Kabam’s Star Wars: Uprising (Free) is not a very forgiving freemium game. With multiple in-game currencies along with a premium counterpart that’s pretty expensive to purchase that aspect of Uprising would be tough enough to navigate. Combine that with the expansive equipment system, mission structure and the extracurricular battles and there is plenty of opportunity for players to lose out on potential rewards. However, with the right timing and knowledge, there’s also opportunity to be taken advantaged of. A few of us here have been playing pretty regularly since launch and have compiled a few tips on how to potentially put the odds in your favor.
Player Rating and the Soft Barriers of Uprising
It’s no surprise that Star Wars: Uprising, as a freemium title, has a lot of soft barriers associated with it that will encourage payment in some form or fashion. Probably the biggest element of Uprising that encourages that is the player rating concept that governs mission difficulty. All missions (whether story or side) have difficulties attached to them, with higher rewards for the more difficult versions. Uprising uses the player rating concept to restrict players from playing those harder difficulties (and thus earning those much better rewards) unless they have a high enough player rating. Player rating is calculated based on player level and equipment level. The higher your level and the more you upgrade your equipment, the higher your player rating is, which means you can play those harder difficulties and earn that cooler loot.
Sounds simple, but here are the issues associated with the above system. First, as your player level rises, the minimum player rating for those higher difficulty missions also rise. In addition, as you progress further and further into the story missions, the player ratings for each difficulty also rise in turn. Obviously, this means that as you get further into the game, it’s expected that you upgrade your equipment more and more in order to keep up with the difficulty curve. This works up to a point, as players will eventually hit the level limits for their weapons and equipment, forcing them to either find higher leveled equipment or use crystals to upgrade the gear already owned (assuming they can in fact be upgrade). The first approach is pretty hard to do as Uprising has a tendency to restrict difficulties that might reward players with the higher leveled equipment beyond the theoretical maximum limit where it is needed. So, for example, if you have a full set of maxed out three star equipment and you’re now looking for four star stuff, the difficulty level for missions that actually have four star equipment as potential drops is still out of reach.
Therefore, there’s really only two ways to get better in Uprising: using Chromium to potentially win equipment, and earning crystal to upgrade the equipment already in possession. We’ll go through both approaches below.
Chromium – What It’s For and How to Earn it
As Uprising’s premium currency, Chromium is used for a variety of different things in the game that I suppose could be considered ancillary in some regards. For example, you can use Chromium to re-roll your crew runs as well as take a chance at winning some nice equipment in the premium crane game. The game will on occasion also throw some special deals at players that will bestow crystals, upgrade materials and regular currency for some Chromium. The potential purchases with Chromium are all well and good but the biggest drawback is the real money expense associated with Chromium. As of the writing of this guide, 150 Chromium was being sold for $4.99 USD. To put into perspective what 150 Chromium will get you, a single pull from the premium crane game costs 120. When you put like that, the cost is simply outrageous.
Thankfully, there are a few ways to earn Chromium in-game and while you’ll never earn a ton, you can eventually earn enough to do a little bit. For example, you can occasionally find a crew run that will earn a small amount of Chromium. In addition, on occasion the daily Cartel Missions will have Chromium as a reward (typically between 15 and 50 per mission). While there’s little you can do to make Chromium-reward missions come at a greater pace, the best thing I can recommend for the cartel missions is to simply log in and play that daily mission at a minimum. Even if you don’t earn Chromium, odds are you’ll pick up some crystals which are just as important. As for the crew runs, the only advice I can give you is that the more you do, the faster they reset. Thus, you should check in on a regular basis each day to complete your runs and unlock new ones.
In addition to the above, one of the easiest ways to earn Chromium is to max out the level of any equipment owned. Uprising keeps track of every weapon and piece of armor owned. The game also keeps track of those items that you’ve maxed out, as well and rewards 15 Chromium for each item. While this bonus is only rewarded once per unique equipment item, there are a lot of items for you to max out. Even if you only focused on working on the five or six early sets of equipment that don’t require too much time and resources to upgrade, you can easily earn 600 or 700 Chromium with relative ease. Considering the going USD rate for Chromium, that’s not a bad haul. The easiest way to work this strategy is to use your script to play the regular crane game and upgrade every low level piece of you find (obviously using the Armory to makes sure that you haven’t already maxed that piece out).
Crystals Are Your Best Friend
In my view, crystals are the bread and butter for any player hoping to eventually get to a decent player rating without the assistance of Chromium. Simply put, crystals are used to upgrade everything you own. Obviously, you can use them to upgrade weapons and equipment to the next tier, but they can even be used to upgrade your crew as well.
Crystals are primarily earned as mission rewards and drops, but they can also be given as daily log-in rewards and even as crew run rewards. Thus, some easy ways to earn crystals are to log in every day, and take place in the daily assault missions which can potentially offer them as drops. Low level crystals can also be picked up in the regular crane game, and can be salvaged from equipment as well. If you’re dedicated enough to actually get ranked in a sector battle, you can also earn crystals as rewards in that mode as well.
So based on the above, players have a wide variety of activities to partake in to pick up crystals. Participate in sector battles to earn lots of requisition script which can then be cashed in for pulls that will hopefully reward some crystal. Always keep your crew runs active (similar to the above) so you an get more chances for crystal runs. If you have excess equipment, I’d always recommend salvage vice simply selling as the potential crystals you earn are far more valuable than the minimal basic currency earned. In fact, I’d recommend using some chromium to pick up some currency whenever one of those specials come around so that way you can focus on salvaging.
Meanwhile, once you obtain enough crystal, it’s really just a matter of taking the lesser crystals earned and upgraded them up to the level you need. Of course, this is going to require a ton of work to acquire all the crystals needed to continually upgrade all your equipment but honestly, outside of the actual gameplay, this is the crux of getting better in Uprising so players are going to have to get used to it.
Other General Tips
Beyond trying to work the freemium systems, there are a few other general tips that can be employed while playing. Make sure that the abilities that you take into battle compliment your play style and equipment. For example, if you’re melee based you aren’t going to want the abilities that focus more on ranged attacks and vice versa. In addition, enemies come out in waves in Uprising so I always recommend that you take the missions relatively slow to make sure you can methodically take out each wave before more come at you. There are also some obvious tips, such as always using your abilities when necessary (there’s no point to ‘save’ them, even an ultimate one) and be sure to strategically use the batca tanks in boss battles.
There are certainly more tips out there for folks looking to succeed in this Star Wars freemium title. If you have anything else to add feel free to contribute in the comments.
