TopDoc

Your Spider can contribute significantly more than any of the others in iTrials. If you get in a BAF with 24 people and you're all doing 200 DPS to some AV, that's nearly 5000 DPS total. But if you bring a Bane with Venom Grenade, Surveillance, and Mace Mastery: Shatter Armor for a perma 60% Resistance debuff, your entire league will be doing 8000 DPS. Granted it differs by AV, some resist the debuff more than others, YMMV. Against iTrial spawns you can still use Venom Grenade every time. By comparison, your Blaster can get a perma 14% Resistance debuff on a single target only with Surveillance. Your Brute and Scrappers can get under 10% with Melt Armor, which is AoE but not perma. If you don't take any of those powers, you'll be one of the unwashed masses who mistakenly thinks that the best thing you can bring to an iTrial is high personal DPS. Your Bane also has some decent team buffs than none of the others get. And it's melee! For regular play you can have an alt build as a Crab for fighting lower level content, big spawns, or whatever. Your Incarnate powers will work with both builds.

In second is the DB/Elec Brute. Self heal, damage toggle, 90% Energy Resist is great in iTrials, solid resist elsewhere, can soft-cap S/L Defense, and OK AoEs in DB.

Since CoH is shutting down at some point in the near future, how will that affect the Market?

Hey, someone had to start this thread.

Deacon_NA announced he'd be selling everything for 1 Inf in another thread. Other people may be doing the same. On the other hand, some people may be blowing their carefully hoarded cash to purple out their characters for their last little bit of fun. Some people have started announcing their niches. Will they give them up? Does it even matter? Will crafted recipes drain out of the market as crappers (flippers who craft recipes into Enhancements for a healthy profit) leave? Will people even bother selling stuff at the Market?

And most importantly, how can we as Marketeers profit? How can we come out ahead after the game has been shut down?

Step 1) Make a SS/Fire/Mu Brute on Freedom redside.
Step 2) Level it up to 50.
Step 3) Get some Incarnate powers.
Step 4) Farm like mad for tickets, improve build, sell stuff.
Step 5) Profit!

In detail...

Step 1) Make s SS/Fire Brute on Freedom redside. Use SS/Fire because (last I knew) that's the best ticket farmer. You can easily get 90% Fire Resistance, so you make sure you only fight mobs that do Fire damage. Start redside so you can do the Patron arc and get the Mu patron pool. You get Blazing Aura, Burn, Foot Stomp, Electrifying Fences, and Ball Lightning for AoE attacks. You get Fiery Embrace and Rage to increase your damage. Fury also adds 180% all the time. Use Freedom because that's where a lot of other farmers are, so you can ask for hints, trade PLs, maybe join a farming SG, whatever. You may want to switch to blueside. Regardless, start a solo SG for storing your stuffs.

Step 2) Level it up to 50. You can do this in AE in fire farms. Just look for very highly ranked non-Dev missions where you fight Fire based mobs on huge maps. Start at normal difficulty, and crank it up as you level. Take fire resistance powers and AoE attacks ASAP. Once you hit 90% Resistance you can run at fairly high difficulty. Make sure you read the Player Guides about inspiration combining macros, and use them. While leveling I recommend you spend your tickets on Silver level 10-15 until you hit level 40, then Bronze level 15-19 after that.

Step 3) Get some Incarnate powers. You'll want to get an Alpha to T3 so you get a +1 level shift. You probably want to get a T4 Ion Judgement power for the massive AoE it does every 2 minutes. Look in the Brute section of the forums for SS/Fire farmer builds and see what they took and why. Look at the Player Guides section for how to get Incarnate powers.

Step 4) Farm like mad for tickets, improve build, sell stuff. Reinvestment is very important. The better your build, the faster you can farm. Hopefully by this time you'll have some idea whether or not you want to stick with your plan. If you like farming and plan to do it for hours every day, then load up your farmer with purples and the best Enhancements Inf can buy. If you're sick of it, you may want to go with a lower end build. The hardest thing here is deciding how to use your tickets. Long ago, Bronze level 15-19 was the best thing to roll. I don't know now.

Step 5) Profit! Sell stuff you get, and price it to move based on your farming schedule. Most farmers just sell recipes. If you're farming a lot, you probably want to sell bunches of recipes as well. Price them to sell by the time you need the market slots. Alternatively you can craft some and sell them for more. Look for info on paragonwiki on how to increase your number of market slots, because you'll want as many as you can get. Or take it to the next level, trade PLs to get lots of other characters on your account up to level 10 or so and have them be your sales force. Farm for recipes, craft and leave in bins in your base, then have your lowbies sell them.

It's exactly as you say. It can be nice to have low level ones so you can actually use them as you level up. I have a lot of the big 3 PvP procs at level 15, so I can use them on chars as I level up. I got them by AFK PvP IO farming and converting, so I didn't need to pay billions for them. When I hit 50 and respec into a final build, I replace them with level 50 versions. And I don't PL my chars from 1 to 50 because I don't want to, though I certainly have enough Inf to do so. I like seeing how each character plays as it levels up, and adding some PvP IOs isn't going to completely change that. I like earning Accolades. TF Commander requires running 6 TFs. Atlas Medallion requires Slayer and Silver Bullet which I get mainly from the Moonfire TF. I think you earn XP from exploration badges these days, and I usually get most of them along with the history badges. I like opening my costume slots, so why not earn some XP while I'm at it at low levels? If I want to earn Hero Merits, I can do it on non-50s and earn XP in about the same time as I could on a 50 for 0 XP.

It's easier to turn a mage into a tank than it is to turn a tank into a mage.

I was asking Skifer because the name Hoffnung was familiar.

The fastest way to get converters is to run the blueside WWD#1 arc. You can do it once a week on any char level 20+ who has confirmed their alignment. You get a Hero Merit which you can convert to 10 Converters. Redside the arc is slightly longer, but you can get to The Crucible faster than getting to Fort Trident blueside. It looks like Organica has been converting Reward Merits directly to Converters. You can get twice as many by converting them to Hero Merits first, though it costs an extra 20M Inf.

There's lowball, and then there's wasting your time.

People come and go all the time, but even if they stop playing their bids are still active. There was a post shortly after Converters came out about a returning player who found all of his "lowball" bids of 1B for Glad Armor: +3% Def IOs were filled. There are probably plenty of "lowball" bids for the recipes as well, from people who are no longer playing.

Just a follow up. Support emailed me that they generic'd my costume, but I still crashed. They asked if it was OK to log into my account to check things themselves and I said sure. Then they emailed to say that they accidentally generic'd the wrong character, specifically the one that I logged the /petition from. When they generic'd the character that was crashing, I could log her in again.

So the quick solution is to /petition to have your broken character's costume generic'd. The better solution is to have NCSoft put some checks in place so that this doesn't happen. Maybe explicitly catch broken costumes in the client and report them as such, maybe establish a rule that costumes cannot be made invalid, or establish a procedure for genericing costumes during maintenance when they become invalid.

Done at 1397 on Phantom Quark.

It was a grind, but in the end we succeeded. Got about 8 people the badge I believe, and a few fillers got some good progress. The Lichen Infested War-Walker was the last one.

Rescheduled, see new thread, please reply there. Too bad I can't change titles or I would reuse this thread.

I'm looking for some fellow badgers to earn the Dreamwalker badge. This is for defeating each of Malaise's 16 nightmares at least once in the first phase of the Minds of Mayhem Incarnate trial. The easiest way to do this is to get a team of 8 dedicated people to repeat the first phase of the trial time after time. With 8 people all on the same team there is no question about who should get credit. It can take a while since the monsters you get are random. I already have 12 of the 16, but I'll do it as often as needed to help people get the badge. The only requirement is being able to do the trial, which I believe means being a VIP and an Incarnate. We'll only be running a single team of 8 each run, but as people get the badge we will probably be able to rotate new people in. I'll be in Pocket D as Phantom Quark a bit early to get things rolling, but please let me know your global here or via PM so I can contact you if needed. I'm @TopDoc.

Phantom Quark has resolved her costume malfunction.

Sunday, July 1, 9:00 PM EDT, Pocket D, Freedom

1. Phantom Quark, @TopDoc
2. Tentative: Tulpe, @DesireForFire
3. Dynexus, @Llydia
4. I Forgot My Prozac, @I Burnt The Toast
5. Bellator Corvus, @Bellator Invictum
6. Swift, @Heavensrun
7. Deadly Quill, @quillz
8. Conflicter, @Squirrell

Alts:

I've been unable to load my main badger since this update. The game client crashes as soon as I click on her name. I've tried this on 4 different computers. I've filed a support ticket and I'm hoping they can get the problem resolved. So far I'm not liking this patch.

Glad things are working for you. Unfortunately my character was still broken last night. Can you identify which of your characters is broken? Once the list comes up just click on each of them till your client hangs. I want to know the name so I can add it to my customer support ticket, so the GMs or devs can see if there is anything in common between the two.

Aha! Never mind doing what I said above. I just did it myself. I moved Phantom Quark to the top slot in Freedom. Now when I select Freedom, I get the text about "Retrieving character list" and then the game crashes. I don't see any character list at all. So I do know what I'm talking about, and we both have the same problem.

Also, I play in windowed mode. When my game crashes I get a window asking me to type in what I was doing. If you're playing in full screen mode I don't think you'll see that window, so it will look like you're hung. Try alt-tabbing to see if you get the error window.

So if you want to play with other characters on virtue, you can do what I said above. Move your first character in Virtue to a different slot and then you should be able to see your Virtue characters. But your game will crash when you select the character that used to be on top.

If you know anything unique about your top character, or more importantly have their costume saved, you might mention it here. And email me the costume if you have it to airionis@yahoo.com. I'll see if I can reproduce the costume and crash, because that's my top guess as to the problem.

I had something strange happen to me that might be related. I can log in every character I have except Phantom Quark on Freedom. I can select Freedom, and once there I can select most of my characters. But when I click on Phantom Quark, before it even displays her the game client crashes. It could be that the top character that you have on Virtue is broken in the same way Phantom Quark is. Also, I've tried logging in Phantom Quark on 3 different computers, and they all fail the exact same way.

Here's something you can try. First you need to have the game make a playerslot file. Turn on the checkbox to remember your account name, log in and go to some server other than virtue, and move some of your characters to different slots. Then exit from the game. Look for the playerslot file and open it with Wordpad or another text editor. Edit an entry to move your top virtue character to be in another slot. For example, if your top Virtue character is ZZZ, edit one of the entries in the file as follows:

"<your acct name>" "Virtue" "ZZZ" "2"

Then restart your game client and select Virtue. If you get in and see a different character on top, then I may actually know what I'm talking about. And if the game crashes when you click on the character who used to be on top, then I guess I really do know what I'm talking about. And we have the exact same problem. Personally I think there's something broken about my character, like a costume that has somehow become invalid and breaks the game when it tries to load. I've asked customer support to generic my costumes, but haven't heard back yet. But it could be anything.

I may have to call this off. The game client crashes whenever I click on Phantom Quark in the character list. It doesn't even display her. It could be an invalid old costume, or the fact that she's loaded with massive numbers of temp powers, badges, base salvage, and souvenirs. I tried at least 50 other characters and no problems with them. I'm current jumping through Customer Supports hoops, but it doesn't look good. They moved her to Pocket D, even though that's where she already was. The game client still crashes in safe mode. They want me to run their Game Advisor to check my network connection and such. I doubt if this will be resolved by tonight.

I'm looking for some fellow badgers to earn the Dreamwalker badge. This is for defeating each of Malaise's 16 nightmares at least once in the first phase of the Minds of Mayhem Incarnate trial. The easiest way to do this is to get a team of 8 dedicated people to repeat the first phase of the trial time after time. With 8 people all on the same team there is no question about who should get credit. It can take a while since the monsters you get are random. I already have 12 of the 16, but I'll do it as often as needed to help people get the badge. The only requirement is being able to do the trial, which I believe means being a VIP and an Incarnate. We'll only be running a single team of 8 each run, but as people get the badge we will probably be able to rotate new people in. I'll be in Pocket D as Phantom Quark a bit early to get things rolling, but please let me know your global here or via PM so I can contact you if needed. I'm @TopDoc.

1. Phantom Quark, @TopDoc
2. ?, @Caliburst
3. Dynexus, @Llydia
4.
5.
6.
7.
8.

Alts:

You are rich beyond your wildest dreams. You can buy around 60,000 level 50 SOs. That's enough to fully equip 666 characters. Or you could load up around 210 characters with 50++ SOs.

You could also consider yourself middle class. You can buy enough level 50 Common IOs at 300K each in the Market to fully slot up 111 characters. Or at say 1M each load up 33 characters with moderate to decent set IOs.

You could also consider yourself poor. You can only buy about 3 sets worth of purples for a single character. I have nearly two orders of magnitude more liquid Inf, and there are people richer than me.

So really, it depends on what you plan to do with that Inf.

Back in the day, the best option was a Rikti Chief Soldier. They would just swing their sword every ... 9.5 seconds or so I think. On a Scrapper or Stalker with a Heal in Rest, you could regen fast enough. I think everyone else needed outside healing, like someome spamming Heal Other. The Rikti Soldiers were best because they would do WAY more than your total HP each swing, but the one-shot code would keep you alive. As long as you could regen or be healed back to full before the next swing, you would survive.

A while later the boss AI was tweaked so bosses would cycle their ranged attacks, so I don't know if this works anymore. I tried different looking bosses and different combinations of range. I think Arcannaville mentioned that some bosses would just to melee under some circumstances, and I think I managed to reproduce that once. But in general I don't bother these days. I just use a Guide like everyone else.

Yat Man and Turg are right. The faster you take him down, the fewer beams you have to avoid. If you want to stack the deck in your favor, use Ultimates, use level 53 chars, use Kins to increase the team damage, use Resistance debuffs, and use Lore pets. Say there's a 5% chance on any one beam that someone messes up. If there are 10 beams, there's a 60% change to succeed. But if there are only 5 beams, there's a 77% chance to succeed.