Crysis

My Demon/TA MM was, and continues to be, the absolute worst combo I’ve ever played. I farm a bunch, and I play a bunch of alts. I farm to feed my alts. I think nothing of dropping a billion in IO’s per alt. Some have much more. And once I hit 50, I almost always run the toon through incarnates up to T4. Then I park them and pull them out here and there for certain missions or just to have fun. This was the ONLY AT I ever got to 50, summarily respecc’ed out of all IO’s and deleted. It was a mercy killing. Demon/TA was a chore. ROAR twang twang ROAR twang twang Oil Slick ROAR twang ROAR ignite slick ROAR.......for like 5 minutes a spawn soloing. In teams I may as well have been the beer cart driver for all the uselessness I brought to the team. This was all back on Live before the proc changes. This thread gives me hope I could try it again but use Procs to make it semi-useful. Thematically it was a cool toon with a great backstory (evil Cupid). Looked cool too. But damn if it wasn’t weak sauce.

There was a time when the size of street spawns were much larger and this was a legitimate method for leveling without using content. Sadly, the devs nerfed that when they realized that Fire/Dev blasters and no tank aggro limits were pulling the entire city zone into a dumpster of mines.

Anyone who has played a scrapper and does NOT have a “last player standing” memory is NOT PLAYING THEIR SCRAPPER correctly. There, I said it. We were all thinking it. I once duo’d with a player who made himself look like a flaming monkey in costume creator and he was one of my Fire/Kin’s “scrapper pets.” He’d basically just stay targeted on one of the Imps and do whatever they were doing. Was hilarious when we’d join a team together.

I saw a “Unique Dragon” character on both Torch and Excelsior in the first weeks of release of HC to the unwashed masses. One bio was just this quote, the other one claimed to be the REAL, OG Unique Dragon (one had a period in name somewhere). I sent a tell to the one claiming to be the original and he said he was just a kid when he posted that. The world may never know.....

I don’t know that the tanker damage buff will be all that good or not. Have to wait and see what’s final. But the Fury bar on my brutes, even my AE farming brutes, seldom stays at max. It’s even harder at high level PVE since stuff is dying or locked down and I’m not taking as much incoming fire. When teamed with a tank, even worse.

Sir Myshkin and Bopper, thanks for this thread. I’ve not played Defenders since like issue 5 of Live so this has been my next alt. I’m very familiar with /Time on a MM and have builds that leverage it to the fullest there. On a MM, Times Juncture is a key component of “Tankerminding” for me as it allows me to pull aggro for a spawn, take the alpha and shrug it off while also debuffing the spawns TOHIT, which is effectively an additional layer of +DEF for me and anyone fighting the critters. I see Bopper has that power (slotted with Dark Watcher IO’s), but I see that Sir Myshkin doesn’t have that power at all, at least not in the Time/Rad builds. Just wondering why you felt TJ to not be of value? I usually 4 slot mine with 1 Dark Watcher To Hit Debuff, 1 Impeded Swiftness Chance for Smashing Proc and 2 Dampened Spirts IO’s which gives me an additional 2% global damage boost. I get damage boosts on a Defender don’t do a whole lot but every bit counts.

Perhaps, but some of us define entertainment in different ways. I _do_ play the game. Content and all. I _do_ farm, often AFK farming. No reason to not do both if that's what floats your boat. One supports the other.

Can’t remember the last time I was even near Boomtown, let alone inside the zone.

I’d pay $50. Right now.

AFK farming does equate to billions of inf. I can earn billionS actively farming for a day. But an AFK farmer, using the same maps and just background tasking while working on other things, doing chores or whatever, will easily be able to earn a billion a day. Why do you think there’s been so much interest in mobile app control of COH? I use my phone all the time to just move my toon in/out of the farm. Can’t really play the game, but all I need to be able to do is reset mission and move it back to center every half hour or so while I’m away at work, between flights, or whatever.

The price for Frozen blast, and most of the LoW sets for that matter, are set by two things. First is that you can buy a WInter Pack for 25MM. They come in those (or a high chance to get one at any rate). So minimum price will be pretty much hardcapped at what people have to pay to get one. 25MM. Second is as you’ve stated. Merits truly are the “gold standard” for the market pricing since its the alternative to spending influence. You’ll see this across the marketplace. 50 merits for a purple @ 270K = 13,500,000 influence which is about the lower limit for purples. Since any purple can be converted to any other purple via Converters, and free upgrade to Attuned.....there’s your rationale for purple prices on the marketplace. Which is why I don’t really understand the whole conversation about a 200MM, no purple Rad/Fire AFK farmer. Yes, if its AFK oriented, you don’t need min/max to do that. You want top tier builds if you are manning it yourself because every smidge of benefit = less time running the map. For AFK, you are leaving the toon unattended for 10-15 minutes at a time. For me it’s usually closer to 15-20 mins as I don’t seem to luck out with the wandering spawns and always come back to more left than I thought should be there. But regardless, if you are doing this even just when you are playing your main account (like I do), you’ll be earning 200-250MM a night of doing basically nothing while you play normally elsewhere. The average mission time is under 20 mins normally, so when I exit mission main, I’m usually resetting my AFK farmer for another round as well. At that kind of “free influence gain” why bother with even 200MM on another Rad/Fire farmer? Just use your ubiquitous, everyone has one, Spines/Fire and let it accomplish the same goal. Spend the 200MM on an alt. I make about a new alt every few days, PL them to 32 in 25-30 mins, and then hand them 200MM to start their slotting. Better served there than on another farming toon that will likely be deleted once they update Tankers.

Exactly this. You used to be able to stack Burn as well pre-ED I think. I remember being a Fire/Ice tanker, pulling the whole map to a dumpster and dropping several stacks of Burn and Ice Patch to kill the whole map.

PDP was a “no fire zone” but the day Issue 3 released they had a server-wide event and thus Council vs 5th Column battles spawned inside there and everywhere else I can recall. This was pre-COV release so no villains to interact with on hero side. Pocket D came in with COV I think, or near it, and introduced co-op between Heroes and Vils along with RWZ and later Cim if I’m remembering release history.

....and Imperial City (Studio 55) for Praetorians. Like all four of you. Edit: Was anyone playing in Issue 3 when the Council took on the 5th Column (the old nazi looking dudes) and spawned everywhere to do battle, including inside of Paragon Dance Party? Good times.....

Could have been worse and taken place in side one of those GOD AWFUL PURPLE LAYER CAKE CAVE MAPS. ANY mission in those cave maps is an auto-abandon for me if possible.

So with all the tank changes coming real soon now, I’ve gotta ask you theory crafters a question. Whats the new FOTM Tank Farmer going to be now that Spine/FA and Rad/FA aren’t king of the AE hill any more?

Lemme get out my gibberish-to-English dictionary and try. 1) Make a Rad/Fire farmer. Spines/Fire works just as well I've found, but he specified 200MM no purple Rad/Fire farmer. 2) Go look up fire farm 17748 (I think), it's a 49 exemp fire farm. Run in, trip up the group with the drummers and the EB, then jump to middle of map. Leave Burn on auto. Pop your Hybrid and your Lore Pet then alt-tab out of that screen and go do whatever you want. Your farmer will AFK burn the roving spawns away. 3) Come back in 10-15 mins. Most, if not all, the spawns are gone. I generally find at least one group immobile over on the rocks somewhere. Cleanup and finish mission. 4) Go out, rinse, repeat. 5) Earn billions. Dupe rares if you wanna. Spend your billions on hookers and blow. Or your alts. Same thing for me as I have an alt named "Hookers and Blow." That particular firefarm has some grudge against a few players, which will be obvious when you speak to AE contact and enter the map. Since you are AFK farming, you won't notice it after the first time.

Run a second instance/account and AFK farm on that window while waiting on team members, game stuff etc on main account/window. I can easily make 30-40MM influence an hour doing absolutely nothing on farm account other than clicking iPowers every 3-5 minutes. 4X that much if I actively play that toon for farming of course but getting that much free money for doing almost nothing is a good use of spare cycles while I actively play my other alts.

Personally, I get the most XP exemp'ed to 49 vs 53 spawns, and yes its about 115K per boss then. But the fastest runs I've found are in the Shivan map with moving spawns. You position yourself in between as many as you can, you use your Lore pet to draw aggro beyond what you can, and you target passing mobs with a ranged AOE (like ball lightning) to pull them to you. So basically...you hardly move at all. You let them come to you. On the outdoor map, you have to move and that doesn't sound like much but in fact it can add significant non-XP earning time to your farming habits.

The only sure thing about Drops is the faster you kill the more you kill and the more you kill the more “drop rolls” you get. So if you want better chances at earning a Purple drop, kill more spawns and kill them faster.

I don’t think anyone directly answered your question. Most of the record times you see posted are farming solo. If you bring someone into the map to PL, a couple things happen that can slow you down. First, if they are earning XP/influence, its being pulled from your shared pool. Second, your inspiration drops will also be fewer than if you are solo (FAR fewer in fact) and thus you’ll have fewer to combine via macros into damage inspirations, meaning your damage output will be less than if you were farming influence solo. I PL alts and alts of friends often. For that, I often use the cave map or the outdoor map fire farms, just to keep the lowbie safe and to keep from having so much zone in/clear/zone out activity. I’ll also prefer to no exemp down but go straight +4s. But for influence farming at max influence per hour, you want to exemp down to 49 so you are fighting 53’s and be solo. With inspiration combine macros. And no EB’s. That’s the “best times” you are seeing.

I think this is the first time I’ve ever seen someone blot out their build slotting. Afraid of leaking PVP secrets?

Blasters were my thing in Live, but the Homecoming Blaster is a completely different kind of AT than it was back on Live, and this is all because of the Sustain. Back on Live the /Mental Manipulation Blaster secondary had Drain Psyche which was Foe -Regen/-Recovery and Self +Regen/+Recovery. To my knowledge, this was the only Blaster secondary with that kind of power. Now ALL Blaster secondaries have a Sustain power that’s similar, with most (all?) being a toggle. So many ways to slot it as well. You can drop +END uniques in there, things like Performance Shifter or Panacea, and get a significant amount of +REGEN/+RECOVERY from that single power. I’ve even done some frankenslotting on it with things like Preventative Medicine proc, Numina and Miracle procs etc. Sustain powers are truly a game changer. Build for at least one good positional or typed +DEF and between the two survivability is very high and Blapping is highly effective. Some primaries, like DP’s T9, even up your DEF during delivery of the power which, coupled with your Sustain, makes you quite tanky. With a relatively high investment in +DEF IO sets, Blasters are quite capable of soloin’g many TF’s, farming, etc. Times have changed! edit: Be sure to check out this thread for a better rundown onSustain powers:

If you note from my commentary above my build, I’m still trying to fit in BoneCrusher. I agree it’s a great melee attack. But my issue is that I can’t find a way to keep it 4-5 slotted and get the same + Def set bonuses in play that I’m getting via WebCocoon and Superior Entomb. Bonecrusher will take Stun IO’s and Universal Damage as well, but even there I can’t match the set bonuses of Superior Entomb.

I used ROF for 18-28 as a method to cover my retreat or if I pulled too many soloing. But once I respecced into a higher +DEF build it wasn’t necessary. And I’ll second the comment above about Bonfire. On HC with a KB to KD proc it’s actually a fairly solid opener Alpha, which works well with Ranged +DEF builds if you want to run in and Blap it up. Fire/Energy is a very versatile set allowing you a lot of play style options. Ranged +DEF and Boost Range. S/L +DEF and Bonesmasher + Total Focus. PowerBoost for any and pump your DEF to softcap or beyond to deliver Aim + BU + Inferno. Energize for max END. Partner up with a Kin and you literally become a Tank Mage. Killer combos.