Robotech_Master

Gotta love all the people going, "Oh teh NOES, NCSoft knows about us! Hide the children!" We've only been in the news for, like, four months. Do you think they'd have just left us alone like this if there hadn't been negotiations started? I'm just going to cross my fingers and hope for the best. It's also kind of ironically amusing to note the confusion between Titan Network and City of Titans. This sort of thing is exactly the reason trademarks exist. Perhaps back in the day, Titan Network should have told the CoT people, "We appreciate the homage in your name, but really we'd rather you called it something else so people don't get confused." But too late for that now.

They don't need to be Attuned because they already do naturally what Attunement adds to normal sets. So, yes, you can boost them just fine. You could also Attune them instead...but since they act Attuned already, it doesn't give you any benefit.

I'm not seeing any sign Converters are going up. If anything, the opposite. I almost never see Converters listed at 150K anymore, and can often buy them for 80K each if I place the bids and wait.

And, of course, you can always have it both ways thanks to alternate builds, by making two separate builds and Attuning one, Boosting the other. But really, what with ED and such, you're not going to get a huge benefit out of boosting sets anyway, so it probably wouldn't be worth the extra money you spend on it—especially if you plan on purpling out both builds.

And, of course, it's kind of ironic that, in a set called "Luck of the Gambler," we rely on how lucky we are at converting to see how much money we make from the resale... 🙂

I think you mean to say to do the first Heather Townsend arc. Not just the first mission. Might want to be more clear about that in your guide.

To be fair, as I say toward the end of the guide, there's nothing wrong with farming, if it's what you want to do. It's where all the money that fuels the conversion market comes from, and it can be reasonably lucrative if you're willing to put the time in. It's not even necessarily boring. It can be kind of zen, relaxing in a way, like a colorful screensaver with user participation. Spines/Fire and Rad/Fire Brutes are generally deemed the best farmer classes, but anything /Fire with decent AoE can do all right with the fire farms. But Enhancement conversion does have the benefit that you can make a decent chunk of change while still having most of your time available to do other things like adventuring...or even farming as well if you feel like it. 🙂

Very interesting. It looks like you're skipping the craft step and going for pre-built IOs, which could be one way to do it. I'm able to get Reactive Defenses recipes for about 500 to 600K each, usually, and with the crafting cost plus the cost of the rare salvage, I'm usually at about 1.2 million Inf total cost to craft them. Which means that for the cost of a minute or so of fiddling with salvage bids, I'm making 8 million Inf more in profit for every ten I craft and sell. But if it's worth that to you to do a little less clicking, I guess I can't really argue. 🙂 When I go to sell the LotGs, I tend to shoot for a price of 7 mil for the Global Recharge, and 5 mil for most others. (And by "shoot for," I mean price most of a million below that so it sells more quickly. I'm fine with losing a few hundred K if someone bids lower because most of the time they don't.) If something has a going rate of 3 to 4 mil instead, and/or has a huge number of sellers and fewer buyers, I'll convert-in-set to something else until I get one that doesn't. Sometimes I'll get lucky and it pops up the global recharge IO first try, but with only a 20% chance per click of it happening, it wouldn't take too many failed attempts to eat up all or most of that 2 million difference in profit. (I'm not so concerned about spending time clicking as I am with losing money by failing.) So I content myself with the profits I can take most easily.

Attunement has two major, related effects. When you're leveling up, Attuning an Enhancement lets it "level up" with you. Instead of slotting a level 32 Enhancement and keeping it there while you level your character higher, your Enhancement "acts like" a level 32 Enhancement while you're level 32, then like 33 while you're level 33, and so on, providing a slightly better bonus each time. It's kind of like the opposite of an SO, which degrades slightly each time you level up. The other effect works in reverse: when you're level 50 and are exemplaring down, you'd normally keep the set bonuses only as far down as you could have slotted that specific IO. If you have a level 50 IO set slotted, it only provides the set bonuses (those nifty little global plusses to defense, resistance, accuracy, recharge rate, etc. that sets give you for having more than one Enhancement from them slotted) when you're exemplared no lower than level 47. You still get the benefit of the level 50 Enhancement itself to the power you put it in as long as that power is available (modified by the percentage all Enhancement performance degrades as you scale down), but you don't get those set bonuses. If you have five Enhancements from a set slotted at ranges 25 to 40, you'd only get the 5-IO bonus down to level 37 or below, because that's the level at which all five Enhancements were capable of being slotted. Then when you drop three levels below the next highest IO, you'd lose the 4-IO bonus. And so on. When you have the Enhancements Attuned, again, they pretend they're equivalent to whatever level you've exemplared down to, and you get the set bonuses from any that could have been slotted when you were at that level originally. So you keep those set bonuses as far down as 3 levels below the lowest end of that set's availability. If it was an IO set whose low end is level 20 Enhancements, you'd have access to those bonuses as far down as level 17, even if the power they're slotted in isn't available to you at that level. (If the power is available when you're exemplared below that level, you'll still get the scaled-down effects of the Enhancements themselves, as above, but not the set bonuses.) Clearer?

No, I think you've got a little confusion there. ATOs are already Attuned. They share the same thick circular border as Attuned sets. What you can do with Catalysts is transform them into a better version of themselves, at level 50. This Superior version has basically double the set bonuses of the regular version. Unlike regular IO sets, the two versions of ATOs are not bucketed together, so the only way to get the Superior version is either to buy it (and they're generally hard to come by, because to sell a Superior version someone has to Catalyze it and then pry it out of their own character's slots) or Catalyze it yourself. So this is the only time you really want to use Catalysts on anything instead of buying the Attuned version from the AH.

Quite useful for any powers you're just slotting with one or two IOs, like Hasten. Not only does it make them more effective at level 50, but also when you're exemplaring down.

Tip: you can use the LFG teleporter to get to Atlas, Talos, or PI really easily. The "Descent to the Hydra" Trial is in Atlas, the Citadel TF is in Talos, and Terra Volta Respec #3 is in Peregrine. Just select the appropriate TF or trial from the LFG screen, lock to your group, and queue. Boom, you're there.

And just to make this clear, because it doesn't look like anyone's brought it up yet: you don't want to Attune your own Enhancements, because the Market will do it for you for free. Attuned Enhancements cost exactly the same as the regular, level-locked version of those Enhancements. To the game, they're exactly the same item. So, spending 2 to 4 million Inf on a Catalyst to Attune your own Enhancement is a big waste of money. Instead, you should unslot and sell the Enhancement, and then buy that same Enhancement from the "Attuned" category on the market. You do pay the cost of the Unslotter, and you might lose a little money from the difference between what you sell it for and what you have to pay for it—but it probably won't be 4 million Inf.

Well, I'm here and waiting in a waiting area to the left of the entrance...

But at least he doesn't have to worry about Roman charges…

I just wanna know why those tiny little islands have full-fledged city sewer systems underneath them.

Does Posi go to Gen Con as an individual, or does he work for one of the exhibitors?

HoundsTooth, check out my book, http://mybook.to/geekindy -- it's a little out of date in some areas, as I hadn't gotten around to updating it this year, but I can promise you it's got a lot of fascinating stuff about Indy in it.

If they gave as much AV as a typical AV at all, that would be nice. But, as I say, they now give less XP than a Rikti boss.

I wish they could add a Notoriety setting for that, so people could decide for themselves whether they wanted cysts and such in the game.

Way back in the day, Hatched Kraken in the Abandoned Sewer Trial used to give a lot of XP. So much so, in fact, that powerlevelers took to "farming" the trial—killing the 6 Kraken without completing the trial itself. The Devs didn't like this, so the XP of the Hatched Kraken was nerfed to where it's actually less than a Rikti boss gives. In the here and now, people have a lot better ways of powerleveling than going into the middle of the abandoned sewers to kill six monsters, so even if they did offer a good chunk of XP it seems unlikely people would have the urge to farm the trial any longer—not when they can just go live in AE for a while instead. But on the other hand, if they did offer that good chunk of XP again, it might just get more people interested in running the trial. I've hardly seen anyone but me doing one, since I've been back. It would be nice to make it a little more attractive to people, given how challenging it is overall. What do you think?

Did a little bit of reformatting on this guide, after the example of the GMs who kindly added formatting tweaks to and pinned my other guide. Have also added the odd new bits of text here or there, such as mention of the Power Analyzer power...

It's situational. In a small set like Karma or Steadfast Protection, and I'm going for the KB Protection, sure it's worth a try. One out of two chance each time you'll get what you want, will only take a couple coin flips before you get it, most times. I wouldn't do it to, say, try to convert every LotG I get into the global recharge bonus, because I'd eat up all my profit by the time I got it. But if I run across a case where one IO in a set is only selling for 3 million, and I know others are going for 5 to 6 million each, it's worth burning three converters to change that low-seller into something else because I'll more than cover the conversion cost with the difference. And though it's not involved with marketing, there are cases where converting in set can be worthwhile if you need a particular set enhancement and it's just not available on the market at all. Particularly where ATOs are concerned. I'm sure I've burned through a lot more converters than something was worth just to get that something at all.

As I noted in my own guide on the matter, one big reason is that if people want Attuned Enhancements, it's much cheaper to buy them pre-made than Attune them yourself. This means there's always going to be a market for crafted set IOs that's not just people too lazy to do it for themselves.

Wow, pretty awesome. I really appreciate the reformatting work on my guides, and pinning the Making Millions one. (You might also want to consider pinning the P2W store one, as I think that one's particularly useful for new players. 🙂 ) I'll look forward to seeing the new BBCode-based editor.