PleaseRecycle

Farming is but one of many ways to pay the bills, though that's an odd way to phrase it in the first place since last I checked, superheroes don't have bills. That is to say, there's nothing in the game that requires you to spend any amount of influence, much less the kind you earn from hours of brainless farming. If you're addicted to purpling out all of your characters and also hate waiting, farming is a decent way to go, but aren't you kind of missing the point of the game? You make so much money just playing the game normally and being somewhat shrewd with your marketing that anyone should already be able to afford purples now and then.

Any character that has at least two good aoe attacks can farm. Really, just one aoe would even be fine as long as it's good enough, such as spin or foot stomp. You can even farm on characters with no radial pbaoes at all, if their cone is good enough! One time I tried farming on a DM/SR, it was passable.

Melt armor is junk because at best you're hitting ten targets with about 10% -res. There's no guarantee that any of those ten targets will even be affected by your attacks within forty seconds unless you're doing an old school demon farm or something. Just hitting them with another aoe instead will have a more pronounced impact than the debuff possibly could unless you're farming +4 bosses only somehow, and for some reason.

As everyone else has either said or implied, you really don't need "a farmer." Just make a good character, perhaps a scrapper but basically anything other than an empathy defender could work almost as well, and if that rustic mood takes you, clear out your inspiration tray, fill it with reds and a few purples, and go nuts. Nothing could be easier.

I can't say which is better as a homage, but I have played both of these. DB/DA to 47 and MA/DA being my current lowbie. Based on nothing but funness, or funinity if you will, I highly recommend MA/DA over DB/DA. Surely a rational case can be made for either combination, but the spooky ghosty punchy kicky feels so much more satisfying. Dual blades, on the other hand, goes more naturally with a less visually intense set in my view.

The one mechanical issue I had with DB/DA was that it puts competing pressures on you to both maintain your combo and fire your heal as often as you need to. The animation of dark regen combined with the redraw of DB can be enough to interrupt a combo if your target isn't still immediately adjacent to you, thus alternatively vexing me and, rarely, getting me killed.

He most definitely means purple invention sets. Many of them have a fifth slot bonus of 10% recharge, the largest single recharge bonus you can get. Most of the purple sets that a MA/Regen could conceivably use also have the bonus of costing about two billion inf all told for five pieces if you shop carefully, hence some posters' reluctance to recommend decking your builds out with em.

One thing I don't think has been mentioned yet that you may not have noticed is that martial arts got a major revamp recently. It did several things, such as giving eagle's claw the ability to enhance the critical chance of an attack queued during its animation, but for my money the best change they made was turning cobra strike into a real attack, basically identical to crane kick. The only difference is that crane kick has a 60% chance to knock back, and cobra strike has a 75% chance for a mag three stun. Well, the animations are different too. Depending on whether you always loved sending nogoodniks flying with your furious feet or whether it always drove you crazy how erratic crane kick's kb was, you might consider swapping the two.

The best way to understand building a decent character in general, short of simply doing it yourself a bunch of times, would probably be to read through as many existing build discussions as you're interested in doing. There's no shortage of them!

As for your last question, the absolute easiest way to accumulate recipes and inf is to just run five tips a day for two days and then complete a morality mission. If you're in the process of turning villain and back, I believe you should get your first alignment merit when you reach villain itself. Before switching back, go to the Crucible in Cap au Diable and spend the villain merit on five random recipe rolls. I prefer the 30-34 level range, opinions vary.

In addition to running tips, do TFs. Build up a supply of reward merits and wait until you've settled into the alignment you want to stay in for a while, be it hero or villain. When you're comfortable that you won't be changing alignment any time soon, start using 50 reward merits to buy an alignment merit and then rolling recipes with it. If trusting the random number generator puts you off, you can always save up two alignment merits and spend them on a single valuable rare recipe of your choice. Miracle +recovery and Luck of the Gambler +recharge are perennial favorites.

Those two things should alleviate any fiscal issues you may have all by themselves. The only thing to remember is that changing away from hero or villain causes your hero or villain merits to evaporate. Sadness would ensue.

You know, the temptation to be snide is nearly overpowering but I think I can contain it long enough to impart and important message. If you loathe dual pistols with every fiber of your being, to the extent where you can't even conceal it, and in a thread asking for advice about dual pistols you have no choice but to not only post at all but to preface all of your statements with qualifiers about how horrible the set is, how bad a person anyone who uses it is, et cetera, you should perhaps rethink your priorities in general. It really doesn't matter why I or anyone else likes the set, what matters is that we do. Yes, you abhor it, you find it to be worse than Hitler. This has become abundantly clear. I'm sick of refuting your bizarre points so please consider simply keeping them to yourself.

I have an idea. You guys should try KM/FA. I hear it's a great combo that everyone likes if they're cool.

It's a little disingenuous to start off with "it sucks" before admitting in the same breath that it's actually pretty good in the circumstances in question. Also, power siphon is still buffing your damage during the ramp up and ramp down periods so I'd call it a thirtyish second buff for two seconds of animation. And corpse blasting? C'mon, nobody has forgotten that all you ever do is fight increasingly large piles of AVs at once.

The reason I enjoy KM as much as I do is that, like you said, it seems like it was specifically intended not to hinge on any particular gimmick. It has a number of strengths, therefore a number of possible secondary synergies. It seems particularly suited to the resist sets, as their damage auras love long-uptime buffs, this in turn supplements burst, and their heals are just the ticket for bolstering its somewhat incremental mitigation.

Really though, it was made for fire armor. AoE for days, or as much single target as you can handle, both on tap. Ideal for, well, that just about covers all of the content in the game, really. This combination's only drawback is that in a target rich coupon oriented reward collection facility, or similar such setting, power siphon is legitimately inferior to build up and collects dust with the rest of the single target part of the primary.

Swap Ammo: The Blaster's Guide

Thanks for your interest in Swap Ammo, the "Power of Champions!" Throughout the ages, its mysteries have proven to be as multifarious as its conundrums. "Why is it here?" "Where am I?" "Am I dead?"

To answer LIFO style, of course you're dead, you're a blaster. Fortunately, you're also here, in my Swap Ammo guide. The crux of the matter, however, is this final answer: Swap Ammo is here to ensure that your bullets are on fire. This will naturally raise in your gullet a feeling of malaise, to put it mildly.

"Why," you ask, "should my bullets be on fire?" To answer this question we must examine the laws of thermodynamics themselves, particularly the second and a half law: "That which be-eth on fire doth hurte more." If Stephen Hawking is in the audience, he may note that being really cold is technically the same as being really hot, therefore must not cryonic rounds be as damaging as inferno rounds? Nay, Stephen, they must not. They serve but to vex your foes afore their inev'table downfall, and thus are less productive toward your overall endeavor.

What of poison bullets, then? Well, basically, they're okay. You can use them if you want, I guess. They look cool. Iunnoh.

Bullets free of any enhancement are somewhat effective, yet they are scarcely visible, and they virtually never set anything on fire. Tell me, would you trade a single unslottable power for the constant ability to set people on fire with any other power set in the game? This would be akin to taking fire armor on a brute and then skipping all the powers that caused things to be on fire. Don't think about it too hard, you may perish of fright.

I hope this guide answered your questions, see you in the game!

If I had to pick my favorite way in which that build is bad, well, I like how you took the sixth slot out of the oblits in hail, losing that s/l defense, in order to put a performance shifter proc into stamina. Meanwhile you failed to take conserve power at all, one of the highlights of energy manipulation. You also have eleven slotted attacks. Argh, I promised myself I'd just pick one!

Wait I have another one, Jophiel didn't want a premade build to begin with. Gosh this is so hard, I'd better quit before I embarrass myself.

Ninja run suppresses entirely as a travel power would, but all you need to do is place a cj/nr switching bind close at hand and that is hardly an impediment from ninjaing about in combat.

Before ninja run came out I had already begun a policy of, on a respec, stripping travel powers out of my builds in favor of using cj + hurdle out of combat as well as in it, so the martial arts booster was really more of an admission by the devs that yes, that is how they feel the game should be played.

The only way the combination could be nicer would be if you got a merit bonus for the franticity of your fighting style.

For my own dp/em blaster, it became clear to me that the options were frozen armor (or scorpion shield I think?) and s/l defense, or no APP restriction and ranged defense. Advantages of the s/l route are that if you plan to blap kinetic combats are a natural fit, and it is much easier to softcap s/l when you start out with such a huge pile of it from the shield. Disadvantages are that the shield is appallingly ugly, but more important is that most mezzes are ranged and not s/l. I tend to feel that combat mobility can keep the big melee hits away from you in the first place and that's where s/l shines. Meanwhile, hopping about does little to protect you from ranged attacks in most circumstances. Even jumping into a spawn to hail of bullets will result in a 90% ranged alpha against you, and by the time they're gearing up to switch to melee, you're out of melee range and they're dead.

Of course, for me, "no APP restriction" means "definitely fire mastery" because char, bonfire and rise of the phoenix are all stellar blaster powers, while fire shield is a good steadfast res/def mule. Char is good for ranged defense and the rest are one slot wonders, which brings me to another advantage of ranged defense - it results in a much more open, affordable build. You don't need any melee at all except power thrust, which goes pretty well with DP's style. The only DP power that requires you to get close is hail and it pretty much speaks for itself. I can't imagine hailing a spawn and then wanting to transition into melee - better to follow up with a bullet rain, or a piercing rounds on a boss if that's all that's left standing.

This is of course one of many ways to do it. Softcapping anything is going to go a long way. Ranged simply seems like the best fit for blasters in general but particularly for this combo.

You are legally obligated to take hail of bullets and bullet rain. Piercing rounds is also very good and very fun but if for some reason you hated having to line it up, it would be slightly skippable. Empty clips is about as good as psychic scream, the main difference being that one causes redraw and one does not. I wouldn't take both of them, let's put it that way. Psychic shockwave is numerically good but I just don't like it for some reason. It's a substantially larger radius than fire sword circle, really the only comparable power in a blaster secondary, so it has that going for it.

Really just take as much aoe as you need to supplement hail and rain, which are both excellent. For me that meant taking piercing rounds and empty clips, i.e. all the aoes from DP itself and nothing else, but dropping empty clips for scream or psw, or even both, would be quite workable.

Thanks for the input, I must admit I was leaning in that direction already. I sort of agree with more aoe for MA, but I have the sneaking suspicion it would come with a nerf to storm kick. Cone crane kick is the best idea I've heard though, now that would be amusing.

On a different but related topic, I'm trying to decide whether it would be a good idea to pick up eagle's claw for the purpose of using it before dragon's tail when possible. That is a big damage boost and they're on similar timers, but when other than farming are you going to have complete confidence in your ability to fart around for 2.7ish extra seconds with a melee aoe? Would being able to more accurately position dragon's tail not make up for a significant yet stationary damage boost?

Any martial artists use eagle's claw in that way?

I suspect the effect at work here is that when the server is lagging heavily, your power icons will claim the power has recharged long before it actually has, if the lag is severe enough. Cutscenes also have this same effect - power recharge is halted for their duration, but the icons keep on truckin'. Obnoxious? Yes.

Okay, right off the bat I'd remove two slots from concentration and slot it with two rectified reticles and a common recharge. I'd drop flash freeze and replace it with snowstorm, slotting that with curtail speed or impeded swiftness, depending on your available slots. I'd try to ED cap weave, which is worth approximately one more moderate s/l bonus. I'd save a slot in mind probe and use kinetic combats there rather than hecatombs. You can see where I'm going with this - less purples, more defense. This in turn would let you make changes in other areas - swap out kick or boxing for tough and slot that with reactive armors, for instance. Less s/l defense in exchange for a very decent amount of resistance.

An additional slot in stamina for two level 50 generic endmods and one or two slots in health for a numi global, a miracle global, and a numi heal would also have a major impact on both endurance sustainability and survival, or at least how often you need to use greens. I also see you haven't listed a destiny yet. If you go barrier, at tier four that's five percent s/l defense that you simply no longer have to worry about for normal content, and the spike at the start has you covered a quarter of the time even in trials. Alternately, and this is what I chose on my pistol blaster, rebirth is better than you might think on a so-called squishy. I actually settled for ~37% ranged defense, if I recall correctly, and it just isn't an issue most of the time. Any size luck means softcap and as you well know, inspirations drop at an alarming rate when you're burning down spawns. Rebirth simply takes it even further, letting you bounce back from imminent doom (if your timing is good) and continue to ignore bosses for the next thirty seconds, while sitting at one or two drain psyche targets worth of regen for the entire duration.

You may note I proposed a lot of additional slotting without committing to equal slotting cuts. That's right, I'm a US senator. Seriously though, I think just dropping a couple of your least favorite attacks will easily recoup plenty of slots and you won't miss em in the end.

It's not immediately obvious but respecs are surprisingly easy to obtain. For example, this week's weekly strike target (more comically, weekly task force) is the level 34-43 respec trial for both heroes and villains. You can run these trials as much as you want, but you can claim up to three respecs while doing so. With new issues, a freespec is also virtually always granted to all characters that don't already have one. In other words, don't be shy about trying different things.

My general new blaster advice would be, and apologies if this is old news to you, to simply make sure you keep your favorite basic attacks well slotted with SOs. Don't go too crazy picking up every available attack to the extent that either you can't properly slot any one of them or you don't have the power picks to do other things. By that I mean heal yourself with aid self, accumulate personal defenses from pool powers like tough, weave or hover, et cetera. By "attacks well slotted with SOs" I mean that any attack you use often should have at least one accuracy and three damage SOs*, and you should try to keep them green or white, i.e. your own level or higher.

Inventions are a staggering boon to performance but going from the weird slotting you sometimes see new players come up with to just a solid SO build is an even bigger leap. If you want to get right into inventing and marketing more power to you, literally, but be aware that for approximately half of the game's life inventions didn't even exist, and most of the content in no way requires their use.

*Corollary: You also don't want to slot more than three of any given type of SO. For example, three damage SOs will give you something like 94% damage enhancement. A fourth damage SO will increase that to around 99%. This is due to "enhancement diversification," or ED, heh, but it can be summed up in the handy mnemonic "More than three? Not for me!"

The sole reason to take executioner's shot over pistols is that you think the animation is cooler. It is inferior in every other respect. Halved range, tendency to overkill where pistols will not, cannot be used while mezzed, and its DPA is actually worse than pistols' using anything but inferno rounds, where it breaks even. The range issue is especially egregious since, as ball says, piercing rounds is an excellent part of your single target chain and when used at long range it can easily hit three targets often and two targets almost always.

ball, among other issues, your aoe chain, if you can call it that, takes over twelve seconds, not including hail of bullets. This raises the question, "why do you need permahasten in the first place?" You could entirely forgo hasten and global recharge and be able to chain all of those aoes together under any but the most severe recharge debuffing.

The other primary problem I see is that you don't ever actually have to worry about recharge debuffing, or indeed single target attacks, as that build appears to be geared toward farming and farming alone. No utility powers apart from maneuvers, and thirteen slotted attacks. That's a tray and a half of attacks. You obviously won't actually be able to use all of these attacks so at least half of them are essentially set mules. Could this character farm? Absolutely, but only in that any aoe heavy blaster can easily farm and this build is nothing if not that!

In immediate retrospect, this post sounds kind of harsh. I'm not trying to personally attack you, ball, I just think that going this gung-ho for attacks is missing a lot of the subtlety available to blasters.

If they don't give scrappers ice armor and melee, they'll have to give them SS or SM and stone armor!

Or EM and energy aura...

Come on, ice armor!

Right off the bat, drop executioner's shot and take pistols instead. Same DPA, pistols can be used while mezzed (not relevant in farming but often relevant elsewhere), pistols fits easily into any chain.

If you can't devote slots to it, don't even bother taking empty clips. The only way to make it worth its cast time is to get it to the ED cap on damage and ideally have a posi's proc in there as well.

Opinion may vary wildly on this but I think drain psyche can be considered good to go at three or four slots. Just a few pieces of one of the accurate healing sets will give it great enhancement values and some all right bonuses.

If you take World of Confusion, six slot that sucker. The only reason to take it is to put a full set of coercive persuasion into it. This confers a five percent ranged defense bonus and sets you down the path toward the range softcap, my favorite direction to take blasters. Again, this doesn't matter for farming but if you ever want to use the character for TFs and stuff you're going to like having high ranged def.

Not sure why you need four slots in CJ? Karma, kismet, lotg global, and a lotg defense? That isn't bad by any means but the last slot is something I'd only go for if I were pretty sure I had slots left over.

I would skip psy scream, psy shockwave, and static discharge. Each of them is a good attack in its own right but the principal selling point of DP is that it has a ton of aoe. You don't need to add any more, especially ones that will cause constant, nagging redraw. Now that I've said this, I'd also recommend taking empty clips and giving it at least five slots. With those slots it is a fine, boilerplate aoe. No redraw, short recharge, kills things.

The hold in the electric APP is the better bet than static discharge I think. You can put lockdowns or basilisks into it, for starters. Lockdown is a great set for ranged defense, and can also be slotted in suppressive fire, which you should take. I'd then put only the steadfast res/def into charged armor and take it off my tray (unless you want it for the looks). Finally, the force of nature clone would probably be more useful than EMP, as good as EMP is.

That's my story and I'm sticking to it. Or editing it.

If you had to choose between weave and maneuvers, weave easily wins as it is nearly twice as powerful (though does not help your team as such) and it also entails taking tough which is also great for FA. My KM/FA is softcapped to s/l, with little focus on other types, and runs tough, weave and maneuvers at all times. In addition to five sets of KC and three sets of reactive armor, I made up the rest of the softcap with rectified reticles and obliterations. Is there any way you could take both?

One might also argue that if you were willing to settle for less defense anyway, maneuvers would be the better pick as it does help your team out which is quite relevant on trials. Then again, with the buff changes coming up, we may all be sitting at the hard cap on trials anyway.

I only mention venge and resuscitate because they're fantastic utility powers to have on pug teams. I guess it would also have been worth mentioning that I keep a tray full of phenomenal lucks and whatever big oranges are called on all my 50s. This does not strike me as cheating as any character can easily do this without ever having to buy them on the market. So yeah, are the riders hard? Sure, until you use a couple of the many aces up your sleeve. Blasters also have enough hit points that rebirth is crazy effective on 'em.

You can say that scrappers can also leverage inspirations and incarnate powers, and you would obviously be completely correct. While these things can make anyone unkillable, though, they can't add the same amount of damage to anyone, in my opinion. Sure judgement is amazing for a scrapper but that's once every 90 seconds. Blasters get judgement too, and they should have no qualms dropping it and everything else they've got on anyone who looks at em funny with all the defensive perks they have always had access to, and newly have access to.