slicing

I can quit slicing any time!

by lura on January 13, 2012

Oh, slicing… How I love thee, let me count the ways…

I love slicing.

It’s no secret that I love gathering in games, but how I feel about slicing… it’s beyond “love” — it’s just perfect. Take everything I love about gathering crafting materials and selling them to other players and take out the horrible parts of having to actually sell them to other players and you’ve got slicing. No mules, no taking bags full of items to a mailbox to send to said mules, no painstakingly keeping track of market pricing and splitting up stacks (which in SWTOR is currently SO SO PAINFUL). I almost never have to leave my farming spot, unless I want to. Farming straight-up cash money? Heck yes!

My leveling has been reduced to a slow amble: I’ve gained about 3 levels in 5 days. I am a mere level 35 when I should probably be at least 40 now because I found the most perfectly perfect farming spot and can’t pull myself away. It’s so, so good and there are so, so many credits. I am rolling in sugary-sweet credits, people. And I can’t stop.

I am totally addicted: I log in when I have a spare ten minutes, run my circuit and sometimes talk myself into waiting for the respawns. I leave my farming spot to go to Balmorra to get some missions done but return only a fraction of a level later because I want some more of that sweet credit action.

The only thing keeping me going back to missions, at least once in a while, is that if I can just level to 40 I’ll get to train faster speeder skills and buy a faster speeder (which I can TOTALLY afford many times over, yet I still want more credits), which would — ahem — “speed” up the entire process.

Sights set on 40… GO!

{ 6 comments }

The Cost of Slicing Missions

by lura on December 28, 2011

Crew Skills Missions/Tasks: SlicingWith the arrival of patch 1.01 yesterday, “Rewards from Slicing have been reduced to bring them into balance with other skills.” I am hearing that the lockboxes from slicing missions return less credits than it cost to do the mission, but I’m not seeing quite those results. Check this out:

Before Christmas (pre-patch), I had just started to gather some slicing mission data to write a post about whether or not crew skills missions were worth it or not.

Before Patch 1.01:

Here’s a sample of 4 missions for Class 2 Lockboxes my companions ran one day last week (I did not note the type of yield: abundant, bountiful, moderate, or rich):

220 credits = 326 credits
220 credits = 208 credits
220 credits = 275 credits, Schematic: Grade 2 Beam Generator
285 credits = 311 credits

Total spent: 945 Credits
Total received: 1120 Credits and item that vendors for 80 credits
Total return (if item vendored): 126%

After Patch 1.01:

After the patch, I had my companions run comparable tasks (Mission Level 10-16 for Class 2 Lockboxes):

220 credits (moderate yield) = 274 credits
220 credits (moderate yield) = 426 credits
220 credits (moderate yield) = 298 Credits
285 credits (abundant yield) = 350 credits

Total spent: 945 Credits
Total received: 1348 Credits
Total return: 143%

For data purposes, additional missions of around the same level yielded this:

195 credits (rich yield, Class 1 Lockboxes) = 231 credits
295 credits (rich yield, Class 1 Lockboxes) = 156 credits
230 credits (moderate yield, Class 2 Lockboxes) = 282 credits
230 credits (moderate yield, Class 2 Lockboxes) = 330 credits

Total spent: 950 credits
Total received: 999 credits
Total return: 105%

And here are some more post-patch numbers for higher-level missions, if anyone out there is number-crunching:

After Patch 1.01, Mission Level 33-40:
645 credits (moderate yield, Class 4 Lockboxes) = 851 Credits
870 credits (rich yield, Class 3 Lockboxes) = Schematic: Grade 4 Ship Armor (vendors for 220), Mission Discovery: Underworld Trading (Purple, vendors for 365), Reinforced Large Credit Box (Blue) containing 2041 Credits

Total spent: 1515 credits
Total received: 2892 credits and 2 items that vendor for 585 credits
Total return (if items vendored): 230%

Was anyone else running numbers on this stuff? What are their findings?

{ 1 comment }