Struggling with Credits on Shae Vizla

I hit level 80 with my first character on Shae Vizla shortly before the new year. It's still kind of funny to me that I'm effectively a "warrior main" over there right now, strictly because "complete missions as a Jedi knight or Sith warrior" was a seasons objective during the server's launch week.

Story-wise, she's only just finished chapter two of her class story, but that's still better than I usually do with story progress before getting distracted by other activities.

Since I'm currently aiming to do more on this server than just seasons objectives, I thought I'd jump onto the gear treadmill. It was a strange experience to actually run out of Conquest commendations while picking up gear, and I was kind of taken aback when seeing that even buying what I tend to think of the "cheap starter gear set" costs about ~250k credits, with prices increasing for item level upgrades. On any other server, I'd consider that chump change, but on Shae Vizla, credits remain precious. I briefly felt inspired to do a round of Dromund Kaas heroics solely for the purpose of making money but was quickly reminded of why that kind of gameplay bores me.

The economic situation in general is really interesting to me though. SWTOR has had issues with inflation for a while (even if I personally didn't think it was as much of a problem as some people made it out to be), but the devs have taken measures to combat it in the past year that have actually been really effective. My personal measuring stick for this have been the blue flagship encryptions, which I remember selling for about 200-300k credits a pop once upon a time when Conquest was still relatively new. At the peak of inflation, they were going for more than ten million a piece, but now they are down to about one million again - on my home server Darth Malgus, that is. On Shae Vizla they sell for 15-30k each right now (not that I've been selling mine; they've been going towards the guild bank).

While levelling, I generally felt that I was in a good place in terms of credits. There were some small expenses like quick travel or locking in an outfit in the outfit designer, but none of this was too bad (outfit designer costs scale with level and are cheap when you're a lowbie). However, now that I've hit max level, I feel like there are credit sinks left and right that make it challenging to save up for anything.

This is an interesting contrast to when the game launched. I found that in this post from March 2012, I noted that credits had been a bit of a struggle while levelling up, as paying for new skill ranks at the trainer was expensive, but once I hit max level, there wasn't really a lot to spend money on, even as a round of Belsavis dailies netted me 100k credits each time. (Though it's interesting to see how that number felt like a lot to me back then. Even on Shae Vizla, a million credits doesn't feel like a lot to have right now, at least not to me.)

Nowadays you only have small expenses while levelling, but then you hit max level and:

• Building outfits becomes expensive, costing 100k+ credits for a full outfit at level 80. Not to mention the cost of purchasing dyes for example.
• As mentioned above, the gear vendors charge considerable fees for every piece of gear you buy or upgrade.
• Unlocking legacy perks is another credit sink running in the hundreds of thousands, if not millions. While the legacy system was added very early in the game, it wasn't there yet at launch when I started.
• Death can also get expensive. On my fully-kitted out Commando on Darth Malgus, one death costs 30k+ credits, which doesn't even register with me over there, but on Shae Vizla you may find that kind of cost noticeable. In fact, I found it interesting that there are posts on the forums complaining that progression raiding on SV isn't really viable right now because wiping repeatedly incurs a high cost that requires way too much grinding to compensate for. I'm not really in a position to comment on the validity of that complaint, but it's noteworthy to me that this is even a talking point.

I was somewhat reminded of something that happened in my guild on Darth Malgus not too long ago, when someone returned to the game after a long absence, made their way to the level cap, and then fizzled out with a bit of a rant about how they found the endgame to be grindy and boring. I responded to them at the time that the game could indeed be like that if you were hell-bent on playing only a single character, but that it's designed around the idea of making you play alts, which immediately alleviates a lot of those issues.

I think I basically need to heed my own advice from back then and consider that even if I do want to gear up a bit on Shae Vizla, there's no need to rush it, and that I should keep working on my alts to strengthen my legacy as a whole. My wealth should automatically increase over time that way, without the need to start grinding for cash.

Either way, it's another interesting aspect of the "fresh start experience". When I started playing on Leviathan and Tulak Hord in Galactic Season 2 and ran into issues with needing credits to finance buying out a few levels on the seasons track, I could "cheat" by buying a dye from the Cartel Market and selling it on the GTN for a billion credits, which meant that I was immediately set for life in terms of any normal gameplay expenses. On Shae Vizla there are no shortcuts like that (at least as of now).