As a person with only one lvl 400 anything, a biochem, I make a few extra credits by selling Exotech stims. These require 4 Radioactive Paste (in addition to more easily aquired mats) for each batch of 3 stims. To support making these, I run Diplomacy Grade 6 Medical Supplies gathering missions to get the paste. I have outfitted my ship droid with the legacy +2 Diplomacy Crit Armoring, and as a Trooper have Aric Jordan who has a +2 Diplomacy Critical buff by default. Both companions are max affection. As I understand it (re: http://www.swtor.com/blog/community-qa-april-27th-2012), running the green and yellow level 6 Medical Supplies missions with these two companions should give me a 22% crit rating.

 

My apparent crit result rate recently however, is far, far, lower, on the order of perhaps 7% or less of missions returning Radioactive Paste. For instance, in the last week I gathered over 200 smart cells (the only other material collected) vs. 11 paste. This was the result of running about 50 missions (I log in and queue missions even when not actively playing), in which I received paste 4 times, in quantities of 3, 3, 3, and then 2. These results have been repeating for a few weeks now, so that should be a big enough sample to eliminate any statistical flukes. Does this indicate that the crafting mission crit chance is broken, or actually not as described in the above Q&A? Am I making a false assumption that a crit result should always yield paste? It seems like I used to get a lot more paste (perhaps before 1.4 release?)

 

I realize of course, that rare materials should be hard to acquire, however this seems a bit off... After spending a week running missions at a cost of close to 100k credits, plus the cost of missions to get the other required mats, which will be at least 10k more credits, I have 9 Exotechs to sell on the GTN for about 180k credits, about a 70k profit. Does this seem like the right rate of return, or the right amount of reward for in game effort (50+ crew missions)?

I use underworld trading and I feel that it yields purple materials at about 15-20% rate with full affection and 400 UT. However, some clearification would be wonderful!

Crits will yield half as much paste as you would normally get in smart cells - I'm not sure about what exactly you're seeing in crit rates, but mine seems pretty normal across several different mission skills (including diplomacy).

Does anyone have any input on the question of whether a crit gathering result should always yield some purple materials (radioactive paste in this case)? I swear my ship droid just came back from a mission, reporting "I have exceeded your specifications master..." which I though he only said when a crit result occurred, yet the only mats I got were a lousy 4 smart cells...

The messages they say when they return used to be very bugged. I've noticed more recently they have been fixed to usually be an accurate indicator of how the mission went, but not always.

The messages have been bugged longer than they haven't been.

 

But on the note of Crit Chance return rates, over the past days/weeks, I have noticed a significant drop in the crit chance rate.

 

Always with 10k affection companions, and over about a few dozen missions, the rates do not appear to be what they used to. From what I hear from guildies, this is not just affecting me either.

Anyone notice since the no notes, no client update patch that crit rates are back where they should be... I have been consistently getting at least 2 paste (i.e. one crit result) every 4 to 6 missions...

I can say that my crits on slicing are sub par in number. Over a 100 missions I got maybe 2 or 3 cirts. I guess I crit when I get advanced neural whatnot, right? Yesterday I got angry and dropped slicing entirely. Went for treasure hunting for a change. Perhaps that one is not nerfed to oblivion. I really liked slicing.

 

BTW, that is with all comps at 10k affection (except for the droid, standing at 7k).

Edited November 12, 2012 by Kyanzes