Fulmens

534 hours to 50.

Back in the day, no reputation ratings, uphill both ways, etc.

These days apparently 150 is "kind of normal".

A lot of it depends on the power sets.

If you have, to give a hell-on-earth example, Broadsword badguys:

Broadsword has a to-hit buff
It has a defense DEBUFF (So once they hit you, they keep hitting you)
And it has Build Up. Which, I think, is straight double damage on top of that +20% to hit.

My first character was BS/INV and I never slotted more than 1 Accuracy... and I pretty much never missed.

FF's very relaxing compared to Kin. Well, anything's relaxing compared to Kin and FF is relaxing compared to anything else...

Hope you like it.

First:
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im just starting to learn how to play the defender architype.

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Defenders aren't really "an archetype" the same way Blasters or Scrappers are... there's almost no common playstyle between an Empath, a Storm, a Dark and a Force Fielder.

I describe Force Fields as "boring if you do it right- your team just steamrolls stuff and doesn't get hurt. "

The Philotic Knight guide is something I've disagreed with him on for, like, four or five years.

You can be a good Force Field defender by keeping the two small fields on everyone, keeping Dispersion Bubble up, and not doing a lot of zigging and zagging around. (Dispersion Bubble works best if people can find it.) Those three things will do more for your group than everything else you can do with the set.

"Keeping the bubbles on the group" is not challenging, but it's hard. If you screw up, everyone tends to get dramatically hurt and if you don't screw up, nobody notices. So you need reliability. They just think they're that good or something. I use a digital kitchen timer and start reshielding (and reset the timer) at the 3 minute mark. Yes, that's 20 times an hour, or several thousand times over your Defender's career. Shift-1 will choose the first person on the team, shift 2 will chose the second, etc.

Secondaries are what you do as a hobby in between rounds of reshielding the group. I like Sonic, Ice, Electric; don't really like Dark, Rad.

Heal Other: I personally don't like the medicine pool, because whiners blame you for their own stupidity, but if you're looking for something to do with your spare time after reshielding the group, go for it. A much better choice is actually Maneuvers; because of how Defense works in this game, the last 5% is worth as much as the previous 40%. Force Fields gives you 40%, and Maneuvers gives you 5%.

FF Powers:
Deflection Field, Insulation Field, and Dispersion Bubble are the set-defining powers.
Force Bolt is precise, reliable singletarget knockback. Very handy for problematic single targets.
Personal Force Field is a "Get out of death" card. When you're in Personal Force Field you're very hard to kill but the rest of the team is much easier to kill, because none of your toggles affect them. If you're dead, none of your toggles affect them EITHER. Use freely if it looks like things are going bad. Don't be stupidly macho.
Repulsion Bomb is a nifty-but slow ranged damage power. Knocks everyone down and hits them about as hard as a typical ranged AOE attack from your secondary.
Those are the six I highly recommend.
Detention Field is a very-long-duration "notouchie" power- nobody on your team can hurt the enemy, and vice versa. I'm not a fan.
Repulsion Field does area knockback and annoys enemies, greatly, with you personally. I am not a fan.
Force Bubble does repel- NOT knockback- so very few badguys resist it. I've seen one or two times I wished I had it, but normally, I'm not a fan. Gently shoving people around doesn't actually harm them that much.

So there's my take on the set.

Go forth, play in a relaxed fashion, and beat the enemies flat!

I think that may be backwards, NiVra.

Almost all the ends-at-30 TF stuff is terrible, and if you roll 30-34 you risk getting that stuff. 35-39 prevents that. When you put a few Trial recipes into the TF pool, they sort of get swallowed.

Here's the list- although they are weighted and we don't know the exact weightings.

I dunno, but apparently I missed the memo.

I was assuming that there was a glitch or corruption in the mission itself, which would probably end up in the loss of the mission, which might result in wanting to go back in Ouro to regain it.

Upon close inspection, it turns out I didn't actually say any of that. Oops.

I'd like to emphasize something that you probably know: If you're working on set bonuses at a lower level, watch that you don't get "understrength" in the power itself.

Crushing Impact is a set where you don't have to worry: any five of those at [probably] any level the set exists will get you to the softcap in damage. You can get "enough" Acc or Rech or End, as needed, in five.

Mako's Bite, in contrast, is something where if you get the whole set of 6 at level 40, you end up with [*checks wiki*] 89.2% instead of 94% or whatever at level 50. (it's 98.3 before ED).

Personally, I start building for set bonuses at one of three times:

1) I'm bored.
2) I have a lot of extra money.
3) The character seems to need help surviving.

1 and 2 generally show up in the low 40's; 3) can show up at any time. I have a heavily-IO'd out Stalker at level 34 because he seemed to need it.

... or maybe the dumb AI came first and their massive damage was put in for balance. Either way, I consider it well-coded Artificial Stupidity. I've shot a zombie who came after me and, halfway there, FORGOT WHAT IT WAS DOING.

In an attempt to be helpful: There have been people who had newspaper missions go bad if they had 'em pre-issue and post. I remember some guy went into a warehouse expecting, like, warriors and got level 41 Cimerrorans.

There might be something like that going on.

Is it possible to get this particular Battle Maiden mission through Ouroboros? If you love your Champions of Whatever, you might be able to get 'em back.

Clearly, Werner, we are all intensely reasonable people.

I already stirred enough [censored] without actively trying to make things worse, people. Let's not turn this into a rumble.

P.S. Laughing five times in a row might put you on the road to Mad Science, Tubby. You might wanna look into some math courses.

I haven't done much recipe buying since the weighted rolls went live- I don't know how the random rolling stacks up. If you do random roll, I think that 35-39 is still your best bet.

Eryq2: Taking it to PM.

Demon_Hunter: The tone you thought you heard was not the tone I intended, but the essence is accurate. There are cases where people in community A complain, a lot, about problems that are known and solved in community B. (one common complaint is "things are too expensive.")

So I was, in fact, a guy with a solution looking to see if there was a problem that I could apply it to. Apparently there isn't.

Demon_Hunter, Snow_Globe: I apologize for troubling you.

People have done stupid things trying to transfer money before.

Wasn't there a thread by a guy named Gnomercy or something about how he'd bought a ton of low-level TO's and put them up for sale for 1 inf, and garnered several hundred million in poorly structured transfers?

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The case I haven't seen reasonably presented yet is twofold: Items that are continually
(and permanently) trending upwards in price where the rate of that increase is *also*
higher than the rate of increase in income over corresponding time. Those cases would
represent inflation to me.

I'm not saying that cannot or does not exist, but I am saying I don't believe it is common
or widespread beyond a few specific items (or item categories - purples for instance).


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More thinking in public on my part here. . . pardon my rambling.

Clearly there's a surplus of inf and no price raise on "basic" stuff; you are right.

Here's what I've seen heroside, and these perceptions may be wrong. Throw in an "I believe" in every sentence in the next paragraph.

There has been a raise in what people are paying for common crafted IO's, and for uncommon salvage. There's been a raise on average for common salvage as well. There's been a lowering of the price for the most expensive rare salvage and there's been a raise of the price on "ordinary" rare salvage (Diamonds for instance.)

I THINK there's been a raise over the last two years in the prices for "frankenslottables" from the 50K range to the 150K range. I'm not sure about that one.

I KNOW there's been a raise over the last two years in many uniques. In some cases the raise is because people figured out "What it's good for." I bought Steadfast Def/Res recipes for 30K each at one point, to give a dramatic example. In others- like anti-KB IO's- I don't know if education alone is sufficient to explain the raise in prices. Karmas used to be 3 to 6 million; my feeling is that they are now 10 to 20 million, though I haven't checked lately.

I believe, but haven't proved, that the non-purple "high end stuff" is generally more expensive. And of course purples didn't exist at all.

So for the median transaction, I think the price has gone up a bit; my feeling is that the total amount of inf in the system has gone up by like a factor of 10.

The devil is in the details, of course.
I can come up with a situation where 99% of characters are making more and spending less and the inf supply is going down. Or the other way around.

A small number of transactions have a huge effect on the "total supply of inf." A set of level 50 SO's costs about five million inf; That's half the Wentworth's fee on a 100-million-inf recipe. If the purples go from 60 million to 120 million and nothing else changes, you're burning a lot of money in the high end while not actually effecting the lives of the mythical casual players.

On the other hand, if the price of common salvage goes from 5000 to 50,000 inf, and you have 200 pieces of common salvage in a level 50 build, you've just raised the price of that part of the build from 1 million inf to 10 million inf. That would cause massive stress to people who only HAVE 10 million inf, while the person who is purpling out the warshade won't even notice.

So I think there is some possible effect on "social mobility"- if the price of a starter set of IO's is going up considerably, that's going to effect how many people use them.

I have a feeling- maybe a worry is a better phrase-that most of the money spent by the high-end community stays in the high-end community and we're seeing less trickledown than we used to. Purples pretty much ONLY come from hardcore play, and I suspect that more inf is spent on purples than on everything else combined.

Inflation isn't, at least not right now, what I'm worried about. Stratification?

Some of the Nemesis 1-shot missions- "get track sample" or "rescue the Ladies' Aid Society" for instance- are really fun for me. I don't know if you can get those through Ouroboros or not.

dammit, now I want to do an LRSF.

Apparently we've all been answering a rhetorical question.

Oh well, hardly my first time.

Oh dear, this thread took a turn or two for the worse since I last checked on it. . .

I would like to rewind several pages and correct Zloth.

The correct unit is "Helens of Troy". Millihelens are more frequently used, that being the amount of beauty required to launch a single ship.

By the way, the reason that "45% is the Defense softcap" is kind of nonintuitive and difficult to explain. Defense gets overcomplex in a hurry, but I'll try to keep it nearly simple.

A PvE critter has a 50% Base To Hit, from which Defense is subtracted. The result of THAT is multiplied by whatever bonuses due to level and rank exist.

An even-con minion has no bonuses- just the 50% Base- so 40% Defense would cut that to 10% and 45% would cut that to 5%.

Lets say some slathering +3 Archvillain is at 90% To Hit.* That's actually 50% Base To Hit times 1.8 for rank (AV) and level (+3). So if you had 40% Defense that would be 10% To Hit times 1.8, or 18%, and if you had 45% Defense that would be 5% base times 1.8 or 9%. You cannot reduce the base below 5% and you can't reduce the final below 5%.

I hope that wasn't hopelessly obscure!

* I don't know the true number but this makes for easy math.

Welcome to paragon city!

It is true that (due to horrible goldfarming spam) trial accounts are quite limited. I'm sorry about that. You can't get above level 14, you can't carry more than X influence (something like 60 thousand), you can't invite to teams, can't use /tell or /broadcast . I think you can use /l ("local") to say something that can be heard in maybe a 100 yard radius. That's about it. You might want to send a message like "Level 5 Blaster" [or whatever you are] "on trial account LFT." [Looking For Team]

To get a true travel power (Superspeed, Flight, Teleport or Superjump) you need to pick up a "prerequisite" power at level 6 or higher and then you can pick up the actual power at level 14 or higher. The four choices have different advantages and disadvantages; I have a friend who used to log on for a half hour at a time and just fly around. It's relatively slow, if you're looking at it from a minimax perspective... but he just loved to fly.

Have fun and don't be afraid to ask questions. I love to hear myself talk!

Lemme try and summarize what I've learned and see if there's anything I can teach:

1) Existing bases already have more prestige than they need.
2) People with new bases are likely to be infl-poor as well.
3) If you're making infl by playing the game, you're better off making prestige by playing the game.
4) People value 100 million inf far more than 200K prestige.
5) (do I understand this one right?) The inf costs of crafting for a new base are signficant. What is "significant?" a million? Ten million? Fifty?

... So a small percentage of the population, coming in with new bases, would be the only people who would want to convert. And they'd want to make [say] 100 million for themselves before they were willing to make 100 million for the base.

You can do that in the market. KeepDistance made a billion (1000 million) in a month, starting from zero. I can make 50 million in a weekend, easily, if I start with 50 million in cash. It probably takes me a couple hours to get the first five million but after that it just multiplies.

EXAMPLE: I made 13 million on an Impervium Armor, level 40, Res/Rech just now. Bid filled overnight. Spent about 9.5 million, it sold for 25, minus 10% Wents fees = 22.5. You can check my work- I buy for numbers ending in 908.

What would be useful for people to know? How to get from 20 million to 200? How to get from 0 to 20 million? Or do I have no real audience here?