Crafty Buggers

Some new information about crafting as appeared on the SWTOR website in the last few days. Check out any of those links for the full details.

My understanding from reading it is that each player will have three “Crew Skill Slots”. Those slots can be filled with the skills Gathering, Crafting, or Mission branches. Gathering has 4 branches, Crafting 6, and Missions 4. So of 14 total choices, each player can only pick 3. From those, you can take any number of Gathering or Mission skills, but only 1 can be a Crafting skill.

That leaves a lot of interdependence in the crafting system.  Items will come from 6 different branches so one person can not produce everything they will need without having 6 different characters. Since there is no info on how many characters per server someone can have, hard to say how likely that will be.

The hardest part is going to be deciding which crafting track to take. Unless Bioware has create the perfect crafting system, a feat no one has come close to doing, some of the crafting trees will be essentially useless.

• Armormech – the ability to work with hard metals and electronic shielding to construct all types of personal armor
• Armstech – the skill of constructing blasters, blaster rifles and upgrades
• Artifice – the delicate work of constructing Jedi and Sith artifacts
• Biochem –the engineering of performance-enhancing chemical serums and biological implants
• Cybertech – the technical expertise to construct gadgets and components for Droids and high-tech armors
• Synthweaving – the art of creating lighter outfits and armors that are imbued with supernatural qualities

With my lack of knowledge of the game I’m going to say that Armormech is useless for Smugglers and Consulars, Armstech is useless for Jedi, Artifice is useless for non-Jedi, Biochem is needed for everyone, Cybertech is only useful for Troopers/BH and maybe smugglers, and Synthweaving is for useless for Jedi Knight and Trooper.

The big question then becomes, which of these things are useful at the end game? Will the only good armor and weapons come from raids? If so, Armormech, Armstech, Synthweaving become useless at endgame. Maybe even Artifice and Cybertech.  It would be like Weaponsmiths and Woodsmiths in LOTRO once Legendary weapons were added. They had nothing anyone wanted to use. Is Cybertech useful to anyone other than a Trooper/BH or someone with  Droid companion?

However, if the items are more about upgrades than particular items, then the crafting professions could have a use. Some upgrades are drops, some are crafted, some are crafted but require parts that are dropped, or get better with parts that are dropped (Krayt tissue anyone?).

This could be an interesting concept, especially since everyone can do it, but Missions and Gathering allows them to forgot crafting. That might help make the market more vibrant, rather than stagnate in many games. A lot will have to do with the resources needed for crafting. Are they tiered like LOTRO, where the low level stuff is useless to anyone but a newbie? Or are the types of things you need the same throughout, so that a newbie can go gather, and has stuff a level 50 needs?