Scientist

I was puzzling over how much slotting love to give Inexhaustible on my Bio tank, I don't have enough to 6-slot it for interesting set bonuses, should it get more than 1-2, and what should those be?

Good to know, I'm discussing this with a friend who is going to dual build Crab/Bane, it will change both my and his powers chosen. I actually kind of like the gun models, but Suppression is too awesome to give up. Do you happen to know if anyone has tested this for the VEAT powers, btw? Sometimes the devs did forget about HEATs and VEATs when rebalancing things. . .

So it sounds like what I might gain in animation time by using the gun ST attacks in place of the Crab ST attacks, I'm likely to lose in redraw time. I'm not willing to give up the huge Suppression cone from Crab, which is also energy damage, so back to Crab attacks it is. Thanks for the info!

In the 3 months since the game came out the markets have definitely changed due to this. The OP mentions Decimation, for example, as only selling for "several million" when in short supply. In the first couple of weeks of the game, they were selling for well over 5M. More people have learned how to do the conversion process to efficiently turn low demand goods into high demand goods, so the market has "flattened". Numinas have also dropped in price, I know because I still have a memorial one listed for over 8M. Also, as Boogaloo said, even if you generate your own IOs, to get them attuned for free you have to buy them on the market, so you would want to sell yours and buy someone else's (or maybe your own, not sure if that is possible?). There are a few procs that may be exceptions, where if you made the low level one to sell, you can just slot it since it is level invariant.

I definitely like the Destiny 120 sec Clarion mezz protection for a Rad/ defender, getting mezzed can be death in a lot of TFs and trials since your AoE debuffs have been generating aggro all this time. As a Rad/ I don't tend to need more End, between the "you are on a team" defender inherent and perma-Accelerate Metabolism, so I didn't bother with Ageless.

So when I was setting up my Crab build back on Live, a goal was to avoid any Soldier gun attacks, because the redraw animation slowed things down in a rotation. My understanding is that late in the game, there was an animation pass by BABs so that redraws would not slow down animations, but I never revised the build. Does it now make sense to use the first two Gun attacks, which are faster animations, in place of Channelgun and Longfang? The AoEs (Venom Grenade, etc.) seem to be equivalent, though Suppression on the Crab of course has double the arc. I realize Channelgun has energy damage, which is less resisted than the lethal of Single Shot, but Single Shot is also 1 sec instead of 1.6 sec, for example. Also, does anyone happen to know if the gun redraw animation is one of the ones that can be turned off at the Tailor?

I believe they did bump up damage resist values in set bonuses in multiple sets with the code that went into Homecoming, because nobody ever built for resist, just defense. I think actual damage resistance got added in as well to some sets where it was previously only "mezz resist", which wasn't of much use to anyone. A few defense bonuses may have been mucked with as well.

I didn't manage to make the donation window, but did want to make a suggestion to the devs that they make their contingency fund a full month's expenses. As they saw this time, it is not hard for something unexpected (Paypal issues, changing server companies, etc.) to require an extra month's worth of fees "up front", just like when you are changing rental apartments some extra money is needed for deposits and such. I've been involved with several nonprofits, and I'm sure the IRS does not have a problem even with a nonprofit to have a months worth of expenses in the bank at any one time.

I tend to plan out my characters way in advance, so as I level up I look at powers I can put the same attuned sets in that I want at 50. That way I get to start benefiting a bit from the recharge, defense, etc. even before 50. That might mean I 5 slot something earlier than otherwise, for example, to get a set bonus. Other powers will just have generic level 25 or 30 IOs for a long time. At 50 I'll typically respec anyway to make sure all my powers are available at the levels I may want to exemp to, and ditch anything I was experimenting with (goodbye Long Range Teleport!), so I can pull out anything I changed my mind on at that point and reuse it on someone else.

That explains why a friend of mine who had one listed at 10M for weeks from before the price dropped down to the 5-6M range finally had it sell, I'll pass along his thanks to whoever tried this doomed attempt to manipulate the market! :)

I believe you are correct that they have to be slotted to upgrade, so I suspect it is a mix of buying and using unslotters, and people who are respecing and pull out the old ones to sell because they want something else in that power. It is pretty easy to recycle IOs now that you have dozens of enhancement slots instead of just 10. Neither of those produces a lot, which is why I think the superior ATOs turn over a lot slower than the regular ones.

I would say a lot of wealth in this game is a lot less than it was on live on the original game. There, a fairly high end build was 1-2B, here as someone said earlier around 300M, give or take, will do it. A high recharge build, a bit more, high defense is not as expensive. I'm not working quite as hard on my marketing since I cleared 1B, since I only have one level 50 character so far, and at my rate of play I'll be lucky to get 1 additional every couple of months. Then again, after getting my first 50 I now spend a lot of play time doing things like running arcs to open TF contacts, collecting badges for useful accolades, and so on rather than joining PI radio teams for fast leveling. Really optimizing a character takes longer than getting them to 50 these days, and there are not many additional shortcuts you can buy with Inf once you have your IO build. :) To those wondering where the 1% cutoff lies, I would bet my 1B is well within it. There were a LOT of people even in the live game who never had 1B inf in the entire game, and it was considerably easier to earn Inf then since there were a lot more things you could flip profitably. I had several friends with multiple 50s who probably didn't have 200M between all their characters, let alone a purple IO.

Does your base teleporter take you to the Chantry in the Shadow Shard? Thanks for the guide, I didn't realize LFG worked this way.

Sonic has - by far - the worst (inherent) single target dps of any Blast set. The stacking -resist debuffs merely bring that up to 'adequate'. Fire Blast will still do more damage solo. Sonic Defenders also tend to 'de-optimize' their single target damage rotation by taking Screech rather than Shout since it boosts the resist debuffing. Good to know, I hadn't done a dpa analysis of Fire versus Sonic. I've never really seen any reason to optimize my dps on a defender, I'm rolling a defender for teaming, I've got other ATs for soloing. While I definitely want to contribute dps on a defender, if I want to fight an AV as an AV I'll recruit someone to help to make it tolerably fast.

Same issue throughout my rad defender career, as far as I know the only answer is the Clarion Incarnate power. Adding up various "resists" from IO sets just shortens the duration of a mezz, toggles still drop.

There was a reason sometimes I would switch from playing my Rad defender, which required a certain amount of team cooperation which one would THINK would be fairly straightforward, to playing my Mastermind, once in a while. . . :)

The reason it happens every time you level is that you get one large inspiration of each type affecting you when you level, and a yellow insp grants +to hit. A large one grants +37.5%, which is over the 22% needed for insta-snipe. A medium yellow, btw, is only 18.75%, not quite enough. To the OP, the nomenclature in the game can be confusing, unfortunately. Accuracy goes in one place in the overall formula to hit mobs, "to hit" goes in another place. Accuracy comes from IO set bonuses, slotting Accuracy SOs/IOs in powers, and so on. To Hit is much rarer, though also much more useful percent-for-percent if you are trying to hit mobs which are higher level than you, or have defenses. It is also the only thing that can give you insta-snipe currently. To hit comes from the Tactics power, as well as a few others in the game, yellow insps, and you can get continuous +6% from the Kismet proc (which is wrongly labeled Accuracy, by the way). A defender can actually get insta-snipe continuously just from a Kismet and 2-slotted Tactics, but that is because the AT modifier for buffs/debuffs on a defender is much higher than that on a blaster. I suggest using the Pine's hero planner to figure out exactly what you need, no point in buying enhancements and doing a respec and still not having it work. I heard, by the way, that they may be changing insta-snipe so that everyone has it, but the damage bonus will increase with higher To Hit up to 22%. I haven't verified that myself.

An associated tip that relates to this is the "/altinvite" command which lets you invite other characters you have on that server to your sg, without needing to have some other friend in your sg online to do it.

It should, they are from different power sources. One is a foe-self-casting proc, as Redlynne mentions, and the other is from your Arctic Breath. I would also guess that a different -res proc, such as that from Annihilation, would stack with the Achilles Heel one, any idea Redlynne?

I would agree with you that a lot of bids on something could be pretty meaningless, but I would argue that having only a few bids does tell you something useful. You mention, for example, the Aegis that only had 2 for sale. If it also had only 3 bids, that may be a sign of low demand, and you may not want to list at the high end of whatever last 5 range is showing. If there are 50 bids, it may at least be worth looking at the set bonuses and demand for other IOs in the set and such to see if there may be legit demand versus someone trying to pump demand with lowball bid stacking.

An Epic pool available for Tankers that I think is underrated in this regard is Soul Mastery, which has Darkest Night. That is -21% damage on the target, and I don't believe -damage gets the automatic 87% or more reduction of effect that most other debuffs like -tohit get against AVs. -resist is the other exception to that reduction I know of. The nice feature of that is not only is it like stacking another 21% damage resist on top of your other resists, if the AV does an AoE that hits the rest of the party, it reduces damage on them as well. What I'm not sure of is how much Taunt effect comes from a non-damaging toggle debuff. The threat multiplication calculations I've seen work based on a damage multiplier. I can tell you from playing defenders that toggle debuffs do generate aggro, but I've never seen anything on how they multiply with Taunt.

Would a Hami-O Acc/Mezz increase the duration of Time Crawl at all? It isn't really a standard mezz.

I actually found doing the Moonfire TF on a team of 8 was just about as fast as hunting those stupid warwolves outdoors, because they run all over, and it got both the WW and the Vampire badges (well, I think I was 2 short on the Vamp one) plus merits. No unlock, unlike Hess. Interesting about the contact to get all the Mayhem missions, I had no idea there was a way to do that other than carefully level a character villianside, making sure not to get on a great team for too long and blow past a 5 level range. . .

Actually, I would suggest buying most of your level 25 IOs from the auction house, just don't pay the "buy it now" price. You can buy most for well under what it costs to buy the recipe and craft it, like 10-30k. You just need to take a few days to get them at good prices.

Sonic will certainly be more in demand than beam rifle in a high level team, since it helps melt AVs. I kind of liked the effects of beam rifle, so I had one on live, but never got to 50 on them, it was for a theme team. Kinetics takes a certain kind of high risk/high reward, live on the edge type player. I have a friend who loves it, but his motto for blasters is "if you don't have debt, you aren't playing hard enough", so take that with a grain of salt. It will certainly be in demand at high levels, but so is Time.