Dec 21, 2011

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Halls Of Healing: Leveling As A Healer

Each week or thereabouts here at Ask A Jedi, we’ll meditate on the finer points of the healer’s role in Star Wars: The Old Republic. No matter where your allegiance lies, you’re sure to find guidance here in the Halls Of Healing!

I was lucky enough to be able to get into the game on the first day of Early Access and experience the wonderful process that is leveling in Star Wars: The Old Republic. If there is something to say about doing Missions (known as Questing for you ancient cavemen) it is that they can be hard. Yes, you can pretty much forget going up and soloing bosses designed to be taken down with a group, and sometimes you can fail multiple times just doing your normal Class Missions. These type of Missions makes me remember the days back in World of Warcraft with the rare Class quests. They were totally do-able, but sometimes required multiple attempts before you actually learned how to beat it.

Now, where does healing come into all of this? Leveling as a healer has historically been tedious. You usually do much less damage than your tank or damage-dealing counterparts and things just take much longer to accomplish. This holds true for TOR as well – you will have less damage output than the other roles and since some NPCs are actually designed around you nuking them down quickly, making things much more difficult as a healer.

However, there are aspects to leveling that will actually make things easier as a healer. One of them is that NPCs tend to do a lot of damage, especially when you get to the higher levels. The tanks and damage dealers will take more damage and will have to pause longer between fights to regenerate their health and resources – you won’t need to do this as much as a healer.

Bowdaar

Even Bowdaar needs a heal once in a while.

The other major part is the Companion system. Companions make this game very different in the leveling process from any other MMO I’ve played. Due to the way you can choose and customize your Companion to complement your role and skills, you can mitigate the impact of having reduced damage output. Where damage dealers and tanks might choose a healing Companion you can choose an all out damage dealing Companion or a tanking Companion.

Now, down to what this article really is about: how can you make your leveling in TOR easier and more enjoyable as a healer? Read on for some pro-tips!

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Nov 29, 2011

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Ask A Jedi At DreamHack Winter 2011

Ask A Jedi was in Jönköping, Sweden recently to participate in the world biggest computer gaming festival known as DreamHack.

Over the course of 4 days, gamers from all over Sweden and all over the world gathered to take part in the numerous events inside the halls of Elmia. While the LAN is the biggest part of the event, there are many other activities. Over the years, culture similar to what you see at  music festivals has emerged. I’m not going to try to describe it as there simply aren’t any words for it, it has to be experienced!

This year, DreamHack beat its own record for most users on the same network simultaneously, the highest bandwidth (120 Gbit/s although only 23ish Gbit/s was used) and not to mention, the most bandwidth ever used over the course of the entire LAN party – over 800 TB.

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Nov 15, 2011

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Halls Of Healing: The Social Side Of Healing

Each week or thereabouts here at Ask A Jedi, we’ll meditate on the finer points of the healer’s role in Star Wars: The Old Republic. No matter where your allegiance lies, you’re sure to find guidance here in the Halls Of Healing!

In previous articles we’ve covered topics on game mechanics, advanced classes and the user interface. This week we will take a look at the social side of being a healer.

I’m sure most of you who are reading this will have some form of connection to healing. You’re either planning to play one, have played a healer before or played with a healer on some occasion.

Healing in Groups

In groups the healer’s job is to keep yourself and your group members alive. This can often be mistaken by the majority of players that it’s solely the healer’s job to keep the group alive, not a group effort.

I’m sure many of you will disagree with this and say that, “Everyone needs to be a team player.” I agree that this is highly preferred, but it’s not the case in a majority of groups I’ve played with (I’m generally talking pick up groups here. Not guild runs with people you know. However this is also the case for a vast majority of players inside guilds).

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Oct 11, 2011

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Halls Of Healing: The Healer, The User And The Interface – Part 2

Each week or thereabouts here at Ask A Jedi, we’ll meditate on the finer points of the healer’s role in Star Wars: The Old Republic. No matter where your allegiance lies, you’re sure to find guidance here in the Halls Of Healing!

Last week in part 1, we had a look at the User Interface in The Old Republic and the importance of it to healers. If you haven’t read part 1 yet I suggest you do so prior to reading this one! Don’t forget to check out the comment section there as well, as there was a lot of great ideas and thoughts on the matter.

This week we will take a closer look at the key features that a good MMORPG healer user interface needs. I apologize for the length of this article, there was so much I wanted to say and didn’t want to split this topic in two. I’ve done my best with the formatting to enable those who want to skim the article quickly, to do so. On with the show…

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Oct 5, 2011

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Halls Of Healing: The Healer, The User And The Interface – Part 1

Each week or thereabouts here at Ask A Jedi, we’ll meditate on the finer points of the healer’s role in Star Wars: The Old Republic. No matter where your allegiance lies, you’re sure to find guidance here in the Halls Of Healing!

The User and the Interface

Some time ago, we ran a poll on whether you think add-ons and User Interface customization should be implemented in the game. It is one of the most hotly debated topics of all time in the world of MMORPGs and there are many good arguments both for and against the idea.

For those of you who are completely new to MMORPGs and gaming in general, the interface is made up of the parts of the game that connects you (the player) with the character. In general “User Interface” is directed specifically at the layout and design of the game controls. In reality, the User Interface is everything from the way key bindings works  to how certain elements in the game give you signals in form of sounds and much more. It’s how you communicate with the game, and how the game communicates with you.

In part 1 of this series, we will take a look at how the visual elements of the user interface are designed in the game, compare it with the User Interface of the largest MMORPG, World of Warcraft – all from the perspective of a healer.

Anyone who has spent a decent amount of time healing in an MMORPG, or any game for that matter, has probably realized that healers needs to rely on the User Interface much more than any of other roles. We constantly need to keep track of current health levels of the entire group while still doing everything else that pertains to raiding. It’s also widely known that the good healers aren’t the ones who just stare at their health bars, but rather the ones that keep their eyes on what’s going on in the encounter.

This being said, the quality of the Interface is a big concern to us healers.

The Interface of The Old Republic

Earlier this year Michael Voigt, the Lead UI Artist at BioWare wrote an extended blog about the progress of the User Interface in Star Wars: The Old Republic, explaining the process from original thoughts to what we currently see.

In this blog he touches on several key elements in building a great User Interface, such as the layout, grouping of elements containing the same information, and many aesthetical aspects.

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