Fulmens

I've been told that bronze outearns silver on a roll-by-roll basis, never mind ticket-by-ticket... I almost never farm AE so I haven't verified this result. [occasionally I will take a level-locked character in and make a bunch of 30 or 32 or 33 or 35 commons.]

"I'm going to have to focus, and start keeping notes if I'm going to be able to keep up with it all. " You can send email to the specific character you're on with notes about what you're doing if it helps you keep track. Or use the proverbial Back Of The Envelope.

(I only have two dedicated marketeers, although other characters start making a little inf for personal use and get carried away from time to time.)

Also: you're down to 25K? if you need small amounts of cash in a hurry (" a couple hundred K so I can craft this recipe" kinda cash) you can buy level 50 set recipes for 100 inf or so and run them to a vendor (5000 inf profit each.) If you're in Paragon City, the Kings Row setup is a pretty short flight. It's boring and annoying to do for more than 50K or so.

I should be around at any given point today- @Boltcutter- if you want to pay extra and get it today. 2.5 billion is my Buy It Nao price.

(I don't know how long the average wait is to get it on the market; it's pseudorandom anyway.)

I just bought a Psionic Threat Report for 229 million and change.

IT WAS A REALLY SERIOUS THREAT OK?

STOP LAUGHING!

... and there's a really good chance it went to someone else in the Market channel at the time.

We'll see if they post a screenshot of the other side of the transaction!

And to think you coulda started with 1 inf and turned it into 2.2 billion in 15 days. Another opportunity missed...

Right. You can put BoTZ in sprint or fly or Recall Friend or what have you. Karma only fits in powers that provide Defense. Karma's cheaper if you're slotting in CJ or Hover - those being the only two powers I know that could take either- but one way to think of it is "You could put a BoTZ in sprint and a 7.5% recharge in place of the Karma."

EDIT: Sprint may not take BoTZ, but Fly or Super Speed will.

/e checks names on Zukunft
"Ugly American" is taken, but "Irritating Tourist" is not!
/e battlecry
Ich Sprechen Nicht Deutch!

I'd be surprised if those level 10 enhancements were moneymakers. 15's or 20's or 25's are much more likely [I don't know the current market for any generics]. Flipping salvage for starters is good- or pulling level 50's off and selling them to a store for the VERY early stages.

I have a number of goals (too many!) and I'd like to accomplish as many as possible. I'm looking for suggestions.

I have a billion inf to turn into Prestige. I'd like to do some or all of the following:

1) take at least another billion inf with me
2) Help small SG's get off the ground
3) Publicize the possibility of turning inf into prestige
4) Help the BBC out.

I could just do another inf matching deal, but that only helps with 1) and not 2,3, or 4 . Almost everyone here knows about inf -to-prestige, and almost nobody here is in a "starter" SG.

The best idea I have had is a costume contest, low-prestige SG's only, with the prize in prestige instead of inf. It's not a very good idea and I'm hoping you can do better.

First question: Does the BBC have any plans which could be dovetailed with mine? If not, could we come up with one?

Second question: How big is the "gap" currently between the starter base and the next size up? I took a quick look at an old guide and it looked like you go from about 300K prestige to about 1000K , meaning that 800K of prestige would be a good first prize; but I'm not good at this and it was an old guide.

You don't have to make inf on every IO- just overall. I generally set my price around the "memorized breakeven" in most cases. But given that you can often sell level 40 EndMods for 500K-1M [memorized breakeven something like 70K] and you need to craft considerable numbers of extra IO's... it's hard NOT to make inf.

You lose 10% of the inf in those transfers.

I thoroughly approve of this idea.

Hell, maybe I'll start doing it again instead of gleemailing to myself on general principles!

Dear OP:

Welcome to City of * . I'm sorry that our responses are peevish; the discovery is new to you, but not to us.

This is the game where one character, at level 17, can make seven other characters, each, ten times as hard to kill as an undefended one.
Another character, at level 32, can double the entire team's damage.

These are not isolated cases; these are not slipped decimal points. Buffs that, in other games, are considered overpowered? In this game people complain that they're not worth taking.

Play what you like. Play what looks cool. Play what feels mighty. There are a few combos that might give you a bit of a challenge initially- scrapper/blaster is one, storm summoning/any melee is another- but you can throw together almost any eight players, on any eight archetypes, and as long as two of them are good: you're good.

I worked with a guy who used to say "What's the question behind the question?"

You can get to 50 remarkably fast, if you're determined and have some sort of reason or an axe to grind. My wife did it in one 2XP weekend- which is something like 60 hours total elapsed time, and there was some sleep in there- but that was after something like five years of gameplay. I bailed at level 38 or 44 and went to do other things.

But the important thing is, what's at 50? Getting there once, it's something to aim for, big milestone and all; but most of what people do at 50 is replay 1-49 content. There is a super seekrit clubhouse for 50's only, with new powers and missions and stuff, but there's only about five "you must be 50" trials and taskforces.

Enjoy the game. You're only going through for the first time once. Find out what the Clockwork have to hide; learn the story of Salamanca; try the Eden trial. There are tourists and commuters. I'm a commuter by now. You should look out the window and see new stuff while I'm sitting with my face in my book.

Interesting article. I'm kinda skeptical only because they used 2005 data, "The most recent available" and 2009 RECS data is available. Maybe it wasn't when they started writing... I'm told that pawnshops have been doing a lot of business. We've got six million extra unemployed, most for at least a year at this point and not counting the ones who've given up looking. (I'm only considered unemployed because after I graduated I started looking for a job...)

But yeah, we have a lot of stuff in this country.

EDIT: Did some math. Two 24" TV's plus DVD player, new, around $500; to put it another way, under 10 tanks of gasoline at current prices. Or one car repair if you're lucky.

Reminds me of someone asking a drug dealer where he thought "middle class" started and the guy said "$150,000 a year?"

Sent tell in game.

You already have the option. 1500 Reward merits (plus cash)-> 30 Hero/Villain Merits-> purple.

There's about 10 characters' worth of [for instance] Kinetic Combat IO's on the market. It wouldn't take a lot of fresh demand to clear it out in a hell of a hurry. I know, there's a lot of secret supplies hoarded away, but if even 1000 new "shiny me up" characters come out of 2XP (never mind proliferation) prices could get dramatic in a hurry.

flipside: I had the impression that the OP had tried farming for purples (eg in Cimerrora) and, since that hadn't been profitable enough, had returned to the AE building.

I wouldn't say "mastered" so much as "Adapted to" the market... we don't really have a lot of control. We drain off a little every time the tide goes up or down, but we do not control the tide.

I agree that we don't have a lot of new insights.

Standard phrasing is "Anything can work." Having said that there are some things that require more cleverness than others.

* Storm defender/controllers are tricky, especially in combination with melee characters.
* All blasters and scrappers is a tough combination to pull off.
* Tanks may be overkill on personal survivability and underkill on everything else.
* There's no such thing as too many defenders and controllers. Those are force multipliers.

It's hard for me to get in the mindset of fresh players, but I'd suggest "as long as someone's playing so-called support, you'll be fine." Good powersets to have on the team are Radiation buff (whatever it's called), Dark Miasma, and Sonic blast.

There are crazy superteams that you can build with as few as three characters- for instance the Green Machine three empath team- but you can do well with just about anything you want.

Slotting changes: ED means you can't get much past 95% slotting in anything, invention system is complicated but means you can get the equivalent of miniature hamidon enhancements from, like, level 30. Money flows like water in the invention system; this is shocking at first, but if you're a seller and not just a buyer it works out.

Welcome back! Go hammer the enemy.

The blue number is % improvement- white number is the improved number.

To give a simple example, if it's an attack that normally does 100 points of damage and you slot for 50% damage improvement, it would look something like Base Value 100, Value 150 (50%) . <- 50% should be blue

IO's- there are several 'levels' of improvement.

1) Replace all SO's with generic IO's. Gets you maybe a few percent improvement at level 35 or higher, but the main advantage is they never decay with time. You can go from 35 to 39 and they won't turn red.
2) "frankenslot" - one property of IO's is that a multi-part IO (acc/dam for instance) gets you more than "one IO" of total power. So you can scrape up all sorts of different cheap IO's of all sorts of different levels, generally with 30 being a practical minimum, and get the equivalent of 7 SO's or so in a 5-slotted power. As an advantage, because you're using unloved sets like Focused Smite, it can be really cheap. As a disadvantage, because you're using unloved sets like Focused Smite, it can take several days of having bids up on four different levels before someone actually sells you something.

3) You can go all sorts of minimax by using set bonuses. If you slot [for instance] Crushing Impact and you slot five, you get a bunch of bonuses: a meaningless mez reduction, more hit points, more accuracy in every power you own, AND more recharge in every power you own. You can combine multiple sets to create a really expensive character that has an entirely new playstyle- a stone tank that moves and hits about as fast as a normal one, or a Blaster with super reflexes-level ranged defense, or a Brute that pretty much never runs out of endurance. There are a lot of pitfalls and traps in this.

For extremely simple Frankenslotting math, about up there with "don't slot more than three SO's":

* Anything level 30 or better is about as good as an SO.
* A dual (like acc/dam) is slightly more than half an SO- three acc/dams from different sets would give you about two SO's of acc, two SO's of damage. But you can count it as about half an SO of each.
* A triple is half an SO of each type.

Add halves till you get what you like. Personally I go for about one and a half SO's of accuracy. I also like to have one set which gives a global acc bonus. Some people like more.

Also, you don't have to go to Wents and keep raising your bid till you get it right now. You can leave bids overnight and get stuff much cheaper.

I recommend working on two powers at a time, so you can pretty much hold all the IO's in your tray before you reslot. (Nothing sucks like half-reslotting a power and realizing you only have half an Accuracy.)