Star Wars: The Old Republic will kill WoW - outsourced to Broadsword

[Blaine]

I'm interested in your PC specs because I have a GTX980 ti and the game kinda runs like shit even on low settings (ran way better on my old GTX580)

I have the same card. I still have the manifest saved, comes in handy for questions like these (running Windows 7 Professional): http://pcpartpicker.com/p/ZkWkBm

G-Sync made a difference. It was a tiny bit stuttery while I was still running v-sync (as is the case in most games), but certainly not sluggish or awful.

 

[Zetor]

FWIW, the game engine used by SWTOR is total shit cpu-bound. I was getting a 1-2fps slideshow on my 660Ti with more than 1-2 people onscreen -even with the lowest possible settings on 800x600- because my ancient Phenom II couldn't take the heat. I upgraded to an i5, and bam, instant 60+ fps!

... not having a 64-bit client available in 2015 probably isn't helping things, mind.

 

[Blaine]

Bear in mind too that cooling configuration, fan control, and even arcane minutiae such as system and driver power management settings can have an impact on performance.

 

[Mangoose]

Bear in mind too that cooling configuration, fan control, and even arcane minutiae such as system and driver power management settings can have an impact on performance.

The Hero Engine just sucks.

For the stutter, setting Pre-Rendered-Frames to 1 always helps with a lot of games, actually. Need Inspector for Nvidia, dunno how to do that for ATI.

 

[Mangoose]

Another thing I forgot to mention: There are no fucking skill trees in this game! You choose a class, a specialization, one of three disciplines, and get a few "Utility" points to spend (most seem to be no-brainers, so not a lot of choice there, either). I read that there were skill trees once, but that they were removed for balance purposes. That's a major blow as well, because you have little choice in customizing your character apart from very broad decisions.

The game has been massively dumbed down over the years, to make it as easy as possible for prospective customers to enter. To my surprise they haven't tried releasing an Xbone version to make the most of it.
The only thing missing now to put the final nail on the coffin of what little commitment to a class is left, would be changing advanced classes on the fly.

The thing is that it doesn't matter, because MMORPG combat is already stupidly easy as fuck, and the only "difficulty" is the tedium of the leveling timesink.

You may mention endgame PVE or any form of PVP.... But there are dozens of other games in other genres where you will find more complex, more interesting gameplay in the same manner.

So I sure as hell ain't playing this game for gameplay (difficulty). Just for the storylines/cutscenes.*

Edit: *Which is actually why I started playing. I found out about this 12xp boost they were running, which meant I could avoid all the stupid side quests and just do the "better" main ones. Now Companions are OP so I could do the same.

Dumbed down? Yeah. But weighing the alternatives...

Option 1: Game doesn't require side quests. Game is therefore dumbed down. (not being sarcastic)
Option 2: Game requires side quests. Side quests are dumb in the first place + Side quests are tedious.

So I pick Option 1 lol.

(I'm not talking about the trees/Disciplines.. that's a whole other story)

 

[Bliblablubb]

To be fair, when I played the game in the old days, you HAD to do the planetary chains AND fetchquests (and/or lots of space railshooting) to not fall behind the curve, what was already hard thanks to equipment being king and the average player being extremley spacepoor. Rested xp only helped in a small way, unless you had a severe case of althritis (that's why none of my chars reached fiddy in my 2 months).
I don't mind loosing the random fetchquests, but some of the planetary ones did tell a nice story, bringing you deeper into the overall arc. Taris was pretty good actually, or Balmorra. When played in tandem with the class quests, you could even wrap them up without much extra walking. "Walking", because you didn't have speeders then.
But when I started the Pebblethrower, I only did the classquests and some bootyhunting, and I felt a little detached from the world without planetaries, having forgotten most of them. I only remembered there was "something" when looking at the dominant buildings involved at the distance (the tower on balmorra or the gun on voss for example). Heh, even the bonus questlines sometimes had interesting stories to tell.
If it weren't for the hardcoded "no dmg dealt when level difference higher than x", I would have just ran behind my OP companions and finish the story at lvl30 or so.

Ramblings aside, a new player SHOULD do all planetaries on each side at least 7 times once, but somehow I doubt most players do that as long as they get enough xp to continue to the next planet, temptashun to continue just the class story and leave fucking ASSderaan can be high.
Now that they removed orange armor pieces from bonus questlines/heroics, why even bother? Why did they even do that, just to force player crafting?

 

[hakuroshi]

Now doing just class and planetary chains gives tons of XP. With level-synch (meaning you NEVER outlevel content) you'll likely hit level 65 before finishing main story. So the planetary quests are mostly redundnant. I wonder why XP boosts are still sold...

 

[VentilatorOfDoom]

Dumbed down? Yeah. But weighing the alternatives...

Option 1: Game doesn't require side quests. Game is therefore dumbed down. (not being sarcastic)
Option 2: Game requires side quests. Side quests are dumb in the first place + Side quests are tedious.

Nobody's talking about side quests or excessive grind. Stuff like 12x XP was a godsend.
It's about removing skill trees, removing choices. You could tailor your build to your liking in the past, now you choose a discipline and thats it.
You no longer have to bother actually learning how to play the class, especially now with the OP companions. You can win the story on a sage just using force quake all the time. What that does is it grows a generation of fucktarded windowlickers who are literally too dumb for a proper bowel movement and these guys will eventually show up in PvP or endgame PvE to the enjoyment of the few normal people left in this game.

 

[Kem0sabe]

The Hero Engine just sucks.

For the stutter, setting Pre-Rendered-Frames to 1 always helps with a lot of games, actually. Need Inspector for Nvidia, dunno how to do that for ATI.

The engine is highly dependent of cpu and memory, much less on gpu.

Even a low end modern cpu with 8 gb of memory can run this game very smoothly with a lot of the setting turned to high.

 

[Blaine]

VentilatorOfDoom
You do have to learn how to play your class properly if you want to be efficient. It's dead-easy for me, because my first "theme park" MMO was Final Fantasy XI upon its US release in 2003, and that game was old-school as Hell. For starters, you had no choice but to do everything with a full party, you lost a bunch of experience when you died, and everyone working efficiently meant getting XP 2-3x faster, so you had to quickly learn to be reasonably proficient or else get kicked. I played Red Mage/White Mage primarily, which meant memorizing three or four full ability bars and exactly what each and every ability did and when and how to use them.

SWTOR is kindergarten by comparison. The main thing you need to do (in my experience so far) is read over the ability and passive descriptions a couple of times and construct rotations based on DoT efficiency (probably want to lead off with long-lasting ones), casting times, cooldowns, and "combos" (such as ability X allowing ability Y to be cast instantly).

There are far too many long-ass cooldowns in this game for my liking, and they really aren't anywhere near powerful enough to justify 5- and 10-minute cooldown periods in my opinion; but that's neither here nor there.

 

[VentilatorOfDoom]

If you're an MMO vet SWTOR might be kindergarten, but trust me, it seems to be really difficult for a lot of people. See them everyy day on The SHIT Eclipse.

 

[Mangoose]

endgame PvE

Honestly?

Endgame PVE, or group PVE of any kind, is 99% dependent on things like aggro management (letting the tank attack for ~5 seconds before healing or DPSing, the tank knowing when to use and when to not use hard single-target and area taunts, the DPS and healers using care with HoTs and DoTs which can easily steal aggro back), resource management (having several groups of healers that rotated in and out when one bottomed out on mana/energy/etc.), knowing to focus on one target, knowing which target to attack, stun, and knowing not to attack the stunned target.

You're not gonna be any good in group PVE unless you level up playing group PVE in any game. The only thing soloing - without OP companions, etc. - will teach you is a DPS rotation without teaching you how to not over-do damage so that you pull aggro.

Or at least that was my experience in vanilla WoW. You can group with people at 60 and the DPS will attack before anybody else, the healers will over-heal, the tanks don't know how to use regular attacks to build aggro and keep hard taunts for emergencies. This includes me, btw, who didn't learn how to tank until I joined a guild and the GM walked me through tanking during Scarlet Monastery or something ~ level 20-30.

Shit, IIRC even the best players had an aggro window mod. (BTW every MMO needs to learn from Blizzard and have UI API)

Talent trees are child's play. I played at launch. If you have an IQ over 100 you know how to build a tree and you know how to build a rotation, as Blaine explained. This isn't ToEE. Talent trees were cookie cutter like your grandmother's.

PVP is a whole other ballgame, knowing about LOS, knowing how other classes play, knowing how humans play, knowing the complete ins and outs of CC for your class and every other class, etc.

 

[Blaine]

The trouble with learning to play in a group is that the solo quests with their multi-million-dollar voice acting are the main focus and draw of this game. SWTOR shouldn't ever have been built as a WoW clone (or a traditional PvE MMO for that matter), yet that's exactly what it is, with instanced mission queues requiring a 5- to 20-minute wait and all of the halfway-decent rewards available only in group content. The heroics reward 2-4x as much cash if done with a group, even if you can easily solo them. I found myself wanting some of the rewards that were available, but I got tired of theme park group PvE many, many years ago.

I'm not saying that there shouldn't be a variety of reasons to group with other players in this game, but to me it makes absolutely no sense to spend almost all of your resources on the solo experience, then move all of the rewards over to instanced dungeons and raids. It's dumb.

 

[Mangoose]

Blaine Actually what people do these days is spend those common data crystals on mods and slot them into orange/purple slottable gear.

 

[Deleted member 7219]

Finished Bounty Hunter storyline. It was ok, but not as good as Trooper.

Storylines in order of how much I liked them: Sith Warrior, Imperial Agent, Trooper, Sith Inquisitor, Bounty Hunter, Jedi Knight

Playing the Smuggler now. Name is Jalkeesh if anyone has a Republic character.

 

[Blaine]

Mangoose: Yeah, that'll do for stats, but what people really want is customization, and I'm no different. I'd probably want some cool robes, maybe some dyes, a special crystal, a particular mount, some decorations, et cetera—just like everyone else, which, along with the awful cash shop scheme, is probably why everything cool costs hundreds of thousands or millions of credits. I'm thinking more of the 18k x 4 credits per heroic (plus whatever else you get from the mission) and so on. Granted, I really haven't played the game for that long, and a lot of this is standard theme park MMO stuff: figuring out which crafting materials and/or crafted items sell briskly for a good price, which missions/mobs to grind, and so on.

The path of least resistance, and not by coincidence, seems to be to pay $40 and buy those 30x hypercrates to open and sell. The coolest shit seems to come from the Cartel shop (and some exclusive rewards, like "PvP season 1 mounts" or whatever), and isn't looted or crafted, which skews the economy in some fairly obvious ways.

Side note: At one point, my custom outfit vanished/reset for no reason and I had to pay ~6,000 credits to set it up again. That's a really obnoxious currency sink, but I needed to cover up the low-level Consular rags robe.

 

[Mangoose]

Mangoose: Yeah, that'll do for stats, but what people really want is customization, and I'm no different. I'd probably want some cool robes, maybe some dyes, a special crystal, a particular mount, some decorations, et cetera—just like everyone else, which, along with the awful cash shop scheme, is probably why everything cool costs hundreds of thousands or millions of credits. I'm thinking more of the 18k x 4 credits per heroic (plus whatever else you get from the mission) and so on. Granted, I really haven't played the game for that long, and a lot of this is standard theme park MMO stuff: figuring out which crafting materials and/or crafted items sell briskly for a good price, which missions/mobs to grind, and so on.

The path of least resistance, and not by coincidence, seems to be to pay $40 and buy those 30x hypercrates to open and sell. The coolest shit seems to come from the Cartel shop (and some exclusive rewards, like "PvP season 1 mounts" or whatever), and isn't looted or crafted, which skews the economy in some fairly obvious ways.

Side note: At one point, my custom outfit vanished/reset for no reason and I had to pay ~6,000 credits to set it up again. That's a really obnoxious currency sink, but I needed to cover up the low-level Consular rags robe.

Yeah.. I don't think you get any good looking gear from group content.


Meanwhile:

 

[Mangoose]

Sorri guise I'ma try to finish Smugglir very fast so I can be back on Imp side. I still have the JK to do but she's going to be played, very, very, very sporadically. Will be back on my BH and Agent when I'm done with Smugs.

Meanwhile:

 

[Mangoose]

Why can't I make a Gungan?

 

[Kem0sabe]

Why can't I make a Gungan?

It would be unbalanced for players to be able to choose the race of the secret overlords of the Galaxy.

 

[Mangoose]

Why can't I make a Gungan?

It would be unbalanced for players to be able to choose the race of the secret overlords of the Galaxy.

I want to make Darth Snooki.

 

[Blaine]

Why can't I make a Gungan?

All of the playable aliens are recolored humans so that they could reuse the same animations, armor sets, voice acting, etc. It's one of the more annoying things about the game; I used to have a composite image ridiculing these palette swaps from back when the game was new floating around in my random images folder.

 

[Blaine]

I should have said "disappointing" rather than "annoying." Waaaaaay back when Star Wars Galaxies was relatively new, I played an Ithorian nerf herder and it was p. cool: puttering around in a speeder, plonking down resource extractors, and adding shit to my Tatooine space house.

 

[Mangoose]

I should have said "disappointing" rather than "annoying." Waaaaaay back when Star Wars Galaxies was relatively new, I played an Ithorian nerf herder and it was p. cool: puttering around in a speeder, plonking down resource extractors, and adding shit to my Tatooine space house.

I sadly wasn't around during SWG

Nael I started my Op and almost done with Hutta. Funniest thing is I made a Kaliyo clone. 1 more level til Sniper!

 

[RK47]

If you're an MMO vet SWTOR might be kindergarten, but trust me, it seems to be really difficult for a lot of people. See them everyy day on The SHIT Eclipse.

Heroic moment cooldown is 5 min now.
Stealth with Imp Agent to bosses and just hit the 'Fist Up' icon, spam the 4 legacy powers that deals 5k combined damage at lvl 20.

#rekt.