What to do with Marks?

[Gabriel980]

Hi,

I am still around lvl 50, but so far I have been hoarding Marks without using them. With very few exceptions, I can easily get items available in the skirmish camps during questing, including better gear. What is the best use of Marks? Do they become more useful at higher levels?

TIA

[Brandon_Blackbird]

I pretty much use mine exclusively to level up my soldiers, and to buy reputation acceleration tomes.

[Letter142]

When leveling, Marks are generally best spent on Reputation Tomes and Items (both for your own use and for selling to make gold), your Skirmish Soldier (but only if you are doing Skirmishes, as the Marks cost of leveling your Soldier decreases as you level), and cosmetic items. They can also be useful at around level 50 if you want to buy the class quest items instead of doing the instances or searching for a seller.

When at cap, Marks are generally best used to buy Scrolls of Empowerment for your Legendary Items.

Note that at cap, you can earn marks twice as fast as when leveling, so saving is good, but not essential.

[DeadlyGazebo]

1) Level up your skirmish soldier if you like skirmishing. If you leave the guy too far behind you, skirmishing will eventually get much harder, since he won't be helping. There are points in the moria and mirkwood epics that require running skirmishes, so it will help if your skirmish guy isn't useless.

2) Cosmetic items. If you like to look good, the skirmish camps are a good source of stuff. (Some people care, some don't.)

3) As another poster mentioned, the rep acceleration tomes are often a good investment for certain factions that are hard to get rep with (several of the level cap factions are obnoxious and require grinding away at repeating quests to hit kindred; you can dramatically speed up the grind if you put even a few marks into rep accelerators). At your level, this may not matter as much; it sounds like you are probably about to go into moria, and most people have no problem hitting kindred with moria... but if you feel like going back to rep-grind any low level factions for the turbine points on your character, a few marks will save you some time.

4) If you do feel like crafting items, shards plus one-shot crafting recipies are actually going to be noticeably better than questing gear from solo quests. At level 50, the beryl shard stuff is excellent. So is the Carn Dum/Urugarth armor, if you get a group together to run that, however, so maybe you feel like questing

[Vilan]

I've been using marks and medallions to buy emerald shards to sell and then buying stat tomes. So I'm kinda using marks to get stat tomes. But mostly I just use them to level my soldier.

[Gabriel980]

So far I didn't feel much need for reputation items, but it's something to keep in mind. Shards for crafting or earning money may be useful! Cosmetics and quest items are interesting as well.

Actually, my marks are from hobbit presents and deeds, as I haven't been doing skirmishes at all. You see, why do skirmishes to earn marks if I didn't know what to do with them? My impression was that I would do better questing instead of doing skirmishes.

[HaleElven]

why do skirmishes to earn marks if I didn't know what to do with them? My impression was that I would do better questing instead of doing skirmishes.

I'd agree with that, but if you're following the Epic quest into Volume 2, seeing as you are lvl 50, eventually you're going to have to do some skirmishes in Moria and Mirkwood, and in Angmar for Volume 3.

[YamydeAragon]

So far I didn't feel much need for reputation items, but it's something to keep in mind. Shards for crafting or earning money may be useful! Cosmetics and quest items are interesting as well.

Actually, my marks are from hobbit presents and deeds, as I haven't been doing skirmishes at all. You see, why do skirmishes to earn marks if I didn't know what to do with them? My impression was that I would do better questing instead of doing skirmishes.

Regular game money (copper, silver, gold) are too easy to earn in game. Skirmish marks, medallions & seals are significantly harder to get. It is a bad business to trade marks for money because you will be loosing lot of marks in the exchange. Shards drop frequent enough from craft farming & monster kills. Now the reputation accelerators, specially for Central Gondor quest pack are a bless, but the other areas are too easy to grind the reputation, as it is atm. Scrolls of empowerment for level 100 legendary weapons are a must have & they are insanely expensive & hard to get by other means so that is a good use of marks. The cosmetics are pretty cheap so you will not loose a lot for a bit of fluff occasionally.

[Vilan]

Scrolls of empowerment are not must-haves. I'm not sure that I have ever purchased one. Outside of certain difficult instances (of which there are few these days) there is no need for maxed out legendary items. Even there, I've beaten plenty of T2C content without them. Just my viewpoint.

[Anavalar]

Shards drop frequent enough from craft farming & monster kills. Now the reputation accelerators, specially for Central Gondor quest pack are a bless, but the other areas are too easy to grind the reputation, as it is atm.

Guess that depends on whether your game style favors Mark accumulation or shard accumulation. I've got about 80,000 marks about 8,000 medallions, 4 seals and only 2 shards with 2 alts heading towards cap that will need around 12 shards to get them geared up for lvl 100. I sure am not seeing mobs or nodes drop emerald shards and I spend more time than most harvesting nodes.

[Brinswith]

I traded all of mine for Stephens and Andrews .....

Seriously though with Marks I tend to use save them for new inevitable rep grinds. Whenever a new faction comes along I mass buy the small rep items.

[Marxlne]

Be advised that if you plan to max out your Skirmish soldier and Legendary Items you're gonna need tons of Marks & Meds.
To max out Skirmish Soldier (level 50) you need approximately 100 000 Marks
To max out your LI's legacies, you're gonna need 15-20 Anfalas Scrolls of Empowerement. For each legendary item! One scrolls costs you 3782 Marks & 586 Meds, so you can do the math

[Radbug]

Rep accelerators (must haves to cut the more egregious grinds)
Cosmetics when I take the fancy
Scrolls of Empowerment/Delving (most are spent here)
The consumable you need to make the good relics. Book of ME 5 or whatever it is.
Level 75 armour for alts because I like an indulgence once in a while.

Can't think of anything else I spend them on TBH.

[Urwendil]

I find myself spending a lot on IXP pills to upgrade alts' LIs. Need more raiding/BBing...

[Andilos]

I traded all of mine for Stephens and Andrews .....

Seriously though with Marks I tend to use save them for new inevitable rep grinds. Whenever a new faction comes along I mass buy the small rep items.

As long as you never trade this mark for anything

But i use marks for legendary scrolls, sometimes for shards for crafting too.