Punished for thinking outside the box??

"MasterSeedy;c-1945459" wrote:
Getting crystals from Fleet is much easier than getting crystals from Squad Arena.

I went all in on fleet (and particularly BH ships) the moment the Falcon was announced, possibly even before that. I had to gear Bossk for TW anyway, so there was no point in not getting such a great ship. I'd floundered in ships before HT, but I took that opportunity and boosted my rank some - with KRU, Vader & Bossk my go-to pilots, toons I would have geared anyway. I got Falcon 5* the first time round and 7* the second time around. I've been taking 1st place in Fleet Arena almost every day since.

The average of better than 350 crystals per day makes every other farm go radically faster. My Cantina farms get 3 energy refreshes/day. My regular energy gets 3 refreshes per day. One or 2 hard nodes, depending how hard I'm farming and what I'm farming, also get 1 refresh/day.

That's a crystal budget of 550 crystals/day, but getting 400/day from fleet most days and another 50-75 from Arena was enough to make it work. I got Revan, DR, Padme, and Malak all on the 2nd try without even stressing about it. My Brood Alpha was the 3rd in my guild to reach 7*.

Yeah, for 3 months I lagged a little behind while I was pushing for Xanadu Blood and IG-2000 to reach 7*, but ever since then my farms have been dramatically faster than the vast majority of my guild-mates. Now I'm at 78/100 on my last Cantina Farm available, and I can start banking 300 (more) crystals/day, so instead of my crystal stash creeping up about 50/day, it will shoot up 350/day. I can use that for buying major gear pieces to rush the equipment on toons for the first time since I started playing this game. On top of that, Now I'm landing 40-80 in arena, and so my minimum crystal reward from squad arena is 100 instead of 50, and that's due to (almost) keeping up with the meta in a way that I couldn't possibly have done without winning Fleet every day.

Sure, they'll eventually release new toons to Cantina, but with no backlog I'll farm them like a boss and go back to stacking up insane amounts of crystals for gear purchases. I'm not that far out from having every single toon that I want at 7* (Gamorrean and Young Han I've skipped since I'd rather have the gear). Even the ones I don't want are almost all at 5* or higher.

And why?

Because I went all in on fleet.

It doesn't slow you down, it accelerates things massively. It's like trying to drive an overheating car gently at half the speed limit so you don't screw things up completely vs. stopping at the mechanic, fixing the engine, and then driving away at 10 over the limit. Too many people complain about the time it takes to get the engine working at full speed instead of noticing all the full speed cars that were behind them but are now passing them by.

The crystal budget is slowing you down because you dare not drain it too low, lest you not have any for some emergency or other. But if you actually got your fleet in shape, even if it took time away from other priorities, your crystal budget would double (if you're doing well in Squad) or triple (if your squad rank is worse than top 20).

But never mind. Don't bulk up in fleet. Just complain about how you can't compete because you're not willing to farm. That just guarantees that I'll stay on top of fleet forever. I suppose if everyone decided to get good in fleet it would be as hard to take 1st in fleet as it is in Squad.

So keep doing what you're doing, and I'll keep doing fine.