Bionic_Flea

Jordan: I don't like the way you play! Ewing: Well, I don't like the way you play! You think you're so good at this game.

All will be revealed . . . SoonTM

He gives a rundown at the beginning. As I recall, Sonic, FF, Dark, Kin, Elec, Cold.

Congrats! You are crazier than I thought you were! I can barely bring myself to finish one badger.

LOL. https://hcwiki.cityofheroes.dev/wiki/Recharge

Some people are merit rich and inf poor because they run lots of TFs and story arcs, but don't want to mess with the market or farm. For those, buying with merits makes sense. But it's also appropriate to point out that it's "cheaper" to buy IOs with Inf. Some don't realize they can use merits to buy converters to either sell or convert IOs and then sell those.

One of the sturdiest, funnest tanks I have ever made was Rad/Dark. Capped resists to S/L/E/F/T without Meltdown. With Meltdown add capped Negative, Cold at 83 and Psy at 72. Softcapped Melee, 36 to S/L/F/C, 20ish to everything else. And then add perma 1000 point absorb shield, 2 heals that do damage, endless endurance, tons of tohit debuffs, and excellent ST and AoE damage, capable of almost self capping damage for a few seconds with Meltdown and saturated Soul Drain with a Gaussian's Proc.

Outside Aeon Plaza, Jimmy McMillan says the costs in /AH are too damn high!

DEATH BY SNU-SNU!

Or maybe the Dev's can sponsor an AE contest to get ideas . . . oh wait!

To @MHertz: I think the flaw in your argument is that you are not accounting for time and rank. Fighting +4s generally is much slower than fighting even level especially at lower levels before you have all your powers and IOs slotted. Fighting +4 bosses takes even longer. Because of that, while leveling, I tend to increase team numbers over level numbers when setting difficulty. I'd rather fight evens at x8 than say +4/x4. But in the AE you can create dense crowds of NPCs specifically targeted to your characters strength, i.e., Fire Farms, and this is generally done at 50+. In the AE players can clear hundreds of +4/x8 critters including bosses and EBs much faster than the time it takes a lower level character to defeat an equivalent number of critters as even level. To @Wavicle: There's nothing arbitrary about it. Killing critters generates Inf. The faster you kill them and the higher their rank, the more you get. That's not arbitrary, that's deterministic. That's like saying running three Hamidon raids back to back arbitrarily rewards raiders more than others.

I'm not sure if it was in that thread or another, but Jimmy has also stated that marketing does not create influence, it transfers it between players and has a deflationary effect of removing 10% influence per transaction. So yes, farming is faster than street sweeping or running TFs and story arcs to create influence, but marketing is still a faster way for a player to accumulate (not create) influence.

I don't think that the Devs are going to, but a few GMs posted about the economy in this 2 year old thread. (Note: The price of LoTGs were about 6 million back then too).

Look to buy Aegis resist and Scirocco Melee AoE sets, and then build up a few WinterO sets .

Would you tell us the actual increase? Because going from 1,000 inf to 3,000 inf is a 300% increase, which is negligible. I would even consider 10x or 100x from the starting point to be negligible as well, but some may not.

Is farming an imbalanced method of earning ingame rewards? No. And why did you answer "no?" Discuss. Because.

LOL!

I'll echo Krimson and suggest that you run some of the story arcs on your own, at your own pace, with or without extra accounts or friends. I'll recommend all the Zone arcs as they tie in and explain what's going on in a zone and between the groups that hang out there - Hollows, Faultline, Striga, Croatoa, and Rikti War Zone all have a series of story arcs from different contacts that combine to tell a story. I sometimes level a new character just doing those zone arcs at natural level. You also end up with a lot of reward merits and neat temp powers and a few badges. Additionally, when you open up an Ouro crystal and look at some of the lists you'll also see a series of arcs that are numbered Part 1, Part 2, etc. that similarly tie together some game lore. Here's a list of all the Hero TFs and Story Arcs to see if anything calls to you (Villains and Preatorians have a similar list): https://hcwiki.cityofheroes.dev/wiki/Hero_Merit_Rewards

A good team built for the ITF can run a 54/x8 Kill Most at 15-20 minutes, so you can multiply that 10-12 million by 3 or 4. But lets be conservative and say 30 million inf per hour per player. Multiply that by eight players and you have 240 million. If we add in Luminara's merits and call it 16 mill per run x 3 runs (48 mill) x 8 players is 384 million added to the economy in an hour. Also: Nerf Regen, not farms or ITFs.

I agree with Ukase, there are temporary, cyclical ranges in the price of IOs but I have seen no evidence of sustained inflation. In fact, I have seen much more evidence of deflation in the most sought-after IOs. Where there is some small inflation is in what most would consider "junk" IOs. Uncommon sets with middling to bad set bonuses have gone up in price while popular, powerful pieces have gone down in price because people buy the junk and convert them to the popular and powerful. You'll also see the same IO vary in price over the week. More people tend to play on weekends so it is common to see a spike in prices as demand goes up and then slowly goes down over the course of the week until the next weekend. Miss Magical's thinking that farmers cause inflation even though there is no inflation because the farmers set the equilibrium makes no sense to me. The equilibrium is set by the merit cost of rewards at the ATM vendor. You can buy a reward merit for 1 million inf and buy any purple recipe or ATO for 100 merits. Therefore, no reasonable player would spend more than 100 million for any of those items regardless of the amount of farming they had done. Further, reward merits can be priced by the sale of Boosters, Catalysts, and Converters to be roughly about 210,000 inf. Using that number and multiplying by 100 merits you get a price of 21,000,000 for a purple recipe or non-superior ATO/WinterO. Again, no reasonable and informed player would more than 21 million for a purple recipe . . . and they don't. ATOs and WinterOs are further capped by the price of Super Packs at 10 mill (25 for Winter). I also don't buy the argument that farmers insist on 10x the influence rewards. Influence is magically created when a player defeats an NPC. Influence is also magically created when a player completes a story arc or TF or sells an item to a vendor. Every player gets the same amount per kill, per completion, and per sale. The difference is the speed in which those tasks are completed. Some people like farming, some like speeding TFs, others like spending hours perfecting a costume, base, or AE arc. Those are all fun and worthy endeavors and totally allowed by the game. The game only rewards killing critters and completing missions. Players, however can and do reward creativity by having costume contests, paying for a base builder to make a dream home, and highly rating an AE arc.

Y.U.P.

Oh, yes. Sorry. Corrected.

At 100 damage, assuming it hits, the power does 65 damage after resistance, and that is consumed by the Absorb shield leaving 10 absorb points. No loss of HP. At 150, again assuming a hit, the power does 97.5 damage, consumes the 75 points of Absorb and removes 22.5 HP from the player. But I have no idea whether bodyguard divides the damage before or after Absorb. My guess is before absorb, but a Nature MM should be able to say for sure. Assuming it's before absorb and six pets are out either 65/8=8.125 damage to each pet and 16.25 to the player, which then consumes that much absorb. https://hcwiki.cityofheroes.dev/wiki/Mastermind_Strategy#Bodyguard