f13.net

Because we need more topics, and I think to have everyone's rage compressed to one thread for posterity.   :grin:

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


Get your angst on!

I dropped slicing before the patch to make room for synthweaving, so I dodged the bullet. Not sure how much they nerfed it though, it might have been a minor nerf.

It's still free money, as long as the other trade skills are not fixed so they make anything worth using at end game free money beats the big fat nothing everything else gets you.  Cept Biochem i guess, that one actually rocks.

Color me unshocked.  Luckily I got all my inventory slots and enough banked to get all my speeder skills and a comfy nest egg.  If I knew the nerf was coming, I would've gone at it a bit harder to max out my cargo hold though.  

"to bring them into balance with other skills."

My experience of the other skills is that they cost you money to use. So does that mean that slicing is now a money sink? Because if so then what's the point of it?

Augmentations and Recipes.

The recipes aren't too interesting as they're just the ship/vehicle ones.  Still, augments and crafting missions mean I'll likely keep it on my main and use an alt for Underworld Trading.

Income really depends on where medium boxes end up though, as they were about the same as blue ones in my experience.

Does something happen at the end game that prevents you from harvesting resource nodes and selling the results to the vendors? Because that's free money, too.

I may dump it, I may not. It's certainly earned me money on the way up.

I believe the crafting tradeskills offer bind-on-pickup gear crafted from materials dropped by hard-mode flashpoints and operations. Whether that gear is actually valuable or easily replaced by drops is another question entirely.

There's a wee bit of difference between actively harvesting nodes on one character and cycling through an account full of characters running slicing missions on 5 companions each.  

It was going to break the hell out of the economy if it hasn't already. It needed nerfed honestly no matter how cool "Push Butan, receiv credits" was.

Like 99% of Goon Squad was abusing the shit out of it so I look forward to logging in tonight to hear all the bitching.

They say it will now be "in line with other gathering skills"... which would suggest little profit outside what can be sold on the GTN (augments).

Guess we'll see after their "extended" maintenance...

 :oh_i_see:

From what I understand it was already heavily nerfed in beta.   Probably a fair chance this was just a basic credit nerf and they don't understand the actual problem with the others.

Yes, you end up with more money. However, if all other tradeskills supposedly don't provide anything worth using at the "end game", what's the benefit of having all this extra money you get from the slicing, at that stage?

Buying dungeon/raid drops, augments, modifications, vanity items, consumables, etc.

Are any of these better than the supposedly worthless results of other crafting specializations, and/or actually possible to acquire for plain cash?

Augments?

Who here has actually slotted an augment on anything they didn't craft?  I've tried selling them, even at the silly-low rate the AH sets for them and all I got was a lot of wasted deposit money.  With everyone and their brother wanting Orange gear or quest drops Augments don't have a place.  The whole slotting system needs tweaking based on this.  They know it but haven't moved forward with a plan yet.  Until they give them a place other than "hey, crafting crit!" augments are fairly useless.

Ditto for missions. Nobody's interested in buying them, particularly since they're one-off.  I got a slicing mission, ran it and got .. a lot of purple augments and some decent credits.  I also got a scavenging mission that was 2 levels below my tier, ran it and failed.  I can't see spending big money on then as a player only to have to pay the expense of a "Wealthy" return mission on top of it.

Schematics are a chance since eventually folks will have what they want and the prices on them will plummet, probably below the point of making slicing worth it.

The free money  boxes in the world are about the only reason to have the skill if missions aren't profitable.

Umm, augments fit into orange gear. At maximum level, everybody will be in either purple or orange gear with purple augments/mods/enhancements/whatever.

Augments fit into slot created on critical succes crafted gear (not necessarily orange) You know, the one that no one will make because no one will take up anything other than slicing, since it's all worthless at the end game :grin:

What slot on orange gear?  I haven't seen any augment slots on any of the stuff I've gotten.

faked cuz tmp was fasteR:  Oh crafted oranges.  Yeah, not getting made for endgame stuff.  Purps and whatnot don't have aug slots.  None of the crafted oranges have been nice-looking enough to purchase, either.

I'm not sure what I find stranger, that they took so long to do this, or that so many people made up convoluted reasons to themselves that this wasn't needed.  (see the "She's Crafty" thread for multiple examples)

I've been hoarding all of my slicing mission/recipie finds in anticipation of this nerf too, so here's hoping the values of them will shoot back up now with less people sinking all of their companion missions into slicing.

Crafted oranges don't get augment slots, no one has ever reported getting one.

I went to the torhead thing to check meantime and it seems the PURPZ can have augment slot, actually: http://www.torhead.com/items/catg/2/subcatg/1/slot/7

(unless that info is outdated, of course. i should probably check at the vendor in game to make sure)

so i suppose yeah, there's a great profit to be made from selling these augments :why_so_serious:

Thanks for the correction-- SWTOR has so many types of "crap that slots into other crap" that it's easy to get them confused.

I wouldn't trust Torhead on Augment slots just yet.  It seems like they added one to everything a few days ago.  Another DB has the couple of orange items I looked at listed as impossible to critical on, but that could be an equally unreliable data point.

I'm going by the multiple threads asking if anyone has ever crit an orange recipe full of negative answers as well as no one in my large one having gotten one.  They could be extremely rare, which still makes those augments completely useless.

Shrug, if that's the case I'll drop slicing. It's not exactly like I have a huge sunk cost here-- leveling it made me money.

I'd always thought slicing worked fine the way it was.  Frankly, wasnt that great for anything besides making money... therefore typically you'd have to spend said money to buy stuff anyways (for instance, I bought headgear for Kaliyo yesterday and pretty much spent every dime I ever made slicing).  You can slice missions as rewards, but typically they're not even from your crafting specialty and good luck selling em.

Also, they're gonna have to adjust the pricing on pretty much everything else if there are no slicers out there with spare coin to buy at current values.  This means playing with vendors pricing, pricing on missions and mats, etc.  This is all assuming they set the economy with "imba" slicing taken into account in the 1st place.

Nobody seems to have taken cybertech on my server; having a hard time finding extra motors, sensors, etc., and as far as I can tell all the droid parts do use augments and mods a lot.

Nobody makes droid parts unless it's a request. Everyone but 2-3 companions per faction uses Armor pieces and Mods instead. Personally, I have 3 of my 6 epic armor plates done, and 2 more levels to gather the mats for the rest (damned purple rare metals..)

Hrm, if augments are as useless as everybody says, I may just drop slicing and grab underworld trading.  Sounds like I can just buy the augs easily for the rare times I need to use them.  I've already accumulated about 15 blue augs just from last night.

The problem is that other than biochem crafting appears to be worthless. Armourmech has been handy for gearing out companions whilst levelling, but it creates nothing at the high end at all. Everyone will be wearing either purple bought gear or orange recipes, both of which cannot have augment slots.

The entire crafting & mod systems needs another overhaul to be frank. It just doesnt work and is complicated as hell for very little payoff.

So far, slicing is still turning a profit for me, but missions take half an hour or more to run so it'll be a while before I have enough missions run to see if I'm just getting lucky on these first few or not.

Mods (at least most types) will certainly be money makers at max level.

Gah. I traded TH for Slicing since everyone said sliciing was hax. I haven't had a chance to level it and abuse it though.  :cry:

You should make a profit with Grades 1-5.  Grade 6 is looking like it might break even at best on credits, but it does give you the Grade 6 missions which are probably the only ones people will care about down the line.

Looks bountiful missions barely make a profit now, hardly worth keeping it.

Was all the money from slicing coming from missions?  I've just been running around slicing random nodes and made a good profit that way.  How badly have the nodes been nerfed?

I don't know where you guys are getting this "purpz don't have mod slots" stuff from. I've gotten at least two purple drops that have had mod slots.

Everything has mod slots, we are talking about augment slots.  Oranges don't have augment slots, i assume purples do since nothing else actually does.

At least for synthweaving, I see augment slots on any item where I get a critical success crafting.

Ah, nevermind.

I think the point is that, so far, the only thing that has augment slots are craft-able items that crit.  The drops in the very first end game raid are better than anything you can craft.  So unless purple drops (not crafted) naturally come with augment slots, augments are going to become more and more worthless as more and more people hit max level.

Haven't had a node yet, but yes the bulk of the cash was coming from missions.  You'd run a rich or bountiful T5 mission for 2k credits and get 5-6k back.    I just ran a few Abundant and Bountiful missions and got less than the mission cost back.  So it pays nothing other than nodes now.  You'll see a lot of folks drop it but the nodes should still be OK for free cash.

And to be clear there are  MOD SLOTS then MOD SLOT TYPES.   Slot types include Barrels, Crystals, Enhancements, AUGMENTS, Armoring, Hilts and (stupidly) Mods.   Augments appear to ONLY be on crafted items that crit.

This is a pointless waste for Slicing because when leveling-up you replace gear too often to actually bother finding a crafted item that's crit vs just muddling through.  Endgame Purps will have no augments - as was previously stated - because folks would just farm the early bosses, rip out the mods and boom, instant raid gear.  (Although, yes it's possible they'll have an empty slot for Augments to be added-in.  No word on that yet.)

Well last night i was in Quesh and today i am in Hoth so it could very well be that, but the slicing nodes went from giving 450-600 to 1000-1200.  It could just be the change in planet though.

Fairly in-depth reports from the forums are that lockbox missions are now net negative over time. You'd make more profit camping a slicing world node and waiting for it to respawn. Time to drop slicing, folks.

It's also time to drop any illusions that "TOR will be different".

The developers don't communicate their goals. They made core design decisions that were obviously wrong and ignored beta extensive feedback until after some lucky people profited in live. Then they reflexively over-nerfed in the very first patch, and destroyed an entire tradeskill. In other words, TOR is a MMO.

Slicing nerf seems fine.  People are just crying over not having a money fountain anymore.

It's not "fine", there is absolutely zero point in it existing now.  And before anyone pipes in with the retarded augments and missions crap again: the missions are random drops on crits, you can't run missions specifically for them, you get maybe one in ten missions and the only ones people want are the max level ones which come from the max level missions that didn't make money even before the nerf and the augments are completely random among about 20 different stats most of which are worthless, most of them are green thus worthless and each mission takes over an hour to finish.  The skill is dead, removing it would have been a better option.

Do people even look at this stuff or just theory craft and rage?  I've run about 10 slicing missions since I got home and I'm about 12k positive credits on top of picking up 2 (340) skill mission discoveries.  That's without considering any slicing gathering nodes I would of picked up if I was actually running around.

Again, slicing seems mostly fine now and people are just raging.  The only point I agree on is that the augment missions are mostly worthless and could use a buff.

Yes, i ran missions on three companions for several hours.  Rich missions are a profit, they are just rare and most of the time you have to run the money losing ones.

For money making while leveling up are there any decent gathering or missions skills now post-nerf?

If you are actually out there gathering everything is a profit, slicing better than most i assume. 

You've gotten lucky on rich spawns in your mission log, then. Abundant, Moderate and Bountiful are a definite loss.  Do you *think* you're profiting because you're running quests or are you keeping an actual log?

I'm just not seeing that from the data gathered on EJ.  All but three lockbox missions (which have sample sizes 1, 6, and 3) are showing a net profit on credits.

I'm not sure what "fairly in-depth" translates to in terms of samples and there are other factors to consider (like affection critical rates) so I can't say for certain those people are wrong without looking at their work.

I actually wrote down the cost and profit of about a dozen missions before I quit tracking them and they were all profit.  All Class 5 & 6 lockbox missions.  My profits weren't huge, but were profit.  Guess I just must be lucky?

Level 6 only goes up to abundant and those were not a profit before the nerf.

Hrm, I'm torn on abandoning it.  With all the drama over it, I'm sure this wont be the last change.  I predict a lot of buff/nerfs to the skill till they figure it out, so might be wise to hold on to it in case they change things to buff it in other ways (like making augs way useful or something.  Who knows).

Or adding the bonus missions as an actual mission reward rather than just a random crit chance.

I just ran a level 6 abundant reward mission, it was a 250 credit loss.  There is no way you can be making a profit from those unless you are getting extremely lucky.

I kept a log of the handful of missions I did earlier today.  Every one turned a profit.  Level 6 missions - all of them were "Plug the Leak" and one "Data Race".  I think that's moderate and abundant yields.  Again, every one turned a profit...but it wasn't a big profit.  It's certainly not worth keeping slicing for these profits.  To be precise:

111227, 11:30 Plug the Leak - Cost 1415 / Return 1989 - Profit: 574
111227, 12:09 Plug the Leak - Cost 1415 / Return 1650 - Profit: 235
111227, 12:42 Plug the Leak - Cost 1415 / Return 1636 - Profit: 221
111227, 13:14 Plug the Leak - Cost 1415 / Return 1738 - Profit: 323
111227, 13:45 Plug the Leak - Cost 1415 / Return 1528 - Profit: 113
111227, 14:19 Plug the Leak - Cost 1415 / Return 1445 - Profit: 30
111227, 14:56 Data Race - Cost 1485 / Return 1753 - Profit: 308

I plan to keep logging every mission I run like this to see what happens.  I think I'll also note whether they're moderate, abundant, etc.  I also did not note in those logs which missions gave me additional rewards besides the credits and which didn't, but I got at least one purple schematic out of those missions as well.

I'm not sure the schematics, augments, and mission discoveries are worth the skill.  But the credit amounts are reasonable enough.  You're not going to be making huge amounts of money on this, but it's not going to make you go broke either.  The only question for me so far is whether the 'primary' rewards of the skill: the schematics, augments, and mission discoveries - are worth having Slicing rather than some other skill.  At the moment, I'm not sure they are.

They need to make it so you can add augment slots to things, otherwise augments are pointless.

If all moderates turned a profit and abundants can go either way that has to be a bug, unless i got the reward hierarchy wrong this whole time.

In terms of tiers it's Moderate, Abundant, Bountiful, and Rich.

As for "which ones should you run", I think lowering the rewards from the green quality boxes has flipped it around from before.

They took an atomic bomb to the skill. Now, they begin the rebuilding process.

Will it be worth keeping? Hell it was so easy to level in the first place, by the time they fix it I may just pick it up again.

I kept a log before and after.

At the high end they cut the yield by about half, don't have enough data to be conclusive yet because the missions take so long to run. 
At the low end they doubled the yield, plenty of data here because they run so fast.

They may have increased the mission failure chance overall.  Prior to the patch there were 5 missions that yielded more than a credit per second, I expect all of those to be dramatically reduced, to the 0.25-0.35 range.  Cutting the yield by a factor of 4-7 is a pretty heavy nerf, might make an interesting decision on which mission you run as tier 1 missions have a higher per second yield but are much more hands-on to manage than the longer running tier 6 missions.

I've been tracking Treasure Hunting as well, since it also has lockbox missions.  Those are much closer to break-even than Slicing, slicing just got a vastly reduced but still positive yield with this patch.  That makes some sense as you get useful crafting goods with Treasure Hunting while you only get credits with Slicing. 

Either way you look at it, the return is greater than 1, it makes a bad casino (or a good one from the players perspective).  In the current state it will continue to be massively popular.

They made a moderate nerf to an obviously overpowered crew skill that still pays you to level it.  :headscratch:

The major benefit of still taking slicing to begin with is that in-world resource nodes give direct cash money instead of filling your inventory with worthless junk.

Plus as a beginner you can play with missions for free.

I took slicing immeadiately before the nerf, and I'm keeping it until I am rich enough to give no fucks.

Quick logging results from yesterday & today:

12 slicing lockbox missions, levels 4 & 5, all Moderate or Abundant yield. Total creds spent on mission costs 13570, total income 14444, which is a profit of 874 creds, over a 4 hour time period.

Plus 12 in-world boxes during that time giving a total of 1583 creds, ~132 creds each.

So, yes I'm still making a tiny profit from slicing, but it feels so small as to be not worth the bother, especially since there's no other benefit at all from it. Previously I was using slicing payouts to fund biochem leveling on another character but that won't work now. All crafting abandoned for now then, it's just a money- and time-sink as it is right now.

The next step will be them removing either the credits from it or removing all in-world nodes. It's still free money. And it's too big of a faucet.

That being said, speeder prices are too high given this nerf.

I don't have slicing and I had no problems buying any speeders.  Slicing was not a needed skill, it was just a cash machine.

It's quite interesting look at the data being collected on the forums. Slicing was nerfed three, maybe four ways it seems.

- mission yield was cut by approx 71% across the board expcept for tier 6 missions which got a slight boost.
- critical success rate of missions appears to have been decreased by an equal amount.
- companion affection no longer decreases mission time. (it never said it did, but pre-patch you ground get up to a 15% decrease I mission time from affection)
- potentially also the failure rate was increased, but this one hasn't been tested properly yet and may just be RNG.

Despite all that, it still seems to be the only skill that can make money on my server. I'm on one of the highest population Euro servers, and underworld trading metals sell for less than the mission cost once you add in the listing fee. No tradeskills makes money at all.

Once you include failures, lockbox missions are a net negative. If you notice, the people noting a small profit just lucked out and didn't have any failures. It really is time to drop the skill.

Slicing needs to be completely reworked. Lockbox missions should be replaced with something different; maybe random crafting materials with a slightly better yield to compensate for not being able to specify what you want, or perhaps missions that reward mission discovery items. Itemization needs to be changed so players want augments. The gathering node lockboxes are fine and can remain.

Pretty sure you get the listing fee back after you sell your auction. Or after it times out.

You know, like in WoW.  :awesome_for_real:

I'm only familiar with Armormech, but if you crit making a piece of armor it gets an augment slot. Of course so far I have 4 companions as a trooper and none of them have bonuses to armormech so I haven't seen it happen a lot, but yeah, that's how you get augment slots.

As for slicing...well, it needed nerfed. Sorry, none of the other tradeskills gave you piles of free money. I'm honestly not sure what to do with it however since it's extremely hard to determine that sweet spot where it's profitable but not so good that it's a free money fountain or an enticement to shithead Chinese goldfarmers to just buy 1000 accounts and sit around mashing the mission button. Crafting mats as a reward are kinda pointless in light of them being generally worthless due to underworld trading/scavenging/etc providing pretty much everything you need.

Sooo i should be running tier 1 missions? and are the higher reward missions still better than the lower ones?

Of course it needed to be nerfed. But the way they nerfed it rendered the skill garbage.

You shouldn't be running slicing missions at all. Either drop the skill or just harvest nodes with it.

My little sample was, well, too little, but out of 12 missions I had 2 failures, and still made a (tiny) net profit. But, 12 missions is clearly far too small a sample to be meaningful, just an observation.

I say they should have left the rewards as they were, but double/triple/quadruple the time needed to complete missions.  You still nerf the credits-per-hour ratio, but still make the reward worthwhile.*

*Note: I've never dabbled at all in Slicing, so if this idea sounds like I'm talking out of my ass, I am ^_^

Missions already took over 40 minutes at high levels. At some point you hit absurdity. Lockbox missions need to go entirely. It's a flawed design, so there's no way to fix the implementation.

The skill was based on the time value of money. The idea that developing your tradeskills should somehow be a net loss in a regular circumstance is the problem.

It's not luck, 400/400 slicing and companions with around 2,000 affection.  It's very rare that I ever see a failure anymore.


Difference of opinions I guess, I was thinking the exact opposite.  That the idea that leveling your trade skills should pay out huge gains is the problem, that and the fact that people have this idea that if they have to actually work at saving enough credits for a mount instead of having it's handed to them that the economy is broken.

It still decreases mission time.  I just tried it out now and a mission listed at 01:12:00 "starts the clock" at 01:01:55 with a companion at 9606 affection (and no relevant efficiency bonus) and 01:11:57 with the ship droid.

Before anyone asks, as that's obviously an augment mission, lockbox ones show the same behavior.

Indeed.

What amuses me about slicing:

It's a gathering profession, not a mission profession.

If you do nothing but spam missions on your gathering profession: you are INSANE. And likely broke. Gathering is for finding world nodes and getting shit from them. The missions are for needed specific X Y or Z in exchange for credits. Slicers haven't been bitching that world nodes are the problem, they've just been using the mission functionality 24/7, which is intended on a gathering profession to convert credits to materials. In Slicing's case it was converting credits into a shitload more credits.

Now it converts credits into a few more credits (every bit of forum math I've seen still has it being net positive over time, just Barely net positive). But if you use it as *gasp* a gathering profession, it's just a free few thousand credits every few minutes when you slice a world node.

Can we shut the fuck about it now?

 :roffle:

They really need to remove the lockbox functionality of Slicing and have it return something of worth, but not usually credits.  Maybe random items different from what Treasure Hunting does.

I think the problem may be this idea the trade skills are something that's only there to "level up", rather than function as a source of equipment for whatever level you have it at, one that's guaranteed to be viable to operate at whatever level it is at, too.

I don't see why there should be net loss attached to rising it -- working on my other progress bars is an endless stream of loot, credits and xp points. All there to encourage you to keep running that treadmill. Why should crafting be that one redheaded stepchild that stabs you in the cock, instead? All that does is making less people do the crafting, which means less gear options available for all players, which doesn't benefit the game in the slightest.

Crafting in this game is really, REALLY trivial to do, so I don't buy into the whole "nobody will bother" aspect. If anything, what will keep people away from crafting is that it seems to cap out at needing heroic mats/schematics to do level 50 items. I can make epics that are better than anything you'll find on a commendation vendor right now (and had two done by the time I could equip them), but they're going to be about even with heroic 50 blues from what I can tell.

But actually doing the crafting? It's trivial since you just send your companions out to do shit. If anything sucks about crafting it's that the system doesn't really click until you have your second companion. So the low tiers where you'd eat up the ability to make your own gear, you aren't really making gear.

If it actually costs me money to the point where it's cheaper to just buy equally good stuff i need from vendors, why bother? The latter also saves me all the mucking around with sending companions out, running to these resource nodes and all the other shit which yes, is trivial, but still takes time i could be instead spending on kicking the foozles in the balls, which is equally trivial but pays me money, in contrast.

Gathering and Crafting for skillups does not cost a dime? Well, depending on the tradeskill you may need to spend 200-1000 credits/hour for flux or what have you. Most of them can harvest half the mobs you fight (salvaging and biochem, depending on the planet)

The crafting that costs money is Blue+ quality. But you don't need to touch that stuff to hit 400. You just gather away, and randomly pick a party member to queue 5 craft combines on and ignore them. Compared to crafting in pretty much every other MMO ever? This shit be trivial, yo.

So that crafted materials actually have a value instead of just being fodder everyone gets for free?

I'm starting to think this whole stupid slicing debate is really just two sides - people who care about the game having a good competitive market, and people who just want everything to be free.

I thought it was between people who took slicing and crafters.

Fuck markets.  I don't want them in my games. There is no "market" when all gear from raids is > crafted mats anyway, so pretending there is only happens to appease crafters.

This is why I always stick to Alchemy, or Space Alchemy in this game.

Folks wanted Slicing nerfed, so quit bitching that they nerfed it too hard.  I guess players who've had the game two weeks know better than the devs who've had the game since 2006.  :awesome_for_real:

Crafting not making money?  Adorable!  Meanwhile my vault looks like Scrooge McDucks. But we'll see what happens after the great Slicing nerf. 

Seems to me there are a lot of 'experts' who are trying to fuck this game up.  And Bioware is listening to them.

I want to know who got the idea that making a tradeskill produce nothing but meanwhile while simultaneously having it so that the player themselves spent none of their actual time on said tradeskill, would be a good idea in any circumstance.

That's crux of the matter, really -- is crafting just something "you raise to 400" (and if you do, then for what?) ignoring bulk of options in the process, or something that should ideally make you want to actually play with it by being beneficial all the way?

I informed bioware of an exploit I found with artifice which turned it into even more free money than slicing, despite being a building-stuff-skill. They hotfixed it. I'll live comfortably with the finder's take :>

Except that isn't determined by what your crafting costs were, because the buyer couldn't care less about them. But mostly by what it costs to get an NPC-generated equivalent. At the other end you have the bottom value determined by how much the NPCs are willing to pay for the produced stuff. It's pretty much the same like it works for the "market" of npc loot drops.

And just like with the drops the game already throttles potential supply of crafted stuff through multiple gates -- number of available skills you can have trained, crafting mission lengths, node quantity/respawn timers and whatever else is there i can't think of at the moment. With all these in place the arbitrary cost attached to crafting really doesn't have any purpose other than discourage people from actually using the system to full extent.

I can only speak for Cybertech, but I craft mods I use on my guns, armor, ship and droid.  I also sell mods on the GTN for a nice chunk of change.  So yeah, crafting is useful leveling up.  I could have zoomed higher, but now I'm on Tier 5 and CT keeps my gear always up to date.  I got blues, I got purpz.  Now let's see what happens to my profits with the slicing nerf. 

Standard Slicing missions in terms of credit per second yield.  Prior to the patch the highest yield on this scale was 1.7, now the highest yield is 0.4 (and previously all missions had positive yields).  Now Slicing casually supports 1 additional character instead of 6.  Still going to be a massive credit source in the world.

I also saw 18 failed missions out of 250 for a fail rate of about 7%; only a few of the 33-40 and 41-48 missions have fewer than 10 samples.  Still, a single failed mission can still move the average quite a bit, especially with the missions more expensive bountiful and rich missions - hence their lower yields.  It looks like they brought in the Max side of the equation without adjusting the up-front cost, which has the consequence of making the lower level in tier missions look better.

I found it beneficial, and used blue items I made for myself all the way to 50(cybertech, so I was making armor pieces and mods). But if you just want a 400 skill to make shit then, you don't need to spend much money at all (really, vendoring the shit you make will more than make up the cost of the flux missions if you want)

My comment was entirely that it's really really EASY to max out a crafting skill. There is no dick-stabbing point in the curve or anything where you need to dump millions of spacebucks into it or time.

So running level 1 moderate missions: cost 95, pay out around 140-146 each.  They take 3 mins.  That's just all kinds of broken, the skill gets worse as you level it up.  Running the missions you get at skill level 1 is the best way to make a profit.

I'm not actually sure the skill gets worse as you level it up.

It'd take a lot longer to prove than i am willing to put into it but those 30 min missions would have to average around 500 profit to keep up with the skill 1 missions.

I plan on putting it to the Spreadsheet test!

Don't forget to account for the auction value of the found mission discovery things at each tier etc.

Right and the fail rates with amounts lost.

I plan on doing this for both TH and Slicing, both sending the crew out on lockbox missions, and seeing what happens.

I spreadsheet for you.

Here's the results of my last few days. No missions in this log were pre-nerf as I've kept that in a separate log.
http://dl.dropbox.com/u/704172/F13%20Photos/Credit%20Missions.xlsx

I'm sure there's something wrong with the totals because it's telling me the average cred/min is .94 but that doesn't jibe when you multiply it times 28hours and compare it to the total profit.

My total profits are 16,107 credits after 28 'crew hours' which since I was running 2 at a time is really about 12h of playtime.  For comparison, I can get 7k in 'grey' items from killing quest mobs for 2 hours.   I only just got my 4th companion so I could only ever run 2 at a time because mako was heal-bitch.  Times when Mako was running were when I was training or PVPing.

Mission Type Key:  YLX:  y= Yield, L= Level, X= Augment or Credit (when I started tracking those.)

If a schematic or augment sold, I plugged the number into the profit point.  Thus far none of them have so.. hay, great return there.   :awesome_for_real:

The market for missions and schematics is still destroyed from everyone running constant slicing missions for so long I'd guess.

Interesting. I plan on testing a similar method across the tiers.

To get a real idea of the value of slicing overall you probably also need to include the money gained via gathering nodes in regular play.

Is there a mechanic to stop me from macroing 3min slice missions from till F2P?

Just use the vender value of the returned items.  It simplifies the data, simplifies your life, and you can sell anything for any price on the auction house - you don't need a tradeskill to take other people's money.

You can't rely on any sell price from the AH to be repeatable, use the vendor value and determine the floor for these missions.


I've tracked Treasure Hunting as well.  Treasure Hunting can pull the same margins, but there are far fewer positive yields down the Treasure Hunting line and you can end up in situations with no interesting and profitable missions to run.  If you are interested in the other things Treasure Hunting provides the missions can be as profitable, but you lose the in-world resource collection and that's not a trivial loss.

I like Treasure Hunting simply because it gives me so many useful items, and tons more to auction.  Since a failed auction returns your money, you only need enough to cover the up-front expenses.  My only gripe with Treasure Hunting is how many relics it returns.  So. Many. Freakin'. Relics.

(PS - If you need a relic or two, send Kylantha a mail with your level.)

I don't think there's any market for missions to even speak of, given they are single shot and on top of that you aren't given any indication what the mission is going to give you. Checking Shien, the schematics "market" also appears broken but in the sense of "not working" rather than destroyed -- there's few schematics put on sale, most of them are for sith gear (on republic side), and there's hardly any people selling goods manufactured from these schematics which tells something about levels of interest/profitability of the entire venture. It certainly doesn't appear oversaturated supply-wise like you'd expect it with everyone running constant slicing missions for so long.

I see a dire lack of orange gear on the market, but I also see people trying to charge silly amounts for it when it's up (meaning some crazy 5000% over mats cost, they're essentially treated as blues)

The missions should be selling decently. Gathering missions (scavenging and the like) are completely useless. Mission skill missions (diplo, UT, etc) are fucking awesome however. They pretty much just give you a bit of everything the mission skill could give, including epics. I will cut a bitch for high tier UT missions.

Nobody's running slicing missions at higher tiers, it seems.  I've been looking for the Grade 4 ship upgrades and can't find the fuckers at all. Whether it be my own missions or the market.

I'm also not terribly inclined to /run/ the damn missions since there's about a 1% chance (or less) of actually finding said schematic.

The whole crafting and mission system continues to feel like it was designed by spreadsheet looking at a 2mil population instead of the 3-5k population of a server.

I think the expensive ones are from the flashpoint drops, since they come with fitted mods. The manufactured oranges come empty and pretty cheap -- like 1-3k cheap.

re: missions, it's hard to get any picture because some skills have 10+ pages of missions up for sale, and some have next to none. I can't tell whether some mission types get generated more often than others or it's different levels of demand, but it doesn't appear as simple as "gathering missions no one wants, mission missions are awesome" because at least two of these 10+ pages listed are for the mission missions.

I did a lot of slicing missions.  I got ONE slicing mission ever, got tons of diplomacy and investigation.  I'd have to look at my bank to get an idea of the rest.

I'm pretty sure slicing missions got removed very soon after launch, i got a couple my first day then none since.

I have an epic 300 slicing mission I just got.

The best (worst) part of my find, I got a (340) slicing mission.  Ran it once, then it never showed up again for me to select.  :mob:

Missions you discover can only ever be one once - it makes the concept pretty pointless.

Uh, yeah, I assumed that it just added them to your mission options because only running them once and having it vanish....would be completely worthless.

Yet one more little bump to being sure about my decision to not sub after my 30 days are up.

So we'll stop hearing about how you aren't renewing when? 22 January?

Oh no! I mentioned it twice on the forums!  (The first time being a thread where it was completely relevant to talk about it.)  I'm such a dirty spammer.  :oops:

Tier 4 Ship Parts don't seem to sell on Shien except when priced too low to be worth it. I can use the same mats to make a couple armoring mods and make 2x to 3x the cash. And they have a small level window of use, the storebought 5s while having less bonus stuff, are better.

The bonus stuff makes a big difference between 1 & 2's.  I assumed it to be the same between 4 & 5's.  (Hell the crafted 2s are better than the bought 3's except for the missile bay.)

I'm not looking to sell it, just make it for myself and alts. I've got 3/5 just need the shield regenerator & armor.

I've taken gathering skills - archaeology, biology, scavenging.  Only done Coruscant, but there are nodes everywhere you go; went from 1 to 100 in each skill between levels 12 and 18.  Sold stacks of 99 whatever on the GTN for about 10k credits (and that's significant at this level and on my server).  Not worth doing gathering missions, but manually gathering nodes seems to be ok.  Maybe I'll drop one of the skills and pick up one of the trading ones.

Node slicing is still a pretty decent source of money for me at 42. I leave a planet with about 15-20k credits that I wouldn't otherwise have had. The missions, eh, not so much.

Scavenging is working out pretty well just for now because people are buying the mats to level Armstech. Buying at high prices, actually. That will probably change once people level those to max level and find out there's nothing to them.

You can still run missions for a profit if you stick to moderate an abundant, and if you don't mind micromanaging the lower skill missions have a higher return per minute spent.  It's completely bassackwards but it still works.

Yep, Abundant at high level returns well.

Which high-level 5 or 6?  I stopped running and just farm boxes now as it was less frustrating.  If I stick to city areas I can average about 500cred/ min (Pure guesstimate)  There's a few places you find boxes clustered and can spring 3-4k effortlessly before running to the next spawn area.

The high level missions are worth a lot if you get the right ones so i chose level 6 first, then work my way down looking for abundants and moderates.

I second the idea that you should run level 5 slicing lockbox missions rather than level 6--they reliably produce more profit per mission, at least for me so far. I should start charting them.

But level 6 missions can give you the 340 skill crafting missions, some of which sell for around 15-20k on my server.

Really? I'm lucky to get 8-9k for most of them.

Run "Finding our Way"  (tier 5) every time it is up.  The payout is 2x any other mission per unit time.  Run Sabotage and Taking Back Control from Tier 5 as well, since they pay out higher than any of the T6 missions.  After that run the T6 missions  because the UI is annoying and the T6 missions keep the minions out of your hair for the longest time.  T5 and T6 provide mission scematics, though putting up with the auction house is beyond my abilities and I just vendor them when I get them (8k with pain or 960 now - I'll take now thanks).  Finding yields at 0.8 per second, sabotage and control are around .37, the T6 missions at about 0.2.  Most of the T4-5-6 have payouts in the 0.2 to 0.3 range.  If you were running 5 minions on Slicing at the same time you'd probably saturate your available T5 and T6 options, but I run underworld trading as well to I can stay in the sweet T5 spot and be happy.

I had 550k when I hit level 40, and bought speeder II and a vanity speeder for 55k, and more inventory rows and another bank tab.  I'm at 700k at level 45 now.  I'm going to buy the 1.5M speeder at 50 just because I can.  I also have maxed Cybertech and full ship upgrades (and maxed underworld trading so a steady source of Mandaloian Iron). 

Slicing easily keeps one character ludicrously well equipped.   I just have to pull scaveging materials out of my friends or alts - scaveging is super abundant so that's not a problem.

Good info, i still prefer the lvl 6 missions since UT TH and Diplomacy missions sell for a fuck ton and i do make full use of the gtn.  Also i've ran a few level 5 missions tonight on two chars and havent seen finding our way or sabotage once.

You get a new set of missions whenever anyone of your minions finishes a mission, so when I get a set I don't like I send someone on a 3 min mission and take another swing at a useful one.  Be Careful What You Read and Missing Probes in T4 are both very good as well, and Spy Droid in T4 is better per unit time than anything in T6, so if you are just churning off bad mission options they are also pretty handy.  They are apparently 'fixing' the availability issues in the next patch and I think we'll always have all the available at level options.

I've got two characters with similar playtime in the mid-20s, the one with Treasure Hunting for lockboxes is broke and the one with Slicing is rolling in cash.  There are only 1-2 lockbox missions at each tier for TH that make money, whereas there are only 3 total slicing missions (T1, T2, T2) that lose money over 10+ attempts.  For reference, the yields were cut by minimum half with the nerf (and to 1/7th the yield in some extreme cases - forcing them negative when considering the initial cost). 

There does appear to be an issue currently with missions from this 1.1 patch note:

Which can sometimes piss you right the fuck off.   I was running missions again last night based on everyone's reccomendations and when "Finding our Way" finally popped I was just about to send Blizz out to run it when Mako returned and reset my damn list.  :mob:

Leave it to the wife to rob you of cash.

Look, it takes a certain level of OCD to hit nodes, but I'm more certain than ever that slicing is the only guaranteed cash earner if you look at it from the node side. I'm making a ton of money on scavenging now but that will not last very much longer, only as long as there are a large number of players desperately trying to level Armstech. As soon as that's done, the market for scavenged metals is going to fall off big time. Slicing nodes on Belsavis last night netted me 25-30k in three hours of questing. Sending Corso just on the one Level 6 lockbox mission with abundant yield was almost always profit-making just on credits, though not hugely so, but I netted 3 340-level missions for other crafting professions in that time, which is about 10k per.

In the last regular Patch Slicing was un-nerfed.  This patch/hotfix/thing has restored the nerf.

Expect it to revert to default after every patch as they apparently don't have a very robust change management system in place.

MMO growing pains are hideous enough to have their own nature video. If the MMO was an animal it would start life as a horrendous, screeching bug-lizard that has to erupt violently from its own pus-filled cocoon, screech and caterwaul while it greusomely eats its own legs out of sinewy mucilagenous fiber-strands, then immediately begins an agonizing molting process while trying to suck down its own vestigal parts and stillborn loser embryos from out of the pod husk for nutrients.

Yep, I got 20k out of one box. Now my sad returns.

Oh god I'm having EQ flashbacks.

I think I'll skip dinner tonight.

Somewhere out there, a MMO developer is furiously taking notes  for the next epic boss encounter.

I think you need to make a comic of that.