Fulmens

I love fire too much and AR not much at all, but I don't think it's as simple as Chaos says.

AR has a lot of cones and does a lot of AOE damage. On paper AR looks quite good to me. AR/Energy is a good, if nonintuitive, combo that reaches out startling distances with enormous built-up cones. In practice, it makes a lot of noise, annoys my wife and I have more than enough projects in this game.

Ice is a very good primary, although it tends to be what I refer to as "Bartender with a mallet" playstyle.

"You, sir! [wham] You! [wham] I'll get back to you [hold]. And you [hold]. OK, you! [wham]" It's very, VERY good at both singletarget damage and holds.

I actually found my Ice/Ice to have TOO MANY really good toys that mitigate damage. I had stuff that, on another blaster, I would have used, but it was just too far down the batting order.

I'm not a /Dev fan because I want my blasters to go fast, and have Build Up. My playstyle is not the only playstyle, and maybe even not the best.

So I'd suggest something like Ice/Energy [a classic combo and still very good] or Ice/Elec. I don't have an intuitive feel for Ice/Mental- I've mostly used mental to provide a third area-of-effect for sets which have two already, but it's got a lot of different good tools. Whatever you end up with, I recommend both Build Up and Aim- perfect together.

[Incidentally, when soloing it's probably going to be around 200 hours to level 50, maybe more. Don't think that just because you played something to 14 you've "Gone too far to start something else." You have 8 to 12 slots per server,and I still find the lowbie game fun. ]

Especially when a bunch of us were planning on trying to fill every bid on Luck Charms at once, and we'd built up a stockpile for, like, a month.

Nethergoat said
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I'm too used to blaming merits for the pool C die-off, when the real cause was the Katie nerf it camouflaged.


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Merits have TWO flaws.
1) You can get exactly what you want at a ludicrously high price, compared to getting random things including exactly what you want. People read "You can get exactly what you want" and then assumed that the price was set wrong. They paid the price and complained about it.
2) Near-infinite storability. It's a decision to spend merits, it's not a decision to store them "for a while longer." Especially when you aren't comfortable merits ... if you never spend them, you never find out that you've made a horrible mistake and wasted the reward for twenty hours of your life. That combined with a situation where, right or wrong, max level is most valuable; the system actually penalizes people for generating anything at any level but 50.

I found a few people willing to sell me merit rolls for cash at sub-50 levels . Some of them had never cashed in merits for a roll before, and had hundreds of merits. Some of them had notoriously bad luck (in Minotaur's case, the reputation was magnificently well deserved.) People didn't want the "I screwed up" no-prize.

In short, merits would have worked if humans figured out the obvious right thing to do, and did it. They did not.

Almost every type of midrange common salvage can be gotten, with a week of planning, for 1-2K apiece blueside. If you list the [midrange, common] stuff you don't need for 9K and, again, leave it for a week you should be able to sell a lot of it.

Level 27, you're going to have about 47 slots. One IO uses 2-4 pieces of salvage [2 or 3 for a generic IO, 3 for most uncommon set recipes, 4 for most rare recipes.] So we're looking at 150-200 pieces of salvage. About 100 of those will be commons, of which there are 12 types, so about... 8 of each type. More or less. 30 in the vault, and 10-stacks in some of your market slots, should help store most of them.

Whether "you'll have enough salvage" sort of depends on what kind of IO's you are planning on slotting. If you have 15 recipes that take a rare salvage each [or you have procs, which tend to take TWO] then you will probably not have enough salvage.

I've lost track of uncommon prices. They used to be trivial. I think ... with a week lead time, they are trivial (by which I mean under 2K each) again. But that may not be the case. I know that Thorn Tree Vines stayed over 20K for over a week at one point.

Should be doable with patience, unless you're really heavy on Alch Silver or something.

Apparently they think you haven't learned.

I can't prove it either way.

I haven't tried it with Provoke... but it works, sort of, with Voltaic Sentinel.

It's good if you have a scaredytank on your team, anyway, because it usually embarasses them into starting fights.

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You mean time bomb?

And i totally disagree with the above statement by Fulmens.

I loved my fire/dev by level 10/12 when i got flares, fire blast, fireball, fire breath, caltrops and targetting drone.

Blaze and RoF were the next gravy on the cake. I run with DOs till 32, and i had zero problems till then. You probably need to respec and relocate some slots/powers. See above build and i can't imagine you having very many problems.

FYI i use a stealth IO to go with cloaking device. Its not really necessary for tirp mines, but if you wanna time bomb the mob you'll want it. Saves the power slot on smoke bomb.

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that quote?

I know this has been beaten pretty flat, but STL_Heroes said:
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While I am a casual player I guess, I use the market, but really I hate it. I'm not the guy that stands in Wentworth's for hours at a time, no thats not me. I see those outrageous prices and think to myself "wow, so the only way to afford this is if I stand here all day and mess with this market, or farm. Dam cant I have fun AND afford to be "uber-super-mega-ultra" like the farmers and Market Fanatics?"

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If you spend hours doing things at the market, you're doing the wrong things.

I can show you something where you could pay more than the last 5, get an instant sale, craft, put it up for sale for less than the last 5 and more than double your money.

Last 5 recipes are selling for under 5 million, last 5 crafted are going for 15 million (13.5 after Went fees). I bought mine for 5.1 million and put the crafted it up for sale at 13.5- should sell quick, I'm under the "market price"- and if I get exactly what I ask for I make more than 6 million inf.

It hasn't sold yet, but that was literally a 5 minute transaction for me. Including the time to trot from the Steel Canyon Wents to the university and back.

Yes, there is a learning curve on the market, but once you put in a couple hours of learning, it's pretty quick.

I repeat: If you spend hours doing things at the market, you're doing the wrong things.

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I just had an arc mission where you had to hunt 45 carnies. There was another one before it with more. Really stupid missions to have as a 41-42. Having to kill +3 master illusionists is not my idea of fun at all.
Hunt missions should be restricted to baddies that spawn all over. Like Rikti.

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As mentioned- much less of a problem than it used to be, now that you can get a newspaper mission full of Carnies. That doesn't solve the Malta problem, of course.

Windenergy said
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And i totally disagree with the above statement by Fulmens.


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... which part? The one where I said I don't like salad dressing, or the one where I said I don't make the rules?

... chuque, aren't you the guy who bought every Luck Charm on the market and sold them for 1 inf?

... I'm the opposite. I don't slot super IO's and I could afford them, because I'm like "I get 25% better than SO's from slotting the cheap stuff, I should spend fifty times as much to get 50% better by slotting the expensive stuff? " [Actual numbers are not right. I'm starting to think that I may have to learn how the high end builds work before I can talk intelligently on the topic.]

I think there is a missing thought process in there. If SO's are an '87 Taurus, and the billion-inf build is some sort of Ferrari, people don't realize that there's a nice option that is a lot closer in cost to the Taurus and a lot closer in performance to the Lamborghini.

The Luck Charmer situation was unusual. All numbers in this post are rhetorical- I don't remember the true numbers on anything except the "Drive 'em out" pricing.

There was a stable-ish price when we started- 45K or so.

Then we bought a couple thousand and prices went crazy briefly. They settled to "buy at 65K, sell at 80K".

Now we were slowly buying during this, if I recall, although at this point we were generating almost all of our LC's by going to Dark Astoria and hitting zombies with fireballs, going to Perez and hitting Hellions with glinting blasts, etc.

At one point we decided that if we were going to fill all the bids at once, we would have to drive out some flippers. Because when we started there were 2500 bids and 1500 for sale, and now there were 4000 bids and 2000 for sale, or something.

So we bid on "A lot" of LC's, and sold "a lot" of LC's. I wasn't the only one in the Luck Charm conspiracy doing this and I was flopping 500 a day. Buy at 66K, sell at 69K. Then after a few days, buy at 65, sell at 67. Buy at 63, sell at 66. When we got to "Buy at 58, sell at 61" we had a heck of a time breaking the 60K barrier- I think we had to throw in four hundred Luck Charms temporarily- but shortly after that 800 bids just disappeared in about an 8 hour window. The corresponding "Sell" didn't disappear, of course.

There were other attempts and experiments in there before the "Squeeze the profits" plan. One morning or afternoon, I bought several hundred at 80K and instasold them at 60K, only to find out that someone was live, on the other end of the transaction, selling them right back to me. It was like "I've filled 800 orders. How come the number of bids only dropped by 200? Oh." The winner in that particular experiment was Mr. Wentworth.

So, yeah, there are people flipping in a price band that may be entirely artificial. My suspicion is that Alchemical Silver is being artificially supported right now- because it's massively more expensive than anything else, and it has more than twice as many bids and sales as anything else in the priceband. Eight thousand people aren't bidding on that stuff. Not with a straight face they're not.

I want to see you spam numbers! This is how we learn, and lord knows it's not intuitive.

As SpaceNut mentioned: EvP is completely different from PvE. Critters get to apply their bonuses for level and rank (level = "+2", rank = "lieutenant" for instance) only after the Def is subtracted.

So 50% [for nearly everything in game]-45% * 1.4 (roughly, for a +2 lieut) = 7% to be hit.

There's also the slow, annoying way. Go back to your "active contacts" and they'll give you the next higher one.

So if you last hung out in Steel Canyon with a level 10-15 contact, I think they give you a 16-20 (probably in skyway), who gives you a 21-25 (probably Talos) who gives you a 26-30 (probably Indy) who gives you a 30-35, who gives you a 36-40, who gives you someone in PI.

They might "Shortcut it" and the level 15 might give you a level 41 directly; it's been a while since I've done this.

I am honored, sir, and have striven to live up to the standards you've set for blastardom.

I built a blaster up to about 35% vs. smash/lethal/energy/dark and it did make a significant difference. Of course I didn't get those levels until about level 48, and I don't play my 50's much.

The "turning point" for me is about 40% [five times harder to kill than 0 defense] or higher. 45% is ten times harder to kill.

There's _another_ turning point, though... maybe two depending on how hard you want to work it.

One Luck gets you 12.5%, so if you can get to 27.5% you can hit 40% "Basically any time you want." [You can carry enough single Lucks to get you through ten or fifteen fights...]

One medium purple [Good Luck? I dont' remember] gets you from 15% to 40%, and I can buy those in bulk at Wentworth's with a little planning. Admittedly if everyone did it I wouldn't be able to pick them up for 5K anymore.

Werner: The tragedy is, a couple of people ARE spending terrible amounts of effort keeping the prices up on pieces of common salvage. They probably discovered what they think is a great and terrible secret, that they can make a quarter million inf per stack and they can do it on forty stacks a day. TEN MILLION INF A DAY and it only takes them like an hour of miserable boring work.

(Actually, the one time I saw it, provably, it was 6 million a day on eighty stacks. *wince*)

Y'know, there has been a request that I not call other posters idiots.

Nihilii's _arguments_, however, are incoherent, poorly formed and poorly thought out.

Fallacy 1: No True Marketeer [tm] would disagree with the "mainstream" positions. So despite playing the market, making millions and enjoying it, Nihilii is not a true marketeer. (related to "But when I do it, it's ironic!")

Fallacy 2: "Do you walk to school or bring your lunch?" A person can be pretentious, annoying, and right. Very sad, that.

Fallacy 3: Everyone Says It, So It Is False And Also I Am A Rebel And Morally Superior. Far easier than defending an actual position.

Fallacy 4: "You just believe that because it's convenient." Many people around here run experiments, take measurements, and generally _prove_ their various points. Standing there going "You just believe that because you're greedy" is a wonderful way of insulting people without, actually, disproving their points. Even if I'm a terrible terrible person, greedy and patronizing, that doesn't prove me wrong. But, hey, unearned moral superiority feels good, doesn't it?

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This is from the site ffxiah.com, created by a player of FFXI.

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... we tried publishing "Average weekly prices" for salvage in the City Scoop. Sadly, it was boring as [tedious thing] to actually do- I did it a couple times- and it got abandoned after a while.

If you'd like to come up with a player-generated snapshot of the market, I applaud your efforts.

One common problem with people [in general] is that sometimes you don't reset to answer 1 when someone asks question 1 for the first [to them] time... I try not to start with answer 50 to question 1, but sometimes it happens.

They already tax players for going rouge. Icon.

Mostly I'd think of nuking the second you see an AV as "Well, there goes YOUR endurance bar for the whole fight..." but I didn't include anti-AV tactics because it seemed a little specialized. The hard part for me [audience goes "no, really?"] is brevity.

Kinda funny... when I was reading through I was like "Well, your opinions and mine have some differences, but that might be playstyle..." Then I got to the Ice description and I was like, "Are you MAD?!?!"

Shiver, unstacked with itself or anything else, is around a 50% recharge debuff on +2s. Which means that they hit half as fast which means that you live twice as long. An alpha will still kill ya, if it was going to anyway, but otherwise... you have time to win the fight, which is all any Blaster should ever ask for.