Yomo Kimyata

Try powerset combinations that may not be "optimal". Try mission arcs against enemy groups you normally avoid. Try out mechanics which are unfamiliar with. Go red side. Go gold side. I'm going out on a limb here, but no one needs a higher difficulty in order to run Council farms.

Great post from top to bottom, but this line is the best part. We don't need every set to have the ease of play of Willpower and the strength of Bio and the AoE of Fire. If you don't like the challenge, don't play the set. If you can't meet the challenge, don't play the set. Don't take the challenge away simply because you can't figure it out. Please stop the power creep. Maybe Dark Armor is the shortest kid in the class, but he is still tall enough to ride the ride.

The devs say it’s working as intended but I can see ways that it could be used for griefing so you were right to point it out.

edited until resolved

Edited until resolved

Agree completely, and it is mostly across the board that IO prices have dropped. In some cases I can point to clear supply increases; in others, it just looks like a buyers' strike. This is coupled with @tidge's observation that people seem to be liquidating merits for easily traded items and (mostly) dumping them on the market. Ironically, this is a golden age to buy items if you are an inf farmer.

I hate to suggest this, but chances are really good that this is some sort of user error. I do this occasionally (although what I usually do is to sell the unattuned version higher than where I buy the attuned version), but during Live I did this all the time in order to transfer funds before the email system was cobbled together. To use the goalpost metaphor in my guide, you want to pick a price that is firmly between the goalposts, and you want to execute quickly enough that no one hops in. In your example, I would log in with the character who wants to sell the unattuned item and list it at a strange price that seems to be between the goalposts, something like 3,030,123. I suggest a strange price so that you know that it is the one you posted, and so you can verify that this process works. Log out, and log in with the character who wants to buy the attuned item (this is important! The same character cannot sell to herself! But other characters on the same account can.) Bid 3,030,122 on the attuned version. If you buy one, congrats, but you bought someone else's. In the grand scheme of things, you saved yourself 1 inf. If you don't, bid 3,010,123. You should buy your own there, unless someone has sniped in the time it took you to log and bid. Or, it is possible that I've been lucky in doing this and that there is something else screwy with the system!

Input welcomed!

Reserved for item descriptions

Reserved for strategies

The Auction House (AH), or Black Market, or Wentworth’s, or Trading House is a mass of incandescent gas, a gigantic nuclear furnace, where hydrogen is turned into helium at temperatures of millions of degrees. Oh wait, that’s the Sun. The AH is actually a giant accounting machine, matching up buy orders and sell orders from players and taking its cut in the process. Sorry, that’s not nearly as interesting. This guide is about how the AH is SUPPOSED to work, in an ideal Platonic universe. However, I would be remiss in my duties if I didn’t discuss the elephant in the room. THE ELEPHANT IN THE ROOM There are significant bugs in the AH system, and the worst part is that it is not clear exactly what the extent of those bugs are. The primary bug that I am aware of is the “display bug,” where a specific item displays an incorrect “Last 5”, number of bids, and number of offers. (I’ll explain these terms shortly). This bug is not common, and it does not appear to be constant, but it shows up periodically and it shows up on some particular items with regularity. If the “Last 5” looks like it is abnormally low, or abnormally high, it is likely that the bug is in effect. Until/unless this gets fixed, you must always take the information given with a grain of salt. MOST of the time it will be correct, but sometimes it is not only incorrect, but it is hilariously incorrect. If something looks too good to be true, it probably is. There’s a second elephant, but I’ll address that later. SOME QUICK DEFINITIONS A “bid” is an order to buy something, and in this game, it is an order to buy something at a specific price. That can either be a noun (“I put in a bid for XYZ at 10mm inf”) or a verb (“I bid 10mm for XYZ”). An “outstanding bid” is not one that is particularly noteworthy; it is one that has not been filled yet. Something that is confusing about the AH interface is that when you want to place a bid, you have to press the button that says “Make Offer”. Anyway, “bid” means “buy”. An “offer” is an order to sell something, and again, in this game it is an order to sell something at a specific price. You can “make an offer” or offer something. “Offer” means “sell”. To “hit the bid” is to sell something into someone else’s bid. To “lift the offer” is to buy something from someone else’s offer. Let’s give an example. Let’s pick a mythological [EDIT: Ha! Not so mythological now!] lvl 53 Ribosome. Person A wants to buy one and has a bid of 10mm inf in the AH. Person B owns one and wants to sell it, and has offered it at 50mm inf. At this moment, there is one bid and one offer, and there is no trade since the order to buy is less than the order to sell. Now Person C enters the AH. She also owns a lvl 53 Ribosome and wants to sell it. She can either offer it at a level of her choosing, or she can sell it into the best available bid in the market. If she hits the bid, then she sells to Person A at 10mm, which is the only outstanding bid. But let's assume she decides to list it and offer at 40mm. Now Person D enters the market, and he wants to buy. He can put in a bid that is below the lowest offer, but let's assume he lifts the offer and buys the cheapest available item. That's the one that belongs to person C. Now there are only two items left in the queue: one bid at 10mm, and one offered at 50mm. That difference between the 10mm bid and the 50mm offer is known as the “bid-offer spread”. WHAT IS THE AH? The AH is a player-driven exchange, where people can anonymously buy and sell specific items to each other at various prices. This differs from vendors, where players can buy or sell items at specific prices in unrestricted amounts. Want to buy a small luck inspiration from a nurse? Buy as many as you want! They will cost you 50 inf each time, and each time you buy one, that inf gets deleted from the economic system, and a small luck inspiration is created and put into your inventory. Want to buy a small luck inspiration from the AH? It may cost you more or less than 50 inf, depending on what you bid, and where it is offered, and if in fact any are offered at all. When you buy one, your inf gets transferred to the seller (less a transaction fee, which is deleted from the system) and you receive the inspiration. Nothing is created – the inspiration gets transferred, and so does the inf. However, the transaction fee gets deleted from the system. THE AH INTERFACE First you need to access the AH. In the olden days, you had to trek over to Wentworth’s on blue side or the Black Market on red side or the Trading House/Underground Trader on gold side and open up the interface. Nowadays in the wonder of this golden age, you can open up the trading interface with the command “/AH” or “/auctionhouse” or probably a few other ways. You cannot open the interface in an instance, meaning you can’t open it during a mission or when you are in a base. That’s a technological issue, and as awesome as that would be to open the AH interface in your base, it’s probably not going to be possible any time soon. Of course you can still go to Wentworth’s or the Black Market, and remember that those are locations that lead to day job badges and accolades. Once you open the interface, you will see it is divided into three sections horizontally. The top section is the search section, where you can specify what you are looking for. It’s mostly self-explanatory. The text box allows you to input what you are looking for, and if you have auto-complete checked it’s pretty good. Want a luck charm? Start typing “lu” and “luck” autocompletes. The “Levels” interface on the left are best used if you are looking for a specific level or range of levels in a recipe or enhancement. They default to a minimum of 1 and a maximum of 53. If you change them they will stay at the new levels, so be sure to change them back when you are done searching otherwise you might get confused when things stop showing up because they are out of the prescribed level range. I never use the “Rarity” or “Origin” options, but I guess you could if you wanted. [EDIT: I have started using this to find available uncommmon recipes/enhancements that are cheap.] The “For sale” and “Bidding” buttons will restrict the interface to only show items that have outstanding offers and bids respectively on them. The middle section is the menu of all items and is divided in half vertically. On the left side is the index of all items available by category. If there is a [+] next to the name, that means if you click on it, it will expand and show a sub-index of items. Play around with it. Later, this guide will go into each section in detail. On the right side is an expanded view of the items within the selected category that meet the restrictions you set in the search section. The bottom section is your inventory. There are six tabs that show, in order, All, Stored, Selling, Sold, Bidding, Bought. There is also a running total of your inf. Helpful hint: if you want to monitor your inf total during regular play, you can set up a window. In the regular interface, click Powers, Combat Attributes and the Combat Attributes window will open. Select Base and at the bottom it will show your inf total. Right click on your inf and you can Monitor your inf in a window that you can reposition on your interface. You can actually monitor a lot of things, so if you didn’t know you could do this, you’re welcome! Ok, now that we have the interface open, let’s go to an item. We already started to look at luck charms, so let’s go there. In the middle right, the Luck Charm icon shows with certain pieces of information: 10652389 for sale 1085 bidding 420 on 2020-04-28 42 on 2020-04-28 42 on 2020-04-28 42 on 2020-04-28 42 on 2020-04-28 There is also an area where you can put in a bid, choose how many you want to bid on (up to 10) and click the “Make Offer” button to register your bid. Yes, yes, it’s confusing that you have to click a button that says “Offer” to make a bid. The for sale and bidding numbers are self-explanatory and represent real bids and offers that are already in the system. You don’t have any idea at what level those bids or offers are at. Every bid could be at 1, and every offer could be at 2bn. The 420, 42, 42, 42, 42 numbers are what I refer to as “Last 5” and they represent the last five trades that occurred with a date stamp. Those are actual trades that have occurred. If a block of 10 trade all at the same price to the same buyer and the same seller, it only prints as one trade. So the last 5 listed above could represent a total of 5 luck charms trading, or a total of 50, or somewhere in between. Now is the time I remind you of the elephant in the room and again warn you that this information may be entirely false due to the display bug. I will additionally warn you that even if it is true, you have no idea what the quality is of those bids or those offers. Those 1,085 bids may all be really strong high bids, or they may all be for 1 inf. A large number of bids does not necessarily represent any high bids. In fact, those bids may all be the same and they may be all by the same person. Similarly, you don’t really know where those offers are. However, you do know that they are real offers; there are actual items for sale and you can buy them for the right price. There is also a smaller elephant in the room. Another bug is that sometimes the information of last 5 doesn’t come up at all and says something like “no information available”. In that case, the almost universal work-around is to put in a low bid on the item, like 1 inf. That puts the item in your inventory section at the bottom and there you can refresh it to get a current and hopefully accurate picture. POOLING AND SEEDING Now is as good a time as any to talk about seeded items and pooled items. If you switch from luck charms to another piece of common salvage like inanimate carbon rods and you do it quickly enough that no trades have occurred, you will notice that the for sale, bidding, and last 5 numbers are identical. That is because the Homecoming devs made certain things in the AH fungible, or exchangeable, or poolable. "Fungible" is a funny term that is usually used in finance; it does not mean "like the Devouring Earth"! But in this case it's exactly the right word. When anyone offers a piece of common salvage, no matter what type, the system puts it in a pool of “common salvage”. When anyone buys a piece of specific common salvage, it comes out of that pool. What was a luck charm can become an inanimate carbon rod. This is tremendously useful, and helps keep anyone from manipulating specific markets. Common salvage, uncommon salvage, rare salvage all have their own pools. Every set IO recipe, no matter what level, is in its own pool. You can sell a Luck of the Gambler proc recipe at level 25 and buy it back at level 50. However, the different set pieces are in different pools; you can’t sell a LotG end/rech recipe and buy the proc from the same pool. Every crafted set IO, no matter what level, is in its own pool. This leads to a variety of strategies. If you want to buy a recipe in order to craft it and sell it, you probably want to choose the lowest level, since that will have the cheapest crafting costs. So you can buy a level 25 recipe, craft it, sell the IO that someone else may be buying as a level 50 IO. One other important thing to know about fungibility is that crafted IOs and attuned IOs all share the same bucket. If you want an attuned IO, one way to get it is to buy a crafted IO, buy a catalyst, and attune the IO yourself. Or, you can buy an attuned IO directly from the pool for the same price and save yourself the price of a catalyst. You can actually even sell a crafted IO and buy it back from the pool as an attuned at the same price. Oh, I almost forgot about seeding. Another thing the Homecoming team did in order to make things easier and to keep people from manipulating markets is they offered a large number of items at a fixed price. Those seeded prices are: 10,000 for common salvage; 100,000 for uncommon salvage; 1,000,000 for rare salvage; and 50,000 for brainstorm ideas. Initially there were 10mm of each put into the market. You can consider these to be price caps; no one can stop you from bidding 2mm on a piece of common salvage, but you will essentially always be able to buy it for 10k or less. BIDDING AND OFFERING IN THE AH In order to bid on something, as mentioned above, you want to select the item and then in the box put in the price you wish to pay and the number of items you wish to buy (1-10). If you want to buy more than 10 items, you need to put in more than one bid. Bidding is free and has no consequences. This means you can put in a bid and if it doesn’t transact (because there is no item offered at that price or lower), you can retract the bid with no penalties. This means you can “bid creep”, or offer progressively higher bids for an item until you buy it. In theory, you could bid creep by 1 inf at a time until you hit the exact offering price, but ain’t nobody got time for that. In order to offer something, you need to actually own it. If you open the AH interface and drag the item from your inventory into the AH, it will be moved onto the Stored tab on the bottom. There are three buttons: Find, Post, and Get, and there is a text box where you can input a number. The Find button should pull up and refresh the current info on the item, showing number of bids, offers, and last 5 trades. If it does not, try it again until it refreshes. The Get button will take it out of the AH ad put in back into your personal inventory. You use the Post button in order to put in your actual sell order: input the price at which you are willing to sell the item and press Post. When you post an offer, you will pay the first of two potential fees. The first fee (“posting fee”) is 5% of the amount you are posting the item for; the number will show up beneath the price window. This amount is a minimum of 5 inf, nonrefundable, and mandatory. If you don’t have that amount of inf in your possession, you cannot post the trade. If you later decide you want to take down your offer, you can, but you eat the posting fee. The second fee is assessed when/if your item is purchased by someone else. The amount of the second fee (“sales fee”) is equal to 10% of the final sale price, less the amount you already paid as posting fee. The net result is that you always pay a total of 10% of the sales price, which is deleted from the economy, and you receive 90% of the sales price, which goes into your account balance. Note that since there is a 2bn inf cap on every character, if claiming a sale would put you over the cap, you are not able to claim the proceeds of that sale. HOW DO TRADES OCCUR? It’s a secret! According to the employees: “At Wentworth's we use a 'secret bid' auction. To make a long story short, you set the price for your item, but the Buyer does not see it. The Buyer bids what he wishes to pay and if he meets, or exceeds, your requested price he will receive the item. You may even receive more than you asked for! In order to help the Buyer with a bid, there is a history of how much that item has sold for in the past.” When a new bid or offer enters the system, the AH checks to see if there is a bid higher than or equal to the lowest offer. If so, a trade prints and the bidder receives the item that is offered at the lowest price. The bidder pays the amount he bid, even if it was higher than what the offer was. The seller receives 90% of the amount the bidder paid, no matter whether or not it was higher than what she asked for. Let’s give an example: There are three bids in the AH: 100, 120, 150; and there are three offers in the AH: 200, 250, 300. This is in equilibrium, since every bid is less than every offer. If this were not true, then a trade would have already transacted. Nothing is going to happen in equilibrium. Now let’s say a bid for 125 enters the system. Since this is lower than the lowest outstanding offer (“LOO”) of 200, it’s not good enough to trade. It goes into the queue. Let’s say an offer at 225 enters the system. Since this is higher than the highest outstanding bid (“HOB”) of 150, it’s also not good enough to trade. It goes into the queue. Now someone bids 300 for this item. Now we’re cooking! At 300, the bid is higher than or equal to every offer in the queue, but the trade goes to the LOO, which is the offer at 200. The bidder receives the item. The bidder has no idea where the item was listed, just that it was less than or equal to 300. The seller at 200 sells their item and receives net total of 90% of 300, or 270. Since their posting fee was 10 (5% of 200), and their total fee was 30 (10% of 300), the sale will tell them that they sold the item for 300, and paid 20 in incremental fees. The trade is printed to the last 5 at 300. The 300 bid and the 200 offer are removed from the queue. The queue now has bids of 100, 120, 125, 150 and offers of 225, 250, 300. Next, a seller comes in and dumps the item for 5. 5 is lower than every bid in the queue, but the trade crosses with the HOB which happens to be 150. The bidder receives the item, and has no idea where it was listed, just that it was less than his bid of 150. The seller at 5 sells their item and receives net total of 90% of 150, or 135. Since their posting fee was 5 (which is the minimum posting fee), the sale will tell them they sold the item for 150, and paid 10 in additional fees. The trade is printed at 150 in the last 5, the 150 bid and 5 offer are removed from the queue, and the queue now has bids of 100, 120, 125 and offers of 225, 250, 300. I like to think of this visually as a set of goalposts, where the left goal post is the highest outstanding bid, and the right post is the lowest outstanding offer. If you are looking from increasing prices from left to right, where each vertical line is a bid or an offer, it might look something like this: |||||________||||| There may be more than one bid or offer at any vertical line, and they may not be evenly spaced. Maybe a better way to look at it is with + representing bids, H representing the highest outstanding bid, L representing the lowest outstanding offer, and – representing offers. Then it would look something like: ++++H_______L---- In order for a trade to occur, it has to enter the system outside of the goalposts, either on the high side or the low side. New orders can come in and narrow the goalposts, but as long as there is even 1 inf of difference between the HOB and the LOO, no trade will occur. Without a little sleuthing work, you really don't know what other people are bidding or offering, and since any given queue of bids and offers may be huge and complex, it's often difficult to suss out what the rest of the book looks like. There are, however, a few ways that I will discuss in a later section on strategy. Some common questions: "I've had an outstanding offer at 1mm for days now, and I see the last 5 has trades that printed at over 1mm. Is that normal?" Yes, probably. In order for you to trade, your offer has to be the cheapest one in the book when a bid comes in. In this case, it is very likely that there were other people who were offering at prices under 1mm, and people came in with bids of over 1mm. The highest bid matches up with the lowest offer when there is a cross, and the trade prints at the level of the bid. This is probably working as intended. "I've had an outstanding bid at 1mm for days now, and I see the last 5 has trades that printed at under 1mm. Is that normal?" Nope, not at all. That shouldn't happen, since every trade prints at the level of the bid, and if trades are printing below your bid, then something is wrong. That is probably due to the elephant in the room display bug. However, I wouldn't write off the possibility that there are other glitches in the system that keep it from operating the way it should. "What happens when there are ties? Like if I have more than one bid at the same price, or if five people are offering at the same level? How does the system choose which trade happens?" I honestly don't know. Anecdotally, it doesn't seem to be purely random; it also doesn't appear to be time stamped, although I have noticed that, in general, later orders tend to execute before earlier orders. I would love to hear from a dev on this topic. Regardless, we know that the real tie-breaker is price. An item offered at 999,999 will always sell before one listed at 1mm, and a bid of 1,000,001 will always buy before one at 1mm. Or at least that's the way it's supposed to work. "What happens when there are block bids or offers? What's the allocation process?" Boy you ask good questions. Let's go back to our queue of {B: 100, 120, 125; O: 225, 250, 300}. Let's look at four independent scenarios (these don't all happen in order): 1. An offer of 2x @ 120 comes in. The system looks at the highest bid and sees that it crosses, so one trades there. at 125 Then it looks at the next highest bid and, yup, that crosses too, so the second trades at 120. The queue now looks like {B: 100; O: 225, 250, 300} and two trades print in the last 5 at 125 and 120 respectively. 2. An offer of 2x @ 125 comes in. Does the highest bid cross? Yes and it trades at 125, but the second does not and it gets added to the queue which looks like {B: 100, 120; O: 125, 225, 250, 300}. The goalposts just got narrower. One trade prints in the last 5 at 125. 3. A bid of 2x @ 275 comes in. First, the offer at 225 fills, then the offer at 250 fills. Both of those trades, however, transact at 275, since the bid determines the price paid. So even though the sellers at 225 and 250 both go filled at the same price of 275, the 225 offer executes first. The queue now looks like {B: 100, 120, 125; O: 300}. Two trades print in the last 5, since they were allocated to two different sellers, but they both print at 275. 4. A bid of 2x @ 235 comes in. The offer at 225 fills, but the next best offer is too high to fill. One trade prints at 235, and the extra bid joins the queue, which now looks like {B: 100, 120, 125, 235; O: 250, 300}. the goalposts got narrower. If this seems confusing, let me know and I can change the language. But there is a simple process that the AH is supposed to follow. [EDIT: Here is another metaphor that I have used with some success to a certain group. Suppose you are playing a drinking game and you throw a ping pong ball into a cup in order to get someone else to drink the contents. Let's say you are in the middle and if you are looking to buy you are going to throw it to the right into a cup that has your item listed, and if you are looking to sell you are going to throw it to the left into a cup that has a bid for your item. You don't really know where those other cups are, so you get to decide how hard and how far you are going to throw your ball. If you throw it to the right, it's going to go as far as you throw it. If there is a cup at your price or less, the cup that is closest to you to the right is going to get your ball. However, that cup is going to get moved to where you threw the ball in terms of where the trade occurs and where the trade prints. If you throw the ball to 100 and there is a cup at 50 and another at 55, the cup at 50 will get the trade and the trade will print at 100. The cup at 55 stays there. If you throw it to the left, it's going to go as far as you throw it UNTIL it reaches any cup; then it is going to drop straight down into that cup at where the cup is, and the trade is going to print there. If you throw the ball to 1 and there is a cup at 50 and a cup at 5, the cup at 50 will get the trade and the trade will print at 50. If you do it again, the trade will print at 5.]

I can second this. All the attacks in the fighting pool scourge.

Sleep is an incredible tool for aggro management, but because it is so easily broken, it loses a lot of its efficacy when you are on a team, since most people will just zerg zerg zerg. As mentioned, if you can communicate to your team members that you are going to take out a specific boss/EB/AV, then you and your team can deal with things on your own terms. Also, even on zerg teams a mass hypnosis kind of power is a decent "oh shit" button when things go pear-shaped. One of your teammates might drop a AoE a second later, but that's a second to start running.

Theme trumps all for me, but I suspect you are looking for mechanics answers. Sometimes you want a resistance set, but why dark over other sets? I'd say Dark Regeneration is probably the best self-heal money can buy. Cloak of Fear is great if you slot it for accuracy and is a soft control I don't think you can get from any other set. And Oppressive Gloom is a fantastic "oh shit" button, especially teamed with Dark Regeneration. So those three powers, in my eyes, make it unique and worthy of pursuit. But coming back to theme, you rightfully mention that you can easily use another power and justify your theme by coloring flames or whatever. I agree completely, which is why no one should ever feel they have to play Dark Armor for theme if they don't want to. As you of all people know, economics is about allocation of scarce resources. To take your question to an absurd extreme, why would anyone object to removing all endurance costs for toggles? For me, part of the enjoyment of any game is figuring out how to best manage these scarce resources. Yes, dark armor requires more attention to be paid to endurance management than most sets. To me, that's a part of the game and frankly an enjoyable part. I don't think that it makes the set fundamentally unplayable by a long shot. It probably does make it harder to play than fire armor. Then great, play fire armor if you don't want to have to worry about endurance! I don't expect anyone else to have to enjoy managing endurance, and I don't expect anyone else to have to play dark armor. It's always a choice. By the way, I finally understand that when you are talking about set balance for SOs v. IOs you are talking about removing set bonuses, not about common IOs. Personally, I don't think anyone should balance the playability of a set around SO performance since absolutely no one uses SOs unless it's a personal challenge, but I can understand balancing it around lvl 30 common IOs. Dark Armor really lends itself to some innovative slotting choices other than 1x end red, 3x res dam; Cloak of Fear is a great example where your personal balance among accuracy, end reduction, fear, and to-hit debuff can provide a unique experience. I don't mind providing optional tools to make the game easier. I can't stand the idea of mandating an easier game. I don't want to play chess on a 4x4 chessboard. If someone else wants to only use those 16 squares, go right ahead. But please don't shrink the board for all of us. I guess my upshot is, if you don't like dark armor, don't play it. It's no skin off anyone's nose. The devs don't care; there aren't any power quotas. I rarely notice the ATs of people I play with, much less worry about what power sets they have. These are only my opinions, and I neither expect nor want to get anyone else to change their minds. I also apologize if anything I say comes off as confrontational; that is certainly not my intent. I do, however, want to raise my hand amidst a sea of complaints and go on record as saying I think this set is just fine as it is. It could probably use some optional fx fixes though.

I trade with myself all the time, mostly intentionally, sometimes by accident. Most of the things on the market have astonishingly wide bid-offer spreads. In my thoughts, this is due to the fact that the cowmen who make markets have gotten bored with it. Self-dealing (this is by account. Once character cannot trade with itself, but can trade with another character on the same account) works well whenever you establish a trade point that is mid-market.

You need to figure out what the lowest outstanding offer is, which is the lowest price someone else has it for sale. If you have the non-attuned and you want to buy the attuned, first I'd put in a bid at a weird number that you think is in the middle of the market. For the Panacea proc I'd pick something like 11,867,530. If you buy the attuned there, great, that's a good buy. If you don't, then post your non-attuned (on a different character, it doesn't have to be a different account) at the same price. Unless someone came into the market in that minute or two, you should transact.

I haven't seen it trade below 10k in what feels like months, but my sense of time seems a little off nowadays.

I cannot imagine any reason why anyone would want to be an unpaid volunteer for an organization they don't have a personal stake in. Since there is no money involved, I assume that it's a love of the game that keeps them going on through a mostly thankless job. It's even more thankless when people like OP post things like this.

Again, I hear you but in order: 1st sentence, no, it's really not, since it does what it needs to do. It's not as powerful as other sets or as powerful as you may like it. So what? Is it stopping anyone from meeting their goals in this game? Nope. Do you have to manage endurance throughout most of the levelling process and make power selections that help with endurance? Yup. 2nd sentence, this may be true, so great, don't play it. Why in the world would you play something that is not fun? "But I have a great concept about dark, but Its not as powerful as bio armor." Great, play bio armor and rationalize your back story. Don't play something you don't enjoy (I say as I'm trying to run my elec/kin corruptor through a Malta arc, oy). 3rd sentence, the baseline game is the game which everyone plays. Even a brand new player with no inf will use basic invention IOs rather than SOs. Use your baseline as common IOs if you must. But it's a lot more playable if you 4 slot Dark Embrace with 2x end red and 2x dam res than 1x end red and 3x dam res. 4th, why would IOs break the game? Is it because set bonuses are too powerful? I'm not understanding this. Dark Armor is not unplayable, not even close. It's quite strong. Why in the world do we have to buff it? Because all the bio armor users are snickering? Because your pylon time is 5% slower? No, I'm putting down my foot against power creep. If you don't like the animations, fine. If you want a bio armor clone, nope, I can't support that.

I hear you. There are two ways they can go with fixing underperforming sets. One way is to make everything equivalent. T1 attack does X damage regardless of set, etc. In that case, everyone will flock to the least resisted damage types, but at least it would be equal. The other way is to give advantages and drawbacks, which I see that DA already has. I really don't think it's worthwhile judging sets in terms of IO SO slotting just like I don't ask about the value of my house in 1920 dollars. It's just not relevant. But my real issue is, what is underperforming? Is there anything that you can do with, say, Invulnerability that you simply cannot do with Dark Armor? Solo +1/x3 content? Solo +4/x8 content? Solo TFs? Teamwork at +4/x8? ITrials? I don't think there is anything in the game that *requires* any more from any set than it currently has. Sure, some sets are "better" than others, but if your theme calls for Dark Armor, and the powers are sufficiently powerful to accomplish every task you want to do, why does a power need to be boosted? I haven't tried every power combination, but everyone I've tried so far is way more than powerful enough to accomplish any goals I needed to set. That said, I don't feel I need to solo Hamidon with my Archer/Pain corruptor, which is good, because THAT is an awful power combination. For me, concept trumps all. If I have a concept and the combination is unplayable at what I consider "normal" play for me, then I'll lobby to fix the powers but in general, I've found everything is already powerful enough. Just because there always has to be a shortest kid in every class doesn't mean that that kid is too short to do everything anyone else in the class can do.

My sure to be unpopular thoughts: I think this is a great set as is. Dark Armor does not need to be improved. The issues with endurance are a weakness of the set that you should plan around, just like momentum in TW and speed in stone armor. People talk about how sets need to be balanced around SOs and that is silly. Even the newest noob can see that the SO system is both more complicated and less intuitive than the common IO system. If endurance is a problem, then add an endurance reduction in your attacks or toggles and take out a damage or resist damage. This is all a trade off, but the gut instinct shouldn’t be to make every set so that it matches the best part of every other set. Cloak of fear accuracy is fine. Slot for accuracy if you want it higher. It’s a trade off v. More terrorize or more to hit rebuff. From experience anything over 100 accuracy effectively locks down minions indefinitely. I’d like the skulls aura to be optional though. another reason I like this set is that it has a lot of tools and you don’t have to take all of them to be effective or thematic. please please please don’t boost this set simply because it’s not as easy as some of the other armor sets. Change the visuals, sure, but please stop the power creep. I don’t want all sets to end up as TW/bio.

Yeah, I've been looking at this from not just a fear-heavy build, but a fear-heavy play concept. In the case of melee characters, which is my main focus, I wanted to come up with an idea that used/required the fear mechanics to really shine. What does fear provide? As mentioned above by @Bionic_Fleathese can be exclusive. - Soft control in the form of terrorize, either single target or AoE. I can't quantify "terrorize" right now, but that's the trembling that serves much like a short-term sleep, as it can be partly broken. - To-hit debuffs, also either single target or AoE. So, it seems like a resist-based defensive set adds more value than layering -to hit on top of +defense. Dark Armor fits the bill. Dark Melee has Touch of Fear, but since the rework its AoE iin the form of Shadow Maul is practically unplayable as a Stalker and I presume a Brute, Tanker, or Scrapper too. I didn't follow the changes thread in Beta, but I cannot stand the trade-off of a much much much wider cone for much much much less damage. My strategy for Uabhas Wraith, Dark/Dark stalker currently in his 30s, has generally been to: take out threat LTs from Hide, debuff boss, debuff crowd of minions, then arrest them one at a time from relative safety. I'm currently running at +3/x3, and I'm finding the strategy very effective. I should go up to +4 shortly, but much more than x5 will be really tedious, thanks to the new "improved" Shadow Maul. Accuracy bonuses are very important, since as they say, you miss 100% of the baddies you don't hit. Getting accuracy up in Cloak of Fear to something over 100 is more important than boosting the to hit debuff by a point or two, in my experience so far.

I'd chalk that up to people liquidating their supplies of merits. Supply offered in the converters is now north of 50k when a few weeks ago it would often dwindle to nothing. Normally, I'd see that as people building up cash supplies and using them to buy, but at the same time I'm seeing a lot of what I consider to be staples of IO sets enter the market. Nothing insane, but an extra 100-200 offered in a bunch of categories. So overall, it looks like a big cash hoard in process to me. Heck, it could be just one or two people doing it.

Specifically, the presence pool only has the terrorize effect.

I don't shop often for rare salvage, but it always seems to be in the 400-600 range. I also do all my recipe shopping in advance, so I don't often check to see what is available. I have noticed that prices o most crafted IOs are unchanged to lower and supply of said IOs is unchanged to higher, so I'm not sure why it's costing you more. It's actually costing me less, so far. So I'm seeing pretty much the opposite of you right now. Maybe it's unrelated.