Star Wars The Old Republic Online - Page 7

Alignment can affect at least one companion directly (One of the Sith Warrior companions).  You get either a "light side" or "dark side" version (though on their character sheet they still register as "neutral") based on your own alignment, with a considerably different set of companion conversations and a completely different look.  However, if you switch gears mid-game and decide to change alignment, the companion doesn't shift...their alignment is generated when you first attain the companion and doesn't change after that.

 

I don't know if any other classes have an "alignment mutable" companion, but aside from that one example I haven't seen alignment affecting anything with the other companions (Besides raising/lowering their approval ratings through your actions). 

 

It would've been pretty awesome if they'd instituted some kind of alignment-shift ability like they had in KotOR2.  Maybe in the future, I suppose....

My Knight is 35, and aside from a brief (but fumbled and very obvious) pseudo-conflict with my Padawan, I can't call out a single plot point outside of the trite Planet Killer class story nonsense.

It's funny, but when I first read about this game, I was curious how Troopers and Smugglers etc., were going to fit into a mmorpg that was almost certainly going to filled to the brim with Jedi Knight wannabes. I knew right then that the last class I wanted to play was a Jedi.

It's also funny that my Dual LIGHT SABERS do significantly less damage than punches or hilt bops. I have to build up a bunch of useless saber attacks to finally get to do my super devastating ultra face punch power.

I had enough time to play a variety of classes to a range of stages. None really captured my interest as much as the Agent did. Some have terrible stories (Jedi Knight), while some have boring early companions (and I'm not playing 40 levels to get to the interesting ones).

 

It also really hurt my interest in playing multiple stories that sooooo much content is repeated for every character. Even playing the opposite faction doesn't help that much - some planets play almost identically for Empire and Republic. 

 

I fully intend to play the game more in the future, once they've added some more content, and I've forgotten some of the stuff I'll have to repeat to see the unique storylines. I'm sure I'll finish my Sith Warrior and Smuggler at some point down the road.

 

Right now, I'm dinking with DC Universe Online, since it's free. The gameplay is so so so much better. I really wish TOR hadn't been so slavish about mimicking the WoW model.

I've come to love the attacker/defender PVP. Unlike the Alderaan siege, it has its own mini-narrative and logical flow, and that unlike Huttball, it isn't a guaranteed clusterfuck.

It has been brought to my attention that one of the Bounty Hunter's companions is a Jawa who can tank with his rocket launcher.

That was I needed to hear. I am downloading this shit right now, bookmarking wikis, databases, and blogs while I wait.

I actually like the Republic Trooper storyline, but I'll agree it's not up to par with the Sith Warrior.  Likewise I've heard good things about the Smuggler but I haven't tried it myself.  Also as noted:  Republic characters seem to get the short end of the stick companion-wise (in terms of how interesting their characters are and the order in which the "interesting" companions are gained).  Though I confess great affection for the Jedi Knight's astromech.

 

From guild chat:

 

 

 

 

The trooper gets to sex it up by level 16 with enough flirting.

Yup. My trooper is 38 and already he's done two women. I'm the master of Bioware romances. Which clearly illustrates how unrealistic they are.

Which leads to my follow up: what do Lady Troopers do? Does Lt. Jaxo become a man?

Hang in there, got mine at lvl 38, there was a horrible bossfight involved though (use stims & potions and have the cd on your companion heal up).

 

The little dude makes it all worth it though.

 

 

 

I've shelved my Bounty Hunter for the time being; the first companion is a healer, and having her around was making me lazy. I've opted instead to level a Sith Inquisitor (Sorceror), and I'm having a blast with it. Here, at level 15, the pet is a tank and I'm the ranged DPS/Healer. So when I'm in a group doing a flashpoint or a Heroic quest area, and the companion disappears because the party is full of live players, I already have some practice working with the full tool set that my class has.

Having tried two classes at least up to the late teens, I'm loving how you get your first crowd control at about the same time that groups of mobs begin appearing in quest areas. My first impression is that the class designers, the gear designers, and the content designers actually work in the same building, go to the same meetings, and generally keep communication open with one another. I've never had that impression with WoW.

Haven't played in about a week, I need to get back into this and try to max out at least one guy before the next billing cycle hits. My main Trooper is still sitting at 32, I took a break after being frustrated with a companion mission that seemed way too difficult for the level it was labeled.

My JK is level 43. By now, I've come to realize that, at least for the JK, the recommended mission levels are pretty much hooey. Unless I'm at least a level above the mission level, I know I'm in for a slog of resting, stims, and meds.

 

There's at least one JK mission that levels with you, making it unbearably difficult: The

Warning: Spoiler! (Click to show)

After nearly giving up, I had to fake-stealth it by racing through, getting my ass whooped, and ghost walking as far as I could. The fight at the end was surprisingly easy.

 

Normal missions are more or less straighforward with their difficulty levels, but the 'epic boss fight' sections have been grueling. Is it like this for every class?

Mine have been ok so far. (Imperial Agent) Usually there's just an elite waiting for me at the end of a story mish. Just hit lvl 47. What sort of companion do you have with you? I usually travel with my healer, and he's made my Agent's life much faster and easier.

Yeah, I'm typically with my healer, although I've recently found my Sith Tank companion to be more effective with the bosses. The guy is a sponge.

As a Sith Sorceror with a tank pet (Khem Val), I had a difficult time with the boss fight at the end of my class story on Nar Shadda. And by difficult, I mean that I killed all the adds before the boss killed me, I respawned right there, and then felt like I had cheated after killing the boss without the adds because they didn't show up on the second attempt. The tuning on that encounter may be a little off.

In the interest of fairness, it probably didn't help that I didn't notice the suggested level range for that planet before I arrived. I was given the choice of heading from Dromund Kaas to either Balmorra or Nar Shadda next, and I naturally assumed the planet in Hutt space would be seedier and more interesting. Now that I've finished one out-of-order planet, I'm going to bulldoze Balmorra the next time I'm logged on.

Bulldozing Balmorra is not such a bad thing.  I've found if you go to Balmorra first and are a completist (up to and including the Bonus Series) you're overlevelled for Nar Shaada (until the Bonus series).

 

Having finally got my first alt to 50, I feel strange saying that I think XP gain could actually be just a tinge slower given how long it took me, but I went through a long section of the game where I tended to be overlevelled for most of the standard planet-based content, just because I was pretty religious about doing my space dailies (which I was doing more because I wanted the credits and enjoy the diversion than for XP), and hopped into flashpoints now and then.  It was pretty easy to stay "ahead of the curve" all the way until the final couple of worlds in the storyline quests.

 

 

Good advice.

 

Anyone get the security key? Anyone get the physical one? Piece of junk or worth the bite?

I just have the mobile security key. My WoW account was hacked once. Can't speak for the physical key, but I'd guess it's fine. 

I'm not bothering with higher security for a game than my bank uses. I figure if anyone wants my account in one of these games THAT badly, they can have it.

 

My level 70 Druid in WoW belongs to some asian gold farmer now, and I'm totally ok with that. 

Got the physical one as part of the collector's edition package.  Seems fine.  The "Security Key Vendors" sell some amusing stuff, but it's all basically social/vanity items.

Without hyperbole, lag on Ilum has been as bad as in any game I've ever played.  Better get fixed.

Would that be the search for Aric's buddies?  I haven't tackled that yet, but I'd be glad to know if I should wait a couple more levels to try it.

Yep. It was really only frustrating because of the way one group of mobs was set up, it was virtually impossible to keep this one additional elite enemy from glomming onto me. I'm decent at crowd control, and I don't mind dying once or twice if it means whittling down the group, but I just couldn't seem to do enough damage. I think I leveled twice, went back, and of course it was a piece of cake and made me wonder if I had just been approaching the whole battle wrongly.

Amazon has this as its Gold Box deal of the day for $39.99.  Don't know if that's a sign of lagging sales or just pushing an already hot game.  I know I've cancelled my subscription after not playing since January and really not thinking about it.  It was fun, but I just didn't feel the urge to keep paying to play it.

I dug it, but it is an MMO - you either dig those or you don't. If you like them, you'll love this. If you don't, this won't change your mind.

 

I enjoyed taking my Agent to 50, but I'm taking a break to do some console gaming. My PS3 misses me.

I think I've just finally soured on the whole MMO thing.  I loved the story, but if I'm going to play a story-driven game, why not a game that's tailored to MY experience and not a few thousand other people as well?

From my understanding a lot of folks are waiting on starting new class stories until this "Legacy" system shakes out, based on the possibility that new races and such might be made available.

I'm level 49, and at this point, I'm finishing it up just to see it through. There are definite highs - I came to love parts of the PVP, and the space missions are among my favorite diversions in any RPG - but the lows are so, so low. I've moaned at length about the JK story, so I'll spare you that song, but the game structure itself isn't enough to sustain 200+ hours of play without becoming repetitive.

 

With the exceptions of Tatooine and Hoth, which are the game's two highlights (mostly thanks to a set of fun sidestories and a tangible connection to the only two good SW films), the planets are mostly interchangeable. Get quest, go to cave/field/warehouse, and collect/kill/disable entity. If underleveled, grind your ass off. It also doesn't help that the design reminds me of the Clone Wars cartoon.

 

I'm starting to refer to this game as both the best and worst thing BioWare's ever done. It's the best in that it pulls together so many BioWare signature features, like the spoken dialogue, the "building a team," the skill trees and combat systems, and the planet-hopping. It's the worst in that it puts quantity ahead of quality; it throws so much of this stuff at you that it all becomes meaningless in the end. It's the least enriching BioWare game I've ever played, if you can call a game "enriching;" after finishing ME2, I felt invigorated, but after playing this game, I just feel exhausted. It's how I imagine casino addicts feel after spending twenty hours in front of a one armed bandit.

I'm still guessing it'll be like the heirloom system in WOW. Which is kind of pointless as this game is piss easy.

I'm the same. The raid-get better loot-raid again hamster wheel doesn't interest me. If I were to play again, it would be to see a different class' story.

This is my dilemma. I like the game, but I don't get home and feel the urge to play. I struggled to find a class that I liked at first, so my friends are all at 50 with nothing but PVP. I am just at 42 and on Hoth. I haven't logged in since Wednesday of last week. I probably won't log in tonight.

I'm also a little tired of the apparently entrenched idea that max level means it's time to PvP or raid repeatedly.  I know it's probably a pipe dream, but I'd love an MMO where the new high level content is more of the game I've been playing for the last 50 levels instead of being expected to either fight other players or farm instances.  Dungeons and Dragons didn't ask you to keep running the Temple of Elemental Evil over and over again until everyone in the party got a good roll on the loot table.

Keep in mind that TOR is about as generic an MMO as possible in gameplay terms. There is very little attempt to evolve the genre, so it's unsurprising that you (and I, and others) would tire of it quickly once the shine of story fades.

Any of you who haven't tried DC Universe should give it a shot. It doesn't completely shatter the MMO mold, but the action-based gameplay, character development that doesn't end at max level, and ability for every single player to both kill things and fill a team role are refreshing and fun. Plus, the stories are pretty good and some of the group/raid content is a blast, even for someone who usually goes it solo like me. Plus, it's free.

 

And then there's The Secret World, with it's mystery-based gameplay and open-ended character devleopment, and Guild Wars 2, which looks like a real game-changer for the genre. There's innovation out there, sadly this game just didn't do (or even try) much.

I don't know, I'm still enjoying the game immensely. But then again, this my first MMO and I've been taking my time learning everything (I've only just unlocked the space combat with my main). I haven't even touched the Heroics/Flashpoints/PvP yet, and don't feel in any rush to do so. Also, I rarely have time to play more than an hour or so at at once, so maybe that's a factor as well, but I will say that as someone who has rarely stuck with an MMO past a few hours, I'm getting a lot out of this one. True, the story stuff isn't as deep as with Bioware's single player RPGs but it's doing the job for me, and there's tons of potential for expansion there. But yeah, this is a relative MMO newbie speaking here so I guess I'm coming in from a different perspective.

Are you speaking from experience on The Secret World? I've been really looking forward to this for a few years now, a modern day MMO is going to be all sorts of fun to roleplay in.

 

...and I'm done.

At least until Bioware fixes the framerate problem. As of right now, they're still insisting it has nothing to do with the engine at all and everything to do with the hardware every player is running the game on.

Yeah, if they turf Ilum I'm out as well. 

From the developer interview I read today(on ign I think) they said they were taking away the daily and weekly quests on Ilum since so many servers are just getting together to exploit the system instead of actually engaging in open pvp. The emphasis will be placed entirely on warzones and reworking the reward systems there as well as adding a new map(one along the lines of the Alderaan map with turrets to cap). All that and a bunch more stuff is gonna be in 1.2 which I think is supposed to come some time this month, but seeing as on the forums they are just now asking for people to beta test it I wouldnt be surprised if it gets pushed back a bit for fine tuning.

 

Leaving Ilum suits me just fine though. I havent had any framerate issues there but I just dont enjoy the environment there at all. Maybe it's just Tarro Blood being heavily Empire slanted but on the best of days you see half a dozen Republic types there, mostly hiding in their base. The rest is dull quests with little story to add to the mix.