4761

Most crafting relies on your MISSION and GATHERING skill to get the required materials.
Some crafting also requires you to purchase an ingredient from your crafting vendor

4762

This is quite wrong. You have short class quest bits that return to recurring locations between planets, but the planets get bigger and bigger and more beautiful/epic (except Corellia, which is beige again like the low levels). Also, new cool class quest areas keep popping up.

4763

Crafting in a nutshell

You want to make guns. You get gunmaking skill (armtech)
You read in your Codex what goes with gunmaking skill. (underworld trading/scavenging)
You get those skills one is called a gathering skill. (scavenging)
Why is it a gathering skill? Because not only can you send your companion to do it mission style , but you have nodes in the world (and often other objects) that you can collect yourself. Hands on … ala mining. Nodes for scavenging often look like piles of metal. Oddball star on your minimap shows you if something near you can be picked up.

You then go get your mission skill. A mission skill means you have to click your companion, click the skill…get a list of things to go do, and pay money to have the companion go and -attempt- to get something useful out of what you asked them to do. They will fail, you will loose money, you will get lots of items sometimes, you will get recipes from some of these mission skills.
It is a pay for random result kind of thing.

So remember that picture earlier showing what skill goes to what gathering/mission so on?
Use that to determine what you might think of doing.

IMPORTANT THINGS TO NOTE…
Synthweave has little to nothing for non force users.
Artifice is useful to jedi … but can be perfectly serviceable on anyone that uses shields in the off hand slot.
Armstech is guns
Armorstech is armor that isn’t for force users
Cybertech is mods. I see a bunch of confusion with this. This is the jewelery meets enchanting skill. You won’t make much that is directly useful to you , but when you get to end game you are certainly going to wish you did.
Bioanalysis - this is effectively Alchemy. You make pots (medpacks) and elixers (stims) and the occational adrenal (think potions that aren’t recovery of health… small stat boosts like a stoneskin pot) the elixers can be made as flasks (blue level stims)
It is interesting to note most the restrictions on the bio stuff has been removed. One can sell most of it on the AH now. As long as the blue level stuff can be manufactured and kept in buyable quantities Bio is going to make money.

The odd man out is Slicing, it is considered a gathering skill (-hacks an ATM-) but it also can get one other things. Something like random open loot box for your effort.

You can craft anywhere, since you are not the one doing the work. If you are soloing park in a field of farmable whatever … and send your companion to work it up. It gets easier and more expensive as you get more “companions”.

4764

Excuse me if I take the word of a level 42 in my guild over a person I do not know. :-)
(He’s probably closer to 50 now, if he isn’t stuck in login queue)

Spent 2h10m in queue now, which was the estimate when I joined as 1969. Now I’m 1134.
Client is using 910MB of RAM while it is queued… which is just awesome.

4765

Fair enough, but remember that a fair number of us played to 50 in beta… :D

4766

Mouse over the resource and it will tell you what type of material it is.

For example Green Goo for my beloved biochemistry is a Grade 1 Biochemical compound.

The grade is basically the level of mission that gives it. At first you only have mission for the 10-16 range which gives Grade 1, but as your crafting skill goes up, you get access to higher level missions which give higher grade materials which in turn are used in higher level constructions. The “Biochemical Compound” part is the category/type of resource it is.

When you are looking at the screen to send your slaves/companions on missions, they state what quality/quantity of materials they will give and the category at the bottom. The easy way to look at it is that the more expensive a mission, the more it will give.

Here is a pretty decent guide, including nice pictures.

I’ve been loving biochemistry. As a Juggernaut, i found myself looking at death a lot while tanking some 4 man heroics lately. Only my frequent use of healing potions saved me on some of the harder pulls. I also soloed BT a few levels ago through the use of potions.

I finally made the following after finding REALLY cheap alien blood samples on the auction house:

Reusable Battle Fortitude Stim (lvl 8):
+16 End
+6 DEF
60 minute Duration
Reusable

Reusable Battle Might Stim (lvl 8):
+16 str
+6 power
60 minute duration
Reusable

Reusable Surgical Medpac (lvl 16)
heals 1250 to 1525
90 second CD
Reusable

The stims are basically an extra item you’re equipping. They have unlimited uses and no CD so when i am soloing i can just use the str one and when i am grouping, the end one.

Because the medpac is unlimited use, i just use it whenever i am in danger instead of saving it until it is REALLY CRITICAL.

My agent went cybertech and while nice in its own way, biochemistry seems to havea lot more bang to it.

4767

Ha! I was just going to make a post about Biochem. I love it!

4768

And this helps people in 4+ hour long queues how?
Edit: Make that 5+ hour.

And before you suggest making a character on a different server:
I actually did that yesterday.
Today that server also has a login queue. (Albeit 30 minutes instead of 5+ hours)

4769

The reason is the same as with my suggestion to never log out, this only works if only a small number do it.

If everyone sees a 3 hour queue and starts a new character on the lowest population server, that formerly lowest population server now becomes super packed with 3 hour queues. This forms a repeating cycle of the swarm moving from packed server to empty server, making it a packed server and then moving on to the next empty server to do the same.

4770

The good thing about artificially low caps is that they can be raised by changing a number.

I’m not saying I have the information about what the hard server cap number is, I don’t, but it seems obvious that it hasn’t been reached yet because there’s no lag.

I don’t remember seeing a queue in beta ever, did that ever happen? Judging from the number of people running around the starting areas during the weekend betas and the number of people running around the starting areas during the last few days, you could make a solid estimate that the server cap could be increased to 2 or 3 times its current number, at least.

Anyway, a big buffer like that will wipe out the queues and still leave plenty of room for launch day players to choose a server based on where their friends are playing rather than seeing a number of servers that were “chosen” in the early access period be full already.

4771

My main character is now trapped in the “Taris memory bug”.
http://www.swtor.com/community/showthread.php?t=29475&page=8

Basically, in the Taris starport, my FPS suddenly dropped to about 0.5 as memory usage suddenly spiked and the game crashed. This now happens every time I log in with that character, so it is effectively frozen and cannot be played. It’s considered high priority right now by the dev team, even though this issue was widely known in beta.

4772

Not exactly true. Each range of levels has it’s own planet to visit. Yes some assets are re-used - eg. there are only so many ways the Empire builds an outpost building - but the planets and missions themselves are all unique all the way up to level cap.

4773

Awesome.

I queue for 5 hours.
Get into the game.
Queue for PVP
Enter PVP
Get disconnected
Guess who is at the back of a 1600 person queue again!

4774

I may have accidentally discovered a little secret. I decided to make an alt this morning and went through the creation process to the point where I clicked on play and it started loading. I went to get a drink while it loaded and got roped into doing other stuff. I came back FIVE hours later and found it waiting for me to press the spacebar. I did so and it played the intro movie and put me right into the game. I spoke to a couple npc’s to start the first quests and did some general chat to make sure I was actually there and I was. If it doesn’t timeout after 5 hours, I don’t think it does. I’ll try doing it overnight and see what happens.

This is cheating the queue and your fellow players, so don’t kid yourself that doing this isn’t evil.

Oh and I did log out to server selection to verify there is indeed a queue stacking up.

4775

Can you guys who are more familiar with MMOs explain the reasoning behind the queues again?

They want to ensure that the servers remain well-populated after the initial rush - I get that. But why don’t they just open and close servers according to demand? Is it a big technical hassle to migrate the data if you later close the servers? The game’s the same whether you play on one server or another, isn’t it (i.e. there’s no dynamic changes on any particular server – territory being conquered as in EVE, etc.)? If that’s the case, why does it matter if servers are later combined, as long as everyone on that server is moved (so you don’t lose access to friends)?

Obviously it gives the wrong impression of the future of the game if 40 servers combine into 3, but that would only be a concern for a game that’s of uncertain commercial success, which clearly won’t be the case here.

4776

It’s too early to say if the game will be a commercial success or not; it’s not uncommon for MMOs to have a whiz-bang release, only to bleed players and stagger to unprofitability in a couple months.

As for the purpose of queues in general, merging servers is more tramautic* than you’d think. Servers rapidly gain their own culture, and people become attached to their servers surprisingly early on. You end up making many customers unhappy when you merge servers, plus you have to deal with naming collisions between the various servers, which further unhappifies** customers. True, long server queues don’t exactly thrill customers either, but it’s probably better (from a business perspective) to make people unhappy with long server queues rather than merged servers later.

In addition, I suspect that game developers aren’t too unhappy with long server queues early on; it helps give the impression of a highly desired product that everybody wants to play. It’s kind of like a long line at a brand new brick and mortar store… sure, everybody is annoyed by the line, but it adds to the allure.

*This is probably too dramatic a word for it, but I can’t be bothered to think of the more appropriate term.

**Yes, unhappifies is a word. Look it up. Or better yet, don’t look it up but just take my word for it.

4777

This is a mentality I’ve never understood. I’m not drawn by places with lines. I avoid them at all cost. I don’t shop at the busy grocery store for instance, I drive 15 minutes further to go to the one that’s usually empty and has no lines. Lines are the reason I have never been to a disney park and will never go.

4778

To be fair this happens in WoW as well, to this day.

4779

I am playing the release vesion of SWTOR last couple of days and seeing the same thing. I have tried setting /high cpu priority, changing resolution and modifiying clientsettings.ini with no effect. I love this game but the continuous 2s pause is quite annoying :( Have you found out anything that fixes this?

4780

I don’t see this with any other game and have good laptop so not sure it is hardware.