Fulmens

En/Fire... *twitch* my second serious character was Energy/Fire. I'm fairly experienced, I respecced Boom Baby more than, possibly, all my other characters put together, I left her alone for about three years... and I couldn't make it work. Sneak sneak sneak Build Up Aim Fire Sword Circle Explosive Blast... meh.

I'm looking for a good suggestion for a strong secondary to retry Energy Blast. Because I may not have given it a fair shake last time.

Is there an update for how to do this in the brave new world of the NCSoft launcher?

I tried the old way, got outwitted, and am now patiently updating... perhaps someone else can be saved from this fate?

energy/*, hmm. Maybe I'll go En/Mind. That gives me decent defense FOR A BLASTER. Other suggestions?

Arcanaville, you know where I stand on this, but I may not have talked about it much in the last five years.

I play about as many Fire/* blasters as non-Fire blasters. And I am seriously considering *more* Fire Blasters.

Why? firebreath/fireball is "erase the minions" territory. I'm old school, I hit fireball first because traditionally, I was mezzed/knocked back/dead by the time the fireball was supposed to land.

I can takedown a boss and 8-10 minions in twelve seconds if I do it right.

I have PLENTY of damage... on a Fire Blaster.

The handwave numbers I work with are that a Blaster does around 20-30% more damage than a Scrapper, at 1/6 the survivability. Those numbers (probably) change when you get to level 45+ . By which time all the Blasters have given up long ago, or settled for dueling +3 Snipers and bouncing Death Mages, gloomily firing off Nova in a group of minions every three minutes... OK, maybe I do need to level up a blaster "normally", which I have not done in like five years. Because that was a LONG time ago.

Can Energy/* two-shot AOE minions, second shot while they're knocked back, and stay quasi safe during their alpha? I vaguely remember they could at some point do that, but I don't know if that's the case in this brave new world, that has such Blasters in it.

Additional question: Are we teaming for half the TIME or are we teaming for half the XP? Because if (say) soloing is three times as slow to gain XP, we're talking about a considerable difference.

Were you not familiar with the prisoner's dilemma?

Cool, we're educating people and making them evil!

I agree with the "PVP crash" thesis. Apparently the average to make a random PVP into a Glad 3% is something like 40 or 50 converters? Call it 5 Alignment merits , if that code ever goes live.

Something that used to cost 30 AM's is now available for 5 AM's and a junk recipe. Less than 5 if you're willing to settle for another of the "big three". There are around ten times as many junk recipes as valuable ones.

And just in case someone was gonna try and buy up supply to hold the price (a good way to burn hundreds of billions of inf and still lose, if my experience on smaller-scale projects is anything to go by) we're going to start off with a flood of, like, three hundred Glads.

Good basics.

I hate to be that guy who says "It should be more like *MY* guide" but I would suggest discussing the defense cap - because that's where FF really shines in my opinion, is in getting people to the defense cap no matter what- and Maneuvers, which I consider the tenth power in the set.

Also, I have to mention that while Repulsion Bomb is "nothing to write home about" it does roughly the damage of a typical AOE- Ball Lightning, Explosive Blast, or Energy Torrent. It's not going to look good in a set with no damage buffs or resist reduction, but it's perfectly acceptable (if slow) damage.

I have a defender-based view of the set, which will warp my opinions in a different direction than yours.

Never mind, Christy and Michael are talking to me now.

Not selling me converters, but talking to me.

I think there's going to be slightly less money available per really high-end build, because people won't need to farm as hard to purple out a character (and because some of the reservoir of inf drained off in the Great PVP Frenzy.) And people who have it will spend it, competing with other people who have it, so... my grand guess is that purple prices will come down to about 75% of their old values for the expensive ones, maybe 2/3 of that for the cheap ones.

I've been figuring ballpark for an AM is about 100 million, but that was before the recent flood of merits, followed by 2XP, followed by converters. It's at least 50 million.

Figure that Doctored Recipe-> Doctored Crafted is about 5 million inf.

Maybe if you turn a Doctored, like, endurance into a LoTG you will do pretty well. Looks like an LoTG averages about 30 million. Red Fortune: Endurance (craft your own) will run you under a million. So 1.5 million and two converters in, 30 million out, that's like 140 million per converter. Your raw material costs are under your market fees.

Interesting!

OK, this is weird.

Installed a patch just now.

At the Crucible, respecs are for sale for AM's (were they earlier? I don't know) but converters are not.

In Ouroboros, Astral Christy and Empyrean Michael won't even talk to me. Not on a level 45, not on a level 50 with Alpha. (heroside both times.)

Anyone else confrim this?

I ... hmm.
I guess if you're shopping for a set of six Hecatombs (or five) you could CONVERT IT NAO for the first two and you'll probably get things you want.

On the other hand, none of us is safe from irrational shopping. I've only purpled out two builds and the second one, I spent 200 million over "reasonable market price" to get the last item RIGHT NAO.

Then I found out it wasn't the last item... /e facepalm

I've heard claims that bronze beats silver- not just ticket for ticket, but recipe for recipe. I haven't investigated, myself.

" The PVP IOs I bought were a waste of money."

... it's not a waste of money until you sell it. I expect at least SOME bounceback. There may be enough PVP IO's to get every child a Glad 3% Defense, but I doubt it.

I'm going to buy a couple PVP +3% Res IO's for cheap. Maybe ten. I have invulns, dark armors, lots of people that can get 6-10% more survivability out of one slot.

Ouch.

Topdoc said:

They need to do X "for this to be viewed as anything other than" Y.

There is no way to view this as anything other than Y, because they did not do X.

Fair enough, it was an imperfect paraphrase and poor use of quotation marks.

I stlil came up with three other ways to view it and I wasn't working that hard.

Meanwhile, you're mad because you made a big bet that Live would work just like Beta, which is a guarantee they explicitly do NOT make.

You're right, Darth. There is no way they were making a mistake after playing all weekend. There is no way they were trying to encourage large-team play by making Reward Merits have some other value than fodder for Alignment Merits. There is no way they were trying to throw a bone to Rogues and Vigilantes.

Maybe it was a profit-hunting move. But saying "There is no way" it was anything else just makes you look unusually bad.

There's a rule in software that you're most likely to find the NEXT bug right next to where you found the LAST bug.

I can think of a couple non"SKEEZY" reasons they may have done this, but Additional Human Error is #1 on the list.

(I was a zombie yesterday from 2XP, and if the coders are also players of the game, they may have been as well. )

Congratulations, everyone who got on in time to make some eye-popping profit!

I would also like to add that dust is a REALLY GOOD INSULATOR. If you vacuum your apartment/house it tends to make it even worse; it kicks up the dust which makes your computer into a secondary cleaning device.

My current computer is pretty much cooked because of a terrible grate design which clogs up with dust REALLY fast. I know, all fan grates and fan blades get dusty eventually, but I would clean mine, look at my wife's fans and computer interior and... hers was impeccable.

People of earth: Clean your computers.

Edit: That's what I get for posting from work; scooped by Hyperstrike.

If you 'can't hold enough insps' two medium purples work exactly like four small purples. 60 seconds of Elude. Won't keep your pets alive, though. (I buy mine from Wents; do you have a friend to do the shopping for you? )

Also I would second the recommendation to slot 1 acc, 3 damage in anything you are using to do damage. The difference between 3 damage SO's and 1 damage SO is literally one and a half times the outgoing damage.

Bottom prices will rise slightly; probably by 10% or so (fewer total recipes generated, some of them converted into good stuff). These are already things you can buy for a million and sell for ten million, so I don't think we'll see a lot of clear and visible change.

Yeah! Get em! Spend them into the ground!

Fix their inf-spending ways with YOUR inf-spending ways!

That's how we did it when I was a kid and Reagan was in the white house.

... or maybe they'll burn so much inf buying purples for 1.5 billion that there won't be ANY inf left!

A man can dream.

I believe the way the game is coded, it's not depressing the button that causes the problem... it's releasing it.

Like a land mine!