Why do I play? How do they play?
My intention when I started this run of The Old Republic was to do something a bit different. Instead of running with one character for the full 24 hours I was going to split my time between several – starting off some (or all) of the six remaining characters I'll play in this game.
(Play up to a certain point. As I've said before it's highly unlikely I'll ever take all eight classes all the way as the story narrows to one or two tracks after the original 1-50 content. Which character(s) I do take that far I won't know until I get there.)
I'll likely still do a multiple character run at some point – maybe in this game, and almost certainly in City of Heroes – but not this time around. There's been a few changes to SWTOR since the last time I played, and after a couple of hours on this Jedi Consular I've decided to stick with this class for the duration and get more of an idea of how these changes impact the game.
The biggest change is undoubtedly the introduction of combat specializations. Put very simply, this enables players to select a different class for their class – for example you can now play the Trooper story but with Bounty Hunter abilities. It has sensible limits – Force users can only select Force based ability trees, and tech users are still restricted to one style or another of blaster.
Which isn't to say it can't look a little strange. I did do a double take the first time I saw a Jedi using Force Lightning on a group of Flesh Raiders... It was rather like seeing a mastermind and their pets in Atlas Park for the first time in City of Heroes once it became possible to roll what had been a villain only archetype as a hero.
I probably won't be making much use of
this feature myself. Even if I could have selected a different spec
for my trooper or warrior I wouldn't have, and similarly my consular
has gone for a Sage spec, which has always been an option for that
class. I might change things up a bit for other characters in the
future. It's certainly an interesting feature, even if canon purists might balk at some of the possible combinations.
The other big change is that the abilities of each class have been significantly reduced. I've played a consular before – albeit some years ago, pre-blog – and I'm already noticing that my hotbars aren't filling up nearly as quickly as they used to. While it's too early to have a definite opinion on this I will say that so far I'm all in favor of this, because SWTOR has long suffered from ridiculous levels of skill bloat, with multiple abilities that all did slight variations on the same thing. In the past I'd often leave some skills off of my hotbar because I knew I'd rarely or never use them.
I can only hope that the ones I didn't use were the abilities that have been dropped, since the last time I played a consular I took advantage of the excess of available skills to set up a somewhat unorthodox combat rotation. It'll be interesting to see if I can replicate that now.
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