Wasting My Tech Fragments so You Don't Have To

I remember when Onslaught had just come out and we were all chasing this new tech fragment currency for gear, one of my guildies said something like: "Give it a couple of months and we'll have these things coming out of our ears!"

God, was he right.

Initially I was after fragments to acquire my first set bonus and a Tactical item for my main. Then I did the same for alts! Then I did the same for even more alts. At some point I ran out of max-level characters that needed gear.

Then there were the achievements to collect all the various gear sets and Tacticals - though don't get me started on how buggy these have been since launch. Still, it was something to work on, so I started to spend fragments on filling those out instead, even if it wasn't very satisfying. I don't like being capped on any currency though, and even in their now overabundance, tech fragments still felt special somehow, and like I shouldn't just let them go to waste.

One of my guildies who found himself in a similar situation decided to regularly buy "unidentified unique items" from Kai Zykken instead. If you've never had one of those, they cost a thousand tech fragments and 500,000 credits each and can turn into any Tactical item or a (supposedly) class/spec-appropriate set piece item.

We poked fun at him for being a gambler, but there was a method behind the madness: He really wanted the extremely overpowered Emergency Power set, which technically has a chance to drop in Dxun, but our experience has always been that the drop rates for any gear in there are abysmal and that you could go weeks and weeks without ever seeing a single piece. As his Vanguard tank wasn't even his main, gambling at Kai's in hopes of having a random gear piece turn into a piece of Emergency Power was therefore the only real avenue open to him. And he did get there in the end! It took him several months but he still ended up being the first person in the guild to complete this set.

Anyway, I initially kept scoffing at him because I'm really against engaging with these kinds of RNG shenanigans, but the more I struggled with finding ways to use up my own tech fragments the more I started to feel tempted myself. I eventually gave in when the Fulminating Power set for Guardians was released alongside master mode Dxun. I knew I wasn't going to go there, but my AoE taunt having two charges sounded awesome for my flashpoint tanking!

And thus, I too started buying random pieces of gear from Kai every week, but unlike my guildie I kept a spreadsheet with the results, with the goal of eventually sharing them on the blog. I'm not necessarily done with this particular experiment, but as I actually did achieve my 4-piece Fulminating Defense last week, I thought I'd share how long it took me:

To get to this point, my Guardian bought a total of 114 pieces of random gear from Kai (that's 114,000 tech fragments and 57 million credits spent for those keeping track at home).

The most annoying thing was that only 28 of those (less than 25%) actually turned into tanking items. 64 of them (56% and therefore the majority) turned into one of those annoyingly generic items like the Luck Always Changes Tactical that aren't really obviously beneficial for any particular class or role and mostly quite useless. And 19 (or 17%) turned into outright dps gear, despite of my Guardian always being in tank spec. At least I didn't have anything turn into gear that my class couldn't even wear, which is something that happened to one of my guildies on at least one occasion.

Looking at the time invested (obviously this had to happen over the course of many weeks as Kai is only in town on weekends and you can't store more than 10k tech fragments at once) and money spent I unsurprisingly can't really recommend this as a method of gear requisition as it's kind of ridiculous. Then again, if you're like me and sitting on more credits and tech fragments than you really know what to do with, upgrading your gear at 14-15 million per piece isn't a considerably worse way of wasting that money than anything else. And at least you might eventually get something truly rare as not many people have cleared Dxun on master mode to this day.

First world problems, am I right?