f13.net

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=CFFS3ndWSJ4

So we're getting some idea of what classes/role we're going to jump into. What are people thinking as far as crafts go? Might help some of the undecideds pick something we're lacking.

I'm going BH Powertech, so Armormech with Scavenging and Underworld Trading; really fits the Mandalorian lore, being an armor-centric folk.

I keep hearing about this spice stuff... I was really hoping to RP a drug addicted sith juggernuts.

But I have no clue. I have never been into crafting early on in any game. I get into it once I burn out of leveling. However, telling your bitches to go do stuff and make me stuff might get me involved earlier. I was reading up on cybertech, but really, all i think about when I hear that is cybersex, then horrible visions of goldshire inn come back to me. I will definitely go with underworld for the companion gift thing... Vette better put out at some point.

I'm leaning towards artifice with my inquisitor, with archaeology and treasure hunting.  I assume that lightsaber and armor mod stuff will be useful no matter what AC I go with. But Biochem also sounds interesting.  

Artifice, Archaeology and Treasure Hunting. Sorely tempted to take Slicing instead of TH because TH blows nuts, but it'll probably be nerfed even more before launch. The wife and I will both be playing Sith so I imagine she'll take Synthweaving and whatever goes with it

Biochem is one of those unsung professions that a lot of people are going to overlook until the raiding game starts getting a bit more robust. The stims and medpacs they make are extremely good, but you will almost certainly not use them often solo; I had to force myself to use them on the character I made with Biochem. Implants are pretty nice, though they account for a low overall amount of your stats from gear.

I get hooked on crafting, but I haven't been in the Beta so I really don't know anything about it yet. I took a look at the charts Lamaros linked to and went  :uhrr:.

My current plan for my first run is a Pureblood Warrior/Juggernaught with Vette the ranged DPS machine standing behind me, so I'll want something to play in to that. Suggestions are welcome.

I constantly used the Medpack that heals both me and my companion while leveling up.

But yea, Biochem is the Alchemy of SWTOR, I full intend to fund my VIP pass via selling adrenals to raiders  :grin:

My IA will probably either be the armswhosit (the gun making one) or biochem, with the support thingies that go with them respectively.

They all looked fun.  I usually do armorcraft on my tanks, then find that there's a billion people doing it because it's one of the "Sexy" tradeskills.

I'm leaning towards something more esoteric this time.. Cybertech probably.

Counsler(Shadow - Tank) - Sythweaving & Archeology & Underworld Trading

Unless something changes, I haven't tried Trooper/BH yet but I know I didn't like Smuggler/IA at all and I don't want to play anything that can heal since that's pretty much all I ever did in WoW and want something new.

Slice (as in Slicing) not Spice. Its like hacking. Used to open boxes in the world. Makes amazing money, or so I have been told.

Biochem has Artifact level stims that have unlimited usage.  That's kind of neat.

No, I actually meant spice.
Actually my BH test guy had slicing and scavenging - which is actually useful in dungeons (I find that pretty cool btw - that crafting skills are used outside of just crafting).

I am probably going with Bioanalysis, Scavenging and maybe Slicing and try to sell those resources to make some cash.

Do "resource nodes" only show up when you have the corresponding gathering skill ? I saw lots of Archeology nodes during the weekend but not one slicing thingy.

They're around even when you don't have it, I saw some.

You can see any node in the world, but the mini map won't highlight them unless you have the gathering profession for them. They are also kinda glowy if you have the profession, so they stand out more.

Slicing nodes are all the little computers and lockboxes you randomly find in the jungle  :why_so_serious:

Can't say I noticed a single one  on the first or second Sith planet

You won't find any gathering nodes on the 1-10 noob planets. Slicing is the most popular profession because of all the free money it generates so people may just be getting them before you see them. Or you may be oblivious, or both!

There are some salvage ones around I think.

It may depend on how crowded your server is.  I found at least 4 lockboxes on my Jedi and another 2-3 on my BH.  They're long, low and have that blue glow that quest objects do.  They're typically surrounded by a few "strong" mobs or near an Elite.    Each one in the newb zones had a bunch of cash and a green item.

Maybe not for slicing, but lots of biochem and scavenging stuff is available on noob planets. On Hutta, once I had Mako trailing along I jumped from 5 to 50 scavenging in 30 minutes just from all the droid trash people left behind.

Based on current requirements:

Sorcerer - Artifice, Archaelogy, and Treasure Hunting
Warrior - Synthweaving, Archaelogy, and Underworld Trading
Agent - Droid, Scavenging, Investigation
BH - Arms or Armor, Scavenging, Diplomacy

The Agent and BH may be tweaked a little.  I'm likely to substitute one of the duplicate gathering professions for slicing.  I expect Artifice and Synthweaving to be my main pursuits though.

Slicing really is a crazy amount of money if you don't want to really craft, by the by. My slicer had twice the cash on hand by 25 as my non slicer.

In my limited beta, slicing missions didn't pay well.  The money was in slicing open the chests.

My BH will probably go Armstech/Scavenging/Slicing. 

I did not beta enough to get to crafting. My guess is that I'll go with what is most relevant for an Inquisitor.

Or, apparently, slicing. Maybe biotech.

Fuck, I have no idea.

I hate crafting, but this whole 'send someone off to do it for you' thing got me playing around with it to some extent.

I think I'll probably go Artificer. Archeology + Treasure Hunting on my Sith Warrior and maybe Armstech and the relevant other 2 with my BH.

That said, there do seem to be some skills which are independently useful, such as investigation for the schematics, slicing for the cash, diplomacy for light/dark side points - I might just mix and match to make some money.

Can I go Cybertech/Underworld/Treasure Hunting and craft effectively, or do you pretty much need to take the correct gathering/mission/crafting skill combos? 

If you pick the crafting/gathering skill, you can make any green item in the list, and learn blue+ recipies.

The suggested mission skill is what gives you the appropriate mats to make the blue+ stuff.

So you can kind of craft (and buy some stuff if you need it) with craft+gather and a wildcard not suggested.


Cyber/Underworld/Treasure is a craft and two mission skills, so you'd never have mats for the cybertech stuff.


I think you could go slicing/two mission skills to just auction house blue+ mats to people, but I don't think you can effectively go crafting/two mission skills.

If you change your mind on a crafting choice, can you ditch it and switch to a different one?  Starting over from 1 of course.

If nothing else, take gathering skills and send some materials to those of us who love it.  I'll happily use it to skill up and research schematics so I can make things for guild members.
Yes.  It's a button press.  Learning the skills are free, too.

I'm not sure if you keep learned schematics should you swap back to something you once knew and dropped.  Maybe I'll try that out if I bother leveling a character of the next two weeks.

Yea it's easy, you just click the little 'X' next to the craft in the crew window. Then it goes "Are you SURE you want to remove this craft and lose all progress in it?" and you Y E S and done!

Right, I'll try and give crafting a fair shake first, but if I end up getting bored, I'll definitely take at least one gathering skill so I can send mats on.

If you drop a skill you have raised do you start from one again if you start it back up?

So would it make sense to just take slicing while leveling and then switch to something else at max level?

You have to type "Yes, I accept" exactly right, I hear.

Fuck, it asked the companion.

Yes, and all learned schematics are gone and you have to buy them again.

So... not the best thing to do when you have a schematic book full of rare schematics you got from the AH.

Potentially.  I love crafting as I level, but if you are just interested in end results then all gathering skills while leveling is certainly reasonable.

That also means you'd have an assortment of materials when you get there, stuff for trade, and lots of credits along the way.  I'll be quite poor with all the crafting and reverse engineering I'll do.

So I took Synthweaving/Arch/Slicing.  I can make light armor but if I reverse engineer I discover blue recipies.  Unfortunately, I need Underworld Trading to craft the item required to make the blue recipie. 

It seems crafters have that choice; take the three skills that work well together or take a gathering and a crafting and a third, seperate skill.  The downside to the second choice is you'll have to buy your special item off the AH and that could be expensive. 

Or take three gathering skills and sell on the AH.

As an aside, Slicing missions still pays peanuts.  But I was a a very low level so maybe the range between the costs of the mission and the actual reward grows as you gain in skill.

They've been continuously reducing the immediate payout with slicing.  If you're patient though, you can sell found items on the galactic market, potentially making a lot more out of it.

Ah, I see.  I have never gotten items from slicing, just briefcases of cash.

If I decide to go Slicing, Treasure Hunting, and Underground Trading, can I give the advanced components/schematics/whatever I get from the misison skills to other people to make my shit for me?  In other words, are they bind on equip or whatever the equivalent is?  Also being able to sell stuff from these skills would be good too, but I don't really understand exactly how the mission skills work in relation to the greater crafting system at the moment.

Most everything should be tradeable, yes.

There's a bunch of purple items that are bind on pickup for each craft, so you'd only be unable to use those.  It looked like Biochem had the largest list, but that's primarily because it has to offer something for each class and spec.

Really, really digging the crafting and reverse engineering.  I managed to learn a purple quality green lightsaber crystal.  So even lower tier resources aren't useless if you like knowing as many schematics as possible.

For what it's worth, it's really easy to level up a gather/mission craft once you hit 50 and have 5 spare companions to constantly send out. Costs a little cash but you have no shortage of that at 50 either.

It is entirely too easy to make yourself broke because of crafting in the early levels.  I was sending guys on treasure hunting missions (lockbox only) and hitting up every archaeology node I could fine.  I'm level 19 with less than 500 creds to my name.

Yeah, but the main point of crafting to me is using the stuff I craft.

That girl's a bum!

After broking myself in the first weekend, last weekend I took it way more casual and didn't have much of a credit crunch. The UT missions also seemed a lot cheaper than the Arch and Slicing missions, but just going off memory on that. Also had slicing the first weekend, but spent like crazy because...END OF THE WORLD, MAN.

I was doing fine credit-wise last beta weekend, until I tried to preview a piece of 24k armor from the vendor and forgot which hold key to use.  :oh_i_see:

I can do some limited non-force armor (Armormech) for the Hutta folks. I have a lvl 9 PURPZ belt recipe, maybe enough mats for one or two more. It's not great, but what the heck. Also a couple lowbie (11-15) blues from reverse engineering.

Mostly heavy armor, until I take some time to mess with the medium stuff. I only have vendor recipes for medium.

Do not forget that Underworld Trading hands out orange recipes randomly now. It's actually worth keeping one of your minions out going random underworld missions as often as possible. I picked up a sith inquisitor robe pants slot item that I can't use (synthweaving), and an agent/warrior only medium chest piece.

I took up Biochem, Bio-analysis and Diplomacy. 

Last night I finally discovered a purple permanent stim.   :awesome_for_real:

I have always hated crafting, but when I can send out my minions to do my work for me and can craft while questing I suddenly love it!  I think TOR has the best crafting system ever created for people who hate crafting.  I have no idea how people who love crafting view the system.

It's like Bioware took out all the shit and boring out of it.

I actually now look forward to see what I can make and do with it now.   :awesome_for_real:

Mechanically its the same as in Fallen earth. I liked crafting in fallen earth.

I can do lightsaber mods, crystals, shields, and foci for people.  The nice stuff is more DPSy at the moment, but that will change as I level up the rest of the recipes. 

Kinda cross-posting from the other thread where crafting came up, but I thought I had it more or less figgered. Then, when reverse engineering a piece I had already RE'd, I got a different blue recipe. One was +Power, the other +Crit, same stats otherwise. AWESOME. And crafting crits adding mod slots...it's MAD.
I could use a good shield (lvl 20ish), tank stats but my shield is pretty old... Can you make better crystals than the pre-order yellow/black?

You still only get 1 mod slot on crafted items, correct?  (the one you get for a crit)

That's all I've gotten thus far. Not sure about the rare recipes from missions.

Biochem doesn't work that way unfortunately, there is only one upgradable version .. I think.

Also, I've also noticed getting a better chance to get a new recipe if I RE a stock of something rather than one at a time.  Maybe it's just perception.

It looks like I'm wavering between artificer and synthweaving. It seems like both would be useful for my inquisitor, with perhaps synthweaving coming in a bit more useful.

Also, the underworld missions sound like they may be more fun than treasure hunter.

SAVE IT!!!!

They aren't actual missions. Your companion is gone for X minutes, returning with crafting materials for blue and purple recipes.

Does anyone know if lightsabers have been added to artifice yet?

I have them saved, I figure I will find out how to move things between factions eventually.

My consular is also saving every quest orange I get so I can play dress up at 50.

So trying to decide between Synth and Artiface for my Warrior - I look at the guide and see that Vette gets bonuses for both Treasure Hunter (+5 crit) and Underworld Trading (+5). Anyone know what difference that crit rating makes?

For those, not much. They'll bring back more stuff (purple with their blue), but I wouldn't pick a trade based on your companion perks imo. Per the loading screen companion approval also impacts crafting success. Which explains why my colorblind fucking lizard never brings back blue lightsaber crystals!

It's basically do you want to make armor for force users, or lightsaber parts. I'm a little offended that artifice can make lightsabers, but ONLY at skill cap. Dude, I can make the hilts, the crystals.. how hard is it to put those two together!

The only thing I'm confused about is the orange stuff.  Orange items are just cosmetic?  Are they bind on pickup?  Is it worth getting Synthweaving/Underworld Trading just to make the oranges?  Basically I'm wavering between Biochem for usefulness vs Synthweaving for looks.

Orange items are items that can be modified.

They are the designation for "has mod slots"

Essentially they wind up being cosmetic with how many they give you, you just slot it with real stats (buy them with commendations if you can't get some crafted quickly). I use mine to basically pick weapon and armor models I really like and keep them up to date as effective blues.

Nothing appears bind on pickup via orange crafting. So if anyone gets the patterns in the guilds, I'm sure we can have them made for people.

Excellent.  So I wouldn't be missing out on any good looking outfits by going Biochem since I can still beg/borrow/steal them?

Yep, from everything I've seen so far.

I'll be going Artifice / Sythweaving / Cybernetics / Arms  (maybe Armor instead of Arms), probably on both sides.  Plus whatever others are doing, so you'll have lots of options for outfits.

See that's why I just took gathering skills. You'll need a bunch of money to buy a mount in a couple levels.

So far, I can make green, blue, red, and yellow crystals.  Some purple quality, but only the first teir.  I've not really quested much past getting my ship, so I don't have many raw mats for the next teir of stuff yet.  I may have a shield that will be an upgrade for you.  I'll link you some stuff next time I see you in game. 

A good FAQ and guide here:  http://www.starwarsmmolevelingguide.com/crafting-guide/#crew-skills-introduction

I will probably due this to earn some creds and not start off broke:

With five companions it seems like you could 400 any skill within six or so hours.

If you have the cash for it, yea pretty much more or less.

Where do i buy the white crafting components?

Crew Skills Vendor. Filter map by vendors or just look in crew skill trainer areas for one.

Took me a while to figure this out so I post it here.

You split stacks by holding shift and dragging with a left click. Interestingly this also triggers item linking (which is just shift-leftclick) in whatever chat channel you have open. Carefull with the enter key after splitting a bunch of stacks or else Sky yells at you.  :why_so_serious:

Spam Spam Spam the souless guildchat?  :why_so_serious:

The inner nerd of me was compelled to do some data crunching on Slicing last night.  Keeping my ship's robot running slicing missions while I quested over about 2 hours I had a mission cost of 12,065 credits and a reward of 17,085 and two mission discoveries. (I didn't do any augment runs beyond my first mission as I noticed they fail pretty frequently. )  Total gain 5,020 credits and 2 blue missions. (Bio and I forget the other) 

It doesn't look like a huge money maker, but I was also only running L2 slicing missions for most of it.  Towards the end of the night when I started to get in to L3s the payouts got much larger than the buy-ins.   For example: One mission I kept running had a 780cred buy-in and netted between 1497-1842 each run.  The most consistent-paying L2 was a 425 buy-in with a payout of 396-673. (I had several L2 fails)

I was under the impression that the big money was in the gathered lockboxes, not the mission income.

You mean the lockboxes you get from the missions?  Yeah, that's what I was tracking. 

If you meant the world lockboxes, that's possible. I'm not tracking the lockboxes I find, just the mission ones for payout.  Many lockboxes in the 2nd planet were bugged and I couldn't even open them.  I'm not running in to that problem as much on Nar Shadda.

I will say that having my 2nd companion running these is going to pay for my speeder skill. I'm getting level 4 boxes from missions now. The missions cost 665-1175 and are paying me 880-3300 credits.  Success rate is probably about 95% on making more than the mission cost.  I've got 53,000 credits at level 23 even after I've bought a bunch of mats & spaceship patterns off the market.

Also; if you need Ship upgrades I've got most of the T2 ones, just send me a message in game.

Last night I learned that Treasure Hunting lock boxes can drop schematics, and one mission gave me orange gear as the reward with a model I had yet to see on any gear. 

I don't know if this holds true for the other classes but w/ BioChem reverse engineering works as follows...

Purchased recipes provide green or blue stims. They come in two varieties. One time use, 60 minute small boost stat stims or 15 second large boost stims (ie +90 power, +90 crit).

If you make a stim and reverse engineer a few you will eventually learn a 120 minute version of the stat stim. Or, in the case of the 15 second stims you learn a purple unlimited use 15 second stim (3 min cooldown).

I haven't found out yet if I can learn anything beyond that as I haven't found any purple mats to make anything yet. I need a lot more mats yet to keep playing around. The crew missions for the blue mats can get expensive at 400cr a pop.

That's essentially it.

Where Biochem really becomes cool is when you can start creating Implants.  I'm not there yet though.

I was really torn over the weekend, thinking of dropping armormech; everyone will pretty much be using orange gear. After getting a couple orange recipes I feel a bit better about it. And it still provides upgrades as you begin each planet and don't have the proper commendations or quest rewards. I'm also outleveling my gear like crazy, so it's nice to fill in those gaps, since I'm crafting armor just ahead of my level. And the RE stuff is just addictive.

I do wish there was an option to take more than one crafting occupation, so I could take maybe cybertech and armstech on a single guy and supply them with stuff from my BH. It's throwing off my normal crafting alt synergy.

Artifice really blows ass. Need a ton of mats to make a crystal and you only really get 1 or 2 per Gemstone run - but need 4-6 to make shit... Next!

I'm not sure if its due to my archaeology skill in comparison to the mission tier or companion affection level, but I am pretty sure I have been getting 4-6 color crystals per mission lately.  Though it's almost never the color I actually want 

While I was regretting artifice for a bit, I'm mostly over it.  I've been focusing more on levelling the skill as opposed to REing everything out, and I think it's starting to pay off more.  So far, selling select items on the AH helps defray the mission costs as well. 

And the crafting mission unlocks seem to be worth tracking down.  The few I've been able to run were pretty critical in getting me a good stock of the rarer mats.

FYI anyone on Shien that has a BH, I can make a few orange (modable) pieces of armor, pants and a helmet.  Currently, I can make up to level 25 armor.  If you want something made, let me know.  Some stuff will require you sending me a few of the mats but I should have lots of the underworld metals required.  I can also make a lot of medium armor, primarily intended for IA.

Would you make so orange moddable stuff for Qywen for me? He's pretty much the only companion I will use until I get to the end and get the female jedi as my Padawan.

Edit: Oh wait. BH is on imperial side. NVM.

Unrelated:

I don't play SWTOR and I have had the Beastie Boys song stuck in my head for a couple weeks now.  Thanks.

You're welcome!  :awesome_for_real: I think her name was Lucy but they all called her loose.

Along with Ginaz, I'm also armormech, though I think I have one orange. We'll have to start keeping track of which slots we have covered, should be all of them shortly enough.

While I still vacillate on bio vs armor, another thought I had about armormech: if an orange recipe crits, does that add an augment slot? If so, that gives the slight edge to crafters over quested/dropped oranges. I believe slicers get the augments.

The medium stuff is also good for Mako, she mostly wears stuff I craft for the cunning stunt stat. Probably not a huge deal, but I like to keep her as kitted out as possible. Usually ends up greens or bought blues, since I grind on heavy armor for the sweet, sweet RE goodness.

Slicers aren't augments.  Cybertech does Mods and Armoring while Artifice does Enhancements.

I'm up to Rank 9 items for Cybertech, so let me know if anyone needs some.  I haven't been REing for blues for anything other than what I and occasionally Mako needs  but I'm willing to give it a shot if more folks want them.  I figure I could wait until the levels slow down to extend the range of blues I'm creating - particularly since I can't gather the blue mats myself.

Slicers are the only source of the "augment" type mod, actually. They don't craft them, they find them on the missions.

Yeah I just realized that and came back to edit but you responded.  I was thinking of augments as a general thing not the specific piece.  Herpderp.

I can run augment missions up to level 42 if anyone needs some, just speak up.

I don't know if other crafts have this 'issue', but the problem I have with Cybercraft is how damn quickly and trivial the Armor and Mod modifications are obsolete.  So far, I've acquired a few orange pieces through dungeons and questing, but they usually come with mods that are equal or better than what I can craft.  By the time I've RE'ed enough armor/mods to learn blue/purp stuff, I'm skilled enough to make greens of the next tier up.  I'm now at the point where I can make better, but I'm too low in level, and in two levels after that, I can already make the next set.

Seems like it'd be better if they spaced them out a little further apart, creating fewer tiers, but each tier is actually significant.  Just seems silly that I can make a purp Skill Mod 2 when I can also make a green Skill Mod 5 that trumps it.

The terminology is a little fucked, yeah. The one that gets me is there is a type of mod, called a "mod".  :uhrr:

Humm, So, how do you get new schematics?

Regular ones: buy from merchantstrainers.

Fancy versions of regular ones: randomly get when reverse engineering the regular ones you made. (And purple versions of those from reverse engineering blues.)

Random rare shit: extra bonus stuff from missions. (For example I keep getting fancy synthweaving recipes as extra bonuses when I send my dudes on Underworld Trading missions. Sadly I am not a synthweaver and the recipes have all been sith-specific so far.)

I'll make the prediction here and now that by this time next year, there will either be an item that increases/guarantees a schematic learning from REing stuff, they'll increase the chance that a schematic is learned by default, or they'll cave completely and just give you the schematic the first time you RE. 

This kinda plays off my above post regarding Cybercraft Armor/Mod mods...I have so much useless shit...to turn that useless shit into 'possibly' something better?  The game of chance does not belong here in REing.  I must have made 20 Reflex Armor 3s before I finally 'learned' how to make a blue version of it.  And for what?  I can make fricking Reflex Armor 9s now!

Meh with the level-up mods who really cares if you can make a purple version anyway? It isn't like you are going to want to sink a bunch of cash into Underworld missions to get the blue metal you need to make the fancy 3s or 5s or whatever anyway. I'm sure we'll make enough of the top level ones to eventually know all the fancy ones we need.

I always seem to get non-synthweaving ones. We should trade, as I can use the synthweaving ones. Either that, or I just need to go force lightning more shit to feel better.

I think there's a neutral AH in Nar Shaddaa, I should probably try selling that stuff there.

Seems to be some skill threshold too. Now, schematics are pouring in.

Damn, maybe it's just a matter of the typical "honeymoon" start with any MMOG, but crafting is addictive: at least at the beginning, also thanks to reverse engineering, there seems to be always one more item to craft, one more mission to send your companion on :). Great stuff!

Seeing a definite divide in opinion on RE. Since some are enjoying it and other don't give a shit, I think it'll pretty much stay as is.

I got five orange schematics just before the servers went down, maybe people were dumping them? They were wicked cheap.

Some people (like me) just don't know the value of things and can't be arsed to browse the fucked up browsing system to find what things are selling for.*  So you just toss them on and let the UI decide what to sell 'em for.


* Why can't I just search the name.  Why do I have to pick the top two options every time?

Also, no way to limit down the search to specific item slot, and despite the game telling you the 'power level' of the item in the tooltip right after the name, you can't search based on that, either.

The thing is, you'd have to go out of your way not to think about having these, so i can only take it as deliberate design decision. One that makes me go 'what'.

In the interest of keeping things in one thread, I'll respond to Rat's question from the Blitz thread here.

I haven't been keeping track of Cybertech like I have with slicing missions, but If I make 10 of a mod I'm usually guaranteed to get the blue version by the time I RE the 10th.  Obviously sometimes sooner, once in a great while it's sometimes later.  It's definitely nowhere near the 5% you seem to be experiencing.

Ok... I said screw artificing. I picked up synthing along with my underworld, arche. I am sure, artificing will be end game must have crafting as it usually pans out with my choices, but synthing is way easier to deal with.

Depends on when the Force is with me. I find the earlier figure (10%) was pretty solid, but last night I tried to get a blue version of my gloves and 10 didn't do it (both companions with full queue makes it easy to track). Popping the blues is usually much easier, because of the more available mats, I just grind the skill on stuff I use. That's how I found that you can make multiple versions of the same blue item (like +crit and +power), I just kept RE'ing the greens after I had a blue version (which is probably why I'm still broke at 28). Purples are tougher, as I said, materials. I'm into the 20 minute range for middling tier 3 UT metals, so it's definitely becoming a throttle, along with item creation times also around 15-20 minutes each.

At this point I'm more concerned about the fact I've seen zero tier 3 purple metals. Rat's become my supplier :( So much for self-sufficient armoring.

Right now I can make stuff up to 29, though most of my RE stuff is obviously going to be of the Shield Tech variety due to limited resources. I've mostly stopped sending out companions on missions because money continues to be an issue. I guess I should be a good capitalist, head back to earlier worlds and gather a ton of materials and sell a slew of stuff on the GTN. To be a broken record, I really wish it were the EQ2 broker, as most of my gaming economy experience was with that and the AH-style is so inferior. Ah, well. Enough rambling.

I can make two orange chest/pants combos; hit me up for links if you want a preview. Just know I probably don't have the mats for them, I totally ran out of aluminum (luckily they count as blues not purples, so I don't need the purple metal iirc).

I'm in the same boat with tier 3 mats.  It's probably because tier 3 stuff doesn't start showing up till level 30+ planets, of which Tatooine and Alderan are not.

As for my REing, I'm experimenting with that right now.  Using all these surplus mats to get epic mods and stuff.  There's no real consistency.  It's almost like playing Blood Bowl...sometimes you throw up a nice chain of Defender Downs, and sometimes you get a bad chain of Attacker Downs  :why_so_serious:

All of that said, I can make purp mods of various stats and varieties.  Look me up if you're wanting to upgrade.

I picked up slicing and finally got it to the point where all missions are making bank now.  Good times.  Now I need more companions.

I foresee Slicing either...

- Getting nerfed
- Becoming an aux. skill that everyone can have
- Going away

The economy will inflate to high heaven with all the credits floating around from slicers.

Oranges are an oddity, crafting wise. They're pure vanity for the most part, so you're paying only for rarity. They're pretty cheap to make (I've only seen them take blue equivalent mats) so shouldn't really be that expensive.

Orange weapons are a bit more expensive, since you can't bulk produce them.


On a generic crafting note: level 40+ mission skills? DEAR GOD WHAT. I'm not at the highest tier yet, one more to go. But Underworld Trading for rare metals? Corso is dicking around at that for 40 fucking minutes per attempt. I have not really noticed much of a time difference with affection either. I have 4600 with corso and 0 with bowdaar, but they both seem to report identical times to complete those missions.

I'm thinking your companion's actual level (which of course is your level) being relative to the mission might have something to do with time needed to complete as well.  I'm probably wrong though.

I think it's just an odd scaling factor. Making a green item is about 2 minutes now. Making the blue variant is about 16 minutes. Level 30-40ish mission skills for mats are about 30 minutes, gifts are 15.

All I really know is that they will always complete halfway through trying to kill a gold elite, and the popup window will appear over the party frames while I'm trying to heal. <3

If mission times and rewards keep scaling like they do so far, I expect slicing to be much less profitable at the highest level.

I read a thread this morning on the SWTOR boards complaining about this, actually.  A skill 400 slicer was bitching that the best mission reward he could get from slicing was just giving him lockboxes with random greens that sold for less than the mission cost.  Was more profitable to run the previous tier missions.

Similar to Tier 2 Treasure Hunting.  Though I've finally gotten some Rich and Abundant missions, and those seem to have a good return once more.  The blues are starting to roll in.

I'm wondering if being in the appropriate level range or on the proper planet affects the returns though.

I know the planet does seem to impact things. When I was slumming it doing a bonus series (nar shadda had a level 30ish bonus series, oddly), I couldn't trigger higher level underworld trading missions.

Would be a bit neat if the epic level mats varied by planet.

The reason for this is because the person with 400 slicing likely was not level 50. From what I've read the rich/bountiful missions are only unlocked when you advance in level. Maybe the planet has something to do with it like Lant and Kildorn are saying but I haven't noticed anything to that effect so far.

So quick query regarding equipment crafting. A guildie had crafted two blue armour pieces with the same primary stats but different secondary stats (one was +Crit, the other +Def iirc) and they had slightly different titles (e.g. +Crit piece was "Critical something something" - they don't seem to be in any of the item databases at this point) Allegedly, he got these two from one crafting attempt and seemed to imply that they were schematics but I'm dubious. So two questions:

Is it more likely that he had a crit?
Does each secondary stat on a piece have it's own specific schematic?

I've definitely had people send me blue-quality schematics like the ones you describe, and yes, there are a ridiculous number of schematics in the game.

Typically when you crit when crafting it adds an "augment" slot, not anything with the stats.

Thanks

Follow up: do mods (Armoring, Enhancements etc) have variations with additional stats as well (+Surge, +Alacrity etc) or do they only ever have primary stats?

Blue pieces add a secondary stat.  Critical rolls add an augment slot.  (On armor at least.  I don't think mods get any bonus for criticals [maybe a higher RE chance; that's speculation].)

Different mods add different stats.  Later ones and prototypes might add secondary stats, but I haven't gotten that high in my crafting to know, and they changed what did what up in every iteration of beta.

It's been my experience thus far that blue mods only add more stats and mods can't crit.  However, I'm only crafting shit for myself & Mako and to level-up so it's possible I've just not critted yet.

I haven't critted on any ear pieces.  I Don't know if those can or not, either.

Spaceship parts I'm going to bet will not crit at all because it would be silly.   You can't RE them to create teh purpz, either, just as an FYI.

Purp mods can be RE'ed to make multi-stat purp mods. 

What are "exceptional" pieces of (green) armor ? Could not find a difference between them and normal ones.

Exceptional pieces have an Augment slot.  Augments can only be obtained through Slicing missions.

Maybe it was a deliberate decision to make the AH just painful enough to use that most people can't use it as a credit printer but still allow some basic inter player buying and selling.

I really like the crafting system so far... but the naming conventions for the Item Modification System clearly clearly beat, rolled, and tied the Game Design team somewhere in a dark alley of Beta testing.

Some of it is perfectly intuitive: Hilt = Hilt: Barrel=Barrel.  But slip into armor and I just seem to see synonyms for Mod... with one of the synonyms being, well, Mod.  Augment is like a breath of fresh air... and I only just now connected it with slicing.

Ear pieces can crit for an Aug slot. I made one with a slot yesterday!

When an armormech RE's a green, they get a random blue schematic (the +crit, +def variants), unlike the other professions with only one possible blue upgrade to their green. This is where Overkill _____ comes from.

I just updated the Helpful Link post with this gem.  It's a nice in-depth guide that goes over all the prefixes, the augments, and a pretty good explanation of how REing works.

Oooh, nice to know.  Thanks Rat!  I know what I'll have the 3rd companion doing when I get them now.   :drill:

Too bad the SWTOR site has put me in the queue for the last two hours.

I'm not logged into the site...seems anonymous people can still browse around without issue.

This has been my experiences with cybertech as well. Armoring comes every two levels which is just too frequent, especially once you add in the blue and purple versions. Earpieces and mods are a bit better as they are every four levels.

I made a few grenades, but I'm just too stingy to kill mobs by throwing credits at them.

Lucked out and got the custom speeder schematic off the AH for 315. Had enough spare materials on hand to make one.

I actually have the opinion that armoring is overpowered, because of how easily I can match the commendation/instance gear. Every time I hit a new armor level, I immediately swap out all my gear to the new tier. If I wanted to do that via commendations I'd be at it for a week trying to get enough. From looking at the commendation items, armoring allows you to wear a rating one level before the commendation gear would open it up. Not sure if that is just a temporary quirk though. I'd have a rating 96 armor mod with a minlevel of 39, and a rating 96 commendation armor piece with a minlevel of 40.

But, um, if you don't like the armor piece they give as a reward, you can take the commendation points, right?  And then you make the commendation points worthless by spending credits instead, to level up a craft skill and to gather mats.  Seems counter-productive.

Plus, pretty much every heroic quest on a planet rewards multiple commendations. Since those heroics are also repeatable daily, it shouldn't take that long.

Craftards please add your crew skills into the member notes field after your name.

You can't buy a full suit of commendation gear on any planets I've seen. So you're pretty much spending all your points to buy 3-4 items at the end of a planet for you and your companion of choice.

Armortech avoids that by simply spending 2 commendations/item on mods, and making their own set of blue armor mods of equal quality. And then buying epic random chests instead <3

No planet is a one-stop-shop, true, but each planet has a different item as oranges.  Nar Shaddaa is Helms, Balmoraa was - I think - boots, etc.

I've never felt gimped with my slowly-growing supply of oranges.  Plus I'll be able to fully-mod w/ blues & Purples once I hit 50 since I'm cybertech.

Oh, that's entirely what I do. I fully use oranges, and try to have a set for me and my companion of choice. Then I buy or make the mods to upgrade them as I go. Cybertech makes that pretty trivial to do imo.

Uh, I'm 400 slicing and ALL of my missions rewards give me a lockbox that has about 1k - 8k credits in it.  He must also be doing the augment missions instead of just lockbox missions.  The augment rewards are terrible.  I've made about 30k pure profit tonight already just from running slicing on 3 companions while I'm working on something else in the house.  Slicing is just a broken money fountain, at level 26 after already buying my mount and skill I'm sitting around 250k credits currently.

Share the wealth, budday!  :awesome_for_real:

What sucks is that was a well-known issue in the beta. Hell, my first beta character I only played to 20 was rolling in dough and buying all kinds of stuff.

Versus my level 31 BH who has always been and is still flat broke.

It's the game helping to keep you in proper character for a bounty hunter.  Always dead broke and hoping for the big payoff with the next job. 

I'm sharing how to get the wealth, that's good enough for me.  :oh_i_see:

Hm.. I'm 26 now and only have 30k credits after buying my speeder.   Clearly my need for a companion and only having 2 is holding me back from earning big bucks.   That or you've got a lot of /played hours without leveling.

At higher levels slicing you get maybe a 2k profit on a 30 min mission.  Moderate rewards are a loss, abundants break even and I've never seen any higher than that on the 49/50 bracket so you end up running the 2 lower levels for rich/bountiful lockboxes.  Crazy profit at the lower levels, mostly useless at endgame.  Also I'm fairly sure it got nerfed within the last 48 hours.

Yeah I finally hit the 49-50 tier yesterday.  A 1415c mission was netting me 1598-1830.  Meanwhile the Rich mission one tier down cost me 2025c and got me 5668c.   Could just be because I'm only 29 but we'll see. 

Still probably the best craft to have and run constantly either way, nerfed returns or not.   A bout of crafting and purchasing of purple L49 schematics put me down to about 15k creds yesterday and an hour or two of running 2 companions and doing some space missions & questing has me up at 60k again.

The end missions are useless. If you want to maximise profit / time, it's the tier 3 and 4 bountiful / rich missions that offer the fastest profit rate.

Watching the people who have slicing knot themselves into contortions trying to defend it and justify the gain is amusing though. It's utterly broken and need stunning into a money sink like all the other craft skills, but until it is I'm going to keep abusing it.

Slicing isn't a crafting skill, it's a gathering skill.  Gathering skills are never money sinks, that would be stupid.  Crafting skills shouldn't be money sinks either, but that's how they tend to work out in practice, sadly.

Right now apart from maybe treasure hunting all the othercraft skills are money sinks. The materials I earn from scavenging / underworld trading do not over the cost of running the mission. Maybe when the AH is turned into something usebable by humans rather than 6 handed hummingbirds, but for now every tradeskills costs money in my experience, gathering or crafting.

That's the economy's fault, not the skills'.  Gathering raw materials should be a way to turn time into money; if it costs more than you can sell the parts for, the auction value of the parts has been set too low by the people doing the selling.

I dropped Slicing, but I feel I still have plenty of money.  At level 31 I'm crafting like crazy and still have cash.  One reason is that my items are selling well.  I can currently craft items I'm not high enough to use.  That's good, it means I can keep outfitting myself with my own creations.

Why should it be a money sink when making money is the only thing it is good for? it doesn't help with any crafting skill, if it doesn't make money it has zero reason to exist.  You are trading the ability to craft anything for yourself for the money to buy it.

That's the sort of response I was referring too earlier...:-)

Firstly, slicing does give other things. It gives blue and epic crafting missions, cybernetic schematics and augments - and augments are one of the few tradeskilling items that might actually have value at 50, unlike a lot of the tradeskills.

Secondly, if it *didnt* do anything else other than give money - then just remove it from the game!

Thirdly - it doesn't prevent you crafting other things. Other than biochem, crafting doesn't produce anything soul bound at all so you can just spread it over your atls. And you earn so much with slicing you can just buy the raw materials you need and still come out ahead on cash.

It's these sort of justifications that just show how silly the skill is. Pretty much every MMO has had a tradeskill bug at some point which allowed people to make free cash. TOR has an entire skill broken and so show this is fine and should be kept! ;-)

A sign of how out of sync the skill is the quest rewards you get. I'll receive an email from a Darth thanking me for saving their world, and I'll get 300 credits as an attachment. Woohoo - I'm earning almost 100 credits a *minute* from slicing on one character alone. Slicing removes any concern for money out of the game, gives far more cash than anything else you can do before 50 by a long way, and doesn't cost you anything. It's clearly just broken.

It might give other things but it doesn't let you craft anything, you need all three skills to craft and slicing doesn't match up with anything.  The other things it gives you are also basically for money making.  Making free cash is not a bug, it is the whole god damn point of the skill.

After RE'ing 118 blue mods over the levels, I finally got a purple schematic. Yes, I'm keeping a tally on the desk. 7% RE schematic rate on greens so far.

Not impressed.

This whole line of thinking makes no sense.  The third one isn't even true and the first and second one don't defend your point that slicing is broken they actually claim the opposite.

It takes two mission skills to develop any crafting skill and the only reason you can get cheap materials is because the game is 2 weeks old and prices haven't settled.  It's also not true for every skill, have you looked at the prices for the Metals from Underworld Contacts?  The level 1 mats are selling for 400 each on my server, that's ~300 credits a minute at level 11 (2 mats in 3 minutes).  People are claiming 300k a night income at low levels off of selling excess materials on the AH.  What's funding that?  Slicers buying mats at way over priced levels is what.

Slicings not broken, it's the engine driving the economy.

e: Also, I disagree with the basic premise that if it's not a punch in the dick it must not be working correctly.

BioChem is way more forgiving then that, I usually only have to RE 5-10 blue medpacks for a purple one.

I just don't get how a skill that PAYS ME to level it and find crafting recipes and crafting missions isn't broken.  Those items will never have any value.

This is my point. People are bending themselves into *ridiculous* contortions to justify something that in any other MMO would instantly be labelled as broken and stupid. Slicing is happily separating the server into haves and have nots, and the fact that people are relying on trickle down economics to balance it out is silly. There is nothing stopping people with slicing ALSO getting other professions that generate cash.

The game clearly isn't balanced around people with slicing generating so much free cash so early on. Bioware have said they are going to do something about it, so hopefully they will before servers become too full of people with a ridiculous head start on cash due to a broken tradeskill.

Same goes for me with Cybertech, about 5-10 blue RE's for a purpz.

You can argue it's a bad idea to have a profession that produces money all you want but it is certainly not broken when it does the one thing it is designed to do.  Slicing can either make a decent amount of money or it has no reason to exist, and at this point i seriously doubt completely removing it is on the table.  

It seems to have a reason to exist (finding schematics and augments), but I disagree with "if it doesn't make dickloads of money it's useless" because down that path lies "if my tank isn't invulnerable it's useless" and "if my dps can't oneshot things it's useless"

This is probably highly variable though.  I am also taking the Scavenging/Cybertech/Slicing route.  I went to look up what the level 1 Underworld Mats were trading for last night on my server, and they were going for 300 for stack of 10, which is less than 3 slicing boxes (or one if I get lucky) at my current level.  Not sure how it scales up from here, or how the markets will pan out as the craziness of launch imbalances go away, but high prices are not universal so far.

Prices aren't universal because it's not an efficient market. It's not an efficient market because the GTN is such a piece of shit that people that normally play the AH metagame are walking away in disgust.

Most people rightclick their items to sell and accept the GTN's default buyout price, because it's just so incredibly painful to do it properly.

WTF than? Does the rng hate me? Is there some 3rd factor I'm missing?

Man, if Nuffle is bitch slapping you this bad in swtor, you should probably never ever play Blood Bowl.   :awesome_for_real:

Edit:  To add, so far on my RE of green Cybertech mods, I've gotten the blue schematic about every 3-8 times.

Yeah if I queue up 2 dudes to make 5 cybertech mods each, I typically get the blue mod before I RE all 10 of them.

Because the entire game pays you to level as it is -- the quests, the foozles, everything else does the exact same thing, spawning money and items out of thin air to reward you with. It's not broken, but their way to keep you busy at the treadmill.

I'm more surprised that people are so trained into the whole make-believe "money sink" way of thinking so deeply, that having a trade skill follow a different formula for a change is something they balk at.

(on separate note, adding a data point to the RE thing -- also usually getting a blue recipe out of 5-10 greens. Sometimes as early as 2-3. I don't really bother with the PUPRZ because the levels fly too fast early and mid-game to bother)

Every skill pays you to level it, the others just pay you in items.

If you are trying to min/max crew skills, is +critical the companion bonus to go by or is there some cutoff where +efficiency is "better" than +critical?

I defy you to tell me the real difference between an item worth 100000 credits and 100000 credits. It the same thing in a different shape.  The only real issue is that the economy isn't mature enough to have stabilized prices yet.

It's what 'worth' means.

And if slicing didnt give me vastly, *vastly* more wealth than any other option at my level you might have a point. But when saving a world gets me a whole 398 credits in the post from a Darth Lord, or finishing a long multi-haim quest line gives me 1500 credits, it's incredibly obvious that the game is not balanced around me earning 160 or so credits. *minute* from doing nothing. Especially when I'm not actually playing and can jus pop by every 30 minutes whilst doing other stuff.

If I didnt have slicing I would be utterly broke due to the cost of levelling tradeskills and skill upgrades, and wouldn't have had a hope in hell of affording my speeder. As it is I have the speeder and 150K already in the bank' which is VASTLY more than I should ave at level 25 - the game makes that very obvious with every other monetary reward in the game!

I just don't get why people throw all logic and sense to the wind and try to defend Slicing. It happily separates the game into haves and have nots - The only people who can buy things on the AH are those with slicing because we have all the cash! Trickle down economics doesn't work in real life, I'm not sure why it's supposed to work in star wars.

I guess my question would be... What does a quest pay out at 50 when you get no exp? That will determine how broken slicing is.

Nothing, from what I've heard.

So here's a way to look at it - how about if Slicing is supposed to fund alts and other crafts?

My level 20 has Slicing 250 and hasn't leveled anything else yet. He's got 70k credits. My level 13 has been leveling Biochem/Bioanalysis/UT and is stony broke. I think he's got 2k creds. I'm going to have to send him money to pay from my Slicing dude so he can train class skills. Without having the Slicing bankroll I'd have to stop leveling his Biochem, no question.

A five minute flying mission gets you around 2500 at my level for around 80 cost.  And none of my none slicing guildies are lacking their speeders or training money.

I do find it hilarious the way trash quest npcs will promise fabulous riches from a scheme that sounds like it really should yield a significant sum, then you do the donkey work and they excitedly hand over your share of 200 credits.

I'm an up-and-comer in the ruling elite and I'm basically working for tips.  So I have to run a gang of leet hackers on the side to fund the lifestyle I deserve, I'm only hitting republic targets I swear!

*cough*  *cough*

Saving the world gives you 400 credits on top of murdering 20-30 foozles which saving the said world usually involves, each foozle paying you 50-100+ credits in their dropped unmentionables. It's effectively a bonus for sitting through cutscene which the quest will have and plain murdering the foozles for the heck of it won't.

But the point was really about the mechanics, not the exact values involved. Yes, you do have a point that slicing allows to generate money fast, compared to other options. I'm just arguing that's not "broken" any worse than any other source of (infinite) income in the typical MMO.

Party's over:

http://www.swtor.com/community/showthread.php?t=90083&page=3

"Slicing

    Rewards from Slicing have been reduced to bring them into balance with other skills.
    Adjusted incorrect values for medium slicing boxes."

Why are you reading MVP award threads? ;)

You're looking at this as a player. As a player, you don't give a shit if you sell an item to another player for X credits or have the game generate the cash directly. But there is a very, very large difference to the economy.

Items are worth whatever players will give for it. If everybody has tons of money, that item is worth many credits. If money is scarce, it's worth less credits-- because money itself has greater value. Slicing is inflationary in that it directly introduces cash to the game world. This is so obviously a bad idea and I can't conceive how people don't seem to understand it. Nerfing slicing doesn't fix that, unless they nerf it to such a degree that it simply isn't worth doing at all. Even if the developers nerfed slicing income by 50%, if it's profitable, it's inflationary.

lol as it is, the notes are correct.  Slicing was nerfed.

http://www.swtor.com/patchnotes/1.0.1/12272011

Even if they make it break even costwise, I can still park an alt in a few spots with four to five boxes in close proximity and make free money. 

I guess they could make it negligible amounts. But...they need to make speeders cost less then.

Level 50 quests return a 1:1 ration of xp to credits if I'm not mistaken.  So there is still a way to get cash.

We'll see how bad they really nerfed slicing today.  If you don't make any money, then it's a useless Crew Skill because you don't actually get anything from it unless you count random Augments.

Or schematic and mission prices just went through the roof.

Not to point out the obvious again, but perhaps because it's what the entire "economy" of the MMO is based on? So making arbitrary calls about when the idea of spawning money out of thin air is bad and where it's treated as something normal, is odd at best.

All MMOs generate currency from nothing when you kill monsters and complete quests. This money is then drained out of the economy through various moneysinks like repair costs, auction fees, vendor crafting materials, taxi rides, etc. Generating money from nothing is not in of itself a problem-- it has to come from somewhere.

The issue here is that players can only have three tradeskills, and only slicing directly generates cash. If all the others generated roughly equivalent cash too, it would be easy to balance against the various moneysinks in the game. That would be fine. But with only one tradeskill making cash money, it either needs to be nerfed to such a degree that nobody takes it or it will exert an inflationary pressure on the economy.

And less importantly, the people who don't take slicing feel like suckers.

Why? Don't you remember in Vanilla WoW spending 35-40 grinding out earth elementals in the Badlands so you'd have enough cash for your mount and riding skill? What makes you think SWTOR is meant to be designed any differently?

I was getting thousands of credits per quest leading up to the initial 40k purchase, I was easily able to do it, without slicing. You just have to have some discipline about not sending someone off on a mission skill every single time it comes up.

And yet again, what's exactly so terrifying about having one additional source of "inflationary pressure" in a game which is built upon this very principle?

(it's not the "it makes economy unbalanced!" argument, because the MMO "economies" are inherently out of balance in the first place, thanks to the whole printing infinite money out of thin air principle. The devs have realized that a few years ago, which is why you see the movement to various token-based systems for everything that's supposed to matter -- not to introduce any kind of nebulous balance, but simply to better control the pace of goods acquisition)

Additionally there's little point in desperately saving up all your money for X levels just so you can get that speeder as soon as you become eligible, when the monetary value of rewards from foozles grows significantly with each level.

Case in point: my character landed on Tatooine with literally 1k credits in pocket. Few hours of lizard and pig murdering later, she's at ~20k, and that's just from selling the grey trash to vendors every now and then. And with spending ~5k on crafting materials and whatnot meantime, too.

There are three options on the table.

1) Slicing is awesome. All players choose to take it. This makes it easy to balance, since it's predictable, but is an obvious design flaw as there are a bunch of other tradeskills being ignored. This is basically where we stood pre-nerf-- if it wasn't nerfed, everybody would take it sooner or later. Sooner, for the clueful.

2) Nerf slicing to be roughly as profitable as other tradeskills. Lockbox missions level your skill but tend to break even over time. You take slicing to gather lockboxes in the world and run augment missions. Hopefully this is where we stand today, post-nerf.

3) Over-nerf slicing. Lockbox missions lose money over time. Everybody drops slicing.

I'm hoping for option number two, but I question how augment missions will match up to the other gathering tradeskills, since crafters actually need those materials. I guess we'll see. Either way, I'm glad I made my half a million credits per character pre-nerf.

The whole "you can't afford basic necessities unless you take up slicing" thing is obviously complete and utter bull.

Can you maintain your crafting skill producing current-level items and buy your speeder at 25 without taking slicing?

Yes. I'm actually a few levels ahead on my crafting.

EDIT: And I haven't vendored anything I've made, just REd everything.

I'm a bit ahead, as well. And by level 34 I had enough money to catch up with not being able to train all my skills that I had been dealing with since level 25. And I opened the 20k row of inventory.

I have 8k on me now.

I haven't been able to spend money on anything else since I bought my speeder. So yeah, things are a bit tight.

500k, ffs.

Yeah I've also bought the 40k inventory row and never missed a skill train.

The profit from other tradeskills is ultimately determined by the overall level of wealth the players have. Since slicing is one of such wealth sources, that's effectively not possible to achieve -- you'd be trying to hit a moving target, one whose position shifts in reaction to the very changes you make.

Nah, you just do what I posted earlier, make lockbox missions break even over time, so slicing is more about gathering lockboxes in the world and augment missions.

I wasn't aware that +critical affected companion missions.  Hm.. guess I should gear-up the robot when sending him out.

It's not from gear, each companion has different tradeskill bonuses that you can see after pressing 'N'.

This means slicing produces less money, which reduces the level of wealth in the playerbase, which reduces to profits of other crafting specializations. But since the slicing still produces free money without a need to sell anything to anyone (it's just now profits are lower across the board) what makes you believe that's going to stop anyone from crying how unbalanced it still is?

Ooh.  Mako only has +5 and +15 skill so I didn't think those applied as crits and what not.  Galt has UT bonuses but who has UT?

UT is cybertech and armortech, at the very least. I think synthweaving as well.

So I'm a tad sad that it seems you can only vendor buy up to level 49 armor patterns, and the rest are heroic mode random drops? QQ.

Huh? No. Read it again. I said lockbox missions would break even over time. Not make a profit.

Gathering lockboxes would be slightly profitable, but that's not a big deal. I probably found like 20 of them total so far.

Before this nerf (maybe still if it breaks even and still finds recipies/missions) slicing was begging to have someone write a bot for it that just sends your companions out on lockbox missions over and over.  Even if it's only maybe  1 - 6k profit per mission, if you leave that running on all of your companions, overnight every night, would add up fast.

Yes, but that still leaves the person with slicing capable of harvesting nodes in world for direct money, whereas other specializations only get resources they have to peddle either to NPC or to another player. Even such simple difference is likely to be enough for some to cry imbalance, with charts to prove the point et al.

My early slicing profits came largely from these nodes -- the missions would more often than not break even over time (3-4 instances of pay 95, get 80-90 back with occasional solid 40 credits of profit, that sort of thing) while each node in world was fully free 100 or so credits with no cost attached (and having the companion with me meant i could cull through stuff faster, making more money from foozles in the same time) With the bug affecting the nodes allegedly removed it should get even better now.

That's not a lot of credits.

My highest character is level 32. It's not a game-breaking amount for me personally, but if everybody else did the same thing, that would be a different matter entirely.

:ye_gods:

Seriously, fuck that noise! If you're on my ship while I'm getting shot at, your ass has chores to do! <3

I have absolutely no idea.  I have never even been to that thread before, i thought i was linking the patch notes.  Weird. 

I mostly have them craft stuff to raise the actual crafting out of all the enormous piles of crap I scavenge while leveling.

I had a phase where I had four underworld trading missions running at a time to try and catch that up to my crafting skill. I found it lags behind a lot if you don't keep up with it.

I normally leave the companions idle because i'm too lazy to queue a mission every few minutes, plus the UI has this horrid preference for closing your currently open AH window and whatnot whenever the mission reward window pops up, which is direct chute to the dark side with the hate it generates, tbh.

edit: on the subject of making money without slicing and how it's impossible to buy speeders etc without it, couple hours of Tatooine questing later i'm at 35k cash from yesterday's 20k, again pretty much just from grey foozle drops.

Selling relics is the only reason I could afford my speeder and training.  Probably by selling to all those people who took up slicing so they couldn't get their own.  Without the auction house and a lot of patience though, Underworld Trading is a money loser, even if all you do is go for treasure boxes.

Treasure boxes from UT? I assume you mean Treasure Hunting, I've got ~340 UT, just missions for toys, metal, and cloth.

Mostly missions for toys and cloth. Makes me sad when all 6 tiers only have companion gifts or fabric missions available.

Er, yeah, Treasure Hunting.  My bad for posting between client builds.

UT tier 6 missions were returning the occasional synthweave recipe. I think the same orange chestpiece recipe.

UT hands me pretty random patterns regularly for synthweaving and armormech. What I'm having issues getting are epic rare metals.  :heartbreak:

Would be nice if UT gave me Cybertech schematics..you know, for the craft in which I'm running UT missions for in the first place  :oh_i_see:

Gault brings me steady blues with UT, maybe 2 or 3 purples a tier; almost no schems. I think I may have gotten one. I strictly run the metals missions the few times they're available, usually abundants.

I run metal -> fabric -> gifts as my priority. Given that I'm trying to farm up metal for my armor set, I've pretty much got all five of them out finding me stuff all day. I get maybe 2-3 schematics a night?

Same thing happened to me with Treasure Hunting with the combination Artifice-Archaeology-Treasure Hunting; at around lv 17-18, I was around 95-98 with the first two, but lagged behind with the third at around 35-40. Problem is, before that level range you don't really need grade 2 mats from Treasure Hunting (mats that you can access in the late sixties), and if you are like me and just craft stuff for your character and companion (along with unlocking prototype-blue schematics), and also you don't want to outlevel the gear you are crafting, you can't just keep "adventuring away" and keep a natural flow, or at least that's the situation I found myself in.

So, to keep it short, yesterday night and today's early afternoon was an exercise in frustration waiting for the 6 and 8 minutes TH missions to finish, with only the last Class mission to do in Coruscant :P .

Since I only run better than moderate missions unless I just unlocked the tier, even with Gault out most of the time (since there's usually only one appropriate mission), my UT is lagging behind my armormech and scav, like maybe 225 UT to 280 for the others. I guess I should just grind it up on lower missions, I have enough gear myself up and have a few things for mako this tier.

Really, the scavenging holds me back from doing a lot of RE. I just don't come across enough nodes of a type until I don't need them. Metric shit-ton of phlobium and bondite on Taris...seems like the materials are slightly out of sync with gear levels.

With UT, I just spammed it for a day to catch up about 200 points. And used all those companion gifts to cap two companions out, which was by far the most annoying part of it (give present... waiiiiiiit.. give present.. I wonder if she figured out I was buying her affection when we'd stop every 15 seconds while walking to the next quest location to give her something pretty)

What I do with Treasure Hunting is send my guys out for Lockbox missions.  I slow down if I'm going broke near 25, but otherwise they're always going.  Basically my priority list is to only run Rich and Bountiful missions.  I'll drop down a tier or two if none are available before taking an abundant.

This makes it out-level my crafting skills by a lot.

Well, I only have Gault and the ship droid to send out :) Mako is busy keeping me patched up.

Hmm, question regarding Armormech; obviously reverse engineering crafted greens can get you a random blue-quality plan for the same item. Can you reverse engineer blues to get artifact level plans?

I took armormech fully expecting it to be useless since in every MMO I take armorcrafting and it turns out to be largely worthless, but I appear to have lucked out as a trooper and it is awesome. Minus the droids, all of your companions wear heavy armor, which means I can keep all of them completely kitted out in at least semi-respectable gear as I level. I plan on just grinding out a gigantic pile of the level 49-50 armor sets (Armormech has a full set of heavy armor for healer-types, tanks, and DPS) and reverse engineering them until I have a set of all blues to throw at my companions.

Yes, you can get purples by reverse engineering the blues.

And you want to RE the proper blue, as well. Sure, I might get a quick blue schem out of RE'ing stuff I ground out or whatever...but I tend to shoot for specific blues. End>Aim + defense is my general ticket. So I RE greens until I get one of those, and then if I have resources (I generally don't) I'll RE that into a purple. Haven't done that since around level 22 or so, just takes up too much time and resources to bother with.

Armormech is great for BH, too. Though my companions thus far have used medium armor, they're both non-force agent types so I can make medium armor for them. Way more limited than if I could make them heavy armor, since that's what I focus on for yours truly. I tend to hit a new planet and use crafted blues until I get enough commendations for the mods, which generally only makes the oranges slightly better...until the next tier.

Something I have not been able to put my finger on. What items can and cant be DE'd, and why.

I know anything I craft can. But it seems to be hit and miss with drops.

Almost no drops can be. Not sure there is any sense to it, might be a holdover from one of the many revamps to the system.

I have gotten many drops that I can Dcon right in the N.G.P window, as well as my inventory. That's the confusing part, I can't figure out WHY they can.

As an artificer I can RE any lightsabers I find, but it's usually a waste. I'd rather get a few hundred credits instead of a crystal and maybe a fragment.

Yeah I just vendor green drops.

It depends upon the profession.  They kept changing the system up so that a lot of items aren't flagged properly.

If you hadn't raised it at all before buying your speeder and training, you probably could've afforded it. I did not touch treasure hunting until I had my speeder, which I bought (with money to spare!) as soon as the skill was available. My artificing and archaeology skills were skilled up, mind you, but that's because I didn't need to send my crew out on arch missions because you wind up with a fuckton of the normal materials just wandering around questing, as I am sure everyone already knows because seriously, fuckton of shit.

Then I immediately went about running out of money by doing nothing but sending my crew people out to essentially buy themselves something pretty.  :why_so_serious:

It bugs me that the comments the crew members make when they return in no way match the actual results.

Ship droid brings back a credit case of like $7,500 and a purple mission as well.

"I'm sorry I'm such a failure master!"  :uhrr:

See, I love that, because it makes me think the ship droid has self-esteem issues. <3

But it IS a pretty silly bug.

It's certainly better outcome than when he gets mission failure and claims i deserve nothing but perfection.

Though perhaps that just means he didn't think the spoils were up to my standards and threw them away... :why_so_serious:

Back before the slicing nerf....

Gault: "You win some, and you lose some. You just lost some."

Right-click the credits box reward, and "You receive 12991 credits."

Bizarre.

I so wanted to save the data spike from the brothers in arms heroic to use on my own droid.  :why_so_serious:

The comments are reversed.

I tried this. No such luck.

I think one way to help out Armormech is to remove armoring from Cybertech and put it into Armormech. At least it would spread out mods some more, right now Artifice has 2/4 (if you're a force user); Armstech 1/4 (if you're not, could also use some help maybe); Cybertech 2/4 (for everyone). Bio (who picked two crew skills with the Bio-prefix anyway, I can never keep them straight) has the good consumables so obviates the need for mods.

And some kind of repair kit and armor buff consumable to give some rotating usefulness, especially an Armormech-only purple armor consumable.

Armormech is still useful to a degree (especially leveling, if it didn't take so long to RE purples). But moving armoring over from cyber and adding those consumables would at least keep it viable at the cap, maybe even preferable for tanks with a decent armor consumable.

Except some tanks are force users, so having to take the skill to make armor I can't use just to making Armoring mods I can is fucking silly. At least if I had gone Cybertech (I didn't, I'm Synthweaving) I could make ship parts to get my mods instead of useless/alt/companion armor.

Split it so that the two armour skills make the appropriate armoring.

I'm still expecting a patch note - oh by the way, some basic greens you learn don't have an upgrade option, sorry we forgot to tell you!
I've RE'd the same lev 29 Green Chest piece 14 times now without getting a Blue recipe.

I had some Greens in the low 20's that I got Blue recipes on the first RE try.

I have successfully RE'd a Blue to a Purple once. A level 9 belt.  :uhrr:

I'm pretty sure the fact that I have less than 20k at level 32 is enough to indicate that I have spent a considerable amount of time trying to get more out of RE'ing, but I'm essentially just out leveling every armor piece before I manage to upgrade it.

This could work I guess, but it'd have Synthweaving making 2 of the 3 armorings (Str/End and Will/End for SW and SA tanks) while Armoring just gets...uh, whatever stat PT's use (Aim? Cunning? I can never remember).

Regarding crafting/REing gear; what I've done is keep my Synthweaving very high, so that I can make gear 2-4 levels in advance. This gives me a lot of time to spend REing, enough to usually get everything to go up 1 tier (greens into blues, trained blues into purples). The only time I've RE'd a green all the way up to purple was when I RE'd the blue after replacing it  :oh_i_see: (it's purple version was still a downgrade).

I've touched on this before, but starting at level 41 it kind of fell through for me. Through the 30s, I generally had purples to fill in the holes (and up to 40, armormech was AWESOME). I always had it a few levels ahead and RE was pretty reasonable. At 41, I just had a hell of a time getting a blue. One belt I believe I RE'd the green 30 times or so before giving up. But there's also a level 9 medium belt I RE'd a ridiculous amount (40?) without getting a blue schem at all. I was able to RE the similar level 9 boots up through two purple recipes as intended. RNG and whatnot, but I'm still suspicious of an issue there.

Trying to RE just the chest piece of the level 49 tank set finally broke me on trying. I hit 50 with 60+ of the blue metal (constantly sending out Skadge to level up UT and planning ahead). I used up ALL of it on unsuccessful REs of that one item, and then used up maybe 20 more. Given the sheer time involved I was just sending Blizz out non-stop and queueing him up before I logged.

Anyway.

Good point about Synthweaving, forget them. Apply the same things as Armormech, but make them stat-appropriate, as suggested.

Armoring isn't just for tanks - it determines the armor value of all Custom clothing. There are four types (at base level) - so Armormech would make Aim/End for Troopers/BH and Cunning/Endurance for Smuggs/Agents.

So, you'd leave Cyber with mod mods, and earpieces? And ship parts for the people who care about space combat?

There are just way too many combinations. Each green equipable can be RE'd into 3 different blues, each of those blues into 4 or 5 different purples.

I already had a cybertech, so I started an artificer so I could make enhancements. At level 43+ I counted 48 different named enhancements to cover the different stat combinations. And they're not evenly distributed. There's just one defense/alacrity but four different shield/critical. Of course each one has a blue and purple version. Cybertech didn't have as many options, as you can't craft mods with defensive stats, although you can  occasionally get them as a quest reward.

Maybe a more modular system where you can each piece has a slot for the primary, secondary and tertiary stat of your choice with blue and purples having a more tertiary slots. Then put augments into those slots. Let a few more skills craft augments or put some greens on an npc.

As it is now, the amount of time to gather mats, the low RE rate, the irritating and streaky nature of the rng and the sheer volume of items. It's just too much for me to bother with purples. I can just about barely stand making blues.

For some reason artificers can make all the enhancements but cybertechs can only make some of the modifications. It is pretty annoying, I can't make any tank-statted mods, just the ones with crit and power.

I'd really like to see just one green/blue/purple recipe with the crafter choosing the stats.  It's cool to have so many schematics to discover, but incredibly unwieldy.

Maybe unlock the appropriate primary/secondary/tertiary for each level as you RE pieces, but still only have a single item template.

Base components:  Green
Optional blue mat:  Blue where you pick the secondary; bump to base stats
Optional purp mat:  Purple where you pick the tertiary; further bump to base stats; requires blue materials

Bioware is welcome to copy the idea for a nominal royalty.

Hell, some of those enhancements are so nice, they exist twice, just with different names. Because it isn't cluttered enough!  :why_so_serious:

Think i even saw one that was so nice it had 3 differently named copies.

Just wondering if anyone else has found a problem with crafting since the patch.

Now when I compare the thing I'm about to craft, the gain/loss is reversed.

Stats are fine.
Once the item is made the comparison is fine.

I've seen that with RE'd recipes forever. Not just reversed, sometime it uses the stats of the base item and only accounts for the new stat added on the RE version. It's odd and I've gotten used to working around it (since I rarely need to use it).

This is happening to me, I even posted it about it somewhere in this subforum (the patch thread, maybe). At first I thought it was all items but now it looks like it's just in the crafting window.

Yep, also getting this now. Confused me at first and then I remembered this post and it made sense.

On another note, does anyone have any knowledge of which slicing missions are most likely to turn up Grade 4 ship upgrade schematics? I've got 2 of them but didn't notice which missions they came from :/

I'm guessing level 4 missions, but that really is just a guess.

Reverse-engineering to get schematics is just fucking awful. On Friday, I decided to just make a fuckton of a level 50 pistol and then RE it and see what I get. Couple of augment-capable greens in making them, which course have no value because everybody has a better orange or is buying the artifact level ones that two Armstechs on the server make. The rest, 15 all told (Corso's been slaving away all night) I RE. I get back a handful of materials and that's it. No new schematic. The only time I get pretty consistent luck in this respect is making and RE'ing pistol barrels, which yields blue versions pretty reliably. Otherwise, this is a bullshit mechanic: the hassle-to-reward ratio is utterly out of whack.

The problem with end game crafting is that daily commendation gear is so incredibly easy to get and superior to absolutely anything you craft for those professions. 

I hate doing it... but THIS.

I was so proud when I started crafting my purple 22 armor mods only to be horrified at the thought that you can get comm mods that are better and with less effort.

Success percentage seems to drop considerably for l.47-49 items based on my experience with them so far.

The armoring/barrel/hilt mods are kind of useless to make for this reason, yeah. Other mod types should sell decently well still; the only way to get the fancier modifications and enhancements via dailies is by doing the heroic 2s, which not everyone will do, and even then you can only get them for your own stat combo so you should be able to sell some to people kitting out their companions. Color crystals are not obtainable through dailies at all, so there's a market there too.

Or by taking them out of pvp gear.

OK, sure, but then you're only getting the particular stat combos that are in said PVP gear, and also the grind for that is more significant than the grind for daily commendations.

You still can't pull color crystals out of that stuff, too.

So as a craft, which ones actually have anything better than the level cap comm vendors? Bio? Artifice (for crystals?)?

A level 20 crafted item is not as a good as a level 50 drop item in a level based game: News at 11.

 Everyone sets sights on the end level and nothing else matters. You know, all this "Well at 50.." or "Nothing maters till end level..." or "Race through to level 50..." Stuff makes me realize one thing.


Levels are dumb.

Not really where I was going... try level 50 / level 50. If I can take a few hours or a day or two of grabbing comms to get the best purple mod you can get or spend credits on the AH or grind the shit out of crew skills to get a few purple mats AFTER I have already spent a few days REing blues to get a rare purple scheme to proc AFTER I spent a few hours doing crew skills to get the blues... well yeah. MMO and path of least resistance comes to mind here.

Cybertech for grenades, ship parts and droid parts, Bio for med packs, Artifice for crystals, the others are basically for oranges.

Now, this is not taking into account the recipes that I hear drop in raids.

Bloodworth, nobody is talking about comparing level 20 items to level 50. We're comparing max crafted items with what is available through daily commendations. It is solo content of the same level, it is an apples to apples comparison.

Right. At any given level, what a crafter can make is generally no better and frequently worse than what can be earned through commendation badges, which are earned in the normal course of levelling. In substantial measure, this is because the level limits on crafted items generally make them available at the precise point at which the player is also turning in the commendation badges.

If, on the other hand, the crafted items essentially became on average available at the *start* of a player's engagement with a particular planetary set of missions, basically about 1.10 levels earlier than the commendation badges will make items available, the crafter would gain a slight edge that might make the crafting worth doing--and might create a reasonable auction market for the crafted items. Instead, crafters can devote considerable effort to becoming able to make items that are totally irrelevant to the players who might buy them and use them at the point at which they could use them. Crafters don't even get the nice little bonuses that are common in many other crafting systems (e.g., a weapon, armor or other item modifier derived from their crafting).

Right now as far as durable crafted items go, I think only Cybertech gets something that you can't get any other way.

Actually I really only find this to be true at cap. I was able to make purple mods that were better than what I could get as a quest or commendation reward while leveling; I just very often chose not to because it was kind of a pain.

It is only at level 50 that the commendation stuff is just outright better, and, importantly, it is only at level 50 that the supply of commendations becomes effectively infinite. Before that you can only get so many commendations per planet reasonably, which is not enough to kit out a full set of oranges in mods.

See, with Armstech, I found again and again that the item that I:

had the materials for
had the ingredients for
was not WTF-pwn better than what I was using right that minute, just slightly so

was almost invariably level-locked to me at that point.

When I could use it, I could get an orange or blue replacement that was better. There's a purple schematic at some levels that's better still (though non-moddable) but getting that is a matter of major grinding of RE or something else I haven't done. Only two Armstechs on the server appear to have the purple schematics for some weapons.

So Armstech is mostly just useful for making companion weapons on a regular basis, from what I can see.

My armstech is the queen of barrels and techblades. Being able to make blue barrels for myself is really quite nice, as it means I can spend my commendations on other shit (like a hilt for Bowdaar, or whatever), and those sell perfectly well on the accursed GTN. And techblades are money. Totally money. <3 At cap, however, the barrel thing goes away, and I imagine the techblade thing does too.

Once you've gotten past the 'I have to afford my speeder' hump at 25, you should be able to raise your mission skill enough to be able to be making yourself blue barrels as you go which in turn should be pretty competitive with what you can get with commendations, which would then allow you to spend your commendations on something else, like armor mods or orange pants or whatever happens to be available on the given planet. You can't only look at 'well, I can make this gun that is identical to this commendation gun, thus crafting is worthless' because you're ignoring that there's a cost to that commendation gun - it means you can't buy the OTHER things you might want. If you're crafting as you go, you can often get everything off the vendors you might want instead of just some of the things, at least in my experience.

Sadly, I outleveled my shit faster than I could feasibly craft it. Sure, I could fuck around REing greens to blues, then pray I have enough blue mats to make enough to RE into a purple which would be way better than the comm vendor blue (~level). But by then, I was already on the next planet's comm vendor and still waiting on my crew to bring me back some purple mats. GTN is a carnival of despair, so fuck those inflated prices.

Or you know, sell your stuff for those inflated prices!

The time it takes to make better gear I could spend leveling, where I would have already found equivalents and be needing the next tier of stuff.

The system is okay for filling some gaps, and great for twinking alts, but most people simply aren't going to be able to keep their crafting level equal to their adventuring level.  I go out of my way to craft and I'm frequently finding I can make things just about the time I no longer need them.  I feel sorry for anyone with interest but without my dedication.

Once guild banks are in, guilded alts will be the ones to really benefit from the system.

The time it takes to craft you could also spend not even logged in; I don't find that particular part of the system to be much of an issue. The random factor on REs (and on missions to get the purple mats you need for purple gear) is really the main thing that kept me from spending time on items above blue quality while leveling.

I find this surprising, because without really even trying, my characters are all ahead of what level they are craft-wise. Jassan even dropped armormech and took up cybertech, and now he is at 390-ish cybertech (at level 41). And he's had metal to spare. Siala could make mods far above her level without even trying. And I'm seriously not very dedicated to crafting at all. I just pick stuff when I see it and craft crap while I level.

Crafting (outside of Biochem) seems to have one purpose: Twinking alts.  It's not a bad purpose.  It just seems like wasted resources in its current iteration, particularly when we were told in early beta that the best items in game would be crafted. 

Whether you can craft level appropriate things or not depends mostly on what non standard leveling methods you use.  I got a lot of exp from space missions and pvp leaving me slightly over leveled for the actual content and for the crafting mats i collected.

It may very well be true, I haven't yet seen any information on what the raid-dropped recipes can do.

EDIT: I guess from a certain POV orange items "can" be the best items in game (once they make the armoring mods removable from epic drops as they plan to), and can be crafted.

Ok, "Best in the game" and "Tied for the best in the game" can technically be the same thing, but come on.  I very seriously doubt that any o fthe raid recipes will produce anything better than Tier 3 gear.  Equal to, maybe... definitely not better or the masses would cry foul.

You can cap your crafting easily with the T5 materials, which I did. I started getting the T6 materials ... right about when I started hitting the levels I would use them (they show up on Corellia).

I'm guessing the difference is people who hit planets way ahead of schedule due to PVP/space missions, as Threash says.

Makes sense since I hit Corellia @ 49.4

Especially when no one sells them on GTN :uhrr:

People actually gather materials by hand? I get 90% of mine through sending the minions out gathering.

It's quite faster to farm a few nodes each giving you anywhere between 2-5 materials and each respawning every few mins, than sending companion on 30-60 min long mission that nets you the same amount.

I do! And it makes me cash money! I tend to make aim ones because there always seems to be plenty of +cunning ones up for sale, but I know the troopers need a LOT of +aim barrels if they're keeping their companions up to date too. And techblades, of course, there's a captive market there.

That's just blatant Fordel catering, ain't it :why_so_serious:

I was probably just unlucky or there's plenty barrel-hungry smugglers maybe, since each time i check for the +cunning barrels the highest on sale are like l.37, which doesn't work too well for my companions at 45 or so.

The only Barrels I've actually bought were the top end purple ones for Dorne and Myself.

Which I promptly replaced with the Daily Comm vendor ones, because I "NEEDED" that extra 2 aim  :why_so_serious:



All of my other companions are basically dressed for looks and little more.

Ha, not quite, I've been leveling a trooper myself and I noticed every time I looked, there were a bunch of +cunning but no +aim and dammit M1-4X needs the BEST BARREL to shoot the BEST HOLES through ALL THE IMPS. The highest I can make easily top out at 39 though, so even still I am not much help to you!

One thing that is kinda interesting, is seeing which classes end up taking which crafts and how that reflects item choice on the GTN.

My sorcerer went cybertech, and since no one on the squad uses aim (except the ship droid), I've never bothered buying any of those recipes.

Just doing regular questing often puts me ahead of the materials available. More than once I've had to skip ahead a planet to find the types of nodes I needed. I just find a nice gathering loop, often with an easy to get security chest, and spend a play session gathering, crafting, re'ing.

*hits 400 Armormech*

Cost for all standard 400 Armormech plans: 120,000 credits. Ow.

That's just crazy... everyone has orange or purple gear by 50.  Essentially you're crafting stuff for companions that will get orange/purple eventually too.

Trip report on Armormech so far:

1-49:
+Keeps you in armor that is consistently better than quest rewards.
+Lets you spend commendations on other stuff like weapons/weapon mods, or in my case artifact boxes.*
+Unless you're running a lot of FPs and getting armor drops, you'll actually not look like a clownsuited retard. (unless you're a smuggler because some of the mid-late level smugger stuff is pretty herfderf)
+If you're a class that has a lot of companions rocking Cunning/Aim based armor, you'll be able to keep them all completely kitted out and useful with minimum effort. (see: The trooper. All heavy-armor companions -droids)
+If you're lucky and reverse engineer the results of your odd crafting spam you can get better plans.

-That last one rarely ever happens.
-If you're overleveled for your current story content (which you will be if you're hitting the odd FP and doing bonus series on every planet) you'll need to rely heavily on the ridiculously money-inefficient scavenging quests to get you metal. Also later metal grades include two types of metal/compounds and scavenging seems to be designed to give you more of whatever you don't need.

50:
+???
-You'll look at people who took biochem and now have unlimited use superstims and supermedpacs, and be like, "Why didn't I take biochem?"

*This I was ridiculously lucky with. I kept getting useful epic shields, implants, and earpieces, so between those and my usually superior to quest-reward Armormech armor I was pretty ridiculously overpowered in FPs/Heroics.

Your everyone...is not everyone. I've got half blues, and all my oranges are slotted with blues.

So. CRAZY!

But again, until level 41, I had great success with Armormech and was generally rolling in purples with Mako in all blues. I just hate to throw out all the money spent on recipes and all the recipes people have sent me or I've bought from GTN or looted; just to pick up Biochem. But I still might. I was hoping to kit out the entire crew in purples first, but I've gone on about RE enough already.

I admit, I bought a lev 9 purple barrel last night for my new Trooper, just because at 1500cr, it just seemed silly not too.

You can buy one orange piece with commendations about every zone if you don't get them as a reward for the bonus quest in that zone.  You can alternatively get them from pvp or flashpoints as well.  An orange from level 10 is still good at 50 with new mods.  I usually hit the commondations vendors in the Fleet to see if a zone has what I need.  Then I'll take commondations as the reward (instead of green gear) and buy armor/mods as needed.

Seems pretty easy to gear with oranges.  It's not that I'm doing anything fancy.

Nebs, orange isn't anything but a thing. The color of the mods is the thing. I didn't use but maybe one orange from 25-40 because purple non-orange items > an orange with blue mods.

Bunk, yay! Going to be a tough climb for my JG, since all my bankroll is on the Imperial side and I'm quite a way from having a ship on the Rep side.

You can buy mods from the Market too.  It's not like money has many other uses at 50.  Also, the ilum dailies give commondations for purple mods.  They're yummy.

I use pvp gear for pve until I get decent pve drops.  Then I just swap gear depending on need (wish there was a pvp/pve gear swap mechanism).

I used quest greens and comm vendor items till 40.

At 40 I had a full PvP suit for me and my Companion that took me all the way to 50. The only thing I upgraded from 40-50 was my weapon from comm vendors whenever I could.

I know all that. I was just refuting your assumption that 'everyone has orange or purple gear by 50'. I don't, mine is effectively all blue.

I don't pvp, I just got to Ilum a couple days ago (which was enough time to do one quest).

The point is, crafting is sort of viable for gear up to around 40, then it's pretty much garbage for a variety of reasons. But pre-40, it's the best way for casual players to get good gear, no need to run multiple FPs or pvp ad nauseum.

I agree completely.  That's why I said paying 120k credits for a worthless level 49/50 recipe was crazy.  It makes gear that has almost no value.

If you are not doing the ilum dailies the crafted stuff is pretty nice.

I'm in the same boat. The only other character I have on the Republic side is a level 2 Smuggler. That 1500cr was about a third of my accumulated wealth.

You can put some white item for sale on the shared gtn for a lot of money and buy it with your cross side character.

True, though due to the fact that I am stubbornly determined to get a purple above level nine on Synthweaving, I only have about 30k on my lev 33 Imperial.

Is shared in Nar Shadda?  I need to transfer money to my Rep alts.

Yup.

Thanks.  I have 3 Rep alts in Nar shadda and all are dirt poor. 

Not that I have a ton of money on Komoto, anyway (200k and dwindling fast). But at least I could open up some inventory slots.

I was hoping to use the terminals in the pvp region of Tatooine, but though you can get to the Rep terminal, you can't use it. Too bad, you're risking a ganking browsing the GTN there.

Anyone know where to gather Mullinine? Rather not do the missions if possible.

Then your only option is the AH. Blue/purple crafting mats come from the missions only.

 :cry:  :heartbreak:

Although it does stuck that the purple recipe components come from the crafting missions, you can buy special "crafting missions" on the GTN.  Which guarantee you a few purple components

I've made a small fortune (over 2 mil) buying these from people that put them up for what ever the default price is on the GTN. I just check a few times a night for all the purple crafting missions level 340.  Be careful though, some of the lower level missions have the same icon as the top 340 ones.  I got burned by this twice in my haste to buy before the next guy. I've actually had the GTN say I bought them and then have the money come back in the mail saying the item was no longer available.

My personal example.  Treasure hunting (for artifice).  Purple missions default price is 4.3k.  It returns no less than 4 Coursca (sp?) gems that sell on server for 7k+, in addition to the other items: usually 8-10 blue crafting materials, a lock box with either 5-7k cash or a random level 50 blue and some other garbage that more than makes up the 4.3k price.  

I can turn those 4 Coursca(sp?) gems into one purple enhancement which sells for 50k or two focus/shield items (they use 2 each) which sell for 30-35k a piece.  I consider the rest of the items needed to make the item irrelevant since I run my guys on missions all the time just out of OCD and my bank is over flowing with crafting crap.  


** Fake edit.  I usually get 3-5 of these a night during the week. As many as 10 on the weekends.  I just check around the times people are heading to bed and cleaning out their inventory. 

Update on crafting stuffs (http://www.swtor.com/community/showthread.php?t=260731)


Translation: Ok, yeah, you guys really have been playing these MMOs longer than we have.  Our bad.  We'll try and change things up to make sense  :awesome_for_real:

Right now I'd settle for them taking another pass at my enhancement recipes and removing the fucking doubles. And they really, really need to do it sooner rather than later.

Nice; better late than never.

I need to find a way to get the ear of the crafting devs to get my UI idea in their head.  It may not be the perfect system, but it'd really help the clutter and duplication.

The problem with the pvp gear is that you collect tier 1 and 2 at the same time, and tier 2 goes much faster.  You get a piece of champs every 4-5 bags, while cent takes upwards of 10 or more depending on how many champ pieces you get in those bags.

I looked at tier one as a consolation prize or a way to fill in missing pieces. The whole valor 60 battlemaster tier three seems like it's there to make you invincible. In mostly tier two I am a pain to kill. Then again the stuff is like level 56.

The two lines that kinda made me go  :-o are the critical success on orange gear (which I assume means aug slots?) and the making augments more relevant.


Augments are already like, the most important piece of any piece of gear currently. The same item with an aug slot is virtually one tier above the item without it.

But since you can't use them in pvp gear or raiding gear then they really don't mean jack shit.  You might use a crafted piece here and there until you upgrade to raid or pvp gear, but right now augments mean nothing.  Orange gear with augment slots and being able to take out armoring from raid/pvp gear makes them extremely good though.

Augs on crafted oranges is huuuuuuuuuuuge.

And it so perfectly solves the whole "crafted vs raid/pvp" gear issue too, now the best items will be crafted orange gear with raid/pvp armoring.

I'm going to be very sad to give up my level 40 pvp suit :(

By the time I get a few alts up to 50, this game will be in pretty good shape. Awesome!  :grin:

Wait, I mean it will fail because they utterly don't understand mmo and rawr austin and mmo is a failed genre because FARMVILLE.

Sorry, wrong thread. Didn't want to interrupt the flow.

Orange crits is a great gift to crafters, crafted oranges will be in demand, especially as so many have abandoned armor/synth/arms. Even on my two new guys I grabbed bio because of the state of the listed crafts. I can still grouse about the end game item balance, but it's a step in the right direction.

Increased RE chances: about goddamned time. It only takes hitting the wall once (ok twice) to give it up completely.

A consumable crafted thingy that would let me put an aug slot onto my existing oranges would be nice, but maybe counter productive for their goal.

A chance to RE an orange for the schematic would be nice. Expensive and/or grindy, but nice.

I'm torn on the OJ aug slot thing just because I already like how my sage looks. If the robe she's wearing doesn't have a crafted oj equivlient (and I don't think it does, at least not yet), it means I have to dress in something I like less, and that is disappointing.

Or something you like MORE! Who knows what kind of wacky orange recipes are out there not being made right now.

I doubt there's anything out there I will like more. My robe is a pretty blue color AND doesn't have a fucking hood up. That's pretty goddamn special.

I think they're just going to make all the current crafted purples into oranges is my guess.

Raids should just drop mods, it's a perfect way not to employee artists on anything except crafted recipes.

This is why I don't see a problem with making a consumable crafted aug socket thingy, as long as it's crafted by the same skill that crafts the OJ of course.  So a Synthweave one that only works on STR/WILL gear and an Armortech one that works on CUNNING/AIM gear.  They could do something like REing a crafted OJ that has an aug slot pops out that aug thingy to use on another OJ piece, to preserve the 'sanctity' of only getting augs on crits.

You know what it is? It makes me think of DAoC crafting, where 98 and 99% shit you couldn't GIVE away. That's what non-crit oj's are going to wind up being, I suspect.

That's not true!

Enus gave me plenty of 99s  :why_so_serious:

It's not quite as bad if you can shift the aug slots around, though.  But I'm not holding my breath for that.

Raids should drop materials.

Anyone noticed changes in RE rates after recent patches? I took a green pair of lev 37 boots to Blue on one try and Purple on two tries this weekend. Was rather shocked.

I've not noticed any change, and I've been doing 20+ REs a day on my cybertech.

Yeah I've been trying to RE some implants and have given up in utter, utter exasperation. 40+ blue lvl 49 implants and not one fucking purple. Retarded fucking system.

Well, there is this dev post from last week (http://www.swtor.com/community/showthread.php?p=2613451#edit2613451):


That said, I've been getting new patterns on my Armormech and Biochemist at a similar-enough rate this past week.  Small sample sizes and all that I guess.

"An upcoming patch" - one of their favorite phrases. I've left off doing much RE until I see it in the patch notes.

Though I ran my BH completely out of the last tier blue mats trying to make stuff already.

I can't believe that people actually farm the mats to make the BOP bracers and belts over and over and over again until they get a crit.

I inadvertently made half my guild hate me because I mentioned I crit on the first try for both Rakata items.

One thing I can't wrap my head around is why shit takes so long at lvl 45+ to complete. Missions take forever... Why? My companions have been doing this shit since level ~12. You'd think they would be proficient at doing this stuff by now. They actually get worse as time goes on. I get it, it is a time sink... but still. Mastery accounts for nothing. You'd think my comps would pick up shortcuts on getting metals/crystals/fabrics they could use later on. Nope... they get dumber.

They're taking on harder and harder missions which are more complex and yield rarer materials!

Which would only work as rationalization of the earlier missions continued to decrease in time.

Personally I was kinda hoping that raising your affection with your companions would increase their crafting bonuses.

It kinda does - they complete missions faster, they fail less often and they return higher amounts of materials. It's particularly noticeable with the high level mission discovery missions - I never send anyone except my max-affection companions on those any more!

For real? Huh. I was talking more along the lines of their actual bonuses (like Tanno Vik's crit for Armormech/Underworld Trading), but that's awesome too. Looks like I need to butter up Vik some more.

So general question on crafting to those that have played a few MMO's in your life (I'm sure there are a few out there lol).  What are your expectations on the crafting updates? 

Here is my dilemma.  I have far too many crafting resources due to stocking up on materials when I thought crafting was actually going to make me some money.  Also several friends have dropped level 400 skills to take up biochem and have dumped their stuff on me as well. I've become overly frustrated with the RE experience, 75 blues = 3 new purples... oh wait you already know that recipe x 2.. so you only get one new recipe.  At which point I pretty much swore off making anything until things got fixed.

My hope is that RE'ing gets fixed/improved.  But I still can't make anything that I can't get from a level 50 daily.

Do you foresee them making new recipes?  Adding level 23 mods (yay I can make daily rewards /golfclap)?

Maybe adding new, higher end materials, making the materials I have now worthless? 

As it is, I steal mods out of HM drops to put into my gear. I just can't see in my head how they can fix this easily.

The RE rate should improve in a weekly patch I believe, they've said its bugged. Might not be this one, but pretty soon'ish.

If you're doing dailies and HMs, then why do you need crafting?

I can now say with some experience, this.

I've now got 1 of each crew skill to 400 on my small army of alts, and have been crafting and selling for a couple of weeks on most of them. Turns out that there's very few ways to make a decent amount of money with actual crafting. The baseline for this is two things: 1) daily quests at 50 and 2) the best money farming activity I've found so far - chain running Boarding Party solo with a 48+ character. Just farming the 3 large and 5 small chests in Boarding Party and only killing the bosses * mobs you *have* to kill you can make about 120-150k Cr/hour. Level 50 dailies may be better than that with 2 people or if you're a well-geared DPS plus ofc you'll be getting daily commendations, but as a badly geared healer I find them slow, painful and boring, and lower income than Boarding Party.

Orange armour (both Armormech and Synthweaving) sells fairly reliably, but only in small volumes and not for enough money given the time taken to get mats and make it.
Purple armour sometimes sell, but again not for enough and regularly enough to be worth it, and certainly not for enough to actually grind RE'ing for them at the moment.
Armstech is a waste of time, in all respects.
Biochem is great for personal use but nearly everyone has on their main anyway so there's very little market for medpacs etc. Implants sell OK, especially the low level ones, but for small amounts of profit. Nowhere near enough to outweigh the other money makers.
Artifice is a pain in the arse. Too many things to make, not enough market for any specific group of items, although mods sell OKish, but again not for enough money to justify the time and hassle.

As for gathering it's a mixed bag. Guaranteed sellers are the purple grade 5 & 6 UT mats - Promethium sells very well but only at limited volumes. Same with Mandalorian Iron but at lower volumes still. Most other gathered mats are a bit hit and miss. Sometimes you can sell huge stacks of Archaeology mats (especially the grade 5/6 artifact fragments) but other times they'll sit on the GTN for days and days. Same with Bioanalysis mats. Scavenging mats aren't worth the bother, just vendor them. Too many people have Scavenging.

Mission discoveries sell well but the market is priced too high generally. If you price them sensibly then UT, Scav, Slicing and to a lesser extent Investigation & Treasure Hunting 300+ missions sell very well. However if you have alts that can use them they're better off used yourself for the purple mats, especially 300 skill UT ones.

Out of all of the crew skills the only guaranteed regular income is from Slicing. And only from crit successes on grade 5/6 lockbox missions. Those small number of crits make the entire skill profitable. Oh, and in-world lockboxes on high level planets, but even then only if they're actually right in your path. Don't go out of your way for them, you're better off spending the time completing quests in a pure Cr/hour sense.

So, my view on it is get Slicing on every single alt you can. Get your companion affections high - all of them. Constantly send every companion on every alt you can out to do slicing lockbox missions - preferably grey con ones. Use or sell the purple mission discovery drops, especially 300 skill UT ones. Apart from that don't bother except to make nice things for your leveling alts. If you just want to make money then crafting is a complete waste of time. That said, you quickly hit a point where there's no use for money. I've got about 10 million between my alts now so I don't feel any need to even think about it any more.

Long post, sorry, but the TL:DR is only Slicing makes more money/hour than other methods.

I'm sitting at over 4 mil just from PvP.

When Bioware fixes crit-rates on crafted items and makes raid-epics fully moddable (or rather, DE-moddable), armormech and synthweaving will be the new thing to make shitloads of money.

Agreed! Hopefully the RE rate will be fixed soon too. Just fixing that could make quite a difference to crafting tbh.

I think Synthweaving will be mad cash on the Empire side because WOW their tier sets look bad for the most part.

For artificing, I picked two enhancements to give a shit about getting purple versions of (battle and ... I forget the other. Something defensive). I sell 'em for 40k a pop. And I know most of the different colors of crystals now, which sell between 25-30k. I do virtually nothing to make these, when I happen to see a cheap crafting mission up or get them on my slicer, I go on another crafting jag, essentially. When RE rates get fixed, I'll get around to REing some decent shields and focuses.

Yeah, I could make more doing dailies, but then I would have to do dailies. And fuck dailies in this game.

I'm an artifice as well and I hope they start adding in more recipes. Every EV raid we get two BoP crafting recipes for the other professions.  Kind of feel left out.  :heartbreak:

Found out yesterday I can't even make a shield for our assassin tanks. Apparently they were switched in beta from STR to willpower but artifice was not updated.  Which sucks because I've made it a habit of sending out crystals/focus/shields to anyone in the guild who hits 48 so they can start gearing up a little faster. Everyone likes a free purple in the mail!

You can get a decent shield for flat credits on Corellia I think?

BoP raid-drop recipes are awesome.

 :oh_i_see:

How much does a purple lvl49 main-stat augment go for? I've sold two, and both insta-sold (40k for a str and 45 for Willpower) and I really cba to find out what the adequate price is.

Look at the mat costs on the GTN.  Then build your costs from there.  Alot of people are starting to stock up on augments right now, since there will be more new slots in 1.2.

isn't slicing the only craft that makes augments? So you can't really calculate the cost - it's hoping to crit on a lvl6 mission or getting the purple mission. And even then getting a stat one is a bit of a crap shoot, since you have alacrity, crit, power, surge, etc and stats.

Umm, new question, do raid epics have augment slots? Or is it only crit crafts?

edit: it doesn't, so they either have to add augment slots to raid gear, or crit crafts will become bis once they allow the de-moding.

Slicing 340 missions cost around 40k on my server, so 40k for the specific augment you want is fairly cheap.  Usually the good ones go for 3 times that.

Slicing missions (purple) go for 55k-100k depending on the day on my server.  Augments go for 30k (presence) up to 120k depending on stats. 

Getting a bit scared about how much this is going to cost if people want BIS gear.  Figure 80K+ for an augmentable orange. 30k to pull raid level 56 mods out. That's per mod, so armor/enhancement/mod you're looking at 90k per item.  Currently not a lot of orange belts/wrists but if you do that add two more slots.

80K for the orange with augment slot
90k to pull old mods
40k for an augment
---------------------
210k per slot

Going to get expensive pretty quick.

Which are the expensive ones? Flat main stat, or power or something? I just don't know what's desireable stat wise.

No way, for best in slot gear you are looking at at least several million.  Which most people already have.

"Most people" don't even have a 50.

So that's bollocks, clearly.

I have around 45k on my lvl 50!

Purple augments on Shien/Republic go for like 60-75k unless they're for something less popular like Presence or alacrity.