Obitus

Criticizing someone for an alleged ad hominem, and calling him a mental patient in the process. Irony, thy name is Another_Fan.

Your entire premise is based on the conclusion that yours is the one true definition of hyperinflation. Hence your cutesy quips about the definition of rain -- implying that hyperinflation is not only present in CoH; it's actually self-evident. In your mind, apparently, the debate was over before it began. (And your most recent reply is explicit on that point: "Given that this entire thread has been about people trying to redefine the term so it doesn't apply" -- you assume you're right based on the unproven theory that everyone else is wrong.)

I've shown that there are other definitions of hyperinflation, and that thus the presence of hyperinflation here is still legitimately in question, despite all of your posturing. In fact, the very link you use as evidence contradicts your one-true-definition assumption in the first paragraph.

You have no substantive response, because you're smart enough to realize that we don't have 50% inflation per month, here (which would, over three years, amount to a cumulative inflation rate of 1.5^36, or about a 218 million percent increase in prices, if I'm not misplacing a decimal, -- and heck, even if I am misplacing a decimal, we're a long freaking way from 21 or even 2.1 million percent inflation). So instead, you accuse me of committing your sin with a smarmy one-liner, and then proceed to bury the headline in a mass of distracting irrelevancies.

This isn't the place to disabuse you of your questionable character-build theories; suffice to say that the math is not on your side. Have a nice life, dude.

I think we can all agree that someone who has, say, 30 million dollars is very rich. That's not world-beating wealth, but it's enough to make 99% of the population green with jealousy. How many yachts does 30 million dollars buy you? Not a whole heck of a lot. You're surely not going to be giving them away as party favors.

The problem here isn't that you're too poor to buy more than any individual could ever want or need (including the proverbial yacht or two). With 50 billion influence, you can, in fact, kit out at least four characters with absolutely top-of-the-line bleeding-edge builds.

The problem here is that the game encourages you to want to buy yachts for several (sometimes even dozens) of individual characters.

MMO design tends to emphasize long-term, singular character progression. CoH didn't follow that mold for the first few years of its existence -- instead focusing on a strong diversity of character builds that players could max out at leisure -- but Inventions (and now Incarnate content) are meant to give players long-term goals for their favorite characters. The flip side of that design decision is that you're probably not going to be able to kit out every single one (or even most) of your alts without becoming the COH equivalent of Warren Buffet. We can't have it both ways.

You can choose to give a legion of alts really good builds, or you can choose to give a handful of alts the most expensive builds available. Whatever you choose, what would be the fun if you had no further goals after you spend your current bankroll?

In short, you're very, very rich, but perhaps not the international mogul you might've imagined yourself to be years ago when you were sitting on 3 billion influence. You can take that as you will, but for the game as a whole, it's not necessarily a bad thing. Quite the opposite, in my opinion -- and I say that knowing that I probably only have about a quarter of your wealth.

Also, what Uber said.

Oh, and I like the edit note

That's a very good point. I've never thought of it that way. FWIW, I judge my own builds in large part with respect to how little they require me to care about how well my team plays.

On three and two-minute timers, respectively.

Midnight Grasp is a single-target attack.

Beyond the two points above, you're over-emphasizing on-paper damage figures at the expense of practical considerations. Shadow Maul is an excellent power, but it's about ten times harder to leverage to its fullest than Footstomp is.

Likewise, having played a Fire/Mental Blaster exhaustively, I can tell you that scatter is absolutely key in any discussion about Blasters' theoretical farming ability. Even if you take the Mace Mastery AoE immobilize (the best one available, basically), you're gonna get annoyed with the huge activation time during which you're not doing damage.

And all of that ignores that Blaster builds will have a comparatively hard time surviving in an ambush-farm environment.

These unquantifiable things matter. In some cases, they matter much more than anything you can draw up on paper. Doesn't mean that Blasters or DM Scrappers can't farm at all, but they're not traditional choices for a reason.

I never did that and you know it.

Well let's see. We have (at least) two quantitative definitions:

• Yours says that hyperinflation is defined by a 100% cumulative inflation rate over three years.
• Then there's Philip Cagan's definition, which states that hyperinflation is 50% inflation per month.

We almost certainly have enough inflation to qualify for the first standard. We have nowhere near enough to qualify for the second. So what we're left with is a discussion of how apt the term is in the context of the game's economy -- a game economy wherein the traditionally dire term is nearly toothless.

You're being deliberately obtuse. I can't come to any other conclusion based on the posts of yours I've seen on the Blaster forum. Still, for the sake of any interested reader with the superhuman patience to have read this trainwreck of a thread all the way through:

Recharge tends to give you diminished practical benefit as you add more and more of it, and the cap for recharge is basically unachievable for any build by itself. By contrast, each subsequent point of DEF up to the soft cap is more valuable than the last -- and even after you have capped to one type/position of DEF, most builds would benefit from raising DEF in another area. No one can soft-cap to all positions or types on IOs and pools alone.

Global recharge is usually a matter of achieving a given attack chain. Sometimes you can push yourself to a better tier of attack chain. Sometimes you can't. Shaving an extra half a second off of Build Up isn't a big deal though. Even when you can afford them easily, purples aren't always the best choice.

Lower value compared to what they were before, like I said. I don't have a perfect recollection of what the market looked like three years ago, but I believe LoTGs were going for 70 or so million back then. Now they're ~200 million.

Compared to the rise in earning power, and compared to the inflation in purple prices, that's not such a large increase. If nothing else, Alignment Merits make formerly high-luxury items like LoTG procs far more freely available to everyone. We've been through this. Endlessly.

A high-end purple set (that's five pieces of an attack set) runs about two billion influence these days. That's a lot more than even five LoTGs will run you.

Most people I talk to in game consider my Dominator build spectacularly expensive. (Most people consider my Tanker with perma-Dull Pain and 45% S/L/N/E DEF pretty effective, too, and it has not a single purple.)

I am pretty darn rich, but nowhere near as rich as you are.

If you're going to draw equivalence between my mentioning your own self-admitted behavior with respect to in-game currency and others' talking about your mother, then that speaks for itself.

Your position boils down to repeating a numerical definition of hyperinflation as if it were iron-clad, and waving everything else away as irrelevant. The available evidence suggests not only that your definition of the term isn't iron-clad; it suggests that your definition is the narrowest possible.

With that in mind, your posturing is unwarranted at best, and unintentionally hilarious at worst. In order to trot out that cute raining schtick, you must take as given that there is rain, and you haven't established that except by the dubious definition above.

If I had any confidence that you were asking this question in good faith, I'd ask you to post a build so I could show you. But I don't have any such confidence, so suffice to say that heavy recharge beyond a certain point doesn't affect overall performance a whole heck of a lot for most builds. DEF bonuses will tend to have a far more dramatic practical effect on most builds, and those bonuses primarily reside in uncommon/rare IO sets. (Lucks of the Gambler are actually lower-value items now (comparatively) than they were before, so they really shouldn't be lumped in with purple sets for the purpose of this discussion.)

Dominators are arguably an exception. I myself have a Dominator build that has a current market value of probably 12+ billion -- but that's only because I wanted to have Domination overlap with a comfortable cushion and I wanted soft-capped ranged DEF. Not by any means a typical set of goals. Not even on the Dominator forum will you see too many people going with that approach.

Heh, I think he was joking.

And Joe Blanton's one heck of a number five starter, isn't he?

http://www.econlib.org/library/Enc/Hyperinflation.html

"Hyperinflation is very high inflation. Although the threshold is arbitrary, economists generally reserve the term “hyperinflation” to describe episodes when the monthly inflation rate is greater than 50 percent. At a monthly rate of 50 percent, an item that cost $1 on January 1 would cost $130 on January 1 of the following year."

http://www.investopedia.com/terms/h/hyperinflation.asp

"Extremely rapid or out of control inflation. There is no precise numerical definition to hyperinflation. Hyperinflation is a situation where the price increases are so out of control that the concept of inflation is meaningless."

http://faculty.lebow.drexel.edu/mcca...obs/infl7.html

"The term "hyperinflation" refers to a very rapid, very large increase in the price level. Measurement problems will be too minor to notice on this scale. There is no strict formal definition for the term, but cases of hyperinflation tend to be expressed in terms of multiples rather than percentages. 'For example, in Germany between January 1922 and November 1923 (less than two years!) the average price level increased by a factor of about 20 billion.' Some representative examples of hyperinflation include ... [various examples of terrible real-world economies]"

http://www.investorwords.com/2365/hyperinflation.html

"A period of rapid inflation that leaves a country's currency virtually worthless."

Ten minutes of searching yields a lot of different takes on the strict, numerical definition of hyperinflation that you've so piously presented here as though iron-clad. Almost every link I found, including the Wiki article you supplied, goes on at length to discuss the typical RL causes for, and the inevitably devasting consequences of, hyperinflation. Among the long list of results Google pulled up on hyperinflation, there were countless alarmist headlines.

Words have meaning. Hyperinflation is not just a cut-and-dried numerical formula. There's nothing about the term that's neutral or ambivalent: when you have hyperinflation, it's always a bad thing. In an environment that doesn't have (more importantly, cannot have) the terrible consequences traditionally associated with hyperinflation -- not even by analogy -- does the term even have meaning anymore? To go back to a previous analogy of yours, is evidence of rain, even very heavy rain, proof of a typhoon? Using the dictionary definition of genocide, I can make a pretty strong case that CoH Defeat Badges fit the term, but I wouldn't use it. Would you?

Regardless, even if we all accept that hyperinflation has technically occurred here -- then what? We wouldn't be allowed to discuss the appropriateness of the term? Are seriously pulling the forum police card?

Is this the part where I say that most people probably don't have and probably don't even care about bleeding-edge builds, and you say that I need exhaustive population statistics to prove it? Let me save you the effort: I can't prove it, but happily not all unprovable statements are unreasonable. We have dev commentary ("casually purpled warshade") and the obvious, comparative rarity of purples to suggest that purples are supposed to be very high-end items.

Is it appropriate for me to point out that you claimed to have 70 billion influence banked (hardly a sign that you're panicking about the value of the currency, btw), and that perhaps your perceptions are therefore skewed?

In any case, I don't need population statistics to show that a great build can be made without purples or PvPIOs. UberGuy's 80/20 philosophy is spot-on, as far as CoH builds go. If anything, 80% performance for such builds is generally an underestimate.

Yes, we get it, you're using a different definition of hyperinflation. You've spent several pages aggressively and obnoxiously arguing semantics. Congrats.

To take a page from your book, I'm sorry that you think the highest luxury items in the game are analogous to household appliances.

What I didn't miss was your insistent and obviously incorrect assertion that people were arguing that there isn't any inflation, even when the very words you quote say exactly the opposite.

Because the term hyperinflation has various and far-reaching RL implications, it is not factually incorrect to say both that we have inflation -- even extremely high inflation -- and that it isn't hyperinflation. You are free to disagree on that point, but your obsessively contrarian behavior in this thread on which you claim not even to have a strong viewpoint suggests to me that your purpose here isn't simply that you have a kind of detached, academician's preference for sound argumentation.

Quite the opposite, in fact. You dance back and forth, picking little nuggets of other posters' arguments (real or imagined), deflecting and distracting from even direct questions posed to you. And as above, when all else fails, insult people's intelligence.

A harder time. What kind of idiot would argue that it's impossible for you to have a perma-Hasten Brute? I don't want to be harsh here, but dude, seriously?

Meanwhile, if you build a melee character as you describe, then you've slotted four of the most expensive purple sets just to pull even, recharge-wise, with a Dominator/Controller who can slot several of the (comparatively) cheap ones. Why are the attack sets so much more expensive? Because they're useful to more or less every build.

And if you don't go with purples at all, what are you left with? Probably 15 or more powers that can only take 5% recharge bonuses (again, heal/RES/melee attacks only offer you one kind of bonus, before purples). If you're lucky, you'll get a lot of DEF powers into which to toss some LoTG procs, but even then you're not looking at much more than about 60% recharge until and unless you diversify your build (which often isn't even possible until the late game, and even then not by a whole heck of a lot). Whatever your views on the matter, it isn't exactly mainstream to spend 5 slots on multiple control sets on a melee character. Possible, yes. Usual, not really.

Exactly right. Meanwhile, I had a perma-Dom build at level 30.

You can argue that the disparity I've described isn't an intentional part of the design (though frankly you'd have no evidence besides wild speculation), but you can't very well argue that there is no disparity.

If you can point to a plausible RL example of hyperinflation wherein:

1. The general populace is responsible for printing all the new currency that's inflating the market;
   
2. Everyone in the general populace has equal capacity to produce any good any of any kind;
   
3. Everyone in the general populace has equal capacity to sell/trade those goods for the inflated rate;
   
4. And the everyday staples required for functional existence are both price-capped and in infinite supply,

Then we can discuss the appropriateness of the term hyperinflation, in-game, through the lens of RL. When you were just banging the numerical definition drum, you were on much firmer ground; many of us thought you were missing the point -- that the term has alarming RL connotations and that therefore it's inappropriate to use the term here -- but at least you had a superficially valid argument about hyperinflation in CoH.

The moment you introduce RL comparisons, though, you must acknowledge that COH's little closed market is fundamentally different -- largely immune to the worst problems traditionally associated with inflation.

For what it's worth, it seems to me that the devs intentionally gave us the present spread of IO bonuses. Melee builds generally have a harder time adding +recharge, for instance (because heal/def/res/melee attack sets all use the 5% recharge bonus, and because melee builds have less room for purples generally), and have a fairly easy time adding DEF. Ranged builds generally have access to a wider variety of sets and bonuses, but their access to DEF bonuses is limited the more ranged AoE powers they take (because Targeted AoE sets don't give any DEF). Fittingly enough, then, higher offense ranged builds have fewer options than lower offense ranged builds.

(As an aside, I think Confuse was given not just a purple set, but arguably the best purple set, for a reason. You are rewarded for heavily enhancing a rare and traditionally controversial control type that isn't usually featured among high-damage powersets. Control in general is seemingly given an emphasis, in fact, probably because -- as above -- the devs felt that utility builds should have more flexibility. The reason that buff/debuff IO sets aren't given the same treatment is probably a result of the devs' publicly proclaimed wariness of and/or regret about the potency of force-multiplying powers. Likewise, pet powers were given arguably the worst purple set, bonus-wise, because pets are a means of delivering damage on the very ATs that have access to the widest variety of purples.)

More purples may be added somewhere down the line, but I wouldn't hold my breath. We're already in the midst of an immense effort to offer level 50 characters an end-game path to power that has nothing to do with IOs. Seems vanishingly unlikely that the devs would choose this time to add more end-game enhancements.

It's been quite some time since new IO sets of any kind were added to the game. There's prolly a reason for that.

Off the top of my head, Heat Loss' debuff has a 30-second duration. The recovery buff has a 90-second duration. So you can make yourself and (some of) your team basically indifferent to endurance on a permanent basis, but it'll take +300% recharge. (Doable but not exactly easy, as you noted with Benumb.)

The debuff portion of the power isn't anywhere near perm-able, certainly, but then it's not like you need it with all the -damage, -res, -regen, -special, and +DEF you can throw around otherwise. Benumb is really the jewel of the set, debuff-wise.

Honestly, I'm not sure what Yomo was trying to say about Heat Loss, so if this clarification is unnecessary, then I apologize.

Sounds like a project!

In theory, it's not an unreasonable proposition. Put eight characters at or near the damage cap, floor the AV's regen, and stack -RES debuffs on it -- and even Brawl oughtta finish the job rather quickly.

I might have to respec my Controller into Assault and see if I can't put brawl-only AV team together.

For what it's worth, I judge versatility as a measure of black-and-white capability rather than as a measure of relative performance. In other words, how many broad categories of function do you bring to the table? Do you have a rez (any rez)? Do you have -regen debuffs? -RES? -DEF? -Damage? How about AoE control (including taunt effects)? Single-target control? Mez protection (either for yourself or others or both)? Healing?

Once you start getting into damage output, you're not really talking about versatility anymore, IMO, even though high damage output is obviously an asset. For good or ill, the team game here really doesn't place a very high premium on high, self-contained damage output. Mediocre damage can become high damage output once it's modified by buffs/debuffs and/or when multiplied by several team members.

Controllers may not be the most versatile AT even by my standard, but I'd say they're at worst tied for first place as a generic class. A particular build of another AT may be more generally capable or more (even much more) well-suited for a particular situation, but to me Controllers as an AT are the most swiss-army-knife-like, and that's precisely because they don't have powersets that are explicitly designed to deliver damage. Everyone can deliver damage. On my perhaps over-simplified black-and-white versatility checklist, damage is a given.

Almost by definition, my theory of versatility is primarily centered on end-game builds, because the lower levels generally require you to spend an inordinate amount of resources firming up your consistent performance rather than your situational capability. Here again the Controller wins, though, after a fashion, because Controllers' damage is folded into their control powers (and because the AT damage modifiers don't normalize until 20+, which means that Controllers at very low level ranges basically have double-Blaster-damage-scale attacks), allowing them to spend more resources diversifying their capabilities.

My theory of versatility also tends to focus perhaps inordinately on AV fights, because my premise almost requires that normal fights aren't terribly difficult (don't generally present teams with unusual or quirky situations), and especially not for high-level teams. This is where Cold Domination shines most; of all the debuff sets in the game, it has the most comprehensive anti-AV toolset -- stacking -RES, sizable -Regen, a nasty buff/debuff/control-effect debuff (this is key), and considerable defensive buffs for teammates to boot. Cold Dom isn't particularly good at dealing with large spawns of opponents, though, and so Controller Primary sets offer perhaps unusually high synergy with /Cold (or if you prefer, they cover Cold's arguable weak point better than most of the complementary sets available on the other relevant ATs).

There is, of course, another equally valid way of measuring versatility -- that is, breaking down the various playstyles by broad category and measuring relative performance in each. How well (quickly) can you solo? Hard targets? Large spawns? How well-suited are you to teaming (or if you prefer, how attractive do you think your build is to teams)?

By that measure, there are any number of builds that qualify as versatile, with the caveat that we're dealing with a (sometimes very heavy) dose of generalization. A build that normally cruises through solo missions at x8 will likely hit a wall at some point against a given NPC faction or target. A build that offers spectacular on-paper benefits to a team may well find that a given team doesn't need their specialty, whatever it may be (like, say, Force Fields, which is kinda a third wheel once the team has DEF covered).

I've very rarely seen any team turn away someone based on build, but it can be a little dull to feel like you're entirely superfluous, which is why I like the versatility-as-situational-capability standard better, flawed as it might be. The idea is always to have something (noticeably) significant to offer in as many situations as possible. The idea is to minimize the possibility of an insurmountable challenge, even if you can't complete that challenge as fast as another build can.

Sorry for rambling. Good topic.

The debt is irrelevant, I think, to most players. The purpose of a combat self rez is to give players a tactical leg up on someone else who might have to go to the hospital or wait for a rez from a teammate. For that matter, the purpose of a combat self rez is to relieve some of the pressure on a rez-capable teammate.

Dying immediately -- and thereby invoking the sizable cooldown timer on your rez -- defeats the entire purpose of the power.

Fair enough, but again, the difficulty level is irrelevant. A squishy with half health, no access to toggle defenses, and no ability to react dies very easily to even a small handful of foes that have the benefit of a computer's (instant) reaction time. In fairness, the bug (if we can call it that) doesn't rear its ugly head very often in my experience, in part because of RoTP's stun, in part because of teammate aggro management and/or support, and in part because frankly I don't die all that often soloing ( ). But it does happen, and it's annoying when it does.

You're welcome.

The purple patch affects ToHit, too. Your chance to hit a +4 mob is 39% versus the 75% chance you get against +0s.

My guess is that the stun is missing a larger portion of the spawn at that level. Or, the player in question is facing something that's unusually resilient to stun effects. Or, the player is getting pummeled by mobs that are just outside of the stun's area of effect. (I've seen that last scenario myself on my Blaster while fighting +0s, in fact.)

It doesn't take all that many opponents to kill a rezzing squishy.

Perhaps I misread your intent, then. You did say the following, though:

Those comments imply to me that you're hand-waving the issue. I suppose the delay on the squishy version of RoTP could be intentional, but there is no obvious rationale for that intention. If the idea is to make the power more risky for squishies to use, then that's fine (IMO stupid, but fine in principle), but why is the period of vulnerability before the player can react at all, in any way?

After all, isn't that period of helplessness the very reason that rez inspirations are generally ineffective in combat? Isn't that, in fact, the very reason to take a combat self-rez in the first place?

It's not a big deal in the grand scheme. It's just really annoying that even the freaking self rez on a squishy (which generally dies more often) is markedly less effective -- and in such a head-smacking, counter-intuitive way -- than the same power on a melee character.

Yeah, I figure Tough (and especially unslotted Tough) is basically a waste to run when you don't have an APP +RES toggle to stack with it. If you're in an extraordinarily tough situation (no pun intended), then Tough isn't a bad thing to have, but you can save the endurance most of the time.

Enzymes are maybe the best high-end trick for saving slots. Thank heaven for coding oversights, right? I guess the expense is disincentive enough for most people.

I can't look at your new build right now, but I'm sure it's great. Assault versus Tactics is really kind of a toss up. In theory, Assault adds more to a full team in most situations. Then again, in my experience, most large teams at the high end really don't need a whole lot of help killing normal stuff; they might have a hard time against the occasional high-DEF opponent, or the occasional blind effect, or the occasional ToHit debuff, or in the occasional situation where your Tank gets feared or whatever. So it sorta comes down to Assault, which is less useful much more often, versus Tactics, which is more useful much less often.

Your build is strong enough that that question is an afterthought. You can't go wrong.

I've seen the above mentioned twice now in this thread, and I have to wonder where the idea comes from. A quick perusal of City of Data reveals that Electric's first tier attacks do not deliver unusually high damage:
So out of ten Primary sets (including Electric Blast), six of first-tier pairs have Electric's damage output. The other four pairs feature significantly lower recharge timers to compensate for their lower per-hit damage. There is no obvious evidence that Electric Blast's two initial attacks are given a numerical advantage with respect to the standard attack damage/recharge formula.

I'm certainly no expert on Electric Blast, and so I'm more than happy to entertain anything I might've missed here, but my suspicion is that -- to the extent that the developers may have worried about compensating Elec for its lack of a tier three attack -- Voltaic Sentinel is meant to be the set's compensation.

Either that, or whoever originally designed the set (and whoever may have revisited it in the interim) placed a high premium on the set's theoretical end drain, which as we all know is very much an all-or-nothing proposition.

Roughly half as long as it would be against a +0.

As to your objections, they're irrelevant. A combat rez is a combat rez. RoTP is not working as explicitly described by the developers (at least in certain of its incarnations). Is it a big deal that a solo Blaster dies (again) against large spawns of higher level mobs? Not in principle. Is it a big deal if that death results from what appears to be a bug? Yeah.

Your views on difficulty level are for another thread.

Acrobatics protects you from mag 3 holds. Or rather, it protects you from one mag 3 hold at a time. Depending on your playstyle and your build, that can be a big help or not. On high DEF builds, I favor Acrobatics because it's an extra layer of protection behind your DEF -- an extra layer that also happens to preserve some not-insignificant amount of your DEF, too.

And particularly on a ranged build (which Bass' doesn't seem to be), holds are probably your area of greatest concern, vis-a-vis mez effects. They're more common at range than stuns are, and the only other toggle-suppressing mez effect (sleep) breaks when you're hit. Also, AFAIK there are no non-positional stuns in the game. There are two non-positional holds (Mind Control's Dominate and Illusion's Blind). There is also a very common-in-PvE non-positional sleep power (Mesmerize), but there's not much you can do about that. Fighting Rikti's gonna be a mez fest playing a Blaster. Them's just the breaks.

In any case, the build in question is covered against most stun effects (usually attached to grenades or various melee attacks) by soft-capped S/L/E DEF.

Acro's end cost is much lower than it (IIRC) used to be -- not at all outlandish or even unusual by today's standards (lower than Tough or Weave's, in fact), though certainly if your build has end problems you might want to skip Acro. It's certainly not a panacea. FWIW, though, my high-DEF Blaster notices a significant difference with and without Acro. As an added bonus, Acro gives you hefty KB protection, which can be helpful in slot-tight builds. At the very least, it can save you some influence.

As far as Accelerated Metabolism goes, the Controller version of the power gives 173% status resistance across the board. That's more than double the original bulid's best values, and nearly six times more than the amount of status protection that Bass was getting from IOs (as opposed to the bonuses he had anyway from Health/Acro/CJ). Stun was his worst value at ~32%. I'm sure there are situations in which cutting an opponent stun by 1/4 would be the difference between life and death, but I very much doubt they're anywhere close to common. Chances are, if you're stunned by Malta (and yeah, they do have obscenely long stuns) and don't have a Break Free handy, you're gonna die regardless.

Apologies for rambling.

Quoted for excellent clarity and succinctness.

Yeah, I believe that the scarcity of supply at the low-mid level range is a far more pressing problem from a design perspective than inflation. As a practical matter, it means that IO builds are basically reserved for 50ish characters, even when the players in question could theoretically afford those builds sooner.

The supply crunch in those level ranges isn't new, though. It's been with us basically from the beginning, and only correlates with inflation to the extent that the characters with the highest capacity to print new money are the same characters who only generate high-level recipes.

Unsurprisingly, more of the inflation has concentrated in low-supply areas, like the low-mid level range. Anyone can cherry-pick a listing that's blown up (and especially a crafted-IO listing): the question is at what price comparable enhancements are available, not what the worst possible price is.

I can't give definitive statistics to prove that the market's inflation has been rather kind to most desirable IOs, relative to the inflation in earning power. My evidence is anecdotal, but to my mind it's also self-evident. It doesn't take an exhaustive statistical analysis to realize that LoTGs (which used to be ~60-70 million and are now in the 150-200 million range) haven't inflated nearly as much as purples (which used to be ~40-50 million and are now in the 400-500+ range). Sets like Crushing Impact usually aren't even worth the time it takes for me to sell them, these days. Earning uniques like Numina and Miracle requires a mere ~2 hours of play time spread out over 4 days even for the most obstinate market hater. An 80/20 build with four or five LoTG procs that would have given most people pause is now achievable within a couple of weeks even if you have zero influence to start.

And even if you don't marketeer.

All of this talk about the numerical definitions of hyperinflation is at best irrelevant, and at worst wantonly contrarian. Hyperinflation is a loaded term that implies widespread economic sorrow, or at the very least a deep and urgent problem. Even leaving aside the obvious emotional pitfalls of comparing RL problems with video game problems, the analogy implicit in the use of the term doesn't hold up for a multitude of reasons. The game's economy is fundamentally different, and not just because pixellated super heroes can't starve.

Hey, different strokes. My builds place a premium on DEF and Recharge, so it's hard to justify a frankenslotted Drain Psyche, especially given that the base power gives me more than enough recovery in most situations.

If you're big into your nuke, then by all means. I don't see much other use for such a slotting scheme, though.

Acrobatics is also very nice when layered with high DEF. It's by no means comprehensive protection, but it does give you a mulligan against the occasional hold that gets through.