Now if they would just make it so that mobs don’t instantly respond to your “instant” spells that delay applying their effects.  Yes, I’m looking at YOU, Project!

Finished up Alderaan with my Trooper at level 37 — only 5 levels above where I “should” be.  And now I’m back on Nar Shadaa finishing up the bonus series there that is rated level 31-32, just like the end of Alderaan.  Got my Legacy unlocked, so all my characters have the last name of “Le’fey” which is a carryover from EQ2, where nearly all my characters had the same last name so that people who saw me running around would know it was one of my alts due to them all having the same last name.  Of course, characters with names like “Gotter Dammerung” were fun too, and I do have a “Gotter” in SWTOR as well.  And my Commando’s really supposed to be “Wahren Peese” but yeah, he’s stuck with “Le’fey” now also.  Such is life.

Still and all, I can’t help but wonder what exactly these Legacy Levels I’m getting will actually do once they’re implemented.

In other news, my Consular Sage re-spec’d out of the Seer line for healing and is now rocking a hybrid Telekinetics/Balance dps build.  It can be downright brutal in the damage output at times, and can still spot-heal in a pinch if necessary.  At level 29, the build looks like this so far, and at the eventual level 50, I think this looks like it might be interesting.  I’ve not researched any dps builds anywhere, so I could be up in the night as to its effectiveness, but I think it looks fun, and if not. . . respecs are still fairly cheap for me, so I’ll see what I think later.

So in my last post I made a quickie comparison between the tank stats of my Shadow vs the tank stats of my Commando’s tank pet, and even though the Shadow’s gear isn’t completely up to snuff, it was still better than the not-terrible pet’s stats.  Well silly me, I decided to actually get the Shadow up to 29 and do a complete upgrade of its gear and see how it went there.  I was close enough to spit on 29 as it was, and in fact gained that level by doing the daily space missions.

I took screenies of the stats, but since the tank pet is a a ranged class I don’t think the damage stats are an apples to apples comparison.  So, I’ll just list off the relevant defensive stats instead:

.                                                  Level 29 Shadow      Level 35 M1-4X

• Armor:                             3392                           2998 (in-combat 3247)
• Mitigation:                     33.95%                      27.76% (in-combat 29.4%)
• Defense Chance:          18.39%                       10.54%
• Shield Chance:  20% base, 35% buffed     27.46%
• Shield Absorption:        24%                          21.58%

Same as before, obviously — the Shadow’s stats are definitely superior, in spite of being 6 levels below, and yet, the droid’s sufficient for everything I’ve tried to do with it so far, so take that any way you like it.

So anyway, after getting all the upgrades I decided to see what kind of trouble I could get into with the bonus quest series on Tatooine in order to see if the Shadow seemed “weak” in comparison to the Commando.  I had some old heroic quests sitting in the journal too, and figured I’d perhaps try to group up and clear those out.

I ended up in the Dune Sea and decided to clear out the Sarlacc quest by just stealthing past the mobs around the Sarlacc pit and tossing in the grenade.  AfterI did that, there’s that champion mob standing there which I know is a part of the quest’s bonus part, and I figured I can always do a stealth break of combat if it didn’t go well.  But it went fine.  Tharan kept me healed up like a champ, and a lot of the mob’s attacks were avoidable ground-targeted AE’s anyway.  He dropped some nice moddable light armor robe-style leg gear that I promptly gave away to the next Consular that I saw since my level 29 mods in my little bikini were already better than the level 25 piece of gear.

I decided to uncover the rest of the Dune Sea map, which found me that champion-level scyk to kill for the codex entry update and also the Ancient Sand Worm in the SW corner of the map.  I soloed both of them without any trouble.  Butthen there was Warlord Nekra the Geonosian champion.  I was even-level to it, so I figured it’d be tough if it was doable at all.  I attacked, and it became clear very quickly that I wouldn’t be able to solo it.  Not at that level, anyway.  Fortunately for me, a level 37 combat medic with his 4X out came up right then, so I stealth-broke the combat, invited him to group and we duo’d the thing instead.  Since he was at +8 levels the xp wasn’t nearly as good as when my “merely +3″ commando soloed it, but one can’t have everything, right?

I returned to the Jundland wastes section and looked at my heroic quests and realized that the Search and Rescue (Heroic 4) quest didn’t actually have a kill requirement, so I wondered if I could just stealth it.  And yes, I could.  What surprised me was that clicking on the prisoners you’re supposed to free didn’t break stealth, so I didn’t have to use my 3 minute cooldown combat breaker each time, but could get away with just plain stealthing up and hitting my 1 minute cooldown stealth-increaser if something gasped that it was about to detect me.  Seems a little exploit-y to me, so I don’t plan on doing so again.  Plus it just gives a crappy looking moddable helmet for the reward, and I’ve already got a good looking moddable helmet, so. . . I took the commendation reward, not the item.

And then I kept playing along, working the bonus series, thinking I was doing great and planning to be logging out at midnight, and suddenly “the servers are coming down in 15 minutes” maintenance announcement for patch 1.1 popped up, meaning it was 12:45.  I’d completely lost track of time.

So in spite of me still being willing to call the game a buggy mess (and probalby will for months to come — it’s a new game, after all. . . . ), it’s also a really fun game that can suck me in well enough to make me forget to look at the clock.

For the Trooper, it seems that the most liked companions are Elara Dorne (healer), or the one you get toward the end named Tanno Vik (melee tank).  Yuun (melee dps) and Aric Jorgan (ranged dps) are well regarded too, but the ranged tank M1-4X seems to generally be regarded as “weak” or “bad.”  There’s an occasional shout out for him saying that if you keep his gear up to date that he’s really good, or that those who think he’s bad aren’t using him right or something along those lines.

Since my Trooper is a Cybertech crafter and this includes the ability to make droid parts/armor, I decided to see what I could do with 4x, since I like how the thing looks.  Plus I’m spec’d as a full Combat Medic healer, so in my eyes having any kind of tank companion should work well.  I was already level 30 on Nar Shadaa before I got far enough in the story line to get him as a companion, and the “full set” of gear for that level range needed level 31, so I didn’t start using 4x until I got to Tatooine.  And I love him to death and think he’s quite awesome.  He grabs aggro like a champ and then keeps it.  He can take quite a bit of damage, but. . . I’m a healer, so damage isn’t really that big an issue.  His dps is decent also.  Groups of “weak” mobs I can still AE down before 4x picks a target.  Strong mobs he can solo, and Elite mobs we can take down together usually without me needing to heal, though sometimes I will if he seems to be getting unlucky with his avoidance chance.

As for results, well, check the screenie to the left there.  That’s a Champion difficulty mob designed to be difficult for a group of 4 to take down.  For comparison, group quests usually have a boss at the end with about 30,000 HP — this mob had 78,000.  But yeah, it’s dead in the picture after having been hit up by the tank/healer combo.  It was a long fight, and I did spend a lot more time healing than dps’ing so 4x did all the real heavy lifting as far as the killing went, but he was just fine.  I also killed a few other Champions that were around the Dune Sea, though they were all in the 30K hit point range again.  Got a nice Codex update for the Scyk to boot.

Down in the screenies at the bottom of the page, I have a shot of 4X’s tank stats vs my Shadow’s tank stats.  Their levels are different so the HP totals reflect that, but the actual tank stats themselves look to be quite comparable when both tanks are fitted out in blue gear, though the Shadow’s still got a couple of pieces at the level 23 upgrade range, so once I get her to 31 and fully upgraded, her armor rating would probably be much nicer, especially since the 4X shot was taken while in combat with him having his 20% armor buff active.  So yeah, player tank better than companion tank, but you’d really expect that wouldn’t you?

***

On the game play front — I’ve made it past Tatooine and am now on Alderaan, in case the 1st 2 screenshots didn’t let you cotton to that fact.  I’m so over level already that I’m breezing through it and when I stumbled in to a “Heroic 4″ area and thought I was pulling a single gold that turned out to be a group of 3, I still managed to CC one of them, and 4x could tank the other 2 just fine, so that worked out.  Though I still don’t plan to try to solo that quest.  That’d just be a pain.

Anyway, my plan now is to push through Alderaan as quickly as I can in order to finish Act 1 and unlock my legacy stuff.  I was going to simply do the story quests and more or less skip the planet, but I’m enjoying the exploration too much, plus the gear I’m picking up from quests and kills and such I can send back to my alts so that they have gear appropriate to their level, rather than to the area they’re questing in.  So yeah, still doing all the quests and thus still way over level for the area, but. . . such is life.  Happy Gaming!  And enjoy the other screenies that follow –

Belt by Batman?

I thought the Sarlacc was just big enough for a stunt man to fall into. This looks a bit too big. . . .

Sith are flashy!

Shadow Tank Stats

Companion Tank Stats

My latest BFG and M1-4X too

I’ve got the Trooper up to Tatooine now, but unlike the Shadow, I’m actually running around exploring the map and finding random 1-off quests here and there as well as a ton of quest hubs out in the hinterlands.  I’ve even stumbled into the “Imperial Area” in the south of the map.  As a result of all this, I’m now level 31 on a planet designed to take you from level 24-28.  I’ve also got my harvesting skill of Scavenging maxed out for the planet too — any node I find is gray and doesn’t improve it.  Which is fine — it just means I’m gathering lots of stuff to use to actually make things and level up the crafting skill, after all.  So there’s the gameplay update.  Happy happy joy and all of that.

***

Something that’s been cropping up a lot in blog posts and on the SWTOR forums is that a lot of people are complaining of “missing features” and bugs and whatnot.  The typical “fanboi” response is “Well compared to WoW’s launch this is pretty good.”  To which a rejoinder is made “But it’s competing with WoW *now* not WoW-at-launch.”  And then it goes from there in the back and forth with both sides talking past enough other.

I think what’s really going on is that “everyone” has a list of features in their head, probably not even consciously, that an MMO *should* have, and when a new game comes out that’s missing some of those features it makes them go “OMG this is crap!” and then go flame on the forums about what a crappy game it is that doesn’t have this “basic feature” that *all* MMO’s have.

I can see these people’s point — games released now are expected to be on par with other games, regardless of how many years head start the other game may have.  But on the other hand, the devs have only got so many resources to use for development before their investors/backers say “Get it out the door and start recouping costs here!”  So of course they have to prioritize and make sure you have all the *essential* features their game needs to fill their vision, and then the “quality of life” or “fluff” features can come later, while enduring the whining of the gamers that say “This other game that made billions of dollars and thus had a ton of resources to make this feature 5 years after it launched and everyone loved it so now any new game coming out has to have this feature at launch or else it’s a sucky game!”

Even worse is that I’m one of them.  There are several “missing” things that make me shake my head and go “What were they thinking launching the game without this?”  Of course, since I’m enjoying the game and can live without these “missing” features, it does show them to be non-essential and thus left out due to that priority list that the devs must have, so. . . yeah.  I’m sure over time more and more features will be added, and the game can only improve from here.

This takes me to another point:  There are a ton of bugs.  I’m not going to try to list them all off here, there are simply a ton.  And IMO, it’s better for BioWare to squash the bugs and also to get the interface and combat to have a nice smooth snappy feel to it before anything else.  If they get the actual gameplay is to where it should be, and then focus on the “quality of life” stuff, I think that’s the path that will make their players/customers happiest, even if the customers are whining more about the “missing” features than anything.

In the past week or so, my Sage made it to level 21 and is working her way through Taris now.  And the consular I made with the joking intent of going Shadow and being a “tank in a bikini” (due to the social clothing) has apparently become my main character.  I say “apparently” since I still think of my Trooper as my main, even though the Shadow is not only higher in level (28 vs 26) but has also gone farther into the story, having just completed her story arc on Tatooine (though still having the bonus series to do) while the Trooper’s still working on the Red Light section of Nar Shadaa.

Scary thing about all of this was that the Shadow finished up Coruscant at level 20, got level 21 from the initial run through of the space missions, then went to Taris, but I got bored there since I’d just done those quests on the Sage, so I went to Nar Shadaa “level appropriate” instead of having massively over-leveled it.  It made it so there was a little bit of challenge every so often, instead of always breezing through every quest.  And Nar Shadaa is also where you buy the “slave dancer bikini” social gear, so I was already there to buy it anyway.  But anyway, the “scary thing” was that I hadn’t intended to play this toon much at all, much less let it “take over” so to speak.

And in case you wonder, yes, I do get a lot of funny comments when I join a group as a tank and am running around looking like this screenie to the left here.  But I also have kept my mods up to date and blue as much as possible, so I have the best stats of any tank in my level range that I’ve seen — often having 20-30% higher hp than same-level Jedi Guardians.  So it works out

Overall, I think the Sage is probably the stronger soloer of the 2, since I can control when my tank pet gets healed and how well.  Getting the healer pet on Nar Shadaa was a big help for the Shadow, but sometimes his healing still seems a little lackluster, so while much of the time I feel like I’m wearing an unbreakable forcefield, there are also times then my health drops pretty precipitously, and what should be simple fights vs 4-5 mobs sometimes end up with a death.  No idea why I seem to take a ton more damage at times than others either.  Sometimes a “strong” (silver) mob seems to do more damage to me than an “elite” (gold) mob.  Go figure.

Since I’ve gotten my grapshic settings tweaked around and the game feels a lot more snappy as a result, my only real complaint now is the horrible UI.  Sure, there’s still a bit of the “molasses” feeling, but it’s far less noticeable now.  Hopefully UI customization and/or mods will be available soon.

And finally, to close — when I saw the Hutt and I was there in a dancer outfit, it became a moral imperative to take this screenshot:

Happy Gaming!

Things progress apace.  My alt-itis is already in full stride, so while my Trooper is up at level 26 now, I’ve also got a level 16 Jedi Sage and a level 15 Jedi Guardian working their way through Coruscant as well.

I’m enjoying the game overall.  My only real gripes are:

• The UI is atrocious.  The inability to move elements of it around other than the chat windows is extremely fail.  Add in  that moving the chat window is a bad idea becuz then it will overlap the other non-movable windows, and well… there you go.  I also need more space in my hotbars.  My Trooper’s 26 and both bottom bars are completely full, with all my buffs and such over on the right, and the left reserved for the companion bar.  I do have some spaces open on the right, but new skills that I’ll use need to be in the bottom bars.  Of course, I can’t recall the last time I used a few skills, so I could free up a bit of space by removing them, I suppose.
• I’ve mentioned this briefly before, and seen others complaining about it now also and they’re calling it “feedback.”  I called it “feels like I’m playing in molasses.”  (If you follow the link, scroll down to section 3) Clicking an instant causes the mobs to respond instantly, but you still have to wait for your animation to run, then the thing’s travel time before the mobs are actually affected by what you’re doing.  Clicking a 2nd skill to queue it up while a cast-time spell is going will result in the cast-time skill NOT firing off at the end of its bar, restarting the bar, firing off about 2.3 of the way through, and then it’s a toss-up if your queued skill will actually fire off or not.  Which kinda then goes back to the UI stuff — there’s no visual indicator on the UI if you’ve got a skill successfully queued or not, so quite often you’ll click a skill to queue it and then . . . nothing until you click it again.  Sometimes you get an error saying you clicked to early (another annoyance — if I can queue it I should be able to always queue it.  I’ve got the queue length set to the maximum 1.0 seconds, but with a 1.5 second GCD, it’s still easy to click too fast), but often you just get nothing while you just stand there.
• Crafting is actually pretty pointless.  Cybertech makes Earpieces which I don’t find easily any other way, but its bread and butter is mods.  Guess what you get on the commendations vendor (and commendations drop like candy)?  Yeah. .. no reason to make mods.  Biochem makes Implants, but anything else (stims and medpacks) really aren’t necessary.  I made myself a nice Willpower+Power stim to use on my Sage and I noticed absolutely no difference whether I was using it or not.  Made an armormech thinking it’d be nice to be able to outfit my companions instead of dinking around with drops or on the “Galactic Trade Network” but you can’t make full sets.  Not in the early levels, anyway.  Just belts and boots to start, then add in some gloves later.  It’s just silly.

That said, I’m having a blast checking out the various playstyles.  Deleted a few of the characters I’d made and showed in the prior post, and then turned around and made more.  Currently I’ve got 6 characters on Sanctum of the Exalted, and they’re all on the Republic side.  I’ll get around to the Sith stories eventually, but for now I’m simply Republic.

Something I am doing as a sort of “proof of concept” is that I made 2 female Consulars 1 to be Sage and 1 to be a Shadow and at level 11 I bought the moddable “Social Clothing” for them and I’m simply upgrading the mods (from the commendation vendor) on them as I level up to see if it’s a viable thing to do.  I’ve only leveled the Sage so far, but … it’s working quite well.  She’s not quite upgraded everything to the max that you can on Coruscant, but I’m only 1 or 2 mods away from that now and, well. . . . . . grouping up for Heroic Missions (3+ commendations per mission, after all) and having 20-30% higher HP than the tank… and then ending up tanking it myself anyway since my dps output is high enough to pull it away.  Yeah, seems to be working quite well.  Admittedly, these tanks have been level 13 so don’t have their tanking stances yet, so that will probably help them out once they get there.

But enough of my yammering.  It’s time for the pretty pictures:

My Commando as he got his ship

Coruscant looks amazing from the roof

But not so nice in the lower levels

Taris is a ruined city world

Nar Shadaa is Vegas in Space!

The new Sage while leveling on Tython

The Sage after Level 11 with "Social Clothing"

Level 11 Heavy Armor looks good on a lizard

Happy Gaming!

Compared to the other starting worlds, I find Ord Mantell to be a bit lacking.  The quest hubs aren’t well designed, everything’s sprawling every which way. . . I’m running and running and running around endlessly.  Add to it that the combat animations are slooooooow and always have to go off 1st before the ability is actually tripped and I feel like I’m playing in molasses while on this world.

After completing that 1st series of quests in the main hub, I didn’t feel like running out to the next hub, as the completionist in me would feel compelled to finish those quests too and I was getting tired, so I logged out after a little over an hour.

I fired Rift up, since I’d gotten some new gear the other night that I’d told a friend about and he wanted to see the screenshots which I hadn’t taken.  Got in, took the screenies (see to the left for an example), had enough rested xp for a level, so figured I’d burn it out for about a half hour and see how far I got.

At the end of my time limit for myself, a guild group was going to run an instance and needed 1 more dps to fill the group, and I didn’t want to go to bed yet, so I joined up.  We ran the Fall of Lantern Hook and it took about 40 minutes overall.  Not bad considering it was the tank’s 1st time there.  I got my level in there too, so now my rogue is 44.  Only 6 more to go!

Since I was playing the 2 games juxtaposed so closely, I couldn’t help but compare how the combat felt.  Rift felt snappy and responsive, especially in comparison to SWTOR.  Rift tends to have the skills set as “hit the button, skill fires when the cast time is complete (instantly for instants)” and they’ve done an excellent job of having either an instant animation, or an animation that exactly matches the cast time of the skill.  Interestingly enough, there is 1 move that the rogue does that has a longer animation.  It’s an instant, and does fire off instantly, but it’s a huge swing of both swords way out to the sides, and it takes a little bit to pull back out of it.  This serves as a break in the flow of the animation and if the skill didn’t do so much damage I’d be tempted to take it out of the macro just so it wouldn’t have that clunky feel to it.  And that’s just with a long animation AFTER the skill fired off.

Now imagine that *every* skill felt like that but with the delay happening BEFORE the skill fired off.  And yeah, that’s how I feel in SWTOR.  Every skill (even the instant ones) still has some long-ass animation that has to play out before it applies the skill.  Exacerbating the clunky feel is that the mobs react as though they got hit instantly by your decidedly non-instant skill.

So. . . for now, at least, I find myself preferring the SWTOR “4th pillar” storytelling to Rift’s lore, but I vastly prefer Rift’s combat to SWTOR’s.  I did a short foray into the SWTOR forums and am finding similar complaints from others, so we’ll see if BioWare can improve on the feel of the combat as they move forward.  And I’ll continue to play both games, not exclude the one for the other.  Nothing says I can’t like them both, right?

I’d never done the Smuggler stuff before, so seeing how BioWare worked a “civilian operator” into the military-themed action on Ord Mantell was interesting.  I liked how they mentioned that the separatists had just hit a walker, since that walker being hit is how the Trooper story begins.  Too bad they couldn’t figure a way in the Trooper story to mention that the Separatists were over-running the hangar and stealing any ship in there that they could find.  Ah well, the meta reference was still fun regardless.

I didn’t really get any “action” screenies last night, but I did at least catch what my toons all look like as of now, so enjoy the “portraits.”

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So anyway, yesterday I created 8 toons to reserve names, and I thought I had the race/class combos how I wanted them and wouldn’t need to remake any of them.  Ha!  Ha, I tell you!  HA!!!!

After several rounds of redoing toons, I’m still not fully stabilized.  I’ve got 1 more to re-do for sure, but I think I’m set after that, though you probably shouldn’t quote me on that.  Which is kinda silly due to the fact that the races are purely cosmetic in SWTOR, but. . there you have it.

I decided I wanted a bit more of a story preview than I’d given myself in the beta weekends I was in, and I wanted to give my future alts a little boost, so I started running through the initial quests until such time as they’d take me to a cantina to log out in so I could start accumulating rested xp for them.

Sith Warrior I ran through the quests in the Tomb of Ajunta Pall, then did up through “the jailer” quests inside the Sith Academy before logging out.  Total time was about an hour and I made level 5 when doing it.  I’ve seen this story before, so I just blew through it as quickly as I could, while still killing every mob in my path.

Imperial Agent actually starts out in a cantina, but I still wanted to do a little since the rested xp amount you can get seems to be tied to your level, so I ran enough quests to get it to level 4 and logged out in the cantina in the Hutt Palace.  I chose all the Dark Side conversation options, so got into an extra fight, and was just all around evil.  I actually wasn’t impressed with the DS options, though.  The LS options seemed to make more sense for an agent trying to keep a cover going, but. . . I’m not the Bioware story author, so what do I know?

The Jedi Knight has a slight display bug in its opening cutscene that you can see there to the left.  That doesn’t appear in every cutscene, only some of them, but it still was odd enough to pull me out of the story whenever I saw it.  I made it to level 4 on this toon also by the time I’d logged out in the Jedi Temple on Tython after an hour of play time.  I find myself preferring the Knight’s story to the one of the consular that I experienced during my 2nd beta weekend.  but the JK and the JC are very very far down on my list of the order in which I plan to play the alts, so… doesn’t really matter.

The final toon I played last night was the Bounty Hunter.  I was a bit hesitant to do so, since my planned main is its mirror — the Republic Trooper.  I needn’t have worried, though.  I find myself absolutely loving the playstyle and how the abilities work, so I don’t care if it’s a BH or an RT, I’ll love it either way.  Thing about the BH, though — the story of the Great Hunt and the murder and backstabbing going on in it really grabbed me, so even though I also had planned to only play an hour and get to level 4. . . Plus, doing LS options when it seemed to make more sense to be DS also added another layer of interest for me.  I ended up staying up way too late and making level 6 before logging out.  Still and all…. to keep to my plan, I won’t be logging it in tonight, but will be running through the other 3 alts to get them to their respective cantinas at level 4 or so, and then I’ll start my Trooper main in earnest.  Very much looking forward to it.

Some general stuff about the game:

Not all the settings you put on each character transfer over.  For example, I’d set it to show LS/DS options without requiring mouseover on one toon, and then have to set that on the next toon, and the next, and the next. . . .  That got kinda old.  I also am not finding any kind of UI import option, so I’m having to set each toon’s UI as I start it.  I’m not modifying it much, but I’d still rather just import it.

The gameplay feels a bit clunky still.  There’s a delay between any button press in the UI and the actual action.  It’s odd to hit an instant ability, have all the mobs turn and start shooting at you, and THEN have your “instant” ability fire off.  Plus the looting takes a while too.  Part of it is the AE looting combining multiple things into a single window — I can watch it lag as it pulls it all, but even the looting animation can take up to 3 seconds to fire off one just a single mob with loot.

The Agent’s Sniper Shot ability is also a bit weird and often does its full 1.5 second cast time, takes no action, then does a full 1.5 second charge time again, and then fires off.  At 1st I thought it was pushback from being hit, but repeated testing showed that while pushback occurred during the cast it was always a small amount and never reset me to zero.  This was some other bug causing the failure to fire followed by the complete recast.

My tab targeting works like a charm again and it doesn’t have any delay on it like my abilities do, so that’s a good thing.

Very enjoyable time in the game last night.  So fun I forgot to take more screenshots — too busy playing.  The 2nd one I put in the post of the Jedi was originally taken as another example of a cutscene with Caucasian hands, though I cropped that out before adding it, obviously.  I’ll see if I can’t remember to take more tonight.

But anyway, I’m liking it a lot so far and will keep posting about it for a while since Stargrace won’t