Fulmens

By the time I get my response in, I'm like... [wow, there are a lot of inappropriate metaphors kicking around my brain] ... well, I'm consistently late.

The hell with y'all, I am going to count how many items in this game sell for more than ONE billion.

EDIT 1: Well, zero purples are selling for as much as a billion.

EDIT 2: Shield Wall +Res, three Panaceas, Gladiator's Javelin proc, Gladiator's Armor +Def in the level 50 PVP list.

EDIT 3: No Hami-Os.

I just pulled up a level 47 character to check, and they have 280K prestige. Let's say 300 K by level 50.

If the devs planned for a typical SG to have 20 people in it, half of which go 1 to 50 in SG mode over a couple of months, that's 3 million prestige, which is plenty to build a base with. [originally they were expecting SG's to have 50 people in them, if I recall. They found out that most people don't build SG's that large and cut base costs appropriately.]

Point being: If you want to do something that normally takes 8 or 10 people a few months, and there's only one of you, you're going to have to do unusual things. If you were trying to solo an ITF, and you complained that it was too hard, people would suggest that the problem doesn't lie with the ITF.

So what unusual things can you do? Well, you can hunt bosses [If I recall, they give disproportionate prestige.] You can do TF's [maybe, or maybe not,disproportionate prestige- but you're doing a lot of missions and beating up a lot of guys. Volume, volume, volume.] I think there's a large XP/inf/prestige bonus for completing story arcs; you could look into Ouroboros.

And then there's buying it. I know what you're thinking: "that's a heck of a lot of influence!" And if you want a million prestige, that is in fact 500 million influence. How do you get that?

Well, there are roughly three ways:
1) Market
2) Farm
3) Play relatively normally, leaning slightly towards things that make you more inf.

Farming is not my thing- I don't have any useful advice on it.
Marketing, well, I can go on at considerable length on the topic. What I do is buy a recipe plus ingredients for 3 million and sell the crafted IO for 8 to 15 million. You can do that 60 or 70 times and make 500 million.
Playing "normally": You can do a Statesman's Task Force [if you're level 45-50] and get a Synthetic Hami-O, which sells for between 100 thousand and 100 million. You can do ten tip missions and a morality mission and get an Alignment Merit, which turns into five random recipes, which turns into around 50 million inf depending on the recipes. [your first time, you get 50 reward merits which costs money to turn into an AM, but after that it's straight AM's.] You can do ouro arcs, you can do task forces, and get Reward Merits which you can (with a starting investment) turn into Alignment Merits.

Almost the only thing that won't make you merits is doing newspaper/radio missions.

If you have any questions on any of the above moneymaking methods ["how do I get 3 million inf?" or whatever] just ask.

If you're level 30 or 35 you might do pretty well with the random rolls. I'll give you the bailout option (mail the losers to me, I'll give you 10 million each for them.)

A Zeus is not JUST a boss Herc. It's a boss herc that you get the COOL way.

We may have Malta's gunslinger pistols... and sort of have their sappers... but they've still got some cool toys we just can't get.

I will admit that my first thought was "5 years old? May not be the keybinds..."

(Fortunately my wife READS but does not POST. I do a lot of Xtreme Point Blank Blaster tricks,and I survive at least 3/4 of them. She has storieessssss...)

I'm not on as much as I was, but I have a force fielder or two on Freedom- I'm @Boltcutter and if you happen to send me a tell and I'm not busy, I can teach bad habits to all the blasters you know. I make Blasters into Tanks. And then when I leave the team... they stop being tanks 3 minutes later.

The shades don't have to be that tight as long as you don't have any fans going or windows open. Modern houses are pretty airtight, you don't get a lot of drafts going with today's insulation. I mean, really, it's one of those green things you can do that actually saves money.

/e looks around to see if the Insulate Your House conversation killed the thread

I want to say an expanded couple of things:

1) I'm ok with the Sand Mandela idea, as far as my one character goes. However:
2) It has to be ok with DAMN NEAR EVERYONE.
3) It especially, especially, has to be OK with Teutonic Rogue, because they are putting (and have already put) a lot of work into this base, and this is a hell of a change to toss out at the, what, 100-hour-of-work mark?
4) Alternative idea: We hit #1.
We then start a TWO-PRONGED approach, whereby we defend the #1 spot on Virtue with the Crazy 88s... while also starting Crazier 88s or Crazy 88s Sand Mandela Edition or something.
Then we get the Crazier 88s to #1. And destroy them.

One SG for the price of two!

PumBumbler: At this point, I'm not sure we can ignore the "20M inf" in "50 merits+ 20M inf".Not when a typical "nice" Pool C is going for around 50M, crafted, and an LoTG is going for around 100M [or 100 merits and 40M, setting the price of "100 merits" at 60 M].

EDIT: I don't know what the price is for a min-level LoTG; I have only been watching the level 50's. It may still be 150M for a level 30, in which case "100 merits" is a much more significant 110M inf.

Chriffer: You managed to understate the number of AM's it takes for an LoTG by a factor of 2, AND understate the number of missions for an AM by a factor of 2.2 . Factor of 4.5 total. So, yeah, 22 missions over 2 days to equal 7 ITFs [presumably over 7 days] is still favoring the AMs, but not quite by the ratio you were suggesting.

Warning: You will almost certainly experience sticker shock.

TONS OF INF, OLD SCHOOL: I have enough to get SO's for ten level 50's. That's over fifty million inf!
TONS OF INF, NEW SCHOOL: I have one and a half billion inf. I can buy any single IO in the game... except about three.

The good news is, you don't need a Ferrari, and you can get really good performance from a Honda. With a couple weeks of time for bids, you can "Frankenslot" for about fifteen million inf and get very good results.

The other good news is, you can also SELL at Ferrari prices.

I have market mini-guides [from a consumer point of view] in my sig. I don't think they're too obsolete.

Welcome back!

400m can buy you 2 Kin Combat triples and maybe a LotG +rech.

It's been a while since I frankenslotted anything, but I did fill 93 slots on a level 50 for 15 million a while back.

That's 15 million, total.

There's a mini-guide to Frankenslotting in my sig. The basic idea is that you can get "extra slots" in your character- if you slot three Def/End IO's from different sets you get about two SO's of D, two SO's of End Reduction.

If you're just starting out on the road to IO's, it is a good way to learn and if you decide to change it up- you can trash your entire investment and still be out less than the cost of one solid gold IO.

Almost everything you'll be buying is cheap stuff, maybe 100K plus ingredients plus crafting cost. I recommend a couple of non-cheap things for a "Starter" set:
1) A Steadfast Protection Res/Def IO. This is 3% Defense, which will make you more than 6% tougher, and only takes up one slot. Currently running around 20 million for the level 30 recipe (or 40 million if you're made of money and want to pay someone to craft it.)
2) One or two sets with a global Accuracy bonus - say Crushing Impact around level 35 or 40.

After that, you can mix and match as you see fit. Slot a typical melee damage power like this:
Focused Smite Acc/Dam and Acc/Dam/Rech, Smashing Haymaker Dam/End/Rech, Crushing Impact Dam/End/Rech, Smashing Haymaker Dam/Rech .

This should give you- I haven't done the math- around 40% Acc, 95% Dam, 35% End Reduction, and 85-90% Recharge Reduction . A little better than 1 Acc, 3 Dam, 1 End, and 2 Rech.

... in five slots.
... for probably under five million inf.

It's also possible that we caused NONE of it- most people only look at their neighbors- but I like to think that some of it is us.

give ME his money back!

I remember a while back noticing that Regen Flesh hadn't gotten a thousand-item buffer back after issue 19. Guess it still hasn't.

(With ToTing going on, this is about as clear as "double XP, everything's expensive.")

Never?

NEVER!

You seem to have reposted while I was writing.

It seems you're speaking of "flipping" as something that only happens during short-term "Attacks". I guess that is what the "it" refers to in your post.

This is not true. I've flipped [as I said] at least a hundred respec recipes. Over weeks. If I buy them at 65 million and list them at 81 million, and they sell at 90 or 100 million, THAT'S A FLIP. If I do this with 2-3 a day for a couple weeks, THAT'S A FLIP. If I am not the lowest seller , my recipe doesn't sell. If I'm not the highest bidder, I can't buy.

And I'm not the only person who deals in respec recipes. I'm sorry if I'm belaboring the obvious here, but you don't get it so I have to. So every respec I buy, one or two a day, I have to outbid the other guys. At some point someone gets sick of me and raises their prices. I bid "64,100,908" and they go "64,100,909." I go "64,200,908" because "908" is how I keep track of what I bought. They get annoyed and go to 66,666,666 . I now have to go to 66,700,908.

Every instaseller is now making about 2,700,908 (minus 10%) more than they were before I got involved.

On the instabuy front: People are normally paying 100 million. So I throw mine up at 81,000,908 and sell for 100 million anyway. Until someone tries 90 million and then I make less, and then EVERYONE tries 90 million and ALL the flippers make less. And then the guys I'm fighting with on the "sell it nao" front gets annoyed at his inability to sell his stuff (cause I'm selling for 81 and he's selling for 88 or something) so he cuts his prices to 79,000,000. And then someone tries 80 million, then EVERYONE tries 80 million.

Prices, if you'll notice, are stabilizing and lowering at this point. I'm speaking from personal experience here. Some of these prices are from last week.

Now I have to decide: If I sell for 80 million, I keep 72 million. I'm buying for 66,700,908 . Is that worth doing for 5 million influence? Really? I can make 10.5 million influence on a freaking Impervious Skin triple and it only costs me 3.5 million total. I bail out and the other guys, eventually, lower their buys and raise their sells.

I've seen prices driven down by healthy competition all over the place. I just have to look at the stuff I haven't relisted yet. Numina's: Heal/Rech. Celerity: Stealth. Impervium Armor: Resistance. I'm waiting for Reactive Armor to crater but apparently there's something shiny about it that I just don't see.

I have done this stuff. I have seen these results over time. I believe this is how it works.

You have not done this stuff. You have not seen these results over time. You believe it works differently.

P.S. I tried to artificially raise the price on respec recipes once. I lost my shirt and some skin.

Alkirin: here are some unsupported statements from your post. I'm using roman numerals as you've used both letters and numbers in your posts.

I. "Pinching supply does inflate the price of an item. This is seen on a regular basis" You have no proof that what you see is actually anyone "pinching supply" - in many cases there's a natural explanation which is, at the least, not LESS likely. (Recent example: "Why are alchemical silvers high? Oh, ToTing produces XP but no common salvage." Thread is called "Fess up, who went medieval on AlSil?" )

II. "If flippers stopped attacking items on the market then, yes, the prices for those items would indeed drop, then stabilize." This has been repeatedly disproved. The first public attempt I know of is the Luck Charmers. We dropped several thousand LC's on the market and prices went crazy for several days- from 1000 inf to 100,000 inf or more, whereas previous prices had been stable in a 50-60K band for months. They eventually did stabilize, but I don't think they stabilized at a significantly lower price.

In another example, someone managed, by taking a previously unflipped product and flipping it, to create a regular price with both bids and sales- actually increasing the number of those recipes reaching the market. I thought it was Nethergoat but I can't find the thread.

III.

My, that's a lot of unsupported statements, Alkirin.

In many cases, my experience suggests that you're wrong.

On a petty note, "wastes a lot of time and effort" is the usual phrasing. If you actually meant "wastes a lot of time IN effort" I apologize for my high-handed tone.

You can't do that for full benefits- at least not four on the same character.

One comment on TFs: The veteran players who have done this all before? Will be rushing through the task force as fast as possible looking for the rewards at the end. Which could be very frustrating. It's like someone going through a powerpoint presentation looking for a specific slide, instead of actually giving the presentation. Click-click-click -click-click-click "Hey, that looked interesting!" click-click-click ...

Story arcs: If the contact you're talking to has an open book under their name they have story arc missions for you. (They shuffled this around a little bit in the last six years- anyone want to clarify?) In City of Heroes the arcs start around level 10 or level 15- before that you're beating up muggers, getting coffee for your contacts, whatever. In City of Villains you start getting into the meat of things around level 15 as well.

The Hollows/Faultline/Striga/Croatoa zones have one story per zone- which might make it simpler. You do each contact all the way through and you get the whole story.

In no particular order:

* If you have to buy it for 100K, you can also sell it for 100K.

* As mentioned, you don't have to buy it for 100K. Often you can buy it for 20K and sell it for 100K. See also: my sig.

* Tips are relatively hard for stalkers because they give every enemy individual attention and tips drop on a per-enemy basis. Much easier for people going through 6-10 badguys at a time like Brutes and Blasters.

* If you "reinforce" your alignment (do 10 villain missions as a villain, or 10 hero missions as a hero) you get a Villain or Hero merit. Actually, the first time you get 50 reward merits, but after that you get an Alignment Merit. You can get 5 random rare recipes with one AM. You can buy an AM with 50 reward merits and 20 million inf. So, inf aside , it's about twice as efficient getting rewards with AM's as it is with regular merits.

* There are two totally different things making the market extra-crazy right now. One is Trick or Treating, and all the associated madness. The other is [EDITED] something we shouldn't talk about.

* Just to repeat a point: Yes, everything's more expensive than it used to be, even without the current craziness. (everything but SO's, that is.) Yes, that includes selling AND buying.

Bug hunter's pretty tough to get. I found a legit take-down-the-live-servers-and-fix-it-now bug and didn't get it.