My question to you today is:

What if the class you choose affects your crew skills ability?

In past games that I have played I have found that sometimes the class I choose to play affects the potential I have to use the crafting system to its fullest amount.  By using certain mechanics of a class system sometimes you can gain advantage over other aspiring master craftsmen looking to advance to grandmaster craftsman status.

Some examples of this to let you know what I mean would be like one of the characters I used to have in Ultima Online. 

He was a focused miner/prospector and two things I needed to be able to achieve was to be able to get to thousands of locations at a moments notice to hit a respawning node for ore, and then to defend myself once I was in the process of mining.  Resource nodes for ore in that game had a nasty habit of spawning elementals when you attempted to mine them and they would immediately aggro you.

So what I found to be highly effective for that character was a build that consisted of 1/2 mage skills for the marking of travel runes and the travelling to and from the runes, and 1/2 melee skills to be able to fight and kill elementals.  So with that class build I was able to solve my two most pressing problems as a miner/prospector.  The need for travel and the ability to survive.

Another example would be for a prospector/forester in LOTRO.  In that game I had a character that had similar needs.  He needed to be able to gather from many areas most of which were dangerous.  He needed to be able to travel and fight off the mobs from resource spawn areas.

The best solution I could come up for that character was an elven hunter.  As a class only ability, the hunter could fast travel to any location in the game I needed to get to.  No other class could do that.  He then at the resource gather site could use his ability to deal massive damage from range and the ability to pull mobs singly allowing him to brave even more challenging areas than other classes could do solo.

So now that you see where I am coming from with this question, how do we think it will relate to SWTOR?

I am not for sure about this because I do not know what most of the game mechanics are like, not being a tester makes this merely speculation on my part.  Based on what I have observed from all the released information though I can make a couple of guesses.

One of the class abilities that begs me to use it for crew skills supremacy is the force jump.  Jedi or Sith, your choice. (me personally it is Darkside)  I can see this skill being highly useful in attempts to get at places that are hard to reach for gathering, plus the ability to kick some ass once you get there doesn’t hurt either.  This mechanic seems like it might have the ability to aid travel in general as well if it is not on some sort of cooldown.

Another type of area to consider might be gathering resources from a planet like Quesh where the resource collection might possibly be contested.  Such areas like this planet with its focused resources like the mats  needed for bio chemistry are interesting indeed.  If you were choosing to have your main crafter character focus on bio chemistry, if this planet ends up being key to your needs and if this planet is contested maybe you ought to consider a character that has the potential to kill opposers and survive in a pvp situation so hat uninterrupted gathering or crafting can continue?

Possibly a Bounty Hunter or Sith Warrior on the Empire side or a Smuggler or Jedi Knight from the Republic might be a good choice to solve this problem?  Situations like these are the ones I watch when trying to decide if my class choice will aid my crew skills abilities.  There are many other areas to consider as well like will this type of choice have any benefit to any of the other areas of the crew skills system?

The added mechanic of the companion system still leaves us with a lot of unanswered questions at this point.  I can see the companion system causing some of these types of concerns to be less than in other games due to the fact that you can just send your companion out to gather for you.  Or that they will be crafting the majority of the items for you.  This mechanic is going to change the way we look at crafting in MMO’s, it is going to change the usual options we are used to in other MMO’s when trying to make the best class choice

Hopefully though there will still be certain places that you as a character have to physically go to get a certain drop or personally fight for the ability to gather a resource that you will need in order to craft certain items.  The ability for your companions to craft will still be based off of the schematics and skill level you as the boss knows so hopefully there’s still the ability in those regards to make a best class choice.

As we see more and more information released we can start to form ideas where certain class mechanics may be beneficial to us as crafters.  I will be watching these areas with much interest because as  min-maxer I look for advantage in any way I can squeeze it out.

If you have any other ideas as to mechanics that you have seen that might be beneficial to crafters from a class selection standpoint I would love to hear them.

Thanks for reading!

Tags: beta, bioware, class, companions, crafting, crew skills, group, MMO, skills, space combat, star wars, star wars the old republic mmo, swtor