Nethergoat

It's your inf, do whatever you like.

=)

I wish we could engrave this in stone over the base entrance.

=D

In which case trying to intuit their "intent" is pointless.

The functionality exists so players will use it.

They keep boosting earning power without adding any commensurate inf sinks. What follows is entirely predictable.

Why?

The 'balance' in turning inf into prestige is the ridiculous, almost insulting conversion rate. That's why people don't generally do it. But if you don't care about that, what's to stop you?

Think of it like exp debt....which isn't that big a deal now, but let's pretend.
As a drag on levelling it's a "bad thing".
But if you're level 50 and you want the badge, the illogical becomes the rational.

As with a lot of things in the game my stance is if it's there, players will use it and dev intent is meaningless. MA isn't for farming, blah blah blah blah.

If they didn't want people buying their way to #1 they wouldn't have let us convert inf.

nah, I wouldn't want to rain on their party (it looks like fun, too bad I'll be working). It'd be more of a long-term investment in eventually eclipsing their total with dirty, ill-gotten prestige.

nothing against Doc Viv personally, but this is arrant nonsense.

Who runs the Guardian 88's?
I'm happy to siphon some billions their way.

....well, once I *have* billions again, anyway. =P

that's where the 'balance' comes in.

not everyone will be bothered to stockpile blues to trivialize the crash, which is why they're as good as they are.

if everyone used nukes the way I do, they'd get nerfed in short order.
it's already borderline abusive how good they are with high global recharge.

The end crash/recovery thing is a very minor annoyance on my fire blaster.

Okay, it USED to be something to worry about...then they added inspiration combining to the game.

At the higher levels when you have a big tray to mess around with there's no excuse for not having a handful of *whatever* you need/want on hand for emergencies.

Here's how things go with my fire blaster, who has Inferno up every other spawn or so:

Zip in, aim>buildup>inferno, eat a couple of blues, blow up stragglers with Fireball and Blaze. By the time I've finished them off, my recovery is working again and my blue bar is well recovered by the time I start shooting at the next spawn.

The end crash just isn't much of real counterbalance to the glory of a nuke in the modern game.

I don't fault newcomers for not intuiting all the options available to them when it comes to equipping characters, but if they certainly deserve some flack if they persist in complaining after said options have been pointed out.

big teams definitely kill your drops.
Also, leveling is quite a bit faster in general than it was back in the day, which 'shortens the runway' so to speak. Between patrol xp, xp smoothing and meaningless debt, you're going to arrive at 22 quite a bit faster than the historical average.

I can see those two factors plus some bad luck keeping you from kitting out at 22.

Me too, and on my high recharge fire blaster that's quite a bit!

not as a MM, but I have a grav/TA controller who is all kinds of fun.

=D

that's about what I ended up with when I cleaned house for the 88's Solstice Bonfire.

200 million here, 300 million there...pretty soon we're talking real money!
=P

You must have had an EPIC run of bad luck.

I tracked lowbie earnings in a thread a few years back to illustrate the discrepancy between the thriving hero market and the wizened villain market and AFAIR at level 15 my hero had 400k or so and my villiain had ~200k. Common salvage sales generated nearly all of those earnings, as at that time uncommons were universally vendor trash.

Although I will admit I haven't actually 'kitted out' with SOs at 22 since the day I9 launched...and the only time I did it before I9 launched was when one of my buddies gifted me a few million. Back in the day most of us limped along with an uneasy melange of trainings, DOs and a few key SOs (usually acc) in various stages of decomposition until earning power caught up with expenses in the late 30's-early 40's (and that was being totally poverty conscious, selling stuff at the right store, riding enhancements until they went red, using intentional debt to boost earning power, etc).

Maybe it does take some luck with drops to fully equip at level 22.

The market redistributes the wealth of 50's across the spectrum of all players.
So, provided you've taken the absolutely minimal step of selling your drops on the market instead of vendoring them or whatever en route to 50 you will arrive with a tidy bankroll.

Again, my non-optimized RP concept stalker has 60m in the mid 30s from behaving more or less exactly as per your requirements for minimal market involvement.

He stealths everything he can, kills absolutely as few enemies as he can and only recently bumped up his mission difficulty from the default.

Look, EVERYONES income is "utterly dominated" by market sales.
EVERYONE.
Farmers don't get rich from defeats, they get rich SELLING DROPS.

I genuinely do not understand the point you're trying to make here, or rather the point is so divorced from my market reality you might as well be speaking some weird moon language.

If you mean "by selling drops", then I agree.

The day I stop thinking of new characters to try out is the day I log out for the last time.

Happily, that'll never happen since they keep adding new powersets and proliferating new combinations.

their buffs are basically useless, but they're GREAT at taking the alpha.

I love multiples, but I can see why we won't get 'em. =)

Organica at least made a special SKI SLOPE UBER-BUILD- you could be onto something! =P