UberGuy

For most stuff, I think prices may have peaked after the combination of the great Monkey roast, plus the wave of I19 respecs. Prices of things recently expensive I have been selling have been falling this week.

Of course, that could be a short-term trend. I'll know better when I see what they do on the weekend. In my experience, the average price of given stuff rises on the weekend, presumably because "want it nao" demand is higher.

Purples have been doing some interesting things. It's not clear to me where they are trending. Lowball pricing has been on a steady rise on several of them. Their prices do seem to fall mid-week, but not as much. That could just be because their rate of supply is a lot lower than most other stuff, so their long-term trend tends to be even longer term than some other goods.

Being able to jump off of a one story building and probably being injured and sometimes even killed would be realism. What we have here with respect to taking falling damage is the barest nod towards realism's general direction.

You guys are saying it yourselves. "I just don't feel as epic," "I feel much more effective on a team". Are you more effective with more AoEs? Sure, in terms of raw, total DPS across all foes, AoEs in this game are basically always more effective.

This gets back to the point I made in my very first post. Why are you so worried about being that much more effective? If it makes you feel super in some inner RP kind of way, then I have no argument with it. If you're really concerned about the performance benefit, I think you're playing the wrong game. An experienced player can steamroll most of the content in this game with three fingers and a straw to drive the controls. Unless it's truly an internalized preference about what feels fun, I can't wrap my head around worrying about it. Play what you want, make it the best it can be and enjoy yourself. If you need AoEs to enjoy yourself, go to town building for them, but if you don't, don't sweat it.

I'll tell you what, though. If you're in love with AoEs, I wouldn't run around trumpeting it. The reason you guys feel this way about single-target damage is that AoEs are massively imbalanced here. I am pretty certain that the only way this situation will change, assuming it ever does, will not be to make single-target damage better.

Did you forget to leave "Hover" in that snippage?

It's not just you, but it's not uniformly considered hard. For example, I find the TF straightforward, and have not yet been on a run of it where I did not end up with the "Master of" badge. I think the most I've ever died in one run was twice. I usually don't die, even in the last mission.

The strategy I use is as follows. The main challenge in my view is the patches on the ground. Keep an eye on the ground, and stop activating powers when you see a patch appear under you. If you have queued powers, cancel them. (This took me a few tries to get into my reflex reaction to the patches.) Move away from the visible warning patch, quickly. It's best to keep active a movement power that doesn't suppress, such as Sprint, Combat Jumping or even Hover (or any combination thereof), so you can move away swiftly.

If you are a melee character and Battle Maiden is left in a patch, use whatever ranged powers you have on her until either she comes out of the patch or the patches on her expire. Then re-engage in melee range. This may lead to a hit-and-fade situation where you beat on her, patches form on her and you recede, then the patches on her fade and you can go back in, then the cycle repeats. She doesn't seem especially regenerative, and this hasn't been a problem for teams I have been on, even when melee-heavy.

Beware the brown hills behind where Battle Maiden appears. My experience is that the warning patches do not dutifully appear on top of the terrain, and sometimes clip into the hill. This means the nanite patches can seemingly appear without due warning.

I play with sound on. The patches have a very distinct incoming sound. If you are having trouble seeing them, try using the sound as a warning. It's much louder if it's centered on or centered near you.

If you can't afford to ignore her swords and subordinates during the fight, or if you are fighting during BM's retreat phase, the advice I've been given is to concentrate on the human subordinates. I believe this is because there is a literally never-ending supply of sword waves, but the same is not true of the human allies.

The patches are extraordinarily damaging. They ignore defense and resistance, and their DoT frequency is very high. I don't even recommend jousting through them, though it's do-able with strong enough healing and high HP.

Edit: One last bit of advice regarding flying and hovering. The patches appear at the elevation the character they targeted was at. However, the patch effects themselves are a sphere. This can lead to the situation where a flier can cause a patch in mid-air that people watching the ground may not see but which can still kill them. The recommendation here is for fliers to stick near the ground, and if anyone forms an "air patch", they should warn the team ASAP.

Why?

You know, I knew PvPOs didn't care about exemplar, but for some reason I never made the connection that would mean the level of this thing wouldn't matter.

My understanding is also that you only take damage if you land at a point lower than where you "touched off" from, and that the damage was based on how much lower your landing point was from your starting point.

The ticket cap varies by map. The largest is 1500 tickets, and that includes the end bonus. That means that, barring any bonus ticket effects you have going on, there's no point (from a ticket earning perspective) in earning more than 750 tickets fighting foes even on the largest of maps, since the completion bonus matches the number of tickets earned up until then.

The rise from 0 to max is wildly variable. It depends on your character and what they are fighting. It's possible to tune foes in the AE to your own strengths and weaknesses, which can make you more efficient than otherwise. Note, however, that building farms in the AE is ... frowned upon, and a farming arc can get banned and the AE mission slot locked out, if it's reported or otherwise discovered.

It has significantly longer base recharge than those powers, and it cannot critical. It also has a longer activation time, and activation times affect base damage in PvP, because PvP attacks are "balanced" around normalized DPA.

I suspect the power is not broken, based on the rules they use.

Yep. And given the rarified market for these, I think you are likely to find people who really don't give a damn what level it is. If you can find someone in the know, they may actually pay you more for a minimum level one. That is what tends to happen with pool C stuff that follows these rules - the sale rate is lower, but the price you can get is generally higher.

Here are how I approach these.

• Work with what you have. If you have any in-powerset defenses, use them as your basis. If they are positional, build for more positional, and if they are damage-typed, build for more damage typed. If you have zero in-powerset defense or all your defense is uniform against all positions and types (like Weave), then this doesn't matter.
• Positional defenses only have a "hole" to non-positional attacks. Damage-typed defenses typically have a "hole" to Psi and Toxic damage. In my experience, non-positional attacks are (much) more rare than Psi attacks, though there are well-known psi attacks that are also non-positional. Addressing the Psi "hole" in a damage typed build would require you to build for a fourth defense type, because Psi damage defense isn't paired with anything else. Of course. it's actually impossible to build for Toxic defense, making it good that pure Toxic attacks are fairly rare. A saving grace of damage-typed builds here is that you always end up with some positional defense, so if you're worried say about positional Psi and Toxic attacks, you can try to beef up your E/N and F/C defenses which will also increase your ranged and AoE defenses. (There aren't enough melee pure Psi or Toxic attacks to focus on, IMO, and good L/S defense will have moderate to good Melee defense already.)
• Work with what you can get some uniformity with. For positional defense, I like 25+% Melee/ 20+ % Ranged / 15+% AoE. For damage-typed, I like 25+% L/S / 20+% E/N, / 15+% F/C. These are bare minimums, IMO, and I definitely like some of these values to be higher if I can pull it off, especially in first two categories. I have a preference for Positional defense, because I like being able to think tactically about my admitted damage by position - high melee defense = less damage when in melee, for example. However, I have found some characters for whom I could not build for positional defense and get sufficient defense in the Ranged and AoE positions without making undesirable sacrifices in other areas of my build. In these cases, I was still able to build for high L/S defense, and moderate E/N and F/C defense that met my minimums above.
• I rate the positional defenses in importance (high to low) as Melee, Ranged, and then AoE. Ranged damage used to be somewhat ignorable. However, mobs now regularly fire their ranged attacks even standing in your face, so moderate to high ranged defense is now fairly important, IMO. AoE defense may be least important of the three, but can be very important if you face much in the way of AVs and Giant Monsters.
• I rate the typed defenses in importance (high to low) as L/S, E/N and F/C. Vast amounts of attacks in the game have a Lethal or Smashing component, so high L/S is the biggest bang for your buck. Dark and Energy attacks are also very common, and frequently have no L/S component. Dark Blast and Electric attacks are great examples. Fire and Cold are relatively uncommon, and very frequently have Lethal or Smashing components attached, at least to damaging attacks.

If I could cap whatever I want, I would go positional, because I feel it offers the least conditional protection.

* Sends Stan a No-Prize.