Category Archives: crew skills

Inquisitor Companions: What You Need to Know

24 Saturday Dec 2011

Posted by in companions, crew skills, spoilers

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Please Note: If you do not wish to know anything at all about your Inquisitor’s companions prior to them joining you in game, stop and please head to another page.

The purpose of this page is to help you effectively understand amd manage your Companions. As I am only level 33 as of this writing, I only have 3 of the 5 companions thus far and will update the post as I obtain the new companions.

Khem Val

When do you obtain them, and where?

He joins you as you do your class quests on Korriban, anywhere from levels 7-9.

What do they wear?

Wears heavy armor with strength and endurance his two primary stats. Uses a vibrosword as his main hand and a shield generator as his off-hand.

What kind of gifts do they like?

Weapons and Cultural artifacts are his favorites. Will also give points for Trophy, Technology and Imperial Memorabilia gifts.

What wins their affection in conversation?

Anything involving killing everyone, strength and fearlessness will earn you +affection points with him. Has an aversion to your being polite or well-mannered in your responses to other people. i.e. saying thank you to someone or noting how their support helped you be successful tends to earn you -1 affection. And never ever let someone go if there is an option to kill them instead. He positively HATES that. And if you are gong light side with your alignment, it will probably be best if the two of you part ways quickly.

What is the best role for this companion?

If he is by your side as you quest, you will typically want to have him in a tanking role. When he is back on the ship doing your crew skills bidding, note that he has the following Crew Skill bonuses:
+15 Artifice Efficiency
+5 Investigation Efficiency

Andronikos Revel

When do you obtain them, and where?

He joins you as you do your class quests on Tattooine, anywhere from levels 24-26.

What do they wear?

Wears medium armor with cunning and endurance his two primary stats. Uses blaster pistols as his weapons, which is appropriate given his gunslinger/pirate life style.

What kind of gifts do they like?

It’s no surprise that this former pirate likes Luxury, Underworld Goods, Military Gear and Weapons gifts.

What wins their affection in conversation?

I have to start of by saying he pretty much hates everything I say, as a dark side aligned player. He balks at asserting one’s authority, or acknowledging hierarchy/others’ authority, and using any means other than a brawl to settle a dispute. He seems to react more favorably to jumping in and taking action quickly, keeping your promises, and getting yourself into complicated situations.

What is the best role for this companion?

If he is by your side as you quest, you will typically want to have him in a single-target ranged DPS support role (though you can change his active abilities to do AOE damage.) He is also allegedly the Sith Inquisitor female’s romance companion, but I wouldn’t know because he hates my guts. When he is back on the ship doing your crew skills bidding, note that he has the following Crew Skill bonuses:
+2 slicing critical
+2 underworld trading critical

And as noted in the comments on TORhead, at some point early on you have a conversation with him during which you can ask him to be your pilot. If you do that, during space missions his will be the primary voice you hear instead of your character.

Ashara Zavros

When do you obtain them, and where?

She joins you as you do your class quests on Taris, anywhere from levels 32-36.

What do they wear?

Wears medium armor with strength and endurance her two primary stats. Uses dual lightsabers as her weapons.

What kind of gifts do they like?

She likes Weapon, Military Gear, Republic Memorabilia, and Cultural Artifact gifts.

What wins their affection in conversation?

Like Andronikos, she pretty much hates everything I say, as a dark side aligned player. She seems to like it when I reassure her she’s made the right decision by coming over to the dark side with me, and likes when I am lenient and don’t purple lightning everyone for fun. She has also responded well to my attempts at humor. She reacts negatively when I ask an NPC why their petty situation is my problem/why I should care.

What is the best role for this companion?

If she is by your side as you quest, she will be in a melee DPS support role. Those of you playing male Inquisitors will likely want to try your hand at romancing her, but note that if you’re not a light side aligned player, you are going to have a rough time getting on her good side for that. When she is back on the ship doing your crew skills bidding, note that she has the following Crew Skill bonuses:

+10 Synthweaving Efficiency
+10 Diplomacy Efficiency

I’m Synthweaving my Way to the Poorhouse!

16 Friday Dec 2011

Posted by in crew skills, synthweaving

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Anexxia and a holodancer

Perhaps I can take up Cantina dancing to pay for my speeder?

I ended my SWTOR adventures today at level 20, and no closer than 1/3 of the way towards the speeder I’ll want to purchase at level 25. This vexes me because in that other MMO I play, I’ve never had a character be unable to purchase their transportation at level, even with keeping my professions leveled up with my character.

/cry

This is a symptom of my crafting affliction. I absolutely *HATE* to have my crafting not keep pace with my character’s leveling. Why? Because it sucks to not be able to make items I might actually want to use, that’s why! I’ve made a solid dent in my crafting thus far, and can actually make a few items my guildies might want to wear (see my crafting rare patterns list for details on what I can make.)

But as of now, I am going to have to hoard my credits until 25 to see if I can make it to being able to purchase my speeder training and my speeder. Most unfortunately I think I will just be fast walking my way around, getting the smackdown handed to me.

This really should not be the case. But I have had to spend cash on archaeology missions due to the sheer volume of bugged archaeology nodes I’ve seen in my travels. I get excited about a node on my map ,clear my way too it, then find it’s not able to be collected. Rinse and repeat for about 60-70% of the nodes I saw today on Balmorra.

I do have an evil plan for how to address this gap. I plan to make some sacrificial alts this weekend, and funnel all of their earnings to my main. It’s cruel, but I am going for maximum dark side points, now aren’t I? Which reminds me I shall have to track down that silly woman who was responsible for those 50 light side points. Truly unacceptable…

For those of you crazy enough to follow in my synthweaving leveling footsteps, I do have a few tips:

1) Skip out on the Underworld Trading missions unless you are dead set on making yourself one of the low level fully moddable clothing items and need the special materials.

2) Stock up on the fibrous nylite solution when you visit your first crew skills vendor. You are going to go through this stuff like mad, so buy 20-30 the first go round so you have it on hand.

3) Go out of your way in search of archaeology nodes whenever one pops up on your mini map. Yes, many of them are bugged, but you will need every mat you can scrounge up, so worst case scenario, you’ve gotten a few more credits and a smidge of XP.

4) If you get stuck, use your archaeology missions judiciously. I suggest saving them up for when you need the artifact fragments, or when you are in the transition phase between level 1 and level 2 crystals.

5) Free up your bag space by storing your crafting materials in your cargo hold. Your companions can easily access them for crafting but they won’t keep you from picking up all the grey trash you can find to finance this little venture.

I have to also note that companions are supposed to be able to go and sell your greys for you, but it has been my experience that more often than not, my companion will not, in fact, toddle off on this task. The request seems most likely to fail when underground or in a special quest area. I believe that is a known issue so cross your fingers our little minions are back on taking out our trash soon.

And now for a poll…

Anexxia’s Rare or Better Synthweaving Patterns (levels 1-49)

15 Thursday Dec 2011

Posted by in crew skills, gear, synthweaving

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I’ll be listing all the rare or better pre-50 synthweaving patterns I can make here, which includes a number of moddable pieces. Following this up with a separate post for my Level 50 patterns.

Available to Coconut Monkeys on Th Bastion server with your mats. Items are listed with lowest level items at the top of the list, with item level in parens.

Note that the databases do not yet have all the variations on the patterns. Sometimes, when crafting and reengineering crafted items, you learn a blue quality version of an item that adds an additional stat upon it. Those items are denoted as follows:

  • Critical versions of a green item have +Crit as a third stat.
  • Overkill versions of a green item have +Power as a third stat.
  • Redoubt  versions of a green item have +Defense as a third stat.
Please also note that some pieces of gear require light or dark side alignment, and a few are for Republic characters; make sure your character can wear an item before I craft it!

Light Armor

Medium Armor

Heavy Armor

Reflections on a SWTOR BETA Weekend, Pt. 2: Professions

12 Monday Dec 2011

Posted by in BETA, companions, crew skills, screenshots

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spaceshipI had 2 big goals for my BETA time, in addition to just getting a feel for caster game play and gaining familiarity with companions as party members: 1) to see how far I could get with leveling my professions, and 2) to earn my spaceship. Happily, despite having to work for half the BETA weekend, I was able to make great progress against these goals.

As soon as you complete the first portion of your class quest, and get sent off to the Fleet, at level 10 or so, you are able to start training your professions. Special note: if you go ahead and talk to all the trainers as soon as you arrive at the fleet (only accepting those skills you actually want to train, mind you), you can earn a nice chunk of experience. There is a great visual that shows the best skills to pair with each other to maximize your leveling ability. You may only train a total of 3 crew skills per character, which may be any combination of gathering skills, a maximum of 1 crafting skill, and mission skills. I went with Synthweaving, Archaeology, and Underworld Trading.

Crafting Skill: Synthweaving

In other games, I’ve often taken up tailoring, so it was no surprise that I chose to go with Synthweaving for my cloth wearing caster. I like having the ability to craft gear upgrades for myself, and have typically found the rare or better crafted gear to sell pretty well, especially in the early days of a game/expansion.

I ended my BETA time with a skill of 160 or so in Synthweaving (I had an annoying keyboard not recognized problem as I was wrapping up my BETA time and neglected to write down my final #.) I was able to easily finance this leveling, at level 16, through selling a few world drop items, and making 6 blue quality belts and gloves, which I put on the auction house for 1200-1500 credits. Despite buying a few rare quality cloths from the auction house in order to do this crafting, I ended up with 8500 credits at the end of my professions leveling spree.

My primary tip is to reverse engineer every green quality item you make that you do not need for yourself or your companion. I found that I usually got 1-2 power crystals back for every item reverse engineered at the lower levels, which came in handy. I always made the most inexpensive item that was available to craft, but that had not yet been greyed out (once a pattern is in grey text in your skill window, it will no longer give you a skill point for crafting it.)

I also suggest making a blue quality item that will give you skill points whenever you have the special materials on hand that are required. You can obtain those special materials from some of your more expensive Archaeology and Underworld Trading missions, however, you will soon run into Fibrous Nylite Solution, which is an item you can purchase from any Crew Skill Trade Vendor, as is Thermoionic Gel Suspension.

Gathering Skill: Archaeology

One of the nice things about Archaeology, is once you get out into the world after level 10, you should be seeing crystal nodes as you go about your everyday questing. Although I did spend a good chunk of time sending my companions out on Archaeology missions to get up to 100 or so in skill, I also raked in a ton of power crystals as I walked around completing quests.

You are able to send your companion out to complete archaeology missions whenever you’d like. I personally kept my companion at my side for questing, so I could more effectively handle large packs and heroic quests by myself. But whenever I was zooming back to a capital city, I sent him off on an errand. Who knew bossing around my minions would be so much fun? Ahem. I mean, it was a very rewarding bonding experience to allow my companion to do my bidding. Oh nevermind– I think you are already seeing why I am going Sith.

There are two key factors that will help you decide which missions to send your companion out on — the cost and the potential end result. The cost to send my companion out on the mission started at 95 credits, and topped out at 295 credits. You receive new missions to send your companion on as you increase your character’s level, starting with 4 missions available to you at level 10. I found that I eventually had an archaeology skill level above the level of items available to me for completing the missions, but that was only due to some serious focus on profession leveling.

The third factor to influence what mission you send your companion on is what the potential reward will be. A few examples of how entry level quest yields are described:

  • Moderate Yield: Grade 1 Color Crystals
  • Moderate Yield: Grade 1 Power Crystals
  • Bountiful Yield: Grade 1 Artifact Fragments

Moderate yield missions can result in a return of 1 or 2 items upon completion. Bountiful yield quests were often 3-4 items in total. But it is important to note that on occasion, my companion would come back empty handed, especially when sent out on a bountiful yield (and more expensive I might add) quest.

Mission Skill: Underworld Trading

Underworld Trading was the more vexing of all the crew skills for me. Mission times started out being relatively short (3 minutes) and increased to 6 minutes over my small leveling journey. Now before you say “Aw, Anexxia, you are just too impatient!” let me remind you that these quests can fail. And somehow, it seemed it was always the 275 credit 6 minute quest that would fail.

In the BETA stress test weekend, quests would note that they could result in either Underworld Metals  or Grade 1 Luxury Fabrics. Under that design, I found I most often ended up with metals, and had to buy my cloth from the auction house. I believe the last minute professions fine tuning has broken the rewards down to separate them out, which will be helpful for maximizing your mission time and credits to enable you to obtain the raw materials you want for crafting your preferred items.

Due to the longer amount of time and greater credit cost per mission (starting at 95 but quickly headed into the 200s), this was the skill I got the least far (only mid 40s.) I have a feeling I’ll end up falling a little behind on this one as I level, but the upside is I think there will be a good auction house market for the cloth and metals if I don’t need to put them to use in my synthweaving.

Final Impressions on Professions

Overall, I found the professions to be easy enough to level, and without breaking the bank. I didn’t make my 10k credit goal (I wanted to buy a sandcrawler vanity pet from the lightside vendor), but I made a serious dent in my synthweaving leveling and made myself and my companion a few nice pieces. I think a lot of folks will be tempted to skip over the professions leveling in a mad rush to get to max level, but I would caution against that. You will not want to be sitting around in a capital city just sending your crew on missions, as a huge money sink, making items you can’t use at max level. In the long run, it’s a lot more efficient — and personally rewarding– to add the crew skills missions into your daily pace. And if you happen to be working from home and on a conference call, which prohibits you from actually being out and about completing quests with your character, crew skills leveling is a great multitasking activity. but don’t tell your boss I said so…

See you in the game soon!

dancing fools

Reflections on a SWTOR BETA Weekend, Pt. 1: Leveling

02 Friday Dec 2011

Posted by in BETA, crew skills, screenshots, space combat, spaceship

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SWTOR BETA weekend screenshot

Like many of the gamer folks I know through twitter and the blogosphere, I participated in Bioware’s Star Wars: the Old Republic BETA weekend stress test over the long Thanksgiving weekend. The TL&DR Version? I absolutely loved it and only had a few, minor hiccups.

Choosing a Class to Test

I wanted to get a feel for what it would be like playing my Sith Inquisitor to be, but didn’t want to spoil the story for myself on a character I’d have to give up. Thus, I chose a Jedi Consular (Sage talents once she could specialize), who you can see in the above screenshot. Although I did my first level or two by myself, I was soon joined by my SO on a Jedi Knight, so we could check out the effects of grouping on leveling.

I’d decided pre-BETA that I wanted to focus my time on just 1 character, versus trying out a number of them, since you don’t get a true feel for the class characteristics until you hit level 10. I hoped to be able to make a significant dent in a profession or two, and to get to experience space travel. I was able to accomplish those goals pretty easily, despite working for 2 of the 4 days of testing.

Leveling Together as an Advantage

My SO and I have leveled together in World of Warcraft a number of times over the years, and more recently, leveling from the starting areas onward in Aion, Rift, and LoTRO. Inevitably, leveling together would end up feeling a little frustrating, with our having to kill twice as many mobs for quests in order to get the required number of quest items, one or the other of us running off to complete a class specific quest or a non-shareable quest we thought the other of us had also grabbed, etc.

It was thus a pleasant surprise to see that leveling together in SWTOR was actually an ADVANTAGE. Having an omnipresent second party member meant we were able to easily tackle the heroic quests/bosses we came upon in our questing travels. Once we both had our companions and got to Coruscant, we decided to 2-man the Esseles flashpoint. In retrospect, this was probably the smartest thing to have done at level 10, as it allowed me to really spend some time thinking about how to maximize use of my companion, and my crowd control skills. Other than my falling through the floor at one point, and dying on our first attempt on the first boss due to a lack of a healer (I later filled in on that role) it went pretty smoothly.

Other leveling pluses included being able to Holocron in for NPC conversations when one of us found a quest giver, versus having to wait for a slow runner to catch up, and getting to peek in on another class’ class storyline events as a guest.

How Can 3 Hours Have Gone Past?

I think my biggest surprise as we went through the leveling was how engrossing the story was. Hours would pass as I went through my class storyline and other starting quests, without feeling like it was taking a long time to progress.

This was due in large part to the participatory dialogues with the quest givers, but also with the way the questing itself was organized. For instance, when I would be out in the world on a specific quest, I would inevitably kill a mob or three on my way there. Often, these collateral kills would result in a “bonus objective” of killing X number of said creatures. If I was feeling particularly like smacking them around, I would complete that side quest before returning to my objective. But if I was especially intent on what I came out there to do, I just continued upon my original path, and once I completed the quest I came out there to do, the side quest would come off my quest list. Not having to manually go in and clean up quests in areas I was done exploring was a nice touch.

Once we hit level 10, my SO and I split up on our testing objectives (he went on to level up a total of 3 characters past level 10, to test out PvP on all of them.) I continued on in the hopes of getting a good feel for crafting leveling and with the goal of getting my spaceship, which you can see from the below screenshot, I accomplished.

Bug Report

As a Mac user who has to use Bootcamp in order to play SWTOR, I was crossing my fingers that there wouldn’t be too many glitches to report. And overall, until the end of testing, there were relatively few issues I encountered, and most of them minor. Those included:

  • All my screenshots were black. I put in a ticket on this but did not get a suggested fix. Once I thought to ask twitter, however, I was able to resolve that issue by unchecking the Exclusive Full Screen mode in the graphics options.
  • Unfortunately, unchecking Exclusive Full Screen mode in the graphics options meant I could no longer minimize the game. It also coincided with the game deciding to no longer recognize my Mac bluetooth keyboard. Having my keyboard flit in and out of usefulness is actually what put a stop to my BETA testing on Monday. After a lond day at work the last thing I wanted to do at home was fight with the computer over recognizing my keyboard.
  • When crafting, the list of required materials for a recipe would sometimes…blank itself out.
  • Mail in the mailbox seemed to often take 15-30 seconds and a number of clicks to open.

I had one crash to desktop, one server restart but no queues for login over the 4-day period. Not bad for a BETA test.

It's my ship and I'll fly if I want to...

It's my ship and I'll fly if I want to...

Next up: an overview of my crafting experience, space combat, and my search for vanity pets.

SWTOR Professions: What to Choose for My First Character?

24 Thursday Nov 2011

Posted by in crew skills

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Crafting is always one of my key motivators when leveling a character. I get excited about finding or training new recipes, and improving my character as a result of my crafting profession. And over my years of playing World of Warcraft, with my and my SO’s army of alts, I’ve gotten really used to having all my crafting needs covered in-house. But, since you can only pick a total of 3 skills (across Gathering, Crafting and Mission Skills) for your crew to take on, it will be quite a while before that’s the case for me in the Old Republic. Which means deciding what profession to pick up first takes on some significant weight.

The Crafting choices:

  • Armormech, working with hard metals and electronic shielding to construct all types of personal armor (for non Force users)
  • Armstech, constructing blasters, blaster rifles and upgrades.
  • Artifice, constructing Jedi and Sith artifacts, including crystals to change your lightsaber’s color, and item enhancements.
  • Biochem, engineering of performance-enhancing chemical serums and biological implants.
  • Cybertech, constructing gadgets and components for Droids and high-tech armors, including earpieces and armor upgrades.
  • Synthweaving, creating lighter outfits and armors that are imbued with supernatural qualities, for Force users.

The Gathering choices:

  • Archaeology, the ability to seek out imbued items like Lightsaber crystals and ancient artifacts
  • Bioanalysis, the practice of collecting genetic material from creatures and plants
  • Scavenging, the art of recovering useful materials and parts from old or damaged technology
  • Slicing, a skill in accessing secured computer systems and lockboxes to acquire valuable data and rare schematics

The Mission Skills choices:

  • Diplomacy, conducting and managing negotiations
  • Investigation, examining evidence and following clues to discover valuable secrets
  • Treasure Hunting, recovering valuable items by investigating a series of clues
  • Underworld Trading, trading in illegal goods and services

You are limited to a total of 3 Crew Skills, with only 1 allowed to be a crafting skill. For this reason, I am thinking I’ll go with Aracheology, Synthweaving and Diplomacy Underworld Trading on my Inquisitor. I always like being able to make myself (and my friends) good quality gear at max level. Both of my max level shadow priests in World of Warcraft are tailors, so I am used to the cloth grind and the money sink. Thankfully, through reverse engineering of my completed goods, anything I don’t end up wearing can be ripped apart to recover at least some of the materials it took to make it.

My SO is thinking of going with Artifice for his first crafting skill, which makes me happy. I hope to see a purple lightsaber crystal in my near future…

I’ll be participating in the BETA testing this weekend, and hope to actually have a stable enough server to get a character up to the 8-10 range so I’ll make it to a town with profession trainers to get my first hands-on look at the professions.