I stopped playing TSW around the time Tokyo came out and completely shut down when the writing was on the wall with F2P. Some may remember me from the old forums or gaming with me (in game The Adjustor)
I am looking for answers to the questions that aren’t in the sales pitch for the game.
Just how bad is penalty for not going patron, just how inferior is going patron to having a sub in the old game.
Just how much will it really cost me on top of going patron to get a fully geared out character vs grind time in game (if that is even still viable, in TSW I had something like 4 billion pax)
About 10000$ If you wish to bypass the grind completely.
Also I believe TSW capped at about 2.7 Billion Pax but that was quite hard to achieve so you might be thinking 4 Million. In any case the currency in SWL will take a long time to grind unless your good with the Marketplace (which is more challenging now with the smaller playerbase and less valuable items) or alternatively if you play several alts and spend the whole day doing dailies.
Thanks for the response. It’s very helpful
And no I had 4 billion+. Mostly from farming and marketeering. I had two accounts and my own guild set up to store it.
I wasn’t alone at that level someone was buying those godforsakenly ugly gold items after all.
Ah yes that makes a bit more sense. There was some limit where the game didn’t like going over a certain value but multiple accounts would work. I was probably one of the crazy people buying all your gold augments cause I couldn’t be bothered to farm them all lol.
Patron helps a lot but the real challenge in SWL is that its an excessively longer grind then TSW and its made harder by the fact that there are less groups of players actively grinding anymore. Like getting to max gear at launch only took 3-4 months if you were willing to put in the time but now I feel like it would be much harder.
I think the penalties you will feel f2p the most is the lack of 8 hour cooldowns and the lack of double AP/SP. I had to adapt a cycle of one day Tokyo, one day CF, one day SF for my dailies and AP/SP grind still felt a little slow compared to patron.
But it’S workable.
You just never will progress as fast as a patron playing the same time, naturally. I would say in the realm of other mmo the f2p in SWL is relatively nice baring you from nothing.
It’s hard to buy progression…like you can buy chestkeys for Marks of Favor which you get from dailies and Marks of Favor can be indirectly bought with selling Aurum aka the Realmoney currency but generally the issue is more your ability to run stuff than your income. You can buy cache keys but you would need a lot to just level to max even with the free one from patron.
Limiting myself to the two main currencies here: Marks of Favor:
Kinda limited since you get some from dailies and have to gain every penny more from selling stuff on the market to other people but technically you can gain quite a fortune if you put in the time.
Anima Shards: As long as you run missions on the side and don’T go crazy on the gearupgrades you should always have a shardpositiv. And once the museum is done you don’t even have a good sink for it.
Hope that helped you. Generally I advice patron if you have a stable income just for how many Quality of life things it brings but f2p is what I did and I never felt like I hit a wall I couldn’T progress through.
If you just want to get through the story, then it is perfectly viable to play as F2P without spending a dime.
If you want to max out your character, and are playing every day (or nearly every day) then being Patron is a lot of help, and quite good value for money. I’d say that being Patron in SWL is actually more useful than being a subscriber in TSW.
I don’t recommend spending any significant amounts of money on SWL beyond the cost of Patron though - it is just too expensive to pay your way through the whole grind to be worth it.