Star Wars: The Old Republic

It's gated based on gaining/losing Affection with them, progress through the chapters, and previous conversations had, not mission-specific triggers or anything like that. If you "miss" a conversation, they'll just end up bringing up things that happened a couple chapters ago when you finally do unlock it, that's all. You can't miss out on any conversations other than romances (or a couple similar forks, like light/dark Jaesa or releasing/enslaving Vette), and missing those forks won't prevent you from unlocking the legacy perk for that character.

They'll sometimes pipe up in class quest conversations, but those don't affect anything legacy or "real" conversation-wise, so don't worry too much about that.

So. A couple of weeks into this now. I'm not a MMO person normally, the only one I've ever played before was LOTRO, and I'm playing it like it was a single-player game. I honestly haven't grouped up even once yet. Some odd notes:

1. My main is a female Jedi Sage and while I not often have a problem with the completely neutral responses from my character, so far I think the game has missed out on having the other characters bounce off of that. I mean, I'm really scary in a lot of ways since if I decide your cause is just I'll pretty much annihilate anyone and everything that's in your way. Saving that guys "loved ones" on Tatooine was the best mission from that POV.
2. Tharan Cedrax. Now there's a man I don't have any use or time for. I'll just keep on sending my nine foot tall murder lizard into the fray, thanks. I hope I'm not required to talk to Cedrax or anything? Because for some reason I dislike him even more than Corso Riggs. I dunno why but as soon as I got Corso a completely different face, skin and hair, I didn't hate him as much. OTOH, "I call him Sparky". Really? Someone needs to die for writing that. I also like that huge ancient rage-monster you get for your SI.
3. Probably one of the best Bioware scenes, ever, is when you choose to thank your tutor for being a great teacher, in the Sith Inquisitor tutorial. I still laugh when I think about it.
4. Crafting should be horrible, excruciating and ultimately rewarding. So far SWTOR is two out of three. I have Synthweaving 120, Archaelogy 170 but Underworld Trading at 45. So, no, I can't create anything useful for my lvl 27 character. Is there any other way to raise UT (and the other similar trades) than to send your crew on "missions" for hundreds of credits over and over and over?
5. The writing for the SI plot is so over the top I'm sitting here shaking my head with a big grin on my face.
SI: "The thing I want is under 200 million tons of toxic waste? Clearly, the only solution is to become like one of those monsters eating toxic waste."
Sycophant Major: "An excellent plan! It's the only way of course."
Sceptic Captain: "But, surely ..."
Major: "That will be all Captain, See to it."

There are gathering skills and there are mission skills. Gathering skills may be leveled by running missions or by harvesting nodes out there in the big wide universe. There are no nodes for mission skills, and UT is a mission skill.

As for whether it's rewarding, well, I made ~20 million credits from Armormech, Artifice, and Cybertech, and I didn't craft a thing. Endgame mats were going for 200k apiece a couple months ago, and while the price has been steadily dropping since folks figured out they could pvp to get items to reverse engineer, they're still around 160k on the Harbinger

Rewarding in the sense of "making stuff you can actually use as you level up" not "getting insanely rich on the GTN" was what I meant. So, paying credits for making your companion(s) unavailable for five-six minutes a pop ... alright, if that's what it takes. I'm more inclined to like running around harvesting mats and then spending time to craft stuff but I guess that's too exploitable or something. But thanks for the clarification!

Twenty million buys a lot of leveling gear, so I was totally addressing your point in the manner you intended. Totally.

Note that toward the higher end of mission/gathering skills you're talking about thirty minutes per mission, not five or six. The SuperDuperExtraLucrativeMissions you have to use a consumable to unlock take something like two and a half hours.

Yeah, well, first character always gets to do all the dirty legwork I guess. I just understood why Qyzen always gets better results than not-C3PO - affection is a factor as well. Yay. Oh well, I don't want to come off as someone who hates the game - I enjoy most of it - especially the dialog and the occasional questline as well. Fun fact: My Dark Side points has come from telling (not forcing or ordering) soldiers and militia to actually fight instead of desert or flee and also for slaying an ex-jedi who was "entirely consumed" with the Dark Side. For this I have around 450 DS points. Huh.

Just as an aside you can raise the affection of the ship droids through gifts. They don't LOVE anything, but they like Cultural Artifacts and their side's Memoribilia pretty well. (and I think Technology?)

Eventually you can also get a vendor droid for your ship through a legacy unlock that sells crafting enhancer thingies for them as well (for 100k a pop) that will bring them up to the equivalent of any other companion from a crafting perspective.

I hit 50 on my Marauder and I'm kinda at a loss for something to do. I have a feeder quest wanting to send me to Ilum and I got an item in the mail having something to do with Hard Modes. I did grab my free gear at 50, which made finishing my class story stupidly easy and now I wish I hadn't used it. So things to do.

I'm really not interested in raiding or even this games version on heroics so I'm kind of worried this might be the end of this character.
I see that my crafting(Artifice)tops out at Might Hilt 23 but people advertise for up to 27s. Where can I get the schematics for those? I suppose I should be using this character to unlock all that account wide legacy stuff? Some of which is really expensive, even after selling that hideous Overlord Throne mount for huge pile of credits. Is there decent money to be made from running dailies?

You remember those raids you're not interested in running? You pick up drops from those and reverse engineer them. Well, or you buy someone else's hilt and try to reverse engineer that (this was a bug, but they've said they're not going to fix it and will look at some other method of balancing crafting in the future, presumably meaning when Makeb launches).

Decent? Yes, but. Yes, but they're crushingly boring (well, Ilum and Belsavis are. Design improved for The Black Hole and Section X). Yes, but you'd make better money farming warzones for commendations, turning the commendations into War Hero gear, reverse engineering the WH mods, enhancements and armorings, and then selling the resultant Molecular Stabilizers on the GTN. At least for now.

Related: marauders are hilarious overpowered in PvP

Dailies, once you factor in all the cash from selling trash drops, etc., are well over 100k/hour, and that's not factoring in anything you might be able to do with the resulting commendations. I'm surprised the war hero gear is attainable fast enough to beat that, I'll have to think about giving that a try (although I'd have to go buy PVP gear first I suppose.) Although, wouldn't you have to carry both artifice and cybertech to be able to RE all 3 things? That seems like a lot of effort.

Stabilizers sell for 150-160 on the GTN on my server. One piece of war hero gear nets you a minimum of three and a maximum of six. With the rate of comms per warzone as well as the daily quest you can get one piece of gear in what is almost certainly less time than hitting the various daily planets would take (though if you were planning on just doing one or whatever that'd be different), and possible dramatically less time. There is a slow but steady downward movement in price, so that won't always be true.

Yes, you do need cybertech and artifice (which means at least two characters as well as one piece of legacy gear to transfer the mods). Yes, you lose some of the money to the cost of ripping out the mods.

Double XP weekend started today.

Just started playing about two days ago. Having a hard time taking breaks in playing to live a normal life.
I think not remembering a single thing about Star Wars beyond KOTOR is making this more enjoyable; a lot of people apparently look down on the Smuggler class because "yeah you are han solo look at all these han solo things you can do".

A little disheartened on all the restrictions that come with being a F2P person, but I'm sticking by my "don't spend money on an MMO" rule.

What server did you roll on?

Those people are dumb. <3

I'm on the ONLY West Coast PvE server.

I'm thinking of trying out this game, but I haven't been able to get it to work on my laptop. That isn't much of a surprise since my laptop's about 4 years old by now. I'll be getting a new one this summer and I'd like to be able to play this game with a minimum of lag/fairly high graphics settings. What would people suggest? I'm kind of clueless about system specs as far as gaming is concerned.

My computer isn't high end by any means, but I've got everything that isn't my character's model turned waaaay down.
My character model and everything involving her are AT THE MAX and it still runs just fine.

A good modern $400 laptop should be enough. As an example:

AMD - http://www.newegg.com/Product/Product.aspx?Item=N82E16834230960
Intel - http://www.newegg.com/Product/Product.aspx?Item=N82E16834312429

Both of these would run TOR like a champ (although they might get a bit hot doing it).

If you enjoy the game, you might want consider becoming a "Preferred" player by spending $5 on cartel coins. It removes a lot of the F2P restrictions, while still avoiding the need to subscribe.

It's the class, not the content. People love having melee dps in endgame content, provided they're vanguards or sentinels. Soundrel dps is just way, way below par (around 25% below VG/Sent/Gunslinger) and has been for a year. 2.0 may change that, I haven't paid much attention to the reports from the PTS.

I doubt that's an issue for anyone who's just leveling, of course.

Smuggler is amazing in SWG...

at least as a human one, I made an insane amount of credit just buying imperial faction points for people plus they got decent pistol skills. this is before the big SWG change though...

me and my wookie creature handler buddies( gave him an AT-ST pets, who need rancor when you have AT-STs ) strolling around in town, blowing up rebels with AT-ST.

Actually, Commandos are easily the weakest of the three healers (supposedly this is still true on the PTS, but I wouldn't know). Ideal composition for an eight man group is one sage and one scoundrel, and scoundrels are generally well regarded.

Heal output is easily surpassed by a sage, but only in AoE situations, and that's because Salvation is the most obviously overpowered skill in the history of anything ever.

I still boggle at how Salvation exists the way it does (and it used to be even more ridiculous when it was bugged and would double heal on the first tick or whatever) but the smuggler and trooper AE heals are still mostly ass (although the smuggler one has grown on me, I just don't expect it to actually, like, save any one).

I still can't stand sage healing, it's the same goddamn healing I've done in MMOs for far too many years and I am sick of it. Good thing I don't raid. :D

The furthest I've gone with any class is being a Jedi Consular. I think she's level 12. I don't know what it is, but something about the Republic/Empire reminds me of the Citadel from ME and then I lose interest in playing. Especially when the general chat is full of people being petty babies to the point where you can't get any honest questions through.

I might just go ahead and join the Ebon Hawk server if you say it's good Neopythia. And then I will try to make fraaaands all over again.

I think part of the issue is that, as much as I love Jennifer Hale, I can't stand the Trooper storyline. I can't. Dunno why, but it doesn't appeal to me. And for storylines that do appeal to me, there's the issue of companions. I really dislike most of the beginning companions, and while I would hope that wouldn't make too much of a difference, it really does. I want the person following me to be someone I can stand.
Ugh, maybe all of this is just because I've been playing alone for too long, haha.

Don't get too wrapped up in the very initial bits of each storyline; most of them change pretty significantly from prologue to act 1 to act 2 etc.

I know, it's just so hard to like...muck through the bits I find really uninteresting for the sake of seeing if it gets interesting.

I refuse to live in a world where someone doesn't like the first Jedi Knight companion.

The first trooper companion grew on me, as did the first consular one, but take any and all dislike you have for the first smuggler companion and cling to it, because he is the worst. Well, the worst for Sjofn. It's like they did a study to discover what sort of dude companion Sjofn would hate more than she ever thought capable of hating a fictional person, and then wrote Corso Riggs. And damned if they didn't do a fine job if that was their goal.

The trooper storyline is ... uneven. But they all are at some point, some more than others. But if it's not interesting you enough to get past the prologue, ain't no need to force (HO HO) it.

(You get a like for that HO HO joke, you clever lil shi-)

First consular guy bugs me so much because I have to read the damn subtitles up in the top left corner to see what he's saying when I click on him. Makes me want to not talk to him...which is bad, you see, because I like talking to my companions. I like the guy for Troopers. He's a cool guy. But I think about doing some of those quests again as a trooper and I want to throw a small plant at the wall because the market with all of those shooty people and there's not even sneak available as a trooper ugh nooooo...


i was hoping corso wouldn't suck. i was really hoping. i'd gotten so used to my curvy trooper, too...

Yeah, I can see that being annoying for Qyzen, although in his actual dialogue scenes his subtitles are in a much better spot! The sith inquisitor has a similar companion in that sense, by the by.

I'm also on Ebon Hawk, by the way, but I am currently in a pre-expansion-slump where I haven't been logging in. :P

But this weekend (and LAST weekend, too!!)(AND NEXT WEEKEND AS WELL!!!!!!!!!) are all boosted XP weekends!

sometimes, i like to abuse exclamation points to confuse people. "Is she really that excited or is she mocking people that get that excited, I wonder?" That is what them to ask.

Yeah, thing is I kinda have a 50 of every class but one, because I am broken. And I'm kinda holding off on that last class (bounty hunter, for those of you playing along at home) to level with Ingmar, who is being a slowbutt about wanting to level his IA!

I have been sort of thinking of maybe leveling another JK though ...

gee, i can't even hit level 15 without tossing in the towel and going "WELP THAT WAS FUN, TIME TO MAKE A NEW PERSON". I want the blind people class. That seems like the most interesting goddamn species and I reaaaaaally want it, but I'm not about to pay money for it, which means I have to save up credits to buy it. Which is totally okay, I guess.

Doesn't it unlock if you pay the five bucks? Or do you mean you want it unlocked for some class that doesn't get it by default?

There's a class that gets it by default???
I was looking for one and couldn't find it!

Both Jedi classes get blind humans, I'm just not sure if the F2P people do because I have literally no idea what F2P people get versus preferred versus subscribers.