UberGuy

During the period of price increases introduced when people were still using the AE for power leveling but after the ticket cap introductions, prices on many goods rose significantly because supply fell and real influence supply probably increased. During this time, I produced large numbers of drops and converted them into influence, mostly because I was shooting for purples and decided along the way that I wanted to inf cap multiple characters. I'm silly that way. (During that time I inf capped three characters.)

Now, with I16's changes and significant increases in total drop supply thanks to the team size settings (and the subsequent drop bug fix), prices have fallen dramatically. That inf now has somewhere between double to five times the recipe purchasing power it did previously, depending on what I'm buying. I know, because I'm still tracking what I get when I sell things.

Prices are not hyper-inflationary, nor are they even just ever-increasing. They change with conditions, and savvy players can make informed decisions about the nature of those changes and benefit from them. I saw what was coming and I16 and intentionally held off buying my purples. Now I'm sitting pretty.

Edit: Notably, I don't think anyone saw the L50 inf/mob change coming. That's going to devalue existing stashes of cash, potentially by as much as a factor of two. On the upside, that doesn't hugely affect anyone playing at level 50 or marketeering unless they miss out the transition somehow - like they made a big stash, stopped earning L50 or market inf, then come back later and try to buy stuff. All this really does is make for worse sticker shock for non-marketeer, non-50s.

As a technicality, even they affect the summoner. The bonuses grant the caster a power that in turn buffs the pets that are nearby.

Alternatively, you can bypass the patcher all together. It is possible to create a shortcut that runs the game without passing through the launcher. Of course, this most likely counts as an unsupported configuration, so make use of the following at your own risk. It works for me, but you should be aware of the caveats.

• You don't automatically download new patches. The game will kick you out when you try to log in a character if you are out of synch with the server.
• You don't automatically download pre-staged art and other content the devs sometimes release ahead of major patches.

One of the reasons I like to use this is it's much faster to restart. This is especially true after a game crash, because skipping the patcher skips validating your game files. Note: my system has never failed a game file validation. If you have situations where your game files are known actually fail validation you probably don't want to use this trick. You probably do want to figure out why that's happening - you may have a virus or a failing hard drive. If you use this trick and your game will not restart after a crash, run to the patcher to try to validate/fix your files.

So exercise judgment before following me off a cliff.

Shortcut Values
Target: "<GameInstallPath>\CityOfHeroes.exe" -project Coh <otherSwitches>
Start In: ""<GameInstallPath>"

Example From My System
Target: "D:\City of Heroes\CityOfHeroes.exe" -project Coh -maxinactivefps 5
Start In: "D:\City of Heroes"

Woah, I'm glad I looked at this. I just figured it was someone asking questions.

Bigtime grats, just for setting that goal and achieving it!

I just tested, and bosses are worth a pretty even 1.8x what they used to be. So the new weighting bumps up the favor of AoEs against lots of minions compared to single-target DPS against a stream of hard targets.

Edit:
It used to be that a boss was worth 10.71 minions and a LT was worth 3.43 minions.
Now a boss is worth 7.94 minions, and a LT is worth 2.59 minions. (All the above were at +2.)
A mission complete bonus is now worth 1.43x what it used to be (from 13.99 +2 minions to 8.23).

It depends on your build. A strong AoE build tends to do better with more, weaker foes. A strong single-target build goes the other way, and tends to do better with fewer high-value (and tougher) foes. I find my sweet spot tends towards +2s, but most of my builds worth doing this on are hard-hitting melee characters with AoEs meant to thin the herd around a tougher foe.

Yes. As far as I know, any arguments the launcher itself doesn't need are passed on to the main game executable.

I prefer setting it in the shortcut, since it's not sticky. It's not really harmful to have it set all the time. I suppose it might bug some folks to have a background instance of the game get all choppy if you tab out a lot.

There are several reasons.

One, it gives a baseline metric for what people can earn irrespective of luck, and more based purely on their build. With a strong character, you can create enough raw inf to pay for a certain level of build even if your luck stinks to high heaven. It's nice to know what that level of build might be, so we can pass it on to others.

Two, it gives everyone in this forum some sort of idea for how fast inf might be being created based on a spectrum of builds. There used to only be a few people out there acting like farmers, namely those willing to ask others to fill or those with enough accounts. Now, anyone with a good enough character can act like that, and it's instructive to see how much of that's around, and how good it is. It factors into questions about currency inflation.

Three, it's ammunition against a certain category of complaints that people pop in this forum making about how poor they are. Armed with this knowledge, we can debunk many of the claims on the basis that if they get no marketable drops at all, they still can earn X inf/hour.

Allowing market sales in the picture makes it impossible to paint any sort of general image of how much earning power certain builds have, because you could end up with a FF/Electric Defender making as much with a lucky drop in 10 minutes as some tweaked-out farming build does in 6 hours. This thread is about determining raw capability, not luck factors. Worse, how much something is on the market is variable with time, and with marketeering "skill". Some great earnings today based on rare widget X that drops from mobs could change next month while the raw defeat capabilities of our builds might stay the same. Likewise, someone who lists a patient high bid can earn 2x-10x more than someone who lists at "sell it naow" prices.

In this sort of power, it goes off when you hit a foe with the power, whether KB happens or not. Back when it was 100% chance I tested this a fair bit, and whether it activated had no relationship to whether the foe was knocked.

I have never tried it, but I have read other posters report that it does rely on KB actually occurring when it's slotted in the few toggles that can knock things back.

>.>

I have 5 trays open on all my characters.

Well, they have some, but I'm sure the point was that it's not enough to make do in PvP vs. the nastier -def effects players can pump out.

I find it incredibly frustrating to reach a point where you aren't contributing anything to a fight at the end of a TF because you brought a damage-dealing character with the wrong damage type.

The onus is to prove that there's no other possible explanation than that the "Malleus" badge relates to the Malleus Malleficarium. That requires at least a strong argument that no other explanation is reasonable, if not that none is possible. The lack of visibility by the (presumably) same instigators of the Rularuu invasion is not clear evidience that the same party could not also have caused the subsequent Halloween one. I am not out to prove your theory wrong, but to illustrate that it is not the only viable one, and thus suggest that the Malleus Malleificarium is not the only possible explanation for the badge title.

There's a very fine line between magic and religion, both in history and fiction. Trafficing with demons is seen on both sides of that coin. Notably, though, there's little historical precedent for the sorcerer or wizard (or witch) as distinct from fetters of religion. That's a more recent invention, derived in part from the cross-pollination of early physical science and religious lore seen in the works of mideaval alchemists. Other than them, there's not a lot basis for "mages" in the more familiar D&D sense - persons who traffic with extraplanar beings and esoteric magical forces without specific religious overtones. Even real-world alchemists often worked religious lore into their works, even if it was sometimes apocryphal.