Fulmens

...and today I learned something! Well that and the properties of black chrome.

OP left out "____ do what Defender do only better! They're worthless on a team! Defenders are going to DIEEEEE!"

Usually controllers, sometimes corruptors... I'm bored.

MASTERMINDS DO WHAT DEFENDERS DO ONLY BETTER! GOING ROGUE IS GOING TO DESTROY ALL OUR DEFENDERS AND REPLACE THEM WITH BOTS!

Something I dragged up a while back, that I think is worth reconsidering for merits:

I immediately thought, "People would outwit the system by buying expensive items and mailing THOSE to their other characters to resell."

Somebody facepalm me.

ooh! Salvage to craft tier 2 insps, with like a 10K crafting fee!

... this is probably a stupid idea, but in my enthusiasm I can't see what's wrong with it.

Unfortunately, while a costume contest removes personal wealth from you, it does not remove inf from the game. (Conversely, selling at an 11.2% profit removes inf from the game without removing personal wealth. )

Hmm. Newb tours (Who wants wings? Who wants a jetpack?) wouldn't remove MUCH wealth from the game. Seven jetpacks = 70K gone from game. That's the equivalent of crafting, like, a level 40 IO. I'm trying to figure out how to give "tours" that would make money go away, and encourage people to make money go away on their own.

Generic IO Crafting Lessons?

OK, I haven't got an account EU-side but I think I've got a plan. Sending PM.

Edit: I got Enyalios[sp] taken care of. So Cende, SFist, Forsaken Empire, and Captain Starstorm? I've been falling behind on this. Sorry.

I transfer inf cross-faction (10% fee, plus 10% went-fee if on a a server other than Freedom and Virtue.) I know, it's a private service with limited scope, but it's there.

... anyway. I agree, we need more inf sinks.

I read this as "Acid Mortar and Pestle."

No, I have nothing useful to add.

I have a general guide to "Frankenslotting" (IO's the cheap way) in my sig. Basically the idea is that if you look on this page, if it's a yellow gunsight it drops frequently from beating critters. If it's a yellow gunsight and the set has bad set bonuses (like Focused Smite) chances are there will be a lot for sale, and they sell for cheap.

Frankenslotting is good because, to give a simple example, three "Damage/something" IO's gives you the equivalent of two damage SO's, plus two "something else" SO's, in four slots. An Acc/Dam/End gives you half a damage SO, half an acc So and half an end reduction SO in one slot.

One thing you can do on your build is, while you're waiting for the juicy set bonuses, slot the really cheap equivalent. So if you can't afford a Numina's Heal/Rech yet, you throw in a Harmonized Healing Heal/Rech at level 39 or 40. You'll spend maybe a million on it, instead of the 40 to 80 million that the Numina's costs, and it works nearly as well EXCEPT for the set bonuses.

I don't know anything about PVP. How do opponents deal with To Hit debuffs, Recharge debuffs, psi damage, and/or Fear?

... yeah, I'm thinking a Dark/Psi might be very, very nasty.

A real consignment house- or THAT real consignment house- doesn't take 5% of your attempted sale price up front, either. (Real-life one is a variant on Yog's Law, I suspect.)

Somewhere I had an explanation of what the various levels of Defense "mean" to give sort of a seat-of-the-pants feel.

Under 25% Defense: Fulmens does not notice this level of protection.
20% Defense: For emergency usage, you can cap with two small purples or one large one. 60 seconds of Elude.

25% Defense: Half as much stuff hits you.
32.5% Defense: About 1/3 as much stuff hits you. At this level or higher, you can cap with one small purple [so you can carry 20 minutes of Elude around.]
40% Defense: About 1/5 as much stuff hits you. At this level you have some sort of "mez protection" because most mezzing attacks don't hit you. Exceptions include some Psi attacks, which have NO range/melee/AOE tag at all. Freakin' Carnies.
45% Defense: The softcap. 1/10 as much stuff hits you as the no-Defense blaster. And half as much as the 40% Defense blaster. One mez lands and you're dead, but it has to LAND.

My approach was to build to about 32.5% in smash/lethal and "a lot" of Energy, and carry a lot of purples. Mostly I play fireblasters, and so I do a lot of "Hit first, hit last" play. If 80% of the spawn goes to the burn ward in the first three seconds after you make contact, you'll probably win the fight.

I hated my En/Fire, but that was a whole collection of issues (literally; started her in issue 2, didn't hit 50 until, like, issue 11 or something.) Back in the good old days, she did damage literally half as fast as my ice; there is no primary/secondary synch; and it's really, really hard to AOE kill a bunch of people before they kill you.

I love /Elec and /En for the same reason; you can hop in, open an amazing can of whup*** in about a second and a half on one guy, and hop back out again. Bonesmasher/Energy Punch, especially if you happen to have Build Up and Aim going, is pretty hard to argue with.

As far as Energy Blast, the "if I shoot it, it's mine" rule is a pretty good one. Singletarget, you've got a lot of ranged strength in Power Blast and Power Burst. With clever positioning, Energy Torrent can be singletarget. Pick, say, a lieutenant and just go bowling.

As far as AOE: nobody cares how where a corpse lands. A lot of this depends on how fast the team kills, but you can often find a good time to let fly with the Torrent where you'll drop three, four guys right off the injured list. If you're Explosive Blast-level there's a trick where you hit XB while Torrent is activating, and you hit the same guys with both attacks.

This is in addition to using your attacks to nudge people back into the tar patch or pile 'em up in a corner or whatever. Most Energy attacks have frustratingly inconsistent KB, so I didn't really play those games.

So if you want to give it another try, there's some tactics. If not... I rarely delete anything- especially while we've got free transfers- but it's perfectly acceptable to backburner someone for, oh, six to eighteen months.

Another thing about anchors: You have to develop a certain tranquility. An old Dungeonmaster rule was "If you give it hit points, they will find a way to kill it. " If my anchor lasts to the second half of the fight, I'm very happy. . . I only really complain if they kill my anchor FIRST.

To extend what Chriffer said, the traditional rule of thumb is "one endred in one attack pays for one toggle."

Faster recovery, in large chunks (e.g. "getting Stamina") is a major improvement as well.

I've done a lot of experiments on a variety of things. At one point, I transported about a lot of low-priced high-level salvage villainside (I don't remember, Hydraulic Pistons or something. Let's call them Hydraulic Pistons for now. ) from the market to a vendor. I took it from something like 3900 items down to 2800.

Those 2800 were all priced at 50,000 inf or more.

Someone tried cornering the market -maybe two people- and driving the prices up to high levels and keeping them there.

It didn't work, and they left their slots full of overpriced Hydraulic Pistons and went about their other business. No reason to pull them, there could be a global shortage or double XP or something.

I put up fifty or a hundred low-priced Pistons and flipped them a couple times at no net profit while the stock built back up, so I didn't accidentally let the market BUY those pistons.

It turns out that 52 "automatic price drops" will take a 50,000 inf item down to autosell level. So it would eventually get rid of EVERYTHING. It's a different world that you're setting up there.

... but why the refund on their 5% down payment? If someone is greedy, or stupid, or incredibly patient, or whatever, and they put up ten Improved Cybernetics at a million inf each, why should they get their half-million inf back? (Yeah, I did that last double XP. A month or so back, they sold. Improved Cybernetics? Who knew? )

I would think they'd have to do something like rename any forum posts with the old name so someone doesn't, I dunno, try to take credit for Mephe's Perfect Firetank or something.

A few points in no particular order:

1) Freedom is the most populated server. It's not necessarily the "Best server". (Many people are radically anti-Freedom.) In my opinion, with a smaller server you have to become civilized, you have to learn, or you get centrifuged out; with Freedom, you can always find a new group of people who don't know you're an incompetent, griefer, troll, whatever.

2) There are two systems of enhancements: the "old way" and the "new way." The old way is where you buy them from a store- TO's, then DO's (available from level 12+), then SO's (available from level 22+). They work adequately well, are always available from stores, and have a known (reasonable) price. The new way is the invention system (called "IO's" somewhat inaccurately.) You can be a little better than SO's for about the same price, to a LOT better than SO's for... as much money as you can get. You can ALWAYS spend more money on the most expensive IO's. Which, I will repeat, you do not need.

IO's are more complex, more expensive, and provide an optional "Game within a game."

3) The Architect Entertainment system is full of promise and full of traps. Many players have been through all the content in the game, two or more times. Their complaint was that there was nothing new to do. So, when given a tool to MAKE new things to do, they mostly had one of two responses:
* Make something really easy to get to max level as fast as possible (so they could, umm, keep complaining?) - a farm.
* Make something really hard to challenge themselves.

There was a third option:
* Tell the stories they've always wanted to hear. Make up their own badguys.
Unfortunately, the AE has very few actual limits on how hard you can make something, and your dream badguy may be a LOT harder than normal content. Or a LOT harder for certain types of characters. Or for solo characters, or teams. And many people trying to tell a story were not your "A" english students.

The result is that most AE arcs are boring, impossible, or hideously wrong in one of six or eight different ways.

What I'm saying is that AE is not somewhere I think you should start.

Currently eight C's drop for every U and four U's for every R.

Your ratio would effectively make it 4:2:1.

I don't know if that's a Good Thing or a Bad Thing. There'd certainly be an interesting transition as 4,000 Kinetic Weapons rapidly turned into 1,000 rare salvage (for instance.)

Edit: I'm Wrong. I thought C+C = U and U+U = R, which was not the case.

Macskull: imagine you have ten characters, each with 20-50 million, and you want to make one character with nice stuff -say, a build with a 75-million-inf item in it.

I hate to bring up the mythical casual gamer, but I can see why lots of people who aren't me might have a use for pooling their inf.