Revisited: Swtor.

Being absolutely bored today I revisited Swtor after a long absence from the game. Since I was a pre-release player my account is preferred, which gives me advantage over mere f2p-accounts; it sits between f2p and subbed. But apart from little perks, it doesn't give extra XP, or subbed XP.

The first thing that I noticed was the absence of people. On Hutta I was with 38 people at the most. Heroic +2 missions are hard to complete, grouping is not done anymore. (the same problem that runs rampant in Defiance and WoW) Even if someone asks LFM, jumping up and down and asking for an invite is ignored. That happened to me around ten times before I shrugged and forgot about grouping. Why is someone LFM only to ignore people willing to group? It boggles my mind.

Another thing I noticed, and I don't know if that has to do with me not being subbed at the moment is the server-connection. It was bad. Huge lag and seldom more than 3-stripes connection.

Still, Swtor has undergone some changes, your toons can now be 'family', which gives some major perks as you build your Legacy. You can have one toon of yours be married to another toon of yours and they can have children. As you level up your Legacy, class-specific skills become a bonus skill to other toons in your Legacy. As you gain exp, you also gain Legacy exp. However, levelling up your Legacy takes patience, the amount of Legacy-exp needed to go from 1 to 2 is insane.

There's a good achievement system embedded now that gives perks as goals are completed. Doing the achievements for each faction or planet will help you with levelling your legacy. Maybe it will also help with getting enough level to do heroic +2 solo... I haven't tried.

The thing that stopping me from levelling my new toon further is the fact that as preferred, I lose out on credits and exp, and I have to pay a lot more to get stuff from vendors. The other thing that really got to me from the start is that combat is resolved before animations are played. That constantly sets me on the wrong foot as I'm trying to start a combat-skill on an enemy that's still running around on the screen, but has been 'killed' by the system through another combat-skill I used on it prior. There's no visual clue as to what's happening. It's that precise problem that made me delete my Tank, it happened to often that I was tanking something that was 'dead' ahead of the animations, locking me out of my skills while hammering my keyboard. I have always seen this as the one major flaw of Swtor. It wouldn't be such a problem if the player wasn't left hammering the keyboard. In WoW, you can cue up your attacks more or less and if an enemy is dead, the cue just drops, giving a tank much more feel of the combat.

Now, with the shoddy server-connections (Maybe I should restart on a EU-server, as f2p-preferred it's no big loss, really) and the earnings debuff and prices mark-up for f2p/preferred, investing a lot of time on Swtor is not high on my to do list. I'm intrigued by the Legacy system though, so maybe, when I'm bored again, I'll drop a timecard on it when Steam is lean on good deals. ^^

If you've never tried Swtor, the f2p-system is a good way to decide if you want to try a timecard period. Give it a good try before you decide to drop money on it and try to select a populated server. The Heroic +2 missions will be hard to do otherwise.