Yomo Kimyata

That's fantastic and great work on your part! We all really appreciate it, although it puts more information in the hands of dumb money retail investors. (I actually understood more of that than I thought I would, but you got to go for the Far Side reference when you can!)

Counterpoint: the controls and debuffs on my blaster are too weak.

I suspect that the G.P. will rank them Super Reflexes, Willpower, Energy Aura, but I would personally rank them Energy Aura, big gap, Super Reflexes, big gap, Willpower. Super Reflexes is an I win button for casual play, there is no denying. It's pretty straightforward to soft-cap your defenses and max out your defense debuff resistance, so you will generally only be defeated when either sheer numbers overwhelm the RNG and you breakdown, or you run into something that is designed to work around defenses. Your secondary defenses (like resistance, healing, etc.) are minimal. Willpower is the monarch of set and forget; once you have your toggles going, you will be set for the vast majority of content and it will be layered mitigation, so you've got some defense, some resistance, some healing. The problem is that it is very easy to get over your skis with Willpower in the endgame, and the T9 is not a very good power to hit when you get in trouble. For casual content, it's awesome, but it's also very easy to faceplant in end game. Energy Aura is a much more active secondary, and has a lot of active tools to manage your character over and above protection, namely endurance recovery. It probably has a much higher learning curve than the other two, but rewards that learning with performance. I wish the defense power didn't provide stealth, but it is what it is.

I logged on yesterday and noted that some staples that have been meticulously maintained for years have dropped in price and with a large umber of offers. Not all staples, but a few. Looks like someone with a large inventory got tired of holding and whoever was maintaining the market got swamped.

It's doable, but it's not a slam dunk:

Oh yeah. I’ve also noticed over the years that not all glowies are equal in generating noise.

Too starchy for me

You don't need a phd in mathematics to know that more is better -- a x is going to get you more bang for the buck than a +. If xp is your goal, run x(as many as you can safely handle) I'm sure there is a formula somewhere that will tell you if +2/x3 is better or worse than +1/x6, but more bodies = more xp = more drops.

I'm not sure I read the part where you describe *why* sleep needs to be improved?

I would love to hear as much as you are willing to tell about this. I've had plenty of personal theories!

It is possible that there are plenty of Salvo A/D listed UNDER your price of 800k, and every one of those listed trades were legit, just a case of the buyer throwing in a "fair" bid rather than doing any price searching. An easy way to check is to go to another character (or use this character after you take down the offer) and bid 799,999 and see if you own a new Salvo.

Regen brutes can work very well indeed, if you like the playstyle. To your point above, I've got both a staff/regen and a broadsword/regen at 50, and they are at least as well equipped to handle +4/x8 material as any of my other builds. In general, I like to have an "oh shit" power on my melee characters, in case things go pear-shaped. Frankly, by endgame it should *all* be pear-shaped. But for regen, we don't call them "oh shit" powers; we just call them powers. Moment of Glory and Instant Healing (and Dull Pain to a lesser extent) are inherent to the set. I always want to add something else in there on top of that, like Shadow Meld on a scrapper, or Darkest Night on a brute, or Unleash Potential on anything, and that's even before incarnates. Being able to swap between Moment of Glory and Instant Healing and Unleash Potential, with Darkest Night running on your anchor, should keep you pretty much unkillable if you are paying attention and watching timers. EDIT: Willpower is a great set until things go pear-shaped, but like I said, for me it's always pear-shaped so its inherent oh shit power in Strength of Will is rarely useful to me in terms of surviving.

Well, the minimum level of SOs used to be 25, so why not slot DOs if you must be enhanced at level 5?

"Arrest"

I noticed the other day that Shield Defense has quite a bit, but that's all I know of off hand. It would be a very useful thing to have nowadays.

I already have two Water/Poison corruptors, but I'm DYING to make Instant Jellyfish now.

When I hit 50: I add purple sets to my build. If they are procs, I add them as attuned (because I prefer the look and it distinguishes them from the rest of the set). Otherwise I slot them as lvl 50 and boost them to +5. I remove all PvP IOs that are not procs (which I have already added as attuned), and replace them with level 50 and boost them to +5. Now my purples and PvPs are massively boosted and will give bonuses when I exemp lower. I use a catalyst on every ATO and Winter O I have slotted, which changes them to Superior.

Ooh, now I'm gonna buy up all the Hamidon Goos on the market!

It will, but only if all the bids on that character are below all the offers on that character -- in that case they are all just legitimate bids and offers in the queue. It's when you have a bid that is equal to or higher than an offer on the same character that the queue gets circumvented and things go screwy. Think of it this way: if I could instantly sell inanimate carbon rods to myself at a loss, I'd get all the sales badges instantly! But the devs hate badgers! Darn! In practice, it's easy to play around with bids and offers on an item in order to try to get more information about the other bids and offers in the queue, but accidentally leave in bids that are higher than your offers. Or at least it has been easy for me to make those accidents...

For defense based builds, probably not. But for most of my builds splitting the Scrappers Strike 3-3 helps my overall survival. I don’t often slot the entire Critical Strikes either: usually just the proc or the proc +2 pieces for accuracy. For pai melee, you ideally want crit strikes available for both Mass Levitate and for Greater Psi Blade, so I like to look for secondaries like Shiwld or Bio or Rad. But given a choice, I’ll slot it in Mass Levitate and slot Greater Psi with Two purple damage procs (often 5- of Hecatomb).

Huh! I never looked it up in City of Data (all hail Uberguy) before. I love it on scrappers and that's the only place I've used it to date. Looks like the damage power is a 55 degree cone with 20 foot range (max 5 targets). This is the power that accepts scrapper ATOs and ranged AoE, so this is where Critical Strikes proc and Annihilation -res procs activate. Generally, I see Cric Strikes proc almost all the time. The control power has a 20% accuracy penalty, and is a targeted AoE with 20 foot range and 15 foot radius. That's a lot more square footage than the damage power, and it affects up to ten targets. +0.67 knockback to everyone, and a mag 2 stun with a 50% chance for mag 3 stun. This is the power that accepts knockback and stun IOs, so this is where FF +recharge and Amazeballs chance for -to hit procs activate. Generally, I see FF proc almost all the time. It may not be helping my dps, but on scrappers I'm mostly concerned with survival first, and this power is stellar for all kinds of mitigation. If you can layer on another source of stun (I've never made a Stone/Dark Armor scrapper, yet...) you're golden. EDIT: just made Absolutely Stunning on Excelsior, a beauty queen contestant who would do anything to win.

Just to be clear, because of the ease of switching between hero and villain (you visit Null the Gull, who is a seagull sitting atop a truck just on the red side of Pocket D), you can easily switch from hero to villain at level 35, fo to arbiter rein in grandville (standing just outside the big arachnos building), run a patron arc (which gives you a free respec), then go back to Null the Gull and go hero again. Now you are blue but you have access to patron pools still. also, at 35 is when I go to RWZ and join vanguard. It’s not much, but from then on you will get chances for Vanguard merits on defeating Rikti, even if they are not during vanguard missions.

I respec early and often, and maybe that repetition has made the process more enjoyable. I'll make a build, play three missions, then respec again, play three more, then respec again. I even wrote a guide!

I like it on my scrappers, but I see the point of people preferring radiation or preferring to play it on a brute. It shouldn't be that difficult to get many/most of your resistances to the 75% cap by the time you hit 50, but you are going to be way over 75% on energy, which just feels a little wasteful! (Yes, it does help with your damage resistance debuff, but that should mostly be on the fringes.) As a set, you are set on resistance and endurance recovery, but I'd like a little more help on the healing side, and on the defense side. I find that in 50+ content at 4/8, my electric armors tend to get overwhelmed more than some of my others.