Reptlbrain

Redside, or Blue? I may have alleviated this shortfall somewhat by storing a handful in that range from sometime ago (blue), but I don't remember. It appears in some cases low/mid-level rare pool As are becoming scarcer (at least according to price) than some Cs.

I'd agree with you on that, though the evidence is anecdotal from board commentary and checking peoples' bonuses on teams.

I marketeer off and on with my 'retired' 50s--and occasionally use them en masse to create a whole bunch of bids across a wide range of levels for mid-level toons who, for instance, might need a Miracle and three full sets of Obliterations*, and soon!, but don't have the capital or space for such an enterprise. This, of course, has some benefits when you pick up three Numina's procs for 15 million less than the going recipe rate.

Ha!

*These remind me, I need to check on Oblit proc bids...

I just wish my costumes didn't mostly suck.

Typically most tend toward (attempted) humorousness, as I suppose The Tick is the source of most of my superhero knowledge. Like Sailboat (whose toon with a nice biography was standing next to me once at WW)

• A sub-literate recounting of power acquisition (my forum namesake's)
• A recipe
• A whirlwind tour through real historical events that the character experienced
• Journal entries
• Passages lifted (and modified slightly) from historical documents
• A personal ad
• A warning label
• An alien trying to parse and fit in with superhero culture
• Two citations from the Qur'an
• A condemnation of the reader
• A short joke on the character's name
• A breathless newspaper article on the character's exploits
• A song whose lyrics need a lot more refinement
• Meta-comic book material (Unlikely Man: No one ever expected a kid from across 110th Street to grow up to fight evil with magic, a robot arm, and a bow.)

Other players' good biographies and costumes make the game delightful almost every day.

If you only play one character at a time. (I'm sure some of the time I spend on crafting/selling/shopping is inefficient in xp/min terms, but a huge portion of my own entertainment is tinkering with builds.)

Again, if you stick to one character at a time. Buying a 40 makes sense in terms of availability, but by other measures (exemping for certain favorite TFs, PvP, cash-flow) a 33, 37, or 38 might be better.

'tis too often true. People ain't paying what recipes is worth. Including cheapskate me. (Though for alleged "crap" recipes I always pay at least 55,555+ villainside and 155,555+ heroside.)

The problem with the "new" mechanics is even "kissing" a foe with the edge of the cane--if at the wrong time during a repel pulse--sends the mob several feet from where it was standing.

Obviously if your melee have mature defenses they probably don't need the -tohit debuff, but otherwise increased safety usually comes with increased irritation.

When Hurricane's mechanics were changed (i6? i7?) due to PvP whining (waaah, my scrapper/tank can't just walk up on the ground to every squishy and pound them, in a game where everybody who chooses certain powers can operate in three dimensions), it made the power a lot less useful. The repel pulse used to recur every tenth of a second, or something like that, and only extended just slightly beyond the graphic. This was fabulous for repositioning mobs where you wanted them, with the occasional knockback displacing one or three. Now the repel pulse recurs with a much longer gap (a second?) and slides mobs a looooonnnnggg way away, not giving you the precision once possible. In addition, critters can run into the hurricane during the gaps, and they invariable hit a different vector when the pulse expels them (slight movements along a small circumference), resulting in scatter.

This is the only nerf in the game that has really bothered me (obviously, since I'm still kvetching about it); I actually liked ED, though I'm not sure I should admit that in public. (Note: I did not have a /regen scrap before i5.)

Um, fire, dark, and electric have s/l resistance and status protection. Electric has layers in self-heal/+regen and end drain. Dark has layers in resistance, stealth (and a modicum of +def), mezzes, and a massive heal. Fire...has ...uh, a rez. Now these layers may not equal WP in practice, but they are layers...

There's not a decent quantity of rare pool As available at all levels. In the highly desired mid-level sets, these As turn up more rarely than Cs. (See Kinetic Combat)


I think we have ample evidence of people without sense playing the game. (See rest of forums about lousy teammates.) Of course, they probably aren't generating that many recipes.

But your statement is also wrong in other ways. I spend all my merits earned at the points of 30, 35, and 40 now. Why? To occasionally provide rare recipes that I want while I'm leveling. Because I don't power level to 50 and then play. Because I like my toons to be awesome in the 30s. Because I don't play my 50s that much, so IOing them out at that point seems a waste. To sometimes earn tremendous amounts of cash on a lower level toon (see a 30's earning power versus a 50's) if I'm bored with marketeering. And even to provide goods for the market, for others' fun. I've answered three specific requests in this forum, one of which was for a lower-than-max snipe pool C.* I actually get pretty disappointed with the new-ish weighting of the task for rolls**, since even if it's worth less sometimes, I like the Cs from accurate tohit debuff and such, rather than the common armors and attack Cs. Earning cash is easy. Getting some recipes is trickier.

*This person then said, oh I meant redside, after I'd posted for 30 million in WW. It still sold for the asking price when I left it up for a couple weeks.

**The two Numina's uniques and Obliterations in my last 10 rolls, notwithstanding.

Make sure to check prices on crafted vs. recipe. You can often make 5-10 million more by crafting recipes of this ilk (and the salvage and crafting at 24 should be cheap), particularly if there are none others for sale below 30...

edit: Ah, beaten to the punch by mere seconds!

Heh. I see what you did there.

Half of the above as pool As tend toward 10 million+ crafted. In the 10-14 and 15-19, if you're "rolling" from 30 or higher, almost any uncommon or rare pool A acc/dam, end/res, or end/def at max level is going to be salable--crafted--for at least a million. But you do have to do that salvage & crafting routine, and maybe that's not worth a market slot.

Here's several tips: If you're missing 95% of the time, and even if you hit, you only do negligible damage, stop firing; you might be wasting endurance. If you're on a team of 8, who presumably all have your bubbles, let somebody else who has better defenses than you take the aggro from the MOG'd PP. Also, PP's have cones, you might be familiar with one from your own powerset, so don't stand near the person with the aggro. Also, there are ways you can circumvent the MOG before it's fired. For instance, when the PP's rather low on health you can a) hit Aim and Power Burst, i.e., "burst damage"; b) knock him down with Force Bolt and concentrate solely on him to make sure he can't get up and trigger it; c) ask some of the idiots on your team to please mez the PP before he can fire it off. Or, if someone on your team has psionic attacks, that person can kill the PP if they can hit 'm. Give them your yellows and turn on tactics. Or, one durable teammate can hold aggro until the defense ends (and it can be killed with one more shot), and the rest of the team can go on to the next spawn, with high hopes that they're not too moronic to let the next PP pop off its ueber defense.

A good 10% chance! With a mag of 2! With a duration of 4 seconds! As long as you aren't fighting above your level! Then it's less!

Nonsense.

At level 50--and the curve may vary a bit at 35, but not that much--you can take down an even-con or +1 minion with 4 attacks, provided they don't have strong energy/smash resistance. That will cost you 20 endurance if, as you claim, they're slotted for about 67% end redux. Even if you have Maneuvers, Weave, and Dispersion bubble unslotted for end redux, your gain is 1.25 end/second. Firing off those four attacks consumes at least 6.67 seconds, which means you're regaining at least 8 end while those attacks fire. So each minion killing sequence will cost 12 end, which means you can kill 8 minions with non-stop attacking.

We are men of (imaginary) action. Lies do not become us.*


(*Sorry, Westley in the thread and all...)

Wait, now it's a whole team of eight, not a solo encounter? And he's breaking the game code by one-shotting you? No wonder you want the mechanics changed.

Here's a tip: defender melee modifiers are even worse than their ranged modifiers. I really can't imagine a situation where it'd be more useful for my FF/ to box a critter than do anything else. Apply another shield, delete some ceramic armors, tab out and check the boards...

Here's another tip: play a game where you can enable the cheat codes; your character will feel super all the time and never have any constraints on them.

Make sure you pick up Schismatrix Plus--the short stories are more fun than the novel.

reptlbrain is taken from a standard(?) British nature documentary pronunciation for the parts of the brain argued to have evolved earlier. It seemed to fit for the first CoH character that I enjoyed playing.

At least the moron kidnapped can keep up...

This is what I've discovered--in my only MM of any substantial level--though Christmas Man (Oni) just got his Rain o' Fire.

Brillyant! Curse my stupid concept that requires flying and the shark immobilize (which yes, will be useful with aforementioned RoF and Hurricane).

I did the Tarikoss for the first time ever the previous weekend--the same day that the leader's level-lock was patched in (surprise!). Let's just say it was slow-going locked at 18 with lvl 15 IOs as enhancements and lots of Spectral Demons as opponents, and as four toons that we couldn't take down Ba'atzul (not sure if the new rules meant he was +2 to us, or if he automatically conned to our level).

Our Mind/Earth dom was certainly the linchpin in beating Infernal, though we wished we had saved him to help with Ba'atzul.

RE: invisible (or not-so-invisible) contributions. One of my teammates gave a mock critique of the performance in the failed strike force, noting of the dom: "She had a really good attack called "domination", but she only it used every few minutes. Use it all the time! Duh!" (Yes, he has his own dominator. Yes, he was kidding.)