Screw efficiency. What's FUN for farming?

As some of you are doubtless aware, Zombie_Man recently challenged marketeer types to try to fill all the outstanding bids for alchemical silver.

I am totally up for abusing game mechanics for humorous ends, but I have a problem: I tend to find farming sorta dull. I managed to get a solid day of fun out of an axe/fire brute, just because axe/fire is so amusing -- all that knockdown makes for giggles. Sure, it's no CEBR, but I killed stuff and got tickets and all.

So here's the question. If you need a ton of tickets or salvage or whatever, what's your go-to build if you want to actually enjoy the process? What's fun before 50 and a ton of IOs, for that matter?

The way I see it, there's too ways to optimize farming. One is straight efficiency, where the optimization comes from needing as little time as possible spent farming to get Lots Of Stuff. The other is to have as much fun as possible while farming. So what's fun?

i have many personal farms in AE that i use if i wanted to farm in AE, but i also have plenty of different toons with normal farms to switch around to what i feel like and when

for non AE i have toons with the snake, liberate tv, and eliminate demons farm mishs

for AE, i have maps built for fire armor, elec armor, ice armor, anything good vs smash/lethal, lowbie, and one which has a ton of very easy AVs with the mob built for smash/lethal

Roll Storm. Pwn Croatoa. Sell Alchemical Silvers. Done.

Is that really comparable to the rate of ticket return on AE? 48 tickets, on average, for one silver. I haven't come CLOSE to that rate of common salvage dropping anywhere else.

Yeah, that was about what I thought.

So I'm back to "trying to find ways to kill a lot of things in AE, which are at least vaguely sort of tolerably efficient, but which are also actually fun". I know in theory that stuff like claws/elec brute is amazing, but I would love a bit of variety in how I go about killing stuff. In theory the damage output from blasters and the like should be significant, but in practice if I try to kill lots of things on blaster/defender/corruptor, mostly I just die.

Farming tickets is easy enough that you should be able to pick pretty much any damage dealer and not be too far behind the performance of the fastest ones, provided you pick AoEs available to your powerset and use inspirations as they drop.

I'm sort of leaning towards trying to dual-box for this, since dual-boxing sounds fun.

I am probably screwing myself by mentioning that the names "I'm With Stupid" and "l'm With Stupid" came to mind.

When I'm in the mood for an amusing AE run or two I'll grab a mission/arc from @Wishful and @Wishful2. I find the stuff he's done to be a bit of a kick in the funny bone.

Not as efficient as doing fire farms, but entertaining to me none the less.

One of the ways you can try to make farming fun is to farm with/against something that's actually risky. Now, getting dead much isn't very efficient, and beyond a point it's probably not fun, either. So the point isn't to "farm" something that kills you tons. You want to farm it, not let it farm you!

Sadly, I can't really offer specific advice on this, since it's going to be very build dependent. I recommend finding something that can't quite handle +4/x8 on some farm map of choice, and then turning it down (probably in team size, but maybe (also) in level if +4s are too slow for good farming) until you can just barely do it, including using inspirations.

Making the farm keep me on my toes to survive keeps me engaged. Others might hate it since it's hard to "zen out" when playing this way. Ultimately what's "fun" is going to vary by individual, so YMMV.

I am experimenting with dual-boxing; dark/mace tanker, emp/psy defender. The defender can contribute with /follow and occasional button pressing, and makes up for the tanker's key weaknesses quite well. We'll see.

Fortunately I can enjoy farming on my SS/FA Brute. More easily if I'm PLing someone so I have someone to talk to, but when I've had to PL myself (damn Mayhem mules) it's not so bad because I enjoy the stompy stompy.

That said, what you can also do if you've got a laptop or second computer is set it up right next to the monitor you're playing CoH on. IME farming doesn't require a great deal of concentration, so I'll often watch tv or movies on my laptop while doing it. It's obviously a bit slower than going full bore and concentrating on it, but it's still plenty fast and a lot less boring.

Depends how much you are willing to spend. fire/fire/ice dom is ok but expensive. was stupid good when reactive was borked.

I hit the ticket cap crazy fast with my Warshade. Farming with a Spines/FA scrapper is a lot of fun too.

Fire/Fire/Pyre Tank - If I want to be able to chat while farming.
Spines/Fire/Pyre Scrapper - If I want to focus on staying alive.
SS/FA Brute - Speed

They are all fun, but I like farming. If you dont like it, there isn't a toon you can roll that will make it fun.

Believe it or not a Fire/Fire blaster on the CEBR farm - I ran it a bit lower 0 x 8 but still so fast and so much crazy fun.

I've got different farming builds for different types of farms. A S/L farmer (DP/MM blaster) in this case for S/L farms, etc. I find I still go back to my SS/FA brute for most farming (tickets, PL'ing, etc.) simply because farming itself isn't that entertaining and I play to have fun. So I want to minimize the time I'm not having fun by going with the most efficient farming build I can. SS/FA wins.

If I want to amuse myself while farming, I play my Rad/Kin Corruptor.

She has lots of procs, fast recharge on the AoEs, and Fulcrum Shift. Since she's not quite soft-capped to S/L and has minimal resistance so I need to pay attention, but Transfusion recharges fast and I can get through the farms fairly quickly (as fast as a Brute who doesn't pop reds to remain at the damage cap!).

Quote:

Originally Posted by PleaseRecycle it has gone from unconscionable to downright appalling that we have no way of measuring our characters' wetness.

Quote:

Originally Posted by Brillig It's hard to beat the entertainment value of Whackjob Wednesdays.

I'm experimenting with dual-boxing. So far as I can tell, a pocket empath who stays back and provides heals and buffs (but not debuffs) does not seem to get aggro, unless the empath also adds damage, in which case there's some aggro, but if I stick to ST attacks, it's not much. But this makes life MUCH easier for a tanker.

My Traps / Dark defender can do the fire ambushes, with bosses at 8 / +1 (maybe 0). Sometimes I'll join free farms -- I usually get some humorous tells along the lines of, "Holy crap! I had no idea healers could do that!"

When Reactive was bugged, it was OMG HILLARIOUS since she can stack 3 caltrops patches. She was defeating mobs who wouldn't fight back because of the aggro cap.

Elec/Fire brute for me. Triggering Lightning Rod and watching the results tends to induce a giggle fit in me.

I can do +4/8 fire or sl (ambush or not) on my plant/kin. Not sure how efficient he is but its damn fun listening to all the slapping the creeper vines do.

Fun is subjective. There is no way someone can aswer "Whats fun" for you. You find that out for yourself.


I find doing something as quickly as possible to infact BE the funest way to do something, for example.

Well, obviously people can't tell me what will be fun for me, but I figured they might be able to tell me what's been fun for them, and that might give me ideas.

One of the issues I always face is that I can't tell whether something will be even viable for killing quickly without dying at high levels. And if it's not, levelling one to try to farm with it is stupid.