f13.net

http://www.swtor.com/gameupdates

Not a lot of detail there for now. I'm pretty unthrilled about adding rep grinds to SWTOR, but on the plus side at least they're legacy-wide so you don't have to do it over and over again on every alt, which was the worst thing about them in WoW. The Gree event seems to be recurring and is apparently the replacement for the western shelf stuff on Ilum.

Yeah, Bioware's talked up the Ilum revamp for months upon months now.

Come to think of it, I don't recall them ever saying that the Ilum revamp would be a PvP  revamp.

They said it wasn't going to be at some point, yeah.

I'm not looking forward to a grind, and what's more I thought I already proved myself to both the Gree and the Voss so it seems superfluous as well. It'll be more tolerable on the inevitable alts tho.

They still refer to the western shelf as contested. That's usually their code word for pvp flagged, but who knows what they are actually doing.


I have a really hard time imagining they'll make their brand new gree content be pvp centric, especially after the hilarious butt-hurt from people having to even ENTER the tatooine FFA zone to visit a vendor.

I can't think of anything they could add to swtor that is better calculated to make me (re)cancel than a reputation grind.

If there are enough Gree quests that I don't have to repeat any of them then it might get a pass.

http://www.swtor.com/blog/game-update-1.7-developer-blog-galactic-reputation


More Reputation Info. Who enjoys grinds?  :why_so_serious:


-edit-

That just gave me a mental image of my smuggler delicately eating an actual trophy. NOM NOM NOM

To smuggle it past the customs checkpoints?  Ingenious!

He's willing to do what it takes, baby!

This is going live next week during the Tuesday maintenance after absolutely no time on the PTS.

What's the worst that could happen, eh?  :awesome_for_real:

None of the prior events were publically tested either. I bet the reputation system will be busted in some way though, yeah.

Chevin event could have done with testing and feedback tbh.

Not sure how much testing a reputation system needs given that they've got affection and ls/ds rankings. Still, on the plus side, it does mean that we don't have to wait 3 weeks.

http://www.swtor.com/info/news/blog/20130211

It is a pvp event. Commence baaaawing on forums  :why_so_serious:

Well, part PVP anyway.

Ugh, this is going to be awful. 50s PvP is terrible.

Okay, so I've done a goodly bit of the event. I was right, it's fucking awful, but not for the reason I feared.

Basically, it's like this: You now have a reputation for the Gree Enclave. You start at 0, and at 2500 rep you reach Outsider, 5000 gets you Newcomer, 7500 gets you Friend. The next rank, Hero, probably takes around 10000 rep, then Champion, which I figure will take about 12500, if the pattern holds. Reputation applies legacy-wide, so multiple characters can stack it up. However, you also have a legacy-wide cap of 12000 rep you can earn per week.

On Ilum's western half, you have a series of 7 dailies (3 soloable, 1 heroic 2+, two PvP that really need 4 people, and one Area mission to kill three world bosses, requiring an 8-man Ops group) and two vendors. One vendor sells armor. Level 45, legacy bound, three sets of it. Cheap credit cost, but each requires a rep rank; two need Friend and the third needs Champion. The other vendor sells weapons, a couple non-combat pets, and an access key to the next daily hub. The weapons need Champion rank, one pet needs Newcomer, the other needs Legend (the highest rank), and the access key needs Newcomer. The weapons also have a separate "grey helix component" cost (read: commendations); 18 for the blaster pistol and single-bladed lightsaber, 24 for the rest.

So with all that in mind, this is how it ends up working out: The two PvP missions are usually flat-out undoable if your server has even a single good PvP guild dedicated to keeping people from finishing it (the area the missions are in are auto-flagged for free-for-all  PvP), so those are pretty much resigned to late-night or not at all. The Area daily actually cannot be completed until Newcomer rank thanks to the third world boss you need being locked behind a rep gate. Doing the three soloable missions and the fairly easy Heroic net you a total of 1440 rep and one (1) grey helix component. Each world boss gives, I believe, a small rep item and has a chance to drop a helix component.

So, as you can see, it's not actually possible to hit Friend and pick up any set of armor in the first week of the event. You can maybe, maybe  hit Hero during week two if I'm wrong about how much it takes to get to it. And then, well... you're SOL because the event only lasts two weeks and nobody knows when it repeats. If you can run the event on multiple 50s (don't buy the bullshit Bioware says in a blog post about it being doable by 45s, it's not), you can actually save up the reputation-granting tokens you get and use them in the no-event weeks each time you uncap, and possibly reach Champion if you can stomach doing the dailies every day for that long. Of course, it doesn't help that the components to buy the weapons are so scarce.

So if we assume that the event repeats monthly (which is probably a very generous estimate), it'll probably take a more casual player two or three months to get any weapons out of the event. Even hardcore players who run every possible thing they can is stuck sitting on a a pile of unspendable comms and a heap of rep items that can only be used weekly until the Gree come around again and they can finally offload the crap.

This is goddamn stupid.

Not following your math at all. If you can earn 1440 per day with the easily doable stuff, that puts you well over 7500 if you do it every day for a week, in fact it gets you to Hero (if 10k is right).

I wasn't clear. The rep doesn't continue: Once you reach Outsider, you go back to 0/5000. So 2500 to reach Outsider, then another 5000 to each Newcomer, for a total of 7500. It then rolls back to 0 and you need to get another 7500 to get to Friend.

Edit: For instance, when I was piddling around on Voss earlier to see how the rep was there, I did two Heroic 4s. Each gave me two blue rep tokens, each worth 630 rep. After eating all four, I wasn't at 2520, but instead at 20/5000.

Gotcha, makes sense now.

 :facepalm:


Seriously, Bioware, just ... just do more story shit.

Looks like the stuff is all cosmetic shells.

Yep, as expected, this is the point at which I stopped caring.

The PvP part of this is lol-sand from Sithilus.


I kinda hope more shit unlocks or something as days go on, right now its kinda shitty. It's like 12 daily quests disguised as 3 or 4.

I dicked around with it on my level 45 dude, just to see how hard the PvE ones are, and they're pretty hard! If I had been in a duo it would've been fine but yeah. Not really for soloing as a 45. I finished one of the quests, but the others, every fight I was ending at half health or worse, and blowing cooldowns versus the silvers, so. Not worth the effort!

The unlocky thing from the vendor at the next rep level up says it unlocks more dailies. Not sure if they are better dailies, of course.

I always wanted to do dailies so I could unlock the possibility of more dailies. I yearn for the day when my daily quests will consist of doing other daily quests (yo dawg.)

I did the dailies last night.  Nothing remarkable.  The ship looks good but I've never been a dalies kind of player so I don't see me going up in rep, unless it's by accident while I'm in Section X.  The Gree rep armor looks really cool though.

So I assume the gear from the Gree event will be inferior to the new xpack gear yes?  I wonder about the timing a bit, but maybe Makeb is full of rep stuff.

The Gree shit is all moddable, no? So even if it's crappier than Makeb stuff, you can still shove the higher mods in it or whatever.

There are actually PvP versions of all the normal quests up in the north end in that empty southern part underneath the big PvP "bowl". That area has mobs that are easier: silvers instead of golds, normals instead of silvers, etc. You also get Bolstered during it. Of course, you have to deal with PvP, and FFA at that.


Also, one other fun thing about 1.7 that may have slipped past peoples' radars:

This right here? This means your repair costs have more than doubled. Prior to 1.7, my top-geared tank would eat a repair cost of ~4700 credits each time I died. Not bad, but a string of wipes or work on a progression boss would really build up and kick the wallet.

Now? 10000 credits per death, minimum. An hour of the Ilum dailies yesterday with no  deaths left me with a 27k repair bill. There are level 20s  who are seeing five-digit repair costs.



The Gree equipment is nothing but a bunch of empty shells, despite the mind-boggling minimum level of 45 for the armor and 50 for the weapons. They have no stats.

I did the Gree dailies with my sorc. Probably won't do them again. I just don't want any of the rewards. Armor's not my style, no interest in pets. I'll wind up getting Belsavis faction as I do the section X stuff occasionally. Don't like the look of that armor either. Haven't checked out Voss yet. Hopefully Makeb will be interesting because this sure isn't.

Weird, my costs after the Gree quests run (tanking so I was taking the hits) was only 5k or so. Maybe your gear is 5x better than mine.   :awesome_for_real:

If he's raiding, it's actually possible. Have you seen the top tier stuff these days?  :why_so_serious:

You get bolstered everywhere in the Gree area, I was in the safe PvE area and bolstered. Ilum mobs are just kinda mean when you're in your poopy leveling up gear. And I wouldn't go into a FFA PvP area without some friends, so might as well stick to the PvE area for the PvE quests, since, like I said, had I one other person with me, it would've been fine. :P

I had logged off my sorc on Ilum, so when I went back to craft some stuff for an alt I remembered the other reason I don't like this update. By putting achievement stuff in a pvp zone on pve server the bitching and moaning over general is just awful.

It's moddable, adaptive and bound to Legacy. The Level 45 restriction is obviously just to stop it's wide use on the early planets which is  :oh_i_see:  Personally I'm wondering what my Havoc Squad will look like all wearing this.

Getting just the red or blue Gree rep armor (require friend standing) will take ~6.5 days of doing just the 6 dailies outside the Grey Secant on one character.  If you've got two level 50s then you can, at best, get the armor in two days by running all 7 dailies (there's only 1 extra one in the Grey Secant from what I can tell) and doing the 3 one time missions (barring not being able to reach friend standing until week 2).

The white armor requires Champion standing - that's ~5.25 days of doing all 7 dailies on 2 characters.

Getting the weapons requires running the Operations a lot so fuck that.


(Disclaimer: all figures calculated as a subscriber with the 50% rep bonus. YMMV)

You do have to be in it for the long haul for the weapons, if you're not raiding. If you diligently do the heroic you could have a weapon within 2 occurrences of the event, but they're not really interesting looking enough for me to bother with that.

Yeah, that's pretty much what I meant. Doing both Ops gives 10 of those doohickeys a week. Doing the heroic every. single. damn. day. gets you 7 a week.

I'd rather gnaw my own toes off.

If you can swing it, do the 16-man version of the Story Mode ops boss, since it drops 6 helix components instead of 4. It's pitifully easy and only requires a single tank and two healers. The rest can be DPS.

I find this one really bizarre. They spent a lot of time on updating the Ilum zone, but otherwise its like, Copy Pasta questing. I don't think my PC has even spoken a single line to the Gree Quest Droid.

I think for updates like this we aren't going to get VO for the 16 player voices. That's probably going to be reserved for Makeb-scale stuff.

The thing that is killing the pvp quests in this event for me is not the random ganking (haven't been ganked yet), nor the free-for-all (only , nor high end pvp guilds - it's the damned queuing to turn in the energy orbs at the pylon. Everyone waiting in line for their turn is very civilized but fuck that.  :uhrr:

There are steps you could take you know.  :why_so_serious:

When I'm on my own, not going to happen.

Last night though, in a group, different story. Sentinel and scoundrel cc'd everyone, I jumped to the front of the queue, turned in the orb and then we legged it like naughty schoolboys. Halcyon days!  :drill:

Played a bit with my new pub guild. Did a few missions, killed some Imps, got some comms. 9k rep pts away from buying a new pet.  :why_so_serious:

I had fun but everyone's on TS or something so I need to get a new headset  :oh_i_see:

*buys the new event armor*
*goes to equip it on Jaesa*

"You do not have the required reputation rank to use that item."

You're killin' me here, Bioware.

That'll teach you to do stuff!

Gree Event is back, including new reputation mount (for meagre price of only 48 Grey Helix components  :oh_i_see:)

(http://dulfy.net/wp-content/uploads/2013/03/swtor-blue-sphere-speeder-gree-reputation.jpg)

Also, new Cartel packs which have lots of KOTOR 1/2 costumes (Darth Malak, Brianna the Last Handmaiden, Carth Onasi etc) and a Skiff mount

Nice Sex Swing.

 :ye_gods:

Bless you, Ironwood, for posting that, because it put to words my vaguely undefined feeling of "wtf is that mount."

Pfft, there's a new rep that can only be ground by buying Cartel Packs.

There's also a nice actual dress cosmetic I expect to see 5 billion of on our server.

(http://i.imgur.com/KOYM2ud.jpg)

And an 80s workout/music video oufit.  :awesome_for_real:

(http://i.imgur.com/TT20ao3.jpg)

It's shirtless on dudes, looks pretty funny.

When does the Flashdance sweatshirt come out?

SOLD

Hah I may actually grind for a dress.  :why_so_serious:

I have a character who needs the Handmaiden outfit for sure.