Want a Notice of the Well solo? That'll be...

40 straight up + 48 from crafting = 88

It's a lot to me. I haven't been playing for seven years. I don't have 50s that have been at the cap for four years with nothing to spend influence on. 100 million inf takes me a fair while to collect, or getting extremely lucky by having a valuable purple drop.

I like it myself, no time limit so there's hope that it may actually deplete some of the excess currency. But I doubt it will.

When I stopped playing the game two years ago, I had two 50s I barely did anything with. Lack of endgame, you see. I came back two months ago. In that time, I haven't touched those two 50s, and I've leveled a third I only play sometimes. The highest vet reward I have is the 21-month. I think I get the 24 in March or April sometime. I didn't expect to be playing again, so when I stopped I gave the vast bulk of my inf (about 100 mil) to a friend.

I currently have about 700 mil total, and I earned ~50 mil tonight by rolling up a bunch of recipes off the AE and selling the valuable ones.

Are you going to refuse to use the market too?

100 million inf takes a day in the market. Buy cheap yellow recipes whose enhancements are in high demand (eg. Crushing Impact), craft them and sell them. Takes about 600K to create each enhancement and they sell anything from 4 million to 10 million, depending on what you pick. Whenever I need influence I just do that and get between 100 and 400 million in a day, depending on how many times I reload the market.

Really, all it takes is 2 Alignment Merits and selling one of the high-value Rare recipes you can gain with it for about 200M.

Even so, 88 shards... iye! That really feels spiteful.

I mention a lucky purple drop and you ask if I use the market? What good is a lucky purple drop without the market?

I don't do AE, though. Too hard to find worthwhile content amidst the dreck.
That I refuse to do. When I'm playing the game, I'm playing the game, not sitting around crafting. I have my Field Crafter badge, and I'm done with any crafting that isn't directly related to enhancing my characters.

Yup, the 100M is very doable with A-Merits.

The shards though, yeech.

So you do use the market. Then it's not the inf you should be worried about.

Put it this way: you can earn the amount of inf you need solely off defeats in the time it takes you to collect the shards you need.

At 88 shards ... yeah, you're probably right.

Stupid me, being optimistic. I keep hoping they'll lower the requirement to something sane. 88 really sort of feels like a "shut up, soloers" sort of thing.

Eh, not so bad really. Compared to the number of shards, the influence is nothing

Recalling the Hour Farming Challenge numbers, one run of the Portal Corps Council map gave (including the vendored drops) some 6M per full run or so, lowballing it, at +3x8-NoBosses. If it's about 20 spawns , think 4 Lts and 8 minions per, something like 2/3 of a shard per run on average. Say one full shard per run, being generous. By the time you have all 88 shards, well, you'll be closer to a billion influence than to zero.

The thing to do, IMO, is to wait for a TF that can be soloed to be chosen as WTF, and parallelize runs. Instead of running the TF with your weak character(s) combined with someone else's strong ones, find someone who has one or more strong characters that can solo the TF set to x2, have your weak character be the "anchor", while YOU run the TF solo with your strong character in parallel, having that other person's "weak" one as anchor.

That ain't gonna work until the right TF comes along tho

EDIT: More back-of-the-envelope maths for fun. If you want to get that very rare solo without WTF, by the time you've gotten all the shards you need, you will have:

- Defeated about 100,000 mobs (minion/Lt./Boss mix).

- On average, gotten about 20 purple recipes at worst (worst = flat 1:5000 drop rate).

- Received 5 Pool C+D drops from bosses.

- Gotten over 1 Billion influence from defeats alone (assuming bosses on).

- Hit the influence cap, and then some, by selling the common recipe drops at the nearest vendor.

- Received about 300 pieces of rare salvage.

- Caused more casualties than any single battle during the American Civil War.

Have at it!

You'll need to do 8-12 of them if you're not doing a WST.