Robotech_Master

Hey, I didn't see this post until just now, but the other day I actually did add a section on the referral program to my guide. An interesting thing about it is that buying and applying a game expansion apparently counts as a month for the purpose of this referral program. So you could earn yourself a free month by inviting a friend who hasn't played yet, and sending him the code from one of the older $5+shipping game packs.

They are? When I was last playing, the Training Room *was* the beta server.

Actually, in terms of inf per ticket, some of the highly-demanded uncommons (such as Carnie Mask) are a better deal for marketeering than rares.

One thing to note is that there are certain yellow sets that are cheap to buy, cheap to build, that you can stack for some better-than-nothing albeit small bonuses while you're working on being able to afford "real" sets. Smashing Impact is such a set for melee; Thunderstrike is one for ranged. They're cheap enough overall that you don't have to feel too bad about just dropping something more expensive in over them later (though usually I still do).

You can usually get orange sets for non-attack powers pretty cheaply as recipes, though you'll find that crafting them calls for a rare salvage apiece that can cost 2 million Inf.

If you're going to slot yourself up with sets, it's smarter to build them yourself; you'll end up paying several times what it would cost to do that if you buy pre-made. (Though on the other hand, selling pre-made is a decent way to earn yourself the cash you need for better sets.)

It nets you the same 400 per month that paying $15 a month does, along with the extra time of enjoying all the paid benefits; it just does so more cheaply.

Of course, you can only run about five of them at once before you run out of token slots for the day.

I still tend to use the same method of teaming I have in the past: /search and find people who are free or LFG, and send them a /tell telling them what I'm doing and asking if they'd like to team up. Of course, it works better on the servers that have more people on them, such as Virtue.

In regard to unlocking reward tiers, it would be more cost-effective from a real-money standpoint to buy these game-time cards instead. Each one is two months' worth, which unlocks two months of reward tokens, and it's only $18.50. (How can they sell them so cheap?)

They must have changed something since then. I had the same experience as you, originally, but I started my account when the game first launched. Someone who replied where I posted this guide on the CoH livejournal community told me that he found the original CoH disc and Good vs. Evil are now mutually exclusive when he set up a pair of accounts for friends using older boxes recently.

Well, I just checked and it still shows $18.50 here. Perhaps you checked the wrong place?

Regardless, I snagged three of them on Friday.

Well, I have a number of 50s, including an Incarnate Fire/Fire Tanker who goes through most normal mobs with very little effort. I was wondering if there are certain specific things you have to do in AE, certain maps you run or that you choose to run them in a certain way.

I manage to make a few million here and there by crafting and reselling, but I look at the prices on things in the market now and can't help feeling like I'm playing with pocket change, and I'd really like to know what to do to start making the real money.

It's inflation, isn't it? Farmers make huge amounts of money, and outbid everybody else, and drive the prices up. And then ordinary people feel like they have to start farming too just to buy the stuff they want that farmers have caused to be priced well out of reach otherwise.

I sure hope the developers can do something about that.

Here's the Mids file for the build I finally ended up going with, after consultation with a friend.

One thing my friend pointed out to me: if you're wanting to IO-set up a L50 Tanker on the cheap, level stacking 3 or 4 sets of Level 50 Multistrike IOs for your PBAoEs and 4 or 5 sets of Level 50 Crushing Impact on your melee attacks is remarkably inexpensive. (If you craft them yourself, anyway—they're all pretty cheap to buy and rely on only common or uncommon salvage rather than bank-breaking rares. Conversely, I can say that crafting and selling them on the market is a good way to triple or quadruple your money pretty quickly.)

This slotting scheme gives you some decent bonuses to defense and accuracy, and even some psionic resists for doing level 45-and-up content, including the Incarnate stuff, and doesn't gimp you much worse than if you had SOs in the slots for exemplaring down. And it's cheap enough that if you later come into some of the much pricier Scirocco's Dervish or Obliteration sets, you can just drop them in over the cheap stuff without feeling too bad about not respecing to pop them back out again.

Another friend reminded me that you're not limited to just one specific build per character, thanks to the ability to keep an alternate build you can swap into at a trainer. The original idea was to be able to optimize separate PvE and PvP builds, but it could just as easily be used for a totally-Defense-based versus Resist-optimized build, a solo-friendly vs. team-friendly build, or even a level-50-set-slotted-to-the-max Incarnate-adventuring build vs. an IOs-only exemplar-friendly build. I'll have to think about that some. I might want to do something like that for my second slot, and you might too.