SWTOR: GWJ Sith Guild, Imperial Paper Pushers Catch-All

Just got started with the game and joined the guild (name's Klaudius, Imperial Agent). Was pleasantly surprised to find people on, even at European times!
So if any other eurogoodjers are on the fence, I advise you to play on Keller's Void, I haven't noticed any lag.

Medmey wrote:

Nice write on on the level 50 steps Fuzz. I was pondering this last night once I hit 50 and didn't have any time to look into it before I had to hit the sack. Looking forward to getting some post 50 stuff going.

Great summary Fuzz.

Having done a bit more PVP now, I highly recommend to do the Ilum PVP area daily and weekly as soon as possible before things change if you have a chance to. PVP daily/weekly was pretty hit and miss for me due to the matchmaking system.
It may even out in the end, but it is frustrating if you lose quite a lot of matches in a row just because your team is considerably lower level or just not a full 8 group.

Having said that, we seem to have been quite lucky so far in terms of getting champion gear tokens out of bags and with the increase of stats (between 20-40 more points for your main stat, depending on your previous gear), it might be enough to be ready with only 2-3 T2 equips. I would also advise to save the centurion commendations from the bags to buy gear that fills in missing parts for the set bonus (this list seems complete: http://knotor.com/item_sets).
The centurion gear itself is not that much of an advancement if at all over most blue lvl50 gear, so it only makes sense if you truly benefit from it or are able to unlock the set bonus.
I wasn't able to test it myself, but apparently you should be able to mix equipment of different tiers and still retain the set bonus as long as they are part of the same set. (i.e. Sith Sorcerer would go with Force-Mystic)
It seems so far that naming conventions are a bit weird, though.

As an example:
There is a Force-Master set and a Force-Mystic set which emphasize either Endurance or Willpower, but are generally the same else. The "Force-Master" title also applies to auxiliary equipment that does not contribute to the set bonus (i.e. Force-Master Lightsaber, Implants, Earpiece,...etc.). This in itself is not a problem at all, but it was a bit confusing to me when I started wondering why I couldn't find any Force-Mystic equipment for the tokens I got.

As for the tokens, they generally let you chose between 2 different sets (if available as described above) and you should go with the one that fits your advanced class best and then stick with it for the 2 piece and/or 4 piece bonus.

So in short:

- try to do the Ilum PVP area daily/weekly as soon as possible while it is as easy as it is now (just wait for the Rep's to turn the capture points)
- the PVP daily seems to be the bread & butter foundation for any decent gear at the moment
- the planet dailies are good to upgrade your companions and/or stack up on daily commendations for the really expensive earpieces, but outlive their usefulness once you start to get more T2 Champion gear

Gah. Really looking forward to logging in again tonight. My trip to WI killed me last night, basically just fell over.

See all you folks in the Galaxy tonight!

For those of us that are waiting to 50 to care about datacrons, Darth Hater is starting to roll out a series of planet-based 'cron guides.

http://www.darthhater.com/tag/datacron

Good stuff.

Dumb question -

I hit 50 a little bit ago and shelved the guy (work has been rather extreme). I went to Ilum to hit the dailies everyone is talking about, and I only see two. Do the rest open up after you finish Correlia (which I never did)? Or is there some other trigger I'm missing?

Bloo Driver wrote:

Dumb question -

I hit 50 a little bit ago and shelved the guy (work has been rather extreme). I went to Ilum to hit the dailies everyone is talking about, and I only see two. Do the rest open up after you finish Correlia (which I never did)? Or is there some other trigger I'm missing?

Yes, you need to finish your class quest before you can do the Belsavis heroic and Ilum quest lines. Doing those lines opens up more level 50 daily quests.

Bloo Driver wrote:

Dumb question -

I hit 50 a little bit ago and shelved the guy (work has been rather extreme). I went to Ilum to hit the dailies everyone is talking about, and I only see two. Do the rest open up after you finish Correlia (which I never did)? Or is there some other trigger I'm missing?

the important ones there are the help the war effort daily/weekly for the champ bags

Getting t2 gear from champion bags is beyond lucky. To do it naturally takes awhile to reach rank 60.

Anyone interested in doing the Heroic or Group stuff from Balmorra tonight? I think that it should be around levels 17 to 22 or so.

CptGlanton wrote:

Anyone interested in doing the Heroic or Group stuff from Balmorra tonight? I think that it should be around levels 17 to 22 or so.

I'm in. I have a level 22 Imperial Agent - Sniper. I have all the heroic's/groups to do on Balmorra pretty much.

I should be on about 7pm CST or so....

ranalin wrote:

Getting t2 gear from champion bags is beyond lucky. To do it naturally takes awhile to reach rank 60.

That almost makes me feel bad now for getting 3 equips from 3 bags just now.
I'm on 6 pieces of champion gear with no duplicates so far.

Forgot to add--my name on TOR is the same as here, so anyone interested, just send me a party invite.

Kolbo wrote:
CptGlanton wrote:

Anyone interested in doing the Heroic or Group stuff from Balmorra tonight? I think that it should be around levels 17 to 22 or so.

I'm in. I have a level 22 Imperial Agent - Sniper. I have all the heroic's/groups to do on Balmorra pretty much.

I should be on about 7pm CST or so....

Cool. That's probably a good time for a general meet-up anyway.

Their community manager put up a piece on why the resolution is different on your in-game models and your cinematic models.

http://www.swtor.com/community/showthread.php?p=1478869#edit1478869

It boils down to: the hi-rez textures they use in the cutscenes would be too taxing in a big group environment like an Op or the Fleet. Pretty much exactly what I figured, but he spells it out in a nice, understandable fashion here.

Michael Zenke wrote:

Their community manager put up a piece on why the resolution is different on your in-game models and your cinematic models.

http://www.swtor.com/community/showthread.php?p=1478869#edit1478869

It boils down to: the hi-rez textures they use in the cutscenes would be too taxing in a big group environment like an Op or the Fleet. Pretty much exactly what I figured, but he spells it out in a nice, understandable fashion here.

I'm baffled. That reads like they just limited it to only cutscenes so they didn't get complaints about the game running bad on high settings from lots of people.

If it's there for the cutscenes...the option should be there for the rest of the time for those of us that can run it...sounds like a typical corporate propaganda piece to me.

Maybe there's a lot more to it but it reads just like half the excuse letters i've seen from IT guys in my life...and i've seen a lot of em.

Fuzzballx wrote:

I'm baffled. That reads like they just limited it to only cutscenes so they didn't get complaints about the game running bad on high settings from lots of people.

If it's there for the cutscenes...the option should be there for the rest of the time for those of us that can run it...sounds like a typical corporate propaganda piece to me.

Maybe there's a lot more to it but it reads just like half the excuse letters i've seen from IT guys in my life...and i've seen a lot of em.

Is this really what you're playing the game for? For quibbles over how high res the butt of your avatar is? The graphic quality of this game is already fading as technology marches on and it's does a fine job of conveying the world of Star Wars. I don't see what the big deal is.

Also, if "IT guys" are sending you excuse letters, you should look into having them email you instead.

kingschiebi wrote:
ranalin wrote:

Getting t2 gear from champion bags is beyond lucky. To do it naturally takes awhile to reach rank 60.

That almost makes me feel bad now for getting 3 equips from 3 bags just now.
I'm on 6 pieces of champion gear with no duplicates so far.

I'm at 30+ (tbh lost count) champion bags and only have 4 pieces and 2 duplicates. At that rate i'm going ot hit rank 60 before i get those pieces in.

Michael Zenke wrote:

Their community manager put up a piece on why the resolution is different on your in-game models and your cinematic models.

http://www.swtor.com/community/showthread.php?p=1478869#edit1478869

It boils down to: the hi-rez textures they use in the cutscenes would be too taxing in a big group environment like an Op or the Fleet. Pretty much exactly what I figured, but he spells it out in a nice, understandable fashion here.

Sweet! Been playing on medium for no reason at all, will switch to high resolution textures for better cutscenes then.

I've noticed another issue with the preferences screen, is that when you switch from high quality shaders to low quality shaders, the shadows setting adjusts automatically to low : so far so good. But the performance of the game in this bugged low shader low shadows combo is worse (the fps counter can be brought up with Ctrl Shift F), much worse actually, especially indoors, than if you manually switch the shadows quality to off and then to low again. The indoors scenes were bordering on the unplayable for me on my ageing computer until I fiddled with those settings.

ranalin wrote:
kingschiebi wrote:
ranalin wrote:

Getting t2 gear from champion bags is beyond lucky. To do it naturally takes awhile to reach rank 60.

That almost makes me feel bad now for getting 3 equips from 3 bags just now.
I'm on 6 pieces of champion gear with no duplicates so far.

I'm at 30+ (tbh lost count) champion bags and only have 4 pieces and 2 duplicates. At that rate i'm going ot hit rank 60 before i get those pieces in.

Sounds typical....i'm close to ya in terms of bags and unique pieces...somewhere in my upper 30s now with 5 pieces (implant, boots, ear, shield generator, and wrists).

All in all it's pretty good though...i mean it's somethin to work on while we wait for more folks to be level 50 and readty to run normal ops/ hard flashpoints right?

King's just insane....think it was his very first bag that he got a mainhand T2 saber in:)

I can hardly fathom rank 60s already...i think there are some around but they musta leveled off pvp or something:) I'm only rank 24/25 atm and feel like i've been doing tons of pvp heh:)

I really don't care too much for the warzone pvp though. I'm lookin foward to the revamped ilum in 1.1, think i might really enjoy that if there's a half decent turnout. Sounds like they're gonna focus folks on the central area for conflict though which shoudl help a lot and generate some open world pvp with guilds rollin in and stuff. Could be a fun distraction if they fix it up nicely.

BadMojo wrote:

Is this really what you're playing the game for? For quibbles over how high res the butt of your avatar is?

Butt-polygons is my new metric for evaluating graphics technology.

Michael Zenke wrote:

Their community manager put up a piece on why the resolution is different on your in-game models and your cinematic models.

http://www.swtor.com/community/showthread.php?p=1478869#edit1478869

It boils down to: the hi-rez textures they use in the cutscenes would be too taxing in a big group environment like an Op or the Fleet. Pretty much exactly what I figured, but he spells it out in a nice, understandable fashion here.

Ah yes, the medium gfx option is a bug and medium is now high. I'm calling bullsh*t on this.

Please just give us the option to mess with the settings and balance performance vs. quality on our unique machines. I'm not liking the recent trend (see Skyrim and Rage!) for taking engine settings out of the users' hands.

Fuzzballx wrote:
ranalin wrote:
kingschiebi wrote:
ranalin wrote:

Getting t2 gear from champion bags is beyond lucky. To do it naturally takes awhile to reach rank 60.

That almost makes me feel bad now for getting 3 equips from 3 bags just now.
I'm on 6 pieces of champion gear with no duplicates so far.

I'm at 30+ (tbh lost count) champion bags and only have 4 pieces and 2 duplicates. At that rate i'm going ot hit rank 60 before i get those pieces in.

Sounds typical....i'm close to ya in terms of bags and unique pieces...somewhere in my upper 30s now with 5 pieces (implant, boots, ear, shield generator, and wrists).

All in all it's pretty good though...i mean it's somethin to work on while we wait for more folks to be level 50 and readty to run normal ops/ hard flashpoints right?

King's just insane....think it was his very first bag that he got a mainhand T2 saber in:)

I can hardly fathom rank 60s already...i think there are some around but they musta leveled off pvp or something:) I'm only rank 24/25 atm and feel like i've been doing tons of pvp heh:)

I really don't care too much for the warzone pvp though. I'm lookin foward to the revamped ilum in 1.1, think i might really enjoy that if there's a half decent turnout. Sounds like they're gonna focus folks on the central area for conflict though which shoudl help a lot and generate some open world pvp with guilds rollin in and stuff. Could be a fun distraction if they fix it up nicely.

Maniac and Pizzil (quentam and jammew?) on your side i thikn is 60... Nellie on our side just turned 60 last week. I'm rank 56 and there's a coupld guys right on my tails and we've been doing it since lvl 10

Quick note for the undecided:

When I respecced my Sorcerer to DPS yesterday, I noticed that respec cost is reduced to zero after a week.
So if you want to try out another tree for a week, or change things up for a FP - it is (almost) like dual classing.

Is it reduced to zero, or decreased based on how often you've respecced? (I haven't respecced in SWG, but the old WoW system increased prices in steps for successive respecs and then decreased them by one step every week.)

I want to do red reaper tonight, need a healer and 2 Deeps. Any takers?

Heals!

Hypatian wrote:

Is it reduced to zero, or decreased based on how often you've respecced? (I haven't respecced in SWG, but the old WoW system increased prices in steps for successive respecs and then decreased them by one step every week.)

It's reduced to 0 after a week thank god.

Tonight is flashpoint night!

Grab some guildies and run some stuff!

And... Emperor preserve me... let's try to do some group PvP Friday night. I haven't even touched PvP yet so that should be an adventure. Remember, level doesn't matter in PvP, everyone can still be effective. Depending on how annoying he is, I might even put a bounty on Ranalin's head. We'll see.

See you on mumble, folks!

Hypatian wrote:
BadMojo wrote:

Is this really what you're playing the game for? For quibbles over how high res the butt of your avatar is?

Butt-polygons is my new metric for evaluating graphics technology.

My new fav rating:P

Patch 1.1 has an official title: Rise of the Rakghouls!

Rock, Paper, Shotgun has a bit on what's going to be in it and the official update video.

Massively has an interview offering up a few more details on contents.

Fantastic stuff. If they're going to charge a sub fee, they've got to offer this kind of tangible appearance of value. Ohlen said in an interview they're already working on stuff into next year. Very nice work on their part. Can't wait to see what the year brings.

have they said when 1.1 will be released?