UberGuy

I don't really understand the lack of ability for non-VIPs to remove the store icon. I mean, I can certainly imagine someone thinking it's a good idea, but I also think that someone was deeply mistaken about that good idea.

There aren't really many rules of thumb, but I can tell you the rules I do use. The list is sadly somewhat complex, but I do have it mostly memorized now.

For recipes, you are almost always safe selling level 50 Common recipes to an NPC and getting more than you can get on the market, primarily because they are, well, so common. However, if you craft them, you might make more money selling them. This is only true for some of the enhancement types - damage, recharge, endurance, accuracy, healing, and end modification all tend to sell for several hundred thousand inf on the market, though the price wanders over time.

There's no hard and fast rule for what Uncommon or Rare recipes are worth on the market, and whether or not it's worth your time to try and to sell them. However, NPC vendors always pay you a pittance for Uncommon and Rare recipes - they pay you far more for Common ones. Basically, if I sell an Uncommon or Rare recipe to an NPC, it's because the alternative was that I planned to delete it.

What a recipe is worth depends heavily on what set bonuses it provides. In general, things that give +defense to melee attacks, lethal/smash damage or ranged attacks is valuable, as are things that give +5% or more recharge. These are especially valuable if the bonus in question comes within a number of slots that people might consider investing in a power anyway. For example, lots of people would five or six slot attacks anyway, so a set that gives +recharge for five slots and +defense for six is probably highly desirable, and therefore valuable on the market. A set that gives +defense in the 5th slot of a resistance power is probably not as valuable, because not many people find the need to five-slot their shields outside of set bonuses.

Sets that provide +HP or +regen are also popular, but probably less so than +defense and +recharge. Sets that provide damage resistance, mez resistance, or debt protection are often junk on the market.

Sets than enhance Defense, Resistance, Damage, and Healing are very popular, because most characters can make use of these. Sets that enhance Holds and Disorients are more popular than sets that enhance most other mezzes, because powerts that Hold and Disorient are relatively common. Sets that enhance Snipes, Confusion, Fear, and Taunt are not very popular, even when they give good set bonuses, because the number of characters that can use them is limited.

Edit: Very Rare sets always worth selling (assuming you don't want to use them. While some, like Sleep and Confuse sets are relative stinkers within the price range of all purples, even the cheapest of them will usually sell for a few million inf, and the most valuable ones (usually the damage sets) will sell for hundreds of millions - the best sellers are closing on 1B.

Most common high-level 50 salvage, especially Tech salvage, is so incredibly oversupplied that if you try to sell it for more than an NPC would buy it from you for it will take longer to sell than you might like. However, once again NPCs buy it for a pittance relative to what a level 50 earns in combat, so this doesn't really mean it's worth selling it to the NPC. I sell my common salvage for badges, not profit, because at 1000 sales and every 2000 sales after that up to 7000 sales adds a bonus market slot.

High-level Uncommon salvage can range from no more expensive than Common salvage to several hundred thousand inf, and the prices are unstable. There's truly no rule of thumb here at all.

Most highl-level Rare salvage currently sells for between 1 and 2M inf. These prices are fairly stable within this price range. Some mid- and low-level rare salvage also falls in this range. However, some mid- and low-level salvage only costs a few thousand inf, because it is not used in many recipes that people like to craft.

Also, something very important to note in relation to this thread is that the Inf prices have been divided by four over what they were when this thread was previously active. A Rare piece of Incarnate salvage can be created using 100 Threads, one of each Uncommon salvage, and 25 million Inf (this was originally 100M Inf.)

If the RNG is being unkind to you (and I'm fairly confident, based on a lot of parsing of my own reward logs over around 600 trials that it really is random), I think the above method or spending Empyrean Merits are both reasonably accessible methods for getting a Rare component to craft a Tier 3 ability. However, if you are having bad luck and want Tier 4 abilities, I recommend you use the above Threads/UC/25M method to create rares, and save Empyrean Merits to create Very Rare components.

As mentioned, though, bear in mind that VRs, while sometimes nice, are not usually nearly as much nicer as they are harder to get though just about any method.

Honestly, I wish they'd fix the need to foot massage the riot cops at the hazard zone gates for my benefit. That wasn't always like that - years ago you could click on their torsos or heads and it worked fine. Then after some release or other it shifted down, and has been that way ever since.

There are a lot of "click on door" things in this game that irritate me. For example, why are so many doors such that I must only click on closed doors to pass through them? Why are only some doors like this? Why do I have to wait for a train to arrive to chose my destination, forcing me to stand there staring at the train door, waiting for it to arrive? (I realize that this is a special case of not being able to click on an "open door". The fact that this "door" has a long open period and a short closed period attached to opening a pick list makes it particularly obnoxious.)

I would like to see all these things made simpler and more user friendly. I imagine a new player encountering these things and wondering, "if this is how doors work, what on earth is the meat of the game like?"