Muon_Neutrino

I believe they're the same ones. They're not talking about a costume literally unlocked by reaching a certain influence milestone. It's a tradition here in the market forums to take a picture of your character with the influence visible when you hit 1 or 2 billion, and if the character didn't already have them, it's traditional to give them a top hat and monocle for the picture, and to take it while using the /em teabag emote.

Well, for one thing, the markets are cross-server, so the freedom and virtue markets are the same (although they are not cross-faction, so the hero and villain markets are not the same). So, yes, it really is this rare, across all servers, and for good reason - it does indeed function the same way as the steadfast 3%, and you can stack them.

The reason it is so expensive and rare is that demand is huge and supply is tiny. Everyone who wants to soft cap their build in PvE wants one, so demand is through the roof. The IO is in a PvP IO set, so it is only supplied by the (extremely rare) IO drops from defeated players in PvP. Given that very few PvP in this game and the drops are very uncommon even for those who do PvP, the supply of these IOs is next to nonexistant. So, there is no standing supply, thus those that want it bid higher so that they have a chance to get the next one that is posted, and so the bids keep going up. If it wasn't for the 2 billion influence cap, the price would probably be even higher.

If you want to get one, the only real way is to place a 2 billion bid on either the enhancement or recipe at level 50 (whichever has better turnover) and hope the RNG smiles your way and chooses your bid from amongst all the other 2 billion offerings. If someone were to try and sell it on the forums, I'm guessing it would go for well more than 2 billion.

edit: I suppose it might be possible to farm for one, but that would require extra accounts, likeminded friends, or both, along with a huge amount of time investment and patience. I don't know exactly how such farms work, but I do know that the restrictions on drops make even that method slow, also farming for a specific recipe is always hit or miss.

Honestly? I don't know. I dabbled in PvP a bit pre-i13 with the only character I had that was even remotely suited, a dom. I found it fun on occasion, but it was also the start of my incredible dislike for a very large fraction of the PvP population in this game. I don't think the current system is really an improvement over what we had, but even if it were overhauled once more (and into something functional this time), I don't think I'd ever really get into it unless the two fundamental problems I have with the whole thing were fixed.

The first problem is one that I'm not sure *can* be fixed, and that is the simple fact that a very large number of powerset combinations are nearly useless in PvP. For a primarly PvE focused player who doesn't play all day and doesn't level up characters very fast, it's a big hurdle to look at my stable and realize that all but a couple are would be nothing more than farm bait in PvP, no matter what build or tactics I use. Not to mention that even if a character has appropriate powersets, I'd still need to slot out an entire alternate build, which is a hassle and an expense I'd rather be putting toward slotting out some other of my characters' primary build. I'd rather have a system where more combinations were viable and skill was the paramount factor rather than enhancements (I'd still lose, of course, but at least I wouldn't need to spend as much money to lose), but I'm not sure if it's possible to create such a system that would be satisfactory in other ways.

The other problem, though, is out of the hands of those who design the system, and it lies squarely with the people who use it. While the current predominant attitudes among the PvP population remain (and I am *not* just talking about zone idiots), I won't be joining them. I am not a hypercompetitive person, and I find that mindset foreign. In many games, the population segregates itself, and I can avoid those more concerned with winning than with playing. In this game, they seem intent on forcing their hypercompetitiveness on everyone else, and I won't play under those conditions.

Wendy, the benefit is not necessarily that the pool powers will be more useful at those low levels than the primary/secondary powers - note that this is a suggestion for pools to be opened up at level 0 on an *earned respec*, not while initially leveling. The benefit is that a higher level player who has no need whatsoever for some of those early powers is not forced to take them, and can instead get some of his pool power prereqs out of the way early on.

For example, if this were allowed, my grav/storm would drop gale in a heartbeat (and take, say, hover) so that he can actually fit in all of the powers he wants, such as snow storm. Tell me with a straight face that that does nothing to help me or my teams.

And yeah, some will just use this to gimp their builds even more, but frankly it's not like it would make any difference at that point. What do I care if that emp has no attacks at all instead of 1 unslotted attack that they never use? Either way they're not going to be killing anything, after all. And I imagine that such characters won't be on very many successful respec teams anyway.

That sounds reasonable, 2 slow 2 rech should work pretty well.

What level of foes are you fighting? Quicksand with 2 slows ought to put up to +3s at the 10% runspeed floor, if they're not resistant. Sure, normal mobs will wander out eventually, but stunned ones ought to be stuck in there pretty good, considering that they don't move *that* fast even without quicksand.

Nice costumes! Simple, yet striking (unlike mine).

I went with a science origin on my Ill/ controller, with a quantum mechanics shtick. Almost all of the ill/ effects can be justified with that - quantum duplication, invisibility, confusion and fear from the mind-bending math involved... When I hold my enemies, I'm literally blinding them with SCIENCE! Muahaha!

There are definitely concepts beyond the 'magician' one.

Just use quicksand to keep them in place instead of cages. It recharges relatively quickly, and it's auto-hit to boot (unlike cages). You should be using it on every spawn anyway, so it's no big hassle to lay it out after you hit stalagmites.

Eh, I dunno if electric is actually *weaker* than fire - it's got almost 10% more S/L res and some psi res, and capped energy resist is more useful than capped fire res. The heal is about half as strong, true, but it's got some possible mitigation in end drain and a real tier 9. It might not actually be stronger, but I'm not sure if it's actually weaker either.

/threadjack

This combo has some interesting possibilities, I think. One of the nice things about plant is that it tends to clump up baddies at the same time as it neutralizes them, making fissure's small AoE and tremor's long animation less of drawbacks. On the other hand, plant is going to be -KB'ing the enemies, which will weaken some of earth's mitigation tricks a bit. On the third hand, PB + seeds will confuse things for an ungodly long time.

As for must haves, from plant I'd definitely grab strangler, roots, seeds, vines, carrion creepers, and fly trap. From earth I'd consider spears (forced), both mallets, seismic smash, power boost, and fissure to be the must-haves.

Roots is unusual among the AoE immobs in that it does twice as much damage as normal, for less endurance. It's quite worth slotting up as an attack, especially given how seeds will clump foes.

You probably know this already, but seeds is one of the most godly control powers in the game. It's got a big cone, huge duration, quick recharge, clumps stuff up for you, has no accuracy penalty, and you get it at level 8! As long as you don't let the enemies kill each other completely solo, you won't get any real XP loss (roots is good here). It should be the first power you 6 slot, and will be your staple the whole game long.

Vines is a bog standard AoE hold, and thus often overlooked. However, I feel it's an important part of your arsenal in this case. Seeds is a *very* good power, but you want a backup for when it's recharging, or you need to control a second group (or against confuse resistant foes - darn nemesis). With the aid of power boost and domination, it will last plenty long enough to fulfill that function, as long as you throw it a few slots.

Carrion creepers is a strange power, but a very good one. In short, it summons an invisible pseudo-pet that follows you around for a while and summons vines to attack your enemies. The vines and other effects can slow, damage, knock down, and immobilize your foes. It's generally best to slot for max recharge and then damage, accuracy, end reduction, and damage procs to taste. The vines can take aggro, so it's useful for keeping the heat off of you, but they can also do some noticeable damage.

Although I didn't call it a must-have, I would still consider picking up entangle. /earth is a bit short on ranged attacks, and the ability to immob an EB without the end-heavy AoE immob is nice to have. Slot it up with some damage, acc, and end, and it can help round out your ranged chain.

Spirit tree and spore burst aren't anything special. They do what they advertise, but aren't especially strong. I wouldn't use up power picks on them.

On the earth side, the mallets and seismic smash make for a massively smash-tastic melee punch - they are some truly beastly melee attacks, although slow to recharge. Stone spears has a cool animation and some nice mitigation with knockup, but it is a bit slow. Hurl boulder, even though it's your only other ranged attack, is slow enough that I wouldn't consider it a must have, although it definitely is usable.

Tremor is also saddled with a quite slow animation. However, since seeds will be leaving things rather harmless, it could still work well on the clumped up foes, I think. Just be cautious with using it against uncontrolled baddies. Fissure doesn't have the animation problem, but does have a rather small radius. Again, seeds will help here.

Power boost is your ace in the hole. Hit power boost and domination and confuse a spawn, and you could just walk away because they're never coming out. Or, PB + vines makes a very credible panic button backup control.

From earth assault, the only power I'd outright skip is mud pots. The radius is tiny, the damage is nothing to write home about, and the immob and slow are totally redundant on an AT with so much control.

For slotting, roots, entangle, seismic smash, the mallets, tremor, fissure, and spears all get standard attack slotting. You can probably skimp a bit on entangle and/or spears, as the melees are the real meat of the attack chain.

Strangler, seeds, creepers, and roots all need a lot of slots. For SOs, seeds and roots can both be slotted 2 acc, 2 mez, 2 rech. Strangler can get away with 1 less acc, and creepers should probably get 1 acc, 2 dam, 3 rech. Fly trap just needs an acc and 3 damage.

If you're concerned about overall amount of slots, consider frankenslotting stuff. I know the fashion is to go for recharge bonuses, but you can get a viable and slot efficient build for really cheap. Getting 7 SOs worth of enhancement for 5 slots in each attack, etc.

Well, the 28 dark/psi and the 32 storm/dark usually solo at the base difficulty since neither one of them really has enough slots for their stuff yet. Eventually I expect both to be able to solo higher settings, but at the moment it's a mite tedious to kill lots of foes on them. Slotted lightning storm and life drain should help change that on the storm/dark, and getting the two AoEs and the rest of the blasts fully slotted out should help for the dark/psi.

My 50 FF/nrg is softcapped to ranged and could run on high settings quite safely. However, his killspeed is not the greatest even with all the blasts well-slotted, so I leave him at base when I solo him. He can kill stuff fine, but it takes long enough that I'd rather not load down his missions with extra foes.

We don't do very big christmases anymore, it makes things so much less stressful. This year I got two music CDs from Powerglove (makers of awesome video game metal) and a pair of shirts (one with a funny message and one without). It was good. Better was watching my mom open the presents she didn't think she was going to get.

I personally wouldn't skip it, but I can see why some might want to. The thing I really like about TT:assault is the low end cost, no need for slotting, and stacking it with the equally powerful regular assault for +30% damage. It might not sound like much after playing kin, but that's a 30% that's on all the time and doesn't require you to do anything. Look at it this way - a crab with 95% slotting and 2 assaults is doing almost blaster level base damage on his ranged attacks, and he's buffing the rest of the team to boot.

I would personally drop the fighting pool in favor of double assaults, but at least in part it depends on how much you team vs how much you solo. Possibly make a second build without fighting and see if you miss the survivability? IMO crabs are pretty darn tough already, so you might find you don't actually *need* the fighting pool.

You're not going to be branded 'noob' either way though, since you did take the most important toggle. It's amazing how few SoA I see in game who actually take TT:M.

Since we've got some general discussion on ice/ice here, I'll leave my thoughts on the combo, in addition to the 'CE or not' comment above.

One thing that becomes apparent is that ice/ice has gobs of soft control, but less hard control than other sets. Here is where the synergy with the secondary comes in, because with power boost, a decently slotted glacier becomes a very credible 'everybody stop NOW' button - giving a very welcome option for a backup *hard* control. Despite the AoE holds' typical 'meh'-ness and ice's every-spawn control not being affected by power boost, I would not skip either power. I just love jumping into the middle of whatever giant ambush has hit the team, hitting dom, PB, and glacier, and freezing them into next week.

Ice also has some weaknesses in alpha control. Opening with ice slick will allow some of the mobs to shoot at you, and flash freeze's sleep is delayed by a quarter second due to the trivial tick of damage, also allowing a partial alpha in most cases. For this reason, I don't bother taking flash freeze, since it doesn't work well for alphas and its panic button role is better fulfilled by glacier. The best way I've found to open is to summon ice slick from behind an obstacle, but sometimes there isn't one in range of the enemy spawn. In that case, I usually hit one of the enemies with an ice bolt or hold while in mid air jumping behind a corner, and pull the spawn onto the ice slick. It could also be worth slotting a range or two into ice slick, for this reason.

I don't personally consider frostbite worth taking. You have no AoE stun to worry about preventing wander from, no need to set containment as a controller would, and no actual control options that mesh well with the power. It costs way too much to use as an AoE, and it doesn't offer any useful control by itself, unless you count 'annoying the mobs into shooting your face off and ignoring the rest of the team' as 'control'.

On the other hand, I did take chilblain. I didn't slot it very heavily, but about the only time plain old immobilize is a useful effect is against PToD EBs that you want to keep out of melee while the triangles are up. For that purpose, I considered it worth picking up the ST immob, since I had the spare slot and it works so much better than the AoE one. One acc is all you need at a bare minimum, I put 2 more slots into it with a mix of acc and dam so that the animation time isn't *totally* wasted in terms of damage.

On the age-old question of 'AA or shiver', I fall firmly into the 'both' category. Really, they don't fulfill the same purpose. AA is passive mitigation against mobs currently in or near melee range, while shiver is ranged, clicky mitigation against mobs who may not be anywhere close to melee range. Maybe a controller might not want both since they get more mitigation in their secondary, but on a dom, I like having both - especially since it's not like shiver needs *that* much slotting, a bit of acc and rech is all really.

With the patron pool, I would definitely pick whatever power allows you to regain end, as the end use on this combo really is kinda annoying. I went with leviathan for the best thematic fit, and made sure to take hibernate. Mu has power sink and soul has dark consumption (which is nowhere near as good, but whatever). Mace is the only one without, and also given how clunky the redraw is, I wouldn't bother with that pool - although personal force field is tempting. I think the best is actually probably mu, because power surge could help with another potential problem - staying alive against PToD EBs. It might not be able to do the job completely by itself, but combined with charged armor and a few insps, it would probably be much easier than for a dom without (also, though I wouldn't use him because I think the mu are fugly, the pet is supposedly pretty good).

I mostly frankenslotted, concentrating on getting a good amount of endredux and recharge into my attacks for not very much slots or cash - while AA is a big drainer, the real killers are attacks.

CE will not be especially useful in this case, mostly because of the very small radius. AA causes avoid behavior, so most foes will be trying to (very slowly) flee the area - so they won't be right next to you where CE can hit them. Also, CE's effects aren't spectacularly useful in this case - it's just a bit more movement and recharge slow, and if they're inside the range of AA, they're already slowed to smithereens.

I wouldn't take CE. If you want another AoE slow effect, take shiver instead - the area on that power is *huge*, and as a click, it doesn't depend on where you're standing afterward. You can also use it to slow groups even if it's a group you don't want to melee, to slow the rest of a spread out spawn, or even to slow down pursuit if you have to flee.

I'm not sure if it was the recharge bonus specifically (two sets of red fortune, btw, so it's not like I spent millions on that - it was more or less a side effect of trying to get soft-capped ranged def), but my attacks are slotted with about 55% endredux and recharge, so perhaps I'm able to put together a tighter and more efficient attack chain. I do have aim and power build up, though I didn't use PBU on catburgler. As far as the monitor window, open up the powers box, click on the button at the top (view combat attributes, I think it's labeled) and then right click on any particular stat and select 'monitor' - it'll appear in that little box.

Didn't they increase arc space at one point? If I'm remembering correctly, then if you haven't looked at it in a while it's possible that you might have a bunch of extra space. Most of the customs did have descriptions, I only noticed it missing on those two.

I just took my 50 FF/nrg and soloed the arc. He's got a few more powers than a mid-30ish def would, but most of those are defensive in nature, and the offensive ones (PBU, TF) I didn't use on the bosses (I don't have conserve power, either). He usually runs on the standard difficulty, but for this I turned on bosses so that the EBs wouldn't be downgraded.

Catburgler spawned right on top of me (was that intentional?) and surprised me, but as soon as I got my bearings I just hovered over his head and hit 1, 2, and 3 until he died. He healed twice, but I was able to overpower that. I used 1 medium blue after I realized that using energy torrent to fill out the attack chain was costing too much end, and one medium green when he got lucky and hit me twice in a row with focus. I brought some yellows to see through his stealth, but found I didn't need them as I could still target him for a few seconds after he hid and so was able to knock him right back out. My end was certainly low at times, but I never bottomed out.

Fight!
The end of the Catburgler

The rest of the arc wasn't overly difficult either. I just used PFF when the boss in the third mission hit BU, and used force bubble on the boss in the 4th so he couldn't close with me. The final boss was more challenging, but with some purples to overcome his pets' 75% base tohit and defense debuffs, some greens for the hits that leaked through, and some blues to counter the end cost of the AoEs I was using, he went down.

The final soldier drops

The arc was pretty fun, by the way. The customs were well done, and the difficulty wasn't too over the top (at least on standard difficulty, although non-flying+softcapped characters would probably have had more trouble with the melee-heavy bosses). I especially liked the map choices, I thought they were very atmospheric. Also, I like the fact that the boss in the 4th mission had fly (which I think is sadly underused) - it made the battle feel much more epic to be dashing all over the sky with him.

I only had a couple nits. The Ubermenschen and russian soldiers were missing descriptions, which may be a file size issue (heck knows you've gotta be pushing 100% with all those customs), but I did notice. I didn't mind the first kill all very much since the map was small and it made sense, but the last one felt odd - the briefing sounded like my objective was just the boss. Finally, I think it would spice things up a bit if the patrols said something when they spotted you - the arc is a bit light on dialogue, and given that (I assume) they're all a single detail it wouldn't cost much space to have them shout 'Achtung!' or something when they see you, and it would add to the atmosphere. Those are minor, though, it was really pretty good overall.

Returning from the threadjack/impromptu arc review, I don't necessarily disagree with the idea that it's a mite unfair for lower-damage ATs to pay more for the damage they do get. I'm not sure it rises to the level of a full-fledged problem that needs to be dealt with, but it did always feel a bit odd to me. One possible issue does come to mind with the idea, though, if we just simply lowered the end costs on ATs like tankers and defenders. Given that all the damage scalars start out at 1 and then diverge, at low levels they'd effectively be doing the same damage as blasters, but paying much less end for it. I'm not sure if the devs can make end costs that also scale by level, which would be the way I would fix that issue.

Ultimo, if you don't want people to fixate on the example, it might indeed be good to just not give one. The problem is that you often give examples that are pretty obvious edge cases, so of course those that disagree are going to focus on them since discrediting them is a way to argue against the suggestion. This would have probably worked just as well if you had simply said: "It is my experience that defenders often have endurance issues solo, and I think it comes from the fact that they pay more end per point of damage than higher damage ATs. Perhaps we could... " etc. You'd still get people saying 'my defender doesn't have end problems', but I think as a whole it would stay more focused. If you do want to give examples, It'd probably be good to make a conscious effort to have them be as 'normal' as possible to avoid people attacking them for being edge cases.

(As an aside, I'd never actually bothered to use detention field on an EB before, and was surprised that it didn't work. I understand that acc/mez hamis raise the magnitude of the OnlyAffectsSelf status - does anybody know how many it would take to make detention field work on EBs?)