Adeon Hawkwood

Assault/Maneuvers/Vengeance is also a potentially useful option (depending on your build). Room for 2 LotGs and the powers are slightly more useful than the concealment ones.

I suspect it was people using the exploit to level. The market for lower level recipes is a bit iffy so if they were maxing out their tickets while leveling spending it on rare salvage for a guaranteed profit would make sense.

Fixed that for you . To me that is the thing that makes this a lot more reasonable. Yes it would allow people to farm the AE and get A-Merits but there is a 20 hour gate on how often they can do it.

*cough* yeah... I suspect we both misread it the same way. The Plum bit came about partly due to me forcing myself to remember that it starts with P and NOT B.

Sorry about that, I already read your name as PlumBlumber.

I see where you're coming from but personally I prefer to consider all of my powers in the context of the entire build rather than simply primary/secondary. A mez power in my secondary (ignoring the damage based ones like Bitter Freeze Ray) is in my mind an additional buff/debuff power and will be selected of skipped on that basis. The nature of the power means it generally has less utility than the buff/debuff powers available in my primary but I still prefer to consider it's usefulness as a buff/debuff power first and foremost.

Sure I can see that. My point is that from a rewards point of view 200 tickets is already roughly equivalent to 1 merit. If I do a random rare recipe roll under the current rules it doesn't matter whether I spend 4000 tickets or 20 merits, the outcome is the same. Tickets do give better rewards on a per time basis than merits but that is because while farming merits you can get other drops (and AE is a little imbalanced). An exchange ratio or 200 tickets per merit would make merits easier to get but it wouldn't increase the rewards you already get for farming the AE it would simply change what you can spend them on (which brings us back to Plum's point about the devs setting it up to cushion things).

9,999 Tickets is almost enough for 3 gold rolls. 1 reward merit is 1/20 of a gold roll. I realize you don't like the idea but I don't get how you could see that being an even remotely worthwhile exchange rate from the anyone's point of view. If you said something like 300 it would make sense, that's high enough that you're still better off spending the tickets directly on random rolls but low enough that someone desperate for a direct buy might take it.

I think we're talking at cross purposes here. I'm not advocating 200 tickets for one a-merit, that would be stupid, I'm talking 200 tickets for one reward merit.

That is a potential concern, however I think the fact that you could only generate 1 a-merit a day with this method would be sufficient gating. It would, admittedly, make it easier to get that one merit a day (at least for people with farming characters) compared to running TFs.

Also we are apparently in agreement . I proposed 200 tickets = 1 merit, since it takes 50 merits to get one a-merit that means 10,000 to buy the reward merits needed to get the daily a-merit.

Huh, I've not heard of that before. I would recommend posting about it in the mids forum:
http://www.cohtitan.com/forum/index....db17c9c60b&c=5

That's an... unusual viewpoint. The majority of the mez powers in blast sets are balanced around being a mez power with the damage component being essentially there for flavor. There are exceptions (such as in Ice and Dark) but most of the blast set mez powers have minimal damage.

You might want to take a look at Mids' Hero Designer:
http://www.cohplanner.com/

It does the math for you which makes things a lot easier .

Actually the suppression seems to have been removed. I did some testing with it a few nights ago and was able to chain the recharge boosts together. You can't double stack it but it doesn't seem to suppress anymore. I'd link to the wiki as proof but since I put the edit noting that it no longer applied in the wiki that would be kinda pointless .

There is definitely some truth in this and I think it's a pity. It is worth taking the majority of the powers in a buff/debuff sets no matter what AT you're playing. As for Leadership I personally apply the same standards for Defenders as I do for other ATs, it's my go-to choice for filler powers. I generally won't pass up a primary/secondary power I want for Leadership but if I've got a spare power choice I generally use Leadership to fill it (the other prime option is Recall Friend).

Assault Rifle and Archery are pretty close to Fire in terms of lack of secondary effect and they both got ported. AR has a very small defense debuff and a bit of knockback while Archery has just one attack power with knockback (ignoring the stuns in both obviously since those aren't secondary effects).

They can, and most good defenders do.

Yes, I realize that people would find ways to maximize ticket gain, they already do after all. My question is:
How would they spend the merits that would be more profitable than the current options for tickets?

Nope, read my other posts, I frankly don't care one way or the other. I spend both tickets and merits on random rolls so a conversion wouldn't impact me at all. My argument has simply been that if an exchange was implemented 200:1 would be a sensible exchange rate. Please don't put words in my mouth.

Sure, totally irrelevant to the point I'm making though

That's actually rather insulting. Swing by the market forum sometime and ask there. Most people opt for random rolls since on average you come out ahead compared to direct buying. You get about 12 times as many recipes doing random rolls compared to direct buys. Direct buys are a good choice if you want to avoid risk but you don't get as much over a pro-longed period.

Yep I read them all. The basic argument seems to be:
"200:1 is ridiculous because it would mean an average of 2.5 merits a minute which is higher than the developers intended" (using 1500 tickets in 3 minutes, I've seen a few different values posted so I'm picking one semi randomly, it doesn't matter to much)

My counter-argument is:
1. The general consensus I've seen amongst marketeers is that when converting merits to inf random rolls are best
2. At 1500 tickets in 3 minutes you can already get a random roll in 7.4 minutes which is equivalent to 2.7 merits a minute anyway (given that 30-34 and 35-39 are more popular rolls than 45-50)
3. Therefore under the current reward structure adding a 200:1 conversion rate would not actually change the time to reward from farming the AE since it would be more profitable to take the tickets and do gold rolls instead of converting them to merits.

If I've misunderstood people's core argument or there's a counter-counter argument I've missed please, feel free to enlighten me.

I fail to see what point you're trying to make here. In fact I would say the fact that a person prefers random rolls would generally make them indifferent to the OPs idea since it wouldn't change how they personally interacted with either merits or tickets. Unless the devs had a complete loss of sanity and set the Ticket to merit ratio low enough that you could get more random rolls by converting tickets to merits than you can using tickets directly adding a ticket to merit exchange doesn't change random rolls at all.