Ukase

So, as some of you know, I was attempting a "drop" challenge, where my character would only slot items that dropped, or craft recipes that RNG graced my character with. And, of course, the defeat/delete penalty. Like this one, no p2w, but also no use of merit vendor or AH, except to sell. I gave it a good try. 5 characters - with mixed levels of success. My best effort was level 21 before getting clobbered in First Ward by an EB. I'd like to think I know a lot about this game - using tricks like completing SSAs for an SO, instead of the merits. So, I figure I'm going to table that challenge for another time. It really isn't much fun, although it is nice to get excited about an enhancement drop. Even more than when a purple drops on one of my farmers! So, I'm going to try this challenge - but with one change - no use of the AH to buy anything. I figure I'm so good at the market, I could have 1 billion in a day if I put the time in. Then I could slot whatever, and the only concern is defeat. For a character with IOs, defeat isn't really an issue in most cases - because I avoid certain factions at certain difficulty levels. (like Banished Pantheons at +4...that's a death wish for 95% of my characters, particularly the ones without any DDR or armor. Thanks to those who have given us the idea for something different!

I looked this morning, and 15 of the GotA were for sale, for at least one of them. It's a set I largely ignore, so was unaware of anyone selling/listing them routinely. The guide I gave to the fellow is not on these forums, and covers things in a way that a new player should be able to follow it, as I list specifically the steps I take, which sets I think will sell for a good price, and which ones I tend to avoid, and why I avoid them, and a lot more. Hopefully, he finds a way to get through it, and it doesn't suck the fun right out of the game for him.

So...a returning player...all the way back from issue 2, maybe, crossed my path today. The fellow had found a build on the forums and had gotten his crab to 50, but was more than a bit overwhelmed with IOs and such. So, I helped him out, but not too much, where he'd have nothing to work towards, and then I get this tell asking how he should get Gift of the Ancients when there weren't any on the AH. Long story short, I explained how I would get them - but that some patience and come converters would be my tools to get it done. So I ask you, marketeers: We all know intuitively that the Gift of the Ancients recipes and crafted IOs are mostly going towards conversion into LotGs. Makes sense - the price of lotg is higher than GotA. But, isn't there some way we can ensure that there's always at least a few we leave behind for these folks that actually want the GotA ? I've been hashing it over in my brain, and other than me burning through far more merits and converters than I want, I can't think of a solution, other than having folks just be prepared to pay more for the GotA, even when they're really not that great. (at least, I don't think so. I can't think of a time I've used them in any of my builds. ) I just feel badly for these newer/returning players who know so little about the way our market works, that they genuinely have no idea how clueless they are. I gave them a copy of my guides to amassing wealth in game. It will be interesting to see if the seed takes root. In the meantime, let something get by you! There's new 50's that need that stuff. They don't all have to be LotGs.

I've made a few new characters that may be worthy of this list. Lola Palooza Layla Palooza Lila Palooza All three are a bit of a play on Lollapalooza, the odd name of a music fest, in addition to: lol·la·pa·loo·za /ˌläləpəˈlo͞ozə/ Learn to pronounce noun INFORMAL•NORTH AMERICAN a person or thing that is particularly impressive or attractive. "it's a lollapalooza, just like your other books"

This - you can do now. Left click on the channel in question and scroll to "set color" and pick the color you want.

I never understand threads like this. This game, that so many of us missed...and missed a lot...some of you just want to change it. I fully get that folks might get tired of the same content. But - there's still a ton of it, and a lot that many players have yet to experience. Sure, there might be some options the costume creator could benefit from, but heck, my wardrobe could benefit from more options too. If I'm gonna play a game of "What if", it'll be about money.

"Cost of recipe: 2.6mm" The cost of the recipes are free! At least, for me. That's the whole point of having the afk farmer. But, at least I see where your numbers differ from mine. Granted, everything has an opportunity cost, I'm in agreement on that. We both get where we're going, just use slightly different methods to get there.

I'm missing something. The cost of crafting is as you say, about 500k. The salvage is always free, or you don't craft it, until it comes from the rng. Or are you crazy enough to buy salvage? No wonder you're broke. (j/k - I know you deal in bulk, and who has room in inventory for 50-100 of each salvage) Seriously, the only price I pay to craft anything is the cost of crafting at the workbench. (490,400k unless it's a purple, but I don't sell those, just stash 'em.) Granted, there is opportunity cost of about 600k in salvage (current prices of rare salvage being higher than 500k for buy now prices), and another 490,400k to craft. So, on the high side, the cost of IO production is 1.1M. Sell for 3m, less 300k fee = 2.7M net proceeds, less the cost of production of 1.1M =1.6M How are you only getting 400k profit? (remember, converters are free, too)

I have ZERO sympathy for low-ballers like this. It's common that Unbreakables are worth, and sell for 3-4m. Curse these lowballers! Be a bid creeper for one item if you must, but for multiples? Shame! You know what they're selling for. Pay the price, or bust out your own converters. When I say lowballer, I refer to the intended bid price of 2.6M instead of the standard price of 3-4m, usually much closer to 3m.

So, my new brute, spines/regen is a lot of fun. Unfortunately - while stamina only just turned into an issue at level 17, accuracy is a huge issue. (I haven't taken the recovery power yet) Back on live, on Liberty, I had played Spines/regen scrapper (post nerf) and recall enjoying it quite a bit. This experience isn't much difference - except, in the back of my head, I know that HP is a big factor in regen rate. And the rules of the challenge are really inhibiting the best nature of this secondary. Add to that...defeat was suffered in my pursuit of an Accuracy SO on the SSA arc out of Skyway. It wasn't the boss, but the darn spectrals that came in with Echidna. I couldn't hit a darn thing. At level 16, "beginner's luck" only gave me a paltry ..I think it was 2% bonus, but that wasn't enough when all the accuracy enhancements were red. And although I had 2 level 15 common IO accuracy recipes, I didn't have the salvage to craft them. Still don't! But, suffice it to say, that after 5 failed attempts, I'm going to table the challenge for a while. I'll likely try again in a few months. For now, I think I'll just try to do a "don't work the market" for inf challenge, and go with SOs. By "don't work the market", I mean, I can sell whatever, but I can't buy recipes to craft and then sell. Or buy ATOs or Winter-Os and catalyze and repost them at a higher price. (Big inf maker, that is) I'll still stick with the get defeated, get deleted theme, but this way, I think I'll have a bit more fun. Also, if I see someone taking down a GM or something, I'll feel like I can ask for an invite without feeling like a freeloader. I still have a couple characters that are sitting in First Ward for the D.U.S.T. day job, which increases ToHit & damage & range. I'll give them a shot at the old challenge as soon as I recover from this feeling of inadequacy. Thanks for reading!

On the bright side, the dfb on blue side and the dfb on red side - much to my surprise - are identical. Run the dfb on blue, then go see null and proceed as a villain. Yeah, I get it - it's distasteful to do it that way, but it's an easy enough solution and there's no waiting for people to figure out if they want to do a dfb on red side. While I get that there are some that enjoy red side - to me, that's for good reason. The view is horrid, the content isn't that great - both of which are subjective - and there's far fewer zones to get the free merits from explorations. My red crawl toon is eagerly awaiting the switch to vigilante so it can gather all that free money off the streets. The best solution, as I see it, is for the devs to flag dfb and dib as co-op trials, like Market Crash or Apex/Tin Mage.

I tend to "crush" any content, with most characters - when I slot them in a typical fashion. It can get trying when I see the IO recipes I can use drop - and not have the salvage for them, and to have SOs drop that are useless due to the wrong origin. But, if I cross that line, then next thing I know, the game is easy and dull again.

Well, for me @Snarky, there's only so many times I can do a dfb. It's just so dull after all these times. And while I don't discount that the buffs and SOs would be useful, I wonder about the utility of the first couple as you'd outlevel them, I think, by the time you'd finish. To me, the adventure of being solo has more benefits than penalties. Up until this challenge, I've never tasted defeat solo. If I thought it were overly difficult (and not interesting) I wouldnt' do it. So, I say, suit yourself. To me, I literally have ..almost 1000 very rares in my base, all crafted and ready to go, should the HC devs ever take a nerf-bat to afk-farming (thus the supply of purples gets reduced, prices of then would creep upward). I just have nothing in game to get excited about, except during this challenge when an enhancement or IO recipe I can use drops. Not to mention, the XP in DFB is ridiculous. A little too good if you ask me. I'd just as soon avoid it. The only reason I do it now is for badges.

@LockeValken The Sisterhood is a group that uses an in-game chat channel. They may or may not have a discord, not sure. They're a fine group of folks; used to play with them on Liberty back in the day. I'm not in game at the moment, or I'd try to look up the name of one of them. I think @QP is one of them, or at least would know whom to refer you to. To answer your question, there are a number of sgs on Excelsior that use Discord. Cosmic Council is one of them. You would, in fact, be required to join their discord and read the list of rules in the publicly available Welcome and Rules channel, and state that you have read and agree to them in the gateway channel, and they should be able to get you an invite if that's what you'd like. An SG with rules. Crazy, right?

Well, if someone had told me a rad/dark defender would fare better than an elec/bio scrapper, I wouldn't have believed it. Died at level 7. A few lessons learned in this run, though. There's a day job in First Ward in the Free Fire zone that boosts ToHit and damage and range. So, that's where the next one is going to be parked. And a new rule: if I die at level 1, I don't have to re-roll, just carry on. This is a maddeningly frustrating task. I hate that the rad/dark got defeated. It was doing fairly well. A lot more fun to play than I thought it would be. This next time, I think I'll go with elec/bio brute. I will sorely miss the ATOs, for sure. But maybe with more hp, it'll be just the difference.

Fair points, but not doing it for the recognition. I figure eventually they'll open their enhancement tray and figure it out. I just figured folks were paying more attention when they play. I find email to be annoying, too. Having to get a global, fill in all the fields..then do that 3x...and when their global has an l or a I it can be hard to tell the difference. (that's L or i)

The only issue I have with procs are the inconsistency..or is it lack of clarity in how they work. They're an option. Choices are sometimes a good thing. The Preventative Medicine Absorb Proc - it works. It works no matter where it's slotted, at least, it seems to me it does. I can't say the same for all the other procs. I have to resort to math to determine if it WILL fire, or will it simply have a chance to fire. How much of a chance? I have to do the math. I don't ordinarily mind it. I look at builds that are posted in these forums when people ask for help with a build and see a number of procs in the suggested build. I then do that math, per Bopper's formulas on his spread sheet and see that either I'm missing something, or the builder is missing something, or both of us have missed something. I see people slotting the Chance for Recharge KB IO in Kick from the fight pool. 16.1% chance of firing an attack that most wouldn't ordinarily use in their attack chain. And I'm not saying it's completely useless. I'm sure the argument can be made for making it useful. My point is - if players are told there's only a 16% chance of the thing giving you what you want, are they going to use it? (assuming no other recharges in the power, and no recharge boost from Alpha slot) I suppose that all depends on the player and what they're after. I think the biggest issue is the lack of clarity in how these things work. There's a number of different kinds, and a number of different rules in which to determine their efficacy. And to have to break out Bopper's spreadsheet (If credit should go to someone else (Macskull?) then my apologies.) for each one...that's just tedious. I think the rules need to be more understood by more players before we can really ask opinions. Some folks may give their thoughts but despite the best of intentions may not fully understand how they work, (And how they could be applied by people smarter than me for maximum carnage). My solution would be very unpopular, and probably make proc-monster builds untenable. Only allow the proc to work when slotted with at least one of the others within it's set. And then remove this "Chance" to fire nonsense, but have it fire. Takes away the need for all this bloody math.

This is so very well stated!

lol. Don't tempt me!

You should do what makes it more fun/interesting/engaging for you. Where's the challenge come in? Being able to actually afford the enhancements needed? Personally, the economist in me would rather die than spend merits on a recipe.

I'll say this: I'm still not clear what a pokemon is. And I don't care enough to google it. (I also don't need anyone to tell me. I like not knowing.) I can't remember how old I was when I started playing...issue 3, sometime around Christmas was when I picked the game up at Circuit City, now out of business. I know I'm 54 now. It's strange. I know my father, at my age would have never spent so much as 30 minutes playing a computer game. He saw the computer as a tool. Turned his on with a key. An IMSAI-VDP80, damn thing was 4 feet long and almost 3 feet high, and maybe 3 feet wide. No mouse, just a keyboard and a floppy disk that was actually floppy. Back in those days, the most controversial thing was the sound of a toilet flushing on All in the Family. I even remember when Ron Howard (Richie Cunningham) was the star of the show, Happy Days, and had a big brother, Chuck, who disappeared early in season 2, and was even portrayed by more than one actor.

So...I have given away 99 level 10 PvP IOs - the panacea +HP/End, the glad armor 3%, the Shield Wall 5%, 1 each to random folks. Well, not truly random. If they already had set bonuses, I didn't give. If they had more than one level untrained (looked like sitters in fire farms to me) in Atlas, I didn't give. The bulk of the gifts went to lowbies - levels 1-10. I tried to give away in red side zones. I'd do a search by zone..maybe see one or two players there. I pop in, and look around, and if I found them, I'd give 'em. One player sent them back with a global name of Hedgefund Prime or something like that. Said he had an overflow of them in his base. I should've checked global names, lol. After that point I began to check global names, and if I saw something like @global2 or @global3, I assumed they had multiple accounts and didn't need any assistance. The disappointing thing was only 2 of the 32 took the time to thank me. Not that I was looking for that, but some acknowledgement would've been nice. I suppose, though, it's possible they were afk and had no idea where they came from when they came back, as the system messages would've scrolled up before they returned. Not sure which server I'll visit next.

I remember when the game shut down. It was a huge relief. The burden of feeling compelled to play was over, and I could work on my real life instead of the pixeled lives I'd created. At the end, I remember converting all my inf to prestige and taking a screen-shot at the zero hour of my one man sg being the top SG on the server. That was kind of fun. Seeing the purple letters of "Very Rare Recipe" splash brightly and fade...that was always a nice dopamine hit. Now when it happens, because I have 3x as much as I did on live, it's a bit of a snooze. The content in the game is dated. I've done ALL of it more times than I care to acknowledge. Last August, I joined a super group, thinking the people might make things more "fun". Some did. Some don't. Some really don't. So, my grandmother told me as a kid, "If you're bored, it's because you're boring." So, I make my own "Fun", which is really for interest/ego. How fast can I do SSA 1, who will die? 4 minutes? Can I do it in less? Can I make a billion by level 50? Too easy. Can I make it by level 25? Still too easy. Heck, just sit there and do it at level 1. I only need to kill one thing without 2xp to work the market. Just need a little seed money. But that's too simple now, although it can certainly get tedious. So now, I pretend I'm broke and see if I can get to 50 depending ONLY on drops without using the AH, other than to sell surplus goods. No buying of anything, from any vendor or AH. No upgrading enhancements. Just living off the land of the RNG. And if I'm defeated, I'm deleted. I haven't done this yet. (got to level 21) One character was too much "fun" to delete. The actual word, though, escapes me. It's not fun. The last time I had fun involved two married lady friends I have, some beer and some hummus and baba ghanoush. My stomach still aches from the laughs. and my head may or may not still ache from the hangover. To me, fun is when you look back and chuckle at how quickly your time went by. It's not something I think about while I'm having it. I've never done that with this game. The game is just to give me a little dopamine fix.

An MM or Veat is something I hadn't even considered. The Veat - the toggles on it would be sooo end heavy. As for the MM...interesting. I'm in the middle of playing one for the second time. The first time was on live, and I'd gotten to level 17 before the servers shut down. I may try one, but which kind...I dunno. I find the robots, thugs and demons to be so hideous, I don't think I could stomach it for such an investment of time. I honestly have no idea how they caught on...but different strokes and all that.

Oops, I didn't even see where you'd already answered the question for me. I will tell you one thing that has opened my eyes A LOT. Praetorian content seems to drop specific to your origin. So, I intend to try Praetoria out in the beginning and see how much of a difference it makes. But, what will continue to be the very roughest part will be the end mod drops. The end mod enhancement drop rates are supposedly 1/175 !!!! At least, that's what the paragon wiki has. The HC devs might have changed it, but I seriously doubt it. I could run my fire farmer through a dreck map 5 times, and I'd be lucky to get one of them. They are more rare than a purple recipe if you ask me. Even the end mod recipes are quite rare. So, I know whatever character undergoes this challenge it will most certainly have to be something with an inherent stamina boost of some kind - either AM as the case is with the rad defender/corruptor/controller, or possibly rad armor, or Bio armor. There may be another powerset, but I can't think of what it would be. Blasters with their inherent at level 10 are quite capable of managing endurance - but only with end mod IOs and the nifty procs. Wait...truth be told, I don't think I've ever played a blaster without those nifty procs and end mod IOs...so who knows? My guess would be that it would be harder than I'd like it to be. I have a Staff/Bio brute in the wings to re-take on this challenge - in praetoria. It's parked in First Ward now for the recipe bonus day job.