f13.net

My companion wishes to speak with me, but clicking on him only makes him say he wishes to speak with me.  There didn't seem to be anything on the crew window to talk to them either.  How do i talk to him? also i am level 10, how do i pick my advanced class?

If I recall, if you're companion is wanting to speak, you're in the Imperial Orbital Fleet.  Go to the dead center of the complex and try talking...should trigger the interaction.

Also, those little helper tips on the right hand answer your latter question.  If you somehow clicked those off assuming you wouldn't need to read them  :oh_i_see:, then take a walk around the Imperial Fleet station.  I'm sure you'll run into someone that can train you, eventually.

Take the companion to a cantina or to your ship if you have one (probably don't yet.)

As for picking your AC there should have been someone offering you a quest to go to your AC trainer right as you got off the lift to the main part of the Imperial Fleet. (Not the part where you first come in from noobworld.)

Sometimes your companion will just want to talk to you, you can talk to them in a cantina or your ship. Other times they'll specifically want to be aboard your ship (which obviously you don't have yet, so that is unlikely where s/he wants to talk. :P). Once you're on the Imperial Fleet station, you should run right into a questgiver after leaving your shuttle's hangar that will tell you all about picking an AC.

Thanks, i'm still on the starter planet actually.

Yeah, once you're done with everything there and take off for BIGGER THINGS, some of that will become obvious and you'll go "haha, I'm a derp for asking."  :heart:

My noob question would be, did they remove some of the titles?  When I got off Korriban with my Inquisitor, all I had was the Apprentice title.  In beta, though, I had an Acolyte title, as well as the Sith Scholar title from one of the group quests.  I didn't do anything different this time around, other than a dialogue choice, or two.

They did remove some titles in one of the last beta builds, there was a note of it in the patchnotes. 

I saw people with the acolyte title running around Korriban.  Diplomacy, synthweaving, archeology, as far as i can tell this are all compatible with each other, is there a better combination to make light armor for a sith assassin?

That's it.  Synthweaving produces armor for force users.

You can take underworld trading instead of diplomacy. Diplomacy will give you the silks for the light armor recipes, but underworld trading will also give you metals so you can craft the rarer medium and heavy armours.

I thought they swapped Diplomacy and UNderworld crafting materials? Diplomacy was giving me BioChem things last beta build, did they swap them back?

Regarding cross-faction chat: back in late august, it was mentioned that it would only be enabled (meaning, a player of the opposite faction would understand what you are saying) in the "local" ("say") chat. Can anyone please confirm this whenever you can? Thanks :)

I took diplomacy, and as of last night, I was getting medical supplies for BioChem.

I just took 2 gathering professions and slicing, to generate as much money as possible. Figure I'll mess with crafting at max level.

Yeah diplomacy looks like a bust for synthweaving.

Yea, then it's how it was at the end of Beta still. This worked out fine for my plans!

Tell me how it's going, my plan is to run to the imperial fleet as soon as possible, grab the gathering skill and farm the shit out of the newbie planet.  :awesome_for_real:

edit: @topic -  How do you send your companion to harvest a node/mob ? Could not figure out the command during beta.

You right click the node. There's a bunch of buggy ones out there, though, that are there but not.

Ah. Then I encountered only buggy nodes during beta. So you actually never gather yourself but send your minion ?

You can gather yourself.  You can make the companion gather with right click, shift+right click, or alt+right click.  Depending upon what you pick, you are one of the other combinations, so it's entirely possible to send your companion to gather while you do so, too.

So, for any of us who is going to receive his/her copy before the 20th; will it be safe to add the game code before the actual launch? What about the authenticator, CE vendor and the other bonus stuff?

If you have a game code, isn't that a preorder code? If so, it it n now and you can download the client to play early.

No. As they've stated several times in the forums (use the DevTracker view):

1. The Pre-order code is different from the Game Registration code. You only have a game registration code if you already have a box copy or you bought an Origin digital version.
2. You enter the pre-order code on the pre-order page, and you will get up to 5 days early access.
3. You can enter the game registration code, but that just means you are ready to go for the 20th. It does not mean early access. You have to enter the pre-order code for early access.

Edit: This: http://www.swtor.com/early-access (http://www.swtor.com/early-access)
is the best explanation for early access. At the bottom is info about your game code,also called your Product Registration code.

I'm getting a little turned off by all the group only heroic areas, it seems they put some in every zone.  It was fine on Ord Mantell because they were all in the same area so I could just group up with others loitering outside but some of the other planets are piece meal.  Does the game continue to have such areas each zone as I level?  Please tell me it doesn't eventually get such that most of the zone is group only like launch EQ2.

They're just things to give you a reason to group up. Heroic2's can be taken by player/companion combos sometimes (depends when and what player/companion setup. Need some healing usually)

But it's entirely possible to ignore them entirely and level fine.

I ignored them on Nutta, and I did 1 of them on DK.  They aren't necessary at all.  They're also just extra areas out of the way you can play in as a group.

Trooper/ BH and Jedi Knight I had no issues doing the starter planet once you got my companion.    Is it a problem for the squishier classes? 

I can see it being an issue later but they're not related to my main quest so I'm not overly concerned about them as anything other than a completionist.

Yeah they're not story driven or anything (probably tipped off by the fact that they're all repeatable.) Just a different thing you can do or not.

Heroic2s aren't too bad. You can solo them with a companion if you outlevel 'em... they're a good thing to do when you're around their level though, they usually give blue-quality quest rewards and a lot of xp.

BTW, the "Trouble in Deed" heroic4 on coruscant was freaking hard [much harder than the esseles flashpoint]. I pugged it just now as a lv14 vanguard trooper with a lv13 and lv16 jedi guardian and the level 16's DPS pet. Some of the pulls had 4-5 [!] elites in them and as we had nobody with a CC (or healing abilities, for that matter :why_so_serious:) we had to do a whole lot of kiting and aggro ping-pong... without taunt except for the level 16 guy.

The last boss was also fun with his constant AOE and stuns (and us not having access to healing), until we figured out some cheese

End bosses in heroic areas are sometimes in instanced rooms. If you're with another player, you can pull and hold aggro until nearly dead, zone out and heal up while your buddy beats him down, then rotate until you win. Speaking of cheese.

Think of the Heroic Quests much more like mini-dungeon runs, then actual quests. They are all repeatable and usually phased/instanced.


They are not required for leveling at all either, I didn't do a Heroic past Courscant in Beta and I still had entire planets of quests left after I hit 50.

Maybe it changes later on, but I haven't seen any repeatable heroic quests, and most of the content is not instanced-- usually only bosses are instanced, so you don't have multiple groups of people camping a spawn. Bosses with triggered spawns aren't instanced at all, they're out in the game world.

They're all repeatable AFAIK. Just sign up for them again after you turn them in.

Huh. I guess I must have missed that. I did all the heroics on Hutta and Dromund Kaas, too.

The first line in every Heroic Quest in your log is that the quest is repeatable.

My smuggler was fine on the starter planet heroic 2 stuff, but she got her ass owned by a heroic 2 on Coruscant because she is a gunslinger instead of a scoundrel, so she doesn't have any healing. And uh. It's good to have someone who can heal at least a little on those, I guess. My sage facerolled them in beta. :P

I thought there was a timer on the Heroics before you could repeat them?  

I thought it was a day.  Could be wrong though. 

Now that could be, I may be misremembering that part.

They reset at midnight, or some hour in the morning.

Does companion affection do anything besides influence crafting? I was expecting some sort of romance type quests but as of 1200 affection with Vette I've had no conversation options at all aside from the first dialogue when we left the noob planet and I took off her shock collar. Hell, do companions have any quests at all?

Also, does anyone know what kind of gifts 2V-R8 (the Empire ship droid) likes?

Some of their conversations trigger when you hit certain points in the story, I think.

Correct, companion quests are gated to affection levels AND class story progression. It's not uncommon to hit a point in your class story then have like 5 companion dialogues/quests in a row.

Do we have some sort of voicecom server ? Typing in guild chat is so 2001.  :grin:

Agreed

I keep hearing there's a CE store where you can buy a second CE crystal, is there? And if so, where?

You mean the preorder crystal? On the imp fleet, somewhere next to one of the corridors that connect the outer and inner rings. South, I think.

NiX's f13 teamspeak seems gone, but I think ts/vent/etc would improve things. Though with so much VO stuff, I imagine people will want to listen to the game more than Sky ramble on.

Is there a way to buy multiples of an item? In most other games it's shift+click. I occasionally stock up on the vendor crafting ingredient before I head out and clicking twenty times is a bit of a nuisance.

You buy in piles the same way you split stacks. So shiftclick and drag, then accidently spam your guild line.

The lifts in the very middle of the Imperial Station take you to it.

How are male humans managing to procreate given how tight their pants are all the time? :oh_i_see:

The tight pants might reduce the rate of successful pregnancies, sure, but they also increase the number of opportunities...

Ha!  I think one of the first comments I made in guild chat was 'Holy cow these are tight pants!'.

:heart:

Not that I can see Ingmar's jedi's butt, he's too busy cosplaying someone from Flash Gordon.

DIIIIIIIIIIIIVE

I don't really ever craft much in MMOs, so this is a pretty noob question:  how do I get new schems for my Artifice profession?  Do I go back to a trainer to "level up" so to speak?  These skills don't seem to level quite the way I am used to seeing it in my very limited experience.

I am starting to stockpile better crystals, but have nothing to produce with them.

I believe that my Sith Sorc has a ranged auto attack right now - at least, graphically when I right click on a mob, instead of bashing on it with the sabre she does an animation with her off-hand and there's a shadowy graphic on the mob itself. It just doesn't seem to do any damage? Is it an auto-attack or is it something else I don't understand?

Yeah, you have to pop by to visit the artifice trainer every once in a while.

Ah good, was hoping it was that simple...it just doesn't "ding" quite in the same way that other MMO does.


I am pretty sure that when you do the mouse clicky thing (either close or from range), it will fire off whatever you have in toolbar slot number 1.  So moving your basic attack there can actually be pretty handy.  I end up using it frequently while I am repositioning myself in battle and am too busy moving my cursor to fire off the attack normally (normally for me is mouse clicks on the toolbar).  Is that what you are talking about? 

ಠ_ಠ

It is, my not-shadow word: pain is on 1, and that would explain everything. So I basically have to dedicate a slot for my "auto attack" or I can't do it? After years of just right clicking to trigger it -_-

Also as far as noob questions go - can I turn that whole mechanic off? It's actually doing more harm than good like this.

I have no idea if you can turn it off or not...can you even map what your mouse buttons do?

I actually find it a convenient function, considering the lack of auto-attack, but I can see how it would be annoying.

At level 10, you get a passive that turns most of your non-lightsaber close-range abilities into long-range 30 yard skills.

it's actually meters, go back to wow with your yards  :why_so_serious:

Yeah I know that, I'm having quite a bit of mana issues in dungeons, since people are not avoiding avoidable stuff every time, so I'd rather fill globals in down time with the free not-auto attacks, rather than cast stuff.

Seriously... I do not get why the fuck people can't figure out that those balls that drop outta the ceiling and shoot fire need to be avoided. Or any of the other flashy shit that forms on the ground. Hey if the floor starts glowing under your character, guess what you should do next. Fuck those people - let them die.  :oh_i_see:

Are the speeders worth it? Is the speed increase worth how expensive and goofy looking they are? I have the creds but so far running's been just fine.

You can probably get by without a speeder until Tatooine, though I found it convenient before then.  You can get knocked off of it pretty easy, but it does make travel less of a pain.  But Tatooine is huge and full of wide open spaces that would probably drive me crazy if I was having to run on foot.  Which makes sense, it's Tatooine.  I think they really captured the planet well in that regard. 

Except that - as was pointed out in guildchat last night - everyone with a ship has crashed into Tatooine at some point.  :awesome_for_real:

It's just a galactic 'pick your own part place' Got a junker? We pay credits for you to set it on a collision course to Tatooine! Need a part? Bring your own tools and pay as you leave.

Management not responsible for death by Krayt Dragon

Can any sith warrior let me know if I have somehow failed to get Quinn?  I'm on Nar Shadda and have finished Balmorra.  I recently picked up a quest reward that had an option for Quinn, which makes me feel like I messed up.  But I completed my class chain on Balmorra.

Picking him up is the last step of the Balmorra quest chain. If he didnt join, you probably didnt finish Balmorra after all. Did you meet him in his barracks for a debriefing?

Yeah, and there I talked to baras about him. I said Quinn was swell and Baras recommended him for some captaincy.  Was there a part after that?  Did I just miss one last dialog or something?

No, I think after that he appears in your Balmorra hangar right next to your ship. With a quest icon over his head.

Also, it looks like the "To Kill A Legend" mission wont be completed until you talk to him. It should still be in your journal.

Ahh.  Makes sense, I used the Emergency fleet pass to get off of Balmorra.  Back I go, thanks!

I can't yet quite get my head around orange/custom gear.

Torhead lists no orange crafting schematics for synthweaving. Is that an oversight or does it mean orange gear is drop only?

Is there a custom version of every item in game? IE: If I see a certain robe that looks good, can I assume there is a similar looking "custom" version somewhere?

Can someone explain augment sockets to me? Are they only available on crafting gear?

In case people were wondering, you can indeed visit other people's ships if you're in a group with them.

Yes, there's apparently customs of everything.  One simply needs to find an armor/synth maker that's RE'ed the schematic.


Yeah, augment sockets are what you get for 'critical' purp gear.  The augments themselves are obtained through Slicing.

The augment slot isn't limited to purple stuff. It's added if you crit the crafting, had couple of them pop up on green items i made, so far.

The orange gear is very new.  It's based upon several iterations of the mod system, but that's probably why Torhead doesn't have much.

Crafters can get schematics, but at this point I don't know if they can be learned through Reverse Engineering, or through schematic drops only.  Almost every item is supposed to have a customizable version though.

Right, so, I'm weakening. Lots of you seem to be having a lot of fun with this and I have the urge for some MMOage badly, so I'm prepared to give it a proper chance instead of just my 15 mins of beta.

So, what the score with region locking? I'm a Eurotard, if I purchase a digital download can I play with you guys on your US server *and* with other people on EU servers? Does it make a difference if I pay in USD or GBP or €? It's quite a lot cheaper if I pay in USD you see... Edit: answered that question, Origin will *only* let me register a UK address and thus will only let me pay in GBP.

If I purchase a digital download today will I be able to play it today? I already have the client downloaded and updated because of the beta that I only played once. Edit: answered this one too, the digital download is currently *only* available to US residents, the UK apparently has "sold out".  :oh_i_see:

Are there any other f13 Eurotards playing? Or will I be alone on the US server while all you merrrricans are asleep? :p

No region locking, playing on the US server works just fine from Europe. I get around 140ms ping, which is perfectly fine for PvE at least. (PvP connection craters from time to time, but that seems to be in part a server side problem)

I don't think there's a way to pay in USD, unless maybe you can come up with a US credit card or something.

I am also playing on Shien just fine from Euroland (well, minus the shitty lag last night that I can't explain).  Also getting 140ms ping most of the time, which is quite fine.  There seem to be at least a couple of people on all the time even in the wierd hours, and sometimes up around 30.

I have the benefit of still having an American credit card, though, so transactions aren't a problem for me.  Is it out of the question for you to just go pick up a physical copy?

Cool, cheers guys.

And no Cyrrex, I'm wavering on the edge of doing exactly that! Except not today, we did the first half of our xmas food shopping (non-perishables!) this morning and the crowds were bad enough between 7am and 9am, I don't fancy them at 3pm.  :ye_gods:

Add another one playing on Shien from EU. Similar pings as well.

In a way the time zone difference is bit of advantage since i get to log in when it's relatively light load :grin:

Noob question:

I've done about 15 minutes of research on this game so far. I'm installing the game now, and am considering playing a Trooper/Commando. Am I going to be pigeonholed as a healer in groups/raids?

I'm drawn to the ranged dps / armored / soldier style rather than the sneaky Bounty Hunter ranged class.

PUGs will no doubt 'expect' you to heal, since, well, you have heals!  But much like how WoW Warriors are 'expected' to be tanks, it all comes down to how those talent points are spent.

Where/how do I get "enhancement" mod types? I know I can buy hilt, armoring, and mod ones from various vendors but can't seem to find the enhancement ones. Are these crafted only or something?

I don't mind healing on occasion, I just don't want to find out when I hit level 50 that the only way I can group or raid is by being a healer. I'm hoping the ranged dps aspect of commando will also be valued.

I got mine from a planetary commendation vendor at Imperial Fleet.

Do you know which planet? The Nar Shaddaa vendor sells the other 3 types but no enhancements. I have boots that would be an upgrade if I could just fill that slot with something level appropriate.

Is there anything you can do with old commendations?  I recall that in beta there was a way to trade some in for one of the next tier.  Specifically I got the Tython commendation robe but have a bunch of commendations left that I would like to do something with.

Enhancement mods are also made by the Artifice crew skill I believe.

Correct.

You can't trade them in anymore.  People would never really spend them and just sit on them all the way to cap, or at least that was my plan.  lol

After Tython all the vendors have little lockboxes you can spend your leftovers on, at least.

I got mine from the Balmorra vendor.

Light Side / Dark Side.......should I be Min/maxing one or the other? Sometimes I feel like rescuing the kitty, and sometimes I feel like shooting it out of the tree.

Is there any disadvantage to not trying to max one or the other?

As long as you tend in one direction or the other, you will be ok. There is gear that is restricted to Darkside or Lightside, so staying neutral will cause problems but deviating from the path once or twice won't be so bad. For example, my SW has 650 LS, 2800 DS for a total of -2150 Dark (Rank 2) at level 25. I've yet to find anything that's required more than Dark I so far.

Okay, I'm picing this up in the morning for me and my 5 year old. Mechanics-wise I'm not to worried about myself, but the 5 year old needs something pretty basic. He gets the basics of gameplay and was adequate enough to not die with my prot paladin. He's not up to much more than dogedly pushing one or two attractive attack buttons or alternately randomly pressing them all. What class has the "simplest" mechanics and the greatest survivability. Not too worried about boredom, the first character I leveled all the way in wow was the prot pally. I just don't want us to roll a class that needs crazy skill chains or twisting to be effective. Also, since BC appears to be sith, it should be a sith class.

Also, 3-4 people from my wife's work (branch manager, librarians) are all playing. Would anyone have a beef with me pointing them to Shien and the BC guild?

As the old saying goes, "the more librarians the merrier".  If nothing else, I'm pretty sure that Sky loves all librarians, so you should be good on that front.

In response to your question...first letting your 5 year old play is  :drill:.  Anyway, I am playing a Sith Juggernaut, which is a tank, and I think that would be a pretty good choice for a button mashing kiddie.  Survivability is high, and once you get a companion you don't even have to worry too much about dealing damage with all your other skills.  Your only job is to flail around and look cool.

That said, some of the twists and turns of the story (with or without the choices you make) can be rather...disturbing?  My nine year old boy watched me yesterday murder a Jedi I had captured, and while he didn't exactly start crying like a bitch, he audibly noted his disappointment in my action.  Just saying that, if you are really going to let him play, you might consider playing Light Side as much as possible (regardless of affiliation), at least when he is playing.  Nonetheless, there are clear scenes of torture and murder that you cannot avoid if you play as Sith.  Just something to think about.

Mechanics for the IA seem the least intuitive, so I might skip that.  Bounty hunter or some form of sith might work best.  With a BH he could just hit a bunch of buttons and watch stuff explode.  It's some of the most aesthetically pleasing MMO combat I've experienced.

I have no issue with friends of F13 members in an F13 guild.  Just note that we're a bit more SRS BIZNESS and don't disruptive people in the guild, which I doubt they are.  I think the only person to get kicked out of Bat Country guild has been NiX.  :awesome_for_real:

So anyone got as far as getting a Legacy name sorted? Apart from the surname/title, any hints as to how the Legacy system plays out with regard to levelling alts yet?

Legacy system has yet to be fully implemented, except for the basework of "You get a special name" and you start accruing "special XP" that will unlock stuff in the future.

It's the special XP stuff that I was interested in. Is that implemented? Does it retrospectively get added for any levels alts are at? (Yeah, I'd search the official forums for this info but, hey, no search function!)

It starts counting from the moment one of your chars finishes Act 1. Any quests your chars do from that point forwards increase your legacy XP.

So someone in general said there's a respec guy and Rattran just mentioned he "switched over" to a full healing merc. 

Did I miss a spec-swap option being added-in?

I largely ignored all the frothing on the subject, but I thought skill swapping was always in...it was just that AC swapping was verboeten.  No? 

AC Swapping was verboten and Spec-Swapping was "Soon (TM)"   I didn't know if it had made it in for launch or not.

Dunno the past, but I can also confirm that I saw such an NPC as well.  Didn't click far enough to see what it cost (if anything). 

I know the first time is free. I assume it scales after that both with repeated use and level. If anyone is looking for the NPC there's one in Kaas City beside the commendation vendor and in the combat skills area on the fleet beside the guild registrar.

Would be curious if anyone knows how much it increases as you scale up.  Wouldn't mind trying a damage spec for my Jugger.

There were some reports that it scales with frequency of use not number of uses and that if you don't use it for a while the fee drops.

As I discovered last night, the Fleet has Commendation Vendors for all of the planets (far left on Imperial). I actually went back to DK, because I was a few commendations short for a nice orange gun for Vette. Picked up five in a PUG Heroic, bought the nice gun, promptly stole the orange crystal for my sabre.

You can reset the points you have spent in your advanced class but not the class itself, it is done at the "Skill Mentor", so if you have a healing tree you can switch to that if you need to heal.  The cost does go up, there was a thread yesterday about someone who said his next respec would cost over 40k credits...

Edit: Oh, and I'm not really a prude or anything but I would not let a five year old play this game, especially not as sith.

Once you hit 50, 40k credits isn't really that huge of a deal.

Only if they rp dark side librarians collecting overdue fees (jk I love librarians....literally!). If they can put up with you, they can probably put up with us :) For anyone bringing people into the guild, have them mention your f13 name in the Member Notes, as you will be responsible for them  :drill:
Duse was kicked out of the EQ2 guild after a day, iirc. As far as disruptions go, it's been pretty pleasant. I hope people keep any negativity here on the boards.

I use those vendors to plan out my upgrades for the next 2 planets or so. "Okay, so he sells weapons + pants, but next dude sells pants+boots, so we're buying everyone pants this time, and boots next planet!"

Don't you mean... Literarilly?

Is there any special bonus for completing the Codex entries for a planet like bonus XP or title or something?

:oh_i_see:





 :drillf:

Ditto. The game is rated T (teen) though I would think as long as you are actively parenting/supervising it's your call. And the Sith quests do have "light" choices, even if they are choosing whether or not to sleep with someone for less-than-honorable reasons...

A quest I did last night on my sith warrior had me poisoning the water supply of slaves to kill them, this was the light side option.  The dark side option was to poison them in another way that made them die in pain over weeks.

Well yeah.  Poison to kill was a mercy thing, thus Light side

/martha "It's a good thing."  :grin: :why_so_serious:

That won't be the last time you're thinking "oh my God, this is the light side option?" as an Empire person.  :awesome_for_real:

Well, another noob question:

If I group with a friend while doing my classquest, is there a way to let him watch the cutscenes/conversations?
When I helped a fellow Sith on Korriban exactly that happened: I got pulled into something called "spectatormode" and was able to view (but not effect) his conversation with Khem Val.
Trying the same in reverse does not work. I speak with the class-questgiver yet my smuggler partner stays in the "gameworld" unaware of what's going on.

The only differences I am aware of is that the former was within a story-line instance and the latter conversation was triggered in the open gameworld.

Apologies for the clunky wording. It's 6 am and having sleeping problems  :sad:

I think you can only spectate mode inside story instances, yes.

You need to enable "Allow access to same-class story areas" (which doesn't make sense but that's BW UI for you) in your preferences. Don't remember which panel it's in and servers are down right now so I can't check.

Pretty sure it's in the social tab. I don't find the preferences menu very intuitive. I'm always hunting for stuff.

Thank you very much   :-)

Having to wait until tomorrow to test it, but I'll report back about the results.

I'm kind of bummed out by situational moves like SW's Retaliation.  With no macroing and no flytext notification that the ability is available, I'm stuck staring at the action bar.  Am I missing a setting somewhere?

Nope, that's how it is.  Again, this game took inspiration from WoW Vanilla and BC with pretty much every mechanic and feature, but left out macros and add-ons.  So, yeah, it sucks :(

If that's the same as the Jedi's Riposte, then the notification is the quick flash of "Parry" or "Deflected" on the screen.  :grin:  

But yeah, I see that like one out of ten times.  

I put retatliate at the right edge of my top bar for best visibility, and I can usually see it out of the corner of my eye at this stage.  Although I admit, in general, I spend a good amount of time looking at my hotbar regarding cooldowns.  They are so vital to how your attack chain will work and some are kinda long so it's not super intuitive.  But I've gotten the hang of retaliate at least.  Love retaliate.  Alongside deadly saber (annihilation spec) you have two big dps boosts off the gcd.  Tears through shit like whoa.

I buckled last night, and made it to level 8 as a BH.  I'm so weak.   :cry2:

So what's the verdict thus far?

Is it just a shinier WoW or is there a compelling reason I should rush to sub up?

Not meaning to start a war, just genuinely interested and hoping to get a tl;dr blurb or two.

It's a shinier version of WoW from four years ago, if that makes sense.  If you liked kotor and didn't hate WoW you will probably like this.  I think it's pretty fun and am enjoying the storylines and seeing all the planets.

I imagine they will start free trials once the initial chaos dies down in a month or two.

It is precisely WoW mixed with Mass Effect dialogue options and a modern bioware story done pretty well (although not quite as good as their single player games).  Game plays well, it's polished, but it takes NO chances other than the 'story' bit.  Everything gameplay/gameworld wise is pulled directly from WoW.  Except for companions.  Companions rule.

Negative side:  Crappier version of KOTOR with kill 10 rat quests cutting up the story.  The gameplay/story split lacks cohesion and doesn't really make sense.
Postitive side:  A high-quality WoW clone with 8 modern bioware quality stories to play through.

I'm in the middle, but the game plays well enough that I'm enjoying it decently.  I'm very critical of WoW-clones, but this one is working for me right now.  The gameplay is key:  It's fun and responsive.  I find the story/gameplay split sometimes lacking, especially with side quests which I just spacebar through since the dialogue is basically WoW-esque with voice acting.  But the main storylines are well done and compare to their single player stuff pretty well.  Not quite as good, but close.

The crafting system is superior to WOW by a long shot.  I hate crafting.  I love crafting in SWTOR.
This is incredibly subjective, but I think the leveling is 100x better than WOW just based on story, voice over, and moral anguish on how I'm going to kill people (slow or fast). 
Combat is the same mechanically, but I really enjoy the animations and sound effects.
Groups are 4 people.  Raids are 8 and 16.
You always have a companion, you can have up to 6.  They are awesome.

It's a DIKU game at the heart, but it's star wars and fun.

The only bad thing about this game is that the UI is fucking down right awful.  I'm surprised the chat system works.

When you look at how much MMO's tend to evolve over their lifespan SWTOR is in a pretty good spot.  Polish up the few negatives, reinforce and enhance the positives and it's going to be really addictive.

The only thing that has yet to be determined about this game is often they make new stuff.

I'm not sure what the Legacy system is supposed to deliver, but I'd almost like to see future content aimed at the idea of your character continuing literally in a future of some kind -- i.e. no engagement with the current stories or planets but instead something set, say, 2-3 years from the current content such that you have a connection to previous events, and you still have your character, but you're now ahead of other players not only in level but also in overall story timeline.

(Jeez that's a horrible sentence.)

As others have summarized, it's BC-era WoW. Everything else depends on the kind of MMO you want:

• Crafting was designed for non-crafters. Your companions do most of the work on a timer (ala Torchlight) so you don't need to leave the action except to train, though you can manually scavenge/slice/collect with them in tow.
• The Story is, well, it could be something that immerses you lite-KOTOR style, or it just gives you an interesting way to grind out the Light or Dark side for what amounts to factional gear.
• Space combat is either enjoyable or annoying. As much my baseline is still Freespace 2, the system they put in TOR is workable and can be fun for the pew pew. The XP-to-time is also rather nice.
• Very cool ambience in parts, though this can also be a downside because they chose to make avatars like 50% too small or something. Everything is just too goddamned large. Great for screenshots, crappy for running around.

Otherwise it has all the same trappings and annoyances of stock MMOGs. And the jury is still out on post-launch content and directions for the game. It's easy for them to continue to extend levels and story arcs of course.

I actually get some City of Heroes flavor from it, too.  Mostly from the way the enemies are set up as groups of minions with more powerful enemies interspersed around, and a few of the environments.  Gameplay as far as your character's abilities is mostly WoW, but I do like not having an autoattack.  What can I say, pressing buttons makes me feel like more of an active participant.

That's a good point. I was thinking CoH earlier not because of your (valid) reasons but because instead of being balanced to fight one, maybe two, possibly three mobs solo as in WoW, here they've set it up so you're fighting 3-4 at a minimum, often 5 and 6 at the same time. It's a nice way of making you feel heroic, something I loved about CoH (and which DCUO does too in some outdoor cases).

My only gripe is that I feel I'm leveling too fast for the plot/quests I'm following. Most of my quests are green or grey by the time I get to around to them ...

Hmm I should stop logging off in a cantina, might help a bit.

How is the appearance of fighting represented to players?

My beef with applying WoW to lightsabers is entirely a graphical issue.  The game engine can track HP dropping to 0 like every other diku, I just don't want to see anything being struck more than twice and still standing.  Lightsabers are like SDF-1 guns; there's no being hit by one and still being okay after.  If you get hit by one, your arm should fall off and you should fall down and scream for a while.  Being shot by blasters tends to be pretty quickly lethal too.  Nothing in a Star Wars game should just twitch and make an 'ugh!' noise with some red numbers over their head after someone slid a lightsaber across their chest.  They should pop open like a tauntaun so you can crawl inside them to keep warm.

What a smart game would do is keep track of damage behind the scenes, and show the target dodging or parrying the attacks until they run out of health, at which point you see the attack score a clean hit and they drop dead.  The old Star Wars pen and paper RPG did something like that, claiming that instead of tracking HP, it was tracking endurance, and when it ran out the person was too tired and slow to avoid the blaster shot that finished them off.  Which at least makes more sense than smacking some guy in the face with a lightsaber over and over again like a wiffle bat.  That's mostly how the Jedi Knight games worked; scoring a hit was tricky against other jedi, but a good clean hit would pretty easily kill anybody, turning fights into nicely cinematic-y duels with lots of lightsaber-on-lightsaber clashing while lesser threats like lone stormtroopers were cut down like wheat.

People in Star Wars movies survive by not being hit, not by shrugging off the hellishly lethal weapons.  People with lots of armor, people with no armor, people in vehicles, they all tend to die in one hit.  Some of that can be hand-waved away with personal shields, and non-lightsabery people need an excuse for not instantly dying when a jedi gets within six feet of them, given that they can't really parry a lightsaber with their pistol, so shields are fine.  But if someone has to stand in place whaling on random_imperial_trooper_002 for fifty seconds with a lightsaber before he dies, that's simply a big failing with the game.

This is probably the most immersion-breaking thing for me.  The scale just feels wrong all the time.  It's one of the things that drove me nuts about WoW too.

Not really the end of the world but every time I stop and think about the scenery (which generally looks pretty decent)  it bugs me.

Don't other games end up with some kind of "widen camera angle" scaler to fix this?  I agree with the comment, in any case.


Not surprisingly, it is not how you want it to be.  There is still some element of slashing and blasting enemies who then do not immediately fall to pieces, especially with the higher end mobs.

That said, as with the COH comparisons made above, this game does a better job than most MMOs of conveying the sense of Hero Power that really helps put the combat over the top.  Better than WoW, that is for damn sure.  From the time I aggro a Mob to the time that the first is dead and the next one is almost dead...it seems like an instant.  More realistically, I force jump into the fray, immediatly perform an AOE sweep (the cooldown is finished before the force jump animation is even done).  Before I can even do anything else, my companion has finished off the first mob or is about to.  I instantly switch targets and pull off my Force Scream, and that kills off the second mob, or very close to it.  All this takes...two seconds?  I then turn my attention to the third mob, and maybe I have a Retaliation ready to go.  If so, it take another second, two max, before my companion and I kill him off.  I don't really know the real world time, but you absolutely mow over the trash mobs.  Limbs are not falling off, but you feel exactly as powerful as you should feel.  The actual combat animations themselves are generally really nice, and the sound effects are outstanding.

Really, I think they nailed this part, short of the FPS-like representation you are looking for. 

This is precisely the thing that bugged me about other games and that I ended up loving about WoW and now SWTOR. I don't care that the scale is wrong, I just love the sense of vastness and that's all so big and epic. LOTRO did scale better but for some reason, I was always left underwhelmed.

I have the same problem, even without logging off in a cantina and skipping heroics. Finished Tatooine at 31 and now starting Alderaan which is listed as 28-32.

Had a moment in game yesterday where I just ran through some kind of underground base and me and my companion slaugthered mobs left and right. First time ever in an MMORPG playing the game looked and felt like the intro movie.

I feel the same way on my Shadow.  Sneak into a group of minions, AoE push-back w 4s stun to knock em all around.  Then slam one with a rock to kill it, re-stun another with the instant cast ability and then snicker-snack down a third just as it's getting off the floor.  Tab to switch targets and finish off the one coming out of stun.  Done, 6-8 seconds of whirling flashing lights, sparks and things flying around tops.  If I have a companion out it's even faster but usually they're off doing crafting stuff.

The best is when in the middle of everything you see your toon do a behind the back block of a blaster bolt or sword strike with his saber.  I love that blocks, dodges and parries are all animated.

Ok, noob questions, what is my primary stat as a sith assasin (dps) ? Is it still willpower ?

Surprisingly, yes.  All four classes are stone-set to one of the primary stats, regardless of whatever role you take.

You hit people over and over with light sabres, it doesn't make sense but there are no feasible alternatives.  They already parry and dodge enough and I dislike that more than wailing on someone with a light sabre.

I don't like how massive all the hallways and rooms are in the dungeons/bases/what-have-you either.  I can almost see the grid that the inside areas use.  Doesn't help that most of us just put a hundred hours into skyrim with its form fitting dungeons.

One of the things that I loved so much about the Jedi Knight line was the realistic danger of the weapons.  You could wind up one-shotted by a sniper's disintegration gun, and just bumping an ignited lightsaber into a guy while you walked past could make his head fall off.  I know that MMOs can't be quite so cavalier, but Star Wars is a poster child for the "one main character is worth fifty extras" trope.

That and force-pushing people off the walkways in Nar Shaada always made me smile.  Especially when my roommate thought he was being cool by leaping down at me, only to get rocketed up in the air and fall into a bottomless pit when I'd force push him straight up.

Well, this you can still do.

Trooper/BH = AIM
Smuggler/IA = Cunning
Jedi Knight/Sith Warrior = Strength?
Jedi Consular/Sith Inquis = Willpower

You can have dual light sabres turned on and /dance, the sabres stay on and are constantly flowing through your body.

I don't know about the only bad thing, but yeah. I really miss not even having basic macros, and the auction house is the worst-designed piece of dogshit I've ever seen.

A lot of basic UI functionality just doesn't work, either -- try filtering for 'usable' items on a vendor or trainer. The guild window is also pretty buggy, doesn't display all people, etc.

Not gamebreaking stuff, but it can get annoying.

Just so you guys know, I highly recommend duoing this game with a friend. Not only is there no penalty for it, but you can basically own anything you want on the way up.

A friend of mine and I have been jumping on vent nightly and playing a Jedi tank and smuggler healer combo with our pets out. It's awesome. Not only that but you get to make fun of the stories and gloat over who wins conversation rolls. We died laughing when we heard the quest from one of those dwarf pig things talk for the first time. That and anybody who has an Abraham Lincoln beard.

I like the Freddy Mercury 'staches, myself.  :grin:

That's right, I noticed that too. Good catch.

Agreed on the bork'dness of the UI. It's a UI from a long time ago. You can't move the frames, opening a 3rd window closes one of the previously opened. Focus target modifier keys work ~70% of the time, which makes healing a bitch. Guild List breaks often (ctrl-u twice to reload ui) Having to look down at your health rather than having it higher on the screen, and no real ui thing for reactive.

Rift, LotRO, and WoW unmodded UI's are all superior to this one.

Just started exactly this with a mate. We're level 5 now, 30 mins in, and already I've nearly hurt myself laughing. Good sign.

Agree about the UI issues, but I suspect (& hope) that this is an area that will receive a lot of attention over the coming months. The GTN UI needs serious work too.

Of all the things they shamelessly copied from other games, why couldn't the GTN be one of them.  :why_so_serious:

It is seriously one frustrating Auction House interface... I'm either blind, or they took out the ability to sort by armor slot.  :uhrr:

You also can't do a specific name query until you first make and fetch a query for 'all the things' in the category you select.

I can somewhat understand the perspective of whoever designed this system...if you limit the amount of data being queried to certain categories instead of the entire fucking d-base, you slightly improve the server-client connection for everyone as a whole, or something.

It's still silly though.

No you can't look by slot, best I can come up with is putting in "gloves" in the text filter since most all of the slots share a common word like that (not chest and some others though...).  And as luckton said you have to do the word filter after you search for some insane reason.  Some of the components you can key in on things like "Might" if you want strength gear for example too.

I have also found that your ill timed companion quest completions won't close the search window if that is the only window up.  So open up the GTN and close the auto-opened inventory window and the quest completion window won't blow away your carefully refined search.

The GTN UI is definitely in the "minimal viable product" range of launchability. It's enough that it's there and enough that the truly invested can find something with a great deal of work. But they probably just figured a large density of players wouldn't care until they were playing the late game when gear improvements are more infrequent.

And now it's a self-fulfilling prophesy. Less people are relying on it because it's barely useable and therefore there's not much of a market for crafters. Already I'm seeing trade channel spam and people hanging out at Coruscant.

Could just be they had nostalgia for EC Tunnel  :oh_i_see:

Is there a way to turn off the camera auto-rotate? When I'm running along I like to be able to look in a completely different direction without having to hold the mouse button down if I want. Otherwise you can't inspect things without having to stop, which is very annoying.

Me want to tank with Sith Juggernaut. Wat do?

What's my important stat? I'm assuming Endurance for moar HP. Lots of armor seems correct. I put sunders on mobs and they hate me, right?
I'm only 13th level so far, but it'd be nice to know what to shoot for.

My yesterday's laugh of the day was seeing the AH list the l.20 items before l.19 items when told to sort by level in ascending order.

At least it did recognize 21 to be larger than either of those, properly.

I think Strength stays your primary stat, with End being 2ndary.

I've just got my first taunt at 15/16, not sure exactly when, it had been some time since I'd trained, along with Guard which reduces agro on one party member (or your companian).

All the archetypes like End as their secondary. Primary stats:

SW: STR
BH: AIM
IA: CUN
SI: WIL

AFAIK

Winner.

As a Jugg you want to make End your primary stat; there are items with more End than Str on them and these are the ones you want to focus on. Guardian instead of Might for most mods, etc.

Yeah...same can be said about any of the ACs though. Juggs want END > STR most times and when the choice is given... however, they are kinda odd man out in that Juggs END is almost always heavy armor where in the Marauder is Medium.

I was just pointing out that someone said to keep End as a secondary stat, when it can/should be your primary as a tank.

As if the Cover mechanic wasn't mind-bogglingly stupid by itself, turning with the keyboard (turning not strafing) breaks cover. Does anybody know if there's a way to fix that?

I tried an operative, but cover seemed to be a terrible, terrible mechanic.

It is - but the operative doesn't use it. Whilst you still have access to it, you don't have any operative abilities that use it in any way shape or form, and your dps age abilities are all melee range. Basically you use it up to level 10 then choose your AC and forget it even exists. Which is a very good thing!

As an Operative damage dealer, you'll never use Cover in normal play past 16 when you get Carbine Burst.  Nearly all your major abilities (exceptions: Rifle Shot, Corrosive Dart, Fragmentation Grenade) are at either 10m or melee range.

As a healer, Cover is occasionally useful if there's natural cover available during in a set piece where you might draw ranged aggro.

As a sniper I kinda like it . First it allows you  to get nice bonuses (like insta snipe and  temporary defence buffs). Many awesome abilites are only usable in cover (such as cc immunity, pbaoe knockback with root ,etc). And it allows you rapid re-positioning  when rolling from cover to cover.  IN pvp you never really sit in cover - just activate , unload ability you want and get on the move again

The cover mechanic is buggy as hell... causing me much rage.  Ambush often deactivates.  The multishot, channeled marksman ability cancels early from cover all the time so it sits on cooldown often.  I'm not even going to go into the way that cover inverts positioning causing you to not be able to hit mobs chasing your companion behind you. 

I hate stationary cover in pve and do everything I can to avoid it completely.   

The Cover Mechanic is Bioware's "It sounded like such a good idea at the time" thing. There wasn't a patch cycle in Beta where they didn't revamp the cover system. I imagine it will continue to change a lot more in the future.  :why_so_serious:

I like the cover system. Not sure what you guys are on about.

It's more like  "combat would be retarded if its just two dudes trading blaster shots to the fucking face so we need to do something".

In their defense, it's much better now. Earlier in the beta you had to use hard cover. Now it's just an extra keypress to crouch, which is annoying as hell but not literally broken.

What I enjoy about Cover is it isn't just a mechanics problem, but a world design problem. There's just no reasonable way for them to have enough possible crates and broken pillars for every cover situation that could come up.

I want them to get rid of the forced cover and let me just take cover where I want to using crouch or my little cover force field.  The diving behind cover causes so much lag in pvp and so many problems in pve that it's beyond worthless... it's frustrating.

Do we know anything about the Legacy system?

I see that it says active when you complete Act 1... is Act 1 level 30 (as some reports have it) or level 50?

Does it make sense to delay new alts until the first character opens the Legacy system so that Alt XP is added to the mix?

There's a command for that ("cover in place" or smth) Bind the F key to that, it'll unbind it from the regular cover function and that way you should never roll into any of these green cover spots by accident?

Act 1 is after you finish your first class quest storyline; for me it was around level 32.

After you do that, you can choose your legacy title and will start accumulating legacy xp on all of your characters. Of course you can't do anything with that xp until they actually implement the legacy system, but...

Do you have to have a legacy title or can you continue without one after completing Act 1? I ask because I think I'd prefer to not have surnames on my characters until I manage to think of a good one that will work with my naming system.

You can set whether you want to display your legacy title in preferences: options are "show as surname", "show as title", "hide".


e: I think you -have- to choose a title after finishing Act1 though... it pops up a window and everything.

OK cool, thanks. I'll start trying to think of something that would fit either as title or surname now then, but at least I can hide it if my imagination fails me!  :awesome_for_real:

I can't imagine what I will do for my Legacy name.  My main's name was created with the intention of putting the Darth title in front of it.  The classic Darth Advective/Verb combination. 

Oh well.  As long as nobody has to see it, then I suppose I can figure out something.

Maybe if they made "cover" mean you duck or roll out of the way (left/right) of incoming shots, rather than having it depend on terrain.  It would still cause lag, probably, and issues because it's "movement" and movement interrupts things.

Replace "Take Cover" with "Crouch" on your action bars/binds (as tmp mentioned).  Crouch will not move you into natural cover, just drop you in place.  If you are behind natural cover when you do it, it'll still work as such for defensive purposes.

I imagine you'll benefit far more from being able to send your alt cash and loot if you do this, than you will from legacy xp.

I've just started my Jugg, but from tanking on the BH I can hit a few things (most of which has been covered, since I was playing TOR and not the internets).

You'll see two flavors of heavy armor for Juggs. One favors Str, that's for a DPS spec, the other favors End and works for the tank spec. Having lots of Str is good, too, so don't necessarily turn something down because it's a Str-biased piece, especially if it has significantly more armor. The End-favored armor tends to have better tanking tertiaries like +Defense. The Str and crits will also help build threat, so it all works depending on how you play and who's backing you up (favor Str if you group mostly with DPS to hold aggro, favor End if the heals are lacking, etc).

Tank specs don't really start to flesh out for quite a while. One thing I did was slap my taunts on Q. Regular taunt on Q and area taunt on Shift-Q, stun on E. Still working out keypresses as I get used to the new rotation (my Jugg is also only 13), on the BH I like flamethrower and AE flamethrower on F and Shift-F, respectively.

I'm soon to hit 10 on my Sith Warrior.  I understand to choose Juggernaut is to choose 1hd tank and Marauder is dw dps, but how do they play differently from each other, outside of the whole dps/tank difference?

you only get companions by your class quests correct?  And so, you only get them per level?  In other words, I can't have n+1 companions until I'm greater than level 16?

They come at various story points, yeah. I don't think they're specifically gated by level, just by when you can actually finish the missions you get them on?

I got the tank aura, slapped it on my companion, and have the taunt ready. I'm getting moderatley good at tanking for the AI at level... 17-18ish. Haven't had a chance to do it for real players yet.

Is there a shared vault between characters?

They are somewhat gated by levels, i got to Hoth severely underleveled and i wasn't even let out of the space port.

No, you have to mail.

That's odd, I was running around Hoth at level 28 just to look around.  I went to all the planets and the only one that barred me was the destoryed city world that wanted me to be vaccinated.

The first companion is when you finish your starting world, then you get your ship and the droid in there sort of counts as a companion, the rest are entirely class specific.

Hoth had the same sort of entry quest as the vaccination planet (Quesh) it looked like - I had to get my 'winter survival gear' or something from the guy in the orbital station.

My mistake, i meant Quesh.

I went to Hoth, noodled around well before I got my cold weather gear. Level 33 when I finished the initial story arc (and got stomped by Wampa)  Quesh is gated though.

Is companion affection just another grind?   And for gifts, do we have to have underworld or the correct tradeskill for the items they want, or can we buy them off the AH? 

You can buy gifts from vendors.  It's a cheap easy way to level affection quickly.

I just view the affection bar as compatibility meter with the companion -- if it grows it's nice, if it doesn't too bad but nothing to cry over.

Is there any way to use medpacks or stims on a companion?

There are special medpacks made with biochem that heal both you and the companion. That's about it, IIRC -- of course if you use your out-of-combat regen skill, it regens your companion as well.

The only way I know of to increase the companion's power (other than gear) is by stacking the 'Presence' stat.

Is there an obvious way to tell what class a companion is?  Mako, for example, has a pretty high cunning stat.  I assume that means she is an agent type companion and I'm giving her cunning weighted gear.  Or am I missing something?

Look at the companions codex entry. (Same tab as mission log.) It not only has fluff text but lists the companions primary/secondary stat and preferred weapon.

Also you can look at any piece of gear that has their name on it and see what stats it gives (everything they start with and all companion specific quest rewards are called 'Mako's knickers' or whatever).

Like so many things in this game, the companion stats are a good game mechanic but UI fail.

It wouldn't have been hard to find some way to mark the one primary stat in the character sheet (text highlighting, mouseover tooltip, whatever), but instead you have to either scan specific gear for the stat or navigate away from outfitting your companion through several levels of UI to read through a block of text in the codex.

Some of the companions are also pretty much mirror images from the other faction, without accounting for gear availability. For example Elara (trooper healing companion) is a mirror of Mako (BH healing companion), but she's supposed to be a trooper so her main stat is Aim instead of Cunning. This is OK for the most part (since you can just pass your own gear down to her or take the companion-specific quest rewards), but she's using a blaster pistol instead of a blaster rifle, and blaster pistols on the republic side are itemized for Cunning instead of Aim (smugglers). You *can* get an orange blaster pistol for some commendations and use +Aim mods to fix this, but that's not a very intuitive solution.

Qyzen (consular companion) also has some issues, since he is a melee tank but his main stat is Aim. He also uses electrostaffs that are very rare to find and I haven't run across any drops or oranges -- your only options are to do the planet quests that upgrade his weapon, or find an armstech that can make electrostaffs. Even then I'm not sure there is a good blue/purple-quality option for him at level 50...

If you mouseover the stats on the companion sheet then, as I understand it, the primary stat is the one that you'll see one that affects multiple attributes.

You can also make an educated guess based on preferred weapon and armour types (eg. a ranged weapon and heavy armour suggests Aim as a primary stat).

Sure, and that's good enough for us poopsockers who already know how the whole stat system is supposed to work, but it's not much help for the newcomers who need the information the most. Like any bad UI, it hurts newbies far more than those who have gotten used to working around the problems.

Who are you calling a poopsocker? I think it's one of the loading screen tips - I'm pretty sure that's how I found out about it. Yes it would be nice to have the UI flag it straight away but it's really not hard to find the info if you want to know. It just seems like a little thing to worry about, UI wise, when you've got fucking monstrosities like the AH interface that doesn't even filter by slot.  :ye_gods:

I would also submit that the average noob who can't figure it out from the various clues probably also doesn't give two shits.  You get companion gear pretty early, and you can see what the primary and secondary stats on them are for your companion (they never change).  If you can't figure it out from that, then either you'll never care, or it's too early in the game for it to matter much.

Well, "us" refers to a group including the speaker, but not necessarily the one being spoken to, if it makes your fragile ego feel better. :why_so_serious: Perhaps "hardcore MMO gamers who actually care enough read forums and shit" would have been clearer, but not as funny.

Ugh, approximately when do I get a ship?

Level 15-17 depending on how fast you get through your class quests.

The UI pops up with a "here's a codex about your companion, please click the button to read it, oh god why don't you read it" when your companion joins you. I reckon someone who is supposed to be a newcomer that can't figure that or is unwilling to follow... will have far more trouble figuring out how the fuck put equipment on the companion in the first place or that it's even possible. Since it requires all the fancy tab switching in the character UI window and whatnot.

Which is a :uhrr: in itself, but that's another story.

Is it not possible to apply both your keyfob security key AND your 'droid app version?  There are times when I dont have my phone but my fob is sitting there, and vice versa.   I got the fob assuming I'd be able to apply it, but alas... no luck so far.

What's the best way to make credits at level 50?  Skills are so damn expensive... as are repairs (37k after running a Flashpoint... really?) that I need to find a way to keep a steady supply of credits rolling in.  I enjoy pvp, but it doesn't pay well. 

Preach it. Figuring out what stat my companion wants was easy. I moused over a piece of their gear when I got them, done. The AH is a fucking abomination.

I am not sure if it is the same republic side, but there are dailies available on Belsavis and Ilum that reward a decent amount of credits.

I play empire.  I'll look around Ilum.  I've been doing some quests there, but a few are still buggy.

Any other suggestions welcome.  Teh auction house needs some love in this game.

So, I've levelled a few classes to around 12-13 to try and find something interesting to play.  About what level would you say each class comes into their own, i.e. class defining ability, able to tank or heal.

- dps Sage to 12 but would like to be a healer longer term (I find the mage gameplay to be pretty boring and the spell effects to be blah. For some reason force throw really disappoints me - dirt storm of death is not particularly interesting).
- Jedi Sentinel to 12 - seems enjoyable but not overly interesting.  Doesn't do what it says on the packet...an agile fighting approach doesn't equate to combat animations of standing in place.
- trooper tank to 13 - fun enough but a paper tank.  Might improve at 14 with boost to shield%
- Working on a Jedi guardian (tank) at the moment to see if melee tanking more fun than ranged tanking.  Plus force jump + sweep never gets old.

Also interested in hearing about what you love/hate about each of those classes.

I don't think you've played any of those classes to nearly a high enough level to see what they have to offer. My Juggernaut just hit 31 and it's only now that he's starting to feel like a serious tank.

You know when I build my impenetrable fortress I'm going to be the one guy smart enough to put the force field generator - inside the force field - that way one random dude can't go smash up my generator and screw everything up.  I have come up with this brilliant strategy after being given what must be my tenth external force field generator to turn off.

Don't count on that tech becoming available soon. They still won't have it figured out by the time of the Battle of Endor.

I don't remember exactly what levels, but my Sith Juggernaut had taunt, stance and a single target aggro debuff when I grouped at level 19. I tanked quite well, we were just missing crowd control.  :uhrr:

Played Jedi Sage to level 17 and Jedi Guardian to 23.

Jedi Sage has a bar-full of damage abilities and 2 heals + shield by level 17, but has two rather large issues, in my opinion:

1.  Your only companion is the lizard tank, whom (because he's a tank) you have to gear him up so he can soak the damage, but the only techblades in-game seem to be from NPC weapons vendors and they're horribly overpriced and suck.  So your tank will miss quite a bit of oomph and endurance due to no decent weapon slot.  And, your only companion for a while is this ugly lizard.

2.  Targeting controls suck, and I've found it very difficult to switch from heals to damage to heals on the fly.  You kinda have to focus him and use the focus-modifier key.  Several times an elite caught me by surprise and I died very fast, despite the fact that I didn't freeze and had all the cooldowns available.  I just couldn't control targeting very well.

The Jedi Guardian has quite a few attacks by level 20 and you start getting taunts after that.  Doesn't DPS very well, but at least you get two useful companions who are easy to itemize, and they will DPS for you.  Also had two problems with the tank, imo:

1.  Targeting again sucks.  I kill 3 mobs out of 4 and then I'm standing there like an idiot cause nothing is targeted.

2.  Camera control sucks.  As a tank you kinda need to look behind you to see what the group is doing or if anything's headed for the healer, and between having to target and having to move the camera I just found it too difficult.

Despite no previous MMO tanking experience and plenty of MMO healer experience, I've had more success (and fun) with the guardian than with the seer.  Force Leap is awesome - I've leapt up cliffsides to the top and down from the top, and if it says "you can't see your target" (cause it's behind cover), you can often just jump up and activate Force Leap at the top of your jump and it'll go through.

If you know any armswhatever people, they make techblades, for what it's worth.

The focus casting really needs sorting out. As far as I can tell, from casual observation though 18 levels of playing a Scoundrel and screaming at my PC "No heal Corso you stupid fucking thing!", the game will disregard the focus cast key if you try to queue up a focus cast while another ability is animating on another target. As long as you wait for the attack/whatever to finish it seems to work fine.

Might do some more testing on it today (if I manage to update the test server before 4pm), it sounds like it might be a problem with the ability queue not checking for a target change/modifier.

Tyrnan, try to reduce your ability-queue time to 0.  It's somewhere in the preferences window; the default is you can queue up another ability (by pressing its key) 0.5 seconds before it's ready.  Normally, I'd say this is unrelated, as it's talking about cooldown timers, but who knows.

Yeah I played around with it a bit more earlier (only realised maintenance wasn't today after I posted :oh_i_see:) and the problem is definitely queuing a focus ability during the GCD, it just doesn't seem to recognise that the focus key has been pressed. So reducing the queue to 0 certainly fixes the problem, I'll just have to see if I can get used to playing without it.

The game doesn't even do targetting well when fighting.  I can have one enemy targeted and my character will just hit an entirely different one, if I tab target to a new mob sometimes it still hits the old one.  It's frustrating.

I start a long-windup ability at a target, my companion kills it, my character autoswitches to the next target, and my long-windup finally goes off on the NEW target.  I'd say that they don't queue target information with each ability at the moment of keypress, but rather, whatever goes off will go off on whatever target you have.  Which would also explain the lack of focus functionality - most people don't hold down the focus key until the ability goes off, they just queue it with the focus modifier then queue something else without it.

Ok, that made my decision for my baby Inq. I play with a 1s queue and it's NOT LONG ENOUGH. Why not the full GCD, or better yet: I press a button and it queues up to fire when it's next available (unless there's a status issue or something)? With the 1s, it misses enough for me to still have to mash buttons most of the time. Rift got it exactly right, dernit (EQ2 also did it right, actually they did it best, like a lot of things).

So I won't be healing in TOR. Which is ok, I don't dig it anyway.

I need to try reducing the queue to 0 to see if it will reduce casting lag in pvp.  Now I'm starting to wonder if the cast-lag I experience is related to my processor being bogged down more than the game itself.  Time to build a new box perhaps?

Yeah I can make techblades but there's not really a demand for them - so I haven't. Happy to make you one though, I will even RE a few to see if I can get a purple. (I can make level 23-25ish blades right now).

This really is a shitter for consular... Qyzen Soze is actually not bad a story told, but gearing his ass has been a frickin' nightmare. I have kept up on grabbing the latest green vendor blade, but still... he is the only one that uses this dumb ass weapon and therefore he is gimped for the duration.

I don't see why they had to make both vibroblade and techblade catagories.  Trying to outfit a droid isn't fun either.  And who uses the techstaff?

Couple times i've made the techblades they've sold within hours. Generally the only ones i see that don't seem to sell on Shien are from a guy who tries to charge for them 2-3 times the NPC vendor price (both being green gear pretty much identical stats-wise) so i'm not surprised in the least these wouldn't go.

Torian I think is the only one that can use. Again dumb, but since Torian is later in the game... not as much as issue as getting your first pet and having it handicapped by weapon limitations.

Last IA companion uses Techstaves.

Edit: And Techblades, but I'm not sure if there's a reason to use those over the two-handers if you can.

There should be a quest on just about every planet (at least after a certain point) that rewards a techblade for him.

I'm pretty sure I've seen weapons he can use on some of the planetary commendation vendors as well.

Viin, thanks, but I'm not playing on Shien.  I went for what was, at the time, a light population server.

He can only use techblades (that's the problem); if they add any other melee weapon to him it wouldn't be a big deal to buy an orange from the commendation vendors, pull all the str mods out, and put in aim.  But I haven't seen techblades on the commendation vendors or on the AH; only weapons vendors have them.

I'm also thinking of taking up weaponstech; techblades should sell like cake, and more and more people will get a clue that they need one, and buy from me.

Nebu:

Delayed casting seems to actually be a known bug, it's probably not because of your computer.  There's a thread on the official forum (http://www.swtor.com/community/showthread.php?t=119676) that's reached the limit of replies and been extended 4 times now.  They're looking into it, supposedly.  Several things are happening:  "instant" abilities can be interrupted because they have animations that take up to 2 seconds to deliver the instant, 1-second spells have 2.5-second animations, and then the next queued spell doesn't start until the current animation finishes, even if the global cooldown is ready and you're spamming the button.  Other things too, like the wrong target or the spell not firing at all.

I have noticed using my target modifier key to shield/heal Qyzen that if I hold down my modifier key and keep holding it, then hit my shield key, it fires off on him just fine. However, if I keep holding the modifier key down and fire right after the shield a heal or my HoT, it ends up healing me instead IF I FIRE IT OFF BEFORE THE GCD resets. I find that odd and very discerning given the times when I have to do this are the "oh shit qyzen needs a heal like now" times. When the happens, I just target my scaly tank directly, but screw myself out of any dps for a time.

I'm going to program my G15 with some keypress macros:  

F6 (target companion)
1  (bottom bar 1 - heal)
g  (target of target)

See how it works.  I'll probably have to add in some 50 ms delays for it to work.

01101010 - That's because they have the functionality that if you have no target or if the target is invalid, it casts on you.  Sort of, a copy of WoW, but it's finicky as hell and most of the time it doesn't work.  And certainly, with all the delays and animation issues they have, it's a pain to use and does more harm than good.

what's a datacron and how does one find out about it, other than being told?

They are small cubes that give you either a permanent stat boost or some matrix crystals. The stat boosts are small, I don't know what the crystals are for yet. There's a few on each planet, 3-5 or so I think? They're often hidden, hard to get to and/or in heroic areas.

I first noticed one on Korriban when I saw something glowing at the top of a ridge that I couldn't easily get to, so I explored and found a way up and there it was.

I've found a couple more since then but not seen any for several planets now - I'm resisting the urge to Torhead them for the moment!

I saw two datacrons so far, but I wasn't exploring for them or anything - one of them was on Ord Mantell in the elite area (stumbled across it while doing the quests there in a group) and one of them was on Tatooine on a hard/impossible-to-reach ledge that's probably reachable through some secret tunnel. Datacrons emit the same 'loot beam' you see on corpses, so they're visible from a distance... the main challenge is actually getting to where they are.  :awesome_for_real:

What Apocrypha said.

On the starter planets, they're reasonably easy to find if you venture off the beaten path at all (there are a couple of areas where if you say to yourself "I wonder what's down here?", chances are good that you'll find one). In some cases (Korriban, Ord Mantell for sure) you can see something glowing in the distance with a very noticeable vertical light beam similar to the loot drops that is basically a big sign saying "LOOK HERE!" (Fake edit - Zetor beat me to it)

On every planet after the starters, they require more seeking out (apart from the first one on Coruscant) and, in some (all?) cases, can only be got with a tediously frustrating amount of platform jumping.

The matrix crystals that you can find can be combined to form an equippable relic but I don't know the specifics.

If you check the codex entry for a planet, it should show you how many datacrons you can find. There are, obviously, plenty of guides already available but I'm resisting the urge to look as well.

I'd buy a drink for anybody who gets all of them without requiring a guide. Some of the jumping is stupidly infuriating. Some of them are also a bit more creative and require interacting with the world or using a friend.

There's one on the fleet that gives +10 to all stats and requires a stupid amount of preparation and execution and 3 other people. Gold star to the people who found that one.

people interested in raiding are going to love that  :uhrr:

While on tatooine I overheard curses and frustration because I guess you have to wait for around an hour for this baloon that slowly orbits the desert to float by a certain place high enough to jump on to it, then stick the landing when you get to the datacron, after a half hour spent on the balloon...

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=bD4Q3ObBlZA

Oh is THAT what people were bitching about... screw those crons. Corusant is a steaming hole and those crons were the last I will ever monkey around with.

Datacrons aren't something you do while leveling up, they are something you do 4 months from now while you are waiting for the next content patch.  :why_so_serious:

From SWTOR-Holo.net:


Someone mentioned one in the Fleet that's +10 to all stats?  Anyone got a link on this, because I'm not finding anything about it.

Well, combining the blue, red, and yellow datacron shards you get from Ord Mantell, Tython, and Coruscant (Republic), you get a relic at level 15 or so that's decent for that level (has stats), 5 levels before you're able to get the light or dark side relics from the Coruscant vendor (those are activable trinkets - no stats).

Still, you're probably right.

Are they re-usable? Otherwise, I'd imagine you should hold them until 50.

I've been using the relics from the light side vendor, green but decent stats (I'm stacking End). They have 20s activations but I never remember to use them.

That's my plan!  :why_so_serious:

You can disassemble them, but each disassembly consumes a power core costing 8k. So no worries about reusing them at high level, but for your first matrix cube, make sure you've got the combination right, since that's a lot of money at level 20.

Video guide: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=D7miHDE_VOA
Written guide: http://www.swtor.com/community/showthread.php?t=108876

That's the wrong fleet  :oh_i_see:

I don't prefer it to having no such system at all with stat boosts, but it's a lot better than grinding out AA/PA experience or Deeds, which all need to be shot into the Sun.

Like liked Deeds and the whole trait system concept from LOTR! :(

I would've liked Deeds better if they didn't turn into "farm 23486123856238564236 slugs."

The ones I disliked were "use this ability you constantly use 250 times!"*

*can only increment 5 times/day

Those were dumb but bugged me less, generally. It was mostly the farming level 5 mobs that bugged me. A GAZILLION OF THEM. And it got worse from there!

I did like the trait part, though.

Talk to me again after the 50th person you've attuned for onyxia ran through the fleet datacron gauntlet.

Exploration (and all other) badges in CoX were pretty cool. Of course, they play out rather differently when you can fly.

So far I'm pretty much ignoring datacrons, I spotted one on Korriban and one on Dromund Kaas which I picked up. But if you don't go looking for them they can't really hurt you.

As I've played through nearly 40 levels solo and consistently a couple of levels below intended level, I don't think it is really slowing me down to be without the +2 stats.

We can agree to disagree on AA/PA, but having to do dungeon Deeds for Virtues is worse than the Fleet Datacron and you had to do a lot more of them.

Okay, so is there a downside to leveling via PvP other than I'll I'll have way outleveled the PvE content when I go back to do storylines? It just seemsso much faster, makes a ton more money, and I don't care as much about keeping up with gear since it'll be shit whether I update every two levels like I've been doing or don't upgrade at all. Also, if there's no real drawbacks, is there a point of diminishing returns where it's better to do PvE quests?

There's no real drawback that I know of, other than outleveling your story quests, but if you only give a shit about the story part of them and don't mind facerolling the mobs involved, even that's not really one.

I guess there's also the "your companion's rep might suffer" aspect, as the non-story-mandatory quests will give rep gains as well.

Without story progression you won't get companions, a spaceship, or the ability to craft efficiently I guess.

If I were you I'd at least think about story questing maybe staying a few levels ahead of the story.

Do I get epic schematics from space disenchanting blue stuff, or are the epics just crit crafts?

Yes, purple schematics are gained from disenchanting/RE-ing blue items.
Crafting crits have an [expectional] tag and an extra slot for Augments.

so basically there's no point in trying to get an epic before cap. Unless you hate money that is.

Companion gifts are a good way of offloading all the moolah you earn through PvP

I don't know if every single recipie has a purple for it but you can always sell them, there are a few trade skills with profitable niche areas.  If you are biochem it is worth making the purples because it makes the med packs and stim buffs reusable.  You have to have biochem to use them so they might not sell that well unless you have a lot impatient raiders and pvp people.

Now that I have capped Cybertech, I am starting to RE my created blues and so far I have two armoring purples which I am saving my mandy iron for so when I hit 49, I can drop them into my armor. Still trying to get my mod blues to give me the purple scheme. Once that is done, then it will be about modding out my companions. However, throughout leveling, I'd RE the greens for a blue scheme and then make those. Never tried for a purple since I would outlevel most armor/mods so quickly. Got a purple armor to drop and replaced it within the day since it was outleveled by my blue crafted stuff. I figure now that I am at cap, I can settle in and start concentrating on trying for the epic mods.

That's what I mean, I'm cybertech and the blues sell very nicely and more than cover the expenses of leveling the profession, no point trying to get a purple.

I've also gotten into the habit of buying republic specific oranges from the empire AH realy cheap, transfering them through nar shadaa and putting them up on the republic AH for insane profits. And that's going both ways. Yesterday morning's run netted me something along the lines of 50k profit for 20 minutes of runinng through load screens.

Actually, back when RE was actually working for me, the purples had really long legs. I'm still wearing several. They're really quite good compared to just about anything else you can pick up outside maybe pvp or doing FPs enough to get fully kit.

I am sure I'll get around to fleshing out the purpz when I start in on my Trooper, but when catassing through the game, waiting to proc a purple scheme by going through a ton of blues that you had to wait to get the ingredients for doesn't work out with said poopsocking.

I do agree, I had a purple mod and armoring on my chest piece for quite a long while in the 20s.

Making purple medpacks worked out well, they last a lot longer then armor/weapons seem to while leveling.

You can buy your own (account) auctions on the Neutral GTN? Interesting...


Also, we need a beard stroking emote.

I love my perma stim/medpac/adrenal.  So good.

My plan was to set up my republitard alts by selling a couple grey items for 100k to my Empire duders. But getting an alt to Nar Shaddaa, heh.

Ahh, this is good to know.

how long does it take for the respec to drop down in price? I've been running around as DPS when questing and respecing to a healer realtively often for flashpoints. It's getting a bit pricy.

Er, there's no price decay on respec afaik.

There is. After the confirmation dialog asked me to pay about 8000 credits, I got a message saying something like "It's been a week. Your counter has been reset." and then the respec was free. Not sure if that means you have to go a full week without any respeccing or if it counts from your first free respec.

Ah that's cool, thanks :)

Has anyone found something that correctly explains all the secondary stats like Alacrity/Power/Surge and how the benefit each class? I'm drawing a blank right now, but I ran into something on the weekend that I had never even SEEN before.

http://www.starwarsmmolevelingguide.com/character-stats/

been using that as a cheat sheet.

Put mouse over the attributes listed on your character sheet, the ones for damage, defence etc. The tooltips will have breakdown how each stat affects them, if at all.

Awesome, this is perfect. It was an item with presence that I got and I couldn't find a single person that knew what that did.

Look at that link. My how the UI changed.



Also, I seem to have had the same issues finding this stuff too. All the secondary stuff is a mystery to me.

What the hell is wrong with those people.

(http://i44.tinypic.com/14nk3yo.jpg)

Probably didn't think there was a stat that only affected your companion? I didn't know that until just now.

It would have made sense if it was a companion only piece of gear.

Edit; Ah Fuck it, it IS sitting right there on my char tab. I have no idea how i kept missing it.

Yes presence can be hovered over, finding wtf power, tech, alacrity and surge do is trickier.

Yeah, but i was mainly referring to the fact the stat is listed quite prominently on the character sheet, and it takes whole two seconds to find out what it does.

The idea that no one did is kinda like mental image of a bunch of guys sitting in front of a fishing rod and just stabbing each other in the eye with it. Painful :heartbreak:

edit:
little bit, yes. They're included in the tooltips of the other attributes, in the lower panes.

Incidentally, that screenshot also shows the social items stat bug -- only when re-equipped it correctly notices the endurance/willpower are actually at 700+  :uhrr:

Apparently, sometimes I can't see what's right in front of my face.

For all the shit the UI gets, comparing abilities is pretty awesome with the different drop-down stats and mouse-overs. Like if I'm debating a item that favors cunning or power for Mako, I can drop-down tech stats and watch the effects as I swap each out.

Now...finding what defense or shielding actually triggers on... :why_so_serious:

Why alacrity is not haste and why expertise is resilience I don't know. If you're going to call it something else, at least don't use expertise which means an entirely different thing to a large portion of your playerbase.

I polish my mandalorian armor with wowtears.

What I find funny, is the folks who played DaoC all know what alacrity is.  :why_so_serious:

Expertise is named as such because it also makes you hit people harder in pvp, not just make you more resilient.

Surge doesn't have a WoW equivalent and power is the same thing as it is in WoW.

I struggle with expertise - I don't really understand why it was put in game

It is a way for them to reward people in PVP without having the PVP gear turn around and unbalance PVE (in theory.)

To make PvP itemization different from PvE.


IS that a good or bad thing, that's a different debate entirely.

Is it possible to romance more than one companion? I'm finally getting decent affection levels (3k+) and I'm wondering if I have to pick one, or can I have a harem?

Most class/gender combinations only have one choice anyway. What are you playing as?

My understanding is if you romance a second companion you get a conflict dialog down the line, much like the arrangement in mass effect - and you have to pick one.

Sith Warrior, I figured I could get with Vette and Jaesa.

They'll make you choose eventually.

Which is totally wrong and not the Sith way :heartbreak:

I wonder if they'll ever patch in polygamy.

Actually, afaik retarded star wars lore would make fucking around without attachment a jedi thing, whereas sith would get jealous and throw shit at each other.

Yeah being attached the is "bad" part, so really Sith should all be in commited, loving relationships and the Jedis should all either be celibate or huge sluts.  :why_so_serious:

Yeah but that's why actually forcing the resolution makes less sense -- way more potential for passion and drama in active, jealous and fighting triangle :grin:

The lack of choice is entirely in keeping with the rest of the game design.  :oh_i_see:

 :oh_i_see:

It's Bioware.  When have they EVER let you slut around with more than one interest?  Even as far back as Baldur's Gate 1 they forced a choice.

Someone over there hates polyamory.

Are there any player created general channels out there for Shien?  Im thinking like in LotRO with GOOC and GLFF etc.

My padawan keeps hitting on me.  What do I doooo?

/ There is no passion
- I'll be in my bunk
\ Cue Barry White

Well there's the ever popular F13 channel ...

Command?  Not in BC.

How does reverse engineering a green you crafted to get the same blue schematic work exactly? Is it a flat % chance, does it lower if you're RE-ing a higher level item? I had the worst luck yesterday with a green mod, had to make over 20 before I got the schematic :/

Feels like a flat % somewhere in the 10-15% range. When I RE to make gear for an alt it doesn't seem to happen any faster.

It's a flat percentage, however that percentage might vary based on item level.  The mat requirements keep me from being able to do large scale tests at the higher tiers.

Even with low materials, you can see how messed up the RE system is. There is a lvl 9 medium boot and belt that I wanted to whip to a quick purple for my agent. The boot, blam 4 or 5 greens to get a blue. A couple more to get the blue I wanted (I'm ok with multiple blue schems, though we should just get to pick which we want, gets punitive at the high end burning through blues and the longer blue queue time). Maybe three blues to get a purple and got lucky it's the right purple. Now, that's a really good outcome.

But the belt? I spent a good hour making green belts (cost 2 compounds, get 1 back with RE) without a single blue.

That's messed up and it's why I basically quit RE on higher level stuff that seemed resistent to giving me a blue.

I only bother with the max level stuff right now, and yeah it gets pretty painful. Send me all your 340 scavenging missions.  :ye_gods:

why does space-devastate cost rage and space-sunder gives rage? Why do I need to use both skills? Do I get enough rage from damage at later levels to the point where I can press whatever I want always, so I won't need my rage generating auto-attack and space-sunder?

You need your focus/rage builders, always. Both of em, in my experience.

Space sunder should replace the loser focus builder and it pisses me off that it doesn't! I wouldn't mind the focus cost on space devastate except it has such a long stupid cooldown I can't replace slash with it completely, which I would REALLY LIKE TO DO.

Basically, JKs need some of their buttons combined, goddammit.  :heartbreak:

Pretty much everyone does, and i hear no talks at all about a macro system coming any time soon.

My (healy) trooper and my (healy) sage both have perfectly manageable buttons. My (tanky) assassin is pushing it at level 43, but he's a damn sight better than the (level 40, tanky) JK still. My (level 40 healy) operative is fine too, thinking about it. It's pretty much just the JK I am having issues with.


PS: Don't judge me.

My tanking vanguard is mostly okay, I do have a few more keybinds then I normally like though.

The big thing is, I have adrenals and relics and medpacks and class cooldowns, like half a dozen or more of these things, all off the GCD. If I could macro those things together, I could probably eliminate like a entire bar worth of stuff.

No class can get rid of their 'autoattack'.  So far all the melee classes I've played have it worse than the ranged classes when it comes to too many buttons.

Autoattack for my assassin isn't a big deal. I don't actually use it that much, but I don't begrudge it its spot on my quickbar like I begrudge "strike," because while my assassin presses right up against my button tolerance, it does not exceed it.

Not that I'd cry if all the melee classes had one of their bread and butter attacks just go ahead and completely replace autoattack.

I think one of the key differences, is for Troopers and Smugglers, their autoattack is always useful simply because its ranged.

The Strike/Sundering Strike thing bugs me, too.

I barely ever use autoattack on my sage. When specced for dps [balance], TK throw has greater range, regenerates my force, does much more damage, and procs all kinds of useful stuff, so there's no need for a weak melee-range autoattack.

When heal specced, the only thing I could use my dinky melee attack for is to interrupt a node cap in pvp... if I'm in melee range and all three of my instant damage abilities are on cooldown. Maybe to cause some pushback to a hybrid (dps specced merc/operative/sorc) trying to cast a heal so my interrupt will come off cooldown? That's, like, situational++.

You know what would help? If right click was always auto-attack, instead of doubling for "1". That way it frees up the space on the bars, but you don't lose your "free" attack you can at the very least fill globals with.

As far as buttons go my scoundrel feels like there are a couple too many if I want to actually be doing some damage to mobs, while on the commando I feel I'm contributing enough just with charged shot and whatever-the-channel-was-called. I think a big part of it is that both free heals have synergies, but the commando's being on the auto attack, while the scoundrel's is a different button is where the issue's coming from. Also I would KILL for powa on the scoundrel. Or at least raid frames that show companions.

I haven't really felt like I NEED the free heal on the operative/scoundrel because TA procs so much I just merrily spam the other free-ish heal (the instant that eats a charge of TA) all day long and rarely run my energy low. That said, though, it would indeed be nice if it wasn't a seperate button and was just healing bullets instead. Right click = autoattack would be nice too, I was sad when I discovered it just does whatever is on 1 instead.

mine just hit 30 and it seems like the emergency madpack is enough to keep my buddy up when he does one of his pull two groups, break all the CCs, scream HEEELS stunts. I was ooming pretty bad before. In theory however, if you were going to optimize how you heal, you'd have tco use both the free heal and kolto pack, sine the pack seems to heal more than even the regular heal.

Is Ilum the only "large scale" battle in the game?  I ask this because I keep seeing these SWTOR tv commercials in which a hundred lightsabers unsheath and a massive battle ensues. 

This would help immensely.  As a 42 Marauder I have a dozen abilities I just don't use, ever, because I can't handle that many buttons.

My auto-attack is like shift-7, so when I really need it, I've taken so long to press it that one of my other abilities is up and I've completely lost the flow of combat.

That is not the game you are looking for.

GEICO didn't save me 15% or more on my car insurance!

Yes.

I hear some servers actually have large zergs that swarm over each other in Illum, but not on Shien. On Shien it's the same half dozen guys on both sides picking each other off as WarZone pops give each side a numbers advantage.  :why_so_serious:

Ilum on my server has turned into kill traders that all group up with a stop watch and AE each other down every 3 minutes. Then use the /stuck command to instantly re-appear where they were standing so they don't have to run back.  People stand out here all day trading kills and gain tons of valor points.  (2k isn't unheard of every 3 minutes, depends how much you own in ilum)

My guild has decided that a "PVP" zone should have actual "PVP" in it.  So we've been breaking up these little trading parties 4-5 times a day. This started because one of our members was killed 4 times because she would rather pick up the boxes than stand in the AE pile, so they started camping her.  10 minutes later 16 guildies took away the traders fun and camped the republic from central back to their base. In the process we all finished our kill 30 daily and actually had a great time doing it.  We only had 2 deaths in 60 minutes due to getting pulled into the base and getting instantly killed.

Now we head out there all the time just to hear the tears in general chat and /say.  Its a cheesy way to get valor points and battle master titles.  The on going joke in guild chat is that we have created a new form of content.

Nah we don't have traders from what I've seen. We don't have enough people on either side to actually trade.

/who Illum = 6   :why_so_serious:

Kind of sad when Bat or Slap could group up one night and control a battlefield all on their own.

Let's kill trade you guys!

OK no.

Friendly skirmishing where we goof around?  Sure.  Kill trading?  No thanks.

I like the idea of a BC v SLAP pvp thing.

Quite honestly its been some of the best pvp I've been in.  You actually get to play with your friends. All of them. Not limited to 4.  No respec'ing because the healer is in the other pvp group.

Feels more like a "guild" activity

Our server is heavily dominated by Imperials.  Probably 2/3 imp, 1/3 repub.  Most of the time the PVP is short lived because the pubs can't field many to counter. Or maybe they don't like getting crushed.  I'm sure voice coms help our group a lot where the randoms that team up on the other side don't have nearly the coordination.

We get asked all the time by the kill traders on our side to join up with us.  Most of them we let in. But we have a few on our lists that are constantly kill trading that we don't.  They seem to be the vocal ones in general chat when we bust up their free valor.  Chat becomes quite colorful for the next half hour.

I wish I had Photoshop at work so I could make IT'S A SANDBOX.jpg with the Mon Cal pic.

is it possible for some money to disappear from my mailbox? I had some recently sold stuff from the AH, the money still hadn't come in. I bought some other stuff and the "item sale succesful" mails disappeared before the money came in and I had a chance to loot them. Wondering if it's a bug, since I've read something along those lines on here.

I get that all the time.

When you get an "item sold" mail *do not* click on it until well after the 1 hour delay is up - leave it as unread until it says at least "2 hours" on it.

I've never experienced that myself. I almost always check my mail as soon as it arrives.

Game does have bugs though, so /shrug

Noob revival!

Is there a way to change race/appearance in this game? 

I'm afraid the answer is no.

Nope, and Bioware has not given even the barest hint that there will be.

No, there is no way, AND you can't tell from the character creation menu but some (most?) of the humans stare downward slightly, which you'll notice during cinematic speech (your character won't look whomever you're talking to in the eyes).

I've never noticed that.

Same, I must pick faces that love making eye contact.

Thinking of coming back with the release of F2P. Are there still dead spots in the levelling curve where you are basically stuck with orange-level quests to do?

Those dead spots only ever existed if you refused to go back to prior planets and do the 'bonus' quest line, and also refused to do pvp or space missions instead, and also refused to do dailies instead of that.

So no.

Horik, as soon as you get your ship you can do a couple levels of space missions and mostly skip the next planet (it's often a sucky one), and otherwise the convo and exploration xp is pretty high.   Unfortunately, all of these options are limited or blocked in F2P.

Gear is easier to upgrade: planet commendation coins drop often, from random kills; by the time you finish a planet you can easily have 28-30 coins, and you can use cash to buy armoring and barrels, and planet coins for mods and enhancemets (cost: 2 per).  Gear now also has augments, if you have the money to buy them, for additional stats.

So, I mean, I would welcome orange mobs and quests - with the buffed-up gear that's easy to get, they're rather easy kills / easy xp.   I'm playing for the storylines, so I've fully skipped (just did the storyline quests) 2 planets and am abandoning quests once I get high enough for each next planet.  Completely skipped all the heroic quests, and I'm still leveling faster than the questlines on each planet.

Other things that can fill in alleged 'dead' spots in leveling, besides what eldaec mentions:

flashpoints, heroic missions, rest xp, legacy xp bonuses (these are probably not worth buying but it is an option)

I have never really heard of anyone running into these problems before, I certainly never have even when soloing.

I've soloed a number of characters to 50 and my biggest issue was having a backlog of quests that were green/gray. 

If you have a gap, you're not exploring zones.  There are quest hubs outside of the story path.  They offer great xp and good rewards.  The end of planet quests are pretty long but offer RIDICULOUS xp when finished.  Also make sure that you do the bonus for each and every quest.  That's where the gravy is.

The main problem is not level gaps, it's having to redo the same planet quests over and over on each alt (unless you're a subber and do flashpoints / WZs / space combat to fill in the gaps between story missions)

I probably only have about 50-60% overlap between 2 characters if I'm really trying to do different stuff, and can pretty much skip any one planet I want to other than the story quest in the 2nd half. It's only right at the start where you're mostly stuck repeating (which is probably why it feels more repetitive than it is.)

I can't stress enough what a big difference doing the bonus series for a given planet can do in terms of changing up your progression path.

Yeah there have been a couple of times where I've thought to myself, "I don't want to do the next planet," and just done a bonus series somewhere. Bam, I don't have to do that planet I wanted to avoid except for the class story parts (which I WANT to do).

I do admit, though, if I've started a planet's quests, I am usually reluctant to abandon it mid-way through, even if I hate the planet and I'm now high enough for the next one. Dunno why!

I'm looking at you, Nar Shaddah.

Yeah unfortunately Nar Shaddaa comes early enough that you usually can't skip the whole thing. Another planet in the level 15-25 range would probably be the highest leverage thing they could do for varying the leveling process.

Yea, for my republic characters it was Coruscant (in the Dark Ages before always-on level 1 sprint), Nar Shaddaa, Taris and some of Tatooine that made me want to stab things.

See, I like Republic Nar Shaddaa fine. I like it a lot, actually. Empire Nar Shaddaa is way more irritating, though.

The planets I absolutely loathe are Taris (FUCK YOU EMPIRE TARIS ... Republic Taris is easy to skip so my hating on it has eased significantly) and Belsavis (Republic is far more hateful than Empire). I also often skip chunks of Balmorra (although I did Empire Balmorra AND its bonus series this last time through, because I felt like it).

Coruscant has never bothered me, because the flow is so simple. Get sent to section, do section in its entirely, port back to the hub, fly to new chunk. Dromund Kaas is way more annoying.

I do think they could do a better job of leading you into the bonus series stuff, sometimes the starter guy is hidden on the fleet somewhere and people don't know about it.

The other thing on my wishlist is a different quest icon for heroics.

I always use rested xp and daily warzones to extensively skip quests.

I hate balmorra and alderaan crew checking in.

The fact that everyone hates different planets probably says something good.

Empire Taris and Republic Balmorra are both horrible with terrible quest flow. Republic Belsavis is annoying, though I don't mind Empire Belsavis so much. I actually like Alderaan on both sides, and Hoth is good too, if a bit eye strain-y. I can't even begin to give a shit about Quesh, I've never finished Nar Shaddaa on Empire, and Corellia is an utter nightmare to navigate.

IMO they should be making a really big out of which storyline a mission is in (they do it sometimes for bonus stories but give them a rather too prosaic title).

I'm still surprised they aren't selling storylines for cash.

I've found a way to enjoy the hell out of this game. 

Story quest.  Flash points until you get all of the drops for your class.  PvP.  Space mission dailies for filler.

If you eliminate all of the Kill x quests and obtain 10 of y crap the game is quite enjoyable.  1-49 pvp may keep me rerolling for months to come. 

They actually are.  The new content (HK+Dreadmasters) requires a pass if you have no subscription.

Ding!  Finally got my BH to 50 after leaving him stuck on 45.  Now I want to start a new Republic hero.  I have it narrowed down to Jedi Knight and Smuggler.  Which one has the best story line?  Are Smugglers that don't go two weapon any good?  My BH was dual weapon so I want to do something else. 

Can my Imp BH mail items to my Republic toon if he is part of the legacy?

Smuggler hands down for story. I'm only act 1 on jk and smuggler but this is clear already.

Scoundrels are fine but previously got nerfed and are anti-fotm. Gunslingers do shit loads of uncomplicated damage. If you aren't going to play serious business post-50 then all the classes are fine.

Personally I'd pick advanced class on the basis of whether you think stealth and healing is more or less cool than dual wield and cover.

Whats the state of PvP?

1-49 reasonably fun and casual. Level 50 PvP is serious business so I don't do it.

It hasn't changed much since launch. If you had a particular beef with it then they might have fixed something I never cared about, but basically, was a fun diversion, still a fun diversion.

If you're  an assassin/shadow, juggernaut/guardian, or a sentinel/marauder that is reasonably well geared, pvp is awesome at 50.  If you play anything else, not so much fun unless you are ridiculously well geared. . 

PVP at 50 -may- be worth doing after 1.6 (only as a subber, ofc) if top-end gear will really be as easy to get as some claim. 1-49 pvp is mostly fine.

e: this assumes you like diku-style / gear-based pvp

Smuggler is better early, story-wise, but JK's act 3 is stronger, so it really just depends if you like jedis or not, I think. The smuggler one is definitely funnier, though, and you get to sleep with WAY MORE PEOPLE as a smuggler. But the smuggler also has Corso Riggs, although if you're playing a dude smuggler, he's only about half as annoying.

As for AC, I prefered the scoundrel (1 pistol), but you shouldn't avoid gunslinger just because of the dual weapon. The BH dual pistols and the smuggler dual pistols play pretty differently. I played my scoundrel as a healer for the versatility, and I found the gunslinger a pain in the ass to solo with (smuggler's healer doesn't show up until Hoth) (JK's doesn't show up until Balmorra, which is the equivalent to Empire's Taris level-wise), but I kinda sux at deepz, so take that however you like!


You can mail stuff cross-faction now, yeah. No idea if it requires the legacy to even be unlocked, but it won't be an issue for you and your level 50 dude either way. :P




I also disagree with Nebu on what classes are "awesome" at 50 in PvP. My scoundrel is not ridiculously well geared (pretty sure, anyway, I mean he still has the fresh-50 free PvP weapons and implants, I think, and the generic war zone commendation gear) and he is a goddamn hoot, except for when he gets assist-trained, but that's the nature of being assist trained and I don't get my panties in a twist over it. Pair him with a tank and oh my God, it is hilarious.

Who's claiming that? The gear grind isn't going away, or even changing, unless they've suddenly decided to do away with the terrible Ranked Warzone system that nobody uses. It's just another round of the soft reset PvP gear's been having ever since 1.2 when a new PvE tier hits, where they drop the lowest comm-bought tier of gear and move the tier above it down into its slot to make room for a new set.

I play a 50 sniper and 50 operative (healer) that are both pretty decent rank and geared.  I think I want to come play on your server.  I get LOL smash trained for 7k each person whenever I try to heal in a warzone. 

Here: http://forums.f13.net/index.php?topic=22632.msg1136016#msg1136016

The current set of Recruit gear is nice, yeah. What 1.6 is doing is replacing the not-too-hard-to-get Battlemaster set with the current War Hero set (so the War Hero set is going to be acquired with normal Warzone comms), and replace War Hero at the top with Elite War Hero, which still requires a long grind of ranked comms and a trade-in of the War Hero piece occupying the same slot.

It's not lessening the gap, just shifting the goalposts.

I stopped paying attention to my rank eons ago, so I have no idea what rank my scoundrel is, and I am too lazy to log in and look. :awesome_for_real: Server is Ebon Hawk (RP server, woo), and it seriously ain't no thang to jump into level 50 PvP there, imo. I went in with my blues, no augments, etc, fully expecting to get run over and hate it and ... it was fine. I hardly exploded in two hits to a marauder at all! And I am pretty easily frustrated in PvP, I think, perhaps Ingmar and Fordel could tell you stories of my temper tantrums over arena in WoW.  :heart:

Caveat: I played a few WZs at level 50 during the come-back-weekend on Ebon Hawk with my recruit-geared sage healerand had a pretty terrible experience - 2-shotting marauders and constant pubstomping by premades. I think it depends a lot on what time of the day you are playing, too.

Could be, but I suspect it's partly because scoundrel healers are super mobile, have space vanish, etc. I wouldn't want to heal as a sage in PvP, now that I've healed as a scoundrel. You can't make me.

You mean that you play with people that don't dot you every time they see you?  I find it nearly impossible to use stealth on my Op healer in a WZ.

Space vanish will still make them have to retarget you, and sometimes that's all the breathing space I need. But no, I don't get DoT'd all the time. There are many, many, many people out there who aren't 100% awesome at all times, I think sometimes you guys forget that. :P

1.6 isn't really changing much.  It's already ridiculously easy to get near top-end gear.  Compared to something like WoW the difference between War Hero and Battlemaster isn't significant.  You're talking a couple % statistical difference.  It's a very tiny tiny bone thrown to serious PvPers.

I'm not sure, I played both WOW as a new 90 and Rift as a green-geared 50 (this was before the expansion though) and I felt much more effective / had a lot more fun than I did in swtor with my full recruit gear. In rift's case there's automatic bolstering to rank 40, and in WOW's case there's inherent resilience/pvp power now. Also in WOW there are only two tiers [honor/conquest] and conquest is the one that takes a long time - this seems pretty similar to swtor's system, to me.

e: also, while it is hard to tell how big of a statistical difference it is, on my sage I was getting 2-3shot constantly. On my tank-spec vanguard I couldn't even put a dent into anyone with a war hero title (yes, tank spec I know, but I was able to at least make healers sweat back in 1.0). YMMV I guess.

A new 90 in WoW a couple weeks/months after the release of the expansion that let you hit level 90 is not an apples to apples comparison, though. Th e real test would be a fresh 90 in WoW pvp in, say, 6 months when everyone is geared up, compared to how a fresh 50 does in SWTOR.

Well yea, but my experience wasn't very different near the end of cata when I leveled a disc priest. If anything, I should probably give warzones a second look to see if my first experience was just a fluke [could've just queued into the same uber premade 4 times in a row for all I know]

WZ's are most fun between level 30 and 49.  I strongly encourage trying them.

I agree with that (on my healer sage I pvp'd pretty extensively in that range) and the lack of a gear grind is a definite plus. I suspect it is in no small part due to a lot of people playing at that point who aren't that serious/hardcore/good at pvp (and are just doing it as a leveling diversion or whatever), though.

The class dynamics are completely different at the sub 50 range, due to the flat gear and the mixture of class abilities/scaling.

More questions...

1.  If a companion has +15 efficiency in Cybertech what does that mean exactly?  I think the other bonus is a crit bonus, forget its name now.
2.  Are there companion missions at certain loyalty levels?  I maxxed out Blizz and he just basically said 'thanks'.  Gault tried to involve me in a scam which I refused.  He then brought up some female but I didn't get a quest that he really seemed to feed me.  I feel like I'm in a blind spot here.  I did Mako's quest line did I outlevel the others?
3.  Can a fully specced Scoundrel heal good in a flashpoint?  Where does he rank in Republic healers?
4.  Is there another way to get Rank 7 and 8 crafting schematics besides Fleet Commendations?  They are random and that worries me.

My googlefu has been weak on these issues.

1) Efficiency means they'll complete the task faster.

2) Only the first companion has real quests. Some companions are much more obvious than others that they were supposed to have quests that got cut for time.

3) All the healers, if specced for it, make fine healers. I like the trooper best for PvE, and the sage is the most idiot-proof, but a good scoundrel is a good healer.

4) I don't know, as I haven't bothered!

As far as general use and flashpoints and such things go, all healers are pretty equally capable. However, if you get into raiding/operations, things get a bit different. In some fights, some healers have a very noticeably easier time of things than others, and some combinations of healers make certain fights go much smoother.

My raid team typically runs with a Sorcerer (Sage) and an Operative (Scoundrel) healer. The Operative is fantastic at keeping the tanks up and quickly topping off individuals in the raid, and the Sorcerer does a bang-up job of keeping multiple people going through bubbles and AoE heals. However, if our Sorc can't make it and we bring in one of our Mercenary (Commando) healers, then certain raid bosses with lots of raid-wide damage going around (Zorn & Toth in Explosive Conflict, the Dread Champions in Terror From Beyond, etc.) become an absolute nightmare for our Mercs to keep up with; they just don't have the toolset to account for that. Likewise, in fights with a lot of movement, our Sorcs are kind of neutered.

It's nothing insurmountable, of course, but at that level of play the "separate but equal" class design breaks down a bit when it runs into raid encounter design.


Similar problems crop up with the three tanks as well, by the way. In many ways they're even less equally capable between themselves than the three healers are.

To follow up on this, apparently there are some people (http://www.swtor.com/community/showthread.php?t=563504) (on EH, even) that keep their characters at level 49 (quitting right before a WZ completes so they don't get xp) and trick them out in the best available gear + augments from flashpoints etc. THIS could be pretty detrimental to the game depending on how big the warzone population is, and reminds me of WOW vanilla/BC twinking until Blizzard implemented the "if you're turning xp off, you're getting put in your own queue" thing.

e: and yeah, I'm fully aware that this problem is probably overstated and/or dramatized because lol official forums. Still, I don't like the fact that it's possible to do in the first place...

I've run into that a bit on Shadowlands, and it's quite annoying having multiple people suddenly drop out of your warzone group at the 11th hour to avoid leveling.

I wouldn't say no to being able to turn off XP, but be limited to the normal 10-49 bracket. The amount of twinking one can do at that level is so minor that I'd go so far as to say that aspect of it is a non-issue. If the twinking half is really  that big of a game-changer, you can completely kneecap the worst of it by making tier 22 item modifications (armorings/mods/enchancements/augments) have a requirement of level 50 instead of 49.

That has a lot more to do with who queues up for BG's in WoW.  Mostly it's people doing the humongous honor grind.  You also run into serious pvpers a lot more in SWTOR.   In WoW they'll be doing arenas or whatever.   Here they queue up and crush you for the daily.

Maybe it's slightly worse as a new 50 but you can get competitive gear so insanely fast that it's far better in the end.

In my experience, the honor grind wasn't 'humongous' in WOW at all (both in cata and mop), certainly faster than the warzone commendation grind in SWTOR 1.0 and you could speed it up even more if you run a few AVs during AV weekend or whatever. Conquest points take much longer, just like ranked warzone comms (can you even get those without running a full premade in ranked WZs?), and the biggest failing of the WOW honor/conquest system is how long it takes to get a pvp weapon (which is huge). How many matches does it take (assume a 50% win rate to be generous) to get a full suit of battlemaster (and after 1.6, war hero)?

And yes, I consider the 'serious pvpers in swtor have nothing to do but stomp pugs' thing a problem, as running into a 4-man premade in a 10-man battleground when you're in a full pug is basically an instant loss (unless the premade is hilariously bad, which I saw a few times). Premades exist in WOW, but the player pool is so much bigger with the unification of all battlegroups that it hasn't been a problem at all since cata in my experience.

I felt like I got my SWTOR-version of an honor suit much faster than I got my honor suit in WoW, but it's honestly been so long (it was Cataclysm, after all) I couldn't really tell you for sure. But it didn't feel particular grindy.

I'm entirely willing to believe that I lucked out and rarely played when pre-mades were playing on Ebon Hawk, but ... I dunno. Maybe because I am never thinking "I MUST PVP TONIGHT" and thus willing to go "yeah not fun tonight" after two matches and do something else (which always happened as a result of the groups I landed in sucking as a whole rather than ZOMG I AM GETTING MURDERRRRRRED :P), it never struck me as terrible?


EDIT: I DO agree that not having a 40-man BG to hide in when you're fresh probably feels frustrating, and some larger-pop BGs would be nice (although they'd probably have to do cross server queues then, and they're all DERPY DOO about those for some reason). But again, I was surprised at how not-shitty my level 50 PvP experience was, after all the bitching and moaning I listened to about it before I decided to give it a whirl.

I honestly think x-server warzones would help a lot - both in reducing queues and making the pvp experience a bit more varied. And yea, like I said, I *may* have just gotten a bad streak and should probably give level 50 pvp another shot after the scars from my last attempt have healed. :p (Probably right after 1.6 to help with the gear gap problem)

e: most of my trepidation was from the huge shift of how powerful I felt with my characters in January (mix of centurion and champ gear) to how utterly worthless I felt on both of them as a returning player in the 'come-back weekend' (July I think?) with the recruit gear (not sure if it was mk1 or mk2)

Cross server queues would be nice, but they seem pretty well set against those, so I've basically put them out of my mind at this point. :P

The system used in SWTOR 1.0 doesn't even exist any longer.  That system didn't even have an honor gear equivalent.  You grinded for top end gear (Battlemaster wasn't even really an upgrade) right from the get go.  Not to mention it was completely random. 

According to this: http://dulfy.net/2012/11/20/swtor-patch-1-6-elite-war-hero-pvp-gear/

It's 10600 total for the whole set (you start with BM relics).  You'll have 2750 saved up by 50 easily. That lets you buy a weapon + some other pieces right away.  First daily/weekly is another 500 right away.   If you try to grind it all out right then I'd say maybe 25 hours for the rest of the set.  I'm not sure how many matches that is but I think 300 wz/hour is very realistic.  It's far less hours overall if you do dailies and weeklies though.   

In pve has there been some general power buff applied at some point? My guys are chewing through NPCs much quicker than I remember.

The legacy presence bonuses are pretty crazy at low levels.  Especially if you have a level 50 human.

That could be it. Against groups of normal mobs Vette is doing more than half the killing now.

If you have some money you can make things really easy (scavenging can make you plenty just selling laminoid).

1) Buy 11-19 level augments and super cheap Mk-1 augment kits.  Put them in everything.  They're worthwhile all the way to 50.  The Mk-1 kits are cheap so you can even waste them on blues.
2) Keep your tank pimped out.
3) Send in the tank and let him take all the damage.  Unsummon then resummon after the fight = zero downtime.

Yeah, it's the legacy stuff. There's no scaling so your companions are extremely powerful at low levels with legacy presence bonuses.

Can you override low level Aug kits with higher ones?

What I'm thinking is if I put a mk 1 or 2 in my sweet looking orange drop am I going to get irritated when I can't put a mk 5 or 6 in later?

You can always put in a higher level kit at any time. Just can't put a higher level augment in a low level kit.

I had a tank quit on us in Hammer Station. My companion (Corso) had 2k more hp than the tank.  :why_so_serious:

We were able to finish with 3+ corso, but I had to blow Legacy (Orbital strike, force choke and rocks)

My smuggler is in all 51/50/50 enhancements and crafted implants and earpiece - and Risha has more HP than him at level 50. I'm at something like 280 bonus presence right now.

Granted I don't have 'real' gear yet (and not fully augmented), just best-available-through-dailies.

Dailies. hiss

So I reactivated (mostly because I am weak and the 1.6 changes look promising - also my SWTOR-playing guildie has been badgering me for months now) and so far it's been pretty smooth sailing. One thing that stands out is the Rocket Boost ability from legacy, which is pure  :drill: in a box. Faster-than-mount speeds in indoor maps and while in stealth?! Sign me up! I'm actually considering blowing the 2.5mil credits of my level 50s (and/or some of the 500 coin 'allowance') to upgrade the ability even further.

I actually don't mind dailies in SWTOR, in a relative sense. The money rewards are *very* good compared to WoW, it seems to me, and the armorings/hilts/barrels are cheap and good. Saving up for the really big ticket items can be a bit tedious, but it doesn't feel as bad as a rep grind.

My main beef with dailies in any game is that they're a repetitive excuse for content and feel like a chore designed to take ~1 hour of my playtime every day. They're particularly bad in WOW:MOP because they gate so much stuff - including the legendary questline (well, you can get that rep by grinding mobs, but that's even worse). So I just choose to ignore them - regardless of what the rewards are. I prefer getting money/drops by doing things that are fun for me (dungeons and pvp... well, the latter only once 1.6 hits).

I actually went to look at this 'section x' thing and found that it was... a daily quest hub. Yeah no. Thankfully, there's enough of the game that doesn't revolve around dailies - will probably check out the storymode operations once the free tionese (or whatever) gearset comes out so I don't have to try and heal/tank stuff in the really-really-bad mark 1 recruit gear.

There's no obligation to do them in SWTOR though like there is in WoW, where specific pieces of gear are tied to specific reputations and their whole gear progression is tied into it, though. They're fully optional for the most part in SWTOR, as long as you're willing to concede one BIS relic. It's just a way to make money and optionally gear up for hardmode flashpoints, which you could do through normal modes or crafting or the AH instead (or just by using your free Tionese suit in 1.6).

The worst thing I have to say about dailies is that if you use group finder you may find yourself grouped with jerks. I just do them mainly to break up the monotony of soloing all day. Now, doing dailies for gear I can see would be upsetting. I may end up doing that for my sniper + Kaliyo.

I found I could go straight into hard modes without touching any dailies.

Because, basically, fuck dailies.

One thing I really enjoy is soloing Heroic +2 missions.  Thanks to my legacy, Corso is a pretty tough cookie.  A nice challenging change of pace.

Enjoying the Scoundrel.  Stealth AND healing?  Yes please. 

I like doing dailies in SWTOR, 'cause I don't have to, and it gives me something easy to do to remember how the shit to play one of my classes that I haven't touched in two months. And it's easy money, mostly.

Yea, I can see that - though I just prefer doing an easy dungeon (like a normal-mode Red Reaper or sommat) for that.

Also, are there any other global legacy unlocks that have the  :drill: potential of Rocket Boost (I mean srsly, 110% speed boost while stealthed in FPs / indoor areas? wut.)? Trying to decide where to spend my creds (and maybe my CC allowance).


e: random aside - I just did a few lowbie WZs on my level 25 heal-spec agent, and while there doesn't seem to be an apparent advantage from gear, there's an absolutely huge advantage from levels. I know this is "duh"-level stuff, but going in below level 31 at the very least to unlock the instant heal (maybe even 41 to unlock the AOE heal) is a massive disadvantage, and games are almost always decided by who has the more level 40+ people. DPS classes that get their best attack skills early (BH/trooper maybe?) could be an exception to this, but eh.

Hard mode queuing is I guess functionally similar dailies, but somehow I'm OK with that because the group adds variety to the experience. They seem to turn over about 50-70k per hour (which is usually channeled into twink funding) plus chance of item upgrade.

I also don't mind doing the space daily while I queue. Don't know why that counts as acceptable but it seems to.

The area based dailies I ran once but really can't bring myself to do them twice.

Yeah, I consider heroic quest queuing just like a "mini-dungeon" (some of the hard modes are actually harder than dungeons even - if you don't have a holy trinity setup and/or are using companions to tank/heal), which is OK, especially if the group finder ports you to the appropriate place etc. It's the regular solo dailies (go there, kill x mobs, get y items, do it again tomorrow) that I can't stand.

Thanks to augments you can actually get quite a gear advantage past 43ish.  Sub 50 pvp is really class specific though.  My sent was doing 200~250k dps all the way from 10 to 50.  The big thing for most classes is finishing your tree.

It's not just raw damage or healing, either. Even though all the heals I have is diagnostic scan (almost uselessly small channeled heal, but cheap), kolto probe (lifebloom-style HOT with 2 stacks that doesn't heal much at all, but sometimes gives me TA), kolto injection (slow-cast big heal, runs me out of energy if spammed, gives TA) and kolto infusion (faster-cast slightly smaller heal, costs much less energy, consumes TA), I can do 190k healing relatively easily, even if I'm being trained. It's just that a lot of that healing ends up wasted and/or I can't keep up my target even if I use my CC as well as possible, since I'm missing both crucial healing tools (the big instant heal that's free if target is under 30% and costs TA otherwise + the AOE heal) and regen abilities (mainly from the long channeled heal - diagnostic scan - that heals for diddlysquat without the appropriate talents); similarly, my target is probably missing important defensive cooldowns that'd save them until my slow heals did their job. Low levels can also pretty much only heal or do damage, they lack decent AOE/area denial (orbital strike in my case), more CC options, snares/roots, and healing/tank/burst cooldowns. My operative doesn't have stealth openers yet (all I can do is space-sap people who aren't in combat), which is huge on its own.

I had someone ask in our level 14/15 group last night "who can tank?" I said at this level, nobody :p

Though having the shield and a couple basic tank passives and guard is something, anyway (I'm playing an Assassin tank). Was real tough with three dps guys healing (op, merc and sage).

Do we have a new empire guild on ebon hawk?

My guys are in Bat Country and I have literally never seen anyone else online since resubbing. Appreciate :f13guildlol: is a factor, but we seem suspiciously quiet even for that.

One thing they did that I really like with one of the Section X dailies (the instanced one) is they put in a bunch of optional champion mobs that you can kill if you're doing them in a group for extra loot and social points.

When the transfers initially happened, we reformed Bat Country on Ebon Hawk. Then they MADE everyone transfer, so everyone who still in Old Bat Country transferred over in-guild (WHY they didn't make this possible during the first round is a ~mystery~). Anyway, we had to rename New Bat Country, which is now Bot Country.

If I'm playing Empire, I'm likely either Yulla or Jov'ash.

Hmm I'm still in Bat Country.  I'll try to find you guys.

I'm back playing, too (getting bored with WoW).  All my Empire guys are on Ebon Hawke.  Leveling my Inq. atm but got back onto my BH a bit as well.  Forgot he had 2 pieces of Rakata gear (is that good these days?) and the rest is mostly lvl 50ish so he might be gtg for hard modes.  Anyway, if anyone is on and wants to do some flashpoints or level an alt, let me know.  I have a few Rep. alts I can work on if theres more Rep. than Empire playing.

Once you get HK-51, does he replace your default droid?  And does crafted droid parts work with HK? 

HK is an extra character, not a replacement.

HK can use any generic droid part any other droid companion can use. The exceptions being any piece of gear that is specific to X companion, such as the crafting bonus droid sensors, which are labeled specific to your ship droids.

HK does not increase the number of active crafting crew slots (this is level dependent).

More importantly, are his lines less or more  :awesome_for_real: than those of M1-4X?

He has the sort of combat lines you'd expect from an HK unit, and he has a lot of them. He doesn't pipe up in story conversations or whatever though, as you would probably expect.

He does have a few environmental trigger lines like some companions have for certain spots on various planets though. Not many, but a few.

HK is HK, dunno what more to say really.

I'm mostly Rep side these days. I have 2 baby Jedi sub 5, commando and scoundrel 18 23 range, and a 33ish sent. None are in f13 guild (don't even remember the name lol) but I wouldn't mind grouping.

What's the best site out there for this piece of shit game ?  I'm finding torhead a lot lacking.

http://dulfy.net/ for news, but all the data-mining sites for swtor are pretty crappy in comparison to the wowhead/mmochamp standards.

I've heard Torhead and Ask Mr. Robot are both kind of lacking due to how hard it is to get reliable parse data from the game. I'd wager at least 30% of all the items in Torhead's database don't even exist in the game any more, but it's hard to check.

I'd also imagine that there isn't a terribly large amount of enthusiasm for players to get in there and verify this stuff thanks to TOR's relatively low subscriber numbers.

Yea, half the comments on torhead are like "is this even in game?". What ever process they use to rip info out of the WoW client, doesn't work near as well for SWTOR.

Ask Mr. Robot has some half-decent spec advice and such last I looked. Also I am pretty sure that sithwarrior.com is as close as SWTOR has to an Elitist Jerks site for builds/raid stuff. Obnoxious format though.

While I like hk51, I think they've intentionally made him less awesome than hk47.

47s lines in the flashpoints are better than 51s as a companion. I love 47's explanation of Revan's plan in the foundry.

4X is superior IMO, not least as his personality is new

HK-47 is delightful in the Foundry, but the other flashpoint he cameos in, he isn't nearly as fun.

This, and also many people swear by noxxic.com as a source for 'how should I spec/gear' type info.

Not that I think many of you guys need more slots like I do, but be warned, right now there is a completely fucking stupid bug where if you buy a character slot, you may find a bunch of your names flagged for a rechange.  :why_so_serious:

Because what TOR needed was more name drama.  :why_so_serious:

As far as Noxxic is concerned, use them for pretty much nothing but spec advice and to maybe get a general idea of what kind of gear you're aiming for.

Following their rotation guides only ends in tragedy; ask someone else of your class and spec for rotations/priority.

As it turns out, if you log all the way out of the game and restart it, it fixes it, but still, wtf!

I thought they were restricting free players to 2 character slots. When I logged in I still had 6. Cool. :)

Yeah, I've never ever found a site with good info on rotations (in any MMO I've played) - you are always best off finding someone in-game for that.

I don't know what the limit is, but you may have more characters showing than you can actually play. At any rate players can now use cartel coins to buy active char slots.

Freebos get 2 slots, Preferred get 6, and Subscibers get 12.

If you happened to have more than 12 before F2P hit (thanks to server merges), subscribers get a one-time grandfathering in, letting them keep those extra characters.

That's cool. If I had more than 12 because of merges and had to pay to access the others I'd be upset.

What is the point of any equipment that's not orange ?

I'm serious.

Mostly as "at least I'm not using that level 13 green" and/or stuff you put on your companions. I haven't collected a full orange suit on my agent until the 40s, so I've been using various greens in blues in most of my slots till then.

Right, but as far as I can see :

1 - All Orange Stuff is pretty much usuable at level 1
2 - All Orange stuff can get upgraded as you upgrade and purchase new mods for it.
3 - All other stuff usually pales in comparison to the Orange stuff upgraded to your level.


It seems to me it's like Heirloom items that are fully customisable.  I've just bought a suit of 'Enquisitor' shit from the  AH and I'm putting together the mods.  I think that'll pretty much do me....forever.

Seems odd.

The biggest real downside to fitting yourself out in nothing but oranges at a low level is one of sheer maintenance.

Unless you have a Cybertech (and an Artificer, but mostly Cybertech) to make you a wholly new set of mods and armorings every 4 or so levels, it's really easy to lag behind in gear quality, sometimes to the point where those shitty greens you're getting from quests end up being better. Speaking as someone with both of those as alts, it's a major, major pain in the ass to do.

The other alternatives for keeping your gear's mods from lagging behind (the AH, commendation vendors, and stripping flashpoint loot) each have big problems: Low-level mods on the AH are retardedly expensive, at least on my server; it's not uncommon to see a blue-quality level 27 armoring going for 20,000+ credits. Commendation vendors are nice, but it is simply not possible to afford a full gear set's worth of armorings, mods, and ehancements from a planet's vendor unless you both do all of the planetary quests along with spend a few days grinding out the various Heroic 2s and 4s for even more comms for mods. Stripping flashpoint loot isn't too bad either, but it's the most time-consuming method, since you have to wait in group finder, actually run the flashpoint, and then hope loot for you drops AND you win it.

It's still very much worth doing and I guess you can get away with just using cheap-as-free green-quality mods and armorings from a Cybertech alt, but it's not a trivial prospect.

Fair enough, but it hasn't applied to me yet.

I've got enough commendations thus far to keep myself 'current' at the start of every new area and that seems to do me until the next one.  The drops are usually worse, similar or not actually a huge upgrade.  So it's a balancing act between being uber and juggling tons of shite.

But I take your point - It might become a larger issue later.

Replace what you can with rewards (oh, wait...) and commendations.  You really don't need the latest and greatest at every level.  You will want to upgrade as much as possible when you start fighting level 30 mobs (Alderan for Imps), because there's a huge jump in mob difficulty then.  You can start stepping as you get mods again soon after though.

 :oh_i_see:

There isn't one.  It was one of the huge design fails that they never grokked this point and all equipment should have been "Orange."

As Koro says, through most of Act 1 you just won't have the resources to keep a full set of oranges full of mods unless you're supporting the character from an alt, so blues and even some greens that drop tend to be useful. I tend to find that in Acts 2-3 I rarely touch anything that isn't moddable, but I have massive presence bonuses on my companions at this point and they pretty much paper over any weaknesses in my gear.

You *will* be able to keep a handful of oranges going even from the start without hardship, like 3-4 of them should be OK, and I think you're expected to; as such I am not sure why they reward green weapons ever, since everyone gets an orange weapon at the end of noobworld.

Don't forget you'll want to upgrade the gear on your companions as well.  At least the one you use the most.  I took the orange route on my PC as well, so most of my rewards and drops went to my companions, iirc.  I eventually upgraded my companions to oranges as well, but trying to keep PC *and* companion gear all oranges while leveling would be awfully hard.

I have a cybertech and artificer. Since I didn't level the skills while I leveled those chars, it's hella expensive to keep my other alts going (had to pay for rare underworld metals and such). One thing about FPs is that the daily also gives you comms, and in the 20s or so I was getting comms for planets I hadn't gone to, so I was able to make armor and mods and use the coms for barrels and augs (for some reason I have blue or better hilts but never bothered to improve my augs)

I had a cybertech so keeping myself and a companion in full orange ubergear was easy. There really wasn't a reason to be anything but that and a slicer early on. No idea about now.

I still feel that bio is the only main craft that adds any particular value for solo gameplay at all, as it has been since the beginning of the game. Although it is a lot easier to get biometric alloys to make your BOP Rakata belts and bracers with armor and synth now, so that's something.

Biochem's still really good even at level 50 in raids, though I don't know how long that'll be the case come the "expansion", since Bioware's been on record saying that they don't like all the reusable stuff at max level for biochems.

Those tokens you use to buy raid gear pieces should be components that crafters use to make gear. Otherwise why bother having crafting in the game?

Non-Orange gear is for alts you level up that you never intend to play after you finish their story. Low hassle outfitting.


It's otherwise just something you vendor or breakdown for crafting bits. Maybe part of a RP suit if that is your thing.

Speaking of roleplay I finished a quest on Corellia that gave me an Imperial uniform but was WHITE. I already had better (tionese) but hey I loved the look  so why not?

I do kind of wish everything was moddable because I don't think every set piece is moddable. I can't remember what it looked like but I remember getting myself an all black outfit for my sniper and having to reluctantly part ways with it because it was low level.

I remember in beta, you could mod everything, but they took that out for reasons I cannot remember and probably thought were bullshit at the time. There are definitely armor models out there that need orange versions still, and it kills me when I come across something pretty and neat that's a shitty ol' green.

Edit: You probably know all this, but for the benefit of those who weren't in beta...

Back in beta that stuff was ostensibly removed/changed due to inconsistencies with the modification system they had at the time. Rather than the Armoring/Mod/Enhancement/Augment system we have now, it was something like... Armoring/Overlay/Underlay/Enhancement/Augment. Weapons were similar, in that blasters used blaster-specific mod/enhancement equivalents; same with lightsabers and other weapons. Back then, Armstech made all weapon-related mods, Artifice made all force-user armor mods and lightsaber mods, Cybertech made all non-force-user armor mods, and so on.

The big problem with the weapon side of the system was that it caused a lot of bloat in the databases and made Artifice too powerful as a crafting skill, which they eventually addressed by moving all Mods and Armorings into Cybertech. I wish they'd kept the weapon-specific mods in Armstech and Artifice and just made Cybertech the general armor mod skill.

As far as armor went, it was a different problem: there was no consistency in modification slots. Some armors had swappable Armorings and Overlays. Some had swappable Overlays and Underlays but no Armorings. Some had Enhancements, but nothing else. No single piece of gear had all of those slots available for use.

So, rather than just make every piece of gear "orange", they kept select major quest rewards and Flashpoint drops moddable and turned the rest into the greens and blues we see (and never use) today.

Orange is the way to go, but it's a chore to keep current mods on them.  My first toon was a cybertech so it wasn't too bad, this was before augments.  But with my alt, I only have two on him and a max of one per companion.  Just not that needed when leveling up and does become annoying.

With my leveling hero using only two oranges, life is a lot easier and I can continue the story instead of stopping every level and sitting at the AH.

Yep. You have to upgrade 3 things in each orange every few levels, and it's a huge chore - I just used oranges as I got them from flashpoints, and maybe kept one or two of them (+ weapon) up-to-date. My other rule of thumb was to upgrade orange gear once per planet (Quesh isn't a planet :awesome_for_real:). For the rest of the gear I just used greens from drops / quest rewards. Ditto companions, especially since for most of the game my companion was using heavy armor with +aim while I was using medium armor with +cunning; hand-me-downs weren't possible.

You typically get one armoring / barrel reward per planet, and maybe 1-2 enhancements or mods; the commendations you get from doing every quest outside the bonus series will typically only be enough to buy 2 full sets of armorings / enhancements / mods for your orange gear.

Actually that's not how it looks to work. I have "Activate" buttons beside each of my characters. At the bottom of the list it says I currently have 1/6 characters activated.
So unless I get another 6 characters on another server there is no grandfathering. The reason I'm not 100% sure about all this is I have only activated 1 character so far. Oh ok I just checked another server I had an alt on and I don't have to activate it to play it so it looks like I do get a few more characters as preferred.
So, if you had max characters on your main server you will be boned for 2 of them from what it looks like, but if you have a bunch of characters spread over multiple servers it looks like you can have 12.

They upped the number of characters you can create on a server to 12 at the same time they did the Big Mandatory Merges, so one may be even MORE boned than you thought! I assume non-subs can't create over their personal cap any more, though. That it's per-server for the non-subscribers is interesting to me, I had wondered if that would be the case or not.

For grandfathering, I was talking solely about actual current subscribers (and not preferred/F2P) who had 13+ characters on a server due to server merges. Originally, Bioware was going to make even subscribers lock out a few characters beyond those 12 and have you unlock new character slots to play them again, but they decided not to this one time.

It's nice to see them occasionally get something right. Shame it's like the broken clock though. That said I still haven't worked out how the current system works as it keeps resetting my character selections.

OT but I found it interesting that on the same day I'm in a FP with a level 35 Master jedi a level 21 trooper begs me to help him finish Act 2.

Can you even finish act 2 at that level? I thought the Act quests had a hard level requirement.

If by "hard level requirement" you mean unable to complete (or enter a zone)  at all, I don't know. I just assumed one could do them at any level, but the npcs would be at a certain level range for everyone.

As far as I can tell, the act quests don't have a hard level requirement, no.

Bounty Hunter is just Awesome.

So much more fun than my Inquisitor, though Mako is really, really hard to fucking please.

My super-neutral money-grubbing Merc's found Mako plenty easy to please. She doesn't mind hands getting dirty, isn't completely skittish about killing folks, and no matter which way you swing with your character's priorities and motivations (money vs. rah-rah Mando honor bullshit), she's pretty chill with it.

I mean it's not like she's goddamn Corso or something.

I guess if you're all-dark, all the time Mako'll probably hate you, but neh.

Yeah, Mako only gets pissed if you:

1) Break the BH code.   i.e. You were paid to complete a job but you backstab the client by setting the target free or gunning them down when it turns out they're the dick.  That fucks your rep as a hunter.
2) You do shit for free.

If you simply don't give two fucks beyond the money, she'll be in your pants in no time.

Hmmm.

Bounty Hunter is the best damn class in the game solely because of Blizz. Sure, he's not effective to roll with unless you're a healy merc. But worth gimping yourself or respecing to have as a companion.

Blizz is also adorable as hell. I mean come on, he's so tiny he has to hold a blaster pistol like a rifle!

All of the Bounty Hunter companions are interesting, at the very least. Even dull-as-dirt Torian and the thoroughly unlikeable Skadge.

I always get +rep with Mako when I let people go, as far as I can remember. Maybe that was more evident in the planet missions than the story ones, though, can't quite remember.

Yeah planet missions don't seem to affect her as much because you're not hired to take those folks out.  She was wonky on a few there, IIRC.  It's been over a year, though.

My main reason to make a BH was for Blizz.  He rocks!  But most companions come too late in the game so Torian and Skadge might be interesting, but not when I've already go Mako, Blizz and Gault.  I love Gault cause he takes it to the next level.

Me:  "OK, looks like we've encased our bounty in carbonite."
Gault: "Awesome.  Hey, for extra credits, lets sell his kids into slavery!"
Me:  ....

You get Torian before Blizz, though! Although I agree on Gault, I can't see Torian replacing him for my dude BH. Gault is magical.

(I find Mako kinda meh, sorry!)

Blizz>>>>>>Gault/Mako>>>>>>Torian>>>>>>>>>>>....>>Skadge

Yeah, I haven't actually met Blizz yet (my dude hasn't even gotten Torian Bieber yet), but I am totally looking forward to it.  :awesome_for_real:

I was sort of dreading Gault due to a bunch of friends and a few guildmates absolutely hating him, but when I finally got him, I was pleasantly surprised to find out that he is awesome.

Even when he disagrees with you, his dialogue is still solid gold.

It is crazy to me that anyone could hate Gault, yeah.

Gault was amusing for his dialogue but I hated him as a partner.  Probably because I was a tank and he didn't work well with the melee-centric tank abilities.  Mako or Torian worked very well.

Torian was good as a partner, but meh as a character.  He's Mandalorian, though, so if you've got a thing for their lore folks will enjoy him.  He synergized really well with my tank spec because he had some nice melee AOEs.  Keep things together and keep him upgraded and stuff died quick enough I never missed taking my healbot.

I get your Meh-ness for Mako, Sjofn, because she's the romantic interest and not notable beyond that.  If you're not playing a male and don't want to do the romance she's *generic healer* with a mildly-interesting storyline.

Being a tank I never used Blizz much.  I keep hearing he's awesome but he was outshined by Galt in my on-ship conversations, which were really my only interactions with him.

Skadge just blows.  Abrasive personality and his DPS seemed shitty.  If I had the option to space him I would have done so.

Isn't Skadge a tank?

Skadge is a melee tank, and really a terribad one. As a tank, he can't seem to hold aggro and stay alive, set to dps, he does less than Blizz set to tank. Blizz is a ranged tank, which works fine for Healy Mercs.

I was shocked at how much better Khem tanked than Skadge did.

Hrm. Skadge's ability set looks pretty much identical to Vik's, and Vik tanked just fine for me. Granted, I had some pretty big presence bonuses by then.

While we're talking about bad companions, I want to give a shout-out to Lokin, who's so hardcore he doesn't even start with a weapon. I played a healer operative, so I didn't use him in the first place, but  :awesome_for_real:

Companions of the same type are all near as damnit identical.

If you are seeing differences it is either your imagination, gear, or a bug.

If you actually go through companion by companion there are some weird differences.

Melee tanks for example, some of them have an AE ability that does damage and heals them + the PC, where others have a different AE ability that does the same damage but instead applies a 5% damage debuff. Some of them also have a knockback where others don't.

And Xalek is just freaking weird, as he has some things off the ranged tank list and some things off the melee tank list.

Yeah, Xalek is technically a ranged tank, but he spends 85% of his time in melee range due to having a lightsaber. The only way other "ranged" tanks stay in actual tanking range is through their charges.

Lokin is the worst heal companion in the game thanks to his little bit of fluff around his 'condition'.

Seriously, so bad.

He is seriously the fucking worst. I also played a healy operative, so it didn't matter for ME, but God. What were they thinking with him?

edit: seriously, eldaec, I agree on any other companion, but Lokin really is worse than anyone else. He doesn't do damage in his heal stance and he cannot heal in his damage stance.

Yeah, it's a silly byproduct of when he used to be a tank back in beta.

It still boggles my mind that they didn't. Like. Fix it.

I never noticed a problem with Lokin, but then when I used him I was probably at least 2 levels higher so maybe he never had to heal me much. I hated Kaliyo as a tank but just noticed I didn't have her equipped with a shield. LOL I hope I wasn't playing the whole game like that. Probably why I got owned so hard in Section X though and had to use my juggernaut.

This game grows on you.

It's fucking annoying.

I think you got mind worms from that last hooker.

Relax, I'm just strangely enjoying the story.

I can see absolutely no interest in any type of 'end game' here.

I enjoyed the story and would really love to go back and finish it on my Juggernaut. Problem is, last time I tried jumping back in to it my head nearly exploded trying to remember what the hell all the damn buttons did in combat.

Nine levels under cap and I had something like 18 buttons I had to remember the functionality of to do combat passably. Not as in I will have a bit of a hard time, more like "oh shit I'm getting owned by three generic mooks because I can't remember exactly what these six different situation interrupts do".

I think I'll head back to the other SW.

I had the same issue with my 43 Jugg, played a jedi knight to level 20, which got me back into the flow for the juggernaut combat. Sadly, the juggernaut at 43 was so much less fun than the jedi sentinel, that I reshelved him.

This is my feeling exactly, but then I've never cared for mmo end game either

So you're playing a single-player Bioware game with some collaborative MP encounters mixed-in.

No reason you shouldn't be enjoying it, eh?

He has to maintain his grumpy street cred.  :why_so_serious:

Not that I'm Ironwood but...

The main problems I have is that companions side quests are just talky then fade to black stuff, space combat is meh, and the usual kill ten rats stuff. I'd also wish I could use more than one companion since it's rare I'm in a planetside pve group.

Is legacy stuff worth getting? I hardly ever go to the vendors and I don't think I have any armor kits; I just have the main hand weapon ones.

The non-orange pieces?

No, not really worth going out of your way for it. If you have kits just lying around, sure, why not, I guess. Sometimes I get them as random crewskill mission rewards, the kits. Otherwise it's a tiny level range you'll outgrow in roughly half a planet each time.


The Orange-Moddable pieces can make some nice dress-up outfits though, if pricey.

Odd, isn't it.

I'm really not very sure why this is an online game.  Really.

My gut says because someone saw the numbers subsription games were making per month and said, "Fuck me, why should we settle for a $50 one-time-fee when we can get triple that every year!" and didn't look any further than that.

Add in multiplayer FPs, and if they had configured their team to provide $15 worth of DLC to expand the story options each month and I can see how they could have built it as worthy-of-being-online.

But too late for that now. It's 50 levels of bioware followed by an unconnected raid game. Which is all rather unfortunate.

This is the most group-friendly-without-being-group-required MMO I've played. Guild Wars 2 kinda fails for me there because there is zero point to being in a group at all (which is fine, really, but it does make it Not For Me when I want to play something with Ingmar).

I agree with this, it's the only MMO I've played in the last 10 years where the leveling content was actually better with a group instead of worse. The game is pretty unremarkable alone and I haven't progressed any given solo character past ~20. It makes sense as a multiplayer game but not necessarily an MMO. If they had decided to make a co-op RPG instead of an MMO, we most certainly would have gotten a game with a much smaller scale though. $200+ million budgets don't happen for games you only expect people to pay $60 for.

Agree with the swtor bit. Though it is very much preestablished gaming group multiplayer rather than mmo multiplayer.

Wouldn't say there us no point grouping in gw2 though. You would pretty much roflstomp everything in a coordinated duo, and gw2 at least does level matching all the time everywhere.

GW2 PVE would have to be worth doing at all to be worth doing in a duo, though.

I can't argue with this since it has a major qualifier, but I wish they would relax some of the barriers to grouping specifically with heroics and WBs, or at least make it clear to n00bs like me what the requirements are.

I'll also add a caveat that a lot of the pve (mainly the mundane planet quests) isn't very inspiring at all when solo.

Yeah I'd rather just do a ton of FPs than do non planet storyline quests. I love doing the planet story lines (especially E Balmorra and Taris) though, for the most part.

It's not even that. I have literally no reason to want to hang out with you. If you happen to wander into the zone I'm in and kill stuff near me, well, that's cool I guess, but there's no reason for it and it adds absolutely nothing whatsoever to the experience. You could just as easily be a stranger passing through and my experience would be exactly the same. I lose nothing by you being there, but I lose out on nothing without you, either.

GW2's PvE is very weird. It's both very social and extremely isolated at the same time.

SWTOR, on the other hand, does everything it can to make sure you don't lose anything by grouping (which is indeed the same in GW2, but otherwise you're at least a bit penalized in any other MMO, just because you need to find twice as many clickies, get twice as many bear ass drops, TSW had those fucking solo instances, etc). But the conversations in a group are fun, you get more experience, and silly as social points are, you get those for dress up clothes (it's even better now that the stuff is adaptable instead of only light armor). I feel like it adds something, rather than simply exists for the sake of existing (like in GW2).

This isn't, of course, taking into account dungeon content and stuff. I'm just talking kicking around with a friend or two (or three!) and having that feel fun and rewarding and like it added something to the experience in ways beyond "I get to shoot the shit with my friends." 'Cause I can shoot the shit with my friends without grouping with them. :P

The best times I've had on SWTOR is with another player and we burn through many, many quests.  Knock out solo, story and Heroic +2's and watch the xp pile up.  Went through one planet almost all the way through in one night. 

So yeah, this game makes even me want to group.  That's pretty good.

Swtor doesn't do everything it can. It doesn't do sidekicking.

Which is completely critical outside if a totally committed 'play these characters only as a group' situation.

Yep, I pretty much had to play solo and do random dungeon finder PUGs 100% of the time* because I have really different playtimes from the rest of my guild, and everyone paces their levelling differently (some people play a lot, others play less; some people have multiple alts, some focus on one character only). LOTRO had this problem too, and it was even worse there because levelling takes forfuckingever.

This also applied to WOW, mind, but levelling in WOW was a relatively short solo-oriented endeavor in the first place. In SWTOR, most of us didn't even get past act 2.


* this isn't really true, we could group for warzones due to the bolstering thing. Most of my guild hates diku pvp though, and honestly pvp in SWTOR is nothing special (it's not TERRIBLE, but it's not very good either). Also, warzones in an organized premade group are almost always a boring one-sided steamroll due to the huge difference a 4-man premade makes in a 8-man battleground.

Sidekicking isn't important enough for me to cancel out the narrative disruption it would cause in a game like SWTOR. I guess I could deal with it in flashpoints, though (you'd have to change the loot model). Exemplaring would be more OK. I loved it in CoH, and hated that it was unoptional in GW2, I think I'd rather NOT have it than have it that way.

In which case you'd choose not to use it - but honestly in your specific case you aren't really in a position to appreciate it.

Being married to the single person on earth SWTOR was most designed for and who may very well attempt every gender/race/class/alignment/romance combination before she is done is not a typical SWTOR experience.

Spoilers are only really relevant on the class quests and if your friend is playing a class you will play through later. For most people that means they maybe have to worry about joining 1 or 2 class stories - and even then they can choose not to spectate the cutscenes in a pinch.

I can see how sidekicking would be a problem in TOR since it's so story driven, but exemplaring (the higher level player leveling down) would work well.

Not every alignment combo, I have a hard time with dark side choices.  :why_so_serious:

They'll mostly be twileks too.

What about different skill trees combos?  :why_so_serious:

Anyone use Knight's crusade armor (synthweaver level 27)? I'm making some for my JK. I could have sworn that the first time I previewed it, it wasn't a midriff. As far as I know it's the only moddable heavy armor that is, and I haven't seen any at all above level 20 or so.

eta: speaking of which I still need the schems for bracer and belt if anyone has or can make them.

I actually made some coin last week by crafting and selling on the GTN. Bought four of those Cartel indestructible crystals and some mats.

You get a lot of orange robe rewards from quests and stuff. A lot. My JK has like five in her vault, I think, and had slapped one on Lord Spoiler. :P

As for different skill sets, no, because I can just respec for that, but different ACs, yes.  :why_so_serious:

Agreed.  I think they should let us shift AC's because why make us go through the class storyline again just to access the alternate trees?  Hell, put that on the cartel market.  I'd buy that for a dollar.

I think he meant it was the only orange heavy robe that shows off your bellybutton.

On the AC respec thing, I wanted it before I played, I still don't think it would be a disaster, but I don't really mind it terribly since it gives me an excuse to go through the stories a second time gender/alignment flipped.

I want AC flipping because I fucking hate playing a sage/sorc but would like to be able to switch to it if we have a dire need for one at some point.

Stop liking what I don't like.  Anyway you make a good point, but once per class to 50 is fine with me.

What's AC?

And yes I did mean "showing off bellybutton". On the official forums there were a couple of people bitching about not all the jedi gear being matronly, and I've never seen any but medium armor like that, so I figured it didn't exist. Maybe they were just referring to consular gear.

Probably, 90% of JC gear = SpaceNun.


AC = Advanced Class, Sentinel vs. Guardian etc.

I'd like dual spec before AC respec, and they still haven't implemented that (the zero-cost field respec thing is NOT an acceptable substitute, sorry). Until then, I just make sure that I choose different ACs on classes on both sides (vanguard/gunslinger/sage/sentinel v mercenary/operative/assassin/juggernaut) -- with an obligatory one-year wait between levelling alts so as to make the planet quests fresh-ish again.  :awesome_for_real:

Another thing they could do is add a forth tree so there are no DPS only classes left. I assume the practical reason people want to swap is access to tanking or healing.

But an AC retrain would seem easier to implement.

AC swapping - if you're talking about swapping ACs like you would swap specs in another game - is idiotic, and I don't understand how any of you can seriously be for this. Despite the shared abilities, they're pretty much wholly discrete classes and play extremely differently from one another. It's like if I were still playing WoW, and I went "Okay, I'm getting kind of tired of my Priest, I think I'll go respec him to Death Knight  now." Those shared classes have lead to some very weird expectations apparently.

And what would the advantage be? "I hate playing Sorc/Sage, but if my group really needs one, I'll swap to it because boy howdy that's sure not going to lead to burnout!"? Why? Because you don't want to run through the story again? I'm sorry, no. This game has low enough replayability as it is, and AC swapping would remove one of the only reasons to actually go through a class story you've seen over again. Plus it places an unfair burden on Warriors and Knights, who would have to more than double the amount of gear they cart around, when no other class set would have to.

They're no different from each other than specs of paladin or monk in WoW, honestly.

I'm with Koro on this one.  I think it's a little silly to ask this.

Now, Dual Spec is almost a must at this point.  That said, I'm ok with my Tanks because they dps a fair bit, but my healing Sorceror is just shit.  (also, healing with her is shit, but that's another story.)

AC switching doesn't have to be on the fly as koro suggested.  Make it a moneysink where you have to go back to the station and spend a lot of credits or buy a cartel item. Make it non-trivial, maybe even with a modest amount of dallies. 

I see Powertech and Merc as two branches from the same tree.  With half of that tree forever locked out.

While I agree with you guys, dual spec would cause an almighty wailing and gnashing of teeth from snipers and marauders. Because, as you know, anything a developer does that benefits other people more than yourself is a calculated insult.

Meh, many of the gunslingers I know respec between saboteur for ranked warzones and sharpshooter for fun/pve - and the sentinels actually respec on the fly from focus to combat for huttball. Pretty much everyone could get some use from it.

For most of the classes, it is FAR more like "I am sick of being a holy paladin, I think I'll respec to protection." And claiming "replayability" is just silly. I am the queen of replaying this game, and I think asking people be as crazy as me just to play the other side of their class is uh. Not reasonable. Why go through a class story again? Because you liked it. That's the only reason you should go through it again (I mean c'mon, there's 8 class stories, that's plenty for the normies.). Otherwise, that will lead to the feared Burn Out, since if someone doesn't like the storyline of the class, well, they'll resent doing it again if their group really, really needs whatever the opposite AC is.

Speaking of burn out, since swapping AC really isn't much different from respeccing (it REALLY ISN'T much different, I have played a lot of the different ACs and while there's an obvious split, none of them are any more drastic than, say, feral/resto druid), the burn out thing is also not any more major than it currently would be. People respec to something more useful to their group or raid when they need to, if they want to, as it is. We all already understand this. It's up to them to keep themselves from burning out. I know where my line is on the sage healing, for example.

Also, boo fucking hoo for the warriors and knights. You don't have to flip your AC if you don't want to. You really don't. And your "having" to carry a set of medium and heavy is no different than, oh, my consular having to carry different sets of light armor to fill the different AC roles. It's another price a person decides if they want to pay if they want that flexibility. It's an option, not compulsory.

How is going from DPS <-> Healer any different than going from DPS <-> Tank or Healer <-> Tank?  It's a completely arbitrary line.

And how anyone could be against giving players more options with zero negative impact upon themselves I don't know.

What's the problem again?

The difference between a Sage and a Shadow is nothing more than the difference between a Balance/Resto Druid and a Feral Druid.  Ranged DPS? Check.  Healing? Check.  Tanking? Check.  Stealthy melee DPS? Check.

One detail worth considering is that SWTOR has way more ability bloat than WoW. Switching to a different AC means learning 3-4x more abilities than switching talent specs in WoW. Even Rift has less ability bloat, but switching to a new Soul at a high level is still an overwhelming experience and it takes a while to learn how to play again. I think the feature is necessary in WoW/Rift where so much emphasis is placed on end-game content where specific group compositions are required to play, but it makes less sense for SWTOR. Leveling content, where dual-spec is less useful, is the main appeal of the game and dual spec would give you one less reason to play again.

I'd think having to do a story you've already done in a game with eight stories is sufficient reason to not make people do it again.  Also limited character slots.

Not anymore! SLOTS FOR DAYS  :why_so_serious:

Speaking of ability bloat: I'm thinking about getting a gaming mouse for the first time ever. Anyone pvp w/o one? (Cuz that's the only reason I'm considering one; right now I use keyboard + left-clicking to get to my abilities but I'm assuming in pvp only n00bs use the mouse that way. )

I arena'd my way to CHALLENGER in 2s with a sub-par class combo with Fordel in WoW that way.  :why_so_serious:

I don't think I'd try it with SWTOR buttons though.

Bollocks. 

TOR has ability bloat but not nearly to the extent that you seem to think and certainly not 3 to 4 times more than WoW.  To continue with my earlier example, the amount of abilities a Sage has is very comparable to a Resto Druid.  A Shadow might have somewhat more abilities than a Bear or a Cat individually but much less than a Feral Druid overall, which is an entirely reasonable comparison since the context of the discussion is about AC swapping.  A Sage switching to a Shadow spec would have less abilities to swap out than a Resto switching to Feral (my experience with Feral being WotLK/Cataclysm, not that MoP abomination).

I just run 1-6, shift 1-6 then F G C V and shift  F G C V. If I need more then that, it's probably a spec I don't want to play anymore anyways.

You already know that they removed a lot of the multi-spec abilities from specs that didn't need them in MoP. Regardless, none of the WoW classes have ever had the ability bloat on the scale something like the JK Sentinel. Cata/Wrath-era Resto druids had ~12 feral abilities to consider, but only ~4-5 of these were actually useful. In my experience almost all of the abilities in SWTOR seem useful for any given AC which makes separating which abilities you should/shouldn't use, if you happened to switch to to that AC at 50, much harder.

I just don't think "well, some people might be too dumb to figure this out" is a good enough reason to disallow it. The upside is not enormous, so I don't reallly think it needs to be a high priority, but a paid AC change would not break the game in any kind of important way.

It's irrelevant how many abilities they may or may not have removed for MoP in the context of this discussion because people weren't too confused to respec Druids into different roles in WotLK/Cata regardless.  And if you cut out the non-useful abilities of the Sage from being considered, they have probably less useful abilities than a Resto or Balance Druid.  Seriously, I have all kinds of empty quickbar slots on my Sage, unlike most of my other TOR or WoW characters.

As for Sentinels, I would agree that they are the most egregious example of ability bloat but they also share many of those abilities with Guardians.  That would make respeccing between Sentinel and Guardian rather simple, due to all the abilities they have in common.

I definitely agree with Nevermore, especially on the JK front. There is ability bloat for sentinels for sure, but a LOT of their buttons overlap with the guardian. I have a very easy time jumping between my two sith warriors from that standpoint. But my sage also has a lot of spare space on her quickbars, because she simply does not need that many buttons (especially since she's heal-specced).

It is no different from switching your druid from feral to resto, or your paladin from holy to protection.


And yeah, all you need are some credits and you can have character slots for daaaaays, at least for now! I bought two for 230k a pop and I think it's dropped pretty far since then. :P

Well, for one, pvp in swtor and wow sucks, so don't worry about it.  :awesome_for_real: A lot of diku pvp is the gear game, and some classes are more resilient to keyboard turning or clicking than others. In swtor you can secure wins easily most of the time simply by playing in a 4-man premade (unless the premade is REALLY REALLY bad, which can happen, but isn't common)

Anyway, depends on what you mean by gaming mouse. I use a deathadder (or whatever it's called) with just two side buttons, and it's been enough for pvp in general - even when I was playing button-heavy classes like WOW resto shaman. You do need to keybind almost everything though - 1-6, shift/ctrl/alt 1-5, qezxrfv, shift/alt/ctrl modifiers of qezxrfv (not all modifiers on each key - depending on convenience), f1-f4, and 3 mouse buttons (center, side1, side2) have been enough for me. Clicking is bad not just because it's slower (though it IS; if you're a super gosu SC2 player it may be even, idk), but because you can't click an ability and mouselook at the same time, and in pvp if you're not able to swing both your character and the camera around as needed you'll get stuff like people jousting you and not being able to fight back. Another artifact is that if you're not turning with your mouse, you need to rely on strafe/backpedal to move around / get away, and backpedalling (walking backwards) is noticably slower than normal walking. I remember dueling a keyboard turner warrior back in WOW vanilla with my much less geared warrior, and was able to defeat him without taking much damage at all simply by exploiting his slow turning radius and the delay between his attacks.

On AC switching, seems like a lot of the people arguing against are worrying about problems that would primarily emerge from on the fly spec switching, whereas those in favour are talking about permanent respec.

On ability bloat, I take your point wrt warriors/knights, but on the others, seriously, other MMOGs carry way more genuine abilities. Your regular use stuff that needs a key bind is maybe half a dozen per class. Everything else easily fits on a handful of hot bars.

There are plenty of buttons you can hide altogether because they won't be relevant to your spec or are PvP only or whatever.

What is this about character slots and credits? I feel I should know.

They started selling MOAR character slots on the cartel market, but it's an item you can put up on the GTN, so some people have been. So if you want more slots, but don't want to pay real money for it, there's that option instead.

Is there any upper limit to how many you can buy?

230k is 2 hours at level 50 at most.

Actually, I'm fairly pleased with the whole 'fantasy money for cartel stuff.'

I've convinced the wife to have a play about with it and while she's enjoying it, she's horrified at the idea of only 2 quickbars.  I put up some auctions and bang, new quickbar for her.

The idea that, sure, you're a freebie, but that the only barrier to entry is to get in game cash and 'upgrade your account' works for me.  Further, the idea that you get preferred from a single purchase is also rather a spiffy thing that really draws the customer in.

If the argument against AC switching is ability bloat, something which needs to be reigned in anyways, I'd say... reign in the number of abilities.  Two problems solved!

There is some theoretical limit to the number of slots you can have on a server, but its like 30+ or something apparently.

Only Sjofn need apply basically  :why_so_serious:

LOL I was feeling good about myself getting 100k in that time period. What's the secret?

I spent a happy half hour on the GTN last night looking at the prices of various Cartel items but didn't realise that it extended to character slots too. Awesome.  Are there any other unlocks that can be bought for credits too?

Are you on a Euro or US server?

To the best of my knowledge, nearly everything can be put on the AH. If you look through the actual Cartel Market itself, any Unlock that appears as an item in the Item Preview window can be sold. This goes for Section X authorization, color unify, bank tabs (you can save literally millions of credits by buying an account-wide bank tab from the AH), and more or less everything but weekly ops/warzone/flashpoint passes.

Euro.  Because anything else would be daft.

I agree. Many wouldn't. If you're on Progenitor, give us a shout. If not, you can go about your business. Move along.

http://forums.f13.net/index.php?topic=22154.0

 :grin:

I should redo it to cover the new dailies and such.

Can you solo the Ilum H2 yet?  :oh_i_see:

Probably, I haven't tried in ages.

I don't remember any non heroic dailies on those planets but I'll look into them. I did the dailies on Section X but I don't think they gave out that level of coin. I didn't keep a detailed record tho

The whole process would go much faster now too, as the shuttles will port you directly around to the daily areas, when I did that test I still had to run back and forth through stations and stuff to get anywhere.

I am.  How does one go about shouting ?

Btw, thanks for the responses re: gaming mouse, but anything that requires 2 buttons for one ability in pvp sounds to me like a non starter. I had to change companion attack to 'V'. :crying_panda:   I think I'll rearrange my keys though so my important stuff is 1 6 and on Q,E,C,V, get an inexpensive mouse and roll with that.


eta: drats. That king's crusade armor I mentioned? It only looks that way on my inquisitor. Itlooks like just another jedi robe on my guardian. LOL I guess the art doesn't go with the armor but with the level, armor type, and side.

Side is what determines the look.  There are a ton of things that looked awesome on my Sith that looked terrible on my Jedi.  Maybe a few in the reverse direction, but Sith clothes have so much more character and variety.

That new Jedi outfit (you know the one that's on every cover and screenshot and is now available to buy) is just awesome.

I would put it on all my chars.

First thing you need to do is shift your move keys across to ESDF. Opens up QAZ for abilities and tab is still in range of your little finger.

Death to all WASDs.

That's an interesting idea actually.

Hmmm.

I don't use more than S and F for movement (strafing) and that frees up E and D for abilities too.  Double mouse button for forward movement and no backpedal.  Primary fire on E so it's always accessible.

So I played a ton of pvp today on my 28 29 shadow (leveled through pvp). Well I guess I was worried about nothing in a way. I still haven't bought a new mouse but I did ok. My main problems can't be solved with a mouse: other players just moved too fast for me to keep up and I had no idea what I was doing. I just followed the zerg around and hoped for the best lol.

Here's something I didn't expect. I thought pvp would be like DAoC's battlegrounds but all levels were kind of thrown in. There was a buff to make us all 49 from what I was told. Does anyone know what that covers? For example I figure it covers obvious things like armor, endurance,  and primary dmg stat, but what about absorption, power, crit, and surge?

I think it scales everything up, yes. So if you have one piece of gear with absorb on it, you'd have one level 49 piece of gear with absorb, etc. It doesn't scale you up for ability access so higher level people will have more buttons, which can give them quite an edge depending on things, but it is generally pretty even and pretty fun in the 1-49 warzones. I've never done a level 50 one.

Note that this is heavily class-dependent. Some ACs get all their good abilities early, while others have to wait until the 30s [or even early 40s] for them. This both depends on stock class abilities and the way the talent tree is structured. Higher-level characters will also have an edge when it comes to utilities/CC/cooldowns, but I suppose this is to be expected.

For example, healer operatives have really crappy and interruptible healing which runs you out of energy really quick until level 20ish, then they get a stackable hot that makes things a LITTLE better. At 30ish they get an instant energy-free heal powered by TA that heals for a ton (and solves both mobility and energy problems that are pretty prevalent until then), and finally they get their only aoe heal at 40ish which makes their throughput skyrocket in places like novare and voidstar. OTOH I could see something like a powertech/vanguard doing well from level 10, as they get most of their class-defining abilities early.

From memory, the way the Bolster mechanism works is that it works on a multiplier basis - so it takes your level and uses a multiplier to make you equivalent to a level 49 player. So, for example, at level 29 your Shadow would have a base pre-gear bonus stat of 166 Willpower and at level 49 it would be 246 - so a multiplier of 1.48 would be used in warzones.  This applies to all of your stats - primary (willpower, strength etc), auxiliary (endurance) and advanced (power, crit, surge etc.).

Gear is affected by the same multiplier though so if you're under geared at level 29 then you may find that someone who has a base level of 10 and is in appropriate level green gear will have higher stats than you after Bolstering.

Level 50 becomes more of a gear dependent game, unfortunately, although I gather they're trying to make it less so. I'll believe it when I see it.

The main reason I asked is that, because I have several crafter alts, I have some augments so I have like 46% shield chance (with shadow buff) and about 36% absorb but I don't think those increased, but I'll check later.

Sadly, shielding/absorb/defense are all pretty lack luster in a typical pvp environment. The distribution of attack types on player abilities mostly all just bypass those defenses entirely.

I dunno, my Juggernaut tank in mostly top-end PvE gear is pretty sturdy in 50s PvP. There were a couple Voidstar maps where I could guard a door with a single healer and nobody else, and nearly the entire enemy team could quite literally not kill me.

But yes, you're mostly right. Shield and Absorb aren't that great in a PvP environment, though Defense is. Even in PvE, Shield/Absorb is kind of sketchy at times. There are several end-game bosses who simply cannot be shielded or defended against.

As I recall (been a while since I pvp'd with my Vanguard) the issue with shield and defence stats in PvP is that they don't stop Force or Tech attacks and pretty much all special moves are one of those.

Pretty much, outside of a bunch of Sniper/Gunslinger things.




There's also some shenanigans where crits overwrite shield chance on the attack table, but I don't really know the details.

So what's the purpose of being a tank if I can't tank? Sounds like I'm better off being a marauder or going dps on my shadow

Now you understand why PvP at level 50 is mostly Sentinels/Marauders and Vanguards/Powertechs (specced in the ridiculous Assault/Pyro trees).  Or at least it was when I was regularly PvPing over the summer.

There isn't much currently. The main 'tanky' bit of pvp tanking is the taunt damage reduction, but you don't need to be an actual tank spec to do that.

There are still a few pseudo tank split specs, that end up wearing mostly DPS gear but keeping a few key tank spec talents and staying in their tank stance for guard, but those are drying up now too mostly I think.

Didn't say there wasn't a purpose in being a tank, only that there might be not much benefit to stacking shield and defence for PvP because of the way mechanics work. A lot of tank spec talents and skills are to do with damage resistance and reduction (not avoidance and mitigation which is what shield is for) so your survivability goes up. I vaguely recall this is why Juggs/Guardians can be quite formidable in PvP - they do quite well with resistance talents.

As said, you can guard (http://www.torhead.com/ability/f4576PJ/guard)/shield another player (if no a healer then there better be a bloody good reason) - and that shield is a damage reduction/diversion mechanic (and isn't affected by the Shield stat) that also counts towards medals. Plus taunt is a damage debuff (but only damage against other players) - and all tanks get an area taunt at level 30.

I levelled my Vanguard a lot in WZs and my spec was 25/14/2 with most of the points in the tanking Shield tree and I was consistently closer to the top of the leaderboard than the bottom (although given most peoples impression of Republic PvPing, that's like saying my shit may have smelt better than everyone elses but it's still shit). It can be done. (Well, it could be - tbh I've neglected my tank and haven't kept an eye on how much the last few patches may have nerfed her).

Conversely, I hate hate hate PvPing with my Scoundrel. I absolutely don't get how I should be playing it. I see all these Imp Operatives jumping around doing stuns and backstabs and other such crap and I *know* I have the same skills available to me but I have absolutely no idea what they are or how to use them.  :uhrr:

Well, I still have fun in pvp.  I just don't feel all that tankish when being attacked. Maybe my opinion would change if I was playing a sorc/sage.


What are medals for anyway? I noticed that I got a paladin medal for shielding someone, and I have like 6 MVP awards, for some reason lol.

What happens when I max out on comms?

If you max out on comms, you don't get any more. :P The medals are mostly to show "hey, you did shit" and you get bonus stuff (I don't remember what exactly, hovering over the medal count should tell you?) for the first 8 you have.

I guess what I really should have asked is if there were other things to spend comms on besides armor; probably won't do much 50 pvp. I found the pvp vendor and bought 100 medpacks. I seem to survive much longer now. My last match was like 20 kills 0 deaths. (oh and I also use stealth, insta stealth and that speed buff more often now, so it looks like most of the problems I've been having were user errors  :grin:)

If it was the PvP medpacks you bought, I would have suggested not trading comms for them as they're so easy to come by in the daily reward boxes. Then again, I don't use them as much as I should (and keep forgetting about them at the moment). But you already have and that's your perogative.  :grin: There are boxes you can buy which give adrenals and a piece of gear that you may or may not be able to sell on the GTN but other than that, gear. When you get to level 40, it's the only way you can get gear with Expertise on before level 50. Other than that, yeah - armour and weapons.

re: medals. The number of medals you got determined how many commendations and how much valor you got. Unfortunately this led to a scenario where, e.g. in Huttball, a team would quickly score 5 goals then not score the last one but farm the other team for medals. So they changed it in an early patch (pre 1.2 iirc) so that only the first 4 medals counted - plus bonus for each MVP you get. They also introduced medals for winning a game quickly and for defending nodes in warzones like Alderaan or Denova to encourage and reward strategic play.

Actually, noob question of my own:

WTF is a good team strategy for the Ancient Hypergates warzone? I think I understand how the game works but I don't understand what the team tactics should be short of Gotta Kill 'Em All.  Is it better to get orbs back to the node or go for killcount?

Look at the different level 20 and 40 armors and see if there are any you want your companions to dress up in. :P

Wife has nixed the idea of the slave girl outfit for Vette.

I is annoyed.

That's like dressing your baby sister in slut clothes.  I agree with the wife.

Baby sister ?  Really ?

Hmmm.  My Vette doesn't act like that.  Possibly because my Sith Warrior is an utter psychopath.  I mean really.  He's nuts.  It's just not funny.

My premade team uses the following strategy:
1.  Two fast movers (Cons/Inqs) trade back and forth between running orbs and guarding the node.  When 1 reaches halfway, the other leaves the node and heads toward mid.  Call for help when needed.  Rinse repeat.
2.  One or two stealthers harass opposing teams node and try and get a cheap double cap or two.  Even one double cap is a huge boost in points.  If you get one double cap, keep one stealther on opposing team node to keep them honest and burn opposing players snare breakers.
3.  Balance of team occupies mid with AoE damage and and AoE healing with a smart healer Operative/Scoundrel bouncing around the door/LoSing doing spot heals and whatever splash damage they can do.  Put a tank (preferably Consular/Iinquisitor) in mid that is kept alive by your Op/Scoundrel.  Specify who does what debuff (accuracy, armor, healing, movement, etc) and keep those debuffs on CD.  Have your team lean how focus fire and always have the FF target marked with a symbol.   We use the reticule symbol with the Connie tank using autohotkey to mark his target.

Excellent, cheers.

Your wife is trying to save you from looking like a creeper that dresses up his real dolls when he's not playing SWTOR, that's all.

Actually my first thought was to buy expertise gear but I didn't see any below level 50, so I figure medpacks was the next best thing. Is it on the class pvp vendor or the other one? I already sold enough stabilizers + crafted items to buy expertise gems so I'm pretty g2g unless there's a way to get a hand-eye coordination transplant.  :grin:

Whoa, that slope sure is slippery....

 :ye_gods:

Expertise is only on the PvP weapons which, for Republic, are sold by Captain Tracer who stands to the right of the PvP quest terminal. First weapon with +expertise is avaialable at level 34 I think and then every 3 or 4 levels after that.  It's only a small amount (the lvl 47 pistol I bought last night had +25 expertise on it) but something is better than nothing. Also, the stats are quite good even for levelling.

Speaking of which, the blue (orange?) PvP level 40 armour is also quite good for levelling - it doesn't have any expertise but it's a good use of comms. (Again, I think you can start buying the gear before you get to 40 but I did that when the comm cap was 1000, not 2750 so it may not be relevant). It should see you most - if not all - the way to 50.

I'm finding levelling fuckalicious easy and fun.  Only 35, but there hasn't really been a grind as yet and I was able to 'just' do class quests on Alderaan to skip it almost entirely.

It's the Creeper Cliff.  One foot over and you're into real weird shit.

Not entirely sure you'll ever find a chap with more respect for women than me, but sometimes, just sometimes, you have to dress one up in a gold bikini.

 :why_so_serious:

The metal bikini's come in all kinds of colors now!

I started the week being annoyed by fellow gamers who seemed to think everyone should know how to pvp or the rules of the map to being annoyed by the n00bs who don't know how to pvp or the rules of the map.  :why_so_serious:

I can definitely feel the difference when it comes to playing against other pugs and pre-mades.

Are operatives able to stunlock others or was it just me? I pretty much have no hope of beating one unless they are horrible.

Does this game have a decent chat log? The only thing I can get it to do is show me how I killed or was killed, but not blow by blow. The main reason I want it was that my shadow lost to an assassin pretty badly. he had about 50 70% health left and I popped all my defense stuff + wz stuff on the fight. I don't know if there were LOS issues (he was moving around a lot during the beginning of the fight) or what.

The game's combat log is horrendous. It's essentially unreadable from the straight .txt file:



So how do you read this shit? You use a combat log parser like Ask Mr. Robot (http://swtor.askmrrobot.com/combatlog) or TORParse (http://www.torparse.com/), which still isn't perfect since I don't think either site has a blow-by-blow combat timeline.

Edit: TORParse has an option to convert the log file's second-by-second format into something human-readable, so you can kinda sorta do a blow-by-blow like that, but it's a pain.

lol why make it so difficult? I can't think of a single mmo I played where this was a big deal.

Well I guess it's not worth the effort  to someone like myself. Against other n00bs I win more than not. Against pre-mades I get facerolled so the only good that will come of reading the logs is making the pre-mades break a sweat once in awhile.

There was a lot of brouhaha about the combat log near launch (and a lot of people loved not having one, because death to dps meters!!!! or something), it took a while until we got this thing.

Yep, the premade situation is particularly terrible in swtor (in fact, after having played a bit this december, pvp in general is... not in a good place) due to a premade basically providing 50% of a team, and no cross-server queues meaning you WILL run into that premade with your pug again... again... and again. I have beaten premades with pugs in swtor, but it's VERY rare and requires them to be really really bad - both individually and as a team. This is all at 50, btw; sub-50 pvp doesn't have premades often (except for a handful of high-40s twinks who quit near the end of games to avoid getting xp).

Anyway, for CC / stunlocking, the sticky thread in the official pvp forum explains the resolve system - including when is the best time to use your CC breaker - pretty well. On my (heal-spec) operative I could do an ok job mez-locking people, but most of the time I used flash grenade and debilitate as "get off me" buttons.

Well I can understand the dps meters thing. I get annoyed when people start lecturing me on my gear (doesn't happen that often now that I have a ton of good crafters) I certainly don't want people telling me I can only use 3 buttons and what order to use them in. I just want it for the basics so I can get a little better.

Yeah it's rare that I run into (what I assumed to be) pre-mades, but when I do it's insane. I swear they have 10 healers and 10 dps, all stealthers lol. Of course it doesn't help when I'm the only one attacking a healer.

Speaking of which how should one pvp as a tank? Normally, as a shadow, I'm capturing/defending something solo or duo, but there are some occasions where I have an opportunity to put guard on a healer. Should I stay in range for guard to work, taunt and cc attackers or go after healers? I'm sort of stuck because usually I'm the only one harassing the enemy's healer(s) but I'm not sure my dps is good enough to make a difference.

I don't have a shadow, but I did play a tank-spec vanguard in pvp pretty extensively. Basically you need to identify whoever is being focused (in an unorganized pug match this'll probably be a healer), put guard on them, stay near them so they benefit from guard, and use taunts on enemy damage-dealers trying to burst them down (single-target taunts on ranged, AOE taunt on melee train). Then beat on stuff that gets close, and annoy people with pulls / stuns / interrupts while making sure you stay in guard range most of the time.

My damage as a tank-spec vanguard was pathetic* and - like said before - my mitigation was nonexistent against most damage; I could probably do better using all damage gear and a hybrid damage spec, but eh, I wasn't going to ditch my pve tanking capabilities for that (dual spec, wru?). You can do OK as a harasser / interrupter -- I could keep a sorc healer locked down almost completely by chaining my interrupts / pulls / stuns. This also generates more pvp aggro than taunts, btw :awesome_for_real: Problem is, a dps spec can do the same while also putting enough damage into the healer / caster to kill them in a relatively short time.


* I did end up near the top of 'total damage' on the scoreboard quite a few times, but that's just due to high survivability and long uptime -- ultimately the damage I did was predictable and easily healed through, even if the healer was under pressure.

Whenever I do PvP on my Juggernaut tank, I pretty much stay defensive. Find a healer, Guard them, and stay near them while guarding a held point Taunt folks who peel off you to try and kill your healbot, interrupt captures, and try to stay alive. In Huttball, a tank is pretty much the best ball carrier.

Doing damage and actually killing people is pretty low on my priority list (though if it's a DPS that isn't a Marauder/Sentinel, even my tank will eat them for lunch), though I hear some hybrid builds with some DPS-ish gear can do some pretty killer damage while still being tanky.

Taunt ?  In PvP ?

Really ?

How's that work ?

Similar to WAR, taunted target(s) get -30% damage reduction on everyone except you. It's not a bad implementation, actually...

e: as for tanks doing damage, it's all about smash (sweep for JKs) doing 8k crits as an instant aoe move. Or so I hear.  :awesome_for_real:

Hmm, that's even on the tooltip.  I just didn't think they'd put it in PvP.

I like the idea.

Smash/Sweep crits on a tank-specced (and tank-geared) Jugg/Guardian does like 2k, tops. Maybe 3k if you have DPS gear. Non-crits will be for something along the lines of 800-1200. You need to be pretty deep (if not full) Rage-spec and nearly best in slot geared to pull off the insano 6-7k Smash/Sweep crits.

Yeah, which is why I think it's better to go in as a full dps spec / build (maybe going into tank stance to guard the ball carrier or a healer -- is a dps'r in tank stance still capable of those 7k smashes?), but otherwise lolsmashing to victory.

Yeah, a Rage Jugg in tank stance can put out the 6k Smashes. The only thing Shii-Cho is required for is the talent that lowers the cooldown on Smash by 1 second when you do pretty much anything damaging.

Noob PvP related question:

What is a "hard target switch" and why should I care?

A hard switch is basically an "all-in" switch to a target (switch meaning that the damage-dealers stop attacking whoever they are hitting and focus their attacks on the switch target) after making sure that it is sufficiently vulnerable; in a hard-switch, the attackers typically pop their cooldowns and trinkets to hit even harder. In this context, "sufficiently vulnerable" means the target is out of position, burned their CC breaker or other major defensive cooldowns, has some relevant debuffs on him, etc. I heard the term first in WOW arena circa 2006, but I'm sure it's been around longer than that. During a hard switch it's usually important to not let the target's teammates bail him out, so it's usually called only when they're out of LOS / CC'd / otherwise unable to help.

tldr: hard switch basically means "one of our enemies screwed up, guys! Pop everything and roll your faces across the keyboard EXTRA hard". Most of the time, the hard switch target will be the enemy healer.

It's only effective in PvP actually. Not that it would matter in PvE since its a taunt.

It would matter a lot on AoEs, which is exactly why it only works in PvP.

True enough.

Back on the equipment and sub 50 pvp question: I've noticed since I've hit 41 that my stats are decreasing. Someone said it has to do with the level of my equipment. At first I thought that meant item mods but is it also the level of the armor itself? Most of my armor is level 20ish but I have level 40 item mods. Do I need to buy new armor?

Not sure I follow: are you asking if Orange gear has an effect on PvP scaling? If so, then to the best of my knowledge, no it doesn't - provided, as you say, you keep your mods and armoring up to date. (If your Orange gear still says it's got a level requirement of 20 then make sure your Armoring mod is up to date as that should affect the level requirement of the item).

Or are you saying that a lot of your armor is level 20 but the mods in some pieces are level 40? In which case, you should try to upgrade the level 20 armor to match your level.

In sub50 PvP your effective stats with given armour will fall every time you level, then rise again when update your mods.

Changing the armour model you plug mods into won't make any difference, assuming it is all moddable equipment.

My companions are simply not levelling as fast as I am.

(Yes, I get that they're the same level as me, but the gear progression is a massive pain in the arse.)

I'm sure the Cartel will be happy to sell you gear to outfit them to a more suitable level.

Actually, I doubt it.  Cartel doesn't really sell shit that doesn't require ME to upgrade it.

It's just the personalised drops come once a blue moon and are usually in fits and starts.

"Here are Mako's SUPER SNUG PANTS.  They replace the NOT SO SNUG PANTS you've been using for 20 levels.  They're also shit."

And I can't be fucked remembering to outfit them.  I'd LOVE IT if they had gear like heirloom stuff that levelled up with them, even if it wasn't optimal.