Companion Wishlist

Hawtpants of the Old Republic Posted on by

I really like companions, but there are a few things I would change…

1. Hide Helm.  FFS people!  I want to see my companion’s face.  I don’t want to listen to a voice coming out of a bucket head.

2. Get Companions Earlier (before level 30).  You spend SO LONG with your first companion and you’re wishing for some variety.  Also, when I get a companion at level 40, you might as well just print “ur a crafting mule” on his head.  If a companion is going to be invaluable to my role (like, say, a healer companion for a melee dps toon), I’m going to suffer if that companion is given to me very late.

3. More Healers and Tanks.  It would be ideal if all companions had a heal or tanking mode.  Generally, you find yourself taking along a tank or a healer.  If you had more than one healer, you’d have some more variety in choices of whom to bring along.  Right now, as soon as you get “the” companion that is appropriate for you, that’s your perma-buddy.

4. Easier Gearing.  Once you have 5 companions, it’s hard to keep them all geared, which just leads to the same old problem of bringing the same one every time.  And many of them can’t wear orange pieces that are restricted.  For example: heavy armor that is restricted to “trooper or jedi knight” cannot be used by your friendly neighborhood Corso.

5. More Companion Quests.  I was pretty disappointed that the first companion gives you a quest to go somewhere and do something, but all the rest just want to have conversations.  Sigh.  I realize that if your companion/main combination is not ideal, a quest where you’re forced to bring a specific companion might be difficult.  But the companion quests could be easier than others…

6. Conversation Spacing.  Ok, when my companions gain affection, they want to talk to me at specific affection levels.. which is spaced out nicely.  Unless the conversations are gated by finishing chapter 1 or whatever – in which case, they just build up and once Chapter 1 is done, the companions want to chat and chat and chat and have all the conversations back-to-back.  Maybe there should be a minimum time between these conversations?  Maybe a day?  It’s pretty disconcerting to have your companion say “this will take a long time to track down” – you finish the conversation, and then there’s another triangle… you click and “HEY I FOUND IT!”  Mmkay.

7. Chat when I want to Chat.  I joke the Corso is a typical man… when he wants to talk, I should make time to hear him out, but when I want to talk and I click on him he says something like “I have nothing to say.” Grrr.  Even if it’s a dumb little inconsequential conversation, there should be SOMETHING.

What would you change about your companions?

Little Jedi’s Lightsaber

Hawtpants of the Old Republic Posted on by

Little Jedi: I want a lightsaber.

Me: We can get you a toy lightsaber.

LJ: I need two lightsabers.

Joun (the husband): What color?  Qui-Gonn has Green and Darth Vader has red…

LJ: I want two blue lightsabers.

Joun: This is all you.

She wants to be just like mommy. Awww.

We ended up with one purple lightsaber due to selection (no blue) and the fact that there’s no way for a 4-year-old to actually hold up two at a time.

Two Hours Later…

(Electronic WHOOSHING noise)

LJ: “PEW PEW!  I’m PEWING the BAD GUYS.”

50 Is Overwhelming

Hawtpants of the Old Republic Posted on by

Yay I did it. And at the same time it’s all just beginning.  It feels a little daunting, but at least I have a plan, albeit a half-assed one.  Remember, folks, unless you’re cutting edge progression, there’s more than one way to get where you’re going.

Gear

I want to raid, so I need to gear up for that.  I have a few options (or combinations thereof):

  • Reverse engineer for purplez
  • Do dailies for purple augments etc
  • Grind cash to buy stuff off the GTN
  • Do instances with guildies

My answer to this is, of course, a little of everything, but I’m focusing on crafting. I don’t have unlimited time.  So I make sure to “send off the idiots” to gather stuff before I even start anything else, because a lot of the “heavy lifting” for crafting can happen while I’m not even paying attention or online.  So far, I have reverse engineered purple pants, hat, and bracers within the last two days (working on boots now).  Not a bad start.  I haven’t finished my story quest yet so I won’t be doing dailies until I complete that.

Datacrons

All I can say about Datacrons is fucking hell.  There are a ton of them and a lot are simply impossible to get to – particularly for someone who is jumping–impaired like I am.

So I’m doing the half-assed version as follows:

  • Only target datacrons with my primary stat (strength) AND
  • They must not be ridiculous to obtain

The one that requires a 30 minute balloon ride?  Hell no.  If I get all the easily-obtainable strength ones, I may start to get some for other stats.  If I have time.  Priorities!

What To Do If You Get To The Fleet At Level 9

Hawtpants of the Old Republic Posted on by

Ideally, you will finish your story quest and all your intro planet quests (minus maybe the heroics) and get to the fleet at level 10, pick an advanced class, and go on your merry way.

Now, say you create an alt.  And, well, now you’re a little more efficient.  You know where everything is and you don’t end up killing extraneous mobs.  Your class quest ends, and you’re level 9.5 and you have nothing left to do but group quests.  And if you’re like me, you hate other people and don’t want to group with random people from general chat.1

So what do you do?  Do you kill boars?  Hell no.  Get your butt to the fleet!

1. Do the crafting quest.  You will be able to get the “learn a crew skill then talk to your trainer” quest.  Do that.  But also talk to ALL the trainers.  You get a codex entry and xp for each.

Still at 9?

2. Exploit your companion.  I’m assuming here that this is an alt and you have some cash to burn.  Right?  Ok good, get yourself to the GTN or the companion gift vendor and start buying up the stuff your companion likes.  Start giving the gifts. It’s a 30 second cooldown.

Eventually, the companion will want to chat with you!

Important note about companion chats: Sometimes you will get the “companion wants to chat with you” icon but the companion doesn’t actually want to chat.  The way you know for sure is to click on your companion and he or she will say that they want to talk.  It’s a different phrase for each of them…

Clearly Aric Jorgan wants to chat. In private. This is not a bug or false alarm.

Get to the fleet cantina and have a nice heart-to-heart.  At the end, you will get xp.  Maybe enough to get off the fleet.  No? Rinse, repeat.

As a side note, early gifting of companions behooves you and is cheaper in the long run. If you have the cash, it’s not like you’re wasting it getting your companion affection up early.

  1. True story: grouped with a random dude for one of those instance-cave thingys… he drops and because he was the first in the cave and it was technically “his” story area, I got booted out and had to re-enter as my story area and re-kill all the crap I had just killed.  Not cool. ↩

My Awesome New Belt

Hawtpants of the Old Republic Posted on by

I got the awesomest new belt, guys!  And when I realized how “awesome” it was, I had already DE’ed RE’ed my old one.

Is that a… leaf?
A heart for (late) Valentine’s day…

Actually, more than a leaf or a heart, it reminds me of Pingu’s snowboarding adventures and how his friends strapped a pillow to his butt to cushion his falls…

In case you’re wondering how this saga turned out, I narrowly escaped the clutches of the Fashion Police.  I crafted a bunch of green belts with synthweaving until I managed to RE a blue recipe out of it, and then crafted myself a normal looking belt, though with ever-so-slightly worse stat distribution.  To quote Darth Meatloaf: “I would do anything for stats, but I won’t do that.”

Links, Blogroll, and Emailing Me

Hawtpants of the Old Republic Posted on by

Stuff You Should Read

One of my guildmates posted about Sage healing on our guild blog.  Wait, you’re not already subscribed to it?  What’s wrong with you?

See, a lot of our guildies are bloggers – and those who don’t have their own blogs like to have a platform for when they want to make an occasional post.   It’s definitely not the kind of “guild blog” that announces what we killed when we killed it. We write about normal bloggy-things with only the occasional “guild news” post.

While I’m Learning 2 Sentinel, I’ve found this post on the official forums very VERY useful.  But I’m always looking for more things to read if you have suggestions.

And I’ve been obsessed with fashion for both my sentinel and smuggler lately, so imagine my rejoicing that there is a Smuggler Fashion Show thread on the official forums.  All the pieces are fully-moddable (orange), so most of them work for sentinels too (except smuggler quest rewards that are unobtainable by non-smugglers).

Mah Blogroll

I updated my blogroll to prune blogs that are inactive.  And I am always looking for new fun blogs to add!  So holler if I missed yours.

Email and the Contact Form

Every so often, my inbox gets the bright idea that messages submitted through the contact form are spam.  Sigh.  If I don’t answer you, it probably got caught in spam.  If that happens, or if you find contact forms annoying, you can always just email me at njessi [at] hawtpantsrepublic [dot] com.

More Adventures in Companion Customization

Hawtpants of the Old Republic Posted on by

You know how I said I was customizing all my companions?  And how I wouldn’t ONLY IF the kits were so disgusting that I couldn’t stomach it?  That happened.

Apparently, it was too much to ask to get rid of the mustache on Doc.

(Insert inappropriate joke about “mustache rides” here)

Apparently he has to have facial hair of some disgusting sort on most of the customization kits. Unfortunately, the previews are small.  Also unfortunately, I was throwing up on my mouth for some of them.1

Doc Customization 2. Facial hair not improved

Continue reading »

  1. Note: I don’t have a picture of Kit 1, which comes from the Ilum security key vendor.  It’s a very dark-skinned guy with a blond goatee. ↩

Being Gray

Hawtpants of the Old Republic Posted on by

I was a little bummed that being gray (i.e. not “light side” or “dark side” but rather somewhere in the middle) had no super duper gear choices like full-light or full-dark.

But then I realized that for non-min-max purposes, gray was awesome.

(1) Every choice is a choice

If my character is really goody-goody, chances are I will pick the light side option most of the time because that’s what a goody-goody character would do, end of story.  Vice versa for being totally evil.  But if my character is truly neutral, every choice, every single one, could go either way, and I get to sit there and debate with myself what to do.  I love that.

(2) Diplomacy

I took up diplomacy.  Some people use it to grind light side or dark side points, depending on their preferences.  I use it for money.  That’s right, I’m a smuggler, dammit, and light and dark make no difference to me.  I choose the mission based on the profit.

I would be so super-pissed if I saw a diplomacy mission with a rich payout but was light side and didn’t want to take the dark side hit (or vice versa).  As a gray, whatever, money is money.

Jedi are totally different. Jedi aren’t influenced by money.  However, it’s awfully easy to get dark side points just making choices that a normal person might make.  Failure to tattle to the council? Dark side. Covering for a friend? Dark side.

 

Update: Customer Service Ticket Answered!

Hawtpants of the Old Republic Posted on by

Remember a few days ago, I wrote about a ticket for an item restoration that I had put in over 2 weeks ago.  Well, today I got an emailed response!  2 of them actually.

Greetings [My Real Name],

I am Protocol Droid [Redacted], and I have received your transmission your item you lost due to a issue with the game.

I would also like to thank you for sending the requested additional information.

Your report has been forwarded to the relevant department, who will investigate further. We regret we will be unable to provide you with further updates on this issue, but recommend checking future patch notes for any up to date information.

We would like to apologize for any inconvenience this may have caused, and to thank you again for the valuable feedback you have provided. Please do not hesitate to report any other issues you may encounter during your game play.

Galactic Support is our specialty…
Sincerely,

Protocol Droid [Redacted] Star Wars: The Old Republic Customer Service

And not two hours after that, a follow-up.

Greetings Njessi,

I am Protocol Droid [Redacted] Human-Cyborg Relations.

I have received your item restoration request.

I am pleased to inform you that on this occasion I have been able to restore your item. Please check your inventory in-game mail to ensure that you have received the correct item.

Please note that our restoration policy allows you 3 item/currency restorations within a 6 month period. On this occasion you have not used one of your allotted item restorations, but future requests may use up one of your allotted restorations.

Thank you for your patience and understanding while we investigated your issue, and we apologize for any inconvenience caused. Should you require further assistance with this or any other issues, please do not hesitate to contact us again.

Galactic Support is our Specialty…

Sincerely,

Protocol Droid [Redacted] Star Wars: The Old Republic Customer Service

Consider me pleasantly surprised.  Professional customer service that is directly responsive to the problem.  And not charging it against the allotted restorations has definitely made me a happy camper.

I still have concerns. I’m not a convert yet.

The first concern is that my initial complaint did not appear to be read and asking for additional information was unnecessary.

The second concern is the response time.  Though a customization kit is scarcely game-breaking, and I’d hope that if it were something seriously important, I wouldn’t have to cool my heels for 2 weeks.

The final concern is that this response may only be due to the blog article I posted about this issue.  True I have a blog with a small readership, but it was cited yesterday by MMO Melting Pot (and I have no idea what, if anything, went on with the twitterz).  It is entirely possible that it was read by people who can get shit done – and then, well, shit got done.  If I did not have such a platform, would I still be waiting, and would my response have been so satisfactory?