"Things I wish I knew before I started playing SWTOR" [tips]

One guy made a thread about this and another guy compiled them somewhere else and we will improve and expand it here. Some interesting tid-bits for new players;



SWTOR Knowledge; (please reply with tips you'd like to see added).



 

Economy and Gear



Orange items can be kept untill level 50 and still be viable by keeping the mods up to date.

You dont need modifying station to mod your gear! Ctrl + rightclick a modable item to open its modding screen.

Modable gear including weapons can be worn indefinitely. You can just keep swapping out current level modifications and the stats will always be level appropriate for you.

Do not sell or destroy modable items. Keep them in your bank. You can do daily heroics to get an entire set, and at the end of the game you can look how you want to. [gaugemew]

It gets super-expensive to pull item enhancements out of your gear (upwards of 3k to pull out a lvl 30 purple item).

You can just over-write mods, but it destroys the current enhancement in the slot.

This is probably a repost but USE the Galactic Trade Market to sell all the random blue/purple items you find can make a nice cash out of it.

Selling things on the auction house is always nice, but if you dont sell your item, you get your deposit back !

If you cancel the item (because you accidentially put it up for 1499 instead of 499 (damn "1" bug thing)), you will lose the deposit

The higher your buyout price is, the higher the deposit also

The GTM will automatically suggest a buy-out price undercutting the already listed items.

 

Crafting and crew skills

When you craft superior quality items (at least, implants and earpieces) they will gain an augment item modification slot.

You don't need to have crafting (crew skill) materials and components in your inventory, you can keep it in your Cargo Hold and it is usable (since the crafting is in fact made by your crew members). [from Fext]

Take your crew skills asap - right when you visit the fleet for the first time - namely the gathering support skill. This will spare you a lot of money later. Corusant yields a lot of easy resources that way. [from Fext]

Another reason to visit the crew trainers ASAP is XP.  If you take the mission for crew trainers at the console near where you spawn, you get a significant amount of XP for visiting each and every trainer. [Robsolf]

Reverse engineering the stuff you made gets you new blue (prototype) schematics and some resources. [from Fext]

Rev Eng blues gets you purple artifact level recipes. Rev Eng purples and you may eventually get a legendary purple item recipe. Certain mission skills will unlock orange recipes, like underworld trading for example [from Aquazen]

Each Rev Eng is a critical chance roll that you get the next tier recipe, the higher your crew skill and the more affection your crafting companion has, the easier you will make the crit roll [from Aquazen]

Your mission crew skills can take the longest to raise, eventually, have more then one crew member get on your mission skill duties so you can stay current with your crafting and gathering skills [from Aquazen]

Reverse Engineering might double proc: RE'ing a green item can teach you a blue upgraded schematic as well as an orange one. [from 9reesracer9]

Reverse engineering a stack of items (stims/medpacks for example) will RE the whole stack. [Hopscotch73]

To split a stack shift-left click and drag the stack - and choose how many you want to split off, then drop into a free slot in your inventory. Because shift-click also links items in chat, you'll need to delete the random appearance of the item names in the chat window (I hope they fix this!) [Hopscotch73]

Crafting Components don't stack automatically in your cargo hold, you must stack them manually.  [Sora2810]

The second tier (mission levels 17-24) of mission crew skills opens when you hit skill level 65. [Konfess]

You can simply run past a node and just right click it and if you have a companion out he/she will run over and mine it and it WILL auto loot for you.  This is also useable on nodes that are out of range as your companion will attempt to mine the node, realize he/she is too far away and try to run closer to the node to mine it.  Note that mobs will aggro onto companions so this is not a way to avoid mobs while gathering. [TimTeBowed]

Biochemists (only) can make and use a reusable, purple medpack. [Hopschotch]

Mounts



Mount costs 48k credits at level 25 (skill 40k, mount 8k)

The mount vendor on your Fleet sells 2 level 25 mounts.

The mount vendors on Tatooine sell a wider selection of different level 25 mounts compared to the fleet.

There's a speeder vendor at the first flightpath on tatooine. Make sure you buy a speeder before you start Tatooine, trust me... Tatooine is hot and big... and big

There is also a speeder vendor on Alderaan in the first city you come to from the spaceport.  Near all the trainers. [elocke]

Light side and Dark side vendors have an epic mount for sale as well which requires tier V, level 50 and about 99,000 credits if I remember correctly. [elocke]

There are also pvp rewarded mounts requiring a great many Warzone and Mercenary commendations. [me]

There's also a level 25 mount schematic available for Cybertech crafters which yields a bind on pickup mount [me]

If you are a VERY social person, there is a great looking level 25 mount available from the social vendor at social level 7 but I reckon you need to be grouping pretty much everything to come anywhere near it at level 25 [me]

 

Ship & "space on rails" combat



As soon as you get your ship, get all the upgrades you can and do all the missions asap, you should complete all of all of them, and the xp is good.

Space missions (quests) give fast experience, and are easy with inexpensive Tier 1 ship upgrades available at any spacedock. It's a good way to add variety to leveling when you get tired of missions on a given planet.

If you let go of the mouse button and stop firing for a bit, your shields will regen faster than if you just hold the blasters down the whole time. [elocke]

Companions



You can get your companions to go sell all your "Gray items" saves bag space while questing and instant creds

You can enable an option that allows you to compare gear not only to your own, but to that of your active companion's when you hover over the item.

If your companion comes with multiple stances like healing/dps, double-check a stance is actually active! My companions frequently lose their stance. Click the companion bar + plus sign to expand it and view stances. Unfortunately, companion abilities cannot be rearranged to put stances on the "short bar." The long bar clutters the screen so I close it again after checking the stance.

You can reassign your companions abilities to the left action bar which seems more natural. It makes it very easy to keep an eye on what is active or not.

Your companions can craft up to five items at a time, simply click the craft button over and over.

Companion that comes together with your first ship is actually a healer and can be summoned. (Your first dialog with him suggests his not suitable for combat.)

You can set some of your companion spell on an automatic use. You can only do that by using the extended companion bar and right clicking on the spell you want to "auto-use" (dos not work in the spellbook or the little companion bar)

You can call your companion if it's not active by clicking the small button on the lower left of your screen. [77lolmac77]

If it's lying dead and too close to mobs you can simply dismiss it and recall it.

Don't be afraid to give companion gifts to your companions.  I believe the more affection they have for you the more quests you get from them, some of them are really lucrative and give good xp as well as help flesh out your character's story better. Diplomacy is a great profession for finding tons of companion gifts.  My cargo hold is overflowing with them. [elocke]

Biochemists can craft Med Units which enables you to heal and revive your companion in combat. [Coldcut333, Castille]

[SPOILER] A list with all companions + their crew skill bonusses and companion gift preferences can be found here [Timukas]

If you have neglected your companions affection you can easily bring it up to 2000 or 4000 by buying companion gifts from the companion gift vendor located near the galactic market in the fleet (for Republic anyways). The rank 1 gifts are for 0-2000 affection and the rank 2 are for 2000-4000 affection and are 200credits and 600credits respectively I believe from the vendors. [Meltdown]

 

Combat & questing

NPC enemies bumped from high heights will die

If you knock down an enemy from heights and it does not die, it tends to use pathing to get back to you instead of magically climbing the cliff - and also bring the nearby friends with it.

Some quests you might find yourself stuck or bugged for whatever reason.  Instead of abandoning the quest and trying to find the NPC who gave it to you, you can just hit the "reset" button and it will revert to the very first step in the quest line.  Very useful for when I got stuck on my BH class quest because I used the Fleet Ticket to fast travel off of Dromund Kaas without going the long way and having the quest update. [elocke]

You can use environment objects. Almost everywhere where there are enemy there are cases you can make explode that removes like a third of the life of your opponents . Or perma stuns elites so they become soloable. [pouf]

 

Flashpoints and Parties



At the end a Flashpoint, you can exit the area by clicking the "Exit Area" button above the mini-map.

If everyone in your party picks the same speech option you actually get more social points.

Group bug: the tab that says: "Area Phases" and click "Reset Area Phase". Your problem will then be fixed and you can ask for a new invite. Winning.

When in a group, each person gets to make the choice how the conversation will progress. The game simply determines by random roll whose choice is used.

Your light side and dark side points are rewarded based on YOUR choice, not the winning choice. However the results of the encounter will progress along the path of the winning roll. This may grant you a title you would never willingly have chosen to get.

Was happy to find out you can create a comment in the LFG page.. This is an AMAZING feature IMO. Pick up a heroic area quest or a flashpoint quest.. hit the LFG and find out who is looking for that exact thing. No more spamming channels or finding people in a general LFG that are looking for entirely different groups, find exactly what you want and when you need.

Yes, this is info that more and more people seem to be figuring out. I'm seeing fewer and fewer people asking in general chat, and seeing more and more people running around flagged for LFG. Very handy feature! The first time I used it, it took me over an hour to get a group for a heroic...no biggie, I was busy questing anyway. The second and future times I used it, it took me less than 5 minutes.



 

Travel



Everyone has an ability in their "spellbook" general tab called EMERGENCY FLEET PASS.

the Emergency fleet pass, IS an emergency pass, you have an 18h cooldown on it

You do not have to return at your ship every time you leave a planet, your ship will follow you everywhere

You can bound yourself to unlimited locations, unlike WoW. You can't however, teleport yourself from planet to planet.

Jumping while moving results in you moving slower.



 

Alignment



You can also activate an option which allows you to see any light or dark gains during discussions.

Pick an option in a cut-scene which you hate, or was not quite what you expected your character to say? Press ESC to exit the convo, nothing is saved and you can start it again and pick another option without any consequences.

If you want to bring up your dark/light you can use the diplomacy crew skill to do so. A list of which missions are dark and which are light can be found here [Meltdown]

 

 

PVP

If you PvP before 20, enough to get at least a thousand commendations, get pvp gear from the fleet, its that good.



When playing Huttball, you can throw it. Really. Didn't take me long to figure out but it seems like no one knows.

Beware if you do Pvp a lot, you will be quickly capped with pvp marks (1000 maximum, at a rate of 50-60 per game)

There is no hot key for battleground ques, you need to click your faction icon on your mini-map on the bottom right side.

In Huttball, if you hold the ball for too long (about a minute I think) you will blow up and the ball will be given to the opposing team. [evilastro]

In the combat skill section of your fleet there is a quest machine near the PvP vendors for a daily warzone, this is very good exp. Don't pass it up if you occasionally pvp. [Meltdown]

To trow the ball in Huttball you need to put that skill from your general abilities tab in a hotkey bar, (cause your bar might have been full when you got it!). When you activate it an AoE circle appears on the ground; move it over a team member and left click. [drbaltazar]

 

Exploring, Datacrons, Matrix Shards & Cubes

 

On all planets Datacrons are hidden; Datacrons give fixed, small, permanent stat boosts but some of them yield Matrix Shards. Matrix Shards can be combined into a unique, equipable relic with great stat boosts called a Matrix Cube.

To make a Matrix Cube you need three Matrix Shards and visit your faction's assembly room; The Ancient Assembly Chamber for Empire (near the Dark Temple in the west side of the valley approaching it), for republic the Lost Assembly Vault in the the west room in the Jedi Temple on Coruscant. You can find a guide + list of recipe's here.

Matrix Cubes can be disassembled as well at the same location you made them but it requires a Power Core. These power cores can only be obtained for 8000 credits from junk vendors on various planet. For republic there's a jawa on Tatooine, north of Anchorhead near a sandcrawler. For Empire there's one on Tatooine as well in the northern most part of Mos Ila near the exit.

Some Datacron's are hidden very well, some have very unique ways to get to them and others require multiple people. You can try and find them on your own (yet finding them all could take you a lifetime) but you can also use a guide. There's also a series of video guides listed here.

In a large amount of far off and hidden areas on planets, rare spawn champions can be found: some require groups or raids, others can be easily soloed at higher character levels. Most of them drop at least a blue item. Their portraits are indistinguishable from normal champions but their names might hint that it is a unique, un-quest related boss.

Misc



Character names can include 2 apostrophes, 1 dash and there is a 15 character limit

When your UI is frozen or has other issues just press "ctrl + u" twice to reload it.

Being a completionist puts you 5 levels over content.

In SWTOR, you should not feel obligated to complete all the quests. Experience comes easily.

You can also change the music in the cantina by purchasing a jukebox token from the bartender and clicking on the jukebox. And those dancers, wow, just wow.

You can turn on an option called "loot area" - this will loot all corpses in the near area when you loot the first one. So good.

Pressing ctrl + shift + f (I think) shows you your FPS in the lower left corner.

Easy chunk of XP at starter levels: One little thing I have been doing on my toons is grabbing my crafting skills as soon as I can get to the shuttle (yes you can leave the starter planet before you finish your class quests).  At level 2-3 going to all the trainers before making your selection (adding them to your codex) can garner you 2 levels and some change.  Then choose your skills, and head back to the starter planet a little ahead of where you should be level wise.  Makes it a nice smooth ride till you finish your class quests and are able to hit the fleet for the first flashpoint. [from Blasphim]

You can't share your class story quests with people of the same class or have those people participate in conversations. [renaldare]

You can set in your user options to allow more than one person of the same class into your story area. However, their own story won't progress in there if they haven't completed that part yet. [Amana]

In preferences there is an option to turn on subtitles if you are playing on a system without sound [Meltdown]