I noticed in 1.2 that there are now TWO Cat Bauer – I mean Aric Jorgan – customization kits at the security key vendor.1 The first one was the same old “bad hair” but the other (Customization 4, I believe) was a new blue-black panther.
This one definitely has a better chance at BSOCK.
Remember how I had a bad experience with customer service being slow and unresponsive – and after I QQ’ed here (and MMO Melting Pot linked it) the issue was fixed almost immediately – but the fixing at that particular time was totally not in response to the blog post, just a happy coincidence…
I got over my initial QQ and decided to keep sending in bug reports. I’m doing my part to make the game better, dammit. In the last few weeks, every bug report I’ve sent in has been answered in minutes. I mean, under 5 minutes, and the response was relevant to the bug in question (not all form). You know, like they read the thing!
Now, there are 2 possible explanations for this:
1. They are ramping up customer service and making it better and faster.
2. I’m on a list of QQ’ers who must be dealt with immediately.
#2 is my husband’s theory. I choose to believe #1, because #2 is damn creepy.
Have you had a good or bad experience with customer service lately?
Yay, I got Dark 1. I look badass.
Hey look, Dark side corruption now shows on character select screen. Dark. Dangerous. Rawr
Hey, now I got Dark 2! Awesome.
Ok… um… not awesome. Disgusting? You’d better believe I loaded up on light side diplomacy missions until I was back to Dark 1.
What can I say? The sickly look doesn’t jibe with my view of the “seductively evil” minion of the dark side. You know, now that I think about it, when I see sithie female NPC’s in-game they don’t have much (if any) dark side corruption – even some of the girl sith lords are blemish-free. Especially that girl sithie who tried to seduce my girl smuggler… the dialogue was awfully suggestive considering I didn’t get any flirt options after it.
I’m keeping Dark 1, and that’s about it. I will need to save the occasional orphan to make this work. Also, diplomacy is a great way to “fine tune” alignment.
Got to do some toon creation last night. I have a lvl 50 (republic) Zabrak and a lvl 50 cyborg.
As expected, if you unlock cyborg, you get access to all the cybernetics in game. The slider starts with the agent ones and works its way through to the trooper ones. In the end there are 60+ options, but there might be some duplicates.
However, character creation is a bit tough without slider labels:
Hopefully that got fixed last night in the patch.
As you know, Zabraks can already be all the classes in both factions. However, Republic Zabrak and Empire Zabrak are considered two different species for character creation purposes. Getting to 50 with a republic zabrak unlocks “Empire Zabrak” for republic toons and “republic zabrak” for empire toons.
So you can’t mix and match the options (for example, the empire red skin tones with a republic tattoo). I was kinda disappointed that I couldn’t get the badass tattoos of the empire side without those gross red-ringed eyes.
Disclaimer: I could be wrong some (a lot of) things here, the “answers” are clear as mud and I didn’t try to test everything. In the interest of getting you an article while it’s still relevant, I’m taking my best guesses. I’m editing as I find out new things…
In 1.2 you can pull the armoring out of your set gear (as you can currently do with the mod and enhancement). However, the tier bonuses for the rakata/columi/tion gear stays on the actual piece and does not follow the armoring (says the devs, anyway, I haven’t personally tried this). Future gear will have the set bonus tied to the armoring, but for now, we’re stuck choosing between “stripping the mods” and keeping the bonus.
Now, I could not write this before I had actually tested it in 1.2. Why is that? Because the devs in the same QA, practically in the same paragraph, made contradictory statements about reverse engineering and oranges.
Many of the new end game items (and end game items going forward) can be reverse engineered to learn schematics based on the original item… Reverse engineering an item with mods leads to empty orange equivalents of the end game items. This can be done after the mods are extracted and used in a different item!
Yay right? Then…
Because we do not want players to gamble with reverse engineering custom appearances (orange items) which are often unique quest rewards, the schematics for these items are obtained via mission discoveries for various gathering skills and are set to Bind on Equip to encourage active trading.
Lolwut?
I also found this thread, which supposedly clears things up.
We have added a number of orange appearance schematics to the system through mission discoveries.
From the dev comments it seems:
This is what I understand:
With 1.2, you can get augment slots in crafted moddable orange items (which is currently head, chest, legs). If you strip the mods out of the columi gear and plop em into crafted oranges, then you have the same stats as before, minus 4 piece set bonus, plus augment slots. You can keep your 2 piece set bonus by keeping your set gloves and boots, since those slots cannot be crafted oranges and cannot have an augment EDIT: Except the PvP recipes which, again, you need 70 valor to wear, or possibly RE oranges from “end game items”. (I am assuming, I have not seen all the new recipes).
Now, some set bonuses are pretty damn good. Like that extra 50 force for consulars, nom nom nom. Y’all have to live with your bananahands for a while. But those of you with a fucking useless bonus like mine can opt to ditch the bonus in favor of extra stats.
You will have to pay for a few things:
As you probably gathered, stripping the mods out of the gear is going to cost an arm and a leg, while the other parts of the plan probably won’t be that bad. Many of the oranges that are pretty are also low level, so making a bunch of copies of those won’t be a big deal.
Now, for the love of pete, figure out which items you like BEFORE you start moving around those mods. It’s better to model the empty outfit (before mods have been removed from anything) and say “this isn’t for me” and continue the search… rather than put the mods in, equip it, and scream. That’s right, the preview window is not to be trusted with that much money.
See how it looks with and without the “Match to chest” option. Most of the time, it’s pretty obvious how the pants are going to turn out based on the chest, however, there are a few weirdnesses. Usually it still looks GOOD, but just unexpected.
Model it. Match it. Go in the sun. You’re going to be wearing it for a while. You’d better like it.
I thought I hated C2-N2’s constant blathering. I thought I hated Risha’s self-absorbed posturing. But Tharan Cedrax is the worst.
Things I Hate About Tharan:
So, in the spirit of haet, I decided to punish him with a companion customization kit.
Hi guys! I talk about our awesome guild all the flippin time and y’all are impressed, I know. Anyway, we are recruiting a little right now – “a little” because we’re small so we don’t need more than 2 more people.
We are primarily a raiding guild (ops, totally ops)
We are looking for:
Even if you’re not interested, you should check out the site because (1) I designed it (2) we say funny shit in guild chat, and (3) underpants!
So, until now, I played my characters in a way that felt “natural” for them. This included killing the occasional asshole or breaking the jedi code, but it also included taking the high road to impress my companions (whom I wanted to BSOCK). This landed my two lvl 50 characters somewhere around Light II or III. Which means I’ve only seen the content through the lenses of a mostly-goody-goody.
My consular is planned to be evil. I’m not doing that well at it. When I did an “audit”, I had 900 light side points and 400 dark side points. CRAP. It just doesn’t feel LOGICAL to be an ass… as my story progresses, I’m basically led on rails through doing the bidding of the Jedi Council, and it’s really hard in my mind to reconcile that my character is EVIL yet continues to do the bidding of the Jedi Council.
And some of the dark side/light side choices are just plain stupid. On the Tattooine quest chain, there’s this dude who has been trying to kill you for the entire planet. At the final confrontation the choices are (1) Ur going to jail (light side) or (2) Sure I’ll take your bribe (dark side). Hold on a sec. I hate this guy (and hate is very darksidey)! I don’t want to cooperate with him, ever! I want to kill him in the FACE. In that case, I’d just have to take the light side “hit” because cooperating with him is just unacceptable.
So we see a corollary to the “asshole rule” here:
Thou Shalt Not Suffer An Asshole To Live – but if killing him isn’t an option, for fuck’s sake, don’t cooperate with him!
Since seeing that I was on path to be light again, I focused really hard on being a rat bastard and I’m officially Dark 1. I get to the asshole response and I grit my teeth and just DO it. I admit, I’m cringing as my toon callously asks a wounded officer “Want me to put you out of your misery?” But hey, I’m never gonna see the evil side of the stories if I don’t be (at least a little bit) evil, right?
Fortunately, this time, my companion is Qyzen whom I’m not trying to BSOCK, and I don’t really care if he gives me the -1 of shame. Or the -30 of shame. Because he’s a fucking lizard. I bought him some weapons. Pretty, shinies, Qyzen. Go sit under your heat lamp. Strangely, he doesn’t disapprove of many of the dark side choices… and approves of some of them. It sure beats trying to be evil around Kira, T7, or Corso, the goody-goodies.
If being a total jerk all the time fails, there’s always diplomacy to keep me at Dark 1 – evil out to the 10th decimal place, yo.
From talking with a fellow healer, it has become clear that SOME DPS did not get the following memo:
To:DPS
From: Your Healers
RE: FireDO NOT STAND IN THE FUCKING FIRE, KTHX
Ahem. Now, if you’re still having trouble after reading the above informative memo, there are a few things that you can (SHOULD) do.
1. Zoom Your Camera Out
I know your flips and twirls look awesome. They won’t look awesome when you’re dead because you couldn’t see the fire on the floor. Zoom out. Way out.
2. Look and Listen For the Clues
I am the worst about playing with my sound off – however, without addons, you don’t get a ton of warning, so listen up!
Watch and Listen for these. Don’t depend on someone else to call them out.
3. Don’t Walk Backwards
You back up slower than you run forward. Always run forward out of crap, even if you’re running in the wrong direction.1 Usually, you can swing back around to the proper position.
4. Drop Everything and Run
Do not finish that channel or cast. I don’t care if it’s on an eleventybillion hour cooldown, when you need to run, you fucking run.
5. Use Cooldowns, But Not As A Substitute To GTFO
Using cooldowns is good. You still have to get the hell out of the fire, fast. Use them when you’re running out of the fire. Don’t pop your cooldown and say “don’t worry guys, I’m mitigating the… OW IT BURNS.”
6. Excuses Will Not Save You
You didn’t have lag. The dog didn’t pee on your keyboard. Just suck it up and do better next time.
This post is dedicated to Veela. No, not the one from the Revan novel.
OK, this bothers me. Let me try to explain.
Let’s say the empire is building a big bad thing in a museum. The easiest and most effective way to get rid of the thing is to just nuke the shit out of the museum. However, there are thousands of years of history, blah blah. There is a way that it is POSSIBLE to lure the troops out and disable or destroy the thing without destroying the museum.
Now, as you can imagine, the dark side choice is to nuke the museum to pieces while the light side choice is to disable the thing while still preserving history.
But this is a bullshit choice! The light side option doesn’t actually carry the risk of failure, despite what the NPC’s say. The reason that you would nuke from orbit is that you aren’t sure that you can do it the stealthy way, and people’s lives are on the line. There is no chance in this scenario that the light side choice will fail and the empire will be successful in building or using its thing. You can safely pick the light side choice knowing that the people will be safe and sound even if you take this in-theory risky method.
Would it even be a light side choice if you could fail, leading to the demise of innocent people? Of course not. But the way it’s presented, you can absolutely do both successfully: save the people, save the history. If it’s a choice between people OR history, history becomes a dark side choice. But if there is a WAY to save both, it’s assumed that you CAN save both. And that is a faulty assumption.