Organica

I have a mastermind. Why is she not rolling in infamy? What am I missing?

That said, I have a lot of influence on Virtue and not as much infamy, so I could do a 1:1 trade at the moment too.

If the problem is "stuff is too expensive" then the solution is "increase drop rates". At least, a significant increase in drop rates across the board would certainly drive down prices, maybe to the point that anyone could buy anything.

In any case, the solution is NOT "throw out the entire crafting and economic system that the Devs have spent several years building."

Also, I think you are making an assumption that everyone should be able to slot out every character of theirs with whatever they want easily... which is an assumption I do not believe the Devs would agree with.

(Except, of course, that I am able to slot out every character of mine with nearly anything I want short of purples -- and others can do the same if they really want to. But it takes time and effort.)

Anyway... no. I don't think your suggestion would improve the game at all. I imagine a world where everyone can softcap their defense or have perma-hasten or perma-dull pain (for a couple of examples), where soloing AVs and entire Task Forces was not just a pretty nifty event but a rather everyday thing, where crafting badges didn't exist because crafting didn't exist, where there was not only no crafting or marketing, but no reason to farm either... where there was no way to improve your character at 50 because you already had everything you needed, no new IOs to shoot for, no need to earn more money, no reason to play your 50 at all except for the enjoyment of it. And trust me, there are a lot of people for whom "the enjoyment of it" alone is not enough of a reason.

Crafting and the market exist to keep people playing and keep them occupied, and to allow people to reach 50 and still have goals to shoot for.

*edit* Oh yeah. I'm not bullish on the word obolish. Abolish it!

I soooo want to try and do this, at least the one conference room with windows onto the stars. If I can manage that much, I'll consider whether to do anything more. ^_^ But it looks incredibly cool.

Ugh, hate stuff like that. The other day I was working on a new room, raising the ceiling and lowering the floor square by square (it was a very large room) when I got the bright idea to click "apply to entire room". This seemed to work perfectly -- until I realized that various points throughout my entire base had floors and ceilings lowered or raised randomly, pretty much any spot that didn't have something sitting on it. I had to go through the entire base fixing each room, and moving objects that collided with where the floor now was first.

Awesome, congrats!

Scrappers are very strong, one of the more popular ATs for soloing AVs, rikti mothership pylons, and other extreme performance feats.

Trollers are also quite popular. For farming, fire trollers have never gone out of style.

Well to be fair, you can log in for a few minutes and get your marketing done and run off an play, but I have spent hours at the market, and I doubt I'm the only one who posts here who can say that. Usually when I'm working on my toon's build rather than working to make influence/infamy, but you can stand at the market for an hour and have the same toons on either side of you for all of that time too.

But yes, I made a lot of money last weekend and also spent most of my time actually playing my characters. 1-10 on a scrapper, 20-35 on one defender, something like 28-40 on another, and I think 20-25 on a third.

I suspect if the people here who say "allow any concept build on a team" were to make an empathy defender with NO heals and join PuGs, they'd find quite a few that were not happy with that build. Although it might be fun to try. ^_^ (You'd have to use "Doctor" or "Nurse" or some sort of Healzor name just for added stupidity.)

To me, a shield defender (of any stripe) without shields is the same thing. It's true that people don't pay as much attention to what the shield defender is doing -- in fact the team I was on tonight had a bubbler who would allow bubbles to drop for sometimes half a mission before remembering to apply them again -- but as I was playing an ice defender, nobody really noticed or said anything. If I let my ice shields drop as well though, people started taking damage quickly.

Shields -- and especially defensive shields -- make such a huge difference in a team's survivability (unless everyone on the team is softcapped, I suppose). I can understand joining random pickup groups with odd builds but for a Task Force you really gotta warn people, they're committing to maybe an hour or two to finish it, and not everybody checks your build before starting the TF. If you can't keep people alive in some way, then you're not fulfilling the role people expect of a defender (what the AT was created for), and could potentially cripple the team's ability to finish. Warn people.

I know people say ITF is easy, and it is, but teams still fail it. I was on one two weeks ago that failed, in my opinion because more than half of the team were builds that required someone else to carry the weight, and there weren't enough useful people on the team to make up for them.

To expand a bit more on what Johnny said, you can buy up level 50 recipes for unwanted sets (stun, sleep, that sort of thing) for maybe 100 influence a piece and vendor them, usually for 5,000 or 10,000 a piece. It's slow, but it's an effective way to earn enough influence to start something more profitable. You can also buy up high level SOs for cheap and vendor them.

The next step up, in my opinion, would be to pick a very popular IO recipe (accuracy, damage, heal, defense) in a mid-range level, say 25, 30, 35, and then put in low bids for salvage to craft it (in stacks of 10, and for the recipes if you can buy them cheap).

Then you craft enough of the two levels needed to earn the memorization badge. You can probably sell what you've crafted at a profit, but once you've memorized the recipe then it's even easier to make a profit.

Important: put in low bids, wait for them to fill overnight. List your recipes for a good price, high enough that you'll make money but not so high that they'll never sell. It can take a bit of practice to get that right. Also, wait a day or two for your crafted IOs to sell.

This kind of crafting can easily net you enough money to outfit characters with whatever generic IOs you want, or with cheaper set IOs. When I did this regularly, I had a couple of characters who worked up over 100 million influence. I thought that was great, until the day I decided I wanted full set-IO builds. Then I had to get into crafting set IOs and leave the generic IOs to other people. ^_^

Another possible option: Run AE missions, use tickets to buy salvage or recipes to sell on the market. It helps to know what recipes and what salvage are worth the most money, but you can do pretty well with just bronze random rolls (for example).

I bought and slotted the last two hectacombs in fire sword for my fire/fire blaster this week, and now I have 177.5% global recharge (with hasten up -- which is always). That includes 3 purple damage sets, several LoTGs, and various other sets with recharge bonuses.

I don't even care if that's practical or if it's overkill, or if building in some ranged defense might have been a better option. This is my one character that I've done this with, and it's just plain fun having virtually any of my powers available at any time.

But I do think I'll eventually replace level 50 IO sets with level 30, so that I can respec down a bit and not suffer so much.

In the meantime, when I really want to unleash pure carnage, I'll play my blaster for a bit.

I have a level 39 in my base, crafted of course. I'm on Virtue though so I'll throw it up for sale.

I think these are recipes that people usually vendor (both Kinetic Crash and Forced Feedback). But I kinda like 'em so I often craft 'em and toss 'em in my bins.

Okay, posted for exactly 950,000. Hope that's a relatively fair price, they seem to sell for 1-2 million when the do sell. I don't remember what it cost me to craft it.

I do believe you had me going up to the point where Defenders are weak because Corruptors and Controllers are better, but Corruptors are weak compared to Defenders and Controllers are useless...

I've read that the set might be a tad underpowered, but for me, that means it probably fills the same role for blasters that Martial Arts does for scrappers. MA is not a fantastic set damage-wise, but it's always been popular because of the animations. It has style. I figure DP is the same thing for blasters, more or less. ^_^

I'd say that, as long as current conditions remain the same, Purple prices (especially the most desired ones) will continue to go up, due to influence inflation.

Conditions are subject to change, as others have pointed out. But people were predicting prices on purples to fall with the introduction of mission settings, and that hasn't happened. Instead it's become easier for people to get influence at level 50, so prices have only gone up further. In the short term, at least, I'd think that holding onto them is a very good option.

I had a couple of market toons that sold out their inventory, and I was pulling stuff out of my base. I have at least one IO table of stuff crafted just to sell, but I remembered that in another table I had a full set of level 50 Obliteration. I always thought I'd use it on another character, but I've since picked up the practice of slotting everything in the 30-35 level range. So I put the full set up for sale. I set the price at the high end for each piece. I wanted to get my money's worth.

They all sold in 24 hours. >.>

That happened to me once, and it went on for months before I figured it out. ^_^ (Had somehow selected not to view them).