Something I want to ask about set Inventions.

I got a few like that, my fav so far is one slotted into tactics IIRC and its a chance for build-up when tactics is active I get a continual 5% chance for build up every few seconds my next fav is probably a chance for negative energy damage in brawl - Silly I know for the last one, but its come in handy a few times when the proc goes off and I get a surprise sucker punch out of it

Let me add that if you're willing to wait a week or so, you can buy most of these pieces at level 50 for 250,000 inf. And I mean already-built, ready-to-use, completed enhancements, not recipes.

Hold your nose, walk into the market and put down a bid for each one you want, then run out. Come back in a week when the stench of 'marketeering' has died down.

Ta-dah! You'll have bought most of what you want, spending less on each than the inf you'll generate in a typical lvl 50 mission.

Basic marketeering is very simple: whenever you've got a full inventory of salvage or recipes, head down to Wentworth's and dump it all on the market for 10 inf. It will tend to sell almost as fast as vendoring, at better-than-vendor prices.

Hold on... this isn't right is it? I always understood the rule of 5 is that you can only have of the same named bonus. So you can have 5 '2.5% smashing' bonuses and 5 '3.5% smashing' bonuses as well as 5 '2.5% smashing/lethal' bonuses because it has a different name.

Yes. I think that is right. In the same way that 5% run speed is not the same as 5% movement bonus.

This. Basically when levelling I frankenslot as I go. Typically attacks get 2 Acc/Dam and 2 Dam/Recharge, using Yellow set items (rather than the rare orange).

For melee attacks Focused Smite and Touch of Death are my go-to IOs, because they are cheap. I typically try and buy oddly levelled ones (like level 29/31 ones) too as they tend to be less bidded for and you can often pay 10,000 per recipe (maybe less but I always go with 10k anyway). 3 of those are yellow, thus salvage is relatively cheap, 1 is orange.

For Targetted AOE damage Air Burst and Detonation are your best friend. My Fort has all four of her AOE attacks slotted with Acc/Dam and Dam/Recharge pairs of these.

It's cheap and easy to do, doesn't take long (typically I get one or two at the end/start of a play session when I'm selling stuff anyway) and for ATs like Dominators its a life saver in defeating Slot Crunch

Diggis is definitely right. It's important to not just apply the "only 5 of a given name" rule to whole categories of set bonuses, like recharge. You can absolutely have more than five recharge bonuses. What you'll see is that +recharge set bonuses of different size have different names. For example, 7.5% set bonus is a "Huge Recharge Bonus" while a 6.25% set bonus is a "Large Recharge Bonus".

Complicating this example, the recharge bonus from the LotG special enhancer, which also grants a 7.5% recharge bonus, has its own name for that bonus, meaning you can stack five of that bonus even if you are getting five Huge Recharge Bonuses from sets like Panacea, Basilisk's Gaze or Sting of the Manticore.

First and foremost: Thank you for the numbers. I know what they mean, but I'm still not sure what to take from them. I can see the improvement, however, to say that much.

However, in response to the quote above, this is one of the spots where I usually get called colourful names and dismissed out of hand, but here it goes: I hate disorganised enhancements. One of the most satisfying feelings for me as I reach level 50 is looking at my enhancements screen top to bottom and just enjoying the neatness and order of it. Everything is level 50, everything is arranged in an orderly fashion (to the point I'll buy extra enhancements to rearrange order within powers) and everything is just... Perfect.

To consider playing a build that'll be all over the map, from 25 to 54 and Lord knows what else in-between and, worst of all, a build that never really feels "finished" is enough to sour me on the game. I know it's stupid, I know it's irrational, but when I can't have things JUST RIGHT in how I want them, I tend to lose my motivation to even bother. I can stomach playing a character who's a work in progress if I can at least foresee an end and some kind of completion somewhere along the line, but to take that as my ideal build? No. The performance gain isn't worth the discomfort.

Normally I wouldn't complain about this, but there's a problem: I lack this kind of patience and, indeed, I lack this kind of commitment. I stick with my characters for the long haul. My currently 35 SS/Inv heroic Brute is the only thing I've played since she was created around New Years, and I have played nothing else. However, as soon as I stop playing her, chances are she won't see the light of day in another year or so. The type of Marketeering you suggest really only seems to work if I'm willing to play multiple characters simultaneously, so I can put a few bids for one, park him for a week and come back to my enhancements, when what I really want is to spend the money NOW and get my stuff NOW, and in the Market, this means big money.

So one would think, but it never seems to play out that way for me. I don't really over-list anything. I list my common salvage for 250, my uncommon salvage for 1000, my rare salvage for 5000 and any recipe I'm selling for as much. I have tried listing everything, but the result is unimpressive. First of all, my transaction inventory gets clogged up with junk no-one wants REALLY fast. Secondly, even when this "junk" does sell, it goes for... 1000. I mean, sure, 1000 is four times as good as 250 to the vendor, but at the cost of not having enough slots to list or, heaven forbid, big on things? There just isn't enough turnover.

I've managed to more or less learn what sells for a lot, and failing that I've learned to spot when an item will sell well and when it'll wait a week or more, and I manage to do well enough for myself and my own needs. However, my needs are humble, and the most I've ever had on a character doing that is around 100 million, including a few 50 million + chance drops, like a respec recipe or whatever that heals set is which sells for ungodly amounts.

Now, I do have the option of simply being more aware of the intricacies of the Market even if I don't necessarily play the Market game, but I just can't seem to keep up and remember these things. Sometimes I make the right call, but a lot of times I just misjudge how expensive something should be to people. Even as we speak, I still have a bunch of recipes listed for 5000 that have recent bids of over 100 000, and they've been rolling around my transaction inventory for a week now. As long as I can keep the long-term items below about 5 or 6, they don't get in the way, so I let them linger, but sooner or later I'll just pull those and dump them at a vendor to make room.

Originally Posted by Arcanaville Samuel_Tow is the only poster that makes me want to punch him in the head more often when I'm agreeing with him than when I'm disagreeing with him.

But that's the beauty of Frankenslotting, you get things cheap while getting to 50 (and each slot only ever needs to be bought for once). Frankenslotting works better on the journey to 50, when slots are scarce and powers underslotted.

Once you hit 50 you can conform to whatever crazy schema you desire/demand, the Frankenslotted IOs you've used to get there were cheap anyway and have fulfilled their purpose and still overall cost less than SOing every 5 levels.

I think this is really what it comes down to. The way the Incarnate system's basic design interacts with my distaste for teaming, it just means I'll spend ages and ages getting anywhere, replaying level 50 content, and actually making a pretty penny off it. That's something I noticed when fighting to get my Incarnate slot on Brutticus - 50s make a LOT of INF just killing stuff, which I hadn't really noticed before as I don't really play my 50s a lot.

So, yeah, if I can find a decent build that doesn't include oddball enhancements, I could see myself making this a long-term project along with Incarnate slots. We'll see how that goes.

Originally Posted by Arcanaville Samuel_Tow is the only poster that makes me want to punch him in the head more often when I'm agreeing with him than when I'm disagreeing with him.

Well, there's your problem. 10 inf isn't a random suggestion - it's a highly efficient price point for sales velocity. If you are having trouble clearing inventory slots, it is because your prices are too high. Remember, the lowest listing price is always sold first. This means that sometimes you will sell items for way less than you could have got at a vendor, but sometimes you will sell them for way more, and over time the market tends to beat the vendors. Making sure you get better than vendor price on every single transaction does not pay off in earnings over time. I've tried the experiment myself: I used to list everything at better than vendor price, and now I list everything at 5 inf, and I spend less time at the market, don't run out of market slots, and get more inf faster.

That said, if you can't bring yourself to slot anything other than level 50 enhancements, then your personal utility function is clearly not tied to maximum efficiency. Do what feels good; it's a game.

That's really why I never got into Inventions. I looked at the whole system, and instantly a list of all the things about it that bugged me started forming in my head. "There's the thing, and that, and this here and UGH! Forget it!" Of course, this isn't objective, but nothing I've heard of Set Inventions has ever convinced me otherwise. Still, I figured I might as well ask and know what I'm missing if I'll be ignoring Inventions, and it just seems like I'm missing something I don't want to bother with anyway. Yeah, that deprives me of a lot of performance, but the whole thing's just liable to make me hate the game before it gives me any benefit.

Originally Posted by Arcanaville Samuel_Tow is the only poster that makes me want to punch him in the head more often when I'm agreeing with him than when I'm disagreeing with him.

Level 25 quad-aspect IO: 14/14/14/14, say, damage/endurance/recharge/accuracy. Total is 56%. Level 50 common IO: Not 56%.

Sub-50 enhancements are not necessarily worse. The set bonuses utterly trump anything else. Look at Basilisk's Gaze, which stops at level 30. 4-piece bonus is *7.5% global recharge*. Figure a typical character has probably 10-15 powers which can use recharge. 7.5% recharge to 10 powers is 75% recharge, or the equivalent of about two +3 SOs. For free. This utterly stomps the 30-50 gap.

So, my advice: You don't have to, but you'll be much better off if you do.

Lol talk about OCD...

But I'd probably suggest just experimenting, Sam. One aspect to Set IOs is the type of builds you can make. For example:

-Lots of people want Dual Pistol/Reflex characters (myself included). You can build the character using Set IOs to be a DP blaster with defense bonuses to make getting into melee more comfortable.

-For my Kat/SR character, I really wanted to put at least 2 procs in all his attacks (one has 3), so he'd need really decent enhancement numbers from just 4 slots. Talking about 40-60% range for End and Rech as well as ED cap for damage. It required the frankenslotting technique to make decently effective.

-I saw Werner post a build for a FM/SD Scrapper that only used the fire sword attacks. Kind of limiting if you consider there are only 3 fire sword attacks, 1 of which is an AoE. It needs lots of recharge to make work. I've got a version of the build (less optimized, for cost concerns, of course) that adds in Breath of Fire.

Without special slotting, these builds aren't really possible. So my point is, find out what you want out of the build and research it. For your SS brute, look into if you want anything special from it. Extra procs? Quick recharges? Various slotted pool powers?

If your goal is to simply frankenslot, that's easy. Just grab multi-aspect IOs from multiple sets and stick them in a power. But why do you want to frankenslot, exactly? Conservation of slots? Make room for uniques? Anything at all?

I hate playing the market too.

What I do is this: I list an item for less than the "going price", and if it doesn't sell between then and the time I am done with the market, I take it and vendor it. That's for salvage and crap recipes.

I can be patient if I know it will net a significant reward. For example, I know a Hecatomb recipe will sell for several hundred million, so I'll set what seems to be a fair price based on the going rate and go do something else. Most of the time when I do that when I log into that character next I have sold stuff. However, I only do that with characters I play on a regular basis.

It IS possible to use the market to your advantage without being annoyed by it.

My general rule is:
If it has a lot for sale and none bidding, it gets vendored.
If it goes for a decent amount and seems to be selling decently, I'll post it for around half what the average going price is (so if something sells for 20 million, I'll list it at 10), I'll leave those up for a day or two.
If it goes for hundreds of millions, I'll list it for somewhat under the average going rate, and leave it up until it sells.

I have no interest in delving into the market any further than that. The way I do it, it takes maybe 5 minutes at the beginning or end of a play session, and I don't have to pay attention to market fluctuations or any of the other details I don't care about. I'm not out to get rich, but I can use the market to my advantage without feeling like I'm obligated to.

Also, the way I approach it, I don't have to pay attention to anything beyond what the market window tells me while I'm standing there. There's no research or time spent figuring out market trends, I just look at the information the window is giving me right then and make my decisions based on that.

Your experiences and preferences might (and probably do) differ, but so far my approach to it has worked for me.

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, I think this is a very pertinent question: Why do I want to frankenslot? To be perfectly honest, with the way Set Inventions are now, I really don't, but I wanted to know more about the system so I'm not operating on preconceptions and hearsay. If, however, I had the ability to use multi-aspect enhancements of any kind (that doesn't break any powers), then I would want to frankenslot for the simple fact that I like the math behind it. It makes the system ever so slightly more pliable and allows me to make more interesting slotting choices for an upward gain of enhancement values, and that's something I'd never refuse if it came without a catch.

For some characters I do indeed need to free up slots, that's true, but I very rarely look for more power than I get out of basic slotting. It's good enough for me and for most of the things I have to face. Granted, the Incarnate system seems to be purpose-designed to require higher stats (or a team) but I'm reserving my judgement on that one for at least another year before we see what the system actually constitutes.

Basically, my reason for looking at Set Inventions Enhancements was... Because they're there, and I try to make use of everything that's in a game if I can. In this case, though, I'm not sure the opportunity cost is enough to shift my lazy *** from the comfort spot that is Common Inventions.

Originally Posted by Arcanaville Samuel_Tow is the only poster that makes me want to punch him in the head more often when I'm agreeing with him than when I'm disagreeing with him.

That's more or less what I do, really. And it gives me enough INF for Commons, but I don't think that's enough for Set Inventions. To quote my experience from yesterday: My SS/Inv Brute hit 37 and got a full round of level 40 Commons. She had somewhere between 50 and 60 million on her at the time, and when I was done with enhancing her powers, she had a little over 30 million. The whole ordeal took me a little over an hour, with Alchemical Silver constituting the bulk of my cost, with 8 needed for accuracy, 4 needed for defence and 4 needed for run speed enhancements (sigh...) for a total of 16 at a pretty steep price. I expect to get back to around 60 million by level 47, when I'll get another round of level 50 Commons this time.

However, people keep quoting single recipe costs in the hundreds of millions, and cheap or not, I simply cannot afford that.

Originally Posted by Arcanaville Samuel_Tow is the only poster that makes me want to punch him in the head more often when I'm agreeing with him than when I'm disagreeing with him.

I can sympathize with your dilemma on costs. I would suggest finding ways to mitigate the cost to you through a couple techniques (this is all under the idea of common IOs, but can be applied to Set IOs if you want):

-Start early. You know you'll need to enhance again at 47. You start earning salvage for the 45 and 50 IOs at level 40-ish (sooner if you're difficulty is set higher). Do a little plotting and see what you'll need and save those pieces of salvage, either on a base storage rack, on a mule character, or even on the market (just don't list it for a price).

-Find alternate ways to getting the salvage. Things like Ticket Rolls for common salvage can often be cheaper in the short run, and get you some spare cash, in the long run. And since you're just converting tickets to salvage, you won't feel the pinch on your wallet then if you were trying to buy it up on the market. In fact, you could end up being the guy selling off pieces of salvage for a couple grand each because what you got wasn't what you needed.

-Bid Early and Low. This is similar to starting early, but instead of saving, you put down your cash on the market early and use low bids. This trades the speed of having it now for a lower cost because the price fluctuates over time.

-Prioritize. This might take a bit of personal sacrifice, but if prices are too high for certain salvage, maybe you don't need to spend that money on Alchemical Silvers for a Run Speed IO right now. Maybe it's cheaper already made because of low demand. It may be okay to let a low level IO sit in the power for a while until you recharge your funds. The point is to focus on what will improve your character the most and worry about the rest as time goes on.