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The ULTIMATE Star Wars Galaxies Strategy Guide

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The Unofficial ULTIMATE Strategy Guide!!!!!

Introduction:

The following is a near complete strategy guide for the Massively Multiplayer, Online Role-Playing Game, Star Wars Galaxies, the game I've played and loved/hated since about a month after it's public release. I've been utterly and unavoidably hooked ever since. I've unlocked 3 Jedi Force Sensitive Character Slots since then, and mastered over 60 total professions. Some I mastered more than once of course since there are only 33 total professions in the game. I'm a die-hard student of efficiency and speed, what you're about to read is a complete compilation of all the tricks and strategies I've used. All my secrets...

Inside are strategies that encompass many aspects of the game... Earning up to 5-10 million credits per day by buffing people... Mastering every combat and crafting profession in under 2 days... Mastering Bounty Hunter (The hardest combat profession) in a week... Merchant in 1-2 weeks... Musician and Dancer in about 4 days each... Every profession is covered, including the dreaded Politician, which takes a very, very long time... Finally, the last part of the guide is dedicated to mastering PvP combat..........

Table of Contents:

Section 1: Profession Mastery...

Introduction: Choosing a Profession...
(Which kind of player do you want to be? An adventuring fighter, a profiteering tradesman, or a little bit of both? This chapter explains the best professions for whatever style of play you'd rather choose.)
Chapter 1: Basic Essential Knowhow...
(Secondary skills and techniques that are instumental in gaining experience as quickly as possible. General advice on the best skills and equipment to invest in before you go off to master your first profession.)
Chapter 2: The Combat Professions...
(Detailed instructions and more basic essential knowhow for mastering all the combat-related professions, including Marksman, Brawler, Bounty Hunter, Commando, Fencer, Swordsman, Pikeman, Rifleman, Pistoleer, Carbineer, Smuggler, Squad Leader, Teras Kasi Artist and Creature Handler.)
Chapter 3: The Crafting Professions...
(Detailed instructions for mastering all the crafting professions, including more basic essential knowhow. Artisan, Architect, Armorsmith, Chef, Droid Engineer, Tailor, and Weaponsmith.)
Chapter 4: Non-Combat, Non-Crafting Professions (Or Hard to Classify)...
(Detailed instructions for mastering all the other professions of the game. Entertainer, Medic, Scout, Combat Medic, Dancer, Doctor, Image Designer, Merchant, Musician, Bio-Engineer, Ranger, and Politician.)

Section 2: Credits, Credits, Credits...

Chapter 1: Missions...
(Sony has nerfed this method, so I had to remove it sorry.)
Chapter 2: Harvesting Meat/Hides for Profit...
(A guide to resource harvesting as a profession. Many doctors, chefs, Bio-Engineers, and Armorsmiths will pay TOP dollar for hides and meats of exceptional quality.)
Chapter 3: Resource Harvesting...
(Ever seen those bulky machines harvesting minerals from the earth or growing plants? In Chapter 3 are the tricks of the resource mining trade, one of the most profitable trades of the game.)
(How to earn a living making regular and Bio-Engineered clothing for profit.)
Chapter 4: The Doctor...
(A complete guide to earning credits as a doctor by selling buffs, wound packs, stimpacks, enhance packs, and all the rest.)

Section 3: PvP/Faction-Related...

Introduction: Which Faction...?
(Faction perks of both factions, including personnel, and factional equipment. Also locations of various Rebel and Imperial outposts, bases and theme parks throughout the galaxy.)
Chapter 1: Jedi PvP...
(How to kill those pesky Jedi (LOL) in PvP combat.)

Section 4: Unlocking your Force Sensitive Character Slot...

Chapter 1: How to Unlock...
(The confirmed method that's circulating around the internet on how to unlock your FSCS now that publish 10 has changed everything around. I unlocked all 3 of my Jedi before the new system was implimented, so this is the best I can do until there's less mystery surrounding unlocking. It would be kind of hard to figure out from personal experience because it supposedly takes a LONG time to unlock, to the tune of 6 to 12 months or something, and I just don't have that kind of time on my hands any more.)


Section 1: Profession Mastery...

Introduction: Choosing a Profession...


There are several areas of expertise in the game that one might chose as their primary field of endeavor. One is crafting important equipment for their guild or for profit, another is hunting creatures and NPC's with their friends and player association members for fun and profit, and another is hunting creatures and NPC's solo for fun and profit.

If you're going to choose a crafting profession, please keep in mind that it takes MANY weeks if not months to gather the necessary resources to make quality items, and it takes time to find and purchase skilltapes to get +120 experimentation for your profession, for the extra +12 experimentation points (not 120, 12. You get 1 experimentation point per every +10 to your experimentation experimentation skill). It takes a LOT of money and time to buy all these items, so I recommended if you want to go crafter, unless you want to struggle for months trying to sell lower quality equipment for a small profit for new skilltapes and better resources, that you go for master artisan. It generally takes fewer resources to make their items, such as weapon powerups, repair tools, swoop bikes, and more, which still sell fairly well.

You can also mine your own resources using mineral harvesters, flora farms, and several other types of harvesters. A lot of people seem to make good money selling power (What you run your harvesters and equipment factories with), and it's less difficult, but the profits aren't nearly as good as selling regular resources. The resources you mine/grow can either be sold for more money to help purchase the skilltapes you need, or can be used in your crafting, depending on if you thought ahead and only harvested the resources you'd be needing for your profession later. You can do a little bit of both as well, selling the ones you can't use and keeping the ones you can use later for your future craft. (For more information on harvesting resources using mineral, flora, and the other types of harvesters for profit, see Chapter 2, Section 3.)

If you don't want to go artisan or be a resource dealer, you can also harvest creature resources for money, but it helps to be a ranger and have master of at least one combat skill to help you kill them faster. If you choose this method there's no guarantee that you'll be able to find a creature resource, i.e. -- meat or hide or bone, that has good enough stats to get a decent profit by selling it to an established crafter, but when you do, the profits are extremely high. (For more information on harvesting resources from creatures for profit, see Chapter 2, Section 2.)

If you'd rather get your hands dirty, and have a few blasters blow up in your face, or possibly mash your finger or toe by accident with your power hammer, and you're not too concerned with making items for profit, there are a lot of adventuring professions out there that are a lot more fun than sitting around mining resources and making pastries for people.

Before you choose what kind of combat profession you want, you need to choose whether you want to primarily hang out with groups and fight with other people, or if you'd rather solo most of the time, and rely only on yourself. You can also focus on a versatile character who's handy in both a solo situation and a group situation.

Also you'll need to decide whether you'll want to be primarily a Player-Versus-Environment player (PvE), or a Player-Versus-Player combatant (PvP). For soloers, you can gear yourself towards PvE and PvP both, but you won't be as effective. For example: A Master Heavy Swordsman is great in PvE. He can do a spin attack that lets him kill 5-6 creatures or NPC's at the same time, but he's not very good in PvP, because to use his knockdown attack, and deal any damage, he has to be close to his opponent. If you're primarily a team player, a grouper, you can just focus on PvP and PvE both, and you'll still have plenty of skills left over to be very effective in PvE groups. If you want to do a little grouping, a little soloing, a little PvP and a little PvE, read on and I'll give you a little insight a few paragraphs down...

I'll start with solo PvE... If you like to solo a lot, you'll want a melee profession, such as fencer, heavy swordsman, teras kasi artist or pikeman. They have high melee damage mitigation, which grants added protection against most creatures of the game, and they all have a really powerful spin attack which helps them to solo entire lairs of creatures much faster. This is an extremely useful tactic for levelling up on the road to mastery of the profession, because you kill creatures faster, and can earn upwards of 500 to 600k weapons experience in an hour of steady grinding.

For group PvE it really doesn't matter what you pick. Just pick a profession that it looks like you might like, and stick with it. If you stop and switch to another halfway through the process of levelling up, you won't really know how good the character could have been, so stick with it! You can level up any combat profession in the game in under a week anyway, even as a total newbie! I can do them in 1-3 days so just stick with the character and build up your wisdom, then choose which you like the best.

Next I'll discuss Group and solo PvP... As I've said before, any character dedicated entirely to solo PvP is just fine in a group situation. There is nothing you can really do to improve your group PvP performance that would be any different from regular solo PvP preparations, short of being a doctor so you can revive your friends that get deathblown.

The best PvP'ers in Star Wars Galaxies hardly ever get knocked down, and when they do, they get right back up. This is because of 3 factors: Defense vs. knockdown prevents you from being knocked down as often, and at higher levels seems to make you near impervious to knockdown attacks. I once tangled with a PvP'er whom I shot approximately 30 times with a knockdown move and she never went down. Defense vs. Dizzy is another one. When you're knocked down, you can normally get right back up, unless they use a dizzying skill on you. A lot of professions can dizzy

The best PvP'ers use a weapon that does stun based damage, because most people who PvP wear composite armor, which has usually no defense against stun, or up to about 40% defense against stun, or no armor at all. This makes a stun weapon your best friend in PvP combat. The only stun weapons I know of are the Geonosian sonic blaster (requires pistoleer techniques 2), stun baton (novice fencer), jawa ion rifle (rifles 4 tree in marksman), and the tangle pistol (pistols 4 in marksman).

Good PvP'ers also tend to target the mind pool with whatever special attacks they have, because of the fact that any master medic with powerful stims can heal their entire health and action once every 5 seconds, making all the damage you do to those pools pretty useless. The only two ways to heal the mind are by eating certain food/drinking drinks, which I'll explain about in more detail later (Section 1, Chapter 2), and by finding a combat medic who's willing to heal it. You can only eat food so many times until you're full, and the combat medic's mind healing skill has so many drawbacks they very seldom ever use it, so regardless of how nice his armor is or how well he can dodge, your opponent's mind pool is usually his undoing.

The professions that can damage the mind pool are firstly rifleman, who gets head shot 3, swordsman, with 2 hand head hit 3, bounty hunter, with eye shot, and the combat medic, whose mind poison stims are so SICK, and I mean just PLAIN sick, in PvP, that they're considered the best profession for dealing mind damage in the game. A combat medic's poison once damaged me for about 300-600 mind damage every 6 seconds, until I had 1 mind point left, and ran away. Luckily I escaped, but I just barely made it. Mind poison is JUST PLAIN SICK in PvP and it lasts for sometimes 5-10 minutes, beating relentlessly at your mind pool until it goes away. Against weapons, you can dodge, but against mind poisons... you're out of luck and you'd best kill them fast, or run away. Better hope they didn't destroy your speeder...

You probably already guessed this, but when coupled with the Jawa Ion Rifle, the Rifleman using head shot 3 is generally the second best choice for raw damage to the mind pool, and when rifleman attacks are coupled with combat medic poisons, you know your damage output to the mind pool will be pretty ridiculously powerful.

The bounty hunter, with his eye shot, does massive damage to the mind, especially when you couple the bounty hunter pistols tree with the pistoleer techniques 2 tree so you can use the Geonosian sonic blaster. The bounty hunter carbines tree includes some decent knockdown and dizzy attacks, so you can usually knock people on their backs and blow them away with your eye shot from your sonic blaster! Some high end sonic blasters have better damage output than the Jawa Ion rifle, so bounty hunter is also an extremely powerful PvP choice!

The fencer can use the stun baton, sure, but they don't have any mind attacks, so they're not as good in PvP as the other professions I just talked about, in my humble opinion. They do however have a few boxes with good knockdown and dizzy defense, so they're not a completely bad profession.

All of the best PvP'ers in Star Wars Galaxies have the following:

1. Good defense vs. knockdown and dizzy to keep them from getting knocked down, and to keep them from not being able to get back up once they're knocked down. (pistoleer and fencer have the best knockdown and dizzy trees out of all the possible professions). Good combat equilibrium, to help you to get right back up as soon as you are knocked down. (Teras Kasi Artist has +40 to combat equilibrium from the balance conditioning tree, and fencer has +20, but +30 if you master it). Also, there is a chef food, called Thaktilo, that increases your knockdown defense dramatically! You won't even need knockdown defense bonuses from skills if you eat this all the time, but some players already have knockdown defense, and don't need it, making room for other important foods such as vagnerian canapes.

2. Good damage mitigation, dodge skills, block skills and/or melee and ranged defense modifiers, to help avoid damage, limit the amount of damage that can reach them, and to help avoid some attacks altogether. (The best profession for all of these except block is fencer. They recieve high bonuses to dodge, melee and ranged defense, and have melee damage mitigation. If you go for master fencer, you have all of the important defensive PvP skills except for block, which comes in the rifleman tree, and ranged damage mitigation, which ALSO comes in the rifleman tree. Pistoleer also has some VERY impressive dodge mods, and all the professions have a little melee and ranged defense. ) If you go master fencer, and master rifleman, it seems to be the best combination for both heavy mind damage, melee and ranged mitigation 3, and for all of those vital defensive skills, however, you won't have enough points left over for combat medic, so you might sacrifice some of those defenses in exchange for that added heavy damage, but master rifleman master fencer is also a very viable alternative.

3. The ability to knock down other players and dizzy them is also important if you want to have an easier time in PvP. It's not necessary, though... All the melee professions have a knockdown attack, and I think a dizzy attack as well, but you have to be up close to use them, so I prefer the ranged professions that can knock down, if you knock down at all. Bounty hunter has a nice knockdown attack in the carbines specialization tree called fire knockdown, and they also underhand shot. Fire knockdown also has a chance to dizzy, so it's better until you land the dizzy, then I think you should use underhand shot for the knockdown itself since you are only trying to get 1 special effect to take effect not two... I'm not sure on this one, but I'm pretty sure it's the way the game mechanics work. Carbineer has charge shot 1 and 2, which also knock down opponents. Smuggler has low blow, which hits them in the nads and they fall over grabbing them until they don't hurt any more... (it's a knockdown attack) smugglers also get last ditch assault, which is a very powerful attack that doesn't target a specific pool, and is very useful in groups and in PvP against people who can't heal damage to their health and action pools.

4. The ability to heal yourself at least a little. I recommend you go for at least pharmacology 4 in medic for high powered stim B's without too much skill point cost, but preferably first aid 4 as well, so all your heals do even more healing. Even better still would be master medic for the stim E's that heal for almost 4000 damage per 5 seconds!!! I personally would just try to go for Stim D's with maybe 1 or 2 boxes in first aid, but master medic is already a requirement for combat medic, so if you want to go that route, you can look forward to some powerful heals to heal yourself with in addition to those devastating mind poisons I told you about.

This is only a guide. I strongly encourage you to make whatever kind of character you want, and to use my guide as simply a set of guidelines to help you make that decision... however here are some suggestions for what professions to choose for the defense modifiers above...

5. Damage mitigation versus ranged and melee are both very important. Every ranged weaponry profession (rifleman, pistoleer, and carbineer) offers ranged damage mitigation 3 at master, with levels 1 and 2 coming at earlier points in the skill tree, and melee mitigation is the same, except it comes with the melee professions (pikeman, fencer, swordsman and teras kasi artist). These are very useful skills to have in PvP combat, as they limit the amount of damage you can take from a weapon. For example: If your opponent is using a weapon on you that shoots for 140 to 700 damage, your ranged damage mitigation skill would reduce that weapon's maximum damage by a significant amount. The weapon would have an effective damage range of about 140 to 400 damage when firing at you. This is of course the same with melee weapons and melee mitigation. Since you can be sure to encounter both melee and ranged attackers in PvP, you'll need both, however there are probably more ranged weapon using PvP'ers because most people get really tired of having to chase people down while hitting them a lot less often with melee weapons than with a nice ranged weapon. With this in mind, if you are short on skillpoints, and don't have enough to master a melee profession and a ranged profession both, I'd recommend trying to get at least level 2 in ranged and melee mitigation, but preferably level 3 in ranged, and even more preferably both, although it's a tossup sometimes and you have to make a few sacrifices of certain skills. Just weight the ones you think are the best against the ones you think aren't so good.

6. Dodge is just that... the ability to completely dodge an attack. The best skill tree for dodge is the pistoleer grips tree, as I earlier mentioned, but fencing techniques gives +15 to dodge in each of the 4 fencing techniques boxes, and +15 in another fencer box, I think for a total of +75 to dodge at techniques 4, and +100 at master fencer, PLUS you get +40 to dizzy and melee damage mitigation 2 along the way up the techniques tree, making fencer techniques 4 a better choice than pistoleer in some ways.

7. - Area attacks. Not all good PvP'ers have area attacks, but I mention them here because they are a very effective tactic to use. The only one I really recommend using, however, since people heal themselves fairly commonly, is area effect mind poison and disease delivery units that come with the combat medic profession. A master combat medic with high powered area mind poison delivery units can put a mind poison on a group of foes at the start of a combat, then run away, and come back to finish them off after the poison has taken its toll!! Provided you can escape to your swoop, and make it to safety, when you get back, if you have a mind damaging attack and a good stun based weapon, you can use this tactic to take down several opponents if your mind poison stims are strong enough, and they don't have anyone in the group to heal the poison/disease!!! Some people get confused in the heat of combat, anyway, and might do stupid things like run away or something. If you see someone doing this, take a not of where they went and follow them to take them out first lol. The antelope that strays too far from the herd is more readily caught by the lion.

I hope you followed me through all that... I know it's kind of confusing, so just try to follow the guidelines and try to keep in mind that it's good to balance your damage output somewhat with your defensive skills. I recommend you study all the skills available to each profession by pressing control + S in-game to see the skills window, and clicking the "all professions" tab at the top left corner so you can check them all out and see which skills are available, to help you make a decision. I'm not sure how long this site will remain active, so please email me at if they ever take it down so I can remove this part of the guide, but go to the following link, and click "character builder" at the top of the page. This helps you determine how many skillpoints it will take to get the skills you want, so you can plan ahead and know what you'll be able to get before you get really close, and realize you just barely missed it, or you calculated wrong. This site is very helpful, trust me:



Please be sure to donate to their site by clicking the button on the top right corner, if you have any extra money lying around that you don't need, and you feel that their service is helpful. It might help keep the site alive a while and I'm sure the hard working folks who made the site could use the money!

(For more information on PvP combat, and ideas on some good character combinations, go to Section 3, Chapter 1. There's quite a bit of info there on PvP combat.)

Now you're ready to pick what kind of character you want to be!

No matter what profession you choose, they all have their fun points. The game has a wide variety of things to do, and no matter what skills you choose, you're bound to have a lot of fun, so just pick something, and enjoy! I hope this section of the guide helped you decide a little on what you'd rather play as, but please don't choose entirely based on my suggestions. Part of the SOUL of your character, is that you chose skills for him/her that best suit YOUR personality! If you're a loner in real life who just wants to make some money and maybe buy a place of your own some day, maybe you'll choose to be a bounty hunter, or a weaponsmith, who knows... just tailor your character to be like you, and you'll feel a lot happier about him when you log in... trust me hehe... I've powergamed and grinded every day almost since the game came out, with only about a month break in between, so I know what I'm talking about! Play for FUN!!!!!

Chapter 1: Basic Essential Knowhow...


Before I talk about anything else, I'm going to talk about stats. You have 3 stats per pool. You have your primary stats (health action and mind) and you have your secondary stats (stamina constitution strength focus quickness and willpower). Health, action and mind are of course, your main pools. They determine how much you can take before you're incapacitated. Stamina, constitution and willpower all determine how fast your natural regeneration rates are. This is how fast your stat pools (H/A/M) regenerate after depleted. Your quickness, strength and focus are stats that determine how fast your health action and mind are depleted when you use special attacks.

Mind stats:

When I make a new character, knowing that his mind is the most important stat, I migrate his mind stat as high as I can get it, first thing. Secondly, I make sure his willpower is maxed, then I put whatever is left over into his focus. All the other 6 health and action stats are usually about 300-600 after I do this, but I ALWAYS rely on buffs from doctors for levelling up. This is just good sense. Trust me. When you're fighting a bunch of baddies and your vagnerian canapes/brandy are keeping you alive just fine, and you don't even have to use any muon gold, in fact, in my inventory the entire crate is still just sitting there and hasn't been used for almost a month, you'll thank me for telling you this!

Protect yourself:

For starters you're going to need to have composite armor. This stuff is a LOT better than Ubese. It has something like 3x as much durability, and doesn't wear out nearly as fast. A full set costs nearly 250-350k, and you're looking for something with Kinetic protection of at least 79 or 80%. If you can't find it, go to another armor shop, because 80% kinetic protection composite is fairly common. Try to buy an extra chestplate or two, and maybe an extra pair of pants and a new helmet, and repair it every time the kinetic protection drops down to about 70-75%. If the item falls apart, goes into the negative numbers for the durability, or just plain gets too low to wear any more, you'll need to get a new piece for that slot. A typical set of composite consists of 9 pieces. The helmet, the chest plate, the pants, the boots, the left and right bracers, and the left and right biceps. Ubese is ok, because it's cheaper and almost as good, but in the long run composite will be better for you because it lasts a lot longer than Ubese and is very much worth the money. The only drawback to composite is its "encumbrance" which reduces all of your secondary stats. Your focus, willpower, stamina, constitution, strength and stamina are all reduced significantly when you wear composite, and you may be forced to have a set of doctor buffs and drink a vasarian brandy or eat a canape just to put on the full set. When the buffs wear off, you can still wear the armor, but you're going to need to leave it on until you get another set of buffs, because you can't put it back on once you've taken it off until you get buffed again. With the right foods, and good doctor buffs, the encumbrance penalties from wearing composite armor should be far outweighed by how heavily it protects you from damage, and how impervious it is to the wear and tear of getting knocked around and beaten on by creatures and NPC's hitting you. Also, unlike kinetic armor, composite also has protections for every type of damage except stun damage. A good set of composite that you'll pay about 300k credits for has 80% kinetic protection, 78-79% electricity protection or cold or heat protection, and about 65-70% protection to everything else (except stun). Another reason composite is the best armor to wear, though, has nothing to do with how powerful it makes you!!! It just looks plain freaking cool when you wear it!!! :P

A little healing goes a LONG way:

You're going to want some medic skills. This is one of the most important parts of solo levelling. Without the ability to heal yourself, at least a little, you're just going to die too often to have a good efficient levelling experience. It's just something you need. Novice medic is actually pretty good, as you can heal yourself for 300-500 per heal, which should be all you ever need for solo hunting Huurton Stalkers or Quenkers, however, if you make the jump up to pharmacology 4 in medic you'll be able to heal yourself for about 1500 per heal with good stim packs, and at master medic you can heal yourself for up to 3000-4000 with one heal, which is more than most people's total health and action put together!!!

Skill enhancing clothing (Not just for medics!):

To accompany your medic skills, you'll need a shirt or pants that give a bonus to your injury treatment. This will help you heal more damage per stimpack use. The highest bonus you can have from any skill mod on a piece of clothing is +25. If you have a shirt that gives +17 and some pants that give +15, you're still going to only get a maximum bonus of +25, not +32, so get whatever you can get and try to get as close to that +25 threshold as you can. Some master tailors can actually make pants and hats and shirts that give +25 to injury treatment, so you might just want to do what I did, and get one item, saving the other slots for something with perhaps melee defense or mask scent. I prefer a shirt because it's the only piece that won't conflict with a piece of armor you'll be wearing in combat. They make similar skill mod clothing for mask scent skill, bleeding defense, musician wound healing, and melee defense. Ask any master tailor for a full list of Bio Engineered clothing that he can make.

Running multiple instances of Star Wars Galaxies on one computer:

This can be extremely useful if you have another account, and want a hunting companion, or another character online at the same time as you main character, but don't have another computer or another internet connection!

Go into your main Star Wars Galaxies directory on your computer. For me it's...

C:\Program Files\Sony\StarWarsGalaxies

Once you're there, create a new text document and name it user.cfg -- Inside this file you should copy and paste the text below EXACTLY as I have it here...

[SwgClient]

allowMultipleInstances=true

Save the file, then enjoy running 2 instances of the game!!!!

Stimpacks:

You'll also want some decent stimpacks. Try to get the best ones you can find. Stim B's, for novice medic usually have about 390-430 strength if they're really good. Stim C's are about 700 strength for a crate of good ones, good stim D's are about 900 strength, and the best Stim E's I've seen were about 1200-1300 strength. A crate of 10 of them, whatever kind you qualify to use, will last you quite a long time, and should only cost maybe 10-30k depending on the quality and the level of skill/resources required to make them. A full crate of 50 stim B's should only cost about 25 to 75k but they're not as good as high quality stim E's which would probably be close to 120k-200k for a full crate of 50.

The mind is the most important stat:

Your mind stat is very important, which you're aware of if you read the earlier section of the guide entitled "Choosing a profession", and the best way of keeping your mind at a high level without losing too much of it in combat, other than stat migrating your mind stats to their max, is buying vagnerian canapes, vasarian brandy, and muon gold. High quality Vasarian Brandy will last you about 40-45 minutes per use, plenty of time to your stomach to get empty again so you can use more of it, and it should only take up 49 or 50 spaces in your stomach so you can take 2 of them at once. This is instrumental in almost all combat, as it increases your mind, focus and willpower by 400 each time you drink it, for a total of 800 if you drink 2, which should fill your stomach. Your focus determines how much mind you lose when using a special attack. Another factor that affects your mind loss from using specials is the "Mind special attack cost" on your weapon, which can be found by examining it. The willpower stat is simply put, how fast your mind regenerates. The higher your willpower, the faster your mind points replenish after they've been depleted. Your best quality vagnerian canapes are about 33 filling, meaning you can eat like 3 of them before you get full, and EACH one of them gives about +600 to +700 to your focus and willpower (Not your mind, but since the willpower is so high, your mind regenerates so fast you won't notice anyway). It only lasts about 10-13 minutes, though, so I recommend you only eat one or two at a time, and wait for it to wear off before you eat another one or two. Muon gold increases your mind focus and willpower by 500 for 10 minutes, and is a spice. Spices are different than foods. When you eat the muon gold it will last for the 10 minutes, then you'll LOSE 500 from your focus willpower and mind. That is why I say it is only for emergencies. That 500 point loss can be a real blessing in a tough fight, but when the buff wears off, and you go on what they call a spice "downer" you'll be wishing you'd ended the fight sooner! A full crate of the highest quality vasarian brandy should cost no more than 100-200k, and the price for canapes is about the same, and a full crate of both should last you a LONG time. I generally go through about 3 crates of canapes before my brandy supplies are depleted, but I'm assuming you don't have much money, and might not be able to afford much more than 3-5 stacks of each to get you started. Muon gold is no more than 10-20k for a full crate, but you'll probably find yourself hardly ever using it if you have plenty of canapes and brandy. Those quenker missions add up! It generally only takes me 1-3 days to master any given combat profession, so you should be there in no time!

Solo groups:

Just about every time you go out to gain experience, you should join a solo group first. Grouping with 10-20 other players is absolutely instrumental in getting as much experience as possible when solo or group hunting. A solo group is a group of players who group together for the sole purpose of getting higher level missions, then going off to fight solo so they don't have to share the kills with the other group members. They all stay in the group until they're ready to log out or stop levelling, and generally tend to stay in the group even if they go afk so the other group members can benefit from them being in the group as long as possible. Here's an example of why being in a solo group helps a LOT for doing solo quenker missions for experience: The typical 5-6k quenker mission that you take from the mission terminal generally has about 9 quenkers for you to kill. 2 spawn out of the lair, then you kill them, and attack the lair, after which 2 more immediately spawn out of it for you to kill, then when you take the lair down to about 50-55% health, 2 more will spawn out. After those are dead, you are free to destroy the lair, and no more will spawn from it.

PAY ATTENTION HERE: When grouped with a droid or creature pet for the experience bonus you get from having at least 1 other person in the group (yes even pets), the experience per kill is about 3100 per kill. Without a pet or another player in the group with you it's only about 2500.

Assuming you are taking advantage of the experience bonus, those 9 quenkers will give you about 27k or 28k experience per lair... However, if you're in a solo group, and the missions are at least about level 78-82 in difficulty, your quenker lairs will spawn 5 per wave, for a total of 15!!! That's 46k experience per lair!!! If you're by yourself and don't even have a pet grouped with you, those 9 quenkers will give a measly 22-23k per lair! The experience bonus really adds up fast and can be the difference between 100-200k per hour and 200-500k per hour in weapons xp!!!

Repair Tools:

Make sure you bring plenty of repair tools with you, to repair your weapons and armor as they get low on condition. The general rule for weapons that I've found best effective is to repair them when they get down to about 25% condition. Always have a backup weapon or two with you in case a repair fails, and the same goes for your armor if you can afford it. For armor, I try to not repair it until it's special protection against kinetic drops below normal by about 5-10%. For example: When an 80% kinetic composite chestplate gets worn out a bit, its special protection to kinetic will drop some, to say 75%. I'd normally repair it then, or wait until it gets to about 70%. It's your call, just try not to let either your weapon or your armor get too low before you repair it. Whenever a weapon or armor gets below 20-30% condition, you have an outright chance to fail at the repairs, making it utterly fall apart and become totally useless. I think it can actually fall apart at higher condition than that, but it seems to be more frequent the lower the weapon/armor piece gets. Also be sure your repair tools are at least 97-98%. You can buy them very cheap at the bazaar markets in Theed and Coronet, usually, and you should always examine it first to be sure the "functionality rating" of the repair tool is 97-98.00 at least.

Vehicles:

Another piece of essential equipment is a good vehicle. I try to have 3 vehicles so that I have backups in case one or two of them get disabled, but you should do fine with just 1, if you watch it a lot to make sure it doesn't get too low, and if you're not involved in much PvP battle. A player can attack and destroy your vehicle in 1 or 2 hits even if he doesn't know the first thing about PvP, so watch out. Keep a good eye on its condition and type /find garage before it gets low so you can go repair it. Generally, to repair a vehicle to full condition it should cost no more than 7,000 to 9,000 credits. Landspeeders are the most durable vehicles, and you don't have to repair them nearly as often, and speederbikes are slightly less durable but a lot faster. The fastest of them all, but the quickest to lose durability and become disabled is the Swoop bike. This is my personal favorite because I'm a steadfast advocate for "getting where you want to go quicker and making more progress and credits because of it". Generally a swoop is only like 15-25k credits, and speederbikes and landspeeders are about 10-15k.

Buffs:

Be sure to get buffs before you head out, and don't forget how important a solo group is. Remember, a solo group is a group of players who group together for the sole purpose of getting higher level missions, then going off to fight solo so they don't have to share the kills with the other group members. They all stay in the group until they're ready to log out or stop levelling, and generally tend to stay in the group even if they go afk so the other group members can benefit from them being in the group as long as possible. Here's an example of why being in a solo group helps a LOT for doing solo quenker missions for experience: The typical 5-6k quenker mission that you take from the mission terminal generally has about 9 quenkers for you to kill. 2 spawn out of the lair, then you kill them, and attack the lair, after which 2 more immediately spawn out of it for you to kill, then when you take the lair down to about 50-55% health, 3 more will spawn out. After those are dead, you are free to destroy the lair, and no more will spawn from it. The experience per quenker (when grouped with a droid or creature pet for the experience bonus you get from having at least 1 other person in the group, yes even pets) is about 3100 per kill. Without a pet or another player in the group with you it's only about 2500. Assuming you are taking advantage of the experience bonus, those 9 quenkers will give you about 27k or 28k experience per lair... However, if you're in a solo group, and the missions are at least about level 78-82 in difficulty, your quenker lairs will spawn 5 per wave, for a total of 15!!! That's 46k experience per lair!!! That experience bonus really adds up fast and can be the difference between 100-200k per hour and 200-500k per hour in weapons xp!!!

Slice your weapons and armor!!!:

I guess I don't need to remind you to get your weapons and armor sliced by a master smuggler before you start hunting, but it helps a LOT. Damage per second is the most important thing for a soloer, even more important than your armor and your stimpacks. The only thing more important is CLONE be sure you clone at the nearest cloning facility before you go out there, because if you die and you're not cloned you take about 100 wounds to your mind action and health, plus you get about 100 battle fatigue. That's another thing I'll talk about for a minute after I finish this paragraph... Before I talk about battle fatigue you need to know about insuring your items. When you die, unless it's in a PvP conflict, your items in your inventory, ALL of them, including your armor and weapons and repair tools, EVERYTHING loses 5% condition. If you INSURE at the insurance terminal, they only lose 1% condition when you die, but you have to be sure to insure after you die, every time, because the insurance wears off after each death. It costs anywhere from 500 credits to 10k credits to insure your items before you go out and go hunting, depending on the value of all the items you have in your inventory.

Watch your battle fatigue!!!:

Battle fatigue is a big of a thing to worry about... you get a few wounds when you get hit if your battle fatigue is too high, like higher than 400, but the wounds are pretty negligible and not really worth mentioning, BUT when a doctor buffs you, your battle fatigue is VERY important. If your BF is higher than 200, his buffs won't buff you for their full amount. If it's about 300, he'll only buff you for 2300 where he'd normally buff you for 2500. If your BF is closer to 500, his buffs will only buff you for something 1500. If it's really bad, like 800 to 1000, you'll likely only get buffed for around 600-800. I highly recommend that when your buffs wear off, every 3-4 hours, that you go into either the Mining Outpost cantina, the Coronet cantina, or even the Theed cantina, and heal up your mind wounds and battle fatigue before you have a doctor to sell you buffs.

Easy apprentice XP!!!:

Apprentice XP is the final thing I need to talk to you about... in order to master any skill, you have to have 620 points of apprentice xp. The only way to get this experience is to teach other players skills until you've reached your goal of 620 apprentice points. Generally, if I have money, I'll go to Coronet or Theed and shout something like, "Buying apprentice experience!!! Paying 2500 credits per train!!!" You can change the amount of money you offer, depending on your budget. Another good way is to simply stand there and shout, "Master Marksman, Entertainer, Brawler, etc. training skills free of charge!!!" Be sure in your shout to state which skills you qualify for so your potential trainees know if you have the skill they need or not. Another way to get apprentice xp, if you have medic skills, and a friend who only has novice medic, or one skill tree empty that you have full, is to go to a secluded space with him and type /tumbletostanding over and over and over. It helps to make a macro such as the following (Don't forget to include the semicolon in the middle there):

/tumbletostanding;/macro tumbletostanding

(Be sure you name your macro "tumbletostanding" or the macro won't work. Remeber, if you want to stop the macro, just type /dump.)

Anyway... as you tumble your action and health slowly deplete. Your health depletes far less than your action, though. The best way to do this is to get a buff to your ACTION pool and no other stat. Do NOT buff your quickness or stamina or this strategy will not work. As you sit there tumbling for your friend, he heals you with the best stimpacks he can use, and every time he qualifies for a medic skill, you teach it to him and he then surrenders it. You repeat this process until you've earned enough apprentice XP to master your skill, and that's that.

My favorite way to gain apprentice xp, is a lot harder to do, but you get it much faster. You need to have a friend with pharmacology 4 and first aid 4, but no skill in diagnostics. You in turn have to have diagnostics 1, and get your action buffed, but once again NOT your quickness or stamina. Also you need a pet who has learned the "trick2" skill. This skill slowly depletes your action bar, AND your mind bar, but here's the trick... you make a macro like the following (Don't forget to include the semicolon in the middle there):

/tellpet trick2;/macro trick2

(You have to name the macro trick2 or this will not work. Also remember that when you're ready to stop using the macro type /dump.)

Next, you type /macro trick2 to get it started, then you type /macro trick2 several more times, so that you spam the server with it. I usually type /macro trick2 about 7 times before I stop, and when the server is spammed with your trick2 requests, your pet looks like it's got a nervous twitch, then you see your action bar is depleting about 3000 points every 2 seconds!!!! Since this skill depletes your mind pool as well, though, this technique will not work at all unless you have to drink a bottle or 2 of vasarian brandy, eat a vagnerian canape or 2, or just get some focus and willpower buffs from a nearby musician who's got time to buff you. Muon gold also works but unless you get musician buffs, you have to take a combination of canapes/brandys/muon to make your focus high enough for it to not deplete when you use the "trick2" command. Anyway, once you get it working, and your action is depleting like crazy, just have your friend with pharmacology 4 and first aid 4 heal you non-stop. It helps if he uses a macro but it isn't necessary. Every time he qualifies for diagnostics 1, simply teach it to him and have him surrender it, and you should have all the apprentice experience you need in no time at all!!!!

Another really good way to gain apprentice xp is to simply offer to trade it with someone else who needs apprentice experience. You and he/she both have to have skills that you can teach the other, and that's the only requirement. Usually you don't have to pay in this scenario because you're both benefiting from the exchange.

Chapter 2: The Combat Professions...


Basic Essential Knowhow: (Please refer to the section above as well for added help with the combat professions.)

For all combat professions I recommend that you bring along a good full set of 80% composite armor, with backup chestplates in case you get a repair failure, and also some vasarian brandy and vagnerian canapes to increase your mind stats. Some muon gold for a quick emergency 500 point mind heal also helps, but keep in mind that the muon wears off after 10 minutes and your mind is decreased by 500 for the duration of the downer effect, which is about 3 minutes.

Don't forget that getting in a solo group is absolutely necessary for fast levelling. For quenkers you'll want 10-20 people, and for huurton stalkers, you'll want about 15-20. Read below for more information on why. Also, getting missions from a Playermade city is always better than getting them from an in-game city such as the Mining Outpost or the Imperial Outpost on Dantooine, because in playermade cities, for some wierd reason, the missions are always a couple hundred meters closer to the terminal.

Don't forget to group with another player, or even a pet! This gives a nice experience bonus!!! You get about 20-30% more experience per kill if you are grouped with someone/something.

Killing Quenkers and Huurton Stalkers on Dantooine are the two best ways of earning weapons experience I've been able to find. Quenkers are best when you have relatively little to no skill at all with your current weapon, not only because they're simply easier, but also because stalkers give more experience based on how much weapons experience you have with your current equipped weapon. Since they're slightly harder to kill, (about 50-70% harder), it's just common sense to kill quenkers at the early levels, and to make the transition to stalkers a bit later when the experience rewards outweigh the slightly harder difficulty of the stalkers. At novice skill level, the quenkers and stalkers will both give you about 3000-3200 experience per kill. At about 5 to 7 skill boxes into your weapon skill you'll get the same from quenkers, but the stalkers will shoot up to about 3400-3500 experience per kill! At maybe 10 skill boxes stalkers will max out at about 3900-4000 per kill, and they're still soloable so I think you'll find that they're the best all around for later on! Just use your best judgement when deciding when to make the transition. Keep in mind that stalkers pretty much require you to have a nice 80-90% kinetic resistance composite helmet, and plenty of vasarian brandy/vagnerian canapes, because they do a considerable amount more damage to your mind than the quenkers. They also do a good bit of damage to your other stats as well. For hunting quenkers, all you'll probably need is buffs, although I'd get some medic skills and the mind enhancing food/drinks just to be safe. For stalkers, since like I said they're pretty hard in comparison, you'll definitely want at least novice medic, if not better, and you're NEED the food/drinks to survive. Refer to Chapter 2 above for more details on the medic skill and acquiring stimpacks/foods/drinks. Also don't forget to have some muon gold for emergencies. I never really needed it, but my composite helmet was 90% to kinetic so you might want to take a little with you in case of emergencies. It's a quick 500 point mind heal, and it buffs all 3 mind stats for 500 with a 10 minute duration. Keep in mind, that after that 10 minutes is up, you LOSE 500 from all 3 mind stats, and it lasts for about 3 minutes. This is called a downer.

I've been able to get some combat professions from novice to master in about 1 day of grinding (15 hours or so)!!! For Huurton Stalkers, you'll be looking for the ones that pay about 10k credits. When you go to the mission details it clearly says "Huurton Stalker Lair" right there. You can't miss it. If it says "Huurton Matron", or "Huurton Pack" or "Huurton Howler" you weren't paying attention to me when I told you to get the ones that pay 10k credits. All the other ones are either too hard or too easy, and not worth your time. I chose stalkers because they're the most efficient thing to kill on Dantooine, if not in the entire game. Ok, keep that in mind. Here's some more useful info before we get started on hunting techniques... I highly recommend that for Huurton Stalkers, you get in a group of at least 10-15 people, because unless you get missions of 85-90 difficulty or greater, you'll likely get stalker lairs with only 12 creature spawns instead of 15. More spawns in the lair means less time running back to the city for more missions, so you level up faster! I dont need to tell you this is a good thing. For quenkers the missions only pay about 5k credits, and the lair is called "a quenker lair". You may be tempted to take the "savage quenker lair" missions because they pay a little more, but they are a lot harder, and they have a ranged attack, which makes it very hard to kill them with the area effect damage strategy I'm about to tell you about. Also avoid the ones that pay 15-25k because they're quenker relic reapers and ravagers. I don't even want to get into how hard those are to kill, and they give about the same experience as a huurton stalker... For the REGULAR quenkers, lol, you can probably get the 15 creature lairs with a group of about 5-10 people. I know you need to have missions of around 75 to 84 difficulty to get the best possible quenker missions.

Strategies:

For killing both the stalkers and the quenkers on Dantooine, you'll want to follow either of these two strategies. The slowest method is just killing them one at a time. It's less risky but a lot slower as far as gaining weapons experience is concerned. The fastest method utilizes an area attack such as burst shot 2 (for carbineer), flushing shot 2 (rifleman), fanshot (pistoleer), and the various spin attacks that the melee professions get.

The one at a time strategy:

For the slow, one at a time method, you just target one of the creatures, go prone, and begin shooting it with your best special attack. I tell you which special attack to use in the specific section below for each profession, so I don't really need to list that here. Just know that you use the most powerful attack in your arsenal as far as efficiency and speed of the kill is concerned. When it runs up close to you, just stand up or kneel, and continue shooting until it and its friends are dead. I personally choose to kneel because of the added accuracy bonus, and because I don't appear to take enough damage to matter whether I stand or kneel. It's just common sense to kneel for me, since it gives you a better chance to hit. Someone once said to me in the game, "I kneel before no beast." I didn't think to say anything to him at the time, but I'd rather kneel in front of a beast and shoot it with more accuracy, than let it beat me up, eventually biting off my nose or my ear... Anyway, when the initial 5 "beasts" are dead, just shoot the lair one time, then type /peace before anything comes out of it and attacks you. If you shoot the lair while there's a creature out of it, they'll go up and heal it, so it's best to just hit /peace before any of them spawn. It helps to have a button on the toolbar that automatically types /peace for you. Just open up your macro editor and name the new macro whatever you want. Inside the box type /peace and then be sure you drag the macro up to a button on the toolbar. That's basically it. Just hit the corresponding F key whenever you need to peace out, and you won't have to sit and tediously type out /-p-e-a-c-e which you're in combat. Much simpler. Anyway, kill the second wave of 5 creatures the same way you killed the first 5, then you need to take the lair to about 50% health to get the final wave to spawn. /peace out as soon as you see the first one spawn and you should be fine, then kill them, and finish off the lair. I should mention one other thing about the one at a time attacking method. It helps a LOT to make a macro for your best special attack, so you don't have to sit and hit the attack button over and over and over and over and over and over and over and over and over and over and over and over and over and over and over and over. It's as annoying as reading what I just typed, which is almost as annoying as typing what I just typed lol. Here's an example of a good macro that I use personally for whatever combat profession I'm working on:

/bodyshot2;/pause 1;/macro attackmacro

(It's that simple. Make sure that the macro is named attackmacro or it won't work, and change it from /bodyshot2 to /overchargeshot 2, /legshot2, /headshot2, /melee1hbodyhit2, or whatever. Just go to the skill box in your character skillsheet and hover the mouse over your skillbox to determine what the exact command for the attack is, and put it in your macro. To stop the macro type /dump. You'll need to do this every time you want to change to another target.)

The area attack method:

Now for my personal favorite, the area attack method... This method is pretty awesome. I've used it to earn about 300-700k experience per hour on huurton stalkers, and every time I master a profession this is what I use. Depending on which profession you are, your best area attack will be different. For some professions you have to use a normal one at a time approach for a while until you earn your skill level in your area attack, but it's worth it to go straight for the area attack tree before you work on anything else. I'll tell you in the specific profession sections below which attacks to use, so I don't have to type it here and waste space. This section just tells you have to use them the right way. Ok, for the melee professions it's REAL simple. You walk up to the lair, make sure you have all your brandy and canapes ready and eat what you need, then you start wailing on the lair with your best area attack. I prefer to use a macro to spam the attacks for me, just something that loops the attack over and over so I don't have to hit the attack button all the time. Go above to the macro for bodyshot2 and just use that. It works for all special attacks, so just substitute the word bodyshot2 with whatever attack you'll be using. Ok, I told you it was simple. You just keep attacking the lair. The creatures that come out of it will keep healing it, but you'll be hitting them with the spin attack, so they'll eventually die, which will let you take the lair down to 50% health so the last 5 spawn out, then you just attack them all until they're dead. A pretty simple method, and I think you'll find that it's a lot easier to do, and a lot faster than the one at a time strategy.

For the ranged combat professions, it's a lot different, but still pretty easy. What you'll need to do is go prone about 64 meters away from the lair first thing. You can see your distance from the lair when you target it and look at the little target box in the top right corner of your screen (unless you moved it). Next you simply shoot the lair with your best area attack until the lair is at about 50% health, to spawn all 15 creatures (again, I'll tell you which are the best attacks to use in the profession-specific sections below). I prefer using a looping macro to attack for me so I don't have to keep hitting the key over and over. Whenever you need to change targets, you just type /dump, which I've also made a macro for. Read a couple paragraphs above for a good macro to loop your attacks. Just substitute bodyshot2 for whatever attack you'll be using. Anyway, after you attack the lair prone from about 64 meters away, and get it down to about 50% health, since all 15 creatures are spawned out of the lair, you need to change your target to the closest one that's chasing you, and start shooting it. Ok, once one dies, you'll need to switch targets, and it helps a LOT to run around in circles away from the creatures as you're shooting them. You need to be a distance of about 10-15 meters away from them to hit them all with each shot from your weapon, with your area attack. If you're only 5 meters away, you'll be lucky if you hit 1-2 of them, but if you let them chase you around, running at your top speed (burst run isn't necessary at all), you'll hit most if not all of them with EVERY shot from your weapon. While you're doing all this craziness, one or two of them might just stand there like you're not even there. What you do when they do this is either change your target to them, or you just run past them in a way that your area attack will hit them in addition to your target. I also forgot to mention, that if you need to change targets, hitting /dump alone won't be enough. You'll have to first hit /dump then hit the "clear" button in the little window that shows what special attacks you're using.

This method is a LOT faster than the one at a time strategy, and if you do the math I think you'll use it as much as humanly possible .
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Old 06/27/2005, 12:00   #2
 
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Brawler:

Unarmed:

Use a vibro knuckler with at or around 1.7 speed, 150 damage and buy a few crates of melee weapon speed powerups. Also try to get a speed slice if at all possible. From level 0 to 1 just hunt newbie spawns outside any major city using the /berserk skill as much as possible. It helps to make a looping macro so you berserk over and over again. This keeps you from having to do it manually every 10-20 seconds which is a big hassle. Here's an example of a good berserk macro:

/berserk;/pause 1;/macro berserk

(To end the macro, when you need to change targets or something, just type /dump. Remember, this macro won't work unless you name the macro "berserk".)

From 1 to 3 get master doctor buffs and wander around outside the city killing any high level creatures you can find, (i.e. -- tortons, humbabas, gurrcats, sharnaffs, and wrixes), still using the berserk macro. You can usually find these creatures or plenty of other relatively hard creatures (but not if you're buffed) easily within 2000 meters of the city. From level 3 to 4, go to Dantooine and get in a solo group, then get a couple quenker missions. Keep on using the berserk macro until you get all the way to level 4 in unarmed, which should only take about an hour or two total if you do it like I told you. The solo group isn't really necessary at this time because you only need 70k unarmed xp, which can be gotten from 3 or 4 easy lairs. In a solo group it's faster because you only have to take out 2 lairs but honestly the time it takes you to find a solo group can sometimes take longer than just grabbing the missions and running to them .

One Handed Sword:

The weapon of choice for this tree is the curved sword, which can be used as early as novice and all the way up to master brawler. Again, try to get a speed slice, and use crates of speed powerups. From level 0 to 1 just hunt newbie spawns outside any major city using the /berserk skill as much as possible. It helps to make a looping macro so you berserk over and over again. This keeps you from having to do it manually every 10-20 seconds which is a big hassle. Here's an example of a good berserk macro:

/berserk;/pause 1;/macro berserk

(To end the macro, when you need to change targets or something, just type /dump. Remember, this macro won't work unless you name the macro "berserk".)

From 1 to 2 get master doctor buffs and wander around outside the city killing any high level creatures you can find, (i.e. -- tortons, humbabas, gurrcats, sharnaffs, and wrixes), still using the berserk macro. You can usually find these creatures or plenty of other relatively hard creatures (but not if you're buffed) easily within 2000 meters of the city. From 2 to 3, kill these same creatures, but start using /melee1hbodyhit1 instead of /berserk. Just use the macro above and substitute every instance of "berserk" with "melee1hbodyhit1". From level 3 to 4, go to Dantooine and get in a solo group, then get a couple quenker missions. Keep on using the macro until you get all the way to level 4 in one handed sword, which should only take about an hour if you do it right. The solo group isn't really necessary at this time because you only need 70k one handed sword xp, which can be gotten from 3 or 4 easy lairs. In a solo group it's faster because you only have to take out 2 lairs but honestly the time it takes you to find a solo group can sometimes take longer than just grabbing the missions and running to them .

Two Handed Sword:

From level 0 to 1 use heavy axe, and from 1 to 2 use a 2 handed axe. From 2 to 4 you'll be wanting to use a 2 handed curved sword. Speed slices are what you're looking for for all these weapons, with the exception of possibly the heavy axe and 2 handed axe, since you'll be breezing through these levels anyway, and it's a waste of money. From level 0 to 1 just hunt newbie spawns outside any major city using the /berserk skill as much as possible. It helps to make a looping macro so you berserk over and over again. This keeps you from having to do it manually every 10-20 seconds which is a big hassle. Here's an example of a good berserk macro:

/berserk;/pause 1;/macro berserk

(To end the macro, when you need to change targets or something, just type /dump. Remember, this macro won't work unless you name the macro "berserk".)

From 1 to 2 get master doctor buffs and wander around outside the city killing any high level creatures you can find, (i.e. -- tortons, humbabas, gurrcats, sharnaffs, and wrixes), still using the berserk macro. You can usually find these creatures or plenty of other relatively hard creatures (but not if you're buffed) easily within 2000 meters of the city. From 2 to 3, kill these same creatures, but start using /melee2hheadhit1 instead of /berserk. Just use the macro above and substitute every instance of "berserk" with "melee2hheadhit1". From level 3 to 4, go to Dantooine and get in a solo group, then get a couple quenker missions. Keep on using the macro until you get all the way to level 4 in two handed sword, which should only take about an hour if you do it right. The solo group isn't really necessary at this time because you only need 70k two handed sword xp, which can be gotten from 3 or 4 easy lairs. In a solo group it's faster because you only have to take out 2 lairs but honestly the time it takes you to find a solo group can sometimes take longer than just grabbing the missions and running to them .

Polearm:

From level 0 to 1 use wooden staff, from level 1 to 2 use metal staff, and from 2 to 3 use a speed sliced lance. From level 3 to 4 use a long vibro axe. Once again use speed slices powerups on your weapons, but you might want to skip wasting a powerup on the wooden staff if not the metal staff because you should breeze through those skills. From level 0 to 1 just hunt newbie spawns outside any major city using the /berserk skill as much as possible. It helps to make a looping macro so you berserk over and over again. This keeps you from having to do it manually every 10-20 seconds which is a big hassle. Here's an example of a good berserk macro:

/berserk;/pause 1;/macro berserk

(To end the macro, when you need to change targets or something, just type /dump. Remember, this macro won't work unless you name the macro "berserk".)

From 1 to 2 get master doctor buffs and wander around outside the city killing any high level creatures you can find, (i.e. -- tortons, humbabas, gurrcats, sharnaffs, and wrixes), still using the berserk macro. You can usually find these creatures or plenty of other relatively hard creatures (but not if you're buffed) easily within 2000 meters of the city. From 2 to 3, kill these same creatures, but start using /meleepolearmleghit1 instead of /berserk. Just use the macro above and substitute every instance of "berserk" with "polearmleghit1". From level 3 to 4, go to Dantooine and get in a solo group, then get a couple quenker missions. Keep on using the macro until you get all the way to level 4 in polearm, which should only take about an hour if you do it right. The solo group isn't really necessary at this time because you only need 70k polearm xp, which can be gotten from 3 or 4 easy lairs. In a solo group it's faster because you only have to take out 2 lairs but honestly the time it takes you to find a solo group can sometimes take longer than just grabbing the missions and running to them .


Marksman:

Rifles:

From level 0 to 1 just use a cdef rifle, from 1 to 3 use a dlt20a rifle, and from level 3 to 4 use a spraystick. For the cdef the slice doesn't really matter, and I wouldn't waste powerups on it. For the dlt20a rifle I suggest a speed slice and speed powerups, or speed slice with damage powerups, but neither is very essential because you won't be using the weapon long anyway. For the spraystick you'll definitely want a damage slice and to use damage powerups. From level 0 to 1 just hunt newbie spawns outside any major city using /overcharge. I recommend you make a macro to loop the special attack, so you don't have to sit and hit the button over and over again. Here's an example of a macro I use:

/overcharge;/pause 1;/macro overcharge

(You need to make sure it's named "overcharge" or it won't work, and to end the macro at any time, when you need to change targets or something, simply type "/dump")

From 1 to 3 get master doctor buffs and wander around outside the city using /headshot1 to kill any high level creatures you can find, (i.e. -- tortons, humbabas, gurrcats, sharnaffs, and wrixes). It helps to just use the same macro above for overcharge shot, only substituting every instance of "overcharge" for "headshot1", including the name of the macro. You can usually find enough creatures to get you through these levels easily within 2000 meters of the city. My personal favorite was war grondas and savage humbabas outside of Coronet but it's kind of hard to find a lair of them by chance alone. From level 3 to 4, go to Dantooine and get in a solo group, then get a couple quenker missions. To take these down use /headshot2 instead of /headshot1 because, well, it's better. A solo group isn't really necessary at this time because you only need 70k rifles exp which can be gotten from 3 or 4 easy lairs. In a solo group it's faster because you only have to take out 2 lairs but honestly the time it takes you to find a solo group can sometimes take longer than just grabbing the missions and running to them . You should be able to get from 0 to 4 in maybe an hour if you do it right.

Pistols:

From level 0 to 1 just use your standard CDEF pistol. From level 1 to level 4 you'll want a damage sliced DL44 metal pistol with damage powerups. Don't worry about using a powerup or slice on the CDEF because it's a waste of money. From level 0 to 1 just hunt newbie spawns outside any major city using /overcharge. I recommend you make a macro to loop the special attack, so you don't have to sit and hit the button over and over again. Here's an example of a macro I use:

/overcharge;/pause 1;/macro overcharge

(You need to make sure it's named "overcharge" or it won't work, and to end the macro at any time, when you need to change targets or something, simply type "/dump")

From 1 to 3 get master doctor buffs and wander around outside the city using /bodyshot1 to kill any high level creatures you can find, (i.e. -- tortons, humbabas, gurrcats, sharnaffs, and wrixes). It helps to just use the same macro above for overcharge shot, only substituting every instance of "overcharge" for "bodyshot1", including the name of the macro. You can usually find enough creatures to get you through these levels easily within 2000 meters of the city. My personal favorite was war grondas and savage humbabas outside of Coronet but it's kind of hard to find a lair of them by chance alone. From level 3 to 4, go to Dantooine and get in a solo group, then get a couple quenker missions. To take these down use /bodyshot2 instead of /bodyshot1 because, well, it's better. A solo group isn't really necessary at this time because you only need 70k rifles exp which can be gotten from 3 or 4 easy lairs. In a solo group it's faster because you only have to take out 2 lairs but honestly the time it takes you to find a solo group can sometimes take longer than just grabbing the missions and running to them . You should be able to get from 0 to 4 in maybe an hour if you do it right.

Carbines:

From level 0 to 1 just use a CDEF carbine. From level 1 to 3 use a damage sliced DH17 snubnose carbine, and from level 3 to 4 get a good damage sliced laser carbine. Don't use any powerups or slices on the CDEF because it's a waste of money, but for the DH17 and the laser carbine, be sure to use damage powerups. From level 0 to 1 just hunt newbie spawns outside any major city using /overcharge. I recommend you make a macro to loop the special attack, so you don't have to sit and hit the button over and over again. Here's an example of a macro I use:

/overcharge;/pause 1;/macro overcharge

(You need to make sure it's named "overcharge" or it won't work, and to end the macro at any time, when you need to change targets or something, simply type "/dump")

From 1 to 3 get master doctor buffs and wander around outside the city using /legshot1 to kill any high level creatures you can find, (i.e. -- tortons, humbabas, gurrcats, sharnaffs, and wrixes). It helps to just use the same macro above for overcharge shot, only substituting every instance of "overcharge" for "legshot1", including the name of the macro. You can usually find enough creatures to get you through these levels easily within 2000 meters of the city. My personal favorite was war grondas and savage humbabas outside of Coronet but it's kind of hard to find a lair of them by chance alone. From level 3 to 4, go to Dantooine and get in a solo group, then get a couple quenker missions. To take these down use /legshot2 instead of /legshot1 because, well, it's better. A solo group isn't really necessary at this time because you only need 70k rifles exp which can be gotten from 3 or 4 easy lairs. In a solo group it's faster because you only have to take out 2 lairs but honestly the time it takes you to find a solo group can sometimes take longer than just grabbing the missions and running to them . You should be able to get from 0 to 4 in maybe an hour if you do it right.

Ranged Weapon Support Abilities:

Combat experience is acquired while you work on levelling up your other weapons skills. If you're working on master marksman, you should get ranged support 4 about the same time you get rank 4 in the other 3 skills. There are no fast tricks to earning combat experience. It's just slow sometimes. The best and fastest way I know of is to just kill quenkers or huurton stalkers, whichever gives the best experience per hour, on Dantooine in a solo group. For huurton stalkers, the experience you get depends on what your weapon skill is with your current weapon, so there's a good chance you will want to pick these over quenkers, or just kill quenkers instead. Read the combat professions basic essential knowhow above for more details on figuring out which one of these two creature types will give you the best experience per hour. You should be able to get from 0 to 4 in 1-3 hours if you do it right.


Bounty Hunter:

Investigation:

At novice investigation, before you earn ANY investigation experience, unless you already have another high level combat skill, I recommend you work on one of the 3 weapon trees below (carbines, pistols, lightning cannon) at least up to level 3 but preferably level 4. If you're using a pistol, use eye shot on your mission targets, if you're using carbines I recommend leg shot 2, and if you're working with a lightning cannon I suggest you use lightning single 2, unless you don't have level 4 yet in which case I'd just use lightning single 1. Go to Coronet on Corellia to do your Bounty Hunter Missions. The mission terminal you'll want to be using is right next to the capitol building. The reason I picked this is because it's right next to a Spynet Operative. The waypoint for this terminal is -193 -4471. The trick to getting the fastest Investigation experience possible is to open the mission terminal, then to walk about halfway between the Spynet Operative and the terminal, so that you can converse with him while the terminal is still open. Next you need to click on the "payment" button at the top of the list so the missions are listed in order of which ones pay the most. Pick the best paying one and try to get the highest difficulty possible, then click "accept mission". Converse with the Spynet Operative and you'll get a waypoint showing the distance to the mission. It's possible to get missions as close as 20 meters away, so if it's more than about 900-1200 meters away, just open your datapad and abort it, then repeat the process until you get one close. Once you get used to doing it you come up with a rhythm. You can even drag the windows to just the right spot so that you click "ok", "accept mission", and "abort mission" without having to move your mouse at all! Another helpful trick is to create the following macro, which makes it so you don't have to click on the Spynet Operative:

/conv;/pause 1;/macro conv

(You have to name the macro "conv" or it won't work. Please remember that you have to target the Spynet Operative or the macro won't work.)

Once you qualify for investigation 1 DO NOT train it. I can't remember which, but the missions start to go to other planets at either 1 or 2. I'm pretty sure it's level 1, and if they don't go to other planets at level 1, I think the distance increases or something else. It's been a while since I mastered BH, but trust me, and do it this way: Save up your investigation experience until you have about 10,000 of it, THEN train in investigation 1 and 2 both. This makes it a lot faster since you don't have to planet jump every single mission. Shuttle and Starport wait times are pretty hectic, and it's just a lot easier to do this way. You can get the initial 10,000 investigation experience in about 5 to 8 hours if you get a good fast rhythm down, where with any other method you'd end up spending upwards of 12-36 hours getting it if not longer...

To get from level 2 to 4 in investigation, the strategy changes quite a bit. You first need to get about 1-3 packs of seeker droids and 1-5 packs of Arakyd probe droids to get you started. You'll probably need a LOT more of these by the time you get closer to level 4, but these should be fine to get you on your way. Next you need to go to Kadaara on Naboo. This city is by far the best city for doing level 2 and 3 BH missions because there are Spynet Operatives nearby for both levels. In most other cities, you'll have to go to another city to talk to an operative, which increases your mission time drastically. Ok, once you've made it to Kadaara, go the the BH mission terminal directly in front of the Starport gates.

Before you get your first mission, you need to know that TIME IS OF THE ESSENSE HERE!!!!! You need to work as FAST as you possibly can to get the mission, then run to your bounty mark and kill him, or the mission might disappear and you'll have completely wasted all that time you just spent on it. Your bounty will run in a straight line (usually) across the planet, and eventually get to his destination and disappear!!! If you don't work as QUICKLY and efficiently as you possibly can, you will miss him and have to start all over!!!! When I first started working on investigation, I took a casual approach, and found that I was lucky to get 1-2 missions completed per hour. At that rate it would have taken me a week or more of steady 10-15 hour per day grinding just to get to level 4. After I found out there was a time limit, I buckled down and began getting 2-5 missions completed per hour! It was a lot better, and if I'd known this ahead of time I would have gotten from investigation 2 to 4 in maybe 20-30 hours of play time, which is a LOT better than a week or more . SPEED IS IMPORTANT HERE!!!!!!!!!!!!!

Ok, now that you know to work quickly, If you don't have a speederbike swoop, make sure you buy one before you start the missions. Make sure you get a SWOOP, because the other vehicles are too slow. Get on your swoop first thing then open up the terminal and get the hardest mission you can find. I think the best mission difficulty available is about level 31, but check and make sure so you get the hardest one you can. I would actually just settle for level 30 as I recall because I was trying to work as fast as I could, to get investigation out of the way, and you only lose maybe 5-10 BH exp per mission if you settle for a level 30 mission over a level 31 one. Once you have your mission, you need to go behind the Starport to a Spynet Operative in a little alcove. It's right behind the Starport, and hard to miss. The waypoint for the level 2 Spynet Operative is 5512, 6674. Get off your swoop, converse with him and you'll get a biological sample for your Arakyd probe droid. Next, as FAST as you can, get back on your swoop and head to the nearest shuttle port. Once you're there, if the shuttle isn't there, go outside the outskirts of Kadaara, and call your Arakyd probe droid down from orbit as quickly as possible. If the shuttle is already there, it's best to just go to Theed first, then call the droid down from orbit, so you don't have to risk waiting 5 more minutes to catch the shuttle to Theed. To call down your droid from orbit, simple go outside the city to about 100 or 200 meters past the point where it says "You have left Kadaara". Now call out your Arakyd probe droid. You don't have to dismount your vehicle to call it out. You should see a message saying you're calling down a probe droid from orbit. At this point you wait a few seconds, and you see a countdown. When it gets down to 1, look all around you for a plume of white smoke that looks like a meteorite falling from orbit. Head to that location and you'll see your probe droid hovering there. Click on him and feed him the biological sample, then he'll run off to find out which planet your mark is on. As soon as you feed him the sample, head to the shuttle port. You don't have to wait for the little animation showing him flying away, because that just wastes your time. Just feed him the sample and run. He'll do his job, trust me. Ok, if you called him from outside Kadaara, head to the shuttle port and take the next available shuttle to Theed Starport. If you called him from outside Theed, just head to the Starport as soon as you feed him the biological sample. After about 2-3 minutes from the time you put the sample into the droid, you should get a system message telling you what planet your mark is on. Take the ship to that planet, or Coronet/Tyrena, whichever planet connects to that planet, and head there as fast as you can.

Once you're at the planet, take no breaks, talk to nobody, just hurry. As SOON as you arrive on the planet, send a seeker droid to find out where he is. You should already have a little orange waypoint showing you his last known location, but as I said marks move a lot. It's best to send the droid as soon as you get there so you find out his current location as soon as humanly possible. Look at the first location it tells you on the map (use control+V to call up the planetary map), then if it's close enough, just take your swoop there. If it's kind of far away, or it looks like it would be faster just to wait for a shuttle and take a shuttle to a nearby shuttle port, do that instead. Use your best judgement here, based on shuttle wait times and the distance from your current position. As I said before, the bounty mark will run in a straight line, from his starting location to his destination. After a minute or so your droid should give you an updated waypoint for his current location. Before you get this new waypoint, I recommend you go to the planetary map, "right click on the orange waypoint and go to "create waypoint" which will put a blue permanent waypoint over top of the orange one, so you can start documenting where he's been, in order to accurately judge where he's going to end up. It takes a few tries to get it to line up the blue waypoint directly over top of the blue waypoint, but eventually you'll get the hang of it. It is worth the few seconds of time it takes because it helps you finish the mission faster in the long run, not to mention you can do it while you're running by pressing the numberlock key, or while you wait on the shuttle to arrive, etc. One other important thing I have to mention is that a few seconds after your seeker droid gives you the updated waypoint to your mark, it will say "Your seeker droid has lost track of his target." This is the time to send a new droid out. Do it as SOON as you see that message. Make sure you're not sending Arakyd probe droids once you're on the planet by the way, LOL!!! You need to use SEEKER droids haha.

Ok, once you get to your mark, just kill him with whatever attack you like best, and you'll get your BH experience. That's basically all there is to it. Head back to Kadaara as soon as you can, and start the whole thing all over again Once you earn level 3 in investigation, you get a new skill called "seeker droid find" or something like that. DON'T use it. It lets you basically use 1 seeker droid like 3 times or something, but it's a lot slower than track, so it's not worth using. Seeker droids are dirt cheap anyway, so you might as well keep using track like you've been doing. ALso your Arakyd probe droids find the planet a lot faster, but other than that there's not much of a difference between 2 and 3. Your new Spynet Operative location is 5275, 6561.

Keep doing those missions! You'll eventually get it! Like I said, if you hurry you can get from 2 to 4 in maybe 20-30 hours of straight grinding. Good luck with Bounty Hunter! This grind is one of the most hated grinds in the entire game, but with the strategies I just laid out for you, it should be fairly painless .

Bounty Hunter Carbines:

Get a the best damage sliced laser carbine you can find and get plenty of damage powerups. The hunt is fairly straightforward. Plain and simply, all you need to do is get master doctor buffs, go to Dantooine and join a solo group, and hunt quenkers using /legshot2 from level 1all the way to level 4 in BH carbines. Use the traditional one at a time hunting strategy until you get to level 4. There are no area attacks for BH carbines, so unless you get some carbineer to help you with it you're better off just using the one at a time technique. By the time you grind up to a point in carbineer that gives you an area attack, you may as well have spent that time to get BH carbines up to 4, heh. If you work fast and efficiently, you should be able to get from 0 to 4 in BH carbines in maybe 5-10 hours.

Bounty Hunter Pistols:

If you have novice pistoleer, use a damage sliced republic blaster. This is by far the best, but if you don't have any pistoleer, get a nice damage sliced scatter pistol, and you should be fine. Also, with creatures that are resistant to energy damage, the scatter pistol is better, and for creatures with more resistances to acid damage, the republic blaster is better, so keep that in mind as well when selecting a weapon to use before a fight. I'd recommend getting one of each. You'll be wanting to use damage powerups for either weapon you choose. The hunt is fairly straightforward. Plain and simply, all you need to do is get master doctor buffs, go to Dantooine and join a solo group, and hunt quenkers using /healthshot1 until you reach level 2, then switch to eye shot. You might find that you like health shot 1 better than eyeshot until level 3 when you get better speed and accuracy, or even all the way up to level 4, so try them both out and see which one you kill faster with. I know it sounds strange that healthshot1 is better than bodyshot2, but it's better damage and speed unless they changed it recently. If they did, just use bodyshot2, which is fine. Use the traditional one at a time hunting strategy until you get to level 4 in BH pistols. There are no area attacks for BH pistols, so unless you get some pistoleer to help you with it you're better off just using the one at a time technique. By the time you grind up to a point in pistols that gives you an area attack, you may as well have spent that time to get BH pistols up to 4, heh. If you work fast and efficiently, you should be able to get from 0 to 4 in BH pistols in maybe 5-10 hours.

Light Lightning Cannon:

Another easy grind. You'll be hunting quenkers in a solo group. With all heavy weapons, including the LLC, you end up getting a max of about 3000-3100 experience per kill, because there's a cap on heavy weapons experience. This means that anything you hunt will give no more than 3000-3100 experience per kill, and since quenkers are the easiest thing that I've found that gives that kind of experience, I highly recommend you just kill these all the way up to level 4 in LLC. You should use a speed sliced LLC from level 0 to level 1, and use overcharge shot 2 for that part of the grind, then from 1 to 4, use a damage sliced LLC, and lightning single 1 as your attack. The area attack, lightning cone 1, that you get at level 2 in LLC is pretty good, so you might want to use the area attack technique instead of the one at a time technique to get from 2 to 4. Just test them both out and see which one you like better . If you work fast and efficiently, you should be able to get from 0 to 4 in LLC in maybe 5-10 hours.


Carbineer:

The first skill tree in carbineer you should work on is assault tactics, because of the speed bonuses the tree gives. These will allow you to use a damage sliced weapon for the added damage, and the speed will still be about the same as a speed sliced one. From novice carbineer to level 4 in assault tactics, I recommend you use a speed sliced laser carbine, with either speed or damage powerups. I would personally go with speed powerups until about 3 or 4 in assault tactics, then switch to damage powerups, but try them both and see which you like better as far as damage per second is concerned, since weapon stats will vary from server to server, and weaponsmith to weaponsmith. I highly recommend getting an extra one, also speed sliced, in case of a repair failure. Once you get to level 4 in assault tactics switch to a damage sliced laser carbine with damage powerups, and get an extra 2 or 3 of them in case of repair failures, or your weapon just plain wearing out.

Use leg shot 2 from novice to assault tactics 4, and hunt quenkers on Dantooine in a solo group. Look above in this chapter for the basic essential knowhow section to learn how to set up a good macro for your attack, and if you haven't already, read up on the one at a time attack method of taking down lairs for the fastest experience possible, like I said, using leg shot 2. Once you get level 4 in assault, start using wild shot 2, which helps you take down lairs of creatures much faster than any other carbineer attack. Change your attack strategy to the "area attack" strategy, which is also listed in the "basic essential knowhow" section at the beginning of this chapter, and change your macro accordingly.

Once you do get to assault tactics 4, you might also want to try your hand at huurton stalkers, since your damage per second should be a LOT better, and they give a good bit more experience. If you're not satisfied with stalkers, keep hunting quenkers for a while, but try the stalkers again later when you get a few more skill boxes in carbineer, as they give even better experience per kill as you gain more skills. They're really worth the effort. They should give about 3900-4000 per kill when you have around 10 skill boxes.

The next tree you should work on after assault tactics is carbine counterinsurgency level 3, for burst shot 2, which is the upgrade from wild shot 2. The reason I suggested wild shot 2 first is because the speed tree is the way to go regardless, since it helps you to kill stuff faster.

Ok, well... once you get counterinsurgency up to 3 and start using burst shot 2 instead of wild shot 2, get marksmanship up to 4, then go grab counterinsurgency 4. By the time you get all 3 of these maxed, you should be level 3 in special abilities, and almost level 4. You'll have to take out maybe 7-8 more lairs to get the rest of the combat experience you'll need to master Carbineer, unless you already had some combat experience saved up before you started the profession. If you do it right, you should be able to get from novice to master carbineer in about 2 or 3 days of steady grinding, spending maybe 10-15 hours per day.


Commando:

Before you start with commando, you'll need to chose your favorite heavy weapon to use. Acid Rifle and Flamethrower are your two choices. In the past the acid rifle was weak compared to the flamethrower, making the flamer the only viable choice, but supposedly that's been changed, so neither is better than the other, now, supposedly. With this in mind, I'd probably still pick flamethrower, but it's up to you. As soon as you pick one, get one throwaway weapon with a speed slice, to use for your initial grind, then get one with a damage slice for the rest of your commando skills. Heavy weapons experience is capped at about 3000 to 3100 experience per kill no matter what you kill, so I highly recommend hunting quenkers on Dantooine in a solo group. Be sure you get master doctor buffs, and you should be fine. There's no reason to hunt harder creatures because they give the same exact experience almost as the quenkers, only they're harder to kill, and thus you get less experience per hour. Equip your throwaway speed sliced weapon, and use nothing but overcharge shot 2, and the one at a time killing strategy until you get that weapon skill up to level 4. The reason I call it a throwaway weapon is that overcharge shot 2 drains the weapon's condition pretty bad, and by the time you reach level 4, it'll be pretty worthless, with maybe 200 max condition remaining, not to mention with all the speed bonuses, you'll want to use the damage sliced weapon anyway, since the speed of the weapon will barely matter any more. Once you're at level 4 with your favorite weapon, you'll be working on the other one. All the commando weapons xp is based on heavy weapons, so whether you use the acid rifle or the flamethrower you're going to get the same experience. Once you start using your damage sliced weapon, begin using flame/acid single 2, which should allow you to kill each quenker in 1 shot. I highly iterate that you should not use flame or acid cone 1 because it creates burning damage, which depletes the amount of experience that you get per kill. Anyway, continue doing quenker missions until you get level 4 in all the skills. The field tactics likely being the last one that you get to level 4 because with most skill masteries, unless you had a little combat experience saved up before starting on it, you'll most likely have to kill maybe 7-8 more lairs worth of creatures before you finish off the combat experience part of the profession. If you do it right, you should be able to get from novice to master commando in about 1 to 3 days of steady grinding, spending maybe 10-15 hours per day hunting quenkers.


Creature Handler:

First off, you need a pet. Anything bio engineered level 8-12 should be fine. Go to the Geonosian Biolab on Yavin 4. The waypoint is -6450 -360 and it's North of the Labor Outpost. There are usually a LOT of people there hunting, so you should have no problem at all sending your pets in for experience that you have to do basically no work for. Your pet will get hit a few times, so bring some pet stimpacks, or get some medic skills with which to heal your pet, and always go buffed, in case your pet isn't the only one who takes damage. Trust me, in the caves, you'll probably get hit quite a bit, so taking along some mind enhancing food/drinks is a pretty good idea. I got killed within my first few minutes in the caves, but after an hour or two of getting used to it I found it was pretty simple to avoid the dangerous creatures and not get killed hehe... Anyway, the crazed geonosians at the entrance are pretty good experience, to the tune of about 900-1100 CH exp per kill with a level 8-12 pet, and some of the other creatures int he cave are a little harder/easier to kill depending on what it is, with varying levels of experience depending on what you're sending your pets after. Basically though, I just sent my pet in on everything that was getting attacked by someone, and healed him up when he was getting damaged pretty bad. It doesn't hurt to get your pet buffed, but it's kind of a hassle. Do it if you want to. After a little experience in the caves, I found that there were some crazed genonsians a little deeper in on the right hand side before a technical looking room with geonosian lab assistants I think they were called, and I stayed there for a lot of my experience. Just try the various areas in the cave and go with the one that gives the best experience.
Once you get to the point where you can handle a level 25 pet, I highly recommend getting a Greater Sludge Panther, as they give about 1000 CH exp per crazed geonosian, but the panther has a lot more health and a lot better armor than most low level pets, making it require much less healing. I'll mention one last thing about the caves, then talk about another alternative. If you make a macro, you can go afk while you send in your pet against creatures for experience, as long as there are plenty of other people around to take the heat off of you, so you don't get killed in the process. Just find a spot with a lot of people and take a seat, and run the macro. You have to be careful though, and not go afk very long, in my experience, because the pets DO take some damage and will die if you don't heal them now and then. Here's the macro you should use...

/ui action cycleTargetOutward;/tellpet attack;/pause 2;/tellpet follow;/macro petmacro

(To end the macro at any time, just type /dump. You have to name the macro "petmacro" or it won't work. Basically this macro will send your pet to attack the nearest thing in your field of vision, then after 2 seconds, call him back and send him against the next nearest target. You have to be careful not to be looking at the floor or the ceiling, though, because you might send your pet after something deep underground or above ground, and lose him. Worse yet, you could bring something to the group they're not prepared for and get yourself or somebody else killed.)

If you can't find anyone at the caves, the next best way to earn CH exp is to go to the Science Outpost on Dathomir. There are a lot of people there usually hunting Enraged Rancors for experience and loot, and usually you can persuade one of them, or a group of people to let you come along and send in your pets to help earn CH exp. You'll probably get about 1500 CH exp per kill with a GSP (greater sludge panther), so this is another pretty decent way to get CH exp.

I forgot to mention this, but it really doesn't matter which skills you go up in the CH tree. Just make sure your pet knows the attack command and the follow command before heading to the caves and you're set. If you have to go find a more experienced creature handler to teach it the commands before you go, just do it. With a little skill, after you get used to hunting in the biolab, you should be able to get from novice to master in CH within 2-3 days, grinding perhaps 10-15 hours per day.


Fencer:

For the fencer skill, as with most other skills, the best skill tree to go up first is the speed tree, which in this case is footwork. From novice fencer use a speed sliced one handed curved sword with melee weapon speed powerups. Use one hand spin attack 1, which you get at skill level 4 in the brawler one hand swords tree, and hunt quenkers on Dantooine in a solo group. Look above in this chapter for the basic essential knowhow area to learn how to set up a good macro for your attack, and if you haven't already, read up on the area attack method of taking down lairs for the fastest experience possible. Once you earn footwork 3 or 4, you'll want to switch to a damage sliced gaderiffi baton, and damage powerups, because the speed bonuses from the footwork tree really begin to take effect, and the damage sliced weapon should begin working about as fast as the speed sliced one. I highly recommend getting 1 or 2 extra gaffi sticks in case of repair failures, and due to the fact that even if you don't get any failures you're likely to lose one of your weapons due to plain wearing it out, before you get to master. The reason I say to switch to the damage sliced weapon at footwork 3 or 4, instead of just giving you a straight skill level at which to start using it, is because weapon stats vary, and thus you might want to experiment between the curved sword and the gaffi stick and see which one does the most damage per second at footwork 3, and use which ever one seems better. At skill level 4, though, the damage sliced one should definitely be the best choice, as the speed mods are extremely high by then.

Once you do get to footwork 3, whether you're using a gaffi stick or a curved sword, you get your second spin attack, one hand spin attack 2. Switch your macro around accordingly, if you're using one, by substituting the number 1 for the number 2, to start using your new attack. You might also want to try your hand at huurton stalkers now, since your damage per second should be a LOT better, and they give a good bit more experience. If you're not satisfied with stalkers, keep hunting quenkers for a while, but try the stalkers again later when you get a few more skill boxes in fencer, as they give even better experience per kill as you gain more skills. They should give you about 3900-4000 per kill when you have around 10 skill boxes.

Once you've earned footwork 4, and max out on speed, just work on whatever skill tree you want. One gives dodge and one gives melee defense, so they're both fine. I'd recommend techniques for dodge, but melee defense is fine too. Whichever you want. Once you get everything up to level 4 except for finesse, unless you had some extra combat xp already saved up from another profession, you'll only have to kill 7-8 lairs to get master. That's about it! If you do it right, mastering fencer should take about 2 or 3 days of steady grinding, for 10-15 hours per day.


Pikeman:

For pikeman, and most other combat skills, the skill tree you'll want to raise first is the tree with the speed bonuses, which in this case is stances. Your weapon of choice from novice to stances 3 or 4, will be a long vibro-axe with a speed slice and plenty of speed powerups. Use polearm spin attack 1, which you get at skill level 4 in the brawler polearms tree, and hunt quenkers on Dantooine in a solo group. Look above in this chapter for the basic essential knowhow area to learn how to set up a good macro for your attack, and if you haven't already, read up on the area attack method of taking down lairs for the fastest experience possible. Once you earn stances 3 or 4, you'll want to switch to a damage sliced long vibro-axe, and damage powerups. I highly recommend getting 1 or 2 axes in case of repair failures, and due to the fact that even if you don't get any failures you're likely to lose one of your weapons due to plain wearing it out, before you get to master. The reason I say to switch to the damage sliced weapon at stances 3 or 4, instead of just giving you a straight skill level at which to start using it, is because weapon stats vary, and thus you might want to experiment between the speed one and the damage one and see which one does the most damage per second in stances 3, and use the one that works best. For level 4 it should definitely be the damage sliced one, as the speed mods are extremely high by then.

Once you do get to footwork 3, whether you're using a damage sliced polearm or a speed sliced one, you get your second spin attack, polearm spin attack 2. Switch your macro around accordingly, if you're using one, by substituting the number 1 for the number 2, to start using your new attack. You might also want to try your hand at huurton stalkers now, since your damage per second should be a LOT better, and they give a good bit more experience. If you're not satisfied with stalkers, keep hunting quenkers for a while, but try the stalkers again later when you get a few more skill boxes in pikeman, as they give even better experience per kill as you gain more skills. They should give you about 3900-4000 per kill when you have around 10 skill boxes.

Once you've earned footwork 4, and max out on speed, just work on whatever skill tree you want. One gives dodge and one gives melee defense, so they're both fine. I'd recommend techniques for dodge, but melee defense is fine too. Whichever you want. Once you get everything up to level 4 except for finesse, unless you had some extra combat xp already saved up from another profession, you'll only have to kill 7-8 lairs to get master. That's about it! If you do it right, mastering pikeman should take about 2 or 3 days of steady grinding, for 10-15 hours per day.


Pistoleer:

For pistoleer, the skill tree you'll want to raise first is stances and grips. Your weapon of choice all the way from novice to master pistoleer should be a damage sliced republic blaster with plenty of damage powerups. I highly recommend getting 2 or 3 republic blasters, all damage sliced, in case of repair failures, and due to the fact that even if you don't get any failures you're likely to lose one of your weapons due to plain wearing it out, before you get to master. Use health shot 1, which you get at skill level 4 in the marksman pistols tree, and hunt quenkers on Dantooine in a solo group. Look above in this chapter for the basic essential knowhow section to learn how to set up a good macro for your attack, and if you haven't already, read up on the one at a time attack method of taking down lairs for the fastest experience possible, like I said, using health shot 1. Once you get level 4 in stances and grips start using your very best pistoleer attack, fanshot, which helps you take down lairs of creatures much faster than any other pistoleer attack. Change your attack strategy to the "area attack" strategy, which is also listed in the "basic essential knowhow" section at the beginning of this chapter.

Once you do get to stances and grips 4, you might also want to try your hand at huurton stalkers, since your damage per second should be a LOT better, and they give a good bit more experience. If you're not satisfied with stalkers, keep hunting quenkers for a while, but try the stalkers again later when you get a few more skill boxes in pistoleer, as they give even better experience per kill as you gain more skills. They're really worth the effort. They should give about 3900-4000 per kill when you have around 10 skill boxes.

Once you've earned stances and grips 4, work on getting level 4 in the marksmanship tree, which gives you more accuracy which even further increases your already formidable damage per second. Finally, polish off your tactics tree by getting it up to level 4, then the only thing you should have left is special abilities. Unless you had some extra combat xp already saved up from another profession, you should be about halfway past level 3 in special abilities, so you'll only have to kill 7-8 lairs to get master. That's about it! If you do it right, mastering pistoleer should only take about 2 or 3 days of steady grinding, for 10-15 hours per day.


Rifleman:

For rifleman, the skill tree you'll want to raise first is countersniping techniques. Your weapon of choice all the way from novice to master should be a damage sliced spraystick with plenty of damage powerups. I highly recommend getting 2 or 3 of them, all damage sliced, in case of repair failures, and due to the fact that even if you don't get any failures you're likely to lose one of your weapons due to plain wearing it out before you get to master, because they're such fast weapons. Use head shot 2 from novice to counter sniping 3, and hunt quenkers on Dantooine in a solo group. Look above in this chapter for the basic essential knowhow section to learn how to set up a good macro for your attack, and if you haven't already, read up on the one at a time attack method of taking down lairs for the fastest experience possible, like I said, using body shot 2. Once you get level 3 in counter sniping, start using your very best rifleman attack, flushing shot 2, which helps you take down lairs of creatures much faster than any other rifleman attack. Change your attack strategy to the "area attack" strategy, which is also listed in the "basic essential knowhow" section at the beginning of this chapter, and change your macro accordingly.

Once you do get to stances and grips 4, you might also want to try your hand at huurton stalkers, since your damage per second should be a LOT better, and they give a good bit more experience. If you're not satisfied with stalkers, keep hunting quenkers for a while, but try the stalkers again later when you get a few more skill boxes in rifleman, as they give even better experience per kill as you gain more skills. They're really worth the effort. They should give about 3900-4000 per kill when you have around 10 skill boxes.

Once you've earned counter sniping 3, work on getting level 4 in the accuracy tree, which gives you more accuracy to even further increase your already formidable damage per second. Finally, polish off your concealment tactics tree and your counter sniping tree, by getting them both up to level 4 in whatever order you want, then the only thing you should have left is special abilities. Unless you had some extra combat xp already saved up from another profession, you should be about halfway past level 3 in special abilities, so you'll only have to kill 7-8 lairs to get master. That's about it! If you do it right, mastering rifleman should only take about 2 or 3 days of steady grinding, for 10-15 hours per day.


Smuggler:

Dirty Fighting and Underworld:

To get from novice to level 4 in underworld and dirty fighting, if you have stances and grips 4 in pistoleer, you'll want to use fanshot and hunt quenkers or huurton stalkers on Dantooine in a solo group. Go up to the "basic essential knowhow" section at the beginning of this chapter for instructions on the "area attack" method of gaining experience, and pay attention to the macro listed in that same section for some added ease of levelling. If you have level 3 in pistol tactics, use body shot 3, and the one at a time strategy in that same section. If you have no pistoleer at all, you'll be using the one at a time strategy still, only using health shot 1 instead. Hunt the quenkers if you have less than 4-5 skill boxes in pistoleer or underworld/dirty fighting, and hunt the stalkers if you have 5-10 skill boxes. The reason being that the experience from the stalkers is much better the more skills you have with your current weapon. For these skills you should be using a damage sliced republic blaster if you have novice in pistoleer, and if you don't have novice in pistoleer you should use a damage sliced DL44 metal pistol, or a damage sliced scout blaster. I prefer the DL44. I recommend getting an extra weapon or two in case of repair failures, and in case your weapon wears out from too much use. That's basically all you have to do to earn level 0-4 in both these skill trees. You may wish to switch your attack to last ditch assailt once you get that, but body shot 3, health shot 1, and fanshot should be just fine. These skills take maybe 10 to 20 hours of steady grinding to level up to max.

Slicing:

Resources Required (Estimates only): 700-750 precision laser knives (remember there are 10 uses per pack, so you'll need about 70-75 packs), 350-400 molecular clamps, 300-400 weapon upgrade kits, 300-400 CDEF or similar weapons (factory crates made by an artisan work best), 20-60 locked containers (20 if you intend to slice terminals to get from level 1 to level 2, which is much slower but far less expensive. 60 if you plan on skipping the whole terminal slicing thing because it takes forever!)

Slicing is kind of hard, and tedious, but not too bad. To get from level 0 to level 1 in slicing, you HAVE to slice locked containers. These can best be acquired from other players or by killing low level NPC's like meatlumps, which are very common outside major cities such as Coronet, Kadaara, Mos Entha, etc. A macro can be made to attack them while you're afk, but be sure you can handle them or you could come back to a dead character when you get back from afk. Here's the best macro to use if you don't have enough cash to buy containers... in place of bodyshot2 just use whatever your best special attack is.

/loot;/kneel;/ui action cycleTargetOutward;
/pause 1;/bodyshot2;bodyshot2;/loot;/macro lootgrind

(The name of the macro has to be "lootgrind" or it won't work. To stop the macro at any time, just type /dump.)

That macro is great if you find a static spawn of some meatlumps or some other NPC's. Just get some buffs or wear some good armor and head to a spot where 3-5 of them spawn... a lot of locations will spawn a new one every time one dies and you loot it, so as soon as you loot the corpse a new one pops up! After 5 hours your inventory should have a few containers in it. It takes about 20 successfully sliced locked containers to get to level 1 in slicing. To slice them, all you have to do is get some molecular clamps from a smuggler goods vendor, and some precision laser knives. Be sure you take your knives out of their crates and put any crates of knives you have left over into your backpack, because when you slice, instead of using up one charge from the crate for each slice, it will use up a whole PACK of 10 knives from the crate for each slice! I repeat, do NOT slice anything while there's a crate of knives in your inventory. Take them out of the crate and put any crates you have inside a backpack or drop them in your house!!!!!!! Ok, once you get your equipment you need to right click on the container, go to slice, then click to use the molecular clamp. It will tell you a color that it lights up. This is the color wire you cut first. Once you cut that wire you slice the other one. For each slice, you use up a total of 1 molecular clamp and 2 precision laser knives. To slice your initial 20 containers, this adds up to 40 precision laser knives and 20 molecular clamps. Each pack of laser knives has 10 in it, and each pack of clamps can only be used for 1 use, so you'll need 4 packs of knives, and 20 packs of clamps to get from slicing 0 to slicing 1, slicing 20 locked containers. Inside the containers you'll get force crystals, skill tapes, articles of clothing, and other valuable items, but the good stuff is very rare. On average I only got 1 nice item in every 20-30 containers I sliced. Sometimes you'll even get another locked container inside a locked container! LOL. It's pretty wierd when you ask yourself how they fit something inside something that's the exact same size... so I just decided to believe that some of them are smaller than others LOL.... Anyway... oh yeah one more thing. The skill tapes and armor attachments you get... if they're blank don't throw them away... get a jedi to look at it for you and tell you what the stats are. These are usually special tapes that give bonuses to Jedi abilities, I've heard, but I threw away my only blank one before I heard about this, so I never found out if it was true or not for myself. Another great way of getting locked containers to slice is to just go to Coronet or Theed and shout something about how you're willing to slice locked containers for people free of charge, letting them keep what's inside, or something. You might even offer to pay them 5k per container or something. You're bound to get it in a few hours because a lot of people in town have spare containers... a lot more than you'd think. You might also even offer to outright buy them from people for 5-10k each, or even more, depending on how desperate you are to get to slicing 1. I've seen vendors selling them for 10-20k each but that's a little steep unless you're rich, which I was at the time, so I bought like 80 of them haha.

Once you get to slicing 1, you have 2 options for getting from 1 to 2. The first is slicing more locked containers. It takes about 40 more locked containers to get from 1 to 2 in this manner, but it's a lot faster than your only other option. The second method is slicing mission terminals. You can only slice a terminal once every 2 minutes, so it's really slow, but it only costs 2 laser knives and 1 clamp. You don't have to pay for anything but slicing supplies. It's a lot cheaper but much slower. Some people might try using a macro program such as "macro scheduler" to slice the terminals easier. Do a google.com search for "macro scheduler" and download the program first, then go into the program and select "record new macro" then tab into the game and slice a terminal. Go back into macro scheduler and edit the macro a little bit to take out the initial keys you typed, like alt+tab and the others, then add a 2 minute pause in the macro and make it loop, and you're set! You can easily find out how to edit the macro to make it loop and to make a pause in the macro in the help files, but here's a short example of how to do it: At the VERY beginning of the macro you put something in there like Label>Start. This tells the macro program where the beginning of the macro is, and at the end, it will go back here, as long as you tell it to. At the end of the macro, when your commands are all done, you add a command such as Wait>120 which puts in a 120 second pause to wait for the terminals to refresh. Finally, you add one more command, at the very end of the macro, to make it loop. Add Goto>Start at the end. Just make it Goto the name of the first label I told you to put at the beginning of the macro and you should be fine! If it still doesn't work, email me at for help, but first check the help files that came with the program and you should get some easy enough to understand knowhow on getting it to work without my help. I'm a pretty busy guy so try to figure it out on your own if you can please . You should be able to go afk for a few hours and have slicing 2 after not much time at all, and it costs nothing at all to do, except as I said, the price of the knives and clamps! The only drawback, like I said, is that it's a little slower going. Also please note that you may not be able to activate the macro while in-game. You may have to alt+tab out of the game, then activate the macro, then alt+tab back into the game for it to work effectively. You might also try adding a 10 second pause to the beginning of the macro, so you have plenty of time to get back into the game before it starts up.

*****WARNING!!!: USE MACROS AT YOUR OWN RISK!!!!! THEY ARE 3RD PARTY PROGRAMS AND ARE AGAINST THE EULA OF THE GAME, WHICH MEANS YOUR ACCOUNT COULD BE BANNED IF YOU USE THEM. I HAVE NEVER GOTTEN IN TROUBLE FOR USING ONE BUT CONSIDER YOURSELF WARNED!!!!!*****

Anyway, now that that's out of the way... to get from slicing 2 to 4..... To get from slicing 2 to 4 you'll need to slice simple weapons such as survival knives or CDEF weapons. Heavy axes work too, I think, but I'm not sure. Anyway, slice the knives or CDEF weapons for a few hours until you're FINALLY done, and you should have level 4 in slicing !!!
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Old 06/27/2005, 12:02   #3
 
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Spices:

Resources Required (Estimates Only): 12,000 organics, 2,500 metal

To get from spices 1 to 4 is a very simple task. All you need to do is craft shadowpaws in a food and chemical crafting tool. By far the easiest way to speed craft is to run an in-game macro, and just click on the resources, but it can even further be automated by using a program called "macro scheduler" which can be downloaded from here:



I'll explain how to use macro scheduler shortly, but for now, let me tell you how to set up the macro for crafting using only in-game macros... First off go into the game options by pressing ctrl+O then go to "misc" and uncheck "confirm crafting actions". Don't forget to do this because it's necessary for all crafting macros. Now drag five food and chemical crafting tools onto your toolbar and put them in the f1 through f5 slots. This will make your macro work. Now, to make the macro itself. Open up the new macro window, and name the macro "craft" or it won't work. Put this string of commands in the macro commands box:

/ui action toolbarSlot00;/selectDraftSchematic xx;/pause 4;/nextCraftingStage;/nextCraftingStage;/nextCraftingStage;/createPrototype practice noitem;/createPrototype practice noitem;/pause 4;/ui action toolbarSlot01;/selectDraftSchematic xx;/pause 4;/nextCraftingStage;/nextCraftingStage;/nextCraftingStage;/createPrototype practice noitem;/createPrototype practice noitem;/pause 4;/ui action toolbarSlot02;/selectDraftSchematic xx;/pause 4;/nextCraftingStage;/nextCraftingStage;/nextCraftingStage;/createPrototype practice noitem;/createPrototype practice noitem;/pause 4;/ui action toolbarSlot03;/selectDraftSchematic xx;/pause 4;/nextCraftingStage;/nextCraftingStage;/nextCraftingStage;/createPrototype practice noitem;/createPrototype practice noitem;/pause 4;/ui action toolbarSlot04;/selectDraftSchematic xx;/pause 4;/nextCraftingStage;/nextCraftingStage;/nextCraftingStage;/createPrototype practice noitem;/createPrototype practice noitem;/macro craft

Where it says, "/selectDraftSchematic xx", put in the number that corresonds with shadowpaws. The only way to find out which one it is is to test them out. Open up your crafting tool, then type "/selectDraftSchematic 00". If this is shadowpaw, stop and use 00 in place of xx for the macro. If it's not shadowpaw, change it to "/selectDraftSchematic 01" and continue until you get the right one, then use it for the macro. Everywhere in the macro where there's a pause, i.e. -- "/pause 4" might not be entirely accurate. It depends on your situation. I find that if you're on a broadband connection with low ping, it's best to use the lowest pause you can. I personally use a pause of about 2.5 seconds after selecting the draft schematic, and a pause of about 2 seconds after creating the prototype, but I'm on a broadband connection with really low ping, and I use an autoclicker macro, to speed it up as much as possible. If you're clicking manually, I find that a pause of about 4-7 seconds is best for the first pause, and about 2-3 seconds is best for the second pause. To end the macro when you're done, type "/dump".

Also, for the macro above, if you'd wanted to keep the spices you make, for sale or for personal use, you would just go up into the macro and delete every instance of "practice noitem". For example: Instead of having it say "/createPrototype practice noitem" you'd change it to "/createPrototype".

*****WARNING!!!: USE MACROS AT YOUR OWN RISK!!!!! THEY ARE 3RD PARTY PROGRAMS AND ARE AGAINST THE EULA OF THE GAME, WHICH MEANS YOUR ACCOUNT COULD BE BANNED IF YOU USE THEM. I HAVE NEVER GOTTEN IN TROUBLE FOR USING ONE BUT CONSIDER YOURSELF WARNED!!!!!*****

Now that I've explained how to use the in-game part of the macro, you can either choose to use that, and just click manually, which takes longer, and can't be done afk, or you can set up a macro with Macro Scheduler for the best efficiency, and the ability to do it afk... Now then. Macro scheduler is simple. All you have to do is open up the Macro Scheduler program and hit the "record new macro" button. Next tab into the game and run your macro. At this point you just click on the resources for a few minutes to get their positions set into memory, then you hit the button to stop the macro recorder, and you tab out of the game back into Macro Scheduler. Now... in macro sheduler you have the ability to edit the macro you've just recorded. Go there and remove some of the excess commands, like the alt and tab. In fact, remove all the commands except the ones that... the only ones you need to keep in there are the ones that click, and the ones that cause a wait in between each click. Here is an example of a working click macro for use with Macro Scheduler:

// C:\Program Files\MJT Net Ltd\Macro Scheduler\click.scp
// Recorded on Monday, July 12, 2004, at 05:51 PM

//Recorded Events
Label>Start
MouseMove>125,187
LDblClick
Wait>0.25
MouseMove>213,187
LDblClick
Wait>0.25
Goto>Start

To end this macro while it's running just hit shift+escape! That's about all there is to it! If you want to avoid the hassle of failed crafting sessions, you might want to make the macro look more like this:

// C:\Program Files\MJT Net Ltd\Macro Scheduler\click.scp
// Recorded on Monday, July 12, 2004, at 05:51 PM

//Recorded Events
Label>Start
MouseMove>125,187
LDblClick
Wait>0.25
MouseMove>213,187
LDblClick
Wait>0.25
MouseMove>125,187
LDblClick
Wait>0.25
MouseMove>213,187
LDblClick
Wait>0.25
MouseMove>125,187
LDblClick
Wait>0.25
MouseMove>213,187
LDblClick
Wait>0.25
MouseMove>125,187
LDblClick
Wait>0.25
MouseMove>213,187
LDblClick
Wait>0.25
MouseMove>125,187
LDblClick
Wait>0.25
MouseMove>213,187
LDblClick
Wait>0.25
MouseMove>125,187
LDblClick
Wait>0.25
MouseMove>213,187
LDblClick
Wait>0.25
Press Esc * 8
Goto>Start

(All I did was simply loop the click commands a few times before repeating the macro, putting a command to hit the escape key 8 times just before the loop. This way, you hit escape several times to surpass the crafting error windows that make it a lot harder to run the macro afk, because any little lag spike will mess you up. You may feel better with a longer or shorter pause before the macro hits escape to clear the macro. If you want to make the pause in between the loop shorter, simply remove some of the click/wait commands, and if you want to make the pause longer, just add some more, like I did. Personally, I recommend going down to about line 100 with the clicks before you tell it to press escape 8 times and start over.)

Now that you have your click macro set up and ready to use, start your ingame macro and the click macro and you're all set! You should be able to figure the rest out on your own! Getting from spices 0 to 4 with these two tricks should take maybe 2 hours at the most! Also please note that you may not be able to activate the macro while in-game. You may have to alt+tab out of the game, then activate the macro, then alt+tab back into the game for it to work effectively. You might also try adding a 10 second pause to the beginning of the macro, so you have plenty of time to get back into the game before it starts up.


Squad Leader:

Squad Leader is fairly simple and straight forward. All you need to do is get in a large group and have them kill as many high level creatures as possible. Sure, your squad leader skills may seem kind of cool but they don't really help you to get more experience faster, so don't even worry about which one to work up first. It doesn't really matter. I prefer to go up one line to 4 first thing, then to work on the other ones when your skill cap is maxed (from having a level 4 skill). This way you don't have to go find a trainer as often, so you can hunt for prolonged uninterrupted periods of time, which is much more efficient. Don't even worry about this if you have another squad leader who can train you nearby or even in your group. To get squad leader experience you have to be the leader of your group, by the way.

Ok, the best squad leader experience I've ever gotten was at Fort Tusken on Tatooine. It's in your POI tabs in your datapad if you don't already know how to get there. All you have to do is go there and invite everybody you see who is at the fort into your group. You should get around 5k to 20k squad leader experience per kill depending on how many people are in your group. I was able to get from novice to master in about evenings of hunting at the fort. When someone else already had a squad leader group going, I simply asked them to let me join there group, to help them get experience, in exchange for letting me take over as leader when they finally got master. It's a pretty good arrangement, as there are usually 10-30 people hunting at the Fort, but it depends a lot on which server you're on and what time it is, too. If you have trouble getting into a squad leader group at fort tusken you might also try the geonosian biolab on Yavin 4 at -6450 -360, or the force crystal hunter caves on Dantooine, which I think is on the POI tabs. If you don't like any of these places you can also try getting in a 10-20 person hunting group on one of the major planets, and just gain your experience that way. The first time I mastered squad leader I joined a large group that was killing slinking voritor hunters and was getting upwards of 24k per kill, so this can be just as fast if not faster than the tusken fort. The only difference is that you have to find a large group, which isn't always available any more now that solo groups have been invented, and also the fact that you're always running to your different missions for the group, whereas at the fort, the biolab and the caves people are killing pretty much nonstop. If you want to go afk at the fort or the biolab or the force crystal caves you can, but you have to remember to keep inviting people! The more furtively you invite people into your group the faster you get to master! Don't forget that!

It takes maybe 10-20 hours of being the group leader at the tusken fort or one of the other spots to get from novice to master squad leader, but you have to be persistent! That's about all there is to it!


Swordsman:

For swordsman the skill tree you'll want to raise first is the offense tree. Your weapon of choice from novice to offense 4 should be a speed sliced 2 handed curved sword with a speed slice and plenty of speed powerups. I recommend that you get 1 or 2 extra swords to use in case the first one wears out, because more than likely you're going to lose one or even two due to repair failures or outright wearing the weapon out because it's so fast. Use two hand spin attack 1, which you get at skill level 4 in the brawler 2 handed swords tree, and hunt quenkers on Dantooine in a solo group. Look above in this chapter for the basic essential knowhow area to learn how to set up a good macro for your attack, and if you haven't already, read up on the area attack method of taking down lairs for the fastest experience possible. Once you earn offense 2, you'll want to switch to area attack 2, and at offense 4 switch to area attack 3.

Once you do get to offense 4, start working on the techniques tree for the speed bonuses, and continue using area attack 3 until you get to master. You might also want to try your hand at huurton stalkers now, since your damage per second should be a LOT better, due to the increased damage range of your area attack, and they give a good bit more experience. If you're not satisfied with stalkers, keep hunting quenkers for a while, but try the stalkers again later when you get a few more skill boxes in swordsman, as they give even better experience per kill as you gain more skills. They should give you about 3900-4000 per kill when you have around 10 skill boxes.

After you get the techniques and offense trees to level 4, go ahead and get level 4 in defense. Once you get everything up to level 4 except for finesse, unless you had some extra combat xp already saved up from another profession, you'll only have to kill 7-8 lairs to get master. That's about it! If you do it right, mastering swordsman should take about 2 or 3 days of steady grinding, for 10-15 hours per day.


Teras Kasi Artist:

For Teras Kasi Artist, the skill tree you'll want to raise first is the Power Techniques tree up to 4. Your weapon of choice from novice to power 4 should be a speed sliced vibro knuckler with plenty of speed powerups. I recommend that you get 1 extra to use in case the first one wears out, because there's always that possibility that you might lose one due to a repair failure because the weapon is so fast. Use unarmed spin attack 1, which you get at skill level 4 in the brawler unarmed skill tree, and hunt quenkers on Dantooine in a solo group. Look above in this chapter for the basic essential knowhow area to learn how to set up a good macro for your attack, and if you haven't already, read up on the area attack method of taking down lairs for the fastest experience possible. Once you earn power techniques 3, you'll want to switch to spin attack 2.

Once you do get to power techniques 4, continue using spin attack 2 until you get to master, but switch to a damage sliced vibro knuckler with damage powerups. Make sure you get 1 or 2 extras of these in case you get a repair failure or your weapons just plain wear out from using them a lot. You might also want to try your hand at huurton stalkers now, since your damage per second should be a LOT better, due to the increased damage of your vibro knucklers, and they give a good bit more experience. If you're not satisfied with stalkers, keep hunting quenkers for a while, but try the stalkers again later when you get a few more skill boxes in TKA, as they give even better experience per kill as you gain more skills. They should give you about 3900-4000 per kill when you have around 10 skill boxes.

After you get the power tree to level 4, go ahead and get level 4 in balance conditioning, for the defensive bonuses, then work meditation up to level 4. Once you get everything up to level 4 except for precision striking, unless you had some extra combat xp already saved up from another profession, you'll only have to kill 7-8 lairs to get master. That's about it! If you do it right, mastering TKA should take about 2 or 3 days of steady grinding, for 10-15 hours per day.

Chapter 3: The Crafting Professions...


Basic Essential Knowhow:

In-game macros:

Ingame macros are extremely helpful in crafting as fast aas possible. They'll run through the crafting stages for you so all you have to do is click on the resources. First off go into the game options by pressing ctrl+O then go to "misc" and uncheck "confirm crafting actions". Don't forget to do this because it's necessary for all crafting macros. Now drag as many crafting tools onto your toolbar as you'll think you'll need, starting at the f1 slot and moving to the right. If you need more than 12 (some skills items require up to about 16-20 tools), just go down to the next row of your toolbar and start from the left. If your toolbar only has room for 12 slots, you just need to click on the bottom right or bottom left corner of it and drag to make it big enough to support 2 rows, 24 buttons. Now, to make the macro itself. Open up the new macro window, and name the macro "craft" or it won't work. Put this string of commands in the macro commands box:

/ui action toolbarSlot00;/selectDraftSchematic xx;/pause 4;/nextCraftingStage;/nextCraftingStage;/nextCraftingStage;/createPrototype practice noitem;/createPrototype practice noitem;/pause 4;/ui action toolbarSlot01;/selectDraftSchematic xx;/pause 4;/nextCraftingStage;/nextCraftingStage;/nextCraftingStage;/createPrototype practice noitem;/createPrototype practice noitem;/pause 4;/ui action toolbarSlot02;/selectDraftSchematic xx;/pause 4;/nextCraftingStage;/nextCraftingStage;/nextCraftingStage;/createPrototype practice noitem;/createPrototype practice noitem;/pause 4;/ui action toolbarSlot03;/selectDraftSchematic xx;/pause 4;/nextCraftingStage;/nextCraftingStage;/nextCraftingStage;/createPrototype practice noitem;/createPrototype practice noitem;/pause 4;/ui action toolbarSlot04;/selectDraftSchematic xx;/pause 4;/nextCraftingStage;/nextCraftingStage;/nextCraftingStage;/createPrototype practice noitem;/createPrototype practice noitem;/macro craft

Where it says, "/selectDraftSchematic xx", put in the number that corresonds with shadowpaws. The only way to find out which one it is is to test them out. Open up your crafting tool, then type "/selectDraftSchematic 00". If this is shadowpaw, stop and use 00 in place of xx for the macro. If it's not shadowpaw, change it to "/selectDraftSchematic 01" and continue until you get the right one, then use it for the macro. Everywhere in the macro where there's a pause, i.e. -- "/pause 4" might not be entirely accurate. It depends on your situation. I find that if you're on a broadband connection with low ping, it's best to use the lowest pause you can. I personally use a pause of about 2.5 seconds after selecting the draft schematic, and a pause of about 2 seconds after creating the prototype, but I'm on a broadband connection with really low ping, and I use an autoclicker macro, to speed it up as much as possible. If you're clicking manually, I find that a pause of about 4-7 seconds is best for the first pause, and about 2-3 seconds is best for the second pause. To end the macro when you're done, type "/dump".

How many lines in the macro is determined by how many crafting tools you have in it. For each crafting tool in addition to 5, remove the "/macro craft" part of the macro from the end, then add another line to the macro identical to the others, except add a line with a higher number for the "/ui action toolbarSlotXX" command for each additional tool in your toolbar. For example, if you want to add 5 additional tools, your macro would look like this:

/ui action toolbarSlot00;/selectDraftSchematic xx;/pause 4;/nextCraftingStage;/nextCraftingStage;/nextCraftingStage;/createPrototype;/createPrototype;/pause 4;/ui action toolbarSlot01;/selectDraftSchematic xx;/pause 4;/nextCraftingStage;/nextCraftingStage;/nextCraftingStage;/createPrototype;/createPrototype;/pause 4;/ui action toolbarSlot02;/selectDraftSchematic xx;/pause 4;/nextCraftingStage;/nextCraftingStage;/nextCraftingStage;/createPrototype;/createPrototype;/pause 4;/ui action toolbarSlot03;/selectDraftSchematic xx;/pause
4;/nextCraftingStage;/nextCraftingStage;/nextCraftingStage;/createPrototype;/createPrototype;/pause 4;/ui action toolbarSlot04;/selectDraftSchematic xx;/pause
4;/nextCraftingStage;/nextCraftingStage;/nextCraftingStage;/createPrototype;/createPrototype;/pause 4;/ui action toolbarSlot05;/selectDraftSchematic xx;/pause
4;/nextCraftingStage;/nextCraftingStage;/nextCraftingStage;/createPrototype;/createPrototype;/pause 4;/ui action toolbarSlot06;/selectDraftSchematic xx;/pause
4;/nextCraftingStage;/nextCraftingStage;/nextCraftingStage;/createPrototype;/createPrototype;/pause 4;/ui action toolbarSlot07;/selectDraftSchematic xx;/pause
4;/nextCraftingStage;/nextCraftingStage;/nextCraftingStage;/createPrototype;/createPrototype;/pause 4;/ui action toolbarSlot08;/selectDraftSchematic xx;/pause
4;/nextCraftingStage;/nextCraftingStage;/nextCraftingStage;/createPrototype;/createPrototype;/pause 4;/ui action toolbarSlot09;/selectDraftSchematic xx;/pause
4;/nextCraftingStage;/nextCraftingStage;/nextCraftingStage;/createPrototype;/createPrototype;/macro craft

If you have too many lines, though, be forewarned; you'll have to copy and paste the macro into the macro box each time you start the game or load a new zone. I usually have a text file on the desktop for this purpose. To rebind your keyboard keys to support copy and paste, all you have to do is go into options, then "controls" then click "keymap". It's the bottom left button. Next you need to go to the tab up top labelled "chat" and rebind the keys for "chat edit copy" and "chat edit paste" to whatever you want them to be. Don't forget to click "apply" then "done". From now on you can copy and paste just like you're in a regular windows window, but be sure not to bind the commands over top of some keys that are already bound to another command! You can mess yourself up and have to restore the default keys to get it all back to normal.

Not using practice mode:

Now.... for both the macros above... if you'd wanted to keep your items you crafted, for personal use or to sell, the macro would be exactly the same, except that everywhere you see "/createPrototype practice noitem" you would instead just have "createPrototpye". If you want to keep your items you craft instead of losing them, you have a slight experience gain penalty, but just erase "practice noitem" everywhere you see it in the macro above.

3rd party macro programs:

Now that you have an in-game macro set up, you can just use it if you want, and click manually. However, a 3rd party macro, although deemed against the rules by the makers of the game, which makes using them punishable by banning your account, is very useful indeed. You can use a 3rd party macro to click for you so you can go afk while you craft. It's extremely handy. I'll tell you how to set one up here in a second, but first, the official warning:

*****WARNING!!!: USE MACROS AT YOUR OWN RISK!!!!! THEY ARE 3RD PARTY PROGRAMS AND ARE AGAINST THE EULA OF THE GAME, WHICH MEANS YOUR ACCOUNT COULD BE BANNED IF YOU USE THEM. I HAVE NEVER GOTTEN IN TROUBLE FOR USING ONE BUT CONSIDER YOURSELF WARNED!!!!!*****

Now that I've explained how to use the in-game part of the macro, you can either choose to use that, and just click manually, which takes longer, and can't be done afk, or you can set up a macro with Macro Scheduler for the best efficiency, and the ability to do it afk... Now then. Macro scheduler is simple. All you have to do is open up the Macro Scheduler program and hit the "record new macro" button. Next tab into the game and run your macro. At this point you just click on the resources for a few minutes to get their positions set into memory, then you hit the button to stop the macro recorder, and you tab out of the game back into Macro Scheduler. Now... in macro sheduler you have the ability to edit the macro you've just recorded. Go there and remove some of the excess commands, like the alt and tab. In fact, remove all the commands except the ones that... the only ones you need to keep in there are the ones that click, and the ones that cause a wait in between each click. Here is an example of a working click macro for use with Macro Scheduler:

// C:\Program Files\MJT Net Ltd\Macro Scheduler\click.scp
// Recorded on Monday, July 12, 2004, at 05:51 PM

//Recorded Events
Label>Start
MouseMove>125,187
LDblClick
Wait>0.25
MouseMove>213,187
LDblClick
Wait>0.25
Goto>Start

To end this macro while it's running just hit shift+escape! That's about all there is to it! If you want to avoid the hassle of failed crafting sessions, you might want to make the macro look more like this:

// C:\Program Files\MJT Net Ltd\Macro Scheduler\click.scp
// Recorded on Monday, July 12, 2004, at 05:51 PM

//Recorded Events
Label>Start
MouseMove>125,187
LDblClick
Wait>0.25
MouseMove>213,187
LDblClick
Wait>0.25
MouseMove>125,187
LDblClick
Wait>0.25
MouseMove>213,187
LDblClick
Wait>0.25
MouseMove>125,187
LDblClick
Wait>0.25
MouseMove>213,187
LDblClick
Wait>0.25
MouseMove>125,187
LDblClick
Wait>0.25
MouseMove>213,187
LDblClick
Wait>0.25
MouseMove>125,187
LDblClick
Wait>0.25
MouseMove>213,187
LDblClick
Wait>0.25
MouseMove>125,187
LDblClick
Wait>0.25
MouseMove>213,187
LDblClick
Wait>0.25
Press Esc * 8
Goto>Start

(All I did was simply loop the click commands a few times before repeating the macro, putting a command to hit the escape key 8 times just before the loop. This way, you hit escape several times to surpass the crafting error windows that make it a lot harder to run the macro afk, because any little lag spike will mess you up. You may feel better with a longer or shorter pause before the macro hits escape to clear the macro. If you want to make the pause in between the loop shorter, simply remove some of the click/wait commands, and if you want to make the pause longer, just add some more, like I did. Personally, I recommend going down to about line 100 with the clicks before you tell it to press escape 8 times and start over.)

Now that you have your click macro set up and ready to use, start your ingame macro and the click macro and you're all set! You should be able to figure the rest out on your own! Also please note that you may not be able to activate the macro while in-game. You may have to alt+tab out of the game, then activate the macro, then alt+tab back into the game for it to work effectively. You might also try adding a 10 second pause to the beginning of the macro, so you have plenty of time to get back into the game before it starts up.

REMEMBER THIS:

Whenever you run an ingame macro OR a 3rd party macro or both to craft, whether it be on a slow dialup internet connection or a high speed T1 line, you need to be in a secluded spot, such as inside your own house, or in the corner of a guild hall in town, or the top floor of the medical center, facing the wall, and looking down at the ground. This helps reduce the lag on your system which will increase your crafting speed and efficiency by a good 50% in some cases, possibly more!!! One other thing worth mentioning is that you should ALWAYS and I mean ALWAYS be sitting on the ground when you craft, and have the mouse in the "arrow" mode and not the "little green crosshairs" mode. The reason for this is you will frantically jerk around left and right, alerting everyone who might see you that you're running some kind of macro that makes you jerk left and right and all around!!! DO NOT DO THIS, or you could get caught using a third party macro and get banned from the game!!! Be smart about it and you probably won't get caught!! I used crafting macros on 4 different characters, on 3 of which I unlocked my FSCS, so you can do it without getting caught, but you have to be smart and hope Sony isn't watching you!!

Grind Materials:

I just thought I'd throw this at you all to save you a lot of money buying materials for your grind off the Bazaar terminal. The best place to get cheap minerals is from "grind material" vendors. Each server has many of them, and they are fairly easy to find. Where you could buy 100,000 units of ore on the bazaar for possibly 200,000 to 400,000 credits, you'd be able to buy the same resources from a "grind materials" vendor for a lot less. Grind resources can usually be found for anywhere from 1 credit per unit to 3 credits per unit, with the average being about 2 cpu. I recommend before you shop off the bazaar that you go to Coronet or Theed or both, and look at the planetary map's vendors tab for resource sellers. Take your speederbike to any shops you find and shop around! You'll probably be glad you did!

Harvesting your own resources:

Another well known way to get resources for your grind is to harvest your own. (Look at Section 2, Chapter 3 for a detailed description of how to mine for resources for personal use or profit.)


Artisan:

Engineering, Domestic Arts, and Business:

Resources Required (Estimates Only): 11,000 gemstone, 5,500 Metal.)

Your best bet for crafting at novice artisan is water survey devices. Each one requires 19 units of metal and 8 minerals. Since metal IS a mineral, you can just buy a stack of 5,500 metal and only have to click on one thing to get from novice to your next targetted skill. Just be sure to make them in practice mode. I recommend that the first skill you work on be domestic arts 4, because with this skill comes the ability to craft large glasses, which require 100 gemstones each and give 210 general crafting experience per combine in practice mode. For speed these are the single best item for general crafting experience in the game. If you're working on a crafting profession that doesn't require master artisan or domestic arts 4, I still highly recommend that you work on domestic arts 4 for large glasses because in the time it takes you to craft up to novice in whatever skill you're working on using water survey devices or clothing and armor crafting tools, you'd have been able to have done it twice probably if you'd worked on domestic arts 4 and used large glasses for your grind instead. The only drawback is it costs more money to go up the domestic arts skill tree if you don't need it. If you're on a budget, I recommend you craft water survey devices up to engineering 1, then switch to clothing and armor crafting tools until you get novice in the skill you're working on. Otherwise craft water survey tools until domestic arts 4, then large glasses all the way until master artisan or novice in your target crafting skill. This is by FAR the fastest way to gain general crafting experience.

Surveying:

Before you start, I suggest you find an image designer to stat migrate your quickness, stamina, focus, and willpower up as high as you can get them, in order of importance from left to right. Next, your best bet for surveying is to first off open up any survey device. I recommend you get one of each, and try to find a concentration of about 70-80% inorganics/organics somewhere fairly close to an NPC or player artisan trainer. The rest is fairly easy. All you have to do is begin sampling by typing /sample and your character will go through a skill animation of kneeling on the ground and it will show a particle effect of some resources coming up out of the ground. I would say just to stop there, and watch the surveying experience roll in, but occasionally you'll get a little window that pops up asking you if you'd like to follow the survey device to a higher concentration of the resource, or something to that effect. This little window completely halts your surveying, so you need to take other steps to make it so you can work afk... I find that the best way to work around this is to simply put an object on the enter key!!! I use a stack of 3-4 nickels, then put my wallet on top of the nickels, so none of the other keys get pressed down, but the enter key is held firmly down. You can use anything, though. Some people use a 20 sided die from their Dungeons and Dragons playing days, and others would recommend you use a lengthy macro. I'm not putting the macro in my guide because it's much easier to just put something on the enter key, go afk, and come back to train every now and then so you don't hit your skill cap and stop gaining experience.

Artisan can be mastered in 1-2 days, depending on how much time you have to run the survey macro and what kind of crafting macros you have for the crafting part.


Architect:

General Crafting Experience:

To get novice in architect, see the Artisan section above in this chapter. Also read the tips about ingame and third party macros in the basic essential knowhow section at the beginning of this chapter for the most efficient and fast experience...

Construction, Furniture, Installations, and Buildings:

Resources Required (Estimates Only): 28k metal, 545k ore, 275k gemstone

First you need to work up to construction 1 by making armoires, which require 125 metal, in practice mode. From construction 1 until master, simply craft gungan head statues, which require 2000 ore and 1000 gemstone. Also make SURE you're making these in practice mode as well, because they're expensive to make. Architect is simple and straightforward, and can be done in under 2 hours if you have a macro set up like the one in the basic essential knowhow section at the beginning of this chapter.


Armorsmith:

General Crafting Experience:

To get novice in armorsmith, see the Artisan section above in this chapter. Also read the tips about ingame and third party macros in the basic essential knowhow section at the beginning of this chapter for the most efficient and fast experience...

Personal Armor, Layers, Deflectors, and Techniques:

Resources Required (Estimates Only): 200k Steel, 100k Iron, 70k Fiberplast

The first skill you should work on is personal armor 3. To get this you need to craft Armor Upgrade kits, which require 20 metal and 10 chemical. Be sure to make these in practice mode. Once you get personal armor 3, switch to Ubese armor shirts, NOT jackets! These require 30 steel, 20 iron, and 10 fiberplast. Also make these in practice mode for the experience bonus. You may find that you are unable to craft them, even at a crafting station. The reason for this is that you have to be near a PERSONAL crafting station, inside your own house. Just find any architect and have them make a generic small house for you if you don't already have one, and also have them build you a junk structure crafting station. From personal armor 3 until master, you'll simply be sitting at your crafting station in your house crafting ubese armor shirts, in practice mode. If you're using the fastest macros possible (both ingame and 3rd party) you should be doing these so fast that it requires 15 to 18 crafting tools to keep going non-stop LOL!!!! I know because I did it. You should master in no time. For me, running all possible macros I mastered in 1-2 days.


Chef:

General Crafting Experience:

To get novice in chef, see the Artisan section above in this chapter. Also read the tips about ingame and third party macros in the basic essential knowhow section at the beginning of this chapter for the most efficient and fast experience...

Entrees, Desserts, Mixology, Cooking:

Resources Required (Estimates Only): 105k Berries, 60k Water, 55k Fruit, 15k Wheat, 7k Oats, 3k Vegetables

Ok, at novice, make soypros. They require 10 cereal and 10 vegetables. DO NOT make your soypros in practice mode!!!! EAT THEM!!!! They give 40xp extra each time you eat the whole stack of Soypro, and they are 0 filling, so you get more experience from eating them than you would from practice mode . Once you get desserts 1, start making pastebreads in practice mode. They require 20 wheat, 10 oats, and 10 water. At desserts 3, switch from pastebreads to kliwik clusjo swirls in practice mode. They require 40 berries, 20 fruits, and 20 water. Continue to make swirls until you hit master chef. You should master in no time. For me, running all possible macros I mastered in 1-2 days.


Droid Engineer:

General Crafting Experience:

To get novice in droid engineer, see the Artisan section above in this chapter. Also read the tips about ingame and third party macros in the basic essential knowhow section at the beginning of this chapter for the most efficient and fast experience...

Production, Construction Techniques, Refinement, Blueprints:

Resources Required (Estimates Only): 430k Steel, 190k Fiberplast

From novice to blueprints 2, make MSE droids in practice mode. These require 53 metal and 15 chemical. When you reach blueprints 2, switch to advanced droid frame units, all the way until master. These require 150 steel, 70 fiberplast. Don't forget to make them in practice mode for the experience bonus. That's basically all you have to do to master droid engineer. You should master in no time. For me, running all possible macros I mastered in 1-2 days.


Tailor:

General Crafting Experience:

To get novice in tailor, see the Artisan section above in this chapter. Also read the tips about ingame and third party macros in the basic essential knowhow section at the beginning of this chapter for the most efficient and fast experience...

Casual Wear, Field Wear, Formal Wear, and Tailoring:

Resources Required (Estimates Only): 155k Steel, 140k inert petrochemical, and 16k fiberplast

From novice to field wear 2, make ribbed shirts in practice mode. They require 30 fiberplast and 30 metal. From field wear 2 to field wear 4, make link-steel reinforced gloves in practice mode, which require 50 inert petrochemical and 20 metal. From field wear 4 until master, make cartridge belts, which require 50 inert petrochem, 35 steel, and 25 metal. Don't forget to make them in practice mode for the experience bonus. You should master in no time. For me, running all possible macros I mastered in 1-2 days.


Weaponsmith:

General Crafting Experience:

To get novice in weaponsmith, see the Artisan section above in this chapter. Also read the tips about ingame and third party macros in the basic essential knowhow section at the beginning of this chapter for the most efficient and fast experience...

Melee Weapons Crafting, Firearms Crafting, Munitions Crafting, and Weapon Crafting Techniques:

Resources Required (Estimates Only): 460k steel, 6k chemical

From novice until firearms crafting 1 you should craft weapon upgrade kits in practice mode. These require 20 metal and 10 chemical. Now, for one of the longest crafting grinds since I mastered armorsmith with only armor upgrade kits...... From firearms crafting 1 ALL the way until master weaponsmith, you'll be crafting projectile rifle barrels in practice mode. They require 31 steel and 15 metal. You should hit master in 2-3 days of steady grinding if you have all the best possible macros and plenty of time on your hands to make sure everything is working properly.


Chapter 5: Non-Combat, Non-Crafting Professions (Or Hard to Classify)...


Entertainer:

Image Design:

Basically, to get from novice entertainer to level 4 in image design, you're going to need 2 things. One is a companion to help you get experience faster, and the other will be an image design tent. These are in most major cities, including Coronet on Corellia, and Theed on Naboo. There are others, but I recommend these 2 since these are usually the most populated cities on a server, and are the best for finding people to help you gain experience. Now... you CAN image design yourself for experience, but it's VERY slow and VERY arduous. I highly recommend you get a friend to help you by letting you image design on him. There's a trick I'm about to mention, also... I think it works but I've never tried it, so you'll have to find out for yourself, but I think I heard that you can image design more than one person at a time. Try getting 2 friends to let you image design them at once, and see if it works better. There's like a 5 minute pause in between image design actions, so having more than one person there to help you with it would be extremely helpful in getting to level 4 faster. I mastered image design before they added the pause in between image design actions, and the image designer tents, otherwise I'd probably have an answer for you on whether this is possible or not. Sorry guys... I normally try to know everything about something before I post it in a guide, but I figured that it would be better to put this knowledge out there for you to try, than to completely hide it from you and not at least give you the chance to see if it can help you. Basically, with image design, you're going to want to try every single possible action you can use on your friend, and find out which one gives the best image design experience. Once you find that one, you basically have to sit and use it over and over until you reach your next skill level. Once you get the next level, you start all over with trying new skills out on your friends until you find out which one gives the best experience. Rinse and repeat until you're level 4 in image design, basically. Some people who are working on musician and dancer like to image design in the cantina while they're working on their entertainer dance or musician skills. I see nothing wrong with this, so long as you're already working on musician and dancer. If you don't need dance or musician experience anymore, though, I advise you to do it in an image design tent, because there's supposedly a bonus to image designing times inside the tent. The developers said there is a 5 minute timer inside the tent, and a 10 minute timer outside the tent, if I'm not mistaken, although it might be as low as 2 minutes inside the tent and 5 minutes outside it. Again, I'm sorry to have such lacking information regarding image designers here guys, but as I said, I mastered before they put the time limit in between image design actions, and have yet to get a chance to try the skill after the change more than a couple of times. Ah yes... one more thing. If you have a lot of people helping you with image design experience, and you're having trouble keeping your mind regenerated to full before the next image design action you have to do, make sure first thing, that you're sitting down. This regenerates your stats something like twice as fast as when standing. Also, you might want to try either stat migrating your focus as high as it will go, or buying some bio engineered vasarian brandy and/or vagnerian canapes. I find that these are extremely helpful with almost every skill I'm working on. They're one of the most versatile foods in the game when it comes to helping you with many many different professions, and this is mostly because your mind stats are basically ALWAYS important. This can take a few days to a week, depending on how many people you have to help you and how much time you have. Image designer used to take about 45 minutes, but they recently changed it so it's really long and difficult.

If anyone knows any tricks to image designer I didn't mention here, please email me at -Thanks!

Musician (The easy way):

Resources Required (Estimate Only): 35k Metal

I have an unusual technique for getting to level 4 in the entertainer musician tree, but it's actually the fastest way to level the skill, even when you get to the musician profession... it's called CRAFTING! Instead of sitting there flourishing to your heart's content while dancing the night away, wasting precious time, I ran an afk macro crafting musical instruments! All the way from novice musician to level 4 in entertainer musicianship, craft slitherhorns! . I did the math, and where I was getting only about 75 experience per 10 seconds doing the usual flourishes at level 3 or 4 in musicianship, I was getting 90 experience by crafting slitherhorns, and I could craft 1 every 5 seconds!!!!!! So basically that's it... craft slitherhorns until level 4. Be sure you craft them in practice mode for the experience bonus, and each one takes 45 units of any kind of metal to make. I was able to do it in a few hours. It wasn't very tough at all. To learn some tricks on speed crafting using ingame and third party macros, go to the beginning of Chapter 4: The Crafting Professions... and read the basic essential knowhow at the beginning of that section. Now... I'm obligated to explain how to do this the other way as well, in case you don't want to use crafting macros, you just plain don't have the money for 35k units of metal, or you're not working on dancer too. If you're not working on dancer as well, you won't be able to save up the entertainer healing experience, and you'll be sitting there with level 4 in musicianship but no healing experience to take you on to novice musician, so... if you'd rather play music than make instruments, read the next section to learn how...

Musician (The hard way), and Dancer:

First of all, for musician and dancer both, you'll need to join an entertainer group in either Coronet cantina or Theed cantina. The reason I chose these two cantinas is because they're both full of entertainers and people to be entertained, which is good for getting into a good entertainer group, and also good for getting entertainment healing experience. Preferably you're going to want to join one with 20 members, but anything will do, so long as you have the knowledge that you get an experience bonus for each person you have in your group who is actually PERFORMING -- i.e. either dancing or playing an instrument, you will get more experience. Second of all, you'll either have to take a break every 2 hours to get your quickness stat buffed, or take the easy method of stat migrating your quickness and stamina as high as they'll go. I prefer the image designer stat migration method because it saves money in the long run, and you can go afk more than 2 hours, however I mostly would use the stat migration method for the elite dancer and musician professions, rather than entertainer, because I can get entertainer mastered, excluding the image design part, in less than 6-12 hours. Now that you're all set up, and in a group, with your stats properly migrated or buffed, you're going to need to start off with your very best song or dance, and in the case of musicians, using your very best instrument for your skill level. Musicians are limited to what song they can play in a group, as they can only play what everyone else in the group is playing, so it's kind of beneficial to them that their instrument has a large effect on how much experience they gain per flourish instead of what song they're playing. For dancer it's all about the dance they're dancing. Remember: For musicians, if the band is playing a song that's too hard for you, most entertainer groups will be MORE than happy to switch the song to something you can handle. If they're not willing, you'll have to leave the group or find one that will change the song to one you can handle. For novice entertainers, the best song is starwars1, the best instrument is the slitherhorn, and the best dance is rhythmic. For level 1 in musician, use rock (or whatever song the band is playing.) and play a fizz. At level 2 in musician use starwars2 (or whatever song the band is playing.), and at level 3 in musician use folk (or whatever song the band is playing.) and play the fanfar instrument. For dancer, at level 1 use basic2. At level 2 use rhythmic2, and at level 3 use footloose. Now then... for dancer and musician both, the best way to go is to use flourishes as much as possible. They give experience on top of the experience you get every 10 seconds for just being in a band dancing or playing music. You have 8 different flourishes for each song, and it doesn't matter which ones you use to get the experience. You have to perform at least 3 or 4 flourishes I think it is, to get the maximum experience gain every 10 seconds, but I personally use 6. Here's the macro I'd use for dancer:

/flourish 1;/flourish 2;/flourish 3;/flourish 4;
/flourish 5;/flourish 6;/pause 5;/startdance rhythmic

(If you have a song better than rhythmic, replace the word "rhythmic" in the macro above, with the word for the best dance you have.)

And here is the macro I'd use if I were a musician:

/flourish 1;/flourish 2;/flourish 3;/flourish 4;/flourish 5;/flourish 6;/pause 5;/startmusic

(Note that I didn't include a song after the "/startmusic" command in the above macro... this is because you automatically start playing the same song as the rest of the band when you type the /startmusic command, but with dancer, you dance whichever song you want, so you have to specify which. With dancer, though, like I said, the entire band plays the same song, so you don't have to specify.)

Entertainment Healing:

Usually, by the time you get to level 4 in dancer, your entertainment healing will also have hit level 4, providing you're in a good full group in either Coronet or Theed cantina, however, sometimes it doesn't, and you're forced to sit there a little longer, trying to get the rest of the entertainment healing experience you need. If this is the case, use the best instrument or dance you qualify for and just wait it out. If you're a musician at level 4, you'll want to use the kloo horn, and if you're at level 4 in dancer you'll want to use the dance called "formal".

That's basically all you need to know to reach master entertainer as fast and as easily as possible! Like I said, if you do it right, you can get everything but image designer in 6-12 hours. The image design part takes a good bit longer, ranging from a couple days to a week, depending on how many people you have helping you, and how effectively you use your time, but it's a necessary evil now that Sony changed it so that image designers are the ONLY profession that can migrate stats, yet it takes a VERY LONG TIME to get to master. Oh well. Go figure.


Medic:

Organic Chemistry:

Resources Required (Estimates Only): 2k organics and 2k inorganics

For tips and tricks on getting the experience as fast as possible, using in-game and third party macros, go to the above chapter, Chapter 4: The Crafting Professions, and read the basic essential knowhow section at the very beginning of the chapter.

From novice to level 4 in organic chemistry, the only thing you'll need to craft is biological effect controllers, which require 6 organics and 6 inorganics. Craft these in practice mode for the best experience possible, since practice mode gives an experience bonus.

First Aid, Diagnostic, and Pharmacology:

For all the techniques below you're going to need good stimpacks. If you're going to work on all 3 of these skills, I highly recommend you work on pharmacology first, so you can use better stimpacks because, with the better stimpacks comes better healing ability, and thus more experience per heal, which leads to mastering medic as fast as possible. Once you get pharmacology up to level 4, work on first aid up to 4, because with first aid you get injury treatment bonuses, which even further adds to the strength of your heals. Finally you should work on diagnostics up to level 4. I have yet to find out exactly what diagnostics does, despite the fact that it's supposed to make you heal faster... I simply haven't noticed a drastic enough change to even see what kind of a change it is... At novice medic you need to use the best Stim B's you can find. These can usually be found on the bazaar terminals in theed and coronet, and are generally easy to find in strengths as high as 350-400. Don't worry about the quality of these, though, and you're not going to really even need very many of them. I'd say 5 full packs should be plenty enough to get you to pharmacology 2. At pharmacology 3 you get to switch to Stim C's. C stims are a little harder to find than stim B's but sometimes they're on the bazaar terminals too. You should be fine with about 5-10 packs of these as well. If you can't find them on the bazaar hit ctrl+P and try to find a master doctor on the list who will probably recommend a good med shop to go to. Try to get some of exceptional strength; something along the lines of about 600-700 strength should be the best you can get, but I think 500 or 600 should be fine for a grind. At Pharmacology 4 You make the jump to Stim D's which, like stim C's are harder to find with a decent strength, but if you can get some with around 800-1000 strength, your grind will be a lot faster.

Now for grinding techniques. The first one, and the most obvious one is to simply go join a group somewhere. Dantooine mining outpost and dathomir science outpost are the two most common places to find a pickup group. The next most obvious one is to go to Coronet or Theed cantina and heal the action of all the entertainers hanging around dancing/singing. You can also go to the Geonosian Biolab on Yavin 4 and heal everyone you see there. It's a very effective way to get medic xp, as is doing the same at Fort Tusken on Tatooine or the Force Crystal Hunter Caves on Dantooine. The Tusken Fort and the Crystal Hunter Caves are both on the POI tab for their respective planets, but the Geonosian Biolab isn't listed anywhere. To get there you need to hit the Labor Outpost on Yavin 4 and head due north. The waypoint is -6450 -360.

If you don't feel like running around finding people to let you heal them, and you have a willing friend, you can do this technique, which is the best of them by far, if you meet the requirements... First, you need a friend with a pet, and his pet needs to know the trick2 command. Next you need to make sure your friend has plenty of bio engineered vagnerian canapes and vasarian brandy to increase his focus. He also needs an entertainer to buff his focus. I think the musician buffs your focus and willpower, while dancers buff your mind, but I might be wrong. I never worried too much about mind buffs except for medic grinding. Finally, your friend needs to get his action buffed for at least 2000 by a master doctor, but preferably the buff should be for 2500 points, and do NOT buff his stamina or quickness. These stats regenerate the action and make it harder to run out, so it's VERY important to leave these unbuffed. In fact, you should have your friend wear a full set of composite armor to make his stamina and quickness as LOW as possible. Due to the encumbrance of the armor it could be as low as 1 point in each, if his stamina and quickness were low enough to start out. It also helps to have his action stat migrated as high as it will go, but this part isn't absolutely necessary. Once you're all set, run this simple looping macro to have his pet do the trick2 command, over and over. The trick here, is that the trick 2 command depletes some of your action each time you use it, and you'll be healing his action every 5 seconds... Here's the macro:

/tellpet trick2;/macro trick2

(To get this entire method to work, you have to name this macro trick2 or it won't loop. Finally, the last thing you need to do is make sure he loops the macro about 7 times. You'll notice that if he types "/macro trick2" after he has the macro all set up, he'll start losing maybe 500 action every few seconds, but if he runs the macro twice at the same time, it jumps up to maybe 700-800. To get it running at full blown strength, you need to spam the server with it about 7 times, which should make him lose about 700 action over and over again, so that his action is almost immediately depleted back to 0 every time you heal him.)

Also, here's a nice little macro to help you heal your friend without having to click the heal button once every 5 seconds...

/healdamage;/macro healdamage

(You need to name the macro "healdamage" and you need to type "/macro healdamage" to get it started, plus you have to have your friend who you're doing the healing on or it won't work.)

The only thing you need to remember, once he has his macro running and his mind isn't depleting like wildfire is the progression of skills. You should go up the pharmacology tree first. Start with Stim B's like I recommend a couple of paragraphs above, until you get to pharmacology 3, then switch to Stim C's. Finally when you get to pharmacology 4, switch to the most powerful Stim D's you can find, and continue the macro until you get first aid 4. The last skill you get, (which is obvious since it's the only one left), is diagnostics. If you pull this macro off right, you can be master medic, less the crafting part, in only an hour or two, possibly even a half hour.


Scout:

Survival:

Resources Required (Estimates Only): 10k Hide, 5k Bone

For tips and tricks on getting the experience as fast as possible, using in-game and third party macros, go to the above chapter, Chapter 4: The Crafting Professions, and read the basic essential knowhow section at the very beginning of the chapter.

From novice scout to survival 2 you'll be crafting basic camp kits, which require 10 hide and 5 bone. From survival 2 to 4, you'll switch to crafting multiperson camp kits, which require 20 hide and 8 bone. Don't forget to craft both types of camp kits in practice mode for the experience bonus. If you don't have the money to buy 15k units of resources, you're going to have to earn it! A budget way to gain survival experience is to sit in the best campsite you can make while you craft, or just to sit there and do nothing, depending on your situation. After about 10 or 20 minutes the camp fills up on experience, and when you disband it, you'll get quite a bit of survival experience. What I mean by "fills up" on experience, is the camp kit literally won't give you any more experience once it hits its maximum number, so it's best to disband it and put down another camp kit for optimum survival experience.

Trapping:

To get from novice scout to trapping 1, your best bet is to craft wire mesh traps and to just go outside any city and throw the traps at a couple of butterflies until you qualify for trapping 1. Go train up to level 1 in trapping, then make some more wire mesh traps. These traps are going to take you all the way to master range if need be, because they require the least resources to make out of all the trap types, yet still give the same experience as all the other traps, all the way to level 4 in ranger trapping. Once you get a healthy amount of wire mesh traps made up, and are ready to work on getting trapping 2, head back outside the city. I find that humbabas or any mid level creature is great for trapping experience at this level. Be sure you get buffed, and that you're wearing a full set of composite or Ubese armor if possible. I think you can do this with one or the other but I'm not sure because I always had a full set of composite and was decked out in buffs before I went out to do much of anything. Anyway, pretty much any creature will do, just as long as it's not a completely newbie creature like a butterfly or a gnorrt. I think gurrcats worked well. Just go outside the city, not so close that all you find is newbie spawns, yet not so far away that all you find is tortons and high level stuff that your traps won't work on yet. I'm almost POSITIVE that humbabas were great at this level, and they're all over the place near Coronet on Corellia. Once you find one, just stand there, throwing traps over and over until you qualify for trapping 2. You might even want to keep standing there until you hit your skill cap if you have enough traps for it. Your cap should be 50% more than the requirements to hit trapping 2, I think. Once you're done, go back to town and train, and make up some more traps. Now that you're at trapping 2, go back out and find another humbaba or something to get you to 3. Anything that gives about 300-500 trapping exp should be fine, and shouldn't be able to hurt you too badly through your buffs and composite/ubese. I rarely even saw my HAM drop at all when fighting these things for trapping experience. Continue at this until you qualify for trapping 3, then go back to town and train. The next things I used to trap were sharnaffs until level 4. These are only on Corellia, and can be gotten at a mission terminal, but you can't get them alone. I had to sit at the starport and ask people to let me invite them into my group just long enough to get a sharnaff mission, and it was probably very annoying, but I actually succeeded every time, and it only took maybe 10 minutes to get a group of about 15-20 people together to help me get the mission. It doesn't take nearly that many people if you have a few combat skills, but I actually had I think none at the time, once, so it was pretty hard to get enough people together to get me a sharnaff mission. Anyway, I think every planet has missions with difficult creatures such as sharnaffs, and you can try those if you wish, but Sharnaff are the ones I know, so I put them in the guide. You could probably work with Piket Longhorns or Plainswalkers on Dantooine if you wanted, or even savage quenkers, but they're a little tougher. The only thing you need to know about Sharnaffs is that the bulls might be too high level for your traps to work on them. Don't worry. There are 2 types of sharnaffs and if you hit the lair once, to get more to spawn out of it, you'll almost certainly get a few of the regular non-bull sharnaffs to come out of the lair to help you with your trapping experience. I remember once when I was earning trapping exp, my brother was there asking me why I was attacking all the poor defenseless animals. I told him that I was just throwing wire mesh traps at them, and that I didn't intend to kill them, so he seemed placated until some nearby adventurers came over to attack and eventual kill them. I told my brother it wasn't my fault lol... Regardless of my brother's and my antics, make sure you have buffs and composite/ubese armor before trying to trap tough creatures like these, and possibly you might even need novice medic skill with some 300-400 strength Stim B's for rough situations. If you don't have any of these you can try it, but if it's too rough, you may need to earn some credits so you can afford at least a set of Ubese, the buffs, and some decent Stim B's.

Anyway that should get you to level 4 in trapping pretty quickly. It took me maybe 1-2 hours to get it done. The most time consuming part of it was crafting the actual wire mesh traps...
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Old 06/27/2005, 12:03   #4
 
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Exploration and Hunting:

These are the easiest skills to raise other than trapping. You can earn scouting experience in a number of ways. The worst way is to use mask scent and hope that the creatures don't detect you. You'll get maybe 50 to 100 scouting experience each time, and it takes a long time, and is really boring. You can actually jump on your speederbike and drive around a planet raising the experience this way, but every time you're detected, your mask scent breaks, so you have to get off the bike and remask every time that happens. Anyway, that's why I said this is the worst method... well, actually the worst is probably fishing, but you can try it anyway! LOL... it's kind of fun, and the fish look cool on the wall. The best by far is to just join a group and harvest their kills. You might have to give them all your mission rewards or something, in exchange for them letting you come along, but it shouldn't be a problem. I normally went to Dathomir Science outpost and found a random stranger to let me tag along with him out of the kindness of his heart, because each time you harvest those Enraged Rancors, which they're usually hunting, you get a whopping 1800-2000 scouting experience, and there are about 6 to 15 rancors per lair!!!!! If you're working on saving up their meat, hide or bones to sell to a chef or doctor or something, I recommend going up the hunting tree first, but it doesn't really matter otherwise. You can also gain scouting experience on Dantooine in a group at the mining outpost, hunting slinking voritor hunters, but they only give about 1000 scouting experience per kill.


Combat Medic:


Medicine Crafting:

Resources Required (Estimates Only): 20k Lokian Wild Wheat and 20k Tattooinian Fiberplast OR 14k organics and 14k inorganics

For tips and tricks on getting the experience as fast as possible, using in-game and third party macros, go to the above chapter, Chapter 4: The Crafting Professions, and read the basic essential knowhow section at the very beginning of the chapter.

The reason I give two choices for the types of resources you can use, is that you can either craft regular biological effect controllers, which require 6 units of any organic and 6 units of any inorganic, or you can craft advanced biological effect controllers, which require 18 units or Tattooinian Fiberplast and 18 units of Lokian Wild Wheat to make. The easiest and fastest way is to craft the advanced ones, but they cost more money and are harder to find. If you can't find them or you don't have enough cash, you can fall back and make the regular ones, but it does take longer. The plus side is that regular organics and inorganics can easily be found on the bazaar terminal all the time, not to say that I haven't been able to find plenty of Lok Wheat and Tat Fiberplast almost every time I browsed the Coronet or Theed Bazaar terminals. Don't forget to craft them in practice mode, also, or you might run out of resources before you get to level 4, not to mention it's a lot slower without the practice mode experience bonus.

Combat Medic Support, Ranged Healing Speed, and Ranged Healing Distance:

For the healing experience portion of combat medic, you're going to want the best stimpack E's you can find. The good ones range in strength from about 1500 to 1700 strength as I remember, but due to your master medic skill bonuses you'll be healing for about 2500-3500 per shot. This is whopping experience, and you should be able to get about 600-1000 healing experience per heal, HOWEVER, where are you going to find a nice steady reliable source or people with THAT MUCH of a need for healing? Realistically, you can't. Now... you can go to a cantina and heal the entertainers there for 700-1500 points of action every 30 seconds or so on average, or you can take a more aggressive approach. By more aggressive I mean going to Dantooine or Dathomir and heal people while they're fighting in a group or solo, but this, by far, is still too slow...

If you don't feel like running around finding people to let you heal them, and being as slow as molasses at getting healing experience in the process, and you have a willing friend, you can do this technique, which is the best of them by far, if you meet the requirements... First, you need a friend with a pet, and his pet needs to know the trick2 command. Next you need to make sure your friend has plenty of bio engineered vagnerian canapes and vasarian brandy to increase his focus. He also needs an entertainer to buff his focus. I think the musician buffs your focus and willpower, while dancers buff your mind, but I might be wrong. I never worried too much about mind buffs except for medic grinding. Finally, your friend needs to get his action buffed for at least 2000 by a master doctor, but preferably the buff should be for 2500 points, and do NOT buff his stamina or quickness. These stats regenerate the action and make it harder to run out, so it's VERY important to leave these unbuffed. In fact, you should have your friend wear a full set of composite armor to make his stamina and quickness as LOW as possible. Due to the encumbrance of the armor it could be as low as 1 point in each, if his stamina and quickness were low enough to start out. It also helps to have his action stat migrated as high as it will go, but this part isn't absolutely necessary. Once you're all set, run this simple looping macro to have his pet do the trick2 command, over and over. The trick here, is that the trick 2 command depletes some of your action each time you use it, and you'll be healing his action every 5 seconds... Here's the macro:

/tellpet trick2;/macro trick2

(To get this entire method to work, you have to name this macro trick2 or it won't loop. Finally, the last thing you need to do is make sure he loops the macro about 7 times. You'll notice that if he types "/macro trick2" after he has the macro all set up, he'll start losing maybe 500 action every few seconds, but if he runs the macro twice at the same time, it jumps up to maybe 700-800. To get it running at full blown strength, you need to spam the server with it about 7 times, which should make him lose about 700 action over and over again, so that his action is almost immediately depleted back to 0 every time you heal him.)

Also, here's a nice little macro to help you heal your friend without having to click the heal button once every 5 seconds...

/healdamage;/macro healdamage

(You need to name the macro "healdamage" and you need to type "/macro healdamage" to get it started, plus you have to have your friend who you're doing the healing on or it won't work.)

Basically, once you have the macro running and his action is depleting like crazy, all you have to do is heal him every 5 seconds with the best Stim E's you can find. You should be healing him for 2500-3500 points per heal, and getting 600-1000 healing experience per heal. THIS EXPERIENCE ROCKS!!!!!!!!! It's best to do this near a combat medic trainer if you want to train faster, because your skills should roll in pretty fast. I'd say you can get completely from novice to master, minus the crafting portion of combat medic, in a couple hours easily. I highly suggest you DON'T use the pet trick in public, unless you want everyone to find out about it which would inevitably increase its chances of getting nerfed out of the game. I suggest you do it in a secluded part of town that nobody goes to very often if you can. Anyway, that's about it. Combat medic is extremely easy to get to master with this trick, and all you really have to do is sit there and run a looping macro on your friend while you enjoy some coffee or tea, and sleep or watch TV or something while you rake in the healing experience.


Dancer:

For dancer, all you need to do is go to a populated cantina like the ones in Corellia or Theed, and join an entertainer group. Get in the biggest group you can find, and keep in mind that you get an experience bonus for each person in your group that is actively PERFORMING. When people are just standing there, you don't get the bonus. You need to have either buffed quickness and stamina, or have those 2 stats migrated as high as they'll go, otherwise your action will get depleted over time and you won't get the best experience gains possible. I highly suggest you go with the stat migration method because you won't have to get buffs and refresh them once every 2-3 hours, which is a lot better for afk work especially, since without buffs to worry about a typical dancer macro can run all night overnight until the servers reboot. All you have to worry about is running the macro right so you don't end up stopping your dancing and getting kicked out of the group for not helping. The primary way a dancer gains his dance experience is through flourishing. He gains experience when he doesn't perform a flourish, but it's a negligible amount. To get the experience as fast as possible, you have to flourish as much as you can. It works in intervals of about 10 seconds, at the end of which you'll gain an amount of experience based on the skill level of the instrument you're playing. You need to do as many flourishes as you can to get the best musician experience possible, so here's the macro I suggest using:

/flourish 1;/flourish 2;/flourish 3;/flourish 4;/flourish 5;
/flourish 6;/pause 5;/startdance rhythmic2;/macro dance

(If you have a song better than rhythmic, replace the word "rhythmic2" in the macro above, with the word for the best dance you have. Also remember that if this macro isn't named "dance" it won't loop!!!)

The best dance for novice dancer is rhythmic2, so use that when you first start out. Since the better the dance you use, the better experience you gain, the first skill tree you should work on is dance knowledge. As soon as you get dance knowledge 1, switch from rhythmic2 to either popular2 or footloose. I think one gives more experience than the other but I'm not sure. It's been a while since I've been a dancer, so I can't remember which one it was, and the change was so little that it may have just been a coincidence. I suggest you try them both and see which one gives the best experience. At knowledge 2 you get to choose from formal2 and poplock2. Again, I think one gives slightly better experience than the other, so try them both and see which it is, for the best experience gains. At knowledge 3 you get both exotic2 and lyrical2, so try those both and see which is best. Finally, at knowledge 4, you get exotic3, so use that all the way through techniques 4, and the on until master dancer.

The first healing skill tree you should work on is a personal choice. I prefer the fatigue healing tree but you might choose the wound healing tree as well. The reason I would go with the fatigue healing tree is that if you think about it, every person who goes to the cantina for healing after a lot of combat is going to have battle fatigue, however, not so many have mind wounds. On the other side of that coin, however, mind wounds take longer to heal than battle fatigue, at least I think, but I never paid much attention to it. You can do both at the same time, even, if you want, so you target both types of wounds, but I recommend you go up to fatigue 4 before working on wound healing. The best way to finish off the healing trees is probably by getting a combat medic to apply disease to the mind stats of the people you're playing for, or by playing music in a camp in the wilderness, while 3-4 of your friends, (or even 1) survey for radioactive material, taking massive wounds in the process!!! If you do either of these methods, increase your wound healing tree first, then the fatigue healing tree. That's about it! Going from novice musician to master should take only about 3-4 days if you're on the game, either afk or not, macroing nonstop flourishes in either Theed or Coronet cantina! Good luck buffing people for fun or profit or both!


Doctor:

Medicine Crafting:

Resources Required (Estimates Only): 23k Lokian Wild Wheat and 23k Tattooinian Fiberplast OR 18k organics and 18k inorganics

For tips and tricks on getting the experience as fast as possible, using in-game and third party macros, go to the above chapter, Chapter 4: The Crafting Professions, and read the basic essential knowhow section at the very beginning of the chapter.

The reason I give two choices for the types of resources you can use, is that you can either craft regular biological effect controllers, which require 6 units of any organic and 6 units of any inorganic, or you can craft advanced biological effect controllers, which require 18 units or Tattooinian Fiberplast and 18 units of Lokian Wild Wheat to make. The easiest and fastest way is to craft the advanced ones, but they cost more money and are harder to find. If you can't find them or you don't have enough cash, you can fall back and make the regular ones, but it does take longer. The plus side is that regular organics and inorganics can easily be found on the bazaar terminal all the time, not to say that I haven't been able to find plenty of Lok Wheat and Tat Fiberplast almost every time I browsed the Coronet or Theed Bazaar terminals. Don't forget to craft them in practice mode, also, or you might run out of resources before you get to level 4, not to mention it's a lot slower without the practice mode experience bonus.

Wound Treatment, Wound Treatment Speed, and Medicine Knowledge:

For the healing experience portion of doctor, you're going to want the best stimpack E's you can find. The good ones range in strength from about 1500 to 1700 strength as I remember, but due to your master medic skill bonuses you'll be healing for about 2500-3500 per shot. This is whopping experience, and you should be able to get about 600-1000 healing experience per heal, HOWEVER, where are you going to find a nice steady reliable source or people with THAT MUCH of a need for healing? Realistically, you can't. Now... you can go to a cantina and heal the entertainers there for 700-1500 points of action every 30 seconds or so on average, or you can take a more aggressive approach. By more aggressive I mean going to Dantooine or Dathomir and heal people while they're fighting in a group or solo, but this, by far, is still too slow...

If you don't feel like running around finding people to let you heal them, and being as slow as molasses at getting healing experience in the process, and you have a willing friend, you can do this technique, which is the best of them by far, if you meet the requirements... First, you need a friend with a pet, and his pet needs to know the trick2 command. Next you need to make sure your friend has plenty of bio engineered vagnerian canapes and vasarian brandy to increase his focus. He also needs an entertainer to buff his focus. I think the musician buffs your focus and willpower, while dancers buff your mind, but I might be wrong. I never worried too much about mind buffs except for medic grinding. Finally, your friend needs to get his action buffed for at least 2000 by a master doctor, but preferably the buff should be for 2500 points, and do NOT buff his stamina or quickness. These stats regenerate the action and make it harder to run out, so it's VERY important to leave these unbuffed. In fact, you should have your friend wear a full set of composite armor to make his stamina and quickness as LOW as possible. Due to the encumbrance of the armor it could be as low as 1 point in each, if his stamina and quickness were low enough to start out. It also helps to have his action stat migrated as high as it will go, but this part isn't absolutely necessary. Once you're all set, run this simple looping macro to have his pet do the trick2 command, over and over. The trick here, is that the trick 2 command depletes some of your action each time you use it, and you'll be healing his action every 5 seconds... Here's the macro:

/tellpet trick2;/macro trick2

(To get this entire method to work, you have to name this macro trick2 or it won't loop. Finally, the last thing you need to do is make sure he loops the macro about 7 times. You'll notice that if he types "/macro trick2" after he has the macro all set up, he'll start losing maybe 500 action every few seconds, but if he runs the macro twice at the same time, it jumps up to maybe 700-800. To get it running at full blown strength, you need to spam the server with it about 7 times, which should make him lose about 700 action over and over again, so that his action is almost immediately depleted back to 0 every time you heal him.)

Also, here's a nice little macro to help you heal your friend without having to click the heal button once every 5 seconds...

/healdamage;/macro healdamage

(You need to name the macro "healdamage" and you need to type "/macro healdamage" to get it started, plus you have to have your friend who you're doing the healing on or it won't work.)

Basically, once you have the macro running and his action is depleting like crazy, all you have to do is heal him every 5 seconds with the best Stim E's you can find. You should be healing him for 2500-3500 points per heal, and getting 600-1000 healing experience per heal. THIS EXPERIENCE ROCKS!!!!!!!!! It's best to do this near a combat medic trainer if you want to train faster, because your skills should roll in pretty fast. I'd say you can get completely from novice to master, minus the crafting portion of combat medic, in a couple hours easily. I highly suggest you DON'T use the pet trick in public, unless you want everyone to find out about it which would inevitably increase its chances of getting nerfed out of the game. I suggest you do it in a secluded part of town that nobody goes to very often if you can. Anyway, that's about it. Doctor is extremely easy to get to master with this trick, and all you really have to do is sit there and run a looping macro on your friend while you enjoy some coffee or tea, and sleep or watch TV or something while you rake in the healing experience.


Image Designer:

Image designer has gotten a lot harder since before they nerfed the profession, adding a time limit in between each image design action, but it's still very doable. To get started, you need to stat migrate your focus as high as you can get it, or be prepared to use up a lot of vagnerian canapes and vasarian brandy. You can also work on focus enhancements from a musician. Depending on how many people you have letting you do image design work on them, you might not even need anything more than stat migrated focus, or you may have to go all out, and use the food or focus enhancement from a musician as well. You shouldn't have to use all three, but the stat migrated focus is highly recommended. Although you can stat migrate on yourself, I suggest you get a partner to help you get the experience, because you get a LOT more experience from designing on another person than you get solo. Designing yourself gives only something like 10% of the experience you'd get if you have a partner. I'm not saying, though, that you can only design on one other person, though! You can design on as many people as will help you! It's also mutually beneficial to find another image designer to trade experience with, plus you can make a friend in the process . One other thing I can recommend is that you do all your design work in an image design tent like the ones in Coronet and Theed. There is a pause, as I've already said, before you can do another image design action on someone, and when inside the image design tent, this pause is a lot less than it is outside the tent. If you're working on musician or dancer in the cantina, you can dance or play music while designing other people in your entertainer group, and you actually get the experience a lot slower, but it can't hurt while you're already working on entertainer experience! Remember that. If you can't be in two places at once, it's always good to do something in one place that you can't do in both, but can still do in one place a little less effectively... Did that make sense? LOL... Anyway...

The final thing I can tell you about image design is that you should definitely work on the facial tree first. All of the image design actions that yield the best experience are in the faces tree. Early on you work on eye size, which gives a good bit more than anything else in the lower level image designer trees, and there's nose length and width, which is also extremely good for faster experience gains. Finally, later on, you get to modify their chin, cheeks, and jaw. It's been a while since I worked on image designer, but I think jaw is the biggest one. Once you get to where you can modify the jaw you can start working on the other trees, but I recommend that if jaw comes at faces 2 or 3, to keep going until faces 4, and to experiment with ALL of the image design techniques you get as you get them, because since the change some could be better now than they were, or they may have added a few since then that I don't know about yet. Regardless, try them all and see for yourself which ones give the best experience because I haven't done it in a while, and I'm only about 95% sure that jaw is the best one. I am however 100% sure that you should work on the faces tree first, unless they added some new features I don't know about since they changed the profession, which I highly doubt they did, and even if they did I doubt they'd add anything as good as the jaw and other high level facial modifications.

Image designer, since they changed it, is extremely hard to raise now. It probably falls in the ranks of the grinds that people hate to love and love to hate, right up there with Bounty Hunter, Merchant and politician, but there's nothing we can do about it. Just stick it out! After 3-4 days you might have it mastered, or it might take a week or two, but once you can stat migrate people and change the physical features of your friends and even random strangers (another good way to make friends, by the way, LOL) you'll be happy you did the grind! Well... maybe not so happy, but I don't know! It's your time! lol...


Merchant:

Ok. For merchant you're going to want 10 small Naboo Houses, and a nice area where you can set them all up somewhere near Theed. There is a certain type of small Naboo house that only takes up 1 build slot instead of the usual 2 slots that every other small house I've ever seen uses up. It's either style 1 or style 2, I'm fairly convinced, but it's been a while since I got them from my architect friend so I can't remember which style they all were. All I know is it's the small round one, and it's style 1 or 2. Talk to any master merchant or master architect and you'll find out in probably 5 minutes or less. The next thing you do, after you set up all 10 of your houses is put an access fee on them. You should get access fees way back in artisan, so you don't have to do anything other than open the structural management terminal for each house, set the access fee to 1 credit, and the time interval to 15 minutes. We'll get more into the access fees part in a little while, but first, I'm going to tell you how to set up the rest of your merchant resources that you have at your disposal for the maximum experience gain.

Inside one of your houses place a vendor. It doesn't matter which house or vendor style, just that you remember which house has your vendor. This house will be the future location of all of your future vendors as well. Put the vendor down, then initialize him, and put some kind of item on the vendor for 7 billion credits or something equally insane so nobody buys it. If you qualify to put down another vendor, do that until you have as many vendors as you can have inside the house. Put an item on the other one for a few billion credits after you initialize him as well, so they both have items on them.

Now that you have all 10 houses set up with access fees on 9 of them, and all the vendors you can support in one of the houses, you're ready for the fun part... getting people to help you with merchant experience. You get 50 experience every time someone enters one of your 9 access fee houses and pays the 1 credit access fee. With this in mind I'd like to also point out that there's a bug, if you can get it to work, where you can go up to the door, click the pay button, then immediately walk in the door again and click the pay button again, for double the merchant xp per house. It's a tricky thing to learn how to do right, but I discovered how to do it about 90% of the time after only about a half hour of practice. With this method, and an alternate character, or dedicated friend, you can rack up about 700-900 merchant xp every 15 minutes that they are actively "running the gauntlet" for you. Running the gauntlet is the affectionate term we who have worked on Merchant have given to the act of running in and out of all 9 houses to pay access fees. A great way to get people to run the gauntlet for you is to go to Theed and shout that you're paying people money to run it for you. To prove that they've run the entire gauntlet for you, you might want to put an item on the floor of each house, and only pay them if they can tell you what the items inside the houses were. One enterprising individual I heard about was actually selling people 500 apprentice experience each time they ran the gauntlet for him. He'd let them teach him ranged support 1 in the marksman tree over and over about 25 times until they'd earned 500 apprentice xp.

The other way you gain merchant xp is this: You gain about 50xp per vendor per hour that it is active. By "active" I mean that it has to be loaded "in the world" which is only possible when there is an actualy player within 100 meters or so of the vendor. To be safe, I'd put all of my vendors in one house next to each other, and park a friend or another character of mine on another account right next to all of my vendors, to get this 50 xp per hour per vendor. Another way you gain experience from these same vendors, is browsing them. If another player, besides yourself, browses your vendor and clicks the refresh button, so they actually see the items, you'll get 50 experience. They don't have to buy anything, but they do have to click refresh so they can actuallyu see the item in the list on the right side of the vendor window. I am pretty sure that it only works on a person to person basis, every 15 or 20 minutes one person can give you experience for ONE of your vendors, and can't just click on all of them and give you experience for each one. By this I mean that one person can click on all your vendors and hit refresh, but you only get the experience from one of the vendors, and not all of them. You do however get the hourly experience from each vendor just being active, so I highly recommend you have as many vendors out as you can qualify for. Now, I want you to keep this in mind. I've tested it and I think I'm right, but there's a chance I was wrong, because merchant exp comes to you in kind of wierd intervals, and you'll get it sometimes in lumps... You may get experience from one person clicking on multiple vendors and hitting refresh, but I am almost positive that you only get the experience from ONE vendor browse per person per 10 or 15 minutes. Ok, with that said, there's a macro you can run that will let you actually automate the browsing of your vendors, so if you have another account or a friend who will help you, have them stand in front of one of your vendors and run this macro:

/ui action vendorUse;/pause 5;/ui action defaultButton;
/pause 30;/sit;/pause 5;/stand;/macro merchant

(Now, to get this macro to work, the other character on your friend's or your other account has to actually have the vendor targetted, and be standing right next to it. The macro itself has to be named "merchant" or this macro will not loop.)

The above macro alone will get you about 300 merchant experience per hour per person who uses it. This coupled with the base 50 merchant experience you get per vendor per hour, can make you quite a good bit of merchant experience per day, especially if you have several friends or other accounts running this macro, and a few other people running the gauntlet for you as well.

The only other thing about vendor experience that I definitely need to mention, is that you need to work on the management skill tree first thing! Each level in the management skill tree gives you another vendor to keep in your house, and you get 50 experience per hour for each additional vendor! This may not seem like much, but 1,200 merchant xp every 24 hours per vendor is a Godsend when you realize how slow and difficult a journey Master Merchant actually is! REMEMBER!!!!! Your vendors have to have someone within about 20-30 meters of them at all times so they don't unload from the world and stop giving you experience!!! If you run the gauntlet, with an alternate character, make sure your merchant is sitting comfortably in your house with your vendors! If he's in Theed shouting for help with merchant experience, you might want to be sure your houses are all close together, so your alternate character that is running the gauntlet is still close enough to the house to keep the vendors loaded, and just to be safe, go back into the house after you're done running the gauntlet to keep them loaded as often as possible!!!!!

That's actually all there is to getting master Merchant. All the other skill trees are unimportant, unless you'd like to list your shop on the planetary map, which you get the ability to do at level 3 in advertising. This gives you the ability to register your vendor with the planetary map.


Musician:

For musician, first of all, I'm going to teach you the fastest way humanly possible to earn the musician experience to get you to novice musician: crafting instruments instead of playing them. KEEP IN MIND: If you already have a LOT of healing experience saved up, and TONS of money, this is the method for you. You need to know that healing experience in the musician profession takes a LOT longer to acquire than the regular musical experience, so by the time you get to level 4 in musical knowledge and techniques, you're likely going to have a lot more work ahead of you to get the rest of your healing experience saved up. This method, with that in mind, is NOT A GOOD IDEA, unless you already have a lot of healing experience saved up, and a lot of credits lying around. It is MUCH faster to craft instruments using macros, but it's a LOT slower if you end up crafting your way to musical knowledge and techniques 4, but have no healing experience at all saved up. For the last time, make sure you're not crafting just to be doing it, if you want to master the skill as fast as possible. You need to get healing experience first and foremost, unless you have a lot saved up already, and the only way to do this is to actually play your instrument.

If you use this method, you must keep in mind that it costs money for resources to make all these instruments, and you won't be getting any healing experience while you sit there crafting. With this in mind, you may want to skip this method entirely, and just play music until you get to master. However, if you already have some healing experience saved up from doing dancer or entertainer for an unusually long time, or you simply can't find an entertainer group to join, you'll probably want to use the instrument crafting method to gain experience because it's a LOT faster than just sitting there playing an instrument all night afk... For starters, to get the 50k musician experience just to get you to novice musician, you must use 26k units of metal. Any metal will work, (Note that ore is not a metal) and you'll be crafting slitherhorns in practice mode. Remember to craft them in practice mode for the experience bonus, unless you plan on opening "Smitty's Slitherhorn Shop" sometime in the near future. For more advice and tricks on using third party and ingame macros for speed crafting, see Chapter 4: The Crafting Professions... and look at the basic essential knowhow section at the very beginning of that chapter.

Once you actually get novice in musician, the drawbacks of crafting instruments become apparent, as you must use up 110k units of metal to get to level 2 in musician techniques, which gives you the ability to craft your next instrument, the Traz. The traz only gives 120 musician experience per craft, so to get from level 2 to level 3 in techniques, it's going to require another 90k metal, and this metal has to be non-ferrous, such as coppers or aluminums. Ferrous metals, which you won't be using just yet are steels and irons. Be sure to craft the Traz in practice mode for the experience bonus you get, unless you play on opening "Smitty's Slitherhorn and Traz Shop" sometime in the near future. Anyway, once you get to level 3 in techniques, you're going to start crafting Bandfills, which give 150 musician experience and require 50 ferrous metals (steel and iron) and 25 aluminum. To get from level 3 to level 4 crafting bandfills you're going to need about 80k iron or steel, and 40k aluminum. Don't forget to craft them in practice mode for the experience bonus, unless you want to open up "Smitty's Slitherhorn, Traz, and Bandfill Shop" sometime in the near future. Finally, at level 4 in musician techniques, your going to start crafting the great big whopping instrument, the "Nalargon" Which gives 450 Musician experience, and requires 150 Ferrous metals, such as steel and iron, and 75 aluminum for EACH ONE!!! Be sure you're crafting these in practice mode for the experience bonus unless you're actually seriously really planning on opening a musician shop in the near future. It's going to take approximately 210k steel or iron and 105k aluminum just to craft for enough experience to get level 4 in your other musician skill, "musical knowledge". Now then. If you just crafted all these items, and you have absolutely NO healing experience, you're in for the long hard realization that you just spent millions of credits on resources to craft instruments to master musician faster, but the healing experience part is actually the worst part of the entire skill!! You should have read my warning at the VERY BEGINNING of this chapter that said only to use this method past novice if you already have a LOT of healing experience saved up, and money to blow, because the only time crafting instruments past novice musician is useful at all, is if you already have healing experience saved up, as it's a much faster way of gaining musician experience than actually playing.

And now, for the musical part of the musicain skill... all you need to do is go to a populated cantina like the ones in Corellia or Theed, and join an entertainer group. Get in the biggest group you can find, and keep in mind that you get an experience bonus for each person in your group that is actively PERFORMING. When people are just standing there, you don't get the bonus. You need to have either buffed quickness and stamina, or have those 2 stats migrated as high as they'll go, otherwise your action will get depleted over time and you won't get the best experience gains possible. I highly suggest you go with the stat migration method because you won't have to get buffs and refresh them once every 2-3 hours, which is a lot better for afk work especially, since without buffs to worry about a typical dancer macro can run all night overnight until the servers reboot. All you have to worry about is running the macro right so you don't end up stopping your dancing and getting kicked out of the group for not helping. The primary way a musician gains his musician experience is through flourishing. He gains experience when he doesn't perform a flourish, but it's a negligible amount. To get the experience as fast as possible, you have to flourish as much as you can. It works in intervals of about 10 seconds, at the end of which you'll gain an amount of experience based on the skill level of the instrument you're playing. You need to do as many flourishes as you can to get the best musician experience possible, so here's the macro I suggest using:

/flourish 1;/flourish 2;/flourish 3;/flourish 4;
/flourish 5;/flourish 6;/pause 5;/startmusic;/macro music

(To get this macro to work it has to be named "music" or it won't loop! Remember that!)

The best instrument for a novice musician is the Traz, so use that when you first start out. The better the instrument you use, the better experience you gain, and the song has very little if anything to do with it, just play whatever song your band is playing (usually the highest song possible for the lowest level musician/entertainer in the group). With that in mind, that the instrument you play is key, the first skill tree you should work on is musical knowledge all the way to level 4. Keep playing the Traz until musical knowledge 2, at which time you should switch to the Bandfill instrument. At knowledge 3, use the Chidinkalu Horn, then the Ommni box at level 4. Once you're level 4 switch to musical techniques until you get it to level 4, then continue playing music until you get both of your healing trees maxed out. Basically the Ommni box is your best instrument until master.

IMPORTANT!!!!!: Once you start using the Ommni box at level 4 in musical knowledge, and even the Nalargon when you hit Master, your macro stays the same, but you have to remember it won't work unless you have your instrument targetted. Target all your instruments that sit on the floor and you'll be fine.

The first healing skill tree you should work on is a personal choice. I prefer the fatigue healing tree but you might choose the wound healing tree as well. The reason I would go with the fatigue healing tree is that if you think about it, every person who goes to the cantina for healing after a lot of combat is going to have battle fatigue, however, not so many have mind wounds. On the other side of that coin, however, mind wounds take longer to heal than battle fatigue, at least I think, but I never paid much attention to it. You can do both at the same time, even, if you want, so you target both types of wounds, but I recommend you go up to fatigue 4 before working on wound healing. That's about it! You should finish off the healing trees a good while after you finish off techniques and knowledge! The best way to finish off the healing trees is probably by getting a combat medic to apply disease to the mind stats of the people you're playing for, or by playing music in a camp in the wilderness, while 3-4 of your friends, (or even 1) survey for radioactive material, taking massive wounds in the process!!! If you do either of these methods, increase your wound healing tree first, then the fatigue healing tree. Going from novice musician to master should take only about 3-4 days if you're on the game, either afk or not, macroing nonstop flourishes in either Theed or Coronet cantina! Good luck buffing people for fun or profit or both!


Bio-Engineer:

Clone Engineering, Tissue Engineering, and Engineering Techniques:

Resources Required (Estimates Only): 110k organic, 80k creature food (meat), 80k creature resources (hide bone etc.) (keep in mind that if you are a macroer you may have to add 10-20% more meat to this number if not a lot more because you'll likely be putting a lot of meat into the "organic" slot. If you are really good at modifying your macro you can reduce this down to only about 10-20% of your total meat, but if you're not any good at it you may have to add as much as 50% extra meat to make sure you have enough to grind to master with afk macros.)

At novice Bio Engineer you will be starting out crafting constrictor cloths. These require 20 units of flora food (beans, wheat, rice, oats, corn, tubers, vegetables, fruits, berries, etc.), 15 units of creature food (any kind of meat), and 15 units of creature resources (meat, bone or hide, There's a chance I'm wrong about the bone part and it's just hide or meat). You'll need to craft approximately 95 of these to get you to tissue engineering 1.

At tissue engineering 1, you gain the ability to create micronutrient supplements, which will take you all the way to master from here. These require 20 units of organics, 15 units of flora food, and 15 units of creature food. You have to be careful while crafting these because if you're using a macro you may actually put the expensive and hard to find meat in the "organic" slot, wasting 20 units of it in a spot where you could just as easily use corn or wheat or bone, just about anything organic. Meat is a lot more valuable than just any old organic, so what I had to do was set up my macro so that it would click about 5 times on the slot for my organic, then click once on the meat, that way I had maybe a 10 or 15% chance of putting meat in the organics slot instead of a 50% chance. That's the only way I can tell you to fix the problem other than do it manually, and sit and click and click and click, the entire day away, for several days... You can easily change your macro around so that it clicks 5 times in one spot then 1 time on the other spot, by simply making 3-5 lines of "Ldblclick> 544, 344" or whatever location it actually is, this is just an example, then adding "Ldblclick> 524, 344" only once. You'll need to loop this over and over of course, and add a command to hit the escape key 8-10 times every 30 seconds or so, to get past any craft failures or errors, even lag, but I think you can do it. Just tailor one of the example macros above in the guide, such as the one in the basic essential knowhow area at the beginning of Chapter 4: The Crafting Professions... to the appropriate click locations.

It takes me generally 1-2 days to completely macro through the crafting portion of Bio Engineer. The hardest part is generally finding all that meat. I spent LOTS of money on meat from the bazaar terminal most of the times that I mastered Bio Engineer, and it was basically just a hassle to click and bid on all those little slots where there was 500-1000 meat here and there, then saving up money to buy more, and finally going to all those cities on all those planets to get the rest of the meat I needed. Flora resources and hide/bone are always really easy to find on the bazaar terminal in Theed or Coronet, so at least that part shouldn't be a problem.

DNA Sampling:

First off, you need to go find a master tailor and buy enough bio engineered clothing to give you a +25 bonus to your mask scent skill. Buffs will also help, but aren't very necessary for this next part unless you don't have any composite or ubese armor to wear to protect you from those small creatures you're about to start sampling. Your focus stat is very important for sampling. Without high focus you can run out of mind points fast from sampling DNA, so I recommend stat migrating it and your willpower as high as they'll go before starting on this. Musician buffs are also good, but they wear off, so stat migrating is the way to go. For an added bonus, I highly recommend some bio engineered vasarian brandy and vagnerian canapes. I've heard here and there that focus also helps with your success rate with DNA sampling, but I haven't noticed any difference to be honest with you. It can't hurt though, as it also helps with your mind depletion rates, and the willpower that comes with these foods also increases your mind regen. I highly recommend as well that you mask scent every time it wears off. If you're macroing it doesn't matter, but if you're just doing it manually, which is faster by the way, I suggest you mask scent a LOT because it helps with the success rate quite a bit, at least I am almost positive I noticed a significant change.

Now that you're all set up with what you need to get started, go outside any major city and sample dna for an hour or two until you qualify for DNA sampling 1. I personally prefer Keren, Naboo because there aren't any guards around so it's easier to macro the DNA sampling fairly easily there. When there are guards around, you'll automatically run up to one of them occasionally, and it will halt your macro for a while, until a new creature comes into range of the guard, which sometimes won't happen, and when it does, there's no guarantee that the guard won't fall back into your target list, starting the whole process again, which isn't a good thing. I'll give you the macro soon, by the way. If you're not going to use a macro for easy sampling experience it doesn't matter really where you do it, but if you are a macroer you can go afk for a few hours and come back with enough to train your next level, so it's very worth it. Also keep in mind that if you have DNA samples in your inventory you have to destroy them or you'll stop getting sampling experience. In fact, you'll fail every time once your inventory is full. With this in mind, you can only sample for maybe 5,000 experience on an empty inventory before you fill up completely with samples, so it's not a very good idea to leave the macro running unattended for more than a couple hours unless you just don't want to get anything done.

Ok, now then. The macro...

/ui action targetSelf;/ui action cycleTargetOutward;/follow;
/pause 10;/sampledna;/pause 10;/sampledna;/pause 10;/macro sample

You may have to substitute "cycleTargetOutward" with "cycleTargetInward" to get it to properly cycle targets, and you may need to change the pauses to petfect it, depending on where you're campling. The pause 10 after the dna sampling might need to be made 11 or 12 or even more, depending on the lag your computer gets, and the pause after the follow might be too long or too short, depending on the average distance between you and most of the creatures around you.

Some people like to run this macro all the way until DNA sampling 2, 3, or even 4, if they don't want to do it manually somewhere else, but I personally just get it over with by leaving and tackling harder stuff as soon as I qualify for sampling 1.

Speaking of harder stuff to sample... Once you get to DNA sampling 1 and train the skill, head to Dantooine and get in a solo group. If you don't know what a solo group is, see Section 1, Chapter 2: Basic Essential Knowhow for a detailed description of what a solo group is and why people join them. Once you're comfortably in a solo group that you don't think is going to fall apart for 5-6 hours at least, you're ready to start on the sampling. Get some master doctor buffs and don a set of composite or ubese armor, and make sure you have a speederbike swoop. I also recommend that you get some decent 300-400 strength stim B's for rough situations. If you don't have all these things you'd probably be better off just doing the macros outside Keren, Naboo or earning some money until you can afford the armor, swoop, stims, and buffs.

Once you're sure you have everything you need, head to a mission terminal in the Mining Outpost and get 2 missions for Bol Pack Runners. Do not get seething Bol missions because I'm fairly sure these disease and you don't want to have your progress halted all the time by a crippling disease that forces you to go back to the outpost all the time for healing/disease cures. If you can't find the right Bol missions, just get the piket missions that pay 10-11k. They're called either piket plainswalkers, piket longhorns, or piket protectors. All the pikets give about the same sampling experience so it doesn't really matter which kind of piket mission you get, but you should wait until sampling 2 before you do these because they're a little hard to sample until then. From 1 to 2 try the Bols unless you don't have any other choice. The method here is simple. You need to get 2 missions in the same direction. Both should be North, for example.

Next you head to the nearest lair, and dismount from your bike, but not so close that you spook the creatures. I'd say 20-30 meters should be fine. Now immediately mask scent, and watch out for red creatures in the area, especially if you have a piket protector lair in front of you. Now that you are masked, hold down the shift key so you are walking instead of running, to even further lessen your chance of spooking the creatures. You'll know the creature's spooked if you see a little question mark or explanation mark over the creature's head. If it's spooked, IMMEDIATELY stop sampling from it, or it will attack you, and you'll have to either kill it or get back on your bike and run away until it stops chasing you. Generally if you leave it alone for a while and start sampling another one that's not spooked, it will revert back to calm status and you should be fine to sample it again shortly, but sometimes they stay mad at you for quite a long time after being spooked, and you may have to just leave and go to the next lair. If they're all spooked, and you're just having general trouble sampling them, head to the next lair. If in the event that you successfully sample from all of them and kill all of the first 3-5 from the first wave, hit the lair and immediately type /peace, or hit your /peace macro button. Make sure you're masked, again, and remember to mask again each time your mask falls. Do NOT forget to walk and not run, by holding the shift key at all times while you're sampling their DNA. Remember that if they're all spooked beyond sampling them any more, or if you take out all 10 of the creatures in the first 2 waves, head to the next lair. By the time you finish with the new lair and come back to the original one, it should be fully spawned with a full compliment of fresh new creatures again for your sampling pleasure. Theoretically, if you only sample from the first 2 waves, you can keep bouncing back and forth from one lair to the other until you're level 4 in DNA sampling . Once you get sampling 2, if you'd been working on Bols, now's a great time to switch to pikets. They give more experience but are a little harder to sample. Some people would tell you to stick with Bol's actually, but I have found a great deal of success with just sampling Pikets at level 2, and never really got too many failures to warrant going back to Bols.

After diligent sampling, non-stop, using the above described methods, I would easily get from sampling 1 to 4 in about 5-8 hours. Bio Engineer is actually a fairly painless profession if you know how to use macros to craft, and you use my sampling tricks right .


Ranger:

Wayfaring and Field Bioscience:

These are the easiest skills to raise other than trapping. You can earn scouting experience in a number of ways. The worst way is to use mask scent and hope that the creatures don't detect you. You'll get maybe 50 to 100 scouting experience each time, it takes a long time, and it's really boring. You can actually jump on your speederbike and drive around a planet raising the experience this way, but every time you're detected, your mask scent breaks, so you have to get off the bike and remask every time that happens. I sort of jumped the gun when I said that it was the WORST way, because fishing is probably the worst way, but to be honest, if you go to a higher level dungeon like the geonosian Bio-lab at -6450 -360 on Yavin 4 near the Labor Outpost, there are a lot of high level creatures like enhanced Kwi's and Klikniks you can raise your skill on fairly quickly, just not as quickly as by harvesting, which I'm about to describe in detail. I do however feel that there's one more thing worth noting about masking your scent for scouting experience. In the wayfaring skill tree you recieve several different camoflage kits, which enable you to be virtually undetected by anything in the game, so long as you are prone on the ground. You may find you have some decent luck getting scouting experience doing it that way, so try it if you want.

The best method of gaining scouting experience by far is to just join a group and harvest their kills. You might have to give them all your mission rewards or something, in exchange for letting you come along, but it shouldn't be a problem. I normally went to Dathomir Science outpost and found a random stranger to let me tag along with him out of the kindness of his heart, because each time you harvest those Enraged Rancors, which they're usually hunting, you get a whopping 1800-2000 scouting experience, and there are about 6 to 15 rancors per lair!!!!! If you're working on saving up their meat, hide or bones to sell to a chef, doctor or bioengineer or something, I recommend going up the hunting tree first, but it doesn't really matter otherwise. You can also gain scouting experience on Dantooine in a group at the mining outpost, hunting slinking voritor hunters, but they only give about 1000 scouting experience per kill. Using the harvesting method on Dathomir or Dantooine, you should be able to get both Wayfaring and Field Bioscience to level 4 in a matter of perhaps 5-6 hours.

Advanced Trapping:

To get from novice to trapping 4, you first need to make about 50-200 wire mesh traps. How many you'll need depends on the amount of trapping experience the creatures you're trapping give, so, if you have inventory room, I recommend you start out with about 30, which should be plenty to get you started. Now that you're stocked up on traps, head to Coronet on Corellia and try to get some people to join a group with you so that you have enough people to get high level difficulty missions from the mission terminal. If you have trouble getting enough people, you might even have to go to the Mining Outpost on Dantooine and get into a solo group there. A single sharnaff mission should be all you'll need to get from novice ranger to trapping 4, but I suggest you get 2 just in case someone comes along and destroys your lair. Before you head out to your mission, get buffed and put on a full suit of Ubese or Composite armor. If you don't have a set of armor, I suggest you earn some money until you can buy a set of Ubese at the very least. Another thing that helps a whole lot is some decent 300-400 strength stim B's and at least novice medic skill so you can use them. Now that you're decked out in gear, you're going to want to head to your mission, and find a Sharnaff Bull. If you can't find one, shoot or punch or smack the lair once to get the next wave of spawns to come out so you can get started with your trapping. The next part is simple. Throw traps at the Bull, over and over, until you either run out of traps or you reach your next skill level. If for some reason the Bulls aren't affected by your traps, which they should be, switch to the regular Sharnaffs, which spawn out of the same lair, until your next trapping level. If things get too rough for you jump on your speederbike and regroup. I suggest that if they hit your mind too much, you eat some vagnerian canapes and/or drink some vasarian brandy to give you a boost to your mind stats, and go back in traps a blazing.

Once you reach trapping 2 or 3, I can't remember, which, so let's say 3 just to be safe, you can do the same thing you just did with the Sharnaffs on Enraged Rancor missions outside the Dathomir Science outpost. They're a little rough to take hits from unless you've got really nice armor, buffs, and plenty of good bio engineered food, not to mention some medic skills to heal yourself with, and some good 300-400 strength stim B's, but it's doable, and they give about 1200-2000 trapping experience per trap thrown instead of the 600-800 (I can't remember) that the Sharnaffs give. If you just plain can't handle them just follow some guy around throwing traps at his rancors and you should get to level 4 in trapping in no time! If you do it right, and follow my instructions, ranger trapping should be a breeze, taking only a couple of hours, maybe 4 at the very most.

Frontiering:

Resources Required (Estimates Only): 40k Hide, 25k bone, 15k metal

From novice ranger to frontiering 2, you'll want to craft high quality camp kits which give 100 wilderness survival experience and require 30 hide, 15 bone, and 5 metal. Remember to craft these in practice mode, unless you want a few left over to actually sit in while you craft, to get the added survival experience from the campsite you're sitting in on top of the experience from the crafting. If you can't afford the resources to simply craft your way through to level 4 in Frontiering, the only other way is to either fish, or sit in camps that you craft. Some people like to put camps just outside a major city so more people walk through them, as many people are kind enough to know what you're doing and walk into your camp to help you out. The reason being that the more people that walk into your camp, even if they leave right away, the more camping experience you get, or rather the faster your camp accumilates it. When your camp has been in existence for 10-20 minutes it hits its cap for the survival experience it can give you when you disband it, so you're most likely going to want to disband a camp and set down a whole new one every 10-20 minutes so you get the best survival experience you can get. If you leave one camp out, for example, for about 3 hours, you're still only going to get 1000 survival experience when you disband it, however, if you have many camps, each being disbanded after 10-20 minutes, you'll get a lot of experience from each one. The cap is something like 500 and 2000 survival experience per camp kit, depending on which type of kit it is. I'm not too clear on the exact amount you get because I never really used this method for survival experience as I was a crafter first and foremost.

Anyway, once you get to frontiering 2 from crafting high quality camp kits or sitting there in your camps forever or both, your next camp kit will be the field base kit, which will take you all the way to frontiering 4. Sit inside your camps while you craft for the best experience possible, and if you can't afford all the resources required for crafting camps as your only means of experience, I highly suggest you earn some money until you can afford them, or just until you can afford enough to pay for the necessary resources for making camps to sit in, for the slow method of gaining the experience. If you haven't noticed, there's usually a slow, cheap method of doing something in this game, and then there's the faster method that takes a lot more money. LOL...

To get from novice to level 4 in ranger frontiering, I'd say it took me maybe 4-5 hours of afk macroing. Doing it the lengthy camp sitting way would probably take about 20-30 hours, but I've never tried it so I have no clue if I'm even close on that. For all the ranger skills combined, if you follow all of my methods, and have the money to be able to afford to do it the expensive, fast way, you should be able to get it all finished in about 11-15 hours total, maybe 20 if you slack off and don't do it very quick or efficient.


Politician:

Politician is probably the longest profession to master in the game, and the hardest, to boot. Before you can reach master, you have to be running a major city with more than 85 residents, and by residents I mean they have to have a house in your city, and it must be declared their residence. (You can only declare one house your residence, even if you have 10 total houses.)

Before you do anything at all, you have to save up 500 apprentice experience to get novice politician. Go to Chapter 1, Section 2: Basic Essential Knowhow for tips on easy apprentice XP.

In order to get started, you have to have 10 people, all living in your city, all with their house within your city limits, and ALL have to have their house declared as their residence. To be safe you may want a few more than 10 houses when you first start, something more like 15 would be good, or even 20 if you can get enough people who will be dedicated and devoted enough to your city to not just up and leave without telling you first, leaving you high and dry, or out in the cold, as they say. Within 24 hours of placing the deed for your city hall, if you don't have 10 or more houses in your city, all declared residences, you lose your city. With this in mind you're going to need to plan ahead. Get as many dedicated friends as possible to join you, and try at all times to keep gathering new people to live in your city. You are counted as a resident if you have a house there, so you actually only need 9 other people to get you started.

The next thing you're going to need is a city hall. You can buy one from a master architect for around 700k credits, give or take 2-300k. You can probably actually get one for as low as 300-400k if you know the person, or they're taking a loss, and sometimes you'll see them as expensive as 1 million or even 1.5 million credits. I suggest you spend about 500-700k on one if you can. Shop around if you have to, but just get a city hall. The hall is the backbone of your city, and without one you can't become a politician.

REMEMBER!!!: If you fall below 10 citizens, your city hall deed becomes destroyed, and you have to start all over.

Politician is an extremely expensive career, in that your city hall requires a maintenance fee to keep running, and you need to have cash to offer people who come live there, including buying them a new house to set up there, and paying some of their maintenance on the house if they don't want to pay it themselves. You'll need at least 700k to 2 million credits to start out your city, including the money you'll need to "buy" new citizens. You might also, while we're on the subject, try to think of something to tell prospective new citizens to reel them in. You've got to attract people or they won't want to help you as much... Tell them you're forming a guild or something, and actually form a guild... There are a lot of things you can tell people to get them to want to come live in your city, so start brainstorming now!!!!
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Old 06/27/2005, 12:04   #5
 
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The next thing on your political agenda will be getting new people to join your city. You're going to have to have, as I said, 85 or more residents in your city to reach master, so here's what you're going to need to do... Go to a very populated city with a lot of traffic, such as Theed or Coronet, on most servers, and begin shouting that you're giving away free houses, or just about anything you can think of.

After the initial 24 hours, your city hall becomes an outpost, if you have 10 or more citizens. Otherwise, it is destroyed and you have to start all over. 1 week later, your city goes through the next city cycle, and will be upgraded from outpost to village. You then, after this 1 week period of time, recieve 100 politician experience for every 1 declared residence in your city, or, if someone runs against you at the ballot box voting terminal, you'll only recieve 100 experience per vote in your favor. After another week goes by, if you have 35 or more people, your city gets another upgrade, from village to township, and you get 100 more experience for every citizen in your city. The next week, if you have over 55 citizens, it becomes a city, and finally, after reaching 85 citizens, your city becomes a metropolis.

Another important thing to know about being a politician is that there's a way to disable city zoning so just anyone can move in and declare residency. This is a GREAT way to get more people to come into your city so it grows even more, if you're not too concerned about looks, or anything like that.

The first thing you should work on once your city is up and running, as far as politician skills are concerned, is to get fiscal policy up to level 2. At level 1 you can register your city on the planetary map, for even more exposure, but it has to be a Township with more than 35 residents before you can register it on the map. At fiscal policy 2 you get the ability to put down a shuttleport, which will increase your exposure a LOT more than just having the city on the planetary map, because just any random stranger you can actually spend 200-300 credits and zip on over and see what's in the city! The next good upgrade I can think of is mission terminals, at civic policy 1, then skill trainers at civic policy 2. These are also largely helpful in increasing the popularity of your city. People love running missions from the terminals in a player city, ESPECIALLY if there's a skill trainer nearby as well. I recommend you put in as many combat oriented skill trainers as soon as you can, up to the limit of trainers that your city allows. Pistoleer is a good one, so are fencer, commando, smuggler, pikeman, carbineer, bounty hunter, rifleman, swordsman, and teras kasi artist. If people want training in the basic skills like entertainer or marksman, they're probably going to just go to Coronet or Theed, anyway, and the same goes for the crafting skills, since they're closer in the big city to bazaar terminals for resources, and the public crafting stations. The rest of the skills you gain don't really matter as far as the order of progression, but keep in mind a cloning terminal is very helpful, and you get those at martial policy 2.

If your city grows wildly, off the scale, even, and you're a metropolis pretty soon, you should master politician within about a couple months, but if you're slow going, it could take as many as 6 months or even longer. This is not a skill for the faint of heart, and since the Force Sensitive Character Slot is no longer based on profession masteries, you're probably only going to want to become a master politician if you're dedicated to the ideal of running a city, and have plenty of time, and patience...

Good luck with getting there! You'll need it .

Section 2: Credits, Credits, Credits...

Chapter 1: Missions for Cash...


Sony, in all of their infinite wisdom has made solo groups now split the money with each other when you complete a mission. This section of the guide was dependant on solo groups, so I have removed it. I'm very sorry.

Chapter 2: Harvesting Meat/Hides for Profit...

An EXTREMELY profitable means of earning credits is mastering ranger and harvesting creatures for valuable meat and hides for Master Doctors, Bio Engineers, Armorsmiths and Chefs. Top-notch resources, if they are on the current shift, can be looted from creatures, depending on the power of the creature, in lumps of 20 units to 200 units per creature killed and harvested!!! These units then turn around and sell for anywhere from 20 credits per unit to 300 credits per unit, depending on just how powerful and rare the resource is!!! This means that if there's a particularly powerful creature resource that sells for say, 150 credits per unit, and you happen to have found out at the beginning of its appearance on the server, and you hunt the creatures and harvest the resources for several hours per day for a whole week, you can have, say, 200,000 units of that resource by the end of that week. Now, at 150 credits per unit, if you have 200k units of the resource, imagine the profit!!!! Well, no don't imagine... let's do the math. 200,000 x 150 = 30 million credits for a week's worth of resources!!! I met one guy who has 8 computers, each with a commando/creature handler character. He would log onto all 8 characters at once and use them to hunt and collect all the resources he could. This man was going to the extreme, but getting it done HAHAHAHA....... He realized just how much money you could make selling high quality resources to master crafters of the server!!!!

It helps a lot to have master ranger if you plan on doing this for as much money as you can possibly get, as they get numerous creature harvesting bonuses. Also, get a high quality creature harvesting droid from a master droid engineer for the very best efficiency possible, if not an entire other account (If you have another computer or know how to run 2 instances of the game on one computer) just to follow you around and harvest your kills for even more resources! The good thing is that many of these resources are so good that the master crafters of the server run out of them after a few weeks or a month, so when they don't have any, they're willing to pay even more than usual for the resource!!! If you happen to go on vacation for a few weeks, or just want to hold out for better money on the resources, you can come back and make a killing later on when the resources are in short supply!!! Be warned, however, that if something else comes that's better, or just as good to take it's place, it might be a while before the product will become high in demand again, but all servers seem to have times when there are no decent resources of a particular type for weeks if not months! It's always a risk, and it's all pretty random, so do what you think is best in a particular situation.

To run multiple instances of SWG on one computer:

Go into your main Star Wars Galaxies directory on your computer. For me it's...

C:\Program Files\Sony\StarWarsGalaxies

Once you're there, create a new text document and name it user.cfg -- Inside this file you should copy and paste the text below EXACTLY as I have it here...

[SwgClient]

allowMultipleInstances=true

Save the file, then enjoy running 2 instances of the game!!!!


Here is a list of the resources that are the most commonly sought after for each profession...

Doctor:

Avian Meat:

High quality avian meat is extremely sought after by doctors. They mostly look for avian meat with high overall quality and potential energy, because these stats effect the strength of the buff packs they make. Duration and charges are also important for buffpacks, but not as important as the OQ/PE. The duration and charges are directly affected by the avian meat's overall quality, decay resistance, and unit toughness, with the unit toughness arguably being the least important of the three. So in short, when looking for a good avian meat to sell to a master doctor, look for something with high overall quality and potential energy most importantly, and of secondary importance is the unit toughness and decay resistance. -- Avian meat is harvested on various birdlike species all over the galaxy, ranging from peko pekos, Kaadu's and Nunas on Naboo, reptilian fliers of Dathomir, Perleks, Pharples and Flits on Lok, Carrion Spats and Rasps on Corellia, Vir Vurs and Rasps on Rori, Fynocks and Rasps on Talus, Dwarf Nunas on Tatooine, and finally, whisper birds and chokus on yavin 4.

Bio Engineer:

Dathomirian Insect Meat:

Bio Engineers use this to craft their Pet Stimpack C's, and they are likely to pay a good amount of credits if you can find plenty of it with the right stats. Overall quality and potential energy on this both need to be very high for this to be valued by master bio engineers. The unit toughness is also marginally important, because it has an effect on the charges of the stimpacks, so look for this stat as well when searching for sellable Dathomirian insect meat. -- Dath insect meat can be harvested on the corpses of Cavern Spiders, Gaping Spiders, and Shear Mites, all on Dathomir, as you probably guessed.

Chef:

Carnivore Meat:

This is used in Bivoli Templari, which chefs sell to doctors to increase their wound treatment skills. This food can make a doctor who buffs for 2250 suddenly change to 2500! Overall quality, potential energy, and decay resistance are the things people look for in a good carnivore meat, with decay resistance being the least important of the 2, as it only effects charges and filling, wheras the others both effect the effectiveness of the Bivoli Templari. -- If you can find good meat on the rancors of Dathomir, you'll be looking at a very lucrative experience ahead, as they give so much per harvest, but here are some other creatures that also have carnivore meat -- On Corellia: Gubburs, Sharnaffs, Razor Cats, Canoids, Wrixes, Dire Cats, Vrelts, Grondas, Slice Hounds, Gurrcats and Tabbages. On Dantooine: Grauls and Voritors. On Dathomir: Rancors, Grauls, Purboles, Kamuriths, and Rhoa Kwis. On Endor: Boar Wolves, Blurrgs, Borgles, Gurreks, Mantrigues, Squills, Hanadeks, Robas, and Remmers. On Lok: Kimogilas, Langlatches, and Kusaks. On Naboo: Veermoks, Chubas, Tusk Cats, Narglatches, Shaupauts, and Rawls. On Rori: Tortons, Borgles, Pugoriss, Kai Tok, Swamp Tusk Cat, Vrobalet, and Vrobals. On Talus: Robas, Torturs, Tusk Cats, Sludge Panthers, Wrixes, and Tabages. On Tatooine: Krayt Dragons, Squills, Dragonets, Dune Lizards, Rills, and Scyks. On Yavin 4: Gackle Bats, Crystal Snakes, Klikniks, Stintarils, and Woolamanders.

Armorer:

Wooly Hide:

This is used in composite armor, and overall quality, shock resistance, malleability and unit toughness are the most important stats for this resource, with malleability (affects encumbrance, and unit toughness (affects integrity) being the least important, but still important. -- Wooly hide can be found on the following creatures: Endor: Gurreks and Mantrigues. Corellia: Paralopes and Durnis. Dantooine: Huurtons and Thunes. Lok: Langlatches. Naboo: Gualamas and Peko Pekos. Rori: Tortons, Gualamas, and Vir Vurs. Talus: Paralopes. Tatooine: Banthas. Yavin 4: Mamiens and Woolamanders.

Harvesting resources from creatures is extremely profitable, but you have to either invest the time in finding where the good resources are, or have friends or contacts in the server's scout/ranger community who know where the good stuff is. Sometimes if you actually ask the buyers they'll be able to tell you where the good resources are as well. There is a major drawback to relying solely on creature resources for profit, though... There aren't always good creature resources on the server! With this in mind you may want to couple this method with the Resource Harvesting method below. Also remember that sometimes it takes a while to acquire good reliable customers who'll keep buying from you, but that's just the way businesses tend to work in real life as well... trust takes a while to build up, but once trust between a seller and a buyer have been established it's a very beneficial addition to a business relationship for both parties!

Chapter 3: Resource Harvesting:

This is the opposite side of the resource acquisition coin. With this method, rather than killing creatures and harvesting their raw resources, you place harvesters on the ground, in remote areas where the resource concentrations are the greatest, then sell these resources to master crafters all over the server! Far more people desire harvested resources rather than creature resources for the simple fact that more items require inorganics and plant material than hide/bone/meat! Every crafting profession requires some kind of metal, fungus, corn, wheat, chemical, etc. for their crafted goods, and the components therein!

Even cooler than the fact that everybody wants these resources is the fact that they take almost NO work to gather!!!!! That's right!!!! You put down your harvesters and feed money and power into them, then let them do all the work!!! All you have to really do is some running around to find a good resource, which typically involves running to other planets and taking a few shuttleports here and there. This work probably takes about 2-3 hours to check the entire galaxy for resources. Once you find something you want to mine, with high stats, all you have to do is go to that planet again, survey for a good 70-85% concentration of the resource, then put down as many harvesters as you can on that spot! All you have to do after that is feed them power and maintenance money then wait!!! You can wait for as long as they have power and maintenance money, meaning you can literally go adventuring and doing other things as long as your harvesters have power and maintenance to keep them running! At one time I had 3 seperate accounts, each with 10 heavy mineral harvesters. This brought in about 500 thousand units of high quality resources for me PER DAY. I typically sold these for 3 to 5 credits per unit, meaning I was making up to 2.5 million credits per day, minus the negligible cost of maintenance and power, just for running around for 3 hours every few days to find the best resources available!!!!! That's about 2 million per day if you assume that the harvesters require about 500k for maintenance and power fees, but I think it's more like 200k maybe 300k. It's been so long since I harvested that I can't remember, but know this... it's EXTREMELY profitable! If I were a Ferengi from Star Trek I'd create a new rule of Acquisition just for the harvesting business!!! It's THAT profitable!!!

Anyway, the only other thing you have to know about harvesting resources is that the buyers will try to really get a good deal on these when they're on the current shift. By shift I mean once per week the resources will all change, so you only have about 1 week's time to harvest a resource before it totally disappears. Now then... with this in mind, a weaponsmith, for example, will want to give 3 or 4 credits per unit for 950 overall quality, 950 conductivity copper, which is REALLY good, mind you, if it's on the current shift. If you wait about 1 month, the price of this copper skyrockets to about 10 to 15 credits per unit just because it hasn't been around for a while!!! That's just the way the system works, and if you learn to hold onto rare resources for a while you're sure to have a really lucrative time with the resource harvesting profession. There are numerous types of harvesters. You can harvest power, but it's not very profitable. It's the easiest to sell, yes, but it only sells for 1 credit per unit most of the time, if not for less.

There are Flora Farms, Natural Gas Extractors, and Chemical Extractors, in addition to the Power Harvesters and regular Mineral Harvesters, and they each come in 3 sizes. Each type of harvestor takes up 1 of your build slots, as well, so you're probably going to want to use up all 10 build slots on harvesters if you can, for the largest amount of profit. If you start running low on inventory room you may have to use the bank, sacrifice one of your build slots for a house in which to store items, or just buy another account to store the items on. If you do get another account there's nothing really stopping you from adding another 9 or 10 harvesters to your batch for even more money. You don't have to have the characters logged on at the same time, basically ever, and you can just give harvestor administrator rights to 1 character if you want, so you can handle it all from 1 character .

Now for some more information about harvesters... I'll start with the power harvesters because they're kind of different from the rest... You start with wind power generators, which are the cheapest and smallest. They have a very low rate of gathering wind power. The next step up is solar power generators, which gather solar energy. They're better than wind generators, and fairly good if you're not very wealthy, but they're not the best. The next step up is the fushion ion generator, which is the best by far. It collects radioactive energy, which damages and wounds you when you sample for good concentrations of it, but these generators actually pull in a LOT more than the other types of power collectors once you find some to harvest. Wind and solar survey devices do not damage you when you survey with them, but radioactives do. I can't remember, but I think you actually sample for radioactives using the mineral survey tool, rather than a radioactives-specific survey device. Power harvesters only require money for maintenance, and not power, because they kind of harvest their own power and use some of it to run themselves. Each type of power harvester requires a higher amount of maintenance money than the previous one, the more powerful they get.

Now... All other types of harvestors come in 3 types. Personal, medium, and heavy. These work exactly the same way as the power harvestors, in that they have increasing levels of power and money required to run them as they get more sophisticated and powerful, and they harvest minerals in the same way. The only real difference other than the cost to run them is that surveying for non radioactives doesn't damage or give you wounds, so it's much easier.


Here is a list of some various harvestable resources that are most in demand, what they're used for, and who buys them:


Armorsmith:


Composite Armor Segments: These are used in all pieces of composite armor an armorsmith can make. Since composite is the most popular type of armor worn on a server, with Ubese being second, the resources used in the making of these segments are highly important, and thus sought after if they are high enough quality. The resources used to make these segments are: Metal and Steel. The most important stats for the metal/steel used are: Malleability, Overall Quality, Decay Resistance, Unit Toughness, and Shock Resistance, With Unit Toughness being the least importance, as it affects durabiliy of the armor, and with Decay Resistance being the next to the least important, as it affects the rate at which the armor decays in combat.

Advanced Composite Armor Segments: These are used to create highly powerful composite armor which is better than regular composite armor. The resources used to make these segments are: Colat Iron, Polysteel Copper, and Kiirium Steel. The most important stats for the metal/steel used are: Malleability, Overall Quality, Decay Resistance, Unit Toughness, and Shock Resistance, With Unit Toughness being the least importance, as it affects durabiliy of the armor, and with Decay Resistance being the next to the least important, as it affects the rate at which the armor decays in combat.


Composite Armor Chestplates/Boots/Gloves/Arms/Legs/Helmets, etc: In addition to the segments listed above, in order to create quality composite armor, an armorsmith requires the following resources: Intrusive Ore, Known Solid Petrochemical Fuel, Nabooian Fiberplast, Aluminum, and Beryllius Copper. The most important stats for the metal/steel used are: Malleability, Overall Quality, Decay Resistance, Unit Toughness, and Shock Resistance, With Unit Toughness being the least importance, as it affects durabiliy of the armor, and with Decay Resistance being the next to the least important, as it affects the rate at which the armor decays in combat.


Ubese Armor Segment: Ubese is the second most popular armor an armorsmith sells, so there is generally a good chance that he'll be interested in looking for resources with which to make Ubese. These segments are instrumental in making Ubese armor, and the resources required to make these segments are: Iron, Steel, and Fiberplast. The most important stats for the metal/steel used are: Malleability, Overall Quality, Decay Resistance, Unit Toughness, and Shock Resistance, With Unit Toughness being the least importance, as it affects durabiliy of the armor, and with Decay Resistance being the next to the least important, as it affects the rate at which the armor decays in combat.


Advanced Ubese Armor Segment: These are the advanced segments used in making advanced Ubese armor. This armor is generally better than regular Ubese and the resources required to make it are: Axedite Iron, Neutronium Steel, and Fiberplast. The most important stats for the metal/steel used are: Malleability, Overall Quality, Decay Resistance, Unit Toughness, and Shock Resistance, With Unit Toughness being the least importance, as it affects durabiliy of the armor, and with Decay Resistance being the next to the least important, as it affects the rate at which the armor decays in combat.


Ubese Armor Boots/Jacket/Pants/Helmet etc: In addition to the segments listed above, in order to create quality Ubese armor, the following resources are required by the armorsmith, and thus probably sellable: Iron, Steel, Neutronium Steel, and Polymer. The most important stats for the metal/steel used are: Malleability, Overall Quality, Decay Resistance, Unit Toughness, and Shock Resistance, With Unit Toughness being the least importance, as it affects durabiliy of the armor, and with Decay Resistance being the next to the least important, as it affects the rate at which the armor decays in combat.

Chef:


Bivoli Templari: Bivoli is what Master Doctors use to buff your stats for 2500 points. Without it they'd be buffing for a maximum of only about 2300. Chefs make a good deal of profit from selling Bivoli, and the resources required to make it should be in fairly high demand. The resources required to make Bivoli are: Vegetables. The stats most important on the vegetables used in making Bivoli are Decay Resistance, Overall Quality, and Potential Energy, all of which are of equal importance, meaning you should look for vegetables with all 3 in order for them to be of the highest value.

Vagnerian Canapes: This is an extremely popular chef items, and thus the resources required to make it should sell extremely well. These resources are: Fruits and Berries. The most important stats for these resources are: Decay Resistance, Overall Quality, and Potential Energy, all of which are of equal importance, meaning you should look for fruits/berries with all 3 of those stats very high in order for the resource to sell well.

Vasarian Brandy: This are another extremely popular chef item. Brandy is just as popular as vagnerian canapes. The resources required to make it are: Fruits and Berries. The most important stats for these resources are: Decay Resistance, Overall Quality, and Potential Energy, all of which are of equal importance, meaning you should look for fruits/berries with all 3 of those stats very high in order for the resource to sell well.

Vercupti of Agazza Boleruuee: This chef item increases the health, action, and mind of the user by over 1,000 points, and the duration is over 10 minutes, sometimes over 15, depending on the resource used. This is another fairly popular chef item, and is extremely helpful in player versus player combat, making the resources used to make it likely very popular with master chefs. The resources required to make Vercupti are: Lubricating Oil, and Tubers. The most important stats for these resources, and those that you should look for before harvesting the resource are: Overall Quality, Potential Energy, Decay Resistance, and Flavor. Flavor is of slightly lesser importance as it only affects the duration of the buffs, and the decay resistance is also of slightly lesser importance than the other stats because it only affects the duration and filling of the food, but all of the stats are fairly important, and each should be looked for when searching for a valuable and thus sellable resource.


Combat Medic:


Area Poison Delivery Units: These are good sellers for professional combat medics. The resources required to make them are: Non-Ferrous Metal, Fungi, and Liquid Petrochemical Fuel. The most important stats for these resources are: Overall Quality, Unit Toughness, Conductivity and Potential Energy, and Decay Resistance, with conductivity being of lesser importance because it only affects the range of the poison unit, and unit toughness because it affects only the amount of charges the pack contains.

Regular Poison Delivery Units: These are more powerful than the area delivery units, but only affect one target. These are also good sellers for professional combat medics, and thus should be fairly valuable. The resources required to make them are: Non-Ferrous Metal, Fungi, and Liquid Petrochemical Fuel. The stats that are most important for this item are: Overall Quality, Unit Toughness, Conductivity and Potential Energy, and Decay Resistance, with conductivity being of lesser importance because it only affects the range of the poison unit, and also unit toughness because it affects only the amount of charges the pack contains.

Ranged Stimpacks: These are the main stimpacks that a combat medic uses to heal his allies in combat. Some combat medics actually devote a good portion of their time to making high quality heal packs for other more combat oriented combat medics, and these packs are in high demand, as they're significantly more powerful than your average run of the mill stimpack that a non-dedicated combat medic would make. With this in mind, the resources required to make these should be fairly valuable, and good sellers. These resources are: Aluminum, Organics, and Fiberplast. The important stats for these resources are: Overall Quality, Unit Toughness, Conductivity and Potential Energy, with conductivity being of lesser importance because it only affects the range of the poison unit, and also unit toughness because it affects only the amount of charges the pack contains.

Area Disease Deliver Units: Another popular seller. The resources required to make these are: Non-Ferrous Metal, and Radioactives. The most important stats for these resources are: Overall Quality, Unit Toughness, Decay Resistance, Potential Energy, and Conductivity, with conductivity being of lesser importance because it only affects the range of the poison unit, and also unit toughness because it affects only the amount of charges the pack contains.

Regular Disease Delivery Units: Another popular seller. The resources required to make these are: Non-Ferrous Metal, and Radioactives. The most important stats for these resources are: Overall Quality, Unit Toughness, Decay Resistance, Potential Energy, and Conductivity, with conductivity being of lesser importance because it only affects the range of the poison unit, and also unit toughness because it affects only the amount of charges the pack contains.


Doctor:


Enhance Buffpacks: These buffpacks are one of the most popular Doctor sellers. Action buffpacks have less strict requirements than the other types of buffpacks, so I'll list them below. This paragraph is devoted entirely to the other 5 types of doctor buffs, other than action buffs. The only resource required to make these packs, that can be mined with a harvester is reactive gas, and the most important stats for this resource are: Overall Quality, Potential Energy, Unit Toughness, and Decay Resistance, with Unit toughness being of lesser importance before it only affects the number of charges the buffpacks have, which is still actually VERY important, and should not be overlooked unless you have to. Decay resistance is the other stat that is of slightly less importance, as it only affects the duration of the buffs, which is a very important stat that shouldn't be overlooked, either, unless as a last resort.

Enhance Action Buffpacks: The only resources required to make these packs, that can be mined with a harvester are: Organics and Inorganics. and the most important stats for these resource are: Overall Quality, Potential Energy, Unit Toughness, and Decay Resistance, with Unit toughness being of lesser importance before it only affects the number of charges the buffpacks have, which is still actually VERY important, and should not be overlooked unless you have to. Decay resistance is the other stat that is of slightly less importance, as it only affects the duration of the buffs, which is a very important stat that shouldn't be overlooked, either, unless as a last resort.

Stimpacks: Stimpacks are another very heavy doctor seller. The resources required to make these should also be in very high demand. The resources required to make small stimpacks are: Berries and Fiberplast. The most important stats to look for in these resources are: Overall Quality, Potential Energy, and Unit Toughness, with unit toughness being of little importance as it only affects the number of charges in the pack, and even then it only has a 33% effect on the charges, where as overall quality has a 66% affect on the charges.


Weaponsmith:


Heavy Acid Rifle: This isn't a very good seller for weaponsmiths, as far as I know, because most people would rather use the flamethrower, however, I have inside information that supposedly acid damage will become the king of damage types soon, so at a later date these may become very popular seller. You may with to plan accordingly by gathering and saving the resources required to make these until they become more popular, or you may not . The resources required to make these are: Steel, Iron, and Metal. The most important stats for these resources are: Conductivity and Overall Quality.

Spraystick: Spraystick, in my opinion, is the most powerful rifle to use until you reach master rifleman. With this in mind, and the knowledge that there are people grinding rifleman all the time, you will probably be able to sell the resources required to make spraysticks pretty easily, and at a decent price. The resources required to make these are: Chromium Aluminum, Polysteel copper, and Metal. The most important stats for these resources are: Conductivity and Overall Quality.

Laser Rifle: Laser Rifles are powerful, yet slow, like the T-21 Rifle. They only have medium armor piercing, where the T21 has heavy, so they're not as popular with the high end crowd as the T21, but still, they are quite popular. You shouldn't have much trouble finding a weaponsmith who sells these regularly and is interested in buying the resources required to make them. The resources required to make these are: Link-steel aluminum, Non-Ferrous Metal, and Metal. The most important stats for these resources are: Conductivity and Overall Quality. Supposedly, shock resistance and cold resistance have a direct effect on the speed of the weapon, but I can't see how they would... If you can, I'd recommend trying to find laser rifle resources with decent numbers in those stats as well, but you may wish to just ignore this piece of information.

Laser Carbine: This is quite simply the best carbine for player versus environment battles, in my opinion. You should have a pretty easy time finding someone interested in buying the resources required to make these. The resources required to make these are: Link-steel aluminum, Non-Ferrous Metal, and Metal. The most important stats for these resources are: Conductivity and Overall Quality.

Gaderiffi Baton: The best fencer weapon for player versus environment battles. You should have a fairly easy time finding someone who'll be interested in buying the resources required to make these. The resources required to make these are: Iron and Metal. The only important stat for these resources is: Shock Resistance.

Vibro Knucklers: The one and only weapon that a Teras Kasi Artist can currently use. There is talk of new types of knucklers coming out soon, but until this happens, these will remain king of the Teras Kasi Artist's arsenal, and thus quite popular, making the resources required to make them equally popular. The resources required to make these are: Ferrous Metal, Steel, Metal, and Copper. The most important stat for these resources is: Shock Resistance.

2 Handed Curved Sword: Arguably as powerful as a power hammer for the swordsman profession. They are much faster, and the damage, if sliced and powered up correctly can end up about the same if not better! These are decent sellers and the resources required to make them should be fairly easy to sell. The resources required to make these are: Steel and Polymer. The most important stat for these resources is: Shock resistance.

Rocket Launcher: The most powerful weapon in the game besides a lightsaber! These sell pretty well, but there are other weapons that still sell a lot better. You might try gathering the resources required to make these and finding a buyer, but there are, as I said, a lot of other weapons that sell better... The resources required to make these are: Iron and Metal. The most important stats for these resources are: Conductivity and Overall Quality.

T-21 Rifle: The most popular rifle right now. Rifleman buy crates full of high quality T-21 rifles hoping for a good damage slice, thus making these one of the best weaponsmith sellers. Selling the resources required to make these should be pretty easy, but keep in mind that only 15 galinorian rainbow gems are required, making it hard to sell large amounts of them to any one smith. Still, if you can find several buyers it might make selling large quantities of them feasable, and it can never hurt to put a few harvestors on them, anyway, since later on there will probably end up being a shortage of good rainbow gems that smiths will pay an arm and a leg for . The resources required to make these are: Ditanium Steel, Polonium Iron, Metal, and Galinorian Rainbow Gems. The most important stats for these resources are: Conductivity and Overall Quality.

Republic Blaster: One of the best blasters in the game. It pierces armor like the dx2, but has better damage per second. These are good sellers, and you shouldn't have much trouble selling the resources required to make them. The resources required to make these are: Plumbum Iron and Ferrous Metal. The most important stats for these resources are: Conductivity and Overall Quality.

Power Hammer: Of all the swordsman weapons in the game, these have the highest damage, and arguably the best damage per second, depending on how many speed tapes the user has, in my opinion. You should have little trouble finding a buyer for the resources required to make these fine weapons. The resources required to make these are: Metal, Kammris Iron, and Copper. The most important stat for these resources is: Shock Resistance.

Long Vibro Axe: The best polearm weapon in the game, for the pikeman profession. Nightsister Lances, I guess are better, but I'm not putting those in this section because they're too hard to make to make collecting the resources required to make them a good idea. The resources required to make Long vibro axes, however, shouldn't be too hard to sell. The resources required to make these are: Ditanium Steel, Copper, and Non-Ferrous Metal. The most important stat for these resources is: Shock Resistance.

Flame Thrower: These are the most popular commando weapon right now. The resources required to make a good flamethrower should sell fairly well to a weaponsmith who's running low or out of them. The resources required to make these are: Steel, Iron, and Metal. The most important stats for these resources are: Conductivity and Overall Quality.

DX2 Pistol: One of the popular pistols. The resources required to make this pistol should be in moderate demand, but there are other weapons that sell better... The resources required to make these are: Titanium Aluminum, Platinite Copper, and Metal. The most important stats for these resources are: Conductivity and Overall Quality.


Chapter 4: The Doctor...

By far the BEST crafting profession, in my humble opinion for earning profit is probably the doctor. I believe this for the simple fact that you can get started earning money in 1 or 2 days time, however the initial investment is kind of large, being around 200k credits for the necessary meds to get you started, and about another 100-200k for the resources you need for the crafting part of the grind to mastery. This is an estimate only, so you may end up needing more or less to get you started.

Anyway, after you've finished the grind to master (See section 1, Chapter 5), you can sell buffs for 10k per set, virtually non-stop, all day long, in a major city such as Coronet or Theed. Doctor buffs are always in high demand on the more popular servers (Bria, Chilastra, Eclipse, etc.). It takes only about 30-60 seconds per set of buffs, even less if you eat the chef food "Havla" to decrease your wound treatment speed recovery time, and there are generally always people wanting buffs. On a typical day sitting in Coronet bored, I'll see 1 or 2 doctors buffing non-stop with a line of people behind their current customer as large sometimes as 10-15 people long, all waiting to give them buffs for 10k each.

Do the math with me for a second... The initial investment is around 300-600k. This includes the price of enhance packs for each stat, the price of resources for the craft grind, and the price of Stimpack B's, C's, D's and E's for the healing grind). Good enhance packs, the only kind you should be using if you plan on buffing for money and building a good reputation, are about 920 to 960 strength. They generally cost anywhere from 8k to 20k per pack, which means you'll have to multiply that price by 6, so you have one pack for each stat. The packs generally have about 20 to 35 charges, so each set of packs can buff, let's say 27 people. You're paying 48 to 120k for a full set of buffpacks, and earning 270k (assuming it has 27 charges) for buffing people. On a typical 5 hour doctor buffing session, assuming you're buffing non-stop, and buffing about one person every 30 seconds, you'll buff 600 people! That's 6 million credits!!! If you eat Havla it becomes even faster, so you might even buff more than 600 people in that 5 hours!!!!

Anyway, your cost for enough buffpacks to buff 600 people is about 1.1 million to 3.45 million credits, depending on the price and quality of the packs you buy. That's anywhere from 2.55 million to 4.9 million credits of pure profit, just for sitting there, clicking on someone, and enhancing their stats for them for 5 hours!!!! Now you know the reason why the Doctor is my favorite profession.

Once you've been an established buff doctor for a while, and have quite a bit of savings, you can afford to buy your +120 doctor experimentation skill-tapes, and can begin actually buying resources and making your own buffpacks! Keep in mind that 120 points worth of doctor experimentation skill tapes takes a LONG time to find, and most people can't afford them, but if you're dedicated you can do it over the course of a month or two. That's what most master smiths have to go through in order to be any good in their craft, so it's pretty hard to be a crafting profession and make any money at first...

Anyway, I digress... once you get those skill tapes, and some resources, you can begin making your OWN buffpacks, and selling the extra ones you don't use! You can actually continue to buff people for profit while at the same time making millions more per day by selling buffpacks to other buff doctors!!! Be careful, though, that you don't sell so many buff packs to other doctors that you encourage them to want to sell buffs and compete with you! Be very quiet about just how rich you're getting! If word gets out that there's a money-maker, people will usually start doing it, cutting into your profits! Another way to discourage would-be buff competitors would probably be to just save your buffpacks so they're in higher demand, discouraging other doctors from bothering with it. However, if you charge an arm and a leg for them, and they're of exceptional enough quality to warrant such a high price, some doctors would gladly pay that amount for some personal and social buff packs, for friends and Player Association members, and you'd probably have the best of both worlds .


Section 3: All Things Faction and PvP Related...

Chapter 1: Which Faction?


When chosing a faction you have to decide first and foremost whether you want to be good or evil, or if you really even care about roleplaying. If you want to be good or evil, the answer is obvious, but if you don't really care, the answer is a little more complicated. The Empire has the AT ST pets, which after a long hard faction grind that honestly doesn't take too long if you know how to do it right, is very effective in... well not PvP... just about anyone can kill them in PvP... Hmm they're not good against the environment either, are they? Bah! you can only run factions with them so they're not really worth much any more. Bah, I say. Oh well. You can run faction missions with them, and buy a faction base eventually. That's about the only reason to want an AT ST. OH WAIT!!!! THERE IS A GOOD REASON!!!!!!!! I just remembered....... The AT ST, being such a high level pet, forms an instant solo group with you when you group with it. You can get most high level missions by yourself that anyone without an AT ST or some high level creature handler skills would have to join a solo group to get on the mission terminal. There you have it. That's just about the only reason to be an imperial over a Rebel, other than factional friends, and that sort of reason -- An instant solo group that can help you a LOT with earning fast experience, if you don't get the AT ST killed, which is another story entirely. To keep it from getting killed, your best bet is to place it inside a faction base, at the bottom floor and tell it to stay, so it won't wander off and meet some Player rebels and get killed. If you're running missions on Dantooine, that's fine, but there's always the chance that the base will get attacked and Rebels will run inside and destroy the AT ST. If you're on Dathomir running Rancor missions or something, there's not really anywhere you can store your AT ST safely, so you should just join a solo group in order to get the missions.

In conclusion, in my opinion, the only reason to be Imperial over Rebel is the AT ST walker, which is really only useful if you don't feel like going to the Dantooine mining outpost to join a solo group, and even then you have to be overt to use the AT ST which makes you vulnerable to all sorts of attacks by Rebels, and hassles you could just avoid if you stay covert or avoid joining a faction all together.

With this in mind, the only reason I would want to choose a specific faction is so that I could kill other players for fun, and then it wouldn't really matter to me which faction I picked, although it would probably be Imperial because there are bases all over the place with shuttle ports etc. Either one is fine, though...

Chapter 1: PvP Combat...

The Mind Stat:

In Player Versus Environment combat, the mind stat is by far the most important stat, because with the simple click of a button, if your stimpacks are strong enough, you can heal all of damage. That's all good and well, but your mind stat can't be healed! In PvP combat this makes the mind stat even MORE essential, as most players who dedicate any amount of time to PvP combat know this fact about the mind stat, and use attacks that specifically target the mind pool when they can, not to mention the fact that many of them use stun based weapons that almost totally ignore composite armor!!!

Armed with this knowledge you can somewhat effectively protect yourself from these PvP'ers by increasing your mind stat in every way possible. First of all you should stat migrate your mind, focus and willpower as high as you can get them. Your mind is the most important stat to increase, with willpower being the second most important, as it directly affects the rate at which your mind regenerates. Your focus is of less importance as it only affects how many points from your mind you lose when you use special attacks, but it is still an important stat, and should be raised as high as possible after spending all of your stat migration points first in mind, then in willpower. Another good way to enhance your mind before PvP is by getting a mind buff from a musician or dancer. Dancers buffs your mind, while musicians buff your focus and willpower. The only real drawback to entertainer buffs are that they take a while to get, like 10-15 minutes per set, meaning a wait of 20-30 minutes before you can head out for battle, which is often times too long of a wait when you're involved in a hectic PvP battle. Vagnarian canape, a mind stat enhancing food, increases your focus and willpower by up to about 600-800 points with a duration of about 10-15 minutes, if you get the good bio engineered stuff from a master chef. This is a great food to carry with you and eat right before you get involved in an intense PvP situation. Another good chef item is Vasarian brandy, which increases your mind, focus, and willpower by about 400 each, and lasts for about 40-45 minutes. You can eat 2 brandy before your stomach becomes full of food, and 3 canapes before it becomes full of drink, so you're looking at a maximum buffage on a full dose of both items of around 800 mind, 2900 focus, and 2900 willpower. With a willpower THAT high, you're going to regenerate any mind damage pretty fast.

Stun Composite Armor:

Some master weaponsmiths sell stun composite armor. The best set I've ever seen was 90% protection to all damage types except stun, and about 37% stun protection. This is extremely good compared to all the other stun composite I've ever seen, which I believe the best of only had about 20% stun protection. This set, when i found it was extremely expensive; along the lines of about 300k for helmets and 500k for chest plates, but remember, the mind is the only important stat if you can heal yourself, which you should be able to in PvP, so a stun composite helmet with really good stats is an investment worth having, if you plan on PvPing like a pro!!!!!

Medic Skills:

I highly recommend some medic skills if you plan on being any good in PvP. The lowest I'd recommend you have your medic skill is level 4 in pharmacology so you can use high quality stim D's, but I seriously recommend you work to get master medic, so you can use stim E's. My reason for loving master medic so much is that you can heal yourself for up to 3500-4000 points of damage with a high quality stimpack E. This means that you can sit and battle it out with some guy for a few minutes until your health, action, or both are really low, then pop a heal on yourself for total recovery! These stims also generally have so many charges when they're superiour enough quality to have such powerful healing strength, that even one pack of them will last a very long time. They only come in crates of 5 to 25 though, usually, but still, the investment is quite worth it! If you're forced to settle for novice medic, get the VERY best stim B's you can find, but I'll warn you now... you'll be healing yourself all the time when you would otherwise be using devastating special attacks and not constantly flailing to clear your special attacks window so you can squeeze in a heal. With the strong heals, all you have to do is click clear once on your special attacks window in the upper right corner, then type /healdamage self or click the appropriate macro button, whichever.

Doctor Buffs:

You should know by now that doctor buffs are essential in good PvP or PvE if you've read any of the other parts of my guide. If you haven't, I highly urge you to read Section 1, Chapter 2: Basic Essential Knowhow... for a few pieces of info that are very helpful. A lot of what's in this section is already in that section, but trust me when I tell you that the info in that section is likely to be helpful.

Vehicles:

A good Speederbike Swoop can assist with a hasty retreat if you're outgunned in PvP, but be careful. When a vehicle is disabled you're out of luck. You basically lose it permanently if someone hits it one or two times, so either make sure you kill them before they can get to it, store it before you initiate combat, or dismount a good distance from them and run to them from there. Be warned, though... the further you are from your vehicle the less chance you have of making it to the swoop alive, and if they kill you, a lot of the time they'll run up and destroy your vehicle just for spite. Alas, this is not a world for the chivalrous any more... /sigh.

Armor:

I already mentioned something about stun protection armor, but I should mention regular armor also, since it's also a necessity in PvP. Without a good set of at least 70-80% base effectiveness composite armor to protect you from multiple damage types, your mind won't be the only stat to worry about. People will be able to consistently hit your health and mind for 100-500 damage, and after about 10-15 shots, even if you're buffed, you could be killed. In a group PvP situation you might die pretty quickly without armor, even with good damage mitigation, melee defense, and dodge/block skills. Get some decent armor! It's worth it's weight (encumbrance) in credits!!!

Slicing Weapons and Armor:

I shouldn't have to tell you to slice your weapons and armor for maximum efficiency in PvP, but I am anyway. A lot of people actually buy 10 weapons just to get a good slice so they can PvP better.

Thaktilo:

Basically, a food you can buy from a master chef that drastically increases your defense versus knockdown skill. Use it. Knockdown is the bane of every PvP'er and people get frustrated in PvP every day because of some newbie who knows how to use knockdown attacks. Now there's a way to fight it!

Jedi PvP:

If you want to be a Jedi hunter, and be able to find them, be a Bounty Hunter, but don't master the skill. Level 3 or 4 in investigation should let you find the Jedi on the terminals, and you should also work pistols up to 4 as well. Skip Carbines and Lightning Cannon entirely, because neither skill will really help much in a Jedi hunt. Along with these Bounty Hunter Skills I recommend at least level 2 in pistoleer stances and grips so you can use the Geonosian Sonic Blaster. I have seen some of these with truly superior stats, along the lines of 2.0 speed, 450 damage with a damage slice, and the coolest thing about them is they do STUN DAMAGE!!!! What better way to take down a Jedi as fast as possible than to shoot him through all his armor with the sonic blaster??? EYESHOT!!! Bounty Hunters can shoot the eyes of their opponents with every single shot, making all that devastating stun damage from the already powerful Sonic Blaster THAT MUCH MORE powerful, because it's all targetting the most vital stat pool!!!! The mind pool!!! What else is stronger than shooting the mind pool, though? Well... combat medic mind poisons are!!!! Yeah!!!!! This brings me to another point........

You can tailor a bounty hunter character tailored to have level 4 in combat medic abilities, which is just enough to use the best mind poison packs, bounty hunter pistols 4 so you can shoot them with the sonic blaster, with REALLY good accuracy and speed, level 3 in investigation for jedi missions, and to top all this off, which is already powerful enough, you have JUST enough points left over for pistoleer stances and grips 2, so you can use the Sonic blaster!!!!! Since you have master medic you can heal yourself for 2500-4000 per heal with the best stim E's that can be made, and DEVASTATE your opponent's unhealable mind pool!!!

On most servers there's a resident Combat Medic who makes high quality mind poison stim C's that can deal, with level 4 in combat medic abilities, up to 500 damage every 6 seconds, and the duration on some of these packs is over 230 seconds too!!! This coupled with the extreme STUN damage of the Geonosian Sonic Blaster makes for the most powerful mind damaging combo in the game, with healing skills to boot!!!!

The defensive skills are a little lacking with this combination, but since you can heal yourself quite well, all you really have to do is heal yourself whenever you need to, and eat plenty of anti-knockdown food (Thaktilo) and you should be fine for most battles! If you really don't like having such low melee defense, and no damage mitigation, though, you can skip the combat medic part, and some of the medic, in exchange for some boxes in a melee profession to help with the missing defensive modifiers, but then you have low powered heals, and no mind poison, so I'd personally just go with the above combo for the best PvP results.

The above combination of professions is probably the best in the game right now for PvP against non jedi as well, but if you want to do some PvE at the same time, I recommend you get rid of the Bounty hunter and pistoleer, and go for master rifleman. You can use the Jawa Ion Rifle with Headshot 3 for some pretty good stun mind damage in PvP, and it's almost as good as the Sonic blaster. It's not quite as good, but high quality Sonic blasters cost a LOT of money anyway. You can find the good ones selling for upwards of 10 million credits. In PvE, if you chose to work up rifleman instead of going the Jedi hunting route, you can use head shot 3 with a high quality damage sliced T21 rifle, and be one of the strongest PvE professions in the game!!! Throw a mind poison in as well if its a tough fight, and you'll be able to take out just about anything there is to kill. One more thing: If you're fighting something REALLY tough in PvE, or you just don't want to take any damage, you can use conceal shot with your T21 to do damage undetected to a target. You can shoot it for 2000-4000 damage or maybe more, without it ever knowing where the shot came from .

Section 4: Unlocking your Force Sensitive Character Slot...

Chapter 1: How to Unlock...

To get Jedi, you first have to have all 6 of the jedi augmentation skill trees completely filled, meaning you need to go to the village and convert regular experience into jedi augmentation skill boxes until you get them all filled. There are 24 boxes to fill, and it will take millions of regular experience to get them all filled, so you can become a Padawan. The transfer ratio is like 7:1 on some skills and 3:1 on others. A great way to get a lot of them full is to throw C12 fragmentation grenades at quenker lairs, and the creatures inside them without hitting them at ALL with your regular weapons or fists. You should get like 3000 or more combat exp per creature, and combat exp converts into force xp a lot better than regular weapons xp. The other skills are pretty obvious when you look at the methods in my guide for crafting and survival and stuff. Some force xp can only be converted from those types of exp, and not the weapons kind. Ok to get access to the actual village so you CAN convert exp into Jedi XP, you have to do the following stuff:

To get the visit from the old man, you have to get the "glowing with the force" message when you type /check. I think it's check anyway, but it might be /checkforce or /checkforcestatus something like that. After you're glowing (I'll tell you how to get glowing below), the old man comes and visits you and shortly after several sith shadows attack you. You have to kill them and loot their bodies for some kind of datapad or something, which shows you the way to get into the village. The visit from the old man might be immediate, or you might have to wait a few days. Supposedly though, the developers are making it so that you don't get to see him right away, to avoid too many people swarming the Jedi village at once. After you get the visit from the old man, some say that to get attacked by the shadows you have to be in the wilderness, a few thousand meters from town, and that they won't attack you near the city. One person said he was like 2km out into the desert out on Lok and they attacked him pretty soon. Before you have to worry about this, though, you need to figure out how to get glowing. This guide should help with that:


You must acquire the following badges to get glowing with the force when you check your force status. There may be some discrepancy in this, and you might be able to get glowing by getting many of one type of badge, and skipping some of them altogether, so use this as a confirmed ballpark method for unlocking......

1 Profession badge (Master any Profession, but I don't think basic ones like marksman, medic and entertainer count. Not sure though. Some or all of them might count.)

5 Easy POIs (Any 5 Point of Interest Badges that aren't listed below in the difficult POI badges section. You might hit one that actually counts toward the difficult POI badges, but I don't know which are which, other than the ones I list below, being difficult.)

2 Difficult POI badges (These are the ones I know about: The Tusken Pool at the bottom of the Tusken Raider Fort on Tatooine, The Krayt Skeleton on Tatooine, the Sarlacc Pit on Tatooine, The Lesser Sarlacc of Dathomir, and The Krayt Graveyard of Tatooine. Most of these are on the POI tab in your datapad, and when clicked on should give you a waypoint on how to get to them, provided you're on the right planet.)

5 Content badges (These are mostly themeparks like Jabba's, The Rebel, Imperial and Nym's themeparks. Also the Warren and Corellian Corvette are included as content badges.)

3 Jedi POIs (These include The Jedi Temples on Dantooine and Yavin, also ben Kenobi's old hut on Tattooine.)

Once you get all of the following badge requirements filled, supposedly you will unlock, but it's still shrouded in a bit of mystery for me because they just recently implimented the new way of unlocking, so if you still don't get glowing, get as many badges as you can think of, including extra difficult ones, and Theme Parks and stuff, until you glow! I'll do my best to update this part of the guide later, when I find out more, but as of now, this is all I know.

That's it folks. I hope you enjoyed reading this guide as much as I enjoyed writing it. It took me two months to actually finish it, and the time spent was worth every minute if it helps even 1 of you readers to have a better Star Wars Galaxies experience!!! If any of you have any more questions about the game, keep in mind that I've mastered so many professions I may as well change my middle name to Sony, so just email me and I'll help you in any way I can!!!! Also please email me if you recieved a copy of this guide from anyone other than me, or you see it posted online anywhere at all.

My email is

If you folks ever need anything at all, I'm just an email away!!!!
Lowfyr is offline  
Old 06/27/2005, 14:43   #6
 
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nice guide but outdated... its pre-CU ...
Stardust77 is offline  
Old 06/27/2005, 15:37   #7
 
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