I give up... What about Inventions?

I'd like to throw in the real money option.

I tend to build for recharge (I have a "I WANT IT UP NOW" kind of approach to most of my builds.) With the addition of Positron's Blast and Decimation to the store, I've found that I can buy attuned versions of all the sets I used to craft for my melee and ranged characters.

There are exceptions, but on my latest brute, I just slotted attuned enhancements as he leveled up and gained the slots. It is a refreshing difference and may be, IMO, a way to get Inventions pleasures without crafting pain.

Dear Sam,

If you haven't realized by now, you are much loved around here. That's why everyone wants to send you stuff - I don't know you from teaming or anything, and wanted to send you stuff I have laying around, too - I didn't, cause I didn't know if that would offend you or not (but offer is good, global is @eeek).

I have a few thoughts, please ignore anything that does not suit what you want to do, because that would really be my number 1 rule of playing: NEVER do anything you hate (reason: you'll grow to resent the game and quit playing it).

I (and probably a whole lot of us who started playing before the inventions system) used to hate the whole set IO thing, and avoided it. But when I did start to dabble a bit, the thing that really got me WANTING to do it, was that I could tailor the character exactly the way *I* envisioned it. Without IO's, I had the same cookie-cutter build everyone else did, differing only in whether I used 2) accs, or chanced using just 1) acc and 1) recharge.

With IO's, you can really customize your character via sets, just like you are so good at doing with costumes. That adds such an important element to my characters - they do what they SHOULD have done all along, but I couldn't do until the sets came out.

I would never follow someone else's build. EVER. That is for powergamers, and God bless 'em, that's great for that style of play. I look at other builds for ideas, sure! But using someone else's build is distasteful - it's like wearing someone else's underwear. YUK! I don't CARE how many times it's been laundered, it's still... someone else's underwear! That said, I invariably find that my slotting is almost identical to other people's in the key powers. But I come by it honestly, doggone it!

I also find it a lot more fun to play characters from just the game side of it. It's just less stressful to play when your tough characters are soft capped. Or your blasters are soft-capped for range, and have a whole mess of recharge to boot.

Suggestions for marketing simplicity:
*if you can bear it (and maybe you can't) find an alt to do the marketing for you. Yes, I know you don't like that. But the reason I suggest this is because all this marketing garbage is sort of "in your face" all the time when it's being done on the character you play all the time. Like it's hanging over your head, nagging relentlessly. If you can do the marketing on someone else, you can very cleanly do as Unicycle Peon suggested, which is put out lowball bids and leave them awhile. Almost all will fill reasonably quickly, which will save you a ton. Do this on an alt, and you can completely forget about it for a week, play as usual, then come back in a week and see what you've got. Thus reducing the nagging, the stress, and frustration and general "not fun" that goes with the market.

*you do not have to bid on recipes. The huge time sink of set IO's is bidding and juggling all the tons of crap you need to make the darned stuff. Some of the IO sets U.P. had suggested for you have a number of IO's which regularly sell for less CRAFTED than the recipes sell for. Crafting from recipes is going to be overall cheapest. But it IS the easiest and SOMETIMES cheapest to bid on the crafted item. Especially if you are doing the lowball bids and "completely forget any of this stuff exists for a week" thing.

*realize that marketers routinely put their selling price as MUCH less than the usual going rate for level 50 IO's. Thus, the mentioned performance shifters that usually sell for 20 mill. are actually being placed on the market for 15.xx million. ALL THE TIME. We are not talking lowball bids, we are talking the regular set asking price. Why? Everyone does what you do - find the going price, add a bit to make sure you get the thing and don't have to muck about. Something for 5 mil going price is place on the market for 4.xx. Something for 10 mill is listed at 8.xx. Marketers are competing with a zillion other marketers, and they are all trying to undercut each other, and they can do this, because almost everyone bids like you've said you do. Do what you want, of course!, but realizing that basic dynamic is always at work can be quite helpful.

*Stone Daemon has a very nice Mids guide, which has sadly fallen to 3rd page. In this, right near the top, there is an AMAZING link to "Mids Video Tutorial" by Hyperstrike. It's really a great thing, and he explains things that even a complete computer idiot such as myself can understand it. Plus, it's u-tube, so he's actually showing it to you as well.
( http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=9-Cnpbgfd70 is what I cut and pasted from the address, as am such an idiot I don't know how to type in a link). Since you're very good at this stuff, it will fill in any non-intuitive uses for mids.

I wish you good luck with all of this. I truly hope you find a way to make it as bearable as possible to do, and that you come out with the wonderful, unique character, tailored just to you, at the end of it all.

Fascinating thread. I'm really enjoying reading it through and I hope it's helping the OP get started.

A few points that I'm not sure were addressed elsewhere:

Yes, you can see the enhancements that a set provides in Mids, via the "Enhance" tab. The dip in going from a 50 to a 40 set is a lot smaller than you'd expect. It's worth keeping an eye on this tab. Some of the sets with great bonuses are a little slanted in their enhancements, giving more damage than you really need or not much endurance reduction.

Your "no supply" problem is a lot more common at levels below 50. Once you hit 50, the supply goes way up because a lot more people are playing at level 50 at a given time than at 36 or 41 or whatever. Anyone taking reward rolls at 50 will be getting max level recipes too, helping to keep supply strong at 50. When trying to determine supply, watch how frequently an item is sold, not just how many are available. If they're selling fast, then even if there are none at the moment, it's a good bet that one will come along pretty soon.

Color alone isn't enough to determine rarity, particularly for "rares". Stupefy is rare, but it is also dirt cheap. Not that it's a bad set, but not that many people need disorients compared to melee damage, so supply outpaces demand. You'll spend a lot more on the crafting costs than you will the actual recipes. Mako's Bite is also rare, but the prices for the recipes are generally pretty reasonable these days. Numina's Convalescence is also rare, and it has some hideously expensive recipes in it. It's a little hard to know what's going to cost what going in. You'll get a feel for it over time.

Getting recipes:

I get most of mine either through the Market, however, I also use drops and Merits to supplement this. For instance, Miracle +Recovery is very useful, but it's also VERY expensive. If I have a couple of Alignment Merits or a bunch of Reward Merits laying around, I pick one up that way instead of trying to scrape together 110 million Inf.

However, I also try to maximize my merits. If there's a recipe I want that is just kinda expensive (say 10 million or so), but would cost that same 2 Alignment Merits from Botler, I might buy a Miracle instead, sell it, then buy what I needed from the market and use the difference for salvage or other recipes.

Best of luck to you!

One last thing before I go:

Quote:

Originally Posted by _eeek_ *if you can bear it (and maybe you can't) find an alt to do the marketing for you. Yes, I know you don't like that. But the reason I suggest this is because all this marketing garbage is sort of "in your face" all the time when it's being done on the character you play all the time. Like it's hanging over your head, nagging relentlessly. If you can do the marketing on someone else, you can very cleanly do as Unicycle Peon suggested, which is put out lowball bids and leave them awhile. Almost all will fill reasonably quickly, which will save you a ton. Do this on an alt, and you can completely forget about it for a week, play as usual, then come back in a week and see what you've got. Thus reducing the nagging, the stress, and frustration and general "not fun" that goes with the market.

See, my ultimate goal is to keep the game being a game, and what this means is to find a way to integrate all that stuff into my routine and actually make it part of the entertaining side of the game, rather than the godless busywork side of it. Having to log into a character and "work" is a lot like having to do actual real-life work: All of a sudden, stuff like Bejewelled, Solitaire and The Ceiling look amazingly entertaining and I get the urge to go and do that. I want to develop a routine for playing WITH Inventions that doesn't make me feel like I want to shun the game like it's work.

Honestly, if that means buying only recipes nobody wants (and still produces a decent build), I will. If that means buying with Merits, I will. Whatever that means, I want a way to work with Inventions to where they don't feel like something I have to stop having fun to do, but rather something I can accomplish WHILE I'm having fun. I suspect sidestepping the more expensive ones is the first step. It may be shooting myself in the foot right out the gate, but I'll worry about that some other time.

Quote:

Originally Posted by Arcanaville Samuel_Tow is the only poster that makes me want to punch him in the head more often when I'm agreeing with him than when I'm disagreeing with him.

Sam: You will find in your in game e-mail a set of 4 level 50 Mako's and 3 level 40 Touch of Deaths. I had spares laying around in storage. While they will slot just as well in a super-strength brute as a street justice and you can still use them in either character, I would advise against it.

For invulnerable, I would shoot to soft-cap smash/lethal defense to augment what you already get from invincibility and tough hide, which should give you about 13% defense to smash/lethal with one enemy in range assuming you slotted 3 defense in each.

The best way to get smash/lethal is through Kinetic Combat in attacks and Reactive Armor in resistance powers. Four Kinetic Combats give 3.75 defense to s/l, so 5 sets will get you an extra 18.75. Fill the fifth slot with another set piece or an IO. A lot of folks opt for an acc/dam or acc/dam/xx from Crushing Impact as they are relatively cheap. Kinetic Combats are not cheap.

Four slotting Reactive Armor grants an additional 1.25 s/l defense, so 5 of those nets an additional 6.25. Most people skip the endurance and endurance/recharge IOs.

With those ten sets and two powers you should have about 38 defense to smash/lethal. Add combat jumping and you are at 40%. Add the Steadfast Protection 3% defense to all in your first resistance power pick and you are at 43% defense to smash/lethal on top of your other resistances and big heal in dull pain. And you also picked up a bonus 112 hit points! While not as expensive as Kinetic Combats, Reactive Armors aren't cheap either.

As an aside, let me tell you how I worked my way up from having SO and HO builds to having spare sets lying around. When IOs first came out, I, like you, was overwhelmed by the volume of choices. I just started replacing SOs with the generic IOs, which you have already done for some of your characters.

Just by playing normally I was getting all sorts of drops so I started crafting and storing in my base whatever recipes I had the salvage for, figuring that I may have a friend or another character that might use them later. I then realized that slows, sleeps, fears, and certain other IOs were junk. No one ever used them. So I vendored those and just crafted the 'good' stuff.

Then I started using Mids, looking at other peoples builds, and started to plan builds in advance. I noticed that a lot of builds had similar needs either for defense or recharge so I made a point of crafting and saving those things. Then, if I needed say a set of Touch of Death, I would transfer funds to a character that was off active rotation, put in a bid for 10 recipes of each and all the salvage and let it sit for a week or two. If the item was too expensive to bid for ten, I would bid for 5, or as many as I could afford. When I came back, I would be able to craft several IOs. I would craft what I could, store a couple for a future project and sell the rest. If I wasn't getting at least a few recipes in those two weeks, I would cancel the existing bid and increase it by a little.

Before long, I had at least 100 million on all my alts. I consolidated most of the currency into one character again. Once you have that much spare cash, you can bid in lots of 10 for the really good stuff -- uniques, procs, Obliteration quads -- stuff that you can buy for a few million each in recipe form and then resell for tens of millions, even a hundred million in crafted form.

The other thing I did is I did random rolls with my merits. While I don't always get lucky, I do enough story arcs and TFs that I have gotten dozens of Luck of the Gambler, Numina, Miracle, and other global uniques over the years. I use or save what I want and craft and sell the rest.

I don't consider myself a slave to the market. I like punching and blasting much more than pretending to be Sam Walton. But it only takes a few minutes per character every few weeks to be a multi-billionaire in this game.

That's how I went from SOs to having billions in the bank and an SG full of good IOs in storage.

Yeah, Crushing Impact is also a good set if all you want is some decent slotting with consistent pictures in all the slots. Its set bonuses are nice if not amazing, and it gives very good enhancement with 5 pieces. (There's not a ton of value in six slotting CIs, IMO - just pick the five that give you the best mix of Acc/End/Rech you would like and damage will pretty much be ED capped no matter what you pick.)

I might have missed it but I'm surprised nobody has mentioned the simplest way to get any non-purple, non-PvP recipe: Hero merits (or villain if you're cool). Four days equals two merits and 2 merits equals any normal set IO recipe. You can do it in less than two days with multiple characters assisting and using the SSAs for a couple of extras per week.

Any of the characters I've setted out, only 3 fully and a 4th that still needs all her purples cost a billion or so. Then again I use a mix of normal sets, purples and a couple of PvP IOs as well as a few HOs for power in low numbers. A single Numina's proc can go for 100 mil (yay AMerits).

What you're trying to do is gear up for end-game raids. It's a grind. Period. *shrug* If you want to do it, just go in with eyes wide open.