Feb 14, 2012

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Breakdown: The Cybertech Mods You Want!

Breakdown is designed to to fill that stressful void while Star Wars: The Old Republic is down for maintenance. Each Tuesday morning, we’ll look at a topic and try to break it down to the basics. In the end, we hope to educate, entertain, and prevent you from having your own Breakdown!

This week’s Breakdown is about Modifications! If you’re an avid customizable gear user  you know that keeping up with all of the different modifications for your gear can be dizzying. Every class, and every spec, has something different you want to focus on. On top of that, once you hit the 30s, the number of options you have grow considerably! If you haven’t already, go back and read my previous article on Enhancements (there were so many they needed their own article!) This week, we’re going to break down all the different types of Modification mods and Armoring mods available to you, so that you know which ones you want to slot into your favorite set of custom gear.

First, let’s start with some definitions:

When you’re a “lowbie” (below level 30) You’re going to use one of the “Basic” mods. These terms work for both Armoring and Modifications.

  • Might = Strength (Jedi Knight & Sith Warrior)
  • Reflex = Aim (Trooper & Bounty Hunter)
  • Resolve = Will (Consular & Inquisitor)
  • Skill = Cunning (Smuggler & Agent)

22 Series: Each time you go up a level range, the series of Enhancements, Modifications, Armoring, Hilts, Barrels, etc… will increase. The 22 series is the highest level that crafters can make (not to be confused with the different qualities such as prototype and artifact). Every time you increase in rating, you’re increasing in the level requirement and the magnitude of the stats that are on that particular item modification.

Click to Enlarge

Rating: If you look carefully at the Armoring mods, they will have something that shows you the rating. In the above example, it says “Armor Rating 70.” This doesn’t really mean anything until you slot it into a piece of customizable armor, and that will depend on if it is heavy, medium, or light armor. The higher the rating, the higher the value of armor. Artifact pieces will have the same level requirement (such as level 31) but instead of being rating 70, they will be considerably higher, granting you a better bonus (and better stats) for the same level range.

Now without further ado, I give you Ask A Jedi’s newest Breakdown crafting modification chart:

Click to Enlarge

This chart includes the previous one on Enhancements, as well as Modification mods and Armoring mods. The bonuses marked in here are for the basic prototype quality that anyone can make. Prior to level 31, you’ll want to use the “lowbie” ones I mentioned above. Also, the italicized and struck out Enhancements are the repeats (exact duplicate) of the one above it.

Hopefully this will help you next time you decide to peruse the Galactic Trade Market (and remember that the one on Nar Shaddaa is cross faction), or the next time you hit up your local crafter. As always, I hope I’ve helped educate you on more of the basics, and I hope you’ll join me next week when the servers are down for another Breakdown!

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Feb 3, 2012

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Blasters, Beggars & Credits: The 10-49 Brackets Mean 10-49 Gear Is Back

Some players do it for glory. Some do it for infamy. Some like to accumulate the most points, or explore the far reaches of the worlds they inhabit. This, however, is not a column for those people. This is a column for those people who, quietly or not, enjoy making money so that their digital avatar can sleep on large piles of cash.

PvP has never been a great focus of mine – though currently I am playing it a lot more than I participated in previous MMO titles. I have found it fun without the awful side effects that so often plague it – though it’s far from a perfect system (see Bags, Champion).

However, many players have made it their main focus. Some of them are 50 and at the expertise cap, and some of them are still at low levels. And today, we are going to specifically zero in on the 10-49 bracket.

Recently level 50s were given their own PvP bracket, with all the other levels in their own. This segregation has, of course, come as a relief to the many lower-level players and alts who enjoyed pvp but found it frustrating to fight level 50s who were doing fantastic amounts of damage.

Now, however, they have their own non-expertise and non-50 bracket, where the higher levels have an advantage in abilities, but everyone is pretty close with the bolster mechanic. And there is a market to sell to these folks, provided you can make armor, mods, or weapons at the right points.

The first big one is level 49. Level 49 is where many of the PvP players will focus an entire level, both to farm valor and have enough commendations to purchase gear. However, that creates a market of people that could have a major advantage. As a Synthweaver I have lots of level 49 patterns that can easily translate into much higher pvp damage. Many of those remain viable into the end-game and are about as good as the tier 1 gear, which, of course, has created a nice market for me.

Mod-able gear is another possibility (sadly, I haven’t tried it). Selling a few cosmetic pieces could potentially net some money as well. In general the materials are quite simple to gather for them, such as the Jedi Initiates Vestments. There’s also a noticeable change around the 30s for leveling, and I would highly suggest selling anything in the 30-38 range if you can; 42-49 is also a nice range, but I would focus more on mods until the 49 gear.

Now, there are a few other levels (10 and 14 being rather big as well) that you could focus on as well. Some people will level alts to do the same. There are two level ranges to stay away from: level 20 and level 40. The gear that can be had from the pvp vendors at those levels is quite good, and competing against commendations is a losing battle. However, as a Cybertech you should look into selling mods that are 2 – 6 levels higher than that gear, especially the artifact-quality (if you have the time and resources to commit to getting it).

The twinks are coming; some are already there. Keep this in mind while leveling professions – anything with high endurance is a great bet to reverse engineer to get a better version.

Beggar’s Tip: I see a lot of people bemoaning Synthweaving and Armormech as being non-moneymakers. Yes, I can say our potential was behind a bit at level 50 initially; Cybertech, with all its toys and ship parts, made a few individuals incredibly wealthy. At least on Jung Ma Republic side, the spaceship business has gotten a little cut-throat and made it slightly less efficient as a money-maker (although my friend reports that his armorings and mods are selling quite well). However, if you didn’t guess right at the start of the game, don’t fret – you can still make money.

Now, competing against slotted gear doesn’t work so well – if you get lucky and get something with an augment slot, by all means run up the price and sell. But there are two slots where slotted items are rare to the point of being non-existent: waists and wrists. As a synthweaver, I have focus almost exclusively on wrist patterns for RE and do my best to maintain a stock. It’s especially helpful that a lot of those patterns are level 49, but they sell extremely well because, until someone gets into the end-game, there isn’t a better option.

Esseles/Black Talon hardmode drops the Columi token, as does Karagga’s Palace, but judging from the guilds on my server, not a ton of people are running them; similarly, the PVP bags don’t drop tokens in any pattern and are unpredictable. So yes, make wrists and waists and reap the profits (at least, until people come in here and read this column).

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Jan 31, 2012

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Breakdown: Enhancements and You!

Breakdown is designed to to fill that stressful void while Star Wars: The Old Republic is down for maintenance. Each Tuesday morning, we’ll look at a topic and try to break it down to the basics. In the end, we hope to educate, entertain, and prevent you from having your own Breakdown!

If you follow the official TOR forums at all, you will see more than a few threads repeating themselves trying to clarify some of the basic features of Star Wars: The Old Republic. Here in Breakdown, we’ll try to present all the currently known facts about how the game works in an easy to read format. Hopefully, we can clear up a few misconceptions, and answer a few questions; maybe we will even fill you in on something you didn’t know.

This week’s Breakdown is about Enhancements! If you’re an Artificer or a player over level 30, you know that the enhancements go from only having a few options, to having several dozen (about 56 at my last count). Enhancements come in almost every arrangement of secondary stats you could want, and they come in multiple quality grades; each one more difficult to craft than the next. This week, we’re going to break down all the different types available to you, so that you know which ones you want to slot into your favorite set of custom gear.

First, let’s start with some definitions:

Primary Stats: These are things like Strength, Endurance, Willpower, etc… They have a direct relation to how your character performs. Each class has a primary stat which increases almost everything they do.

Secondary Stats: These are derivative stats like Crit Rating, Surge, Power, etc.. and they are merely bonuses to your character’s performance. Secondary Stats, unlike Primary, are affected by diminishing returns. It has also been rumored that Power is not affected by diminishing returns.

Enhancement: This is the name of a specific modification slot in gear. Enhancements are universal, in that they are on both weapons and armor. Enhancements themselves can be purchased for commendations, or bought from an Artifice Crafter.

Enhancements can come in [Premium], [Prototype], and [Artifact] quality; they will always have Endurance on them, and then 2 other Secondary stats. The reason there are so many different combinations is due to the fact that you can get those 3 stats in different values.

Here is an example:

Acute vs. Finesse

Acute vs. Finesse

Both of these enhancements have the same 3 stats, but each has a different value. The important thing when choosing an Enhancement is to figure out which stat is most important to you.

Now, let’s get on to the list! I am using the green version, because they are the most widely available. Higher quality versions will have higher values, but the proportions will remain the same. (Also note there are duplicates in here which I will show, but strike out. These are covered elsewhere on the list.)

As you can see, there are many duplicates, and with time maybe this will be fixed to help fill in a few of the missing combos.

Hopefully this will help you next time you decide to peruse the Galactic Trade Market (and remember that the one on Nar Shaddaa is cross faction), or the next time you hit up your local Artificer. As always, I hope I’ve helped educate you on more of the basics, and I hope you’ll join me next week when the servers are down for another Breakdown!

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Jan 11, 2012

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Ask A Jedi: Commendations, Reverse Engineering, And Game Settings

Stand aside Master Gnost-Dural! The Ask A Jedi crew is here to answer all of your burning questions about Star Wars: The Old Republic! Powered by R2-Db’s question and answer feature, we will answer the highest rated questions each and every week. So sit back, relax, and let us drop some knowledge on you, Ask A Jedi-style!

To start us off this week, MammaGamer asks What has the best drop rate for Hutta Commendations? Well, unfortunately the game is too new to have definitive drop rates on items yet, but we do know that Hutta Commendations, and indeed all planetary commendations, have a chance to drop from most if not all mobs on a planet. It is probably safe to assume that commendations have a higher chance to drop from Strong or Elite mobs. So, get out there and get to “persuading” those mobs to give up their commendations!

R2-DB user Sakasa asks this question: Does reverse engineering have more then one path? For those that don’t know, when you reverse engineer a item, you have a chance to learn a new schematic of either higher quality (blue or purple) or learn a new schematic with a “prefix” that indicates the type of stats that the new item has. So the short answer is yes, there are many different schematics that you can learn through reverse engineering just a single item. For more information about reverse engineering (including what all of the prefix’s mean), check out this article from our very own Zlatto and this collaborative article from Slaign. They know way more about crafting and reverse engineering than I ever will!

Last up, ido-goldberg asked: Will SWTOR settings save for 2 PCs? Basically, he wants to know if SWTOR’s settings are saved on the server so that he can switch computers easily without having to re-enable a bunch of options. This is a tough questions because it seems that some settings are saved server-side while others are saved locally to your computer. There also doesn’t seem to be a way to (easily) copy those local settings from one computer to another.

The consensus is that keybindings are saved to the server, while UI options and graphics settings appear to be saved locally and saved per character. This means that you will have to set up those UI settings for each computer that you play SWTOR on as well as each character. I can testify that I have had to enable the extra quickslots for each character individually when I have created them and there is not a way to copy the setting from one character to another in game or to set a default layout for the UI on all my characters, newly created or not. Hopefully with the UI updates that BioWare is working on, we will see a some improvements for the ability to copy settings between characters and computers.

Remember, if you want your question answered, visit R2-DB’s question and answer web page to ask your question. If you get enough up-votes, I shall do my best to find an answer for you!

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Jan 6, 2012

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Blasters, Beggars & Credits: Missions, Gathering and Crafting!

Some players do it for glory. Some do it for infamy. Some like to accumulate the most points, or explore the far reaches of the worlds they inhabit. This, however, is not a column for those people. This is a column for those people who, quietly or not, enjoy making money so that their digital avatar can sleep on large piles of cash.

Today is a day where we talk about relative value. I will actually use some basic math, so if that turns you off, let me get you hot and bothered in another way: some people do not think things through when pricing their sales on the GTN.

Some of that has to do with not understanding how things work. In the interest of promoting a healthy server economy, let me show you something us robber barons have known for some time.

Underworld Trading produces, without a doubt, the highest demand items on the GTN. The reason? Three professions (Cybertech, Armormech, and Synthweaving) pull from its materials, and all three use the Underworld Trading metals. So the metals are used by three of the six main professions, and it serves all the crafted armor and the crafted armoring and mods to everyone.

That’s a lot of people it’s going to need to go to. Unsurprisingly, the material demand is quite high. There are two metals in particular, the artifact-quality of the 300 and 340 level, that you should pay attention to – these are Promethium and Mandalorian Iron.

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