Armorsmith Archive
Thread: Grinding Armor
I am an Armor Smith, and have JUST started (still 0-0-0-0). It has taken me about a week (of about 12 hours of game play) to get 14,500 armor crafting exp. I will NEVER get anywhere with that.
so i was just nowwandering the boards in my depression and saw that there is a CRAFTING MACRO!
Do you know what it is? if so, PLEASE let me know, i must have it (although i have like no resorces). PLEASE PLEASE PLEASE PLEASE! THANK YOU
What are you grinding?
Mabari chest plates are awesome at about 400 xp apiece. Just go to a tailor and strike up a deal for synthcloth.
For information on the crafting macro go to the link below. this is where I learned to use macros for crafting.
http://swg.allakhazam.com/db/guides.html?guide=139
youll have to look below the post at the comments to find out how to use the "practice" option when grinding, but its there. enjoy!
Here's my technique:
Components:
1) Find a good source of energy.
2) Find a decent spot of inert petrochem.
3) Find a good spot of Fiberplast.
4) Find a decent spot of metal.
1 solar generator, 1 small house (for storage, not really required), a wearables factory, 5 personal chemical harvesters,2 mineral harvesters. That's 10 lots.
Go to Dathomir, offer to buy people's hide. Or go out with the groups and harvest some if you have the scout's hunting skills. This is a good source - you can obtain about 10k hide in an hour.
Go to a populated city like Theed or Coronet, then use the search to find any tailors in the area. Send them a tell and ask them if they'll make a manufacturing schematic for synthetic cloth. You'll have to give them some of your home-grown fiberplast and petrochem so they can make it for your materials. Load the schematic into the factory and you can produce a thousand synthetic cloths (that's 333 Mabari chestplates worth, each yielding ~340 exp). Also make a schematic of armorweave segments. Mass produce them while you play pong or something - or you can go out and use /sample to unearth much-needed resources.
Then, grind away. Make the armorweave shirts to your heart's content. You can rack up about 10k armor crafting experience in about fifteen minutes doing this if you can quickly press them out.
Hope this guide helps.
Aye agree with Origonal... (dont wanna hack up his last name)
But thats basically what we are doing. My little brother plays (allows me to spend time with him while he's in the army) Anyway he's going Master AC. And right now he's grinding away on armorweave chest plates.
We spend about 2-4 hrs a week hunting and I just give him the hide... usually its 10-15k hide thats ruffly 25 makes per 1k hide at 380-400xp per make.
He should be done with AC within 2 weeks.
But having your own harvesters. Even if you only run 2 small mineral and 2 small chem makes a big difference. If you can afford a wearables factory then all u need is schematics from a tailor and u can make your own synth cloth.
Anyway Im just agreeing with the last guy.
Yes, macro's do work. With only 3 or so hours per day, I went from a newly created alt character with no skills to Master Armorsmith in less than 4 weeks. No, I did not use third party software or alias files ... just the available, in-gamemacro techniques.
Here's a few tips:
Don't make armor ... make something that gives Armor XP and takes no more than 2 resourcesthat maygive low experience points for making, but allows you to make tons of them rapidly in practice mode.
Figure out something you can do while the first tool is practice-making that item.
Figure out something you can do while the second tool is practice-making that item.
The actual macros I used, I won't post. It took many initial hours of trial and error and are available to guildmembers only. Heh, gotta have some secrets, but if you read the above carefully, you can figure out how it's done. 
Photari Snackbar
MonCal Master Armorsmith
Oops, should have mentioned the xp gain rate, and I realize upon re-read I was being a bit too cryptic, so I'll just lay it out, short of actually posting the macros.
I used Armor Upgrade Kits to advance through all Armorcrafting skill trees.
In practice mode they give 63 xp per "make", and if you set up the macro correctly, you can do this every 6 seconds, using multiple tools in tandem fashion. That's 37,800 xp per hour, and only requires 2 resources ... any metal and any chemical. The simplicity of the recipe makes gaining the resources much easier. Look for deals on resource vendors and ask guildmates to help with a bit of cash if possible. Or, just set up a few harvesters and gather your own resources.
You'll need one master macro, and one sub macro, and several identical crafting tools (Generic for Armor Upgrade Kits).
The master macro invokes which tool to open and invokes one copy of the sub macro, then pauses for 6 seconds before giving the command to open the next tool.
The sub macro tells the currently open tool which schematic to load, and should allow about 4 seconds for you to click in the 2 resources before invoking the practice mode item-making sequences, which also makes sure the current tool is closed (within 4 seconds) before the master macro opens the next tool (within 6 seconds).
Make sure the last line of the master macro loops back on itself to restart the master macro.
Drawback: The macro runs so fast that you will get a sore index finger from clicking in the resources. 
Photari Snackbar
I found it much easier to make a few untimed macros. This is how it went:
/ui action toolbarSlotXX;
/selectDraftSchematic XX
Put crafting tools in slots, then use toolbarSlot with the corresponding number. F1 is Slot00, F2 is 01, F5 is 04, etc.
The draft schematic number is experimentable, just keep testing it til you get the right one. Or you could go to your schematics list and count each piece that's craftable with the armor crafting tool. So if the object you want to craft is the sixth in line, it will be schematic 05.
Now just fill in the slots as you want to. Mash enter a bunch to cycle through the next phases and have practice checked.
The benefit to this is that there's no hindrance with the timer. Sometimes you find yourself finishing ten seconds before the time is up, staring at the screen and waiting for the session to finish for 10 long seconds... 10 seconds that could have been spent building another piece of armor. Then you don't have to worry about going over time in those instances where you froze up for a moment and ended up wasting 20 left clicks and 20 seconds of time because of a little lag.
What about people who already have friends?
I use macros to make the process less grueling. No one wants to buy your junky mabari armorweavethat a novice armorsmith makes, especially when you have to craft a good 5000 of them to become a master armorsmith.
I use macros because it makes the game run by much faster - so I can actually play with friends! I spent the entire day yesterday experimenting armor setups with my TKM friend. I wouldn't be able to do that without using a macro to speed the redundant process up. You're also going to need a lot of friends if you want to use some hard-core macroing. My four friends all donated their lots for my use - so now I have 38 harvesters all gathering resources for me while I'm out -playing- with these same -friends-. Every day, I have enough resources to craft about 60k worth of experience. Hence, I'll be master armorsmith in no time - using macros didn't deter me from making friends.
Besides, crafting macros are actually kind of pointless. It takes about as long to mash the key with your crafting station, then go through the crafting procedure by pressing enter.
/me wishes people would stop bashing macros.