macskull

Fast forward to now, and you can solo tank Hamidon on a Regen Brute without outside buffs. (Also, lol at blaming PvP for the Regen nerfs.)

Between converters, drastically reduced merit costs for the rarer recipes, normal drops in AE content, and "bucketing" by level on the market, I very highly doubt prices will ever go the way they did on live.

Masterminds do not need a buff in PvP. Pets already ignore DR and an MM in bodyguard is extremely hard to kill without a concentrated, extended effort.

It works but it's a slightly worse version of Empathy. It's best as a third healer on an 8-man team or in an offense/support switch role

Bug fixes, 100%.

FWIW there's likely a nerf to Burn coming in the future so I wouldn't hold my breath on this one.

I don't consider it a waste of time to take an AT that's outclassed by its peers and make it a viable option, but that's just me. You could compare Tankers and Brutes like people currently compare Defenders and Corruptors - both are perfectly viable alternatives.

One way to answer this question is to compare both ATs as they are right now, and as they will be after this patch goes live (assuming nothing further changes). Pre-patch: short of a few fringe cases there's no reason at all to pick a Tanker over a Brute. The Brute deals way more damage, is almost as survivable, and is almost as good at managing aggro, and the Tanker gets... a mediocre, non-stacking resistance debuff on a single target that requires cycling their weakest attack to maintain. Post-patch: short of a few fringe cases there's no reason to pick one over the other. The Brute will deal more damage some of the time, the Tanker will deal more damage some of the time, but there is no longer a clear "this is the no-brainer better choice" problem.

I bought 61 packs. I'm going to use the enhancements as I'm able but otherwise have set aside a bin in my SG base to hang onto them until prices go back up.

Depends what your build is and what you're going to be using it for, really. There's no "one size fits all" answer here.

Looking for the post from the powers guy a few weeks ago (maybe a month, I dunno) but basically Tankers will never get EA in its current form because it would be too good with Tanker values.

I know you're not going to respond to this but I'm honestly wondering if you were reading the same thread everyone else was, or if you were in some weird upside-down one because none of what you said in that doozy of a post was what actually happened here.

Posi never shows up in this mission. You have to kill Black Swan, click the glowie, and defeat the ambush that spawns. If you're running a second account through this mission the ambush sometimes triggers on the guy sitting at the door.

The reduction in damage cap has had no noticeable effect in my testing.

This may be true but from what I have seen prices have remained fairly stable since they settled out after the servers came up (you could argue some prices have gone down as supply has made its way into the system). The only notable exception I can think of is catalyzed winter set pieces, which was less due to inflation and more due to not being "bucketed" with the regular version anymore.

I'm a little confused, I guess. Your proposed solution (seeding the market with drops) solves a nonexistent problem - multiple people in this thread have stated they've had no real issues getting the stuff they wanted off the AH. Now, if you're referring to the AH's sale history listings sometimes showing "no price history," then I completely understand that, but that's a different and completely unrelated issue.

Ehh, not quite. When all you got out of AE missions was tickets, sure, you were generating a good chunk of inf but no real drops to go along with it. Here you're generating inf and drops, merit prices are cheaper/more items are available/converters exist and are practical, and there's a hard cap on how much a given recipe will ever be worth because of the inf/merit conversion rate. There were a lot of QoL changes on the secret server to accomodate a much smaller playerbase than live had and it's those QoL changes that are going to keep market prices reasonable.

Farming was pretty much the only reason a supply of PvP IOs even existed. Their drop rate was so abysmally low and the PvP population was essentially nonexistent (PvP IOs were introduced in Issue 14, only four months after the previous issue's mass exodus of PvPers) that the only reliable supply of PvP IOs were from AFK farmers. The developers tried to curb that by adding in a lockout timer for the drops and all that did was push prices even higher to the point where there were at least two PvP IOs that had no supply on the market because they were being sold off-market for 3-4 billion inf each.

Things on this market are dirt cheap and it's super easy to make inf.

It is worth noting that recipes are sometimes harder to come by on the market because people tend to craft and convert things these days instead of just dumping recipes on the market. If you can't find the supply for a recipe you'll either need to buy the crafted enhancement or use converters to get what you want. Then again, across all the builds I've made since coming back, I think I can count on one hand the number of times a piece I wanted had zero supply (and then I just bought a different piece of the same set and used converters to get what I wanted). Also, if you're trying to slot an entire build by only using reward merits to buy recipes, you're doing it wrong.

The inflation occurred all at once? My old emails gradually chronicling the drop in what RMTers were able to charge for inf would like to have a word with you.

I understand this is a few days late but all my testing has shown that given as-close-to-identical-as-possible builds there is no significant difference in speed between a solo Tanker and a solo Brute with the changes. I think if Tankers had kept their original 600% damage cap (vice the 500% it is on test now) it would be a different story but all I've found is that the difference isn't enough to make it worth rerolling my Brutes as Tankers.

No, the inflation was going to happen from the very beginning. Players had years to amass influence before the invention system/market was introduced and even though the devs made attempts to add inf sinks to the game they just weren't effective. Farming was never the fastest or most efficient way to make influence but it did help supply the market with drops. The systems Homecoming has in place should help mitigate the amount of inflation, to an extent - the "hard to get" stuff is easier to get, the prices at the merit vendors are reasonable and ensure that prices will never get as high as they did on live, and normal drops are available in every AE arc.

Are you running standard rewards or architect rewards? I haven't seen any stoppage of inf/xp/drops at all.

I am pretty sure the name you are looking for is "selection bias."