Rodion

Work on getting incarnate powers for some of the 50s that you've worked so hard on in the past. In the process of getting four T3 incarnate powers you'll probably replenish your supply of inf. It feels kind of like cheating, I know, but use that inf to help outfit your lower level characters.

If you alternate between your 50 and the lower level character, you can put in lower bids for the recipes you want and give them more time to be filled. If you just play the same character, you tend to be in a hurry to buy things and wind up paying much more than you really need to.

Placing bids and waiting at least a day for them to fill will save you hundreds of millions.

Come I21, you'll be able to earn 5 Empyrean merits a day as well (2 for Keyes and 1 for the other three trials that will be live then). Since that Shield Wall costs 60 Empyrean merits you could theoretically get it in 12 days. Even if you just do a BAF and Lambda each day, that's 2 Empyrean merits, which means you can get enough to buy the Shield Wall in a month.

And at the same time you'll earn enough Astral Merits to get 8 or 9 LotG: +Recharges, which you could sell to help finance the purchase of PvP recipes off the market.

All the trials are gimmicky, but Keyes and Lambda are especially so because of the tremendously clunky mechanics of temporary powers. These trials would be improved tenfold if a separate power tray automatically opened up for trial temp powers when they are in play.

Having to dig them out of of the Powers window, which can have almost a hundred entries these days, is ridiculously clumsy.

The trial already forces you to have a big clunky display window showing the current status of the trial. While temp powers are in play that window should be expanded to include a tray for the temp powers.

Trying to explain the temp powers and getting newbies to use them properly is the biggest challenge in those trials.

Actually, if you use level 30 common IOs, which are better than even con SOs, you will save millions by not having to upgrade your SOs at 32, 37, 42 and 47. Upgrading all your SOs at 42 and 47 will cost you many millions, and that's not even considering the hassle of having to do it.

The crafting costs for 30s are not that much more than buying SOs, so you will already be ahead of the game by level 38. The higher level SOs actually cost more than the crafting costs for 30s. You can usually pick up level 30 common recipes for peanuts, especially if you place bids ahead of time.

If you save your Tier 2 salvage when you start getting it, you'll have plenty by the time you hit level 27 and can start slotting 30s.

I gave the literal translation of the paene- prefix and then a specific example of how it is used in English with the correct definition. This is not "wrong" per se, it is literal, which can be misleading if used by itself without other context or examples.

Literal translations are not "wrong" when they are used to illustrate the formation of words. Paene- does not always mean "next to last," and translating it only as such would be more "wrong" and misleading than using the literal translation.

Most characters have enough accuracy to hit most any target 95% of the time. That means the -DEF from /Rad comes into play only rarely (when you're dealing with things that have high defense, like Nemesis soldiers with Vengeance on).

The -dmg res from /Sonic comes into play all the time, almost always increasing damage.

The area attacks in /Rad don't work very well together. One's a PBAoE, one's a cone, and one's a targeted AoE. That makes it hard to work a decent AoE attack chain up, because you have to jump around a lot to hit the same spawn with the three AoEs. /Fire (which defenders will get in the next issue), has a targeted AoE, a cone and a click AoE which work much better together. But fire doesn't get a force-multiplier effect like /Sonic does, just some minor DoT. A /Sonic defender will help the team do more overall damage than a /Fire defender will.

If you solo, the cone sleep in /Sonic is very useful, allowing you to run with higher spawn sizes.

I play a lot on Pinnacle, and it's just a fact of life that people need to earn money and can't play computer games all day. For that reason, I've also created characters on Virtue and Freedom for those times when Pinnacle is less populated (running out of character slot also pushed me into it).

These days, having characters spread across multiple serves doesn't really matter, what with global email allowing you to transfer stuff between alts more easily than using base storage ever could.

It doesn't really contradict the general statement: double-xp weekend is a "loss leader," like a grocery store that sells eggs for a dime apiece one weekend a year.

To keep customers happy and engaged, and give them something to be excited about and potentially return to the game for, the devs will occasionally have "sales" on XP.

It's just Marketing 101.

The same applies to Patrol XP -- people who play their characters incessantly will use almost no Patrol XP and benefit almost not at all from it, but people who play at a more leisurely pace will level 1.5 times faster. But it doesn't matter because they're not zipping through levels, they're being rewarded for patience, or given a helping hand for not having as much time as others.

If you have the Paragon reward that gives you the ability to use the /vault command anywhere, vault space is worth more than it used be.

You don't mention your secondary. Some (like Ninjitsu) have crowd control powers like Caltrops, Smoke Flash and Blinding Powder. If you aren't /Ninjitsu you can use craftable temp powers like the Stun Grenade and Smoke Flash to the same effect.

If you're serious about running against higher numbers of enemies, you'll need to increase your defenses so you can scrap. You won't have the same hit points as a scrapper or a brute, but it's possible to softcap Melee and Ranged defense fairly easy with Ninjitsu (getting the AoE defense too is a little harder). I'm guessing it's also easy to do with Super Reflexes and probably Energy, but I have no experience with those on stalkers.

Dark/Ninjitsu is also nice because it has two heals in addition to the crowd control powers in the secondary. I've run mine (currently at level 43 or so) at +0/x5 with decent success, which usually spawns more than 5 enemies.

Not really. For example, the attitude of the video on buying leveling speed was grudging acceptance, rather than a glowing endorsement. And in the end they say that micro-transactions aren't a panacea and some games should remain subscription-based.

The issue with segregating players based on what they pay for is already a problem. Several times I've been in a league and the leader queues us, but this fails. He then wastes five or 10 minutes of 20 people's time trying to figure out what's going on, and eventually someone realizes that they haven't bought Going Rogue (or are not yet level 50, which makes me want to rap the leader's knuckles). Not getting into Praetoria isn't as much of a problem, but I've been on teams where someone wanted to do the zone event there, I've spent five minutes getting my character there, and then the player who doesn't have GR is stuck in Pocket D, and then the zone event ends and it was all for naught.

This will only get worse as the number of pay-to-play content choices increases (the signature arcs will have the same problem, I assume). The devs are betting that the have-nots will be convinced to join their friends and pony up the cash when they can't get into the content. But the other possibility is have-nots will quit in disgust, irritated by getting nickeled and dimed to death, and their subscribing friends will follow them.

The point is, segregation causes delays, problems that appear to be bugs and annoyance for everyone, including paying players.

It's a tough call either way, and I don't envy the devs having to make decisions like this. I'm fine with subscriptions, but I can see the MT pressure mounting.

Imagine the following conversation taking deep in the bowels of the earth:

Baron Zoria: "But where are the robes and hoods? There's a tradition to uphold!"

Lilitu: "Are you really not getting the look? It's the Circle of Thorns. Our guys should look thorny!"

Baron Zoria: "But this is an outrage!"

Lilitu: "Robes are so twelfth-century, baron. Our recruiters have to compete against the Carnival of Shadows and those spiffy Nemesis uniforms. Our psychics forecast a 12% increase in new adepts if we adopt these new outfits."

Baron Zoria: "Very well. But I refuse to wear support hose!"

I find these effects annoying too, but most of the time changing the color works for me.

What bothers me most is the speed of these effects. If they were slowed down from their jittery frenetic pulse to a more sedate and subtle flux, that would probably resolve the issue for everyone.

Perhaps a slider that controlled the speed of such animations as displayed in your client would be a solution.

Exactly. I love the fact that I am no longer hounded by people begging me to pad. The ability to set the difficulty a good thing overall, even though it does cause imbalance in the market, because in the past only self-centered jerks who didn't care how much they bothered other people to feather their own nests could do it. Running at x8 democratizes the process, allowing considerate people to enjoy the same economic benefits if they so choose.

And although I'm not a PLer or a farm-the-same-mission-till-my-eyes-bleed player, I turn the difficulty up to the maximum my characters can handle whether solo or on teams. By nature I'm an optimizer and min-maxer, but I still appreciate variety and challenge, and a well-designed mission. Making characters that are capable of running +4/x8 is the challenge and interesting part, but actually running the same farm over and over and PLing just to make cash is simply tedious.

This was my take on it. The Tick seems to think "nigh" is a superlative, whereas it actually means "near" (as in "the end is nigh!") and diminishes its noun.

This is a common type of linguistic misconception. For example, many people seem to think that "penultimate" is "more" ultimate, but it actually means almost ultimate. I.e., the penultimate syllable in a word is the second to the last, not the last. This is also illustrated by peninsula, from the Latin, "paene insula," which means "almost an island."