Fulmens

I'm going to talk about "what to buy" first and "how to afford it" second. WALL OF TEXT CRITS FOR 1900 HP!

There's a lot of different people who do things a lot of different ways. I divide things up into levels one way, and progress through the levels one way, while other people do it differently.

I organize like this:

Level 1) "store" enhancements. They go yellow and red, they never get any better after level 22, but you can always get them and they're pretty cheap.

Level 2) Generic IO's. These can be slotted anywhere, you can USUALLY get them pretty cheap with some planning ahead, and once you've slotted them they never go bad, never NEED upgrading. Level 50's are a little better than level 30's but not enough that you'll have to stop for ten minutes when you train up to buy new enhancements. Used to be you could get them in advance for 55K or less with a week or two of patience. These days, I don't know if you still can.

Level 3) Frankenslotting. This is where you buy cheap, unloved set IO recipes and put them together to get around 30% better results in your powers. How does that work? One Acc/Dam/Rech IO is "half a generic" of accuracy, half a generic of damage and half a generic of recharge. Two of them are one accuracy, one damage and one recharge in two slots. Sort of like cheap hamidon enhancements that you can slot from level 32 or so, up. (or even lower!)

WARNING 1: These are in low supply villainside. You may need to wait weeks to get some of them.
WARNING 2: Not all powers take all sets! If you look here and use ctl-F to find "Extreme Measures", you may see some good-looking recipes for really cheap. Unfortunately, they are really cheap because they only work in snipe powers. So you can build it and have nowhere to put it.

Anyway, the approximate cost of frankenslotting is going to be somewhere around 100K to 300K per slot. I did an entire level 50 character, 93 slots, for under 66K per slot once, but I don't think you can do that any more. And I was being incredibly cheap on purpose because I had a 6 million inf self-chosen budget.

Level 4) Basic Set Slotting. This is where we start to take advantage of the "set" part of Set IO's. Slot a bunch of the same thing in the same power and get bonus HP, or Accuracy, or Recharge, or whatever in _all_ your powers. The better the bonus, the more expensive it naturally is.

Level 5) Money Is No Object. At this point you start seeing things like "Purple" IOs (can only be slotted by level 50s and have really ridiculous bonuses) and the most expensive Set IO's and PVP IO's. At this point you may be twice as effective as a SO'd out character. You may have abilities that an SO'd out character can't even get close to (high-defense Blasters, for instance.) The budget here is measured in, literally, billions of inf.

My advice is to fill in with generic level 30s now, and start collecting sets and frankenslotting over the next 5 or so levels. Once you get rich or bored or both, you can start collecting sets and throwing those in. I advise saving to upgrade 2 powers at a time- that way you don't get totally stuck.

So how do you, a level 27 brute with somewhere around 50 slots, afford the 10 million inf that I'm casually mentioning like it's nothing?

Well. You may have that stuff sitting in your tray right now. Midlevel rare salvage is often worth a million or two per piece. SOME common salvage (varies from moment to moment) is worth up to 100K each. If you have architect tickets, you can roll for random recipes (random roll is random), random common salvage or specific pieces of uncommon or rare salvage. 540 tickets is a couple million inf.

(If you have enough tickets for a random gold roll, or enough merits for a random rare roll, do it. I'll buy your losers for 10 million each, and you might get a winner worth a hundred million. I'm @Boltcutter in game.)

Also check your set recipes. Some of them, if crafted, may sell for millions. Most are semiworthless at that level, though.

If you don't have any Empowered Sigils or Steadfast: Res/Def recipes, then what?

Well. Look at how much it costs to get (say) a level 50 Thunderstrike recipe. Look at the costs of the salvage. Look at the very large cost to craft it. 490,000 to craft, something like 55K for the recipe and 25K for the salvage.

Now look what the crafted Thunderstrike goes for. 3 million, you say? That can't be right!

It is. Don't get greedy. If you put it for sale for [say] 1.15 million you will probably get the next sale, even if they don't look and just pay the "last 5" price of 3 million. Or they may go really cheap and buy it for 1.5 million. So all you made was like 800,000 profit.

Again: don't get greedy. Don't build ten and put them all for sale at once. Don't even build ten and leave nine in your tray. Prices change all the time, for no good reason. Build a couple of any one thing, see how it sells. Make sure you have enough money saved back to do something else if the market crashes.

Hope this helps! Welcome back!

Roderick: sounds like some kinda personal connection there. I mean, we've all been there, with the multiple awkward phone conversations and trouble looking the doctor in the eye and all.

... I mean, that's what I heard.

From a friend.

Micronian: Don't you hate it when other people do what THEY want instead of what YOU want?

Neuronia: If I subsidize half of it, you're looking at 250 inf per prestige. You're living in the future!

Doubled my "piss away the inf" screenshots.

My revenge will be huge. And fiery. And partially subsidized by someone else!

Neuronia: 10 inf -> 1 prestige? Seriously?

A fully functional SG base (that's one got teleporters to EVERYWHERE blueside) is somewhere in the 5-10 million prestige range.

You get around 5-10 million inf for a single ITF, don't you? I haven't checked lately.

You're asking for ONE player to be able to buy the prestige for an entire base in ONE day, playing ordinary content on teams.

Even the most aggressive basebuilders only tend to ask for 50:1, 100:1 or 150:1 (based on this thread.

Willowpaw: If you do get on a team, and there's one [or more] players who don't suck, /friend or /gfriend them. Hopefully they will remember you, positively, at least a little and you can ask what they're doing when you next see them online.

I haven't hopped servers for a couple years, but that got me a fairly good intro to teams back when I expanded to Victory, and to Freedom.

I know, you need one team to kickstart the process and it's not perfectly reliable.

In emergencies, you can ask up to 5 people who are ON teams, "Does your team have any use for a [level x] Ice/Rad controller?" Note the relevant facts:
1) your level
2) Your powersets
3) Asking if THEY need YOU. The creaky old Adam Smith quote is still true:"It is not from the benevolence of the butcher, the brewer, or the baker that we expect our dinner, but from their regard to their own interest."

You may get abuse for this; you have to realize that YOU intruded into THEIR play experience and they're entitled to be ill-mannered boors. They're still ill-mannered boors, but they're entitled to it.

If you don't get an answer after 5 polite, passive, constructive requests it isn't your time to get a team. Let the zen flow.

... If someone else wants to do this and take pictures, I'll match the money*. Who's up for EIGHT MILLION PRESTIGE?!?!

* Once. I can only make inf so fast.

To clarify: If you have another 2 billion, Johnny Kilowatt, you're eligible.

Freedom and Virtue are #1 and #2.
All others combined, at any given time, will be around the population of those two. I saw hand-gathered numbers once and I don't remember if "all others" equal F&Vir combined, or separately... but the point remains: you'll see a whole lot more on either of the big two than on ANY of the others. Champion may shuffle around with infinity or whatever- once I saw Liberty in the #3 slot, once I saw Liberty in #11, so they move a lot during the day- but I don't think I have ever seen anything in the 1/2 slots except Freedom or Virtue.

Bit of advice: At some point your endurance usage will start outweighing the ability to get it back fast. (New Kid tip 1: Make sure sprint is off when you're fighting.) You'll see a lot of sample builds, or hear a lot of advice, that says "Get Stamina by level 20." This is good advice, but I would tend to say "Try for Stamina sometime between 20 and 24."

Why do you want Stamina? It makes your endurance bar come back much faster.

How do you get it? You have to be at LEAST level 20, and have two "prerequisite powers" from Fitness. (usually one is Health, and the other is Swift or Hurdle. Personal choice which. To get Health you need to be level 14 and have either Swift or Hurdle.)

Why do other people say "20" while I say "20 to 24 ish?" Once you've experienced Stamina it's hard to play without it. You tend to get access to good powers in the 12-20 range which use a lot of endurance. So people want more endurance, sooner, so they don't have to wait around getting bored. So that's why other people say "20". I say "20-24" because it's a LARGE investment, getting three Fitness powers by level 20, and there are often good powers at level 16 or level 18 which people skip to get Stamina. There are a lot of benefits which will help you get endurance back faster; there is nothing that gives you good attacks if you skipped them to get Stamina. So sometimes I find I have things I consider more important to have right now than Health.

I'm going to give two of my Basic Bits Of Advice For The New Kid.

#1: Endurance and Stamina. MOST characters want to get Stamina fairly soon. The most common advice is "Stamina by 20" (the earliest you can get it) but I usually aim for 20, 22, or 24. There are two prereq powers (Stamina is the last power in the Fitness pool) so that's a considerable investment in a hurry, getting Stamina.

If you are playing Regen, you do NOT need Stamina particularly soon, or at all. You have a power in Regeneration called Quick Recovery which does everything Stamina does, and more, with no prereqs and you can take it from level 4 on , or something like that.

... what doe Quick Recovery, or Stamina, do for you? It refills your Endurance bar a lot faster. One of the main advantages of Regen is that it doesn't take a lot of Endurance to use your secondary powers, and it gives you a huge amount of endurance back. People with a Regen for their first character, whenever they play anything else in the game, feel like "It's really hard on the Endurance bar" because they've never even had to pay attention to the endurance bar. It's an advantage of Regen, it's a legitimate benefit, but you should be aware that it's a benefit not all players share. If you have teammates, or alts, they may play slower as a result.

#2: Buffs, Debuffs and Force Multipliers. In most games you play tank/healer/everyone else, where the healer keeps the tank alive and the tank keeps the rest of the team alive. In most games you take on one or two enemies at a time, with your whole team. This is not most games. Buffs and debuffs that, in most games, would be "massively overpowered" are "kinda weak" in this game. One character ( a Force Field defender with Maneuvers) can make every character on the team up to ten times harder to hit. Ten times harder to hit means that they don't "need a tank", they don't need to worry about aggro control, they can steamroller almost everything they see. Ten times harder to hit means that the normal regen rate (one full bar about every 2.5 minutes) will pretty much keep up with incoming damage.

That's not the BEST support character to play, but it's a very dramatic example. A tank with NO buffs, in this game, can stand around under eight, ten, fifteen enemies and live for several minutes. Depending on the tank, depending on the enemies.

I had a Blaster who (at high level) dropped something like 22 enemies in under twelve seconds once.

I had a character who kicked up outgoing damage by an average of around 50%, while stopping around 80% of incoming damage.


The point here is superpowers. This is not a game for slow, timid, play. Once you hit about level 22, a team with two or three experienced players and almost ANY combination of characters should be able to hit most missions and only slow down for elevators.

Welcome to Paragon! Have fun!

Also, to find other players, use the /search command. Initially it will show you all players in your zone but if you just click on the search button it will show you all [unhidden] players in the game.

(It is possible to STILL get a very low number- on Pinnacle, villainside, at 11 AM Friday, there are 18 players showing, total. )

You could, but it would take a mastermind AND teammate [s]. I guess what I'm saying is that a lot of people, a lot of the time, are going to solo for whatever reason, and that's all redside inf.

And 1/3 of the people you meet in the RWZ AE are going to be villains.

So infamy came naturally from this and you had to work to get influence out of it.

... some purple prices are slowly starting to come down, looks like. May reverse in a hurry this weekend.

Idle conversation today produced this factoid: if 0.1% of the playerbase made one inf-capped mastermind each, that's another 200 billion entering the system.

Which of course gets spent ten times before it goes away.

Come all ye marketeers, do what you can.

If you remember hamidon enhancements, your lower level set IO's work kind of like them.

Two level 30 Acc/Dam/Rech (from different sets), for instance, gives you "just about" the same benefit as one +1 Acc SO, one +1 Dam SO and one +1 Rech SO. Mixing and matching cheap IOs and ignoring the set bonuses is generally called "Frankenslotting". I use anything level 31-37, usually.

As far as expense: Yes. The new world has a lot more inf in it and you don't have any of it... yet. There's a lot of basic-to-advanced advice in the Market Forum, but I'm going to give you four skeletal points (was gonna be two, but I can't shut myself up)

1) Invention Stuff is a lot more money than you're used to. How you feel about that depends on whether you are paying for it, or whether it dropped and you don't need it.

2) There's no law against buying something and reselling it for more. Or buying a recipe + ingredients and crafting an IO and reselling it for more.

3) This game goes to the patient. Leave yer bids up. Prices vary wildly overnight, and even more so from Wednesday to Wednesday.

4) Money is sort of a pinball score in this game. You thought 120,000 was a lot until you got a million. You thought a million was a lot until you got 5 million. Then you saw someone with 40 million and you thought THAT was a lot... you can get a 22-50 supply of SO's for under 20 million. You can frankenslot for 30% better performance than SO's for under 20 million. Everything above that is a luxury.

Welcome back!

I had the impression that Liberty got pretty busy during EU prime time, relatively speaking. I mean, not like Big Two busy, but pretty good.

In case you wanted a spare server or something.

Listed 4 level 36 recipes blueside:
Mako's (D/R, A/E/R) just over a million
LoTG 7.5%, 151 million
Something: Chance to Vendor, 11K

Yes, I finally had a transaction where I made money buying merits. Now I'm 70 million less behind!

EDITED to add, redside: L28 LoTG 7.5%, recipe, listed at just over 200 million. Juicy! And Touch of Death D/E/R, L31, for a million.

2/3 * 2.5 million = approx 1.5 million. It's always a little surprising to me when there isn't a spectacular inefficiency in the market...

I'm willing to help transfer some of your inf to blueside- it's not going to be perfectly simple because I'm not on the EU servers, but it can be done. I'm @Boltcutter .

Edit: Sorry I didn't answer the original question. I don't get Masterminds or Doms, so I don't know enough to help you.

I've met a few self-identified Goons in this game at various points in the last five-ish years. Never had any problems with any of them.

Daemodand: I agree with Deus Otiosus (I know, it's an unlikely statement from me.) I've heard of one person running multiple Masterminds to the inf cap. I think it was four MM's. So that's eight billion inf. There hasn't been a sploitfest like this one in a very long time, if ever.

Everyone I know who runs a currency exchange has stopped because we're out of blue inf. It used to sort of go in waves- I'd be up a couple billion redside, or a couple billion blueside- now EVERYONE HAS REDSIDE INF AND WANTS BLUE.

I'm not saying that the redside market would, otherwise, work as well as blue. I'm saying that right now, there is a flood of redside inf. It is real, there are specific reasons for it and it has distorted, and is distorting, the market.

Neutron Bomb on a Defender. So impressive looking. So slow-to-arrive. So minimal-damage. . . for this you waited 34 levels?