f13.net

I understand making getting these things a challenge, but requiring an excessive amount of platforming in a game that has such poor control response is insane.  I managed to collect all of them up to Taris now (except for the 2 on the literally hour long balloon wait/ride on Tattooine).  My wife has an optical keyboard and it is almost impossible for her to get them because of the 10 ms delay between keypress and activation.

Couldn't they just give you the option to buy them for 50 commendations per planet or whatever?  Good grief.

Just needed to vent.

My exact thoughts when I first heard about them this week. I don't mind their exsitence - but they have to give access to something cosmetic, 50 or so stats is not cosmetic. Or if you go that way, just give people the option to pay for them with tokens at max level, if not for the space-trinket bits, at least for the +stats.

I'm not sure anything related to datacrons can count as spoilers.

i just wanted to be cautious, some folks consider the location of them spoilerish.

Some folks are batshit insane.

What percentage is +50 per stat at level 50?

A lot of them add bonuses to stats I don't care about, so maybe the pain can be cut in half by just getting the important ones (End, Presence, mystat, and the shards).

The ones on corusant broke any desire to get more crons done. Seriously... jump timing and running on hair line pipes/cables =/= fun. Like it has been said... this is something to do 4 months from now while bored and waiting for a patch.

Level 50 purple gear has in the order of +100 on each piece, so less than 5%.

So you're pissed at your wife's keyboard?

I'm confused.

They're entirely optional unless you're in the hardcore must conform raid segment, and imo you did that to yourself.

Don't be obtuse. Jumping puzzles in an MMOG are stupid for more reasons that that. How about lag? How about the fact that animations in this game aren't exact? Clipping? Invisble walls? Random delay?

Being optional doesn't excuse a bad idea. It's one thing to hid items in the world for discovery. It's another to require the people that want to find them to go through bad mechanics to have their fun.

it really doesn't matter if it's 1% or 5%, it's like raiding without a flask or two proper non-gathering professions in wow. Yes, you can, but your character is not as good as it can be. Also guilds will require it, so there's that.

for the record a flask is less than 5%, a profession a little more than 1%. Yet, they're required.

Then leave the guild.

Seriously.

Wolf's going to argue from the progression raider POV. It's good to have that viewpoint, but you need to understand that he's correct within that sphere.

"Just quit, lulz" isn't an option for those people.

Actually I disagree when there are other things you could be doing with your time for an extra 1%. If the guild can't recognise that then they are bad at being a serious business progression RARR guild.

Also afaik the guild have no way to tell if you have the datacrons, since they have almost no impact on performance and aren't visible anywhere.

EA are going out of their way to protect raidtards from themselves by not making epeen measurements visible at the micro level.

5% puts it at the end of the queue of things I can do to improve my character, so basically IF I'm in a raiding guild AND:

- I've gotten all the purples / Tier set I can have access to
- I've bought or crafted adrenals and stims enough for use for hours uninterrupted
- My talents and rotations are super-optimized according to the best armchair advice on the internets

- and it's still not enough,

Then I'll look at getting the hard-to-get datacrons.

Datacrons seem to be the perfect OCD behavior bait.

You really think this game will not have an armory the second they have spare dev time? If 5% of anything doesn't matter, the developers aren't doing their hardmodes right. It is what it is, that's the game some people are looking for. Not all of them are Paragon, Method or 16 years old. The 10m rading scene in Cataclysm is proving that.

Ajax, that's not the point. The point is that +50 (or however much it is, that's really a number I made up) is on that list of things you need so your character is as prepared as it can be. Is it even relevent in the current tier of conent? No, all bosses fell on nightmare mode the week between christmas and new years, so datacrons weren't even needed. I'm pretty sure that all that was need was 16 people that have seen an actual hard mode. However, and I'm calling it now, the next raid they release (full patch tier or something in between) will have a brutal hard mode. If they don't go after the disgruntled top wow guilds now (between DW and Pandas), they won't have a chance. And they've said multiple times they're serious about creating a raiding scene. That's when the datacrons and their 5% become relevent and bad design.

My opinion on flasks was the same when they were "required" as it is now.

We're not a a top % raiding guild.  We're never going to be one and when the little dps bitch that is 5% behind me and IS all potted and buffed to hell manages to pass me on the precious meters I'll worry about it.  Until then get off my back.

If you're obsessing over it like it's "Required" and you're not in that top % guild - chances are there's other things in your raid you can fix.

I don't know what an armoury is? But guessing it is a wow retread of the eq/daoc etc websites that tell you how awesome your guy is?

I actually think EA have make a specific decision to let you show epeen, but only in approximate terms. This is precisely why you have no combat log.

I'm 99.99999% certain that we have no combat log because it's completely broken and they're not sure how to fix it yet. I seriously doubt it was a question in the office "should we even provide damage numbers?"

I have every single datacron except the one on Belsavis that requires you to find four Rakata energy cells that are really hard to find clickies hidden all over Belsavis (seriously, fuck that one) and the one on the fleet that requires a coordinated team of four using the buggy MGGS to solve a puzzle. There are a few datacrons that I'll just be skipping over on my alts but most of them aren't too bad and can be gotten as you quest. If you're planning on being a super hardcore raider, even if you skipped every single one you could probably get 95% of them in a day using a guide.

Here's my point as clear as I can make it. If you're required to get datacrons to join a guild, than yes, you probably don't need them. You won't be less required to get them. On the other hand if you're serious about your character and raiding noone will have to require it out of you - you'll go get them on your own time and you'll have a bad experience doing something you don't necesarilly enjoy.

I don't think there's anyone that can really defend that design, all they had to do is make the datacron rewards cosmetic. Here's the extreme end of the spectrum of that particular line of thought - Insane in the membrane (http://www.wowhead.com/achievement=2336) giving +300 stats.

Shit like flasks and datacrons are more 'needed' for bad guilds like mine than for bleeding edge raiders in any case. Super awesome players can make up for a lot by executing well, we need the bumpers in our bowling alley in the form of the extra stats.  Which is why I think Merusk's approach kind of gets it exactly wrong for the non-elite, but of course it also depends on how tightly content is tuned.

This. Especially because some of the later datacrons require executing 7-10 flawless jumps or result in insta death.  We are the exact opposite of hardcore raiders but it would still be nice to not be at a disadvantage in pvp and such because we all aren't super mario pros.

Wolf, you used "Serious" and "Raiding" in the same sentence in regards to TOR.

While that may be true eventually, last I heard all the "hawt" raiding guilds have already written-off TOR as shit and will be sticking in pandaland.

If BA is serious about raiding, they'd better start slamming out longer patch notes than 2-3 lines every week.  Shit be buggy.

Dear Lord,

Please let the hardcore raiders turn their eyes away from this game. Let them be focused on uberleet panda mounts.

Amen.

Yeah, lots of hate for a silly feature.

My friend who is playing SWTOR was telling me about these and it sounded like something I'd like. Jumping puzzles in Rift and DDO are some of the most memorable/fun content in those games. I really don't understand why they'd give people stats instead of something cosmetic, but it's cool that they added them into the game. I know the community is pretty divided about them in Rift and DDO too, but they get less hate since they are mostly optional.

I am pretty much saving the datacrons for post 50 stuff to do when I am bored. Given the lack of logs its not like anybody can call you out for 5% less damage.

So today I waited 30 minute to catch the tattoine balloon, rode it for 30 minute, only to have it despawn and drop me on the ground right before I was able to get to the holocron.  :awesome_for_real:

I missed this earlier;  I've never been in a guild that's struggled the way you guys have chatted about.  If I had been, I might have a different opinion.  The guilds I raided with had a distinct raiding focus and THEN were F&F, not the other way-round like SLAP appears to be.  That shaman you all chuckle about?  He wouldn't have been drafted for progression raids but hung-out until after the content was on farm.  The only way he'd be on a progression raid is if there weren't enough healers.

In the casual world complaining about potions etc does you no good when you lose 1/3 of your healers and all access to combat rezzers because one or two idiots can't stay out of the fire.  Or some DPS is too worried about their output so they won't switch targets, or cc.  Or the tank won't fucking stop twitching his fingers on the movement keys, constantly moving the boss out of position.

These are all problems I had in my guilds that - when those individuals were sorted-out or removed - we got kills within the next raid cycle.   I could have doubled or tripled my own DPS (and in BC-era I was already ahead of the others by about 5%, unpotted.)  and it wouldn't have mattered because the problems were in no way related to the minor stat boost.  This is why they are inconsequential to most 'casual' raiders.

Merusk: BC raid lieutenant!

 :grin:

He uh. He would not be drafted if there weren't enough healers. Because a) he was not one and b) oh my God he would be terrible.

I tend to agree, though, that the stat buffers and stuff are more needed for shitty guilds than bleeding edge guilds. No, it won't make Drachmir get out of the fire faster, but it'll make it so the two ticks he takes before he trundles out of it not kill him, he'll have to miss TWO steps of the Heigan dance in a row before dying, we'll down the boss riiiiiight before it enrages, etc. It gives you a bit more of a buffer, so that the people who are terrible can be terrible for a little longer, while hitting a little harder.

Can't say we've ever had the DPSers-too-worried-about-their-meter problem, though.

The DPS thing was a problem on a few places.  Lootreaver (MOVE, damnit!)  Anubrekhan & Saurfang being the examples that immediately spring to mind.


Ach! No!

First: Each datacron gives between +2 and +4 to a single stat or a matrix shard. I haven't done the math but not all stats are on all planets and I'd guesstimate you'd get around +16 or so total to each stat if you get every single datacron.

Second: I suck at platforming and I've gotten every single datacron so far except one on Hoth that requires a Hydrothinner (which I don't know where to find), one on Belsavis that requires jumping onto a laser bridge that I seem to just pass right through, and the one on Belsavis that requires finding the clickies which I got tired of looking for. On my alts I've gotten most of the datacrons on my very first try. The jumps really aren't that bad at all once you get used to how things work. I see alot of people going crazy about falling off pipes or missing jumps then acting shocked when I ask if they have sprint on and suggesting they turn it off.

I'd probable get quite a few more of these things if more of them were possible to initially spot/hear. Trying to figure out a way to certain point can be ok, humping every random slope and piece of geometry that looks like it may lead somewhere while hoping there won't be an invisible wall, big fat nothing or my character doesn't just get stuck in some hole they randomly slid into ... not so much.

The way controls and collision detection are handled doesn't help, either.

And more importantly when 2 or 3 people die halfway through if the other people are all flasked/food buffed/whatever, they have that much more of a chance to squeeze out enough damage so we don't have to run it yet again.

There are multiple internet sites that have guides to where the holocrons are. One I go to has step by step screenshots. Another one has videos. Youtube has videos as well.

So I like the *idea* of datacrons--promote exploration.

I hate the fact that they're promoting exploration in a game design that HATES EXPLORATION.

Let's take the pink datacron on Tattooine. Ok, so you see the thing and you first think, hey, maybe I can jump up to it. So I spend about thirty minutes trying and I *almost* can do it. But not quite. So then you think, "oh, it's one of those where you have to get up on that ledge from a long ways away and come back". So I go way south down where some of the bonus quests are and I see the cliffs and I think, "Hey, maybe I can jump along the cliffs until I find a way up." And the thing is YOU CAN. I mean, you can jump along the cliffs for a long ways. Even with the retarded anti-platforming everything of the game engine. And then comes a point where you take a small jump down, I mean, really small, not even the kind you take damage from. And you just DIE, instantly, because you've finally gotten to somewhere that isn't real in the engine.

Fuck. ING. Fail. Do NOT NOT NOT incentivize or encourage players to do something that you don't want them doing, haven't designed for them to do. Don't. Just do not. "Explore the world, but we won't tell you where the physical environment is instadeath or where you'll get 'exhaustion' because, I dunno, we're not even as good as Blizzard at putting unclimbable mountains and oceans around everything." It's a little peeve, but in my mind one of those that really gnaws at me.

Exploration is fine.. I get that. But some of these things are in parts of the world you never go for any reason, at all, ever. Speaking about the ones on Corusant, they are on a bunch of ledges that serve no purpose other than "hey I can crawl all over the map on these pipes and hide up here!" Half the time I was thinking, this would be something to beta test out of your game because really... there is no purpose for this area to even be coded other than to fetch an egg. I get that this is the purpose, just do not like.

I would like datacrons much better if they were tied to a trivia game.

Answer right - win the buffs
Answer wrong - Wookiee rape.

Not even to get my character added to the official Star Wars canon or get a gun that will one-shot anyone in the game will I go through trying to get another fucking Holocron. And I only did them through the second planet. I refuse to even think about what getting the end game ones are like.

Spot on. These things feel like they were designed by someone who explicitly hates players. I'm guessing someone who had their work savaged on a forum somewhere by a bunch of beta testers and is still sore.

Bah, i could swear i'd added "without viewing the youtube guides" to the first sentence. But skipped it somehow so, sorry, that was ambiguous. Yes, obv. they have those locations and everything listed now but --while it's hard to put in words-- there's some definite difference between spotting one of those cubes while in the game and then starting to figure out how to get them, vs opening the web page that has them listed and just dutifully going where told.

the latter is sappin mah immersion, perhaps :why_so_serious:

I enjoyed figuring it out myself up to the point that I discovered that some of the natural experiments you'd try cause instadeath without any obvious reason or warning that they would. And that the terrain is often just-this-far-away from climbable through careful jumping. It's an awful mismatch of different aesthetics. If they wanted to avoid Blizzard's hardcore anti-exploration attitude, this wasn't the way to do it.

That's a good tip!

That Tatooine one on the ledge? That was pretty easy. Tried a few ways up the cliffs, then figured that wasn't the way (if it's not fairly easy, it's wrong). Went around behind and hopped down from above, voila. The only ones I don't care for are those I can't see, not sure where those are...because I didn't see them. The willpower one on Voss for instance, they peek it for you on the shuttle ride, a quick jaunt up a mountain path and I grabbed it easily.

The balloon on Tat I haven't done, just because it's a huge chunk of my daily play time.

I like the datacrons, so I probably shouldn't post in the datacron hate thread.

Yeah on case-by-case basis some parts are also easier if you toggle between run and walk. Like jumps to handle small bumps on ropes and whatnot.

I found a few datacrons exploring around, but died got stuck enough to quit looking. I'll grab the ones I know of on new toons, but screw seeking them out.

I was amused to stumble on the  Voss spirit world one, I was just clicking blue things to see what horror spawned and wtfpwnd me this time.

I think it's more a case of "designed/built by non-players". World-builders who don't actually play the games themselves and have no understanding of why a player would ever want to go to location X or jump down to location Y, or why they would be pissed at not being able to go past invisible wall at Z, or at dying for no apparent reason (environment damage).

Their mindset: "Well just don't go there a second time? Obviously not meant for you to go there if you die from exhaustion/environment-damage. There's nothing interesting behind the curtain, it's just empty space. If I have to spend time on this area, I will have less time to spend adding intricate hieroglyphs along the edges of walls in corners of rooms that people only spend time in because they have to run through them to get from A to B."

Are we talking about airlocks and orbital stations again?

Because oh god I truly hate orbital stations.

Go try to get the datacron from Shadow Town at Nar Shadaa.

Whether you succeed or fail, in just couple hours you'll be all like "Hah, there was a time when orbital stations felt somewhat annoying."

that the pipe jump one?   If only I had thought to hit record.  While pvping I got to hear a great Teamspeak meltdown of someone trying to get that one done. I had to leave the channel, came back 20 minutes later and the guy was still in full meltdown/rant/soapbox/tissue mode.

Predictably, datacrons are my favorite part of this game  :pedobear:

I've gotten very lucky on the stupid balloon thing on tattoine twice already, i just went there and dueled someone to get up top of the crawler skipping the whole wait thing.  Before you go wait the entire time find out if someone is already in the balloon and whether they are not dicks.

And you're a Warrior or they're a Sorc, Powertech, or tank spec'd Assassin, but yeah.  The one time I did it, as many people got it from coming on the balloon as got pulled up by a Powertech that rode it with us.

You can also get up there with force push while jumping.

Some of them are just downright esoteric rather than just plain cruel to get to. I noticed on hitting up Balmorra for the first time on my Jedi Knight that there was a quest marker over a box halfway across a broken bridge in the Bugtown sector of the map, but after I got there, it just told me I needed a key. I figured this might drop from one of the arachni... sorry, colicoids in the area as I fought them. Did the rest of my quests but no key every dropped and I kind of put it out of my mind. Then last night as I'm gearing up to log off, I decide to explore for a little bit (I do hunt datacrons), find some craft crystals etc and I end up in some hidden area round the back of the Republic Landing pad where some woman labelled 'Junk Seller' is acting as a Stims/Medicenter vendor. She has a 'Lost Code Cylinder' as one of her items, for 5k. I put two and two together.
Turns out that 5k buys you a +4 Aim datacron from said mystery box. Wat.

Yup, that one. When i was trying to get mine i was told by the locals it's affectionally called "The Soul Grinder" :grin:

I've purposely avoided all the spoilers on the Datacrons, thus I really hadn't found any. I got really excited when I realized I'd stumbled on to one on Alderann.

Wasn't too hard to get to, a little climb, a little tight rope walk, and one jump. Simple or not, I was excited, because I'd found it on my own damn it!

+4 Aim. Sith Juggernaut. The only stat that benefits me in absolutely no manner what so ever.

The funniest so far for me is the one on Hoth where you chase down a champion probe droid. That thing is FAST!

I'm liking Taris for datacrons.  I've gotten two, and have seen two more that I just need to puzzle out.

Alderaan I found all of one.  Tattooine I know where two are, but the balloon dumped me out 100 feet from the sandcrawler...  Balmora I found one.  Nar Shaddaa I've located zilch.

Dromand Kaas and the starter planets I've found them all.  It felt like a long dry spell until I got to Taris.

I found that box. Then forgot about it. Then discovered it again last night after another player had already opened it.

Turns out the chest doesn't close straight away, so if you time it right....  :drill:

I thought I'd found the only one I've seen since Balmorra today, on Belsavis. But it turned out to only be 1/4 of one and I'll have to find 3 more before I get it.

So, fuck that.  :awesome_for_real:

There is one on Taris you simply won't be able to do without a partner. Just FYI.

No there isn't.  She listed Dromund Kaas, which means she's Imperial, not Republic.  The two person required one would have been way back on Balmorra.

Not that I give these things two fucks of my attention, but I believe I overheard some people on Quesh say there is one out there that also needs two people...

I like the diversion. Found one on Taris that took me a while to get a few days ago....and then I laughed because I had found the little rampway during my beta weekend, but there's an obvious path (that doesn't lead to the cron) and a less-obvious path (that does); I took the wrong one and thought it was just another decorative nothing.

From poking my head into your thread here, I've been given the idea that you get achivements/stats for the equivalent of jumping around Org bank roof and landing on the spikes. That is awesome if true.

Bah, nevermind.  Didn't realize it was different for Imperials.

That's true, I was thinking of it from a republic PoV.

It'll be good to know, eventually.  Thankfully I have a pretty dedicated duo going.

We spent and hour trying to reach one on Taris last night.  Still no luck.  I think they just placed it there as a tease.

One on Taris requires a huge-radius walk-around using the area's architecture to get to it, and another requires starting / climbing at a medium distance from the destination where it is.

That's probably the one I found last week. Even if you find the starter point, there's a spot where it looks like you should go in a different direction. The second time I tried it I had a goal and was able to find my way, the first time I thought it was a dead end.

The one I mean is:

If got the one requiring the long walk.  I actually did the same thing Sky did.

did 3 on Hoth yesterday with some friends, was actually a nice break from pvp.   That said I can't see myself doing the 45+ minute ones like the ballon thingy.

Lantyssa, if you're ok with looking at datacron spoiler sites:

I don't for this one datacron.  I could trace most of the path to it, I was just missing something on reaching one section, despite two of us spending a lot of time figuring it out.

My only issues with the Datacrons are the hour long balloon ride. Although, if you and another with a knockback ability work together, you can bypass the Tat baloon altogether. I haven't had many issues at all. The only one that has been unobtainable for me, so far, is that one in the Alderaan palace. If you're body style 3 or 4 you cannot fit through the doorway that leads to it.

I guess I'm gonna have the problem with the Alderaan one, since I'm body 3.  Tatooine balloon, I thought, was a 40 minute round-trip for the balloon, and once I got on it it was 20 minutes to the destination (luckily it didn't bug out).  Didn't seem too bad; I ate lunch (not at the computer) while on it and almost missed the destination.  

Before you do it, I'd recommend timing exactly how long it takes for the game to log you out due to inactivity.  It's useful information (and no, I didn't do that yet; I'd tell if I knew).

EDIT:  Oh, yeah, I fell off the ramp for the red one, and had to /duel someone and force leap to them to get back on, so that works too.

Had a good crafting session during the balloon ride. Not so much good as counting the amount of times I failed to get a recipe while REing a green level 9 belt. That time was > the entire wait + ride.

Then the other two guys on the balloon missed the ledge for the second one after watching me jump down to it.

I got the bug where the balloon despawns in sight of the second carrier. That was my one  bang my head on the keyboard moments with them.