I need some simple help....

I used to play this ALOT like 5 years ago then gave it up for world of warcraft, now that i got bored of warcraft I came back but found myself feeling like a dinosaur.
I have one of each toon but my main is a....
LVL 50 ice/ice dom that got her association with the shark dude before i left. Someone gave me 100 000 000 inf to equip her better and i dont know how.

Basically these are my questions.
-How do i get up to that +1 level after 50 or am i already there?
-What can I buy with 100 million inf?
-What and where should I be running?

Thank you in advance.
My name is HeatherX and im on Freedom server.

First off, Paragonwiki, very useful for looking stuff up (If you ever google it, the 'Wikia' site is no longer actively updated). I'm not saying look everything up yourself - but it's a great resource, and I'll be linking to relevant pages as I go.

1)"How do i get up to that +1 level after 50 or am i already there?"
First off, you will need a Going Rogue code applied to your account in order to access the incarnate system.

Within the past year the Incarnate System was released. Currently, to unlock the Alpha Slot, you must talk to Mender Ramiel In Ouroboros and run his arc (Some of his missions will send you up against Elite Bosses that may be difficult to defeat solo depending on your build/experience). Once you have the Alpha slot unlocked it's time to start running Weekly Strike Targets to get at least one 'Notice of the Well', and defeat lvl 50+ enemies for shard drops. Shards combine into Incarnate components which are needed to craft Incarnate Abilities to slot in your Alpha Slot. The third tier in the alpha trees requires a Notice of the well, and once crafted will get you a Level Boost (+1).

Note that in the forthcoming Issue 20, there will be additional Incarnate slots available, each with different abilities. The method for unlocking and equipping these new slots will be different, and will provide an alternate method of unlocking the Alpha.

2)"What can I buy with 100 million inf?"

This is a more tricky question, as the answer can range from "One single enhancement" to "Outfitting your character (nearly?) completely with Invention Origin Enhancements". Invention Origins don't degrade in effectiveness as you level up - a level 20 IO will provide the same enhancement when you're 50 as it did when you were 17, unlike TO/DO/SO which you must replace every few levels.

a: Common Invention Origin enhancements
these are fairly straight forward, they work like your standard Single Origins, but around level 30-35 they start outperforming SO's. But be aware that Level 50 IOs have a crafting cost of nearly half a million each, not counting what you may spend on the salvage.

b: Invention Sets
In the enhancement slotting screen, hover over a power and look for the part off the tooltip that says "Allowed sets" - those are the sets you can slot in that power. Next step is to research the available sets that can be slotted in in the powers you have. Head on over to Wentworths/BlackMarket to buy them. (Edit: Note that while it is often cheaper to purchace the recipe and the required salvage, sometimes the already crafted enhancements can be cheaper. Also don't be in a hurry, the "last 5" transaction list can be deceptive, often if you bid lower and wait a week they bids will be filled. One last market tip, don't be dead-set on gettting your set IOs at a specific level; often if you are willing to go a couple levels up or down you can get it for a fraction of the price.)

This is where it gets tricky when you have a budget. While you may be tempted to get entire sets for the bonuses; Some sets, and specifically some individual enhancements within a set can get rather expensive, so an alternative is Frankenslotting cheap set enhancements. What you miss out in bonuses, is often more than made up for in enhancing the values of your powers. Frankenslotting can also be used to maintain current SO slottting effectiveness in fewer slots, allowing you to respec and move slots around, or enhance aspects of your powers you might not, normally (Like, say, slotting End Mod in elec blasts)

Whatever you decide, general enhancing goals for most attacks
- Around 90% damage, 20-40% Accuracy, 30-60% Endurance Reduction, 30-60% Recharge reduction.
Varies a bit from power to power and personal tastes; fast recharging powers might need almost no Recharge reduction, some people like more accuracy to ensure they rarely go below 95% chance to hit, and some ATs are strapped for slots and might forgo a bit of damage to better slot other powers.

3) "What and where should I be running?"

Aside from the Weekly Strike Target, pretty much anything you want. Although I find the lvl 50 Task Forces (Statesman/Recluse, Dr.Khan/Baracuda, Lady Grey, and Imperious) to be good sources of shards.

Things you may want to do however are Run the Midnighters arc (from Montague Castanella blue side, Ashley McKnight red side) to gain access to Cimerora and the Imperious task force therein. Also, run the first mission from Levantera in the Rikti War Zone to get the Member of Vanguard badge so you can get the special rewards from mothership raids...

And since you've been away, there's a number of lower level story arcs that have been added that are quite good and accessible through Ouroboros. On that train of thought, if you have/get Going Rogue, I highly recommend running at least one character through Preatoria. The zones are beautiful (and a bit taxing on your computer depending on your settings), and the story arcs and missions are often vastly superior to most legacy content (although the new enemy groups are a little more difficult, and they were a bit heavy handed with the ambushes sometimes).

For one Million...You can buy my everlasting friendship!

But seriously, there are a ton of sets. Best thing to do is to relearn the game. Don't spend that money right away, and relearn the set you are playing, then head to Went Worths or the Black Market and find sets that give you benefits you feel you are lacking.

WOW thanks for all your help, it seems this game has gone from point and shoot to do a ******** of research then point and shoot lol. Ah well ill play around with it thank you for all your info.

In addition to Influence/Infamy/Information to buy what you want, there are several new "currencies" in the game that you can use to get the same things (ie IO recipes and salvage): Reward Merits, AE Tickets and Alignment (Hero/Villain) Merits. There's also Vanguard Merits, but their use is a bit more specialized. Depending on what and how you like to play, these alternative currencies may be easier for you to accrue.

Well to be fair, you've missed about five years of a game that's been out for seven. Of course there's a lot that has changed and become more complex.

The good news is that most of it isn't necessary for greater than 95% of game content. With just a decent build costing only a few million influence (much less than the fund you were gifted), you can have a functional and useful character. After that, it all becomes icing, designing your character to be just the way you want it and to become ever more powerrful - you can do as much or as little of this as you want really. For the people who enjoy tinkering with their builds, we have resources for that. If you aren't one of those people, you won't be shut out - you won't be as powerful, of course, but neither will you be excluded or 'gimped'. That's the beauty of this game compared to some others (the word 'gearscore' ring any bells?)

I'm going to touch on the 100 million inf thing.

FIRST: As mentioned, you can use SO's and still "point and shoot" just fine. However, you can use inventions to "point and shoot" better. (Although there's no zillion-inf invention-based build that will give you as much benefit as a buffing teammate who's awake.)

SECOND:

There are a bunch of mini-guides in my sig.

THIRD:

... well, looks like the Grim Heaper's pretty much covered all my basic advice. I will add that you can put low bids up at Wentworth's and walk away- the bids will wait for you. There are roughly four "time periods" for buying something. Buy It Now, Wait Five Minutes, Wait Overnight, and Wait Till Tuesday. Buy It Now (or BUY IT NAO as the marketeers say) is considerably more expensive than Wait Five Minutes, and always more expensive than Wait Overnight. Some people don't believe in letting a bid sit on Wentworth's. Those people are frequently poor and angry about prices.

I agree about frankenslotting. My first 50 was a dom, and frankenslotting helped keep down the costs. However, a speed ITF was really brutal to do with the dom, so I had to save enough to build up more defense.

An alternative to sets is common IOs. In some cases, it's actually cheaper to buy them from the market than to make it yourself. I think the commons are listed under Crafted->Other. Slot lvl 25 or 30 ones and you should be good to go!

Warning: Enhancement Diversification can cap for common IOs over lvl 30. For example, 3-slot Unstoppable with common recharge IOs.

Common
IO level | recharge time | time diff | % of base change | % diff
none___| 1,000.0 _____| 0.0 ____| 100.0% ________ | 0.0%
____10 | 740.2 _______| -259.8 _| 74.0% __________|-26.0%
____15 | 634.5 _______| -105.7 _| 63.5% __________|-10.6%
____20 | 567.8 _______| -66.7 __| 56.8%___________|-6.7%
____25 | 520.3 _______| -47.5 __| 52.0% __________|-4.8%
____30 | 511.1 _______| -9.2 ___| 51.1% __________|-0.9%
____35 | 508.9 _______| -2.2 ___| 50.9% __________|-0.2%
____40 | 506.7 _______| -2.2 ___| 50.7% __________|-0.2%
____45 | 504.5 _______| -2.2 ___| 50.5% __________|-0.2%
____50 | 502.3 _______| -2.2 ___| 50.2% __________|-0.2%

When 3-slotting with the same sort of enhancement, level 25-30 IOs give practically the same improvement as higher level ones, ie, (3) lvl 25s give a 48% improvement while (3) lvl 50s give a 50% improvement; a difference of a mere 2%.

For example, if you upgrade from (3) lvl 25 common IOs to (3) lvl 45 IOs, expect an improvement of 520.3 - 504.5 = 15.8 secs for a power that has a 1000 sec recharge.

What if the power had a 10 sec recharge time? If you upgrade to (3) lvl 45 IOs, you improve by 5.2 - 5.04 = 0.15 secs. A whoppingly large number!
Anyway, lvl 45 IOs cost more, so if you're on a budget, you may need to rethink whether you want to pay a lot for such a small improvement.

Some sets I use:

Decimation recipes - prolly 200k-500k each if you don't get lvl 40 ones.
Crushing Impact/Thunderstrike - 2-5 mil per crafted IO. Recipes around 50-500k.
Sandman - cheap
Stupefy recipes - prolly 200k-500k each if you don't get lvl 50 ones.
Dark Watcher/Call to Arms/Expedient R - check the IOs. Prolly can get 2-3 mill crafted if you don't get lvl 50 ones. Recipes are cheap.
Positron - prolly 200k-500k each if you don't get lvl 50 ones.
Red fortune - prolly 200k-500k each if you don't get lvl 50 ones.
Adjusted Targeting - prolly 200k-500k each if you don't get lvl 50 ones.
Defense: Red fortune, serendipity
Resist Damage: Titanium coating
End Mod: Efficiency Adap
Melee: Smashing haymaker, crushing impact, bruising blow
??? AOE: Multistrike, Sciroco's dervish (lvls 20-25 ONLY!)
Health/Heal: Harmonized healing, Triage, Doctored Wounds
To slot on the cheap side, I picked uncommon (yellow color) recipes. Most of my IOs are lvl 20-30. I only pick higher level IOs if I got the power above lvl 30. Note that the higher the level, the more the IO will cost to buy or craft.

Also look in Crafted Enhancements->Other for possible cheap common IOs.

How much can you spend per recipe? Let's look at the cost:
Recipe_______55000___100000____200000
Salv__________3000_____3000______3000
Craft@lvl30___40000____40000_____40000
1_slot_______98000___143000_____243000
88_slots__8,624,000__12,584,000__21,384,000

From the above table, if you spend 55000 per recipe, your cost for 88 slots is 8.6 million. If you spend 200k per recipe, 88 slots will cost 21 million. The above numbers assume lvl 30 recipes for crafting cost. Note that lvl 50 recipes cost 500k to craft. So with 20 mil, you can only craft (40) lvl 50 recipes which is just half your total slots.

Since you're a dominator, you want some recharge bonus to get as close to perma-dom as possible. There's quite a few uncommon sets out there that give 5% recharge bonus.

I also suggest investing 20-30 million for marketeering. Hop by the market forums and look at Organica's journal to get an idea of how it's done.

See ya in game!

Crayhal- you left out the cheap ranged sets I use. Ruin and Maelstrom's Fury. [... which was in the game before Maelstrom was, wasn't it? Huh.]

Well im trying to put enhancements in my lvl 50 ice/ice dom and went to the auctioneer and was looking for some crafted range, recharge and damage enhancements and found none :-(

You can also just type "Invention: Range" into the search box and hit return, the recipes will be found. All of the common IOs are named "Invention: <Type>".

No, that was not a C++ template.

Also! Don't forget you have 3 alternate builds that you can utilize!