Preparing for Casual Raiding. I Mean Ops. Totally Ops.

Hawtpants of the Old Republic Posted on by

If you’re a casual player like me…

Ok, let me stop right there.  “Casual” can be interpreted in many ways, a lot of them negative.  Such as “unwilling to put in effort”, “wanting a free ride”, “noobish about all the things”, you get the idea.  But that’s not what I mean here.  What I mean by “casual” is “do not have lots of time.”  You have other shit that comes first.  If you can clear your schedule for 2 hours on an evening, it means 2 hours, not “lol after dinner and whatever.”  OK carry on.

If you’re a casual player like me, getting ready for raiding seems pretty daunting.  You just hit 50 and there’s so much shit to do.  It seems like you’ll never ever get it all done.  It’s tempting to just give up.

You Must Prioritize Raiding.  If time is a limited resource, you have to make hard choices.  If you spend a ton of credits on that awesome speeder, you will not have that money available for raiding necessities, like consumables or augments.  (And remember, money and time are interchangeable resources, since you need to spend time to make money.)

It’s not to say that you can ONLY do raiding and not do ANYTHING else in game.  If you like to craft, you may very well have time to be raid-ready AND craft.  But raid-ready AND craft AND pvp AND collect pets AND collect mounts?  Probably not.

Baby Steps.  When you hit 50, suddenly you realize that you must find 14 pieces of gear, 14 augment kits, and 14 augments.  BLARGH!  That’s a lot of time and money and, with few credits to your name, it seems RIDICULOUS.

Don’t give up.  Set reasonable goals. When 1.3 hit and I was looking at having to augment at least 9 pieces, it seemed like a hell of a lot of resources.  I even did the math and it was frightening.  But I calmed myself down and set a goal of 2 augments a week.  That kept me on pace without running me ragged.  And even with that small set of goals, I ended up being one of the first people fully augmented.

Don’t freak the fuck out.  Just do a little at a time and it will get done.

You Are Never Done.  Once you’ve done the initial push and gotten all raid ready and start raiding, you may be tempted to wander off after all that hard work and just show up on raid nights.  WRONG!  True, you will have to put in less time maintaining your raid-readiness than initially getting raid ready at 50, but it’s still a time commitment.

Basic maintenance includes:

  • reading all the patch notes and make sure you don’t have to make any changes to your spec, rotation, or gearing strategy
  • working toward obtainable upgrades (dailies)
  • studying boss strategies before attempting a new boss
  • obtaining consumables every week
  • practicing (dailies, the dummy, or flashpoints) so that you don’t lose muscle memory
  • augmenting any new gear you obtain from the last raid before you go into the next raid

There’s no golden ratio of busywork-to-raiding.  Some people say 1 hour of prep for each hour of raiding, but it really varies.

If you notice on the list above, there’s a lot of prep that you can (and should) do while you’re not in-game.  I tend to watch boss strat videos on my phone right before bed.  Some people have admitted to doing the same whilst on the can.  I can also read patch notes while I’m sitting on my couch keeping my daughter company while she watches Dora the Explorer.  If I need something crafted, I try to coordinate with guildies on the forums so I don’t have to hang around online waiting for the appropriate crafter to log in.  Yes it does take a lot of time, but you grab the time when you can get it, and it doesn’t HAVE to take a huge conventional gaming-chunk-of-evening.

Now go forth and pwn the face off a robot or something.

Gear Auditing the Minions

Hawtpants of the Old Republic Posted on by

Has this ever happened to you?

Dailies Buddy: Oh hey, I have my healer out, why don’t you bring a DPS.

Me: Um, hrm. I’ve been running with Doc for 15 levels now, my DPS are in like lvl 30 gear.  Both of them.

Dailies Buddy: Oh… yeah… same.  My only geared companion is my healer.

So yeah, all the time.  Usually, you find the companion your toon needs, and then you stick with that companion forever and ever… unless you’re in a mini group.

No longer will I be embarrassed by Rusk’s pathetic starter Hoth gear!  This weekend, I went on a massive companion-gearup, and it was pretty damn cheap.

Your Resources

  • Things You Greed (remember what your companions wear so you can snap up any unwanted gear in raids/instances)
  • Your Trade Skills
  • Your Leftover Commendations (Voss & Corellia, mostly, if you’ve already outgeared that stuff)
  • The GTN (sometimes you get lucky)

All this you can do without pestering any of your guildmates.  I’d recommend figuring out the easiest path and prioritizing.  For example, don’t actually GRIND commendations.  If you don’t have em, then you don’t use em.  If you are rolling in mats, great, craft some things.  If you have to send out the idiots and wait for them to come back every time, never mind.

You don’t need anything spectacular.  Greens and blues of the appropriate level should do the trick for daily quest purposes.

Also, you don’t have to gear ALL the companions!

  • Do you really need a geared melee dps and a geared ranged dps?  Probably not.  You can safely pick one – and pick the one that is easier to gear!
  • If you’re a tank, don’t gear either of your tanks (duh) unless you routinely run around in a DPS offspec.
  • Finally, consider which idiots have a great crafting or gathering bonus.  An idiot with a fantastic bonus should probably not be geared because that idiot should ALWAYS be busy with crafting or gathering.  Pick the other idiot of the same role to gear, if possible (except you only get 1 healer, doh).

I was feeling ambitious, so I geared all the idiots.  They still all look mismatched and ridiculous.  I contemplated giving Doc the Belsavis Prisoner shock collar to zap him when he looks at other women, but I decided that was a little too kinky for a straight-laced jedi knight…

Orange Synthweaving And Armormech Schematics: Tracking Spreadsheet

Hawtpants of the Old Republic Posted on by

I’m not always on my crafter toon when I’m surfing the GTN.  How do I know what I already have?  The spreadsheet of DOOOOOOM!!  You too can have the spreadsheet of DOOOOM.  Just copy to a new google document and it’s all yours.  Then you can share it with your guildmates so they know what you can and can’t make.

A few points:

  • Republic-only recipes are blue, imp-only recipes are red, and recipes that everyone can wear are in green.
  • If you put “y” in a box, it turns green, like magic.
  • The outfit level is the level of the chest, legs, hat.  Boots and gloves sometimes are lower level.
  • I have grayed out things that I think don’t exist. But I could be wrong.
  • I have it sorted by type of armor then level, because that’s how it appears in my recipe book, but you can sort it however you want.

Happy recipe gathering!

Search Terms for New Synthweaving and Armormech Schematics on the GTN

Hawtpants of the Old Republic Posted on by

Now, as you know, I’m a crazed individual and am stalking the GTN for all the new schematics – namely orange boots, bracers, gloves, and belts.  Now that we have a search feature that (mostly) works, I can at least save myself paging through every time I look.  However, it sucks that the schematics for blue and orange items all register as blue so you can’t just limit your search to the oranges.  I set the dropdown to “crafting schematic” and then start typing in the search box.

So here they are.  I might have missed a good search term… which will become very obvious as I get more items and there are gaping holes in my recipe list.

Boots

  • “boot” (duh)
  • “tread”, “foot”, “sandal” – I don’t think any of the new recipes use “treads”, “footgear”, “footwear”, “sandals”, etc, but it doesn’t HURT to look.

Bracers

  • “brac” – this captures “bracers” and “vambraces”
  • “armg” – armguards.  I could type out the whole thing in the search box, but why?  But just “arm” brings up “armor” so I can’t be THAT lazy.

Gloves

  • “glove” (duh)
  • “hand” – covers “hangear”, “handwraps”
  • “gaunt” – gauntlets

Belt

  • “belt” (duh)
  • “waist” – covers “waistwrap” and “waistcord”
  • “sash”

Have fun searching.  Except if you’re on Canderous Ordo, because all the recipes there are belong to me.

Boot Mismatch

Hawtpants of the Old Republic Posted on by

(Ok for purposes of this article, guys, we’re ignoring gloves and belt, just look at hat, chest, pants, BOOTS)

La la la, I’m collecting recipes… oh hey, Commando Elite Boots… let’s just try that on with the rest of the commando elite set…

Commando Elite set (lvl 43) including boots (lvl 39).

No… That most definitely does not match.

Looking at the boots more carefully, they appeared to be level 39 while the rest of the commando elite set was level 43.  The next orange set “down” is the Lacqerous Mesh set, which is level 39.

I tried on the Commando Elite boots with the Lacquerous Mesh set and…

Lacqerous Mesh set (lvl 39) with Commando Elite Boots (lvl 39).

Ok, those are CLEARLY supposed to go together.

Apparently, all boots are lower level than the set they are supposed to go with.  And sometimes the boots DO go with the set for which they are named.  And sometimes they go with the set that corresponds to the level of the boots, which, while buggy, makes some sense.

But then I get the outcast boots.

Outcast set (lvl 27) with boots (lvl 23)

 

One would think that the mismatched Outcast Boots would go with the level 23 set: the Tempered Laminoid set.  They do not!  And trust me, you know if these clearly orange boots go with something or not.  It’s not ambiguous.  Nope, they ended up matching the level 31 Chanlon Onslaught set.

Chanlon Onslaught set (lvl 31) with Outcast boots (lvl 23)

 

Weird, right?

I haven’t been able to check the matching of all the things because I don’t have all the recipes yet.  And sometimes matching isn’t very clear (on medium armor, a lot of it is opinion).  And in this article I haven’t even DEALT with the gloves, which are ALSO lower level than the set they are supposed to match.

Have you crafters out there noticed any other weirdness?

Now That 1.3 Has Hit…

Hawtpants of the Old Republic Posted on by

The things that I thought would be a big problem aren’t, but there are other things that I thought would be big problems, and they are still big problems.

Augment Kits.  Sure, they are resource intensive, but they don’t require anything rare or RNG-based.  Plus just about every crafter can contribute parts with which to make the kits, even if they can’t make the actual kits.

AAAND, much to my happiness, the kits can crit.  Every so often I proc an extra.  Gotta love Kira’s synthweaving bonus and C2’s legacy module thingy that does the same.

Well, our guild pulled together really fast, probably because I was yabbering about how difficult it would be, and now it’s Friday, and last night we had… 60 kits in the gbank.  And that’s after people have been of course using them.  And we only have one raiding team to outfit (so 12-14 active raiders), so 60 is pretty damn good.  I left a vague guild message about “not hogging” all of them and left it at that.

This initial rush was what I was worried about.  Gradually augmenting upgrades as they come in won’t be a big deal at all.  So yay!

The Augments Themselves.  We may be able to add augment slots easily, but we have nothing to put in them!  I’m still running slicing missions at every opportunity for those stupid purple bits, and RNG has been extra unkind to me since 1.3 hit.  We might have to just use blue augments to start and then gradually upgrade to purple.

Unlike the kits, which are universal, augments are a matter of what class you are and, in some cases, personal preference (some tanks may prefer absorb over shield, for example).  I don’t want to pre-make augments and stick em in the bank because there’s no guarantee that I’m making things that we will need – or making things in the right ratios.  Plus they don’t stack.

Recipes.  Ugh.  Just ugh.  I feel like they’re even more rare than they used to be.  Basically, I’ve been stalking the GTN and sending out my minions on underworld trading missions at every opportunity.  And I obviously don’t have enough money to snap up every recipe I see, so the 100k recipes are out of my price range.

How many do I have?  According to the spreadsheet, I’ve gathered 10 new recipes in the last few days.  Only about 200 to go.

I may be able to fund my recipe acquisition by selling a few oranges that I craft from the new recipes, but I swear that there’s a general GTN Spidey Sense for when I have a given recipe.  I queue up 5 orange belts, and there are none of that type on the GTN… in fact there are no belts on the GTN under 100k.  So I go to list my belts the next day and someone has made the exact same belts and listed them for 3k.  Blargh, I shouldn’t have bothered tasking a minion to crafting those damn belts.

My Fashion.  My own fashion is held back by my recipe gathering.  I have an outfit I like but haven’t found the boots that will complete it.  I’m hoping to find a recipe for such boots.  But that is a few weeks away.

And, as a side note, some of the new recipes are very very VERY ugly.  Like “are you SURE that’s supposed to match” ugly (seriously – look up “apprentice’s boots” on your GTN).  So I may be in for a huge disappointment when I finally do locate the boots that are SUPPOSED to go with what I’m wearing.

Clinging To My Towel For Dear Life

Hawtpants of the Old Republic Posted on by

Patch 1.3.  I was right to panic.  There is so much to do! And I won’t be online until Wednesday, so other people will get a head start.  THE HORROR.

Gather All Recipes.  For armormech and synthweaving that should be about 200 of them.  No, really.

How I handle all that?

  • A spreadsheet of what I do and don’t have.  It’s color coded so it’s easy to see what is still missing.
  • A money limit on GTN purchases.  For example: no more than 10k on a recipe, no more than 5k on a sith-only recipe (since we’re republic).  Once I’m only missing a few odd recipes, I don’t give a crap how much they cost, but in the beginning when spreading my net wide, I need to conserve money.
  • Run the underworld trading missions.  Especially in the beginning, every procced recipe may be a new recipe!  And if it’s not new to me, I sell the sucker to people who are also gathering the recipes.  Win/win.

Augment All MY Things.  But first, back up, I gotta figure out what I’m going to be wearing – and that is highly dependent on what the new recipes look like… and I won’t have those right away.  So we have an order of operations here:

  • First learn all the recipes (at least for medium armor)
  • pick an entire coordinating outfit
  • augment the crap out of it

Folks, I know it’s going to be tempting to start augmenting the shit out of things to be as leet as possible, but it’s expensive to move mods.  It’s expensive to make and add augment kits.  It’s expensive to make augments.  Take a breath, see what is out there, and then decide.  It will take a few days, probably a week, for all the new orange recipes to be known and available.

Augment All The Guild Things.  Now this is going to be the hardest.

I do NOT have enough mats to support the entire guild when things are needed all in a rush.  Previously I’ve been able to easily gather what is needed because the items were needed one or two – or even 4- at a time.  And the mats are going to be BEYOND expensive the first week, if they are available at all.

Plus, cranking out things takes a ton of time… so it may only be possible to make 3-4 kits each night when I log in, and I’m counting both level 50 toons in that estimate.

I’m thinking of a gradual approach by necessity… where we all prioritize our best pieces and work our way down.  After all, there is no huge rush to get everything all fixed up right away… we’re not exactly cutting edge.  I just have to remind myself that life goes on even if we’re not all fully augmented to the eyeballs within a week.

Just When I Was Happy With Customer Service…

Hawtpants of the Old Republic Posted on by

Edit: Oh hey, after a bunch of bloggers holler on the internet, it gets resolved… but it had nothing to do with the hollering… totally.

______________________

After an initial bad experience with customer service, I have been impressed with their responsiveness to tickets– both in timeliness and in pinpointing the specific complaint.

This last week, we moved servers, which was fast.  We got our bank back in about 4 days, which is longer than we wanted to wait, but not terrible.  We’re dealing with the occasional issue of asshattery on the new server, but otherwise, our raid program didn’t miss a beat and life is good… and then I read this:

An Unexplained SWTOR Ban (Part 1, Part 2)

No really, you must read this.  I’ll wait.

Have you read it yet?  OK…

What the fuckcrap?!  So I’m going to put on a little theater for you:

Your Boss: You’re suspended.  Begone for a week.

You: Uh wut?

Your Boss: You heard me.  Week.  Out.

You: OK, I can’t think of what on earth I did wrong, what is this about?

Your Boss: You broke a company policy!  It’s very serious.

You: Um, I still can’t think of what I did.  Which company policy was it?  The manual is pretty thick…

Your Boss: YOU BROKE A COMPANY POLICY, what’s there not to get?  And if you do it again after your suspension, you’re FIRED.

You: Hrm, maybe I should take this upstairs

***

(Later in HR)

You: So you see, I can’t even think of what I did that violated any company policy.  If I’ve done something that is against regulations, please tell me what, so I can not do it anymore.

Boss’s Boss: I see here that you were suspended for a breach of company policy.  I’ve looked into it and you did indeed do that, so your boss was right to suspend you.

You: What policy?  Did you even listen to what I said?

Boss’s Boss: A COMPANY POLICY!  It’s a serious offense.

You: Yes but what policy?

Boss’s Boss: We can’t discuss internal HR matters.

You: Even about my own file?  We’re not talking about someone else’s HR disciplinary action.

Boss’s Boss: … or how we detect violations, or you jerks will try to avoid detection.

You: Um, I didn’t ask HOW, I asked WHAT.

Boss’s Boss: We consider the matter closed.

You: But if I come back next week after my suspension, if I don’t know what I did, I’ll be fired if I do whatever it is again.

Boss’s Boss: Well don’t break policy again.

You: Um… can I get a real answer?

***

(Even later, higher up in the company)

Boss’s Boss’s Boss: Yep, totally, I reviewed your case up and down and sideways, and the decision stands – you totally broke a company policy.  Would you mind filling out a survey?

You: I quit.

As you can see from the dramatic reenactment above, this shit wouldn’t fly in the real world.  Maybe I can get away with saying to my husband “I’m mad and won’t tell you why” if he forgets an anniversary or some such bullshit1, but you can’t pull that shit when you’re in a contractual business relationship.

If this happened to me, well I’d feel pretty damn helpless.  If you don’t know what the hell you did, then you don’t know how to stop doing it!  This is basic logic, duh.  I wouldn’t feel comfortable committing to guild events knowing that any moment I might be suspended or banned without warning.

So, dear readers, this is bullshit.  Total bullshit.  And I hope that someone from the skeleton crew they still HAVE over there is paying attention because, holy shit, this is so unacceptable.

  1. This never happens, as I’m the forgetter of anniversaries because they’re dumb ↩

A Tale of Four Hats

Hawtpants of the Old Republic Posted on by

Remember how I switched my cybertech to armormech?  Well, after hitting 400 rather quickly, I had to get all the orange recipes, you know, for fashion.  I got most of them rather quickly, but then I got stuck on four effing hats.

Between auction housing on both sides (multiple times a day) and running the appropriate level UT missions, I got the hats.  After weeks of trying.

Some people would think I was crazy (most people).  I basically couldn’t play my sithie alt because she was parked at the GTN.  I had to go through the GTN page by page every time because the search feature is, ahem, interesting.  And, of course, there were all the stupid low-level underworld trading missions I was running, when I probably could have been sending  my minions on more lucrative endeavors.

The big question is why?

(1) I didn’t want to be asked for something and not have it.  Even an ugly hat that nobody would want to wear.  Even if it’s a sithie item for someone’s alt.  I don’t want to turn anyone away.

(2) Remember how I was afeared that in 1.3 there will be orange boots, gloves, bracers, and belt added for all existing craftable orange sets?  Well I was mostly right!  From a check of Torhead ptr stuff, each existing orange craftable set will get schematics for matching orange boots, gloves, and belt – but there will be fewer available bracers.1 Yay?  With the prospect of having to gather all those recipes, I needed to have all the available schematics NOW before I have to start collecting the new recipes in 1.3.

Or maybe I’m just a crazy person.  Crafters are a special breed.  A crazy breed.

  1. In case you’re wondering, yes I added all this crap to my spreadsheet of dooooom. ↩