Talen Lee

Any proposition that entails making Smurphy more money is meaningless. The man can make all the money he wants. It's just a way to keep score.

That said, while I doubt any will attest, I have done nice things. I didn't get sick or anything.

Okay, so you're saying that Blizzard is a terrible, terrible power because of something that you acknowledge isn't true any more?

It's all a matter of scale.

Don't consider what the number represents compared to other people's numbers, think about what you can do with it. I permadom'd a character on the malnourished redside market. I soft-capped a defender. I perma-hastened a blaster. All of this without marketeering en masse, without major diddling - just, very simply, playing the game, selling the drops, and knowing how to buy.

That's what a billion inf is to me. A billion inf is... well, it's all the money I'll ever need. I don't need to spend it, I can spend the money that the billion makes me, whenever I need it to. It's an arbitary number rolling over an arbitary limit.

Quite frankly, the collection of wealth has never impressed me. The collection of goods has, though - seeing people running around with lotgs and purples which were purchased at a bargain price? That impresses me. Difficult build tricks, like major defence buffs, or the like? Same thing.

So, yeah, my billion is pretty meaningless. But then, so was my million when I first made it. I still used it to get a -kb IO.

If you're building your Inv/SS to do things like soft-cap to S/L damage, you'd really appreciate having a power that both asks very little of you in power picks, and gives you noticeable amount of endurance and regen.

What he's saying is Shields is overpowered.

It's entirely possible that GIS is deliberately weak, as the rest of the set is considered to be gaining 'more' than it otherwise would.

It's not one I noticed before now - this character was sitting idle for most of the past two years, leaving him without any clear combat experience with larger spawns. The ranged damage makes me wonder about the viability of setting up a dark armourer with high ranged def.

8% defence, plus 50% resistances, plus a great big heal...

I guess my thought on the matter is what else are you going to pick?

(Oh, and the immob protection isn't irrelevant either.)

Pretty much. If it helps you at all, I think it's a bad suggestion, especially since it's trying to fight a perception problem with something that's hard to perceive. Perception issues are only fixed through things that are outrageously hard to miss; there are players who still don't realise that Shadow Maul is a cone.

*pipes up from the back* And if you actually team, you'll do fine with just SOs.

After a great deal of frustration playing my spines/dark scrapper, I scrapped his build and started all over again, ditching a lot of purples and the like in exchange for a more defensive focus.

Dark armour benefits so much from even a bit of defence. I worked to get 32.5% melee, with something like 25% smashing/lethal. I notice ranged opponents all the more, but what I really find sticking with me out of playing him now is how badly I want gauntlet and an area-effecting taunt to force opponents into melee range with me.

Dark Armour has an amazing heal, great resistances, and some fun stuff in its basket of tricks. If I was able to rely on teammates to provide it, I would definitely consider running things like Cloak of Fear (for the -tohit).

Oh, and:

I take issue with your use of the word 'new.'

Would you also like a laser-guided satellite that scratches your butt for you?

Seriously, while I don't disagree with the principle - that ice melee merits buffing - all your suggestions are unfeasible.

Me, I don't see this being the kind of thing that hooks new marketeers. It seems to me to be much more of a tool for the people who already play it.

I think the term for that is 'petulant whine.'

The really embarassing thing is I've had... well, this much inf for quite some time now, I just never bothered compiling it. And it's almost nothing to do with market strategies... just playing the game. Face-kicking. And not on 50s, either - a friend of mine got a billionaire thanks to a lucky purple drop, for example.

I showed a friend. Her response was that you could have done that in ten minutes farming AE, and even if you didn't, you could have just bought inf.

Knowing what I do about Leo, after years of watching him on the forums, I couldn't help but see this as starkly amusing, and kinda embarassing. Impressive stuff, Leo.