Fulmens

Doubleposting to add: Go to the technical issues forum. If you have problems with the trial you WILL have problems with the game once you've bought it. It's pretty much the same code.

I divide it up into [roughly] the 30 million, 300 million and godzillion inf builds. I have no idea what a full build REALLY costs these days; the last time I planned an entire upgraded build at once was in issue 10 or so.

30 million is frankenslotting with, maybe, one or two nice things in there [Steadfast Res/Def, or similar].

300 million is slotting some nice sets for a goodly amount of +Rech, or +Def of a type or two, or +Regen/Dam/HP (those seem to go together in a lot of sets).

Godzillion is where people sprinkle the build with purples, PVPs, LoTG +Rech, and so forth. Money is no object (especially when you're exporting from Mid's to the forums to give people advice.)

Those are only rough brackets, but I find them handy for thinking about what you want to accomplish. I recommend people frankenslot at least their first character, the first time, because it gives you a good handle on how inventions work in an actual character, how the market and such works [not as much of a problem in here, I know] and what kind of benefits you get.

And if you decide to upgrade, the frankenslotted IO's are generally under half a million each and you're going for tens of millions, so who cares if you just destroy them?

I figure I couldn't do 50 merits of TFs in an hour, like I probably can't do 10 minute tip missions, but I figured let's take the most favorable assumptions and see how much pain and suffering we get ANYWAY.

... wow, there's a lot of us.

What do you consider "properly" io'd out? For me that IS like 100 million, but I'm notoriously slack on the actual optimization of characters.

I think "niche" in this context meant "most players don't like that style of play". /Dev blasters, Force Field defenders would be two examples of niche play.

My suggestion for something that starts strong and stays strong would be a Rad/Sonic defender; a Sonic/Rad corruptor SHOULD be very similar but sometimes the small apparent differences end up making a large actual difference. (80% resistance and 90% seems like a small difference, but it ends up meaning you take twice the damage. For instance.)

...assuming it takes 10 minutes to do a tip mission, and 20 minutes to do a morality mission, and you don't get bored, ever, that's 2 hours of playtime per H/V merit. Assume you can do 50 merits of TF's in an hour. So that's 3 H/V merits in 2 days for 4 hours of play. Between 3 toons that's 12 hours per 2 days. Or 180 hours a month. (or a little over 40 hr/week, to put it in job terms.)

So, yeah, you can avoid paying market prices by putting in 60 hours per PVP IO. Your definition of "impatient" and mine may differ a little.

Depending on the character, you might do almost as well soloing as on a sewer team. Running to the mission? Someone offending your personal space? Whack 'em! Running back from mission? See a good target? Whack 'em!

As far as I can tell:

It gives you the "First 50" by whatever method it uses to determine this. If you hit Search again you get the next 50, or however many there were.

So if there are 106 level 40-50 Controllers on Freedom, your search will give you 50, next search will give you 50, last search will give you 6, with no overlap in names.

I could be wrong on this, I've done no rigorous research.

Here's a thread where I went from 0 to 100 million- but I think the problem is that I've been doing this so long I skipped all the steps that would actually explain how I did it. This is far from the ONLY way to make money- if you ask ten marketeers you will get eight to twelve different answers and they all work.

http://boards.cityofheroes.com/showthread.php?t=232470

You can skip the first 4 or 5 posts, where I went from 0 to around 10 million.

If I had to boil down the process to five or six key points:

1) Look at max level in set (40 for Impervium Armor, 50 for Numina's or Crushing Impact or whatever) - that's where all the action is. Nothing like getting a great bargain, listing at a reasonable price and waiting a month for it to sell.

2) Look for something that costs 2 million in parts and labor, and sells for 10 million, or thereabouts, and the last 5 sales are within the last couple days. OPTIONALLY look for something that has relatively few for sale (crafted) and a lot of bids. Be aware, however, that it's easy to put up 100 bids at 1 inf each to create the impression of "lots of bids"; it's harder to fake number for sale, but not impossible [craft 10, dribble them out 2 or 3 or 5 at a time].

3) Remember that "parts and labor" includes the recipe, the salvage [1-3 million if it includes a rare salvage], and the crafting cost [up to 500K for a level 50 or 200K for a level 40].

4) Popular sets! this is included in "last 5 sales" part, but some things are always going to be oversupplied because almost nobody uses them. Hold, immob, knockback, accurate debuff, sleep, snipe, blah blah blah. The good stuff? Melee, ranged, heal, resist, defense, PBAOE, ranged AOE. I'd put them in about that order, but that's very rough.

5) Bidding: Leave recipe bids [and big ticket salvage] around to fill whenever. Don't get petty- I never bid less than 5908 on anything, and I don't blink at bidding 55,908 to get the last common salvage I need to craft something and get it on the market Right Now. On a 2 million inf item we're talking less than 3% of cost. On a 20 million item, 0.3% of cost. Mr. Wentworth takes 10% of profits. Don't stress about it.

6) Listing: I list well below the "typical last 5" but above the obvious asking points. If something has a last 5 from 8 to 10 million, people are probably going to try to get it for 5 or 6 million, but will expect to get it for 8 or 10. So 6,100,908 will make you the full 8 million, 10 if you're lucky and they're lazy/rich, almost all the time. And if it cost YOU 2 million, even if they buy for 6.2 million you will still be happy.

908) In case you were wondering why all my examples end in 908? That's my area code. And I know what buys were mine. Which can be handy if you're juggling a lot of different items across several different characters. I've had people set their price points at 909 to beat me out to items. Eh, whatever, there are a hundred different niches in this market.

Conversion rates are 20 million and 50 merits (1/day) or 11 missions over 2 days or both. They took out the vanguard merits.

You haven't lost your shirt until after the weekend. (spoken like a man with 800M invested in something that has shown a notorious reluctance to go up in price.)

Someday I'll put together the Big List Of Cheap Shots available in the game.

For now, I'll restrict myself to figure 1: The Bat.

Basically this is a temporary power, an invention, and an extra attack.

Extra attack: Self-explanatory. You pull out a baseball bat and whack people in the torso with it.

Temporary power, pretty self explanatory, you use it 30 times and then it's gone. Hopefully by that point you either have more attacks or don't mind making another one.

Invention is the complicated part. To make an invention, you need a recipe, some salvage, enough money, and a crafting table. The first three come from Wentworth's.

MONEY: Embarassingly easy to get, especially in quantities under 100,000 inf. That's a rounding error to a lot of people. Look for level 50 recipes with a lot for sale and zero bids. Put in bids for 100 or 500, whatever you can afford. Buy some of those, run to a regular store, sell them for 5000 or 10000 each. This is stupid and tedious but you will get your money NOW. Do this until you have, like, 50 thousand inf. Which is more than you need for this purpose but may come in handy later in life.

RECIPE: Back to Wentworth's, look for recipes, then Other, then all the way down to temporary recipes, then click on St. Louis Slammer. You will, confusingly, see three seemingly identical recipes on the right hand side. If you hover over them, you'll see that they have different salvage requirements. The bottom one should list "Fortune" and "Kinetic Weapon". Put in a bid- should be available for less than 500 inf, but I wouldn't worry about paying as much as 5000 for it. You should have plenty of money and you can make more surprisingly fast.

SALVAGE: You can type in "Fortune" and "Kinetic Weapon" at the top and see them. Right now they're selling for under 100 each, but I would have no problem going up to a couple thousand for each. Like I said, money's ridiculously easy to get. Buy one of each. You should now have in your inventory a recipe and two pieces of salvage.

CRAFTING: This is the hard part. You have to go to Steel Canyon for this. Either you can run, nimbly avoiding the guys 10 levels above you, or you can pay a lot of money to cheat. They have things which say "Fixed price" and one is a Wentworth's Teleporter. It costs 10,000 inf [you did get the 50K I asked, right?] and it is one-shot. It will take you to any Wentworth's. There happens to be one in Steel CAnyon right where you need to go.

Buy it, put it in your task bar [click on "Powers" and you should see it], use it, buy another one immediately so you can get back to safety. There's a half hour cooldown so you can't go back immediately. So it goes.

Then, when you're in Steel, look on the map and to your East you should see a university.

In this university, to either side of the staircase, you'll see desks with glowing blue things on them. These are crafting tables. Click on one and it will list a lot of things. Scroll down to "invention" and open it up. Your St. Louis Slammer should be in there, lit up, with a "Create" button in the lower left corner. If you hit "Create" it will charge you 500 inf and give you a new temp power, just like the Consignment House transporter. You can put that in your tray, and voila! a new way to run around and hit people!

There are something like 1700 people on Freedom right now and around 500 people on Infinity, not counting people who are hidden. (wife's count. )

On 7-19 there were less than half that number.

I'm sorry, but if you want the EXACT SAME THING EVERYONE ELSE DOES AT THE EXACT SAME TIME, IN THE EXACT SAME PLACE, you may need to wait a minute or two.

... oh, wait, this was what you did in your 60 seconds of spare time, wasn't it? Carry on.

... glad someone else asked this and I found it before starting my own thread. Thanks for info!

Free Fall: just to get this straight - Are you claiming that you have some moral/RP reason for not making the money you don't make? Or are you claiming that it's too hard to make money? or some third choice that is not obvious to me?

We can probably fix your money problems, but we need to know what they are first.

... or you can go really crazy and do a big bunch of task forces at the same time, trading 50 merits and 20 million inf for each aDDITIONAL A-merit.

See, I _can_ play a Blaster that's not Fire/*. But I will be cranky about it.

Another possibility is to take Kick and slot a KB set in there. The only good things I can see there are Recharge (6x Kin Crash for 7.5%), AOE Defense (6x Force Feedback for 3.13%) and some of the regen/damage stuff.

Huh. So far people are getting some significant bargains (rare salvage for 10K) and I've only seen a couple wildly overpriced sales. I haven't looked that closely yet, though. . . I think that 16 M Prophecy was a typo.

I, too, took Punch over Haymaker.

I put up some costume salvage at inflated prices. I don't know if that counts, though.

They merged , all right.

Everything's starting out at 0 bids, 0 for sale. . .

. . . except the stuff I just listed.

I'm doing one of these myself (6 years, I finally decided to try one.) I looked at the numbers BEFORE doing the build and SS has a medium and two big hitters- Haymaker is the medium and Knockout Blow and Foot Stomp are the big hitters.

In the lowest levels, you're pretty weak and not going to look any better with Punch. The bad news is, you've got a long road before you look any good. The good news is, you're most of the way along it.

I expect that Stamina, KO Blow (with 4 slots), and SO's are where it will look good. Right now I'm ... two levels short of that.

I've given this some thought, actually, since I have several characters locked down in the low 30's.

If you're willing to wait for level 35 to lower the plough, Kat/Dark scrapper might do the job. I don't know if it has enough offense for you. Capped melee/lethal defense from about level 12, semi-infinite heal, mez the minions, solid melee cone and PBAOE, damage aura; mostly what you'll want from IOs is end recovery [and maybe ranged/fire/cold defense.] And you can get considerable end recovery in temp powers and base buffs... also considerable AOE.