f13.net

Speaks for itself, I guess  :grin:

http://www.swtor.com/galactic-starfighter

EDIT - Official press release:

http://www.swtor.com/info/news/press-release/20131008

Looks pretty sweet to me.  I'm glad they didn't rush it and actually expanded on ship customization.

I wonder how sticky it will be with people. I know lots of people who have basically been bitching for a new X-Wing vs TieFighter since forever and a day. Will it provide that for those people or will something be wrong?

I'm guessing it won't be a simulator in the same way that game was but who knows at this point.

That video doesn't even make it clear whether it's free flight or if it's what the game currently has (pre-programmed flight path, with the ability to shoot your weapons at where the mouse is on screen).  And even if it's free flight, Freelancer-style mouse control is crap (at least for me - I need joystick support, dammit).

It's free flight 12v12 areanas with some battlezones and other shit that isn't very descriptive.

http://www.swtor.com/galactic-starfighter

I've got to say I'm pretty disappointed by this type of space expansion.

Yep. This is not the space exploration/combat I was looking for.

Going to the Cantina Tour thing on Wednesday, I will report back if there are any tidbits of interesting info.

You just watch yourself.

Kendo class has me prepared for that, man.

Ingmar's not going to let me ask any questions about PvP, because I can't phrase them without swearing.  :heartbreak:

Can you just take the pvp dev and beat him to a bloody pulp with your giant truckasaurus hands?  You won't have to ask him anything!

Honestly the only thing about SWTOR PvP that really bothers me at the moment is the Fucking Arenas being in the random WZ rotation. Everything else is along the lines of "eh, whatever." I think they should get over their stupid NO CROSS-SERVER QUEUES thing for WZs at least, because the more people you have in a PvP pool the better, but it's not a dealbreaker for me by any stretch. I don't especially love premades either, but I can't see them being able to even start to solve that before taking care of the cross-server queue thing.

I admit part of this is simply me being one of the good-at-PvP classes. I like PvP at level 55 just fine, but I'm a scoundrel healer. I don't think I'd like it nearly as much as a vanguard (given I don't even like it in the lowbie bracket, where I am significantly more powerful than I'd be at 55).

I'm sure they put the arenas in the rotation because they know that, like with the ranked foolishness, only a very small but vocal minority wanted arenas so if they didn't put it in the rotation they'd never be used enough to warrant the time spent making them.

In fairness to TOR pvp though, as much as I think they still need to work on some class balance, it's stellar in when compared to what passes for 'balance' in GW2.

Well, that just hooks back into the whole "stop with the server-specific queues arrrrrgh."

SWTOR pvp is something I don't "get". It was passable in the first month or so of launch (before it morphed into 'war hero gear vs. rank 10 noob'), but it wasn't very good to begin with -- the ONLY warzone that was somewhat interesting to play was Huttball, and that relied entirely on the number of gimmick classes you had (enemy pulls, friendly pulls, sprints, etc). My personal litmus test - admittedly, a pretty low bar - is "would I rather be solo-queuing random BGs in WOW?" and the last few times I tried SWTOR pvp, the answer was 'yes'. Even when we were winning because I lucked out with a steamroll premade on our side, or when I teamed up with a couple of friends on my operative and pugstomped 3-4 lowbie WZs in a row effortlessly.

And yet, the playerbase apparently loves warzones and plays them all the time. I DON'T UNDERSTAND

(I play a vanguard and a healing sage, if that affects anything; the last time I tried a few WZs was just 2 weeks ago)

I just wish I could skip Huttball, I'd pvp a lot more without that in the rotation.

I love the PvP, but I can't explain why, any more than I can explain why I love <insert game feature here>. I find it fun, and it generally challenges me in a way I enjoy. My favorite is lolpylons, in part because no one understands the scoring system for it.  :why_so_serious: I play scoundrel/operative healer in 55 PvP (although not much lately, there's nothing I want to buy and the queue is usually slower than the lower level ones), and a wider variety in the lower brackets (sorc/sage, merc/commando, a sad vanguard I only sort of like although now that I have grappling hook it's a lot funnier, etc).

I liked doing random BGs in WoW too (holy paladin for those, mostly), but the gear gap feels less ridiculous in SWToR to me (although as a holy paladin, I hardly ever got truly roflstomped in WoW's PvP for whatever reason). So that helps. I fucking hated WSG, though, more than I hate, say, Voidstar. And I hate Voidstar rather a lot. I do kinda wish SWTOR had a WZ or two that held more people (even if it was just 16 vs 16), it's easier to get your footing in PvP when you have a bigger crowd to get lost in.

I do think a big part of it is class choice, though. I love my scoundrel more than I have ever loved a class. I love playing him doing anything. And no WoW class plays like him.

I don't doubt that class plays a role in WZ fun factor, but my main gripe is that I just don't feel like whatever I'm doing makes a difference. Considering that the team sizes are so tiny, this seems a bit counterintuitive... I suspect it is because a premade - or even just a 2-3man team - can basically win any WZ by themselves as opposed to WOW's 10-15man BGs, where I frequently see up to 5man groups from the same server/guild, but it is rare that they can completely dominate a game.

• Huttball: do we have enough of the gimmick builds that can run the ball or gank the enemy carrier via pulls and whatnot? If so, yay, let's 6-0 them. If not, whatever. At least the gameplay is different and an undergeared team can win this if they are more organized (fat chance in a pug).
• Voidstar: If either team is overgeared enough to wipe the other team between two rez waves, the game is over before it started. Otherwise, do we have the AOE to keep the other team from ever planting a bomb (and healers to keep the AOErs alive)? If yes, cue long slog ending with a win; if not, cue long slog ending with a loss. Maybe try another half-hearted push with a stealth cover when rezzing later that will probably fail anyway. It's like Strand of the Ancients, only worse. (and that... is quite an achievement)
• Civil war: Does the team split up appropriately and do we have better-geared people to wipe their center zerg? If so, we win and watch the other team futilely try to capture nodes without any success for the rest of the game. If not, same thing, only with the roles reversed. I've seen more dynamism in terrible Battle of Gilneas pugs (which is basically the same setup).
• Novare: Same as civil war.
• Hypergates: Do we have enough healers (or any at all) in mid? Can a group of ninja cappers flip the enemy gate? If yes, yay. If not, boo.

Haven't played the others.

WOW random BGs have a lot of problems, and gear is just a small part of it (though ironically it's less of a problem now than it ever was in its lifetime). There are AFKers, there are bots with their simple scripts running from nodeA to nodeB, and yeah, there are premades (rare, compared to swtor). But in the long run, the chances of me being able to actually do something / be useful / actually have an effect on the game's outcome is way, way, way higher in a random WOW BG than a SWTOR WZ. And that's without getting into the entire 'get 2-shot through cooldowns if a lightsaber melee class decides I need to die' thing...


e: to dial back on the negativity a bit, I DID enjoy WZs in SWTOR in the first month or so (it really was a pretty decent DIKUpvp experience when it wasn't plagued by constant premades and horrible gear issues)... if I didn't, I wouldn't be checking on it occasionally and/or writing long diatribes like this one. :p

See, I always, always, always feel like I make a difference in the WZs. Again, this probably goes back to the class I play. I am, if I may toot my own horn, a fucking awesome operative/scoundrel. I heal my non-existent balls off, and I am really goddamn hard to kill (until I finally get marked and 6 opposing players beeline for me everytime I unstealth ... but then they're spending time bothering me instead of doing something else). In WoW it would depend on the BG ... but I could heal my balls off as my paladin as well. And that always, to me, feels like it makes a big difference (except in the 40-man BGs).

Yeah, the WZs require people to know the strategy of the WZ. I don't find this to be a bad thing. I found the WoW BGs fairly easy to see where the wind would blow as well when I was doing it a lot (I haven't been in one in over a year, though). In both games, it basically comes down to "Is my team full of derps? If so, can they be herded to victory?"

Maybe it's your server, I dunno.


PS: I fucking hate bots and afkers more than basically anything. And I know they finally broke the whole twink game in WoW, but I found that a MILLION times more infuriating than the premade thing, which does happen on Ebon Hawk but just not that much in the lowbie brackets. And when it does, you can lol at how sad they are to make premades for the 10-29 bracket.  :awesome_for_real:

I also almost exclusively play healers in MMO pvp (resto shaman in WOW, cleric in RIFT); I'm very used to being public enemy #1! With good kiting and CC work I can usually survive even against groups of 3-4 enemies (while keeping my team up) on my shaman and could even do the same on my sage while leveling as well -- it's not like I'm a terrible healer or anything. Or at least I don't think I am. :awesome_for_real:

My experience is mostly from an undergeared healing sage POV in the 50 bracket and then later in the 30-54 one. I mean, I could outheal everyone else on both teams AND keep critical targets stunned / CC'd*... but all I did was help a steamrolling group steamroll harder, or just make the hopelessly-outclassed group slightly less hopelessly outclassed (we still lost by a large margin).

As it is, in my experience the first 60-90 seconds always defined how the WZ would end, with very very few exceptions. IMO bigger team sizes would help mix things up; I don't necessarily mean AV/IOC-scale stuff (which isn't very fun in WOW either), but 12-16 people would be a good number. Ditto with the maps; Arathi Basin is a hundred times better than Gilneas because 5 nodes vs 3 adds a lot of complexity -- turtling 3 isn't always the right answer, and there are many ways to recover from being 3-capped, etc etc.


* That is, when I wasn't busy getting 2-shot in a stun by some dude with a red lightsaber. :why_so_serious:

That's it right there. 

Play a scoundrel healer with decent gear in pvp.  You will affect the outcome of the match in a more profound way.  Sage healers just are too squishy and lack the mobility to get the job done.

I'm fairly sure the reason they don't have larger WZs is because the game engine would have a problem with it.

I think my biggest problem with pvp in TOR is that in general they decided to lean on healing too much when they balanced the classes.  Healing is really powerful so DPS has to be really powerful to try to get through the healing so if you're without a healer you just get murdered really, really fast.

I am surprised you had the same experience in 30-54 that you did in the 50 bracket, Zetor. My experience is generally that the gear-stomping scenario really only comes into play at the cap.

Don't wear 'pvp' gear unless you actually have the top end pvp gear. The way the bolster system works is it checks if armor has expertise on it, if no, bolster, if yes, don't bolster.

I doesn't care HOW MUCH expertise though, so if you wear your old level 50 pvp gear into a warzone, your gonna have a bad time.  :why_so_serious:

Ingmar: To be fair, most of the stomping (going both ways btw, but it wasn't much more fun to be on the winning side) was when the cap was still at 50 (the Crazy Adventures of A Healer In Recruit Gear after the release of Kaon 1, the Section X quest hub thing, and then shortly before the mini-xpac release), but I did get a few games in 2 weeks ago with very similar outcomes (played 3 games total in 30-54 for 2 losses and 1 win -- all of them really lopsided)
That sounds like... a not really well thought-out system, but yeah, that's exactly what I did. My gear was like... Recruit MK1 with battlemaster bracers? Or something like that.  :awesome_for_real:

That does explain some of the  :ye_gods:, at least!

Yea, the bolster system has some... issues  :why_so_serious:


But yea, if you were wearing the old blue recruit gear in the 30-54 bracket, everyone else was up leveled to 55 stats with a large amount of expertise (the pvp stat), while you were wearing level 50 blues with proportionally jack and shit for expertise in comparison. Like any amount of expertise will prevent bolstering, even from a saber crystal. If you want to lowbie pvp, just wear normal level appropriate gear.

Heck if you want to Level cap PvP, you're probably better off in your pve gear until you get a full pvp suit saved up.

I just wanted to add that the character that I had the most fun with in pvp was my shadow tank, although I really felt gimped in terms of damage, at least I could defend really well. I liked pvp at the beginning because it gave tons of xp and I didn't want to do pve solo. Towards the end, it became less fun because the two sides were poorly matched.

I started playing again recently and I've gotten facerolled in arenas for my troubles. Not sure why I bothered lol.

So we went to the Cantina thing, which was nice. We wound up talking Blaine Christine for like a half hour. At one point he asked if any of us had done the new arenas yet, all perky-like. And Ingmar basically MADE me break the poor man's heart. I reluctantly (but tactfully!) said that I had, and I really kind of don't like they're part of the random scrub rotation, because random deathmatches are my least favorite thing to do, even when I'm winning. He seemed sympathetic to my plight, at least. And I didn't curse at him!

The starfighter thing is ... I think it might be fun? The problem is that it's really overwhelming to just jump into, but I am under the impression that that's what you gotta do. Jeff Hickman told me that it usually takes three or four rounds for people to start to get the hang of it enough to not feel overwhelmed from what they've seen. I did manage to kill people and help take objectives in the second round, at least. The first round I opened up by almost immediately flying into something and dying.  :why_so_serious:

Ingmar says he will post his impressions tomorrow and I promised not to steal his thunder too much, so that's all you get for now.

Wait no, one other thing: There's not going to be any joystick/controller support, although they did say if the playerbase is really screaming for it, they'll probably try to figure something out if they can. That doesn't bother me, because I am pretty sure I'd suck regardless, but I know that's something people really wanted to know.

I should have said this before you went to talk to them but oh well!  In a recent poll on the forums (started by a dev mind you), 'do more class stories' was the number 1 requested thing last I checked.  Did they say anything about picking those up again?

They didn't talk about that in specific no, there was a lot of talk about how they rank stuff based on demand, etc., though. The things they hear about over and over again that they mentioned were: hood toggle, guild capital ships, dual spec/gear swapping. All that stuff is on their list but no promises were made. The capital ships thing got more talk time than anything else, I think that's the one they hear about the most.

-----

Anyway, I went in pretty apathetic about the space thing but after getting to play it, I'm pretty impressed with it. One thing I found surprising was how playable it was with KB/M - which is good because it isn't going to have controller support (though they got asked about that a whole lot so it is probably on the radar.)

So, summary of what it is:

- 12 vs. 12 PVP arena thing. There are 2 maps to start with (a space one with shipyards and asteroids and a flying-around-mesas-on-Makeb one), each has 3 objectives with turrets; you capture the objectives by blowing up all the turrets and staying near the objective to flip it to your side, both sides accumulate points based on owning objectives and possibly for kills, not sure about that last bit. I believe a 3rd map is coming later and also a related flashpoint for the non-space lovers.

- Gameplay is reminiscent of X-Wing or Wing Commander type games. W/S accelerate brake, A/D roll left right, you steer/shoot with the mouse in a fairly clever way I think - you get a leading reticle to help you aim at moving targets as well. There's regular pew pew guns and lock-on-for-a-certain-amount-of-time-to-fire-missiles, etc. There are also some cooldown type things on the 1-4 buttons, and you can put extra power to shields/guns/engines, etc.

- There are 3 ship 'roles' to start with, they come in different variants with different special abilities - scouts, strike fighters, and gunships. Scouts are speedy and turn faster, strike fighters are pretty much your standard X-wing type thing, and gunships are kind of a sniper/support type role. I was not able to really grok the gunship at first when I tried it. A 4th ship class (bombers - still NDAed so who knows about them) is coming in February. All in all I think they said there are 15 total variants at start.

- All this stuff is unlocked with a resource called 'requisition' - it comes in 2 types, ship requisition, which can only be used on the ship you use to earn it, and fleet requisition, which you can use on anything. Stuff you can unlock - ships, ship equipment, crew members (you can use all your ground crew plus some other guys it seems to give you automatically, but you can also unlock crew from other classes so if you want M1-4X as your co-pilot on every class or something, you could do that - does not unlock him for ground use though, for that you're still stuck with your regular dudes), paint jobs, etc. etc. At first glance there appears to be a shit-ton of customization available, but I didn't have a ton of time to play with that part of the interface. Side note: they did a bunch of new sound work with the voice actors for all the companions for this, although I don't know that it is going to be anything more than them yelling at you when your ship gets shot and such.

- They did do some vague hinting that a PVE thing was possible down the road; they did PVP first because the demand was higher and the bar to entry was lower, because they didn't have to do stuff like AI on top of making their MMO engine do a space shooter.

It's apparently going to be on the PTS the next two(?) weekends for subscribers I believe so it is worth checking out if you are one, I don't think anyone else can get on the PTS.

They also gave us thumb drives full of images and stuff, if I get a chance I'll put those up but I bet if you check the official forums someone already has.

Also: free food, free (good!) beer/wine, and I got to give Hickman shit about the left axe nerf in DAOC, so that was fun. Worth going to one of these if they come nearby and you have any interest in the game.

Wait, you got Hickman cornered and you gave him grief about Left Axe and not the forever missing Evade I for Thanes?  :why_so_serious:

I'll reactivate (at least for a month  :awesome_for_real:) if they add dual spec. srsly!

By dual spec do you mean switching trees or switching advance classes (e.g. sentinel and guardian) on the fly? Cuz I want both.  :why_so_serious:

It was a hard choice, but I figured the left axe thing would play better for the room.  :awesome_for_real:


The former, but I wouldn't hold my breath for either one based on the way they talked about that particular idea.

Links to dulfy guides in this post:

http://www.swtor.com/community/showthread.php?t=697880

For what it's worth, it was only people who worked on the space crap there (plus the CM guy), so even had that been asked (I considered asking something along those lines myself), I'm pretty sure they would've been like "uhhhh" and then a likely "we're aware people really, really want that" from the CM dude.

Oh, also, one of the suggestions they actually seemed a lot more receptive to was the guy who asked if they could pretty please make it less annoying/expensive to swap your mods from one piece of armor to another, probably because (from Hickman's reaction anyway) it would be easier to do than most of the other stuff mentioned, it's a lot more obvious a lot of people would use that than some other stuff mentioned, and because they know they'd probably sell even more shit off the cartel market if people didn't have to do a bunch of busy work to change their outfit again.

Have some actual gamplay footage:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=fBGVTqrBmTM

Looks better than I was expecting.  We'll see how it plays, though.

Looks like fail.  Think about this from a flight combat sim perspective.  If you happen to get a maneuverable enemy on your six, you'll never shake them.  Ever. 

How is that fun?

You're aware it's a team scenario, right?  If you have a slow, non-maneuverable ship it's up to your teammates to protect your six.

You're missing the point.  Even if the enemy has the same maneuverability, they win simply by the virtue of getting behind you.  Now it takes two people to remove the one giving the enemy a man advantage.   Flight sims get around this issue but employing speed management (dive to gain speed, clime to lose speed, drag, flaps, etc).  These won't be in play during space combat.  If you can't change the outcome of a 1v1 engagement without requiring the need of a teammate, then positional advantage will snowball quickly during a match.

I've watched a whopping single video here, but I do feel genre-conversant enough to make the sweeping statement, "space sims ain't flight sims." There's no gravity or lift/resistance, but other factors come into play:

Obstructions on the battlefield - asteroids and space stations you can duck and weave through. Nearby NPC mines and station/capship flak. These are far more ubiquitous in space sims than in flight sims, since they can be anywhere - not just on the ground.

Power management - crank up shields and/or engines to evade. Transfer shield power from fore to aft.

Maneuverability vs. speed - Lower thrust to increase rate of roll/pitch/yaw.

In that video, I see evidence of obstructions, NPC turrets, power management, and shield management.

There are also some hot bar abilities designed to help you shake someone on your ass. It's also disorienting as fuck when someone dives right off your screen from using one and you have to pick them back up again. :P

I am fucking terrible at the space combat, though. So fucking terrible.  :why_so_serious:

You're wrong about that - there are cooldown abilities that you can get via different crew members or ship types that let you do a 180, boost + barrel roll, etc. There are plenty of ways to get someone off your ass.

Also, given that you respawn like any normal SWTOR warzone there's not going to be any positional snowballing to worry about IMO. This isn't WoT where once you're dead you're waiting for the next match.

In that case, I'm glad that I'm wrong.  While I have little faith that they can pull off balanced pvp, I am glad to see some new gameplay added to SWTOR.  I enjoyed the game.

That looks pretty fun, but I enjoyed the 'on rails' flight in TOR, too.   The ground game actually is what drove me away, it just took too long and was too repetitive on the 2nd character. Needed more alt planets.

Messed around with this a bit today. A little limited in that so far the only have one game mode (capture the control points), but still pretty fun. Had 2000 cartel coins when I resubbed so I dropped 1800 on a premium ship. Don't know if it's any better than the other ships, but what the hell. I haven't read or watched any of the preview stuff so I had to figure a few things out. For instance each ship apparently accrues points individually so if you want to focus on upgrading a particular ship you'll want to keep using it. There's also a smaller pool of points you get which seem to be usable for any ship. Seems to be a shit ton of stuff you can upgrade. Overall had a decent bit of fun with it.

The Cartel Market ships (at least thus far) are identical to the ships you get for free statistically, they just look different.

My main annoyance with this so far is that you don't just share all the same ships across your characters. I don't want to have to re-level my ships multiple times so right now anytime I want to do Galactic Starfighter I've got one Imperial and one Republic character I feel like I have to login to.

That was asked about at the cantina thngy we went to and they did have a reason for why it doesn't, but I cannot remember why right now. :(

Because how would leveling a ship on a Republic character impact an Imperial toon? That's like saying since I got one character to level cap, the rest should cap out too.

Well, there's lots of stuff like that with the legacy system already is the thing. It would be sort of convenient to at least let you be playing whichever Republic character you want, considering the unlocking is a pretty slow process, and the matches do give XP, which gives you an incentive to not do it on your max level main guy, which is kind of odd.

There's a lot of shit to unlock, and it's not like JKs have different ships than Troopers or whatever, so it's not really the same thing. I don't think it should go cross-faction (because those ships ARE different), but within the faction? It would've been really nice.

I phrased it a little badly but what I meant was that I'd at least either like all Imp characters to share their ships and all Republic characters to share their ships, or possibly when you earn points for any character they just end up in a pool that be used on Imp or Republic ships. They way it is now, I started playing Galactic Starfighter on my Juggernaut. If I'm on any of my other Imp characters they'd have to start completely from scratch which isn't worth doing.

It's not the same as leveling new characters because it's the exact same gameplay. I'm not learning new abilities or getting a different class story, I'm just doing GS at a disadvantage because I don't have anything my Juggernaut unlocked. That's why right now I feel restricted to just playing GS with just one Imp and on Repub character, which means that something that could have been a good source of xp when I'm sick of doing the same planets and quests for each alt is now relegated to just one character. Also due to loading times it's tedious to go back and forth between characters when I want to play GS.

Edit: Also it should be noted that we're talking about a PVP environment here, which as far as I know doesn't have any sort of matchmaking to find players who have upgraded their ships around the same amount as you or any ways of boosting up new players or people leveling new ships so that they can compete with people who have fully upgraded ships. Instead it's a matter of, do I play against this group of people with these ships I've spent some hours upgrading, or do I play against this exact same group of people using much weaker ships so I can expect to get killed more and potentially be a burden to my team. I mean that's partly just a long term balance issue regardless, but making you start over with each alt only exacerbates it.

The matchmaking is actually supposed to take that into account, it's just the pool is pretty small right now with only subs, so ... yeah.

This is open to "Preferred" players now.

Got the email.  Guess I could give it a shot.

Have they actually changed anything in the last year, or has it all basically been new content to try and wipe away the memories of the launch stuff?

Maybe fill me in on what you didn't like the first time around and I can try to answer that.

Ability to change your sub-class, or at least able to dual-spec your sub-class?

Story blandness?

There's no sub-class changing, nor will there ever be, and the class stories are the same as they always were.

 :awesome_for_real:

What server is everyone on these days?

Not a lot of f13ers playing (we have more from Broken Forum at this point) but Ebon Hawk is the server.

I would like a dual-spec, though my list of complaints about TOR is pretty short. It's a solid game, not sure why it gets so much hate.

Well I was disappointed that it was just a Star Wars skin on a DIKU or whatever you want to call it. I love the voiceovers and the class storylines. I've pretty much finished all of them by now though. I'd sub again if they were going to continue them but it doesn't look like they will.  :heartbreak:

So I played a couple starfighter matches.  Having no prior knowledge of what all went into this system and what it was all about, it was like playing a completely different game than a MMO.

Which I kinda didn't like.  I was thinking I'd be able to bring in my ship, my crew, and all that jazz and go to town.  Instead, all of that gets kicked to the curb.

I understand now they're just starting small and maybe expanding this thing to PvE.  But by the time they get to that point, will it be too little too late?

Have you made it to end game yet?  That's when the wheels fall off. 

Endgame raiding = meh

Hardmode dungeons = meh

Endgame PvP = limited to a few classes/builds

Lack of dual speccing is quite annoying as is maintaining full sets of gear for each spec + pvp.

For me, the hate grew even before endgame.

At level 42 I think with a Jugg, I had four full bars of buttons to use almost every combat. I took a break from the game at one point and came back about six weeks later. I was getting raped by grey mobs because I couldn't remember what all the damn icons were. Memorizing an ideal sequence of 24 button presses is not "skill" to me, its tedious.

Give me something that played in combat more like the new Neverwinter, but with SWTOR's story and cutscenes and I'd still be playing it.

I haven't liked the 'end game' of any mmo since UO/SWG. Horribly unfun. So none of the things you list matters a whit to me.

I'm with Bunk on the button issue. I  signed in a few weeks ago and discovered that all of my skills had been reset. The idea of figuring out what skills were worth having and then having to assign them to 4 hotbars just sucked the enthusiasm out of me.

And conversely, I think Neverwinter makes the short list of 'worst mechanics I've ever endured in an MMO' for me.

Anyway, SWTOR's endgame is WoW's endgame with a few tweaks. If you don't like one you won't like the other.

While they do have the same premise, the WoW endgame is much more polished and interesting.  Granted, Blizzard did have a few more years to perfect it. 

I took 6 months off and came back to grind to 55.  After hitting 55, I found that the dungeons still had many of the same bugs and issues that they had 6 months ago.  That was rather disappointing.  SWTOR seems to be on life support rather than progressing in a meaningful way.  They just don't have the resources to fix old issues and seem more interested in introducing new grinds as filler. 

I enjoyed the leveling experience in SWTOR quite a bit, but the game just doesn't have and sustain to it.  A shame since they poured so much money into it.

Interesting. I don't remember the last time an instance bugged out on me.

Regarding buttons, every spec has several they can essentially leave off their bars entirely, or relegate to a side bar where they'll be used once in a blue moon. It's usually about 2-2.5 bars of buttons you'll actively use in combat. If you have questions about a particular spec I can probably help.

The assassin's bars weren't too bad and there was a slew I put off on a sidebar and maybe used a couple times and two or three I ditched entirely (usually where an advanced class skill superseded a base class skill). And that's a pretty positional class that's also a bit squishy so I was pretty active with a lot of different stuff. The Powertech was pretty awesome for not needing a lot of buttons, but it also kept things pretty limited as far as creativity went, too.

Can you get them down to an 8-button spec?  I'll try it again if so.

If you're just leveling with a companion character, you could probably get away with 8 buttons on a lot of specs. You'd be eaten alive in PVP and probably too ineffective to do dungeons past the midlevels, but if you just want to see the story content you could pretty easily manage it without using your whole kit I think.

If that's the case maybe I will give it a try because I honestly couldn't care less about any group content at all.

More realistically, you would probably want a bar of buttons you push for fighting and another bar with 'oh shit' stuff like defensive cooldowns, CC break, etc.

Yeah, if you want a class that can get by in solo content with few buttons, Powertech/Vanguard is the way to go. You could probably just use three or four if you really wanted to cut down. Stay out of warzones though.   :grin:

Tradeoff is those are probably the 2 worst stories, mind you. Neither is outright bad, but they don't rise to the level of the others.

Ingmar giving out wrong opinions again I see.  :why_so_serious:

The trooper storyline is boring, Fordel. Deal with it!

Also, luckton, the crew doesn't get "tossed out" with Starfighter. Click on the crew button on the hangar. Why hello, it's your companions, hoping you'll pick them to be your copilot, or at least pick them for their passives over those stupid ol' default crew people.

Powertech is a badass with a healing companion right off the bat, I could solo champions regularly. As Ingmar says, the story is pretty meh. I was  :drill: so many times in the Assassin line, I'm really glad I popped back in the game.

And for most elite (gold) mobs, you'll probably want to use your interrupts and whatnot. I found with both PT and Assassin there were a couple tough fights with golds even so, but if you're not as solo-oriented as I am it's no big deal with a buddy.

Tank assassin doesn't really need that many buttons. I was super, super lazy on mine, using about 5-6 unless the fight actually got hard.

Been leveling a sniper and you can do well there without using too many buttons. I agree with the earlier statement though about high level Juggernauts being too hard to come back to after a long time off.

I know it's not the same as reducing the number of buttons to 8, but the game does differentiate between the 1-0 keys and the numpad keys.  So you can actually have 10 abilities + 15 ohshit or miscellaneous on the numpad.  Otherwise I just love the G510 keyboard, as you get another block of keys for the left hand, so that's another 18 abilities easily accessible.

The user interface lets you reshape the bars from horizontal to vertical to 3x4 blocks, or 4x5 or 4x6 (two adjacent bars with some spots hidden), so they can actually visually match the look of your numpad or blocks of keys.  Makes it easier to remember what to push.

And don't forget q, shift-q, e, shift-e, etc. Most of my ohshit stuff lives on those kind of keys.

And I got lured back in...

Going to try running the Imperial Agent through as a medic. Going to see if its possible to let the computer tank for me (Kaliyo) while I keep her alive. Never played a healer in one of these, so I figure it would be better to practice on the AI first rather than piss off other players with my ineptitude.

Oh, and I must admit, the populations are surprisingly high.

I have an endgame geared Scoundrel and Operator.  Both are amazing healers for FP and PvP, but for solo questing you will want to gouge your eyes out.  It's very safe to let Kalio tank, but it's SO FUCKING SLOW.  If I were to level a scoundrel/Op now, I'd go full dps/stealth spec and enjoy all of the get-out-of-jail-free abilities when I have tough fights.

I've been playing my Scoundrel the last couple nights. Having just come off evil submit-to-me-or-die Yuggoth the assassin, I wanted something a bit sillier, and my fiancee's groans at my 70's stache and chops Scoundrel's lame pickup lines is perfect. Also wanted something tech rather than force, but with the very handy solo stealth options as Heroic 2+ was quite soloable with a stealth dps assassin+tank companion.

I also opted for Biochem this time around to smooth some of the issues I had with Yuggoth's lack of healing outside Khem's AE (whcih would generally be toggled off for Heroics where I used more CC).

I really love the Smuggler storyline, it might be the best of all. Caveat being I have yet to get around to Agent, I was saving it for last since everyone says it is so good.

I always either [Flirt] or go with the "But where is my ship?" variant, it's a very strong character, as was the assassin imo (kneel or die, even when that got me into trouble).

Zebekor (because I lost Zebulon  :oh_i_see:)

(http://i.imgur.com/rgGayDe.jpg)

At first I was really into the personal story until I kept running into times when none of the options matched what my bountyhunter would choose.  The nonsensical morality behind darkside/lightside choices was very frustrating.

I generally agree, with the exception of DS Inq . I usually play paladin types so I went from  :ye_gods: to  :why_so_serious:

I started my agent mostly DS but ended up neutral with 7kish in both. I think it fit well with the story.

So are any of these random packs I'm seeing worth spending Cartel Bucks on, or is there something specific I should be using them on?

You can see what the possible things inside each pack are from the Collections interface. Also before you spend cartel points on anything, check the GTN to see how much it costs there, because almost everything you can buy with cartel points you can turn around and sell on the GTN for credits. You might be better off buying things that sell for a high price, then using credits to buy the unlocks you want or whatever.

Was it the time you walked into a trap, or the other time you walked into a trap, or that time you fell for the trap?

That's why you don't heal a tank companion, you heal a DPS companion. I've been leveling a punchy scoundrel and I preferred leveling as a healer. Dungeons pop faster when I feel like doing those, I have a lot more variety for who I hang out with companion-wise, and I'm immortal (and still get those get-out-of-jail abilities).

Sounding like I'm slapping a side of beef every time I hit someone is pretty funny, though.

Y'all seem to forget I have old-woman reflexes.  Modifier keys and the num-pad aren't a real solution for me.

Just to let everyone in on a secret...

Mouse clicking works fine for everything beyond your top 3 or 4 abilities in any context other than the super-fuck-off-stupid-hard mode dungeons that you don't play anyway.

It doesn't work well in PvP...  unless you have cat-like reflexes.

Even in hard mode dungeons you can click all the stuff outside the 1-10 keys that are your core abilities. Ground PVP is really the only place you need keybinds to be ahead of the game. The only PVP I play at this point is the fun spaceship kind where it doesn't matter.

Made my first attempt at Galactic Starfighter last night. Kinda thought I understood what I was doing.

At the end of the battle, I was credited with one hit. Not kill, hit.

Did a little better the second time.

Sounds challenging.  Was it fun? 

Haven't jumped in the cockpit yet, but I did run my first FP since resubbing in November. Taking the Scoundrel a bit slower than my mad Assassin dash, about to outlevel the Esseles (sp? after all this time I dunno). The new intro quest guides you to join through the group finder. So I queued up as DPS, only waited about five minutes while I was questing. Popped in, one guy was a little slow, the tank was a little gungho but knew what he was about otherwise. Everyone waited for conversation without bitching. Nobody sucked. Straight playthrough then popped back to my questing area. Really smooth experience, I know it's the easy-peasy first FP but I've had some pretty awful groups back when it was 'stand around shouting for groups' the 'community builders' love.

I was thinking about that when I heard some tards bitching in General about the f2p scrubs, but populations are good and the actual jerkwads seems to sit around chatting in general. Per the thing in Useless News about the f2p revenue, I see a LOT of people in cartel gear. It's cool and all, but when you look at how much those packs cost!! Wow. (leaving aside my little mans hobby costs!)

I think you can buy a lot of that cartel gear on the GTN for credits.  I used to browse a lot to see if I liked the look of any of it.

How I would recommend starting out:

- Pick only one character to focus on, or one on each side. Starfighter stuff is per-character, not legacy wide, so if you change characters you'd be starting from scratch with it. It does give XP, so you might want to pick someone who isn't max level, but for me I just went with the character I want to be known (AND FEARED) by name.

- Pick one of your two starting ships and sink all your resources into it for the first couple days, don't worry about saving fleet req as you want to get your ship improved fast enough to be competitive with the established people who already have a lot of unlocks. You are probably better off with the scout than the strike fighter when starting off. The rest of this advice will be about playing a scout.

- There are 2 kinds of requisition: ship req and fleet req. You get ship req for playing a given ship, for completing the daily (this gives 500 req to each ship you have unlocked) and for completing the weekly (750 2500 req to each ship you have unlocked.) Ship req can only be spent on the ship you earn it for. Fleet req can be spent on any ship, and is also what you use to unlock extra crew (more on that below.) You get fleet req by completing the intro quest (500 fleet req, one time only), doing the weekly (500 fleet req each time) and you get 1 point of fleet req for every 10 points of ship req you get just from playing. It piles up pretty slowly, so once you have one ship in good shape it's better to save it for unlocks. Also note you can spend cartel coins to convert ship req to fleet req so if you have coins lying around and a ship you hate playing, you can spend them to turn the stuff that piles up on the ship you don't like from the daily/weekly quests into fleet req that you can spend on other stuff.

- You have all your regular unlocked companions plus the 4 default ones for your side as crew options. They all give passive benefits based on their slot type and then you can pick one to be your co-pilot who gives you an active ability on a fairly long cooldown. One of the ones that will tempt you is one that repairs your hull, but I feel like that one's a bit of a trap on a scout (better on a strike fighter or gunship). Sensor range is really important on a scout, so you can spot gunships and go bother them, which is one of your two main roles as a scout (the other being capturing objectives.) Note that you can unlock crew members from other classes on your side (Republic/Imperial) if you like their stats+actives, I think it costs 1500 fleet req. I use Nadia as my co-pilot on a lot of my ships on my Jedi Knight, for example, because her combination of stats works well for my style.

- Personally the order I like to unlock things is: 1) buying different systems if I don't want the default ones (the defaults are all good on the starter scout for the most part), 2) getting the first tier of weapon upgrades, 3) maxing out all my secondary systems (they're cheaper and make a big difference), 4) then slowly maxing out all the primary systems. #4 will take a very long time as the top tier upgrades are very expensive, you could speed this up by spending coins but I don't think that's worth it really; once you're at the point where the upgrades are costing 10k+ your ship is already really good.

- As a noob scout, try to harrass gunships, shoot turrets, and hang around close to capture points. You'll die a lot, that's ok. You can make use of F3 to put all your power to engines and your starting system (engine pool regen, it should be on your 1 key) to basically burn all the way across the map without having to stop if you need to go from point A to point C for a defense or capture or w/e. Just make sure to hit F4 to put your power back to neutral when you get there.

- One note, the starting secondary weapon for the basic scout is not a lock on weapon - you just fire it off when you're in range and the target is in the inner circle of your reticle. Sometimes they miss, but you can spam them pretty fast. They're especially good when you're shooting a turret or a gunship that's zoomed in sniping at someone else. Once you start to survive for a long time in a scout you'll find yourself running out of them sometimes; you can only reload by suiciding right now; when they add bombers supposedly those will be able to drop some sort of ammo depot thing. You might want to consider using a companion in the offensive slot that increases secondary ammo capacity because of this.

600 points a month (from sub + authenticator) is ~2 of those packs a month if you wait for sales. There are *definitely* people who sink a lot of real money into that stuff though. For me, almost all my dudes are dressed in Cartel pack gear at this point because I like their look, but I bought most of it at the GTN for credits (a few of them are in the sets that get sold outright on the cartel market rather than from packs - if you watch the market they put that stuff on sale for 75%-80% off for a day every so often so you can get a full suit for a few hundred coins.) I do buy packs occasionally with my points and then if I get a high ticket item, I GTN it then use it to buy one of the cheaper outfits with the credits I get back, etc.

Oh, one other thing, since this isn't explained anywhere in game properly IIRC:

The 4 sensor-related stats and what they do:

sensor range: the radius around you that you can detect opposing ships (if it is, say, 15k, you can detect opposing ships in all directions 15k from you)
sensor focus: the distance in a cone in front of you that you can detect opposing ships, this starts from the edge of your regular sensor range and goes out from there (if your sensor range is 15k, and your focus range is 10k, you can detect opposing ships 25k away if they're in your focus cone)
communications range: the distance around you that you can pass the location of opposing ships to friendly ships (if it is 20k, all friendly ships within 20k of you can detect enemy ships that you can detect and vice versa - I think this can be chained together too)
sensor dampening: this reduces the distance that enemy ships can detect you from

Gunships like to pile on the sensor dampening, this is why it is important for scouts to have good range and/or focus, so they can find the gunships and zip over to stop them from sniping people.

I'd recommend the hull repair active on anyone starting out while they get the hang of it, then branch out once you find yourself rarely using it. :P

Oh, one last pro-tip: check the GTN for the new premium gunship, it comes out of packs and I've seen it up for sub-100k prices. That's chump change and a lot easier to get than 5k fleet requisition to unlock the non premium version of it.

EDIT: Derp gunship not bomber, bombers come next month.

Unfortunately that particular gunship also kinda sucks which is partly why it goes for cheap.

Tried the event op with a pug last night...not a good idea. I learned about bolstering, though, as half the group was mid-30s. It really showed how gimped those levels are for a lot of the stuff you need to fight big stuff...but I also suspect they kinda sucked (it was a small guild and I hopped on TS with them). I'm kind of a newb about ops and a lot of the technical details of the game, but I'm pretty good at actually playing in those situations and I learn quickly.

Unfortunately, after 3 wipes a couple of us left and they gave up...but it killed the time I had available for the 4+ daily. It's going to be tight just getting 'Newcomer' if it's a single week event. That 2nd tier armor (the green glowy one) is never going to happen.

I find it interesting when I do pugs, there are a number of people who group regularly who are not really all that good, I think group play allows for a bit more leeway than soloing, especially when I have been regularly doing 2+ content with a questionably geared tank. Really have to be on point for that stuff.

Also, when I say wipe, I mean everyone but yours truly with Force Cloak. I used to do that a lot with feign death in EQ. I did go down once because I was apparently the only one handling the adds on the healers, no off-tank and I'm 53 taking on several 55 adds as a pure dps piece of paper. Ah, well. Mmo and whatnot.

Weekly rep is capped anyway. This will be a recurring event like Bounty Week or the Gree thing, although I don't know on what schedule. So, no super big hurry to grind up as far as you can, IMO.

Never is  :grin:

Last night, log on to run event dailies. Last spot open for Op, what the hell why not. Larger op group this time. Go in while a couple stragglers straggle, start clearing out trash, dumbass straggler runs directly through the boss to the group, wipe. Spawn, take out the boss like clockwork, snag one of the token drop thingies and also hit Newcomer so I can buy stuffs. Nifty.

Went and played my Scoundrel, who is just too awesome a dude for words. I keep wanting him to say '60% of the time it works every time.' Anyway, guy calls for Heroic 4+ just as I nabbed the quest, what the hell why not. Only three in group, me same level one over one under. Gunslinger, Vanguard, my Scoundrel. Guy says fuck it lets three man it and charges in. My crappy basic scoundrel heal is enough for me to heal my first group quest :p Laughing, guy friends me as a healer (I'm dps spec not that that means much at 16 or w/e).

One thing that stuck out about SWTOR at launch that still holds true, I've grouped more and had consistently better group experiences in this game than all other mmo combined.

Finished off the consular story last night, so just IA to go for me. Consular has a really good last planet, but drags a fair amount before that I think. Male VA for the Consular is about a billion times better than female (maybe not a fair fight since it's Nolan North vs. a first-timer.)

So, Inquisitor companions (as a dps assassin). I finished Khem's story and wanted to have another companion along, preferably one who spoke Basic and I like the Xalek origin stuff. I know he's supposed to be a bit squishier but more dps than old Khem (who I used until I got Xalek), but he's been pretty squishy. Like on gold mobs he's probably going down every fight (thank god for force cloak). So when I tried the HK into quest and you get the Champ mob in Section X, I needed a random passerby to help out (and Xalek still went down)...and I dropped around 250k gearing up Khem on the GTN and he's back on duty. Kinda bums me out the choices for companion are so limited, I think the game could be so much better if you got to use the other companions for a change (and I probably could've geared Xalek but grrr bye Xalek).

I have taken to swapping in other companions for some dialogs when I know it won't drop into combat (mostly the healer guy in case I tank spec later).

Who do you guys like, have you leveled a dps assassin?

It was a mistake to force roles onto the companions instead of letting you choose as was originally intended.

I used Ashara mainly, but I went the force lightning route instead of assassin.  Talos was relegated to the air-lock, and Andronikos was too squishy so I never tried him later.

I almost went into the class kit for companions rant, but meh. One of the biggest mistakes they made, imo.

Talos (well, or Treek) are the most generically useful from a dicking around doing dailies standpoint for anyone who's not a healer themselves.

EDIT: Also once you get to the point where you've got hundreds of points of bonus presence from the human level 50 bonus and various companions maxed on different characters you can pretty much use anyone you want for stuff that isn't meant to be grouped for, assuming they're at least in appropriate greens.

I'd be surprised if Talos could heal enough for the more heroic stuff, especially champs, that I try to tackle. I only have cyborg and sith at 50, each with one companion, so only 20 presence from that. I did nab two of those relics from the last event that I think give a hundred or so presence with both equipped (40k for both, sure!).

I'm only starting to get basic equipment right now, along with about 2/3 of my mods I think Makeb purples. And I'm finally trying to gear up the companion a little better, Khem was always in leveling blues.

Well I routinely get through champs solo with my JK and Doc, but I'm tank specced. I am not sure if there's a reilable combination that makes a DPS spec able to solo champs at that level safely, but I'd be surprised if a geared up healer companion isn't the best choice.

Things that are non-inuitive that could help would be putting him in DPS mode and turning off his channeled CC ability.

I'll give that a shot once I recoup some funds. It broke the bank setting Khem up again, I hadn't used him in a while.

Assassin is a fun class, though (I'm in deception spec). I hit Makeb, snuck through into what I guess was a heroic area, groups with silvers and golds. Stealth until I find a security chest. Even with 'dirtnap' Xalek, split up groups by abusing Force Cloak (bringing back memories of my EQ1 necro abusing feign death). Loot chest. Nobody was there so all the chests were up and I nabbed, I dunno 14k/chest plus a blue drop from each? So that was cool.

Unfortunately I hate Talos with the passion of a thousand burning suns.  Even more so after Plot-Point.

That's... weird. Are you sure you don't mean Quinn?

Maybe.  They all blend together after so long gone.

Talos is the friendly old archaeologist that hangs out with the SI. Quinn is the ass kissing lieutenant who hangs out with the SW.

You must mean Quinn, Lantyssa, because Talos is a sweetie. He also doesn't have a Plot Point like Quinn does.

I find it a little funny that you tried a non-geared Xalek, decided he was too squishy, and then ... geared up Khem. I don't think Xalek has a self-heal like Khem does, though, which probably makes a huge difference. On the whole, I prefer Xalek, but my assassin is a tank and I have a bajillion presence (although most of my assassin's career was before that magnificent change), so even my half-assed geared companions are fine to run around with for most solo stuff. I usually run around with Talos, unless stuff is taking a long time to die (there's one fight on the latest planet that our shitty combined DPS was making me fail the fight), then I pull out Ashara.

Basically, if I'm a healer, I pull out whoever I feel like (although it's usually one of the DPS companions). If I'm anything else, I hang out with the healer, with one of my DPS companions ready for duty in case I need to burn something down faster.

The presence thing is great, but it's really skewed my perception.  I did start a smuggler on a different server fresh, though, so I am recalibrating a little bit. I actually have to pay attention to my companion's gear at least once a planet now, it's crazy.

My Sorcerer vastly preferred Xalek over Khem, if only because I could easily grab cheapo Assassin tank tier sets and slap them on Xalek and have him be adequate.

My Assassin was a tank, though, and ran with nobody but HK from level 1 onward.