2 billion per enhancer

Sounds like an honest question. Here goes. I have recently run a SS/Will Brute for almost a year. Sitting with around 80% recharge, no speed set. This meant I was regularly double stacking rage. I wanted a different character, and the toon I am running is based in a tabletop RPG, but the origins do not matter.

For Dark/Invul there are multiple benefits to a huge amount of recharge. Dark Consumption, the AoE attack/End Recovery tool is not up often enough to feed a hot running brute (Invul with Fighting runs hot) in normal play. With a ton of recharge mine is up way comfortably often (and I am only running 1 End SO in Stamina). Soul Drain is the 30 second combat buff. At this point I have almost gotten it to a 30 second recharge. This is without super speed. I will drop Super speed on the build for a one week trial when i19 loads. To have Soul Drain perma, or stacked!!! would be the dream. Invulnerabilty: Dull pain. The best heal for brutes. IMO. Slow as heck to get back up. I have it on Perma now, and want it up even more often for things like the LRSF. Now, Dark has weak AoEs, and i have slightly gimped the ST damage by Purpling Midnight Grasp with Gravitational Anchor. So I use Soul Mastery Gloom and Dark Obliteration (both purpled) as heavy regular attacks. Having tons of Recharge makes this very feasible. Once i19 hits I plan to test adding Soul Tentacles or Darkest Night as well for a week. Dark/Invulnerabilty is a somewhat tanky build with mediocre atack power. By Bringing the tons of recharge onto this build and adding a heavy ranged attack set the builds seams have closed up and it slices through very difficult content with ease. It was my original vision, and it seems to be working nicely. I look forward to completing this crazy quest and having this character completed.

When I was complaining about how little money I had, and it came out I'd been levelling on teams, people told me that was my problem -- team play doesn't necessarily produce as much wealth as solo play.

True. I accepted I would rarely if ever have time to run TFs and pre-merits that meant I was stuck with only getting Pool C rare recipes through the market so I was going to have to acquire enough inf to do so.

Then they added merits so I was able to use Ouroboros to run arcs to get merits to random roll or buy my rare pool Cs in addition to the market.

Then they added bosses random chance to drop Pool C rare recipes so I made sure my characters who could handle bosses changed the difficulty slider to get them.

A lot of people left the game when the inventions/markets were added because they were unwilling to accept the new game changes. Nothing has changed other than the amounts and which items on the market people are complaining are too expensive. Meanwhile those who were willing to adapt to the changes or adjust their expectations are doing well.

I think I'm gonna dispute this a bit.

My friend who "just likes to punch dudes" certainly has less wealth per time played than I do. His characters are typically less well-enhanced at low and mid levels than mine, and may well be less well-enhanced at high levels once I make it to high levels, except for the ones he's been playing for years.

... But so what? He can raid, he can do all the high-level content, and he has a great time. Punching dudes.

What you get from the game isn't a matter of how wealthy you are, or what enhancements you have. It's a matter of how well you pick your goals to meet your preferences, and your activities to meet your goals. The only time there's a problem is if, say, you really enjoy having Uber Loot, but don't want to do any of the things that produce it. A WoW player who hates crafting, marketing, and raiding would have similar problems.

The difference is, in CoH, if you do nothing, at all, but punch dudes, and sell anything you don't need by listing it for 1 inf, you will eventually end up very well equipped. Even if you never buy stuff on the market, and do nothing but buy stuff with a-merits and reward merits, you can end up rediculously well equipped after a while.

I'm slamming 10 PvP I/Os on this guy and then nosing around to see if I can cram one more set on, and i do not PvP. if I did PvP my goal would probably be closer to seven sets.

Well said. I'll take it one step further: The only time there's a problem is when you really enjoy having uber loot for the sake of having uber loot. As the IO system currently stands, build performance is highly skewed toward the low-to-mid-cost sets.

In general, the performance difference between a super-expensive, purples-bursting-from-its-ears build and a build with just oranges/yellows is probably less than 10%. The difference in cost ranges from probably 400 to 1000%. That's assuming you know what you're doing with the items in question. If you don't know what you're doing, then you can actively hurt your build's performance by just throwing money at it willy-nilly.

Unfortunately, a lot of players don't seem to know what they're doing. Blue_Centurion falls firmly in that category. He wants all the best stuff, and he wants it yesterday -- but he hasn't even stopped to think about whether the supposed best stuff is the best for his particular build. But boy, don't tell him that, you capitalist pig!

I'm sure there are exceptional cases wherein a skilled min/maxer can wring large performance gains out of the upgrade to purples, but DM/INV isn't even close to qualifying. More recharge is always good for your attack chain, but INV only has one important power (Dull Pain) that is in any way affected by recharge enhancement, and that power is available often enough even at middling global +recharge bonuses. In any case, simply taking Hasten would help B_C more than all the purple sets in the world.

His build almost certainly wants for defensive bonuses, too. It's sorta like watching a guy on welfare complain about not being able to afford lobster -- when he's allergic to lobster. Comical.

Originally Posted by Iggy_Kamakaze Nice build

Don't drop hasten if that is your goal. You need 300% recharge to get Soul Drain up permanently. With 95% enhancement in Soul Drain itself that means you need 205% from global bonuses. It is theoretically possible to get that much in a build without violating the Law of Fives but I don't think it's actually possible given the IO Sets available and even if it was doing so would severely gimp the build.

Actually, with dark melee you have an attack, that, even slotted like an attack, will heal more over time then dull pain will. Dark consumption, while nice, shouldn't be the end all fix for your build. Enhancing up stamina, or just putting in the performance shifter +end proc will help ALOT in management of your endurance. You only need Dark consumption up as often as your blue bar starts to waver, which with invuln, shouldn't be all to often, as you have 3 toggles, (five if you include the fighting power pool)

While gloom is very nice, and slotting the purple in that is probably your best use of the gain, Midnight Grasp is one of your hardest hitting attacks, and is included in the highest damaging attack chain Dark melee can dish out (which actually also include siphon life, so as your rocking that massive damage, your also healing yourself)

Invuln Craves defense. Once you get to the point where you can softcap at lest lethal/smash defense with 1 or even 2 guys in range of invincibility, your tohit debuffs from Dark Melee will do the rest, and you'll never have to rely on healing again. If you slot in a +end proc into siphon life, then you'll also be gaining endurance while you beat the snot out of everything in range.

Dark obliteration is again, probably your best bet for AOE damage as well, so i can see wanting that up as often as possible, but with Soul drain feeding your high recharge single target attack chain, and doing some pretty nice AOE damage on itself due to fury feeding its damage, you may not need dark obliteration up as much as possible, because you'll just eat everything in your wake.

I know you want to aim for high recharge, but on a dark Melee/invuln its just not worth it.

To perma Soul Drain, you would need to get its recharge to 25.644secs, to make up for the cast time. Which would mean you need to have about 368% recharge, which I'm not sure is possible, with all the +rech you can possibly slot. You'll get close, but I don't think you'll hit perma.

So you're just getting uber loots only in order to have uber loots? I guess this is the problem, or at least a large part of it.

It may very well be that the devs didn't even intend the "best" (best is very difficult to design, but I'll just define it as best all around) builds to be those that were just crammed full of the rarest stuff. This is quite visible in purple sets alone where pretty much all of them have similar set bonuses. Why'd they do this? So that even the less hardcore players could get the "best" builds available for their powerset combinations.

Happily, that isn't necessary.

You're on a forum, so people are going to respond to what you post.

Going from what you've posted in this thread there are obvious conclusions to draw, and people have drawn them.

If you don't like those conclusions, you should express yourself more clearly and accurately.

I think our friend Eryq2 falls into this group. He drops into this forum once in a while to tweak our noses and gripe about the market but he's made it clear that he simply finds the market boring and would much rather spend his time fighting. I've never teamed with him but my impression is that he's done very well for himself this way.

I typically run Brutes, especially at 50. I think I have a Kin at 50, and a blaster, the rest are brutes. I solo content a lot. I also have a couple good channels where TF teams are the bomb. One in particular is a godsend. There is nothing like a steady flow of Task Forces with a great network of players.

Que the insults now.

"cue".

"Cue" => indicate that something should start
"Queue" => list of things to do next, such as a printer queue
"Que" => Not a word in English

... Well, you did ASK.

I've got a wide range of build styles in my stable, from pure generic IOs through Frankenslotting up to 'the good stuff' and then on to purely ostentatious purpled out 'bling' builds.

To me, the only really noticable performance jump is between generics and Frankenslotting.

'The good stuff' is measurably better when you look at the numbers, but in game? It doesn't feel that much different.

Ditto for the UberPurple/PvPIO builds. I mean they're really nice, but to me performance is roughly the same as 'the good stuff'.

Of course, I'm not a player that pursues extreme challenges and NEEDS that extra few % of advantage- I mostly just run missions at moderate difficulty settings, or I farm boatloads of low-ish powered stuff to maximize my drops.

Right now my 'best' character from a performance standpoint is my fire/axe tank, who's mostly Frankenslotted with a few powers still lagging behind with level 30 generics. I'm working on upgrading him, but it's more just a way to keep him 'progressing' now that he's level 50 than from any desire or need for better performance.

Just my two cents.

There are players who 'need' uber performance to do amazing things, but those players are few in number and also not 'casual' by any meaningful definition of the word.

For the vast bulk of the playerbase (myself included) l337 gear is purely a status symbol, or a way to 'improve' a character you like who's run out of other avenues of progression.

Makes sense. I think that's the thing. If you enjoy punching dudes, then "you have to punch a whole lot of dudes before you will have a lot of purples" is a horrible problem at the level of "well, before you can have that baby, you and the person you love most will have to have a lot of sex".

No insults, as thats what a normal, casual player does. Runs TFs just to do it, and most people like playing 1 AT over another. Yours is brutes, nothing wrong with that. Your playstyle matches a normal, casual, to high end player.

The problem lies in the loot you want. Which is Very high end. Take that other game, with orcs and humans, and what your basically doing, is wanting to run the high end raids, without getting the required gear score, then complaining because you have to run other things first. Its the way the game is designed.

Did you just say, "are the bomb"?

There is no need to insult you at this point.

Gonna respond even though you are an insulting thing. Mainly because you bring up a good point. I realize that the cheaper I/Os are where to min/max performance in general. However, even a heavily crafted build will generally benefit from some high end I/os. Some. Not what I am doing to my monster. My monster is a concept build. You can throw out insults until the day turns to night. You might as well stand next to me while I am painting and keep telling me my brush stokes are not the way you would paint. Providing I would actually let you do that for very long, it would only be because I found it highly amusing. The concept build continues, maybe i will make another Dark/Invul with a different style to it. I was rather thinking another SS/Will for the middle of the road "Get the max benefits accross the board without chasing dimishing returns build". i will think about it more as I complete this version.

Que the insults.

Okay, here's where we went off the rails.

See, you're no longer looking at what an "average player" wants to "complete". You're looking at a "concept build". You shouldn't be viewing a "concept build" as something that needs to be fairly easily obtainable -- it's like badging, not like levelling up.

It is not a problem for the game if concept builds take a really long time, even if it's much longer than it would take for a min/max build.

Heck, I've set 2,000,000,000 inf on fire just for laffs since he started this thread.

=P