Star Wars: The Old Republic (The Thread)

[White Haven]

The shabbyEST gear, yes, but you can still get some fairly low-level not-too-neat-looking blues and kit them out quite seriously.

And it might not work on a conscious level, but it most definitely works to some extent. You see someone dripping in awesome-looking gear, they're a high-value target, either to be attacked en masse or avoided if alone. And in a game where it's not quite so simple to look underequipped as it is in a game with a simple appearance tab, I expect it may work a bit better.

[Brother-Captain Gaius]

Most of the social gear seems to come with a lot of slots, so you could even do it with the Coruscant fancy-clothes or the Nar Shaadaa Slave-Leia clothes

[CaptainChewbacca]

Apparently there's a final FINAL beta starting this Friday. Check your emails, you may already be a winner.

[Mr Bean]

This is correct I've already seen there is high level social clothing that can be purchased that matches everything you can buy in the game, the stuff you find or are rare drops can also be gotten via merits from doing missions on specific planets and once bought you can strip out the old stuff to let it match anything late game. In fact around your mid 20s you start getting the options of rewards of either some nice blue armor item or an equivalent upgrade if you want to keep the look of your existing gear.

[Highlord Laan]

You mean I'll be able to have my character use straightforward, utilitarian and simple gear like any real professional would without having massive glowing pauldrons with spikes and the entire ensemble looking like a circus tent full of drunken clowns vomited on it? And the gear will actually be viable beyond the starting zones?

Consider me sold on the entire game.

[Brother-Captain Gaius]

You mean I'll be able to have my character use straightforward, utilitarian and simple gear like any real professional would without having massive glowing pauldrons with spikes and the entire ensemble looking like a circus tent full of drunken clowns vomited on it? And the gear will actually be viable beyond the starting zones?

Consider me sold on the entire game.

Heh. I'm just happy I can wear a plain brown Jedi robe with no frills without gimping myself. I was worried for awhile, seeing some of the progression videos.

EDIT: Notably, this all applies to lightsabers and blasters, too. So you can stick with your original saber or a blaster you like as well.

[Highlord Laan]

You mean I'll be able to have my character use straightforward, utilitarian and simple gear like any real professional would without having massive glowing pauldrons with spikes and the entire ensemble looking like a circus tent full of drunken clowns vomited on it? And the gear will actually be viable beyond the starting zones?

Consider me sold on the entire game.

Heh. I'm just happy I can wear a plain brown Jedi robe with no frills without gimping myself. I was worried for awhile, seeing some of the progression videos.

EDIT: Notably, this all applies to lightsabers and blasters, too. So you can stick with your original saber or a blaster you like as well.

Awesome. I intend to go Trooper mainly, so being able to keep using a "tried and true" set of no-nonsense gear is outstanding.

[charlemagne]

You mean I'll be able to have my character use straightforward, utilitarian and simple gear like any real professional would without having massive glowing pauldrons with spikes and the entire ensemble looking like a circus tent full of drunken clowns vomited on it? And the gear will actually be viable beyond the starting zones?

Consider me sold on the entire game.

This isn't as revolutionary as you might think, Lord of the Rings Online got cosmetic appearance slots half a year after launch that allow you to do exactly that. My main char there has been showing the same outfit for close to 4 years now. Age of Conan uses a similar system. It still is awesome that you aren't forced to look stupid in TOR either just because the stats are better.

I wonder what hardcore-PVP-players think about the TOR system - in Lotro, cosmetic appearance is simply disabled in the PVP-zone, so you can't disguise your heavily armored meele dps as a squishy there. I guess in TOR it will just mean that everyone assumes the best items/stats on everyone if there's no real way to judge another char's stats by just looking at the items.

[PREDATOR490]

You mean I'll be able to have my character use straightforward, utilitarian and simple gear like any real professional would without having massive glowing pauldrons with spikes and the entire ensemble looking like a circus tent full of drunken clowns vomited on it? And the gear will actually be viable beyond the starting zones?

Consider me sold on the entire game.

This isn't as revolutionary as you might think, Lord of the Rings Online got cosmetic appearance slots half a year after launch that allow you to do exactly that. My main char there has been showing the same outfit for close to 4 years now. Age of Conan uses a similar system. It still is awesome that you aren't forced to look stupid in TOR either just because the stats are better.

I wonder what hardcore-PVP-players think about the TOR system - in Lotro, cosmetic appearance is simply disabled in the PVP-zone, so you can't disguise your heavily armored meele dps as a squishy there. I guess in TOR it will just mean that everyone assumes the best items/stats on everyone if there's no real way to judge another char's stats by just looking at the items.

Hardly... people can just do /inspect and see exactly what your wearing on the spot.

TOR dosent have the ability to hide what your wearing like LOTRO and the skill trees are so railroaded that someone can have a 50/50 chance of guessing exactly what specific tree you have gone down. Mouse over someone and it will tell you exactly what they are and even their Advanced Class, the lightsaber types are fixed so only one class uses the saber staff and only one class can use two sabers.
You might get a little bit more confused between Jedi Knight and Consular for the 5 seconds it takes to mouse over and the Non-Force users can be recongised instantly regardless if you put on a scruffy piece of level 15 armor or not. All armors are distinctive between the classes and I have not seen any ability to run around in armor that isnt made for your class.

Bounty Hunter Armor Progression
Imperial Agent Armor Progression
Sith Warrior Armor Progression
Jedi Knight Armor Progression
Jedi Consular Armor Progression
Trooper Armor Progression
Smuggler Armor Progression
Sith Inquisitor Armor Progression

[Mr Bean]

Hardly... people can just do /inspect and see exactly what your wearing on the spot.

Little hard to do when I'm jamming a lightsaber into their back. You missed his point about this being for PVP, one of the several issues WoW pvp has is being able to instantly ID high valued targets since all kitted out people are easily identified. That's nice you can Id my equipment when I'm standing over your cold dead corpse.

Also ID the other faction does not show anything as of last week.

TOR dosent have the ability to hide what your wearing like LOTRO and the skill trees are so railroaded that someone can have a 50/50 chance of guessing exactly what specific tree you have gone down. Mouse over someone and it will tell you exactly what they are and even their Advanced Class, the lightsaber types are fixed so only one class uses the saber staff and only one class can use two sabers.
You might get a little bit more confused between Jedi Knight and Consular for the 5 seconds it takes to mouse over and the Non-Force users can be recongised instantly regardless if you put on a scruffy piece of level 15 armor or not. All armors are distinctive between the classes and I have not seen any ability to run around in armor that isnt made for your class.

I have in fact my Trooper was wearing a stylish head-dress similar to the Sage's at the end of the beta because it dropped.

TOR has both social clothing slots and the ability to modify armor to any states you like, the only disadvantage comes from trading down armor rankings (IE a +50 armor mod provides only +30 in Light Armor and +40 in Medium armor but the full +50 in heavy armor). However because of the aforementioned social clothing if your Jedi wants to dress up like an Imperial officer and still enjoy his fancy robes he can do so!.

[Civil War Man]

You missed his point about this being for PVP, one of the several issues WoW pvp has is being able to instantly ID high valued targets since all kitted out people are easily identified.

No longer the case with WoW since they now have transmogrification. Though if you ask any decent PvP players in WoW, they'd tell you that even before the latest patch, IDing priority targets by their armor models is a bad strategy because it takes too long. It's much faster to keep nameplates on so you can ID by armor type and then check their health pool to see how geared they are. Mouse over them if you must ID their class, but for the most part knowing whether they wear cloth, leather, mail, or plate tells you most of what you need to know to fight them.

[TheFeniX]

I don't care if this game is awful at this point (it isn't). I've managed to reconnect with players from my original Jedi-Oucast/Academy clan as well as the guys I ran with on Wanderhome in Galaxies. I've even allied with the gaming community I used to play with in Natural Selection and Counter-Strike: Source. So, multiplayer KOTOR: my money, take all of it. I've had so much Star Wars music rolling in my head this week, I've just gone ahead and reburned all my ripped Star Wars music. I still need to pickup the EPIII soundtrack as it wasn't out at the time I bought all the CDs.

Just so this post isn't all me ranting about shit no one cares about, I found my list of annoyances that should be fixed:
1. Put saber stances and possibly sprint on it's own toolbar, much like forms and auras were for Druids and Paladins, respectively.
2. Please stop closing my character screen when I open a vendor and closing the vendor when I open the character screen. Since I can't compare item stats for my companions directly, I'm forced to write this shit down on paper and I haven't had to do that since Wizardry VII.
3. There's some UI issues with Taxis and Quick Travel points. Sometimes they won't show up on either my map or the mini-map. And to save me some headaches, just make them harder to skip. I find them just fine, but my party members? "Ok, let's port back to base." "I didn't grab the travel point." "GOD DAMN IT!"
4. Let me move my UI where I want it. Blizzard is even worse about this shit, but the UI customization of Star Trek was light-years ahead of both.
5. We discussed the lack of character customization.
6. Let my party members get on my ship with me. I hope this is coming at a later date. Galaxies did this just fine a decade ago (AND asked your party if they wished to join you). I would also kill for something like a guild "Base of Operations" on a ship. Essentially a home in space you could dock at, then move on to do solo missions or guild missions from a central location. NOTE: I am not holding my breath for this one. But a man can dream......
7. On that note, do we really need separate instances, that are usually a LOONG run, for each class ship? Just have an NPC that ask "Do you wish to board your ship?" and put him near the normal shuttle.

I'm not as pissed about the rails space combat anymore. I remember Jump to Lightspeed and how it was basically an X-Wing vs Tie-Fighter MMO and was arguably better than Galaxies as a whole. I can wait for better space combat, but I do hope it's coming.

All these are just annoyances, which I hope to see ironed out soon. Nothing really game breaking for me except the conversation and map bugs that would crop up every once in a while. These would force a restart of the game to fix. But WoW has issues even today that can't be fixed with a /reloadui.

[White Haven]

There's an option to compare with your gear and your companion's gear simultaneously. I'm not in beta right now so I can't look up where it is in the menus, but it's in there.

[Molyneux]

After reading this thread, count me in on this game for at least a bit of play. I'll drop DCUO (which I'm not that fond of anyway) and check it out.

Are y'all going to be playing predominantly Republic or Shit Empire?

[TheFeniX]

BiPolar Bears fight for the Republic!

I'm just not big on playing Stupid Evil. Before I even look at Sith, I will have at least leveled my Jedi Knight and Trooper.

[Brother-Captain Gaius]

Republic. The Sith Warrior story seems pretty cool, but I loathe the ham-fisted attempts at equating Sith = Galactic Empire and Republic = Rebels, which is just silly. In any case, I want to buck the undoubtedly popular trend of various wannabe-badass Dark Jedi/Sith and play a saint-like super-zen Jedi. I wish to harvest the tears of groupmates upset with me because I won the conversation roll and just declined the rewards for the entire flashpoint. It's delicious.

[Mr Bean]

I've already got four characters planned and which I play depends on which one I enjoy more on first play through. Space Jesus (Jedi Consular), plus Imperial Agent, Trooper and possibly Smuggler, Needless to say I'm going to the healer route with my Counsular, Sniper with Agent, Trooper tank spec'd and Smuggler will be grenade spec'd. So that's 3 to 1 in Republic VS Sith.

[Broken]

I'm planning Republic first off; Jedi Knight and Trooper. Not decided if I'll go dps or tank route with them yet. If the game still holds interest for me, I'll then level a Bounty Hunter and Sith Inquisitor. Not sure if I'll go PVE or PVP server yet, but I'll be on some US server, either East Coast (where I live) or West Coast (time zones means getting home late from work and still sometimes make raid times) depending if I get a few RL friends to play or not.

[AMT]

I think my first main will be a bounty hunter. Fun story, and I like the playstyle of the BH, going two blasters.

[Ritterin Sophia]

I've got an idea of what I want to play for most every class except for the Jedi, I just can't find a way to like them.

I plan on playing a Sith Juggernaut on launch, I know what happens up to around 30th level, but I like the gamestyle and I really want to finish the story I started on.

[Highlord Laan]

Republic forever. I'll be rolling Trooper/Vanguard and make a dedicated multirole infantryman to buck the inevitable flood of Jedi and sith. And I have no interesting whatsoever in seeing the sith's "side" of things. Much like the Legion in FNV, they exist to be killed in my gaming.

[Molyneux]

I think I'm probably going to start as a smuggler - just because they have the coolest hats.

[Darth Yan]

Surprised no one mentioned scourge yetSpoiler

He is a knight companion, but he also murdered the Jedi Exile and is the reason Revan has been imprisoned by Vitiate.

[VarrusTheEthical]

After getting a taste of mowing down Sith with an assault cannon in the beta, I'm planning on a DPS spec'd Commando. Basically, I'll be taking the "Hockey religions and ancient weapons are no match for a good blaster at your side, kid." to the extreme.

[Highlord Laan]

He's named Scourge? I assume this fanboy self-insert fanfic jackass then went on to fuck Bastila and arrange a lesbian orgy with KOTOR's entire female cast? It'd be par for the course for his archetype.