The Current State of the Market

I’ve been, sort of, away from the game for a while, and now that I’m back I’m trying to adjust to this bold new world, and am looking to liquefy some of my assets.

Consequently I have a few questions for the Masters of Marketeering, the Cardinals of Currency, the Gurus of the Green, the Pontiffs of Profit, in short; the Market Forum Regulars.

Question 1 – What is the current effective inf value of a Merit (conventional Merit, not Alignment Merit)?

Question 2 – If I have a large bundle of Merits, what is the best way to spend them if all I want is wealth? Is it more cost effective to do a collection of random rolls or just by up a premium recipe (craft it?) and sell that on the Market?

Question 3 – What is the current effective inf value of AE Tickets?

Thanks in advance for your responses.

(PS: I apologise to anyone who looked at the thread title and was expecting a hilarious, deranged rant.)

I would put the value of a merit somewhere around 600K maybe a little more.

For liquidation unless you are earning more than 50 per day or are in a huge hurry I would recommend converting them to Alignment Merits and spending those. Since an alignment merit is worth about 100 merits you're effectively buying 50 merits at 400K each when you do the conversion. As for direct buys versus random rolls it's hard to say which is better. I think random rolls are a bit better on average but I haven't really been doing ti much myself so I can't say.

Yeah, the problem with random rolls, as always, is that there's only a small handfull of recipes that are worth anything significant, and everything else is junk with very little "in the middle" (IE, worth more than their vendor price but not a big seller). Now, I still do random rolls because I like the thrill of the gamble and hoping i get something big... and also my characters are currently outfited the way I want them so neither enhancements or their value mean much to me. I just like getting "the big prize".

However, if you're trying to make money, it's not the best way to go. Yeah, you can always roll a miracle, a numina, and 2 LotG procs... but you can also end up with 4 Crap of the Hunters. I kid you not that happened to me once. ;_;

Go for the direct buy on certain things. It allows you to pick the level of the recipe. lvl 20 miracles and lvl 30 numina and lvl 25 lotg are definately wanted more so than the others because you can use them as you level. In the case of the LoTG its more exemplar friendly. The random can be done once you cherry pick everything else if you have the luck for it. I do not use random because I always end up with a ton of crap recipes I can not do anything with that I would never craft and would only vendor them. Those of you with better luck might come out better with the random roll but for me its off limits.

I find that the "practical minimum" for many crafted Pool C's is around 10 million. There are utter junk recipes still and always, but there are some things in the middle. Devastation, Aegis, things like that.

If I'm buying specific recipes, something that was very good (and very well known) for a very long time was Kinetic Combat Def/End and Def/Rech. It dropped down last I looked, but it might be back up; it was 100-150 million for a single h/v merit in the golden months, 60ish last I looked.

If you are going to do random rolls, convert the merits to alignment merits. You do spend 20 million per roll but you get 5 random rolls for 50 merits, essentially half price.

Working the market and crafting I/O's is far more reliable, so I would suggest stockpiling them and using them to buy specifc things for future toons.

Like say a stealth proc you can slot at level 12. Quite handy.

Thanks for the advice and information all. I had forgotten about converting reward merits into alignment merits, and that is good to know. Unfortunatly, my largest stockpile of reward merits is on my Rogue which makes conversion a little... tricky .

AE tickets: Out of curiousity, I took a L15 [or so] character, locked XP, paid for an AE run, and rolled bronze.

I paid 10M and got income of something like 60M, but I only tried it once...

I forgot to mention that the toon doing the rolls is a lvl 50. This means that the recipes I got are at the max lvl for the recipe range. In Fulmen's case, his rolls are at lvl 15, which probably isn't as profitable as lvl 50 recipes.