Werner

I suspect you'll have trouble running +4x8 with bosses on a Dark Melee/Regen on a tight budget. I'll certainly defer to Umbral on this one if he knows differently, though. I suspect he's personally running a really expensive super high recharge build, though, which is going to be out of your reach.

OK, my best guess for the chain you'd want is my normal suggestion for a double stack, but with Sting of the Wasp replacing Gambler's Cut. In other words:

Divine Avalanche -> Gambler's Cut -> Soaring Dragon -> Gambler's Cut -> Divine Avalanche -> Gambler's Cut -> Sting of the Wasp -> Gambler's Cut

That takes 9.77 seconds to complete if tight. But you'll have a 0.21-second gap between Sting of the Wasp and Gambler's cut. No biggie. So you end up just under ten seconds. I think that's fine, and there's not any big need to add recharge for your attack chain.

Your attack chain uses 2.71 EPS, which is decent enough. The toggles you have clicked on only use 0.94 EPS for a total burn of 3.65 EPS. And you recover 3.54 EPS, plus another 0.40 EPS from your procs on average, so 3.94 EPS recovery. In other words, with the toggles you have off, you will tend to recover endurance even while fighting flat out. For normal play, you'll probably want to run Death Shroud and Cloak of Fear, so you'll be running at a loss, but that's what blues are for. If you're AV soloing without inspirations, you'll want either Death Shroud or Cloak of Fear up. Both are about 0.38 EPS. So... 2.71 + 0.94 + 0.38 = 4.03 EPS burned. You recover ALMOST that much on average, plus you have Conserve Power. You'll be fine. The biggest variable is Dark Regeneration. It sucks down a LOT of endurance, but if you take the feared minion approach, that gives you a much higher chance for Theft of Essence to fire to drastically reduce the cost, or if lucky, recover some endurance. So... probably OK. It reminds me of how I tuned my own build. All I could say before I started using it was that it was probably OK. And it's normally OK, but occasionally, I need to slow down attacking in AV fights. Usually not for long before a proc fires or Conserve Power recharges or whatever. Just enough to annoy me. Anyway, I'd say that your endurance situation might be fine, and if it isn't, probably isn't worth much additional effort and compromise to improve.

I agree that Death Shroud is underslotted. It's kind of your best attack. But you don't exactly have slots just sitting around wasting space. Perhaps the one in Stamina? Nah, too much of a difference when you're probably already on the edge. Mind you, swap out the common IO for the endmod/recharge. Yes, it's less endmod than the common IO, but it also gives you a recovery set bonus, and the total ends up higher. (EDIT: Oh, duh, do what others said earlier. Move it to Physical Perfection. Even better.)

I'd probably short change The Lotus Drops before short changing Death Shroud, but it makes me sad that both are short changed.

And Dark Regeneration is underslotted too. Hmmm. Well, if you accept ALWAYS using minions when fighting AVs, you could try to trade out some healing for more recharge and endurance reduction, maybe. Not seeing a way to on first glance, though.

Yeah, the problem is that you need just a few more slots for a few powers, and I just don't know from where to get slots without making very large scale changes.

I'm not sure what they're going for these days, but you could use a Ribosome instead of Aegis res/end in Obsidian Shield. Slightly better in all ways.

I guess that's all I have for the moment.

Oh, I just saw your post about your intended attack chain. Without going to the trouble of doing a full DPS calcluation for your exact slotting, I'm going to make an educated guess that DA->GC->SotW->DA->GC->SD will do lower DPS than what I mentioned above. My chain above is your chain with two more Gambler's Cuts thrown in. Gambler's Cut, since is has the Achilles' Heel proc, is a key attack that you want to spend a lot of time using. And Divine Avalanche is something you really don't want to use much more than twice every ten seconds, because it doesn't do a lot of damage for the time it takes. Yeah, you spend 0.2 seconds doing nothing, but I'm still fairly confident you'll be better off DPS-wise with the one I mentioned. That said, don't be at all afraid to drop one or two Gambler's Cuts (and turn it into the chain you mentioned) when switching targets, or if you miss with Divine Avalanche. You want to make sure that Divine Avalanche stays double stacked. That tends to take priority over DPS.

Yes, people who play the market seem to be that hated. It seems to often be based on a lack of understanding of economics combined with the need to blame someone for their lack of purples, or whatever it is they want right then, sometimes even commons. Since we're being hated for something we don't actually do (drive up prices, screw the little guy, etc.), I usually just let it roll off my back, or just stay away from the market forum when I'm not feeling up to being abused for how I play a game.

I've used this analogy. Let's say that a whole lot of people believe that whoever has the aggro gets a bigger share of the XP, and for the sake of argument, that this is at least vaguely plausible, if wrong. People would pretty much hate tanks, particularly tanks that TAUNTED during a mission. They'd show up on the tank board, calling the tanks names, asking them why they were such horrible people, and so on. They'd produce evidence like "I was on a team, and halfway through this mission, the tank dinged and I didn't!" The tanks, at first, would try to explain the XP system, and how it wasn't affected by aggro. They'd produce guides to XP and aggro. A few would get the message. Most wouldn't. Eventually, some of the tanks would just take to insulting everyone that came to the board accusing them of wrongdoing. They'd call themselves "ebil taunters". Threads would degenerate into personal attacks. Everyone would be CERTAIN they were right, and the bad forum behavior of some the tanks would only be further evidence that they were exploiting the system at the cost of the rest of the team.

And thus we have what often happens on the Market Forum.

Observations while reading the thread:

While I don't read dev minds and don't read the dev digest, I'd be EXTREMELY surprised if the devs INTENDED for there to be a hard cap on influence or bids. Rather, it is a simple artifact from the days, long before IOs, back when the game came out, when two billion influence was simply unheard of. Nobody would ever hit the cap, and it wouldn't make any difference if they did, because there was nothing to spend the influence on. If the devs could do it simply, I suspect they would have long since removed the price cap. I suspect that people "exploiting the level 53 recipe bug" aren't anything the devs care about, because the REAL bug is probably the influence cap itself.

Flippers normalize prices, not raise prices. They're putting in both a price floor and a price ceiling, and the more flippers you have competing in a niche, the closer those price floors and ceilings become, driving prices closer and closer to a stable equilibrium. Patient bidders WILL pay more as a result. If you're a patient bidder, then you'll be paying more. But you were getting a bargain before. Now you're just getting less of a bargain. But what I find strange is that most of the people who hate the flippers seem to be in the buy it now crowd. Impatient bidders will likely pay less on average due to flippers, since they're buying closer to the price ceiling, and flippers lower the price ceiling. (Because for some reason this seems to matter to people, I'm not a flipper, so I'm not trying to mislead people here in order to continue my ebil, flipping ways.)

Nobody needs to understand economics to play the game. Regular life skills of buying and selling goods are sufficient to use the market, and heck, you don't even need to use the market, so you don't even need regular life skills. When you DO need to understand economics is when you are proposing changes TO THE GAME ECONOMY ITSELF. In that case, expect the people who don't understand economics to be shot down by the people who do.

Generally speaking, I think better influence destruction like influence sinks are "the answer" to "the problem". "The problem" seems to be that influence generation is higher than influence destruction. Might be true. I remember a thread a while ago about influence sinks, and I bet it comes up quite often. I believe one of my proposals was a badge or costume that cost a billion influence. Your "billionaire" badge requires you to SPEND a billion, not just have a billion. Now, it won't do much overall, but I bet a lot of the marketeers would want a billionaire badge and costume. That'll be your new photo op instead of a monocle and cup of tea. Drop in the bucket, though. I don't remember my idea being shot down. Not all ideas are shot down.

You need to be very careful with influence sinks though. It has to be something good enough to tempt people out of their hard-earned influence, but NOT so good as to cause resentment from people that can't afford it. In particular, I think combat-useful powers are out. You want to appeal to people the way that most badges appeal to people - no tangible benefit, and yet they can be a serious motivation. Motivate people to destroy influence with the same fervor, and you're onto something.

I don't personally have a problem with raising drop rates on purples and PvP IOs to bring down those prices somewhat. Although I kind of like that there are items so rare that I only have the rarest of them on a single toon after playing since beta, I also wouldn't complain if supply was higher. However, from what I've gathered, it seems that the devs are happy with the current level of scarcity. I believe they intended them to be both ultra rare and useful. Useful and ultra rare items are going to be very, very expensive.

MMOs, in general, are designed as time sinks. An endless treadmill where you're always chasing the next shiny thing. The devs COULD make purples and PvP IOs as common as SOs. Buy any crafted IO in a store for 50,000 influence, say. But to me, and probably to a lot of players, the magic then disappears. The only reason Ferraris are interesting is because they're rare, exotic, better than your Camry. But if everyone drove Ferraris, they wouldn't be interesting. They wouldn't show up on schoolboy dream posters. I drive a ten-year-old Miata with a plain old naturally-aspirated engine. I've kept up with an even older Ferrari on a track until it spun out in front of me trying to stay ahead. Modern cars, modern tires, modern suspension, modern brakes - we're ALL driving Ferraris now - just old Ferraris. But nobody knows it, and nobody cares. The game would be like that too. If everyone had purples and PvP IOs, they wouldn't be special, it wouldn't be interesting, and you wouldn't have anything to strive for. And that, I think, is why MMOs tend to have shiny, rare loot for you to chase after endlessly. It keeps a lot of people playing that otherwise might not.

Price caps result in shortages and off-market activity. If you stay on market, you'll put in your price capped bid and WAIT. I don't know exactly what happens with equal bids for items, but I'm guessing they're handed out randomly. So you've simply entered into a lottery. So let's say we price cap everything at 100 million. You put your bid on the market for 100 million for the PvP +3% defense. Now you wait, along with the other four hundred people with the same bid. A few days later, someone for some reason posts their PvP +3% defense on the market instead of selling it off-market for billions. You have a one in four hundred chance of getting it. Frankly, you're just not going to get one. To get one, you'll have to move off market, where all the real buying and selling is being done. And you're going to have to outbid someone, or maybe know someone that has one and is willing to cut you a deal, or trade a bunch of Luck of the Gambler globals for it, or whatever. So you're still paying through the nose, but now you're paying through the nose AND it's really inconvenient, and takes much more specialized knowledge than just placing a bid in a market interface window. (Oh, and as CapnGeist pointed out, off-market trading removes no influence from the system, so actually increases inflation.)

Not a recommendation of mine, but really, the only way to apply a price cap without doing this is by introducing stores selling at specific prices. That is often recommended. If anyone can buy their PvP recipe from a store for a hundred million, then yes, you have an effective price cap. But what you DON'T have is the same level of scarcity that the devs seem to have intended. The store greatly increases supply. Well, if supply was the problem, why not simply increase the supply? Again, because the devs seem happy with the supply. But I would suggest that anyone that wants a price cap instead campaign for increased supply. I think that's the solution that will produce the effect you want, while price caps will have some very negative unintended consequences, while not making it any easier for you to get your shiny.

I think there can be a lot of legitimate disagreement on how easy it should be to get the shinies. The people who want to be able to afford the best stuff when they hit 50 without putting in additional hours aren't wrong. It's just what they WANT. How can you be wrong about what you want? In fact, you could easily make a MMO without the shinies, without that particular treadmill, and people might love it. That's what City of Heroes was before I9. Well, there were Hamios. Let's pretend those didn't exist, as there were certainly the same sorts of complaints about those. In any case, perfectly doable, reasonably popular. It's a niche for an MMO, and it caters to some players, perhaps a lot of players. Me, well, that's not the MMO that I want to play. It was fun for a while, then I was growing tired of it, then I9 grabbed my interest and the IO system has held my interest in this game ever since. Frankly, I'd prefer if it took MORE work to reach level 50, MORE work to get my shinies. Again, this is just what I WANT. I'm not wrong; it's just personal preference. I like having to put in a lot of time and effort to get what I want in a game. Before people go saying, "but it's a game! It should be fun!" That IS the fun for me. I LIKE spending those hours. I LIKE the process. And frankly, if you're playing an MMO, I suspect you like the process too, and the main disagreement is how long the process should continue before getting the rewards.

Katana/Willpower

• Easy to play (toggle up and kill, though you need to include Divine Avalanche in your attack chain)
• Probably difficult to mess up the build
• Has enough hit points, resistance and regeneration to give you time to realize you're in over your head, unlike some sets (Regeneration, for instance), where you can go from good to dead in seconds
• Easy to level, pretty much strong out of the box and all the way through
• Extreme top end performance potential, so it isn't just a starter scrapper

That's not to say that it's the right choice for everyone. I don't even have one myself, despite constantly recommending them. It's not even the best choice for all "new" players. All scrapper combinations are good, they're just good in different ways. But I suspect you're still a little too new to say, "Well, I want to do passable AoE, but great single-target. I want a nice combination of defense and resistance, rather than a strong focus on one or the other. I don't like self-heals, because I don't want to interrupt my attacking. I just want to toggle up and go, not have to micromanage my survival. I don't care about AV soloing, but I'd like to be able to crank up the difficulty level in normal missions. It'd be nice if, some day when I IO it out, I can handle +4x8. But I'm not looking for a farming build. I know I'm never going to PvP. I've always hated PvP in every game where I tried it." Mind you, if you CAN put together a statement like that, we can probably get a lot more specific with our advice, and maybe recommend something else.

But if you can't, no problem, go Katana/Willpower. It's not just a jack of all trades, it's a master of some of them.

Take your damage auras. Take them early. Slot them fully. Slot them as attacks. They're PBAoEs for only single-target endurance usage that you don't have to put in your attack chain. They're awesome.

OK, that makes sense. Give yourself a lethal defense cushion, and your comparatively poor DDR will still make good use of that cushion.

The only thing I have approaching a guide is this:

“There are definitely other approaches, but here's what I'd consider a basic plan for the Regeneration secondary using SOs or common IOs:

• Fast Healing at 1, 3 heals
• Reconstruction nice and early, 3 heals, 3 recharges
• Quick Recovery nice and early, 1 endurance modifier at first, add 1 or 2 more as necessary
• Dull Pain when or shortly after when available, as there is a lot to squeeze in at that level, 3 heals, 3 recharges
• Integration at 16, 3 heals, possibly 1 endurance reducer
• Resilience when and if you can work it in, 1 resist
• Instant Healing when or shortly after when available, 1-3 recharges, no heals unless you're swimming in slots
• Skip Revive
• Moment of Glory when or shortly after when available, 3 recharges
• Hasten when convenient, 3 recharges
• Health when convenient, 3 heals
• Tough when convenient, 3 resists, 1 endurance reducer
• Stamina if and when you start having endurance trouble, which may not be until 30 or later, 1 endurance modifier at first, add 1 or 2 more as necessary"

As far as set IOs go, you're looking for recharge, recharge, more recharge, and then defense. High recharge is quite expensive, so you may be limited there. Buy as much as you can afford. For Katana, you want to make sure that you hit the magic 45% defense with Divine Avalanche, probably double-stacked. If you can, slot it purely as an attack, and get the other 15% defense from pool powers and set bonuses. Grab yourself a Steadfast Protection unique, and a Kismet unique while you're at it. You're shooting for a chain of Divine Avalanche -> Gambler's Cut -> Golden Dragonfly -> Gambler's Cut -> Divine Avalanche -> Gambler's Cut -> Soaring Dragon -> Gambler's Cut. Gambler's Cut needs to recharge in 1.58 seconds for that, which is about +90% recharge enhancement. Should be simple enough. Put an Achilles' Heel proc in Gambler's Cut. Even though it's a buff, use Dull Pain reactively, not proactively. Your proactive protection is Moment of Glory and/or Instant Healing. While you want your clicks available as often as possible, in a sense, you want to use them as little as possible. Don't click Reconstruction if waiting a few seconds will heal you to full. Don't click Dull Pain if Reconstruction is enough to cover it. That way, you're more likely to have the good clicks available when you really need them. I'm sure there's a ton more, but I just woke up, and my brain isn't quite engaged yet.

Hush now! I loves me some Disembowel!

I still want Katana/Shield Defense.

(But only for the numbers.)

You're fine then. Neither primary is shooting yourself in the foot. Katana is generally slightly better, but not enough that you'd really notice unless you were timing yourself doing the same things, or running herostats, that kind of thing. For me at least, the seat of the pants experience is that both are equally capable. The big difference for me is in how they feel, not how they perform, and that's despite me being a serious min/maxer.

Yep, the best end game Katana chains do more DPS than the best Broad Sword equivalents, and with less recharge required. And Katana is particularly good at taking advantage of the Achilles' Heel proc due to the fast-activating and fast-recharging Gambler's Cut. Overall it isn't such a huge difference as to avoid Broad Sword if you prefer the SMASH (I have two at 50), but it's a difference. Similarly, Katana puts out a little better AoE damage, with both primaries' PBAoEs recharging at the same rate, but Katana's putting out slightly more damage in a much shorter activation. And while Flashing Steel does less damage than Slice, it still achieves better DPA (damage per Arcanatime, the measurement that tends to mean the most in top end builds).

Well, I suppose my surprise is because Willpower doesn't have much defense debuff protection. Katana/Willpower is a great combination, but against large crowds of Cimerorans? The evidence says it's much better than it sounds in my brain, but it still sounds icky in my brain. I went on one ITF with Werner. I was popping purles when I thought I needed them, and cascading defense failure still got me once, and that was on a team. Katana/Willpower IS a much better combination for the job. But THAT much better? Eh, it just boggles my mind. Obviously my preconceptions about what Katana/Willpower can do are wrong, but it still boggles my mind.