To IO, or not to IO - a question

I've heard a lot of advise from others, but it kinda goes both ways, so I'm coming out and asking.

Is it more cost effective to make and slot level 15 common IOs at level 12, than to buy DOs at 12 and again at 17?

How about at level 22? Should I stick with SOs until I can start slotting level 35 IOs, or start moving things to IOs right away?

This is, of course, only about common IOs. Sets I don't usually deal with until a character is in the 40s. (Exceptions being made more on individual powers than on Characters in general.)

And this is for both Red Side and Blue Side toons.

Thanks, all!

The cost of DO's and SO's is fixed. The cost of IO's is not, so it's impossible to really say for certain. If you are going to craft them yourself, they tend to get a lot more expensive. In my experience, you can buy a crafted common IO for less than it would take to craft it yourself, especially if you have some patience. As a rule of thumb, try bidding 75% of the crafting cost and see what happens overnight.

And yes it is worth it, especially once you get to 22. A level 25 IO is pretty close to an SO, costs about the same if you leave a bid up for a couple of days, and lasts just fine until 50. I often go from level 12 to 22 too quickly to buy cheap IO's patiently.

Also don't ignore time in your decision.

It takes less time to buy SOs than to buy IOs or buy recipes and salvage and craft your own IOs but the SOs will need to be upgraded and replaced adding to their time factor while the IOs don't have to be.

I generally wait till 27 for IOs. Before that, it's just too much hassle to wait for bids to fill when I'm probably gonna be at the next tier before they're done, not to mention the bother of crafting the IOs. 30 IOs are easily good enough to last till 50.

Low level, you're pretty much only interested in Accuracy, Damage, Recharge, Endurance Reduction and maybe Run. And depending if your powersets, Resistance, Defense and Heal. Salvage-wise, I think the only thing really expensive (for a low level currently) are the Luck Charms which you'll need for Accuracy and Defense.

As for the expense, there are means to generate a million Inf starting from nothing fairly quickly working the Market. If you craft enough to slot yourself, you can pretty much memorize the low level recipes as a side effect. So then, after you've memorized a few recipes, you can craft more to sell to generate more income. It's expensive up front, but can pay for itself later.

I start crafting for the level 15 common IOs. I don't bother with the level 10s unless I'm bored.


Edit:
In terms of cost effectiveness, I'd say it depends on whether you team or solo.

If you solo, you have time to putz around the Market to make enough Inf to buy what you need to make the IOs, even if you have to buy the recipes straight off the Invention Crafting table. Plus personal performance is probably of more concern than cost (again, assuming you have cost covered).

However, if you are on a team and can rack up the XP fast, buying DOs and SOs and just making do for the duration is probably better. Any lack in performance can be covered by your team mates (hopefully).

Bidding low for IOs works really well, and at very low level there aren't so many slots to fill. And anything like Holds or Immob IOs can usually be bought right away for peanuts.

I also have lowbies chuck the useful salvage like Luck Charms into a salvage rack as they go, and when the rack fills up I bring in a character with the crafting badges, make the commonly needed IOs from levels 10-25, and put them in the IO table. Then lowbies can pick them up as needed, filling in the gaps with WW buys.

I don't see it as a big deal either way- I can make a million in an hour- but I'll try and give a better answer than that.

Crafting level 15's costs about 7000 (if you don't have it memorized) per item. You have around 22 slots (not all of which necessarily need filling) so that's around 150,000 inf in crafting costs alone. This does not include any salvage you will need to buy. Flip side, this doesn't include any huge bargains you picked up because you put the character on a shelf for two weeks.

It's roughly 250,000 inf for the level 15 and 20 DO's, if I remember. Or, to put it another way, buying thirty uncommon level 50 set IO recipes (at 500 each) and running them to a store (at 10,000 each) will get you there.

I'd tend to think the DOs are cheaper, but I make money pretty fast so I don't give it much thought.

I tend to use level 15 common IOs over DOs as I have access to a field crafter who makes em for me. (much cheaper)

As for the 22, 27 or 32 comments, I generally slot L25 commons and call them good.

My SS/fire brute hit 50 wtih his aura still slotted with the level 20s I grabbed for him at 17. His low level attacks had low level sets that stayed put. I'm slowly swapping them out for higher level versions as a when they drop.

My most reent 50 a fire/NRG blaster still has plenty of level 20-30 set IOs nabbed for cheap and frankenslotted. Maybe she will get more a more planned build eventually, but she trows fiar plenty fast enough for me on an TF I'm likely to use her on.

I too go the IO route.

The other point that I didn't see mentioned yet (hope I didn't miss it), is the
value of frankenslotted sets at L22 (L25 IO's).

An Acc/Dmg L25 set IO gives a 20% bonus to both accuracy and damage.

Grab an Acc/Dmg from a different set, and in two slots, you get 40% Acc
and 40% Damage enhancement -- This is better than you could do with +3 SO's
(1 Acc, 1 Dmg) in just two slots. Better yet, they *never* expire...

When you add in other slots you can typically get 60% Acc, 95% Dmg,
and 30+% in EndRed and/or RchRed (depending on what exactly you slot).


For me, that always trumps DO's and SO's, and I've long since stopped using
those at all...


Regards,
4

For the scrapper:

Run radios in KR versus Hellions (or CoT if thats the only option) solo. Run the safeguard and pick Lorenzo DiCosta, Wes Schnabel, or Willy Starbuck.

Run missions for that contact until you unlock the Bonefire Arc (1st mission Stop the Gang war).

Run the Bonefire Arc.

By the time you finish that arc you should have 2-3 luck charms. Post a little above the 'last 5' rate, and you should more or less double your current wealth from those sales alone.
The other arcane salvage you get will just be the bonus.

Reside the market demand for salvage is much softer, but there is plenty of inf to be made selling low level crafted common IOs. I have a step by step guide in the makrt forum guides section you can follow.

A lot depends on how fast you generally level. If you have time to wait around for bids to fill, you can definately get crafted IOs cheaper than SOs/DOs. But if you are rocketing through the levels, you aren't going to have time for bids to fill, and DOs/SOs are going to be cheaper.

Making a million inf in an hour on a low level character with no seed money will probably bore you to tears, but it isn't very hard, especially if we mean an hour of in-game time vs an hour of real world time.

One option is to put in low bids, like 1100 inf, on a bunch of level 50 SO's. In about ten minutes you can run through placing bids only on SO's that have 0 bids and at least 1 for sale. Once your tray is full, sell them all to the Vanguard store, or whatever store is handy. It's tedious, but you'll probably get your million in under an hour. You can do the same thing buying common IO recipes, but I find that works better if I spend a few minutes placing bids and then log off. When I come back the next day, the bids are full. At low levels, you can't carry many recipes, though. Just make sure you know the buy back prices of the recipes you're buying. It's a function of the crafting cost, which is displayed in the market interface. Something like 1/4 at level 50, but the ratio changes as you go down in level. It's on paragonwiki somewhere.

Here's the method I use for seed money on a new alt:

Run a few missions to get a little inf.
Go to the auction house and look for unpopular level 50 set recipes... you want to buy them for under $500 inf each.
Take the recipes to a vendor and sell them... uncommon recipes will sell for 5k and rare recipes will sell for 10k.
Repeat the process until you've achieved your goal.

I generally go to the auction house and place bids of 100-500 inf on several stacks of 10 junk recipes and then go do something else. Before I log off for the night I check my bids and take any that came through to a vendor. If I have empty auction slots available I'll place more lowball bids on stacks of 10 uncommon or rare recipes. Most of them will have filled by the next time I play that character. It can get tedious going from auction house to vendor on really low characters since your recipe inventory is so small... King's Row is the best location blueside for this with a vendor very close to Wentworth's.

Good options for this are snipe sets, immobilize sets and various debuff sets; just look for something that's selling cheap. Remember, you can sell any level 50 uncommon recipe for 5k and rare for 10k. I generally bid 400 inf on a stack of 10.

I usually get DO's at level 12, then make a bunch of level 20 IO's for level 17, because they give noticable better bonuses. 25% vs 16%.

I do all this in bulk to ease the tedium, like have one character craft them all and stick them in the SG bin for the others to use. If I wasn't making characters 10 at a time for my own private supergroups, I dont think I'd bother though.

Okay this is just my opinion and you will get other. Unless you are a very casual player and take considerable time to level (soloing a lot as oppposed to teams and Tfs etc) the very early levels slip by so fast that spending time on IOs seems wasted. If I have the salvage and recipe fine I will slot it but I don't waste a lot of time below 22 level.

Now at 22 you can purchase SOs... and you'll find that IOs give you about the same percentage. The thing is, as long as you have the funds SO stacked will continue to outshine the similar IO until level 25 .. from 25 to 27, when you can replace with 30 is the best time to start using the IOS.

I usually don't seriously start to IO out a build until around 37 level. A 40 level IO gives you more than a similar 50 level SO. from that point on I keep adding until I get my entire build enhanced and then start replacing 40 with 45 or 50 as I continue up in level myself.

I have several characters now that have every slot IOed to the highest level possible and I didn't waste a huge amount of influence buying 15, 20 and 25 levels along the way which only made getting all those 50 levels that much easier.

I'm not much for specialty enhancements and generally just use generic IOs in all slots. Yes I know it's possible to obtain a huge amount of bonuses but I design my builds for damage, accuracy, and speed of attack, If I need end reductions I slot for those as well... Using a Blaster as an example I generall have 3 slaots of damage, 1-2 slots of accuracy and 1-2 slot of Recharge depending on the powerset and what it can do on its own. Archery is very accurate even without enhancements so I use 1 accuracy there and give it 2 recharge for quicker recovery time. Others that are less accurate get 2 accuracy enhancers and only 1 recharge. With 50 level IOs this gives me 99% damage above the norm.. Now since use stamina for end why should I decrease my damage output using an IO that drops the damage from 42.4% to say 25 so i can add 20 to 25% end reduction? Again just MY view and the way i slot others are quite successful with the other methos I just think the generics are easier to use and require less time, energy and PLANNING to be effective.

Another method I've used for characters on servers away from my home server and its wealthier characters is AE tickets. There are fun interesting non-farm, story arcs for lowbies in AE. Prophecy, for example, was recently selling for 4-6 million blueside and 1 prophecy (or other rare tier 3 salvage) costs 540 tickets. Run some lowbie friendly AE stuff instead of radios or story contacts (or in addition to). Use the tickets for some rare salvage and sell it. Now your lowbie has millions and a few levels.