Endurance.

Mathematically, when you say you are primarily concerned with having the endurance to defeat something without regard to time*, what you want to optimize is damage per endurance, often referred to as DPE. The problem with your original build is that you slotted heavily for endurance but neglected damage. This is a mistake, because you're missing out on doubling up the benefits of both. You can only benefit effectively from 3 damage or 3 endurance SOs, but you can have the DPE benefit of up thee of each.

Damage for a power is BaseDam*(1+DamageEnhancement). Endurance cost for a power is BaseEndCost /(1+EndurenceEnhancement).

Since DPE is damage/end, that means the DPE with enhancements is:
BaseDam/BaseEndCost*(1+DamageEnhancement)*(1+EndurenceEnha ncement).

So you've get to multiply the benefit of the endurance and damage slotting together for DPE.

You can't ignore accuracy here, because accuracy affects average damage, which must therefore affect average DPE.

The reason that IOs are the optimal solution for DPE here is that they allow much more than six slots worth of SO-strength slotting in six (or often just five) slots. You can usually easily approach 3 SOs worth of damage, two SOs worth of endurance, and 1.5 to 2 SOs of both accuracy and recharge.

* Of course, most players do care about time to victory, and this means that damage slotting is the priority, because it improves both DPE and DPS. Increased DPS has the benefit of reducing the time the enemy gets to deal damage to you, affecting how likely you are to win for a given health recovery rate. This is why most SO builds have 3 damage slotted, but only one or two end reducers. The ability of IOs to add accuracy in six slots improves DPS as well.

Well, I've never bothered playing the market before, and I've never used merits for anything before, so I had no way of knowing the relative value of the merits.

Not a big deal to me, really. I now have fewer of something I have never used. I'll know to save them next time.


Some good advice so far in the thread, thanks!

6 million "stings"?

Ouch.

WTF. This makes less sense the more you talk.

I've been playing a bit over four months and I have somewhere around two and a half billion inf, and my highest level character just made 40 ten minutes ago.

Ok, while some of us may not have Sorrow or the Goat's market aptitide or savvy, it is not something you should turn a blind eye to, especially with some of the complaints you claim to have with your toons. The last few posts have been nearly spot on. Even if you use the market to just take your drops to sell, gou should find yourself in enough inf to make 40mil seem like pretty petty cash. A-merits only make that more pronounced. Get one LotG +7.5 and sell to get you started, and either get specific enhancements if you want them, or roll random and hope you get lucky. My wife and I have used this method with very good results and whereas I have read up on how to do this, she pretty much figured it out even never having been on these forums.

Either way, inf should not be an issue after level twenty, or at least not easily remedied. I would just get the Miracle and Numi uniques yourself so you can get them low level and have them early and for exemplaring.

You can head over to the market forum for nearly step-by-step guides of how to do this. Just try not to be too intimidated by how much they make or how fast they do it (which I admit was what got me at first. Not seeing the exact same results they did used to discourage me a bit, then I realized if it took me an extra couple of days or a week that is no bug deal). You do not need to rush any of their processes, just be diligent.

As far as general power slotting goes to help with endurance goes, Uncommon recipes or even generic IOs are your friend. Even just frankenslotting if you do not care about bonuses. So long as you not trying to do "Stupid <insert AT> tricks," you can get pretty effective toons relatively cheap.