Fulmens

If it's only stored for 10 minutes, I have no problem storing my inf in gleemail. Longer than that is risky- gleemail gets rolled back and so forth a lot.

I'm not a huge fan of firetanks for pure survivability. However, I'm going to try and be constructive.

1) For Defense, it pays to specialize. There's usually a huge difference between 45% and 25%, or even 40%. (details here if you feel mathy.) But there's a corollary: 32.5% is much better than 27.5%. Why? One small purple insp, which you can make out of any three-of-a-kind that drops, turns 32.5% into 45% and you're nigh unkillable for the next 60 seconds. So if you have a choice between, say, "A lot of En/Neg" and "some En/Neg and some Smash/Lethal" go for the lot. You can also carry ten or fifteen medium purple insps if you don't mind planning in advance and shopping for them. If you have 20-25% Defense one medium inspiration (or two small ones) will cap you.

2) It seems very likely that AV's are firetank killers. Many AV's (old Battle Maiden was famous for this) throw out shots doing six or eight THOUSAND points of smash/lethal damage. Multiplying that by 28% (if you're 72% resistant) hurts a lot more than multiplying that by 10% (if you were 90% resistant.) One possible workaround is to carry big oranges. Yeah, those things that everyone in the game converts to something else. They're cheap!

3) I don't generally build for psi survivability unless I have something to build on [like a Dark Armor], because you can either put a lot of resources towards getting mediocre survivability vs. psi or you can put a lot of resources towards getting huge survivability vs. two or three other things, which are probably way more common. Some people don't like weaknesses. I'm ok with them as long as I'm ludicrously overpowered to everything else. (Yeah, I'm repeating myself: it pays to specialize.)

hush, star! You're giving away the secret ending!

Progress! I blew another big chunk of inf unwisely.

We're over 100 million prestige AND we're in the top 50!

Next milestone: 10% of PsychotiX .

A lot of my niches have dropped by,like, a factor of 4. I don't keep a whole lot of stock usually, so I've been buying for 1/4 the price and selling for 1/4 the price and making 1/4 the money... It still adds up quite nicely.

EDIT: But I've found a few things where the recipe dropped and it took a week or two for the crafted to drop. buy for 20 million, sell for 55 million: I'll take it!

Rad/Sonic defender gets a lot of good powers early. I recommend a chunkload of temp powers with any 1-20 character- Med Pack, Recovery Serum, maybe a Kinetic Dampener, etc. - but that's because I'm impatient and sloppy after this many years of play.

They should open up the fast path to Incarnate status.

Before AM's they were around 3-4 billion, I think.

After: They were holding steady at 2.5 billion for a long time. (I know because I tried to flip one from 2.65 to 3.0 and it didn't work.) They seem to be drifting back up as people try for 3.0 and apparently get it. I don't have the kind of cash at the moment for this First Person Buyer game, so this is hearsay.

Father Xmas:In the early days my friend and I were in Steel, and we went "What are those things?"
... "Did we just get our ***** kicked by a mushroom?"

Postagulous et al: We refer to forgetting your toggles as a "no pants moment." ("Ever have that no pants dream and it wasn't a dream?")

... back when the expensive part of your orange recipe was the orange salvage? I remember it.

/e rocks chair back and forth

I've heard of someone managing to somehow get over the cap lately (but not to the actual 2^31 limit). Juicy rumor, but unconfirmed.

Workarounds, which you may know:
* You can globally email yourself up to a billion inf per email- we recommend collecting it and keeping a gleemail saying which alt is holding the money, because gleemail gets lost or rolled back sometimes.
* You can put bids of [say] 10x 199 million on something worth a lot more than 199 million, like a Hecatomb or a Gladiator's Armor: 3% Defense . The Market code is pretty stable.
* You can buy stuff and hold it as a hedge against inflation- although with Respec Recipes dropping to just over 100 million, "prices fluctuate" is a realistic warning.

Supply and demand.

1) Supply of inf has, in fact, gone up. Some of this was the doubling that has been mentioned, some of it is people coming up with much more efficient ways of farming, and some of it is many more people playing their level 50's, often on large teams [which generate more inf per recipe.]
2) Supply of most IO's has gone up. You can get a "task force" recipe for at most two Alignment Merits and random non-TF recipes for a handful of AE tickets. [Karma -KB has gone from 40 million to 5 million inf; I think it started around 10 million inf in issue 9, when 300 million bought you the best build in the game.]
3) Supply of purple IO's has gone up very little. There is no useful shortcut to get purple IO's: the cost in Alignment Merits is deliberately disproportionate. (In AM's, one purple is about the cost of fifteen Luck of the Gambler: Recharges.)

So that's the "supply" side. "Demand"- since more people are playing their 50's, on the harder Incarnate content, more people are trying to purple their 50's out. There are very few ways of burning inf other than paying 10% to the Market. So every inf farmed gets spent about ten times before it goes away. (all other ways of burning inf are relatively trivial, compared to buying a 400 M purple and burning 40 million in fees.)

Result: You have a LOT more inf chasing only a few more top-end goods. If you want anything other than top-end goods [see the Karma example] you will find prices have gone up by a much smaller amount. Orange salvage is still 2-3 million inf, which hasn't changed much since Issue 9.

Edit to add: Welcome back!

Hey Junction Boy! You misspelled "vicious" in your sig, twice!

/e flings poop, inaccurately

Tossed in another billyun. We're past The Unders and coming up fast on Xanadu Fire.

Many thanks to whomever bought a 40 million inf HO for 400 million !

... I'm guessing it's crafted. *nods*

*writes check*

To clarify FourSpeed's comment about the market's 10%:

It remembers what you spent in listing fee , and charges enough when you sell that it ends up at 10%.

Let's say there are bids out there on Deific Weapons at 2 million inf. You have, somehow, 20 thousand inf and 2 Deific Weapons. You list the first one at the maximum you can afford: 400K inf. The market takes your 20K listing fee and immediately sells the Deific Weapon to a standing bid at 2 million . When you collect, the market takes 10% of the total, minus your listing fee.
10% total: 200K inf
Prepaid listing fee: 20K inf
Final fee: 180K

You end up with 1820K (the 20K you started with plus 1.8 million, 90% of the sale price.)

Now you have enough to list your next Deific Weapon at whatever you like. Since you're in a hurry, you figure 2 million inf is good enough. You list at 2,000,000 . The 5% fee is 100K. You instantly sell, again.
10% fee: 200K
Prepaid: 100K
Net fee: 100K
You get 1900K, but you already spent 100K so you are, again, up by 1800K at the end of the transaction.

The only time the initial fee matters is if you decide to list a Deific Weapon for 4 million and then you change your mind. Then you lose your 5%-of-list-price deposit.

As far as spending and earning: There's a Market Self-Defense guide in my sig. You probably know everything in there, but it couldn't hurt to read it. You might have missed a trick or two.

Roughly, you have two numbers multiplied together: base to-hit and accuracy. Accuracy starts at 1.0 and goes up with acc slotting.

Base to-hit is dependent on a bunch of things- it's 75% for a normal even con enemy but goes down with their level (and Defense if any). It goes up with things like Tactics and yellow insps.

A +3 is something like 56% base to hit, so if you slot 67% accuracy [about two SO's] in your attack power you'd have 1.67 * 0.56 = 0.935 or a 93.5% chance to hit.

You can never go above 95% final to hit or below 5%.

EDIT: Dasher, it seems like you miss more with your acc boosts up for a couple reasons. One, the biggest one, is you're paying a lot more attention. Nobody ever says "Wow, I normally hit 19 out of 20 times but I've gone 40 in a row without missing!" On the other hand, miss two BU/Aim/Snipe combos out of ten you notice. The other reason is that when your final to-hit changes, that resets the streakbreaker- at high enough accuracy, you're guaranteed to never miss two times in a row.

Or if you want to store a few hundred million inf so you don't go over the 2 billion inf limit while you're doing your impressive financial wizardry.

I did have a second at one point where it looked like the market was down- logged on a character, went to market , showed 0 slots full- but I closed the market window and reopened it and it was all good.

I just dropped in a billion. We're still #58.

But the next 10 billion is going to get us more than 10 slots.

The only thing I can see Emp/Sonic defenders having a slight problem with is the lack of -Regen for AV's and such. I know, envenomed daggers are cheap, but some people might not want to go to a temp power for that. Other than that? Well, I've seen stacked Sonic Blasts before and it is a very, very pretty thing. Add to that capped regen, capped Defense, enormous recharge, infinite end recovery... nothing's going to kill you* so it's just a matter of WHEN you win.

* OK, there might be some AV's that can get lucky and 1-shot one of you.

I think I've accidentally kept one open for months. It had been a long time since I logged that character in, but I don't remember if "a long time" was 10 days or 90 days.