Star Wars - The Old Republic (Part Five)

Stats, Level & Fighting Ability
From the encounters and experiences I've gained throughout my roughly one to two months of playing in SWTOR, I seem to have come to this understanding that one's ability to fight against any opponent largely hinges upon two critical factors, namely "Stats" and "Level". Now although you might be thinking "Well, duh? Isn't it the same like most MMOs?", I still have to explain how they work here in SWTOR.

First of all, if you bring out your character's stats window (press "C"), you will see quite a few stats like "Strength", "Presence", "Aim", "Cunning", "Endurance", "Willpower" and "Expertise". Now if you hover your mouse over them, you will see that

• Strength increases your aptitude in melee combat.
  
• Presence increases the effectiveness of your companion.
  
• Aim increases your aptitude with ranged weapons.
  
• Cunning increases your aptitude with technological abilities.
  
• Endurance increases the amount of damage you can suffer before being defeated.
  
• Willpower increases your aptitude with Force powers.
  
• Expertise increases your effectiveness in PVP combat.
  

However, these are merely general explanations that are good to know, but can be forgotten. This is because from the way things are in SWTOR, you will only need to focus your attention on two stats at best or maybe three (if your into PVP).

The first stat you need is called your "Primary" stat. This is the stat that you will depend upon for your damage output. Do note however that this so called "Primary" stat would differ from class to class (as well as companion to companion) but can be easily identified by inspecting which of them grows the fastest as you level (I'm referring to base stats of course, ignoring the bonus part which comes from equipment and datacrons).

If you still have not guessed it from the pictures, the second stat would naturally be "Endurance". This stat needs to be increased in order to improve your character's survivability. And as far as I know, although each point in Endurance only increases your max health by 10 points and health regen by a speck, it is however still imperative that you not ignore it.

This is because SWTOR combat mechanics dictate that you can only pot once per fight (not to mention that its cooldown between uses is 1.5 minutes). This means that you cannot "potion spam" yourself during a fight and thus if you do not have enough health, you will become very squishy and cannot handle sudden adds.

Since the third and final stat (that I have mentioned) will only become important when your doing PVP, it should be a no-brainer for you to have guessed that its "Expertise". But generally speaking, this "Expertise" stat increases your PVP effectiveness via enhancing stuff like your damage output, damage reduction and healing against other players (by percentages or so I heard). So in other words, it is sort of acting like a bonus and would be relatively useless if your original stats sucked.

As for why the other stats can be totally ignored? This is because improving them would have no benefit whatsoever due to weapon restrictions and ability differences between each class. Just think about it...would a Jedi Knight need "Aim" when they can't even equip and use ranged weapons? How about a Smuggler increasing "Willpower" when he has no Force abilities?

Next, the reason why "Level" plays an important part in fighting ability isn't totally due to the variances in one's stats compared to the opponent. In fact, if you strictly compared just the base stats, you will notice that the stat increases you get when you level aren't really a lot. It is roughly 4 points per level for your primary stat, 3 points per level for endurance and presence, 1 point for the other non-critical stats or something like that.

But yet, from what I could tell, whenever I encountered a particularly hard to beat opponent in one of my quests, all I had to do was to level myself such that I was equal in level or one to two levels higher than him and then I would be able to defeat him with relative ease compared to the earlier encounter even though there were no changes in my equipment and ability setups.

To verify my observation, I did a tiny experiment by removing all my armor so much so that I reduced my stats to the range I had back when I was about level 10. Then I jumped back into the flashpoint I had trouble with (back in the past) and stood there letting two level 10 drones pummel me. And interestingly enough, the drones had difficulty killing me as most of their attacks were either deflected or dodged and those that went through did pretty low damage. So I guess there should be some innate system coding that sort of scales the balance of a fight according to the level gap.

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Star Wars - The Old Republic (Part Four)

Combat

Although there is melee and ranged combat in SWTOR, I'm afraid that I didn't find them to be that much different from each other mechanics-wise. In essense, regardless of it being melee or ranged, all combat in SWTOR turned out to be a skill-spamming fest and frankly-speaking, I was a bit disappointed that it was neither a hack-n-slash nor fps (or a mixture of both) type of combat.

But nonetheless, this doesn't mean that fighting in SWTOR is typical and mindless. In my opinion, there is still a bit of difference in terms of the fighting styles of the various different classes and your ability to grasp and adapt to their differences would determine whether you have the upper hand during combat. However, since I'm no guru, I would rather not go into that and only touch on some general aspects of combat that you would need to know.

Resource
If you've read my previous article on SWTOR's Character Creation, then no doubt you would have come across this term called "Resource".

Basically from what I can tell, this resource-thingy is something that is needed when you use your various class abilities during combat. And for each class, the way it is needed and used may be somewhat slightly different.

For example, the Jedi Knight starts with zero "Focus" when he enters a battle. And as he uses his class abilities to deal damage, some of them will generate "Focus" resource while some others (the harder hitting ones) would consume them. Then upon finishing the battle, the Jedi Knight would slowly lose all the "Focus" resource he had gained during the fight.

The Trooper on the other hand, enters combat with full "Ammo" resource and needs to rely upon the system to "regenerate" his resource over time before he can use more of them. And although there are certain abilities that do not need "Ammo" to cast, most of them do and with the high damage abilities needing more.

In short, the fundamental difference is that the Jedi Knight builds his resources during combat and uses them while the Trooper needs to rely on how fast his "Ammo" resource regens. And from what I've noticed, the Trooper's "Ammo" regen rate is dependent on how much "Ammo" he has left (low "Ammo" level equals low regen rate).

So with this difference in the way resources are generated and consumed, there is a difference in combat style between a Jedi Knight and a Trooper. Theoretically, the Jedi Knight can continue to use skill combos endlessly as long as he is still alive by juggling the resource building and resource consuming abilities and their cooldown times. However, the Trooper's problem would be in "controlling" his rate of consumption of "Ammo" so that he does not empty his "Ammo" resource pool. For once he does empty it, his damage ability will be seriously hampered.

As for the Smuggler, while his "Energy" resource shares a somewhat similar behavior to the Trooper's "Ammo", he alone gets access to a unique "Cover-based System" that provides a strong defensive bonus as long as he is "in cover". However, the way this "cover" bonus works is not absolute and will only apply if the enemy does not get close or flank him. And if my memory serves me right, while being in cover, the smuggler will be able to see a certain icon (a shield if I'm not wrong) on top of the heads of those whom he is "in cover" against.

Finally, the Jedi Consular's "Force" resource behaves most similarly to that of a magician's mana in regular MMOs. As far as I know, its regeneration rate appears to be unchanged whether it is in battle or not. But combat-wise, the Jedi Consular is far from being the "squishy" type mage as its fighting style incorporates a balance of melee and force-based attacks.

Abilities
Another thing that I reckon you might need to know about would be how to identify the various types of abilities found in SWTOR.

Generally, abilities can be classified into three types, namely passive, active and toggle abilities. And while you can supposedly identify them easily via their descriptions in the "Abilities Window" (press "P"), I found that amongst these three types, it can be slightly difficult to differentiate between active and toggle as the descriptions do not state so clearly.

However, as I played on and gradually learnt more about the game, I discovered that toggle abilities can be easily recognized by a slightly elongated hexagon at the bottom-center of their icons. For example, if you refer to "Ataru Form" and "Juyo Form" in the picture on top, you will notice that both of these are toggle abilities and if the "hexagon" is lit up, it would mean that that ability is currently "active and in use".

Last but not the least, one final thing that you might be interested in learning would be how to make your Companion AI start using all the skills and abilities that they have in their arsenal.

To do so, you will first have to press the "tilde key" (~) to bring out your companion's hotkey bar. Once it is out, look for all the abilities with a box at the top right corner that is not lit and right click on the boxes to light them. This is to actually instruct the AI to include the ability into its fights.

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