Fulmens

I'd probably recommend triple-Ice. It's extremely survivable, by Blaster standards.

... I'm seeing a lack of consensus here.

Arcanaville: While sub-30 characters are definitely net consumers of inf, they aren't *large* net consumers of inf. 0 to 30 on DO/SOs is under 3 million inf, or roughly what a 50 makes in an hour when not even trying. Even if that under-30 creates salvage that sells for a couple million, or a recipe that sells for 15 or 20 million... they're not making a big dent in the inf supply.
The ability to convert purples made a much larger dent in total, I think: a sleep purple can now sell for 200 million as a recipe, 300 million crafted, get converted into an Apocalypse and sell for 400 million- plus the cost of the converters, the crafting cost, and the Wentfee on the salvage. You're potentially approaching 100M destroyed for a single IO. (I don't know if that happens often; I imagine some of those 300-million-inf mezzes I sold got converted, but I don't know if they got resold after that.)

100 million inf is 30 characters' 0-to-30 trip funded. Less if they do a lot of tooling up at Wents (L4: buy and craft plasmatic taser, kinetic damper, backup radio, medkit, and recovery serum. While you're there, might as well pick up a jetpack. And the envenomed dagger you'll need eventually. )

It's possible that storage alts are preferentially 'whatever's first on the list', but we've also been told that Scrappers are the #1 holder of inf.

I'm starting to wonder if the Market isn't better at destroying inf than we have given it credit for.

"more alts" and "more inactive accounts" would both be counted by the Devs' Scrapper measure, wouldn't they?

What was it they used to say? "If you're playing a Blaster and you make any mistakes you die. If you're playing a Blaster, and anyone on the team makes any mistakes, you die."

I don't think "Being better at being a Blaster than at being anything else" really makes up for that.

Let's imagine two towns. Town A has $10 parking tickets and town B has $500 parking tickets. How often do you have to get parking tickets before deciding that town B sucks?

(Also: Blasters in the teens are in their golden years. It's gonna be interesting to see the reports from Blasters in their 30's.)

Interesting stuff! And hard to argue. I can find a few specific places that a trillion or ten could be hiding, but nowhere to put "hundreds" of trillions.

* We have no way of telling how much is being stored in "sold but not collected" bids, but the only person I've ever heard talk about storing inf that way is ... Arcanaville.

* I could boost the 51-53 numbers two ways: if the average bid were larger (I tend to do single billion or two-billion bids, and I suspect most people do two-billion-inf bids instead of ten 200-million-inf bids) that would kick it up to 9-18 trillion, and if Arcanaville had only counted recipes OR crafted and not both. (I doubt Arcanaville made that mistake, but she might have.) Even if that number goes to 30 trillion, that doesn't help us find "hundreds of trillions".

Email doesn't help that much; you'd need 5000 accounts full to the top to store 100 trillion. I don't know a large percentage of "big money" people, but nobody I know does that.

If that sounds like too much, we're about 5 billion out of second.

There were also people flipping cruddy Doctored Wounds (think End/rech) into Numinas - that too may have saturated.

I've been scratching two itches at once by rolling L30/33/35 randoms and then upcycling the terrible ones a la Regretsy. Seems to take about five converters to make a decent L30 IO out of a bad one. That's not efficient compared to, say, spending an average of two converters to turn a sleep Purple into an Armageddon.

Which in turn is not that efficient compared to buying a crafted Armageddon for 220 million and selling it back for 350.

The place I've made most of my money is converting purples and converting Kin Combats, but I'm more concerned with "hey, would THIS work?" than optimizing my inf gains. (Where THIS is turning L40 Titanium Coatings into any other dam resist, or whatever ...) It's hard to do worse than 10M per converter, and with purps you might be able to get 40M per converter. I tend to do about 20M, flailing at random.

Half XP if exemplaring.

Much much less inf for everyone, on a much much less dramatic curve, and many more ways of having your inf taken away.

Round of nerfs for melee mez protection (and round of nerfs for KB-inflicting critter attacks.)

Round of nerfs for containment, Tanker damage, Scrapper damage, possibly Brute damage.

I like the 1% chance of permadeath: you could turn it off, though, but then you'd get 10% of the rewards. Take THAT farmers!

And I'd do something to flatten out the difference between 40% and 45% Defense, or 80% and 90% Resistance. The last 5% counts as much as the first 40%? I call bull... err, beef by-products on that .

There was in fact a short downward spike when the rest of the converters went live- and one the weekend after. I bought a batch of 3% Defenses at slightly over 200M and sold them for 3-400M, and did the same with 3% Resists on the next spike.

One aspect might be that a "12 billion inf" build now only costs, say, 8 billion (or 6 if you are slow and careful in your buying.) So if you were saving up 12 billion and you get bargains on the big things, you don't care so much if you overspend on the little things.

It could be an abandoned website or something. I logged onto a very old character last night, and I had 170+ old spam emails. I can tell you what a billion inf was selling for in april 2009, according to They Who Shall Not Be Named (starts with a "g")... prices have been dropping ever since.

A better metric might be "super packs to merits to inf". I don't know the number of hero merits in the average super pack, but 50 HMs gets, roughly,178 million inf (10 converters at around 20 million each, minus 22.5 million burnt making an AM and ten converters) so 25 billion is... around 6000 HMs .

Edited to add: Delicious mammoth. It's even better as sandwiches the next day. I'll have to see if I have anything I can throw on the fire.

My opinion, unsupported by any real evidence, is that once you with those Reward Merits it's "RM to AM to converters", followed by "RM to AM to random roll", followed by "RM to AM to specific buy."

I've been playing in the shallow end, though.

It's amazing how I get a number and I'm immediately not happy with it.

What percentage of the L50 accounts are "PLed to 50 thinking it would be the start of the 'real game', left disappointed?" What percentage are multiboxer accounts? What percentage left before the Invention system and never made more than 15 million inf total? What percentage are AE babies who, again, left disappointed? I don't know if those, and similar, categories add up to 50%, 90%, or anything in between.

*sigh*

White Hot Flash: you may have misunderstood the experiment. It's performance in a "playing the game and seeing how it performs" sense. How much do you die, how much do you win, what works better and what only seems like it would work better?

I got back to my scrapper/blaster pair just now after 11 days off, and the blaster had a MUCH better day. I was teaming with a friend who was a Dominator, pre-DO's and on the scrapper side, we spent 45 minutes on a single CoT radio mission, +1/x1. Those batches of spectrals are hell on melee, and when they're +2 to mission owner they're even worse. In a moment of dumb, I actually got pulled into another spawn (also ghosts) once; I blame not having had breakfast yet. I don't even know how many times we died, but it was a LOT.

With the Blaster, in a little less time we did three missions, plus one level/buying enhancement run: Trolls (crushing victory), CoT (crushing victory) and Tsoo (sidekick was now DO'd. One wipe-rez-wipe, but other than that, victory. )

Results: Blaster now 18, Scrapper barely 17. Neither one ran through their patrol XP.

Edited to clarify: For me personally, It's been a long time since I played the game "straight up" trying for the new kid experience. Now it's all grab the nemstaff, grab the Sands of Mu, grab four temp powers for healing, endurance, jetpack and a ranged cone attack by level 2; it's not the same game a free player or new VIP sees. Trying to simulate the new VIP experience... there's a lot I've forgotten about being level 16.

Dammit, Granite Agent! You resisted our mind control rays! AND you didn't have to wait overnight for that bid to fill! (OK, slightly more constructively: I think of things as filling "in about five minutes", "Overnight", and "over a weekend." A lot of people buy and sell at the beginning or end of their play session, and a lot of people play more on weekends. Good on you for waiting, bad on you for not waiting ENOUGH. )

Getting back to the OP: I haven't been squeezing every last drop of blood out of the stone, but I seem to get around 200M for my 10 converters going from Alignment Merits converting Kin Combats. I played around a little bit with converting L30 rares into better L30 rares and did much worse (maybe 100M for 10 converters), I played around a little bit with converting purples. The money was good but I could get almost as much just flipping purples, so I started doing that instead.

Hey, now, we're all on the same side. It's not a race.

... it's more like a screaming mob charging an abstraction.

There must be something wrong with my reading comprehension. I can't tell the difference between the original post and "Why do people tell me Blasters are awful? They just have to accept that they don't perform well , solo, and don't provide much to a team."

I can't match inf for inf, but I can throw in a billion as a gesture of appreciation.

The Archery advantage, as far as I can tell, is mostly that Rain of Arrows is a pseudopet and, I believe, does "Blaster nuke" damage. Which I have seen and like really well on Blizzard.

Welcome back, you VIP you.

It's saved my life a few times. . .

and I like the almost constant damage buff of the new Defiance just fine.

Scrappers and tanks still do get mezzed. I would estimate they get mezzed between 1% and 5% as much as blasters. But i'm willing to listen to any arguments that they get mezzed more than that; keep in mind that you get some seconds of mez added to the tally when you use an Awaken.

Cleansed by fire!

I threw 4 billion into the firepit and roasted some hot dogs over it.

They were delicious. (We're at 881 million prestige, Hero Dawn is at 979 million, American Legion has retaken first with 1007 million. . .for now.)