A little while ago, a couple friends of mine discovered absolute profit to be obtained from enhancing. It's still kind of a thing right now, but I'll assume that after this post it might not be. I tested it myself, tracked some data and found it to be kind of insane how much silver it was printing. The following will include the how, and the potential why this was possible. None of this has anything to do with market manipulation, and in fact it's a completely legit silver printing method. All of this has to do with Blackstar Armor pieces(not limited to just the Armor slot). 

We were turning a 4 bil an hour spot into around a 20 bil an hour, or more, spot. Approximately 600 bil+-

The method was enhancing Blackstar armor - which is limited in how many you can make, but with enough drop rate that limit is kind of negligible.

The How:

Making Blackstar armor pieces is rather simple after you've completed the questline. It's streamlined for each piece after the quest is completed, for every character on your account. There are, however, two limiting factors

  1. Each character can only make one of each piece(helm, shoe, glove and chest)

  2. Each blackstar requires a Spectre's Energy - an RNG drop.

The first of those factors is a simple fix. You just get a character slot and make a new blackstar at level 20. Once the initial quest is completed, the only hard requirement to do that same piece of gear again is the character being able to turn on all quests - which is limited to level 20. Essentially if you have the items and a level 20, you can make another blackstar gear piece and start enhancing it. My own profit margins to be shown later, with an assumed amount from some friends.

The second factor is a little more tricky. There are a few ways to get Spectres Energy guaranteed for free in this game, and events give them out occasionally, but the bread and butter printing silver method requires going to a single grind zone. This grind zone is Tungrad Ruins. For some unknown reason, getting 3-5 Spectres Energy there is insanely easy. Buff the literally heck out of your drop rate, cap it as much as you can, and start grinding. The Spectres Energy WILL drop - so long as PA hasn't nerfed the drop rate. In an hour I have personally gotten 5, but I've also gotten like 3 or 4 in 15-30 mins before.

Once you have the items, and have crafted the base piece, you simply enhance it to TRI, repair it up and sell it on the market at the highest price you can. The general cost to enhance is about 1 bil to 2 bil, and it sells for almost 6 bil at max. With tax, VP buff and max family fame, you get about 5+ bil return. Subtract the cost of making the piece, including the cost of buying the boss gear to turn into concentrated aura's, the memory fragments, buying the sharps and the concentrated blackstones from the market, you still come out with 3 bil profit usually. More if you don't hit pity on things - which hitting pity is very unlikely. Below is a rough breakdown in a google sheet calculator I made for tracking profits:

The image above is my VERY rough calculator, doing things I set it to do. Essentially, I would track every enhance attempt from base to TRI. Memory fragments would be tracked, totalled and assumed as a specific number for calculation(kind of above market), same with Sharps. Each attempt prior to PRI attempts was valued at a specific Concentrated Blackstone value in the same manner as the sharps and memory fragments. Essentially, and not by much, my total profit amount should be a little more or less than the above.

About the specific pieces themselves: Armor, Gloves and Helm all sold close to cap, while Shoes was hovering around the 3-3.5bil mark. There's potentially a very good reason for it, and some of you reading this might have already guess it. To finish this section off though, these items are PURE profit. The above then values the Spectres Energy at a whopping roughly 3 bil item so long as you make Helms, Armors or Gloves. Which if you got 5 Spectres from an hour or less, that turns those items into 15 bil profit instead of 150 mil from vendors. 

The Potential Why:

My best guess as to why is related to what they've been giving out for free. I'm assuming that people are smart with their Tuvala Fallen God exchange, which would be to grab the boots. The boots are, inherently, the hardest of the 4 pieces of gear to get, so getting a TRI Ator's Shoes for a DEC Tuvala piece is an easy choice. As for the other pieces, my best guess is that people are choosing Blackstar over Caphra Enhancing. As someone that did Caphra Enhancing boss gear to get fallen god, I don't quite get it myself, but again this is my best guess. As for choosing the other slots, The Helm and the Armor are two of the easier pieces to get, but the gloves are ridiculously easy to get - flame-wise. This is only my best guess.. Honestly, I really don't know why people we're buying as much as they have been.

For referrence, two of my friends sold about 70 TRI's each, totalling around 211 bil each assuming you multiply their number by my average Gloves profit. I, as you can see, made about 24b. I was very lax with it, the other two we're very active. We had a few others making them too, making more than me but less than them.

Between 5 of us, we were close to about +-600 bil profit. For me, I didn't do it long, but the others did. The timeframe that these items were made was from around the start of Feb to, well, today, the end of March. 

I know this is the day before April 1st, and I'm all for fooling people, but the market is diluted enough that we've decided to pull out and release these files. This shouldn't be a money maker, especially one that produces more money than the best spots in the game. With the introduction of Edania, some spots have jumped to 4 to 6 bil an hour. With this method, you could grind until you get like 3 Spectres, which could take 15 to 30 mins, then spend the rest of that time creating and enhancing the blackstar gear to TRI and make more money than the people with the best gear in the game grinding for an hour. If the spot makes 3 bil in trash in an hour, then that would be 10.5b in 30 mins assuming you got 3 spectres and then spent 30 mins making TRI blackstars..

All of this is possible because Agris Anvil stacks exists. The above is two of my friends theoretical "If we had to pity the entire way" which is terrible odds, possible, but highly unlikely. Below is one friends Garmoth grind session vs grind sessions at Edania spots:

Spectres valued at 4.5b roughly.

Edit: This is NA only. Idk what anyone else's servers are like. Your market information might vary.

Just did the math on the Full Pity charts and it looks like some of the table numbers are wrong/outdated for the price cap that was hit during that time:

Even at few increments under price cap, it was STILL profitable to pity all the way from Base to TRI.

AW shucks, the jig is up boys. pack up shop til the next one

The natural result of this method being overpowered would not necessarily be to decrease the price of Blackstar, but rather to increase the price of all the component items. It's interesting that this hasn't happened much. Let's say making 3 armor pieces and enhancing to TRI takes 20 minutes. Making around 3 billion an hour is good, but it's not incredibly overpowered, especially considerating how much silver you can make with other activities and how much endgame upgrades cost. Having anything that's competative with grinding is excellent.

I do agree about having competative silver generation methods outside of grinding. Personally I prefer other methods over grinding. I think I'm well over my limit on grinding and I barely grind these days as is. Occasionally things like this will get me out to grind more than I would have in the past half year. I'm all for anything other than grinding being lucrative. 

The only thing is, this one doesn't make sense and it bugs me that it doesn't make sense. It exists right now because someone or some group is buying them. We don't know why, but its happening. We know it's still happening:

That most recent purchase is from about a little over an hour ago before typing this response out. Prices have dropped about 1b, and people are still buying TRI blackstar's. There's more than enough materials on the market to fund the blackstar market into the ground, even if you were to increase the price on things, it would just create an overstock issue that we have already. If we increase the price of the materials used, we will have the same thing that happened everytime they've done this. Normally, if you increase the price, you need to tie it to something people need. If we simply increase the price, the boss gear used to make the aura's will drop to the new minimum and stock will be there. The remnants will be listed at minimum until the flood price is reached and they will then sit there. With the increase in price, the Blackstars themselves will also receive an increase as its now more expensive to make the thing - thus creating the same problem. This is proven by the lifecycle of the game. Everytime something has increased in price related to a piece of gear, everything related to that gear - including the gear itself - has increased. If you tie the materials to something new, the same thing happens except now you have the stock sold out until the general populace has gotten their fill, then the price will drop as supply outdoes demand. This is how bdo works and has worked for 10+ years.. 

These items are only really useful for mid-tier gear. The armor alone is two tiers below max tier, so its not even worth buying unless you're trying to get into fallen god.. Simply buying 4 of these to click to tet to click for pen would lead you into the "I should have just bought the fallen god piece.." territory. I guess my only takeaway here is the why. I truly wish I knew why people we're buying TRI blackstar gear.. I'm also assuming here that due to this post, and the reddit post that links here, that those people buying the gear are making more money now. Either that, or they're getting more clicks for tet because lower tri cost??? 

The machinations of these TRI buyers eludes me to no end..

I'm not talking about PA increasing the maximum price of items, but rather that you would expect players to buy out stuff (like remnants for example, but also memory fragments), thus increasing the price of those items by having demand exceed supply. However, this doesn't seem to be happening, which is interesting. As to why people are buying them, it could be because people are not interested in taking the time to enhance the items, and TET/PEN versions are not being listed on the market.

i clicked for the funny title, but the rest was disappointing