Rodion

While that's true to a certain extent, there were always people who worried about that stuff. Before IO sets it was Hamidon Origin enhancements.

There's a lot of good information in the forums, but reading them takes its toll on your psyche. There are all these guys out there who spending billions on their builds, six-slotting Taunt, capping defense, and all the rest. You can't let that get you down. That is not the norm. That is the extreme far end of performance.

I play with people who obsess about getting the maximum bonuses from IOs, and others who never touch IOs. I can't really tell from how the character plays whether the player has IOs or not. On teams it doesn't matter as much, especially if you've got a defender or controller around.

What really makes the difference is understanding what your character's strengths and weaknesses are, and what actions to take when faced with a difficult situation. That takes a good knowledge of what the mobs' capabilities are, which comes from playing the game.

You can make tanks that can easily solo x8 spawns without spending billions. However, most tanks are vulnerable to some kind of attack. Invulnerability is vulnerable to defense debuffs. So, while you may have had trouble against Cimerorans, you'll do fine against Nemesis or the Circle. If you want to make your tank robust against everything, you'll have to take certain power choices like Tough and Weave, or depend on bonuses from IO sets.

If you're having problems with a particular villain group, look in the combat log and see what attacks are causing you damage. Then enter the power name in the chat window in brackets and say that in local. The power name should be bolded when displayed. Click that and you can see the details of the power in a dialog window. That'll tell you why the power hurt you so much, and give you ideas about what you can do to counter it in the future.

I use HOs in powers that I want to invest only two or three slots in. You've got 95%+ accuracy in a lot of attacks in powers with five or six slots. That's probably overkill. For my powers with five or six slots I use a fair number of IO sets that provide acc bonuses, while aiming for around 60% base accuracy. With 60% accuracy your to-hit chance is capped against defense of 40% in PvE.

In my Dark defender I've got a 41% global accuracy bonus, and a 28.8% global recharge bonus. The most expensive set I've got is one Positron's Blast and a Steadfast: -KB.

Since HOs are very expensive you could sell a few of the HOs you're using that are giving you that overkill accuracy (for example, Endoplasm or Nucleolus), and make a few hundred million. That won't be enough to get you a lot of Luck of the Gambler: +Recharge IOs, but it'll get you enough for an extremely powerful build. Also, it doesn't take all that long to generate millions of influence with a level 50. Playing for a few hours on a good team will net you ten million directly, and give you millions more in recipe and salvage drops.

When reading the forums you'll see many builds that are decked out with three or four LotG: +recharge, or purples, or PvP sets. These are way out there on the extreme range of performance. You can make a fabulous Dark defender that will be hugely successful on teams (and even solo!) using uncommon and rare sets (rare sets for Fear and Stun can be had for pennies on the market), for much less than what you can sell one of your Nucleolus Exposures for.

Most purples have the same few bonuses: recharge, recovery, accuracy, a couple more. It's a pretty limited set.

Many people use IO set bonuses to get things that their characters can't normally get. For example, soft-capping ranged defense, or S/L defense. Only one purple recipe offers any defense bonus. So if you're soft-capping your Invulnerability tanker's defense, or your Storm Defender's ranged defense, purples don't help.

You can get slightly lesser versions of the purple bonuses in many rare and uncommon sets. Rare bonuses are typically 65% to 75% of the purple bonus values. So, yeah, Ragnarok gives a higher recharge bonus. But is that tiny 3.5% overall increase in global recharge worth the 100 to 1000-fold price differential over Positron's Blast worth it? To make a real difference in recharge you have to slot several purple sets or LotGs.

The last thing about purples is that the bonuses work at any level. If you don't exemp, or you have IOs that are lower than the level you're exemped to, that feature won't matter to you.

I have several purple sets, but only one is expensive (the PBAoE melee set, Armageddon). The rest are sleep, immobilize, stun, etc. The tanker I have Armageddon on has dual builds. And honestly, the performance difference between the two builds is insignificant. One purple set doesn't make that much difference, and getting lots of purple sets take more Sitzfleisch than I have.

I'd suggest getting Mids and looking harder at the Set Bonus Finder window to find alternatives to purples.

Even more surprising: I got "Mind-burn" for my Fire/Psi dominator on Virtue yesterday.

But that points out a problem. I would wager that "Syfyr" was not your first choice for the spelling. In my case, "Mindburn" was already taken, and someone will probably take "Mind.Burn" and "Mind - Burn" at some point, then "M1ndburn", "Mindburn-", "Mindburn.", etc.

In terms of originality and uniqueness, all these names are essentially the same. They have been manually disambiguated by us at creation time by forcing us to pick undesirable spellings. Over the long haul it would be preferable to have the system automatically disambiguate characters with essentially the same name, and allow us to have the desired spelling instead of some hack.

The problem we want to avoid is one character impersonating another one. Right now it's possible to impersonate someone by choosing a name that's very similar. Unless you look at someone's global, or question them closely, they could pass for someone else. (The ubiquitous right-clicking you can do to avoid typing character names actually makes the system less secure. Imagine someone impersonating one of your SG friends telling you that they accidentally quit the SG and needed to be reinvited and promoted. Depending on how well you knew them you may or may not catch on.)

So, while the concatenation of the global in CO is kind of ugly, it's actually a more secure naming scheme (because someone trying to impersonate someone else would have to fool you with both the character name and the global).

Having played numerous tankers and numerous defenders, I can tell you from personal experience that the defender's inherent is totally useless when solo. Gauntlet is always useful, even when solo, because it automatically aggroes mobs and makes them return to you when you use things like Burn and other Fears. Vigilance is also essentially useless if you have Stamina or are playing on a competent team, or if you are mezzed.

Tankers are already extremely durable. I've made tankers that can easily solo x8 team sizes, and these tankers aren't decked out with LotG or Numinas or purples, or anything crazy like that. They do use IO sets extensively, but mostly ones that you can pick up immediately or within a few days on the market. With IOs there are many ways now to increase Tanker durability that also allow you to customize your character to your liking.

I also think your proposed solution falls short. Critical resistance to an incoming attack not useful in the same way that a critical hit on an attack is. A critical hit essentially multiplies each attack's damage by 5-15% over time.

Critical resistance would not be something that you could count on, so you have to build the tank to the same specs you would without the critical resistance. If it is a "small" chance, that implies something like 5% or 10%. A "large" percentage of the damage might be 50%. That means that on the average damage would be reduced by 2.5% or 5%. You can easily get this much extra resistance that you can count on for every attack by selecting the right IOs.

However, most players who are interested in making tankers more durable don't want more resistance, they want more defense. What many would really love to have is resistance to defense debuffs on tankers that don't already have that.

Tanker primaries are already calibrated to give tankers the amount of defense and resistance that the devs consider to be proper. If they deem tankers to be too squishy, then a far simpler solution would be to simply increase the damage resistance and defense numbers of the tankers who are falling behind. They've already done this, tweaking Invulnerability at least a couple of times to deal with shortcomings pointed out by sets such as Willpower.

I am able to solo Dark Miasma and Storm defenders at level 50 on +0/x8 with little difficulty. It's not the fastest, but you're pretty safe (with Dark Miasma having the edge in safety due to Fearsome Stare, Tar Patch and Darkest Night).

Putting Disruption Field on the wisp works, but as you noted it's not very robust. It doesn't attack, so it's not very good at positioning itself in the optimal location.

When Going Rogue comes out I assume that every defender will have the option of getting a pet by going to the dark side and taking a Patron Power Pool. Not sure what the effects of then switching back to being a hero will be. Will heroes be able to respec into both Epics and Patrons after having been to both sides?

Problematic powers like Fortitude would be powered down somewhat when used on yourself.

The sure-fire way to get all the necessary AVs is to do the Tina McIntyre and Maria Jenkins arcs through Ouroboros. If you've reached fifty and have no idea which one you're missing, this will do it. As soon as you get the badge you can blow off the rest of the arc (but you'll miss out on the merits!).

Also: you can use the /playernote XXX command with XXX being any text. I use it to track how many of each type of recipe I've crafted when going for the crafting badges. So, you could create notes like /playernote "Rodion's AVs" or /playernote "Rodion's Crafting"

Agreed.

I think a better idea than having a pet would be the ability to use yourself as a pet. That is, defenders should be able to use their buff-other powers on themselves.

For example, an empath could use Fortitude and Adrenalin Boost on himself, or a Sonic could use Disruption Field on himself, or a bubbler could use Deflection Shield on himself.

Since many of the defender sets are primarily debuffing, something would have to be done for them. When using a debuff power, the defender could receive the opposite buff of the debuff they've just used.

So, for example, a Traps defender with an Acid Mortar out there would get a Defense and Damage Resistance boost for a short time. A Stormie with Hurricane up would get a minor To-Hit buff and resistance to KB/Repel. Disruption Arrow would give damage resistance and Glue Arrow would give Slow resistance.

This makes sense thematically, since defenders are experts in these attacks and would know best how to counter them.

About defenders taking attacks: the only way you get anything in this game is by defeating enemies. Any character that can't defeat enemies is crippled. I can solo any defender I've created against EBs (admittedly, several inspirations are required for some of them). I can solo several of my defenders running 0/x8 missions.

Among defenders, empaths are at the greatest disadvantage because they have no debuffs to multiply their own damage and no mitigation with their primary. That led me to taking Psychic Blast for my empath's secondary and Psychic Mastery for her epic, making her sort of a controller to help mitigate damage. Telekinetic Blast, Scramble Thoughts Subdue, Psychic Scream, Will Domination, Dominate and Mass Hypnosis all slow down, hold, stun, immobilize or otherwise take the mobs out of commission. A defender using those powers while buffing and healing the team is much more useful than some "pure empath" who stands around uselessly spamming area heals while waiting for Fortitude and Adrenalin Boost to recharge. And good teams don't really need to be healed all that much, so you might as well make yourself useful.

Making it more obvious that the mob is caged is Good Thing. A bind that tells the team what's happening would be good too. Warning the team when the caged mob is about to come out is good too -- the icon starts blinking when 10 seconds are left, I think.

As long as you don't overdo it and do it appropriately, only bozos will complain.

What server are you on and what time do you play? If you're on a low-pop server at a weird time teaming is nigh impossible. If you're on a high-pop server at a weird time you have to work at it. Redside is much less popular and it sounds like that's where you're playing, so that's yet another strike.

Probably your best bet is to start a new hero on Virtue or Freedom if you're not already there. I get invites on those servers redside at totally dead times.

I have a dark/dark scrapper and have a Steadfast: -KB in Obsidian Shield and a Karma: -KB in Cloak of Darkness. The cloak is off a good deal of the time and I still get full benefit of the KB IOs.

8 KB pro is good for most things in the game, though Fake Nemeses, Malta robots and Rikti Pylons will knock you around some.

It's probably based on the way the database engine orders result sets when multiple records match the selection criteria. It may not be random, but might be based on something in the database, like the database ID of the record. That's usually sequentially incremented so later ones get assigned higher values. But with a system that deals with so many transactions it may not be that simple. Different databases may implement this differently, so without knowing what the underlying engine is it's hard to say for sure.

The key point is that there's no guaranteed ordering mechanism besides the price. If you want to have precedence when posting items for sale, you have to list for a lower price.

I like this uncertainty because it provides a subtle pressure to reduce prices. It can cause prices to creep downward when the peak price has been hit in much the same way they creep upward as demand increases.

I've got two KB IOs on my Fire/Ice tanker and rarely get KBed (8 points of KB pro). I have three (two Steadfast and one Karma) for 12 points of KB pro on my Fire/Fire tanker, which previously had Acrobatics before the nerf. For the same number of slots and one less power choice I now get 3 more points of KB pro.

Generally, one KB pro IO is enough, but you'll still occasionally get knocked around by things like the Nemesis Staff and the Rikti Pylons.

The Pylons have the Swarm Missile power, which has a 40% chance to do 10.39 KB. You'll need three KB IOs to counter that.

Your build has three AoEs already (Fireball, Psychic Scream and Psychic Shockwave), so you'll be able to drop all the minions in a spawn pretty easily. But they're three different kinds. The PBAoE will be the problem -- after you hit them with Fireball and Psychic Scream you'll have to run into the group and let loose with Shockwave to finish them off. It would be easier and safer if your AoEs were more compatible.

Rain of Fire causes the mobs to scatter, making it problematic for many builds. I have it on my Fire/Dark corruptor and it works fairly well there because of Tar Patch. I also have it on a Fire/EM blaster, and it generally works well in combination with Fireball and Fire Breath -- the three are more or less compatible. I skipped the nuke on my corruptor because the end crash would drop Darkest Night, which is a very important component of my defenses.

Part of your mitigation is in toggles as well (Tough, Weave, Temp Invuln), which will drop when you use the nuke. Assuming that you'll only use the nuke when there are just LTs and minions (or if you're on a team), you should be fine. I took the nuke on my Fire/EM blaster because it's all about burning everything ASAP, and she doesn't expect anything to survive so the toggle drop doesn't matter.

Most of your AoE choice is personal preference. If you haven't used these kinds of powers before I'd suggest you try out all the powers by copying your character to test before you invest heavily in IOs and respecing there, so you get a feel for how they play.

What kind of character are you fighting the PPs with? If you time things right you can prevent them from using MoG/Unstoppable/whatever by hitting them with stacked stuns/holds or knockback when they're down to like 30% of their hits, and then hit them with your big attacks. If you've downgraded them to LTs you can usually whittle them down to that same number and then mez them or let them have it with your biggest attack, which is usually enough to take them down in one shot for blasters and scrappers and most tankers.

Admittedly stacking mezzes can be tough on the boss PPs for some ATs and powersets. But even so, only 1 out of 10 PPs manage to get off MoG on me.

I agree that having two Ring Mistresses or Master Illusionists in a spawn is the pits. I did a Carnie mission today on 0/x8 with my 41 Energy/Energy Brute and had to resort to a lot of pulling, so it was kind of slow. But I like getting two bosses with other villain groups, so the two-boss spawns should stay. Finer control over what's generated would be welcome, but it's no big deal to change to 0/x1, or 0/x3 or downgrading to LTs before missions that have problematic villain groups.

Actually, if you're satisfied with SOs you can start slotting IOs in the 30s and you'll get better performance than SOs, and you'll never need to replace them. It's also cheaper in the long run because you won't have to buy any replacements at 35, 40, 45 and 50.

If you don't care about set bonuses you can just "frankenslot" (slot IOs from any set to maximize bonuses), and make characters that have high recharge, high damage, low end use and high accuracy. There are many common recipes that are in low demand, and can be had for next to nothing, but will give you far superior performance compared to the same SO build. Five slots of uncommon IOs can be worth seven or eight slots of SOs.

A few hours of PvE play on a level 50 will give you enough influence to buy and craft all the recipes you'd need to frankenslot a character, as long as you don't try to buy all the recipes and salvage in one sitting. Have a little patience, do it over a few sessions and you'll find it not so difficult.

I just ran several Cimeroran missions solo at +0/x8 on my Fire/Dark corruptor. They fell down on me from above with no warning (no pet summoned) and killed me instantly the moment I entered the mission. I then proceeded to make mincemeat of them through several more missions, without ever seriously being in danger.

Prior to that I ran the Rescue Ghost Widow mission (forgot from whom), which is packed with Longbow. It includes an AV ambush (scaled to EB in my case), with several waves of Longbow ambushes. Somehow I survived, chewing up five break frees and completely without Ghost Widow's help -- she was just standing around with some Longbow jawing about the weather.

Yes, Cimerorans are tough. But they're far from invincible and they're not overpowered: my Fire/Fire tank can wade into multiple spawns of them, as can my SS/Electrical Brute. (But that same fire tank has serious problems with Carnies.) Having weaknesses and strengths versus different enemy types is intentional and not unbalanced. It is only one of the incentives the devs have put in place to encourage teaming.

The only near-universal protection you can get is to hit debuff. That's one reason why Willpower seems so tough -- the -to hit aura is a significant mitigator. But put some ranged energy/fire attacks coupled with some -def and WP starts to wither.

I was surprised to find out that my lowly Fire/Dark corruptor is one of my toughest characters against so many different kinds of mobs. Carnies, Council, Arachnos, Cimerorans, Rikti are all so much cannon fodder, mired in flaming muck.

Level 14 isn't really high enough to get a sense of what the character is like. The majority of level 14 characters are nothing like what they're like at level 50, or even level 35.

My first character was a tanker, but I gave up on it at level 14 because it was kind of squishy, it was an end hog and it didn't do much damage. I tried scrappers too and had the same experience, so I avoided them for the longest time. I've since played many tankers, scrappers and brutes, and while I don't like them as much as ranged characters, they're fine for me now.

Tankers and scrappers are a pain in the neck to play until you get Stamina, SOs and enough slots to flesh out your attacks and defenses. Many Tankers don't really mature until the 30s. It's the same with other characters. In particular, low-level controllers don't have pets and area holds or the mid- to high-level secondary powers that can make them real killers. Defenders don't get enough attack powers or slots to do much damage till later.

My goal was to play all ATs so that I could understand how best to team with them. Knowing how all the powersets works is very useful, because you learn the synergies between them. For example, some tankers have stuns or holds as part of their attacks, and when you use one of those attacks in tandem with another player's similar attack, you can hold bosses in one. If you're teamed with a /Dark scrapper, who often have a stun AoE toggle, you can use that to stun a boss in essentially one shot if you've got a stun too.

These days it's not all that hard to get a character to level 20 or 30, without PLing. You can get to level 10 in a couple of hours. Once you're there, hold off playing that character for several days to build up Patrol XP. You can level with a couple of good missions when you have patrol xp.

You don't say why these other characters don't do anything for you, but since you like scrappers and tankers, I'd guess that you don't like being held or being squishy, or you don't like playing too carefully and would prefer just to run in and fight. You also don't say whether you primarily solo or team. If we knew your preferences on some of these things it would help.

It takes a different mindset to play a squishy, but there are certain powersets that can let you play a lot like a scrapper or tanker solo. For example, Dark Miasma and Rad have to-hit debuffs that make the mobs miss you. A */Rad controller with pets can be pretty scrappy. A Dark Miasma Corruptor does a ton of damage and is extremely robust, especially once you get the pet. A Storm defender with Hurricane can solo x8 mobs pretty easily.

I can sympathize somewhat with your concept concerns. A lot of the powersets just seem kind of goofy or ugly. The power customization goes a long way toward correcting those issues. But if you're completely hung up on concept and are content to just replay the exact same character down to the name, I don't think there's anything anyone can suggest, except to move to another server that has the name free.

I know where you're coming from, I've been there. You have to adjust your mindset. You can get anything you want by not wanting things you can't get.

Sounds stupid, right? Well, I have lots of characters and all of them have IOs. I have four or five characters with a single purple set each (mostly low-demand Stun or similar sets). Out of dozens of characters I have not one Luck of the Gambler: +Recharge or full Numina sets. I don't want those things, so I don't have a problem.

I do, however, have a lot of characters that are fun to play. Many of these characters can solo +0/x8 missions (including some defenders). I don't make single dimensional characters that can totally decimate one particular type of mobs on one particular map. I make characters that are tough, can solo and play on teams, and do all the things I want to do.

I try to be as self-sufficient as possible, and find it fun to build characters as cheaply as possible. I don't gimp characters by picking useless powers that serve as mules for expensive procs, or just to get an extra 3.13% ranged defense (however, I'm one of the seemingly few people who consider Stuns and Sleeps to be useful). If I need lots of recharge, I'll get it by taking Hasten and finding recharge bonuses in uncommon and rare IO sets. I don't even consider trying to get LotG: recharges.

If the price of rare salvage is outrageous, I'll run missions in AE for tickets and use them to get the salvage. If I need a bunch of uncommon recipes for making a second build, I'll run a lot of AE and use the tickets on Bronze rolls. That'll get me a bunch of recipes that I need, some that I can sell for tens of millions on the market, and a lot of junk that I'll just vendor.

What you do need is patience. You can get most rare or uncommon items you want on the market within your budget -- if you wait long enough. You may have to take an IO at a lower level than you really want, or make some other compromise. But ED often makes such things irrelevant.

As others have mentioned, prices are high because some players are impatient and wealthy. It's my guess that a lot of the people who are driving the prices sky-high are farmers who have lots of money and are making special-purpose, single-dimensional farming characters that are optimized to do one thing very well. They need the specific IOs they're going after to make their whole gig fly. Those of us who just want characters that are tough, responsive, pack a good wallop, and play well on teams can build characters 100 times cheaper.

Like any high-performance item, getting the last 1% is the hardest part. Unless you're willing to spend the kind of time the min-maxers are to get that last 1%, you probably won't notice the difference in everyday play.

But plenty of bus passenger shelters!