Where are the casual players?

I have a question about set bonuses (which pertains to frankenslotting, I guess): do the benefits of set bonuses apply, let's say from a power that is a toggle, even when that power isn't active (i.e., the toggle is off)?

Coming to this threat late [I swear I wasn't egosurfing!]

TXwXoX Three things:

1) You have sticker shock. I understand. I had sticker shock when you could get a character full of the most expensive stuff in the game for 300 million inf. [It's now in the multiple billions. Note "most expensive" is not "best".] The thing is that you can be a hundred-millionaire easily through normal play plus, like, five minutes of following directions.
2) IO'ing out doesn't have to be the painful process it looks like, but if you decide to live that lifestyle you DO have to put a few hours into learning it.
3) I'm sorry that you discovered Architect Entertainment the way it is actually used, not the way we hoped it would be used.

Discussing these points in detail:
1) Sticker shock: It doesn't matter much what the units are as long as you're buying and selling in the same units. [I recently realized that "starting salary" is about twice what it was when I last got starting salary. Sticker shock is very real.] 2 thousand frobnitzes and 2 million frobnitzes aren't really very different.

I'm going to discuss how to make 600K, 6 million inf, and 60 million inf in an afternoon.
600K is boring but foolproof: you find some level 50 recipe [confuse or sleep or snipe] with like 60 for sale and 0 bids. You buy as many as you can hold (at around 100 each) and run to a nearby vendor or shop. You sell them for 5000 or 10,000 each. When you can't buy any more cheap ones, find another recipe. Repeat for 100 recipes, around 10 runs. Might take an hour depending on how close the vendor is- KR has a very near one.

6 million inf is a little more tricky. It involves [audience hisses] crafting or flipping. The important thing to realize is that a lot of people have so much inf they can't even see the difference between a million and ten million inf any more. It's a rounding error. So you can take the time to craft, say, a level 50 Doctored Wounds IO, and put it up and they will pay you handsomely for the convenience of just buying it, slotting it and going. You can often find a recipe and ingredients for under half a million, spend up to half a million crafting it, and sell it for five million. Wents takes 10%, so your 4 million profit becomes 3.5 million. Yes. You need a bit over a million inf to try this and there are some tricks to learn. But it'll work.
6 million inf, version 2: Go to Ouroboros, select a 25-29 arc. This will "auto-exemplar" you down to 25. You don't have to DO the arc, though. You can go burn down a few hundred green or blue zombies in Dark Astoria, classical "Street sweeping" style. This can actually be fun if you only do it every six months or something. Eventually some of them will drop orange salvage, which sells for 1 to 1.5 million inf per item.
6 million inf, version 3: Do an AE arc or two. There's an entire forum full of people talking about the good, fun ones. Cash in your tickets for orange salvage and sell it for 1 to 1.5 million inf per item. I think Deific Weapons and Enchanted Impervium are still good sellers, but check for yourself.

60 million inf: This is going to be REALLY annoying, but it's a lot of inf. First, get 20 million inf and 50 Reward Merits. (Sister Psyche, for example, is a TF that gives EXACTLY 50 reward merits. You can also do a bunch of Ouroboros arcs and get merits.) Go to Fort Trident or the Crucible and buy a Hero or Villain Merit. Then, also at Fort Trident or the Crucible, buy a specific recipe. Details available on request. Craft it and sell it for 60 to 100 million inf. Gain 35 to 70 million inf in profit. [remember, you spent 20 on the Hero Merit and Wents took 10% in fees.] Boom, you're rich.

... Wow, that was longer than I thought it would be. 2 and 3 in next post.

2) How to IO out:
The simplest version is generics, which "work" like SO's only they never go red, and the higher level ones give you more bonus than the lower ones.
More complex is Frankenslotting: pick what's cheap and of a reasonable level [I like 30-35; 31,34 and 36 tend to be extra-cheap] and leave your bids for a day or two. My former sig was "If you didn't leave a bid overnight, you didn't really try to buy it." You can think of Frankenslotting sort of like miniature hami-Os that you can start slotting at, like, level 27. Notice that if you're level 28 you can put in bids for your next two IOs and, when you hit level 29, you might already have everything ready to slot. You have to do a teeny bit of planning, true, but you slot it at level 29 and you don't have to touch it until you decide you want to do a big fancy respec. Maybe at 50, maybe NEVER. You don't even have to spend a lot of money- it's five or ten times more expensive than SO's, but almost every time an orange salvage drops on you that's close to the price of a full set of SO's right there.
Yet more complex is the "Set IO" game, where you figure out what you want to max in set IO bonus terms and you do that. The more you spend the more you can max. I've done this on eight or ten characters, realistically. I recommend two or three things to ALL characters that you're IOing: a knockback IO if you don't have KB protection is the closest to "necessary" this game has. I wouldn't play without it. I suggest one or two sets that give global Accuracy bonuses- a lot of those are cheap and common. If you want to get a little fancy you can get some global Recharge, which is cheap as long as you don't want more than 10 or 20%.

But the max-IO game is something to do if you have one or two characters that you love A LOT and you want to make them as mighty as you can, and you're going to spend a lot of time on them anyway. Very roughly, your first 30% improvement in strength costs 10 million, your next 30% costs 200 million and your next 30% costs 4 billion. If you're going to make 4 billion inf anyway [because you play a lot or love marketing], why NOT make your favorite character more powerful?

3. Architect Entertainment. Many people have always loved doorsitting and getting PL'd and getting the most stuff for the least work in this game. It's been around since issue 2 at least- I remember Peregrine Island demon farms, I remember hydra teams, and I bet you do too. AE allowed those people to build custom farms and run them. In fact, it's really easy to build a farm. It's really hard and it's a lot of work to build an AE arc that is:
interesting
challenging
not annoying
not suicidal
and well-written.

I'd estimate 1% of the arcs in AE are really good, 24% are really trying, and 40% are abandoned or stupid or crapfests in one way or another. The other 25% are farms.

The number being RUN are probably 1% good arcs and 99% farms. That's not the fault of AE: it's the fault of human nature. Some of those good arcs are as good or better than the Devs' best work. There's a forum for that, if you run out of Dev-provided content.

I make a ton of money off procs -- kismet +6% accuracy, force feedback chance for +recharge, positron's blast chance for energy damage, stuff like that. I mean, not a "selling purples in large quantities" ton of money, but enough that I mostly just buy stuff I want.

You dont need to grind. You dont need to farm.

Sometimes I play a few task forces over and over, but mostly because I have fun on those and because I'm normally trying to do different things and/or get the feeling of my latest tweeks on my toons. And some of the TFs I like arent the popular ones (like the Shadow Shard, for an example).

I dont deal with the market too. I run up to 50 with mostly what I find and craft.
When I find a recipe, I craft it and store it on my base.
When I have a toon that needs it, I get it.

Today I had a visit on my base, and he was amazed of the things I had stored there. He is one of the "ebil marketeers", and said I could make a fortune with those enhancements. He refused to believe that those were my drops, and not a market tweek. He also refused to believe that the most influence I ever got on a toon was 300 mil, and thats because I pulled influence from many toons...

Its amazing what youll get when you play having fun. Its almost Karmic.
The point is... Having fun is your reward, not the latest shinnies. You cant control what drop youll get. But you can control what gives you fun.

I don't have any purpled out characters, and indeed the only fully IO'd character I have was IO'd out simply because he had to be in order to be remotely playable for me. And back when I did that, the market seemed a great deal more reasonable in both prices and supply. I recently decided to mostly ignore IOs, and to never take the Fighting Pool again (except maybe on a Willpower character). And I still haven't crafted any Incarnate abilities with my 50s. How's that for casual?

I'm late to the party too, but I wanted to give you some advice and amplify things that other people already mentioned. As everyone has said, yes you *can* do nearly everything with SOs but until you have the Alpha slot unlocked (which you do) you can't participate in Tin Mage or Apex TFs and until you have something equiped in the Alpha slot you'll be -4 to mobs on those TFs (which are level 54, so you'll be -8 with nothing equiped). On the other hand, when you have a Tier 3 Alpha equiped, you'll have a level shift . . . you'll be 50+1 against everything, over and beyond the other benefits of the Alpha Slot Ability.

This is the one of the most direct and straightforward things you can do to improve a character at 50. To get a Tier 3 Alpha, you basically just need to run certain TFs . . . ITF, Kahn, STF, LGTF, Cathedral of Pain, or Hamidon and RWZ Mothership Raids (MSRs don't give components directly but do give lots of Vanguard Merits which can be exchanged in the Vanguard Base for an Incarnate Component; Hami Raids give a choice of 4 incarnate shards which can be combined into your choice of component). The Tier 1 Alpha needs just 3 components, so figure out which one you want (and folks would be happy to discuss which one would be best for a particular character) do a couple of TFs, and you are rocking and rolling! While doing the TFs, you'll also get shards to drop (which can be combined to make components if you don't feel like/can't/aren't willing to re-run TFs). At some point you'll need to do the Weekly TF to get a Notice of the Well which is required for the Tier 3. If you do each of those TFs once + a WTF you'll have most of what you need, you might need to re-run one or two.

I must admit, that's not the most *straightforward* system. There are a lot of moving parts, its cumbersome, sure. But it isn't particularly *difficult*. And for the most part, TFs are pretty casual friendly. You can do them all on SOs. And you don't have to do very many of them to get your Alpha slot equipped (even to Tier 3).

To get your other Incarnate Slots unlocked (and equipped) you'll need to run Incarnate Trials. Currently there are 4 of them in the game. Two of the (Lore and Destiny) will give Incarnate Level Shifts, similar to the level shift you get from alpha, but Incarnate Level Shifts are only active when doing Incarnate content. You'll get incarnate experience (which unlocks the slots) and also the various rewards needed to craft incarnate abilities for each slot.

If you don't want to be all grindy, once you have your Tier 3 alpha you can pretty much go ahead and run any of the incarnate trials. You don't need to have anything unlocked or equipped. You get Astral Merits and Empyrean Merits as well as Incarnate Threads and a random Incarnate component at the conclusion of each trial. You can convert Astral and Empyrean Merits to Threads, which you can convert to components of your choice. I don't know if running all 4 trials will unlock all the slots and give you enough stuff to craft tier 3s in Lore and Destiny (for incarnate level shifts), but it will get you darn near close and if you don't plan on running those trials again it really won't matter if you don't have incarnate level shifts. If you did each trial twice, I imagine you'd unlock all the slots and have enough components (converting your merits to threads and threads to components) to create several incarnate abilities. Some of it depends on luck with the random component drops of course.

Unless you are obsessing over min-maxing or want to run a lot of incarnate content, there is no reason to *worry* about Incarnate slots beyond getting a Tier 3 alpha and getting whatever you can get via running the 4 current trials twice. And while I'll agree with you that all the different components, shards, etc are confusing and not super-intuitive, they aren't hard to get and don't require a ton of grinding the same content over and over again.