The table below expands upon the Artifact (Purple) Grade 11 materials unit cost from my inaugural post to include all of the Grade 11 crafting materials. The core assumptions are that only Rich Yield and Bountiful Yield missions are used and at a 1:1 ratio. The green materials are based only on the cost from gathering missions, so the greater the portion of them that are gathered from nodes on Riishi or Yavin 4, the lower their effective unit cost would be in reality.
My vision is for this to be a resource more than analysis, so here’s the table (updated for better formatting and clarity):
I will be following up this week with a full analysis and discussion of how this table can guide your GTN buying and selling to make your SWTOR personal economy as efficient and profitable as possible.
– Andrew | SWTOR Economics
SWTOR Economics 
This is a great page!
The numbers are fair but perhaps a bit lower than the numbers I derived for myself by running a few hundred of each type of mission. They’re not so far off as to make a compelling difference in cost of finished goods, so this isn’t a complaint as much as an observation.
Care to share what your methodology was to determine the numbers?
Also, you’ve purposefully excluded the cost for Wealthy missions. This makes a lot of sense for a post geared to more casual crafters, which most probably are, but as a more hardcore crafter, I almost exclusively run Wealthy missions to obtain Artifact level materials. The cost per item of doing that is significantly lower than what you report here, though I’m certainly limited in the quantity I can acquire via that method.
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Now that I have video content up and running, my goal is to do a video with the spreadsheet math to discuss the methodology. I assumed the vendor sale of any schematics obtained in critical mission successes, could that be the difference that’s pushing my numbers lower?
I have a draft with basically only a title on a blank page currently for Wealthy missions. I haven’t had time to determine the cost of the mission discovery itself yet, that’s the primary snag. Do you buy them from the GTN some or at all? I’ll definitely circle back on the topic at some point along the way though and thank you for reading!
-Andrew
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Yep, having read more pages on your site, I think the delta is that your numbers assume selling undesired mission returns to vendors. That makes sense… and it’s convinced me to just sell the silly things instead of hoarding them like I’m trying to get onto a bad reality television show. 😉
For the Wealthy missions, I only use what I get from slicing mission returns. Those seem stacked heavily in favor of Investigation and not at all in favor of Treasure Hunting, so it’s not as nice as I would like. I would buy them from GTN if I could find them under 5k, but the GTN interface makes searching for specific skill levels of mission discoveries cumbersome.
I also have the luxury of having clicked the slot machine many, many thousands of times while it was in its incredibly generously broken state, so I have a lot of stacks of Jawa Junk. This affords me the ability to sit back and only run mission discoveries. Eventually though I’ll run out of Jawa Junk and probably have to go back to running Rich and even Bountiful missions again.
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This is a great snapshot. In my experience the drop rates for all Gathering skills and all Mission skills is the same. As an example, the expected cost of 1 Autoimmune Regulator = 1 Verpine Fiber = 1 Midlithe Crystal, etc.
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The differences come from variations in the resale proceeds of the schematics, which vary across the mission skills, as well as a difference in critical chance for Enigmatic Artifact Fragments whose Rich Yield mission is inexplicably Hard/Orange Difficulty (base 10% crit chance before companion bonuses) while every other Grade 11 material is Yellow Difficulty or lower (base 15% crit chance before companion bonuses). The drop quantities are the same for missions within the same yield and quality tier (purple/blue/green & rich/bountiful/abundant/moderate) but vary across both of those spectra.
Definitely planning to do a video post with my spreadsheet on the screen to show and discuss the methodology. Always looking for ways to improve my modeling, which I know you can relate to, and there’s no better way than putting it out there for the community to critique!
– Andrew
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Very interesting about the color/difficulty affecting the crit rate, I hadn’t thought about that. When 3.0 first launched I recorded every crew skill mission I ran. With 16 toons and 35 non-crafting crew skills it was a lot of data. Of course, it quickly became obvious that the base and critical drop rates were the same, after that I did just a simple expected value. Of course this also became kinda pointless with the ease of gathering mats on Yavin IV driving the resale cost down. I’m looking forward to seeing your more data intensive analysis on this though.
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This is a fantastic posting on a blog that has quickly become my favorite SWTOR blog. Great work — I admire your dedication in manually capturing and tracking prices and supply factors (hopefully someone can help you automate).
I am interested in your formula for unit pricing (factoring crit rate, companion bonus, affection, legacy of crafting bonus, failure rate, mission cost, mission yield, etc.), as I would like to try to apply it to missions of all levels, as there is still significant opportunity on flipping and/or gathering <11 mats. With the upcoming 2XP weekend, craft vs. "sell the mats" decisions will need to be made for <11 grade items.
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I’m making my next post (after the capstone on wealthy missions) the one I’ve set aside on my methodology so that it’s out before double XP weekend like you mentioned.
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