Adeon Hawkwood

I'm glad you found a build you like regarding deleting the thread, the short answer is you can't, only the mods can. In general though I'd have to ask why? It's not doing any harm sitting here and since it has several builds posted in it it is a potential resource for someone who comes along with a similar question in the future.

A couple of point here. First off if you are stealthing mission then the rate at which you kill the boss is virtually irrelevant. You probably spend more time zoning in and running between missions than actually fighting the boss anyway. Killing him safely is a lot more useful since it saves the extra time from a hospital run.

Secondly if your goal is rewards/time solo stealthing missions isn't always the best options. It's useful if you are farming tip missions on a bunch of characters but that's about it.

Thirdly full stealth isn't needed to stealth a mission. If you run on +0/x1 (which you should be if your goal is to complete missions as fast as possible) you can generally just run past all of the enemies without any stealth even on a blaster (it's worth carrying a BF or two just in case).

No, it take 2 days. It sounds like you might be missing something though. I have two suggestions for things that you might be missing:
1. Only pure villains can earn villain merits, rogues cannot
2. After you do 10 Alignment tip missions (which takes a minimum 2 days) you need to do a Morality tip mission to reaffirm your alignment. It is this morality mission that awards you with a Villain Merit.

From your comments I suspect that you have been doing a bunch of Alignment missions while teamed with other people and as such have missed doing your Morality Missions. If you have been doing Morality Missions and are a pure Villain but have not gotten any Villain Merits then it sounds like something is bugged for you.

Well first off the alternate uses for Astral and Empyrean Merits are probably not going to be related to building the next slots. They will probably be used to buy other stuff (no clue what but IO recipes would seem an obvious option).

As for the general question of why introduce a new currency for each level of slot personally I don't think the concern is hoarding. I think that the reason for doing it is to make running the new content the way to get the new powers. In the current case switching from shards to threads meant that getting the new powers required running the incarnate trials instead of simply running the old content. Since they didn't put any limits on the new trials people were getting the new stuff in a few days anyway so clearly the devs weren't to concerned about hoarding. If they had allowed us to make the new powers using shard components then people would almost certainly have abandoned the trials in favor of farming the WST and the level 50 TFs.

The earning power for level 50s just counting game-generated inf is significantly higher than the pre-market days. As you noted vendoring a single common recipe gives on the order of 100K inf which is about 20 minions worth of inf. Additionally a few issues back inf earning was pretty much doubled.

Damage mitigation operates in layers. In general I class the layers as follows (in order in which they take effect):
1. Stop the attack from happening (controls, defeating the foe, slows)
2. Stop the attack from hitting (defense buffs, to hit debuffs)
3. Reduce the damage from the attack (resistance buffs, damage debuffs)
4. Undo the effects of the attack (healing, regen)

Now for the most part it is impossible to stop all incoming damage with a single form of damage mitigation so you are left stacking different forms (baring the edge cases of successfully mezzing an entire spawn or killing them all with a single shot which rarely come up in practice). In general having some mitigation in each layer is more effective than having a lot of mitigation in a single layer.

The thing here is that stealth, pulling and phase shift all cost time. If you can use other forms of mitigation to reduce the damage you can survive then you can spend more time blasting. Additionally the damage from AoEs scale upwards based on targets hit so being able to fight a larger number of enemies at once means that you actually end up dealing more damage over time.

As for inspirations when I run my Blaster I convert the majority of my inspirations to reds. I have enough baked in survivability that I don't need to worry to much about defensive inspiration usage and con concentrate all of my inspirations on offense. When I solo I generally have 2 or 3 red inspirations running at any one time.

There is nothing wrong with a heavily offensive Blaster if that suits you but I think you'll have a hard time pushing the difficulty envelope as high as you would with a more balanced blaster.

Following on from this comment I'd also add that damage bonuses from IOs are really not that great. A small damage Inspiration gives a 25% damage bonus for 60 seconds. Getting even that much through IO bonuses is pretty hard so even on a damage focused build I wouldn't really bother with that and simply use Inspirations.

Heh, I have a Crab Spider with exactly the same name

I assume you meant a couple of hundred million since a couple of hundred thousand would only cover the crafting cost for one IO. That being said, it should be possible. For your primary you're mostly going to be looking at Thunderstrikes (which are very cheap) and Positron's Blasts (which are pretty cheap, especially if you lowball and wait a bit). Similarly for your secondary there are several good sets (such as Red Fortune) which provide nice bonuses on the cheap. If you want to focus on pets then the pet sets are reasonably inexpensive although you'll probably use them for Frankenslotting rather than slotting entire sets.

The two places you might want to spend more are LotG 7.5%s and Soulbound Allegiance. Crab Spiders do benefit a lot from recharge so slotting some LotG 7.5%s in is well worth it (you can easily slot 3 or 4 depending on your build) so if you are doing it I'd recommend running tip missions and using the Alignment Merits to buy some.

Soulbound Allegiance is more questionable, as I mentioned above you'll probably be Frankenslotting your pets to some degree since the recharge intensive pet sets aren't that great and if you do then getting a few pieces of SA with Recharge enhancement can help a lot in giving you maximum uptime on your pets. SA is not to expensive compared to other purples so it might be worth farming up more alignment merits to get some LotGs to sell and get a few pieces.

An interesting idea. The devs have stated before that they do not want to increase capacity (for reasons Soulwind mentioned). However the option to have a larger storage rack which also uses up more of your storage items limit would be nice although I have no clue how practical it would be to implement.

i.e. currently you can have 18 storage items in a base, with a limit of 9 per workshop. Adding a, for example, 60 capacity rack which counted as 2 items for plot and room limits would be a nice QoL improvement without changing the actual limits on storage.

I agree. one of the deciding factors for me in switching from Munitions Mastery to Mu Mastery on my AR/Dev was that Body Armor really, really sucks. The problem is that from a balance perspective buffing it would pretty much require making it a toggle which is a pretty significant change. Compared to Resist Physical Damage and Stone Skin the base value (before AT scaling) is actually 25% higher so I'm guessing the devs have already increased it as much as they feel comfortable with.

Personally I'd favor just making it a toggle and then increasing it to Temp Invulnerability. While having it as a passive power does make MM special compared to other Blaster Epics when you factor in the low resistance scalars of Blasters it's really pretty weak. On a Defender it would provide enough resistance to be moderately useful (although I'd still favor the toggle shields) but not on a Blaster.

Personally I think that just decreasing the cast time for gun drone would be a huge buff. Gun Drone has a 7 second cast time and needs to be resummoned every 90seconds. Looking through the lists most other pet powers have cast times in the 2s-3.2s range (Demon Summoning has 4s, a few others have 1.17s) I don't see any logical reason for Gun Drone to need 7s. Sure it gives a decent Defiance bonus due to the long time but I would happily trade that for a 2.03s cast time (same time as the Spiderlings).

True although when I do chokepoints I generally recommend putting twice as many people on the south path compared to the north path. Four doors worth of prisoners run along the south path but only two doors worth along the north path.

A practical reason is simply balance. Buff/Debuff sets are already very powerful, giving Defenders (who already have the most powerful buffs and debuffs) even more power is not a good thing for balancing team play. Also, from a different angle, Defenders already do have a buff/debuff bonus, it's just baked into thier powers rather than being an Inhernet Power.

The other side of it would be that it's not something that would apply evenly across powersets. For example Traps would get no benefit from it (unless they did something special with it) since Power Boost type effects don't boost pets or pseudo-pets.

Actually it's poor wording on my part. My point was that Damage Buff and Resistance Buff are the same thing. That is why HOs that buff one also buff the other.

Ice has 100% as long as Energy Absorption is up. You get 60% from Wet Ice, 20% from Permafrost and 20% from Energy Absorption.

As joebartender said it does not boost resistance. In fact, for technical reasons it cannot boost resistance.

In case you're interested here's the reason. Due to the way that powers and enhancement system was originally created certain buffs and debuffs were paired so that the only difference between a buff and a debuff was whether it was greater or less than Zero. In particular To Hit Buffs and Debuffs are the same thing and Defense Buffs and Debuffs are the same. This is the reason for the Hamidon Enhancements bug since enhancements for those types will enhance both buff and debuff properties of a power as long as you can slot the enhancement in.

In addition to those obvious pairings Damage Buff/Debuff and Damage Resistance Buff/Debuff were all grouped as a single buff type as well (side note, Resistance Buff in this context is referring to the resistance enhancements rather than the characters actual resistance values). This means that any buffs that increase the effectiveness of one in a power increase the effectiveness of both. As such any powers that provide a global damage buff would also buff any resistance powers you have running. In order to prevent this from happening (which would have an obviously negative impact on balance) all powers that provide resistance are set so that the resistance portion is not affected by buffs.

Now, there are two ways that the devs can do this, which also provides one of the other weird aspects of Power Boost. The first way that they can do it is to make the entire power unaffected by Buffs. The second way is that the can make just the resistance portion unaffected by Buffs or Enhancements. The cannot make the Resistance portion alone immune to buffs but not enhancements. The net effect of this is that if a power takes resistance enhancements it will not be affected by any global buffs (such as Power Boost). This is why Power boost buffs the small shields for Force Field characters but not for Cold Domination. Additionally a few powers that have an unenhanceable resistance element are also tagged not to benefit from global buffs (Scorpion Shield is a good example) but this is the exception, not the rule.

No, you just have to look at it kinda sideways.

Let's say that when the Empyrean and Astral merits options are released the merits from a single trial allow you to purchase 3 Gee-Gaws.

A player with all of the current incarnate boosts will be able to purchase 3 Gee-Gaws per trial. A player without any incarnate abilities can choose to either purchase 3 Gee-Gaws and make incarnate progress or purchase no gee-gaws and make faster incarnate progress. In both cases however the players are limited to 3 Gee-Gaws per trial.

Once you have all of the incarnate abilities you desire the trial rewards effectively decrease (since you have no use for threads/components) which functions as a catchup mechanism. Have-nots get greater rewards than haves (geegaws + incarnate progression versus just gee-gaws).

Now when the next set of slots are released we get what is effectively a gear reset. Your ability to carry-over progress from one set of slots to the next means that everyone starts on an almost even footing regarding making the new abilities (again, a catch-up mechanism). The concern there becomes balancing out the power levels, which is another reason for limiting the ability to carry over progress. If it proves necessary the devs can drastically alter the rate at which you can make the old abilities to make "gearing up" to the new trials easier.

For example, a simple solution would be when the new slots come out add iXP for the current slots to the Tin Mage/Apex TFs and allow people to make abilities for them using alpha slot components. In that way even if the existing trials aren't being run a new player can gear up on the non-trial content.

Then any extra salvage will be pretty much useless (except as a expensive upgrade when the next set of slots are released). I know that's not what you want to hear but I'd be very surprised if it were any other way.

From a Trial Rewards point of view it makes a lot of sense. By making it so that a portion of the trial rewards (threads and components) are effectively useless once a person has all the stuff they want the devs provide a built in catch up mechanism for people who start running the trials later.

Eventually it will be possible to use Astral and Empyrean merits to buy "other things" at that point a player who doesn't have their incarnate slots filled will have the option of acquiring those things at the same rate as a player who has them filled without completely halting incarnate progression.

One thing to keep in mind is that different people have different tolerances for what constitutes "over-moderation".

To continue the team leader example, there is one guy that I will NEVER join a team he is leading. I have no problem teaming with him when he isn't the leader and from what I have seen he's a nice guy but I find his leadership style to be way to controlling so I don't join teams he is leading. Conversely I'm sure there are people who like his leadership style and find my laid back "do whatever you want and we'll figure it out" style frustrating.

In both cases it isn't really a matter of "good" or "bad" it's a matter of being consistent and having a style that suits the other people involved.

The to hit debuff version is nice against basic enemies but I agree that it's pretty useless against AVs.

Slight correction here. If the channel is the one that I think it is most people you see getting unsilenced are actually people who have recently joined the channel. The channel is set to silence new members by default as an anti-spam measure.

In the general case I agree with Zombie Man. The channel moderators set the rules and if people can't live with that then the channel will die as people move to other channels. While I personally feel that the moderators of the channel in question could stand to loosen up a bit on the no-off-topic talk rule I also respect their right to set the rules they wish.

I could see Clarion being useful for Blapper, especially ones that actually use the Manipulation damage auras but for the most part I agree, between Defiance and BFs mez protection isn't critical for Blasters. I think the characters that really benefit the most from Clarion are the support sets with offensive toggles (primarily Rad, Dark, Cold, Storm) since they often rely on those toggles for survival and getting mezzed drops them immediately.