Creative SWTOR-Based Title Goes Here

Yeah, I’m all out of creativity for post titles about TOR.  Too bad.

So in my last post I made a quickie comparison between the tank stats of my Shadow vs the tank stats of my Commando’s tank pet, and even though the Shadow’s gear isn’t completely up to snuff, it was still better than the not-terrible pet’s stats.  Well silly me, I decided to actually get the Shadow up to 29 and do a complete upgrade of its gear and see how it went there.  I was close enough to spit on 29 as it was, and in fact gained that level by doing the daily space missions.

I took screenies of the stats, but since the tank pet is a a ranged class I don’t think the damage stats are an apples to apples comparison.  So, I’ll just list off the relevant defensive stats instead:

.                                                  Level 29 Shadow      Level 35 M1-4X

• Armor:                             3392                           2998 (in-combat 3247)
• Mitigation:                     33.95%                      27.76% (in-combat 29.4%)
• Defense Chance:          18.39%                       10.54%
• Shield Chance:  20% base, 35% buffed     27.46%
• Shield Absorption:        24%                          21.58%

Same as before, obviously — the Shadow’s stats are definitely superior, in spite of being 6 levels below, and yet, the droid’s sufficient for everything I’ve tried to do with it so far, so take that any way you like it.

So anyway, after getting all the upgrades I decided to see what kind of trouble I could get into with the bonus quest series on Tatooine in order to see if the Shadow seemed “weak” in comparison to the Commando.  I had some old heroic quests sitting in the journal too, and figured I’d perhaps try to group up and clear those out.

I ended up in the Dune Sea and decided to clear out the Sarlacc quest by just stealthing past the mobs around the Sarlacc pit and tossing in the grenade.  AfterI did that, there’s that champion mob standing there which I know is a part of the quest’s bonus part, and I figured I can always do a stealth break of combat if it didn’t go well.  But it went fine.  Tharan kept me healed up like a champ, and a lot of the mob’s attacks were avoidable ground-targeted AE’s anyway.  He dropped some nice moddable light armor robe-style leg gear that I promptly gave away to the next Consular that I saw since my level 29 mods in my little bikini were already better than the level 25 piece of gear.

I decided to uncover the rest of the Dune Sea map, which found me that champion-level scyk to kill for the codex entry update and also the Ancient Sand Worm in the SW corner of the map.  I soloed both of them without any trouble.  Butthen there was Warlord Nekra the Geonosian champion.  I was even-level to it, so I figured it’d be tough if it was doable at all.  I attacked, and it became clear very quickly that I wouldn’t be able to solo it.  Not at that level, anyway.  Fortunately for me, a level 37 combat medic with his 4X out came up right then, so I stealth-broke the combat, invited him to group and we duo’d the thing instead.  Since he was at +8 levels the xp wasn’t nearly as good as when my “merely +3” commando soloed it, but one can’t have everything, right?

I returned to the Jundland wastes section and looked at my heroic quests and realized that the Search and Rescue (Heroic 4) quest didn’t actually have a kill requirement, so I wondered if I could just stealth it.  And yes, I could.  What surprised me was that clicking on the prisoners you’re supposed to free didn’t break stealth, so I didn’t have to use my 3 minute cooldown combat breaker each time, but could get away with just plain stealthing up and hitting my 1 minute cooldown stealth-increaser if something gasped that it was about to detect me.  Seems a little exploit-y to me, so I don’t plan on doing so again.  Plus it just gives a crappy looking moddable helmet for the reward, and I’ve already got a good looking moddable helmet, so. . . I took the commendation reward, not the item.

And then I kept playing along, working the bonus series, thinking I was doing great and planning to be logging out at midnight, and suddenly “the servers are coming down in 15 minutes” maintenance announcement for patch 1.1 popped up, meaning it was 12:45.  I’d completely lost track of time.

So in spite of me still being willing to call the game a buggy mess (and probalby will for months to come — it’s a new game, after all. . . . ), it’s also a really fun game that can suck me in well enough to make me forget to look at the clock.