UberGuy

The total amount of money that could exist in the game is theoretically infinite. (In practice it's the total amount of money one character can hold times the number of characters one player can create times the maximum number of players the game could support. For our purposes, I'm sure we can consider that "infinity")

However, the rate at which money is being created is finite. It's the aggregate rate of generation by all players actually playing, usually one character at a time. Sure, some folks play 2 or more 50s at a time, but some people (almost certainly a lot more) play lowbies a lot, who inject comparatively very little into the money pool.

Strictly, for purposes of this discussion, it doesn't matter quite so much how much money exists, but how much of existing money is being circulated back and for through the game market. I suspect a great deal of inf exists "trapped" on characters whose players don't use the market, or who have active accounts but don't play so much now, etc.

The flow of inf that's active in the market is important. When I want to buy something expensive, I intercept bits of that flow over time, add them together, then throw them back into the market when I buy, less the -10% fees. So not only is there new money probably being injected into the market as people kill foes and vendor recipes then buy something with the proceeds, but most of the money taken off the market by market sales is re-injected into the market when the sellers buy something with their sale proceeds.

If money is injected into the market, and the people who get it keep turning it back into the market by buying things with it, then the sellers buy with it again, and so on, 1 billion inf can power just shy of 10B inf in market transactions, before market fees eat it away to nothing. (Edit: It would be 10B exactly, but because we deal in round inf numbers, some of it is rounded out of existence.)

So imagine that I take 1B inf off of the market in proceeds from my own sales, and then never put any of it back. That's ~10B in transactions that can't happen until someone puts another billion back into the system.

This is the idea which gets people to destroy inf. It's not "destroy inf once, lower prices forever." You have to keep destroying inf, because of course people keep creating it and putting some of what they create into the market economy. How much are they lowering real prices? No idea. But the theory is sound, even though we don't know if it's worth doing in practice.

Unless everyone starts destroying inf, I can tell you that the only people with a chance in hell of using it to lower prices are the really high-roller market users (be they marketeers or something like a PvPO farmer), because they can aggregate cash from the market at rates higher than anyone. So while it's usually only a pursuit for those who are so wealthy they feel they have info to "burn", that's fine, because that's the people who are most likely to have an impact anyway.

Not correct. You do not need to keep the power. Only the IO level constraint applies.

So, you want people to have to spend more slots to get the same benefit they have today, and you consider that a better result?

You can't just make a suggestion about how to "improve" the pool and then wave your hand at the fact that your suggestion actually makes the pool harder to use to the same benefit.

I don't think that's why they did it. You could still stack multiple castings of it until they did this. I don't really know anyone who did it in practice, but I know it was possible. This now appears to truly prevent that.

When we say "the buyer" we don't mean each person as they come along.

We mean that the sellers only sell at prices that the buyers teach them will work. If we list too high over that, odds are good that we'll have to sit there, waiting an uncommonly long time to sell that item, assuming it ever moves.

When you can't get the price you want currently, that means other players are consistently willing to pay more than you are offering to.

Do you ask this because you do think it's worth its reward? Because I do not think it is even remotely worth the cat herding, even if you complete it in 10 minutes.

Frankly, because none of the existing game mechanics work that way. If you need X to win, bringing a metric butt-ton of X means you will win really, really fast.

Killing Rularuu takes some moderate coordination and a lot of effective DPS (which includes -regen). If you have the coordination down and bring huge amounts of DPS, you're going to win in a hurry.

It really is that simple.

Nukes are something that can help if you don't have a lot of "native" DPS. If you have a lot of "native" DPS, you don't need nukes. But if you let nukes exist for the sake of people who don't have lots of buffers and/or heavily IO-laden characters on the trial, then you also have to let the people who do have lots of buffers and/or IO-heavy characters bring nukes too.

Making the trial objective be a big, tall, sack of HP will always work this way.

Edit: In GR beta, Castle said he couldn't replicate the Aspect attacking when he was in his bubble. Is this still the case? If so, this perplexes the living hell out of me, because I have never seen or heard of him staying passive when invulnerable.

Also part of the edit: Giving a version of the AV Hurricane sucks (blows?) bigtime for anyone with a melee AT. Yeah, you can bring a tray full of yellow inspirations. That doesn't seem like the way it ought to work, though. First time I went on a CoP, we were melee heavy, and we got the Hurricane AV and just couldn't kill him because we lost a ton of DPS when the melees could not hit. We tried again with more ranged characters and I'm pretty sure we got the other AV, and he folded like a house of cards.

Accuracy TOs are, in fact, the only TOs I slot.

We're discussing whether or not DM's average DPS is higher with Soul Drain than with Build Up. If you can hit at least 3 targets, it's basically the same, and if you can hit more, it's higher.

You seem to be arguing that at least 3 targets is somehow not a reliable situation in general in order to defend the position that the DPS of a Stalker is not lower with BU than it would be with Soul Drain.

You've additionally tried to suggest that having AS makes up the difference, particularly because it's all negative damage. In response to that I've argued that:

• AS isn't the only all-negative damage in DM. In fact, it's two hardest hitting non-AS attacks are pure negative energy.
• AS is harder to utilize to it's full DPS contribution in the conditions under which people most tend to care about being able to deliver high DPS. Those are:

• Larger-than-baseline team size settings, particularly if you are not using a defensive secondary
• Steamrolling (particularly in teams, but even the solo version since it often involves moving from foe to foe and movement has weird latency problems)

Really? And how does that compare with the benefit of a shorter power?

There's a value judgment in here that this playstyle is inherently detrimental. People play this way for a reason. It's highly rewarding in terms like XP or drops per hour.

What does this have to do with what we're discussing? I am not trying to convince anyone to change Stalkers to have Soul Drain. I am only discussing how the existing design of Stalker DM plays into the arguments of people who might overlook Stalkers for other characters. The original point was that Stalker DM is about as "AoE-ish" as Scrapper (or Brute) DM, but lacks the AT-mod-adjusted sustainable DPS of the Scrapper version because the average +damage contribution of Build Up of is very likely to be lower

Then we should stop arguing, because that's all I was replying to you about.

I'm really not sure what that has to do with much. Increasing team size is much more common in my experience than ramping up the level of foes beyond +2 or +3, for exactly the kind of reasons you mention. (It also has to do an awful lot with the fact that more foes of a given level is typically more rewarding/time than fewer of the same foes at a higher level. The sweet spot is basically +2 - beyond that reward/time tends to fall off.) Edit: The point here is that playing on +0/x1 isn't something that someone who cares about which power gives better sustained DPS is likely to do anyway.

I'm not sure why you're asking me that question. You've captured very succinctly one of the main positions people who pass over Stalkers take when they do so. They conveniently ignore that this is a problem for almost any single-target damage dealer in that context. If they're skipping Stalkers they should also probably skip over DM or MA Scrappers, EM Brutes, etc. I'm not defending that anyone should heap this on Stalkers. Read my original post in this thread. I said that Stalker balance decisions should not be based on this.

What I'm now arguing with about four people is how the steamroller playstyle interacts with AS. I've qualified my statements in earlier posts agree that AS is good for slower pace and to be talking specifically about how it works at very aggressive pacing. Under such conditions, AS is either hard to use (interruptable by damge or {lingering} movement) or overkill. In many but not all cases, I find it is simpler and more reliable to avoid using it, because I don't need to use it. If I am using it less because I don't need it, then sure as hell my team doesn't need me using it, and so we can't use the availability of AS as a reason to bring a Stalker on a steamroller team, which I felt was something being argued earlier.

None of that applies in the same way. Soul Drain works so long as I am in place. It cannot be interrupted. The game only has to think I'm in (roughly) the correct vicinity. Moreover, I get the buff for every valid target in range at activation, whether or not the target is alive when the animation completes. This is radically different than AS.

See earlier comments about AS overkill on damaged opponents. Might I not have much left to kill once Soul Drain goes off? Absolutely and that happens plenty. Of course I also have 30 seconds to carry it into the next spawn or so and maybe pop off Shadow Maul or MG on a hard target.

No, it's simply not for any condition where you can hit three enemies or more. It's that simple. The math is not conditional, and I'd like for you to present a defense of the likelyhood that you cannot activate the power with at least three enemies in range. I'd especially like you do defend that notion when playing solo on something like x4.

I'm really not sure where you get that notion. Can you explain it?

In a team context, DPS does not have to be measured only against single targets. Even if a team is not AoE heavy, you still have multiple targets spread around, and the single-target melee optimally spread around and engage multiple targets that they can each defeat rapidly. Being high DPS composed of smaller, fast attacks means that you have an ability to tear down these smaller targets rapidly and move to another one. If your primary contribution is a large burst of damage, you're going to need to beeline for the big targets or you're going overkill something and then other people will kill off the rest, possibly including the target you move to after you defeat your AS target. Unfortunately, everyone likes to pile on the bosses. In my experience this gets back to a boss being 1/2 dead before the AS goes off. Sure, I could go obliterate some minion, and that sometimes makes sense (Sappers, anyone?) but I find in general it seriously downplays the value of the large burst of damage AS delivers.

See seeb's response. I explained clearly that the issue in a "steamroller" environment is not (always) that the target is dead, but that AS is overkill that happens to come bundled with interruptibility.

This is absolutely true. And it's the kind of situations that people who complain about adding a Stalker to a team use to "justify" that, because Stalkers are generally more single-target oriented than other ATs with the same powersets. There's some aspect of their fragility in there, but most of what I see centers around the AoE factor.

See my comments about mobility, above. If I have to move to the target, wait for the game to acknowledge that I am no longer moving, and then wait out the activation, I just don't have a target who's worth Assassin's Striking any more. See below.

This is true, but I think it's important to point out that the target doesn't have to die to make me not want to AS it. If I use AS on a target where I'm wasting most of my AS's damage because the target is heavily damaged, that's still a drop in my effective DPS. What's the point in delivering the full DPA in AS when, say, 1/2 or even 1/4 of it is pointless? I'd do better to just activate a couple of lesser attacks that will deliver less, but suffiicent damage to defeat the target in comparable activation time, but have zero risk of interruption (from damage or from moving).

That's a terribly important qualifier. Important enough that I think it should be part of the TL;DR version.

Why? Because all Stalker secondaries are not defense sets. In fact, only three out of seven are defense-based. I'm not suggesting that the distribution of actual Stalker secondaries matches that simple distribution, but I do think it's clear there are going to be a a very much non-trivial number of non-defense-based Stalkers.

Focusing on those defense sets, even when defense-capped I find myself knocked out of hide on teams often enough to be bothersome. Examples are things Rikti Monkey gas and the incendiary grenades from Cimeroran Engineers. While the grenades roll hit checks, they spam enough of them that I find myself interrupted pretty regularly. (This used to bother me a lot more before AT damage mod buff and the addition of random criticals.)

These can certainly be viewed as edge cases across the breadth of normal content, and even in the places I run into them a lot (commonly run TFs) they relate primarily to using a steamroll playstyle. More sedate pace and more strategic targeting/disabling of foes can mitigates these challenges, but some of the problem we're discussing is that the stereotypical team that would overlook a Stalker doesn't want to worry about careful targeting of foes.

Finally, there is another problem with the interruptibility of AS not previously mentioned here. That's the problem of having to not move to use an interruptable attack, and how the game seems to determine whether you're (still) moving. Standing still long enough to AS foes is fine when it's your opening move, since you have time to position, wait, and then fire. It's often not fine in , well, a running battle.

I have a typically very good network connection to the game servers I play on. Despite this, whenever I have been moving, I often have to wait around one second after I've stopped moving (from my perspective) for the game to consider my character to be stationary. If I don't wait, the game interrupts my AS, as though I'm still moving. This phenomena seems to get worse the higher your network latency, though I have no hard data to back that assertion - it's a qualitative observation. If my foes are mobile, this situation makes using AS on them less attractive. I still do it, but it's definitely more problematic, and it worsens my AS's effective DPA from the ideal.

Against foes that heavily resist smashing damage, sure. Against everything else, not so much.

Yep, just like it affects one's ability/desire to pause and AS things. I tend to play my DM Scrapper a little like I might a Brute, at least when I want to get a big Soul Drain off - by which I mean I try to charge in and fire it before my teammates get a chance to munch my targets.

We don't have to nit-pick those into the picture, because my numerical analysis didn't make any assumptions about availability of foes. It just shows how many foes it takes to meet/beat Build Up's performance. I do think though, that the finding that the magic number is three is pretty compelling. In general, I find it pretty easy to get Soul Drain off on at least three targets per spawn. It's generally even easier when solo, at least when running on higher virtual team sizes.

Are there times when having an unconditional self buff wins out over a "parasitic" attack like Soul Drain? Absolutely. I'd say that the general play style of a Stalker counts almost full time. Their intended role is burst damage, and Build Up works way, way better for that. But circling back to the main topic, burst damage just isn't that desirable to teams, and Stalker Dark Melee's DPS is sort of middle-of-the-road at sustained DPS. That's different than Scrapper DM's standing, and the difference is Soul Drain vs. Build Up.

Actually, the upgraded Martial Arts is now one of the top-rated Stalker (single-target) DPS sets.

I said this before. It doesn't have to be saturated.

I never said I wanted the devs to change anything. Soul Drain on a Stalker would mostly be dumb. I said it lagged in performance, and it does, and it doesn't require saturation to lag.

Edit: I want to clear up just how the appeal to saturated conditions is invalid for Soul Drain's numerical superiority.

Assume 95% recharge slotting in Build Up or Soul Drain, 95% damage slotted in attacks with no procs, and no global recharge bonus.

Under those conditions, Build Up is +80% damage for 10 seconds every (90/1.95)+1.17 seconds plus or every 47s. Accounting for slotted damage, that's 2.75/1.95 = 1.41 factor damage. Averaging over its cycle time gives 10/47 or 21% of that value for an average damage increase of 1.41*21%= 30%.

Soul Drain adjusted to Stalker buff scales would be 8% per foe for 30 seconds every (120/1.95)+2.37 seconds or every 64s. Accounting for slotted damage, that's (100%+8%*Nfoes)/1.95. The cycle time factor is 30/64 = 47%.

The two powers break even when these two values are equal. So 30% = 47%*(100%+8%*Nfoes)/1.95. Solving for Nfoes gives Nfoes = 2.86 foes. That means at just three foes, Soul Drain is slightly better than Build Up for your average damage dealing.

This holds true at higher recharge levels all the way out to 150%. Soul Drain creeps ahead slightly, but NFoes remains a bit below three foes.

None of this means I want Soul Drain on my DM Stalkers. All I'm doing here is responding to the use of the term "saturated" to discussions of whether Soul Drain is the better performer. It doesn't have to be saturated to be better on average. Better on average is a very DPS-focused perspective, which typically dovetails in well with the people who would pass up a Stalker on the basis of lack of AoE, for example. That's why I brought it up as the "problem" that Stalker DM has relative to its Scrapper counterpart, in contrast with MA, which has the relative "problem" of losing Scrapper MA's one AoE attack.

Wut?

Yeah, we've been over this several times, but I'm pretty sure you haven't been in the going's over that I have.

I think you answered your own argument once you consider my comment about pacing.

The way a lot of people play, at least in the high-level game, there's essentially no such thing as distinct fights per spawn. Entire missions are practically a single ongoing fight, barring a small amount of time to travel between spawns (sometimes - that can depend a lot on the map). The way I play my Stalkers, stopping to AS something is often a loss of time and DPS... and that's solo.

If I'm on a team of like players (which is common, because I play with a core of "regulars" who gravitate towards similar build and play styles), even using AS on a boss can sometimes mean it dies before I finish activating. Hard targets last longer, of course, but if you're fighting a hard target on a team, your critical bonus is likely in play, since most of the team will cluster around the hard target, which ups the DPS of your non-AS attack chain even further.

I would not say it was the goal, but it was clearly a goal of it. It was stated very unambiguously that you could level from 1-50 in the AE, should you choose to do so. That said, no promises were made about how efficient it would be, which has led to all sorts of side debate.

For a relatively sedate pace of play, I'd agree. For a more high-end pace, which (for better or worse) I think a lot of people use to judge the relative value of powersets, I can say that Assassin's Strikes in general can be downplayed. If you have good recharge (though slotting, Sets, Hasten, what-have you), you can put out (single-target) DPS without your AS comparable to or better than you could put out by including your AS. This wasn't really as true before the last round of Stalker AT buffs, and a lot of it is down to the long activation time of the ASes, which is one of the reasons people often call for them to be shortened.

Obviously, if you have a powerset with decent AoEs, you'll probably do a lot more damage per time with those, unless you're working on a boss or harder target.

I don't want to totally downplay the pure negative damage aspect of Assassin's Eclipse, because I know it can be nice at times. I'm not sure it rises to the level of a shift in overall performance, though, especially since DM has a couple of other heavy-hitting pure negative shots.

I don't have the analysis at hand, but you don't have to have SD saturated to beat the average performance of Build Up. Don't get me wrong; Build Up makes perfect sense even in PvE for a Stalker's operational assumptions. But if I am remembering correctly, it isn't likely to give the same average DPS performance even for relatively moderate stress situations like x2 team size settings. (Edit: I mention that not because stress relates directly to DPS, but increasing virtual team size increases the number of mobs per spawn. That increases both incoming attack stress and targets to fuel Soul Drain, and it's that indirect relationship between I was shooting for.)

This is true, but thanks to the way AoEs are laid out, there is an immense difference in potential performance in a set that has even just one AoE, and the same set with that one AoE removed. To be fair, though, that narrows the big offender list to MA. DM has a more interesting difference; in PvE, having Build Up instead of Soul Drain is actually a fairly significant drag on peak performance. Soul Drain really is just so good that it can elevate a set with otherwise fairly middle-ground DPS into the top end.

In my opinion, correcting this through game balance is going to be impossible.

I think that Stalkers as an AT have one strong balance gripe - they are a damage dealing AT that most of the powersets have severely restricted AoE damage in a game where a lot of people recognize that AoE is a big deal. IMO, most everything else that people say the AT has "going against" it is either in the noise (the numerical "problem" isn't really that significant) or a matter of preference.

But we're left with this public perception that the AT isn't desirable, in a way that I think goes beyond the valid balance concerns. I think that's a mix of the AoE thing (which has some validity), leftover distaste over how the AT used to work before it got some buffs, and the fact that no one needs any specific melee damage AT. In general, it really doesn't matter what AT you pick for melee damage, but there's this one AT with some problems and a lingering aftertaste, so who's going to get left out?

Let's be serious. Does anyone ever look for a Kheldian for their team? How about a Mastermind outside the BSF? While I don't think it's a pervasive issue, let's think back to the posts with people claiming they'd never take a Defender on their team if a Controller was available. I think being odd-man-out on teams isn't somehow unique to the Stalker AT.

I do think Stalkers have some legitimate, lingering problems. I do think the Scrapper/Brute discussions in the I18 Beta highlighted them well. I don't think addressing them will be easy barring making them more "Scrapper like". I really don't think looking at how often the AT gets invited to teams is the right basis for identifying the problems, or for coming up with ways to address them, because I think an awful lot of things that have nothing to do with real "balance" are tied up in that.

Has that really been established? What I'm seeing is that one piece sold for that much over the weekend. How many times? Is it still that price?

To me saying something "costs X" means it regularly costs that. Maybe it does, I haven't checked, but that's not really what I got from the thread up till now.

That option is not very sensible, however, compared to prior prices. If prices rise into the 600M-1B range, that probably changes.