Fulmens

And now the warnings:

1) You have to plan ahead to get good prices on Salvage; you have to plan ahead to get midlevel recipes AT ALL. And often, you have to put up bids on the level 32, 33, 34, 35, 36 and 37 recipe to get even one of them in a weekend. Marketeers refer to "BUY IT NAO" syndrome, which costs you millions of inf more than you needed to pay.

2) You still sometimes get spiked by salvage prices. Mostly, yellow recipes use white and yellow salvage. However, (for instance) Air Burst is a weak, unimpressive, ranged AOE set that you wouldn't expect to cost you much. But Air Burst: Dam/Rech needs an orange salvage that costs around 2 million inf. Everything else combined is like 300K. There's another hole in the budget.

Frankenslotting is a lot more flexible than you are giving it credit for.
TL;DR version- you can enhance EVERYTHING with NO penalties.

Mathy version:
I'm going to give my favorite example, which I've beaten to death round here: a five-slotted ranged power. We will use [about] level 35 IO's, which give [about] the same performance as a +1 SO if you're looking at a generic (that only enhances one thing). A "triple" gives exactly half the performance of a "Single" in EACH category.

FIVE SO's: Acc, Dam, Dam, Dam, Rech or End (your choice).
FIVE IO's:
Thunderstrike: Acc/Dam/Rech, Dam/End/Rech = 1/2 A, 1 D, 1 R, 1/2 E
Ruin: Acc/Dam/Rech = 1/2 A, 1/2 D, 1/2 R
Maelstrom's Fury: Dam/End/Rech = 1/2 D, 1/2 E, 1/2 R
Generic: Dam = 1 D
Total: 1 A, 3 D, 2 R, 1 E

Seven "SO's" worth of power in five slots. And you get a small set Recovery bonus for having a pair of Thunderstrikes.

Warnings in next post.

My thinking:

1) Gotta have no mez protection. Sittin' there, gettin your tiny brain turned around by a Succubus, is classic and traditional.
2) If you're going for your CTRS (classic, traditional, rural stereotype), AR/something blaster would fit nicely. Sadly, you can't put bullet holes in the stop signs around town.
3) For the secondary, I'd go Energy, and custom-color the pompoms into near invisibility. The CTRS is famed for beating people with his fists.
4) For either a medieval yokel type or the Bo Duke CTRS, Arch/En would work as well.

In the mini-guides in my sig, there's one on frankenslotting. It is true that SOME sets have unavoidable built-in limitations; Mako's Bite is an example, where you can't quite get to 94% damage. However, some other sets (Thunderstrike and Crushing Impact being two classic examples) get you all the damage you could want, plus quite a lot of acc, recharge, and end reduction even without counting the set bonuses.

For a good general rule, one part of a "triple" is about half an SO. One part of a "double" is about 2/3 of an SO, so three Dam/Rech is roughly "two damage, two recharge" .

The definitive detailed guide to frankenslotting was written by Capn Canadian (the spelling may be off on his name)- it had "cheapskates" in the title, and that's how I always found it with /search.

If you care about set bonuses, you're all of a sudden going from "a few hundred thousand per IO" to "five to ten million per IO" (for fifty to eighty IOs)- or more if you want to totally make yourself unrecognizable- but you can do some dramatic things at that price level. The biggies:
* Recharge- hugely trendy, so hugely expensive, although purples have taken a lot of the pressure off here.
* Defense- also very trendy, although many times it comes in cheap uncommon sets like Thunderstrike and Red Fortune. If you start getting close to the softcap in something your whole playstyle shifts to "I am unvulnerable!" Then you get mezzed and learn how wrong you were, but you're still way ahead. However, getting 45% Defense is not a casual thing to do.
* Regen- was trendy for a while, not so much now, but still tends to be expensive. If you build up 80% Regen bonus, that's like a whole nother slotted Health.
* Damage- not terribly trendy, but you can kinda get Assault for free if you want. Often bundled with other attractive bonuses.
* Recovery- easy, cheap, and I find it very handy.
* Accuracy- there are a lot of ways to get Accuracy these days, but I think it's still worth making sure you have at least one global Acc bonus somewhere in your build. Often bundled with other attractive options, so often expensive.

There are a lot of IO set bonuses which look like crap, and are. You can tell the bonuses are crap because people are giving away the IO's. . . so if you can frankenslot with those, you win.

Lessee, we've got 10 people here admitting to [on the order of] 56 billion each. Assume that 10% of players are forumgoers and 10% of forumgoers are willing to talk about being rich here, that's about 1000 people with 56 billion each, so yeah, around 56 trillion cash.

Jakhammer: Let us, to extend the supposition, suppose that only 5% of the people who CAN do what we do actually CARE to do it.

As has been mentioned in many other places, there's not very many uses for 56 billion inf.

I haven't got 56 billion inf- but I've BURNT 56 billion inf.

Oh, that's why you stopped so close to the next SG up?

Oopsie.

Grats all!

(Arcanaville, because I so rarely get to correct you: Didn't Power Burst used to be half its current range?)

50 Billion? not much. 56 Billion, on the other hand...

I just looked at it and assumed 56 trillion inf.

I, among others, was mistaken!

(amount dropped into prestige by one SG > total "amount held by players" seems unlikely. )

Is there any reason you're aiming for approx. 50%? 45% is "standard" softcap.

... and as mentioned, you can get a common/pool A drop from Day Jobs (hang out in Ouro, and every mission you complete gets you a bonus IO.) I believe those drops are based on your true level.

So if you start empty and run a Sister Psyche, you could finish, check your recipes, and have both a level 25 and 50 Invention: Accuracy .

I actually made a decent amount of inf off being a trusted currency exchange.

May we suggest...?

I don't know when you left, but there are now, approximately, two main paths for increasing your power.

1) Invention Origin enhancements. For a few million inf you can get the equivalent of a couple hami-Os in each power through "frankenslotting". For a lot more inf you can get a lot more power and evolve your characters into quite different beasts. (A tank with Footstomp every six seconds and enough end to use it is very different from one with Footstomp every fifteen seconds. A Blaster with 40% Ranged Defense is not like one with 5-10%. )

You can generate some of the enhancements directly; you would need to buy others on the market. Costs are silly if you're only buying stuff, and not selling your drops. As long as you're both buying and selling stuff, it's all the same units. (And you can be an Ebil Marketeer and buy stuff and sell it for more. We have secrets and we don't shut up about em.)

2) Incarnate abilities. I'm still learning these. There's the Alpha slot (which uses "incarnate shards" as the base material for building your stuff) and the next four slots (which use "incarnate threads" and lots of 'em.) The Alpha can give you an extra slot or two in ALL your powers, and part of that is not affected by ED; it can also give you a "level shift" which makes you fight like you're level 51. Your enhancements all work like you're level 50, they don't become junk, but it's like you're sidekicked up an extra level.

There are more level shifts, but those mostly seem to be either temporary [there's a super insp that gives you a 3-minute level shift] or only work on trials.

I'd start with your Alpha and go from there.

My guess is "Buy it sooner"... or when someone does put it up at an overprice, people fling the money at them.

I'm kinda n00 to all the thread stuff, but is "upgrade 10 shards into 10 threads for 2.5 million inf" useful once you've got your alpha slot taken care of? That seems like a small, but steady, inf sink.

Heck, I'll pay 2 billion for one!

Do you think there's a place for a guide called something like "How to make the inf for your Incarnate slots even if you hate the Market"?

If I've matched prestige for you in the past, be aware that I'm going to take your name in vain in a post in the Market forum.

Cheers.

You can (in what i presume is a hideously inefficient and expensive way) turn threads into iXP.

"I'm bored with running the new content over and over again."
"So do this other thing which works, but is considerably less efficient."
"Let me repeat, with emphasis. I'm BORED. with RUNNING. the new content OVER and OVER again."

I haven't done the new trials yet. I've got twelve threads or something. I'm not really in a hurry. *shrug*