Fulmens

It used to be nearly every morning.

Kids today and their sense of entitlement.

Next thing you know they're going to ask for powers to cost less endurance, travel powers to go faster, more HP for blasters, more damage for Stalkers, Defenders, Controllers, Dominators, and Tanks. Dark Armor to stack. Capes, wings, costume changes, respecs, renames, server transfers, FREE respecs, more zones, more starting zones, customizable missions, special PVP builds, inherent Fitness...

... wait, they don't have inherent Fitness yet? Just wait, the Devs will cave in.

The NCSoft people said "We're always thinking of new things for power pools", which sounded, to me, a lot like "We haven't found worth the work, and balanced, to go into a power pool since 2004."

My interpretation is not necessarily the truth.

Raising the price is relatively trivial if the demand is there. We were trying to LOWER the price. We were leaving no room for profit between our buy point and our sell point, and then every week or so we were lowering the buy and sell point.

The Luck Charmers is one of those "How could it have gone so wrong?" stories. We started out just wanting to get the number of bids on Luck Charms to zero and take a screenshot. We ended up controlling almost the entire flow of LC's through the market. I was spending two hours a day on it, and I don't know how much time the other members of the cabal were spending. We ended up pulling the trigger too early and didn't make it.

There's some sort of lesson about anarchist desires and authoritarian results there. But we all learned a lot.

EDIT: Raising the price is relatively trivial in the short term. If you want to see the long-term effects, go buy something with 9000 for sale- Spirit Thorns or Regenerating Flesh or Silver. Last time I tried this, I found a couple thousand at low prices, then the last 4000 were at prices like 100K, 500K and so forth. I think of those as a fossil record of people who tried what you're recommending and ran out of money, time or slots.

Congratulations! Congratulations, also, on removing 90 million inf (30 million in wentfees, 60 in conversion) from circulation!

Wouldn't you be better off giving him 20 million in startup cash so you can buy that first A-merit ?

It's not the moral issues of beating up a little old lady. It's LOSING to a little old lady that's hard to live with.

I can see why they were cautious about giving out AOE -Res powers when they built that set. But, yeah, the AOE is pretty poor. I've tried using the Sleep as an AOE and the damage is not impressive even when you kick it up by 20%.

EDIT: As a Kin I _have_ to not care who lives and who dies. Kinetics provides, like, six times less protection than Rad or Dark or Force Fields. In return it makes your entire team into ravening monsters of damage. Kin isn't ABOUT saving your teammates. If you do, occasionally, heal one of them or slightly debuff enemy damage that's an unexpected bonus.

Standard "max gain per hour" is about +2. At +4 you're doing 48% damage, you hit something like 2/3 as often depending on slotting, and in a lot of cases the max XP is actually capped. It used to be that you didn't get more XP for fighting a +5 than you did for fighting a +4; they changed the XP things gave, and last time I tried to unravel it I got confused. Sometimes +4s give no more XP than +3s.

Underlings have always given weird XP anyway.

I'm with Leo_G and Biospark. For MOST of my characters, Health makes a real difference in between-fight downtime. It almost never saves you in midfight. Boosting regen in general is "handy, sometimes" but it takes an awful lot of regen to save your life.

Pharoah: This is the first time you've asked these questions, but the fiftieth time I've answered them. I'm going to try to resist the temptation to be snarky .

1) I like playing with the market and making imaginary money. Profits are a side effect. Most people use the profits to buy the IO sets they want for their characters. My builds are cheap, so I do things like donate Prestige to other people's bases and fight inflation and bribe people to produce low-level recipes. It's my money, I can do what I like with it.

2) If you are buying common IO recipes, you're doing something wrong. Likewise, if you're unable to afford common IO recipes, you're doing something wrong. You can get crafted common IO's for less than the crafting cost listed on the recipe just by leaving a bid up overnight. (In many cases, you can get it for less than the MEMORIZED crafting cost- some people sell at a loss.)

3) You said "I don't want to have to marketeer". Different people mean different things by "marketeer." If you mean "buy things and resell them" or "Buy things and craft them and sell the product"- which is what MOST people mean- you can make a lot of money without doing that. If you mean "sell anything at Wentworths, ever" you're going to have considerably more of a problem.

4) What we donate to new players, so they feel they have a chance in the market, is knowledge. This thread has at least two examples of people starting with under 100K and going to hundreds of millions. There is no difference between my level 20 character in the market and your level 30 character in the market. [I have a vet reward that gives me a few extra recipes and whatnot- L20 to L30 is about the right ratio, I figure.] We can buy and sell and craft all the same things. You can buy anything I can, for 1 inf more than I can, and my buy price is right there in the last 5 .

5) "I don't want to have to marketeer just to buy the IO sets I want for my character." I'm going to be a little hostile on this. TopDoc said once, on the topic of purples, something like "If you want to slot anything that you didn't get yourself, you're going to have to convince other players to give it to you. Other players can be very unreasonable." That's the situation, really. The market is just a collection of other players, some reasonable and some not*, offering to swap some of THEIR stuff for some of YOUR stuff. If you don't want to give up any stuff, why should anyone give you theirs?

*I include the people selling generic IO's at a loss as unreasonable. It's just unreasonable in the customer's favor.

Did you buy a generic last night with too many zeroes? Let me know what it was and what you paid, and I'll give you your money back.

Why must neo-nazis ruin our nice numbers?

It's very uneven, generic IO's. Like there were about four days last week where level 40 Defense Buffs [or something] were going for a million each. I only sold about six at that price, but it felt GREAT. Like I was getting away with some big secret.

I ran a sonic/dark for team support- the two cones with some -ToHit slotted, and Maneuvers, give you a sort of "jack of all trades" feel. You can't put someone to the softcap unless they're most of the way there, and you can't keep them alive with just the Res and the Def/-To Hit, but you can take anyone with a little Res or a little Def and slam em up to bulletproof.

Kin is very tiring for me. Once I stop caring who lives and who dies, I'm sure I'll do better.

What to slot these things for:

The two enemy toggles need End Red and lots of it. RI (? the -ToHit one anyway) should also have -ToHit and lots of it. Lingering Radiation and AM, all I remember is stuffing recharge in there. I could be missing important things.

As far as the sonic side of things: your basic one acc or similar, 3 damage, and recharge to suit. I tend to frankenslot or throw four, five t-strikes into a power so I end up with a lot of end reduction and recharge reduction along the way.

I _like_ going with Hasten and some +Rech (the cheap sets, not purples n'stuff) because Hasten and AM play well together. It's not _necessary_ by any means.

Yup. When we were running the Luck Charmers, we were freezing flippers out of the market and we had to set our sell/buy points really carefully. We still ended up selling a couple hundred charms to each other a couple of times. ("Today we're selling at 53,000 and buying at 51,500." We made money.)

I'm not sure you WERE handling a majority of the salvage. I know it was a long time ago, but there were 500 luck charms a weekday going through Wents back when you had to TRY to get LC's. I'd be surprised if there were less than 1000 Thorns a day going through Wents right now. (my guess would be 2000 thorns per day, but I could easily be off by a LOT.)

Of course, you may have done 180 at a time, 5 times a day, in which case I retract my statement.

"Money is like sex; it's only important if you don't have it." I don't remember who said it but it's very true.

Two things about the 30 seconds going to base and back:

1) Mistakes = another 30 seconds per mistake, or more. I hate it when I didn't buy enough, like... improvised cybernetics.
2) It allows me to keep a clearer view of what I paid vs. what I charge. "Get all the salvage, pull down the bought for 3 million, craft, put up the crafted for 15.1 million" vs having to keep all those prices in your head for six different things.
3) If I have spare time on the crafting table, sometimes I'll stand there and buy/craft/sell until the 5 min are up.

Then again, I'm an egg-stealing mammal, so I have six different deals going.

She locks down niches. I raid other people's niches like a mammal eatin' dino-eggs. Her way is more profitable, but I could tell you everything I bought and sold, what my prices were, and it would have NO EFFECT on my ability to make money*.

* Well, I can't tell you, because I don't write em down, but it's the principle of the thing.

I'd stay away from "two blasters", at least at first. (Also, scrapper/blaster, although you mentioned the no melee thing.) I'd also TEND to stay away from "Two defenders" because the damage is low in almost all cases. Defender primaries (or corruptor/controller secondaries) that I'd recommend for small teams include Rad and Dark. I'd stay away from Force Fields and Sonic in those groups. (note the difference between Rad, Dark and Sonic BLASTS and Rad, Dark and Sonic "defender primaries". The two are not interchangeable.)

I had a lot of fun with my wife running a bunch of pairs- Rad/Sonic defender and MA/SR scrapper being one that comes to mind right now. Dark/Cold defender and Fire/Mental blaster was another one. Dark/Dark defender and Ice/Ice blaster was fun, but I'd recommend the Fireblaster pair myself. Brute/Corr [although Brute is melee] worked well for us.

Really, there's a lot of good pairings and it's hard to go wrong.