Sixth screenshot meme (contains slight Jedi Knight spoiler)

Posted on February 21, 2012 by stoppableforce

Psynister left his tags open for the Sixth Meme which has been floating around the WoW blogosphere (and now is somewhat making inroads into the SWTOR blogosphere). That’s good enough for me – I fall into “everyone who hasn’t been tagged yet.”

The basic premise is easy…

Go into your image folder

Open the sixth sub-folder and choose the sixth image.

Publish the image! (and a few words wouldn’t hurt, though I dare say I couln’t stop a blogger from adding a few words of their own).

Challenge six new bloggers.

Link to them.

The problem lies in the fact that I apparently have the most disorganized approach to screenshots ever: one big folder, ordered by timestamps and game (which happens automatically thanks to Fraps). However, my Fraps folder is the sixth one in my general images folder, so I guess it kinda counts! So, let’s see what we get:

Dinging in space. Well, that was boring. Let’s try sixth from the bottom.

Lord Scourge, talking about… well, who IS he talking about? Spoilers! Okay, let’s try something else – I enlarged my Fraps folder until the icons are in rows of six, and picked the sixth screenshot of the sixth row.

One of the walkers on Hoth, seemingly wearing sunglasses – this one’s stationed outside Aurek Base.

Well, that could’ve gone better. Ah well. I’ll redo Psynister’s tagging: if you haven’t been tagged yet, consider yourself tagged now.

Focus, Padawan

Posted on February 14, 2012 by stoppableforce

(Disclaimer: All of the article below is based on my experience leveling a Sentinel. YMMV, as always.)

The Jedi Sentinel can be an interesting class to level, especially when it comes to picking a skill spec. The three skill trees all say “Damage,” which doesn’t tell you a whole lot, but after reviewing the talents, you can get the gist of them:

Watchman does its work in Juyo Form, lights things on fire, has Force Leap with a shorter cooldown and minimum range of 0, and is capped off with a 5(!) Focus ability that hits like a train. It also has some minor self-heals from its talents and from Zen. Watchman seems to be the “traditional” leveling tree, mostly because of these self-heals and ease of play (at least until 40, when you’re trying to figure out how to shoehorn Merciless Slash into your priority list, but that’s another topic entirely).
Combat focuses on hitting more often thanks to Ataru Form (both in the sense of bonus accuracy, and in terms of Ataru Form hits), contains an attack that lets you momentarily pierce all armor and is capped off with a Slash replacement that… causes you to do more Ataru Form hits. Really, the entire thing’s built around maximizing Ataru Form. Even its Zen ability is based around Blade Rushing more (or Slashing more, prior to 40). Combat also, notably, has exactly zero survival tools outside of a way to avoid some AOE damage – it is the “glass cannon” spec. Unless you’re towing around Doc or using one of the tanks, or wearing some extremely good armor, it can be a mite tricky to level as Combat.
And then there’s Focus, the shared tree – although there are minor differences between the Guardian and Sentinel version of these. Focus seems like a real oddball at first – its work is done in Shii-Cho Form, which (thanks to talents) lowers a number of cooldowns, it has multiple talent boosts to Master Strike and Force Stasis, and it picks up some bizarre talents in the form of Zealous Leap (basically Slash on steroids with a 10-meter range) and Force Exhaustion (a DoT + progressive slow that ends with a big hit). When in Shii-Cho Form, Zen is similar to Combat’s Ataru Form Zen, but with a slight difference: Slash is completely free, and also cleaves a nearby enemy. Its survivability comes from the inherent damage reduction of Shii-Cho Form (which increases from 3% to 7% when talented) as well as reducing the cooldown of Guarded By the Force to 1 minute.

Focus is easily one of the odder trees – it discards some abilities you gain from being a Sentinel (like Juyo Form) and focuses on things present for JKs from early levels, while also adding strange new abilities like a second leap and a DoT. So what’s the big deal? You might want to think about leveling as a Focus Sentinel. Why? More after the jump.

Continue reading →

Shard-hunting on Belsavis

Posted on February 8, 2012 by stoppableforce

What you see above is someone taking a circuitous route through Belsavis to get Rakata Energy Cubes. You’ll need 4 of these (among your group, that is, or 4 by yourself if you’re solo) to hunt down the Green Matrix Shard on Belsavis. I didn’t particularly need them on my Jedi Shadow, but my Jedi Knight needed it… and now he has all three green shards for his level 50 Matrix Cube, at level 35.

Why yes, I do believe in preparedness.

Anyway, to get a general idea of the process afterwards, check out SWTOR Spy’s article on the Belsavis datacrons - and use the above video to take a route. It took me about two hours, all told, spread across two attempts (the second was much shorter than the first, and was the route I was taking AFTER watching that vid).

(Bonus points: if you have slicing 250+, there are usually tons of slicing nodes around here – varying, of course, by server population – but especially around the wrecked spaceship along the route. You’ll know it because it’s the only part with droids.)

Welcome to Hoth, it’s cold

Posted on February 2, 2012 by stoppableforce

Deal with it.

Hoth: it’s cold. It’s once again full of pirates. Jentra’s level 43. And it’s cold. It’ll probably be another week or two before 50 is a realistic possibility due to circumstances, but there it is. Even then I might wait until my JK hits 50 as well before committing to any kind of single character for endgame (Fortress is, in fact, level 32 – on the last few quest chains of Alderaan – proving that no matter the class, I evidently level at exactly the same pace every time when solo).

Oh, and Jentra is also nearly Social IV. Too bad there’s… not really any social gear I want at Social IV.

The guild did a couple test run operations and the results were good, as you can see from the operation progress tracker on the side of the guild website. Grats all! We haven’t tried Karagga’s Palace yet, apparently; I’m kind of hoping to eventually get to see that, as I am way more excited about “Hutt mounted on a giant robot” than “powerful imprisoned guy with glitchy platforms.”

On the table

Posted on January 24, 2012 by stoppableforce

No, I’m still not level 50. I’m level 42 and just finished the first quest hub on Hoth. I’m the overlord of overlevelling. I needed an excuse to share this screenshot, though. (You’ll want to click through to see the dialogue.)

With that out of the way, here’s a combination of “posts you can expect in the future” and “a public to-do list so Stop has to write these things.” In no particular order:

Shadow specs, esp. for leveling – Balance, ~~hybrid Balance~~, full-on Deception, Kinetic Combat.
A look at the Focus tree for Jedi Sentinels. Holy crap, I have fallen in love with this tree.
Legacy system wishlist.
A guest post from my leveling partner on morality/choice in SWTOR. As soon as he quits having to GRADE ALL THE THINGS, anyway.
Speaking of which, if you’d like to write a guest post, let’s talk turkey. My list of available post topics is pretty much wide-open.

A leveling tip, courtesy of @Asros

Posted on January 12, 2012 by stoppableforce

PRO TIP - If you dont do heroics or flashpoints or pvp while leveling, do all bonus objectives and bonus series while leveling. #SWTOR

January 12, 2012 4:37 pm via Echofon ReplyRetweetFavorite

@Asros

Asros

Its not a tip so much as a rule, because leveling is modular, if you skip grouping, you have to do all solo content.

January 12, 2012 4:37 pm via Echofon ReplyRetweetFavorite

@Asros

Asros

Or as I told someone earlier – don’t be Blender. Our guildmate ended up at 49 with half a level to go, with absolutely no source of XP outside of space missions, flashpoints, PVP, or dailies – all because he chose to skip almost all bonus series and probably a lot of bonus quests, as well.

There and back again

Posted on January 10, 2012 by stoppableforce

The hills are alive, with the sound of--no, no, stop that, NO SINGING

Over on the Inquisitor’s Roadhouse, Anexxia asks: “why the rush to 50?” Well, let me tell you who’s not rushing. There’s a story here.

Oh, how I love looking at Alderaan. I’m pretty well ready to go, though. It starts with Kyzur, a rotund miraluka Jedi Sage with a problem where his head clips through hoods. It took me 30-odd levels to realize I’d made a huge mistake. (Pardon the pun.) I just wasn’t having fun with the Sage playstyle at all. I loved the story, but evidently I am still primarily a melee player. Yet I still wanted to get my legacy. (Silly things are important to me.) So between levels 30 and 32, I tackled the first three quest hubs on Alderaan, then said “oh screw this” and did my story quest there, my end of act 1, picked my legacy out, and left Kyzur Epsilon Barsen’thor to take a well-earned rest on the Republic fleet.

Enter Jentra. Rolling out the door from day 1 as the action-oriented Shadow to Kyzur’s “let’s talk it out” Sage, I remembered why the Shadow/Assassin playstyle was the first one I played in beta. Fluid, fast, stealthy, loved it. I blew through Tython and Coruscant, slogged through Taris – which I am happy to say takes nowhere near as long the second time, mostly because you know where everything is – and was rolling through Nar Shaddaa’s first quest set when friend and NSTK guildmate Xindrola caught up to me. Somehow. Despite spending way too long on Taris. (Xin’s argument is that he was saving for a speeder because he’d blown a bunch of cash on investigation and armstech; upon being told that Nar Shaddaa was not the spread-out hot mess that is Taris, he hopped planet immediately.) I helped him catch up to me in the Kintan Kings quarter, then we duo’d the rest of Nar Shaddaa. All of it. To give you an idea how grossly overleveled we were at this point, we were able to immediately accept the Nar Shaddaa Bonus Series. (Level 28, I believe, is the minimum for that.)

We actually tried it at first, but it was slow going. “C’mon,” I said, “let’s just go to Tatooine.” And so we did. Everything fell before the combined might of a Shadow, a Commando, M1-4X, and Tharan Cedrax. Alderaan as well, which is where we left off last night – we still have the Glarus Valley quests, but he’s now completed his end of Act 1 and I’m doing mine tonight (again). But it was slow going at times. Xin’s still a bit new to MMOs (he played a little WoW, and I think someone talked him into FFXI because they were sadistic), so keeping him oriented in the right direction can be a challenge – I’m eager to kill Sand People for their rifles, while he’s busy trolling the wildlife by punting it into canyons with Concussion Charge, for instance. He still lives with family, so he (understandably) gets called away from the computer for minutes at a time – pretty frequently sometimes. Getting lost also happens occasionally. I want a leash sometimes.

We’re also still grossly overleveled. When we got to Alderaan, I was one level ahead, and every quest outside of my story content was grey. All of them. 5 XP apiece. Woohoo? (Even now, still at the last quest hub of Alderaan, I’m level 36. I’m pretty sure I’m at the high end of the level range for Balmorra.)

But on the upside, it’s a lot less boring than doing the same content again would be by myself. I get to see two stories for the price of one – 90% of the trooper stuff is available to me in Spectator Mode, and likewise for consular stuff for him. We have two crafters’ worth of crew skills available to us (granted, Armstech is really only useful for Tharan, but he is our healer). We can usually roll Heroic 4s with a combination of smart CC and, in one case, me kiting a boss around LIKE A BOSS.

And Social points? I am rolling in Social points. I’m 200 or so away from Social III. My Social points abruptly jumped during Tatooine; I was barely in Social I when I got there, but was at Social II and then some by the time we left – even before the bonus series.

Still, I wouldn’t characterize myself as being in a rush to 50. Pretty much the exact opposite. I am, however, in a rush to see something I haven’t seen before – I’ve been here before, and now I’m back again. Luckily, I’m on the verge of doing just that: every quest left on Alderaan is one I haven’t seen, as is every planet after Act I.

Jentra gets Space Cadet-ized; plus, a lesson on lizards

Posted on December 30, 2011 by stoppableforce

Shiny New Art

On Twitter, DiscoPriest - artist of the Disciplinary Action and new Space Cadets comics – announced an art giveaway, in which she’d redo your SWTOR character in the style of a Space Cadets character. Sadly I did not get in on the contest (don’t ask me why!) but I still wanted one, mostly after seeing Asros and Fynralyl sporting theirs on Twitter and the guild forums, so I did it the old-fashioned way – I commissioned one. It was well, well worth it! I opted to get one done of my new Jedi Shadow (more on that in a sec), Jentra. Here’s the before… (click any of the pics below to enlarge)

And here she is after becoming a total Space Cadet:

So cool! Thanks again, DP – love ‘em. If you’d like to get one of your very own, here’s the easiest way to do so – the cost is $20.

Take a screenshot of your character at the SWTOR login screen. (You can use the same screenshot button that works in-game – for me, that’s Print Screen.)
Optional: take a full-body screenshot in-game. I apologize to Disco for the shoddy quality of my in-game pic (controlling the camera over a remote connection is nigh impossible!) but she did extremely well all the same.
Send the pics, along with a short email requesting a Space Cadet-style avatar, to the artist.
She’ll take care of you from there!

Shiny New Character

As you can guess from the fact that I didn’t get Kyzur cadet-ized, I’ve switched away from playing him. The Sage playstyle is okay, but it just wasn’t clicking with me. Unfortunately, it took me about 20 levels to figure that out. At that point, I was so close to unlocking my Legacy that I figured I may as well just go ahead and do it – and that’s what I did.

(A side note here about my Legacy. For no apparent reason, my original choice of Legacy names (Cygma, as in Sigma, as in Kaiser Sigma) was not allowed by the Legacy system for no apparent reason – and neither was any other spelling of it. I wonder if it can’t be five characters long? Seems kind of arbitrarily short. So I went with a backup – Epsilon. It took a little bit to grow on me, but I got used to it. About 75% of the way to Legacy Level 2, to boot.)

Jentra, my shiny new Shadow, just got to Taris. Yes, that means I’m now one of those people with multiples of the same class – but the Shadow and Sage play so differently they may as well be different classes. Just to ensure it’s not a total repeat, Jentra’s making different choices than Kyzur did in many places, even if it’s just seemingly inconsequential dialogue. As a result, she’s developed a definite anti-Imperial leaning, and is less likely to be your staunch, stuffy, upright Jedi. If Kyzur represents the Jedi Order’s guiding voice, Jentra is its striking arm.

FOR GREAT JUSTICE.

A Lesson on Lizard-men

So I’d complained on Twitter that, starting at around Tatooine but definitely noticeable on Alderaan, Qyzen Fess seemed a lot… squishier. I also had a much easier time pulling threat from him if I was spec’d for DPS. Getting some upgrades on Tatooine seemed to help his survival and threat somewhat, but I still had to bubble the green dude every time I got a chance. When I got Jentra, I was happy to have Qyzen again at a low level, where he’s very, very tanky.

Then I noticed something: a little green icon in his buff bar, for Trandoshan Regeneration, his “tank stance.” And then I realized that I hadn’t seen that icon when I was playing as Kyzur since, oh, sometime on Taris. Later on, after several groups, I resummoned Qyzen – sure enough, Trandoshan Regeneration had turned itself off for no apparent reason.

Learn from my mistakes: always make sure your tank is actually in tank stance!

The Stoppable Force

a long, long time ago, in a blog far, far away

Category Archives: SWTOR