NDA’s up, which means I can actually talk about The Old Republic now.
Thank goodness, I was getting tired of not talking about The Old Republic.
Got questions? Fire away in the comments. I’ll answer as best I can. I’ve got a wide-ranged smattering of experience with the class types (i.e. I may not have played the Agent for long, but I did play a Smuggler, so I can generalize – things like that), low-to-mid-level content, and general game systems.
I’m interested in finding out about the tanking mechanics. How dies tanking work and how do the three tanks compare?
I can only speak for 2 of the 3 – my troopers and bounty hunters were healers and DPS – but it’s a start.
Sith Juggernauts/Jedi Guardians will be very familiar to anyone who’s played a sword-and-board tanking class in basically any other game. Your primary armaments are a lightsaber and a shield generator (yes, really), you sport heavy armor, you build up a resource with some attacks to use it on others, you have stances that up your defense and threat, your cooldowns do things like raise your health – sound familiar?
Sith Assassins/Jedi Shadows are more unique – my closest analogue would be Rift’s rogue-tank with little bits of feral druid or DK scattered in. As light armor wearers, they do get a boost to their armor through a lightsaber ‘charge’ (I don’t know what the Shadow version is – Assassins charge their saber with lightning) and self-healing, as well as a lot of avoidance and – this may have been rebalanced from when I was actively playing one – pretty huge health pools. Assassins are very mobile and active tanks, and can be quite a lot of fun. (Plus you get to run around in awesome flappy robes and wield a double-ended lightsaber, who doesn’t like that?!)
Someone else will have to speak about the Trooper Vanguard/Bounty Hunter Powertech, as I’m no help on those. Sorry!
Trooper Vanguards work better than you’d think. I tend to see them as a “boss tank” because so many of their attacks are single-target.
As a Vanguard at level 14 you get Ion Cell, which is basically your tanking “stance.” It has a chance to generate extra damage on hit, reduces your damage taken, gives your shield generator a chance to partially deflect incoming fire, and increases your threat. It’s an exact analog to Defensive Stance for a warrior in WoW. You also get a ranged taunt, and later on (I think) you get a little bit of CC. You do have some ranged multi-target attacks but generally you’re shooting one target in the face in a variety of ways. There’s no minimum range so you can keep shooting even at stuff that gets up in your grille.
Troopers use a resource called Ammo and it’s a little different than the Jedi’s use of Focus, because Ammo’s a bit like WoW energy, it’s subtractive. You start with 12, and most attacks consume a little bit of Ammo, which regenerates quickly. But the catch is, the less Ammo you have, the slower it regens. So you’ve got some choices to make. If you burst out a ton of shots, you’re going to leave yourself starved and with just your basic attack (there’s no auto-attack, but there’s a spammable basic shot that doesn’t cost Ammo), or have to use your emergency Ammo-rebuilding skill (on a 2-minute cooldown), or you can ration your shots to keep your Ammo built up in case you’ve got to bear down for extra DPS or you lose aggro or whatever. It’s tactically interesting.
Belatedly – you may be interested in checking out this thread/FAQ on the SWTOR forums. It’s a good overview of tanking in TOR.
I’m most interested in the leveling itself. How quickly do you level? How much freedom do you have in choosing where you level? Are there options already for leveling through means other than questing/grinding?
Leveling is definitely slower than in WoW; it’s closer to Rift speed, or TBC/Wrath-era WoW (before the introduction of heirlooms made everyone level at rocket speed).
Outside of the starting zones, the leveling experience is rather linear. The difference largely lies in what you’ll be doing – maybe half of a planet’s quests (sometimes more) are standard quests that anyone who comes through a zone will get – go here, do this, kill X of Y, et cetera. The differences come in class quests – class quests rarely overlap (if a trooper kills X of Y for reason Z, rarely is a smuggler also going to kill X of Y for reason Z2, or if they do, you bet your ass Z2 is completely different).
Grinding is basically a non-efficient way to level. Same for PvP (if it even has XP now, I’ve actually participated very little in TOR’s PvP outside of a game of Huttball here and there, and aside from the PvP daily quest, I don’t recall any XP). This and the linearity both stem from the heavy focus on the character storyline.
Your ascension from 1 to 50 in TOR is very, very focused on your story – you get companions through the story, you get your ship through the story, you advance from planet to planet via the story, and so leveling is centered basically entirely around the storyline for each class. They have eased off a bit on the XP requirements – for a while, it was also absolutely necessary to find a group for every group quest, or else you would find yourself heavily underleveled after a while – but questing through the storyline is absolutely the way to go for leveling, and is, at this point, basically the only efficient way to level because of how many things are granted to you for following the story.
Now, that’s not to say it’s not a social game, and this is where it gets interesting for me. If you like questing with other people, this is the game to do it. Even something like running around to pick up quests at a new questing hub can be social – you gather some, your friends gather some, and you can holo-conference into each other’s conversations with questgivers, choose your own answers, and so on. This also goes double for flashpoints, which absolutely blow away anything other MMOs have thought about in terms of storyline and choice. Your choices inside flashpoints can change how the flashpoint itself plays out – sometimes even to the point of some bosses being on a route opened by one “choice” and some on another. It also helps you out gear-wise – besides boss drops, you’ll also start earning commendations from the very first flashpoint you do which can be traded for above-average quality goods.
Short version – basically, leveling up is heavily focused entirely on doing your storyline quests and the planet quests because of all the stuff they give you – companions, ship, etc. – besides just XP and loot.. No leveling through PvP, no constant dungeon running, and grinding is extremely inefficient and not recommended. Group quests are not as required as they once were, but are good for social fun, big bursts of XP, and phat lewts. Flashpoints are fantastic and are another fun group activity with good rewards.
Thanks for the reply, Stop.
The story railroad has me a little concerned given my particular playstyle. Since I’m not real big on story in general it also concerns me in terms of replay value. I mean, sure I could choose different answers to the questions and go Dark vs Light, but if I’m still experiencing mostly the same things in the majority of my play then rolling more than one of the same class seems a bit pointless.
I’m not going to judge it too hard until I experience it all for myself, but the leveling experience as a whole has been sorely lacking in virtually everything we’ve seen pre- and post-NDA so I’ve been eager for some answers. Hopefully my experience with the beta this week end can put my mind at ease a bit.
Thanks again!