JusticeBowler

OK. I've been playing this build for a couple of days now Electric/Poison Controller. Here's my latest experiment in -END/-REC. It doesn't help where you need most of the help (the alpha strike). However, I will say that after a few seconds into the battle I do see an effect particularly in a place in the game I didn't expect. The high end. When people are running +4/x8 unless they are all floating Incarnate level damage it does take a minute to melt mobs and END is quicker to floor than health to zero. Folks might dip in health, but with the LTs and Bosses low-to-no END folks can concentrate on clean up. It feels a bit like how Empathy, Regen, and other "reactive" defenses work but it does work. I was hoping that Poison's Weaken (which I have maxed out for -TOHIT) would fill the gap, but it doesn't have the range to affect enough of the mobs (unlike Dark and Rad similar powers) and still takes a moment to have an effect, so I just can't provide that sort of mitigation. That's OK... there are other people on the team that can help with that. The real question is, is it more mitigation than say taking Fire instead of Electric would have been (mitigation by faster mob melting)? My argument is yes. The truth is, as awesome as a Fire controller can be they still do less damage than other ATs (say a Fire blaster). And the difference between a Fire and Electric controller is less than a Fire and Electric blaster. I'm simply not there for damage. Gremlins will help though, I'm sure. Most of the damage difference would probably be the difference between Gremlins and Fire Imps. Yes, I could have gone /Kin, but I think when I get Poison Trap at 38 I won't be sorry at all.

Groovy.

Procs are so confusing and the implementation is so strange. I mean, I can't see how Impeded Swiftness Chance for Smashing damage could possibly be better than just slotting a DMG IO in there. There's a lot of that sort of thing with slotting sets. Apart from the "overall effect" of getting all the sets to carefully line up so a character is at the DEF softcap, or to satisfy some RCHG hungry-crazy folks trying to get to 350+ global ... all of it seems not much of an improvement over straight slots. I'm sitting here thinking "can I improve over common IOs for anything I'm doing" and the answer is, not really. Getting Shield Breaker and Cloud Senses chance for damage into Envenom and Weaken is novel (hey they do damage now) but such minimal damage as to be unnoticable. It looks like procs (apart from some specific ... devs screwed up and missed this crazy idea) are primarily for people with some extra slots for powers otherwise already maxed out in utility.

So a Tank with Electric Melee could slot EM Chance to Disorient, Triumphant Insult Chance to Disorient, and Pounding Slugfest Chance to Disorient but I'm out of luck?

So, I built a Electric/Poison Controller and I'm having a bit of fun. But the truth is, I just can't quite slam the -END and -REC quickly enough across enough of the mobs to be terribly useful doing it. I mean, if someone else had the same effect (even unslotted) then together we could sap whole mob groups. But I got to thinking about EM:CtS... I mean, it isn't unique. Why can't I put 3 or even 5 of these in every one of my Electric attacks? Each one would fire off about every 30 seconds which would mean across 4 or 5 powers and 3-5 procs per power I could be a stun spamming nightmare. Tell me why this doesn't work a lot better than trying to sap the poor bastages.

I think the strange thing about any increase in interest in the player base for making real money in the AH is really just raising more folks into the range where they can afford the good stuff. Converters aren't ever going away due to merit farming and with all the AE tickets flowing the rare salvage being cheap means a lot of folks will probably craft those themselves keeping prices up. I see the medium term (weeks to months) price as pretty stable. We could have a rough time on a weekend if a few billionaires wanted to drop their bankrolls on friends and sundry, but I wonder if that would have a bigger effect on grapesets and Winter IOs more than on the upper end of the Rare market. Once that INF is back in the market it is going to wash all over the place though, which incentivizes more extractors. As long as there are plenty of Converters flowing from the Merit vendors (and the profit for dumping them on the market is fast-reliable money that's immediately spent on the market) the whole playerbase benefits from the ability (as a group) to move relatively unwanted IOs into more desirable sets. COMMODIFICATION => LIQUIDITY! Now that I've got the hang of making a little bit of cash, I'd certainly hate to see the spigot turn off entirely, but I suspect that no matter what the monetary rewards a good portion of the player base will be happy to pay us to make AH work well for them. It isn't a bad trade for them after all. It would be nice to get causal folks out of Single Origins and into the market though. They really are missing out, even with Common IOs and lesser sets. Heck, even "collecting" the sets is fun IMNHO.

I never care about what a toon is like at the end game. I know that's what the boards are obsessed with, but it has never factored into my enjoyment of the game or the way I play it. This isn't just the alt-itis talking. It is also that builds at 50+ depend far more on your willingness to tweak it to its optimum design at enormous expense. I build toons to explore a character concept or far more likely a "play style" that would make trying to plan for maximum utility either PvE or PvP at the end game impossible to achieve. In this case, I was largely trying to avoid stupid mistakes and see if there was something statistically significant in playability at low levels Gold Side because that's all I'll probably ever play this toon to do. Once it hits lvl 20 it will probably be retired. I won't ever see single origins much less lvl 50, purplesets, and incarnate stuff.

Look - I don't intend to come off as harsh - but why wouldn't you simply stash the IOs in your very own sg base for your alts to come in and access them when needed. I do understand that some folks just don't bother with an sg base..but it's such a time saver over the long run. Or maybe you belong in one sg and your alt doesn't. Suggest you form your own, and make a coalition with your current one. This way, you have a big hassle removed from your game time. Just my .02 inf. Here's the thing, I completely get this! I assume a lot of people manage it this way. In fact, I assume that's how they deal with even the fiddling around with salvage which they probably bought in bulk for crafting stations in the base. The problem is, I'm actually shopping around for good SGs. I have several alts in different ones. I also have my characters on two different servers (my wife and kids play on Excelsior though they don't play much, and a bunch of people I've connected with online including some people I knew from live a long time ago are on Everlasting). But this is very much on my mind. So my plan is to set a main on Excelsior up with all the goodies, form an SG there and build a base (this is something I want to learn anyway, never did it live). Then add all the lowbies and such to it and make it easy to mess around there with crafting, etc. Then I'm thinking I'll do the same on Everlasting though as soon as my toons get setup with IOs and such, I'll think about shopping them around to SGs... at least I need to keep doing this until I find an SG home on Everlasting.

I've been playing a Kinetics/Shield Stalker. This is a side project so I'm not very far along (he's only level 8). I'm convinced that the most important thing about this project is that he's a Stalker! I'm stealthing a lot of content because I just don't need (and in fact don't want) the XP. Still, there have been some very ugly fights. I'm not sure that any combination of sets that folks have recommended would have given me an edge. I like the Praetorian setting, stories, and mobs, but I can't help but feel like this is level 10 or even level 15 content being pushed right out of the gate before I even have an attack chain. I have a feeling that after running a toon through all this, if I want to play Gold Side again I'll do it through Ouroborus, where a well outfitted toon can Exemplar down gracefully through it. That's sad, because it would be a heck of a lot of fun with teams over there, but maybe Gold Side is solo content by nature (every story ends with a solo "morality" mission). Still I'm glad I decided to do it and I look forward to the next time I play. He's fun.

Right now I'm thinking Psychic or Ice with Electric or Super Reflexes. I think that Psychic/Electric is stronger in straight sets, but I really love the increased effect protection from DEF and I might be willing to put up with the survivability problem to avoid all the secondary effects of attacks because mobs can't hit me in the first place. I'm thinking I might try Ice since DPS doesn't have to be the bleeding edge and I've always wanted to roll an Ice blaster. Also P/E doesn't have any sort of character concept. It's just thematically random.

OK. So I changed my approach and took a new look at how the market functions, especially with respect to converters. And I accepted the need to gamble, hard. If you are willing to set fire to INF, it will turn into something eventually. I think one of my chief problems in the past was not having enough money to spend to make the money, at least this way. As soon as I was willing to spend a lot of money (say around 25 million which scared the crap out of me, but I did it)... and focus in on exactly what I thought I could accomplish, I was able to almost double that over the course of an hour or so. The second hour I got lucky with a couple of sales and did more than double my investment. There are some limitations to what I'm doing. The supplies of the right recipes are a little lean and as soon as you grab up the few "at cost" (around what people are selling them for) you run quickly into people that want double or even triple the going rate for stuff and the profits drop like a stone. The other problem is, salvage. It just takes so friggin long to pull out what salvage I need in what numbers and fill up without overfilling my limited capacity. So what I'm doing won't ever scale beyond turning 25-30 into 45-50 in an hour or so, just in terms of how much clicking and sorting and stuff I have to do. 20+ million an hour is no joke. This is better than I've ever seen before. (usually I'm turning 5-6 million into 8-9 million) but that's still 50 hours of markettering to get to 1B INF... that's a lot of time doing some mind numbing sorting of salvage. But it still isn't the 100 million folks talk about casually making in an hour of markettering each day. So I'm a step closer, but the big time is still out of my league. I'm OK with that for now. The money I made is a welcomed relief. It certainly makes Farming (AE or otherwise) rather pointless, which is great because I sucked even worse at that!

It took me 32 levels to realize that my Savage Melee / Radiation Brute really wanted to be a War Mace / Shield brute. *sigh* Oh well... that's why they call it alt-itis.

Staff on my Dark Tank made the build. Being able to get that stacking DEF in there along with the END efficiency just made playing him a dream... as a tank. But I've completely given up on the idea that he's going to do any damage to speak of. I tried going back through Ouroborus to pick up a few badges and some merits... even on -1 and a build completely focused on maximizing his offensive potential, I felt like I was being punished for taking Staff offensively. Scrapper base numbers are much better, so maybe it wouldn't play out that way, but I'd have a hard time not playing Staff/Fire or something that could give staff a real kick in the DPS butt. I like the animations. I like the style. But the DPS just isn't there.

I've always assumed that the Bubbles stack. Bots + Bubbles is slow going sometimes but feels nigh unkillable outside overwhelming threats.

Yes, Sentinels should get shields. I was actually wanting to make one and really disappointed that it wasn't available. But Blasters? That's what Sentinels are for.