Invention

[Rendakor]

Is this shit worth doing at low levels? The character I'm playing now is level 17, and I'm wondering particularly about the set-based ones; they seem useful but they're almost all either really expensive or unobtainable (none on AH). Should I even bother or just stick with DOs/SOs til 50?

[Ingmar]

it is definitely worth making the ones that drop for you assuming they have reasonable component prices. Not having to replace them every few levels is a huge inf savings over time. At lower levels you probably shouldn't care so much about making sets, the regular IOs are well worth it too.

[Rendakor]

That's about all I've done so far, thanks.

[Zetor]

The AH is a seller's market right now -- there's a HUGE demand for high-end set IOs, recipes for the aforementioned set IOs, and (normal) salvage at all levels with everyone rolling alts, resulting in not nearly enough supply. One of my SGmates became an inf multi-millionaire (infillionaire?) after a week of playing (he has a new account and never played the game before) simply by running AE missions, crafting enhancements for himself and selling the excess crafting materials.

Which brings me to my recommendation: run AE to get tickets, then turn those tickets into salvage used by normal IO recipes at your level (this gets you salvage faster and more reliably than waiting for drops and you won't "waste" drops on uncommon/rare components and recipes that are actually pretty useless at low levels). Buy the actual recipes at the crafting station with inf (they're fairly cheap at low levels). You will likely use a level 20 IO until at least level 30ish or even beyond that; I am still using level 35 IOs for my level 50 defender due to the way enhancement caps work.

Obvious plug: if you're running AE, search for @Zaphir to find my story arcs   More seriously, http://boards.cityofheroes.com/showthread.php?t=222095 is a good thread containing tested, high-quality AE arcs.

[Rendakor]

What's AE? AoE aka Area of Effect? Or something else entirely?

[Ingmar]

Architect Entertainment - the mission maker thing.

[Rendakor]

Ohh, ok. Is that another thing that isn't available in Praetoria? I haven't messed with any of my old toons, and my new guy has a few levels left before he can play in the real world.

[UnSub]

I think the devs learned from their mistake and didn't put AE / MA (Mission Architect) in Praetoria.

[Rendakor]

Decided to give the MA missions a shot; picked an arc that was highly rated and set off. Since I had just left Praetoria, I decided to play with the difficulty a bit; I'm playing a Brute so the default setting was much too low; everything was easy and boring. I turned it up a bit (Even level, +3 players, No bosses), then jumped into the MA mission and blew through the first one with little trouble.

The second one, however, was an impossible mess. The very first room had 10+ minions and 2 lieutenants; I landed one attack before I was debuffed and CC'd to hell, then died. I decide, fuck it, hit the Hospital button with the intent of lowering the difficulty. Except whoever made this arc decided that dying should rez you in some prison further in the mission.   Two deaths later I log out just to clear the stupid mission.

Edit: Apparently you can't abandon MA missions? There's an Abandon button, but it says I'm not allowed when I click it. WTF? Guess I'll go turn the difficulty down and try to finish it.

[Ingmar]

The prison thing is just a function of certain maps - there are regular missions where that happens too.

[Rendakor]

I remember it happening in certain TF missions and such, never on a CoT cave before.

[Ingmar]

I remember it happening in certain TF missions and such, never on a CoT cave before.

The bigger CoT and Council maps have prisons, I think there might be some Crey type tech maps that have them too.

[Rendakor]

Guess I just didn't remember them.

Zetor, you suggested earlier I run a ton of MA missions for tickets, then use those on salvage; should I just buy random, level appropriate common salvage and put the ones I don't need on the AH?

[Nevermore]

You don't remember the Orange Bagel prison room?  It has mostly water on the ground and the prison cells are up on stone-like platforms with sort of crystal doors you have to break down.  I think the other maps with prisons were 5th column/Council, Arachnos and Police station maps.  I don't think the tech, caves or warehouse maps have them at all.

[Zetor]

Well, browsing MA can be hit or miss. Remember Sturgeon's Law? A lot of arcs (incl. 5-star-rated arcs as long as they have a small number of 'my friends and guildmates' type votes; heck, even some of the early hall of famers / dev choices don't stack up nowadays) are just not that good. OTOH there are some real gems that end up at 4-star averages due to griefers and never get played, no matter how awesome they are (like my arcs! ). There has been a big push to get the devs to improve the search interface and cull the unfinished crap / abandoned farms / never-updated broken arcs from 6 issues ago... but it seems that MA is sort of on the backburner for now. ATM that thread and the 'Excellent arcs' thread in the MA forum are my beacon when I'm looking for MA stuff to play.

As a rule of thumb, avoid arcs (even highly rated arcs) that have an archvillain or 'extreme <anything>' warning in their text unless you are comfortable soloing that stuff, and be careful with ones that have elite bosses. The 'solo friendly' flag is also something to look for, especially if you are cranking up the difficulty. You can also do arcs with archvillains if you select 'no bosses/AVs', they downgrade into elite bosses (just like regular missions).

If you're low level (sub-15 with training enhancements, if that), sticking to arcs that have low-level enemies with few abilities (like skulls, hellions, clockwork, maybe vahzilok and council) is the way to go, custom enemies are really tuned for SO-level characters (22+). Also in that thread you can see a lot of 'level 5-10' arcs; that's not a coincidence, the second dev-hosted AE challenge was to create low-level arcs. On my low-level arc I got around the 'squishy player / hard to solo' problem by adding allies to the harder missions.

As for abandoning: MA storyarcs work like task forces. You need to hit the 'architect options' button in the mission title bar, then choose "quit story". No idea why they made it this way, btw...

Guess I just didn't remember them.

Zetor, you suggested earlier I run a ton of MA missions for tickets, then use those on salvage; should I just buy random, level appropriate common salvage and put the ones I don't need on the AH?

Yes; I usually just did a 50/50 split of random common tech and arcane salvage. You don't need to get recipes -- you can just buy those from the crafting station.

edit: If you're running the MA purely for cash (and don't need to craft IOs anymore), you can get crazy money by buying bronze recipe rolls (as high-level as you can get) and random rare/uncommon/common salvage of the appropriate level, then crafting the set IOs. A simpler way to turn MA into cash is to buy high-end rare salvage with your tickets and AH them; on the Virtue server you can sell that stuff for 2.5mil easily for 540 tickets, which comes out to like 3.8k inf per ticket.

[Rendakor]

Thanks for all the tips dude. I'm going though the ones in your linked thread that are level appropriate, and I've made ~5m inf selling shit. 

Does XP slow down at 20, or am I just feeling the lack of end-mission-XP-bonus since I'm doing MA missions?

[ezrast]

As for how to slot your character: everybody seems to have their own method, but mine is to slot myself fully with level 25 generic (i.e. non-set) IOs as soon as I can (which is level 22), and stick with those until 50 (well, 47), when I start worrying about sets. The exceptions would be pieces that give global bonuses (like the 6th piece in Numina's or Miracle), which work just as well at low levels and so don't benefit from waiting til 50, but those are usually pretty expensive for a new player.

The reason I choose level 25 is two-fold. Firstly, there are three tiers of salvage: 10-25, 26-40, and 41-50. The demand for low-level salvage is pretty low, so the materials to craft things level 25 and below are generally cheap. Secondly, the increased benefit per level of IO drops off steeply at 25 - that is, level 25 IOs are significantly better than level 24 IOs, but not significantly worse than level 26 IOs. So level 25 is absolutely the bang-for-your-buck sweet spot. Until I can slot those, I just run with whatever drops for me or buy the occasional DO for my important powers.

As for tickets: I think the best way to spend those is supposed to be level 30-35 bronze recipe rolls. However, I've never managed to roll anything good this way, and the new A-merit system is mucking with the old conventional wisdom anyway. Mid- and high-level rare salvage are good choices when you need a little bit of cash right now, like to pay listing costs for more expensive things. Don't buy common or uncommon salvage with tickets as a single rare piece will yield enough inf to buy infinite amounts of pretty much whatever non-rare stuff you want. Just check the AH first to see what rare salvage is selling well that day (2 mil per piece is average, anything above that is good).

Finally, the AH is cross-server and now cross-faction, so any market advice should be applicable no matter where you play. In my experience, once you've got a few million inf to get started, it's easier to get cash just by playing the market than by trying to farm AE. Crafted set enhancements will often sell for millions more than the market cost of the recipe + salvage.

[Rendakor]

As for how to slot your character: everybody seems to have their own method, but mine is to slot myself fully with level 25 generic (i.e. non-set) IOs as soon as I can (which is level 22), and stick with those until 50 (well, 47), when I start worrying about sets. The exceptions would be pieces that give global bonuses (like the 6th piece in Numina's or Miracle), which work just as well at low levels and so don't benefit from waiting til 50, but those are usually pretty expensive for a new player.

The reason I choose level 25 is two-fold. Firstly, there are three tiers of salvage: 10-25, 26-40, and 41-50. The demand for low-level salvage is pretty low, so the materials to craft things level 25 and below are generally cheap. Secondly, the increased benefit per level of IO drops off steeply at 25 - that is, level 25 IOs are significantly better than level 24 IOs, but not significantly worse than level 26 IOs. So level 25 is absolutely the bang-for-your-buck sweet spot. Until I can slot those, I just run with whatever drops for me or buy the occasional DO for my important powers.

As for tickets: I think the best way to spend those is supposed to be level 30-35 bronze recipe rolls. However, I've never managed to roll anything good this way, and the new A-merit system is mucking with the old conventional wisdom anyway. Mid- and high-level rare salvage are good choices when you need a little bit of cash right now, like to pay listing costs for more expensive things. Don't buy common or uncommon salvage with tickets as a single rare piece will yield enough inf to buy infinite amounts of pretty much whatever non-rare stuff you want. Just check the AH first to see what rare salvage is selling well that day (2 mil per piece is average, anything above that is good).

Finally, the AH is cross-server and now cross-faction, so any market advice should be applicable no matter where you play. In my experience, once you've got a few million inf to get started, it's easier to get cash just by playing the market than by trying to farm AE. Crafted set enhancements will often sell for millions more than the market cost of the recipe + salvage.

While you say it's easier to make inf playing the market, wouldn't it still be more profitable doing AE than doing regular missions while leveling up? Otherwise, good tips, thanks. I'm level 23 now and fully slotted with 25 IOs.

[ezrast]

Oh, that is probably true, yes. The merit rewards from missions arcs are nice, though probably not as nice as tickets and will not pay off until you're 50 anyway (the good stuff costs 200 merits) unless you're stealthing through missions.

edit: also a lot of the quest writing is less terrible than the MMO average, though that's not saying a whole lot.
moar edit: I play redside almost exclusively, not sure how blue compares.

[Zetor]

I mostly recommended MA as a way to make good bank while leveling (I am also pretty heavily invested into MA with 4 published arcs and more on the way, so part of it is probably my bias ). There -are- a lot of good MA story arcs out there, but... yeah, Sturgeon's Law.

ezrast: Doing 'normal' (non-AE) mission arcs is ok on blueside, but most of the old arcs are kinda bland and have a lot of filler. The newer hero arcs (faultline being the big one, MAYBE the hollows) are pretty good. Generic newspaper/radio/bank/mayhem/vanguard missions are not really doing it for me unless I'm in a group. I have a personal beef against most villain arcs in the mid-high levels (35+) since they invariably seem to have AVs, depriving me of my preciousss reward merits unless I get a group. Actually I seem to remember the faultline arcs having a heck of a lot of AVs in them as well... but this isn't a problem if you can find a pug.