Beginning Your Journey

As we get closer to the start of Early-Access for Star Wars: The Old Republic, the days feel longer and the nights grow more and more restless. You step out into the cold winter mornings heading to work and images of the frigid, biting winds of Hoth are all that sweep through your mind. The boss informs you that he’ll need those TPS reports this afternoon and without skipping a beat you loudly proclaim, “That’s impossible! Even for a computer.” Well you aren’t alone, we’re all right there with you as the anticipation to finally start playing the release build reaches its apex. Redirect all that pent up Old Republic energy and use it to prepare yourself for your journey in a galaxy far far away. Here’s just a handful of ideas to get your creative juices flowing and some tips learned from the beta to help you start out.

Plan Out Your Characters
Remember this is your journey so choose a class and character that you want to play and that you want to represent your adventure throughout the galaxy of The Old Republic. Don’t choose your class and role based on the needs of your friends or guild, take solace in knowing that you can always make an alternate character to fill that niche role later. Unfortunately, with the beta already closed and no stand alone character creator it’ll be hard to pre-build your characters, but there are still some things you can do to prepare and keep time spent in the creator to a minimum. Jot down some names that you want to use for your character, because this is an MMO you may not get your first choice of names especially if you are late to early-access or miss it entirely.

Plan out your look.

The MMO Triumvirate
Once you’ve got your starter class picked out and you’ve chosen the name that’ll will carry your legend across the galaxy it is time to start thinking about how you want to build your character up from zero to hero. There are some exceptions, but the Advanced Class that you choose largely impacts what role of the triumvirate you will fill and the game does a pretty good job of explaining each advanced class. Healer, Tank and DPS are the three main roles for a MMO character and generally speaking each class is able to handle 2 of those 3 with each advanced class tending to specialize on one. At level 10 you will be able to choose your advanced class and from there you can see the skill-trees that you will distribute the 41 skill points you obtain on the way to level 50. At this point with the 41 skill points it is advisable to stick to focusing on one skill-tree instead of making a hybrid build, but the ability to experiment is there as you can always “respec” and re-allocate your skill points, although it will cost you in-game credits. If you need a little help choosing the right class for you, check out our Class Focus articles as well.

Companions, Who to Choose
Throughout your adventures across the galaxy you’ll encounter people that will aid you in your endeavors, each class gains their companions at different levels and points in the game and at the end of it all you’ll have five companions to call on in any given situation. So which do you choose? The obvious choice is whichever one is available, especially early on, but as you gain levels and companions you’ll want to find the one that compliments your play style the best. For example as a Tank, will you take a DPS companion with you to mete out the damage while you take the heat, or will you bring along a Healer to keep you alive while you chip away at your enemy? Keep your play style in mind and don’t forget that you’ll gather a variety of allies on your journey and different situations call for different solutions.

Space can get lonely without a companion.

Crew Skills and Crafting
Crafting in The Old Republic revolves around Crew Skills and your companions. There are 6 crafting skills and 4 each of both gathering skills and mission skills, which are designed to provide you with the materials you will need for your crafting skill. However some skills have other perks as well, Slicing for example doesn’t provide you with crafting materials, but rather lock boxes for credits and sometimes schematics for other crafting skills. Upon arriving on either the Republic or Imperial Fleet for the first time make it a point to visit each and every Crew Skill Trainer, you’ll gain important insight and codex entry on each crew skill and a healthy chunk of xp as well. Which crew skills you pick will largely depend on your class and what you want to craft to provide for that class, of course you can skip crafting altogether if you choose and pick crew skills that aid in other ways, such as Diplomacy for LS/DS points and Slicing for credits. Keep in mind you can only have 3 Crew Skills total and only 1 crafting skill at a time.

Join a Guild
Something that is unique to The Old Republic is the foundation it brings from the strong single-player offerings of both the original KotOR and its sequel The Sith Lords. Several fans from those two games will be taking the jump into the realm of MMO’s with this game and while it is entirely possible to play through the entire class stories solo there is a lot to be said for embracing the help of others. There is no better way to do this than find a group of people that share a common interest, and grouping with others is the only way you’ll be able to tackle some of the more challenging and rewarding quests in the game. The official website for the game has a guild directory that you can browse to find a group that meets your needs and several guilds will have their own website to browse for more information about them. In addition we have a sub-forum for guilds and guild recruitment over on our forums and we have our own guilds for both the Republic and Empire that you are more than welcome to join.

Explore the Galaxy
Each planet while not exactly linear is laid out in such a way that upon arrival you’ll obviously start out at the space port and main city and you’ll be able to pick up and complete a handful of quests for that area. As you complete and turn in those quests you’ll find that your story will take you to the next city or outpost on the planet and the next set of quests, and you’ll proceed from quest hub to quest hub until your time on that planet comes to a close. So these hubs tend to lead you in a linear direction, but don’t let them there is much to gain from exploration. You can find extra quests, beautiful scenery, gain experience points for “defogging” your map and also some special treasures called “datacrons”. Datacrons will provide your character with permanent bonuses to their stats or items which you can collect to turn into usable artifacts, they also fill your codex for added back story.

A look at the Bounty Hunter ship interior and the Galaxy Map.

Bind Points and Quick Travel
Speaking of quest hubs, the majority of the time at new outposts you’ll find terminals that you can “register” called Bind Points and you can also talk to the protocol droids to open up speeder quick travel routes. Be absolutely sure that you register each new bind point that you find, this will allow you to almost instantly return to each using the Quick Travel ability. The Quick Travel ability is especially useful when you get to the end of a long dungeon and you don’t exactly have the urge to fight your way back out, but be a bit cautious about using it too liberally as it does have a 30 minute cool down time. When you gain your Advanced Class you also gain the Fleet Shuttle Pass ability which works in the same manner as Quick Travel, but instead of returning you to a selected Bind Point, you are returned directly to either the Republic or Imperial Fleet, however the Shuttle Pass does have an 18 hour cool down.

Rested XP, When and Where to Log Off
It has been fourteen hours since you were last seen anywhere besides your computer desk chair and your pillow is screaming for some attention, but wait don’t just exit the game stick around for 5 more minutes. Ok those 5 more minutes turned into half an hour, it happens, this time though just take that little bit of extra time and hit that Quick Travel we were talking about. Send yourself to a cantina, your respective factions fleet or your personal ship, from there you can log out safely and re-introduce your pillow to your drool. Logging out of the game in one of those “safe zones” allows your character to accrue “rested xp” at a much quicker rate than logging out while exploring. Rested XP basically grants you double the experience points for killing mobs than you would have gotten otherwise, but only towards a certain amount which is dependent on how long that character remains logged off.

Sit back and relax in the tranquility of your local Cantina.

MMO Lingo
This bit is obviously more for the people that don’t have much experience playing MMOs and how some of the group mechanics work and what some of the chat lingo looks like, so we’re going to go over a few things really briefly. First off the chat box will be up in the top left of your screen, in Preferences you can turn it off completely, but that is not advisable. Instead if you want to ignore certain main channels you can turn those off individually. The three main channels are /1 (General Chat), /2 (PVP Chat), and /3 (Trade Chat). If you are wondering what /1, /2 and /3 all mean, well it is simple, that is what you would type in the chat line in order to talk in each specific channel. If you’re new to MMO’s there will also be a lot of unfamiliar acronyms and abbreviations that you’ll see in chat. A few of the more common ones: LFG (Looking For Group), LFM (Looking For More), WTT (Willing To Trade), you can find a much more extensive list of MMO terminology here.

Loot Tips & Etiquette
This is another one for those that are new to MMO’s and one that we’ve seen cause some confusion during the beta testing period. Before we get into who gets what let’s talk about how to loot more efficiently. First of all in the Preferences menu there are two options that are off by default that you should consider turning on, Right Click to Auto-Loot and Area Loot. Auto-Loot basically just sends all the items straight into your inventory provided you have enough room, but it doesn’t allow you to really pick and choose your loot carefully and can lead to filling up your inventory if you’re not paying attention. Area Loot is highly useful because it prevents you from having to right click everything you kill, and you will kill lots. Loot etiquette comes into play when you are playing in a group with others and valuable loot is up for grabs. A loot roll will begin and you have three choices, Need, Greed and Pass. When in a group courtesy dictates that you only select Need when it is an item that your player character can use and is an improvement over whatever is currently equipped. If it is an item that your companion can use go ahead and hit Greed, if you can’t use it at all, go ahead and Pass by hitting the X in the corner of the loot box.

There you have it, just a few ideas to take the edge off your insatiable urge to play BioWare’s upcoming MMO as well as a few tips for once you get started. If that’s not enough and you still can’t stop thinking about The Old Republic then put your thoughts to paper and leave us some advice and tips of your own in the comments section below. A few of our forum members are already voicing some of their opinions on how to progress early in the game so feel free to join them as well.