Life begins at 50?

So I hit 50 for the first time last night. I've been playing since early 2005, but sadly there is no "services to altoholism" badge.

I was taken with the elegance of it; I was doing the last mission of "Upon the Psychic Plane", the last arc I hadn't finished, and exited the mission still 49th. Phoned it in, got the arc reward, and *pow*.

Now I can get down to some serious badging!

However, the question is this. I've been carefully bringing all my IOs up to 50th, but it struck me I'm likely to spend much of the rest of my time on this toon exemplared - I've no interest in grinding the ITF for purples until I have to pay someone to come by and dust me. Given the shallowness of the IO effectiveness curve, should I actually be targetting 40 or so (more, cheaper, sets available at 40, for one thing) to maintain more set bonuses when exemplared? I'm mostly Frankenslotted anyway, to be fair, which helps when exemplaring.

I know this is a bit of an "it depends" question but I'd still like to hear what people think.

I like to go with level 35 IOs, really. That way, you can exemplar down pretty far, and still have set bonuses active.

No, see, you go with as many purples as possible--that way you never lose those crazy set bonuses.

It depends a lot on what you want to do, personally I would say that 33 is the "optimal" in terms of being better than SOs but keeping bonuses when exemplering down to a multiple of 5 (which most TFs do). If you run the Moofire TF a lot then 30/31s are better.

That being said the enhancement supply in the mid-levels tends to be pretty low so I'd recommend taking the 30-33 range when possible or the 34-38 range if you can't get it in 30-33.

BTW, that was my poorly worded attempt at saying, "Purples aren't as expensive as you think."

I usually don't worry about set bonuses when exemped. I look at it like this: I didn't have them when I really WAS that level, why should I need them now?

As such, I shoot for max level IOs, because I lack the patience to potentially wait for WEEKS for a level 33 Touch of Death Chance for NE Damage to drop. (as an example)

My advice to you is to spend LOTS of time in the Shadow Shard. Not running the missions, but exploring the shard itself and hunting enemies. Why? Because not only is the scenery beautiful and weird, but the enemies all have a chance to drop purples. And you don't have to exemplar and lose powers.

I get a lot of use out of Aegises, for the AoE defense, but I mostly run 'em on Invulns.

I go with level 35 as my target for IOs to help exemplar down. Below that you're generally pretty buff enough without bonuses anyway.

However, I disagree with your original premise. I have a toon that, has well over 1000 hours of play time on him. He's level 50. He's purpled and PVP'd to the gills. I run ITFs and Kahns and LGTFs and STFs as frequently as my real life allows. I just enjoy playing that toon. If I see a sister psyche starting, and I have the time... I have 6-8 toons I could throw at that TF... but one does it better and more ejoyably then the others, so that's who I bring. It's actually quite fun to forget about leveling and aquiring influence and to just say, "what's going on tonight?" and go be Shred Monkey with whoever is willing to throw me the first invite.