TheDeepBlue

I've already read all of that. Again, I see nothing saying that the Battalion is currently using the Kheldians

Again, where does it say this? I know the clue in Twilight Son's task force says that he sold the Kheldians out in the future to escape, and may have sold out the ones in the present to escape twice, but I'm not sure if there's anything that shows that the Battalion has actually begun harvesting Kheldians in the present day.

Granted, we're talking about events in deep space, here, so anything could have happened by now, but I don't see anything showing what's happened one way or the other.

He was killed? Where does it say that? The souvenir for the Apex Task force says that Battle Maiden may have attacked Paragon in defiance of his orders, but it doesn't say that Marchand died anywhere.

I believe they use the Kheldians as fuel in the future. They're not doing that yet.

Personally, I'm of the opinion that if your general idea that the other Titans exist in the CoH universe, then they might actually be a part of whatever organization Prometheus claims to be from. It's possible that Prometheus may have decided that the Olympain Incarnates were sucking up too much of the collective human potential from the Well and tried to redistribute some to the rest of humanity, prompting Zeus to try and turn him concave.

I'm not sure where the part about the hawk eating Prometheus' liver every day would come in.

The bar is to deter leeching. If you even try to help the league, you can probably clear the bar.

I just want to add that I don't sell the stacks of salvage in my Market Inventory until I get enough in my Salvage Inventory again.

It's kinda important, so I won't really run out of what I might need.

This is what I do at LVL 50:

All rare and uncommon salvage gets put into my Vault until the Vault is full. At that point, if I get uncommons that I don't have a bunch of or any rare, I make room for them by removing the uncommons I have plenty of and hock them.

Any stack of common salvage I have that amounts 5 or greater in my Salvage Inventory gets stored in my Market Inventory. I add to those stacks in my Market Inventory as my Salvage Inventory starts getting full. When a stack hits the maximum amount, 10 salvage, I hock it. I repeat.

This allows me to not have to bother with keeping track of what salvage I've got, but at the same time I usually have what I need stored somewhere for that character...if I haven't done a lot of crafting. If it turns out I'm missing something I need, I get it on the market, but that typically only happens for uncommon and rare salvage.

No, just leave them as recipes and store them in your character's recipe inventory until you're ready to craft the set for a power.

I think they've been using 3DS Max the whole time. At least, they were when I last saw them mention what program they were using.

The Raptor Pack looks blocky and awful.

That's fine, I don't actually know how it works. I just wanted to give you LJ's thoughts on the matter.

I generally don't slot powers out with set IOs until I've got all the recipes I need for that power, since just partially slotting the power out may alter its qualities to the point where it's functionally worse than before. I just keep the recipes as recipes as well, since otherwise I'd clutter up my enhancement tray with stuff I'm not ready to use.

That actually sounds like you have had the chance but haven't taken it yet. Just go look at the sets that have been discussed.

As I said before, just because it APPEARS that no one is selling that recipe does not mean that no one has sold that recipe. You absolutely must look at:

1) When the last several of those recipes sold.
2) How many bidders are trying to get those recipes.

If the recipe has sold recently and frequently, and people are bidding on it, you can be sure that the recipe is being supplied at a steady rate, but people are also snapping it up as soon as the seller puts it on the Market. Make your own bid and wait and you might be one of them if you've bid high enough.

If the recipe has sold recently and frequently, but no one is bidding on it, that should be your cue to bid.

If the recipe has sold recently but not frequently, there may be a supply issue or sellers are jacking up the price higher than the bidders are willing to pay, and the bidders are waiting for someone to try and be sneaky and set their sale at a lower price. In this case, you may want to find an alternative way to get the recipe.

'Non-famous?' Don't conflate expense and usefulness. 'Expensive' is a correlation that the player base has created for 'useful' items, but useful stuff like Red Fortune isn't always that expensive.

Sinking, huh. I know a person who has a Katana/Super Reflexes main and we were talking about this the other day.

I've got a 50 Spines/Super Reflexes, so I can vouch for what he says. Incarnate stuff is tough until you've got those level shifts, but I knew from him what I was getting into when I rolled a Super Reflexes eight years ago. All that said, UnicyclePeon's build is good too, so don't knock Super Reflexes before you've got a proper build made.

Mako's Bite is not out of reach. I'm not even sure if it's as expensive as Touch of Death.

People like them because they're relatively cheap and give a decent recharge bonus. I've got a few sets on my Mind/Psi Dom.

Technically, Uncommon and Rare recipes are always available at Merit Vendors. Very Rare recipes and PvP recipes are always available at Alignment Merit Vendors in addition to Uncommon and Rare recipes.

You just can't buy them for inf straight up...without using the Market.

Consider your options:

300-600 merits will get you at most twelve recipes (lowest is 50) from a Merit Vendor, depending on what you buy. Not enough for an entire build, and the cheapest recipes may not be the ones you want. I mean, unless you're only buying one IO set.

Alternatively, converting 300 Reward Merits can give you 6 Alignment Merits over the course of six days, for a total of 120M inf. It is certainly possible to get that much influence without being a market mastermind, because I am not a market mastermind by any means. No Uncommon or Rare recipe from an Alignment Merit vendor costs more than 2 Alignment Merits, so if you had the 300 Merits and inf on hand, you might get 3 to 6 specific recipes.

However, what does all of this mean in context? Consider the most expensive part of your build, those Touch of Death recipes. The set of 6 costs 850 Reward Merits from a Merit Vendor. Alternatively, it costs 8 Alignment Merits, which would require 400 Reward Merits and 160M inf for a straight conversion if you weren't getting the A-Merits from other sources like Morality missions or Signature Story Arc rewards. Now imagine having to get these resources twice more to get the three complete sets of Touch of Death.

I agree; the costs above look terrible, considering that U.P. says the set of 6 costs about 10M right now on the Market by comparison. That's about right on average. Direct Alignment Merit purchases are best used when the costs of conversion are less than buying the same recipe on the Market.

However, this implies that you can purchase a recipe with Alignment Merits and sell it for more on the Market than it cost you to get those Alignment Merits, if you had to convert Reward Merits and inf. If you got the Alignment Merits some other way, all you're looking at are Market comission costs and crafting expenses if you choose to go that route. Everything else will be profit.

It's always good to check and see if what you're selling is actually being bought on a consistent basis.

Consider that you can get any recipe on the market if you have the inf to bid sufficiently high enough. As your amount of inf increases, your chances of failure at making a purchase become arbitrarily small...if what you want to buy is available, of course. You may have to wait on a bid for a while, but checking what your item is selling for can show you how often it's selling. If there's a successive string of sales of your item within the past two days, odds are your item will be available on a consistent basis and it's worth waiting. You can increase your bid from there if what you want keeps selling but you're not getting it.

What I'm trying to say is, if the first sentence in that quote above is is true, and if you believe me that the second sentence is nothing to worry about as long as your inf keeps going up, then doing stuff on the market is going to be worth the time you spend on it. You just have to be willing to put the time into it.

I'd bet that if you started working on getting Alignment Merits and rolling for stuff, or even just picking up recipes that sell for bunches on the Market if you want consistent results, you could get that 150M inf people are estimating you'd need to buy recipes on the market and finish your build within the space of one week or less. I mean, compare that to how long you've actually been playing the character.

I could believe that if you were pushing diminishing returns for one aspect of a power, i.e. slotting three LVL 25 IOs for damage, defense, etc, but for just slotting one or two IOs of the same category, IOs start to become better than SOs at about LVL 30. See this chart.

Hamidon Origin Enhancements.

I usually just get my stuff by playing normally and buy whatever I need at the time from the market.

I find farming to be terribly boring.

I think 'farming Alignment missions' is not really something that can be done, since you're limited to 5 tips per 20 hours and thus 1 alignment merit every 40. That said, alignment merits are where I get most of my inf to buy recipes from, or if I feel the price on the market is too high, where I get some recipes from.

You can build however you like.

But it may not be as effective as you'd like.

All proc IOs will work regardless of their level if you can use the power they're slotted in when you RSK.

All global bonus IOs will cease functioning if your RSK level is more than 3 levels under the IO.

A good explanation is here.

'Value' is determined by a combination of rarity and market price.

Experience with the market will usually give you an idea of how expensive your build will be.

Depends on what you want or need. My Storm/Elec Defender has stuff that keeps enemies from wailing on her. I focused on Recharge with her. I don't think I'll be able to say the same for my Ice/Cold Corruptor. She's going to need her defense boosted.

You have to know your character.

There are quite a few builds available in the Archetypes forums, though not always up to date. You should download Mid's and see how it works.

You can estimate the 'work' you'll need to do by deciding how expensive your character's build may be. Filling a character out with Uncommon and Rare sets is more expensive than filling one out with Common IOs. Filling a character out with any number of Purples in addition to Uncommons and Rares is far more expensive.

Depending on how much inf you've got or still need to get, you may or may not get the build finished overnight.

Don't expect to. I've spent a long time on characters putting them together after they've hit 50. Then again, I've spent relatively short amounts of times putting them together completely, if not most of the way.

It's usually the builds where I'm trying to get defense bonuses that take shorter times. Purple sets don't have many useful defense bonuses. Not that it's necessary to get a good number of recharge bonuses from Uncommon or Rare sets...but not all of them are at 50...

I'm not a genius at building, but I can tell you some of my building methodologies if you'd like.

What is this 'little red text' you've mentioned?

I don't see it there.

You mean the Riptide/Harbinger fight?

Get a tank on your team, or someone with repel abilities.

I totally feel you, and agree 100% that Rocket Pack A is the best option possible of the three.

I've never understood how that whole 'exposition in intense melee combat' stuff works in any comic book universe.

I've noticed an emerging tendency for the writing to refer to matters not previously discussed in-game. If we're to believe that there's a story being told here through the actions of the player/character, then at some point every one of them, new or old, needs to have been given the opportunity to access the parts of the story beforehand that will serve as the foundation for later parts of the story, if those parts become pertinent. Information from the novels or even from the boards...not everyone's going to know about that stuff, and I don't think it's a good idea to leave too many people in the dark.

As a specific example, Prometheus casually mentions that, surely, by now I must know that Statesman is an Incarnate of Zeus, and Recluse is an Incarnate of Tartarus.

Well yeah. I knew that. I read it in the second novel. But I don't think my characters ever actually heard that anywhere in-game before.

Similarly, the business about the Well showed up a little quickly. For such a pertinent plot device, and to tie it so closely to our characters, I don't think it got as much allusion and reference leading up to the endgame as it should have been given. The player was never made to ask 'what does make super powers possible?' except possibly during the Origins of Power stuff (which I've already stated could have been worked on a bit more carefully.) Again, I had some idea what woke super powers back up in the world, because I read the first novel. But my characters didn't.

All of the rifles you see Vanguard foot soldiers using in RWZ are automatic railguns. I believe they're "Redding Rail Rifles" or something like that. You can't use ordinary bullets in that sort of device.

I'm sure their fighter craft and weapons platforms are doing even better.