Crew Skills

You know, I’ve been so busy a) making Google Docs spreadsheets (it’s a compulsion, I tell you!) and b) actually playing the game, that I haven’t actually talked about what I’m playing! Let’s rectify that.

Siha here is my main; she’s a Commando, currently specced into Combat Medic. Which was inevitable, really; heavily-armored healers seem to be my thing. And beyond that, I love military sci-fi, and the female trooper is voiced by Jennifer Hale. How could any other class compete?

Siha’s currently sitting at level 46 – I’ve been stopping to smell every flower I can find, and I’ve been further slowed by a deluge of RL stuff – and I’m ambivalent about the light at the end of the tunnel. On the one hand, I’m looking forward to what level 50 has to offer; on the other hand, I don’t want Siha’s class story to finish! I’m really, really loving the Trooper class storyline. I haven’t experienced much of the other classes yet, though they do seem fun from what I’ve played so far, but Trooper is just great. It grabs you and gives you a reason to get really invested right from the start, and just doesn’t let up.

And here’s the rest of the team:

Zushan is my Jedi Shadow. She’s young and passionate and generally a good person, even if she finds the Jedi Code a bit of a challenge at times.

Tineru is my Jedi Knight, and I’m currently torn between Sentinel or DPS-specced Guardian for her advanced class, though I’m leaning towards the latter. She’s peaceful and calm where Zushan is headstrong, but I don’t have a clear sense of her personality yet, so she’ll be sitting on the backburner for a bit yet.

And Anaxa is my Gunslinger; she’s very much a reluctant hero – she’d prefer to avoid getting involved in the Republic’s fight, but she just can’t help getting invested…

Of course, all the other Advanced Classes look like oodles of fun as well, and in some cases (notably Sage and Scoundrel) they seem radically different from the other AC available to the class, so I’ll definitely be trying out everything in the long run. I was a bit put off by the duplication, though — not the class-quest duplication, as let’s face it, I’ve been playing other MMOs for a decade and I’m used to doing the same thing over and over again. No, what I found offputting was the idea of trying to differentiate my second AC from the first one on a character basis, short of having one Light and one Dark side in every class pairing (which felt a bit artificial). I’ve found the combination of voiceovers, animated quest dialogues, and quest choices to be immersive enough that my characters are distinct, to me, and a second one of any class risks feeling very much like a retread.

Then I hit on the solution: my second character for each class will be male! This means the voice acting will be totally different, and they’ll have different romance options and thus different relationships with their companions. Because Jennifer Hale’s voice acting might be awesome, but listening to it for another fifty levels would just make my second trooper feel like a pale copy of the first, instead of a cool character in their own right. This way I can have my cake and eat it too.