Star Wars - The Old Republic (Part Six)

Equipment

As mentioned in my previous post, the bulk of your stat increases do not actually come from leveling up but rather from the equipment and items that you wear upon your character. There is armor that you wear to defend yourself, main weapons and off-hands (weapon, focus, generator or shield), earpieces, implants and relics. But regardless of how numerous they may be, all you need to remember is equip yourself with the items that give you boost to your primary stat, your endurance and armor rating (defense) and you will be relatively safe.

However, I think there are still some minor aspects that I wish to briefly touch upon.

• Armor Types
  There are four types of armor, light, medium, heavy and adaptive. With the same "rating", light armor will provide the least defense while medium armor will provide more defense than light followed by heavy armor offering the most protection.
  
  Adaptive armor, like the name suggests, adapts itself according to the best armor that one could wear. What this means is that, if your character can only wear medium armor, then the adaptive armor (when worn) will offer you protection that is equivalent to that of medium armor with the same "rating". If you can wear all three forms of armor, light, medium and heavy, then the adaptive armor will become "heavy armor-like" since that is your best protection outfit.
  
• Earpieces & Implants
  
  These slots merely provide more avenue to increase your stats and nothing more. You can start to equip earpieces and implants at around levels 15 and 20 respectively.
  
• Relics
  
  
  
  Relics are slightly more interesting because apart from serving the same purpose as earpieces and implants, they are also able to provide a temporary boost of power when you need it (such as to your critical and defense ratings for example). To use them, just click and drag the equipped relics onto your hotkey bars and you can use them like your using abilities. Relics can be equipped at around level 20.
  
• Custom Equipment
  These equipment can be easily identified by their orange name and border. The primary purpose of using them, in my opinion, is when you wish to maintain your character's or companion's outfit or appearance while at the same time being able to keep your equipment up-to-date with your levels.
  
• Rarity
  All items found in SWTOR are graded with a color coding system that is much like those found in other games we've played such as DC Universe Online. Starting from the most common, we have "Gray" (Cheap), "White" (Standard), "Green" (Premium), "Blue" (Prototype) and "Purple" (Artifact). And in the same fashion, items which are more rare would provide better stats and bonuses, however I must remind you again that the funny thing in SWTOR is that artifact level equipment cannot be worn by non-subscribers unless they've acquired an "Artifact Equipment Authorization" pass.
  

Item Modifications
Item modifications are a set of items made almost specifically for custom equipments...all except for one which can be used on all sorts of equipment if the conditions are right.

The item modifications for custom equipment consist of Armoring, Barrel, Color Crystal, Enhancement, Hilt and Mod these six types. Each of these can only fit in their own specific slot and depending on the equipment, the slots available might be different. For example, a custom weapon will have slots for a color crystal, a hilt or barrel, a mod and an enhancement while a custom chest armor would only have slots for armoring, mod and enhancement.

And as far as I know, apart from giving extra bonuses to your stats like primary and endurance, a few of these item modifications also serve an important alternative purpose. For instance...

Armoring also plays the role of modifying the defense provided by your armor pieces. With a higher armor rating, the armoring modification would offer more armor protection compared to one with a lower armor rating.

A color crystal plays the role of changing the color of your lightsaber, beam fired from your ranged weapon or the color of your shielding.

Hilt or barrel modifications alter the damage range of your custom weapon. With a higher power rating, your custom weapon will deal much more damage.

And since these custom equipments are made to be "update-able", you can actually swap the outdated modifications with newer and better ones easily (so long as you have enough credits and the right level requirements for them). To do so, just "ctrl + right click" on the custom equipment, right click on the outdated one to free up the slot and then put in the new modification.

Now Augments are the only item modification that can be used on all kinds of equipment regardless of whether they are customed or not. However, this is only based upon the condition that the item has an augmentation slot available.

From what I heard, these augmentation slots can appear on your crafted items during a crafting run if your lucky enough. However, since the chances are low (and even lower for free-to-play players), we can't really depend on luck for them now can we? So the more common method of obtaining an augmentation slot is actually through the use of the "Item Modification Station" and an augmentation kit.

There are six "levels" of augmentation kits available, MK-1 to MK-6. Each of these kits when used will give your item an augmentation slot of the corresponding "level". The catch now is that an MK-6 slot can fit all levels of augments as long as your character level is sufficient for the augment while an MK-1 slot can only fit in low-leveled augments. Furthermore, regardless of whether your item is augmented or not, you will always need an augmentation kit and the same credit costs to make or upgrade your slot. Therefore, it is much more cost-efficient to just go for an MK-6 slot and pay 45,000 creds in one shot rather than work your way up from MK-1 to MK-6, all the while paying for the kits and upgrading costs (which would certainly be more than the cost of one MK-6 + 45,000 creds).

And just in case you were wondering, these augmentation kits can be made if you have sufficient skill in any one of these three crew skills, Armormech, Synthweaving or Armstech.

As for the important ingredient in making them, Augmentation Slot Components, they can be gotten from "reverse engineering" (dismantling) certain equipment (depends on your crew skill). For example, with Armstech, you can reverse engineer weapons to obtain them while Armormech and Synthweaving will require you to break apart armors instead.

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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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