Star Wars: The Old Republic

[Ian]

I was in a meeting with the Jedi Council when you pm'd me.  I just got my ship so I'm about ready to depart Coruscant.  I'm leaving tomorrow morning to visit my parents for Christmas, but I'm scrambling right now to get SWTOR installed on my laptop and see if it's runnable on there.  If it is, I'll be playing a bit over the rest of the week, if not, I'll be dormant until I get back from the visit, but I'll still have full internet access so I'll post here to let you know either way.

[Sir Edward]

OK cool, I was going to ask if you saw the "tell" or the "email' I sent. It looked like you caught up pretty quick. You were ahead of my level at that point. I hit 19 last night before logging out. But in any case, my questing time is limited to evenings when my wife doesn't have me doing other things. Heh.

But yeah, once you have the ship, things really open up.

I'm liking this a lot more than WoW right now. I'm getting sufficiently caught up in the story and missions that I'm surprised by the level-ups. In WoW, it felt more like a grind and I was always watching the XP bar.

[Ian]

Yeah, I remember in WoW there always came a point when I ran out of quests and had to sit there and grind for what felt like an eternity to level.  I have had no such experience in SWTOR so for.  I just keep going through my story and pick up any side missions I come across and haven't had to 'grind' once.

The first day I played WoW I remember being really impressed and since then I have tried out tons of other MMO's and never quite got that same feeling and in the end I always went back to WoW because nothing could touch it's level of polish, completeness, and fun.  SWTOR day 1 had surpassed that 'wow' (not to be confused with WoW) factor I got when playing WoW for the first time.  Wow, that's a lot of wow's in once sentence, haha.

Plus it's Star Wars... so how can it get any better than that?

[Sir Edward]

What's funny is that the storyline we're playing (Jedi Consular) is considered by the community to be the least interesting one. I'm enjoying it. But it does make me curious about the others.

The thing is, I'm not big into playing lots of alts. I usually stick to the class that suits my style the best.

[Leganoth]

Well if you guys ever wanna play with me, im on Nadds Sarcophagus

[Sir Edward]

Well, I'm around level 44-45 now. Getting pretty far through the story for the Jedi Consular class. It's pretty good overall.

Something I'm seeing more than in WoW though is the scaling of difficulty. In WoW it was easy to get into a basic class-skill rotation, and even at the higher levels, most of the quests could be done with same tactics.

In SWTOR, there's a sudden increase in difficulty around level 36, and it seems to increase slightly again around 40. It forces you to use the CC and interrupts, and not just faceroll your way through anymore.

Sir Ian, since you're playing a Sage, have you gotten to Lord Vivicar yet? If not, I'll give you a little head's up (not a spoiler). The boss fight itself isn't that bad, but all the stuff you have to get through to get to him is what will kill you. The next patch (today, or this week maybe?) is supposed to fix some of this, but I think it's buggier than they realize. You'd activate a terminal and get immediately aggroed by like half the map. You'll have to let me know how your experience compares.

I hope they improve the crafting at some point. They modeled it (and a lot of the game) off of WoW, and unfortunately they copied the idea of making most of the crafting useless until end-game, and even then, most of it gets out-classed by RAID/PVP award gear. I'm regretting taking on a crafting profession, in a way. I'll probably hold onto it for now in case they make it better, but we'll see.

[Ian]

I'm 36 right now.  Yes I've already done the Lord Vivicar fight.  I'm spec'd healer so it wasn't too bad, I've got quyzen relatively up to date gear-wise and I can keep him healed and keep my dots up on the boss at the same time.  But yeah, I hit that part where you aggro everyone on the level and just got blasted down, I used a lot of med-probes and just widdled away at what I could each time until the numbers were manageable.  I'm currently progressing through Chapter 2 of the story, I'm on Balmorra right now trying to oust the Empire.

I do like the necessity to use CC and tactics and not just pull all the trash you see and AoE everything down a'la Wrath of the Lich King.  The things that are annoying me right now are 1. the ability delay and ability animation issues that some have brought up, sometimes my interrupts don't go through as a result which get frustrating fast  2. the inability to play with high-res textures, while not a huge deal is kind of a peculiar bug I've never seen in a game before 3. the GTN needs a serious overhall, the interface is pretty much unusable.

Other things I would like to see are custom UI mods or at least tweaks when in party's, and yeah, crafting feels like an afterthought, I just slice on the side to make some extra credits, when crafting becomes more useful I'll worry about it more.

Overall though, SWTOR is a breath of fresh air and has real potential to be a top tier MMO that's around for a long time.  I love the story line.  I think since the end-game isn't fully developed yet I may look into a shield spec'd trooper as a possible secondary character to level.

[Sir Edward]

Past 40, as a tanky DPSer Shadow, I started to find some of the boss fights nearly impossible, attempting them at-level or with me one level too low.... until I started switching up the companions to suit the situation. Qyzen has been my favorite all the way through, and has been best for me for most fights, since between my taunts and his tank stance, I can usually ping-pong the aggro back and forth and make use of both of our health pools, and his DPS isn't terrible for a straight tank.

But some of these boss fights are needing a bit more, and my interrupts aren't always enough. With Tharan, even without him being geared up as well, these fights got a lot easier, since the healing is the one part I can't do myself. It made ALL THE DIFFERENCE when I fought Stark (class quest right after Belsavis, roughly around level 43). It went from impossible to almost feeling like I was cheating. Just a tip with him, it's all about breaking line of sight on his attacks, and interrupting his heals.

I haven't seen so much of a problem with the ability delay, but I've seen the forum threads. I'm wondering if this affects sages more. Maybe I'm just spending too much time watching my cooldowns instead of the animation to notice the problem?

The hi-res thing doesn't bother me so much, in that they can just patch that at some point. I've seen other games limit it at launch and then put out a patch a few weeks later to unlock it. Not sure why that happens.

Agreed on the GTN. It's horrific. Half the features don't work, and it's very limited with what does work. Hopefully they'll fix that up before long.

But yeah, I'm loving the stories, and the cinematics. I'm just starting to experiment with the PVP warzones. Just did one last night to get my feet wet. I scored right in the middle for the overall rankings for the mission, which isn't too bad for a first try. And our team won, which is nice.

[Sir Edward]

Well, I started getting hit with ability delay pretty badly last night. Wow, that was nuts. It seems there was a lot of latency in Voss last night for some reason. I'd hit an interrupt and a couple of seconds later it won't have happened, so I'll hit it again... and then a few seconds later it would actually occur. Crazy.

I'm wondering if it's a server-lag issue.

[Ian]

It doesn't feel like server lag to me, because it happens regardless of my ping.  Mostly I see it with interrupts and heals.  With interrupts I'll see an enemy casting bar, hit mind snap, watch the enemy casting bar finish, then watch mind snap fizzle because the mob has already gotten their spell off despite me casting long before they finished their casting time.

With heals, this video I think best displays the problem. 



When I cast a spell with say a 2 sec cast time, then move forward at 1 sec, it should cancel the spell, cancel the trigger of the GCD, and then immediately let me re-cast a spell when I stop moving.  This happens in WoW perfectly every time regardless of latency.  In SWtoR, the spell cancels, the GCD appears to cancel, but it will not let you cast again. 

There's also the issue of if I cast, and then move exactly when my casting bar completes, the spell should go off.  It works in WoW, but in SWtoR the spell will not be cast.  There's a fraction of time that prevents casts from actually going off when they should, that is presumably the next clock cycle after a casting timer finishes or is canceled (provided you're outside the GCD now in the case of a full cast).  Works in WoW, not SWtoR... this is why people are so frustrated in PvP, because it's that split second timing that makes or breaks PvP.  The limitation should be the player's skill and reflexes, not the game engine.

[Sir Edward]

Well, server lag and network latency are two separate issues...

But thanks for the explanation and video! NOW I see what you're talking about. You're right, the global cooldown shouldn't continue quietly in the background after something is canceled.

I've noticed something similar with mounting speeders. If you start moving exactly at the end of the animation, you end up back on foot, unlike in WoW where you'd be mounted and moving.

[Ian]

I've noticed something similar with mounting speeders. If you start moving exactly at the end of the animation, you end up back on foot, unlike in WoW where you'd be mounted and moving.

Yeah, in WoW I would always do that.  It would look like you're character is just running super fast for a second, but that was just because the animation hadn't caught up yet.  In SWtoR 50% of the time I try to mount my speeder I get dumped on to the ground again and then have to intentionally let the animation finish instead.   

I know a lot of people on the forums get all bent out of shape when you compare SWtoR to WoW, but let's face it... there's really only 1 major competitor in the MMO market.  If a new cola flavored soda came out today, it's completely fair to compare it to Coke or Pepsi even though they've got quite the head-start.    I really want SWtoR to succeed, 1. because it's Star Wars and therefore the greatest IP of all time (since LOTRO went and botched up the other greatest IP of all time) 2. it's Bioware, and I've been a fan since I played Baldur's Gate 1 back when things like THAC0 were cool!  3. I love MMO's but can't wrap my head around Pandas... lol

[Sir Edward]

I realized why I've never really noticed the ability delay-- I rely mostly on instant-cast abilities. The global cooldown affects me more than any single ability's cast-time.

Agreed. WoW simply is the elephant in the room. And not only that, but SWTOR directly emulated WoW's method of gear scaling, talent trees, skill training, and how those things tie to level advancement. Granted, every game is going to have some variations on these themes, but SWTOR took WoW's design philosophy almost 1:1. Comparisons are inevitable.

I think SWTOR will succeed just fine. So far the numbers seem to indicate this. Supposedly over 2 million copies have been sold, and they've hit a peak concurrency of 350,000.

I've started hitting the PVP a bit more, BTW. I'm wishing I had about 20 buttons on my mouse now. Heh. I'm still doing the "hunt and peck" with the mouse cursor to hit most of my abilities on the quick-bar, but I'm often ranking somewhere in the middle of my team at the end of the matches.

[Sir Edward]

I hit 50 over the weekend, but I'm not done with the storyline yet. I'm getting close though. I'm probably about 3/4 of the way through Corellia.

I just bought the rank 3 riding skill, and some of my other skills, and a speeder (that I'm now not as happy with due to clipping issues), and I'm almost broke. I'm regretting trying to be a crafter now. Artifice is pretty useless at level 50, and has been nothing but a money sink all the way up. Unless you're really dedicated to reverse engineering everything to the point of making purple quality items, there's no market for it, and prices have crashed in the past week on most things.

Time to rethink my strategy... even though it's pretty late in the game.

[Ian]

Grats on 50!  I'm running artifice too but haven't zactually worked on it in a while. I was planning on waiting for some updates to the crafting system.  I keep my gathering skills up to date for now though.

I have an alt that I rolled yesterday.  He's a trooper, going to go tank with him.  Just level 11 right now sitting at the republic fleet for the time being. I rolled him because I got my wife to sub over the weekend, and this way she'll have someone to quest with.  My sage is working through Belsavis right now and doing some warzones on the side.  If you need a personal healbot for pvp let me know.