Its being easy, but its not allowing us to make anything useful in return. Maybe when you learn a basic schematic for some purple gear, you could still RE it to learn a BETTER purple piece. For example, say you find a schematic for the Awesome Chestpiece of Butt Kickery +60 Aim +50 End (totally random stats for example) Of course, you can crit it to give it an augment slot. Now, say you reverse engineer it, and learn the Awesome Chestpiece of Critical Butt Kickery! +60 Aim +50 End +20 Crit +20 Power RE a purple schematic, get a BETTER purple schematic. Then people can find their rare schematic, and STILL be leet crafters and improve on it. Alternatively, give crafters a way to spend resources researching a piece of gear, so they don't actually have to MAKE one, they can just do the research (which will take MORE mats than to craft it) and get a 100% chance of learning the next schematic up. Thoughts?

I will submit that, I guess, crafting skills that aren't Biochem and Cybertech are alright when you're leveling up. If you never get gear from commendation vendors and never do flashpoints or heroic quests.

The only issue with damaged gear losing stats is... well, that's EXTREMELY tedious and annoying. I understand your goal is to bring the economy back to life, but look at it this way: If the stats on gear are proportional to how much damage its taken, guilds working on hard or nightmare content would have to run off to take a repair break EVERY ATTEMPT. At best, every 2 or 3 attempts. How is that fun? The stimpacks idea is one little bandaid fix, making one item that some people will buy occasionally will not fill the economy with life. The root of the issue is the whole ideology behind the crafting system itself: everyone is self sufficient. You don't need materials from anything or anyone else to work your crew skill. Rather than repost my entire OP here, I'm just going to link to it: http://www.swtor.com/community/showthread.php?t=137955

The only restriction, AFAIK, is you can only have 1 Crafting. You CAN get 3 Mission or 3 Gathering, I am fairly certain. Someone confirm? I know one of my chars has 1 Crafting 2 Gathering.

No, EVERYBODY needs to drop their crew skills for Biochem. Maybe then Bioware will understand that everything else is useless.

If your attention span is too low to read the title, you probably aren't capable of forming opinions anyway.

And the bottom options beign bad is not always the case. GENERALLY, its top-good middle-meh bottom-douche, but this game has loads of exceptions to that.

Let me start by saying this: today was the fist day I hit Escape to restart a conversation. I have been playing this game first and foremost as a Bioware RPG: picking what I would do in the situation, and dealing with the consequences of my choices. Here is the problem: a LOT of that chat options on the wheel are a HORRIBLE indication of what you're going to say. Its not even close! I've had many times where I picked what seemed like the option to explain the situation gently and told the guy he was a worthless pile of trash and I probably killed his dog. But, none like the option today. This conversation happened on Taris. Minor spoilers for background (its just a sidequest) So I meet up with the commander to turn in the quest. He's aggressive, and I ask *** his problem is. Then the problems start. He asks what happened to his convoy. I picked -I cleared the route for them (middle option) My smuggler says: "That was so easy I fell asleep doing it." ...what? How in the world is that ANYTHING like saying I cleared the way for the convoy and they were heading in? This commander has NO IDEA why I'm even talking to him, and when I was sent out nobody even knew if the convoy was ALIVE! Ok, whatever. That's stupid but I guess I'll live with it. Next, the commander asks why they haven't turned up yet. I picked -They're on their way (bottom option) My smuggler says (paraphrased as close as I can remember): "I'm done with this, figure it out on your own." WHAT THE HELL!? The top and middle options were BOTH to... I was trying to cover, and the ONLY options left to me, which is STATED as "Don't worry they're coming" was basically telling the commander to go play with himself! It was at that point I hit Escape and restarted the conversation. Can we at least have the dialogue options on the wheel even REMOTELY represent what you're about to say?

Bump for GREAT JUSTICE. We this really needs to be higher on Bioware's list (although truly they DO have a pretty epic list right now)

That's largely a result of number 1 and number 4. Admittedly, the gear you can make is pretty much poop, but you'd still see a MAJOR improvement if 1 and 4 were addressed.

I'm gonna throw this out here right now, mildly off topic but I really need someone to explain this logic to me. "LOL WAIT SQUIDDISH, WOW DIDN'T HAVE THOSE THINGS AT LAUNCH, SO ITS OK!" Is SW:TOR's launch simultaneous to WoW's? NO! If I make me a big fancy FPS and release it for xbox 360, but the graphics are terrible, am I going to say "Well, the original Call of Duty had slightly worse graphics than this"? NO! We are competing with CATACLYSM, not vanilla WoW. But this is beside the point, I'm not one of those "BUT BIOWARE YOUR X IS Y SO I'M CANCELLING MY SUB YOU MAKE BAD GAEMS" people. I am aware that, as an MMO, this game is going to constantly evolve. I am also aware, as an avid Assassin's Creed fan, that some developers have absolutely NO CLUE what is best for their game, or how their game even works it would seem. I am simply hoping to outline what I think are the biggest major problems with the current state of the crafting system that need to be addressed to make it... well, not suck. I am aware that the crafting system is not one of Bioware's big priorities, so if these changes EVER come, its a long way off. But we can hope.

Well, to be fair the reason there's so many is because its a major problem. If every crew skill is useless but one, well... we have a problem. I am glad you think this thread one of the more productive though, I just outlined what I think will be easier fixes to improve the system as it stands. Granted, its a bit of an overhaul, but that's REALLY what's necessary.

I saw a thread earlier that talked about crafters being able to color their armor. Why can't we do this? If we make a piece of Moddable armor, why can't we have some barebones coloring mechanic? I'm not talking a great gigantic editor, I'm talking pretty much what Bioware did to all the reskinned pieces of armor out there. Give us a piece of armor we can craft, and when we craft it, give us RGB color sliders (or even just a grid of predetermined colors) for primary, secondary, and accent colors. TA-DA! Now just add in the ability to Armstech and Cybertech to make mods that don't blow, and we have useful skills and a booming economy!

UPDATE: Patch 1.1 has NERFED BIOCHEM and CYBERTECH, showing Bioware DOES NOT understand the current issue with Crew Skills. It is not that those two were underpowered, its that the rest are useless. There is another thread discussing these nerfs here. This thread has gotten pretty large, so before my wall of text explaining the major fixes I think will revive crafting, here is a bullet point list of the ideas that have come from this thread (summary of what we would like to see) -Buff the Crew Skills other than Biochem and Cybertech to have toys for the crafter -Give more "Orange" moddable gear to crafters -Allow moddable gear to at least COMPETE with PvP and Raid gear -Make Crew Skills require more materials dropped from mobs, or from other Crew Skills -Buff leveling crafted gear OR nerf quest rewards. Crafted, at level gear should outstrip quest rewards. -Bring endgame crafted gear up to be SUPERIOR to commendation gear for all classes and specializations -"Exceptional" crafted Orange gear that comes with additional Augment slots -Give crafters the ability to customize gear color TO AN EXTENT -Give crafters the ability to ADD Augment slots to PvP and Raid gear -Some sort of system for Synthweaving, Armormech and Armstech that allows players to improve a piece of gear (lower the GCD on your spammable attack? Increase elemental resistance? Boots with a +5% run speed?) -Add more Lightsaber colors obtainable through Artifice (seems to be the biggest offender of being a useless skill) -THERE IS NOTHING TO LOOK FORWARD TO MAKING AS A CRAFTER And some more ideas I'm not sure I agree with: -Make some slots unobtainable through Raiding or PvP, only Crafting -Make some Raid bosses drop BoE mats for those slots instead of full pieces of gear -Remove commendation gear from max-level planets entirely, so your starter endgame sets come from Crafting -Orange gear ONLY obtainable through crafting -Craftable gear equivalent to normal mode raid gear or PvP gear -Replace commendations with BoE mats to MAKE the gear that used to come from commendations And the original OP, in all its glory: Bioware, the crafting system DESPERATELY needs addressed. Hopefully in this thread here we can pile up everything wrong with the crafting system where hopefully somebody will see it and something can get done. I'm not asking for SWG. I'm not asking to make a character that does nothing but craft. All I want is a crafting system that isn't absolutely pointless. Here are my MAJOR concerns: 1: Everything but Biochem is pretty much useless. You could arguably say that Cybertech's grenades make it not ENTIRELY useless compared to everything else, but its still leagues below Biochem. Bioware, take a good hard look at Biochem. It gives the crafter rewards for there work. It gives Biochem players some tangible, beneficial rewards that cannot be matched by anything outside Biochem. Its also a good source of income (as good as anything is in this game, I guess) and provides rewards for you and friends even at low levels. What does everything else have? Cybertech, like I said, has some grenades. Everything else just makes useless gear that, while maybe helpful for leveling A LITTLE, offers no benefit at 400 skill or player level 50. There's no reason to level Synthweaving, Armstech, or Armormech AT ALL. The gear you make is far outstripped by even quest rewards. I absolutely hate to bring the WoW-Beast into this, but look what they've done with crafting. I use them because they are a prime example; EVERY trade skill gives the crafter a tangible reward that can ONLY be obtained through crafting. Better armor enhancements. More SLOTS for armor enhancements. Even active-use abilities! The bottom line is, a crafting skill needs to REWARD the player for all their work. The population (minus Biochemists) shouldn't be sitting around with their 400 skills wondering why they bothered. 2: You might as well just pick one crew skill. Let me elaborate: everything is tied together. You take Armormech, you take Scavenging. You take Artifice, you take Arhcaeology. Now, I understand this. This is reasonable. Obviously, a crafting skill is going to be generally linked to a gathering skill. But why do the mission skills have to fall into this as well? I expected mission skills to be some cool gravy I could pick after I hashed out a gathering and crafting skill, not effectively ANOTHER gathering skill I needed to craft. Granted, you can level a crafting skill to 400 fine without using the related Mission Skill. Granted, there is ONE Mission Skill you could take advantage of regardless of crafting skill. But I still expected more. I didn't expect to pick Biochem and be immediately pigeonholed into Bioanalysis AND Diplomacy to take full advantage of my craft. I was hoping mission skills were going to be something new and exciting, a new addition to the old crafting schedule, not a glorified gathering skill for blue and purple mats. I guess you could say this isn't a major issue, and it probably isn't. It's just something I would have liked to see more done with. 3: Blandy McBlanderson's tax accountant is probably more exciting. Ripped shamelessly from Yahtzee on Zero Punctuation. There is virtually no excitement or real sense of progression in the crafting skills. You're never really aiming for anything. There's no magical carrot-on-a-stick thresholds you're shooting for, other than 400. You never look forward to getting to craft that supershinyawesome item that is totally exciting. This somewhat ties in to number 1. If all the trade skills are pointless and a pile of suck, there's clearly nothing to be excited about. But even Biochem is lackluster. Sure, its useful, but has ANYONE who has ever leveled a crew skill in this game ever been excited for anything? Probably not. The crafting skills need more goodies you can look forward to. Even things like Armstech and Armormech could add in some fun things to built other than JUST armor and weapons. You've got all your silly social items Bioware, make some silly things for the crafters! Give us something we can look forward to! Let Cybertechs make a Mod that has no stats but lets you rocketjump at somebody once every 20 minutes! Let Armstech make Barrels with cool effects or sounds! Let Armormech make a tank chestplate with a built-in defensive CD! MAKE THINGS FUN! 4: When everyone is self-sufficient, there is no economy. Lets jump back to number 2! Ok, I'm gonna jump in front of the bus here and say my highest crafting skill is Armormech at 250, so I might be wrong on this one. Armormech uses Scavenging and Underworld Trading materials. JUST Scavenging and Underworld Trading materials. There is 0 overlap to other tradeskills. Armormech is never going to require a couple items from Archaeology, or Bioanalysis. Hell, Slicing doesn't even have items, I figured Slicing was gonna be the wild card that had computer chips and data discs all the other professions would need to build fancy toys. When everyone is completely self-sufficient, there is no economy. If you can use your 3 skills to gather everything you will ever need in your life, why would you ever buy things from anyone else? OH GOD, ITS THE WOW-BEAST AGAIN! In WoW, every single tradeskill requires materials from multiple gathering professions. Lets look at Blacksmithing. Blacksmithing uses Mining as a gathering skill, since it makes things with metals and stones. However, a LOT, and I mean a LOT of blacksmithing recipes require leather from Skinning. A lot require cloth from mob drops. Some even require rare gemstones you can get RARELY out of ore veins or commonly from Jewelcrafting, or even weirder things like potions or scrolls. The point is, Blacksmithing and Mining does not make your character a sad little crafting minion sat alone in the corner leveling his profession by himself. If you want to level Blacksmithing and make the shiniest toys, you're going to need some help. You're going to need to buy some things. You're going to need to kill some mobs for lewts. Nothing in crew skill crafting (that I've seen) even takes mob drops, it is literally 100% from you gathering skill and technicallynotagatheringskill mission skill. THIS is why there is no economy. Sure, the GTN interface is a terrible pile of poop. But when you can't make anything anyone wants, and you can't gather anything people need, and hell, mobs don't even drop Troll Sweat or Deeprock Salt or Fluorescent Bat Guano that somebody, somewhere wants to make a hat out of, why would you ever use the GTN in the first place? That's all I've got for now. If you have any other issues with the crafting system, or ideas to improve it, or just want to agree, or think I'm a gimped monkey slapping the left side of his face on a keyboard, feel free to chime in. If anyone has any other major concerns with the crafting system, I'll definitely add them to the OP. I just really, really want crafting in this game to be less of a complete waste of time than it is. Another good post from Page 13 with more ideas MAINLY about moddable gear and RE'ing: TL;DR: Go away, us grown-ups are talking. Keep this thread alive, ladies and gentlemen! We've had all kinds of good ideas roll in, let Bioware know we ARE NOT happy with the current state of crafting!

Again, Force Lightning is an EXACT MIRROR of Telekinetic Throw.

Guided Missle=/=Mortar Volley. Mortal Volley is the mirror of Death from Above, which also only hits if the targets are kind enough to stand there. However, DFA does activate and do its damage faster than MV, which is apparently a bug with fixes inc. Actually Telekinetic Throw, the mirror of Force Lightning, does exactly the same thing. Actually, so does every other channeled ability. Aimed Shot from Gunslingers, the mirror for Snipe, does the same thing. Actually, lots of stuff hits over 1500, like Shoot First and even the backstab move Shadows have. Latency. Trust me, I hate the super-fail that is Republic PVP as much as you, but none of these things are causing it. Its 98% L2P issues and 2% some of our moves actually are bugged (or in the case of Smugglers, they just gave them longer CDs for no apparent reason). I just made a Sith Inq so when I feel like PvP, I can play on the winning team a bit.

This is what everyone asking for no Huttball is missing. Your queue wouldn't go from 5 minutes to 15 minutes, it would go from 5 minutes to AT LEAST an hour. Possibly even more. The faction imbalances are staggering, your queues would almost literally go on forever.

Luckily enough, it happens with EVERY companion that has a death grip. Yaaaaaaay.

Well, before 20% worked, now 50% work. Don't worry, its right up there with letting you speak in party chat for more than 50% of the parties you join. Or guild chat more than 50% of the time you log in. Or showing more than 50% of your guild mates that are online. Come to think of it, seems like I'm playing 50% of a game...

I absolutely second this motion. I'm playing through the game with a friend, and between PvP Warzones and Flashpoints (and a bit of space combat), we finished up Coruscant with myself as level 20 and he was 19. So, we got our quests for both Taris and Nar Shadda. Seeing that Nar Shadda was level 21 and Taris 16, we said screw it lets go do Nar Shadda. End result, we spent the entire day today trying to steamroll through our class quests on Taris as a level 25 and 26. It was boring, it was pointless, it was absolutely no fun at all and a complete waste of a few hours of my life. There was absolutely no reason for us to have to do Taris. Better yet, it wouldn't even be HARD for Bioware to think of reasonable retcons that let you skip a planet like that. ***TROOPER STORY SPOILER*** There are LOADS of ways Bioware could work around my Trooper having never gone to Taris, or my friend's Jedi Knight. Point is, its just a terrible decision to have a progression-based MMO that lets you progress through questing OR Flashpoints OR PvP OR space combat that forces you to do planet-spanning quest chains on every planet to get to the planets that are relevant for you. It would be like saying if I leveled through PvP and decided to try Eternity Vault at 50, that I had to go back and do every single flashpoint in order before I could. Not even heroic, just at level. Go do the level 10 Esseles.

The reason Imps get Huttball 95% of the time is because there are probably about 10x more Imp characters queueing for WZs on the Empire side. If Huttball was Imp v Rep only, Imp queues would be HOURS long.

...I think I'm going to go back through this thread and start up a tally of people who should have their posting privileges revoked because apparently they're incapable of reading the OP.

I have noticed a crapload of this, so hopefully it'll balance out over time. Its always 4-5 Imp 50s vs our team led by a 35-40. On a sidenote: BOLSTER IS TOTALLY WORKING BIOWARE, DON'T CHANGE A THING!

I ask this question honestly having gone 1-37 now with my Smuggler (that's 1 warzone win, 37 losses). I've never ended up in a Republic v Republic Huttball game, and the 1 win was a 9v4. We somehow had 9 people in a Battle for Alderaan, and we got the "Lobby will close not enough players" message every 30 seconds or so because the imp team kept waggling between 4-5 people. Republic DOES NOT WIN. EVER. EVER EVER EVER. I thought being on the Alliance was someone's idea of a cruel and unusual punishment in WoW, but at least they won OCCASIONALLY. Is this seriously just my server? Just for kicks, I rolled a Sith Sorc on my server. I've lost 1 warzone on him, and it was Imp v Imp Huttball. All 7 games against Republic, we steamrolled hard. I find it difficult to believe that the entirety of the Republic is this bad. Someone, tell me there is hope on another server. Please.

This is actually a really good summary of things, once we had each boss figured out and had a plan, we downed them with no deaths.