Fulmens

... I don't think it was ever any good to start with. But I have no substantiative argument with the rest of this post.

People like to b**ch, it's human nature, but very very few people will actually not accept you for a team because of your enhancements. I don't think I've ever been on a team where I've even seen someone comment on someone else's enhancements.

I'm not understanding your reasoning here, and it's very possible the problem is on my end. -14% damage debuff (from evencons) turns 1000 HP of damage into 860. If you can't ignore one you can't ignore the other. Are you talking about stacked -recharge effects?

Speaking for myself? Very sure.

Now there is a difference [maybe not an important difference for your purposes] between these statements:
1. "the markets are full of max level recipes because the level 50s are making all the recipes"
2. "People below 50 don't roll until they reach 50."

I can only gather data on #1, so for #2 I have only a moderate number of anecdotes, based on trying to get people to sell me sub-50 recipes and generating them myself.

* I ran a certain number of TF's- mostly during the US daytime, so more skewed towards hardcore players- but MOST of the people on the teams, who were not already 50, wanted to wait till 50 to roll their recipes.
* I have heard people in Atlas Park/Freedom discussing the common wisdom of the noob- which was, in this case, "wait till 50 to roll." It may be no wiser than "don't click on the boxes in the respec" but the urban legend is out there- that's the way to go.
* I have been told by people from whom I was trying to buy merits, "I'm waiting till 50" or "Why would you want recipes below 50?" or "That's a waste of money."
* I've never heard anyone,ever, explain how they were going to, or someone else should, roll at anything other than 50.

It is clear that the vast majority of recipes are generated at level 50. I will assume that hardly anyone buys Perfect Zinger: Taunt/Rech, and that people do not care what level they get it - feel free to discuss this assumption.

If this assumption is correct, then the ratio of "bought at 50" to the ratio of "Bought below 50" should match the ratio of rolls at 50 to rolls below 50.

There are 13 recipes for sale at 50, and the last 5 cover the 27th of June to present
There are 19 from 41-49, last 5 tend to have sold from about 5/1 to the present. So 5 sales at 50 in 2 days, 40 sales 41-49 in the last, roughly, 60 days.
There are 2 for sale from 31-40, last 5 vary from June 1 to (in one case) Feb. 2nd. Maybe 5/1 on average. So 50 sales in the last, roughly, 60 days.
There are 6 for sale 21-30, with quite a lot of last 5 sales in the march-april range. (worst case is September 2009...) So 50 sales in the last, roughly, 90 days.

I conclude that, at least for the recipes sold, you sell about 1.5 per day from 21 to 49 and about 2.5 per day at level 50.

It might be good to a factor of 5, that estimating technique, but I wouldn't trust it further. Maybe Stealths, where there's enough of a market that you can actually trust the IO is used or sold?

10 for sale at 50
2 for sale 16-49
3 for sale at level 15
Last 5 sold at 15 since 6/23 (roughly 5 in 5 days)
Last 5 sold at 16-25 -one level has 5 in the last 2 months, most of the rest go back into mid to late 2009. 50 in the last 200+ days.
Last 5 from 26-35 - typically around February or March. Call it 50 in the last 90 days.
Last 5 from 36-45 - "more reasonable", around april maybe. 50 in the last 60 days.
Last 5 from 46-49: 15 in the last, say, 90 days.
Last 5 at 50 since yesterday

We pretend that all these were rolled, even the level 15s, and conclude that we have 2.5 sold per day at 50, 1 a day at 15, and roughly 1.5 a day at 16-49 .

So we have as much business at 50 as we do at 15-49 and approximately half the IO's rolled are at level 50. If we take out the bump at 15 (people buying with merits) we get roughly the same 2.5/1.5 ratio.

So around 65% of [sold] rare recipes are generated by level 50's. Now there are many things throwing that off- farmers tend to have a completed build, be picking up 50's, and to occasionally get a rare recipe from a boss- but that still says most of the rolls are done by and for 50's.

Discuss.

Lest we get carried away, Red Tomax lists it as 4 seconds [used to be 6, I believe], putting it ahead of all Blaster snipes, and 5 [!] seconds faster than Time Bomb.

Stalker snipes are upwards of 7 seconds.

I'm not saying FA is a good power or a bad power. I'm just factchecking ya.

You know what else takes out even con minions? Fireball/Firebreath. In under five seconds. Without any Build Up or Aim. With very reasonable (SO) slotting, it does so on about a 12 second cycle.

If you've got Mental as your secondary, you can do it with nearly ANY primary.

Oh, and "Without any Build Up"? You say that like it's an advantage instead of a disadvantage. Because if you use Build Up, it will expire with about 14 seconds left on the timer.

If you really don't see 24 seconds as a problem, go you. (Is Time Bomb on a "leash" like tripmines are? If so... you can't even set it up and go on to the next spawn.) I have run on teams where fights are over before Build Up expires. Frequently.

It took me years. Deciding that I wasn't going to pay less than 5908 for salvage has saved me many hours of bid creeping. (it's a couple million difference on an entire build. That's four level 50 crafting costs. )

Trying to deliberately destroy billions in market fees helped. I started out with the idea that I could lose on a few of the transactions, and I made a lot of money on 99% of them.

On the 42 million? I still want to yell at that person. 42 million was even above the "last 5". They didn't even TRY !

I'm going to mention that the game kinda changes around level 20 (18-22) for MANY characters. In the case of Tankers, that's about when you first get your taste of "up to your eyeballs in badguys and you just. don't. die." The early levels are the "die for the team" levels. Pay thy dues and keep going.