GavinRuneblade

Screw SOs. Starting at level 14 frankenslot. Higher numbers, costs less inf, you can start sooner, never expires on you in mid mission.

If you are poor then the higher the prices the better it is for you. Because YOU CAN SELL.

You want steadfast def%? Get yourself a peacebringer, scrapper, blaster, or brute, level to 15 or 20 and turn off your experience so you are "locked" If peacebringer be 100% sure to get and slot your nova attacks, and to use the respec "bug" that lets you slot them starting at level 1.

You will not only get the defence, you'll get the -kb, regenerative tissue +regen, and quite a few other very good ones.

Run AE and roll bronze tickets. I have 5 or six sitting in my base from this. I have a 15 claws willpower brute that runs a level 1 boss farm I created for myself. Also keeps me stocked in low level acc/dam IOs for all my new alts. She has 380 million inf and has never had a penny given to her by any outside source.

It is not as fast a money maker as level 50 farming, or gaming the market. But my "farm" is actually a story mission that I'm constantly tweaking to be a test/training mission and so it is a lot less boring than most outdoor farms. I have fun. And I get rich. And I stockpile a LOT of really great stuff.

The market wil never be flooded. With hte newly announced change to making fitness inherent so every one gets them for free at level 2, you suddenly have hundreds of thousands of characters wanting the numina and miracle uniques because htey have free slots to put them in. Simultaneously all those characters have three free power choices that used to be swift/hurdle, health and stamina. It is very safe to assume that A LOT of people will go concealment and slot the luck of the gambler x3 one each in stealth, invisibility, and phase.

You want to be rich in three months? Get a private supergroup. Stash away luck of the gambler, numina and miracle's. When i19 hits list them at 1.5x the rate from the day before.

Go back to the market. You can probably buy any SO you want for 5k or 10k instead of for 30 to 50k

But I recommend instead getting some cheap set recipes, and crafting them. They will never expire and save you millions in the long run.

Look at one slot. If at 22 you slot a level 25 SO, by 28 it expires and you need to put in a 30. At 33 it expires again and you need to put in a 35, and a 40, and a 45, and a 50. That's about 280,000 inf total.

Or you can buy a cheap level 24 or 25 set recipe on the market for 15,000 to 48,000, and add three salvage and craft it for about another 48,000. Less than 100k and it will never expire, it will never drop in power. And, if you total upp the Two or Three areas it gives you a bonus to, it adds up to a higher bonus than the SO ever will.

Cheaper, never expires, and gives higher bonuses.

Learn the joys of frankenslotting. =)

I missed part of this question, sorry. On the randoms it is exactly the same as what you used to get from task force completion, and still get from a random Reward Merit roll. This is typically called "Pool C". They are exactly the same as the ones you can pick, but they exclude a lot of the crap that drops on kills.

The list is here on Paragon Wiki.

I personally have been picking because I need about 18 specific pool C's at specific levels (35 and 40) that are not on the market and if I rolled I'd only get level 50. So until I get all of them filled, I'll be picking. Once I'm done, it will be 100% rolls.

No, it doesn't depend on what you are looking to buy. In every single case, you are better off using A-Merits over Reward Merits. Every single case.

Bane's are pretty impressive. Do some searching for a build by Frosticus. He has a 400dps+ bane build. It's expensive as all hell, but apparently the third highest damage output any build of any AT in the came can pull off.

I will list the occasional acc, damage end, endmod, and recharge SO on the market for under 5k. But you always get more for them from the vendors. There are enough players who buy cheap SOs and vendor them to raise money for lowbies that I am willing to support this since it destroys influence from the enconomy and thus fights inflation (the same inf is added to the economy by the vendor, but a portion of the market price is removed via the fees. this is a win for everyone and I can afford to miss out on 10k per SO).

I always list my common recipes on the market. Uncommon and rare recipes that aren't worth crafting I will try listing at very, very low prices (like under 500 inf) and if it doesn't sell after a day or two, to the vendor it goes, or just gets deleted.

Huh, honestly, I only knew about the knock in ripper and the immob in impale. I'm going to have to pay more attention =)

But I see this as a potential disadvantage. The focus of dark causing -acc in every attack means it is reliable. You can build around it safely. Immobilize and slow don't actually provide significant mitigation (best you can do it pin someone down and break line of sight).

I feel it does mediocre single, mediocre aoe at the expense of mitigation. It sure feels like it doesn't have much mitigation. Though I do appreciate ripper.

Ahh, that's a good point.

Kinetic Crash. I'd rather put the steadfast -kb into tough with the def% and take the 1.5% recovery set bonus.

To buy the gambler Recharge bonus IO by itself you need 240 reward merits or 2 villain merits.

2 villain merits are the equivalent of 100 reward merits and 40 million inf.

Most of the rest of the set you can get for 1 villain merit, but you are always better off saving two and getting the +recharge, selling it, then using the inf to buy which ever other IO you wanted.

This bit was glorious.

I heard this bit with the music and vocals from the Cape Radio's jlove public service announcement, which sounds vaguely like porn music. So very wrong, but in all the right ways.

I'll be chuckling about this for at least 4 hours.

Thank you, I'm posting this on hour 12 of my workday on a freaking holiday weekend, and I'm working at least 10 hours each this Sunday and Monday so I really needed this. You rock.

The reason I was selected for the PSTAT study was how bad my luck is. =) One of the grad students saw me playing warhammer 40k with my brother (old school epic rules using missions) On a this particular game I has 18 tanks surrounding his messenger, each tank has 2 shots, they hit on a 4, 5 or 6 (standard 6-sided dice), and miss on a 1, 2, or 3. On any given hit, they would kill him on a 2, 3, 4, 5, or 6. I had 36 shots, each with a straightup 50% chance to hit, then any hit was an 83% chance to kill. If I killed that one unit, I would win.

I didn't even hit him. 36 straight failures on 50-50 odds.

My D&D group had to implement using fixed stat points for character generation. Using the roll "4 dice use the highest 3", I reliably had characters who were worthless. Using "roll 5 dice keep all 5" I reliably had 3 out of 6 stats lower than 11. they finally just gave me fixed stats and said use them.

But it was fun to have my professors document it officially =) I should have kept a copy.

I don't really do any better with drops here. Thank god the market isn't random. =)

Then look at cheap sets. titanium's coating and red fortune sell for 1 million each or less crafted, and sometimes as cheap as 50k each as a recipe. Remember that any set IO from level 24 higher gives a bigger bonus than a level 53 SO. You don't need the good ones, get anything at all!

Let's look at an attack, if you have two slots and put in a 53 Acc and 53 dam you get 38.3% acc, 38.3% dam. If you put in two level 24 acc/dam set IOs you get 38.4%/38.4%. You can buy the recipes for level 24 Acc/Dam IOs for less than 30k if you pick the right sets and are patient. A level 50 SO costs 50k+.

Sets can be cheaper than SOs and still give higher bonuses.

You have it all wrong, if you are poor you want the prices to go UP. Then you just play the game and sell things. the higher the prices get the more the things you sell are worth, and the faster you gain money.

Post your bane's build in the Soldiers of Arachnos forum. I guarantee that either you have mis-slotted, or there still are places you can get a beneift, even on an all SO build.

Whoever gave you that information somehow confused A-Merits and the Incarnate Alpha Slot that is coming out in i19. Totally unrelated items. A-Merits you can only get two ways:
1. Reinforce Hero/Villain morality (takes 10 tip missions and 1 morality mission).
2. Trade 50 merits and 20 million inf

#1 takes more than 20 hours because you can only run 5 tip missions every 20 hours
#2 can only be done every 20 hours

It is the alpha slot they are *thinking about* allowing to be purchased with vanguard merits etc. This is not live yet, and not finalized so may or may not happen.




No such thing exists. You can get 1 Alignment merit, and some taskforces and trials allow rewards of over 50 merits, but I don't think even a doc quarterfield taskforce gives 250 reward merits.

Saving for a purple is an extraordinary waste of time and money. You are 100% correct. HOWEVER, saving for a PvP Proc, might be worth it depending on which you want. Specifically the Gladiator's Armor 3% defense is worth up to 4 billion inf off the market, and they are unimaginably hard to get a hold of on the market. If you want one, saving up might be a worthwhile way. Purples? Never worth it.


Currently there is no single more valuable way to spend your reward merits than to turn them into A merits. By far an away the best use of them. Think this way... For 100 Reward Merits you can get 5 rolls. Or you can spend 40 million, and get 10 rolls. In those extra 5 rolls what are the odds that you can get a single recipe worth 41 million+? The odds are very high. Especially since it is really easy to have all 5 be worth 5-10 million each, which is still going to be worth more than you spent on the conversion.

Or, you could just straight out pick a luck of the gambler +recharge at level 25, craft it for about 1.5 million in salvage and sell it for 180 million. Easily worth the 40 million you invested and if you tried to pick one with Reward Merits it would cost you 240, not 100.

Short version: If you are using Reward Merits for anything other than conversion to A-Merits, you are wasting them.

Technically, what is spines secondary? I just kind of assume it doesn't have one as such other than the DOT and the powers feel pretty random. In my mind I kind of consider it our fire melee.

On this concept, what are you looking for that you can't get already with dual blades? just the poison?

My #1 desired and #1 on "not going to happen" is still a huge body model for females.

/em sadness

This has not been true for more than a year. Unless it came back with i18 and has not been removed again.

Use Villain mertis not real merits. You can get one every four days. period, full stop. No exceptions. Run 5 missions log off. Run 6 missions log off. Run 5 missions log off. Run 6 missions, buy your gambler, log off. Done.

It provides +toHit which is more than twice as effective as +accuracy and becomes comparatively more and more effective the higher level enemies you fight.

It also provides + Perception.

It is also the only source of +toHit protection available. Hate fighting those Circle of thorns spectrals or anyone else with negative energy attacks screwing up your accuracy? Focused Accuracy will help with that, good luck finding anything else that will other than using a competing buff like popping a yellow.

That said, it's totally not worth the cost. Should be cheaper than Tactics, since tactics is a team buff. But tactics only provides confuse protection which is no where near as useful.

Mix and Match, use the three triples from Thunderstrike and get a ranged def bonus, then a proc and flavor to taste with the leftover 2 slots.

I have farmed up to 6 hours per week for months without getting a purple drop. Now, I am not the best farmer, but I was running either Borea rikti warzone missions at +0x8 or the code merlin arc set to +1x8. I probably did a good 4 or 500 missions with no purples. Random is random. That's just how it goes.

Granted, way back when the probability and statistics office at USCB used me in a study on luck (I'm not joking either, somewhere there is documentation of me getting coin toss results of 300-something wins, vs 600-something losses on two separate identical trials as part of a study on luck).

I've been on an 8 man ITF where one guy got two pieces of armageddon. Random is random.

1. If you wait you will have to wait 2 days. You can only convert for 1 merit per day.

2. it is a per conversation fee. It does not increase, but you have to pay it each time.

3. it is a per conversation fee. It does not increase, but you have to pay it each time.

4. If you d the rolls they will all be at your level or the highest level the recipe can support. If you pick you can choose the exact level you want. This makes the decision for me. If I care about the level, I pick, otherwise I roll.

I've gotten the third damage taken badge and second slept/stunned/held before level 24 on more than one character. The first mezzed badge was 99% from the stun from using a wakie.


Try Eve Online. If you don't prepare properly, death is hardcore = lose all money, possessions, and start over from level 1. If you do prepare properly and get killed twice in rapid succession it is always hardcore.

Or try Final Fantasy XI. If you're not teamed it will take about 3 or 4 hours of solid grinding to kill enough mice and rats to go from level 3 to level 4.

Game balance is not around top end performance, it is around general public. Remember that the average player of CoX doesn't know the official forums exist. Many don't understand the market. You gotta assume the average player dies before level 15. Hell, I see people get taken out during the tutorial from time to time.

What about debuff resistance in the same sense as the debuff resistance from IO set bonuses? Meaning, make it wear off faster instead of reducing the impact when it happens. If the duration is the penalty not the degree of the reduction, then let us turn off the debuff sooner. Against a Stun, I can ignore the magnitude, or I can unstun faster. Against -regen I can do neither. If ignoring the magnitude is too difficult, what about shorter durations?


From a purely annecdotal perspective, I find this plays out almost identical to psionic resistance. Either it doesn't exists, or it exists is such high quantity that fun is removed. Regardless of the math of the scenario, the fun is removed.

Most enemies do not have -regen. Those that do have it, sometimes have enough duration and/or frequency, to keep it going non-stop until you kill them. To me, that is either too high a duration, or too fast a recharge, or giving it to too common an enemy (minion instead of lieutenant for instance).

An example are the nemesis Jaegers. The duration on the -regen is long enough, and there are enough jaegers in any mission featuring them, that my /regen has almost no protection from my regeneration at all. I'm surviving or not based on clickies and inspirations and kill speed. From the miniute the debuff kicks in until the spawn is gone (or all running away because the AI is annoying like that) I have no regen. The fact that I can regen at all only matters outside of combat, ie while resting. That's too much for me. It's not a challenge, it is no longer fun. And I find it hard to believe it was the intent of the encounter.

And I dunno about the new praetorians using smaller amounts, I'll have to rerun the arc and watch more closely. I was getting so frustrated that after a while I stopped bothering with IH since I was below zero with or without it. But I did only run part of the arc one time, so I do not consider my experience at all definitive.

Two groups where I find the -regen works very balanced are the Carnies and Longbow. There is a -regen in the fire attack of the seneschal. And I really notice it. Makes me want to get the hell out of the burn patch. Longbow has the same with the flamethrowers, but not every longbow minion is a flamethrower. And yet there are few enough of them, and the effect wears off before the next application, that during battle my regeneration matters, but their -regen also matters. This works for me. It is more of a challenge, but still fun.

So I guess the real question is, how many groups have too much of it? Are we focussing on the negatives, or is it an issue?

The only difference between what he just did and being softcapped is that he would have popped two oranges instead of two purples.

He is exactly that good right now.

@the OP: Cheers!