Scientist

You may want to take a look at the changes for Grav planned for I22, I think they are in the Dominator forum, there will be some Dev Digest comments in there. One of them is that Propel's animation is getting cut down to 2 seconds, IIRC, and the projectile getting sped up, with no loss of damage. There are several other MAJOR changes, including a complete rework of Dimension Shift, so check those before settling on a final build.

As it turns out, adding *more* data to a limited data set never makes it worse and almost always makes it better data. I don't offhand know of any exceptions.

You may not like the data, the data may be influenced by outside factors such as a person flipping that recipe you want so that it never goes below 80,000,000 Inf, but the more complete data may keep you from paying 120,000,000 Inf.

And Neuronia, the devs have put pretty much everything in a "store" now. You can buy various IO recipes and salvage with several different kinds of merits, from Alignment to Reward to Empyrean to AE. You may feel that its too much work to get IO sets together that way, but evidently the devs feel that that is "about the right amount of work". Anything that short circuits it, like using the market, is a bonus.

To the OP, I've seen one other MMO's auction house, and CoH's is vastly better. It only showed the prices people were asking on an individual item basis, no transaction history of any kind, and as another poster mentioned, that is much less useful information because if the item is still showing, unless you got really lucky timing-wise, it *must* be overpriced. Maybe a little, maybe a lot, but you have no way of knowing. And if you list something that doesn't happen to be for sale right now, you are completely guessing. Meanwhile, if there are a few for sale and you list at the price thats showing, you may be overpricing your stuff as well, and paying auction fees for nothing because it won't move. That game DID force me to keep records of stuff I was buying and selling.

Here, I can be reasonably sure that if I see a bunch of sales for X with bids up (another useful feature, though I realize that can also be manipulated) and I list at half that, I'll probably get at least 2/3 X. Meanwhile, if I list for 1, I'll probably get a reasonable price. It may be what the flipper is paying, not selling for, but they are taking the time to figure that out. My choice if I want to do the same, or just get back to playing the game. Not a bad deal IMHO.

Sorry, you are correct, I used the wrong term, higher rank foes have a higher accuracy, not a higher base tohit. The net "chance to hit you" numbers I mentioned because of this factor are correct though, I believe.

Where I have seen a team like that fail even with insps on the STF (which I've done a lot more then the RSF) is that if the dps/buff/debuff part of the team isn't up to snuff, the insps don't keep the "tank", be it tank or brute or whatever, alive for the many minutes it takes for the team to start dropping AVs before the insps run out. I was on a STF, for example, long before Incarnates, where the only -resist debuff was a /storm controller. OK, that would normally work, if they were competent and had a good build, but they never used Freezing Rain unless specially requested in chat a couple of times for each individual casting, and I'm guessing they had no recharge, because it was like once every few minutes. The slower the AV killing on that, the more often Ghost Widow gets to hit with her haxxor hold, and the more Scirrocco AoEs all the support, and the more the AVs get to heal up, and the longer it goes. We were well over two hours on the last mission.

Similarly I was on a early Khan where the only buff/debuff was one kin, who (1) kept standing next to the AV and dying, despite repeated requests not to stand there, and (2) only used Fulcrum Shift or Siphon Power on special request. Kins have reasons to stand in melee, but not just to blast. I was so wishing I had my rad defender along on either of those instead of the Warshade, who is great at spawn destroying but not the best in a lone AV fight. The team gave up, it was so slow to take Khan down.

Thats one reason I prefer playing support, and work a lot on good IO builds for them, on a good team you can beat anything on SOs, but the worse the team gets the more load one or two characters may have to carry and then the build and powers start making a big difference. And I've been on a number of PUGs where nobody on the team really seems to know why they are sometimes winning and other times losing.

I heard Ninja/TA MM is tough, since the Ninjas sometimes flee from Oil Slick, and TA doesn't offer much to keep them alive.

Although I actually like Rebirth - Heal for the Destiny power on my Fire tank, with the build I have its tough enough to withstand anything I throw at it, where I have problems is more likely to be some of the high end TFs/Trials where AVs have huge AoEs that take out squishies on the team. If most of the support drops, best case is everything probably takes longer while they recover, retoggle, and return, and worst case you may be facing an AV who is hitting a lot harder because they are no longer debuffed. The large Rebirth AoE sometimes prevents a partial team/league wipe, and Barrier is harder to use for that since you don't usually know when the AV may fire something off.

Where I find it particularly useful is not for a healer, who with the possible exception of some Emp/Fires don't pull that much aggro, as for debuffers, who often do. My Fire/Rad controller friend manages to faceplant fairly regularly even with me running a Fire/Fire tank, just because the radius of some of her powers (the AoE Immob in particular) is larger then my biggest PbAoE. On a fairly dispersed spawn, it at least gives me a chance to try to target any bosses lurking on the outskirts and drag them over before they beat him up. I can also reel in debuff anchors, who have a strong tendency to flee these days with the latest AI tweaks.

I was just on an ITF last night that ran with "who was available", and the only tanking available was 2 scrapper and 2 MMs. Lots of fun, and not many deaths at all, but the Rommy fight was a bit of a pain because with no Taunt to keep him in place he went running way off to the side and died out of LOS of a Nictus so we had to beat that down later. AVs, and critters in general, tend to run if they can't hit you, a common situation on high level teams these days. Similarly, in the Keyes trial Taunt is really handy to keep Positron where you want him without damaging him. In a Apex trial you can keep the AVs attention while she is in a Death Patch and you can't melee her. In a STF you can keep Lord Recluse's attention even when he is unhittable. The positioning and facing you can do with Taunt is just very handy, in my opinion, and particularly so in the situations where a team is likely to want to recruit a tank for their survivability and aggro control anyway.

Nice to know the Mito knockback is Mag 10, I had been trying to find out if the Mag 11 protection I have on my Fire tank would be enough to tank them but ran into that AT specific modifier problem that got fixed, thanks!

Higher rank foes (i.e. bosses, AVs, etc.) have higher base tohit chances. You'd need to see the whole tohit formula and play with some numbers to see how that works, but basically even with every player on the server providing tohit debuffs on the AV and defense buffs to the tank, a level 53 AV will ALWAYS have a 9.75% chance to hit you. A level 54, such as on the STF, has a 10.5% chance (assuming you aren't level shifted, if so its 9.1% and 9.75% respectively).

For more information on tohit and defense, see Arcanaville's guide; she knows more about it then anyone, including most (possibly all) of the devs, and it was due to her input that the basic formula used by the game was changed to the form it takes now. It used to be even worse for SR. . .

And in fact you can stack Celerity + Shadow Cloak + Superspeed, though one of the few places this is actually helpful is against turrets, such as the ones you fight in Bloody Bay for a Shivan. SS + Stealth, Shadow Cloak + SS, etc. aren't enough but you can stand right next to them with all three going.

Unfortunately the much more common (at high levels) Rikti Drones ignore all stealth, so no help there.

Correct; Defensive/Stay works fine for Bodyguard, which is handy for things like pulling AVs to a killing spot, keeping them at range, keeping them in melee, etc. Note that pets in Defensive/Stay will ignore the "stay" part and run out to shoot anything that shoots at you, though.

One other thing which can be annoying or handy, depending on how you use it, after you issue a "defend" command, there is a several second pause before the pets will start shooting stuff. They don't wait like this if they are already in Defend mode and you run in to a spawn, its just a pause after you issue the command. This prevents superfast toggling between Attack and Defend modes.

Say there is a preformed league of 22 players in the RWZ and they enter the BAF queue as an "open league". In 1 minute they enter, along with one guy who was wandering around in Talos for the last 45 minutes in queue.

Average time of wait = (22 players x1 minute + 1 player x 45 minutes)/23 players = 2.91 minutes.

So yes, that one guy in Talos was looking at a "3 minutes wait time" for most of an hour, as will the next person, and so on.

The only way that displayed wait would get fairly accurate for the "pickup trial joiner" is if almost EVERYONE used the LFG system to enter trials, and nobody did preformed leagues. If this game emphasized street sweeping, where you could hang out in LFG queue all day, that might happen, but otherwise it probably won't. Especially as later trials get harder, and start requiring more people on the team to do specific tasks, or have specific ATs/powersets, and so on.

I do sympathize with the OP, though, as from a written description, even with maps, it can be hard to figure out which reactor is which and who is doing which things on the team when different people are scattered around doing different things. For a sentence like "click the glowie and use the temp on the computer" to make sense you have to know where a glowie is and where a computer is, and what they look like. Glowies are in different places, I've never even seen the ones inside the bunkers. And rare is the league leader who takes much time to explain it, since there is a fair amount of time pressure, which means you have little subgroups of players who may be winging it as well. Or they may know exactly what they are doing, but you have no way of knowing if you don't know what to do yourself.

Duration is 30 seconds, so a total of 40 seconds of floored regen. With recharge slotting and a bit of global recharge, its not hard to have it perma, which allows soloing of GMs. A fair number of powersets can solo AVs, not many can solo GMs because of the regeneration issue, which is considerably higher on a GM then a (normal) AV. Traps can. Not that thats a major part of the game, but it explains the reputation the OP asked about.

Otherwise, Traps has a lot of the other tools you need for AV soloing; a good single target Immob to keep them from running or closing to melee, mezz protection, fairly easy soft capping, stackable -resist, an alpha soaker/damage debuff with Seekers, and with enough patience a decent Alpha strike with Trip Mine. I was soloing AVs with a Bots/Traps MM on SOs while leveling, there are not many powersets in the game which can do that before IOs, even among Masterminds.

Just as a note, if this period was during the merger of the blue and redside markets, all transactions got cancelled and refunded, etc. when that happened.