Ukase

Marine X, While I applaud your initiative, I think there are some things you may not be aware of - or perhaps I misunderstood something. Let's say you do have a Slow IO. Why would you slot it & catalyze it? You'll get the same inf for one that's attuned as you would one that is not. The level 22 IO is in the same "bucket" that an attuned version of the same IO is. Let's say that I missed something in your post, and the idea was to slot it on a lower level character, say level 25. And the Slow IO in question is level 50. In this context, rather than having your controller slot it, attune it and unslot it so your lowby alt can use it - you're far better off selling it unattuned, crafted level 50 and re-buying it for the same price as attuned. Yomo goes step by step on how to do this somewhere in this forum subsection. For the sake of efficiency when crafting, a lot depends on the scale you craft at. For someone like me, one character is insufficient. This is because of one issue - salvage storage. Max my character can hold is 200. So, when I bid on 5x 54 level 10 pvp IOs, that's 5 pieces of salvage for each one I happen to acquire. If I get about 100 recipes, that's 500 pieces of salvage, which is 300 less than the 200 I can hold. (which requires level 50, purchase of 10 extra storage slots from Vanguard computer for 500 vg merits, and a slew of crafting badges to get from the default 172 to 200.) So, this is what I do. Which, I'm not doing now because I don't have any good places to stash the inf, outside of AH bids. And I'm not comfy with stashing inf that way, because then, only one character can access it, unlike email - accessible by all alts. As you can see, there are 36 "stacks" of 5 of each salvage in the level 1-24 tier. As I grab 5 of the pre-purchased that I need in my character's inventory to complete the purchase, I re-bid for a "fair" price - one I'd be willing to sell for and anticipate someone bidding on. Because I don't want to wait 24 hours, it's generally 500k for rare, 2k for uncommon, 300 for common. Perhaps a little higher, or lower, depending on market conditions. This is just for recipes in the 10-24 range. I have a similar character for the 25-40 range, and my farmers tackle all the crafting for 41 to 50 recipes, because they always have the salvage. If they don't, the recipe stays in inventory until the salvage drops, which is tends to do as I farm. For whatever reason, in AE, the mobs drop both arcane and tech salvage, so there's never a need to use the AH to grab any missing item. Some days, I'll have a dozen recipes waiting on some uncommons or rares, while other days, I can craft everything because the RNG likes me more than most of the other players. I used to have a base filled with salvage. I'd kept it alphabetically, 5 of each. Then I kept it in tiers by level. I finally opted to stash purples instead of salvage, resorting to the method demonstrated and explained above. I used to have an alt that would grab things from a storage SG and hand them to a lower level character leveling up. That got expensive, (opportunity cost) having a character stand idle in a base waiting to be needed. Far more profitable to have the character in a farm making inf, than sitting idle until needed. I finally just sold all the surplus out of the extra bases, and consolidated to the one. This method seems to work the best. One area that I should address: Superior ATOs. To make them superior, you have to slot, then catalyze. And your character needs to be that AT. I used to convert them to Brute ATOs and let my brute do this, because then, the Brute ATOs sold for much more inf than the others. But, there's a lot of competition in this niche, and I finally just opted out, and let something get by me. Cost me a lot of converters to convert all the non-brute ATOs to brute ATOs just to slot and catalyze. I still made influence/profit, but it was time consuming, and I can make the same inf in less time/hassle in other ways. So, I just use my alts that align with the ATO type in question and let them do the catalyzing and selling. Puts all those catalysts that drop on them to good use, too. In Summary, while I like the way you're thinking, I think you're going it at the wrong way. But, again, I may have misunderstood your intentions.

I completely get why you'd catalyze something like a Glad Armor Resistance IO. But the 3% def (All) ? No need. Works the same. Same case for the Panacea and the Shield Wall. But, I get your point. It would be tedious to craft/convert a ton of IOs.

Well..when you're rogue or villain, The Ranged Summons pet isn't Positron, but Scirocco, and his powers don't do nearly the dps or debuff that Posi's echo does. I'd go with the tank option and use Lord Recluse. The good news is, you're on test, so you can burn through temps and get more by simply re-copying the character to Beta if you need to retry. Try a heavy - from the vanguard base special computer. Also, be sure you've adequately buffed before starting - i.e. defense, survival, offense amplifiers from p2w, maybe some sg buffs from the empowerment stations, frost bite, Winter Ward (pocket d elf by the slopes) and yeah, a Shivan wouldn't hurt.

Um...you may not be aware of this - but pvp IOs are had for 2M, plus the cost of crafting & converting. Now, I can hear the rebuttals: "I don't enjoy that." or "There's not enough recipes" etc. This is just one recipe of 54 types of different pvp IOs. (9 sets, 6 each) If you place 5 bids for each one at 2M each, by the end of the day, you should have anywhere from 80 to 120 of them. Maybe more. When you craft level 10's, it only costs 3600 inf to craft, plus 600K for the salvage, at the most. 2.6M, sell for 8m, or give it away. Or, craft 3, sell one, give away 2 to cover the costs of making 3. I have literally made billions doing this, often a billion in a day. I know it's feasible.

If you're going to give the lotg 7.5% recharge/def IO, may I suggest it be attuned? This way the defensive portion levels up as they play. Granted, it's a meager number either way, but every bit helps. In my own humble opinion, while not every build can make space for them, here are the mainstays that I try to incorporate in my builds: Kismet 6% Perf Shifter +end Miracle +recovery Numina +regen/recovery Panacea +HP/End Steadfast Protection 3% def/Resist Glad. Armor 3% Def/TP Unbreakable Guard 7.5% HP Reactive Defense 3% Resist (the wording on this is misleading, but my combat attributes shows at least 3% resistance out of combat from this gem. Shield Wall 5% Res(all) Lotg 7.5%/Def x 5 Blessing of the Zephyr KB prot. Celerity: Stealth

I'm not in a position to confirm the upper limit on HC now, but it's at least 9. The Paragon Wiki states that it's 10, and your SG would make the 11th.

Hey, I got followed by Bionic Flea! Didn't realize that feature before.

I must have already reacted. No badge for my reaction.

To me, it's simple. If you're on a fire kin, you have to be active. Pro-active, even. If you've a choice between just sitting in the center of a map with burn on auto, or constantly hopping about, spamming Fulcrum Shift, etc...it's no contest. Who's got time for that? Easier to let it go in the background while you try new combos you haven't tried previously.

Hmm...I didn't see any glowing gold, or any countdown. But - my settings are set to performance, not ultra. I suppose it's possible I missed it with all the PP's in the herd. Maybe they could go with a different color for the countdown? Like Red? Or purple? Even so - it's silly to dish out that damage to the point where nobody can survive. Again, that's not difficult. That's just silly dodge ball. In Magisterium, Apex, Protean...there are clear indications to get out of the way. In this occasion, I saw no warning. It's possible I missed it, but if I did miss it, I missed it because of the npcs that were surrounding me. I'll know to look for it next time - but the warning should be more obvious. Again, opinions will vary.

It's possible the UI warned me in some fashion, but I don't think so, but this just happened in the third mission. I was solo, on my tank, and although I think the HP my character has is pretty high, it's nowhere near the damage that took place here. I've solo'd this part before, on my fire/fire blaster and this didn't happen. I was just whittling away at the mob, and this happens. I was on the 2nd difficulty setting, Malicious, trying it out. I understand that your focus is to corral folks like me from soloing to teaming with others, though I've no idea why. But, even if I were teamed, I don't see how any amount of buffs would have handled this damage. Is this working as intended? If so, I suggest there be some sort of clear, visual cue as to what's about to happen. What's troublesome is - the mission completed right afterwards. I can't redo the mission without redoing the first two missions. I will, but it's a bit irksome. And I do get that at the higher difficulty setting there should be more difficulty. But going from 3k to zero isn't difficult. Getting gob-smacked for 2500, with a few seconds to react before it happens again - that's difficult. This is just kind of silly, don't you think? It's like me flying over Steel Canyon and getting blown up by the building on fire. Nothing difficult about it. The damage taken is too much to handle, so you are defeated, even though you never had a chance to move out of the way, or use an inspiration or your self-heal. Just my initial take. I'm sure opinions will vary.

That's certainly fair enough. I know you're not alone. Plenty of folks are pleased about it. Part of me wishes I could get more joy out of making a cool costume and using emotes & such, as I think I'm missing a fair portion of what the game could offer, but it's just not my thing.

I guess I'm just too out of touch with my fun side. I don't see the appeal.

I dare fine.

My anecdotal data supports the theory that the AH just takes time to process during certain times. Over 30K bids strongly suggests that unless they're all for between 1 and 5 inf, that mine should have sold instantly, or at worst, within a second or two of the figurative hamster turning the wheel within the server. There really is no other reasonable explanation. I cannot accept that there would be so many bids for such a tiny amount of influence, when everyone knows that rare salvage generally sells for 500k, on average. It is possible, of course. Just not very likely. Sure, I can see 100 folks selling 20 pieces or so of rare salvage for the tiny price, but given as my alt account had standing bids for them at 500k at the same time....nah, not buying that my pieces weren't first in queue in this example. Possible? sure. Likely? Nope.

I place this here not because I'm not familiar with it - but because some folks may not be familiar with how the AH works (or doesn't work) from time to time. Most of us more experienced marketers have seen it. We just adjust, shrug and move on. Some of you may have noticed that in the past couple of days, rare salvage wasn't getting bought at the usual 500k price. I mean, not even my overnight bids at 500K were filled. This pic was taken just now. It's not just an instant in time. It took me about 30 seconds to pull up the snip & sketch and to stretch out the AH UI so you could all see how many pieces were listed. Look at the bids - 34938 bidding for rare salvage. Do you honestly think all of those bids are for only 5 inf or less? I do not. The server that's running this is moving fairly slowly. This is why some items that you'd think would sell for 4M easy aren't selling (at least, not that you'd notice). My guess is these sales were "instant" as far as the system goes - but it's taking my system time to get the information from the server. Mind you - in the minutes it's taken for me to type this out - the items have sold, so don't try to bargain shop! Well, go ahead and try, but you won't get mine. But this is why, I believe, that your reasonable bids don't go through when you make them. If influence is important for you, you may be well served to wait about 90 seconds after each bid to see if it actually worked. Items on weekend nights (anecdotally for me) do not seem to sell or get bought right away.

Let me give folks a chance to brace themselves. What's the saying? "One man's meat is another man's poison" ? Or one man's junk is another man's treasure ? I made a poison/ice defender. I got it to level 11 and just said enough. I'd read this post on the forums where some kind soul was singing the praises of how wonderful poison was. It ain't. It's trash. I can't fathom why anyone would ever make one. It really is trash. Another combo was a mind/psi dominator. I had a friend who'd needed MoTPN. The badge giving them fits was the one with the telepathists. Sure, I could've PL'd it, but I wanted to play it - experience the AT. See how it was. It just made me respect Mistress Mezmera all the more - because he play's his incredibly well. Makes it seem easy. Mine, however was a turd. Each day, I'd play it - and it was horrid. It wasn't until level 48 when I learned that the dominator hit domination more quickly when teamed. I was pretty pissed off. I completely understand that this game is an MMO, and yeah, yeah, teaming, teaming is all the rage. But, I digress. So, I just deleted it. I didn't even take any of the enhancements out of it. Just a straight delete, and swore off of Dominators. A truly trash AT if there ever was one. And then...I ran into Shotty Mario who persuaded me to give an Earth Dom a shot, and I did. Now I have two of them. But for the rest of them - they're trash. Until I'm convinced otherwise. (Anecdotally - when I've done master TFs that failed, it was always someone on a Dom that died! Low HP, meager damage, just really useless to my style of play. )

Sorry if it wasn't clear. I'm long-winded, so I feel like my "suggestions" would be poor use of the Dev's time. The question is about an inf sink. My spending 1 billion for 10M credit towards the last inf badge. Would that be a bad idea? As for the method used by Voltor (the chap with each AT with all the badges) the strategy has been kill all ITFs at +4/8. I'm not a big fan of ITF. And certainly not doing as many times as it would take to earn 250M more. Well, not a fan doesn't really express my distaste for that TF quite enough. I actually hate it. It was actually my motivating factor in making enough emp merits through a farmer so I wouldn't be a slave to running TFs for reward merits. Everyone loves to do ITF, either as kill most/all, or speedy. I think I'd rather do it 4x speedy than once as a kill most/all. But I'd rather not do it all. Sure, any map will give progress. And I'll get there eventually. But, never hurts to ask folks what they think. (well, usually it doesn't hurt. Some of you folks are just mean and nasty. But that's okay. I'll live. )

Anyone have more than one badge character with all the badges? I know of at least 4 people that crazy besides me. I'm not sure about them (Lorainne, Sentenza, Voltor, Stitch), but with me - it took me a year of goofing off when HC first came out before I even reconsidered badging. I'd done it on live, and was pretty high up there, considering my late start to play (issue 3 - missing out on some anniversary badges & a few others) I know I had as many as I could possibly get when the game closed. So, my last badger was complete before the 2xp nerf. I remember it being one of the last ones I got, but I was scratching my head, trying to think why this time around it was taking longer. And then it hit me - I no longer had the option to turn off xp for the 2xINF. Fun facts for those that don't know: Influence earned in the market doesn't give progress/credit for this badge. AE influence doesn't give credit/progress either. Since there is no more 2xINF, I'm thinking perhaps there might be a way we could find another way to earn credit towards this badge. Like, I dunno - buy it, as an inf sink, maybe? I give up a billion for 10M credit or something ridiculous like that? or would that be bad form? I mean, I'll get it eventually, but I do have some alt-itis that is needing attention. Getting a little tired of playing this water/sonic corruptor, despite it being one of my better built characters.

I think most of my characters wouldn't use music to announce themselves, but probably Clark Howard instead. Music is fine for certain occasions, I guess. I've just never understood why people listen to it. It's kind of pointless. I'd rather hear something useful, something that can help me. Information is better. I can use that. Or at least find it interesting. Music? Pointless. But, if I'm being honest, most of them would choose

They'll be in their own category. You may unpucker.

Really? I haven't used a trainer outside of my SG base in....months. Can't stand the crowds around Ms. Liberty, and hate traveling to where an alternate trainer would be. I'm headed to my base to hit the next mission, usually. Just makes sense to me.

I was a routine user of the forums from issue 4 or 5. I have no recollection of this. But, I guess that's certainly plausible. What does it mean or imply?

Sorry to say it...well, no, I'm not sorry - but if I came up with what I thought was a decent idea (that wasn't), and you said "Jranger"...I'd have ZERO idea what that would mean. Maybe it's just me, but if you don't like an idea, there's nothing wrong with saying, "I don't like it" or "I don't like it because this, this and that". Saying "Jranger" communicates nothing to me, other than I'm too old or too young, or have been quarantined too damn long to have a clue what that means. And I don't know who Brandon is, either.

This is why you win. I'm not even considering such actions any more, beyond the routine stuff I do, which is really done more out of habit than anything else.