_Dusk_

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While the Statesman TF may NEED a strong tanker, just to hold onto Lord Recluse long enough to bring the towers down, I've never run across ANY OTHER TF that "required" a certain type of character.

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Untrue. The Statesman TF can be accomplished with a good illusionist who can taunt with phantom army. Unless they've changed this recently and did away with the ability of PA to taunt. I've run several STFs with only an illusionist as the taunter. The STF doesn't need a tank.

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Firstly, it's impossible in the mechanics for a click-debuff on an enemy to turn off because you're nearby clicking on object. More than likely, the debuff didn't hit all the foes and it only takes one to see you and to alert the others when you click on an altar. Or, the smoke grenade debuff lowers perception, but not enough when you're very close to them and your stealth drops as you click the altar.

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No, I'm monitoring PvE stealth in combat statistics and I can watch my stealth go to zero when I click the altar. I do notice the smoke grenade increase my steath radius before I click the altar and then watch it go to zero after I click the altar. I'm not sure of the distance in which smoke grenade increases stealth radius, but I would think it be at least close to normal stealth...which would be enough to enable me to click the altar.

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Just so you know, the stealth from the Empowerment Buff Station in bases *doesn't* suppress when you click on objects. Just sayin'.

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That's good to know.

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Gave the tower thing a try this afternoon. I don't wanna badmouth anyone in particular, but let's just say some of our team wasn't as sharp as they could have been.

Never could get Rom on the corner right with the essences on the other side. I saw some of the team cheaty video to figure out where the best spot looks to be. But it just didn't seem to work with our group. Hopefully can try another time with sg members and really give it a solid go.

Also, we ended up doing the "blast two essences that aren't the healer from 80 ft" thing. First time I have done that. Surprisingly easy, but very time consuming. Another 3+ hour ITF, and that is really sad. But at least I haven't lost one on live yet. That's two at 3+ hours though and that's not much fun.

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lol, I was on that ITF with you. Yeah, 3 hours was a pain, but it wasn't the most optimum ITF team either. Lots of damage, 1 tank and 1 support character (me).

I suggested the cheesy blast the Nictus from range strategy because everything else up to that point failed. On hindsight, we probably should've just charged up and rushed Rom. We had plenty of damage, so it probably would've worked.

Zero down: How to Start a New Character with No Influence (I12)

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This should go in the Player Questions or even better Scrapper forum.

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Agree with this.

People place builds here only as a complement to a guide. You're not posting a guide but rather a build...and asking questions to boot. Wrong forum.

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One 'nit' update:

"Assuming you get only your list price (typically, I've gotten far more), you've made 225,000 influence with 10,700 influence investment. "

This doesn't take into account the cost to craft the enhancements ... I don't remember the exact cost, but I think the Lvl 30s are around 30,000 each ... so you've actually invested approx 100,000 influence. Still a nice tdy profit when selling for at least 225,000 ... but not quite as much as originally depicted.

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Yeah, thanks for the catch. According to paragonwiki:

Level 25: 33,000 influence to craft
Level 30, 38,500 influence to craft

So, yeah, that eats into your profit of 225,000 by about 100k if you're crafting the level 30s. However, I've found that I almost consistently get higher than the listed price and once memorized, the crafting costs also drop. About 50%.

Even with less profit, it's still a sure fire money maker. And I only used recharges as an example. I'm pretty sure endurance modification and accuracy IOs go for roughly double (about 150-220k each) at current market rates. Though, admittedly, those are more crowded markets.

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Great guide...I never thought to try using rare recipes in the early game. I'll definitely have to try that. Just a quick question...will most of these tips help Villain-Side as well?

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I did this villain side first, and just recently did it hero side. So, yes, it works redside as well too. The common IOs actually move faster redside than blue. And redside salvage is far, far cheaper. There's just more demand blue side for common stuff, so you occasionally see stuff like scientific theory for 50k each or inert gas for 90k.

This guide is intended for new and veteran players alike. I started a new account back in March 2008 and rolled several new characters with no influence/infamy to my name.

Most of my villains have more infamy than they'll ever need, are completely IO'ed to my satisfaction and a couple sit with hundreds of millions of infamy. I just started on heroes and so far my dark defender (who is level 36 and my highest level hero) has 40M influence. I don't state this to brag, but to point out that the steps I detail are the same ones that I use myself.

So, you have just rolled a level 1 character, what do you do? Below is what I do at each point in my character's career.

Beginning to level 2: Do the tutorial. While the tutorial is mind numbing for those of you who have been playing this game for over 4 years, it provides two things right off the back. The first is that it's a very quick way to level to level 2. The second is that it provides you two sources of influence: two large inspirations that you can sell and two level 1 training enhancements. As you do the tutorial, don't use either the inspirations you've been given (the tutorial isn't hard and you don't need them) and don't slot the training enhancements.

Level 2: Arrive in Atlas Park. I choose Atlas Park because a Wentworth is handily in the zone and is a short run from the NPC enhancement vendors around Ms. Liberty. Go to a NPC enhacement vendor (Superpowered Field Trainer) and sell your 2 training enhancements. You should have 40 influence. Alternatively, "arrest" about 5 Hellions who are nearby. After this, run to Wentworth and sell your two large inspirations for 10 influence each. They should fetch a few thousand influence each, but all you need is about 1000 influence to get started. At this point you should have anywhere from 1,000 to 25,000 influence, depending on how the sales go.

Level 2 and at Wentworth: At level 2 you will only have one transaction slot and will only be able to carry 1 recipe. This will improve as you level. With your 1 transaction, look for a rare (orange) IO recipe. Look for snipe, sleep, tohit debuffs, defense debuffs or teleport. See if you can buy one of the level 50 recipes for 500 influence or less. Odds are you will be able to. It doesn't matter what it is, just as long as it's rare. After purchasing the recipe, look at common tech salvage (kinetic weapons, inert gas, ceramic armor plate, silver, etc.) Look for salvage that has a lot of quanity (1000s or more), but very few bidders. Bid a stack of 10 for 10 to 50 influence apiece. Go back to the Superpowered Field Trainer and sell your rare recipe. It should sell for 10,000 influence. If you don't get your 10 common salvage, don't panic. Just wait. Go off and arrest more stuff, join a sewer team or the typical things you normally do. It will fill. After a little while, go check on your bid order. When the bid order fills, simply grab the salvage and go off and sell it at a vendor. They sell for 250 influence each, so a stack of 10 will sell for 2,500 influence. The process is repeatable so you can do this multiple times, with each step involving a stack of 10 or more common salvage and 1 or more rare but unwanted IO recipes.

Level 6: By this time you should have finished your missions in Atlas Park from your first contact or gone through the sewers with a pick up group. You will have more transaction slots and the ability to hold more recipes. The process I outlined earlier will still work: you can buy common salvage (just buy larger amounts of them) and you can buy/sell unwanted but rare IO recipes.

You can diversify a bit as well too. A lot of uncommon tech invention salvage can be bought cheaply and sold for 1,000 influence each. Polycarbons, steel, temporal tracers, titanium shards can be bought as low as 200 influence and sold back to the superpowered field trainers for 1,000 each. That's 8,000 influence profit for each stack of 10 at those rates.

Level 10: At level 10, go to Steel Canyon. At this point, you'll begin making enough influence to be set for most of your character's career. By selling unwanted rare recipes and buying cheap common/uncommon tech invention salvage, you should have a tidy nest egg of 50,000 - 100,000 influence at this point.

Take that influence and bid on level 25 and level 30 common IO recipes. The ones I usually aim for are: accuracy, endurance modification, endurance reduction, damage resistance or recharge. These IOs sell well once crafted and level 25/30 is the break point in which many players switch their characters from SOs to IOs.

For the purposes of this guide, let's assume you go for recharge IOs. I'd make the following bids:

3 level 30 recharge IO recipes - 2,000 influence each (6,000 total)

Ingredients (these are listed by simply mousing over the recipes)
3 spell inks - 1,500 influence each (3,500 total)
3 circuit boards - 400 influence each (1,200 totatl)

Crafting costs: 38,500 influence each (115,500 total)

Total cost: 126,700 influence

Place the order and then wait over night. Once you get the recipes and the ingredients, craft them into IOs at either the Steel Canyon university or at your base's crafting table. Once you craft them, list them at Wentworth's for 75,000 to 90,000 each.

Assuming you get only your list price (typically, I've gotten far more), you got 225,000 influence with 126,200 influence investment. That's a 100k profit with just selling three IOs at your list price.

Repeat this a number of times, so you can grab the relevant crafting badge, and not have to even bother buying the recipes anymore. Crafting and selling common IOs will allow you to accumulate a nice nest egg of a few million influence very quickly - in a few days to about two weeks depending on how aggressive you are and market conditions. This process along with your normal adventuring should allow you to have a few million to spend on SOs or IOs as you prefer. Further, it will save you influence since many of the IOs you craft (at bargain prices) are ones that your character can use.

Around level 20: With a few million influence in the bank, and your character well slotted with your choice of enhancements, it's time to make even more influence.

There are a number of influence making schemes, but the easiest of those is essentially a derivative of the things you've been doing all along: crafting set IO recipes. There are a number of invention set recipes that sell fast and have high demand. The ingredients tend to be more expensive than those that form common IOs (though there are notable exceptions), but profit margins are higher. It's easy to make 1M - 5M per sale of a single invention set IO.

The steps are just like what I've detailed earlier for common IOs: Bid on the recipe and the ingredients. Wait. Collect your winning bids. Craft and then place on the market. Collect the influence as it sells.

While this guide won't go into all the invention sets that are crafted to make influence, I'll leave you with a few pointers:

1. Look for the sets that appeal to the largest amount of characters. Hero side, there are a lot of ranged damage ATs so ranged sets are good targets. Scrappers and tanks are also popular and a few key sets (Touch of Death, Crushing Impact, Pounding Slugfest) are in high demand.

2. Be patient. IO set pieces drop more infrequently than common IO recipes. Some only drop at the end of taskforces or trials. Place your bids and wait a few days. If your bids don't work out, simply remove the bids and bid up a little higher.

3. Don't be greedy. Once you craft an IO, don't list the IO for far more than the market is willing to buy it. Every time you list an item, you're paying a listing fee, so pricing your crafted IO correctly is important and saves you influence. Generally, I list about 20% LESS than the typical market going rate (the average of the last five transactions). While sometimes I get only the price I list (which is still profitable!), I often times get far more. Also, in a market where several of the same IO are for sale, it's usually my IO that sells whereas the higher priced ones just sit there unsold. Always remember that the lowest priced item is the one that is sold for the highest bid first.

In conclusion, with a little bit of work and patience, it is very easy to make influence and have enough of it to set up your characters. I've done the above process about six times now, and have never received a gift of influence or a transfer from another player. If anything is unclear, let me know or just drop by the Market forum.

EDIT: As pointed out below, I forgot to account for the crafting fees. Added that section, so the profit from crafting is a bit more modest but still very worthwhile.

Great guide Cat.

Here are my biased opinions on this.

All the missions go fast except with the exception of the last one.

1. I think having Bat and Infernal duke it out wastes time. With a decent enough team, it's easy just to take each one out separately.

2. The smoke grenade temp power that you can buy in Siren's Call (which I had hopes for) will not give you enough stealth to hide you when you click the altars. Clicking the altars suppresses all stealth, including that given by targeted debuff powers. Frankly, I think that's rather borked, but it is what it is.

3. 3 lucks have served me pretty well in being able to click in a mob. The other options I've seen work is to fear them (fearsome stare AoE fear) or use sleep (Siren's Song). It's a pain though if you miss.

4. I find it's helpful to draw out a quick spider (a circle with eight legs radiating out of it) diagram before hitting the altars. It helps you quickly mark out which passage you've already checked or ones which you are skipping because of mobs.

5. I pull Bat by using a ground based targeted debuff. I throw a tar patch where I see the purple triangles. I find this more useful than a ranged attack because sometimes Bat doesn't show up in my targeting reticle.

6. I made a Cap running character especially for this TF. He's a sonic/dark corruptor with the +stealth IO (stealth IO + shadow fall = perfect invis) and recall friend. A lot of combinations will work, but a good Cap specialist should have recall friend, invis (or the equivalent) and -regen power (transfusion, twilight grasp, lingering radiation, howling twilight, etc.) This will allow you to group with just about any 3 other characters and have a successful run.

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On another note can someone confirm the locations of the generals in mission 3? The locations I am aware of are 1) the bridge, 2) the monsters, 3) the surgeons, 4) the bosses, 5) Requiem. However last night there was another EB on the platform with the 2 AVs. Does he not count or is there something weird about the General's locations?

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I'm of the opinion that it's easier to just clear everything to Romulus and not just take out the generals. You have to take out the generals and their spawn, which in one case, means you have to take out the EBs that spawns with one or a group of Roman bosses in another. Just cherry picking the generals is just a bad idea IMO. It doesn't necessarily save time since the team can just as easily clear.

And yes, I believe that your location for each of the generals is correct. The EB on the platform is not one of the generals.

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Also there seems to be a problem with the ambushes in mission 3. One of the times I ran it the ambushes were severely delayed and we ended up with 5 consecutive ambushes when we got halfway up the hill. Romulus' ambush didn't appear until well after he died for the last time.

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I'm also of the opinion that the group is better off staying and fighting off each ambush instead of rushing and just killing the crystals. Sometimes the ambush spawns at a set point, but I've seen the ambush follow a group many times. The mission isn't that much longer if you simply stay and fight since the ambush mob is trivial to take out for a good team...they last maybe 30-45 seconds. I just don't get the viewpoint that you need to rush to the next one since if you screw up, you can end up with multiple ambushes on your team.

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I have done this SF and killing romulo 4 times is a lot more easy. I won't recommend to targets nictus first.They are just a pain to kill but romulo can be easy kill when everyone just target him.

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I think it depends on team composition.

A defender / controller / corruptor oriented team with debuffs is better going after Romulus. For example: 4 debuff defenders, 2 controllers, 1 brute, 1 blaster. Why? Romulus is affected by the debuffs.

A buff oriented / damage oriented team (blasters, doms, stalkers, brutes) is better going after the fluffies. Example: 4 blasters, 1 tank, 2 empaths, 1 /FF controller. Why? Buffs help the damage team survive the obnoxious behavior of the fluffies (heals don't hit, damage is avoided). And the fluffies without the heals go down faster than Rom.

I've had the team switch strategies depending on what type of team we've had. Sometimes going after Romulus isn't the easiest option because the damage Nictus and the summoner Nictus can cause the team untold problems - even more than the healing one.

A few things I remember (ignore my reg date, I've actually been here since retail release):

* Flame Thrower being bugged and 1 shotting tanks
* 6 slotted hover - introduced right after they put in travel suppression
* Toggle drops - to help out "gimped" blasters lol
* 6 slotted brawl for melee toons (for the toggle drops!)
* Anyone remember PositronBot and his Bots SG?
* DarthJoe - original hibernoob
* Peritus introduces the Rad/Psy defender - that opened a few eyes
* Peritus introduces the Thugs/Poison MM
* The turtle - not sure who originated it, but one of the most infamous was LoTD Bots/FF turtle
* HVND Acetaminophen team
* Every PvP build having whirlwind
* Cuddles and his obnoxious Sonic defender

I'm very impressed. That's just an expert build. I doubt very many players can come up something like that. Kudos for posting it but I don't think I'll even bother trying to level up something like that.

Did you have to wait over a year to post that comment?

/e shoots zombie thread in the head

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I can’t tell you how excited I am for our game’s future, and although we have some major announcements yet to be made, one of the things I can talk about is a feature that we are planning. Similar in concept to our character creator, it allows you, the players, to create missions and story arcs for your characters and others to participate in. You’ll be able to pick the map, villain group, and objectives, as well as write the dialog and any clues needed for the missions. When you are satisfied with it, you can upload it and have other players across all servers play it and rate it. Fame will come to the players whose stories rate the best overall. It is features like these that we never dreamed of including when we first shipped, but are excited to be able to offer players very soon.

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Holy crap! Awesome beyond words!

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Should we start calling them the "Survivng 15", like the Surviving 8 from the Rikit War? :P

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I'd vote for Surviving 15.

And yeah, quite simply amazing amount of output for such a small staff!

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Do you see anything wrong with this screenshot?

http://i267.photobucket.com/albums/i...7-14-39-43.jpg

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I think you way overpaid for a teleport IO.

My personal scorecard on how every AT made out (best to worst):

1. Blasters - Psy Blast! and a brand new Psi manipulation secondary.
2. Controllers - Plant and thermal - two previously villain exclusive sets become hero sets. Makes villains not have empathy even more glaring.
3. Defenders - Cold - which is an awesome set and a previous villain exclusive and ice blast, arguably one of the best single target blasts sets in the game.
4. Scrappers - Fire/Fire should've been a scrapper set to begin with. I think once players settle in with this, some incredible AoE based sets will be developed (Spines/Fire, Fire/Dark, etc.)
5. Corruptors - at least they get Storm. Electric blast is meh, but the secondary pushes them up there.
6. MMs - Storm for MMs. No primary but still a nice surprise given everyone was expecting another shield set like sonic.
7. Dominators - Earth is sort of okay, electric "assault" is sort of okay. Not great, but it will make some concept players happy.
8. Tankers - Dark/Dark - if you're a tank you're somewhat happy having the great resists (at tanker levels) of a dark primary and the mitigation of a dark primary. Still, I think the collective disappointment that it wasn't electric armor is still there.
9. Brutes - Axe/Mace/SR - they get three choices but with power sets that don't have a reputation for being very powerful. Concept players will be happy, but power players will stick with super strength, energy coupled with an an electric, fire or wp secondary. The collective disappointment that it wasn't regenation is huge.
10. Stalkers - not terribly exciting. Electric armor is a decent set, but for a class that lives by damage, electric melee is a disappointment.

Bottom line: Heroes, especially blasters, controllers and defenders made out the best. Villain ATs made out rather poorly.

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Please use this thread to discuss the below announcement.

Level Designer Melissa “War Witch” Bianco gives us a blow by blow account of what is changing in the Hollows with the “Gameplay Makeover” for the zone that will be included in the next free expansion, Issue 12: Midnight Hour.

Click here to read the article.

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Excellent update. I'm impressed that War Witch put so much thought and detail into this zone. It was nice to read her reasoning as to why things were changed. They make sense to me.

Now if we can just get her to look at:

* Perez Park - What were they thinking when they designed the tree maze of doom?
* Dark Astoria - Literally a ghost town in more ways than one. I don't think it has gotten use since the change to smoke grenade back in issue 1. It used to be a leveling zone for /dev blasters and fire tanks. Unless you're badge hunting, there's no point to this zone.
* Sharkhead - The Pit and Potter's Field can use some serious work. Anyone else thinks its annoying that Vince Dubrowski (sp?) sends you to go kill 10 Scrapyarders at level 20 when they're level 25 - 28 in the Pit? One of the most annoying hunt missions ever.
* Granville - The whole zone could use a lot less texture. I'd rather have less pretty, more functionality.