Adeon Hawkwood

PK, there's an entire back-up of the public CoH forums in static form. Would it be easier to work with that -- or just instantiate them into a new BB? Dang, 219Gb.

It looks like you're right. Converters used to be a good winner but the price has tanked enough that Boosters are slightly better at the moment. So I guess now the advice changes from "trade merits for converters and sell those" to "check the market to see if converts or boosters are currently more profitable and trade merits for one of those". The price of converters seems to have hit the bottom so I expect over time the market will adjust and both converters and boosters will offer roughly the same inf:merit ratio.

There's a decent number of iTrials going on, more on the weekend than during the week but I've seen a few during the week. The server as a whole has enough level 50s to support a raiding community. They mostly get announced in the Looking for Group channel and the iTrials Everlasting global channel so keeping an eye on those is useful. Ouro is often used as a meeting point since it's easy to get to but Kallisti, Dark Astoria and the RWZ are also used.

If you never get in trouble then the support players get bored. Scraping Blasters and Scrappers off the floor keeps things interesting and lets support players know that they are appreciated. Plus I always appreciate a change to get off a Vengeance buff.

I tried that but overall I was underwhelmed but it. In theory it's good but the problem is that you need to get two stacks for most mezzes and in my experience the mez tended to expire before I got that second stack.

In general I would say that you've spread your set bonuses out a bit to much for my liking. You've got a decent amount of AoE and Melee defense but it comes at the expense of Ranged defense. Personally I prefer to focus on Ranged and let Melee and AoE fall away a bit more. In general you can keep enemies out of melee range (by killing them before they get there if nothing else) and while AoE attacks are a threat they are less common than ranged attacks so to a large extent you can tank those if you've got good ranged defense. Overall I'm not a huge fan of the Winter sets, I feel like you could probably use those slots for more ranged defense or recharge.

So I'm going by memory here and unfortunately I can't find the original data but from what I recall the answer is slightly more complicated than that. When the market was first released some people did some testing and concluded that while the order in which transactions were performed was not random it also wasn't as simple as "first in, first out". Basically there was some other variable (probably database ID related) that determined sale order which was deterministic but not predictable. So functionally it was random but it wasn't technically random. Of course now that we've got the code base it should be possible for someone to look through the code and figure it out.

Yep, I know she normally spawns on a roof so I made sure to double check all of them as well.

So the mission "Take Down Nightstar" from Maria Jenkins seems to be bugged. I tried it on two different characters and despite scouring the map I was unable to locate Nightstar with either character. I think her spawn point might be bugged.

Really? Because I find the exact opposite. I spend less than 1 million buying a recipe, crafting it and then converting it into an enhancement that sells for 2million-6million. That's a pretty decent profit margin IMHO (and I'm including the cost of the enhancement converters). Now if you're talking about just crafting enhancements then yeah there's generally very little profit there but that's because converters are so cheap.

Because you can get three converters for a single reward merit. So right now they are both incredibly cheap and the most profitable thing to buy with reward merits.

There are updates for Devices on the beta server, you might want to check those out. In regards to your proposed buffs, first Field Operative already has a recovery bonus, it was given that when it was made a sustain power. Secondly regarding shield drone, every blaster secondary now has either a regen buff, a heal over time or a refreshing absorb shield. In the case of Devices it got the regen buff option which was added to Field Operative. So adding a second sustain power would be unbalanced (the regen from Field Operative is equivalent in strength to the refreshing absorb in other sets). Regarding the recharge buff, that is already part of the devices buff on the beta server, it's getting a 30% recharge buff added to Targeting drone.

You can get softcapped Ranged defense (or pretty close to it) on a Blaster with IOs. My AR/Dev Blaster has 44.6% Ranged defense (so close enough to the softcap for me). I posted the build in another thread but I'll give a basic summary: https://forums.homecomingservers.com/index.php/topic,3175.msg23524.html#msg23524 Powers: Combat Jumping (2.03%) Field Operative (2.03%) Maneuvers (3%) IOs: Steadfast Protection (3%) Gladiator's Armor (3%) 2 x Thunderstike (7.5% total) Sting of the Manticore (2.5%) 3 x Blessing of the Zephyr (3.75% total) Gaussian's Synchronized Fire Control (2.5%) Superior Defiant Barrage (2.5%) Superior Blaster's Wrath (5%) Stupefy (3.13%) Expedient Reinforcement (3.13%) Eradication (1.56%) The total comes to 44.6%, I could softcap by swapping the Sting of the Manticore set for a third Thunderstrike but I like the build as it currently plays so I'm not in a hurry to do so.

Not really. Most of the support sets are pretty good so I always advise people to play the one that they enjoy. Additionally the popular support sets tend to be played a lot because they are good so the less common sets are the ones that are only ok. Rad, Dark, Traps, Cold and Thermal all have a strong regen debuff which makes AVs easier so while none of them are essential they are all very useful for taking down AVs and all are strong sets for other reasons as well (Thermal is probably the weakest of them). Kinetics is another very popular set for the combination of recharge and damage buffs that it provides. Thermal and Sonic are both nice sets that are relatively rare and provide resistance buffs which are less common than defense buffs.

Not really, I know it happened (as I said I did it myself by accident from time to time). But there's a huge difference between "sometimes people spike the price of something for a few hours" and "the market is constantly being manipulated". A lot of people act like the market on live was constantly being inflated by groups or individuals for profit which from what I could see wasn't really the case. Sure people would occasionally spike the price of something but the price would pretty much always return to normal within a few hours. There were also plenty of times that the price skied due to a temporary blip in supply and demand, and personally I suspect that those were more common. So unless you were incredibly impatient (or just didn't care) a spike in prices didn't really impact you.

A few weeks ago when I was running farms with my Scrapper without IOs I had constant bids out on Good Lucks and Dramatic Improvements and I'm pretty sure I single handily made those prices spike for a week or so. Was that why they were going for 50K each for a while?

I think you're probably correct. I've noticed that over the last few weeks the cost of salvage has been dropping while the price of enhancements has increased slightly which is probably at least partly due to more people having level 50s.

Yeah I probably should, I'm just lazy.

You know I see this bought up a lot and I seriously question how often it actually happened. Yes you got occasional spikes in the price of low-volume items like Luck Charms but it was pretty much impossible to tell the difference between someone trying to spike the price versus a random blip in the regular supply and demand (which also happened quite a bit). When that sort of thing happened I just put bids in at normal prices and they'd generally fill overnight (or even in a few hours). So if people were trying to corner the market they weren't really doing a very good job. Sure you might be able to spike the price for a few hours and maybe you could even make a profit doing so but I never really considered it to be a serious problem. Heck I spiked the price of items from time to time simply because I was buying a bunch of something and wasn't super concerned about price. A lot of items had a relatively thin "skin" of reasonably priced items (which had high turnover) and a larger inventory of high priced stuff that people had either listed "just in case" or were old bids that had been forgotten. A sudden spike in demand could easily burn through the skin items and start digging into the reserve.

It didn't kill it at all, it just changed it. You can still easily make billions of inf marketeering, although the nature of how you make that inf has changed. Crafting is no longer profitable (for most items, there are some exceptions) but crafting and converting is still very profitable. Flipping is also still profitable on at least some items. Honestly the main change is that the relative scale has changed. Prices are, roughly speaking, about 10% of what they were on live so while the profit margin is still there for those who want it the overall prices are more affordable for people who don't want to market. Basic marketeering isn't what falls under "Market PvP" and you know it. Actually I don't, I would consider any form of buying items with the specific intent of reselling them to be a form of Market PvP. What definition do you use?

It didn't kill it at all, it just changed it. You can still easily make billions of inf marketeering, although the nature of how you make that inf has changed. Crafting is no longer profitable (for most items, there are some exceptions) but crafting and converting is still very profitable. Flipping is also still profitable on at least some items. Honestly the main change is that the relative scale has changed. Prices are, roughly speaking, about 10% of what they were on live so while the profit margin is still there for those who want it the overall prices are more affordable for people who don't want to market.

So this one is a little more limited than some of the others but it came up last night so I figured I'd share it. If you're on a Task Force and a mission gets bugged it is possible to reset the mission without needing a GM. Have everyone on the TF exit the mission, log out and wait about 3 minutes before logging back in. This should cause the mission to reset at which point it hopefully won't be bugged.

I'm fine with it as well. Basically the market just has a lot of stuff in it so the price for an IO'd build comes down substantially. To be honest the only downside I can see is that you can't frankenslot with level 30s on the cheap anymore but since you can just buy attuned IOs relatively cheaply instead I don't consider it a major issue.

So there was a raid up last night. We did win although I think the key lesson was that double blooms are bad. You can fight through the 25% bloom easily enough but spawning both the 75% and 50% blooms at the same time is a bad idea.

I did a Katie Hannon TF last night. We were halfway through the first mission wiping spawns of witches before we realized that we were doing that because none of us could recall where Mary spawned and were all just following each other hoping that someone else remembered.