Returning Player Diary

At this point, I would have sent tells to everyone else on the team, quit and reformed without the...weak element. That kind of stuff just makes me nuts.

Quote:

Originally Posted by EarthWyrm But I do understand that there is an internet rule that any bad idea must be presented by someone at least twice a year to remind everyone who hasn't already read every previous thread on the topic precisely why the idea is bad.

Okay, caught on with a nutty TF last night.
Messing around with Crafticus, my shield/mace tank. Call goes out for a Penny Yin TF, and he just happens to be in IP since the last time I played him he ran a Penny Yin- kismet!

So I join up, and it's me and four Water blasters.
Hah!

The guy keeps recruiting, and when we roll out it's me, a defender, and SIX water blasters.

Pretty hilarious.

The all had their "water" colored some crazy way, so most fights were like me sitting inside a rainbow waterfall, with whirlpools and spouts and whatnot spraying all over the place. Stuff was dying SUPER fast, and nothing gave us even a moments pause until the final battle with Clamor, when that gargantuan Freakshow ambush caused the same result as on my last run- team wipe!

I think next time I'll try and drag Clamor away from that room, maybe it's one of those ambushes that runs to a spot and then sits around picking its nose.

Anyway, we all got back to the mish and made short work of the leftovers.

Fun run, got a good look at the new powerset, picked up two levels since I started out a few bubbles from gratzing.

Still loving reading this, and I was happy to get to meet you last night during the Great Aura Frenzy on Virtue.

Have you been playing the summer event? The OF enhancements are live in Wentworth's now, so even if you can't use them you can make some millions...

Looking forward to more.

a quick in-game jaunt this morning- after breakfast the boy wanted to "see some guys".

We went through my alts on Freedom & Virtue, with him clicking and then asking everyone's names and what they did and whether they were good guys or bad guys.

He eventually selected a long disused dark/dark brute, Eclipsoid, for the morning's visit.

We ran around Cap for a bit, with him clicking map features and then running over to check them out. Whenever I did something that closed the map he got upset- "dada, how can we see where we're going without our MAP? You're a bad dada!"

He's gotten pretty good at map reading- "Hey dada, there's a GUY to talk to!"
"You're right! How did you know that?"
"Well, a YELLOW arrow means a guy to talk to, and a RED arrow means we go look for a CAVE!"

As I've said, he *really* likes caves.

Anyway, I hoofed it to the level appropriate Nerva and picked up a Warriors paper mission, which happily ended up being in a cave.

"Dada, look at all the STUFF in this cave! It gots cobwebs, and WOOD, and mushrooms...and look dada, A DOOR!"

He was very excited.

But even his seemingly bottomless love of caves could not survive that bane of the newspaper cave mission, the LAYER CAKE room. After clearing most of it out there were the inevitable stragglers, and we kept walking into holes, and after a while he climbed down off my lap, with the explanation "Uh, dada...I think I'm going to go make a plan- you bonk these guys and tell me when you're done."

The situation was magnified by my (inexplicable) lack of a -KB IO on this guy- vs warriors, I got knocked through my share of holes in the floor. Very tedious- login said he hadn't been played in some ridiculous number of days, but even so I'll be sending him a -KB, just in case.

What I've done, mainly, is try and avoid buying procs and uniques I want as much as I can...through Hero Merits and converting.

I leveled two different characters up to 44/50, respectively, over the last two months, and saved all their converters until they got to where I could use whatever it was I wanted (especially the procs, as their levels don't matter so much).

Basically, anything with a proc/unique you want, buy something else in the set. Celerity is a good example because the regular run speed ones are hella cheap, AND there's a 1 in 3 chance you'll convert to the stealth IO, rather than 1 in 6. As for out-of-set, I'll usually only do that on rare recipe drops, but it's all YMMV. Totally depends on what IOs you're looking for.

I have found, though, that with the Perf Shifter procs only costing 1 hero merit, there's absolutely no reason to buy them on WW anymore.

Quote:

Originally Posted by EarthWyrm But I do understand that there is an internet rule that any bad idea must be presented by someone at least twice a year to remind everyone who hasn't already read every previous thread on the topic precisely why the idea is bad.

Ok, finally got in a Summer Event run the other night.

Overall it was fun although I personally am not a fan of Casino Heist style gameplay- usually anything that requires me to read something and follow instructions to complete ends up being a dismal failure and just frustrates me.

In this case it was magnified by some weird situation where we only had three people on our team- I used the LFG queue and when we appeared in the lobby one of our teammates, uh, wasn't on the team. His name was white (?) and he could talk to us in /local but he wasn't on the team and we couldn't invite him.

So we carried on alone.

I took HITTER, which seemed to be the most straightforward.
I'm not sure if I did us any good, but we ended up in our 'hideout' fighting a big ol' pile of baddies, which was fun. I was on Burn Rate, my fire/fire blaster, and she had ample opportunity to ply her AoE's.

After a while a purple boss showed up, and we eventually whittled it down- I was less useful here, as she's got exactly two single-target attacks- my basic Fire Blast & Fire Sword. End was an issue with my AoEs and I'd burned through all my blues already.

Then ANOTHER purple boss showed up, and this was a total slog. We were all out of everything, and our tank was self-sustaining so it was just a matter of time. I actually ran off into a corner of the room and hit Rest at one point- got SO TIRED of waiting for my blue bar to fill up enough for an attack. Burn just isn't build for a long slog against a hard single target.

Anyway, finished it off eventually.
It went okay, and I can see it really appealing to a certain type of player, but that player isn't me.


On to the second, and IMHO much more fun episode, TIME GLADIATOR!
Reminded me of a fun mission in that big fantasy MMO in a gladiator pit.

Gameplay was more my speed- no fiddling, just waves of enemies to plow through plus a parade of bosses with their own weird abilities. It was a pretty terrific fight- we had a couple of deaths, but the vet rez came in handy. The waves were challenging without being overwhelming, and the bosses were tough without being discouraging. I spent pretty much the whole battle down below half health, but only faceplanted once. Great fun.

As it was my first run through I didn't really have a handle on what any of them did, it was basically just a frenzy of attacking and running away. But fun, and that's my only demand on the game.


One unfortunate thing was I got a tell in the middle of the run from someone who wanted some market advice- "are you Nethergoat from the forums?" Which hardly ever happens, and I always enjoy spreading the market gospel, but there wasn't really any breathing room in the trial and they had to log off before we finished. Kind of a bummer, as I spend more time in-game just hanging around messing with the market or sightseeing with my son than anything else and usually have plenty of time to help folk out with stuff.

Anyway, sorry about that, unknown chatter!
You just caught me at a bad time.

So I got one of the IOs and just stuck it in base storage- it was time to log off and I didn't want to just toss it on the market without sniffing around a bit to see what the deal was.

Sounds like you had a bit of bad luck with losing a player, and possibly having under-50 characters, in that summer event run. Even when being exemplared down, being 50 makes a big difference in slots, good IOs, etc. Try it with a team of 4 50s and it's a lot less of a slog.

Nethergoat, I have enjoyed reading your diary and especially the adorable comments from your son (his strange love of caves aside).

I find myself in the reverse of your position as my account just went from VIP to premium. This is partly due to finances though I may re-sub when Issue 24 comes out. It's going to be interesting to see how things change now.

Looking back, is there any one thing you liked most in jumping from premium to VIP? My guess would be character slots since, you know, alts.

My connection has SUCKED the last few days- barely adequate for web surfing, nearly worthless for gaming, totally useless for streaming. As pretty much all the media entertainment options in my home ride in on the internet (Gaming, Pandora + Netflix + Hulu Plus via Roku) this has been a trial. I'd almost forgotten how irritating having to actually play a dvd on a physical machine is. =P

AT&T should be ashamed of themselves- if Charter wasn't three times as expensive in my area (counting the criminal ten dollar surcharge for not subscribing to their ridiculously overpriced teevee service) I'd switch over in a hot minute.

Anyway, it's put quite a crimp in my CoH'ing.

Marketeering isn't too painful, as long as I'm super careful typing in bids and listing prices, and I can *barely* run solo missions provided they don't generate too many enemies, so right not I'm basically limited to fiddling with costumes, builds, market schemes, and low-ish level soloing.

This morning my son caught me doing some marketeering on The Goat, who he really likes, and demanded that we go "find a cave with him!"

I sorted through my contacts and found a likely looking tip mission and off we went. Goat was set to a moderate +1/X3, which I hoped wouldn't choke my connection.

The mission turned out to be in a sewer, not a cave, but he was willing to settle. Gameplay was PAINFUL for me, but he didn't mind the lag and thanks to /dark's spectacular mitigation it wasn't all that dangerous, so I forged ahead.

I've re-colored all Goat's fire stuff to be a dark blackish/purple, to reflect its nether-ish origin. The first time I dropped Rain of Fire, he yelled out "Dada! It's BLUE COBWEBS!" He also looooved the Dark Servant- "Look, Dada, it's Uncle Boonmee! Except he gots blue eyes!"

He has quite an advanced cinematic palate, especially for a three year old...

So I hobbled through the mish, got it done and then he ran off to look at some new books we'd picked up. I hung around to do a bit of marketeering.

I'd noticed the Goat had 10 converters & given the info up-stream about the profitability of turning crappy purples into great purples I thought I'd take another stab at it, with the caveat that I wanted to INSTA-BUY the recipe- no boring waiting around. I settled on 140m as my buy point- figure 10m for salvage & crafting, so 150 up front cost.

Threw out 5 failed bids before I snagged my winner, I think one of the Fortunatas. Paid BUY NAO prices for salvage, crafted it, pulled up the conversion window and SCORE! it immediately became a Ragnarok that should sell pretty quick around 300m (we'll see when I get home).

I wish I'd been around when they announced converters...I can only imagine the GROTESQUE fortunes my fellow marketeers earned buying up recipes before they went live.

I recall years back one of my market forum fellows creating a stir by buying up the supply of Fortunatas and deleting them because it offended his sensibilities that they were so cheap....hah!


I doubt the converter gods will always be so generous, but that was a nice score.

Hopefully my connection will clear up soon-ish, I was actually getting used to just jumping on a random TF when I had the free time....

So my connection was still crummy last night so it was just some marketeering and fiddling. This morning it seemed much improved- Netflix was working again- so hopefully tonight I'll be able to run a few things.

Got a tell from Ultimus looking for help getting some badges, but my connection still wasn't playing nice and had to turn him down.

Checked on my converted Ragnarok, and it sold....for 280m.
Oh COME ON now! Who bid creeps on a 300m IO?!?
=P


Still, a tidy profit - around 150m invested, so a 130m profit minus market fees. Not bad for less than 5 minutes of "work".

When people wax conspiratorial about this or that evil cabal "cornering" a bit of salvage, or something along those lines, I remember scores like this.

Very few people need bother being nefarious on the market when massively profitable deals like this one are literally strewn all over the place. No eeeeeebil necessary, not even any real market know-how; just the willingness to take one step more than most other people.

And that's a concept that scales fairly well- it doesn't apply just to high finance with purples, it even works with humble generics.

I can, on any given day, pick up a ten stack of 'good' level 30 generic recipes (defined as 'anything people actually use'- heal, damage, accuracy, end mod & end redux have reliably high turnover) for 100 or so inf each, craft them & sell them by the next day for 2-300k each.

Same goes for invention IOs- there are a lot of things that aren't super pricy that people still like. Over the past month or so I've picked up 10 stacks of this or that 'okay' recipe for a few k, mostly something I needed for a character, crafted them and sold 'em for 500-1m.

No savvy required, just the willingness to put in some bids, buy some salvage & hit a crafting table somewhere.


On weird thing I've noticed since returning to the game is you can get positively DISGUSTING prices for super low level generics- level 15 and 20's.
I was churning out level 35s on my field crafter for a while before I noticed that he could sell 15's and 20's for the same price, but with a lot lower overhead.

I think it's due to DFB.
People hit the FF button and arrive at level 12 or whatever with totally empty slots, and spending a few hundred K on a generic they won't have to mess around with for a while is a no brainer.

Anyway, it's something that can be a good moneymaker for your low level guys.