How Crew Skills forced me to roll another alt

Kizu and I finished Tatooine this week, so this weekend, we were ready for Alderaan and the end of Act 1 (which will be the object of my next post). As we were maybe halfway through the zone, Kizu pointed out that our gear was pretty outdated and suggested that we upgrade our orange pieces to kill more efficiently. Lyr being an Artificer, I started looking for enhancements and hilts to craft for us. It took a couple (way too many) tries for me to get the blue quality version of the Might enhancement I needed, and only one try for Kizu's Resolve enhancement. The same thing happened for the hilts. Someone out there must hate me. I also got us some neat +14 crit red crystals.

But we also needed mods and armoring! Kizu's Bounty Hunter is a Cybertech that can craft those, but since he was pretty low on mats, he made us only some armorings, and we bought mods with Alderaan Commendations. Needless to say, once we upgraded all our orange gear, we started killing mobs noticeably faster. I think we spent more time Saturday night crafting upgrades then actually playing. But that's fine, because it was fun.

Kizu's main being his Sith Assassin, his Bounty Hunter hasn't had much love in a while, except to do the space mission dailies occasionally for credits. In order to support us all the way through level 50 on his own, he would have to get scavenging mats solely through missions, which would be way too costly.

That is why I needed to start a new alt! Say hello to the new addition to the family!

Fredrick, my future Sniper

Fred will be our scavenging mats farmer, and our slicer for cash and augments. I know I said I wouldn't start another alt yet, but it's for a good cause! I blame crew skills for being so fun and the craftable stuff for being so good. The quality of the gear really does make a difference in the leveling process. Being able to craft our own item modifications is totally worth it.

Hopefully, I'll be able to level him enough this week so he can get level-appropriate mats for Lyr and Kizu as soon as possible.

Crew Skills are fun

Know what I did this weekend?

I crafted. And it was fun. 

I love crew skills. I love being able to send my companions to gather the mats I'm missing. I love being able to reverse engineer the things I make to get some mats back, and to have the chance to discover a better quality recipe. It makes leveling profession pretty exciting! Well, for me anyway. Maybe I'm just very easily excitable. And I actually enjoy going out of my way while questing to gather crystals, or plants, or whatever. Sure, it might slow down the leveling a bit, but I don't seem to care. I'm having fun. Never thought I'd ever enjoy gathering mats. But I am. And my goal would be to level every crew skill to 400. Lucky me, I have a shit-ton of alts!

I've been working on Artifice and Biochem mostly, as Kizu started an Assassin on the Empire server (fuck, I levelled a Jedi Knight to level 13 for nothing?!) and he needed some stuff to level faster. It's been quite fun. But I wish I had more companions. It would go faster. Would also be nice if my character could make herself useful. Because I send them to gather stuff, and craft stuff, and I just sit there and wait for them to come back. I suppose I could go gather some mats by myself, but it would be impractical, as I usually just stand by the crew skill trainer, so I can learn the next recipe.

I also played Lyrestra the Gunslinger a little this weekend. She's now completely done with Alderaan, and ready to start Balmorra. I must admit I was a little sad that the Republic gets to start on Bugtown, because I hate Bugtown, but hopefully I won't get to fight those damned Collicoids for too long. I really hope so. Fingers crossed. Fucking bugs...

On a side note, I had forgotten how much fun the smuggler/agent playstyle is. Made me want to role an Agent. Again. Maybe someday I'll be able to decide which race and gender I want to make it so I can actually level one past Hutta.