Enhancements and IOs

[Ultimo]

1 hour ago, Videra said:

It's genuinely shocking to see an Ultimo thread in which he isn't getting as horrifically dunked on for once.

Let's not go there, hm?

[BlackSpectre]

10 hours ago, Ghost said:

On an avg, no hurry carnival map run - I’m hitting around 700k a minute.  42mill an hour (straight inf.  Drops not included) - and there are many farmers doing a lot more than that.

 

Ah, man! Now I need to look into that again! LOL

 

10 hours ago, Ghost said:

I have less than 50 alts and don’t buy IO’s for them until they hit 50 - which is roughly half my alts.

 

What I and my SG started doing was getting IOs at lvl 25 or 30, and then when we hit level 50, we RESPEC (to swap those common IOs out for the good ones). We then put the lvl 30 IOs in the SG's storage bins to recycle and use again for our next alts. So now slotting IOs doesn't cost anything! Ended up saving the whole SG millions and millions of inf! 

 

I also took one alt and got him the various Memorization badges to craft IOs at a discount in case my SG needed any. https://homecoming.wiki/wiki/Memorization_Badges

 

Oh man, I can't farm the Dreck or Carnival maps anymore! It's just too monotonous for me now. If I farm at all, I now need something quick... like a tunnel map or asteroid map. LOL

 

Edited June 8 by BlackSpectre
typo

[Scarlet Shocker]

Question I've not seen asked here yet: Are you running XP Boosters of any kind. DXP booster means you earn no inf while levelling and the others reduce inf gain commensurately.

 

Just something to bear in mind if unaware

[Ultimo]

7 hours ago, Scarlet Shocker said:

Question I've not seen asked here yet: Are you running XP Boosters of any kind. DXP booster means you earn no inf while levelling and the others reduce inf gain commensurately.

 

Just something to bear in mind if unaware

I usually get the double xp boost when I create the character, but after they've got a few levels, I don't bother with it.

[tidge]

20 hours ago, StompyOne said:

This has been hinted at and referenced a couple of times in this thread. 

 

But take the 41, park it in Echo: Dark Astoria (the portal behind Ouro). Play your regular toon.  Wait for an Adamastor announcement in LFG. Swap toons to the 41 for 10-15 minutes. Tops. Get in on the monster kill. 

 

I'm looking forward to Echo: Dark Astoria becoming a PvP zone.

[StompyOne]

1 hour ago, tidge said:

 

I'm looking forward to Echo: Dark Astoria becoming a PvP zone.

Ha! Now that would make Adamastor exciting again! 😂

[Wobegone]

I'd start by going through your highest level toons and use Merits to make converters.  If you haven't used Merits yet, it's unlikely you'll use them in the future.  So put them to work.  If you don't want to fiddle, put the converters up for 1 influence (I'd bid creep a bit personally, but that is fiddling).  The level 41 should have a fair amount of Merits.  Use the proceeds to buy as many level 25, 30, 35, 40 generic IOs as you can.

 

After level 22, I much prefer to use IOs.  The more slots you have, the more expensive SOs are to upgrade.  When I was young and poor, 35 IOs seemed the best bang for the buck if there were any on the AH, often cheaper than 25 IOs.  Just buy as many as you can with that character and throw them in your SG base.  If there aren't that many up for auction, leave some bids and build as many as you can with that character. Having one character who goes after the Invention badges would continue to be a cost-effective way to fill your bins as needed.  

[MoonSheep]

On 6/6/2025 at 9:17 PM, Ghost said:

I farm and am sitting on around 1.3 trillion.

 

what a peasant

[Ghost]

1 hour ago, MoonSheep said:

 

what a peasant

 

[UltraAlt]

On 6/5/2025 at 4:36 PM, Ultimo said:

When I asked how people are getting the billions of Influence I keep hearing about, I was told to play the market, selling this or that or what have you... which left me feeling rather depressed.  First of all, I have nothing of particular value to sell.  Secondly, and more importantly, I'm playing a game to be a super hero, not a day trader.  I really don't have any inclination to fiddle around with the market every day.

 

On 6/5/2025 at 4:36 PM, Ultimo said:

Is all this really necessary?

 

People have said it the game didn't work this way back then, but it sure seemed to based on my experience ... that is to say...

Back on live before the invention system and the auction house, I had a defender. An empathy defender with electric blast and leadership powers. (I don't even think we could email inf to ourselves back then; even if we could, I didn't have enough to go around). I couldn't scrape together enough influence to by TOs to fill all the character's slots. I would be on a team healing and keeping the team rolling but wasn't dishing out much damages. The way I remember it, xp wasn't really shared across the team and it was related to how much damage you were dishing out. Characters would be dinging repeatedly all around me with my character making barely have a level, not getting many drops, and not getting much infl because I wasn't dishing out much damage.

Then came the IOs and the auction house.

What I needed was inf to slot my characters ... my many characters ... across the shards ... the multiverse as it were ...

And so crafting and trading, I made my way to gaining enough inf to slot my characters and dabble in set enhancements .. always leveling and creating (until slots were full ... which really didn't take that long back then).

 

As time when on, teams started sharing the xp and infl. Things more balanced out. That was long before the Sunset when that multiverse winked out of existence.

 

Is it really necessary to craft and work the auction house for inf?

No.

I could tell you to farm, but I'm against that.

You could join some high level PI scanner mission teams and level-lock your character if you don't want to out-level content.

 

I setup an email to forward myself stuff. I have several in fact. One is just for infl.

I reply to that email and post what influence I want to send for a character.

On another character, I have some influence I want to move. I go to the email that has the amount sent by the other character, I take the inf and delete that email, then I go to the email to send inf, reply to it, and add the total amount to send in that email.

I know the cap is higher, but I make my cap 500 million per email. Once one has the full 500, then I leave that one alone and start a new reply email and do the same thing.

When I make a new character take some of that loot from email. When I need some on a character I take some from email. When I spread some influence or stuff around, I pull from what a character has on hand or from email.

 

AH trading is PvP. It does take some getting used to. If it isn't your thing, then I understand.

 

[crimson72]

On 6/5/2025 at 4:36 PM, Ultimo said:

So... I was looking at one of my characters today, he's outleveled all his SOs once again, and hasn't enough Influence to be able to replace them.  So, I thought, he's L30 now, perhaps I can upgrade them to IOs, and not have to worry about all this nonsense.

 

I started looking at the IO recipes, just the generic ones, and they're on the order of 45k, just for the recipe.  THEN there's the cost to MAKE them, AND the cost of the salvage... they're ridiculously expensive, there's no way I'd be able to get them made.  When I asked how people are getting the billions of Influence I keep hearing about, I was told to play the market, selling this or that or what have you... which left me feeling rather depressed.  First of all, I have nothing of particular value to sell.  Secondly, and more importantly, I'm playing a game to be a super hero, not a day trader.  I really don't have any inclination to fiddle around with the market every day.  I HAVE a job, I don't need another one.  I just want to zap the bad guys.

 

Is all this really necessary?

The solution to this is to just farm pocket D with a tank.  You'll be able to support regular IOs for your characters no problem, but you might as well forget the set/special IOs even exist unless you find recipes for them.  Just forget the market/AH exists, you'll be better off.  

[crimson72]

1 hour ago, UltraAlt said:

 

 

People have said it the game didn't work this way back then, but it sure seemed to based on my experience ... that is to say...

 

During live, SGs often gave a 1-2 million bonus to new players to at least buy DOs and SOs during the leveling process, players like me with farm tanks literally had 100s of billions, so basically the big pockets funded the DOs and SOs for the leveling players in any SG worth mentioning, that's how it worked.  Level 50 players had enough inf to fund the enhancements for their own alts.  SGs that didn't help new players, or do PLing at portal were generally useless.  This game was always considered casual.  

[Maelwys]

Influence generation and consumption on Live was a whole different kettle of halibut.
Getting kitted out with SOs was always very easy as long as you had at least one high-level toon or a supergroup.
Prior to the market as long as you had at least one level 50 you also tended to get a steady stream of Hami-Os from raids.
(Although certain members of my Coalition were constantly cadging millions off each other to fund their new outfit habit...) 

However after the market and IOs were introduced in issue 9; all hell broke loose and the "loot" system really kicked off.
Influence actually started to mean something; and those of us who had previously thought that a few tens of millions was plenty had a rather rude awakening.
But we adapted. Selling loot you didn't need earned you enough influence to buy different loot. So I started dual-boxing some PVE farming runs for rare salvage (with a Spines/DA Scrapper mainly IIRC) and it was easy enough to afford to kit out my own characters and help out plenty of my SG buddies too.

Then after a few more issues PVP enhancements came out (Issue 14) and things really got silly. Billions per enhancement?!? 
The cost of those high ticket items was insane... and it also made earning influence incredibly straightforward for anyone with two accounts and half a brain.
(For me; it was "take a Katana/Regen Scrapper with The Lotus Drops set to autofire plus a EM/Regen Stalker with Revive (slotted for recharge so that they stay dead for less than the ~180s forced hospital respawn timer) set to autofire. Park them both next to each other in a quiet spot up on a pipe in the depths of Warburg; and go to sleep/work/college. Then come back in several hours and collect the PVP IO recipe drops..." so suffice to say that in short order every character I had was at the influence cap + fully decked out in the most effective money-is-no-object builds I could come up with; and nobody on my Global Friends list ever had to pay for their own Icon visits again!)

I for one am happy with the balance on HC: influence rolls in even if all you do is play your 50s and the asking price of high-end HOs and IOs is at least somewhat sane.

[WumpusRat]

The way I tend to earn money is something like this:

 

Starting out on a brand new character, grab all the stuff I want off the START vendor (usually Reveal, Secondary Mutation, and 2x exp just to get past the first few levels more quickly so I've got a couple powers), and start running through story arcs, TFs, etc. 

By around 20th or so I usually have 30-40 merits, at least. I'll turn them into boosters and sell them, and the character will then have around 6-7 million inf.

At 22nd level I'll replace the SOs with 25th level IOs, as they don't need to be replaced, they're not very expensive, and they're around the same potency as an even-level SO.

Once I hit 35 or so I'll start swapping out to IO sets, building slowly towards my final build.

By the time I hit 50, I usually have another 400-500 merits, and I can turn those into more boosters and thus into more merits. Usually around 100 million or so.

If the ones I need are too expensive (LotG, Panacea, etc), I'll spend some merits on converters and flip stuff to get what I want. It usually doesn't take more than 1-2 million inf worth of converters to flip something into a piece I want (less if it's already the same type, and even less if it's already part of the same set).

My builds typically end up costing me a total of around 400 million or so all told (I don't tend to slot purples, and not a lot of PvP recipes), and I pay for by selling boosters.

Edited Monday at 11:26 PM by WumpusRat

[Herotu]

Crafting Cheap Recipes: Check if they require an Orange salvage, if so, don't bother crafting them. There are some that use just white and yellow salvage. Now remember the purchaser doesn't check what was in the recipe so they'll usually pay >750k for something that cost considerably less to craft.

Make a note of what worked for you and repeat it over and over.

 

Crafting Expensive Recipes: When you have ~50m I'd have a go at doing purples. Just remember that the orange salvage and crafting cost (it's on the recipe, it's about 500,000 inf) mean it'll cost at least 1m to just craft a purple! So add that to the cost of the recipe, compare that with how much they're going for. The price of recipes varies over time and a lot of old sellers are stuck with loads of enhancements they crafted and stuck on the AH when recipes were more expensive, so be aware of that if the price rises you will 1. get good profits but 2. have sudden resistance levels where all these old players' sell orders suddenly become relevant.

 

My advice is craft recipes into enhancements and sell for at the VERY least 500,000.

For slotting my own characters, I always buy Attuned Enhancements so I can go up and down levels. I don't understand the enhancement system, it's far too complex for my little brain. I keep it simple.

[UltraAlt]

3 hours ago, crimson72 said:

During live, SGs often gave a 1-2 million bonus to new players to at least buy DOs and SOs during the leveling process, players like me with farm tanks literally had 100s of billions, so basically the big pockets funded the DOs and SOs for the leveling players in any SG worth mentioning, that's how it worked.

 

Was that before the invention system and auction house or afterwards?

 

3 hours ago, crimson72 said:

Level 50 players had enough inf to fund the enhancements for their own alts.  SGs that didn't help new players, or do PLing at portal were generally useless. 

 

Everyone wasn't racing to 50.

Some of us were never for power-leveling.

 

A supergroup that doesn't play with others is generally useless. What is the point if you are in a supergroup and the other members don't team with you ... oh, it gave prestige for the creator of the sg...

There were plenty of great supergroups that weren't into power-leveling. They weren't useless. They were fun to run with in my experience.

 

3 hours ago, crimson72 said:

This game was always considered casual.  

 

not to everyone that plays it.

[MTeague]

19 hours ago, UltraAlt said:

People have said it the game didn't work this way back then, but it sure seemed to based on my experience ... that is to say...

Back on live before the invention system and the auction house, I had a defender. An empathy defender with electric blast and leadership powers. (I don't even think we could email inf to ourselves back then; even if we could, I didn't have enough to go around). I couldn't scrape together enough influence to by TOs to fill all the character's slots. I would be on a team healing and keeping the team rolling but wasn't dishing out much damages. The way I remember it, xp wasn't really shared across the team and it was related to how much damage you were dishing out.

 

Many things are possible, but this absolutely does not jive with my own personal recollection. I played a Mind/Kin troller in live. Always been my favorite combination, even back when people shunned Mind Control for using confuse and "lowering XP".  (Which really did happen, people would quit teams over it)

 

I seem to remember always getting an equal share of XP for all mobs. Scrappers and blasters did not outlevel me rapidly after a few hours on the same team. 

 

Now that said, what might have been so, is if you did NO damage whatsoever, might you have gotten no xp for a given mob?  I still don't think that's how it worked,.... but I can't conclusively rule it out, as I no longer have logs of any kind from those days. Maybe. But even as a controller, I was always damaging mobs with holds and sleeps, and later with Terrify, all the time, as well as spamming Transfusion to keep my teammates standing. 

 

Mostly what I think it was, was when your team was very successful on a regular basis, you gained XP faster than you gained influence.  If you piled up debt here and there (remember the joys of running Oldschool Positron TF, back in Oldschool Faultline, or the joyful mission with hordes of CoT daemons?  That was the Debt Emporium).  Working off that kind of debt would delay me from levelling up until I'd earned enough Inf to afford my next batch of enhancements.  It may have also mattered if you fought bosses or not. I always played on at least "Rugged" difficult, back under the old notoriety system, so every mission would have bosses, and bosses are worth quite a bit more in both XP and Influence.

[momentarygrace]

I dabble on the market but like the OP, it's not my job, I'm a hero (or villain or recently, rogue/vigilante). I developed a couple of habits that help fund my irresistible altaholism. None of these are new, but I didn't notice them in this thread, so maybe they will help.

 

I always get Inner Inspiration from the START vendor the moment I'm out of the tutorial (I do the tutorials for the perks - Outbreak for large Insp, for example, and I like to get the Isolator badge). I keep 3 Isp slots open and punch Inner Inspiration every time it's up. I always sell the Large Insp on the /ah. For 50 or 100, anyway the Large ones always sell for more. I repeat I ALWAYS sell the Large Insp. and I fire Inner Inspiration as soon as it's up. I do this even on my 50s.

 

This is a free source of cash for my lowbies and a consistent trickle for all levels.

 

Selling Converters is also an option and as others have pointed out, it's easy enough to collect all the exploration badges in your first zone for 5 Merits, then buy Converters and sell them.

 

For my lowbies (I always have lowbies, I'm an altaholic!) I run around street sweeping in the newbie zones for a while before starting on missions. I used to do DFB but lately I haven't been doing them. I like the low levels. I'm weird. Anyway the inf. I get from street sweeping is enough to put those first Large Insp. on the market to start the enhancement fund going.

 

Based on advice I read on the forums at some point, I started selling most or sometimes all enhancements that drop for about the first 5 levels.

 

I still recall when, back on Live, someone I didn't notice before they were gone dropped a level 50 inhancement on one of my super lowbies in Atlas. I remarked to my sister who got me on CoH that I didn't understand why someone would do that, I couldn't USE it... of course she said, no, idiot, sell it! And that was a nice boost to my early enhancement funds. So nowadays I do drop in on Atlas or Mercy when I'm running one of my 50s and drop a few 50 level enhancements on unsuspecting lowbies. Easy cash tip. Toons with bios most likely to get my largesse. 😉

 

[UltraAlt]

34 minutes ago, MTeague said:

Now that said, what might have been so, is if you did NO damage whatsoever, might you have gotten no xp for a given mob?  I still don't think that's how it worked,.... but I can't conclusively rule it out, as I no longer have logs of any kind from those days. Maybe. But even as a controller, I was always damaging mobs with holds and sleeps, and later with Terrify, all the time, as well as spamming Transfusion to keep my teammates standing. 

The character was made as a team mentor (more or less). They mainly healed and buffed. I would get off shots when I could, but, like teams seem to do, when there is a "healer" on the team, the tend to get more reckless - which means if you want to keep them alive, you have to concentrate mostly on healing them and getting in some blasts as end is available to do so.

I know on that character I would get pretty pissed on teams because I was too busy protecting/healing and empowering the team to get much fighting in.

 

38 minutes ago, MTeague said:

If you piled up debt here and there

 

I'm far better at avoiding defeat then many players that I have seen. A team might sucker me into falling once, but it generally won't happen a second time.

 

39 minutes ago, MTeague said:

Mostly what I think it was, was when your team was very successful on a regular basis, you gained XP faster than you gained influence.

 

On that character, I didn't seem to be getting much of either.

My melee characters (tanks and scrappers at the time) and blasters were able to get enough infl to slot.

I kind of remember that controllers had it rougher than tanker/scrapper/blasters.

Defenders were the worse and empathy defenders were bottom of the barrel ... and that character was an empathy/electric defender.

 

And, yeah, they play much better now than they did back then. I honestly can't say how well the gain inf (because I PvP /AH) but they appear to gain XP at the same rate as the rest of the teams I'm on at this point.

 

To me it seems like the system change to equalizing xp across the team happened sometime after the invention system was released. maybe within a year or two, but, with the release of the invention system, I was happy enough just being able to completely slot my characters.

[Forager]

I literally offered this guy a job and he ignored it. Y'all think he's going to learn to use the market to make money?

[Ultimo]

5 hours ago, Forager said:

I literally offered this guy a job and he ignored it. Y'all think he's going to learn to use the market to make money?

You were serious about that?  I assumed it was a joke.

[wmtyrance]

On 6/5/2025 at 4:36 PM, Ultimo said:

So... I was looking at one of my characters today, he's outleveled all his SOs once again, and hasn't enough Influence to be able to replace them.  So, I thought, he's L30 now, perhaps I can upgrade them to IOs, and not have to worry about all this nonsense.

 

I started looking at the IO recipes, just the generic ones, and they're on the order of 45k, just for the recipe.  THEN there's the cost to MAKE them, AND the cost of the salvage... they're ridiculously expensive, there's no way I'd be able to get them made.  When I asked how people are getting the billions of Influence I keep hearing about, I was told to play the market, selling this or that or what have you... which left me feeling rather depressed.  First of all, I have nothing of particular value to sell.  Secondly, and more importantly, I'm playing a game to be a super hero, not a day trader.  I really don't have any inclination to fiddle around with the market every day.  I HAVE a job, I don't need another one.  I just want to zap the bad guys.

 

Is all this really necessary?

Yeah, this is my problem with this game. All this un superhero crap you have to do at max level to keep up. This is what the end game has always been about in COH, so if you don't want to do it, quit now.

[Herotu]

On 6/11/2025 at 1:37 AM, wmtyrance said:

Yeah, this is my problem with this game. All this un superhero crap you have to do at max level to keep up. This is what the end game has always been about in COH, so if you don't want to do it, quit now.

A little off-topic and for that I apologise.

My problem is that everybody gets more than a basic set of powers. You shouldn't be able to get quite so many - it should be a small set of skills - perhaps make it a swap-out situation if you want, but it's too much - you look at Superheroes from comics and they have a couple of powers that some heroes use in clever ways AND a weakness sometimes in the form of a weak relative or friend.

 

In COH you've a massive set of powers and no weaknesses. That's out of step with traditional super heroes. 

Edited Friday at 05:48 PM by Herotu

[BjorJlen]

23 minutes ago, Herotu said:

A little off-topic and for that I apologise.

My problem is that everybody gets more than a basic set of powers. You shouldn't be able to get quite so many - it should be a small set of skills - perhaps make it a swap-out situation if you want, but it's too much - you look at Superheroes from comics and they have a couple of powers that some heroes use in clever ways AND a weakness sometimes in the form of a weak relative or friend.

 

In COH you've a massive set of powers and no weaknesses. That's out of step with traditional super heroes. 

 

While a interesting and valid viewpoint, I am not sure I totally agree with it. Specifically when you said "you look at Superheroes from comics and they have a couple of powers that some heroes use in clever ways", and then "In COH you've a massive set of powers"...
 

   While true, as far as your primary & secondary powers goes, you only really get TWO powers... which you then learn to use in "clever ways". Case in point... the Human Torch. In CoH terms, he is a Fire Blaster, and his Primary power set (Fire Blast) he is learning to use in different ways as he gains experience (hence, gaining other T2-9 powers). The same goes with a CoH characters Secondary power choice. And if one taps into Epic Power pools, then that too can just be an extension on how the Character (player) has learned to use his/her powers in new and awesome ways.

 

   Now as far as weakness' goes, you are right on that score. There are no Weakness Selection options in the game at all, but that atm is a nothing burger imo, because the game character is being played by a actual Player... And in my mind, that can be enough of a weakness sometimes for anyone (especially on PUG teams). lol But good viewpoints nonetheless... 😁

 

"Courage is not the absence of fear, but the triumph over it." - T

[Herotu]

2 hours ago, BjorJlen said:

   While true, as far as your primary & secondary powers goes, you only really get TWO powers... which you then learn to use in "clever ways".

I like this, it's got a ring of truth about it. BUT then add all the pool powers, mastery powers and we're back in the "zillions of powers" zone again.