Bioware Rewards Their Players…Sort of

[UPDATE: Follow-up post - Bioware Opens a Can...of Customer Support]

In case you haven’t seen the most recent announcement, here’s the Source.

With the launch of Patch 1.2, Bioware has decided to give out some extra rewards to their players. I’m going to assume that this has been planned because I have faith in Bioware. I’m slightly annoyed right now, so I’m going to go with that assumption rather than the one I’m hearing from other people that this is a distraction to take away from the fact that rated warzones didn’t make it into the patch which pissed a lot of people off last night resulting in scores of people cancelling their subscriptions (and for the record, I really don’t care about the rated warzones thing, I’d rather it come in working than come in buggy).

 

Monk Heirlooms

With the beta invites being sent out by the hundreds of thousands and the expansion drawing ever closer to going live, I think it’s time to start getting plans for heirlooms in motion.

I know a lot of people will not want to use heirlooms on their monks, especially since the class and expansion are going to be brand new, but I also know that there are a lot of people who really don’t like the leveling process at all who are going to make use of every heirloom they can get their hands on. And you can’t forget the twinks, of course.

This guide is written for those of you who do want to use heirlooms on your Monks, and would like a little direction in which purchases to make, and which enchants to use on them if you feel like maximizing your leveling potential.

As you continue reading, please keep in mind that this guide is aimed strictly at showing you which heirlooms are you best option among the heirloom gear; I am not necessarily saying that you should use these heirlooms exclusively and ignore all other gear. For example, I would never use the Dread Pirate Ring unless I really wanted to level a character quickly because it offers only secondary stats and an experience bonus. I would much rather use rings that provide a bonus to my primary stats that I know I’m going to use. As a guide that covers heirlooms though, I’m going over every slot for which heirlooms exist to say, “if you’re going to use an heirloom in this slot, then this is the one you want.”

 

Planning My Legacy

A couple of days ago I wrote An Altoholic’s Look At SWTOR’s Legacy System describing some of the concerns that I have about the system. Today I wanted to gather my thoughts about this system and break it down to what really matters to me so that I can plan out how I want to create and level my alts.

This planning is necessary for me because SWTOR has no intention of increasing character slots above the existing 8, which I talked about in some detail in the post linked above. Since I can’t get all of the features I would want (ie all of them) I need to decide which ones matter to me the most so that I can prioritize the alts and see if I’m able to justify not deleting all of the high level characters I currently have.

There are two things that really stand out as far as deciding which alts to roll in regards to legacy: Species and Class. Certain features are tied to leveling a species to 50 and others are tied to leveling a class to 50. I need to decide which of those features matter the most to me.

Welcome to my thought processes.

 

An Altoholic’s Look at SWTOR’s Legacy System

Bioware included a feature in SWTOR known as Legacy. At this point in time your Legacy is purely cosmetic, nearly worthless, and somewhat confusing. It’s also one of the most highly anticipated features of the game for the average player, at least, the features it’s supposedly bringing in patch 1.2 and beyond are.

I’m not going to get into the details of the Legacy system that have been revealed yet, though I did initially when writing this post. At this point in time the information that’s out there on Legacy has already been covered by more than enough sites so there’s no reason for me to repeat it (see the links at the end of the post if you need details). Also, we don’t have all of the details yet so even if I did post all of the information it would be incomplete and I’d rather get all the details out there at once as soon as they’re fully released.

What I want to do instead is exactly what the title implies. I want to share my thoughts on the Legacy system as an altoholic because that’s who this system was designed for. There are many things to cheer about in regards to Legacy, but there are also some things that make me a bit concerned.

I am going to touch briefly on the basic concept of Legacy for those of you who are not playing SWTOR or who have not looked at any of the information on it so that you’re not wandering around here completely lost. I’m going to try to fight my natural instincts of sharing bucket loads of detail here though, and just try to cover the basics.

 

Sage/Sorcerer Leveling: 10-20 Healing

For the first 10 levels of playing a Sage/Sorc healer, you’re no different than any other Consular/Inquisitor out there, so I’m going to refer you to my 1-20 DPS Guide for information about how to level and what spells you get during the 1-10 range if you feel you need it.

This guide is aimed specifically at leveling as a healer which takes place from level 10 on, so that’s where this guide is going to start. I will be discussing how to deal damage in the healing spec, and how to go about questing and so forth, I’m just going to assume that you’re already at least level 10 for the purpose of this specific guide.

 

Sage/Sorcerer Leveling: 21-40 DPS

In the 1-20 guide I went over two specs for DPS leveling but this time around we are going to look at three. The first two will be Full Telekinetics/Lightning and Full Balance/Madness, and the third will be a hybrid of the two which is also my personal favorite.

For those of you who are interested I do have a healing version of these guides in the works that I will also be posting Soon™. I’ve got a level 30 Sage that I just switched over from Balance that I had a lot of fun healing with, so now I’ve got a baby Sorcerer who’s going to level as a healer to give me a view of the 10-30 range so that I know what the crap I’m talking about.

 

How I Write Leveling Guides (Part II)

Part I of this little mini-series talked mostly about when I write my guides. I consider when to be a big part of how because getting that feeling of being qualified to write a guide is really the foundation of the whole thing.

Once I feel that I’m qualified to write the post it’s time to start the research phase.

Research and Verify
After I feel that I know the class well enough to write a post about it, I get online and do some research to see if anything has changed that I didn’t know about. Sometimes I might miss a patch note that changes a stat priority or that makes a talent suddenly worthless, so I like to make sure I’m on top of everything.

I’ll also see what the flavor of the month versions of my spec are to see if there’s anything crazy going on that I should try out. That’s how I found out about the spec that I’m currently using on my level 40 Sage, which is a hybrid of Balance and Telekinetics that has some amazing AoE potential which I love more than these words can describe. I had been so used to WoW’s current talent trees that force you to use the whole tree before branching out that I didn’t even consider hybrid builds before I saw a post on that, which has led to some interesting builds I have in mind for other classes.

Once I know that I have a good grasp on everything for sure it’s time to move on to the next step.