Andreah

I don't use any tools. I mix and match sets with a general goal or two in mind. I'll look at builds in the forums to see what sorts of goals people have pursued for various AT/powers combinations, but I don't follow them closely. And my builds do fine.

Your efforts were noticed. :D

I know right!! This is the single biggest reason we don't see a lot of crazy market shenanigans.

I hadn't though of it this direction, but it could go quite a ways. However, someone else buying low and reselling high might detect this and go to town on it. I suppose it's conceivable one might "reset" the going price down a bit. This may be very unlikely, as it depends on the elasticity of supply and demand for these.

You build a new, parallel auction house -- /ah2. Then start up /ah2 and you do a soft retirement on the old auction house. No new adding items to store, no new postings of items to sell. You can buy things that are already there, cancel orders you've posted, and pull things out, but not put things in. Maybe you warn folks it's going to be deleted in a year; maybe you just keep it forever.

Can confirm. A lot of it I encountered was due to unexpected success -- you plan for a throw-away tool or short life system, but end up keeping it for a decade or more. And there's sunk-cost logic all along the way. It's easy to fall into that trap. And there's incremental funding. On a project I was on, we had short-term results based funding, and at best we could only use a small amount of it to do short term bug fixes and add critical new capabilities required for the current work. Additional work was not only not in the budget, it was contractually not allowed. Rinse/repeat twenty times, and you have a truly amazing mess. And at no point along the way could you have done it differently, even in hindsight.

Try a Gravity/Kinetics or Gravity/Time controller, both are very fun, powerful, thematic, and different than a meleer.

I agree, and despite all that, if the player writes some decent background fiction explaining this, I could be okay with it.

Isn't there a regulars costume chest ornament filled with medals? Are they the same ones?

Most likely, the artist who created the uniform just grabbed a bunch of medal images and pasted them together without thought to the lore implications.

My favorites? Hmmm... probably all of the ones they made since Live shut down forever.

Pretty much this.

A few weeks ago, a friend of mine and I were discussing some of the support powersets and how strong they were on teams. Somewhere along the line I said, if you chose one these as your secondary on a Petless MM, you could level to 50 on teams and no one would notice. He took it as a challenge, and did it with whip (petless demons)/rad. He kept counts of comments he got, and, iirc, he got one or perhaps two, but both were positive. The game offers us so much over and above our core powersets on SO's, that we should not be surprised that any one thing can seem to be on the margin -- even something as big as your main pet powers. I believe using vs. not using temp powers, or even incarnates, won't make or break most characters in normal content. However, they might take the sting off an ordinarily very poorly performing theme/challenge character, like a petless mastermind.

It sounds like you deliberately made the character for the theme, knowing it would limit the character's power; and not to maximize the character using both temps and an powers build optimized around having them. For example, knowing you would get some +recharge and +defense from having amplifiers on 24/7, and therefore deciding to end your conventional build that much short of perma-hasten and that much below the softcap, and then putting the rest of the build's trade space against increased damage.

I'd be on board with at least making it impossible to claim anything from emails while inside missions.

I don't know anyone who has specifically built around temporary powers; but several who build around incarnates. I do the latter myself -- I'll look ahead to which alpha I intend to use, and then build around having it and the corresponding level shift in 50+ content. I think anyone who doesn't do this will be at a disadvantage, of sorts, in the same content. But is it a serious one? I think generally not. They will still contribute to the team, feel needed (as much as anyone is), and enjoy the game. Most content is easy enough for well built non-incarnate and non-temp users to do just fine.

If a player opens a lot of packs, they will have plenty of amplifiers to use. You can't sell them, so using them on level 50's is a good way to go. Some inspirations are powerful but may not be cost effective, and can be quirky to use -- like needing to pull them out of emails one at a time. If a player has paid the cost and gone through the effort to make use of temps, empowerments, amplifiers, incarnates, IOs, rare inspirations, and so on, they should not be denied their use. In my opinion, restricting use of these things to create more difficulty is bad design. Design content and systems changes to support the level of difficulty desired. Don't weaken the players. strengthen the content. If they're unbalanced, then instead of turning them off, they should be fixed. Inspirations, specifically, as a system need some work. They've always been an easy crutch to lean on. Something like them having certain kinds of diminishing effects and cooldowns could work.

I appreciate seeing the post to LFG letting us all know the team filled. Sometimes the person who was advertising goes the extra mile, and posts something like "Sorry everyone I couldn't add - there were lots of tells and there's probably enough of you to make another team" It's not always about getting the most for one team in the least public typing.

I think both these arguments go together; it's supply being more restrictive due to the generally higher cost of winter packs, and the demand is there for almost every serious build.

And if you're good enough, you get FREE surgical insertion into a wild and crazy eight-legged cyborg suit!

I don't get many merits, so I just buy my converters off the auction. The profit I make off each converter is high enough whether I buy it at 60k or 80k makes no appreciable difference to me.

There is only one market shared by all the servers. Also, there are players who go through hundreds, and possibly thousands of enhancement converters each day. I'm one of them, at least in the low hundreds ranges. I generally put up bid for them at modestly low offering prices, and let those sit overnights, or even several days to fill. Chances are, when you list your few dozen or even hundred converters, someone like me already has bids for many hundreds in above your listing price, and they sell instantly. If you list them higher, you could sell them more slowly, and get better prices. For example; if you go to the market with a hundred converters to sell, try selling just one first, listing it really low, and see what price it actually sells for. Then, look at that price, and if that price isn't crazy, list the rest just a tiny bit above that, and let them sit for a day. You could easily get ten or even twenty percent more for your converters by listing them at a price point that doesn't sell instantly.

I think I would be there already if I posted more often and people liked those posts more.

Psizzard

Crevasse