Now that 6.0 has gone live, I have set about trying to pursue crafting, mostly just Biochem right now, while having the whole affair impact my cash reserves as little as possible.

 

First of all: 500,000 credits per discipline seems like way too much for unlocking crafting up to 700. Not only do I have my main 6 crafters, I have my 4+ auxiliary gatherers (slicing etc), plus a set of 6 auxiliary crafters (and probably other toons with crafting). Already this is getting to be in the realm of 25 million credits JUST to give most of these toons the privilege to grind their way to 700.

 

Getting from 600->700 did not take long, between having 8 companions at influence 50 on my Biochemer plus crafting/mission efficiency on the guild ship. Felt like a short two hours. Of course, I had the benefit of preparing for 6.0 by leveling this many comps on all my crafting toons because I knew it would be a lengthy grind from my experience on the PTS. Anyway, I leveled Bioanalysis and Diplomacy at the same time, then Biochem afterward. For Biochem, I crafted the green Cell Grafts until 665, then swapped to the blue Cell Grafts until 700.

 

At this point, I realized the mats vendor on fleet was selling the recombinators for way less than on the PTS (300 per unit for white, vs iirc 3500 on the PTS), so instead of running that Bioanalysis mission, I just bought stacks of white/green/blue recombinators from the vendor.

 

Adrenal schematics start at blue quality, so I left those alone at first. Implants start at green quality, but STILL require the blue-quality isotopes, so I left those alone as well. Stims and Medpacks start at green quality, so I crafted some of them up and then started REing stacks of them to learn the blue schematics. This didn't take too long. I was lucky, and was able to learn the blue Medpack/Med Unit/Proficient/Versatile/Fortitude/Command within no more than 5 REs per item. This was nice, and within the 20% tolerance each time.

 

But I only realized after this that it was merely "lucky". There is no RNG protection on Reverse Engineering.

 

After finishing all the green RE-ing I was going to do in order to focus on blue RE-ing, I was a bit miffed at how far these mats I had run missions on did NOT go towards crafting actual items. So, I decided that instead of running the missions, I would instead run a gathering circuit on Onderon. This was better, and stopped hurting my bottom line so much. However I'd like to point out that here I was swapping money for time. Money is more important to me, so I waste time instead.

 

My first plan of attack after getting a healthy stack of blue Cell Grafts crafted, was to queue up each item I wanted to learn a purple schematic for and hope that REing them would give me at least one recipe. All of these had a 10% RE chance, and I had enough mats to craft 18 stacks of stuff.

 

I crafted, in terms of stacks of blue quality: 3 x MedPacs, 2 x MedUnits, 3 x Attack Adrenals, 2 x Triage Adrenals, 2 x Shield Adrenals, 2 x Versatile Stims, 2 x Proficient Stims, 2 x Fortitude Stims. Out of these 18 stacks, all with a 10% RE chance, I learned Advanced Proficient Stim, and nothing else (I should've gotten 2 things if my luck were average, and 1 thing if my luck were bad, or 0 for exceptionally bad luck). I considered one recipe for 18 stacks to be within acceptable tolerance (if barely), so I moved on.

 

After this, I gathered for another couple hours on Onderon, crafted up another set of blue Cell Grafts, and this time I crafted loads and loads of blue quality Medpacks for REing. I spaced them out so I could RE each stack individually as they completed so as to not waste my items if I learned it early. Haha. Well, all told, I RE'd 40 stackcs of Medpacks (including the 3 from earlier), and did not learn the purple Advanced Kyrprax Medpac. This is supposed to have a 10% chance. I should've learned the recipe 4 times on average. 37 of those REs were during the same instance with no logouts. This is a huge problem.

 

I think going forward, I'm going to return to crafting all different things and hoping something will train, rather than all the same thing because while it doesn't actually matter which method I do, it still feels like I'm wasting my time less if I do different items, which helps keep the frustration at bay.

 

Anyway, while the farming on Onderon makes the monetary expenditure slightly more palatable, I just don't have the time to farm mats day in and day out for eternity just to not learn the schematic after way more than the threshold REs I should need. Also, this is a boring way to spend time in the game, and I shouldn't be forced to do this in order to avoid spending millions of credits just to not learn purple recipes anyway (and I still have the legendaries to go too!). This makes me feel like I've wasted my time and/or money, and the worse luck I have the saltier I get about it.

 

I haven't seen anyone yet say they enjoy the crafting changes, or even feel neutral about them. So again, I invite the devs to go here:

• I wrote up a detailed post in the PTS forums (here).
  
• JediBoadicea wrote up a more succinct post in the PTS forums (here).
  

Almost all of these issues from the PTS still remain at 6.0 launch.

 

Devs, please do something to reduce the grindiness and cost of crafting. Plus all the broken things related to crafting that have not yet been acknowledged (war supplies imbalance, iokath recombinators still being used in dark project schematics but you can't get them from anywhere, etc). Crafting should be a mindlessly enjoyable activity, a strategic Conquest activity, or a slightly less efficient gearing supplement, not a major monetary sink and grindy frustration that feels much like a second job.

Last I saw the Iokath Recombinators were available on Odessen for 270,000 credits each from one of the vendors in the area where the Umbara, Copero, and Nathema flashpoint entrances are located.

 

You should have learned the purple schematic after reverse engineering 40 stacks, but you haven't reached the level of "unlucky" yet. The cumulative chance of learning the schematic is up to 98.5%. It will hit a 99% chance (in other words 1 player out of 100 still fail) with the 44th stack.

 

I have one character that has tried to RE a blue stack of Kyrprax medpacs 78 times now and still no luck. The cumulative probability has reached 99.97% that I should have learned the purple plan. However, each time I try a stack there is still a 90% chance of failing on that stack. This could take forever, but probably won't.

Thanks, Citrienne. It's sad to see that crafting is very frustrating here in live 6.0. Yes, it's what we predicted, but none of us actually wanted it to turn out this way. We just couldn't see how it would turn out any other way, without enough changes made based on our feedback. And so it has turned out.

 

I haven't done much REing yet in live 6.0, personally. I almost feel sick at the thought of it. I think my previous expereinces testing REing were more like PTSD than just PTS.

Edited October 24, 2019 by Estelindis

As a fairly casual crafter I was already disinterested in this new crafting paradigm, but after reading your report I've decided I'm not going anywhere near this pile of Hutt offal. I can craft all the dyes I want, and I'll just stick with my 228 augments (unless they decided to muck up those recipes). I was never much of a min/maxer anyhow.

 

Thank you for taking the time to put this together.

And I shall say it again: Are we there Yet ? lol

 

Kidding! Seriously, though. What I want to know is: WHY MY SLICING is giving me crap stuff for crafting huh???

 

I don't craft. EVER. Cose its mind numbing boring. and the reward is no existant (Unless you are a seller or a user of the stuff you make) .

 

But Slicing would give you box with tiny bit of credit. Not much, but that was fun to hunt down. Now my Inventory is filled with green and blue ''Take it to a vendor to exchange it for ressource for crafting'' .

 

I DO NOT CRAFT. What I'm supposed to do with these ? they sell for 1$ Credit .

Last I saw the Iokath Recombinators were available on Odessen for 270,000 credits each from one of the vendors in the area where the Umbara, Copero, and Nathema flashpoint entrances are located.

 

You should have learned the purple schematic after reverse engineering 40 stacks, but you haven't reached the level of "unlucky" yet. The cumulative chance of learning the schematic is up to 98.5%. It will hit a 99% chance (in other words 1 player out of 100 still fail) with the 44th stack.

 

I have one character that has tried to RE a blue stack of Kyrprax medpacs 78 times now and still no luck. The cumulative probability has reached 99.97% that I should have learned the purple plan. However, each time I try a stack there is still a 90% chance of failing on that stack. This could take forever, but probably won't.

 

I queued up some blue prototype medpacks last night, I had a stack of 40 this morning. I reverse engineered the entire stack and learned the purple schem. When I checked the tooltip, it said the RE chance is even worse than PTS, it’s down to 5% now!

 

I can understand a low RE chance, or rare mat requirements, or expensive to make. But this is all three. After three days of running missions on four gathering toons for about an hour or two each day, I only had enough Components to make 6 stacks of purple medpacks. Obviously I didn’t learn the schem and ended up with two medpacks left over.

One thing I do think has improved from PTS to live is the number of harvesting nodes found round about. With people being dispersed through many instances, I'm generally finding competition for them isn't too bad either. It's not making much impact overall on my crafting because the bottleneck caused by the blue isotopes is artificially stunting my progress there, so other bottlenecks from other materials aren't really apparent. I fully admit that maybe if I went all-out on crafting again like I did before I might find it actually make a negligible difference (assuming I could find a sufficient supply of isotopes), so for now my harvesting comment is somewhat theoretical... But anecdotally, at least, it does feel like they improved things a bit on that front. Edited October 25, 2019 by Estelindis

One thing I do think has improved from PTS to live is the number of harvesting nodes found round about. With people being dispersed through many instances, I'm generally finding competition for them isn't too bad either. It's not making much impact overall on my crafting because the bottleneck caused by the blue isotopes is artificially stunting my progress there, so other bottlenecks from other materials aren't really apparent. I fully admit that maybe if I went all-out on crafting again like I did before I might find it actually make a negligible difference (assuming I could find a sufficient supply of isotopes), so for now my harvesting comment is somewhat theoretical... But anecdotally, at least, it does feel like they improved things a bit on that front.

 

There are no where near enough nodes on Onderon or Mek. Remember many people just aren’t bothering because of how bad this crafting changes are.

If the normal amount of crafters (before 6.0) were farming nodes, there would be an out cry because there are no where near enough to support the population. Even if they kept this number of nodes, they wouldn’t respawn fast enough for that amount of people.

I think what people are missing is "the reason why". The devs designed 6.0 the way they did, because they had to create a system that would take the most amount of time, and keep players subbed during the grind. They are buying as much time as they can, because they are freaked out about their future, and the staff and budget can't support the growth that the game actually needs. Crafting was in the way of that goal. So they only way they could make it work was to change the values to absurd levels to keep it from competing with the time sink needed to get end game gear. It also has the added benefit of taking credits out of the system, because they failed to figure out how to delete the billions upon billions that flooded in due to exploits. Edited October 25, 2019 by Holocron

I think what people are missing is "the reason why". The devs designed 6.0 the way they did, because they had to create a system that would take the most amount of time, and keep players subbed during the grind. They are buying as much time as they can, because they are freaked out about their future, and the staff and budget can't support the growth that the game actually needs. Crafting was in the way of that goal. So they only way they could make it work was to change the values to absurd levels to keep it from competing the time needed to get end game gear. It also has the added benefit of taking credits out of the system, because they failed to figure out how to delete the billions upon billions that flooded in due to exploits.

 

But they went too far and it doesn’t keep playing longer. It makes people play less or not at all. Their way of thinking is counter productive to the health of the game. They spent all this time messing around with systems to slow down game play when they should have spent the time and resources on more playable content. And made the game fun and not a drag.

Edited October 25, 2019 by TrixxieTriss

But they went too far and it doesn’t keep playing longer. It makes people play less or not at all. Their way of thinking is counter productive to the health of the game. They spent all this time messing around with systems to slow down game play when they should have spent the time and resources on more playable content. And made the game fun and not a drag.

 

You and I agree.

The only thing I take exception with is the OP using the term DevS as in plural, this wont be the case, it will be one persons vision, likely someone who just got given a promotion to take lead and is putting his/her "stamp" on things because his/her vision is perfect and everyone else just cant understand because they are stupid. Its why feedback was ignored on the PTS entirely.

 

From a political point a view this wont change short term because he/she will be emotionally invested in their "vision" regardless of any negative consequences, he/she will see these as simple growing pains and the cries of idiots who dont see the "big picture" that they have in their minds eye.

 

I predict this crap will last for six months minimum as the lead who made the choices certainly gives the impression of being inflexible and it will require him/her getting a slap from someone higher up but to get their attention they will need to see things like sub drop offs and those numbers arent gathered regularly. End result will be him/her being cycled out of the role unless they react to this debacle fast, but again, I dont see it happening.

I think what people are missing is "the reason why". The devs designed 6.0 the way they did, because they had to create a system that would take the most amount of time, and keep players subbed during the grind. They are buying as much time as they can, because they are freaked out about their future, and the staff and budget can't support the growth that the game actually needs. Crafting was in the way of that goal. So they only way they could make it work was to change the values to absurd levels to keep it from competing with the time sink needed to get end game gear. It also has the added benefit of taking credits out of the system, because they failed to figure out how to delete the billions upon billions that flooded in due to exploits.

 

I thought about that, perhaps the Devs didn't want all their hard work in the Spoils of War loot system to go to waste. But if that's the case, don't make any new crafting at all.

But, let me give them the benefit of the doubt. Let's presume this wasn't some way to divert people away from crafting so that the sole pathway to gear is SoW. Then why create crafted tacticals and set boni?

 

OK, so they want crafting to be useful, but more tedious. Why does green crap that gets thrown away or REd need blue mats? Why create three nested levels, three grades of everything including the old white mats? Then, on top of the needing blue mats for green crap, and multiple nested levels, and multiple grades, you increase the material requirements thirty-fold? Why do all that, AND make the RE chance 5%? Why do all of that, and make the biochem consumables minimally improved over grade 10s? I mean, this was a lot of developer time, art, and effort to introduce literally five levels of nerfing and, in the case of biochem consumables, not make them worthwhile. This is like cutting off all four extremities and then making a mouth operated wheelchair go a little faster than if you used your chin to drag yourself along the ground. This is more than just a nerf.

 

I've been on Onderon on a phase with a dozen other people ... Archeology nodes are NOT falling from the sky. Its cheaper than running missions but by no means more fruitful. I consider Yavin to be plentiful, for comparison, or the Zakuul Endless Swamp or Chapter 14's Darvanis. You need hundreds and hundreds of greens and you get none from rich missions and hardly any from bountiful. Failures with jawa junk as a result are like a sick joke when a single material costs 200 jawa scrap.

 

I mean this is more than just the attitude, "We don't want crafting to be a compelling alternative to actually acquiring loot in spoils of war," which doesn't really jive with both the notion of crafted set bonuses and tacticals as well as the ongoing need for biochem consumables. There's no real money monetization in this, I mean sure, maybe they drive people to buy more CM dyes or color crystals, but you can't get item modifications/set bonus shells/biochem consumables from the market. There's no MTX Consumable you can buy to increase yields, increase RE chance, etc. You can get jawa scrap from packs but not in any quantity that makes financial sense. Remember that a failed mission, or a cartel pack, gives you maybe a dozen green jawa scrap. That means it takes 8 failed missions/cartel packs to buy ONE grade 11 material. Not one stack, ONE mat. And you need 180 green materials to make a single 6-stack of purple medpacks. Thats over 1400 failed missions ... or 1400 cartel packs. Who would do that? I mean anyone who thinks that's P2W must think the earth is flat. So they are not making any real money on this.

 

So what the hell are they playing at? What is the real goal here?

 

And I thought the original Contraband Slot Machine nerf was over the top.