A player’s guide to going from 40k at lvl 35 to 30kk at lvl 40
I thought I would write a few helpful hints to new players / players wanted a hint to make a little money grow. See if it can help you 8)
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By PoulKrebs
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Often I see new people write in this forum how to make money in this game. The most given advice is "playing" the market.
While this is true, is doesn’t really help them all that much. The market is definitely the easiest way to make money in this game, but to a person just arriving in the game, it can seem confusing and overwhelming.
I recently came back to the game from being away a few months and I picked up my little dwarf. By that time she was an artisan lvl 33 with just 40k in adena plus some equipment and mats/recipes gathered the first levels.
I needed c grade and really wanted a pole and some good heavy armor.
After scouting the marked the price for top c pole with top jewels and armor was 30kk+. What to do, what to do.
This would be the normal situation for a newcomer to the game. Not top equipment and next to no adena in my inventory.
Ideas from this guide can be applied earlier in the game to acquiring d grade, and is not specifically targeted towards dwarves (except the crystallization and shots-making of course :p )
This will not be an exact point to point guide telling what to buy, when to buy it and at what prices, but it will be a detailed explanation to how I went from the 40k and up to 30 million adena in just around a week.
First a few general pointers.
1. Forget about getting rich overnight. To make
money takes time, and effort.
2. Put up shop all the time, and leave it overnight.
3. Spend a lot of time learning the prices for stuff.
4. Do NOT try overpricing your items by huge
amounts, hoping a sucker falls for it.
5. DO NOT buy weapons and try to enchant
them to make a quick profit.
6. Find out which items sell, and which ones don’t
7. Shop placement ( especially in dion ) is important.
1. As I said, you wont make the money overnight. To earn money playing the market you have to build some capital. The cumulated profit you make on stuff you buy and resell will give you the extra capital, so that you can buy more expensive items, which you can resell with a higher profit.
2. The more time your shop is up, the quicker you will get your items sold, and seeing as you want more money, it should be a given to be open as much time as possible.
3. There are several ways to learn the right pricing of items. The easiest is to run around Dion, Giran, and Aden (depending of your earnings to this point) and check the prices several times each day.
4. The reasoning behind it would be “But I will make a lot of money when the sucker buys it” and that is indeed true, but if you apply this strategy you risk having the item in your shop for a very long time, waiting for the sucker. Money tied up in items won’t help you gaining more money. Instead you should learn the price-range that the item is in and price it in the higher area, but lower than the top price. That way you’ll quickly sell the item, make a profit and have more money to invest.
5. Again, this is a fool’s way of doing it. The profit to a new player can be huge, but you run a HUGE risk of loosing all (or most) of your hard earned money. Do NOT try this.
6. The easiest way is to look around town and see what items are hugely represented. If there are a lot of the items, there is a tendency that they also sell in high numbers.
7. Especially in dion where you compete with a lot of people who are selling the same stuff as you, at around the same prices, think about where you put up your shop. People are generally lazy, so they want to run as little as possible. If they find your shop immediately, there is a higher chance they buy from you.
Then a few specific pointers
• Contrary to what some people think, the d grade shot market is not dead at all. From the new c5 addition to the game many clans are making new chars which they use to gain points from levelling them to 40 in their academy. This means that a lot of people are in d grade.
The current price range for shots is 12-13 adena at the minimum. ( check shops in dion to see current price range ) If you price them in this range you won’t be able to keep up. They will often be sold as soon as you put them for sale.
• Buy enchant-scrolls in bulks. People tend to be willing to go low in price, if you promise to take all of them of their hands.
• Low grade d items are your friend. The following is a short example of a crystallization table with what prices you should look for.
Item crystals 600a 550a 500a
Aspis 63 37K 34K 31K
Assault Boots 177 106K 97K 88K
Black Pearl Ring 77 46K 42K 38K
Complete lists can be found on other fansites, but info on crystal count on every item can be found on this site, so you can easily make it yourself.
Especially when you are in the low millions d grade is your friend. Try shouting often in dion. Shout something like "!WTB all low and mid d grade items".
Some people will just npc-shop their low drops for a little adena so actually you do both them and yourself a favour. They get a little more money, and you get some cheap crystals.
Use these crystals to make very cheap shots which you can sell at regular prices for an extra bonus income.
While in shop mode you should continuously make shots. (drag the craft shots icon to your hotbar).
Especially while your business is concentrated around dion. D grade shots should be sold there.
Apart from all these preliminary advices, here is how I did.
Right of the bat I didn’t concentrate much upon moneymaking, so I gained a few extra levels. When I got around lvl. 38-39 I though that I would let my dwarf be self-sufficient so I would start playing the market.
I looked through my warehouse and found the few mats and extra recipes I had.
The recipes I had in surplus were divided into two groups. The useless and the useful.
To a new person this wont be obvious, but if you look around town you will see sellers of recipes. If you check their shops you will see that it’s often the same recipes that are sold. The recipes are recipes for shots, mats and a few d grade items. Mostly brigadine recipes.
Many of these recipes sell for around 50k but in Gludio ( which is a close run from dion ) and dion you can quickly find someone selling recipes for much less. Often all the way down to 10k for the same recipes, especially the ones for mats.
Shots recipes tend to stay around the 50k mark. This was my first step to my money.
Keep looking for cheap recipes and sell them, but set price a bit LOWER than the 50k. Buy them at around 10-20k and sell for 40-45k.
As mentioned earlier, one thing you should focus on is where you place your store. Next to the gatekeeper is the place I used mostly.
That way people teleporting in, looking for something, find it in your shop right away.
When you have gotten a little starting capital together (and the recipe for d shots if you didn’t have it already) begin looking for d grade offers. Make a shout every once in a while, and check the shops in town.
Compare the pc shop-prices with the crystallization table and see if you can find a good offer.
If people respond to your shouts try buying for a good crystal value. As cheap as possible, but don’t be an [923]. Let them get a little something out of it, while still making a good deal.
Also make it a habit of asking people if they have some key mats for stuff that they could throw in the deal. If they have, and you can find the recipe (or already have it) that will give you extremely cheap crystals/shots.
When you begin to accumulate some money, expand your business to ead´s.
Make shouts that you want to buy bulks of ead´s. People are often willing to sell them at 50k or even lower, if you buy a lot of them. Right now the average price on my server is 70k for them. I sold them all for 65k and always quickly sold out, when I found them.
If you find 10, and sell them with of profit of 15k, that’s 150k in pure profit right there. Remember it all adds up.
Especially ead´s can be found in big bulks from people doing raids. Some bosses drop high amounts of them and many low level raid-parties have the loot distribution on random sometimes giving one person a lot of scrolls.
Again, remember shots-crafting while sitting in shop. You don’t have to spend all your time sitting watching your mp meter rise, just make a habit of creating shots every time you pass your computer. Quickly you will get a lot of shots you can sell for good profit.
The next items I began to concentrate on were brigadine armors specifically. Often I could find a helmet for around 1.8 – 1.9 kk or top bottom cheap. Top and bottom I could sell for around 400k for the top and 300 for the bottom.
I don’t remember the price in Giran, where you can actually buy it in the armor shop, but its lower I think.
Somehow most people are either lazy or unaware. The helmet will most likely require most – if not all your acquired cash at this point, so only buy it if you find a really good offer.
From this I expanded to ewd´s, eac´s and ewc´s.
These sell for 500k, 150k and 1k respectively. By now I began to progress to Giran where I had much less trouble selling c grade enchant scrolls.
Every once in a while someone empties the market for enchant weapon scrolls. This is because they use the following strategy to their enchant attempts.
1. Get a lot of weapons
2. Get a lot of scrolls
3. enchant all to + 3 safely
4. start making all +4
5. try making the survivors +5
6. continue until they are satisfied with the result
(some people just continue until only one weapon is left at the highest possible enchantment they could reach this attempt)
When someone is doing this they buy all the scrolls they can find. All my ewc´s I sold for 1.050kk.
One night there was a shop in dion selling them for 880k. I bought all I could afford, went to giran. Set up shop at 1.050kk. Sold in a few hours. Went to dion. Bought more. Back to Giran. Rinse and repeat.
At this point I was up to 6-7 million I think. This was after 3 or 4 days. I was lucky finding some great offers from time to time, but even if you progress slower than I did, don’t worry. Just have patience and remember your goal.
Also at this point you can look into buying and selling top d weapons. They can often be sold with a couple of hundred k in profit each one, if you find them at a good price.
The market for them is mostly in dion, so at this time you spend a lot of time porting / running back and forth between these two towns. Everything d should be sold in dion, and everything above should be sold in Giran.
When you get above the 10kk mark you should start concentrating on Giran only. At this point you can experiment with finding cheap prices on higher level mats, stones of purity, scrolls and weapons ect. For instance, I found someone selling a homunkulus +5 acumen for 12.5kk (c grade mage user sword, very popular) which I picked up right away and resold that night for 20kk+
This put me around the 30kk I needed for my C grade equipment which was my goal. But by now I was hooked on playing the marked and make more money, so my next goal is the 100kk mark.
I will update this to let you know how my market endeavours went 8)
I hope that a few of these experiences can be helpful for especially new players.
PoulKrebs / HildaHeick
Sincerily, the time you spend to write this will help lots of new and old users of this game!!! I'm 2 years old player in this game (5 months in official) and really its a very useful guide for me. Thanks and continue working ^^ (i hope the new guide to B and A grade items hehe)
As a friend off PoulKrebs, I promissed to make comment on this post, which I told him I would do after trying out his idea......
A bit about my self: I have been playing this game for over 2 years now and has problem making money like everyone else. I started PoulK. idea with 7kk on hand and tryed it out for a few days now.
With the amount of money I had allready, I thaught starting in Giran with C-grade would be best. But I soon found out as new to this idea Giran can be canna confusin with all it's privet shop's, so I soon moved to Dion where there are less shop's and you can better overwiew. I started out with buying cheap D-grade and then crafting DSS/DBSpS (have a dwarf lvl 41), which on till now have showed to be good money - so I can only say the idea works, but as new to it, it is good to start in Dion and with D-grade untill you learn the overall idea!
Just a little update. Im in the process of both levelling a bit and experimenting with consumables, aa and tax rates and when I feel like having something to contribute, ill make another real update to my thread. Earlier I made these sheets to d grade shots, so thought that I might as well share them with the public. If you can use them, great, if not, 8) no matter
Below are calculations on 15600 d-shots(100 d crystals and 300 soul ore).
Soulshot d grade:
Price of soul ore and spirit ore is affected by the regions current tax rate, but giran sell them the cheapest. Here they cost 292 for soulore and 468 for spirit ore.
The different ore prices are taken from ingame npc shops in different parts of the world.
As you can see in my calculations there are indeed money to be made.
When focusing specifically on shots, the extra travel expense to go places with cheap soul-ore can be well worth your while. Of course its cheaper to run, but you will still make a profit without obsessing about every single expense.
From c5 there are now certain times in the day when travel-expenses have been lowered. Use this when getting your soul ore. And buy large quantities every time to minimize travelling expenses.
Especially with d grade it is very easy to get d crystals. Most shops carry d grade items so there is an infinite amount of crystals for your disposal.
Again d grade equipment prices vary from town to town due to taxes. Without having undergone extensive calculations I have found that the more expensive the item is, the less adena is payed pr crystal. Brigadie tunic sells for something like 350k in giran right now, which gives a crystal price around 644 adena. This is fine if you low on crystals. Especially because youre there anyway to get soul ore ;-)
edit - sorry about all the --- in the table, but it was the best way I could find to make it look semi-properly as I wanted 8)
I would also like to open up people to the AA market - there is a huge amount of money to be made there, i regularly go from 10m to 100m every couple weeks. People need items that are easily available through the MERCHANT of mammon (to emphasize merchant, not blacksmith :P), and most are completely ignorant of what it costs to get these items. Everything from swift attacks, magic haste, brez's, and almost ALL enchant scrolls (not to mention dyes) are available through the merchant, and all are resellable. As a new-comer with a lower end capital to work with, try reselling the pots. Go for swift attacks, magic hastes, maybe some greater heals - they don't take much investment, and if you set up next to a gatekeeper, people will always buy em. Bsoe's would seem like a good idea, but stay away from them - all the large pvping clans that want them usually have clan halls - which sell them cheaper than you can afford to. As you move up in money, try moving out to enchant scrolls. calculate the exact amount you are buying them for, and figure out what you're selling for. I put it in terms of AA usually. I'll buy seal stones at as low as i can get them, right now the market is high on my server so its about 3:1 AA:Adena, and then i price my items usually about 1a higher...say 4:1 prices. this almost always sells, and you can usually squeeze a bit more out of em. Blank scrolls factor into the equation for EA's and EW's, but figure out your cost, and price to make a decent profit - if you buy at roughly 2m and sell at 3m for say EAA's, then you make 50% profit. those numbers add up WAY fast. To give you an idea, ATM i'm buying at roughly 3a, and selling at 5a. you do the math, its almost doubling profit. you've all done doubling problems, no? the more money you have, the faster you make more. When i make a big purchase, i always try to leave myself with roughly ten mil or so, if you keep repeating the process each week, you can make it to 50+ m in a few weeks. Good luck friends :)
If you have two accounts, you can have someone in giran and use the racetrack to make crystals and buy the soul/spirit ore. also you can buy basic mats in other towns. It might be a good idea for you to figure out what is the cheapest way to make D,C,B crystals. In case you don't know, have a set of robes that increases your dwarfs MP for crafting.
Whatever that chart was...... it pked my eyes, btw.
lol, ye, charts dont do well in strict txt-form.. in here anyway.. and the next update is full of them 8/ (almost finished btw).. Im looking into putting all this up in html instead, so it will be much easier on the eyes 8)
A quick explanation to the table.
Crystal-price = price for crystals used in the craft
Soulore = price for soulore used in the craft
Total-cost = the two above added up
Price-pr.-shot = chosen price charged pr shot
Sold-for = Total earnings from sale
Profit = Earnings - expenses
but as I said, dont give it much thought.
I will collect these posts, and the stuff meant for the following in some sort of html soon, which makes the whole thing much easier to watch without getting your eyes pk´ed ;-)
It is just amazing how you say you made 30kk in the time it took you to make 5 levels. I'm glad you didnt list 150 items at 200,000 profit. if you did that once a day, 5 levels in 150 days...
I find information like brigadine gaiters gives the best d crystal price....or excellent leather gloves is close....if you don't need so many. You should try to figure out how to cheaply make C crystals and B crystals. and, i hope you try to sell shots for the most you can. making 1 adena per shot makes me ill. having to make 100,000,000 shots to buy an a grade helmet makes me ill. People HAVE to play with shots. they will pay whatever it costs, rather than do without.
those you listed are all good ways to make money. you should do all of those...all the time...and there are a few other ways to make money. with some hard work and knowledge, makes the idea of cheating to get adena seem silly. Keep trading aggresively, and eventually cheaters adena will just end up in your pocket.
Oh and just in case you are curious.... people in dion don't have any money.... :)
I think this should be stickied or something, because i find one of the biggest problems people have with this game is making money, when really if you follow something like this its not so hard.
As said before, shop location is key. In addition, the shop sign is just as important, if not more so. Be sure that you know what the short names for items are. For example, AA = Ancient Adena. If you set up a sell shop that says Ancient Adena you will miss all of the people that do a /findprivatestore AA. The best way to do it would be to put something like "AA | Ancient Adena | AA". Doing this allows you to catch people using the /findprivatestore function.
When setting up a buy shop, be sure you know what farmers call the items you are buying. Lets say you are buying ALL seal stones. If you set up a shop that says "Seal Stones", you will quickly find out that it doesnt work well. Generally I will set up a Seal Stone shop with the title "| GSS | RSS | BSS |". I have actually totally bought out when a guy next to me was buying for alot higher price.
This thread is very helpful, and others seem to agree too, so I'll sticky it; however, I think the Player Guides forum is in dire need of a little consolidation so guides on specific things are easier to find. I'll be working on doing that over the next week. :)
I do the same thing. I get my crystals cheap (drops from hunting) and it costs me around 8 or 9 to craft. 11 is a good rate, but I usually get bought out within the time it takes my butt to hit the ground.
When I started I learnt the market pretty quick and by the time I was 30 C3 came out.
I started off with the manor system, I thought I'd see what the guy did so bought some seeds with the little money I had and farmed them in catacomb groups (not knowing no one else in pty got drops... but oh well ;) ). Then I went to giran for the first time shouting to sell my 3000 thread that I'd earned, I found a buyer and got a good price by looking in all the shops.
I then had enough to buy myself a sword of revolution cheap off a person's sellshop, which I then upgraded with the AA i'd got whilst hunting. the elven longsword I got for it I sold at a good profit ontop of the market price of AA and the cost of my SOR. This meant I had no weapon, but enough adena to buy new and AA for upgrade and a brig set.
Every day I'd buy a weapon and brig set, upgrade to top D and hunt whilst farming the manor system for the most profitable and sellable seeds for my level. Then at night I'd set up shop in noob areas selling my brig and ELS at a good markup (alot of people don't check giran for brig ;) ).
By 39 I had full top D, a Fullplate set and SLS with focus in my warehouse without any help from others money wise. By 45 I was selling 3-4 top D weapons in a sellshop every night only chosing good sellers following the classes that I saw around (lots of people wanting bonebreakers, ELS and staff of lifes at the time).
By 50 I had all my Bgrd bought, bar the Damascus sword which was rare and expensive. I found a reasonably cheap one and offered a trade of my SLS and adena for it. I then sat in giran shouting and in sellshop untill I got a trade for my damascus at goods priced alot higher than what I'd paid for the sword, let alone the market price.
Trades are a good way of making money if you have the time and market knowledge to get the right deal. Often you can make more money this way as you have to put time into selling and people know that and will often give you more value in items than the adena value of the goods you are selling.
Anyway, after a week orso in giran and 3-4 damascus swords I had a +3 Damascus with focus, full Doom armor, Black ore jewels and enough adena to hunt and farm the manor system with.
Basically if you put time into playing the market, farm the manor system or a place with good drops, you can get as much adena as you'll ever need in this game. Don't buy worthless goods that no one wants.
Another good money makinng tip is to read patchnotes and find out which classes are going to be played and which gear is best for them. Mid C4 I started buying majestic leather armor recepies, which were going cheap as most people were playing FOTM necromancers, I'd read the C5 patchnoted and forums and knew archers were the next big thing. Thus I made a load of majestic leather armors costing 4-5mil per craft and sold them at slightly above the market value of 30mil. Once my first couple were sold I used the money to buy all of the armors in giran which were under 30mil and put them back in shop one at a time for 60mil......
....after while the other shops followed suit and raised the price as the armor was being bought up faster than it could be made. then my 60mil armors started selling and I had a good margin to lower price if needed. After selling 18 sets of armor I had a nice amount of cash to invest in the next project........
..which got cut short when I got drunk and decided to try enchanting all my gear and blew it up and went on a pk spree.
i love the Dss market, it's fun getting EVERY dwarf in town mad at me, just cuz im the good guy selling dss for 11a :p
Have you considered the loss you (and every other dwarf) has? People in one town will buy a more or less specific number of dss, nomatter the price. You might sell your shots before the other dwarves, but in the long run you loose too.
It's exactly the same way oil and other resources are NOT sold in the world market. Check cartel (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cartel) at wiki :)
But you leave out one very important aspect of Lineage 2: reputation.
I'm not talking about /evaluate, or clan points. I'm talking about the value of your name. People see you log in and they know "Oh, hey! There's Gharik! He's got shots at a good price!"
And, assuming you don't have shots in your shop, they might just poke you to see what you do have.
Once they come to think of you, and you start to build name recognition, you can build on it even further until everyone knows to come to you for shots, crafts, or what have you.
Conversely, everyone can come to think poorly of you; you have negative name recognition, and they make sure to stay the hell away from you. Even if you are selling at 11a each, you might be an enemy. They do not want to finance their enemies, so they go spend 12a somewhere else.
Reputation is a precious commodity. Moreso than XP, SP, or adena. Harder to earn, easier to lose.
muuusic. i've been collecting every score i can find, creating hundreds for 200a each and selling for 400a+ more than doubling my money and music is like candy so i get business quite often (more so now that i finally found the comedy theme ^^)
muuusic. i've been collecting every score i can find, creating hundreds for 200a each and selling for 400a+ more than doubling my money and music is like candy so i get business quite often (more so now that i finally found the comedy theme ^^)
hmm... I always throw those things on the ground... or play like 12 of them all at the same time.
i love the Dss market, it's fun getting EVERY dwarf in town mad at me, just cuz im the good guy selling dss for 11a :p
Have you considered the loss you (and every other dwarf) has? People in one town will buy a more or less specific number of dss, nomatter the price. You might sell your shots before the other dwarves, but in the long run you loose too.
It's exactly the same way oil and other resources are NOT sold in the world market. Check cartel (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cartel) at wiki :)
:> Sofia (Teon)
that's over thinking it a bit much, as long as you make a profit, and there are people to buy it (which there always will be, with academy alts for clan points) there's business, which goes to the person selling the lowest.
mind you, i've stopped the Dss business, becuz music is just so much cooler, and at the moment, no competition, being a very small window of opportunity for the lucky like myself ^^
there is only 1 thing i would add to this post. i made a post recently about making money. 2 requirements are needed.
1. LOCATION< LOCATION< LOCATION. be in a place wher demand is high but supply is low.
2. sell things that are consumable.
i make *** because ppl are in a grade the longest. it takes me 1hr every day to make 200,000 *** in giran and sell it in aden for 1mil profit each day. on the weekends i can sell 1mil *** /day all because ppl are to lazy to make em themselves.....
D-crystal price column going down. across the top is the respective DSS prices. The cost column is the cost of crafting 1 batch in this case 156 dss (d-cry price + (312*3)).
The -negative numbers and positive numbers in the table are the actual profit per 1000 DSS sold at that price and using the d-crystal price column.
Sorry it was messy. Honestly seems like you can make more money turning off ss and going around town killing mobs then sitting there crafting DSS because of either d-crystal price inflation or something.
Please feel free to double check the numbers. I was rushed when making it.