With all the information that came out of the recent Guild Summit it is only natural that players are looking for some clarification on all the various tidbits that have been released. Ever since the summit the SWTOR forums have been flooded with post from people looking for info, wanting more details, and the inevitable complaining about gameplay features they have not even experienced yet. Luckily for everyone the master of the forum posts, Mr. Georg Zoeller, has been laying down some of his famous yellow posts to squash some of the rumors and questions running across the boards. Continue Reading »

BioWare recently released patch notes for update 1.1.2, which is currently live on the Public Test Server. It includes the usual plethora of ability, mission, and companion fixes as well as some tweeks to the Biochem skill.

Biochem users will now be able to give/sell Energized and Exotech stims and adrenals to other players as they are no longer bound to the user nor do they require skill in Biochem to use. There seem to be two big reasons why this change was made. First of all it removes the pressure on players to take Biochem in order to optimize their performance, particularly at endgame. Second it opens up more options for Biochem players to make credits by selling these stims and adrenals on the Global Trade Network. Biochem also will be getting another nerf as the effectiveness of Biochem exclusive Rakata stimpacks have been reduced to be equal to Energized stimpacks. In fact Bioware announced that they intend to reduce, over a series of patches, the effectiveness of situational consumables on endgame combat resolution. The end goal being to make the outcome of endgame combat be based more on player skill and less on what items they have on hand.

BioChem is just the first of the crafting skills to see tweaks in order to make all the skills more applicable to end game content. Major changes are currently on schedule for the next major content patch, such as extractable basemods (armoring, barrel, etc.) from purple items, critical crafting successes on orange outfits, more bind-on-equip schematic drops for artifice and other professions, increased relevance of augments, better reverse engineering chance, and other improvements.  PvP is also going to see some changes in the future, with the power difference granted by PvP gear being reduced to make it easier for new level 50 players to compete in PvP.

You can read the developer post about the crafting changes here, and the full 1.1.2 patch notes after the jump. Continue Reading »

Sitting here last night playing the beta of the Neverwinter heroes facebook game, I happened to do my nightly stroll across the swtor.com web page on crew skills before I went to bed, just to check on my pretties you understand, when I saw that the rest of the blanks had been filled in.  I have been waiting for this day and still it took me by surprise.

Continue Reading »

There is an Electronics Arts event being held in London, and as we reported earlier a big announcement for The Old Republic was anticipated at the event. Bioware delivered in a big way on this promise and gave us details on both crafting and PvP warzones.

SWTOR Crafting

Crafting will have three major groups – Gathering, Crafting, and Missions. For now, we have been presented with two professions in each of the groups:

Crafting system is completely innovated in comparison to what we are used to seeing in other MMOs. You will be able to use your companions for crafting! The “Crew Skill crafting system” means that you will be able to send your companions on crafting tasks and specialize them in certain crafting branches. Sending out your companion on a Treasure Hunt can bring you a rare item based on random number generator. Certain companions will excel better at certain professions than others (the example provided was Vette, Sith warrior companion, who will excel at Treasure Hunting). You will be able to send companions on crafting missions from anywhere in the world and you will be able to queue your tasks for them. It is still unclear whether different companions will be able to have different crafting tasks at the same time or you can have one task at a time (with multiple companions working on it), but I believe we will soon find out.
A very interesting mechanic was mentioned concerning gathering. If you have your companion with you adventuring; once you see something that you can gather, instead of moving your character there to gather, your companion will do it for you while you continue fighting or doing whatever you were doing.

For all you crafting buffs out there here’s a very interesting quote from the event:

It is a very robust system, and there are still some details that we haven’t revealed yet which I know players are going to be excited about. I will just say there are some mechanics to it that will allow players who are more involved in crafting to really get deeply involved in crafting and be appropriately rewarded for it.

SWTOR PvP Warzones

We received details on Alderaan’s warzone that was previously announced at E3 but without going into too much depth. The most important points are:

• 8 vs. 8 combat
• objective-based PvP with a goal of controlling an area
• rewards tokens
• rewards XP

The way this warzone will work is that each team starts at their drop ship in the skies. They have means of transportation to get to the ground. Once there they fight to get control over planetary’s defenses. Whoever controls the defenses starts firing on the other team’s drop ship. The winner is the team that destroys the other team’s dropship.

The other thing we learned is that each warzone will have different objectives and mechanics involved. For example, the next warzone that will be revealed will take place on a derelict starship and will have completely different mechanics than Alderan’s. Here’s a quote from Darth Hater’s original article that I found most interesting:

BioWare’s PvP designer Gabe Amatangelo said they wanted Warzones to fit in with the story element of the game. When they looked at PvP, they decided that banners, flags and points were “too game-y.”

These two reveals have once again changed our way of looking at this game once again. The crafting system is much more intricate than we initially though it will be. The warzones mechanics looks legit and fun from a PvP buff point of view. Everything is starting to fall right into place and we are now more excited about the game than ever before.