Yomo Kimyata

Protection? War Walls are not widely used in Praetoria, although they can be found in some outdoor missions (such as on the Prevent Shadowhunter's Resurrection mission from Maria Jenkins). The borders between the Praetorian zones are invisible, and when a player character moves from one zone to the next, they will appear in the appropriate area on the edge of the next zone. The border around Praetoria as a whole, however, is protected by a Sonic Fence that is lethal to player characters

At level 10, some observations about Praetoria: I like it! It's different and I'm not sure I'm really getting the "choose your own adventure" part just yet. I mean, some missions tell me I can rat out my people to Marchand, but I've never met him yet. I guess I am supposed to just find him on the map and introduce myself, but I can do that with Miss T 1.2. I'm fighting groups that look like Uma Thurman in Kill Bill, I just finished a mission that seemed to be full of characters from 90s tv shows and video games, and ghouls, lots of ghouls. The last are the most interesting, and I secretly like how one is just sitting there so you want to go up and punk him, and then two more drop from the rafters to punk you. At some point I need to run this at x8 to see what happens, but I'm not there yet! I can't bring myself to halt XP to experience more content, so I plan on making more alts, as I am wont to do. Some observations about Poison/Radiation Blast defenders: I'm not unfamiliar with either set, but slow playing against decently tough opponents demonstrates that this is hardly easy mode. I know that this will develop into a PBAoE monster, but right now, with minimal slotting, it's a bit of a slog. My main attacks are ranged with Neutrino Bolt and X-Ray Specs, and both my debuffs are ranged with Weaken and Envenom. I own Irradiate, but find it underwhelming for now. Eventually I will proc it up, but (by my calculations) an under 40% chance of a 3.5PPM trigger is less than awe inspiring. Things will pick up, I know it! This is also the first character I really have tried hover blasting on. I am not a big fan for two reasons. One, it seems kind of unsportsmanlike. Two, it keeps me spinning right round like a record and that makes me dizzy. So I do back and forth between hovering and just running around blasting things from my eyes. It's a good time regardless! So, on log in I've sold all 22 of my roulette spins (the Cloud Senses just sold as I was writing this) and I'm up almost 60mm for very little work. If we wanted, we could just play rare roulette in packs of 30 nineteen more times and call it a day at one billion, but why be boring? There's this beautiful city to explore and a lot of nooks and crannies in the AH that I'm gonna share with you. First step is to reinvest in converters. Always be reinvesting in converters. For my more active marketers, I get nervous when I have less than 1,000 converters on hand, but I think a couple of hundred on Miss T should be sufficient. Ooh, they are trading at 100k right now! I am tempted to flip some of the ones I currently own for a profit, but by now we should all know that just because there are a few high prints on the trade history doesn't mean the next trade will occur anywhere near that level. I'm pretty much done converting large inspirations at this point as well. Last time, before I logged I wanted to make myself a Kismet Accuracy attuned, so I put bids on one of each of the other Kismets in the set at 1.5mm and ended up buying three of them. Now I'm going to convert each one of them in set until I get the Accuracy, slot one in Hover, and sell the other two. Is this profitable? Well, there are five different IOs in the set, and if you have one that is not your desired outcome, you have a one in four chance of getting the exact one you want in one roll (using three converters). That means *on average* it will take 4 conversions and 12 converters to get exactly what you want. It could happen with one roll. And it is *possible* that you could keep rolling until the sun goes cold and never get it, but that is very unlikely. I'm a big fan of probability, and I've never had any reason to doubt that the RNG is fair in this case, so I'm going to roll. On average, I spent 1.5mm on the IO and spent (assuming 70k per converter) an average of 840k worth of converter for cost of 2.34mm. I feel very confident that I can sell it for 4-5mm. Why not do this on a large scale? I do! One of my marketers does indeed make Accuracies for profit, and I'm definitely not the only one, although I'm pretty sure I'm the best looking one. Or at least that's what my mom tells me. For self-love, I could start investing in ATO sets, but for now I'm going to stick with Yomo(tm) SO slotting (accuracy, damage, endurance reduction, damage, damage, recharge in that order) and upgrade them every two or three levels because I'm made of information, baby! For next time, I want to work on some converting that I like to call "cracking" so I'm investing in some particular recipes and the aforementioned converters. Time to go buy the portable workbench as well -- no point in being in the Underground and not being able to craft! -- so that's a 10mm investment from the P2W vendor. And I'm ready to invest in some super useful PvP IOs (in attuned form): Panacea proc to go in Health and Shield Wall proc to go in the other slot in Hover. I can either buy them directly, buy something else in the set and convert in set, or buy another PvP IO and roll that by category until I get the set I want and then roll i set for the procs. In this case, I believe that I'm best off with the first option, because there is generally not a huge price disparity within the sets, and the variability of random rolling PvPs is not what I want right now. (Oh don't worry PvP IOs, your time in the spotlight will come). So I'm putting in some low but realistic bids on those two. That leaves me with a little over 5mm inf in cash that I'll think of some way to put to work. Maybe my bids fill and maybe they don't, but it don't cost nothing if they don't and I cancel the bids next session. Until next time.

I was just joking, but the more I think about it, how great would that be? One week, none of the subways work, and you have to use alternate modes of transport. People would FREAK! I would LOVE IT!

Transit strike.

I'm going to cheat just a little bit in doing once-a-day posts, because I had literally two minutes to log on this afternoon. I had bought about 60 converters so I crafted and converted my remaining 20 Quickfoot recipes into Celerities. Five of them were +Stealth so I posted them at prices that would move quickly. I'm still buying cheap yellow, blue, and orange large inspirations, converting them at 3:1 to purples and selling them. I've moved past common salvage for the time being. When I logged on this evening, they had all sold, so I'm sitting on over 10mm inf that I immediately reinvested in converters that were trading at my price. I'm now sitting on about 150 converters, 22 lvl 20 Celerity (non-stealth), and I'm itching to make some cashish. NOTE: this session I'm about to describe at length took five minutes, tops. That's because I've had a lot of practice, but I cannot imagine it would even take Slowy McSlowerson more than 15 minutes. This was purely a marketing session -- no game play other than upgrading Miss T a bit with some enhancements which I will detail later. This writeup is taking *MUCH* more time than actually doing that voodoo that I do so well. Playing rare roulette is part art, part study in statistics. I usually budget 10 converters per IO to make it worth "something" but I rarely use anything close to that. In this mini case-study, I have 22 IOs that I want to hit my sales price bogey. I usually set that bogey at around 2mm, but sometimes more, sometimes less. This takes a bit of practice and knowing what can change into what easily. Generally, I will convert a random rare once by rarity (pull up the Convert menu, drag the Celerity to the top, select the Out-of-Set Conversion radio button, and use the (default) Rarity: Rare setting). But how do I know if it's valuable or not? A good shortcut is to ask yourself if you have ever slotted it yourself or if you find it useful. A slightly longer cut is to move it to the AH and check the trade history. At this point in my career, I have a pretty good idea of what items are worth "something". But sometimes I'm wrong. I've never slotted a Rectified Reticle, but I've sold oodles of them. Sometimes you will get an item that isn't very valuable in and of itself, but it can be converted in set to something valuable. Or it can be converted by category to something valuable. Example: I roll a lvl 20 Impervium Armor Resistance IO. That's probably worth something by itself. If I convert it in set, I can eventually get the +psionic resist IO which is generally worth a fair amount more. If I convert it by Resist Damage, I can end up with a Steadfast Protection or an Unbreakable Guard. You can run the odds if you like, but often either way will be ok. I'll talk a lot more about converting in set at a future point in time but I'll tell you this one right now: I always convert a Steadfast in set until I get the Defense, and I always convert a Kismet until I get the Accuracy. If you really have no idea what something is worth, think about what your bogey is. Then see if it has traded for less than that amount in the last five; if so, reroll. Just don't set your bogey too high or you will be rolling a long, long time. All you need to know about what can turn into what can be found here: https://archive.paragonwiki.com/wiki/Enhancement_Sets#Overview (EDIT: that's the old wiki page. See this one for current stuff with new HC sets and all: https://hcwiki.cityofheroes.dev/wiki/Enhancement_Sets). Remember, PvP sets can only turn into PvP sets, ATOs can only turn into ATOs, purples can only turn into purples, WOs can only turn into WOs, and vice versa. You cannot get a Shield Wall from rolling a Reactive Defenses, no matter how hard you try. Here's what I ended up with out of the 22 lvl 20 rares, which took me 106 converters: Blessing of the Z knockback Call to Arms proc Celerity stealth x2 (yes, these converted away from Celerity and then back to Celerity) Cloud Senses A/E/R Energy Manipulator Endurance x2 Gift of the Ancients run speed Impeded Swiftness proc Impervium Armor +psi res Kinetic Combat D/R Kismet accuracy Reactive Defenses x2 (not proc) Rectified Reticle to hit buff Regenerative Tissue regen Steadfast Protection Def x2 (this is a common. I converted a rare Resist Damage by category and got to Steadfast) Unbreakable Guard x3 Winter's Gift slow resist I've got a good idea where to post these to sell most within 24 hours, so doing that now. No need to be greedy. Now, time for a little self love. At level 7, I'm going to need some accuracy SOs, so I'll buy 5 of those. I'll probably start loading up on some sets soon, but not right now. I do need a Kismet Accuracy, and despite the fact I just made one (wrong level), I can make one a lot cheaper than I'm going to sell this one for. And I also like them in attuned form. So my plan is to buy some different attuned Kismets and convert them to Accuracies. Bids placed. Until next time, gentle readers!

I call it PVT: Patience, Volume, and

That is absolutely the fly in the ointment.

I professionally squat for inf. Timing.

I was just reading an article in the NYT that was questioning the scientific value of blue light glasses: https://www.nytimes.com/2021/02/18/style/blue-light-glasses.html?searchResultPosition=4 And to hedge their bets, they also have an article on the best blue light glasses: https://www.nytimes.com/wirecutter/reviews/best-blue-light-blocking-glasses/?searchResultPosition=2

So in today's episode, Miss Terrigen 1.1 meets BV and realizes that +2 ghouls are no fun at all. I start all my characters at +1/x1 with bosses on, and it's not that I regret it, but I'm going to have to do something in order to stop missing so much. Anyway, I've now run two story arcs for 10 merits in total, and am just short of lvl 8. The first thing I did when logging on was hit Inner Inspiration and sell the large yellow inspiration for 3,000. Then I asked myself, hey, why are large yellows so cheap compared to reds and purples? Demand! So let's put in some bids for the ones that are cheap, transform 3 of them into a red or purple, and resell! It's not a super fast endeavor, but it's a great way to turn 10k into 50k on a relatively short turnaround. Remember, in the AH, time is your friend. By playing the slow game, you are trading convenience to others at the price of their inf. They say the first million is the hardest, but I'd actually say the first 10mm are the hardest, because that's what you need to buy the portable workbench from the P2W. Until then, I need to find a place to craft! Fortunately, the wiki tells me of the C.D.E.C., which is apparently the equivalent of the University goldside. So, take me down to the Imperial City, where the pints are Imperial and they sing this ditty. Oh, but before I do, I need to go to the Merit Vendor and trade in my ghoul-blood soaked merits for those magical animals -- converters. 30 in my pocket. So first step, let's take the 20 brainstorm ideas and craft them to a Hamidon Goo. It cost me 20 * 16k = 320k to make this, and I can make a profit as long as I sell it for over about 356k. Remember always that selling is going to cost you 10% in total of the sales price. I like to refer to this as the 9/10 or the 10/9 rule for breaking even. For acceptable profits, I tend to look more at a 5/10 or 10/5 rule, but you can work as cheap as you want. Just make sure you don't lose money on the trade unless that was your intention. Anyway, looking at the current market for rare salvage, I choose my sales price and in short order sell it for 450k, which was more than I expected. Good, I need some posting money. Now let's look at the 30 recipes I bought overnight: lvl 20 Quickfoots (running) 10 Endurance, 20 Run Speed, and paid 10,005 a piece for them. Why Quickfoot, and why level 20? I'm glad you asked. We (or at least I) talk a lot about rare roulette, and there are great guides out there, but it might be easier to give simpler examples. I use rare roulette as a phrase that covers changing cheap recipes or IO enhancements into more expensive IOs through using converters. "Rare" because usually the most expensive IOs are rare/orange, and "cheap" usually means uncommon/yellow recipes or IOs. It's easy to turn an uncommon recipe into a rare IO through conversion, and it's a lot cheaper (generally) than crafting a rare recipe that requires expensive rare salvage. So why Quickfoot? Well, it's one of two Running recipes, and if you spend two converters to convert a Quickfoot by Category (Running), then you will end up with a Celerity, which is the rare Running IO. One of the three Celerity IOs is the +Stealth, which consistently sells well and has decent, if not spectacular, outstanding bids. I generally find this a great way to get my characters kick started. Why level 20? Well, the lower the level, the cheaper the crafting costs. Quickfoot/Celerity starts at level 15, but I've found that level 20 has a much better variety of IOs that I can transform to. So, let's buy my invention salvage. A total of 60 common, paying 250 a pop, which fills almost immediately in the AH. A total of 30 uncommon. At this moment, there appears to be someone bidding 1,001 on large amounts of yellow salvage so I can't buy it at 1,000 right now. Fortunately they also seem to be offering large amounts at 1,002. That's a decent way to get your sales badges for the AH, but as far as I'm concerned I'd rather pay 1,002 to get it right now than to wait for a lower bid to fill. I can afford to craft 10 Quickfoots right now, and I have 30 converters. On your Enhancement bar, you should see options for Manage and Convert. If you don't see Convert, you don't own any converters! It only shows up if you have some in inventory. So I open up Convert, drag a Quickfoot into the interface, select the Out of Set radio button, and use the pull down menu to select Category: Running. I do that ten times (yes, you have to use the pull down menu each time. It's a real drag) and end up with 10 Celerities, and three of them are stealth. I post one for 500,000. I expect it to trade for more, but I never post for less than I want to accept. It sells for 1,755,000, which is more than satisfactory. I sold one more for 1,500,000 and posted the third one at a price I believe will sell in short order. I've now got almost 3mm in inf, which I am going to plough directly back into converters. Right now, the last five trades for converters are all at 75,000 and that is well more than I want to pay. Generally, I pay somewhere between 60k and 70k and it's time to take a break anyhow. Currently level 7, sitting on about 175k of uninvested inf, and 7 level 20 Celerities. Invested time about 25 minutes of game time and about 5 minutes of marketing. Next time, I'll do some rare roulette on those seven (and the other 20 recipes) once I buy my converters. See you soon!

Huh, I find that a little surprising. My experience with solo ITFs is that I assume I'm going to get defense cascade failure at some point, so I max out s/l resist and try to avoid zerging into enemies with both def debuff and res debuff. For me, having two heals up every 30 seconds plus an optional oh shit button from incarnates works just fine as long as I know what I'm getting into. And as people in General (I think that's in Iowa!) say, the best defense is a good offense, especially if your defense is deep in the negatives.

You know what else is sappy?

(EDIT: tl/dr: A great way to make consistent bank, no matter how often you play a given alt, is to put in a bid for 10x a yellow recipe that doesn't require rare salvage as the last thing you do before logging off. First thing you do when next logging on is collect them and put in bids on your salvage. Play and you should have bought your salvage by the end of your game session. Collect salvage, craft, play some rare roulette, and post your items. Put in a bid for 10x yellow recipe. Repeat ad infinitum.) So, I decided to start a new alt, explore Praetoria, and document a solo path from zero to a billion inf in detail, and not at a breakneck pace. I expect to demonstrate a lot of ways to accumulate inf without spending very much effort and to do it in real time. I think a lot of this will be old news to long-time readers of this forum, but I hope someone finds it useful So welcome Miss Terrigen 1.1, a mutant Poison/Radiation Blast Defender. After running through the tutorial, I ended up on the streets of Nova Praetoria at level 2 with nothing but the wings on my back, 25 information in my pocket, and two large inspirations in my, um, I'm actually not sure where I'm keeping those. So they've got to go: open up /AH and post them each for 5 inf and BAM there's my seed money. Since I heard a rumor on a Reddit board, I decide to look up Ancient Artifacts and see how they are trading. Color me surprised to see that there are over 10mm for offer and zero bids. I'm no evil genius (in this incarnation) but I realize that I'm pretty likely to buy me some common salvage if I'm willing to put some bids in. Since I'm not greedy, let's bid 55 inf a piece for as many as I can carry, then do some work for Praetor Barry White. A few missions later, I'm dinging level 4 and going to the vendor to sell my inventory of ancient artifacts, then refill my bids for more. You can repost them on the AH as well, but I'd rather take the sure money right away from the vendor. Don't forget that when you open the vendor window, you can right click on the stack (I think it was 124 deep at this point) and sell the entire stack at once. So, I've quadrupled my initial stake, and I'm going to keep doing this while I go pick some roses. Soon I ding 5, get a new contact, clean out my inventory again and now I've got low six figures of inf. Let's try out something else that I wrote a guide about a long time ago and see if anyone is selling any cheap SOs. So I set filters on the AH for levels 40 to 54, click the For Sale toggle, and I'm bidding on any accuracy and damage SOs available. Again, since I'm not greedy, I'm bidding at 10k a piece. Let's give people a little love, right? I can sell all for them for about a 5k profit, so we're good. At this point, I'm going to invest a little bit in myself at the P2W vendor or whatever it is called. Spend 10k on Reveal, 5k on a jetpack, get Athletic Run and decide to pick up Inner Inspiration as well. The last is another great way to get seed money -- every 30 minutes you get three medium or large inspirations. The larges are generally good for at least a few thousand inf in the AH. I'm not sure how long I've been playing now, certainly well under an hour. I'm going to log, but before I do I put in bids on three recipes at 10x apiece (I'll reveal names and prices next episode). I've got 340,939 inf left over, and I hate leaving that unused. Remembering that brainstorm ideas trade at 20:1 for a rare salvage, I put in bids for enough to buy one rare salvage worth and hopefully make a small profit. Until next time!

You should be able to solo those with any AT that can solo Doc V as an AV. So just about any AT if you want to carry daggers and/or purple inspirations.

The silver lining to this supply deluge is that people started selling into my noob traps again.

I use Time Manipulation to simulate "luck" powers for my concept characters. YMMV.

There appear to be a lot of bids out there higher than yours. I’ve been able to buy decent size north of 360 but south of 400.

I've got a 50 there. The main selling point is that you get two damage auras and you hit like a really slow brick. I think I'm respecing for something like:

RE: cowmanning. In January I leaned into things a little, meaning that I made sure I didn't take a day off. I have a small circuit of seven alts that I run through in the morning over coffee; if I had time I would revisit two or three of them in the evening. Total time spent under an hour, and usually while I'm multitasking. The basic premise is doing the difficult, difficult work of changing lead into gold and receiving a small fee for my efforts. Really, I should get a medal for all I do for the community... Anyway I tracked the profitability by sector and it's way up there. I have a larger circuit as well that I run every few days that involves slower moving commodities and that spits out inf in larger chunks. I do it because I find it soothing, making order out of chaos and taking my (rather large) cut. Ooh, and I found 500 winter packs on an alt that were left over from the Winter Event before last. RE: real life investments. My style is a mixture of value-based with a soupcon of behavioral economics. This works very well with the sort of statistical arbitrage that we see in the AH, but in real life I stay far away from the things that get lots of attention in the news. I'm on the side of the shorts in the Gamestop debacle fundamentally, but applaud the short squeezers for manipulating the flawed (bugged?) system of shorting. That said, I'm not a first mover and I'm not going to buy anything that I can't break down into its component pieces and extract value. That generally keeps me out of things like crypto and even gold, because fundamentally to me the current value is only what I am able to get someone else to pay for it, and I don't understand tulipmania. RE: the pandemic. I thank my lucky stars every day for this game and the people in it. It certainly helps to soften the situation.

I was (deliberately) married on a Friday the 13th, and every one is an anniversary. You scared the crap out of me, but the next one is in August. Happy Lunar New Year y’all though!

I don't get Call Bruiser for another level.

Peppa Pig is the Induced Coma % for -Rech of the porc world:

I haven't read the whole thread, so apologies if it's been mentioned. When I'm a little ahead of my skis when I'm fighting an unexpected EB/AV, I pop out of the mission and *gulp* open up /AH and buy some large purples. Maybe fill up on Good Luck Imbuements before trying him again? They can't one shot your bots if they can't hit them! Also, I've fought him a number of times, but always on melee characters. If I'm able to focus on him, killing him disbands his pets. And of course, make sure you clean out the random enemies so that you don't accidentally aggro anyone other than Calystix and his buddies.

You asked for it: