Ask A Jedi | An Outpost for Citizens of Star Wars: The Old Republic

Feb 14, 2012

Halls Of Healing: Building A Healing Team, Part 3 – Motivation!

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!

We have now covered ways you can find and recruit healers and how to build up a good base of communications in your team, but something we haven’t covered is motivation. As far as raiding goes motivation is probably the most important factor of them all when you’re aiming to make progress. If your fellow players don’t have any desire to be around, you will come across problems such as people not showing up, poor performance, attitude issues and general burnout. Issues for players who aren’t new to the raiding scene are probably all too familiar with.

How to actually go about this is very different for each and every Operation team, as every team and member has his or her own ways of gaining motivation. However, since all your members are in your Operation team you can assume that they are either interested in progression and loot, tactical challenges or they are just interested in doing something fun with their friends. I’d say that every team needs a little bit of each of these to be successful, and if you make sure you have all these things you will keep the majority of your players interested and motivated.

Feb 14, 2012

Posted by Lethality | 12 Comments

Patch Notes: 1.1.3 – Surge Rating, Bug Fixes & More

Today, BioWare pushed patch 1.1.3 to the live servers and seems to catch a lot of little bug fixes. The biggest change seems to be in the re-balancing of surge rating, which seems to make more sense the way it’s now described. Being Valentine’s Day, I would have expected some sort of boost to companion affection, but that’s another issue ;)

You can view the full patch notes for 1.1.3 below, or you can check out BioWare’s official patch notes page for these as well as all previous patch notes!

1.1.3 Patch Notes — 2/14/2012

Classes and Combat

General

Surge rating has been re-balanced. It now reaches diminishing returns the same way as other damage ratings, and its per point damage contribution has been reduced by approximately 10%.

Bounty Hunter

Mercenary

Arsenal

Stabilizers: Correctly adds pushback resistance to Unload.

Trooper

Commando

Gunnery

Steadied Aim: Correctly adds pushback resistance to Full Auto.

Feb 14, 2012

Posted by Lord Paladin | 15 Comments

Breakdown: The Cybertech Mods You Want!

Breakdown is designed to to fill that stressful void while Star Wars: The Old Republic is down for maintenance. Each Tuesday morning, we’ll look at a topic and try to break it down to the basics. In the end, we hope to educate, entertain, and prevent you from having your own Breakdown!

This week’s Breakdown is about Modifications! If you’re an avid customizable gear user you know that keeping up with all of the different modifications for your gear can be dizzying. Every class, and every spec, has something different you want to focus on. On top of that, once you hit the 30s, the number of options you have grow considerably! If you haven’t already, go back and read my previous article on Enhancements (there were so many they needed their own article!) This week, we’re going to break down all the different types of Modification mods and Armoring mods available to you, so that you know which ones you want to slot into your favorite set of custom gear.

First, let’s start with some definitions:

When you’re a “lowbie” (below level 30) You’re going to use one of the “Basic” mods. These terms work for both Armoring and Modifications.

Might = Strength (Jedi Knight & Sith Warrior)
Reflex = Aim (Trooper & Bounty Hunter)
Resolve = Will (Consular & Inquisitor)
Skill = Cunning (Smuggler & Agent)

22 Series: Each time you go up a level range, the series of Enhancements, Modifications, Armoring, Hilts, Barrels, etc… will increase. The 22 series is the highest level that crafters can make (not to be confused with the different qualities such as prototype and artifact). Every time you increase in rating, you’re increasing in the level requirement and the magnitude of the stats that are on that particular item modification.

Click to Enlarge

Rating: If you look carefully at the Armoring mods, they will have something that shows you the rating. In the above example, it says “Armor Rating 70.” This doesn’t really mean anything until you slot it into a piece of customizable armor, and that will depend on if it is heavy, medium, or light armor. The higher the rating, the higher the value of armor. Artifact pieces will have the same level requirement (such as level 31) but instead of being rating 70, they will be considerably higher, granting you a better bonus (and better stats) for the same level range.

Now without further ado, I give you Ask A Jedi’s newest Breakdown crafting modification chart:

Click to Enlarge

This chart includes the previous one on Enhancements, as well as Modification mods and Armoring mods. The bonuses marked in here are for the basic prototype quality that anyone can make. Prior to level 31, you’ll want to use the “lowbie” ones I mentioned above. Also, the italicized and ~~struck out~~ Enhancements are the repeats (exact duplicate) of the one above it.

Hopefully this will help you next time you decide to peruse the Galactic Trade Market (and remember that the one on Nar Shaddaa is cross faction), or the next time you hit up your local crafter. As always, I hope I’ve helped educate you on more of the basics, and I hope you’ll join me next week when the servers are down for another Breakdown!

Feb 13, 2012

Posted by Cormeister | 2 Comments

Yellow Posts: Cooldown Animation and Reverse Engineering

Other than public test server updates, the dev tracker has been relatively quiet this week.

Easily the biggest thread of the week was started by Joveth Gonzalez, Associate Online Community Manager, titled “Poll: What do you think about the new changes made to global cooldown UI in 1.1.2?”. The poll has since been closed with 57% responding “They’re terrible!”, 31% responding “They’re good!”, and 12% responding “I don’t care”.

BioWare’s Stephen Reid, Senior Online Community Manager, wants to stress that the developer’s have heard the feedback from the community and changes are coming. If you saw the community blog post on Friday, then you know that you are going to have a lot more flexibility with how your cooldown animations are displayed. So when exactly are these changes coming? According to Mr. Reid, sometime within the next couple of weeks:

…tentatively scheduled for deployment in the week beginning Monday 20th.

Personally, I am really excited for the cooldown text functionality. That was one of the first mods I installed when I played WoW so I can’t wait to have the same functionality as a standard feature in TOR. It’s also really nice to see the devs respond so quickly to issues like this. The cooldown animation changes were not received very well by a lot of players, but the devs saw the feedback and are making quite a few changes to improve the animations.

This gives me a lot of hope for the future of TOR if the devs are willing to listen to feedback and make changes quickly.

User Priam created a thread to ask “Is RE [Reverse Engineering] Broken?” He reverse engineered quite a few items and never got a blue upgrade schematic. So, he wanted to know if the “drop” rate was stealth-nerfed in the most recent patch. Turns out that it is just a bug and will soon be fixed. Here is Patrick Malott, Systems Designer, with the details:

The reverse engineering return rate is not currently working as intended. In an upcoming patch, we are improving the reverse engineering rates – especially for the higher-level items.

Feb 13, 2012

Posted by Lethality | 51 Comments

Blue Milk & Cereal: Are You Rolling An Alt?

No day would be complete without the breakfast of Jedi: Blue Milk & Cereal. Every morning, the team at Ask A Jedi will get Force-induced thoughts coursing through your head with delicious issues from around the galaxy! Join in the discussion below to make your voice heard!

Today marks exactly 2 months since Early Game Access for Star Wars: The Old Republic opened up. If you began playing on that very day, playing just a couple hours several days a week, it’s been enough time that you could have a character at level 50 by now. So for those of you who are level 50, and I’m guessing many in the AAJ Army have at least one, did you decide to level an alt?

There are some complaints on the forums that people are “bored,” but a quick study shows that these players generally raced to level 50 for the most part, and expected unlimited gameplay options once they got there. It’s just not going to happen in a brand new MMO. Especially when BioWare made it clear they were betting big on the level-up game. With individual stories for each class, and the Legacy system in place to support exactly that, it shouldn’t be a big surprise they want players to play many characters in Star Wars: The Old Republic.

Damion Schubert: We really want to put in systems to encourage replay. The Legacy System, which we hope to get in, will hopefully be in that venue. I am not ready to talk about what exactly it is and how we do that, but we are really betting heavily on the level up game. We are really betting heavily on the story aspects of the game, and we really want people to enjoy that journey, and to feel like that journey is interesting and exciting. We actually want to incentivize people to try the different classes so that they experience those other stories, and they play the game again. So that really put a lot of pressure on us to make sure that leveling up your second character and your third character is not grinding, and that it still feels like a fresh and interesting experience. We’re less interested in doing a Dark Age of Camelot “hey bypass all the content” in order to get to max level to do the endgame content because of what we think is important about our game and is our unique selling point: we want you to try that content. Maybe there is a way in the future, but that isn’t even a sparkle in our eye at this point.

Now, I’m a fan of sticking to one character whenever possible… and due to my play time, that’s all I can usually do anyway. But I have dabbled in some other characters especially during Game Testing. Oddly, I find leveling an alt in TOR to be somehow more repetitive than leveling an alt in previous games. I can’t put by finger on it… the class quests are all different, but they make up only a small part of the content. If you pick the class that shares your main’s starter world, then nearly everything else you do is a duplicate of what you’ve already done, right from the start.

So I’m just curious how many of you guys are out there rolling alts, and what prompted you to do it. Are you simply bored at level 50 waiting for everyone else to get there, or are you genuinely interested in seeing the story for multiple classes? What is your experience of rolling an alt so far… different enough?

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Feb 12, 2012

Posted by Cormeister | 1 Comment

Wild Space: Companions, Lightsabers, and ATI Performance Tips

It’s a big galaxy out there, and Wild Space can be a dangerous place. Worry not, explorer – each week we’ll navigate you safely through the lost hyperspace routes of the Deep Core and track down the great articles and entertainment from around the SW:TOR fan community, all in less than 12 parsecs, of course!

First up this week, is a really well done editorial from Darth Hater. Titled “Companions: The Good, The Bad and The Broken” the article goes on to describe the bad stuff about the companion system, the broken (i.e. bugged) stuff that needs fixing ASAP, and the good stuff that truly makes the companion system unique.

For starters: the bad. Tanking companions are the primary complaint here with the main problem being that they don’t…well…tank too effectively. They tend to need lots of healing after a battle or two or just flat out die during fights with Champion level mobs. Speaking from experience, tanking companions in flashpoints also don’t work too well. It would be nice to see tanking companions get a buff or two so that they can tank effectively in PvE content.

In “the broken” section, the author talks about the difficulty for some classes to actually get damage dealing companions to engage in combat:

…more than half of [Sniper and Gunslinger] attacks don’t cause their companions to engage the enemy. Players have to either remember to manually activate their companion each fight, or make the conscious decision to use an ability that activates their follower, usually at a substantial DPS loss.

But overall, we love our companions, don’t we? As the author says, companions provide us with a really great crafting system that allows to fulfill our crafting needs without spending all of our characters time on it. But the most amazing thing that companions do is get us to care about them. Even if we hate the way a certain companion acts, *cough* 2V-R8 *cough*, we still feel something about all of them. And that is a feat worth celebrating.

Check out the full article over on Darth Hater.

Next up, do you like lightsabers? I know I do! SWTOR Strategies stumbled upon a really cool fan-made diagram showing many of the lightsaber hilts found in game and their corresponding icons. The idea being that you can see what that new lightsaber will look like since, you know, you can’t view weapons in the dressing room window in game (yet). Thanks to SWTOR Strategies for finding this cool image for us.

A couple weeks back, I posted some tips from the Red Rancor folks about improving your computers FPS. Unfortunately, those tips were only for those with Nvidia video cards. This week, I stumbled upon some (older) tips for our ATI/AMD bretheren over on the MMO-Junkie forums. You’ll definitely want to scroll to the bottom of the initial post and see how the author configured his Catalyst Control Center for maximum TOR performance. Check out all the tips here!

Feb 10, 2012

Posted by TwinHits | 1 Comment

United We Stand: Stand Back, We’re Learning

Dear Parents, don’t worry. Your kids are going to be alright even if they are spending a ton of time playing Star Wars: The Old Republic. It’s not antisocial, it’s not useless, and it’s not a waste of time. It’s learning, and according to James Paul Gee’s book What Video Games Have to Teach Us About Learning and Literacy, they are doing a better job than our schools are. “They operate with—that is, they build into their designs and encourage—good principles of learning, principles that are better than those in many of our skill-and-drill, back-to-basics, test-them-until-they-drop schools.” (Gee, 205)

Check out that handsome book cover.

And he is absolutely right. In this book, he highlights thirty-six learning principles identified by learning and literacy studies and talks about how they are used in modern game design. An excellent example that he uses is the pattern teaching strategy that first person shooters use. They teach you have to move, how to shoot, and how to not die then they throw enemies at you. When fighting, you develop strategies and learn tactics that are effective against your enemies. Then, as the game progresses to more difficult enemies, the game forces you to use everything you have learned in new and different ways. Then, as the final boss nears, the game tears these strategies’ away from you and makes you look for solutions outside of the box, drawing on all the experiences you have had throughout the game.

Feb 9, 2012

Posted by Lethality | 3 Comments

Patch Notes: 1.1.3 – Public Test Server

Well, you can’t fault ’em for consistency! As soon as a patch is deployed on the live servers, another one shows up on the Public Test Servers! BioWare just pushed 1.1.3 t the PTS and have posted the notes. See anything that sticks out as interesting? What about missing?

You can always find these notes and other PTS information over in BioWare’s Test Center. Let us know if you log on and check out the changes.