I am a retuner, and leveled most of my toons after 4.0. I use simple strategy to level influence: as soon as I got a new companion use green lvl 1 gifts to raise influence to 20. I am trying to avoid any conversation gains before that. Right after that I use all available at that moment crystals to buy gifts (typically I can get influence close to 30). All conversation are done only after that because your conversation gain does not depend on level, but gift gain drops significantly after lvl 10-20-30-40. By the time I have a third companion, my first companion is somewhere above 35, so I park him/her and continue leveling with third one. With this strategy I have couple 40+ companions, three 25+ companions and one 20 by the time I finish class story - which seems OK for me. On couple crafters I repeated Black Talon couple times, it gives ~ 7-8 K rep (only if you have not start KOTFE on the toon).

As solo player, you always have your companion out. As soon as you get their affection about ~20, your own DPS does not matter anymore. You need to have a companion in the healer mode only while they are less than lvl 10 or for toughest solo content (let say heroic starfortress) where CC/interrupts/knowledge means far more than DPS. So if you are min/maxer even in solo game - your goal is to level companion affection ASAP.

As of now the best solo class is level 30+ companion.

ESO - everyone is limited to only five skills available in any moment, so very convenient key binding can be setup without loosing any abilities/cooldown access. Addons allow to have and fast switch between different setups. Tab-targeting available AFAIR. It might be a bit demanding for melee, but should be very comfortable for ranged toon. I liked playing through story a lot even when they started with tons of bugs. Now the game seems to be much cleaner and they continue to add some content.

I saw a few threads about soloing WB pre-KOTFE, are any bosses soloable now?

I am a new player, and as result I don't have proper routine yet, I need to analyse what was sold, what are current changes on markets I am trying to work on, decide on pricing and further experiments. With my WoW setup I had about 40 positions I worked with on regular basis, and it took about 2-3 minutes to check current situation for all off them, decide what I want to do and about 2 more minutes to post 1-10 items in each position. I don't see how I can do it with SWTOR interface, I have to check each position individually, not to mention posting. With experience on each market it becomes faster, but now working on about 20 positions plus trying to watch about 10 more takes 25-30 minutes. Sending companions is the fastest part and really less time consuming than crafting in WoW. Pretty much your 20 min/day does not include time you spend on market analysis/experiments. With your experience you are not doing it daily, but it is huge time investment, and this is area where WoW addons were very helpful.

I returned into the game about month ago after a few years break - consider me a newbie. Money making is a big part of any MMO for me, so I spent a lot of time on GTN/crafting. By now I have all 6 crafters, and I can say that ~1-3 mln/day is easy enough, and crafting, running some profitable missions and playing game itself are giving me roughly same profit. Honestly, the more I play the more I see that crafting is one of the worst money per hour return in game. For example, running heroics (if you do it smart and convert data crystal to money) gives about twice larger profit/hour. It could be different if we had tools similar to auction addons in WoW, with current interface I spent on crafting/missions/selling about 40 mins twice a day - way too long for me.

Can you please advice how you can get to rank 20 for 50K? I did a few calculations (definitely did not check all options) and the most cost effective were vendor rank 1 gifts. But 1-20 with legacy improvements unlocked is about 470 gifts, meaning almost 100K.

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