SWTOR

SWTOR Disciplines Calculator by swtor_miner - Dulfy

tl;dr minimum companion spoilers: Treek and HK remain, affection being renamed to influence, new ranks of companion gifts, most new companions will have crafting bonuses similar to HK/Treek. Their stats will scale based on influence, gear is merely there for looks.

Expansion releases with 9 chapters, then 1 chapter/month. You can sub for the first month to play then let it lapse for a year and play the rest if that's your thing.

I will almost certainly pick up the expansion and give it a try. I'm probably one of those customers that bioware hates. I play like 1 month a year to get the new stories and then quit until the next batch comes out. I suspect this "1 chapter a month" thing is to combat customers like me. Now if it really takes a month to finish a chapter then I will probably stay subbed year round. But if i can finish a chapter over a weekend then I'll just queue them up.

I refuse to feel bad about it though. You would think that a major game publisher would put a lot of emphasis on creating tools that would allow story tellers to pump out new content quickly and cheaply to keep filthy casuals like me hooked year round...

I really can't tell from the calculator if the gameplay has changed all that much. From what I remember with the Revan expansion, my smuggler was ok with the changes but they changed the sorc just enough that lightning spec no longer worked. I'm sure it was balanced and all but I could no longer just run around casting lightning over and over while pet tanked. New cool downs got in the way I think. Really ticked me off. I liked running around doing constant lighting on mobs (or npcs if the quest would allow it). That was the whole fun of the class to me. Keeping up with the 15 step rotation I got off of Dulfy to accommodate the new "improvements" took a lot of the fun out of the sorc for me. Hopefully they actually simplify this time around.

Does ANYONE actually like rotations?

Rotations are not fun. You do them for optimal dps/effectiveness/buff up time, whatever, and that's about it. It saps the fun out of game play, but there will always be someone that figures out to the N'th degree the absolute best standard sequence of actions and people will do that to be the best. That being said, some rotations are MORE FUN than others. I like a moderate to slightly hard difficulty rotation, with some randomness to break up the monotony, and a sprinkling of situational, cooldown, and one off stuff to keep things lively. Some of the classes in this game I can't get into either due to rotation flow or honestly, just visually how they execute. Love my Jedi Guardian, fucking hate how the same thing flows on a Juggernaut, aesthetically it just doesn't feel or look right. Probably because I got so use to pub side. If rotations weren't... well rotations, then I think you could unlock a lot of fun. Not sure how to do something like that without imposing some pretty different mechanics. You would need some kind of attack typing with different combinations of triggers and counters for different enemies, so that way combat was always relatively different, encounter to encounter, based on what you were fighting and it's skill sets, defenses, and attack focus.

WageSlave_sl said:

I really can't tell from the calculator if the gameplay has changed all that much. From what I remember with the Revan expansion, my smuggler was ok with the changes but they changed the sorc just enough that lightning spec no longer worked. I'm sure it was balanced and all but I could no longer just run around casting lightning over and over while pet tanked. New cool downs got in the way I think. Really ticked me off. I liked running around doing constant lighting on mobs (or npcs if the quest would allow it). That was the whole fun of the class to me. Keeping up with the 15 step rotation I got off of Dulfy to accommodate the new "improvements" took a lot of the fun out of the sorc for me. Hopefully they actually simplify this time around.

Does ANYONE actually like rotations?

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Currently playing my sorc with lightning spec, and tbh Im destroying next to anything with Khem tanking and me just AoE blasting stuff (and fire off procced skills when they show up). Its by and far the easiest class to play right now if you stick to solo/instance stuff. I have all classes at 60 now, thanks x12 xp boost, and nothing comes close to the sorcerer.

AoEing has never been easier for any ranged class with the +25% damage talents. Rotations are generally there for them to justify making more than Fireball and Frostbolt and doing 111111112111111112 spam. But sometimes the class devs make it too tedious and almost all the time it's linear with no actual options: whatever hits the hardest is correct.

Rotations are fine because all it really does is give people a guideline on what to do. Knowing a rotation is all well and good but the player behind the keyboard still can't just sit there and hit keys and hope to be effective. The problem ultimately comes from when that does happen, which is kind of where I feel Sorc/Sage stands at the moment, and to a slightly lesser degree PT/VG. You can get a good sense of both ease of play as well as competitive advantage by looking at the class breakdowns in the Arena Seasons.

Most of them comes down to optimal opener (buff/debuffs) -> faceroll by priority. With the last round of talents any energy management is practically gone for everyone so its actually hard to play wrong.

There are exceptions (marauders? wizard tanks?)

How hard would this be to get back into if you haven't played in over a year? I think I made a Sith Jugg.

Extremely fast if you sub, you blaze through 1-55 with 12x story exp and they literally throw gear at you at the start and end of Revan expansion.

The main draw is the story though, so if you're a spacebar skipper looking for end game this might not be the best choice. That might change in 2 months, no one knows cause they aren't saying much.

Brahma_sl said:

How hard would this be to get back into if you haven't played in over a year? I think I made a Sith Jugg.

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Not at all especially if you start with a new character. I just started playing again a couple months ago and it had been many years since I had last played. If you had a key authenticator on your account you probably have a crap load of cartel funbucks to purchase stuff with too.

Treat this game like KOTOR and not and MMO. If by the end of KOTOR you kind of still like it, then it's an MMO too so you might get more enjoyment out of it. If not... you still played some cool KOTOR.

Draegan_sl said:

Treat this game like KOTOR and not and MMO. If by the end of KOTOR you kind of still like it, then it's an MMO too so you might get more enjoyment out of it. If not... you still played some cool KOTOR.

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That is pretty much how I am playing it enjoy all the story lines and once those are done still have mmo stuff to do.

I am up to 7, 60's now.

I got back into this about a week into June 2015.
I had played in beta, early launch 2011 until May 2012. Came back for Rise of the Hutt Cartel, lasted about 6 weeks. Came back again for Galactic Strongholds, lasted a week. Came back for Galactic Starfighter, lasted a day.

All that said I only had 4 50's somethings when I came back in June of this year. I raised all of them to 60 plus started 3 more to get all my class buffs and crafting skills I wanted. I am still enjoying it more as a solo game with PvE/PvP stuff to do during prime times. I do all the various forms of the game everyday. PvP/GSF pop mostly during prime time. Operations you can pick up for any of them during prime time too. HM flashpoints are a crap shoot, but I always finish them. You can two man most of them with a companion. And tactical flashpoints are soloable with your companion after you have your Ziost gear (free iLevel 190 in almost all slots).

Now I will enjoy it for the next two months I am sure. And I was really hyped for KotFE until I saw the companion data-mined stuff above... Now ugh that could be a killer if that is its final form. Lets hope we get more good news about KotFE soon.

I suppose they're removing a lot of companions and such to streamline the content as they probably don't want to pay the voice actors any longer. If the new expansion (from what I gather) is more of a single story line it makes sense that they'll limit the amount of characters we get to talk to. I'm OK with this, truth be told I do feel some attachment to companions, but most of them are pretty uninteresting. If they create a larger group of more fleshed out companions which include hk-55 and such to bring back that KOTOR feeling then I'll be happy. I don't need to bring my apprentice with me, as long as the new guys are cool. I guess it hurts the replayability but that's fine, I'll play 1 character through the story and that'll likely be enough for me

I was about to say that didn't make sense but then I realized most companions have things they say when you get into a certain area so their use is ongoing, at least in a limited fashion.

For those experiencing problems in Windows 10, I foundthisyesterday. Apparently DX9 (which is what SWTOR uses) is emulated in W10. Should help.

I did all the steps in that post after I logged out yesterday so I'll see how things go later today. Anything has to help, since 3.0 and now W10, performance has been shit.

Started my bounty hunter last night, wasn't feeling my Jug. Already look more like Boba Fett than I expected to be possible lol. Haven't decided yet if I want to do Powertech or Merc, but I've played Commando as a trooper so I have a general idea of what one side should be like. I know that powertechs are typically 10m out at most, any other insights into the class to help me make a decision?

Mercs are pretty fun but power techs are pretty great too. Really depends if you want dps/tank options or dps/heal options. If you want more stationary long range DPS go merc if you want to go up and hadoken/flamethrower/nut punch for victory go power tech.