Alphabet Soup II

Wondering based on those that market here what they consider a lot of INF.

So with Hemorage being so good for stalkers does it make Savage a top tier stalker set?

Same here, I usually bought 30 at a time and typically got around 35 ATOs and 300 merits and a random assortment of boosters and converters. Selling all the ATOs at 9mil+ a piece and then getting converters out of the merits usually netted me around 50-100mil in profit. I stopped doing this though because constantly having to clean up my inventory was pretty irritating to do in addition to all the converting. Then again, I might go back into this for a while to get my two ATO sets once I settle on what my next character is going to be. Yeah I feel you, I've slowed down on it too because the of inventory and converting. I used to do it everyday on my lunch break while I ate but the mass converting really is boring. The best thing though is getting all those merits. I've never had to buy a single converter of the AH once, those merits keep me flowing with converters.

I've always netted profit with hero packs, but I also only buy bulk, usually 50 at a time. My best all time was getting 64 ATOs & 750 merits in a 50 pack purchase. That's super good usually I get like 57 ATOs and 400 merits, but either way I love them other than having to convert cheap ATOs into expensive ones in bulk and the time it takes. Also my email gets full for inspirations I just pop instantly and waste.

I like to keep the INF on one toon because it makes it easy to know what I have, it feels more lavish to have a ton on one toon, and I can spend more easily. If I want to throw 1B out on lowballing purples 10 at a time, and then spend 500M on Winterpacks I can without having to move money around.

I have 4B on my market toon and right now use dead bids to store money but is email a safe storage option? Can't I send myself a couple 1B emails and let them sit or should I fear they will disappear or something?

This is pretty intensive though, you are farming and crafting and converting that's a lot of time invested. I don't craft or farm for INF on my marketing toon, though I do farm to PL toons. You can do it without the farming if you want. I drop about 500M or so a day on superpacks and just convert all the ATOs to brute ATOs and make 100M of profit with the added bonus of getting a ton of merits for converters and other stuff. I dropped 500M on winter packs recently and made back 300M in profit, but winter packs are more swingy than the other ones, you can get bad luck and break even because you just can't buy as many with 500M. I'm think of moving to 1B a day but the converting will take sooo long at that point.

Those #'s don't include Savage Melee. I'd be interested to see where SavM stands on a Rikti comparison, those DoTs really do add a lot of damage and you can get a pretty optimized 4 power attack chain that pops hemorrhage with 4 blood frenzy each time.

I agree with this basically entirely. Really converters give players a ton of power. If more people used them effectively it would start to drive prices to a relatively tight range based on their rarity class. Currently though people will still throw a rare undesirable stun recipe on the market for like 5-10k despite the fact that with a few converters it could become something much more desirable. Also it's funny because something like a LotG +7.5 has massive stock on the market because a ton of people are converting pieces into them and selling them. So their price is highly driven down. Eventually as Bionic Flea says less desirable pieces will go up in price because they will so rarely be kept in their original form.

At this point it's mostly just scale that accounts for the size of profit. For example yesterday I bought 30 10M superpack(300M), something I could do because I have a large bankroll. In those 30 packs I got 41 ATO's, 350 merits, and bunch of other little stuff like brainstorms that I turn into rare salvage and converters/catalysts/boosters. I turned all the merits into converters 350x3=1050 converters. I then took all 41 ATO's and either listed them for near 10M a piece or converted them to a piece that could get near 10M and then listed them. That nets me about 100M profit just on the ATO's and I still had like 800 converters leftover. That's just one example of a way I make money. It all just comes down maximizing converting. If you don't have a bankroll for superpacks, buy cheap rare enhancements and convert them into better pieces. I find rare enhancements under 1M on the AH all the time which is crazy because it costs more than a 1M to craft a rare enhancement so buying them for less then converting them into good pieces and listing them nets a good margin. You have to do a lot of them but once you build a bankroll you can do more things. Because of my bankroll I have about 500M in open bids on the market that snag high value pieces at cheap prices at this point pretty regularly, I then flip them. It's only because tying up 500M on bids doesn't effect my day to day that I can do that and the size of the operation makes it more successful than placing one lowball bid on a single piece, I have a lot of lowball bids on a large variety of pieces.

Simply playing the game's content and living off the INF generated from that will definitely not be the primary way of making INF for those that want to live a lavish IO lifestyle, but it will certainly afford you way more on HC than it did on live. There are a confluence of various design decisions in i25 that make everything more attainable and drive down prices on things. That said there is still plenty of room for folks like myself who want to acquire tons of wealth by trading on the market. With very little effort I make maybe 200M+ or so a day on select trading at this point. There is no normal gameplay that will provide those sorts of returns in as little time as I invest in acquiring it. Even if my profit margin shrink over time it will still outpace normal gameplay especially when you consider scale and how it becomes easier and easier to make more and more INF the more INF you acquire.

Best flip is buying a Winter Superpack and getting 2 winter pieces that both sell for 25M+, or converting them into two pieces that do.

Best way to make money is converting. Buy low sell high has never been easier when you can literally buy some junky rare for 10k inf craft and convert it into something 4M+ or better yet buy a crappy enhancement preuilt for 400k and convert it to something 4M+. Converters and the market basically provide you an indirect way to turn merits into INF. It's a basically risk free way to make money. Then as always the more money you have the even easier it becomes to make money. You can literally just buy superpacks in mass and sell the goods and you end up making money with a bit of converting.

Buying out stock of anything will be incredibly difficult with converters. Honestly converters and the ease at which you can get them fundamentally change the games economy and how to make money on the market. If you spend merits on anything other than converters I think you are making a mistake. 30 converters for 10 merits is such a ridiculously low cost for tremendous power. You really don't have to be clever to figure out how to exploit converters to get what you want or make money. I started playing the market once I accrued 10M and I currently have over 1B, 3 fully IO'd expensive builds, and a SG base full of a stupid number of miracle procs, LOTG +rech, Numina procs, +3% def procs, +5% res procs, and tons of purps and ATOs. Honestly paying 50 merits for a rare IO or 100 merits for a purp, winter piece, or PVP piece is a total waste. You should never spend merits on that stuff. Buy cheap and convert, you will always spend less resources that way. 100 merits is 300 converters, that's so much power and flexibility. Obviously not everyone will want to put in the time or think about how to play efficiently and that's why I can make money so easily. Also prices are effectively capped at 100M because you can buy any piece you want from the merit vendor for a maximum of 100 merits and you can also straight up buy merits for 1M per merit at the same vendor. So market prices are really never going to crest 100M unless people just don't recognize they can literally buy merits.

Nah, you're just wrong. High prices were due to lack of supply(as the currently seeded invention salvage demonstrates). Additionally farmers add to the supply more than casual players and they also spend a ton of influence that goes to casual players that got a lucky drop. Well the invention salvage currently is different because that is a partially controlled economy to a certain extent as the GMs have price capped those items with essentially endless supply at fixed prices. That's not to say your point about lack of supply is moot, you are certainly right the lack of supply played a big role as well although if we are being honest a lot of that lack of supply was due to traders buying up supply and slowing releasing it to market. I know this because I actively participated in it. That said as someone who played live for many years the prices were not solely effected by supply, inflation was also a big part. I remember when cresting the 1B inf mark was an accomplishment of the richest class on live and I remember years later when the game shutdown I burned something like 200B on SG prestige because it didn't matter anymore and I certainly know people who had far larger sums of inf than me and plenty others I'm quite sure who I didn't know that did. That increase in what was considered a lot of INF was due to inflation, and that inflation effected market prices. Purples didn't just start to become more rare all of a sudden they were always rare, but more and more INF got added to the economy each day the game existed. I think it's totally fair to bring up that farmers while accelerating inflation also feed the supply pool and feeding the supply pool is helpful to the general public. However it still grants increased wealth disparity and wealth conveys power in the economy/marketplace. Maybe most of these farmers quickly sell off goods and don't use their funds and goods to play the market in any way to their advantage, I can't really say. I know I exploit my advantage on the market, as Adeon pointed out the real INF is to be made in trading.