Sardan

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I have noticed my imps arent the killing machines they used to be.

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As a fire controller you should know that controllers now benefit from something called "containment." When anything is held or immobilized, you get double damage. So if you do Flashfire (your stun), then Fire Cages (to keep the wandering mobs from wandering off and set up containment), then stand in there with Hot Feet running, you'll do big damage.

Gratz!

And those are some amazing Photoshop skills. I didn't even realize the image had been altered until I looked very closely.

Lots of good advice in this thread. One thing that wasn't mentioned is that it can be very difficult to juggle the various percentage enhancements in your head, especially when it comes to set bonuses. I strongly recommend you get a program called Mids Hero Designer. It's invaluable. There's a little learning curve, but it makes it dead easy to do things like compare different ways of slotting. It even does things like total up your set bonuses for you.

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At 50, there's still many things you can do:
- Collect badges
- Write/Play Architect missions (with i15, we'll be able to buy up to 5 extra story slots, too)
- Hamidon Raid
- Rikti Mothership Raid
- Many high level Task Forces
- Explore the Shadow Shard
- PvP

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I'd add "going nuts on enhancements" to that list.

One thing I used to do was immediately stop playing a character that hit 50. Since there were no new powers or slots to look forward to, it just felt pointless. And it wasn't hard to get enough dough to fund enhancing a new character.

Now with inventions, you can build characters that are just amazingly powerful through something called "set bonuses". But the best set bonuses come from recipes that cost a bunch on the market--the high cost is directly due to how great they are. Purple enhancements are ultra-rare, have the best bonuses, and are ultra pricey.

What I've found is that this makes it fun to continue to play my 50s. They can either be working towards kitting themselves out with pricey IOs, or building up funds for my next character. This also indirectly opened up another fun venue: the market. I dabble in the market as a way to build my wealth, and it's not hard yet quite satisfying.

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As for the markets, that seems very hard to tell. I think the options are merging them (I'm not really for it, but that's greed speaking), leaving them as is (makes no sense) or allowing trades and transport to each side (similar to the base "hax" in the golden days).

The third option may be the initial route, with it going into the merger sometime thereafter. Leaving it as is would make it pointless for the ebil marketeer to 'port over.

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While I really want to see a single market and one currency (that'd enable things like trades between heroes and villains in co-op missions and in co-op zones), due to some of Posi's comments I believe we'll see no merger. I sincerely hope I'm wrong.

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then, when you achieve 5 lines of purps on 12 toons.
That is where i am now.

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/e boggle

I have one character reasonably purpled out: 4 sets of purps. I consider that character's slotting perfect for my needs, and getting a 5th set would actually hurt some stats I care about. I have a second character with multiple sets who I built using a template created by the evil genius TopDoc. He's a Posi TF specialist and I wanted him to have tons of bonuses when exempted.

But overall I just don't crave purples for most of my characters, and don't miss 'em.

If email was able to be turned off, wouldn't spammers simply switch to sending offline tells? It's easy enough to find out a person's global handle.

Mercy is so full of junk it already feels semi-destroyed. And as a player who mostly uses Super Speed, I hate it. I love many of the villain ATs, but the chock full-o-junk aspect of a destroyed zone is a turn off for me.

I'm all for more events, but not zone destruction. Bleah.

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I keep looking in the cowfields for horses. No matter how many times I look all I ever find are cows. Cows are worth half the value of a horse. HOW CAN I POSSIBLY GET A HORSE?

My friend Bob helps me search the cow fields sometimes. He once bought two cows and sold them. With the money he made he bought a horse.

I think Bob is an evil market manipulator. I am going to continue searching the cow fields for a horse. Bob has lots of horses now.

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Wow! The entire market summed up in a very clever way! (as well as a lot of people's perception of the market)

Well done Xanatos

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Agreed. Nicely done.

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Yeah, DC Universe Online.... Didn´t want to say names cause tought would be against the rules.
But speaking of things in the horizon, there is not any planned date for Going Rogue yet either, right? All we know is that it will be SOON™...

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Speculation based on an email some got, says issue 16. I for one DO NOT believe it's issue 16. I think there will be another smaller issue called 16 before we see 17/the Expansion before the end of the year.

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Castle made a comment on the Dom buffs that made me a firm believer that it'll be i16. He said word from on high was that he either had to get the Dom buffs in with i15 or wait till i17.

EDIT: and of course today Posi said "I am here to set the record straight. Issue 16 is NOT Going Rogue."

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Well, when you break the system from sheer win and become The One, let me know. I would love to subscribe to City of Smurph.

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It's already City of Smurph. Notice how you never see Smurph and Nemesis at the same parties? Ever wonder why?

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I'd rather play CoH, kill mobs get drops, etc. WW is too much of a hassle for me.

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There are plenty of players who mostly ignore the market and just use SOs or generic IOs. I was just chatting with a friend of mine last night. He was playing on Freedom, not his normal home server. So I asked him if he wanted some Inf, and he replied "nah, I'm doing great--I've got over a million inf." He pretty much only buys SOs until he hits 32, then puts in low bids for generic recipes. After he gets his level 35 generic IOs he never swaps them out, unless he gets a lucky drop. That's not my cup of tea but he loves playing and couldn't care less about set bonuses. It works for him and he's happy.

You, on the other hand, seem determined to outfit your character with sets. You mentioned just this week alone you've spent over 30 hours farming. Presumably you're not doing that for generic IOs.

Let me suggest an alternative that involves the bare minimum of using the market: assuming you have at least one high level character, do one ITF run a day. The ITF is a fun task force that takes an average team 60-90 minutes (yes, I know about 30 minute speed runs). At the end of that time, you'll have several million inf just from kills, at least a chance of getting some purples, salvage that will be worth a few mil more, and most importantly enough merits to go for a rare drop (suggestion: go for a lvl 30-34 recipe). Yes, you'll have to use the market to list your items, but you can just list them low and cash out immediately. That's painless even for someone who doesn't care for the market.

After 2-4 weeks of this you're going to be sitting on an embarrassingly large pile of inf. So then you hold your nose to cope with the distaste of using the market, pick one of the rare/pricey recipes you really want and buy it.

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I think they could fix the problem by making purples available for buying with architect tickets.. that would probably vastly increase the supply and lower the price.. then again they would probably have to increase the ticket cap too. I don't even know why they made it so low. Probably technical reasons.

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It's been stated a few times in this thread that the devs don't consider teh scarcity of purples to be a problem in the first place. It's WAI.

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Exactly. When the merit system was released, the devs explicitly mentioned the absence of purples was intentional. Players need to come to terms with the fact that the devs simply don't share a vision that every player is entitled to purples.

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Anyway you slice it, marketeers cannot force players to pay higher prices.

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I think this single statement is the most disbelieved by anti-market types. They think that somehow there is a natural price of items that would be low and affordable, but the darn evil marketeers drive the price up and force the po' folks to pay through the nose.

Anyway, Smurph, I appreciate your 500th attempt to explain supply and demand curves. I hope this time it sinks in, although honestly I wonder at Eryq2's power of abstract reasoning. He is apparently impervious to logic.

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This gives a cross-faction market, keeps the RPers happy, and provides an extra Inf-sink, and one that people will FLOCK to. It's win-win-win!

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Other than competition being spread out over 3 markets instead of 2 and everyone under level 35 being blocked out you are right.

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There's a totally simple fix to that. Once DJ Zero in Pocket D sees how well the guy in Cimerora is doing, he sets up his own 4th market, not linked to any of the other 3. He also only pays in his own new currency, ZeroClix.

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you can't come to the market forums and say "cheaper". too many greedy people here for that and you'll just get flamed. trust me. (i agree wityh you though) everything is too high. i'll never spend those prices.

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Don't confuse markets with stores. Players set prices for everything in the markets. No one forces anyone else to buy anything. If you think an item is overly rare, the solution is for the devs to up the drop rate. The thing is, Posi has already stated he wants purples to remain ultra-rare. He doesn't see it as a natural right of every level 50 character to eventually purple-out their character. If your vision is different, take it up with him. Don't blame it on the market.

I'm all for an email system that allows us to send inf and items, but I remain in favor of a straightforward market merger. Just get it done and over with. Yes, there will be some shock and outrage redside as people have to relist items at lower price points. But that'll be drowned out by the cheering hordes.

Gratz!

I strongly recommend getting Mids' Hero Designer. It's a terrific program that will let you plan out your build. More importantly, it will make it trivially easy to play around with different slotting options.

There's a diminishing return in slotting due to something called Enhancement Diversification. Mids' takes that into account automatically for you. You'll sometimes hear people refer to the "rule of 3" for slotting, meaning it's next to worthless to slot more than 3 of any single enhancement type in a power due to the severe kick-in of the ED diminishing returns. But with triple- or quadruple-aspect IOs, it's more difficult to keep track of when you're bumping into the ED wall. Better to use Mids.

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Last time I did it over the course of a month shooting for 45 minutes a day 5 days a week. (I was bored) I ended up with I think 33 stashed and 5 used by the time I was done.

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Wait, what? You put in roughly 20 days' work times 45 minutes = 15 hours of play time. In 15 hours you got 38 purples? That's a purple every 24 minutes.

If Paragonwiki is right and the chance for a purple drop is roughly 1 in 5000, and your drop rate was roughly that average that'd mean you were killing over 200 mobs a minute on average, nonstop. Every minute you spent resting, looking around, taking a drink, traveling, would mean that in the remaining minutes you had to make up for lost time.

Either the Paragonwiki-sourced drop rate is off, or you're dramatically misremembering the amount of time you put in, or the number of purples you got, or the random number generator freakin' LOVES you. Probably the latter, you lucky [censored]. [EDIT: of course, a possibility I left off originally is that the guy may just be an absolute buzzsaw killing machine.]

For the average player working the market in addition to playing/farming is a far quicker way to get those purples than just farming alone.

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I actually cried out "Nooooooooo" while I was depressing the key.

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I got a Mind/Fire created just for I15. Played it on test and loved the combo.

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I also love playing blasters. Especially on a good team they're extremely satisfying to play and have some great-looking powers. However, if you like to solo, a scrapper hass a much easier time of it.

Villain-side, Corruptors are pretty awesome. They have blaster primaries and defender secondaries. So for example, a Fire/Dark corruptor does great damage and has a pretty amazing bag of tricks for either soloing or being on a team. If i15 (the next game update) releases soon, you might also try a Dominator. They have a cool mix of control and damage.

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I was refering to real world economics, and not game economics.

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I was too. Game theory in economics has to do with the study of dealing with imperfect or incomplete information. It's useful in a wide variety of real life scenarios, not just literal games.

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I will look at my resists when I get home. I actually was trying to max my defenses ( I had a lv 46 broadsword/super reflexes first, so I tend to value defense ).

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If you can, pick up a Steadfast Protection +3% Defense IO. For comparison, if you have Maneuvers triple slotted for defense that yields about 3.6% defense. So that single IO is almost as good as Maneuvers!

Regarding your Tough/Weave question, they'll help noticeably. And Weave will give nearly 6% def when slotted.