UberGuy

Here's a wake up call for folks like you who can only equate big numbers with "gold farmer".

I have never, ever bought anything from a RMT service. I hate them. I hate the email they send me.

I do not use the market itself as a primary means of earning in-game cash. By this I mean that I almost never "flip" items on the market, or do any of the other things that "evil marketeers" are usually associated with. Instead I get my goods playing the game and then sell them on the market. Fighting foes is my primary means of earning goods, which I sell for in-game currency.

I have 5 level 50 villains, who collectively have 8 billion inf in liquid funds, and are heavily IOd (3 outfitted in purples). I have 4 level 50 heroes, who collectively have 3 billion inf in liquid funds, and are heavily IOd (2 outfitted in purples). I play my villains more than my heroes.

How is this possible? For one thing, I play the game at level 50 frequently. For another, I sell lots of things on the market. All my level 50s have at least the badge 3000 market sales, most have the 4000 item badge, and one is closing in on 7000 items. Remember, I do not flip stuff, so all of that is stuff I got as drops. Certainly it's vastly dominated by salvage, but I sell lots and lots of recipes and crafted IOs too, and that's where I make my money.

Claiming that the market is broken on the basis of high prices shows ignorance of how to use it in some of the most basic, fundamental ways possible. Those of us who know better are pretty tired of it, because it seems to be akin to sweeping at the ocean. No matter how many people we either educate or convince to leave, the tide keeps rolling in.

He wants to make mad profits on the actual Black Market that springs up.

You seem to be having a problem separating the concept of PLing from the concept of farming.

All farming is not PLing. PLing is something one can achieve highly effectively by farming with an optimal level mentor and SK on the team.

This change makes PLing less optimal. The difficulty setting changes makes farming easier to achieve without asking for padders/fillers. The two changes are not directly related. However, making PLing less effective doubtless made it easier for the devs to decide that such open-ended difficulty settings were a viable idea.

Truth. After ignoring the crafting badges for a long, long time, I got off my virtual duff and am going for Field Crafter on my hero badger. I had a nice stockpile of mid-level common salvage saved up, and used it to get going. Of course, I eventually ran out and had to start getting more. I chose the market as my source.

In general, I have been buying salvage anywhere from 50% to 10% of its peak price. I have seen things going for 100k apiece and gotten a stack of 10 of them for 10k apiece. I've been buying recipes for somthing like 10% to 50% of their purchase price at a crafting table.

On the flip side, I have been selling my crafted IOs for 200% to 300% of the non-outlier minimum prices I've seen. I just leave them up for a few hours or overnight and they all sell.

So here I am doing this thing that, once upon a time, made my teeth itch just looking at the raw crafting costs, and I'm making money off of doing it.

It does help to keep an eye on both sides, though. For whatever reason, sometimes you can get the crafted item for the same or less than the recipe.

Right before DXP weekend I got a crafted purple off the Black Market for the same low-ball price I had out for the recipe. That was about 65M less than the historic high price of the crafted item for the time I was bidding on it. Needless to say, I was pleased.

"The same level of synergy" isn't a sufficiently meaningful description. Synergy at what is important.

Brutes, Scrappers and even Tankers need their powers to do two things solo, and (sometimes) three on a team. Those two things they need solo are survive and deal damage. The third thing, primarily useful on teams, is aggro control/management. Sometimes, the third thing is achieved in ways that overlap with the first two. For example, if you have AoE mezzes or knockdown, this serve to both manage aggro on a team and provide mitigation for you (whether teamed or solo).

When you mix powersets, you get various levels of all three of these functions, depending on what powers you choose and how you slot them. It's important to consider that you can take powersets with high performance and build them below their peak potential, and that you can take powersets with low performance and shore them up with your other powerset and pool powers. This capability is a source of endless disagreement on the forums about how well certain powesets perform, because they are impossible to experience in a vacuum without deliberate testing which is unavoidably an unrealistic play scenario. People perceive the performance of their whole character, and then use that to defend (or harp on) a powerset's capabilities when considered on its own.

No mater how you get there, there's a performance level that's good enough to play the game. I think it's arguable that Electric Armor has always been at or above that level. However, I think it also currently lags its peer powersets, primarily because they have either have more tools at their disposal, sometimes simply better ones, and sometimes both.

So the complaint against the set's performance is one of relative performance. People don't campaign for improvements to Electric Armor because they can't make an Electric Armor character that's viable. It's that you can make a more survivable character with nearly any other secondary even when building something with relatively poor synergies.There are absolutely times where Electric Armor as it stands today can fare better than its peers. Exposure to largely energy-typed damage comes to mind. However, playing ElA through the game's standard content (something I am wont to do with every character I level up), I perceive that other powesets end up with better performance across all foes and situations, across a wide variety of build options. I find it compelling when that lines up with "paper" analysis.

I have made a point of playing to Electric Armor's focus of end drain as active mitigation, and have always found it wanting compared to other means of mitigation found in other sets, direct or indirect. I also have experienced the relative performance of the set through playing alongside other players using it. I don't often play on random pugs, but rather with a consistent core of very veteran, usually very savvy players, who understand the game's powers, how to leverage foe AI, positioning for optimal power effects, and so forth. To my knowledge, they have never considered the set a reasonable FotM except briefly in PvP when Energy Melee/Manipulation had high positions on the food chain.

The lack of a self heal, +HP, or +regen has been singled out in the past as one of the prime reasons for ElA to lag other sets, and a standout difference between ElA and other sets. (It was also identified as one of the problems for EA as well, but EA also had some other issues.) I think it's telling that the devs have offered it something along these lines as a benefit. This is beta and nothing is firm; things aren't firm even after they go live. That said, I think this set of changes looks very good, and by no means out of line with other powersets.

Yep. I understand that you're wrong.

It's important to note that the yellow text is extremely important. If you do not choose a complimentary primary the weaknesses of ElA become extremely visible. It also becomes visible in comparison, taking primaries with strong mitigation (Stone or Dark Melee, for example) on ElA and then a better-performing set, such as WP.

The differences are marked.

You act as if there aren't builds that can't do this sort of thing already. You act as if there's some problem if ElA is added to their ranks.

ELA was only considered a FoTM when it was shiny and new, and people were taking it because of that and playing it on teams, where various healing buffs and other mitigation benefits covered its significant performance holes. It's the SR of Resist sets, with none of the perks of a high-defense set. Specifically it can't reach the 90% Brute DR cap on its own outside of Power Surge, while SR can with a few pool powers and/or IOs. Like SR Scrappers, most successful soloers using ElA did so with the help of Aid Self, but unlike the SR users, ElA lacks the +Def to help activate AS uninterrupted under heavy fire.

This change looks very welcome and not at all overpowered in the presence of things like WP, SR and even Invuln.

No, it's really not.

That amount of regen is not that significant on its own. It's not going to save you in a tough fight. And if a 50% heal on a 30-35s timer is broken, why doesn't it make Fire Armor broken to have one on a 20s or less timer with far, far less recharge than Permahasten?

Sorry, not nearly as awesome as you guys are painting it. Especially on a Resistance-only build (no +Defense) since every effect and its brother gets through, meaning you eat all the -Def and -Res that come your way.

Chat logging only works once turned on. Anything before it is turned on (or after it is turned off) is not logged.

In the interests of showing why I do include it, and not to argue that your exclusion is incorrect....

The two offered definitions of "Mitigate" to not offer any fixed reference for when they apply. If damage is taken, and then removed, I find this fits the definition of making that (already sustained) damage "less harsh or hostile" or "less severe or painful". There's nothing implicit in those definitions that makes obvious that "mitigation" only applies when the thing to be mitigated has not yet been inflicted on its subject.

Heh.

In the context of the origin of the term, I think having Build Up produce a mini-gold would be kind of sweet.

Agreed. Breaking the "cottage rule" is something like making Whirling Sword into a team +speed buff that deals no damage. It's a radical departure from the original spec of the power.

Messing with the recharge/duration/magnitude of a power is typically considered a buff or nerf, depending on how the stats change.

FYI, Defender ranged damage, which is the damage scale used by the vast majority of Defenders the vast majority of the time, is 0.65.

No offense, but that is a fairly ridiculous suggestion. Defenders getting a 0.9 damage scale is far more likely.

Nice F.U.D. to wrap up your post.

Seriously, we're talking about people who want to leave so much that not being able to solo their Defender fast enough is the straw that breaks their back. I don't think there's any great loss there, to either the community at large or those players.

Strange, I'm not leaving.

Oh, wait, I'm not like you after all. I've been here five years.