There are only 4 mods. However you're more likely to get a DMG or ACC mod than CRTH or even CRTD. I found CRTD to be about a 1 in 6 chance, with 1 crth, and DMG and ACC being about equal.
But this is upgrading them one after the next.
How sure are you about that estimate of 1/6? How many items did you test?
There's a guy on Twitch, his name is Amaz. He plays HearthStone and every Friday he has an event. It's 12 wins in a row in Arena PvP or he buys 100 packs of cards (5 cards each, 100 Zen each pack.). If a guy like him can afford to spend 10.000 Zen every week on his favorite game due to his job's income and status, I bet there are players in Star Trek Online who can do the same. It's not a secret.
[SIGPIC] [/SIGPIC]
I will always choose a lazy person to do a difficult job...
Lobi ships on the exchange are a good deal, unless you happen to want to open $200 worth of lock boxes. Even then, you might prefer to spend your lobi on consoles like the Tachyokinetic Converter.
Lockbox ships are often a good deal a few weeks after the lockbox comes out. Now is a good time to get Xindi Olaen for example. It's a much better deal through the exchange if you just want that ship.
Yes, if you are willing to spend $400+ on lockboxes you'll probably turn a profit selling all of the contents including the 2 lobi ships, but you also have the work from putting all of those items on the exchange.
How sure are you about that estimate of 1/6? How many items did you test?
Very sure. I have made 2 full sets of crtdx4 UR beam arrays with 1 full set of dual beams.
I have 4 full sets of Beam array Epic weapons (crtdx3 pen) with 2 full sets of Dual beams.
For a total of 56 weapons that I have crafted in the last 4 months. Not including another 3 sets of beams and 3 of dbbs made prior to that 4 months and the multitude of sets I made on Tribble.
Now this doesn't include the weapons I upgrade which didn't get a mod as there was plenty that never upgraded, but of the ones that did upgrade my ratio from above is what I ended up with and an inventory full of UR/Epic weapons which many of my fleet hated me for my luck.
When you say "there is no cost to do this" you are just wrong. The cost you pay is not selling the things, because opportunity cost is real.
Crafting a crtd3 beam is earning 7m. Using it to gamble on crtd4 is spending 7m, it doesn't matter how you got the beam.
If you paid 7m for it on the exchange, you lost 7m EC that way. If you crafted it, you lost 7m by not selling it.
Opportunity cost is real, it actually is real.
It's a fundamental fact of truth.
There is a difference in opportunity and reality. Because the opportunity to make 200mill for being the first to post a MK XII or XIV Ultra Rare weapon was there when RND went live doesn't mean you lost 200m by not participating.
It just mean you didn't reap a benefit. You don't lose what you didn't get. This is called economics. You only lose what you have spent to get an item. If I spend 7m to buy a weapon and did nothing with it or gave it away that is when you lose. You buy a part worth 7mill, you drop some into it hoping to reap a positive result to flip or use. Even in the worst of cases you only add to the item in this game. I have never had an UR item drop below the initial cost. I have ALWAYS made a profit when I get an UR item. And when it didn't upgrade I resell it at a matching value. SO I lost zero on those cases.
When you upgrade and item you are not spending 7m. It never got bound to you. The only time you lose that 7mill is when you use the item. And even in those cases that depends on the value of the item to the person. When you get that perfect run of upgrades where you get UR and Epic even, that is a game changer for yourself, but you invested and won. The value of the item never goes away, unless you discard it of course. The only lost in cost is those items that are discard rather than resold. And you can always make back what you had spent, if any, instead of taking a hit on it.
Need help with a mission to beat it? Visit http://pilotreviewshow.com to learn how we can help!
There is a difference in opportunity and reality. Because the opportunity to make 200mill for being the first to post a MK XII or XIV Ultra Rare weapon was there when RND went live doesn't mean you lost 200m by not participating.
It just mean you didn't reap a benefit. You don't lose what you didn't get. This is called economics. You only lose what you have spent to get an item. If I spend 7m to buy a weapon and did nothing with it or gave it away that is when you lose. You buy a part worth 7mill, you drop some into it hoping to reap a positive result to flip or use. Even in the worst of cases you only add to the item in this game. I have never had an UR item drop below the initial cost. I have ALWAYS made a profit when I get an UR item. And when it didn't upgrade I resell it at a matching value. SO I lost zero on those cases.
When you upgrade and item you are not spending 7m. It never got bound to you. The only time you lose that 7mill is when you use the item. And even in those cases that depends on the value of the item to the person. When you get that perfect run of upgrades where you get UR and Epic even, that is a game changer for yourself, but you invested and won. The value of the item never goes away, unless you discard it of course. The only lost in cost is those items that are discard rather than resold. And you can always make back what you had spent, if any, instead of taking a hit on it.
Loss of opportunity is still a cost. Take a real world example:
You are the owner of a small business with 5 employees. Each employee works 40 hrs/week, totaling 200 man hours of labor each week at a pay rate of $15/hr. You will pay $3,000/week in payroll nomatter what. You can make sure they're busy, and get your $3,000 worth, or you can let them TRIBBLE around on Facebook all day and lose it. That's obvious. What's less obvious whether the things you're having them do are a waste of time. If you have an employee spend 10 hours on a task, and that task ultimately is a waste and generates no revenue, you have lost an opportunity. You spent $150 and got nothing back, when you should have spent $150 and gotten something out of it even if it was just cleaning the shop or completing necessary paperwork. The loss occurred because you could have had that employee do something else which would have had value, but you didn't. You wasted the opportunity, and it cost you $150 of value. We have probably all been in a situation where we felt our boss was wasting our time and generating no value when there were other things to be done.
The same is true of a pile of crafting materials. They have a real market value, you could sell them as is and take your money. But, if you make something of them they can be worth more. If you craft a bunch of weapons and get a [CrtD]x3 you can sell for 7 million, you have gained 7 million minus the market value of the materials you spent getting there. Now again, you can cash out at 7 million and "realize" your gain. That's what you're talking about, realized gains. That's different than opportunity cost. Even a gain you haven't realized still has value though. When you buy stock and it goes up, you have gained. If you have stock and it goes down, you have lost. You can cash out and realize or not, but the gain or loss still happened.
A [CrtD]x3 beam has the potential to become [CrtD]x4. If you upgrade it and get [Dmg], that potential is now gone and the value is hurt. You have suffered a loss even if no money ever changed hands because the potential to make money is gone. Every time you make a choice, there is an opportunity cost in the choice you didn't make. When you make choices, you are doing it on the hope that you will gain something worth more than the lost opportunity. If you don't, well, you lose.
Sure if you ignore those 150 keys would generate 750 Lobi and other byproducts since we all know Lock Boxes are either a ship or nothing right?
All those other prizes net out.
There is no special box right now that will 100% pay out more then you spend opening it.
50/50 every box you open will have some junk booster worth 1/3 - 1/8th the EC cost of the key. + 4 lobi ... T6 Lobi ships are 900 lobi sell for around 90 mil, which is also a steal. It takes around 160 boxes on average to get 900 lobi which is around 400 mil.
The bottom line is the lockbox ships are less then a 1% chance to pull... everything else nets out for the most part. Yes some traits and a few of the other toys can make you more then the EC cost of a key... however weigh that against the copious amounts of junk you will pull and it really does net out.
You can buy keys with EC all day long, selling all the junk and cashing in a lobi ship every 800-900 lobi... and after a week you will have exactly the same amount of EC you started with. lol
The EC value of everything right now is pretty much exactly where it should be, with exception of the ships, they are a little undervalued in general. So I don't get the complaining about the grand prize costs, they are cheap.
Yeah, the prices of the ships, even the T6 ships have come way down from pre DR. They have come down in most cases over 100%
Only certain ultrarare items like leech and certain duty officers and super desirable mods are wickedly expensive and continuing to rise.
99.5% of stuff is now within reach with a little effort.
Captain Jean-Luc Picard: "We think we've come so far. Torture of heretics, burning of witches, it's all ancient history. Then - before you can blink an eye - suddenly it threatens to start all over again."
"With the first link, the chain is forged. The first speech censured, the first thought forbidden, the first freedom denied, chains us all irrevocably."
Thats not exactly true, before DR announcement prices wee rising ... Crafting kinda lowered the rising prices with DR kicking them in the pants.
Prices right now are about as high as last year and prices last year were higher that 2 years ago.
For ships? Many ships last summer were in the 200-300 million range. I waited out the xindi carrier until maybe september and got it for around 150 million. But there were quite a few ships still much higher until the T6's arrived.
For consoles and weapons it's a much different story (except for the #1 desired mod). For example the field generator purple 12 in September was 50 million. Now I can make it for nothing.
Captain Jean-Luc Picard: "We think we've come so far. Torture of heretics, burning of witches, it's all ancient history. Then - before you can blink an eye - suddenly it threatens to start all over again."
"With the first link, the chain is forged. The first speech censured, the first thought forbidden, the first freedom denied, chains us all irrevocably."
Yeah, the prices of the ships, even the T6 ships have come way down from pre DR. They have come down in most cases over 100%
Only certain ultrarare items like leech and certain duty officers and super desirable mods are wickedly expensive and continuing to rise.
99.5% of stuff is now within reach with a little effort.
Some of those T6 prices on the exchange are a damn steal, IMO. The Manassa Escort is still a mean customer with a wonderful trait. And it's in the lower half of lockbox/lobi ship prices on the exchange.
But one has to shop and know what the ships offer. There are some highly overrated ships selling for way more than they're worth. There's good ships going for bargain prices.
Let's see...it takes on average something like 150 keys to get a ship...the chances are under 1%. You can buy a ship by selling 40 keys...yeah...the exchange ain't too expensive. If anything it's a bloody steal.
Just looked it up a Jem'hadar Dreadnought Carrier goes for almost 50.000.000 EC yes keys are at 2.500.000 that's about 40 keys and you do 10 extra keys because you like to outfit the damm thing to so let's say about 50 Euro or 5300 Zen should do the trick...
But not only that it's also cryptic that's make this impossible because if you don't like to grind you are bound to get your stuff from the exchange because ingame you can't buy anyting highest gear mark is Mark IX from the shops and Fleet Starbases is the same problem if it isn't up to speed you can forget to buy an T5 U Fleet ship....
They killed the Dilithium store I wish they never done that.... So then we are stuck with an Lobi Store which has good gear and such but pretty hard to acquire.
Then we have Gold Pressed latinum thats a worthless store unless you like to buy an holo emitter...
So that summed up it's up to the exchange !!!
[SIGPIC][/SIGPIC]
"Coffee: the finest organic suspension ever devised. It's got me through the worst of the last three years. I beat the Borg with it."
You can use dil with the reputation stores to buy weapons, but if you're patient it's better to try to get gear from the daily and hourly rep XP projects instead -- those pay YOU dil.
Between the Reputation Stores and Crafting, you can easily outfit any ship without buying a single thing from the exchange.
It might take a while, might require patience, but it's easily done.
Buy Weapons from Rep or Craft them, buy Impulse/Deflector/Warp/Shield from Rep or craft them and craft all of your consoles.
With the exception of the Plasmonic Leech, I don't think a single item on my ship came from the exchange. It's all either crafted, bought from Rep Store, or from my Fleet.
I think the question is also about the OPPORTUNITY to make EC .
See, with the combination of NADORC and selling engines & deflectors for around 50K , I did manage to get a host of lockbox ships, at times even more than one of the same type .
I could have played the "flipping" game on the exchange -- I knew of others who did that, but I never wanted more EC than I needed just like I never wanted the most uber gear out there (still don't) , plus I also didn't want to make profit on such highly desirable items as I knew that I'd only be responsible for driving up the prices , which in turn would turn around and bite me in the rear some day .
Now, I started this with speaking about opportunity to earn EC .
The new crafting system threw NADORC under the bus, but not before Cryptic 'adjusted' the EC costs & items drop rates to turn the vendor trash arena into a nearly empty shell .
Which is why I've found making EC a lot harder after the two changes above .
Now after the mad rush for 'gold' gear settled , I've found that the investment to make gold items and sell them was not all that worth anymore , as I found myself grinding for dil, and it wasn't too much fun .
So to put things in perspective -- the lockbox ships prices may have stayed the same, but earning that EC price has gotten a lot harder, to a point where :
a) you start to think about spending RL cash for them, or
b) you just /shrug and don't bother .
I've chosen 'b' for at least 3-4 lockbox ships of late, and while I am saddened , ultimately I have no regrets .
Cryptic has chosen to drive me out of business , so I'm sure that they and the lockbox ship sellers & flippers will forgive me if they don't see my business on the customer side of things .
... it's interesting that now Cryptic is pushing the ship bundles instead of lockboxes ... , guess that's what happens when they destroy their own economy on purpose , while they continue to drive ppl to spend RL cash and not ingame resources ....
But not only that it's also cryptic that's make this impossible because if you don't like to grind you are bound to get your stuff from the exchange because ingame you can't buy anyting highest gear mark is Mark IX from the shops and Fleet Starbases is the same problem if it isn't up to speed you can forget to buy an T5 U Fleet ship....
MK XI is still far more than you need for even the elite missions, HSE aside. Now, the fleet stores and the repstores provide good weaponry for decent prices.
There are a number of ways to get EC in this game, and it comes down to: Sell stuff. And I am not talking about zen-stuff.
Just the other day I read the 10k stuff upon which I though I would do some stocktaking. And what shall I say, I found 150mio EC pilling up in my storage. Rarity: Rare (blue!).
They killed the Dilithium store I wish they never done that.... So then we are stuck with an Lobi Store which has good gear and such but pretty hard to acquire.
Then we have Gold Pressed latinum thats a worthless store unless you like to buy an holo emitter...
Aside from shipconsoles (and ships) the lobi-weaponry is second class. And the dilithium store? Buying there was a huge waste of dilithium, those things were far less powerful than you got ingame for free or from the fleet (for less investement). Its a good thing for new players that they closed down that thievery shop.
I remain ec 'poor.' and dilithium rich because the 'exchange rate' between dil to ec is unpalatable to me. The economy has moved to crafting. I feel crafting is a great improvement to the game. Gives us a lot to work on. For me the most reliable source of income now is selling materials - especially blues. My reserves have gone from around 300 mil to around 500 mil since DR and most of this has been through selling materials.
It used to be you would make 2 or 3 million from vendor loot with a full run of killing things. Now this is more like 500,000 (or less) and not worth it to me. Instead focus on gaining the crafting materials and sell those. They are coming down but you can still make up for the vendor nerf by doing the materials or making weapons and consoles. Without this you basically will not see your ec grow.
Captain Jean-Luc Picard: "We think we've come so far. Torture of heretics, burning of witches, it's all ancient history. Then - before you can blink an eye - suddenly it threatens to start all over again."
"With the first link, the chain is forged. The first speech censured, the first thought forbidden, the first freedom denied, chains us all irrevocably."
I know people like to get EC ingame to buy there Mk XIV gear....
Why do people put it on therefore reasonable prices I mean a ship for 94.000.000 EC if you have to buy that with keys you have to sell almost 40 keys to get there ...
I don't want to complain but I just don't understand it what could it is to sell stuff that high because there is no one having that much stuff to sell to get the EC except if he or she is selling Ship upgrades, Fleet Ship Tokens or Keys....
Like to know what players think ?
You need to learn how to make EC, expecially if your a KDF player, your not even playing the game correctly if you cannot make even 50 mil EC in a 2 hour session.
You need to learn how to make EC, expecially if your a KDF player, your not even playing the game correctly if you cannot make even 50 mil EC in a 2 hour session.
LOL, if you can't make 200 million in 15 min you are nub.
Captain Jean-Luc Picard: "We think we've come so far. Torture of heretics, burning of witches, it's all ancient history. Then - before you can blink an eye - suddenly it threatens to start all over again."
"With the first link, the chain is forged. The first speech censured, the first thought forbidden, the first freedom denied, chains us all irrevocably."
LOL, if you can't make 200 million in 15 min you are nub.
LOL if you don't make 500 million in 5 min you are hopeless LOL
^ Memory Alpha.org is not canon. It's a open wiki with arbitrary rules. Only what can be cited from an episode is. ^
"No. Men do not roar. Women roar. Then they hurl heavy objects... and claw at you." -Worf, son of Mogh
"A filthy, mangy beast, but in its bony breast beat the heart of a warrior" - "faithful" (...) "but ever-ready to follow the call of the wild." - Martok, about a Targ
"That pig smelled horrid. A sweet-sour, extremely pungent odor. I showered and showered, and it took me a week to get rid of it!" - Robert Justman, appreciating Emmy-Lou
My reserves have gone from around 300 mil to around 500 mil since DR...
300-500mil is "ec poor"? :eek:
(personally, I think the most I've ever had is 150m, after I'd sold a rare lockbox doff. Typical is more along the lines of 20-30m, spread across ~8 characters. But, then, I've never deliberately set out to "farm" EC.....)
(personally, I think the most I've ever had is 150m, after I'd sold a rare lockbox doff. Typical is more along the lines of 20-30m, spread across ~8 characters. But, then, I've never deliberately set out to "farm" EC.....)
I'm something of a miser. I do buy expensive things a few times a year. Otherwise I hoard. I only got the xindi carrier by saving up a lifetime of lobi from replays and sold a ship for it for about the same - like 140 million. But I had to have that carrier.
I say poor mostly in comparison to the refined dilithium. I ask - which would you rather have 8 million refined or 800 million ec? Frankly 8 million refined Should translate to more like 2 billion ec. Maybe 3 billion. If it did I would sell half.
Captain Jean-Luc Picard: "We think we've come so far. Torture of heretics, burning of witches, it's all ancient history. Then - before you can blink an eye - suddenly it threatens to start all over again."
"With the first link, the chain is forged. The first speech censured, the first thought forbidden, the first freedom denied, chains us all irrevocably."
Comments
I've also seen the special crafting modifiers appear on items that come from doff assignments.
How sure are you about that estimate of 1/6? How many items did you test?
...because he will find an easy way to do it.
-Bill Gates
Lobi ships on the exchange are a good deal, unless you happen to want to open $200 worth of lock boxes. Even then, you might prefer to spend your lobi on consoles like the Tachyokinetic Converter.
Lockbox ships are often a good deal a few weeks after the lockbox comes out. Now is a good time to get Xindi Olaen for example. It's a much better deal through the exchange if you just want that ship.
Yes, if you are willing to spend $400+ on lockboxes you'll probably turn a profit selling all of the contents including the 2 lobi ships, but you also have the work from putting all of those items on the exchange.
Very sure. I have made 2 full sets of crtdx4 UR beam arrays with 1 full set of dual beams.
I have 4 full sets of Beam array Epic weapons (crtdx3 pen) with 2 full sets of Dual beams.
For a total of 56 weapons that I have crafted in the last 4 months. Not including another 3 sets of beams and 3 of dbbs made prior to that 4 months and the multitude of sets I made on Tribble.
Now this doesn't include the weapons I upgrade which didn't get a mod as there was plenty that never upgraded, but of the ones that did upgrade my ratio from above is what I ended up with and an inventory full of UR/Epic weapons which many of my fleet hated me for my luck.
There is a difference in opportunity and reality. Because the opportunity to make 200mill for being the first to post a MK XII or XIV Ultra Rare weapon was there when RND went live doesn't mean you lost 200m by not participating.
It just mean you didn't reap a benefit. You don't lose what you didn't get. This is called economics. You only lose what you have spent to get an item. If I spend 7m to buy a weapon and did nothing with it or gave it away that is when you lose. You buy a part worth 7mill, you drop some into it hoping to reap a positive result to flip or use. Even in the worst of cases you only add to the item in this game. I have never had an UR item drop below the initial cost. I have ALWAYS made a profit when I get an UR item. And when it didn't upgrade I resell it at a matching value. SO I lost zero on those cases.
When you upgrade and item you are not spending 7m. It never got bound to you. The only time you lose that 7mill is when you use the item. And even in those cases that depends on the value of the item to the person. When you get that perfect run of upgrades where you get UR and Epic even, that is a game changer for yourself, but you invested and won. The value of the item never goes away, unless you discard it of course. The only lost in cost is those items that are discard rather than resold. And you can always make back what you had spent, if any, instead of taking a hit on it.
Top DPS 102k
Loss of opportunity is still a cost. Take a real world example:
You are the owner of a small business with 5 employees. Each employee works 40 hrs/week, totaling 200 man hours of labor each week at a pay rate of $15/hr. You will pay $3,000/week in payroll nomatter what. You can make sure they're busy, and get your $3,000 worth, or you can let them TRIBBLE around on Facebook all day and lose it. That's obvious. What's less obvious whether the things you're having them do are a waste of time. If you have an employee spend 10 hours on a task, and that task ultimately is a waste and generates no revenue, you have lost an opportunity. You spent $150 and got nothing back, when you should have spent $150 and gotten something out of it even if it was just cleaning the shop or completing necessary paperwork. The loss occurred because you could have had that employee do something else which would have had value, but you didn't. You wasted the opportunity, and it cost you $150 of value. We have probably all been in a situation where we felt our boss was wasting our time and generating no value when there were other things to be done.
The same is true of a pile of crafting materials. They have a real market value, you could sell them as is and take your money. But, if you make something of them they can be worth more. If you craft a bunch of weapons and get a [CrtD]x3 you can sell for 7 million, you have gained 7 million minus the market value of the materials you spent getting there. Now again, you can cash out at 7 million and "realize" your gain. That's what you're talking about, realized gains. That's different than opportunity cost. Even a gain you haven't realized still has value though. When you buy stock and it goes up, you have gained. If you have stock and it goes down, you have lost. You can cash out and realize or not, but the gain or loss still happened.
A [CrtD]x3 beam has the potential to become [CrtD]x4. If you upgrade it and get [Dmg], that potential is now gone and the value is hurt. You have suffered a loss even if no money ever changed hands because the potential to make money is gone. Every time you make a choice, there is an opportunity cost in the choice you didn't make. When you make choices, you are doing it on the hope that you will gain something worth more than the lost opportunity. If you don't, well, you lose.
All those other prizes net out.
There is no special box right now that will 100% pay out more then you spend opening it.
50/50 every box you open will have some junk booster worth 1/3 - 1/8th the EC cost of the key. + 4 lobi ... T6 Lobi ships are 900 lobi sell for around 90 mil, which is also a steal. It takes around 160 boxes on average to get 900 lobi which is around 400 mil.
The bottom line is the lockbox ships are less then a 1% chance to pull... everything else nets out for the most part. Yes some traits and a few of the other toys can make you more then the EC cost of a key... however weigh that against the copious amounts of junk you will pull and it really does net out.
You can buy keys with EC all day long, selling all the junk and cashing in a lobi ship every 800-900 lobi... and after a week you will have exactly the same amount of EC you started with. lol
The EC value of everything right now is pretty much exactly where it should be, with exception of the ships, they are a little undervalued in general. So I don't get the complaining about the grand prize costs, they are cheap.
Only certain ultrarare items like leech and certain duty officers and super desirable mods are wickedly expensive and continuing to rise.
99.5% of stuff is now within reach with a little effort.
"With the first link, the chain is forged. The first speech censured, the first thought forbidden, the first freedom denied, chains us all irrevocably."
Make sure you have enough ec space in your bank before you begin.
For ships? Many ships last summer were in the 200-300 million range. I waited out the xindi carrier until maybe september and got it for around 150 million. But there were quite a few ships still much higher until the T6's arrived.
For consoles and weapons it's a much different story (except for the #1 desired mod). For example the field generator purple 12 in September was 50 million. Now I can make it for nothing.
"With the first link, the chain is forged. The first speech censured, the first thought forbidden, the first freedom denied, chains us all irrevocably."
Some of those T6 prices on the exchange are a damn steal, IMO. The Manassa Escort is still a mean customer with a wonderful trait. And it's in the lower half of lockbox/lobi ship prices on the exchange.
But one has to shop and know what the ships offer. There are some highly overrated ships selling for way more than they're worth. There's good ships going for bargain prices.
Will you share this wisdom and enlighten the uninformed?
/thread.
"There... are... four... lights!" ~Jean Luc Picard
Just looked it up a Jem'hadar Dreadnought Carrier goes for almost 50.000.000 EC yes keys are at 2.500.000 that's about 40 keys and you do 10 extra keys because you like to outfit the damm thing to so let's say about 50 Euro or 5300 Zen should do the trick...
But not only that it's also cryptic that's make this impossible because if you don't like to grind you are bound to get your stuff from the exchange because ingame you can't buy anyting highest gear mark is Mark IX from the shops and Fleet Starbases is the same problem if it isn't up to speed you can forget to buy an T5 U Fleet ship....
They killed the Dilithium store I wish they never done that.... So then we are stuck with an Lobi Store which has good gear and such but pretty hard to acquire.
Then we have Gold Pressed latinum thats a worthless store unless you like to buy an holo emitter...
So that summed up it's up to the exchange !!!
"Coffee: the finest organic suspension ever devised. It's got me through the worst of the last three years. I beat the Borg with it."
Between the Reputation Stores and Crafting, you can easily outfit any ship without buying a single thing from the exchange.
It might take a while, might require patience, but it's easily done.
Buy Weapons from Rep or Craft them, buy Impulse/Deflector/Warp/Shield from Rep or craft them and craft all of your consoles.
With the exception of the Plasmonic Leech, I don't think a single item on my ship came from the exchange. It's all either crafted, bought from Rep Store, or from my Fleet.
See, with the combination of NADORC and selling engines & deflectors for around 50K , I did manage to get a host of lockbox ships, at times even more than one of the same type .
I could have played the "flipping" game on the exchange -- I knew of others who did that, but I never wanted more EC than I needed just like I never wanted the most uber gear out there (still don't) , plus I also didn't want to make profit on such highly desirable items as I knew that I'd only be responsible for driving up the prices , which in turn would turn around and bite me in the rear some day .
Now, I started this with speaking about opportunity to earn EC .
The new crafting system threw NADORC under the bus, but not before Cryptic 'adjusted' the EC costs & items drop rates to turn the vendor trash arena into a nearly empty shell .
Which is why I've found making EC a lot harder after the two changes above .
Now after the mad rush for 'gold' gear settled , I've found that the investment to make gold items and sell them was not all that worth anymore , as I found myself grinding for dil, and it wasn't too much fun .
So to put things in perspective -- the lockbox ships prices may have stayed the same, but earning that EC price has gotten a lot harder, to a point where :
a) you start to think about spending RL cash for them, or
b) you just /shrug and don't bother .
I've chosen 'b' for at least 3-4 lockbox ships of late, and while I am saddened , ultimately I have no regrets .
Cryptic has chosen to drive me out of business , so I'm sure that they and the lockbox ship sellers & flippers will forgive me if they don't see my business on the customer side of things .
... it's interesting that now Cryptic is pushing the ship bundles instead of lockboxes ... , guess that's what happens when they destroy their own economy on purpose , while they continue to drive ppl to spend RL cash and not ingame resources ....
Either one of your numbers are wrong or your math has much room for improvement
MK XI is still far more than you need for even the elite missions, HSE aside. Now, the fleet stores and the repstores provide good weaponry for decent prices.
There are a number of ways to get EC in this game, and it comes down to: Sell stuff. And I am not talking about zen-stuff.
Just the other day I read the 10k stuff upon which I though I would do some stocktaking. And what shall I say, I found 150mio EC pilling up in my storage. Rarity: Rare (blue!).
Aside from shipconsoles (and ships) the lobi-weaponry is second class. And the dilithium store? Buying there was a huge waste of dilithium, those things were far less powerful than you got ingame for free or from the fleet (for less investement). Its a good thing for new players that they closed down that thievery shop.
It used to be you would make 2 or 3 million from vendor loot with a full run of killing things. Now this is more like 500,000 (or less) and not worth it to me. Instead focus on gaining the crafting materials and sell those. They are coming down but you can still make up for the vendor nerf by doing the materials or making weapons and consoles. Without this you basically will not see your ec grow.
"With the first link, the chain is forged. The first speech censured, the first thought forbidden, the first freedom denied, chains us all irrevocably."
You need to learn how to make EC, expecially if your a KDF player, your not even playing the game correctly if you cannot make even 50 mil EC in a 2 hour session.
LOL, if you can't make 200 million in 15 min you are nub.
"With the first link, the chain is forged. The first speech censured, the first thought forbidden, the first freedom denied, chains us all irrevocably."
LOL if you don't make 500 million in 5 min you are hopeless LOL
Get the Forums Enhancement Extension!
300-500mil is "ec poor"? :eek:
(personally, I think the most I've ever had is 150m, after I'd sold a rare lockbox doff. Typical is more along the lines of 20-30m, spread across ~8 characters. But, then, I've never deliberately set out to "farm" EC.....)
I'm something of a miser. I do buy expensive things a few times a year. Otherwise I hoard. I only got the xindi carrier by saving up a lifetime of lobi from replays and sold a ship for it for about the same - like 140 million. But I had to have that carrier.
I say poor mostly in comparison to the refined dilithium. I ask - which would you rather have 8 million refined or 800 million ec? Frankly 8 million refined Should translate to more like 2 billion ec. Maybe 3 billion. If it did I would sell half.
"With the first link, the chain is forged. The first speech censured, the first thought forbidden, the first freedom denied, chains us all irrevocably."