Why don't they fix the other crew skills first?

The nail that sticks up gets hammered down, huh

So, let me see if I understand.

 

The goal here is to make Biochem/Cybertech less desirable (or in some cases, mandatory, depending on the "leetness" of your group leader).

 

In order to do this, the highest level crafted consumables (and/or reusable consumables) have been lowered in effectiveness. However, they are still the highest level crafted consumables available, efficiency nerf or no.

 

And now you also have to have the highest level available in their respective skill trade to use them at all.

 

I fail to see how this makes either skill LESS appealing. If anything, I would expect MORE people would now find it beneficial to have these skills themselves since they cannot buy the items for use if they do not have the corresponding max level crew skill.

 

Maybe I'm missing something

I also think that the changes are illogical. A solid first step to not make biochem a requirement, would be to allow trading of the stims.. Not making the BoP or require Biochem to use.. which is in my opinion is as much a requirement to have biochem as it can possibly be.

Yet again should pvp destroy a game.. Make sense we who are BIOCHEM will get longer cooldown on our stims then others... We gonna get punish for our professions???? it's normal that when you have a profession you have some advantage, if you feel they heal to much reduce heal then if you MUST! but don't mess with the cooldown, this way our healing stims will be useless, and we need use normal stims like others since they will be "OP" now..

And i remeber you guys talking before launch of the game that you would focus most on pve, now with this change you are planing you're destroying the pots for PVE... Ask yourself if you was playing the game (not sure you do) and you had choice use your own healing stims that had increased cooldown timer but heal small amount more.. OR use normal stims that still had 90 sec cooldown and heal almost the same, would you really use your own? i think not...

Frankly i'm VERY surprised you are really planing on doing this... I really hope you will not turn out and do ALL needy and whiny people tell you too, if you do, this mmo is over for me.

Peace..

Getting silly, really.

I went Cyber and Biochem on my main and alt simply because none of the others were worthwhile.

Until Bioware addresses the inherent flaws in other crafting skills, not Biochem, everyone will still go Biochem.

Agree with everyone that the issue is much bigger than BioChem. The problem is NOT that it is "must have" end game, but rather that there aren't any other "must haves" to compete with.

All professions should give an edge in some way. The trick more, I would think, is to make it so that at least two professions would give an edge end game to each potential role in the game (tank, heal, dps, pvp) and only one can be had, so a decision must be made by the player as to what better suits playstyle. All professions should offer something unique or something higher quality than what the game offers through vendors as well.

Lately it seems very popular for MMOs to say "crafting shouldn't be required" and frankly I think this is where the problem lies. Why even bother putting the feature in the game if it isn't needed to fully experience the game? I don't want a crafting system with few benefits, a clunky, frustrating auction house, and a dead economy. I want a satisfying crafting system that drives me to use it because I can make money and have something to show for the time I've put into it.

I think all of this "you don't need to craft" is games trying to have their cake and eat it too. Stop catering to the people who don't want to enjoy this part of the game and cater to those that do!! Everything doesn't have to be "fair" and the game should give advantages to people who explore all facets of it.

Bioware is at least listening -- however, crafting has a long way to evolve.

I'll be eager to see how the crafting changes a few months from now when I consider a resub.

Bioware is at least listening -- however, crafting has a long way to evolve.

 

I'll be eager to see how the crafting changes a few months from now when I consider a resub.

Bioware never listened during beta, they aren't listening now.

Server forums are an excellent example of this.

As some of you may have already noticed from our patch notes for Game Update 1.1, we’ve made adjustments to several high-end, purple, player crafted items on the BioChem and Cybertech professions. Simply put, we reduced their overall impact on gameplay and I wanted to explain why it was necessary.

It was never that Biochem was too good.

It's that the other professions are pointless.

So long as I get to keep my reusable stims/adrenals, no nerf is overboard.

 

To the people saying Biochem isn't OP because you can buy non-bop adrenals and stims... well yeah, you can, but who would waste stims and adrenals in PvP or on PvE trash? Having reusable stims/adrenals effectively improves your performance by a wide margin, even if they aren't limited to Biochem when considering non-reusables, because of the expense of using non-reusable stims/adrenals.

 

If anyone regularly uses non-bop adrenals in PvP besides the expertise adrenals, feel free to call me out on my claim.

I use them constantly. My character's self buffs and heals were on each toolbar.

I sent extra stims to guildmates and my other character, so all, I would say four different characters use these stims. In both PVP and PVE.

I fear that this casual attitude towards changing crafting is a really bad sign of things to come. The gimping of the handful of benefits offered by the two useful crafting skills just about puts the last nail in the coffin of effective crafting.

I really wish that instead of worrying about the unnecessary "fixes" made to crafting in the last few patches, maybe some of the serious bugs and flaws would get some attention.

Currently there are several Armormech, Armstech, Synthweaving and Artifice recipes that can be found in end game content. We will be adding more in future updates.

If by "end game content" you mean group gated end game content, then count me against. I have no evidence either way, but it probably is since "that's how WoW does it" and Bioware too often insists on emulating the bad from WoW.

Furthermore, even if the recipes are available via solo end game (Bioware did add that as promised, right?), but are BoP, then count me against again. If I get a recipe to drop, but it isn't for the crew skill that my current character has, I should be able to pass it to an alt, family member, guild member, someone who can get use out of it.

I don't agree with BoP for anything crafting (see exception below). End items, materials, recipes, nothing should be BoP. I don't know of anyone, manufacturer or craftsman, who makes anything in this world, but they alone are able to utilize it. BoP != rewarding. BoP recipes and materials are extremely frustrating to me as a crafter. BoP recipes and materials gated by group content are especially egregious.

Now, to be constructive, I have to propose solutions and I am here to do just that so read on Bioware. The way I'd address the current "BoP items make crafting rewarding" view is if those BoP items were the same as normal BoE items but were crafted using drastically reduced materials costs.

For example, take those BoP speeders that Slicers make. That's a lot of mats! Keep those mats as is (removing any BoP mats of course), change the speeders to BoE, but add an option to recipes that severely cuts the mats at the expense of making it BoP. Then Slicers can craft themselves that nice speeder for very little cost. This makes crafting "rewarding" while allowing crafters the ability to trade (or give away) ALL their wares to other players, not just the next to useless items.

Imagine, as an Artifice I can craft you a nice lightsaber using up all these materials, but I can craft one for myself for next to no mats. I can craft you color crystals, hilts, and enhancements, but I can craft the same things for myself for half (or less) the mats. Note that this change would require that these special "BoP" crafted items couldn't be reverse engineered thus keeping the material usage for crew skill leveling as currently intended.

Bioware, try knocking that idea around a bit or use it as a starting point. Try to come up with something different than what some other game did. I'd like to see the system improved. I will monitor posts and patch notes in the coming months in the hope that improvements (including removal of the current, in my opinion flawed, BoP restrictions) are imminent.

Crafting armor is currently entirely pointless except as a means to work really hard and be able to better outfit one, maybe two, of your companions, and possibly help yourself have a slight edge while leveling.

But only if you burn a lot of time, mats and money; in the end, you pay way more for crafting your own armor than if you just ate the occasional repair bill and comparatively brief running-back time to die one or two more times at worst.

Armstech and artifice? Again, same deal; mere supplements to commendation vendors that allow for more customization of your secondary stats than comm vendors do while leveling.

Unfortunately, once you hit 50, do your Belsavis and Ilum dailies for a week and you can get enhancements, mods, hilts and barrels that are better than anything you can craft -unless you get special raid schematics-, or yoink mods out of PVP gear.

So, raid or die. Funny thing is though, if you're raiding regularly enough to have a real shot at schematics useful to you, there's a really good chance you have no cause what-so-ever to care. If you could turn around and craft those better things and sell them at huge prices to the folks that can't or won't raid, it might almost be worthwhile for that alone, but, typically, BOP's the thing. I'll just say that I have by no means seen all the schematics that might drop, but those I have seen have near-exclusively been for BOP stuff.

if I'm wrong on that, funny, that should have made itself even theoretically apparent by now. The fact that it hasn't says a few things itself; they're not good or happy things.

Cybertech? Earpieces are nice, but you're just over a week of dailies away at level 50 from having raid-grade earpieces from daily commendations. Mods, armor mods, droid gear and ship parts?

...Does anyone even care about the ship parts? They're nice additions, but do they add meaningful value to the skill? What're you gonna do at 50 with your ship; farm fleet commendations for the better part of a month to get a level 50 purple box off the fleet commendation vendor?

Hell of an investment in a lottery ticket for a chance at a gear drop that A) probably won't be useful to you and B) is irrelevant compared to PVP gear, which takes a fraction of the time to get by comparison.

Biochem's good. The nerf looks like they're nerfing everything but that which needed nerfing, being adrenals, but implants suffer the same endgame problem as Cybertech's earpieces; they're only valuable if you can't or won't raid. The absolute best earpiece you'll ever make without a raid drop schematic will require you to invest way more time and a heck of a lot more money into making it than...if you just went and did your dailies for just over a week and got a raid-grade daily commendation earpiece.

Do it all and outfit your companions in crafted stuff and wear your daily and raid stuff yourself? Must be nice to live in a vaccuum wherein which we all have the time and dedicated focus to do everything at maximum capacity at all times.

If you don't, there's no point to most of these crafting skills. They are, in terms of credits and time, a total loss; a complete wash.

There are systems in place that are less time consuming and frankly, more fun to invest one's effort in. If you've got 18 hours a day to play the gorram game, you could PVP all 18 hours and walk away with two, possibly three or maybe even four champion bags.

Dailies? Well, they didn't do dailies all that well either; they're annoying and run you around in obnoxious circles. At least in WoW, they made their dailies something you could knock out in an hour and not have to burn your entire evening on...but, you can still get great gear and mods for doing them.

Better than you can craft unless you A) raid, B) get the raid craft schematics, C) get the raid drop components and D) have the right craft skill.

So really, for crafting to be worthwhile, you'll need six characters on a server, one with each craft crewskill, all of them at 400, all of them decently supplied with non-raid/HM mats, you'll need to farm your dailies at the mere cost of 5-7 hours of your life every day, you'll need to raid as often as the lockouts are off and you'll need to farm HM's as often as possible so you have the best chances of getting the schematics and components you'll need...

...to finally be able to do something relevant to endgame with crafting.

Boy, that sure is reasonable. Read my signature for my thought on that.

And while you're at it, Bioware, please take a well intended bit of advice: don't try to out-WoW WoW. You're embarassing yourselves. Seriously. You can't even set up dailies to be relatively minimal in the obnoxious department.

You have no grasp what so ever of scaling your content to basic truths of human psychology, in short. You don't have the years of dedicated experience that's brought WoW to being what it is today, for example; not in their arena. Not in making a raid-and-grind game that doesn't drive people insane as a function of its own systems.

And if you think I'm wrong...h'okay. You're the developers; you know best. Developers always know best, right? That's why games are always perfect on release and everybody always thinks everything's wonderful with no patches or nerfs or tweaks or overhauls to anything ever required, right?

Just, y'know...cutting that assumption's head off pre-emptively and all.

So please, quit trying to be WoW and, if you for some reason can't figure out how to not do a crappy job of carbon-copying WoW's models, at least learn from their experience in how to deliver that model?

Please? You wanna waste all your time and money developing story content for a playerbase that will evolve in suit to your raidgame fantasies, sure, go ahead, that lesson will teach itself starting...about three weeks ago for anyone paying attention, so I assume you'll catch it sometime in a couple years.

I don't think you're stupid, mind you. It takes intelligent people to make the stupendous and fabulous mistakes, after all, and you've got a couple already made and, for their making, you're aiming yourselves right at the bullseye of several more.

Right now, crafting's general and ultimate negative value is one such thing. If it isn't valuable to endgame and it can only be made valuable in the most fringe of fashions if a staggering list of time-devouring requirements are also met....why did you include it at all?

Who were you trying to fool? You think gimped and marginalized crafting systems are a new deal? Think you've invented some clever new yard of wool to pull over unsuspecting eyes?

Have you paid exactly no attention at all to a degree that must surely cross a few lines into outright denial on the evidence on plain display in other games wherein which crafting is identically irrelevant?

Does it look like the non-raiders in those games are -happy- with it? Congratulations, you've imported a years-old point of dissatisfaction from many MMO's before you by doing nothing any differently.

At least in some games, it really is irrelevant and they don't even try to make it look like it could be useful. But hey, let's look at your idol, World of Warcraft. Guess how much relevant raid gear is craftable? Only that which you get patterns for in raids, and nobody cares!

S'right, Bioware; nobody cares. Been raiding for years in WoW. You know what most of us do with those patterns? If nobody in any of our guild that has a crafting fetish wants or thinks they need it, we auction it. Isn't worth sticking in a gbank slot to save for anyone in the future to use.

Could it be, in theory, useful if crafted? Sure. But why give that much of a hoot when you can just...go raid and get better? If you're raiding already to get such drops in the first place, you have no need at all for whatever it is those patterns can make.

Absolute best case scenario is that you or someone you know can craft it and use it until they get a better raid drop. Absolute best case scenerio in WoW with those.

Here? You've made it three times the pain in the rump to even try to care.

Again, you have no demonstrable grasp of the macrosocial or individual psychological interplays involved in trying to emulate WoW, as you've copied none of their easement factors that...sure, get the wannabe 'hardcore' crying about how 'easymode' and 'welfare' a lot of stuff is, but ALSO don't drive the vast majorities insane and reward those that try to make something of it with a steady stream of pointless frustration.

You also very clearly have this idea stuck in your heads that gambling is just the best and most repetition-propagating thing ever. RE'ing in crafting is the equivalent of playing the lottery with your crafted gear.

Will I win a blue schematic on this one? Nope. This one? Nope. This one...? Nope. Get my roughly 1/6th to 1/4 return on the recaptured mats, try again.

Blues to purples? Blues take a substantially longer time to craft; that's fine, to a point.

But then we have to use -them- as lottery tickets too.

This would be pretty alright if the purple schematics we stand to get were even vaguely worth trying to get in general. But what the heck is the point of working and working and investing away in a craft skill to, say, make a set of purple level 49 armor for yourself...when you can invest absolutely nothing in a craft skill, save your time, save your credits and wind up equipped in modded blue-equivalents and decent greens with no comparative effort at all and then turn around at 50 and, since the assumption is that everyone has all the time in the world every day, go farm hardmodes for 50 purples and 50-modded oranges while you plink away at your dailies for the better mods, earpieces and implants?

It's a nice hypothesis that, again, emulating WoW, having raid-grade craftable gear schematics drop in raids will make crafting more valuable.

Too bad the vast majority of those things I've seen drop are BOP when crafted. If you can't personally use it or stick it on a companion, its vendor trash. Can't even benefit the community via trickle down of selling most of that stuff on the market.

You sure have a love affair with WoW's bend of gear elitism, eh? LotrO kinda does too, but you know what LotrO also does? They do a pretty good job of making the top end craftables accessible via numerous recipes available off daily vendors with a smattering of BOE recipes that drop in dungeons or raids.

They also enrich the value of weapon crafting skills by tying the best weapons in the game to require a crafter that's done their craft guild dailies and has the recipes for 1st Age and 2nd Age legendary weapons/offhands to make them.

Crafted armor in LotrO? Yeah, raid sets you have to farm your face off to get are better, but if you never see better than the top end crafted teals (purples in our equivalence here in TOR), you are -not- doing poorly. You could hop right into a raid and not be holding your team back or needing to be carried due to gear inferiority.

Here? A difference between 14k HP and 20k HP is enormous, and the stat differences between the best non-raid craftables and gear you can PVP or farm out of normal mode ops? We're looking at a difference of around 1100-1200 in your primary stat and 1700-1900, and the same goes for endurance.

That's HUGE. Utterly unapproachable by anything even vaguely available to a crafter.

So, I've ranked every single craft skill you opened with to 400. I haven't invested a lot of effort into anything but Armormech and a smidge into Biochem and Artifice, but it's been telling.

I had 5 weeks of holiday leave to burn on TOR and boy did I burn it.

And boy do I feel burnt for what it's shown me.

You think you're going to out-WoW WoW. Your crafting is as annoying where it isn't moreso, you chew up way more time and, frankly, your provisions of craftable modifications doesn't hold a candle's worth of relevance to Enchanting in WoW, or Gemcutting...or Herbalism....or Cooking...or Engineering.

All of those have, over the years in WoW, evolved into things that are useful to everybody. Gonna go into a raid with your gear unenchanted, no potions, no scrolls and yno gems in your gear? Are you stupid? Invest in your community! Invest in your own experience and level a craft skill to make useful stuff!

Armorcrafters and weaponcrafters in WoW? Y'know, I seem to recall having bought a very nice set of blue resilience armor off WoW's auction house to go futz around in PVP with. Gemmed it, did my own enchanting, snagged a decent PVP weapon after racking up enough valor to snag one and...I could have done a lot more if I cared about PVP.

But I was able to go out there and be quite effective for a putz putzing around with my guild, and some crafter got to sell me some entry level PVP gear that, frankly, worked as well as my interest in investing in it required. Wasn't great, but it wasn't irrelevant either.

Can crafters currently craft anything with Expertise on it? Huh. No entry level PVP gear? No encouragement to crafters to give the community that bridge into your own PVP system? Farm warzones like you have nothing better to do with your life or nothing on that end?

Moreover, I was tanking, and tanking just fine I might add, with an iLvL 359 tank-statted sword in WoW until I finally won a much nicer tank weapon in a heroic firelands raid.

Could the same be done here? I suppose, but...why, when for far less wasted time struggling out the best weapon a crafter can craft you could just...PVP for a while and almost certainly get a better shot at a pretty heavily superior PVP weapon?

Ain't like the PVP weapon can't have the right stats on it. Heck, you're far better set if you do nothing but PVP and start raiding in Champion/Centurion/Battlemaster gear than if you waste one second of your life trying to go the crafting route.

You're funny people. You clearly tried so hard to not be WoW in the story immersion. You clearly tried to break away from the generic moulde of holy trinity class structures.

...But then you turned around and undermined those things by carbon copying the most annoying and raid-funneling engineered aspects of WoW. You built the need for holy trinity class structures right into it and, consequently, made several trees on numerous classes pointless to do much with, set the standard by which numerous talents on those trees are just plain stupid to take for anything, ever...

...and you didn't even come vaguely close to copying the WoW experience with anything resembling skill or proficiency. Just...stop trying. It's still early enough to save yourselves further embarassment, and you've got such a lovely thing going with the story immersion.

Really, you do. You folks generally tell a good story and have a well of potential to bring folks down a years-long epic, unfolding saga on the weight of that story.

But I'm just gonna go ahead and call it right now, for the absolutely no good it will do 'cause I doubt anybody that matters will even read this; you're not going to out-WoW WoW.

By the time you acquire the proficiency and nuanced, firsthand understanding of the macrosocial and psychosocial details involved in the whole morass, we'll be two years down the road, everyone that was primarily here for the story will be alienated and have no faith left in you at all, if they're even still playing, and your forum will be full of people trying to play your raidgame like a raidgame and griping about how you keep sticking ove-relaborated story and dialogue into everything.

And even then, you'll still be dragging along in WoW's shadow, because WoW does one thing and funnels all its effort into that one thing; it all leads to raiding. There's lore, there's story, but it's of optional, secondary and, for many raid-minded folks, utterly irrelevant concern as anything but a very occasional talk point while waiting for Bob to get his dang flasks crafted so we can get on with this raid.

You're gonna see it as it is. You will see the ire rise over dialogue existing in HM flashpoints and operations. You engineered that yourselves; you're trying to run in two directions at once.

Go out into a hall and try this. Try to run in two directions at once.

Keep doing it until you get my point. You don't get it as of right now as far as anything presented even vaguely indicates.

But you will. Whether it's too late for that knowledge to matter or not depends on how long it takes you to figure out that you're not going to out-WoW WoW and you've committed yourselves absolutely to a very specific degree of immersive storytelling.

I feel like I'm explaining rain to someone that doesn't go outside to say it, but, if nothing else, I feel better. It's said.

I'm gonna go see what a new class' storyline's like now and try my best to ignore your sinkhole craft skills.

Peace out.

Most of you people cheering for the biochem nerf are probably the same people that sat around crying in warzones about them, instead of leveling up biochem. Put some effort into bettering your character.

Hear hear!

is it just me, or does the fact that there's 52 pages and only one reply from anyone from the dev team or a gm irritate anyone?

and im usually not one to complain about stuff like this, but 90% of the people on here are saying roughly the same thing, and no one seems to be acknowledging this

Crafting armor is currently entirely pointless except as a means to work really hard and be able to better outfit one, maybe two, of your companions, and possibly help yourself have a slight edge while leveling.

 

But only if you burn a lot of time, mats and money; in the end, you pay way more for crafting your own armor than if you just ate the occasional repair bill and comparatively brief running-back time to die one or two more times at worst.

 

Armstech and artifice? Again, same deal; mere supplements to commendation vendors that allow for more customization of your secondary stats than comm vendors do while leveling.

 

Unfortunately, once you hit 50, do your Belsavis and Ilum dailies for a week and you can get enhancements, mods, hilts and barrels that are better than anything you can craft -unless you get special raid schematics-, or yoink mods out of PVP gear.

 

So, raid or die. Funny thing is though, if you're raiding regularly enough to have a real shot at schematics useful to you, there's a really good chance you have no cause what-so-ever to care. If you could turn around and craft those better things and sell them at huge prices to the folks that can't or won't raid, it might almost be worthwhile for that alone, but, typically, BOP's the thing. I'll just say that I have by no means seen all the schematics that might drop, but those I have seen have near-exclusively been for BOP stuff.

 

if I'm wrong on that, funny, that should have made itself even theoretically apparent by now. The fact that it hasn't says a few things itself; they're not good or happy things.

 

Cybertech? Earpieces are nice, but you're just over a week of dailies away at level 50 from having raid-grade earpieces from daily commendations. Mods, armor mods, droid gear and ship parts?

 

...Does anyone even care about the ship parts? They're nice additions, but do they add meaningful value to the skill? What're you gonna do at 50 with your ship; farm fleet commendations for the better part of a month to get a level 50 purple box off the fleet commendation vendor?

 

Hell of an investment in a lottery ticket for a chance at a gear drop that A) probably won't be useful to you and B) is irrelevant compared to PVP gear, which takes a fraction of the time to get by comparison.

 

Biochem's good. The nerf looks like they're nerfing everything but that which needed nerfing, being adrenals, but implants suffer the same endgame problem as Cybertech's earpieces; they're only valuable if you can't or won't raid. The absolute best earpiece you'll ever make without a raid drop schematic will require you to invest way more time and a heck of a lot more money into making it than...if you just went and did your dailies for just over a week and got a raid-grade daily commendation earpiece.

 

Do it all and outfit your companions in crafted stuff and wear your daily and raid stuff yourself? Must be nice to live in a vaccuum wherein which we all have the time and dedicated focus to do everything at maximum capacity at all times.

 

If you don't, there's no point to most of these crafting skills. They are, in terms of credits and time, a total loss; a complete wash.

 

There are systems in place that are less time consuming and frankly, more fun to invest one's effort in. If you've got 18 hours a day to play the gorram game, you could PVP all 18 hours and walk away with two, possibly three or maybe even four champion bags.

 

Dailies? Well, they didn't do dailies all that well either; they're annoying and run you around in obnoxious circles. At least in WoW, they made their dailies something you could knock out in an hour and not have to burn your entire evening on...but, you can still get great gear and mods for doing them.

 

Better than you can craft unless you A) raid, B) get the raid craft schematics, C) get the raid drop components and D) have the right craft skill.

 

 

So really, for crafting to be worthwhile, you'll need six characters on a server, one with each craft crewskill, all of them at 400, all of them decently supplied with non-raid/HM mats, you'll need to farm your dailies at the mere cost of 5-7 hours of your life every day, you'll need to raid as often as the lockouts are off and you'll need to farm HM's as often as possible so you have the best chances of getting the schematics and components you'll need...

 

...to finally be able to do something relevant to endgame with crafting.

 

 

Boy, that sure is reasonable. Read my signature for my thought on that.

 

And while you're at it, Bioware, please take a well intended bit of advice: don't try to out-WoW WoW. You're embarassing yourselves. Seriously. You can't even set up dailies to be relatively minimal in the obnoxious department.

 

You have no grasp what so ever of scaling your content to basic truths of human psychology, in short. You don't have the years of dedicated experience that's brought WoW to being what it is today, for example; not in their arena. Not in making a raid-and-grind game that doesn't drive people insane as a function of its own systems.

 

And if you think I'm wrong...h'okay. You're the developers; you know best. Developers always know best, right? That's why games are always perfect on release and everybody always thinks everything's wonderful with no patches or nerfs or tweaks or overhauls to anything ever required, right?

 

Just, y'know...cutting that assumption's head off pre-emptively and all.

 

So please, quit trying to be WoW and, if you for some reason can't figure out how to not do a crappy job of carbon-copying WoW's models, at least learn from their experience in how to deliver that model?

 

Please? You wanna waste all your time and money developing story content for a playerbase that will evolve in suit to your raidgame fantasies, sure, go ahead, that lesson will teach itself starting...about three weeks ago for anyone paying attention, so I assume you'll catch it sometime in a couple years.

 

I don't think you're stupid, mind you. It takes intelligent people to make the stupendous and fabulous mistakes, after all, and you've got a couple already made and, for their making, you're aiming yourselves right at the bullseye of several more.

 

 

Right now, crafting's general and ultimate negative value is one such thing. If it isn't valuable to endgame and it can only be made valuable in the most fringe of fashions if a staggering list of time-devouring requirements are also met....why did you include it at all?

 

Who were you trying to fool? You think gimped and marginalized crafting systems are a new deal? Think you've invented some clever new yard of wool to pull over unsuspecting eyes?

 

Have you paid exactly no attention at all to a degree that must surely cross a few lines into outright denial on the evidence on plain display in other games wherein which crafting is identically irrelevant?

 

Does it look like the non-raiders in those games are -happy- with it? Congratulations, you've imported a years-old point of dissatisfaction from many MMO's before you by doing nothing any differently.

 

At least in some games, it really is irrelevant and they don't even try to make it look like it could be useful. But hey, let's look at your idol, World of Warcraft. Guess how much relevant raid gear is craftable? Only that which you get patterns for in raids, and nobody cares!

 

S'right, Bioware; nobody cares. Been raiding for years in WoW. You know what most of us do with those patterns? If nobody in any of our guild that has a crafting fetish wants or thinks they need it, we auction it. Isn't worth sticking in a gbank slot to save for anyone in the future to use.

 

Could it be, in theory, useful if crafted? Sure. But why give that much of a hoot when you can just...go raid and get better? If you're raiding already to get such drops in the first place, you have no need at all for whatever it is those patterns can make.

 

Absolute best case scenario is that you or someone you know can craft it and use it until they get a better raid drop. Absolute best case scenerio in WoW with those.

 

Here? You've made it three times the pain in the rump to even try to care.

 

Again, you have no demonstrable grasp of the macrosocial or individual psychological interplays involved in trying to emulate WoW, as you've copied none of their easement factors that...sure, get the wannabe 'hardcore' crying about how 'easymode' and 'welfare' a lot of stuff is, but ALSO don't drive the vast majorities insane and reward those that try to make something of it with a steady stream of pointless frustration.

 

You also very clearly have this idea stuck in your heads that gambling is just the best and most repetition-propagating thing ever. RE'ing in crafting is the equivalent of playing the lottery with your crafted gear.

 

Will I win a blue schematic on this one? Nope. This one? Nope. This one...? Nope. Get my roughly 1/6th to 1/4 return on the recaptured mats, try again.

 

Blues to purples? Blues take a substantially longer time to craft; that's fine, to a point.

 

But then we have to use -them- as lottery tickets too.

 

This would be pretty alright if the purple schematics we stand to get were even vaguely worth trying to get in general. But what the heck is the point of working and working and investing away in a craft skill to, say, make a set of purple level 49 armor for yourself...when you can invest absolutely nothing in a craft skill, save your time, save your credits and wind up equipped in modded blue-equivalents and decent greens with no comparative effort at all and then turn around at 50 and, since the assumption is that everyone has all the time in the world every day, go farm hardmodes for 50 purples and 50-modded oranges while you plink away at your dailies for the better mods, earpieces and implants?

 

 

It's a nice hypothesis that, again, emulating WoW, having raid-grade craftable gear schematics drop in raids will make crafting more valuable.

 

Too bad the vast majority of those things I've seen drop are BOP when crafted. If you can't personally use it or stick it on a companion, its vendor trash. Can't even benefit the community via trickle down of selling most of that stuff on the market.

 

You sure have a love affair with WoW's bend of gear elitism, eh? LotrO kinda does too, but you know what LotrO also does? They do a pretty good job of making the top end craftables accessible via numerous recipes available off daily vendors with a smattering of BOE recipes that drop in dungeons or raids.

 

They also enrich the value of weapon crafting skills by tying the best weapons in the game to require a crafter that's done their craft guild dailies and has the recipes for 1st Age and 2nd Age legendary weapons/offhands to make them.

 

Crafted armor in LotrO? Yeah, raid sets you have to farm your face off to get are better, but if you never see better than the top end crafted teals (purples in our equivalence here in TOR), you are -not- doing poorly. You could hop right into a raid and not be holding your team back or needing to be carried due to gear inferiority.

 

Here? A difference between 14k HP and 20k HP is enormous, and the stat differences between the best non-raid craftables and gear you can PVP or farm out of normal mode ops? We're looking at a difference of around 1100-1200 in your primary stat and 1700-1900, and the same goes for endurance.

 

That's HUGE. Utterly unapproachable by anything even vaguely available to a crafter.

 

So, I've ranked every single craft skill you opened with to 400. I haven't invested a lot of effort into anything but Armormech and a smidge into Biochem and Artifice, but it's been telling.

 

I had 5 weeks of holiday leave to burn on TOR and boy did I burn it.

 

And boy do I feel burnt for what it's shown me.

 

You think you're going to out-WoW WoW. Your crafting is as annoying where it isn't moreso, you chew up way more time and, frankly, your provisions of craftable modifications doesn't hold a candle's worth of relevance to Enchanting in WoW, or Gemcutting...or Herbalism....or Cooking...or Engineering.

 

All of those have, over the years in WoW, evolved into things that are useful to everybody. Gonna go into a raid with your gear unenchanted, no potions, no scrolls and yno gems in your gear? Are you stupid? Invest in your community! Invest in your own experience and level a craft skill to make useful stuff!

 

Armorcrafters and weaponcrafters in WoW? Y'know, I seem to recall having bought a very nice set of blue resilience armor off WoW's auction house to go futz around in PVP with. Gemmed it, did my own enchanting, snagged a decent PVP weapon after racking up enough valor to snag one and...I could have done a lot more if I cared about PVP.

 

But I was able to go out there and be quite effective for a putz putzing around with my guild, and some crafter got to sell me some entry level PVP gear that, frankly, worked as well as my interest in investing in it required. Wasn't great, but it wasn't irrelevant either.

 

Can crafters currently craft anything with Expertise on it? Huh. No entry level PVP gear? No encouragement to crafters to give the community that bridge into your own PVP system? Farm warzones like you have nothing better to do with your life or nothing on that end?

 

Moreover, I was tanking, and tanking just fine I might add, with an iLvL 359 tank-statted sword in WoW until I finally won a much nicer tank weapon in a heroic firelands raid.

 

Could the same be done here? I suppose, but...why, when for far less wasted time struggling out the best weapon a crafter can craft you could just...PVP for a while and almost certainly get a better shot at a pretty heavily superior PVP weapon?

 

Ain't like the PVP weapon can't have the right stats on it. Heck, you're far better set if you do nothing but PVP and start raiding in Champion/Centurion/Battlemaster gear than if you waste one second of your life trying to go the crafting route.

 

 

You're funny people. You clearly tried so hard to not be WoW in the story immersion. You clearly tried to break away from the generic moulde of holy trinity class structures.

 

...But then you turned around and undermined those things by carbon copying the most annoying and raid-funneling engineered aspects of WoW. You built the need for holy trinity class structures right into it and, consequently, made several trees on numerous classes pointless to do much with, set the standard by which numerous talents on those trees are just plain stupid to take for anything, ever...

 

...and you didn't even come vaguely close to copying the WoW experience with anything resembling skill or proficiency. Just...stop trying. It's still early enough to save yourselves further embarassment, and you've got such a lovely thing going with the story immersion.

 

Really, you do. You folks generally tell a good story and have a well of potential to bring folks down a years-long epic, unfolding saga on the weight of that story.

 

But I'm just gonna go ahead and call it right now, for the absolutely no good it will do 'cause I doubt anybody that matters will even read this; you're not going to out-WoW WoW.

 

By the time you acquire the proficiency and nuanced, firsthand understanding of the macrosocial and psychosocial details involved in the whole morass, we'll be two years down the road, everyone that was primarily here for the story will be alienated and have no faith left in you at all, if they're even still playing, and your forum will be full of people trying to play your raidgame like a raidgame and griping about how you keep sticking ove-relaborated story and dialogue into everything.

 

And even then, you'll still be dragging along in WoW's shadow, because WoW does one thing and funnels all its effort into that one thing; it all leads to raiding. There's lore, there's story, but it's of optional, secondary and, for many raid-minded folks, utterly irrelevant concern as anything but a very occasional talk point while waiting for Bob to get his dang flasks crafted so we can get on with this raid.

 

You're gonna see it as it is. You will see the ire rise over dialogue existing in HM flashpoints and operations. You engineered that yourselves; you're trying to run in two directions at once.

 

Go out into a hall and try this. Try to run in two directions at once.

 

Keep doing it until you get my point. You don't get it as of right now as far as anything presented even vaguely indicates.

 

But you will. Whether it's too late for that knowledge to matter or not depends on how long it takes you to figure out that you're not going to out-WoW WoW and you've committed yourselves absolutely to a very specific degree of immersive storytelling.

 

I feel like I'm explaining rain to someone that doesn't go outside to say it, but, if nothing else, I feel better. It's said.

 

I'm gonna go see what a new class' storyline's like now and try my best to ignore your sinkhole craft skills.

 

Peace out.

Hmm... This formula sounds suspiciously like playing an MMO game. I suppose it's better to choose if you want to have fun following story or RP, or be a L33T pvp superstar with all purples and X amount of dps or whatever. It's kinda hard to get it both ways, if it's possible at all. And any references made to the macrosocial aaspects of another game should be made with respect to the fact that this currently is and will always be younger than any currently running mmorpg out there. It takes time

As someone who just dropped a 400 to go biochem, I knew this was inevitably coming and thank you for not going overboard with the nerf.

You did what? You had a great crew skill already maxed and you dropped it for a pvp centric crap skill?

Dont get me wrong it is a great skill, the stims are awesome and inserts, but man.

mal

The problem isn't the amount, the problem is the fact they're reusable and it's SO much money saved especially with the medpac and stim. And you're just making it worse cause now everyone will just be permanantly biochem, making them tradable would have fixed it. There are better options way late game which takes care of the "well then nobody would go biochem after they got them" but that wouldn't happen once they start getting the better "usable" drops.

 

You either need to make them tradeable or take away the reusability, the amount of money saved is the problem NOT they fact they didn't require biochem...

 

This is a terrible change, there will only be biochem users now.

You don't even know what they changed exactly yet. It seems to me they will have toned it down too.

I am thinking they should be useable by anyone though (thus tradable)

crafting is broken beyond belief and the proof is that the 'nerf' to Biochem to, in their words, stop it being the goto crafting skill will make it 100% the goto skill. Making them non re-usable would have been better, making the trade-able maybe.

You cant level the playing field if no one wants to play.

Making crafting results BoP seems backwards, crafting is to sell/trade, that's why people make things, its the game within the game. As no one can make anything that anyone will want to buy...

The RE process is, it seems to me (not done a lot of it so only speaking from a little experience) a pain, a lottery. It burns thru creds and mats and mats are not in abundant supply. All to produce gear you will out level by this afternoon or eclipse with drops/commendations/end game

The crafting mechanic is very simple, skill less and not a huge time sink - so it plays to the current MMO players (I personally think the SWG system was the best) but the results do not justify the effort.

Maybe they should try to shape the crafting side of the game into making appearance based items to stop the whole galaxy either looking like it just walked out from the charity store or like everyone else.

For a game that is story based and visual how the hell did you make 1000 armours that all look like total crap? and a dozen that are ok? and lets not get started on the lo-res textures and your ridiculous excuses for why you cant get medium res ones back in game, there wont ever be hi-res, they simply do not exist.

Currently I have cybertech, slicing and scavenging on my main and underworld trade on an alt, I see little point to not doing biochem.

(btw. to fix this in PvP, FIX IT IN PVP!)

its a nerf to make it as pointless as the rest of crafting, not progression or balanceing or blah blah.

Biochem will still be one of the only worthwhile crafting skill to have, why even waste time with all the others? oh for more credits that are so hard to get......

ironically crafting should be used as a good credit sink, not, crafting is totally pointless but do it anyway because it is part of the overall enrichment of your game.

and another thing, you can craft and use your bods (companions) to farm and even lottery your reverse engineering (reverse engineering another joke) but to make the high end of your chosen craftable you must farm high end raids, that is laughable.

MAKE CRAFTING (non consumables) USEFUL AND WORTHWHILE!

Crafting armor is currently entirely pointless except as a means to work really hard and be able to better outfit one, maybe two, of your companions, and possibly help yourself have a slight edge while leveling.

 

But only if you burn a lot of time, mats and money; in the end, you pay way more for crafting your own armor than if you just ate the occasional repair bill and comparatively brief running-back time to die one or two more times at worst.

 

Armstech and artifice? Again, same deal; mere supplements to commendation vendors that allow for more customization of your secondary stats than comm vendors do while leveling.

 

Unfortunately, once you hit 50, do your Belsavis and Ilum dailies for a week and you can get enhancements, mods, hilts and barrels that are better than anything you can craft -unless you get special raid schematics-, or yoink mods out of PVP gear.

 

So, raid or die. Funny thing is though, if you're raiding regularly enough to have a real shot at schematics useful to you, there's a really good chance you have no cause what-so-ever to care. If you could turn around and craft those better things and sell them at huge prices to the folks that can't or won't raid, it might almost be worthwhile for that alone, but, typically, BOP's the thing. I'll just say that I have by no means seen all the schematics that might drop, but those I have seen have near-exclusively been for BOP stuff.

 

if I'm wrong on that, funny, that should have made itself even theoretically apparent by now. The fact that it hasn't says a few things itself; they're not good or happy things.

 

Cybertech? Earpieces are nice, but you're just over a week of dailies away at level 50 from having raid-grade earpieces from daily commendations. Mods, armor mods, droid gear and ship parts?

 

...Does anyone even care about the ship parts? They're nice additions, but do they add meaningful value to the skill? What're you gonna do at 50 with your ship; farm fleet commendations for the better part of a month to get a level 50 purple box off the fleet commendation vendor?

 

Hell of an investment in a lottery ticket for a chance at a gear drop that A) probably won't be useful to you and B) is irrelevant compared to PVP gear, which takes a fraction of the time to get by comparison.

 

Biochem's good. The nerf looks like they're nerfing everything but that which needed nerfing, being adrenals, but implants suffer the same endgame problem as Cybertech's earpieces; they're only valuable if you can't or won't raid. The absolute best earpiece you'll ever make without a raid drop schematic will require you to invest way more time and a heck of a lot more money into making it than...if you just went and did your dailies for just over a week and got a raid-grade daily commendation earpiece.

 

Do it all and outfit your companions in crafted stuff and wear your daily and raid stuff yourself? Must be nice to live in a vaccuum wherein which we all have the time and dedicated focus to do everything at maximum capacity at all times.

 

If you don't, there's no point to most of these crafting skills. They are, in terms of credits and time, a total loss; a complete wash.

 

There are systems in place that are less time consuming and frankly, more fun to invest one's effort in. If you've got 18 hours a day to play the gorram game, you could PVP all 18 hours and walk away with two, possibly three or maybe even four champion bags.

 

Dailies? Well, they didn't do dailies all that well either; they're annoying and run you around in obnoxious circles. At least in WoW, they made their dailies something you could knock out in an hour and not have to burn your entire evening on...but, you can still get great gear and mods for doing them.

 

Better than you can craft unless you A) raid, B) get the raid craft schematics, C) get the raid drop components and D) have the right craft skill.

 

 

So really, for crafting to be worthwhile, you'll need six characters on a server, one with each craft crewskill, all of them at 400, all of them decently supplied with non-raid/HM mats, you'll need to farm your dailies at the mere cost of 5-7 hours of your life every day, you'll need to raid as often as the lockouts are off and you'll need to farm HM's as often as possible so you have the best chances of getting the schematics and components you'll need...

 

...to finally be able to do something relevant to endgame with crafting.

 

 

Boy, that sure is reasonable. Read my signature for my thought on that.

 

And while you're at it, Bioware, please take a well intended bit of advice: don't try to out-WoW WoW. You're embarassing yourselves. Seriously. You can't even set up dailies to be relatively minimal in the obnoxious department.

 

You have no grasp what so ever of scaling your content to basic truths of human psychology, in short. You don't have the years of dedicated experience that's brought WoW to being what it is today, for example; not in their arena. Not in making a raid-and-grind game that doesn't drive people insane as a function of its own systems.

 

And if you think I'm wrong...h'okay. You're the developers; you know best. Developers always know best, right? That's why games are always perfect on release and everybody always thinks everything's wonderful with no patches or nerfs or tweaks or overhauls to anything ever required, right?

 

Just, y'know...cutting that assumption's head off pre-emptively and all.

 

So please, quit trying to be WoW and, if you for some reason can't figure out how to not do a crappy job of carbon-copying WoW's models, at least learn from their experience in how to deliver that model?

 

Please? You wanna waste all your time and money developing story content for a playerbase that will evolve in suit to your raidgame fantasies, sure, go ahead, that lesson will teach itself starting...about three weeks ago for anyone paying attention, so I assume you'll catch it sometime in a couple years.

 

I don't think you're stupid, mind you. It takes intelligent people to make the stupendous and fabulous mistakes, after all, and you've got a couple already made and, for their making, you're aiming yourselves right at the bullseye of several more.

 

 

Right now, crafting's general and ultimate negative value is one such thing. If it isn't valuable to endgame and it can only be made valuable in the most fringe of fashions if a staggering list of time-devouring requirements are also met....why did you include it at all?

 

Who were you trying to fool? You think gimped and marginalized crafting systems are a new deal? Think you've invented some clever new yard of wool to pull over unsuspecting eyes?

 

Have you paid exactly no attention at all to a degree that must surely cross a few lines into outright denial on the evidence on plain display in other games wherein which crafting is identically irrelevant?

 

Does it look like the non-raiders in those games are -happy- with it? Congratulations, you've imported a years-old point of dissatisfaction from many MMO's before you by doing nothing any differently.

 

At least in some games, it really is irrelevant and they don't even try to make it look like it could be useful. But hey, let's look at your idol, World of Warcraft. Guess how much relevant raid gear is craftable? Only that which you get patterns for in raids, and nobody cares!

 

S'right, Bioware; nobody cares. Been raiding for years in WoW. You know what most of us do with those patterns? If nobody in any of our guild that has a crafting fetish wants or thinks they need it, we auction it. Isn't worth sticking in a gbank slot to save for anyone in the future to use.

 

Could it be, in theory, useful if crafted? Sure. But why give that much of a hoot when you can just...go raid and get better? If you're raiding already to get such drops in the first place, you have no need at all for whatever it is those patterns can make.

 

Absolute best case scenario is that you or someone you know can craft it and use it until they get a better raid drop. Absolute best case scenerio in WoW with those.

 

Here? You've made it three times the pain in the rump to even try to care.

 

Again, you have no demonstrable grasp of the macrosocial or individual psychological interplays involved in trying to emulate WoW, as you've copied none of their easement factors that...sure, get the wannabe 'hardcore' crying about how 'easymode' and 'welfare' a lot of stuff is, but ALSO don't drive the vast majorities insane and reward those that try to make something of it with a steady stream of pointless frustration.

 

You also very clearly have this idea stuck in your heads that gambling is just the best and most repetition-propagating thing ever. RE'ing in crafting is the equivalent of playing the lottery with your crafted gear.

 

Will I win a blue schematic on this one? Nope. This one? Nope. This one...? Nope. Get my roughly 1/6th to 1/4 return on the recaptured mats, try again.

 

Blues to purples? Blues take a substantially longer time to craft; that's fine, to a point.

 

But then we have to use -them- as lottery tickets too.

 

This would be pretty alright if the purple schematics we stand to get were even vaguely worth trying to get in general. But what the heck is the point of working and working and investing away in a craft skill to, say, make a set of purple level 49 armor for yourself...when you can invest absolutely nothing in a craft skill, save your time, save your credits and wind up equipped in modded blue-equivalents and decent greens with no comparative effort at all and then turn around at 50 and, since the assumption is that everyone has all the time in the world every day, go farm hardmodes for 50 purples and 50-modded oranges while you plink away at your dailies for the better mods, earpieces and implants?

 

 

It's a nice hypothesis that, again, emulating WoW, having raid-grade craftable gear schematics drop in raids will make crafting more valuable.

 

Too bad the vast majority of those things I've seen drop are BOP when crafted. If you can't personally use it or stick it on a companion, its vendor trash. Can't even benefit the community via trickle down of selling most of that stuff on the market.

 

You sure have a love affair with WoW's bend of gear elitism, eh? LotrO kinda does too, but you know what LotrO also does? They do a pretty good job of making the top end craftables accessible via numerous recipes available off daily vendors with a smattering of BOE recipes that drop in dungeons or raids.

 

They also enrich the value of weapon crafting skills by tying the best weapons in the game to require a crafter that's done their craft guild dailies and has the recipes for 1st Age and 2nd Age legendary weapons/offhands to make them.

 

Crafted armor in LotrO? Yeah, raid sets you have to farm your face off to get are better, but if you never see better than the top end crafted teals (purples in our equivalence here in TOR), you are -not- doing poorly. You could hop right into a raid and not be holding your team back or needing to be carried due to gear inferiority.

 

Here? A difference between 14k HP and 20k HP is enormous, and the stat differences between the best non-raid craftables and gear you can PVP or farm out of normal mode ops? We're looking at a difference of around 1100-1200 in your primary stat and 1700-1900, and the same goes for endurance.

 

That's HUGE. Utterly unapproachable by anything even vaguely available to a crafter.

 

So, I've ranked every single craft skill you opened with to 400. I haven't invested a lot of effort into anything but Armormech and a smidge into Biochem and Artifice, but it's been telling.

 

I had 5 weeks of holiday leave to burn on TOR and boy did I burn it.

 

And boy do I feel burnt for what it's shown me.

 

You think you're going to out-WoW WoW. Your crafting is as annoying where it isn't moreso, you chew up way more time and, frankly, your provisions of craftable modifications doesn't hold a candle's worth of relevance to Enchanting in WoW, or Gemcutting...or Herbalism....or Cooking...or Engineering.

 

All of those have, over the years in WoW, evolved into things that are useful to everybody. Gonna go into a raid with your gear unenchanted, no potions, no scrolls and yno gems in your gear? Are you stupid? Invest in your community! Invest in your own experience and level a craft skill to make useful stuff!

 

Armorcrafters and weaponcrafters in WoW? Y'know, I seem to recall having bought a very nice set of blue resilience armor off WoW's auction house to go futz around in PVP with. Gemmed it, did my own enchanting, snagged a decent PVP weapon after racking up enough valor to snag one and...I could have done a lot more if I cared about PVP.

 

But I was able to go out there and be quite effective for a putz putzing around with my guild, and some crafter got to sell me some entry level PVP gear that, frankly, worked as well as my interest in investing in it required. Wasn't great, but it wasn't irrelevant either.

 

Can crafters currently craft anything with Expertise on it? Huh. No entry level PVP gear? No encouragement to crafters to give the community that bridge into your own PVP system? Farm warzones like you have nothing better to do with your life or nothing on that end?

 

Moreover, I was tanking, and tanking just fine I might add, with an iLvL 359 tank-statted sword in WoW until I finally won a much nicer tank weapon in a heroic firelands raid.

 

Could the same be done here? I suppose, but...why, when for far less wasted time struggling out the best weapon a crafter can craft you could just...PVP for a while and almost certainly get a better shot at a pretty heavily superior PVP weapon?

 

Ain't like the PVP weapon can't have the right stats on it. Heck, you're far better set if you do nothing but PVP and start raiding in Champion/Centurion/Battlemaster gear than if you waste one second of your life trying to go the crafting route.

 

 

You're funny people. You clearly tried so hard to not be WoW in the story immersion. You clearly tried to break away from the generic moulde of holy trinity class structures.

 

...But then you turned around and undermined those things by carbon copying the most annoying and raid-funneling engineered aspects of WoW. You built the need for holy trinity class structures right into it and, consequently, made several trees on numerous classes pointless to do much with, set the standard by which numerous talents on those trees are just plain stupid to take for anything, ever...

 

...and you didn't even come vaguely close to copying the WoW experience with anything resembling skill or proficiency. Just...stop trying. It's still early enough to save yourselves further embarassment, and you've got such a lovely thing going with the story immersion.

 

Really, you do. You folks generally tell a good story and have a well of potential to bring folks down a years-long epic, unfolding saga on the weight of that story.

 

But I'm just gonna go ahead and call it right now, for the absolutely no good it will do 'cause I doubt anybody that matters will even read this; you're not going to out-WoW WoW.

 

By the time you acquire the proficiency and nuanced, firsthand understanding of the macrosocial and psychosocial details involved in the whole morass, we'll be two years down the road, everyone that was primarily here for the story will be alienated and have no faith left in you at all, if they're even still playing, and your forum will be full of people trying to play your raidgame like a raidgame and griping about how you keep sticking ove-relaborated story and dialogue into everything.

 

And even then, you'll still be dragging along in WoW's shadow, because WoW does one thing and funnels all its effort into that one thing; it all leads to raiding. There's lore, there's story, but it's of optional, secondary and, for many raid-minded folks, utterly irrelevant concern as anything but a very occasional talk point while waiting for Bob to get his dang flasks crafted so we can get on with this raid.

 

You're gonna see it as it is. You will see the ire rise over dialogue existing in HM flashpoints and operations. You engineered that yourselves; you're trying to run in two directions at once.

 

Go out into a hall and try this. Try to run in two directions at once.

 

Keep doing it until you get my point. You don't get it as of right now as far as anything presented even vaguely indicates.

 

But you will. Whether it's too late for that knowledge to matter or not depends on how long it takes you to figure out that you're not going to out-WoW WoW and you've committed yourselves absolutely to a very specific degree of immersive storytelling.

 

I feel like I'm explaining rain to someone that doesn't go outside to say it, but, if nothing else, I feel better. It's said.

 

I'm gonna go see what a new class' storyline's like now and try my best to ignore your sinkhole craft skills.

 

Peace out.

"A Massive Wall of Whining" hits you for 8,000,000,000 crushing damage!

I really don't see how this nerf of biochem and cybertech helps the problem which is purportedly trying to be fixed.

If this small amount of elitist *****s are influencing people to change their profession to biochem or cybertech to do endgame, won't making having the professions a requirement for using the broken items only make things worse? Getting a profession to 400 is not too high a hill to climb to get a slight edge for that type of people.

Also, as a JK Sentinel, cybertech grenades are my only true long ranged attack at the moment and a 5 minute cooldown seems excessive...

good stuff

I read it all. You have written so much that I was trying to articulate myself. In my opinion, crafting should at least match hard-mode FP's and good, starting-level PvP gear. Crafting should be capable of launching players on to greater deeds. Just not there right now and without it there's no demand and no reason to pursue it. And BoP in crafting should die (with possible exception of my suggestion in my previous post). I wish I could comment on so many points you made, RE Roulette, the Crafting Grind to Nothing Useful, the attempt to out-WoW WoW. But time is limited and I don't know how much longer I'll be able to post. Bioware should read your post and take serious note.

I actually have a high tolerance for pain in MMO's. I even dabble in STO now and then having purchased a lifetime account a while ago and that's hardly a perfect game (although it is much better than at launch). With TOR I find myself in an unusual situation. This is the first time, ever, that I'll not be going directly from my free month into a paid sub. I'm sticking this one back in the oven until it's done.

Bioware is exceptional at storytelling, but I've come to the realization that much of the game just doesn't come close to the level that the storytelling does. Especially crafting which is a huge part of my fun-factor in MMO's. (I won't even address the bugs, including ones that I reported in beta 5 or 6 months ago, the UI, the many other design decisions that Bioware has made that has led me to my decision regarding TOR.) In the end, if story is the primary and nearly only positive, well, I can get story from reading a book, for less money, and a lot less time investment and frustration.

I'm sure I'll finish the storylines I'm interested in eventually (main only made it to level 27, which is actually quite good for me), but after dropping the cash for CE's (and regretting it now), I just can't justify paying still more to play at my normal, casual MMO pace. Crafting could've been a reason to stay, but it isn't in its current state. I'll save the stories for vacations, etc. when I have more free time on my hands.

LotrO kinda does too, but you know what LotrO also does? They do a pretty good job of making the top end craftables accessible via numerous recipes available off daily vendors with a smattering of BOE recipes that drop in dungeons or raids.

 

They also enrich the value of weapon crafting skills by tying the best weapons in the game to require a crafter that's done their craft guild dailies and has the recipes for 1st Age and 2nd Age legendary weapons/offhands to make them.

 

Crafted armor in LotrO? Yeah, raid sets you have to farm your face off to get are better, but if you never see better than the top end crafted teals (purples in our equivalence here in TOR), you are -not- doing poorly. You could hop right into a raid and not be holding your team back or needing to be carried due to gear inferiority.

I just wanted to highlight this part since I can verify your assessment. I've been playing LOTRO since open beta in 2007 and I still play it today (going on 5 years). That's years longer than I played WoW. I raided in WoW and I left that game. I don't raid in LOTRO, so what has kept me playing there? Story (I admit TOR has the upper hand there) and crafting. Crafting is useful and I enjoy doing it. While I don't raid, I have crafted for folks that do raid and what I craft is useful to them. I certainly like LOTRO's crafting better than WoW's crafting and TOR's crafting is even worse than WoW's.

I agree i would like to see the posts of players complaining about too good of heals .. And that a bomb is too strong. But you can only use them every 5 mins. I think Bioware nerfed it for bioware, not for they players.

people were not complaining about healing too much. This was all about pvp. People were complaining about people buffing themselves up and 1 shotting people in pvp.

there were suggested fixes - frankly ripping most of the stims and so on out of pvp warzones would fix it it from that perspective.

We won't know exactly how well this works until they put it in. I am one of the players who loves pvp and respected my characters with the pvp required crew skills because of the huge advantage they had.

I'm still think more changes are required though. Example - Perhaps make some stims un-usable in warzones (they already have a mech for that the other way around).

Making the other skills better would be nice. I saw no reason to stay with Artiface or Synthweaving. One would think these crafting skills should be great for jedi types but they simply were not worth the money, time and effort.