Yomo Kimyata

Well, in terms of having defense only and zero investment in resistance, no. My current build is looking something like this: But in terms of dealing in resistance by taking three slots in Sorcery and basing my incarnates around it, I'm not doing that. Although I'm working on an alt build for that very purpose.

I front load Kick in a lot of builds in order to slot it with accuracy and fill in an otherwise sparse attack chain. At end game I put a FF+recharge in there and if I remember to use it, see if I can get that dopamine rush from hitting the jackpot of a hit, a knockdown, and a +recharge proc. Also, animation-wise, to me it always seems that kick lengthens your leg temporarily, which makes me think of Robert Crumb's "Keep on Truckin'."

One of the things I enjoy about this game is learning new things, and sometimes that thing is that I was looking at things in a different way than perhaps others were looking. I have never liked defense-based armors (Ninjitsu, Super Reflexes, Energy Aura, Stone Armor -- somehow I'm ok with Ice Armor). What I have telling myself for years is that I don't like them because it is easy mode -- you soft cap your defenses and there you are. However, I've been spending time on my WM/Ninjitsu scrapper and finding that dinging 50 and playing at +4/x8 *feels* much more difficult than it does on say, a WM/Bio. Why would that be so? I'm softcapped to all relevant defenses so only 1 in 20 blows should be getting through. And hitting the T9 shouldn't *majorly* affect my survival, since still only 1 in 20 should be getting through, but it really does. And *smacks forehead* of course, the purple patch. Before I get level bonuses from T3 incarnates, my effective defense is not 45%, not at all. And I'm so used to playing multifaceted armor sets that I'm used to proactively healing or boosting my defense or whatever, and not having those tools in pure defense sets are killing me smalls. Another thing that I forget about incarnates (and I don't pursue them on all my 50s) is that lots of my endurance woes go away once I hit Radial Musculature and Ageless. So I do see what some of you are saying that I'm overbuilding for endurance, but I'm overbuilding for my *future* endurance. As of now, I'm firmly in what I consider the sweet spot, but once I T3 I suspect I'll respec again.

I think my biggest error is relatively insignificant -- buying a bunch of converters with an extra digit or two in there by mistake and only realizing after I've hit the Bid button a few dozen times. This booster mishap was probably my most significant win:

Nemu taught me the gospel of knockdown.

He's ok.

The OP is a real life friend of mine, and not only has he not played this game in over a year, I'm not sure he even knows how to use his computer anymore.

nope. I’m not going to support any of you whiny kids who want moar. How much of a penalty should we enact on those who don’t do what we want? I’m hoping for 100%

my first thought is to change the title from Pretty Good to Pretty Damn Spectacular but I’ll take a look

I hate to give away obvious secrets, but this is, in fact, the way.

Honestly, I don't have any idea of how much liquid inf I have anymore. Whoever is managing the PvP factory and/or the purple factory may well be in the mutilple trillions range, but I cannot imagine how much time it might take them per day in order to lock it up -- I generally just get involved there at weak points nowadays. Yes. Actually at this point, somewhere in my gallery, I have someone with either a factory for making everything or have hundreds or thousands of things in storage. Generally, all of my alts self finance, and the only things I will consider emailing are lvl 53 HOs (and then only the expensive ones). Everything else I just buy and sell on the open market but since I am not in this business to give things away I will generally do things like buy ten things, use one and sell the other 9 for a 25% profit.

Also, thanks to the devs front-loading powers, I find that the levelling experience is more annoying pre-31 since I generally am wishing for the three enhancement slots than I am for getting my T9 at level 26 and then not having anything constructive to do with it until I level higher then exempt back down.

It's worthwhile noting that your playstyle will affect your perception on this. If I'm levelling a scrapper, I will up my difficulty and number of opponents as I move along. By the time I'm in my 40s, I'm probably running x5-x8 and that increases your experience rate like mad. Generally, my 40s are like a fever dream because they move by so quickly.

Back to OP: you may not be aware of this but you can literally resummon your pets every five seconds. So if you aren’t using group fly to keep your personal experience at tip top, your team experience should be very similar in terms of what you are contributing

Personally, I don't think of Market PvP(lol) as buyer v. seller, but rather buyer v. buyer or seller v. seller. I think if you don't care then it's just plain P.

I think that market PvP is really interesting, partly because I always think I'm winning, and I'll bet many of my counterparties think the same thing...

Two reasons from my gameplay experience: 1. War Mace is endurance heavy, even well slotted. Also consider you can slot three AOE with FF +rech and that is a never ending cavalcade of joy that sucks your blue bar dry. 2. Ninjitsu’s endurance regain power kind of sucks. Yeah, it’s a lot better than nothing, but it’s a click that only affects you and can at realistically best give you 60% of your endurance back every 25-30 seconds. Unless I want to assign five extra slots to health and stamina, which I do not!

what was the biggest?

nods. All of it.

Here are some initial thoughts, and I'll try a build over the next week: I solo just about everything, so in general I want a ST rotation and an AoE rotation. For ST I'll go with some combo of Pulverize, Clobber, Shatter, and a snipe. For AoE I've got Whirling Mace, Shatter, Crowd Control. For WM I use Shatter as the holder for Critical Strikes proc to enhance crits for both ST and AoE. This also means I'll always lead out of "hide" with Shatter. I usually three slot generic defense toggles with a LotG proc and 2x lvl 53 cytos. Saves me slots I put elsewhere since the bonuses for defense sets are pretty weak and I'm better off using those slots elsewhere. I'm not really seeing the point in the T9. Yes, it doubles your DDR, but then again, I'm only going to need ANY DDR on a streak breaker. Even if the crash is manageable, I'd rather smash than manage. Thinking power pools of Leaping (CJ), Fighting (Kick, Tough, Weave), and either 3 from Force of Will or 4 from Experimentation. I'm skipping Hasten because I find that 2-3 FF +rech keeps that +100 up most of the time. Endurance will be a bottleneck, and I will probably need to use an epic pool to address it. Psionic Mastery gives me endurance help and a snipe. Done.

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Ninjitsu is only for scrappers and stalkers, so this isn’t some great conspiracy! Stalkers get Ninja Blade instead of Katana, and the powers that be feel (rightfully imo) that Battle Axe, War Mace, and Titan Weapons would be too powerful for stalkers without significant rebalancing. Coincidentally I just started reinvestigating my WM/Nin who I took to 50 but didn’t love. I don’t have much experience with pure defense sets, but my hazy memory says that I remember him being significantly more fragile than I expected. That said it was an organic build in an unknown set to me so I’m sure I made errors. I’ll be back later on this one.

I am absolutely going to try to increase the graphical load on each of my characters.

When I turn 50, which I have done a bunch of times, I'm generally going to need about 20-25 catalysts. Usually I put in lowball bids for 30 or so a day or two before I hope to ding 50. but that said, so what if I go into the market and spend 25mm on catalysts? 25mm is a rounding error for me and I think for most experienced players. I've even clicked on the Character Items page to pull off catalysts from there, and we all know that's not worth our time!