Plasma

This will directly launch City of Heroes, bypassing the launcher. (It is the launcher that is crashing, if anyone didn't realize; not the game itself.) Note that if you need a patch you'll have to "keep trying". I was having good results just launching it normally using reopen->do not reopen windows; but now I'm on a trip, stuck on my retina MBP, and I've had runs of like 50+ crashes so I decided to look for a workaround. Enjoy.

Edit: I cribbed this IP address from the cohlauncher.pl script used by the guys getting coh to run under linux wine, but it wasn't good for me any more. I sniffed traffic though, to find an IP that did work: 64.25.36.88

Even closer than converters would be the buy-craft-sell. Which would be just what Organica describes, but you bid on a recipe, then get salvage and craft it, then relist it. Many, many IOs have a huge gap between the recipe and the crafted IO cost. So in additional to being patient and getting recipes at great prices, you do the crafting for the impatient people and profit. Back in the day, this was my first niche - buying up LotGs and Miracles for ~20m as recipes, then crafting and selling those for as much as 100m. There are slews and slews of niches where 20-50m+ per purchase is fairly normal.

Indeed!

I think I was flipping >20 purples a day with conversion, making ~100m per IO (~44m/converter). This is bursty; it was more like 12-16 per weekday, and then I managed ~60-70 over the weekend.

That's the biggest line item. I'm also making at least 500m a day from some other efforts, which are far more passive and low-effort.

I'm looking to ramp up with some pure flipping and some buy-craft-sell flipping.

I'd love to corner enough markets that I could gain 100B in a week, even if it took a lot of hours, because that would be pretty awesome.

So, you didn't ask me, but...

In the process of feeding the 88s for fun, I ramped up to about 10B a week on the way to burning ~110B total so far. Then I was moving, starting a new job, and just felt like taking a break so I more or less ended all my income streams other than ordinary play (and did little of that).

I have gone whole hog again the past few weeks. I'm not actually 100% sure when I started, but I think I've made something on the order of 13-15B/week, although it may be as high as ~20B a week. I'm not 100% sure because I bought a bunch of stacks of overwhelming force IOs just to stash for a rainy day. (I did the event twice and then decided I'd had enough of that.)

I've been plowing a lot of that back into the enterprise. I started with about 4B when I resumed marketeering and I now have >20B in bids in play and I have a ways to go.

Good info, Sentry, but getting recipes for 15m has to be very rare. I sell a lot of pvp recipes, and prices seem very steadily 85-90m even for the junkiest junk.

There are two ways to go about this. Buy junk PvP IOs, and convert out of set and (if necessary) inset, or convert in set only.

Glancing back at the figures I worked up for sims in my Brief Guide to Enhancement Converters thread:

Let's assume you pay 90m per PvP IO for a pure junk IO, which is a decent price on the buy side. (If you are patient you can cherry pick lower but not much lower than I've seen.)

I think if you targeted any proc set, specifically aiming to produce any of:

- Panacea global
- Glad global
- Shield wall global
- Fury -Res

Then you'll need ~2.5 converters to hit any of those sets on average.

From there, 16.66% of the time you'll have the good one in hand, and the other times, you'll pay 15 converters on average to hit the global in-set. .8333333 * 15 = ~12.5, so your total cost is about 15. Let's assume you average a sale price of ~300m which is generous. That's ~14m per converter. It's not -terrible-, but it's certainly nowhere near what you can get in other niches. (I'm not factoring in market fees, which actually also slightly favor pvp IOs since the margin is higher, but it's fairly negligible.)

Granted, it's the most you can make "per IO", but it's nowhere near the most you can make per converter, and since you can just buy IOs, I think per-converter is the metric to use.

You're probably guessing right then, since on a 'good' day, I'm burning ~60 converters, more or less.

There was a time when I trimmed WAY back - I was only plucking like 2-5 a day, but since I was making ~150-200m on each, that was fine by me. I do some non-purple things that make me ~3B a week or so too.

To be fair, I do some SSAs purely for merits, but the itrial stuff I just do for fun and to finish building out my 50s, so using the a/emerits on converters is just a bonus.

It's generally pretty safe, since it will block a claim that would put you over the cap, with the possible exception of "claim all", which I think has bit me before.

I never run tips any more. iTrials, where I use the ingredients to craft new powers, but use all the A-merits and E-merits on converters; and then I run SSA #1-1 a heck of a lot, since I have a lot of characters that can finish the whole thing in <10 minutes.

It's still, admittedly, a decent amount of work now that I've burned through most of the huge surplus I had to buy converters with.

I'm currently using ~11B on my bids for this. Which is a lot, but not really "that much".

Edit: side note, having extra enhancement trays/salvage/recipe/market slots is basically mandatory for this to save time. Literally all my bids are off one character, who also is almost always bidding on a ton of 10-stacks of salvage to fuel crafting them.

5 years later, Nethergoat still trying to ruin my niches

Heh. You should check the leaderboard before a post like this. @goat's apparently decided we had it too easy, and we are now 36B infl out of 1st.

Basically, L50 = 42.4%
L50+5 = 53%

3xL50 = 127.2% before ED, 99.08% after ED
2xL50+5 = 106% before ED, 95.9% after ED



Thanks!

Frankly, you'll still have a better PB than I ever could back when I made those builds, thanks to instant shifting, forms getting the buffs from the inherent, and light form not stopping you from shapeshifting. That, and even frankslotting cheap IOs makes you more powerful.

However, healing is reactive, and so it is also never entirely wasted. If you spend animation time on casting an absorb, and then it goes unused, it is wasted. (This assumes the absorb has a time limit, which is the case in every other game I've played with that.)

I'm not saying one is better than the other, just saying that each can be wasted.

The magnitude of the absorb is somewhat irrelevant to the balance, and one could argue (especially in a mixed set) that absorbs don't need to be on the same scale as heals. (I'd suggest they should be, but that doesn't matter.)

What matters is that, if absorbs ablate before resists, then absorbs are up 10x as effective for a defensive set vs a resist set. (And while real-world cases won't be 10x, there will be real comparisons that are >5x)

That makes it extremely weak, relative to healing.

Normally, you take damage after resist and then are healed, meaning each point of healing is healing "effective damage" of (1*(1-resists)).

So, say a tank has 2000 health and 65% resists. They take 5000 raw damage, which is -1750 health. They have 250 health, receive 1500 in healing, and are back at 1750/2000.

Now, consider the same as an absorb. They get a 1500 pt absorb, and they take 5000 raw damage. The absorb removes 1500, leaving 3500; they resist that down to 1225, leaving them with 775 health.

So, same raw # amount of healing / absorbing, but the heal leaves the tank with 1750 health, and the absorb shield leaves them with 775.

On the flip side, where there are no resists, heals and absorbs are effectively equal, except that absorbs can't overheal so they'd be preferable. (Although they could, conceivable, "expire", and you might be tempted to place absorbs on people they don't end up using, thus wasting animation times.)

Point being: for those to be balanced, absorbs really need to be applied after resists.

Moreover, absorbs being applied BEFORE resists screws up defense vs resistance enormously, as it means that a defense set with 45% defense would still be mitigating 90% of all damage (getting hit only 1/10th as much as they would be base), and getting the FULL BENEFIT of the absorbs (since no absorb is "used" on a miss, whereas a resist set at 90% resists would burn the entire absorb before mitigation applied.

In short, if this is really how it mechanically works, it should be strongly reconsidered. I can only point to one game (an mmo) that has absorb mechanics, and absorbs definitely are removed as a last step, after all other mitigation occurs. (ie, in said other game, if you take 1000 damage but have a cooldown up that is reducing damage 50%, you take 500 and THAT is the amount counted against your absorb shield).

My original "gold standard" build was meant to be a true "tri-form", but the advent of IOs has, in my opinion, somewhat obsoleted the purpose. Keep in mind I wrote my original guide between the ED change and the introduction of IOs.

Now:

- You can get a lot of mileage out of 6-slotting again, because of procs; both -resist and damage procs
- The change to Light Form makes forms vastly more viable
- Because of massive +recharge, you end up with much tighter attack chains and a big desire to run 5 purple sets and other recharge bonuses.

That build I've been running for a while now, and it is positively sick. Perma-resist-capped nova form, constantly debuffing, two self-heals on 15s recharges.

With I23, it is far, far better than before, since you can pop into human form and pop BU, dwarf and heal, and be back in nova form just like that.

The original gold-form PB was also predicated on a particular bit of gameplay, which was that you could go: Build Up->Nova->Scatter->Detonation->[Interrupt the Detonation Animation by Toggling off Nova]->Solar Flare

It was also a nice "jack of all trades", but preserved light form use for situations where you really wanted it.

I actually extensively played a human-only build pre-I23 (since I've made enough influence lately to easily be able to actually afford to run two fully-IO'd builds), and it looked like this:

I actually had situations pre-I23 where I preferred this build - for example, when I ran the Keyes iTrial, I liked doing it in human form, because it let me taunt/control Keyes for terminal kiting (judicious use of quantum flight can make it so you're quite good at this), and also have a beefy Glowing Touch for healing disintegrating people. Post-I23, I'm more inclined to run my forms build (which isn't really a tri-form build; it is a nearly-pure dwarf/nova build, which just slots up the critical human form powers; hasten, build up, Lightform, Essence Boost, Restore Essence)... and maybe I'd scrounge up a slot to 2-slot Glowing Touch. No real point in slotting it for recharge; 1.4s is short enough.

Of course, PBs get enormous mileage out of enhancement boosters, since all those places you can run 2xL50 IOs that are +5'd to 53% really pays off. (I may not have actually set them to +5 in my builds, but basically anywhere I've got 2xL50 IOs, you can generally assume I'm boosting them to +5 - hasten, inner light, dwarf form, etc)

Anyhow, long story short - dwarf/nova focused builds are really as good as they have ever been, between the changes to Light Form and the I23 changes.