Andreah

The moving mole machine reminded me of the train in The Secret World's mission: The Last Train to Cairo

I'm the same. My builds are not just for mechanical power, but also for roleplay sense, and few of my builds make sense with ice/cold/winter themed powers in them. I'd ignore any enhancement based on the name or icon, but if there's an obvious visible power or side effect (e.g., freezing a foe in a block of ice) from it that clashes with my character theme, I'm not using it, no matter how good it is.

It's not even how much you spend -- it's how much leaves circulation. If you're buying items from other players via the auction, only 10% of what you spend leaves circulation. The rest goes to another player who is likely to respend it. If you buy from vendors or from START, all of what you spend does.

They're two sides of the same balance. Whether the money supply is sufficient to keep prices stable or not can only be judged in context of the supply of goods. Ordinarily, those goods would be created by drops from active play, and be accompanied by Inf drops as well. Let's say money wasn't being hoarded - then, the goods (the ones actually in demand and not sold to a vendor -- those are just Inf drops, one step removed) would be accompanied by the Inf needed to buy them. But demand isn't just having money, if there's nothing to be done with the goods, then demand for them will drop. E.g., imagine if everyone stopped playing new alts, and just stayed playing completed-50's. Everyone would pile up money, and still not need to spend it. The huge numbers of items going up for sale would find few buyers, and prices would drop in a race to the bottom at vendor prices. I think we're seeing some of this, but unless HC datamined the rate of alt creation/leveling, it's hard to definitively say.

In an inflationary economy, that's a value-loser. Imagine you had a bunch of rares, a bin's worth -- 100 of them. You could keep them for a year, and you'd still have those 100 rares. Now imagine you sold them today, and they were worth 5 million each, and got 500 million inf, which you set aside in some clever way for a year. After a year, you decide to buy rares. Their prices have declined to 4 million each (we don't have that fast of deflation, but it illustrates the point), so you 500 million inf would buy 125 of them -- a net gain of 25. In an inflationary economy it makes sense to buy assets to store instead of cash. This makes inflation worse of course, by keeping all the money in circulation. In a deflationary economy, the opposite it true, which also makes deflation worse :D

I've been tracking prices of some highly sought items since HC launch, and we actually have slow deflation. Your average Billion-High-Pile-of-Inf buys more today than that did did last year, and especially years ago. Part of the problem is we have a lot of player who just like to stash it away to gloat over. Muahaha! :D -- The amount of Influence that actually circulates has been dropping on a per-player/alt/build basis, and that's driving down prices.

I hate it when I accidentally double-post.

Here's the relevant chart from the Attack Mechanics page in the wiki. Notice that at +5 the ToHit modifier is the same as at +4. Only when the mob is SIX levels higher than you plus your level shifts, does it get more ToHit and thus raise the Soft-Cap for you. From even level up to +5, it is getting some incremental accuracy, but not to hit. It will be very slightly more able to hit you and do a little more damage when it does, but those will be hard to notice, unlike a higher softcap. If a player were just barely softcapped at +45% defense, and then suddenly all the mobs got 5% more ToHit, they'd be (roughly) hitting you twice as often -- hitting you 10% of the time instead of 5% of the time. Not a big deal against one opponent, maybe, but if you are surrounded then having the incoming DPS, controls, and debuffs that land double up might hurt a bit more.

I suspect the key issue for people is understanding that the mission difficulty label (+4, +5, +6, +7) is not often the level difference they will face. A level 50 with an alpha slot shift in a mission set to difficulty +5 is still going to be facing +4 enemies -- a level 55 boss being fought by a 50+1 player is only +4 to him. Looking at the table "Level-Based Accuracy and ToHit Modifiers for Critters Attacking Players" on the https://homecoming.wiki/wiki/Attack_Mechanics page, we can see that the 45% defense softcap still applies right up to level differences of five. A level 50 player is still going to have a proper 45% softcap vs a a level 55 boss. It's the players who were Sidekicked to level 49 who'll see softcap trouble in the +5 content. If gets more interesting in incarnate content. +7 difficulty that produces level 57 and level 58 enemy mobs will still be at the same incarnate softcap (59% iirc?) to 50+3 players. The level 58 enemies are still only 5 levels higher than a combat level 53 player. But to a level 50 player without all three combat shifts from incarnate slots, or especially to sidekicked level 49 players, those level 58's are going to hurt. As they should. ^_^ If I've done the addition right, the level 49's are going to be up against a 79% softcap -- if everyone has maneuvers running or good team buffs, it'll work out. If not, hope your character has good medical insurance.

If every character on an eight-person team is running Maneuvers, that's giving enough +def to get everyone half way to the softcap alone; and if they've all reasonably slotted it, it probably does it regardless of their builds. Similar with tactics, it will give so much +to-hit to everyone, even the relative lowbies on the team will be able to hit high level mobs.

A further enhancement is to add "concordance" to the index listing. This is a short list of topically related keywords to each keyword's entry in the index. basically, this tells it what other words may be related to a give keyword, to help it map out the topical structure of the input document. Here's a prompt which accomplishes this, if given the original document and an index which already has keywords and their locations: Take on the role of an Index Enrichment Engine. Your sole task is to augment the provided index structure. For each primary "keyword" in the input list, you must identify 3 to 5 other keywords from the same list that are topically or semantically related. This list of related terms is the "concordance". Constraint: The concordance array must only contain terms that exist as primary keywords in the input list. Output: You will reformat each entry in the input index to include a listing of related concordant keywords after each primary keyword, and before the primary keyword lookup locations. Present the output in a text format with one primary keyword's full index record to each line, with newlines between them. When it's done producing this, I append it to the end of the main augmented file.

Here's a very relevant discussion which labels this technique as a kind of: "Context Engineering" https://ikala.ai/blog/ai-trends/context-engineering-techniques-tools-and-implementation/

For a how-to, Your Mileage May Vary, so some clever prompting on your part may be needed. In my case, I had a Python tool to extract the Wikimedia headings from all the documents to get a basic outline started. From that I told it to: Using this outline of the sectioning of the document, prepare a master hierarchical Table of Contents of the document, which lists all the sections at their hierarchical levels, includes their section titles, and then includes a short list of keywords representing the most important topics, characters, subjects, places, things which are mentioned in that section. Think hard about these short lists of keywords to keep them relevant and useful for future searches. That produces a pretty darn good Table of Contents. I saved that to a file. Then, I told it to do this: Using the master hierarchical TOC at the top of this document, compile an alphabetical keyword index from all the keywords listed across every section. This index will serve as a navigable end-reference for the document, enhancing searchability for both humans and LLMs. Step-by-step instructions: 1. Extract and Deduplicate Keywords: Parse the TOC to collect *all* unique keywords/phrases (case-insensitive for uniqueness, but preserve original casing for output). Ignore duplicates across sections. Aim for a comprehensive set without bloating. 2. Alphabetize: Sort the unique keywords A-Z (ignoring case for sorting, but display in original form). Group multi-word phrases naturally. Once you have an alphabetized listing of keywords, provide it as a single listing, one keyword to a line in a text format. Finally, I told it: Continue to process the listing of keywords to add approximate locations within the document as Token-Count Locations: 3. Add Token-Count Locations: For each keyword, identify all occurrence locations in the document. Use approximate cumulative token counts from the document's start (estimate based on section positions in the TOC hierarchy). Include a brief contextual anchor (e.g., section title) for clarity. Format as: "~XX,XXX tokens (Section Name)". If a keyword spans multiple dense areas, list them separated by semicolons. Base estimates on the TOC's structure (e.g., early sections ~0-50K tokens; mid ~100-300K; late ~400K+). Note the estimation method upfront (e.g., "TikToken-based averages; ~4 tokens/line"). 4. Output Format: Start with a header "# Alphabetical Keyword Index". Then, list each keyword followed by its locations in a clean, bulleted or line-item format. Keep it compact--no intros or fluff. End with a validation summary: (1) Total unique keywords: X. (2) Coverage estimate: Y% of doc themes. Think carefully: Ensure locations are realistic and tied to TOC sections for accuracy. Prioritize high-frequency or pivotal terms with more detail. This index should "echo" the TOC's utility while leveraging recency bias for end-of-prompt recall. This produced the final index. The last step was manual -- I loaded the document in Notepad and pre-pended the table of contents and appended the index. Done! ^_^

I wish I could claim some really impressive degree of creativity for this, but I won't. If you look at any textbook published in the last few hundred years, you'll find a table of contents up front, and an index in the back. We've learned over all those years that people get lost in long works without them, and "Best Practice" is to have both an up-front hierarchical listing of what's ahead, and then a detail look-up table to help find specific topics in the back. Art imitates reality.