Life without high-level alts...

So, my highest-level character just made 27. And I noticed something: It's fairly hard to afford a complete set of SOs, and any IOs other than the generic "invention: damage" types seem to be thoroughly out of my reach. I've been doing cheap WW farming (buying recipes for less than they vendor for and selling them), and I made 27 with about 3.5M inf. That's enough to buy the rarest/most-expensive component of, say, a single orange or yellow IO of around my level, probably. The IOs themselves tend to run anywhere from half a mil to 5-20M+.

So. Theoretical question: What is the game balanced around assuming I'll have? Is it assuming I'm fully tricked out with SOs? That I'm using a mix of SOs and DOs and maybe a few IOs five or ten levels below me (but still working)?

The big issue I'm seeing is that I'm not used to the idea that equipment completely stops working as I level. I'm used to it becoming sort of obsolescent, but hey, it's still working, it's just that it's not as significant as it used to be. And I'm not sure how I'm supposed to be dealing with this, or even whether I am.

Possibilities that occur to me:
* You're not really expected to have anything enhanced except by whatever random drops you got and maybe a handful of SOs, and the game is plenty balanced and playable as such.
* You're expected to regularly spend a fair bit of money upgrading, and I should have made a lot more money somehow (perhaps by crafting and selling stuff?)
* The game assumes that you have a level 50 alt to farm for money.
* It's not really working as designed, but it's not practical to try to correct it, because any of the obvious proposed corrections would be dramatically worse.

My experience thus far seems to be that, at least for a relatively new player, the big crippling weakness is that there's not enough auction slots to leave both bids and sales up for very long, making it hard to either buy low or sell high without using a lot of alts who are buying and selling different kinds of things. Which may actually be a good strategy, but it seems odd.

So, imagine that you just made 27 and didn't have any rich alts or rich friends. What would you be putting in for enhancements? How would you get it?

1.) Game is balanced around the idea that you are (at 27) kitted out with SOs.

2.) Yes, SOs expire. Its annoying.

3.) Completing sets can be expensive (especially if you want ones with great set bonuses).

What to do?

1.) First, you are vastly overestimating how much it costs to craft yellow recipes. Rare salvage can run close to 3 million, but the white and yellow salvage (with a couple of exceptions) typically can be bought for much less. Put your bids up at reasonable prices and leave them there overnight, see what happens.

2.) Most efficient way to get bang for your buck at your level is to use yellow recipes as funkey, supereffective SOs rather than for their set bonuses (if you get a bonus, well . . . bonus!). Put in 2 different acc/dam set IOs at level 30 (or 29, or 28, or 31, the difference isn't that great) and you'll get roughly +43% to dam and acc. That's better than using SOs or regular IOs, and of course they'll never expire. Use 2 acc/dam/rech, and you essentially get 3 SOs for the price of 2. Just mix and match cheap recipes.

3.) How to get cheap recipes? Stick to yellow ones, the orange ones use more expensive salvage (you've figured this out already). Some yellow recipes cost more than others (they have better set bonuses). Don't feel like you *have* to use the highest level set IO (as noted above the difference between set IOs a couple of levels apart isn't huge). Put up modest bids and wait overnight for them to get filled.

4.) Another option is to spend a bit of time checking out the player-designed missions at the Architecht Entertainment center. Instead of salvage, recipes, or enhancements, you earn tickets that can be exchanged for things. Do a couple of missions (don't be quick to click glowies, clear the map) and go to the ticket vendor once you have a few thousand tickets.

My advice would be use them on "bronze recipe rolls" in the level 30-34 range as that would generate a lot of things that you could use at your level as well as stuff you could sell. If you were only trying to maximize profits, many folks like the level 10-14 and level 35-39 brackets. Don't worry, no matter what range you roll in, the recipe will be at your level (or level 30 if you roll in the 30-34 bracket, or the max level for the recipe if you are higher level than the max level for that recipe). You can also buy salvage with the tickets, should you choose.

By level 27 you can slot level 30 generic IOs, which offer roughly the same benefit as a +3 SO and never expire (so you spend the inf on them once and never have to worry about that slot again unless you decide you want something else there). Level 25 generic IOs offer roughly the same benefit as an even-level SO, and are sometimes cheaper than their level 30 counterparts, so it's a good idea to check for price differences (for example I'll sometimes use level 45 generics instead of level 50 for those powers which require them, because I'm paying a fraction of the price for an almost negligible decrease in effectiveness).

In short, keep doing what you're doing, but maybe step up your marketing a bit. It may seem tedious, but the thing to remember is that the more money you have, the easier it is to make more. 3.5 million inf at level 27 might have seemed difficult to get, but it becomes pretty easy to turn that 3.5 into 10, and then 10 into 25, and then 25 into 100, and so on.

What I don't understand is how you get to 27 with only 3.5 million or so. I mean, by the time you hit the 20s, you are likely going to be getting the occasional rare drop that will sell for that much inf, so by 27 you should have gotten at least 2 or 3 of them and have about 10 million. Heck, if you just list every single bit of salvage you get at 1 inf, or even just sell it all to the vendor, you can make 1-2 million by the time you hit the 20s. I do it all the time. In fact, I've only transfered funds to a low level alt once in the past year or so, and that was to my Huntsman because I wanted to mess around with early frankenslotting.

Did you buy TOs? That's a huge waste of funds right there. But really, at level 12, DOs usually run me about 100-110k inf. At 17, that's up to about 175k. At 22, SOs usually cost me around 1 million inf. I doubt that at 27 SOs would cost more then 2-2.5 inf. The prices don't increase that much, and since 22 you've only gotten 6 more enhancement slots and 2 more powers with a base slot each. So really, I don't see what your issue is. You say you have about 3.5 million at 27, that should be more than enough to buy SOs.

Are you buying SOs from contacts, or stores? Contacts charge more, from what I've heard. In fact, I think the cheapest place to buy SOs is from the RWZ Quartermaster. I may be wrong on that though.

Still, since the addition of Invention Salvage and Recipes, getting SOs is incredibly easy. Just vendor everything you get and you should never have any issues. Plus, you don't get penalized anywhere nearly as severely as you once did for running in SG mode. I remember getting to 37 on my first character and being nigh broke. I had to bug a bunch of friends to loan me funds, because I had been in SG mode since around level 8 or so. I dropped SG mode, at their advice, and never had to borrow a dime again. Not as major a concern now, and not a big issue for 27 in any event, but goes to show that funds are a lot easier to make now than they used to be. Fully Slotted SOs without "twinking" is so incredibly easy now that I don't even worry about it. The enhancing level comes, I enhance.

The game is balanced all the way from mid twenties to 50 assuming you're fully slotted with SOs. This is to say that IOs aren't needed for any regular content. You'll need them, though, if you want to do something silly like solo AVs without insps or temp powers.

IOs, on the other hand, the way I perceive them, is mostly an "end-game puzzle" for high levels. I sometimes use very cheap IOs along the way to 50 to make my character slightly better than it would be with SOs or generic IOs, but the big ticket items I don't get earlier than late 40s. I'm not saying you couldn't start IOing earlier, but I just feel like the system was thought out for high levels.

Just tossing my 2 inf since wasn't clear any one said this specifically (and sorry if you did!), in that frankenslotting the "less" popular sets into powers, if possible, is an option.

I know not all powers are as flexible, but, as an example, some ranged and melee sets take other sets like slow, KB, tohit debuff, etc. You don't need to slot for KB or slow if you don't want too, but those sets also contain things like end/rech IOs or acc/dam IOs. If the powers take only ranged or melee (as an example), there are the less popular ones in there too. It all comes down to how much or a bonus you want and can add up.
So on some of my toons now that need some extra rech/end/acc/whatever, I will frankenslot from various common sets and get the bonuses (NOT set bonuses) I want. Just look at ALL the sets you can slot for a power, and then dig down further into the sets, many times you will see like 50 recipes for sale and 0 bids. I have gotten a lot of recipes like that for as low as 5 inf bids.
The salvage can be relatively cheaply bought by just waiting overnight in most cases. Place a cheap bid, come back the next day, and there you go.
Craft up and now you may have acc/end/rech/etc. bonuses and cheaper too.
If you want set bonuses, then that will be more expensive. And takes a different route.

Lastly, I always recommend to plan for the future. This doesn't directly help your lvl27, but planning now for what you want a 50 may help some. For example, I had an idea for a brute in GR. I have mapped out the general build and IOs I want (Numina, Miracle, etc.) I placed my bids in the spring - cheap bids. I now have all but 1 of my IOs I plan to use. Yes, it took months of just checking every so often, but I saved a ton of inf in the process.

There are about two cases where I would say that IO's are "needed"- that is, there is poor game design that IO's can fix. One is the stupid, stupid, stupid amount of knockback- which you can fix with a 10 million inf or less Karma or Steadfast IO. I'm sure I'll come up with the other one, probably when it's too late to edit this post.

As far as making money in the game: what is it the kids say today? ur doin it wrong? Running recipes to contacts/stores makes you something like a million an hour, and if you need a couple hundred K RIGHT NOW it's a perfectly valid way to get it.

Edit starts here---------------
The TL;DR version of my post below is this: You can buy things on the market, and resell them for more. You can buy cheap-but-popular recipes, craft them, and resell them for millions more.
Edit ends here ---------------

The orange salvage you've mentioned can be sold as well as bought- although I realize that in the first 20 levels all the orange salvage sells for nearly nothing.

The traditional way to make inf around here is "buy low, sell high" or "buy low, craft, sell high." There are pitfalls doing this, and it is possible to lose money while you're figuring it out, and some people claim that you're taking advantage of other players' ignorance. (If I'm buying stuff for one of my guys? I'll happily overpay. I'm rich and I don't care. Most big sales are to people who are rich and don't care.)

If you have ethical problems with buying low and selling high, memorize generic recipes. You can produce for cheap, list for less than it would cost someone to craft it themselves, and still make a profit.

Otherwise, do the following: Look at the level 50 stuff for ONE of the following: Thunderstrike, Crushing Impact, and Doctored Wounds. You will probably find something where the recipes are selling for 100-200K, and the crafted is selling for 2 or 3 million.Put in a bid for one of those at some reasonable number (like 201K) and put in cheap bids for the salvage. Unless you have all the ingredients immediately, leave those bids and WALK AWAY. Check before you log off, and check when you log back on. Once you have all the stuff, grit your teeth and go to a crafting table [your SG should have one, or the Universities are full of 'em.] Spend the 500K to craft it, go to Wents and list it for just over a million inf.

People mostly bid like this: 1,000,000 [didn't get it] 2,000,000 [didn't get it ] 5,000,000 . So you'll probably sell it for 1.5 million or 2 million. Maybe 3m if the guy was in a hurry.

Do this a couple times, checking the top level and making sure you've got something that sells fast. Don't get too heavily invested- if you've got 5 million inf, only put 2 million or so on the market- and don't flood your niche by listing 10 of the same thing at the same time. That's a sure way to drive the price down.

Eventually you'll get more comfortable, get a couple different niches, and you'll make a few million every time you log on. At that point you can either decide you have enough inf, or you can decide you want more. There are a lot of ways to make more, and more, and more in this game. At some point you may find you are buying things for 210 million and selling them for 350 million. At some point you may find that you're not allowed to pick up your sales because you would have more than 2 billion inf. At that point you're one of us.

Swellguy, Warron: Give him a chance. He's trying, he's just new.

Seebs:
From 1-20 all your oranges are going to be relatively worthless, and from 20-25 there's a 50-50 chance they will be worthless. So I can see how you haven't gotten any good oranges yet [especially if you've been teaming; XP gets a multiplier on teams, but drops get divided between all the characters on the team. So you get less drops, more XP.]

There are a lot of ways to get buckets of money on the market. My personal favorite, because it scales nicely, is buy/craft/sell. You can start with something that costs 250,000 to buy and craft, and sells for a million [I don't know- level 40 Harmonized Healing Heal/Rech or Heal?] You can move up to something that costs a million to buy and craft and sells for three million [level 50 Thunderstrike Acc/Dam/Rech, maybe?] You do a few of those, get 10 million that you can afford to lose, and potentially find something that costs you five million and sells for twelve or fifteen million [Decimation Acc/Dam maybe, or Miracle Heal/End, or Aegis End/Res].

But that's only one method.

Low to middle profit:
There are people who make money flipping stacks of seasonal salvage. There are people who buy generics low and sell them high [I did this the other day, because level 50 damage was selling for 55K and I knew it would be 300K at least in an hour or five. I just couldn't resist the profit margin.] There are people who craft stacks of generics, making 100K or 200K on each one.

Middle to large: Doing TF's as you level up and then buying a really big recipe [a Luck of the Gambler costs something like 240 merits and sells for something like 240 million.] Rolling dozens of bronze recipes and selling the good ones. Farming with a level 50, if you're efficient. Flipping purples.

There's a LOT of ways to make money. Don't be discouraged.

Buy recipe?

I get the feeling this is Something I Should Know About. I have at least a few Reward Merits gotten from various stuff.

And yes, I've been nearly-always teaming, that would explain it. Drops divided by eight people, but we have 5-8 times as many mobs... But there's that huge XP bonus, so the net result is a ton more XP per mob I get loot from. So I'm running behind on loots, probably.

I was messing with crafting, although I ended up about breaking even because I forgot to include the actual influence cost of doing the crafting. Silly me. But I understand the principle, anyway, and I have indeed made some money doing that. The killer for me has usually been lack of available slots to leave bids out on stuff that fluctuates widely in price (that being, so far as I can tell, everything on the entire market). I assume I eventually get more than 15 auction slots... Although I could improve things some by using alts aggressively, pick a given range of stuff, have an alt put out bids on most of it, leave them there for a week or so.

The advice Swellguy just posted is solid and works pretty much for just about any scenario. You could easily double that 3.5M by running a few MA missions, grabbing 550 tickets and grabbing the most expensive rare salvage out there and sell it. However, I'd recommend that you just do bronze rolls, delete the junk, craft the usable and sellable stuff. That will usually net you considerably more.

Making 550 tickets will take you at most 30-40 mins even on the slowest character. And any MA story arc (set to MA awards not regular awards if Dev choice) will work.

Okay, where do I learn more about how I can use MA tickets and Merit Rewards to get stuff, because I apparently didn't adequately understand that functionality.

I just played a toon to 27 in ae didn't even do any mayhems (on a mm) and I discovered ma tickets max out at 9999. Waiting for the merge now

I wouldn't put anything other than regular Single Origin hancers on my toons. They're cheap and you outlevel them too quickly to bother with anything more expensive.

Wait until you hit 50 to do any expensive slotting. And even then I still don't do it unless it's a toon I really like and intend on playing often. Otherwise, SO's work just fine. Use your money on the more important chars. I funnel my other toons funds to my main chars.

On the other hand, it is quite different these days. Back before the market ever existed and when money meant nothing, we built up HUGE stockpiles of useless funding. Having that initial wad pre-market made living after it much more bearable than compared to a newer player. However, since SO's are all you really need till 50, it's moot.

Make your own base. Store everything there. Craft along the way. Never buy anything from the market - its purely for people who want to "play" some kind of evil stock market game. Just pretend the market doesn't exist until you're ready to sell something to the people who don't care how much they spend on something they can get for free and are willing to pay for the convenience of "hafta have now".

mouse

Disclaimer: All of this is IMHO and purely suggestive based on my personal experience. Your results may vary. I'm not liable and can not be held responsible for any information where it's obvious it originated from my subjective opinion to which many others will refute and argue. Objects in mirror may be closer to fantasy-land than they appear.

Far be it from me to correct Fulmens, but LotGs are 200 not 240 merits so 10 rolls rather than 12.

One of the most efficient items to sell (and I'm publicising this as I want to see more merit rolled and sold to bring the price down) is the 35 Kinetic combat dam/end. This only costs 125 merits, and is selling for 125M hero side, and was 150M vill side yesterday and is 180-190M today once crafted up.