FourSpeed

I put the T3 Cardiac Alpha (Total Core Revamp) in my Grav/FF and I find it pretty helpful. I also have Conserve power, but not Physical Perfection in my build. I posted my current build in this thread, and it has been working quite well for me. The only time I seem to run into END issues is in lengthy extended fights (and only rarely at that), or if I forget to shut my prestige travel power off during the battle. It, and Invisibility can chew quite a bit of END, and if it does get tight, I'll turn invis off until that fight is over also. I also run Maneuvers and Tactics as well, and they're fairly costly. Hope that helps. Regards, 4

It can -- take a peek at this guide thread from RedLynne --> Here Cheers, 4

"Nomar Mister Iceguy": Ice Blast / Ice Armor Sentinel (Bio: A refrigeration / HVAC tech who decided to build himself a suit after a particularly bad week with some of Paragon's various villain groups) 😉 Cheers, 4

Oddly enough, one of my concept characters doesn't need a *set* addition, but simply a change in the Costume Editor to allow for some non-heroic (ok, overweight, out-of-shape, non-athletic) characters to be created. 🙂 The concept is one of those stereotypical Walmart shoppers. You know, the very large, very vocal, mean tempered person you *definitely Do NOT* want to get in the way of during a blue light special, for fear of being fatally trampled 😉 Unfortunately, the Character Editor makes all the characters athletic and muscular -- ie. from the Olympic Gymnast look in the small sizes to the Buffed up Body-Building Terminator in the large sizes. Oh well, maybe someday... 😉 Cheers, 4

Ok, Here's the build (post respec) I think I'm going to go with... Any advice / suggestions welcome. As mentioned earlier, this is a themed, mostly solo build, so a couple power choices were dictated by that (notably Teleport). Based on the last 10 or so hours of playtime on the current build, the order of power picks was somewhat tweaked around level 20 for the Signature arc down there ("Who will Die #1 - Alastor / Theoden) which I like to run, so the two bubble shields were deferred til later (re: solo toon). A few ideas I like in this build are the Mag +2 Hold Chance IOs (Devastation) in Crush & Lift (My Blasters use those and they work quite well). I also was able to slot the KB -> KD procs in both Wormhole and Singy, and still had room for one of RedLynne's resist procs in the pet as well (although, in my current build I've never even seen Singy's HP bar move -- even fighting Romans in Cimerora, but moar iz bettah 😉 ). I dropped the Med pool in favor of Speed (for Hasten - which is fairly close to perma) as I wasn't getting hit much, and I can use P2W Med Kits instead. In addition, I also have a Chance for Heal in Power Blast (another trick my Blasters use), and there's also quite a bit of Regen in the build as well. I was also able to take the Leadership Pool (by dropping Fly - Hover) to increase perception (vs Knives of Artemis, Arachnos Commando Scouts, etc.) and bump Accuracy / ToHit up from the 75% scale. Finally, to answer my original question and taking these replies into account, I put 5 of the Will of the Controller set into Crushing field, and per Frosticus, I threw the Psionic Dmg proc in Singy (I'm now expecting Hilarity, Frosticus! 😉 ). Overpowering Presence (only 5) went into Wormhole (along with the Sudden Accel KB -> KD proc), and when Hasten is up, it should recharge in ~28 secs... Once again folks, thanks for the advice, and if you have any other thoughts on this build, by all means, please feel free to post them. Regards, 4 PS> One more thing -- I can't figure out how to get the "Pet Window" on-screen when Singy is active (like you see for the Lore pets, for instance). Can that be done? If so, how? (TiA) Build Details

Thanks for your quick replies - very much appreciated. I'll take a peek at your guide, RedLynne, and see how you slotted yours. This toon is primarily a solo'er, and one idea I did like was the idea of KB -> KD in Singy which would complement the same in WormHole for porting a mob into his clutches. I'm not too experienced with the toon yet (it was a theme character I started on the old Live servers, and PL'd here), but so far, with just Commons, and some Frankenslotting in the key attacks (Lift, Propel, Crush), it feels Blastery to me (which I like), and Singy is nigh-invincible already, so I'm wondering if I can swap the Sovereign Right IO for the Sudden Acceleration KD proc to get that double KD synergy with Wormhole. Currently, GD & GDF are slotted with Lockdown Sets, but I'm still looking for an ideal place to put the Will of the Controller ATO set also. Once again, thanks for your advice. Regards, 4

I've finally gotten around to filling out my Grav/FF controller and I've noticed both: A> An absence of Grav Guides on HC and B> An absence of builds for a Grav/FF on these forums. I've read some of the stuff from the old Live Forums (on Wayback Archive), but quite a lot is different in HC. So, I'm wondering where to slot the two Controller ATO Sets. I'd basically been thinking about GDF and Singularity, but I'm not at all sure those are the best fits. Any thoughts / advice would be very welcome. Thanks in Advance, 4

The normalized price of ~500K is not that expensive (imho) for rare orange salvage. Many were the times that certain pieces were a Lot More spendy back in the Live days. That said, if the OP feels that it IS too pricey, that's unfortunate, as there is nothing they can do to alter the price. That said, however, there a Lots of ways to earn enough inf to not even bat an eye at that price. A few ideas just off the top of my head (in no particular order), and that's not even considering the many guides that are out there to help you make more inf than you'd ever need: * Exchange merits for converters and sell them on AH * Recipe Vendoring (ie. buy recipes from AH cheap, and vend them to the superhero trainers or stores) * Salvage / Inspie vendoring -- similar to above, albeit less profitable. One nice perk -- Inner Inspiration from P2W is Free, and you can make 3 Medium / Large inspies every 1/2 hour to sell on AH Once you've got 50, 100, 200 million, or more on your character, that 500K piece of salvage is nothing more than loose change in your spandex pocket. 😉 Or heck, you could read my Low Budget Farmer's Guide (in my signature), and be a Seller of rare salvage rather than a Buyer of it (and get filthy rich doing it, besides). 😉 In short you can't do anything about the prices of items in game, but you CAN do a lot of things that can make those prices seem like mere trifles to you. Regards, 4

Interesting thread, and one heck of an accomplishment in a mere 35 hours. Gratz. You didn't beat your challenge, but you were really close, and it's still an impressive piece of effort all the same. I used to do a bunch of marketing back on live for myself, and as part of the Crazy 88's SG, but I haven't really done much here. In general, prices are SO low here, and inf is so Easy to earn here that I haven't really bothered all that much. I have two accounts (for dual boxing, and powerlevelling up the handful of toons from live that I wanted back up to speed quickly). The mains on both of those accounts have about 1/2-3/4 billion on them, and the farmer on each of those accounts has ~1 billion on them (to jump start any other toons I decide to run), and that pretty much covers my needs. For active characters I'm playing I just do Recipe Vendoring based on the old Guide I wrote back on live, and that easily gets the toon ~200 million with minimal effort. That's plenty enough inf to kit them out with nice shinies as they're maturing to L50. That said, I still do enjoy reading about some of the newer strategies that HC makes possible these days, but I couldn't imagine putting in the marathon effort that Yomo did. That's some impressive work, so Gratz from an old-school Ebil Marketeer from the Live days... 😉 Regards, 4

Good to know. I've skipped some "old" missions for that very reason. I was unaware that had been changed. Thx for the info (and thx Devs for the change) Regards, 4

You might also want to take a peek at my Guide: The Low Budget Introduction to Fire Farming where we build a capable Fire Farmer from scratch for under 40 million inf ... or Free, since it is completely self-funded along the way... 😉 Cheers, 4 Caveat: YEP - I know he asked for Rad/Fire, but after a week or two with the LBFF in my guide, he won't need to ask for a cheap build... 😉

In spring of 2004 (March or April, I think?) a good friend, work colleague, and experienced gamer got me into the CoH Beta.... I'd never played an MMO before (I was mostly, and still am, a flight sim guy), although he and I had played several other PC games together (Diablo series, Mechwarrior series, Age of Mythology, Battlefield 1942, and a bunch I don't even remember anymore). Like Bill Z Bubba (Hi Bill!), I was a bit reluctant, but I decided to give it a go. My first character was my namesake. He was an Electric / Electric Blaster, and I picked that because Blasters were (advertised as) damage kings, which sounded good to me, and firing arcs of electricity like Emperor Palpatine looked cool as hell. 😉 His costume was pretty rudimentary, but I liked that the "circuitry" motif was available, so his suit was covered in "micro-circuitry" to amplify his powers (based on his backstory). He was my main in the Beta, in Live, and even today in HC. In Live (on Guardian), he was my first L50, and when I heard about HC, I recreated him and once again, he became my first L50 here as well. It's fun to be back in the City once again, although I don't get to spend quite as much time in here as I used to back in Live (Heck, I don't even have an L50 Kheldian yet -- but I'm working on that too, and a few of my other former characters from Live), but my Elec/Elec blaster was, is, and probably always will be the character I think of as "My Main". Cheers, 4

I'm glad you enjoyed the guide, thanks. Also, thanks for the Ramiel information. Good to Know. Oddly enough for me, I didn't appear to be getting any iXP or threads and stuff. My Alpha Slot also kept showing 0% progress, so I'm not sure what the situation was -- As soon as I started Ramiel's arc (before even finishing it), it seemed to be working properly at that point. Go Figure. I'd heard you didn't need it anymore either, so I'm not sure what was going on. I guess it's worth watching, when you first ding 50 -- if you start getting iXP, cool, and if not, the arc isn't too hard to run for the LBFF. Regards, 4

Welcome to the final chapter of our Low Budget Fire Farming Guide. First, and foremost, if you've followed along from the outset, Thanks for hanging out with me, here. 😉 Next, if you've actually gone so far as to make and play these builds, I truly hope you had as much fun with them as I did (and Gratz on L50 if you made the Final Build!). 🙂 Ok, the Final Build was attempting to squeak out just a little bit more performance, if we could, without breaking anything else. Looking at the planner charts, we were able to eke out a small amount more of Defense, and the Endurance picture improved somewhat (more on that in a bit). The biggest gains though were to his Regen and DPS. The LotG sets, and the extra Numina in health were spendy, but a big help. With the LotG 7.5% recharges, and the 6.25% bonus from Stupefy in CrossPunch, DPS improved noticeably. Fiery Embrace is also a significant damage boost, when it's active. Physical Perfection is helpful for our Health and Endurance recovery. Lastly, I took Tactics purely as a set mule, without any plan to run it. The Adjusted Targeting IOs give a slight boost to Damage, but the Endurance Cost for Tactics is pretty high, and I felt it might offset the modest endurance improvement we had just made. Besides, most of our powers have pretty decent accuracy already. After looking at ToHit rolls on the Combat Chat window though, I find that Tactics does help with accuracy at higher difficulties. So, if you can manage the extra endurance cost (it's not *too* bad), it's useful to run. You can leave it shut off as well, especially for lower difficulty levels, and I don't think it will be too big of a factor. So, did we help our LBFF? I think we did, particularly at 3/8 and 4/8. Both of those seem much more manageable to me now. For curiosity's sake, I re-ran my informal Earning's Rate test, so let's see if the numbers bear that out. Preliminary / Informal Earnings Chart Difficulty Clear Time Net Infuence Inf/min --------------------------------------------------------------------- 2/8 21-22 mins ~6.2 Mil/run ~290,000/min 3/8 25-26 mins ~8.3 Mil/run ~330,000/min 4/8 34-35 mins ~10.5 Mil/run ~308,000/min I believe there are two factors in play here. First, our LBFF is now trained to L50 (he was only trained to L40 in the prior chart). I think that is why the Net Influence column is slightly higher. If the Net is higher, the Rate will be higher for the same amount of time. I was mildly disappointed that times didn't improve as much as I'd have thought (or, at all, at 2/8). However, at the 4/8 difficulty, the completion time was distinctly better, and I believe that reflects the improvements to our attack chain and DPS. For the moment, it still looks like 3/8 is slightly more optimal (on that map, at least), but it's really close, and a little later on, we're going to revisit that in some more detail. Before we talk about Future Considerations, however, I'll share a bit of what I learned while playing our LBFF Build in the Fire Farms, and hopefully give you some tips to consider. You already know from the L25 Build, that part of managing him at the higher difficulties is being watchful about *both* his health and endurance - either can get you killed if you're inattentive. We've made several build decisions to help that, to the point where it's really only a factor at 3/8 (somewhat) and at 4/8 (slightly more-so). Still, managing that often comes down to a trade-off between using Consume and Healing Flames (and maybe not having them recharged next time) vs just popping an Inspiration in the tray. The vast majority of the time, you'll be fine with just the two powers, and in general, unless health or endurance go below half bar, I don't even use them until then. (Note: if Endurance goes below half bar, check how many enemies are still around you -- it *may* be better to finish off the current group, and then pop Consume at the next one). If you can though, you want to *avoid* using inspies in your tray, because they are a BIG part of your damage picture, and your Killing Speed. The red/Red/Boom macros are integral to this. You *can* manage it manually, but either way, converting inspies to reds and popping them like crazy is a key element of farming strategy and success (after a good build, of course). I have two exceptions to that. The first, is that your tray will become clogged occasionally when you get a bunch of singles or pairs of different types and sizes, and pretty soon, you're not converting anything -- that's Bad. At that point, chew two or three of them (I look for loners first). Generally, that will fix it, and you'll be creating reds again. Second, of course, is if the situation has gone (or is going) badly south. If you're 1/3 bar (or lower), and you don't have HF or Consume ready, that counts. Our macros, intentionally leave Good-Lucks alone, and I usually keep one column of them in reserve. I pop any other Good-Lucks along the way (they're best just before jumping into a large group). Being above the Defense Cap whenever you can goes *a Long Way* towards ensuring a situation never does go south on you. Less often, I'll occasionally pop a blue, and the best time to do that, is after you've thinned out a group, *and* used Healing Flames to restore full health. Popping an extra blue right then, can usually top you right back up on both health and endurance for the next crowd. For Build-Up and Fiery Embrace, I use them in two distinct approaches. First, both are short duration (10 & 20 secs respectively), so they're best suited for Alpha Strikes or Finishers. In some cases, I'll use them alternatively, BU on the first group, FE on the second. This is usually the case with lower difficulty. On higher difficulty, I like to pop both at the beginning, to maximize DPS, and they're often ready again to help finish off the Boss and/or stragglers toward the end of that fight. Finally, the attack chain. As mentioned earlier, the first attacks I use (preferably with BU / FE on them) are Burn and Spine Burst. Then the single target attacks on the toughest guy, until the AoEs are ready again. Rinse and Repeat. For the single attacks, (Crosspunch, Barb Swipe, Lunge and Kick), at least one (or more) of them are almost always ready. Of special note: *Start* your single target attacks with Crosspunch! Unfortunately, CP isn't in Mids/Pines (fully - ie. in the Power Charts) 😞 However, because we have Boxing and Kick in the build, Crosspunch will improve the accuracy of your next 2 or 3 attacks. I have verified that in the Combat Chat screen, and the difference is significant. You could also add Boxing to the attack tray, but neither it or Kick are well slotted, and I preferred the KnockDown of Kick. Since Barb Swipe and Lunge are actually the highest DPS attacks (ahead of Burn), I tend to use those first 3 more often than Kick, anyway. In "Real Content", this build is just fine now. As mentioned, you want to reset your difficulty level when you leave AE. Whether you go with 0/0, No Solo Bosses, or not is now up to you, but my feeling is that you're NOT going to make more than the 8-10 million / mission that you make in AE, so there's nothing to prove in my book... YMMV 🙂 Again, you'll also want to shut off the inspiration chewing macros when you leave AE. On patrol, I load up with 8 purple, 6 blue, and 6 green (all Mediums). Since I have 195 auction slots, I order those 3 types in lots of 50 (5 groups of 10 each) and keep a supply on hand -- they're cheap, and those purples are a great "Emergency Button". Speaking of that, you might also want to keep a supply of Focused Rage on hand as well, not for Content, but for Farming. Pop a Good-Luck and a few of those Rages at the Start of your farm, and you can get things off to a nice quick start, if you like. That's my Memory Dump from the Farms and "Real Content".... 😄 I truly hope it helps. Ok. Let's talk about the future -- Now that you're L50 there are several things you'll want to take care of in very short order. Up until now, your primary source of income has come from sales of rare salvage from AE tickets. At 1500 tickets per run, that's 5 rares every two runs (with a few hundred tickets left over). At ~500K per rare, that's a decent 2.5 million when you sell them. But, looking at the chart above, we can Do Better... Way, Way Better (and you don't even know the half of it yet, pun intended). 😉 So, if you must, make a few more runs with Architect Rewards on, just to max out your tickets (maybe for later crafting or an alt), but it is definitely time to start selecting Standard Rewards for your AE runs. In addition to the nice Influence payout, you'll also be getting Recipe drops (including the occasional Purple), Converters, and Salvage (including the occasional rares). The next thing you'll want to do is Super Jump (don't Sprint or walk 😉) over to Mender Ramiel and open up his mission Arc to unlock Incarnates. If you've never had an Incarnate character before, *now* is definitely the time. If you don't have an Ouroboros portal yet, ask in Atlas Park, and someone will usually put one down for you ... Or, you can handle it by yourself. If you have (or are part of) a SuperGroup, you can use the base teleporter to get to Echo-Galaxy City. If you're not in an SG, make one! -- it's Free (no more Prestige reqs) in Atlas Park City Hall. Build a teleporter with the proper beacon (Paragonwiki can help you with all that info, if needed) and you're set. In the tram in Echo-Galaxy City, one of the destinations is Ouroboros! On the very top of the main building's arch in Ouroboros is the Badge location you need, to pick up the portal power. Talk to Ramiel, do his arc, and unlock iStuff -- mini Spoiler below Now, you'll be getting iXP and opening up those power slots as well. While I've had several Incarnate characters, *none* of them ever unlocked those powers faster than your LBFF will, just by running your normal farm missions. This *will* matter. Lastly, in your Game Options, in the General Tab at the bottom, are two options, "Disable Earning XP", and "XP While Exemplared". Ensure that the first one is set to "Earn XP", and the second one is set to "Double Influence, No XP" (Note: that will *not* stop you from earning iXP for your Incarnate slots -- iXP is different than normal XP). Once you've done that, it's time to revisit that 3/8 vs 4/8 earning rate from our earlier discussion. If you'll recall, there were several factors affecting those numbers, (Build, Level, XP Settings, Incarnate levels) some of which, we've started to address. The prior chart shows us that 3/8 is still slightly better for our LBFF, but it's close. However, if we can handle 4/8, there is a trick. The Farm Mission Builder sets the level of the mission, when it's made. In both the #11612 mission, that we've been using a lot, and the #2915 5-mission farm that the other thread uses, @brigg set it so that the highest level Bad Guy is L53 (3 levels above our LBFF). At difficulty 3/8, or lower, you go in as your normal L50 and you farm those L53's. However, if you choose 4/8, your Big Bad should be L54 (+4 to you). The mission maxes at L53, so it *cannot* give you a L54 baddie ... So, what happens? The mission Exemplars YOU to L49, and now, the Bad Guy *is* +4 to you. The upshot of that is that the Options settings we just discussed *now* take effect in that mission, so instead of XP, you get (roughly) twice the Influence! Now, let's take a look at our Earning's Rate again using that nifty little game mechanic. Preliminary / Informal Earnings Chart -- Using the L49 Exemplar Game Mechanic Difficulty Clear Time Net Infuence Inf/min --------------------------------------------------------------------- 2/8 21-22 mins ~6.2 Mil/run ~290,000/min 3/8 25-26 mins ~8.3 Mil/run ~330,000/min 4/8 35 mins ~21.3 Mil/run ~610,000/min Hmmm... Isn't that interesting? 🙂 Encouraged, I ran the #2915 mission for the first time. Again, I don't have Herostats, so this is purely informal, and unofficial. I learned two things. First, I found this mission to be much easier to run than #11612 for my LBFF. That was great news to me. I also verified his approximate earning rate there. Mission-Arc #2915 at 4/8 using Exemplar Game Mechanic Clear Time Net Infuence Inf/min --------------------------------------------------------------------- 36 mins ~21.2 Mil/run ~589,000/min Currently, I haven't gotten too far with the iStuff just yet. All of his slots are unlocked, but all I've gotten built so far is a T3 Alpha (Musculature). So, I ran #2915 a second time with that slotted. FYI, Musculature is a Damage boost, and nicer still, a percentage of it ignores ED (Enhancement Diversification)! Finally, the cherry on top is that the T3 (or T4) version of it also gives you a +1 Level Shift which is not factored into the Exemplar mechanic (meaning that you're technically only 3 levels below the Big Bad instead of 4). Any predictions on whether this will help much??? 😄 Here's your Answer. Mission Arc - #2915 at 4/8, Exemplared with T3 Alpha slotted Clear Time Net Infuence Inf/min --------------------------------------------------------------------- 26 mins ~28.0 Mil/run ~1.07 Million /min Yeah, that matters... It gets even better (though my LBFF hasn't gotten there yet). As part of the several iPowers you can choose, you can also get two more Level Shifts along the way. 😄 Now there's something to ponder when we look at that chart. How much can this guy actually earn with 3 Level shifts and a bunch of T3 or T4 Incarnate powers? Conclusions (Finally, and then I'll sthu 🙂 ) ======== To say I'm pleased by the way this project turned out is a huge understatement. Honestly, I'm completely gobsmacked by it. In my craziest imaginings (other than build cost itself) I never imagined he'd turn out this well. When I look back on the original disclaimers, I'd say this guy blew the roof off completely on all counts with: -- Total Build Cost: 37.5 million (25% under budget), which can be completely and easily self-funded, from scratch, as he levels, in just a few days. Virtually *anyone* can do this. -- Excellent survivability, and surprisingly, he does better than I ever expected (at L40 build and above) in typical Game content as well. -- Earning Rate that is insane. I never imagined for a second it could get anywhere close to the High-End. 50% (or better with full Incarnate), is completely surreal to me. -- Although unstated here, one of my own goals for him (from my other post) is to PL guys on my 2nd account. I started a little of that, and it works great with one disclaimer Finally, where can this guy go? You guys tell me. I'd love to hear where you guys take your own LBFF. Some ideas: You can use him to fund every other alt you ever make 😉 My LBFF was "born" on 10/03/2019 and during the past two weeks working on this guide, he's pulled down 250+ Million Influence (over and above all the Costs discussed here). With that kind of coin coming in, heck, you could even use his free 2nd build (switchable at any Trainer), or one of the free respecs he has already, to raise his game even further, by making one of those very impressive High End builds, discussed in the other Farming thread, for yourself. You might decide to see just how far he can go in the other game content - can he deal with an AV, run the wall in Cimerora, contend with a Rikti Pylon? Who knows? It would be great to hear what you guys discover. Last, but not least, I want to give another shout out to Warlawk and the posters in that other Farming thread, for inspiring this project, along with the AE mission builders (like Brigg and Humble Farmer) who made our own little playgrounds for us, and finally to you readers who've slogged through this guide (once you understand all the info in here, it's actually easier to Do It than explain it, but there ya go). Personally, I had a blast planning these builds, running them, and finally sharing it all with you, while re-learning the very different playstyle that Fire Farming entails. Thanks for your time, attention, and patience. I truly hope you found it helpful. Happy Fire Farming! 4

Welcome to Phase III of my guide to Low Budget Fire Farming. In Phase I, we created an LBFF character, leveled him up to L25, equipped him sufficiently to dip his toes into a Fire Farm at 0/3 difficulty, and survive it. Hopefully, you were able to have some success (and fun) there, gaining actual experience managing your farmer safely, while leveling up and earning enough tickets to further fund his career. In Phase II, we discussed some of the challenges that farmer faced, and spent a substantial amount of influence and merits at L40 in hopes of resolving many of those difficulties, while continuing to level up to L50, where we'll finalize his build. If you've gotten this far, and you've played the L40 Phase II build, I hope you got to experience the WOW! moment, as I did. Gone are the endurance problems, and the health problems, and now with several extra attacks available, we can finally dispense with the free P2W attack powers -- they're not needed anymore. 🙂 How far can you ramp up the difficulty in the Fire Farm now? At 0/8 he can virtually sleepwalk thru the farm... You probably didn't even need to use Consume or Healing Flames at all! The baddies virtually melted away from him, and I got the feeling that 0/8, 0/50, 0/1000 would be No Problem -- it would just take a little longer to kill everything. Heady Stuff! 🙂 What a Night and Day difference -- WOW! At 2/8 it wasn't much different. A little bit slower of course, as tougher mobs take slightly more time to kill, but survival was never in doubt, and any damage was easily mitigated if necessary. My LBFF really felt like this *was* his playground now, and running it was a lot of fun. At 3/8, it starts to get a bit more challenging again. The mobs are much tougher, and they can start to wear your health down a bit. It's not too severe, but you probably started needing to pay attention again, and make more use of Purple inspirations to boost your Defense to the soft cap. It takes noticeably longer to kill them all at this difficulty. Can he survive 4/8? As a matter of fact, Yes! Yes he can. Great, right? Actually, it's only Good, not Great. First of all, this felt a lot more similar to the experience our L25 guy had at 0/3. You need to actively manage him, and it feels like it takes forever to kill anything, while they're wearing you down all the time. Inspirations aren't dropping as quickly, and sometimes, Consume and Healing Flames aren't quite ready when you want them to be. In short, 4/8 is challenging, although it is definitely do-able for our current LBFF. If you ran some Tips again with him (you did remember to Reset the power binds back, and the difficulty back to 0/0 first, right?) you should have discovered that he's just fine now in the "real world". If things started looking even a little bit tough, he could simply pop a medium Purple, and he's golden. Even Malta Sappers weren't hitting my LBFF before I could kill them, that way. It's Good that he can survive at 4/8 difficulty. The first thing you need is survivability. After that though, the most effective farmers want Killing Speed... The quicker the map can be cleared, the more money you can make and the more effective you can be. The best farmers maximize "Earning Rate". As it turns out, there is a relationship between difficulty, time needed to clear a map, and earning rate. Let's take a brief look at that, shall we? Somewhere along the way, my LBFF dinged 50, and while he was only trained up to L40, he started earning influence again. I decided to do some preliminary testing of his earning rate. Please bear in mind that these numbers are informal, just using the #11612 map. No fiddling with XP or Influence settings, just a simple "see what he started with", "see what he ended with", and "how long it took". Preliminary / Informal Earnings Chart Difficulty Clear Time Net Infuence Inf/min --------------------------------------------------------------------- 2/8 ~20 mins ~5 Mil/run ~250,000/min 3/8 ~26 mins ~8 Mil/run ~305,000/min 4/8 ~42 mins ~10 Mil/run ~240,000/min Unsurprisingly, as the difficulty is raised, you earn more influence each time you run the map. Interestingly, though, the rate earned per minute actually drops when the difficulty is at 4/8. We can see that it took much longer to clear that map at that difficulty. While our LBFF is able to survive it, he's simply not efficient enough there to do it quickly. The chart tells us that he'll actually make more money by running at 3/8, currently. One other small note for the curious, is that these rates are about 1/6th - 1/8th of what the High-End guys are earning (~1.5-2.5 Mil/min). There are several factors involved in that. First, our build cost is only 20 Million (likely 1/8th, or better, than the likely cost of those builds). Additionally, those builds are also full Incarnates with Tier 4 powers. This LBFF hasn't even trained to L50 yet. 😉 Finally, they're also taking advantage of an XP setting that raises influence. I honestly don't know what our LBFF's Earning Rate actually is just yet. That's something I'll explore in a little more depth in our next installment. In the meanwhile, whether we can do much about that with our last few power picks, also remains to be seen. At this stage, his Power Pools are set, and our choices are more limited than they were making the L40 build. If possible, we'd still like to bolster his Defense, and we'd like to raise his DPS, without risking his recovery and health. If possible, we'd like to maximize his earning rate at 4/8 difficulty. I'd also like to say that all of that is a piece of cake with the final build, but after looking at several possibilities, I'm not 100% sure. The one I went with does improve on those things somewhat, but whether it will be enough to achieve those goals is currently unclear. Nevertheless, lets look at the Final Build and its associated costs Final L50 LBFF Build | Copy & Paste this data into Mids' Hero Designer to view the build | |-------------------------------------------------------------------| |MxDz;1470;650;1300;HEX;| |78DA7594DB6E524114866760530A0581520E6D69CBC102967697A6BD6FB40563521| |4257A4B76CA08240410A8166FB47AEB1B68BCF001BCF3EC0378487C130F6F808BBD| |FE9E2025906FF3AFD3CC3F0C85C35DD7DBEB47DB424EED348C6EB77CAD73D053F69| |B46EFA06334AC4208F7AD462A5A30F6775B4DA351B193326DE6940BAAA1945E6AD7| |9BAA1B666957DD57CDAED2F375D5E997AF520BDF8D664D7554B3A71F3FB88AAD564| |3DF530615569DE697525BA98ADB7CCCD7ABB51E053CC75915D5E9D6EAEDD95CBBBE| |AFE79AAA53ED970B46B7371C600E0DD38A96E9F32D29F01A68A24858D084E50E73F| |236D355625E3298EF86E9D2ACB188A034B5B9103315667E4F2285FACA91BE1AFA3A| |47FAFEA01A2BD7D8AC0F917BC89C78849AC74C6F9F39FD80F99E60E335D96CA89D4| |0ED246A5D17D406E978EC5C6BB52FB2B678CC00EFE70ABE7F2038788DD271976389| |12F323A953F0656A8BB5992CB8C90CD12C37D70B779A7BFEA47D7BB84E7A5E5A84F| |06B62E515334EF93EF4F46538FFF2083F11FCC8F1636E0C736398FB8B6604E04F00| |FE04E14F10FE44E04F04FEC4E0CF6742C83C99813514652D9C39CF3950D27A67E1C| |FEC139EBD78C4B4506C1EB1F91CF69067FA28B680335888B1969881F75EE60ACE42| |A3DC25CED596901BBD20770DE7E6F00911874771EC2101AE835F7027861E2DC3A32| |43C4AC2A3243C4AC1A3143CFA4A48A37F1A5EAC811BE00B6A9EC19DC8C09B5578B3| |FA1C7C8A753F63BA68DD3AFAEADBACADEFC873EBF6931F59F89A7D6DE1996F9811E| |DE47ED39B5E62654CC98E291B63CAE698B235A6E4878A347F2783BDB3519C51513B| |F94F10129E38BC27777EF0DB497189F81AC7FF9E6A52DEE37D6FE0DEFD399B8FBBF| |4EF54B348F8131DE17FAF1ECA04| |-------------------------------------------------------------------| In addition to adding a couple powers to increase damage, regen and endurance, the biggest addition will be adding some Luck of the Gambler sets including 3 of the 7.5% Recharge IOs. The idea is that faster recharging attacks will increase DPS, and hopefully kill the mobs faster. I also adjusted the macros my LBFF uses, slightly. If you recall, the L25 attack macros *didn't* convert any blues. They were left alone so that some were usually available to help deal with his Endurance problems. Since the L40 build solves those issues, we can now add blues to the conversion process. On the other hand, since medium Good-Luck inspirations can soft cap our Defenses, I'd like to have some of those available as a bit of a safety net for the higher difficulty situations. They can serve as an "Oh Sh*t!" button if things get dicey. Once again, if you find that you're stockpiling too many of them, simply using the Grn macro will convert them to medium Dramatic-Improvement inspirations (which do get converted in the attack macros). For reference sake, I've included the list of the 9 macros currently in use on the final L50 build. While cash is probably not a big concern for us at this point, I'm still going to get the LotG 7.5% Global Rercharge IOs with Merits (50 each for the 3 of them) picked up by running Tips. The rest of the set isn't too expensive, so I'll bid for those on the Market. Here's how the Costs break down. Name Count Total Cost ------------------------------------------------------------------ LotG Def 2 Recipes 5,400,222 LotG Def/End 2 " " 6,600,222 LotG 7.5% Rch 3 " " ------ Traded 150 Reward Merits Harmonized Healing 2 " " 122,222 Stupefy 5 " " 45,555 Adjusted Targeting 2 " " 15,222 Rectified Reticle 2 " " 202,222 Numina's Heal 1 " " 125,111 Crafting Costs 19 @ 43,700 830,300 Salvage - Common (white @511 ea) 32,193 - Uncommon (yellow @2,111 ea) 33,776 Common IO's (Recipes & Crafting) 469,655 ----------------------------------------------------------------- Total Cost 13,876,700 Adding up the cost of the various build phases, our LBFF has cost 34,641,685 influence. Adding in the estimated 3 million for the initial L25 build, brings our final total in at just a little bit north of 37.5 Million, and 210 Reward Merits, which is well under our 50 Million budget. What that bought us is a farmer that is capable of running Fire Farms at 4/8 difficulty (though he should stick to 3/8 for now, at least) and should easily be able to return that investment in pretty short order just running the #11612 mission a few times. Enjoy! In our final installment, we'll explore the results of the L50 final build, and discuss some ideas for the future as we wrap up our guide. Stay tuned...

Welcome to Phase II. In the previous installment, we set some basic expectations, and created a Level 25 character that is capable of surviving fire farms at an entry, beginning level. The cost for that build was minimal (2-3 million), using common IO's but, we also covered a funding strategy that should allow your LBFF to progress nicely into the next phase we're going to talk about. Still, some of the IO's we might want will cost more than his entire build so far. Another way to obtain those IO's involves Reward Merits. While there are plenty of ways to earn those, one fairly easy way, since our LBFF is L25+ (you have been practicing with him, right?) is to run Tip missions. They're short, and the end reward is a cool 40 merits (ie. 2 Steadfast IO's, or 80% of a Luck of the Gambler 7.5% Recharge IO, from the Merit Vendor, just to put it into perspective) when you run the Morality mission. With that thought in mind, my LBFF ventured out of the AE into the "Real World" of content. Originally, I was planning the Phase II build around L35 or so... A couple things changed my thinking ... drastically. The first was trying to run those Tips... At L25, our LBFF is decent at running 0/3 difficulty Fire Farms... Don't let that success go to his head! 🙂 Remember the Disclaimer about "designed, built, and expected ... for AE"? Yeah, I forgot it too... Most content out there is not Fire based, and our LBFF has almost no defense. He also took a lot of his fire resistance powers early, just so he could survive in the farm... That didn't leave much room for real attack powers (the free "Sands of Mu" is a key part of his attack chain - Yikes), or much of anything else... Oh, and he doesn't have any KB protection either (yep, he spent a bunch of time on his keester). Talk about an eye opener (or maybe a fatal belly opener 😉). That was compounded by a few other mistakes, so, I'll pass those on here as well... SO, If your AE LBFF is going to venture out into the "real world" at this point in his development (that *is* ok btw, but be advised...) DO: * Remember to RESET his difficulty level! He's not a content runner (you have other alts for that), he's just a farmer who wants a few Reward Merits... 😉 0/0 is just fine tyvm. Running anything (other than Fire) at 0/3 is likely to end Badly... for You, not them... 😄 * Those macros that are awesome in a fire farm are Not Helpful in normal content. You'll want some way to turn those off outside of AE (Actually, all you really need there is to change the attack binds so they don't auto-combine inspies - ie. run red/Red/Boom when pressed) and reinstate them when you're ready to run in AE-Mode again. I use a couple little files for that. As for inspirations, you'll be much better served to carry a selection of green, blue, and purple inspirations that don't get auto-chewed by your attacks. * Remember why you left AE in the first place. You will *absolutely* make more money IN AE, and your farmer doesn't care about the stories -- he's out there for a short, specific, purpose. In my case, it was Reward Merits thru Tips. Get out, git r done, and git back in the AE - where it's safe and cozy... 😉 Ok, Egon -- thanks for that important safety tip... 😄 The second reason I held off is that at L40 we also get another column of inspirations. So, in that build, we're going to try to address his health and endurance issues, and we're *definitely* going to add some KB protection 😉, and he'd certainly benefit from having fully slotted Burn in his build. To top that all off, we're going to want some IO sets, namely, Scirocco's Dervish, Kinetic Combat, Steadfast Protection, Aegis, and a couple Numina's. Yep, some of that is going to cost a pretty penny, but that's why you've been trading AE tickets for rare salvage to sell for the past 15 levels, right? So, here's what the Phase II build looks like. L40 Mature Farmer Build | Copy & Paste this data into Mids' Hero Designer to view the build | |-------------------------------------------------------------------| |MxDz;1266;560;1120;HEX;| |78DA7593DB6E12511486F786A1949394D672688172B0606C9C54DB7BA302C6A4284| |AF4964CCA16482603CE502DDE98BE90779E5FC043E29B7878837131EB2F22E824E4| |1BFE75DAEB9F99E6692DFAEACED90D2123B74DC3713AB7EC93B10ADE33C627B661F| |A8510B1FB66B5D0348E6B43CB30BB4152D6BD9C4E53994AE9EDD1C0524E9AA59A7A| |A22C47E98D81B2279D9BD42271D7EA2B5B5963FDFC26DA1A0E4DFD481954D80B7B7| |FDA23A5BA31EFB631E8F5C714889F677595EDF407A34C7D3438D6EB96B27B934ED3| |70C6D301DED0349D68977E9F2A0297AB891621A709DF43E6EA0366B4CDBC60305F4| |FD3A557E31349E9695B296635CDFC5C410AF5950B7D35F40D2FF4FD42357EAE09F8| |9F21F794B9F21C352F986B13E6FA53E61B4280CF1408A07605B5ABA88DFEA736498| |F27887D8279D6F20B7C4B08F1D964E811EF586E33DF911A417DE490B58BFBE00133| |4533625C2F6297B9E757DA370E2D7E9DB512E52558F325F658BBB4C0F7840DCCDBC| |0BC22E61531EF1BF5DE841F9BF023093F92F0230B3FB2F0A3083F3E1052DE9370FD| |A9026BE9BDBFB9054A3A6F06BE645EF2ECFC19D347B16DC4B6EBD8A1C14C502CC7E| |793B9226B6578AD516C07B11DC40A8885C89C1262259CAD0C7EC43B3DDD79173B57| |B073053B57B073153B57B1B3FB8F2BABCDBE0DE125882B4BCAFE92726D493958520| |E9794C654919EE7EED17C14FBB7B4D9F72424BC0FADCDBE17F77B98E212F1AB1CFF| |39AF3DE667F2635EC37BF8EB8FE693F0B2B0C0DFA378CA10| |-------------------------------------------------------------------| So, let's talk a bit about costs. Hopefully, you've been earning some decent coin while leveling your LBFF, so this shouldn't seem as daunting as it might have at the outset of the guide. First of all, you shouldn't be the least bit concerned about recipes that need rare (orange) salvage. You've been getting that for free (AE tix) since your Farmer was created. Take it as read that *all* rare salvage needed for the build was (and should be) obtained using AE tickets exclusively. You *sell* rare salvage - you don't buy it... 😄 Looking at the build, you'll see that we changed to L30 IOs. The reasons for this are pretty simple -- L30's are roughly equivalent to +1 SO's, so they're reasonably powerful. They are also more exemplar-friendly than L40 (or higher) IO's and will suffer less degradation if your farmer exemplars. Finally, they are substantially cheaper to buy, and even more importantly, to craft. With regards to salvage, I admit it -- I paid "buy it Nao" prices for salvage. So, for Common (white) salvage, I paid 511 each... Sure, I might have gotten it for 50 or 100, but really? There's a lower limit to penny pinching (at least, for me). 😉 For each piece of Uncommon salvage, I paid 2111. Those bids were typically filled immediately. Recipe prices vary across the board, and even by IO within a set. I bought the lot over a few days, and I'll detail that momentarily. As it turns out, the Scirocco's were virtually a dime-a-dozen, I got the Numina's relatively cheaply, the Aegis and Kinetic Combats were surprisingly expensive, and the 3 Steadfast IOs seemed way overpriced, so I got those with 60 Reward Merits. I filled out the rest with L30 Common IOs for new slots, but I didn't actually replace all of the L25's (ie. Stamina actually has two L30s and one L25 in it). In general the power difference is minimal, and we're on a budget. 😉 Of course, it's also nbd if you want to use L30 commons to replace the L25's across the board. Your Call. Here are the costs (that I paid) to outfit the L40 build. Name Count Total Cost ------------------------------------------------------------------ Scirocco's (4-sets) 20 Recipes 222,220 Multi-Strike 4 " " 44,444 Stupefy 2 " " 3,222 Kinetic Combat 6 " " 3,792,266 Kinetic Combat D/E/R 2 Crafted IO's 3,311,222 (No recipes were available, so I had to "suck it up" on these) Crushing Impact 2 Recipes 102,222 Aegis 6 " " 6,620,266 Bruising Blow 2 " " 10,122 Numina's 3 " " 3,551,137 Steadfast 3 " " ------ Traded 60 Reward Merits Crafting Costs 48 @ 43,700 2,097,600 Salvage - Common (white @511 ea) 67,452 - Uncommon (yellow @2,111 ea) 63,330 Common IO's (Recipes & Crafting) 879,482 ----------------------------------------------------------------- Total Cost 20,764,985 On a bad note, the L40 build has cost almost 10X as much as the original build, but on a good note, we're still well under budget, and we have made some substantial improvements across the board. Please bear in mind with costs, this is what I paid, this time. The market is always variable, and depending on what's going on, some items may be cheaper or spendier than they were for me. That said, I think these prices are fairly representative of what you can expect and I'd be surprised if they changed very much from the numbers I saw. YMMV - Caveat Emptor. The improvements made, most notably to Defense, Health, Endurance recovery, and DPS should help this build fare much, much better in our fire farm, and even in "real world" content. The biggest factor here is that we can soft-cap our Defense to just about everything with a single Good-Luck inspiration, and what does actually hit, should be mitigated by our resistances and regen. Your LBFF should be easily capable of running our Fire Farm at 0/8, and probably even higher levels (2/8, 3/8, 4/8 ???). Certainly, this build should easily see you through the last 10 levels to 50. In the next installment, I'll discuss my experiences with the L40 build, see if the prior claim(s) are actually true, and of course, we'll look at the last few powers needed to finish it out. Stay tuned...

Hi Guys & Gals, This is going to be a bit of a niche guide on Fire Farming in the AE, using a Spines / Fiery Aura Brute as your Farmer of Choice. For those of you interested in this topic, there is a Great Thread on Fire Farming, including some amazing builds and results over ----> here Intrigued with the idea, I posted in that thread (here) but, basically being too chintzy to build one of those High-End purpled out builds, I decided it might be a fun project to see what I could build ... on the cheap, and see how it compared. It occurred to me (eventually) that my post might be a bit of a thread hijack in that High-End thread, and would definitely be too long in any case, with the various updates. SO, I decided to make it a separate guide on Low Budget Fire Farming... Hope you find it useful (or even, mildly interesting) 🙂 I'm not going to repost the contents of my first comment here, but I will cover the key points in this guide. You should also read the other thread (especially Warlawk's first post) to pick up some important basics. Meanwhile, a couple Disclaimers... 🙂 First: This is a Fire Farmer... He is designed, built, and expected to spend almost his entire career in the AE running Fire Farm missions at as high a degree of difficulty as he can handle safely. Second: As the title implies, this is going to be a Low Budget, "Farmer Lite" kind of build. If you've never done any AE farming, and you want to dabble, or learn the ropes, inexpensively, this is your guy. Otherwise, the first thread I linked is where you'll want to be for the high-end stuff (and it's a good read, besides). You won't be seeing any Purple, PVP, or ATO sets in this build. My maximum estimate for this guy's build is 50 Million total, and my expectation is that he will be *well* under that. He's going to be entirely self-funded for this project, with the idea that *anyone* who wants to can jump right in and try this with a brand new character and do exactly what this guy is doing. Btw, if you haven't done so, you'll want to get Pine's Hero Builder. I'll be posting the Data Chunk for our Farmer's build(s). Those can be cut and pasted directly into that program, and will be invaluable for knowing how to slot and IO your LBFF (Low Budget Fire Farmer) character. Third: I honestly, have *zero* expectation that he'll seriously challenge the inf/minute numbers of the High-End builds, but he should be able to reach some (decent?) percentage of that, and will well-exceed earning levels of more typical characters. How far he can go remains to be seen. That said, this isn't a "theoretical" build. I am actually playing the exact builds I'll be posting, and we'll see how he does as we go along. Finally: I'm doing this guide in a few installments. While I've done some farming back on the Live servers (way back when), I'm not an expert by any means, so a part of this project is to relate my experiences with these builds, as I jump into the figurative pond of AE Farming, myself. Consequently, I'll be breaking this guide into sections: Phase I -- Beginner Build, Phase II -- Mature Build, and Phase III - Final Build. Currently, I'm wrapping up Phase II as I write this, and am considering what the Phase III build will be... Ok, if you're still here, let's get started.... Create yourself a shiny new Spines / Fiery Aura Brute. Note, I made him as a hero, and after the tutorial, I started him out in Atlas Park. I'd imagine, it would work similarly for a villain, but this is what this guy did. DO take him thru the tutorial, and keep the 2 TO's and the 2 Inspirations he gets from it. That will be your initial shoestring starter fund (although you'll get plenty more, shortly). 🙂 Sell the two TO's to the trainer by Miss Liberty. Dump the two inspirations on the Auction House for 11 each, and take what you get when they insta-sell. (Tip: You can type /ah to access the Auction House from just about anywhere, which I find very helpful, except in an SG/VG base, or inside an active mission). Those sales should probably net you anywhere from 10,000-50,000 inf. While you're in Atlas Park, DO stop by the P2W vendor (on the plaza by Atlas' right foot). You will definitely want to pick up some free perks there. At minimum, you should grab the free attack powers (Blackwand, Nemesis Staff, and Sands of Mu). Note the first two offer a small bonus depending on your origin, so do grab the right ones for your character. You also want the Inner Inspiration power. That will randomly create 3 Medium or Large inspirations (if you have room in your Inspie tray) which you can use, or sell for additional inf. It can be used every 1/2 hour. You'll also want to look at the P2W's Custom XP rates. The last one in the list is Double XP. It's free, you can stack up to 8 of them, and you'll want to do exactly that. Don't be concerned that you earn no influence with 2XP - You *won't* be making your money from killing stuff. Trust me, that *won't* be a problem. Finally, you also want to disable getting Awaken (resuscitate type) inspirations. You have to pay a little bit for that (1000 iirc), but you just don't want those dropping for you and cluttering your tray. I'll also throw in a recommendation for Reveal (it removes "Fog of War" from a map) if you can afford it (10,000 iirc). If you did OK on your inspiration sales, it's worth picking up. Alright, from the moment you stepped into the tutorial til now (after collecting your P2W goodies) should take about 20 minutes, unless you're completely new to the game. In that case, maybe a 1/2 hour, or so... 😉 If you've played in the AE at all, and if you've wandered into a Fire Farm (either by mistake, or out of curiosity), you probably learned, as I did, that those are deadly places for most normal characters. For our guy, that is going to be his office and playground. That means we're going to have to make some very specific choices initially, just to keep him alive, and eventually, to make him a Fire demigod. That is going to take some time. In fact, our first build is designed for L25. Prior to that, he's just not viable at all (imho). It's crazy dangerous in there! 😄 So, let's get him leveled up. This is an AE guy, so I recommend you doing it there. Doubtless, there are several AE missions that will do the trick, but, if I may, I'll give some props to @A Humble Farmer (search on the word Humble in AE). He created some missions that are especially friendly to low level characters. You can run these from L1 onward, and with the P2W attacks, and your first two power attacks, it's pretty easy. My own favorite there is #3297 - Bads' Backyard BBQ. You'll level quite quickly in that mission, especially as a lowbie using the Double XP perk. DO select "Architect Rewards" setting when running this. That will give you AE tickets as you go through the mission. That is your *income*. For every 540 tickets you earn, you can exchange them for a piece of Rare Invention Salvage (from the guy at the top of the stairs) -- that includes Hamidon Goo, Mu Vestment, Deific Weapon, etc. Each of these sells for 450,000-600,000 on the Auction House, and that is substantially more than you'll make by killing bad guys in normal content missions. Initially, you may need to list them low on the Market (due to seller's fees) and take what you get, but once past that point, I generally list them for sale around 480,000 or so to get full value from them. Trading tickets for rare salvage is how you are going to self fund your Farmer, initially. As you're doing this, *don't* train up your character when he levels. You won't need to, and it'll make it easy to make our first build (@L25) Ok... You've been running AE awhile, you've leveled up to 25 (or more), and you've been selling that rare salvage, so you should have several million inf on hand. It is time to commence your Farming career. Here's what we're going to build. L25 Entry Level Farmer | Copy & Paste this data into Mids' Hero Designer to view the build | |-------------------------------------------------------------------| |MxDz;982;436;872;HEX;| |78DA9592D94EC2401486A750A86CB20914A3068DA2116DDCEE8D0A181350121EA06| |96084264D216D49E4D217F2CEF5095C12DFC4E50DEAA17320D8C60B2769FFF69BF3| |9F396766EA57E5E8CDE9F521E122279A629AF2B131B0A870AE580343D1FC8490D88| |5B65EA82BAD724F57B4B60024E5C4C875AA512A35FBAA4E4D91A132BDA4BA49A5AA| |4A8DA17C042992677A971A54B7A4F147B4D1EB69528D2A60EC849D9F669FD2767CC| |CDBD430BB6A3FE6FC57D54ED782C07CA5AFB6A48A4E8DCE50AE2BA6355AC0595484| |8AD6E0792E121C364FE641449EF89699CE2C328DA2CEA2DE8EC239C743C816632F4| |544908773E5E1D11776E579058F9F79027EF4F0E809BA3C09D414CEDF8104580D81| |007A837FD4EDF666E13804AC5F5862EC1E24C46A21A155C61E40222CCE17C13EE75| |C9A835C31F4C536187B83BEE2C8E27B8CAD405C1259B2C4D823481AEB4863BE77F0| |6670CD0CF6951DD78D7D3C81E49C9DB37DB9026362E9B7DA3048DE79DBFF190BFCE| |43E109664D343763C64D743F63DE4C043AA23C2397DD8B5E959ECB7C14FEE14E1B0| |AF50627267EC8F30CCE3FE71DB6CFE6B9AE1397E4E333CA3EF69867BF8039AA8CA2| |A| |-------------------------------------------------------------------| This build uses L25 Common IO's throughout. It has nearly capped Fire Resistance (88+%), decently slotted attacks, and the basic building blocks for what he'll need as he matures. It should cost about 2-3 Million to build him, and if you've been following along, this should be easily affordable by now. This is a build that can not only survive the Fire Farm, but use it to continue leveling. The Gold Standard for Fire Farms (based on the other Farming thread) are written by @Brigg. He has several of them. Personally, I like his Outdoor farm #11612 which can be run in about 15-20 minutes or so and gives you plenty of XP and AE tickets. Again, until your LBFF hits L50, you should always be running on Double XP - so, you'll need to refresh that from time to time with the P2W vendor. Let's talk about running a farming mission with this guy. This build is capable of safely running a Fire Farm at a difficulty setting of 0/3 (possibly 0/4). You were expecting +4/8 ??? Hold on, Champ... 🙂 This guy is a Beginner! You'll find he has Endurance issues, No DEF to speak of, a sub-optimal attack chain, and significant health issues if he aggroes too much, too soon. Healing Flames and Consume can help with that, but they won't be charged fast enough all the time (esp. Consume). That's ok. You'll need to be attentive, and learn how to actively manage him in the farm. In fact, if you struggle at all with that, dial back the difficulty a bit (0/2, or even 0/0) until you get the hang of it. You'll both improve as we go along. Right now, what you have is a guy that shouldn't die on you in that fire farm if you're paying attention. At this point, I'm going to direct you back to the other posts for a bit (the links are up top). You'll want to understand the section on binds and macros, because those are the keys to running your LBFF more efficiently. I highly recommend that you install them -- they'll help a lot! I did things a bit differently, but the actual binds and macros I'm using are listed there in my post. Take your time, I'll wait. Ok, hopefully, you have the binds and macros covered and set up (if not, ask, and I'll try to help). This guy's play style is quite simple. Turn any travel toggles, except Combat Jumping, off (Sprint and Super Jump) to preserve Endurance. Ensure your Shields and Damage toggles are on, and in you go. It helps to target the Boss and wade in close to him, as he's hardest to kill, and will last longest. If Build Up is available, pop that, then your Spine Burst. Then use your single target attacks (on that boss). As you do that, you'll be creating red inspies if possible and automatically using them when you attack. You don't have a real attack chain, so just fire off whatever attack is ready (Note, you may need to press it a couple times due to the binds making and burning reds, so watch to make sure the attack actually queues). Keep an eye on your health, but especially on your Endurance. De-Toggling by running out of Endurance will get you killed quickly. Use Healing Flames for health and Consume for endurance if needed and available. If they're not available, don't be shy about clicking an inspie in the tray. Currently, the attacks will not use blue inspies, so they're there to help the endurance issue. If you get too many clogging the tray, use the grn/Grn macros to convert them. Early on, you won't get Large inspirations, but eventually they'll drop as well. The macros don't do anything with those, and in the other thread, they recommend turning those off at the P2W vendor as well. I left mine on, and in between farm runs, I sell them (they can sell for anywhere between 5,000 - 100,000 inf typically). If they actually start clogging your tray, don't feel shy about using them. Initially, 100K seems like a nice chunk of change to throw away, but after you get a few million from AE tickets, it won't be much of a concern anymore. I'll leave it up to you to decide how you want to handle the large inspirations. In the meantime, survivability in the Fire Farm is your key goal as this build is just starting to learn the ropes. As you do that, you'll be leveling and earning tickets needed to fund his future progress. After a few runs, I think you'll find it pretty simple to manage, and pretty soon, it should start to go fairly smoothly. If not, dial back the difficulty a bit. Keep it super simple and easy as you're learning and leveling. In the next installment, we'll look at improving this L25 build by using some simple IO sets, a few higher end IO's, which can be bought from AH if you're flush with cash, or, with merits... For that last, we'll have to foray into the "real world" of content, and that presents a different set of difficulties. Stay tuned...

Just wanted to pop in and say thanks to the OP for this mini-guide. I used to run this mission a fair amount back on Live, but I don't think I knew you could run it over and over, farm-style. It's been a great help getting my Elec/Elec Blaster all the threads he needs for his iStuff. 🙂 He plays more like a ranged Stalker, so he usually zips thru it pretty quickly. His best time is just a few ticks over 10 minutes even (10:06, iirc). With Aim, Build-Up, and Zapp, he one-shots the guys he needs to, including Hua Tov (although, like most folks, I usually just click thru him), and, Aim, Zapp, and Thunderous Blast takes care of the final mission question of who is getting rescued, or not... Usually, the baddies' reply is to all drop dead without firing a shot... (Invisibility is a beautiful thing for a pre-emptive Alpha Strike) 🙂 Anyway, once again, Thanks. I've had a lot of fun zipping thru this arc, and it's a fun, and useful one, to run thru when playing time is short. Cheers, 4

Hi Guys, Firstly, I want to express Thanks to the OP, Warlawk for starting this thread, along with the advice, binds, macros, and builds to foster the topic. Great Stuff! My perspective on this isn't so much from a farming approach per se, but rather, a desire to get a bunch of my former characters from the Live days built, and PL'd back on HC, to where they once were, by (eventually) running them with this guy on a 2nd acct. So, with that in mind, I've started a Spines/Fiery Aura build along the lines of the concepts posted earlier. For those of you looking at these Purpled, ATO'd, mega builds and wondering, "How can I do *that*"??? Fear Not! If the OP's #1 Mantra is "I'm lazy" 🙂, mine is: "I'm a cheap Bastard!" 😄 -- No Purples, No ATOs, Few, if any, fancy-schmancy shinies required for this guy. He'll be self-funding, and for the couple trinkets he will want, he'll be able to buy them, or heck, just throw some reward merits at them (a Steadfast +3% recipe is either: 3-5 mil on the auction house, OR, 20 merits, 1/2 of a Tips Run reward) 😉 So, my build just started his farming career at L25, mostly on @Brigg's outdoor fire map -- #11612 (as I continue to level him up). It currently has NO sets, purples, or ATO's. In fact, it doesn't use anything but L25 Common IO's currently. Obviously, he's nowhere near (yet) the numbers OP has listed for his guys, and in fact, since I'm currently running him at Double-XP for leveling, he doesn't even earn inf on these runs. That said, he does have nearly capped Fire Res (88.3% iirc)***, can run that map in 15-20 mins safely (at 0/3 diff), earning anywhere from 1100-1500 tickets per run (which is how I plan to fund his build). *** A second ResDmg IO in Fire Shield (slot taken from Consume) will cap him at 90% Fire resist, but I kept that slot in Consume to help with Endurance... more on that, below. So -- think of this guy as "An Entry Level Farmer". I DO have further build plans for him (bidding on set recipes now), and I'll update this thread as he moves along. The goal however is to keep him as a budget build (~30-50 mil, or less), and see how he ends up doing, comparatively. With that in mind, this isn't a "theoretical" cheap build. I'm actually running this guy right now. Here's the Importable Data Chunk for his Entry Level L25 Build (imho, this is really the earliest this guy can actually survive that map safely -- with a little care and attention). Entry Level L25 Build | Copy & Paste this data into Mids' Hero Designer to view the build | |-------------------------------------------------------------------| |MxDz;982;436;872;HEX;| |78DA9592D94EC2401486A750A86CB20914A3068DA2116DDCEE8D0A181350121EA06| |96084264D216D49E4D217F2CEF5095C12DFC4E50DEAA17320D8C60B2769FFF69BF3| |9F396766EA57E5E8CDE9F521E122279A629AF2B131B0A870AE580343D1FC8490D88| |5B65EA82BAD724F57B4B60024E5C4C875AA512A35FBAA4E4D91A132BDA4BA49A5AA| |4A8DA17C042992677A971A54B7A4F147B4D1EB69528D2A60EC849D9F669FD2767CC| |CDBD430BB6A3FE6FC57D54ED782C07CA5AFB6A48A4E8DCE50AE2BA6355AC0595484| |8AD6E0792E121C364FE641449EF89699CE2C328DA2CEA2DE8EC239C743C816632F4| |544908773E5E1D11776E579058F9F79027EF4F0E809BA3C09D414CEDF8104580D81| |007A837FD4EDF666E13804AC5F5862EC1E24C46A21A155C61E40222CCE17C13EE75| |C9A835C31F4C536187B83BEE2C8E27B8CAD405C1259B2C4D823481AEB4863BE77F0| |6670CD0CF6951DD78D7D3C81E49C9DB37DB9026362E9B7DA3048DE79DBFF190BFCE| |43E109664D343763C64D743F63DE4C043AA23C2397DD8B5E959ECB7C14FEE14E1B0| |AF50627267EC8F30CCE3FE71DB6CFE6B9AE1397E4E333CA3EF69867BF8039AA8CA2| |A| |-------------------------------------------------------------------| I've done things a little bit differently than OP, and I'll cover those points here. First, at L25, he's a Beginner. 😉 He has No Defense to speak of, he has Endurance issues, and occasionally Health issues if he aggroes too much, too soon. Healing Flames is usually up enough to cover the Health, and I've haven't got him killed on that map yet, but every now and then, you still might need to pop a respite. Endurance is the bigger concern currently, and Consume doesn't recharge fast enough to fully mitigate it, so I've covered that in the way I've coded the macros. Similar, and based on, but not exactly the same as the OP, macros are critical to running this guy. There are 9 that I have. Two of them (red and Red) combine small and medium inspies (including Break Frees) into Damage inspies. Every attack, runs these two macros, in addition to the macro to Burn a red if you have one on hand. One wrinkle, these macros Do Not burn Blues (CaB & TaB). Eventually, as the build matures and the Endurance issue gets solved, that will change, but it's important for now, to have a blue or two in the tray if needed -- Nothing is more dangerous to this guy than De-Toggling from lack of Endurance. The other 6 macros are variations on red & Red and they are blue, Blue, purp, Purp, grn, and Grn. As you may expect these create the color inspie they're named for. The green and purple macros are the *only* ones that will also use Blues up. So, if I get too many blues in the tray, I can click those to whittle them down. The only Automatic ones are the three initial ones (for making and using reds - and they're keyed by any attacks used). Also, as this guy is self-funded (mostly by selling rare salvage from tickets), I DO keep any Large inspirations I get. First, it costs INF to turn those off 😉 (see #1: I'm cheap), and second, those sell for enough to warrant putting them on the market after each run. Currently, he doesn't get very many of those, so it hasn't been an issue for clogging the tray, so far. Here are the 9 macros: #1: /macro Boom "insp_exec_name enrage$$insp_exec_name Focused_Rage$$insp_exec_name Righteous_Rage" #2: /macro red "inspcombine Sturdy Enrage$$inspcombine Insight Enrage$$inspcombine Respite Enrage$$inspcombine Luck Enrage$$inspcombine Break_Free Enrage" #3: /macro Red "inspcombine Keen_Insight Focused_Rage$$inspcombine Dramatic_Improvement Focused_Rage$$inspcombine Good_Luck Focused_Rage$$inspcombine Rugged Focused_Rage$$inspcombine Emerge Focused_Rage" #4: /macro blue "inspcombine Sturdy Catch_A_Breath$$inspcombine Insight Catch_A_Breath$$inspcombine Respite Catch_A_Breath$$inspcombine Luck Catch_A_Breath$$inspcombine Break_Free Catch_A_Breath" #5: /macro Blue "inspcombine Keen_Insight Take_A_Breather$$inspcombine Dramatic_Improvement Take_A_Breather$$inspcombine Good_Luck Take_A_Breather$$inspcombine Rugged Good_Luck$$inspcombine Emerge Take_A_Breather" #6: /macro purp "inspcombine Sturdy Luck$$inspcombine Insight Luck$$inspcombine Respite Luck$$inspcombine Catch_A_Breath Luck$$inspcombine Break_Free Luck" #7: /macro Purp "inspcombine Keen_Insight Good_Luck$$inspcombine Dramatic_Improvement Good_Luck$$inspcombine Take_A_Breather Good_Luck$$inspcombine Rugged Good_Luck$$inspcombine Emerge Good_Luck" #8: /macro grn "inspcombine Sturdy Respite$$inspcombine Insight Respite$$inspcombine Catch_A_Breath Respite$$inspcombine Luck Respite$$inspcombine Break_Free Respite" #9: /macro Grn "inspcombine Keen_Insight Dramatic_Improvement$$inspcombine Take_A_Breather Dramatic_Improvement$$inspcombine Good_Luck Dramatic_Improvement$$inspcombine Rugged Dramatic_Improvement$$inspcombine Emerge Dramatic_Improvement" The play style is simple. Ensure the various toggles are on (Quills, Blazing Aura, Fire & Plasma Shield) and then, run into a group, pop Build-Up if it's ready, and then pop Spine Burst, Lunge, Barb Swipe, and/or any other attacks you have (I even use Sands of Mu and Blackwand - Hey, they're not great, but they're Free! and give me a button to push while waiting for the normal attacks). 😉 I don't really have a defined attack chain, as yet. I just fire off whatever is available, when it's up. Keep an Eye on Health, and Endurance. With minimal DEF, they *will* wear you down, so at ~half health, pop Healing Flames, or a respite from the tray. At about 1/3rd End, pop off Consume, or pop a CaB or two. If the group is almost gone, hold off on Consume. Use that as the First power when you go to the next group. Early on, like this, don't get too ambitious with the Difficulty settings (0-3 is fine, 0-4 is probably ok, but more than that will likely be too much, just now). With that in mind, also don't herd multiple groups just yet. Also make sure you Don't have a travel toggle running (ie. Jump, Sprint, etc). At this stage, they cost too much End to leave on. That's pretty much all there is to it. Keep moving, and keep your Fury bar up as much as possible. While I have 9 macros, in actual practice, I don't click them much or at all. The first 3 take care of themselves as I attack. I will occasionally use a Respite or CaB out of the tray if needed, and if too many CaB's start clogging the tray, I'll click the grn macro. That's about it... One other item to note. I don't train this guy up at all, until, I'm ready to actually slot the planned IOs in. So, this guy is actually ~L29 or L30 now, but I left him at L25 as posted. In the next build phase (mid 30's or so), I'll train him up to there, and place his new shinies -- which will include basic Frankenslotted sets, and then leave him there again... As this guy grows, I'll update this post with the current build and difficulty level he's running at... When he gets to L50, I'll see about doing some inf runs for comparison to the Big Boys... 🙂 -------------------- PHASE II Update ------------------ 10/14/2019 Hi again, rather than Hijack this thread -- I decided to make a Low Budget Farming Guide ---> here. I'll add a couple summary bits here (TL;DR stuff) just to keep you apprised, but the detail will be placed into that thread, so I don't distract the High-End guys with my Ghetto Farmer. 🙂 Right now, he's capped at L40 (he's reached L50, but only trained up to L40) on his 2nd build. My assessment on that build is WOW! What a difference some levels and decent sets can make. That build cost just a tad over 20 Million, and he's currently farming the fire map easily at +2/8. I'll be seeing just how far I can set the difficulty while deciding on the last 10 Levels for his next (final?) build, but even without the Double Influence setting, he's getting 1500 tickets each time, and more than 6M per 20 minute run (so that 20M cost was repaid in about 2 hours). So far, I've been having great fun with him, and I'm quite pleased at his level of progress. Here's the Data Chunk for the L40 version: L40 Low Budget Farmer | Copy & Paste this data into Mids' Hero Designer to view the build | |-------------------------------------------------------------------| |MxDz;1266;560;1120;HEX;| |78DA7593DB6E12511486F786A1949394D672688172B0606C9C54DB7BA302C6A4284| |AF4964CCA16482603CE502DDE98BE90779E5FC043E29B7878837131EB2F22E824E4| |1BFE75DAEB9F99E6692DFAEACED90D2123B74DC3713AB7EC93B10ADE33C627B661F| |A8510B1FB66B5D0348E6B43CB30BB4152D6BD9C4E53994AE9EDD1C0524E9AA59A7A| |A22C47E98D81B2279D9BD42271D7EA2B5B5963FDFC26DA1A0E4DFD481954D80B7B7| |FDA23A5BA31EFB631E8F5C714889F677595EDF407A34C7D3438D6EB96B27B934ED3| |70C6D301DED0349D68977E9F2A0297AB891621A709DF43E6EA0366B4CDBC60305F4| |FD3A557E31349E9695B296635CDFC5C410AF5950B7D35F40D2FF4FD42357EAE09F8| |9F21F794B9F21C352F986B13E6FA53E61B4280CF1408A07605B5ABA88DFEA736498| |F27887D8279D6F20B7C4B08F1D964E811EF586E33DF911A417DE490B58BFBE00133| |4533625C2F6297B9E757DA370E2D7E9DB512E52558F325F658BBB4C0F7840DCCDBC| |0BC22E61531EF1BF5DE841F9BF023093F92F0230B3FB2F0A3083F3E1052DE9370FD| |A9026BE9BDBFB9054A3A6F06BE645EF2ECFC19D347B16DC4B6EBD8A1C14C502CC7E| |793B9226B6578AD516C07B11DC40A8885C89C1262259CAD0C7EC43B3DDD79173B57| |B073053B57B073153B57B1B3FB8F2BABCDBE0DE125882B4BCAFE92726D493958520| |E9794C654919EE7EED17C14FBB7B4D9F72424BC0FADCDBE17F77B98E212F1AB1CFF| |39AF3DE667F2635EC37BF8EB8FE693F0B2B0C0DFA378CA10| |-------------------------------------------------------------------| -------------------- FINAL Update ------------------ 10/19/2019 Hi again. I've completed my basic, Low Budget Fire Farmer (LBFF) build, and I wanted to pass on that information for anyone that might be interested. First, this guy IS cheap! The entire build cost was ~37.5 million influence (that's 25% under my max, projected budget ... if only our world governments could do that... 😄). All of that was completely self-funded along the way, over the past couple weeks. Second: How does he perform? I'll be honest -- I'm completely *stunned*. He just started down the Incarnate Path (having only a T3 Alpha slotted currently). There are No Purple or PVP IO's, or ATO's in the build. I don't have Herostats installed, so his Earning Rate is both informal (using wall clock time), and unofficial. Still, in the #2915 farm, at 4/8 difficulty, exemplared, with the T3 Alpha (Musculature) slotted, he completed the mission set in ~26 minutes, earning a tad over 28 Million for the full run. That translates to a rate of just over 1.07 million / minute. Sure, that's only half of what OP's builds are doing, but still, I'm completely amazed that this budget build busted the Mil/min plateau at all. I'll curious to see what he can do with a full set of T4's. Anyway, to wrap up, my conclusion is that an inexpensive, decently performing Fire Farmer is quite easily do-able, for anyone who has an interest in it, and has a few days to give it a try. Here's the Data Chuck for the FInal Build. Final L50 LBFF Build | Copy & Paste this data into Mids' Hero Designer to view the build | |-------------------------------------------------------------------| |MxDz;1470;650;1300;HEX;| |78DA7594DB6E524114866760530A0581520E6D69CBC102967697A6BD6FB40563521| |4257A4B76CA08240410A8166FB47AEB1B68BCF001BCF3EC0378487C130F6F808BBD| |FE9E2025906FF3AFD3CC3F0C85C35DD7DBEB47DB424EED348C6EB77CAD73D053F69| |B46EFA06334AC4208F7AD462A5A30F6775B4DA351B193326DE6940BAAA1945E6AD7| |9BAA1B666957DD57CDAED2F375D5E997AF520BDF8D664D7554B3A71F3FB88AAD564| |3DF530615569DE697525BA98ADB7CCCD7ABB51E053CC75915D5E9D6EAEDD95CBBBE| |AFE79AAA53ED970B46B7371C600E0DD38A96E9F32D29F01A68A24858D084E50E73F| |236D355625E3298EF86E9D2ACB188A034B5B9103315667E4F2285FACA91BE1AFA3A| |47FAFEA01A2BD7D8AC0F917BC89C78849AC74C6F9F39FD80F99E60E335D96CA89D4| |0ED246A5D17D406E978EC5C6BB52FB2B678CC00EFE70ABE7F2038788DD271976389| |12F323A953F0656A8BB5992CB8C90CD12C37D70B779A7BFEA47D7BB84E7A5E5A84F| |06B62E515334EF93EF4F46538FFF2083F11FCC8F1636E0C736398FB8B6604E04F00| |FE04E14F10FE44E04F04FEC4E0CF6742C83C99813514652D9C39CF3950D27A67E1C| |FEC139EBD78C4B4506C1EB1F91CF69067FA28B680335888B1969881F75EE60ACE42| |A3DC25CED596901BBD20770DE7E6F00911874771EC2101AE835F7027861E2DC3A32| |43C4AC2A3243C4AC1A3143CFA4A48A37F1A5EAC811BE00B6A9EC19DC8C09B5578B3| |FA1C7C8A753F63BA68DD3AFAEADBACADEFC873EBF6931F59F89A7D6DE1996F9811E| |DE47ED39B5E62654CC98E291B63CAE698B235A6E4878A347F2783BDB3519C51513B| |F94F10129E38BC27777EF0DB497189F81AC7FF9E6A52DEE37D6FE0DEFD399B8FBBF| |4EF54B348F8131DE17FAF1ECA04| |-------------------------------------------------------------------| I hope that anyone who wants to dabble with Farming on the cheap, or at an entry level, finds this build (and his earlier ones) helpful. I've covered the entire process in much, much, more detail in the guide I wrote, as a result of this project (link is a bit earlier in this post). Regards, and Happy Fire Farming! 4 PS> I *never expected* this guy to match the numbers of the builds posted earlier in this thread, but, as someone mentioned previously, if it can get to 80% or so, on the cheap ... that might be worthwhile. That still remains to be seen, but he's already at 50%, so I'm very pleased and encouraged with the results, so far... 🙂

Bingo! That was it... Never saw the scroll bar on the Powersets -- was looking for it on the Incarnate Threads screen only... Dense of me (as previously noted) 😉 Thanks for your help! 4

Evidently, I'm a little dense today... Unfortunately, I also don't recall how this was done in Live either... 😞 So, let's start with a simple Alpha example. I'm level 50, and my Alpha slot is unlocked. I would like to craft my Tier 1 Alpha Power (Musculature). Based on the above quotes, I should be able to do this with just Threads, but I cannot figure out how... eg. Musculature: Requires Essence of the Incarnate, Hero 1 DNA, and Dimensional Keystone components to craft it. When I open up my Incarnates UI (Powers -> Incarnate Abilities) and I select the Create Tab, and then pick the Incarnate Thread dropdown, and then select Common, the only choices in the right-hand box are: Arcane Cantrip Conversion -- Biomorphic Goo Conversion -- Detailed Reports Conversion -- Enchanted Sand Conversion Genomic Analysis Conversion Meditation Techniques Conversion -- Nanotech Growth Medium Conversion -- Supercharged Capacitor Conversion All of these components require 20 threads, but none of these Commons are the ones listed for the Musculature Power. If I look in the Incarnate Shards section, I DO find those items, all requiring 4 Incarnate Shards to create. So, what am I missing, or not understanding when it comes to creating the proper components using only Threads? Thanks for your Help, 4

Nope, not really... You don't run it down, so-to-speak, you get up to height either well ahead of it, or wait til it comes around again... Then you drop onto it, ... and promptly fall off... 4

I'm sure this is WAY down the list of significant ideas that folks have for improving the game, but my hope is that it maybe could be something simple and fun to do... So, I'll suggest it anyway. From the very First Day I was in the original Live Beta - I've looked up in the sky, seen that Blimp motoring around, and wanted to "hitch a ride". As soon as I got my very first flying power (Hover) I went up there, only to find that you cannot actually stand on the Blimp -- you slide right off... (*cry*)... So, please, please, pretty please, if it can be done, it would be wonderful to make that an object we could actually land and stand, and ride around on, for a bird's eye tour of the city. (maybe even put a badge on top of it -- "Atlas Touring Co" or some such). If it could ever be done, I'd be smiling for days over it (I'm very easily amused...) 🙂 Thanks & Regards, 4

Hi, I ran into this last night. I'm playing a Peacebringer running a King's Row mission arc for Eagle Eye. In one of the missions, your character is disguised as a Skul - complete with visual costume change and power set change. The task is to infiltrate the Skuls, listen in to their conversations, and find clues to the whereabouts of their leader. Cool Idea. As typical when you play Khelds, there are usually a couple minions using Quantum weapons or Voids in the mission -- that part is no surprise. The surprise is that the disguise works perfectly for all the "normal" Skuls, but it doesn't work for Skuls with Quantum weapons. In this particular mission, I believe this is bugged behaviour, since the "disguise" aspect is integral and critical to that mission's design. Unfortunately, since the disguise doesn't work for that guy, he immediately attacks and shoots you if you get into detection range. Worse, you cannot use any inspirations, and of course, you also don't have *any* of your own powers -- result ... unpreventable insta-death. Further, at least in that mission, you can't simply avoid them, because they're in small rooms or hallways that you have to traverse to proceed. After a number of helpless deaths, I was forced to "complete" this mission with my contact directly, as it was impossible to play through it. I also reported it to Support in-game and was directed to post here. Since this mission actually changes your character and powers, and it relies completely on the ability to stand in close proximity to the bad guys to "hear" their conversation, I believe that Skuls with Quantum weapons, in that particular mission, should not be able to see thru the disguise, just as is the case with the normal Skuls. Regards, 4