Some dude had dressed his Kira in a bikini – honestly, why do guys DO that? Sigh. Anyway, if all the cool kids were bringing out their bikini-clad companion, I’ll be damned if I’ll be left out of that party.
Y’all, help me caption this image?
Patch 1.3 looks beyond awesome. However, in my little corner of the universe, I’m freaking out…
Presuming everyone already has augmented weapon(s), chest, head, and legs, we will still need to augment 10 more pieces: boots, gloves, bracers, belt, earpiece, implants x 2, relics x 2, and off-hand.
Each augment kit takes 10 reverse engineered doodads, each of which comes from a crafted item. That means each person will need 100 items crafted for those kits. 100. Items. Granted, you can get SOME of the mats back through reverse engineering, but still, 100 items that take level 6 materials. When each mission to get level 6 mats takes 30 minutes, and then each minion comes back with 4 units (give or take), the flow of materials is severely limited.
But wait! You’ll have to fill those new augment slots with augments (duh). Each augment takes 4 purple augment parts from slicing missions. That means each person will need 40 purple augment parts. Holy geez, do you know how long it takes to accumulate those damn things? I have all my companions at 10k affection, and T7 has a 2% crit bonus, and I probably have 80 of them. Which would just about cover myself and 1 other guildie. That’s not a lot of people coverage for months of gathering.
Needless to say, I’m looking at how the fuck we are going to augment all the things in a reasonable amount of time, and I’m seriously panicking. I comfort myself with the thought that people will not want to augment a non-orange item unless it’s close to best in slot, so all 10 augment kits might not be needed right away.
New orange recipes for boots, bracers, gloves, and belts – woot. However, how many will there be, exactly? I’ve just finished gathering all the recipes for armormech and synthweaving. Right now with chest, hat, and pants there are about 120 synthweaving and 90 armormech recipes that I have (give or take). I’m only missing 4 (armormech hats).
Now, suppose they add recipes for belt, bracers, gloves, and boots to each existing orange set. That would mean 160 new synthweaving recipes and 120 new armormech recipes. After gathering the aforementioned existing recipes, the thought of collecting an even larger number of recipes makes me want to hide under my desk. For the last few months, I’ve been checking the auction houses religiously to make sure to complete my sets. I’m nearing the end of that journey just to be tossed back onto the trading treadmill. Fail. At least they’re combining the auction houses so I don’t have to check in multiple places.
We will have to see what they add… and I dearly hope they increase the underworld trading drop rate because, holy hell!
And that’s what’s making me run for cover. Your thoughts on Patch 1.3?
Anexxia posted her Mid-Year SWTOR Assessment and it got me thinking about what’s happened with me, the guild, and the game in the last 6 months.
It’s been 6 months, more or less, and the biggest thing I’ve noticed is a lot of people stranded – and I don’t mean stranded on a low population server. I mean stranded by their guild.
As is natural with a new game, people get psyched to play it and find out it’s just NOT for them. Hell, I lasted maybe a week in EQ2 before I was like I HATE THIS I CANNOT DO IT ANYMORE! But a few of the people I started playing with loved it, stayed, and played hard-core end game for YEARS.
We started out with a piddly little guild of 8-10 people (because I am too lazy to go back and count), and we didn’t really know what to expect. We had all raided together in WoW but we didn’t know if people would go back to WoW or what. And before we had a viable raid team (people were still leveling) it was a bit of a struggle to keep people interested.
But as soon as we started raiding, it clicked. We know how to do this! We know how to not-stand-in-bad. We know how to analyze an encounter and figure it out – even without meters (I know, the shock.) Maybe what’s even more shocking is that we were having so much fun, nobody went back to WoW.
Sure, we had people who were unhappy with this or that, but we worked through it as a team. One guildie decided he didn’t like the class he had chosen, and was just miserable. Well, don’t go back to WoW! Just reroll! Instead of QQing about any possible holes in our roster, we adapted, because this isn’t a JOB, this is a game, and if you’re not having FUN, that sucks. We pulled together and helped him level and gear his new main and hot damn, he’s happy, he’s good at his new role, we’re happy.
As for recruitment, it’s really hard to integrate people into an established group and have them really feel like one of the team and not like a junior member. Here, I think we actually did it. Well, Alex did it. She’s in charge of that stuff. I’m pretty derp when it comes to recruitment.
Here we are 6 months in. We can most of the time fill the roster unless a bunch of people go on vacation at once, and usually we don’t have more than one person sitting out on a given night. We’ve had people’s schedules and mains change and managed to adapt the roster to make it work.
I hear about these guilds falling apart and I wish I had a magic bit of advice how to keep your guild strong and together, but I honestly have no fucking clue how we did it. We just kinda did.
There’s a domino effect when a few people leave, and more tend to leave. There’s also a domino effect when you manage to stay together. Suddenly, we have (unsolicited!) applications to our piddly little guild, which we didn’t expect, and we have to adapt and figure out, as a guild, if we should limit growth… and honestly, that’s a conversation I never thought we’d have. I am as shocked as you guys.
I figured you guys wanted to hear what I’m up to, right? RIGHT? Ahem ok…
(Can we tell I’m out of writing ideas? There are only so many ways I can yabber about Fashion, and it’s not like I know anything about playing my class…)
Synthweaving. I actually finished out my orange recipes and got every last stinkin’ one of them, even all the sithie ones (but not the pvp crap). I guesstimate that’s 140 recipes.
Toward the end, I was missing 2 key recipes and actually ran underworld trading missions in the appropriate level range until I got them. Luck was on my side, and I managed to get each recipe within a day, and that’s not really a day of PLAYING, more a day of logging over every once in a while to send the minions back out. Yes, I am aware that running UT missions for a specific recipe is crazysauce.
Now I’ll cry big salty tears when 1.3 comes out and I have to ferret out any new recipes. Ok, I’ll be happy to have new recipes, but crying due to the difficulty of procurement. You know what I mean.
Armormeching. Remember how I went insane and dropped cybertech for armormech because I had to have all the fashion? Thanks to being maxed in the relevant supporting skills, having some mats already in the bank, and having 5 minions in play, I got to 400 armormech 24 hours after starting. And yes, I also went to work that day (and I don’t have one of those jobs where I can play the game at work).
I have a spreadsheet – when I say “I”, my husband actually made the dorky spreadsheet and I copied it for my armormeching. 3 columns (hat, chest, and legs) by about 30-something rows, let’s just say there are 90 recipes. I’m missing 6. Of those 6, they are sithie gear, hats, or sithie hats. While I want to be completist and get all the recipes, I’m not that worried about sithie gear that we won’t wear or hats that we won’t show.
Legacy stuff has sped up recipe gathering – and what I mean is that I can mail an opposite faction toon goods and money. I now check both auction houses, Rep and Imp, every day for the remaining recipes. For whatever reason, the imp auction scene is pretty good, expensive but good, and I’ve gotten most of my stuff there. I also have been known to buy republic-only recipes on the cheap from the imp auction house and sell them on the rep side (and vice versa). Since my imp is questing out of Nar Shaddaa, I also check that auction house periodically, but it’s not very widely used.
Social 5! Party Time! Excellent!1 I hit Social 5 which comes with the “Party Time” title (perfect for the Pretentious Legacy) and opens up most of the social gear (except for the corsec outfit). I ran around buying up all the social gear, which is incredibly stupid because I don’t have the bank space for it. Fortunately, it’s really cheap so I can just vendor it for the space and then buy it again later if necessary. I was a bit disappointed how some really desirable pieces clipped or colormatched poorly. My dreams, dashed.
The Belsavis set comes with a shock collar. Unfortunately, I do not have Social 5 on my Consular… because I’d totally put that collar on Tharan, whom I hate.
A New Self-Indulgent Gaming Mouse. Guys, the naga was redesigned for 2012! Now, my naga works well. I don’t need a new mouse. However, the new version has 2 extra buttons on the top, where I can reach them. 2 extra buttons in a convenient place are SRS BZNS. What can I say? I bought one.2 I justified my purchase by sending my old and perfectly functional naga to a guildie whose naga had broken recently. See, I’m doing a good deed. And getting 2 extra buttons.
The problem was, of course, learning to USE those damn buttons. I ran some dailies to practice, during which I was completely inept at interrupting anything (as I had moved my interrupt key). However, that was resolved by raid time (whew). Muscle memory is hard to overcome.
Guild Stuff. I’m lazy. I already wrote a post on how awesome my guild is. Go read.
If you got this far, it’s amazing, because I confess that when a blog has a wall of text like this, I tend to glaze over and move on…
If you’re serious about getting your outfit right, the preview window has several major flaws:
It’s teeny. But you already knew that, right?
For example: these 3 headgears look pretty much identical in the preview window, but they are clearly different (some more different than others) when tried on.
Seriously, all over the fleet I see Kira, Elara, Risha, and Nadia roaming about in bikinis. Well, if dressing your companion in a bikini is the cool thing to do, I’m not going to be left behind. Behold, my bikini-clad companion, Akaavi Spar.
Does she remind you of anyone? From Futurama?
I think Akaavi might murder me in my sleep.
I’m clearly crazy. Last night in a fit of fashion-lust and frustration that cybertech is getting absolutely nothing useful (probably EVER), I dropped cybertech on my smuggler and picked up armormech. I’m going to be able to craft ALL THE THINGS. And if you’re wondering, I have a spreadsheet of all the orange recipes so that I can track which ones I have and do not have.
Deranged fashionista looking for recipes, PST.
I’ve been playing a sithie bounty hunter lately, because I was pretty happy with the class in beta. Something about a gruff american accent in a sea of brits. Because of legacy unlocks, I made a “rep-style” Zabrak bounty hunter, which I don’t find as anachronistic as big fat red sithie jedi, but that’s a topic for another day.
Now, Mako. I think it’s so overpowered that my first companion is a healer. Yes, I feel bitter that on my main (sentinel), I had to wait until the late 30’s to get a healer companion. She’s really into bounty hunting. She knows all the great hunt winners, and you keep her happy by sticking to the code. So you’d think that she knows what being a bounty hunter entails.
But no, she’s a big fat whiner! Every time we’re about to go into someplace spooky or yucky, she say “We’re not going in THERE are we?”
Yes, Mako, we are. You begged to come along. I have to go THERE for my great hunt assignment. You know, the hunt that you LOVE and want to win more than anything in the world… so yes, we are going into the big scary fort/cave/nest/temple. Shut up.
A few weeks ago, I talked about hats that push the hood down but still allow you to see your character’s hair. At the time, it was bugged and caused you to GO BALD. They fixed that. Today they seem to have changed a few circlets that formerly fit under hoods and now they push the hood down. For some people, this is awesome, for others, they really liked the look of that particular headgear under their hood.
Now, it may very well be a bug that these select circlets now push the hood down, and it may very well be reverted (after I pay to move all my mods).1 It may also be totally intentional.
Without further ado, here are the republic2 synthweaving craftable hats that both show hair and push the hood down. Anything marked (new) didn’t push the hood down prior to Tuesday’s patch. From the forums, I found out that there are also non-craftable circlets that have been changed to put the hood down, but I don’t have a list of those.
(Insert disclaimer here about how, as with all my research, this is incomplete and half-assed. Also the icons on the mouseover tooltip show the empire version.)
Heavy Armor
Medium Armor
Light Armor
The rest of the craftable circlets fit under a hood and do not push the hood back (i.e. the Traditional Brocart Headgear for light armor).
Now, excuse me while I squee like a schoolgirl because now I can push my hoodie down when I want to by showing headgear, and the headgear isn’t ugleh. I hope this isn’t a bug, or if it is, that they never ever fix it.