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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Star Wars - The Old Republic (Part Two)

Character Creation
In my opinion, character creation in SWTOR is somewhat the same as regular MMOs and there's nothing too fancy about it.

Server Selection	Faction

Class Choice	Species

Gender	Appearance

There's the usual server selection followed by faction, class choices, species, gender and finally appearance customizations that you have to plough through before you can start playing. And since they're just the regular stuff, I guess I can spare you the agony of repeating it and totally skip most of them apart from the class choices.

Class
From what I can tell regarding class choices, there are four classes available for each of the two factions, Republic and Sith. And basically, apart from naming-sense and some minor discrepancies, you can somewhat think of the four classes from one faction having a mirrored counterpart in the other.

For simplicity's sake, please refer to the following class comparisons:

Jedi Knight	vs	Sith Warrior
Tank Damage	Class Role*	Tank Damage
Lightsaber Dual Lightsabers	Weapon*	Lightsaber Dual Lightsabers
Medium Heavy	Armor*	Medium Heavy
Focus	Resource	Rage
* Depends on Advanced Class Choice at Level 10.

Jedi Consular	vs	Sith Inquisitor
Tank Damage Heal	Class Role*	Tank Damage Heal
Lightsaber Double-bladed Lightsaber	Weapon*	Lightsaber Double-bladed Lightsaber
Light	Armor	Light
Force	Resource	Force
* Depends on Advanced Class Choice at Level 10.

Smuggler	vs	Imperial Agent
Damage Heal	Class Role*	Damage Heal
Scattergun Blaster Pistol Dual Blaster Pistols	Weapon*	Blaster Rifle Sniper Rifle Vibroknife
Medium	Armor	Medium
Energy	Resource	Energy
* Depends on Advanced Class Choice at Level 10.

Trooper	vs	Bounty Hunter
Tank Damage Heal	Class Role*	Tank Damage Heal
Assault Cannon Blaster Rifle	Weapon*	Blaster Pistol Dual Blaster Pistols
Heavy	Armor	Heavy
Ammo	Resource	Heat
* Depends on Advanced Class Choice at Level 10.

Anyway, think carefully and choose well for the class you've decided upon will stick with you for life...or at least for the most of your SWTOR career. That is until you get bored and decide to create another character and play a different class of course.

You know...on hindsight, I can't help but notice that SWTOR's character creation system does give off the same feel as that of The Secret World's. Both of the games appear to have a somewhat limited array of character customization options. Additionally, none of them have hairstyle options that are longer than shoulder length.

So I suspect that the reason for these limitations might also be due to its attempt at wanting to add the player's own character into the quest conversations. However, in contrast with The Secret World's implementation, I kind of feel that SWTOR did a better job at it.

Not only did they implement conversation choices which allows us to at times alter the reactions that we get from the NPCs we're interacting with, sometimes we would even get to direct the outcome of an encounter. Like for example, allowing a defeated quest foe to live or die due to the choices we make in the conversation.

And on top of that, compared to TSW's still and silent characters, SWTOR's characters had motions (in terms of gestures) as well as speak with the NPC so much so that it becomes a real conversation rather than a one-person show (they've even bothered to hire voice actors/actresses to give life to our characters).

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