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Crafting skills - are they necessary?


Stressfire

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Title pretty much says it all. Are crafting skills necessary to be successful in-game?

 

My main at the moment is a high-30s Merc with all crew skills of the gathering variety: scav, slice, and UT. For the most part I just sell everything I get from crew missions and for the most part, the missions seem to pay for themselves.

 

I've recently started a couple of other toons and have yet to allocate crew skills for them. But honestly, crafting seems like a real pain in the butt. Is it worth the effort? Are there items that can be crafted that cannot be obtained any other way and are necessary for certain classes/roles to do their jobs effectively? Or can I just do all gathering and be just fine?

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Title pretty much says it all. Are crafting skills necessary to be successful in-game?

 

My main at the moment is a high-30s Merc with all crew skills of the gathering variety: scav, slice, and UT. For the most part I just sell everything I get from crew missions and for the most part, the missions seem to pay for themselves.

 

I've recently started a couple of other toons and have yet to allocate crew skills for them. But honestly, crafting seems like a real pain in the butt. Is it worth the effort? Are there items that can be crafted that cannot be obtained any other way and are necessary for certain classes/roles to do their jobs effectively? Or can I just do all gathering and be just fine?

Specifically answering your questions:

- Crafting is not necessary to be successful. While leveling, quest rewards and flashpoint boss drops are more that sufficient to keep your characters geared. That being said, if you keep a crafting skill slightly over your level, and you RE to purple quality, there will be times when that purple crafted gear is superior to anything you can get at that level. This only makes questing and FPs a little easier.

- It is only worth the effort if you enjoy it (like any other aspect of this game). If you find it tedious, you will not maintain it and it will be a waste.

- there are no items, in this game, that can only be obtained through crafting. Most crafted items are BoE which means they can be sold/given to other characters. There are some crafted items that are BoP but most of them are obtainable by other means (i.e. most crafting skills allow you to craft Rakata level gear, that gear is also available by token drops in operations)

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Oh, thank the maker!

 

I was really hoping to avoid it, as to me it really does seem tedious - started to have flashbacks of my SWG Gunsmith and having to hunt down the best materials for high level schems and save them in perpetuity as they would never show up again.

 

Questing and flashpoints are really more my speed play-wise, so spending my game-time crafting of searching out specific materials is not my idea of a good time

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Yeah, there are a lot of former SWG players who wish the crafting system in SWTOR was more like SWG's but it is most definitely not.

 

I'm actually quite glad it's not - can't tell you how many mining machines I totaled because I forgot about them:o

Or how many single use schems got wasted because I wasn't using top of the line mats that hadn't been available since Combat Update went live:rolleyes:

 

So the simplicity is nice, but still tedious from my perspective as one who prefers killing stuff and making credits rather than playing a bad-*** bounty hunter who spends his downtime as a seamstress;) But I hear knitting can be very calming

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I think the nice thing about craftng is, it's a nice mini game....a nice side quest....a break from my "usual" gameplay. Well, that and the literally millions of credits I've made from it :)

 

Seriously though, crafting , dong story quests, doing heroic 2s and 4s, doing flashpoints, dong operations, doing hard mode FPs and Ops, doing PvP, doing rated PvP, doing space missions, doing dailies....all of it can earn you credits,fun, and satisfaction. I find that dong some of this and some of that mixed in between a bit of that and this really helps to keep from getting burned out or making one aspect of the game feel like a grind or a job.

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I have five toons in my legacy so far. To this point, the Cybertech crafting skill seems to be the most useful as all character types need the armoring pieces. For this reason, two of my five toons are Cybertechs. HAving said that, the most frustrating crafting skill so far has been the Artifice skill. For some reason, maybe just random, dumb luck, it often takes dozens of greens reengineered to learn the blue schematics. Purples have come a little easier than blues, but my observation is purely anecdotal as I don't have the actual numbers.

 

I have also noticed that it seems to be more profitable just selling the materials. In the case of puple hilts, I often have trouble just breaking even as far as value of materials VS the selling price of a purple hilt. This says nothing of the cost or time I incurred to learn the schematics. On the other hand, purple hilts are not available much of the time on GTN. Probably because it's not worth it to the crafter to craft and sell them. It's a catch 22 in a way if you want the purple hilts. Please note: I am speaking of hilts< lvl 50. I have no experience yet with lvl 50 hilts.

 

One last frustration: has anyone else noticed that the alleged high crit level of certain team members don't seem to produce any more crit than a non-crit crew member? I have.

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Nope, not unless you plan on useing Biochem because a lot of the consumables require a certain amount of skill to use. If you have money or don't care about overgearing your character every 5 levels then you can make it just fine without crafting anything. Money can be made doing quests or selling the occasional decent drop.
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I have five toons in my legacy so far. To this point, the Cybertech crafting skill seems to be the most useful as all character types need the armoring pieces. For this reason, two of my five toons are Cybertechs. HAving said that, the most frustrating crafting skill so far has been the Artifice skill. For some reason, maybe just random, dumb luck, it often takes dozens of greens reengineered to learn the blue schematics. Purples have come a little easier than blues, but my observation is purely anecdotal as I don't have the actual numbers.

 

I have also noticed that it seems to be more profitable just selling the materials. In the case of puple hilts, I often have trouble just breaking even as far as value of materials VS the selling price of a purple hilt. This says nothing of the cost or time I incurred to learn the schematics. On the other hand, purple hilts are not available much of the time on GTN. Probably because it's not worth it to the crafter to craft and sell them. It's a catch 22 in a way if you want the purple hilts. Please note: I am speaking of hilts< lvl 50. I have no experience yet with lvl 50 hilts.

 

One last frustration: has anyone else noticed that the alleged high crit level of certain team members don't seem to produce any more crit than a non-crit crew member? I have.

 

RNG is a ***** :eek:. You may be having trouble with RE and crit crafting but someone else is getting VERY lucky. Over the long haul and over all the crafters in the game the numbers balance out.

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I have all but given up on any kind of crafting. Its is such a PITA and so expensive to craft stuff. I am going to just start giving my guildies the stuff they want to make me stuff. After that I am going to start selling stuff. packs of 20 or so.

 

I have done 6 lvl 50 toons and never once got any kind of use out of it. I just got so frustrated that I gave up on it every time i started it.

 

Do you need it no not at all. I make more coin from slicing and treasure hunting than anything else so thats all I do now. I may start some underworld scavenging and sell that stuff off but that would be

Edited by KratorOfCondor
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