Yomo Kimyata

Well, my self-funding no-market alts don't have the inf to buy and upgrade to +3 every time they level. But yeah, they are generally cost-effective in comparison to IOs.

I've actually been playing a lot on SO builds due to various challenges. If you have the inf for them, they are ridiculously overpowered at early levels! I would have interest, but my ability to schedule consistent team play is virtually nil. But I would want the name Flea Agent.

Their livers are poisonous. Beware.

To be fair, I don't think Sally ever studied law.

Your PUG is like bad medicine. Bad medicine is what I need. (Woah-a-oh) Shake it up, just like bad medicine. There ain't no empath who can cure the Vahzilok Wasting disease.

You could not possibly be more correct. It is a game breaking problem that Seeds doesn’t have a significantly longer recharge.

I commend you for thinking outside the box, but I’m not sure I support the rework of a basic mechanic of the game in order to make one specific AT a little better. My two cents.

My thoughts on how I would approach Iron rules for the AH: 1. No selling on the /AH. Vendors only. Unfortunately that means only 5k for a rare. 2. No buying on the /AH unless it is a seeded item, then pay the seeded price. 10k for common salvage, 100k for uncommon, 1mm for rare, 10mm for Hero packs, 25mm for Winter Packs. Buy whatever you want from vendors. 3. Anything else goes, including merit vendors, pvp vendors, etc. This feels sufficient to stay decently equipped in SOs, you should be able to accumulate lots of merits (and therefore converters) so you can strategically add crafted IOs based on drops if you get lucky. This is pretty strict, but I’m also the kind of person who accumulates 100mm on an new alt in an hour, so an unrestricted budget would probably make things too easy. Am I right in assuming people are running +0/x1, bosses, no AV?

I'm very pleased that as I start on a new project: The Natural Limit The Human Limit and The Natural Human Limit were all available on Excelsior!

This is exactly what I'm looking for, thank you! Could you point me to the source material if you know it offhand? As far as I'm concerned, Powerhouse and his/her/its team are the only ones who have opinions that are particularly relevant to me, so I'd like to have a handle on what they figure the specific problems are in order to determine what my responses will be. Thanks!

Specifically with respect to uncommon salvage, I micromanage it (on a very micro level) for two reasons. 1. It's a good fast way to build up a couple of hundred thousand inf on a new character. 2. I consume a lot of them, and I realize that it's a potential bottleneck in the AH. I won't buy it NAO but I will buy it Soon(tm). It's when someone starts messing with my Soon(tm) price that I get annoyed so I log onto an alt, dump yellow salvage until it's at my target, put in lowball bids to fill up my AH slots, profit slightly.

At level 2? It's difficult. At level 49, nerp.

Early observations: @Doomguide2005 is exactly right. This whole experiment is understanding the purple patch. https://hcwiki.cityofheroes.dev/wiki/Purple_Patch Early on, defense is almost irrelevant. You're probably gonna get hit by anyone and everyone. I've been focusing on resist over defense. Also, accuracy is critical. SOs at level 2 are ridiculously overpowered. If you are using SOs then and not playing at +3 or more, in my opinion you are beating up kindergarten kids. Amplifiers are also ridiculously overpowered. See above comment. Strategic leveling is always fun, and you will do it early and often. Take your ding as an opportunity to shell out as much as you can before running away. Remember, if you level a few times and you are facing the comparatively trivial mod of +3/x8, they will slay you. Echo of Statesman lasts for seconds. Run away a lot. I keep Sprint active, and I'm actually going to two slot it soon. I may three slot it eventually. Early on, I don't think it really matters what AT you play. I wouldn't play a mastermind, controller, or dominator (except mind of maybe plant). Pets don't last. But I think almost anything else is "doable". I'm setting up a Beam/Willpower sentinel for an additional data point. Right now she's making inf and getting res day job bonus.

The exact opposite. It fixed the mob size at x8 but it bugs the level to +5-?+7?.

also. /setdifficultyteamsize 999

Early on in HC, I joked about running a character solo to 50 at +4/x8 settings through missions. Then this thread taught me that there are ways to break that. So now I'm trying to run to 50 at +4/x999! My self-imposed rules: 1. Start a new character, run through the tutorial. Then put your settings at +4/x9 (or higher). See @Apparitions thread for how to do so. Bosses activated, but there is no way I'm going to activate AVs. 2. Pure solo. No teams, no drive-by buffs. 3. Regular XP. 4. No street sweeping unless it's part of a mission or is absolutely necessary. In other words, don't circumvent the task by leveling outside of missions. 5. No outleveling missions. No going back to a level 8 mission at 12. 6. No Ouro missions, or if you do, turn off XP. Other than that, use every tool you have at your disposal and run missions. Throw the kitchen sink at them. For extra bonus points, do this on a self-funded character. It's tedious, it's time-consuming, and a real exercise in learning how to avoid aggroing an entire spawn. But it's far more doable than you might think. I haven't hit any +7 spawns yet (currently at level 11 on a Mind/Nature controller after a total of three missions). I die a fair amount. I suspect that it's going to get really painful in the 30s, but we'll see! Wish me luck!

Apologies for the Rectified Reticles, on two levels. Not only did I bring them up in the Meandering Path thread, but it was the niche I was moving into. I took it out of rotation, but not before I locked up a huge amount of Encouraged Accuracy and Rectified Reticle recipes and cheap IOs. It has not been the first market I ruined… Flipping is still great on a lot of items, but for most IOs it’s much more profitable to craft and/or convert. Plus, I can usually do that in good sized blocks! There’s still good flipping in HOs (and in packaging them up into 53s, although that’s so slow and thin), but with daily Hami runs on many servers, there’s still a lot of daily supply. IMO more than demand. So market PvP is alive and good, but it’s really not sellers v. buyers.

Play whatever sets you want! Depending on what type of opponents you are fighting, you probably won't need the defense from Divine Avalanche, and you can focus on attack chains that give you better net damage.

I know this is true, but my search fu is weak. Is there any "official" dev statement that identifies *what* they think the problem with procs is? Even if that problem is as simple as "we don't like 'em!"? I think that would help people brainstorm possible solutions that directly address the stated problem. My initial response was, "You're a monster!" But on further review, why not make *every* proc unique?

I can only speak for myself, and I fully recognize my biases: It depends on what you mean by market pvp (lol). If you mean buyers competing against sellers, I don't really consider that pvp, but ok. In this case, I think that "market pvp" is generally a straw man argument that doesn't really exist. A real fundamental difference between Live and Homecoming is that the current devs have implemented (or expanded) policies that, honestly, make it extremely difficult if not impossible for people to manipulate markets. -- Fungibility (or pooling) of items make it extremely difficult to manipulate markets. Shutting down luck charms was simple on Live. It is a lot more difficult to shut down all common invention salvage. -- Fixed price offerings, or price caps. These caps can be (relatively) hard, like seeding 10mm rare salvage at 1mm, or 10mm Hero Packs at 10mm. Or they can be soft, like converting other items (like merits) from one item to another, like the cost of an item (in inf) that costs 100 merits is definitively capped by the inf cost of 100 merits (which is 100mm), and soft capped by the relative value of selling alternate items (e.g., comparing the cost of a Winter O with the cost of 300 converters). -- Converters are cheap, practically free. With few exceptions (Hami-os leap to mind), you can create expensive items from cheap items. It is (usually) probability based, and it takes a small amount of knowledge, but you cannot stop supply. -- You cannot stop supply. Fundamentally, Homecoming is an essentially closed system. In order to control a market, you need to control supply, demand, or both. There is no way to stop people from making more in-demand items, unless you buy them at inflated prices. If you artificially create demand, that only works in the very short run. In that case, you are setting yourself up to get pummeled with supply from other people. Which brings me to my second point: If by market PvP you mean buyers competing against other buyers or sellers competing against other sellers, that's real. But that leads to better prices for buyers, as sellers compete. It leads to better prices for sellers, as buyers compete. This seems to be the exact opposite of what you are complaining about. Truth be told, ebil marketers are making better, more efficient markets for the market muggles out there. tl;dr If you can't afford something over the long run (which I would consider one to a few days), that's not ebil marketers. That's your fellow consumers wanting the same things you want and buying them at better prices. I'm not going to claim there is *no* manipulation, but it's practically non-existent, in my opinion and in my personal experience. Of course, your opinions may vary.

I did read them, but I don't really see them as the real game breakers that you do. And that's fine. I do think that min-maxers are gonna min-max. Point 1: I think people are gonna take Hasten whether or not they use procs, so the problem (if there is one) is with Hasten, not procs; 2: I may be smarter than the average bear (or I may not!), but I don't think it's all that complex. When I'm looking at procs, I look at percentages as calculated by one of the spreadsheets that people have so kindly provided!; 3. Old procs benefitted quick recharge powers, new procs benefit a different set of powers, a new system would benefit another class of powers (presumably). I don't really see that as a problem. If people don't want to min-max, that's fine. Their characters will still be fully playable at the highest of levels; 4. This is a risk tolerance/behavioral issue. It's interesting, but I don't see it as a problem. It's certainly possible I'm undervaluing the problems here, but I'm not sure. Again, just thinking aloud. EDIT: I'd understand if they worked global recharge into the formulas.

I'm trying to figure out my position on procs, so most of this post is just me thinking aloud. Originally, (I think), all procs worked off a chance to activate. Call it 20%. Fast activating powers had the same chance as slow activating powers, so you would get more bang for the buck by slotting "buzzsaw" attacks. I see that the desire for balance between damage and activation time got thrown out of whack, so I understand what the problem was. I'm less clear about what the problem is with PPM. I see that it was an attempt to "normalize" activation, and I think it was a pretty good attempt. I like the current system, in part because it is still probability based in large part, but it is more balanced. Is the problem that some powers get maxxed out at 90% because of recharge time/activation time? Is the problem that certain powers are not being used for their "purpose", e.g., holds used as damage attacks? Is it that global recharge (often) doesn't affect proc chances? Other? I ask this question a lot in this forum: what is the problem we are trying to solve? I noticed that in recent patches, the devs have instituted "internal" times on powers that result in lowered proc chances on those powers when compared to their actual usage. I'm not particularly pleased with that direction, because then it will be the devs' somewhat arbitrary opinion on which powers should proc and how often. I also differentiate procs into three general categories: damage, enemy debuff, and character buff. For the last, there is a real discrepancy between single target and AoE, which is why, for example, I slot a Force Feedback into every single AoE KB power, but less frequently slot one into a single target power. I'd hate to see that go away, but I'd understand if it did.

Ok. First of all, certain items in the AH are fungible, or bucketed. This means that also they may be different on your character, they all go into the same pool in the AH. And when they come out of that pool, they come out as a specific item. Example: all rare invention salvage is in the same pool. If someone puts up an Alien Blood Sample for sale, the AH considers it to be in the "rare salvage" pool. If someone else comes in and buys a Pangean Soil, it comes out of that same "rare salvage" pool and is defined as a Pangean Soil for that character. When it comes to IOs, the pooling occurs by level and by attuned-ness. So a level 25 Reactive Defenses D/E offered for sale goes into the Reactive Defenses D/E pool. Someone can buy it as a lvl 25. Someone can buy it as a lvl 50. Someone can buy it as an attuned. When it is bought, it comes out of the Reactive Defenses D/E pool, and is defined by the form in which the buyer bought it at. Note: a Reactive Defenses D/E is not equivalent to a Reactive Defenses D/E/R. Ok, now let's get into the nitty-gritty of how trades in the AH work. A character cannot buy or sell to him-, her- or it- self. But another character on the same account can buy or sell to that character. Or, a character on a different account can as well. Now, let's look at how the AH makes trades. People put up bids (orders to buy) and offers (orders to sell) at various prices. When a bid comes in, the system determines if there is any offer at or below the bid price. If so, the orders cross and a trade occurs. Likewise, when an offer comes in, the system checks if there are any outstanding bids at that price or higher. If so, again the orders cross and a trade occurs. I like to think as the order sheet like a set of goal posts. There are lots of bids on the low end, there is an empty space in the middle, and there are offers on the high end. Like this: ||||_____|||||| Every time a trade occurs, it's at one of those inside posts. If you sell something at 1 inf, it goes to the highest outstanding bid (which is the right-most upright on the left group) and the trade prints at the level of the bid. If you bid 1bn for something, it goes to the lowest outstanding offer (which is the left-most upright on the right group) and the trade prints at 1bn. If both of these cases, the innermost upright makes the trade, and is removed from the system. So what does this mean for you? If you want to change a lvl 25 to a level 41, or to an attuned, you sell one and buy the other. It doesn't have to be the exact same one. But if you do want to make sure you trade to yourself, it will be cheapest since you will then only pay the 10% AH fee as opposed to paying the AH fee and the bid-offer spread (which is the price difference between those two innermost uprights). In your example, you can offer your level 10 at 10mm and you can put in a bid at 10mm for the level 40. If 10mm is a price that is in the middle of the two uprights, then congrats, you just transacted with yourself! The risk is that it is possible that you sell one at 10mm, but you can't buy one at 10mm; or that you buy one at 10mm, but you can't sell one at 10mm. So figuring out where that middle price is may be the tough part. Now if you don't really care about prices, you can sell your level 10 at 1 inf, note the price it sells at, and then bid creep on the level 40 starting at that price and keep going until you buy one. Sorry for the long-winded explanation. Please let me know if I can be clearer!

Right, but since this is a player-driven economy (meaning that players supply other players), no one wants to be the chump who shovels out the chicken feed. I doubt that the GMs thought about this when they seeded salvage, but yet another positive purpose that seeding served was to provide all that chicken feed, albeit at (relatively) high prices. This is why I always react negatively to the people who want to only have rare salvage drop for them, since white and yellow aren't worth their time. In my mind, you shouldn't get to only select the rares, because that's part of the mechanism that keeps whites and yellows coming into the system. Even if selling them is only muscle memory or habit rather than any significant profit motive. Also, sometimes I'm grumpy.

I'm always happy when this thread gets bumped up, usually because I've got something to add. This one I wasn't shocked to get, but it was nice because I really wanted the name. I've been thinking about making a Rad/Regen scrapper for some time, and was super pleased to get Henrietta Lacks. Both in terms of theme, and also a tribute. If you are not familiar with that name, check her out. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Henrietta_Lacks