Fury Flechette

Scrapper - Katana or Broadsword with WP and Regen, DM/SR
Controller - anything with Rad
Corruptor - Fire or AR with Dark, Fire/Sonic/Archery with Rad

Best with just SOs, all ATs:

*/* MM
SS/WP Brute

Day 5 - Starting inf: 445,781,312, Current inf: 560,992,704

There are times when you realize that you have to give your IOs sales a little push and change strategies. As I mentioned before, I had some regret in adandoning the mid tier sales strategy and focusing more on big hitting sales. Well, I decided to earnestly go back to that for a while and abandon the big IO strategy.

So I sold off a couple of Regen Tissue IOs - took a small loss on the two that remained - and focused on filling up the slots with more stuff that will sell quickly. I also relisted some stuff that I felt wasn't moving fast enough.

I have a bit of a glut in inventory so even though I'm eking out small profits, I'm still seeing my total influence rise.

Still, it's nice to pass the half billion marker.

Day 5 - Starting inf: 445,781,312, Current inf: 458,846,272

Due to the unexpected publish of the Mutant Booster pack, day 5 overnight sales were surprisingly sluggish. Only 2 IOs sold during that time and the rest haven't moved. While overnight sales were disappointing, I'm optimistic that the next couple of days will see good market activity. The market is really slow on Monday and it's around mid-week that it starts to pick up.

Some lowball bids did come in over night and will fetch quick profits. The strategy of simply buying up cheap recipes, crafting and then selling them for a modest mark up can easily generate 2 - 4M per slot, getting you a very easy 50-60M a day (assuming you have the base minimum 16 slots). Given how slowly some of my other IOs have moved, I sort of have marketer's remorse for not riding this particular strategy longer.

Day 4 - Starting inf: 207,103,840, Ending Inf: 445,781,312

Today was a very busy day for me. While I didn't need to go to work, all the errands and tasks that had built up over a week suddenly became more important to get done now. So, excepting my logon this morning, I wasn't able to log on at all until late this evening. With that said, Boreal still made influence...



Not a bad sales day. One of my big items, a Regen Tissue +Regen had sold. The only thing that I regret a bit on that was that given no time constraints, I'm fairly sure I could've gotten more than 80M. Still considering that I bought the recipe at 51M and paid buy-it-nao prices for salvage which pushed the cost of the IO to around 56M, it's not a bad amount of profit. Had it been a weekend day with more frenetic sales volume, I would've easily gotten 15-20M more.

Given that I had around an hour or so before my self-imposed bed time, I decided to play a MA arc for more tickets. I had a number of IOs that had sold during the day and I was running out of stock.

For generating tickets, I chose Eva Destruction's Freaks, Greeks and Men in Black (Arc #161629). I could've chosen other arcs, but choosing Eva's seemed fitting, not only to demonstrate the fact that you don't have to farm and to show that I have nothing personally against Eva for expressing a differing opinion than my own about using AE.

The arc was rather hard. While it doesn't have the overpowered custom mobs which plagues some MA missions, Eva chose to use some of the toughest canon mobs in the game: Malta and Knives of Artemis. Sure, there were also Freakshow (which are pushovers) and Crey (which is sort of midling in toughness), but Malta or KoA were in every mission. Boreal was sweating it even though I dialed down the difficulty to +1/x2/no bosses.

Due to the amount of mezzes put out by Malta and Crey, Boreal probably depleted Talos Island's supply of breakfrees. Surprisingly, Boreal only died once. Still, she had a number of close calls. If you're into more challenging content, this arc should appeal to you. If you are looking to mow down patsies for quick tickets, this might not be the most efficient choice, largely because you actually have to stay on your toes to go through the missions.



Anyways, after completing the 5 mission arc, Boreal ended up with 920 tickets. That's less efficient than doing a sweep of the Council farm, but to be fair, fighting Council ad nauseum is not exactly a thrilling endeavor - merely a means to an end.

I took the 920 tickets and quickly exchanged them for bronze rolls. The results weren't as stellar as yesterday (Karma -kb and a Reactive Armor recipe being the highlights), but it was enough to keep me stocked until I can get more game time in perhaps tomorrow or the next day.

This concludes day 4. I'll be taking day 5 guesses starting after this post.

The only downside I can see about this is that they'll be cancelling a bids prior to the merger. That only affects the multi-billionaires among us because if you have a character that has way more than the 2B limit in bids (I have a number that fall into this category) then you could potentially lose your influence.

I foresee a rash of banking alts created just prior to merger.

Awesome decision. I think the devs just improved the incentives to stay a villain dramatically with this alone. Now, alignment can simply be a matter of preference and not a severe handicap if you stay a bad guy.

I've gotten several PMs asking me about the super secret farm that I use to generate those AE tickets. 1200 tickets per run sounds like a lot to some people, and to generate that in about 40 minutes, I must be using super secret techniques and obviously exploiting game mechanics.

I've been up front in saying that the "farm" I've been using is nothing more than an AE mission I cooked up in about 5 minutes of time. Anyone could create the same mission in the same amount of time. However, to appease those people who are still convinced that I know some super secret that I haven't revealed yet, I'm going to detail exactly the steps I use to create the farm.

Step 1: Start up Mission Architect. Fill out required fields for Story, Description and Contact.



Step 2: Pick an enemy group (Axis America because they're patsies), a map (City 02) and write the required mission dialog (Intro Dialog, Send Off Dialog, etc.).



Step 3: Pick a mission objective (Collection Mission) and choose a Collection Object (I chose Bomb, but you can choose anything). Click Save and then Publish it.



What this mission gets you is a map that can generate up to 1500 tickets (max for AE) with an objective that ends as soon as you click on the Collection Object which shows up as a glowie. To max out the tickets, you beat up on the Council until you get 750 tickets and then click the glowie. The completion award will double the amount of tickets you collected so far up to the 750 ticket limit.

With a competent farming type character, you can set your difficulty to +2/x8/no bosses and get 750 tickets in about 15 minutes. Boreal on the other hand can't handle a difficulty that high, so I set difficulty at +1/x4/no bosses and a complete clear of the map yields around 600 tickets with the mission complete doubling that to 1200.

Anyways, now you know my super duper, ultra secret AE farming technique. To those who missed by bad attempts at sarcasm: I have no super secret technique.

Finally, just to prove it isn't the mission, I will be using only Dev Choice or Hall of Fame story arcs for the remainder of the experiment if I need to generate any more AE tickets.

Day 4 - Starting inf: 207,103,840, Current Inf: 291,152,688

So day 4 starts off with a little bit of recovery from the investments made in day 3. None of the huge profit IOs sold over night, but that was to be expected. Many of the high priced items don't necessarily sell that fast unless you're selling at very reduced rates.

Late last night as I was checking on prices just before going to bed, I had an IO sold and was invited into a kill all ITF with friends. The 207,103,840 total that I start day 4 reflects influence from kills, salvage/recipes sold off from drops during the TF and one IO (Steadfast Res/End) which sold right before I logged off. It's why I'm starting at 207M instead of 180M.



The ITF was a decent influence earner but probably the worst one for drops that I had for a very long time. I didn't get any rare salvage, no purples and the only recipe drops I got were a temp power (recovery serum) and a tohit debuff generic recipe. So there isn't going to be any uber purple recipe to help me out this time.

Also, just in case you're wondering, I have the star because the leader d/c'ed briefly during the start of the second mission, giving me the star. Also, the team played like maniacs, hence the high death rate...no one was concerned whether we'd win, but rather how maniacally we could kill everything that moved.

Anyway, going to this morning, a number of IOs sold over night, and I crafted and almost insta-sold several IOs. You can see the overnight sales below. Among those that sold right away:

Steadfast Res/Def (two of them) for 25,555,555 each
Basilik's Gaze Acc/Rech (recipe not crafted) for 10,123,123



After collecting all the profits and subtracting costs for salvage and listing fees, I ended up with 291,152,688. I'm hoping that one of the big profit IOs sells with today's busy cycle, which typically starts around 5 PM Eastern and lasts around 12 PM Eastern. After that the market activity decreases severely until the next day. Tuesdays also tends to be another slow day with activity typically picking up starting on Wednesday.

EDIT - one note about flippers: As some of you have already figured, the Steadfast Res/Def and Basilik's Gaze were most likely bought by a flipper. The Steadfast prices were particularly telling since I got the exact same price 25,555,555 both times. Some marketeers are put off by this because what it reflects (correctly) is that the IO probably had a higher profit margin, and the flipper is buying at a point where they can relist the IO and still make a profit. This sort of thing doesn't bother me in the slightest.

First of all, I'm in a hurry. I've already accepted the fact that I'll take moderate profits now rather than trying to eke out 30% more profit but tying up a slot. Second, flipping has some inherent risks. The market for the particular IO may crash from someone flooding the market with that particular IO with IOs from base storage. I've literally seen situations where the supply for an IO went from 10 to 90 overnight, crashing prices. Third, the flipper makes profit by essentially being patient. While they don't craft anything on their own, they do in a sense "pay" for their investment by tying up a slot, sometimes for weeks, in trying to make enough profit to justify the purchase price and the higher listing fees they pay. Since I'm only doing this for 4 more days, time is a precious commodity to me.

Also, one clarification:

While I don't want to dampen enthusiasm, please limit yourself to one guess per day. If you've missed the posts for day 1 and 2 already, you don't get three guesses unfortunately, just one for day 3 and future guesses for the coming days (which should be made during that day). I do want to give an advantage to those posters who have guessed early since they guessed with less information. I'm also going to not count guesses made in advance. So, sorry, you don't get to make your guess for day 5, 6 and 7 today, though I'll start taking day 4 guesses after this post.

Day 3 - Starting inf: 227,963,856, Ending Inf: 180,589,984



As I eluded in my earlier posts, today's sales activities were far lower than the frenetic pace that was the weekend. Further, despite my best efforts, I was able log on only once during the day after being able to play about 40 minutes before work. Because of this, I wasn't able to micro-manage as well as I did on Sunday and I was left by lunch time with a number of market slots which had sold IOs but no replacement stock.

By lunch time, influence had spiked to around 265M and if this had been a weekend day, expectations of reaching perhaps 500M would not be unrealistic. However, I suspected that Monday sales would slow, and so I decided to use much of my depleted market slots to take another gamble.

I talked before about how I have been limited by the number of slots that my character possessed. The number of slots directly affect how much throughput your character can have. I've never marketed much with Boreal and she had exactly 16 slots, the default number for a level 50 who hadn't earned any more. With this limit, one of the ways that you can increase your earnings throughput is by trying to eke out as much profit per slot. I did that on the weekend by logging in (even with small time increments) and making adjustment and replenishing sold stock. That way, slots were able to have multiple profit making transactions per day.

The other way to get more throughput is to engage in transactions that will garner more profit for each transaction. This evening, I decided to go ahead and shift towards this strategy and invested in a number of recipes which were expensive (50M+ each) but could make tens of millions per each one sold. I actually don't favor this strategy most of the time, and am content usually just cycling over transactions that make 5 to 15M per slot. The high volume, moderate profit strategy is pretty underrated and I've used that strategy before to great success.

However, with the time deadline looming, I thought that this change in strategy was warranted. If I succeed with it, I should have monster sales in the next couple of days. Time will tell.

Also, after work, I leveraged my favorite AE map again and earned around 1600 tickets (1 clear, and 1 partial clear). Due to price spikes on some salvage, I spent around 300 of that in buying level 26-40 salvage. Spell Inks, Demonic Blood Samples, Circuit Boards, Scientific Theories have all spiked in the last couple of days and I wanted a bit of buffer in case I wanted to craft something NAO!! and not tie up a crucial market slot.

I also managed to get some very good rolls. This is what I had left after deleting the junk. The next couple of days could be monstrous...in a good way.

Yeah, the topic sounded a bit familiar to me too.

Day 3 - Starting inf: 227,963,856, Current Inf: 247,489,464

Just a quick update before heading to work this morning. A few IOs sold overnight and my current influence total is just shy of 250M. Slots are full again with IOs to sell and I have a little bit of influence from a clear of the AE farm I've been using (which also generated around 1200 tickets).

Welcome!

Day 2 - Starting inf: 21,087,948, Ending Inf: 227,963,856

Well I thought I had 250M in the bag, but those last couple of IOs sat for the last five hours. Sometimes that's how it goes. Overall, it was a good day and I made well over 200M influence.

As you've noticed if you've been keeping up with this thread, I've been able to sneak away from work on three different occasions for about 10 to 15 minutes at a time. That allowed me enough time to collect earnings, bid on new recipes and quickly craft items for sale. Normally, on most week days, I wouldn't bother about trying to get in game so aggressively, but weekends are really when you can absolutely make the most influence. You can count on your inventory completely turning over (selling out) maybe once or twice on a weekday but several times daily on an active weekend day. If you're a casual marketeer, you should bear this in mind: bid, store and craft during the week day, sell on weekends. Prices also tend to be higher.

Tonight, I had about 90 minutes of time after work and before dinner, so instead of AE, I decided to do an "experiment". Since my market slots were full of IOs that were for sale and bids on recipes or salvage, I decided to go and garner up some reward merits and try to get some of those rare and sometimes very expensive pool C or taskforce reward recipes. To give myself a chance for 2 rolls, I went to Ouroboros and chose two story arcs: The Freakshow War by Neal Kendrick (worth 33 merits) and The Redemption of Alexander by Ashwin Lannister (worth 7 merits).

I chose these because I can do the Freakshow arc in about 50 minutes and the Alexander arc in about 20. I finished the two arcs in about an hour and change, and promptly rolled two random level 35-39 recipes (20 merits = 1 random roll).

Here's what I got:



One very good roll, the Obliteration; one that is rather mediocre, the Positron Blast.

I knew that by rolling the Obliteration, I was going to break the 200M mark. I was hoping to get 30M for it and maybe have a couple of others sell too. This was what happened...



Better than I had hoped.

Now you may have noticed that there are a number of other IOs that are showing up on my screens that I haven't talked about much. The sharp eyed among you will have noticed the sale of Efficacy Adaptors, Eradications, Adjusted Targeting, Steadfast Protections and Reactive Armors. Those are a partial list of some of the recipes that I have bid on for cheap, crafted and then listed for sale.

While I won't go into minute detail about what price points I used and exactly how I acquired these recipes (largely because I think I'd bore you), I will talk about how I decide to go after certain recipes.

As I talk about in my guide, I look for IOs which have a large discrepency between the price of the recipe and the price of the finished IO. However, since I'm trying to maximize profit in a short amount of time, I also use other criteria. In particular, I look at sets which have beneficial bonuses for just two slots. Steadfast Protection is a great example of that, offering a very nice recovery bonus for two slots. I figure that since many players desire the Steadfast Res/Def IO, many will also buy a Res/End IO (which sells for far less) as a companion IO.

The other criteria I use is that I often target the second best IO in a set. I've purposely bought up the Eradication Acc/Dmg/Rech and passed up its much more expensive quad aspect sibling (Acc/Dmg/Rech/End). The quad will sell for about 80-85M crafted, the triple about a quarter of that. However, even quad recipes are expensive and rare, while the triple recipes can be had for less than 1M. If I buy the recipe for a million, pay the buy-it-nao price for the salvage (around 4M), I'll still eke out well over 12M profit after subtracting marketing fees.

The other IOs I've bought follow the same two criteria. I bought the Adjusted Targeting ToHit/Rech/End Rex, largely because many players covet the double aspect ToHit/Rech piece highly. I've bought the Efficacy Adaptor End Mod single because many players also buy the other pieces of the set, since just 2 of those give a nice set bonus for hitpoints.

It's this thought process that helps me narrow down the choices among the possible profit opportunities available.

Finally, while I'm touched that many of think I will make it to the billions, please remember that the sales results you're seeing are the result of weekend market activity. I know for certain sales volume will slow significantly in the next couple of days, picking up again around Thursday. You should definitely factor that in your calculations. Further, I'm at a point where the bottleneck in my ability to generate profit is the number of slots I happen to have. To alleviate this bottleneck, I may have to go after riskier, bigger game...

Day 2 - Starting inf: 21,087,948, Current Inf: 147,948,576

I jumped in game again for another 10 minutes after scarfing down my lunch. A few more IOs sold and a number of bids also came in. It could be a very big evening in terms of sales.

Some of the stuff that has sold today:

Level 30 Kismet Def/End for 4M
Level 30 Eradication Acc/Dmg/Rech for 20M (two sales today)
Level 50 Efficacy Adaptor End Mod for 5M each (multiple sales)
Level 34 Mako's Bite Acc/Dmg recipe for 3M

Currently I have 11 out of my 16 slots devoted to sales, while 5 are currently set on bidding desirable and sellable recipes for crafting. Oh, by the way, you know those Spell Inks I mentioned that were selling for 500k each. I snagged a stack of ten for a cool 11k each. Patience wins out in the market game.

Screen of current inventory and profit so far:

Day 2 - Starting inf: 21,087,948, Current Inf: 120,797,416

Had another mini break and was able to log on briefly to make some further transactions. I had enough time to put out some bids for some recipes, some salvage (oy, spell ink had spiked to 500k each!) and collect some influence again.

I am completely out of AE tickets and have been since the start of the day. What I want to make clear about this is I'm still making profit despite not having any interaction with AE.

One technique that I use is attempt to keep my market slots as full as possible. If they aren't full selling something then they're put to work in grabbing salvage or recipes that can be crafted. If you're looking to maximize profits, this is something to bear in mind.

Screenshot of some more IOs selling. By the way, I'm buying those Efficacy Adaptor recipes for almost nothing, and they're selling for 5M a pop.

Day 2 - Starting inf: 21,087,948, Current Inf: 110,107,360

Another quick update since I was able to sneak away for about 10 minutes. A bunch of my listed IOs sold - many of them at current going rate even though I've been listing them for far lower. Efficacy Adaptor and Adjusted Targeting have been my friends in this effort. As per usual in a weekend, I'm running out of stock. And my ability to generate even more outrageous profit has been hampered by lack on in-game playing time.

It's nice to crack the 100M mark even though it's just the beginning of day 2.

Screenshot of what every marketeer likes to see: stuff being sold.