Mind Forever Burning

Project Burn Rate: 0 to 1B in 30 days

Table of Contents:

I. Introduction

II. Market Strategy
IIa. Phase 1: Scrounge and Prepare (0-1M)
IIb. Phase 2: Double XP Weekend (1-100M)
IIc. Phase 3: Heavy Lifting (100-200M)
IId. Phase 4: High End Play (200-1000M)
IIe. The Strange Case of the Devastation Quad

III. Merit Strategy

IV. Outfitting Strategy

V. Leveling Strategy

VI. Conclusion



I. Introduction

In January of 2009, a claim was made on the City forums that anyone equipped with the desire, knowledge, and persistence could earn enough for an elite IO build in a month. From that claim, a challenge was issued: take a new character on a new server, starting at level 1, and see whether that character could reach 1,000,000,000 inf at the end of 30 days.

Project Burn Rate is my attempt to succeed at that challenge. I rolled the character on Wednesday, January 21, 2009, as a Fire/Fire scrapper on Triumph. Today, February 18 as I write, marks 30 days since I started him - and 4 days since I won the challenge. He reached level 50 the same day.

This post (really, series of posts) is the history of Burn Rate as he rose from ignominy to fortune. It is less guide than journal, though there are certainly lessons here for those interested in market forces.

I've compiled screenshots that follow Burn Rate's career here. Some days I forgot to take screenshots, but I have them covering most of the relevant period. I also have a final screenshot showing him with 1B inf, which I intended to stage as the the Money Shot as he hit level 50 at the market on Day 26 (but which I sort of botched with the window placement and level-up emote). Finally, if you're interested in seeing his net worth progression over time, I have an Excel-generated sand chart here.

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<font class="small">Code:[/color]<hr /><pre>
Task Name New Total Old Total Difference

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Katie Hannon Taskforce 9 7 3</pre><hr />


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is this New Math? 9-7=2 old school

EDIT: It's not just this example, there are a bunch of off-by-one errors in the "difference" column. LRSF didn't change but has a delta of 1, for example.

EDIT2: Hah. I need to learn to read. (It's roundoff error, for anyone else who didn't read Synapse's post.)

Now, who wants to enter all this data into the ParagonWiki tables?

... not it

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Except you can get full benefit of most (all?) of those purples, but you can only make use of the first 5 LotG.

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Rumor has it the 5 bonus rule does not apply to LotG +7.5% bonuses. I have yet to test.

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The non-obvious behavior you're thinking of is that the LotG +7.5% bonuses are separate from the sets that give 7.5% +recharge. They both obey the rule of 5, but you can have five of each.

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&lt;qr&gt;


So along these lines of thinking I am seeing from a few in here. If i play my bs/sr the most and its the toon I play the most and and I want to make a chest thumping build, it would be super awesome if I slotted 14 lotgs just to show off. In the end that would be about as cost effective and make almost as much sense as slotting 8 full sets of purples.


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Except you can get full benefit of most (all?) of those purples, but you can only make use of the first 5 LotG.

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The team ran the Sharkshead/Renault/Leviathan/Temple of Waters/25-30 Strike Force twice. We ran lots of other stuff too. I believe the whole team is 31.

I just did a bank mission. We had everyone scatter to the winds and fly high. Then assembled to the door of the bank awaiting the "ambushers of death." I had two lowbie friends with me. They commented they couldn't target an enemy before the Longbow were dead. Back Alley Brawler showed up. The MMs had enough time to actually drop Darkest Night and Tar Patch. I think he lasted 3 Venom Grenade Volleys. It was a good long fight of... 30 seconds or so.

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I was on your team last night as Remiss. I know I was only level 10, and had lots of patrol XP built up, but... holy cow! The xp bar was moving faster than I could track for most of the maps. I should've shot a video.

You should consider doing the LRSF when you get up there. I'd love to see how fast you can drop the FP with none of the usual temp power trickery.

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* Supposedly they are extremely rare (don't recall the math though)

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The math has never been revealed, although several analyses of available data have suggested ratios of around 6:1 rares to ultra-rares (that is, for every purple that drops, about 6 rare Pool As drop).

Tar patch is the one I was most curious about. I usually bind that to alt+lbutton.

You can run four instances on one box? That's a hell of a box. My own quad-boxing was done with two computers, but I gave up on it because switching between two keyboards and two mice was starting to give me RSI.

How do you manage to control all those powers? Which ones do you leave on auto?

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There's no slope. It ends at "in game" verse "not in game." I will update you if I become aware of any changes.

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And it's not like paid PLs are new to i13, or even to i9 (though they certainly took off in i9 when inf became a much more useful currency).

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1. I think having Bat and Infernal duke it out wastes time. With a decent enough team, it's easy just to take each one out separately.

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It's easy to defeat them separately, but there are advantages to leaving Infernal alone anyway:

1. Infernal will defeat the last altar's ambush pretty quickly, clearing the ramp for Bat'zul to mount.

2. Once you pull Bat'zul, you should be able to get Infernal to aggro to him without attacking anyone on the team. If done properly, you can then focus fire on Bat'zul with Infernal acting essentially as a teammate.

3. Once Bat'zul is down, you can defeat Infernal and exit without having to deal with the ambushes that follow Infernal's defeat.

I've done it both ways and I'm not sure there's an absolute rule about which one will be quicker. 90% of the time the limiting factor is being able to pull Bat'zul out of the lava; he has a really annoying tendency to summon imps and then get stuck on them. When Infernal is in the fight he can sometimes fireball the whole group and separate the imps out from under Bat'zul's feet.

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Also Surveillance did not subtract any Resistance from it, proving they are completely immune to Resistance debuffs as well.

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Did you take a screenshot of the resistance values? They don't show in the posted screenshot.

And I agree with a previous poster, it looks like sleep could nullify the nicti, making the "shoot rom x4" strategy pretty straightforward.

OK, I did another run, and I'm convinced that what happened on previous runs was that we didn't clear the two side spawns of legionarii to Romulus' left and right. Those spawns typically have Imperial Surgeons, and their heals seem to scale to AV hit points. This makes them incredibly dangerous to leave alive.

I think the guide should emphasize that the team make extra, extra sure there are no Surgeons around the AV when you start the fight. (I made a macro for "targetcustomnext surgeon".) In addition, if during the fight you find you can't damage the chosen target, back up and scope the terrain again. I'm betting you'll find a Surgeon you hadn't noticed before.

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And every observation I have done and tactic speaks otherwise, otherwise the nictus would heal itself.

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Here's a video of the Nictus healing itself: http://video.google.com/videoplay?do...9334&amp;hl=en.

I've also seen runs where the Nictus stops healing after 1-2 heals. The data seems inconsistent. I'm not sure it's possible to write a definitive guide to the last encounter yet.

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Now, some may think the best, first target would be the left Nictus. In this case no it wouldn’t/ The Nictus doesn’t heal other Nicti, they only rely on their regen rate for healing.

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46 pages of discussion in the open beta forum disagree with what I've bolded above.

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Also, someone said that the -res does nothing. I would have to disagree, since you will notice -Resistance isnt mentioned in the Paragonwiki article, I would think having -res to bring down his God Mode would be much better than the highly resisted -regen.

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(Damage resistance) resists (damage resistance debuff). If you're hitting for zero before -res is applied, you'll still be hitting for zero afterwards. So -res is indeed useless in this particular circumstance.

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Twilight Grasp has -regen. I believe this includes Dark Servant's Twilight Grasp. It makes a huge difference when fighting giant monsters and archvillains.

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No it doesn't. The little known fact is that -regen is almost useless in the vast majority of AV fights. They simply don't regen enough; however, they do pack upwards of 80% resistance to -regen effects, making that piddly 50% -regen a mere 10%.

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This is not the vast majority of AV fights; this is Hero 1 who activates a power that makes him completely invulnerable to most forms of damage (negen being the only exception I know of, and even that is resisted at 90% or so). +dmg and -res have no effect if your damage type is 100% resisted.

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I have done this TF without TechSpider and his Dark Debuffs, and we had no debuffs from the dark set in this team makeup, and we still took him down no problem. But 80% of the times I have done this, I have had TechSpider had Darkest Night on him. This is only a - Accuracy - Damage Debuff. And when I have pulled the Dark Servant out, the only debuffs he throws are -DMG, -ACC, Foe Immobilize. So we have never, to my knowledge, had a -Regen on him, and still take him down.

Tech

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Twilight Grasp is -regen, which Dark Servant also throws. So if you had a dark/ defender on the team I can almost guarantee you were applying -regen.

As far as the other teams you've had, I would have to know the full roster to say for sure that there was no -regen in it anywhere.

Also:

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Infamy gained from selling Rare Recipe: varies by the recipe you get, if all members of the group are 50, no Lackeys/Sidekicks, you have a better chance at
a purple recipe.

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Not true, lackeys/sidekicks have no effect on purple drop rates. Only the level of enemy matters. Any enemy 47+ can drop a purple to any member of your team.

My testing says you can't defeat Hero 1 without some form of -regen. He heals back to full during his ridiculous version of Unstoppable unless you apply -regen. Even -res is useless since he has 100% damage resistance against most forms of attack.

He does still take damage from negative energy so it may be theoretically possible to stack the team with dark melee scrappers and dark blast defenders, but it hardly seems more attractive than just finding some -regen.

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Arc Name: Echo Down the Aeons (note: this is the Arc to run at level 15 in "real time" to obtain the requirements to gain the Ouroborus Portal and Entrusted with the Secret badge ALSO if you want to take a partner with you that is at least level 15 into this, THEY will emerge from the arc with the Portal power and Entrusted badge)

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You won't be able to flashback this arc with a level 15-24 character on your team, because everyone has to be in Ouroboros to start, and you have to be 25 to get into the zone.

I quite enjoyed the lead article this week. Nice work Snowy!

I'm going to reply to BaB's comment in the other thread, but my testing shows that A is in fact constant.

Thanks for summing up the situation so clearly.

- Protea

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Yes, I understood that. I still contend the testing method is flawed and does not prove anything.

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Please explain to me how my testing method does not detect a 1s difference in the execution of Gash by measuring the distance between bracketing attacks. As I said as far as I can tell my method and yours are identical aside from the irrelevant difference of what specific attack is used to bracket Gash.

- Protea

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Because there is a 1 second pause after the attack animation before you can use another attack that you are not accounting for.

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You say this, and yet I am accounting for it. I am executing an attack after the attack that contains the draw animation. In A-B-C, B contains the draw, and I measure from A to C.

Are you saying that the third attack in the sequence should have a pause after it depending on whether the second attack in the sequence requires a draw? That is nonsensical. If you can make the argument about the third attack, you might as well make it about the fifth, and sixth, and so on - in other words, I have to execute an infinite attack chain to reach any conclusions.

- Protea

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Yes, I understood that. I still contend the testing method is flawed and does not prove anything.

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Please explain to me how my testing method does not detect a 1s difference in the execution of Gash by measuring the distance between bracketing attacks. As I said as far as I can tell my method and yours are identical aside from the irrelevant difference of what specific attack is used to bracket Gash.

- Protea