Tuesday, March 20, 2012

Eternity Vault Normal and Hard Healing Guide

I've had enough experience healing EV on both Normal and Hard Mode that I can now write a guide for healers healing this Op. I'm going to summarize everything a healer needs to worry about to successfully heal EV, most things are the same for both with just higher healing requirement, I'll mention specific differences when relevant.

1st boss: Annihilation Droid XRR-3. Your group will either split up or group together, if you split up you mostly need to worry about your group, but you can change position to reach everyone when needed. The tank will take pretty high damage and needs to be healed. There are 2 abilities you need to worry about, one spawns a circle on the ground, get out of it. The second is the boss missiles that needs to be avoided by hiding behind the turrents. If your DPS hide as well, this should be easy to heal, however, if or when the DPS needs to step out and continue to hit the boss, you need to position yourself so that you are out of LoS for the boss, but still have LoS for the DPS, this will also mean healing will be much more intensive.

Thursday, March 15, 2012

Progression, HM Operations and PVP

I've been pretty busy lately and my blog was being neglected, I'll try not to make it too common that my first post this week is on Thursday.

I've been spending my game time on questing with my 2 republic chars, my Gunslinger is now 19 and my Jedi Sentinel is 29. I'm really enjoying both and not surprisingly the Republic zones and stories are just as interesting and fun as the Empire's.

Other than this I was mostly spending my time doing some PVP, I just got my Gladiator title, so I'm climbing the PVP ladder as well as working with my guild on HM KP and EV making progress every week.

Friday, March 9, 2012

Healer stat priority and the importance of alacrity

As you advance and gets better gear, a good healer will find himself asking "which secondary stat should I invest in"? There are 4 secondary stats that benefit healers, crit, surge, alacrity and power. But how do I decide which one is best for me? Which one should I prioritize to maximize my performance?

One thing I saw in many of the healing guides is that alacrity is the worse one, considering it lets you spend more resources, but doesn't increase your regeneration rate. As a result you will ran out of resources faster, making this stat the worse one to have. I completely disagree. In a theoretical testing scenario, if you had a static amount of resources and needed to calculate how much healing you can do, than it's true that alacrity wouldn't increase the healing done, only the time it takes you to cast it. This however, has nothing to do with the real world (I mean, game world) of actually healing a FP or Op. If it was, you would only be spamming your most efficient heal and only care about HPF (Heals Per Force) replace force with energy\heat\ammo depending on your favorite healer class. This is obviously not the case in any real healing scenario.

Wednesday, March 7, 2012

Eternity Vault HM Experience

After clearing EV and KP on normal mode, it was time to move on to the next challenge, Hard Mode Operations. We started working on EV HM. The first night my guild went there I couldn't participate. They managed to get to the last boss and I joined the following night to keep working on him. The second time I was there from the start and we got to the 4th boss. So I got to experience all the fights.

HM is basically a very similar experience with the bosses getting some type of advantage over normal. It can be more health, more damage, shorter enrage timer or a slightly different or buffed mechanic. Nothing too exciting to have to describe the fights again. Another change I didn't really like is that they use the old WOW master looter option, which is actually working with the latest patch 1.5 (previously the master looter option was bugged and caused fewer drops). This can potentially cause drama, mistakes and disagreement which I think is unnecessary, not to mention the time to /roll (another addition to 1.5) or whatever loot system your group is using and the time to distribute the loot. You also get Rataka level loot, the highest you can currently get. So you basically get a bigger challenge and better loot, nothing surprising there.

Monday, March 5, 2012

Karagga's palace first run

We ran Karagga's palace for the first time. Cleared the operation in 4 hours and change. It was a really fun and well designed operation, just like Eternity Vault. I would say it's more challenging than EV, we were slightly more geared, since we had additional time for gearing up between the operations, yet it still took us longer with more wipes. One thing that disappointed me a bit is that this operation has many more trash groups and much harder ones. Feels a bit like an artificial way to make the op longer.

Also the difficulty design seems a bit strange, it's not an increasing difficulty ladder like EV, with the last boss being the toughest one, the forth boss, "G4-BC Heavy Fabricator" seemed much tougher than Karagga himself, which is the last boss.

Friday, March 2, 2012

Theorycrafting gaining popularity finally

There are many more online resources for WOW compared to SWTOR. This makes sense, people had more years to create content for WOW than they had months to create content for SWTOR. One thing that I was missing in SWTOR is a good theory crafting site, like Elitist Jerks. What's more important to invest in? crit, alacrity or surge? You can try to do some calculations yourself, try to play a bit with the numbers, but to get a real, definite answer you need data gathered by many people, you need class experts who really tested things and did the research, you need deep intelligent discussions and conclusions. You need "Elitist Jerks", or more precisely a SWTOR site similar to elitistjerks.com.

Well, finally I found one sithwarrior.com, it's not that new, but it's been gaining huge popularity lately and as a result, now contains ton of data for all classes, deep and very interesting discussions, impressive amount of theory crafting numbers and tests. Exactly what you need to be able to really dig into maximizing your class performance.

Wednesday, February 29, 2012

The questing experience SWTOR and WOW

MMO Champion, one of the biggest MMO resource sites, released yesterday an interview with WOW Lead Quest Designer, discussing the Cataclysm questing experience post mortem. You can find the full article here: Cataclysm Post Mortem Quest Design I found it very interesting, having played the Cataclysm since launch day and considering I really enjoyed the experience. I think the Cataclysm, mainly the old world redesign was a very big step forward for WOW at the time, making many significant improvements to the questing experience. I intentionally don't call it "leveling experience", because this implies that the goal is to progress through the levels, while I consider the goal to be enjoying the experience. If it was simply work that was needed to get to end game and not a fun experience I doubt many people would've spent 20-30-40 hours doing it. Regardless of what you think of questing, whether it's a fun game, or a chore on the way to the "real game" at max level, an MMO can never succeed without a good and enjoyable questing, simply because most of the people will never get to the endgame.

I found some of the things he said at the interview very interesting, I'll sum it up for you:


Monday, February 27, 2012

Why do we play? Gear vs content

We've cleared EV (Eternity Vault) last weekend. This weekend we went there again. We had 3 players who weren't at the first run. The time it took us to clear it went from 3:30 hours to 2:15. Pretty descent progression, which makes sense considering most of us knew the encounters and we had an extra week of gearing up. When the op was done, an interesting discussion followed. What do we want to do next? There were 2 main points of view voiced by different guild members, with most people belonging to 1 or the other. 1 is to move on to Karagga's Palace, the second is to keep running EV. Obviously we could also do both, scheduling 2 runs next week, but we do have a "main" op night and members who will have to choose one of the other if we had 2 runs.

I'll present the main arguments for both points of view as well how we ended up handling it. I believe most groups running content are finding themselves having the exact same decisions to make. These are inherent to MMO endgame and even pre endgame play and boils down to a simple question: "Why do we play?". I have a very clear personal opinion on the subject which I'll try to leave to the end of the post.

Friday, February 24, 2012

Keeping the blog alive with idealchooser.com

Today isn't about SWTOR gameplay for a change, it's more about myself, the author of this blog and the blog future in general. If you've been following my blog, you know I've been pretty consistent in working on it. I was very proud to see the interest which really fueled my motivation to keep posting. In 1 month, since the blog was created, I got over 600 page views, that means over 600 times people either found an article and checked it out or found it interesting enough to keep coming back for more articles.

I know it's not a huge number compared to other sites, but personally I find it really encouraging that this many people got a glimpse of my work and even more so, the fact many of them kept coming back and subscribed to my feed.

When I'm not writing this blog I'm working on a shopping comparison and alerts site idealchooser.com. It's still very new and growing and I improve it every day, this is my full time job.

As you can imagine, keeping up the blog takes a lot of my time and every minute spent on it, is a minute less I have to work on my site and lately I'm finding myself constantly having to make the decision if I should invest more at the blog, or at the site.

I came up with a possible solution that I hope will work out. First of all, this is it, letting my blog readers know about idealchooser.com. I'm hoping it will make you curious to check it out. I really think the site is great for finding online deals, by gathering data from a huge amount of merchants, you can find many offers for anything you are looking for, helping you grab the best possible deal available. In addition the price drop alert option is a very nice way to be aware of price drops as soon as they happen.

If a small number of my blog visitors will check out this site and even a small number of these will make idealchooser.com a place they check out when they are looking to buy something online, this will make my time investment at the blog totally worth it.

So if you want to help me keep this blog running, please check out idealchooser.com, if you are willing to click the "like" button at the site, that's even better. I hope you will find it useful and this blog will end up giving idealchooser.com additional exposure.

Meanwhile, I also added a small, not annoying ad at the blog page, this will be the only advertising method from now on.

Thank you very much for reading this, I hope you like my blog so far and will also find idealchooser.com useful. I will be back to my usual SWTOR posts almost every week day as usual.

Wednesday, February 22, 2012

Endgame Eternity Vault encounters

I found the encounters in EV to be really interesting. The bosses are very different and unique and the fights make sure each participant of the group knows what he's doing. I'm going to discuss the bosses, this isn't meant as a complete walkthrough of EV, but more to point out what I think about the different encounters, my personal likes and dislikes and the main things to expect both as a participant and as a group trying to progress through EV.

I'll number the bosses and not name them, in case people want to go fresh and not know what to expect.

1st boss: This is a very straight forward encounter, the mechanics are simple, get out of bad things and use line of sight periodically to avoid a big damage of a special ability. It seems to be aimed to give people a sense of accomplishment by making sure the first encounter isn't too hard. You have to do enough DPS to take down the boss before enrage, but it's very possible. Basically any group that can clear an HM FP can also take down the first boss. Our group managed to take him down on the first try.

Tuesday, February 21, 2012

Operation review Eternity Vault what to expect

My guild had the first try at Operations Saturday night, we went to Eternity Vault. 1 of the 2 current operations and considered by some to be the easier one. I'll describe my experience running there as well as my observations on what to expect from your first OP.

We cleared the entire place in close to 3.5 hours. The pace was pretty relaxing, with occasional 5 minute breaks and discussions of strategy and plans. I would consider our entire group experienced and very capable, but that's just an opinion, I'm sure there are top guilds who would consider us a bunch of casuals while others, very casual players, who would consider us really hardcore. So I'll go into a bit more details about us, to give others better idea what to expect based on your own group experience and abilities.

7/8 of us ran about 10 HM before and had about 1/2 Epic (purple from HM, dailies and Tionese vendor) and half leveling gear, we could generally clear an HM with 0 or 1 unlucky wipe. About 2 nights before, 4 of us ran The False Emperor for the first time and wiped twice, once on HK and another on the last boss, who I won't name to avoid spoilers. The 8th person was less experienced, with only 2-3 HM runs and mostly leveling gear. Still he was a capable DPS who could do his job well. I guess this can give a general idea on how capable my group was, so readers can compare their own experience and know better what to expect.

Friday, February 17, 2012

Fresh level 50 gearing guide

Congratulations, you are 50, it's a major milestone in your SWTOR career, but the game is far from over for this character. There are ton of content that is meant for max level characters and as many people say "The game starts at max level". To be able to experience much of this endgame content, you will need better gear than you have at this point. Hard mode Flashpoints are very challenging without proper gear and Operations simply can't be done without it. So how do you get that much needed equipment upgrades?

There are 2 main ways to start gearing up your characters, FP and dailies. You can also get some nice PVE upgrades through PVP, an epic (purple) level 50 PVP item is almost certainly better than green, blue or even custom quality level 50 item. There is also the PVE trinket you can get from PVP which I mentioned at my last post.

Thursday, February 16, 2012

Epic PVE trinket available with PVP rewards

Just a tip today which I've seen often missed in gearing guides. When you are gearing your level 50 character, aside from the obvious HM and dailies, you can also get a nice purple trinket using PVP commendations. You will need 800 PVP Warzone Commendations. You can easily get these buy running a daily PVP warzone few times even before you hit 50. These are also nice way to get some quick XP, especially if you enjoy the Warzones.

Once you have 800 of these, you can trade 600 for Mercenary commendations at the vendor next to the PVP quest terminal. 200 Warzone Commendations plus 200 Mercenary commendations is the cost of a Champion Bag, which contains Centurion commendations, as well as a small chance for a Champion token (PVP token similar to PVE gear tokens which is still better for PVE than most gear you get when you just hit 50). These Centurion commendations can be trades for PVP gear, however the PVP trinket is also very much a PVE trinket. So there you have it, a quick easy way to get an epic trinket which doesn't require any HM or dailies.

Wednesday, February 15, 2012

Subscription numbers soon with Asia Pacific

Bioware announced yesterday the coming release of SWTOR in Asia Pacific. You can read their new release here: The Old Republic Asia Pacific Launch. What people don't mention often when discussing the subscription numbers is that so far there are servers only in the US and Europe. There are people from outside of the current server regions who already play the game, but obviously the majority of potential subscribers in different regions will join when they have regional servers to play on.

Now, how much of the total subscription number actually come from different regions? according to Wikipedia  "As of January 22, 2008, World of Warcraft has more than 10 million subscribers worldwide, with more than 2 million subscribers in Europe, more than 2.5 million in North America, and about 5.5 million in Asia."  However this is far from being the full picture and there is no way to really compare SWTOR and WOW numbers and assume it'll be similar in any way. Wow has a different subscription plan for Asia, also the exact region and locations of the servers are different.

So what can we say about the potential subscription numbers of SWTOR?

Tuesday, February 14, 2012

SWTOR frustrating bugs.

Last night I was running HM Boarding Party and hit what is apparently a pretty common bug on the second boss (Sakan Do'nair), the Jedi with the 2 healers. To make a long story short, basically what it does is making the healers immune to damage completely, making this fight impossible to complete, as you must burn down the healers or they keep healing the boss. This was pretty frustrating. After 5-6 tries, when we realized this is consistent and trying couple of things that didn't work, we gave up. This was really frustrating. Now I've found out later that there are possible, hard to execute, workarounds, but it doesn't change the fact that this bug makes this boss much harder than intended.

Another frustrating bug I've seen is the infamous HK-47 bug, to make a long story short, what basically happens is that when you destroy the 4 panels of his chamber (which you should destroy) too quickly, he enrage too soon, causing an almost sure wipe. Thankfully for us, we learned of the workaround, just don't hit the panels too quickly, after "only" 3 needless wipes.

Monday, February 13, 2012

Early PVE endgame experience

After 3 busy SWTOR days of exclusively playing my level 50 Operative, I have a much better picture of what the endgame feels like, what I need to do, what I still need to check out and how early level 50 feels like. I ran 5 HM FP (hard mode flashpoints) at this point, completed the Belsavis bonus series (level 50 daily quest hub), did most of the Ilum series and maxed out my trading skills. Told you I was busy :)

The daily quest zones feel very much like the leveling zones, which I think is a very good thing. Great plot and interesting quests, with the only difference being that you get daily commendations instead of XP which can be used to buy some endgame quality gear and mods.

As for the HM, what I was mostly thinking is how well they captured (AKA copied) WOW's feel of endgame gearing experience. The most similar gaming experience I can compare this to is playing following 80 in WotLK, or 85 in Cataclysm. The new challenging group instances, the great feeling or getting that new epic piece of gear. The satisfaction of completing a hard challenge with a competent group for the first time. Basically a really fun and familiar gaming experience. However there are some notable differences.

Friday, February 10, 2012

More endgame thoughts and progress plans

More of my endgame experience as a new 50 planning to see what the game has to offer and progress through the content.

After about 3 hours of being level 50, it hit me just how much there is to do at this level. It's a bit overwhelming, but I'm sure that with time I will have a better idea what I'm interested in, what I need to do to advance my character and what I consider a good use of my play time.

One of the first things I tried was a hardmode Black Talon run. Someone was looking for a healer, I whispered him that I just hit 50, so I'm not sure if I'm ready, but I would give it my best shot if he'll take me. Turns out the tank was also a leveling geared fresh 50. 30 minutes later I learned my first lesson, a completely ungeared group of 50s can't make it in HM FlashPoints. I know some of the guides claim it's possible, but considering the first boss was hitting our tank for 50% of his health every 1.5-2 seconds, I wouldn't recommend trying it until you have some better gear. I guess that's what the normal level 50 FP are for, there are 4 of these.

Thursday, February 9, 2012

Endgame plans I'm level 50 now what?

Last night I've hit 50 with my Operative. A major milestone. Time to explore the endgame and see what SWTOR has to offer.

I found a nice article about the number 50 at Moon Over Endor, another SWTOR blog: 50! this article has the same date as this one and starts with: "As of yesterday evening I got my (first) character to level 50!". Pretty funny to find this right when I'm about to write about hitting 50 last night.

Time for me to explore the endgame and see how well Bioware made it. Endgame is mostly what MMORPG are about, so a good endgame is a must if SWTOR is going to keep being fun and keep people playing it for months and years to come.

My to do list at this point is pretty long:

Wednesday, February 8, 2012

Altoholism playing different characters

I recently started my 4th character, I went for a Jedi Knight just to check out a completely different aspect of the game. With a different class mechanic, new story area and the fact I play him as a nice friendly "I'm here to save the world" type of hero, it feels like a whole different game. I'm enjoying every minute of it and I really recommend trying more than just one character.

The difference between the Republic and Empire factions, between playing a Light or Dark side character, between the different classes, the different class stories, is just too big to skip. I know many MMO players tend to pick a main, get to the end game and stick with just this one. I think by doing this they are missing a lot of the fun SWTOR has to offer.

Few more benefits that you get while playing different characters:

Tuesday, February 7, 2012

Sage and Sorcerer Healing Skills and Abilities

This post continue the Sage and Sorcerer healing guide from the previous post. I'll concentrate on healing abilites and skills and only mention others when they directly apply to the healer responsibilities or play style.


Abilities:
General abilities:
Overload: knock back, very useful when you get agro to give your party a chance to take care of the mobs while keeping you alive and healing
Whirlwind: general cc, make sure you use it often, there's no excuse not to help your party with cc when needed
Electrocute: 4 seconds stuns, I find it often better to use this as a stun\interrupt when doing so prevent more damage than casting another heal
Recklessness: 2 charges of 60% crit bonus, each crit use up a charge. Great for emergencies when extra healing is needed quickly
Force Speed: 2 seconds sprint, use it to get quickly to your healing target when they get out of range or to escape when you need to.
Jolt: the Sorcerer interrupt, use it often, remember, preventing damage is often more useful than healing it
Consumption: uses health to give you force. This is very expansive and should be used rarely without Force Surge proc. It costs a lot of health and lower your force regen rate for 10 seconds. Use it only if you need a bit of extra force for the last heal or 2 before combat ends or you get into a less intensive healing phase.
Cloud Mind: lowers your threat, don't forget to use it when you get agro to help your tank and dps grab the mobs away from you

Monday, February 6, 2012

Jedi Consolar Sage, Sith Inquisitor Sorcerer Healing

The Sage and Sorcerer are identical classes for the Republic and Empire. The only differences are the skills and abilities names and some of the visual effects. I'll be using the Sorcerer terminology, but everything also applies to Sage unless I specifically mention it.


The Sorcerer is the most similar healer to other MMO healing classes. If you played a healer in WOW or another major MMO you'll feel right at home with the Sorcerer with a very short learning curve. If you have previous healing experience and want to jump right in and know what you are doing, the Sorcerer is a good choice. He also doesn't have a complicated (or simple, depending on your personal skill) resource management mechanism the other 2 healing classes has. He does have management consideration and synergy between abilities which I'll get into soon, but it's more straight forward and quicker to learn and master, at least in my opinion.


Don't read the previous paragraph as the Sorcerer requiring no skills to play well, if you won't be aware of your strengths and weaknesses and be able to do the right thing at the right situation, you'll find yourself and your party dead very quickly. That's why this post is written, to try to give you as much information as I can to heal with the Sorcerer effectively.


Friday, February 3, 2012

Grouping with a server wide LFG Channel

Bioware promised a new LFG tool, but the players aren't waiting for it. A new trend that is taking over the galaxy is a player created, server wide, LFG channel. More and more servers now have player created LFG channel and this is becoming a great way to find groups these days. Like I mentioned in a previous post, sticking around the Fleet to find groups isn't a good option and many players, myself included, who will gladly join groups, don't do that.

Thursday, February 2, 2012

1.7 million active subscribers

Bioware just released their current active subscription numbers. Their official announcement can be found here: http://www.swtor.com/news/press-release/20120201 1.7 million active subscribers. A pretty impressive number for a 6 weeks old game. Another thing to take into account is that many people who were estimating the growth and success of SWTOR were commenting that the first month numbers aren't a good indication of the subscribers, because people who buy the game get 30 days free, so when counting the numbers during the first month, you count all the people who bought the game at launch or pre-ordered it, were disappointed by the game and never became active subscribers. This become irrelevant past the first month. While potentially this number still includes people who bought the game during the past 30 days and aren't happy enough to become active subscribers, these numbers are currently much smaller than during the first month.

Wednesday, February 1, 2012

Questing SWTOR VS WOW

Yesterday I was doing the Aldaaran Bonus Series with my level 40 Operative and I get these 2 quests at the same area, right next to each other, both require 4 drops from specific mobs. I'm going for the first one, killed 2 of these mobs, no drops. I must be doing something wrong, right? No way I didn't get a drop twice while killing the right mob. I read the quest description, a rare thing by itself, because normally everything you need to know is part of the dialogs and built in quest tracker, couldn't figure out what I'm doing wrong, this looks like the mob I have to kill. As I'm one of these people who have to experience all the content, I wasn't about to let it go. Alt tabbed and looked for it online, turns out the drop rate is 30-40%, so I killed about 10-12 more and finished it. Went for the second quest, 4 kills, 4 drops, as usual, this is how quests normally are.

Tuesday, January 31, 2012

Group Finding Tips

Grouping is a huge part of SWTOR, the plot of the flashpoints is very interesting and engaging sometimes with the best story and twists in the game (I'm thinking of you Foundry) the fights are well designed and the plot is often very interesting. They did 2 things with grouping that I really like, the first is the system  where all groups participate in dialogs, this makes your group members from faceless, voiceless strangers who are only there to help you get through the content, to characters who are part of the plot and decisions. The conversation  rolling system in dialogs works really well. Makes you feel like a part of a group where each one participate in the decisions and actions of the team. The second thing I like is that the decision making makes each fp run feel a bit different, with different dialogs, different cut scenes based on the decisions and even different bosses to fight.

Monday, January 30, 2012

Scoundrel Operative Healing Abilities and Skills

This post continue the Scoundrel and Operative healing guide from the previous post. I'll concentrate on healing abilites and skills and only mention others when they directly apply to the healer responsibilities or play style.

Abilities:
Tack Cover - Boost your defense when healing from a distance, making you less likely to take damage so you can worry about healing your team mates.
Kolto Injection - Your typical big heal. It's pretty expansive to cast, so you won't be able to spam it, but when someone needs a big health boost, this is your best line of defense.
Adrenaline Probe - regenerate energy, very useful after an expansive healing burst is needed and you need to keep healing.

Friday, January 27, 2012

Smuggler Scoundrel Imperial Agent Operative Healing

The Scoundrel and Operative are identical classes for the Republic and Empire. The only difference is the skills and abilities names and some of the visual effects. I'll be using the Operative terminology, but everything also applies to Scoundrel unless I specifically mention it.

Generally speaking the Operative healing style is based around HoTs, he gets cheap ones that stack and can be active on multiple targets and he has the only group HoT skill. In many situations the Operative can keep the party alive by making sure everyone who is taking damage or about to take damage is covered with HoTs, however the Operative also has few other tricks up his sleeve when more intense healing is required.

Thursday, January 26, 2012

Healing thoughts and classes

So you want to be a healer? Let's take a look at healing in SWTOR.

There are 3 classes that can heal in SWTOR, each mirrored identically between the Republic and the Empire. These are Imperial Agent Operative for the Empire, which has identical skills and abilities as the Smuggler Scoundrel for the Republic, Bounty Hunter Mercenary which is mirrored by Trooper Commando and the Sith Inquisitor Sorcerer, mirrored by the Jedi Consular Sage. I'll use the Empire names because it makes my life easier, considering I currently mostly play on the Empire side, but everything is relevant for both factions. The only difference is the names of the classes and abilities and some of the visual effects. The gameplay and the abilities themselves are identical.

Wednesday, January 25, 2012

What SWTOR needs to succeed as an MMO

So I established that I think the single player and leveling aspect of SWTOR is incredible, but SWTOR is defining itself as an MMORPG game. So let me take a look at the MMO aspect.

Before I get into it, I want to say that this is just general observations and guesses about the future, I simply think it's too early to judge it. MMO by nature is an evolving game and SWTOR didn't have time to evolve yet. Most people aren't 50 yet and there aren't too many established guilds and serious long term raiders and pvpers that makes it comparable to an established game. Also it's obvious Bioware mostly invested at the pre endgame content which people hit as soon as the first day and that they have plans to expand the endgame in the future. For this reason I'll concentrate on the MMO aspect during leveling, where most people are currently at.

Tuesday, January 24, 2012

How many gaming hours are there in SWTOR?

I'm purposely not including endgame in this discussion, because by the nature of it, MMO endgame can vary from infinite amount of time, if you enjoy it, or a very short time, if this doesn't appeal to you. I think it's meaningless to even try to count endgame hours of play.

As far as the leveling game, counting an average of about 1.5 hours per level (less for lower levels, more for higher levels), getting a character to level 50 takes about 75 hours. Characters for the same faction advance through the same zones, so each zone content can be done once for completely unique questing experience. However there are more quests than needed to reach the next zone level.

I'm currently playing 3 characters, Imperial Agent Operative, Sith Inquisitor Sorcerer and a Bounty Hunter Mercenary. Why these 3? Because they are all healers and personally I love healing in MMO and I like to try out high level healing with every class before I decide which one is my favorite. 2 of these are close to 40 and the 3rd is in his high 20s. I've never repeated a single quest with 2 different characters, there are simply too many things to do for me need to repeat quests.

Monday, January 23, 2012

A new approach to deep engaging game worlds

My thoughts after playing the Imperial Agent story to level 36. If Bioware would've made just this story a single player game, SWIA (Star Wars Imperial Agent) they would've had a 70 hours RPG. The plot is one of the best in gaming ever, there were already 2 plot\decision points that i know i'll look back years from now as some of the best in gaming ever, incredibly deep in interesting side quests, mini games, crafting system. I can't wait to see how it develops, understand what the hell is going on and do things that needs to be done (it would've been much easier to explain if I could add spoilers). SWIA would've passed the 90 average game score easily, personally so far I would've put it with witcher 2 and Dragon Age Origins as the best single player RPG of the past few years.

Instead they put it as 1/8 of a full blown MMO, making people compare it to WOW, judge it's grouping, social aspect, end game, PVP, balancing. These are all valid, MMO players and pure social gamers, who wouldn't dream of picking up a single player RPG title, are targeted audience of this game. But it blows my mind that people can play for hours\review the game\judge\buy\subscribe\quit\like\hate a game without even touching 5 minutes of this incredible 70 hours full blown game. I'm not saying I don't understand it, it's perfectly valid to judge an MMO by advancing 1, 2, 3 characters to endgame and play it.