Eldorado

Caution: long post ahead!

In answer to your specific questions, Xetrov:

1) The orange level IO sets generally (almost always?) give better set bonuses when you slot multiple enhancements from the same set. Crushing Impact gets you a handful of added hit points, a 7% accuracy bonus, and a 5% recharge bonus. Mako's Bite would give you a few more hitpoints, a 3% damage boost, and ranged, energy, and negative defenses. Touch of Death would give you a few more hitpoints than Crushing Impact, a 2.5% damage boost, and melee, lethal, and smashing defenses.

Since market prices are all about supply and demand, you can get an idea of which sets are more popular based on pricing, but a lot of people who are building for survival are investing in sets with good defensive bonuses.

2) If you look at the set bonuses for having a full set of Gaussians, you'll see that gives a decent recovery bonus, a damage bonus, and an across-the-board defense bonus to just about every damage type -- and that's why it's in demand and expensive! There are alternatives if you just want extra "to hit" and endurance reduction, like Adjusted Targetting, but that only gives an added accuracy and recharge bonus and not extra defense.

3) A lot of scrappers love CJ and SJ -- SJ because it's one of the fastest travel powers, and CJ because of the extra mobility in combat. And of course, CJ has a tiny endurance cost but provides an additional bonus to all types of defense!

The nice thing about Willpower as a secondary powerset is that it's inherently based upon resistances [which reduce damage after you're hit] and regeneration, and does a pretty good job of survival just with those. When you start adding defenses to it and getting hit less in the first place, it's just icing on the proverbial cake!

Of course, these days there's a lot of people who are also trying to build more survivable characters, which means the prices for those desirable sets are higher than sets that don't add such nice set bonuses. I know I got "sticker shock" myself when I came back to CoX after a short break and rolled my DB/WP scrapper, then started learning about the Auction House for the first time! (I'd been busy with real life and had merely been logging in once in a while, but had missed pretty much all of Issue 10.) But I loved my new character, and wanted to be able to experiment with the new-to-me IO system, and started coming up with ways to make influence.

Once I dedicated myself to learning some of the ins and outs of the consignment house system (and not very well, either) it took me a few months to eke out my first billion, which is what I thought it would cost to outfit my scrapper. After I spent that and scrounged and scraped together my second billion, I started reading the Market Forum and discovered that a lot of players had better systems for making influence and were willing to share them! There's a TON of influence out there, and a lot of ways to make it without farming or grinding. I highly recommend at least checking out a few of the stickied "guides" in that forum to see how you can carve out your own piece of the giant pie.

One of the ways to do that or to get your own high-level IO's (which BrandX alluded to) is through the use of tip missions and Hero Merits. I'm guessing that your 450 merits are the "old fashioned" kind from story arcs and task forces -- but you can earn one Hero Merit in two hours or less of "tip missions" spread over two days. Two Hero Merits will allow you to buy ANY desirable non-purple or non-PvP recipe like Luck of the Gambler: Recharge or Miracle or Numina's procs, which you can craft and sell for upwards of 150 million influence, or use yourself in your build.

Speaking of LotG: Recharges -- and sorry this is turning into such a long post on so many sub-topics -- there's a couple of different facets to soloing AV's. One, as you discovered, is building for survivablity and the defense to stand up to the incoming damage. The other is YOUR damage, which has to overcome their defenses/resists and very high amounts of regen. Temporary powers like Evenomed Dagger will help lower their regen temporarily, but a lot of scrappers who trying to solo AV's rely on sheer damage per second -- and THAT usually requires A LOT of recharge to run the most efficient attack chain. And "a lot of recharge" can get very expensive very quickly, since the biggest recharge bonuses are found in the LotG IO and in purple sets.

I know that I was somewhat disappointed after outfitting my scrapper to the point where I could wade through a batallion of Council thugs on 0/x8 and stand at the base of a Rikti pylon and not get myself killed -- but I still couldn't muster up enough DPS to make a dent in said pylon until I got enough recharge through LotG: Recharges and my Alpha Slot. So it was back to Mid's Hero Planner and back to the market for more influence and more IO's! I've decided that high-level builds are kind of like custom cars as a hobby: a month after you're finished with building some super tricked-out design, either something new will come along or you'll have a new idea and start tearing it apart again -- and throwing more money at it!

As you can see, AV soloing and other Crazy Scrapper Tricks™ can get expensive fast -- I'd say only a small percentage of players can afford to create builds in order to do them, but we certainly talk about those things in this forum a lot, which has led me to joke that we need some disclaimers about them.

Hopefullly this long-winded mess answered more questions than it created -- and definitely check out the Market Forum for influence-generating ideas for your new "project scrapper."

What I love most about this game is that there's no "right" way to play. People can have plenty of fun with SO's, and still beat most of the content, or they can invest billions of influence, accomplish more, and have different kinds of fun.

The problem is, that also makes it difficult to answer general questions without knowing a lot of details. All I know for sure so far is that the OP has been here for 15 months, and has made 4 posts on the forums.

Let's see -- in somewhat order, without making a gazillion quote boxes:

@Syndace -- no, I was NOT trying to mock you. I was expanding on the above "LOL at PvP" remarks and trying to give a fairly brief overview of the history of PvP in the game for all the newer players who might not have known about the so-called "improvements" to the PvP system. Nor did I think you were 13 years old, but back in Issue 2 or 3, one or two looks at broadcast chatter strongly hinted that the PvP crowd WAS a lot younger.

"we need pvp here lol i totlly pwn my buds at countesrtike why cant we pvp here lol?"
"Because the devs didn't design the game around PvP? But we're superheroes! Go. Hunt. Kill Skulz. Er, "arrest Skulls." Be glad you're not raiding and go have fun!"
"lol id pwn u 2 u noob lol u got counterstsike lol? besides im level 40 now and bored"
"That's not exactly what we call a "well-thought, compelling argument". Anyhow -- did the box SAY there was "PvP" when you bought it? No. Relax. Have fun. Make an alt. You made level 40 in 12 days? That's -- wow! But anyhow...."
"lol this game suxxors ur only level 22 u suxxors 2 roflmao ima go pvp somewhere else"

There was a little hyperbole in my post, to be sure, for comedic value. There ARE more than 38 people who read the PvP forum. There might even be 3,800 of them. Now, if there were 38,000 THAT would be a significant chunk of the player base -- BUT THERE AREN'T.

I'm glad YOU agreed that veteran players with more experience and more INF should be able to have better builds and more skill than someone who bought the game on Friday night and got PL'ed to 50 and then got pwned on Sunday night. I agree with that concept, too, but there were (are?) still some new players who wanted instant parity with veteran players and the devs tried to make PvP more "noob friendly" with their "fixes." Obviously, a lot of people don't like the "new PvP", as this thread shows.

Lastly, yes, this IS the scrapper forum, but scrolling back through the past couple of pages of topics, I don't see any other obviously PvP specific topics, whereas the PvP forum IS full of PvP specific questions and answers. However -- the "madness" I was referring to here isn't about asking PvP questions here. The madness I referred to is the scrapper forum trend towards bigger and wilder Crazy Scrapper Tricks™, such as soloing Rikti Pylons, soloing multiple AV's AT ONCE, the old RWZ Scrapper Challenge, and Arcanaville's Scrapper Challenge AE mission (arc?). (There's also mathematical madness in the way of algebra and calculus, and arguments over all sorts of survivability and damage tenths of a percentage point, too!)

For the players who don't live on the edge of scrapperlock, with health bars routinely turning a VERY dark orange, or to new players who come looking for build advice and find themselves boggling at multi-billion INF builds, this place probably DOES look like madness. For those that hang around here regularly, we view this kind of insanity as "totally and completely normal"! [Now, if someone like Werner said "hey guys! I rolled up a defender and I'm quitting the scrapping business FOR GOOD!" we WOULD find that to be just completely deranged! (And let's hope THAT never happens!)]

@kangaroo120y -- dual builds (now aka multiple builds) were introduced in Issue 13. Unfortunately, as mentioned in other threads, very few people with very expensive builds are willing to spend just as much and then some on a PvP specific build as well.

Smersh -- I liked it, and am looking forward to Part Two!

Since his toon is /da he should be able to hit about 35% smashing/lethal resists with just Dark Embrace and three SO's. But 45% resist isn't a "magic number", or one worth writing home about, IMHO.

45% DEFENSE, on the other hand, would be. (And wouldn't the baked-in defense from Cloak of Darkness help in achieving that?)

Regardless, the posted build [which I didn't notice a couple of hours ago, either] seems to be talking about (and exceeding) 45% defense, and it's looking pretty good from here -- especially if "the end issues are melting away"!