UberGuy

I thought about that, but I'm not sure how much they will. After all, people can still produce them using Alignment and Reward merits. They have to buy them directly, though. Pool A and B ones can't be produced as random merit rolls.

Rate of production on them will be down due to two things, though - less lowbies in play and less bronze ticket rolls.

You may not be aware, our characters do not start out at low levels with the full mez protection they enjoy at high levels. On a Posi TF your Tanker would have had less than 10 mez protection.

I can't seem to find a reference for how the protection varies with level.

Among all the other reasons given that it's a bad idea to use these kinds of services (you know, like that it's against the rules and they're historically bad about ripping you off), I've never once understood why anyone would pay someone else to play the game for them.

It gets back to the idea of enjoying the journey. Yeah, it's fun to run around on a tricked out 50 and kick *** left, right and center. But you know what I think is even more fun?

Knowing I got there myself.

That's correct.

I exemplar down pretty often, honestly. Several times a week to be sure. Thus I am unlikely to tune my builds to their optimal assumptions for pure level 50 play.

Now, I could set up a cheap-o alternate build that I used to exemplar play. If I didn't trick it out to the max it'd probably be worth doing. The dual build system hasn't appealed to me much previously, though. I may be too lazy to bother.

Says the guy who responded to me with claims that, you know, I'm wrong about the performance of what we're talking about using the example of Tanker in a thread in the Scrapper forum.

Read my previous post again, and if you have hours of research about anything else but a Tanker, please bring it on.

If instead, if all you have is a heap of information about your HO'd Tanker, then I have to wonder why the hell you're talking about it in the Scrapper forum, or why you'd think people who play other ATs would agree with your assessment.

I'm guessing you like to talk out of the wrong orifice a lot.

Are you being sarcastic?

Yes, I was here. I really think what you're saying is ridiculous. I want to know what HOs you had slotted that let you add defense to characters who didn't have any, that let you have the benefits of Hasten (and then some) on every power without Hasten, or which let you have the combination of endurance reduction and recovery to fight non-stop without end.

Are there some builds that were better in those days? If there were, they were probably Tankers, since they were the only ones who can get to 90% DR. (Brutes didn't exist in an pre-ED world except in CoV Beta.) But for everyone else your claims ring very hollow.

(Invul Tankers tank that on the order of that many GMs at Hamidon raids regularly. I haven't bothered to count - it was enough that it was hard to see the Tanker.)

I suspect that's a combination of the addition of A-Merits and the re-weighting of random rolls done back in I16. After I16, the prices on just about all procs dropped dramatically due to significantly increased supply. Increasing the proportional supply of everything on top of that probably led to what you're describing.

I demand the satisfaction of seeing the bone made into powder so fine it will seep between the grains of dirt and sand on which it rests.

I've seen a build or two do it. The -KB protection is pretty attractive in the DR sets for builds like Fire and Dark Armors.

The guy I know who did that (I'm not sure he had 15, but he had around 10) is a PvPer, but the character in question was not built for PvP.

Edit: This assumes you want a significant amount of KB protection. The character in question is a MA/FA Scrapper who can go to town on yellow Mitos at Hamidon Raids protected solely by IO-provided KB protection.

The best part is that almost nobody would choose that route. What I consider sensible players will pick the lowest-hanging fruit from each system. Some market interaction will get you most of the most inexpensive stuff. Some merit earning can be used to obtain things that are maximally expensive and/or low-supply on the market. Playing the game will earn you some drops you can sell or maybe use, some inf and some reward merits. Using the whole system instead of insisting on using only one part of it while ignoring all the others always collapses the time significantly.

I'll take this a step further. This is like this because people want it to be this way. A lot of people, and I dare suggest that most people want there to be greater reward for greater time/effort expended.

People like to suggest that a "farmer" is somehow exploiting the system. Sometimes they do find ways to do that, but "farming" isn't intrinsically exploiting. It's about finding something that's optimally efficient and performing that activity repeatedly.

I still don't understand why you want to do that with a DM/Inv. That's not a build where that kind of recharge is typically sought after.

It just pains me to think that you're putting so much energy into this argument spurred by a build that isn't even getting you the best performance for the money you're (essentially) worried about.

You could not be more mistaken, Blue. That's where the major breakdown is between you and basically every other poster here.

There is no "severe limitation". It's not as if building a character with SOs is hopelessly gimp*. You repeatedly refuse to accept the notion that we've got a game where the baseline character is well-equipped to handle the game, but they offer us ridiculously overboard levels of power if we want to spend the time chasing it. Before they ever added Inventions to the game, all my level 50s played solo on Invincible/Relentless settings, some even padded for two players. (I have two accounts so I would load my second account to increase the number of spawns.) That includes stuff like my Defenders. Now that I have Inventions I do things like run on +2/x6-8.

I'm sorry, but no one is going to accept that every character has to run on settings that high to feel reasonable. It's there for you to chase if you want it, but declaring that it has to be easy to obtain is always going to be a non-starter. Give up trying to convince the larger forum population that this is a reasonable goal. And if you won't convince us, then you will likely never convince the devs with your letter, because the devs are probably much more conservative about this than the players.

* Even if one is unsatisfied with SO builds, it's not as if there aren't easily accessible levels of improvement above that SO baseline through incredibly inexpensive approaches like "frankenslotting", using uncommon or cheap "rare" sets, or buying only limited numbers of very specific expensive items (see: Miracles). The notion that it's "purples and PvPOs or bust" is setting up a false dichotomy.

My average for this kind of activity is probably on the order of 4-6 months per character, including 1-2 months of meticulously playing them from 1-50. This time is not all exclusively spent on that character. There is a period of near exclusivity as I level the character up, but as I get closer to my target build, I diversify more again, going back to playing other characters more.

I have what I believe to be an unorthodox level of commitment to maxing out contact bars which requires me to solo during character leveling and/or turn off XP for parts of it. This means that I almost certainly take (significantly) longer to level than most people. (Edit: than most people with my number of hours played and target levels of min/max performance.) I also end up with more merits than most (but probably not significantly more in the big picture).

When I get a character to 50, I tend to continue to play them heavily for a couple of months at the expense of spending time on other characters. During this time I usually focus on earning money and merits which I use to obtain any missing things I need for them. I buy in a strategic bootstrapping method, by which I mean I buy first the cheapest things that will best increase their base performance, as well as the most expensive items I can obtain in the shortest timeframe.

In practice, this usually means I outfit them as follows.

• During the leveling process, I outfit them with accuracy TOs, then some DOs, then common IOs
• I use existing stock or other characters to "twink" them usually only to the extent of buying expensive "singles" that will improve low-level performance, such as Miracles, Knockback IOs, Kismets, and sometimes LotGs. I try to release low-level "proc-like" IOs from high-level characters during respecs so they can be re-gifted to low-level characters, but if I have none free I will use merits to create one from scratch.
• As the character approaches appropriate levels for sets, I start slotting any I have obtained for the character. For example, in the 40s I would have Touch of Death sets slotted.
• I pay attention to what my build would do when exemplared, but I do not choose sets at lower-than-max levels for this purpose. Instead, I choose only "special" IOs, like LotGs and KB protection IOs with this in mind. This gives me good exemplar performance with ease of acquisition for (near) full sets, since most set pieces are produced at or near their max levels.

Other than the twinking I do with Miracles and the like, I do not specifically use my other characters to buy most of the stuff for my new characters. I prefer to use each character to outfit itself. This is, again, significantly time inefficient by my own choosing. I just like to play the characters like they got their full powers mostly on their own. This also means that each of my characters has large pools of cash on hand that they do not spend on one another. This was, for example, how I was able to readily afford a PvPO - by the time I was "done" focusing on the character that I ended up wanting a PvPO for, she had 2.3 billion inf all to herself.

At times, when a build is nearly complete, I will have a fully functioning build that has almost all the sets I planned but is one or two short. Depending on what those sets do, I may defer 100% completion beyond the time frame given at the top of this post. I usually have dual motivations in this. If this happens, it's usually because the last few pieces in the build are very expensive, and I need more time to obtain them. However, hearkening back to comments in this thread about the joy being in the journey and not the destination, I also like having a reason to keep coming back to the character. If I've got them to say, 90% or 95% of where I want them, and have built up my character with the best cost/performance components first, then I have an extremely effective character already, and playing them to get that last 5-10% of their build and performance will be lots of fun to me. I don't begrudge the system giving me a reason to play them.

Remember, there are at least thee things I could do to shorten this cycle. I could level faster by being less anal retentive about completing content. I could either set up forward-planning market activites on my active character to earn money for future purchases. (Notice there was no mention of marketeering in my write up. I could also or instead market stuff on other characters who I am not playing.) I could also give myself money from other characters who are, essentially, needlessly wealthy. So my 4-6 month timeframe could probably be reduced to more like 2-4 months by someone who focused more on efficiency than on the sense of self-development that I invest in my characters.

Patience is for when you aren't willing to pay more for something.

There's no "breaking" involved. We can store inf in other places, or even as items that we sell for money. All the 2B "cap" prevents is that you can execute such a purchase as a single transaction. (Maybe. You could make the trade using the trade window in Inf plus things like crafted purples.) It in no way, form or manner prevents the purchase from happening.

I'm lovin' it.

Anyone who has run across the right threads with me knows I'm a dogged poster. On top of that, I thought it deserved something that B_C did change his tone, if not his position. I wanted to try and give info at least related to what he asked for during the transition.

Unfortunately, at the core, it seems awfully hard to convince B_C that his actual, non-theoretical, mechanical experience with using the market to obtain IOs can be different or better than the way he's experienced it so far. If love your cat, and your experience with microwave ovens was that you put your cat in there, pressed a button and got a cooked cat, you aren't going to like microwave ovens much. I try hard not to use my microwave like that, and I'm probably a lot more satisfied with it as a result.

No one here can make anyone like using the market, but we can show ways that allow doing so to at least be useful, practical, and even convenient at times. But if B_C won't believe us, or take any of the lessons to heart, then I agree the discussion doesn't have much value, no matter how dogged one is.