Keeping The Minions Busy

Before patch 1.3 went live, my minions didn’t really receive much love. Tharan was allowed to follow me around and heal me through dailies, but aside from occasional slicing missions and making a few stims to put in the gbank for raiders, the rest of these guys rarely saw any action. Well, actually Lt. Iresso saw some major action for a while there (of the BSOCK variety, if you know what I mean – wink, wink) and I managed to hit 10,000 with him, but the rest of my companions remained way below that number. Tharan came in second simply because as my only healer he spent plenty of time observing cut scenes during dailies and even though he gave me the -1 of shame most of the time, after all of our time together he was around the 7,000 mark. Qyzen was around 4,500, Nadia was around 4,000, Zenith was only at 2,000 and CN2 was at 0. Yep, I pretty much did that all wrong.

Obviously Lt. Iresso got to max affection because I was very interested in the romance storyline and wanted to see it through to it’s conclusion. But the rest of them were just basically ignored because… well, because I’m an idiot I guess. I knew in the back of my mind higher affection somehow affected crew skills, but since I wasn’t a serious crafter I didn’t really spend much time worrying about it. I suppose I’m technically a lazy gamer. I love to be logged in and playing and I follow a lot of SWTOR blogs, but I don’t REALLY pay attention to learning the things I should probably learn about the game. I skim blog posts, read headlines about patch notes, etc. Aside from not loving a weekend raiding schedule, this laziness for learning is a big part of why I don’t have a history of raiding in other games. I have never felt like spending an hour or two a week studying for a game I’m playing for the purpose of fun and relaxation. For the record, since I am now committed to raiding, I always make sure to read any boss fight strategies the raid leader directs us to in preparation for our next adventure. Luckily, that doesn’t happen a lot or I’m afraid I would get lazy with it too. I wish I knew what caused this behavior, because it’s not the way I am with other things in life.

Anyway, back to why my companions all look so intensely hard at work in the screenshot above, I have finally FINALLY realized the error of my ways. Since the patch dropped (sadly if I had paid more attention to blog posts and patch notes I would have started working on this weeks ago) I have been trying my damnedest to help the guild out with getting everyone all augmented up. I started making and RE’ing level 49 green implants with my biochem for the purpose of stocking the bank with Augmentation Slot Component MK-6 for the serious crafters in our guild to use in making Augmentation kits. That’s been pretty easy since the bioanalysis mats needed can be farmed on Ilum and gotten with rank 5 biochem missions. But I’ve also been sending out 2 companions on level 6 tech part slicing missions non stop in an effort to get the purple Advanced Neural Augmentor items needed to make augments. After having such a crappy return rate on actually getting the purple items I googled it enough to learn they are only returned when the mission crits. And is there any way to increase the chances a mission will crit? Why yes there is, Kristalys, you idiot. If you have your companion’s affection level maxed out it totally increases your chances of mission crits.

So guess who spent an outrageous amount of credits yesterday buying companion gifts and running back and forth to my ship to have companion conversations. Ugh. I hate spending money in big chunks like that. How nice would it have been to have slowly built up their affection over the past 6 months like smart players had already done. You live and you learn, I suppose. I certainly will pay more attention to this with my alts. Of course, I just couldn’t make myself spend all my money in 1 day so I don’t have them all maxed out yet. I did get Tharan up to 10k and Nadia and Zenith are both over 8k each now. Qyzen has been ignored for now since he’s my main bioanalysis monkey and the level 5 mats I need don’t require crit. But I’ll start working on him and CN2 as soon as I top off Nadia and Zenith and build some money back up.

So yeah, lesson learned; a happy minion is a more effective minion. And I’m an idiot.