Yomo Kimyata

Exactly. I figure that an "ideal" winter pack would be 1.2 WOs and 50 converters. Avoid that whole "Build Snow Beast" nonsense.

I set my noob traps before the event and adjusted bids thereafter. I figure I've created about a thousand synthetic Winter Packs by now. I can't wait until the event ends, then it's full on Market PvP!

Keep in mind that building S/L defense/resist is probably easiest and cheapest in terms of builds. Also, if you are planning to team at all, most support characters would be most likely to give you S/L help, so if you plan on being team oriented you can cheat a little and focus instead on other types. IMO.

I'm still deciding what I want to do with respect to Winter Packs. One day in, and almost 40k packs have been sold (and a small number relisted), which is more than a pack per active account according to March 2020 numbers. @Ukase's other thread is giving a good sample of what one should expect from bulk purchases. My first observation is that there are a lot of potential merits out there, which nowadays translates to a lot of converters, etc.. I've lowered my bid prices as I said above, but we'll see it I end up buying there. My second observation is that WO prices seem to have quickly stabilized to around 8mm, more or less. Like it or not, the lion's share of the value in a Winter Pack are the WOs. Personally, I don't use them very often and when I do it's Avalanche. Some people have posted about how it may not be worth their time to invest in Winter Packs and profit in a few months when they can make inf right away, and they have a point, but it's like marketing before and after you go farming -- why not do both? I am not, however, convinced that there will be unbridled demand for WOs in six months, and I still have my Character Items inventory chock full of all kinds of things that I can pull out and use anytime I want to, even mid-mission. That's a valid reason in and of itself to open a few hundred packs -- to have a ready inventory of things like unslotters and catalysts that all your characters can access without having to email it to yourself. Yesterday, I bought 100 packs for the pure reason that I wanted to try and clean out any remaining high bids in the WOs (and I was far from the first mover there) and I made a nice profit on the WOs alone. But I think I'll wait until towards the end of the Winter Event before deciding to invest in more packs in bulk.

I dropped my buy-it-soon(tm) bids for converters. There is a veritable glut of merits.

I am soothed by that knowledge, thank you.

In my experience, mercs are the shortest kid in the class. I can't speak for the personal attacks, since I rarely take them on MMs, but the pets are pretty lackluster. Something that would help a lot (but would keep them at the bottom of the pack) would be change Serum into a mule power for IO sets, like Necro and Thugs have.

I think the most profit you can make is to buy the packs now, then unpack them when the event is over and try to sell the contents for 30-35mm, net. Reselling the packs post-event is also good, and assuming that you price appropriately and make sales at 25mm, you'll get 22.5mm net for a lot less effort. Last year, I really expected a huge race to the bottom. It was so obvious how a 60% sale on significant size was profitable that I assumed *everyone* would do the same thing. I was actually looking forward to seeing what happened to Winter Packs in the aftermarket. But nope, day after the event ended, people started paying 25mm again and it felt like I was the only one with any supply. So I held onto them and gradually liquidated. This year, I think people are smarter and there is an order of magnitude or two more of disposable inf, so I'm hoping we see a different type of post-event equilibrium.

Ok, for posterity's sake as of right now there are 9,983,800 for sale. 1 December 2020 1:45PM EST.

Dammit, now I have to buy all of them and relist.

@Ukaseby any chance did you track the number for sale before the event started?

I like doing the Frostfire mission and positioning myself next to an ice column when destroying the first key. If you set it up right it blows you back into the column then up to the top of the column where you hover for a few seconds before coming back down.

Sorry, had to correct that! NEVER FORGET THE VIG! If they go on sale, I don't see how I can't buy a bunch of them. At some tipping point, it's possible that so many people will buy them that demand for WOs will be overfilled tenfold. I mean, I have over 100 alts, most of which are completely tricked out (although most under 50) and I might have a total of 100 individual WOs among them at the absolute most.

Since the last time I saw this thread, I've moved on to a new RP project on Excelsior. A supergroup called The DEFCON 5. Five females who formed an elite team to protect the POTUS and the nuclear football, but the team disbanded for unexplained reasons. Starting as heroes but will switch over via alignment missions at level 20. DC5 Fade Out: (Blue) Ice Melee/Rad Armor Stalker DC4 Double Take: (Green) Illusion/Rad Controller DC3 Round House: (Yellow) Martial Arts/Ice Armor Brute DC2 Fast Pace: (Red) Fire Blast/Radiation Corruptor DC1 Cocked Pistol: (White) Storm/Dual Pistol Defender

I made a similar choice recently. I play rather than rush, so I choose in part by how quickly I want to get certain powers.

When deciding an armor set, I ask a series of questions: 1. What’s the thematic choice? This trumps all. There are very few things you *can’t* do with any given set. 2. Do I want defense or resistance or healing or combinations? I tend to prefer resist sets for brutes and tanks, for example. 3. What are the bells and whistles? For example I generally try to avoid sets where I need to activate mez resist.

I do both. I use email for short-term holding until it starts getting full then I move it to bids on a (hopefully) nonexistent item. Email in the past has generally been buggier than the AH, believe it or not, so I don't count on it still being there from day to day. Also, I have heard that you can only have 100 emails at a time, which puts an upper limit on your storage.

Part of it also is the "did this happen or didn't it?" memory/reality wipes like House of M and the Sentry. Part of it is that everything is a Secret.

This is the thing that is throwing me off. I'm having a difficult time trying to figure out what is or is not canon anymore, or even if the whole concept of canon has been thrown out the window. These are great suggestions, and I'm SUPER thankful for them all!

I just created an air pressure-powered technology scrapper named Johnny Pneumatic. EDIT: Also a sun-powered energy/time blaster named Johnny Gnomonic.

Ok, I've gotten to the point in the pandemic where I've subscribed to Marvel Unlimited for (almost) unlimited browsing of comics on my tablet. My question is, what has happened since the late 1980s (when I last spent time reading monthlies) and what should I be reading? I've seen just about every Marvel-associated movie (including the Dolph Lungren Punisher, which was the best, fight me!) so I'm trying to catch up with the universe and catch the great stories that I've missed. What do I like? Well, I have to admit I started with everything Marvel Zombie, so there's that. As far as what is my favorite style, I love Sandman and Neil Gaiman, so I've also read his Eternals series. Outside of that, I'm kind of picking and choosing. Any thoughts?

I would guess those were parking bids.

It appears there were a small number of 1bn bids still out there, and a larger number of 100mm bids. I'm not sure if the latter are still there or not -- I soaked up about 10 of them (but missed the big fish). Also, my noob traps were moderately effective...

I don't like the incarnate system. The interface is ridiculously bad. Half the powers are extraordinarily overpowered, and half are generally harmless. Most of the time it makes a near god-like character into full god-like. But it does a terrible job of making a mediocre character into a great character, imo. My incredibly unpopular suggestion: Make all incarnate salvage fungible by rarity and lock it account-wide, so you can move incarnate salvage from one character to another. Then lock the number of incarnates per account to one. You want a godlike character? You get one. You want two? Make a new account or demote your other god. One thing about living in Paragon City I never could stomach, all the damn godlike characters.

It is my hunch that a reason that they haven't made this update in a while is that the population has dropped a lot since March, which is fine with me, but may result in a lot of DOOOOOOOM(tm)ing.