Ele/Fire Brute, desperate for some guidance.

I'm an Electric/Fire brute hovering around 27 with no other alts or sources of income. Honestly, I am completely clueless when it comes to this game since I quit previous to the Black Market truck and the invention system altogether.

Although I want to min-max some in the future, right now I'm struggling with the new enhancements and whether or not I should pursue them. I hear something about IOs at 30, but I'm unsure if people mean actual enhancements made from inventions or the sets. Moreover, I'm not even certain what's worth anything when it comes to recipes.

Anyway, I've been reading the literature but second opinions are nice. What should I be buying and slotting?

Well, first off, welcome back, and welcome to the forums!

Secondly, you may want to ask down in the Brutes forum for some help. They tend to be more familiar with the kind of slotting and powers that you'll want on a Brute-specific character.

Secondly, you'll want to let them know what exactly you'll want to do with this Brute. What do you want to be able to stand up to? What do you want to be killing? What will your difficulty settings be for your missions? What problems are you having with your Brute now? Giving us some details about what you want will help us to give you good information for where you want to go.

Secondly, you may want to take a look around for Mid's Hero Builder. It's a great tool that will let you plan out a build. You can even export your build from it, and get feedback on it from other poster's here.

Obligatory Paragon Wiki link.

Seriously, anything you want to know about the game now is there.

I'm going to talk about "what to buy" first and "how to afford it" second. WALL OF TEXT CRITS FOR 1900 HP!

There's a lot of different people who do things a lot of different ways. I divide things up into levels one way, and progress through the levels one way, while other people do it differently.

I organize like this:

Level 1) "store" enhancements. They go yellow and red, they never get any better after level 22, but you can always get them and they're pretty cheap.

Level 2) Generic IO's. These can be slotted anywhere, you can USUALLY get them pretty cheap with some planning ahead, and once you've slotted them they never go bad, never NEED upgrading. Level 50's are a little better than level 30's but not enough that you'll have to stop for ten minutes when you train up to buy new enhancements. Used to be you could get them in advance for 55K or less with a week or two of patience. These days, I don't know if you still can.

Level 3) Frankenslotting. This is where you buy cheap, unloved set IO recipes and put them together to get around 30% better results in your powers. How does that work? One Acc/Dam/Rech IO is "half a generic" of accuracy, half a generic of damage and half a generic of recharge. Two of them are one accuracy, one damage and one recharge in two slots. Sort of like cheap hamidon enhancements that you can slot from level 32 or so, up. (or even lower!)

WARNING 1: These are in low supply villainside. You may need to wait weeks to get some of them.
WARNING 2: Not all powers take all sets! If you look here and use ctl-F to find "Extreme Measures", you may see some good-looking recipes for really cheap. Unfortunately, they are really cheap because they only work in snipe powers. So you can build it and have nowhere to put it.

Anyway, the approximate cost of frankenslotting is going to be somewhere around 100K to 300K per slot. I did an entire level 50 character, 93 slots, for under 66K per slot once, but I don't think you can do that any more. And I was being incredibly cheap on purpose because I had a 6 million inf self-chosen budget.

Level 4) Basic Set Slotting. This is where we start to take advantage of the "set" part of Set IO's. Slot a bunch of the same thing in the same power and get bonus HP, or Accuracy, or Recharge, or whatever in _all_ your powers. The better the bonus, the more expensive it naturally is.

Level 5) Money Is No Object. At this point you start seeing things like "Purple" IOs (can only be slotted by level 50s and have really ridiculous bonuses) and the most expensive Set IO's and PVP IO's. At this point you may be twice as effective as a SO'd out character. You may have abilities that an SO'd out character can't even get close to (high-defense Blasters, for instance.) The budget here is measured in, literally, billions of inf.

My advice is to fill in with generic level 30s now, and start collecting sets and frankenslotting over the next 5 or so levels. Once you get rich or bored or both, you can start collecting sets and throwing those in. I advise saving to upgrade 2 powers at a time- that way you don't get totally stuck.

So how do you, a level 27 brute with somewhere around 50 slots, afford the 10 million inf that I'm casually mentioning like it's nothing?

Well. You may have that stuff sitting in your tray right now. Midlevel rare salvage is often worth a million or two per piece. SOME common salvage (varies from moment to moment) is worth up to 100K each. If you have architect tickets, you can roll for random recipes (random roll is random), random common salvage or specific pieces of uncommon or rare salvage. 540 tickets is a couple million inf.

(If you have enough tickets for a random gold roll, or enough merits for a random rare roll, do it. I'll buy your losers for 10 million each, and you might get a winner worth a hundred million. I'm @Boltcutter in game.)

Also check your set recipes. Some of them, if crafted, may sell for millions. Most are semiworthless at that level, though.

If you don't have any Empowered Sigils or Steadfast: Res/Def recipes, then what?

Well. Look at how much it costs to get (say) a level 50 Thunderstrike recipe. Look at the costs of the salvage. Look at the very large cost to craft it. 490,000 to craft, something like 55K for the recipe and 25K for the salvage.

Now look what the crafted Thunderstrike goes for. 3 million, you say? That can't be right!

It is. Don't get greedy. If you put it for sale for [say] 1.15 million you will probably get the next sale, even if they don't look and just pay the "last 5" price of 3 million. Or they may go really cheap and buy it for 1.5 million. So all you made was like 800,000 profit.

Again: don't get greedy. Don't build ten and put them all for sale at once. Don't even build ten and leave nine in your tray. Prices change all the time, for no good reason. Build a couple of any one thing, see how it sells. Make sure you have enough money saved back to do something else if the market crashes.

Hope this helps! Welcome back!

I'll pass on my advice for leveling. You have two builds now and every 10 minutes you can visit a trainer to swap between them. For now, just pretend you only have one. As you level up, follow Fulmens advice about slotting.

Visit the Brute forums or use Mids and get yourself a nice customized level 50 build that costs about three times more money than you think you can afford.

Once you hit 50, swap to your second. This will be totally empty and level 1. Now, pick the powers and slots based on that ideal level 50 build. Play with your primary build while earning money and sets to fill out the second. This way, you always have a fully functional build, and once you're done you can use the primary build for taskforces and oroboros arcs and exemplaring down to help friends, but you have your Uber build for when you're up at 50 which is where I suspect you'll play most of the time.

This strategy has served me very well.