Fulmens

As Frogfather has said, that's a terrible example- it's terrible in so many ways that it almost has to be a troll. But, y'know, bait is tasty so here I go.

1) There are an estimated 50,000+ people playing the game. Is it entirely unreasonable that 2% of them could have an Alchemical Gold for sale at any given time? I've probably put one or two up for sale this week.

2) I actually [with some help from the other Luck Charmers] controlled the market in Luck Charms for a little while. At that point there were, if I remember correctly, about 500 LC's a weekday moving through Wentworth's- two or three times that on a weekend. And Luck Charms are a low-volume item, because there aren't that many naturally generated. They drop half as much from 20 to 25 and not at all beyond that. If you do Synapse or Sister Psyche you will get very little salvage during those levels, and a lot of that will be from tech-only droppers. In short, "controlling" an item of salvage is a LOT of work. It's easier if you don't want to make a profit, of course, but it's still a lot of work.

3) There's very little money in it. I can find a recipe for 5 million, salvage for 3 million, craft and sell for 35 million. I think that was, umm, some sort of level 40 Decimation? Anyway, the profit on that ends up being about 22 million inf. If I was buying Alchemical Gold at ELEVEN INF and selling for 10,000 (9,000 of which I keep) I'd have to flip over two THOUSAND Alch Gold to make the equivalent of one mid-to-low-end recipe. That's two hundred stacks bought, two hundred stacks sold. If it takes you five seconds to flip a stack [which is aggressive- I timed myself once and it took me longer than that] you're talking about one thousand seconds, almost 20 minutes of grinding tedious work.

4) There's nothing that stops YOU from seeing THEIR standing orders and buying for one inf more. After all, if it's a standing order than it's going to be picking up around half the sales, so there's very likely one in the last five.

5) There's ALSO nothing that stops you from playing an AE mission and buying your own damn Alchemical Gold with tickets.

So ... am I saying that there's nobody flipping salvage at a profit? I am not. I'm saying that people profit off salvage BECAUSE THERE'S SO MUCH INF OUT THERE. I myself, when I'm crafting that 35,000,000 inf IO, will tend to bid like this on common salvage:
5,908
55,908
155,908
If I don't get it at 155,908 I go back down to 55K and let it sit while I buy the rest of the stuff.
Cause, you know, I am making 22 million, I can afford to give someone half a percent to save myself a couple minutes.

... the old game inf sinks were never really all that. (Although I did know three people who went broke on costume changes, it didn't really last. )

And the market 10% does get rid of SOME of the incoming inf. I tried to calculate that here and came up with, pretty much, "1/3 to 1/5 of what you make farming is new inf." I don't really trust my analysis, though.

... I'm not quite sure that you're using the term in the standard sense, or in the sense that the Devs used it.

To Killer Krock:

First, welcome to the forums!

Second, sorry if we seem a little hostile. We see similar questions a LOT, although I have to say yours is polite and has a lot less subtext than most of them. One guy this last weekend was offering to kill people in Real Life. In the desert. For disagreeing with him.

Third, the specifics of your post. I had a co-worker who used to say (in an Argentine accent that I cannot replicate in print) "What is the question behind the question? "

There are several possible "Questions behind the question" and people often don't know which one they mean.

Some people think the question is "How do I get the nice stuff?" and what they really mean is "What horrible cruel methods do you people have for getting more stuff than me?"

Some people think the question is "What horrible cruel methods, etc?" and in fact they really mean "How do I get the nice stuff?"

Some people think the question [statement, really] is "I don't have nice stuff and it's YOUR FAULT". And, really, what they mean is "I don't have nice stuff, I don't know how to get nice stuff, and I don't want to learn."

One handy way of figuring out the question: If I gave you a billion inf, and next week I gave you another billion inf: Would you still be seriously concerned about the prices of IO's?

For myself? I think I have one PVP IO and zero purples slotted, across all my characters. I play hard, I beat the hell out of the [computer-controlled] opposition, and I do it with [relatively] cheap builds.

I _also_ make a lot of profit on the markets, and I do so with the explicit goal of destroying inf (turning it into Prestige mostly) to fight inflation.

Taking myself as an example, you could conclude that expensive builds aren't all that important to enjoyment, and you could also conclude that you don't need to justify marketeering and profit. It's ok to be making money even if you aren't, for instance, building schools and saving lives with it.

So what is the question behind the question? Do you want to know the details of inflation, what causes it, what fixes it and what the ebil marketeers think about it? Do you want to know how to get nice stuff for yourself? Do you want to know how to make a kick-tail bargain build? Do you just want to blow off steam?

HERESY!

You ALWAYS need more damage!

... ok, maybe that superteam where we had five sets of Sonics, six Assaults and we could drop Dominatrix in under a minute, maybe we had enough damage THAT time.

Maybe.

Don't take this the wrong way, but you've just accomplished what many Empaths DREAM about. You're the closest thing in the game to napping your way to 50 and still being a very useful member of the team.

I would, as DrMike suggested, go for personal defense. With Maneuvers, big bubble, and little bubbles you can put everyone ELSE to the softcap in Defense. Why shouldn't you get some of that for yourself?

Red Fortune and Thunderstrike, as mentioned, give you all the Ranged defense you could need. Some AOE defense, if you can find it, is also nice.

My personal belief is that if you have any power on your character that produces green numbers for someone else, then idiots will blame YOU when THEY get killed. Even if they're three rooms away, herding on a blaster. In my experience if you have Maneuvers and the bubbles up, and you are reasonably easy for the team to find (so they can stay IN the big bubble), normal regen rates will provide all the healing people need... almost always.

So that's why my Force Fielders tend to have Tough and Weave [with the Steadfast Def/Res in Tough] and nothing from the Medicine pool. Cause I just don't believe Force Fielders need to do any reactive defense. If you can't take care of people with the bubbles and with occasional slap-to-the-horizon Force Bolts (oh, mr. Tsoo Sorceror, I don't THINK you're going to be hurricaning my team...) you probably can't do it with that plus a tricorder.

...ok, so much for Elec/Fire blaster. I think Scarlet-Letter is the most dead I've ever gotten on a single character, and that's including ones that took me 500 hours to level to 50.

If you've got force fields on the team or something, you can build an entire attack chain out of PBAOE and still skip some of the bad ones.

I think billz didn't SAY it was a scrapper, he just said that he KNEW scrappers. I could be misinterpreting the post.

Anyway, for high single target damage I have gotten impressive results (for cheap builds anyway) with a Fire/Elec blaster. The inbound damage is a little rough at times though. A Fire/En gives you pretty close to the same tools for melee damage, for all I know it may do more, but I prefer the zappy visual/audio effects to the muffled bass drum effects.

Enhancements come in multiple levels, in general, because they've always come in multiple levels. in the old TO/DO/SO system you outlevel your enhancements and have to buy new ones because they rot in place.

For IO's, in general, they don't rot but the higher level ones work better. The lower ones have advantages (in terms of keeping set bonuses) when you're exemplaring- if you have all 33's you keep your set bonuses from level 30 up. If you have five 33's and a 50 you keep all but the "six in a set" from 30 to 46, and get the six-of-a-kind bonus at 47. But the level 50 dam/rech gives you 26.5% damage and 26.5% recharge, while the level 33 one gives you [...looking up...] 22.4% of each. It makes a difference when you've got four or five IO's adding up.

The +stealth IO's (or other "special" IO's) come in multiple levels because the devs would have to write extra code to make them work differently, and they didn't choose to make extra work (and add extra bugs) for themselves.

... is that not a market mechanic?

http://paragonwiki.com/wiki/Enhancem...ts#Travel_Sets

You can only slot one, from any set. Sprint takes both Celerity and Unbounded Leap, which a lot of people don't realize; Unbounded Leap was a lot cheaper last I looked.

There are two answers to this and both are right.

The answers everyone else has been giving [level 50 players beating things up] is the core of the money. (It turned out when I9 went live I knew two billionaires. There was nothing much to spend inf on in the first couple years of the game, so it just built up.) But that's not the entire answer. You have to spend inf ten times to get rid of it. An example might make this clear.

Let's say I punch a lot of badguys in the face and make 1,000,000 inf (probably half cash and half from selling level 50 generic recipes.)

I buy something from Appalling-Man for a million. 100K goes to Wentworths. Appalling-man has 900K.

Appalling-man buys something from B0mbsh3ll for 900K, 90K to wentworths and 810 goes to B0mbsh3ll.

B0mbsh3ll buys from Canadian Rage for 810K , Canadian Rage gets 729K and Wents gets the rest.
Canadian Rage buys an SO for 29 K to make my life easier and spends 700K buying from Dbagge, who gets 630K.

Dbagge buys from Eagle-Scout who gets 567K.
Eagle-Scout buys from Firekinsylvania for 510K.
Firekinsylvania buys a jetpack for 10K and has 500K left to spend on the market.

We've still got half the original money left and we've spent 1M+ 900K + 810K + 700K + 630K + 567K + 510K on the market, for a total of about 5.1 million.

If we run the half million through 7 transactions we get about 2.5 million to get to a quarter million, then 1.25 million to get to 125K... it end up that "the market" buys just about 10 million inf of stuff with a million inf of new actual money.

And that's why stuff costs more than it did a year ago.

That wins 1000 Fulmen Points.

...otherwise it would be beautiful, but pointless, and we can't have that.