Rodion

There was a bug in the past that prevented purple drops (due to an uninitialized variable). It's possible that a similar bug still exists and is affecting you. It seems unlikely at this point, but it's possible.

The way to determine this is to run solo missions and tote up 10,000 kills. You should get 2-4 purples if the estimates of the drop rate are correct.

When I made a concerted effort to run solo missions at x8 with my brutes and tankers I got purples at the expected rate -- after the patch that fixed the purple drop bug -- about one every 2000-3000 kills.

Another thing to realize is that there's only one chance per team for purple drops when a mob is defeated. When you team with seven other players your chances are therefore eight times less than when you solo. That's why it seems to take so long to get purples doing those TFs. People who get lots of purples are soloing.

If you solo groups that you can defeat easily at x8 you may take two or three times longer to defeat them than on a team, but you'll still get drops at three or four times the rate you do on a team of eight. Alternately, you can duo with a debuffer like a Dark or Rad Emission and benefit from a faster defeat rate but only share with one other person.

If your goal is get purples I suggest beefing up one of your brutes or tankers so they can solo x6 or x8, and run for several hours and see what shakes out. People have gone crazy with Fire/Kins in the past, but they often have to be extremely selective what maps and enemies that can solo at x8. If you have a tanker or brute with a couple of AoEs (or even just one good AoE), and you utilize your inspirations well -- they drop like rain when you solo -- you can be very effective. And you aren't locked into one particular map with one kind of enemy the way so many Fire/Kins are.

Your sample size is too small. Come back when you've done it 50 or 100 times and then we'll talk .

I always have 3-4 Break Frees on squishies, at least 4 purples and 4-5 greens. When I use them I convert whatever odd reds, yellows and oranges I have around to maintain a good stock.

And I always carry at least one Break Free on melee characters, because you can get held. My Fire/Fire tank was once held by an MI and her four summoned illusionists when they all popped off holds simultaneously. It was very surprising, but the Break Free saved his life.

The problem with Rad/ is that it's not fire and forget: if you don't like the toggles it's kind of a drag. So which a particular player will have more fun with is more about the playstyle you prefer.

With TA you can just start shooting away on a team and all your debuffs will do their work no matter what your team is doing. With Rad you have to choose the right anchor and make sure that mobs are kept within the area of the debuff. Pick the wrong anchor (one that dies right away) and your mitigation is gone until you can reestablish the debuff on another one. But that hassle factor definitely lets you solo more easily, assuming you don't kill your own anchors prematurely.

Personally, I find Dark/ to be a happy medium between TA/ and Rad/. It has only one toggle debuff, and has a fast recharging -regen like Rad/ has that's very useful for AVs.

The problem I have with TA is that there are several debuffs that are applicable in most fights on teams, and they all take a couple seconds to establish. A lot of the time everything is dead before you have a chance to fire off all your debuffs, let alone firing your own damage attacks.

Even Oil Slick is a time-consuming two-step process because you often have to ignite your own slick. (Playing with a Fire tanker or Fire blaster can make your life a whole lot easier.)

I always take Taunt on my brutes, but may not do so until the late 40s. With inherent Stamina the only difference will be getting it an earlier level so it's available when exemped.

There are another couple of reasons that people think flipping is bad.

If someone lists a recipe at a low price, a flipper "takes advantage" of that person by buying the item at a low price and selling it at a higher price (nearer its true value).

To avoid this sellers should always list items near their true value, on the low end if they wish to sell quickly, or the high end if they don't need the slot. I never list something of value at ridiculously low prices; I always list it at a price I'd be willing to pay, but that's usually (a lot) less than the highest price in the bidding history. About 90% of the time I sell the item for something near the top price, or at least what I think it's worth. I've had to swallow the listing fee, but usually only for charity cases (listing uncommon recipes that are good but no one is currently buying).

Some would-be noble marketeers try to force prices lower by listing low, and get mad when flippers grab up their stuff and relist it prices near their actual value.

The problem is that a seller cannot force prices lower on in-demand items unless they have a glut of supply -- only buyers can force down prices by refusing to pay inflated prices.

The other service flippers provide is to "rent out" their market slots to people who don't have room to list their items at a higher price.

I don't consider people who buy recipes and craft them to be flippers -- they're performing a service and are not just buying low and selling high. It's a service I would never pay for, but some players find value in it and are willing to pay for it.

I personally find flipping kind of cheesy, but if everyone thought and behaved like flippers the market would stabilize quickly and very few people would pay through the nose. The problems arise when rich people get impatient and gobble everything up, abusing their wealth by drastically overbidding to jump the line.

Think of it as a life lesson writ small.

I'm sure you know this, Bill, but just to clarify to other readers who may not know: you can get an auction house teleporter in-game without paying for it with a day job. Just leave your character in Wentworth's or the black market when you're logged out and you'll get charges on a temp power.

And I'll also second your basic sentiment: if you think common salvage costs too much, just go play the game for an hour and you'll have it coming out of your ears. Turn up your difficulty if you need more.

Paradoxically, it would seem, the price of RARE salvage has gone down recently -- most rares clocked in between 1 and 3 million, usually averaging 2 million. I've seen rares for as little as half a million recently. But it's not really a paradox at all.

Why? Supply and demand. Monkey farmers have lots of tickets, and the easiest thing to get and sell is rare salvage. Increased supply = lower prices.

My name is Rodion, and I'm a hoarder...

There's no question that people are now hoarding IOs and salvage, and have been doing so since those things were created.

I have a friend who's created two bases on two servers and has two or three tables in each base filled to the brim with all manner of crafted IOs. That's hoarding. When base storage was obsoleted we had half a dozen storage racks filled with it (that was hoarding), which we converted to rare salvage with Brainstorm Ideas (which was also hoarding).

We currently have one rack filled with hundreds of pieces of Halloween salvage left over from the time when the racks could hold more than 30 items. At one point a member of the SG accidentally dragged the whole stack of Hamidon costumes to his character and couldn't put them back. We've got another storage rack filled with rare salvage. This is hoarding.

I historically haven't hoarded IOs, but when I respec I put the leftover ones in a table in case I need them again. They were starting to pile up, but global email has made it a whole lot easier to move them around. Before global emails I would sell a lot of recipes because getting them to other servers was difficult/risky (you had to sell to yourself through market). Now I send them to characters that can use them. That's hoarding, though not quite so egregiously.

I temporarily hoard mid-level salvage (especially the arcane stuff) in market slots and personal vault storage from level 25 to 38 because it's just more convenient to have it at hand rather than mess around buying it on the market -- that stuff has been ridiculously volatile for the past couple of years. I sell it all when I hit level 38 or so to make room for other stuff, so I'm not a total packrat.

I've begun crafting certain IOs (Crushing Impact, etc.) from recipe drops that I know I'll need at some point and am storing them against that time. I tell myself that this hasn't reached the point of hoarding yet, but in all honesty, it's hoarding.

And our hero SGs are no different from other people's bases. I started a villain SG and a friend has taken it over and remade the base in really cool ways. He's hoarding salvage. I'm a member of other friends' SGs on other servers, and they hoard salvage and IOs just like we do. I've seen tables chock full of worthless stun and sleep IOs that no one can bear to delete, but are impossible to sell on the market for even a fraction of their crafting and salvage costs.

This is why the devs don't increase the capacity of the personal vault and the salvage storage racks. They can run the stats, and they know how much junk we're packing away. They want the market to function, and if everyone hoards everything the market will be adversely affected more than it already has been. Even so, the devs have made it fairly easy to hoard thousands of IOs in each base. If you create a personal base you can get enough prestige by level 50 to do this yourself. The only thing you can't do easily is store recipes, but crafting them is almost as good.

The one thing I think the devs should do is add a badge that will increase the personal vault storage capacity on a character by some small amount. They already have badges for increasing market slots and on-character storage for salvage and recipes, and increasing vault storage by 10 or so would be a nice perq and not unbalancing. The badge should be called "Packrat." Or is there already one called that?

Come on, all you hoarders. Own up to it.

I'm curious why you have so much accuracy slotted. Some of your attacks have 188% accuracy, on top of the Kismet. Do you have Nemesis troops that much ?

In other words, you want the devs to invest time, effort and money to prop up your vanity. Fair enough: vanity is a big part of the game.

The problem is that the vanity of the vast majority of players is propped up by by leveling faster, not more slowly. The devs have made a conscious decision to accelerate leveling time and time again. This game, like almost all computer games, is all about instant gratification. If you peruse other sections of these forums, you will find hundreds of instances where people complain bitterly about how slowly things come to them (Incarnate shards are the whine du jour). Why do you think there's such a rush every time a new exploit is found in AE?

Patrol XP is the new normal. The game has been retconned to make it so. Everyone currently plays under the same rules. Forget about what went before. Now is the only time that matters.

You say it, but do you really understand that your request is just one of thousands of requests to set various options in the game? And that the majority of other people's requests don't have any kind of workaround at all, but require actual changes to the game? And that your request has several perfectly viable workarounds? And that, in the grand scheme of things, playing the game is really doing nothing, and all the in-game rewards are welfare checks for doing nothing? And you still persist in demanding that the devs do what you want for no reason other than to satisfy your pride?

Finally, there is a solution to getting no Patrol XP: never log off.

You don't really need to farm. Just do an arc or two, say Kelly Nemmer's or Buck Salinger's in Croatoa, solo or with a couple of friends at x2, x4, x6, or x8, whatever you can manage easily. You wind up with tons of salvage -- more than I can store -- and a decent number of merits for your trouble. If you forget about the drops and just play for fun you very quickly wind up with more salvage than you can hold.

The devs intentionally make broad categories of random drops to avoid the problem other games have with forcing players to defeat very specific enemies to get specific equipment. They've gone a little in that direction with specific rewards for certain TFs and activities (Hami-O's from Hamidon, Recluse and Statesman's TF, and the recent Incarnate rewards for certain TFs). But since Incarnate shards can drop from any level 50 enemy, only the Hami-Os are really forcing you to do specific content for specific rewards. And since Hami-Os are pretty niche items -- not overpowered by any means, though certainly quite useful in certain circumstances -- it's no big deal that those are the only sources (I've been able to get ones I want on the market with a minimum of hassle).

I don't question the need to throttle XP/inf/rewards in AE -- I've advocated for it since the first big wave of AE exploits. But I have a quibble with the above statement. (Though in theory I agree with you, Frederik, and am disappointed that they chose to make MA missions just be simulations -- see below.)

Arguments about not giving experience and influence for a virtual reality simulation nested inside a virtual reality simulation are moot. As I recall the devs were undecided about whether AE should give xp and inf at first. However, they decided (correctly) that running AE missions is in every material way identical to running regular missions, except for the rewards given (tickets instead of regular drops). And of course Devs' Choice arcs do have the same rewards.

Since the AE simulation is every bit as real as the "reality" of the game, there's no question that that you should get every bit as much experience running the simulation as you do in a regular mission. Even if you posit that it's a simulation -- the simulation is so perfect that the character would gain as much real-world experience in that simulation as they would in real life.

That leaves the question of influence/infamy. As a practical matter, since you can't be killed permanently in "real" action, it takes no more bravery to face down the biggest bads for "real" than it does to face them in AE.

The conceit of influence/infamy/information is a flawed simplification chosen to represent cash in the game. It is inherently flawed because the value of influence does not scale with level the way experience roughly does -- your purchasing power increases drastically as you level, even though the opponents you defeat may not represent any more challenge to you than they did at level 20. That level 50 Tank Swiper is probably easier for you to defeat than it was at level 30, but you get a ton more inf.

Inf pretends to represent your level of notoriety, but it is just a unit of currency. Your inf level does not appear to affect your level of in-game notoriety in any way -- it only represents your spending capacity (your level actually represents your notoriety). And since you can freely trade it with others, and get more by selling things on the market, there is no semblance of it being anything but cash.

Finally, not giving inf along with exp is not an option. Characters really need to get equivalent amounts of inf and experience, otherwise things get really skewed (remember the Winter Lord?).

The whole conceit of AE -- that it is just a virtual reality simulator -- disappoints me and raises the exact in-game problems that you point out, Frederik.

My preferred backstory would have been that you're conducting missions for Portal Corp exploring alternate dimensions where all sorts of things could happen. I would have headquartered it at Portal Corp (with a similar Recluse-sponsored facility in Grandville). Instead of tickets, Portal Corp would issue credits that you could use to purchase items that teams recover from their extra-dimensional missions.

Everything else would be the same, more or less, but it would lack the virtual reality aspect. Since all these missions occur in other dimensions, they have no bearing on what happens in this dimension and "official" content.

That would give the whole enterprise a much more logical footing in Paragon City, and would avoid all the snarkiness of having Dr. Aeon involved.

I too am tired of reboots. Every director who gets hold of a franchise decides that he doesn't like the previous Batman/Superman/Spider-man movie and has to retell the origin story for the umpteenth time.

Why retell the origin story? Why not just have another chapter in the life of the character? Or tell the story of a different character?

As you suggest, Whedon's multi-generational slayer concept primes the pump for spin-offs. If the new director has a new slayer that's not supposed to be the same old Buffy but just played by a new actor then there is a scintilla of hope for the project. But if their "new" movie is just a rehash of the original movie or series there really is no point. Been there. Seen that.

The real problem is not that directors and writers lack creativity and imagination and CAN'T come up with new and original ideas. The problem is that the money guys at the studios won't greenlight those ideas. They want to lock in an existing audience who have an emotional attachment to those old characters.

What the money guys don't seem to get is that the audience is predisposed to like anything that is inspired by or reminiscent of their old favorites. That audience will go watch new and original stuff that's not identical to their old favorites, but will react poorly to hackish remakes.

The success of Twilight, True Blood and the Vampire Diaries shows that audiences are still drawn to original shows in the same vein as Buffy. These shows tell many of the same kinds of stories as Buffy did, but in different ways that add (well, sometimes add) something new to the genre. Some of the new ideas will then become even more popular than the shows that went before.

Remakes are a three-edged sword: some fans will go to see it because they'll see anything attached to their favorite show, some fans will refuse to see because it despoils the original, and some movie goers will never go because they didn't like the original.

For a show like Buffy with a devoted but smallish fan base, the money guys would be better off picking an original project, or at least one that's disconnected enough from the original Buffy that it won't turn off hard-core fans or hard-core haters.

In a previous episode I seem to recall the campers setting up a perimeter alert system with cans on wires to let them know if walkers were shambling through. They didn't hear anything, which could mean that the geeks somehow got through without raising the alarm, they found a hole in the fence, it failed to work, the campers were making too much damned noise to hear the alarm, or -- my favorite -- someone cut the wires and led the deaders through.

The original cast included Kristy Swanson, Hillary Swank, Rutger Hauer, Paul "Pee Wee Herman" Reubens, Luke Perry and Donald Sutherland. Those actors are all a bit long in the tooth for the original concept now, so it would require a new cast.

But I agree with your sentiment: why remake a movie that was only made 18 years ago? I would guess that's why Whedon is not involved.

If you have something you'll be able to use all the time instead of the nuke, you will not be gimped. Recharge time on nukes is long and the end crash can be painful if you have many toggles.

So, for example, if you're running Leadership toggles, Combat Jumping and Scorpion Shield, a nuke may not be for you.

Another thing to consider is minimal slotting for the nuke if you have a power slot but don't want to use five or six enhancement slots. With Hami-Os you can get a potent, accurate nuke with just three total slots. A cheaper alternate that's almost as good is Multi-strike: Acc/Dam 50, Cleaving Blow: Acc/Dam, and common Damage IO: 50.

I didn't have Atomic Blast on my Rad/Kin originally, but got it so that I could squeeze out another 1.875% S/L defense with an Obliteration set.

I slot level 30-38 IO sets for most of my characters' level 32 and lower powers, and level-appropriate sets for higher level powers. That way I can exemp down to the 30s and not lose any bonuses.

You can mix components of any level of an IO set and still get the bonuses. You can have a 31, 3 50s and a 41 and everything works as you would expect. This happens to me sometimes when I happen to have an IO sitting around in the base that happens to fill in a set that I'm buying.

If you're planning on getting a fair number of purple sets then there are different considerations: purples retain set bonuses at any level. However, purples don't have a very broad variety of bonuses: mostly accuracy and recharge; only one has any defense bonuses. So if you're trying to softcap you'll probably wind up using a fair number of uncommon and rare sets and you'll have to decide at what level you want to keep the bonuses at.

The Fury mechanic causes you to assume a certain playstyle -- you're always rushing forward to keep the Fury bar high. Lots of scrappers play that way anyhow, but with a brute you need to either constantly attack or be attacked (this generates Fury faster) to even approach scrapper levels of damage.

The other thing is how much you play on teams. If you like to play with other brutes, tanks and scrappers you'll be competing with them for aggro and therefore Fury to increase your damage output. If you primarily solo or play as the only aggro magnet on the team, then it's really a toss-up between a scrapper and a brute.

The upshot: if you don't like the Fury mechanic and like to pick your battles, scrappers are for you.

For similar reasons I begin slotting IOs at level 27 or so, and have many of my IOs at level 30-35 or so. Playing with SOs or commons just isn't as fun as playing with IO sets. I still play my characters at level 50, but getting there is 90% of the fun. So I like having my character play nice and smooth from level 30 onward, rather than always standing around gasping for breath or waiting for powers to recharge.

The other aspect is that doing this spreads out the purchase of your IOs and salvage over levels 27-50, rather than trying to buy, craft and slot everything between level 47-50. If you take more time getting your IOs you'll wind up paying much less than if you try to buy everything in the span of a few levels. Also, crafting level 50 IOs is a cool half million just for the crafting cost itself, which can cost you almost 40 million just for making the IOs. Level 30 IOs cost 10 times less to craft.

I try to make my IO purchases level-appropriate. That is, I get IOs for the powers at the level the powers are obtained (with a minimum of level 30 most of the time, because that's where ED really start to take its bite). That means my bonuses will work at any level I'm exemplared down to, till about level 30 or so.

I also slot level 25 commons at level 22 or so, and then replace them with level 30-35 IO sets as I can buy and use them. There's no need to rush to replace SOs that level out this way, and nothing forces me to pay through the nose for a recipe that I have to get RIGHT NOW.

Finally, for the primary bonus in a power (damage in attacks, for example), ED limits the advantage of slotting level 50 sets. At level 30 most attack sets give you around 60% accuracy bonus, which is more than enough for most characters, especially considering how many sets give accuracy bonuses. Where level 50 sets do help is in the "off" bonuses. Using a set of level 50 Crushing Impacts will net you 69% endurance reduction and recharge, rather than 57% at level 30.

So the answer for the OP is: if you hate planning ahead, or if all you care about is getting to 50, then it makes no sense to buy IOs at lower levels. Just PL your way there and then pay through the nose for IOs when you try to outfit the character all at once.

If you read the information on the very rare alpha slot boosts (Radial Paragon, for example), you'll notice that they provide a "level shift."

We haven't seen this in beta yet, but this will apparently shift your level up by one. So, while you won't be level 51, you'll be effectively level 51 -- level 51 minions will con white to you.

We don't know if the subsequent nine Incarnate slots will include level shifts, but it's really irrelevant. What matters is the new capabilities that you get and the relative efficacy of the character. New levels increase your to-hit relative to lower mobs, your hit points, etc. As long as the things that level increases raise go up, the actual level number makes no difference.

For example, a future Incarnate slot boost could raise base to-hit to higher than 75%, without actually increasing the level. You don't need to be level 51 to have a higher to-hit (currently low-level characters have a higher-to hit to make up for lack of accuracy).