- Joined
- Feb 21, 2009
- Messages
- 2,932
Well, I disagree about the presets thing. I thought they were full fledged classes. You have a class (Mage, Thief, Warrior) with major and minor skill sets to specialize it. It was kinda like a regular class and an advanced class mixed into one. Or, you could do what I always did and custom class it.
At any rate, the new system. There's these standing stones you find and you can choose Mage, Warrior or Thief. You can only have one active at a time. The one you choose will advance the skills that you use under that heading (Mage, Warrior, Thief) 20% faster than your other skills. You can change this at any time. You just have to go back to the standing stones to do so. Not a problem, though, because once you discover a place you just fast travel there and back.
When you level (You don't have to find a bed to sleep to do this anymore) you go to this rather fancy looking skills screen. Each Skill is a constellation. Each star in the constellation is something within that skill tree that you can choose to have, depending on your skill level. Example:
I'm using a one-handed weapon, so I want to get something within that skill tree. My one handed skill level is 27. I look at the One Handed skill constellation and I notice that none of the available skills are actually available until I hit 30. I've gotten all the other lower ones. So, I decide, why not some Restoration? Healing spells are always good. So, I go over to the Healing constellation, and pick the first star, because my Restoration level is 21, and the first star only requires level 15 (Also, none of the other stars are available to me, because I haven't unlocked the first star). So now my Restoration spells use 20% less magicka (Or something, I forget and I'm not going to look).
What I did was pretend they still had the major and minor skills and I chose five of each, wrote them down and follow that. It makes it easier to keep track of where I'm at in each skill tree. While the constellations look nice, they're not a very efficient way of seeing where you stand.
I don't have a console, I do all my gaming on this. It's not exactly problem-free, of course, you do need a bit of an ability to learn or just push on to fix stuff yourself, but it's rewarding.
And I must say, that The Old Republic is pretty awesome. The fact that they've voiced the entire thing changes the feel of play completely. Have they completely revolutionized MMOs? No, they stick to the standards, but the voicing and the story lines make it feel more like a first person RPG. Really fun.
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