I typically play around in Mids' before or just after rolling a new character, and put together what looks like a solid build. After getting the character to 20-25ish, I usually have a fairly good idea how it plays, earlier if it's sets I'm familiar with. At this point, I'll tweak or redo the planned build, transfer about 100 million to the character, and start bidding on enhancements. By the time the character reaches 35 (the level of IO I usually slot), I've got most of the enhancements, and by 50, I've got the merits to cherry pick whatever enhancements I'm still waiting for. Alignment Merits will make this last step even easier.
Bidding early also lets you get the bargain IOs and recipes, instead of having to pay the Buy It Nao price, which can sometimes be very high - See the Goat's Rule of Zero.
@Roderick
Yeah. I've got a bunch of bids out for the two sets of Blood Mandate I wanted, and they're trickling in bit by bit at prices I like. I'm being a lot more careful with 25-40 orange salvage (I'll wait a few days to save 500k) than I am with white salvage (the difference between 500 and 25000 is, in fact, completely trivial at this point).
learn to play in the market and you'll never want for inf. again !
I am an ebil markeeter and will steal your moneiz ...correction stole your moneiz. I support keeping the poor down because it is impossible to make moneiz in this game.
I'm doing okay on the market, sorta -- I've got several toons with 30M inf, now, which is definitely progress. I haven't got quite enough to start playing with the stuff where recipes go for over 50M, but I'll get there eventually. Right now, my big problem isn't so much inf as WW/BM slots.
So, I haven't played my mastermind in about a week. See, I had this insight. I had plans to respec her at some point, and I had a free respec. So I figured I'd use that to convert some of my more valuable enhancements to cash, and the rest to, well, cash, and redo her with level 30-35 stuff instead of level 15-25 stuff.
Great idea. Except that, a week later, I'm still trying to snag a few more items before she'll have a basic set of good enhancements in all her stuff, because it didn't occur to me in advance that this would cost money.
On the plus side, I've made about 30M inf so far equiping her. See, I wanted a kismet +accuracy. Reasonable enough. But pretty hard to get, so I had one alt just fill all WW slots with bids on the recipe. Well, I won four of them... You get the idea.