seebs

This is not how market economics works. If the prices aren't reasonable, unsold recipes will accumulate until people give up and sell for less. If that's not happening, the chances are there aren't enough of that recipe for a lower price to be reasonable.

If the program was told to do the wrong thing, that is also a bug.

That's where it's at in terms of which players you want to invite. If you want to decide what to roll, though, set balance becomes more important, because you're comparing sets with the same person at the keyboard -- you.

I count the lack of a snipe as a weakness, because snipes are useful to me in a couple of contexts. One of those is cases where I'd like to open a fight from outside retaliation range.

However, since I'm dp/dev, with a stealth I/O, I'm covered; I use Time Bomb for that.

I quite like piercing rounds, even without the toggle to get the -res debuff automatically. If I macroed it to always get the -res debuff from it, I might like it even more, as I frequently get a couple more good hits in on something, and a substantial -res debuff would more than make up for the slight damage loss.

... And again, I say: This set would be amazing if you could set ammo type per-power. So I could, say, set piercing rounds to lethal ammo for the res debuff, hail of bullets to cold for use as a slow in an opener, etcetera.

Exactly. When I decide to bid on something, I usually try a couple of lowballs. I regularly see things with last-five all 500k where a bid at 12,345 gets me at least one item, possibly more than one. If more people did this, prices would be less sticky.

Er, MNV: It's higher-volatility items where it's easiest to nudge things. Smaller overall market = more room to influence that market. Uncommons aren't used for common IOs, so many people don't need them, but they can be components in stuff where the next item over in your shopping list costs four or five million inf, so no one cares much what they cost.

No one disputes that, in theory, if you want to put in the time, you can do stuff like this for at least a while. It may, in some cases, be profitable at least in the short term. In the long term, though, people will come along, notice that temporal tracers are hugely profitable and easy to buy from AE, and probably start taking advantage of them.

When you jump into the market for something that usually vendors for more than it sells for at WW, if there's not that many up, there's plenty of room for short-term effects. It's not practical to sustain them, though, so far as we know... And that's where the accusations that people are manipulating the prices of, say, Alchemical Silver, come into play. Short-term, sure. Long-term, maybe not.

Yeah, if I had been asked to name an origin which needed more love, Magic would have been #5 on my list. Nearly everything can be handwaved as "magic".

I would suggest that you consider starting a new character in Praetoria to wander through the content.

There are a number of good super groups I know of on Virtue, which is where I hang out. I'd advise avoiding groups that, say, try to invite you without having talked to you or grouped with you first, because that tends to indicate that they aren't selective -- and that means the other people in the SG won't have been filtered either.

If you have issues with having enough money, hang out in the Market & Inventions forum, or join the global "TheMarket" channel and ask around -- there will always be people happy to tell you how to make ludicrous amounts of money, and most of us would happily send you a few million inf just to make your life a little easier.

Other things: If you know any players, hang out with them. If you know someone who consistently has similar play times to you, consider forming a levelling duo, which can be a great deal of fun. Don't be afraid to make alts; this isn't like WoW, where there's an "endgame". If you want to see a variety of interesting content, and you have a character who's at least in the 10+ range, check out the Mission Architect forum, where people discuss particularly well-written story arcs that you can get to through AE.

Time Bomb is decent if, and only if, you have some way to be invisible. That might be superspeed plus a stealth I/O (and Grant Invisibility for your FFG), or it might be something else.

The key is, a time bomb placed in a spawn can open the fight -- and you can be around a corner. Across a minefield. Good for soloing stuff that would otherwise be out of your reach.

I'm doing a traps/dp at the moment, and my build is focused in part on picking up things like resistance debuffs and defense debuffs, then picking up utility stuff like leadership pool, recall friend, etcetera.

FWIW, I love my dp/dev. I don't care whether it's the best set, or whatever; it is thematically perfect.

I think I'd love it even more if you could set ammo type for each power separately. I'd love to be able to, say, pick the resist debuff for executioner's shot, and follow it up with incendiary's extra damage in something else.

Not specifically drama about that -- it's just an observation, American Legion is a large coalition of SGs, so in theory we ought to be competing with the sum of their prestige totals. There was some drama from some unhappy heroes, but no one knows who they were, and besides, the thread got deleted.

We could make a goal of sweeping the top 10 by the end of 2011.

I'm a programmer, and I've been dragged into other peoples' existing projects enough to say, with confidence:

I have no clue at all how easy or hard it would be to make various changes to the boob sliders. And no one else who hasn't seen the code knows either.

Feel free to engage in comparisons of programming credentials if you want. I am pretty sure all the other sufficiently experienced programmers will agree, though, without seeing the code and really understanding it, it's not very useful to speculate on how easy or hard it would be to change a given feature.

I don't think rolling around on the floor laughing counts as freaking out. Do it! IT'D BE AWESOME!

I've been playing dp/dev, and /dev provides a great deal of very effective backup to fill in the gaps in dp.

You have an interesting point about swap ammo. I'd been ignoring the secondary effects (-defense is pretty insignificant to me, I always have 95% to hit), but I'm wondering whether the -res in piercing and executioner's shot might not pay off.

The Crazy 89s is a hypothetical Marketer SuperGroup, on Virtue, which has as its sole goal obtaining the #1 spot in the Virtue SG list, by burning inf.

This way, we can increase the burn rate, and help quell any complaints that the 88s only made #1 because the biggest SGs are really coalitions of multiple SGs.

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It may be that they don't want the market to be balanced.

Er, dumb question time:

Why can't you out your private account once you've left the company? Is it against company policy, or do you just not want to log in every day to 20 fresh emails blaming you for things that are totally outside your control?

Couple other thoughts:

Empty Clips is a defense debuff if you don't have any ammo swapped. Suppressive Fire, with ammo swapped, changes from a stun to a hold. If you're teamed with a controller that you can stack holds with, that lets you lock down bosses more easily and/or reliably. There's also the detail that you can 4-slot it with Basilisk's Gaze for a 7.5% global recharge.

Swap Ammo is pretty much a must for Blasters, and with rare exceptions, you will never want to do anything but leave it up on Incendiary Rounds. Yes, even against things that are vulnerable to cold and resistant to fire.

Piercing Rounds is really best treated as a single-target attack, but it does decent damage, and you can occasionally get a second or third target with it. Decent opener, when you have time to line up. Executioner's Shot is okay. Both provide a -res debuff when you have no ammo up.

I also recommend Trip Mines strongly. Optionally, depending on play style, cloaking device and time bomb -- with a stealth IO, you can then toe-bomb with a time bomb, making the power sort of useful. Basically, Trip Mines lets you animate a bunch of attacks in advance before the fight, then have them all go off. You can wipe out an x5 spawn without taking a single attack, let alone a single point of damage, using trip mines and time bomb. (But it's not fast, so you may not always want to...)

Also, if you're with a grav/kin... Speed Boost lets you overcome one of the key weaknesses of trip mines (the longish recharge), and Wormhole lets you overcome another, which is getting a lot of targets dropped precisely onto your mines.

Do not ignore the largeish inherent accuracy of the archery set. Which is to say, don't worry too much about accuracy. If you have the money, get a kismet +6% accuracy proc in something like combat jumping or hover somewhere in the teens, and you'll have 93% to hit with most of your archery powers without even slotting them for accuracy at all. Note also that it's a multiplier. A 30% accuracy enchancement on a 1.15x accuracy power doesn't give you 1.45, it gives you 1.49. This adds up.

Trick Arrow is a bit frustrating at lower levels, where many of its powers are slightly nerfed versions of stuff from other sets; it only really shines once you get Oil Slick Arrow.

If at all possible, be sure to team with someone who can be counted on to ask you to "use Healing Arrow" halfway through a TF.