Astral/Empyrean Merits = Recipes.

Well, the Devs INTEND for these things to be rare.

For instance, i don't know if you know this, but if you do 5 tip missions a day, and an alignment mission every 2 days, you can build up A-Merits (As long as you're strictly a hero or villain). You can trade A-merits for purple recipes. However, you need a MONTHS WORTH of a-merits to get one. So if the fastest the devs want people getting purples is roughly once a month, the high market prices are somewhat justified.

After all, I'm not going to spend a month getting something, then only sell it for less than I can make by steamrolling a TF.

If the Devs stick by that formula, expect Purples to go for about 30-120 Empy Merits (which would be 1-3 trials a day). They might consider going lower than that, HOWEVER, it would completely negate A-Merits as a way of attaining these goods.

When people say they want "more ways", the Devs respond, but the devs also want people to keep playing the game. They're not going to make these things easy to get. As it stands, we'll now have 3 ways to get these: Farming (Which the devs are okay with, but they don't like exploiters), running solo missions (to get a-merits, though a purp could always drop from a goon you fight, too!) and now people who like doing trials. The only other option would be being able to trade in Normal Merits, which the Devs have seemed reluctant to do.

I guess they could always up the drop rate a tiny bit... I play roughly ever-other day, and usually do a TF or a trial or do some street-sweeping. I've probably defeated dozens of thousands of foes, yet I haven't seen a drop in months. Now, random is random and there's never any guarantee of anything, but at this rate, if i WERE looking for purples, i'd be highly frustrated by now.

You really need to fix the Coercive Persuasion frame of that gif. My brain twitches every time it snaps up one pixel from all the others.

You could try running a few TFs, and do a bunch of random rolls in the 35-39 range. You'll have a chance at LoTG and Kinetic Combat recipes which are worth several million a piece and will help you save up the money for the purples.

Do some I-Raids and select Super inspirations as your reward and sell those off. The Ultimate ones (+1 level shift for 90 seconds) are going for a pretty penny.

In short, find ways to make money and go after them =)

TwoHeadedBoy:

You're doing it wrong.

I've burnt pretty near all my inf -turned it into Prestige- and I'm going to have a billion inf again within two weeks; maybe within one. It's not that we start with these tremendous reserves of inf; we start with more knowledge and that's really it.

To oversimplify, let's say I can double my inf every time and I start with a million. 1MM, 2MM, 4MM... In 7 sets of transactions I'm at 128 million, in 10 sets of transactions I'm at a billion. In actual fact some of them are "spend 5 million, sell for 35 million" and some are "spend 100 million, sell for 150 million", but double is probably a pretty good guess.

You want to get rich or you want to complain?

The first billion is always the most difficult. Seriously. Unless you get really lucky with some drops and sales you will have a slow time reaching that one billion influence/infamy number. Once you do you can move on to buying up some more expensive recipes and posting for high profits. I've been solely buying, crafting, and selling purples/PvP IOs for the past month. I hit one billion after about 3 weeks of 15 minute a day transactions on one character. I'm now up to 6 billion after 2 more weeks. I'm hoarding inf for no reason other than the fact that I can.

So basically, my advice to anyone who would listen (which would probably be no one) would be to stick it out till you hit a billion and then go from there.

I think 20/30 e-merits is probably right. You can acquire an E-merit in about 1/2 the time a HAM/VAM takes, plus you can get 2 a day. That sounds like about the spread they'd give as a bonus for grouping.

OTOH, it could be less, simply because they want those bigger rewards to be more attainable for Incarnates who are playing end-game content. But since they're tradeable...

Here's what I generally look at:

* Max level
* Orange recipe that "someone would use"
* Good spread between recipe/crafted AND low number of crafted for sale.
* Only work around 5 of the same IO at one time, with 2-3 niches on a character.
* I usually go for either the most-desired item in a less desired set, or the second-best item in a highly desired set, but that's personal choice. [Miracle: Heal/Rech is not as desired as Miracle: Recovery, but people who are going for a set bonus will frequently jump on the Heal/Rech or the Heal next. On the other hand, people only slot Serendipity because they want another Def/End or something, so you go for the Def/End as The One That Moves. These are not really high-profit examples, necessarily. ]

This is heavily slanted towards my playstyle, which is "hop on 2-3 times a day to flip stuff around." A watched pot is my pot. On the other hand if you were running 100-200 market slots you shouldn't have a problem running 20-50 on a couple of guys.

Go ahead, check Pool C. I'm going to tell you right now that there's at least one recipe that sells for 2 million where the crafted sells for 35 million. At the moment.

EDIT: This is a response to TwoHeadedBoy, post #37.

Well the open beta is here. Someone on the forums posted that recipe prices are 40 E Merits for a Purple and 50-70 for a PvPIO. So it looks like the conversion is 1 Alignment Merit = 2 E Merits.

32 Astrals for a Pool C/D Recipe, and 16 for a Pool A/B.

Quote:

Originally Posted by Shubbie Im very good at taking a problem and making it worse.

Quite, I'm ok mostly with where the purples lies. I suspect that it'll be quite some time before [many] people start using their E-Merits for either Purples or PvPIOs anyway given the current costs of the ascension armor pieces. That said, stuff can change, and I may simply be overvaluing the desirability of the costume pieces. Or just plain old projecting my personal plans .

I'm cautious about the Astral Merit cost for some of those IOs. 32 Astral Merits for a LotG/Recharge is very nice. That's something I'd be willing to burn a few astral merits on when it goes live.

I do hope prices go up.

The current prices on beta

32 astrals = 1 lotg+7.5 or Numina +regen/+recovery against 200 merits or 2 Hero Merits.

It looks like tip missions are still the winner for these.