Monday, May 7, 2012

Triumph of the Flying Jetski

My SWTOR Trooper hit level 25, and obtained his first real mount over the weekend.  It looks vaguely like a giant hovering Jet Ski, and it adds 90% to my out-of-combat travel speed.  The added effect of this boost can be overstated when you consider that all characters get a permanent 35% non-combat sprint boost at level 1 as of patch 1.2.  The mount only takes half a second to activate, but it disappears nigh-instantly upon combat, so it definitely isn't worth mounting up between packs of mobs.  Still, it's a marked increase in speed while crossing the outside world.

The big black things do not appear to be functioning cannons.
The main reason why I was able to pay the 43,000 credits for the training and the vehicle was courtesy of SWTOR's crew skill system.  Each character is allowed three professions, and it appears that the intent is to take one crafting profession, one gathering profession (which procures basic materials for the corresponding crafter), and one mission skill (which procures rare materials for the crafter, and other miscellany).  However, pretty much all mission skills appear to operate at somewhat of a net loss of credits, probably to balance out the fact that you can have two or more missions going at once while AFK. 

Instead, I've gone with Slicing - an odd gathering skill that does very little for crafting but does find literal safes full of credits scattered around the landscape.  There are also slicing missions and I've had extremely mixed luck with these, generally breaking even.  (I've heard these were more lucrative in previous patches.)  While I suppose it's hard to complain about breaking even while earning skill points, in general I'm sticking to the guaranteed returns of looting lock boxes. 

Meanwhile, my other two slots are occupied with the Biochem crafting skill and Bioanalysis gathering skill.  Bioanalysis produces all the materials I need to make common medpacks (potions) and stims (longer stat buffs) with Biochem.  There are some NPC costs associated with training and materials, but in general this is a very low cost way to obtain all of my consumables.  So, I'm basically getting everything my character needs and operating at a net profit from crewskills alone, which makes all of my quest rewards and drops pure profit. 

I hear mixed things about the other crew skills, and I can't make use of any rare recipes I learn through reverse engineering (a process in which crafters are reimbursed for destroying the common items they make for skill points) for lack of the associated mission skill.  That said, I would not hesitate to recommend this particular combination to any other newbies looking to purchase their first speeder.  



5 comments:

  1. Well, to be more exact, it's not the combination of crew skills, it's just slicing to be honest. Slicing itself provides in quite a bit of credits. Add the fact that you can actually get rare recipes from the slicing missions and the credits really start rolling in.

    I personally don't see Biochem stuff selling well though, since you can actually buy the cheap stims from the medbots at the graveyards, but I might be wrong.

    One last note is that, the rare mats that you need to make the Rare medpacks/stims come from Diplomacy :) though it does eat up cash quite quickly...

    ReplyDelete
  2. Yeah, LifeDeathSoul pretty much nailed it.

    Slicing used to be ridiculously profitable. If I didn't have 125k or more on a character by level 25 then something was wrong. Before the initial nerf I leveled every character with Slicing, period.

    Now I level about half of them with Slicing and the other half with fully related skills. If you want to make money from Slicing then you need to focus on Tier 5-6 Lockbox missions because they have a chance to return Mission Discoveries which sell well (except Investigation which is worthless). You may or may not be able to make a killing on selling augment mats as well, it's very server dependent.

    On the two servers I'm on, Biochem mats are the cheapest to buy on the AH, save for 3-4 specific ones that are farmed only at the end of certain planets which people often skip which naturally lowers supply while demand stays high. So selling them doesn't earn you much, but you do save yourself a lot of cash by crafting your own medpacks and stims and what you can make blows what you can buy out of the water.

    Still, Biochem is probably the single best crafting skill to level with overall, and one that I use for a lot of my characters. Your particular combination is, in my opinion, the best you can have from a leveling perspective.

    ReplyDelete
  3. This comment has been removed by the author.

    ReplyDelete
  4. 'm a big fan of the combo you picked to level with. Biochem saves you money on medpacks, and gets you access to a good selection of implants sooner than than you would through quests. It also means that you can afford to constantly be "stimmed up" on stims better than anything you can get from a vendor. Finally, slicing does almost as much for you by not being a money sink to level (say, compared to diplomacy) as it does as a source of income.

    ReplyDelete
  5. A nice easy way to make decent money is doing the space combat dailies. There is a vendor in the Fleet that will sell you level 50 green gear for those tokens which is worth a fair amount of money early on.

    ReplyDelete

Comments on posts older than 14 days are moderated and will not appear until manually approved because the overwhelming majority of such comments are spam. Anonymous commenting has unfortunately been disabled due to the sheer volume of comments that are defeating Google's spam filter.