4041

OK, then, see you in 5 days or whenever the normal early access starts.

4042

I’m gonna be pedantic here… :)

Login:
Pretty much the same experience. Although I suspect you’ll have a login queue on launch on some of the servers, which is pretty much what you had on WOW for a long time (and might still have after major content patches).

Doing a dungeon:
Both games have dungeons, that are varied in scope, length, difficulty and rewards.

But the process of getting into a dungeon is very very different than how WOW does it (Streamlined).
Unless retail changes something - this is the process for SWTOR Dungeon Groups

SWTOR Dungeon Grouping:
a) Use public chat channels/guildchat to try and form a group, alternative use /WHO and search manually for people matching your preferences
b) Group up
c) Move to the dungeon instance
d) Enter the instance

The process for WOW
(optional) Form a group with people from your guild/other
a) Click the random dungeon button
b) Get automatically ported to the dungeon instance

Questing:
If you are interested in BOTH doing questing and doing dungeons, you will have a hard time to achieve this in SWTOR due to how the game mechanics “prevent” you from Questing while you are trying to form a group for dungeons. With separation chat channels in the different areas of the planets, and the lack of a “LFD” dungeon system, you will need to use the limited game interfaces and guildchat to try and find a compatible dungeon group, before spending time to move to the dungeon entrance.

Appart from this; Questing in WOW and SWTOR is basically the same thing.

  • Go out
  • Find a questgiver, usually one standing still with a symbol magically floating over his head
  • Move to the quest area
  • Kill 12 rats
  • Kill 4 more rats, as the 12 rat tails you needed didn’t drop on the 12 rats you killed
  • Go back to the questgiver, who now has a different magical symbol over his head
  • Get Bacon

The differences from WOW is of course that in SWTOR the dialogue is voiced, has multiple branches, might give you followup quests if you pick the correct option, might give you Light Side /Dark Side points, as well as Positive or Negative influence with your companion, or might even give you an “extra” event where you fight the questgiver (who is now an elite mob).

Additionally, if you are doing this with a party, and the quest does not require you to HAND IN or PICK UP a quest object, your party members (If eligible) can choose to join as a hologram if they immediately stop moving when the prompt appears and click YES, while you - physcally there - wait for them all to click yes or no. You will then wait on every prompt for the party to ‘catch up’ if someo of you decide to listen to the voice, and others decide to press space after reading the text to ‘skip ahead’.

A Little PVP:

In WOW you have various options for PVP.
You can click on the “weekly PVP” npcs spread around the world to find out which pvp battleground give extra rewards, then queue up for this one. Or use the PVP Queue interface to select which (3?) battlegrounds to queue for, OR Queue randomly for all (for extra rewards) (out of 7(?) available). This will put you in a PVP Queue in your Battlegroup, which is a combination of several servers - ensuring you have an adequate supply of PVP’ers for any time of day.

In SWTOR you click the little icon in the bottom right corner and you are automatically queued for a random battleground (out of 3 available) with other players from your own server. This means that at off-peak times (such as at 05.00 in the morning) you might have a very very limited pool of players to pick from. They have attempted to mitigate this somewhat by having the pool of players be anyone from level 10-50, but picking those closest to your level first.

Singleplayer Experience:
It will be enjoyable in SWTOR. Just as it was in WOW.

Crafting (bonus round #1)
This will be faster in SWTOr than in WOW, since you have access to a companion who can do this for you from anywhere, while you are questing. Although this will slow down your ‘content’ speed in terms of killing stuff and surviving. I am not sure if they balance the content around you always having a companion helping you or not.

Inventory (bonus round #2)
This is worse than WOW, because you need to pay 5000, then 20.000 to expand your inventory. If you are saving up for a mount, and you did not pick slicing, you will likely not have enough money for the second upgrade until you are level 27 or more.
In WOW you always had the option of getting a bag as loot from a mob you killed, a quest reward, or you could buy it on the auctionhouse from crafters. This meant that the price of the items would fluctuate with demand and supply, and you could risk getting them very cheaply. You could also send bags from other characters or get them for free. You could also use the bags you carried and put them into your Bank as you gained access to bigger ones, thus re-using the bags.

In SWTOR the only bag upgrades are available from “Bioware” and the prices are Fixed. You can not reuse your bag upgrades from your character in your bank either, and you will have to buy Sepparate upgrades from the bank, which also have a fixed cost.

4043

During beta I had little issues getting a group together for a dungeon while questing. Then again, I’m old school wow player, and never really played beyond Burning crusade and hated the new instant port to dungeon feature - for me, it took away some of the charm, but thats a personal issue. I understand why its there - I just don’t agree its needed.

Usually, I just walked up to the dungeon in SWTOR in question, and found some guys there - worked most of the time.

4044

I propose that we all pronounce SWTOR “sweater.”

4045

Insant0: From what i hear, you eventually get more than one companion so you can have a couple companions working on crafting that correlian bikini of lightsaber mastery on your ship while you adventure with your favorite companion.

But yes, it is a huge loss in power when you only have one companion and send them away. Unlike most other games, your companions are quit strong and add a lot of effective fighting power to your group.

oh and you can also collect resources in person.

4046

Not sure which game you played, but SWTOR is full of them. They have exactly the same type of quests you find in every other MMO but there is a conversation before and after each one and there is a bigger story that you play through from one till the level cap. That stuff is great and all, but the individual quests are more of the same.

SWTOR also has plenty of quests from the genre “Oh hey, remember that dungeon/cave/warehouse you were just in when you were killing all of that stuff for this quest? Why don’t you go back to that exact same spot and do a thing right next to where you were?” Blerg.

4047

Yes, this is how it works. I’m not sure how many of your companions (I hear you get five or six) you can have on missions at the same time, but I had two companions and I could have them both on missions, or one on a mission and one with me.

4048

Naah, it’s not just personal: it’s a community-destroying negative “feature”, which is why it’s been intentionally omitted here.

4049

Do people really believe this kind of nonsense? Spamming chat with requests for group members got old the second time I had to do it in WOW back in 2004. All it adds is another time barrier to keep the casuals/carebears/whatever derogatory term you prefer from being able to access content.

4050

Sounds like even Vanguard:SOH has a better system in place for matching-making quests/dungeons. And that’s a game that flanked from 4+ years ago!

4051

To be honest, I would say maybe 20% of SWTOR quests are like that (and in fact, I think as you get higher level you get fewer and fewer of that type). The others are

*“I need you to go get this watchamacallit-foozle that is deep in this building guarded by 5.3 billion bad guys.”
*On the way there you meet another guy who needs a thingamajig-doodle from a nearby room.
*When you go to the area and start killing mobs you get a “bonus quest” that rewards you if you kill 30 mobs in the area.
*When you do that you get a followup bonus to kill 50 of them.
*Then after that you get a followup bonus to kill a tough guy who drops a magic horseshoe that you can turn in for a reward.

And as far as what Mike says about backtracking, I’ve found very little backtracking in questing. Maybe it’s because I’ve done it a couple of times, but I typically pick up all the quests I see at the local quest hub, and then go do the quests. I find that I do all the quests, and when I turn them in I’m usually sent to a different area or to a different quest hub. I have found it rare to have to backtrack to the same area (I did have to do this a couple times on Balmorra, at the Weapons Factory, but that’s partially because I missed the quest turn in guy who was standing outside the entrance and not at the quest hub).

Crafting (bonus round #1)
This will be faster in SWTOr than in WOW, since you have access to a companion who can do this for you from anywhere, while you are questing. Although this will slow down your ‘content’ speed in terms of killing stuff and surviving. I am not sure if they balance the content around you always having a companion helping you or not.

I believe the game is balanced around you having a companion with you while you’re fighting.

You can indeed send as many companions as you want out questing and/or crafting simultaneously. However, if you send multiple companions out on missions, you’ll go broke pretty quickly.

And truth be told, the main thing that will be gating your crafting is lack of materials, so in that way it’s very similar to WoW. You’ll be able to burn through your raw materials much more quickly than you will be able to gather them.

Inventory (bonus round #2)
This is worse than WOW, because you need to pay 5000, then 20.000 to expand your inventory. If you are saving up for a mount, and you did not pick slicing, you will likely not have enough money for the second upgrade until you are level 27 or more.

That’s probably true but lack of inventory space never really bothered me. After all you can send your companion off to sell stuff (only takes 60 seconds) and so all the gray loot goes away. If your inventory is full of green items, you’re in no position to complain.

4052

Are you telling me you don’t enjoy repeat posting something in a chat channel, managing whispers from people, manually looking up their info, grouping them together and traveling to the dungeon location?

Who wants to be able to do that with the press of a couple of buttons? Even if you were saving time, you’d be doing so at the expense of THE COMMUNITY. Shame on you, sir.

4053

All I am saying is, back in wow before Burning crusade - going to a dungeon like Molten Core was an adventure…it wasn’t a few clicks on icons, but yeah, the game changed - I’m glad SWTOR hasn’t yet.

This is probably another discussion, but its a sign of the instant gratification crowd winning out, and honestly I think it’s taken some of the magic out of MMO’s, at least for me.

4054

I partially agree with you. Yeah it was great back in the day but this was back when WoW only had a few major instances. Now though with wow having like 10+ max level instances it makes more sense the way that they do it.

The flip side of it can be that some people simply won’t be able to see the content because of time constraints and such.

4055

The lack of an LFG tool for SWTOR is a huge drawback, imo. Especially considering every 8-10 quests is a group quest – far too many, imo.

4056

Eh, I don’t find the proportion of group quests to be any different than what I remember from vanilla WoW - and, like vanilla WoW, you can skip them without being underlevelled or doing bonus circuit quests, so long as you do the rest of the content fairly comprehensively.

4057

yeah, and you can even solo a lot of them. At least, some classes can.

4058

I didn’t see a real issue with group quests as most of the time there were other people looking to do them at the same time. The real issue will be months down the road when there are fewer people leveling.

4059

If the early quests are any indication, you can simply get a few more levels and take your companion with you to do the group quests, something i did on a few of them when i was feeling anti social.

4060

Something to remember Re: Questing

Quest rewards SCALE with your level.

If you are above the level for the quest, the “return of investment” will be smaller and smaller.

I am not sure if they scale UPWARDS to the quest level, but they definitively Scale Down.

I can not understand why games makers have such a HORRIBLE “#&” model of doing stuff, by punishing players for doing quests that are Grey. Instead of giving you 100 xp / coin when the quest is Gray, they might as well give you a big fuck you sign and kill your character.