Kelenar

I would pay for a custom ending to the LGTF where Hro'Dtohz gets punched through the ceiling while exclaiming, "It looks like Team Rikti is blasting off agaaaaaaaaain!"

;_;

There's a menu on the market interface that has Bidding Only/For Sale Only/All. If you go to All, it will show you everything, regardless of whether there's one for sale at this moment or not. You can then bid on it.

Myself, I'll be taking stuff both ways. I'd enjoy a Scrapper or Warshade villainside, and a heroside Brute or Mastermind would be such a hilarious cakewalk that I couldn't pass up on the chance. I'll probably mostly be sticking to the same sides, though, unless GR brings some pretty big changes to how people team.

Heroside Stalker, though, seems unpleasant to me. Way too many kill-alls over there for my stalking tastes.

Pretty much the only game that old whose music is still on my playlist.

I tried fitting the villain ATs onto this as an idle experiment, but I kept just wanting to put
|<-----------------------------Mastermind----------------------------->|
at the top.

A bit off from what you had in mind, but I actually had a Mastermind like this. Six bodies (5 pets + character), one mind that could only really handle one body at once. I had a huge network of binds so that I could type with chunks of the sentences coming from random pets.

The only problem I ran into that would apply to your idea is that people are used to just looking for whoever they're talking to for responses. If you respond from a different character, they can miss it really easily, especially if they're not aware of your concept and/or you're in a noisy area where they're already filtering out a lot of stuff they don't care about.

This, I could get behind. About half the reason that I don't have a /Storm Controller can be summed up with "Oh boy, Gale!"

If I recall correctly, Gang War sticks around after your death, too.

And oranges sometimes, yeah. Silver Mantis can cut through high defense like tissue paper once she lands a hit or two, so I've found oranges to be more useful for fighting her (or even better, both). Pretty sure there's at least one other EB where I favored that strategy.

As a general rule of thumb, though, it's hard to beat 'throw purple inspirations at it until it dies' as a strategy over most of the game.

This is the one thing I would absolutely tell everybody in the game if I could. Most of the people I've known who insist that soloing EBs is practically impossible had never thought to just try packing a stack of purples into the mission. With purples? 90% of EBs will fall to 90% of builds.

Holy crap, now that is old school.

This is where I am. Well, I had a pretty big network of friends back in The Day, from about i0-i7 or so, complete with SGs and all that... and then about 95% of my friends left the game or started playing once a week. I've had pretty lousy luck with SGs since, with most groups I join very rarely having enough people on to team during my active hours (and usually having an average 'last logged in' date of about 9 months ago). So, for the last year or so, I've been going it alone, just grabbing PUGs or forming my own. Well, okay, I'm in some of the big Virtue global channels, but I'm not really involved enough in them that they serve as much other than more people for me to yell at when forming a PUG.

The initial transition was pretty painful. I was used to being able to just log in and grab seven of my closest friends for whatever I wanted to do. Without that, I came very close to quitting the game--I generally dislike soloing unless I'm on a Brute or MM, and I was getting very, very bored. After about six months of alternatively glaring at the game in disappointment and whining to people, I eventually figured out to just form my own teams.

I've found that you can do pretty darn well for yourself by just forming your own PUGs, on Virtue at least. I can usually get anything short of a Shard TF together on a whim unless it's the middle of the night. The only place that not being in a big web of friends or a SG has kind of hurt me is RP. Any time I manage to get decent RP with strangers, either on groups or in Pocket D, I can be reasonably certain that I'll never see that character again. Makes it kind of hard to advance a character's story. The RP thing is probably a bit exacerbated by my preference for RP'ing in missions rather than in SG bases or the D (I'm playing a superhero, not a professional conversationalist), but still.

I dunno, nowdays my Spine/ stalker feels pretty damn nice as far as AoE. I'm sure there are builds that outdamage me in pretty much every other villain AT, but I'm at least able to make a good impact on teams that aren't steamrolling.

This is pretty much my experience... playing my /Shield scrapper just sort of makes me look at my /FA and sigh. For the 'offensive secondary,' FA sure feels lackluster compared to Shield there. That it feels weaker defensively too is just a kick in the face.

The real horror stories from Virtue's Pocket D are about characters with names like 'arbiter dark death godess'. If you thought ridiculous character concepts hurt to read normally, now imagine them trying to roleplay.

This. If you could somehow absolutely enforce people only selling things for 1 million max, by making it so nobody can trade outside of the market... then there will be 1302948093240932409 bidding, 0 for sale on the good stuff, because everybody will be able to make enough money for one in about an hour of fighting at level 50, but the supply won't have increased at all. Plus, with that little profit in selling them (if you looted a purple that you have no use for, but it would only sell for the price of vendoring a handful of level 50 IO recipes, would you put it on the market?), most people would just horde them instead of putting them on the market, leading to farming things personally to be the only way to get them.

But that's what Second Life was built for. It's like a zoo with a neverending supply of new species!

Also, everybody needs to come to Virtue so that I can get SFs at 4 AM by asking in Local. On Monster Island. On a Tuesday. On a brute concept build with nothing but the medicine pool, the presence pool, and the teleportation pool except for the Teleport power.