Jump to content

Fixing Grade 11 (6.0) crafting


Estelindis

Recommended Posts

Following Keith's check-in, I would like to consolidate suggestions for crafting improvements to a single thread.

 

We've had many threads and posts about the issues with Grade 11 crafting. This thread is not intended to argue if crafting has problems, or even necessarily what those problems are (I think they're fairly well identified at this point), but what to do about the problems.

 

Anyone who wants to contribute, please make specific suggestions or tweak someone else's suggestions. No insulting Bioware or even defending them, please; this is not about them but about the topic of crafting. Keeping our contributions steamlined and on-topic will help BW far better than any meta discussion.

 

Now, on to the suggestions!

 

  • Revert basic components to needing 2/2/2 of each material. No more 8/10/10. A slight lowering to something like 6/8/8 is not enough. Please go straight to 2/2/2. This is the most important thing for you to do.
     
  • Adjust the supply of green materials via missions. Because Grade 11 crafting needs greens predominantly, but greens are not adequately supplied in proportion to how much they are needed, add extra moderate missions to all mission and gathering skills, but especially to archaeology, scavenging, and bioanalysis (add twice as many new moderate missions to them as to slicing and the mission skills, because they additionally do not have enough missions per type of material, e.g. currently only one moderate power crystal mission, one moderate artifact fragment mission, etc.). Additionally make the other grades return some/more green materials along with their current yields. Alternatively, make moderate missions return twice as many materials (but still give archaeology, scavenging, and bioanalysis extra missions, please - or make their moderate missions return quadruple results instead). But I think this is sub-optimal because a lot of people haven't even noticed that moderate missions are the only ones that return solely greens, and many may continue to not notice.
     
  • Also because of the need for more grade 11 green materials, realign the proportion of green to blue to purple materials provided by harvesting nodes to approx. 7:2:1. At the moment, even one purple basic component take 204 greens, 72 blues, and 30 purples. (This doesn't take crits along the path to purple components into account, since people's crit rates are different. I acknowledge that in practice the requirements will be less than this, but I find it a helpful starting point for working out how much we need of each quality.) The proportion of green to blue to purple here is approximately either 6:3:1 or 7:2:1 (more precisely, 67:23:10), so that's what the average proportions offered by nodes should be. If BW have some more precise proportion to offer that takes average crit rates into account, that could be used instead. Additionally, for archaeology nodes specifically, please provide the same amount of power crystals as artifact fragments; don't split crystals between colour and power, as there seems to be an under-supply of power crystals that I imagine is coming from nodes (since we never see the amount gathered by a companion in any info window, it's hard to track).
     
  • Reverse-engineering/deconstructing *either* needs to have a lowest chance of 20% *or* an in-built pity timer that guarantees success after a certain number of attempts. My personal preference is 20% at the lowest, no matter what the grade, but I'm open to argument. The cost to RE higher levels will still be higher because higher levels cost more materials for every attempt. It's not necessary to reduce the chance to 10% or 5% on top of that.
     
  • Green items should need materials no higher than green. Blue items should need materials no higher than blue (this can include blue exotics like isotopes). Purple items should need materials no higher than purple (this can include purple exotics like matrices). Only gold items should use gold materials.
     
  • This is a comment partially on grade 11 but also partially on grades 1-10. Restore pre-6.0 mission success chance rates. Before 6.0, I do not remember ever failing a grey-difficulty mission. (If it did happen, it must've been so rare that it didn't register.) Certainly I did not, for example, fail a grade 6 mission when my skill level let me run grade 10 missions - yet, now, I do fail grade 6 missions, often enough that it stands out. This appears to be taking away with one hand while offering to give back with the other hand if we pay a price - i.e. trying to incentivize us to pursue +success rate amplifiers. But, at least for me, all it does is fuel resentment, because I never used to fail on the vast majority of missions before. It was unhelpful to make our success rate worse and hold hostage the prospect of getting it back to what it once was, under certain conditions. Even if one can re-achieve pre-6.0 success rate via amplifiers, having to swap equipment back and forth just to run missions actively makes the crafting experience worse, when 6.0 should be trying to make it better.

 

Additionally, this is a purely subjective suggestion made solely on behalf of people like me who craft for pretty things rather than stats, so it's a comment on part of crafting rather than crafting as a whole, but...

  • Please add purely cosmetic items at grade 11 (two dyes and one new colour of crystal for artifice is all you gave us; new synthweaving and armormech outfits have stats, when you could also give us empty shell outfits, armstech could get empty weapon shells, artifice empty sabers, more dyes and crystals, mounts for cybertech, etc).

 

I have cross-posted this thread to Reddit as well, with a view to hopefully gaining more useful feedback. Feel free to comment there if you prefer.

Edited by Estelindis
Link to comment
Share on other sites

I agree with all these suggestions Estelindis. I would add that there needs to be a second mission for the so-called Supplement materials ... the ones that used to only be white but now come in green and blue varieties and are sold by the crew skill vendor and advanced repair droid legacy perk. However, I have low expectations that such a change could be implemented in short order.

 

Why do I think these changes are immediately necessary to resuscitate crafting?

 

The changes as proposed by Estelindis will still result in a system that consumes far more materials than previously, simply by the nature of the nested components and purple/blue grades of things that were previously only green. This achieves the inferred goal of the developers that crafting should be time consuming, expensive, and encumbered. (I mean, that's the only conclusion I've come to regarding the developer's motives for putting this out despite the PTS feedback.) Additionally, since deconstructing items results in the return of materials completely unrelated to the crafting skill (e.g. deconstructing purple biochem end products gives luxury fabrics and sliced tech parts) a crafter will still be in significant green material deficit for the foreseeable future, as crew skill gathering gets very expensive and gathering nodes on Onderon and Mek Sha are either sparse or buried under geometry.

 

So, the developers still get to burden crafters, but the system isn't the travesty that it is now.

Link to comment
Share on other sites

Additionally, this is a purely subjective suggestion made solely on behalf of people like me who craft for pretty things rather than stats, so it's a comment on part of crafting rather than crafting as a whole, but...

  • Please add purely cosmetic items at grade 11 (two dyes and one new colour of crystal for artifice is all you gave us; new synthweaving and armormech outfits have stats, when you could also give us empty shell outfits, armstech could get empty weapon shells, artifice empty sabers, more dyes and crystals, mounts for cybertech, etc).

 

I have cross-posted this thread to Reddit as well, with a view to hopefully gaining more useful feedback. Feel free to comment there if you prefer.

As I suggested over in your crossposting in the r/SWTOR sub-Reddit, I would like to tack on the following suggestion: put the former Galactic Command armor and weapons in as craftable sets, with schematics coming from the Skill Trainers at varying levels, depending on what Tier of GC crates they used to come from.
Link to comment
Share on other sites

Further, deconstruction failures should only affect one item out of a stack - the one item the deconstruct fails on.

 

Currently if I deconstruct 20 bonded syntex cloth, I *might* get 20 augment components, or I might just get Jawa Junk. If I deconstruct them one at a time, I might get 19 augment components and one might turn into Jawa Junk.

 

There is nothing more aggravating than deconstructing 20 things for augment components and getting nothing but Jawa Junk because the roll failed on ONE item in the stack/window.

Link to comment
Share on other sites

Further, deconstruction failures should only affect one item out of a stack - the one item the deconstruct fails on.

 

Currently if I deconstruct 20 bonded syntex cloth, I *might* get 20 augment components, or I might just get Jawa Junk. If I deconstruct them one at a time, I might get 19 augment components and one might turn into Jawa Junk.

 

There is nothing more aggravating than deconstructing 20 things for augment components and getting nothing but Jawa Junk because the roll failed on ONE item in the stack/window.

 

I saw a theory on the gen chat that if you put those sub-components in your crafting bag, and then pull them out, they get bugged and don’t generate returned mats.

Link to comment
Share on other sites

[...]

Restore pre-6.0 mission success chance rates. Before 6.0, I do not remember ever failing a grey-difficulty mission

[...]

Even if one can re-achieve pre-6.0 success rate via amplifiers, having to swap equipment back and forth just to run missions actively makes the crafting experience worse, when 6.0 should be trying to make it better.

[...]

You don't remember failing those, because you didn't... the failure rate was well known... 0% change on grey 1% on green, 5% on yellow, 10% on orange, flat rate chance, affected by nothing but color difficulty

oh and for fun, those amplifier will NEVER return us to pre-6.0 failure rates,

[EDIT]

The above statement (by me) is incorrect... I misread some available buffs, and I cannot yet confirm how much effect the "+success"" amplifiers can or do have)

[/EDIT]

 

crewskill missions are a two roll system.... roll for success/failure (flat rate, based on difficulty), then IF if succeeds, roll for critical (based on bonuses)

 

and to top it off, those amplifiers are completely misleading.... they only apply AFTER the roll for critical (or after the application of time reduction) so are reduced from their stated value, by the inverse of the base rate....

ie Real Amp Value = Amp% * (1 - Base %).... so 50 companions, and no other bonuses see only 1/4 of amp efficiency, and 3/4 of crit (down to 3/5 at for subs)... Max... less for every other normal bonus you can get (like the subscriber crit bonus)

Edited by Void_Singer
Link to comment
Share on other sites

I think the biggest change they need to make is to show us what our success and crit chances are on things before we initiate them. I have a bunch of gear that increases success chance or crit chance, but I don't know what the total values are or what exactly they mean. It's possible that some of these problems are more about the interface failing to communicate what we can do to be successful.

 

Also, give green mats with all missions :)

Link to comment
Share on other sites

I think the biggest change they need to make is to show us what our success and crit chances are on things before we initiate them. I have a bunch of gear that increases success chance or crit chance, but I don't know what the total values are or what exactly they mean. It's possible that some of these problems are more about the interface failing to communicate what we can do to be successful.

 

Also, give green mats with all missions :)

I can tell you if you want to know.....

The whole formula broken down to bite sized bits

 

 

CRIT (All Bonuses are checked on crew skill finish, offline skills "finish" at login)

Base Failure Rate = 0% Grey, 1% Green, 5% Yellow, 10% Orange (and it looks like +5% global in 6.0)

Sub_Bonus = +10% for Orange, +15% for all others

Base Critical Chance = ROUNDDOWN( CompLvl * 0.5% ) + Sub_Bonus + Legacy_Bonus + Guild_Set_Bonus Guild_Perk_Bonus + Guild_Skill_Bonus

Amp Critical Chance = Amp_Totals

 

Psuedocode

IF( Roll1  > Base_Failure_Rate )
   Check for Critical
}ELSE(
   Give Jawa scrap
)

# Check for Critical
IF( Roll2  < Base_Critical_Rate + (Amp_Critical_Rate *  (1 - Base_Critical_Rate)) ){
   Give Critical Amount
}ELSE{
   Give Basic Amount
}

 

 

EFFICIENCY (All Bonuses are checked on crew skill start)

BASE_TIME = Varies for each crew skil item, but an example is 4hrs for Invasion force crafting

BASE Efficiency = ROUNDDOWN( Companion_Level * 1.5% ) + Guild_Set_Bonus + Guild_Perk_Bonus + Guild_Skill_Bonus

Amp_Efficiency = Amp_Total

 

Psuedocode

Time = (BASE_TIME * (1 - Base_Efficiency)) * (1 - Amp_Efficiency)

 

 

ETA:

you can often ignore the display values in the crew skill window, since

A) they haven't been right since 5.10 (some bonuses get applied to the wrong stat)

B) They have NEVER included the Sub Bonus

C) they usually don't include guild bonuses, and definitely don't include Amp bonuses

Edited by Void_Singer
Simplified
Link to comment
Share on other sites

Following Keith's check-in, I would like to consolidate suggestions for crafting improvements to a single thread.

 

We've had many threads and posts about the issues with Grade 11 crafting. This thread is not intended to argue if crafting has problems, or even necessarily what those problems are (I think they're fairly well identified at this point), but what to do about the problems.

 

Anyone who wants to contribute, please make specific suggestions or tweak someone else's suggestions. No insulting Bioware or even defending them, please; this is not about them but about the topic of crafting. Keeping our contributions steamlined and on-topic will help BW far better than any meta discussion.

 

Now, on to the suggestions!

 

  • Revert basic components to needing 2/2/2 of each material. No more 8/10/10. A slight lowering to something like 6/8/8 is not enough. Please go straight to 2/2/2. This is the most important thing for you to do.
     
  • Adjust the supply of green materials via missions. Because Grade 11 crafting needs greens predominantly, but greens are not adequately supplied in proportion to how much they are needed, add extra moderate missions to all mission and gathering skills, but especially to archaeology, scavenging, and bioanalysis (add twice as many new moderate missions to them as to slicing and the mission skills, because they additionally do not have enough missions per type of material, e.g. currently only one moderate power crystal mission, one moderate artifact fragment mission, etc.). Additionally make the other grades return some/more green materials along with their current yields. Alternatively, make moderate missions return twice as many materials (but still give archaeology, scavenging, and bioanalysis extra missions, please - or make their moderate missions return quadruple results instead). But I think this is sub-optimal because a lot of people haven't even noticed that moderate missions are the only ones that return solely greens, and many may continue to not notice.
     
  • Also because of the need for more grade 11 green materials, realign the proportion of green to blue to purple materials provided by harvesting nodes to approx. 7:2:1. At the moment, even one purple basic component take 204 greens, 72 blues, and 30 purples. (This doesn't take crits along the path to purple components into account, since people's crit rates are different. I acknowledge that in practice the requirements will be less than this, but I find it a helpful starting point for working out how much we need of each quality.) The proportion of green to blue to purple here is approximately either 6:3:1 or 7:2:1 (more precisely, 67:23:10), so that's what the average proportions offered by nodes should be. If BW have some more precise proportion to offer that takes average crit rates into account, that could be used instead. Additionally, for archaeology nodes specifically, please provide the same amount of power crystals as artifact fragments; don't split crystals between colour and power, as there seems to be an under-supply of power crystals that I imagine is coming from nodes (since we never see the amount gathered by a companion in any info window, it's hard to track).
     
  • Reverse-engineering/deconstructing *either* needs to have a lowest chance of 20% *or* an in-built pity timer that guarantees success after a certain number of attempts. My personal preference is 20% at the lowest, no matter what the grade, but I'm open to argument. The cost to RE higher levels will still be higher because higher levels cost more materials for every attempt. It's not necessary to reduce the chance to 10% or 5% on top of that.
     
  • Green items should need materials no higher than green. Blue items should need materials no higher than blue (this can include blue exotics like isotopes). Purple items should need materials no higher than purple (this can include purple exotics like matrices). Only gold items should use gold materials.
     
  • This is a comment partially on grade 11 but also partially on grades 1-10. Restore pre-6.0 mission success chance rates. Before 6.0, I do not remember ever failing a grey-difficulty mission. (If it did happen, it must've been so rare that it didn't register.) Certainly I did not, for example, fail a grade 6 mission when my skill level let me run grade 10 missions - yet, now, I do fail grade 6 missions, often enough that it stands out. This appears to be taking away with one hand while offering to give back with the other hand if we pay a price - i.e. trying to incentivize us to pursue +success rate amplifiers. But, at least for me, all it does is fuel resentment, because I never used to fail on the vast majority of missions before. It was unhelpful to make our success rate worse and hold hostage the prospect of getting it back to what it once was, under certain conditions. Even if one can re-achieve pre-6.0 success rate via amplifiers, having to swap equipment back and forth just to run missions actively makes the crafting experience worse, when 6.0 should be trying to make it better.

 

Additionally, this is a purely subjective suggestion made solely on behalf of people like me who craft for pretty things rather than stats, so it's a comment on part of crafting rather than crafting as a whole, but...

  • Please add purely cosmetic items at grade 11 (two dyes and one new colour of crystal for artifice is all you gave us; new synthweaving and armormech outfits have stats, when you could also give us empty shell outfits, armstech could get empty weapon shells, artifice empty sabers, more dyes and crystals, mounts for cybertech, etc).

 

I have cross-posted this thread to Reddit as well, with a view to hopefully gaining more useful feedback. Feel free to comment there if you prefer.

 

So basically you want to craft the best gear, with little effort ? That’s what I read in all this. Pity times massive increase to chances for crits. No effort even though everything was being posted to gtn first week. God forbid we actually have to work at getting stuff. People in MMO’s now have such a poor attitude. They don’t understand what a grind is. They have no clue how it used to be in games where you literally would have to grind items for months at a time to get the best gears.

Link to comment
Share on other sites

Following Keith's check-in, I would like to consolidate suggestions for crafting improvements to a single thread.

 

We've had many threads and posts about the issues with Grade 11 crafting. This thread is not intended to argue if crafting has problems, or even necessarily what those problems are (I think they're fairly well identified at this point), but what to do about the problems.

 

Anyone who wants to contribute, please make specific suggestions or tweak someone else's suggestions. No insulting Bioware or even defending them, please; this is not about them but about the topic of crafting. Keeping our contributions steamlined and on-topic will help BW far better than any meta discussion.

 

Now, on to the suggestions!

 

  • Revert basic components to needing 2/2/2 of each material. No more 8/10/10. A slight lowering to something like 6/8/8 is not enough. Please go straight to 2/2/2. This is the most important thing for you to do.
     
  • Adjust the supply of green materials via missions. Because Grade 11 crafting needs greens predominantly, but greens are not adequately supplied in proportion to how much they are needed, add extra moderate missions to all mission and gathering skills, but especially to archaeology, scavenging, and bioanalysis (add twice as many new moderate missions to them as to slicing and the mission skills, because they additionally do not have enough missions per type of material, e.g. currently only one moderate power crystal mission, one moderate artifact fragment mission, etc.). Additionally make the other grades return some/more green materials along with their current yields. Alternatively, make moderate missions return twice as many materials (but still give archaeology, scavenging, and bioanalysis extra missions, please - or make their moderate missions return quadruple results instead). But I think this is sub-optimal because a lot of people haven't even noticed that moderate missions are the only ones that return solely greens, and many may continue to not notice.
     
  • Also because of the need for more grade 11 green materials, realign the proportion of green to blue to purple materials provided by harvesting nodes to approx. 7:2:1. At the moment, even one purple basic component take 204 greens, 72 blues, and 30 purples. (This doesn't take crits along the path to purple components into account, since people's crit rates are different. I acknowledge that in practice the requirements will be less than this, but I find it a helpful starting point for working out how much we need of each quality.) The proportion of green to blue to purple here is approximately either 6:3:1 or 7:2:1 (more precisely, 67:23:10), so that's what the average proportions offered by nodes should be. If BW have some more precise proportion to offer that takes average crit rates into account, that could be used instead. Additionally, for archaeology nodes specifically, please provide the same amount of power crystals as artifact fragments; don't split crystals between colour and power, as there seems to be an under-supply of power crystals that I imagine is coming from nodes (since we never see the amount gathered by a companion in any info window, it's hard to track).
     
  • Reverse-engineering/deconstructing *either* needs to have a lowest chance of 20% *or* an in-built pity timer that guarantees success after a certain number of attempts. My personal preference is 20% at the lowest, no matter what the grade, but I'm open to argument. The cost to RE higher levels will still be higher because higher levels cost more materials for every attempt. It's not necessary to reduce the chance to 10% or 5% on top of that.
     
  • Green items should need materials no higher than green. Blue items should need materials no higher than blue (this can include blue exotics like isotopes). Purple items should need materials no higher than purple (this can include purple exotics like matrices). Only gold items should use gold materials.
     
  • This is a comment partially on grade 11 but also partially on grades 1-10. Restore pre-6.0 mission success chance rates. Before 6.0, I do not remember ever failing a grey-difficulty mission. (If it did happen, it must've been so rare that it didn't register.) Certainly I did not, for example, fail a grade 6 mission when my skill level let me run grade 10 missions - yet, now, I do fail grade 6 missions, often enough that it stands out. This appears to be taking away with one hand while offering to give back with the other hand if we pay a price - i.e. trying to incentivize us to pursue +success rate amplifiers. But, at least for me, all it does is fuel resentment, because I never used to fail on the vast majority of missions before. It was unhelpful to make our success rate worse and hold hostage the prospect of getting it back to what it once was, under certain conditions. Even if one can re-achieve pre-6.0 success rate via amplifiers, having to swap equipment back and forth just to run missions actively makes the crafting experience worse, when 6.0 should be trying to make it better.

 

Additionally, this is a purely subjective suggestion made solely on behalf of people like me who craft for pretty things rather than stats, so it's a comment on part of crafting rather than crafting as a whole, but...

  • Please add purely cosmetic items at grade 11 (two dyes and one new colour of crystal for artifice is all you gave us; new synthweaving and armormech outfits have stats, when you could also give us empty shell outfits, armstech could get empty weapon shells, artifice empty sabers, more dyes and crystals, mounts for cybertech, etc).

 

I have cross-posted this thread to Reddit as well, with a view to hopefully gaining more useful feedback. Feel free to comment there if you prefer.

 

I agree with all of these suggestions accept maybe the reverting back to 2/2/2. If they increase the drop as they did, and add a guaranteed amount of greens to mission results (I would think at least 8-10), then 2/2/2 may be too easy. If they do all the other suggestions on you list, I can see maybe a 6/8/8 or something being harder, but workable (especially if they raise the RE percentage to at lease 20%...so you don't have to waste an average of 20 mods just to get a RE pop).

 

The problem (as I see it) is that they didn't make one thing harder, they made all things harder (not enough greens per mission, MASSIVELY increased materials requirements, multiple levels to craft EACH higher level, lower RE rates, etc. ) And, these difficulties didn't add up, they MULTIPLIED the difficulty. It's so hard to get mats for blues, that most crafters can't afford to waste 20 blues (or more with bad luck) just to get one purple recipe (and that not even taking into account actually crafting purples).

 

I would also add one suggestion to your list: if they are going to require conquest rewards to craft anything, then they need to massively increase the number of mats conquests reward you (or it is going to take forever to get conquest mats to craft anything). It shouldn't take 1-2 months to gather mats just to craft augments for ONE of your characters. The gear will be worthless (as new gear comes out) by the time you craft gear for multiple characters.

Link to comment
Share on other sites

Anyone who wants to contribute, please make specific suggestions or tweak someone else's suggestions.

 

  • Also because of the need for more grade 11 green materials, realign the proportion of green to blue to purple materials provided by harvesting nodes to approx. 7:2:1.

 

A small addition to this one, because I've deliberately gathered with my Materials Inventory open to see what quantities I'm receiving.

 

It would be useful to tighten up the range of the materials returned from the gathering nodes specifically, I've been getting anything from 3 to 20 of the same material (in this case Bioanalysis mats). Ideally this needs to be a much tighter range, with a smaller percentage variance.

 

8 to 16 of greens would be an ideal range, if the base is 12 that would be a +/- 33.3% range, what I've been seeing while gathering is a range more akin to +/- 75-80% which is far too inconsistent and unnecessarily increases the time required to gather materials.

 

Obviously this depends on whether the Grade 11 schematics get reverted to 2/2/2 and the number of steps required decreased.

 

The second point that needs to be made is Crew Mission skills. I'm seeing Rich yields on Diplomacy for one type of material only, the other type simply isn't there. A pass through of all of the Grade 11 Crew Mission skills to ensure that each type of material is equally represented at each tier of mission wouldn't go amiss. That seems more like an oversight than anything else.

Edited by Transcendent
Link to comment
Share on other sites

Additionally, this is a purely subjective suggestion made solely on behalf of people like me who craft for pretty things rather than stats, so it's a comment on part of crafting rather than crafting as a whole, but...

  • Please add purely cosmetic items at grade 11 (two dyes and one new colour of crystal for artifice is all you gave us; new synthweaving and armormech outfits have stats, when you could also give us empty shell outfits, armstech could get empty weapon shells, artifice empty sabers, more dyes and crystals, mounts for cybertech, etc).

I agree with the basic idea here, although it's worth noting that Outfit Designer means that armour pieces *are* cosmetic, except that while OD ignores weight restrictions, it does obey class-lock and level-lock restrictions, meaning that lowbie characters can't use grade 11 statted gear in OD.

Link to comment
Share on other sites

In my view the OPs suggestions do not go far enough. Grade 11 crafting should be brought in line with Grade 1 - 10 crafting. I do not understand why it was felt necessary to change that pattern in the first place - it can't have been to slow down gearing, some players were full 306 with a day or two of launch simply by chain running flashpoints.

 


  •  
  • Material nodes should give green materials only, blue and purple materials should come from missions. Missions, along with white materials (of which there should only be 1 for grade 11) are your credit and time sink.
  • Green items should require green and white materials only.
  • Blue items should add blue mission items to the list of requirements (no isotopes)
  • Purple items should add purple mission items to the list of requirements (no matrices)
  • Gold items are the only ones that should require exotic materials, including isotopes and matrices
  • The amounts of materials required should match previous grades.
  • Jawa junk costs should be reduced to match previous grades also, to offset this they should be removed from slicing nodes.
  • Training costs should be reduced considerably or dropped altogather - 1.5m per toon is a large barrier to entry.
  • RE chance should be increased to at least 20% if the previous value of 60% is deemed too high.

Link to comment
Share on other sites

Thanks to everyone who has responded so far, both here and on Reddit. :) I hope we can keep discussion going.

 

So basically you want to craft the best gear, with little effort ? That’s what I read in all this. Pity times massive increase to chances for crits. No effort even though everything was being posted to gtn first week. God forbid we actually have to work at getting stuff.

A pity timer is not my preferred resolution for the current issue of REing / deconstruction being too wasteful and too RNG-dependent. My preference is to increase the base % chance so that it's never lower than 20%. Main reason is that (as far as I know) there is no pity timer mechanic anywhere in SWTOR currently, and I don't think our best bet to fix things quickly is to ask Bioware to introduce wholly new mechanics. Plus one of the main complaints is that grade 11 crafting has been made much more difficult than all previous grades, so our aim is to restore it to parity, not necessarily to make it any easier than it was before. Nonetheless, in some of the threads discussing crafting, the idea was mentioned that it shouldn't be possible to (for instance) RE 40 items and still not succeed, so I wanted to represent that concern in this topic.

 

By the way, the fact that some people get lucky with RNG does not change the overall statistical situation in the playerbase.

 

Also, it's important not to consider only those who enter the crafting market: many people like to craft solely for themselves, to be "self-sufficient." But, for the record, the best way to keep the crafting market competitive is to not artificially raise the difficulty. If crafting is pretty easy to get into, then anyone can do it if they want, so no one is beholden to "the market" - people simply choose to craft if they want to, and choose to buy from others if they don't feel like crafting. On the other hand, if crafting is artificially restricted, then a small number of players with massive resources to sink into an expensive process will be able to hold everyone else over a barrel. That's not good for the game.

 

I agree with all of these suggestions accept maybe the reverting back to 2/2/2. If they increase the drop as they did, and add a guaranteed amount of greens to mission results (I would think at least 8-10), then 2/2/2 may be too easy. If they do all the other suggestions on you list, I can see maybe a 6/8/8 or something being harder, but workable (especially if they raise the RE percentage to at lease 20%...so you don't have to waste an average of 20 mods just to get a RE pop).

 

The problem (as I see it) is that they didn't make one thing harder, they made all things harder (not enough greens per mission, MASSIVELY increased materials requirements, multiple levels to craft EACH higher level, lower RE rates, etc. ) And, these difficulties didn't add up, they MULTIPLIED the difficulty. It's so hard to get mats for blues, that most crafters can't afford to waste 20 blues (or more with bad luck) just to get one purple recipe (and that not even taking into account actually crafting purples).

I agree that the problem is that they made everything harder. However, I maintain that basic components need to go back to 2/2/2, in parity with all previous grades. I would have more flexibility about some of my other suggestions (such as number of extra moderate missions to be added or extra green resources to be returned by missions) if the 2/2/2 change was made.

 

As it stands, current grade 11 moderate missions give a decent amount of materials but only when measured against a 2/2/2 requirement. A grade 11 moderate mission will generally return 10 green materials on regular success and 20 on a critical success. This is a higher amount than the highest-yield missions of previous grades. For instance, if I run a rich grade 1 archaeology mission for power crystals, I will receive (to be the best of my recollection) 8 rubat crystals on success or 10 on a crit. However, this is counter-balanced by the fact that I am able to run other concurrent missions to get more rubat crystals if I wish, whereas there is only one grade 11 mission that returns solely green power crystals. Further pressure is then applied by the fact that I need x3 green materials to make blue and x9 to make purple components, a requirement that doesn't exist in any other grade. So my view is that, yes, basic components need to go down to 2/2/2, and if that is done then additionally we need either missions to return some more green materials, or some extra missions returning green materials to be added (but not double and quadruple in this scenario).

Edited by Estelindis
Link to comment
Share on other sites

While I do think much of the crafting world is going to be dead until they fix it. The biggest barrier is Solid Resource Matrix. Having this only come from conquests is killing the ability of the vast majority crafters. At the moment, I cannot craft anything unless I am willing to spend millions off the GTN to even make a green that I am going to RE at least 10 times to get the upgrade. Legendary Embers are the same thing.

 

Whoever at BW decided to go this route should have his paycheck be paid out in penny's, nickels, and dimes until he decides to change it. And maybe for good measure, we should throw in some RNG to make it interesting.

Link to comment
Share on other sites

My views are slightly different but I do feel there need to be changes so here are my suggestions:

 

1 - Augments

Fix the SRM issue (conquest mat). SRMs are too few as a reward for the amount you need to craft and in particular get schems from deconstruction. This is a combination of the low drop rate from conquest rewards, the low chance (5%) of getting such a schem and the fact that blue schems already need a lot of SRMs.

 

Possible fixes:

a) Increase the availability of SRMs

b) Increase the chance on a schem from deconstruction

c) Lower the amount of SRMs needed for blue schems

 

SRMs are now solely available through conquest and particularly based on how well your guild performs and how many alts you get over 50k. I think that's too punitive for people in smaller guilds or who don't play many alts. Perhaps they should drop 1-X from renown crates so that people have more available based on play time rather than playing in a certain way only and having to put many alts through conquest.

 

The chance of a schem should be at least doubled to 10% in order to be less punitive.

 

The amount of SRMS for blue schems should be reduced to 1-2.

 

My idea is that these 3 things are done at the same time, not just one of them.

 

2 - Green mat availability

One of the core issues that I see currently is that it's actually too hard to get green mats from gathering missions. When you have scavenging at 700 there are only 2 missions that are really useful: they grey ones. The green ones give a little bit of green mats but fewer and the yellow and orange missions give zero green mats. To add insult to injury (a bit dramatic but it fits), you can have r50 companions and legacy perks set and still it is possible for your companions to FAIL a greyed out mission. Then on top of it the jawa junk situation is out of control as well: 200 junk for one green item is NOT a fair trade even with increased drops of jawa junk.

 

Possible fixes:

a) Give more green mats from missions

b) Don't let grey missions fail anymore

c) Reduce jawa junk cost for r11 materials

 

The idea here is to have grey and green missions give ample green mats. Green missions currently give a pittance or give 2 more grey missions.

 

I do not think it's fair that r50 companions can fail grey missions so that needs to stop

 

Finally the cost of 200 jawa junk for 1 green mat is preposterous. I am now stacking more jawa junk than before in my storage because it's just not worth it. I personally feel that it should be reduced to 10 jawa junk but remove them as rewards from gathering missions that fail and from slicing nodes. There is entirely too much jawa junk but even a stack of 9999 jawa junk can only almost buy 50 mats. Considering how many mats you need, that's just plain stupid.

 

In my view jawa junk should only come from deconstruction and the amounts should make sense there. It's become an annoying currency right now.

 

3 - Crafting bandwidth

What I mean here is the question of what you can do with crafting or how useful it is. Currently the mods and accessories you can craft are useless because they are obsolete already because of the gearing system giving out better gear so easily. Beyond augments and stims, there's nothing really useful that I've seen so far. There's an occasional tactical but that's it. I can't re mods or anything for schems so what gives with that?

 

The solution lies simply in the concept of making crafting more part of endgame gearing by giving it more options but it's too big a thing to tackle in detail here. One thing I'd like to see is the addition of amplifiers as craftable upgrades, which would solve another problem as well. Perhaps a system where you craft and amplifier and then have an item (shell, mod) that you put in the modification station with a new enhance option which absorbs the amplifiers.

 

-------

 

Overall I am not against crafting being a bit more difficult and costly than it was. It was a joke before to be honest. But there are some things, like I mentioned above, that are out of whack. Higher mat costs are fine but it shouldn't be so difficult to get green mats from gathering missions for example. That makes the system feel punitive rather than fun.

Link to comment
Share on other sites

I do not think it's fair that r50 companions can fail grey missions so that needs to stop

 

Actually I think this is something I'd like to add my viewpoint on. Considering the expense and credit sink involved in getting multiple companions on multiple crafting or gathering alts to Rank 50, I honestly believe that the chance for failure on crew skill missions for Rank 50 companions should be zero.

 

If BioWare want incentive's for people to use up their credits, this is one way of doing it, make it a perk of Rank 50 companions to have zero failure rate on crew skill missions alongside an increased chance of critical success. As it stands with 6.0 it seems there is no incentive at all to have Rank 50 companions aside from faster gathering, which can be overcome by simply having multiple alts with the same crew skills.

Link to comment
Share on other sites

So basically you want to craft the best gear, with little effort ? That’s what I read in all this. Pity times massive increase to chances for crits. No effort even though everything was being posted to gtn first week. God forbid we actually have to work at getting stuff. People in MMO’s now have such a poor attitude. They don’t understand what a grind is. They have no clue how it used to be in games where you literally would have to grind items for months at a time to get the best gears.

 

I do. I used to play SWG where you needed to grind Krayt Dragons, Nightsisters, and whatever else to try and get subcomponents that you would then take to a crafter, usually another real person, perhaps in your guild. You would know them because they searched every inch of every planet for good resources, placed as many harvesters as their lot limit would allow. They had a shop where you could see the quality of their workmanship. You'd entrust those hard-work-acquired components and give them to this crafter who would make you the best whatever ... armor piece, weapon. Don't forget carrying a trader into the Death Watch Bunker to craft your Mandalorian Armor.

 

Give it a rest. This is not about working hard, or being lazy. This isn't about an interesting or challenging system. I've seen what that is, and this game will never hold a candle to SWG's crafting system even after the NGE.

 

I've got no problem "working hard," "stockpiling materials," etc. What I have a problem with is:

 

1. Spending about 20 cycles of four characters with rank 50 companions, all eight sent out on gathering missions and my fifth harvesting bio materials in the wild ...

2. Crafting 24 stacks of artifact-quality biochem consumables

3. Trying to reverse engineer those stacks at a 5% RE chance

4. Getting no schematics from that and getting materials completely unrelated to my crafting profession as a result.

 

I said it in the other thread and I'll repeat it here: The resource requirements and nested components might be tolerable IF the RE chance wasn't simultaneously punishingly nerfed and doesn't return nearly enough materials to make ONE end product. There is no amount of hard work that can "ensure" a RE result, and that's what I have a problem with. In SWG, if I managed to loot that legendary component, I could take it to a good crafter and with good resources have a reasonable expectation of the outcome. That's because the crafter would have worked hard to have good resources. That's what I consider to be worth it.

 

Sorry for taking the thread off topic, Estelindis.

Link to comment
Share on other sites

A rare conquest mat, in quantities greater than any single character can earn in a week, should NEVER have been a requirement on (blue) training level crafts... and should be removed as a requirement across the board

 

Materials costs for Item modifications should be considerably LOWER than entire gear pieces, by a minimum of HALF

 

Crew Misisons return values should be tightened up... qualities should not be randomized, rich and wealthy missions should return a rough ratio of 1:2:6 ( or whatever the ratio is after reducing craft costs)

 

G11 craft requirements should be cut in half as a starting point.... I get that it was a real cute way to disguise how utterly draconian craft changes were behind bigger numbers, but there's no disguising the explosion of time and cost requirements.... I know when it takes 4 times as many materials runs to make the same number of crafts.

 

fix the bloody mats storage. Default Sort is [Category > Grade > Quality (eg artifact) > Type (eg Compound) > Alphabetical] Filters are Grade / Quality / search-match. Categories for craft skills for assembly parts, vendor mats go in gather skill category, and items that are also currency do NOT go in mats storage. if you can't do that, then just give u 5 old style storage bays and let us figure it out ourselves.

 

 

And it might help to remind the designers that outside of reusables and augments NOTHING crafted is even remotely max gear. There is no reason it should be harder to craft basic armor and mods than it is to earn much better gear through other content. Nor should it take the same amount of Rare Materials to make an augment which IS max gear, as an armor piece which isn't even halfway there.

Link to comment
Share on other sites

Remove conquest material from any item that isn't conquest related and / or isn't an alternative method for obtaining an end-game 306 equivalent item.

 

Adjust mission returns so the ratio of greens matches that of crafting requirements, and such that they follow basic mission logic (the higher the skill, cost, time - the more materials, including greens).

 

Adjust crafting materials costs and or mission returns to bring total time required to craft an item closer to 6.0 levels (e,g, decrease materials required and / or increase mission returns).

 

Return mission success / failure rates to pre 6.0 levels (it appears an addition 5% or so has been added to all missions).

 

Massively increase RE chance - 5% is ridiculous and has the potential of leaving a significant number of players burning through hours of crafting without making any progress (effort should be rewarded - not dumb luck).

 

Display critical, success / failure, and time modifiers for crafting to players - including base information + companion bonuses + guild bonuses + amplifiers + legacy + etc.

 

Make all crafted items relevant - items such as basic gear and modifications should be craft-able (e.g. use basic gathering / mission materials) at close to 306 levels (in 6.0, early gear was 230, crafting was 228, so 304-ish).

 

Requiring the amount of materials (especially the inclusion of conquest materials) along with multiple iterations against an extremely low RE just for a chance to learn something well below what drops from easy mode Hammer Station makes no sense.

Edited by DawnAskham
Link to comment
Share on other sites

The moderate level missions give exclusive green crafting items, if the comp crits…..you can get 20-30 green mats. The abundant missions reward green and blue. These are all I have been running. It also saves you some creds.

 

I would suggest farming mats while doing dallies...it helps significantly.

 

Also, If you have not figured it out yet....this expansion is all about alts. The more the better. For instance, I am running 3-4 scavangers, 3-4 archeologists, 2 plant pickers, and two slicers while playing. Although I have only managed 5 lvl 75 toons, all of my 70s are farming. A lvl 70 toon can hit 700 in all crafting designations.....

 

/shrug....what I am doing.

Edited by Nickodemous
Link to comment
Share on other sites

Following Keith's check-in, I would like to consolidate suggestions for crafting improvements to a single thread.

 

We've had many threads and posts about the issues with Grade 11 crafting. This thread is not intended to argue if crafting has problems, or even necessarily what those problems are (I think they're fairly well identified at this point), but what to do about the problems.

 

Anyone who wants to contribute, please make specific suggestions or tweak someone else's suggestions. No insulting Bioware or even defending them, please; this is not about them but about the topic of crafting. Keeping our contributions steamlined and on-topic will help BW far better than any meta discussion.

 

Now, on to the suggestions!

 

  • Revert basic components to needing 2/2/2 of each material. No more 8/10/10. A slight lowering to something like 6/8/8 is not enough. Please go straight to 2/2/2. This is the most important thing for you to do.
     
  • Adjust the supply of green materials via missions. Because Grade 11 crafting needs greens predominantly, but greens are not adequately supplied in proportion to how much they are needed, add extra moderate missions to all mission and gathering skills, but especially to archaeology, scavenging, and bioanalysis (add twice as many new moderate missions to them as to slicing and the mission skills, because they additionally do not have enough missions per type of material, e.g. currently only one moderate power crystal mission, one moderate artifact fragment mission, etc.). Additionally make the other grades return some/more green materials along with their current yields. Alternatively, make moderate missions return twice as many materials (but still give archaeology, scavenging, and bioanalysis extra missions, please - or make their moderate missions return quadruple results instead). But I think this is sub-optimal because a lot of people haven't even noticed that moderate missions are the only ones that return solely greens, and many may continue to not notice.
     
  • Also because of the need for more grade 11 green materials, realign the proportion of green to blue to purple materials provided by harvesting nodes to approx. 7:2:1. At the moment, even one purple basic component take 204 greens, 72 blues, and 30 purples. (This doesn't take crits along the path to purple components into account, since people's crit rates are different. I acknowledge that in practice the requirements will be less than this, but I find it a helpful starting point for working out how much we need of each quality.) The proportion of green to blue to purple here is approximately either 6:3:1 or 7:2:1 (more precisely, 67:23:10), so that's what the average proportions offered by nodes should be. If BW have some more precise proportion to offer that takes average crit rates into account, that could be used instead. Additionally, for archaeology nodes specifically, please provide the same amount of power crystals as artifact fragments; don't split crystals between colour and power, as there seems to be an under-supply of power crystals that I imagine is coming from nodes (since we never see the amount gathered by a companion in any info window, it's hard to track).
     
  • Reverse-engineering/deconstructing *either* needs to have a lowest chance of 20% *or* an in-built pity timer that guarantees success after a certain number of attempts. My personal preference is 20% at the lowest, no matter what the grade, but I'm open to argument. The cost to RE higher levels will still be higher because higher levels cost more materials for every attempt. It's not necessary to reduce the chance to 10% or 5% on top of that.
     
  • Green items should need materials no higher than green. Blue items should need materials no higher than blue (this can include blue exotics like isotopes). Purple items should need materials no higher than purple (this can include purple exotics like matrices). Only gold items should use gold materials.
     
  • This is a comment partially on grade 11 but also partially on grades 1-10. Restore pre-6.0 mission success chance rates. Before 6.0, I do not remember ever failing a grey-difficulty mission. (If it did happen, it must've been so rare that it didn't register.) Certainly I did not, for example, fail a grade 6 mission when my skill level let me run grade 10 missions - yet, now, I do fail grade 6 missions, often enough that it stands out. This appears to be taking away with one hand while offering to give back with the other hand if we pay a price - i.e. trying to incentivize us to pursue +success rate amplifiers. But, at least for me, all it does is fuel resentment, because I never used to fail on the vast majority of missions before. It was unhelpful to make our success rate worse and hold hostage the prospect of getting it back to what it once was, under certain conditions. Even if one can re-achieve pre-6.0 success rate via amplifiers, having to swap equipment back and forth just to run missions actively makes the crafting experience worse, when 6.0 should be trying to make it better.

 

Additionally, this is a purely subjective suggestion made solely on behalf of people like me who craft for pretty things rather than stats, so it's a comment on part of crafting rather than crafting as a whole, but...

  • Please add purely cosmetic items at grade 11 (two dyes and one new colour of crystal for artifice is all you gave us; new synthweaving and armormech outfits have stats, when you could also give us empty shell outfits, armstech could get empty weapon shells, artifice empty sabers, more dyes and crystals, mounts for cybertech, etc).

 

I have cross-posted this thread to Reddit as well, with a view to hopefully gaining more useful feedback. Feel free to comment there if you prefer.

 

I like the intent behind all of these, but I would also like to add that the slicing mat requirements from most of the lower-grade (green & blue at least) items should be REMOVED. It is now not possible to craft basic things (green/blue lightsaber hilts) using a single character unless you spend an enormous amount of credits or jawa junk on slicing mats. I know people can "run alts", but this is one of the things that exacerbates the large cost of crafting in this expansion.

Link to comment
Share on other sites

Other MMOs offer quests to go after specific items required for crafting. In the case where an item is more valuable than one which, say requires a two-part quest, the quest has three or more parts. However, all parts are doable solo, or in the case of the need to run an "FP styled instance" the player receives bonuses to allow them to solo it. In short the quests system can make it necessary to do a number of tasks to receive an object, but those tasks are doable and not excessive for the item level of the reward.
Link to comment
Share on other sites

So basically you want to craft the best gear, with little effort ? That’s what I read in all this. Pity times massive increase to chances for crits. No effort even though everything was being posted to gtn first week. God forbid we actually have to work at getting stuff. People in MMO’s now have such a poor attitude. They don’t understand what a grind is. They have no clue how it used to be in games where you literally would have to grind items for months at a time to get the best gears.

 

- Wait a minute... Didn't someone post in the very beginning of this thread that only constructive suggestions need be submitted; that there be no bashing of BioWare nor other persons posting in the thread. I find your copying that very statement and then insulting everyone posting here at once to be worthy of nomination to the "2019 MMO Forums, Troll of the Year Award".

Link to comment
Share on other sites

- Wait a minute... Didn't someone post in the very beginning of this thread that only constructive suggestions need be submitted; that there be no bashing of BioWare nor other persons posting in the thread. I find your copying that very statement and then insulting everyone posting here at once to be worthy of nomination to the "2019 MMO Forums, Troll of the Year Award".

 

You can nominate me for what you like. I have every right to post how and where I want too. Just because someone makes up their own rules does not mean I have follow them. I completely disagree with the entire premise of the post. I feel that crafting is ridiculously easy in the game already and you all only want to make it easier. It’s a joke as is. Instant gratification is not good in games, it makes them boring and people leave quicker when they don’t have any real challenges. What’s the point.

Link to comment
Share on other sites

×
×
  • Create New...