Wobegone

So I decided to do an experiment ala Yomo here: A Meandering Path to a Billion Inf - The Market - Homecoming (homecomingservers.com) but simplified a bit. Starting from scratch I decided on an Archer/Tactical Arrow blaster. Always wanted to make one...this seems like the perfect time. First I hit the vendor and got Inner Inspiration and Steam Jump. (I also picked up various other free goodies) After finishing Outbreak(don't use the inspirations you get)I leveled and got a mission from Matthew Habashy. After the first mission(defeat 5 Hellions) I had enough influence to type /ah and list my outbreak inspirations for 1 influence each. I also used an inspiration to clear a space and hit Inner Inspiration and again sold the three on the AH. 46,000...not great, but enough. I finished the Habashy arc, street sweeping along the way and finished at level 4. After that I got all the exploration badges in Atlas park for a total of 8 merits, ending with exchanging them for 24 converters. By this time I'd been playing for about 15 minutes. I have a decided advantage in that I've done this many times....a new player would have to look up the location of the exploration badges. Most also wouldn't know to hit Habashy right away, he's not listed as an initial contact(he absolutely should). Habashy offers two more contacts..I chose Officer Fields. After leveling, I get 2 Times Xp then start Fields missions. Another short arc, although against Vahz(use inspirations liberally!) for three merits. Use Inner Inspiration again...another 26,000 Influence. New contact Aaron Thiery. Total time now about 30 minutes. At this point I haven't even bothered with slotting powers outside of a few free stuff I've picked up like the prestige enhancements. A couple of missions from Thierry, and decide to level again..now level 7. About 45 minutes from start. Still not slotting anything. I'm at about 78k Influence. I finish the Thierry arc for another 3 merits and decide I'm done for the day. Inner Inspiration again, but bad luck. I have about 86,000 influence and 42 Converters. I once again type /ah and look at one of my favorite recipes to buy and convert...Taunt: Mocking Beratement(I like level 31 personally). I look at Rech/Acc first and the last few are for a measely 2025 Influence. I put a bid in for 5000. Immediate hit. Head on over to Steel Canyon and University and craft IO. Convert once to Perfect Zinger for two converters, then start converting for 1 converter by rare type. After two tries I hit on Unbreakable Guard:7.5 Max Hp. This is lucky for me! I list for 1 Influence and it immediately sells for 2.9 million. I now have enough influence and enough merits left over to buy some recipes and log for the day. I put in several bids for more Mocking Beratement recipes...Two I avoid because someone seems to be bidding for higher than I'm willing to pay. The rest I put bids in for 9 each at 5000 per recipe. Time to log. Total time, jut over an hour. I understand a new player would not be able to do this so quickly. But my time investment of just over an hour produce over 2 million influence, 7 levels, and a bunch of bids for level 31 recipes. When someone says 'A lot of time' referring to playing the market, I have a hard time understanding that. Although I understand that some players simply don't have the time, I think it's more likely that the AH is uncomfortable because it's not familiar. It's daunting deaing with a system in which you have no experience...let alone patience to learn it.

Assuming you don't want to bother with IOs: I'd be more selective about which IO recipes to auction and which to craft and auction. Take a quick look at crafted IO prices first. Same for Yellow recipes. Going further, unless you need orange salvage, I'd craft almost all yellow recipes before dropping on the AH. You can make more money with less investment in time by simply buying cheap yellow recipes, crafting them, then converting them. No farming needed at all.

My solo Scrapper projects I'd include for ease is: Mace/Bio Katana/Bio Claws/anything(I've tried Bio, SR, Willpower, Energy Aura, Radiation(on a Tanker). Mace/Shield(End problems early) Energy/Energy DM/Shield(end problems early). I'd say any primary paired with Bio or Willpower would be considered easy mode. That extra End managment early is key for early solo play. I'd add Regen to that list but Regen simply isn't as sturdy if you want to push the envelope a bit. Edit: Radiation secondary is pretty buff as well....just started playing with it, and my Rad/Rad is fairly impressive.

I love Sentinels for hoverblasting and Mez protection. Simple as that.

Great post @oldskool. I love my Fire/Bio and Electric/Bio Sentinels.. Both are super tough and do significant damage. Neither hold a candle to my toughest Scrappers for AV killing at +4x8. I'm fine with that....they're not great AV killers. They are great at taking down mobs. Honestly my only beef with Sentinels is their crappy ATOs. No ranged defense? No S/L defense? Garbage!!!

The big five-oh in November. It's kind-of amazing reading this thread(as well as a similar thread several months ago). So many players about my age or older. This is one of the reasons I love City of Heroes. Yep, there are plenty of youngsters....but a large part of the player base are folks in their 40s or 50s. I love that I was a young man at the beginning of RPGs with the release of Baldur's Gate. To me that was the beginning of a new age of gaming. KOTOR and Mass Effect were both similar milestones for me. KOTOR, Baldur's Gate 2, and Mass Effect 2 are still my favorite single player games. But City of Heroes was the first game I played that was an MMO. I'll never forget my first day logging in.....the character creation, unlike anything I'd ever seen. The music on entering Atlas park. Watching in amazement as someone soared above me. Like the games I mentioned above, there was nothing like it. It was an incredible experience when i first got Super Jump. I still remember that first character with fondness, a Katana/SR scrapper. I loved jumping from mission to mission with him.....timing my jumps to land on the top of buildings......There was nothing like it at the time.

This is insulting, demeaning, unhelpful, conceited, and apathetic. I also think your claims on kinetic users' ignore habits is either hyperbole or a lie. I'm not RogueWolf, so I can't speak for him. It could be anything....medical, mental, crappy computer, or just plain personal preference. Calling him a shitty player....see above. For myself it's my laptop. If I'm going too fast in missions I have problems, especially in caves and sewers. Speed boost in those situations just doesn't work for me. I've never had someone complain if I lag a bit behind the team. Unfortunately I don't have a solution @RogueWolf . I suppose you could try a few solo missions to get the feel of it and see if it's viable. If not, I'd start using it situationally. Make a macro or keybind that makes it easy to toggle off and on.

In an earlier thread adjacent to this topic, I made a (badly worded) argument that the number of players who didn't want to play a villain or evil character was statistically significant. While I still think that's true, I think other factors play a larger role, familiarity with Blue side perhaps biggest of all. When I hear Red side advertising a weekly Strike Force, I'm usually hesitant because of unfamiliarity. Having a 'Red Side Weekend' with increased rewards and/or contests sounds ok to me, but even better would be a Strike Force team that goes a little slower and shows people around. It might even get me to play another character Red side.

A few days ago I was buying Set IOs for a new alt. I'm a patient fella, and when my bids didn't fill after 24 hours, I took a closer look. Someone was putting bids in that were higher than historically average and reselling for rather exorbitant prices on three of the six piece set. The gap between bought and sold was huge....several million per IO. So I decided to overbid them and undersell them. I went into the project thinking i was gonna normalize prices at a loss. I was wrong. In fact, over the last three days Ive made half a billion influence, with little time invested....simply buying the lesser used set IOs in set and converting, and buying recipes of the same category and converting. Always, always overbidding and underselling. Now the market for those IOs are flooded, and the prices are normalized. The original market PVPer seems to have given up, so I've been lowering the prices gradually. Even more amazing.....half my sales are at the higher 'buy it now' prices, netting me a nice profit.

According to your Mids build, your highest defensive numbers are: Energy-41.4, Smashing/Lethal-39.7, and Ranged at 37.3. I'm baffled why your powers display in game is showing the numbers you posted.

I can neither confirm nor deny the use of alcohol and/or legal drugs while gaming (or posting on the forum).

I'd think Accolades are a better indicator rather than badge count. I have one badge character and many with all of the Accolades. I like joining MoTFs for a bit of a challenge that has nothing to do with additional badges. I have a badge character who already has that badge. This makes sense looking at a fresh level 50 with 46 badges...but not really with a Vet level 12 with 223 badges.

While on rare occasions I use ignore, this seems a bit extreme. You're equating wanting to powerlevel a now decades old game with incompetence. Yea, sure, some of those folks constantly spamming annoy me...but I think most folks just wanna skip some levels they've done dozens or even hundreds of times.

Playing the game is: Logging my main and doing a bit of market work, mainly buying yellow recipes, crafting, and rare roulette, although I do this less and less nowadays. Getting on my farmer and jamming some music, although I do this less and less nowadays. Creating a new character and doing some solo missions for a while. Leveling one of my many solo projects. Playing missions and Task Forces with whichever alt tickles my fancy.

Yes....which is why I included it in my post. Seriously, I wasn't gonna respond to this but your condescension sucks. There are several reasons why the Redside population has been consistently lower then Blueside. Some of them have been covered in this and several other threads on this topic. That doesn't mean one of the reasons is many people prefer not playing a villain. With SWtoR there were morality decisions which made running Sith characters palatable for me. The Inquisitor starts as a slave...hard to say he/she starts as a villain. But the only one with a satisfying ending was the Imperial Agent. If I ever play SWTOR I won't be playing a Sith character again. I did the same with City of Villains. I roleplayed two characters that were redeemed and went Blue side eventually. They were fine, but after that, I had no desire to play a Villain again. The story arcs and morality decisions available Redside simply don't offer me palatable choices.

Apologies for the doube post.

I'd say the number of likes counts as evidence...perhaps it's anecdotal, but still evidence. He obviously speaks for a lot of folks reading this thread. I also think your interpretation of Lightside Sith as not 'good guys' is your personal slant. Not mine. That was the only reason I played any Sith character. It was the same for KotOR or Mass Effect. Same for every tabletop RPG I've ever played. I don't want to play evil/selfish/villianous characters. I never have. I've tried a time or two but I found the experience....distasteful and unsatisfying. Increased rewards won't change my mind.

This is true for groups like the Repeat Offenders who purposely stacked buffs and debuffs(and trivialized most content). Pre-IO PUGs...not so much.

How do Scrappers, Brutes, and Tanks differ without IOs? How much do IOs effect the performance of Scrappers, Brutes, and Tankers relative to each other?

This has been an interesting thread to read. My own take is when I reached around 8 billion. It was a meandering path(this is a tribute to Yomo's Meandering path to a billion thread) I started by accumulating merits with a couple of solo projects. After they reached 50, the next several alts got to level 22 via the AE accumulating tickets, which turned into hundreds of low level IOs. After transferring 50 million Influence to each character, those IOs were then rare roulette. Anything I couldn't slot were sent to my main via base storage. This worked pretty well for most of my early alts. Frankenslotting works quite well for mid level characters. After doing that for a couple of months I adopted @Yomo Kimyata's method of each alt being self sufficient. Once I reached around 8 billion Influence I started just giving it away. I started by buying large amounts of Performance Shifter and Miracle procs and giving them to any character I encountered who didn't have set bonuses. And my 8 billion didn't budge. I continued to have each alt be self-sufficient, while doing occasional market work on my main, and started accumulating ATOs via Superpacks, occasional runs with my farmer for purples, and the rest of my time spent leveling alts. My 8 billion hasn't budged, while my supply of ATOs and purples have filled my base. Simply put, once i reached 8 billion, I never had a need for Influence again with minimal effort playing the market, while still giving away rare procs on a daily basis.

I love my Dark/Dark/Dark Defender. She's not only my favorite character for high level content, she's also my badger which means I'm comfortable soloing lower level content. My one caveat to that is I sometimes wish I'd made her a Dark/Fire/Dark Defender. In fact I'm going to make that combo at some point. Dark Defenders are wonderful characters for nearly all content. Fear is extremely powerful, comes early, and is capable of neutralizing an entire spawn, especially at high levels when your defense is high(my Defender is soft capped vs all positional). Combine that with a strong heal, -resistance, and -regen, and they're also perfect against hard targets. i like my Dark/Dark Controller, but he's only level 24 right now. He's great for teams but is rather terrible solo....simply not enough damage yet.

As for powersets specifically, as you said, that is much more difficult to quantify. With the force multipler classes, those with -regen and -resistance are better against single hard targets, while those with +defense +resistance, and -ToHit are great for large mobs. The more I think about it, the more complicated it seems. Other things like +recharge help against both hard targets and large mobs, but so might +defense, +resistance, and -ToHit. As for solo powersets, I've found that either hybrid defense/resistance or defense sets are the best solo. Yet even that doesn't exclude several melee defensive sets from being premier solo characters. Again, IO sets blur that line.

I think each AT could be categorized as having a niche, but IOs blur that a bit. For instance, as @oedipus_tex indicated, Defenders, Controllers, Masterminds, and Corruptors are clear force multipiers with teams. But Any AT can have -resistance procs. Also, the other ATs could take the Leadership pool for additional force multipliers. Obviously a Defender with the Leadership pool and a -resistance proc would be the ultimate force multiplier for teams. My brief time with Repeat Offenders really changed the way I thought about team composition and effectiveness. Multiple force multipliers makes most content trivial. Blasters have a clear edge in damage over any AT with teams. Force multipliers magnify this exponentially. As for solo play, Scrappers and Brutes are clear winners in my experience. This doesn't mean that other ATs can't solo even the most difficult content. It just means that my most successful solo characters are either Scrappers or Brutes. Successful being easiest. (Special plug for Tankers solo-They may not be able to dish out the damage of the other melee ATs, but they can successfully solo almost anything). Caveats: I have little experience soloing Masterminds and Stalkers. The above was simply my personal experience.

Some players take nerfs way too personally. It's an attitude I've never fully understood. There have been cases where Devs have gone too far, but on the whole, nerfs to powersets have been fully justified in all the games I've played. I not only understand the need for balance, I agree with the desire to achieve it. Those who don't kind of baffle me. It's not personal. In the grand scheme of things it's also not important.

What if the problem is untrained levels combined with a specific IO slotted? Or some other obscure combination? We know there are occasional respec failures, and we know that the three solutions are 99% effective in solving the problem. I've never had a failed respec, but I also can't recall a time when I did a respec with untrained levels. The one example in this thread with a confirmed failed respec involved untrained levels. I wouldn't call that a red herring.