Maybe shards drop more frequently somewhere, but I spend most of my vet levels doing Hami raids and TFs, and haven’t seen where.
The other day I saw a toon named “Dreadstone,” and I immediately thought “Dred Flintstone.” I’m going to see if that name is taken.
I really hope you make the character like Judge Dredd in the Flinstones universe.
“Yabba-Dabba-Dredd!”
He’s a Jamaican version of Fred Flintstone, a Titan Weapons (giant rock club)/Willpower Brute.
He’s a Rocktafari.
That’s even better.
Yabba-Dabba Mon!
The GMs held a Costume Contest in Echo Plaza yesterday. I took Dred Flintstone. We lined up for the GMs to inspect, then they had us assemble in front of Statesman’s statue for a group shot. I’m right in the middle.
Aw, man, I always miss the GM costume contests. Did they do a Monster Mash afterwards?
I didn’t stick around. Hami was about to start.
Oh yeah you are noticeable. Well done!
Currently at 135 alts. Most of them, though, are “on hold”. Once I got to about 125, I took a look at the fact that only 4-5 of them were level 50. My usual play sessions involved flipping through the “pages” until I spotted a character that struck my fancy that day, and then play that character for a level or two. That resulted in a lot of alts that were taking forever to level up, some that weren’t getting played for months at a time, and alts with powersets I don’t like so much (ahem Dual Pistols) all getting bunched up together at low levels.
So I’ve changed my approach. I was already keeping all of my alts sorted by level, high-to-low. So once I had my first page of ten alts all at 50, I started on the second page of ten and got them to 50, and so on. So I now have thirty level 50s, and “page 4” alts are currently ranged between 42 and 38, so they’ll be to 50 before much longer. I just focus on the one page of ten at a time, rotating through them.
I play entirely solo. Only one of my alts has all Incarnates at Tier 4 (my fire farmer), but you’ll be happy to know that you can do it without the Notice of the Well component. Nearly all of the Incarnate powers have multiple recipes, so if you can’t use one recipe you can use another. I was similarly balked by the 25,000,000 inf cost of the T3 (I think it was T3) powers until I noticed there were multiple options.
Anyway, I’ve been dipping my toes into playing Path of Exile lately. I was big into Diablo 2 back in the day, but I bought D3 in 2012 and got fed up with it in about two weeks, and I didn’t bother with D4 at all (for that matter, I’m officially done with Blizzard altogether, after WoW’s “Shadowlands” expansion finally killed what love I still had for that game). But I’m enjoying PoE.
Yeah, you don’t wan to buy Rare and Very Rare Incarnate components with inf and threads. Use Emps instead. You’ll need 46 Emps per branch, which means 12 Hami raids. 
Usually, Hami raids go 3 rounds, and about half the league will swap to alts each round to get the most Emps for the buck. I stay because no way am I passing up 120 Reward Merits.
The main source of emp merits is veteran levels. You get a big batch of them every three vet levels. Alternately, you can do incarnate content (which isn’t all team stuff), like Dark Astoria, Belladonna Ventrano, Number Six, or Sister Valeria: At the end of every arc, you’ll get a choice of rewards. If you choose “random incarnate salvage”, there’s a decent chance you’ll get a Rare or Very Rare (it chooses the rarity randomly, but then lets you choose one from that rarity), which avoids the need for emp merits entirely.
I’m told that once you learn the layouts, you can solo the first arc of Dark Astoria in about 15 minutes, so that’d be a quick way to get all of the incarnate materials you need.
I’ve been doing some level-50 missions along with Ouroboros missions. I’m currently on a story arc fighting against Malta. Well, to my surprise after one mission, there was a Kronos Class Titan robot waiting to ambush me. Being a long-time hero, I’m used to ambushes after missions, but I’d not seen a Giant Monster one before.
So we started pounding on each other. After about five minutes*, my health and endurance were still at max, and the robot’s health and endurance were still at max. It was an epic stalemate of tanker vs tanker. I turned on my auto-punch to keep it engaged, and then asked for help in the Broadcast channel. Three other heroes teamed up with me and we took it down. Yay!
This is such a great game.
*I know it was five minutes because my Incarnate pet reached its time limit.
The GMs will sometimes spawn Kronos while we’re setting up for Hami raids. They’ve also had him spawn while we’re killing buds.
We have to be careful, though. Kronos has a higher chance to make Hami spawn. If we kill him before the raid, Hami could spawn and we’d have to hit /ah for EoEs. If we kill Kronos in the bowl, Hami could spawn right on top of us, and raid wiping ensues. It happened once.
That’s why you never want to log off in the bowl. In case the raid fails, next time you log in, you might have unexpected company.
Random citizen near City Hall: “I heard you were being chased by a giant robot. What’s up with that?” Then he shoved me out of his way.
Great way to keep your ego in check.
Same deal in Skyway City for Synapse Saturday Night when we’ve gathered all the Babbages together at the intersection in the middle. Pedestrians and cars just venture through like nothing’s happening.
There’s a special City of Heroes 20th Anniversary event starting soon. There’ll be “time capsule” presents scattered about with free goodies. There’s two official costume contests with special prizes. And there’ll be a question and answer panel with some of the original developers (War Witch headlining).
I’ve been farming the first 1-2 DA arcs. My fastest time so far on the first arc is 23 minutes, but then I’m a compulsive “defeat-all” player. I could seriously cut my time down if I skipped the skippable enemies.
Been farming them because, on my first few 50s, I got my incarnates all up to T3 and decided that was good enough for the content I do. Those characters thereafter just converted all their Emps to Reward Merits to turn into Inf (before they stopped allowing that). But I recently got the bug to go ahead and get those alts to T4. Alas, the Emp rewards from veteran levels decrease the higher you go, and by this time my “main” (Flaminatrix) was at vet level 80-something, and would get only 5 Emps every three levels. I was able to get enough to make one Very Rare component, but she’s about to hit 99, the last level that awards (5) Emps, so she’ll be farming for the last four Very Rare components she needs.
Meanwhile, I started a bit of an RNG statistics test. I’d been occasionally doing Emphram Sha’s repeatable missions to farm up Super Inspirations, and I’d started noticing that I seemed to receive the Damage and Endurance insps more often than not. I thought, “Hmm, those two seem to be weighted heavier than the others.” But, realizing my sample size was incredibly small, I decided to start tracking the drops. I’ve been running those repeatable missions on all of my alts that have completed DA, and have tracked 683 drops so far. Again, small sample size in the grand scheme of things, but there’s already a noticeable distribution, with Damage on top:
Damage: 130
Health: 116
Accuracy: 108
Endurance: 104
Then a big dropoff:
Defense: 68
Resurrect: 58
Resistance: 52
And another big dropoff:
Ultimate: 25
Escape: 22
That’s right, more Ultimates have dropped than Escapes.
Also, anyone who still enters the CECIL base may notice that all of the insp collectors are fully stocked with Large (or better) insps. For the last couple years I’ve been logging in 20 alts a day just to use the Inner Inspiration power to generate 3 inspirations, and use the power as often as possible while leveling characters. Doing that, I’ve managed to get every one of my 100+ alts fully stocked with Larges, and I put any excess into SG insp collectors, so now they’re all full (in the CECIL base and in all four of my personal SG bases).
Anyway, I’m coming up on hitting level 50 for the 37th time; Epic Gear (Battle Axe/Invuln brute) is just about to hit 49.
I play Tetris with my small and medium insps. I combine 3 of them to make room for more insp drops and keep the larges.
If you have spare threads, you can go to the fairy juggler vendor in Ouro and buy Super insps. You can get the +1 level insp for 30 threads. It’s handy for when a mish becomes too tough to solo and you don’t want to beg for help in lfg. The +1 level insp lasts the entire time you’re in the zone.
Wait, really? I thought it was 2 minutes.
Personally, my main moneymaking routine is flipping superpacks (each one costs 10 million, but on average contains about 12 million worth of stuff), so I end up with a surplus of inspirations in my Character Items from that (you can collect and sell them, but they fetch a low enough price that it’s not usually worth the time). It also gives a steady supply of non-tradeable temp powers like Experienced, Revival, and Windfall (of course, I never remember to actually use the Windfalls when appropriate).
I finally got my tier-4 Incarnates on my level 50. I’d got to tier-3 a while back (thanks to some help from this thread) and stopped there. Once I had the level shift and two incarnate shifts, there wasn’t any real reason to go further. I’m mostly doing Ouroboros missions. But then I remembered about them and had more than enough salvage to go to Tier 4.
So my main is basically maxed out. My money-making is selling everything that has an inventory limit on the auction house. So, inspirations, invention salvage, recipes. I’ve turned off drops of small inspirations–all they do is clog up my inspiration tray. It’s not even worth my time to click them to use them up.
When I feel like doing something grindy, I do Sha missions in Dark Astoria. A couple minutes to get a merit reward or super-inspiration. I use the classic “tank-stealth” of simply flying to the mission end. Aggro limits and strong armor makes me unstoppable.
I’ve been playing some with my son. We do a Tanker-Blaster combo hero-side and a Dominator-Stalker combo villain-side. Great fun!