crimson72

I'll strongly consider using converters, I find a lot of recipes while farming, and last I checked on the AH converters were selling for around 60-70k a piece. I'm trying to calculate the ratio of 1 converter per merit and estimate whether it's quicker to simply get 3.5 million inf through farming vs getting 50 merits from a TF or whatever content you acquire them from. 3.5 million doesn't take very long at all to get, even on my under equipped spines/fire brute who's still a purple pill addict. I'd estimate the rate to increase by a whole lot if I was fully kitted to the point where I had max defenses and resists. Even looking at merits from the perspective of 50 being able to buy a luck of the gambler defense/recharge 7.5% for 50 merits, which typically goes for around 6m on the AH, even 6 million inf might still be quicker to obtain even with a brute who's an unoptimized purple pill addict over grinding merits. Can someone tell me how long it takes to get 50 merits using the best known methods? A quick search suggests about 45 minutes to an hour, but that could be wrong, or maybe it's better now, these were topics a few years old.

A power leveled 50 alt can still exemplar down and do task forces, etc if that ends up being a good method. So it's not like leveling to 50 misses anything other than certain story archs. I don't care so much for the stories in MMORPGs, and this is one of the reasons why I tried, and couldn't play a game like Final Fantasy 14 with the forced main story arch, it was mind numbing for me, when all I wanted to do was run dungeons/raids/etc and get loot. People don't have to like that, but that's my preferred way of playing MMORPGs. I can state for a fact that the number of games I've played for the story is 0.

Can you offer a specific example for how merit farming is more efficient than AE farming (includes selling drops/recipes and inf gained)? I've asked this before, and I've never gotten a decent response. I'm interested, if you can at least provide me with some specifics. You don't need to type a huge wall of text, just an example of why this method is more efficient/better than this other method is all I'm asking for. Because it seems to me like this is simply an alternative for people who don't like AE grinding more so than it being a better method. I'm open to trying it.

Nobody has to like people power leveling, that's their personal opinion, but absolutely nobody can deny that power leveling hasn't always been a part of CoH gameplay at every single point during the game's life. If one method was nerfed, another area/map/build became meta for whatever the new method was. This is and always has been a thing. Anyone who remembers the old game can attest to all the farm groups running portals in PI. Virtually every single team entering and exiting portals were farming groups power leveling. Pretty much every SG (the ones worth joining at least) had dedicated farm tanks who helped the group level up alts. Even lower level teams, the tanks would herd up massive swarms on the overworld, or in missions, and buffers/healers/blasters would do their roles to keep the tank alive and eliminate the packs. It was fun.

If you think CoH is a power leveling simulator now, then you haven't seen nothing. CoH was always a power leveling simulator. I still remember the time when tanks had no aggro limits, and cones/aoes would hit as many targets that were in range, and tanks could quite literally herd an entire AE meteor map worth of enemies into an ice patch and burn the whole stack down. Ask anyone who played back then, they can attest to the almighty fire/ice tank. The pwnage was so hardcore, that even factoring in double exp at current rates, the exp/hr is still overall lower than it was back then. You could also sidekick people with a level 46, so level 1s were sidekicked at 45, and while the tank was burning down massive stacks of 53s, and the sidekicks got full exp gains.

Also, queing for content has never worked once for me. That was one of the very first things I tried when I started this game looking for teams was to simply use the que, and hope that it worked like a traditional que function in MMORPGs. Turns out that nobody really uses it. It's frustrating that nobody seems to use such a convenient feature for teaming. I tried to que for dfbs many times on several low level alts, and waited in ques for an excess of 30+ minutes before dropping them. Why the community seems to insist on totally ignoring this as well as the game's traditional teaming feature (setting yourself as looking for group + a comment) is a complete mystery to me as a returning player. Back when I played on live, people would have absolutely used that que if we had it. It's an example of an actual good feature that was added since I last played that nobody seems to take advantage of.

1. What I said was true based on my experience, which I already said could vary wildly depending on if you have friends or know people who play this game. And to be perfectly honest, this would have been the exact same in live had I not knew a network of people who also played the game. Thugs/Poison mastermind could barely solo 0/1 radio missions, and it was quite slow, so I was desperate for a team, and couldn't reliably find one. At some point you give up and find a way to solo with a stronger build that doesn't rely on whatever the whims of the day are, and how active other players are. I could be the only person on the server, and my AE farm is running regardless. 2. This is partly true, as the other methods don't really suit my style. 3. This is NOT true, I have sold rare salvage on the AH and have used it to purchase things. I've stated my issues with the AH very clearly. 4. This is true, because it's seeming less efficient than simply AE farming and getting inf and drops to sell. AE grinding vs grinding for merits is all the same to me, whichever provides the better gains is what I'd prefer. Maybe you can provide a specific example of how grinding for merits is overall more efficient than grinding AE for drops? 5. This is NOT true, I simply dislike some of the methods for acquiring them. 6. Yes, when I played during live there were no IOs, and no AH. If I was to state which I prefer more, SOs and hamis to the current system, I'd prefer earlier issue CoH to the current issue for sure, all things considered. In fact if there was a server that ran a pre-ED version of CoH, I'd 100% be playing that version, and would abruptly abandon current issue. 7. I wouldn't say every, but many of them yes. Because they're recommendations that don't really suit my style of play. I've already stated that I've given strong consideration to making an alt account to power level my main like one poster recommended in this topic.

Here's how this could be addressed. At any given time you can only have 10 items posted for sale, and additionally be bidding on 10 items, and can only purchase 50 items per 24hr period, and separately sell 50 items per 24hr period. This would bottleneck access to the market through limitations that wouldn't discourage a player like me, but it would discourage rampant price manipulation. People likely wouldn't put up low value items like white and yellow salvage, but others have already stated that the system gets involved in some cases to sell these. Anyone trying to repost an item that's wildly above the market average for that item should either be denied, or have to pay a really high % posting fee, around 50%+. It won't look like such a good idea if you're trying to sell an item for 5x more than the average while getting footed for a 50% tax on something that's going to sit for a long time and take up limited posting space. Anyone caught using multi-boxing or multiple separate accounts to grossly circumvent the limitations should have all their accounts banned.

People sitting on 10s of billions got the currency to just buy up all of a certain recipe or enhancement posted on the market, let's say they just clean them all out for 1m a pop, and then proceed to just repost them all up at 3-5 million a pop? There's zero measures in place to keep people from doing this, and that's really the core of the problem I have with markets is people manipulating them in this manner. Putting more limits on selling could curve this somewhat, or at least discourage it. I've already seen cases just searching for specific enhancements, where there's only a few of a certain type for sale with 600+ people bidding and it's absolutely clear that the prices are being manipulated artificially here. People with 10s of billions are controlling the supply and unilaterally deciding what the new price is. So, it's not that I don't know how to do this, I very well could, I just find such activities to be unsavory.

Anyone care to explain why a set that cost 20m in 2019 now costs 100m+? I was looking at budget builds, and the builds people say they did for 20m in 2019-2020 are absolutely not possible to do anymore for anything close to that amount. I think the only way to explain this is people playing market simulator and driving up the prices, as players amass more currency by doing nothing, they're more inclined to keep doing this and keep gradually driving the prices up as there's really not much of a currency sink for these players.

I've already looked into merits, and it's not a good investment of time to grind merits, if you're gonna grind you might as well just run a farm tank. I was looking at spending 50 merits on a luck of the gambler defense/recharge, and it turned out I could just buy it off the AH with money I got farming in less time that it would have taken to get 50 merits. Specifically with markets, the real issue I take is that players manipulate markets for gains. I don't take issue with a market existing for the purposes of bartering or trading on a base level. For me with markets it's more about how to implement markets/trading in a game while also designing it in a way where players can't just play market simulator is a smarter way to do it IMO. DIablo 4 is case and point for a way that this was addressed. Also, launch Diablo 3 vs RoS where they totally killed the auction house. I quit playing D3 at launch, that was really my first experience with a game that had a robust marketplace, and I didn't like it at all. Also even in WoW, there's trading on some things, but you can't just trade for best in slot equipment, you have to raid for that. I found WoW's market to mostly be a sellers market for players like me, I rarely if ever purchased anything on it and only sold. And after some time, I was at the point where I didn't interact with the market at all. WoW's market would have been a serious issue for me if people could just drive the prices up on equipment by speculating the market, and items weren't soulbound and you could just trade whatever the hell you wanted to. That would have made it more like this game's market.

I don't like it because I feel penalized for not engaging in the economy in a more robust way. The more people talk about how effortless it is to just make billions on the market, the more I'm convinced this is the case. Some people like market simulator, other's don't. Taking a game that wasn't a market simulator and turning it into one is going to turn some people away, there's no way to make both sides happy when you add stuff like that. Because the people who don't like it take issue with the fact that it exists in the game at all. SOs and DOs don't hack it. I learned this first hand by playing a couple of characters. In the original game, back when I played, hamidons were best in slot, and other than that you had SOs. So a 50 fully kitted in SOs with a couple of hamis was quite strong compared to a similarly equipped character in the current game. You'd need to be fully kitted in sets in this one. This is extra stuff they added that I don't care for, and I either participate or run a gimped character, or stop playing.

It doesn't take awhile to learn how to use a powerset. There's no extraordinarily complex rotations that require full and complete focus in order to play in this game. People said that about Mastermind, but I found it to be a pretty chill class to play, although it was extremely weak (at least Thugs/Poison was). I copied some button binds off a topic I googled, and that made Mastermind a lot easier to manage. Also, as a returning player, I still remember how to use classes like controllers, tanks and blasters, the basic dos and don'ts. Like don't just run up and use rain of fire on a pack and take a freaking alpha strike. When the game was live, tanks really didn't like it when players put down CCs or moves that would scatter the packs. So moves like rain of fire, or moves with AOE knockback effects (exception for nuclear AOEs that do massive damage), people didn't generally use them.

Unfortunately, I'm disappointed to see yet another game turned into a market simulator. You know I really liked Path of Exile as well, but couldn't find a way to enjoy that one either because of "markets" and "trading". And it seems like I'm in a similar position with this game. I'm the type of player who'd rather find their own drops. So I much prefer a system like Diablo 3's to Path of Exile's system, or games where you find or craft your own gear. Diablo 4 is right around the corner, and I'll be playing that instead of this. There will be minimal trading in that game too, but far less so than this game or PoE, but you won't be trading for the best equipment. I just can't say as a returning player from issue 7 or 8 that I approve a lot of the changes made in later issues.

Someone invited me to a SG, and I accepted, but this SG turned out to be a massive wall of completely inactive level 50 characters. It was probably 1 person's alts. Also, I do like teaming, but I'm not going to wait around too long to get on one. I've taken advantage of opportunities to do a couple of TFs for example, but beyond content like this, I don't see too many advantages for teaming doing stuff like radio missions for example. Half the teams I've been on seem to insist on trying to bite off more than they can chew on difficulty and spawns. I already knew from playing this game previously that ramping up the difficulty and spawns without some damage dealers on the team makes for a not so fun experience. Getting bogged down by a massive swarm of freakshow while players are dropping left and right just isn't a very intelligent way to play.

I logged in on 4 separate days looking for a team, and after 15 minutes I just logged out of the game. Soloing is painful on a fresh start. This was on Excelsior server as well. It takes a lot of effort to find a decent team, far more so than it takes to just AE farm. I'm not going back to spamming LFGs hoping for a group anymore. Those days are completely behind me. I might take that suggestion above about making an alt to level up my characters. The very last thing I want to do is sit and spam an LFG for 15 minutes hoping someone sends me an invite. I'd rather take advantage of opportunities to join teams for TFs or whatever vs it being pretty much required for a character. Also, people don't seem to use the team function, where you flag yourself as looking for group. In old CoH that system worked, and people would message you and ask if you'd like to team up for X or Y. I never once got an invite by flagging myself as lfg on the team function. I don't know why nobody seems to use it anymore.

What happened to the economy since this topic was first made, because even the alleged level 40 budget set is gonna run probably 80-100m, I found the prices on the enhancements and recipes to be in excess of 10 fold the amount listed for some of them. So, you can't do anything with 20m currently. The kinetic combat enhancements alone will cost 20m.

It's a standard configuration, with a Ryzen 5 5600x + GTX 1080ti and 32GBs of ram on Windows 10 64 bit. I get an unhandled exception error. When I try to load any type of link from the forums, or file I get a bunch of different errors. Is there an easy fix? If there's any prerequisite runtimes or ,net framework required, etc, it absolutely did not mention this on the download page.

Hi guys, I need a budget build for a spines/fire brute. I'm a new account, so I don't have a billion inf sitting around waiting to be spent, and I need something realistic as a first farmer build. The old links I found for spines/fire builds don't seem to load in mids, it gives multiple errors loading through the .mxd file, or via the forums link. Spines/fire is already level 37, and I'm committed to this even if it's not the absolute best, it'll work for my purposes.

Hi, I'm trying to load the budget build into mids, and it gives me an error. I can't find any other topics recommending budget builds with links that actually work in mids. I'm looking for build suggestions for a first farmer build on a limited budget.

It seems to me like if your gear is good enough you can turn pretty much anything into a destroyer of worlds.

So, I didn't take a free handout, and decided to make my own way, and that's a facepalm? What specifically did I say that triggered you?

I played the original game I believe up until around Issue 7 or 8, so there's a lot of new stuff in this version that I never got to experience. Back then, I had a group of friends and family who also played this, and I had a far easier time playing whatever I wanted, because I could always generally get a team and didn't have to rely on the generosity of strangers. In this version, I started as a thugs/poison mastermind, and felt like this class was extremely weak. Struggled for about 20ish levels with little to no resources for gear. Getting on a decent team was rare, and solo leveling a pleb mastermind was very slow. HOWEVER Then I made a spines/fire brute, and started fire farming to power level myself and get drops and money and found this game to be far more enjoyable than the struggles of a fresh starting account with low-mid level mastermind with little to no resources. Now I at least got enough to keep my enhancements up to date and then some. And I'm able to make steady and consistent progress without requiring myself to be carried by the community's generosity. This is my personal opinion, but based on my experience, I wouldn't recommend a returning player on a fresh account try to play anything other than an AE farming build with their first character, because that's a really steep road, and you'd be relying on getting on solid teams in order to level up, which isn't guaranteed, but you'd probably have better luck than I did if you actually have IRL friends or family who play this.

If your goal is to merely destroy large packs of mobs as quickly and efficiently as possible? I just want to make a brute so I can kill tons of mobs, get tons of inf, and drops, and even power level some people.

Triage beacon with traps is completely useless, I can't notice a difference when it's on or off. It should be healing a certain amount per tick that scales with level or something, or a %HP amount per tick. I recently rolled a thugs/traps mastermind, and I truthfully 100% feel like I just stumbled on the worst possible build in the game currently. It does no damage, has no heals, and a bunch of stuff that takes too much time to place. I think the acid mortar should be placed without a crouching on the ground animation, just summon it like a pet. The other stuff, you should be able to toss it to the ground like caltrops vs crouching down. Traps needs a huge amount of love.