Fulmens

Welcome, welcome. Grab an overstuffed leather chair, put your feet up on a minion. Ring a little silver bell and someone will bring you some tears for your cup.

... what? We're low on tears?

*farms tears in the BoTZ thread*

IT IS YOUR FAULT I MUST TELEPORT EVERYWHERE NOW.

... or something.

OK, I'm going to ask a couple questions:

1) What's your goal?
2) What's your budget?

I am a big fan [although supply is lower than I'd like] of "frankenslotting". It's cheap, and it will make all your powers "work like they did before, only much better." Here's the example I always give: 5 slotting a ranged power with
Thunderstrike Acc/Dam/Res, Dam/End/Res, Ruin Acc/Dam/Res, Maelstrom's Fury Acc/Dam/Res, Generic Damage, all around level 32-36.

This is the equivalent of slotting these SO's: 1 Acc, 3 Dam, 2 Rech, one End. 7 "slots" in 5 slot spaces, and really cheap.

Here's a classic guide to Frankenslotting, although the internal links may no longer work.

Frankenslotting is a good way to get a handle on the basics of IO's. Pick a power or two at a time, put in the bids for the recipes and salvage, craft them, slot them. I recommend two powers at a time, and don't slot a power till you have all or nearly all the IO's for it- otherwise you can end up in weird situations where you're short on damage or accuracy or something, because one of the crucial elements isn't in place yet.

Once you have frankenslotted a couple powers to get the hang of it, you can (if you wish) go for a more expensive build. Set IO's are easy to gimp yourself with- pay close attention to the percentages in Mid's. It's not worth it getting good global bonuses and ruining the power itself, unless it's a power you never use.

It's generally best if you stack a few types of bonuses high- getting a LOT of recharge or a LOT of regen is better than a little damage, little recharge, little regen, little defense and a few extra HP.

My recommendations for "Must-have IO's " are some sort of KB protection, no matter what, and optionally a Stealth IO in a travel power. As you know, shooting first is very important for a Blaster.

You can get a surprisingly good build for 40 million; a REALLY expensive build doesn't even play like the same character.

One last note: If you exemplar down a lot make sure you have the set bonuses you NEED. Level 35 IO's, for instance,don't give you set bonuses below level 32.

OK, I'm going to ask a couple questions:

1) What's your goal?
2) What's your budget?

I am a big fan [although supply is lower than I'd like] of "frankenslotting". It's cheap, and it will make all your powers "work like they did before, only much better." Here's the example I always give: 5 slotting a ranged power with
Thunderstrike Acc/Dam/Res, Dam/End/Res, Ruin Acc/Dam/Res, Maelstrom's Fury Acc/Dam/Res, Generic Damage, all around level 32-36.

This is the equivalent of slotting these SO's: 1 Acc, 3 Dam, 2 Rech, one End. 7 "slots" in 5 slot spaces, and really cheap.

Here's a classic guide to Frankenslotting, although the internal links may no longer work.

Frankenslotting is a good way to get a handle on the basics of IO's. Pick a power or two at a time, put in the bids for the recipes and salvage, craft them, slot them. I recommend two powers at a time, and don't slot a power till you have all or nearly all the IO's for it- otherwise you can end up in weird situations where you're short on damage or accuracy or something, because one of the crucial elements isn't in place yet.

Once you have frankenslotted a couple powers to get the hang of it, you can (if you wish) go for a more expensive build. Set IO's are easy to gimp yourself with- pay close attention to the percentages in Mid's. It's not worth it getting good global bonuses and ruining the power itself, unless it's a power you never use.

It's generally best if you stack a few types of bonuses high- getting a LOT of recharge or a LOT of regen is better than a little damage, little recharge, little regen, little defense and a few extra HP.

My recommendations for "Must-have IO's " are some sort of KB protection, no matter what, and optionally a Stealth IO in a travel power. As you know, shooting first is very important for a Blaster.

You can get a surprisingly good build for 40 million; a REALLY expensive build doesn't even play like the same character.

One last note: If you exemplar down a lot make sure you have the set bonuses you NEED. Level 35 IO's, for instance,don't give you set bonuses below level 32.

Mr DJ said:

The thing that interests me is the question: Which way will the most people go? Will it be Brutes and MMs headed heroside? Or will it be scrappers, controllers... what WOULD people bring V-side?

I have a financial stake in the outcome:I'm going to be doing currency exchanges and hopefully lots of them. I'm quite sure I'll end up with all my money on one side and I'm trying to figure out which side.

Acquired! Thank you, anonymous capitalist! Enjoy your money!

I don't see it as a big deal either way- I can make a million in an hour- but I'll try and give a better answer than that.

Crafting level 15's costs about 7000 (if you don't have it memorized) per item. You have around 22 slots (not all of which necessarily need filling) so that's around 150,000 inf in crafting costs alone. This does not include any salvage you will need to buy. Flip side, this doesn't include any huge bargains you picked up because you put the character on a shelf for two weeks.

It's roughly 250,000 inf for the level 15 and 20 DO's, if I remember. Or, to put it another way, buying thirty uncommon level 50 set IO recipes (at 500 each) and running them to a store (at 10,000 each) will get you there.

I'd tend to think the DOs are cheaper, but I make money pretty fast so I don't give it much thought.

Interesting split in the answers between "I have no problem finding people" and "Here's how you might find people".

You can tell which questions people have been answering lately- the "This game is dead" ones and the "What works to find teams" ones...

Looking for level 30-32, got bids out for approx 20 million. That's 4-10 times the "last 5" prices. Have had these bids out for a couple weeks.

C'monnn, people!

Sadly people in Real Life spend a lot more time thinking about making and keeping their money. . . I've never had anyone go "Hey, nice outfit" and throw $100 at me.

Neither have any of my friends who can actually dress themselves.

Wow. Myriad's post wasn't up there when I started my previous post. I spent too long writing...

Myriad- the worst case is not "debuffed to 0% defense." You can be debuffed to NEGATIVE defense, which means they can be capped and hit you flat out 95% of the time. That's the joy of the cascading defense failure( in my example, you'd probably have 15 stacked Defense Debuffs on you till you died.)

General: My apologies for giving the unsupported strawman in the OP that "debuffable defense is useless." Someone mentioned a couple of posts in the 900's from That Other Thread. I honestly lost track of who said what. I know there were arguments that were worth having, and people had valid points on the other side, and I just missed them.

Psiphon: You're not seeing defense debuff with Nemesis, I'm pretty sure. You're seeing Vengeance (+ToHit, I think, I don't know exactly how the Nem version works) and probably lots of it. My rule of thumb was "two Vengeances pretty much neutralizes a Force Field defender. " So that suggests around 10-20% To Hit bonus. Defense Debuff Resistance wouldn't do a thing against that. Does that match the experience of the SR scrappers here? Does nailing two Nem Lieutenants turn you into an instasquishy?

StrykerX: I wasn't touching squishies in my analysis, it is true. There's a lot of active defense on any given squishie- and it varies a lot from squishie to squishie. Are we talking a Fire/En blaster? Sonic/Rad defender? Controller? Ice/ice blaster, where any given debuff will wear off long before the next attack? Herdicaning storm? I wouldn't even know where to begin the calculation.

Cyber_naut: I don't have a level 50 SR build. I only have one build that's particularly high-end. I'm working with what I got.

Umbral: Right. Dark Regen. There are certain powers I will never correctly name without doing the damn research. I was trying to give a "generic solution" with relatively anti-player approximations (1.6 is slightly better accuracy than most enemies, I think- a normal +2 boss should be at 1.56) ; every attack is -Defense; one 50% heal per fight seemed low-to-reasonable) lest I get dragged into details. Dark Armor and Invuln are an absolute swamp of special cases (how many enemies are minions? how many are stunned? how many guys will break away and fight at range instead of feeding Invincibility?) I don't actually play Fire Armor so I'd probably make some extra-stupid build assumptions.

If you want to try and make specific builds, put up against specific enemies, you can do that. Maybe I'm too lazy to make an argument that gives specific, testable, useful results. (As far as 8% "standard debuff" for Cimerrorans- I don't know. I had the idea that 7.5% was standard, based on what players get and what I vaguely remember from Council attacks.)

Dechs (and Deus Otiosus ): Are you perhaps hammering on Aegis (about 4.5% En/N per set) to get that level of E/N? 20% from powers, +3% from Steadfast - you have four resist powers ANYWAY... I'm trying to stay away from specific build discussions but it's like yummy candy for me.

Deus O, specifically:

Good point. I've dived into a big batch of them on a Invuln brute and seen both my S/L res AND my S/L Def go well into the red... one of those "a second is a really long time" moments.

Are there still any ugly Thorns at level 50? or do you outlevel most of the really nasty things, the way you do with DE?

This is a split from the BoTZ thread. Because I have a belief and I want to see if the math supports it. I will list all the assumptions I can think of in my modeling, and if any of them are dramatically wrong I'm sure someone will mention it.

The claim is, essentially, that "any defense without debuff resistance is useless" and I think that's entirely specious. Any defense without debuff resistance will sometimes fail catastrophically. I agree with that. But the question should be asked: how often does that happen, and how fast?

First, it has to be an enemy with defense debuff- Cimerrorans and Council are the most common level 50 enemies I can think of with DefDebuff. Am I missing something obvious? Probably. Malta, maybe.

Let's consider two melee builds here. Both have mez protection. One is Generic Resistance + IO Defense and the other is SR. Both are exactly at 45% Defense. One has the SR "bag of goodies" and the other has 66.7% resistance to incoming damage (most attacks with def debuff are lethal) and one significant heal (Dull Pain, Healing Flames, Dark Consumption, whatever) for 50% HP (3D).

Let us approximate enemy attacks as follows: Eight enemies with 1.6 accuracy modifiers firing in perfectly synchronized waves every four seconds. All attacks have a 10% Defense Debuff that lasts 9 seconds. (That allows doublestacking, unless something interferes.) Damage for the attack is some variable "D". We will say the player has 6D hit points. I don't know how good a model this is; feel free to suggest a better one.

Let us also assume fairly bad luck on the player's part; after all, players go through hundreds of spawns, and the fights with good luck are irrelevant for our purposes. And let us pretend the players have just given all their insps to a worthy cause.

Round 1: Both targets are at 45% Defense, with a (1.6 * .05) 8% chance of getting hit by each attack. As the 8 attacks are perfectly synchronized, there's a (.92^8) or roughly 51% chance that the entire first volley misses.
If none of the eight attacks hit, round 2 is just like round 1.
We will assume one of them hits.
SR is at 91% chance to be missed by each of the next volley and has taken D hit points of damage.
Generic Resist (GR) is at 82% to be missed by each of the next volley and has taken .333 D .

Round 2: SR gets hit by one attack 53% of the time. Generic Resist (GR) gets hit by about (.18 * 8) 1.44 attacks. Let us assume each, again, gets unlucky. Over time, it's the unlucky spawns that determine how you do. SR now has been debuffed by 2% and GR has been debuffed by 30%- it now has 20% defense. SR has been hit for 2D damage (two hits) and GR has been hit by 3 attacks totalling D damage.

Round 3: SR gets hit by one attack 57% of the time. GR has 20% effective defense,for (1.6* .3) 5 hits.
Rounding up, SR has been hit three times for 3D and GR has been hit eight times for 2.666D.

For the next round, "Round 1" debuffs expire. SR is still at 43% defense, GR is at -20% defense (7 debuffs remaining.)

Round 4: SR gets hit by one attack 57% of the time. GR gets hit by all 8 attacks. GR is now getting hit by everyone, forever: enemies are at capped "To hit". SR is getting close to needing their built-in resistance. SR has been hit four times for 4D (out of 6) and GR has been hit sixteen times for 5.333 D. GR uses their heal, lowering damage to 2.333 D.

Round 5: SR gets hit by one attack 57% of the time; at WORST they're at 5D and now have about 30% damage resistance. GR goes straight back up to 5.0D (2.33 existing, plus eight attacks at .333 each).

Round 6: SR is hoping some badguy drops a green soon. GR is dead.

So that took 20 seconds (counting the alpha), with what I think are very aggressive assumptions about enemy capabilities and some bad luck.

It does not include any active mitigation by the players- no enemies taken down, knocked back, stunned, acc debuffed, or held.

In this near-worst-case scenario, it took 48 very accurate attacks to produce catastrophic failure in supplemental Defense. The length of fight is highly variable depending on team vs.solo; most teams I play on are mopping up by second 10.

Am I overlooking anything major in this model? The things that seem weakest to me are the lumped attacks and the homogenous assumptions (no "two-hit" outliers, for instance.)

As mentioned: You can go to the tailor and change your current costume. You can also get extra costume slots (which will start out with a copy of your current costume) by doing hunt missions- at 24, you talk to Serge in the Steel Canyon icon, at 30 you can talk to someone in Independence Port. (Lauren maybe?) To switch between costumes, you can open the menu (I haven't tried \k -I'm sure it works) and go down to "Costumes".

As for the money and the SG and stuff: If the supergroup has things that are useful to you (teleporters, etc.) it may be easier to stay with it than to leave it. ONE WARNING: Some supergroups have storage boxes (for enhancements and such). It is possible to have enough rank to put things IN to the storage box but not to get them out again. Try it first with something you don't mind losing.

Send me a tell in game (@Boltcutter) or a PM here and I can try to meet you and set you up with a nest egg. 10 million or something, or if you have your own SG I'll get you some prestige. It's not that hard, I think, to learn to make money on the market. But if you're a new player, you've already got plenty of stuff to learn.

What server are you on, and when do you normally play?

Two people might be the exact wrong number- enough to get into trouble but not enough to get out. When we go in (and this is a team with, like, 30 years of combined vet badges) we've got like a controller, two defenders and three blasters. Lady Jane doesn't even get a shot off half the time. There was once, if I recall, that we both force fielded and speed boosted her. . . oh, man, that was funny. She was a BEAST.

EDIT: Some bits of specific advice for the OP. Fortitude, slotted for defense, will be a big help. That's like 30% or 40% less hits she'll be taking. It's also hard on a Scrapper- I ran a Scrapper in a Scrapper/blaster duo and there's not really any team-based things you can do to "save" the blaster. You can't tear aggro off her, you can't taunt or hold or debuff. All you can do is eat red candy and jump in like a maniac.

Well, at one point I was playing "Stabilize the market" and a LOT of these things are just "well, someone bought a bunch and then the market randomly ran out." I had things where I'd have a stack up for 55K and, like, 6 of the 10 would sell. Yeah, sometimes someone gets crazy about it for whatever reason. (Often going for Field Crafter.) And sometimes they're profiteering. But sometimes... stuff just runs out. "Everyone knows Regenerating Flesh isn't worth anything, I'm not going to list it..." and then there are six left and they go for twelve million each. Cause someone with a lot of money is on their last bit of salvage for the last Nuclear Donut in their build and they want it NAO.

Grats on the quick cash-in!

The traditional lifespan of a spike like that is about 10 minutes. . . hope you got on it quick.

It's in with the subtle color schemes and quiet, understated costumes.

Seriously, you were looking to the "FOOLS! I'LL DESTROY YOU ALL!"/ "NOT IF I HAVE ANYTHING TO SAY ABOUT IT! FACE MY FIST OF JUSTICE!" crowd for discretion?

We have THOUGHT BUBBLES over our heads with all our secrets in them.

Note that [certain] Controllers solo AV's because it's easy. Scrappers solo AV's because it's very hard.

On scourge: I divide fights into two parts mentally. (This may not be a particularly useful or relevant paradigm for other people, but here it is.) The first part is where all the minions go away, and the second part is where you finish off all the management. Scourge doesn't help much with the first part, but makes the second part of fights go dramatically faster in my experience.

And the fight's not over until one side is ENTIRELY dead. So Scourge is very useful for me. Also Scourge scales up very well with enemy toughness- it's there more for the hard fights.

One of the things Empaths sometimes run into is "Down here with the rest of us" syndrome. Nobody playing, I dunno, an Elec/Elec blaster ever gets a tell saying "We need an Elec". Nobody playing a Scrapper ever gets "Team in trouble! Could you join us?"

Empaths get a lot of those tells, ESPECIALLY in the low levels and ESPECIALLY from people new to the game/coming from other games. So when you get to the point where people aren't actively hunting you down, you start feeling like everyone hates you.

Sounds like you've managed to find good solutions- rebuilding your friends list is a very good one. Forming your own PuGs and /friending the person or persons who don't suck is another good one. Global channels, very popular ways of finding players too.