Yomo Kimyata

Nuh uh!

I would have hoped that at this point, "Your mileage may vary" would be implied! When I am playing a level 50, it's probably solo and I'm probably playing at +4/x8 and maybe with a Windfall active. It doesn't take many missions before I am full or salvage or recipes or enhancements, and I generally only do inventory management when I get a flash telling me that I'm full of something or other. I cut off rare recipes because I don't choose to put in the effort to weed out the valuable ones. It's a higher return for me to get fifty common recipes that will net me 5mm inf than for me to get ten rares of which I will vendor 9 for 10k and spend 1mm on salvage and crafting for one LotG that happens to drop. Or better yet, if I feel like crafting on that character I'll buy fifty level 41 Red Fortunes and craft and convert them to LotG and make 100mm+ profit.

By the time I hit 50, there are very few rare recipes that are worth crafting or selling. Between the crafting cost and the rare salvage, you are already about 1mm inf in the hole. And rare recipes are only worth 10k to the vendor, so I just turn them off so I have more room for commons, PvP, and purples. It's a minor thing.

I seem to be having tremendous difficulty with my lifestyle.

I think it also worthwhile mentioning that when I ding 50 I turn off uncommon recipes and often rare recipes as well at the P2W. The crafting cost is close to a half million inf for a level 50 recipe and if I’m going to craft on that alt I see no need to add a half million to my cost basis. I keep commons, pvps, and rares active.

Also, there are some uncommon IO sets that require a rare salvage to craft. Pretty sneaky, sis!

Be cautious with the Upgrade button if you are keeping your eye on your funds. It upgrades all of your SOs (and DOs and others) to +3 your level. There is a confirm button, but it is all or none. I tend to use it every level, but you don’t need to upgrade all your SOs every level and it’s a big inf sink. Id target every three levels or so, and if you shift over to IOs you won’t need to upgrade .

Guilty as charged. I tend to never use temp powers for the simple reason that unless I can easily reacquire them I don't want to depend on them. That said, there are plenty, especially from the P2W menu, that get work. I was gratified when the powers that be gave every new character a jetpack and athletic run, since that was always the first thing I do with the P2W vendor unless I'm specifically boycotting them. I also buy Mission Transporter, Team Transporter, Inner Inspiration, Return to Battle, Reveal, Portable Workbench. I'll eventually get Envenomed Daggers, and generally I'll keep an XP booster going, at least for the first 35 levels or so. I'll get Renewal of Light from the Candy Keeper -- it's only 8 days of rez but it's got a different timer than Return to Battle. Other than that, I'm pretty clean. I just started looking at Smoke Grenade (which you can get from Day Jobs as well as side missions in Mayhem/Safeguards). My biggest stumbling blocks in what I'd like to be able to do but often cannot is scrapper soloing some of the TF/SFs where I'm mucking around with a bunch of AVs and I'm just not very good at pulling them off one at a time yet. I hope to give this a whirl over the next few weeks.

If this is new to most of you, I'd suggest just playing it old school and not worrying too much about building out your characters to the nines. You are allowed to buy SOs (single origin) enhancements right away now, but that is expensive for brand new characters. However, if you just do the simplest thing as described in the title here (trade in your merits for converters and sell them on the /AH) you can easily keep yourself in SOs (update every few levels to stay sharp!) as you and your buddies relearn the game. You're not going to *need* anything expensive for a long long time.

For an intro to Dark Armor, I'd strongly suggest skipping Cloak of Fear, and Oppressive Gloom also won't do a lot for you (although it's pretty low cost). CoF in my opinion really needs a big investment in order to be worthwhile. OG will generally keep minions out of your hair, but then again a tank shouldn't be worried much about minions -- it requires a bit more stun in order to be useful against tougher opponents. Hasten is skippable with Battle Axe. I'll generally put a Force Feedback +rech in both Whirling Axe and Pendulum and when you are fighting large groups you will pretty consistently have +100 recharge up most of the time.

It’s almost like someone posted all the information they needed. A “guide”, if you will.

Mender Lazarus was originally named Tom Sawyer and that fence isn’t going to paint itself.

Nope, both enhancements and recipes are fungible. You can sell a level 50 and buy it at level 10.

You covered a lot there, and much of it was a lot more subtle than most will give you credit for, you sly minx! I may or may not come back to some of that later, but I've got guides in progress on similar things. I think you are conflating what something is "worth" versus where you can buy or sell it (and even those are separate from your titular question of where to list it!). This may sound like semantics, but these semantics are what got me my first trillion inf. Let's look at your example of the Obliteration proc, and let's assume that I own the recipe and all the relevant salvage (2x common, 1x uncommon. 1x rare) that all came as drops. If it's a level 50, I can spend 490,500 inf to craft it and now I have a level 50 Oblit proc. If I want it attuned then I can use a catalyst that let's assume I got as a drop as well. If you are using it, great! but let's look at alternatives. Now, it looks like I can probably sell the recipe for 800,000 based on the /AH, possibly more but it looks like someone is buying there. I can vendor the common and uncommon salvage for 1,500, and I can probably get 500,000 (definitely 400,000) for the rare salvage in the /AH. So 1,300,000 less 10% = 1,170,000+1,500 = 1,171,500 inf if I sell the materials, and more if I sell the catalyst as well. I feel pretty confident that I can buy an attuned Oblit proc on the /AH for 1mm or less within a few hours, so even if I had all the stuff lying around and even ignoring crafting costs, I probably wouldn't waste time or effort crafting it. In fact, I probably would just vendor the recipe for 10k rather than even check to see what it is going for on the /AH.

Utility can be subjective, but I think it's fair to say that prices in the /AH for converters and boosters are primarily driven from the supply side at this point in time. Even though you *can* get converters from drops (but not boosters), the vast vast majority are coming from merit conversions. Economic theory and basic math would indicate that if the price ratio of boosters to converters in the /AH differs significantly from 15:1 then one would expect merit farmers to shift their conversions to whichever salvage is more lucrative. Right now, converters seem to be running consistently at 60k +/-, which would put "fair value" for boosters at 900k.

Scared?!? Why I oughta...

Bio is easily one of the best armors. However, it does not have defense debuff protection, and if that is how OP defines what "sucks" means then yes it does suck. If you are fighting a mob of 15 centurions and everyone of them swings at you with an attack that causes -10 defense every three to five seconds, you should be aware that will floor your defense pretty quickly once a few hits get through. It's known as "cascading defense failure" and if you are new to the game you can read about it here: https://homecoming.wiki/wiki/Cascading_Defense_Failure

This is nice to read. No one (I don’t think) has the time or motivation to run every combo, so we use mental shortcuts. Claws is a quick low endurance primary; Stone is an endurance hungry hippo. On paper, good offset.

Or, and hear me out, everyone else has been bidding too little.

Keep in mind the Triumphant Insult % to stun proc is a 2PPM for a 3 second mag 1 stun. In and of itself, that's pretty useless. However, if you are running other stun (I'm thinking particularly Oppressive Gloom from Dark Armor), you can stack mag. Even so, that's pretty useless.

I spend most of my time on scrappers, and it’s fair to say that by the time I hit 50, every one of them is able to handle +4/x8 content. However, some are much faster than others. I think the original devs thought process was to work in trade offs. Sets that add additional survivability or control effects are offset with lower damage. The problem though is that in team play outside of Hard mode stuff survivability is trivial enough that people want to just focus on damage.

That was my initial thought as well

I'd consider scrapper my primary AT, and I've seen a lot of venom over the years for "runners". To be honest, I never really noticed it, and maybe that's because I don't do speed runs or I mostly solo or maybe I just have a pretty good tolerance for it. The best advice I can give, other than what has already been stated, is defeat them faster. At some point, almost all of my scrappers (especially the AoE ones) have a build with Experimentation and use Corrosive Vial which can inflict some nice -res via procs. In addition, knockdown is your buddy.