((The RP XP with MJ #11))

The Zabrak Padawan Force-pushed aside the door and entered the dank back room of the warehouse, his lightsaber beam illuminating the space with a soft blue glow.

A chair sat in the middle of the room, torn bonds around its legs and hanging off the back. The crates and boxes stacked around the room all stared out with the crescent-shaped Czerka logo. There were no signs of anyone else nearby, though Tarik didn’t think to reach out with the Force to take a closer look. Instead, he found himself attracted to small dark speckles on the floor near the chair.

He crouched and reached down, smearing a finger across the spots before raising it to his nose and sniffing. Blood.

Then something heavy landed hard on his back and flattened him against the warehouse floor. His lightsaber extinguished and clattered off between two large boxes.

As suddenly as the weight hit him, it was gone. Tarik heard shuffling footsteps and looked up in time to see an orange blur rush toward his lightsaber. He reached out and Force-pulled it into his hand before getting to his feet.

“Ah! Damn!”

He recognized the woman’s voice immediately, but ignited the lightsaber to see her. “Yulel?”

“Who did you expect, Tar? Man, Kendris really has to work on your training. I can’t believe you didn’t sense me up there.” The Twi’lek nodded to a stack of crates next to the door, on top of which she had been waiting while the bombardment leveled half the quarter outside.

Tarik stretched out a hand toward the room controls and turned on the lights. Then he switched off his lightsaber. “You ok, ‘Lel?” he asked in a soft voice.

The Twi’lek pouted and tilted her head as she saw him in the light. “You’re hurt.” She stepped up to him and gently reached up to touch one of the scarred horns on his head. “Were you caught in the bombardment?”

Tarik swallowed and nodded, unable to speak as his heart thudded painfully to match each bruise and cut on the Twi’lek girl. He reached out slowly and touched her cheek, then managed, “I’m not so bad off, but… but you.”

“Meh,” Yulel smiled. “I pretended to be in pain through most of it. Narcos do wonders for pain blocking.” She turned away and moved to the crates on one side of the room, checking the numbers and manifests attached to each one.

The pain in the young Padawan’s voice was personal. “You’re not still on the Narcos, are you? You promised me you’d get off that poison.”

“Here it is!” Yulel ignored him and crouched before a footlocker-sized box on the floor. “One-one-three-eight.”

“Yulel.”

“Tarik.” She ignored him and produced a small folding tool from her belt. She tapped at the keypad on the box as she waved the tool in front of the box latch.

Tarik watched her for awhile before stepping closer and crouching next to her. Overcome with curiosity, he decided to let the conversation about Yulel’s drug addiction wait for another time. “What are you doing?”

“Picking a lock. What does it look like?”

“Why?”

“Because the stupid bounty hunter and ignorant Chiss who held me here were looking for this. It was under their nose the whole time.”

Tarik glanced back at the chair just two meters away. “Why didn’t you tell them so they’d stop torturing you?”

Yulel stopped and looked at him. “Because it was funny.” She offered a crooked smile before turning her attention back to the box. It opened with a click and a snap.

Tarik reared back a little surprised. “How’d you manage that?”

“I used to be a locksmith for Czerka before I got into spice running.”

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Let me go ahead and say this right up front, I am a lore nut. To me the idea of spending an evening surfing the pages of Wookieepedia to add even more knowledge to my arsenal is an evening well spent, so I am very interested in how lore is going to affect The Old Republic once it is released. And don’t kid yourself; it is going to affect how the MMO plays out, and not just through the story. Like it or not, lore is going to affect gameplay in this title. It’s impossible to get around it; the lore behind the Star Wars universe is too massive and too important to fans for Bioware to sweep it under the rug when making decisions about gameplay. At the end of the day lore will probably be trumped by gameplay, but if you think it is not going to be taken into account you are sadly mistaken. Continue Reading »

In their well known fashion Bioware released another enticing video trailer to celebrate the start of their pre-orders and their presence at San Diego Comic Con. Trailer features all the playable classes delivering great one-liners that tell you straight away what that each class is about. As always, they get me excited about the game no matter what.

SWTOR’s current class system is nothing new, Ultima online had this. Even though it did not have a class system in the traditional form we all know now.

Yet, it did give you the ability to take on a number of roles, Mage, Warrior etc.

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Going through all the blog posts and tweets and everything else has left me exhausted. The amount of information given in this last Friday Update is staggering if you think about it, as it is something actual about our classes we are playing at launch. In the bigger picture, if you look at it like I do, it really breaks down class roles, and that leads to the reality of how close we actually are to finally playing this game. With all of this, I am going to try to dissect some of this information in relation to the Bounty Hunter.

Diving straight in, I am going to start with this quote below:

Choosing an Advanced Class is very important in The Old Republic, as within your Advanced Class, your character will reach their full potential. Your Advanced Class choice dramatically alters the gameplay experience of your base class by providing access to two exclusive skill trees per Advanced Class, with a third being shared between both Advanced Classes.

So how I take this is that this plays out like any other MMO so far, even the venerable Warcraft and how their Talent trees used to be when it wasn’t so restricted. This basically say “Hey, pick the AC you want, you still get the base class abilities of the class itself, thus this being the Bounty Hunter. You can even place some points in the other AC. So, just like WOW, we get 3 talent tress to mess with to fine tune the type of player we want to be and how we play.

Now, as much as I hate “cookie-cutter” builds on classes, I don’t see a way Bioware can stop this. Some abilities are going to be better than others and there will be those that will probably force those upon you depending on the role you pick. With this in mind, I hope that Bioware gives us the “Dual Spec” option so that we can have 2 builds based on what we are doing (Soloing/Group).

Something else I picked up on is this:

As you level up, your character will gain abilities from three sources:

• Through trainers, from their base class (e.g. Sith Warrior)
• Through trainers, from their advanced class (e.g. Marauder)
• Through skill points spent in the skill trees of their Advanced Class

So no longer is it the run to one trainer and you’re done. We now have to hit up the Base Class (Bounty Hunter) but we also have to fine the AC trainer that we are playing, in my case which will be the Mercenary. This is interesting as unless these are always grouped up, you have to make sure to remember where each are to make sure all of your abilities are up to par.

Now the fine folks over at Bioware even gave us the break-down on the roles for the Bounty Hunters:

Bounty Hunter Advanced Classes

Mercenary (Roles: Mid – Long Range Damage Dealing, Healing)

PowerTech (Roles: Close – Mid Range Damage Dealing, Tanking)

• As previously announced, the Bounty Hunter’s Mercenary Advanced Class now features the ‘Bodyguard’ skill tree, allowing this iconic class to fill the role of a medic if desired.
• The ‘Advanced Prototype’ skill tree, shared between both Bounty Hunter ACs, now features an upgrade to the base class flamethrower, which allows the player to rotate while using the ability.

We now see how the Bounty Hunter breaks down. Mercenary breaks down into a DPS/Healer role and the Powertech breaks down into a DPS/Tank role. Now for all you WOW’ers out there, Bounty Hunters look to have the possibility of being Paladins of Swtor.

Those that are going the Tank Bounty Hunter will also have that DPS chance of speeding up their leveling without sacrificing the Tank aspect of it. It also plays

I, like many, think this last update was a great one. it really moves use one step closer to that fateful date where we all get to jump in game and put all this information we have been hoarding for so long to the test. In regards to the Bounty Hunter, playing a main healer and knowing I have DPS choices to help in the leveling process make me very happy as well.

My question to you today is:

Based on your normal play style how do you see yourself acquiring the materials you need to craft in SWTOR?

Will you use the auction house mechanic relying on other players to provide the auctions for you to buy, or will you rely on yourself and your companions to gather what you need via the gathering mechanics and the missions?

Read on!

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Swtorcrafter Bounty Hunter!

How can a guild best support their crafters in SWTOR, part 2

With the small amount of material available on the crew skills system it is really hard to speculate on what I think will be important for a guild to focus on when trying to support their crafting efforts.  I am going to speculate anyway though because it can’t hurt to guess at this stage.

Read on!

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Swtorcrafter Bounty Hunter!

(A topic suggested by my loyal blog reader Daelda, thanks!)

The question I want to pose to you today is:

How can a guild best support their crafters in SWTOR?

One of the things I absolutely hate to see in a guild group is a lack of optimization of equipment.  When I see guild groups in game and I mouse over their equipment and they are wearing shoddy, mismatched gear that is tiers below the optimization that I as a crafter know is available, it makes me sad.

It could be this way for many reasons, either they don’t know any better, or possibly their guild crafters are failing in gearing up the guild.  If it is the latter then possibly it stems from a lack of support from the people they need to be gearing up.

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My question to you today,

What can we do to make crafting more fun in SWTOR?

For some people in MMO’s today crafting can sometimes be looked at as simply more than a utilitarian function, a means to help the overall leveling process.  As something you do as merely a side thought when you need some type of item in-game.  Some people would go so far as to call crafting “boring”, or something they do out of boredom.

To us that thoroughly enjoy these types of systems in MMO’s, we know them to be capable of so much more.

So what can we do to make crafting more fun in SWTOR?

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From the last blog post I did we looked at the developer blog “closer look at crew skills” by Patrick Mallot.  It was this piece of it that inspired this blog post and a lot of personal joy from me.

These are my personal opinions anyway.    🙂

“It’s worth noting that players will definitely need to be directly involved in the process when learning rare schematics”

That tells us that there will be such a thing as rare schematics, and that we as a player will have to be directly involved in the learning process.  Learning the schematic won’t be something that the player can pass on to the companion because the schematic will need to inscribe itself into the players learned items database so that the player can access the recipe later when he wants to craft that item from that certain crafting skill.

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