UberGuy

When it came out, I preferred it. The spread of goods made it possible to find bargains if you were willing to scan the levels. The problem with it now is that several successive changes to the game have cause increased clumping of playing at 50 and/or generation of recipes only at max levels (merits/tickets). This has caused what used to be a more widely populated spectrum of drops to be sparse at non-max levels.

One of the intentions for the market explicitly stated by the devs during I9 beta was for (some) goods produced by low-level characters to be desirable to high-level characters, so that it would create channels of wealth transfer from high-level to low-level characters. Of course, for that to work the low-level characters have to exist and sell their drops (and/or roll their merits to produce pool Cs). Those aforementioned game changes have reduced the degree to which any of those things happen.

For most characters, it's a significant increase. For a Regen or WP character, who are already rich in +Regen and (to a lesser extent, +Recovery), it's not as significant. The +Recovery of the two uniques could allow you to, for example, skip adding Stamina to Quick Recovery if you were otherwise planning to take Stamina. However, you really would not notice the +Regen of the two uniques that grant it on a WP, because you already have so much.

No, it doesn't. Read Arcanaville's summary of Scrapper secondaries, and look at the conclusions for Dark Armor.

Dark Armor doesn't have a problem with survivability at all. If you feel it does, you're either not playing it to its strengths, or mistaking the fact that you have survived more than a lot of other powersets would have and kept going, and drained your blue bar by forging on. A lot of other powersets can pay for increased survival in different ways, such as the "godmode" clicks (which crash and take all your end with them), or the way SR really is best if you take all the powers in the set.

If I had a complaint with DA, it was the KB "hole". IOs have essentially closed that hole at a cost I can accept if I'm not nuts about. Survival isn't really a problem unless I'm trying to do something like solo an AV.

Something of an aside, but I personally know the player of a Rad/Psi that did it. He used a bunch of inspirations, certainly, but I can forgive that for someone soloing what amounts to nine GMs at once.

It also took a really long time.

I do think that farmers produce a significant fraction of the wealth that the overall population of people playing at level 50 produce. It's relatively easy to see how. Farmers, especially "professional" ones, basically spend all their in-game time farming. Other people playing at 50, even fairly powergamey ones, spend their in-game time doing other things that aren't quite so efficient. For example, I spend a lot of time running speed TFs, which are absolutely abysmal inf/hour. And since a lot of people spend time teaming and whatnot, there's also the downtime spent assembling teams, etc., where most farmers solo (since I16 especially).

So hard-core farmers probably spend more time in combat and earn (sometimes a lot) more inf/time than most people do for their time spent fighting.

Do they outweigh the general populace? I don't know, since I don't know what percentage of the populace spends what percentage of the time farming. But I think they probably do help account for an awful lot of our in-circulation inf.

All the below are rules of thumb. They vary by character depending on things like AoE capability, innate endurance usage or recovery of powersets, etc.

+0/x1/bosses until I'm in able to slot level 25 enhancers. The combination of low accuracy, low damage/endurance per attack and low recovery until I get something like Stamina generally throttle how fast I can progress at these levels.

+1/x1/bosses once I can slot SO-strength or better enhancers.

+2/x1/bosses as soon as +1/x1 ceases to be a regular challenge.

I normally do not bother slotting IOs in my characters until sometime after level 40, and once I have my target builds I can play most of my characters on x4 or higher. I keep the level at +2 and leave bosses on. I might turn bosses off to farm, depending on what character I'm playing, but I do that rarely.

Whether I have AVs on depends on the character in question. I have soloed AVs on multiple characters now, and know that it generally comes down to having the right powersets, right IOs, and sometimes a streak of favorable luck, or all of these. As such I only leave AVs on in general if I am specifically in the mood to solo an AV.

Everything everyone does with their own characters is a matter of taste, ultimately, including people who follow guides.

People who write guides usually do so with an eye to performance. When you choose a power, there's an opportunity cost in the sense that it represents some other power you ultimately now cannot choose as a result. It behooves players who want their character to perform well to know which power choices have the lowest such costs. Educated with that information, players can make their own choices based on their own tastes. At least the player is choosing potentially lower performance because they think the power is fun, as opposed to not knowing any better.

As others have said, in the time it takes you to activate a snipe, most powersets could have fired multiple other blasts that did more damage in total, and have zero chance of interrupt. That's why people recommend the blasts for pulling, because if you can do more damage in the same time, that leaves the snipe's range as its primary advantage. (Also, using it as an "alpha strike" avoids worry about being interrupted.)

Are snipes bad power choices? Not in my opinion. But there are other options in most powersets that do more for you in more situations. Powersets where taking the snipe is somewhat common are Dark Blast (which has a limited selection of single-target blasts) and Fire Blast (where fire's DoT adds a fairly significant percentage of damage).

Maybe we can get them in the upcoming "grey side".

No worries. I wasn't saying that's how I define it, but it seems to be how a fair number of people I've run into (who usually don't know much about the market) seem to think of it. And since marketeering has a bad rap, people who don't know how to use the market sometimes don't want to learn, because they don't want to be evil. Or something.

You're on a forum with human beings, not a pack of wolves. While there are certainly people like those you describe, attributing such behavior to the people here is incredibly insulting to them, and is quite the red herring.

I can assure you that quite a lot of people on the forums talk about this sort of thing. People who type posts with no/poor capitalization or punctuation get negative feedback about it all the time. You shouldn't imagine that this is some unique persecution of you in particular.

You're drilling in with far to narrow a focus here. You posted an apology, and as part of people's response, you got some advice on how to better improve future posts that discussed the pitfalls of your posting style. Your response to that is why this has become an argument. You reacted negatively to those suggestions and kicked off an argument about it.

That folks are arguing back does not suggest that they have some intensive desire to beat you up over it, but rather their desire to defend their points in the context you your attacking them.

Well, how are you defining "marketeering"? The fear/loathing/mistrust/etc. I refer to often applies to what most of us in this forum would consider any reasonable use of the market, including selling your drops wisely.

It looks to me like A_F is extending the question. "Is influence really that hard to come by if you don't know how to earn it." The answer to that question is probably yes. However, it's my opinion that the answer to that version of the question isn't that informative if you then don't ask "how hard is it to learn how to earn it". I think the answer to that question is "not very hard". However, that then begs another question: "How many people don't want to learn due to fear/loathing/mistrust/apathy". The answer to that question seems to be "quite a lot".

Just to muddy the waters, a Blaster's melee damage scale is 1.0 and a Defender's is 0.55, so the Defender deals 55% as much damage in melee with the same attacks. Of course, that "with the same attacks" rarely comes up. About the only melee attacks they can get in common are in Power Pools (like Air Superiority) and Defender Epic Pools (like Total Focus).

Actually, the Bio nuke is fantastic for soloing a single hard target. It lasts 5 minutes and buffs your damage and regen quite a lot. I've used it to solo AVs a few times on characters that weren't otherwise up to it. Similarly, it's an immense buff to something like a Shivan.