Chaos_String

^This. It can be done. But the moment anything goes wrong and you have to kite for a few seconds or reach for the tricorder, all your progress goes out the window.

Good luck.

The P.Shifter proc is actually the most valuable thing you can slot in Stamina, even if it's just in the base slot. It translates to (on average) 0.2end/sec that isn't reported by Mids. So you'd really be at (approximately) 3.46end/sec recovery.

Here's a good way to deal with that, from back in the day when I used to solo AVs with an ill/rad before inventions.

When PA is about to drop (there's an icon in your buffs bar and it will flash), look to see if Phantasm has a Decoy out. If not, immediately resummon Phantasm. His first action will almost always be to summon a Decoy Phantasm on the AV.

Now duck behind the corner. When PA drops, you will get aggro breifly, but the Decoy only has to land a single hit to take that aggro from you. So breaking LoS for a couple seconds is all you need. Then you can go back do doing... whatever... you do, until PA recharges.

Don't knock it; try it. It works a treat.

End drain is a very fiddly form of mitigation. Slot LF for damage output.

Also, although you've heard some ringing endorsements of melee defense, which I won't dispute, it isn't equivalent to S/L defense. S/L defense protects against more. There are exceedingly few melee attacks which will be used against you that have neither a smashing nor a lethal damage compoent, so S/L does almost exactly everything melee defense does, and more--including defending you from bullets, grenades, missiles, shuriken, thrown rocks, energy blasts, ice blasts, etc.

I won't try to dissuade you from melee defense as I'm sure it is easier and cheaper to accumulate, and I'm sure it can be leveraged with good corner pulls and other tactics to minimize your exposure to ranged hate. But be aware that S/L defense protects against almost everything that melee defense does and much, much more.

Just out of curiosity, how well-versed are you in high-end Mids builds? Having a good knowledge of pieces that are ubiquitous in very powerful builds can be invaluable when deciding what pieces to deal in. I began playing the market while making a "dream" scrapper build. Instead of just building one of certain enhancements, I'd buy a stack of them and sell my extras. I made a boatload of money IOing this guy out. Nowadays if I could snap my fingers and liquidate all my slotted enhancements I'd be sitting on something like 50 billion inf, and I never spent more than 15-20 minutes a day at the market.

Wow, a nerf at level one, when you have, what, brawl and a single attack? Okay. Sounds like hyperbole to me, but I haven't rolled a new brute yet. My buddy rolled an axe/wp brute and says that building fury seemed easier at low levels and harder at high levels. Others have reported that the new mechanic works to their advantage on teams, but again, I don't have a lot of experience with it so I'll defer the arguments to others. I stand corrected (sort of).

This from the guy who thinks that Praetoria was an elaborate ruse of smoke and mirrors so they could "nerf" the Mother Mayhem farm.

My point stands. Lowbies and non-tanking brutes will find it easier to maintain a moderate level of fury. Solo brutes and tanking ones will find their fury redlines at a lower level. That's not purely a nerf, even though those of us who had, for instance, AV-soloing brutes may feel that it was one.

While certainly true for level-capped solo brutes, I don't think it is for lowbies and brutes who are on teams but not running point. YMMV of course.

*facepalm*

Well, the reason I make a distinction is because I've been playing another game a lot lately. Over there, there's money to be made in crafting; but grinding up your crafting proficiencies is itself a money sink and takes quite a long time. So the easy money over there is just in flipping, which is buying at X price and selling at Y price which is higher than X. And of course item stacking and storage and shortages and so on come into play.

But here, there's no proficiency required to craft IOs; anybody can do it. However, from a logistical standpoint, bear in mind that level 50 toons have more inventory for salvage and recipes than, say, a level 10. So that's a significant factor. Also, I'm not sure, but it sounds like you're thinking just in terms of your personal inventory and the 15-18 market slots you've got. Whereas most players who craft commercially in CoX have a private Super Group base with storage facilities for salvage and crafted enhancements. (No such storage exists for recipes, however.)

Anyway, my point is, crafting is easy in this game, unlike in other games. But conversely, engineering shortages and overages is hard in this game, relative to some other games.

So, if you have a level 50, and a little SG base with a crafting table, an enhancement table and a couple storage racks for salvage, you will find the logistics of crafting IOs from recipes and salvage to sell for a profit to be quite simple.

But, like the previous poster said, if you're dealing in just one piece, it really only takes 5 or so market slots to keep a volume of them moving (usually), so you could deal in up to three high-profit niches at once, even if you don't have the private storage SG base.

You can move more volume or deal in more different pieces if you have the storage, though.

Hope that helps.

First things first, I want to clarify some things if I can.

You were observing in the OP that there isn't a lot of "junk" on the market--everything is worth SOMETHING. Well, that's true, even if some things really aren't worth very much. Here in CoX even the worst level 30+ IOs are better than SO enhancements--which is to say that crafted is better than drops, period.

That's a long way from being true in some games.

Now, if you're looking to flip, you should be thinking about flipping salvage, not recipes. In other words, buy for X, sell for 2X (or 1.5X or whatever).

But don't think of crafting for profit as "flipping" because you're actually providing a service that players will pay for.

EXAMPLE: For a while I was dealing in Obliteration triples. Level 50s only; that's where the volume is. I'd buy the recipes back then for somewhere between 13M and 15M and then post crafted Obliteration triples for about 80% of the going rate, which was about 30-35M. They'd sell for the going rate, mind you, but I'd posted them at a lower price so that mine would sell first.

Highest qualified bid matches with lowest posted price to determine a sale. So if I'd posted for 26M and someone else was posting at 30M, and then a buyer bid 35M, I would get the 35M.

But here's the thing: even though the crafted IO was selling for 30M and up, you could buy the recipe and salvage and craft it RIGHT THEN for under 25M. People were willing to pay extra for the convenience of having only to buy the crafted piece, rather than craft themselves.

And it turns out that there's a lot of inf in providing this service. What makes it efficient is that you've observed the niche for a while. You know about what to bid, and you bid in stacks of 10. You know what salvage you need, and you buy it in stacks of 10 also. You wait for the bids to fill, you scoop up your stacks, you hit the crafting table and you crank out 10 enhancements at a time, bam bam bam. Depending on the market, you may want to post them only 3-5 at a time, though, and store the rest in a private SG base. But the point is, you don't spend a lot of time crafting to generate that profit.

This may be why some people call it flipping, instead of crafting, which is what it is. Unlike in some MMOs you don't have to master a crafting profession; it's not gated at all; anybody can do it, and you don't have to grind and grind for hours to accomplish anything. So it seems like flipping. But isn't.

Like I say, if you're set on just flipping, I think the way to go is rare salvage pieces, done in stacks of 10, but it's been so long since I've done that, that I don't really know.

IMO the money's in crafting, not flipping.

For me, too. I doubt I'll ever get around to rebuilding all my 50s with inherent fitness and alpha slots. I'm going to have to prioritize and let some of them fall behind the times. I guess that's okay, but I don't intend to implement any new IO builds until i19.

Torque being equal, I'd take the sexy paint job and 300hp. 8hp isn't going to win you a lot of races.

That seems pretty clear.

We're all free to agree or disagree with it. But in its current incarnation, it's intended to do a big bite of damage while restoring the player some health. I can see where you're coming from in criticizing its "clunkiness." It feels less fast-paced and punchy than the buzzsaw builds that people were using previously. But I see Dark Melee as a utility-oriented attack set, not a purely pugilistic one, so I have no issues with Siphon Life being a lynchpin of the attack chain.

It's thematic. It's not hitting someone in the face, but it is sucking some of their life out. That ought to hurt.

And remember that the MG>Sm>SL>Sm requires a fair bit of recharge from IO sets. Shadow Punch isn't pointless until you reach those levels of recharge: at lower levels you'd chain MG>Sm>SP>SL>Sm>SP. Lots of sets have substandard tier 1 or 2 attacks that you'll use until you have enough recharge to get rid of them. Shadow Punch is hardly alone in that regard.

Anyway, if you don't like the feel of MG>Sm>SL>Sm, then feel free to use an older, buzzsaw attack chain. They're still good. Just not the best. And I for one think that's okay. I'd rather use a signature power like Siphon Life than skip it.

I think you may be reading too much into those powers when you start to describe their intent. The powers simply are what they are, regardless of what you or I think they are meant to be. Issues ago, Siphon Life was a very poor attack and used only as a heal, but when Dark Melee was revamped its damage was increased. This suggests to me that regardless of how it was intended issues ago, it's now meant to do a lot of damage.

FWIW, I feel much the same. I've solved the endurance issue on a few dozen level 50s, and I *dread* the thought of respeccing them all. Not that I'd necessarily NEED to, depending on how converting the pool to an inherent is going to work, but obviously the endurance issue itself is going to change, so re-optimizing all those builds will likely require respeccing them. And that's an awful lot of retread for me to deal with, even if it makes my characters stronger.

It may be that the "retired" characters I have now, which only come out on a blue moon, will be permanently mothballed if I can't be bothered to come up with new builds for all of them.

And like you, I also wonder just how necessary it is to make this game any easier. It's already a much easier MMO than the other ones I've played. But I guess the change should alleviate the tedium of having to rest and/or micromanage endurance below level 20, which is a good thing especially for new players.

I stand corrected...

I thought he ran BF > AS > SS > AS.