Adeon Hawkwood

IO builds are, in many ways, subject to diminishing returns. Selling a single high value purple recipe can potentially fund your purchase of a large chunk of your build. That will in turn allow you to farm faster which means getting the expensive parts of the build (such as purples) comes faster.

Because it takes time and requires doing something not everyone wants to. There are plenty of other ways to generate inf in the game (such as farming or marketeering) so for someone who prefers something else buying it makes sense.

Ah that makes sense, I just saw Sky Raiders and Sharkhead and figured he meant SM.

As someone who LOVES power armor character I've got a few general thoughts on this .

First, Ranged Characters (Blasters, Defenders, Corruptors and maybe MMs). Assault Rifle and Dual Pistols are obvious "weapon" sets with Energy and Electrical Blast providing a more generic "hi-tech' look. Rad is ok but I'm not a huge fan of the look. Fire can sort of work as a "flame projector" power but Fain of Fire and Fire Breath look a bit out of place. For your other set Traps or Devices is a nice "gadget" style set while Force Field and Energy Manipulation provide a relatively techy theme. Energy Manipulation in particular is quite nice simply because it allows some good melee attacks. The actual "armor" portion is tricky to represent, the best bet is to take the Fighting Pool, Combat Jumping and a Resistance armor from the epic pool. Temporary Invulnerability is a nice low-key graphics option there while Charged Armor works well as a "electric defense system" technobabble style.

For Melee ATs Invulnerability is my preferred option for the "stand up to a hail of bullets' style power armor. Shield Defense and Super Reflexes also work well for a "force field" style power armor and a "fast moving" style power armor respectively. Energy Aura might also work, but I've never tried it. Offensively any of the weapon sets work well (especially if you go with the various "projected energy field" style weapons. Super Strength is also nice for the "strength amplifying" style of armor. Energy Melee and Kinetic Melee can work as well. Ranged attacks are harder to fit in, the only ones I really like are the Shurikens or Scrappers or Energy Torrent for Tankers/Brutes.

Of course this assumes you are going for a pure-tech-my-armor-is-my-power style hero. If you start mixing in other things you can open it up a bit. For example my Inv/Axe Tanker has Energy Torrent to represent her latent telekinesis power.

Well according to the original info page on it it's variable depending on TF length but Sister Psyche, LGTF and Ice Mistral all gave 5 bars. I haven't had a chance to do Numina yet.

I believe you are correct that gun drones inherit any damage buffs on you for the remaining duration (I haven't tested it specifically but I know other pets that do so it seems reasonable). I don't think they are supposed to defiance buff each other but at the same time I'm not willing to rule it out until I've had a chance to test it. I know there is a bug with FFG for Masterminds where you can resummon it to upgrade your pets so it could be that something similar is causing a new gun drone summon to make an existing gun drone re-inherit your damage buffs.

For the rest all I can say is please do check the combat attributes, I verified it myself a while back so unless there's been a new bug the buff only applies for a short duration.

Yeah, I was mis-remembering slightly here. Snipe powers have their defiance bonus based entirely on the non-interruptable portion of the activation time while the Devices powers are based entirely on the interruptable portion.

This leads to different problems with both types. For snipes the damage bonus is lower than it really should be (going by the idea that defiance is supposed to use cast time) while for the Devices powers the damage bonus is slightly low but the duration is effectively buffed since the timer does not start until the interruptable portion finishes.

Now, personally I think interruptable powers should use a combination effect. The damage bonus should be based on the total cast time but the duration should be based on the non-interruptable portion (in order to preserve the "damage bonus for 7.5s after casting ends" rule). The remaining issue would then be that Time Bomb And Trip Mine are treated as single target powers for damage bonus despite being AoEs. In their current incarnation I don't have a problem with that since Trip Mine in particular is frequently more useful as a pseudo-buildup than as a mine but if the devs ever decrease their casting time (as I think they should) then the bonus would need to be adjusted to be more in-line with thier actual effect.

While it's possible he went to a RMT, it's also perfectly plausible that he simply spent some time marketeering. With a small amount of seed capital (less than 100 million) it's perfectly reasonable to make 1 billion in less than a month. Building up the 100 million from nothing is trickier but not to hard. Before gleemail on my new alts I would generally spend a bit of time buying and vendoring some stuff to get a few hundred k, then spend a few days flipping luck charms to turn that into a few million (and get my scavenger badge for more salvage storage) and then start crafting the popular common IOs (Crushing Impact and Thunderstike both were good options) until I had a few hundred million which was enough to take care of their IO needs.

Sure it would be harder for a new player since they wouldn't know the tricks but if they read the marketeering forum and/or had experience with similar tactics in other MMOs it's not unreasonable to get 1 billion in a few months.

This isn't really a problem with Apex but with the fact that Devices in general is not a particularly useful set on a team (and an AR/Dev Blaster is one of my 3 Incarnates). In a game where a spawn can be AoE'd to death in less than 20 seconds taking 4 seconds to setup a mine or 8 seconds to summon a drone just isn't particularly useful on a good team. I rarely bother to use either power on teams although they both are very useful solo.

Also for the BM fight in particular Devices also has Caltrops. With a bit of recharge you can easily get them down to less than her casting time on the blue patches which means after you move position you toss them down to provide protection from the wondering swords/champions.

Actually it only provides a defiance boost for about 10secodns after summoning. I've seen this misconception a few times for both Gun Drone and Trip Mine. The problem is that the summary if you right click on the buff icon shows the bonus during the entire duration but if you check the detailed power display or monitor your damage bonus the defiance boost only lasts a few seconds after casting. It does last slightly longer than defiance bonuses are supposed to but AFAIK that's due to the defiance durations being mis-calculated for all interruptable powers.

I completely agree. I've said before that for Devices changing Trip Mine and Gun Drone to have a short non-interruptable casting time (around the 2s range) would IMHO fix a lot of the problems with the set. Those powers (and *sigh* Time Bomb) are supposed to replace the melee powers in other manipulation sets, allowing them to be used as melee powers would make the set a lot more generically useful.

What to go with depends a lot on the particular character and on what you want to do. The most popular build goals are normally some combination of defense and recharge but there are other options that are useful for certain characters (+HP is popular on melee types as is +regen for certain powersets). Secondary bonuses form IOs tend to be things like recovery, accuracy and damage, people don't really focus on them in builds but you can often pick up a number of bonuses for them in the course of getting your main bonuses.

There is some definite truth in this. I don't really play Villains much but I do have a couple. I've noticed that even when running the WST Redside on Virtue it can take quite a while to form a team.

I think in many ways what we're seeing with side-switching is that the Market problems with Redside are now being applied to population. Alignment merits (and to some degree Alignment Powers) encourage people to stick to the extreme alignments. The population of Redside has always been lower and the ability to take preferred ATs to either side simply encouraged that. As the population Redside drops people are less likely to even bother with Redside (unless they like soloing) since it's harder to form a team and consequently move even more characters blueside.

I think Silver Mantis would object to being called a guy .

Or, maybe, just maybe people have noticed that the price of alchemical silver is high and as such but in long term bids to purchase what they need at low prices. In general anything that is desirable and in short supply has a lot of bids on it, it's the nature of supply and demand. Alchemical Silver is a particularly noticeable example since the price, while high, is low enough for most players to afford to place a large quantity of long-term bids and is needed in large numbers due to being a component in two important common recipes (Accuracy and Run) plus at least three popular Set IOs (max level Basilisk Quads, Kinetic Combat Dam/Ends and Impervium Armor Triples)

I'm sure some people are flipping Alchemical Silver (mostly because the high end price is kept relatively in check) but I really doubt there's any sort of cabal actively conspiring to limit the market supply.

Right, that is basically what flipping is. The thing to remember is that in order to do it for any significant length of time they are either hemorrhaging cash buying up stock they can't use or they are simply setting buy and sell points that are inside the normal range of values for the item but closer to the theoretical perfect market price.

And the low price is normally about 180K (IIRC) leaving a bid up at that overnight allows you to buy them for a lot less than 500K.

There are two general problems with this. First off there is the simple fact that doing this is NOT a monopoly. All someone has to do is put in a buy order 1 inf higher than theirs and they get the next one on the market.

Secondly let's look at the math for this. First let's assume you're not actually deleting any salvage at all (i.e. regular flipping). In order to break even on the transaction your sell price must be at least 11.1% higher than your purchase price (i.e. buy for 100 inf and sell for 112 inf). Now assume you're deleting 50% of the purchased salvage, in this case to break even your sell price has to be at least 122.2% higher than your purchase price (i.e. buy at 100inf, sell for 223 inf).

The point is that in order to make a profit there HAS to be a gap in between your sell price and your purchase price. What that gap means is that it's impossible to stop someone else from moving in and setting their own buy or sell prices in between yours at which point you are no longer controlling all of the transactions. Sure you can adjust your buy/sell points in order to get rid of them but that decreases your profit and they will just move back in with new prices, a cycle that repeats until you are at the "no profit" levels detailed above.

Now obviously some prankster could do it at "no profit" levels for fun but what is happening at that point? He's basically taking his money and distributing it to those who have salvage to sell. Yeah kinda annoying to those who want to buy salvage (since they'd have to go to the AE) but nice for the people with salvage to spare.

Then do it and take screenshots. Heck, you don't even need an existing alt stable. Taking an empty server and powerleveling 12 alts to level 10 would give you 120 market slots for minimal effort. (Or PL to 20 for 180 slots).

It depends a lot on the AT and on what you want from the pool. For example Blasters can get an AoE immobilize from the PPPs but the only AoE Mezzes in the APPs are either sleeps or on long recharges. For a Blaster with a large chunk of Ranged Defense an AoE immobilize is actually very useful.

For Defenders the PPPs open up the possibility of a Defense shield instead of a Resist shield.

Masterminds are pretty similar to Blasters, the PPPs have some useful options not available in the APPs (not to mention the decision to remove the shield power in Charge Mastery.

To be honest the VEATs are the one place where the PPPs do make thematic sense. I can get people not liking the VEAT story but the PPPs make perfect sense within the context of that story.

Other than the general complaint that it's not particularly enjoyable I don't think this is really true. Any character who is level 35-49 can run Numina/Mistral and get XPees.
In fact in many ways those are the non-incarnate characters who benefit the most from the WST simply because those levels are when XP starts to slow down.

Sister Psyche/Silver Mantis was fun and nice since almost all characters could participate but the static 5 bars of experience is less useful to a character in the 20s than one in the late 30s or 40s.

Ah, that's not character copy, that's the fast install method. the wiki has an updated fast install method for the new launcher:
http://wiki.cohtitan.com/wiki/Training_Room

Actually you don't even need to do it that way (although that may work). If you go to the first tab in the incarnate window (I forget what it's called) and click on the Alpha Slot it will allow you to select a specific Alpha Boost to slot.

I think the reason for this is actually the fact that it would potentially clip either with the head itself or with manes. Personally I think adding a limited selection of the existing hairstyles (specifically the ones that didn't clip) to the "mane" category (i.e. you can have hair or a mane) would have been a nice compromise although I'm not sure how that would have looked.

In particular having some hairstyles would allow for a more feminine look, currently there isn't really anything to distinguish between male heads and female heads (yes, I know real animals don't differentiate that way but since we're talking about anthropomorphic animals realism isn't a major concern).

Just a small comment about Healers (since it's something that tends to catch people from other MMOs by surprise). In CoH, healing is not the premier form of damage mitigation. Assuming you like playing support characters you can get healing abilities but they are not your most important powers. Healing is useful and especially at low levels is very powerful but as you get to higher levels the utility of healing drops off rapidly compared to other types of buffs/debuffs. Also, Defneders/Corruptors get blast powers for a reason, you're expected to use them .