Star Wars: The Old Republic

I'm actually really enjoying the Inquisitor arc, myself. It's very selfish and Sith-y. (And probably the 2nd funniest story, after the Smuggler.)

Played Smuggler to completion, and Trooper, Sith Inquisitor, and Sith Warrior to the end of Chapter 2.

To me, the voice actors are a big part of what makes quests enjoyable. By that measure, female Smuggler is sexy, snarky, and fun. And the female Sith Inquisitor, when played total Dark Side, is a delightfully bloodythirsty psychotic.

Storywise, the end of Act 1 for the Sith Warrior was dramatic and emotionally satisfying. The Smuggler Act 1 treasure hunt was fun. On the other side, everything after Sith Inquisitor Act 1 was very silly.

In all cases though, I still kinda want to play through what happens. I'm not finding the combat as dissatisfying as some people, so I'm still subscribed. (Plus, I want my throne mount, dammit.)

I have finished all the stories except for Sith Warrior (although I am nearly done with that) and bounty hunter (which I've barely touched). My own rankings are as follows:

Imperial Agent > Sith Inquisitor > Smuggler > Jedi Knight >>>> Jedi Consular (I actually like the story more than a lot of people, I think, but it does have lulls) > Sith Warrior (this story has seriously only gotten interesting in the last act) > Trooper (SO SAMEY, it's the only one I can't see myself repeating ever again unless I desperately want a tanking trooper, and even then I will sulk about it)

I'm not ranking BH because I haven't even finished act 1 on it (my "main" BH is waiting for Ingmar to want to play his IA, but I occasionally dick around with a dude BH on the Other RP Server). I don't mind the "War? What war?" aspect of the SI storyline (in fact, I will go so far as to say I like that it utterly ignores everything else going on story-wise in the game). I think the smuggler story starts to suffer when it tries to tie it into the Overall Storyline and I sort of wish they went the "fuck it, this class just straight up has no cares available for the Overall Story" route with that class as well, but there is so much Funny in that storyline, I still really, really enjoyed it. Imperial Agent is the most solid throughout, though, it's the only one where I can't really think of any point in the story where I felt like it was trying to pad out until the next Major Plot Point. The trooper story, on the other hand, is practically nothing BUT padding. I'd say the JK and smuggler storylines gave me the most "HELO I AM PLAYING A STAR WARS GAEM" vibes.


And because I am bored, I will now rank the romances I've done (or at least done most of):

• Female JK: Doc is the bestest dude around, and I will never play a dude JK because of it (I don't like Kira very much to start with)
• Male Smuggler: Risha is the bestest lady and the banter I had with her made me squee
• Male SW: Vette is pretty cute with a light side dude
• Male Trooper: Dorne is nicely fleshed out, but pretty straightlaced, which can get dull, plus she gets a little sappy and I have a sap allergy
• Female Consular: Lt. Boyfriend (Iresso TECHNICALLY) is a really, really nice guy and I wanted to airlift him into some other class' storyline, because he has absolutely no chemistry with the lady consular, because the lady consular is a walking yawn
• Male SI: Ashara only really works with a light side fella, which I was (mostly because I played my SI as a gigantic Empire-trolling dork, which evidently nets you a lot of LS points) and even then her voice is alarmingly young sounding to me
• Female SW: Quinn is a) boring, b) a spineless bootlicker and c) has other issues I shouldn't go into, but there were still a few redeeming moments I guess
• Female Smuggler: Corso Riggs is a fucking blight upon humanity and I wish I could blast him out of my airlock. I have never fucking hated a character as much as I hate this guy. It's like the writer sat down and thought to herself, "How can I write the worst possible romance for Sjofn?" It's like they had an anti-Sjofn focus group to test this asshat on. The best part? You can't dump someone once you start on their romance path, so he comes across as hilariously stalkerish and creepy once you're trying to get him to LEAVE YOU ALONE.

My lady smuggler slept with anyone who showed the slightest bit of interest, so I hopped aboard the Voss train as well. Amusingly, in light of his apparently doggedness if you DON'T romance him, one of the things that I really liked about the Doc romance was getting to tell him to take his pet names and cram them up his ass. And he actually listened. Really, I think 90% of my flirts with him were actually telling him he was a giant dipshit. He was a good sport about it, though.

As for voice acting, the male inquisitor is probably my favorite in the entire game. Overall I've preferred the male voice acting, though, with only the female smuggler and female SW really standing out to me as sounding exactly the way I wanted them to at all times. Female IA and female trooper suffer from "I already spent many, many hours listening to you do this exact voice" syndrome, though, so it's not exactly their fault.

Ha, yeah, that's pretty much how Ingmar plays his sith inquisitor. Mine was much more mellow, which resulted in people giving him lip for not being a douchebag. Which then provoked me into showing them I AM TOO A DOUCHEBAG. By and large, though, with my inquisitor, I had one main thing: always, always, ALWAYS pick whichever choice seemed more likely to either directly screw the Empire or eventually backfire and screw the Empire. <3

Can't trust them ex-slaves, man, they ruin everything.

It's not controversial that the best part of this game is pushing an enemy off a ledge right as the sentinel in your party leaps to it, right? Although I suppose using harpoon to take an enemy away right after the sentinel uses leap is a close second.

In fairness, so is the male consular

One of my guildies frequently complained to his wife about this. Her response was always the same: good, now you know what I have to deal with all the time.

Lum Neopythia you owe it yourselves to spec (if only temporarily) into the pyro tree if you haven't already (Commando or Vanguard, doesn't matter). The laugh when PPA procs is fantastic. If you're a Vanguard you can just stay in that spec, since it's highest dps by far.

When I quit they had just nerfed the laugh. It's back now?

I don't think it ever went away. There was a patch that got rid of many/most of the audible indicators for procs, but that one wasn't one of them. I think. It has been quite a few months, but I have vague memories of people wondering why my vanguard still had a laugh when their scoundrel no longer did.

If it actually did go away, well, they put it back in months ago.

I'm leveling a dude one up now, and it's not even close. The female consular is zzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzz. The male consular at least occasionally sounds like he may have felt an emotion (shameful!) at some point in his life.


And yeah, the commando laugh never went away, just the scoundrel one. Which I miss a little bit. My operative had a charming laugh. He just ... did it a lot. Which made him sound a bit cracked. <3

They didn't remove it from the Tanks.
I remember being very frustrated with the patch that removed the laugh (snicker?) from my Imp Agent, but quite distinctly remember it stayed around on my Flamey Power Tech.

Oh right, a new story from the land of wtf:

I was bored so I tanked a dungeon. One of the two dps was another vanguard with a motley assortment of poor gear (his only tionese piece was, uh, for dps commandos. Whatever). Well, dungeons other than LI are trivially easy these days with nearly any group (LI is actually dangerous since half the people who queue for it have no idea what they're doing) and anyway the gear requirements were never particularly strict, so I shrug and guard the other dps.

I keep losing threat to the vanguard. I'm very confused, as my tank set is a mix of campaign and dread guard and I don't have many threat problems in, you know, actual raids. Then during one pull I hear the distinctive sound of a vanguard taunt and see the taser launch from the dps vanguard's wrist. Well, okay, I guess he's trolling me. Whatever, it's still easy, I don't care enough to risk any drama. After we clear the dungeon I ask him if there was any reason he taunted. He says he never taunted. Well, okay, I guess that's that. I thank everyone for the group and leave.

A couple minutes later I get a whisper from the vanguard. He says he looked through his attacks and just realized that one of them was a taunt.

Well, my only exposure to the male is flashpoint dialogue, and he's flat as a board in those. I'll defer to your experience.

No, it's definitely tied to an ability. One of my guild's troopers re-specced to Assault Specialist (Pyro for Bounty Hounters) a few days ago to try it out. His dps was much lower than his normal Gunnery spec so he switched back, but he said it's one of his goals to practice more with Assault Specialist and get better at it specifically so he can hear that evil laugh sound on his procs.

Male consular = Nolan North. He does a very good job of toeing the line between "inscrutable Jedi monotone" and "actual human being" in most of the stuff, much better than the Consularess.

I haven't played a female Consular, but Nolan North's male Consular is horribly bland and monotone. His performance is by far my least favourite of the voice actors I've heard (which includes all 8 class/gender combinations on the Republic side plus male Imperial Agent on the Empire side).

The Consular kind of has to be that way, though; I think there's a fair amount of subtlety in his work there that's not present in the other version. It's never going to stand out next to, say, the Sith Inquisitor (~IMAGINE ME IN FOREVER PLAID~) but I think you're selling it short, personally.

EDIT: It's especially going to sound that way if you stick to the 'stock' Jedi answers, there's more range in the less stereotypical stuff I think. There's a lot of, let's call it professorial annoyance and such in the bitchier lines.

4 quickbars for premium people coming:

http://www.swtor.com/community/showthread.php?t=562422

Yeah, having played both a mostly-by-the-numbers lady JC and now playing a much crabbier (but still nice deep down) dude consular, he is much better at the "you are lucky I am a Jedi, so I only sound mildly annoyed, instead of slapping you upside the head like your stupid ass deserves" lines. He's still mostly zen (consulars are just zen, that is clearly the direction the actors were given), but the dude one is much, much better at finding the little spots where he can do something with his lines. While I did mostly pick the nice responses on my lady consular while I leveled her up, I almost always try the crabby responses now when I play her, and she sounds the same as she does when she is spouting meaningless Jedi platitudes (and getting -2's from Tharan). The dude consular at least attempts to give me several different types of bland, but she's just one kind of bland throughout.

Wait, I lied. There's a point where you pretend to be a Sith, and she is delightful for two whole lines.

The jedi knights get to have a lot more fun with their lines. Actually, everyone gets to have a lot more fun with their lines (the sith actors all sound like they're having the MOST fun, though). I don't blame the consular actors for it, though, as I am 99% sure it was the director's fault.

Haven't you heard? Emotions might lead to the dark side. Jedi aren't allowed to have them.

Evil consulars can be really fucking evil. I am positive the female consular still sounds bland throughout, though, as the few dark side choices I made with her ... zzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzz. Evil, but oh god so bored.

Yeah, I could talk about this game way too much. This is actually me being restrained. D:

I'm enjoying my light side sith warrior, although he is light side in a similar way to my sith inquisitor, in that half my light side decisions are just me actively trolling the Empire, Baras in particular. I like my neutral sith warrior too, though, partly because I feel much freer to go "fuck you and your additional step, light side choice" and just murder people for their trinkets or secrets or whatever.

Here is an example of what happens when I feel free to ramble endlessly about what I've done in SWTOR, though. I wrote this for a DIFFERENT FORUM, about my manquisitor Jovian. Luckily the bulk of it is behind spoiler tags:




Jovian's main motivation was "fuck the Empire," which resulted in him being mainly light side, although he certainly picked his fair share of dark side shit (but one of his tradeskills was diplomacy, so he's Light V anyway). I really, really enjoyed the story though, although if you prefer your class storyline to have anything at all to do with the game's overall plot, the sith inquisitor is not for you. The sith inquisitor is too busy dealing with Sith Bullshit to worry about the Republic.

Companion run down:

Warning: I am pretty sure I have the first two chunks safely squared away time-line-wise (I even have some of chapter one actually in the chapter two section to make ABSOLUTE CERTAIN), but chapters two and three kind of blur together, as they have the same issue the consular has, in that it feels less like OKAY CHAPTER THREE NOW and more like OKAY ON TO CHAPTER 2-B. I may be fucking some of it up, especially since, like Joshua before him, Jovian had a two month break between landing on Belsavis and actually doing Belsavis. Then I took yet another break before digging into Voss. So um. Sorry if I ruin anything.


Prologue:

Chapter One:

Chapter Two:

Chapter Three:

And in case you're wondering, this is how Khem's thing shook out, don't read unless you finished chapter 1 completely, although it's not possible to actually finish before you finish the class story completely:

I'd heard about her ploy, but didn't actually get all the way through the relevant parts before my sub expired. Is it ever explained why she... has such a bad body image?

Hm, I'm not exactly sure what you mean, but if you want to PM me something a little more specific for SPOILER PURPOSES, feel free!


EDIT: Actually, screw it, I'll PM you! :o

You guys are making me wonder if I missed something when I unsubscribed at level 16, way back in January.

I'd say you have, actually.

Whether what you missed is worth the 20 GB download is another matter of course....

Do not do it!
I've tried. Done LS/DS and all16 advanced classes (the DPS guys tended to be DS and Healy guys LS).
The DS counsular just makes no sense.
Not in the DS inquisitor "Oh you so crazy dude!" whimiscal kind of "makes no sense" but you smile and just shake your head at him. It's more along the lines of has no grounding in reality and leaves you scratching your head at the total disconect from logic.

They gave Kissinger the Nobel Peace Prize, too. Don't make the mistake of thinking the Jedi Council can't be just as dumb as any other people. ;)

Started over as a smuggler and I'm into it again. I think Jedi just doesn't agree with me. I was hoping for a slow descent into madness as my consular unlocked the dark mysteries of the Sith, but it was just too slow and boring for me.

Isn't that, like, the entire plot of the prequel trilogy?

Just about done with the intro planet with my Dark Side smuggler and still liking it. How exactly do I go about getting in the guild? Do I just start messaging you all by name and catch someone who's on? Is there an account name like COH has, or do I just try character names or what? I haven't played with chat turned on at all yet, since General is apparently populated solely by pre-teen Tea Partiers.

I like that I often have dialog choices for both "cares only for killing" and "cares only for money", along with that namby-pamby Han Solo choice. My character does NOT have a heart of gold, thanks very much.

Are you on The Harbinger?

I am.