Fulmens

*blushes* So it was.

Let's say you can average 10 million per converter. That seems like about the right number the way I use them; a lot of people can do better, I'm sure, but that seems like a pretty conservative number.

That's 100 million per Hero Merit.

That's 3.5 billion per "level 10 PVP enhancement".

Given that I recently picked up some level 50 PVP enhancements for less than 1/10 that, I have trouble believing that's ever a price you're going to approach.

Flat out buying individual recipes, I could get 50M easily, 75M with hard searching and luck. I have trouble believing that you can roll 5 at a time and consistently not get ANYTHING worth 50 million.

You'll get rich any of these ways.

Rolling or converting PVPs doesn't seem like the way to go these days.

Converting purples is good money. There are also specific in-set and out-of-set conversions that are good money; I don't know many of those though. (3 converters is a lot to put into a Kinetic Combat: Knockback. Numina's End/Rech might be a good deal, but I haven't tried that one.)

I think "random roll, 35-39" is still a pretty good bet; however, I have been doing a lot of playing and very little optimizing these days. You might even do well with random roll 25-29, because not many people are doing that and something like Eradication or Basilisk's might still be worth 100 million inf.

10 converters can almost certainly get you more than 5 random rolls. I just don't know enough of the details because I'm not hungry enough for inf.

The competition has just gotten a little tougher- Lord Goat just dropped me a note.
We're 38 billion out of second place, maybe more if the American Legion steps up.
Well played, Hero Dawn, well played.

Is this too tacky?

The Crazy 88s...
We're like the Hutts of Virtue. We sit around like slugs and act appalling with our wealth.
We're never on. We dont team with SGmates except by accident.

The Crazy 88s. You don't have to spend a couple billion on prestige to be a member, but there's not a lot of other reasons to join us.

... there's the firepit we throw our inf into.

One of us might show up for a while.

... about 2B infl away now.

I may have to sent @Goat's half a billion inf to assuage my guilt.

If you can ignore things like "some mobs move faster than others" and "not everyone's going to be in the blast radius" I can ignore things like "I don't get perfect spawns everytime".

I can get about six sets of ten even-con minions in that same 51 seconds , no aim/buildup, on a Fire/* blaster. If it's Fire/Mental I might be able to get +1s without dying.

I think the "cost" is less inf and more 16 slots that wouldn't have otherwise been placed in the build (my estimate- 1 each in the ranged attacks, 2 each in three melee attacks, 5 in brawl), plus a wide variety of IO benefits you give up for those very specific bonuses. A [hypothetical] blaster with some Defense might have been able to get another 50% Recharge - four LoTGs and two purple sets- as well as another 80% or so Regen and a few other handy benefits.

You're talking about at least 54 slots out of, what, 93 total?

Edited to clarify: 54 slots = 9 six-slotted powers.

The worst-case getting killed all the time combo would be, maybe, three times slower than winning all the time. Permadebt plus a little bit of running back from the hospital with eight purples and a Wakie/BF/blue/green combo.

I don't know if playing a tripminer really IS three times slower or if it just feels that way.

... oh. We're 15 billion inf out of SECOND place and a good 50+ billion out of first. (823 million prestige, second is 851, first is 937 .)

That's a little different. Maybe we should do some math before charging at this one.

I'm good for 4 billion, if we decide to do this. Maybe 5. Granny's good for, call it 2. That leaves us... about 50,51 billion short of first.

Elec/Fire is the PBAOE king, if you don't mind spending a LOT of time in melee range of a lot of angry guys. What I'm saying is, there is synergy if you have a very defense-heavy team.

I couldn't find a damn thing to do with En/Fire, on the other hand. (My first Blaster created, and like my fifth one to L50.) Very non-synergistic.

As far as the unwashed masses:

I think a lot of people get discouraged early by the market: they press the lever and get a shock, so they don't press the lever again.

Now those same people pressed the lever and got a pellet of food, so they're gonna press the lever some more.

I think we're gonna see some new marketeers come out of all this.

If an obscure, low-margin trick can get me 200 million per AM (Midlevel Crisis: The Revenge) I think it's going to be a long time before we run out of massive and easy profits.

Last I looked we had, like, 10 or 12 billion to catch up.

A while back Cathulu asked:

Urchin: You're welcome to your opinion that unless everything is perfect, it is completely valueless. I will apply that standard to your posts.

In actual news: I just had a VERY interesting run. Characters are L15, on a L21 large team doing one radio mission per character. In about the same time [20 minutes +/- 1] the Blaster gained nearly half a level more than the Scrapper- maybe 50% more XP. The enemies were the same [Warriors], and the rest of the team was nearly identical (I swapped characters on the same team.) The missions were different (Blaster one was a warehouse with three ambushes), and the mission owner levelled in the second mission, but I think there were two critical differences: 1) Teamwipe in second mission adding a couple minutes to the mission and 2) I was hitting 2-3 people with the Shadow Maul/Sands of Mu combo vs. hitting 5-10 with Psychic Scream/Energy Torrent . And I think 1) was strongly influenced by 2). On an 8-person team you wouldn't expect one blaster to make that much difference, but it did. There may just not be a lot of other AOE around at that level.

A comment I made about Back In The Day, in response to another comment about Back In The Day, was being misquoted as relevant to current affairs, and being used as a grand strawman. I have no problem with ceasing to talk about 2005, but then we ALL have to stop talking about the days when Scrappers were twenty times tougher.

We all OK with that?

Also, goalposts are moving back, forth, and sideways in this discussion. This is probably because THB, for instance, is discussing a different case than B_L_Angel. Shall we consider, for the purposes of discussion, maybe three different cases?

1) Minimal IO's- frankenslotting or SO's, with one or two shinies- on both sides, and possibly a level 40 case.
2) Moderately priced IO's on both sides, level 50 characters, budget of maybe half a billion or a billion inf. (I can't believe that's the price of "moderate" these days. And yet I could earn half a billion inf through near-normal play by level 40. Get off my lawn.) Pick say the "third-best" AT combination [I couldn't pick that, but maybe we can come to an agreement?]
3) Best powersets, best IO's, incarnate with whatever trimmings you choose on either side. Sky's the limit.

It may be me, but it seems like some people are talking about type 3 Blasters as compared to type 1 Scrappers. . . if we're giving the type 2 Blaster capped Range defense, then we should give a type 2 Willpower scrapper capped E/N/F/C defense. And if we're fighting the type 2 Blaster at range, we should acknowledge that it has very, very little damage advantage over a scrapper.

This can be a reasonable discussion or an unreasonable one. If the latter, I'd like to know now.

I see. You don't need to play perfectly, you need the ability to "shrug off defeat."

I don't hang out in the other AT forums much, but I don't ever remember seeing that specified for anyone else. Maybe Kin Defenders. I don't know.

I have the ability to "Shrug off defeat." I remember when the debt cap was twice what it is now, you got full debt indoors, and it took 10 hours to get a level, playing hard, in the 40's. If I remember correctly, after trying the Sewer Trial in 2005 or 6, it took five hours to burn off the debt.

What I don't have is the opinion that the "limitations and weaknesses" of a Blaster are just something to accept, given that they are so much greater than the limitations and weaknesses of EVERY OTHER ARCHETYPE IN THE GAME and there's very little benefit to counterbalance them.

30% more damage than a scrapper on a good day. 500% more vulnerability on a typical day.

I play Blasters- I've lost count, somewhere around eight at or near 50, a couple up-and-comers. I think I'm pretty good at Blasters. I don't believe Blasters are balanced. I have levelled up tanks, scrappers, defenders, corruptors, brutes. I may sometimes come to the wrong conclusion, but it's not from lack of research.

B_L_Angel:

I'm the guy who mentioned a factor of 20.

I'm a pig.
I'm dragging you down in the mud.
And I'm full of it.

... I'm being misquoted.
What I originally said was
"My invuln scrapper used to be TWENTY times tougher than my wife's blaster"

in response to FourSpeed not buying that the AT was "broken" in 2005, which is when I was talking about.

Early 2005. Issue 4. I had capped Defense with more than about 3-4 guys around me, which back then dropped EVERYONE to 5% to-hit, and I had around 65% resist to f/c/e/n and 75% s/l . My wife's blaster had... tough, weave, and combat jump? So maybe 25% Defense. She may have respecced out of those by then.

I didn't USE inspirations. I didn't NEED Parry. And I was still three to four times tougher than her on resistance, five to ten times tougher (vs. purples of course, because what else would you fight? What do you want, to take six hundred hours to hit level 50?) on Defense... all through the 30's and 40's. And I had Dull Pain.

B_L, do you want to backtrack this conversation a little?

Well, a month or two ago the answer to "What do you do with billions and billions of inf?" was "you buy one or two individual IO's. " Now you fill out an entire build for that kind of inf.

Or,yeah, you burn it to keep warm, that can happen as well.

I've got a bunch of inf coming in at considerable speed these days. I imagine some of you guys do, as well.

I've been idly fighting for the #2 position on Virtue with Goat's ... thanks to those who contributed.

Any old 88ers want to get back together and take back #1 on Virtue in a semi-organized fashion? I've thrown in 5 or 10 billion, and I can definitely put in another 2 or 3.

Well. Let's see if we can get the bank back together.

My usual statement is "Voltaic Sentinel does about as much damage as an Empathy Defender." It was handy for AV fights and situations where chain-aggro wasn't likely. (Also on a FF/Elec when the tanks were hanging back waiting for people to tell them how brave they were. VS + PFF = "Follow me.") Like most of the things in Elec Blast, it's not LIKE the other kids, but that's not necessarily a bad thing.

Today's notes:

* L11 is rough. It's a lot less rough if you have part-time mez protection, some defense and -ToHit, and a self-heal, but either way, rough.
* Blaster is still ahead, maybe pulled up a little bit. Despite the quintuple face-flop (5-1 blaster, first debt on either character.) Now has Aim.
* Setting +1 difficulty (scrapper) and x2 difficulty (blaster) gives different results. I will pick one and go with it.

With all due respect to sypher_vendetta, there's a huge difference between "is not conclusive proof that will end the argument" and "reveals or explains nothing". Obviously I'm going to learn a lot more "playing like a new kid" than someone else will learn from reading my posts, but there's still a lot you can learn from one data point.

There's a space between "nothing" and "everything" and that's where THB and I (and StratoNexus? Do you have a scrapper in this test too?) are playing.

I'm using 100T because, while there could well be more, I don't want to go too far above the ArcanaEstimate. I'm a wimp like that.

I got to my 100x100B, 1000x10B estimates through much, much less scientific means than you might imagine. . . and I'm expecting a lot more flow this weekend.

(There's also been a bloody battle on Exalted for #1-3 as well as Slax dumping 128 billion inf into prestige on Victory. Hey, every half-trillion counts. )