Ascule's Adventures: January 2012

It's been about 1 1/2 months since I started on TOR early access. Ascy the Commando has come a long way. I'm level 50 now, and still in the middle of act 3 in the Trooper storyline. Trooping along, taking some side trips to do some flashpoints with Fuji, Gibson and Ghir

We nearly have enough people hitting level 50 at this point that we can start thinking about setting up some operations. These are 8/16/32 people adventures which take up one part of the level 50 "endgame"

Some interesting things about TOR:

Crafting and crew skills is crazy simple. I'm already at max skill for Armstech, Cybertech, Slicing, Scavenging, Investigation, Underworld Metals and Armormech. I'm starting to work on Synthweaving and associated skills as well on various alts
Exping, or simply going through the plot is pretty easy too. There are more than enough quests on each planet to level up through content appropriately. I've actually started to skip various portions of boring planets to move on to the next major plot area. Space battles and PvP are optional, but are alternate ways to get exp quickly.
Grouping up, while not mandatory like FFXI used to be, still has some advantages. You'll be able to blow through content a lot quicker, have less downtime, and the way the game is set up, you'll end up with more exp (which is one of the big reasons why I'm overleveled). The down side is that you'll get less credits since that is split up among people.

In my opinion, the most fun way to play TOR is to do so with a partner. That way, you'll get social points for doing things in a group, and still have companion points since you'll have your companion around. Social points is important as there are various tiers of a "Social" attribute that can only be earned by playing in a group.

Some tricks for playing TOR:

Use gifts to raise your companion's affection as soon as you get them. You can spam rank 1 gifts to get their affection up to 4,000/10,000 easily, after which you can use conversation options to increase their affection further. Raising affection not only makes them do crew skills faster, but also opens up a ton of extra dialog, quests, exp and credits from just talking to them
At this time, most of the crafting skills are fairly pointless due to the "Commendation" system. You can get level appropriate gear from just trading in rewards you get from doing quests. If you do want to craft, the skill "Biochem" appears to be the current defacto "broken" craft due to the reusable consumable items that you can craft.
Choosing "slicing" as one of your crew skills is highly recommended. There are tons of credit boxes just lying around the world which you can pick up for extra money. Furthermore, you can send your companions out on constant slicing missions for extra money while you are out questing, supplementing your income.
Space missions have secret hidden bonus objectives which give a significant exp & credit reward, over 2k each. Use those missiles on big capital ship bridges!
Spend some time in playing in the warzones, even if you're lower leveled. You can start at level 10, and the warzones boost your stats so that you can take on higher level players, though you won't have all the skills that they do. Warzones and pvp give you commendations that can be traded in for decent gear sets at level 20, 40 and are used to get pvp gear at 50.

Ok! Random photo time!