Just curious what some of you higher ranks thought was a good rank to npc at. I know the obvious after you get your 4 mark 3 doms, but is there any real level you should be shooting for or avoiding?

After rank 150-200, when you can get your artifact production high enough to stop your ship getting too weak from ranking. Getting your 4 Mk3 Dominion Cannons is a ood benchmark, unless you buy them as soon as you hit rank 100.

ok, thanks for the advise blue.... guess i will try and unlock one of the races then till i get closer to that mark. not quite 100 yet but got all my yellow and red badge items out of the way. and could not decide what path i was gonna take. now I know lol

Bluecifer has the right idea.
Save all your energy cubes and tri emblems

you sure you got all badge items? make math on them, collect all bedges needed for all upgrades (even tho you dot have medal points for them) once you get those medal points later (very later) it will 4-5x harder to get them so use your low rank advantage and get as many of those PvP badge mods as you can

I would suggest that you start npcing after you get all of your battle market artifacts. (Dominion cannon mark III x4, protean armory x3, cipherbot x3, decryption quad frame x2, bm50 convoy shuttle x3) By then, your ship will hopefully be too powerful to be bothered by most players, so you can focus on npcs. Also, most of the best npcs cannot be fought until higher ranks, so killing them before hand is practically pointless.

If you wait too long to NPC you miss out on a lot. I'd say start NPCing around 130, you can start getting the good NPCs for giving you free stuff. Around that point you can get Drannik Power Cores, Dark Ring Thrusters, Lazuli Mind Controllers, Sha'din AI Cores and all sorts of fancy stuff that is far easier to get than the Battle Market items. Plus, NPCing, if your ship has the damage, is the fastest leveling method it the game.