Rodion

Perhaps the easiest thing to do is run tip missions at -1/x1 difficulty. Get a Hero Merit. Do the random roll. You'll get five rare recipes. Sell them on the market. Profit.

You should be able to do each tip mission in 5-10 minutes once you get to know them. Do five a day in 30-60 minutes, and every other day you'll earn a Hero merit.

The other thing about this is that you should join an SG that does such content on a regular basis, and not depend on the whims of pickup groups. The dialog usually goes along these lines:

PB: "I want to bring my PB."

Team leader: "Well, we need more debuffs. Can you bring your rad instead? We'll run the TF again next week. I'll bring my rad and you can bring your PB."

Even when I get unsolicited invitations to join a TF and the team is missing a particular useful character type (usually debuffs), I'll volunteer to switch to a more needed character. Most of the time the team leader decides it isn't necessary after all, we go as is, and slaughter everything in sight.

I play so many alts I don't really have any vested interest in a particular character. I have several ongoing projects, but I'm happy to switch to a favorite level 50 character if it's needed for a certain TF. That's the mindset among long-term players, because if you stick with one character you're going to get bored and quit the game.

If the Incarnate system works the way it did during the I18 beta, anyone can get the Alpha slot. The devs are unlikely to put a huge roadblock in the way. It may require doing an arc, or spending some merits, or making some investment in time. But they will almost certainly make sure everyone will be able to become Incarnate solo. The salvage required for crafting alpha slot powers dropped doing normal level 50 missions and required nothing special.

However, my guess is that they will have new and difficult content that will grant you the required salvage at an accelerated rate, the same way A-merits are a faster track to get rare stuff than reward merits, and doing TFs/SFs gives you reward merits faster than regular/Ouroboros arcs.

There is no "true" value for anything that depends on a market that is driven by speculation and whim. Even in a the "real" stock market, the "true" value of any stock varies on a daily basis, depending on what economic report was last released or who gets elected to office or what the value of the renminbi is or whatever rumors the traders heard at the water cooler. Despite what many economic theorists say, high-flying markets are not rational.

This goes double or triple for the in-game market, where impatience is the primary factor for driving prices up, inf is easily obtained and the consequences for mistakes are nil.

The numerical inf. value of anything is largely irrelevant unless your sole goal is to hit the inf cap. What really matters is: can you get the things you want for your character in the time frame you want them?

If you consider that you can do most tip missions in 5-10 minutes, that means it will take about 30-60 in-game hours to do the 330 missions required to get 30 A-merits, over a period of two calendar months (or less calendar time if you're converting reward merits to A-merits as well). If you can generate 3 billion influence in some other way in less time, then using A-merits to buy that PvP IO is not worth your while.

For example, if you were to PvP for 30-60 hours, what would the expected number of PvP drops be? If it's greater than 1 or 2, and you like to gamble, then A-merits are not the way to go. But there's always a chance that you'll wind up with nothing because you're depending on a random drop that may never come.

So, if you're the kind of person who would rather do the work and get the sure thing, A-merits are the way to go.

And even if you get bored halfway through and decide to pack it in, you're still fine. You'll have a lot of A-merits for each of which you can get 5 random rolls. Many people prefer to save up and make a lot of rolls at once, because they don't feel ripped off if they get 50 lousy rolls and 25 great rolls.

I find Invulnerability, Willpower and Shield Defense to be quite durable, especially when you add Tough and Weave and slot IO sets for lots of defense bonuses.

You might also consider creating a brute. Not quite as tough as a tanker, but the damage can be much better. I've got an Electrical/Electrical brute slotted for high Slash/Lethal defense and it can easily deal with x4/+1 spawns at level 43. It can do Tip missions (which have a lot of the worst mobs in the game -- Malta, Carnies, Arachnos, etc.) at that difficulty without serious problems.

I've got a level 43 Electrical/Electrical Brute that works fairly well. Jump in with Lightning Field running, hit Power Sink and everything is drained to about 20% with four-slotted Efficacy Adaptor. They quickly go to zero by using their attacks. If you hammer on a boss you can keep the boss completely drained and unable to attack from the -end on your attacks and Lightning Field. The minions and LTs attack you at a reduced rate, but they occasionally regain enough to use some attacks.

I have Lightning Field slotted for damage, accuracy and end reduction; if you were to slot it for end mod instead it looks like it will drain almost 3 end/sec. By comparison, Conductive Aura looks like it'll drain 10 end/sec. If your average mob has the same recovery as a character without Stamina (1.67/sec), Lightning Field will eventually be able to eventually drain the minions to zero and keep them there. However, with all the AoEs from Electrical Melee (especially when you use Lightning Rod with Fury and Build Up) they will probably be dead before long anyway.

Upshot: Conductive Aura is much better than Lightning Field for draining a large group, but a brute can keep a boss completely drained and shrug off the damage from the minions, and still quickly dispatch the minions by AoEs targeting the boss.

Some of this may be due to accidentally bidding on a recipe when they thought they were bidding on an IO. I've done this more than once, sad to say.

I think he means that it's relatively easy to soft-cap Shield to all three positional defenses, but that Ice can be easily soft-capped only to Smash/Lethal and Energy/NE, leaving significant holes in Fire/Cold and Psionic defense. (I also had to throw in two-slotted Combat Jumping to hit 45.1% S/L/E/NE defense in my quickie Mids build to test this.)

Ice is hard-capped for Cold resistance, but has very little defense or resistance against pure Fire and pure Psi.

Since most Fire attacks contain some Smash/Lethal component and Psi is less common, it isn't usually a problem. But Ice tankers can be extremely vulnerable to a few specific attacks.

There seems to be a misconception about what the soft-cap is. It is not the maximum possible defense you can get. It's the point at which more defense doesn't buy you anything against even-con, 50% to-hit, PvE enemies on the first attack.

This mean that:

1) If you're soft-capped against even-con opponents, you are not soft-capped against +2 level opponents.

2) You are not soft-capped against opponents with higher accuracy/to-hit bonus, which includes PvP opponents.

And 3) if you do get hit by, say, an assault rifle burst your defense will be reduced by 7% for 8 seconds. Voila! You're no longer soft-capped. If you get hit by other such attacks (as you often do when facing large spawns containing Council Marksmen), you will quickly lose a great deal of defense in the infamous defense cascade failure. Since defense debuffs are extremely common this is a serious consideration.

Because of this, the soft-cap is not really a cap at all. It's just a convenient term used to describe the point at which striving for more defense provides diminishing returns. Exceeding the soft-cap is still very desirable because it lets you fight higher-level enemies more safely, and prevents defense cascade failures. But because it can be so expensive to do so, it's usually deemed sufficient to hit the soft-cap to create a solid character.

/Dark Melee is mostly a single-target set that would improve survivability. It provides a self-heal in Siphon Life (very good for Shield/ which has no heal of its own), and its secondary effect is a to-hit debuff, which will make your Shield/ primary that much more effective. You also get an End Drain/Restore power in Dark Consumption and a slower-recharge damage buff power in Soul Drain that also does some AoE damage. Negative Energy is also less resisted, but it's not as much of an advantage over Electrical as it is over Smash/Lethal.

/Electrical Melee is much more AoE-oriented, with four AoE attacks. Lightning Rod is a great power. The end-drain aspect of Electrical Melee can be good, but without something like Power Sink and Lightning Field as a base for sapping I don't think you can count on it as an effective mitigating effect.

Really, it depends on what you want to do. If survivability and single-target damage is your primary goal, /Dark is better. If massive AoE damage is your goal, /Electrical is better.

You didn't post a Mids build, so that raises the possibility that you don't have it. Here's the link:

http://www.cohplanner.com/

It's a great tool for planning your characters.

Guys, check again what the OP is asking: he's asking what IOs and sets he should go for, and not how best to pad his wallet with selling recipes from random rolls.

In essence, he's asking for a build for an electric/ice tanker. with a budget of 680 merits.

Actually, with global email attachments it's possible to keep most of your characters in their current SGs. You just need to have one character with its own base, and you can store IOs from all your characters in that base by getting multiple enhancement bins.

Yes, it's inconvenient to have to email items to the character with the base, but I find that I don't actually need to store all the IOs for a character at once. I start slotting IO sets at level 30 or so, and can usually keep IOs for the next several few levels on the character. Most of the things I store in the base are IOs that I won't be able to use for many levels, or extras I have left over from respecs.

Organica's advice is spot on. The main reason I like to start using IO sets at 30 or so is that your character plays much better while you're leveling up. You can pack 7 or 8 IOs worth of enhancement into 5 or 6 slots. It eliminates your end problems and makes your character play much faster.

However, if you wish to go the IO set route at 47/50, it's much, much cheaper to use IOs at 22-27. Level 25 common IOs are slightly worse than SOs over five levels, and level 30s are slightly better. Once you get into common IOs your enhancements last forever. You will literally save millions in inf between levels 22 and 47 by not buying all those sets of SOs that you just throw away. Your 25s and 30s will be good enough all the way to 47, and you can always replace a couple if you have specific performance problems.

Level 10 IOs aren't really very useful -- the bonus is only a few percent better than a trainer. I'll bid 1000 on them on the market and use them if I get them, but the first 11 levels go by so fast it doesn't really pay in time or inf to bother with them. I heartily endorse 15 IOs, though. I save salvage (Luck Charms and the other higher-demand ones) to make level 15-25 IOs as I need to slot powers. If you put the salvage in the bank or store it in market slots you can easily keep yourself supplied.

If you solo a lot the drops are sufficient to keep you independent of market swings, and even if you can't get common IO recipes on the market for what you want to pay (which never happens except for End Mod), just buying the recipes at the crafting station is still much cheaper than buying SOs because with level 25-30 IOs it's one and done.

The ability to set mission difficulty to x8/+2 or x8/+4 and farm Ouro missions probably has more to do with it now that AE exploits have apparently been shut down. Characters able to solo at that rate can make a ton of inf. There are probably duo combinations out there that make it even faster and more profitable than doing it solo, plus you're likely to get a lot of purple drops slaughtering thousands of minions at level 50.

You should start crafting common IOs at level 22 or 27 (or buy them on the market; you can often get them for not much more than the crafting cost). If you're not using IO sets, or you're planning to use them once you hit 50, level 25 common IOs are cheaper in the short-medium run and MUCH cheaper in the long run, and the level 30s have better bonuses than SOs.

A little planning and crafting will save you 10-15 million on the way to 50.

The latest issue added the ability to use combat auras. In particular, you can put an aura on your character's fists that appears only when you're in combat (that is, you've clicked a power). You can actually control when your fists are on fire: click any attack power and they light up. Press ESC and they turn off. It's much cooler than Hasten's spontaneous combustion every minute or two.

That means that Super Fiery Pompom Guy can set his fists aflame without Hasten. It also means that anyone with Hasten can't use the combat aura without Hasten bollixing up the look.

In the long term, then, an option to completely remove FX from Hasten is the way to go. But like others in this thread, I'd rather have the devs do it right than rush something half-done into production. We've had the burning hands this long, we can wait a little longer.

This has already been done in Praetoria's auction house. It's not as nice as you might think: it suppresses ALL powers, including Sprint. So getting around the place is like wading in hip deep mud wearing ankle weights and a fat suit.

No hate, just an observation:

This makes you look like a 12-year-old who likes to spray-paint his name on sidewalks to annoy the grownups. Why are you wasting your time and ours?

Sure.

The first thing is to turn down the difficulty to -1/x1/No Bosses. Then give priority to the tip missions that your character finds easy to do. This will vary by character. For example, my Mind/Electric Dom has a terrible time with Nemesis because they have some sort of resistance to Confuse, though Crey and Council are trivial to deal with. My tankers generally steamroll Nemesis like they aren't there at all.

Because there are only like 10 different tip missions for each set of levels, you'll quickly learn the gimmicks for each of them. Some can be completed in a few minutes, while others take longer. That's why you do the easy ones first. You want to put off the time-consuming ones as long as possible. You'll eventually have to do some of them, but you may luck out and avoid the long ones. When you do the morality mission all your tips will be tossed out and you'll be able to pick up new ones.

Then, if all you really care about is getting A-merits, run with the characters that can do the missions the fastest. You can always global email the items you buy to other characters.

Considering that most well-built level 50 brutes and tankers can easily solo most missions at +0/x8/Bosses, running that same brute at -1/x1/No bosses should be trivial. The only problem will be missions that have escorts or weird mechanics that cause you to run around looking for a chained spawn (of which there are quite a few).

Personally, I get bored doing things this way, so I usually run at higher difficulty. I'd rather take my time and have fun, rather than always racing against the clock. But I'll occasionally resort to doing it the fast and easy way; it's always nice to know how the limits can be pushed.

On my dom I usually run tips at +1/x2/no bosses, and most of them take between 10 and 15 minutes. A level 50 brute or scrapper running at the lowest difficulty should be able to crank through most of the tip missions in 5-8 minutes, or 2-3 hours for 22 missions.

Edit: I just did two Hero tip missions with a Fire/Ice tanker at -1/x1/no bosses (You're a cruel one Mr. Phipps -- free three hostages, click a glowie, defeat a boss; and the rescue of Sister Jocasta -- rescue hostage from a boss, escort her out). The first took 4 minutes, the second took 7. The most time-consuming part of those missions was getting to them: one was in IP, the other was in Crey's Folly. The mission teleporter, the WW teleporter, the Ouro teleporter and a base with all teleporters can make things go much faster.

Unslotted Stamina and even three-slotted Stamina with trainers or DOs will not make characters overpowered. Stamina at the lower levels won't help all that much if you don't have any end reduction in your attacks.

At higher levels even characters with Quick Recovery (Regen and Willpower) often take Stamina as well because they can fire off attacks faster than Quick Recovery (which is better than Stamina) will recover it.

I'll predict right now that hundreds of players will think that Stamina was nerfed because they'll be running out of end once they get three or four attacks, at level 12 or so. They'll be used to playing with level 50 characters with Stamina, end recovery procs and IO sets with 30-40% end reduction in them, and will shocked when they find themselves running out of end half way through every fight -- in part because their attacks will be slotted with a measly 20-40% damage bonus and no end reduction.

As others have mentioned, it's trivial to get any salvage you want for a small investment in time by using AE tickets.

Currently you can get the rarest of rare recipe over the span of four days and 22 missions, spending perhaps as little as two or three hours of real time if you turn the difficulty down to -1/x1.

The only thing you can't get on demand off-market with relatively little effort is uncommon recipes. Currently you need to use reward merits to buy uncommons directly from the vendor, and getting reward merits is actually more time-consuming than getting hero merits, though it's easy enough to run Ouroboros arcs at -1/x1.

I'd like to see an option to buy a full set of an uncommon recipe for two A-merits. For example, for 2 A-merits you could get all three Steadfast Protection recipes at the desired level.

It's a bug, but it's not readily exploitable. Not every bug is an exploit.

I've noticed the same thing with certain attacks when I'm jumping around in a fight with my Dom. Most of the time my attacks root me, but occasionally I'll just use one and keep right on moving.