Yomo Kimyata

If it makes you feel any better, they are definitely the best procs out there. Those five in particular.

The Terrigen Miss just finished Noble Savage's and Katie Douglas' arcs and, yeah, now we're talking! I had been considering moving up to +3/x1 but nerp, I'm sticking at +2! The Possessed and Apparitions, especially the bosses, are no jokes, and I'm really enjoying it. I just dinged 24, and am experimenting a bit with Experimentation. At 24, I wrestled between adding Corrosive Vial or Adrenal Booster and went with the former. It's still new to me, but combined with Weaken and Envenom, it really helps with tough bosses. I'll try AB at some point, and there will certainly be at least one more respec in my future. I may have made a mistake in picking up Kick and Tough already. I think I could use Maneuvers and Tactics from Leadership a lot more. Also, since I mostly play melee characters, I've still relatively new to the mechanics of snipes, at least the whole fast-snipe-with-slow-snipe-damage. Right now I've got Toxic Dart, X-Ray Beam, and Proton Volley 5-slotted with Decimation; Electron Haze 3-slotted with Vigilant Assault and two procs; Irradiation 4-slotted with 3 procs and an accuracy SO. Don't sweat using respecs or unslotters -- I got 2 of the former and dozens of the latter from my Hero Pack experiment. Speaking of which, I streamlined my process a bit to hurry it up. I had sold 30 of the 51 ATOs at my price by today. My planned system had been to take down the remaining 21 ATOs (costing 5% of the posting fee), convert once by ATO (costing 1 converter) and repost at my original price. Instead, I reposted at a discount price, just to move past this chapter, since we're moving closer to our goal of 1bn and since I'm starting to run out of relevant lessons. One thing that was interesting was that the unsold ATOs weren't all the ones you would expect (less frequently played ATs, crappy sets) but included some really popular items. This brings me to the madness of crowds and overreacting. Sometimes, suppliers of goods lose sight of the forest for the trees and overproduce popular items by changing unpopular items into popular items. But unpopular doesn't necessarily mean no demand. So in my ATO example, I had unsold brute ATOs and sold Kheldian ATOs, all at the same price. Another example is in Luck of the Gamblers: Normally, the most popular ones are the proc, the Def, and the Def/End and the other three tend to lag in flow and/or price. Well, not very long ago the supply of the D/E/R dropped pretty low, presumably because people were not putting them on the market and were instead converting them to the top three. So when I noticed that, I saved myself some converters and started selling them directly. I am a big fan of putting together systems for making inf. My favorite systems are what I like to call "sustainable factories" -- I like to identify items that are in high or at least consistent demand, and to create them by using other materials that I can replenish in short order. And I like to do this in blocks that I can sell to real end user demand on a daily basis. A theoretical factory would be putting in bids on lvl 41 Red Fortune recipes, crafting them to IOs, converting until you get a LotG, converting the crappy LotG IOs to the good ones, putting them up for sale, and putting more bids in on the recipes. Assuming no market pvp (lol), this is sustainable so long as you are able to buy more recipes as fast as you are able to or want to make and sell LotG IOs. Some of my factories lag in supply and I have to wait to replenish. Some of my factories lag in demand, so I have to be careful not to choke the market with too much supply. And my favorite, of course, are those Goldilocks factories where I steal everything from the bears and then have them killed am able to spit out product as fast as I want to. Don't get me wrong, rare roulette is great! It's a wonderful way to put out as much product as you feel like making and it's good bank. But having a good system (and periodically rechecking your assumptions and changing things if necessary) is potentially much more profitable and definitely faster. I'm in the process of getting rid of all the inventory I accumulated (the Kinetic Crash and Paralytic recipes which I will craft and crack), and I'm currently in the beta stage of our newest factory. I suspect it will be limited by true end demand, but it's looking promising. I think I need to get through a weekend with its normally increased demand before I can make a real judgment on its value. Currently at about 650mm in straight cash inf homey, and have 65 items for sale. Stay frosty.

For me, a couple of different reasons: 1. Like @Ukasesaid, it's a good way to get a character started from scratch. 2. It's good practice, and it (hopefully) helps to keep the mind sharp. I could use some help there, for sure. 3. I think it's fun. Sometimes. In real life there are tons of financial strategies that are super low risk and super low margin that aren't worth the effort until you leverage it up 100x. And those are the strategies that make bank. Well, until they go pear shaped.

Just now someone was bidding 50,000 and I sold about 150 into that bid.

I'm down with that!

Today, I'd like to discuss market pvp (lol). I really only think of two types of market pvp (lol): large buyers competing against other buyers, and large sellers competing against other sellers. Compared to Live, there is blessedly comparatively much less of this on HC. But it exists, and there really isn't anything to be done about it. If you are buying something in bulk (like rare salvage), it helps to periodically check the last five history to see if your bid is still the best one. Sometimes, someone sees a bunch of trades at (for example) 475,000 and so put in mass bids at 475,001. It's annoying, but all you can really do is to outbid them, or wait until their bids get filled. If you are selling something in bulk, and you haven't made any sales in a while, check to see if someone is under-offering you. that's harder to see because trade histories print at the bid, and you don't really know where the offer is. There is, of course, a foolproof way to see what the highest outstanding bid (HOB) and the lowest outstanding offer (LOO) is, but you may not like it. First of all, you bid creep on an item until you buy one. In theory, you would increase your bid by 1 inf each time until you bought one, but that's hideously impractical. I normally start at a low number then increase bids by 100k until I buy it. Keep in mind that people also like round numbers or repeating numbers or numbers that are easy to type. So by bid creeping you can find the approximate (or exact) ceiling. There's no guarantee that the next one is at the same level, but it's a decent guess. Then, in order to find the floor, all you need to do is what I tell people never to do: sell the item at 1 inf and see where the trade occurs. Again, no guarantee that there are more bids at that level. But you may be asking, what about the market pvp (lol) between buyers and sellers? I don't really consider that pvp, because it's getting two parties together for (hopefully) mutual gain. But that said, there are some tricks and traps, some dirty, some not-so-dirty that people will use. I'm not going to detail them there, but it's handy to remember that buyers always want you to sell things for cheaper, and sellers always want you to buy things more expensively. Also, I want to talk about what I call "stupid market tricks" after the bit from David Letterman many years ago. There is a lot of inf out there, and there are a lot of items out there. Not every trade has to make economic sense, and sometimes people will do things just for the lulz. Also keep in mind that the devs hold the keys to the Fed and can change anything they want at any time with no warning. So don't count on things staying the same forever. Now that I've gotten that ray of sunshine out of the way, let's look at our latest project: Hero Packs! There have been tons of threads about these and about Winter Packs, so I'm going to ask you to read there for greater detail. But I had some spare inf lying around and wanted to demonstrate a real time strategy. This morning I bought a total of 40 packs (20 Hero and Villain, 20 the other one) at 9,999,999 and 10mm each respectively. I always check to see if someone is selling at less than the seeded price, and sure enough, I saved myself 20 inf in total. I opened them all and tracked what I got: 51 ATOs 48 insprations 460 Brainstorms 450 merits 54 converters 59 unslotters 8 boosters 3 catalysts and a bunch of temp powers, a respec or two. Now all these items go into an account-wide grab bag named Character Items that is on your email tab. Character Items is a magical place, and you can take items off of it on any one of your characters at any time, even in an instance like a mission (where you normally can't access the AH). My Character Items is a big mess, but for the sake of clarity I made sure to claim every item that came from these 40 packs with the exception of the inspirations. I have so many freaking inspirations on my Character Items that I just ignore them at this point. Then I created a system. Systems are very good for making inf. Step 1: put every ATO, regardless of type, on the market at the same price. That price was not 1 inf. That price was also not 10mm. That's all I'm giving you for now. Step 2: (this is where we are now) wait a day. Some sold instantly, more trickled in over time. Step 3: pull every unsold ATO, convert it once by category: ATO, and put it back on the market at the previous price. Step 4: wait a day. and repeat steps 3 and 4 if necessary. This means I'm listing brute ATOs at the same price as dominator ATOs, but who knows, I may get some people who are building dominators! Everything else, I'm keeping for now, except brainstorms, which I'm converting and selling as rare salvage. Ever since the first post when I talked about buying 20 brainstorms, I've been keeping an eye on them. Remember that you can convert 20x brainstorm to one random rare salvage, so if the going price is low enough, there is a pure arbitrage opportunity. And yes, as we've been watching rare salvage prices move higher (IMO stupid market tricks), brainstorms have remained low enough that I could buy 20, convert, sell the rare, and make over 100k profit. I've been engaging in market pvp (lol) for a week and a half now before I got tired of it and just put in a bunch of bids just over 20k. It has been quite profitable. Miss T finished her first arc and I really enjoyed it. First Ward is visually interesting, stories are engaging, it's dope stuff! She's now at level 22, and I'm doing a reassessment of slotting. Now is the time where I'm going to be swapping out SOs for IOs for the most part. I'm also regressing to a tactic I used to use in Live: put in a bid for 10x on something I want, slot one, sell the other nine. Working well. I'm sitting on about 100mm in cash inf and the rest is invested in a few other things, including possibly our new niche. The anticipation is terrible! I hope it lasts. In a while, crocodile.

I didn't read it that way at all. My initial reading, which I now think was wrong, was that they adjusted supply and demand by artificially using dev tools. On second look and after the OPs edit, it just looks like they thought that the HOs in question were too cheap, so they bought them all and put in a bunch of "fake" bids in order to try and fool people into believing there was actual demand. And then their bids got hit because there was no actual demand. Standard market manipulation, which we really can't stop, but I would have expected better from a GM. It's not like marketers have the best reputation to begin with, but a GM bragging about trying to trick people doesn't really help people trust the marketplace system. Let me put it this way: I expect cops to run red lights while stopping/preventing crime, but I don't expect them to run red lights off duty to get to the donut shop faster.

I've not done extensive research on this, but I think the Rebirth server (i.e., not Homecoming) is the closest to "old school" CoH right now.

The only PvP sniper recipes are Experienced Marksmen. You can ONLY convert these to other PvP sets (or convert in set, of course). I'm guessing you used different sniper recipes? No problem! There are (in my opinion) too many sniper recipes and the only one that's any good is Sting of the Manticore. Ask yourself, "What Do I Do with That?". My answer is (for uncommons), convert by rarity: uncommon until you get a different set from sniper, then convert by category: whatever that set is until you get a rare, then play rare roulette.

I've gotten great use out of my Staff/Bio stalker. I haven't run a 4/8 ITF yet, admittedly. But staff gets you two AoEs and automatic form of the Body and all of bio's goodness to help with the damage. It is not, however, a charge in and aggro two or three groups at once kind of build. I believe you have a like/hate relationship with bio, and my builds tend to sacrifice tankiness for offense.

I hear you and as a fellow human, I sympathize. It's tough to make silly mistakes. As a player, this reinforces that this is not a market driven economy and that any fiction of a free market can disappear in an instant at the whim of a GM. I don't have words right now to describe how I feel about this. EDIT: I think I just realized that you acted as an individual player, and did not use any programming reserved for developers. If that is the case, then this is just stupid market tricks.

So Miss T decided to run Penelope Yin's arc and I found it, sadly, unimpressive. But I figured that I'm a completer and since I'll be moving on to greener (grayer?) pastures in First Ward soon, I might as well. I've now run all the arcs for the Resistance: Warden storyline (except Dark Watcher, which I outlevelled) and overall, two thumbs up. It's s good story, and it's a story I'm new to, so great! I will certainly run the other three storylines (I've already made a Loyalist who is hooked on Rikti fan "fiction" named Boy.Fan, Battle Axe/Bio Armor scrapper, modelled in part on Comic Store Guy). My main complaint so far is that although the play is nicely difficult, there is very little challenge in the way of end bosses. I like my story arcs with lots of Elite Bosses, and maybe I'm spoiled, but 1 1/2 EBs in that entire storyline is too light for my tastes. To each their own. I also took some time to do some exploring and to pick up all the exploration badges in all six zones. There are some really nice vistas (visit above ground during the day though!) and I like the color scheme. It's not as dismal and hard on the eyes as redside, and not as saturated bright as a lot of blueside. I also read all the plaques for Headjuiced; well, look, maybe I didn't read every single little tiny syllable, no. But basically I read them, yeah. How'd you do on your homework assignment on Basilisk's Gaze? Personally, I would buy Paralytic recipes in the level 10-19 range. Convert them once by category: hold and you either have a BG or a Neuronic Shutdown. The NS proc sells well, and you can play rare roulette with the other pieces. Sadly, over the past two days I'm really not seeing a ton of interest in BG, despite the low supply. I've been flipping or buying and converting in set for small profits, but this is not the new niche I was looking for. Sometimes though, it really takes off, so it's useful to keep that in the back of your head. I've also been flipping some Perf Shift procs, buying around 2mm and selling 3-4mm. Not ridiculous money, but good flow. I've still got a bunch of Paralytic and Kinetic Crashes I should get rid of. All my spare marketing slots are going into bids on something I'll tell you about next time. The real project occurred when I was thinking ahead about my snipe power and how I wanted to slot that eventually. So I go looking at the snipe PvP recipes and was astounded, ASTOUNDED at how cheap they were. Don't people know that PvP IOs are all topologically equivalent?!? So I put in bids of 10x for each recipe in the set and within two days bought 60 of them. I guess a lot of people get a PvP drop and think, "Wow, great drop, I can sell this right now for 3+mm!". But I think, "Wow, great drop, I can craft this and convert it and make 8-10mm!" There's so much juice in PvPs as some of you know very very well. So I crafted them all and converted until I got something I wanted: all the Panaceas, some of the Shield Wall, some, but not all of the procs. And rather than set individual prices on each of them, I picked my price and listed them all at that price. Some insta-sold, which always makes me stop and wonder if I'm really selling things too cheaply. That reminds me of some of the fundamentals of the marketplace that I wanted to discuss. Now it is clear that every transaction has a buyer and a seller. But did you also ever thing about that every transaction has a passive counterparty and an active counterparty? By that I mean that every trade occurs when someone enters a new bid or a new offer in the system, and that bid is high enough (or the offer low enough) that it will cross with an existing order in the queue. That existing order was the passive counterparty -- they put in their order to buy or sell and were willing to wait for transaction. The new order was the active counterparty, and they either bid higher or offered lower than anyone previously in the system, which means that they paid up a little in order to instantly transact. This may not seem the least bit interesting, but it demonstrates how the passive counterparties will tend to get better prices because they have given up time in the form of how quickly their trade occurs; in exchange they get a slightly better price. There is nothing wrong with being the active counterparty or the passive counterparty, and both are necessary for trades to occur. Ok, thus endeth the boring part. Miss T is now at level 21 and we are very excited about the next part of her journey. Both for exploring a new zone, with new stories and new enemies, and for the wonders of soon dinging 22, which opens up a whole raft of new slotting choices. I'm gonna have to think on that. Most of my PvP IOs have sold, and I'm sitting on over 600mm in inf that is just burning a hole in my pocket. Can you guess what comes next? See you later, alligator.

As I've gotten better at the game over the (literally) years, I realize that it is beatable, but it takes a bit of luck and a lot of micromanagement. Even now on Immortal, it usually takes me a few tries to get a victory. The key is preventing a runaway rival. And for me, embracing war early and often really slows the AI down.

It's 2021. I really thought we'd have hover cars by now.

So Miss T has finally dinged 20 after finishing Helix's and Aaron Walker's arcs, and they were great! Why? GHOULS! Fat Bottomed Ghouls, the Ghoul from Ipanema, Ghouls, Ghouls, Ghouls! Every arc needs more Ghouls! I'm very much enjoying running all these arcs for the first time slowly, but I can't imagine running them more than once each. Nowadays, I like redside missions, and I vastly prefer the other content (like TFs or radios) either redside or blueside. And I'd really like to see more elite bosses. I still have some missions from Calvin Scott, and I can run the Penelope Yin arc, so I'm going to wrestle between doing those or moving on to First Ward. And oh, I learned something today. PRAETORIANS GET UNIQUE TITLES! WHY DID I NOT KNOW THIS!!! Every once of my Praetorians will be known as Sweetcheek from here on out. Well, only the Resistance. Once you gain interest in the AH, it really helps to keep an eye on things and try to take advantage if flows change. And then you have to ask yourself if things have really changed, or if someone is just screwing around. Example: when selling all the Performance Shifters I've made recently, I noticed that a lot of the procs were selling at 2mm. That seems low, very low. So I put in a bid for one just over 2mm and bought it. And I put in a bid for 10 there and bought 10 there. And put them up for sale and sold them for 4-5mm each. Generally, they trade somewhere in between, but if you see a buying opportunity, take it, you notorious flipper you. I also ended up buying 10 Endurance Mod/Recharge recipes at 5 inf each from my price-finding bid, so I figured that I really needed to craft those and convert some of them in set for the sake of diversification. Speaking of diversification, I noticed something with the purples I crafted and converted. I ended up with about 25-30 of them and converted all to one of the damage types as detailed in last issue. Soon, everything sold at my price except for the Apocalypses. Normally, I don't look at my purple sales on a daily basis, and I would let it sit for a few more days. But no, I need those market slots! So I convert them to a non-Apocalypse damage type and relist. Moving quickly. One thing I hoped to get out of this documentation was to try and start up a new market niche for kicks, and the first step is to learn more about potential candidates. Basilisk's Gaze is a very useful low-level rare with good set bonuses, but it ranges in price a fair amount based on supply. Run your own analysis on this, and ask yourself if you were to make BGs, how would you go about it and which ones in the set would you target to sell? I also started a new project for the next lesson that took some working capital but I guess I'd be up to about 400mm in profits right now if I weren't invested. A great way to make consistent bank, no matter how often you play a given alt, is to put in a bid for 10x a yellow recipe that doesn't require rare salvage as the last thing you do before logging off. First thing you do when next logging on is collect them and put in bids on your salvage. Play and you should have bought your salvage by the end of your game session. Collect salvage, craft, play some rare roulette, and post your items. Put in a bid for 10x yellow recipe. Repeat ad infinitum. May the odds always be in MY favor.

I've put a lot of hours into Civ V over the years, and since the pandemic I've been playing with old friends while we Zoom. It resparked my interest. My current long-term solo goal is to win at Immortal for every civilization on random maps. I'm working on it alphabetically by civ and have been stagnating on Carthage for weeks now.

Let's talk about mistakes. I make mistakes ALL THE TIME. I already documented converting by rarity instead of by category. Happens all the time. Or accidentally converting in set because you had the wrong button pushed. It's no big deal -- there's lots of inf out there and losing a little on user error is not a bid deal. Another thing I do all the time is not leave myself enough inf for posting fees, which are 5% of your offer price. Sure, you *can* offer at 5 inf, but then you take the risk you *do* sell it at 5 inf. Or pricing something too high -- if it doesn't sell in your time frame, don't be afraid to eat that posting fee and a little pride and take it down and repost. There are so many ways to make errors. For example, when setting up my example from yesterday with the Perf Shifter E/R/A recipes, I originally accidentally put in 5x10 bids at 10,005 on the End Mod/Accuracy recipes. It would not have been a big deal, but I wanted to drive home the point about converting away from garbage, and End Mod/A are not quite garbage, but are not quite gold either. Regardless, I also crafted 50 of those yesterday. Now, when I can, I like to work in bulk. Blocks of 10 at a minimum, blocks of 30, 50, 60 are preferable. And I like to deal with things that will sell quickly between sessions. I would much rather sell 50 IOs for a 2mm profit each than sell 10 IOs for a 5mm profit each. (Now, 50 at a 5mm profit, THAT'S worth getting out of bed for!) And the End/Acc would take a while to move, in my opinion. So what did I do? Well, I put 10 of the 50 up for sale as is, then converted the remaining 40 to the proc, the End Mod, the End Mod/Rech, or back to the End Mod/Acc. This gets me some diversification at the cost of some converters, and that's a trade I'll take. Instead of selling 50 End/Acc I'm now selling 10-15 each of 4 IOs, which will hopefully sell out between sessions. So don't sweat mistakes. Or have regrets. But egrets? I've had a few. And sometimes you get little happy coincidences, like when you put in a place holding bid on something x10 at 5 inf each (that is what I use to get around the display bug. If I can't see the trade history, I put in a lowball bid, and then refresh my bid to see the actual trade history. That is, unless the trade history is bugged...) and you end up buying x10 at 5 inf each. Just earlier, I made a mistake by not having enough inf for posting fees. So I rare rouletted a block of 10 Kinetic Crashes that I had "accidentally" bought at 5 inf each while I was pricing it out. C'est la vie, and that should get me enough inf for posting fees, possibly even by the time I'm done typing up this synopsis. But wait, didn't you just have 220mm inf? Well, the problem I have is that I'm always looking at new gigs, so I thought I would give purple recipes a look see. So I'm looking at Gravitational Anchors, since I'm not sure I've ever slotted one before at 50 and I see this: I'd say the odds of being able to buy this a little under 10mm are good. So good, that I'll bid on a block of 10. And it's not the only one in the set. But I admit I did a little math first. Let's say it costs about 10mm to buy the recipe, 600k to craft it, 3 rare salvage, and 2 uncommon salvage. Can we round that to 2mm in costs? So my breakeven would be 10/9 * 12mm or 13.333mm. Going rates for the crafted are well above that, but they aren't exactly selling like hotcakes. So, how about a system where we buy purple Immobilize recipes, craft them, and convert them into a different purple IO? And that's what I do. My personal system is to convert by rarity: Very Rare until I get what I consider to be the best selling four (Apocalypse, Armageddon, Ragnorak, and Hecatomb; or as I like to call it, "red, but not the red pentagram". Then I offer them all at the same price, which is what I consider "cheap, but not ridiculously cheap". Diversification means that I'm not trying to move a block of 10, but 1-2 of many different types. This is not a huge profit markup, but it's good for at least a couple of mm and often more. But it *does* take a significant investment in bids, so I thought I would play around with it. It's something I do on a few alts that I normally check out every few weeks, but for Miss T, I'll see if I can get some faster turnaround. Learning new things, burning new neural pathways, it's all good. So Miss T has done some work with Crow, and it has earned her level 17 status. The last story arc wasn't particularly challenging, even at +2, but it's a good story. Also, the missions where Crow fights with you make me realize I would much rather have him on my side, because that dude hits hard! Normally at level 17, I'm over the moon about upgrading my IOs, but since HC instituted low level SOs, for the most part at this level I'm better off using SOs rather than, say, moving to Entropic Chaos for the set bonus. So basically, the only thing I'm buying for myself right now is an Performance shifter proc. May the odds ever be in your favor.

There have been a couple of threads about this in the Market Forum -- try your search fu! In addition to what @Apparitionsaid, you can also get merits from opening Hero packs or Winter packs. As far as what to exchange them for, it's up to you. If it's for personal use, it's all fair game. Merits are easy to get, pain heals, chicks dig scars, glory lasts forever. If you are trying to exchange your merits for inf at an "optimal" rate, there are a number of alternatives. My observations are: 1. For 100 merits, anything netting out 18mm+ (selling for 20mm+ before market fees) means you are probably doing ok, although there a few marginally more profitable options; 2. I've never found anything more profitable than converting them to converters and then using the converters to make lead into gold. Who's a good boy? Is it you? It is! You're a good boy!

Baseball bat or shillelagh (which I can imagine into a cane or walking stick) are my only acceptable skins. I'm ok with the shovel on my Axe brute, but I'd have to use the flat side on a War Mace scrapper and I'm not sure I want to do that.

In my opinion, once the MCU added to the continuity, everything went out the window. I just can't bring myself to watch anything after Endgame.

I'm not going to have time to play Miss T today, but I did have 93 seconds to log in, collect all my loot, log out, and start typing. I think it's time for a reality check for everyone. I've been posting for six days now, and hopefully passing on some good information. Truth be told, it's killing me to go so slowly, but I want to go back to my guiding principle which is "make this accessible to everyone". Well, everyone who reads this forum. So over six days, I've run missions solo for, um, five hours? That feels high but I'm just guessing. I'd ask an NPC with the right letter name, but I'd have to look that up, and besides I have a pronounced tendency to multi-task so I'm grinding time on HC while I'm grinding time on other things. I'm at level 16, have about 220mm in cash inf after collecting yesterday's sales and about 100mm "face value" investment in my character. Far short of 1bn, but the whole point of this is not to push any limits. But to see what any and every person can do. I just pulled up an old lvl 50 of mine and he has 94 slotted IOs. Call it 100. At 5mm average cost per IO, a pimped-out build would cost 500mm. Even that looks high. Anyway, I feel that we've already gotten to the point that anything I want on Miss T, I've probably already paid for it. Homecoming is great in a lot of ways, but one of the greatest is that they make it simple for you to get everything you want with a very small amount of effort. Not no effort though. That works for me. So from here on out, I'm just making inf for the sake of making inf. Give it away, fund other characters, make a big bonfire. But we've proven the concept. Anyway again, we talked about rolling in set for one out of the (three/five/six) and we talked about rolling in set away from a stinker. There are a lot of cases that fall in between, and that's today's case study. Do you have a Performance Shifter proc slotted? If you are 17+ and the answer is no then boo on you. Booooooo! How about a Performance Shifter Rech/Acc? Probably not. I would rank (and the marketplace backs me up) that the value for Perf Shifters by IO range from (high to low): proc, End Mod, End/Acc//End/Rech, End/Rech/Acc, Rech/Acc. The top four sell a lot more quickly and a lot higher than the lower two. So let's make some money! On Sunday, I put in bids on lvl 21 Perf Shifter E/R/A recipes at 10,005 and by yesterday bought 39 of them. Let's craft them and convert them in set until they are NOT an End Mod/R/A or an R/A. They cost you a rare salvage and 3 or more converters. Yes, it is extremely annoying when you convert in set from an E/R/A to an R/A to an E/R/A to an R/A and so on. But the odds are in your favor. Sort them by type, and sell 'em! You could convert all of them to procs. Some people do. You're not going to make a fortune on these, but let's say it costs 600k to buy and craft the recipe, and 100-200k to convert it. And you will sell every one of these, so long as you don't price it too dear. Until next time. May all your dreams be full of easily debuffed Council.

I have a tendency to make theme SGs based on incredibly trivial reasons. One of my most recent is The DEFCON Five, a team of super Secret Service agents whose main role is to protect the POTUS's nuclear football (sometimes from him/herself). The ATs and power sets were chosen based on the code names for each level of DEFCON, and a little bit by what I felt like playing. All of them are level 15-16 right now, but I'm thinking ahead. DEFCON 5: Fade Out -- Ice Melee/Radiation Armor Stalker DEFCON 4: Double Take -- Illusion Control/Electrical Affinity Controller DEFCON 3: Round House -- Martial Arts/Ice Armor Brute DEFCON 2: Fast Pace -- Fire Blast/Radiation Emission Corruptor DEFCON 1: Cocked Pistol -- Storm Summoning/Dual Pistols Defender Looking at it now, an incredibly offensive group, but maybe not the most synergistic.

So, I finished up Seer 1381's arc, had some laughs, and have finally made it to the big leagues in Neutropolis! Good story arc, nice Elite Boss at the end. Now that I've gotten some IO slotting under my belt, things are getting a little too easy. I really don't want to rush xp, or to turn xp off, so instead of increasing number of mobs, I'm going to move up to +2 missions. I just picked up Proton Volley at lvl 16, so I now have four single target attacks (the mandatory Neutrino Bolt, X-Ray Beam, Toxic Dart, and Proton Volley) and two kind of crappy targeted AoE (Irradiate and Electron Haze). Only Envenom and Weaken from Poison, and I'm a-ok with that. Last time we talked about "How Do I Get There From Here?" Today, I'm going to clean out my inventory and play the counterpart game, "What Do I Do With That?" I've been vendoring all my enhancement drops and all my regular IO recipes, and I assume everyone else does the same. But by lvl 16 I've ended up with 8 uncommon or rare recipe drops, and I've been wondering, "What do I do with that?" Basilisk's Gaze Rech/Hold lvl 15. That's probably a net money maker if I craft it, but I need rare salvage (which has been creeping higher lately) and the IO would not be *that* valuable. The past 5 recipe trades indicate sales of 10,005 (and I have to wonder if I have an alt buying them somewhere. Probably.) so I post it at 5,000 and insta-sell at 50k. Everything else gets crafted: Hibernation A/E lvl 10. I will craft any yellow recipe that doesn't need orange salvage. Convert once by category to get a rare Induced Coma. Roll by rarity 4x to get a Regenerative Tissue +rech. Cost: 6 converters. Reactive Armor Res/Rech lvl 15. I can probably sell that for 2mm+ as is, but not quickly. Convert 3 times by category to get Imperium Armor +psi resist. Cost: 6 converters. Kismet Def/End lvl 13. In set until Accuracy! And I get it in one. Cost: 3 converters. Achilles' Heel proc lvl 10. No brainer, and it's an orange recipe but doesn't require rare salvage. Cost: zero converters Deflated Ego lvl 11. Also an orange recipe that doesn't require rare salvage. So after crafting, I can convert by rarity as a rare. Score! Four rolls by rarity later I get an Explosive Strike proc. Cost: four converters. Explosive Strike KB/Accuracy lvl 10. ALSO an orange recipe that doesn't require rare salvage. Craft and convert in set (2 rolls) for the proc. Cost: six converters. Gift of the Ancients lvl 16. Needs a rare salvage, and I can sell it as is, but let's go for a Kismet or a Karma. And I screw up and convert by uncommon instead of by category. Stupid pull down menu! And I convert by uncommon again to roll a Karma KB. Talk about Karma indeed! Cost: 2 converters. Generally, I think everyone should periodically go through their recipes and craft and roll anything that doesn't need rare salvage. Possible exception: at lvl 50, the crafting cost is about a half million inf, which is more than twice what it costs at lvl 49. Also, we've talked about rolling in-set in order to get a specific outcome. But what about the opposite? What happens when a set has one real dog and the rest are worth something? In that case, if you start with the dog you can spend 3 converters and are guaranteed a good outcome. A good example is Kinetic Combat Chance for Knockdown. Kinetic Combat has a very good melee defense set bonus at 4 slots, but I've never even considered using the proc, and I don't see a lot of others using it either. So on Sunday I put in bids for lvl 20 Kinetic Combat procs at (you guessed it) 10,005 and bids for crafted IOs at 1mm. I only bought 6 recipes and 10 IOs, but keep in mind the recipes only drop from content lvl 20-35 -- a range lots of people zerg through. The recipes take *TWO* rares, so I'm approximating the all in cost of crafting the recipes to be about 1mm. Anyway, with 16 crappy IOs I'm going to roll each once in set and will end up with something worth 3-5mm that cost me 1mm and 3 converters. In the land of self-love, I picked up my ATOs overnight. I still need a Achilles' Heel proc, and I was fruitless in my lowball bids o/n so I'm just going to put in a low bid under where I just offered the one I made. I expect to transact both by morning. I also want a Fury of the Gladiator proc, so I put in really lowball bids for the others in the set and got 4. One I will roll in set for the proc. That took me 15 rolls, or 45 converters! That's a LOT! And yet it was cheaper in total that if I had bought it outright. The other three I'm going to roll by PvP until I get something tasty. Nine rolls later (that cost 9 converters in total) I end up with a Shield Wall, a Panacea, and Glad Jav proc that are probably going to sell at about twice what I paid for the FotG. There's a lot of markup available in PvPs, just saying. I'm a little light on cash right now since I'm tied up in bids, so I'm going to rare roulette a block of 10 Kinetic Crash lvl 21 that I bought for 1,005 each. Kin Crash converts by category to either Force Feedback or Sudden Acceleration, both rares, and both with good procs. I was going to use them as another example of "cracking" but meh, you probably already found six other examples you prefer better. That should get me 20-40mm in cash by tomorrow, on top of the other things I'm also selling. Not bad for a few minutes work and a lot of typing on my part. Go get 'em!

Not yet. I have an inkling it may be some sort of War Mace/Bio Armor melee character, but I haven't come up with a good theme yet. Also, there are only like two war mace skins that work for me and I'm tired of them.

Just hit lvl 14 on Miss T, and I've been doing some work for this doctor guy, didn't quite get his name. Dr. Hfuhruhurr? Something like that. So I get jumped by a bunch of ghouls! Remember those guys? I love those guys! And then I had to fight some Seers and I did not like that very much, no, not at all. Hoverblasting doesn't work as well when your enemy is doing the same thing to you. Speaking of hoverblasting, I've started to come around to it. Irradiate will hit people 20 feet below me, so I can start using that power again. And it is absolutely hysterical using a targeted AoE with knockback like Electron Haze straight down. But all that said, I need to step up my game offensively, and I figure it's time to indulge in the ultimate act of self-love. Not that you pervs! I mean time for a respec. I realized I've been thinking ahead as to what my character is going to be rather than to be who she is now, so picking up Kick in order to get Tough really isn't that important in the grand scale of things. Another ranged attack would really help, and I still haven't given the Experimentation power pool much/any thought, so let's give Toxic Dart a whirl. Thanks to this respec, I'm also going to start picking up some IO sets, which leads us to the game: "How Do I Get There From Here?" Case in point, I'm going to need an attuned (attuned because I like the aesthetics. A non-attuned would work just as well) Eradication proc for Irradiate. But they're so spendy! Just for kicks I bid crept to just short of 5mm. That's a lot, and I smell an opportunity for profit! So, How Do I Get There From Here? Some options include: Buying an Eradication proc IO Buying an Eradication proc recipe and salvage and craft it Buying an Eradication non-proc IO and converting by set until you get the proc Buying an Eradication non-proc recipe and salvage, craft it, and convert by set Wow, that's a lot of ways, why I could... Hush you, I'm not done yet. Buying something in the same category that converts easily to an Eradication! Hey, at levels 10-19, a Cleaving Blow will directly convert by category: PBAoE to an Eradication, and then I can roll it in set. Again, either buy it as an IO or buy it in recipe form and craft. Buying any "normal" IO set IO or recipe at level 10-30 (Eradication's range) and doing a combination of conversions to hopefully get to Eradication Buying an Eradication recipe from the Merit Vendor And so on. I've probably even missed some ways. And in order to get the attuned version, I can either start with an attuned IO or I can spend 1-2mm on a catalyst to attune it. Well, let's try a few options, make some Eradication procs, keep what I need and sell the rest. Since last session I bought 8 lvl 15 Cleaving Blow recipes at 10,005 each (don't bid on the ones that require rare salvage by accident!!!), 16 lvl 10 non-proc Eradication recipes at 10,005 each (these all require one rare salvage), and four attuned non-proc Eradications at around 500k each. For the Cleaving Blow, convert once by category for 2 converters and now I've got 8 Eradication IOs, 2 of which are the proc. Now I have a total of 22 non-proc Eradication IOs that I'm going to convert to the proc, at an expected cost of 5 conversions x 3 converters = 15 converters. And I have 4 attuned that I'm going to convert as well. You can run the numbers on the expected cost for each of these and they're all well below the going price in the AH. Now I slot one of the attuned, put the other 27 up for sale at some usurious price that I still expect will sell in the near future. Here I demonstrated three different ways to get where I wanted to be. Some ways are more cost-effective than others, but all are much cheaper than buying that attuned Eradication straight up. Anyway, I also bought a respec recipe as I was typing this, so I'll go through that process. In other self-love news, I'm going to pony up for a full set of Vigilant Assault (defender ATOs) and split them between two attacks for the recharge bonus. A few other things as well, and believe you me, I'm going to ask myself, "How Do I Get There From Here?" Enjoy your morning, afternoon, evening, and night!