Minotaur

I did some research that is published in another thread on the solo drop rate, I was averaging 1 shard per 10 x5 no bosses (suited my toon at the time, psi bosses make a mess of a spines/fire while they're good at mowing down minions) borea missions.

I also had a period of doing this earning more than 200 V-merits while earning only one shard.

Some rough calculations indicated I was unlucky (worse than 1 in 10 chance), but things would be seriously helped by either of 2 things.

1) Multiply the number of shards required to do stuff, and the drop rate by 5 or 10. This will make your shard earning more consistent.

2) put a streakbreaker in, if you've killed way more shard drop eligible foes than you should have to, next kill drops a shard automatically.

My solo earning is about 1 per 2 hours, in that time I could do 2 kill most ITFs and have 15 shards and 2 components (4 shards worth each). Is it really intended that you earn them 23 times faster on a team ? And that was with me on a damage dealing toon.

On Thurdsay nights he's known as Virginia Tarikoss.

Default: I go for +recharge, there are very few toons that can't use more recharge.

I presume your attacks are already slotted up to the ED cap. You will notice the musculature boost far more when you get the rare/very rare as a higher proportion of the boost ignores ED.

The only toon I slotted with cardiac is my dark armor/stone melee tank, 2 of the heaviest end using sets in the game (and it's wonderful).

My question to second measure is this:

As a Brit who plays mainly on a low population US server out of US peak, is there going to be a way for me to sensibly access the later incarnate content without doing massive team raid type stuff ? as accumulating 24 people on a weekday at anything other than 1am is going to be a nightmare (and I play mainly during the week).

Anecdote: CoP:

I've done one, which is one more than most of my SG, I did it at 0930 my time in Aussie peak. We barely scraped up 24 people (pretty much everybody with a 50 on the server at the time), and had a very unsuitable mix of ATs with far too little buff/debuff. We couldn't dent the purple AV. Most people said they were never going to do this again, most of the problem was the lack of inspiration drops and the feeling that if you fail, you get absolutely nothing for an hour's completely wasted time killing some of the hardest mobs in the game.

On my server, I've never seen a CoP being formed before 1am my time in any of the 4 badge channels I frequent.

Have read through most of this thread, although I may have failed to take in some of the points made.

I'm a Brit who both solos and teams a lot, although I'm finding that with I19, I'm soloing an awful lot less, as alpha slotting the 22 of my 57 50s that I've decided to do would take me many years solo, whereas by hammering the ITF and LGTF I've now got 18 uncommon slotted. I didn't transfer over to the European servers because at the time I had to make the decision, I already had far too many toons I actually cared about to fit on the number of available servers.

Shard drop rate could do with looking at solo, as one toon where I needed just a few shards to complete my uncommon alpha was averaging 1 drop per 10 cleared missions doing Boreas at +0x5 no bosses (the toon was spines/fire and the psi bosses or too many psi lieuts mess him up badly). I did a rough calculation from the available drop rates, and this suggested I was unlucky (less than 1 in 10 chance of it being that bad). I've suggested before that multiplying the number of shards needed to do stuff and the drop rate by 5 would smooth this experience significantly.

Raid content is horrible as far as I'm concerned. If you play in US peak, you're probably OK, but I have never seen for example a CoP advertised in the 4 Victory badge channels I frequent in UK peak time. I've done one on Justice (my morning, Aussie peak time), and the problem is that while you can assemble 24 bodies, you have to take what people want to play, meaning we had waaay too much melee and little chance of completing it with the team we had and the mobs dropping no insps (we got the purple guy at the end and couldn't dent him). I've never done this again, and most of my SG have never done one at all. If I want to do a mothership raid, odds are that I'll have to do it at 1am my time.

ITF is definitely soloable, but I think most people who do this use a different exploit to the aggro cap one to avoid the nictus aiding Romulus.

A while ago, somebody in AP opened a trade window with my lowbie, and randomly traded me 1M. He was a 3 month vet and said he had 35M so he could spare it.

I'm a 78 month vet with several billions in the bank, but that toon was skint, so I took the inf and a note of his global.

A couple of days later I emailed him 10M and said he was welcome to it, or if his conscience wouldn't let him keep it to make 10 lowbies happy.

All the best to anybody caught up in this event, it's difficult to imagine for me as I'm a pom who lives at the top of a hill so is never likely to be flooded.

How much cash do you have to spend ?

There is a recurrent bug that does this that surfaces from time to time, it gets fixed fairly fast, it shouldn't work like that and most of the time it doesn't.

Yeah, there was a classic piece of stupidity I spied, forget the actual set, but it was one with an expensive IO in it, but this wasn't it.

last 5:

120M
56K
56K
5M
5M

Oops, somebody bid on the wrong IO.

The issue with psi is this:

Invul is troubled by all psi damage

/SR is troubled by the non positional psi attacks which are the ones from the mind and illusion control sets. It works normally against the psi blast sets.

Hence master illusionists really mess up /SRs, psi clocks rather less.

If the GM in question is not a senior GM, you can ask for it to be referred to a senior GM, if he is, I don't know what you do.

Properly with 4.

Others if they've done some AE or TFs will probably bronze roll a stupid number of tickets and roll a load of merits when they hit 50, and I'll use a load of rarely played toons to craft and sell the proceeds via gleemail.

Best of luck ocho, you will be missed.

Please can you inform your successors that turning up randomly in a few global channels is a good idea. It allows some good info to flow both ways.