5701

This is a pretty helpful crafting site.

http://www.crewskillz.com/

Shame about the name though.

5702

Yup, same with the Juggernaut. As usual, the tank gets exponentially stronger with more cooldowns available. And my cooldowns are awesome.

5703

So like a total catass I bought this:

Wheee hehehehe

5704

Nothing catass about that because that is one of the most awesome all around gaming accessories for the PC. I use it in every game I play.

5705

The Heroic 4 Insufficient Staff, on Alderaan, is unbelievably frustrating. You push a button and a bunch of waves spawn. If you wipe, it bugs the fuck out and you get to reset the instance and start all over from the beginning. I’d strongly recommend avoiding that place.

5706

Fun piece of hardware. Grats. Do it fix the ui? :-)

5707

Yeah I have one of those myself. Anyone have a good layout for SW:TOR though? I only have my Eve profile - where it is btw awesome. It almost perfectly matches the UI layout of Eve.

5708

You just need a good mouse to use with it.

5709

You linked the wrong one. http://www.amazon.com/Razer-Star-Wars™-Republic™-Gaming/dp/B00635N6YI/ref=sr_1_cc_1?s=electronics&ie=UTF8&qid=1325229705&sr=1-1-catcorr

5710

Yeah, that’s not what I meant at all. At all. Not even close.

There are cutscenes. For a certain class, your character loses fights in cutscenes. Once was unimpressive storytelling. Twice is annoying. There are better ways to do a required loss than to show me a cutscene of how my character sucks.

5711

Sorry if this has been discussed or was obvious to everyone else. I’ve been doing Synthweaving since early access and didn’t fully understand it. This mostly applies to the crafts that make gear and weapons, things are a little different for Artifice and Space Alchemy and Make Me a Speeder. So anyway here’s what I just found out about armor and weapon crafting:

When you talk to the trainer you’ll mostly learn recipes for green items. For example, here’s a synthweaving item:

Nimble Mind Bracers
Light Armor
121 Armor
+24 Endurance
+21 Willpower

Pretty generic. I wanted tanking gear for my Shadow but I figured maybe I can learn the blue version of this pattern and maybe get some extra endurance or something. So I made a few and reverse engineered them and learned a blue pattern:

Redoubt Nimble Mind Bracers
Light Armor
145 Armor
+24 Endurance
+21 Willpower
+8 Defense Rating

Awesome, defense! So I made a bunch of those and reverse engineered them to see if I could make a purple version. Eventually I came up with this thing:

Anti-Armor Nimble Mind Bracers [Superior]
Light Armor
156 Armor
+24 Endurance
+21 Willpower
+10 Defense Rating
+11 Surge Rating

It took a bit of crafting but from the base recipe I’ve added 35 armor, 10 defense and 11 surge. Surge Rating is pretty good for Shadow tanks so it turns out the advanced version of the original Nimble Mind gear is for tanking. Or so I thought. Soon after I learned a new recipe from the trainer:

Nimble Mind Boots
Light Armor
130 Armor
+27 Endurance
+30 Willpower
+15 Critical Rating

Sweet, time to make a bunch of them and turn them into awesome epic tanking boots to go with my bracers. So I make one pair, reverse engineer it and learn a new blue pattern.

Overkill Nimble Mind Boots
Light Armor
156 Armor
+27 Endurance
+30 Willpower
+16 Power
+15 Critical Rating

Uhhhh, what? Where’s the defense? Why aren’t they Redoubt Nimble Mind Boots? I want some tanky time. Dudes, check this bullshit out: there isn’t just one blue version of a pattern. There are three. If you make Nimble Mind Boots and reverse engineer them it’s possible you could learn Critical Nimble Mind Boots, Redoubt Nimble Mind Boots or Overkill Nimble Mind Boots, each with their own extra stats.

Oh, and guess what? Each one of them has FIVE different potential purple versions. So even if I get the pattern for Redoubt Nimble Mind Boots I might not learn the Anti-Armor version right away. So potentially you have to make each blue pattern like a ton of times just to get the epic version you want. And once you have the purple pattern (which will undoubtably require a more expensive additional mat) you’ll want to make that a bunch of times until you crit and get a purple with an augment slot in it (at least, you might at 50).

So every green pattern you buy from the vendor is actually the base of 19 different patterns that you have to discover by making the crap out of it. Here’s a breakdown I copied from a post on the official forum:

----------------------------[ Leadership
---------------------------/- Tempest
---------------- Critical ---- Fervor
-------------/-------------- Endowment

------------- --------------[ Supremacy
------------- --------------[ Exactitude
------------- -------------/- Anti-Armor
Base Item - - Redoubt — General
------------- -------------- Veracity
------------- --------------[ ???
------------- ----------------------------
------------- --------------[ Vehemence

--------------------------/- Rampart
---------------- Overkill — Commander
---------------------------- Expert
----------------------------[ Hawkeye

Redoubt (+Defense)
-General (+Defense, +Presence)
-Veracity (+Defense, +Shield)
-Anti-Armor (+Defense, +Surge)
-Exactitude (+Defense, +Accuracy)

  • ???

Critical (+Critical)
-Leadership (+Critical, +Presence)
-Tempest (+Critical, +Shield)
-Fervor (+Critical, +Accuracy)
-Endowment (+Critical, +Surge)
-Supremacy (+Critical, +Alacrity)

Overkill (+Power)
-Vehemence (+Power, +Alacrity)
-Rampart (+Power, +Shield)
-Commander (+Power, +Presence)

  • Expert (+Power, +Surge)
  • Hawkeye (+Power, +Accuracy)

And of course, it’s possible that you will reverse engineer the Nimble Mind Boots and re-learn the Overkill version, which just gives you an error that you already learned it. The good news is that I got skill up points for all of these attempts, so it wasn’t a complete waste. But damn, I can see crafting being either extremely time consuming or expensive at 50 when you’re trying to make fancy gear.

Anyway, so that happened.

5712

I don’t know about the SW version that Marcus linked, but I bought the generic one since it seemed like it could be a good idea to have a mouse with a lot of buttons. The quality was really bad unfortunately. First I had to change mouse pad to get it to track properly (used the same pad with both Microsoft and Logitech for many years), and after a couple of months it started inserting extra clicks. I had that problem with a Microsoft mouse as well, possibly because of dust getting inside, but in that case it took almost two years.

5713

Thats amazing work - Thanks for spelling it out all! I Was kinda confused about a few different things I learned from re-engineering things, but this explains it.

5714

Probably reading and understanding that system I will know why after crafting 3 separate weapons, all shared the exact same stats. Some of the “leafs” of that tree are really the same (stats wise).

I feel bad I made a few bad decissions with my character, even knowing that where bad decissions. Like… armour a much better crafting than weapons. People only use 1 weapon, but 4 pieces of armour,so the need for armour is x4 the one of weapons.

The other bad decisions was rolling a commando, …this game really stress the need of pure healers and pure tanks for content. All these “LF1M Tank/Healer” will be my cruciphex.

5715

Is this really selling all that well I wonder? After all the talk about limited early shipments I noticed that my local Walmart has plenty of copies on the shelf and has never run out. And they don’t carry much in the way of PC games at that location. Makes me interested in seeing what the initial sales figures are.

And a friend asked me about it and I said I’d heard it was a lot like WoW. He bought it and told me couldn’t really disagree with that statement, up to a point anyway.

5716

AFAIK, they hit a million “active accounts” or something a few days back.

Which isn’t what a lot of fans were hoping for, though it’s not bad for what the game is - I’d say.

It’s unique enough in how it’s mostly a singleplayer game that offers multiplayer gameplay on a level somewhat below the best MMOs (if you ask me) - and I think it’s well worth the investment for the singleplayer content alone.

That said, I think it’s very, very far from the kind of MMO I think the market needs to grow and evolve.

It’s also not on the level of what I used to expect from Bioware - but it’s sort of better than what I expected based on their recent stuff.

5717

In most MMO’s I completely agree with you, armorsmithing is more fun because of all the pieces you need. One thing I really like about the mod system though is that there are lots of different important parts that other crafters can make. For example as an artificer, I make Lightsaber hilts which is a very important component of the lightsaber, since it determines the saber’s damage. I also make Enhancements which can be used to upgrade any Orange piece of equipment, be it weapon or armor. I also make Focus/Shield/Generators. So there’s always something I can be working on that will upgrade my character or companion.

5718

Keep in mind they’ve been working on this for a long, long time. So in a sense it’s pre-Dragon Age 2, pre-Mass Effect 2, even though it was released afterwards.

5719

Yeah, I know that - but both games mentioned took a while to develop as well.

Ever since the EA merger - I’ve been worried about their direction, though I’d say Bioware have steadily worsened since Jade Empire. But I certainly wouldn’t put it beyond the suits to make the developers change direction, and I’m not at all convinced SWtOR is the “developers ideal version”.

But that’s my personal opinion, not a statement of fact.

I thought SWtOR would be rather bland, when in fact, I think there are some really neat elements and the voice-overs make a bigger difference than I thought they would - because I’m really an “MMO-MMO person” not an “I-really-prefer-singleplayer-MMO person”.

My two biggest issues, right now, are awfully clunky combat (mostly noticable in PvP) - and really just a very bland world PvP implementation overall.

The first part I didn’t expect, but the second part is not a surprise. But the game would be quite the hit with me, if those two issues were rectified.

Even so, I just wanted a way to pass the time until the next big MMO comes out - and SWtOR does that better than I came to expect from following the development.

5720

I haven’t seen a single SWTOR ad, whereas I’ve been knee-deep, Evony-deep in WoW ads in all media (but especially on the internet) for months. SWTOR had natural buzz, but that doesn’t mean you don’t advertise.