Yomo Kimyata

I could see a case where someone thought that the three-piece bonus from Synapse's Shock was worth it for an additional 10% slow resist, but that's a stretch.

Rest

One other niggle: I kind of wish you could convert merits INTO vanguard merits. I know that they drop like water when you are doing MSR, but I rarely do those, and when I'm doing Mender Ramiel's arc I rarely have 50 Vmerits and so get stymied by $%#%$ Vanguard Colonels and can't afford a Curse Breaker.

Fair enough on the base building part -- I just want prestige as a pure inf burning mechanism (and maybe one to keep score by...). Leave all the base stuff free. Short of deleting items or characters, there aren't a lot of real inf destroying activities. Even the /AH (which I use even instead of emailing myself stuff) only takes 10%! As to your second part, that's the developer conundrum. Even a small number of minmaxxers (and I am specifically not using the term exploit here) who know what they are doing and more importantly care about it or enjoy it have a outsized impact on the economy. And there are lots and lots of people who don't *want* to do this extraneous stuff to be able to afford the items that they do want. It's a sticky wicket to be sure. That's why I do my giveaway -- it's a lot of inf for someone who just wants to get through the game, but it's not enough inf to bring out the minmaxxers to try to bankrupt me!

It’s interesting to me, watching how new currencies have been developed and adjusted over the years in this game. To me it seems like a cycle of developing a reward; people learn to minmax the reward; powers that be wring their hands at how they didn’t foresee this; some governance is put in place which upsets both the minmaxxers and the main population; new reward is developed as appeasement. At this point, it’s an interesting mishmosh of currencies, and it’s always an interesting thought experiment about the “best” way to get something I want. I’d be fine if every currency were to be made exchangeable into any other, but at usurious rates of course. If you don’t use something like shards, that’s up to you! But I’m not going to support a better exchange rate for mana than just falls from the sky. Personally, I’d love to have prestige back as an inf burner, but maybe that’s just me. I’d love to have more things character locked, but I also realize that some people get their joy from making instacharacters and if they can afford to equip them, have at it!

That's where my head went. Symphony/Psychic dominator.

And fat. Bald and fat and wearing a hat.

When I was taught economics a long time ago, it was phrased as "the allocation of scarce resources." Listen "bro", I understand that you are the main player in your experience in this game and that everyone else is an NPC. We aren't, actually, but I've met tons of people like you in real life who are so solipsistic that nothing matters except what they want, right now. I really hope that you are powerful enough in real life to be able to command folks around like you want to do here, because that's gotta suck facing that other people have wants and needs. Best of luck, "bro".

Hey bro. Every one of your suggestions is "Make something do more damage". AND you want all the secondary benefits to stay in place, because all you see is I WANT MORE DAMAGE, so the tradeoff between better survival and more damage doesn't mean anything. I understand that, and I get why you want more, just like a child wants more lollies. More is better to you and you cannot even grasp why there is a tradeoff between damage and survivability. I have no hope that you will say, huh, maybe there should be tradeoffs. I know you feel like you are the first person to discover ice melee or staff fighting or mind control and you rage at the unfairness that they don't do pure damage. But you aren't the first person. I have no idea if you are running Homecoming, but I hope that when you post really mindless self serving posts in Suggestions that are "MORE FOR ME!" that my simple "no" will help serve as a stop for the devs to hear that maybe someone doesn't want MORE FOR YOU. My suggestion to you is to make suggestions that you think will be good for everyone, not just you. Cheers.

The yellows are simple. For the blues I used an alt build with Ring of Fire and Char from epic pool loaded up for bear. Which also worked well for the greens once I switched my Hybrid to Control. It’s the only time I’ve ever slotted the Devastation proc.

Who hasn't?!?

This took me forever to get around to, but I finally gave it a shot, and eventually pulled it off. Ice Melee/Radiation Armor. The two real stumbling blocks are getting rid of all the mitos from Weakened Hamidon and knocking off the Honoree. I didn't think the latter was going to be the worst thing in the world until I discovered: Once he triggers Unstoppable, he's got pretty much 95% resist all for 200 seconds and you only get 45 seconds downtime before he hits it again. I needed Lore pets for that battle. Fun stuff!

One of the things I like best about Frostfire is that he was once just like me.

I will take Focused Accuracy, and two slot it with endurance reduction. For the most part, the reason one goes for Body Mastery is to help with endurance woes. But unlike other melee ATs, scrappers only get one spot to slot a Perf Shifter and that is in Physical Perfection. Conserve Power has such a long recharge that I've never found it particularly worthwhile. Focused Accuracy has one very important thing going for it -- to hit debuff resistance. I generally don't need much if any additional accuracy, but it's rather nice to not have my accuracy floored by an unexpected coven of Death Mages.

This is entirely you. It is completely irrelevant what AT or powers you have when you are on a team.

I am not going to cave to your "I WANT MORE DPS" request. Ice Patch provides an unlimited amount of survivability. Go find another set to cry for more damage.

Listen, I hate elemental swords, so all my ice melee characters use Frozen Fists. Is it better than Ice Dancer Sword? No. But it is worth clicking. I will go on record and say if you can't run Ice Melee from 1-10 with anything more than Frozen Fists, Brawl, and Kick, you are playing a much more difficult game than I am playing.

Absolutely not. Not even if you wanted to make this game "winnable" by toddlers. Ice Melee is already a top if not the top performer.

Endurance is going to be your bottleneck.

same as for everyone else, Snarky. 100mm inf per account!

The one thing that I try to do is avoid having only one type of damage across primary/secondary/pool/epic. Other than that, yes I will spend hours hacking at a Zeus Class titan with a broadsword

Well slap my belly and call me “Shirley”! Good to know that.

damage debuffs and damage resistance debuffs are two different things. Damage resistance resists damage resistance debuffs: if you have 50% smashing resistance, and you get hit with a 10% damage resistance debuff, that 10% is 50% resisted so you get hit with -5% smashing resistance for 45% smashing resistance. if you have 25% cold resistance then you get hit with -7.5% cold resistance for 18.75% cold resistance. I do not think -damage buffs are resistable.

Phi is a magic number. Yes it is; it's a magic number.

One thing I will say is that DNA Siphon can be an utterly fantastic offensive weapon, and I six slot it on every bio character. It's even a great place for the Crit Strikes proc on a scrapper. For an EM/Bio scrapper I would probably go with: Fury of the Glad -res proc, Superior Avalanche knockdown proc OR Overwhelming Force knockdown proc, 50+5 Armageddon A/R, Armageddon damage proc, lvl 53 D-Sync Drain (Acc/End Mod), lvl 53 D-Sync Reconstruction (Healing/Recharge). I never got around to making a scrapper, but my Bio/EM tank is probably my godliest character.