UberGuy

It probably makes sense that "pool C" boss drops are actually in their own pool. I am not sure there is any other way to assign them to bosses only. My understanding is that "Pool E", the one with costume drops in it, was only supposed to drop from minions, so I'm not sure it's reasonable that a boss defeat generated a costume drop.

Another thing to be careful of is how to interpret reward messages in a team context. You can defeat something and then immediately get a reward from someone else on your team essentially simultaneously defeating something else. If that boss in the example above was the only thing anyone was fighting then it suggests that what we think we know and what is going on may be two different things. But if anyone was fighting anything else as the TF ended, the correct interpretation really isn't clear.

Missions that aren't in the AE have no influence over drop rate. Drop probabilities are defined at the mob rank level. All minions have a certain chance to drop something, all LTs a different chance, and so on. A check is made for every drop pool and category a mob can drop.

If you do get a drop for a given category, what you get within that category is random, and controlled by additional weighting. For example, from a mob you can get a common, an uncommon, a rare, or a purple, all (as we understand it) from the same drop pool. Obviously, you are much more likely to get a common than anything else, and more likely to get an uncommon than a purple, etc.)

What mission you're in isn't supposed to matter at all. The AE is clearly distinct and separate. It's worth noting that the AE mobs are separate from the ones we meet in the "normal" game - they can be modified to have different powers or powers that work differently without affecting the regular PvE versions of those mobs. This may also be how they have a completely different drop mechanic - they only drop from the "ticket pool".

I'm the same way. I don't have a problem with Fury, but I prefer Scrappers because if they have to stop and wait for something, it matters not in the least.

In general, real-world play, I don't find there to be enough difference. In a few specific instances, a Brute's HP and higher caps are pretty useful.

Really? Where's the radius information from?

One thing to note is that they are not (fully) controlling trade. All they are controlling is the minimum buy price, which is the buy price they are bidding at. They only "control" the sell price in the sense that this is the price at which they then re-list the items they sell. Any price between their buy and sell prices is fair game. You don't have to pay their listing price, but if you want to avoid that, you do have to pay at least their buying price.

Technically, sale prices above their sale price are also fair game, but this is generally unwise for competing sellers. By reselling a meaningful volume of supply at whatever price they are selling at, they tend to ensure that price is the (likely) price ceiling, because they undercut people selling higher than that.

The current understanding is that they are, indeed, pool A. This is based on a variety of testing, things devs have said in betas, etc. Some of the best evidence so far relates to the non-random drop bug, where some maps always dropped a recipe on the same mob from restart to restart. Those mobs would drop purples.

As far as we know, when a mob is eligible to drop from multiple pools, it can always drop from all those pools at the same time. For example, I have received a pool A rare and a costume recipe from the same mob. I have never heard of a mob dropping both a purple and a less rare pool recipe.

These two wishes are incompatible.

The price people pay for things reflects what amount of inf they value having them at. The price I can get from an NPC has nothing to do with what price I am willing to pay the market to get a piece of salvage. You illustrate that you understand this concept when you mention rare salvage at 1M inf - no NPC will pay you 1M inf for a rare salvage piece, but you are willing to pay it, even though it's 200x what the NPC will pay you.

If NPCs sold salvage, it would be different, as Smurphy mentions. Then the market sellers would be in competition with the NPCs for the business of market buyers. Under the current regime, the NPCs compete with market buyers with for the business of market sellers. Level 40+ players win that contest hands down.

TL;DR: Players don't value pieces of salvage - even common salvage - at the prices that NPCs do. We value them higher, especially when we're near level 50.

Well, OK, but that means they never got to apply any -Defense to you, because they only do that in melee. With no DDR, Cims cause cascade failure in melee, and they are brought up a lot in cascade failure discussions because of it. But you weren't in melee. It doesn't invalidate what you said (that you did great vs. Cims) but saying that is a bit misleading in the context of the thread.

The added part I suppose was taken from context. People were saying that GR would introduce problems for the BM (only), and he responded with an acknowledgment that the devs did indeed predict (NEW) problems that they will take steps to fix. Since there are not a lot of existing WW-specific complaints, and plenty of existing complaints about the BM, and all the player predictions of issues are regarding the BM.

That's not what he said.

He said:

(a) they cannot merge the markets because it is too technically hard. There's some good discussion and some long rambles by me on this over in the GR forum in EvilGeko's "No market merger?" thread. As best we can tell, they may have some sort of crazy, proprietary DB or at least very complex DB underlying the markets. Regardless of what's really there, the devs are afraid of screwing up the markets at a technology level, not necessarily at an economic level.

(b) GR with no merged markets was predicted to be bad for the villain market. This is what they were forecasting. So they have plans to implement things about the market. Personally, I await these things with great trepidation, but I am glad they're going to try something.

Three ambushes of what size? Solo or a larger team?

Did they even reach you? As a DM/Sonic you have tools with which to slow foes and possibly keep them away.

It's not practical that they would not debuff you badly if they actually reached you and were able to actually beat on you. It seems more likely to me that you would have played keep-away and never given them that chance, which basically means they didn't get to apply their debuff.

If so, I think the story might be a tad different against ranged debuffers, like Praetorean Clockwork,

I think that's not quite the right comparison, because I think more players will move stuff from villains to heroes than the reverse in general. The more meaningful metric is probably going to be the ratio between the two ATs on blue side.

Personally, I don't expect to see a major case of one of these two AT over the other. I'm a pretty serious min/maxer and the performance differences in real play don't convince me that there's a reason for concern. Add to that I see a fair number of people who prefer the Scrapper's consistency over the need to feed Fury (irrespective of whether or not they think it's "hard" to sustain fury), and I think there's not a problem.

If there's a migration, I expect it to be from Tankers to Brutes, not Scrappers to Brutes. There are plenty of Tanker players who really love the core toughness of that AT, but there are also a lot of them who play it because it's the closest AT match for the classic Superman-style super-strong tough guy. Brutes straddle the conceptual gap between Tankers and Scrappers, and I think doing Scrapper-level damage with more HP and Tanker buff caps is going to be even more attractive to those players than it is to Scrapper players.

This has nothing to do with IOs affecting how fast you level. It has to do with how fast you can make use of the IO system as an alternate form of progression. Sure, that may also mean that as you progress down the IO path, you gain XP faster, but that isn't what I'm talking about. I'm talking about the IO system as its own progression, and a disparity in the speed at which a villain can take advantage of that compared to a hero.

You mention, "the need [to attain] some specific build" ... how else would anyone approaching the IO system as a means of progression make use of it? You can use them haphazardly, but that's a specific choice to only pursue their capabilities to a limited extent. The point here is that it's easier/faster/cheaper for a hero to pursue the system to any given capability it offers except perhaps the haphazard slotting of IOs that happen to drop.

I was specifically referring to your last option: "If not, I guess you can always use GR and go blue." That's giving up. That's throwing up our hands and saying redside is toast, and abandoning it for the blue side.

I'm curious what they've told us about GR that should give me a wider view. Everything I've seen reinforces my sense of dread about the implications for the Black Market. What, specifically, do you think should do otherwise?

Yes, I firmly believe that the great preponderance of switching will be from villain to hero. I've talked about reasons why quite a bit in the Market Merger thread in the GR chatter forum. There are just too many things that too many people regularly complain about that they don't prefer about the villain side. Those that do like the villain side are most commonly attached to the ATs or existing characters, and not so much the side itself, and I expect there to be a chunk of these players who transplant to hero side for greater teaming. A better market is just icing on the cake for a lot of these folks.

I think this is a pipe dream.

23% ranged defense still reduces average ranged DPS delivered to you by 46%. It's large enough an impact on foe miss rates that you really notice it over having nothing, especially with a large number of foes shooting at you (which tends to behave more like the average). When you crank your difficulty slider on the team size variable, you end up with a lot more foes at range than you do on low settings, just because there are more foes you can't run right up to at once. A lot of ranged damage gets cranked out, and I noticed raising my Regen's defense from the mid to high 20s - in fact it let me crank my difficulty higher.

Regen is all about having time to recover heals, and the less stuff hits you, the longer you can go before you really need a heal again. Combined with some good +recharge, I totally think it's worth it.