Robotech_Master

Welll, it does. On the TFs I was on, they cheerfully let the hostages die, failed the mission, then went right on with the rest of the TF. If it's not supposed to work that way, it's not working right.

I was on a Lady Grey TF the other day, and a Moonfire TF last night, in which the other participants decided to speed the Task Force up by letting the hostage get killed instead of rescuing them. It allowed them to bypass completing tthe rest of the mission and go on to the next one. They lost the end of mission XP, of course, but that's almost no kind of penalty at all. It doesn't seem very heroic, to me, to intentionally kill off the hostage in the name of gaining a little speed. It seems like there should be some kind of penalty for this sort of behavior more stringent than just losing a small XP bonus. Perhaps it should result in failing the TF altogether?

I dunno. To a certain extent, this is kind of anecdotal. A countering anecdote: this weekend when I was looking for something to convert and flip, I went back to one of my standby "magic" starting sets, Perplex. There were plenty of Perplex recipes available selling at low 4-digit prices; one of the Perplexes even had zero sitting bids. So I was able to snag a whole bunch of them very easily at 15,000 Inf each. The market does fluctuate. It goes up and down. Sometimes you have to eat your listing fees and pull and re-list at a lower price to clear out your sales inventory. But that's just one of those things.

So the "trick" is, basically "buy the packs, sell the stuff." A nice "trick," but did it really need to be stretched to a whole guide when, like, a sentence or two would have done? :) (And by the way, Enhancement Converters are probably more lucrative, from an Inf-per-merit standpoint. 100 merits' worth of Enhancement Converters could be worth 27 to 30 million.)

You know, the best way to convert merits into Inf is to buy and sell Enhancement Converters. 100 Merits = 300 converters = 300 * 100,000 Inf (on average) = 30 million Inf. That's triple the return you get from selling an ATO. (Plus, you know, you can put some of those converters to use yourself, instead, while you have them in your inventory...)

Turning level 31 Smashing Haymakers into Kinetic Combats was one of the first monetarily lucrative conversions I found.

And if you want to know more about the amazing variety of powers available, check out my guide. You'll wonder how you ever got along without this stuff.

Well, one other thing about Attunements is that Attuned IO sets can be slotted at any point across their range, and will act like the version available at your current level as you level up. So if you know you're going to want something slotted at 50, and you can slot it now Attuned, you might as well go ahead.

I will say it again, with boldface for emphasis: This TF doesn't have to take any longer than 45 minutes. If you have an eligible character on Torchbearer, I'll be happy to prove it to you. I could always use 42 more merits and credit toward that badge. You just need to use your time wisely: one person with Indancescence Destiny whizzing from area to area using the Paragonwiki writeup of the TF as a guide while the others clean up the hunt in the previous area. Multiple people with Team Transport to get rid of the travel time jumping from zone to zone to do the door missions. 42 merits (or 84 the first time) for 45 minutes of work is not at all a bad ratio.

Enhancement sets have bonuses that they give you for slotting more than one Enhancement from that set in the same power. Those set bonuses normally only apply when you're at or above a level where you could have slotted those enhancements. Bonuses you get from having a set of level 40s slotted, for example, would only apply when you're exemplared no lower than level 37. The purpose of Attunement is to let you keep those set bonuses as far down as the set you're slotting exists. For example, if the set is a 20 to 40 set, you'll keep those bonuses all the way down to level 20. (Possibly 17. I'm not sure.) Attunement doesn't have anything to do with the bonuses provided by the Enhancement itself. Those bonuses scale down in effectiveness based on a formula looking at what level you originally were and what level you exemplared down to, just as with common IOs, SOs, Hami-Os, or any other kind of Enhancement. You only need to worry about Attunement if you want to be sure you keep the extra set bonuses. So, there wouldn't be any benefit to Attuning a Common IO. Those don't have set bonuses, and they already scale down in the usual way. Now, if you Attune a set, you can't also Boost it. Attunement and Boosting are mutually exclusive. Boosting a set means using Enhancement Boosters on each IO to add up to 5 levels over its original level--so a level 40 IO could be brought up to the equivalent of level 45, gaining additional bonuses therein. A level 50 common IO could be made effectively level 55. So, if you aren't concerned about exemplaring down and just want to be the best 50 you can be, you might prefer to Boost rather than Attune. Even if you mostly Attune, you can still get benefit from boosting any Common IOs, Hami-Os, etc. that go in non-set-slotted powers. For example, two level 50+5 Recharge Rate IOs in Hasten will make it very nearly perma. And they'll scale down when you exemplar just the same as any other Enhancement will.

Number of bids may not be all that significant, but number of sales can be. You can throw up a bid for random crappy reasons, but you can't have a sale without the item in question actually being on offer. If there are hundreds of sale listings and relatively few bids, you can know something isn't selling quickly, so if you want your money soon, might need to burn another converter to try your luck with something else. But if there are relatively few sales compared to number of bids, you can know it's in demand, so you might be able to get by with a higher price and still sell soon.

Oh sure, it's a great choice for an out of combat travel power, just like the Rocket Board is great for out of combat flight. It runs faster and jumps higher than Sprint. You just can't use it in a fight, or be ready for a fight immediately after changing back, if you rely on huge amounts of toggles. See also my guide to the P2W store powers.

I don't know about stealth effects or not. I know I have been attacked by enemies while using it. I can tell you that, like the Walk power or the Rocket Board flight power, it shuts off all toggles, so you do have to start them all back up again. So if you regularly run a lot of toggles, it might not be for you.

Of course, if you don't bid but use converters to get what you want, you'll be spending extra to Attune it. But then, if you'd rather Boost instead, I suppose that's fine. I like being fully exemplarable, though.

A big part of the reason to have 3 KB protects is so you can entirely skip Acrobatics and have that other power pick to spend elsewhere, as well as not have to have yet another end-draining toggle on.

Each of those KB IOs is mag 4 protection. For comparison, unenhanced Acrobatics is an 11 mag knockback protect (though only part of its KB protect is enhanceable). So if you want to be where you'd be with Acrobatics, you need to get that mag 4 protection somehow. Some of the ATO sets include 4 points of KB protection as a multi-slot bonus, I believe.

Make sure someone in it has Incandescence Destiny. Even the basic one will do, an Incarnate can craft it for 60 threads and swap it in before the trial even if they normally use something else. It speeds up the process considerably if one member of the team plays flying taxibot, heading on to the area where the next hunt will be and getting set to Incandescence the rest of the team there while they're busy hunting in the previous spot. (And he can also handle going to get ready to talk to Faathead the Kind of Annoying while the team is doing other stuff, too.) There are just a handful of door missions, and a couple of them are located in other zones, so the 10 million Inf Team Transporter group-mission-teleport power from the store will come in handy. Make sure at least half the team has it if you want to be sure everyone has one ready to go at the right time. (I buy one for everyone else on the team as a matter of course whenever I do a Shard TF. I can afford it.) Between those two innovations, my team was able to bang out a Justin Augustine in about 45 minutes last night. Also, here's a real public service announcement: after you finish the mission where you free Faathead, the game will tell you "Task Force Complete!" But don't believe it and say goodbye and quit the team yet--you don't actually get the merits and rewards until someone goes 180 degrees around the Chantry to talk to Faathead again.

Someone actually put the complete Speed on Demand package up at this file locker link. It does have an executable file in it.

Zero to 100 million in a week? Try zero to 250 million in 24 hours, that's what I did. :) As noted in my conversion marketing guide, bootstrapping is very easy, and doesn't have to take as much effort as the OP put in. Just tour Atlas for the badges, buy an Enhancement Booster, take Inner Inspiration from the P2W store, fire it off, sell the Inspirations, list the booster for 1 inf on Wentworth's, and you'll probably get over a million. (When I tried it, I got 1.33 million.) That's ample capital to go into the conversion business.

I've noticed that after you rescue Faathim the Kind, you get the "Task Force Complete" notice--but the TF doesn't actually issue its reward merits (and Weekly Strike Force bonuses) until you go 180 degrees around the Chantry and go in from the north to talk to Faathim again. I'm concerned that this could lead to people missing out on their rewards as they reflexively respond to "Task Force Complete" by saying good job all and quitting the team prematurely. Would be a good idea to fix this if possible.

Also, it's possible that those Thunderstrikes were converted from something that cost even less to craft. The whole point of converting to profit is exactly that sort of spinning straw into gold.

As a reminder for people doing the Justin Augustine TF this week, given that it's about 90% running from one part of the Chantry to another killing mobs or clicking glowies, the fastest way to run it will involve having someone travel from place to place, porting the rest of the team in to do what needs to be done while they're traveling on to the next place. It's only 60 threads to build a basic Incandescence, if you don't have it yet.

Oh, and one other thing I do is I offer to craft any needed common IOs for lower level folks on PUGs I'm on. I've got the crafting table and everything memorized, so it's easy enough just to slap that thing down, pull up the auctionhouse, and grab whatever salvage I need to craft whatever other people need. Or sometimes I'll go to origin stores on Talos Island, wait for someone to come in, then drop a bunch of common IOs on them of the right level for them. :)

Lots of the changes have to do with removing a lot of the time sinks that NCSoft stuck in to make things take a lot longer. For example, there's a new transit system, TUNNEL, that includes Peregrine Island and Firebase Zulu on it--places that you used to have to spend extra time getting to, if you didn't have a supergroup base with all the teleport beacons. You no longer have to do the Midnighter arc to open access to Cimerora--you can get the "House Hunter" badge from Night Ward and that will get you in. You no longer have to unlock capes and auras; you can get those right from the beginning. The market has had some major changes, including "bucketing" to make rare Enhancements and set IOs fungible across all their available levels and Attunement, and salvages fungible across their rarity level. This has the overall effect of bringing prices down so that tricking out your character with the best possible IO sets isn't so expensive anymore--and provides a great way for people to make money through crafting and conversion of uncommon IOs to rares.

This is a fairly common mistake I make too. After buying rare salvage I forget to fix the numbers before my next bid. Whoops.