Hey guys! I haven’t been shirking my duties – I’ve been studiously screenshotting horrid fashion on the fleet and putting it up on ye olde fashion hall of shame. Here are the latest inductees:
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Pants! What have these people got against PANTS?
My Totally Reasonable List of Demands for 2.1
Hey there, Bioware. Me again. It seems like Santa Bioware has been busily working on my list, and practically half these things are accomplished. Which means they have time for even more totally reasonable demands. Hooray!
1. More Zabrak Hairdos. No, wait, that’s not right. Attractive Zabrak hairdos. You have metrics, or hell, just look around the fleet. You see the same 2 hairdos repeated over and over because we girls don’t dig the receding hairline look. So hand em over.
2. Name changes are all fine and good, but if so many names are taken, that doesn’t do much for us. People who haven’t logged in for over a year should lose their names. Fair is fair. They have had the opportunity to log in at any point during the last year as F2P, and yet they haven’t done it. Clearly they aren’t interested.
3. Let us toss our companions into the customizer. I just want to get rid of Doc’s stupid beard, not change his entire head.
4. Where’s my hood toggle?
5. Body tattoos. Why do you give us invisible shirts and those… lovely bikinis if you won’t give us tattoos to show off?
XOXO
Me
MK-9 Components are Expensive
Before 2.0, I could make bracers and belts, cheaply, to RE for parts for the top level (MK-6) augment kits. It was resource intensive, but not that bad.
Now for synthweaving and armormech, it’s total bullshit to get components for the new highest level (MK-9) kits.
The cheapest you can get away with for armormech is 10 units of compound, 8 units of metal AND then 4 of the crafting material you can buy at the fleet vendor. = 22 units of scavenging mats for each MK-9 component.
Similarly for synthweaving except there are no craftable gloves, so we’re up to 8 Crystal, 10 fragments, and 6 crafting materials. = 24 units of archaeology mats for each MK-9 component.
Other cheater crafters have it much easier.
Cybertech = earpieces. It’s 6 metal, 8 compound, and 4 crafting material = 18 units total, as opposed to 22 for armormech. Not great, but better.
Armstech = weapons. It’s 6 metal, 4 compound, and 2 crafting materials! That’s 12 units total and completely unfair! They can also craft the actual kits themselves.
Biostuff = Implants. 2+2+4 biostuff + 1 crafting mat = 9 total! But I’m not sure if biostuff costs the same per unit to gather as scavenging/archaeology. Also one implant crafting mat may be pricier than units of other generic crafting mats.
It seems a foregone conclusion that one should RE implants, providing that biostuff and the associated crafting mat item isn’t significantly pricier per unit than gathering archaeology or scavenging. Otherwise, weapons seems like the next best option. Never ever RE synthweaving, armormech, or cybertech for components. Ew.
This post would not be possible without Mr. Robot, because they updated their database for 2.0.
[Spoilers] The Course of True Love Never Did Run Smooth (on Makeb)
***Spoilers below about the Makeb romance story arc, Republic side.
***Thou hast been warned.
Darth Lipliner, Meet General Eyeliner
Remember this fine specimen of a sith?
Well, I was cruising along the consular story and I think he’s met his match.
Sentinel In Makeb
I yammered a few weeks ago about what I thought about the Sentinel changes before I had a chance to test them. Now I am playing with them and I’m going to share my incoherent thoughts with you. (I’m in process of writing the 2.0 Sentinel guide but it’s not nearly done. Also whilst writing this, the Dev Blog came out.)
Right now I’m leveling in Focus Spec, because it’s supposedly good AOE, crowd control, and other such nonsense for leveling. Plus, it is the spec I know the least well.
From the dev blog:
Our intentions with Focus Sentinels in 2.0 are to continue to support their viable sustained damage, but to lessen the burst potential of Force Sweep. This isn’t solely about correcting issues though, so we’ve also added some gameplay improvements and better utility to Focus.
Yeah, no shit. Force Sweep was nerfed to the ground. Don’t get me wrong, I’m not really a fan of only being able to do reasonable damage once every 10-15 seconds, but still, now my AOE kinda sucks.
I am hating this spec. I’ve done levels 51-53 and I can’t exactly put my finger on why I hate it. I think it’s because there’s a lot of “charging up” you need to do for Force Sweep to be awesome (but less awesome than before), and when leveling, you just want to go in there and come on strong, like other classes can do, instead of having to charge up prereqs.
When I charge in, I have to Force Leap, then Zealous Leap (for the auto-crit to Force Sweep). At which point I have no focus left and have to Zealous Strike. Now, should I Force Sweep right now? Or build Singularity to further enhance the damage of the impending Force Sweep with Force Exhaustion (and will the mob on which I cast Force Exhaustion croak before all 3 ticks are done?). Are all the mobs closest to me already dead from the Zealous Leap and Zealous Strike damage, plus the damage of my leveling partner? (If Zen is up, then I have both Singularity and focus, and I can pwn face, but it’s obviously not always up.)
I will say that Focus Spec has improved in single-target DPS because of the freebie Blade Storm that you get after a Zealous Leap. Those things hit like trucks.
Moving on, I did my first raid in Combat Spec and it was quite a lot to get used to. Devs say:
Combat has been criticized for being a little too simple to play. While they have lots of fun utility, their core rotation was a little boring. However, some players like a more relaxed playstyle, so it’s important to us that we don’t change things too much.
To that end, we’ve helped unlock Combat’s most fun utility (Transcendence, right?), and livened up their core rotational gameplay with a deadly new proc effect.
Relaxed playstyle my ass. There’s nothing relaxed, now or then, about trying to jam buttons like a coked-out ferret to cram all your good abilities into a 4.5 second window.
The major changes are the nerfing of Zen and the addition of Hand of Justice. I’m still struggling with how to get the most out of Zen (from what I can tell, you get one extra GCD in your Precision Slash window). Hand of Justice resets Precision Slash and lets you use Dispatch regardless of the health of the mob, but it completely throws off your timing! If Precision Slash is now off cooldown but Blade Storm still has 10 seconds left, then what? Do you use Precision Slash with your new Dispatch, or wait for Blade Storm to come off CD, at which point, did the Precision Slash reset do any good at all?
I haven’t played around with Watchman because I think that the rotation has changed least of the three, despite being able to use (and find 5 focus for) Merciless Slash more often. Oh hey, the devs said that too.
Watchman has always had a strong rotation with good sustained damage and utility. We didn’t want to mess with the formula to Watchman’s success, so we just made them better at doing what they already do.
I swear I thought this before they said it. This will probably be my raiding spec just because I think I’m better at juggling varied cooldowns than trying to get my cooldowns to line up for a burst phase in Combat spec.
A final note: Twin Saber Throw is badass. It fills a serious gap in our abilities and is usable at any range. I’m not sure how it will fit into a standard spank-n-tank rotation until the math nerds start crunching the numbers.
It also looks cool.
Jumps. Why Did It Have To Be Jumps?
Not Cool, Makeb.
(I made the jump, by the way.)
Competition for NPC Affections
Thehusband and I just started Makeb. We’re recapturing our SWTOR “honeymoon period” by running all the quests together and seeing the new content together for the first time. The rationale for this is that we’ll get to 55 no matter what, but it’s not like we’re getting any new story anytime soon, so we might as well really slow down and enjoy it instead of trying to race to the finish.
Something that has been on my mind with the introduction of SGR with the Makeb NPCS was how flirt options were going to work with non-companion non-class-storyline NPC’s in general.
When you BSOCK a random dude in the smuggler storyline, for example, it’s in the smuggler storyline and you’re the only one that gets to do the talking. Any friends you bring along are in observation mode only. They can’t win a roll and try to woo your would-be sweetie away from you.
However, we’re dealing here, on both sides, with a love interest who is part of the planet story, not class story. How is that going to work?
***MILD SPOILERS BELOW RE: MAKEB SAME GENDER ROMANCE REPUBLIC SIDE***
You have been warned.
New Synthweaving Spreadsheet For You
So, instead of doing anything fun last night, I cross-checked with Dulfy’s crafting list and updated the Spreadsheet of Doooom with the new orange Synthweaving schematics. There aren’t any new ones for Armormech (Edit: yes there are, see below).
When you change an “n” to a “y”, it will turn green. The items that don’t exist are marked with “x”. As we know, sometimes the boots and gloves are a different level than the rest of the set, so for each set, I used the level requirement that is the highest of all items in that set.
If you need to add just the new stuff to your existing spreadsheet, just use tab 3 and copy/paste the new ones in. It may be tricking to import over the formatting though (the auto colors and whatnot). Sorting can be done however you want. I sort the way it appears in the crafting screen (so by type, then level.)
Happy Crafting!
***Edit: apparently there are new armormech schematics, probably added AFTER Dulfy posted. I found one last night. So I will be adding them to the chart the old-fashioned way: by finding them myself or searching the GTN to see what is available.
I suspect they will follow the same pattern as the synthweaving ones. For each armor class:
- 1 set with boots, bracers, belt
- 3 sets with head, chest, gloves, legs
- 1 imp
- 1 rep
- 1 both
I’ll add them to the spreadsheet as soon as I get the complete listing.
***Edit2: Guys, this is very strange. I can’t find any of the synth recipes on the GTN – meaning I don’t know what. Well it means I’ve wasted my damn time putting together a list, that’s what it means.
As a practical matter the synthweaving recipes may not exist at all, and so far nobody has seen any armormech recipes, save for gloves, gloves, and more gloves.
Epic Fail.
Super-Serious Makeb Prep
Are you guys ready for Makeb?
Forget about getting commendations blah blah boring. You need to have your fashion in order!
Whilst leveling, your toon will be front and center talking with (BSOCKing) this or that NPC, in scene after scene. Scenes that you may wish to screenshot… Don’t let bad fashion ruin your screenshots for posterity.
Or at least that is how I justify my 400k outfit change last night.