Game Guides Archive

Posted this over on the weaponsmithing boards, figured I would share it with you all as well.

I see a lot of posts from people wondering about what they should be making to get to master weaponsmith, what gun, what part etc. In the end it is very simple.

To go from novice to master weaponsmith you need 896000 weapon crafting experience.

Now of course you all know you should be using factories but something most people dont know is that factories produce items at a rate determined by the item's complexity. 8 seconds per point of complexity to be precise. So if you dig though your schematics you will notice an unassuming, bugged experimentation little item called a projectile pistol barrel. This is your new best friend. It has a complexity of 4 but uses 26 resources and if memory serves give you about 55 experience per.

So doing the math, 10 factories x 100 items x 55 experience = 55,000 xp per factory run. A run that will take you a little under an hour, 53 minutes to be precise.

So say it takes you an hour, aloting time to make new crappy schematics and run to/start the factories in your spare 7 minutes you can make 55,000 weapon crafting experience an hour and all you need is tons and tons of crappy steel.

Doing a bit more math, 896,000 / 55,000 give you a little under 16.5.

That means the road from novice to master is 16 hours long, and you only have to open your crafting tool a grand total of 165 times. Isn't life grand?

I wasn't going to post this guide because it is so stupidly easy it almost seems like an exploit but oh well. I am moving on to other things and I guess if I can save a few of you carpel tunels, have at it.

*NOTE* Someone informed me in my post on the weaponsmith forums that factory schematics are not limited to 100, want to do 1000, type in 1000. Now you have to open your crafting tool a total of 20 times. 2 factory runs.

Couple people also brought up some points in the original thread:

Q: Do you get full experience from factory made items?

Q: Why would I buy guns from someone who made it to master weaponsmith this way?

Q: Wouldn't it take longer to gather up all the resources and farm the money to buy the steel you need? Than to just do it by hand?

Here is how I responded:

Yes quiet you are a bit confused. You get full experience on items created in factories, it just takes a facotry longer to make an item than your crafting tool takes to finish it.

To the person who said they wouldn't buy weapons from the person who did this. Anybody with half a brain can figure out how to make the best weapons, it isn't that hard. The stats that each components rely on is right there in you crafting window. For the rare components that doesn't entirely rely on one stat or isn't evenly split between 2 you could use swgcraft.com's tool if you dont want to do the math yourself.

Its not like using aluminum with bad conductivity and overall quality will make a better weapon DH17 Pistol than copper with 999/999.

Bit more math:

An average combat character can make 10,000 credits an hour easy 1 or 2 shotting lairs with a so-so weapon. Say a group of 5 combat guys wants to get one of their buddies to master weaponsmith so they have easy access to weapons.

450,000 steel at 3 credits each = 1.35 million

10 factories at 40,000 each = 400,000

So you need 1.75 million to make a master weaponsmith or 175 hours of money gathering. If you spread that out over a week thats 5 hours a day for each of the 5 friends. If a PA of 30 does it, they can make the same 1.75 million in about 6 hours total.

Weaponsmiths will be a dime a dozen simple because they provide the most important part of any combat classes gear I mean honestly, does that brand new suit of composite and a mk 3 deflector lets you solo reds that have 6000 ham bars with your CDEF? no sir, it does not.

On top of this weaponsmiths are at the top of the economic pyramid, everyone needs weapons for above reasons, the weapons wear out and combat classes have nothing better to spend their money on. Dont feel like doing destroy missions for money? Do a lot of them for a week and make a weaponsmith, last I checked I was making about 200 credits a second for every second I am online with my WS, after paying my resource suppliers extremely well.

awesome guide dude this help alot i though it would take me forever to learn that stuff.

Great, you've just given the dev's a reason to nerf factories.

Thanks man

this is fine and dandy if you're in a group and have friends on-line. If you're like me and soloing it, there's no way I can come up with 1.75 million credits. The most I've ever had in my bank at one time was 17k and that was after selling everything I had and doing several delivery missions. I have 3 mineral harvesters and one gas vapor harvester and one wind generator along with my small house and it takes me all evening to raise enough money just to pay the maintenance fees on that. Throw in the fact the devs took away steel from Naboo now and I'm even further behind the ball. I too grind out pistol barrels but I do it the old fashioned way. No wonder I can't sell my dl20 rifles and dl44 pistols. With all the advanced weaponsmiths out there, my stuff is always obsolete which makes it even harder to make money. Any advice for me ?

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Cappinator wrote:

Great, you've just given the dev's a reason to nerf factories.

Thanks man

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In this case, it's hardly called "nerfing" - more like balancing.

Well DEV's there's only one way to solve this lil "EXPLOIT", take away the experience from factory produced items......with this type of play, the economy is ruined for sure. Casual players have no chance against this type of play. Force people to create those items ONE at a time and SLOW DOWN THIS FLIPPIN POWERLEVELING!! lol

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Mordachai wrote:

In this case, it's hardly called "nerfing" - more like balancing.

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It depends. If they take care of the "powerleveling" exploit without ruining factories, good. I use my factories the way they were intended, so I won't suffer from it (make a HQ schematic, make a dozen items so you don't have to fail another 50 times on experimentation to come up with something good)

But I've seen nerf bats being passed around different MMORPG's and more often than not the dev's swing that bat a little too hard. Instead of toning it down, they end up driving it into the ground to the point of uselessness. Not always, but it happens.

I'd just hate to see that happen with factories.

I don't care if they take away or tone down xp on factories, I'm just a little scared of what else they'll do.

I was under the impression that factories only gave you 1/10th the xp of doing it your self. From the sounds of this post that is untrue. Anyone care to clairfy?

Scott

This guide is probably true but requires a lot to get there. It's misleading because it assumes you have a factory, credits, steel, time, and that you want to be a weaponsmith.

If you ask me, it's already a scam that I can just babysit a friggin campsite with my guy by mining resources, and then selling them. It's boring as sin but the bankroll is phenomenal. This doesn't seem like any easier than what I'm doing right now, except I'm not getting that much EXP so much as money for clicking every now and then.

One of the balances already clear in this is as follows: A master weaponsmith isn't that fun. People don't be crafters so they can go see the galaxy, fight the biggest monsters and have stories told about them in cantinas. In fact, we're often TOLD the stories, and we're usually bums IN the cantina, waiting for someone to buy our shtuff in the bazaar so we can tip that slinky little twi'lek making eyes at us again.

The crafter professions are boring, long, and usually very unrewarding but every once in a while, there's a huge payoff. Until the game removes that "/ui action toolbarButton ##" or whatever exploit, this is actually harder than what it takes to be a master weaponcrafter. Right now you can still loop macros if you want (you face ban but i've heard they rarely find you and my server hasn't stayed up for 24 hours straight anyway) so really i could get tons of cash and experience just by shift-clicking F3 right now if I wanted.

The point is, there's no cheap way to be an extremely rewarding class. only one character per server limits your twinking very harshly, and being a weaponcrafter is really unrewarding, gameplay wise. I see nothing wrong with this "exploit" because for all its preparation and effort, it really doesn't give you much overall in the end.

Now if you could find an "exploit" to make me a master bounty hunter in 16.5 hours... yum. That class has got to be really rewarding, but frankly I doubt there are any places to exploit your way up that long and arduous ladder.

Yup, the hangup is in the 1.75million credits you need to actually get this thing off the ground and rolling.

A single player going up "normally" would achieve master weapon smith exactly as quickly as the player using the 10 factory single product meathod because the single player is gaining cash and xp as he goes along while the player using this plan spends all his time up front earning the cash to do the two day run.

So it's not an exploit and not a bug. Just a way of expressing time and resources differently than the average player.

guys.. check patch notes on dev tracker for factories... this has been fixed.. apparently factories were only supposed to give you 10% XP not 100%... so this "exploit" is going bye bye.. sorry charlie

Wohoo, great mate, now that was a good farewell present to all Novice weaponsmiths that now has to struggle to master by handclicking themselfs to death.

They of course nerfed the factory exp, and now you can say goodbye to SWG with an sence of accomplishment. You mastered WC and got to be a millionare, and then you helped ruin the life of every other WC. Well done mate. I can allready see everyone lining up to buy your great weapons from your freend taking over the businees from you.

/applause... (ouch why does mywrist hurt)