Yomo Kimyata

No, but that was the only thing that made sense to me for that tradeoff. I clearly disagree -- -to hit resistance is incredibly valuable, and in order to fit in that power you needed to make balance choices. No longer -- now it's pretty much free. It wasn't OP before, imo. Now it certainly is, imo.

I'm not able to log onto beta at this point in time, but one change that seems very overpowered is the drop in endurance cost for Focused Accuracy/Targeting Drone. Is this because you have removed the -to hit resistance? If so, then I can understand the balancing act, but otherwise it's just incredibly overpowered.

The revamped battle axe is definitely a top performer, and should work well with all secondaries. Energy Aura will be a lot easier for general play than Fire, but Fire will ultimately be a higher damage dealer.

Of course, everything depends, but I've got a system that generally works pretty well for me which involves soloing quickly and I can generally justify it economically and in a role playing fashion as well. Lvl 1: Do the Breakout tutorial redside, pick up the exploration badge, choose Kalinda as my contact. Lvl 2: Level up with Arbiter Richard, kill one enemy (usually a RIP) which will give me enough inf to post the two large inspirations that I got during the tutorial for my initial seed money. Visit Kalinda, and on the way to the mission visit the P2W agent. Pick up Inner Inspiration, Athletic Run, 8 hours of double xp booster -- all free. Pick up Reveal (10k) and a 30minute jetpack (5k). Finish up Kalinda's arc for your first merits, and this generally dings me to level 5. Lvl 5: Visit all exploration badges in Mercy Island for 5 merits and the Long Range Teleporter (the jetpack is useful). Go to Pocket D, pick up both exploration badges to unlock Pocket D as a location. Go to Null the Gull and make all adjustments I want, and switch to hero alignment. Go to Atlas and visit all exploration badges for 5 more merits. Go to Kings Row, get a radio from a detective, pick up one exploration badge to unlock Kings Row (usually Wentworth History buff). I'll also generally start trading salvage at this point to try to build up inf for SOs and such. Run three radio missions, run Atlas Safeguard mission. This will generally get me to level 7 or 8, and I'll usually have enough inf at this point to buy SOs. Lvl 8: Use the Find Contact button to teleport to David Wincott in the Hollows. Run his arc and Flux's arc for merits and punk Frostfire usually at level 12 or so. Lvl 12: Use Find Contact to teleport to Montague in Steel Canyon, do one mission for him, run three radio missions and then Kings Row Safeguard pre-15. Then finish up Montague's Steel missions, go to Atlas and unlock the Cure Lost power. This generally gets me to 17. Lvl 17: Use find contact to teleport to Angry Young Man and start up the Faultline arcs.

In terms of how much actual inf you can carry on a given character, it is 2bn (2*10^9 or 2,000,000,000). If you want to hold more than that, it won't let you claim it. It's a little annoying that if you want to hold exactly 2bn, you have to orchestrate it because it won't let you partially claim something (like if you had 1.9bn and you tried to claim 200mm, it won't let you claim it, as opposed to being able to claim half of it and hitting the ceiling and leaving 100mm left to be claimed.) You can email inf to yourself (or others) and the maximum you can hold there is 999,999,999 inf per email. I'm told that you can have 100 emails, but it has always been a buggy system and I have seen lots of emails just disappear, so I generally don't store things there long term. You can also store inf in the form of bids on the /AH, which is where most of my inf is kept. There are plenty of non-existent items, but you always run the risk that the devs re-introduce these items!

9 or ten figures!

Two of the best characters ever created! And the cats. Don't forget about the cats.

Don't mind at all. Once I figured out converters (I think I was long gone from Live by the time they came along) I was logging on for fifteen minutes in the morning and fifteen minutes in the evening on about 4-7 marketing characters. From late 2019 to 2021, I once estimated I was netting about 2bn inf a day from various niches. But you needed to do it everyday, and there was enough demand to sell everything twice a day. I retired all of those marketers long ago, but every single character I make now generally self-funds. And that's a few hundred.

I went that direction as well:

I challenge you to play an homage to Julia Child. My work is done here.

Could be, rabbit. Could be.

People mentioned the xp boosters from the P2W vendor. When you change your difficulty, increase size of mob over level of mob. You'll level quicker at +1/x8 than you will at +3/x3. Somewhere in the wiki there is probably a formula for it. Don't sleep on patrol xp. When you stay logged off for awhile and aren't earning a different day job badge, you will get up to 10 bars of patrol xp, which is colored light blue on your progress bar. When that is in effect, you earn experience (I think it's) 50% more quickly, and it does stack with the xp boosters, although I don't know if that is additively or multiplicatively. It is significantly faster. Patrol xp seems like a niche case, but there is a temporary power called Experienced which grants 5 bars of patrol xp per use. The devs periodically give that power out to players who log in during a specific time frame. More relevantly, you can get this power as a drop from opening Hero/Villain/Rogue/Vigilante packs and Winter Packs. According to Bopper, you can expect to get one to drop for about every four packs you open. Alternatively, you can open thousands of packs and let them build up. Interestingly, this power works on veteran levels, so if you are looking to fast track your incarnate status through the use of empyrian merits earned through leveling, this is a great power to use. Match it up with the Windfall power (also a pack drop) for added goodies.

You can still be invincible, but it's BS. Here I've got it 6-slotted with defense SOs and I only get a few % to my defense instead of the 120% that it promises!

For the title of tankiest, I'd want something that is at or near melee defense soft cap, at or near tanker resist hard caps, and has some sort of ability to heal on command. The problem I have with something like SR (and this is a personal problem, to be sure) is that even at soft caps, at least 5% of those attacks are going to get through and if you are constantly in the thick of it, those add up. Defense debuff resistance is also important, but you are generally only going to get that in defense-oriented protection sets or through incarnates. I'd think that my personal best would be something like radiation armor and either staff or titan weapons. The offensive sets have enhanceable and stackable melee defense powers, and I don't think you would have too hard a time making bulletproof builds. The downside is no DDR. Invulnerability would cover that, but it's just not as fun or as busy a set!

Maybe you should make a stone or fire controller and change the power appearances so they look like ice.

Personally, I prefer "ridonkulous", "terriblistic", and "completely non-existent return policy".

I've been winding things down for a long time and doing some cleaning up, including tallying some things up. As you may know, the kiosks blueside list a bunch of lifetime character stats, including some marketing stats. I don't think these stats are available redside or goldside. Over the last few months, I kept records of all characters on my main account, with the exception of 15 characters that were either still goldside and I hadn't brought/didn't want to bring them through or were redside and low enough level that I didn't want to spend the time bringing them to Pocket D and switching them to Rogue and checking their stats. Since April 2019: I have sold on the /AH a total of 478,203 enhancements, 2,131 inspirations, 6,221 recipes, and 1,155,880 pieces of salvage. I have no idea how many items I have vendored, but it's going to be a bunch. I'm going out on a limb here and saying that if you have ever bought an enhancement on the /AH from 2019 to 2023, the odds are rather good that you have bought something from me at some point! Happy hunting!

No matter what, your first character isn't going to be particularly self-funding until you get into your upper 30s. I'd suggest something that can use SO (single origin enhancements, available from most vendors) and be effective, like a broadsword/willpower brute. As you learn more, you can dip into IOs (invention origin enhancements, which provide set bonuses and other yummy stuff) and try more exotic characters. Also consider if you want to solo or team. I'm happy to give you, or anyone, start-up capital. Look for my "Salmagundi" thread in this forum.

1. Not stellar. I would not consider spines as an AV killer, but it will certainly get you there for just about everything else. As mentioned, having Moonbeam or Zapp will help a bunch with single target. I'd think that targeting bosses with your ST and letting your auras take out minions/lts on their own is a sound strategy. 2. Absolutely keep Throw Spines. I'd even keep it over Spine Burst unless you needed melee AoE specifically for set bonuses. 3. Mud pots is probably superior to Quills if you are only going to keep one, but as mentioned this is kind of the point of this combo! Endurance is going to be a real bear. For good times, put an Avalanche knockdown proc in one aura and Overwhelming Force knockdown proc in the other. Knockdown is your friend when using passive damage!

Case Study: A while back, I wanted to make a themed SG named the Defcon Five. It was to be a quintet of female special agents whose primary purpose was to protect the U.S. and the world from nuclear disaster. Now, there are five levels of DEFCON, and each one has a code name associated with it (From least serious to most serious they are: 5: Fade Out; 4: Double Take; 3: Round House; 2: Fast Pace; 1: Cocked Pistol). As you can imagine, most/all of these code names had already been snatched up, and names like DEFCON Two were not available across all five members, so I kludged together names for each of them like DC5 Fade Out, and made power sets that made sense and had a pretty good backstory for both the individual members and the group as a whole. But, the names sucked, and I was never really able to play them out so they are all languishing in their early 20s and I consider it a defunct project. So that is a sad story. However, I also decided they needed a nemesis, and so I created a cyborg monster from a post-apocalyptic future whose sole goal is to bring nuclear holocaust to our present. The clear name for this unstoppable beast would have been DEFCON Zero, which was taken. However, DEFCON Zer0 added just a bit of flavor, in a post-apocalyptic/steampunky way, and I ended up creating variations of that character with that name across a few shards. They are all awesome and terrifying and fit the name perfectly. And that is a happy story.

Do you even chuck wood, bro?

I think the question is how much wood would you chuck? I mean, if you *could* chuck wood.

Sometimes I find an even better name.

I've had an Ice/Thorns dom for a long time, and this thread inspired me to pull it back out again. Currently at lvl 45 and running with Ice as the epic pool. Now, you could write everything I know about dominators on the rum of a shot glass with a blunt crayon, so I've been playing this pretty organically. Not focusing on perma- anything. Having Ice Slick, Thorntrops, and Sleet is pretty fun. Set up a macro for casting it on a target or for casting it on your current position. I went Sorcery for Rune, and I think I will end up with Presence in order to increase fear exposure. Hibernation is a very fun and useful power, but make sure you activate it early enough!

Be careful; seals can be dangerous. I heard that a bunch of them killed bin Laden.