Fulmens

I've seen inf fall from the sky once or twice, but I was Air Sup-ing Sky Raiders at the time.

That "I coulda bid below 5908 for that uncommon salvage!" moment. I know it well, dave_p.

I have tried flipping salvage two or three times. I lost my shirt one time and my pants the other. Boxer shorts for the win. People say "learn it on something cheap, so you can afford your mistakes." I didn't do that.

There are weird things going on in the market- we had a huge wave of insta-50s with very little stuff, and a huge wave of tickets being turned into stuff, and prices were all over the place in consequence. I got the hell out and am slowly getting back in.

One thing about craft and sell (As done by me): I don't buy more than two of the same recipe at the same time, and I only list one at a time. This avoids getting burnt too badly. I might get crisped up, because I've been doing nothing today but posting my secrets for making money, but I can usually sell ONE, say, Impervium Armor +Res at a good profit.

I also kinda stay away from the really big items- Numina's Very Shiny for instance- because that seems like a high-competition market where everyone pays a lot of attention. Same with purples. I think that's where the billionaires make their money, though, so I could be wimping my way out of the big leagues.

I figure that most of everything on the market is put there by level 50's. So you'll see most of your buying and selling at max level of the enhancement set. That's where I set up my storefront, as a result.

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EDIT: Except things that are "Buy one, craft, sell, pocket twelve million."

[/ QUOTE ] However, I've yet to find this situation and raises a question. At what level of profitability should I feel is good right now? Are you guys finding that a 1-2M net INF trade is too low? Should I *generally* keep searching till I find a 12M net INF trade? Or are 12M trades fairly rare?

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Depends how much inf you feel you need... I know that may be a lame answer, but it's the one I have.

You can spend 10 million by level 50 on a build. You can spend (I dunno) a billion on a build. The billion-inf build is not ten times as good as the 10 million-inf build. Personally I spend around 150 million, I think, on a character I like by the time they get to level 50. I used to spend around 40 million and that felt like I was throwing money away... I've gotten over some of my cheapskate habits.

For that level of spending, a million or two per item at Wents is fine. It's easy, it's fast, it's painless. Remember that you're going to make around, I dunno, 40 million just playing the game to 50.

If you want a WHOLE LOT of inf, you're kind of getting out of my comfort zone. KeepDistance made a billion in 30 days and wrote a guide on the topic. Basically I'd try it by buying for around 25 million, crafting, and selling for around 40 million. I don't do those kinds of bets often, though.

I listen to Starsman. I just use a freaking plate of salt because of statements like "In certain situations, range made this blaster more survivable than my tanker, and no, that's no hyperbole. "

In certain situations, melee gets you identical damage to ranged. But we aren't fighting 100% Gunslingers and Rikti Drones from level 1 to 50, are we?

My rough estimate (I remembered the result, forgot the methodology) was that an Inv scrapper at level 35-ish was SIX TIMES HARDER TO KILL than a Blaster, NOT COUNTING THE MEZ PROTECTION.

Back to your "Tankers should use 40% less endurance for their attacks, because... um... it sounds good in my head" discussion.

I don't think this is going to make the So Bad It's Good cutoff.

I have seen Fantasy Mission Force and you, sir, are no Fantasy Mission Force.

By the way, Viva Las Vegas (one of my SGs- admittedly all just alts of the same ten or so people) has a standard 100K inf signing bonus and a 1 million inf retention bonus at level 22. "Live fast, die often, squander money." If you consider that 1 million inf -> 2000 prestige in a straight swap, it's cheap at the price.

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Plus, if you go for sub-50s, you'll get them faster and at a severely lower cost.


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For most of the IO's I go after, there's a considerably larger supply at max level- admittedly, at a far greater cost. This is because most of everything that people generate in this game is created by level 50's.

Maybe Blood Mandate is so unloved that there are droves of them sitting around at level 36. There are recipes like that.

Blackavar said
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I left out possibilities that may be more difficult to balance like Dark Miasma for Controllers, Kinetics and Radiation Emission for Masterminds, etc., but this is pretty much a complete list of possible proliferation candidates.

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Fair enough. They do have a lot of potentials to port. (Although I'd consider a few of the ones you listed as bad ideas. Ice Melee for Brutes and Bladed Assault for Blasters are likely to be highly underpowered, for instance. Energy Melee for scraps is likely to be overpowered. The key powers of Ice Armor and Invuln, for stalkers, would be self-defeating. Scrapper Mace would be very similar to "Broadsword, only smashing." )

Anyway,I agree that I'm not starving for power combos and I don't think anyone else is either.

rawk or something!

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ight now I'm working on about my fifth or sixth billion (which still makes me "small potatoes" around here)

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Larger potatoes than me. I maybe made two or three billion total, on all characters, in two years.

To the OP: I'm sorry if you came in here with your idea and we were all "My wallet is far mightier than your puny mind can imagine."

The market is like a pinball game. You start out, and you get like half a million, and you think that's pretty damn good. Then you figure something out and you get like two million and you think THAT's good. Then you see someone get fifteen million.... damn.

There are a bunch of ways of making money, and the thing is that there's such an embarassing surplus out there that we can talk about them all day- broadcast in Atlas Park- write guides- and these ways STILL WORK.

I think I timed it once, and I could make a million an hour schlepping recipes to the vendor. Sounds like a lot, huh?
You can make like eight million on a single buy-craft-sell cycle. That's one IO, where someone out there has enough inf that they will throw down eight million extra to have it now, instead of tomorrow. But you need money to make money.

Phase 1 is "get your first million."
Phase two is "Turn that into five million"
Phase three is "Turn that into 20 or 30 million"
and then you're into wealth beyond counting. Literally you can have more than the 2 billion inf the game allows you to keep in cash.

You've got a pretty good "Phase 1". There are other Phase 1's.

Possibilities for Phase 2:
* Memorize EndMod and EndRed at 35-40, craft a few of those and sell 'em. You may lose money on the ones you are crafting to sell. Or Recharge Red, or Accuracy, or Damage, or something. Defense and DamRes have sometimes been bad bets, historically, even though Defense seems to still be hot as of this morning.
* Craft slow moving, low-cost IOs. Some that used to work are level 30 Karma: Def/End or Def/Rech, and some Serendipity IO's. Buy one for 100K, craft it, sell for a million or more. May take a weekend to sell.
* Apply Phase 1, even more.

Possibilities for Phase 3:
Illtat's list.

Some of the "surplus" IO's from shiny sets. (There are like twenty Kinetic Combat: Dam/Rech recipes for sale at any given time. I think Devastation Dam/End, Decimation Dam/Rech, and maybe Miracle Heals. You don't make a lot of profit on those, and you might get undercut if the market shifts. )

You can probably start flipping rare salvage, but the two or three times I tried this I lost money. Ask an expert how to do that, I don't know.

Phase 4:
* Flipping big stacks of salvage, I guess.
* Crafting and selling high-end stuff- buy for 20 million, craft, sell for 35 or 40 million.Look at the top level of the stuff that ends at 40- Impervium Armor, Miracle, maybe Gift of the Ancients on a good day. Check for uniques.
* Maybe, the ultrahigh end stuff: Luck of the Gambler recharge, Obliteration quads, Numina's and Miracles and Regenerative Flesh uniques. I don't play in this pool much because it's a little scary to me, throwing down a 50 million inf bet. No matter how much it looks like a sucker bet...

Flu-shots: Don't plan on having "one" niche. Find three or four. (Once upon a time I put together a giant list of things I'd made money at... can't find it now.)

Pretty much anything in a power you'd use, at its max level is "Buy one, craft, sell, pocket a million or two."

EDIT: Except things that are "Buy one, craft, sell, pocket twelve million."

PVP: not the same game. I mean, it wasn't before, but now... not the same game.

PVE: Yes, power pool attacks are "almost as good" as some basic attacks. But once you start hitting the good stuff at 18 or 26 or 32, they don't compare.

I wrote a sonnet to headsplitter once. It is mercifully lost to the thread eating monster.

Brutes, once you get Stamina and SO's, are pretty much off the chain. Is that what the kids are saying these days? Anyway, if you took a pit bull, gave it too much PCP, shot it in the butt with a BB gun, and took it off the chain you'd get a very similar effect to a Brute. I have an Elec/Invuln (Elec is wonderful after level 32, kinda weak before then) and a fire/willpower (good stuff in both primary and secondary. Two flaming thumbs up.) So that's my personal experience.

Stalkers are a very different playstyle. One walks through the city, unseen and unknown, deciding who lives and who dies. Why? Because you say so. They're much less desired on teams, and it's a slower, calmer, playstyle. I've got a Ninja/Ninja and an energy/energy stalker and I think I prefer energy primary. [I'd probably go ninjitsu secondary, but I don't have huge preferences either way.]

Bruting, if it's for you, you will clearly know it after about level 22. I find the 15-21 range on EVERY villain I've tried to be kind of unpleasant and hard. You gotta make your bones, I guess.

One of the "Standard" builds that they did guides on was called the Sith Lord- Dark/Elec defenders, if I remember. May not be what you want, but you do get a lot of lightning and you get to just wreck badguys. Might work even better as a corruptor.

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Dont feel bad, I used to Pencil/Paper/Dice all the time with some friends years back.

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... If you're REAL oldschool, you did the D6 system...

Elec/Elec advice - from someone who's never played the specific combo...

You have two really good tricks at melee range, and one at distance.

You can zero out enemy endurance, or close to it, with Short Circuit (near-capped for End Mod) and Power Sink (near-capped for End Mod). You have to be level 36 for that to work, though. Short Circuit and Ball Lightning, sadly, will probably leave them enough END to kill you with. This trick requires jumping in the middle of the spawn and firing off two fairly-slow attacks. I recommend some sort of stealth.

The second trick- and it's barely even a trick,but it works really well- is the Charged Brawl/Havoc Punch combo. This does TREMENDOUS damage to one guy in a big hurry.

You have a ranged nuke in Elec/*- this is great. If you know the "pop-up pull" trick, you can do a pop-up nuke. Hide behind a box and target an enemy. Trigger the power, so it will go off when you get line of sight. Now jump up- it will probably trigger at the top of the jump- and by the time the enemy knows they've been attacked, you've fallen back down behind cover.

Admittedly, not that many people will SURVIVE but the ones who do will have to come get you.

In short, Banshee, you're REALLY CLOSE to the good stuff. You don't have your nuke fully slotted for damage yet. Try it with four small reds to simulate the effect of 95% damage slotting. You don't have the 1-2 end drain going yet. (Disclaimer: I haven't done the 1-2 end drain myself. Maybe you always die before it goes off; I dunno.)

Basically, to the OP, there are a lot of ways to "Break the game". TopDoc's superteams do it very easily.

With eight semicompetent players it's difficult to NOT have a team that rampages through content.

The best team I've ever been on regularly- and it wasn't a Superteam as per TopDoc- was Noise Complaint. (Viva Las Vegas is our SG and we do "theme" groups sometimes. Right now we've got Viva Defiance!)

It went something like this:

Ice/Axe tank, me- forward observer. I would sort of lunge at a group of enemies and the artillery would come down on it. Running Assault.
Sonic/Archery defender - running Assault, keeping the Hula Hoops of Death on me (Sonic Dispersion? I don't remember what the power was called) and the Resistance Rings on the whole team.
Emp/Sonic defender. Ideally keeping Fortitude on me and touching up people's HP, but mostly throwing Sonic Blasts. Sonic/Electric blaster, running [say it with me!] Assault.
Sonic/Energy blaster with Tactics.
Broadword/Regen running Assault.
Warshade with Assault.
Katana/??? scrapper

The goal was "lots of Assault, lots of Sonic blasts, lots of damage in a really short period of time."

When all eight of us showed up, we were dropping Archvillains in thirty seconds. Repeatably.

Yeah, we would have done even better with a Rad or a Kin on the team, but even without those two "I Win" buttons, we won.

I'll let you know in a couple of weeks how "four blasters, a tank, a peacebringer and a scrapper" does. At level 25 it's fast and bloody.

OK, I'm going to take the example of a singletarget melee attack .

My first goal here is to get a couple of "Extra slots" - so we take a 5-slot power and get it close to "seven SO's" - and to do it for really cheap. We would like, say, 50% Recharge and at least 30% End Reduction in addition to 40% Accuracy and of course 95% Damage.

We start on this page and look for the enhancements sets with the WORST set bonuses that still go up to at least level 35.

Looks like Focused Smite has nothing I'd like, and Smashing Haymaker has ALMOST nothing I'd like. Additionally they are yellow (meaning they drop frequently from badguys) and USUALLY yellow IO's have nothing but common salvage.

... before you start the full project put in cheap bids on five of each of these salvage. You may not get all of them cheap, but give it a several-day lead time so you don't have to pay "Buy it NAO!" prices, which are almost always stupidly high.

Iron
Masterwork Weapons
Stabilized Genomes
Demonic Blood Samples
Inert Gas
Runes
Spell Ink
Ancient Bones

These days you're going to pay for the uncommons, too, but I don't know which of those to prebuy because they used to be all cheap all the time. Maybe two of each medium, that's 24. Stick 'em in the vault.

We now return to the specific example.

Pounding Slugfest looks like it should be an unloved set, but you'll probably find it surprisingly expensive. People love their Regen bonuses.

There are a couple of things in other sets that might prove to be bargains, but for now we're going to see how far we can get with these two sets.

The way we can get more than one "SO" per slot comes from two things.
1) A generic IO at these levels gives a little more than one SO of bonus- about 35% at level 30, 39% at level 41. 42.4% at level 50.
2) A "Dual" gives you a bit more than half a "Single" of each thing it does. (roughly, three Duals = 2 singles.) A "triple" gives you exactly half a "single" in each thing it does. So two triples gives you, basically, a free slot.

Let's see what we've got and what we can get.

If we slot two "duals" with accuracy in them, we get around 45% Accuracy. We might go one "Dual" and one "Triple".

Smashing Haymaker has a triple- Damage/End/Rech - and Focused Smite has a triple- Acc/Dam/Rech. It has a non-damage triple but if it doesn't have damage WE DO NOT CARE, because it's important to get the damage up to cap and we only have five slots to work in.

So throwing in an Acc/Dam to top this off, let's see where we are:

<font class="small">Code:[/color]<hr /><pre>
Acc Dam End Rech
* * * Focused Smite
* * * Smashing Haymaker
* * Smashing Haymaker
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We've got a bit more than 1 Acc, 1.6 dam, half an End and exactly 1 Rech in 3 slots.

So we've got our 40%-ish Acc, 35% Rech, 20%-ish End and 50%-ish Dam.

In the other two slots we need 2 Duals of damage, half a Dual of end and half a dual of Recharge. One Dam/End and one Dam/Rech should set us up nicely.

So one Acc/Dam, one Dam/End, one Dam/Rech, one Dam/End/Rech and one Acc/Dam/Rech should give us pretty much our specs.

The cheap levels tend to be 31, 32, and 36, last I looked. Check for yourself, and put in cheap bids at multiple levels. You might get a 34 or a 35 cheap, you don't know. 36 and 37 are going to be more expensive to craft - 80K vs. 50K - but will give you better results, and are only available in Focused Smite. Smashing Haymaker gives you slightly better set bonuses.

So you put up bids for a bunch of recipes for 20-50K at different levels, a bunch of salvage (mostly uncommons), and you wait. Ideally you bid this stuff on Wednesday and don't check until Saturday or Sunday. There's a LOT of movement in the market Thursday night and Friday night, and a considerable amount through the weekend.

You grab your handful of cheap ugly stuff, slot it in there, and let's say you get this:

L36 Acc/Dam -Focused Smite [this one i'd make sure to get a good level on]
L37 Acc/Dam/Rech - Focused Smite
L31 Dam/End - Smashing Haymaker
L34 Dam/End/Rech- Smashing Haymaker
L32 Dam/Rech- Smashing Haymaker

Total Bonus, if I did the math right:
42.0% Acc
106.5% Dam
40.2% End Reduction
59.3% Recharge

... except of course that ED hits the Damage and cuts it down to about 95%.

It looks ugly. But it works REALLY WELL. And that's Frankenslotting.

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At level 10, you are directed to an Invention tutorial in Steel Canyon as a Hero, or Cap Au Diable as a villain.

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Yup. Do that and read it.

Cheapest? Level 31 or 36, probably, from no-name sets like Smashing Haymaker.

Start with this and work upwards as you need shinier things.

P.S. If you're trying to get some sort of shiny medal, I will point out that I once IO'd out a level 50 Spine/Dark for 6 million inf, and I had 100K or so left over. Beat THAT!

Yeah. There's nothing like having +100% recharge and casually kicking it up to +170% recharge, permanently.

At least I imagine there's nothing like it. I hit capped recharge once during a 2XP when my high-recharge blaster received both Speed Boost and Adrenaline Boost. It was very nice, thank you.

I've never been able to,with a straight face, say "I'm going to spend 400 million inf on this build." I started out with 10-million-inf builds because anything more felt wasteful... I'm over that. Mostly.

Umm... there's nothing WRONG with turning off XP. I just feel that you can get inf anywhere in this game, and XP is a little less forgiving.

As you mentioned Wentworth's... it's SO easy to make money there. Here are three things for different budgets and different amounts of time/patience.

* You can buy snipe/slow/confuse/whatever recipes for cheap, like 1-500 inf, and sell them to a vendor for 1000-10K each. It's a lot of boring work for not a lot of money, but you can make around a million per hour. If you just need 100K or so, it's an OK way to get it. No risk, little reward.
* People "dump" crafted generic IO's on the market at random times. If you leave a few bids up for 55K on different useful level 30-40 IOs, it might fill and you can then resell it for 100K or 200K. Requires that you log off with bids in.
* If you buy a recipe and craft it and sell it, you can make millions. This even works on things where the recipe is easily available, and so is all the salvage. This proves to me that people pay for the convenience. Requires a small amount of research -especially, make sure that the crafted IO sells frequently. Works best with max-level-in-set IO's, like level 50 Crushing Impact or level 35 Entropic Chaos. Those may not work-find your own niches.

Human_Being said
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Purple and Orange (Defense and Damage Resistance) inspirations will give you more mileage as a Tank. They cut in-coming damage and last for 60 seconds each.


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Two things:

1) I think they last 30 seconds each. I could be wrong.
2) You get much better results taking them in pairs- two purples work considerably better than one. [Larger inspirations drop from enemies and you can do the math on those if you like.] Four purples works considerably better than two, but anything more than that is wasted. The tohit/accuracy/defense math in this game is very complex, so I'm not going to explain more than that.

EDITED: I thunk wrong. 60 seconds, just tested it.

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I remember nothing along the lines of what you remember.

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Nor do I. On the other hand, I don't guarantee that I have read every interview, dev quote, etc.

My ignorance does not disprove your statement. It does seem like an odd thing for them to say, given that there are not very many powersets left to proliferate. What, Dark Miasma to Controllers, Thermal to defenders, Regen to Brutes, and Energy/Superstrength to Scrappers?

... and many of those would bring up game balance issues.

I formed my argument poorly.

Given that there are a tremendous number of possible differences (I have been known to solo tanks with only one or two of the four or five toggles running) and given that it's difficult to say what any given tank or scrapper loadout requires, in Endurance, to survive, how does one guarantee that one's model is correct?

(For example, it's near-impossible to get any significant amount of Defense from IO's without getting considerable EndRed as well. Look at what 6-slotting Touch of Death or Mako's gets you, for instance...)