UberGuy

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Is there a resource on this? I went to Paragonwiki and couldn't seem to find a list of what IOs would drop for Silver and Gold rolls, only Bronze...unless I was on the wrong page or something.

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I did reference the Wiki. It looked at this.

You can tweak the URL above or use the search box for the following terms.[*]Bronze Class Recipe Roll[*]Silver Class Recipe Roll[*]Gold Class Recipe Roll

IIRC, all the new recipies have two pieces each in pools A, B and C. None were added to pool D, which is sort of academic now.

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Gold rolls with MA tickets seems inefficient to me; at most, you can get 2 rolls in one go.

Bronze or Silver rolls, OTOH, you can fill up your entire recipe inventory at once, saving you a lot of time.

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It depends. If you can earn 4000 tickets faster than 20 merits, then it's better. The per-recipie average value is way higher for Gold roll recipies than for Bronze, and it contains things you can't get at all in Bronze.

As an aside, the average value per ticket for Silver is much worse than per Bronze in most level ranges, because pool B recipies tend to be vendor trash, and they make up a 40% of the silver rolls.

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To my knowledge, none of the missions known to be bugged were ever considered farm maps.

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One was - the Posessed Scientist cargo ship map on villains.

As far as I know, though, the bug didn't have anything to do with moving on to a different map. That player sounds like someone from a different game. Guild Wars, for example, has that kind of behavior.

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I more or less see the VEATs as team or "gestault" ATs. Individually, they might be okay, possibly mediocre, but when grouped together, are greater than just the sum of their parts.

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I can't speak to Banes, but Widows are anything other than mediocre or just "OK" when solo. Their own performance is stellar with or without a team, but when on a team, they improve everyone else's survival.

No, you can't get them all. Bronze rolls contain only those pieces which are pool A drops, meaning they drop from mobs. This includes the Acc/Hold and Acc/Rech pieces.

There are two pieces of the set in pool B (mission completion drops): Rech/Hold and End/Rech/Hold. These can be obtained with Silver rolls, but there is a 1.5:1 ratio of pool A to pool B recipies when rolling this class of roll.

The last two pieces are in the TF/Trial drop pool, which means they can only be gotten as Gold rolls or as Merit random reward rolls. These are the Acc/End/Rech/Hold and proc pieces.

Your best bet is to roll in the 10-15 level range. This range has the smallest number of recipies that include the Basilisk's Gaze set.

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Low magnitude? dude its better than any defensive giving power in the game, in terms of the defence it gives its better than defenders dispersion bubble, better than arachnos soldiers maneuvers, it fractionally less than having a defenders insulation sheild and deflection sheild cast on you. Its massive mitigation by anyones standards

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It's better than Widows' Maneuvers but not as good as Soldiers'.

I'll buy that it isn't "low" magnitude, but claiming that it is "massive" is preposterous.

To be clear, (following up the previous post) it's an +8.438% defense buff unslotted.

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Y'know, Positron was all about "reward per time spent" a while back, and the market breaks that.

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No it doesn't. At all. The reward per time spent is an average (or perhaps median) value, measured across various strips of the character base. They control the available reward per time spent available through the market by controlling drop rates, including those from random rolls.

Did you see what happened when the MA was being farmed like mad? Prices hit the floor on nearly everything except purples. That's not what the devs wanted. They fixed the masses' easy access to ticket farms and prices went back up. The devs control the average rate of access for the overall playerbase.

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The downside is, well, less time on the treadmill. But honestly, CoH has always been supportive of playing alts.

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It still is.

You just aren't personally satisfied with the time scale that's involved.

Your disatisfaction is not proof of a problem. It might be an indicator of a problem.

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As it stands, making enough to IO-out a character takes a lot of time

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Define "IO-out a character". Frankenslot? IOs that currently cost 10M apiece? IOs that cost 100M apiece?

They cost varying amounts for a reason. The better ones are supposed to take longer. And they do.

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the treadmill is NOT the only reason people stay

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Of course it's not. The treadmill is a means to an end. However, it also inproves the sense that achieving the end is an actual accomplishment. It improves your personal investment in the character, the game, and your continued subscription.

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I would actually bet that a large number of people would be MORE willing to stay if they believed they could make a character, level them, and IO them out, all in a timeframe they considered reasonable. The next step is, for many, simply make another character, not leave the game.

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Then why do they need to "IO out" their existing characters before making a new one? I don't even alt that way, and I'm a serious monomaniac. And again we get back to "IO out" as a vague term. You think everyone should be able to purple out to the max, get LotGs and Miracles, on every character before they feel like moving on to the next character?

Why? What justification can you offer for such a massive flattening of the time investment? What would be the point in all the options for intermediate builds? Why have commons and uncommons if purples and kick-[censored] rares are laying around in stores? Why should we be left with such easy access to the concept that a character is "done", so we can run off and alt another to the same level?

I'm sorry, but this just continues to sound like a massively overdeveloped sense of entitlement.

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I'd say on that score it may not be a question of liking not liking treadmills. Its more a question of our game is like gym, that has weights, treadmills, stair machines and rowing machines. There are if I interpret it right people objecting to having to use the treadmill before they can use the weights.

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You're extending the analogy to the point it's not functional. The reference to treadmills is to make clear that it's a time-consuming activity. Inf on the market is a proxy for time. You can do other things and get the stuff randomly, with merits or with tickets, or you can earn inf and buy it on the market.

It's outrageous and dismissable to take exception to things taking time to achieve in an MMO. It's fair to argue about how much time, but only to a point.

The only reasonable objection to the market is that it's the faster way to get the goods. In having inf as a proxy for money, you can get stuff in less elapsed playtime through smart market play than you can earn goods other ways in general. There's nothing the devs can do about this unless they find a way to make other people care how they spend their money on the market - the best schemes get their money from people who are spending it willingly.

So that means that people find the market objectionable because it's the most efficient way to get shinies, and yet (for some people) it's the least liked. That's just tough cookies. I really don't have any pity for it.

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Who said we're ignoring our teammates and don't want to protect our friends? Oh, that's right, skipping a low-magnitude, small-area defensive power is de-facto evidence.

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Totally. (Forgive the modified quote.)

If I'm on a squishy and I want a Scrapper's help, I want him to run up and kick something's butt, not get near me with a +def power I'd hardly be able to notice on its own.

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To be honest I don't think they care how long it took you me or anyone else it did to build out their characters. They just want to do it quicker and with a more enjoyable way of doing it. In real life I laugh at that attitude but this is a game.

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I laugh at people who have that attitude in an MMO. The entire point of persistent worlds is that you keep what you get, and therefore it takes something to get it.

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Many bosses with resists to hold/immob have little or no resist to sleep. I can sleep Cimmeroran bosses and EBs all day long, but it takes stacking holds to lock them down.

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The sleep you are using is higher mag than the holds. The bosses have exeactly the same ability to shrug off holds, sleeps, disorients and fears.

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The "myth" was "lower than base accuracy". Yeah, DM doesn't have the accuracy bonus that other melee sets are given, but the same myth isn't frequently attributed to sets like Energy Melee, Ice Melee, Superstrength, Fiery Melee, Electrical Melee and the like who also lack an accuracy bonus.

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Indeed. Most of the weapon sets have a mere 1.05 accuracy (as opposed to 1.0). Yet people were claiming that it missed so much it was broken, the frequently espoused theory being that it debuffed itself.

I don't think it had much to do with the other sets' accuracy bonus.

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Allowing everyone a better chance at those recipes by increasing the drop rate significantly, will ultimately reduce the margins and adversely affect the enjoyment (and profits) of those that DO play the market and play it well. They can't make one group happy without making another group unhappy. I can't expect, though, that the devs will continue to make the marketeers happy while making the casual players feel like they have no choice but to do unfun, repetitive tasks to earn the rewards they want. (You know... "grind")

They can't leave the market as-is without making the game unfun for a large portion of the playerbase. They can't change it without upsetting the people who have come to enjoy the market minigame for its own sake.

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While this is true, I think it is far less the most important effect.

PvE-focused games like this - particularly subscription ones - beg for a treadmill approach. The devs want to keep you on the treadmill for a while. Unlike a real treadmill, the ones in a game do get you somewhere in a sense. In this game those destinations are places like level 50, IO'd builds, all the badges, or what have you. But the key is that the devs want you to run on the treadmill for a while to get to each endpoint, because you pay them based on how long you run. Not how far, just how long.

Different people will complain about treadmills running at different angles of incline steepness - some don't mind it running really steep, and some people hate the treadmill even if it runs completely level. Very few people will agree how fast and long they should have to run at what angle.

IOs are a goal for people, and the devs need people to run on the treadmill to reach them. Handing them out in stores, even in exchage, completely defeats that. Making people pay inf for them is a proxy for the time it takes you to get them randomly, because inf earned is a proxy for time spent. Buying stuff on the market is actually more efficient in general than time spent earning it directly, because very few things on the market actually have prices really indicative of how much money a level 50 would earn on average before they got one of any given recipie as a drop. Compare market prices with Merit rates for completely outfitting a character, and consider which a level 50 is likely to do sooner.

The devs created rarity and scarcity and perceived value for a reason. They wanted these things to be both desirable and slow to obtain. If you want a sense of the scale of that, just look at Merit earning rates and Recipie merit costs.

The devs of course always reserve the right to change the slope at which the treadmill tilts as you run on it. They did it in the past for XP. They might do it at some future time for inventions. It's a lot harder to predict what they do with inventions though so long as they stick to their guns about inventions being optional.

To get them to make changes here is going to take an appeal to something other than LotGs and purples. As nice as those are, they are supposed to be the slowest things in the game to achieve, because they are rare and powerful. I don't think the devs are going to feel a lot of pity for cries of woe for the casual player's purpled Warshade.

Edit: Reading that, I realize it can be taken pretty negatively, as some sort of indictment against the devs for keeping us on a treadmill at all. Just in case, that's not how I mean it. I'm very goal-oriented, and having the goal of IOs has kept me interested in this game easily a year past where I might have given up on it (and I'm still going strong). If it was so easy as some of the suggestions here seem to be seeking, I would likely already be bored again. I need it to take effort and time, and even if you (whoever reads this) are not like that, you have to understand that a lot of MMO players in general are, and the devs know it.

I've seen a Rad/Psi do it. A very tricked out build, of course.

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So it would seem to me that I need my powers to be effective vs. having I dont know...3%regen increase from buying a superexpensive set and losing the ACTUAL effectiveness of my power.

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In general, there's no need to ever lose effectiveness from a power. In fact, in general, it's common to gain overall effectiveness in powers, especially in terms of "secondary" slotting for things like recharge, endurance, and even accuracy.

IMO, good IO builds end up with the ED "cap" for a power's primary function (such as 95%+ damage on an attack), as well as 45-66% enhancement in each of accuracy, endurance and recharge.

Typically, the only slotting where you might lose out somewhere in the same number of slots is if you happen to have a power fully slotted with well-suited HOs, because HOs have bigger enhancement values per slot.

However, even in the tailored HO case, you usually come out better overall if you also choose set bonuses wisely. It helps very much to decide on something you want and then build for it by seeking out complimentary set bonuses. It also helps to pick something you can build on with your powers - set bonuses are individually small, but a handful of the same type plus a few powers with the same benefit can become highly effective when all used together.

If you're looking at a build that actually sacrifices the effectiveness of slotting in something, you need to ask whether you really need whatever those IOs are giving you for slotting in that power. Can you get it by slotting another set in a different power? Are you netting enough of that benefit to make pursuing it worth degrading a power's effectiveness? How important is that power, or that the power be fully slotted?

If nothing else, IOs are a great way to get levels of simple enhancement that you can't get other ways. Ignoring set bonuses, you can mix and match sets in a power to get really impressive levels of overall enhancement. You can get quite inventive with this - you can really go to town for a long time with 80% endurance reduction in otherwise well-slotted attacks, for example.

If you can find a build that does this and gives you useful set bonuses, then yes, it really can be worth it. IOs can absolutely transform your character's level of performance. The important question is whether that's important enough to you to strive for the build. Poring over a builder isn't for everyone, nor is sifting the market looking for good deals on popular IOs (or alternatively, gathering up enough Reward Merits or MA Tickets to obtain the goods that way). However, if you do attain the build, I think it's very likely you'll enjoy it if you enjoy your character now.

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-Regen is overrated when you've got a team. While you're solo, -regen is going to contribute more than any other effect at your disposal just because you don't have much damage to multiply. Since we're talking about GM Soloing, -regen is probably the most important tool at your disposal (aside from the player, that is).

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Agreed.

If you've got a team of six people averaging ~200 DPS apiece, a 30% DR debuff* increases the total DPS by another 360 - much more than the contribution of adding another person at 200 DPS.

Compare that to laying on 500% regen that's resisted by 85%. If a GM regens 350 HP/sec, that is still going to be the equivalent of 262 DPS - vastly more than the +60DPS you'd get from a 30% DR debuff. Regen debuffs serve the soloer (or the low DPS team) much more than it does a high DPS team. Of course your best off if you can manage both - which Rad Emission and Dark Miasma both can. Lingering Rad has the better best-case uptime with large-scale global recharge buffs, which seems a likely scenario for the typical GM hunter.

* Remember that neither GMs nor AVs explicitly resist DR debuffs any more than any other mob. The math behind DR debuffs mean that a debuff of X% results in +X% total damage dealt after factoring any foe damage resistance. DR debuffs do honor "purple patch" degradation, as do Regen debuffs.

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When did they upgrade from the C-64?

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It's an Amiga running the back-end. The C-64 is still serving up the interface.

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Fact : Only a tiny part of the playerbase plays the market, which is why there's room for new marketeers without a noticeable difference in market income for old marketeers. If absolutely everyone would start playing the market, profit margins would shrink. The smartest, patient folks might still be able to make a profit, but not everyone.

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Anecdote: No one, to my knowledge, has ever claimed that everyone can play the market for gain. What has been claimed, almost daily, from a month or so after the market appeared, is that anyone can do so.

Fact: There is a difference in the meaning of the words "anyone" and "everyone". "Anyone" means "any one person". "Everyone" means "all people in the game".

Fact: Level 50 characters can afford to pay 10s of thousands of inf for a piece of common salvage because they earn over 10 thousand inf every time they defeat a +2 Lieutanant solo.

Observation: It appears vanishingly likely after all this time that everyone will ever try to "play" the market for gain. Instead, it appears immensely likely that many players who use the market will do so loosely, without careful consideration on how to save money. This is reinforced by Fact 2 above - Level 50s can sneeze out more inf than a level 10 character would see in a week of play (if they stayed level 20 for a week of play).

Conclusion: The assertion that "anyone" can choose to make money on the market is valid given the continuously reinforced notion that "everyone" is never likely to use the market in such a savings/earnings-conscious way that precludes it.

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Which blaster is the best?

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There really isn't one that's clearly the best. If there was, either it would be modified by the devs so it wasn't so clearly the best, or the others would be modified to the same end.

A Blaster, fundamentaly, pumps out lots of damage, and has something of a specialty for doing so from range, though many of them are also very dangerous in melee. There's nothing about how the different Blaster powersets fill that role that is especially different in a way that would mesh particularly "best" with an Ill/Rad Controller.

You should pick something that seems thematically interesting to you, or perhaps ask more questions about how the various powersets differ. Right now, it's a lot like you've asked us "which Blaster is right for me given that I like pie."

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The two experimented folks on the team told us the usual order is Numina, then Psyche, then Positron, and not Positron right after Numina. One of them is my friend, I'll believe him over your crazy rants, especially as our run was successful and your own runs are, by your own affirmations, exercises in frustration.

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Your friend's experience meshes well with my own on experienced teams from several global channels I frequent, with whom I usually attend various TFs/SFs.

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Wiping to split AVs is also something I've never seen or ever heard of from anyone else on the numerous discussions about the RSF.

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I can't say one way or other what other people do, but it's nothing I've ever seen personally as no one I run RSFs with bothers to split the heroes at all ... unless it's a MoRSF run, in which case wiping wouldn't work out so well. (I have that badge, btw.) It sounds like discussions I vaguely recall of very early tactics, back when the TF was first introduced.

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Yeah, guess what? Meow farming went on for a couple of weeks before the ticket fix. So are you claiming all those people looking for 8-man teams before the ticket fix still farming for tickets at ~1/64th the rate of doing it solo?


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The ticket fix was what caused the explosion. Prior to that all boss map or all lieutenant maps were the way to go depending on your abilities.

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I think your memory is faulty. The explosion was well underway before they fixed tickets. Farmers were doing just fine without the ticket fix. You didn't need or want eight people in the map if you were a farmer.

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Second your math is in error. First you are neglecting the direct inf drops which was averaging around 4 to 4.5 million a run. A team of 8 could easily clear those maps in less than 15 minutes a reasonable team where everyone had at least some AOE could clear it in less than 10. This gives conservatively 24 million inf an hour. Pre ticket fix you are neglecting inf income.

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I was making 30+M inf an hour solo. So no, my math is not faulty. And that wasn't even on a Meow map.

A good farmer with a good build always does best either alone or with only their secondary accounts on the map.

If you want to argue that the majority of the activity before the comm officer fix was substandard farmers who also happened to not be PLing people, I think you've proven my point for me.

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No you are comparing applles and oranges. The point was never that ticket farming was all of meow farming just that it was a very large part. The combination of the comm officers plus the patch pumped it up, now it has moved on to farming level 53 enemies boss maps and other tactics that are designed to maximize tickets+inf/time

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I never said it was. Very few of the players I knew who were ... making inventive use of the MA were messing with Meow farms. They all had stuff that worked better.

The point is not what was good farming. It was how much of the MA activity was fueled by desire to PL characters (and earn tickets on the side) as opposed to earn tickets on their own. All the explanation of ticket rates in the world does nothing to explain away things that would not happen if people were farming for tickets primarily. For example, after the Comm Officer change, all the other ways to earn tickets remained in effect for a while longer, and yet the mass teaming and armies of lowbies fell off dramatically within two days.

The farmers had already moved on. The PLers were what were making up the majority of people in the AEs. When they left the farmers and the less public PLers were still there, but the point of all this is that PLing dropped off dramatically.

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Actually, yeah, low level is where ticket farming pays off the most.

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Should have warned you agreeing with me is verbotten on this board.

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My disagreement with what he said has nothing to do with you. You might notice that nothing I said to him references you at all.

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Seeing as I did the numbers and was the person that posted them here you are quite off base. Are you trying to adopt Nethergoats style of argument where you just become endlessly insulting until the other person is too ticked off to respond ?

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I was in that thread, and I posted numbers as well. You never disputed them. Hoewver, this whole ad-homenim retort of yours is negated by the response below, since it addresses how you here have convenviently ignored part of my post above.

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After the ticket fix it became exceptionally advantageous in both terms of inf and tickets to farm in large teams that could clear quickly. The patch pretty much completely eliminated the penalties for large teams and actually gave a significant bonus.

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Yeah, guess what? Meow farming went on for a couple of weeks before the ticket fix. So are you claiming all those people looking for 8-man teams before the ticket fix still farming for tickets at ~1/64th the rate of doing it solo?

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Also that casuals, moreso than anybody else, might have the best opportunities for low prices because they won't mind waiting two days for a low bid to fill if they only play twice a week anyway.

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Bear in mind that what I'm about to say should in no way be considered a defense of the perspective I'll describe.

I think the breakdown is in people's defintion of "casual." I don't even mean that in the sense of the tongue-in-cheek way we talk about "mythical casual gamers." I mean that I think paying attention to the market's trends in any meaningful way is so alien and undesirable for a lot of people (or at least a few vocal people) that they consider any effort to do so the furthest thing from "casual" they can imagine.

This is distinct from whether the actual mental energy involved is hard, or takes a lot of time. (To be fair, I do think it takes a non-trivial amount of mental energy - probably more than playing PvE does for long-time players.) No matter how little effort might be involved, if you don't like that type of effort or reject the market thematically, the actual effort needed picks up large magnification because they don't like the effort.

Of course I think this obscuring factor works both ways. These people see the market as this monsterous thing they can't imagine approaching and they figure everyone must see it that way and it should be changed or even removed on that basis. They see people talk about how the market is good for "casual" players and they scoff, unable to imagine how that's possible.