Ready for Rise?

 Posted by
Apr 022013
 

sisyphus_100If you’re like me and you pre-ordered the Rise of the Hutt Cartel (ROTHC) expansion,  then this time next week you will be playing your way through Makeb on the journey to 55. With only a week to go there is still time to clean-up house and get yourself ready for ROTHC.

Expansions are game changers, and while it doesn’t have to be a race to get to 55 you need to understand that 50 is no longer max level and you will have to work your way back to the elder game. You’re not level one per se, but you are leveling again.

Anyone familiar with the story of Sisyphus? Sisyphus is a character from Greek Mythology. He was an evil and clever king who, when he died, was sent Hades. His punishment was that he had to roll a giant rock up a hill. Just as he was about to reach the top of the hill, he would lose his grip and the rock would roll back down to the bottom, and he would have to start over. This is the nature of expansions in progression oriented MMOs. Lucky for us that Makeb is way cooler than pushing a rock up a hill.

Now that you understand that ROTHC represents a fresh start, here are some things you can do to make that climb all the more pleasant and easy.

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Declare a Main

Expansions are a great time to switch roles and/or toons. Got roped into healing, but hated it? Switch to DPS, or become a tank. Whatever it is you like, that’s what you should do, and expansions are the perfect time to make that change. Just inform your Ops leader of your intentions ahead of time. This will allow him to plan as he may need to find a new healer, or manage an over abundance of DPS. The goods new is your Ops team is on hiatus now and you won’t be hurting them by making a change.

Level Your Crew Skills

In ROTHC there will be a new max level for all Crew Skills. If you have any that aren’t at the current max level, you should get them there so you can train to level them to the new cap. Nothing worse than going to Makeb and being unable to scavenge metals, crystals and other materials because you aren’t at a high enough level.

Ready Your Companions

Max out their affection and finish out their quest lines. Doing this will shorten the time it takes to level up Crew Skills and and you’ll get a nice increase to the Prescence stat which will help when fighting on Makeb. Decide now which companion will be at your side and make sure their gear is up to par.

Army of Alts

I have seven level 50s. Right now this is great because I have one of every Crew Skill maxed out. I’m extremely self-sufficient. Once the expansion hits I’ll have to level up each one of these toons and their associated Crew Skills. That’s not going to happen overnight. In fact, that can easily be a 2-3 month process. Additionally if you run Ops on multiple toons then you will have to gear up each of those accordingly.

Depending on when your Ops team is planning to roll, you may have your work cut out for you in getting all of your toons Ops ready. If you’re an Ops leader be prepared to have main toons only in the beginning and don’t count on any team members having alts they can bring to fill a role if someone is missing.

Clean Out Your Inventory

Organize your inventory, sell any crating materials, companion gifts, and other items that you don’t need. You’ll be getting new stuff from Makeb and you want to make sure that you have the necessary room to hold everything. You might just make a few credits in the process.

Empty Your Quest Log

You’ll want to complete and/or delete any lingering quests in your log. You want to hit Makeb with as close to zero quests as possible. One trick I learned from my WoW days is that you’ll want to used daily quests to get a wee head start. The night before the ROTHC goes live, complete a full set of daily quests, but don’t turn them in. When the expansion drops start by turning them all in to get some “free” XP.

Save Your Credits

Every purchase you’re considering, should be made with ROTHC in mind. Whatever you think you might need right now, you probably don’t. Try to bank as many credits as you can. You’ll need them in ROTHC. You’ll be spending money on new skills, new schematics, and new materials. There will be new levels of augments so at some point you will need to re-augment all of your gear. All of those one-time costs you incurred when you first leveled you will incur again.

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Expansions are exciting and fun, and this one is loaded with lots of new content and cool things to explore. It’s also a reset in terms of gear,crew skills, talents and abilities. You’ll be spending a lot of time and effort to essentially get to the point your are at now. It’s just the nature of things, but hopefully we’ll all some fun and create some new MMO memories along the way.

So grab a rock and let’s head to Makeb!

Pay to Win (sort of)

 Posted by
Mar 012013
 

mods_27_gtn

For the better part of a year I’ve mainly focused on leveling toons and experiencing the various class stories. I have six level 50′s with only the Jedi Counselor and Smuggler stories left to complete. I’ve been “flying casually” so to speak.

Lately I’ve been jumping into the elder game and running Operations in a newly formed progression group in my guild. Go Team MXC! We’ll be jumping into Terror From Beyond next week.

My guild is an Imperial guild, and with four level 50′s I had to choose one that I was going to progress with. I chose my Arsenal Spec’d Mercenary (A main toon with the word “Hunter” in the class. Shocking I know.)

So as I begin researching how stats and gear worked in this game I was surprised to learn that with enough credits, and perhaps and army of alts, one could buy their way into a full set of gear that was practically BiS. That’s right, the best stats without ever setting foot in the Ops that drop that quality of gear. I know a couple of Auction House barons in WoW that would love to buy their way into hard mode raid gear.

The way that this work is, crafters can make level 63 (27) armoring, mods and enhancements and sell them on the GTN (If you’re looking for a good introduction into how the gear levels are structured in SWTOR take a look at this article at Force Junkies.) This is the same level stats that come with the Dreadguard gear, only with you in control of optimizing the numbers beyond what comes with the armor. It’s min/max nirvana. The only pieces that you can’t buy with the best stats are the Dreadguard armoring with set bonuses. To get set bonuses without running Ops you would need to purchase the Campaign armoring with Black Hole comms.

Now granted this is an expensive proposition with mods costing 500K credits on the low end and upwards of a million on the high end. That said, if you’re willing to sell items on the GTN and, say, run half a doze alts through dailies, it’s entirely doable. Whether or not it’s worth doing with Rise of the Hutt Cartel coming is another matter.

If you factor in the Cartel Market and the ability to buy coins with real money, and then buy items with coins, and then sell said items on the GTN, you now have way of turning real money into credits and using those credits to buy the best gear. Is it practical? No. Is it possible? Yes.

I haven’t decided yet if I want to pursue getting all the level 63 mods from the GTN. I may grind to get a few here and there, and then just get what I can from Ops. I suspect that come the expansion a pile of credits will be much more valuable then a near BiS set of gear that I’ll replace at level 55.

As someone who is just exploring the elder game I find this to be an interesting concept. How do you feel about high-end mods being available on the GTN? A good thing, a bad thing or a non-issue? Just curious.

May the Force Be With You!

A Game of Operation

 Posted by
Aug 182011
 

Okay, let’s see, we take the little tweezers, avoid the metal sides, grab the funny bone and ZAP!!! No wait, we’re not talking about the game of Operation, we’re talking about Operations in The Old Republic.

Over at that Gamescom conference in Germany, Bioware did a live demo of the Eternity Vault, the game’s first Operation (aka, raid). So how was the presentation?

Let’s just say if I had been there I would’ve spewed my hefeweizen all over the conference floor. It looks amazing. Things were fast paced and action packed. It looked like pure controlled chaos. If you haven’t seen any of Bioware’s presentations, I encourage you to check out this post over at Darth Hater.

Now, until I get my hands on this thing I won’t really know how good it is, but here are some things I liked.

  • Raid sizes of 8 and 16 players. Having experienced 10 and 25-man raids in WoW, I’d say SWTOR got the numbers right.
  • Players were able to get into the action right away.
  • There didn’t appear to be a lot of wasted time. You know standing around, marking targets, CC pulls, waiting for pats to clear, the sort of thing that’s very common in WoW raids.
  • It wasn’t a giant cluster where the tank rounds up all the adds in one spot and all the DPS just AoE them down. There were opportunities for AoE, but it seemed like more of a reaction to how the fight was proceeding rather than a strategy in and of itself.
  • That Annhilator droid was one bad Mutha!
  • Players looked like they were participating in a story; the story wasn’t intruding on the game play (i.e., here comes a random cinematic of a bridge being built).
  • Critters! Every good raid has it’s assortment of critters that players love to one-shot, and it’s nice to see the Eternity Vault is no different (I’m looking at you Mr. Tauntaun).

Players will spend most of their MMO life at max level, and with SWTOR that life needs to begin at 50. I love raiding in WoW, and I hope that Operations offer the same level of challenge and fun that I get from those raids. From what I saw this week, it looks very promising.

How about you guys, did you like what you saw? Are you excited about the Operations in SWTOR? While you think about that, I’m going to grab another hefeweizen and watch those presentations again.

May the Force be with you!