Fulmens

Random other factoid - and I don't have precise measurements for this:

Steadfast and Karma KB's went from 2-3 million in 2007 to 10 million, to 20 million, then with AE they went back to 10 million and (Before this last 2XP) level 30 Karmas were down around 2 million again.

I only pick this specific cherry because this is the only IO that I think is "NEEDED" by anyone. You can play the entire game with SO's, but if you're a squishy you will spend 40% of it falling down or getting up, unless you take an entire travel path (I hate superjump) or you buy one of those.

I've always believed that most of the inflation is happening in the luxury market [level 37 Ruin Acc/Dam/Rech and level 37 Thunderstrike Acc/Dam/Rech IO's haven't moved that much in my experience] and this is a data point that supports that belief.

Sig tweaked.

I have some rare salvage prices from 2007... [I pulled the commons out of this list]

Wentworths, 9/12/07:

Enyalios: The idea is that I work like the trade window. If it's 3 billion inf for a Glad Armor 3%,for instance, one side mails me 3 billion, the other side mails me the Glad Armor, and then I forward it along. If one side doesn't mail me enough, I ask about it and then I return everything to the original owner.

NOTE: If you're thinking about doing this, mail me 1 inf first to make sure you have the correct global.

Amazing!

Congratulations!

I'm kinda curious about how much of the higher prices is due to ease of accumulation [gleemail it to yourself from five characters, and poof you've got a big pile] and how much is just sheer volume of inf being generated.

The other day I calculated that about a trillion inf got ripped out of the system the week that Alignment Merits went live, and the market didn't blink.

I missed the RMT measurement in the original post.

Which is an interesting way to measure it, certainly. Unfortunately, there's a lot of noise on that signal- I remember seeing RMT spam from the same day on the same character with a factor of 3 difference in price. (I may have seen a factor of 10 - two spams, same price, but one for 10 million inf and one for 100 million inf- but I can't guarantee it.) There may also have been clever scheming: "If we charge $30 for 100 million and then $10 for 100 million, people will jump on the cheaper one and think they've got a bargain! And if someone buys the overpriced stuff, we win again!" I don't know what goes through these people's heads.

It's also considering which sets perform best in the following situations:

Soloing at level 31 (So... close... to... tier 9)
SO'd at level 40
Reasonably IO'd at level 40
Reasonably IO'd at level 50
Level 50 with a billion-inf build
Level 50 with a seventeen billion inf build [I don't even know if you CAN spend 17 billion on a single character. If not now, maybe next week...]

An Elec/Shield brute doesn't hit its stride till level 38, for instance, and a Fire/Kin controller isn't much of anything till 32, and doesn't really take off till Fireball [level 41? 44? I don't play controllers.]

Force Field defenders are... not for everyone. Very much not for everyone. I have been playing mine lately (well, two or three of them) and I still like the set a lot, but... heck, I wrote a miniguide on Force Fielders And Why You Shouldn't Play Them.

Sonic/* defenders might be worse. I still haven't decided. You buff the team much less defensively, somewhat more offensively, you have very few oh-sh** tools and you're squishy yourself.

I don't even think of Time Bomb as a damage power. It's that bad. Possibly the devs have some sort of staked-out position on the subject. ("I will come back and haunt you if you make this power any good." -Statesman. I dunno.)

Stacked Sonic Blasts are pretty amazing. I'd hate to give up the other 40-60% -res.

With Envenomed Dagger[s] AV's shouldn't be much of a problem.

Oh, and as far as

Well, if you built a top of the line issue 9 fire tank, it used to cost 300 million. That's no purples, no PVP IO's, no "new sets" (obliteration, eradication, knockback, taunt, accurate defense debuff, etc.)

I don't know if you can really do a head-to-head comparison, because Kinetic Combat is now utterly different than it was [from "Lethal Defense" to "Smash/Lethal/Half Melee" defense].

If someone dug up that old build and priced it out, I'd expect it to cost about 1.2 billion inf- if the person building it was clever enough to have gone perma-Hasten and bought a bucket of LoTG +Recharge- or 5 to 600 million inf (if they went with regen and whatever else was trendy at the time.)

People are spending a lot more inf a lot more casually these days, it's true. Some of that's the ability to easily concentrate your wealth from five or ten characters to one, but a lot of it is real.

DSorrow: How would you rate things like Reactive Armor and Steadfast Res/Def's? We have a lot more high-priced things than we used to. Not "different" but actually "more." Instead of "Impervium Armor or Nothing" you now have Impervium Armor, Aegis, Reactive Armor and in some cases Impervious Skin, all in the 10 to 40 million range.

Careful shoppers don't tend to buy crafted.

Careless shoppers might pay last 5. Especially since you can make 10 million crafting damn near anything in this game. Money used to rain from the sky. Now it comes down in hail that can break windshields. People who own boats refer to a "boat unit" of money, which is $1,000. You pay for boat repairs in boat units.

The "Boat unit" for this game if you're level 50 is apparently 10 million inf.

We dumped like a hundred twenty billion inf in one day. They dumped a hundred twenty billion inf in one day.

So I'm gonna say "Bonfire party."

... So after seven years of balance, you're asking about the overpowered sets?

I vote Fire/Ice blaster and Rad/Sonic defender. But that's highly skewed by what I like to play.

I've had a similar thing happen only it was a sleep and a snipe.

I'm bonded through Chillin'Villains.

... what?

One for sale, 3.0 billion inf. And this time it's not even the same one!

EDIT: Sold.

I'm trying to create a job where there isn't one again.

There have been people trying to figure out how they can do enormous trades safely.

Before gleemail, I moved billions of inf side to side, safely and reliably, and I have references.

So for any two-billion-plus transaction, I'm willing to make sure both sides get what's agreed to. There is a 100 million inf fee. Sounds like a lot, but it's less than 5% by definition. I'm undercutting Mr. Wentworth!

(If this goes well and doesn't take up too much of my time, I may deliver for 5% on transactions between 500 million and 2 billion. I can be lazy, though.)

OK, now I'm going to make a business out of this. (Jharber still gets a free pass, for giving me the idea.)

If there's a third party you both trust, you can both give stuff to them and they'll give it appropriately*. Otherwise, yeah, there's no safe way I know of.

Having said that, I've put myself at risk on a few big-ticket exchanges and not gotten burned.

* Disclaimer: I used to be in the infamy-to-influence exchange business, 10% fee, and a lot of people on the Market forums gave me money and got 90% of it back on the other side. I'd do the transfer if asked, but at some future point I might put a fee on it if I get busy.

The consensus seems to be that nobody's going to actually do that due to the shard costs... if you get that many shards the inf cost is gonna be trivial. I've been wrong before though.

My reason for Fire/Elec (fire/elec/elec, at high enough levels) over Fire/Fire (or fire/fire/*) is this:

The fight isn't over until the last person on one side drops. So what you need is both broad damage [to wipe out lots of minions] and deep damage [to drop lieutenants and bosses.

Fireball/Firebreath, with neither aim nor build up, is already enough to wipe out even-con minions in about four seconds. [You can add the cone from the Electric epic in the late game; however, it was often my experience that I spent a lot of time hitting "tab" trying to find a target for that third AOE.] You can kick that up to +1 or +2 with one or both of the damage boost powers. So Fire Blast has pretty much all the AOE you need. The Fire secondary has a lot of AOE but most of it is to start damaging, slower to finish damaging, and puts you in melee range with little mitigation.

The Elec secondary has a lot of fast, hard-hitting single-target damage. [So does Energy; my preference for Elec is mostly that the animations are prettier. ] So when you've wiped out the minions and you have some half-dead lieutenants and a fairly healthy boss or two, you need to drop those individuals before they drop you. You can run in and throw two roughly-Blaze-level attacks [Charged Brawl/Havoc Punch] and be running back out of melee range in about two and a half seconds. I don't remember the exact timing, but I think a Fire/Elec can drop a single +2 boss in something like twelve seconds, if they're not particularly resistant to those damage types.

For sheer damage in both AOE and single target, there may be things that beat Fire/Elec but I don't care.

If you're a wimp and you want a vestige of survivability, Fire/Ice gives considerably more defensive tools at the loss of a fair bit of single target melee damage.