The Church of Alvis is a guild founded in August of 2003 in Star Wars Galaxies. Since then we have spread to other games, but always maintained a connection with each other. With the release of Bioware and LucasArts’s Star Wars: The Old Republic we have reformed on the Juyo Canderous Ordo Jedi Covenant server. Please feel free to browse the site and let us know if you have any questions or are interested in joining.
Presence is the LOL stat in regards to PvP and End game raiding. It only affects your companions, so no one puts it up on their priority list of things to get when outfitting your toons. However it is important to note that presence is actually pretty useful for a certain phase of the game. I currently have 2 50s. One has all his companions at 10k affection and the other does not.
When we look at the benefit that provides to my level 11 Jedi Knight’s companion we see this result.
Those are some huge bonuses to someone so low. The extra health alone makes it worth it if you are looking at early tanking companions (Corso, Qyzen, T7 to name a few), but even a DPS or Healing companion would benefit.
Let’s now finish the affection grind on the other 50 to get the +10 presence on all my alts.
The increase as you can see will make leveling that much easier. T7 serves as a tanking companion for knights and an extra 250 health makes him that much more durable.
Note: This post expresses the views of Jounville Blackferne and may not necessarily reflect those of the Church of Alvis or its membership.
It has been a long and windy year. Last November many people in the Church were in various forms of the Beta program. We had a huge shared experience in the Thanksgiving Weekend Beta, and SWTOR was largely praised as real potential rival to World of Warcraft.
About a year later we have gone through two rounds of server mergers, seen subscriptions drop, layoffs at Bioware, and are almost at the dawn of the Free to Play era. Some say that SWTOR has been a failure, though I’m not sure I agree.
This last summer for me I will admit was a fretful one in regards to the future of SWTOR. Before the first server merge (I’m sorry voluntary transfer), Juyo was getting 50-100 people on the Republic Fleet during prime time. It was a small but stable community, but I knew it couldn’t last. Without new players coming in, that would drop. As the mergers happened I saw more people, but I was wondering if it was sustainable.
The layoffs probably bothered me more. I knew one of the people laid off and I genuinely worried how he’d do. Luckily he landed on his feet with Fire Fall. Still the whole episode did leave me shaken about the future of a game I was finding myself emotionally invested in.
The biggest shock however was the announcement of the switch to Free to Play (F2P). I’ve never played a F2P mmo before and my thoughts initially were rather pessimistic as F2P read in my mind as “prelude to a funeral”. However I did talk to some people who just couldn’t justify a subscription to a game they could only play a few hours a month. Also lonomonkey of Screaming Monkeys made a comforting case of how F2P has worked for LOTRO.
With that I find myself pretty optimistic about the future of SWTOR. I do feel that as long as I pay my monthly subscription that I should not be put into a position where I have to pay extra to see content, or be competitive. I think the best example of this in WoW was the sparkle ponies in WoLK. Blizzard offered a mount that wasn’t any better than normal in game mounts in exchange for a one time $25. It was purely a cosmetic thing. If I find myself having to pay real money beyond my subscription to list more items on the GTN or go to Hard Mode Operations or the like, that is a deal breaker for me. But if my $15 gets me the all you can eat platter of SWTOR I’ll be happy. If they want one time pay extra for sparkle speeders or lawn chairs for you to sit on on fleet? Go ahead, but keep the core game accessible to all subscribers.
The thing that worries me most with F2P is the demanding content schedule Bioware has set for itself. Every six weeks getting something new seems like a high bar to reach and I really hope they don’t set expectations they cannot meet. Though in playing alts this past month I realized there is still a whole lot of story I have yet to see.
If Bioware can manage to keep up content production and continue to add polish to existing game systems and content, reduce bugs, find the quality of life benefits to all players, I don’t see any reason why F2P would necessarily be a bad thing. So Bioware if you read this, best of luck, I’m hoping you pull this off.
This week the Church of Alvis and our raiding partners at the Snark Side on Jedi Covenant have cleared Story Mode Scum and Villainy.
I failed to get a screenshot from the final boss, but here is Friday’s raid standing near Sunder and Ta’chuk of the Warlords fight. Our roster this week included Alorad, Andosha, Biscotti, Boccior, Jounville, Noreek, Premmat, Shattner, Skiggity, and Starel. It was a good week for us and we look forward to upping our game to the Hard Mode 55 ops over the next few weeks I’d imagine.
Raiding as always should be fun and in our groups it usually is.
Even though we are not on an RP server, the Blackferne clan and Jounville in particular has a life story in my mind. This is a story that has evolved since Star Wars Galaxies, and one of the aspects of that story is that Jounville always should have had an eyepatch. That wasn’t an option in that game, so when SWTOR launched and I could make a character who finally looked more like how he should looked I was pretty happy.
Here is Jounville on December 15th 2011.
Early access and as you can see by the clown armor Jorgan is in we are pretty low level there. The eyepatch is my thing. I get that technically it is supposed to be a cybernetic eye, but it looks like an eyepatch so for me it IS an eyepatch.
Saturday night I helped Boccior, Starel, and Skiggity complete a popular quest chain and we came across a certain Lord Tagriss.
What. Period. The. Period. Hell. Period. Question mark. Exclamation mark. This is like two people wearing the same dress to prom. Listen here Lord Tagriss, I don’t know what you think you are doing, but I’ve been all over Spacebook and OurSpace and hell even that social network that only Ortolan’s use, Orkut, and I’ll tell you something, the eyepatch? It is my effing thing. Okay I’m gonna cut you. I hope you still got the receipt because I want you to go back to Sithieland Mall, stroll right into Hoth Topic or whatever and exchange for a straw fedora or that muscle tee with the Jawa Shore logo on it. You can wear those ironically all you want, I don’t care. But the eyepatch? That is mine.
On Friday night our Joint Raiding program with The Snark Side ventured for the first time into the seedy underbelly of the new operations. In story mode we got through Thrasher before time expired on our raid.
Our raid consisted of Andosha, Biscotti, Boccior, Jounville, Njessi ,Noreek, Shattner, and Skiggity. We picked up on the mechanics very quickly. I will say though the Pirate Stimfiends are kinda crazy. Personally I’m loving the story for the operation and look forward to seeing how it ends.
Golden Fury is downed. First Night Second Attempt.
Last night the Church of Alvis and our raiding partners The Snark Side on Jedi Covenant went to take a look at Golden Fury in Toborro’s Courtyard for the first time. First attempt we learned, second attempt we killed. Afterwards we worked through Operator IX in TFB SM as we are still gauging our strength after leveling to 55 and regearing.
Friday and Saturday our campaigns will continue!
Good work by Andosha, Biscotti, Boccior, Jounville, Noreek, Shattner, Skiggity and Starel!
Last week 1.5 hit and with it the exciting HK-51 Assassination droid. The Church of Alvis on Saturday assembled to cooperatively help everyone get significant parts of the quest line done. We officially started with the Outlaws Den portion. We “RP” walked from the entrance of the Outlaw’s den all the way down to the Jawa selling part of the HK Droid. While it wasn’t the most efficient mode of travel, it did get a remark from Gabrielx on Jedi Covenant who thought we looked cool walking that way. Two Sith were killed and another ran away seeing our posse’s swagger. Gabrielx came by and unfortunately one of our smugglers shot first taking his admiration of Han a bit too far. Apologies to Gabrielx were made as well as a gift to help him on his HK journey.
Following that we went to Taris, then Hoth, and then Coruscant fanning out to use our survey team to quickly identify the parts and allowing everyone to get what they needed. We followed up Coruscant with a dip on the Sith side <Pod Six>.
Same story in regards to surveying, but with much complaining about Dromund Kaas lacking a unified speeder network. Here I thought despotic authoritarian regimes were supposed to make the speeders run on time.
We rounded out Saturday by breaking into groups for the Flashpoint portions.
A quick jaunt through False Emperor for my group was a lot of fun. As you can see I ran with up and coming twitter celebrity @FynnCobb as a tank heal team. It was a lot of fun with wisecracking all around.
The next day a few of us finished up with a run of Hard Mode Maelstrom Prison. A quick Heroic 2+ on Belsavis later and now C2-N2 has a bully to worry about on my ship.
It was a lot of fun and something that gave the Church a great bonding experience outside a raiding context.
If you are interested in joining the Church, or participating in our activities please visit our forums and say hi. We love meeting new people and making new friends.
Summer vacations were not kind to the Alvis raiding program. However with fall coming we got back in the groove and downed Warlord Kephess in Explosive Conflict.
Tanking was down by Jounville and Shattner. Healing by Starel and Kam’ryn. DPS by Leeth’al, Skiggity, Maizan, and Josselin. A few tweaks between tries and we downed him getting many Alvians their first Kephess kill. Great work!
July 16th after settling into our new server Canderous Ordo we set our sights on resuming the push into Explosive Conflict. We pulled together and managed to drop Firebrand and Stormcaller making piles of scrap metal. If you are interested in this quality scrap please contact Furiel.
Next up we are going to learn how to defuse landmines.
The Church is moving off Juyo and to Canderous Ordo with the Bioware megaserver push. This will be a chaotic time for sure, but we can always be found on our forums.
We look forward to getting everyone situated and secure, and bringing our message of drunken vengeance to a whole new server.