Canine

You've got it the wrong way round, Bill.

They're asking about Rad Emission and Sonic Blast, not Rad Blast and Sonic Resonance.

The point about deciding whether you want the shooty shooty first or last stand though.

It may be easy to reach, but it's still a ridiculously massive amount of pretend money.

Also if I'm remembering right, 2 billion is effectively a hard limit due to the variable type used to store the value (I'm very, VERY not a programmer type, so my knowledge of the precise variable used is nonexistent).

Personally, I was assuming issue 1 or 2 so that there'd been time for the referenced 'issues facing tankers' to surface in a live environment, but I wasn't around back then. It also has the 'feel' of a Statesman posting, but I could be wrong on that and I may just be picking up on the older style of the post.

Ah, there we go, thank you paragonwiki. Taunt went AoE in Issue 3...

OK, so that means that JB's quote is ancient, decrepit, outdated, from a different development studio (and most likely a developer who no longer is remotely connected to the game, but I may be wrong on that), and can thus be utterly ignored. Just so I know where I stand

Wait, just exactly HOW old is that quote? And by exactly which member of the development team?

Put my hat in the ring labelled 'Tankers are fine as they are, and don't need the sort of alterations that JB's been going on about for years now'.

See, I can't play with the sound off. I use the sound to give me information on what's happening behind me.

Beating up Freaks and hear a zapping sound behind me? Rezzer. (or a /elec blaster turning on Lightning Field... that's gotten me more than a few times when I was Ice/Ice tanking regularly for a friends Elec/Elec blaster...)

Lambda sector, how do you know when Nova fist has gone off? Wait for the sound effect, since you can't see Marauder through the effects.

etc. etc.

Now all I need is for the devs to re-enable the damn 3d sound option in the game so I can go back to properly using positional audio cues...

Personally, I prefer - /macro XP "option_toggle noxp"

Mainly because I'm idle and it saves me having to go digging through the options each time...

Just a minor quibble.

On the build I posted above, I have 51.9% Defence Debuff Resistance running Rooted, Rock Armour and Crystal Armour.

Running Rooted and Granite, I've got 60.55% Defence Debuff Resistance.

The MAIN difference when it comes to defence debuffs and Granite/Non-Granite is that Granite has its resistances to fall back on when it actually starts getting hit due to defence debuffs. The resistances give the regen in Rooted more of a chance to do its job.

Personally though, since I always carry 7 or 8 Purples, then if I start getting my defence debuffed, I just pop an insp or two as necessary, and catapult myself out of the danger area for cascading defence failure. <shrug>

This is my Stone/Fire scranker build, and there's some expansion in the thread on why I built him as I did.

I use the basic armours 99% of the time. Granite to me is there as a 'panic button' for situations where you're going to need it. For example, the Hydra Pylons in Apex. Suddenly being 90% resistant to Toxic damage is REALLY useful in that situation.

If you don't NEED the raw survivability of Granite, then to me, why should I put up with the penalties that it comes with?

Part of the skill of Stone armour, to me at least, is learning to recognise when it'd be a good idea to hit Granite, and when it'd be a silly thing to do. Earth's Embrace, however is rarely a bad thing to hit in advance when anticipating pain heading in your direction <grin>

Also, nowadays, it's not just Psi damage that Granite tanks need to watch out for, Bobcat in Tin Mage can two shot you through Granite if she's still ticked that you pummeled Neuron. Marauder in Lambda Sector will take you apart with a Nova Fist regardless of what armour you've got (if you're not at full health when it goes off), and the radiation pulses in Keyes don't care how much energy defence/resist you've got.

I've tanked my way through pretty much everything (Incarnate Trials included), and I've only needed to use Granite when appropriate.

TL;DR.

Don't feel it's compulsory to hide in Granite all the time, but unless you're trying to make a point, it's just as silly to skip it entirely.

(BTW, since I rebuilt my Stone/Fire scranker linked above, I can casually stroll through a map full of Carnival of Shadows, annoying 4 times the aggro cap and not really caring as the charge in at me to be burnt to cinders. That is frankly more than enough payback for the investment in the build as far as I'm concerned <grin> 'Oh sorry, what's that ladies? You want to do what to me? I can't hear you above the sounds of ineffective endurance drains going off... Consider it payback for years of annoying my other toons.')

Mask of Weakness and Mask of Vitiation are both Ranged and Negative Energy.

I'm not arguing that they sting like hell when they land on a Dark Armour toon (mine's a Dark/Stone scranker), but a purple or two or enough E/NE set bonuses should have you mostly laughing at Dark Ring Mistresses.

I find my main trouble with carnies on DA is with Master Illusionists. Sine I've got a mostly generic IO build, then I don't have much in the way of defence, and I've been held more than once when a MI and her summons all unloaded Flash and Blind on me.

I had a hard crash, and rebooted, logged back in, got the ' Error: Instance could not be found. It may have been completed or abandoned.' message when I tried LFG->rejoin last, sent the league leader a tell, they apparently tried to reinvite me, nothing happened at my end.

I know the trial was still in progress, as I was on teamspeak with a friend who was still in the same trial, still fighting.

Annoying, as it was the final fight against Antimatter, and he was on about 60% when I crashed.

Ah, the joys of being in the habit of checking the boards late on before I go to bed, means I get to respond once a day, which on this board means I get to respond once the thread's run its course. Oh well.

First up, I'm not mad, I'm unhappy with how it was handled on a PR/Customer services angle.

Second, I wouldn't need to be 'mad', the screams of rage from the boards would be astounding. But I have an innate dislike of what appears to be discriminatory treatment of any single group. I may well have still been annoyed, but we'll never know.

Third, IMO they didn't do it 'the best way they could' they did it 'the easiest way they could' and the cynic in me also says they did it in the way that wouldn't annoy the US subscribers.

The best way to me would be to have gone by veteran status. The one with the most veteran duration wins. That way, long term, loyal supporters of the game don't lose their in game identity to a US account that was active for a month 4 years ago, and hasn't been touched since (yes, it's a deliberately exaggerated example, I'm trying to get my point across).

When suggestions along those lines were made, the response was (paraphrased) 'Tough, we're doing it this way, deal with it, EU players'.

Add on the fact that the info we were given was just plain wrong, in that when there was a conflict, you didn't get changed to the last character you logged out on and then characters trimmed from the end of the name until there was no longer a conflict, instead you got your global changed to what appeared to be a completely random character name of yours.

Then we were also told there would be a reactivation week so people who were blocking their own names with an inactive US account could change things around before the merge. The reactivation week arrived *after* the merge. Again, it felt like 'Tough, deal with it. Now go clean up the mess.'

Given some (and by no means all) of the responses on the boards to the concerns raised by EU players, I'm not expecting any great groundswell of sympathy, but I'm not happy about how it was handled and I'll decide when I move on, thank you very much.

<end rambling semi-rant>

tl;dr - I'm still not happy, and I reserve the right to remain not happy for as long as it takes me to forget. Also, what Scarlet Shocker said.

^This.

Not on the same scale, but on my Fire/FF controller that I took to Tier 3 in everything via incarnate trials, I pulled in 90ish million inf from salvage, recipes, and just plain inf drops.

That's over about a week running maybe 1-3 trials per evening. And to a lot of people, 90ish million in a week is a lot of inf generated. Ramp it up by an appropriate mass destruction machine build and yeah, well.....

Which is not an option for anyone who got their global changed, if the Global they had was being squatted on by an inactive US account... </still unhappy about how it was handled even though he didn't personally get hit by a name change.>

Quoted for emphasis.

I buy common salvage (always at above vendor prices, I like to reward the people selling me the things I need.), and sell generic IO's.

I also sell stuff that drops for me, either crafted or not, depending on prices.

I've got all my 50's inf capped. All 19 of them, and about another 1.5-2 billion scattered around on my non-50's. This from three toons actively 'marketing' (by my definition) and the others selling stuff that drops for them while I play them.

It took me about a year to get my first two inf caps from selling generics. but it's not like I was in any major hurry.

Hence my major rule of the markets :

Patience Pays.

Commons are more complicated than that.

If you've got the recipe memorised, then you can effectively make it for 1/4 price, since you don't need to buy the recipe from the table. Getting common recipes from the auctions is possible but can be slow (I've never had good luck buying generic recipes on the market, the supply is too low), and waiting for the right one to drop will guarantee it won't drop. Oh, and the crafting cost once memorised is also halved.

So for a level 50 Damage, for example:

Memorised - Salvage costs (not going to be more than 2000, if you're patient.) + 232,200 crafting cost.

Non-Memorised - Salvage costs (see above) + 464,400 for the recipe and 464,400 crafting cost.

Memorised total - 234,200
Non-Mem total - 930,800

There's a teeny tiny little difference there

Buying crafted generics becomes worthwhile in that case, because I can't think of any level 50 Generics with prices that stay that high. They're mostly below the 'non-memorised crafting cost' level. There may be spikes from short supply for certain IO's, but they don't last long, if they did, I'd be cashing in, since I make most of my inf from generics <grin>

Have you already got a level 50 toon with an Arachnos patron, a respec of some flavour (recipe, veteran, freespec or earned) and Test installed?

Copy that patron equipped toon to test 4 times

Using the aforementioned respec, change one copy each into a different Patron Pool, take all patron powers from that patron.

Go to a low level zone (still on test).

Try out powers.

Profit.