UberGuy

Exactly right.

They would have to add/change code to allow mobs to drop things above their native level. Nothing exists today that can drop things that are more than three levels above the entity's level.

Then you weren't looking. And lol @ meow being the most severe of the exploits. The worst (or best, depending on perspective) came later.

Apocalypse pieces hit 800M during the height of the exploits.

Yes, they have.

During the height of the early AE exploits, purples were significantly more expensive than they have been for a long time after those exploits were (mostly) quashed. Purples have only gone back to those price levels now with I18, and it seems some recent exploits may have been in the mix.

If you meant to say they've never gone back to the prices they had at introduction, then I agree. But then again, almost nothing has, not even the high-end Pool C/D stuff with its post AMerit price decrease.

I truly don't understand. If what was out in GR beta was any indication, we're going to be able to do things our I0-I3 characters would never have been able to touch.

A lot of what's changed that's downgraded what our characters can do are not changes to powers, but almost environmental changes. The way mobs used to stack into the same spot was one of the most enabling things for the crazy stuff we used to do back then. Combine that with no aggro cap and no AoE cap and mad hi jinx ensue.

And that's some of the stuff that's changed that we'll never get back to - having no target cap on AoEs and no cap on aggro. Those things get down to our core XP/time efficiency. If you can herd unlimited numbers of foes and AoE them all, your XP per time goes up radically. The fact that the devs believe they have to limit stuff like that mean those changes are here to stay.

So yes, peak XP rates went down from the glory days. But in general, what my characters can achieve individually is vastly greater now than it was then, especially when I look at improvement across all my characters instead of just specifically at the powersets who were god-like in the old times.

The flippers lost market share after the merge. If they had a niche to themselves on one side, they probably ended up in competition with another flipper after the merge.

The new market is more price stable, especially if you were a villain. Aggregate supply rates are higher, which tends to reduce price instability, and price instability is a flipper's friend.

The point is, you seem to be saying that the merged market increased the influence flippers have on prices, and the opposite is true.

Supply is greatest for the recipes that level 50s can produce. This includes not only level 50 recipes, but the maximum level for other desirable sets that don't extend all the way to 50. Examples are level 40 for Miracles and Touch of Death, and level 35 for Kinetic Combat.

However, there is a a somewhat odd tendency of people to pay the most for level 50 recipes. Whether this is because they value the maximum enhancement benefit (and don't care about how set bonuses act when exemplared), or because they don't care to riffle through all the recipe levels looking for a better deal, the concentration of supply at 50 (or other caps) seems to have concentrated demand there as well.*

So be aware, while you'll probably find a lot of what you want, you may have to pay more for it if you actually buy at the maximum level.

* There are exceptions, where people also pay a premium for the very minimum level of items that are nice to have at low levels. Examples include KB protection IOs, Miracle and Nimuna uniques, Luck of the Gambler: +Recharge and Performance Shifter procs. Supply tends to exist at the minimum level presumably because people can use merits to produce these items at that specific level, and the lowest level possible gives the longest benefit (if you're leveling up with it) or the best exemplar benefit (for global effects like the LotG or KB protection IOs).

I don't agree. If this were the only way to produce purples, I would. But I think the market supply of them from regular L50 play undercuts them trending to a billion unless there are perturbations that drag down that supply. More people actually try to find better bargains on things this expensive - downward forces on the buyer's buy price are high, and I think the existing market supply is sufficient to yield to those downward pressures in general.

I think that AMerit supply increases undercut the equilibrium pricing we had for Pool C/D rares based on RMerit production rates. I think that AMerit supply rates for purples are too below level 50 production rates of Purples to do the same there. Part of that is in terms of absolute cost, but part is also due to the extremely high opportunity cost of the AMerit cost of purples vs. pool C/D rares. (One purple's cost could produce 100 random pool C/D rares, or between 10 and 20 specific ones ... or more.)

Now, the Pool C/D undercutting has allowed money expenditures to shift from those rares to purples, and that is raising purple prices. But I don't think it's reasonable that the AMerit to inf price ratio of pool C/D vs purples really drive the market price of purples, because I don't believe AMerits are the dominant supply factor.

Agreed.

I fracking despise the use of temp powers the way they were applied in the Barracuda TF. On the up side, it sounds like Aeon probably gets that, as he explicitly mentioned not waiting on Archetype X to join the team. That comment covers a lot more than the temp power situation, but I take it as inclusive.

I'd say it's more because they are planning to respec anyway, so why not work some purples into the mix?

But I do have to say, that's not in line with the way Lothic's post is worded.

I did that once with Nemesis Jaegers in PI, on a BS/Inv. The resulting explosion(s) nearly killed me. Some other players were passing by and actually commented on the noise and light show, because they thought at 1st that it was the Fire/Fire blaster with me using Inferno.

Of note: ToT mobs appear to drop zero invention salvage. If a lot of people are standing around at doors badging and PL-ing, or even chasing GMs around for merits, they are producing zero salvage.

I'm usually a significant market producer of salvage, as I play regular mishes on high team size settings and normally sell all my drops. Since the Halloween event started, I've provided jack squat in terms of salvage.

Eh, due to enhancement I will be at the fly cap on everyone I've been playing since I18 even after they fix this. But I do get the sense of at least mild sadness at "loosing" the accidental overage part the buff. I'd just remind folks that most of them probably won't notice once it's fixed back to where the devs meant it to be, at least if they have SO-level enhancement slotted. (If they normally fly around using temp powers, I guess they'll notice it. >.>)

I'll gladly take the benefits IOs over rolling back ED. And yes, I do think there's no way in blue blazes they'd let us have both.

No, but like MJ, I find it a little hard to accept that sort of difference really being meaningful, and thus being serious feedback. Seriously, that's the difference in me getting a couple of bags of chips from the office vending machine. Either I like the set enough to buy or I don't - the cost of a couple of bags of chips while stuck at work doesn't factor into the equation. If you saw something in the pack you really wanted to buy it for, would you really be unwilling to give up two dollars of something else over the course of three months to afford it?

I'm not saying it's impossible your situation is such that two dollars really makes the difference for you, but it does seem an extremely fine point to me.

I get using "mods" to mean "modifiers" in the sense that damage buffs modify a power's damage. As a direct reply to what I said cutting out "AT", it wasn't clear to me that was what you were doing. I thought you were correcting me and/or mistaking the behavior of the vet powers as related to what mod tables they used.

Yes, they always do the same damage for all ATs (at a given level). That's because they do not use the regular AT modifiers table used by most attacks.

That has nothing to do with why you can't buff their damage. That they ignore damage buffs is a different aspect of the power.

PS: I'm being derriere-puckeringly technical about terms here just to clarify what I meant. There's no real argument going on here from my perspective.