Looking forward to hearing more about the changes, when it took me 6 cargo holds + my normal inventory of materials and jawa junk as well as 2 hours of missions and crafting cell graft to learn the new schematic for and craft 1 reusable attack adrenal I started to wonder how disconnected the developers were from the player base.

Could you perhaps shed some light on the total material cost that you guys are intending for learning/crafting the new purple and the legendary/reusable variants of the consumables currently on PTS? Cause looking at how much time as well as materials it took for me to craft the new ones I am a bit confused how these will become mainstream.

Additionally, it would be great to hear some of the thoughts behind the changes to the crafting system (green, blue and purple materials as well as different "tiers" of cell grafts) and why those changes were made along with how you think that improves crafting in general. Cause it seems that there is simply just a lot of new materials just "because" without them actually having a purpose, apart from making crafting more time consuming of course.

Some of these changes have been implemented on the PTS. Onderon now has all grade 11 nodes. Ossus is back to only yielding grade 10 materials.

Grade 11 slicing nodes still have the bug where yielded credit caches contain nothing. Bioanalysis and slicing nodes (at least) also still have the bug where materials are silently added to the materials inventory if the companion performs the gathering. I haven't tested archaeology or scavenging yet.

The minimap has also changed. It is now in color instead of the classic blue contoured map. Interesting, but less useful I think. Landmarks and roads I would use to orient are now gone or obscured by a gray fog, which I guess is supposed to represent different ground elevations.

Hey folks,

 

One of the things we have seen a lot of questions and feedback on is crafting. Fear not as you (crafters) have not been forgotten and there are changes coming. Here are the things we were hearing, and what we are doing about them.

Fear not?

I'm more afraid after reading your post than before This is the same as previous comments from weeks ago, nothing new at all. Most of this are minor problems (like gathering, is just a matter of new nodes not ready). Of those, real problem is jawa junk cost, and you even said you are not considering changing that. But the problem here is not the increase of cost for grade 1 to 10; considereing we get a lot more junk that is fine. The problem is grade 11 cost.

Now, what you seem to be missing entirely is that the new system is just not viable. Every green gear mat requirement is just too high, rare blue and purples? That is just insane. Its the same as if in live crafting a green 210 required several isotopes and 20 CMTs!!!!!

How come you are ignoring this?

You keep saying more mats more junk; STOP THE INFLATION, just LOWER COST. Have you seen the steps and mats requirements to craft even single biochem consumables? There are very detailed post on that, it clearly shows that no matter how much more we get from gathering or shorter mission times ar: its just a BAD system.

Please Eric, take a loot at this:

https://www.swtor.com/community/showpost.php?p=9760343&postcount=59

And not to be an smarta**, but you all need to read a basic economy book before trying to change currency balance. Lots of things in 6.0 is trying to address the credit inflation by puting several artificial credit sinks. All this big numbers in mats and alternative currencies go in the opposite direction and will make everything worst. If you have an inflation problem the worst thing you can do is print more money. Unlike real economies or already implemented systems, 6.0 is not operative yet; so you can address problem in its root issues: Costs and complexity. If you publish this and then start patching it won't be the same and you may never catch up with the mess it will make.

Eric, we both have been around for the same amount of time in this game.

You should remember that once there was no crafting planned for this game.

Me and a lot of others made that happen, and now you are about to ruin it yet again.......

In the past you reduced the amount of mats per tier due they being to MANY, and now you plan to add even more ??

For what ever reason?,

The old Dev team did ruin crafting to the point that doing nothing but a extremely few items was even worth making.

Now you increase the amount of mats needed, with the poor excuse that we gain more, it's the SAME thing.....

This what you are doing are NOT play it your way, it's play it OUR way yet again.

I can only speak for my self, I've been on forums since mid 2009 in an attempt to get among other things crafting when we where told it was not planned back then.

I've been playing since Beta, and I'm still here.

But you will only accept so many mistakes before enough is enough.

Not that one more or less matters in the end.

But should you mess this up or not you, the ones that work on crafting, there will be one less around.

I've tried over the years to accept what's been going on an work with it.

I worked hard on the old forums to have crafting added in the first place.

Now, at times it feels like that was a huge mistake on my part.

Revise what you are doing again, make sure crafting is useful in 6.0.

or do us all a favor and kill it, end the pain.

When something ain't fun anymore and a chore with no reason in the end, that's the end.

With the history of the PTS versions for 6.0 so far and yes I've tried them, you utterly missed the ball park.

Oddly, one would have thought the others did learn something, al tho you have some but it's FAR FAR from good.

For me personally I will give you ONE last chance to get the act together.

Do or Do not, there is NO try!

Has anyone from BioWare actually tried crafting *anything* with the system on the PTS? Because it seems like 5 minutes of just looking at the numbers should tell you that the system is completely broken, and will remain broken even with these changes.

First off, the cost to craft the basic green components/cell grafts/etc. are way too high, and need to be reverted to the 2/2/2 cost of every other tier. You can't just increase the cost of the most fundamental crafting item by FIVE TIMES and expect everything else to be fine. When you need three of the premium components to craft a prototype, and three prototypes to craft an artifact, that means you need 90 of each green mat to craft a single artifact component. That is just way, way too high.

Second, the number of rare materials required for everything is also completely impractical. The numbers for artifact and legendary schematics need to come down. More importantly, the correct number of flashpoint, Ops, or Conquest materials needed to craft Premium and Prototype gear is ZERO. Any other number is wrong, and will completely break crafting.

Third, the Reverse Engineering chance needs to be completely re-evaluated. Right now, Prototype Gear is vastly more difficult to make than for any prior tier, but the lower RE chance means you will go through way more Prototype items trying to learn the Artifact schematics. End result is the cost of learning a schematic is going to be astronomical. I'm talking orders of magnitude higher than the cost of learning schematics for Grade 10.

The combination of these issues isn't just going to make crafting inconvenient, it will be completely broken. Nobody is going to bother crafting when the time and credits required to gather enough materials to craft even basic items makes their cost so extraordinarily high that nobody will being to pay for them.

Seriously, we're going to be looking at millions of credits for a stack of artifact Stims, where a similar stack of their Grade 10 counterparts would be <100,000. Considering the hilariously marginal stat improvement, nobody is going to buy the Grade 11s, and nobody is going to waste their time crafting them.

It feels very much like BW is trying to 'adjust' crafting to compensate for players sitting on huge quantities of materials, but the only thing that's going to do is punish every single 'normal' player out there.

Or, like others in this and other threads have posted, no-one at BW has actually bothered to 'organically' craft something in PTS.

Crafting better not be BW's idea of how to keep players logging in, because right now the threshold, based purely in the number and types of items needed to be gathered, and the cycles of crafting, is completely unmanageable, and nodes dropping greater quantities is not going to fix this.

I tend to craft things I need for my main & alts - biochem, augments. In 5.x this has been a manageable process, i.e. i can expect to gather and craft in a reasonable amount of time for the item I'm crafting. I can't say how much time that is because I do have materials stashed, but basically I can gather and craft BiS augs in a day or two max per, and I can gather and craft disposable biochem stims and adrenals in less than a day. I don't have mk-II schematics, so no idea how long that would take, I just buy those off others, you can see how dedicated I am to crafting lol.

Eric, again it seems the team is missing the point of all the feedback that has been given.

Keep the same systems and costs in place that are currenly on live, just add the new grade 11 mats. Not 3 versions of each type of grade 11 mat, and not the ridiculous amounts of conquest and ops mats that are needed for basic, entry level gear. Those types of mats should only be required when you get to the highest versions of the craftable items.

It is currently an insult to players that 20 of the new conquest reward mat are needed to craft a single basic level augment. Since no one has even been able to craft or RE one yet on the PTS (with the nice change in lowering the % chance of learning the next tier of an item), how many conquest mats are needed for the legendary (gold) version of the new augments? Somewhere around 60+ is my guess, for a single item, that players need 14 of to set their gear up.

The EA license for Star Wars will expire before an average player is able to grind out even a fraction of the mats needed to fully augment 1 character.

I start wondering why we bother to test or provide feed back when it seems we are ignored or you plan to go ahead no matter what we say.

I’m not alone in feeling like this whole pts experience is a waste because the feed back is largely ignored or seen as wrong by you guys.

People have spent time to test and listed very detailed and thought out feed back and suggestions and not much of anything has changed on your end.

There is more that needs fixing than just tweaking the system because the system is fundamentally flawed or broken as it’s currently set out.

You should not be trying to use crafting as another multifaceted time and credit sink, all it is going to do is destroy it,

I start wondering why we bother to test or provide feed back when it seems we are ignored or you plan to go ahead no matter what we say.

I’m not alone in feeling like this whole pts experience is a waste because the feed back is largely ignored or seen as wrong by you guys.

People have spent time to test and listed very detailed and thought out feed back and suggestions and not much of anything has changed on your end.

There is more that needs fixing than just tweaking the system because the system is fundamentally flawed or broken as it’s currently set out.

You should not be trying to use crafting as another multifaceted time and credit sink, all it is going to do is destroy it

Agreed (on the "why bother testing"). Adjusting the nodes and crew missions is insignificant. Are there any real meaningful changes in the works? That would be useful to know Eric.

I think, at least for me, the first thing I need answered is this question...

Will I need 20 purple mats that I can ONLY get from completing conquest on my characters to craft a GREEN 270 item?

Will I ALSO need 20 purple mats that I can ONLY get from MM Flashpoints and the various levels of operations to craft that same GREEN 270 item.

If these requirements are just "placeholders" for PTS so we can't see what they'll REALLY cost on live, in an effort to prevent people from saving up....well...let us know that.

I think that's dumb...but it isn't impossible.

if you're REALLY going to keep those 40 rare mats in the mix for GREEN 270 items....

Crafting is dead with 6.0

If these requirements are just "placeholders" for PTS so we can't see what they'll REALLY cost on live, in an effort to prevent people from saving up....well...let us know that.

 

I think that's dumb...but it isn't impossible.

Considering all the feedback, It would be dumb not telling us before if it is a placeholder.

But just reading Eric response we can see they are completely delusional about this crafting system. Thinking the problem is gathering nodes and mission time is dumb; or at least is dumb thinking we can find that a proper answer. We all have given a lot of feedback (some people have been very detailed) and the core issues has been completely ignored.

I was hopefull because it apeared like they wer listening to the feedback with some changes, but after last patch and this topic all just feels again like a smokescreen. I'm really getting tired of how the real issues are being ignored or statements like "unlike before we are giving so much info that you are just confused but this is better". At this point it would not surprise me, that would be the cosest explanation we will get for this crafting system.

Eric, grade 11 synthweaving bonded attachments are still taking 1 hour each unmodified, or 15 minutes each with a level 50 companion.

First off, the cost to craft the basic green components/cell grafts/etc. are way too high, and need to be reverted to the 2/2/2 cost of every other tier. You can't just increase the cost of the most fundamental crafting item by FIVE TIMES and expect everything else to be fine. When you need three of the premium components to craft a prototype, and three prototypes to craft an artifact, that means you need 90 of each green mat to craft a single artifact component. That is just way, way too high.

 

Second, the number of rare materials required for everything is also completely impractical. The numbers for artifact and legendary schematics need to come down. More importantly, the correct number of flashpoint, Ops, or Conquest materials needed to craft Premium and Prototype gear is ZERO. Any other number is wrong, and will completely break crafting.

 

Third, the Reverse Engineering chance needs to be completely re-evaluated. Right now, Prototype Gear is vastly more difficult to make than for any prior tier, but the lower RE chance means you will go through way more Prototype items trying to learn the Artifact schematics. End result is the cost of learning a schematic is going to be astronomical. I'm talking orders of magnitude higher than the cost of learning schematics for Grade 10.

 

The combination of these issues isn't just going to make crafting inconvenient, it will be completely broken.

Couldn't agree more. The costs for grade 11 crafting are absurdly high. I'm sure BW don't want to put work into a system only to break it. But, as it stands, BW's target audience with these changes seems to be people who enjoy suffering, and no one else.

I know this was a post about things forthcoming and still subject to change, and I hate to come out swinging when things are still in progress, especially given the effort being made to solicit our feedback... but given that we also only have a month until 6.0 drops, I don't think a responsible feedback-giver can adopt a wait-and-see approach.

I think it's really important that the message be carried very clearly back to the team handling crafting that increasing the amount of mats that drop from gathering or missions is not going to be sufficient to fix this system.

As myself and others pointed out, if you look at only the green mats that drop from a node (setting aside the newly added blues and purples), the amount dropping is pretty much comparable to what drops now. It's vital that you NOT consider your blues and purples in this calculation because your BASE COMPONENT, the thing which you must craft mass quantities of before you can do anything else, is used making green mats. That base component cost was, as we've pointed out ad nauseum, increased by FIVE TIMES over any other grade prior to it. So unless you are going to increase the drop rate on GREEN mats from nodes also by FIVE TIMES, then this change does absolutely nothing to address the core issue.

Further, even if you were to increase the drop rate from nodes by five times, you would still be operating at a deficit overall, because there will be ONE planet where we can get the mats, and every single crafter in the game will be competing for them. (And you thought the problem with bots was bad NOW? Oh my gosh, just wait.) So it won't really matter what you do to tweak nodes on Onderon for bigger yields, because functionally, in this thing called reality, your actual human being players attempting to use this system under the constraints of limited servers, limited instances, and limited hours in the rotation of the planet Earth, will all be competing in a limited area against every other crafter out there for a resource they now need exponentially larger quantities of than they've ever needed before.

In the previous crafting thread, many people went to great lengths to detail the absolutely insane number of materials that are required to craft absolutely anything in 6.0. We cannot know what your intention is with this change, but unless your intention is to dramatically limit the role of crafting in the game, you need to please please please heed the common thread of what all of us are saying:

The only way to fix this is to lower the materials COST. There is nothing within reason you can do to increase the amount of mats we get that is going to actually achieve any sort of parity with the costs as you've currently designed them.

I know that gamers are perhaps the most hyperbole-prone demographic of humanity in existence. I know that to survive as a game developer you have to learn to pick the one speck of gold out of the mountain of crap that gamers throw out there and take everything with a grain of very jaded salt.

But in this, as with the problems observed with something like the Strongholds decorating system, as players observing the completely incomprehensible design choices being made the only conclusion we can draw is that whoever is designing the changes has never actually tried to USE THE SYSTEM. Theory-crafting toward an intended "big picture" result, in absence of actually using the system, is very dangerous.

If the team has actually read the posts people took the time to write in the previous crafting feedback thread, then it completely boggles the mind that most of the system is being left unchanged. If they have not read the posts, if someone is only trying to summarize ideas for them (Eric, I do not envy you your job, this isn't bashing you, but it's important to call out), I really strongly recommend that you ask them to set aside two hours one day to have THEM read the posts, because the math your players went to great lengths to map out for you tells the story very clearly, and maybe it takes a well-intentioned dev actually seeing that math with their own eyeballs.

Materials cost is the foundation of where everything is going wrong - that starts with the five times quantity requirement for your base component, and continues right on into the absolute absurdity of blue and purple mats of any kind (let alone Conquest) being tied to the creation of GREEN items.

Reverse-engineering chances are an issue and others have done fantastic math on those, but I would hazard a guess that if the issue of materials cost was addressed that most of us would be less alarmed about RE. If you want to make the most difficult of end game crafted items much harder to achieve by forcing us to invest more into RE, that actually makes sense (we may not like it, but it makes sense). What makes no sense is compounding that by an insane order of magnitude by underpinning that gamble risk with an enormous increase in materials cost. By doing so you have elevated it from "difficult" to "prohibitive".

The fact that Jawa Junk Prices is being called out as a key issue also troubles me, because it makes me wonder if anyone has carefully read all the feedback we provided. Although Jawa Junk prices were often mentioned, almost universally they were mentioned in the context of "and if this is going to be what you're requiring for base materials cost, then Jawa Junk prices are too high." Jawa Junk prices in isolation are NOT the issue. What we have been trying to point out is that as a supplementary system to fill in the gaps in a pinch, the prices are residing in a different GALAXY entirely in light of how many mats are currently required.

Forget the Jawa Junk. Forget worrying about finding the magic number of mats that need to drop from nodes. Forget trying to excruciatingly fine tune the number of mats that a failed or succeeded mission should give you. All of that is looking at the symptoms and not the cause. If you were to reduce the ridiculous baseline mats quantity requirements for all crafting, and remove the requirements for blue and purple mats from any green item, then you wouldn't really need to worry about a lot of the rest of it.

Oh, and P.S., don't make Grade 11 components required in the cost of war supplies. We did the math on that too. Spoiler alert: it completely breaks things.

But in this, as with the problems observed with something like the Strongholds decorating system, as players observing the completely incomprehensible design choices being made the only conclusion we can draw is that whoever is designing the changes has never actually tried to USE THE SYSTEM. Theory-crafting toward an intended "big picture" result, in absence of actually using the system, is very dangerous.

 

If the team has actually read the posts people took the time to write in the previous crafting feedback thread, then it completely boggles the mind that most of the system is being left unchanged. If they have not read the posts, if someone is only trying to summarize ideas for them (Eric, I do not envy you your job, this isn't bashing you, but it's important to call out), I really strongly recommend that you ask them to set aside two hours one day to have THEM read the posts, because the math your players went to great lengths to map out for you tells the story very clearly, and maybe it takes a well-intentioned dev actually seeing that math with their own eyeballs.

This is my exact sentiment too. Whoever is designing the game simply has no idea what would make the game better or worse because they don't play it.

They also seem to not read their own forums for their own game for feedback... And if not shouldn't someone be reading through the feedback threads etc. and relaying that information to the devs or brain trust that makes the decisions for game design choices? This would mean a failure to communicate situation exists on many levels.

Crafting is not worth doing and I did about an hour of farming for mats in Onderon and the amount of nodes were few and far between. Strange that in the hunting lodge I kept tripping over them, but I realized that was just the scavenging and slicng nodes mixed together. Out on the rest of the map it was okay. no where near how it is on Daravanis but it needs to be. With the extreme amounts of mats that are needed and everyone and their brother going to go after them people will be fighting over nodes.

There are just not enough nodes on the map. I stopped farming mats when you moved the level 10 mats to Iokath as it was not worth the time. Roughly one hour got me about 75 crystals per color and various other mats. Not that I can tell since it does not post in chat what I looted.

Please make the rank 11 mats and the schematic requirements match all the other ranks. Crafting takes long enough as it is and no green should ever, ever, ever, include a rare purple in its construction. Leave this in and many will just stop crafting making the situation even worse as most things you can craft are not worth the time or the mats to craft for so little gain.

Please fix this nightmare and listen to the ones who took the time to see how horrible it truly is.

I'm starting to wonder if the Devs intention is to keep us at Grade 10 Augs, Stims, healthpacs, ect. Cause no one other then high member guilds will be able to make the Grade 11 stuff. I can guarantee you that if someone is able to make something grade 11, it will be sold on the GTN for hundreds of millions credits, no less. The only people who could afford them are gold farmers who are moving their money around.

I have a few dozen grade 10 stims in production, the extra bonus of the grade 11 stims is insignificant compared to the grade 10 one.

I think, at least for me, the first thing I need answered is this question...

 

Will I need 20 purple mats that I can ONLY get from completing conquest on my characters to craft a GREEN 270 item?

Will I ALSO need 20 purple mats that I can ONLY get from MM Flashpoints and the various levels of operations to craft that same GREEN 270 item.

 

If these requirements are just "placeholders" for PTS so we can't see what they'll REALLY cost on live, in an effort to prevent people from saving up....well...let us know that.

 

I think that's dumb...but it isn't impossible.

 

if you're REALLY going to keep those 40 rare mats in the mix for GREEN 270 items....

 

Crafting is dead with 6.0

That sums it up nicely. You will drive some players away. I don't know how many or even it really matters to you. It seems like your going out of your way to get rid of people. There is some good QOL but not worth dealing with the rest of what you might implement. It is PTS so it isn't the final product but I've seen what has happened in the past. It is your game so it is up to you.

This is my exact sentiment too. Whoever is designing the game simply has no idea what would make the game better or worse because they don't play it.

 

They also seem to not read their own forums for their own game for feedback... And if not shouldn't someone be reading through the feedback threads etc. and relaying that information to the devs or brain trust that makes the decisions for game design choices? This would mean a failure to communicate situation exists on many levels.

Sorry to disagree !

They KNOW what they are doing and why !

To me personally that is why none of this makes any sense. The following is probably useless information (to most) but I will try to explain something.

Over the last 45 - 50 years I've seen several companies do similar things.

1. A state of the art circuit board mfg. facility with "world class" production consistently running at 95% + efficiency sold off by their larger (newly acquired) corporate leader .. certain items of production gutted / sold off .. and within 1 years time the new owners were in bankruptcy. The company before being sold cleared over 1.5 mil per month in production. The building was empty for the longest time... finally sold off and remodeled for an entirely different type of business. It's not even a manufacturing facility any more.

2. Another production / retail store: took 20 years to get to where they were able to compete. They finally began to grow. Then the company promptly got rid of those who were doing the work. Two years later every major account was gone. Today they struggle to make pay role. Oddly enough at one time they had some of the best products in the business. Their greed also extended into the production area. They cut corners and began to purchase their raw materials from some 3rd world whole sale outfit and their products frankly were no longer close to what they use to be. WHY? They had everything in their hands … !! Something drove them to make poor choices.

3. Three video games that I've been directly involved with. Two of them MUCH closer than this one. One of them BEFORE beta testing !

Players begged for the companies to listen .. The communities in all three were ignored. All three games died ! All three had some of the most interesting opportunities I've seen. It was really sad to see so much potential to be squandered ! It should be noted that no player expects a development team to do things EXACTLY the way we would do it ! I think most of us GET THAT !

NO !! do not make this game easy for me personally to play. Good grief I'm not that stupid !

HOWEVER... there are several people on this forum that are pretty much right on target.

Good grief... most of us just want to be able to enjoy this game and watch it GROW !! Stagnating is not an option !

Getting into a rut will not help. It's been said that a rut is nothing more than a grave with both ends kicked out !!

Who did we as a community piss off ?? Seriously !! It's as though as a company someone is trying to make a point to the rest of us.

It's YOUR game BW.. We get that !

What I don't get is : What in the name of common sense is going on ???

* Companions: essentially dead

* Getting gear .. (read the forums... loaded with GOOD threads from several players with SPECIFIC information)

* Crafting .. this thread explains it quite well

If there is a better system coming .. or will be release in 6.0 please tell us ! Most of us WANT things to work.

This is not a threat or a warning !! This is a PLEA !!

Is what we are asking for so contrary to where the development teams wants to take the game so diametrically different that the current state or condition is the only thing that will remain ?

Probably my last post on most of this ! My apologies if this is offensive ! I just had to make one last plea !

Since Ossus I'm not sure what the devs' goal has been with crafting. The Ossus recipes were ridiculous with the amount of mats and the rare mats required, and the end result was that I looked at the recipes, laughed heartily, and never even bothered. I was really hoping that 6.0 would reintroduce more reasonable crafting, but this is more of the same.

As others have said, these "changes" do not address the root issues. It's all nice and good to make more nodes on Onderon, but it doesn't mean anything when every crafter will be fighting for them, and when the recipes still require way too many mats, including ones from Conquest. Crafting should be fun. This is not fun.

So what is the goal? I feel the same as I did with Ossus; I'm not even going to bother trying to craft anything new. The recipes for the level 10/GEMINI-era gear are reasonable. These are not.

Colour crystals are not being transferred into the material tab and you can’t add them.

I’m assuming this is a bug?

One of the things we have seen a lot of questions and feedback on is crafting. Fear not as you (crafters) have not been forgotten and there are changes coming. Here are the things we were hearing, and what we are doing about them.

These changes are not enough, so I'm going to spend 4 hours typing up an itemized list of suggestions to improve Grade 11 crafting after having spent 50+ hours on the PTS just playing with crafting. Devs please, PLEASE take these suggestions into serious consideration.

The aim of my suggestions are three-fold:

1. To relieve some of the pressure from crafters (i.e., reduce complaining from when the changes go to live and to prevent people leaving the game over it),
   
2. to fix some problems with the implementation and make it more internally consistent, while
   
3. still making it harder and more expensive to do than in previous grades (which the devs seem to want).
   

First off: the burden of game inflation should NOT be lumped solely on the shoulders of the crafters. This is completely unfair, and a lot of people will be upset enough to leave if some of this stuff isn't addressed. And if they don't leave, we will have to deal with endless whining on the forums until the devs do, grudgingly, change it anyway. And then we'll end up in a "we told you so" situation regardless, which no one really wants.

Things what MUST be fixed:

• Reduce companion mission times to be linearly in-line with the other grades
  
• Fix the Synthweaving grade 11 Assembly Component crafting time to be the same as the other grade 11 AC times (~3m for lvl 50 companions)
  
• Reduce all crafting disciplines to have 1 craftable green, 1 blue, and 1 purple Assembly Component
  
• Remove slicing and other unrelated gathering discipline material requirements from Assembly Component crafting
  
• Crafting disciplines that make augments: augments should be crafted using appropriate ACs + x slicing mats, as they always have (do not require slicing mats IN the AC)
  
• Augment kit mat requirements need to fall back in line with other grades from previous expacs. Given the 19 tiers of gear we have to grind through, it's unreasonable to gate augments so hard.
  
• Change the mats required to craft Assembly Components to, at a minimum, the following:
  
• - Green AC = 12 green, 12 green, 12 white standard mats (recombinators/fluxes)
  
• - Blue AC = 6 blue, 6 blue, 6 green standard mats (recombinators/fluxes) + 2 green ACs
  
• - Purp AC = 3 purp, 3 purp, 3 blue standard mats (recombinators/fluxes) + 1 blue AC
  
• Change the recipe for Dark Projects to NOT include purple Iokath Recombinators anymore
  
• Change all conquest crafting grades of mats as follows: (Type A -- grade 3, 5, 7, 9, 10) and (Type B -- grade 4, 6, 8, 9, 10)
  
• At a minimum, add RNG Protection to Reverse Engineering (20% requires max 5 REs, 10% requires max 10 REs, 5% requires max 20 REs, you get the idea)
  
• Jawa Junks should go into the materials inventory
  
• Jawa Junk prices for grade 11 should be reduced (by half at least, IMO)
  
• Green quality items (earpieces/implants/etc) should have AT BEST green quality mat requirements and no higher; change all recipes to reflect this
  
• Blue quality items (earpieces/implants/etc) should have AT BEST blue quality mat requirements and no higher; change all recipes to reflect this
  
• Purple quality items (earpieces/implants/etc) should have AT BEST purple quality mat requirements and no higher; change all recipes to reflect this
  
• Legendary quality items (earpieces/implants/etc) should have AT BEST legendary quality mat requirements and no higher; change all recipes to reflect this
  
• If (ear/implant/etc) crafting needs to be gated, make acquiring the special mat (of appropriate quality) be like acquiring the old magenta crystal components (grinding tat->hoth->ilum)
  
• ALLLL gathering missions should return green mats, with a chance of blue and purple mats too that scales with tier of mission (wealthy > rich > bountiful > abundant > moderate)
  
• Deconstructing ANYTHING of level 75 or at grade 11 should 100% of the time produce MK components to craft aug kits even if not on a toon having that crafting discipline
  

Things what SHOULD be fixed:

• Preferred changes to crafting Assembly Components:
  
• - Green AC = 2 green, 2 green, 2 white recombinators
  
• - Blue AC = 2 blue, 2 blue, 2 green recombinators + 1 green AC
  
• - Purp AC = 2 purp, 2 purp, 2 blue recombinators + 1 blue AC
  
• Reverse Engineering: increase ALL chances to learn all quality of recipes back to 60%
  
• Increase gathering node density on Onderon to be similar to that of Yavin 4
  
• Jawa Junks should stack in single stacks up to 999,999
  
• Jawa Junk prices should be changed to 50 per unit. This needs to be a viable supplementary system but is currently waaaaaaaay too expensive.
  
• Add the purple grade 11 conquest mat and blue grade 11 isotopes to the Jawa vendors at a higher rate than the base green/blue/purp grade 11 mats
  
• All types (w,r,b,a,m) of gathering missions for grade 11 should yield more mats than previous grades due to the more complex and more numerous mat requirements for crafting at grade 11
  
• Please fix the old gear that is non-deconstructable to be deconstructable. I got some drops in Hammer Station VM that couldn't be deconstructed.
  
• 12 companions should now be deployable. Given the zillion comps we acquired from KotFE/KotET and insane mat requirements for grade 11, this needs to be increased significantly
  
• Number of available-to-run grade 11 missions of each type (r/b/a/m & supplementary) should be doubled
  
• Specs for the Adrenals and Stims need to be boosted a little bit. These are barely better than grade 10. If they're gonna be so hard/expensive to craft, at least make the stat gain way better.
  
• Add grade 10 and grade 11 grenades to Cybertech
  

Let's talk about the Jawa Junks.

The devs have dug-in so far about the cost of grade 11 mats on the Jawa vendors. This is worrisome, since everyone dealing with crafting on the PTS has specifically called this out as a problem. I have spent somewhere in the range of 50-100 billion credits on the PTS to learn all purple pharmaceuticals and 2 legendary pharmaceuticals plus crafting some stacks of purple pharmaceuticals for my guild to run Dxun, using the RE->Jawa Junks system to short-circuit the absurd mission times. Given the high number of mats I was able to buy for such an exorbitant price from the Jawa vendors, it is sad that I was only able to make so little. And this with infinite money; imagine having to do this by running missions and farming nodes and REing garbage drops on toons with the appropriate crafting discipline (which will yield far less for way more time/effort). This is a painful punishment levied onto crafters for no reason that I can see other than it's easy and convenient to do so. Crafting has only rarely been allowed to produce viable end-game BiS gear (e.g., the 240 augs), so why punish crafters in this way when they're still gonna be crafting less-than-ideal items anyway?

Some crafting philosophies that must be adhered to going into the future:

• Cost and time for missions should scale linearly with previous grades
  
• Assembly Components should be cheap and easy to make (in terms of mat requirements)
  
• Assembly Components should be restricted to 1 green type of AC per crafting discipline and possibly 1 special blue one used to make end-game items
  
• If Assembly Components must have common green/blue/purple quality versions, limit it to 1 type of each using ONLY mats acquired from the associated gathering disciplines
  
• Green gathering mats should be very easy to come by in large numbers (with blue less, purple even less, and legendary requiring special missions and tasks and such)
  
• Craftable gear and components should not have a mat requirement of higher quality (green/blue/purp/legendary) than the quality of the item you're crafting
  
• Flux (and the like) missions should always be the shortest and cheapest mission, and should produce more mats than any other but the wealthy missions
  
• Reverse Engineering should be a straight-forward and relatively easy way to learn recipes - forcing people to waste tons of mats and credits and and time trying to RE something is going to cause people to complain endlessly again (as they should). IF you must gate the production of higher quality items, gate it with mat requirements to craft the item they just learned.
  
• Learning recipes via schematic drops in content is also a totally fine way of gaining recipes. Let these be unbound so they can be sold on the GTN for profit.
  
• Biochem in particular should not have onerous crafting requirements for the drugz because raid teams go through drugs quickly - I have crafted all of the drugs for my PvP guild and its progression raid team since 4.0 and I won't be able to do that anymore in 6.0 if the cost/time/effort of doing so isn't reduced significantly (this is just too expensive for me and I have in excess of 1 billion credits in my primary server legacy in live now)
  

Devs, please do not nickel-and-dime us with crafting changes. Make an across-the-board set of real changes to crafting, and put it up on the PTS for us to test. Add vendors on the PTS that sell the blue isotopes and purple conquest mats, and other rare mats (maybe the Legendary Ember), so we can actually test the progression of learning the higher level recipes finally.

I have spent a lot of time on the PTS playing with this stuff. Please do not trivialize the time and effort I and others have spent testing this for you for free. My biggest concern is with the game dying rather than my own in-game finances or other factors. Please read my post. Please address these problems. I don't want people to riot and leave in a rage; I want people to stick around in this game long into the future. Seriously consider everything here. Please.

I think, at least for me, the first thing I need answered is this question...

 

Will I need 20 purple mats that I can ONLY get from completing conquest on my characters to craft a GREEN 270 item?

Will I ALSO need 20 purple mats that I can ONLY get from MM Flashpoints and the various levels of operations to craft that same GREEN 270 item.

 

If these requirements are just "placeholders" for PTS so we can't see what they'll REALLY cost on live, in an effort to prevent people from saving up....well...let us know that.

 

I think that's dumb...but it isn't impossible.

 

if you're REALLY going to keep those 40 rare mats in the mix for GREEN 270 items....

 

Crafting is dead with 6.0

This post needs bumping! Forget about node 'tuning' i would love to know the answer to the above questions as well - this seems to keep coming up and up and yet with all the updates has yet to be addressed...