UberGuy

Faster than farming what with what?

"Instantly" is pretty relative here - you have to log out and pass through the character creation screen, then hoof over to the local WW. (The BM in Mercy is really too far away to consider doing this, IMO.)

You're also subject to limited demand. There's only so many outstanding bids for large inspirations at a time. I'd expect to saturate the market for them pretty quickly. Also I can usually buy most large inspiration for 25k-50k if I wait a half hour or so, so I don't think you're going to break 100k for every one you sell.

Meanwhile, a solo level 50 character can get over 8k Inf for a +2 minion. I'm betting farming is way more stable way to make income.

Since I'm looking forward to what I'm going to get, I barely notice. It's very vaguely like having to tear the wrapping off of a present - sure, I just want to get my hands on what's inside, but there's a little bit of glee and relief at just knowing you have it there in the box, under that paper.

I don't sit down and craft like a rack of stuff at once. I do it piecemeal, swinging by the market when I log in, log off, when I have to delete something valuable because I'm out of room, or when I get the message that I bought something I was eagerly awaiting. Number three in that list is the closest to onerous that list get for me, but usually selling my stuff is progress for me on something I care about; badges, money saved up to buy some shiny, etc. I have goals, so doing things that makes progress towards them excites me, at least a little.

So how was your team measuring the time of the first spawn?

If this is still going on, I haven't seen it lately. I've been seeing them run in and die immediately to ongoing AoEs or pet reactions to their appearance.

Oh, that's just the start of how BaB is a cheatyface AV.

I had to go dig this up from where I posted it in an old thread.

His ET does have the new animation, though.

It varies by AV level because their resistances vary by level, but around level 50, it's around 95 DPS, before factoring in any level differences between your character and the AV.

For a GM, it's around 330 DPS.

* I calculated these some time back and am pulling the numbers from memory. They might be off.

Aware that it was coming, I've actually succeeded at it the last two times I got it from the contact, once on a Dark/Psi Defender and once on a DB/Regen Scrapper. Amusingly, the Scrapper was set to +2/x6, and I wasn't planning enough in advance to have lowered my spawn sizes. That really made it interesting. (I did it on the Defender before the new difficulty settings, though it was on Invincible.)

I've been on a large team that succeeded at it once. That was pretty cool.

No, what he's talking about was indeed fixed. This patch changed at least one other thing as well. One villain only power lacked an AoE cap that now has one.

If anyone took you up on that, you could probably now buy a small army of used Masterminds in the RWZ AE.

This isn't mandatory. There are such things as PBAoE buffs which do not affect the caster. See: Shout of Command as used by Cimeroran bosses and LTs.

That said, I don't support the suggestion. That's a major change in the mechanics of powers that I know some people like being able to specifically target on a player. If the whole buff recast thing is an issue, I'd rather see longer base durations. Not 20 minutes. That's just silly.

Nope. They're blocked by walls. And pillars. And dumpsters.

There's a raging exploit going on that's churning out 50s again, and it's in our favorite source of inflation - the AE (meaning no salvage or recipes, but lots of inf). I'm actually wondering if today's (unannounced) maintenance was to address it.

Consider using the AE. You can run mishes there and turn all your tickets into salvage. And there's surely one consistently closer to a market than hero side mishes, which tend to send you all over creation. Scanner mishes aren't as bad, of course.

It did not always do so.

Very, very early on, it was common for missions to be what people called "back-loaded". This involved coming in the mission door and having the 1st mobs be unusually large groups of -3 and sometimes even -4 foes. As you progressed through the mission, their levels would increase, and somewhere near the middle of the mission (or earlier if they started closer to +0) they would finally all be +0 through the rest of the mission. Back then, stuff didn't spawn at +1 or higher in missions at all unless there was something like a level floor problem with a mob. (For example getting a level 10+ critter in your mission at level 10 even though you were level 7).

People fairly commonly complained about these swarms of lowbie mobs, because even back in the early days (after the 2nd purple patch), -3 foes were considered pretty worthless, let alone -4s. At some point they changed it, but forever more after they did, you could find +1s in your missions. As far as I know, there was never any formal explanation of the change.

Possibly with the deepest of irony given your stance on the matter, the part I quoted in yellow is probably the best attitude one can bring to the market. Success at using the market to get what one is interested in comes from using it as more of a swap meet than a store. (I understand that the rest of what it calls for to use that for IO investment, including long-term planning, is not in your scope of interests. I just thought that bit was interesting.)

You're mistaking capability and conditionality.

It's easy to make enough inf to hit the cap. The reality is, not everyone is hitting the conditions that make it likely.

It's easy to get to 50 and to play there. Not everyone does it. There are reasons besides it being hard that people don't do it, many of which have to do with playstyle preferences.

Are they (edit: people who play at 50) the minority? Probably. Does that make it not a problem for that minority? No. Is it a big problem? Not in my opinion.

For you 2B might be hard to get, possibly, especially if you don't have any level 50s. For people who play on 50s regularly, it's really not hard at all.

This last double XP weekend, for reasons that are not clear to me, was triple inf weekend. That's right, if you weren't getting XP you got 3x the inf for a mob. (I log chat, which captures reward messages. I checked. It wasn't exactly 3x, but across minions, LTs, bosses and missions, it was a little over 3x on some and a little lower on others.) Level 50s don't get XP, they only get inf. So all weekend, level 50s, who already make the most money around, were basically making 3x that already top-tier inf per reward.

I played a 50 all weekend. I made 300M inf just in kills. This was a DB/Regen Scrapper, so not some high-end farmer build.

Let's back out the 3x inf for DXP weekend. That's still 100M over a weekend. How many weekends worth of play time is it going to take me to hit 2B inf just in kills? 2B/100M = 20. So 20 weekends. Of course, I don't just play on weekends. And probably more importantly, that's assuming I have to defeat stuff as my only way to make that money. It doesn't include any money I might make selling things on the market. There are things you can get from merits that sell 100-200M. Purples can net even more.

Sure, if it's still true that most players don't have level 50 characters, and/or most players don't play level 50 characters most of the time, then most players probably don't have 2B inf. But the conditions that allow you to whip up 2B inf aren't actually hard to attain, even if not everyone takes advantage of them. I play my level 50s a lot, and most of them have 2B inf.

10 minutes is a bit much for 20B (or even 2B), even for the latest 'sploits. Not that I'd know, or anything...

As for buying it... what's the fun in that?

* imagines the final scenes of the movie 300 recast with 21st century Samurai (in Japanese with subtitles). *

"The enemy outnumbers us a paltry three to one, good odds for any practitioner of Bushido."