Star Wars: The Old Republic

[Shrinweck]

Instancing tends to have limits and I'm hesitant to play when the point is to push those limits. Still very excited. I doubt I'll be able to resist dropping an afternoon into it.

[Don]

I think you're thinking along the lines of the MMORPG launch from 10 years ago. Throughout this game I rarely see more than 10 people in the visible area but that's because you have like newbie zone (10). The second zone only goes up to (2) so far. Given the number of story/group instances out there (can't see people inside those) it actually feels pretty barren out there most of the time even though there's a queue on the server to just get in.

I find the dark side choices seems to make your own companion hate you since it's usually stuff like "I eat babies for breakfast" but once you go on a path, it's pretty hard to go back since light/dark points cancel each other out.

[Shrinweck]

Aion had instancing and there were still dozens of people in each area. But if there's only like ~10 people then I'm hopeful for the best.

Also, let's pretend like Aion wasn't my best, most current example.

Edit: OH, oh! Champions Online had instancing and was still pretty lousy with people fighting for spawns, too.

[Don]

You've a global area but usually most of the important quests are instanced in there own mini area that only you or your party can see so whatever named you need is always going to be there.

I guess it's possible that you end up with not enough of the generic mob but the kill count quests are usually optional and you're likely to get them just fighting your way through the story area themselves.

[Shrinweck]

Oh.. just read the invites went out to everyone who had signed up to be a tester before Nov 11.. This is potentially hundreds of thousands of people. I guess it's worth a look see to see how they handle it.

[Don]

This game is surprisingly hard if you're not a class that can heal. I usually end up killing the story quest elite guys 1 or 2 hits before I was going to die, though I think those guys will be way easier if you let your companion tank. For some reason my companion lasts longer than I do even though they're supposed to be DPS. Since you never get more Force/Heat/whatever from gear, this means gameplay is more like WAR rather than WoW where stuff don't necessarily kill you immediately but since there's no such thing as 'use up a lot of resource to get full health', once you fall behind it's just a matter of time before you die because you're not going to get your health back faster than the rate it's going down. It's probably a better approach than the pool-based one where eventually people always get enough of the pool so that resource management becomes irrelevent anyway. You'll only have 100 Force no matter what.

[Don]

Saw this from the official site, debate on Trooper vs Sith Inquisitor:

http://www.swtor.com/media/trailers/cho ... vs-trooper

I bet all those guys were paid to say the Trooper was going to win. I mean seriously, an ordinary guy with a gun against force lightning? This isn't even a bounty hunter we're talking about here.

[Shrinweck]

Trooper is supposed to be an unstoppable bad ass carrying an entire arsenal. But yeah, the trooper is the weakest class lore-wise. They're definitely a snooze. The debates about which class would win are pretty god damned ridiculous. If there's a definite answer, then the game is broken unless they're building a rock paper scissors dynamic, which they have said they are not.

I liked the dynamic in the fight between the trooper and the Sith in the Hope cinematic, though. The idea that a trooper could gain the upper hand through their gear and training is conceivable. Of course, it's a canon fight between two major characters in the game and the Jedi finishes it, but it's still awesome.

At this point I want to play a guardian, consular, and smuggler almost all equally. I've given it some thought and I suppose I'll use beta to decide which one I push as my main character first. Funny thing is, that I had no interest in playing a guardian until I recently rewatched the last two movies of the new trilogy. Crazy, I know, but I did like Kenobi and the idea of lightsaber stances that I know are in the game intrigue me. Based on how the stances are handled in the game will decide where I go, I suppose. Consular is an interest because I like double-bladed lightsabers and that's basically it. Smuggler because they're interesting.. even though I actually never really cared for Han Solo.

[Don]

Well they're obviously trying to sell you on the lore, as opposed to any in game advantages, and there's no way the Trooper comes close to Sith anything there. The last one was Jedi Knight versus Bounty Hunter, and at least there you got Boba Fett. I know if you're supposed to think about it in as 'in-character' in a world where Force users are apparently very common, then if you can believe a Bounty Hunter can take on a Jedi (which is even somewhat possible officially) then a more heavily armed Trooper sure can. But from Star Wars lore-wise, no way 'guy with the big gun' stands a chance against anyone who can control the Force.

So far as actual game mechanisms go, ranged classes usually have some advantage over melee due to lack of collison detection plus impossible physics (jumping and turn in midair at full speed, strafe at full speed) but melee range in this game is decently long and your character's attack automatically tracks the enemy's position.

The lightsaber stances are just the same as Defensive/Aggressive/Battle Stance of WoW. For example the default stance is +damage +defense, Sorasu is +defense only, and there's a +damage only stance too. I don't think the way you hold your lightsaber changes depending on what your stance is. That said, even when you're staying still your character is still moving his lightsaber around the whole time. It's kind of like Skies of Arcadia where while you're inputting your command, your character appears to be fighting the whole time. Of course the idle animation isn't anthing interesting (you and your enemy will parry each other perpetually).

One thing I noticed that can be pretty annoying is that most high level lightsabers have a light/darkness requirement to use it. I'm going to assume since the Empire guys can go Light and Republic can go Dark side you cannot assume even your faction's stuff is always going to be dark for Empire and light for Republic. The token reward vendors has light/dark weapons for all, but I'm it's quite possible to get a drop that you can't use. I suppose once you get to like level 20+ you can simply redo the first group instance repeatedly to get dark/light side points (get about 200 for completing it) if you really want to change your alignment.

A really annoying part is that it seems like your companions (at least for Sith Warrior) don't really like a crazy guy who wants to kill everyone in the way. It seems in a generic story quest arc you get like 4-5 areas to say things, but only the last two or so will determine if you get light/dark points. So you don't want to stir the topic toward dark side earlier on because saying "I eat babies for breakfast" is generally frowned upon by your companions. Of course if an action yields dark side points then you got to eat those babies, but presumably the final decision will always get there no matter what you picked along the way. Sure companion relationship can be made up by $, but it'd be best to not waste too much money on your companions early on.

[Shrinweck]

I don't think the way you hold your lightsaber changes depending on what your stance is.

Deal breaker. Still going to eventually give the class a try but it's no longer a priority. Think I'm back to making a consular as my first characer.

[Don]

If there are no macros (currently there aren't) you'd probably never actually have time to see what your character is doing on the screen since the equivalent of 'autoattack' is a button press and you'll be pressing that all the time.

[Shrinweck]

What do you mean? An auto attack button that makes it difficult to watch what my characters doing? Is it not just a keyboard hotkey? Considering I hate games that make macros the only way to compete, this should be good news. Pretty easy to look at my avatar and watch buttons cooling down at the same time.

[Don]

There is no autoattack, but each class has a generic action that uses no resources that does some damage.

The problem is say you're in Inquisitor it might look like this:

Force lightning - 60 force (out of 100)
Regular attack - 25 force
Autoattack attack - 0 force

So say you use up your 100 force right away, now you're regenerating Force but instead of hammering the 'regular attack' so you attack as soon as you get 25 Force back, you really should be hitting the 'autoattack attack' button since that allows you to do damage even without Force. I found that it's easy to forget that you've to hit the 'autoattack' button especially if you're admiring your character's lightsabers. To be fair, the autoattack attack does practically no damage so even if you never pressed it, it's not a signifcant loss of DPS. It's more like a button you press so you don't have lightsabers locked with the other guy forever.

It's kind of annoying as a Sith Warrior when your autoattack ability builds rage and you have no other ability to builds rage without a cooldown. For example here's some typical abilities:

Sunder Assault - builds 2 rage, applies armor debuff, moderate damage, CD 4 seconds.
Vicious Slash - uses 3 Rage, does damage
Strike - builds 2 rage, does very little damage.

I find it's easy to forget that you could hit Strike while waiting for Sunder Assault to come back and in this case not having rage could mess you up. It'd be a lot easier if you've a Rift style macro like

/cast Sunder Assault
/cast Strike

I.e. it will always attempt to use Sunder Assault first if it can be used (it's strictly better than Strike) but it'll use Strike while it's on cooldown. But this functionality doesn't exist in the game so far.

[Shrinweck]

Ah, that doesn't sound like someone I'll have issues with. I would prefer macros and third party UI mods stay out of the game forever.. At the very least third party mods aren't going to be a function at release, last I heard.

[Don]

Missing the autoattack attack probably amounts to very little unless it's one that generates a resource (Jedi Knight, Sith Warrior) though it's annoying to think you're missing something. With the way the system works it encourages you to just mash all the buttons at the same time, since all your abilities on cooldown or require resources can't be used anyway if you don't meet the condition, so rather than memorizing exactly how much time is still left each ability you might as well just push them all. As a Sith Warrior, you'd want to hit Strike + Vicious Slash + Sundering Assault all at the same time (and Strike last). Normally you're starved for Rage, so Vicious Slash will fail (no rage). If Sundering Assault is up, you'll use it. If not, you'll use Strike. And if you happen to actually have some rage you'll use Vicious Slash. But then hitting a lot of bottons at all times is just a manual way of using a macro which is pretty dumb.

It's even less of an issue for characters whose attacks do not generate resources, like the Jedi Consular/Sith Inquisitor. In this case attacks either drains Force or uses 0 Force, so if you just hit everything at the same time you'll either use some Force-consuming attack, or the free one if you ran out. I'm not sure why they even do this other than to annoy you. You might as well have no attacks that have no cooldown and no resource cost. You can just have Jedi Knight/Sith Warrior generate 1 rage per second while in combat or something along these lines.

[Shrinweck]

Argh, dammit, I looked at the Jedi Knight Guardian talent tree and I'm interested again. I just need this stupid beta to happen so I can decide heh

[Don]

The last beta weekend is next week. There's a lot of sites giving out codes to get in.

[Shrinweck]

I know, that's what I'm referring to. "Luckily" my mother is working the day after Thanksgiving and we're staying home for Thanksgiving so other than eating and sleeping I'm just going to narrow down what my main is.

[Don]

Based on my experience and what I heard, you play like some sort of hybrid until about 30 because you don't get your advanced class (i.e. your real class) until level 10, and each class usually fills two roles and you don't have enough talent points to specialize until around that range. For example Sith Warrior (melee) -> Juggernaut (tank or DPS) at level 10, but you got to invest talent points into offense or defense depending on what you want to do so until in the 30s you'll play more like a generic melee. I'm level 16 and puts my points into defense tree so I put into something that improves Sundering Assault (aggro generator), except that's also my best rage-generating attack too. If you go DPS you'll eventually get stuff that's better DPS than Sundering Assault, for but now this is both aggro generator and DPS.

[Shrinweck]

I realize that. Doesn't mean I'm not going to be able to have an idea of who I'm going to want to play the most. I'm not expecting to run a ton of numbers and calculate who does what I want. I just want a feel for the class and a look into the story.

While reporting bugs, of course.

[Shrinweck]

E-mails for the test coming up on Friday have gone out. I haven't gotten mine yet, but going to the tester page (swtor.com/tester), I was able to "RSVP" and then download the client.

Edit: 18.5gb installed.. not bad. The more I read about Jedi Knights being gimped the less inclined I am to try the class during this beta. Maybe I'll just split my time between Consular and Smuggler. Cool seeing the cinematics in the official release quality rather than flash video-sized.

[Don]

It seems like they're staggering in 3 waves (Friday/Saturday/Sunday) except the test ends on Sunday. Talk about a way to not hype your product if you got in on the last day...

The DPS version of the Jedi Knight seems like way too much work because there's like 3 resources systems to keep track of.

[Shrinweck]

I saw that.. I should be getting in Friday since I RSVP'd fairly early. That said if someone got in on Sunday and only got to play during a window of (I think) fourteen hours that would be complete and total bullshit for downloading roughly 20gb that may not even be usable at retail. What a waste of bandwidth.

[Don]

I really wonder if the guys running this game has any MMORPG experience. The game actually plays quite well but who really thought it'd be a good idea to download 20GB for at most 14 hours of gameplay? You'd have a hard time getting to a spaceship in that time unless you played nonstop and that's probably when things start to get more interesting.

[Shrinweck]

Their reasoning is that it will allow them to test their staggered release during Early Access and (FINALLY) allow them to finally figure out the day people will be allowed to play. Doesn't stop a lot of angry people on the forums. Funny enough, anyone complaining this early is probably getting in pretty early heh

[Don]

Then why not have the beta test run to about Wednesday?

The whole stress test thing is kind of absurd for a game that's predicted to have at least millions of sales. Simulating heavy load isn't exactly something nobody has ever done before, and if you're prepared to handle 1 million, you can scale it to 10 million too. It'll probably go really smooth just like every other MMORPG that didn't totally screw up their launch.

[Shrinweck]

I don't think it's testing heavy server loads as much as whatever they're doing with the staggering of participants to ease loads on starting areas. I guess they're going to have a lot more servers available this time around since testing this scenario is kinda useless on servers where an established population is already mid- to high-level. Probably useful to see how many versions of an instance with how many people can be created before things go wonky.

It's certainly possible given all the raging being done that they could extend it a couple days. I kind of doubt it, since at that point they'll likely have the data they need and running servers in this scenario does nothing for them except garner good will.

[Don]

Pretty sure the major influx of people are from this weekend anyway. There's like 15 servers in the last beta test, not exactly much for a game that's expected to pull millions (WoW has like 400 servers not including China).

With the way the game uses instancing I don't really see much problem with overcrowding since every story quest is instanced and most heroic quests are instanced too. The overall worlds are instanced if there are too many. While it's of course possible that you never get the 25 random stuff you need for a bonus quest those quests are optional and not a big deal if you miss it.

Last weekend there was Korriban 9 on the server I was on. If you can do 9 you should be able to do 90 unless you made some very bad assumption somewhere. It's true you could have enough people that exceeds the capability of the server but that's what queues are for. Given the existence of queues it shouldn't be possible to have more people playing on a server than it's designed for by definition. You may have very long queues but that can be solved by throwing money at it (more servers).

[Shrinweck]

Well I just got confirmation of getting in Friday morning woohoo

[kali o.]

For the record, I'll play SWTOR at launch. I don't expect to be subbed more than a month or two - as that should be ample time to play through a republic (commando) and imperial (nuker likely). It's a fun concept, playing an mmo for the story but until they add an end game, it's really all there is.

So make sure to note your server if you are there at launch too.

[Shrinweck]

Since I pre-ordered the first day I should be getting into the first day of Early Access. I'll try to organize things into a republic and sith server. Hopefully it won't be as dicey as Rift where servers available from day one got mobbed and waiting in queues with a dozen open servers available is stupid.

[Shrinweck]

Launcher on this game is pretty buggy. I already have one junk directory in the main folder, the launcher patched into its own folder and then when I launched the patched launcher (in said new folder) it decided to download and install all the game assets into this folder that was initially only patching the launcher. It tried to do this two more times before I caught on and I ended up wasting something like a dozen gb of bandwidth. Cleaning up the junk seems to have fixed this but now I see why they're likely to just make us download the entire thing over again for release.

[kali o.]

The launcher is notoriously buggy. Keep your setup file around in case you have to delete all related launcher files.

[Shrinweck]

It's all in order other than some nonsense involving me trying to get yesterdays patch.

[Shrinweck]

So... good...

[Eric]

So... good...

So's....your....mom....

>.> I'm immature. *flees*

[Shrinweck]

I've given all class archetypes a try now. Bounty Hunter to level 10 purely because he's voiced by Steve Blum (Spike Spiegel from Cowboy Bebop) was fun but the Advanced Classes don't really interest me. Consular to 11 and it was kind of fun. Felt like it was missing something. Shadow probably gets better as it levels. Consular levels 1-10 is a hybrid of ranged spells and boring melee attacks.

To a lesser extent I also played the smuggler to level 3, but got bored and wasn't a fan of the cover system. This experience was tainted by terrible, terrible lag, so I'll give it another go after launch I guess.

Jedi Knight I've played to level four now and I think this is the one I'll be sticking with at launch. Force jumping into the middle of things is a blast and there's certainly 'more bang for your buck' if I only get a weekend to play it, so that's what I'm gonna do for now.

[kali o.]

Trooper remains my top choice. Shame I can't dust my higher level trooper off, but old characters are bugged this new build apparently.

[Shrinweck]

Wow that's terrible. The weapons and style of the trooper don't really interest me but their hero dude in the cinematics is probably the most bad ass in the entire series.

At the very least he doesn't immediately die like the Jedi Knight counterpart heh

[Shrinweck]

Mostly played my Jedi Knight today and it was mostly fun. I get the complaints - it definitely feels like the class is missing something power-wise. I've gone back to my Shadow a bit now that I know more about what I'm doing (paid closer attention to the codex entries and tutorials this time around) and it's certainly up my alley.

This damn beta test hasn't done anything for me solidly picking a class to go with. I'm probably going to go Shadow first and at the very least rush up to unlocking the Legacy system, but I still want to play a smuggler and knight.

Here's hoping they do an amazing job polishing it up in the coming weeks. The choppy combat in highly populated areas is expected to a degree but not this much. Unmarked quests in the map cost me a good 20-30 minutes today, as well. Queues have been astonishingly infrequent and tolerable, with the longest I experienced today (in the afternoon) at fifteen minutes.

It took them an hour to get all the servers up after this mornings maintenance. I'm hoping that's the holiday and beta clogging things up. An hour to get all the servers up (mine was second to last so I got to see this slowly unfold) is crazy if that's the pace to expect in the future.

The amount of stuff with room for improvement is pretty astounding, considering how amazing the game STILL is. I think I may have to disable general chat come launch though. While I usually keep it up just because it's a great resource to passively learn about the game, it's also a great way to be driven crazy by trolls, COMPLETE AND UTTER morons, trolls, and cynical know-it-alls. The older I get the less patience I have for that stuff. Maybe I'll re-enable it once I'm off the starter planet and Coruscant.

I swear this game has the most idiotic fanbase ever. It's somewhat unfortunate that the industry has to participate in so much hand-holding as it is, but when it isn't enough for some people... Ugh.

[Don]

The general chat of any MMORPG is best used as a source of entertainment as opposed to a resource.

[Shrinweck]

Well you have to take it with a grain of salt. If not you're probably crazy enough to join in heh

I loved how all day people were asking when the beta ended and the majority of the time people responded as if time zones don't exist.

[Don]

The time for beta was CST which might as well be a nonexitsent time zone since it's usually EST or PST when talking about US-based games.

[Shrinweck]

They should have just REALLY fucked with us and used Mountain.

[kali o.]

So what level did you make it to?

I gave Sith Sorc a shot for the first time and I admit I really don't like either Imperial side or the Sorc class. I made it to level 25 last night (got my own speeder, lol), so I gave it a fairly nerdy time investment. Sorc lacks a lot of power early on but the ability to cc+heal mitigates the difficulty spike most players encounter in content 25+. Still, cc locking stuff and healing your companion isn't my idea of a good time. The empire dialog choices were pretty lame too, sometimes vague and confusing for the outcome and most of the time, I was just default to the darkside choice to up my rank.

I did feel a *little* bad for a few choices though.

Trooper (Commando) for the firePOWAH and Republic (better light/dark choices) is my launch choice.

[Don]

I didn't bother leveling very far and stopped at 16. The Sith dark side choices seems to be just zap everyone you see with lightning, and I assume there's a reason to rack up dark/light side points so that pretty much means your choice for dialogue is fixed. I guess in theory you could just rerun the first instance over and over again and not worry about the dark/light points but that seems like taking way too much time.

It doesn't look like you can effectively fight elite level stuff without a heal and probably a CC (when you get more than one). The burst DPS potential for classes just tend to be too low relative to the mob's HP so you got to have some way to survive longer and that's not really possible without heals.

[Shrinweck]

I haven't had any issues killing elites solo. The fights can often be close. This is the problem with the Jedi Knight/Sith Warrior being underpowered. I found fighting with my knight against elites to be much more difficult. I basically never even used heals (when available) and still thoroughly beat elites more easily than my knight. HELL, the one time I did use heals on my companion both of us died because it used all my energy. I was also wildly unready and throwing a stealth class into melee distance from a boss to BEGIN with is just cruel of Bioware. The trouble with the Knight/Warrior is I'm unsure what you would change to make them more viable against elites. Oh, well, I'm no game developer.

I ended up getting my smuggler to 17, shadow to 21 (woulda been higher but hit some fucking bug that made the character literally impossible to play - if I loaded him up swtor.exe would max out my available memory and basically do everything but crash my PC), bounty hunter to 10, and Jedi Knight to 16. I've definitely decided on playing scoundrel as my main republic character and an assassin as my imperial. I've wanted to go shadow all this time but the bug made me try the imperial version of the consular and I found the story, evil version of his abilities, and starter world enemies more engaging. Smuggler became a much more enticing option when I realized scoundrels don't have to use that ridiculous cover system. Smuggler over imperial agent because shotgunning someone in the back is pretty great. I understand both of your disappointment over the imperial dark side stuff. I'm likely going to make my assassin light side.

I gave space combat a more thorough go about an hour ago after wisely remembering to outfit my ship with the level 1 mods. It's very simple but VERY addictive and basically got my smuggler most of the way through almost all of 17 much quicker than questing. To balance that out, the quests ran out pretty fast which makes me sad, but I suppose more come up after the next world. Without buying the level 1 ship mods, the quests (other than the starter one) for space combat were a lesson in being unable to do the impossible. The game could certainly have been more forthcoming with the necessity to buy these upgrades, which basically double your damage, missile capacity, and give a regenerating shield. I would say my only disappointment with the space combat is the music composer didn't match the quality of space battle music (video games and movies both) of prior iterations of the series.

Also, as far as I know - there are items later that flat out require you to be dark or light side. I happened upon a light side vendor in the Republic Fleet but only browsed through it once I realized I was 2500 lightside points away from anything, let alone 10 levels away.

I loved how there was a tutorial tip at twenty, telling me to save credits for my speeder at 25 when they're so cheap (8k at 25). Maybe the skill is expensive?

I want to play more but I've experienced everything that's viable before the 1AM est cut off so I suppose I'm done. I don't think I've ever put this many hours into a beta. Frankly I'm glad my shadow broke, so I can't type /played.

Did you finish chapter one by level 25? My Shadow got bugged briefly after I finished the last story quest in Taris and I never got the opportunity to see if that ended Chapter one. I'm guessing Nar Shadda is the end of chapter one, though.

[Don]

The speeder piloting skill is 40K.

I heard chapter 1 takes a while to complete, at least in the 30s.

[Don]

I noticed this is a very heal-weak game in both PvE and PvP. You're not going to see someone down to 10% of their health back up after 5 seconds as if they're a T-1000. If you're low on HP you usually stay low on HP for a very long time. Sure all the healing classes can dump a lot of heals in a hurry but if you ever hit the minimum energy/heat regen or empty all your Force then you might as well be doing nothing for the next minute or two, so there's a pretty hefty price to pay to get someone back up to full or even near full health.

In terms of tradeoffs, if you're fighting exactly 1 mob, it's not necessary all that much safer to have one guy heal and one guy tank it down, versus two guys trying to DPS it down, because your heals are weak so it's almost like getting twice the HP bar but half the DPS. Yes the healing option is generally a little bit better than 2 guys DPS down something but it's not like most games where 1 heal + 1 tank can kill basically anything if you don't screw up a gimmick at the group level, while 2 DPS has almost no chance of killing anything hard.

Looking at the talent trees it doesn't seem like you're really that specialized to the point where you're locked into one role. I mean sure you're not going to heal with 0 points into heal tree but since healing is weak in general, your thoroughput isn't really that much lower compared to a full healing spec guy, though the full healing speced guys has a lot of extra tools to deal with emergencies. Likewise a full DPS character doesn't have talents that do damage you can't possibly match, but of course they have a lot more tools to deal with unexpected stuff. I noticed the lower skills in most trees have exactly the opposite function, i.e. the lower section of healing tree would be mostly DPS, and the lower section of DPS tree would be mostly healing. I guess this is done to ensure you can always somewhat fulfill your secondary role even if it's not your cup of tea. Of course the higher tier talents tend to be very specialized.

[Shrinweck]

I'm not sure I understand your point on talent trees. For instance, the scoundrel has the healing tree and I agree with what you said about that much of it, but at the same time it also has the DPS tree (mostly linked to shotgun use.. the name is evading me at the moment but it isn't dirty fighting (the shared tree with the gunslinger)). The DPS tree doesn't have much to do with healing other than that single talent that ups healing received and slightly ups healing done. I think this is more to be taken if you're a healer, putting his final talent points in before fifty, as opposed to a DPS not looking to lock completely in.

That said, yeah, hybrids thoroughly look to be king in this game. A lot of the beta testers that have put together large threads on Advanced Classes seem to agree that splitting points into different trees is the way to maximize how well you do in both PvE and PvP. Either way I'm glad talent respeccing is in the game. Viable or not I really want to try the skills at the top of the Scoundrel shotgun tree and the Assassin infiltration tree.