IO Sets (worth it or not?)

Yes, yes.......

The idea was to provide increased productivity at a low price. 400 Million to be precise. There is absolutely no way to do that buying Kinetic Combats, Eradications, and or Scirricos.
Easy for me, maybe easy for you, but certainly not on a budget. Please be a little more realistic in your responses to new players.

Edit: Hmm, looking at my own response, I think I came off a little too harsh. Definately agree with the sentiment Mr. Claws. Just would suggest some lower cost IO's, like Smashing Haymakers, Titanium Coating, Multi-Strike, etc...

Sounds like a plan
Thankfully I have a few respecs per charachter left anyways
Plus I am intrigued to see how inherent stamina will effect them too

I actually was being realistic, it does not take that long to acquire Kinetic Combats with Hero merits. And Eradication and Scirocco's were actually pretty cheap last I looked.

Also, I kinda doubt the guy is a new player. A registry date of 2007 doesn't say "new player" to me. I was under the assumption that the OP at least has a working knowledge of how to go about acquiring things in this game. For a casual player right now, Hero merits are probably the most efficient way of getting the high dollar items. Use merits for the more expensive items, and you can buy the cheaper stuff with the 400 mil you have stashed.

I look at a stated budget as a starting point. It is highly unlikely that anyone is going to say "Well, I have 400 million here, I'll just build a character with that and never do anything that earns influence, merits, or recipe drops again." If he continues to play the character, he can work on the stuff he can't afford right now. That's how I IOed out every one of my characters that is, I just played them and gradually put together the build one set at a time.

I'm not trying to be rude in my response, but my post was a lot more realistic than you gave it credit for.

Originally Posted by Dechs Kaison See, it's gems like these that make me check Claws' post history every once in a while to make sure I haven't missed anything good lately.

I understand perfectly.
It is all cool.

Normally with all my 50s I always get regular lev 50 IOs for ever and all slot openings....
but just never bothered with the time to dabble in the "sets" so to speak.
I just tinkered with this particular toon because it is my oldest favorite Tank on a 2nd build for comparison's sake to see if I like it better or not.
So far with what I have put in that build I like (love) certain aspects of the build and the each bonus involved and there are a few things that I prefer with my original build.

I would did more with sets in the past except I have had a few periods where I work a gazillion hours a week and I have had a few periods where my work-load was a lot less

Once you've spent some time studying Set IOs for their set bonuses, you will develop a few favored Sets. Or at least recognize which are the more difficult to acquire without going bankrupt. If you have the time to wait out a bid, you can set them up on your alts.

You can get Kinetic Combats with Hero Merits without random rolling? That would be very cool, because they're going for about 170 million a set...if you can find 'em.

No, I was the rude one. Again my apologies.

Yes. Most of them are 1 Hero Merit apiece, but the triple I believe is 2.

You can acquire a full set of them in just over a week just by running Tip missions and reaffirming your Hero (or villain) alignment. You can do it even faster if you have Reward merits sitting around and a decent amount of cash. You can trade 50 reward merits and 20 million influence for a Hero Merit. You can do that once every 20 hours. So, if you stick to a strict schedule you can get a full set of Kinetic Combat by playing about an hour and a half a day (which most players I know tend to do anyway), and get them in 4 days..

You can do it even faster if you run 4 different characters and email the resulting recipe to yourself. A little over 2 days in that case.

Originally Posted by Dechs Kaison See, it's gems like these that make me check Claws' post history every once in a while to make sure I haven't missed anything good lately.

No problem at all.

You only see 4 instead of all 5 because the Acc/Dam is an Uncommon, and Merit purchases are only Rares

Originally Posted by Dechs Kaison See, it's gems like these that make me check Claws' post history every once in a while to make sure I haven't missed anything good lately.

The Acc/Dam one is available for 50 Reward Merits, so if it's not available on the market and you need it like NAO, don't burn all your Reward Merits converting it to Alignment Merits, haha.

The best thing about Sets are Set Bonuses. While individually small, these bonuses add up to be truly significant when all your powers are properly and carefully Setted. The difference between a Fully-Setted toon and one stocked simply with all Common IOs can be seen and felt beyond the mere fact of "To Hit" or "Damage" bonuses being capped.

The Fully Setted toon will have a wide array of Recharge bonuses, Regen, Defense, Resistance, Accuracy, Mez Resist, Knockback Resist -- the list goes on and on -- not to mention the secondary attributes given to powers that normally don't have them -- like Knockdowns, Holds, extra Damage of different types and more. The add-up to all of this means your toon will fight harder without running out of END, give out more damage-per-second and be able to take more damage.

So before going down the Frankenslotting Route on all your powers (Frankenslotting being, in my opinion, only useful on certain powers, such as Health, where you would Frankenslot one Numina +Rec/+Regen, one Miracle +Rec, and one Regen Tissue +Reg, etc), be sure to consider your other options.

After all, prices in the post-merge market have plummeted, and so you could employ your 400 million to good effect.

However -- and I cannot stress this strongly enough -- you can very easily make mistakes. Many respecs later you may realize you wasted a lot of INF.

How to avoid this? Use an offline character and enhancement build planner, such as MIDS. Used properly and with a lot of careful thought and tweaking, you can make sure you get the most bonuses across all your sets before actually buying a single one -- not to mention make sure that your build's powers are taken in the order best suited to being Exemplared down for various Task Forces and Flashbacks, so that you'll still have everything you need at Level 15, 20 or 30.

You can download MIDS for free at: http://www.cohplanner.com/

With all that being said, you may also want to wait until the next Issue is released before diving in and making all your purchases, as in it, Fitness becomes an inherent power. But by all means, experiment with MIDS for now. It's a great resource in helping you to understand Sets and Set Bonuses.

Last but not least, remember that you don't get bonuses for IO's of any type that are of a Level that is higher than your Exemplared level. So, if you're in a Level 40 Zone or on a Task Force, Trial, Flashback, etc., all of your Level 50 IOs will not be giving you any Enhancement or Set Bonuses (Purple/Unique Sets are an exception to this, and they will still give their Set Bonuses).

This is why it is often better to get lower level IOs than 50 -- the difference in enhancement bonus of a Level 40 IO vs a Level 50 IO is not that great, and the Level 40 IO will keep on working in a wider range of scenarios.

-- Vivian

Good stuff
The next tweaks and changes I make with it will be after the Inherent Stamina hits the fan for comparison's sake

Clarification: Hero Merit purchases are only rares. Reward merits can buy anything that's not a purple or PvP IO

Originally Posted by Dechs Kaison See, it's gems like these that make me check Claws' post history every once in a while to make sure I haven't missed anything good lately.

Actually according to paragon wiki you will get the set bonus from an IO up to 3 levels above your exemplar level.

More subtle than that, even. Hero merit purchases are only things that would cost at least 100 reward merits. The steadfast protection res/def is a yellow, but you can buy it with a hero merit.

Correction I talked to. My roomie last night. He said that we actually lasted 120 seconds and almost got or scrapper buddy.. He did say that those IO's gave him a recovery rate out this world. To make matters worse our scrapper friend had only level 35 and 40 IO's on him.