I was able to get this on my sniper. Make sure you clear all the enemies first. The hardest one is the crate by the ship. I grabbed it, immediately mounted, and went. You'll need to make sure you go up the rock face and drop into the gorge. It's a tight timer on this one. I ended up being able to click the basket and channel and be done with like 2 seconds left. That one may take a few tries. Once you get it you'll be good just keep at it. You'll need to do all of them three totall times to get the cheevo.

I was actually looking forward to a wall of text! Well...we can definitely disagree on if an opinion just becomes right simply by way of it being different. Ralph's whole premise is wrong at every level, and he's way more interested in insults. But, on the other end yours and my debates have actually been something where there is an example of equally different and equally right opinions in regards to that time factor. I don't really think either of us are wrong in analyzing the time functions, and that highlights how complicated that factor really is....which is kinda cool if you think about it. I'm weird though, and I can really get lost in the "nuts and bolts" of something. When it comes to limiting playstyle I think I am coming from a place where I know that at 95 I will be able to perform up since I've got loads of practice and in depth knowledge of my classes. So ultimately no I don't care, and if a solo only player has access to bis thats cool with me. The research scientist in my asks that question of "would things be fine with 0-95 if it felt rewarding enough even if there is a higher level of 95-100 that exists" maybe that's a better way to say it. Part of me is trying to create a hypothesis and then stress test it in a sense. So while I have my own personal beliefs, it would be irresponsible of me to not try to consider different circumstances where this 7 gear system may actually be ok or how would it be ok. And we do agree on the moddable part. I suspect we will agree on the cadence part. We aren't really on opposite sides even if we both really love writing paragraphs. Like, I could totally keep going too lol, but my eyes hurt reading my own stuff now which may be a sign.

don't worry about mine. Mine are long, and nonsensical. I would like to believe there's a good point in my novels but yeah.

Even then...we've totally gone so far passed the topic in this thread. But hey it's been fun none the less.

So our string really didn't go too far back. The first time you mentioned time you said "first...casuals are not free from time constraints." to which I assume is a response the the crafting thing I had put up. In my first post with the maths and total augs I listed each level for the sake of being as complete as I could be. I didn't pass along any recommendation of using golds or purples etc. I did then say in another post that blues were the most accessible and as we discussed you did say you were mistaken there so in our discussion on time constraints at that point pretty much was moot, no? If a solo or a casual has no commitments in game, and can play whenever, or for however long they may want to then would availability be the true marker there? For the augments, and even augment kits I'd say the time sink isn't as heavy as it was initially mentioned because the availability is higher on the materials than previously understood. The points in your corner that are irrefutableare that the non legacy functionality of things, the non-moddale nature of the things, the low cap on the tokens, and the rework of the weeklies makes the cadence of the treadmill extremely problematic even if the ways to get the stats to their check boxes is easier than initially thought of. Without seeing anything on an actual live server, you are 100 percent right here. I've said this in other places but the non moddable nature is my biggest worry. So then it seems to come down to the question of "even if the color is green, is the gear going to be good enough for me to feel more powerful in the content that I want to run, and is the grind to get it and upgrade it going to feel rewarding"? Would you agree with that, or how would you change that around? My stance here is that if the grind is balanced enough to where there's enough to do to drive the player then the color shouldn't matter, nor should the access to the tippy top level matter (aside from what Trixie did point out in that at the top only raiders get immediate access to moddable gear. I'm 100 percent in agreement with anyone and everyone who wants to move back to moddable gear)

So I do think its important to maybe take a step backwards and focus the debate on why available time is not a good variable to use. My idea on this is that in terms of grand scheme things an overall time to target is something to focus on. So from a design phase sure saying "how much time do we want a player in X phase of this expansion" and then balancing around that function using some kind of metric that can put a value on average character time would be seeminly a good way to create a foundation for a gear treadmill. But, saying "First, I don't think you can just assume every solo player is also free of any time constraints" boils it down to too specific of a claim. Neither of us can say we can assume every raider or every casual player or every pvp player or every role player or whoever is free from any time constraints. It's not something we can know and it's not something we can judge with any kind of non biased approach. I would skew more to flashpoints and raids since that's how I view time spent in game. You might go in a different direction entirely. Neither of which would be wrong, but neither of which would be representative with any great power and without any actual predictive power it becomes a point that just doesn't work. I didn't ever mean to include this in any of my posts going back and forth with other people. My main goals were to rebuke that Ralphie guy from continuously acting like us nightmare raiders did some back door deal so that we can continue to feel special (which is still just as untrue and offensive as it has always been). Frankly, no nightmare raider actually cares if you get gear. Doesn't matter at all. I've said that many times now. Does a player that will not do nightmare operations really need that gear? No. Hard truth. Not necessary. Especially if its a strictly solo player. The exception that I'd think would be fun to test out would be MM chapters that could definitely put a twist into things. As a side note, I was really hoping that the Eternal Championship would hold up and be another point that would say a solo only player actually needs higher level gear. But, sadly I didn't find that. I was able to clear the EC using an Assassin tank in 252/258 gear and a level 32 companion. Used zero of the health pods. I know I'm on a tangent, but that one was a bummer. Back on topic, if something doesn't matter at all then having access or not having access to best in slot gear just doesn't matter. What would matter would be if the gear treadmill would offer a progression system that rewarded a solo player for their time, and that the treadmill was deep enough that it gave the player on that path some level of satisfaction. It's definitely possible that going from say 0-95 is equally as satisfying as going from 0-100. This is part of the reason why I asked the questions about what the gear actually has on them and what the gear upgrade pathway looks like. It may be entirely possible that the gear is being unfairly judged because it's simply of green color. So my first idea was "how much is it going to take to augment that gear to get the accuracy to 110. 8 blue augments seems to be the ticket. To get all that it would mean doing conquest, farming materials, getting your crafting going, and running probably something like heroics to get the credits for it all. That's a lot of stuff to do, so at first glance, the very first glance which is the roughest draft of them all, it may be that the gearing treadmill has enough in it that would make the player effort/reward decent to maybe better than a player might initially think right now. Not saying that's going to hold up, but if the metric is "can a solo only player get this gear, and can this gear be upgraded so that they are still becoming more powerful as a player" then it may be enough to make this gear stuff work. The cadence you've brought up as a potential issue, so that could definitely throw a wrench in everything considering you mentioned its not legacy based anymore. To redefine the terms as I understand them: A casual player may not play often, but when playing will not bind themselves to any specific playstyle or content type. They casually enter any arena and play. A solo player will only do activities in the game that are non group based in nature. When I said the isotope or the material claim, my real intention was to highlight that I do it that way but others are free to do the non resource demanding way of farming on a planet. The isotope in question costs 12 blue jawa junk. With Jawa Junk going to be harder to come by I'd say your point of using jawa junk to buy materials being more tedious would be dead on. Which would then mean that my point that farming on the planet that has those material nodes while doing the daily or weekly quests becomes even more realistic and efficient. For the stims, my assumption wasn't listed. My bad there. I'm using the Purple Krypax Stims as a base. The methodology is still pretty simple if you want to play around with it more. The purple will give 264 of the stat. But, what might be better is to just use blue quality across the board? If that's the case then from the poster that gave out the analysis the dps set would need an additional 766 accuracy stat to reach 110%. If we subtract the, now blue, stim amount of 251 we come to the conclusion that we need an additional 515 accuracy to reach the 110 threshold. If we use the blue augment stat value of 95 we can say that 515 divided by 95 gives us the amount of blue augments we will need which would be 6. This leaves you 8 slots for alacrity and critical. If we want to eliminate the accuracy bloat since that division yields basically 5.5 we can see if the blue krypax versatile stim might be better. Using this would remove a lot of the unused accuracy that you have but requiring 8 blue accuracy augs. I've typed a lot. I have lost my train of thought so I'm going to stop here and hope there's some organized thinking in the great wall of text above. And, I can't lie, the more I try to remember what the convo was with you about time I don't remember talking about time with anyone. This feels like the first time it's been brought up with me since Casi did when they were talking about the overall time to upgrade an item being too long with the cap on the tokens. I'll try to find it. I'm assuming its in this thread somewhere.

I already asked this question in a previous thread so thank you for also providing an additional answer..

I wanted to break this out as well because, not going to lie, this doesn't fit. At end game, everyone is augmenting their gear to increase their performances ranging from an operation player to a pvp player to anyone. I don't think augmenting is something extraneous. They're an end game function just like the regular gearing path can be considered. I'd think of something like the Nightmare Crystal of Fury needing to be crafted in order to meet the checks in a nightmare operation would be considered extraneous. Augmenting your gear with different levels of augments though...that's a tough sell for me calling them extraneous.

So I definitely get where you're coming from, and I do think the idea of crafting being a hard core time sink for a solo player is probably very true. However, to craft blue augments for example should not be all that intense. The only thing that they may need for them is the processed isotope stabilizer which I usually purchase straight from the jawa in mass quantities if needed. The other materials I generally just go to Onderon, do 6 dailies, or the 10 for the weekly, and farm mats there. And if progression/ effort is something that solo players want then asking them to play and do a bit of a grind doesn't really sound unreasonable to obtain augments. If anything, this should give them things to do in the game which is what one of the complaints was in all this gearing discussion. Something I'm wondering about, but dont know. The gear pathways. I read that you can upgrade via conquest vendor, flashpoint vendor, or operation vendor. If that's correct: Does, for example, the conquest vendor sell the green 318, and then as you gain conquest tokens allow you to buy the blue 318 version, and then the purple 318 version? Or is it conquest is the color green, and they will upgrade their gear from green 318 to green 324 to green 330? Flashpoints from blue 318- blue 330, and operations the purple kinds? The cost is something I think is a decent argument though. 10k for an aug kit, 11k for a rip...it's debatable if that's too much or not for one. For a full set that's like one weekly mission completed at a daily area. Now, I don't know the rewards or the changes with the weekly stuff so that cost may go from debatable to outlandish quickly. For transitioning blues to three sets of gear (assuming there are three upgrades to get to) that would be around 140k to install the aug 11 kits. 465k roughly to rip and run 3 times (prob only need two times but including a 3rd just as a buffer and in case anything weird happens). So we're talking 605k credits to augment as you go for blue augments (again using blues because they're the most accessible to a solo player). For a solo player, what does it take to get 605k credits? What does that grind look like? For me, granted I do a few things to make credits ranging from making war supplies or dark projects to selling materials of all types plus the RPM or OEM ones, the thought of making 600k credits does not feel daunting in the slightest.

You started a really fruitful little thing here. Keep the good stuff coming.

This is great, Thank you for the analysis. Edit: After seeing this broken down am I close here: Using an Accuracy stim, am I right to say you'd need: Gold 77s: 4 accuracy augments Purple 74s: 5 accuracy augments Blue73s: 6 accuracy augments Using a Verstaile stim: Gold : 6 acc Purple: 7 acc Blue: 8 acc It's clearly not min/maxed. But, my question has always centered on can I at least hit my tertiary goal for at the very least accuracy without having to go bonkers if what I put above this is close then that's not all that unreasonable. I wonder what parsing with that would yield. Then after that my question would be centered around cadence of acquisition and what does the upgrade potential look like.

When you look at your character screen what does the Accuracy percentage say? And that's for the full green set of 318 gear? Is there blue and purple sets of 318? Or is it green 318, blue 324, purple 330?

This is something I've really been thinking over the last week or so. They can't ditch voice acting. This game was built and more importantly marketed and sold as a fully voiced mmorpg. That can not change. In 10 years though they have never really understood how to make that work from a business stand point (strictly third party claim there nothing factual just all the feelz). In true BW Austin form, there's bloat associated with the voice acting that can definitely be removed. For example: there are two quests on Onderon that are daily that have fully voiced over acting. The quest to tame the tamed or whatever, and the Shae Visla one (for the republic side). Those are just not necessary. The voice over acting can be restricted to things like overall planetary quest chains, class story...the big stuff. Losing the voice stuff would just completely remove the remaining identity of the game. They've already deleted the identity from companions, class story. They're barely a bioware type game anymore as is. I know I got into this because it was from Bioware first and foremost. I had never played an MMO before this. I instantly fell in love with the class stories and that the game stayed true to having meaningful companions. Then as I got more comfortable I branched out to group content. Now though? It's...yeah it's much much more shallow. And I think that shallowness definitely takes away from what this game could deliver since it really could still deliver just an overly epic experience on top of the good that's here already. The potentially sad fact for BW Austin is that if they ever really want this game to grow again they have to invest into it with actual playable content that must include voice. And they have to pair that with a change in philosophy to ditching the every sub gets the new content for free and its all paid for, and all comes out at the same time. Pushing out small things over time makes it seem like there's significantly less to the expansions no matter if there is or there isn't. They've already destroyec companions so leave that section alone. They seem way more interested in catering to the whales and trying to treat this like a mobile game than a real mmo these days.

No, the Crit is actualy low. So for the 1.3 GCD you'd have somewhere in the realm of 3200 alacrity. The medium alacrity 1.4 high crit is like 2200 alacrity. That gear is low on power. High on Mastery and Endurance. And...high on alacrity it seems. Edit: Either way, you are not wrong for saying the gear is questionable at best. Me looking at the exactness of your argument is kind of splitting hairs and I'm sorry to do it.

Healers do not use any Accuracy. So yes, you're going to qualify for the overly emotional. I do think that gear, stat wise, is pretty questionable though. It's the same type of higher mastery higher endurance gear that they always seem to push out. It's junk compared to my 306 set. But...it's not junk because it has 0 accuracy

or...spend tech frags on those same materials as you can right now!

Well this is a bummer. But, not all that unexpected. Two months seems like a really really far push back. That's kinda interesting kinda concerning? Either way. Feb it shall be and in Feb I'll be doin swtor stuffs and those swtor stuffs will be fun.

I am 100 percent looking forward to the story side of things. While I may have my previous misgivings about leaning too hard on old villains like Malgus, I think they've done a good job of fleshing this out to the point where I want to see what happens next. Should be fun to see. I love the flashpoints in this game so a new flashpoint is always high on my list. And, even though its not technically part of the initial release of 7.0 I'm definitely looking forward to the R4 operation. They had me at hello kind of deal when they said space horror motif. And oddly enough I'm semi excited for the combat changes and syles. I have always loved the gunslinger animations more than my sniper ones ( I know I'm like the ONLY one who thinks that way I know I know). Since nothing happens on Pub side anymore (save a random 16m dxun last night that was cool and awesome and thanks to the people who set that up in chat) I can make my sniper more like my pub who is my favorite toon.

Have you played through onslaught completely? I found the story of it quite good surprisingly.

So let me get this straight: Nightmare raiding crowd gets together, joins super secret discord server of the super famous Sir Chadwich of Boseman. The developers asked us, the nightmare raiding crowd, if their 6.0 gearing was ok for 7.0 We said in unison at the tops of our lungs "No sirs and Madams! We must throw that system out in full! It does not allow us the ability to feel special! We also score lower on the entitlement index which as nightmare raiders we simply can not have! We demand a private gear path or else we shall leave! And lastly good sirs and madams! We will no longer be able to make any credits in this game for we shant be able to prey upon the weak and overly interested parties who seek the few of us out to buy an achievement or mount run! Our way of life must be preserved! We also require 4 barrels of ale for our drunken shenanigan's! Now let us come to an accord and sing the song of the nigtmare raiding people! <commence satanic devil fire dance>" Is this what you think is reality?

This is certainly taking things out of context, and putting this in some fantasy land with the population of 3.

What in the what? Do you also believe that birds are actually spy drones for the gov't as well? Jeez Louise you people really don't live in the same swtor galaxy as the rest of us.

Hey now, I am short. Napoleon complex definitely still fits me lol

I think everyone is going to suffer from the non moddable gear they're going to pump out to be honest. It won't be just story players that feel the effects. I honestly do not understand why they are moving the direction they are regarding moddable gear.

I've actually said pretty consistently that nightmare raiders do not care what gear is available, or if any non nightmare raider can get it. We do not care. Multiple times I've said this now. You simply need to use the nightmare raiding community as your whipping boy for whatever reason. Nobody cares if you can get BiS gear. Do you need it for solo play? No, but nobody cares if you can get it either. What's really funny about your post: "And more importantly in FF14 every 2nd patch gives catchup gear to everyone gets to be at almost the same gear level..." So...even with those patches you...can basically get to the tier under the bis? While swtor may not be flat out giving you the gear a tier below, you are completely able to get it no? I have no doubt you are far too proud and stubborn to understand why what you just said invalidates your entire crusade. And it does make you look even more foolish. I find it hilarious that you think this game is still about the story. I think it's beyond hilarious that you think the raiding community is to blame, and I find it absolutely hysterical that you can't see that this game is more like a mobile game where they want you to buy stuff from the cash shop more than subscribe. Edit: Also let's be honest with ourselves shall we? Using your logic of a minor minority of the game only experiences end game raiding why do they produce a raid at all? Why are they making a new flashpoint? If the story is so powerful why did they cut Kotfe Kotet trilogy short? Why did the game go free to play so quickly? Surely, it had enough story! Surely the solo crowd is so much more faithful than the raiding crowd! You'll be able to get a tier below the evil nightmare raiding community and be "almost" the same just like in FF which you seem to be ok with. Congrats on over exaggerating your original premise. Stay gold Pony Boy (I love the story myself, absolutely hate what they did to companions, but your logic is so incredibly lopsided it's amazing)