SWTOR Free Weekend Pass

[Gray]

http://www.swtor.com/weekendpass

Starts early tomorrow morning.

Does anyone know the size of the download approx, i'm thinking it's going to take ages to download this.

As a quick question i played KotoR 1/2 - Many years ago, is this game pretty much similar barring it's an actual MMO? I loved those games.

 

[Mabs]

kotor esque.. yes, sort of
very story driven, with standard MMO bits

tbh give it a go, see for yourself

my SWTOR folder is 19 gig, no idea the download size, i would guess about 15ish before it unpacks ?

 

[svartalf]

kotor esque.. yes, sort of

^^QFT. It's obvious that KoToR inspired SWToR hugely... I will leave it at that. I would definitely suggest you try it if you have limitless broadband.

 

[Raven]

Bit early for that isn't it?

As for the game, it's the best levelling from any MMO, hands down.

The end game is terrible though.

As far as I remember the download was 14 gig when I played it, may be large now due to patches and whatnot.

 

[Mabs]

The end game is considered terrible by people who think having to spend weeks farming/gearing up to see the last 5% of the game is somehow a closed club to people with spare time to burn, and allowing everyone else into this special "club" somehow devalues their lives

fixed that for you, pve wise at least

 

[Raven]

Not quite right...

End game PvE just isn't as good as other MMOs.

PvP is restricted to those willing to farm tokens to buy PvP gear and being forced to do the dreadful Huttball over and over and over again. I wanted to just step into it and have fun, not face people with double my HP, resisting most half of my damage while doing double damage to me, all inside a tiny, badly thought out instance. Yeah there is Ilum too, but please - it's not exactly good is it?

The auction house is crap, very crap. Max 50 items for sale, unable to just search for items without knowing the exact search criteria? lol please

Crafting. Meh, set craft, afk for a bit, set craft, afk for a bit. zzzz

But like I said, it's a fantastic leveling process with great class driven story lines. Not worth subbing for but probably worth the box price with the free month.

 

[Mabs]

so how is endgame pve "not as good".. im intrigued by this. cos i keep seeing that, and its followed by "wa waaa all the casuals have got gear i wanted exclusive access to cos i raid for 5 hours 4 days a week"....

pvp.. er, make up numbers much ? normalised 1-49 suffers from "i have more buttons to push than you do" but other than that its workable, but with all things PUG, it can be utter wank.
50 bracket suffers from LOL I GOT GEAR YOU DONT HAVE, followed by LOL I WON, folllowed by I CAN AFFORD MORE GEAR, YOU CANT COS YOU LOST... repeat
AH - being "fixed" in 1.2, and yea its wank, but its useable, and unless you are trying to cash farm it, its hardly catastrophic.again, if you are searching for something, surely you know what it is ?!
crafting... you would rather go to the "solo" stand like a twat at the forge approach ? i find, on both my 50s, that i tend to go "minions 1-5 craft/harvest. minion 6, come do dailies"

 

[svartalf]

50 bracket suffers from LOL I GOT GEAR YOU DONT HAVE, followed by LOL I WON, folllowed by I CAN AFFORD MORE GEAR, YOU CANT COS YOU LOST... repeat

This annoys me no end in PvP games. You have to reward the losers better than the winners or the field will never even up.

 

[Soazak]

so how is endgame pve "not as good".. im intrigued by this. cos i keep seeing that, and its followed by "wa waaa all the casuals have got gear i wanted exclusive access to cos i raid for 5 hours 4 days a week"....

Personally, I feel the end game PvE isn't terrible, but it's not really great. I think the Enrage timer is a pretty lazy idea for increasing difficulty, and tbh the overall difficulty isn't that hard (NM is the only one that you actually need to follow the progression for in terms of gear, and even then, full Rakata is overkill). With the exception of 1 or 2 bosses, they don't really feel like raids (epic, with tricky mechanics etc), just long dungeons. The regular instances however, I feel are amazing.

Worst of all for me: the bugs, they are really frustrating sometimes. The times when the raid group I'm in has hit a brick wall, it's rarely because of lack of gear/ability etc, it's usually because of bugs (pylons not working, someone getting bugged into a different phase on Soa, random 1shot deaths in Karagga's). It's a good attempt, but I'm really starting to see the truth in the complaints people were making in January about how rushed it feels, I'm by no means a 'raider', I did a little in WoW but this is my first real experience with it, and it feels like I've finished it (in the same way you'd finish a single player game)

The PvP is pretty awful.

 

[Raven]

This annoys me no end in PvP games. You have to reward the losers better than the winners or the field will never even up.

It's not about rewarding losers, its about making it accessible to everyone. It is not fun fighting people who are massively better geared than you. There is absolutely nothing you can do to kill them because of the equipment mechanics in SW. Having a PVP stat is an extremely poor reward for PvP progression. It basically results in more HP = harder, which is pretty much Bioware's philosophy in all games these days, it's one thing that they should not have copied from World of Warcraft. It's lazy and it spoils what could be a good experience.
Also, forcing people to play huttball is a stupid idea. Why they can't let people queue for any instance they want I don't know.

There should always be a reward to measure progression (imo) it's the carrot on a stick that keeps MMO players playing. It would be far better if they had followed the DAOC route with additional abilities that while make the character stronger or more useful in certain areas, do not make them invincible.

Anyway, as for the end game raiding. I raid in WoW in a 25 man team and while the current expansion is pretty poor (though better than the last one!) it is still a far better experience than SW, for the social aspect alone. We are far from elitist, we have only cleared 2 of the new dungeon bosses on heroic mode so far, we do it for a laugh, not to be better than the Joneses.

In short. I found the level 50 content a massive let down after the brilliant leveling and decent story telling on the way, even if I wanted to stick my droid in and airlock and jettison him into a sun, most of the time.

 

[Nate]

Since the change to how Armaments work for warzones, I don't get huttball half as much. A lot more republic are queueing on my server at least. Even when I do get huttball half the time it's vs rep too.

It does seem silly that a fresh 50 can't expect to be useful unless he knows a lot about the mechanics of the warzone. Did DAoC have this problem? Ofcourse it did. You didn't see an rr1 untemplated group of 8 beat a fully templated rr11 group. Should new games have this problem? Question to be asked. However I do remember reading in 1.2 they will have a starter gear for end game to make the playing field more level.

I'd like to see mmo's take pvp more like how modern fps's are so players can just get stuck in and have it easily accessed. red vs blue, not RvR is the way forward for instance based combat in my eyes.

 

[Raven]

That's right. But the low RR, untemplated group had the option of doing other pvp, be it keep takes, zerging, dicking about in darkness falls etc. They didn't specifically have to fight the high RR group.

 

[Mabs]

basic problem, imo is balancing :

Im a new 50, i want to be compete VS ive been pwning for months i want to be/look/have access to better

 

[Nate]

There is a distinct balance issue in huttball, 4 classes are much more likely to cause a win then the other 4.

Sorcs, Juggs, Powertechs and Assassins = Jump(enemy&friendly), Push, Pull and speed not to mention absorb.

 

[Mabs]

yup, spend most of my time in huttball on my sorc standing in the cap zone fetching people.
same goes for jugg, push + charge are epic

its very Tor Anroc.. i dont need skills or tactics, i have knock back

 

[Gray]

Well downloading it now, so far about 11gb to be downloaded. Not so bad though since i'm going to be in work for most of it. Thought i'd be getting crappy download speeds too but it's maxxed out - Noice.

 

[leviathane]

im pretty sure people who have a subscription can give a 7day free trial to a friend or something like tht.

http://www.swtor.com/info/friends?intcmp=eaint706

ye it's 3 friends

 

[Soazak]

its very Tor Anroc.. i dont need skills or tactics, i have knock back

Heh, that's exactly how my gf described it after having a go of Huttball. Knockbacks are the worst idea ever for a form of CC imo.

 

[leviathane]

like voidstar on the bridges, sorcs/sages speed burst and knock everyone off bridges. zzzz if happens to you, but funny when you do it to someone else

 

[Corran]

Shame the fuckwits have taken the server down in EU primetime to prepare to let people play it for free... bunch of cunts they are at times with this shit....

End game raiding - OP's normal mode - 1or2 hrs each max. Just some annoying bugs in it and rediculous things missed out that make it a pest with certain setups (no shadow on pillar for SoA, Pylons bugging out if dont do N,S,S,N order (intended???) .... No Target of target visable for a random targeting mob that can 1shot someone undergeared ... said 1shot attack not going the way the mob is facing and hitting people behind instead of infront.)
Hardmodes are a bit more of a challange but then that because I dont care if someone is undergeared for them... just need people to learn the mechanics a bit more so we can do SoA (people not running into lightening ) or for it to not bug out (lightening not exploding when stand in it and saps you 3times for 5k+ health before explodes)
Enrage- pointless cockblock mechanic. May as well just kick you out the instance half the time... though if you lucky you can still take boss down during enrage as long as not got mass aoe attack spam from it.

...
PvP .. dinged my 2nd BM character today. And tbh never felt it an issue of equipment IF i played the objective. If i wanted to be a dps monkey then yes i get ripped apart.... Infact I purposely had <300expertise all the way to rank 60 (no pvp before 50 really - no ilum farmfest) ... Most time I was running with <100exp. . . Yes i was on a sorc so i had mass utility but i always felt helpful and won many games just by positional play.
It the Pew Pew noobs that mostly moan about expertise. Or those that go into 50s pvp in lvl 40 pvp purchased gear that not been upgraded. . . I made sure I had decent gear via crafting etc and had 15k health where most have 11k ... and they wonder why they die quickly. No effort to get decent gear to start with if you not just being a twat and whining.

 

[Exioce]

Agree with most of that Corran. The ops aren't too difficult, you mainly have to work around the bugs that you mentioned. I don't mind the Enrage mechanic, as it gives DPS chars a reason to play well. Without it we would just be doing everything with 1 tank and 7 healers.
I don't even think the lv50 pvp jump is that bad. You get cut in half by well geared people obviously, but it only takes a few days to get decent equipment so you can compete fairly quickly.

 

[Gray]

Well given it a go, so far seems good. But i don't know, it feels like it lacks something when compared to World of Warcraft. While Warcraft is more established, i think the only reason i feel interested towards it is because it's fresh (To me). I'm gutted that the --- ` ----- key doesn't work, i used to use that for autorun, it's a feckin nightmare now :'(.

 

[Gray]

It has been good though, some things are a right old headache though while some are good too. One of the annoying factors about this is when you are questing and it's asking you to "use this item to do such and such". You are under the assumption that you need to find the item in your bag and click it. I spent about 30minutes faffing around only to relise there was a small blue item on the wall which needed clicking. Guess i am a typical WoW player expecting it to sparkle if i was supposed to click on it.

The good things though is the levelling process seems significantly slower than WoW. In WoW, getting 1-10 takes about 10-15minutes. But i've been playing for hours and i'm only about level 7 now, so the low level content is much larger in terms of walking distance and XP. I still don't quite get attacks though, i currently only have access to one UI bar, but most of my attacks don't seem to work unless i have this Focus, which can only be gained through "Strike" or something. Which is a low damage attack. QQ.

 

[Exioce]

You will have a separate tab in your inventory for mission items.
All classes have a different rage/heat/ammo/focus mechanic they have to keep high/low for maximum output. If you need more space you can enable a further 3 on-screen quick bars in the UI options, and hotkey any ability you like.

 

[Gray]

I'm curious, what's the deal with random elite mobs? I seen one standing on his own last night who was a level higher than i, he pounded me though and i had him down to about 1% health (Bahh!). Do they drop nice loot and give a big chunk of XP in SWToR? I seen another one inside one of the personal-instances, but i thought better than to attack him incase be battered me as well.

 

[Exioce]

Often quest objectives. Just tougher versions of normal mobs with nicer loot and more xp. Should be OK if you have your pet and use your abilities.

 

[Mabs]

you should be able to take them np at lvl, just watch for the "+3 others"
some are quest, some are fluff, most drop something a bit special

 

[Gray]

Decided to buy the game if not for a few months. Sith is pretty awesome compared to Jedi by far i think!

I'm confused on the whole gearing thing, ive wracked up a load of green items during my present levelling but i see no use for them. Do you just sell them on the AH or, like WoW, is there way to destroy them to make them more useful for professions?

 

[Mabs]

bin green stuff
you want orange, in all slots + weap, then use planet commendations from quests/heroics/etc to buy mods/enhances/etc and slot them up
an orange item will last you forever:
the slots = stats
Hilt/Barrel/Armour = item lvl.. so if you have a lvl 5 orange gun, put a lvl 50 orange barrel in it.. it will have lvl 50 dps output

so find something you like the look of and hang on to it

 

[Gray]

I see, shame greens are pretty worthless. Would have also been nice to know that the orange items are constantly upgradable. They failed to mention that anywhere so i ended up vendoring my double bladed lightsaber which i got near the beginning because some green item had at the time better stats on it.

The fact that when i bought the game it didn't come with a physical instruction manual was a huge downer, instead it seems they force you to go to their website to learn about things, but it's just not as effective i feel.

There are many aspects which i feel completely fail in game at the moment, in comparison to Warcraft since that's all that i can compare it too. The mini-map feels completely shoddy when you're searching for anything, i had a hard time finding something like the auction house/bank because vendor-icons where just planted everywhere which seemed to override the lesser icons. The auction house is pretty bad, terrible infact. The fact you have to select each individual item as opposed to selling one with the option of selling more of the same item is a complete waste of time.

The professions / crew skills, great idea to have them "do something" with the exploration, but when you're making items... Seriously? 5 minutes to craft 5 items or whichever, each item takes over a minute or so to complete which is just "wow".

I've only just started the game of course, and while there are the negatives theres also a lot of positives. The multi-looting is a great idea (Which it seems WoW has now adopted for the Pandaria expansion, thankfully) and the personal solo instances are a great touch, which in WoW has only been reserved for legendary questlines so far.