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So I just upgraded one item for my science character. Wow.
inthefluxx
Member Posts: 0 Arc User
It took six (6) superior upgrade tokens to upgrade my breen mk 11 shields to mk 12. What did I get for my 2 million EC and 4k dilithium? 100 extra shields.
Seriously, 100 shields for 2 million EC and 4k dilithium? I'm not doing this ever again. I'll stick with my mk 11.
Seriously, 100 shields for 2 million EC and 4k dilithium? I'm not doing this ever again. I'll stick with my mk 11.
Post edited by inthefluxx on
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Er, but yeah, some of the upgrades are pretty damn /facepalm.
Course, that gets tossed out the window with Consoles, eh? I guess to me, it just doesn't really appear to make much sense.
We see the boosts that Weapons get and what we pay for that.
We see the boosts that Consoles get and what we pay for that.
We see the boosts that Space Gear gets and what we pay for that.
Just where is there any sort of balance to that?
They want us to pay more for the Space Gear...then back it up with some sort of appreciative boost to the gear to reflect what we're paying for there, eh?
Hell, to an extent the same could even be said for Consoles vs. Weapons for that Mk XII to Mk XIV journey. And why are we paying more for Projectiles than Energy Weapons?
Then we get into some of those VR to UR boosts...where...well, we really don't get anything. Hell, in some cases we get nothing. Same with going Epic. What's up with that? For the cost of UR and Epic with the RNG...you know, you'd think we'd at least get something to reflect that?
So yeah, I don't think /facepalm quite covered it.
Some stuff, like I said it's a case of looking at it, is pretty much yeah I'm going to upgrade this. Some stuff is well maybe I'll upgrade this. Some stuff is just lololololololololololol...no.
Should check that again...they normalized them at some point. Though I can't remember if they reduced some or increased the others, meh.
Though I won't be the ignorant fellow like some who only read this line, but please make sure you specify. When I saw "100 extra shields" I thought that you meant 100 ship shield items. It's Shield HP.
Now, I upgraded my MACO Resilient to Mk14, and I got as little as 50 extra shield HP. Everything else though? My resistance to energy damage increased. It became my new little tank. So don't judge everything on a shield based on it's HP.
Besides, did you actually place the shield in your ship? The metrics differ from the inventory to the ship.
I have read in various places that most deflectors and Impulse Engines gain little or in a lot of cases nothing from going from Mk XII to Mk XIV. Most people I have talked to only upgrade Weapons and Consoles. A few of them still do the shields, almost no one does Deflectors or Impulse Engines.
I was pretty happy with the result of upgrading all my beams and consoles, the shield provided a very small gain. I have no intent of attempting upgrades on my Impulse or Deflector. Simply put, some items simply aren't worth pushing past MK XII.
Now, I can see that my shield will increase by 400 hp when it goes to mk 13, but upgrading it again doesn't really appeal to me, nor having to do it for the other pieces of equipment.
It's not.
Never purchase the Superior Upgrades from the exchange it's a complete waste of money.
If you have everything at Mk XII, you're fine for now.. there is nothing in the game you can't do. Start leveling your R&D so you can make the kits yourself. Even if you're a level 0 right now, just start doing the daily project. Yes, it will take you a few months to get to level 15 so you can make the kits, but in the mean time you'll be just fine with your Mark XII Gear. Do the missions you want, any ques you can find, battlezones, whatever you like. Just remember to click that project every day, it's easy enough to do.
When you finally get to Level 15 you will probably have a pretty good amount of Materials and you can just make the kits yourself. The reason it cost you 2M EC to go from Mk XI to Mk XII is because you bought the upgrade kits from the exchange.
If you're willing to just wait, you'll spend a lot less EC and Dil to do upgrades. It costs 950 Dil to apply an Improved Upgrade and 1075 to apply a Superior but the Superior applies over twice as much (5k vs 12.8k.)
Buying upgrades is a bad idea, it turns an already costly system into an absolute resource sink.
Hrmm, I needed a wee break from what I was doing so I decided to take a look.
Superior Beam Weapons Tech Upgrade (by price): 296,995
Superior Beam Weapons Tech Upgrade (per unit): 1,120,000 (4 @ 280,000)
-Radiogenic Particle (by price): 124,999
-Radiogenic Particle (per unit): 124,999
-Component Firing Sequencer (by price): 138,000
-Component Firing Sequencer (per unit): 138,000
--Material Rubidium (by price): 47,500
--Material Rubidium (per unit): 2,300,000 (50 @ 46,000)
--2x Material Z-Particle (by price): 54,999 each (109,998)
--2x Material Z-Particle (per unit): 54,999 each (109,998)
-Component Power Surge Regulator (by price): 135,000
-Component Power Surge Regulator (per unit): 135,000
--2x Material Beta-Tachyon Particle (by price): 12,700 each (25,400)
--2x Material Beta-Tachyon Particle (per unit): 89,000 (10 @ 8,900) "each" (17,800)
--3x Material Rubidium (by price): 47,500 each (142,500)
--3x Material Rubidium (per unit): 2,300,000 (50 @ 46,000) "each" (138,000)
-15,000
Okay, so let's take a look at some scenarios here and their cheapest options.
Buying the Beam STU: 280,000
Crafting after buying Components, Radiogenic Material, & 15k EC: 397,999
Crafting, including crafting Components, after buying all Mats, & 15k EC: 451,797
Kind of makes it look like it would be better to sell the Mats and buy the STUs, eh?
At least for the Beam STUs...I'm not going to do that for all of them. But folks should be able to go through and see what would be the most efficient use of their resources, yeah?
Note: the market is fluid, do not take this as advice to pursue any course of action other than taking a look at what the market is doing as you decide what you are going to do.
Yes, this can be the case for Beam Upgrades.
Last I checked, it only works for Beams. Reason is because Radiogentic Particles are guaranteed drop from Crystalline Advanced which is the easiest Que that cannot fail. For that reason, they are the most inexpensive component. Other components are considerably more expensive depending on how hard they are to a acquire.
As a general rule, things that require Beam Upgrade kits are the cheapest to do. Which is nice, since a lot of us have 8 beams per ship.
I think it is a general problem that Deflectors, Warp Cores and Impulse Engines just don't do much in improving your ship. For Warp Cores, the real deal seems to be the general type and the mods (=rarity). For Impulse Engines, even the mods don't do that much. Deflectors are mostly relevant if you're flying something science heavy (aka Science Vessel), but most other ship classes benefit only marginally.
Shields I tend to think are pretty important - but the differences between marks may never have been that big. But I could totally imagine using a Mark VIII Impulse Engine on a ship and not noticing a difference, but a Mark VIII Shield would probably be noticeable...
Of course, you need a lot more weapons on a ship then you need shield arrays or deflectors.
But if you consider upgrading, do it with the weapons first.
It's just one of those things I find to be kind of funny, personally. One of those things where I would have expected folks to take notice of it, make adjustments, stop crafting the Beam STUs, selling the Components/Mats instead - so they could get in on the profit there as those prices started to drop and the Beam STU prices increased - doing that back and forth there. But it appears folks are just crafting away at those Beam STUs to sell driving the price down as they compete while ignoring the money they could be making off the Mats/Components.
I've seen it happen in a bunch of games like that.
Course, I'm just a small time player when it comes to any form of market PvP. There could be all sorts of manipulations going on at levels I haven't even considered.
taken individually upgrading one item the extra you get might seem like very little but you need to look at the big picture once you have upgraded all your weapons & all of your consoles & all of your shields & warp core ect all up to mk14 you are going to have a lot of small boosts that all add up to make a difference.
even say an overall 1% difference to each item could give your shields that extra 1% you needed to take down that last enemy with you 1% extra torps and beams plus that 1% extra speed you needed to dodge that killer one shot hit that you just managed to dodge.
so far since the upgrade feature was added I have upgraded one ship all the weapons & consoles and am just now working on shields warp ect, eventually I plan to upgrade the gear to mk14 on a second ship.
so how much will this all cost me? well nothing at all just playing the game as I have always played it having fun shootin baddies saving the universe and then every now and then getting some dilithium to do a bit of upgrading.
sure it has taken me a couple of months to upgrade the gear on 1 ship but you don't hear me complaining, sure at the end of the day it might only give me a very slight edge but quite often that's all you need.
if you haven't got any mk12 gear ??? I got tons of the stuff from doing rep projects without even having to buy very much after reaching T5 but just doing the daily rep projects more then enough to kit out at least 2 ships with most of what I needed.
some people prefer to craft mk2 stuff and then upgrade more in the hope that they will get a boost to epic and good luck to them but I prefer to keep my upgrading to a bare minimum.
When I think about everything we've been through together,
maybe it's not the destination that matters, maybe it's the journey,
and if that journey takes a little longer,
so we can do something we all believe in,
I can't think of any place I'd rather be or any people I'd rather be with.
sure everyone has had the odd bit of lag and ended up having a bad game as a result but you cant blame that every time you are in a random team and you are the only one who keeps having to respawn, sometimes it might be just because you got bad gear or a bad build, you`ve just got to do what you can to make sure you got the best gear you can get and if that means spending all your dilithium over the next year upgrading gear who cares, if you haven't spent any money and it takes longer or if your flush and want to buy some dil then good for you.
or maybe its just that we are just bad players and no matter how good our gear is we will struggle.
When I think about everything we've been through together,
maybe it's not the destination that matters, maybe it's the journey,
and if that journey takes a little longer,
so we can do something we all believe in,
I can't think of any place I'd rather be or any people I'd rather be with.
If somebody finds that they're dying far more often than the folks around them, they could always hit folks up in one of the various build forums for suggestions on how they might improve things there.
Looking at my last five ISA runs...
1) Nobody died.
2) One person died. They only had 32.5k healing. They had ST1, ET1, EPtS1, and Automated Reinforcement II. They died to a Plasma Array hit (862.58 dmg) 116s in.
3) Two folks died. The first had 65.3k healing. They had ST1, ET1, HE2, and Automated Reinforcement I. They died to a Plasma Torpedo DoT tick (216.443 dmg) from a Sphere 199s in. The second had 123.1k healing. They had Automated Reinforcement II, TSS2, HE1, EPtS2, ST2, ET1. They died to a Plasma Torpedo hit (10,205.4 dmg) from a Sphere 146s in.
4) Nobody died.
5) Two folks died. The first had 216.8k healing. They had ST1, HE2, ET2, EPtS1, AtS3, ET1. The second had 360.7k healing. They died to a Plasma Array hit (873.783 dmg) from the Tac Cube 563s in. They had ST2, ET2, Automated Reinforcement II, AtS2, EPtS1, and Shield Drones. They died to a Plasma Array hit (910.176 dmg) from a Sphere 38s in.
Note, those "died to" are just the kill shots.
With those same runs, looking at the folks that did not die...
1) First had 83.3k healing (took 55k damage) and had Valdore console, AtS1, & HE1. Second had 18.6k healing (took 50.8k damage) and had Automated Reinforcements II & EPtS1. Third had 561.5k healing (took 588.6k damage) and had ST2, TSS1, HE2, EPtS2, Repair Platform Drones, Reactive Ship Repairs, Automated Reinforcement II, & Reactive Repair Nanites. Fourth had 41.6k healing (took 28.3k damage) and had Automated Reinforcement II, TSS1, HE2, & Reactive Repair Nanites. Fifth had 0.0 healing (took 69.8k damage).
2) First had 684.9k healing (took 770.9k damage) and had TSS1, HE2, ST2, EptS1, Automated Reinforcement II, & AtS1. Second had 150.5k healing (took 294.3 damage) and had TSS1, AtS2, ET1, Automated Reinforcement I, & RSF3. Third had 487k healing (took 600.9k damage) and had Automated Reinforcement II, 2pc Borg Hull Heal, Radiant Nanite Cloud, RSF3, HE2, Desperate Repairs, TSS1, MW3, ET1, ST1, & 3pc Borg Shield Heal. Fourth had 45.7k healing (took 185.6k damage) and had ST1, 2pc Borg Hull Heal, 3pc Borg Shield Heal, EPtS1, & ET2.
3) First had 975.9k healing (took 988.4k damage) and had ST2, TSS1, HE2, EPtS1, AtS1, Automated Reinforcement II, & Reactive Repair Nanites. Second had 169.8k healing (took 168.3k damage) and had ST2, Reactive Repair Nanites, ET2, EPtS1, Automated Reinforcement II, AtS2, BFI DOFF, & HE1. Third had 200k healing (took 210.8k damage) and had RSF3, MW3, ET1, & BFI DOFF.
4) First had 399k healing (took 388.7k damage) and had ST2, EPtS1, TSS1, HE2, AtS1, & Reactive Repair Nanites. Second had 130.5k healing (took 246.3k damage) and had AtS1, ST2, EPtS1, AtS2, Automated Reinforcement II, & HE1. Third had 234.6k healing (took 322.6k damage) and had 2pc Borg Hull Heal, Automated Reinforcement II, ET2, TSS1, & 3pc Borg Shield Heal. Fourth had 1.6k healing (took 3.6k damage) and had HE1. Fifth had 29k healing (took 50.1k damage) and had HE1 & ST1.
5) First had 579k healing (took 776.5k damage) and had TSS1, HE2, ST2, EPtS1, AtS1, & Automated Reinforcement II. Second had 122.2k healing (took 210.4k damage) and had MW3, AtS2, EPtS2, ET1, Automated Reinforcement II, BFI DOFF, Shield Drones, & RSF3. Third had 210.2k healing (took 298.7k damage) and had ST2, HE1, ET1, & ST1.
Hrmm, here's a less wordy version of the above including the % of incoming damage they actually took and deaths.
1
A) 83.2k heal, took 55k damage, 36.3%, 0 deaths
C) 561.5k heal, took 588.6k damage, 24.3%, 0 deaths
D) 41.6k heal, took 28.3k damage, 38.9%, 0 deaths
E) 0.0k heal, took 69.8k damage, 47.6%, 0 deaths
2
A) 684.9k heal, took 770.9k damage, 24.7%, 0 deaths
C) 487k heal, took 600.9k damage, 36.2%. 0 deaths
D) 32.5k heal, took 161.6k damage, 60.3%, 1 death
E) 45.7k heal, took 185.6k damage, 39.9%. 0 deaths
3
A) 975.9k heal, took 988.4k damage, 25.9%. 0 deaths
C) 65.3k heal, took 297.3k damage, 45.4%, 1 death
D) 200k heal, took 210.8k damage, 28.2%, 0 deaths
E) 123.1k heal, took 239.7k damage, 42.6%, 1 death
4
A) 399k heal, took 388.7k damage, 24.5%. 0 deaths
C) 234.6k heal, took 322.6k damage, 41.9%, 0 deaths
D) 1.6k heal, took 3.6k damage, 43.7%, 0 deaths
E) 29k heal, took 50.1k damage, 33.7%, 0 deaths
5
A) 579.2k heal, took 776.5k damage, 25.1%, 0 deaths
C) 360.7k heal, took 612.4k damage, 40.0%, 1 death
D) 122.3k heal, took 210.4k damage, 33.2%, 0 deaths
E) 210.2k heal, took 298.7k damage, 45.2%, 0 deaths
Note, A-E are in order of damage done/DPS.
Going back and looking at the actual logs...
2-D died because of a lack of HE. Plasma DoTs ate away at them - even if that torp hadn't of hit them they would have died.
3-C died because of not having their HE handy. They died to Plasma DoTs.
3-E's death suggests unlucky timing with some Shield Neutralizer, not having the HE handy.
5-B's death suggests unlucky timing with some Shield Neutralizer, not having the HE handy.
5-C's death suggests unlucky timing with some Shield Neutralizer, not having HE at all.
Taking a closer look at the three that had HE but either did not have it handy or didn't use it...
3-C's HE last expired 16.9 seconds before their death.
3-E's HE last expired 31.7 seconds before their death.
5-B's HE last expired 25.2 seconds before their death.
Just caught by the CD...though other hull damage resists, hull heals, etc may have saved them.
1) Learn the fights/enemies.
2) Learn how to effectively use their active Doffs and Pilot specialization points.
3) Learn the best combo of gear that works for their ship & class abilities.
As long as your gear is reasonably current level, you can do many if not most PuG queues and even the new missions on advanced. Heck, I just changed my gear on my KDF Eng Cap to Nukara Set + Rom Engine out of boredom. She was doing just fine face-tanking the cube in ISA and the giant Snowflake with just the free Solanae set all this time and getting 1st-3rd place. And I am a fairly casual player who hasn't bothered to learn macros and just logs in to knock out one STF per daily bonus reward, set my crafting & Doff mission for my 3 caps, and then log off. I haven't upgraded one piece of Mk 12 gear yet and honestly don't plan to. Some of the actual lv.15 crafting school traits are more important to me than that mess.
Look for that recent Space Set combo guide on Reddit. It's nice.
Thing is - cryptic shoot themselves in the foot time and time again.
I used to be one of those players who 'HAD TO HAVE THE BEST' and 'HAVE TO DO EVERYTHING FIRST'.
I remember camping in Gamma Orionis with buddys for when servers came back from patch so we could be first to run the new Infected/Cure/Khitomer STFs in their old epic format.
But now all of that feeling is gone.
Alts are on the back burner (rather than being characters that I spent time and resources on).
Main character is lacking so far behing the curve I cannot be bothered.
For every one player who sticks with the curve and spends ridiculous amounts of resources gearing out a ship in Epic 14 crtd4 stuff there are 50 or 100 who say - 'you know what, thats not fun anymore, there isn't the same benefit/fun to be had in being part of this rat race'. There are 5-=100 players who get left behind.
Where will your whales be when there is NO ONE LEFT TO PLAY WITH THEM?
As an aside - when virusdancer posted prices of mats etc and conclusion was cheaper to purchase STU rather than craft did you include chances of crits? (Critting components to get 15 rather than 5 and critting STUs to get 2 rather than 1)? If not this would change the picture considerably if you have purple doffs R&D skill at 20 and catalysts to use...
'
...#LLAP...
Wish I could say, "Yeah, yeah - that's part of what I was talking about with my note." But that would be a lie. Crits totally slipped my mind for that. I didn't really think that post out, it was literally taking a break from what I was doing to see what it looked like - I was along for the ride as much as anybody else, I certainly wasn't driving. But crits, hrmmm. That would be interesting to look at there...
Hrmm, curious what my numbers are there for that on my guy and if that played a part in it. Let me check real fast here.
Okay then, I'm just running a Green (+5) Fabrication Engineer at level 15. So I'm just looking at a 17% crit chance on the Power Surge Regulator and Firing Sequencer. I am running Blue (+15) Research Lab Scientists for the STUs though, which give me a 71% crit chance. Yeah, so the miserable rate on the components is something that's played a part in holding me back. I'm usually looking at 5 and not 15.
But anyway then, working with those same EC costs from the other post - keeping in mind they could be wildly different prices from then to now...let's see what that would do, eh? I've got not idea what the current prices are on Catalysts though. I'm also too tired to login...meh, why does insomnia go away when the sun comes up? Bah!
Okay, let's just assume the crit.
Our single Firing Sequencer will become three. The 155,998 EC we would have made selling the mats has given us three components we could sell for 414,000 EC if we wanted to go that route. We'll hold that thought for a moment though.
Our single Power Surge Regulator will become three. The 155,800 EC we would have made selling the mats has given us three components we could sell for 405,000 EC if we wanted to go that route. We'll hold that thought for a moment though.
So we've got three of each, needing one of each, so let's look at doing three Beam STUs and what that would mean.
Each would require a Radiogenic Particle (124,999 EC) and the 15k EC. So each would add 139,999 EC to our cost for a subtotal cost of 419,997 EC.
So our total cost for the three Beam STUs would be:
155998 (Sequencer) + 155800 (Regulator) + 419997 (Rads 'n EC) = 731,795 EC
The three STUs would sell for 840,000 EC. So we'd make some profit there, right?
But we were doing crits, so we'd actually be looking at six of them selling for 1,680,000 EC. Much better profit there, right?
How would that have compared to just selling the Radiogenic, the crit components, and not spending the 45k for the three crafts?
419,997 (Rads n' EC) + 414,000 (Sequencer) + 405,000 (Regulator) = 1,238,997 EC
Not as nice as if we actually went through and crafted the STUs.
Course, no idea what the Catalysts cost - what the crit rate at 20 with a Purple (FE for Components and RLS for the STU) and Cats would be...
...but yeah, definitely want to thank you for bringing that up. Cause depending on where one is sitting with things, it's definitely going to effect what they should do. Heh, I know that I said that in the other post, but it wasn't taking all of this into consideration and I wouldn't have looked at it if you hadn't have brought it up. So thanks for that. Like I said, I'm just along for the ride for these things like the next guy.
I think the quality of your doffs and level in crafting school is quite important in working out what would be better to do.
I tend to get approx 3/4 crits on the making of the STU itself (so for every mission I send off I expect 1.75 STUs) but I don't use catalysts there.
On the crafting of the Rare components I tend to use +10 /+25 catalysts on the ones that require small/large amount of rubidium (being the most expensive rare mat) but don't use catalysts on the others (here I am talking about making STUs of all sorts) and generally see a crit 1/3 of the time. I also will only craft components in groups of 5 (so to get the best value out of catalysts where applicable). So as an approximation for every mission to craft one component I expect to get 1.67 components.
I always use VR doffs and always use toons that are lvl 17 or above, and for me it is definitely cheaper to craft my own STUs rather than to buy them.
...#LLAP...
Level up your crafting to at least 10. Team up with friends to trade upgrades. Do a little a day. It should be a marathon, not a sprint.
This actually made me LOL only because the best comedy comes from shared pain and I felt exactly what you wrote about.
IIRC, the first words I spoke after upgrading my first set piece were:
"What? That's it?!?! What a bunch of TRIBBLE..."
I'm o.k. with the structure of the upgrade system. I'm even fine with random mods and time involved. But the cost? It makes the randomization aspect of crafting almost physically painful to deal with. Like so much lately, the effort it takes to do it, and what you get for the effort, is...discouraging.
The rent is too damn high!
Certain items gain random mods with increases in Rarity, not the Mark. Epic has fixed mods, though.
So for some folks, it's that taking their VR to UR on certain items where they can end up feeling as if they just got vendortrashed...
...it's why when I upgrade weapons from VR12 to Mk XIII or Mk XIV, I keep my fingers crossed I don't get the UR upgrade. I don't want to be vendortrashed.
No. You get a modifier when the rarity of an item increases, not the mark. You get a random mod every time the rarity increases, except the time you get to epic (gold color), then the modifier is predetermined. Each item category has a special "epic" modifier, starship weapons for example have [Acc/Dmg] which is basically half a [Acc] and half a [DMG] mod.
Why not craft your own kits? You don't have to be level 15 in every school. Rather, you just need level 15 in 1 school and then sell kits on the exchange to raise ec to buy other kits. The dil cost really isn't that bad in the end.
All that said, some stuff isn't worth upgrading. Like warp cores, ay ay ay.