how/where to farm?

My highest lvl toon is 32 and I'm wondering when people talk about farming how and where they do it. In every MMO I've played prior to CoH farming consisted of killing the same type or types of mobs over and over for specific drops and selling them on the auction house. It definitely seems to be a different concept in CoX and while I'm not hurting for cash I want to start making more for my other toons, specifically my tank who's costing me more and more as I'm making it a point to make sure he has the best enhancements he can at every lvl.

Also in regards to "financing" other toons, I'm curious as to why we can't send influence to another toon of ours... I assume the inability to send cash or assets is to try to keep buying influence for real world cash at a minimum but if it's from one of my toons to another one I don't see the problem.

No, farming is the same thing here. With the new SRSLY options, it's even easier to set a map -1/x8 for one person. There are a few zones where you can "do it," but I think maps are the safest/easiest.

The inability to mail inf. really hasn't stopped the RMT folks, but the GMs have done a good job.

Marketing is more fun for some folks, vs. farming. It comes down to personal preference. Done right, each can be equally profitable.

Things drop differently here, and what they are determines how they drop. It may sound confusing, but it's not too much different, I'm sure.

Gray mobs don't drop anything.

Enhancements fall based on character level and enemy faction origin. Most Salvage drops similarly. With each, there are rare exceptions (special enhancements, special salvage). Recipes drop in a variety of ways.

In short, defeating mobs and completing missions earn rewards. Mind you, the -1/x8 makes things easier, but "less rewarding." IE, recipes will be earned at -1, because that is the level of the defeated enemy.

There are a lot of market guides stickied at the top of this forum, for reading on the flip side of the coin. And then flipping that coin.

Marketing requires somewhat of an initial investment. You have to spend money to make it. Further, there is the risk that a scheme may backfire and bankrupt you.

Farming, while it has a lower earning rate (based solely on inf. per mob), is far less risky.

In summary, I would agree that Marketeering earns more money faster, but it also loses it faster. With Farming, you'll only earn.

If your highest level char is 32, then you're not nearly ready for any of the stuff people have been talking about here. You don't have the millions it takes to play expensive Market games, and you don't have the Enhancements it takes farm big spawns. So take a step back and look at things more realistically.

Look at some of the stickied threads here for beginning Marketing tips. Things like buying stacks of level 50 rare Recipes that people don't want for 1k each, and selling them for 10k each to a vendor. Check the Snipe, Sleep, Confuse, and Fear sets. Yes, it is stupid that people will sell recipes on the Market that they could sell to a vendor for more, but it happens. A single stack of 10 will net you about 90k profit, enough for several SOs or fewer IOs. But it's easy and doesn't take too long.

After that you might move up to crafting. By memorizing a common IO recipe, you can craft it for significantly less than other people. Start by putting up some low bids for the Salvage you'll need, and let them fill overnight. Then regularly collect the salvage, craft the IOs, put them up for sale, and put in more low Salvage bids.

Very soon you'll have enough to buy all the SOs and common IOs you want. Then you'll start getting greedy. You'll want set IOs, and those cost more. So you'll graduate to crafting set IOs for a profit. Then you'll try flipping recipes, and even flipping purples. Eventually you'll come to realize that the only reason to level up a character is to get more Marketing slots. Somewhere along the way you'll lose your immortal soul, but you won't care. It has no value on the Market. Eventually you'll be back to post a screenshot of yourself sipping tea, wearing a top-hat and a monocle, and your Inf total will be over 1 billion. Then the rest of us Ebil Marketeers will welcome you to the inner circle.

As to farming, it can be very productive. I could make upwards of 60M/hour on average, and that's when purple prices were topping out around 100M. Given that half of the 30M was from purples, I'd say top end farmers can make over 100M/hour. But that's active work. You can make Inf on the Market when you aren't even logged in. So if you really want to earn boatloads of Inf, do both. But you'll want a top end farmer, which means the right AT and power sets loaded up with expensive IOs. Why yes, this is a chicken and egg problem. So start out cheap and work your way up. Level up a Fire/Kin Controller, or a Fire/Shield Scrapper, or a SS/Shield Brute, or any of the other farming oriented builds.

While you cannot directly transfer stuff between your own chars, it's easy if you have 2 accounts. Just log both in and hand stuff between chars. If you're not ready to double your monthly fee, then you can go a cheaper route. Join a SG or maybe make one yourself to store stuff. I prefer personal SGs, but I farm and play enough to make them very nice. If you're all alone, you might be able to get by if you make up 12 chars and put them all in a personal SG (with the help of a friend). Then you should have enough for an Oversight Center and Enhancement storage bin. Otherwise, join a small SG and make sure you can trust the people in it. Then you can transfer things by dropping them in storage with one char, and retrieving them with another.

I'm not sure about the market>farm unless you ONLY count inf. from mobs. As you can't really depend on what drops, you can depend on getting drops.

For example, my wife ran 4 BM farms in PI, today. She called me all thrilled at lunch. She got 3 purple recipes. 2 A.A., 1 G.A., 1 LotG (def,end), 1 Kin Com, 1 D.W., 1 Sc. Derv., some other crap inv. recipes and several rare salvage including a Chronal Skip, Photonic Weapon, Hamidon Goo. Not to mention the common recipes that sell for 100k per.

Now, i know stuff like that don't fall on every run, those 4 runs took less than an hour. She made well over 100mil in that hour. Monday, i sold an Apoco for 300mil from one run.

We run with 2 fire/kins set to 0x8 and +2x8, tho as of sunday i got an Elec/SD scrapper fully IO'd and he does great! Both charges are up on each mob and def melee at 45.96%

If people would wise up and craft their own recipes, the WW farmers would lose the inf battle very fast. LOL.

I tend to farm more. I don't really care to try to find "niches". I figure if i have 50's, why not actually play them. I know people say they only spend 5 minutes in WW, but i don't see how. It takes me longer than that just to check all the crafted vs. uncrafted recipes i get from farming. lol.

Making inf works either way and i'm not saying farming is better or worse. I just prefer to farm. I've made billions also by only selling and no flipping req. I can usually list everything i get for 222 and net hundreds of millions lol.

One of my big marketeers [a couple billion generated at various points] is under level 20.

To farm for big numbers you pretty much have to be farming at level 50.

To market for big numbers you just need a little patience. .. and you need to grow your wealth.

I think of the stages as "one million, five million, fifty million, hundreds" but I don't market much above a couple hundred million on any given character, because I'm cheap and stuff.

To get to a million, you can sell unloved set recipes, or SO's that people have thrown up on the market. You can do this in about an hour if you've got a vendor near Wents.

To get to five million you can buy Tier 3 inspirations, combine them into something more attractive (three damage into one defense, for instance) and make 100K or more relisting them. Or you can buy common salvage that's in low supply for 10K (in stacks of 10) and sell it for 51K or 101K or however much you think you can get. You can buy generic crafted IO's for 5 or 10K and sell them for 180K. This is something you can do in a couple nights.

From five million to fifty million you can memorize a recipe or two, or you can carefully buy a couple of cheap level 50 recipes and their salvage, craft them and sell them. Once those sell, buy a couple more and continue in that way. (There are mistakes you can make at this point which will cost you money. Read guides.) I'm talking about "a million for the recipe, half a million crafting cost, trivial for salvage, sell for five to ten million."

Fifty million you can start looking at better deals- things that cost five million for the recipe, a million and a half for the salvage, and sell for fifteen or twenty million.

A couple hundred million is usually where I stop playing the market (If one of my characters needs more inf than that, usually I'll just transfer it) but when I did play in this sandbox, briefly, I did things like buy purples for 160 million and sell for 240 million.

That's all neat Fulmens, but that's gotta take time also. lol. That's why i'd rather just hop on my /kin and blaze thru a couple farms, and list cheap and sell fast. lol. I don't have the patience to look, bid, buy, look for salvage, bid, buy, craft, relist. lol. But that's me.

Top Doc and Fury Flechette are wise.

But it shouldn't take someone saying so for people to realize it.

The times when I have found niches it was from trying to market what I thought was a good drop. Get there and it's not selling for anything. Check the crafted version and voila -- profit opportunity.
Playing w/ Mids' is a way to find out what 'should' be a good recipes.

I can testify that marketeering isn't as hands-off as people are making it out to be. I market on 8 characters red and blueside, and just logging all of them in and out twice a day takes well over an hour. This is after I've employed every trick in the book to streamline the process and shave off seconds. You need transaction slots, inventory slots, capital and niches to reduce risk. Using transaction slots to marketeer means you have less to sell your own loot and lowball for stuff. There is risk and unlike farming, you can actually lose money. Marketeering is not superior to farming as a source of income at least at the top end of the scale.

Quote:

Originally Posted by eryq2 If people would wise up and craft their own recipes, the WW farmers would lose the inf battle very fast. LOL.

I used to be one of those wise players; I would craft everything myself and lowball all my items. I even sold SOs to the correct store. These days, I make so much that I don't care. I buy crafted purples and PvP IOs. I think crafting is profitable precisely because you are not selling to poor people; there's no money to be made from poor people. You are selling to people who can afford to pay dozens of millions in markup and don't care, and that's the only customer base worth chasing.

A bit of an idea outside the box would be PvP IO Farming. You don't need any real "Build" to do it, just 2 characters within 3 levels of each other. The average drop will yield you 30 - 100 million with more than a few netting you 200-500 million with a handful yielding you 1 billion plus per sale. Its tedious but you don't need any specific build, no influence, no IO's, no risk involved just two separate characters logged in at the same time.