Posted by Zlatto in Zlatto's Bazaar | 26 Comments

Zlatto’s Bazaar is the one-third Wall Street, one-third criminal empire and one-half gossip rag. You need to keep up on the Bazaar if for no other reason than to keep an eye on your competitors. Don’t be a Ho-tah and visit often. Your comments are encouraged, especially if they make me credits…

Hello, all you GTN moguls-in-training! I’m glad you decided to stop by so we can talk about the exciting math of Reverse Engineering! With the NDA gone, I wanted to get into some of the exciting non-combat mechanics of the game. No spoilers to worry about here, it’s all about crafting and Reverse Engineering in mass quantities to enable us to look a bit behind the curtain of ‘random’ as defined by BioWare.

I am not a statistics guru, but because I am skilled in short-changing purchases in any monetary unit of the known galaxy, I figured it would be best for me to share my accumulated numbers with you, and then together we could decide what they mean. I expect there is a closeted math geek or two that might read the column, so lets hope they decide to chime in and give us some deeper analysis.

This article will assume that you are all up to speed on the process, risk, and rewards of Reverse Engineering. If you are not yet a guru on the topic, take a quick moment and read Momus’ informative article on the subject found over here in Blasters, Beggars and Credits. For now, I’ve decided not to dive into the itemization gain seen at each level of Premium (green), Prototype (blue) and Artifact (purple.) That discussion could barely be covered with a 12-part series and would require more time than I can spend at the moment.

To start, I spent some time running my level 25 trooper around the Migrant area on Coruscant to gather enough resources to sit back and grind a high volume of items to help figure out some patterns. Let’s just say that those leveling in the area were a bit disappointed to see a higher level toon running around stealing all their nodes. I can say with great certainty that there is no Star Wars curse word filter on the general chat. What was more hilarious was that many could not spell the curses correctly; it is Bantha Poodoo, not Bantha Poodu, a total of four o’s you Di’kuts.

I believe a column on Resource Grief-ing might be a topic I cover in the future, as BioWare is almost pushing players into it with the costs of leveling crew skills.

Enter The Matrix

RE to Proc Schematic Used Result of Proc 15 Skill Barrel 2 Skill Barrel 2 – Blue 8 Reflex Barrel 2 Reflex Barrel 2 – Blue 7 Skill Barrel 3 Skill Barrel 3 – Blue 12 Reflex Barrel 3 Reflex Barrel 3 – Blue 9 Skill Barrel 2 – Blue Advanced Skill Barrel 2 – Purple 2 Reflex Barrel 2 – Blue Advanced Reflex Barrel 2 – Purple 7 Skill Barrel 3 – Blue Advance Skill Barrel 3 – Purple 11 Reflex Barrel 3 – Blue Advanced Reflex Barrel 3 – Purple

Above is my first bit of statistical analysis is using the first two tiers of barrel mods. The amount of Silca and Desh used is mind boggling and both the GTN and my guild ran out of Carbo-plas quickly, as that material is needed to generate the second tier of the item and is not found in standard nodes anymore (it comes solely from Investigation missions).

The numbers above show that the success rate of Reverse Engineering is all over the place. If you just took the first 38 attempts that returned 4 new patterns you would see about a 10% chance of learning a blue schematic from the greens that were reversed, but when you evaluate the numbers for the next tier you see closer to a 14% chance.

The Reflex Barrel 2 to Advanced Reflex Barrel 2 returned in 2 attempts, so that seems to have skewed the consistency between the two tiers. The materials needed to create the blue items to reverse are significantly more expensive. BioWare possibly has decided to give us a break on the success rate to balance out the cost of the high end resources.

On my next set of tests, I decided to work up the dead sexy Combat Enforcer. I mean who isn’t going to want a level 13 artifact blaster rifle? I spent a long time looping the Black Sun and Justicar areas accumulating multiple stacks of Aluminium and Laminoid.

A funny observation; the players questing in that area seemed to be just as disappointed in me stealing all the nodes as the players in the Migrant area. I do love consistency in my game play.

RE to Proc Schematic Used Result of Proc 7 Combat Enforcer Overkill Combat Enforcer – Blue 9 Combat Enforcer Redoubt Combat Enforcer – Blue 3 Combat Enforcer Critical Combat Enforcer – Blue 6 Redoubt Combat Enforcer Exactitude Combat Enforcer – Purple 8 Critical Combat Enforcer Expert Combat Enforcer – Purple

So the resulting schematics learned from reverse engineering a weapon is much different than that of a mod. Instead of getting a blue version of the original mod, a successful new schematic or ‘proc’ for a weapon can generate one of three possible blue formats.

From what I have seen a blaster or electrostaff can give – Redoubt (plus defense), Critical (plus crit), and Overkill (plus power). Looking at the numbers from green to blue, 19 items reverse engineered into 3 schematics gives us around 15%. The numbers from blue to purple seem to be 14 items into 2 schematics which gives us around 14%.

To finish off the math of the article I wanted to work up one more set of green to blues. An interesting observation is that some of the higher end schematics in staffs and swords are actually better than some of the average greens players will be acquiring during the course of leveling. Sure its not a lightsaber, but better damage is better damage.

RE to Proc Schematic Used Result of Proc 9 Battle Champion’s Electrostaff Critical Battle Champion’s Electrostaff 11 Battle Champion’s Electrostaff Redoubt Battle Champion’s Electrostaff 9 Battle Champion’s Electrostaff Overkill Battle Champion’s Electrostaff

The resulting math seems to circle back to a 10% schematic discovery rate. Could this be a base number where the other factors can adjust for each player? How does the affection rating impact this?

I avoided using any crew that had a +Crit to Armstech to keep the numbers as general as possible, but there are a lot of unknowns that can change the math here. It will take thousands of items created and RE’s to find all the possible dependencies.

Let us know your experiences if you did any theory-crewing in beta!



