Fulmens

Let us know some of the details: power sets, for instance.

There's not for me but I have friends who use them all the time.

Edit: "use" in the most decorative sense.

1) I didn't see any mention of Fire Imps. I know, they're uncontrollable little darlings with no attention span and an insatiable love of spillover aggro. But they also take the hits for you and work quite well. They are, more or less, the POINT of Fire/Kins.

2) Level 45 is a heck of a time to learn to play your Fire/Kin. You might want to go to Ouroboros and do a couple arcs at level 20, couple arcs at level 25, and so forth so you work your way up the ladder and learn to deal with the tougher critters and the new powers as they come.

I've thrown ten level 30 rare IO's up on the market in the last two days. No ToDs, but I've got another ten or fifteen to do. A person can only handle hero merits so fast.

By the way, what do you think is a fair/generous price for a random roll these days? Last time I did it, it was 20 million per recipe/100 million per HM. 30 million?

They're up to 593 million prestige.

Ladies, Gentlemen, Things With No Gender: a new competitor has officially entered the race.

It's on!

I'm blaming "everyone playing their 50's and generating inf". But, y'know, I'm wrong a lot.

I've got a couple characters with about six AM's, gunning for level 30. I don't have anyone locked there, though. (I decided "It's been a really long time since I did any Midlevel Crisis work, lemme get on that" earlier this week.)

Are you bidding on recipes or crafted? I want to know where to get these juicy prizes you're offering.

Smells like Canadian Girlfriend to me.

Full disclosure: I married my Canadian Girlfriend in 2004. You, uh, can't meet her because she's in South Africa. On business.

Another "practice mode": go get 20 small purple insps. Take four, attack a group, see what happens. When those run out, take four, attack another group, see what happens. This is a lab and those are your safety equipment. When you can't put on your safety equipment, leave the lab.

I don't have a lot of "playstyle" advice in this post. There are a couple things that might help, though.

Zeroth: I am somewhat surprised by your performance. I suspect there's a problem with your build[s] because even if you are bad at the mechanics, +0/x2 on any Brute should not be a problem. I trust we can do better.

First: Dark Everything is notoriously hard on video cards. Check your particle count- see if you get better results cutting it way down [5,000 maybe?] If you're playing in a maze of darkness AND at a ridiculously low framerate, it's going to be extra-hard to do anything clever. You might be a person who gets overwhelmed by the sensory input, but I think a lot of your problem is that your computer's not GIVING you any useful sensory input. Slideshow, dead, "what happened?"

Second: I'm going to give suggestions on the Dark/Dark brute. I know a few things about Dark Armor [and almost nothing about Masterminds or Dark Melee]. So I'm not saying the brute is better, I'm saying I know Dark Armor. You do, as mentioned, need KB protection or you'll spend 2/3 of every fight on your keester, unable to do anything useful. Most of everything falls into the "one KB protection is fine" category. Two would be better, but it's like "95% vs. 99%" better. Yeah, you'll get knocked back 1/5 as often with two, but even with one you'll have a huge, huge advantage over zero. Your basic layers of protection on a Dark Armor, outside in, are "aoe mez", followed by "resistance", followed by "The best heal in the game."

In order:

Aoe Mez. I used two toggles- Oppressive Gloom and Death Shroud- and decided that the fear was worthless. Other people have said "pick two". I don't know if I'm right and they're wrong. But Opp. Gloom made a huge difference in the number of people attacking me and how hard they hit. So that's your AOE mez, every two seconds, with an AOE attack on top. (Death Shroud doesn't LOOK like it's doing a lot but over time it's about like having a regular AOE attack on auto, going off every ten seconds, on top of everything else.) Death Shroud need six slots and clever invention use- you want 95% damage, 80-95% end reduction and some accuracy, or it will drain your blue bar dry.

Resistance. Pretty simple. Three resist SO's and one end SO or the equivalent. If you're short on slots you probably don't need a lot of psi resistance, so Oppressive Gloom can get away with the basic slot for endred.

Heal- Dark Regeneration: Another complete, total, utter end hog that does nothing for you except bring you back to full health. No matter where you started. If there are four-five people around you, and you only need to hit three at most to heal yourself up from 1 HP to 100% health, you barely even need accuracy [well, not as much as you need end reduction.] I don't know if you even need Siphon Life, really, but I'll leave that to the dark melee experts.

I'd suggest investing in a single set (crushing impact or something) that gives you a +Accuracy bonus, because it's nice to have a little more free accuracy.

Tactics are: run in and hit bosses and lieutenants. Your health will drop alarmingly in the first two seconds, then much more slowly, so you can hit the heal. There shouldn't be that much more to it.

If you don't want a monocle, you can substitute a picture of you burning a billion inf in market fees (10 luck charms at 2 billion each, in my case). That's what I did and nobody's questioned my credentials since.

The possibility that occurs to me is that sometimes items fail to show up[ I don't remember if this happens on the "selling" or "Buying" side] - it'll list with a total price of zero and never process.

That sound like what's happening?

Your question has already been answered, but I'm talking and I can't shut up:

Mayor: But did you buy 10?

I can't give you a dev quote, but I heard that Calibrated Accuracy was like that when Castle inherited the IO system ... put it down to Cottage Rule.

Pretty much this guy.
Who uses the railroad system to mind control America? We do! We do!
Who controls the weather, local and planetaria ? We do! We do!

There are a LOT of good combos. Here are some that my wife and I have had great fun with:
Fire/Ice tank and Fire/Elec blaster
Rad/Sonic defender and MA/SR scrapper
Two empaths with special builds

RWH is over for the year, but I do have one last hundred million left in the kitty. Capa Devans shall have it!

Thanks to all who contributed!

Edited again: If you did NOT get your money say something in this thread, or send me a tell. I want to make sure that I close this out with my books balanced and I can't find the random scrap of paper with people's names on it.

Zeroth character: Angelson, inv/mace, didn't make it past level 7. Still around... somewhere.

First character, first 50: Boltcutter, BS/Inv, retired and yells at kids to get off his lawn and back when HE was a kid there was none of this wussy dying to fifty +4s and tanks could take naps under two, three hundred guys and Wonk wonk WONK wonk wonk...

Second character: Boom Baby [renamed when moved to another server], En/Fire blaster. Made 50 after five years for sentimental reasons. After literally a dozen tries, that combo still does not work for me, or possibly anyone.

Third Character [?] : S-Orbital, FF/Elec Defender (the theme is "hamsterballs"), still regularly played.

After that it gets a little mixed up. I play a LOT of classic sets. (Some days it feels like mostly Fire/* blasters...)

I still support a lot of the classics. Never went crazy for [most] of the FoTM builds- I did run a spine/dark scrapper and a couple of Rad/Sonic [ok, not classic] defenders. And my Fire/Rad corruptor is ridiculous fun, but that might be the costume and backstory. No ill/rads, fire/kin, burntanks... I did try a fire/dev blaster but that was years after the smoke grenade fix [deleted], and I did finally try an Inv/SS tank years after they put limits on AOE's.

I guess if we were going with true classics, in at the start of the game, you'd need one with no epic set. That means I don't have any TRUE classic 50's.

I'd recommend rerolling the ice/fire (they're level EIGHT, for pity's sake) as a fire/ice or fire/mental. Fireball plus firebreath drops even con minions with neither build up nor aim; blaze finishes off one lieutenant, and the fight now looks very different...

You're @Cambios? I'm @Boltcutter in game, send me a global tell and I'll send you the money.

Oh dear. Someone's hitting my "monologue" buttons.

Well, pretty much all the relevant monologues are in the link in my signature- so I don't have to repeat them over and over.

For "IO'ing", the short version- Everyone does it differently. As you've seen.

Generic IO's: Slightly better than SO's, nearly as cheap [with clever shopping], never go red. Many people put those in at level 30 or 35 and don't change 'em till 50.

"Frankenslotting" (throwing in a bunch of cheap stuff like they were miniature Hami-O's) gives you significantly better results- five slotting a power and getting seven slots' worth of bonus, things like that. Slightly more expensive than SO's- figure a million inf or so per slot, and you'll probably have plenty of money left over. I'd estimate you can get 40% better performance, by whatever your metric of choice is, than generic IO's or SO's.

Sets- prices go from "ten million a slot" to "partially fused with infinity". Benefits can range up to, potentially, another 40% better performance. With enough money you can make a blaster tanky, a granite fast, or an empath solo.

For "marketing" - look at the top level of any recipe you think you might want. There's going to be something that you can buy for X, craft, and sell for X + millions. Basic warnings:
1) Don't forget to count the "extra" costs. Salvage has costs. Crafting has a cost. Wentworth's charges 10% of the final sale price. Buying a recipe for 55,000 inf and selling crafted for a million sounds good, unless the salvage costs 1.5 million .
2) Sell for considerably lower than the "last 5" prices. People bid like [at best] "1 million, 5 million, 8 million, 10 million" so if you list for 8.1 million you will get 10 million. And if you list for 10 million it won't sell until everyone ELSE who lists at 9 million sells theirs. Which might be months.
3) Don't get carried away. Don't list at 100 inf unless you're willing to sell at 100 inf.
4) You will screw up and lose money. Don't stress about it. Everyone does. I decided to buy a snipe recipe for 500,000 inf [way over the last 5]. If I remember correctly, I bought the wrong recipe. And I bought ten. On the other hand, I've sold things for 14 million when the intended price was 1.4 million. It'll all work out.

I have weird independence issues in almost all cases, so my characters make their own inf. For 2 million it's easy enough: find level 50 set recipes that nobody wants (0 bids, 20+ for sale) and buy stacks of ten for 100 inf, 500, whatever you feel like, and sell them to the vendor for 5000 each.

Mailing yourself ten or fifty million inf works better and faster, though. And there's someone in the market forums who will mail out six million to anyone who asks.