The most common feedback I get when providing a build for someone is 'That's expensive, it's going to take me a really long time to come up with it'. And it's true, it can take some time and a lot of inf.

But it doesn't need to take that long. Here is what I do to bring in the bread:

The Market and You: Invention Sets

The first lesson: Roughly 85% of recipe drops are crap. White (common IO) recipes aren't worth selling on the market, since you have a limited number of market slots. Just vendor them. I also very rarely sell salvage; it's more profitably used in crafting, and if I have a surplus (WHO NEEDS 30 FREAKING KINETIC WEAPONS) I'll just vendor it. Even for Set IO recipes, many of them aren't worth the effort of crafting and selling. My best advice is to check.

In general, the most money is going to be made from melee, ranged, PBAoE, Targeted AoE, and Defense/Resistance sets at level 50 (or at whatever level the set caps at); sets for control powers and pet sets are too niche to find good market, and sets at less than their capped level aren't popular.

'Proc' pieces ('Chance for X') and other pieces with special effects ('Knockback Reduction') tend to be quite valuable, though there are exceptions. There are some specific pieces that are worth disproportionately large amounts of inf; more on these later. As always, check before you craft and vendor an object if you don't think you can make a profit. How do you know if you can make a profit? I'm glad you asked!

There are four costs involved in crafting and selling an enhancement. The first is what I call the table cost; this is the cost the invention table charges you just to put your salvage + recipe together into an enhancement. It varies from recipe to recipe, but I don't like math, so I keep it simple. When I'm calculating, the table cost is 500,000 inf. It is *always* less than this number, so if you use this you're never wrong about whether a piece is profitable.

Table Cost = 500,000 inf

The second is the cost of salvage. For most yellow (uncommon) recipes, especially at level 50, this will be pretty minimal. For a rare recipe, you probably need one or more pieces of rare salvage. Since I once again don't like math much, I use the following:

Salvage Cost (uncommon) = 250,000 inf
Salvage Cost (rare) = 2,250,000 inf

The third is the cost of the recipe. For a recipe that you got via drop (or via trading in tickets), this cost is 0. For a recipe you purchased from the market, this is what you spent on it. You might also have spent inf to convert Reward Merits into Alignment Merits (see below); if so, add that inf to this cost.

The final cost is the cost to sell the recipe. Wentworth's takes 10% off the final sale price of your enhancement. Note that your cost to post the recipe gets refunded out of this, so it's not a separate cost. As an example: I list an enhancement for 1000 inf. I get charged 5% of the list price up front (50 inf). The enhancement sells for 1000 inf, because I put it up at the right price. I get refunded my 50 inf, but charged 100 inf (10% of the sale price). The only time you lose your deposit is if you pull the enhancement off the market before it sells.

Now for some math:

Cost to Craft = 1.1(Table Cost + Salvage Cost + Recipe Cost)

This is not meant to represent the exact cost to craft! It just gives you a good ballpark, so that you know what you need in order to make a profit.

I usually don't bother crafting and selling an enhancement unless I expect it to return twice the cost of crafting. For many enhancements, I'll make back 10 or 20 times (or more!) the crafting cost!

"This is all useful," I hear you say, "But where do I get those recipes? If 85% of what drops is crap, how am I expected to find the gold?"

There are a few ways:

Alignment Merits

With Going Rogue, we got the Tips system and Alignment Merits. The benefit for remaining a Hero or Villain and for reinforcing that alignment through tips is that you receive Alignment Merits, which can be traded in at Fort Trident or The Crucible for IO set recipes. You can also obtain Alignment Merits by converting Reward Merits - 20 million inf and 50 reward merits will net you an Alignment Merit.

Some individual recipes sell for wildly disproportionate prices, largely because they are universally useful or simply that good for particular builds. Here are some examples:

Luck of the Gambler: Defense/Increased Recharge Speed - purchase this at Level 25 for maximum profit; it shuts off when you exemplar further than 5 levels below the level of the enhancement.
Numina's Convalescence: Regeneration/Recovery - The level of this doesn't matter for your build, but the Level 30 (lowest available) sells best.
Kinetic Combat: Damage/Endurance/Recharge - purchase this at Level 35 (the highest available).
Eradication: Accuracy/Damage/Recharge/Endurance - purchase this at Level 30 (the highest available).
Obliteration: Accuracy/Damage/Recharge/Endurance - purchase at Level 50, naturally.

There are others! This list is by no means exhaustive. If you're turning in Merits to make cash (instead of looking for individual pieces to fill out a build), then check to see which recipe is going to bring you the most money. Even if you don't need a particular piece for your build, it may be worth buying, then selling, so that you have enough money to fill out the rest of your build; I managed to fill all of Bitterburr's melee sets on the proceeds from just one sale of a Luck of the Gambler Recharge piece.

Just Buy It

Nothing is easier than turning inf into more inf. Give me a million, and I'll show you a hundred million in a week. Give me a hundred million, and I'll make it a billion. Buying recipes at a low cost, crafting them, and then selling the resulting enhancements is an easy way to make money, if not necessarily fast. I make most of my money this way; buy a recipe in bulk, craft 'em all up, and sell them.

Good targets for this are the yellow recipes in orange IO sets; also good are the yellow Defense and Resistance sets at level 50. Mako's Bite is another popular moneymaking set. Find a few that work for you, and just do a run on them every few days. It's not uncommon for me to buy 10 recipes at 100,000 inf each, craft them (for a total crafting cost of less than a million), and then sell them for 5-8 million each over the next two days - total profit, 70 million. Total effort, maybe 5 minutes.

Architect Entertainment

AE tickets are another good way to get both recipes and rare salvage, if the salvage market this week happens to be bad. I've personally found the most money is gained by having a Level 50 character purchase Silver Class Recipe Rolls in the 30-34 range. You'll get a lot of junk, but on average I'll make about 50 million inf for every 5 silver-class rolls. Sometimes you'll luck out and get that on a single roll, and sometimes your luck will be bad and you'll get nothing but vendor bait. That's how it goes!

And that's it. There are doubtless other ways to make money; some of them will likely even be faster, or require less effort. But this is what I do, and it works for me.

_________________
(5:05:37 PM) DJ Crypto: There is something very wrong with you.
(6:45:59 PM) DJ One Hit Wonder: You are a sick, sick man.
(6:53:12 PM) Chellenator: There is something very wrong with you.
(11:24:20 PM) DJ One Hit Wonder: You worry me.
[CapeRadio]Modern Myth: Harald, there is something very wrong with you.
[CapeRadio]Ashe T'Dust: I like Khronos! We think alike, which is scary.

This is an awesome post! I'm really glad you made it, if only because now you can give people the link instead of having to write it out over and over again.

I've seen some dithering (not from you, but in general elsewhere) about the value of selling salvage pieces, so I want to add this: I do sell rare salvage at WW, but only because I can't stand to sell a piece of salvage for 5k inf at a vendor when I can get 1 or 2 million inf for it on the market. I do not ever expect this to make me rich; all it does is appease my neuroses. As the value of selling even rare inf is questionable for people who are less neurotic than me (which is just about everybody), it is definitely the case that anything LESS than rare salvage is not worth selling at WW. At all. Ever. It won't even net you the 1-2k inf you'd get from a vendor. You can check the numbers to confirm this!

_________________
Chelle / @Chellenator / DJ Eve
Twitter / E-mail: cape.dj.eve@gmail.com
"I'm a wonder woman. Let me go get my rope."

For what it's worth, this isn't always true. I make a point of paying more than a vendor will offer for my salvage; my 'standard' is 500 inf for common salvage (vendors give 250) and 2500 inf for uncommon salvage (vendors give 1000).

Salvage in the 25-40 range sells disproportionately well, largely because 'Level 35' is the sweet spot for many PvPers kitting out their characters with IOs. I will regularly see common salvage in this level range selling for 250,000 or 500,000 inf.

Despite both of these, however, there is an important point: nobody ever got rich selling salvage. Can you make more money off of your salvage than you would get by vending it? Sure. Almost always. Is it worth the time and effort, compared to other things you could be using those limited Wentworth's slots for? Never.

_________________
(5:05:37 PM) DJ Crypto: There is something very wrong with you.
(6:45:59 PM) DJ One Hit Wonder: You are a sick, sick man.
(6:53:12 PM) Chellenator: There is something very wrong with you.
(11:24:20 PM) DJ One Hit Wonder: You worry me.
[CapeRadio]Modern Myth: Harald, there is something very wrong with you.
[CapeRadio]Ashe T'Dust: I like Khronos! We think alike, which is scary.

Thanks for the tip!

I'm going to try this out and see where it gets me.

I beg to differ about selling salvage, even common salvage.

Sure, many pieces of common salvage goes for less than 250 inf on the market, but not all of them. Especially some low-level salvage like Alchemist Silver (?) can sell for 100,000 or more, now and then. Most of the time salvage will go for 100s times more than the vendor will pay and if you have the salvage and the market slots, why not put it up there? Price them at 11 inf for quick sales, or 300 if you want to make sure that you get more than the vendor price. Should you suddenly find yourself low on market slots you can always remove the salvage stacks.

Uncommon salvage used to be worthless for a long time but now some of them will go for 200,000 inf or more. It's probably connected to AE farming: the AE doesn't drop salvage and few farmers waste tickets on buying common and uncommon salvage.

The real money isn't in the salvage trade but it helps, especially if you're below level 30 and haven't got into any real moneymaking schemes yet.

_________________

I'd also submit that selling stacks of Common salvage is a decent way to get a little bit of progress towards the "Sell x Items on the Market" badges, for the badgewhores among us. Also, the /auctionhouse command (Tier 8 VIP reward) is a godsend for those of us who have a lot of time in the game and don't want to scurry back to WW to sell stuff when our inventories get full. It's a shame it doesn't work while you're in a mission.

_________________
Squandering the planet's oxygen since 1976

The single best io recipe to 'convert' to influence, no matter which method you use to obtain it - reward merits, alignment merits, etc - is Miracle: +Rec.

I haven't auctioned this recipe for less than 100 million since I started playing again a few weeks ago. I could probably do even better on it than I do, but I typically auction in a fairly impatient manner and post auctions designed to sell instantly. Like the Numina's Convalescence unique, this IO can be slotted into the Health power to provide a constant passive recovery bump, so it is universally useful. That means that almost every player wants it for nearly all of their characters, no matter the build or AT.

Because it's a lower level set, this recipe is not as common as Numina's, which generally has quite a few being auctioned at any given time.

The other one in what I call the 'Health Set' - Regenerative Tissue +Reg - also sells very well for much the same reasons that the other two do, but the Miracle recipe tends to auction for more and if all you are doing is trying to convert a certain number of Hero Merits or Reward Merits into influence, you might as well get the most bang for your buck. That will generally come from the Miracle reciple.

Additionally, if you're looking at the Market, always consider what is happening in the game at the time you're looking to sell or buy.

Double XP weekends are a lot of fun, but because a lot of people are levelling and reaching goals - players want to respec or IO out their characters. This means that the market goes wild, even for normally "worthless" things like common IOs and salvage. The same thing goes for the first week or two when a new powerset or powerset proliferation comes out. The hardcore grind monkeys will be taking their toon straight up to the top, or will be looking for "standard" and popular IOs (recipes and crafted) to fill in their slots once they get whereever they are going.

Note that when I say things go wild, I mean wild fluxuations on both ends of the spectrum. With all the salvage and recipe drops that come with lots of people grinding missions, supply and demand becomes pretty unpredictable. Something that's showing a redonkulous return on the AH when you post it might bottom out quickly -- Boy howdy did I learn this with the Super Inspirations - originally selling them for 2-10M a pop, and now they're generally around the 500K to 1.0M range. Maybe. Which is still not bad cash, just not OMFGYESYESYESYES levels of glee.

On Common IOs: By all means, note what Khronos says about table cost. It's important, particularly when you get to lvl 50 IOs. The Table cost is pretty expensive and it's difficult to break even. However, you can watch the market (particularly if you're in a period of time where the community has a high demand for IOs), and sometimes bring in some cash. IIRC, the most frequent "high dollar" IOs tend to be Endurance Mod and occasionally End Reduction. Defense, Resist, Damage, and Accuracy can work sometimes, but vary WILDLY.

Strangely, lvl 35-40 common IOs occasionally go for more money that their lvl 50 counterparts, usually because of supply. Keep that in mind before you vendor a "lesser" common IO. The table cost is lower, and components sometimes are easier to find, which can let you "make your nut" easier.

At the very least, selling "junk" IOs and salvage can get you badges, and several can get you extra slots in the AH.

_________________
"...his madness keeps him sane.": My Profile on VirtueVerse
Can You WIN the Internet? Arc #85544
Inhuman Resources - At Work with IE #298132
Task Force Mutternacht #349522 <-- Aeon Challenge Arc

Currently the best return on investment for a straight reward merit to influence market conversion is Reactive Armor (Resistance) if you are actually going to craft the enhancement.

Unlike the special recipes of rare sets like Miracle and LoTG, the reward merit investment for this recipe is only 50 merits versus 240 or 200. The sale will generally be slower. In general, you can sell the proc recipes or, if you craft, proc enhancements almost immediately. However, the Reactive Armor enhancement not only has a lower investment in merits, it is constructed of 3 common and uncommon salvage that auction for about 100k-200k for the three versus having to buy a rare piece of salvage that you will have to invest about 2-3 million for. Finally, the crafting cost is about 105k, for a total outlay of 50 merits and 3-400k influence for a total return of about 50 million influence.

In comparison, the Miracle + rec recipe is selling for about 70-75 million and the crafted enhancement for about 100 million for an investment of 240 merits. The LoTG +rech speed recipe sells for 50-60 million and the crafted recipe for about 100 million for an investment of 200 merits.

That means that for the same number of invested merits, crafting the Reactive Armor enhancements will net you about twice as much influence as the LoTG + Recharge enhancements and about 2.5x as much influence as the Miracle +recharge enhancements.

It's a bit more time consuming, but the return on investment is well worth it.

Quick note to add to what I said, the market generally spikes on the weekends. This means that sometimes you can get some better sells on the weekends, but crafting can be a pain when everyone is trying to grab salvage. This will drive up the price of salvage/recipe components, which can cause your table cost to rise accordining.

So, just watch out about the weekends. Don't be afraid to set a lower bid and allow it it come in slowly. It has been rightfully said that: "If you didn't leave your bid up 24 hours, you didn't actually try to buy anything".

_________________
"...his madness keeps him sane.": My Profile on VirtueVerse
Can You WIN the Internet? Arc #85544
Inhuman Resources - At Work with IE #298132
Task Force Mutternacht #349522 <-- Aeon Challenge Arc