Mr. Vee

Should just buy them anyway. We're not yet at the point where you're getting good value for your merits by buying ATOs. Use your merits on converters or catalysts, sell those, buy the ATOs. Better yet keep the converters and use the tips in Shinobu's 0 to 100 million thread and elsewhere to make money on the market with them.

I feel like I say this in help channel 10 times a day but remember not to attune normal sets. It's more cost effective to sell the unattuned and rebuy attuned.

Good luck. It'll take prolly 400 merits just to cover what i buy in a week at 100k, not even starting on the low bids :P

Ok even better for wolf spiders is the factory looking area in the northeast of Cap near two explore badges and one of the plaques. But lately I've gotten tired of hunting grey cons and have tried to find missions to farm things instead - might as well get exp while killing things. So I've found for wolf spiders the second mission of the radio's arc is great. If you get it at level you can run it at your base difficulty then reset and turn up the team size after you've leveled til you get your 200. If you go through ouro the first mission is just a boss kill and you can log out to reset the spider mish til you get enough. Then at some point in the 20s switch to blue and run the Peebles arc. You should get your marcones and have the +resist ring as a bonus. For demons you can run Smoke and Mirrors on blue over and over til you get them - took me about 3 runs x8 just killing the frost demons and completing the objectives. But that arc's already great merit/minute so running it more with lower spawns would be no issue. It opens at 25 if you talk to Twilight Son next to the ouro mish crystal or it's in the 30 or 35 flashback section. I've been heading for it right after running the patron arc and it gets me good exp on the way to Tina at 40. (I get atlas and portal jockey on blue, high pain, invader and demonic on red.)

RNG seems to know what you're rolling for and punishes you accordingly. I had a similar streak trying to get brute conversions on my first toon. Maybe do the rolls on a different character to try and fool the RNG, though that might just make it more angry.

Iirc purples were a flat 1 in 5000 chance for any kill over level 47. I also recall seeing Leandro say somewhere that the rate for those hadn't been changed, but I don't remember where so it's possible i dreamed it. But they've always been super streaky.

Munki and Justicebeliever have it right. I promise you more people quit the original CoX because they were tired of the secondary grind once you hit 50 to have a premium IO setup that cost billions. I was one of them, and I was a fairly wealthy player with multiple farm incarnates fully slotted out. Nothing like seeing your build go up hundreds of millions of dollars because your slotting requires a single IO that the profiteers and marketeers are currently pillaging people on. Great for you if one dropped. Not so great if you had to acquire financial means to buy it. Marketeering non-stop for a week or grinding endless for a single IO will kill a playerbase much faster than simply allowing the market to balance through conversion. The strength of City of Heroes is there's so many archetypes and gamestyles to experiment with, and so many robust slotting and set bonus options at 50 for various playstyles even within each AT. There's a reason ALTitis is a thing, and always has been, a thing in CoX. The more people get to enjoy different characters at the higher tier of slotting capability, the better. +1 to this. Not even mentioning the grind that was incarnating every alt. It's so nice not to have the long lag between a toon hitting 50 and its being in final form for running things for fun.

It's not so much that people are against it as that it's already so much easier than on live to get decked out characters that we're fine with it as is. Merit rewards for ouro arcs have been increased across the board with a few exceptions and can be repeated for full rewards without cooldown. Merit costs have been halved. All AE content can drop regular rewards including purples. Things that were once behind a pay wall can be bought with in game currency or merits. Converters are plentiful and cheap. You can deck out a character in as many purple/pvp/winter/ATO sets as you can fit for less than two purples would have cost on live. It's pretty much an altoholic's paradise as far as I'm concerned. Sure I'd love it if purples dropped from the sky like snipe recipes but I'm more than set as it is - I don't even bother to farm anymore unless a friend needs a few levels. My banker just does a couple trays of converting and selling when I can stand it and I'm cash flush for decking out new 50s at buy it nao prices. All this and i have barely half the time to play I did on live and maybe a tenth of the time to team. TLDR: If purple rate is increased, great. If not, great.

i'm guessing that's one of the buggy ones. no way more than one person is paying that much for a recipe you can get for 50 merits or the crafted for way less.

/signed and a fix to the storage bins randomly shuffling the order when removing them would be nice too :)

4/8 w/ bosses is what council and CoT are for :D

Might be. Mine's softcapped to all types but psi/toxic. I afk'd for 10 minutes soloing rom/requiem/computer and another 5 with rommy/3 nictii yesterday. Came back to see i still had full health. Will have to try it with some AVs who aren't s/l/neg which are my highest resistances.

I'm probably hovering around a billion - 1.5 most of the time between my various alts, with probably 2000 merits spread around for ??????. It's enough that i can buy attuned as I go on several leveling characters and finish off their expensive builds when they hit 50. I typically have enough on hand that I don't care to throw purples or large amounts of influence to friends and 20-30 million to randoms in help channel. Apart from my first character I've yet to have to wait for anything because of money so I'd consider that wealthy enough. But of course if I had as much time to play as back in the day I'm sure I'd be scrounging by now just from massive altitis.

Once IOd you'll find you rarely need the clickies in bio apart from using them as debuffs. But when you do need them they're great. I'm loving my rad/bio brute - 3 debuffing auras ftw.

I did say ethics, certainly no moral imperatives operative for me. i don't check the vendor prices i just know what they tend to be from vendoring so many recipes. and really with my silly principles i'm probably worse than most because i vendor so many recipes rather than throw them up for others. but time's almost always my major concern.

Wondering if any of you have any self-imposed marketing standards that probably cost you more than you need to spend, but make you feel better in whatever way an arbitrary principle relating to the buying and selling of virtual goods with virtual currency might. For instance, I've always held to the principle of never bidding in such a way that I know the seller is taking a loss. So no 1 inf bids, no bids below going vendor price, no bids below cost to craft, etc. I figure the person took the time to list the thing they might as well make a profit even if they were just putting it up to seed/help and don't need the money. To that rule, which I used on live, I've recently added the principle of always paying 100k for converters. I figure if I'm going to be making hundreds of millions using them the least I can do is my part to maintain the inf/merit standard. I feel like just from the sheer volume of cheap things put up with no profit sought that there are tons of folks out there following their own principles, and my hope in starting the thread is that there are some that are guano-insane we can hear about. Mine are pretty mild. I want to hear the crazy.

Black Scorpion is the shortest, but unless you like fighting Malta go GW. Auto complete the first mish and let the mystic die in mish 2 if you're just going for speed. The rest is easy apart from Numina. Also note that you only have to complete the patron's first arc to unlock the powers but you'll need to finish all 4 of your chosen patron's arcs if you want to be able to lead a Lord Recluse's SF.

Ran a solo moonfire tonight for vamps/wolves and to see if my 37 rad/bio brute could solo an av yet (alas poor Arakh). in honor of this thread i really tried to save the doc but she aggroed a boss mob while i was killing ambushes.

Switch to soul mastery and use power build up before hitting farsight and chrono shift. you'll lose dark consumption but you were probably not going to need it anyway.

I've discovered that the dock area in the west of PO is as fast as the fort on wolf spiders, if not faster, and substantially less annoying.

Yes, but unless there's one not up for sale or they're running really high that day it'd be worth it to sell off converters or boosters and buy anyway.

Back at ya. Not running moonfire solely for speed, usually running it for atlas medallion kills. But once you've gotten through those kill all or de facto kill all caves there are a couple zippy missions. Also I've been on many runs where we decided not to kill the doc and she was so kamikaze we couldn't keep her alive anyway :D Oh and to the various folks talking about letting hostages 'die' - failed missions of this type generally have the contact mention the hospital porter getting them out. e.g.

That would mean a moratorium ALL suggestions...There is no one suggesting anything on this board that isn't someone's personal preference... That's a bit facetious. There are plenty of preferences that can be voiced that aren't forcing anything on others. I'd prefer it if Null had a no-fx option for barrier. It'd help me see better in caves and wouldn't bother anyone. That's entirely different from wanting to change how a TF works for everyone because it doesn't fit someone's concept of heroism. These boards are full of suggestions like that. Everyone should stop speeding because i like to read the stories... Stop PLs because I like to level slowly... Change how the market works because I'm not able to make money the exact way I did on live... One of the best things about this game is that it offers so many different ways to play and have fun. Why impose unnecessary limits? When I run with my usual group we let the hostages die for speed. Every time I run LG or Moonfire with a pug I ask going into the missions what the leader/team wants to do and go with whatever they say. It's not rocket surgery.

/jranger if you don't want them to die then don't let them on your run. leave my run alone. can we get a moratorium on suggestions which involve forcing a personal preference on everyone, please? besides, glacia totally deserves it (she knows what she did).