Rodion

Also, if you create a character with Standard/Hard power selections you get 87.5% XP. This allows you to avoid excessive powers in the attack set (like Build Up), while making them tougher (for your typical melee-based mob).

It takes a little longer to defeat them, but they can't one-shot you.

It's often very useful to make your custom group with a few of your own customs and some standard mobs that are recolored and renamed.

I've redone my arcs to eliminate custom power selections. That means for most of mobs I have either hard/hard (if the primary doesn't have something truly obnoxious like Build Up at Hard) for 100% xp, or standard/hard for 87.5% xp. I also use a fair number of standard mobs as fillers, sometimes recolored to fill in gaps in the hierarchy of a custom group and provide more variety.

The resulting mobs, while definitely tougher than most standard mobs, are easy for well-built level 50 tankers to solo at 8x/+0, and mid-level scrappers and brutes to solo at 4x/+0 or +1.

Which means most teams including a brute, tanker, or scrapper should be able to run these missions without any serious difficulties.

And of course, you don't have to use custom mobs in AE missions. If it's really all about story, any set of actors should be able to fit the bill. The changes for recoloring and renaming standard mobs are actually very cool and can really help customize your missions while maintaining all the advantages that standard mobs have. People don't give the devs enough credit for that (and a whole lot of other stuff).

The thing is, XP and influence are not the only thing that matters. Playing AE missions for tickets is still very lucrative. In many ways, tickets are far superior rewards than random drops. Characters level so quickly now that it's silly to natter on about 15% or 25% less XP. Getting to 50 in the shortest time isn't the most important thing: having fun, playing the character you want, getting the things you want for it are just as important if not more so.

With tickets the average player can get rare salvage for a small investment in time without having to worry about the vagaries of the market and random drops. For that same investment in time that same player can get 7-10 uncommon/rare recipes, many of which can be sold for tens of millions on the market, or used on your own character.

Also, Patrol XP isn't used when you run AE missions, so if you run a mix of AE and standard fare your leveling rate is still going to be fast.

Further changes in custom mob xp are coming down the pipe as well, so the situation is likely to improve in future releases.

If you want to retain the use of bonuses, you should use lower-level IOs. That's how it works and the devs are unlikely to change this.

I generally use level 30-37 IO sets so that I could get all the bonuses when exemped to level 34 (that was an arbitrary level I just picked). The new exemping rules may be even kinder with this; I haven't looked into the details. I also don't want to put off getting IOs beyond the 30s, so I start getting them then and never replace them.

Especially for procs, there's no reason you should use level 50s (other than availability). People pay a premium for lower level procs and -KB IOs so that they can use them at lower levels.

Depending on your choices, the extra bonuses may or may not be worth the extra cost and wait. For example, if you slot 6 level 35 Thunderstrike IOs you get Acc 59%, Dam 98%, End Red 59%, Rech 59%. Six level 50 Thunderstrikes gets you 69%, 101%, 69% and 69%.

Since the Thunderstrike set gives a 7% acc bonus, slotting a few of those and other similar sets (Positron's Blast, Crushing Blow, etc.) the increased accuracy from using a level 50 set is going to be small compared to the other sources of acc bonuses. On my blasters I usually have 30-50% acc bonus from sets alone. The extra 10% from the 50 over the 35 IO is small potatoes. It's worth my while to have those bonuses when I'm running in the 30s, and to have those bonuses when I'm actually leveling up the character in the 30s.

I monitor last hit chance on all my characters and pretty much have it pegged at 95% even when one or two Nemesis LTs have fired off their Vengeance.

ED means that the difference in damage between the 35s and the 50s is almost negligible. For blasters in particular, your attack chain and ability to maintain a high Defiance damage buff will be much larger than the difference between the 35s and 50s. For Brutes the difference is similarly negligible because of Fury. There are also a lot of sets that give 2-3% damage buffs, often with just two IOs in a set.

The recharge and end reduction bonuses are of greater concern. To a certain extent your IO set choices will help you there as well. I tend to use sets that have +recharge (Crushing Impact, Positron's Blast, etc.). These bonuses are only 5% and 6.25%, so they're not as large as the 7% and 9% acc bonuses these sets give. I usually have a 20-30% recharge bonus due to IO sets. Finally, many IO sets give +Recovery and +Endurance bonuses; I go for those as well (Positron's Blast, Stupefy, etc.). Those are in the 2-3% range, but it's definitely useful -- a few of those means a couple of extra attacks.

You can achieve this with uncommons and rares, purples aren't needed.

Of course, if you are trying to optimize everything out to the max, you'll be spending billions on your character anyway. Might as well spring for a second set of IOs for a second build to be used when exemped.

To paraphrase Rodney Dangerfield: "I don't get no respec."

While it's true you can get by with SOs, it's really beside the point. Just the varied distribution of bonuses that IO sets provide make characters using them much more fun to play. The combination of acc, damage, recharge, end red combined into a typical 5 or 6 slot set is almost equivalent to 7 or 8 slots of SOs. Plus they never wear out.

However -- and here's the real point -- you can get sets like that for dirt cheap. Sets like Focused Smite, Multi-Strike, Thunderstrike, Detonation, etc., can be purchased at level 30 or so, and will make your character hum like a top. Sets like Crushing Impact can also be relatively cheap and provide 50% of the benefit that purples do, for a tiny fraction of the price.

You don't need any LotG: +Recharge to get a character that plays really well solo and on teams. If you need more Recharge, get Hasten. It's better than five LotG: +Recharge.

Unless you are trying to solo AVs your character doesn't need to be tricked out with 5 billion inf worth of purples and rares. You can have a very fun character by "Frankenslotting" (combining IOs from different sets to max out recharge, end reduction, etc., on a power), which can be extremely cheap.

I recommend outfitting characters with uncommon IO sets you can find for cheap starting about level 30. Identify some rares that you like and put in reasonable bids for them after you've got uncommons slotted in those powers. Over time (days and weeks) you'll pick up those rares at reasonable prices.

But that presumes you're playing your character over weeks and months. If you want it all to happen in a few days, you'll have to pay through the nose.

When we focus our attention on the things we want rather than what we can get, we make ourselves feel deprived and anxious. Just roll with the game, play to have fun, and you'll get purple drops when you least expect it.

There's no doubt that the market is more lucrative than actually playing the game. All I'm saying is that there's a limit to the price that salvage will rise to. Many players won't buy it on the market when it hits that ceiling because there is an alternate reliable source. This inherent downward pressure on demand results in an effective cap on rare salvage prices.

Many players can run x8 teams now and generate 540 tickets in much, much less than 30 minutes. Because of that, rare salvage is unlikely to rise much above 1-2 million again. If it does, farming tickets in AE becomes viable way to generate influence, which will motivate people to do it, which will reduce prices until a stable equilibrium is reached again.

Of course, all that economic theory depends on rational and informed markets. And the last few years in the real world have demonstrated how silly that notion is .

I've been playing since Sept. 2004, and have received at least a dozen purple drops since they were introduced. And I don't play my 50s all that often -- so I've all got my purple drops on maybe 10 characters played from level 47-50. That's probably 30 or 40 levels worth of playing 50s.

I've got three purple sets on three different characters (the sleep and immobilize sets, which were ridiculously cheap when I bought them, and the third is the PBAoE, which I got around I15 for 70 to 100 million apiece).

The thing is, the bonuses from the purples are pretty much the same. Mostly they give Regen, Recovery, Accuracy and Recharge. Regen isn't that useful unless you have a ton of it. Recovery is always good, but Stamina and other sets give more than enough for most characters. Accuracy is obtainable from many uncommon and rare sets.

Recharge is the biggie, of course. But if you pick your sets carefully, you can get pretty decent recharge with rares and uncommons, plus Hasten.

But if you're intending to make your character really uber, purples aren't the way to go unless recharge is the only thing you care about. For example, if you want to softcap your defense on your scrapper or brute, you will need a lot of other sets that give defense bonuses. Purples don't.

If you have a character with five or six purple sets you might see some major improvements in recharge and regen. But if you just have one set, it doesn't make much difference over what you get with a similar rare. Take a look at Malaise's Illusions and compare it to Coercive Persuasion. Definitely better, but worth hundreds and thousands of times as much influence? No.

The devs will never increase the drop rate so that everyone can have 5-6 purple sets. And increasing it enough so that everyone could get one set would probably fail in its intended goal. It would put purples in that much more demand because they would be more obtainable, and the price would probably increase as more people decided they wanted them.

To paraphrase Spock in Amok Time, "After a time, you may find that having a purple is not so pleasing a thing as wanting one. It is not logical, but it is often true."

Rare salvage is cheap now because demand is down due to AE allowing you to buy exactly what you want for 540 tickets. I can do one quick mission with my brute set for x4 team size and get that with minimal fuss and muss.

If the price of rares goes up knowledgeable players will spend a few minutes in AE to get what they need.

With enhancement storage available in bases, we can already transfer the most expensive items in the game between characters on the same account. It's slightly clumsy and time consuming, and does require the assistance of another account to invite your alts to the same supergroup. You can also transfer salvage and inspirations through base storage as well.

You can't transfer influence directly this way, but you can craft an IO with one character and then get it with another character and sell it on the market. If the crafting character has common recipes memorized you're actually getting other players to finance your alts.

The only downside is that if you belong to a big supergroup you may not have control over who has access to your items, and you may not want to leave expensive IOs sitting in the base for long periods.

You can in fact get 87.5% experience for your mobs by choosing Standard for Primary power set and Hard for Secondary. I do this a lot for melee power sets that have Build Up at the Hard level. I've also gone through a lot of my arcs and chosen power sets that are less problematic, so many of the mobs are at Hard/Hard but they're not crazy tough.

The devs hear you and have said that they will be changing the way experience is given. But they had to release it as is to get I16 out in a reasonable time frame. It's disappointing that it's taking so long, but it's a very complex system with many conflicting demands.

Sadly, the announcements of "Lowbies 4M/run" are showing up in PI on Freedom again. As I feared, the PLing is just moving back to where it was before AE came out.

On the plus side, it seems that the price of common salvage is already going down.

I have the special sprint vet powers (Power Surge, etc.), and sometimes slot the Celerity IO in one of those instead of Sprint. That way I can separate being stealthed from sprinting, and have a cool looking effect to further suggest stealth.

To be more specific, the listing fee is 5% of the price you post at, paid when you post. When your sale is final, you pay a fee of 10% of the sale price minus the original listing fee, paid when you collect your inf from the market.

Yeah, they can be pretty bad from what I hear. A lot of AE farms just have a single high-level character run through the mission (often level 52 bosses or some such) while a bunch of lowbie padders sit at the door. If it's an autoSK level 46 mission those lowbies would be slaughtered instantly if they actually try to do anything.

This is not at all new -- people have been doing this sort of thing for years with the Demon farms and the Family farms. The main difference is that AE allows it to be done with a single mentor instead of requiring a bridge for each SK. And you don't have to find your way to PI to get in on the farm, so it's much more "in your face" these days.

It's not really a bug. They intentionally turned off path checking to allow people to build things by stacking various pieces. They already had several items that could allow stacking (so you could put phones on desks); they just generalized things so more items could be stacked. I don't recall the exact details now, but I believe they said that bases that don't obey the pathing rules will not be able to do raids. And no one really cared.

About better tools: I'm sure they know how clumsy it is to build things out of pieces in this way. But it's a matter of priorities. Do they work on Going Rogue or better base building tools? More people will play Going Rogue than will ever build complex bases that need those tools, probably by orders of magnitude.

I think for a minimum requirement the devs should give us wall segments that have the same textures as the existing room textures and can be resized height- and length-wise, and similar floor segments that you can directly set the height and horizontal dimensions on.

Those two things would go 80% of the way to making cool bases easier, and -- most importantly -- would speed up base building by a factor of 10.

Oh, and another thing -- real wall and floor segments would really help reduce graphics lag in bases. I have a friend who's made our base absolutely fantastic, but my framerate drops to 10 fps in some parts of it because of all the objects and special effects going on. Real wall and floor objects would drastically reduce the number of objects required to make complex bases (one object instead of 200), and allow graphics optimizations that could reduce lag in complex bases.

One possibility would be to turn on the option to change your size for Stone Armor characters.

Just as the ability to use costume change emotes that came with the Magic booster pack propagated to a set of emotes that everyone could use, this would be an obvious case where a specific subset of players would be granted this special option in a limited circumstance.

Personally, I have no problem with not becoming huge. It's one of the main reasons I've never seriously played Stone Armor.

In a game where control over character appearance is perhaps the most important feature, it's always seemed wrong for you to suddenly have absolutely no control over your appearance when you use a specific power.

Slip of the fingers. But I think that's one of the main reasons Dark Miasma isn't available as a controller secondary. It's practically a controller set, with most of the powers having some controller aspect to them (hold, fear, slow, pet, stun, intangible).

With a combination like your dark/ice, you have more single target holds than any controller, and can lock down multiple bosses in a spawn faster than any controller can.

It's one reason why Earth/Storm is such a nasty combination. Nothing moves and everything is debuffed out the wazoo. If only those Stone Cages didn't obscure so much...

My guess is that they arranged a number of RMT stings to identify what accounts were selling the EVE equivalent of influence, then analyzed who gave those accounts the original stuff, following the whole unholy chain back to the suppliers.

Once you identify the accounts in the supply and distribution system you have a good idea of which accounts to ban. Monitor their activity for a time and conduct several more sting operations to be sure and you'll have a very good idea of who to ban.

If you're a regular player farmer, you'll keep all your influence, give it to friends, or spend it on the market. You'll never have given anything to an account that has sold stuff for real money. So the odds of regular players getting banned accidentally are vanishingly small.

The people who pay the RMTers to PL their characters are involved in that distribution system. Their accounts will be among those to be banned if a similar sting operation is conducted in CoX.

I just can't understand why people willingly give their account passwords and credit card numbers to thieves. Why not just play the game?

You're complaining because people are politely refusing to team with you? For valid reasons? There's no incentive in the world that will change this. When you gotta go, you gotta go.

Perhaps your playing schedule doesn't line up with the other players on your server. If you're trying to recruit a team after 10PM US Eastern time, you're going to get a lot of people getting ready to log.

You need to find some people who are on the same schedule as you are and join their supergroup. Actually, you just need to find one other person you like to play with and matches your schedule, and you have the nucleus of a team.

You don't need to have a full 8-man team to have fun, or to get XP. I've been on so many pickup teams where the leader wastes 20 minutes to get a full team, only to have it fall apart after one mission.

If you just play with who you've got your XP/minute will probably be better than standing around wasting time trying to fill that eighth slot.