Katie V

Bah. Windows FTP was written by beginners. Use a real command-line FTP program, like NetKit FTP.

The inactive armors are good places to put things like five pieces of Red Fortune (5% recharge), a Luck of the Gambler 7.5%, or a Gift of the Ancients +runspeed. Stick a LotG, a GotA, and two Cytoskeleton Hami-Os in a defense power, and you've got a strong slotting in only four slots.

It can be made perma, but it requires a great deal of recharge: 105% global recharge outside of Granite, 170% with Granite running.

About the only good thing I can say about that build is that you'll never run out of endurance. Other than that, it's decidedly subpar. Outside of Granite, you're about as tough as a middling scrapper; with Granite running, you're a below-average tank.

When planning a stone tank, your priorities should be, in order from highest to lowest:
1) Slot your powers for their intended use. This means damage in damage powers, protection in your armors, and ED-capped resistance and defense in Granite.
2) Look for runspeed bonuses.
3) Look for recharge bonuses.
4) Softcap smashing/lethal defense outside of Granite (if you're not going for a permagranite build).
5) Softcap S/L/E/N/F/C when running Granite.

Odds are, Fire Sword is tagged as being a Fire, Lethal, and Melee attack. When determining if it will hit, the game will pick the best of those three defense types to use.

In general, an attack's position (melee, ranged, AoE) and type (fire, lethal, etc) are what you'd expect from how it looks and what sorts of damage it does, but there are some exceptions. For example, Foot Stomp and clones are tagged as "Smashing, AoE" despite looking like a melee attack, and Fireball is tagged as "AoE, Fire" despite doing both fire and smashing damage.

Why would you remove the most powerful attack in the set?

With the exception of Hail of Bullets, none of your powers has an animation time longer than 2.77 seconds. As long as you avoid using HoB, the eight-second delay from first warning until the patch hits means you can let your current attack animate, let your queued attack animate, and still have at least 2.5 seconds to get out of the way.

The LRSF rewards 25 merits; the Barracuda SF rewards 20. This means the average team takes about 25% longer to run the LRSF.

You're right, but for the wrong reason.

The only rolls that can generate a two-out-of-three miss are M-H-M (0.2375%) and M-M-M (forced to be M-H-M by the streakbreaker) (0.0125%), for an overall chance of 0.25%. My original math also included rolls such as M-M-H which are forbidden by the streakbreaker.

Back to the original post, the probability of getting no recipe drops after defeating 100 minion-equivalents (about six x8 groups) is 6%; after defeating 1000 minion-equivalents (a typical arc) is 0.00000000018%.

Did you have any arcs open before switching sides? They don't show up in your list, but count against you for doing the Alpha Unlock arc.

Last time I checked, EVE had a professional economist on staff to keep the in-game enconomy balanced.

Money sinks by themselves won't do it. In order to to prevent long-term price changes, they need to be compulsory money sinks. Otherwise, players can accumulate money without bound, leading to inflation.


Random rolls are, but as far as I'm aware, drops aren't.

That's not too unlikely. If I'm doing the math right, there's a 1.43% chance of that happening for any given trio of targets. The odds of defeating hundreds of enemies and not getting a single recipe drop are much lower, best expressed using scientific notation.

I don't know how Fire/Kin farmers use it, but for me, Siphon Speed is part of my attack chain. I'd no more forget to activate it than I'd forget to activate Ice Blast or Headsplitter.

I wouldn't.

If you define a "balanced market" as one without long-term changes in prices, I don't think it's possible to achieve this without drastic changes in the game's reward structure. In order for prices to remain constant over time, the supply of goods, the demand for goods, and the size of the money supply need to remain in balance with each other -- something that's very hard to do, since the developers can only control two of the factors, and adjusting either can cause unpredictable changes in demand. Further, demand can change without any change in either supply of goods or money supply, eg. if people start playing lots of new characters, demand will shift from high-level set recipes to low-level common IOs.

There are changes I would make to the market to make things work better, though:
1) Set recipes would be available only at multiple-of-five levels, the way common IO recipes are. This should make the market more efficient, and may lower prices.
2) Rebalance the drop rates within each recipe pool. Right now, I believe all recipes with a pool at a given level have an equal chance to drop; I'd weight the drops based on the popularity of powers that can slot a given recipe.
3) Random rolls would produce a recipe at the selected level, rather than at the character's level. This should greatly increase the supply of mid-level recipes.

That sounds like a bug. Could you run DropStats on your combat logs from that fight and post the results here?

You must not be trying very hard. My Kin/Ice defender typically alternates between double-stacked and triple-stacked Siphon Speed when solo.

If you use the leftover slot to put a level 50 Recharge IO in Siphon Speed, you can quad-stack SS for another 20% recharge, putting your total at 316.6% (and putting some individual powers over the 400% recharge cap).

If it's just the occasional surface that's wrong, it's probably not a sign of impending failure.

On Virtue, we try for a team of seven tanks/regen scrappers + one empath to hold yellow aggro and Hamidon aggro, although you can get away with four (one tank for Hamidon, and one for each pair of yellows). Blue spike is ideally at least one team of ranged attackers; if we can't muster that many, the raid takes down the greens before the blues. Yellow spike is at least one team of eight scrappers/brutes/stalkers/spare tanks. I'm not sure how many controllers/dominators/ice blasters are needed for the green phase.

If you're trying to get raids going in a group with no raiding history, I'd recommend having the full 50 people the zone can hold. Having more than enough people for each job makes things much easier.

You're facing a downscaled AV here. You need to stack mag 54 confuse/hold on him or (IIRC) mag 6 sleep to mez through the purple triangles of doom.

On the plus side, you're /kin. Don't bother mezzing him, just debuff his damage. Between Siphon Power (you did take it, didn't you?) and Fulcrum Shift, you can get him down to doing only 10% normal damage. It's really quite amusing to see powers such as Total Focus hit for trivial amounts of damage. If you still can't handle his melee damage, use Siphon Speed to slow him to a crawl and attack from range.

That's 14 standard words in five seconds, for a typing speed of 168 wpm. I don't believe anyone on this forum can type that fast: most typists top out around 90-100 wpm.