Home of the SWTOR Tip of the Day
The trailer for HK-51 states that the droid is “under Belsavis.” In the beta, there were significant references to HK-51′s ship being on Hoth. In fact, the ship is still in the game available for anyone to find.
I wonder if the quest for HK will take you to Hoth, or if the entire quest line will keep you on Belsavis?
How to you gauge when to leave a planet? If you are interested in just completing your class quest, I have found that you can easily take these quests on one level behind the level indicated in the mission log. For example, if your class quest is designed for level 25, you can easily finish it when you are level 24. You may be able to complete the quest two levels behind, depending on how tough the boss is or how good your gear is.
The class quest is the metric that I use for moving onto a higher level area or different planet. If I am on par with my next class quest level, I tend to skip other quests in the area. Now that I am on my third character, I want to finish the story as soon as I can. I took this approach with my last character since I was mainly interested in PvP. While I did hit 50 faster than my first character, I didn’t have as many companions maxed out on affection, nor did I have a high dark side alignment rating.
If you just want to check out the class story for a character, use the class quest level in the mission log as a guide on when to move on. If you want to increase other areas of your character, such as DS/LS alignment, codex entries, or companion affection, take on as many side quests as you feel comfortable doing.
One of the many new changes in update 1.2 was the ability to raise affection with your ship droid. Your droid prefers cultural artifact gifts. He also likes technology, luxury, and republic/imperial.
Bonus Tip: Don’t forget about the companion gifts vendor located on the Fleet. You can buy your cultural artifact gifts from there. I saw one estimate that it would take around 33,000 credits worth of rank 5 cultural artifact gifts to raise your droid to full affection.
I have a confession to make….I just found out about the Companion Comparative Tooltip.
Ever since beta, I’ve been looking for a way to easily compare the stats of a piece of gear against what my companion currently has equipped. Enabling the companion comparative tooltip will do this for you.
It is a checkbox that can be found under Game menu -> Preferences -> User Interface -> Tooltips.
With this checkbox enabled, when you mouseover a piece of gear, it will show the differences in the stats compared to the currently equipped items slot for both you as well as your companion. What a huge time saver!
Companions greatly benefit from the presence stat. If you find yourself in a tough fight, try using a stim that adds presence (command stims). Your character will gain extra health, power, and possibly do extra damage.
Using the same logic, companions also benefit from wearing gear that increases presence, however you may not want to seek out high presence gear for your companions. Typically, gear that is higher in presence is lower in other stats. So, you must ask yourself if you are willing to sacrifice presence for something else such as cunning, aim, or endurance.
If you use a med pack that heals both you and your companion, and your companion happens to be “dead” at the time, the med pack will rez them. When they return to life, they will have the amount of health that the med pack healed them for. This comes in very handy during a tough battle!
I know that I’ve had several battles where I wasn’t able to heal my companion soon enough and they ended up dying a long time before I was hoping they would. Fortunately, the med pack “trick” has saved me on more than one occasion.
You can quickly target your companion by hitting F1 twice. This comes in handy if you’re a healer (raises hand) and need to change your focus to your companion quickly.
Here is a list of all Republic Companions and their gifts/affection rating:
Here is a list of all Sith Companions and their gifts/affection rating:
With so much attention focused on your character (well, it is YOU after all) very little attention is paid to your companion outside of gaining affection and what kind of gifts they like. However, companions increase their abilities and gain new ones as you level up.
It wouldn’t hurt to check on their abilities once in a while (CTRL +P) to see if any new ones have appeared or what your companion’s strongest ability at the moment is. Remember, you can move any of these companion abilities to their hotbar as well as your own. I haven’t found a need or a use for the “stop attacking” command in my companion’s hotbar, so I usually replace that with a different ability.
Some companions also learn different stances as you level up. These stances can be more geared toward such things as defense or AOE and can really come in handy depending on the situation. Make sure that you check for any new stances as well. Hopefully Bioware will alert you to anything new that your companion learns in the future, as it can be difficult to remember to check on these things every so often.
After a battle, if your companion’s health is low, you have two options for instantly restoring their health to full capacity:
If you do either of these actions, your companion will appear with their full health restored. It saves a few seconds when compared to using your “meditation skill” to restore their health.
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