Plasma

Perf shifter: 20% chance to restore 10% end. (It says 10 endurance, rather than 10%, but the actual text when it triggers implies 10%.)

Panacea: 20% chance to restore 7.5% endurance; 20% chance for a 0.67 scale heal.

Hey, now I know who I was undercutting.

Well, both are big, big losses... but sadly, I can't get the nuc back even if I'm willing to pay 2B to get it.

The best solution would be to create powers that have charges that are cross-character. So, if I log into a brand new character, and I have 50 XP boosters in my email, I see an XP boost power with 50 charges. If I use one, then change characters, they ALSO have an XP boost power which now has 49 charges.

I'd also like a sort of "vault" for store-bought enhancements so I don't have to gleemail them around one at a time, and I'd like a new inspiration tray so, again, I can click account-wide inspirations to activate them.

(The inspiration issue is far worse of a problem than the XP booster problem was, but claiming them from email would make the cure worse than the disease.)

Speaking of all this - can we PLEASE, PLEASE have a way to make the top half of the email pane larger? It is really frustrating trying to scroll when I can only see 4-5 in the pane but I have hundreds of emails. (And yes, I do have hundreds of Character emails.)

Edit: the ONLY reason this isn't a completely horrible change is because alphabetically "XP booster" is last and that makes them easy to find in the character email window. If it was named something like "Increased XP power" and I had to scroll through my email in that tiny 5-line window through hundreds of emails, I would be really, really irritated. As someone who still has like 150 of these in my email, I vote for a revert. (Implement my totally awesome suggestion of a cross-character power that automatically appears and has shared charges instead!)

Additionally, there is a cost of 250,000 influence per converter, regardless of which method is used.

How They Work

Once you have a converter salvage in your salvage inventory, a "Convert" menu appears next to "Manage" on your enhancement tray bar. Clicking that reveals a place where you can drop an enhancement.

There are two radio buttons that can be selected:

In-set conversion (Cost: 3 Converters)

and

Out of Set Conversion

Additionally, when selecting Out of Set Conversion, there is a drop-down menu. The dropdown menu has two options, but some IOs will only have one choice:

Rarity (Cost: 1 converter)

Category (Cost: 2 converters)

Rarity converts in the same general rarity. Examples:

Rarity: Uncommon
Rarity: Rare
Rarity: Very Rare (purple)
Rarity: PvP IOs

Category converts in a broad category. Examples:

Category: Defense
Category: Ranged

Conversion only works on a crafted enhancement. Once you put a crafted enhancement into the "input" slot and click "convert", you get a new enhancement based on the type of conversion you selected; either a new one in the same set, a new one of the same rarity, or a new one of the same category.

Note: in testing, I discovered the dropdown box would "reset". Do NOT expect it to "stick" to your choice if you are doing a category conversion.

Note: You cannot receive back the enhancement you put in.

Note: For out-of-set conversion, you cannot receive the same set back. When doing a Category conversion, this can sometimes mean you have a guaranteed "other" set. For example, at L50, there are only 2 non-PvP Defense Sets: Luck of the Gambler, and Red Fortune. This means 2-converter Category conversions will always turn a LotG into a random Red Fortune, and vice versa.

As far as I know, the devs have not posted any confirmation that odds are equally weighted. However, I've done quite a bit of converting, on beta and now on live, and they do appear to be equally weighted.

Playing the Odds

When converters were on Beta, I wrote a simulator to get together some numbers on figuring out what the odds were, statistically, of how likely certain things were to happen. For me, my code is more likely to be error-free than my math, thus doing that rather than doing pure computation.

Converting Purples

Let us assume that there will be 4 "more popular" purple sets that will often be the "target" of conversion. The number of converters on average required to convert any non-damage purple to a damage purple is: ~2.25

If you attempt to target a specific purple set (1 of the 10), the number of converters on average required to "hit" a specific purple set is: ~9

Converting a PvP IO

Assuming you have a PvP IO and want to target a specific set. There are 8 PvP sets. You will not get an IO from the "source" set. The number of converters to hit your target set on average is: ~7

Inset Conversions on 6-IO sets

Let us assume you have an IO of a set, and want to target another IO in that set. The number of converters required to convert from one enhancement in a set to specific other of that same set is: ~15 (Note, this is about 5 conversions, using 3 converters each time.)

If you want a specific enhancement, then you can sum up the costs. Say you have a Gladiator's Strike, and want a Gladiator's Armor 3%/teleport proc. You will, on average, pay 7 converters to get to Gladiator's Armor. You have a 16.66% chance of landing on the proc. If you don't, you will pay 15 converters on average to hit it. On average, you will spend 19.5 total converters to target a specific PvP IO.

Likewise, to target a specific purple will cost ~21.5.

Relative Costs

Given there are four ways to purchase converters, and each costs the same influence (not counting influence paid to convert reward merits to H/VAMs if you do that), the question becomes: "What else could I buy?"

As such, you should probably figure out what the "equivalent value" is for your A-Merits, E-Merits, Reward Merits, and H/VAMs.

The math was already such that you could get 1 LotG Global for 200 Reward Merits, or pay 80M influence and get 2 LotGs after converting to 4 H/VAMs. Obviously if you profit more than 80M extra after market fees from selling a LotG, then you should convert.

Similar analysis must be done on converters. If a LotG is worth about 80M, then you can extrapolate the cost of a converter at about:

4M when purchased with reward merits
4M when purchased with H/VAMs
1.5M when purchased with A-merits
750k when purchased with E-merits

For the first 3, I presume buying a LotG and pocketing 80M after fees.

For the E-merits, I presume the alternative is buying a purple and pocketing 300M after fees. These are examples; figure out what you would buy otherwise, and use that to divide up your per-converter cost. Then, multiply your per-converter cost to determine what conversion runs.

For example, converting a random purple to a specific purple costs 24.5 converters, so it is costing you: 98M worth of value if bought with reward or alignment merits; or 18.375M of value when purchased with Emerits.

Results for the Market

My conclusion is that the value of two purples can no longer be more than about 140M apart. (This is a 10% market fee of 40M off the "high end" price, +98M to convert in the least-efficient way.)

In reality, since there is little of value to buy with Emerits once you have all account-wide rewards, and the pricing on Purple and PvP recipes via Emerits is outrageously high, I expect almost all E-merits will be used to buy converters from now on. As such, the intrinsic value of any purple will only be about 18.4M of difference from any other purple, unless demand for conversion is higher than the production of E-merits, forcing purchases by other means, in which case the difference may be as much as ~100M.

It's a question of supply. A higher ratio of bad:good means converters have a larger impact.

Most demand is purely for the 3% proc. Among other PvP IOs, there's at best modest demand. So the supply of "bad" IOs to be converted to good ones is huge.

For purples, 40% of them were already in high demand and 20% more in modest demand. At best, the converter supply only doubles the number of total purples available. That's just not enough to trash the market, especially when lower prices will likely pull in more buyers.

I've never been interested in generating massive amounts of liquid cash. I just want to play how I want to play. My goal for ECs was largely "have so many purples/etc that marketeering becomes entirely optional".

I gambled pretty big, but it wasn't for a paper profit, per se, it was just to wash my hands of it. I wouldn't say I'm retiring from marketeering, but I wanted to know that if I was doing it in the future it would only be for fun.

About 30 billion in sales here, mostly from PvP IOs. But I also unslotted/respeced out of about 60B worth of stuff and sold it over the last month (I'm a very casual marketeer, and only had maybe 10B in liquid funds when scraped together), while using the proceeds to buy up over 650 trash purples, hundreds of pvp ios, hundreds of garbage-grade ATOs, and a huge variety of other things. (I have stacks and stacks of Kinetic Combat: Knockdown, low level Blessing of the Zephyr: Travel speed, L20 Miracle: junk/junk, gobs and gobs of Steadfast Protection: resist/end, etc)

It's amazing how much worthless built-up cruft there was. Like you can still see a bunch of my Steadfast end/res buys. I only paid 11k per recipe, and have hundreds now. (Wow does the recipe storage/AH slot increase seem like a bargain on the Paragon Store now!) An in-set conversion of steadfast can ONLY become something good - either KB or res/def, both of which are worth good money at low levels.

I'm going to post a little tale of my escapades with some screenshots in the next couple days, along with a converter guide, since I wrote a simulator to double check the "odds" on conversions.

I think most of them are now being generated by SSAs. Pretty easy to run one once a week on a bunch of characters, and a lot faster (at least for me) than doing tips + morality.

It is ultimately good for everyone. Well, except people who play almost exclusively controllers and mostly bought purple mez sets. Those people are getting punked.

Yes. Double XP doubles it from around a half to about a full. (At 43, I think I got 11-12 bubbles, though I had an XP boost so I was at 225%)

The bonus xp is a lot more than double. At 41 it's around half a level. And yes, it is doubled. It's completely insane. Moonfire ftw.

If I'm using barrier, I'll be capped on en, 67% s/l, 46.6% f/en with the initial build.

With power surge I'll be dramatically over the cap in everything except psi. I anticipate that any time I'm using power surge, I'll probably do one of two things as it is ending: burnout->re-powersurge, if I keep that feature, or save barrier and pop barrier as it is ending, so I can power up my defenses while barrier is in 90%/90% mode. I anticipate only really extraordinary circumstances will require barrier to be used while surge is up, given the 90% Brute resist cap.

When I think about how it plays, I feel like I may not have a huge problem with melee simply because of all the knockdown. The three main AoEs carry 66%, 75%, 75% knockdowns, and that's a remarkably rare things to have any minion/lt resist.

It's a shame Mid's doesn't know to use the "switch to power" flag when build momentum is toggled on. It would be nice to see the momentum cast times. Does anyone have a good guide to TW attack chains and the interaction with momentum and recharge? The other X-factor of the "perfect TW/elec" build is - "How much +recharge do I need and how much am I giving up by slotting sets for defense instead?"

Was is the key word here. The initial slam to pricing was the flood of merits from H&V Superpacks. However, I imagine quite a few people used to save merits for bigger things. For example, I tended to save up to 30 myself and buy pvp ios. (I didn't do this for revenue however; I was just using them. I flipped stuff for cash.)

However, as PvP IO prices fall <2B and more supply is generated from farms to satisfy what was once obscene demand (relative to supply), it becomes unworth it to save. That means it's time to buy LotGs or other things. (L20 Miracles, L30 Numinas, L35 1-merit Kinetic Combats) are all worthwhile potentially, and if PvP IO prices are <2B then it is probably best to just buy those.

More people buying = continued lower prices. And prices seemed to be recovering as of last night (lotgs climbing back to 90-100m, when I saw them down to 70-75 the week after superpacks), but I think there's a decent chance they won't be back to 150m.

On the other hand, maybe they will - because with cheaper purples and cheaper pvp ios, come converters, people will have more to spend on lotgs/etc. Hard to predict the exact interactions.