UberGuy

When DB for Stalkers was introduced, there were a lot of negative comments about how the combos were laid out.

It seems like it might be an effort to cover up the loophole that bypassing the launcher allows. By not using the launcher, you are able to avoid accepting the agreement. I am not sure how well that would work as some sort of legal defense for violating those terms, but maybe this is a response to someone (RMT, for example?) wriggling out of something on that basis.

Other than it being vaguely ugly and slightly time consuming to present it there, it doesn't bother me. (I bypass the launcher all the time. It's faster for me to do so.)

I too agree that recipes are the way to go. It seems to me a tiny fraction of people bother shopping anywhere but at the top and bottom of the level range for items. There used to be some other critical levels, like level 33 for Siren's Call builds, but that seems to have dried up since I13.

Edit: The above recommendation was from the perspective of optimal profits. However, in terms of academic interest, you might try a common high-level common arcane. Personally, I have long been confused by the trend in common high-level arcane salvage. For a long time after Family and Freak farms were nerfed, common high-level arcane salvage was cheap on hero side, and high-level tech salvage was cheap villain side. I always attributed this to the farming of Demons on hero side and Nemesis on villain side. However, for some time before the market merge, and definitely after, it's tech salvage that is vastly oversupplied on the merged market, and supply of arcane salvage appears fragile. This surprises me, with the presumption of people playing level 50 content. It's not as simple as Praetoreans just dropping tech, either. (As far as I know, they don't. I got an arcane rare from a War Works bot on one of the new TFs.)

I'm not sure where you're seeing other people tell you how you should play in the sense that I think you mean to convey. There are more challenging aspects about the new content. If you're having problems with them, and other supposedly "elite" players are succeeding, would you rather they tell you how they did it in case it might help you, or to just nod and concur that you should give up now?

I won't say no one in this thread is taking an elitist attitude, but let's not apply that label anyone who can complete more difficult content, or who would like some more difficult content.

In any case, wanting to tell other people how to play the game isn't an intrinsic aspect of "munchkinism" in games. It's entirely possible to be a "munckin" without lording it over anyone whatsoever, except possibly your game master in a pen & paper setting. Nor is it intrinsic in less "munchkinlike" min/maxing.

I think this particular item is a good example of some strong instability in the market. When I say "instability", I don't mean the market is going to collapse, or something negative. I mean that conditions come about that are highly sensitive to abrupt and strong change.

The supply of this salvage is pretty high. It took what sounds like a lot of effort for one person to manage draining it so that the price could be manipulated. After all, we have mention of the 30-second timer on logging out being a hassle during the exercise. In general, that supply currently seems to exceed demand, enough that listed supply tends to build up. When this started there were over 1000 for sale. There's nothing quite equivalent to Field Crafter that naturally causes people to consume large amounts of any given Uncommon salvage, so the shift of people running level 50 content seems a likely culprit for general depression of most all high-level commons and uncommons.

However, we just recently went through a period of immense price rise fueled by an AE exploit. I suspect that inf production rates are still high, due, if nothing else, to more people playing 50s more than before to wrap up their uncommon Alpha slots. Increased supply is depressing prices, but lots of currency is still available to throw at goods who's supply dries up, and there is still probably a bit of desensitization to high prices after the AE exploit. Yank the supply on something currently under-supplied and the prices quickly shoot back to levels comparable to the end of I18.

So this is basically a good time to conduct this sort of experiment. Kudos on finding a suitable target and not losing your shirt. It may be a bit easier to pull off than at many times in the past, but it still was a seeming success that's not guaranteed to work.

If you did the market any good, it would have been in terms of the total transaction rate of Temporal Tracers. The low price and high supply may have dissuaded people who wouldn't sell everything anyway from bothering to list their Tracers. At 300k a pop, anyone who saw that would probably be willing to get in on that action, and this more have been listed for sale per day, especially during days two and three. However, I don't know of a way we could show this actually happened.

Placate is incredibly valuable. It's so much more than a double-damage capability. It's an auto-hit, affect-any-rank soft control power. Any spawn that has critters in it you don't like, placate lets you turn one of them off, guaranteed.*

Also, if you choose the right attack to crit with the net effect on DPS of getting double damage (or especially AS damage) is positive. You come out ahead in damage/time, which is usually a key factor in progress/time, survival, or both.

* Barring some bugs with critters you have applied some debuffs or DoTs to, which you won't be able to placate. You can avoid this by placating a mob you are not (yet) attacking.

No worries, I wasn't terribly specific either. Thus my explanations above.

Yeah. In this regard I find the alpha boosts fairly intelligently engineered. They do benefit high-end builds who want to use them to eke out every last drop of some already strong stat, but they are far more beneficial rounding out stats that are away from ED max.

The place they don't always have the best synergy is with set bonuses. I have many powers in many characters where underslotting is not a viable option, because doing so would deprive me of set bonuses that are important to me. However, there are some exceptions. Cardiac and Spiritual both provide something that I rarely have ED max slotting for, but would almost always love to be better slotted. This can be particularly beneficial for powers that are six slotted for a particular set bonus, since that pretty clearly denies me frankenslotting opportunities.

On such builds, that means that the benefits of the alpha slot tend to vary widely from power to power, but I have some leeway to choose the boost that gives any given character the best bang. For example, I have a DM/Regen for whom the uncommon Spiritual boost isn't giving ultra-strong benefit on things like Reconstruction or Moment of Glory, because those are already ED-slotted for recharge. But her single-target attacks are six slotted with Touch of Death, which grants a mere ~43.4% recharge. I'm not even going to hit the worst of ED using the Very Rare Spiritual Core with that base. So while my already strong recharge powers aren't going to change a ton, for my attacks, it's like I picked up 30%+ global recharge.

So now, even just the common or uncommon boost, Hasten and my existing global recharge bonus, I'm just a hair shy of being able to run DM's optimal DPS attach chain gaplress. (According to my calculations, I have a 0.2s gap in my chain, and I get confirmation in the form of a "not recharged" woo sound just a tad before that attack goes off.) Combined with a small improvement in my key survival powers, I'm pretty darn happy with the result.