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Atreides
VeteranXV
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1 - 12-06-2011, 11:41
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I thought I'd type this up to give people a good idea of what each craft will do for you in The Old Republic.


BASICS

There are 3 types of crew skills:

Craft: This is the crew skill that you will learn schematics for creating items.
Gather: Provides common materials for a craft
Mission: Provides rare materials for a craft.

Your character can learn 3 crew skills of your choosing. However, you can only learn one Crafting skill. You can't learn 3 crafts and pull all the mats you need of the Galactic Trade Network (GTN - TOR's Auction House). You will be able to fully support your craft if you select the appropriate accompanying gather and mission skills.

You first pick up crew skills around level 10 when you leave your starter planet. You get an introductory quest for them at your faction's fleet station. I believe the minimum level for this is 8, but since you get your Advanced Class at level 10 people typically pick up crew skills at the same time they do their AC quest as it's in the same place.

Actual crafting is done through your companion (these are "crew skills"). To make an item, you must send away your companion to craft it. Unlike gathering and missions, you can queue your companion to make up to 5 items at a time. They will be placed in your inventory as each is completed. Crafts typically take less time for your companion to complete than gathering or missions.

You can only send your companion to do one skill at a time, so if they're out crafting you won't be able to send them on a mission. Gathering will cost you some time and money. You can select which type of material you want your companion to gather. Each craft typically uses two different types of common materials. So you'll be able to choose which of those types you want your companion to return with.

Missions will cost you more time and money than Gathering. There is also a chance to fail these so take caution when selecting orange level missions for your companion. Aside from expensive rare materials, you can send a companion on a mission for companion items. These items are consumables to boost companion affection. Those missions are much cheaper and faster to complete, making them a better way to level up your mission crew skill if that is your goal.

Each companion in the game has their own proficiency in a crew skill. This proficiency will allow them to complete their task faster than other companions. Boosting their affection will also hasten completion time of crafts/gathers/missions. It is speculated that these factors can also increase your chance to proc HQ results on crew skills. I'm not sure if any of that has been confirmed though. For now, know that it will just increase speed.

Each craft has the ability to reverse engineer the items they make. This works the same as disenchanting in WoW, where the item is destroyed and gives back a few crafting materials. What this also does in TOR is gives you a small chance to learn the higher rarity version of that item. If you RE a green quality blaster, you could learn the blue quality schematic. And again from RE blue to learn purple. From what I've seen, Greens can proc several blue versions that vary in main or secondary stats. I'm not sure if this branches further by a single blue procing several purple variations.

Crafting is capable of High Quality procs in this game (yay!). A notification is sent to you when your companion returns stating they finsihed the item "with great success". HQ items have the quality in [brackets] as part of the item's name. I've made purple quality items with [Superior] and [Exceptional] in the names, suggesting there's multiple levels of HQ. What I've noticed is these affect the item's armor value, provide additional secondary stats, or add modification slots to the item.

Crew skills can also be used in other ways. Some Flashpoints for example offer up access to shortcuts to those with the appropriate skill level. In Bringing Down the Hammer, players can use scavenging to repair a broken drill which will knock down a wall, opening a direct route to the first boss. Athiss has a few doors that can only be opened with Archaeology. There are other uses for crew skills inside Flashpoints such as activating a droid to fight with your party, etc.


CRAFTING PROFESSIONS


ARMORMECH

Armormech is the ability to work with hard metals, alloys and synthetic materials to construct armor for non-Force users. Vendor-purchased fluxes are used during the armor creation process to refine the materials to ensure suitability. Armormechs can reverse engineer their crafted armor and possibly discover new ways to improve armor creation. The gathering skill Scavenging provides crafting resources for Armormech.

Recommended Gathering Skills: Scavenging (Scavenged Metals and Compounds).
Recommended Mission Skills: Underworld Trading (Underworld Metals).

From the recopies I've seen, expect to make all your basic armor slots here. Head, Gloves, Wrist, Waist, Chest, Legs, and Boots. Armormech does not craft any armor modifications from what I've seen.


ARMSTECH

Armstech is the ability to work with hard metals, alloys and synthetic materials to craft blasters, blaster modifications and melee weapons. Vendor-purchased fluxes are used during the weapon creation process to refine the materials to ensure suitability. Crafted blasters include blaster pistols, blaster rifles, sniper rifles, assault cannons and shotguns. Blaster modifications include blaster barrels. Melee weapons include vibroblades and electrostaves. Armstechs can reverse engineer their crafted items and possibly discover new ways to improve their creation. The gathering skill Scavenging provides crafting resources for Armstech.

Recommended Gathering Skills: Scavenging (Scavenged Metals and Compounds).
Recommended Mission Skills: Investigation (Researched Compounds).

Armstech recipies provide a wide variety of melee and ranged weapons. Expect to craft any weapon that isn't a Lightsaber. Armstech also crafts the barrel modification for ranged weapons.


ARTIFICE

Artifice is the delicate skill of constructing lightsaber modifications, enhancements, generators and focii. Lightsaber modifications include color crystals and hilts that augment a Force user's combat attributes. Color crystals determine beam and bolt color for lightsabers and blasters. Enhancements are modification upgrades for weapons and armor. Artificers can reverse engineer their crafted items and possibly discover new ways to improve their creation. The gathering skill Archaeology provides crafting resources for Artifice.

Recommended Gathering Skills: Archaeology (Power Crystals, Color Crystals and Artifact Fragments).
Recommended Mission Skills: Treasure Hunting (Gemstones).

Aside from possibly crafting the best weapon mods in the game, Artifice can also craft BoP relics which are a rarer piece of gear in the game.


BIOCHEM

Biochem is the skill involved in crafting medical supplies, performance-enhancing chemical serums and biological implants. Biochemists can create medpacs to restore health, stimulants (single-use injections) that provide a boost to physical abilities, and biological implants that enhance combat prowess by stimulating neural networks and regulating brain stem functions. Biochemists can reverse engineer their crafted implants and possibly discover new ways to improve implant creation. The gathering skill Bioanalysis provides crafting resources for Biochem.

Recommended Gathering Skills: Bioanalysis (Biochemical Samples and Compounds).
Recommended Mission Skills: Diplomacy (Medical Supplies).

Biochem crafts BoP implants in the higher tiers. As well as non-consumable stims and medpacks. Biochems can make superior medpacks/stims that have a greater effect and duration. Possibly one of the better PvP crafts.


CYBERTECH

Cybertech is the skill to assemble droid armor, earpieces, grenades, armoring, mods and miscellaneous gadgets. Armoring and mods are upgrade modifications that augment combat ability. Earpieces are external mini-computers that are worn on or near the ear. They enhance combat prowess by giving audio and visual feedback to the wearer or through direct neural feedback via an external nerve relay. Cybertechs can reverse engineer their crafted items and possibly discover new ways to improve their creation. The gathering skill Scavenging provides crafting resources for Cybertech.

Recommended Gathering Skill: Scavenging (Scavenged Metals and Compounds).
Recommended Mission Skills: Underworld Trading (Underworld Metals).

Basically a craft for armor mods. They also provide specialty armor/mods for droids and ships. They can craft ear pieces which are typically less common pieces of gear, as well as grenades which are consumable items to use in combat (much like engineering grenades in WoW).


SYNTHWEAVING

Synthweaving is the process of fabricating synthetic materials out of crystals, various chemicals and artifact fragments to construct armor for Force users. Vendors provide premade solutions, suspensions and composites that are used during the Synthweaving process. Synthweavers can reverse engineer their crafted armor and possibly discover new ways to improve armor creation. The gathering skill Archaeology provides crafting resources for Synthweaving.

Recommended Gathering Skills: Archaeology.
Recommended Mission Skills: Underworld Trading (Luxury Fabrics and Underworld Metals).

Basically this is just Armormech for force users. Nothing other than your basic gear slots: Head, Gloves, Wrist, Waist, Chest, Legs, Boots. Can not craft Armor mods.


SLICING

Slicing is not a skill required for crafting. Slicing is the art of accessing secure computer systems and lockboxes to acquire valuable items, credits and rare tech schematics. Common slicing targets include electronic safes, data stations, security mainframes and biometric footlockers. These targets contain credits, rare tech schematics used to construct Cybertech gadgets, vehicles and space upgrades, and mission discovery objects that unlock challenging missions that can potentially yield great rewards. Slicers can send their companions on missions to retrieve these valuable items. Other possible mission rewards include augments that can be slotted into exceptionally crafted items.

Recommended Crafting Skills: All (for mission discoveries), Cybertech (for tech schematics).
Slicing (Gathering and Missions) rewards lockboxes of graduated quality and quantity, but does not supply any crafting materials.
Slicing is considered a "Gathering" crew skill.

If you're looking for some money, Slicing should be a good bet. The amount of credits you get from lockboxes has seen a round of nerfs. Expect this profession to go through some balancing stages, so be warned if you're only taking this as a cash grab. Otherwise, this is a great support for guildmates or just the community in general. You'll be able to find BoE schematics for Cybertech, as well as BoE items that unlock new missions for crew skills. These new missions are typically very expensive, take a long time, but have much larger yields than your standard missions.



LEVELING CREW SKILLS

CRAFTING SKILLS

These are the only crew skills that require you to visit your trainer to learn new recipes. It can also be quite expensive. If you're just looking to make items for yourself and money is tight, I suggest only training the schematics for the items you will wear or craft for skill ups.

Skill ups work very much the same as similar MMOS. Items are ranked in orange/yellow/green/grey difficulty, where crafting greys won't level your craft.

If your craft can make modifications/augments for weapons and armor; these are usually very cheap ways to level your craft. Armormech and Synthweaving suffer in this regard and are a bit more material intensive when skilling up.

You'll find some of your recipes require common items that you don't gather. These are sold by NPCs typically lacated in the crew skill areas around towns/stations. The NPCs have "Crew Skills Trade Vendor" under their name. It's a good idea to find these NPCs and remember their locations. Here is a DB entry for their shop's inventory: http://www.torhead.com/npc/bJi8Lnm


GATHERING SKILLS

The nice thing about these, is that they can be leveled via conventional MMORPG methods. Every gathering skill (including slicing) has nodes that spawn in the world(s). You don't need your companion to gather the world spawn nodes (although you can bind a key to make them gather it instead of your character, freeing you up to heal or do something else). I mentioned at the top that common crafting items usually come in two types. The gather nodes will just have a random amount of each. Usually anywhere between 0-4 of each common item of that tier. So you might get click a node and get 2 stacks of 4, or as little as 1 stack of 1.

You skill up your gathering by harvesting the world nodes just the same as other MMORPGs. At the same time you could send out your companion to do the same, but that's usually a waste of money; only to be done if you're too lazy to go out to the appropriate zone... or perhaps you're busy doing better things like PVP, raids, etc.


MISSION SKILLS

Unlike gathering, you can't fast track this in the open world. You can only skill up this crew skill by sending out your companion to do it. It can take a lot more time and money to level missions, and this will be your bottleneck in crafting. It's very easy to outpace your mission level by plowing through easy crafts that only consume common materials. Try not to let your mission level fall too far behind. You can however always buy/sell the rare materials that missions provide from other players. If you need a material you can't get yet, check the GTN if you have the credits.


COMPANIONS

In the interest of leveling crew skills; get your ship as fast as possible. Once you leave the starter planet (level 10), you're off to your first main planet. Here you will get the story quests that lead to you getting your ship. When you get your ship, you also get your second companion. So it's a good idea to only do class quests once you get to this planet. You could end up with your ship around level 13. If you try to do every quest along the way, you won't get your ship until level 18 or so.

Once you have 2 companions, you are effectively leveling crew skills twice as fast. Plus, the downside to 1 companion is that it's harder to solo quest if you're constantly sending your companion on missions, leaving you by yourself to take down packs of 3-4 mobs. You can send multiple companions on the same skill. With 2 companions, you can be queuing up a total of 10 items to make... or have both doing missions - skilling up twice as often.


MY EXPERIENCE WITH CREW SKILLS

Money can be very tight early on. You'll find that your class skills will cost a lot to train every level. Your first mount will run you 44k credits at level 25. And crafting will clutter up your limited inventory space very quickly, tempting you to buy your first two expansions for 5k, and 20k. Your crafting skill will overwhelm you with trainable schematics. You'll be learning far more than you'll ever be making early on.

If you start heavy into crafting, consider vendoring or GTN everything you make to get credits back. Reverse engineering can give back some mats to help out, and proc rare schematics. It's up to you if that's something you want early. Purple items really don't destroy greens in stats. Getting purple schematics takes a lot of luck, and even more credits. It's very costly. The upside is; players aren't too bright. A lot of them are WoW players, and when they see a purple item on the GTN, they typically buy it - not knowing it's not that much better than a green and won't last them any longer. So you could go that route.

I wouldn't bother listing green items you make on the GTN. I doubt many players will be looking for anything less than blue quality.

I will say however that even the greens you craft are very good items in this game. Better than quest items, and I'm glad BioWare did that part right. Not to imply that they did anything poorly, but most devs have you crafting items of the 'who gives a ****' variety until later on in the game. If you make armor or weapons for yourself, you'll be pretty well off. They only thing that would replace them are commendation blues, and boss loot out of Flashpoints.


**If you have any questions that I didn't address, ask them and I'll try to keep this guide up to date.
 
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Last edited by Atreides; 12-06-2011 at 12:43..
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Data
VeteranXX
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Old
2 - 12-06-2011, 11:58
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Decent summary.
 
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PoorDoggy
VeteranXV
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3 - 12-06-2011, 12:11
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Unless it recently changed, your "one of each type" limitation is incorrect. You may only learn one crafting skill, but that is the only restriction. You can learn 3 gathering skills, or 3 mission skills, etc.
 
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Atreides
VeteranXV
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4 - 12-06-2011, 12:38
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alright.

I also wonder if BW will change UWT. currently they have it providing rare materials for 3 crafts, which doesn't seem right. A recent patch changed the missions so that you could specifically send a companion for cloth or metal. I wonder if they'll stick with that. If so then I guess there will be a much higher demand for UWT mats than anything else.
 
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Ickz
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5 - 12-09-2011, 07:53
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What do you think is your best bet for just flat out making credits and not caring about what you can make? In Rift, I went triple gathering professions and made tons and tons of money just selling the mats I gathered. Then I could just turn around and buy any crafted items I wanted. I've never really been a fan of crafting even though TOR's seems a little more interesting.

edit: Bleh, after looking over the different things you can make on torhead, it seems like cybertech or biochem really could be very nice for PvP.
 
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Last edited by Ickz; 12-09-2011 at 08:36..
Atreides
VeteranXV
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6 - 12-10-2011, 10:57
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I couldn't really say which worked best for making money. The Beta didn't have much of an economy. Not a lot of people used the GTN.

I will say though that as far as gathering goes, Scavenging and Bioanalysis can be a bit more bountiful in the open world. All common gather professions have world spawn nodes that you can harvest. But with scav and bio, you can also harvest from dead droids/creatures. With everyone running around killing **** for their quests, you'll often come up on piles of dead bodies to skin.
 
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PoorDoggy
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7 - 12-10-2011, 11:49
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I will be starting with Bioanalysis, Scavenging, and Slicing. Hoard bio mats, sell scavenging mats, slicing for credits and missions to sell on GTN. At some point I will drop scav/slicing for Biochem/Diplomacy, probably after I buy my speeder and don't have to worry as much about flushing credits down the crafting toilet.
 
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Senty
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8 - 12-10-2011, 15:05
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http://www.swtorcrewskills.com/swtor...rafting-chart/

Edit: nm then
 
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Last edited by Senty; 12-11-2011 at 01:45..
Atreides
VeteranXV
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9 - 12-10-2011, 15:59
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That picture is a few builds old. For instance, Synthweaving doesn't use Diplomacy anymore for luxury fabrics. It now uses UWT. Diplomacy is used for rare Biochem materials.
 
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Senty
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10 - 12-11-2011, 01:48
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What about this one?

SWTOR Crafting Chart ~ Star Wars The Old Republic | SWTOR
 
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Atreides
VeteranXV
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11 - 12-11-2011, 08:41
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Looks good

I'm still curious to see if it will be the same at launch. They tied half of the crafting skills to 1 of only 4 mission skills. That just doesn't make sense.
 
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Senty
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12 - 12-14-2011, 19:53
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fyi looks like you can pick the skills up from the beginning, just got mine at lvl 4; though you can't really use it until you get your first companion

Update: lvl 9 got my companion and can't send them out on any missions.
 
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Last edited by Senty; 12-15-2011 at 00:12..
Atreides
VeteranXV
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13 - 12-14-2011, 20:05
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still good to know for anyone who wants a head start on bioanalysis or scavenging.
 
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Senty
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14 - 12-15-2011, 00:14
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Doubt it only starting world creatures which I remember being bioanalysible were on Tython and that was a few builds ago.
 
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Atreides
VeteranXV
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15 - 12-15-2011, 10:52
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Well, I know I scavenged the hell out of some droids on korriban.
 
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Witch
VeteranXV
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16 - 12-15-2011, 17:06
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Yeah but you're not missing much if you are picking up the skills from Fleet.
 
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Ickz
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17 - 12-17-2011, 16:13
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Posted this in the GD thread.

Just a tip for crafting. It seems like you should always take slicing, at least while leveling to 50 and then you can unlearn it. The amount of extra credits you make from it almost seems broken. You can level a crafting skill to 400 using just the green mats you get from its primary gathering skill. So instead of taking your crafting skill's mission skill, you can just take slicing. The only point of the mission skills is to supply you with mats for making blue and purple items, but that's not really important until 50, unless you really care about making low level items and selling them, and even then slicing would probably be much more profitable and far less time consuming.
 
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Atreides
VeteranXV
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18 - 12-17-2011, 17:30
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That's a good point. The biggest downside I can see to that is Leveling your mission at 50. You can't really just dump money into a skill and power level it. This game aims to have your crew skills be more of a reflection of time invested. My UWT is only 160ish, and it takes 20 minutes for 1 mission. Of course, at 50 you'll have more companions to do the work, but still.

A decent alternative for money making is BGs. PvP seems to bring in some pretty good money from what I've done so far. Plus you can buy up those boxes with the tokens and vendor them for 1.2k each.
 
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PoorDoggy
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19 - 12-18-2011, 13:49
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Slicing is absurd. At level 31 with around 360 Slicing I just broke 200k.
 
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Ickz
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20 - 12-18-2011, 16:09
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Yep.
 
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