Nethergoat

and WOAAAAH, look out for that TIDAL WAVE of /tells!

They literally scrolled off the top of my chat window. I frantically fumbled out a FULL! FULL! SUTTER IS FULL! message, then scrolled up to invite the first four replies.

One of our squad was an Empath who'd run it before, and we also had a time controller who knew the score, so I gave the empath the star (she was 38, our highest level team member) and off we went.

Okay, firstly- if you have a team with a FF defender, an empath, and any sort of Radiation debuffer, THAT IS AN AWESOMELY FUN TEAM TO BE ON. We also had a couple of people running Manuevers, and several teammates reported being at the def cap in some of the later missions. It was just fantastic. We also had some sort of kin, I think it was our dual pistols corrupter, and periodic speed boosts just added to the madness.

So, the TF itself - FUN! Lots and lots of fun. Maybe it was just our awesome team, but I thought it was great.

I like the structure- three BIG missions instead of a bunch of little ones, no tedious nonsense like 'kill all in warehouse', almost zero travel- all in IP, all helicopters on boats near the train station.

First mission, I liked jumping around on the ships. Sky Raiders are usually really annoying, but didn't give us much trouble. The War Walkers were really cool & I didn't mind their 'gimmicky' attack. We cleaned house on this one pretty easily.

Defend Paragon City I really liked. Loved the Talos outdoor map. After zoning we were discussing whether to help Bastion on the 'optional' and one of our RPers, one Kid Freedom, said "Of course- we're heroes, that's what we do!" so that decided that.

Enjoyed the use of the 'Talos Tunnel' as a gauntlet to run.
The team was generally pretty great, but we were absolute hell on AVs.

The Riptide/Harbinger fight was really cool, with the waves of ghoul bombs coming at us. You know what's a really terrific power for those particular fights? Yeah, that's right- REPULSION FIELD! Thank you, awesome Kin player, for taking a power most people hate and think "sucks"!

After we took them down it was out into the demolished Skyway map, which was super cool. The Temblor/Fusion fight was pretty cool, again I didn't mind their 'gimmicks'. We defeated both versions of Colonel Duray so fast we got the TF Complete! window before the big amush even showed up- we were having such a fine time everyone stuck around so we could clean it up.


Took us about an hour. We only had one big speed bump, during the part where you have to disable consoles or endless enemies swarm all over you we somehow got split up & suffered a near wipe. It was me and the Time guy up ahead, and once we went down it was a total mess. But we regrouped and cleaned house. Other than that, it went smooth like buttah.

Definitely the most fun I've had during this recent run of TFs.
And the xp was, of course phenomenal. Picked up two levels and most of another, which I finished off this AM with a quick DFB run.

So I've been fiddling around with his build a bit in my usual disorganized way. I figure he'd benefit from ranged defense, he needs +rec pretty badly, and recharge is always welcome, so I've been doing some casual shopping for stuff.

My problem seems be the level I'm shopping at.
Price isn't an object- I burned some of his merits on an alignment merit, picked up 10 converters and sent him some PvP IOs to sell & now he's hovering around the inf cap. But he isn't level 50, and as we marketeers know recipe supply below max level is a problem.

Take for example Thunderstrike, which I need multiple full sets of.

I laid out stacks of wildly overpaying bids from level 30 to 35 and a week later I had two partial sets plus a few random IOs to show for my efforts.

I've actually sucked up my pride and *shudder* bought a recipe with merits. Ugh! The pain! Usually, anything I can't buy with inf I just don't buy, but Ray is wildly atypical for me in that he's done most of his leveling via Task Force and has nearly 300 merits in the bank.

Now, is it efficient for me to spend 50 merits on the Thunderstrike triple I needed to fill that sixth slot?

HELL no!

Given the gargantuan, ridiculous profits I'm getting converting crummy purples & PvP IOs into good ones that one Thunderstrike recipe probably "cost" me at least a billion inf in lost earnings.

But, if I wanted it that was the only way to get it.
I would have gladly rewarded any intrepid lister on the market with that billion inf, if thats what it took to get my recipe, but ALL the sellers in that level range were small thinkers content to settle for a 2 or 5 million profit.

I only have a few hard and fast market rules, and one of them is Anything with 0 Listings Is Underpriced. 0 listings means there is more supply than demand. Players happy to wait around for a few million 'cost' themselves vastly higher profits from people like me, with more inf than sense, who don't care what they pay they just want it NAO.

So, I bought the stupid recipe, and crafted it, and slotted it.
It is BY FAR the most 'expensive' thing in my build, and given my modest plans for Ray it is likely to remain more valuable than all my other IOs combined.

Such is the power of impatience, dear readers...

as a general rule, I prioritize fast turnover ahead of maximum possible sale price on nearly everything I sell. The exceptions are super high volume stuff (generic IOs, salvage) and super expensive stuff (purples, PvP IOs).


For example, with regular ol' garden variety set IOs if I see a last 5 that's around 10 million, I'll price mine 3. Yeah, sometimes you'll get stuck selling it at 3, but far more often you'll get at least 10 & sometimes more- 10m is pocket change for most anyone buying crafted IOs, so they're not going to quibble about a few million.

Or, if I look at a last five and see this:

15,000,000
15,000,000
3,000,000
10,000,000
15,000,000

I'll price mine 3.5 or 4m.

A super low price in an otherwise standard number line is your friend- it's telling you someone else got burned. If you list a *little bit* over that price you're safe from bottom feeders and are likely to get the 'full' price on your sale.

The biggest mistake most folk make with marketeering is pricing their junk too high. I live by a real world retail motto: "Are you pricing to sell, or pricing to keep?"

Price most stuff as low as you can justify and let impatient bidders take care of the rest. More often than not you'll be pleasantly surprised by their generosity.


/edit
and one last tip-

never pull ANYTHING before a 2xp weekend.

You're about to see a flood of demand that will sweep away every overpriced bit of junk the market has to offer.

I have a bet with myself on whether my field crafter will be able to empty out three base storage bins of leve 20 damages & endmods for over 1m each. =P

Y'know, that's a good idea.

I don't know why it didn't occur to me to just stash the failures in base storage pending a new supply of converters.

actually, it's probably because I'm stuffing base storage full of crafted IO's that will suddenly be "good" once I24 hits, and I can only hold one idea in my head at a time. =P

So, prioritize that and choose your sets accordingly.

That's what I do with my AoE fetish.

Unless they're going to move to cookie-cutter AT design where everybody gets the same stuff in a different package disparities like this will always exist.

I'd pick the one that looked like the most fun.
I admit I mostly avoid sets with crummy AoE, but I've never worried/cared about single target damage. It's just not relevant to how I play: big piles of enemies = big piles of rewards.

And I think the devs see this the way I do- even a magnificent, amazing buff to a single target attack isn't going to make *that much* difference to the time/reward equation.

This buff makes Snipe well worth taking, but it isn't overpowered by any means. I certainly won't be shunning sets lacking a snipe because they're "gimp".


I agree with your final paragraph, but I just don't see the 'new' snipe being that big of a deal. Maybe I'll feel differently when I play around with it for a while.

what is SO AWESOME about improved single target damage that I'm missing?

so many people are getting so worked up about this particular buff it's confusing me.


I see it as a nice improvement, but even if they'd made Snipes some kind of INSTA-KILL power it wouldn't do much to my playstyle. AoE is the main focus of my ar/dev and my fire/dark and the snipe buff does nothing to change that. So bosses go down a little faster, or I can clean out annoying lieutenants like Sappers more efficiently- great!

But nothing worth freaking out over.

So, if I were the sort to want that wolf a probable course of action would be to do pretty much what I did to get the costume set- buy the discounted 25 pack and see what happens.

Oh, I didn't get it- dang!

Well, I'll just get another handful and see what....darn, didn't get it that time either.

Oh well.

*later*

Huh, I've got a few points left after buying that powerset...guess I'll grab a few stray packs and see if I get that wo....darn, missed it again..

*later*

Well, nothing to spend this reward token on, I'll pick up some packs and check on that wolf again.....shoot!


*later*

Ok, this time I'm serious!
*buys another 25 pack*



etc etc etc.


Which is another reason not to put it in the store- presumably there are players who want the wolf, haven't gotten it yet and are still picking up packs here and there hoping to get it.

So some kind of mega time-warp SUPER mapserve.

I'd picked up the Heavy badge along with my level and change, when I logged back in it was all gone.

Grr!

Sent of a petition just for the heck of it.
It'd be nice to get them back, but if not oh well. A couple of quick missions will take care of the xp lost and if I *really* wanted the badges on him I could've got 'em during the weekend event.

well if you're getting a couple a day supply seems to have picked up since the last time I messed around with them (which reminds me, I still need to pull out & sell the ones I slotted the Goat with back when they were new and nobody knew what to price them...).

I'll take a look, thanks for the tip!

Never said it was- but it is the simplest, most consistent high-turnover way to generate 100-200m profits in a single transaction.

Being an essentially lazy creature, this earns it the #1 ranking in the Goat Index. =)


I'm sure PvP IOs work, but my recollection is that after they nerfed drop rates supply basically disappeared, even for crummy ones. Are they more widely available now? One nice thing about purples is that I have a steady, predictable supply, no waiting around.

And that's another thing, original Posi was definitely the worst in the game, a perfect storm of bad design and minguided ideas. The 'new' two part Posi is one of the best TFs in the game, pure fun from start to finish.

The contrast makes plugging through the old, boring ones even more depressing- I'm always thinking about how *awesome* a Posi-style revamp would make them.

As noted I didn't mind the difficulty- if we were all on the same page we generally triumphed, when we weren't things didn't go so well. That part was fun and challenging.

But the entire TF may as well have taken place on one gargantuan map where every room looked like every other room, populated by several thousand identical foes.

While mowing baddies on similar maps for their goodies is essentially what the whole game boils down to, as I've mentioned before it goes down smoother when missions, factions & game types are mixed around.

As in the new Atlas arcs- there's a bit that's basically a couple of street hunts in a row, but between the storyline setup and the differing game mechanics you won't notice you've just done two street hunts unless you're paying close attention. My reaction was more "Oh, I just broke up this dangerous group of arsonists and then rescued these citizens from thugs!" than "OMG two streets hunts in a ROW? Really, Paragon?!?"


And in a TF the story setups are basically wasted on everyone who doesn't have the star, so how you structure things & the game mechanics you use are paramount.

The reaction of last night's team wasn't excitement and and sense of accomplishment at having overcome a great obstacle and vanquished a dangerous villain, it was an exhausted collapse over the finish line by a marathon runner. The general reaction in team chat was "OMG, FINALLY"

It didn't help that Vandal went down in a few seconds- we were a team much better suited to bringing down one hard target than a cloud of minions.

Serious anti-climax there.

Basically, the old stuff is so very, very terrible that I am compelled to comment. Hopefully a large enough groundswell of player ire will bump improvements/replacements up the content pipeline...

Yes, but did it have their ridiculous membrane keyboard?!?

I'm a bit of an absolutist on this issue.

Combined with NC's seemingly official copywrite position When In Doubt, **** the Players! there isn't much room for puppies & rainbows. =P