Miladys_Knight

While all this is true, it is still the worst control set. Most of the control is in Singy and you get alot of backup control (and debuffs) with Rad.

Propel is indeed unique and while you finish animating it and corpse blast your intended target, I'm all ready halfway done with the next spawn.

While Wormhole is indeed unique it is one of the powers that allows the Grav to grief his/her own team. This can be through malicious intent or through sheer newbieness.

I once teamed with a player that used wormhole and insisted on teleporting the entire spawn out of debuff patches and into the back amongst the squishys.

Add in the ITF newb that accidentally wormholed part of the Minotaur's spawn off of the edge of the cliff and down in the water (where it took the team roughly 15 extra minutes to find all of the displaced mobs) and you have just the tip of the iceberg of how bad grav can actually be.

Your English is so good no one could tell it wasn't your first language. That's one reason they were all being so hard on you.

Indeed. That is most likely the dev intention.

This is extrememly unlikely to happen due to normal market forces. Catwhoorg had a thread going at one time that demonstrated that average earnings for a level 50 character was in the 1-2 million influence per hour range. With the repair of the exemplar bug this will now be 2-4 million an hour. Nethergoat's Dark Astoria adventure thread shows the rate that salvage drops occur. Soloing can net you roughly 60 pieces of salvage in an hour. Since about 40 of those will be commons with those numbers "most players are going to balk at paying more than 50k - 200k for a single piece of common salvage and will instead go and run a mission to create it for themselves. The market serves to transfer influence from the rich to the poor so long as the poor wish to be net sellers. In this case they won't remain poor long.

There are 6 pretty clear cut levels of enhancement:

1) Standard enhancements (TOs, DOs, SOs) (pre I9)
2) Common IOs
3) Frankenslotting junk IOs
4) Uncommon Sets (Thunderstrikes, Crushing Impact, Doctored Wounds)
5) Rare Sets
6) Purple, PvP IOs, and Hamidon Enhancement

With the exception of 2 these all follow a pretty standard progression. From 1 through 3 it's not expensive, if you use the market, to get a huge increase in performance. At step 4 it's a balancing act of cost vs performance increase over the previous level. 5 and 6 it turns around it's only a very marginal increase in performance for a very high cost. Only serious gamers tend to be interested in steps 4 and higher. That means a time investment.


Bottom line is that the devs have told us multiple times that inventions, PvP, the market, and Hamidon are all optional content. It's not required content. I do not feel sorry for people that want the rewards of optional content without using the best tools to attain that optional content.

One more thing to consider:

Have you thought about what it would be like to try to use inventions WITHOUT the market? It would be nearly impossible to do much like it was back in the preI9 days of trying to Hami out your toon. You had to raid to get the Hamis, you had to raid to trade the Hamis, and woe to you if you were on a low pop server that didn't raid.

The same would happen without the market especially before glee mail. You would only be able to trade on your home server. Low pop servers would be at a huge disadvantage here. You would only be able to trade if someone was on line to trade. You would have to advertise here for trades and set up times to meet. Well that is assuming that this forum even existed without the market. To advertise a trade you would have to zone and broadcast, zone and broadcast. The mere prospect of IOing without the market sends shivers of dread up my spine. Only the elite that played all the time would have even a small chance of completing a build without the ability to easily transfer goods from player to player through the market interface.

Yes allowing. The devs have put an upper limit on the cost of anything sold through the market. It's quite a generous limit, 2 billion.

I think you are mixing some assumptions here also.

First is that a "poor" "newbie" will be paying 1,000,000 for a single piece of common salvage. Chances are that it's an impatient vet that wants to craft that final IO for their build "NAO"

Second one is that the newbie is too stupid to see that and spend 10 minutes running a standard mission or running an AE mission and spending a hand full of tickets to get the piece of salvage they need and then selling all the rest for 1,000,000 inf each and bank rolling themselves to the hilt in SOs and common/uncommon IOs

It goes back to being net buyers again and having to have all the stuff that players that have been playing for literally years have but having to have it in less than a week.

The tools exist for players to IO out a build solo without ever touching the market or only selling and never buying.

1. Run standard content and earn Merits for completing story arcs.
2. When you hit level 20 run standard content until you earn a TIP. Run tips when they are available and when you run out of tips go back to standard content.
3. Level up to the point that you want your sets to be for exemplaring purposes.
4. Roll all your merits. Sell the surplus recipes you don't need.
5. Use your A merits to fill in all missing Pool C recipes.
6 if you don't have enough merits/A merits level lock your toon and continue to repeat 1-4. Until you have all your pool Cs.
7. Run AE content that is easy for your toon (you can create it yourself so that the enemies aren't mezzers if you are a squishy and/or so that they are weak to your damage type and that you are strong to theirs).
8. Roll bronze until you have all your pool A recipes. (This will be much faster than 1-6). Sell your surplus recipes.

At this point you can fudge a bit if you want. Most pool Bs are vendor fodder and can be had at the market for a pittance. If you were patient in step 4 and 8 and crafted your recipes before selling them on the market you will now have a fully IO'd toon and several hundred million surplus influence.

If you want to be an "avoid the market" purist you can save your drops for your other alts, vendor all the junk and, in this case, you'll end up with just 50-100 million influence at the end.

This is exactly what the market haters are looking for a way to IO their toons without ever touching the market.

Me - "What's that you say?"

Me - "The market hater said it will take 4 times longer if you don't buy from the market and 6 times longer if you play purist" (Yes those figures are accurate I tested them to see.)

Market hater - "THAT'S NOT FAIR!!! It should be just as fast as using the market!!!!!"

Me - "Why? It will take you 6 times longer to repair a watch with a hammer as it will to use a more appropriate tool like a screw driver."

Market hater - "I don't WANT to use a screw driver!!!! I hate screw drivers!!!! I only like Hammers!!! The engineers need to make a hammer that will work just like a screw driver and just as fast as, or faster than, a screw driver!!!!"

(Throws self on floor, kicks, and has tantrum)

Me (watching the fun) - "they have it's called a screw driver. If you turn it around you can use the handle just like a hammer."

High rewards, low cost, low risk.... Hmmm i remember playing a game like that recently.... Oh yeah I was playing Candy Land with my grandkids. I prefer to have at least somewhat of a challenge or better yet a variety. SOs are still a viable way to play the game at least with the original power sets, especially since you can pretty much customize your difficulty level. The people that really WANT IOs are the ones that work for it and want to continue playing. The game was SOs only for 8 issues and they work just as well now as they did then.

By the way it's not me that you are disagreeing with but a different set of marketeers entirely, Paragon Studio's Marketing department. Their job is to balance reward vs time to keep all the Pavlovian gaming dogs coming back when they ring the bell. The idea for them is NOT high reward, low cost, low risk but to give just the right (ie: lowest) reward that will keep people playing and paying their monthly subscription fees. When you get out in the real corporate world you'll most likely run afoul of the marketing department of the company you'll work for.

Actually the market rewards the players in a very balanced fashion. The more effort in, the more rewards out. If you are upset about how much purples cost in terms of A merits you should know that you actually got part of your wish. The devs told us that you would NEVER be able to buy purples with Merits because we couldn't hold enough merits to be able to buy even 1. They've changed their position on this recently. Also the market itself has undergone some "buffing." Posi told us for almost 2 years that it would be impossible to merge the markets due to reasons of DOOM that he was never willing to share with us, and even though they kept on telling us it was all one game, the last bit that stayed separate was the market.

Oddly enough one of the first things that happened when War Witch took over the reins from Posi was a market merger and it was smooth sailing. I've yet to see any DOOM as a result of the merger and rants actually decreased for quite a little time.

We were all new players once. They will learn as we all did.

In the time it takes for most market haters to find the right forum, type their rant, and hit enter, they could have read any of the stickied guides at the top, placed bids and no longer had a problem.

Well all those things are healthy for the market. Marketeering exists because there is profit to be had. Flipping exists because the market haters would rather complain than learn to list things for more than 1 inf, salvage/recipe farming makes goods available to be sold. Without that prices would be higher yet.

There are no poor in this game, there are merely impatient uneducated people. If the farmers can print their own money so can anyone. The people that complain are the ones that think they should be able to purple out their warshades in a month. I will agree that there aren't enough influence sinks in the game. That comes up frequently and several excellent ideas have been proposed here, none have yet been implemented.

This is part of the misconception. If corn costs $1.00 an ear and the government decides to print enough money to quadruple the money supply the price of corn will quadruple. It's much the same thing here. It still takes the same amount of effort to produce shineys. It's really a net sum 0. The only difference is the price tag. People who are net buyers will complain, people who are net sellers will be happy. I don't listen to the complainers because they are net buyers, they and others like them cause the very problem they complain about. They need to get off their whiny entitled duffs and increase the supply instead of draining it.

This is backwards as most of these "fixes" are the root causes of the inflation. The introduction of reward merits reduced the supply of pool C recipes by roughly 60%. This was partly "fixed" later by the weighting of the pool but overall net supply was still about 33% lower than it was at the start of I9.

AE tickets are part of the problem too since they can skew supply. Skewing supply leads to imbalances that cause low buyer confidence and increased prices. AE tickets were put into place by the devs to try to give faster earning options for those people who don't like the market. If you just need a single piece of rare salvage and it takes you an average of 1 hour to get a rare salvage as a normal drop your chances of getting what you want is 1 in 6 but in the AE an hour's worth of tickets can get you 6 of the exact same rare. The difference is that you earned no recipes, common, or uncommon salvage. You spent all your tickets on the rares. That again is an imbalance that causes short (and potentially long) term imbalances.

Fixing the market first requires that the devs believe it to be a problem. Up until the introduction of A merits nothing the devs did (with the exception of costume drops) increased supply. Most of the things they did decreased supply, in some cases dramatically. A-merits should be a massive influence sink. The timer they put on cashing in R merits for A merits puts an artificial set of brakes on the process. You are right that "fixing" the market requires the effort of everyone who uses it. The very people that complain are the ones that are causing the problem, because they don't understand how to use the market, or they don't want to learn. They just want to be entitled and get what they want when they want it without putting forth the effort it takes. They have someone else power level their characters and then expect to be able to power level their inventions. The devs have brakes on the IOing process for a reason.

This is true and it's the way it should be. Experienced players get veterans rewards that the newbies don't. Determined people in the real world work harder to better themselves and do it faster than those who choose not to work and sit on welfare. A newbie purpling out their warshade in a month is equivalent to a new high school graduate thinking that he should be able to jump right into a CEO spot in a major corporation so that he can have a Lamborghini in a month. That's not the way that things work.

Then you'll have even more trouble with the blaster since the end drain is identical but the blaster lacks domination to refill the blue bar. Yes the blaster has Consume but it is up only 1/2 as often as domination and there is no guarantee that you will completely fill the end bar with Consume. The time the blaster spends detoggled may make up the endurance difference though.

Happily you have this correct. Sadly you believe it to be incorrect and are posting sarcastically.

We are getting quite a bit away from the OP here so I will just end with this. For me DP is below (not tremendously below but enough below that I won't play it) my minimum playability standards, as is Elec, and Psi. Add in my dislike for Gun-Fu animations and you have a set that I played once to 50 and deleted and will not play again until it has been buffed and alternate animations made available.

If the devs choose not to buff it or make alternate animations for it I won't play it and I'm ok with that. DP was not a set I was waiting for eagerly and the handful of concepts I had if I liked the set don't mix at all with the animations. Since there are several other power sets that meet my minimum criteria and are fun to play and I only have a couple of empty character slots left on my home server I'm not crying any tears over this.

Ah too much altitis. I have a friend that doesn't alt. He's planning on having it all on his toon.

If you look again you'll see that is not a claim that I made. I merely point out that Full Auto can be used from cover and entirely eliminate an Alpha without a single +def set bonus.


That's not entirely accurate either. If you compare Apples to Apples a set that has higher base performance will still have higher net performance when equally enhanced with set bonuses. The only notable exceptions are when you hit hard performance caps.

You might have the "perception" that a power set is adequate once enhanced but in 99% of situations the set that starts out as higher performing will still end up as higher performing as long as identical enhancements are being done.

Full auto has the advantage of being able to start behind an object, jump high enough to begin the animation and then drop back down behind the object so the targets can't even get an Alpha strike launched before they are dead.

Some of the folks here have been comparing IOd versions but the slotting that should be telling is standard SO slotting since the devs constantly remind us that the game is designed around SO use and was not made harder because of the introduction of inventions.

I played a DP/EM/Force to level 50 (now deleted) my level 47 AR/EM/Ice is all ready far superior in every measurable/meaningful way.

I would agree with this but I'll throw in my 2 cents and say that Sonic/Ice is more survivable yet. My Sonic/Ice is the only blaster I have that I skipped the Epic shield on for solo play because I don't need it.

DP is a much better defender secondary than a blaster or corruptor primary.

Forcefields/DP defender might be one of the better pairings. Forcefields gives you defense and mez protection both of which are solid help for the set. The one thing that DP excels at over every other defender secondary is the sheer number of damage procs you can pack into it.

I've played around with the numbers a bit and a heavily proced out /DP defender might do decently. I'll never know though because I dislike the animations and certainly won't play DP until they are up dated and probably not even then.