UberGuy

People declared people would and/or planned to farm the 250 IDF for Hybrid XP in the first day it was available on VIP beta, and I wouldn't be surprised if it was mentioned in closed beta.

The devs basically wanted a gate on this. Their choices were, broadly, something like this or new incarnate salvage. They listened to us on iSalvage (various folks regularly complain about the different types of salvage), so we got something like this.

I expect that we'll eventually get a solo path that unlocks this. Heaven only knows when that'll be, but as an addendum to this issue seems unlikely though not completely impossible. (I did see above though that we have an expectation already set that it won't be this issue.)

You have to bear in mind that not everyone farming this is farming it because they hate the trial or are already sick of it or things like that. I've farmed the trial some tonight, and I'm in none of those states. For better or worse, they front-loaded most of the iXP in the first fight, so farming it is efficient. I have 11 50s to unlock this on, and about half of them have all the iSalvage they need to craft at least one T4 Hybrid, because I was running iTrials on them after they were "incarnated out" to get Catalysts.

I want to jump on the frequent Magisterium gravy train while it's still running hot and heavy and unlock Hybrid for as many of my 50s as fast as I can, because I can then craft the powers with rewards from anything, Magisterium or not. It just makes sense if I'm concerned with efficiency. If we had the Magisterium and another way to unlock it, if the Magisterium was the only one that was frontloaded, I'm certain some folks would farm it just the same.

Almost all the trial AVs are like that. You won't get a warning about Marauder's Nova Fist unless you are near him.

It might be some mechanical thing, where the warning is related to a radius of the power, but the lightning strikes have an effect outside the "normal" radius. (Clearly they effect everyone.) I usually saw a warning, but sometimes didn't if I was off at the edge of the crater dealing with pillars of light.

Already answered, mostly, but here's the Wikipedia link on the book. Note that I have read the book but not that article. My boss' boss bought copies of it for his whole core team and their direct reports probably around 10 years ago. I hear the phrase used in corporate/work settings, but not much of anywhere else.

Accuracy boosts from sets should not affect it.

As is often the case, there is the strict semantic correctness of things being said, and then there is what people mean.

Most likely, Nethergoat is making a distinction between the price floor, which is the minimum price someone could possibly pay in a given time frame, and "the price people pay" for the item, which spans a range of prices and is usually considered to be somewhere in between the floor and the highest price anyone paid in that timeframe. The latter is clearly not the price floor, or there would be no sales at any other prices, including the higher ones flippers look for as indication of a niche they can jump into.

Yes, the price floor went up. Anyone who wanted to pay the absolute minimum for that item in that timeframe had to pay more. People who were willing to pay more, who clearly existed even before the flipper came into the picture, might or might have to pay more with the flipper in the picture, depending on how high those bids of theirs were relative to where the flipper ends up setting their price.

There is "the price people have to pay" and there's "the price people are willing to pay". My view of the market is that "the price" of goods is the latter of those two. I don't care if the bare minimum price goes up - I only care if the price I'm willing to pay goes up. Yes, when I buy stuff, I do often start budding under what I am willing to pay, to see if I can hit a bargain. If I can't, I bid upwards until I hit what am willing to pay. Then I usually back off my bid some and leave it sit.

Of course, if the price you are willing to pay is at or below the floor, you care about the floor going up. But such buyers already had a problem, IMO, because that price was not necessarily ever going to get them the purchase. Other people were already outbidding them.

So most of the people who say "flipping doesn't raise the price" are talking about a notion of "the price" that represents an average of the low and high prices over some time window. In that model of the market, the perfect flipper collapses the price to that price and does not change it.

The notion of such a price is not perfect, but does have some merit, because prices do tend to hover near certain values. There are long-term and short-term trends in such values, where long-term and short-term tend to relate to the rate at which that good is supplied to the market. (Low supply, rare items tend to have longer price cycle trends than ones with very high supply rates). Short-term trends are the ones that tend to react to "painting the tape", for example. Sometimes short term trends turn into long-term ones, sometimes for reasons that seem clear, and sometimes for ones that are not.

GameMaster, a poster who had very little presence on this subforum but who was pretty well-known among broader forum regulars are the time as a rather intelligent person came here and pretty much posted a step-by-step breakdown of his experience manipulating prices. He sucked up supply, drove up the price, watched the market react, and sold his hoovered up supply. He discussed how profit-per-item changed through the course of the run, prior failed attempts, and how many times he failed before succeeding. He drew broad conclusions about conditions he reckoned most strongly affected likelihood of success in his approach.

This was something like 6-12 months after the market appeared in the game.

Most people posting in this thread spoke up in that thread, and none should therefore be claiming that manipulation doesn't happen or can't produce a profit. I have referred to that thread by GM in past discussions about this topic. All the argument appears, in fact, to be about how pervasive this activity is in practice, which spans some combination of how many items are being affected simultaneously, how often any items are affected, and for how long when they are affected.

These sound like single-target damage considerations. I freely admit that Dark Blast's single-target damage is pants. However, I use it regularly to solo on 54/x8 in both Incarnate and non-Incarnate content (so +3 foes or +1 foes with +14% toHit), and find the cones and immobilize invaluable for being able to pull that off - far easier than with Ice Blast, for example. (And in Incarnate content, you're usually getting 2-4 bosses per spawn.)

Yes, when it gets down to the bosses it absolutely slows down a lot. But I think that's actually pretty well balanced by how effectively it neuters large numbers foes up to the aggro cap on Corruptors. Ice Blast absolutely melts the hard targets faster, but definitely isn't as good at helping manage all the LTs and minions. And on a Corruptor, you're not going to be clearing them out with one pass of your AoEs - especially not against +3s.

Do I think Dark Blast is exactly where it ought to be? No. I'd actually like for Life Drain to have even better DPA that it got. But the set has real use in my opinion. It just may not be a use everyone gets mileage out of, since they may not all be off soloing at x8.

I was not saying it was comparable to Siphon Life. I was saying they gave it a similar treatment in terms of what they changed about it.

It still isn't a great attack, but it's noticeably better than it was, and in cases where you're trying to build a single-target attack chain, it beats the pants off of Moonbeam.

Yeah, that is not what I said, nor what I meant to imply, and frankly, it should have been clear from my post that it isn't even what I think is happening. I said I don't see evidence of it happening extensively, which is pretty much the opposite of lots of people doing it often.

(And I know you were agreeing with that, I'm reinforcing your post.)

It had a pretty dramatic effect on villain-side prices in the short term. I'm not sure what it did to the total of inf in existence, but if any single AE exploit bumped it noticeably above the rest, I would think it would be the one.

The original CoP exploit seemed pretty impressive, too, but I know a lot less about that one.

As Strato said, this was not a recent change. And it was changed to keep people's own Ions from leaping back and forth to targets they had already hit, which was laughably overpowered compared to the other Judgment powers. Folks floated trying to justify that with the fact that it would fail when the initial target died, but then that was fixed.

I use Ion on a couple of characters and am not nuts about the chance for its chain to "fail", but I get why it is like that.

Apparently not. I remember reading not too long ago that it was too much server load somehow, and was unlikely to come back in a post-Freedom world.

Anything that earns massive amounts of XP also earns massive amounts of inf for the level 50 that (usually) acts as an anchor. Case in point was the Mastermind AE exploit that could get you to 50 in under an hour, it would also cap the MM's inf from zero in about two hours.