New raid changes

I'm already guessing that Droids & Smugglers will be important factions in the not-too-distant future. The raid after Krayt, or the raid after that at the latest. They've been pushing Ins so hard that adding them to a faction list wouldn't be any incentive to gear them up, but Aphra's droids are still new-ish and hot, and they require a TON of Kyros, so there will still be a lot of folks that don't have 50R-T, BT, & 000 at relics, while also it's an older faction so including it would allow many people to at least participate in the raid. My guess is that they'll find a way to make Grievous less useful and 50R-T + the Aphra droids more useful, just to encourage spending.

Smugglers is an older and under geared faction, so it's also one that would allow people to participate with minimal Kyros (so it would be easy to get a full squad to g12 if you wanted to, now that we have most of the sub-g12 gear accelerated). And yet we just got Sana Starros as a new smuggler and leader who works well with Raid Han, Chewie, and StormTrooper Han. STHan doesn't have the Smuggler tag now, but he could get it and it wouldn't do anything to break the game. Or they could just put him on a list of special toons allowed even though they're not on the faction list (or they could do LS Scoundrels instead of Smugglers).

I would have been working on the new Aphra folks anyway, but bringing along STHan and a couple of other neglected droids (like T3 and Chopper) seem like good investments right now.

Of course most of us have lots of toons we still need to relic so there are lots of good investments left, but my point is that while things aren't perfectly predictable, you can use your downtime between GL chases to try to think like CG and get some older toons up to g12+0 to ease the transition when new raids do come.