#kept forgetting those are not lootable

[ghosty-bees]

he keeps losing his pulse (but where the hell is it going?)

"wow this really is daniil dankovskys tormentous nightmare" i think to myself shortly before feeding him 7 cigarettes and 2 bottles of strychnine

[rainofaugustsith]

Rain Plays SWTOR: Money

If you have been playing SWTOR since 6.0 you may have noticed that credits have become tight.

- There are numerous very large credit sinks - Items such as crafting materials and stims cost more - Leveling to 700 in crew skills costs 500K each - Ripping mods and augments can cost almost 150K each - Less NPCs drop lootable items - And the items they do drop are less - Junk sells for less - Repair costs are higher

IMHO this is a huge mistake on the part of the devs. The people who are hurt by this are not the ones who have hundreds of millions of credits in their banks. The regular, everyday players are the ones who feel the sting. I think they will have to dial it back at some point, because it makes the game a lot less fun. In the meantime, here are some places to save money and earn credits without grinding the same heroics over and over again.

If you are a player with a GTN empire, you don't need these tips. This is going to assume you're a player who wants credits to buy a stronghold, take care of gear and repairs, etc. without struggling. Some of these may be very obvious, but just in case they aren't known by all:

Do the bonus missions

Kill ten Jedi, click seven barrels, whatever. A lot of the time these are reasonably painless to do and can significantly add to the credits you earn for content.

In the Copero flashpoint for instance, you earn 14,945 credits for completing the flashpoint, but there are also three bonus missions. Viri earned 21,330 credits for completing the first (destroying the Ascendancy barrels) and 18,485 credits for the second and third (bugging the relays in town and tapping the consoles in the factory). It required minimal extra effort on her part, and just one of those bonus missions gave her more credits than the flashpoint itself.

Sell the decos.

This is the one place we're going near the GTN.

Are you taking a character through KOTET? In the Dragon's Maw chapter (6), don't forget to stop by the front lobby as you are solving the puzzles to pick up a Vaylin holo decoration. You can sell it on the GTN (I always do; I just don't want a holo Vaylin). You will find them on a table. You can only collect one deco per character, so no, you can't keep running chapter 6 again and again to farm this. Still, even with only one deco per toon, it's something you can pick up easily that can bring in some credits for you.

In the Umbara, Copero and Nathema flashpoints the bosses usually drop decos that are not bound to player or legacy. If you don't want them, sell them. There are also some decos that have a limit of one (ie, you can only own one copy) so if you get extras, there's no point in keeping them.

Sometimes decos sell and sometimes they don't, but even if you get someone to take it off your hands for 50,000, that's 50,000 more credits in your pocket you didn't have before, for minimal effort.

Exploration missions and bonus series

If you didn't have the "show exploration missions" box checked on your map (where is it? The very last check box on the left side of your map above the galaxy picture), you missed a lot of quests as you leveled up. You should still be able to go back and do them even if you finished KOTET. Some of these missions are so easy that it's silly not to do them for the credits. On Dromund Kaas for instance, there is a mission that requires you to literally walk from an NPC at the first wall to an NPC at the spaceport. On Voss there are a few missions in Voss-Ka that require you to do nothing more than answer an NPC's questions. Even if you don't have the energy or desire to do this on every planet, at least check out the ones on the starter and homeworld planets and amble around Voss-Ka a little.

The exploration mission marker looks like this:

There are also bonus series on Voss, Belsavis, Taris (may be bugged), Balmorra and Nar Shaddaa you can find if you have the "show exploration missions" box checked. These missions are pretty painless overall too, and sometimes introduce you to some fun NPCs (Lord Zavrasha on Nar Shaddaa, HELLO) or has you do some fun things (in Imperial Nar Shaddaa your character gets to hijack a Holonet broadcast and make a speech for instance). You talk to the NPC at the spaceport, pick up the bonus mission series, and complete about five short quests.

There are also some missions you can complete in places you are already going, if you are still leveling up. For instance if you're headed to the Balmorra Arms Factory check the NPCs at the last outpost before you get to the Factory. Chances are you will find a quest or two you can do while you're there.

Forget about amplifiers

So the deal with amplifiers is that you can "re-roll" them, for a fee, to try to get something you like better/that works better for your character. To be honest, unless you are doing NiM endgame content where you really need those extra pushes, I don't think there's a point, especially for the cost. It’s all RNG so you could be sitting there paying again and again (and the fee increases each time) until you get something you like. Which is what they want you to do, but unless you really feel the need to play the equivalent of a slot machine heavily calibrated toward the house, IMHO it’s not worth it. 

Forget about the armor

Each new armor piece will cost you a lot of tech fragments and one million credits, and the set bonuses really aren't all that. I've found that the one you get for having two pieces (which is usually a 2% increase in mastery, endurance, etc.) is the useful one. You are offered an armor piece at the end of Onslaught and they turn up in flashpoint rewards and Conquest and Onderon weekly crates sometimes too.

My philosophy has been to use what I receive, try to match two pieces if I have them, and then use either the Shatek sets or my characters' existing GEMINI or Ossus armor filled with 306s mods and enhancements. The drawback to plugging new mods into GEMINI and Ossus armor is that it's still bound to the toon, you can't swap it between characters, but the Shatek armor doesn't have that problem.

Slice

Even if you don't want to craft, get at least one of your characters slicing. This gives you the opportunity to pick up caches of credits lying around the planets waiting to be gathered, and right now, you need every bit of help you can get. Crew skills may not be worth it You can still gather mats on Onderon and Mek-Sha without paying to level your crew skills to 700. You just won’t get any crew leveling points for it and you will stay at 600. The recipes for new items are so complex that IMHO it’s not necessarily going to be worth paying half a million credits for each and every crew skill just for the achievements of leveling to 700. 

Alliance crates

If you’re doing heroics or Alliance Alerts you may be getting these crates. Turn them in to the specialists! You get 1000 -2000 credits per crate (I think this is new), plus usually an item of armor and a companion gift. The companion gifts save you money (anything you get, you don’t have to buy, right) and the armor can be sold to a vendor if you don’t want it. When I leveled all four specialists to 20 with my latest toon to go through KOTFE she earned close to 2 million credits from selling all the armor pieces she got (she kept the gifts, decos, pets and speeders).