Plasma

Only 19.5. 7 on average to hit the set, 12.5 on average to hit the 3%. (the 12.5 includes the 1/6 chance that when you hit glad armor, it's already a 3%)

Looking at http://paragonwiki.com/wiki/Inventio...hancement_Sets is hard!

Seems entirely plausible, because pre-converters the price points almost never inverted.

A full archetype with multiple primary/secondary choices?

I'd happily pay 5000 points for a full AT with multiple choices. Especially if the mechanics were new on one or both of the sets (primary/secondary) -- ie, corruptors are basically an inverted defender, but MM primaries were unique. If we got a unique mechanic in either the primary or the secondary, I'd be even more supportive. (Even if I had to pay normal powerset prices for additional primary/secondary choices beyond 1)

Any advice I'd give you right now might be inapplicable when things are correctly patched, because it's hard to predict what will happen. What I've seen in general is that prices on LotGs are rising, because merits (in particular, the super pack supply) is going into converters instead.

That said, let's look specifically at the Merits vs H/VAMs case. Your option for 200 merits is:

- 10 Random Rolls
- 1 LotG (or similar high priced recipe)
- Pay 80m to convert to H/VAMs to buy 20 Random Rolls or 2 LotGs

Let's say a LotG will sell crafted for 100M. Let's say you pay 10M in market fees + 6M in salvage, for a net 84M. This means your value is:

Buy with merits: 420k/merit
Convert to H/VAM, buy 2 with those: 440k/merit (84M * 2, minus 80M in conversion costs = 88M)

So you can determine that 100M is about the cutoff for a LotG-type recipe to be "worth it" to convert to H/VAMs first. That won't change no matter what happens.

Likewise, the value of random rolls can similarly be evaluated. I don't know about the value of a LotG vs 10 random rolls, since those are identical cost. But you can do the same math and realize that the value of 10 randoms must be 100M+ to justify converting to H/VAMs.

For Emps and A-merits we'll have to see post-patch. But right now, figure you can MAYBE net 310M on a purple post-crafting, figuring 350M - 35M for fees, -5M for salvage, and that's both a good price and cheap salvage, so perhaps optimistic. That's 7.75m per Emp.

For A-merits, you can do the same LotG math: 84M in net profits / 32 A-merits is 2.625m per Astral. Or, instead, you can get 1.666 converters for roughly the same price. (+250k per converter)

Right now, converters are clearly "worth more" than 1.8M, so at the moment, you'd definitely want them over Astral IOs.

But we just don't know what will happen to the market. Maybe people will convert so aggressively that LotGs/rolls will simply be better deals. Maybe LotG prices will rise because of converter demand, and make the relative value of buying IOs higher. That's why I'm only trying to show how to calculate relative value, because any rule of thumb could be invalidated by the market.

That's barely above average, which would be ~5 attempts. As I've said elsewhere, variance is extremely high.

I tweaked my converter simulator to check how often you'd require certain numbers (or higher) of conversions for in-set converts. Using a simulation run of 1,000,000 conversions, you get:

10+: 133952 (13.39%)
15+: 44277 (4.42%)
20+: 14500 (1.45%)

(These numbers are inclusive, so the 13.39% of the time it requires 10+ attempts (30+ converters) INCLUDES the times where it will also take 15+)

So think about that: about 1 in 20 times you go to convert a PvP IO, it's going to cost you over 45 converter to do it.

This has actually happened to me already. I've also had several go the other way as well: I'd start with a garbage Javelin Volley or such, and it would convert in 1 shot directly to a 3% Glad proc. (Odds of that would be 1 in 42)

Completely agreed, but he could have suggested that lower purple prices/pvp io prices will cause people to want to purple/pvp out more toons, which is probably true.

Since it costs about 22.5 converters to change a PvP IO into a specific one (a bit less if you're willing to accept several options, like stopping on a chance for toxic instead of going for a 3%), and PvP IOs have historically been awfully cheap, I expect that it will be considerably lower. 2 HAMs buys you a LotG. They also buy 20 converters. If we value a LotG at 100M, then the "cost" to convert to a specific PvP IO is about 110M.

I bought several hundred pvp IOs prior to I22 for <20m each.

So the total cost is perhaps 130m.

Suffice it to say, there is basically no chance there's going to be a 400M+ profit available. So the options are:

1. LotG/etc prices will rise because less merits are going into Pool C rolls/recipes because
2. The supply of PvP IOs is actually constrained and prices rise because of raw material scarcity (not happening while pvp farms exist)
3. The prices on PvP IOs falls

My money is on a mix between 1 and 3. I'm expecting LotGs to creep up as converters become more known, and possibly setting in the 100-125M range more firmly. I'm expecting PvP IOs to drop to be from 175-250M.

Don't be deceived by the fact that they fell precipitously and now are climbing. They are climbing simply because of the artificial constraint on how many converters can be purchased. Raw merits only come from TF completion, arc completion, and super packs. A-merits, E-merits, and HAMs are all soloable in a much greater quantity and A-merits and E-merits are attainable in mass quantities by groups.

I've heard topdoc has 6 alts that can form a robot with a giant, market-cleaving sword.

No, I completely agree with you. I myself have probably 700+ converters worth of A-merits and E-merits. I have at least 30 characters with an alignment merit, a lot with 10+, and of course, I can easily create 30+ per week via SSAs.

I'll say this much: I am sitting on literally hundreds of Kinetic Combat: Chance for Knockdown recipes, Steadfast Protection: end/res, Blessing of the Zephyr travel speed. All because I eventually expected them to be worthwhile. (I never did get a good choice to convert to LotGs, so I just used my ill-gotten gains to buy 50 off the market and bin them, half at 25, half at 50.)

Yes, yes it did.

Edit, oh and thanks!

Maybe hundreds of thousands or millions, then. But that just supports my ultimate point, which is: right now prices have not converged as much as they will, because there is an artificial limit on the converter supply. There are a ton of people itching to buy them up with the other 3 merit types.

I don't generate anything really, except by accident, but I've been buying up purples for ~150m, selling them for ~275-300, and thus making ~45m per converter. (Or 4.5m/merit, as it were. Although I've picked up a few converters actually playing.)

Of course, looking forward to, say, emerits. Making 90m per emerit seems pretty good, or 180m per alignment merit.

There's definitely a lot more convergence to go with this availability. The converter supply is very constrained right now. There are 10s of thousands of converters "saved up" in alignment, astral, emp merits, waiting to be unleashed.

It's really important to note that if you don't change the dropdown each time from Rarity to Category, you'll end up changing it.

I think tinkered with a category conversion for L30:

As you can see, it sticks within the melee type. But again, the dropdown loves to reset to "Rarity:" so if you don't adjust it each time, you'll get a weird conversion. (That L30 IO started off as a Kismet: +6 Accuracy, and I converted it by rarity until I hit a melee IO.)

On the test server, I tested these specifically. BotZ and Winter's Gift convert back and forth in the Category conversion. What I ended up doing was buying a pile of quickfoots and Zephyr speed recipes at low levels, specifically to target celerity stealth and WG: slow resist. But at the moment, it's not worth converting because the cost of such a recipe is smaller than the profit spread on a purple conversion, and a typical WG/Celerity type conversion is going to cost more converters. (Figure 2 to get from quickfoot to celerity; then you have a 2/3 chance of needing to spend 6 more on average to "hit" +stealth, so basically an average of 8 converters to get from quickfoot to celerity stealth to profit maybe 40-60m. Meanwhile, going from a junk purple to a damage purple is 2.25 and can still net you 100m.)

It sounds to me like you didn't pick "Category: " from the dropdown box. I had a L50 LotG and, on Beta, did >15 conversions, and it only ever flipped back and forth between LotG and Red Fortune. But I have to emphasize: every conversion causes the dropdown box to reset to "rarity" and you must reselect category.

Leaping, Running, and Universal Travel are each different categories. Universal Travel contains winter's gift and Blessing of the Zephyr.

This is ludicrously lucky.

My viewpoint may be skewed because this was 20 years ago when I read these and I was like 17, but I basically read no derivative fiction (ie, the various doom/m:tg/star wars/etc novels), and yet I completely loved these. A+.

I second the Stephenson recommendation. I haven't read REAMDE yet, but I hear nothing but good things. My favorite was "The Diamond Age: A Young Lady's Illustration Primer". Loved it.

Ender's Game is a classic and fabulous, even if OSC is a loon.

Now that I'm done seconding, I'd also recommend for myself:

Darwin's Radio by Greg Bear. I also liked his book Vitals... until the end.

Any of the collected-work editions of Philip K. Dick's work. Not everything he wrote was gold, but the man was a genius. These short stories spawned a host of hollywood movies, from Total Recall to Paycheck to Next to Minority Report. In a lot of cases, his short stories are dramatically different, but regardless, there are a lot of gems that have yet to be hollywood-ized that are at turns creepy, inspiring, or depressing. Good stuff.

The sci-fi premise Crichton books are entertaining as heck. Jurassic Park, Prey, Timeline, Sphere.

Nope. PvP IOs and Purples do not participate in Category conversions, to or from. They can only do out of set at the rarity level, and in-set.

Yet you can convert from Rare to Uncommon and vice versa using the category setting.

Why? The devs only know, though it's safe to say that if you could convert a crushing impact to a Hecatomb, that might have a crushing impact on the purple market.

Thanks, updated.

This is 100% why I posted the "What's your over/under" thread, because the fact that it didn't make the known issues smelled like, "Whatever, it's just converters". To me, converters are one of the two biggest changes to the game's economy since the CH was introduced. (The other being the market merge.)

I actually don't care as much as I did when I22 dropped. At I22, I had 4 characters that were straight stripped of purples/pvp ios that I couldn't PLAY until converters came out, because I had to convert my trash purples back to real ones to fill their slots again. Now, I have 30B in influence, my IOs back, and the lack of converters is actually letting me accumulate even more stuff because the prices are not converging like they will when the bug is fixed. So I'm actually profiting from the delay.

This thread is meant to be a guide, not a reminder. When the bugs are fixed I'll revise the verbage. I wrote it mostly to acquaint people with the math behind converters.

Thanks. It's definitely intended to be a useful primer. We've had other guides that let people understand things like the math behind random rolls vs buying recipes; or saving for high-end procs vs buying rolls or 2-merit recipes. Since I spent a while considering the converter scenarios and did write some code to actually get real numbers for conversion odds, I thought I'd share. Plus, there are some nasty things to avoid. I don't think people are doing a lot of "Category" conversions yet, but the dropdown resetting to "rarity" is going to be a "gotcha" for a lot of people.