Scrapulous

Hey, CF,

I like this guide a lot. It would've saved me some grief as a novice MM, and I'll try the system on the next MM I level up.

I do have one thought, which may fall more into Advanced Doctrine, but you asked for feedback, so you're gettin' it ;-)

You make a compelling point about force concentration early in the guide, but it seems to me that you haven't mentioned times when you want to have all of your pets focused on a single mob to the exclusion of others. In my play, those times boil down to the following cases:

1) It's worth the increased risk to take out a high threat target. Sappers, Longbow lieutenants (the ones with the aoe -resist power, whatever they're called), certain DE emanators, and Cimeroran surgeons who are healing a Cyclops who has gone Unstoppable come to mind as examples of this type.

2) Leaving bodyguard mode is low-risk. I'm lucky enough to be able to team regularly with a group of people who are skilled both at playing and at creating effective builds. In these cases, there is usually not much danger in forsaking bodyguard mode entirely, whether because I'm at the defense softcap because of a buff or two, or because aggro is being tightly managed, or what have you. Most of my high level (35+) play is like this. Yes, I'm spoiled. In such cases, there's not a lot of downside to focusing your entire offensive capability on whatever your target of the moment is.

Does this mean it's a bad idea to stick with the Primary/Secondary grouping? No, no. If you had to choose a single playstyle for your entire MM career, the CF doctrine is excellent.

There's also a subset of the second case I mention above: when your team is steamrolling so effectively that the pets are not particularly significant. A real steamroller team doesn't really need the pets much, so in times like that I just leave them in bodyguard mode, keeping them in reserve for targets of opportunity that have escaped the notice of the more efficient killers, and concentrate on applying buffs and debuffs.

Then, of course, there are the times when you don't want to have pets at all (80% of most speed SFs, for example).


But those are all exceptional cases while leveling a MM, which is why I think it's probably more advanced than what you want to tell a newcomer to the AT up front. They'll probably cotton to all of it themselves after a couple dozen levels of being in teams of various skill

Scrap

Oh, also, I'm happy to help farm EoEs. I'd be happy to help get bio nukes, but I have nearly zero experience doing it, so I'd probably need somebody to hold my hand through the process. Just let me know in-game if anybody wants help with either of these things.

Scrap

Hey, Tam, I'm in for the villain raid.

Here's what I have to offer on Freedom:

50 necro/dark MM
50 mercs/traps MM
50 fortunata/widow
50 ss/fire brute


Also, you asked in-game about binds to command tier 3 pets. Here are the individual binds:

/petcom_pow Lich goto
/petcom_pow Commando goto
/petcom_pow Oni goto
/petcom_pow "Assault Bot" goto
/petcom_pow "Call Bruiser" goto

Although I haven't tested it, based on my experience with binds it seems likely that a single bind would work for any MM, as follows:

/petcom_pow Lich goto$$petcom_pow Commando goto$$petcom_pow Oni goto$$petcom_pow "Assault Bot" goto$$petcom_pow "Call Bruiser" goto

I'll check it out next time I log into an MM.

Scrap

I'm a big fan of cones in general. My crab works a lot like your brute: two cones to start things off, then grenades once they're all clustered around me. The thing is, the crab can drop an AoE immob on the mobs and then back out for more cone action. Can your brute?

I go for Mu on my AoE brutes, because it has two ranged targeted AoEs. When I've got mobs clustered around me, I don't want to have to switch from melee to range and back and forth to get the most out of my AoEs: I want to be able to lay down a lot of AoE hurt in melee range, over and over. Ranged targeted AoE gives me that. Cones wouldn't.

If you consistently fight things that drop after arctic, bile and FS, then you're probably good with Leviathan. I really do enjoy puking all over mobs.

Scrap

Wow, I'm surprised this guide is still around, never mind that people are still reading it.

Some background: I wrote this guide when Invention Origin sets had first been released to the training room, back when Issue 9 was still in beta. At the time I wrote it there was considerable griping about the IO sets. The most common complaint that I saw at the time was that IOs were inferior to HOs. A lot of veterans complained bitterly that their HO-packed builds didn't stand to benefit at all from IOs, and that IOs didn't actually represent an increase in power from what was available in Issue 8.

I felt differently, and to combat that prevailing opinion, I wrote a few small guides about how you could slot certain types of powers: Health, Combat Jumping, AoE holds and Melee Damage. The idea was to demonstrate that considerable benefits were available through slotting IOs, not just in enhancement value, but also in set bonuses. The response to those was positive, but many people still complained that the set bonuses were too small to be meaningful.

I wrote this guide in order to prove otherwise. I like to think that it helped the undecided parts of our community grasp the potential of set bonuses, even if just a little bit.

By today's standards, the builds I illustrated in this guide are archaic. They don't take into account the new IO set types (endurance modification, knockback, etc), nor the new Purple or PvP sets. I wouldn't build for regeneration on a resist+heal based set like Fiery Aura - my feeling is that regeneration pairs best with defense. But I also wasn't trying to build the most effective tanker, I was trying to illustrate that building for set bonuses can have meaningful, even transformative effects on a build; in this case, letting a tanker duplicate many of the powers in the Regeneration power set without diminishing its effectiveness. These days that point is taken for granted, and so this guide is useful mostly as an example of how to think about building for set bonuses or for an insight into how things were when Issue 9 was in beta or had just come out.

These are the approaches I would take today with a fire/fire tanker:
a) build for positional defense. This is hard, and I've only been able to get melee up to around 36% and ranged and AoE to 26% without really cutting into the powers I like on my build.
b) build for typed defense. This is easier, and _Deth_'s build above is a good place to start. I'd tweak it some, but a good discussion of his build is taking place here: http://boards.cityofheroes.com/showthread.php?t=142936
c) build for recharge. This can get expensive, since this is a popular build option across all ATs and the biggest set bonuses can be the priciest. But builds that rely on click heals and AoEs, like Fire/Fire does, can benefit from a lot of global recharge, so it's worth pursuing.

Thanks for reading the guide, and thanks for all of your comments.

Scrap

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If you want more AoE dmg, go Mu mastery - ball lightning is on a 16s recharge.


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Mu Mastery is fantastic if you want to do more AoE damage. Ball Lightning, however, has a 32s recharge, not 16. Electrifying Fences is 20s.

Scrap

I did a KHTF with a Warshade last night. Folks kept calling him sushi and seafood and so on, and he said:

"My favorite movie is Alien. It was hilarious when the little kid burst out of the stomach of that monster."

I agree with almost everything Tonality has said. I'd add one point, though:

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Acrobatics: Is it good to replace this with Temperature Protection and put a KB Prot IO in there?

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Very much so. This will help you cap your fire resistance. There are fire maps out there that you will feel insanely powerful on. It's nice to feel that way every once in a while.


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What's more, Temperature Protection gives you resistance to -recharge effects. -recharge is a crippling debuff for a set that relies so heavily on a giant heal recharging regularly. Even alone, but especially stacked with the Winter's Gift unique, this can make a big difference in your survivability.

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Dark/Rad does also offer a reason to pick up Dark Pit as you can stack the stun on top of choking cloud. Just figured I would throw that out as many people often skip it.


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Dark Pit and Choking Cloud don't stack. Dark Pit is a disorient. Choking Cloud is a hold. There is no stacking there.

Scrap

I just logged in. Freespecs were granted today. I guess we can consider the "7 days notice" theory dead at this point.

I just got into Freedom. Respecs were granted today.

Ugh, I logged on today to use up the freespecs I had banked, and learn that the 21st date was moved to the 17th? *sigh*

So after promising that we'd always get plenty of notice before being given freespecs, and then seeing that promise broken, and then being promised another one with plenty of notice as compensation, they suddenly move that freespec ahead? This is getting silly.

The conclusion I draw from this is that I should move from my standard, conservative "try to keep a freespec on hand at all times" approach (which insulates me from nerfs) to a "use your freespecs as soon as you need them" approach (which insulates me from losing out on unpredictable freespec grants).

It's like capped vacation time. Many companies cap how much vacation time their employees can accrue. HR tends to be very good about warning people months in advance that they're at or above the cap and need to use their vacation time by year-end or they lose it. Many folks use that vacation time just before year-end to avoid losing it. If HR made the cutoff date earlier with little warning, there would be an understandable uproar.

It's not good to screw with people's expectations.

Disclaimer: Every super group and villain group for which I'm the architect consists only of me and my characters.


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Base Repricing
1) How will the repricing of bases affect you personally?


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It will enable me to do more with less. I can now envision getting a teleporter to every zone, whereas before the smallest plot size wouldn't allow that without also foreclosing vital storage options.

It will enable me to build more functional bases on servers that I don't play as much. This will be very nice.

Since rent is no longer tied to plots, I will be able to consider upgrading to something larger than the smallest hidden plot.

I will be making regularly scheduled trips to Port Oakes and Atlas Park to pay rent, as if I'm reporting to the principal's office or seeing my parole officer.


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2) Will you dismantle your base to gain the additional prestige from the repricing?


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Yes. I'll upgrade to a larger plot so that I have room to move things around, and so that I can use the old room as a model while I build its cheaper i13 replacement. I'll move storage containers into the i13 rooms before deleting the i12 rooms. I will probably not replace the storage containers, since some of them don't get any cheaper, and the ones that do I'd rather keep packed with 2,500 pieces of salvage until I'm ready to remove it.


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3) How long would this process take you if you were to engage in this practice?


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Maybe an hour for the first base, and 20 minutes or so for each base after that. My bases are not decorated. I have 7 bases across 4 servers, so I estimate a total of 3 hours or so. My estimate is on the low side mainly because I don't decorate my bases - I have better things to do with the prestige, although that may change once I rebuild and see how much prestige I've recovered.


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4) What are the positive and negative concerns regarding repricing?


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Positive: The repricing changes put more base power in the hands of small SGs and one-person SGs. This is a good thing. The base builder is a good tool, and making it more accessible to more players is only good for the game. This gets us a step closer to giving people their own "apartments."

Positive: It puts less pressure on large SGs to earn prestige, which means less pressure for them to milk lowbies for their high prestige earning potential, and less incentive for them to recruit lowbies solely in order to exploit them for prestige.


Negative: Some folks will have to pay rent who never had to before.

The changes to rent are a double-edged sword for me. On one hand, I can now contemplate moving to a larger plot size, because if I'm going to be paying rent anyway I might as well give myself some more elbow room. On the other hand, suddenly I'm going to be paying rent, when I never have before. I thought giving small SGs the opportunity to live a rent-free existence was one of the better base system revisions ever made, and I am not happy that I have to choose between having storage/workbenches/empowerment stations and paying rent. I realize that the rent price is small, but I'd rather not have to trundle over to City Hall/Marconeville every so often. If the price is small enough for me not to have to worry about paying it, why do I have to schlep all the way over to zones I never go to otherwise in order to pay it? I'd pay double rent if I had the option to do it from my base.




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5) How will this feature affect you long term and short term?


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Long term: I will achieve what I consider to be full base functionality on multiple servers sooner.

Short term: I'll be spending ~3 hours retooling my bases.


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Base Salvage Exchange to Invention Salvage
1) What is the negative effect on your base for this feature implementation?


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The pain of having to convert a lot of base salvage to invention salvage. There must be a better way than doing it one at a time.


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2) What is the positive effect on your base for this feature implementation?


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To my base, it's the fact that I will be able to convert my worthless and superabundant base salvage into valuable invention salvage. I haven't counted how much salvage I have across my bases, but if the RNG is good to me when converting, I should make some good money from this.

I will also find it much easier to get the salvage I need when crafting base components. There is a brisk trade in invention salvage on the market, and it's clear what pieces I need. Neither of those things was true for the base salvage market.


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3) How long will it take you to adjust to learning this new system?


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Oh, not long. I already have a decent handle on it from futzing around on Test and reading the boards. An hour will get me 90% of the way there, and dithering and making mistakes here and there for another week (elapsed time) will get me the rest of the way.


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4) What side effects to this system do you currently see from transitioning the old to new system?


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More pressure on the market to provide salvage. There will probably be an initial surge in demand from people who have inf saved up and want to convert everything in their bases over immediately.

Allowing people to add invention salvage to bases will probably drop market supply across all salvage categories for a while as the bins fill. There will probably be a subsequent amortized drop as rules are gradually established about only putting rare salvage in bins.

Base salvage will become a collectible item after the pragmatists have converted all of theirs. Some wealthy SGs will keep pre-13 salvage racks stuffed with 2,500 pieces of base salvage as a sort of collecter's case.

It will become much harder to hoard event salvage.


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5) What security concerns do you have regarding this change?


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This change doesn't alter my security concerns at all. Group-based permissions are inadequate when you have more than twenty permission attributes but only five groups (SG ranks). The i13 changes don't make this any less pressing a concern. The tools we have are inadequate to the job at hand. This is one of the two major reasons I remain alone in my private Supergroups.

Storage permissions need to be split into different groups. It'd be ideal if they could be made per person and per container, but that's a lot of complexity; another approach would be allowing SG leaders to create more than 5 SG ranks. An acceptable compromise would be creating permissions per SG rank per container type (i.e. Rank4 can use enhancement bins but not salvage bins).

What's more, permission to put things into storage bins needs to be decoupled from permission to remove things from storage bins.

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And your only basis for changing it is that it benefits "the Market" and by proxy, the marketeers and flippers. Why their profits should come on the basis of hurting everyone else is beyond me.


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No, that's my basis for feeling that salvage storage shouldn't go much higher than 30 per bin.

My support for eliminating base salvage is based on my perception that it is a large, needlessly complex, and confusing system that is used by a minority of players and overlaps conceptually with the better-designed invention salvage system. Having two completely independent salvage systems doesn't make sense conceptually or design-wise, and it adds an additional burden of understanding to new players, who are, after all, important to all of us.

Scrap

I think we'll have to agree to disagree. Your feeling seems to be that base building shouldn't be changed at all. You also seem to think that any changes that do get made should be to make it as similar as possible to the current live implementation, regardless of what other consequences that might have. I differ on all these points, and that's where we'll have to leave it.

I will respond to this comment, though:

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You make a MASSIVE choice of either a) profiting HIGHLY on Invention salvage or b) build a teleporter.


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I just checked prices on both markets for all three arcane teleporter recipes. Here's what I came up with:

<font class="small">Code:[/color]<hr /><pre>
Recipe 1:

Salvage WW BM
------- -- --
Clockwork Winder 3,000 250
Temporal Sands 1,000 1,000
Simple Chemical 500 1,000
Psionic Manifestation 8,000 10,000

TOTAL 12,500 12,250

Recipe 2:

Salvage WW BM
------- -- --
Alchemical Silver 1,000 30,000
Symbol 2,100 1,000
Inert Gas 1,050 1,500
Black Blood of the Earth 10,000 50,000

TOTAL 14,150 82,500

Recipe 3:

Salvage WW BM
------- -- --
Ruby 1,000 350
Destiny 2,000 1,000
Silver 300 500
Hamidon Goo 600,000 1,400,000

TOTAL 603,300 1,401,850
</pre><hr />

To get the prices I took the highest value from the last five entries for each piece of salvage, so these prices are conservative.

For one of the recipes there is certainly a choice between high profit and a teleporter. For the other two recipes that is emphatically not the case.

Rather than try to convince the devs to leave things as they are on live, you might have more success convincing them to make the recipe arrays for other base items more like the teleporter recipes: two recipes that use only common and uncommon salvage, and one at most that uses a single piece of rare salvage.

Scrap

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Decreasing supply, however (which is the effect of allowing hoarding), is bad, because while it increases prices, it can also result in shortages, which makes people hoard more.


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And did you miss the part about how there will be no increase in Invention Salvage drops to replace the Base Salvage drops?

Please see this post and the ones following it.

One supply is being removed... not replaced.... removed.
*poof*
gone
void

This IS a decrease in supply.

By your own statement, this is bad.

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I tend to agree. It sounds like you think I am 100% comfortable with every aspect of the changes, which is not the case. My point is just that allowing invention storage tables to hold 999 or 2500 items would be disastrous for the market, especially red side.

I do think that drop rates should probably be adjusted, but the devs like to get several months of live data on drop rates before making adjustments, as they did in the case of costume drops.

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You're wrong on both counts:

1. If they remove the "Convert Invention Salvage into Base Salvage (Actually Base components) from the Invention Tables - I'm certain the price of nearly all common &amp; some uncommon salvage will drop significantly.

So many people buy up common salvage at less than vendor prices, to do this with - (buy the hundreds in many cases), that just removing this option/behavior would severely reduce the demand for salvage.


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It's an interesting point, and one I hadn't considered.


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2. The only thing complicated about the Base Salvage was matching it up, IF you didn't know to select "filter out the recipes you lack the materials for" in the workbench or empowerment station - while building base components from the large variety of base salvage that exists.


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This has not been so in my experience, which is as a newcomer to bases relative to you, who have the recipes memorized (which is an astounding feat, by the way). It is trivially easy on live to burn some rare and relatively precious piece of base salvage crafting a component that could have been built using any number of other recipes that consumed only common components. Since base salvage has no in-game rarity indicator, it's up to the individual to research recipes using the boards or some other out-of-game resource in order to avoid this trap. What's more, players might not even know that base salvage has differing drop rates, and so assume that any one recipe is as good as any of the other recipes.


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You have no idea how much common salvage gets deleted, vendor'ed (Because people refuse to waste market slots to sell it- unless they list it for 1 inf to sell asap = just to get progress on their Market Sales Badges), or bought up in stacks of 10 for 11 to 50 Inf &amp; then converted into Base Components, that are resold or used for Empowerments.

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To be fair, neither of us knows. Your guess is as good as mine.

I do wonder how much of the trading volume on the market is represented by people who convert invention salvage to base salvage. Like you said, I have no idea, but I'd be surprised if it was more than 10% of the trading volume of the market. It sounds like you think it's much more than that. I think this is probably because of our relative experiences - you're a heavy base user, obviously, and it sounds like you have a lucrative conversion business going. I use my bases as convenience vendors for quick travel to various zones and easy storage of enhancements. I don't use empowerment stations. So each of us is inclined to view the market and bases through the lens of our own experiences.

All that said, I imagine that fewer players use empowerment buffs than don't, and I am certain that fewer players have edited a base than haven't. I suspect that your experience is the minority one. This doesn't mean that I think it should be sacrificed, but it does mean that you might be overestimating the impact of your play style upon the market, for example. I could certainly be wrong and totally underestimating the same thing, of course. Ultimately we're not likely to know in any absolute way.

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You define a "healthy market" as one in which the Marketeers benefit. Forget everyone else.


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No, I define a "healthy market" as one with a high trading volume. That means that there is availability and that people turn to the market when they need something, instead of turning to hoarding and private trades.


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Edit - Not to mention, this also vastly increases the dilemma a person faces. With Base Salvage, they could easily donate to the SG with no skin off their backs. With Invention Salvage, they have to make the decision to either support the SG or themselves. All for zero apparent gain.


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This is no more true than the choice between running in supergroup mode or not. Do I want to profit individually, or sacrifice some of my profit for the good of the SG? Most SGs that I've been involved with have no problem getting people to run in SG mode, so I'm less concerned about this than you are.

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Because there is an opportunity cost in filling up that 50 with salvage, but none in filling up the rack.


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The stuff for filling up the rack? Comes from the same place that the 50 fills up.


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If you have a character full of salvage, he can't earn more. That's the opportunity cost I'm talking about. That's not true of having a rack full of salvage.

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30 pieces is EXTREMELY trivial,


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What would you like to see instead?

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espeically when you factor in that that INCLUDES Event salvage and Candy canes.


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I agree that making event salvage share storage with invention salvage is a problem.

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I'm having a hard time convincing myself that you really believe this. Surely you can see that there's more benefit in storage racks than just trading with yourself. A full salvage rack doesn't prevent further drops; a full salvage inventory does. Salvage racks can be packed in into even the smallest base; personal salvage inventory can only be increased in small increments. Scattering salvage across multiple characters requires inconvenient multiple logins and good bookkeeping; storing salvage in racks allows immediate inventory assessment (without having to ask everybody in your SG "do you have a Chronal Skip?") and instant access to what's available.

Salvage racks spare you the opportunity cost of storing salvage on your characters and they afford you much greater convenience than keeping things across an array of alts and friends.


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No, there's not really a benefit for the cost.


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I think we're going to have to agree to disagree on this point. I see a cost associated with cluttering a character's inventory and market slots with hoarded salvage. Especially market slots, which are one of the most precious commodities in the game. It's clear that you don't, and that you don't think having to relog or track inventory are significant burdens, either. I do, and I think other people do, too.

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Multiple logins and bookkeeping are trivial to pay, as compared to the piddly amount of storage the new system offers.


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Multiple logins and bookkeeping as costs should be compared to the cost of the storage bins: 15k prestige to place and 1k per rent period to keep. I'm not thrilled about the rent, but the placement cost seems pretty cheap to me.


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There's no point to using personal salvage, which is what Invention is, for group item, which Base Salvage was for.


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I don't see any point to the arbitrary distinction between group salvage and personal salvage. The only justification I've seen is the suggestion you made that it produces a tension between personal gain and the welfare of the SG. As I said, in every case I've observed people willing to put the SG ahead of their own benefit. If I were a game designer for NCNC, I'd suggest that if you share a SG with people who don't, maybe you should consider kicking the uncooperative people or finding a SG that better matches your (very common, in my experience) ideas of collective gain.

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I'll actually turn your point around: just because you're used to it and invested in it doesn't make it a good system. From a design perspective there's no good reason to maintain two completely independent salvage systems, so they might as well migrate to the one that is better designed, has fewer redundancies, and is more familiar to the largest number of players.


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Better designed?

Have you seen the recipe requirements? How is using an Arcane Rare (that's already stupidly overpriced on the market) for a Tier 1 object even close to being designed well?


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By "better designed" I was referring to invention salvage over base salvage. I don't have enough experience with the new base recipes to comment. This is one of the failings of the test environment, in my opinion: there is a perpetual shortage on the market, which makes it hard to test new sets and new recipes. This is exactly the situation that could occur on live if there's too much salvage storage available, especially if it's sharable and creates a viable and cheaper alternative to using the market.