Crew skills - First impressions

[Vargen]

Ok, so I thought I would sum up my experience with crew skills from the beta so far. Please don't accept these as facts, but rather what I've been able to get out of it so far over the weekend.

I've played my Assassin up to lvl 20 so far, and my crew skills are just lagging a bit behind as I switched some of them out halfway though. Since I would like to be able to craft armor for myself when the game goes live, I chose Synthweave. To gather meterials for that I chose archeology and diplomacy. According to the overviews I've seen that is the best combo for light armor crafting. What I experienced was that diplomacy was rather useless for anything other then gaining favor with your companions and quickly gaining dark/light points. That may change with higher diplomacy skill though.

Gathering materials is pretty brilliant. In addition to the nodes and skinnin/mining mechanics around the game, you can send your campanions on gathering missions whenever you don't need them. This is really nice once you get more companions, as you only use one at a time, you can constantly send them out, and craft stuff as well. Also I leveled up quite a bit by sending them both out while waiting for a party to get ready to do a flash point. Yey! Something to do when you aren't really doing anything productive!

So how does the crafting itself work? Now I can't speak for the others, but I guess it's safe to assume the mechanics are somewhat similar. Once you've gathered up a bunch of what you need to craft, you set your companions to make stuff. If you make something useless, you can reverse engineer it and get some of the materials back. Really nice when making what would normally be vendor trash just to skill up. Also when you reverse engineer stuff, you have a chance to discover new patterns of that kind. IE. you take apart a light armor item, you may learn a more advance/better pattern of the same slot and type. I seemed to learn more light patterns then anything else, but that might just be because I made and reverse engineered more light armor items then heavy/medium.

I think that is about it for now. The only thing I'm considering changing for live is replacing diplomacy with underwold trading. I will have to research a bit more before deciding though.

Feel free to share your experiences with crew skills as well! It would be interesting to hear other viewpoints and get an idea of what the other skills are like.

[TeaLeaf]

Liked the crew side too, but really did not get very far with it, I think L50 was the highest I got any skill to, so saw very little of the overall pathway.

[JanuZ]

I liked the system quite a lot though there are a few things that people should consider.

You can forget about getting a vehicle at level 25 or maybe ever if you stay current on crew skills. You might even have problems with buying normal skills for your class because it costs hell of a lot to level up crewskills.
I found the crew skills to take to short a time, this might get better after some time but 3-10 minutes is to short to actually quest in between doing crew skills and to long to stand still.
I think this gets better later on cause times seemed to go up with difficulty.

[Vargen]

I liked the system quite a lot though there are a few things that people should consider.

You can forget about getting a vehicle at level 25 or maybe ever if you stay current on crew skills. You might even have problems with buying normal skills for your class because it costs hell of a lot to level up crewskills.
I found the crew skills to take to short a time, this might get better after some time but 3-10 minutes is to short to actually quest in between doing crew skills and to long to stand still.
I think this gets better later on cause times seemed to go up with difficulty.

The time goes up with the difficulty level of the task and the level of the items. So does the cost unfortunatly! I found the cost to be reasonable as long as you don't level trade skills higher then your actual level. If you want to stay current, you will be spending a lot though. I ran out of cash multiple times, but then I leveled 5 trade skills in total throughout the beta, just to get the hang of it. Wasted a lot on that, but now I know what to do and not when we go live.

For live I will choose Synthweave, Archeology and Underworld trading as my crew skills. I may also add that any help with materials you don't need yourself will be greatly appreciated. The mission skills are the ones that kill your wallet during leveling :sad:

During this weekend I mostly did PVP and trade skills, so I found out a bit more how the reverse engineering works.
-You may reverse engineer anything of the same item type as your crafting skill can make
-RE on Green items has a chance to discover Blue patterns, RE on Blue items has a chance to discover Purple etc.
-A pattern for a basic 2 stat green items will have 3 blue versions where the 3rd stat is either tank/dps/dpsv2