firespray

I can sort of agree with the OPs point. It does get tedious having to run the same arc over and over and over and over and over and over again because it unlocks something you want. I stopped getting capes and auras quite awhile ago because it started getting tedious. I'm getting to that point with the midnighter arc as well. It would be nice if they introduced multiple ways to unlock these, or made them account-wide instead of character dependent or something.

I can't imagine that's WAI. I would definitely bug it.

I've played both builds, and both are fun. Some thoughts on each.

Archery/MM:
The redraw can get annoying at times.
You are extremely dependent on RoA, to the point where I got sick of using it every group. The character sort of starts to feel repetitive after awhile.
Your single target damage is much lower than that of fire blast.
Archery does have a targeted AoE, explosive arrow.
The range on fistfull of arrows is only 10 feet more than the range on blaze and fire breath, so if you're planning to use it, you won't be too much further away.
Archery does primarily lethal damage, which will be heavily resisted by some enemies.

Fire/MM:
It plays better as a short-range blaster, so you can take advantage of fire breath and blaze.
Much better single target damage than archery.
Rain of fire is actually great AoE damage if you can keep the mobs in the patch for the duration. If you team with controllers frequently, you'll absolutely want this.
Inferno can be more useful than it seems with a fire/mm blaster. Hitting enough targets with drain psyche will give you enough of a recovery boost to get over the -1000% recovery that inferno imposes. So you'll lose all your end, but you'll start recovering right away.

In the end, I like fire/mm better than archery/mm, but you won't be disappointed in either one.

I'm playing a demon/dark mastermind. I've played bots/dark and thugs/dark both in the past, and I'm a bit disappointed in how squishy my demons are in comparison. I'm hoping things will improve when I get the resist and defense aura procs for them, and when I get fluffy at 38, but does anyone have any other suggestions on how to keep the little buggers alive?

I have an ASUS eeePC with similar specs to the one being discussed in the OP (upgraded to 2 GB of ram though). It would run CoH, and as long as I wasn't in a busy outdoor area, the lag was tolerable with the graphics settings on minimum. The biggest issue for me though, was the screen resolution. Since the resolution is so small, the UI took up more than half the screen. I found that made it fairly unplayable.

Most of the ideas for dealing with inflation and inf sinks are in the market thread.

That being said, there are some okay ideas here, but I really wonder how much of an affect they would have, since they are all voluntary. Also, the prices on the random recipe rolls are WAY too low for that part of the suggestion to be feasible. If you're going to let people buy rolls for inf, the prices should be at least 10-20 times what you've suggested, maybe more.

Honestly though, if the root of your suggestion for more inf sinks is to help deal with inflation, I'm not sure how well they will serve that purpose. To do that, you'll really need something more drastic.

Well, it has a few issues at first glance. If I read it right, then fully enhanced, you'd have approximately 30% defense to all positions, and 40% resistance to all types. For a point of comparison, an invulnerability tanker with saturated invincibility would have around 30% defense to all types, around 70% smashing/lethal resistance, and around 30% resistance to everything else except psionics.

Although you don't give numbers, there are several powers that debuff recharge, so that would also help mitigate things a good bit, and a couple powers that debuff damage some as well.

The amount of recharge boosts for both yourself and the team is way over the top. It looks like you could get around 100% recharge buff for yourself, and maybe 50% or so for your teammates.

My suggestions for improvement would be to do the following:

Tone down either the base resist or defense numbers just a bit. Replace one of the recharge buffs with an endurance recovery power similar to consume or dark consumption. Replace another of them with a self-heal similar to dark regeneration.

This is completely unnecessary. One-shots are pretty rare even the way things are now.

I'd probably play on a team with Captain Knockback for a little while, just for the humor value. I doubt I'd stick around for long though.

By now, it should be obvious that the developers are NEVER going to be able to stop people from farming architect missions. Trying to do so is a waste of time, and quite honestly, may be driving people away from normal architect arcs, since a lot of the changes they make are affecting those too.

The devs need to simply accept the fact that this isn't something they can control, and move on.

Just as a note, Shield Wall is +3% resistance to all. Gladiator's Armor is +3% defense to all.

I don't think this is really necessary, but I wouldn't mind it either.

On a similar note, could we please get rid of the 20 hour timer on spending A-merits? I see no real use for that.

This is an interesting idea, and one I haven't heard before.

I agree that something really does need to be done about inflation though, but I have a different idea on how to fix it.

As far as I know, all inf in the game comes from two sources. Inf dropped directly from enemies, and recipe/salvage/enhancements dropped and sold to vendors. AFAIK, these are the only two ways to create new inf that did not exist before.

My solution to the problem of inflation is not to introduce new inf sinks to the game, but to limit the amount created. I think it can be done without affecting people who want to avoid the invention system as well.

Back when I was first playing the game before the invention system came out, by the mid 30s, pretty much every character was making more than enough inf to replace SOs every 5 levels. By 50, most characters had several million just sitting around, with nothing to do with it. As far as I know, inf drop rates haven't really been changed.

It seems then, that the amount of inf that high-level enemies drop could be significantly reduced, without impacting a players ability to buy SOs every 5 levels. Essentially, the amount of inf dropped by enemies would be reduced to the point that over the course of gaining 5 levels, you would get, on average, just enough inf to buy a completely new set of SOs from a vendor. The drop rates for everything else would be left alone.

Obviously, this would have to be done carefully, but I think over the long term, this could stop the inflation that we're seeing.

I appreciate the update, but I'm severely disappointed that this isn't going live until after thanksgiving. Due to work, that basically means I won't get to play it at all until after the first of the year.

My suggestion would be some type of AoE focused scrapper or brute. SS/Shield, Elec/Shield, or fire/shield would all be good choices.

Ill/rad is hell on wheels against single hard targets, and is fully capable of soloing most AVs and some GMs. It lags in AoE damage though, so having an AoE toon paired with it should help the journey to 50 go faster.

Wow, I'm not sure how I managed this, but I realized this is completely in the wrong section. Is it possible for someone to move this to the market section?

I'm just curious how my fellow ebil-doers store all of their dirty, dirty money. How much do you keep on a single character at a time? Do you spread it out because you're worried about a glitch causing you to lose it? Or do you keep it all on one character?

Personally, I have about 8 of my 12 billion in liquid assets at the moment on a single character. Around half of that is tied up in actual marketeering, the rest is just 2 billion inf bids on level 53 recipes. I have 2 alts on another server that have 2 billion each, just in case something were to happen to that character or the markets. Sort of my 'money under the bed' as it were.

How about you?

My fire/sr scrapper is definitely going for Musculature core paragon. He's already softcapped, and has enough recharge and endurance recovery to run a seamless Incinterate-cremate-GFS chain. An extra 30+ percent damage boost though? Yes please!

Level 50, on freedom. I have both a recipe and a crafted IO, you can have your choice.

Bidding starts at 2.2 billion and will end this friday (11/12/10)

You can post bids here or PM them to me. Please include your global in either case so I can contact you in-game if you win.