Rodion

Avoiding AoEs outside in TPN is seriously not a problem. You don't really need AoEs in most outside phases, and once you get inside it's no holds barred.

Every trial has a gimmick that you have to know in order to make it work. That's the point of these trials: to make us learn to do something together, coordinating large groups of players, and make strategic and tactical decisions. Some of the gimmicks are ridiculously idiotic (like leading Anti-Matter around by the nose to use his RFID, something which he never figures out), but the point is to require us to do something other than stand around pressing the exact same sequence of buttons while the NPCs flail ineffectually on tankers.

The trials are also heavily scripted, requiring players to perform very specific actions in a specific order. My guess is the devs view this as a plus, making the game seem more like a movie or a comic in which players actually play specific roles instead of hitting things.

The trials intentionally make us play differently, and make certain powers and sets suddenly useful that were once considered utterly worthless. For example, area immobilizes and slows are typically denigrated, but are excellent to have in the BAF. Snipes are generally considered worthless, but can be very useful in the Underground Trial.

Every trial also has something that a single person can do to screw it up for everyone. One moronic brute or tanker can taunt Marauder outside the Lambda complex. One moronic brute or tanker can get the whole league sequestered in the BAF. One moronic blaster can attack Anti-Matter and increase the pulse damage. But is this materially different from the scrappers and blasters who could cause team wipes by drawing aggro from multiple spawns back in the day? The ability to kick can help, but if the league organizer is responsible for this nonsense the only recourse you may have is to quit, wasting whatever time you've devoted.

It's always been possible for one or two players to cause a TF to fail simply by bailing at a critical moment, depriving the team of enough fire power/debuffing/buffing/aggro management to defeat the AV in the final conflict. And the ability to kick is useless in this case.

I will agree that getting ganked by mere civilians in TPN is completely unwarranted. There's no logically necessary story reason for this; why are the telepaths outside wasting their time whipping up civilians when they could be inside utterly destroying us?

And I will also agree that the trials are often not very fun, typically when you've got obnoxious twits in the league. But that isn't materially any different from when you have obnoxious twits on TFs. Which, I will also admit, is why I avoided trials for many years...

Your Combat tab should say when it's going off. I think it's displayed in green when you have "Healing Received" displayed, but I'm not 100% positive of that.

I have noticed the same thing, and it bugs me. On Freedom I queued several times, and within a few minutes the dialog appears with four to six players, two of whom decline immediately, which usually means the trial fails to start at all.

Which is totally bogus. DfB is trivial to do with eight. It's trivial to do with four, regardless of AT. I even completed it with one other guy after two of our four-person league bailed on us during the Lost phase.

Defense didn't win, a combination of defense and resistance won -- whatever gets through the defense is mitigated by your resistance. This is the advantage that resistance-based power sets have over defense-based ones. Defense always has a 5% chance of getting hammered, but a soft-capped resistance-based build has 5% chance of getting hammered for a lot less (at least for a little while -- see below).

You can't soft-cap all defense for DM/DA scrappers, you have to pick some kind of defense and go with that. A popular one is Smash/Lethal, because most attacks include a smash/lethal component. These days there's a good argument for soft-capping Energy instead (because it's so common in the iTrials).

You don't really have to sacrifice much to soft-cap DM/DA scrappers for Smash/Lethal. I used four Kinetic Combat sets, plus Tough/Weave, two Obliterations, a Multi-Strike in Death Shroud, and three sets of Reactive Armors. The only slightly weird thing was five-slot Siphon Insight in Touch of Fear to get the 3.75% S/L bonus.

The main problem with putting defense on /DA characters is that you don't have any inherent defense debuff resistance (there is, however, a Destiny power for that). Defense debuffs are pretty common and even when you're soft-capped your defense can melt pretty fast. That's why hitting the soft-cap in the first place is considered so important.

I made this build before iTrials came out and might do it differently now, but that character's on Triumph and I rarely play there. But it works fine for regular content; I haven't run it on any trials yet.

The other thing you can do is get Cardiac Alpha to solve your endurance problems, and the Barrier Destiny power, which completely eliminates your Defense/Resistance problems for several seconds every two minutes. That coupled with a S/L or Energy soft-capped build should be able to get you through anything, along with your ability to heal yourself like crazy.

Yep, you're right. I can't count the number of times my team mates have died around me while I'm chewing inspirations like candy, and when everything is finally dead and my tray is almost empty I try to give them an Awaken and their trays are full.

"Your trays are full," I'll say. "Didn't you use your inspirations?"

"No, I have a tray full of large inspirations and I'm saving them for when I really need them," says one.

"I think inspirations are a cheat," says another.

"I didn't think of it," says a third.

Inspirations are an important part of the game that allow you to fill the holes in your build thirty seconds at a time. They can let you do things you just can't do otherwise, like soloing EBs with lower-level defenders and controllers.

That's why I think the super and team inspirations are kind of useless. Since they're too precious to use casually, there will probably never be a time when the average player will actually use them. I know mine are still all sitting in my email box, and will probably never be used...

Are they planning on changing the way converted enhancements are traded? I just crafted a Gladiator's Armor: End/Rech and converted it to GA: Resistance (got it in one), then put it on the market.

Unless they're changing the way that works, it looks like you'll be able convert things and then sell them.

This sounds about right.

I started working towards getting T3s on a character to see how much work it really is. So far, I've done four BAFs over four or five days, unlocked the Judgement slot and got enough astrals and salvage to make a T3 Judgement power.

That means I should be able to get T3s in Interface, Judgement, Destiny and Lore in 20 or so trials. If I don't luck out and get the necessary rares, I'll have to use some Empyreans, but since they made that fix way back when, salvage hasn't been a problem for me.

The problem I have now is that no one wants to run straight Lambdas: they always want to do sLAMs that usually fail (3 out of 3 fails so far), which means I get very few threads, no astrals, no empyreans and no salvage drop at the end.

The other thing is that in Kinaki's build Time's Juncture is providing a -17.5% debuff, which is effectively increasing your defense by that amount against all affected even-con non-AV mobs.

I have a Time/Electric build similar to Kinaki's (only at level 38 so far and nowhere near the softcap defensively without Power Boosted Farsight), and can stand in the middle of melee alongside the tank without problems. I do get stunned on occasion, but a break free fixes that quickly.

Note that at Tier 3 Clarion Destiny can provide basically perma mez protection, but Clarion Radial Epiphany also provides a power boost for defense, which would seem to boost Farsight's defense numbers to insane levels if combined with Power Boost.

I've got lots of characters, and even though I'm a min-maxer chasing high defense bonuses gets tiresome after a while. Sometimes you want to play a character that's somehow different, and not always scrounging for Kinetic Combats or having to change alignment to grab Scorpion Shield. Permadom is really good enough to allow you to ignore defense and go all in for recharge.

It's not that high defense is bad, it's just that some dominator primary and secondary set combinations can be rather tedious to to get both permadom and decent defense on.

In the worst case scenario, you can always use four purples and hit the soft cap.

Samuel is minding his own business and being badgered by people who want to team with him. People who solo TFs badger other people to sacrifice their time in order to stroke their own egos.

I have no problem with a group of players who need a body or two to get an ITF going, and am glad to help them out. I also think the required minimums on many of the TFs need to be adjusted downwards. But it's still pretty selfish for one person to make up to seven other people stand around waiting so that one person can get bragging rights for soloing a TF.

Yes, I would expect something along the lines of "I want to try for UGT, but if we don't get 24 in the next 10 minutes we'll just go with a Lambda or BAF with whoever we've got so far."

And, yes, it's totally reasonable to want to know what trial you're going to spend the next 10 minutes standing around waiting for...

I also have many characters, and it doesn't take 30+ trials for each ability. You only "need" to get the Tier 3 power for any incarnate slot. T3 powers are for most purposes as good as the T4 power.

I've probably got 25 or more characters to T3 in all five slots (and most to T4 with Alpha). I play a lot, but I've never run more than three trials a night, and usually did just one or two (in part because I just got frustrated with all the crashing from the memory leaks when that was a problem).

The difference between a character with no Incarnate powers and one with five T3 powers is much greater than the difference between a character with five T3 powers and one with five T4 powers, even if you ignore the extra +2 levels that you get inside trials.

You just don't need the extra oomph a T4 power gives you in regular content, and in most trials you don't need that extra oomph if everyone else has T3 powers.

They would have to write code for this, and provide a mechanism for you to choose the option. That's a new service. It costs them money to write and test code, and inter-server transactions are always tricky things to program. Since only a small subset of the user population would likely use this new service, it's not something that would benefit all users equally. So it would make sense to charge for this service only when it's used.

It also opens up a can of worms. If you can freely (or more cheaply) transfer a slot you bought, people will wonder why you can't transfer the 12 slots you "bought" on every server when you got a VIP subscription. And then they'd wonder why you should have to pay for additional slots at all, since you're given dozens for free on the other servers. And if you can transfer an empty slot for free, why should you pay for transferring a slot that holds a character?

Historically, inter-server operations have been treated as resource-intensive transactions and have had a monetary cost associated with them.

No, I got that. The problem is the apparent inconsistency. We are "pacified" when outside the buildings by telepaths, where mere dweebs can kill us with a single rock. Yet once we enter a building the IDF can barely scratch us with RPGs and powerful energy blasts.

If the Praetorians have this awesome ability to weaken the heroes, why restrict it to the outdoors? Why not use the telepaths to protect the interiors of the buildings and prevent us from accomplishing our mission at all? If the telepaths were propping up their super-powered forces they way they're empowering the civilians, no force in the universe could stop them.

Yeah, I suppose the writers have come up with some lame excuse for why they can do it outdoors, but not indoors. Most likely the excuse is that they've only got 12 telepaths. So where do they position them? Inside where they could do the most damage and stop the primals cold? Or outside where they knock an occasional defender out of the air with a rock as they race back from the hospital?

That's just plain lousy writing and bad mission design. But considering that Keyes involved leading Anti-Matter around like bull with a ring in his nose so we could steal his RFID signal time and time and time again, without him ever catching on, I guess I'm expecting too much...

Yep, alignment merits are the way to go for Kinetic Combats.

Also remember that you can get alignment Merits directly by doing morality missions (do 10 tip missions first), and the SSAs each give 1 alignment merit the first time you do each one of them, and you can do one of them each week for another alignment merit (as long as you've done a morality mission).

Finally, Astral merits that you get from iTrials can be cashed in with Astral Christie in Ouroboros for rare recipes (16 or 32 merits).

These last two ways have the advantage of not costing 20 million inf for the conversion from reward to hero merits.

Not only that, but in certain types of flash memory reading the data from one location corrupts nearby data over time, requiring that it be rewritten regularly to avoid losing it. In addition, since the data is basically stored as puddles of electrons on devices in a chip, over time the electrons just begin to leak away, again requiring refreshing to avoid losing data. That menas a flash drive that's off for too long will begin to lose data (this is probably on the order of years, so it's not a huge issue).

The number of read/write cycles for most flash memory is on the order of hundreds of thousands. It'll be interesting to see how long these devices last compared to hard drives.

To be fair, hard drives are being pushed to the physical limits as well, and are becoming more prone to similar problems by packing so much data into ever tinier magnetic domains.

Others have already made excellent suggestions, but there is one more thing you can do at level 50: get the Clarion Destiny incarnate power. You can almost get perma-mez protection for yourself and your team with the T3 Partial Core Invocation power. The magnitude declines over time, but at its weakest it still provides (as I recall) mag 8 protection for two minutes, with a two-minute recharge.

Exactly. Limiting you to 5 tips/day means you can earn only one alignment merit every two days from tips. Now that they're selling rare IOs for real money, they have a very good reason to drag out getting alignment merits. And to the devs' credit, you aren't forced to spend real money to get those things. They're completely optional.

But people need to remember that the five/day limitation is per character. VIPs can have more than 150 characters at no extra cost. If you want, you can spend all your waking hours running tip missions to get more than 75 alignment merits each day. Not all on the same character, true. But since you can send recipes to other characters, the only real limitations of the system are changing alignment and the speed with which you can get ultra rare recipes.

VIPs also get 400 or more points per month to spend as desired. Which means your instant alignment change, when it become available, will be available at no extra charge if you choose to use your points for that.

You can't fault the company for taking advantage of people who cannot curb their own impatience and lust for power. As someone who desperately desires to become a villain, the OP must surely understand that .

Dark Miasma and Storm Summoning have AoE powers that grant your pets stealth, but not full invisibility. Using those you may be able to sneak by some mobs, but probably not all.

But assuming you're running solo, it won't take you long to take those mobs down, so if you can bypass half or two-thirds of all mobs it's still a net savings, if you don't want to monkey with the Concealment pool.

I get IOs at the same level you do, so I finally broke down and created a Fire/Fire brute and level-locked her at 31 (to get the extra three slots). I don't really care if it takes two minutes or five minutes to cap my tickets, so pretty much any fire farm will do, including ones that don't have patrols or ambushes or rezzers or a buffing ally or anything remotely exploitative. Any mission where you don't waste time looking for mobs which you can terminate at will suffices.

With a Fire/Fire brute you will always be able to create an AE mission with fire-using custom mobs, or even standard mobs. You will basically be replicating the dev-created demon-infested Infernal mission that was once a favorite for farming. Since you're not doing anything the devs hadn't already done eight years ago, which players have been using ever since without sanction, it's unlikely they will nerf this.

You need to use purple and red inspirations liberally, but you wind up defeating mobs so quickly that they're constantly restocked. I've got one level 30 Fire/Fire brute on an account that will soon lapse into Premium status that has no enhancements at all and can run these fire farms purely on Fury and inspirations at +0/x8. It can be touch and go at times, but debt is irrelevant when you're level locked.

You still wind up with lots of recipes that you simply delete, but over the course of a couple dozen runs you'll get most of what you need for an entire stable of characters, plus enough stuff to sell on the market to buy whatever else you need. If you create your own base you can also earn enough prestige to buy enhancement tables to hoard all your loot. Combine that with running tips and SSA arcs and you'll have enough alignment merits to get whatever you want without feeling that you're at the mercy of ebil marketeers.

There's nothing wrong with playing the market, but at some point someone has to bite the bullet and provide a supply. Without supply there is nothing to buy no matter how much influence you have.