Fulmens

Samuel_Tow: You have no perspective. There are workarounds for all these things. Base rent is trivial. "I don't want to do that" is a perfectly good reason to not make bases, and yet you insist on making it into some sort of crusade against evil. What will you do when you run into a REAL problem?

... sorry, that wasn't what I came in here for.

I agree with a lot of these. I didn't see this on the list:
N+1: Went-temp powers. I know we're all sick of deleting the hammers and baseball bats and Q-tips and whatever else, but there are some real, valid, useful temp powers in there. My list, and it's possible I'm overlooking some:
* Recovery Serum. Double-stamina from level 3 or so, five times before I have to recraft it? Yes please. When do I need it? L1-20, yes, I go through a few of em. But even after that... Super Stunners, wake-from-mez-in-midfight, nuke-crash, brute-without-enough-slots, dark armor, etc. etc.
* Ethereal Shift. Neener neener!
* Med packs. I know, I'm paying 50,000 inf per green insp. Maybe more. And I'm happy to do it.
* Plasmatic Tasers. I'm trying to break myself of this habit, because they run out ALL the time, but for my characters without enough AOE (all but, like, four) they're great. For the times I get overwhelmed, they put around half of the baddies on the floor over THERE. It's offense, it's defense, it's a floor wax and a dessert topping. Bam!

There are others I use occasionally, on various characters, but that's my A-list.

Alternate theory to explain the same data:

People have X amount of inf, and they're spending less than they used to on their oranges (because they're getting them with HVMs and slotting them), so they have more to spend on their purples.

I don't know which theory is right and I can't think of an experiment to determine it...

The traditional reason why there will never be unresistable crits is the Hamidon. I haven't followed the "new hami" raid- it could be a moot point now.

I've got high level Blasters (fire/elec, fire/en, fire/ice, elec/fire, en/fire [DO NOT WANT], sonic/mental, ice/ice and probably a couple others) and here is what I have to say:

Elec/fire does not actually provide the rated output of AOE. Its mostly PBAOEDOT (M-i-c, k-e-y...) so you have to zoom into the middle of a group, survive for five or six seconds while essentially using taunt auras, and then escape, throwing Ball Lightning on the way out if you last that long.

IF you have good buffs on your team you MAY live. Oh, and if you die all your DOT stops. That's an annoying new twist on matters.

Fire blast gives you enough damage in Firebreath/Fireball to wipe out even-con minions without using Build Up or Aim. Nothing else really does that. [Mmmmaybe ice/mental.] So, secondaries...

/ice gives you barely enough mitigation to live, often. (Shiver is huge in all senses. Sometimes it aggros the next mob.)
/elec and /en give you really good, really fast melee attacks to fix those pesky survivors. I actually prefer /elec because Inferno/blue/Powersink works better for me than Conserve Power/inferno/blue. And it's zappier!
/mental (my wife has fire/mental) gives you ANOTHER CONE, and it gives it to you early. Great stuff. The third cone also cuts enemy recharge, so it's even sort of defensive!

My single greatest Blaster Moment came on a Fire/Elec. I wiped out about 20 guys in about 10 seconds. BU, Aim, FB/FB (left spawn), jump, Inferno (right spawn.) And I actually lived.

So, nothing against Archery or Dominators or Corruptors, but I vote strongly for Fire/Mental blaster. My second choice is Fire/Elec. Mmm, fulminating!

I don't know if I'd describe the ToHit debuffs of Dark as "huge." If you're close to the defense cap, though, small to medium effects get magnified. I ran a Dark/Traps corr with "soft defense cap" (as long as both cones hit, I was golden) and it worked just as well as you say.

EDIT: I'll see your Dave/Grohl and raise you a Josh/Freese.

There are people who enjoy farming.

MOST people who ask about farming are under the impression that:

1) They need the top end equipment to play level 50 content
2) They need to get billions of inf for the top end equipment
3) Farming is the best (sometimes, they think it's the only) way to get billions of inf.

of those three, I'd say 2) is correct. 3) CAN get you billions of inf, but usually you can make it faster and far more easily on the market.

Oh, I'm going to add
4) Marketeers are evil parasites on the necks of the hard working noble farmers. Clearly we're forcing people to sell to us at a price they themselves set, and forcing other people to NOT leave bids at 1 inf over our bid price, and forcing those people to pay our prices to have the shinies right now. Trilateral commission has NOTHING on us.

... what Minotaur said. I've repeatedly had this argument, back when I was "buying merits", and a lot of people have to try it for themselves before they believe.

I've never had and protected a niche. So I don't know what the expand/collapse cycle is on them. I do know (from doing generics, anyway) that sometimes someone moves in and undercuts you for a while and eventually they move on. Niches collapse - faster for crazier overpriced niches, of course-and they don't always come back.

Do you have a plan for what happens if/when your niche collapses? [Every time I've tried to buy out the competition and support my price, it's failed. Maybe I just don't think big enough, but last time I spent a billion and eventually I recovered around 3/4 of my investment. Took a month, though. ]

Oh, it's a lot to me too, I just don't know if it's a lot to the really high rollers.

I've only ever dealt in the top level of any recipe, commercially. I vaguely remember getting grandiose and trying to "Buy out" a pool B recipe [drops from mission completions] and then flip the whole range once. I lost about 50 million, couldn't even BEGIN to increase the price, and discovered that more dropped at level 50 than at level 30-49 combined.

I can't guarantee this is true for pool A, but that's the way to bet.

Ed: Most pool A recipes, possibly all, only require 3 pieces of salvage.

Misaligned: If you're willing to do 10 rolls in the 35-39 range and document them, I'll buy your "losers" for 10 million each.

I got healing badges on Ambunaught by, mostly, just responding to teams that said "looking for healer." I know, it's a Defender forum punch line, but it's a punch line for a REASON.

At the risk of data-dump, a link.

You go from 98 to 68 recipes. You lose a lot of junk, a LOT of junk, but you also lose Eradication and Basilisk's Gaze and probably a couple other nice things that I'm overlooking. You gain ... umm, looks like you only gain two snipe sets. I thought there were more things that started at 35 than that.

If you're just going to buy with a-merits, wouldn't you be better off getting your a-merits on a level 50?

I disagree with heffroncm, but I don't have any proof or statistics backing me up. I've made a LOT on my 14 AM rolls in the low 30's, including several obliterations, at least one 200-M LoTG sale, a couple of stealths that sold for 100M each,etc. I can't tell you how much of that is "freshly merged market", and I can't prove that I have done better than cherrypicking seven level 25 LoTGs.

70 recipes is a whole lot of recipes. I know, I'm deep.

Couldn't be doing THAT badly, you have more than you started with...

I've always assumed, as others said, that the game is a little slow updating that you've actually logged out. I usually get it when I've either d/c'd, or when I've logged out and log in again immediately. I have no verification of my opinion, though. I could be mad.

I think the new Going Rogue people don't know that they CAN get slots... also, there were a couple thousand spare salvage of each type on the market before the big reset, and who knows how many in bases. It's like base salvage. . . could be thousands in there.

35-39 is traditionally The Place To Roll- it gives you all the same stuff as 40+ plus Entropic Chaos triple [meh] and Kinetic Combat triple [around 100 million, last time I got one.] You have to be level 32 min to do that, though. 30-34 is a little... full, though.

Some people root for a really low band, either 10-14 or 15-19. My theory on the matter is, it's sort of a waste to buy (or to roll super-low so you'll hit the level cap for the IO anyway) on a sub-50 character, because ANYONE could do that on a 50. If you random roll, you get stuff that pretty much only comes from a level 30 (or 33, or 35). Obliterations, stealths, Impervium Armor: Resist, there's like fifteen good things that you wouldn't necessarily pay AM's for that will still sell for 50 or 100 million.

... Oh, and just because the last 5 sold for 1-5 million doesn't mean ANYTHING. Goat's "Zero for sale" rule is very true.

When there are people buying individual IO's for 3 or 4 billion, I don't know if one little billion still counts as "high finance."

Yeah, the market is "hollow". I started (and then abandoned) Midlevel Crisis and Teenage Wildlife, hero and villain sides respectively, to try and do something about this. There's a little more action at levels 30, 33, 35 and 40. But not much.

I've got around half a billion still to throw ...I think. I've been throwing seed inf with a heavy hand.

welcome, Wing span!

Scrappers are point and stab.
Willpower is fire and forget.

There's two simpler playstyles that I'm aware of*... but a /will scrapper is pretty basic.

* Force Field defender on "lazy", and [allegedly] a Bots/FF mastermind.

Factoid: Only ALIGNMENT merits go away, I believe. not REWARD merits. So if you cashed the 50 Rewards in for one AM it would have been at risk.

Edit: I am slow to respond sometimes.