What are we missing?

My girlfriend and I have been playing for a while on and off. We recently started to see the Magic of IO sets and it has actually been drawing us to play more.

But, when we see stuff that we like and they go for 10-400 million I cannot help but be mind boggled on how people obtain that much money.

I feel like we HAVE to farm if we want those IO sets.

I was actually almost tempted into one of those RMT spammers, seems like the only way to obtain them.

So, what are we missing that we are only getting 0-1 recipe drop a mission and a few thousand inf?

I haven't checked if it's in the Known Issues, but I and a few others have noticed a significant drop in Drops of late.

As far as the high cost in the markets; meh, get a lucky drop and you can be rolling in the Inf, or at least get to purchase one you like. If you are almost exclusively looking at the Purples; yeah, get out the overalls if you want to afford them. Or play the market like a Wall Street Insider. There are Guides and Suggestions in the Market Forum, or so I hear tell.

Plenty of ways to make money in this game.

(1) Sell all your unneeded drops at Wentworth's.
(2) Do AE missions. Collect tickets. Turn them for random bronze rolls at level 35. Sell whatever you get (if you don't need it).
(3) Craft and sell common IO enhancements.
(4) Buy and flip recipies, salvage, etc.
(5) Collect merits. Buy a recipe that's selling for 100 mill+... sell it at WW's, make 100 mill+.
(6) Farm.

Personally, I use a combo of 1 and 3 above. I used to do 2, but realized that I need to save my AE tickets to buy rare salvage items for the IO's that I craft for my alts.

I have a character that is a dedicated IO crafter-and-seller. Just common IO's, mind you. Every time I play I log this toon in first, go to WW's, collect my money, buy more needed common salvage, craft 21 new IO's, list them, log out. I'll make 100k+ easily on each one, times 21 items that's over 2 mill each time I log in. It's surprising how quickly it adds up.

...and for those recipes that go for 100 mill+... I just save up the merits. Run story arcs. Do taskforces. Take down giant monsters.

Good luck.

While you're probably going to have to play the Market heavily and/or farm if you're looking to outfit yourselves with purples, it's possible to get good non-Purple IO sets though simple marketeering and crafting as well as common sense in-game practices. To put it simply: buy low, sell high, craft what you find as drops and put it up for only slightly more than it cost you to make it.

If you're into badges, getting the memorization badges and then crafting the reduced-price IOs is also a nice niche and one that, while low-profit compared to some, is also pratically zero risk. People who farm and/or play the Market and have the funds generally prefer to buy them off the crafter rather than earn the badges to get the discount themselves. So if you get, say, the badge for 45/50 Damage/KB and place some lowball bids for Demonic Threat Reports and Kinetic Weapons, you can craft up some level 50 Damage IOs. Since each one costs you less than it costs someone without the badge, you can sell them for a profit and still have your asking price be under that of the non-badge crafting cost. So it's a Win/Win - people have incentive to buy from you as your price is lower, but you still make inf. As I said, it's not a huge profit niche, but it's an easy way to make millions while you're offline. Playing the Market is far, far more lucrative, but requires some startup capital and that you know what you're doing.

I suggest that you just play, do story arcs and join tfs for fun. Inf will come in automatically when you play. From my experience, leveling from 1 to 50 should get you enough inf to IO your whole character with uncommon sets and a couple rares. The intention of the rare and purple IOs is for level 50s to further progress their characters without earning more levels. Therefore, don't expect to be able to get all the best IOs in a short time, as they are intended to take a long time to get. Actually, you will feel that your characters are enhanced significantly by just using uncommon IO sets, which are very affordable. You can upgrade to better sets slowly.

About farming and treating the market as a stock market, it is up to you. If you enjoy doing those things, there are guides in the market forum.

Buying recipes is usually way cheaper than buying the crafted enhancement. (note the above responses on how to make influence).

Do you have some characters that you don't play much with? Use them, ie their Market slots, to place low bids for the Set IOs that you're interested in. This way you don't tie up the characters that you are playing. If you have enough Market slots, you can place bids across a range of levels for the Set IO piece since the performance difference is tiny.

Do you have your own SG Base with storage bins? You can take your time and accumulate your Set IO pieces over time if you have secure bins to use.

I'd also suggest working on assemblng the Sets for one or two powers at a time so the project doesn't seem as daunting.

I suggest starting your IO game with something else than purples.

First off, purples are damn expensive. I recently broke 1 billion inf mark the second time but even then I prefer builds that have no purples. 99% of the time they cost too much for the benefit.

Second, if you're only starting with IOs it is better to purchase lower priced sets first. This is simply so that you don't suddenly regret your choice of an expensive IO set where something much cheaper would've been better.

You can easily IO a whole character with 100-400mil, so I don't really see the point starting to outfit your character with "ubar lootz" just because it's the best.

He can't be talking about purples. He said they only get a few thousand influence per mission. A level 50 earns that much for each enemy.

There are two sides of the puzzle. The first is demand. What kind of IO's do you demand?

1. Common IO's: the generic accuracy, damage, heal, etc. These can actually be cheaper than SO's.

2. Frankenslotting: buying inexpensive set IO's and mixing them together to get really great enhancement values but no set bonuses. Putting in acc/dam IO's instead of acc and dam SO's adds up to a free slot or two for each power. You can probably do this for 10,000,000 inf per character.

3. Good set IO's: Here we are trying to get some good set bonuses as well as good enhancement values. Pick one or two set bonuses that will really make a difference to your character (recharge and defense are popular) and buy sets to stack those bonuses. This can be expensive, especially if you are buying the most popular sets for the most popular types of powers.

4. Insane performance: purples, pvp IO's, the old LotG 7.5, and some other special pieces can add up to AV soloing madness. Of course, people used to solo AV's before IO's even existed. Still, if you spend a fortune than you can make a very impressive build.

So what is it you are trying to buy?

The second piece of the puzzle is supply. Specifically, your supply of stuff. If you play in the AE, you'll get tickets. If you play story arcs and TF's, you'll get merits. Any time you play, you get inf and drops. The more time you spend, the more stuff you get. You don't need to farm. You just need to spend time playing. More time ==> more stuff.

Of course, some ways of playing are more efficient than others. A level 50 fire/kin will earn more inf and more drops per hour running the same mission over and over than a level 40 character following Indigo and Crimson back and forth between zones, or a level 8 character trying to cross the Hollows and failing over and over.

Still, as long as you keep playing, then you'll keep getting inf. It adds up.

It adds up faster if you use the market wisely. It will also vanish more slowly when you're shopping if you use the market wisely. There are quite a few guides stickied at the top of the market/invention subforum.

I'm one of those ebil marketers everyone talks about up there. (Well, so are most of them...)

There's a bunch of stuff in the miniguides in my sig that covers a lot of what you might want to know. I'm going to mention two things here.

1) What IO's to buy?

I tend to think of the IO system as about 4 levels of expense/efficiency:

* Generic IO's. Work like regular SO's but ssssssssslightly better.
* Frankenslotting. Gets you "a couple extra slots per power" for nearly the same price as SO's.
* Moderate set bonuses. Things like Thunderstrike sets, where you can spend 10 million per set and get some pretty good results.
* Ultimate, no-expense-spared, gaudiness. Numina's, Purples, Blessing of the Zephyr, real diamonds on your tiara.

I've only gone to the third level a few times, and near the fourth level once (my attempted AV-soloing stalker). On the other hand, I frankenslotted a level 50 Scrapper once for 6 million inf for the WHOLE THING. I'm cheap, really, is what it is, and that works out well for me. If you go cheap and you want to upgrade later, you haven't spent much [comparitively.]

2) How to start out making money: If people tell you "Buy recipes, craft and sell" the next question is always "What do I buy?" Look at what you want, yourself. Now look at the max-level IO for that recipe. Probably there's a 5-10 million inf difference in price. (remember that Wents will take 10% and remember to count ALL the cost: salvage, crafting, and the recipe itself.) Buy two, craft two, slot one and sell one. If you find a good niche, you can sometimes sell a bunch, but niches collapse every once in a while. So don't get TOO far ahead of yourself.

Hope this helps.

A nice fun way to earn up Merits while not feeling like you farmed for it is to go for the Task Force Commander Accolade. It's 282 Merits and you get an accolade!

Thank you everyone for your response!

If anyone has anything else to add please do

Coming from the perspective of a non-hardcore farmer and non-hardcore marketer (I casually do both) I thought I would add my 2 inf.

The bulk of my inf comes from mostly what drops I find - whether it be in missions, or merit/ticket acquired recipes and salvage. Of course not everything will bring in the big bucks. But part of the fun for me is learning what sells and what doesn't. And even when I think I've figured out what the market is demanding, I'll always be surprised, whether I thought it wouldn't be worth anything and yet there is high demand, or when I think it will make a pretty penny, it turns out to be "worthless". But that's part of the fun for me, too.

Though the lower level characters are probably not going to bringing in the inf as quickly as the level 50's, I rarely PL my characters so most of what is acquired is acquired through the journey. I have a level 22 who has earned about 90 million, primarily from sales of various drops (definitely the exception, but it can happen). As I rarely slot any IO's until characters are closer to 50, I'm able to save up all the reward merits and either out right purchase what I might want or have them used in random rolls. Most of it is all luck, but it really only takes a couple good hits to build up your bank.

If I'm starting out on a server with no banked inf, I'll play the market buying and selling salvage. I don't truly flip salvage. I just have a set buy price, and a set sell price. I have a couple salvage that I always use and again it just takes a bit of studying to learn what works. For the level 22 character I referred to earlier, in order to start listing items and have the inf to cover the market fees I traded salvage and in a week I had almost 20 million (I normally wouldn't trade in for that much but when you're on a roll it's hard to stop!). Once I had some funds to play with I was able to start listing some acquired items. Of course there is no guarantee that this will work all the time

Another area I enjoy is AE tickets. This is where my farming comes in. I'll run some missions to save up the tickets and then go for the bronze rolls. I usually do this on my level 50's but I have some lower level characters that were able to pick up some nice recipes, too. Again there is a lot of luck involved but it just takes a couple good ones!

Hope I was able to add to this thread and wish you luck on your quest!