Lakanna

OK, some pretty ugly numbers from running +0/x1 street sweeping.

Total defeats: 907
475 minions
225 Lt's
111 Bosses

Common Salvage drops: 81 (8.93% overall)
44 Minion (9.26% of minions)
20 Lt (8.89% of Lts)
21 Boss (18.9% of bosses)

Uncommon Salvage drops: 18 (1.98% overall)
4 minion (0.84% of minions)
7 Lt (3.11% of Lt's)
7 Boss (6.31% of Bosses)

Rare Salvage drops: 2 (0.22% overall)
1 Minion (0.21% of minions)
1 Lt (0.44% of Lt's)

Common recipe drops: 6 (0.66% overall)
2 minion (0.42% of minions)
3 Lt (1.09% of Lts)
1 boss (0.90% of bosses)

Uncommon recipe drops: 1 (0.11% overall)
1 Boss (0.90% of bosses)

Enhancement drops: 10 (1.10% overall)
2 Minion (0.42% of minions)
2 Lt (0.73% of Lts)
6 Boss (5.41% of bosses)

I wasn't counting inspirations this time around. The drops for salvage still seem to be overall fine. The drops rates for recipes, however, are not fixed, at least not up until the 09-10 "maintenance."

I'm gonna try something different tonight. Farming inthe Fab, and tracking recipe/salvage drops by rank. I'll be set at +0x1 as normal, just to make sure that no strange things are happening with the virtual teammates. I'll post the results of several hours of street-sweeping in a boss-heavy zone later on.

Ran about a dozen paper missions tonight. I'm loving the drop analyzer, makes things so much easier.

1361 defeats. 81 Bosses, 221 Lt's, 1059 minions.

13 common recipes, 8 Pool A recipes (All uncommons); 0.97% chance per minion equivalent
132 salvage, 8.22% per minion equivalent.

Did a lot of tinkering with the mob tables as well, added the mobs from the PI mayhem into it (PPD Drone, Unleashed, Transcended, Guardian, and Awakened, as well as "Knives of Artemis Boss".) I started a new group for the Paragon Heros, and kept getting a "failed the heuristic check" message for a few mobs, I eventually just deleted the ones that didn't spawn redside (Crey tank bosses and malta Gunslingers, IIRC.) Making the mob file .txt and editable helped a LOT.

I know the post was a joke, but I found myself thinking today that tehy're supposed to be introducing extra-hard stuff in GR. What AT do you want in that situation?

Stacking buffs and debuffs are already very powerful, and that isnt' likely to change. VEAT's get those. A team of 8 VEAT's running TT:M and TT:L wouldn't need any meatshields, and would be dishing out some pretty serious damage. Banes can stack the Surveillance, while crabs can stack up venom grenades. i think an 8-man VEAT team that actually took the team buffs could tear through the content pretty well, they become pretty capable at everything and have no glaring weaknesses. Even better, the team would have no weak links that someone needs to keep a watch on: as long as they stick close, each one is a killing machine that buffs the others and is buffed in return.

Depending on how seriously you want to take the powersets, you could try rad/rad defender. Explain the Rad Emission as various plant-derived toxins and the rad blasts as whatever you like: tiny venomous projectiles, clouds of toxic spores...

I went this route for my plant/rad controller: the /rad powers are thematically toxins, grown and released from his own body.

Archie: if you have time, could you incorporate Carnies into the parser? I've done a few missions with them in it, and they're unknowns.

If you update the .pl file, all old data can be run through it again, right? you don't have to scrap old runs when you update the parser?

Fedoras. "Wraps" sunglasses. Armored pads chest piece under an open jacket.

Most of my male characters have at least one of these. If they aren't wearing a fedora, they most likely have "barbaric" hair.

Enforcer or Cyborg belt, slacks or cargo pants. Mot of my characters, male OR female, have at least one outfit that uses one of these.

Can anyone who build a log parser find a place to host it? I'd love to use it to continue to gather more testing date, but don't know enough to build one myself.

http://boards.cityofheroes.com/showthread.php?t=127469

Just an amusing aside, after I finished logging my runs, I set it to -1/x6 for a run. minions and Lt's at level 48, probably close to 300 kills.

2 purples in one run... Murphy's Law strikes again.

OK, another 1040 kills over 20 runs at x1, 10 runs at x2.

Inspirations:
x1: 401 total, 0.3856 per kill, 2.59 kills per drop
x2: 336 total, 0.3231 per kill, 3.10 kills per drop

Common Salvage:
x1: 64 total, 0.0615 per kill, 16.25 kills per drop
x2: 64 total, 0.0615 per kill, 16.25 kills per drop

Uncommon Salvage:
x1: 17 total, 0.016 per kill, 61.18 kills per drop
x2: 22 total, 0.021 per kill, 47.27 kills per drop

Rare Salvage:
x1: 2 total, 0.002 per kill, 520 kills per drop
x2: 4 total, 0.004 per kill, 260 kills per drop

Common Recipes:
x1: 19 total, 0.018 per kill, 54.74 kills per drop
x2: 21 total, 0.020 per kill, 49.52 kills per drop

Uncommon recipes:
x1: 8 total, 0.008 per kill, 130 kills per drop
x2: 8 total, 0.008 per kill, 130 kills per drop

Rare Pool A:
x1: 0 total
x2: 1 total, 0.001 per kill, 1040 kills per drop

Enhancements:
x1: 6 total, 0.006 per kill, 173.33 kills per drop
x2: 6 total, 0.006 per kill, 173.33 kills per drop

0 purple drops, 0 costume drops. That makes 4160 kills on this map without a single purple.


Cumulatives, from previous post and this one: 2080 kills in each sample.

Inspirations:
x1: 740 total, 0.356 per kill, 2.81 kills per drop
x2: 701 total, 0.337 per kill, 2.97 kills per drop

Common Salvage:
x1: 125 total, 0.060 per kill, 16.64 kills per drop
x2: 124 total, 0.060 per kill, 16.77 kills per drop

Uncommon Salvage:
x1: 33 total, 0.016 per kill, 63.03 kills per drop
x2: 41 total, 0.020 per kill, 50.73 kills per drop

Rare Salvage:
x1: 5 total, 0.002 per kill, 416.00 kills per drop
x2: 8 total, 0.004 per kill, 260.00 kills per drop

Common Recipes:
x1: 53 total, 0.025 per kill, 39.25 kills per drop
x2: 40 total, 0.019 per kill, 52.00 kills per drop

Uncommon Pool A:
x1: 11 total, 0.005 per kill, 189.09 kills per drop
x2: 13 total, 0.006 per kill, 160.00 kills per drop

Rare Pool A:
x1: 2 total, 0.001 per kill, 1040 kills per drop
x2: 2 total, 0.001 per kill, 1040 kills per drop

Enhancements:
x1: 17 total, 0.008 per kill, 122.35 kills per drop
x2: 11 total, 0.005 per kill, 189.09 kills per drop


Looks like my hunch about virtual teammates didn't pan out. I don't know the math to find standard deviation and confidence intervals, but first glance says the numbers between x1 and x2, especially with the larger sample, are pretty close to each other.

Death Shroud is skippable until after Stamina, but don't put it of too long: ove time, it will be your single greatest source of damage, and the most END-efficient once you get it slotted up.

You'll want the fitness pool for health and stamina, and probably the fighting pool for tough and weave. Since fighting forces you to take either boxing or kick anyway, I'd recommend picking boxing up as a filler attack. Brawl, with 0-END cost after I16, should help a lot.

I don't run OG or CoF on my dark/dark brute. I tried them, but they interfere with building fury too much. If you plan on teaming a lot, put either one into a secondary build that is more geared towards survival and less towards damage, if you enjoy tanking for a team. DA takes a big investment to make it a tanking build, but it can be done. With SS, OG is probably your better choice: lower END cost, and the ability to stack stuns.

50 brute, running the demon ship mission on +0. All minions, all level 49. Tested 20 runs (1040 kills) at team size 1 and 10 runs (1040 kills) team size 2. All runs done on test.

Inspirations:
Size 1: 339 total. 0.326 per kill, 3.068 kills per drop
Size 2: 365 total. 0.358 per kill, 2.849 kills per drop

Common Salvage:
Size 1: 61 total. 0.059 per kill, 17.049 kills per drop
Size 2: 60 total. 0.059 per kill, 17.333 kills per drop

Uncommon Salvage:
Size 1: 16 total. 0.015 per kill, 65.000 kills per drop
Size 2: 19 total. 0.019 per kill, 54.737 kills per drop

Rare Salvage:
Size 1: 3 total. 0.003 per kill, 346.667 kills per drop
Size 2: 4 total. 0.004 per kill, 260 kills per drop

Common Recipes:
Size 1: 34 total. 0.033 per kill, 30.588 kills per drop
Size 2: 19 total. 0.019 per kill, 54.737 kills per drop

Uncommon Pool A:
Size 1: 3 total, 0.003 per kill, 346.667 kills per drop
Size 2: 5 total. 0.005 per kill, 208 kills per drop

Rare Pool A:
Size 1: 2 total, 0.002 per kill, 520 kills per drop
Size 2: 1 total, 0.001 per kill, 1040 kills per drop

Enhancements:
Size 1: 11 total, 0.011 per kill, 94.546 kills per drop
Size 2: 5 total, 0.005 per kill, 208 kills per drop.

With team size 1, 1040 kills got me 11 enhancements and 39 recipe drops
With team size 2, 1040 kills got me 5 enhancements and 25 recipe drops

I'll be doing more testing, but with 2 samples just a bit over 1000 each, thought it might be worth putting up now.

Lots of good advice from everyone else.

Pick missions you can tear through. Difficulty 2 is probably best for this: more enemies, and easier enemies. Level equivalent doesn't mean anything for purples: a -2 minion has the same chance to drop one as a +4 minion, so over time, you'll get more with easier enemies.

Put any IO's you don't use onto the market, along with salvage. If they don't sell after a few days, pull 'em and vendor 'em. I actually crafted any common IOs I found with the salvage that dropped. After a while, I bought the level 45 versions and crafted them too. It's an easy way to get the 45-50 memorization badges. I know you didn't want to market much, but once you have the memorization badges, you can craft from what salvage you have, and generally make a lot of INF doing it.

My farm spot redside is deep in the Fab, in Grandville. Lots of Arachnos and Crey minions, with Lt's and bosses scattered in. Bosses may not be the best bet for purples, but they do give a lot of INF per kill, and have a very tiny chance to drop TF/Trial recipes.

One decent idea if you can, is revisit your 40-45 contacts. See if you can find a decent farm mission at level 45. If you can, crank the difficulty to 5, and farm the nice level 47's. Donig this, you won't get level 50 set Io's, but you should be able to clear a map fairly quickly, and volume is what you need for purple drops.

One of the reasons I'm running the demon ship over and over is that it spawns only minions (Spawning for x1 and x2 team size- beyond that, it makes LTs that make things harder). So far, run after run, I'm seeing that inspiration and salvage drops seem to spawn according to the virtual team size: double the mobs, double the inspiration and salvage drops.

I can't say that I'm seeing the same for recipes, but I need a LOT more defeats to be able to tell for sure.

If there are certain maps that do this, it might be the ghost of a bug.

Remember the cargo ship map, which used a not-so-random number generator? It might be a good idea to count which mobs are dropping recipes. The demon ship map had only minions, which made it easy to count. When the spawn was minions and Lt's, the count got all messed up, but overall patterns remained, they were just harder to detect because defeat order mattered, and it's possible the order in which things were spawned mattered as well.

I think what's bothering me is that these maps seem to have a set number of drops given, within a small margin, and regardless of how many the maps are actually spawned for. Might be worth checking out the demon ship map and doing the counts again.

My own thoughts on this.

The devs dont' want people to PL. The quick ways to do it have gotten nerfed one by one, and the new super-sidekick system pretty much eliminates the last remaining loophole. They feel so strongly about PLing that they have banned accounts following the AE debacle, and the only metric they announced publicly was "time to 50." There may or may not have been other factors, but that was the only one they came out and said they were looking at.

Farming is another matter. They seem to regard it as something they can at least tolerate. They've nerfed the most outrageous farming maps and tactics (for example, giving all critters ranged attacks) but have never come down with excessive force for simply farming. I believe that they see farming as "something some people enjoy" and not as a deadly sin.

PLing destabilizes the playerbase. People hit 50, wander around bored or get into groups where they have no idea what they're doing. All the complaint threads about the bAEbies should have been a sign that people were getting PL'd, but never learned to play. People like that are unlikely to stick around long: they "won" and then they get bored and leave.

Farmers don't much affect the playerbase directly, except that the best farmers are those with a lot of experience and playtime under their belts: the people who have already shown that they are going to stick around and keep paying the monthly fee. Farmers incidently create wealth, both INF and the things to spend them on, which acts as a stabilizing force for the markets. The new difficulty slider changes seem to be aimed at helping farmers do exactly what they want; play their maps without bothering anyone else. Seriously, getting fillers for a map is annoying for the farmer, annoying for some of the people asked to fill, and in general didn't help anyone. The new difficulty sliders eliminate the last real problem people had with farmers: the tells for fillers.