JakHammer

I mostly play my Stone Tank. Sometimes I get a little disoriented in cave maps ex: Council, CoT etc.

The day the dog came out was SG night and we did a Moonfire. One of our SG members is a dog lover and had points. I got lost a lot till I realized I could follow the dog. MUCH hiliarity ensued as the 'seeing eye' pet led the poor confused tank to battle.

Jak

Thanks all.

I had two items in the limbo area I first described and relisted them last night at lower prices. This morning, both had sold at the kneejerk window price.

Now I just have to decide if I want to eat the lost listing fee and relist a 300 mil purple or be patient and hope the supply contracts till it is alone.

Very glad to get the advice here,
Jak

Ok, for some reason I forgot all my buyer knowledge when I flipped my mind to seller mode and looked at my listing. I forgot that when you bid 10 mil you are going to PAY 10 mil, period. A 10 mil bid is not a "Secret Maximum" bid, and the auction house is not really an Auction. If everyone is just auto bidding the last 5 price then it can stay exactly 10 mil indefinitely. Duh.

Every time a new 10 mil bid comes in, the system awards that 10 mil to the cheapest listing below 10 mil. If there are none below then the = to 10 mil listing sells. In the event of a tie on the listing price, it either breaks the tie randomly or gives it to the oldest listing, or uses some other method. As long as there are ANY listings below my 9 mil listing my recipe will Never sell.

Finally, does this also explain why some people gamble on listing stuff at 1. Does the system take the next bid in the bid queue that exceeds your listing and give it to you. So if, for example, you were to list the same item for 1, one at a time, ten times, you might see sales at 1000, 1 mil, 10 mil, 500K, 18000, 200, 2.5 mil etc. ?

Edit: I see above that some are referring to Highest offer to Cheapest lister as 'the rule' but since I do dump excess common salvage at 1 and often see patterns like 10, 1000, 100, 10 that does not seem correct. If that were the case the pattern should be 1000, 100, 10, 10 assuming those were the 4 hightest bids out there when I listed.

Have I correctly stated the functionality of the market house now?

If so I will have to totally rethink how I list stuff, but will lose a lot of frustration.

Jak

I am curious, do Monsters and AVs have their HP/sec regeneration based off their current Max HP like Players do?

If so debuffing max HP would also reduce Regen/sec and might make a max HP debuff somewhat more valuable.

Jak

I have noticed this before on other items but recently it is realy bad. I have had a recipe listed at 9,000,000 for over a week. Every time I check that toon's listings I see that recipe sold 5 times that day at 10,000,000.

Now having bought and sold a boatload of stuff on real auction sites, that just makes NO sense. Every person that paid 10,000,000 was potentially gipped by 1,000,000. Who is to say that there are not 30 more people sitting at 9,000,000 just like me? This is apparently a high volumn recipe with some 200+ listed and well over 100 bids evey time I check. Is the Auction house WIA, or is this a bug? If WAI what is the screwball explanation of what seems to be a system that will guarantee artifically supported prices?

Jak

Re: Moving shards.
Duh, I mis-spoke. You don't move Shards, you buy vouchers with Astral Merits that other toons on the account can claim via email as Shards.

I also noticed that there are several other options with the Astral and Emp merits, like recipes and regular merits. Here is the overview.

http://wiki.cohtitan.com/wiki/Incarnate_Merit_Vendor

When I was stripping the 2nd account 50's neither had enough Incarnate stuff to bother about, so I was slipshod in researching that, sorry.

Jak

Fortunately, I have never gotten a toon that I did not really like all the way to 50. But I have deleted some 40's and recently had to strip 2 level 50's on a secondary account that is going premium and will not have IO access.

I used the following checklist to do the clean outs.

Roll off all AE Tickets. email or sell results.
Repeat for Regular merits.
Repeat for Hero / Villian merits.
Repeat for Incarnate currencies. Not much you can do here, but you could get some stuff like emotes I would guess. You can move shards to a different toon.
Claim a respec and strip high value IO's. Repeat if needed and you have enough vet specs. Email, sell or store.
Clean out salvage and your vault storage, sell or email.
Check left overs of process at the Auction House / Black market. I usually try to give everything a week to sell, then either relist at 1 or vendor. Email the last bit of inf.

That is about it. It may surprise you how much the total inf, etc. comes to. Stripping that 2nd accout generate about 500 million not counting the recovered uniques. Still it is a drag to do and preping the 2nd account to go premium was more like work than fun.

Jak

My main is a Stone tank and I was very interested in seeing how a Brute would do in Granite. I played a Stone/Stone Brute up to mid 40's before deleting it.

The damage was certainly ok, but I found the Brute version of Granite to be a lot less powerful than the tank version. If you are going to put up with the penalties of Granite, you ought to be really really tough. Brute Granite just seemed ordinary.

So I am working on finding a Brute that is really hardy without the severe drawbacks of Granite.

Jak

I wanted to optimize my Stone Tank for full time Granite. The penalties that I wanted help with were -Recharge, -Damage, and -Speed. Can't do anything about -Jump of course. Over time I have tried four T4 Alphas.

The first T4 I made was a Spititual Core. The recharge boost helped a lot as did the Heal boost, but the increased damage from smoother attacks was offset, in anything other than a short fight, by endurance problems from more activations. I had hoped to get Earth's Embrace to perma levels in granite but that would have required a very extreme build and adding Hasten.

I next made a Musculature T4 core. The damage problem was well addressed but not erased, and the roughly equal DPS did not stress my blue bar as much. This is the best single answer to the big Granite damage penalty, but offers no other benefit to a Stone-Fire-Pyre. This T4 plus a Reactive Radial Flawless let me start soloing Pylons in a reasonablre amount of time, and cut down my farming times by a third or more.

Moving on, I reworked the build to improve recovery, add very strong Global recharge from sets (this seemed the most efficient way to deal with that penalty. I did not want Hasten as I preferred other powers and no toggle droping crash), retained most of the run speed boosts from sets, and made sure all attacks were ED red. I then made a T4 Nerve Radial for Incarnate Trials. This plus a few set bonuses put me very near the 59% defense you want for incarnate opponents. Useful Accy boost and a nifty Taunt boost. Damage output suffered. I still use this Alpha for extreme Tanking.

Recently I made a Musculature Radial T4. The 33% Damage with two-thirds ignoring ED is actually really close to the 45% Core when you look at the final numbers on a toon that is already at ED red damage from regular slotting (about 8% difference). The speed boost let me save a slot in Swift and drop a run speed set bonus to gain another slot. The Recovery boost let me save another slot in Stamina. This is now my everyday Alpha and I think it is the best compromise for a Granite focused Stone Tank.

Now, if I had only had enough skill with MIDS and sufficient game imagination to pick the Musculature Radial at Step 1 .

Jak

I have a 2nd account that will have to go premium for a while.

I am respecing and stripping off the IO's that will cease to function and have put a couple of bins in my personal base to stockpile those I-trial 53's for use by the few gimped toons I'll want to keep active. For the two alts with massive full IO set builds I'll do a 2nd build with SO's and maybe a Hami here and there.

Just a thought,

Jak

Coast to Coast AM.

I am sorry to have to tell you that, at this time, thay are bound to the character that made them. They will just have to sit in your tray, be reslotted, or be deleted (OUCH!) Perhaps this is part of their plan to sell enhancement tray upgrades.

This thread http://boards.cityofheroes.com/showthread.php?t=272664 has an ongoing discussion about boosters. In that thread I conducted an experiment where I attempted to mail, trade, put one in a bin, and put in auction house storage. Nothing I tried works right now.

So for now, DO NOT boost anything you are not planning to keep in a Characters build forever.

I think there may be a planned modification for this in future, where you can move them around on the same account. But I can't remember where I read it, and that may just be wishful thinking.

Jak

PS: I did just think of one workaround. Nasty but doable. Use them in a 2nd or 3rd build. This would at least avoid deletion and clear your tray. If they ever become movable you would have to face the expense of buying 3 more unsloters, but that might be worth it.
Jak

Evil, when you buy the 90 package (or any other quantity fot that matter) the package will be in your Character Items section of your email. They will be available to be claimed, one at a time, by any character on your account.

I found that, in doing massive boosts, it was best to plan each power out seperatly and then claim exactly the number of boosters (usually 5 or 10) for that power only. It helped this old man keep what went where straight, and avoided having any boosters claimed by my main and then not used.

Jak

Not really needed, but to also confirm.

I spent my entire birthday budget on the $100.00 package. Also first purchase. 9600 points and 8 + 1 = 9 tokens received.

Nice to see one part of the new system working exactly as promised.

Now if my monthly token would just show up. On either account.

Jak

The original Paragon Rewards announcemant from July 21st is still on the news archive, and also the Announcements Forum on July 21st from Beastyle. The linked pages inside those announcements that specifically described the up front loading of tokens for multi-month subs are no longer available. Error 404. This is quite proper as they are in error and have been superceeded by what is actually happening. Below is the clarification and apology from Zwil on Sept. 12.

__________________________________________________ _______________________


"IMPORTANT: Paragon Rewards Program Update - 9/12/2011
Since announcing City of Heroes Freedom we’ve been extremely excited to share all of the new features coming with Issue 21, one of the most exciting being the Paragon Rewards Program.
We’ve fielded several questions over the last several weeks about the Paragon Rewards Program, one of which being about how Paragon Reward Tokens are awarded for players who purchase Multiple Month Subscription plans. Our original design, and what we’ve been sharing, is that VIP players who purchased multi month subscription plans would be awarded all Paragon Reward Tokens at the time of purchase. Unfortunately due to technical limitations that we have been unable to overcome, this will not be the case. Instead, VIP players who purchase multiple month subscription plans will receive their Paragon Rewards Token each month on their billing cycle, at the same time they receive their monthly allotment of Paragon Points. Please note that Paragon Reward Tokens granted by the purchase of Paragon Points will grant at the time of purchase.

We do sincerely apologize that we were not able to launch Issue 21 with this feature and will continue to endeavor to implement it in the future.
__________________
Andy Belford
Community Manager
Paragon Studios"

__________________________________________________ __________________________

In re-reading this communication I find that characterizing it as "lame" is a bit harsh, and will in turn give a sincere apology to Andy.

However I cannot help but note that the quoted message above says that Tokens will be granted at the same time as points on your billing date. I sure would hate to have a job where I constantly go before the public with bad information and then have to explain it away somehow. Andy, after this you should consider doing the same thing for big bucks and become a Presidential spokesman.

Jak

I think we can all agree that the implementation of the new rewards system, versus the expectations engendered in the community by promotional descriptions before the actual release, compounded by promised fixes being botched and or delayed, constitute a Major Fail.

I personally consider the promotional hype for all tokens up front for multi-month subscriptions, and the lame apology for technical barriers post launch, to be bait-and-switch advertising. I do not know if the actual published information rises to that level of consumer deception, but I do know that bait-and-switch advertising is against the law in the United States, and would hope that the various teams and the marketing department work better together in future. I hope that the number of subscribers who made a purchase decision based on this errant publicity is small and that Paragon and NCSoft will do something for them. I am sure happy I did not have the funds available to be a victim. Why were funds not available? Read on.

We had to buy my wife new glasses, and even with insurance the requred exam and the advanced lenses needed to meet the demands of her work added up to a tidy sum. If a serious company made a mistake(s) like the one(s) under discussion you would get real personal mail, over the printed signature of a senior officer of the corporation, and including a gift certificate. We just got such a letter and were given new replacement lenses valued at $870.00 free. We also got an extra $50.00 gift certificate for our time and trouble. This was in compensation for an error on my wife's new glasses which was not even detectable by us, and would have gone Unnoticed Forever if the company had not felt Obligated to tell her about the defect. It would be nice if Paragon Studios and NCSoft had a standard of customer service that approached that level.

With regard to CS, I would rather go to the dentist than file a support ticket. The CoH support staff is always polite and professional and pretty much useless. Only on the most trivial matters that their expert systems have one button fixes for do they shine. I recently explained at length in an email reply to support about the problem I was having and the work around I develped to solve it. I suggested that they forward my information to the relevant people. In reply to this hopefully helpful info from me they said basically "hey glad you figured that out, and you should repost that info in the dev forum, we here are just support." That was from a Senior Specialist. I get the feeling that support personel are in a dungeon somewhere in a special pocket dimension, studying their primary trainig manual 'The 37 Ways to be Nicely Unhelpful' by Ima Deni, and under strict instructions to avoid contact with the rest of the team at all cost.

So like everyone else it seems, I finally got my points on both accounts and have Not received my Paid For October Tokens. Since the needle on the Fail Meter has already slapped the top hard enough to wrap the pointer round the post (I wonder how many people have even handled an analog meter with a needle and scale now days) I will just patiently wait for the token mess to resolve. If not, on October 31st I'll very reluctantly open two support tickets for my two accounts that have two different and apparently unknowable Token award dates, and take my double dose of (words fail me.)

Jak

Also note that the PS Proc is at 10% per trigger, and loves loves fat end pools (as all recovery help does of course.)

Get the + Endurance accolades to boost your blue bar to 110 and they proc for 11 each. Add some + max endurance set bonuses and you can see 120 Max blue and 12 end per proc fire. They do trigger for the relevant fractions so 115 Max E = 11.5 per trigger.

With a big pool, if you hit a RNG hate void they just get to work at full efficiency when they kick back in. With two, a long complete void is very rare. When you get RNG love it can be awesome. On my Physical Perfection scrapper, you sometimes finish a spawn almost drained, reach over for a sip of water and look back to a full bar (12+12+12+12 in 10 secs plus regular recovery.)

Jak

Well, while I will use only this forum to post builds for critique and help, I do understand the idea of trying to give new players an obvious path to build advice and really like the officail recognition of MIDS.

If Mids did not exist I might not even still be playing at all. I certainly would not have two accounts, as I do. My time tweaking builds and studying builds and guides in these forums, and doing research in the Wiki probably accounts for a third of my total time playing.

As for the new forum helping newbies, unless they do something to make it come up in search engines, I don't see it being all that earth shaking. Anybody who finds it will already be in the AT forums too.

I hope that now the existing forums actually come up on page one of a search engine. They did not when I started two years ago, and I copied absolute trash pre-IO builds for almost a month off dead sites like Cold Front before I figured things out, mostly because SG mates told me where to look. I was really new and not forum skilled. Shoot I still don't have a sig, so maybe I am not typical.

With time being so precious, I am not going to scan the unorganized hodge-podge of builds I already see in the new Forum very often. That alone seems like a killer error. Hope it works as intended for new players.

Jak

I failed to find the answer to this related question.

When you get your +1 Alpha enhncement for your Alpha slot, does that make the relative difference 1 level less for To-Hit calculations.

example: as a 50+1 do I use the value 48 as my base to hit versus +4 mobs.

Jak

My thought is to give Stone Armor users a choice at tier 9. You would choose between either Granite Armor 'Legacy' ( or call it Classic,' or wharever) and the new Granite Armor Custom.

No problem for existing toons because, just like when we got inherent stamina, you have to respec to choose the new Granite Armor Custom.

Hope they get to it sooner rather than later.

Jak

PS: Yes, OP there are solid penalties for having a power that can almost soft cap 6 typed defenses with one toggle and a few set bonuses and also have 75%+ resistances to boot. I do not think there will be any change by the Devs to that. I think allowing giant rock piles to step up/over obstacles up to 3 feet high in lieu of jump is the only movement enhancement we can hope for. The current ability to step up or over is just too small IMO.

To address some of the Granite Armor penalties, as already said, use recharge boosting sets and set bonuses that give movement or run speed bonuses (a lot of those only require two slots. EDIT: Doh GotA 7.5% run speed, one slot!)
I find the Musculature Radial Paragon Alpha the most effieicnt way to partly fix the damage issue while getting an additional speed boost and extra recovery. The Radial plus good slotting puts all of my damage powers at 120%+ Damage enhancement (119-128). My Stone/Fire is at about 160 DPS with that. Or you can try the Musculature Core - it takes the total to about 130% (127%-138%). I have both now and wear the Radial for general use.

No I have not tried to move any boosted IO's. All boosters so far have been commited to sets that I know will stay on Main no matter what the next respec entails.

I am considering using my free unslotters to pull two-three Ragnarok pieces off a seldom played toon to complete the Purple sets on the Main when the bids on two remaining Geddon pieces fill (two sets done two to go). But I am disinclined to boost them pre-transfer. I guess I could single Boost a generic I plan to use and email it. I'll report back if I do.

Jak

EDIT:
Ok purchased a Generic Lvl 50 Accy.
Claimed 1 booster.
Attempted to boost while in Enhancement tray - Fail.
Put generic in Brawl and boosteed to +1. (SO, you can Only Boost a Slotted IO.)
Claimed 1 Unsloter. Unsloted Boosted Generic.
Attempted to enter Base - crashed.
Reloaded and successfully entered base.
Attempted to put the Boosted IO in an empty Enhancement Storage Bin - red message "You cannot etc. ..." Tried on a Bin that had some in it - same message.
Attempted to email Boosted IO - red message- "You cannot etc. ..."

It Appears, At This Time, that BOOSTED IO's are BOUND to the Character that makes them, Period.

I am sure glad that I was careful to only boost pieces I know are certain to stay on my Main no matter what I do with the rest of the build.

Clearly you would commit few if any boosters to a toon you were not in love with .

Jak

I have slotted about 100 boosters into one of my toons (so far) and plan to write a guide relating the whys and what I got in return for this insane investment. Let me sum up the results to date by saying that I am VERY pleased. Boosters can do some of the the following.

Turn any Level 50 set into a set with Purple % values. Since there are any number of sets that have set bonuses not available in the Purple for a particular power, and even more that have No Purple this can be a great thing.

I have found that boosting Def/End or Resist/End in toggles is nifty.

Using 25 boosters to to max out a 5 slot Crushing Impact allowed me to get more than double the endurance reduction of a Hecatomb set in my most endurance intensive Tier 9 melee attack. This move alone was huge in fixing long fight endurance problems. ( final % were Accy 53% || Damage 101.86 (Pre-ED: 145.75%) || Endurance 84.51% (Pre-ED: 86.12%) || Rchg 84.51% (Pre-ED: 86.12%) .

That Tier 9 attack has an inherent accuracy bonus so even with the lesser Accy bonus compared to Hecatomb final Accy was fine. The slightly lower recharge value compared to Heca was ok when you look at the actual difference in 10th's of a second. And this allowed the Hecatomb to be placed into my most efficient DPS attack. This is the sort of analysis you will need to do if you want to go to the outer limits with boosters.

Finally I have tried to be very careful to avoid fighting the ED dragon with boosters, if at all possible.
Example - Hasten two level 50 Rchg Red - one at 50+5 and one at 50+3 and you go Red Level at 95.26%. After that the last two possible boosters are really wasted neting only 95.90%.

Dual aspect level 50's and Purples are almost always where you want to look first, since you can usually find one that has two things that both need help. Triples with two needed aspects are next. Avoid quads but I have +5 ed one as it was the only choice left to get the values I had targeted to where I wanted them. Boosting lvl 30, 35 and 40 are frustrating by comparison but may be required.

Since Mids now allows you to apply the +'s look for every chance to use the minimum to get to ED upper yellow or red before you commit. And don't just look at the ED status. Look at the actual effect on the power. Having 95% endurance reduction in a toggle that only draws .21 to begin with may not be woth the cost, etc.

Lastly, if you are going to make a really significant change to a favorite Alt. (I am only going to do this ONCE to my main) then the cheapest you can buy Boosters appears to be as follows:
Buy $100.00 (108.25 with tax) in points for max points per dollar.
Buy the 90 booster bundle(s) for max boosters per point.
Net cost for me doing this including the sales tax charged by my State is $0.225 per booster. Thus (so far) I have spent about $22.50 on the one toon.
If I was tier 9 of course I could use tokens to get the repeatable booster pack and eventually do this on the cheap. But that is a long way off for me even with the tokens from my big points purchase.

Jak

Thanks all for the how to use these pets ideas.

I was curious as the Paragon Wiki article for Veteran's Rewards ( http://wiki.cohtitan.com/wiki/Veteran_Reward_Powers ) for the 48 month Combat-Buff Pets states that

"Only the Light/Dark Fairy Pet seem to leave a targetable corpse."

and a targetable corpse should allow Veng.

Jak

Recently got combat pets on the Awards tree.

Can you actually Vengeance a defeated Light Fairy?

Thanks, Jak

As all have said, Purples and their close cousins the PvP IO are niche use sets to achieve special purposes.

Things like very high recharge for perma-whatever often live on Purples.
Exemplar use.
There are some PvP IO's that have combo's of enhancement values that don't exist in other sets. Example: Javelin Volley - Accy/End/Rchg. I often use that to one to replace the Damage/Range Positron in a Fireball 6th slot.

You can use a single 53% Damage only Purple to get a 4 slotted power to enhancement diversifcation red level damage on a tight build. The single aspect Damage is often discounted compared to the doubles, triples and the proc. Beyond that a single aspect Purple can be +5 Boosted to 66.25%. Or of course you could just +5 boost a generic Damage IO and have 53% Damage boost that way.

Now, with enhancement boosters, you can give any level 50 set IO the same percentage value as an unboosted Purple if you are willing to do a +5 boost. That may be awesome, especially as that will allow Purple level percentages in Defense and Resistance sets! It is easy to see why they are being offered for sale in the 90 unit economy size .

I hope to see Purple set prices fall a bit when everybody realizes this.

Jak