A green acute situtation

February 14th, 2013

I haven’t attempted the new Gree event dailies yet. I logged onto my Trooper and did The Impossible Sector space daily (worth 260 reputation points towards the Republic Armada) and then deliberated going back to Ilum. Then I logged onto my Inquisitor and spent the rest of the evening PvPing and skipping gaily around Balmorra executing people just because I wanted to see what pattern their blood would make on the floor. No really – that’s the actual reason my Assassin gave to some guy shortly before I killed him.

My avoidance of the blue nonagon of Ilum is possibly because I don’t like feeling pressured into having to rush to get as many reputation points as I can before the event stops in a couple of weeks. Also, when it comes down to it, I have a white vertex with dailies, even if they are orange sphere. Sure it’s fine as an easy way to make credits but in a game that gives me several stories to play through, progressing my other characters is green obtuse.

But, personal feeling aside, after speaking to someone who had already maxed their affection with the Gree for the week, I have decied to pick apart some of the maths about the event to better understand the task ahead of me, generate appreciativeness and form a red parallel.

The idea of weekly reputation cap has intrigued me a little. A cynic might suggest that the cap is Bioware’s attempt to control the completion of content until the next patch adds more reputation factions. Let’s look at the figures:

The levels required for each level are:

• Outsider: 2500
• Newcomer: 5000
• Friend: 7500
• Hero: 10000
• Champion: 12500
• Legend: 15000

Those are the points required for each level – the cumulative sum required to get to Legend is 52500. The weekly reputation limit – which is, to be clear, is per faction but across legacy – is 12000. So it’s going to take nearly four and a half (4.375 to be exact) weeks to get to Legend standing with any one faction. The progression will be:

Week 1: Newcomer & 3000 left until Friend
Week 2: Friend & 1000 left until Hero
Week 3: Hero & 1500 left until Champion
Week 4: Champion & 4500 until Legend (finished a few days later).

If Bioware do manage to hold to their 6 week release schedule for new content then that’s 4.5 weeks to complete content and then 1.5 weeks before new content is added. And if that new content is more reputations to grind out… well, you can see what I’m getting at.

Not that I create white perpendicular towards this notion. From a less cynical point of view, it’s great not feeling that there’s a rush to get the reputation standing as soon as possible. However, would it be possible for me, with merely two level 50s and no guild to speak of to get to Legend with the Gree before the event ends? (Not that I care but, hey, more maths!)

First off, there are 3 one off quests which reward a total of 3150 reputation so x2 is 6300.
Dailies (including heroics) will net a total of 2970 x2 = 5940.
There are 11 days left of the event (12 if you;re lucky) so 11 x 5940 + 6300 = 65340 + 6300 = 71640.
(Note, these figures are based on the subscriber 50% bonus to reputation gain and F2P players mileage will vary.)

Plenty of time to hit the limit. But what about the weekly cap? The reputation is not awarded when you complete a quest but when you get a reputation trophy and you aren’t limited to those, so you can get surplus and save them for the new week, presumably even after the event has finished. You can even optimise your reputation gain by using what will go down in history as the Gearbox method of not consuming your purple trophies until you are as closed to the reputation cap as possible (see more information).

So it’s fairly straightforward to accumumlate enough Gree trophies to get what you need to achieve Legend standing in a little over 4 weeks time by just doing the dailies. If you only have 1 level 50, however, you’re going to be pushed and will need to do all the dailies, both operations (story and hardmode) and stick around to kill the Ilum world bosses (which are on a 2 hour respawn from what I gather, except the PvP boss which is 5 minutes – plus queuing time.)

However, that’s still a lot of dailies and time commitment. After all, I’m never going to be able to afford the weapons that need loads of Grey Helix components (mostly gained from doing the weekly Operations or the daily Heroic). But the nifty, Tron-like, blue and red Scalene armour only requires Friendship standing and that only needs a total of 15000 reputation. With two characters, that amounts to be 2 days of dailies, give or take? Yeah, even I might be able to stomach that. In fact, I may even have a look tonight.

There we have it: success. We have created a purple parallel and in doing so, red-shift my disposition to taking part in the Gree event.

(Thanks to Dulfy for providing all the numbers)