What does SWTOR do better than WoW? What does it have that WoW is missing, or does poorly? I know some of you will say "no pandas" but as pandas don't seem to bother me, I'm looking for something more.
The class stories are great. I love that my characters talk and each have their own personality.
It seems like it would be a great game for two people to play together since you could see each other's class quests and do all the heroic 2 missions.
I really like the companions. Well at least the ones that speak english.
What do you dislike about SWTOR? What are your biggest gripes? (And are these things which WoW does better, or is it something both do poorly at?)
The sith empire resembles the original empire way too much. The republic ships looking like Princess Leia's blockade runner is fitting, but the star destroyers and tie fighters are rediculus. There's countless examples of technology more advanced than you see in the orignal movies. Like all the personal shields, smuggler/operative portal shield screens, etc. Several quest stories talk about some variety of super weapon that gives the death star a run for its money. Troppers and smugglers can take on sith? Give me a break. I know they have to balance the classes, but they should have at least put in some story about how the lightsaber technique of deflecting blaster fire was only at a rudimentary level at this time period or something. And that lightsaber tech was much weaker back then or something to explain why it takes more than 1 direct hit to kill something.
The worst part about SWOTR for me was the gameplay. Each class I tried just seemed clunky. When I first rolled a tropper I kept jumping around and running like it was a 3rd person shooter for the first few levels until I realized it was pointless.
Cover makes sense logically and fits when a gunslinger is under fire. But why do I have to duck if noone is shooting at me? When it looks like you'll roll into that nice spot there, you instead end up rolling right into the middle of a pack of baddies. Ugh.
Some of tropper tanks best moves are melee range? Really? Why do I carry this huge-ass gun then? The idea of a range tank seemed like it would be an interesting change of gameplay from anything wow had until you relize you need to be in melee range.
Commando / Scoundrel healing seemed interesting but I've lost interest in trying it after reading so many complaints about it.
I find it ironic that a lightsaber is just a stat stick for my sage. If anything gets in melee range, I'm better off stunning them and giving them a roundhouse kick in the head instead of actually trying to hit them with this glowing stick that's supposed to be able to slice off limbs lickety-split.
Some of the light/dark choices are really good, but most of them are fail. A lot of the options don't really fit at all and seem like they were only included because they wanted to have 3 options.
The non-class stories are rather ho-hum. Yeah the cut scenes and voice acting are nice, but too many of the quests just don't fit in very well. You'll be on a super "urgent" class mission and some side quest will be about taking soil samples. heh. It's hard to resist spacebaring through these. A lot of people complained about the linearity of quests in Caty, but I actually liked that this let them give each zone one larger primary story.
The thing that killed the questing for me was that they only have a handful of rather rudimentary quest mechanics.
1. Kill x
2. Loot x
3. Click on object object x
4. Use item in your mission inventory
5. Go talk to x
(I maybe missed something)
I know WoW only had a few mission tools at release too, but apart from the voice acting, I find Catacylsm's and WotLK's quests were much better. Having a quest once in a while to use a catapult to fend off an invading army (deepholm) or fly on the back of a dragon helped shake things up. In SWoTR when I get to a new planet, after looking at the new scenery it always seems like, "here we go again..."
The space missions are a missed oportunity. Instead of dailies, it would have been much better to integrate them into the class stories. I guess make them easy enough that noone gets frustrated and keep the hard ones as optional level 50 dailies.
Either stuff is too spread out or the mounts aren't fast enough. Take your pick.
The custom gear is a great idea in theory. In practice it's a bit annoying to poke through each piece and try to figure out if I should use my commendations on enhancement x for my helm or armor mod for my companion's chest.
Crafting is a mess. If the goal is to just make your own gear and not really sell too much on the GTN, then the missions are too expensive and time consuming just to make leveling gear (especially the blue and purple stuff). If the goal is to be able to be a crafter and make stuff to sell, then the limit of being able to only post 50 items on the GTN makes no sense.
Then end of each planet tends to feel pretty easy and then when you move to the next planet you get kicked in the butt and realise, Oh I guess I should have probably tried to figure out how to upgrade some gear. Wow did a much better job of divying up green quest rewards to keep you rolling without having to hike back to the AH / GTN and pray some upgrades are for sale at resonable prices.
Having two chars (yourself and at least one companion) makes this worse. Good luck trying to keep more than one companion's gear up to date. Troopers at least get the break of 4 of the companions using the same gear as you.
No click casting for healers is so 1999.
No LFD or LFR combined with low server pops is a killer. There are so many HEROIC 2 and HEROIC 4 quests that go wasted because it's a pain to put together a group and if you do manage to, the travel to get there takes too long. At least WoW had the foresight to put in summoning stones before LFD. Taken together, there isn't really any point to trying to do them if you're just trying to level up. No dual-spec makes this worse with few tanks and healers. On WoW, I can hop on and run a dungeon in 30ish minutes. Good luck trying to do that in SWOTR apart from WZs. If there were 100-200 people on a planet instead of 10-20, I could see no LFG working out, but as it is, the world just seems very very empty.
Do you play both WoW and SWTOR? (Or, if you have a wow subscription, is it only for D3 plus beta access to pandas?)
I didn't play WoW hardly at all for the first 6 or so weeks since getting SWOTR. Now, I mostly just log into SWOTR to try to get my sage to 50 before my subscription runs out in a couple weeks.
Did you swap to SWTOR because you had "finished" Cataclysm, or because the game just does a lot of things better? (if it does)
I love star wars and was really looking forward to playing SWTOR but I've pretty much switched back to WoW at this point.
If you PvP, what do you like better about the pvp than wow's? Aside from Huttball (which I admit seems a bit more fun than CTF), is there anything else? Is there an equivalent to arenas, or is it all larger group combat?
There are too many interrupts, cc's, knockbacks, etc in SWOTR for it to be fun for me. I gave up on pvp after a few WZs.
I realize this is a very small sample size, but is server balance completely hosed? Last I'd heard, it sounded like Republic was outnumbered by a large margin, which makes a pvp server (or a pvp zone) sound very daunting.
Somewhere I read that overall it was 57% empire and 43% republic. The fundamental problem with the idea of MMO world PvP is how do you get the losing side to keep showing up? Eventually they just stop playing, server transfer, or re-roll to the wining side. People in my guild in DAoC started playing their Abilon alts more and more until our orginal Midguard setup was all crickets. WoW at least was somewhat sucessful in realizing this paradigm in their design of the WoTLK (scaling player power) and Caty (fixed team size) pvp world zones. Putting these things on a timer of every x hours helps a lot verus trying to doing something ongoing. That Bioware spent 300 million and all they could come up with is empire camping the republic base in Illum is rediculus considering it was entirely predictable.
All in all, it was fun for while but just lost its lustre. I'll probably give SWOTR another go after there's been time for them to polish things up.
