Greg's Quick Guide to Working the Consignment Market

OK, so you're a brand new hero. No influence to use to power-up and play with the big boys? Look no further. Here's a quick guide to affording those "special" recipes and enhancement that you are sure would make you more Super than you already are.

Step 1: Starting Fresh

OK, you just stepped out of the Outbreak zone and you're wondering what to do now? It's actually easy. Hit your first contact, get a mission, and hit the streets. Here's the most important part: SAVE those two big inspirations from the tutorial. Once you have a pocketful of influence from defeating lower level foes, Sprint on over to the Consignment market. Post the "Big Red" Inspiration first. Lowball your sell price at 5 influence or so. It should sell immediately. Get the influence from the sale and then post the "Big Green". Post either at 5 influence, or use your current funds to cover the listing fee of 5% and list it for higher. When it sells, you should have between 5K-10K worth of influence. Plenty to buy inspirations and Training Enhancements from contact(s) or the Field Trainers.

Step 2: Salvage Enters the Picture

Any character can solo easily at low levels. Atlas Park is best "startup zone" for this, I'll hit on why in a moment. As you defeat enemies, etc. you'll get more and more powerful. Around level 5, foes start dropping salvage when you defeat them. Here's the kicker. Hellions drop Arcane salvage. Clockwork drop a mix of Arcane/Tech salvage. Vahzilok and Skulls drop Tech. Don't fight Vahz or Skulls if you can help it. The Tier 1 Arcane salvage is worth a lot (Luck Charms sell for 25K each). Just play as normal, sell all salvage you get at the consignment house. Post at 5 influence just to be sure you don't lose money. If it doesn't sell immediately, don't sweat it. Go do something else. Keep doing this as you level and after buying TO enhancements you should have about 20K or so left over by Level 8-10.

Step 3: Starting to Work the Market

Head over to King's Row. You'll be going there anyway to run Safeguard missions for the temp travel powers. When you have a spare 5 minutes or so, head over to the consignment house. Here's the start of your market journey to riches. Identify common Tech salvage (under the auction menu Salvage -> Invention) that shows White in the list. Ones I like to focus on are Hydraulic Pistons, Circuit Boards, Kinetic Weapons, Silver, and Ceramic Armor Plate. Put in bids at the max of 10 items (sliding the circle on the bar below the bid entry field to increase the quantity to 10) at 5 influence each. Fill all of your bid slots on the auction house with these 10 piece salvage bids. Quick and easy. Wait a couple minutes (get soda, go streetsweeping, whatever) and check the auction house. There should be a BUNCH of salvage you have bought. Get it off the consignment house and head straight over across the parking lot to the area where Blue Steel is (less than 100 yards). Sell all that salvage you bought.

With roughly 30 salvage slots on your character, buying at 5 influence and selling at 250 nets you a profit of 7,350 influence per run. Your first time doing this, you can probably make 3-5 back-to-back runs, placing new bids as the old ones are filled. That's about 25K influence in 5 minutes with virtually no startup capital required to make it work. It's also easy. Place the bids before logging off. When you log in, you're still at the auction house, so just grab the salvage you bought while you were logged off and then sell it. In a couple nights/sessions of 5 minutes here and 5 minutes there, you can amass a goodly amount of influence.

Step 4: Crafting for Profit

When you have about 150K in your pocket from buying/selling salvage, you are ready for the next step. Buy recipes and sell the crafted enhancements. I like to start with Thunderstrike IO recipes. They are common drops, have great set bonuses, and offer good enhancements (out of the 6 set Ios, 3 of them are triple enhancement bonuses), making them desirable. The enhancements also sell for reasonable prices, making them attractive to higher level players who don't mind paying for the convenience of not having to mess with the crafting system.

As to the mechanics of this, go to Recipes and select the Ranged Damage sets. From there select the Thunderstrike group. At the top of the auction window, just to the left of center, there is a drop down menu to screen the auctions that should say "For Sale and Bidding". Change that to "For Sale Only". That will only show what's available at the market. Now cruise down through the list, opening up each recipe as you go, level by level and checking it out. Start with Acc/Dmg/End and then move to Acc/Dmg/Rech and then Dmg/End/Rech. Those are the three most popular for people buying. Now cruise through the recipes, avoiding the L50 recipes (they cost twice as much to craft, ~490K influence). You are looking for ones that have recipes for sale but have zero (0) bids against them. These are the opportunities. Place "lowball" bids of 10K against one and wait a few seconds. Usually nothing will happen and the bid window will update to show items for sale and 1 bid now (yours) outstanding. When this happens, cancel your bid. You get the money back, so no loss. Continue doing this, sequentially placing bids for the opportune recipes. Since some people sell recipes low to get more influence (listing fee is less), you can snag some great bargains. This morning I grabbed 2 for 10K in less than 5 minutes. Usually it takes me about 10 to look over the list and cycle bids. It goes fast once you are used to it.

Once you get a recipe at that great price, look at the salvage required. Should be 2 commons and 1 uncommon to craft. Buy those items, don't worry about scrimping on cost, I generally pay "market rate" of 250 for commons and 1-3K for the uncommon. With salvage in hand, be sure you have enough influence to craft the IO and then some left over (~30K or so) to cover the listing fee later on. Head over to the plaza with Blue Steel and take the doors behind him to the roof. From there, hit the SG Base portal and head to the crafting station next to the vault. Craft the IO and then head back to the consignment market. List it there for as much as you can cover with your remaining funds, up to a max of 85% the lowest last listing price for the IO (you can see this in the bid history window for the item). Most Thunderstrike IOs sell for around 1M-1.5M, so this is a great way to get you rolling on the way to funding IO sets and other expenses. Note it may take a day or a week to sell that IO, but when it does, you have enough to bankroll your upgrade plans for quite a while.

Step 5: Expanding the Operation

This next step is really not required for anyone. It's largely a "for fun" exercise and may be used to try and afford those "Uber" IO sets and Unique IOs that are tickling your fancy. With Ater Custos, I started at step 5 with just a hair over 5M influence. At the end of a week and a half (once a day or so for about 15 minutes), I had (discounting the purple IO I sold for 15M) turned a 23M profit. And that's discounting the roughly 6M worth of items up for sale or roughly 1.5M worth of outstanding bids.

Here's the approach I took (and I am sure there are others). Apply the methodology in Step 4 on a broader scale. Start with 2 IO sets: Thunderstrike and Crushing Impact. Both are sought-after sets with great IO set bonuses and solid enhancement benefits. Crushing Impact is actually the hottest ticket item here, so tackle that one first. Skim the list of IO recipes for the Crushing Impact set the way you did previously, identifying the "opportunities" that have few (less than 10) or no (rare to see this) bids. For the opportunities, place standing bids of 300K at a QTY of 2 per bid slot. Continue this for as much as you can afford. Now, you can also "mix it up" by then using the methodology for Step 4 (getting those 10K gems) and then going back and placing standing bids of 100K at a QTY of 2 per bid slot for the Thunderstrikes to round out your market coverage. This is essentially setting your nets to see what swims in. You can now log off and check your bid status daily/whenever. 15 minutes is all you need to crunch this out.

Once you have snared some recipes, buy the salvage to craft them just like in Step 4. When I place the IOs up for auction, I try to find a "reasonable" price and list it slightly lower. For example, if a Thunderstrike is listing for between 1M and 1.5M, I would probably list it for 910K. Posting lower than your competitors is essential, since the market awards the sale based on lowest posting price (910k would win the sale over a competitor posting at 1M) and if there is a tie in price, is awarded to the oldest posting. Rationale for the 910K is that lowball bids won't get it, but it has a good shot of undercutting people just slapping bids in at the current sale price (based on the last-5 sale history window).

Repeat this process, checking the market bids/sales and crafting as needed. In a short amount of time, you'll be raking in the influence, as the net profit on each sale is between 800K and 2.5M influence. All without "grinding" for hours on end in hazard zones and with very little risk (it just may take some extra time to sell some items, but be patient).

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So there it is. Take it or leave it, but there should be some good information in there if you are looking to make some money and spend time playing without worrying about financing you enhancements. You can dabble a little or as much as you want, it's up to you. No exploits, no cheating, just honest trading with other players over a week or so can get you where you want to be. If you have questions or need clarification, just let me know. Oh, and please don't disseminate this to buddies online, etc. Let's keep this in our little SG for now.