ang griffen's journal

And I cancelled my sub to SWTOR. :( I've got about 20 days left, so I may go back on at some point and try to finish getting to 50, but I just sort of... stopped playing. If it ever goes F2P or sub cost goes down significantly, I'll probably look into picking it up again, but I just wasn't getting $20/month of playtime out of it, what with WoW and trying to be semi-active in fandom proper again.

I've got some F2P games on my to-play list next, so expect some "omg let me tell you about this new game!!!!" shenanigans in the future. They're mostly grindy Korean things, so that'll be new and exciting. Hopefully with no MMO-platforming this time, though.

Things I did in SWTOR today:
- Got promoted to Major
- Boned my XO

Initially I was very anti-Romance Option with Cranky Cat Man, but he is so hilariously bad at feelings. He is also, as far as I have seen, the superior male romance option for the Republic classes. (Tharan Cedrax [Consular] and Doc [Jedi Knight] are both initially presented, at least, as varying degrees of smarmy womanizers, and I haven't played my Smuggler enough yet to have any first-hand experience based feelings on the subject of Corso Riggs, but based on what my Smuggler friends have told me, Aric Jorgan's laconic WHAT-ARE-THESE-FEELINGS-ness seems far superior to what I hear Corso does, which is make *_____* eyes at you and wax poetic on how hard you two are getting married in the future.)

More on actual gameplay experiences later, I guess.

So, here is a short summary of the planets you will quest on as a young Republic trooper:

Ord Mantell (1-10): Rocks and trees and stuff! Actually kind of pretty, in retrospect, although Tython (jedi start planet) is much much prettier.
Coruscant(10-16): City planet. Mostly gray in the questing bits.
Taris (16-20): Has trees, which is a plus. Has spacezombies, which is a minus.
Nar Shaddaa (20-24): space las vegas
Tatooine (24-28): desert

And then at 28 you get to go to Alderaan. ( Alderaan is really pretty. And it has trees! )

Sadly, Alderaan suffers even more from "everything is far away" than Tatooine did. (I think I've been spoiled by all the new Cataclysm flight paths in WoW where you can take a taxi basically down the street.) Mostly because of the fjords, so when your map's not explored, you head out to a place trying to get to a quest objective, and then you're like "oh, it's on the complete other side of this ledge and all the way down there." and you have to go ALL THE WAY BACK and around again on another path.

But it sure is pretty, so I don't mind so much!

Also, the taxis, which on most planets are speeders or hovercars or something, are ( flying dolphins. )

(So far Alderaan has had a lot of quests where you have to kill elites. I kind of love killing elites because I am a healer, so my companion does all the DPS and I sit there and heal him. It takes like 2 minutes to kill one, but I'm also never in danger of dying? :D? :D?)

( Extremely mild spoilers for companions you get as a Trooper )

Yes, that means I am already finished with Nar Shaddaa on my Trooper and have moved on to Tatooine. I haven't done much there though, because I decided to spend this evening playing around with my Jedi Consular.

( He is sometimes shiny and has no eyes )

The Consular questline is not as compelling as the Trooper questline, but the gameplay is pretty fun. I took Sage as my Advanced Class because I am pretty fond of healing, but I'm leveling him as Balance, which is a ranged DPS spec.

Originally I was going to have him go Dark Side, but I have a hard time being as huge of an asshole as that generally compels me to do, so he's currently Neutral-Leaning-Dark. He'll eventually hit Dark I, I'm sure. Eventually.

It's also kind of weird going through and redoing these questlines on a character of the opposite gender. This guy is presented with way more opportunities to flirt with people than my Trooper was. (And one of the people my Trooper wanted to flirt with she couldn't because she was a lady. Although the game totally made up for it by giving me that hot SIS agent guy on Nar Shaddaa.) I especially enjoyed getting to be like "Y HALO THAR SENATOR KAYL" on this guy.

( Unrelated to flirting, but related to conversations, this is the best conversation option of all time: )

That is all.

So I've gotten my Republic Trooper out of the start zone, and she's level 11. I've chosen Commando as her Advanced Class, but haven't decided if I'm speccing her into healing (Combat Medic) or damage (Gunnery, probably Actually assault specialist? Which sounds basically like being a fire mage, but with guns.) [note to self: possible healing spec? couple points i'm not sure enough of mechanics yet to be 100% on, but seems largely what i'll be going for]. I'll probably go healing though, because shooting people with healing bullets sounds awesome. (No, this is true! Apparently you put healing ammo in your weapon and then Hammer - the free filler shot - becomes HEALING BULLETS.)

I'm not sure I like the voice-overed/cutscened quest givers/quest turn-ins. (Although apparently I can skip most of the VA with spacebar, which I did not know until just now.) It's really awesome as far as immersion goes, but it makes questing much more time consuming. Partially because I have to sit and mull over my responses constantly. Being able to see direct Light Side/Dark Side effects has helped, but now that I have my first companion I'm always sitting around fretting about if he approves of me. Even though all that does is make crafting faster.

The Trooper story is interesting. It's very military-y, which is not normally my thing, but I'm actually pretty invested in the story hook that gets you off Ord Mantell. That said, I'm sort of sad that my Dark Side toon is probably going to be my Consular and my Light Side toon is probably going to be my Trooper, since I think they would probably be somewhat less depressing the other way around.

Also, spoilers, whatever, but the... penultimate(?) quest for Troopers on Ord Mantell (when you're sent to deactivate the bomb in the Separatist Stronghold) was pretty brutal. As far as I can tell it seems to be intended as "You are possibly a tanking capable class. We will now kill you repeatedly until you learn how to pull this room and how to assess which of these types of mobs you need to kill first to minimize your damage." Pulling was always my least favorite part of tanking, so this clearly went over super well. (Hint: it involves having a lot of medpacks to survive the strong mobs who hit like trucks, a lot of line of sight pulling, and the patience to wait for one normal class mob to pat around by himself so you don't pull him with the five pack and kill yourself.)

Crafting in this game seems to be largely divorced from earning credits. (The best way to make a ton of credits is with the Slicing gathering profession, apparently, which is basically the "print money" profession.) So I decided to go with professions I actually wanted to have for my characters. I picked bioanalysis/biochem/diplomacy, but I haven't really played around with the professions system much yet.

As far as gameplay goes, I'm a bit worried that I'm level 11 and feel like I have too many buttons. I know there are some I will just take off my bars eventually because I don't use them ever. FTR My "rotation" has largely been Explosive Round > High Impact Bolt or Sticky Grenade that random mob over to the side > Explosive Round > High Impact Bolt. On Strong mobs it's Explosive > Hammer > High Impact if Plasma's procced, repeat. If a buncha dudes get in melee range I use Pulse Cannon, which hits HARD. I've been using Hammer as filler because it's cell-free and gives me lots of chances to proc Plasma, but I don't know if that will stay true now that I've got a lot of my Commando special abilities. I have been having moderate trouble with the targeting system, though, so I'll have to play around with that.

Other minor troubles I've been having: Party chat suddenly became invisible to me today, so I made a complete ass of myself with the guy I was partied with by completely ignoring him. :( He eventually just dropped group, and I feel bad. Apparently this is a known bug that is fixed by relogging, but it is sad!

I'm not sure how long I will remain entertained by this game, as it is sort of fiddly in ways that don't appeal to me, but has some fun parts that do. Will report back once I've gotten my ship and maybe once I've actually done a Flashpoint or two with some people.

I'll also try to take screenshots more in the future. And by "more" I mean "at all".