With the Mists of Pandaria beta also opened, I had decided to stop playing SWTOR until this patch deployed, deciding to focus on a few random goals I had set for myself in WoW. And I guess the best thing I can say about this patch is that since it deployed, I have definitely spent more time in SWTOR than in WoW.

The Legacy improvements are definitely a neat feature. They allow you to create a “family tree” of all of your characters on a given server, showing how your characters are either related or associated with the other. Unfortunately, this tree does have limitations, such as the ability to only set up a single relationship at once, and a maximum of two relations for a given character.

Let me give an example. I have one character that I want to set up as  the father of two others.  I make Kid 1 the child of the father. Now what do I do with Kid 2? Do I make him the child of the father? Well if I do that, I can’t ALSO make him the brother of Kid 1. I have to pick.

This is irritating, but to my knowledge it has no effect on actual game mechanics. You’ll get all the tangible bonuses of the Legacy System regardless of how your tree looks, it’s mostly just an RP thing. I can live with that.

One feature I definitely like is that by reaching level 50 and completing Act 3 of your class quest, you unlock the ability to create any class with that character’s race. So if you finished leveling a Chiss Imperial Agent, you can now create a Chiss Jedi or Sith, or a Chiss Smuggler. It makes for some truly strange and fun characters. And if you don’t want to level an existing character to get that perk, you can also just buy it with in-game credits. It’s a pretty neat little feature, and has me wanting to scrape the credits together to make a Chiss Sith Warrior. (I like the Chiss a lot, can you tell?)

Incidentally, if you want to know, here’s how I set up my “family tree”.

I have three characters (Bounty Hunter, Jedi Knight, and Sith Inquisitor) that are essentially identical in appearance, save for haircuts.  Essentially, I made them look as much like my actual appearance as the game’s character creator would let me.

What? I’ve wanted to be in the Star Wars universe since I was a kid. This game lets me!

So I created a story where the three of them are triplets to my Jedi Consular and a Jedi mother who has since died.  The Consular’s always been something of a renegade. While he stays ultimately true to the light, he’s extremely snarky and borderline disrespectful to his fellow Jedi, and considers the Jedi rules on relationships to be foolhardy and (quietly) ignored them. Incidentally, that attitude makes him a hell of a lot of fun to play.

So whoever this mystery woman was (I haven’t exactly come up with a lot about her, since she’s only peripherally related to their story), she gave birth to three triplets, two of them strong in the Force, the other not. The pair decided to bring them to Coruscant through “intermediaries” to avoid suspicion of their Jedi peers, who would probably not particularly approve of the children’s origin. So they contracted the help of a smuggler ally to present them to the Jedi order as rescued slaves. The Jedi would take care of them, discover their Force sensitivity, and take them in to be trained as Jedi. The third would be given to a trusted foster home, where he would be given a good life his true parents could never provide, but they could at least keep an eye on him.

Unfortunately, while en route to Coruscant, the smuggler’s ship was attacked by ACTUAL slavers, and two of the children taken. Only one would make it to the temple, but he would become one of the greatest Jedi Knights of his generation. The other two would become slaves of the Sith Empire. The non-Force sensitive would grow up never realizing he had brothers and eventually escape using his wits. He would become one of the greatest Bounty Hunters in the known galaxy. The other would eventually be discovered as being strong in the Force by the Sith, and sent to their academy on Korriban, eventually becoming a Dark Lord of the Sith. All three, ironically, would share their father’s feelings on love.

So that’s the basics of the story that my Legacy tree is built on. The other characters are essentially allies or rivals of those detailed above. I think it’s a pretty good setup.

I do have one negative thing about patch 1.2 that I want to talk about, and it relates to the aformentioned Bounty Hunter. I picked the Mercenary Advanced class for him because I liked the whole twin blasters-and-rocketry motif the class had, plus he had a healing tree, which I could use in groups if I so wanted. And it was fun! I enjoyed the story a lot, it takes a lot of elements of the story of Boba Fett, and by the end you really do feel like a badass warrior that everyone in the galaxy should be afraid of.

However, they beat the heck out of the Mercenary in 1.2. They lowered the damage of his main abilities and increased the Heat cost of them as well. Heat is the resource  the Bounty Hunter uses. Each ability costs so much heat, and if your heat levels get too high, you can’t use any abilities that cost heat. Your heat dissipates over time, but the higher your heat levels get, the slower it dissipates. So basically, if you aren’t careful, you can overheat yourself pretty quick.

This was something you had to watch prior to this patch, but in 1.2, they doubled heat costs for several Mercenary abilities, including some of his healing ones, as well as reducing their damage/healing effectiveness. I have tried playing my Hunter a few times since the patch, and while it isn’t so awful that he feels unplayable, he does feel gutted. The damage reduction I can live with, that’s all an issue of trying to balance the classes, but the increased heat costs were done to “encourage more active rotations”. Basically they felt like everyone was using one ability over and over, and they wanted players to use the other ones too.

Except, this wasn’t true to begin with. Good players who paid attention were already using “active” rotations to maximize their damage. These changes don’t make any differences to our rotation, they just make it more unforgiving if we mess it up or get unlucky. It just makes the character less fun, which is the worst kind of change.  Fire mages had this same problem at the start of the Cataclysm expansion. Their spells cost so much mana, they had to gimp themselves into casting weaker spells just to conserve it. It was an extremely unfun mechanic that eventually was patched out.  Hopefully BioWare will do the same. Making classes less fun to play are terrible design decisions. Change the numbers if you must, heck change up rotations if you need to. Just make sure they’re still fun to execute.

Aighty, so there’s my random Patch 1.2 thoughts. I’ve been playing more SWTOR than ever lately, which is awesome, except I can’t stay focused on one class! I have too many things I want to accomplish! And ultimately, i guess that’s a good thing!

I finished the game this weekend. And all I can say is “…..what the hell?”

It’s bad. No matter which option you end up taking, it’s just awful. A truly disappointing end to an awesome series, on multiple fronts. Of course, there are people who DO like it, but for the life of me I cannot imagine why.

So I’m going to break down every single problem I have with the multiple endings. Be warned, it will be impossible for me to do this without spoilers, so if you’re weird and care about that sort of thing, you should probably not read this.

Still with me? Okay, let’s do this.

The basic idea behind “improving” your ending in Mass Effect 3 are things called “War Assets”. You’re doubtless already familiar with these, it’s a numerical value assigned to the various people/races/groups/etc you recruit to help you fight the Reapers. The more you get, the higher your number.

This number is modified by something called the “Galaxy at War” rating. It’s a percentage that shows the “readiness rating” of the 5 sections of tha galaxy. You increase this primarily by playing the multiplayer, but there are other means to do it as well. The minigame in the iOS app “Mass Effect Datapad” can do it, for one. It starts out at 50% and won’t go lower than that

Multiplying the War Assets by the percentage of your Galaxy at War rating gives you your “Effective Military Strength”. This is the number that your ending is based on. To get the best possible ending, regardless of your choice, this EMS number must be above 5000.

So if you play no multiplayer at all, you have to get War Assets totalling 10,000 to get that. As far as I know, that isn’t possible. My final War Assets was in the high 7000s, and I can’t see how I could have possibly gotten more. So, when BioWare said you could get the best possible ending doing no multiplayer? Yeah, they lied. Unless there’s some mysterious amount of War Assets out there hiding, I don’t see how that’s possible.

But that’s not the problem. I love the multiplayer anyway. No, the real issue comes from the story.

At the game’s end, you meet an aritifical intelligence calling itself the Catalyst. It takes the form of the little boy you helplessly watched get killed at the game’s start and have been having nightmares about ever since. They don’t mention who built it or why, but its task is to solve the problem of synthetic races always rising up against their creators. And its solution was the Reapers. The Reapers would harvest advanced civilizations, convert them to new Reapers, and leave the primitive ones alone so that life can continue and synthetics won’t ever destroy life entirely.

Um…what?

First of all, by choosing to take this kid form, the Catalyst comes off sounding like a scared little boy who happens to be all powerful and thus built gigantic death robots to protect it from bullies. Second of all, this solution it comes up with makes NO sense at all. It wants to prevent synthetics from destroying organics….so to do that it makes extremely powerful synthetics to destroy them? Or worse, melt them down into their base chemicals to use as feul for a new Reaper? (Yes, they do that. You can see it happen in Mass Effect 2, and it’s very very hard to watch) This is his “solution?” And we can’t call him out on the BS that it is?

So when Shepard makes it to him, he simply says “Oh, you found out about me. I guess my solution won’t work anymore. You’ll have to come up with a new one. Here’s your choices” He then lays them out for you, and you have to choose by approaching one of three objects. These actually look like they’re presented in a dialogue wheel turned on it’s side and rotated 90 degrees. The left and right platforms are colored Blue and Red, respectively, to match the idea of “Paragon” and “Renegade”, with the middle one being a neutral color.

Let’s tackle these in order, from left to right.

Ending 1: Control

In this ending, Shepard sacrifices him/herself to take control of the Reapers, ordering them to, ostensibly, leave the galaxy and never return. S/He has to unleash the Citadel’s energy, the spread of which destroys the Citadel and all the Mass Effect relays. Assuming your War Assets were high enough, Earth is saved.

Here’s my problem with this ending: it basically undermines half the things you were fighting against in the first place, because it means Cerberus, and more specifically the Illusive Man, were RIGHT. You battle Cerberus trying to prevent them from undermining your efforts to destroy the Reapers, and in the end, why did you bother? Yes, the Illusive Man was under the Reaper’s control in the end, and they’d have never allowed him to do what he wanted to do, but several times you try to convince him of his complete folly, that he could never control the Reapers, and if he wanted any chance for humanity, he should stop fighting you.

Oh wait, turns out maybe you should have stopped fighting with him. Because he was right.

This is incredibly disheartening. You’ve been fighting Cerberus for almost no good reason. You could have simply worked with them, then taken control of the Reapers yourself. Everything you fought against them for? Little to no good, because you’re doing exactly what they did. Not to the same end, mind you, but that really doesn’t matter. All the deaths at their hands, and you wind up using their methods, practically legitimizing all the people Cerberus killed. What the hell, hero?

And this is somehow the “Paragon” ending?

But this isn’t the worst of it. No, for that we turn to…

Ending 2: Synthesis

You get this ending by walking towards the beam of light directly across from Shepard. In this ending, Shep sacrifices him/herself to add his DNA to the energy of the Crucible, which then fires, unleashing it across the galaxy, destroying it and the Mass Effect relays. However, instead of affecting the Reapers, this energy essentially rewrites the DNA of every living thing in the galaxy, both organic and synthetic, into new creatures that are a combination of both. The Reapers then suddenly leave, because with all life being both organic and synthetic, there will be no war between the two, so their purpose is fulfilled. We’re treated to an extra cute scene of Joker and EDI, clearly both part machine and part organic, embracing each other on the Jungle world the Normandy crashes on.

Let’s step back for a moment and think about this. This is a galaxy full of people that, thanks to the Geth, at best distrusts synthetic life, and at worst hates synthetics. Only just recently is everyone starting to get over that, thanks to the Geth joining the Alliance and the revelation that the “evil” Geth were actually under the Reaper’s control. Shep’s crew, thanks to EDI and Legion, are well and truly past that, but face it, the number of people who don’t fear and distrust synthetics is still well in the minority.

So imagine that suddently in the middle of a war with giant death robots that do horrifying things to the people they capture, everyone is knocked out by a sudden green energy wave, and when they wake up, the Reapers are gone, but entire parts of their biology have been replaced with robotics. Or if you’re the Geth, you suddenly go from beings of logic and metal, to suddenly having these squishy organic parts that weren’t there before.

Imagine that happened to you. And everyone else in the galaxy. And no one has any idea why.

Imagine the sheer pandemonium that would ensue. People would be TERRIFIED beyond measure. Some would break down, unable to accept or even comprehend it. Some would probably start trying to tear the machines out of themselves. Blame would start flying around left and right, especially among the giant fleet full of various alien species manning very powerful ships. The humans and Geth would take the worst of it, Geth for being synthetic and thus obvious targets, and humanity for leading this entire effort because of course they knew this would be the result. There would be no peace from this at all. The Alliance would shatter, and even more wars would ensue. All because Shep chose to transform the entire galaxy without even bothering to ask them if this is what they wanted

But let’s cast that all aside for one second. Let’s just assume all of that away. I dunno, some sort of enlightened peace accompanies your unwilling transformation into a robo-organic monstrousity. You’re all okay with it. Because that makes total sense.

What you do in choosing this ending is exactly what the Catalyst, and by extension the Reapers, wants.

Think about it. The Catalyst’s brilliant solution is to “preserve” organic species as Reapers. Which they do, lest we forget, by slaughtering millions of people, and melting the rest into feul for new Reapers, in a process that is extremely painful and horrifying. So the Reapers are somewhat partly organic themselves. But if the Catalyst can make you think this is the best option, it can get you to trigger a process that turns EVERYONE part organic and synthetic, and it can stop dealing with it. You’re doing exactly what an AI that admits it is responsible for most of the pain and suffering and death in the Galaxy for the past number of years wants you to do. Not because it will create peace like it says it will, no, we’ve already disproved that above. No, it wants you all to finish the job its Reapers started. Annihilation. And you just helped it along. Nice job there, hero.

Well, not picking either of THOSE options. After all, I’m Shepard. I’m a freaking hero. So all I’ve got left is….

Ending 3: Destruction

You choose this ending by walking up to the Red-lit path to your right. Mind you, THIS is supposedly the “Renegade” ending. Wow. The other two choices are absolutely awful, so this one must be worse, right?

You do exactly what you’ve been setting out to do the entire game. You destroy the gorram Reapers. And their evil little child-creator too. The reaction unleashed destroys the Citadel and the Mass Effect Relays (noticing a pattern yet?), but the resulting energy wave destroys all synthetic life in the Galaxy. That means no more Reapers, but also no more Geth or EDI. Any synthetic life is wiped out. Shepard, however, lives in the best version of this ending. The Normandy still crashes on some unknown jungle world, but your two squadmates you took with you to the final battle emerge with Joker.

So…yeah. The entire game, hell even the entire series, has been about destroying the Reapers. And somehow, doing this is the “Renegade” option. Anyone care to explain that to me?

What makes this worse, is that you can’t reason with the Catalyst. It claims that synthetics turning against Organics is inevitable. But you can’t prove him wrong, even though you have two examples in EDI and the Geth, doubly so if you stopped the Quarian-Geth war. That’s proof right there that this cycle can be different. This cycle can stop the supposedly invevitable. But you don’t get the chance to tell Catalyst that, and hopefully persuade him to make his death-bots go away. Nope, you destroy one, you destroy them all. It reeks of a child throwing a tantrum and issuing a black and white ultimatum. Maybe that form it chose has less to do with Shepard and more to do with Catalyst itself.

And you have to accept all this if you want Shepard to live and you don’t want to inflict horrifying transformations on the entire galaxy without their consent. No trying to convince Catalyst that it’s wrong.

This should be the good ending. It really should, but thanks to lazy writing, willful or otherwise, it’s not.

So those are our options. None of them are even close to good. And no matter which we pick, the Citadel and the Mass Effect relays are destroyed. Think about what that means for a second.

The Citadel is the central hub of the galactic government. Not only does the Council govern galactic affairs from here, it’s one of the most active centers of trade in the galaxy. According to the Codex, 13.2 million people live here. And you just blew it up. Of course, those people could have already been killed (either by Cerberus or the Reapers) or managed to flee the station, but if not, you certainly just ensured they were. Not to mention all the homes you just blew up.

As for the Mass Effect relays, let’s not forget they’re the best means of travel around the galaxy. The only other option is standard FTL travel, which is expensive in terms of fuel use. Mass Effect relays allow people to come and go safely and quickly. And you destroyed them all, stranding everyone on the worlds they’re on. Oh, and let’s not forget what happened the LAST time a Mass Relay blew up, in Mass Effect 2′s Arrival DLC. An entire solar system was destroyed. And now you blew them ALL up. You might remember that the Mass Effect relays are almost all in inhabited systems, generally pretty close to the worlds of many of the Galaxies major species. And you just wiped them all out, ostensibly. Is it probable to assume the energy waves being generated prevented this sort of galactic genocide from occuring? Sure is! The problem is, we have NO idea what happened.

And that’s really the problem with all of Mass Effect’s endings. They’re either bad choices or lazy writing, or both. We’re presented with three equally awful/stupid options which make almost no sense, and then we don’t get to see any fall out from them. The Normandy crashes on some jungle world, the Reapers are dealt with, and if Shep lives, we see him breathing.

And that’s it. The game jumps to the credits, and after those, we do a timejump some years into the future, where some old man has been reading Shepard’s story to his grandson, describing the wonders of the galaxy. And it’s over.

….what?

No. I’m sorry, people. These endings are not good. They’re at best, lazily written, and at worse, a deliberate choice by BioWare’s writers to not give us the good ending we should have gotten. People are right to complain about it, because it’s awful on so many levels.

Bioware, We have invested heavily into this game series. You’ve given us every reason to care about the people in it. We played as our version of Shepard, and we made the choices that determined the galaxy’s fate. And this is what you present to us. Sorry, Bioware, but this is unacceptable. Give us the ending Shepard deserves, the one as epic as your games have been. Give us a truly heroic option to pick. And for God’s sake, do not pull this “time skip immediately after the climax” crap. Harry Potter and the Hunger Games both did this, and it made their final books a tremendous letdown. Have authors forgotten how to actually write endings?

Of course, since you’re BioWare, and you’re obsessed with DLC, I know I’m probably going to have to pay another $10 or $20 for this ending(s) you should have written in the first place, but, sadly, I can only respond to that with “One problem at a time”

However, the game ain’t perfect, at least not to me. It lacks some polish in areas that World of Warcraft has long improved on, but it’s also made some decisions independent of those issues that I either don’t get or just don’t like as a matter of personal preference. I’ll spare you the former for now, but I’d like to discuss some of the latter category here.

Again, this is strictly my personal taste, so take it how you will.

1. The game needs more “well known” races.

I really think Bioware floundered a bit here. Some of the race selections in this game just make no sense, especially when you look at what ISN’T here. I mean, your standard humans, Twi’leks, and Zabraks are fine. The Sith Purebloods make sense if you know the Star Wars timeline, and are just plain cool. And the Chiss are an amazing addition that I didn’t expect, but really, who doesn’t think the race that Grand Admiral Thrawn, villain of Timothy Zahn’s amazing trilogy of Star Wars novels, isn’t going to be fun to play as. But the rest? You’ve got Mirialans, a race of a VERY background character in one of the prequels. The Miraluka are a race of blind people who only appear in the second KOTOR game and are more or less identical to humans in every other respect. The Cyborg race had potential, but frankly, the “cybernetic” artwork looks less like robotics and more like something you’d wear in a hospital recovery room. I don’t even know where the Rattataki came from. They look similar to the slightly well known character Asajj Ventress (she mostly appeared in the Clone Wars comics and cartoons) but they aren’t apparently the same race at all, so I don’t even know what the deal is there.

So you’ve got a lot of wasted potential there, especially when you look at what’s missing. Just going from the original trilogy races alone, there’s no Wookiees, no Mon Calamari, no Sullustans, no Trandoshans, no Rodians, or any number of races to play as.

(Each link above, by the way, goes to the Wookieepedia entry for a well known member of each of the races that you’d recognize from the films. Just in case you don’t recognize the names. We’ll do it again below)

And while you might despise the prequel trilogy, they did give us some cool looking aliens. And again, far too many of them aren’t playable here. No Kel Dor, or Nautolans, or Togruta, or Chagrians, or Cereans. And that’s just the tip of the iceberg, again.

“But Brandon, maybe they just didn’t have time to build graphical models for those races!” you might say. Except I’ve seen 90% of the above mentioned races as NPCs in this title so far. So clealy they could have done it. I just wish they would have. I mean, come on! Who wouldn’t want to play a Wookiee Jedi? That’s just COOL!

2. I don’t like the restrictions that are currently in place for lightsaber blade colors.

Currently in game, once you get at a certain level of dark side or light side “points”, you are unable to have certain colors for your lightsaber. Once you go dark enough, you can’t have blue or green. Going light enough restricts your ability to have a red crystal. Yellow, orange, and purple have no restrictions, though the latter two are apparently somewhat rare.

Yes, I know. You movie-only people will tell me that red blades are a Sith color and no Jedi has them. Well while that is true, there are written examples of Jedi wielding red blades. In the Clone Wars era, both Adi Gallia and the Padawan and later full Jedi A’sharad Hett. Want a later example? How about Leia Organa? She used a Lightsaber described as “ruby red” during her early years as a Jedi.

On the opposite side of things, the Sith Lord Exar Kun continued using his blue lightsaber that he had from his time as a Jedi, and even modified it to include a second blue blade, one of the first double bladed lightsabers ever recorded.

I know the restrictions are in place to cater to the movie folks (or heck maybe even Lucasfilm made them) and to give each faction’s Force-users a more uniform look, but really, they’re just annoying. I’d much prefer to just let it be open to any color you wish.

3. I really wish we could name our personal ships

Early on, around level 16, you get a personal ship. I just want the ability to name them. It would be a neat little touch, some extra personalization.

4.  There are a few, very few, minor art elements that could use an update.

Most of the artwork in this game is nothing short of astonishing. Things just LOOK amazing. Bioware has done an absolutly fantastic job trying to replicate the feel of the Star Wars universe.

Which unfortunately makes the stuff that doesn’t quite measure up stick out all the more.

When you make a character, it doesn’t take terribly long to get them gear that represents their iconic look. Jedi get robes with raised hoods on them. Your Bounty Hunter gets heavy, battle scarred with lots of weapons and a jetpack. Sith get some jet black hooded robes, and eventually a cool mask. The one thing that’s sticking out to me is the Helmets for Bounty Hunters. It’s taken me until my current level to find one that doesn’t look just awful. They look like helmets from ancient Japan. I’m not expecting a full-faced Mandalorian-style helm right off the bat, but something a bit more appropriate to the sci-fi realm would really be appreciated.

Cyborgs need an update, like I mentioned above. The implants that are currently available make them look more like hospital patients and have no real weight to them.

A common complaint I’ve heard concerns the limited number of body type choices for player characters. Most are seeking something more average than what’s available, the current choices are a bit limiting.

That’s it, so far. Admittedly it’s a very minor list. That’s really how good this game feels to play, as a Star Wars fan. I”m having a lot of fun, and I can’t wait to see where the game goes from here. Again, please note this does not concern gameplay mechanics or features that other games have improved upon, because I feel these are things we can all universally agree are features that need to be added. I’m speaking of things like an automatic random grouping utility, an API for mods, a more customizable default UI, dual specializations, those sorts of things aren’t quite what I was going for here. Those are no brainers.

Anyway, how are you guys enjoying SWTOR and are their any other design choices you would like to see differently?

Anyone who knows me well knows I am TERRIBLE at making decisions. I question myself over and over again. I’m trying not to be this way, I really am, and I have to commend my lovely wife for having patience with me, heh.

But Star Wars: The Old Republic has presented me with one of the harder decisions to make in a long time: Picking which class to start with when the game comes out. There are so many awesome choices, and me being a huge Star Wars fanboy, all of them look appealing in their own ways.

I should state that I had made a decision at one point. I was done, committed. My guild from WoW was going to be on the Sith Empire side, I’d looked over the class choices available to that faction, done the research on what they could do, and picked one. I was good.

Then they announced that they were going to try something new in this game, we were going to establish guilds on both factions for this game, as an experiment. So now we’d have a presence on both the Sith Empire and Galactic Republic sides! Well now my decision isn’t so firm! I have more options to consider! So I started looking over and researching the Republic’s classes, which led me to doing more research on the Empire’s classes, and, well, you see where this goes. I have too many options, all of which sound awesome for various reasons, and now I have no idea how to pick. So I’m asking for…I don’t know if help is the right word, because I’m not sure if I CAN be helped in this matter. Additional information, perhaps? Opinions I hadn’t considered?

Before I list the options, let me explain SWTOR’s class system. Each faction has 4 base classes to choose from. At level 10, your character can choose from 1 of 2 Advanced Classes. At the time of this writing, this choice is permanent, so you have to decide wisely.

The classes on each faction aren’t necessarily different, however. Each class has a “mirror” on the other side. One class and it’s mirror will play very similarly, but their look and feel will be different. For example, the Republic’s Jedi Knight Base class is a mirror of the Empire’s Sith Warrior. Both have one Advanced class that focuses on a Single saber, and the other that focuses on Dual Wielding Lightsabers.  With the Jedi and Sith classes, it’s easy to see the parallels, because they use the same weapons and their Force powers are similar mechanically, though they appear different.

Let’s try another example. On the Republic side, you have the Trooper class. He wears heavy armor, he wields big guns, and throws lots of grenades. His mirror on the Empire side is the Bounty Hunter. Heavy Armor, has rapid fire Blaster pistols, wrist mounted rocket launchers, and other fun toys. You see the idea. Similar design but with different flavor. And of course, their storylines will be completely different. It feels much like a different class.

So now, we come to the options I’ve narrowed down. I’ll list them by their Base Class, then Advanced class, then talk a bit about what the class is designed to focus on and what about that in my own Star Wars interest lures me to the class in question.  And I’ll link each to the SWTOR Wiki, you can go there and read more about the other classes that are available and berate me for not considering them. I can feel the Smuggler fans glaring at me already, heh. Sorry guys, never really wanted to be Han Solo as a kid. Aighty, here we go.

Trooper - Commando: The Trooper is the classic armored guy with a huge gun, mostly inspired by the Clone troopers of the prequel trilogy. These guys are the elite troops with the best equipment and most powerful guns. The Commando class focuses more on firepower, whereas the other class, the Vanguard, focuses on building up their armor systems. Consequently, the Commando gets access to the biggest heaviest blaster rifles in the game, and are pretty much capable of filling the air full of blaster bolts! Heavily armored with a huge amount of firepower, ya gotta love it.

Jedi Knight – Jedi Sentinel: The Jedi Sentinel advanced class is all about the swordplay. This class focuses on dual-wielding lightsabers. That alone is just made of awesome.

Jedi Consular – Jedi Shadow: The Jedi Consular splits into very two odd paths. The first one, Jedi Sage, focuses primarily on Force powers, and has a lot of telekenetic based abilities. Hurling rocks or other objects around, or Force pushing things over, that’s their speciality. The Jedi Shadow, on the other hand, is all about stealth, sneaking around, and quickly dispatching foes with a double-Blade lightsaber. Think a good version of Darth Maul here. I love the double-blade lightsaber and the idea of playing a stealthy Jedi that appears out of nowhere and takes down his opponents sounds sweet.

Bounty Hunter – Mercenary: Mercs Dual wield pistols and focus on their wrist and backpack rocket launchers. They don’t have as heavy of armor as their Powertech brothers, but they have more long range damage dealing to make up for it.

Sith Inquisitor – Sith Sorcerer: The Sith equivalent of the Jedi Sage, these guys focus on Dark Side force powers. That means lightning. Lots and lots of Lightning. I make lots of jokes about being a Sith Lord, well if I was, this is the kind of Sith I’d want to be, hurling lightning around like crazy, demonstrating my RAW POWAAAAAAH!

Imperial Agent – Sniper: I admit, this was the class I was dead set on before the Republic guild became available. Sniper Rifles? Check. Droids you get to control and have blow stuff up? Check. The Chiss as a playable race? Check.

So that’s my choices. I want to have SOMETHING chosen before I start. I mean, sure, I could create another character later, but I would still like to have an idea in mind before I get started on Day 1, you know? So if you have any advice, please share!

Edit: Now that I’ve added character class progression vids for all the classes I’m looking at, here’s the two I’m not thinking about, the Smuggler and the Sith Warrior

So I’ve got a ton of great games both in my hands and coming soon. But all that is to say, I’m still having fun in WoW occasionally. There are changes coming up that make me excited about it. Plus, I’ve already made the committment to a full year. Why would I do that, you ask? Well, for one, if I agree to it, I get Diablo 3 for free. I also get into the next expansion’s beta by default. So it’s a worthwhile investment for those alone. Plus I truly am excited about what Mists of Pandaria has to offer. So even if SWTOR is so utterly amazing, I will be playing WoW at least for a good while in the near future.

That being said, I do think it’s time for a change within WoW. Let me explain a bit.

Since I started the game way back when, I’ve always played my troll mage, Dahkar, as my main. My second character I created was a druid that has survived in various forms to today. Finally, the third character I created that I gave the most playtime to was my Warlock. In various forms, those three characters were the ones I focused most on. They were my first level 70s during Burning Crusade, and during Wrath, they got the most playtime overall. During Cataclysm, they were my first (and still only) level 85s.

But now that I’ve given up raiding and focused on a more casual playstyle, as well as other games, I find myself looking to the future of WoW and wondering I’ll go. Blizzcon, with it’s class previews for Mists of Pandaria, pushed this thinking into overdrive. And I’ve come to the conclusion that it’s time for a change.

I’ve played the Mage for 5 years or so now, and there’s always been a number of problems inherent with the class. I had hoped that Cata would fix them, but if anything, they’ve made them worse. Arcane has been made very dull to play overall. Fire has been crippled by RNG worse than it’s ever been. And Frost (my favorite spec) remains uncompetitive in the DPS charts due to Blizzard’s insistence that buffing it would make it too powerful in PVP. The class preview at Blizzcon mildly addressed these concerns, but the talent trees themselves were worse. Many of the talents were ones we already have, and watching other classes, which had either crazy new options or ones that had been revamped as well as new resource systems, well, it made me sad. The level 90 talent options, as of this writing, are a joke. Yes, I know, it’s really early in development, and they’ll almost certainly be completely different by the time of release. But for me, I think I’ve had enough of dealing with the frustrations of the mage, and I want to take a look at something different.

Plus there are my other “primary” alts. The druid tends to be cyclically fun, but right now, especially with the playstyle the Mists talents seem to suggest, I think I’m ready to give him a rest as well. The Warlock, on the other hand, is one of the ones getting nearly totally revamped, and his talent choices look amazing. So here’s still a maybe, but only as an alt.

So going forward, my primary character focuses are going to look like this
Main: Shadow Priest
Primary Alts: Elemental/Enhancement Shaman, Rogue, or Warlock, two of the three.

The Shadow Priest is who I’ve been playing as whenever I played with my wife, and I’ve come to love both the playstyle, the utility, and the lore of the character. Plsu Shadowform just looks sweet. Come Mists, he’s going to be where I focus most of my efforts as of right now.

As for the alts, I’m going to pick two of the three for sure, and it will likely require the beta experience before I finally decide. As for why…
Shaman: I’ve always loved the dual-DPS style, being able to go melee or caster ranged, and I love the concept of wielding the classic elements. The talents look very fun, and I’m excited to see where the class goes
Rogue: Dual Wielding is awesome, and I’ve always wanted to focus on a character with it. The Shaman was a good place to start, but the rogue is all about it. Plus, stealth is truly fun. You never understand just how great a utility it is, until you play with it. Still leveling it, so time and the beta will tell, but right now, he looks good.
Warlock: Right now, I really want to stick with the idea that I not focus on any toon that I’ve heavily played before. But the sheer amount of awesome love that Warlocks are getting are holding me back from discarding him right now. It’s going to have to be really good to keep him around, so the beta will tell for sure.

I think these changes will help keep my interest in WoW strong through the upcoming year I’ve got with the game. The contract was already worth it for getting Diablo 3 free, along with the other perks, but I’m looking to enjoy the game on its own merit as well, and this should help.

So my fellow WoW players, what do you think? Any changes coming in your play in the future?

Well, in between doing stuff for all of the other places you can find me online lately, the many other things I’ve been working on, and enjoying being with my wife, I just haven’t really had a reason or time.

So am I promising to get better? Nope, I make no such promise. If it happens, it happens. What I can tell you is where the heck you can find out what’s happening with me, or what the heck I’ve been doing.

Best spot? Twitter. And follow my better half too.

Other good spot? Facebook

Semi-Decent spot? Google Plus

Wanna catch my podcasts? Yes, I do podcasts, two of them. Click the link to learn more about what podcasts are, if you don’t know. The first one is called the Anecdotalist (twitter)(website). Deci and I share stories from you, the listening audience, and our special guest cohost every two weeks. Submit your entertaining stories or just listen and laugh with us! We have some amazing people on this show.

The second is the Doghouse Podcast (twitter). Put out by the fine folks at Doghouse Systems, we discuss PC hardware and gaming. Every other episode, I review a PC title for the show. Which means I spend a lot of my freetime playing said PC games, heh. We also do lots of giveaways, make fun of each other, and in general have a good time. Give it a listen. Or read our reviews

Wanna play said PC games with me? Be my friend on Steam. If you don’t have a Steam account, you might want one, since the Doghouse podcast gives all their titles away via Steam.

So yeah, if you’re interested in what’s up in my life, there ya go. Yes this thing will be less frequently updated, and what I do post here will probably not be anything interesting to anyone but me. I occasionally feel the need to write something just to get my own thoughts organized, you’re welcome to read it if ya like, but if general life is what you’re after, you’re better off with the above options.

Love ya guys.

Specifically, the “Meh” one!

(and yes I swear I’ll try to write more)

Yeah that’s right, unless you’ve been ignoring me the past couple of weeks, you’re probably aware that I’m a married man now. I don’t have a whole lot of photos yet, I know that’s what you’re all waiting to see those, but our photographer is getting married herself soon, so she’s kinda busy herself! But I want to talk about my thoughts and feelings surrounding the event, the honeymoon (I’ll spare ya the salacious details, heh), and the few days of “regular” life.

I’ll admit, I was uncertain how the wedding would all come together. It just seemed like so many various little threads had to all come together to make a wonderful tapestry, and I wasn’t sure it would actually happen. Boy was I wrong. The Baker Building was just gorgeous. They did an amazing job putting it all together.

We did not follow the tradition of the groom not seeing the bride before she walks down the aisle. Caitlyn, the photographer, wanted to get photos done before the ceremony/reception, so we did some “First look” photos. She stood me in the middle of the aisle and had me close my eyes until Karen was right behind me, then let me see her. I can’t wait to see how the photos turned out, because Karen was incredibly beautiful. I was floored. That’s not to say I was any less teary-eyed when she walked down the aisle, because I did. It was still an overwhelming experience, knowing she was coming ever closer to being my wife with each step.

We actually had 2 men officiate the wedding. Dr. Rex Butler, who if ya don’t know is the father of my best man and the man who prayed with me to receive Christ, presided over most of the ceremony while Ryon Price, the pastor of Karen’s church in Lubbock, lead the opening prayer and handled the communion. I loved how that turned out. Rex’s service was very unique in how it approached the traditional ceremony. It felt perfect for our wedding.

If you were at the wedding, you might have been able to see that we took Communion, but I doubt you could see the details. But what we planned on doing was the “dunking” method, as in taking the crackers, and dunking them in the grape juice. However, Ryon forgot, and we ate and drank seperately. I was amused, but I wasn’t about to say anything, because I much preferred the way we did it. If you get a chance to see the DVD of it, you’ll see what I mean.

I love my ring. I’ve put some photos up on Twitter, but I’ll try to get one in here as well. It’s a silver ring with some Hebrew on it that says “My beloved is mine, and I am hers”

Onto the Honeymoon! We went to the Grand Pineapple Resort in Negril, Jamaica, for a total of 4 nights. And while we had an amazing time, I learned a few things about the choice in the process. Don’t get me wrong, we had an amazing time, the scenery was gorgeous, and the food tasty, but a number of things made it less appealing as a future choice.

I ordered our package online through Grand Pineapple’s website. And maybe I should have checked it out a little more thoroughly, but I was under the impression that everything was handled. Well, I was wrong. Apparently transportation between the airport and the resort was not included. So when we got there, we ended up looking a little foolish because we were the only ones who had no idea that we were supposed to have transportation vouchers or something. Yeah, well, at no point was that made clear, so we ended up having to pay seperately for that.

Also, we made a HUGE mistake on our first morning there. When we went to South Padre, one of our favorite things to do was take morning walks  on the beach. It was peaceful, we could enjoy being with each other and enjoy the sound of the water. Do NOT try to do this in Jamaica. We were accosted by several vendors who would not listen to us when we tried to tell them to leave us alone, practically threw their merchandise at us, and got all indignant when we refused to pay for it. We got so sick of dealing with it that we just turned around and headed back. I guess that’s the price you pay being in a foreign country that’s so dependant on tourism, but I couldn’t stand it. Just made me mad.

Still, we had a lot of fun. I think I drank more alcoholic beverages those few days than I ever have in my life. Easy to do when they’re free and an expert is making them right? The food was amazing, especially the one night we had a beach BBQ dinner, complete with a local band for entertainment. I think the best thing we did was going snorkeling. I’ve never done that before, not over a lovely reef like where we went, so it was an awesome new experience. Still, I tried breathing through my nose way too much and ended up tasting seawater. Oops.

I love being married. Having Karen here all the time has been amazing. It just feels…natural having her here, as if we’ve always belonged together. It just works. We’re still making lots of adjustments, but we also understand each other amazingly well. I mean, who else is going to banish me to our room to play the game i’m reviewing for Doghouse Systems? She really is the best wife ever. I can’t wait to see where God takes us. I know it’s going to be awesome.

All righty guys, the next post should have a lot of wedding photos. Our photographer has gotten home from her own honeymoon and we’re incredibly excited to see her work! I’ll talk to you guys later, because I will definitely update more frequently!

Rift is the new kid on the block. Trion has taken the lessons that Blizzard has already learned, and it’s applied them to Rift, with enough of their own ideas that make it an individual game in its own right, and they’ve done very well. Rift has had more success than any MMO since WoW came along and became the dominant player. Rift, if handled very well, could evolve into the game that finally truly challenges WoW’s spot at the top.

That being said, neither game is perfect. Each has things the other does not, things that make it great. Things that the other company should look into incorporating, or at least a version of it. I’m going to list 5 such things for each game.

We’ll start with WoW. Here are 5 things that Rift has done that could make WoW even more amazing and even more dominant.

1. Better player character models & customization. WoW has an extremely limited set of options for customizing how your character looks. You have 5 customizing options, each with about 6-8 choices. End result, you often see a lot of characters that have minor if any differences at all. And let’s face it, some of these races need their graphics completely redone. The Orcs and the Humans, WoW’s most iconic races, are so hideously ugly it’s a wonder they get played at all. Rift has an amazing amount of depth to it’s creator, which allows you to be much more unique in your design. Not to mention the fact that all the race options look amazing.

2. Zonewide events – Rift is brought to life by the rifts and invasions that happen in each of their zones. You see tons of players come out of the woodwork, stop what they’re doing, and band together to defend key points, and take the fight to invading enemies. Now, I’m not saying the Burning Legion has to invade every zone in WoW at random intervals, but perhaps in a few key zones, recurring zone-wide events can occur. Maybe a surge of roving silithid suddenly spring up in Silithus, or minions of the Twilight Council suddenly invade a zone. Especially with proper rewards, I think this would drive a lot of players out of the main cities and into the world more, and it would make the zones in question feel much more alive. Actually, a good example of a start to this is the constant battle between the Dragonmaw and the Wildhammers in Twilight Highlands.

3. Updates to the Class System – Okay, I’m not bashing WoW’s class system. I like what they did with it in Cataclysm. But they really need to step outside the box here and think of ways to make each of the classes, and even then each of the schools/Talent trees more unique. Each of Rift’s individual souls plays very differently. WoW should definitely take a look at some of the archetypes Rift introduced and consider how to incorporate them, but not only that, they need to take a look at some of the concepts they came up with. Having souls specifically to serve in a “Support” capacity is an amazing idea. Many classes have debuffs that are unique to the player that serve not so much to hinder an enemy, but to modify how the class plays, such as the Stormcaller’s Electrocute or the Necromancer’s Deathly Calling. Blizzard really needs to come up with either more interesting and unique classes and paradigms, or think way more outside the box with the ones they have and make them a more unique play experience.

4. More customization of the Default Interface – Rift’s basic default interface is extremely customizable. Everything can be moved around without the need for addons. Blizzard is LONG overdue for needing to do this. Many of the default UI elements are in extremely awkward places. Let us move some stuff around by default, Blizzard.

5. Artifacts – Rift’s Artifact collecting (and to a lesser extent, puzzles) is what Archaeology should have been. Archaeology is terrible, and needs a serious revamp.

All right, we’ll move on to Rift. Here are 5 things WoW has incorporated that I’m honestly shocked did not make it into Rift.

1. A Random Dungeon Finder – Come on, Trion. This thing was universally hailed as the best thing to ever happen to WoW during Wrath of the Lich King. Why would you not incorporate it? I get that you’re big on the whole exploring the world thing, as evidenced by the lack of Flying mounts or taxis, but really, you need to add this in.

2. Addon support – This is another no brainer, as it continues to be one of WoW’s greatest selling points. You’ve done a good job incorporating many things people would want to have from addons into the game, but you can’t really have thought of everything. Give us this, please.

3. More exotic variation in player racez – Ugly though some of them may be, WoW has an amazingly diverse array of races as player characters. Trion, you do not. The Guardians are your standard Humans, Elves, and Dwarves. The Defiants are….Other humans, other elves, and Bahmi. The Bahmi are the most exotic race you have, and even then, they’re just big beefy humanoids with cool colored skin. The thing is, you already have exotic looking races in your game that are unique compared to anything we’ve really seen before, you just made them all evil. Look into establishing some faction of some of these races to join the existing factions, or create a neutral one entirely.

4. Better traveling options – Okay, I get it, you want folks to explore the new world. And you have the porticulums to move folks from zone to zone easily. But your zones are really really big, and we sometimes have to spend an inordinate amount of time running or riding our mounts just to get back to areas were in. Having some sort of flight paths (perhaps a series of smaller teleporters that only go to a few towns in a zone) would make this less of a hassle, and would help out a lot during invasion events too.

5. Guild Banks – This one also seems fairly obvious. It was a great addition in Burning Crusade, and many other MMOs have done it since then. I’m really shocked it wasn’t implemented on Day 1. I hear rumors that this is coming soon, so let’s hope it’s the case