Heraclea

Selling those drops on the market probably will fetch a fair chunk of change. I tend not to sell any recipe drop if there's a good chance that any of my other characters might be able to use it; and I often just vendor common IO recipe drops if the vendor price is higher than the WW/BM price, which it usually is.

Now, from the other perspective, I sat down and calculated the maximum price of a level 50 SO build. Our character is Sure Shot, a hypothetical empathy defender who hates to miss and objects to ED as a matter of principle. Sure Shot slots all of his healing powers with 6 Heal SOs, and all of his attacks with 6 Accuracy, and wants everything at peak +2 performance. He has 27 basic slots and 67 placeable slots to fill.

Sure Shot is spending just under 17 million inf. ((27+67)*3*60,000 = 16,920,000). This is the costliest possible pre-i9 build. (I'm not figuring out the failure of the chance to combine, or the fact that many SOs are less expensive than accuracy and heal.) The inf dropped from mobs is designed to make earning this amount of inf something a dedicated player can only do with difficulty. Those who use WW/BM only for purchases are indeed going to be hard pressed to afford anything.

The lack of character binding for loot is one of the glories of this game. I would not like to see this change at all.

My personal perspective is that it is better to have debuff and control on a character that puts out adequate damage than it is to have better debuff or control but no damage. I now have an ice/cold controller and an electric/mind blaster currently working. The blaster is slotting for debuff and control as well as damage, and is taking the ice epic pool. The controller is a lot better for teams, but the blaster is more fun to play, at least for me.

I realized one day that my DM/SR scrapper had never gotten TF Commander, because she never ran Posi TF. That was not an experience I would care to repeat. Defensive sets generally don't handle exemping down as well as resistance sets do.

The win/win situations here are Spines/WP and Kat/Elec.

My Spines/WP is one of my favorite scrappers. Mobs just melt around her. I have one kind or another Chance of Recharge Slow procs in most of her AoE attacks, which adds the functional equivalent of defense without the expense of defense bonuses.

I don't have a Kat/Elec, but from what other folks seem to be saying, /Elec is going to benefit strongly from a primary that boosts your defense, and Katana will do that for you quite well.

The vaguely classical style of the characters would have been out of place in the 5th century as well: most of that stuff was no longer in use by that time. The tower shields would have been replaced by oval bucklers, and most of the soldiers would have been Germans anyways.

They almost certainly had cellular phones by then as well.

FWIW, Frank Miller cannot own Spartans, nor the characters Leonidas, Ephialtes, Gorgo, or Xerxes. He followed Herodotus fairly faithfully.

Willpower can get fairly good defense against Psionics, as does Stone Armor. Dark Armor has high psi resistance out of the box.

If you want to harden another tanker against psionics that lacks typed defense against psionics, it may not be worth the trouble given the relatively small number of bonuses that defend against psi specifically. Better to go with a tanker with positional defense rather than type defense --- i.e. Shields. Psi is just not common enough to build for, and a build that focused on adding psi defense is probably shortchanging other more important performance points. Filling your tray with purples when you face them is a lot cheaper and easier.

If you go for such a build, defense will definitely trump resistance.

On the other hand, KO Blow in Super Strength accepts Hold sets like Basilisk's Gaze. So does Freezing Touch in Ice Melee, and Seismic Smash in Stone.

FWIW, I am doing exactly that: building a character whose set IOs are going to cap at 30. This is blue side, so there will be some supply available. My goal is to build me an ideal tanker for low level stuff.

Not doing terribly badly so far. I know that it's going to take a while, and that some scarce or overpriced stuff will need to be bought straight up with merits. Still, a character meant to be optimized at Citadel and under levels shouldn't have major issues collecting merits.

A simple solution would be to allow the creation of random rolled recipes at a level to order rather than automatically kicking them to the max level for the rolling character.

I typically save merits for specific and high priority purposes over the first part of a character's career. Most of what's bought with merits are procs and the like, and these are usually bought at the lowest level they can be gotten at; for most of them there's no advantage to having them higher level. My high level characters with odd lots of merits greater than 20 do random roll them and claim their Trap of the Hunters and Decimations. I would usually prefer to have the resulting recipes be much lower than 50 or whatever they end up as. I typically roll in the 30-34 tier. But most of them get kicked to 50, when I'd rather have something a character could equip sooner.

Inflationary psychology has been in full swing with my dealings with WW/BM for a good long time, and I don't see that changing in the near future. I try to minimize the amount of inf I carry, and characters that acquire a lot of it typically seek to convert that into hard goods as soon as they can to benefit other characters. I have only one character that holds more than 20M in inf routinely, and most will be holding less than 5M.

I do sell drops - or more likely, crafted IOs - that none of my characters need. But anything that might remotely be useful, I hold and make myself. My abiding belief is that if I let any worthwhile drops go, if ever I want another I will have to pay more in inf to get it than I got from selling it. So they stay in the bin.

Let's all try to educate the market forum regulars about how the rest of the world perceives them, and see what happens. Oh, and market prices are never too high; it's impossible for them to be, because it's a market, and will over time always achieve the correct result.

Technically, inflation doesn't make anything more valuable. It only increases the figure in currency some other good can potentially be exchanged for. The good does not become more valuable; what's actually happening is that the currency is diluted and becomes worth less.

In the situation at hand, this is specifically undesirable. Ultimately, the only real source of inf in the game is defeating mobs and vendoring drops. Higher inf prices at the consignment house mean that more and more mobs will need to be defeated to meet those prices.

For players whose chief source of inf is defeating mobs, this gives rise to frustration. They see the time required to afford anything rising, and threatening to rise past the point where they feel it's worth trying. This is obviously bad, from the devs' perspective especially.

The only people who can afford the market prices are people who engage in marketeering themselves. And, as some market apologists will remind us, the market game is a kind of PvP: a boring kind, but PvP nevertheless. So you're forced to PvP if you ever want to get any of the loot other than your own drops.

Yes, BM/WW prices are too high. This is causing problems with the reward structure of the game. I am not sure that simply removing the ability to store inf beyond the cap would be productive. It would likely cause an inflationary panic as the few large inf holders tried to convert their stockpiles into harder goods. To be effective, that would have to be an unannounced change.

What's needed is to increase the number of worthwhile things that can be purchased with inf at high but fixed rates, to motivate people to remove more of it from the system.

My most efficient characters for working the wall are Spines/WP and Electric/Shield scrappers. A Shield/Electric tanker comes close. The Spines/WP is not even a defensive build, but does feature multiple Chance for Recharge Slow procs, which add the effective equivalent of defense. The scrappers also have Caltrops if things get too heavy.

Any level 50 tanker should be able to work the wall in perfect safety. My Fire/Energy Melee tanker can do it, and that's about as broken as a tanker can be. So can my Dark Armor/Ice Melee tanker. Scrappers will be faster and more efficient, and I'd say an AoE focused scrapper (Spines, Claws, Fire, Electric) with a tough secondary (WP/SR/Inv/Shield) is your best bet.

I'm rooting for O.

If I were to work in Burn, it probably would be too late in the build to make a significant difference given the main purpose of the build, which seeks to excel on the early game TFs. That's one reason why the slots are going to go to under-40 powers. (Exploring DB is another purpose as well.)

I may find that I can do without Conserve Power and Physical Perfection; the character seems reasonably efficient without them; then again, I don't have the Tier 8 and 9 attacks in place yet either. If there ever were a character where Focused Accuracy was attractive, a DB would be it.

Ice melee is a relatively low damage attack set, with other advantages: it has some of the best control in a tanker set. I enjoyed it until I hit the levels where my tankers run a lot of ITFs, and Ice's knockdown and hold control is not very useful in Cimerora.

If you want a damaging Ice tanker, I'd go Fire/Ice/Fire. Ice Patch + Burn, holds, and slows seem like they would work well together.

I got a billion influence on a single character over the course of just over a month, some time ago. I play regularly and run many TFs but don't "farm" in the conventional sense. I don't engage in flipping or other market manipulation at all. The inf was gotten by crafting and selling the less needed drops and random rolls acquired by a roster of characters. This included two or three purples, and a stealth IO I did not need at that level at the time. Had I sold everything rather than just the bottom of the barrel / stuff I do not use much, it would not have taken as much time either.

I did it just to see if I could, and promptly fecked much of it away; I just wanted to do it so I could tell myself I had done it.

If I can do it, it can't be that hard.