Jedi Archive
Thread: A thought on Crystals and Lightsaber Components.
A lot of you are focusing on the past, and the ease/difficulty of getting the crystals so that you got a good tune eventually.
My point is that it's that tuning process that is flawed - it is a totally random chance, the quality meaning you have a slightly better chance of getting a good tune with a better quality crystal. The focus of my post is thoughts on a new system wherea jedi's connection with the force, combined with the quality had a bearing on the min range when a tuning is made.
I mean, if/when they re-introduce premium and flawless crystals with the new expansion, can you imagine having to go through an epic quest series, tooling yourself up with a full group and food and spices, to get your ultimate loot reward of the crystal.. only for you to tune it and get a rubbish tune - how gutted would you feel?
Wouldn't it be better if you had a minium tune value because you have x amount of force pool, and it is a flawless crystal? so even if it is a low tune, the low is relative.
And regarding comments that a couple of days farming nightsisters and krayts would yield 10-15 crystals: frankly I dont have the time to spend that amount of time working on it. I would rather it be the case where I knew I could get a fairly decent drop rate from certain (themed) npc spawns rather than hoping this set of nightsisters I happen to come across wil actually drop something worth my time.
Again, please don't focus on what came before. Think forward to the future and bettering our profession, not crying nerf because one might believe they are more worthy than someone else. We all pay the same, we all love the game - playstyles dont make your account more important than anyone elses.
(That is not directed at anyone in particular, but is a response to the general feel I am getting from reading the boards as of late.)
Regards,
BR
I think with all respect it took about five times long for two to kill an Ancient as it now takes for someone to solo a lvl 86 krayt now! Now by my mathe it wasnt that hard to atleast have the change to loot prems and flawless was it?
STLpMpNu wrote:
Big-Rug wrote:
Pre CU it was a fair enough system - the drop rates were high and loot tables consistent enough to be able to loot enough to get some decent tunes.
However now it is much harder to get power crystals, and even more so to get a good tune because of the lesser qualities of those crystals that do drop. Now, I understand the rationale about making premium and flawless crystals/pearls very rare. They should be akin to getting that super krayt tissue drop for weaponsmiths.
Must not of been a precu jedi. Have you any idea what it took for one premium in the old system. You had your choice Elders or krayts. To even consider soloing either you needed to invest at very least 10 million to do it slow and upwards of 50-60 mil. Then you get into the 10-30 min fights solo or you can team up with other jedi alts who infact want premiums to....... So now that we got that out the way You had about a one in ten drop rate on elders if you were lucky and the bugged spawns that were never there. Or the krayt graveyard who had hoards of people trying to kill steal every krayt that was found.
Since we established how hard it was to actually get Lets bring up flawless well you had one choice Ancient krayts. Well thing with ancients is it took 30+ mins even with a large group of rifleman and a tank or two. Was very hard to get jedi to do them since they would aoe and apply states like you wouldn't belive and if anyone knew the old system at all intim and stun actually did something noticable.
To top everything off if it wasn't a -9 forcecost in the old system it was pretty much junk or grind crystal or pearl. Which you did not get a -9 very often at all much less a high dmg one which caped at 50 dmg.
Since they nolonger made the fc of the saber a multiplier force cost is not a issue all you need to worry about is speed and damage. Goods drop a dime a dozen and is not very hard to get your 100-120 dmg crystals/pearls You will be tuneing about the same as the rest of us who worked hard to achieve a perfect or near perfect saber pre cu. Putting premiums/flawless with how easy the system is would be unbalanced.
Ancients took maybe 10 minutes tops. Giant canyons maybe 5 minutes. We regularly had groups of 4 to 20, many times multiple groups, going hunting for our guild. This is a Massive Multiplayer game. They were not intended to be solo mobs.
I have both pre-9, pre-cu and post-cu jedi. For me, I'm forced to explore powers with my post-cu jedi because it is impossible to match the healing potential of a serious jedi-hunting BH. I know, my BH is deadly. Not to mention that my BH has over 30 different CA/AA modifiers in the 20+ range to all his abilities, many at +25.
The cycle that exists now is further indication of how this nerf has hurt the overall game play. BH's merely plug their credit card into IGE to purchase credits and gear, if they're unable to spend the time forming a viable in-game income source. Jedi literally have no means of matching the damage output of even regular weapons in the game, nor the healing ability of someone with less experience in their whole healing profession than one line of healing in jedi.
The unbalance that needs to be corrected is the damage potential of sabres. Whatever revisionist history you're putting forth just is not true.
As to force cost not being a sabre issue, do you even play a jedi? Force cost is a VITAL part of my pearl assignments in sabres. Otherwise I'd just choose all the best damage tunes to go in. Force management is how you live or die in the jedi profession, whether PVE or PVP.
Fivo Asia
Exposis wrote:
I'm sorry but you keep talking about 'how hard it was pre-cu' to get prem's or flawless. It wasn't at all you didnt need to spend 10mil + on the gear. I used to tank with mdoc/msword while a friend used saber throw. Sorry but how hard was that? Ok it took a while but with Light saber damged it didnt take that long.
I think with all respect it took about five times long for two to kill an Ancient as it now takes for someone to solo a lvl 86 krayt now! Now by my mathe it wasnt that hard to atleast have the change to loot prems and flawless was it?
Im sorry to say it but you sir are a moron. Ancients took 5-10 mins with a group of 8 jedi with 500+ dmg sabers with a couple good tanks. Doing ancients with jedi was usually never a good idea because if the tank kd dizzy the jedi would drop like a rock. And if your talking about jedi well Jedi sabers pre cu was in the range of 40 to start with and went up from there. It was not a common practice to hunt loot with your jedi till the adks came out and even then you still needed tanks.
10 mil starting to be part of a decent krayt team. Not to mention fighting for the kill on acklay to get yourself a decent hammer. Or all the armor/buffs/weapons/foods you went through. There is just no comparison. If you want these back in the game then it needs to be just as hard to get. Anything else would make jedi run around with exact same sabers.
Whats next they fix it you go out solo and can't kill anything cause everyone else is kill stealing and farming 10 times faster than you are you going to demand a instance krayt graveyard with 20 giants/ancients just foryourself.
I don't know about you new jedi who took a month or two tops to get your finished template but it took most people 4-6 months of hard grinding And then another couple of months just getting crystals and pearls to get a decent saber. If you don't want to put in the effort to get a good saber then tough. You can achieve what we did off goods and qualitys with the same amount of work.
Cafa wrote:
Ancients took maybe 10 minutes tops. Giant canyons maybe 5 minutes. We regularly had groups of 4 to 20, many times multiple groups, going hunting for our guild. This is a Massive Multiplayer game. They were not intended to be solo mobs.
I have both pre-9, pre-cu and post-cu jedi. For me, I'm forced to explore powers with my post-cu jedi because it is impossible to match the healing potential of a serious jedi-hunting BH. I know, my BH is deadly. Not to mention that my BH has over 30 different CA/AA modifiers in the 20+ range to all his abilities, many at +25.
The cycle that exists now is further indication of how this nerf has hurt the overall game play. BH's merely plug their credit card into IGE to purchase credits and gear, if they're unable to spend the time forming a viable in-game income source. Jedi literally have no means of matching the damage output of even regular weapons in the game, nor the healing ability of someone with less experience in their whole healing profession than one line of healing in jedi.
The unbalance that needs to be corrected is the damage potential of sabres. Whatever revisionist history you're putting forth just is not true.
As to force cost not being a sabre issue, do you even play a jedi? Force cost is a VITAL part of my pearl assignments in sabres. Otherwise I'd just choose all the best damage tunes to go in. Force management is how you live or die in the jedi profession, whether PVE or PVP.
Fivo Asia
Sorry for the spelling.
Message Edited by papaki on 09-17-2005 04:51 PM
I think one descrepancy here about killing krayts or NS Elders pre-cu vs post-cu is that there is a huge difference in the skill, understanding and preparation. Then there's still the time, dedication and pure luck. These few things are something that weighted heavily on a person's ability to hunt the high end mobs pre-cu. One person who was very knowledged and skilled in their profession could most definitely solo anything pre-cu. In the beginning it did take you upwards of 30 min to kill krayts and Elders. Gradually you learned how to do it faster and faster. Then when buffs and armor got godlike, it took 5 mins tops to kill either Elders or krayts but depending on the profession combination you had made a huge difference. Some professions simply didn't have the damage output to take any of the high end mobs down in 5 mins. TKA's where one of them. As a TKM/Master Rifleman/master brawler/novice medic in the old system. Should I accidently fall into melee range with either an elder or krayt, I was in serious trouble and my whole goal was to get back to kiting range. See the issue was not that i couldn't beat them using TKM skills, it was that killing one or two of them totally wrecked your weapon and armor.
The truth of the matter is that for a TKM to kill a krayt or Elder, you couldn't do much damage to them after their 90% resist cut your damage down to nearly nothing. A TKM couldn't BS around with an Elder at all. She had 100% resist to everything except energy and blast. That meant Only swordsman/rifleman and jedi were viable templates to kill and elder in 5 maybe 10 minutes. A speed capped rifleman with a T21 took a minimum of 5 - 6 minutes to kill an Elder. They where the highest damage dealers against Krayts or Elder's, not even a swordsman could outdamage a rifleman due to the damage multiplier on strafe shot 2. You'd have to have a legendary power hammer to beat out a rifleman who only had a normal krayted T21.
So for those that say it took 5 minutes to kill any mob with resist over 80% are plain and simply lying if they are talking soloing them. In a group, sure it can go that fast because your not doing the damage that's killing them, someone else is.
As for hunting these mobs ina group or solo as a jedi, I'm sorry, only a mid to high level jedi could to so then. With the farming and kill stealing going on back then, any jedi who was not close to full template simply lost out on loot to any master T21 carrying, speed capped rifleman. I know first hand because I was one of those rifleman who could outdamage 3, occasionally 4 high level jedi. I did it many times against both krayts and elders, but I didn't kill steal, it usually happened when the jedi would try to kill steal from me.....but even with theire unresisted saber damage, my T21 still outdamageed them mainly becuase of the AP3 value of my t21, my speed (being the fastest in the game), my range (didn't need to waste combat rounds to heal myself), and my high damage multiplier with strafe shot 2.
Now I say all of this to show one simple thing. I once dropped what little jedi skills I had in sabers so that I could go back to Rifleman/TKM solely to hunt pearls and crystals. As I was transitioning from normal to jedi, I saw that there was no way that my measly jedi skills could be enough to get the crystals and pearls that I would need. I could have hunted in a group but then you have to split the loot and i'm sorry,......anyone who says the loot drop on pearls and crystals where high is full of BS. You would have to play all day to get a huge amount of them. For one thing, elders only spawned every 20 - 30 minutes, so that's 2 kills an hour tops. If they dropped a crystal one in every6 or 7kills (it was worse than that though), your talking 2 or 3 buff sessions just to get a couple of crystals.
I was one of those who would camp the NS stronghold where there were 3 elders. 2 only spawned once per day and the other spawned every 20 - 30 minutes. The drop rate on sentinals, protectors, rangers, spellweavers where not that high either, plus they tend to drop low level pearls (never any premiums or flawless in my year of camping the whole planet of dath).
So I'm saying that I would spend a minimum of 6 hours either camping Elders (less competition) or fighting off others for looting rights on krayts (because they did not spawn anywhere near as much as they do know). In fact it sometimes took a ranger to find krayts for you pre-cu. So the time, the difficulty, the preparation, the luck, the little tricks and tactics, all played a major role in getting crystals and pearls. Being that I was a crystal/pearl hunter I know damn well that I had to spend a week or two just to get 5or so premiums and that would take anywhere from 6 to 9 hours if I had that much time to play. The drop rates where not that good, plus the respawn rates were 10 times lower than they are now.
Post-CU, with any profession you can go kill an Elder or a krayt. PVE is so much easier in the sense that you don't even have to prepare. You don't have to get the best armor, you don't need the best guns (even though they are easy to get), you don't need to use any special tactics (just brute force and rooting) mainly because of the uber healing. Cu PVE is 100 times easier than pre-cu ever was. I actually like the old system better, it was more challenging for myself, but CU PVE can be fun because you can jump right in and don't need to prepare 30 minutes ahead of time.
Point is that the risk verse reward has totally changed. There is no risk in killing krayts or elders anymore. Jedi don't suffer xp lose when they die to them, normal professions could care less about item decay as their most important items are ADK'd and at least insured. Even if you have to fix them, the failure rate on that has dropped dramatically (I haven't failed to fix anything since CU has been out...oh well except when I just kept tryiing to break something on purpose for SAC testing).
So with all of this said I'd have to say that pre-cu jedi are defensive about making it eaiser for crystal / pearl drops and tunes because they had to work 10 times harder to get what they have. Post-cu jedi seem to want it easier, I won't lie I would like it easier too....but the thing is giving post-cu jedi an easier time just leaves a bad taste in pre-cu jedi mouth. It's like if you been on the job the longest (10 - 15 years) and some 19 year old kid comes along and gets promoted over you and he's only been around for 5 months......your hard work and years of dedication was just flushed down the drain and who wouldn't have hard feelings over that. Post-cu jedi is that 19 year old kid reaping all the rewards of pre-cu jedi hard work.
post-cu jedi will never have it as hard as pre-cu jedi. Does that mean the system shouldn't change.....not at all, It should change simply because it has always needed to be changed. The drop rates, the bad tunings have been around since the first jedi ever unlocked and I think it will forever be that way. Noone has ever been happy about the tunes or drop rates. In fact, all the time I spent solely hunting elders and krayts has yeilded me a 98% tuning failure rate. I never got good tunes on any flawless, premium, select or good tune until CU came out. Actually I had maybe one good tune but it got converted into crap with CU. So although I had many pre-cu crystals and pearls, none of them were any good until I tuned the ones I saved when CU came out. From that point on, I have got great tunes. Now that I have no pre-cu crystals or pearls left, I have to get the same ones everyone else is getting. My tunes aren't that bad either. They sure are a heck of a lot better than pre-cu. For example, at least I haven't had this happen post-cu yet, but pre-cu you could have premiums or a flawless tune to -3 damage and 0 force cost. After spending a whole day to get that greaty crystal or pearl (because flawless dropped almost like the rate at which legendary weapons dropped at one time), you totally felt screwed when you got bad tunes like that.
All I'm saying is that it's fine to want the tuning process and the drop rates improved, it's human nature to want improvements and things to come easier....but we must not forget that the past is what shapes the future, without the past there can be no future. That's why I really dislike those that say the past don't matter or that the past is the past and leave it there. Nope, it's the past that has given me the knowledge that I have today, without that, I'd simply be a noob learning all over again and the would be no such thing as a veteran in anything we do.
By the way, I don't have a saber over 650 damage even with all my farming days....so I'm not making this post from the poitn of view that I don't want post-cu jedi to have a saber as good as mine. many post-cu jedi have better sabers than mine and I had access to pre-cu pearls/crystals. Bottom line, it's about the dedication, time and luck that will get you the perfect saber you seek. Don't expect it to be handed to you. If you want a 720 damage saber, you have to put in work plain and simple. The moment the devs just hand it to post-cu jedi is when the players who have been the back bone of this game and kept it alive during the times when this game was at it's lowest will all leave and no matter what kind of twist you put on it, veterans of anything are essential to the future progress of anything. Without those knowledgeable vets in this game, many things would probably still be broken for years to come....it's often the vets that find the /bugs, know what to look for, know what's better or worse and that's through experience and past issues. That's not to say the younger generation don't contribute to that, because vets were once noobs as well, but all-in-all, somethings just can't be too easy....as soon as it is, the appreciation of it is gone and it's meaning becomes less special....which is part of the reason jedi has become so watered down to the normal professions level. the title of alpha class is forever gone from jedi now, we must stop expecting to be gods and the envy of this game, we are mere mortals now.
Anyway, I'm all for the original posters ideas, with a few improvements....however, I don't want it too easy....I still would like that people have to put time, effort and get a bit of luck on their side because it makes you feel much much better when you finally achieve your goal. When it's given to you, you will never appreciate it and treat it like you appreciate it more than if you worked for it. Final point is that if you want the best and it takes 1 million tunes to get it, then that's what you have to do, so we all should get off the boards and go do it. Heck the time I spent writing this post could have yeilded by 2 or 3 pearls by now and one of those might of been my perfect tune I seeked but someone else got it because I'm here...LOL
Message Edited by HardwiredXMan on 09-18-2005 06:36 AM
Big-Rug wrote:
I agree that there should be some effort needed to reap the rewards of a good weapon. What I suggest is that if there is a standard tuning system in place that allows you to get adequate tunes with frequency. Much in the same way as weaponsmiths can make a weapon hat is fairly decent with only the base components and resources, it is special looted items that make truly spectacular weapons.
So why not have a system for saber crafting that can use average quality components, not just crystals - but other things like focussing arrays, emitter plates etc etc. While basic components would be easily made by the jedi, and adequate crystals fairly easy to obtain (even for the casual player), creating an adequate weapon.. I suggest that there should be a selection of excellent components that can be looted from chevroned (elite/boss) npcs. As well as premium and flawless pearls/crystals that can be gained fom boss npcs and epic quests.
What do you think?
Regards,
BR