Purple's

*digs out my economy worksheet*

Please note the numbers that follow DO NOT account for the I16 low level buff to XP earning.

Level from 1 to 50 solo and versus even cons.
You would expect 1321 recipe drops
OF which 258 would be uncommon Sets and 32 rare
During which you earn 27.4 million inf from mob defeats

Taking into the 30-50 levelling only
966 recipe drops
189 uncommon
24 rare
and earn 26.6 million inf from mob defeats

This is more than enough to fit out a character in general terms, if only there was a way, that maybe you could sell the set IOs you dont want, and using the inf generated buy set IOs that you want, but dropped for someone else.

Obviously teaming and fighitng higher cons boosts the XP/drop ratio and reduces these numbers.

How standard (common) IOs are in need updating, you have lost me there.

Hax!

When Merits were introduced, I was certain it would cause Purple prices to rise, so I bought a ton. I did miss the AE effect (was too busy figuring out how to maximize ticket earnings), but still had my stash from pre-i13 buying.

Now, I fully expect Purple prices to drop, especially since I plan on moving my farming from AE to Ouro/TF's. Thus, as of two days ago, my stash of 60 some Purples went onto the market.

When I get home, I may post pics of what I paid for them, and what they sell at, just to tease the OP.

Careful. They probably won't drop just yet due to the apparent bug reducing recipe drops.

I mean, please go sell the ones I have lowball bids out for.

Y'know what happened when Merits were introduced?

People went off to farm farm, farm, farm, farm, farm, farm for them.

This typically involved exemplaring down.

Result?

People stopped playing level 50 content.

Result?

Purple drops declined sharply.

Result?

Prices on purples started shooting up.


Want to make purples purchasable with merits? Okay.

First of all, they would have to cost much, much more than the amount you've suggested. So you'll have to disabuse yourself of the 250/300 pipe dream. That'll never happen.

Still want them to be purchasable with Merits? Okay. When made so, large swaths of the player base would immediately go and farm farm, farm, farm, farm, farm, farm for merits. Likely more than we've ever seen do that before. And, considering that you can now get XP while exemplared, there'd be no reason left for these players to do level 50 content at all. Thus, a "natural" purple drop would be a once-in-a-blue-moon occurrence.

This would ensure that market prices for purples would remain ridiculously high, with scant few--far fewer than we see now--ever becoming available. The only guaranteed way remaining for a player to gain purples would be--dare I say it--farming merits.

Cue the flood of complaints: The game is just a grind now. I can't find a team. All anyone wants to do is farm merits! Doesn't anyone just want to... PLAY THE GAME?!

You think it's bad now? Make purples available thru merits and it'll get many times worse. How do I know? 'Cuz those of us who've paid attention to the market have already seen it happen. We saw what happened to high-level recipes when Merits were introduced. Supply went down, not up. Prices went up, not down. And farming merits became the thing to do.

There is no reason to think that repeating the error would garner a different result. If that's what you think, well... Einstein had something very accurate to say about that line of reasoning.

Which means they should sell for more than when it gets fixed.

Already there! (Unless it is a mez set, only have Hold set up for sale)

Fail on an epic scale? Really?

The core "Bread and circuses" SO's are far more affordable than they've ever been. People used to repeat the Katie Hannon Task Force because you could get ten SO's from the first mission. Ten SO's were precious at level 30... buying them at a store costs (I believe) 300,000 inf.

Which is roughly "thirty midrange common salvage" if you sell at Wents for 1 inf each.

I don't miss the days when people PUT THEMSELVES INTO DEBT ON PURPOSE TO EARN MORE INF SO THEY COULD HAVE GREEN SO's. I don't miss running to five stores to sell ten enhancements so I could maximize my return.(Did you know that a Magic SO sells for 60% of buy value to a magic store, but only 40% to any other store?) I don't miss accidentally buying five of the wrong SO, selling them back, buying three of what I wanted and being TOO BROKE to buy the other two. Have you ever had an empty slot that you couldn't afford to fill? Have you ever bought DO's because that was what you could afford? I have.

And in the same game, at the same time, a level 42 character had literally more influence than they could ever spend.

AAAAGGGGGHHHHH!!!!!!!!!!!

Sorry to burst into this conversation, but reading what I quoted made something inside of me snap like a twig. Please, please help me understand something.
..and I am in a rage, so, if my writing is not understandable, I apologize in advance.


If IOs, and IO sets, are not needed....then please, please, please explain why when you go to the different AT forums, the builds there REQUIRE LOTG recharge IOs, plural, more than one, they REQUIRE Numinas, they REQUIRE every single IO set out there that is so expensive you are required to have billions and zillions of influence points, and I know I am being dramatic, but I feel dramatic about this...not about the cost...sellers sell at the amount buyers buy, but about the necessity of the sets

Case in point....real life example here, I would love to make a Shield scrapper...I happily went to the scrapper boards to do some homework on the subject, and found out Shields demands IOs...it will not perform well without them

Explain to me, how, in one post these IOs are REQUIRED, or your build will not work, and in other posts your builds will work WITHOUT IOS!!!!!!!!!

Which is it?????

If I go build a Dark/Shield, and solo her with a build filled with Crushing Impacts and Common IOs ....will I die in every fight because I don't have Numinas, and LOTG recharges, four of them, and, and, fight with no accuracy because I had to six slot a set of expensive IOs to get a tiny defensive bonus which I can't see, even being as rotten in math as I am, being large enough to make a difference and, and, oh Fudgesticks....my confusion over this has been building and building and I, I, did a Nova.

If someone can explain this whole mess to me, send me a PM because I am sure I am the only player here who is bitterly confused by this "You NEED IOs, You DON'T need IOs thing...

I played this game before there was a Wentworths. The builds people played were SO, DO, and TO, builds, and they worked. Now, these same builds REQUIRE a bloody fortume in IOs or they will not perform.

...Oh cornflakes, I am going to go into the game, and punch some Hellions in the nose with one of my new toons...but....oh noes my new toons just have TOs in their build, the Hellions will hit them in the nose instead.

Lisa-Leaves thread muttering something about bandaids and LOTG..four of them..yes,that made an impression on me.

...and...thanks for letting me rage. I truly needed to express myself on this matter.

I return this thread back to you all.

Perhaps if they water them and put them out in the sun they will grow larger?

You are doing this wrong.

You should not be equipping yourself with drops. You're doing that much right. However, you are approaching everything else about this incorrectly, by which I mean "in some of the most uninformed and inefficient ways possible."

Purples, are, fundamentally, a means of continuing development of your existing level 50 character. This is partially evident in how they cannot be slotted until you are actually level 50. They are explicitly for level 50 characters only.

There's a strong implication there. What is implied by it is that to earn things that represent continuing advancement for a level 50, one must continue to play a level 50. Why is this an important thing to point out? Because it works. I have nine level 50s. Six of them are purpled. Seven of them have more than one billion inf in actual, liquid funds on hand. How did I do that? By playing the game at 50 a significant amount of time since I9 came out.

Earning purples through play is not for people who get to 50 and then want to run off and play a new lowbie. However, those people can obtain them - they have to be willing to use the market as their primary earning tool.

So, in summary:

• Do not assume purples should be available for when you hit 50 and want to purple out. The expectation is that 50s still have work to do to obtain them.
• Do assume that the way you can bypass the expectation above using the market
• Do not assume that RMT is how people buy purples. See the two bullets above for why doing so is no different that people who pay for PL services.

The folks in the scrapper forums have a bias towards high performance toons. That's not saying they aren't helpful, but often times they build with an eye for optimal performance not the budget conscious. With that in mind, many of the ideas they have can be put to good use on even lower priced builds.

I have a friend of mine who rolled and played a DM/Shield scrapper to 50 just using SOs, and he didn't find it gimped at all. So YMWV.

I'd suggest two things. First, go back over there and tell them what you're trying to accomplish and what kind of budget you have. I,along with several others, post budget oriented builds all the time. Second, if they don't help you, shoot me a PM. I have soft capped two shield characters without using a single purple, a single LoTG,a Miracle/Numina/Regen Tissue unique, etc. and the characters perform very well. You don't have to spend a fortune to get a good character.

We already told you which it is.

You do not need IOs to play this game.

IOs are a luxury. They can provide a massive degree of luxury. However, anyone who is telling you in posts or guides that you need them is misleading you. Do not listen to them.

If you are heavily invested in highly powerful characters you will undoubtedly want IOs, and having them will increase how much you enjoy playing those characters. But no matter how much you want IOs that is not the same as needing IOs.

Edit: If you are on the Scrapper boards and see a statement like "you need IOs for a Shield Scrapper", I suspect you have missed some context. Statements like that are usually extended to mean "you need IOs for a Shield Scrapper to solo ArchVillains" or "you need IOs for a Shield Scrapper to defeat the aggro cap's worth of +3 foes". You do not need to be able to achieve those levels of performance to play this game. Some of us think it's a lot of fun to do so, but that's not the same thing. And you can be sure that most of us who achieve those levels didn't pay RMT suppliers to do it.

No it doesn't. I have a shield tank at 50, who is purely common IOs (level 25-35) which is is eqivalent to SO slotting. (but cheaper over the levelling career)

My wife has a shield scrapper at 50, with the same. As an aside these were our irst two level pacted characters that we took from 1 to 50.

Shield performs perfectly fine in any setting with just SO slotting.

If you want an SO only shield build ask for that, and people will oblige. The reason most builds on the forums are IOs are because that is what people ask for advice on.

Really these days who needs to be told that SO slotting for typical attacks is 1-2 acc, 3 damage 0-1 endrec 0-1 recharge ?
Resist toggles 1 endrec 3 damres
Defence toggles 1 endrec 3 defbuff

I mean really who needs to ask that ?

Yeah, because RMTs are 5+ year vets with badge-laden characters.

Especially people like me, who lacks a single one of the popular farming characters, and who has a whopping two accounts to do high-volume farming with.

You're showing yourself to be epically uninformed about some really common sense things. Worse, you're showing a really bad side by reacting by efforts by others to inform you by name-calling and strong resistance to consider they might be telling you the truth.

IOs are not required to play the game. They're required to reach certain build goals... but such builds are not necessary for a character to perform well enough in the game.

Min-maxers/power gamers have been saying "X is a MUST" for years... long before IOs came into the picture. But anyone who says, "you NEED X IO to play" is wrong. Just like anyone who used to say, "you NEED Hasten" was wrong, or, in many cases, Stamina.

SOs work just fine. The game's still balanced around them. IO sets are meant to be something you build over time as "icing on the cake". I still have 50s slotted with SOs and they function just as well on teams as they did before IOs were introduced. Would I like to "trick out" those characters with sets? Sure, and I plan to do so... but I'm in no hurry.

And it hasn't really changed since then. The mobs are the same, with the same attacks, same damage, same effects. So why would an increase in performance be required?

Simple answer: It just isn't. And my SOed characters prove that every time I play them. I generally don't even bother with IOs until level 32, and usually ignore sets until the 40s. If IOs were a requirement, I wouldn't be able to do that, right?

Ergo: IOs are not a requirement.

Who cares about fair it won't happen.

They are.
Anyone with half a brain and an ounce of perseverance can get as many purples as they can slot, and then some.

Then go make your own game, cause that's never happening here.

Um, why did you make Purple possessive? /confused

Did you mean "Purples" as in plural of a singular Purple?

While it's true you can get by with SOs, it's really beside the point. Just the varied distribution of bonuses that IO sets provide make characters using them much more fun to play. The combination of acc, damage, recharge, end red combined into a typical 5 or 6 slot set is almost equivalent to 7 or 8 slots of SOs. Plus they never wear out.

However -- and here's the real point -- you can get sets like that for dirt cheap. Sets like Focused Smite, Multi-Strike, Thunderstrike, Detonation, etc., can be purchased at level 30 or so, and will make your character hum like a top. Sets like Crushing Impact can also be relatively cheap and provide 50% of the benefit that purples do, for a tiny fraction of the price.

You don't need any LotG: +Recharge to get a character that plays really well solo and on teams. If you need more Recharge, get Hasten. It's better than five LotG: +Recharge.

Unless you are trying to solo AVs your character doesn't need to be tricked out with 5 billion inf worth of purples and rares. You can have a very fun character by "Frankenslotting" (combining IOs from different sets to max out recharge, end reduction, etc., on a power), which can be extremely cheap.

I recommend outfitting characters with uncommon IO sets you can find for cheap starting about level 30. Identify some rares that you like and put in reasonable bids for them after you've got uncommons slotted in those powers. Over time (days and weeks) you'll pick up those rares at reasonable prices.

But that presumes you're playing your character over weeks and months. If you want it all to happen in a few days, you'll have to pay through the nose.

When we focus our attention on the things we want rather than what we can get, we make ourselves feel deprived and anxious. Just roll with the game, play to have fun, and you'll get purple drops when you least expect it.

That is very much not beside the point. The very fact that you raise it clouds the distinction between very nice to have and required.

No matter how nice these things are, they are not required. They aren't even required for the game to be fun. That the game is more enjoyable with these benefits does not mean the game is not enjoyable without them. Some of us played the game for years before IOs even existed, including the gap between I6's ED and I9's introduction of IOs. Some of us enjoyed it. Liking the game better with IOs does not make them required.

Saying IOs are required implies that you cannot succeed at defeating foes without them, that it cannot be enjoyed sufficiently without them, or that you will find yourself generally excluded from teams if you do not obtain them. None of those conditions is true in general.

Consider this mutation of your quote.

How odd. I have bought several full purple sets on the market since I've been playing, and I have not and would not ever go near RMT. I've also gotten probably close to 2 dozen purple drops along the way. Frankly, it sounds to me like you want all the best gear without putting in the required effort. That's the whole point of ULTRA-RARE gear. Sorry, but you are not going to be able to purple out all your toons playing a couple hours a week.

Regular set IO's are very affordable and accessible to any player putting in a decent amount of effort. All you have to do is play the game, use the market intelligently, and you should have no trouble acquiring set IO's.

Me too!
I just looked and I only have 14 sets across my 3 top level toons.


Ohh wait, no I disagree they are just rare enough, or maybe a little too common