Fulmens

but not much explanation as to WHY. I'm going to get a little bit of math in your game; I hope that's not too much of a problem.

Let us consider one of the simplest Defender types, the Force Fielder, and totally unprotected teammates, like Blasters. Force Fielders have only three major powers that prevent damage to teammates: two "small bubbles" that defend against different types of incoming damage, which you put on each ally, and one "large" bubble that is centered on you. It takes around 25% of your playtime, or less, to keep the whole team protected.

The small bubbles stop about 50% of the incoming damage [from level 22 on]. The large bubble stops about 30% of the incoming damage [again, from level 22 on.] So your teammates can have about 80% of incoming damage prevented, with just those three powers. Meaning 20% gets through. This is the equivalent of everyone on the team being five times as tough to kill.

To get the same level of protection through pure healing, you'd have to heal every teammate for 4 times their total HP, every fight.

(A Force Fielder with maneuvers will block roughly another 10% of the damage, meaning only 10% gets through and teammates are TEN times as tough.)

To make healing look even worse: as levels go up, difficulties go up, and fights get tougher. There's more danger of teammates getting hit 2 or 3 times in quick succession and dying on the spot. You need VERY fast reflexes to save such a teammate using heals only.

If you love healing and don't want to do anything else, you can play a healer in this game. It won't be terrible. You will probably even have time to shoot badguys!

If you want to be the most effective support character in the game, pure healing isn't the way to go. (Force Fields isn't the way to go either, but that's a slightly more complex discussion. )

Welcome to Paragon City, and I hope I was clear and not [too] rude.

I do not think this word means what you think it means.

This.

I can imagine the case where people play their pre-purpled 50's more and generate surplus purples. Or the case where the market runs short of money due to a huge prestige war on Virtue slurping up all the inf. Or something. But I can't do any sort of sensible modelling so any guess about where purple prices would go and why is ... well, see quote.

Fair enough, but there was mention of a large stockpile of Reward Merits. If there were AM's mentioned I didn't see them.

... you mean like a 20% Recharge buff for an hour, which only people with access to SG bases can use?
Or 5% [specific] damage resistance? Or KB protection? +17% Recovery from level 1? Yes, they're limited-time buffs, and most of them are useless, but the ones that are useful are VERY useful- and it's a crying shame how underused they are.

I also agree with Justaris that there's a difference between "less useful" and "useless".

1) "other ways of getting around" don't go to Crey's Folly, Dark Astoria or Terra Volta [heroside]. To give three examples of really inconvenient places to visit.

2) There's no real replacement for the "rez ring + inspiration storage" combo you get with a base. Yeah, you can usually go to Wents and buy your tier 3 insps at Buy It Nao prices like 300,000 inf each- I've done it- but base storage is terribly, terribly handy when things go really wrong. I'm thinking of an STF from Hell or two, but I'm sure everyone has their own stories.

3) Being able to store most of the enhancements for a big-time respec is also really useful- mailing them to yourself is really limited.

4) Sometimes you need to do a lot of moving around in a hurry, on a TF or whatever. Let's say you're going There And Back Again (fedex mission of some sort): Ouro gets you one way, Wentporter gets you back, then ten minutes later you need to go There And Back Again. 24-month TF porter is pretty handy.

I know I'm more of a visitor than a hardcore basebuilder, but I've gotten a lot of use out of bases, a lot of times.

Here's my view. Off-market stuff doesn't have a "last 5" so if we don't have discussions about what people think it's worth, we have no idea what it's worth. Maybe 2 billion IS a better price for it than 3. I don't have any opinions on the specific matter, but we have no transparency in off-market transactions, so I'm totally willing to have this discussion.

Personally I've not optimized anyone to run tips- certainly not to the point where I can keep my tip jar full AND run five missions in fifteen minutes. I've learned from the Eden trial, among others, that if someone claims to be able to do things insanely fast... they usually can.

So 16 hours spread over 70 days gets you a shiny PVP of your own. I don't really know what I make on the market, but I estimate around 150 million a day. It's probably a little more than half an hour a day even when I'm not futzing around, because I run two marketers twice a day (roughly) with a 5 minute timer on the invention table. Let's say I make 100M a day if I limit myself to 30 min/day (because my timer runneth over, always.) So my 16 hours gets me, over a month, around 3.2 billion inf.

For me it's worth 3.2 Bn, logically, while for Puce it's worth... whatever 16 hours of clock time and two months of elapsed time is worth to them.

It doesn't? I mean, compared to Healing Flames [for plausibility] or Moment of Glory [for out-of-set effects]?