Where are the casual players?

IOs are a different story. You don't need them, you can be fine without them, and unless you want to spend a lot of money to buy crafted IOs they require you to use the crafting system (and likely also use the market to get recipes and salvage). If this is *not* something that you enjoy, you can stick to SOs and do fine.

But if you don't mind rolling up your sleeves and learning a bit about the system, you can do some neat stuff even without shooting for the top dollar items. Others have mentioned "frankenslotting" and I'll give you one of my favorite examples of what you can do. The Focused Smite melee set tops out at level 40 and has an Acc/Dam/Rech and an Acc/End/Rech recipe in it. The salvage could cost more than the recipes, the recipes can be had cheap (right now there are many for sale with no bids, I got one for 11k and another for 1k and reposted them for 1 inf). Each one gives +19.3% to all aspects. So if you craft those two you can replace one ACC SO and one Rech SO and get an extra bit of Dam and End for free! If you already had 3 DAM slotted, you are over the ED cap in Dam, so you can replace one of your DAM with a DAM/RECH or a DAM/END IO (again, look for something cheap). At this point your power now has a bit more than 7 slots of power in 6 slots. Frankenslotting can be a very cheap way to get extra power out of your characters (it works *great* for controllers using multiple acc/hold/recharge IOs).

If you want to kick it up a notch, take a look at the Crushing Impact set. Crushing Impact tops out at level 50 and its more expensive than Focused Smite, but put that aside for the moment. It has 3 triple recipes, ACC/DAM/RECH, ACC/DAM/END, and DAM/END/RECH. If you replaced an ACC, a DAM, and a RECH with those 3 IOs, you'd get 1 ACC, 1.5 DAM, 1 END, and 1 RECH . . . 4.5 slots of power in 3 slots! Not bad, and you'd get a set bonus to health (you also get a set bonus to immoblize resist, but that's not really something to write home about). You can put in two of the other IOs to get the +7% global accuracy bonus and the +5% global recharge, and still have one slot left over to make sure that damage was capped. You can stack up to 5 of the same value/type bonus.

Okay, so how to make the price work for you? The price of Crushing Impact recipes fluctuates over the course of a week or so. Some people pay the "BUY IT NAO" price. If you put up several bids over a range of levels (say 41-49) of 100-200k or so, you'll get likely get several in a week. Craft them all, use what you need, and put the rest on the market with a sell price of a million or so. You'll come out ahead. Level 40 recipes use more expensive salvage, level 50s cost twice as much influence to craft. With a bit of effort and patience, you can get a set of Crushing Impacts for maybe 2 million tops.

Again, if that's not something you wish to explore, you can be perfectly okay with just SOs. The IO system isn't totally straightforward, there is a learning curve. But it isn't rocket science and it doesn't require a ton of brainpower or influence to make it work and have a pretty significant impact on your character. You don't need a bunch of purples or the most expensive recipes/IOs to enjoy the benefits.

Also, when asking for advice on builds, I've found it's better to specify that you're looking for a leveling build.
This lets them know you are looking for basic 'what to take and when' suggestions, instead of the more requested how can i squeeze 00.1% more recharge here deals.

Out of the 140 some odd toons I have, only 4 of them are over level 40! The majority of my gametime is spent in the 20-38 range. Altitis seems to kick in then. So I'm always needing levelling advice, as I don't really bother with sets and such.

I have been away from the game for one or 2 years.
I have had to joint the ranks of the casual players, and started a brand new ill/rad troller with the idea that I wanted to run the new stuff and have fun. Then I got hooked on the idea of not tricking my ill/rad out but only making PA fully perma. It has been fun. You don't need purple IO's, but you need to figure out what you want the IO sets to do.

I ran the GR stuff and then made my solo Base to hold onto all of my salvage (That was a mini goal in itself). I saved all of my inf and used mostly SOs until I reached 47. I cought a big break when I got a purple IO piece that was in high(500mil)demand, and the scrimping and saving was over.

I had a lot of fun saving up for my future semi-almost uber toon.

If you want to make inf in a fast semi no-farm way...run the tips and trade 2 alignment merits for the Luck of the Gambler universal recharge. The lvl 50 ones are trading for over 100mil each.

My guess is that most peoples brags outpace reality. On the internet, it's hard to verify, if you are even the sort skeptical enough to try. But add the pile of brags together, and you create a fair amount of pressure to conform to a standard or norm that's just not the norm.

I would wager it's the MMO equivalent of looking at models and TV personalities for a body self image of what a 'normal' woman (or man) looks.

So I just noticed that I had 4 private messages waiting in my forum inbox, some of which have been sitting in there for a week now. I just wanted to thank those of you who PMed me and offered the in-game assistance. It's folks like you that make me so fond of this game.

I just wanted to let you all know that I do intend to answer you individually, that I didn't just blow off you and your generous offers of help. I just didn't realize I even had those PMs until this afternoon! I am simply not accustomed to looking up in the corner of the screen where the unread message count is displayed in tiny, tiny type.

Anyway, again, thank you all for your terrific input and generous offers of help!

I know the topic has gravitated a bit but I'll chip in on the "don't need IO's" front a bit. I level most toons to about mid late 30's before I throw any IO's in and continue to slot SO's at multiples of 5 until 42 where I'll go ahead and use 45 and 50's common IO's unless there is something better in a set.

In the 30's I "frankenslot" meaning I'll put IO's from a variety of (cheaper) sets. If I REALLY like a character then I'll start putting sets and working towards fancy stacked bonuses earlier but mostly I wait till late in the characters life before committing much INF. End result, I still have a bit of insight into the SO game and I'd say I rarely feel it affects me to "gimp" levels. The worst times are levels like 26 or 31 when the SO's are going yellow hence my general 30's IO slotting tactic I guess.

If anyone is really overwhelemed by IO sets and such try just replacing your SO's with level 45 or 50 common IO's and work your way up from there!

Okay, so I tried my hand at using the Consignment House market for the first time ever today. It was so easy (read: fast), I'm a little taken aback, and I'm wondering if maybe I didn't try hard enough to maximize my gains. Here's what I did:

I discovered that one of my (many) alts happened to get a level 50 Apocalypse recipe drop at some point. The Dmg/Rech/Acc one. I looked and saw that the difference in selling price between the recipe alone and the crafted IO was about 100mil. So I thought I'd check and see which salvage pieces I had, which ones I needed, and how much it would cost to get the ones I needed.

It turned out that between all my toons, I had all but one of the salvage ingredients. The missing one, Magical Conspiracy, I was able to buy for 2mil, instantly on the spot, no waiting. The crafting cost was 600k. The listing fee for the sale was 40mil, The instant I put it up, it sold for 800mil!

So basically I earned over 700mil influence in about 5 minutes. Now granted, that was only because I had the good fortune to have stumbled upon a purple recipe and have all but one of the ingredients already. But still, I can sort of see why the AH works as easily and quickly as it does. With every server being connected to it, it's like eBay in that you have the entire world's population of players buying and selling, and that makes for a very fluid market.

My problem now is figuring out what to do with all the salvage and recipes I have spread out across all my characters. In some cases, their allotted inventory is full and I need to get rid of some of it in order to make room for more. Since I don't yet have a specific plan (i.e., which toon I want to have IOs, and therefore which IOs/sets to aim for), I don't know which bits of salvage to keep and which recipes to keep.

Is there a general rule of thumb to use to help decide whether to vendor a recipe or piece of salvage vs. trying to sell it on the market? For instance, I have a Level 50 Fly IO recipe in one of my characters' inventories. The last several market purchases for this were 12,500. But I can vendor it for over 70,000. I know this is "chump change" compared to the amounts that will come in by selling Rare and Very Rare recipes, but I'm just wondering if there is a set of common practices for this stuff. Like, just vendor any recipe that's not at least yellow? Or orange? Vendor any salvage that's not Rare (orange)? I mean, it could take hours to go through the 1000+ pieces of salvage at my disposal (I had an SG where everyone dumped all their salvage in the base before everyone stopped playing, so there's a lot of stuff in the Salvage Rack), find out their "market value" and sell it all off (20 bits at a time). Is that really an effective use of casual playing time (a question mostly for you casual market players, I guess)?

There aren't really many rules of thumb, but I can tell you the rules I do use. The list is sadly somewhat complex, but I do have it mostly memorized now.

For recipes, you are almost always safe selling level 50 Common recipes to an NPC and getting more than you can get on the market, primarily because they are, well, so common. However, if you craft them, you might make more money selling them. This is only true for some of the enhancement types - damage, recharge, endurance, accuracy, healing, and end modification all tend to sell for several hundred thousand inf on the market, though the price wanders over time.

There's no hard and fast rule for what Uncommon or Rare recipes are worth on the market, and whether or not it's worth your time to try and to sell them. However, NPC vendors always pay you a pittance for Uncommon and Rare recipes - they pay you far more for Common ones. Basically, if I sell an Uncommon or Rare recipe to an NPC, it's because the alternative was that I planned to delete it.

What a recipe is worth depends heavily on what set bonuses it provides. In general, things that give +defense to melee attacks, lethal/smash damage or ranged attacks is valuable, as are things that give +5% or more recharge. These are especially valuable if the bonus in question comes within a number of slots that people might consider investing in a power anyway. For example, lots of people would five or six slot attacks anyway, so a set that gives +recharge for five slots and +defense for six is probably highly desirable, and therefore valuable on the market. A set that gives +defense in the 5th slot of a resistance power is probably not as valuable, because not many people find the need to five-slot their shields outside of set bonuses.

Sets that provide +HP or +regen are also popular, but probably less so than +defense and +recharge. Sets that provide damage resistance, mez resistance, or debt protection are often junk on the market.

Sets than enhance Defense, Resistance, Damage, and Healing are very popular, because most characters can make use of these. Sets that enhance Holds and Disorients are more popular than sets that enhance most other mezzes, because powerts that Hold and Disorient are relatively common. Sets that enhance Snipes, Confusion, Fear, and Taunt are not very popular, even when they give good set bonuses, because the number of characters that can use them is limited.

Edit: Very Rare sets always worth selling (assuming you don't want to use them. While some, like Sleep and Confuse sets are relative stinkers within the price range of all purples, even the cheapest of them will usually sell for a few million inf, and the most valuable ones (usually the damage sets) will sell for hundreds of millions - the best sellers are closing on 1B.

Most common high-level 50 salvage, especially Tech salvage, is so incredibly oversupplied that if you try to sell it for more than an NPC would buy it from you for it will take longer to sell than you might like. However, once again NPCs buy it for a pittance relative to what a level 50 earns in combat, so this doesn't really mean it's worth selling it to the NPC. I sell my common salvage for badges, not profit, because at 1000 sales and every 2000 sales after that up to 7000 sales adds a bonus market slot.

High-level Uncommon salvage can range from no more expensive than Common salvage to several hundred thousand inf, and the prices are unstable. There's truly no rule of thumb here at all.

Most highl-level Rare salvage currently sells for between 1 and 2M inf. These prices are fairly stable within this price range. Some mid- and low-level rare salvage also falls in this range. However, some mid- and low-level salvage only costs a few thousand inf, because it is not used in many recipes that people like to craft.

All generic IOs of any level should be vendored unless you want to craft it for personal use, including getting the crafting badges. The sole exception, perhaps, being endurance modification. Everyone uses them and they drop so rarely that it used to be profitable to buy EndMods from the crafting table and sell them on the market.

A couple other Rules of Thumb that I have:

1. If the bonuses include defense or recharge, it's worth checking.
2. If the recipe has the name of a signature character, it's worth checking.
3. Not all purple and PvPIO recipes are very valuable, but they are still worth checking.
4. All procs ('chance for . . .') and uniques are worth checking.
5. Vendor recipes, craft then sell enhancements.

Useful market tip that I did not know for a long time, to help checking prices of IOs when you have the recipe:

When you put a recipe in the market, you can click 'Find' to pull it up in search. You can then use the up and down arrows to scroll through the recipe/IOs in the search bar to find the matching crafted IO of the same level. This is an enormous timesaver, and something that isn't immediately obvious (or at least wasn't to me).