Star Wars: The Old Republic Random Question/Discussion thread - F2P

[Rulke]

Any ideas on what you're rolling as come launch day?

I might've said this a page or two back, but wife and I are going to play Jedi as well :D Classic duo of Jedi Guardian and Jedi Sage.

[Ohemgee]

Id advise agents going sentinel unless you like dieing a lot. Sentinel gives new meaning to glass cannon. I played it in last 2 builds after they started to rework the job and even with the "improvements" its slow to level cause you spend so much time healing between fights and after you die and expensive as hell if you don't want to die every fight and only sometimes cause you need to use a med pack every fight(starts out cheap 250 each and progressively gets more expensive as you level at 50 4-5k a pop unless you make your own). By the time I got to 45 when build ended am fairly certain I had spent more on med packs then I did on all the armor prices combined all that way 1-45.

Commando can be nearly as good a DD as sentinel depending on how you spec it(straight DD spec or healing spec) but has far better survivability cause you can cure yourself even without going a healing spec. Just remember to let your leader know how your speced and you wont be main healing. Pretty much every class in the game that has a healing spec suffers from rdm complex in that cause your class can heal they assume that is how you are speced. An if you go commando or just trooper in general be ready to run around looking like a clown in miss matched brightly colored armor. With the state the mod system is in right now and the removal of "match armor to chest piece color" you pretty much have no choose but to upgrade your armor piece by piece as you level and every piece of trooper armor is white/"random bright color" you will never have a matching set till you build an endgame set. now while that goes for every class trooper gets it the worst by far cause of the general armor design.

Good to know. I did feel like I was getting demolished as a Sentinel and healing every fight/after every fight. Would a Sentinel become more of a liability for end game? Is Guardian any better? I know its also a great DPS spec, but I didn't get a chance to play through another Jedi class with the beta.

I don't mind healing, I loved playing RDM (it was my first 75 job and I ended up as our main WHM healer for a very long time). I didn't get a chance to actually group up as a Commando (or get very far). The way I spec'd it out on the torhead link is for end game healing, which in theory (or in my head) looks to be pretty nifty. Also the armor design doesn't bother me since my main focus is on other players.

[Calina]

After reading threw this it just goes to show how flawed their touted iteration type development is cause after reading threw this he is mistakenly commenting in 1 build but talking about another.

To start with, we’ve introduced a new color and item type: the Custom items. Those are shown with an orange border and are fully moddable. This change is purely cosmetic. What we have done is take all fully moddable Prototype items (blue) and simply changed their icon color. This helps us create a better and more unique identity for fully moddable gear.

Since other games have used orange to signify truly rare and epic gear, let me clarify that orange in Star Wars: The Old Republic has nothing to do with 'epic' gear. (And for those curious, our version of 'epic' is a very deep purple, bordering on a rich blue). The orange we use is actually the old bronze color we developed a long time ago when our color coding was based on metals (bronze, silver, gold, platinum, etc).

Custom gear is actually pretty common: it can be obtained through class quests around level 8, as social gear, as space quest rewards and as light side / dark side gear. It is also the typical gear found in Flashpoints and as rewards for Heroic missions. Several pieces can be acquired using planetary commendations.

The second change introduced in the latest build is the locking down of the base mods (Armoring, Barrel, Hilt) and color crystal mod on the Artifact items (purple). To explain this change, I need to also explain the history of the the modding system...

So, the first version of the modding system had many issues. It is amazing that a system that is only a few months old is already quite misremembered, but that’s because while the system implementation was less than stellar, players really liked the concept that tried to shine through and now remember it much more fondly that it truly deserves. The main issues of the old system were as follow:

All of these "issues" so to speak where resolved once you took some time to understand and properly use the system. At least in the publicly available build not the internal build we never saw that he must be talking about here.

- There were too many different modifications. Sure, the mods had a lot of flavor and made sense: triggers and scopes for guns, underlays and overlays for armors, power cells and crystals for Lightsabers, etc. But in the end, keeping the mods in all gear up to date every few levels was a major pain on the players’ side. Remember, at that time, mods could not be extracted - so a replacement for each and every one of those mods had to be individually located every few levels. And let me tell you, creating and maintaining all those tens of thousands of mods on our end was also not exactly sustainable.

So cause they are lazy basically.

- Some items only had a few mod slots. I know everyone by now remembers a 'perfect' world where everything was moddable, but that simply wasn’t the way it worked. Most premium (green) items did not have a full set of slots and which slots weren't present was a bit random. So, you could find a purple trigger and get all excited about fitting it on your moddable gun - until you realized the gun mysteriously had a scope slot, but not a trigger slot. Of course, your next gun could have a trigger but no scope. This left many players scratching their heads.

Talking about wrong build here greens could only have modulator slot which was from crit during crafting(and still is). Now id like to take some time to talk about the build we played... blue and purple gear where at the time the best in the game as "epic" wasn't released yet and green being the junk we npc'ed cause they sucked and where not fully moddable o and 90% of green gear looked horrible. He is right that they didn't all have a full set of mod slots but he is misrepresenting the facts here from levels 10-30ish you could only find armor with a max of 3 slots 30-35ish you started seeing armor with 4 slots(personally I had a full set of 4 slot gear by 36). Now he is right that the armor didn't all have the same slots but he must once again be thinking of a different build cause it wasn't "random" all armor that had 4 slots had the 4 same types just different based on the armor slot type(chest, legs, etc...).

- Once slotted, a mod could not be removed. This had a very perverse effect: players would find a really good mod - say a purple overlay - but would really hesitate in slotting it into an armor. What if they find a cooler looking armor next level? Many players would end up saving their good mods for later and ended up over leveling them.

Personally I never ran into this so called issue because it wasn't one that mattered blue and purple mods where a dime a dozen so needed to remove them wasn't an issue and at the time why would you want to use a mod that as they contradicted themselves in the same paragraph "over leveling them" past it already since new mods where every 2 levels personally id rather buy the new mod for the level rather then using the old crappy lower level mod.

- Mods that were crafted or purchased were most of the time inferior to the mod already slotted onto a prototype (blue) item. This made the entire mod system somewhat useless. One of the main reason was that crafters could not create good mods. Reverse engineering - the main method to obtain prototype and artifact (blue and purple) crafted items - did not work on mod.

Because at the time that hadn't finished the adding reverse engineering it was there but only gave mats back so was useless at the time not to mention cause of that you could only craft green mobs via artifice/cybertech. and even now the only credit sold mods are green... but what he fails to mention cause hes most likely thinking about a different internal build we never played is that you could buy good blue mods from commendation vendors. and that blue/purple mods where fairly common I would get 1-2 drops per world as I leveled multiply that by all the players and have most putting them on the GTN(which a lot of people did before they removed them from all but 3 worlds per faction when they did that when the first big beta weekend happened we jumped to about 10 times the sever population and only 1/10th the GTN activity cause people me included rather npc the stuff then spend 10 mins each way traveling to the fleet to put stuff up and cause of the very limited inventory space we need to dump stuff VERY often) so finding new mods wasn't an issue till 40-45+ cause most people wouldn't take characters that far the highest population I saw on belsavis at once was just 4 people in that august build before they gave out the 40+ characters.

- Modding was only done at a workbench. This made it rather cumbersome as the players had to hunt down a workbench before they could fit a new mod into one of their items.

Either flat out lieing or thinking of a different build we never got to play cause you could always hold down right ctrl for 2+ sec then right click an item an item an mod it on the go.

So, to summarize: in the old system, you could not take any piece of gear, fit it with the best mods and keep it all the way to the end levels: a lot of the green gear did not have all the slots, the mods that could be obtained were for the most part... not good, and you could not extract better one from existing gear.

So, to summarize: in the old mod system, you could take any blue/purple gear, fit it with the best mods and keep it all the way to end levels(I did it and so did everyone eles that understood how amazing the system was.)A lot or more accurately none of the green armor had the normal mod slots and we where happy they did not cause they looked so so bad. and you could not extract mods and at the time it wasn't needed except for rare color crystals cause they where a pain in the ass to get.

Now id go on but id have to start getting mean and am to tired for that so ill just say this: 95% of the changes they made where a waste of theirs and our time cause they got the system nearly perfect the first time.

EDIT:Fixed post to make it easier to read + didn't want to double post.

Good to know. I did feel like I was getting demolished as a Sentinel and healing every fight/after every fight. Would a Sentinel become more of a liability for end game? Is Guardian any better? I know its also a great DPS spec, but I didn't get a chance to play through another Jedi class with the beta.

I don't mind healing, I loved playing RDM (it was my first 75 job and I ended up as our main WHM healer for a very long time). I didn't get a chance to actually group up as a Commando (or get very far). The way I spec'd it out on the torhead link is for end game healing, which in theory (or in my head) looks to be pretty nifty. Also the armor design doesn't bother me since my main focus is on other players.

Sentinel DPS wise is always good throwout the game its just dies so easy I personally don't invite them to groups cause they die soon as they pull hate id much rather give that party slot to a commando or a scoundrel that are speced for DPS you lose maybe 5% dps but gain soooo much survivability that the extra time your fighting when the sentinel would nornaly be on the floor dead makes up for it by leeps and bounds. As for guardian its DPS spec is pretty good but tank spec for PvE is where the job really shines. PvP wise its nearly useless unless you really know what your doing personally in high level pvp the best use I found for guardian was to use tank spec leap into a large group use my AoE ability's(AoE CC AoE slow then when they where off AoE provoke which in pvp lowers the max damage they can do to anyone that isn't you for a short time) that way your team mates can kill them all without them fighting back for a time or holding them in place so a team mate can hit the objective. Id say think of guardian as the guy that only ever gets the assists in a sports game but because of that is invaluable to the team weather they know it or not.

And if you liked RDM+WHM you will love sage healing spec its sooooo much fun to play and I didn't even like maining whm+rdm(which I always ended up doing) while its mechanics are amazingly fun its story is boring at best so if you can ignore the story you will love the class.

Personaly ill either be playing Guardian(tank spec) or Sage(healing spec) at launch I played both to 50 in beta and I love them both so its really hard to decide.

[Alderaan]

The sentinel stuff i can unfortunately vouch for as it was and still is my favorite class. I can already see "no melee please" and it frustrates me that companies keep making the same mistakes over and over when it comes to encounters. I'm playing one regardless because it's the only saber class i like but i know going in it's going to be an uphill climb.

[Calina]

The sentinel stuff i can unfortunately vouch for as it was and still is my favorite class. I can already see "no melee please" and it frustrates me that companies keep making the same mistakes over and over when it comes to encounters. I'm playing one regardless because it's the only saber class i like but i know going in it's going to be an uphill climb.

I do admit even with all the bad stuff I have said about the job it is A LOT of fun to play but its still hard to justify taking up a party slot with one unless your doing something your already over leveled for and dieing is far less of a possibility.

[Meyor]

I like the idea of playing a new game as either a healer or tank, so you can usually always find a group that needs you for flashpoints, until you get a good group of friends/guild that you can work with. I had a lot of fun playing an Agent Operative as a healer, but I think I will play republic to start, my hold up is that smuggler gunslinger was just so much fun... and it feels so right, where as the operative for agent felt more right to me than sniper. Having cloak sure makes missions and quests easy mode, you can skip all the trash you want to getting to your goal. I also really enjoyed playing sith warrior juggernaut tank, offhand shield generators are sweet, so much more than just a stat stick. I also enjoyed just soloing and playing the juggernaut as much if not more than operative. I think I will go with Jedi Guardian tank, I haven't played any of that storyline, and since it is the same as sith juggernaut, I know I will have fun playing it. Smuggler Gunslinger/Trooper Commando will be my second class I play I think, going DD with either of them. May have to go bounty hunter instead of Trooper for my first DD class, its so hard to choose!

Jedi Guardian Tank Build I think I'll start with.
http://www.torhead.com/calculator/sk...urrkhRZ0MZhr.1

[Calina]

I like the idea of playing a new game as either a healer or tank, so you can usually always find a group that needs you for flashpoints, until you get a good group of friends/guild that you can work with. I had a lot of fun playing an Agent Operative as a healer, but I think I will play republic to start, my hold up is that smuggler gunslinger was just so much fun... and it feels so right, where as the operative for agent felt more right to me than sniper. Having cloak sure makes missions and quests easy mode, you can skip all the trash you want to getting to your goal. I also really enjoyed playing sith warrior juggernaut tank, offhand shield generators are sweet, so much more than just a stat stick. I also enjoyed just soloing and playing the juggernaut as much if not more than operative. I think I will go with Jedi Guardian tank, I haven't played any of that storyline, and since it is the same as sith juggernaut, I know I will have fun playing it. Smuggler Gunslinger/Trooper Commando will be my second class I play I think, going DD with either of them. May have to go bounty hunter instead of Trooper for my first DD class, its so hard to choose!

Jedi Guardian Tank Build I think I'll start with.
http://www.torhead.com/calculator/sk...urrkhRZ0MZhr.1

That's a good build but I would recommend removing 1 point from command and putting it in stasis mastery. Force stasis is hugely useful deals some damage builds 3 focus and most important stuns the target for 3 secs which is useful in both PvE but more so in PvP. Stasis mastery removes the channeling time useful example being so you can just use it and catch up to the person and stop them from scoring rather then just holding them in place while you are rooted for the same time. PvE wise the faster you build focus the more high focus moves you can spam.

Stasis mastery is 1 of if not the most useful over all skill augment Guardian gets.

[Purrrfect]

As a side effect, this opens up class quest green armor appearances from other classes as well as long as you fulfill the armor requirements.

Does this mean I can play a jedi with lightsabers, running around in the white plastic trooper uniform? They'll never suspect...

[Meyor]

Good tips thanks, I am not the kind of player that maps out everything like crazy, just a general idea, and not having used any ability over lvl 20 its hard to make some decisions. I am sure everything will become pretty clear as far as what the good talent points to use are as you level. How is the first Guardian companion? The little droid? Does he do good damage or is he a tank I don't remember. Cheers

[Ohemgee]

The droid is a tank if you allow it. He does decent ranged damage.

[Calina]

Good tips thanks, I am not the kind of player that maps out everything like crazy, just a general idea, and not having used any ability over lvl 20 its hard to make some decisions. I am sure everything will become pretty clear as far as what the good talent points to use are as you level. How is the first Guardian companion? The little droid? Does he do good damage or is he a tank I don't remember. Cheers

Most people like him but personally I think he sucks. He's meant to be a tank but does okish damage at first but as you level you find getting "Droid" specific gear becomes a huge issue very quickly. He will hold you till 13 or so when you get kira then kira is your goto pretty much threw the whole game she's your glass canon she will tear threw enemies faster then a sentinel can but between your guard skill and taunt you can keep her alive easy. Besides kira only other companion I ever used past lv13 was doc he's the healer but I really only ever use him for boss fights. While having a healer for normal fights sounds nice for guardian in tank spec it actually makes things much harder. When fighting 5+ enemies at once which 35+ is common combined with the fact companions rarely fight what you will they go off an fight a different mob and for DPS companions that's very good thing for a healer that means after a few shots hes spam curing himself while you slowly widdle the mobs down, where if you use kira she would just reck them all you you move on. The real place doc shines is in boss fights where even if there are babies around they die so quick they boarder on irreverent which leaves him spam curing you so you don't die.

[Meyor]

So for a Jedi Guardian, Artifice for lightsaber goodness, or Armortech for keeping good heavy armor available? With appropriate sub skills of course.

[Calina]

So for a Jedi Guardian, Artifice for lightsaber goodness, or Armortech for keeping good heavy armor available? With appropriate sub skills of course.

First off you can't craft lightsabers pretty much for them find 1 of the few moddable ones pick one you like the look of an upgrade it as you level. Synthweaving actually makes light, med, and heavy armor for jedi in general also seems like its going to end up 1 of the most profitable crafts in the early days of the game assuming they don't change it before release. Artifice is actually for making mods for force wielding classes as well as the shield's and I think down the line when the game has aged a few months to a year will come into its own sort of like goldsmithing in XI where your main profit would be making lots of lower level purple mods in mass and a few high level purple mods to sell for huge sum's. But either will be a very good craft to start with.

Now you get to pick 3 crew skills total you can just pick 1 craft and 2 gathering but that will gimp what you can make and ill explain why as I go on but first for either artifice or synthweaving you need archeology as your gathering skill it gets all the stuff needed to make the greens you just spam to level the 2 crafts. With all that said they changed up crafting a little during the last build you can no longer get the blue gear mats from gathering which forces you to take a mission skill, for synthweaving you need to get underworld trading crew skill to get the mats for blue purple and orange(Moddable versions of green gear but they all look god awful so I can't see them selling well) synths. Unfortunately I didn't get a chance to find out which crew skill gives gems to make the blue and purple mods as I mainly focused on testing sentinel and synthweaving during the last 2 builds but if you do go artifice at 10 when you get to the republic fleet and get your crafts just read the mission skill description and should be easy to tell what mission skill gives gem's.

[Ohemgee]

Yeah I really wanted an overhaul on each part of the game..why does Rift have a forum and not SWTOR? D:

[Calina]

Yeah I really wanted an overhaul on each part of the game..why does Rift have a forum and not SWTOR? D:

Maybe will get one once the game goes live. But in the mean time I don't mind answering questions. Played guardian/sage to 50(twice each) sentinel to 45, and Commando/shadow to 35ish so if you have any questions about them or crafts that go with them I'm happy to help.

[vrumpt]

I really like how crafting will useful for crafting orange recipes. I think it'll make armortech and synthweaving really useful beyond making entry raid level gear.

[Ezek]

Any thoughts on Vanguard vs Commando? I'm going Trooper for sure, just unsure about which advanced class to go with. I really like the idea of a ranged tank, but I know next to nothing about how well it does its job due to leveling a Jedi Guardian during the weekend instead, lol.

[Calina]

I really like how crafting will useful for crafting orange recipes. I think it'll make armortech and synthweaving really useful beyond making entry raid level gear.

Its nice that they are letting us craft them again like we used to be able to(they took it away months ago now are adding it back like its a new feature) but the problem is they are only letting us craft moddable versions of green gear and green gear 90% of them look horrible. What we where all complaining about must have went completely over there heads instead of giving of back our moddable blues and purples(which have the best designs of any gear in the game) they give us moddable greens which we never had or wanted. This is what happens when the dev's are so out of touch with the community and am afraid its gonna come back an bite them in their collective asses in the form on low sub's after the first few months.

I know I come off harsh but I really just want to see the game succeed. Outside of the gear/mod system and the GTN issues I love the game.

O and lets take a sec to look at the GTN issues if anyone doesn't know the mistake they made there. First off let me start by saying most people already complained about how often they forced us to go from planet to planet and while that is fun the first few times it gets to be an insane time sync very quickly. So what did they do you ask? Well they did the obvious thing of coarse they REMOVED the GTN access points from all but 3 locations per faction forcing us to leave our current world and move to another just to put stuff up for sale and empty are inventory. Now you might not see this as all that bad but let me lay out a typical run to dump your inventory say for example your on taris first world where there is no GTN on republic side and your far in near the end and you have blues and greens and some junk npcable stuff now you can have your companion spend 60secs dumping the npcable garbage items but that's all they can sell and your inventory will fill up with blues and greens you will want to put on for auction so your forced to leave the world to go to another to sell your stuff now its not just click and your no you need to travel so lets be extra reasonable and say your already at an outpost when you decide your going to go to a GTN so thats 3-5mins of running to the outpost am disregarding from the start you need to take the speeder to the space port that's 5mins of watching the scenery go by right there then you need to run from the space port get in your ship travel get off your ship and run to the GTN and lets again give the most favorable option and go to the republic fleet. Now that gonna take about 10mins of zoning and running around at least longer if you have a slower comp and the game takes longer to load but again lets assume your comp is pretty good with my connection+SSD and general system spec's that will take me 10mins or so far just to get to the GTN that's 15mins easy. Now that we are here we need to price everything put it up and restock meds now again lets give this the most favorable time and say it takes 10mins(can take a lot longer if the GTN is being laggy). So we are at 25mins now and all our stuff is up for sale and we are restocked and ready to go now take another 10mins to get back to taris and 5min speeder ride so we have a grand total of 40min trip just to clear your inventory and that's giving it the most favorable times at every turn for most people it will average an hr at least.

With all that said who is going to waste 40mins to an hr every time they need to dump there inventory I know I wont an i doubt many people will cause I can already tell you they don't just from the beta and saying its beta so people aren't selling anything is bull cause before they removed them with only maybe 10k players we had a thriving GTN could always find what you needed at least I could and my beta guild mates could. Then when they removed all the GTN's when the big weekend happened with 750k players the overall population increased by x75 and the items on the GTN went down to maybe 1/10th if that and that's what I saw all the way till the end of beta.

Who is gonna spend the 40-60mins to go to GTN o and don't forget inventory space is hugely limited and you have to pay large sums to expand it so you will need to dump everything OFTEN when you can just find any npc on the world in 2-3mins and npc everything this change really feels like the retainers in XIV with how long it takes to use it so its not gonna go over well on release.

Before they removed them it took maybe 5mins to run and dump stuff onto the GTN which is why I think even in beta and such a small population it was so well stocked.

[Zerocool]

For anybody that already uninstalled, you can download the client here: http://patchnotes.swtor.com/SWTOR_setup.exe and patch up.

[Calina]

Any thoughts on Vanguard vs Commando? I'm going Trooper for sure, just unsure about which advanced class to go with. I really like the idea of a ranged tank, but I know next to nothing about how well it does its job due to leveling a Jedi Guardian during the weekend instead, lol.

I haven't played vanguard up myself but healing as sage I loved them over every other tank. They don't really "ranged tank" like you would think you will more often then not end up right in the mobs face for most of the content the ranged tanking really comes in handy for stuff that doesn't really chase you like world bosses. Most people agree vanguard has by far the most fleshed out tanking spec lots of mitigation and damage boosts to hold hate. Where guardian is good and does the job fine its tank spec doesn't fell like a fully fleshed out spec there are a few of everything in its spec tree it feels like they didn't really have a plan for it so just threw in a little of everything and hopped for the best.

Commando DPS is 1 of my fav spec's while it does a little less DPS then a class like sentinel or gunslinger which no matter how you spec them they are all out DPS glass canons it unlike them will still be standing simply cause of the heavy armor and the ability to self cure if it pulls hate. As for its healing spec its by far the worst in the game they really need to rework it from the ground up you can work with it at lower levels but 35+ you NEED a properly speced sage or scoundrel healer.