When I see an article in my feed reader that involves FREE FASHION, I sit up and take notice.1 So I was snorting coffee all over my keyboard when I saw Ravalation’s Star Wars Fashion Giveaway.
Guys, you need to enter this raffle. It costs you literally nothing and you might get things. Prizes include armor sets, cartel packs, and cute real life things. Observe the promotional pictogram.
Go immediately to enter said contest. Or don’t. Then I will win all the things. HAHA!
I’ll let you in on a little secret: I hate doing dailies for cash. I’ll do them for rep to get a dye recipe. I’ll do them for crystals so I can buy presents for my idiots, but not cash.
So when I need cash to purchase the latest fashion (I’m lookin at you, Jedi Strategist outfit), I go forth to the GTN and craft and sell dye kits. This has kept me reasonably supplied with cash.
No, you can’t craft this dye kit, but seriously, do I really need an excuse to continue to embarrass Quinn?
Here’s why crafting and selling dye kits is a good idea:
(1) They are consumable. There will always be customers because you can’t reuse your kits.
(2) They are a pain in the ass to make and people would just rather pay, even if the price is way out of whack compared to the cost of mats.
Now, boys and girls, here’s why I say making (and selling) dye kits is a huge pain in the ass:
(1) Unlike most things you want to craft, you will need low level materials of just about every tier. Even with the stacking changes, this adds up to an entire cargo bay devoted to it.
(2) The materials themselves are also a fussy nuisance – both in the gathering and the sheer variety. Typically you will need 3 different color crystals from the same tier for any given dye kit. However, at any given time, there is only one color crystal mission for each tier. And that color crystal mission may bring back the color that you don’t need. I find that having multiple toons with archaeology is the only way to keep up with my color crystal needs.
(3) You need reputation to get recipes for the “good” ones. If any old artificer can make them, the prices are way low. If the recipe requires rep to get, the kit fetches a better price. I even repeatedly went to Voss, to get a recipe.1 Now, if you’ve been playing the game since the beginning, you should have enough rep with all the relevant factions to buy the recipes you want – or only be a few quests short. But if you started playing just recently and skipped certain quest hubs, you might have to go back and start the painful process from newcomer.
An example of a default from-the-trainer dye. You do not want to be making this one. Bleh.White and Light Gray, direct-from-trainer, is pretty. However, it is generally selling for super-cheap because everyone can make it.
(4) You have to keep a variety of kits on hand and can’t just cheat and make and unload the same kit over and over. Some idiot will inevitably flood the market with a given kit, and selling the kit in competition with that moron is useless. On the other hand, you may have kits that don’t happen to be on the GTN right then, and you can quickly unload them (for exorbitant prices). If some idiot has flooded the market with something, I wait a few days and try again after all his auctions have been snapped up or expired. I generally keep on hand 3-5 of each kit to put on the market when conditions are good.
Have I talked you out of making dye kits yet? Yes? Ok fine, go run the star fortress again, see if I care.
Previous dye shenanigans are here, here, and finally here. ↩
Thankfully readers have provided me with examples of horrible fashions that I can share with you. You can find previous atrocities in the fashion hall of shame.
Porkinsdahutt + Bobba’fat. When’s the wedding?He’s the best man at the aforementioned wedding.And his cousin…This guy is invited too.
This is so sad. What did I do Tuesday when 4.1 hit? I stacked all my crafting mats in my legacy cargo hold and reveled in the glorious space. No, I didn’t play Chapter 10. Sorry, Kaliyo, but a walk-in legacy cargo hold is more interesting than you.
Then I made dye kits. As a surprise to me, the medium gray/medium gray looks like absolute crap on everything that I’ve tried to use it on. And the white/light gray looks so badass (it’s pub-side perfect).
I was pretty damn annoyed at grinding out 50 more levels of crafting, but I have been mollified by the surprise changes for artifice.
First, New Color Crystals:
Advanced Black-Cyan Color Crystal (Eviscerating/Hawkeye/Indestructible, Artifice 400)
Advanced Black-White Color Crystal (Eviscerating/Hawkeye/Indestructible, Artifice 450)
Advanced Amethyst Color Crystal (Eviscerating/Hawkeye/Indestructible, Artifice 500)
Advanced Fire Red Color Crystal (Eviscerating/Hawkeye/Indestructible, Artifice 500)
I’d use these colors! Now it would be VERY nice if we could change our weapons with the outfit designer, so that I could match my crystals to my outfit… but for now, this is still good.
Now New Dyes:
Dark Pink and Dark Blue Dye Module (Artifice 520) [eh… maybe]
Deep Yellow and Dark Brown Dye Module (Artifice 520) [I dub thee “baby poop“]
Medium Gray and Medium Gray Dye Module (Artifice 520) [where have you been all my life?]
White and Light Gray Dye Module (Artifice 520) [useful!]
I’d use two of these, and that’s a win in my book. While I’m not wild about dark pink/dark blue, I don’t think we have any other dark pink options that are craftable, and for a single-color outfit where you want dark pink it’s far cheaper than buying a dark pink/whatever on the GTN. I wonder how the XoXaan outfit would look…
You can probably guess which crafter of mine is getting some luv as soon as 4.1 hits. Actually it might be my biochemist because of raiding stims, but after that, it’s all about the dyes.
Currently, I raid with one of my guild’s groups. I’m incredibly fortunate that the raid times plug into my schedule so well or I wouldn’t be able to go at all. Because, hey, kids are so needy.
In addition to very convenient scheduling, I like my team and we have fun together. To put this in perspective, I never have the urge to mute anyone, and in my previous experience, there’s always that one guy you want to beat over the head. None of them are.
Wait. Holy shit. This means I’m that guy. Dammit.
This weekend, the designated raid was TFB. We did most of it on Friday and mopped up the last boss within a few attempts on Saturday.
At which point we were standing there going duh. Now what do we do?
Nobody really needed 220 gear from the other hard mode raids. In previous weeks, we had done strategic strikes for implants, relics, and other needed pieces and were basically done.
Doing nightmare mode wasn’t worth the annoyance since there is currently only a chance of 224 gear. I can see us trying some nightmare modes after patch 4.2 when all of the bosses drop 224. That’s another month.
Somehow doing content for gear we don’t need is not motivating, regardless of “fun.” I guess we’re all greedy, but we feel like what’s the point?
At a loss as to how to occupy ourselves for the rest of the allotted raid time, we regrouped on our poorly geared alts and half-assed it through a story mode. I am terrible at ranged DPS. This is not relevant to the current story, but I thought I’d share.
After all this, I’m really worried. I like our raid team a lot, but I’m afraid we’ll start losing members because there is not enough decent raiding content for us to fill up 4-5 hours a week. That’s not a lot of raid time. I can only imagine that other raid teams have hit this gear/content wall earlier.
This weekend, I finally got around to installing my solid state drive and moving my swtor installation to it.
OK, that’s a vicious lie. My husband cracked open my PC case while I took a nap. Not that I cannot install PC parts myself, because I totally can, but I was in an allergy-medicine-induced coma.
The difference is definitely noticeable. Loading time still is limited by the fact that I probably need to suck it up and buy a new processor. But the change is worth the $50 that I spent on the drive.
I can’t wait to try it out next raid night (since I’m usually the last to zone in or come back after a wipe…)
