I just picked my crew skills last night. I had my companion run over 20 gather missions. The missions are always the same, for the same price giving the same small xp. Do the missions eventually progress, cost more and give more xp? Do they progress the more missions I do, or do they progress as I go further along my story line and level up my character?

Any advice on this. If all you ever get is to xp points per mission, it seems like this is going to take forever to max out.

Any help on this please?

AFAIK you need 65 points to reach Tier 2 missions. The tier 2 missions will cost more and take longer to complete.

I just picked my crew skills last night. I had my companion run over 20 gather missions. The missions are always the same, for the same price giving the same small xp. Do the missions eventually progress, cost more and give more xp? Do they progress the more missions I do, or do they progress as I go further along my story line and level up my character?

 

Yes, they progress without you doing anything other than leveling your gathering skill. When you hit certain thresholds, say 100 points in bioanalysis, new missions(s) will magically appear that cost more and give you higher level returns. They are devided by level brackets (10-16, 17-24, etc.). You can still do the old missions once they are greyed out if you need those materials for crafting, but you won't get xp anymore for them.

 

I do not believe they are tied to your story-line at all.

You gain crew skill level by using that skill. For crafting skills you have to craft, for missions skills you have to run the missions, for gathering skills you can either run missions or harvest the nodes you see around the planets.

 

When you go to do any of those actions, the name or difficulty level should be color coded. If it's gray, that means it's so easy you're pretty much guaranteed to succeed but won't gain any skill from it.

Green will improve your skill but is still easy and likely to succeed.

Yellow and orange are more difficult, so you might fail the mission, but you'll get skill increases.

 

As you increase the skill level you no longer get increases from the same low level tasks (you can't just craft 400 level 1 green mods to get your skill to 400) so keep watching the difficulty and try to be doing at least green or yellow tasks if you want to keep raising your skill.

 

Typically the increases are only a point or two at a time, so if you were hoping to gain 20 points off one big mission, I don't think that exists. You're meant to gradually level it up over the course of your rise to level 50.

Thanks for the help. Much appreciated.