Skilling Those Crews

We're in that quiet time between Galactic Seasons - technically PvP Season 8 is still going on, but I got my last achievement for that the other week and didn't really have anything to say about the experience that I haven't already said after the last couple of PvP seasons (about how lowbie and midbie queues are increasingly anaemic even on Darth Malgus and it's something that worries me a lot in regards to the health of the game... but that's not the subject of this post).

Usually I'd stop playing on the other servers during this time, but this time around I've kept logging in... to work on crew skills. As a general rule, I like the crew skills system, but it hasn't had a meaningful update in forever at this point, and the devs giving us ever more powerful augments to craft recently is something I feel a bit meh about.

That said, I've done minimal work on my crew skills on the other servers, because I primarily play there for Galactic Seasons and Conquest, and raising a crew skill by one point gives a nice number of Conquest points for the mere seconds of interaction it requires. So I've always had it in my head that I'm better off not raising my crew skills on these characters, because capping them would mean losing this source of Conquest points.

There was just one problem with this: I kept getting "mission discovery" items from login rewards (consumables that grant you a one-time crew skill mission with a wealthy yield) and most of my characters weren't actually high enough to use them. Watching my legacy cargo bay slowly drown in these things started to give me flashbacks to when I first created my characters on Leviathan and Tulak Hord and just collected login rewards for a few weeks, until their inventories became so full that I felt I had to start actually levelling them, in order to get access to a cargo hold and legacy storage if nothing else. Like I said back then, other people feel motivated to play in order to earn free items; I feel driven to play in order to deal with all the free items that are being thrust upon me!

I also realised that with each character having three crew skills that cap out at 700 points each, raising them at a rate of one skill-up per day to maximise Conquest points would take almost six years per character. There really was no need for me to artificially try and slow things down.

So I've been logging into at least one character per server per day over the past few weeks to level up their crew skills. You can actually get most of the way towards your personal Conquest target by doing that every day, assuming that you'll also have a companion go up an influence level at least once or twice in the process.

It's felt kind of satisfying, but also made me realise just how slow of a process it is if you're just sitting there waiting for your companions to run missions or craft things, especially if your character isn't that progressed and therefore doesn't have that many companions yet and they aren't of particularly high influence. I haven't really felt the weight of that in a long time, considering how long most of my characters on Darth Malgus have been maxed out in everything.

Sadly my efforts haven't made much of a dent in the pile of mission discoveries yet since a lot of them require pretty high skills to use, but at least I'm making some progress. I think my main takeaway from the whole exercise is that next season I'll need to remember to run at least a couple of crew skills on the side during each "proper" play session to make sure I can get them levelled up more consistently.