In preparation of the launch of early access of TOR on Tuesday and full launch on the following Tuesday, 12/20, I've put together this hints and tips from my time playing through the TOR beta and getting to level 50 while doing just about every quest available in the game. Outside of a couple early flash points, I didn't really do many, but I did get a chance to see a large amount of the crafting, morality, companions, and crew skills in use.
Companions
Your companions will be with you throughout the game. You will get your first companion on your starter world (Korriban for Sith Warriors and Inquisitors, Hutta for Bounty Hunters and Imperial Agents). Throughout the journey to level 50, you will gain another five companions beyond your starter (for six in total). Most people do not consider their second companion (received when you receive your ship at the completion of your class quest on Dromund Kaas) a true companion, but the droid really is as the droid can fight and heal (which is invaluable for a Sith Warrior) so long as you equip them (there are some parts purchased through commendation vendors as well as made from the Cybertech crafting skill).
Your companions are the sidekicks your character depends on in a pinch. Each companion has a niche area, they may tank (like the starting companions Khem Val and Kaliyo), healing (Mako), or DPSing (Vette along with those mentioned). Each companion has their own personality and will react differently to your commentary to NPCs along with your morality choices. Sometimes your comment or action may displease your companion (gaining you negative affection points) or please your companions (gaining affection points). Overall, each companion has an affection rating from 0 to 10,000 (although there does appear to be negative as well as above 10,000). Throughout the leveling process, you can gain affection of your companions, but you will likely only get one companion to 10,000 affection through normal play without the use of gifts. Likewise, you may not even get a companion to 10,000 affection because some of your choices cause them to lose affection.
Fear not however, this is where gifts come in and companions are easily distracted with shiny things. Case in point, Mako and Vette do not like Dark side choices most of the time;
You’re given the choice of petting a puppy (light) or kicking a puppy (dark), you choose to kick the puppy.
Vette: Oh, it’s soooo cute!
*You kick puppy*
Vette: How could you kick that puppy! -1 affection
*hands Vette a gift*
Vette: You are so me…Oooo, shiny! It’s just what I wanted! *Vette is ignoring the puppy with sad eyes now and looking at her gift* (+24 affection)
So, just do as you think your character would do in a given situation. You will still be able to get your affection with your companions to 10,000 through use of gifts which can be either bought from a vendor or found through crew missions.
Another aspect that opens up as well with increased affection is romance options (right now just straight romances so male – female, female – male) as well as companion quests (that happen after achieving 10,000 affection points and completion of your class quest at 50). This means that if you want to pursue a romance with one of your opposite sex companions you can and you also can finish off aspects of your companions’ stories too.
Whatever course you take, your companions will play a major role throughout the life of your character.
Morality
Morality is TOR is tied to the Force and how one acts in respect to its tenants. In order to use the best gear in the game, as of this writing, you need to achieve the extremes of morality, either being fully committed to the Light Side or being fully committed to the Dark Side (in this case, achieving either a combined value of +10,000 or -10,000 respectively which nets you a level of 5 in either Light Side or Dark side). Now, following through on quests (not counting Flash Points – TOR’s dungeon), you will net around 11,000 to 11,500 total points to allocate. Unless you decide to choose all one way or all another way, you may not be able to hit Light 5 or Dark 5. So, this leads to a potential dilemma, whether to play your character how you see the character acting in given circumstances or just saying screw it and maximizing out your points in one direction or the other. Thankfully, BioWare gave choices to be able to get around this.
Flash Points do have morality dialogues in them so you will be able to get extra points that way. Most people here have played on the beta weekends and have seen the first Flash Point, the Black Talon (Empire side). In this Flash Point, you actually have two decisions that will net you some morality points, but overall, it’s not much in the grand scheme of things (about 150 total points). As such, you can do the Flash Points over and over and after hitting level 50, you open up heroic versions of the Flash Points as well.
A second method on making up those points is through the Crew Mission Skill Diplomacy. All crew mission skills have some kind of side aspect to them outside of running the standard get special crafting material or getting companion gifts. Diplomacy has a morality component as well with the missions. So you can send your companions off to get either gifts or crafting materials while also getting some morality points to push you closer to getting either Light 5 or Dark 5, this opens you up more to play your character how they would act under given circumstances so you don’t have to choose every morale option to go one way or another so that you reach level 5 in your chosen morality path at 50.
Crew Skills
Crew skills are your crafting skills and all the skills that go into crafting. This includes the gathering skills (the only crew skill that you technically can perform), mission skills (sending your companions off to gather special materials or something else), and crafting skills (making the finished product). You are given three slots for crew skills, but can only have a maximum of one crafting skill per character (so you can have three gathering skills, three missions skills, or one crafting skill and some combination of the other two although it is typically one gathering, one mission, and one crafting). With the exception of gathering (although there are missions there too), all of the crew skills will require your companion(s) to leave you for a time (depending on what they are doing) to perform the mission associate with the crew skill.
Another aspect to crew skills is you can only send off a certain number of companions at any given time to perform crew skills, this means you may not be able to deploy all of your companions. At level 50, you have 6 companions, but can only deploy a maximum of 5 of them on crew skills. Another aspect is that while leveling, you may need your companion for a quest, so sending them off on crew skill missions or creation of items may not be feasible. Typically, the best times to be sending companions off on missions or creation is when you’re in the midst of a Flash Point or a Heroic 4 quest where you won’t be using your companion. You also want to be careful about doing too many missions as that can drain much needed credits as well (you will want to have about 44k credits when you hit 25 as you gain the ability to ride speeders then and it costs 40k for the initial skill and 4k for the speeder if you don’t have the special edition speeders from the collectors or digital deluxe versions).
Overall, you’re better off taking 3 gathering skills initially (and grabbing a gathering skill for what you want to craft along with what your first alt will do along with slicing as you can get schematics from slicing). Once you have enough materials, as you see it, then you will probably want to dump the two extra gathering skills (slicing and whatever the other one was and keeping the main gathering skill for your crafting skill), grab the mission skill for your main crafting skill along with diplomacy to work more points into your chosen morality track (using the main mission skill to only run material missions and diplomacy to get companion gifts), and then once you have a high enough morality, drop diplomacy to get your crafting skill and work that up. This means that your first character will likely not craft much for themselves (except for top level things), but you will also not be poor at any stage of the game (which is likely if you go nuts with crafting early on).
Crafting
Crafting in TOR has some interesting quirks, but has a number of similarities to WoW and other MMOs like WoW when it comes to crafting. One of the aspects to crafting that you don’t see in WoW is the ability to tear down items you’ve created to learn new schematics of the item (you can only do this with items you created) as well as gather materials for use in further creation (any item your crafting skill can make, so tearing down some cloth armor if you’re a synthweaver). Now, you might have noticed the big difference with TOR compared to WoW, you can learn more powerful schematics of ones you have whereas with WoW, you had go find the new schematics to learn them.
When you initially learn a schematic, it will be green in color. When you create green items, you can reverse engineer the items, sometimes you will learn a blue (prototype) schematic. Prototype, and higher, schematics require you to have materials gathered through mission skills (Diplomacy, Treasure Hunter, Underworld Trading, and Investigation). You can then reverse engineer Prototype schematics to try to get Artifact schematics (purple).
However, crafting can be quite expensive if you try to overextend yourself. Running missions costs credits and new schematics also cost credits and typically, items that are keeping up with you levelwise will require you to send off crew members on gathering missions as the gathered materials are typically not on the planets you may be at (I found that I was typically anywhere from 1 to 4 levels ahead on the leveling curve just doing all the quests available on a given planet). So, likely the first character you make will either be quite poor or will be depending on quest rewards and the like (which isn’t a bad thing).
Companions
Your companions will be with you throughout the game. You will get your first companion on your starter world (Korriban for Sith Warriors and Inquisitors, Hutta for Bounty Hunters and Imperial Agents). Throughout the journey to level 50, you will gain another five companions beyond your starter (for six in total). Most people do not consider their second companion (received when you receive your ship at the completion of your class quest on Dromund Kaas) a true companion, but the droid really is as the droid can fight and heal (which is invaluable for a Sith Warrior) so long as you equip them (there are some parts purchased through commendation vendors as well as made from the Cybertech crafting skill).
Your companions are the sidekicks your character depends on in a pinch. Each companion has a niche area, they may tank (like the starting companions Khem Val and Kaliyo), healing (Mako), or DPSing (Vette along with those mentioned). Each companion has their own personality and will react differently to your commentary to NPCs along with your morality choices. Sometimes your comment or action may displease your companion (gaining you negative affection points) or please your companions (gaining affection points). Overall, each companion has an affection rating from 0 to 10,000 (although there does appear to be negative as well as above 10,000). Throughout the leveling process, you can gain affection of your companions, but you will likely only get one companion to 10,000 affection through normal play without the use of gifts. Likewise, you may not even get a companion to 10,000 affection because some of your choices cause them to lose affection.
Fear not however, this is where gifts come in and companions are easily distracted with shiny things. Case in point, Mako and Vette do not like Dark side choices most of the time;
You’re given the choice of petting a puppy (light) or kicking a puppy (dark), you choose to kick the puppy.
Vette: Oh, it’s soooo cute!
*You kick puppy*
Vette: How could you kick that puppy! -1 affection
*hands Vette a gift*
Vette: You are so me…Oooo, shiny! It’s just what I wanted! *Vette is ignoring the puppy with sad eyes now and looking at her gift* (+24 affection)
So, just do as you think your character would do in a given situation. You will still be able to get your affection with your companions to 10,000 through use of gifts which can be either bought from a vendor or found through crew missions.
Another aspect that opens up as well with increased affection is romance options (right now just straight romances so male – female, female – male) as well as companion quests (that happen after achieving 10,000 affection points and completion of your class quest at 50). This means that if you want to pursue a romance with one of your opposite sex companions you can and you also can finish off aspects of your companions’ stories too.
Whatever course you take, your companions will play a major role throughout the life of your character.
Morality
Morality is TOR is tied to the Force and how one acts in respect to its tenants. In order to use the best gear in the game, as of this writing, you need to achieve the extremes of morality, either being fully committed to the Light Side or being fully committed to the Dark Side (in this case, achieving either a combined value of +10,000 or -10,000 respectively which nets you a level of 5 in either Light Side or Dark side). Now, following through on quests (not counting Flash Points – TOR’s dungeon), you will net around 11,000 to 11,500 total points to allocate. Unless you decide to choose all one way or all another way, you may not be able to hit Light 5 or Dark 5. So, this leads to a potential dilemma, whether to play your character how you see the character acting in given circumstances or just saying screw it and maximizing out your points in one direction or the other. Thankfully, BioWare gave choices to be able to get around this.
Flash Points do have morality dialogues in them so you will be able to get extra points that way. Most people here have played on the beta weekends and have seen the first Flash Point, the Black Talon (Empire side). In this Flash Point, you actually have two decisions that will net you some morality points, but overall, it’s not much in the grand scheme of things (about 150 total points). As such, you can do the Flash Points over and over and after hitting level 50, you open up heroic versions of the Flash Points as well.
A second method on making up those points is through the Crew Mission Skill Diplomacy. All crew mission skills have some kind of side aspect to them outside of running the standard get special crafting material or getting companion gifts. Diplomacy has a morality component as well with the missions. So you can send your companions off to get either gifts or crafting materials while also getting some morality points to push you closer to getting either Light 5 or Dark 5, this opens you up more to play your character how they would act under given circumstances so you don’t have to choose every morale option to go one way or another so that you reach level 5 in your chosen morality path at 50.
Crew Skills
Crew skills are your crafting skills and all the skills that go into crafting. This includes the gathering skills (the only crew skill that you technically can perform), mission skills (sending your companions off to gather special materials or something else), and crafting skills (making the finished product). You are given three slots for crew skills, but can only have a maximum of one crafting skill per character (so you can have three gathering skills, three missions skills, or one crafting skill and some combination of the other two although it is typically one gathering, one mission, and one crafting). With the exception of gathering (although there are missions there too), all of the crew skills will require your companion(s) to leave you for a time (depending on what they are doing) to perform the mission associate with the crew skill.
Another aspect to crew skills is you can only send off a certain number of companions at any given time to perform crew skills, this means you may not be able to deploy all of your companions. At level 50, you have 6 companions, but can only deploy a maximum of 5 of them on crew skills. Another aspect is that while leveling, you may need your companion for a quest, so sending them off on crew skill missions or creation of items may not be feasible. Typically, the best times to be sending companions off on missions or creation is when you’re in the midst of a Flash Point or a Heroic 4 quest where you won’t be using your companion. You also want to be careful about doing too many missions as that can drain much needed credits as well (you will want to have about 44k credits when you hit 25 as you gain the ability to ride speeders then and it costs 40k for the initial skill and 4k for the speeder if you don’t have the special edition speeders from the collectors or digital deluxe versions).
Overall, you’re better off taking 3 gathering skills initially (and grabbing a gathering skill for what you want to craft along with what your first alt will do along with slicing as you can get schematics from slicing). Once you have enough materials, as you see it, then you will probably want to dump the two extra gathering skills (slicing and whatever the other one was and keeping the main gathering skill for your crafting skill), grab the mission skill for your main crafting skill along with diplomacy to work more points into your chosen morality track (using the main mission skill to only run material missions and diplomacy to get companion gifts), and then once you have a high enough morality, drop diplomacy to get your crafting skill and work that up. This means that your first character will likely not craft much for themselves (except for top level things), but you will also not be poor at any stage of the game (which is likely if you go nuts with crafting early on).
Crafting
Crafting in TOR has some interesting quirks, but has a number of similarities to WoW and other MMOs like WoW when it comes to crafting. One of the aspects to crafting that you don’t see in WoW is the ability to tear down items you’ve created to learn new schematics of the item (you can only do this with items you created) as well as gather materials for use in further creation (any item your crafting skill can make, so tearing down some cloth armor if you’re a synthweaver). Now, you might have noticed the big difference with TOR compared to WoW, you can learn more powerful schematics of ones you have whereas with WoW, you had go find the new schematics to learn them.
When you initially learn a schematic, it will be green in color. When you create green items, you can reverse engineer the items, sometimes you will learn a blue (prototype) schematic. Prototype, and higher, schematics require you to have materials gathered through mission skills (Diplomacy, Treasure Hunter, Underworld Trading, and Investigation). You can then reverse engineer Prototype schematics to try to get Artifact schematics (purple).
However, crafting can be quite expensive if you try to overextend yourself. Running missions costs credits and new schematics also cost credits and typically, items that are keeping up with you levelwise will require you to send off crew members on gathering missions as the gathered materials are typically not on the planets you may be at (I found that I was typically anywhere from 1 to 4 levels ahead on the leveling curve just doing all the quests available on a given planet). So, likely the first character you make will either be quite poor or will be depending on quest rewards and the like (which isn’t a bad thing).
Sith Warriors - They only class that gets a new room added to their ship after leaving Hoth, they get a Brooncloset
Einstein said Everything is Relative.
Heisenberg said Everything is Uncertain.
Therefore, everything is relatively uncertain.
Einstein said Everything is Relative.
Heisenberg said Everything is Uncertain.
Therefore, everything is relatively uncertain.