Rodion

What level are you (sounds like you're at least level 37)? And what size spawns are you trying to fight solo?

With the build below I have no problems running at x4 or x6 solo (depends on the group I'm fighting), and never have problems running on teams. I usually hit Power Build Up, then open with Sleet, then Ice Storm, then Frost Breath. I hold any troublemakers and finish off anything left standing with blasts and holds. When solo I hit a boss or LT with Snowstorm to reduce the number of incoming attacks. I also use Blizzard frequently, after Sleet and either Aim or Power Build Up just to be sure.

I also took Hasten and when it's up I have 107% recharge. This is very useful, allowing Sleet to recharge for every spawn (it sometimes recharges fast enough to be used twice on obstinate bosses).

I also take advantage of geometry when I can. You stand around a corner and be out of line of sight from all the mobs when you use Sleet, Ice Storm and Blizzard. This increases your survivability a great deal.

I haven't played this character since I17 went live with the defender damage buff, so this process would be 30% faster now. This build is more of an offender (I have a lot of other characters that are buffbots and am trying something different with this one). You could increase the ranged defense on this character by 8-11% with relatively little expense by using Lockdowns, and Thunderstrikes.


Hero Plan by Mids' Hero Designer 1.707
http://www.cohplanner.com/

Click this DataLink to open the build!

Cold Comfort: Level 50 Magic Defender
Primary Power Set: Cold Domination
Secondary Power Set: Ice Blast
Power Pool: Fitness
Power Pool: Speed
Power Pool: Flight
Ancillary Pool: Power Mastery

Hero Profile:
Level 1: Ice Shield -- DefBuff-I(A), DefBuff-I(15)
Level 1: Ice Bolt -- Thundr-Acc/Dmg(A), Thundr-Acc/Dmg/EndRdx(3), Thundr-Acc/Dmg/Rchg(9), Thundr-Dmg/EndRdx/Rchg(11), Thundr-Dmg/Rchg(13), Thundr-Dmg/EndRdx(43)
Level 2: Ice Blast -- Thundr-Acc/Dmg(A), Thundr-Acc/Dmg/Rchg(3), Thundr-Acc/Dmg/EndRdx(9), Thundr-Dmg/EndRdx/Rchg(11), Thundr-Dmg/Rchg(13), Thundr-Dmg/EndRdx(43)
Level 4: Frost Breath -- Posi-Acc/Dmg(A), Posi-Dmg/EndRdx(5), Posi-Dmg/Rchg(5), Posi-Dmg/Rng(7), Posi-Acc/Dmg/EndRdx(7)
Level 6: Swift -- Run-I(A)
Level 8: Frostwork -- Heal-I(A)
Level 10: Hasten -- RechRdx-I(A), RechRdx-I(15), RechRdx-I(40)
Level 12: Hover -- Krma-ResKB(A)
Level 14: Fly -- Flight-I(A)
Level 16: Freeze Ray -- BasGaze-Acc/Hold(A), BasGaze-Acc/Rchg(17), BasGaze-Acc/EndRdx/Rchg/Hold(17), BasGaze-Rchg/Hold(19), BasGaze-EndRdx/Rchg/Hold(19)
Level 18: Benumb -- Acc-I(A), Acc-I(21), RechRdx-I(21), RechRdx-I(43), RechRdx-I(50)
Level 20: Health -- Heal-I(A)
Level 22: Stamina -- EndMod-I(A), EndMod-I(23), EndMod-I(23), P'Shift-End%(25)
Level 24: Snow Storm -- EndRdx-I(A), EndRdx-I(25), ImpSwft-Dam%(37), P'ngTtl--Rchg%(50)
Level 26: Sleet -- Achilles-ResDeb%(A), UndDef-DefDeb/Rchg(27), UndDef-DefDeb/EndRdx(27), LdyGrey-%Dam(31), UndDef-DefDeb/Rchg/EndRdx(37), UndDef-Rchg(37)
Level 28: Bitter Ice Blast -- Decim-Acc/Dmg(A), Decim-Dmg/Rchg(29), Decim-Acc/Dmg/Rchg(29), Decim-Dmg/EndRdx(31), Decim-Acc/EndRdx/Rchg(31)
Level 30: Arctic Fog -- RedFtn-Def/EndRdx(A), RedFtn-Def/Rchg(34), RedFtn-EndRdx/Rchg(34), RedFtn-Def(46), RedFtn-EndRdx(46), RedFtn-Def/EndRdx/Rchg(48)
Level 32: Heat Loss -- Efficacy-Acc/Rchg(A), Efficacy-EndMod/Acc(33), Efficacy-EndMod/Acc/Rchg(33), Efficacy-EndMod/Rchg(33), RechRdx-I(34), Efficacy-EndMod(42)
Level 35: Ice Storm -- Posi-Acc/Dmg(A), Posi-Dmg/EndRdx(36), Posi-Dmg/Rchg(36), Posi-Acc/Dmg/EndRdx(36), Posi-Dmg/Rng(39), Posi-Dam%(42)
Level 38: Blizzard -- Posi-Acc/Dmg(A), Posi-Dmg/EndRdx(39), Posi-Dmg/Rchg(39), Posi-Dmg/Rng(40), Posi-Acc/Dmg/EndRdx(40)
Level 41: Power Build Up -- RechRdx-I(A), RechRdx-I(42), RechRdx-I(46)
Level 44: Temp Invulnerability -- TtmC'tng-ResDam/EndRdx(A), TtmC'tng-ResDam(45), TtmC'tng-ResDam/EndRdx/Rchg(45), TtmC'tng-ResDam/Rchg(45)
Level 47: Aim -- RechRdx-I(A), RechRdx-I(48), RechRdx-I(48)
Level 49: Infrigidate -- Acc-I(A), Achilles-ResDeb%(50)
------------
Level 1: Brawl -- Empty(A)
Level 1: Sprint -- Empty(A)
Level 2: Rest -- Empty(A)
Level 1: Vigilance
Level 0: Ninja Run

I had to laugh when I saw Brawl slotted with a couple of hundred million inf worth of Kinetic Combat IOs...

I don't think this would have the intended effect.

First, if there's a limit of a 30% reduction, then the poster will simply post at a higher price assuming the price will be cut back. That will cause an immediate spike in prices, which is the opposite of what you want.

Second, this presumes that there's a big backlog of items waiting to be sold but are not selling because the prices are just too high. I don't think that's the case. The items suffering from the greatest inflation are the items in highest demand. These items sell quickly for very high prices.

Take, for example, Kinetic Combat: Dam/End/Rech 35. These are selling for 100 million heroside just now. There are two for sale and five have sold today for 100+ million.

Similarly, Hecatomb: Dam/End are going for 100 to 130 million. Four have sold today in that range (and there are seven posted currently). In fact, all the Hecatombs are selling for more than 100 million and the last five sales on all of them occurred in the last 24-48 hours, and there are between 4 and 17 posted.

Even with the rarest of the rare and the most outrageously priced recipes (Gladiator's Strike 50) have all their sales in the past few days, and have only between 2 and 18 posted.

There are already incentives for posters to list their items at lower prices. First, when someone bids, the lowest priced item is sold first (it has priority over high-priced items even if the bid is greater than both items' prices). Second, you pay a 5% fee when you list your item. If you post so high that no one buys it, you will lose that fee if you take it down and repost at a lower price. Third, posters have a limited number of market slots for buying and selling. If your slots are filled with things that are listed at outrageously high prices that don't sell you won't be able to sell new things. Thus, there is a steep opportunity cost for posting items at excessive prices.

Thus, prices are excessive if there is a huge supply that is priced beyond everyone's reach. Since the supply of these high-demand items is relatively small and sales are brisk, the inflated prices asked are within the means of the buyers.

Your solution would solve the problem of excessively priced items that don't move, while the problem we have is highly-inflated prices for items in high demand.

That doesn't mean I think the market is just fine. It's just that players who know how to generate large quantities of influence are able to afford these expensive items and there's a ready supply of them -- at those outrageously high prices.

Villain-side it's a little different, but I haven't watched the market there closely enough to say what's going on there.

It would seem that "abandon mission" is an easier way to "reset" the mission, which people now usually do by exiting, selecting another mission, then reselecting the original mission.

This way you don't need to have an extra mission hanging around to do a reset.

Perhaps the "errand" task missions referred to are those missions where they tell you to go talk to Dr. Sheridan, or bring this device to Tina McIntyre.

If I were to take a cue from your book of etiquette, I would dismiss anyone who wants Speed Boost on their character as a weakling needing a crutch. I would then kick them from the team because they can't hack it on their own.

Fulcrum Shift is the best Kinetics buff. Transfusion and Transference are more generally useful than Speed Boost (Transference is an excellent offensive power for preventing bosses from attacking you -- no endurance, no attacks). I have nothing against Speed Boost, and it certainly has its uses (especially for characters with long-recharge powers). But for many melee ATs with tight attack chains and good recovery it really offers nothing. When playing such characters I don't need or want Speed Boost (but I won't turn it down, either).

Kicking a Kinetic with Fulcrum Shift but without Speed Boost is just short-sighted, especially if you're replacing them with just another scrapper. FS is a force multiplier for the entire team. If you're going to be completely mercenary about it, the damage buff from FS increases your kill rate more than the +recharge buff. Unless you can find another Kin with Speed Boost on demand, you're just kicking yourself in the head when you kick the SB-less Kin with Fulcrum Shift.

In the end this is just a game that we play to have fun. I don't see why people get so bent out of shape when other players make character choices they disagree with. Unless the player is causing problems or contributing nothing, what difference does it make if the team gets 5% less XP/minute? It's not like this is the Olympics...

There was a time when your complaint was valid, but that time seems to have passed several months ago. AE is always a ghost town whenever I'm there (I try out various arcs solo to get tickets for Bronze rolls -- that's still a good deal despite the experience bugs introduced with the ally fix).

Otherwise I spend most of my time running TFs and missions with friends, and when they're not around I run on the occasional pickup team. Even then my experiences mirror the OP's more than yours.

I don't know what server you're playing on, but with the terrible hit experience has taken with most arcs, are there still people farming AE arcs? If the people you play with are just sitting around in AE you need to find some new people.

I've noticed the same thing, but it just means you have to change your tactics. Instead of charging into a group and fighting it in place, you need to draw some of them away so that you don't attract attention of the intermixing spawn. You can do that a couple of different ways: with a ranged attack, or by taunting, or by running up and punching one and running back.

This actually cuts both ways. I've been playing a level 30 stalker solo at +0/x3, and it can get a little hairy trying to fight that many at once. But since the spawns tend to spread out more, they're often so diffuse that attacking one doesn't aggro the whole spawn. Picking off the outlier is often completely safe.

And if I'm running a big mission with my brutes or tankers at x8, I don't really care if I aggro two or three spawns. I usually hit the aggro cap long before the fight gets dangerous.

As for the time-consuming defeat all maps, I think the devs should take the advice they give in the AE tutorial and eliminate most of the defeat-all missions in the game. Defeat-alls are not a good substitute for engaging content -- if players want to defeat all the spawns there's nothing stopping them: it shouldn't be a required mission objective.

With this in mind you should use an EB, and remind people in your arc description that there's an EB and if they can't hack it they should turn off bosses on their difficulty settings.

I think those numbers are usually right, but sometimes they're wrong. I have characters I know I've played for much less time than others, yet one recent level 50 was in the 600 hour range (a Broadsword/Shield scrapper that leveled very quickly) while many of my other level 50s are in the 200 hour range.

On the other hand, the level doesn't necessarily tell you anything about how many hours the character might have been online. I know someone who has a level 20 character that has spent hundreds of hours in the market. He rarely ran missions with the character, he just traded with it.

Similarly, I could imagine people who log hundreds of hours with a low-level character if they were perfecting low-level arcs in test mode.

Dark Armor (Brutes and Scrappers) and Energy Aura (Brutes) both have invisibility powers. Dark Armor's got a lot of other effects that probably don't fit your concept, but Energy Aura might work for you. It's considered one of the weaker secondaries for Brutes, but with careful design and IOs you can make it pretty robust.

It's your character, so it's your call. I personally have taken Speed Boost on all my Kinetics, though I have a soft-capped S/L corruptor that doesn't have it on Build 1 (I have it on Build 2).

One problem I have with Speed Boost is that so many people don't want it (this is more true blueside, it seems, because so many Brutes have a desperate need for it). It's kind of annoying getting yelled at by half the team for not Speed Boosting them and then getting yelled at for Speed Boosting the other half.

Like you I build my characters to not need things like Speed Boost. At the higher levels I can take it or leave on my melee characters, but I'll almost always take it on my ranged characters because there's much less maneuvering (and I take Hover a lot of the time, which is great with Speed Boost).

I guess I'd recommend doing what you want on your primary build and then have a low-cost build that has Speed Boost in case you're on a team that really needs SB.

My experience with the new interface is much the same as MrNoj. It's actually easier for me to use than the old interface, and it's more streamlined for what I do.

However, that doesn't mean that it's perfect. Many of the problems people are having -- reusing the previous price -- could be made less onerous with a trivial change to the interface: when you drop an item on the market window the previous price could be placed in the edit window and highlighted so that you can just type the new price without having to mouse around or erase anything.

Putting up/down arrows on the quantity field in the bidding window would be another trivial but immensely useful feature. And making the tab key go from the bid to the quantity (highlighting the contents of the quantity field so that just typing the number would replace the existing number) would be trivial to implement but make it much easier to use.

In other words, the interface could be vastly improved just by using some of the standard Windows interface protocols.

Oh, and it's not just that it's horrible to use. It will occasionally delete all the text in the widget for no apparent reason. It is the most unreliable text editing tool I've ever used.

I think the first order of business would be to put forth a set of requirements that are to be addressed, without imposing any solutions or implementation details on them. This can probably be done now without divulging any details the developers want to remain confidential for the time being.

If we can agree on what the problem to be addressed is then we will have the criteria by which to judge whether the solution satisfies it.

Could you explain what you mean by a trading card system?

We've got merits to buy any recipe directly, and random rolls with merits and tickets. The costs and drop chances are all figured by the devs to enforce a particular level of scarcity. As long as the devs' goal is enforce that level of scarcity, I'm not sure how a different mechanism would change the availability of things that the devs want to be rare.

I'm not sure why you say this. If you leave the ALL tab selected no tab switching is required. You see everything all the time, though you do have to scroll vertically if you have more items than screen space allows.

I did this same thing with old interface a few times as well (buying salvage I was trying to sell, listing things for way more than they were worth).

This problem is endemic to interfaces that combine different kinds of data entry fields into the same dialog. Frail humans in a hurry frequently mix up the different input fields.

The old interface was worse for entering the wrong price for an item because it was very common for the item you just put in the market window to be scrolled off to the right and totally out of your view, yet you could enter a number in the price field above the stored items and post it without seeing which item was selected, since the data entry field and the item were disconnected (though the name was displayed by the price entry field). Thus, I posted many many items for the wrong price.

The new interface has the posting price field in the item window itself, so you can always see exactly what it is you're selling. It's directly analogous to bidding on an item -- you enter the bid on the item window itself.

But that still doesn't stop human error: we often assume something is true even when something different is staring us right in the face. The new interface is less prone to error than the old one for this particular problem because the price input field is within the confines of the item window.

That said, there are still many other problems with the new interface that need cleaning up. The designer should look at other well-designed Windows apps that do similar things and take some hints from them.

150 is a lot, and is probably more than enough. But there is another solution that could help alleviate the OP's problem: You should be able to email stacks of items.

This probably wasn't done because of the problem with getting a stack from an email when there isn't enough available inventory space. But it's a logical extension that should be dealt with in a future issue.

No, their intent was to make it difficult to both attack and defend yourself, but not impossible. Since the nukes buff your damage for 10 seconds, and that buff was added long after the initial implementation of the game, it's obvious that they intended for you to attack after a nuke.

With the endurance crash you can't activate powers that allow an easy escape such as Personal Force Field or Phase Shift immediately after a nuke without some kind of external assist like a blue inspiration. This makes it less safe to use nukes, and is part of the trade-off for giving characters such massive attacks.

There are several other powers that crash endurance, including defensive ones such as Unstoppable and Force of Nature. It's a common trope in the comics for heroes to be left exhausted after doing something extraordinary.

There's also a bug where the text entry field doesn't display anything even though there's a number entered there. If you enter another number it still doesn't display anything but if you're quick and don't watch what you're doing you'll wind up posting something for 1000 times what you intend.

Not quite as bad as buying something for 1.5 billion, but it still smarts a little.

If there's a problem, it's not affecting everything uniformly. I have a S/L softcapped Fiery Aura tanker and cruised through +0/x8 Crey and Council missions tonight. I monitor S/L defense and it was pegged at 45.3%. I did have problems with a carnie Ringmistress, but that's to be expected.