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Posts
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I've got about eight L50 blasters and only one of them is built for Defense. I do tend to carry a stack of medium purple insps and if I even THINK things are going bad I hit two of them quickly.
My Blaster-sense is pretty good but not perfect. -
In totally unrelated news, anyone want to buy a Glad Armor 3% def for 3 billion even?
EDIT: Sold. -
Lost my post somehow. Dammit.
1) You can tweak the Emp- get a plan, do a respec trial, boost those attacks. The lazy emp (Fortitude, Adrenaline Boost, RA) helps the team more, and has more time to engage in their hobbies [e.g. exploding fools' heads.]
2) If you like the Widow, play the Widow. If you're on your servers' global channels, and you've friended and global friended the good players you found, that helps find groups.
3) You don't, really, have to choose. Play what you feel like playing. Play two, or five, or ten different characters. (cue someone who's going to say "I have three hundred and eighty! and I play them ALL! ") -
Quote:If you have been gone for 3-4 years, your loot probably won't buy you as much as you think it will. On the plus side, by playing fairly normally you will get a whole lot of new loot worth a surprising amount.
may just start up my old acc's to loot off all my old toons then sell or store for new toons on a new acc so I can start from beginning again, hmm guess I have 5 more days to figure that out lol !!
[Kinetic Combat orange IO's are worth around 100 million inf each. Admittedly they're a very high-demand item... but still. A hunnert million inf.] -
Quote:If you want to help out with Midlevel Crisis, 30, 32, 33, and 35 are all good sellers in my experience.This is the crux of the problem right here.
- weighted recipes not really weighted. Why do we keep getting crap of the hunter and touch my lady grey etc instead of kinetic combats, crushing impacts and thunderstrikes?
- Being forced to "level lock" a toon to try and supply the market or get stuff for yourself in that range.
What would you suggest as a good mid level toon for farming a-merit missions in that level range? Maybe I can get a friend to PL me up one and I can roll some a-merits too. All my toons are either sub 20 or post 40 currently
As a bonus, you can do task forces on the way up and hit your chosen level with a couple hundred Reward Merits in your pocket.
As far as your chosen AT and set? I don't have any opinions on the matter. I built good teaming characters on freedom, but that was before alignment merits so I was running TF's almost exclusively. Hard to go wrong with a Rad/Sonic defender. -
The good news is, next week there's a new WTF.
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/e warms his hands by the fire
Feels good. -
The traditional start for ranged defense is Tough [with a Steadfast Res/Def], Weave, as many 6-sets of Thunderstrike as you can fit, and a 6-pack of Gaussian's. With four T-strike sets that's something like 26% ranged.
One thing that I've gotten good use out of is the "imperfect defense": I slotted a blaster up to 32.5% Defense (to whichever types I was defending against) or a little more, then I carry a bunch of small purple insps. One insp gives me 60 seconds of capped defense against those types, and I can do that whenever a fight looks like it even MIGHT turn ugly.
A stealth IO in a travel power [if you hoverblast, the Flight steath is cheapish] will do nicely for you. Shoot first, shoot last. -
You've got three quick AOEs, you can drop ten +2 minions in six seconds with no buffs, you should be fine with that.
EDIT: I meant "That build should work for you if used correctly", not "If you don't like this the problem is you." -
I'm horribly old-fashioned I'm sure, but here's the way I see Fire/*: Fireball + Fire Breath = dead minions. Takes about four seconds. Even-cons die without Aim or Build Up, +1s die with either Aim or Build Up, +2s take both. Very few enemies are fire-resistant.
If you throw in Fire Sword Circle that kicks it up to probably +2/+3/+4. (I have Fire/En, Fire/Elec, Fire/Mental and Fire/Ice. )
Rain of Fire is just a way to scatter them and insure that you have the aggro. [insure? ensure? neither looks right. I blame the internet for my loss of literacy.]
At one point on my Fire/En/Elec [with the second cone] I was thinking that maybe I didn't need Inferno. Then I got in a situation where I had to blow up about 25 guys in 10 seconds. Three AOEs on the right spawn, jump left and inferno... it stayed in the build. -
I'm not sure of all the ramifications of Djeannie's idea. It exchanges one lack-of-control [level 50s always get max level] for another [if you want the option of Kin Combats, you're going to generate a lot of L39 stuff; if you want the option of Miracles and Impervium Armor, you're going to generate a lot of L44 stuff.] It may still be better- you'd have bands of availability instead of a single possibility- but it seems like you got hamburger when you ordered duck, so they take it back and bring you chicken. It's closer, certainly, without being anything like the same.
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My prediction is more people playing their Incarnated-out 50's = more supply of purples. There is more demand, true, but I think some of the supply has been filled already [people only Incarnate the stuff they love, which is the same stuff they've been purpling already] so I came to the same conclusion for different reasons.
In reality, we'll never know the reasons and we have a half chance of being right if we flip a coin. -
I thought it was 20 hours, but I'm not particularly solid on that factoid.
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Yeah, if I buy stuff that has massive oversupply I'll delete it. Eventually it'll run low.
I'm thinking this is like 100-to-500 million inf of losses, or whenever I run out of places to sell stuff, or whenever I get bored.
I have about ten idle 50's, so I'm thinking boredom is the limiting factor here. -
Another_Fan: Maybe we need to back up and restate our positions. Because it sounds to me like you're complaining about the number of things you need to leave bids on, and then you're leaving bids on things where it makes a trivial difference in total inf spent.
It sounds to you like I'm advocating one hundred bid creeps, which doesn't sound like anything I remember saying.
My view is this: If you BUY IT NAO on the small things, and bid with a small amount of patience on the large things, you can get a build at roughly half price (compared to buying everything, now, crafted) and bid patiently on surprisingly few items. That may be nuanced, but if intelligence means anything it's the ability to make subtle distinctions. -
Quote:You're got several goals, none of which are stated and many of which are in conflict. "Punish the greedy" (tying up slots to save a couple of hundred thousand on uncommon salvage) is on your list. I'm going to take it off my list and see what I get.
Now lets take a look at your positrons blast example
If you want to get the recipes at anything but buy it nao prices you are going to have to wait and wait. I am pretty certain every piece in the set requires at least 1 rare and IIRC there aren't any pieces you can make with less than 4 pieces of salvage.
The base character has 16 slots ? @50. So they need 5 slots for patient bidding another 5 for patient bidding on the rare salvage. Uncommon salvage seems to be a target for manipulation lately so call it 2 slots for patient bidding there and call it another 2 of the 10 common pieces you can't just buy and ignore.
At that point you have 14 out of 16 market slots tied up bidding for one set. You may need several of these for your build.
I'm going to look at Positron's Blast, level 50, and compare four cases: BUY IT NAO [crafted], BUY IT NAO [recipes and salvage], my estimated "patient prices" with BUY IT NAO salvage, and maximum patient pricing. Anything currently under 5908 for salvage, or 100K for recipe, will be bought nao for those prices.
NAO CRAFTED [I actually did this right NAO]- bid creeping from 50% of lowest till buy, in 10% increments:
Damage/recharge 8,000,908
Damage/range 9,000,908
Damage/endurance 20,000,908
Accuracy/Damage 9,000,908
Acc/Dam/End 46,000,908
Total: 93 million, roughly.
BUY IT NAO: [recipes- choosing highest of "last 5"]:
Dam/Rech 7 mill
Dam/Range 1 mill
Dam/End 3 mill
Acc/Dam 7 mill
Acc/Dam/End 40 mill
Plus salvage, assumed to be 3.5 million each, and crafting, .5 million each, and we get 78 million. That's on the high end, because I didn't actually check the buy prices on these to make a conversational point.
[break to do an STF]
If we look at the second-lowest sales, assuming you can reasonably get those prices with patient bidding:
Dam/Rech 3 mill
Dam/Range 0.5 mill
Dam/End 1.5 mill
Acc/Dam 3.5 mill
Acc/Dam/End 18 mill
So if we throw in the "BUY IT NAO" salvage plus crafting, est. at 4 million total per item, we get 46.5 million.
If we assume 2 million per rare salvage, 55K per uncommon salvage, and 5k per common, we get 2.565 million crafting, per item, for a cost of about 13 million salvage and crafting, so around 39.5 million.
Buying crafted NAO vs. bidding on five recipes and instabuying salvage: 98 million vs. 46.5 million. If we buy NAO the two cheapest recipes, we have to bid on three items and we're paying half as much, almost exactly.
Notice that I didn't even check prices on the uncommon salvage. It might cost 100K, it might cost 500K, it might cost 5K. It's not going to make a dent compared to the price of the Dam/Acc/End .
Surely you can leave bids on THREE items overnight? -
Back when I had the need-to-team character, the phrasing I used was "Does your team have any use for a level X Force Field defender?" Now I stacked the deck, because I was playing Force Fields and I was sending tells to Blasters before the invention system, but I generally got pretty good responses.
Note the Adam Smith phrasing: "It is not from the benevolence of the butcher, the brewer, or the baker, that we expect our dinner, but from their regard to their own self-interest. We address ourselves, not to their humanity but to their self-love, and never talk to them of our own neccessities but of their advantages." -
Quote:Which, actually, means they are MORE likely to get better prices. The market: the game you win by not playing.
5 market cycles are very likely >> 5 consecutive real time evenings for most people. -
Quote:You could fill 1-3 slots at a time when you level, or if you're respeccing you could reuse half to 2/3 of your build. But we will ignore that kind of crazy talk for now.I read things like this and can only wonder. Buy it nao is the only sensible thing for most people to do. You have 100+ slots to fill for a build and typically 17 market slots to fill them with. Unless you have high levels of duplication in your builds you will have to wait 20+ market cycles to build your build. (assumes three salvage and 1 recipe per IO) The other choice is the game breaking behavior of turning all your characters into some sort of collective entity.
Its no surprise people still use SOs. For 6 million and 5 minutes you have a build. Its also no surprise people pay the prices they have to for crafted any other choice is incredibly inefficient. What is a surprise is people still stick with a game that sticks such a cowpie in their faces.
For SOME things it makes perfect sense to buy it nao. If you've got a 200 million inf build, anything under about 100K makes sense to just buy and check it off the list. 0.05% is not going to change the price significantly. I think of those as the pennies in the "take a penny, leave a penny" tray. For the 6 million inf man, where I wasn't leaving ANY pennies on the table, I had about 20 out of 93 slots that were generics, or SO's- things like Build Up, Brawl, Sprint, Hover, where I could buy it crafted for cheap, or Buy It Nao for cheap enough.
So that leaves 73 slots. Roughly. Now for any given slot you've got 1-3 pieces of salvage that cost pennies, and 0-2 that you have to actually bid on. You've also got probably 23 slots where your recipe costs are just disproportionately small and it will fill either immediately or very rapidly. [Consider 5-slotting Positron's Blast: there's Dam/Range at nearly every level where the recipe costs less than the crafting cost, and Dam/End and Dam/Rech are a factor of 5 cheaper than the other three. ] There are only 24 different rare and 24 different uncommon salvages, half of which are junk at any given time, so you're only buying 36 different things salvagewise. You never get everything you need perfectly on the first try, so you are putting down 50 bids for salvage.
So the initial analysis (100 recipes, 300 salvage, 20 trips) turns into 50 recipe bids, 50 salvage bids, 6 market trips. (Assuming you start with nothing you need.)
Did I miss something? -
Every time I've tried to control something I ran out of inf before people ran out of stuff to sell me. Now in the 500 million+ range, where there aren't a lot of sales in a different week, it might be different. On the other hand, I have a character that, I'm pretty sure, makes 700 million a week on stuff that's only selling for 15 or 25 million per item. *shrug*
One of us is wrong about your "level of control". Let's take a real example, admittedly over 2XP, and you tell me what you see and I'll tell you what I see.
Armageddon Dam/Rech, last 5 sales today. 305 million, 311,111,222 million, 500 million,400 million, 500 million. 4 for sale, 59 bidding.
Damage/Recharge, crafted, last 5 sales today and yesterday, 27 for sale and 54 bidding: 500 million, 425,555,556, 3x550 million.
What that says to me is, if I buy it nao I can get it for 500-550, if I have some patience I can eventually buy it for 315.1 or 320.1 million [in case some one bid pi hundred million], craft it, list it for probably 460 million and sell it overnight, probably for 470 or 480 million. Minus a shade over 50 million in went-fees and whatnot, that's going to be around 100 million profit. Pretty nice, but it takes a while to get that low price. Maybe a couple days. And of course someone could start sucking 'em up at 333 million and selling em for 400 million, with a profit of about 20 million, at any point.
I'm not saying I can turn a single slot over enough to make 50 million a day. But I'm saying I can do it fast and consistently, and every once in a while I'll find something that makes me 30 million per slot and flips twice a day for quite a while.
I mean, seriously, if people hit your price within 25 million, and people hit my price within 10 million, and I'm crafting twelve things a day for cheap... it seems like your control may not be getting you that much for your money.
EDITED 1: I do know someone [Enyalios] who says she controls a few niches. She makes very, very good money. She doesn't do it in the 500M per item game, though... and I've hopped in and out of her niches purely by accident and made a bit of good money on the way.
EDITED 2: Thanks, Yomo, for keeping the fires burning on that Impervious Skin triple. I had no idea why it was doing so well for me... your hard work! -
I gave a specific example [L50 Crushing Impacts] where prices are DOWN from when you left the game. It would be interesting for me to go back through the "6 million inf man" build [back in issue 9, one weekend + one unslotted level 50 spine/dark+ 6 million inf] and see what it costs now. With one glaring exception, I could probably do a very functionally similar build for no more than 20 million inf ... if you gave me two weeks instead of three days. There would be specific changes [I think I got a lot of cheap Titanium Coatings at the time, and I might have to replace them with something else.]
You're thinking "But 20 million is a lot more than 6 million!" And you're right. But before issue 9, nobody had had any reason to try and make inf on purpose, so that was before ANY inf had really been seriously earned.
20 million was then, and is still, the cost of 6-10 rare salvage. -
There are objective changes since two years ago, and even more from three years ago. You are right, Rhysem, that there's sticker shock.
However, different people mean different things by "there's inflation". If prices on everything are steadily marching upward, that's a pretty good sign that an ever increasing amount of influence is chasing the same amount of stuff. If prices lurch upward only when there are changes to the game, that's a pretty good sign that inf is leaving the system, normally, at about the same rate it's entering it.
Now this is going back a considerable distance, so I'm probably making some mistakes myself, but here are some changes to both inventions and drop rates:
1) There was a bug and level 50's were getting half the inf they "Should" have gotten- maybe under most circumstances, maybe under all. (I think they weren't getting XP turned into inf when they exemplared, but I wouldn't put money on it.) Since almost all the inf in the game comes from level 50s, that's going to double your prices right there, once it percolates through. Which seems to take a couple weeks, as mentioned.
2) People are playing their level 50's more, since issue 19 and the alpha slot. As mentioned, almost all the inf in the game comes from level 50s. [By the way, I could buy level 50 Crushing Impacts for about half a million each for the recipe, before double XP. That's an item that's gone down in price from two years ago. And that's an item that has a direct ratio of items created to inf generated by 50's. ]
3) Defense set bonuses have gotten larger and more general- Kinetic combat went from "only good for Invulns" to "Everyone wants four or five sets", because it went from 3.75% Smashing defense to 3.75% Smash, 3.75% Lethal, and 1.8% Melee. Thunderstrike and Aegis went to around 4% Defense per set (ranged/en/neg in one set and aoe/fire/cold for the other.)
4) People have had a lot of time to work out various techniques for various things. Farming purples, farming AE tickets, farming inf, farming merits and [now] farming A-merits are much more efficient now than they were.
5) With gleemail, characters can now, easily, accumulate inf in a single place to make a bigger individual bid than they could previously hope to.
It is possible that, along with all of this, we have a slowly increasing supply of inf "sitting around". In fact, we probably do. But that is not a matter of abstract inflation: it's a matter of the game changing in different ways.
When the game was new, Steadfast Res/Def was a junk drop- I put one on my 6 million inf man because I didn't have the money for the KB protection I really wanted. Now it's 50, 60 million inf. Why? People figured out how good it was, AND people can now get near the soft-cap with other set bonuses, so it's disproportionately more valuable.
Devastation was loved when the game was new. Now, not so much.
I've gone on far, far too long. But the point is, we're doing things differently than we were. -
Rhysem:
Price of a trash [set] recipe at level 50: 10,000 inf or less.
Amount of pure inf you generate at level 50, per hour, bare minimum: 1,000,000 inf.
Trash recipes aren't going to make a significant difference to the amount of inf entering the system.
If you halve the generated inf-to-stuff ratio, once you get rid of the inf floating around in the system , you will halve the market price of stuff, in inf.
"once you get rid of the inf floating around" is a heck of a disclaimer, I realize. But when there were crazy mastermind exploits, with people hitting the inf cap through AE farming in a matter of hours, it took a couple of weeks after the fix for that amount of extra inf to dissipate. It takes about three weeks to a month after 2XP for prices to regularize, and that's a huge spike in both inf and recipe demand with a much smaller spike in stuff generation.
When a spike in inf enters the system, it does get removed, 10% at a time, eventually. -
OK, when I start buying:
Pool C
Any level under 42
Zero bidding
1 million inf each.
Reselling for 2 million inf each.
(I don't know when I'm going to start, though) -
Quote:Even if we don't burn that inf as prestige, we still burn 10% in Wentworth's fees. It's a much slower burn, but it is a burn.Yes, if you assume we all list more and burn the inf we get into prestige for our SGs, prices will drop. If we don't burn the inf to prestige, where are we all going to spend that inf, other than the market? Green pills @50 a pop? I don't think that's going to cut it. Sitting as a number on my characters ID? Doesn't help me kill mobs better. I'm going to spend what I get on buying new stuff that makes me more effective.
I don't understand why the only thing you focus on is "more will get listed and prices will drop!" Sure, in a very short term, that's possible. Happens on a daily basis when people quit for the night and go list their junk on the AH. I don't see those listing spurts lowering prices on the AH in general over time.
I'm not claiming that changes to drop rates wouldn't be a market shock and prices wouldn't dance around. I'm claiming that with a given (larger than yesteryear) amount of inf in the game, that people are still going to spend it (or try to), and thus the market will remain inflated compared to the old prices. You might change what exactly is pricey at the moment, particularly if you vary the drop ratios between what is 'uber' and just 'decent', but you won't change the general truth that the market/economy as a whole has cost inflation going on.