Fulmens

Various points for various people who need, apparently, to be yelled at by me:

/em lecture

1) DPA vs DPS: unless you're running about 300% recharge, or you're a fire/mental/elec or AR/whatever blaster, you do not have a full attack chain of AOE's. Now admittedly 2.67 (3.0?) seconds in melee range is a long time, but it's stupid to basically claim that Short Circuit is three times as bad as Fireball, as if Fireball-fireball-fireball was a gapless attack chain.

2) Multiplying damage by max number of targets is ALSO stupid. I've run two fireblasters and two or three others up to fifty, with a few in the lower and medium levels, and I rarely hit more than ten guys with an AOE. 10% would be a VERY generous estimate.

3) There's a difference between saying "I don't know what Arcanatime is" and saying "You're making stuff up." Wild and wrongheaded accusations, while fun and dramatic, might make people get put back on /ignore. Which would be a shame.

/em alakazamreact

You have to choose, intentionally, to get yellow salvage at the AE. It's something like 10x the cost (in tix) of white salvage and you have to pick them specifically.

So you can get about "1.5 of every midrange tech common" for the price of a Steel. And it's not "Some random yellow", it's a a Steel.

Basically you don't get the slow buildup you used to get.

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I'll probably get a slew of one-sentence replies concerning my naivete and utter stupidity or something like that

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Fools! I'll destroy you all! Ask me how!

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I am trying to earn a bit of cash on a few servers I started some new toons on.

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Nothing to see here. Nothing.

Sometimes Frankenslotting is the only way to get certain effects.

For instance, if you look at any single Targeted AOE set, you've got terrible recharge. If you want to get tremendous recharge on, for instance, Thunderous Blast, you should frankenslot with three dam/rech (one from each set), and "Whatever else" to get some accuracy, some damage and some recharge (I'd use one acc/dam and an EndMod acc/rech). Results: around 95% damage, 95% recharge, and 50% acc in five slots. It's a bit high on accuracy for a nuke, but I already capped what I cared about.

Usually it's a way to get 6-7 slots of "stuff" into 5 slots for cheap, and in most cases you can get close -to-as-good effects with a single, expensive set (and maybe a 6th slot from something else.) For instance, Crushing Impact or Thunderstrike can get you to something like 60% recharge, 95% damage, 60% acc and 40% end in the mid-30's for five slots. You're not going to do MUCH better (unless you need near-100% recharge for some particular attack chain) by frankenslotting. You can maybe trade some accuracy for some recharge. But you can use cheap things like Ruin and Focused Smite to do it.

I'm waiting to see if the halloween costume salvage goes up. I heard a rumor that you could only do the "extreme body change" in the 5th (halloween) slot.

mmm. Juicy rumor.

OK, helped Sardan out.

Anyone else want to exchange?

Scrappers don't out-DPS blasters because of crits.

IF scrappers out-DPS blasters it is generally because of one of two things:

1) Scrapper spent a billion on the build, and Blaster did not, or
2) Blaster is not using all the tools they have.

I suppose there is case
3) Blaster is dead on floor in the first two runthroughs of the attack chain.

Now I'm tempted to try arc 40062, except based on my experience it would never actually start the mission.

For prestige buys I count both mine and theirs. I don't have an up-to-date number but I put in well over a billion of my own.

For marketing transactions (buy/craft/sell, or flip) I count only 10% of the sell price or (if higher) 10% of buy + ingredients, plus 100% of craft price.

For transfers between servers I count 10% of transfer (the went-fee). This is generally related to cross-server transactions. "I need a billion influence on pinnacle, I have a billion infamy" and the next guy is "I need 400 million infamy on Freedom, have 500 million influence on freedom" - so I move 500 million infamy to freedom, 50 million gets fed to the Went-beast. I make around 50 million profit, minus the wentfee (unless I charge them Went's fees, which I only sometimes do. )

Most of my market churning is profitable- with the crazy differential on level 40 Miracles v-side, for instance, I bought one for 91 million and sold it for 150 million. I may even have bought it CRAFTED. And notch up another 15 million in Black Market fees.

EDIT: If I'm crafting for my own use I count 10% (purchase price + ingredient price) + crafting cost. Every million counts, that's what I say.

Elec/ blast has a couple of strikes against it- some of which are real and some of which are imaginary.

1) "No third, big hitting, single target attack." This is true. It used to combine with "The first two ST attacks are slow", which is no longer true. . . but there's still visible, calculable disadvantages to not having the third attack.
2) "Sparky sucks." Sort of true. If you are fighting a hard target, Sparky is actually pretty good... but otherwise you end up with something that hits five guys one time each. I don't know if Sparky actually goes out of his way to shoot unaggroed enemies or if it's just perception.
3) "Weak in AOE". You have two AOE's in the set. Both are "normal" AOE- not as strong as Frost Breath or Fire Breath, but in roughly the same range as fireball, Explosive Blast, Energy Torrent. Both of them are damage over time, which creates the illusion that they suck, and one of them is PBAOE (bad on aggro) and usually slotted for EndMod instead of damage. You don't really have to choose; if you're willing to Frankenslot a lot you can have damage, endmod, acc, AND recharge. However, you do have the problem of waiting quite a long time for both AOEs to do their work, and having to be in melee range of a lot of people for 2.67 seconds for one of them.

4) I've heard people say that Thunderous Blast sucks. As far as I know these people are unambiguously wrong. Ranged nuke, that you can fire and jump behind cover, is a win.

Upsides of Elec:
1) Sparky IS good against AV's and other hard targets.
2) You CAN, sometimes, get really good End Drain. This is one place where "Secondaries work well with any primary" is not true... End Drain gets special secret bonuses from /Elec and /Energy.
3) Ranged Nuke, as mentioned.
4) Real tier 2- seems like a minor thing, but Fire (for instance) almost has two tier 1's. You hit people with Lightning Bolt and they know they've been kissed. Likewise, it's got a real hold, a real snipe, and a real Build Up. (Disorient is almost as good... almost.)

Elec is different from other Blaster primaries. It may be a little worse at some things but, mostly, it's just DIFFERENT. If you are expecting a Fire Blaster with sparks, you're going to play an Elec Blaster really badly.

... really close to 6 billion burnt. (moving between servers for inf exchange, mostly.)

If you need a 3rd party [same server], I can do it.

Mr. Sword: I think you misunderstood my point.

The problem isn't "capped RES" or "capped DEF" - either of those makes a character very tough to kill. The problem is both capped RES and capped DEF, on the same character at the same time, without help.

Ten times tougher is near the top of "Balanced". Forty times tougher is ridiculous.

Are you seeing prices go down on stuff that absolutely can't be gotten with tickets (purples, respecs) ? I don't shop in that price range...

Slightly creaky guide I wrote in my sig. Covers the basics.

It's something like 1 per 2000 minions (= 1 per 667 bosses) based on numbers I vaguely remember, from Topdoc. And of course on teams, all drops get split between team members.

Some opinions on the topic.

Basically, the short version of my advice to the OP would be "Don't solo. PuG instead."

Force Fields is designed to fix nearly everything that's wrong with a pickup group. You can't fix "We're doing a mission five levels old, on heroic." You can't fix waiting ten minutes at the mission door while the leader tries to find that magical eighth person.

But damn near any stupid move in the middle of a fight is survivable, with Force Fields.

The /Ice half of Energy/Ice is going to be Shiver (still the best, or close to the best, defensive power Blasters have), Build Up, Ice Sword, and possibly Chilblain and the tier 9 sleep.

For Energy/ , there's a trick for hitting the same guys with both AOE's.

For IO's: My guide ( in sig) is old and creaky, but the cheapish frankenslotting for a single-target blast is something I still use frequently:

two Acc/Dam/Rech
two Dam/End/Rech
one Dam or Dam/Rech (depending on level). The first four are two Thunderstrike, one Ruin, one Maelstrom.

I recommend that you slot one or two powers with set Acc bonuses (Thunderstrike will do that nicely); find somewhere for a -KB IO (Karma, in combat jumping or hover, is the usual thing), and if you have lots of spare money a Stealth unique in a travel power is a good idea (I use Unbounded Leap in sprint; if you have prestige sprints as a vet power, you can have a "stealth sprint" and a "unstealth sprint".)

Beyond that, make sure every power has at least 35% Acc and 95% Damage, use Aim and Build up freely, and make sure you get the first shot in.

Good luck!

I have a FF defender on Virtue- I think I'm level 34, though, and I won't be around until about Monday.

So maybe Monday afternoon? Send a tell to @Boltcutter.

I think the lesson they learned is, "If a character is capped on res and def, they are impossibly tough compared to a "normal" character."

Capping DEF makes a character 10x tougher. Capping DEF and getting RES to 75% makes a character 40x tougher. In the case of capping DEF and RES on a tank or brute, they become 100x tougher than characters with 0 Def and 0 Res.

THAT is the case where the other characters can't keep up- or in the "good old days" of I4, you had characters 200 or 300 times tougher than the squishies.

I think the design decision with the IO system was, "either give Def, or give Res, but don't give both." And they didn't.

Incidental factoid: DEF-capped characters still have about a 6% chance of getting doubletapped and killed, when fighting very tough opponents. (Once you get hit once, you have a 5-10% chance that the next hit will land. For sufficiently tough enemies, two hits will kill you.) RES-based characters don't have Sudden Death Syndrome like that.

I can't read the Devs' minds, I have no inside information, but that's my theory about why they made IO's and Defense work the way they did.

10x is a lot tougher, but 40x or 200x was crazy. I was playing an INV scrapper in I4 while my wife was playing a blaster and it was ... there was considerable imbalance, protectionwise.

"Normally", you are correct: lucks are better than sturdies.

There are circumstances where Sturdies are useful, though. If you've already got a lot of (either defense or resistance) getting more of the same thing helps, until you hit the cap. So if you're running a Fire Tank with, I dunno the numbers so I'm making them up for simplicity, 75% resistance to something and no defense:

one Luck gives you 12.5% Defense, and you get hit 3/4 as much.

one Sturdy takes you from 75% to 85% Resistance, and you take 3/5 as much damage (15% of total, instead of 25%.)
Two Lucks produce misses half the time; two Sturdies get you to the 90% Res cap (tanks cap at 90%; almost everyone else caps at 75%) and you take 40% as much damage.

If you have an autohit attack, like the Envoy of Shadows delivers (I think he still autohits; he definitely used to) no amount of Luck helps.

If you are at the defense softcap, usually no amount of Luck helps.

At those points, if it looks bad, eating a handful of big orange pills will give you significant benefits.

(Most of the time, I end up taking small insps two or three at a time...)

... for me the point of doing this would be to destroy additional inf through Wents sales. In other words, I would be willing to burn 10 million inf if you burn 10 million inf as well. If we're on the same server I would just be giving you money. I am willing to match your inf destruction, not replace it.

For hellionball, I prefer Force Bolt. Personal choice, I guess.

I drove someone out of their position once, without even shoveling a whole lot of inf at them. It took about two weeks, though. At one point in the Luck charm project I tried flopping someone out of their position.

After something like 2000 buy/sell cycles the number of bids had only dropped by about 500. There was someone online at the same time as I was, flipping the same salvage I was flopping in realtime. Some of those luck charms had frequent flier miles...