Star Wars - The Old Republic (Part Three)

Class Abilities & Skill Trees

Class abilities are essentially "skills" or "spells" that you can use during combat. To learn them, all you have to do is visit the appropriate trainer for your class, satisfy the ability's level requirement and pay up the necessary credits. And since these are the only two requirements you need, it would mean that you can technically learn all the abilities for your class without going through the headache of choosing what to learn.

However, this unrestriction also spells the doom for individuality as all the people which holds the same class as you would have access to the very same set of abilities. So in order to accommodate for a bit of variety within the same class, this is where skill trees come in.

At level 10, upon choosing your desired advanced class, you will gain access to a special set of skill trees unique to your adv. class. And the way it works is that every time you level up from now onwards, you will gain 1 training point. So this would mean that up to the level cap of 50, you will gain a maximum of 41 training points (includes the extra point given at level 10).

With this 41 training points, you are allowed to freely allocate them to any of the 3 skill trees but there are certain rules that you must adhere to.

• You may only pick up skills that are unlocked. These skills can be easily identified by their lit up icons.
  
• Within each skill tree, there is a tier progression system whereby you will need a minimum amount of training points invested into the tree to unlock each progressive tier (lowest row is Tier 0 and highest row is Tier 6).
  

  Tier	0	1	2	3	4	5	6
  Minimum Training Points	0	5	10	15	20	25	30

• Some skills can only be picked up if you have learnt its prerequisite skill. These skills can be identified via a link between the icons.
  

In short, what all this means is that you will only have enough training points to fully master one single skill tree. If you choose to diversify, then you will only end up being able to climb maybe two-thirds of two skill trees or less than halfway if all three skill trees are chosen.

Anyway, from what I can tell, each of the skill trees possesses skills that enhance or boosts your character's ability to perform a certain combat role if multiple roles are available for your chosen class. If your class only has one combat role, like for example Jedi Sentinel, then all of them would be dedicated to improving just that but the emphasis may be on totally different aspects.

The next thing you would need to know about is that skills found on the skill trees are essentially made up of two types, passives and actives. Passive skills are enclosed by a blue-colored box and will mainly provide bonuses like to the character's stats or their class abilities. Active skills, on the other hand, are cast-able abilities that you can use during combat. They can be identified by a green-colored box.

Finally, if at any time you wish to reallocate your training points, just pay a visit to a skill mentor such as the one shown above. He or she will be able to help you for free (if your a subscriber) or at a price (if your not one). And as far as I can tell, it basically works like the traits reset system in DC Universe Online where the costs increases with use and will only reset after a certain duration (in SWTOR's case, weekly).

And to help you plan your skills allocation properly, here's a nifty SWTOR Skills Calculator that I had found.

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Next: SWTOR (Part Four)

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