InvaderStych

Should have specified "for the team's benefit." 😉

- Hardest Target First. - Attack, Not Confront. - Both +Crit pieces ASAP. Easy with Merits -> Boosters -> Inf -> AH.

Thread is what it says on the tin: Figure this is a bug, but never noticed it before today. Taunt listed under standard enhancement incorrectly, but correctly excluded from the possible sets. In-Game info and Mids suggest Scrapper Savage has no taunt component as it should not. Dunno if this has been previously reported. 🍻

Are these bugged? I made sure to badge my last DA run and teammates were getting the various badges like Lone Wolf and Time Saver, iirc. Probably stating the obvious, but one has to be completing the missions (either as team lead or in parallel) to get Determined and probably any other "All Arcs in Zone" Accolade. Destroyer of Despair should award to anyone who wraps up the list of 17(?) badges though that list includes personal story badges, so yeah, solo. 🙂

+1 for DM/Shield. Classic combo, excellent synergy. /SD is already plenty durable, DM adds a heal and -to-hit to your survival tools. Also: Scrapper Shield Charge. Seriously. Scrapper Shield Charge.

Interesting. I think I figured out your reference here. IDK about hopes for a elaborate tie-in, but if there is a surprise cameo appearance - leading to a full return to the MCU in a later property - by said reference at some point then I'm totally into it. There was a lot to like in the Netflix shows, and a lot to dislike - but if I am reading you right this falls squarely on the side of "A LOT to Like."

I wanted to emphasize those two features of the HC Market as it is possible that not enough players are aware that the market functions in this manner. While I am sure that most of us active in this thread do know that, there's ample evidence (players being unaware that there is a single market serving all shards, for example) that not everyone who stops by the forums does. I am pretty sure that without definitive information from the HC Team the task of determining how much balancing impact those functions have seems basically insurmountable, so there's also that. I can get behind this; not because of an equalizing factor, but because it is more representative of game design in 2021 where the Rewards For Defeats design is very much 2004. There are dozens upon dozens of arcs and probably a handful of TFs that could use their Merit payout increased, for example. So let me ask this: Setting aside activities for which the game code is not able to provide rewards (Organizing Social Events like CCs) what sort reward increase would improve your experience? It's probably possible within the game's code, for example, to provide extra merits to a league leader with a small extra bonus for individual team leaders for things like Trials, TFs, and Hami Raids. It's a good question. I can't stop thinking about Ganymede Station from The Expanse. Complex but also Simple. Easy to send into an irreversible spiral. The Live Market was a lot closer to that than what we have right now. The HC market feels complex/robust enough (and is regulated enough) that it's not subject to that level of failure. I don't know, maybe I am talking nonsense, or stating the obvious. I'm not sure which. Though it's probably for the best that you self-id as Lawful Good. If anyone could send the HC Economy into Cascade Failure it's probably a Chaotic Evil Yomo.

Dark Astoria. From the first moment falling into the Maw through every single one of Mot's interstitial whispers, past the epic entry map with nearly every major (living) NPC on hand, on through the Graveyard map and the epic battles within all the way up to putting down the beast himself. Love every moment of it. 😄

Actually, you know what, that's fair enough. What I infer isn't necessarily what someone means to imply and all that. But I still have a question or two: Over what period of time? How certain are we that inflation is the only source of price increases on individual items? Did recent changes to powers (RoP) or new powers (Combat Teleport, et al) make any particular enhancements more or less desirable and thus impacting price via natural supply/demand? Perhaps not the ones to which you are specifically referring, although I would be surprised if powers/FotM/etc changes had no impact on prices. Are these prices higher or lower than prior to the removal of 2xINF? That change happened a week or two after I discovered HC, so I cannot speak to pricing trends before that point. While all of that is academically interesting, the real question for me is more experiential. Personally, my experience with the HC economy has been quite smooth, easy, and with enough reliable ways to turn Reward Merits into Inf that pricing fluctuations and the current state of inflation have not impacted me negatively. So here's my version of the question: In the current state of the HC economy, are you having a pleasant or frustrating experience? In a vacuum, not comparing your bankroll to someone else's because this is not a competitive game and outside of PVP there's really no such thing as "competitive advantage." This is the reason I'm not worried about it and that I believe, firmly, that whatever is happening in the market really doesn't impact me as a slightly-more-involved-than-casual player. Emphasis Mine. The best I can say is that, to date, I have had a positive experience with both the rate at which various Fake Money Units drop on my toons while playing the content of my choice as well as the effectiveness of those Fake Money Units acquiring the Bits and Pieces to build the toons I want to build. I have never found myself in a situation where I felt compelled to alter (or forced into) one particular play-style or other simply to accumulate Fake Money Units. Would I benefit from Dev intervention in AFK and Multi-Box farming? Probably. Do I need them to do something about it to enjoy the game and accumulate Fake Money Units at a satisfactory rate? Nope.

Is this a tank thing, or are scrappers invited to the party?

Then present your experience as anecdotal, which is how we have to interpret it without seeing the underlying data. If you want us to treat your posts as empirical evidence of inflation; then show us numbers demonstrating a steady-state inflationary trend since the implementation of the NoXP2xInf Fix. Also, I'm pretty sure no one here cares about your market strategy. I know I sure as hell don't, but my Gamer Goal isn't the accumulation of Fake Money Units either. That said, I imagine the marketeers in this thread don't really care about your strategy either, because they have their own. If you've got data showing consistent and rampant inflation in a wide enough market segment so as to affect the player base as a whole... THAT we're actually interested in seeing. This Beast Gets It. I wonder how much of the "OMG AE RUINS THE ECONOMY" sentiment is just scars of the past. Yeah, during Live the economy was basically broken AF. In the 17+ months that I've been around HC though, I'm just not seeing the "massive affects" of the past. Even less so after the removal of 2xINF.

Not Relevant To Me. Because Nerf Regen.

No apologies needed! I don't know why I fixated on that little detail buried in what was otherwise fantastic advice for the set. Doubtless that cycling RT is the way to get the most out of it, I'm just too ham-fisted and forgetful for such things. 🤣 I've got a handful of macros on mine (CT, BoS, Rain) but they're nowhere near as complex as the one's you've got going. I keep it pretty simple.

I apologize in advance for being "That Guy ..." RT is Martial's sustain toggle. It has no endurance cost of its own and increases recovery significantly. Turning it off has the exact opposite affect as the above. My Fire/MC slaughters the blue bar if I leave it off for too long. Between that and the activation time I leave it on nearly all the time, though I will occasionally de-toggle during door to door travel when on a particularly fast moving team.

Because there isn't any. The crusade in this thread can be summed up as "Farmers make more Fake Money Units for Farming than I do for Not Farming and That's Not Fair." As economic evidence is being dismissed and non-farming players repeated saying "this doesn't affect our experience" are being completely ignored, then the arguments put forth basically reduce to such.

Nope, but that is excellent info! League Goals?

Yeah, I forgot about that one. Shout Of Command; Lts and Bosses have it. Giving them the floor from PF to stack that seems to have had an affect. Good stuff. I like it.

Even more broadly: this is the thing I never understand about any particular player's forum crusade against farming. By comparison to most around here I could be considered a "casual," and yet kitting out high end builds on the toons that hold my interest into the proverbial "end game" has been a complete non-issue. It just doesn't affect me at all because of the following: On a whim I dropped 110 merits and netted +/- 22 mil after market fees about 90 minutes ago or so. Approximately 200,000inf/merit using the "Path of Least Resistance." 110 merits can be had in very short order. And most in this thread can accumulate them much faster than myself. It simply doesn't matter. I incorrectly assumed that the consistency in Special Salvage pricing was due to artificial intervention; however, it seems to be designed into the broader interaction between Merits and Inf. Cool, I learned a little something. 😛 There's a "gamer goal" thing going on here. Max Rewards Per Unit Time simply isn't how my measure my gaming experience. If I want to use that metric to measure something I'll go do my real life accounting & such. 😄 If that is a metric that is important to a player; then it behooves them to employ the in-game strategies that net those maximums. It's been demonstrated repeatedly in this thread and others not only that farming isn't the only way to do so, but that farmers don't have the detrimental impact on the broader player base - even "filthy casuals" like myself - anywhere remotely near the level proclaimed by some crusaders.

Gave the new Cimmies a go with the Psi/SD scrappy +3/x8 repeatable mission just for brevity. The stacked defense when 2 groups are swarmed is a bit much, but outside big swarms the hit rate is manageable solo - found myself spamming CT a few times for a bit of extra to-hit not biggie. More interesting to me is that they've become, after a certain point, seemingly immune to the knock-up from both Mass Lev and Shield Charge. Makes sense - Mag 3 protection is stronger than both of those secondary effects, iirc - Mighty still sends them flying, for example. Interestingly they don't seem to toggle up until combat starts; either that or something else strange is going on as the knock immunity does seem to A: not be there for the first volley of combat and B: not comprehensive in that of the mobs hit by either ML or SC, some will fly some will not. Disregarding the misses, naturally. So, my (not really serious) question is this: When is player Phalanx Fighting getting it's cap of 3 stacks removed? 😉

No idea how I ended up with that; but it is kind of hilarious. You're welcome to it for your collection.

Well, yes ... but also no. The market here is subject to some amount of ... let's call it Regulation ... by the HC Team. I don't know what sort of math or logic they use to make regulatory decisions, or even how much/little they Regulate, but .... What I do know is that I've been funneling Merits to Inf in the same minimal step fashion for nearly a year at this point and the sale price rarely fluctuates save but to go up a bit during moments of peak demand. Edit: On average, one should be able convert 100 merits into somewhere between 20-25 million with the amount of time it takes depending on what one chooses to flip those merits into. Crafter/Flipper types or those who understand how to find and exploit a market niche can probably do a little better. I am not one of those players - my market strategy is sort that of a tornado: follow the path of least resistance. 🤣 In this case "resistance" can be measured in time. 😄 Either way, that sort of consistency over time wouldn't really happen in an unregulated system. I don't think so anyway; I know we've got some folks who actually understand economics that could give a more accurate run-down.

I confess, I've sort of been waiting for you to give me an excuse to use that quote. 😉 Had to shoe-horn it in though; I couldn't figure out a good way to imply that the real question is if you knew the server data size of your stash of inf. 🤣

There's zero need to farm. No farmer toons here, yet I not only build with sets, I start using key pieces while leveling. Even if I were to extrapolate my modest "strategy" from my relatively small number of toons to a much larger stable farming still wouldn't be necessary. Merits to Inf does more than enough on the road to 50, and playing at Veteran levels ... well, between raw inf, Common IO Vendor "Trash" and selling drops on the market I can't say I've ever felt the need to farm. I suppose if one wants to be able to drop 750mil on a build all at once on their PL'd 50 ... well, I can't help you there. Playing what others have termed "organically" nets more than enough once one gets the hang of what to sell where to support a toon through their progression to their final build. No crafting required either. I tried that route on one alt; got bored with it. I don't mean to offend anyone, just a personal taste thing. I'm that guy dropping all recipes on the market for you crafters to flip and sell. 😉

You forgot +Whirlwind.