economy How to Make Millions on the Market in Minutes

Slotting your character out with Enhancements takes money. Slotting out with Enhancements that will last, or that will be good across as wide a level range as possible, takes even more. Where do you get it from? The amount you get from adventuring is basically a trickle. (Until you get to the upper 40s, when it starts to rain Inf from the heavens, anyway.)

Yesterday I met someone who was going without Enhancements altogether while speed-leveling to 50, so he could then spend all the Reward Merits he had saved up buying recipes for IOs he wouldn’t have to replace down the road. (He was a Tanker. It was a Rikti Mothership Raid. He was gamely trying to pull Rikti down to the scrum, but was faceplanting every thirty seconds. It was just sad.)

But there shouldn’t be any call for doing something like that. Most of the Enhancements you need are available reasonably inexpensively from the market, even Attuned—you can buy and slot them as you need them on the way up. Reward merits should be saved for things that can’t be bought from the market so easily. (In fact, I was so bothered by watching the guy keep faceplanting that I bought three Attuned Reactive Armor IOs from the Market then and there and gave them to him.) But most people don’t realize quite how easy it is to make enough money for something like that.

When someone in the game filled me in on this trick, I had 1 million Inf to my name (that someone else had just donated to me). 24 hours later, I had 250 million in the bank and more awaiting sale on the market. I hate to sound like an infomercial, but it’s just that simple.

DISCLAIMER: As with any guide that quotes current market prices, the accuracy of this guide is subject to change should market conditions dramatically change. Always verify current prices on the market before you follow any advice from a marketing guide.

COVERING STARTUP COSTS

You need money to make money, so I’d recommend having at least a million Inf to start. If you don’t have any money yet, some ways to get this might include selling rare salvage on the market for a half million a pop—and it drops often enough that it shouldn’t take too long for you to end up with a couple pieces—or winning a costume contest, or begging someone richer for a hand-out. You could run the DFB trial a couple of times with no XP booster and XP for Exemplaring switched off to get a good chunk of change, too. 

But here’s the very fastest quick-start method to get what you need to start from absolute zero new character status:

Make sure you have Vidiotmaps installed (easy to install with http://www.cityofplayers.com/coh-modder/), get the free Jump or Steam Pack and Beast or Ninja Run powers from the P2W Store to let you get around a little faster, then visit all the badges in the starting zone to get the 5 Reward Merit accolade award. Then go to Atlas Park City Hall (or equivalent location in the Rogue Isles or Praetoria) and buy 15 Enhancement Converters from the Reward Merit Vendor ATM. (That is, buy the 3 Enhancement Converters for 1 Merit package 5 times.)

Now go outside to the P2W Store representative, just southwest of City Hall (one of the dollar sign icons on your map) or wherever it is on Mercy Island or in Praetoria (where it goes by "T4V"). Get the free Inner Inspiration power, which will give you three medium or large Inspirations. Make sure you have 3 open spaces on your tray, then fire off that power and sell the Inspirations you get to one of the Training stores nearby.

With the money you got from those sales, hit /AH and list 10 of the Enhancement Converters on the store for 1 Inf each. (Keep 5 of them for use in the next section.) This should land you at least a few hundred thousand Influence, which is more than enough to start with (since you won't need to spend part of it on Converters).

(If you want to be sure you get the most money possible, you could sell just one of the converters for 1 Inf, then use what you get from that to list the other 9 Converters with higher minimum bids, but it’s probably not worth going to the trouble—Converters are in high-enough demand from the people doing the things I’m covering in this guide that the highest low bid seldom dips below 85K to 90K each. Even if it's down to 70K, you should still get plenty of cash to start. And listing them at 1 Inf each also means they'll sell immediately, so you'll have that money right away.)

You can also do this if you've already leveled your character up and have Reward Merits available from running Task or Strike Forces. Use those merits to buy a bunch of Converters, then just sell 10 or 20 to get started. (Selling Converters typically fetches one of the best Inf-to-Merit ratios of anything you can make with Reward Merits, so people who want to convert a lot of Merits to Inf often buy and list bunches of them on the market. But if you already have spare Reward Merits, you can buy and use bunches of them and save yourself some Inf starting up!)

Once you've got a little money, you can also make use of some of the techniques Yomo Kimyata gives in this guide to picking up a few million quickly through Auction House/vendor arbitrage. They won't earn you as much money quite as fast as converting Enhancements, but they'll help you build your stake so you craft and convert more Enhancements sooner.

You could be making your first million Inf in less than an hour from first starting the game!

STARTING WITH A LITTLE EXTRA SCRATCH

5 merits is plenty to start with, if you're in a hurry—but if you're not, you could actually triple that with a little more work. A bigger starting fund will let you convert more Enhancements at once, more quickly, so it might be worth spending the extra time.

Go to the supergroup base entrance behind City Hall, and enter the code of one of the many public-access all-the-teleporters bases people have set up. On Torchbearer, you can use WARPZONE-4141. On Everlasting, ZONE-8888 is a good choice. On other shards, you can ask for the password to a local public porter base in the /help channel. There will almost certainly be one, the community being as friendly and helpful as it is. Once inside, take the teleporter to Echo: Galaxy City.

Gather all the badges in Galaxy City for another 5-merit zone accolade, then take the golden portal at the tram station to Echo: Atlas Park, another recreation of a starting zone as it once was, and grab all the badges there for another 5 merits. That will give you 15 altogether, which you can use to buy a total of 45 Converters. Then, once you're done, you can take the tram portal to Ouroboros, and go up on top of the building to get your badge and free Ouro porter. You won't be able to use the porter for a good long while, but at least you won't need to ask someone else to drop one for you when you are high-level enough to use it. (For more information all the different nifty ways to get various places in CoH, see my guide Getting Around the Cities of Heroes and Villains.)

Finally, if you'd like to add a little more extra scratch and you're playing on the hero side, talk to contact Matthew Habashy and do his mission arc. It's pretty short, consisting of a few Hellion hunts, a couple glowy-click missions, and one door mission, and will give you 2 more merits—that's 6 more Converters you can use or sell. There should be lowbie contacts in the Villains and Praetorian starting areas that can give you a few extra merits in return for short arcs, as well. Once you're done, sell 20 or 30 of those Converters on the Auction House, and keep the rest for use on the Enhancements you get.

If you want to spend a little more time and get even more of a boost, go ahead and run a few story arcs. The ones at the lowest levels are just 4 or 5 missions long, and if you run them on -1 Notoriety, they'll be simple enough to work through. At the end of each arc, you'll get a few more merits, which can convert to more Converters you can sell for more money.

STARTING WITH EVEN MORE EXTRA SCRATCH

I heard about this method on Discord the other day. It's a little cheesy, but if you're really wanting to give yourself a good head start on converting, make yourself a Stalker character. They have a practically impenetrable invisibility power, so they can collect badges in practically any area with impunity right out of the gate, scoring 5 Reward Merits per accolade. Why limit yourself to just 15 Merits when you could hit a few more zones and start with 25, or 50, or more? Some people will make a stalker, hit ten zones to get 50 merits, convert that to a Hero Merit that they can mail to another character, then delete the character and do it again. 

GATHERING THE INGREDIENTS

Next, hit /ah to open the Auction House and buy a cheap recipe. When starting out, any cheap Level 31 or 41 Uncommon should do, as long as it doesn’t require Rare (orange) salvage to craft. (If you don’t know the salvages by name, check each ingredient’s auction house listing to make sure it doesn’t have an orange title before you buy the recipe.) The 31s have lower crafting costs, so it might be better to go with that. Or, for the very lowest costs, get something at level 10. The first link in the appendix at the end of this guide has some useful set suggestions.

Also, you should get at least two and preferably more Enhancement Converters. They go for anywhere from 80K to 150K depending on the time of day, or if you have a Reward Merit to spare you can get three for one of those at the Reward Merit store. (And if you followed the quick-start advice in the previous section, you should already have 5 on hand.)

Once you have all that stuff, it’s time to craft. Find a crafting table—they’re most obviously at the University (or Abandoned Labs in the Rogue Isles), or your supergroup base might have one, or possibly one of the people hanging out near the trainer or stores might have the Portable Crafting Table from the crafting accolade or P2W store. If there aren’t any other tables on hand and you’re too low level to be able to navigate to a University or Abandoned Lab safely, the Vanguard Base in the Rikti Crash Site also has crafting tables, and there’s no minimum level to get in via the Vanguard Base in Atlas or Mercy. Also, Kallisti Wharf is accessible from the transit line, has both a University and an Abandoned Lab with crafting tables, and doesn't have any pesky enemies at all. Go to one of the aforementioned places, and craft that cheap Uncommon recipe into an Enhancement.

ENHANCEMENT CONVERSION FOR FUN AND PROFIT

Here’s where the magic happens. Follow these instructions carefully, because the interface is a little confusing and it’s very easy to make a mistake.

In your enhancement tray, click on “Convert.” This will pop open a window where you can drag your crafted IO to the slot. Do that, then click on the radio button next to “Convert Out Of Set” on the right-hand side.

Below that radio button, there will be a drop-down menu, currently set to “Rarity: Uncomon.” Click on that and select “Category: (whatever category this Enhancement is)”. It should tell you that this conversion will cost 2 Enhancement Converters. If it says 1 or 3, check again to make sure you chose the right options.

When you’re sure you have everything set properly, click the green “Convert” button (if the button is grey, you don't have enough Enhancement Converters to use it and need to buy more) and you’ll have a different (and hopefully Rare) IO in your tray. Hit /ah, drag it to the market, and see what it goes for.

If the name of the IO is bright yellow, it means it turned into another Uncommon. If it’s orange, it turned into a Rare. (Usually. Some Uncommon sets have Orange elements in them, and some Rare sets have Yellow elements. However, for purposes of crafting and conversion, these wrong-colored IOs still count as whatever rarity the overall set is even if their color doesn't match the rest of the set.) Either way, see what it’s selling for. If the majority of the selling prices are at or below 1 million, click “get” to return the Enhancement to your tray and convert it again. If it’s an Uncommon, repeat the same step as above. If it’s a Rare, then leave the dropdown set to “Rarity: Rare” and convert from that, spending just 1 Enhancement Converter. And then start over at the previous paragraph until you get something that is mainly going for over 1 million.

List it at whatever price looks good to you and wait for it to sell. For my part, if I want a quicker sale I go a few hundred K less than the current going rate; if I have plenty of time to wait (like I’m about to go to bed, or to work) I’ll go a couple hundred K more. But if you want more money fast you can just list it for 1 inf and take whatever the highest bid currently is; it’ll probably be more than you paid to buy, craft, and convert, but there’s always the possibility someone placed a really low bid that’s currently highest, so you may not want to risk it.

If you want to make a moderate profit quickly, probably the best compromise would be to throw up everything (or, at least, everything worth over a million) on the market for just over a million Inf, no matter what it's going for. Ones going for more will sell right away, ones going for less might sit a while, but 1 million Inf should more than cover crafting, converting, and listing costs for most IOs. Over time, that kind of volume adds up.

Now, while I say that you can make millions “in minutes,” I actually mean “in minutes of actual work.” If you want a good price for your IOs, you will probably have to resign yourself to waiting for them to sell—especially ones where there are a lot more sellers than buyers. The more sellers there are, the lower you’ll need to price in order to be assured of selling right away. If there are way too many sellers, and the price is fairly lowish, you might be better off to spend another converter or two and hope that the next result you get will be an easier sell.

In any case, this is a great way to work on earning Inf while you sleep, or while you’re away at work or school. Let real life do your “waiting” for you, and you’ll often come back to the welcome sight of many sales listed when you pull up /ah.

And the same holds true for recipes you want to purchase. Some of the most lucrative recipes to convert can be fairly costly or fairly hard to come by, just because so many people have caught onto just how good that particular conversion is. You may end up having to place your bids and wait for them to fill. But, again, let real life do your "waiting" for you, and you'll see those bids will fill over time as well. (You can also place bulk bids for Converters at prices as low as 70,000 Inf each or even less, and they will fill over time at a significant cost savings to you.)

After the IOs do (eventually) sell, then with the money you earned, you can buy more cheap recipes and salvage, and more converters, and sell more recipes at a time. As the saying goes, “Lather, rinse, repeat.”

You'll eventually find that some particular Enhancement conversions are more lucrative than others (and, again, see the first link in the appendix for some suggestions of specific recipes to try)—but even a basic Uncommon-to-Rare conversion should still earn you more money than you put into it. Once you've done a few of those, you should be able to start doing more of them at a time, and then even more as your take increases. And before too very long, if you put much effort into it, you'll be rolling up into the hundreds of millions.

FINDING OTHER RECIPES IN RANGE

The thing about this trick is that it relies on having a good supply of recipes available—and if everyone and their sister starts working on the same recipes you’re using, that supply will probably dry up. So you need to use your own initiative and market research to hunt up other “sweet spots”. The charts on the Homecoming Wiki Enhancement Sets page can be a good resource to help you find places to look. You want to find level ranges where several good sets overlap with cheap sets—preferably with more good sets than cheap sets, because every time you convert into another cheap set, you’ll have to convert again. You’ll need to check the market listings to be sure the Uncommon sets have cheap recipes available, and that the Rare sets are selling for enough to make the conversion worthwhile. Then, as noted above, buy recipes at the lowest level of that overlap so you get the cheapest crafting costs.

You can also do this with Uncommon recipes that drop to you during adventuring—but probably not for any that calls for Rare salvage; at a half million Inf a pop it will kill your profits. Sell those recipes instead. This trick is a bit chancier with random recipes, because you don’t know whether they’ll convert to something that’s actually worth anything—but if they don’t, you can always convert them again until they do. Just remember it’s costing you 200 to 300K Inf every time you reconvert, which can eat into your profits, so you may just want to craft and sell them as they are. (And some Uncommon IOs do go for high amounts, too, so it’s worth checking market value of the crafted IO before converting.)

And if you like playing the lottery, it just costs 1 Enhancement Converter to convert a set IO into one from a random other Uncommon set, then you can try your luck upconverting that. (You’ll probably do this by accident at least once, because you have to remember to reset that darned drop-down every time you do a new conversion.) Or, for that matter, you can convert the Rare result into one from another Rare set, especially if the Rare result you get is selling at the low end of the range. You never know, you might get one of those super-valuable hard-to-get procs out of it.

Also, there are certain Enhancement categories and level ranges where there are only two IO sets available: an Uncommon and a Rare. This means that if you buy and craft an Uncommon at this level, you're guaranteed conversion to a Rare in just one shot. Then you can convert the Rare for one more converter and hopefully end up with something more valuable. You should be able to find some such recipes with the Enhancement set charts linked above.

Do your own market research. See what rare sets are selling for the most, and what categories they are in. If you’re not sure where to look, consider what character classes are the most popular, and what kinds of enhancements they use. For example, Brutes are a very popular class, and they mostly share the same primaries and secondaries with Scrappers, Tanks, and Stalkers, which means that melee, PBAoE, resist damage, and defense sets are probably always going to be in high demand. AE farming uses a lot of AoE, with Spines/Fire Brutes as flavor-of-the-month, so PBAoE sets may be good to look at in particular, and Damage Resistance sets for the Fire Tankers' armor toggles.

Sometimes one or two Enhancements within a set may go for more than the others, just because they're used more often. For example, nearly everyone wants to fill up their builds with Luck of the Gambler global recharge IOs, so those tend to go for at least a couple million Inf more than the next-highest-priced Enhancement in that set. Also, Defense and Damage Resistance sets are often just 2- or 3-slotted, as they go into secondary powers in people's builds or they can better use the slots for something else. If you're only going to slot a couple of Enhancements from a Defense or Damage Resistance set, one of those will almost certainly be the pure Defense or Damage Resistance IO, so those will usually be among the most in-demand (with the exception of cases like LotG where the proc is so often single-slotted). The Enhancement that just does Endurance Reduction/Recharge Rate will be among the least often used, so sometimes you can buy it for cheap and make a profit by converting it to one of the others within the set.

Occasionally a new patch to the game might affect marketeering targets. When a patch introduces new Enhancement sets, these will almost always sell for quite a lot in the first day or so after the patch releases, as people impatient to try them or add them to their builds place high bids to get them right away. There's often some profit to be made there. (And since these patches are tested on the test server first, there's usually plenty of advance warning when there are new Enhancement sets in the offing.)

Once you’ve found a high-selling rare set in a popular category, consult that set IO chart to see if there are level ranges where you have high chances to be able to convert from some cheap uncommon to that specific Rare set if you convert out of set, within category. 1 out of 2 chances or even 1 out of 3 chances to convert into what you want aren't necessarily bad; converters only cost 100K or so a pop, so if you have to convert multiple times and it takes you 600K worth of converters to get to something that sells for 3 million more, you've still made a profit.

Also, don’t get stuck thinking that you only want to craft and convert from Uncommons. They have low crafting costs to be sure, but what matters is the difference between crafting cost and the cost you can sell the other set for. If you can get one Rare set’s recipes cheap enough to craft them for about a million, but you can easily convert in-category to some other Rare set whose IOs regularly sell for 5 milliion and up, 4 million Inf an IO in profits is nothing to sneeze at. (There are certain Rare sets whose recipes actually cost more than the IOs on the market because most of the IOs are supplied by converting cheaper ones!)

You can also use this method if there are certain specific sets you're trying to get out of a conversion (bearing in mind the advice I will give shortly about not slotting your own IOs you intend to Attune). But note that no amount of conversion will change a PVE Enhancement into a PVP Enhancement. So if you're trying to get something from a PVP set, you'll probably just have to spend some of that Inf you're earning.

It is also possible that under some circumstances you might want to forego crafting at all, and simply buy and convert Enhancements that someone else made. You'll probably lose at least a little bit of your profit this way, because Enhancement crafters want their profit too, but the time and frustration you save from not bidding on all that salvage and doing all the crafting yourself could be worth it. But that's for you to decide.

Note that you can buy pre-Attuned Enhancements and also convert them across sets and rarity types. If you want to create an Attuned Enhancement that you can use yourself, and there's a cheap set of the same type that you can convert randomly until you get the one you want, this could be a fairly inexpensive way to get your hands on some of the more desirable sets. You can also pick up a little money by buying cheap Attuned Defense or Healing sets, like Serendipity, Gift of the Ancients, or Triage, and converting them within category until you get one of the more desirable sets like LotG or the various healing-set procs. It's a little tedious, and not quite as lucrative as things that require fewer conversions on average, but if luck is with you it can make you a decent amount at the very lowest end.

This also works for reworking the random ATOs you get from Auction House Super Packs into ATO sets your characters can use.

ADVANCED TECHNIQUE: THE RANDOM CONVERSION

When you're just starting out converting, you'll probably want to stick to simple conversions that make a modest profit over the cost of the materials and crafting. Converting something that cost a couple hundred thousand Inf into something that sells for a million or so is good for building your starting stake. Even a small amount of money magically appearing from nowhere is still pretty impressive.

But you can't always rely on being able to get exactly the recipe you need to convert into precisely the Enhancement you want. So, sooner or later, you may find yourself going random. It works like this: find a cheap uncommon recipe at level 31 or 41 that only overlaps with rares. (Level 31 has lower crafting costs, but level 41 has fewer conversion possibilities so it may not take as many converters to reach something good.) Mez, buff/debuff, and travel power sets are good for this—slow, stun, hold, immobilize, etc. "Tempered Readiness," "Rope-a-Dope," and so on. You can often get the recipes for 50,000 Inf each or less, especially if you're able to place your bids and wait several hours for them to fill. 

Once you have the recipes and the salvage, craft the recipes and convert the Enhancements within their category to get a rare. ("Tempered Readiness" converts to "Pacing of the Turtle.") Then convert the rare within "Rarity: Rare" over and over until you get something worth selling. When you start out, you'll want to drag each newly converted Enhancement to the marketplace window and click "find" a few times to find out the current going rate, possibly taking notes on it if you're not sure you'll be able to remember. Over time, you'll get a sense for which Enhancements go for the most Inf, and what steps to take when you land on an Enhancement of a category that can get you there.

(For example, if I land on a Reactive Defense or a Luck of the Gambler, I know to convert the Reactive Defense by "Category: Defense" until it's a Luck of the Gambler, then convert within set until I have the LotG global recharge proc, which usually sells for over 6 million Inf. If I land on various sets within Healing, Endurance Modification, or Resist Damage categories, there are various procs or other Enhancements within those that sell for 4 to 5 million that I likewise know to convert toward.)

If you're looking for Enhancements you can slot yourself, you can also do this with cheap Attuned Enhancements, as I discussed above. There are a few weird edge cases where Attuned Enhancements won't convert within category, but you can convert them to another category via rarity and continue from there.

When you're just starting out, and everything seems a lot more expensive, it can be nervewracking to spend that many Converters just flipping things around randomly—especially if you're converting within a set, which costs 3 Converters a pop. But over time, it averages out. Sometimes it may take you a lot of Converters to get where you want; other times you'll get there within just a couple of hops. All the short conversions bring the average down to where you can still make a decent profit. And if you stick to going for Enhancements that sell for at least 3-4 million, there will still be more than enough profit to cancel out even a lot of Converter use. Of course, it can take an awful lot of dragging and clicking to get something worth selling, and if that sort of thing drives you crazy you'll probably want to stick to simpler repeatable conversions. But I find it to be kind of a similar thrill to playing the slots in Vegas—only I "win" more often, and I don't need any quarters.

HOW AND WHY DOES THIS WORK?

Glad you asked! At root, this method takes advantage of some of the market quirks introduced in I25—so if you’re playing on one of the I24 servers out there, the main part of it won't work. The quirk is that Enhancement sets and other rare Enhancements are now fungible across their entire level range of the set. That is to say, the market will automatically convert on demand any level of recipe or crafted Enhancement (or Hami-O) from a set to any other level of that recipe or Enhancement, including Attuned.

If you sell a level 30 Karma Knockback Protection IO, and someone else bids on a level 10 version of the same IO because he wants to slot it at its lowest level, your level 30 is magically turned into a level 10 and sold to him. And if you sell a Level 31 Kinetic Combat IO and someone is bidding on Attuned Kinetic Combat IOs, the auction house Attunes that IO for them at no extra charge.

(And this, by the way, is why you should never slot any non-Attuned IOs you make if you’re planning to Attune them immediately. It’s kind of counterintuitive, but if you’re tempted to slot up and Attune some Kinetic Combats you just received from a conversion, it’s far better to sell them and then re-buy the same ones pre-Attuned. You’ll be paying around the same amount that you're selling yours for, or maybe a little more if you want them right away—but you won’t be paying the extra 4 million Inf each (or 20 Reward Merits each) that it would cost to buy Enhancement Catalysts and use them yourself. (But if you want to make Attuned IOs that you can slot yourself, try converting from some other Attuned set of the same type, as I suggest above.)

And likewise, if you’re wanting to Attune some Enhancement Sets you’ve already slotted, it’s far cheaper to pay 200K Inf each for Enhancement Unslotters to pop them out and sell and re-buy them pre-Attuned than it is to use 4 million Inf Catalysts to Attune them yourself. Don’t eat your own dog food.)

This represents a huge change from the way the market used to work, and means that there’s now a huge market for crafted Enhancements—and not just from people too lazy to craft them themselves, as in the old days. As noted above, smart people who want to save money on Attunement can actually get a better deal buying pre-crafted than by crafting and Attuning themselves. And since what level you sell them at doesn’t matter, you have a guaranteed market for any recipe you sell or set IO you craft even if it’s being sold at one of the levels people didn’t want as much in the old days.

(Update: As Shinobu points out in a comment below, on those I24 servers you can still make some money by upconverting uncommons to rares at the same level, but the uncommons have to be of the level of rare you're trying to sell—the market won't convert them for you. It's not as good a trick as is possible on I25, but should still help to some extent.)

So, effectively, you’re making your money on the back of the conversion and Attunement services the market is providing for free. Those services create the demand, and this is how you can provide the supply. Even if everyone starts doing this, as long as the market provides that free 4 million Inf service there should always be at least some money to be extracted by converting and reselling IOs.

Another reason this works is, believe it or not, AE Inf farmers. All that Influence people are paying for the IOs you convert has to come from somewhere, and people who prefer to grind for their Inf are a major source of it. And farmers are also responsible for most of the recipes that we buy to convert, since many of them don't want to mess with crafting and converting themselves so they just throw them on the market for the benefit of the rest of us. So before you scoff at AE and farming as “ruining the game,” remember that without them you wouldn’t actually have a market—or anything to craft and convert to supply that market.

I don’t know whether this will last, or whether the devs will eventually get around to nerfing it somehow...but I’ve got my almost-50 Fire/Fire Tanker fully slotted with Attuned IO sets, so I’m good. So now it’s time to put this information out there in the hopes that it can do some good for other poverty-stricken heroes and villains.

CONVERTING AND SELLING PVP AND PURPLE RECIPES

And finally, here's one last, related method that might also help you pick up a little extra cash, though it probably won't ever be your main money-maker.

Back on live, crafting Recipes and selling the Enhancements was one of the best known methods of making money via the market. Plenty of people who wanted to build super-powerful characters were too lazy to bother to craft themselves (or else the amount of time they would have had to spend to do it was worth less to them than all that Inf they'd gotten from farming and such). But on Homecoming, the conversion marketing game has pretty much killed that method dead. The demand for many of the most popular Enhancements is now filled almost entirely by people crafting and converting cheaper Enhancements into them—which means that the Recipe (that almost no one uses) can often cost more than the Enhancement! (Go to the auction house and look at the average price of the Recipe for the Luck of the Gambler +7.5% Recharge Speed IO, then see what the Enhancement is currently going for.)

But there are still a couple of categories where you can still make some money that way. Because you can't convert ordinary Uncommon or Rare Enhancements into PVP or Very Rare (purple) ones, it's still worthwhile to craft and sell them—but the bucketing system that I talked about in the last section adds an interesting new twist.

Try this: buy a level 10 PVP Recipe. The less-desirable ones, such as Net of the Gladiator, should go for less than 4 million Inf each. Because it's level 10, it will cost nearly nothing to craft, beyond the 500K you have to pay for the Rare Salvage. And since that level 10 will turn into a level 50 if someone buys a level 50, it will still sell at full price—which may be around 8 million.

But wait, there's more: use some converters to change it into other PVP sets, then stop when you get Panacea, Shield Wall, or Gladiator's Armor. Each of those sets has a highly sought-after proc IO that is often slotted without the rest of the set, and often sells for as much as 12 million Inf each—so if the element of the set you get doesn't go for that much, convert it in-set until you get one that does. Depending on how many converters it takes to get to something desirable, you could better than double your money. The one problem is, PVP Recipes don't exactly tend to hit the market in high numbers, and will probably be even harder to find now that I've pointed out how to make bunches of money from them. But it might also be a good thing to do with any PVP drops you get rather than just selling them as they are.

Purple sets are good to craft from Recipe to Enhancement as well—and you should do this for any purple drop you get that you don't intend to use yourself. The crafted Enhancements can fetch reliably high prices, partly because almost nobody actually does sell the Recipes without crafting them—so people who want them and don't care to pay 100 Merits for the Recipes have no alternative but to pay extra for the Enhancements. Of course, this means you'll probably have a hard time yourself finding very many purple Recipes for sale to make money by converting into Enhancements—so you shouldn't count on making your fortune this way. But if such an opportunity should arise, it might be worth checking out. 

Depending on current market conditions, you might be able to find some of the lesser-used purple Recipes less expensively than others—for example, Gravitational Anchor or Soulbound Allegiance are often somewhat cheaper than other purple recipes. Crafting those and converting them to something more popular could be fairly lucrative, depending on market conditions.

THE STRANGE APPEAL OF THE PURPLE ATO

This isn't really an "entry-level" technique, as it only works if you have at least one level 50 character. But if you have multiple level 50s and are looking for another way to turn a little extra profit—or get an endless supply of free Reward Merits for buying more Converters—then this might be a good sideline.

Once you hit level 50, you can convert the orange Archetype Origin (ATO) Enhancements from the Merit Vendor or Super Packs into purple "Greater" versions, by combining them with an Enhancement Catalyst after you slot them. In fact, given the bucketing I discuss above, this may very well be the only really good use for Enhancement Catalysts. But, oddly enough, that's apparently still too much trouble to go to for some people. Greater ATOs often sell for several million Inf more than regular ATOs on the market—even though the only way such an ATO can be made is to have slotted and Catalyzed it into a character and then unslotted it afterward! I can only suppose that there are enough players out there who don't realize you get Greater ATOs by Catalyzing regular ATOs that there's still some demand.

This means that there's room for making a profit. Here's how:

Buy up a bunch of Super Packs, and open them. Set aside any ATOs that correspond to characters you already have at level 50. Convert all the other ATOs you get until they also match your level 50 characters. Then, transfer those ATOs to the appropriate level 50s, and use Enhancement Unslotters to unslot the purple version of each new ATO that you (presumably) already have slotted. Slot and re-Catalyze the replacement oranges, then list the unslotted purples on the market. It'll probably take a few days for them to sell, but they should fetch a price greater than the value of the orange ATO plus the Catalyst and Unslotter, making you a couple million Inf in profit per Enhancement. It's not a huge amount of profit, and the purple ATOs will probably take several days to sell, but it should still be enough to make those Super Packs effectively pay for themselves. Which means you're getting everything else in those Super Packs—including more Enhancement Converters, and Reward Merits you can turn into more Enhancement Converters—for free.

It should go without saying that you don't buy the ATOs from the Merit Vendor, because for the amount of merits one ATO costs, you could resell Converters for enough Inf to get two or three Super Packs.

BEWARE THE "GET ALL INF" BUTTON

One more piece of advice: if you get good at the stuff I've just explained how to do, sooner or later you'll approach the 2 billion Inf cap on a character. When you get close to that mark, be careful how you use the "Get All Inf" button. If you try to get the money from a single sale, the game won't let you go over the cap. But for whatever reason, "Get All Inf" for multiple sales doesn't seem to make that check. It will waste any Inf that would put you over the 2 billion mark if you hit "Get All Inf" when you have more than enough sales to reach cap. This is why I've gotten in the habit of emailing my global a couple hundred million soon after hitting the 1.9 billion mark on any character.

WATCH BETA SERVER PATCH NOTES FOR FUTURE MARKET OPPORTUNITIES

When the Homecoming devs decide to add new features to the game, they will try them out in the beta test servers first. So, if you keep track of what's being tested on the beta servers, you might be able to plan in advance how to profit by it when it goes live.

Watch for new Enhancement sets, power sets, or archetypes to be added to the game, or for power balance changes that will make some existing archetype or power set more likely to be played. In the first days after those go live, they will likely cause shifts in demand as hundreds of people decide to add the new Enhancement sets to characters they already have, or else roll characters with those new power sets or archetypes to try them out. So if you focus on converting to those new sets, or on crafting Enhancement sets particularly useful to those power sets or archetypes, you could make bank from all the people who want to slot those characters up right away. (If there's ever another new archetype, count on the two new ATO sets for it to be huge sellers as soon as the patch with it goes live—as well as any existing sets that would work well in the powers it has.)

AFTERWORD: 11 MONTHS LATER

When I wrote the original version of this guide, I honestly didn't expect the techniques in it to be viable for very long, once more people started using them. But here it is, mid-April 2020, and I'm still being excitedly thanked by people who only just discovered the guide and were able to make tens or hundreds of millions of Inf in very short amounts of time. Some of the most lucrative conversion recipes have dried up as more people got into the conversion marketing game, but I can still buy a few tens of a cheap readily available recipe like Tempered Readiness or Rope-a-Dope, upconvert and crossconvert, and make at least 30 to 40 million Inf in profit for each ten Enhancements I sell. That may not be a huge amount of profit (except from the perspective of someone who just started their first character), but it's simple and easy to do while most of my attention is on other things like my work-from-home job. It doesn't require my constant attention the way farming would. It's like getting free Inf for sitting around doing nearly nothing at all.

You see, new people are still finding the game every day (just hang out in the "New Players" channel on the Discord and you'll see what I mean), and both new and old players are still making alts. And all those alts will still need slotting up as they level up. As long as that remains true, and as long as plenty of people still farm to bring in Inf to feed the market, there will always be a market for converted Enhancements. Various in-game changes may affect the market—I'm still waiting to see what repercussions the recent nerf to disabling XP gain for extra Inf might have—but there should still be a market. So, if you're only just now reading this guide, don't fret that you might have missed out. You didn't. Get yourself some cheap recipes and Converters and see how far you can go.

And I'll say this for sure: when and if Homecoming and NCSoft finally seal the deal to make Homecoming fully "legit," we'll probably get a flood of new players from the publicity, in which case the market for Enhancements will explode. So, now's a good time to get your feet wet and get ready for the rush.

APPENDIX

Here are some other FAQs that might prove useful.

• Craft & Convert: Detailed Step-by-Step Guide
• A quick and dirty crash course in Enhancement Converters
• Enhancements, Inventions, and Consignments. Oh My!
• R_M’s Consignment Market Buying Guide for the Casual Player (ParagonWiki)

+1 Inf, would read again.

Glad you asked! At root, this method takes advantage of some of the market quirks introduced in I25--so if you’re playing on one of the I24 servers out there, it won’t work at all.

Actually this worked well on live, and would work on I24 servers, minus the level conversion / attuned conversion which just makes it that much easier and more lucrative.

Converters were added in Issue 22.  People tend to remember that certain PvP IOs sold for more than the 2 billion influence cap on Live, but forget that all of that went away with Issue 22.

With converters you can craft level 50 uncommon recipes and convert them into rare level 50 IOs, and those sell well.  You can convert any PvP IO to the one you want, which crashed the market for that Panacea +hp IO or the Glad Armor +3% defense IO.  Purple recipes still sold for quite a lot, mind you, and you could make a killing buying the unwanted purple recipes and crafting and converting to the ones that sold for several hundred million influence.  I did a lot of that back in the day.

A fair point, Shinobu. Thanks for the clarification.

So I just sold a piece of orange salvage for 900,000 inf on the AH. It sold instantly. Who's buying this stuff up so quickly for such prices? Do players have bots or somesuch looking for good AH deals, or something like that?

I don't remember stuff selling so quickly back in the day, but I only played up to issue 14 or so.

So I just sold a piece of orange salvage for 900,000 inf on the AH. It sold instantly. Who's buying this stuff up so quickly for such prices? Do players have bots or somesuch looking for good AH deals, or something like that?

 

I don't remember stuff selling so quickly back in the day, but I only played up to issue 14 or so.

I've noticed sometimes when buying Common salvage for crafting of the kind this guide is about that when I bid some odd number of Inf on the first, like 5555 or 4444, it often shows up as the last few bids in the second Common salvage when I click on it. And likewise, I know that there were some Rares in the old days that didn't have much demand at all--yet I've never seen a Rare sale listed here outside the 900K to 1 mil range.

I suspect that not only are Enhancements and Recipes fungible, but that types of salvage are, too--when you list a rare of any kind, it can sell as a rare of any other kind. I haven't asked about it anywhere, but it would seem to make sense.

You don't have to theorize about that, it's true.  All common salvage is in one bucket, all uncommon in one bucket, all rare in one bucket.  This makes it easier to sell your low level rares that few people normally want, and impossible to corner the market on salvage in the way marketeers routinely did on Live.  If you ask me, it's a good thing.  ^_^  But I think it's something from the SCORE server, so hard to say if it'll always remain this way.

It’s kind of counterintuitive, but if you’re tempted to slot up and Attune some Kinetic Combats you just received from a conversion, it’s far better to sell them and then re-buy the same ones pre-Attuned. You’ll be paying around the same amount that you're selling yours for, or maybe a little more if you want them right away--but you won’t be paying the extra 4 million Inf each (or 20 Reward Merits each) that it would cost to buy Enhancement Catalysts and use them yourself.

Not getting this bit here.

I mean how do you know what to sell these for so you can then turn around buy the attuned version?  Looking in the ah history they sell for a min of 4mill inf.

Are you saying you need to sell your lvl xx KC enh for 4mill first so you can then buy an attuned one for 4mil?

Seems a little hit and miss no?  It's not like in other AH's where you can choose who you are buying from so it's not like you can sell yours and rebuy from yourself?

I went from 1mill inf to 4 mill inf this evening but now back down to a measly 345k inf due to have two recipes that are simply not selling...lol  namely a touch of death one and the kinetic combat one I am trying to sell.

Btw it's great the OP shared this but I think this may make this method of making money dry up really fast now.  Hope I am wrong though.

It’s kind of counterintuitive, but if you’re tempted to slot up and Attune some Kinetic Combats you just received from a conversion, it’s far better to sell them and then re-buy the same ones pre-Attuned. You’ll be paying around the same amount that you're selling yours for, or maybe a little more if you want them right away--but you won’t be paying the extra 4 million Inf each (or 20 Reward Merits each) that it would cost to buy Enhancement Catalysts and use them yourself.

 

Not getting this bit here.

Well, I said it's counterintuitive.

I mean how do you know what to sell these for so you can then turn around buy the attuned version?  Looking in the ah history they sell for a min of 4mill inf.

 

Are you saying you need to sell your lvl xx KC enh for 4mill first so you can then buy an attuned one for 4mil?

The thing is, the Attuned one sells for 4 mil--and the level XX one sell for the exact same 4 mil. Because the game considers them to be exactly the same thing.

So, scenario one: you sell your KC for 4 mil then buy an Attuned one for 4 mil to end up with an Attuned KC and no net loss--you spent 4, you got 4 back. And you've got the Attuned Enhancement.

Scenario two: You spend 4 million Inf on a Catalyst and Attune the KC you have. Now you'e got the same Attuned Enhancement...but you're out the 4 mil you spent on the Catalyst.

Even if you ended up selling your KC for only 3 mil and paying 5 mil for an Attuned KC, you're only out 2 mil--that's half what you'd be out if you bought the Catalyst.

In actual practice, you won't come out dead even--but even if you're out a little money by selling and re-buying, you're not out 4 million Inf.

It’s kind of counterintuitive, but if you’re tempted to slot up and Attune some Kinetic Combats you just received from a conversion, it’s far better to sell them and then re-buy the same ones pre-Attuned. You’ll be paying around the same amount that you're selling yours for, or maybe a little more if you want them right away--but you won’t be paying the extra 4 million Inf each (or 20 Reward Merits each) that it would cost to buy Enhancement Catalysts and use them yourself.

 

Not getting this bit here.

Well, I said it's counterintuitive.

 

I mean how do you know what to sell these for so you can then turn around buy the attuned version?  Looking in the ah history they sell for a min of 4mill inf.

 

Are you saying you need to sell your lvl xx KC enh for 4mill first so you can then buy an attuned one for 4mil?

The thing is, the Attuned one sells for 4 mil--and the level XX one sell for the exact same 4 mil. Because the game considers them to be exactly the same thing.

 

So, scenario one: you sell your KC for 4 mil then buy an Attuned one for 4 mil to end up with an Attuned KC and no net loss--you spent 4, you got 4 back. And you've got the Attuned Enhancement.

 

Scenario two: You spend 4 million Inf on a Catalyst and Attune the KC you have. Now you'e got the same Attuned Enhancement...but you're out the 4 mil you spent on the Catalyst.

 

Even if you ended up selling your KC for only 3 mil and paying 5 mil for an Attuned KC, you're only out 2 mil--that's half what you'd be out if you bought the Catalyst.

 

In actual practice, you won't come out dead even--but even if you're out a little money by selling and re-buying, you're not out 4 million Inf.

Yes I get that and think it's a really good idea/trick you have shared.  I am just saying you may be staring at a sell screen for a long time before you can actually buy and attuned version.

I mean I could be wrong but  started this evening at 1.4m inf, sold one converted enhancement and went up to 4mil inf made some more to sell , put then back in the AH at a little under price, what shows up in history, but they are not selling.  Figured give it some time it will eventually.

I want for myself some kinetic combats attuned so instead of using catalyst like i did for the first two  I put one I just created up in the AH...not selling instantly  but figure it will and went ahead and bought one, for the min 4mill attuned one's are showing for, so I can get it right away.  Sadly still stuck looking at mine not being sold for that price yet..lol

Just saying you kind of have to have a good amount of fall back cash if you are going to do all this, for the attunement trick that is, otherwise risk having your funds tied up for an indeterminate amount of time.

My worry right now is this guide will spread I will just keep getting undercut and end up not selling the stuff I have in there right now plus thr AH doesn't give you your fees back I think if you take something out to adjust the price.

As I mention in this other guide I wrote, something else you need is patience. Patience is vital for doing anything in the market, because if something happens right away, it means set your price too low or your bid too high.

Don't watch the pot; it won't boil. Put the enhancements and bids up and go do something else. Put your auctions out of your head. The Auction House isn't a place for instant gratification.

I do a lot of marketing and crafting every morning when I get up before I go to work, and when I get home from work, and when I go to bed. Today I came home to find myself 53 mil Inf richer over the course of the day. And that's from setting prices that I knew wouldn't sell right away; I actually priced them above the going rate because I knew that rate would rise and fall over the course of the day.

Really, I think it's great. It's a way that the game can go on playing itself even when I'm nowhere near a computer. Then I get home to find my rewards.

As I mention in this other guide I wrote, something else you need is patience. Patience is vital for doing anything in the market, because if something happens right away, it means set your price too low or your bid too high.

 

Don't watch the pot; it won't boil. Put the enhancements and bids up and go do something else. Put your auctions out of your head. The Auction House isn't a place for instant gratification.

 

I do a lot of marketing and crafting every morning when I get up before I go to work, and when I get home from work, and when I go to bed. Today I came home to find myself 53 mil Inf richer over the course of the day. And that's from setting prices that I knew wouldn't sell right away; I actually priced them above the going rate because I knew that rate would rise and fall over the course of the day.

 

Really, I think it's great. It's a way that the game can go on playing itself even when I'm nowhere near a computer. Then I get home to find my rewards.

I figured that might be worth mentioning again and might be worth mentioning that it a good idea to keep a "nest egg" at all times in case sales or your market speculation goes sideways for awhile.

What I am researching right now is how to make merits quickly solo...lol

Btw it's great the OP shared this but I think this may make this method of making money dry up really fast now.  Hope I am wrong though.

Well the profit margins on it have been shrinking over the last week or so. More people are buying recipes so those are going up in price and the sell value of the enhancements has been dropping as more people are selling. So even with the price drop on converters profit margins are less than they were a week ago.

That being said I'm not to worried. There will always be ways to make money on the market for two reasons. One is that when the profit margin drops people stop doing it so you tend to reach an equilibrium where the profit margin stabalizes around the number of people who are willing to do it for that margin. Secondly while anyone can do this there are always going to be plenty of players who don't want to spend the time and effort. They'd rather grind than marketeer and there's nothing wrong with that.

Secondly while anyone can do this there are always going to be plenty of players who don't want to spend the time and effort. They'd rather grind than marketeer and there's nothing wrong with that.

Yep, that's the ticket right there. Some of us farm for our inf, some of us marketeer, some of us do a bit of both. You can make hundred of millions pretty easily as a level 50 character, especially if you're specced for one form of farming or another.

It's also worth noting I didn't share everything I know. There are some recipes out there that I didn't mention in the guide that are low-demand enough they sell for very little, but can convert to much more valuable ones. Working out which ones they are is left as an exercise for the reader. :)

(And this, by the way, is why you should never slot the IOs you make if you’re planning to Attune them immediately. This is a mistake I made starting out, and wasted huge amounts of money before I learned the market Attunes for free. It’s kind of counterintuitive, but if you’re tempted to slot up and Attune some Kinetic Combats you just received from a conversion, it’s far better to sell them and then re-buy the same ones pre-Attuned.

A little tip on getting the Attuned IO you want when you have an unattuned version..  If you have the cash, place a bid with one character, and sell with a different character at the same price.  There are three possible outcomes.  First, you end up selling the item to your alt.  Second, the item will sell for more than you bid and you can use the cash to do what’s necessary to craft/convert your way into another copy of the IO.  Third, you could end up buying someone else’s IO and be out the money...but you’ll have the attuned IO and an unattuned IO that you can list and sell normally.

If you’ve gotten multiple copies of the IO, the process is easier.  If you sell an IO on the market, then in that moment the highest price being bid for that item is what you got from the sale.  So, for example, if I sell a Luck of the Gambler global recharge for 7.5 million, I know the highest bid at the moment of the sale was 7.5 million.  The less ‘churn’ on sales for that IO, the more valuable this information is to you.  Generally, high-priced items sell less often than cheaper ones, though there are exceptions.

Use the global email system to transfer the normal IO to an alt, then put in a bid just slightly higher than the expected sell price for the attuned version.  Change to the alt, and put the IO up for sale at the exact price you listed it for with the other character.  You should end up with a sale, as your original character buys the attuned version for the amount you listed it for, and your alt gets the money from the sale (which can be emailed back to the original character).  Yes, you’re out the listing fee, which is notable, but it’s a lot cheaper than just throwing up a bid and hoping it sticks.  If someone outbids your bid, you get extra money that you can use to repeat the process of crafting and converting to get another copy.  The only undesirable result is buying the IO from someone else before you sell your copy, which is only bad if you paid more than what you can turn around and get by listing the unattuned IO and having a bit of patience.

That sounds like some useful advice for people who want to put in that amount of effort. But I, personally, am willing to accept a loss of a few hundred thousand here and there, in return for not having to put in that amount of effort. :)

Just to note, I've updated the guide a bit with suggestions of what to do if the price of Doctored Wounds is sky-high (as it's gotten lately). The hazard of trying to use specific examples is that everything changes so often. :)

Now that we have a Market Board - should this awesome guide get moved there?

Now that we have a Market Board - should this awesome guide get moved there?

Hey Robo,

We ran the Dr. Quarterfield TF last night till' 1 AM. Just wanted to thank you for all of your advice and help (both information and influence). You're living proof that good people do reside in CoX. A real pleasure. I read your guide and am going to attempt to do some light Marketeering.

Thanks!

Hey, no problem. I have more fun if everyone has more fun. That's what this guide is for. :)

I'm afraid I'll have to insist on future TF invites.

I'm afraid I'll have to insist on future TF invites.