Pre ED vs. IO's/Incarnate

So, I've been out of the loop for a while and still don't have a terrific grip on what stuff costs these days, but for the sake of argument let's peg the value of a 'good' IO build at, say, 100 million inf. Not frankenslotted, not a Mid's Platinum Plated Uber Build, just a nice, solid, performance added set IO build.

If I'm way off with that estimate, someone let me know.


Anyway, you can make 100m inf in this game in about two minutes- pick up some Super Packs, sell the ATOs at the going rate, voila!
There's your Uber Build.

Now, some will say "but that's random, you can't know blah blah blah!"
Well, it is random and it isn't. The devs have their thumbs on the scale and you'll always get a fair proportion of "good" stuff with your packs. So it's random, but not in the way recipe or salvage is random.

I bought about 30 packs chasing the Elemental Order costume set and the ATO's I sold brought in about 500m. The Brute and Blaster ones I slotted, the Kheldian ones are still sitting in email while I ponder whether it's worth converting them or not.

That takes absolutely no effort at all.
Get packs, burn packs, sell junk.

And I guess you don't even have to buy them, you can pick them up with tokens- I consider tokens more valuable than $$$ so I wouldn't go that route, but if you have a lot of tokens and you don't particularly like the VIP costume sets, it's an option.


I logged in my crafter, Crafticus, last week and made a bunch of generics.
I figured the weekend was going to be big, so I churned out 30-odd level 40 *Redacted* generics, a perennial seller from way back. Checked in this AM and they'd all sold for between 600k and 1m, netting me in the neighborhood of 25 m.

Figuring 15 million is a sustainable weekly total for a few minutes of "work" he's have his 100m bankroll in a little over a month, if that's the only effort he made.

Of course, this character worked up a 120m bankroll in the process of getting his Field Crafter accolade, so.....


I have another character that has been compulsively buying up piles of big inspirations cheap, usually oranges & rez's, combining them into big purples & selling the result for between 500k & 1m.

I buy at around 10k, so it's spending 30k to make 650k on average.
It isn't actually very efficient on a per-slot basis, but it's something literally anyone can do to print 'free' money. Place bids before you log out, combine and list when you log on. Eventually you'll have your 100m.


Another, slighly more exotic but still far from difficult method is find an IO people like, buy the recipe cheap (bid around 1/2 the 'last 5' and you should be fine), craft it and list the IO for whatever people think its worth. This is more efficient than any of the above methods, but does require a bit of legwork and more up-front expense.

There are always huge numbers of 'good' IOs people would rather buy crafted than fiddle with themselves. Tracking one down that you can make for less than 100k total and sell for 5-10m is child's play.


These are just a few of the more obvious methods to make inf. There are many, many, many more, generally vastly more efficient & profitable.

But the pretense that there's some insurmountable barrier to a good IO build is pure nonsense and needs to be refuted.

I'd say if you wanted a good build as fast as one used to be able to complete one you're probably looking at something more along the lines of 500 million. Possibly up to a billion if you're buying it all now and playing power sets that have been recently popular for whatever reason. If you're very patient, or have the foresight to begin buying your enhancements on the character's creation and before it actually needs them, then a couple hundred mil should certainly suffice.

The extent to which converters have smoothed out prices has impressed me. I don't think they have anything to do with the relative scarcity I've been noticing of things like mid-level uncommons, but they certainly deflated the heck out of purples and PvPs. Even if one were to accept my hypothesis that the mid-range build is now slightly dearer than it was a year ago, the other side of that coin is that high end builds are now vastly cheaper than they had been since about a year after the introduction of purples. I was pretty proud of a fifteen billion inf character I made last year, now I'm making better ones for less than a third of that.