Yomo Kimyata

@UberGuy (all hail UberGuy) has done a fair amount of work on this. See this thread:

You know, you can make some pretty great builds with these power sets so long as you really embrace the knockback and disregard the rikti monkeys your teammates.

Huh, interesting! I assume this is on two accounts logged in at the same time rather than listing on one alt, logging off, then logging on on a different alt?

I did not know that and I do not see them listed anywhere in the Merit Vendor. Where are they listed?

That depends on (and I've never tried this) whether or not bids over a certain amount stack. You've noticed that if you have a bid for something and you bid the same amount again, your bid is replaced by a bid for 2x that item. I don't think that works on every item though, and I don't know if you can get a stack to total over 2bn. If not, then 200*2bn + 100*0.999999999bn + 2bn?

Only 999,999,999 inf per email. So per account, you can have 99,999,999,900 stored in email. You have 1,000 character slots per shard for total of 5,000. Each character can hold 2bn, and has up to 200 market slots. Lots. And then you can have an unlimited number of accounts. So unlimited lots.

Staff gets you 15+% melee defense from Guarded Spin, which should be up pretty much constantly. You get a nice resistance bonus from using the finisher on Sky Splitter. My attitude has been to go offensively, and I really enjoyed my bio/staff tanker (and, well, my staff/bio everything else too). It's a lot more difficult to be immortal, but for the most part, you are definitely immortal enough, IMO.

Ooh, thanks for the reminder. Gotta set the noob traps!

For sale: rocket boots. Never worn.

Also, people like round numbers, and it is *possible* that other bids for 70k got filled but not yours because there may have been a whole lot of them. Price is the first tie breaker (higher price should always transact before lower price), but after that it gets murky and apparently partly random.

On the one hand, I (and presumably many others) have been buying very large quantities of converters recently at something slightly over 70k per converter. So it is *possible* that nothing has made it down to 70k over the past five days. On the other hand, I'm pretty sure that I've seen a trade print at under 70k in the past few days, which should not be possible unless 1. it was a bogus print; 2. somehow your bids were invalidated (are you offering converters on the same alt? that might mess up the queue.); 3. something else. On the other hand, I'm all out of hands. More than some, probably fewer than others. EDIT: to answer your question, no, that should not have any effect.

Careful, this is exactly how I got caught with thousands of winter packs in 2019! I mean, I should have known better and all, and I still made an obscene profit, but it scared the bejeezus out of me when they went on sale. Swapping your bids to 9,999,999 might be prudent unless you are planning on being very vigilant.

I think a good badge for Bruce Banner would be Destroyer of Strength, because he is puny: https://hcwiki.cityofheroes.dev/wiki/Destroyer_of_Strength_Badge

Hiya-- Lemme answer your questions in reverse order, since there are indeed some changes I would make to it today. * The main changes I would make today is to make sure to put a Theft of Essence +end proc in DNA Siphon and Parasitic Aura, and to swap sets and put Panacea in Parasitic Aura and Preventative Medicine in Ablative Carapace. Some other rejigging, and I would do something like this (still a W.I.P.) Slots are harder to find, so I cut back Arctic Breath to a debuff mechanism. * Quite survivable. North of 40 melee defense even without the Guarded Spin bonus (which puts you in the mid 50s I think.) Good (not exceptional) resistances in offensive mode. Two heals that are generally up every 30-40 seconds. * Not really, I use those as place holders. Although if I am closing in on melee I might use spirit shark. But you can definitely leave those empty if you wish. * Nope, don't miss it at all. I've only used it on a tanker, and then I would add an Achilles Heel on the off chance that it would trigger. This is primarily an AoE build, and with so much recharge one or more of your aoE attacks is pretty much available all the time. * Yes, those two slots are supposed to be boosted to +5. I never bother to fill that in in Mids. With so many +recharge procs, you will easily be perma hasten. * I've never had a blue bar problem. With the Theft of Essence procs, both DNA siphon and Parasitic Aura are blue bar fillers so long as you have a few enemies near. It's been awhile since I fought AVs with this build, so there is a chance that you might need blue inspirations for long fights against a single target.

I changed my mind. There's still room at the top in a few organizations:

I'd say it's mostly a combination of 2&3, that I will categorize as low marginal utility. Yes, you can squeeze out a few hundred or thousand more inf by going to a vendor, but the incremental value of that few extra inf doesn't really matter to many people. It's like how people in America might look down and see a penny and not pick it up. I generally vendor some and AH some and squeeze out the few incremental inf, but I certainly don't *need* to. I just feel like it is a good habit.

Black whip? Black whip? Three black whips.

That's so cute that I thought that prices would markedly shift in a month. What a maroon! I don't have a snap shot of prices from then, but I'd probably say that both mid-range and high-range prices have dropped over the last two years? So we are both right. Oh wait, this is the interwebz, so we are both *WRONG*!

I've noticed this too, and without any of the things that @GM Impervium notes, so I changed my password.

I've got a soft spot for a number of villain groups, but that doesn't necessarily mean I want to be a part of them.

I can’t even remember why I posted this. Was the lvl 49 farming fix around this time?

Well, I haven’t been tracking average population, and HC hasn’t released a population update for quite some time, so my thoughts on 1. are mainly anecdotal. What I can tell you is that periodically I track certain commodities and lock down the market to see how many come in/leave the market per day. This is how I come up with estimates about how many new alts are being created per day, and that estimate is about half of what it was a year ago. It’s not a perfect system, but it jibes with what I’m seeing volume-wise.

Also, you get your own tv show.

I agree completely, which is another reason I continue to take profits now rather than later. Some factors I see/anticipate: 1. Overall gradually declining player base. 2. Existing player base making new alts at a declining rate. 3. More people "making their own" rather than buying retail. 4. More people doing challenges that don't rely on high cost builds. 5. People periodically liquidating their stashes. Then again, I've been calling for the sky to fall for a while now, so what do I know?

I'm happy to share my stash strategy. Worst case scenario, someone figures out a way to take it away from me and then I get to start all over again! I have four vault alts. Each one of them puts bids of 10x 100mm on non-existent items, so 1bn a market slot. Currently I'm all-in on one item so if those get re-released, I'm a little screwed. It's happened before -- I got blindsided by the price cut on Winter Packs in 2019 (which was my fault entirely, and I made a lot of inf, so I can't complain); then I was invested in lvl 53 HOs until those were instituted. So let's just say I try to keep my eyes on upcoming changes. I have a number of income-generating alts. My standard path is to accumulate 1.2bn, then send myself an email for 999,999,999 and leave myself 200mm for working capital. I'm constantly reinvesting. Once a month or so I clean out my email stash and move it to one of my vault alts. I trust the AH a lot more than I trust the email system, and I have definitely seen emails get lost or get delayed and delivered months later. Plus, I've been told you can only have 100 emails. I've got a lot of alts (maybe 150 or so). Some of them are name place holders, and some are "challenge" alts (which don't use the AH), but almost all of the rest of them are self-funded. Eventually I'll aggregate everyone's spare cash, but that feels like a daunting task right now.