Hello, i thought i'd ask: Is anyone else seeing a skew in resources harvested from grade 11 archeology nodes? When harvesting large numbers of nodes (10k in mats harvested) I always seem to get less premium lusterous bondar crystal than premium lusterous artifact fragment. It looks like the color crystal nodes sacrifice power crystals for color crystals.

Oh well. for some reason i thought they got base renown. digging around patch notes i do see that preffered do get 25% renown, which isn't the same thing. I was hoping for a way to get a pure, unmodified by anything value from someone, but apparently that isn't possible.

Apparently you found a case where it didn't boost. Given that its a seasonal limited time quest, who knows why it did or didn't. And back at you. Did you read my post at all? A normal heroic mission did boost. So at worst we're both partially wrong and bioware has things mucked up good, and sometimes you get a boost, sometimes you don't. Which is different from 'you never get a boost'. i will further clarify that my numbers were from the mission reward.

That is.. not exactly true. Things are screwed up royally and its a pain to tease out exactly what is happening. First off... as best i can tell the mission report popup has no bearing on anything. It would be nice if it were fixed. The renown boost actually does give more renown, probably about what it should.. There are just a couple considerations: the boosts are additive, not multiplicative. So if you are getting the legendary +25% boost, 3 % from guild perk and 2% from guild pop, like i am, i have a +30% boost there. Further, there seems to be a sub bonus on base, around 20%. This gives me a multiplier of 1.5 for non boosted and 2.5 for boosted Doing the heroic Enemies of the Republic (coruscant) on 2 commandos, both in the same guild, 1 with the boost up and 1 w/o the boost up. Without boost: 10809 renown in the bar (actual gain) With boost: 17892 renown in the bar (note this is also squirrely, there are 2 reported renown gains associated with the quest finishing) If i use my 20% bonus for subs (i goal seeked for that in excel) to get the base value for w/o boost i divide by 1.5, 2.5 for boosted i get a base renown of ~7200 (+/- 6). It would be interesting if someone who had an unsubbed alt account could post the same quest renown as a confirmation.

I've gotten increasingly frustrated with crafting myself. the material cost for endgame components might be manageable if it weren't for the hideously low RE% that you have to wade through to get upgrades. Between me and another player we're at ~35 attempts at REing an augment to purple without a single success. Event allowing for crits, thats 25 crafting attempts to make the augments, which is ~125 solid resource matrix. at current prices that is 375m worth of crafting materials lit on fire with no forward progress, which is extremely frustrating. What is even more frustrating is a bit of math shows that we aren't even that far out onto the low probability tail on getting the RE. If the probabiltiy of success is 5%, then the probability of consecutive failure over N attempts is .95^n. The probability of a single success over N attempts is 1-.95^n. We only exceeded a 50% chance of a success at 14 attempts. As things are at our current number, we're at ~83% of people should have succeeded atleast once, which sounds high, but that means that what, 1 in 6 people trying the same RE will make more attempts than we've tried without a success. Contemplate that. How many solid resource matrixes does your average player pull in in a given week? Some mechanism has to be implemented to cut off these low probability tails that can push an otherwise relatively happy player into a rage. RNG like this is NOT fun.

So, update. ?the most recent patch? seems to have dialed back the gear drops from MM fps from 3-9 per boss to 1-3, which won't do at all.

With all the back and forth on RNG gearing i thought i'd throw out some numbers and opinions from my run at gearing a new PTS char from 268 to 306. What we did: 2 characters (Assassin + Operative) with 2 companions (level 26 dps companions) running master mode hammer station. We made no attempts at doing the bonus boss, we just chained through the three normal bosses many times (18 as of now) How did the gearing go? 18 run throughs took us ~4.5 hours. On the 14th run through i hit item level 306. by the 15th i had a near-complete alternate set of 306 gear. My buddy was at 294 and had been stuck there for the last 6 runs, having only gotten side grades or downgrades for the last 18 boss fights and getting kinda frustrated. This illustrates the problem with RNG gearing: the potential for long droughts of no net positive gearing. Just as a thought experiment, assume there is a 75% chance of side grades or downgrades per boss. That means there is about a .5% chance of 18 down grades or side grades in a row (.75^18). That sounds like a low probability but that is 1 out of every 200 18 boss sequences. Its going to happen, and it will annoy the hell out of the people it happens to and they will complain about it loudly. Consider some sort of pity timer like was used on the ME:Andromeda gear packs to truncate those low probability tails on the distribution? What an i content with? Gearing from 268 to 306. It can be a bit annoying, but anyone who thinks getting to just-sub BIS gearing is harder than early 5.0 needs to have their memory checked. Even with the introduction of gear tokens you were looking at a 50-60 minute operation to get a 5/8 chance at a single piece of 230-236 gear for most people. And with legacy implants/earpieces/relics there isn't a need to do left hand side grinding like there was in the past. BTW, i do thank you for that change, left side has gone from being the biggest pain of gearing to probably the easiest part. Finally, once you've done it once you can ship the 306 gear around to any character you're starting to gear and bypass leveling their gear up again. What don't we know? What are the new set piece vendors are going to be like? what will the cost be for a full 6 pieces set? will they be empty shells or filled with ILVL mods? How will the mentioned 'gear to spec' button work, when will it be introduced? Answers to these questions could be a net positive for gearing or a nightmare. What don't i like? the random mods/enhancements/armor slot pieces from Takarra. Using the well known tech fragment feature i ground out and did statistics on a large block of purchases:193 pieces for 62725 tech fragments. Which is a huge amount of fragments. 3 runs of MM hammer station has been giving me approximately 1000 fragments, so that is nearing 200 runs of MM HS (at 15 minutes a run). As an operative healer nearly half the mods i got were tank specific (87), which is ridiculous. This may be something that got overlooked while changing all the other gear purchases, or might get changed with the new 'gear for this spec' button that was stated to be in development. If not, please include it. The remainder were some distribution of healer/dps compatible pieces (106). I wasn't happy with the distribution of pieces i did get, though my sample was small enough that it could have partially been bad RNG. At first order i'd say that the ideal distribution would be 7 (28%) armorings, 9 (36%) mods, 7 (28%) enhancements and 2 (8%) barrels/hilts per 25 purchases, as that would fill all your slots for a fully modable set a of gear. Really, one should be getting more enhancements than that given that that is a major way to balance tertiary stats (Alacrity, accuracy and crit or Shield/Absorb). At 193 pieces i was getting too many mods (41%), and armorings (34%), and not enough enhancements (19%). The shortage of enhancements is actually probably the worst part: there are 2 (tank, heals) or 3 (dps) types of enhancements that you need to balance out your stats and the wrong distribution can be crippling to hitting target numbers for your spec. With my purchases, ignoring the small variations within enhancements i might have barely had enough correct-ish enhancements to mod out a set of healer, dps and tank gear. No. this does not mean that 20k fragments will let you gear someone out, the chances of you having the proper distribution of parts is probably near zero. I'm not overly thrilled at the 20 new variations on each of the classic mod/enhancement/armorings. Its not an automatically awful concept, but the huge number of possibilities mostly serves to drive people nuts. Knowing that you need one of say 4 alacrity type X enhancements, seeing that you got one, but its in the 16 that don't boost your alacrity enough is another way to frustrate people. Maybe reduce the number of options? 2 steps in either direction from the base distribution, maybe with a reduced total range?

I've said it before, and will say it again. Hold the line is bugged. My guess is the adds are supposed to spawn in waves rather than all at once with infinite timed reinforcements unless you get everything killed before the next spawn time. The imperial equivalent spawned adds on a timer. Supposedly they broke it too in the last patch or three. In prior iterations hold the line was bugged because the geonosians didn't spawn at all. Don't assume things are in their final form or even working properly. Keep pointing out real bugs like this and hope they get it fixed.

I didn't think there was any bolster for PvE. Trash drops on ossus were higher than the 220, can't recall exactly what.

If this is the mission i'm thinking off (recover the holocron in the temple?) it was a heroic in the previous PTS iteration, isn't now. and was a bit overtuned even then. there are more than a few things that are throwing force quakes that do 22k/tick, and if you've got 2 sith lords channeling it at the same time thats pretty nasty.

Dummy parse is not a real world example of damage, no. but if i can maintain rotation A in a pvp match and do X damage with the new gear in the same fight i'd expect to do roughly 10% more. That won't be 1000 dps because you aren't achieving 100% uptime, but it will still be a significant increase.

Cite? if not (and i'm aware of no indication, in PTS or from the unmentionable datamining effors) can we not just throw stuff like that out there?

I don't disagree that the gearing has the potential to distort ranked PVP pretty badly, atleast for a short period. People who find a way to get geared quick will have a window to dominate probably even equivalent players. The boost to damage was actually higher than i'd anticipated, mostly due to all the tertiary stat going into crit causing me to crit more and harder on top of the linear damage increase from other stats. But.. to be frank, i was actually a bit surprised at how easy its going to be to get my main into near 258's. A day or so after the livestream i had my plan and a couple days after PTS opened up i was pretty sure it would let me be geared in 258 for everything but MH/OH, without even doing anything i would consider an outrageous grind, sometime in week 2 after the release. And none of this would require teaming up with other players to do ops and fight over tokens or fight with the (IMHO) radioactive pit that is ranked PvP

As a second point of reference going from fully optimized 248 to close to optimized 258 gear on an IO merc i picked up 567 mastery, 710 endurance, 422 power, 203 crit, 22 alacrity and 11 accuracy. this boosted my 2.5m dummy parse (debuffs enabled) from ~9200 at 40.3 APM to ~10200 at 39.7 APM. That is a non-trivial difference.

Yep, i misinterpreted a screenshot at dulfy and assumed that they had been implemented. i now have no tangible evidence the change has been made

My understanding is that all the existing tiers will continue to exist, and tier 4 boxes will have a tiny chance of dropping 252 gear. I've opened ~150 tier 4 boxes on the PTS w/o a shard or 252 piece. that number is still low enough that there is a ton of room for the actual drop %. 258's will only come from masterwork shards and MM Gods (through crafting). I'm guessing the devs are trying to give a test-drive for a replacement to galactic command for 6.0. I'm not terribly encouraged by how it looks at the moment.

The weekly heroic i'm planning on is NOT the complete 4 master mode flashpoints. it is the 'complete 4 heroic missions on ossus' which are a bit more challenging than open world, but not immensely so (when they get one or two kinks worked out). I've already timed one of the missions down to less than 3 minutes from accepting to completion. Also, expect to see the Hammer Station grind reappear, which will be another source of crystals. For the UC question, stockpile what you can while waiting for the patch. It is probably going to be at least a month. Everyone getting galactic command boxes should be getting some. Pvp'ers should be getting quite a few more. Truth be told, i'm not really expecting enough crafted gear to be made to have much of an effect on things. There will be a few raid groups/players that make out like bandits. Unless the balance is much kinder than i anticipate most nightmare groups are going to take a while to get the Gods bosses on farm. And for PvE'ers, everyone will benefit. Everyone will go into operations, flashpoints and any other content with better gear, doing more damage, healing more, and taking less damage. For PvP'ers there will be a period where some high end players will get even more of an advantage. Yes. it will take a while to regear a character. The more you play the quicker it will happen. Even if i didn't buy crystals with UC's i'd still anticipate getting 8 pieces in week 4, for roughly 16-32 hours of work. Yes, if you've been playing alts in PVP (or PvE) you will have to make choices on who you gear up first. Just like every other time a new tier of gear has been added to the game.

To me it looks like the weekly can be done in less than an hour, probably less than a half hour with some optimizing (yes, even with hold the line as it is today)(yes, they should tone it down. alot). Personally, i'm planning on pushing 8 chars who have Nathema finished and using the crystals they get to buy gear and boost my main healer. I've got stockpiled unassembled components for a long time. 8 hours for 8 crystals, probably dropping closer to 4 hours over the week. Another 4000 UC's for another 8 crystals (buying only 1/week/char). The 8 chars will get me enough rep to be in the heroic tier sometime during the 2nd week. Some time during week 2 i'll start seeing a fairly major improvement in my gear.

I'll go on record as being a bit less panicked about the location locked mods/enhancements. I think its stupid and pointless, but it won't really do more than slow things down a bit. With 258 gear everyone has ~2150 pts of tertiary stat swing that is totally customizable without buying anything other than the minimum amount of gear (2 implants, 1 earpiece, and 14 augments). Maybe there is a customization that requires more than that kind of a swing, but i'm pretty sure what ever stat you're trying to overload gets into diminishing returns territory. Dps has some room for complaint since for most configurations you get too much in the way of accuracy enhancements. Even that isn't as bad as it has been in the past, you take your 2 accuracy enhancements and a stim and you're at the PvE operations 110% accuracy level. There is an (admittedly) clunky workaround for pvp'ers who don't want accuracy or pve'ers who are intent on keeping their accuracy augments: buy extra healer gear for those two slots. they will have either crit or alacrity. Tanks are still in crap territory: AFAIK high end tanks mostly want warding b mods (to the extent that they use defense mods at all) and bulwark/bastion enhancements... none of which comes on stock gear. I'd love to see this change, but its been the case since 4.0 certainly. I want to see these things change, but my experience has been that very little that isn't obviously a bug changes from PTS to the first round or two of live. I'm planning workarounds. A day or two after the PTS was up i had my plan for (barring changes) having a 7piece set in 258, 252 mh/oh, and start replacing my left side with 258, in 2 weeks.

I've managed to clear most ot the heroics solo (pub and imp). Hold the Line (pub) has been the one that has felt most overtuned to me. I've managed it by killing the silvers and golds that don't respawn one by one, running away constantly and when normals are thats left grinding it out. Whether this is considered a problem or not depends on if these are intended to be done solo or as a group. I'm in min-maxed 248/240aug gear as a scoundrel/operative healer with a level 50 ranged companion. I can't get a response for this in general on the PTS, so maybe someone here will answer: the heroics used to be on the daily board. for my chars on the PTS they aren't. i've found start points for 3 of 4 missions at various speeder landing zones, haven't been able to find that last one. where are other people getting the heroics?

I'll just throw this out here as my view. I'm a tenuous PVP'er. i'll do it when the mood strikes, but its usually not my first choice. As things stand i'm running at best 50/50 on win/loss. With the current setup that means 13 or so matches a week (7 wins for 14 and 6 losses for the remainder). With the new setup i'm looking at 17 or so matches assuming i keep the same win/loss. With the potential for it to get astronomically bad. I just won't bother. There are probably alot of people like me who play seriously, try to learn, but are mediocre at best who will look at the change and drop out. I'd guess these changes will probably reduce the mat farmers. They'll also shrink your pool of middling players. They won't do a damned thing about trolls who intentionally throw. Good luck with your queue time.

A couple of points: Star Fortress [story] missions drop 200 mods.. it is not RE'able, but it is not bound and can be sold on GTN Star Fortress [heroic] missions drop 208 moddable gear, probably mods also. pretty sure this is also not RE'able SM ops drop 216, as does the glowing vendor gear. I've got the 216 versatile barrel schem and i haven't re'd a mainhand so elite mod parts can be re'd (and yes, pull them from the gear and make sure you are using a person with the right crafting skill.. a lot of that stuff moved around) Same applies to 220 gear: Radiant crystal parts are RE'able. i specifically know my barrel schem came from a radiant crystal purchase. but the mods and enhancements are the poor versions, i wouldn't bother beyond RE'ing the barrel/hilt so i could make mainhands. 216 costs 1 dark matter catalyst, 220 costs 2 dark matter catalysts. these drop on SM op last bosses (mostly) and HM bosses (all)

I'd kill to see the reactor from the Storm Carrier (Makeb) added as a decoration http://files.enjin.com.s3.amazonaws.com/540045/modules/forum/attachments/Reactor_1436410903.gif

Maelstrom HM Sword Squadron Kill http://files.enjin.com.s3.amazonaws.com/540045/modules/forum/attachments/TOS-SwordS-HM_1431407656.gif

To me it looks like its random, pegged to the classes in the flashpoint. IE: i've been running some of them as an op heal with a jugg tank, we only see strength and cunning gear in those runs. We will see strength tank and dps gear, so its pegged to your potential roles