Kor'kron 501st

I think I’m more excited about crew skills and reverse engineering than I am about questing in TOR right now. I just love this system. You can have three crew skills (think professions in WoW), one of which can be crafting.

I picked Armormech, Slicing, and Underworld Trading. Armormech allows armor to be crafted. What’s interesting is that instead of performing the crafting yourself, you send your companion to do it, and each task takes a specified amount of time. Similarly, I can send my companion, Mako, on slicing missions to earn credit or underworld trading missions to earn crafting metals for my armor crafting.

The real time aspect makes this especially fun. I’ve found myself reading or watching Netflix while checking on TOR every few minutes to send Mako back out. I hope the time required increases later. I’d like some long duration missions so that she can be busy while I’m sleeping or at work.

The other interesting aspect is reverse engineering. You learn base recipes. After something is crafted, it can be reverse engineered (think disenchanted) into a portion of its materials. These can then be used toward crafting again. When something is RE’d, there’s a chance it’ll teach you a better version of the recipe. This second tier version is the same as the first except it has an additional stat on it. For each recipe, there are three second tier versions. Similarly, there are five third tier versions for each second tier, giving a total of 15 (although only 14 are currently available). In addition to this, you have a chance on crafting something to critically craft it, leaving it with an additional socket.

This means there’s a lot of crafting to do.

Oddly, only base equipment works like this. gem’s character has the Cybertech crew skill, which creates mods and armoring. These don’t follow the branching path; upon RE’ing an item, it simply gives a chance of learning a better version of those stats. There’s also no crits with that skill.

Too bad. gem’s missing out on a lot of fun (although some stress and planning as well)!

I wish I could be crafting while at work.

For more information about reverse engineering (or for my own reference), Slaign on the official TOR forums made an excellent guide!