Starship Booty and GSF

When it comes to Amplifiers, there is very good reason to only focus on those which increase damage or healing values. There are the odd few others which are useful for other stuff, like reducing repair costs or increasing crew skill success rates.

Today's post is dedicated to one of the little-celebrated Amplifiers and how useful it can be in specific situations: Starship Booty.

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Starship Booty gives at most a 2% chance per mod (max 18%) that killing an enemy will yield up to 10 Fleet Commendations. These can be used to buy various items ranging from armour sets to upgrades for your personal ship, so are worth saving if you enjoy the space missions and / or are capable of clearing the Heroic missions.

However, there's something else you can buy with Fleet Commendations: Legacy-bound Fleet and Ship Requisition grants for Galactic Starfighter. I touched on this strategy briefly in my long post comparing GSF to Squadrons, but earlier this week I decided to see just how effective this Amplifier could be in getting a character prepared for GSF. 

When gearing up my Vanguard early into 6.0, I chose to deliberately slot as many Starship Booty Amplifiers as I could get because the Civilian Pilot belt is absolutely ideal for partnering with the Republic Officer gear from the Collector's Edition vendor. Even after the belt was acquired, I just left these Amps active. Since this gear is shared between my Vanguard and Powertech, both of their activities tended to yield a fair amount of Fleet Comms, with both eventually accruing 3,876 and 4,433 Commendations respectively.

Neither of them has done a single space mission.

With the latest Total Galactic War, I decided to get another character, my Sage Vihala, involved with GSF. Since it is still a rather painful activity for fresh characters, I decided to go around to my various characters and turn in as many Fleet Commendations as I could in purchasing these grants. In total, I think I had around 9,500 Fleet Commendations across all eight, which resulted in a grand total of:

• 22 Major Ship Requisition grants (4,000 Requisition per ship)
• 2 Major Fleet Requisition grants (6,250 Fleet Req)
• 23 Minor Fleet Requsition grants (400 Fleet Req)

Note: the Fleet Requisition grant seen in the above screenshot that costs 75 Commendations is slightly better value than the Minor grant I used (800 per) - I was just not aware of it until it was too late.

Including the 6,250 Fleet Requisition she already possessed from completing her first Conquest, using the Fleet Requisition grants earned her a total of 27,950 Fleet Req. This was enough to buy the outstanding non-Cartel ships in each class (19,500 Req), seven crew members (4,200 Req), and still have some to spare. Using the 22 Ship Requisition grants then earned her 88,000 Requisition for each of these ships, which was enough to fully-upgrade at least one component in each category, with spare Req depending on how many additional components needed unlocking. 

Essentially, in doing this I managed to completely unlock and master every single one of Vihala's non-Cartel ships, and all without her having done a single match of GSF (she has now done her first Weekly).

As much as I really do appreciate BioWare allowing players to purchase Legacy Requisition grants in the 5.0 patch-cycle, I have to say that I do think that this sort of thing is utterly ridiculous. Being able to power-level a character for any activity without them having even done that activity in the first place is just silly. Great for getting another character up there and ready, but still ludicrous. 

I do not believe that BioWare were really aware that anyone could or even would use this specific Amplifier for this purpose, or if they were then they just did not believe it would be a significant problem. After all, this power-levelling via Legacy grants was still possible at the time they were introduced - this Amplifier has just made it far easier for characters to earn Fleet Commendations.

So there we have it. Simply be in possession of approximately 9,000 Fleet Commendations and you can quickly get a character every single GSF ship unlocked and mastered. Ludicrous, but effective.