Author Archives: Gravity

The Surprising Benefits of Solitude

Aside

2

This is a great article on the benefits of solitude you geeks should read, from HBR.

Here are a few snippets:

The protection of the screen mitigates many problems of group work. This is why the Internet has yielded such wondrous collective creations. Marcel Proust called reading a “miracle of communication in the midst of solitude,” and that’s what the Internet is, too. It’s a place where we can be alone together — and this is precisely what gives it power.

And this:

Decades of research show that individuals almost always perform better than groups in both quality and quantity, and group performance gets worse as group size increases. The “evidence from science suggests that business people must be insane to use brainstorming groups,” wrote the organizational psychologist Adrian Furnham.

The reasons brainstorming fails are instructive for other forms of group work, too. People in groups tend to sit back and let others do the work; they instinctively mimic others’ opinions and lose sight of their own; and, often succumb to peer pressure.

UI customisation is coming

Posted on by
2

This is not third-party Lua addons, but customisation setting within SWTOR so you can resize the UI frames. It’s shown at 1:28 of the video below. It appears to be (a) scaling of UI elements and (b) moving them around, but we can hope for more in time.

Screenshot taken from the video, showing scaling %, and coloured boxes around the elements you can move.

How do you reset talents?

Posted on by
1

To reset your talents in SWTOR, visit the Skill Mentor. You cannot change your advanced class – so a mercenary bounty hunter cannot become a powertech. You just reset the talent tree you have.

Here is where the skill mentor is located, when you want to respec your talents:

Create a bank and auction mule

Posted on by
6

You should sell everything you don’t use for yourself or your companion on the Kiosk (auction house). If it’s a green, as I’m lazy I just go with the default price. If it’s a blue, I double the price it suggests. This is a pain to do on your main.

So, create an alt, stick him near the Kiosk. I levelled a Sith Warrior to L8, took about two hours and I enjoyed every minute of it, so I could get a companion too. Now I have Vette doing slicing missions for me, too. Her progress is slower to skill up because I don’t log on much to that character.

He sits in Fleet, going between the mailbox and the Kiosk, selling stuff for me.

Makes the easy money from auctioning, even easier to get.

As aside, whilst there I saw this awesome Mako outfit on another player. She looks hot!

Datacrons and matrix shards

Posted on by
Reply

I’m writing this mostly to remind myself to follow these excellent Darth Hater guides to two datacron locations: Korriban and Dromund Kaas, and to bookmark guides to relics.

Note the L50 bounty hunter healer/dps relic (which you make from the datacrons shards) requires three blues, and provides stats of +58 Aim / +50 Endurance / +24 Crit.

A site for Troopers has great comprehensive guide to all datacron locations plus details on the matrix shards and relics, along with how to assemble the relic.

My levelling spec for healer bounty hunter

Posted on by
3

I was getting annoyed at having trouble killing some elite mobs, because at L27 my spec was entirely aimed at healing. I’ve decided to respec into a hybrid healer spec until L50, then look at my situation again.

Note I don’t do any PvP, so this is an entirely PvE spec.

At L50, my bounty hunter healer spec will be this. It isn’t very heat efficient or hard-hitting, so I don’t expect I could heal the hardest fights with this spec, but I hope I could do flashpoints.

At L31, it will look this way. It retains the crucial skills of kolto missile and supercharged gas, which I want to keep in my play for muscle memory when I do heal. With extra talents in Arsenal, I’ll have some more dps than I do now, plus I picked a few in that tree which actually help healing.

My six-year old son explains the tank-dps-healer triad

Posted on by
Reply

My boy has loved Star Wars for a few years. He’s watched all of the Clone Wars cartoons, and all the movies except #3 – he’s only six, I don’t let him watch a hero of his become evil, kill children jedis, attack his wife and have his legs chopped off. Now he’s particularly keen on SWTOR.

Instead of keeping it a private hobby, I talk to him about it, and try to use it for education purposes wherever possible. Today we used Lego so I could show him a triad, which we’ve talked about before as he knows I’m a healer, and he wanted to put it on his website. I wanted him to learn about diagrams and using models to show an idea.

Check it out. He’d be delighted to read a comment or two.

 

Storm trooper hikes from Perth to Sydney

Posted on by
3

This is the coolest way to inspire charitable giving, ever. Jacob French, now a number of months into his trek, is walking from the West of Australia to its Eastern seaboard. That’s a bloody long way, around 5000Km.

And he’s wearing storm trooper costume the whole way.

Here’s an interview with the hero. Over here is his Facebook page, where he says he’s taking a short break for Christmas with family before continuing on his walk. Lots of photos with the people he’s met too.

So far he’s raised $43K for charity, and you can donate on his everyday hero page.

Such a legend. I’ve donated. I bet he’s going to play SWTOR when he gets off his feet.

What is an “augment” slot?

Posted on by
3

Around L16 or so I got this odd modification I hadn’t seen before – epic in colour – and labelled an “augment item modification”. No idea what it was for. Here’s how it looks:

Turns out these “augment” purple slots are only in epic gear, and the lowest level of those is L16. In SWTOR “epic” is also known as prototype gear, such as the [Prototype] RD-13A Raider Vambraces:

The in-game tip for this equipment type helps a little too:

Low-level potent prototype gear and augments to suit them will become really popular with twinks, one day.