IOs have irrevocably tainted my ability to give advice...

Want to remember? Just do those ouro challenges that turn off bonuses. Goodness, it smarts. I do have to catch myself, at times, when giving dominator advice. (As that's the one I slotted like mad.)

Thankfully, most of my other characters are kept simple, or frankenslotted at best, so I'm less biased on them.

All that time I spend scrapping ingredients and recipes together for generic IOs and then crafting and slotting them is time that I am not Killing Skuls. So its slotting SOs for me until 50 at which point I try to IO the character out but my rampant altitist generally catches hold before I get to that point.

The point is, the market is a chore to use and I try to minimize my time on it.

I start slotting procs, uniques and lower level sets as soon as I can (ie, I can afford them and they are available at a reasonable price, or I'm high enough to slot the max level for sets like Steadfast and Eradication) and throw in some of the cheaper good sets (Doctored Wounds, Crushing Impact, Thunderstrike, etc) around the mid-30s. Lately I've been building my toons to be exempable to the mid-30s, so I'm slotting stuff when the slots become available and when I can afford it, which means I'm pretty well kitted out by the time I hit 40.

Still, I don't find it hard to give newbies advice at all. It's not like I've forgotten what my powers actually do. I can still tell someone "take power X as soon as possible, it's awesome because it does X and Y" or "power X sounds cool but it's very situational, it won't be as useful as you think it will be" or "if you do this instead of this you won't die." The basics are the basics no matter how many purples you slot.

Yeah, I have a hard time remembering what life was like before IOs.
I think I used to slot attacks 2 Acc, 3 Dam, 1 End or Recharge. Or was it Acc, Rech, End Redux and 3 Dam?

To be honest, I find giving people advice frustrating if they complain about running out of endurance or not being effective enough, but refuse to use IOs.

I'm one of those people that I usually slot whatever drops Pre-12, And I slot generics Starting 12 replacing them every 10 levels. I usually don't worry about Sets until 47 With maybe 2 major Exceptions Those being a Run Or Jump Stealth IO to put in sprint and The Performance Shifter Proc which I put in Stamina.

I sometimes slot generic IOs at 12 and always slot them at 22. 22 is also when I do a respec to switch from a low-level/trying-out-powers build to a more thought out, long term one (except for veats, which use the lvl 24 forced respec). As higher level generics become available I add them in the new slots but usually do not replace existing IOs.
Sets are for upper 40s and only my 2 level 50 characters have sets in most of their powers. Certain uniques are slotted early, mostly KB protection but perhaps some others. And I also frankeslot select powers as early as mid 20s - usually the most used attacks where every % counts.
Overall power levels are similar to SOs so I can still give advice, in the rare cases when I know what to say .

I still have yet to have a character with all IOs. I still remember when I made over 20 million influence before ED. I was rich! Now, on my level 35 DP blaster, I just broke 92 million. Then this morning I did a Khan TF and a purple dropped. I went and looked at how much it sold for. For that, I might IO out some characters