Relic Delta

The update has been live for less than a day. I'm curious how confident you are in saying that any theorycrafting is dead because relic levels decide everything and fail to notice two things:

1)

This in fact opens some new avenues for theorycrafting and has a chance to breathe new life into old teams.

The Prepared Smuggler enthusiast with a cracked out R8 team which had no place in the meta until yesterday now has a chance to actually use an old team they put a lot of resources into by using Relic Delta to their advantage.

What can another old team like GG Droids do with a Relic Delta advantage? I have a Relic 8 GG and a Relic 8 STAP. My STAP has only been good for ROTE platoons for almost the entire time I've had it. Now... I might be able to actually use it for something in GAC.

I've been putting my R5 Zorii squad on defense because it's a team with very strong mechanics and a way to deal damage that doesn't depend on their offense stats (expose damage). Trench, on the other hand, is considered to be a weak defensive squad, even with its current FDC. But my Trench team is a mix of R7 and R8. I might be able to replace Zorii Resistance with Trench on defense and have Trench actually be a decent defensive team instead of a joke. I put 28mln datacache and 1000 mk3 upgrade mats into Trench's FDC. I don't want this team to only be useful in TW. 

Many a complaint has been posted on these forums about how trash JMMW is because he's not the most dominant in GAC. Well, guess what. My JMMW team is R8 (I built the high relics for the O66 raid). Maybe you can still roll up on it with R5 Traya and crush the Jedi... or maybe my JMMW wipes the floor with a low relic Traya team. 

The Gerbil is a SWGOH Youtuber who has maxed out R9 Ewoks and I look forward to seeing what his murderbears will be able to do now that this steep relic investment might actually pay off. 

2) 

Building higher relic levels just became a lot easier. 

For endgame accounts, two particular relic materials tend to become bottlenecks: Bronzium Wiring (BW) and Electrium Conductors (EC). BW features heavily in lower to mid relic levels (R2-7) while EC come in starting at R6. Every level then requires 20 EC. BW is most concentrated between R2 and R5. 

R2-5 -> 40 BW per relic level
R6-7 -> 30 BW per level
220 BW per character (stops featuring in relic upgrade recipes at R8)
160 BW required to go to R5, another 60 to go from R5 to R7

40 EC per R7 character (20 per level going from R5 to R7)

So, why do these materials become bottlenecks? Well, the gear to scrap for them at the Scavenger is either sparse (EC) or has a terrible conversion rate (BW). When I was getting another character to G13, I had to choose between upgrading two R5s to R7 or bringing one R1 to R5. Before Relic Delta, R5 characters held their ground. Even though I might have wanted to bump up my Gungans from R5 to R7, I had new G13s coming in that couldn't really be left at R1. R1 can't even access the full power of a datacron. 

Now, BW and EC are available for much cheaper using raid tokens mk1 (BW) and mk2 (EC), both downgraded a token level. The mk3 token trade for EC was decent and I bought a lot of them this way, but the mk2 trade for BW was atrociously bad. Like, it straight up looked like a scam. Now though, I can buy 220 BW (max required per character) for 8800 mk1 raid tokens. 

Already the 2nd raid loot box (14.5mln guild score) maxes out the mk1 token reward at 16.5k. You get 450 mk1 tokens for scoring 65k points in the raid. So that's 16.95k mk1 tokens per raid. Scrapping a little bit of gear at the Scavenger means that you can *easily* rake in enough BW in one week (one raid) for 2 R7s. And that's going from R0 to R7. R5 to R7 is just 60 BW. R3 to R7 is 140 BW. 

A big obstacle standing in the way of upgrading your Traya team from R5 to R7 hasn't just been lessened with this update--it has been obliterated. 

Yes, signal data will continue to be in demand as it always has been, that's nothing new. But every single old relic level, including R9, has been made more accessible. R9 even had some materials removed from the recipe entirely. 

R7 is now going to be the baseline sensible relic level and CG have, with this update, made it enormously easier to build R7s. R8 materials are more accessibe because mk3 raid tokens won't be spread so thin anymore. Electrium Conductors and Zinbiddle Cards have been downgraded from requiring mk3 tokens to purchase to now requiring mk2. Bronzium Wiring and Carbonite Circuit Boards (two big bottlenecks in early relic levels) are now cheaply available for mk1 raid tokens, lessening the demand for scrapping gear at the Scavenger. 

So, yeah. Your Traya needs an upgrade. And now this upgrade is a lot cheaper. Those key toons you were eyeing for R8 but could never spare the resources for? Now you will be able to. R9 is no longer relegated to only JG requirements for much of the playerbase. Now it's a still costly, but attainable and valuable upgrade for the key toons in your best teams. 

You can let yourself be crushed by Relic Delta, or you can take advantage of it. R7 is the new R5.