I am new to SWL and never played TSW, which I guess does not exist anymore? What I am wondering is to best expierience the game should I become a patron, or does this game require you to purchase currency and DLC to reach your ultimate goals content wise? I do not like Pay 2 Win games. I play Star Wars the Old Republic and its pay currency is just for those who like to look Stylish or decorate they’re homes, but it does have a subscriber model in place if you want to play without limits and not having to grind, and that is what I am wondering if Patron does, is it worth it or not? I have not even finished the tutorial yet but am liking what I see so far just hoping someone can answer these questions before I carry on.
In SWL you don’t really need to pay for anything to play. You can run through whole game without paying a penny. Patron is just pack of conveniences and making things faster. Including bonus AP/SP which you may especially like on earlier levels. You’ll barely need 8h missions cd on start though. Cache keys are neat - don’t forget to login daily to get them, they won’t wait for you, - caches will mostly give you distillates to upgrade your gear.
It’s nice but not like you really need it.
You don’t need patron at all, it’s daily cache key is pretty much all it offers and 8hr cooldowns on missions - that literally is all it is.
If you get to level 50 and decide you want to sub you can do so on a monthly basis and cancel auto renew so you can choose to sub as and when you like.
There are also other small benefits to patron but they are somewhat lacklustre.
Like the others, it’s mostly convenience. Free teleports do save you time/shards if you are trying to find things like legend entries or during an event when you want to go on the open raid and then get back to missions.
The cache keys are nice, although you won’t be able to use the distillates fully early on as they tend to come in 5000xp and up (not really sure of the minimum since it has gone up over time and I’m not sure if that’s Funcom increasing it for everybody or if it’s just that the minimum goes up as your character gains in power). This will more than get a green item from base to max level.
They are much more useful later on because they empower with no anima shard cost. This is not so important with green items, but it becomes much more important when you’re trying to empower Mythic (yellow) gear.
The cosmetics and extraordinary weapons/talismans from the caches can be bought on the auction house - although if you’re not a patron you have to visit the auction house in Agartha to pick them up (more time convenience, since a patron gets drone item delivery).
You get a bonus on XP and anima shard rewards for mission completion, which is a subtle boost.
For buying stuff on the auction house, you get a bonus to Marks of Favor rewarded for completing daily
challenges - also a time convenience.
If/when you decide to run dungeons/lairs/scenarios, you get one daily bonus key of each type, so that’s an extra reward.
To sum up, you get things done faster and level up faster if you are a patron. You don’t get anything that you can’t eventually get if you’re not, although the wait may be a long one.
My recommendation would be not to open any caches until your character is level 50 in order to maximize your distillate XP received. Just keep squirreling the keys away.
I had noticed that the cache distillates went from just over 5k to 6 and a bit and now they are generally coming in at 8k with an IP of 781 (or possibly 782 now).
So yes, I guess they are going up - and from other posters it does increase with IP. That would make sense, since something that is wow when you have purple gear is eh when you have red.