Red Side Market Defeats Me :p

(Admittedly, mostly because I don't spend enough time working it for influence. Anyway.)

I've grown pretty used to outfitting blue-side characters however I want. Admittedly, I've only "purpled out" one blaster, but I have multiple scrappers and tankers with sofcapped builds of various sorts... probably 15 or 20 toons built out how I want them to be, give or take a couple of the harder-to-get IOs. And I tend to buy a certain amount of that at the "buy it NAO" price if I can (if it's not too expensive), just so it doesn't take so long to outfit my character. But I also outfit characters with IO sets in the 27-33 range for exempting purposes, and that often requires bidding and waiting a week. Still, I know those bids will fill.

Meanwhile, I have a level 50 brute. Last Summer or Fall I had over 2 billion infamy on my brute, and set about "purpling out" the character. Only I ran out of influence very quickly due to the high cost of purples redside. I set about earning more infamy and eventually I had a 5-piece set of Hectacomb and a 5-piece set of Armageddon for my troubles.

I've been in a holding pattern since, waiting until I had the infamy so that I could respec into a better build and fully IO out the character properly. This morning, with over 1 billion infamy in hand, I tried to do that... and including bids I have in for 5 pieces of Gravitational Anchor (isn't that supposed to be one of the cheap purple sets?), I'm back down to 8 million infamy.

The build I'm working from has me placing a 5 piece set of Apocalypse in Gloom and a 5 piece set of Ragnarok in Dark Obliteration... which admittedly is overkill and will probably never happen. Even so, I've spent more than 3 billion on this one character and my build still isn't quite complete.

I don't think I've ever spent even as much as 2 billion on a hero. Maybe that much on my purpled blaster, who has 3 different damage sets, but I bought most of those purple recipes last Summer and Fall when they seemed to be cheaper. Is it just my imagination, or have purples continued to go up in price despite what everyone predicted with the coming of the new mission settings?

Anyway, no big insights here, just kinda sticker shock from price of nice sets redside. I'm mostly reluctant to put bids in for stuff at lower levels too if it isn't already for sale, a lot of stuff takes 1-3 months for one recipe to pop up for sale at that level.

Time to earn more infamy I guess.

I'm so used to redside prices that when I glance at heroside I feel like everything is a bargain

(a few exceptions though, notably the pvp IOs)

So I spent all my play time yesterday and today on my top two villains, and I hardly did anything.

I respec'd my level 50 DM/EA brute and, with 1 billion influence, tried to completely redo the character according to my latest planned build. This involved a lot of buying recipes and waiting for salvage bids to go through, and buying salvage from AE, and running a couple of missions in AE to get more tickets (ran the Mercedes Lackey arc, it was okay, and later the "Relativity Be Damned" arc which was a great deal of fun).

I also respec'd my 43 bots/dark MM. She had about 600 million, and I only spent about 200 million fixing her up, although it still took much of the weekend to accomplish.

Anyway, my build for my brute was fatally flawed. I had decided to use power sink and dark consumption both and forgo Fitness/Stamina entirely, which allowed me to pick up some other powers I wanted such as most of my EA powers and my own personal widow pet. I was also trying to build in as much smashing/lethal defense as I could, which still amounted to something less than 30%, and meant I was running six toggles with tough and weave. The flaw would have become evident eventually I think, but was extra obvious when I was exempted down to 26 for the Mercedes arc (I was set to +4 at the time). I was bleeding endurance all over the place, even as I chewed blue inspirations like candy. It wasn't pretty.

I spent some time trying to rework my new build to factor in as much recovery as possible, but then I decided to give up. Even in the best of circumstances, a long fight was going to be a problem. Sooo... I went back to the drawing board, stuffed Stamina back into the build, and after debating with myself for a while gave up on the idea of much defense at all and dropped Weave. It's not such a great power anyway, and I still wanted Power Surge and my widow pet. Had to get rid of Dark Consumption (not really needed with stamina and power sink) and touch of fear (nice power but I rarely used it, and I have midnight grasp to freeze an enemy anyway).

Then I used two vetspecs to disassemble my new build and sell off parts of it, which eventually returned about 250 million back to me (still got some stuff for sale, of course). And I spent a lot more time bidding on recipes and the salvage to craft 'em. Also rolling bronze rolls to raise more money.

I still don't like the redside market, but I finally have my brute to where I'm pretty happy with her. She's still pretty squishy, but that's normal for EA anyway I guess. She has a nice 1-2-3-4 attack of shadow punch, smite, air superiority and siphon life, and can throw in quite a bit of AoE with Soul Drain, Dark Obliteration, Power Sink and Lightning Field.

I ran through the Relativity arc set for 4 people at +2, and I only managed to get myself killed once, which is okay solo against large groups of Arachnos I suppose. I didn't need a single blue inspiration that whole time, so that problem's solved, but I ate a lot of purples and greens.

And two idiots begged me multiple times to PL them. I put one of them on ignore.

That was my weekend. ^_^

do away with tickets for salvage and make AE drop a combo of tickets and salvage.

this will lead to more salvage on the market and ensure that all tickets are used on recipes.

actually, just make AE give regular drops.







also, merge the eff'n markets already.

Well, I did roll on a bunch of common salvage and throw it up on the market, only to save myself from paying over 150,000 for a scientific supply or waiting 3 hours for my bid to fill. But yeah, it's clear that people redside are using AE more than blueside. Rare salvage is comparatively cheap, usually around 1 million, often even less, while uncommon salvage is remarkably expensive and in short supply.

But just overall, redside suffers from lack of supply. Conceptually the whole black market thing makes no sense to me anyway. It's not like criminals aren't allowed to buy stuff from regular stores in real life. Usually a black market sells stuff even cheaper, avoiding government taxes or regulations or price fixes, or simply selling stuff that isn't legal to sell or is cheap knockoffs of name brands. But basically, cheaper and more choices, not more expensive and less choices. And the Rogue Isles must be the only country in the world where no government-approved stores exist, period.

In a real world you wouldn't prevent criminals from buying at a legitimate market, you'd worry about heroes tempted to buy stuff cheaper off the black market. A black market would exist to circumvent the official government-sanctioned market (doesn't exist redside). And Wentworth's wouldn't hesitate to open up in whatever market they were allowed into.

The first time I saw the price of purples redside I cried.

When I put a buy-it-NAO bid in and it took two weeks to fill, I cried again.

Combine markets. Combine markets for great justice.

WARNING: I bold names.

For several days I've had bids on two Siphon Insight accuracy/endurance/recharges in the 35-44 range for my 43 (now 44) MM. I suppose these are pool C's and midlevel range so yeah, I know that they're going to be hard to get, especially redside. But tonight a level 38 crafted popped up...

...and I was the first one to ever buy one.

That kind of illustrates for me how woefully inadequate the redside market is. I know they're a "newer" recipe, but still...