Return of the Alvian Picnic

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One of the cultural touchstones of the Church of Alvis back in Star Wars Galaxies was our Church Picnics. These were large romps where 20-40 people grouped up and did a scorched march across Yavin or Dathomir. The game allowed for that by the nature of being a “sandbox” game. One of the challenges of SWTOR for the Church has been to find activities that people of all levels could participate in like the picnics of old.

Luckily for us there are the Datacron hunts. There are too many to do in one night, so targeting a planet or two in one night allows lots of people to come out and have fun with us. Last Sunday we went to get all the Tatooine and Nar Shaddaa datacrons.

As is our tradition, when we can be in our undies, we go in our undies. We traveled across the Dune Sea in a shirtless biker gang, showing off our hawt bodies for all to see. We had fun time running from datacron to datacron in the buff. We have found that going as a posse makes it easier since we can help each other with things by using trooper harpoon or sage rescue to pull people up to hard to reach ledges.

In addition to collecting datacrons and having a silly time we did take down a world boss partially clothed.

Unfortunately getting people lined up for a screenshot took longer than the despawn time after it was looted. I blame the booze on that, but I swear it happened!

One of the big challenges in a level based MMO like SWTOR is finding a way fro max leveled players and leveling players to do things together. The datacron crawls are a good start and I hope Bioware can make more things like that to allow for interaction between end game players and more casual players.

All in all a very fun night with lots of fun, and apparently some scandalous screenies of my crotch in a gunslinger’s crotch in an attempt to get up on a sand crawler are floating around.

In Which The Price of Corruption is Tallied

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Meet Devo.

The player behind Devo is by all accounts a stand up guy. Devo however is the worst of the worst. Well that may not be accurate. The Emperor in the Revan novel was pretty awful. Regardless Devo is not a person to be messed with.

Last week before our Wednesday raid I noticed he was lounging about in just his undies. The thing that struck me as odd, was the lack of darkside corruption below his neck.

Other bloggers have noted that morality can take it’s toll on you. And it has been noted that the morality questions are often a false choice. But I was always led to believe that being a darkside character would make your whole body weak and taunt. Apparently that isn’t true. It is true for your face, but slap a bag on Devo here and you couldn’t tell me that his body look emaciated by a lack of moral fiber.

The takeaways here are as follows.

  1. Yes the Alvis Raid team can and will strip without prompting before raids.
  2. Being committed to evil gives you a six pack in the abs.
  3. For some reason Devo’s head reminds me of Hunter S. Thompson.

Legacy Unlock: Ship Repair Droid

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With the Legacy system unrolling with 1.2 there are plenty of perks that people can now get. These range from social emotes to unarmed combat attacks to items you can get for your ship. As I’ve been working hard on crafting as of late I decided to get the ship repair droid. The reason wasn’t for the convenience of repairing gear on my ship. But rather because the droid also allows for sensor units to be sold which can make C2-N2 or 2V-R8 more useful in crafting.

Meet Repair Astromech

I kind of wish he had a neater name. But oh well.

In order to get him on your ship (for all characters on your legacy) requires Legacy level 7. And (cue Dr. Evil close up) One Million Credits. He can be purchased directly from the legacy perk screen. I spent 30 minutes running around the fleet and Coruscant before I realized my ignorance.

Press Y for Legacy tab and go to Other subsection.

 

Why you Want Him

If you aren’t crafting or gathering you probably don’t unless you like to show off that you had the money to buy him at some point. However for the crafting minded.

 

The cost of each sensor is 100,000 credits. So yes you just paid one million, and now you are forking out more money. C2-N2 better be grateful!

The full list of sensor units is as follows:

Engineering Droid Sensor: +5 Scavenging Efficiency, +5 Cybertech Critical
Exploration Droid Sensor: +5 Archaeology Efficiency, +5 Synthweaving Critical
Hunter Droid Sensor: +10 Investigation Efficiency, +2 Armstech Critical
Medical Droid Sensor: +10 Biochem Efficiency, +2 Diplomacy Critical
Scout Droid Sensor: +10 Artifice Efficiency, +2 Treasure Hunting Critical
Security Droid Sensor: +10 Armormech Efficiency, +2 Underworld Trading Critical

 

A quick reminder. Efficiency just means they will do those kind of tasks faster, while critical increased the chance of a critical success. Critical success on armor and equipment means an augment slot, while on a gathering mission usually means a higher yield.

When you equip the sensor unit the bonuses will not appear on the crew skill screen.

 

 

I assume at this time that is a display bug, but I have tested out the efficiency bonuses by taking the same mission with and without the sensor unit equipped. The efficiency bonus works, so I assume the critical bonuses are there too. The sensor units are bind on Legacy so if you swap out crew skills or want to help jump start an alt’s crew skill grind you can drop it in the mail and save yourself 100k for that specific type of sensor unit.

Now if you don’t have a million credits or Legacy level seven there is an alternate method to get the sensor unit, but not the droid itself. Find someone who has the droid already and get on their ship. You can access the vendor once on board, buy the sensor unit and equip it on your steward droid. You will still have to pay the 100k credits, but it is a much easier financial pill to swallow than the one million.

The Case for Crafted Gear

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The Case for Operation Players

 

Alvis jokes that I’m either fresh off Ord Mantell, the Pajama Tank or an extra from Logan’s Run because I wear crafted gear that looks much like low level trooper gear. But I do this for two reasons. First it is an individual look you don’t see many 50s sporting. Second and more important in an operations sense, is that I’m getting more out of my gear than people who wear the Tionese, Columi, or Rakata gear as is. Here are the screen shots to prove it.

Columi from the vendor versus my crafted gear

 

So as you can see on the chest piece I have all the same stats PLUS I get an augment slot which is adding 18 shield and 12 power to my totals.

 

Same story on the legs as on the chest.

 

Same story on the headgear.

So the only thing I’m not getting are the four piece set bonuses. But that won’t be the case starting with gear after the Rakata tier of gear. So for some extra cash to strip the armoring, enhancements, and mods out of your hard earned raid gear, you can upgrade your operations or PvP sets with an augment in four or five places.

Currently I have orange chest, head, legs, and blaster rifle. Each has an augment slot with nets me an extra 72 points on one stat and another 48 on another if you stacked them. My wife has a sentinel which has allowed her to get an augmented mainhand and offhand piece giving her 90 extra points in one stat and 60 extra points in a second stat than she would get off of operations loot otherwise.

Yes it is expensive every time you loot something you are paying a lot to strip the mods, but what you gain is more stats and more of a defined look instead of a potential mismatch of gear sets.

Buyers Guide

So now that I’ve won you over to the power of augmented gear it can be a bit daunting to figure out the best way to get it. First you should really sit down and figure out which set or blend of sets you will be happiest with. I Play Swtor did a summary last month of all the craftable orange sets. Notably missing is the Valor sets they added for 1.2 and it doesn’t list augmented weapons. However the list shows you pretty much every other set in the game at the moment. These sets include Chest, Legs, and for anything higher than level 15 headgear.

Take the time to search for images of what this gear looks like. Seek out armormechs or synthweavers who have these schematics in your guild or on your server and have them link the items so you can see how it would look on your character.

Once you settle on the set look you like now comes the choice. Either you can stalk the GTN waiting for one to show up augmented and pay the price listed (ranges in my experience from 80k-500k depending on the item, server, and crafter) or commission one to be made from a crafter.

If you commission one you need to understand that you are taking the crafters companion’s time and that it takes several attempts of crafting an item before one gets an augment slot. This will eat up a lot of resources, but the good news is that the resources it eats generally are pretty easy to get. There are no Biometric Crystal Alloys or Mandalorian Iron materials in any customized gear I’ve seen so far. The crafter may ask for you to supply materials or they may roll the material costs into the agreed upon price. Either way you can get what you want in a timely manner.

 

Breaking News: Soa is Still Dead

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The Church of Alvis kills Soa on Normal

ETERNITY VAULT, Belsavis (AP)- Long time Galactic Menace Soa the Infernal One has been killed at the hands of the Church of Alvis. The squad known for precision operations, reckless drinking, and inappropriate behavior at children’s birthday parties has done it again. A mere two days after the Church took down Karagga the Unyielding, the Church struck a blow at blowhards everywhere by taking down Soa.

 

“I’ll be honest. This feels great. I’m very proud of our boys on this one.” Major Jounville Blackferne said after the raid. “I was worried about having to main tank this bastard, but I managed to drink away the afraids and put on my big boy pants.”

Jounville Blackferne looks at a servant forced to clean up Joun's vomit after drinking speeder coolant on a dare.

The strike team consisted of Jounville, Darrec, Dashl, Devo, Dodd, Furiel, Darklinda, and Bulwark.Major Furiel Plush was also elated saying to the fallen Soa “What now? Huh? Without those bugs you aren’t so powerful are you?!” at which point Soa challenged Alvis to a rematch on hard mode.

Soa the Infernal One is still dead.

 

That did not go well for Soa. Alvis swapped out Darklinda the smuggler for Dlinda the shadow. Marrkin and guild friend Romily of Snark Side fame stepped in for Dodd and Bulwark who had other commitments. The roster changes didn’t matter as the Church slapped Soa back to the floor.

“How do you like me now? Huh?” Furiel shouted at the fallen Soa who lay in a crumpled heap on the floor.

The second team celebrated their victory by trying to avoid the plague at Karrick Station.

News Alert: The Church of Alvis Kills Karagga!

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KARAGGA’S PALACE, Nal Hutta (AP)- Noted crime lord and infamous hat collector Karagga the Unyielding is dead. The killing blow was at the hands of eight drunken members of the Church of Alvis.  Under the leadership of Major Jounville Blackferne, seen here stealing a taxi on Nar Shaddaa, the Alvians exacted a precision raid against the fat Hutt.

The operation occurred in Karagga’s palace and there were many civilian deaths. Major Cuspar said, “It was a bad night to be a janitor in this hell hole. My quote won’t be used will it? It just seems kind of insensitive.”

 

The raid consisted of Jounville, Cuspar, Dodd, Marrkin, Dashl, Bulwark, MarkusTiel, and Naarp. The operation almost wasn’t a success due to a stubborn  G4-BC Heavy Fabricator droid who vexed the raid until a focused effort brought him down.

 

“I hate that droid. I hate all droids.” Bulwark said. “Watching him fall down was the highlight of my week. To be fair it has been a rather boring week at work.”

 

The future looks bright for the Alvian Crusaders as they hope to polish off longtime foe Soa and his pesky assistant “Gravity” in the near future.

 

Getting Raid Ready: A Gear Debate

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As Alvis approached the first raid I knew that I would be one of the two tanks for the instance. The other was my dear friend Cuspar. Both of us are Vanguard Shield specs with pretty much the same spec. But both of us took different approaches towards gearing. This article is intended to look at the pros and cons of the approaches we took and possibly draw broader conclusions from the experiences.

The conventional wisdom I got from various message boards, the official forums, and blogs I was reading was to take the following approach towards raid gearing: get as many orange pieces as you can, run dailies, mod the crap out of those orange pieces. Crafting was considered inferior to that approach. This might have been the result of either ignorance of real stat equivalencies within the theory crafting community, bias against crafting, or people just making stuff up since it was really difficult to “prove them wrong”.

Cuspar chose to follow the orange gear and mod it approach. I chose to go against the grain (and in the process worried our raid coordinator Furiel) and crafted a good chunk of my raid gear.

Important Maths

In the attempt to provide some measuring sticks by with judge how our approaches worked it is important to paint tanking in broad strokes of evaluation.  When you break it down to the gear composition there are two main goals you have as a tank. First is your ability to survive. The second is your ability to generate threat.

The Ability to survive can be measure by two metrics.

The first and easiest metric is effective health. Effective health only looks at two stats from your character sheet: health and armor. Armor reduces the amount of kinetic and energy damage you take. Since most enemies do those types of damage it is pretty useful to know what this is. If you have let’s say 10,000 hit points (hp) and you armor can reduce 25% of that damage it means effectively your health pool is really 12,500. If you armor reduces 45% your health pool is effectively 14,500 and so on. Or in other words a person with 10k hp and 50% damage reduction is the same as someone who has 15k hp and 0% damage reduction. Essentially effective health the bigger the better.

The second survival metric is a lot more complicated. It is called total mitigation. This metric looks at a wider array of defensive stats and essentially looks at how much of an incoming attack you will take on over time. I’m not going to get into the deep math on the formula but it essentially asks these questions in this order: First what is the chance that an attack hits you, and if it hits you, what is the chance your shield will proc? and if it procs how much will be absorbed by your shield? And after all that what is the amount that will be absorbed by your armor? The stats that factor into this equation as I’m sure you get by now is defense chance, shield chance, absorption amount, and armor mitigation. How much health you have isn’t taken into account because this is measuring more about how smooth your incoming damage is.

The second major gearing goal for tanks is threat generation.  Threat is measured by damage output. The base unit is 1 point of damage. A point of heal is approximately .5 a unit of threat. There are various things that alter the threat generation such as whether you have a tanking stance on, have a guard on you, and the range you are from the mob. The further you are from the mob the less threat you generate. For our comparisons Cuspar and I would be comparing Aim, accuracy, Crit Chance, surge, bonus damage etc. Threat generation is important for a tank since if you can’t generate threat your DPS will be capped in their output potential, and with tight enrage timers you don’t want to throttle DPS anymore than you have to. However the first priority for tanks is always to get to a point on survival where your healers don’t have a heart attack keeping you alive  before you switch to threat generation. This is derived from the “a dead tank is a useless tank” mmo maxim.

Cuspar’s Orange Mod Approach

Cuspar had orange for all armor except belt and bracers. He also had an orange weapon. That is a total of nineeen slots to fill with armor mods, mods, barrels, color crystal, and enhancement. It took him two weeks of fairly regular grinding of dailies on Belsavis and Ilum to get the necessary pieces to start his gear up to where he was happy with it for the purposes of tanking a normal raid. The thing to know about Cuspar is that his time is limited. He cannot spend countless hours on running the dailies to cap on commendations every day. Like all of us he has other obligations including a job and family. So it could be done faster, and I’m certain others in Alvis were able to max out quicker than Cuspar.

Looking at the primary stats, modding wins. Crafting is more secondary stats.

 

Cuspar’s end result was a larger focus placed on the primary stats of Aim and Endurance. His effective health was higher and his aim was higher meaning he should be able to do more damage than me. For all the gearing suggestions we could find going into the first raid his stats pretty much always lined up. Tanks seemed to be judged based on their health and armor alone, and not based on other stats which might make them harder or easier to heal. He was fitting all the conventional wisdom perfectly on what to do to be prepared to tank normal operations.

 

Jounville Goes Broke Crafting

I’ve bet on the crafting game. I know that at some point the raid gear will exceed what I could possibly craft, but I’m used to a template of raid preparation that says entry into endgame can be accomplished through crafted gear. I took armormech, scavenging, and underworld trading and had all at 400 before 50. I was already in the REing for entry raid gear before I finished Voss. This is not a cheap approach by any means. First gatherign materials is expensive. Materials range in price to gather from 200-500 credits per unit depending on what it is, and if you need to buy materials off the auction house you are looking at that per unit cost doubling at least. Highly rare materials like Mandolorian Iron routinely sell for 10k+ on our server.

Again more secondary and less primary on crafted pieces

The results were different than Cuspar was getting as well on his gear. While Cuspar’s base stats were higher, and as such his health pool and effective health were higher, my stats at avoidance and mitigation jumped out as higher. This created a perception on a casual glance that my gear was not ready. In fact Furiel told me to get a new chest piece since the Mastercraft Veracity Powered Ultramesh Body Armor I made only had 45 aim and 72 Endurance. I had to point out the secondary stats like +27 accuracy +20 absorb +48 defense and +76 shield to create doubt in his initial impression about my gear.

My effective health was lower than Cuspar’s by nearly 4k going into that first raid. But my total mitigation was 2% more. I had nearly 5% more chance to dodge an attack altogether and my chance to shield was 3% higher. These might seem like small differences, but in a key position like tank, every percentage point counts.

So given the conventional wisdom and now general unease of our raid coordinator, why did I continue to push for the crafting gear plan? Well a few reasons. First time was running out. Our first raid was approaching quickly and I didn’t have the time needed to run the necessary dailies to mimic what Cuspar was doing. Second I think that secondary stats were being undervalued, and crafted gear generally has better secondary stats than can reasonably be achieved with orange gear. And finally I felt that I needed to know if where all my money and time reverse engineering was a waste. Bioware in a sense had to prove to me that they cared about crafting, and if I could tank in an operation in mostly crafted gear, then I knew they had planned stuff well.

The Big Day

The first Alvian Operation came on February 25th, 2012. Cuspar and I were both ready and I was nervous if my bet would pay off. As a raid we had two tanks with different gearing strategies. Also we had two tanks with different tanking in an mmo histories. Cuspar hasn’t really played an mmo since SWG and that was nothing like the group dynamic SWTOR has adopted. I on the other hand tanked many raids in WoW and had experience in improvising in raid settings.

The toughest pull in Eternity Vault for us was the turrets. And I seemed just as durable as Cuspar. Neither healer complained I was a paper tank, or that Csupar was simply a giant health pool with no real mitigation. Through the operation I did take a back seat to Cuspar’s tanking on the one tank fights, acting more like an tutor on how to tank in case he needed guidance, but gearwise I was never at a disadvantage it seemed.

 

Conclusions

In the end I think crafting or modding is a viable method to get ready for normal operations. The  real puzzle at this point is figuring out what the real comparative value of stats are. Without combat logs and the math models that come out of them, it is really hard to say 1 point of endurance is worth 3 points of shield is worth 6 points of defense, or whatever the stat equivalencies are. I think in general people tend to undervalue their secondary stats. A lot of Aim, or Endurance, or Cunning is great, but being able to get crit, power, alacrity, shield chance, surge etc is what can take you from doing well to doing great.

The Church Bulletin January and February

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I wanted to take a few moments to summarize some of the activities the Church has been up to lately.

The March to 50

Jeezbus was the first Alvian to 50 and since he hit that milestone in late december we’ve had several other Alvians hit the big 5-0 with quite a few coming up quickly. As of this writing Alvis has 15 fifties who regularly run flashpoints and dailies together.

 

Initiation

On January 28th we promoted the following people from Altarsquid to full blown Priests within the Church. There was a simple ceremony on the Fleet followed by a Sarlaac jump and some PvP with our friends over at Unrepentant and Archaic. While they may have landed a few shots on us, we put up a valiant fight.

Yim'ays and Devo valiantly fight for drunken vengeance on behalf of their fallen Archbishop.

 

Datacron Crawl

On Feb 11th, Jounville, Veela, Qwuaff, Bulwark, Yimayz, Klak, and Dashl set out on a great Datacron hunt covering Ord Mantell, Tython, Corellia, and everyone’s favorite post apocalyptic wasteland Taris. We were able to get to eevry datacron on those planets even though some were much harder than others. There are plans to tackle more planets in the near future.

 

Our First Operation

This past weekend the Church of Alvis struck a victory for drunken vengeance in the Eternity Vault. We managed to get to Soa to phase three in our raid. No doubt he will fall next time we set foot in there. Here is our first attempt and kill against the Annihilator Droid with our actual ventrillo chatter!

 

Upcoming Soon

Our raiding will continue. More people will be hitting 50 which means more flashpoints, more dailies groups. Our next crop of altarsquids are getting ready for initiation and we are going to be doing more datacron crawls. March and April will be exciting for all Alvians as we delve deeper into this galaxy far far away!

And they lived happily ever after – A first glance into end-game content

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“You have taken your first step into a larger world.”

-Obi-wan, Episode IV – A New Hope

 

Of late, my toon has been racing across the galaxy, conversing with thousands of citizens of the Republic approaching him for help. He has killed countless enemies, gathered, destroyed, pillaged, escorted…and generally had a blast doing it all.

At the pinnacle of it all was his own defining story, a truly epic and heroic tale, of which he was the center of a major conspiracy which drove straight through the heart of the Republic. Not only did he survive the entire ordeal, but in the end he emerged from the ashes of conflict as a true hero of the Republic, and all the glory she stands for.

Then, the unthinkable happened.

Dodd hit level 50. His class story wrapped up shortly thereafter.

As a SWTOR player, this changes the context and psyche of the game considerably. Dodd is still very much the carefree flyboy with a heart of gold that I had intended him to be, however…the class quests and xp grind have both come to a fairly abrupt end. And also, the class story is done. No more Voidwolf chasing me around the galaxy. No more big schemes to thwart. The loading screen, which constantly provided me with an updated SW-themed scroll with Act I, Act II, Act III now reads…”Interlude”.

I found myself quickly asking…ok, what now?

I’m fairly sure as a n00b level 50, others have asked themselves this question, as well as those within the guild who will be getting there shortly. I owe big Props to Dashl for grouping up through several planets, and Jeezbus for running us through several flashpoints. I also freely acknowledge that I devoured this game content in relatively short time and found myself slightly ahead of the leveling curve in comparison to my Alvian guildmates. This was done consciously, for personal reasons I won’t get into here.

So I’m taking the time to document my research on life after level 50, and present it to you, spoiler-free. I’m sure this entry will not necessarily be complete, and perhaps might even become outdated by the time you read this. But here is my best attempt. Here is how to gear up and get ready for Alvis Operations. I admit, we may be getting slightly ahead of ourselves on this one, since they might be a ways off. But it doesn’t hurt to be prepared ahead of time…

Things to remember as a level 50 n00b:

1) You don’t need regular XP anymore, but you will be continuing to gain legacy XP. Keep this in mind if you’re still on Corellia at level 50, on a bonus quest and somehow thinking you still need to kill n mobs of x in total. Bonus quests provide a nice xp boost, but you don’t need xp anymore. So unless you think there is a hint of getting additional credits or commendations from the bonus, ask yourself if this grind bonus quest is worth it for legacy xp, or if it will help you move your character forward in any way. If the answer lies somewhere in the negative, or if you’re uncertain, or just plain bored, you may wish to discontinue the bonus quest and just focus on the overall quest objective.

2) All quests still provide you gear, credits and legacy xp. Average payouts for most Corellian quests are decent in the 6K+ range/quest. So they’re worth doing.

3) Continue to earn as much money as you can. If you go with Speeder 3 training, you’ll need about 500K or so for class training AND speeder 3 training when you hit 50. I was flat broke afterwards and could barely afford fuel costs when I was done on the Republic fleet. Sure, the 1.5 mill speeder which you can buy from vendors might look enticing, but keep in mind this is a vanity item, an expensive one at that, and might take time to grind that kind of cash. For now, speeder 3 and a nice Aratech Dagger will get the job done at 110% speed, quite adequately.

4) This is an MMO. MMO endgames usually involve the eternal quest for better gear until the level cap is raised and more content is added. SWTOR continues to deliver story and purpose to this MMO grind, but overall, the goal as compared to every other MMO remains the same. Get more gear!

5) According to Devs…more moddable endgame gear is on the way. This is a complaint on the forums I’m reading. The best thing about an MMO is that it is ever evolving, patching, ever improving. We’ve only just begun with SWTOR, folks. If there’s something you don’t like about the game…sit tight…chances are the Devs have noticed and are already working on it.

 

Things to experience at level 50, while your guild is getting ready for Operations:

1) First things first. Help other guildies, to the best of your ability. Class quests and Heroics aren’t always easy, having an extra blaster or saber at their sides will help (not to mention a level 50), and while you won’t earn XP anymore and you’ll be potentially gimping their XP gain for killing the mobs, you will nevertheless earn good karma xp. I’ve had the good fortune of Jeezbus running us through several Flashpoints, and I would say that I am extremely grateful for his assistance. Not only this, but consider the more people hit 50 in Alvis, the more available help you’ll have for some of the more difficult content, just as daily heroics and flashpoints (see below). So help out others and enjoy the content this game has to offer.

2) Gear up, and get ready for endgame PVE content. Here are the known current ways of getting started…

  1. PVE Repeatable Daily Quests. Without story spoiling, if you’re really stuck…Go back to the Republic Fleet. A Twi’lek located in the Cantina will point you to Belsavis, where you will eventually unlock around 8 repeatable daily quests on that planet, in a level 50 zone. These quests, unlike other regular quests, will provide PVE Commendations (along with credits) which can be traded for PVE items on the fleet.  Each quest (there are at least 7) earn 1 commendation and 7150 credits.
  2. Hard mode flashpoints. Group up and try some of the higher-end flashpoints (Directive 7, The Battle of Illum, or The False Emperor), or redo some of the original content on hard, and nightmare modes. The way these work is that the bosses up to the final boss will drop epic gear, and the final boss will drop a class token. All bosses will also drop Tionese Crystals, which are used in conjunction with other commendations to purchase epic PvE gear from the Tionese vendor on the Fleet. The main disadvantage here is that the gear drops are random, and from what I hear, Bioware still has some patching to do to ensure equal distribution amongst classes. As of today, the endgame loot bags we were promised while the game was in development aren’t there yet.
  3. Flashpoint Dailies and Weeklies. These are straightforward and gotten from the Fleet. Complete 1/day and 3/week on Hard Mode to get the max reward. Basically you’ll just be doing Esseles to complete this quest.

4) Gear up, and get ready through endgame PVP content. So – yeah. The PVP item purchasing system is a little confusing at first. But it’s pretty straightforward once you get the hang of it. For this, you’ll mainly do PVP Warzones. Lots of them. I’m guessing premades will help a lot in winning if you can find a good group of people who communicate and work well together. Otherwise, be prepared to swallow your pride and lose…repeatedly. I’ve been in about two dozen battlegrounds so far with Dodd and haven’t won one yet. I keep hearing that Republic isn’t that bad, and I’ve probably just experienced a string of bad luck. You might win a bit in the process, and develop l33t skills, pwn teh nub (then go to iHop).

  1. Grind Warzone Commendations through warzones, and trade them in for Mercenary Commendations at the PVP vendor (at a 3:1 Conversion Rate). Essentially, once you’ve accumulated 800 Warzone Commendations (specifically, 200 Warzone Commendations and 200 Mercenary Commendations), you can start buying Champion and eventually Battlemaster bags once your valor rating is 60. If you’re serious about this grind, you’ll basically want to set aside your tokens until you hit 60 valor so you’re skipping the Champion bags altogether (Rating 140 versus 136). These bags have (at the time of this article) a one in ten chance of dropping random epic items, as well as Champion / Battlemaster tokens which you trade in on the fleet for gear.
  2. Daily and Weekly PvP Warzone Wins – These two quests are picked up on the Fleet. Win 3 matches a day, and 9 a week. Daily gets you 1 Champion Gear bag, and the weekly gets you 3.
  3. PVP Dailies – Similar to Belsavis PVE quests, you will also get a quest to head to Illum, and there are daily quests there which also give rewards for completing specific objectives within a PVP zone. The slicing there is excellent, also…incidentally.

5) Crafting. At the time of this article, there aren’t a whole lot of schematics worth crafting for endgame, from the research I’ve done. Nevertheless, it’s still worth investigating and ensuring both you and your companions have the best crafted gear available.

6) Have you discovered all the holocrons and looked at Matrix Cubes yet? If you’re anything like me…you probably rushed through and never bothered. But they will give you a slight extra edge, so look them up on swtor-spy, and get cracking!

7) Do your companions love you, or hate you? Do you care? Do you want them to open up to you more? Romance, and possibly marry them? Try building your relationship with them by offering them gifts, and questing some more with them.

8) Roll an alt! Same server toons earn shared Legacy XP and it’s easy to run some PVE/PVP dailies on your main to get a couple mods and ship some credits to your new toon and blast through crafting much faster.

9) Social Points, titles, space content…there’s so much more the game has to offer.

I might have missed some stuff here, or there may be some clarifications required. Again, I’m still a newbie level 50, and I’m still putting the pieces together. But I hope this helps you, fellow Alvian, to quickly find your way in the universe after you’ve completed the leveling grind.

May the force be with you.

Tak’s Take: Being a Filthy, Filthy Codex Whore

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Does this describe you?  You have just finished the last bonus quest on Taris.  You are ready to leave that planet and its horde of rahkgouls behind.  Suddenly, a persistent itch presents itself at the base of your skull.  Something is missing.  A quick look at your codex reveals your sense of deficiency.  There are things you have not seen, people you have not met, and lore you have not read.  If you cannot relate to this feeling, then congratulations, you are most likely a healthy well adjusted individual.  Otherwise, you are a filthy, filthy codex whore.

Mario Skills FTW!

Mario Skills FTW!

I have only ever played two MMOs: Star Wars: Galaxies and Star Wars: The Old Republic.  The games approach exploration in vastly different ways.  In the Galaxies sandbox, you had vast open vistas that, while often presenting nothing more than a pretty view, offered the hope of discovery.  As a theme park game, The Old Republic often rewards exploration with big red barriers.  So I see the codex as Bioware’s attempt to throw us explorer types a bone.

Curse You Missing Species!

Curse You Missing Species!

The codex encourages exploring areas on the map where no mission icon exists.  It tempts you to take on that champion mob to see what may be hiding behind it.  Loot is secondary to discovery.  However, the codex can also be maddening.  Datacrons, for example, reward exploration with stat bonuses, but require a level of jumping dexterity that I seem to lack.  Oh, Super Mario Bros, did I learn nothing from you.  It also drives you insane when a codex entry is bugged.  I must have travelled the entire map of Ord Mantell five times searching for those last two species entries that were impossible to find.

I like to poke my head in strange places

I like to poke my head in strange places

And yet, my futile attempt to complete the codex entries of Ord Mantell introduced me to my next obsession: completing the world map.  It is always fun to see all those little hexagons disappear from my word map once I have visited every area on the planet.  The bit of XP I get, does not hurt.  Even this has bugs, though.  The only way I could complete the world map on Coruscant was to poke my head through the roof of the starport.

No Hexagons!

No Hexagons!

Those of us who score a 100 percent explorer on the Bartle Gamer Psychology Quiz will find their options limited in Star Wars: The Old Republic.  Thankfully, Bioware has given us a couple of outlets. We have become filthy, filthy codex whores.