I still recall the time I first stepped into an AE Farm mission without knowing what it was. Zoned in, immediately found myself in a small room with angry monsters vomiting out of four portals. I think I lasted about 3 seconds.
There are ‘Fire Farms’. AE missions with enemies that only do fire damage. Even after a bit of a nerf, they are incredible XP and influence factories.
I dunno about quickest, but you can buy the experience boosts from the P2W vendor, and then do task forces or the mothership raid (might have a level requirement) to level quickly.
Here’s an article about AE getting nerfed:
It’s almost 4 months old though. So they might have eased up on the nerfs since then.
This sounds a lot like what happened in the Live game. AE was going, they nerfed the hell out of xp and then everyone stopped using AE except maybe as component farms. Few people do content for “the story” if there’s no other reward.
I find that the double-XP “cheat”, plus the bonus for not having played a character for a while combine to make very fast leveling. I basically only do one contact at a time, and even then I was out-leveling them. I’ll have to go back and finish story arcs at some point.
It depends on how often you’re playing, and how many characters you’re working on. Though I suppose that patrol XP mitigates that issue: If you’re only on one particular character once a week, then you’re accumulating a week’s worth of patrol XP each time.
Overall, I think that they did a good job of balancing the things that actually need to be balanced, and not sweating the things that don’t need it.
I very much agree; they got it right.
I never got to level 50 in the original release, because the upper levels were a slog to go through. It became less and less fun to play a character as it got higher in level. Thus the innumerable alts I had. With the Homecoming version, I’m finding it more fun to play as I go up in level. I’m feeling less of an urge to play my alts now, instead of more.
I got Flaminatrix to 43 last night. I finished up Indigo and Crimson’s arc, dealing with Malta, but I also did a round of Tip missions + Morality mission, and those seemed to generate a lot more XP.
I also added a Reward Merit Vending Machine to the SG base. I plopped it in the middle of the floor just inside the room with the crafting tables, just so it would be immediately visible to people entering the base. **Balanced **can go ahead and relocate it to a better location if desired. I mentioned needing one in there when we were doing the Citadel TF the other day, and somebody (not sure if it was Balanced) asked, “You can do that?”, so I assume the option wasn’t noticed because of the “arcane” theme of the base - the machine is in the “tech” object sections. I’ve noticed there are some objects of one type or the other whose functionality is not duplicated. The “tech” tabs don’t offer the Ouroboros crystal thing, while the arcane tabs don’t appear to have an equivalent to tech’s “Mission Computer”, which allows you to purchase Tip & Morality missions with Merits.
For those of you interested earning influence via the auction house, here is what I’ve been doing.
For 1 reward merit, you can buy 3 enhancement converters. For 10, you can buy 30. Each of these can be auctioned for about 85k influence (prices fluctuate from about 70k to 100k).
Instead of selling the converters, you can use them. Get a yellow invention recipe, either a drop you received, or bought for less than 10k on the auction house. At a workbench, create the enhancement. If you don’t have all the ingredients, buy from the auction house for about 1k each. You now have a yellow enhancement. You can check its selling price on the auction house, but it’s probably not very high.
Open up the conversion window from the enhancement tab. Drag the enhancement to the input (top) box. Click so that you’re converting to the same type. It will cost 2 enhancement converters (if it says 1 or 3, you’re doing it wrong). Click convert–this will turn your yellow enhancement into another enhancement. If you’re not unlucky, it will be an orange enhancement. If it’s still yellow, try again.
Check the auction price of your new orange enhancement. If it’s selling for 1M or more, then sell it. Otherwise, convert it again. Set the converter so it costs 1 convert (not 2 nor 3). You will convert it to another orange enhancement. Re-evaluate price, and so on.
You can also craft orange enhancements directly, if you got the recipe as a drop. (Evaluate price and crafting costs if you buy a recipe.)
If you run out of enhancement converters, buy more from the merit vendor or the auction house.
With starting capital of 90 enhancement converters and several million influence, I’ve made well over 100M doing this. It’s not a fast method, unless you really underprice your auctions, but it’s worthwhile trade of your time for other players’ influence.
Another tip: when you sell a yellow or orange invention enhancement (or recipe) on the auction house, no matter what level it is, players can buy it at any level. That is, if you craft a level 37 enhancement and put it up for sale, it could be bought at any valid level (often 30-50). You can change the level of your own enhancement by putting it up for sale and then buying it at the level you want.
But, you do not want to buy a yellow or orange enhancement at a fixed level. Instead, you want to buy them as “attuned”. That means the enhancement’s level floats to always match your level (even when sidekicked or exemplared). This is very useful! If you buy a yellow or orange enhancement, always buy an attuned one, for maximum utility.
That’s great info, Pleonast - how do you buy them as attuned, though?
In the auction house interface in the upper left corner, under Enhancements, there’s a subcategory of Attuned. It’s then sorted by type of enhancement and then by set.
And to make sure you can rebuy your own, I assume you just want to slam a high price on it?
Maybe, but I think not. This part I’m not clear on. I’d recommend asking in the Help channel.
But let me think through it. Let’s say the going price is 1M. First, you put your enhancement up for sale at 10M. Then, you put in a buy order for the same enhancement, but attuned, for 10M. What I think happens is you’ll buy the enhancement for 10M that has the lowest asking price. That is, not yours. So you’ll be out 10M, still have your enhancement on the auction house, plus the one you just bought at an inflated price.
Let’s try the other way. First, you put in a buy order at 1k. Then you put your enhancement up for sale at 1k. I’m not sure, but I think whoever has the highest buy order will get it, for the price they bid. So you’ll have about 1M from selling your enhancement, but no enhancement yourself.
So I think it’s best to buy and sell near the going price.
Just buy and sell for the going price. The one you buy might or might not be your own, but if it’s the going price, yours will sell relatively quickly, too. Certainly don’t set an inflated price in an effort to get your own, because even if it works, you’ll end up paying inflated auction fees.
And speaking of base items, I notice that we have an empty teleporter, but do not have any teleporter to any echo zone, nor to Praetoria proper (Nova Praetoria, Imperial City, Neutropolis). How does one set those up?
Can you teleport directly to Echo Zones?
There are beacons for a couple of them in the base-building tools. Echo: Galaxy City, and another I can’t recall.
The other beacon is likely for the original Dark Astoria.
Well, in that case, someone needs to be in supergroup mode and collect all the exploration badges for a given zone, to make the beacon available.