Miladys_Knight

Steamy Mist and a stealth IO or Super Speed means that the mobs don't get a ranged attack off before their to hit is debuffed. It's all in play style choice. That said I still use the same slotting of:

1 Lotg +7.5
2 Cytos
2 Ribos
1 Steadfast Res/def

To maximize both aspects especially since it grants both that defense and those resists to team members in the area of effect.

In the case of Steamy Mist you may be best off slotting for resists simply because Storm has Hurricane which can put you over the softcap on it's own against even cons. Dark gets you respectable numbers of -to hit also. Cold.... not so much.

Set bonuses can also garner you quite a bit of defense but resistance set bonuses are few and far between.

That said I always slot powers of this type with
1 Lotg +7.5
2 Cytos
2 Ribos
1 Steadfast Res/def

That's if you team. I don't have to team and yes 7.7 second set up time is nothing when I'm solo - pounding +4s. It's not only the -75% damage from the slows. It's also any resistances you have from any other souce like your PPP or even tough. Since the reduced damage from the -rech stacks with any other resistances you have you can cut the damage down even further. Add a few defense set bonuses and you have 3 layers of mitigation (4 if you go perma dom and get your mez protection permanently). You almost have to try to lose to get defeated.

When I say decent damage from the procs that's what I mean. Any time the IOs proc I get free damage from a power that I'm using for mitigation that typically does very little damage and many Doms skip. Since Ice/Earth is mostly single target oriented I can ignore minions and just use my single target hold on lieutenants while I concentrate on the boss(es). Try running hero stats sometime. You'd be surprised just how much damage you add with those 2 "tiny" procs precisely because the area of effect is large and the power recharges quickly.

By the time the bosses are down the minions are also down just from colateral damage from Frostbite, the procs, Tremor and Fissure. The lieutenants are down to 1/3 or so remaining health at that point and are easily picked off.

No it's not a farming build but it gives you the ability to hang fire with a single target squishy and still come out on top.

It's very good hyperbole. Last time I checked each primary had 9 powers in it. Ice/ must be pretty good if you only need to use 3 to provide maximum mitigation for both yourself and the team vs +4 mobs.

You only need to cast ice slick once per spawn, the - rech in Shiver lasts 18 seconds, the -rech in frostbite lasts 15 seconds. 1 application of each of those powers (plus Arctic Air) is -135% to rech which keeps +4s (or lower con mobs with some slow resistance) just under the -rech cap.

Stacking Frostbite again keeps +4s at (over) the -rech cap. Since you can't slot for -rech (and doing so would be redundant if you could) you can 5 slot posi (every thing but the dam/range) and throw Crap of the Hunter proc into Frostbite and not only maintain your mitigation vs +4s but deal decent damage at the same time.

What's not to like about that?

Indeed. You may wish to try your concept as a Mind/Psi dominator instead. Far from under powered its one of the better combinations on red side.

That's what Ice Slick is for. You drop it to mitigate the alpha. Throw in shiver, close to melee and wait til AA takes hold then frostbite the spawn.

At that point Ice Slick has done it's job, the +4s are at the -rech cap and all you have to do is Shiver and Frostbite every time they recharge and just smash the rest of the time.

Artic Air + Shiver + Frostbite will keep +4 mobs at the -rech cap (75% which is the same as saying that enemy powers take 4 times as long to recharge) That's virtually identical to having 75% damage resistance (both cases reduce incoming damage by 75%)

It's been proven time and again that you don't need to farm (at least on blue side where the market is healthy). All you have to do is play the game and sell (or craft and sell) your drops. The problem is that everyone that complains is only looking at the buy price. Just like any other economical trades when prices are high you should be come a seller, and when they drop its time to buy.

Unlike in the real world everyone in CoX that uses the market is both a buyer and a seller and the size of the market is entirely determined by the number of players using the market, how many characters they have using it, and how high level (ie: how many transaction slots they have). One way that the devs could take some pressure off the market and make it healthier is just to triple the number of transaction slots every toon has available.

Lol I just thought of something Ragman. I bet you aren't in favor of market caps any more. Scenario:

A market cap of 20 mil is placed. The way it has to be placed is per market transaction slot. Therefore..... you no longer have any place to store multibillions of inf because a slot now only holds 20 million max...........

Sure it would be with each controller putting out the equivalent of 15% defense to all postions by using smoke and flash arrow.

We've been told before by the devs that the only thing that is different about heros or villians is a single field, with a single number, that denotes whether a character is a hero or a villian. The separation between the sides is artificially created and artificially maintained. In fact much programming time has been spent by the devs to close loop holes in the programs that allowed things to be passed from one side to the other.

The main problem for the merger is that the entire market database has to be gone over by hand, we've been told this in the past as well. It's not that it isn't doable it's the amount of work involved and from a CS perspective it must all be done 100% correctly on the first pass.

The other potential sticking point is that once merged the markets would be nigh impossible to separate again.

Most of us that are pro-merger don't care about either case. We want them to spend the time to merge them and fervently hope that they will never be separate again.

I have to agree with this as this is how mine is slotted.

The only reason a player that understands the mechanics wants them separate is to exploit the low population on red side. It's very easy to corner a certain good because there is such a small pool of goods available there.

There are several reasons (like RP, "my HERO would NEVER buy stolen goods from a VILLAIN') not to merge the market if you DON'T understand the mechanics.

This. It takes me 4 times as long and roughly 30% more influence to IO out comparable builds (Defender/Corruptor) red side compared to blue.

If IOs are supposed to represent post 50 development then there is problem that needs addressing since there is this large a disparity.

I am a marketeer so just a few comments on this:

What you call leveling IOs don't really have this effect. IOs that are used for frankenslotting/leveling are used for that purpose specifically because they are cheap and plentiful (and oftens times available at prices that are less than SOs). I invariably over slot these or just delete them for the influence during the respec process.

This won't really increase the rate of power creep for a couple of reasons:

1) Power creep due to IOs is a constant. Every time a valuable recipe is introduced into the system it doesn't leave the system. It is slotted in a character and that character gains power. Once the character is level 50 and fully slotted any merits/recipes created are not needed by that character and are passed on to another character through some form of trade (even if that trade is from that character to an Alt of that player). This is going to be a constant process that simply won't end. The only time these IOs leave the system is when a player stops playing the game and all of their characters are "retired".

2) Most CoX players alt. This means that valuable IOs are in demand again for the new alt. This is a continual process and is most apparent when a new power set is released (like Dual Pistols. The effect on the market due to the release of this set just prior to 2xp week end was profound and still has not steadied out.)

3) Most players respecing out of a particular IO do so because they want it for another Alt, are upgrading to better IOs but the IO in question is too good to over slot (which still may be passed to another of that player's alts), or the IO in question no longer has the value that it had pre-nerf. Only in case 3 will the IO typically hit the market. Nerfed IOs then do flood the market and their price drops specifically because the IO no longer has the value it once had. These are eventually cleaned out by people who put the low value IO into their tray to cash into influence during a respec.

This is right on the mark but not for the stated reason. Going back to the above. Once a character is fully slotted to the owner's satisfaction no influence earned ever needs to be spent again. This is also a constant and goes hand in hand with power creep. You earn influence for almost every thing that you do in game. When you stop spending that influence piles up. The more you play that character the bigger your pile is. Then when a new and shiny IO is introduced into the game you can offer an "exorbitant amount" of influence for the very first one to be sold because you have it to spend and also know that you will earn more because you still have nothing else to spend it on.

The way that power creep goes hand in hand is that as you get more powerful you defeat things faster, this allows you to earn more influence per unit time, which allows you to spend more inf on a new shiny to increase your power, which allows you to defeat things faster still etc, etc, etc. Now multiply that effect by a couple hundred thousand person player base and you can see why we have the massive and ever expanding pool of influence. This is known as inflation. The cure for this is more influence sinks that are constant rather than static (it's kind of what the original devs tried to do with SO degradation and what other MMOs do with "gold costs" to repair gear.)

Yes, but again not for the stated reason. The ever expanding pool of influence is the reason here that and the fact that the devs fixed the "exemplar bug" that caused us to earn less influence than we were "supposed to" have been earning.

The bottom line is that there are 2 ways to reduce prices at the market.

1) increase drop rates/reduce merit costs. This will only be partially successful since each toon is their own private printing press and you can print all the currency you want simply by playing the game. This will slow price creep but not eliminate it.

2) Increase the number of influence sinks in the game. Ideally the influence sinks should be set up so that the average amount of surplus influence that is removed from the system is equivalent or slightly greater than the amount being produced.

I've proposed a few possible influence sinks.

Changing SG base empowerment buffs to influence instead of salvage.

Costume pieces/badges/titles that are unlocked by spending influence on that character. (An excellent example would be a solid gold top hat and monacle that is unlocked by spending 1 billion influnce to unlock it. It would also grant a "billionaire badge" and would allow the character to display a permanent yellow title of billionaire).

Other temp powers could be added/made available for purchase through the use of influence. I, for example, would pay repeatedly for a temp power that raised the base accuracy of my vet powers to 95% for a couple of hours.

There are lots of very interesting temp powers that are available through the safeguard side mission "stop the arms deal." There are many players in game that never see these temp powers because they never run that side mission. The temp powers available through this mission could be added as a purchaseable with influence option. "Temp power vending machines" could be added as SG base items.

Making the influence to prestege conversion rate equitable (ie: the same or nearly the same rate as it would have been earned had the character been in SG mode) would have the potential to suck more influence out of the system.

There are many many more good ideas out there. They just need to be implemented.

I had one of these for a while named Monet Again (because of the redraw) I thought it would do well solo or on teams but.....

Solo it burns far too much endurance and has very poor survival. Teamed it just doesn't bring enough to the table. That coupled with the massive redraw caused me to delete him in the low 30s.

The only thing that I could imagine that would be worse would be a TA/DP.