Sith Inquisitor

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CRAFTING | PvP | Old Timers Guild | YT-Fog's Solo Leveling a Marauder for Dummies - newly updated

Guild: old timers guild

minion:  YT-Fog

Update:  9/29/2012 - I got accepted into the Old Timers Guild and Fearless Leader

Kaeli brought my Marauder into the fold - woot!

Also - I updated my Dummies guide to solo leveling a Marauder to include level50 stuff and my first level capped PvP experience

Update:  9/27/2012  It has been awhile since I made an update.  Here is what I have been doing

1. I level capped my Sniper (again solo since the population on the server was dwindling and none of MK was playing any longer)

2. Server migrations took place and then mega server technology came along - all 14 of my toons got collapsed onto Shadowlands

3. I applied to Old Timers Guild - my application has processed but I have not had the time to log in and transfer toons.  I am looking forward to playing with them however!

Here are all of my 14 toons - an embarrassment since I still want to create a Jedi Sentinel at a minimum - I think I need to create another account! (update - created a new account so I could have a Jedi Sentinel - YT-Flame - now I have 15 - yikes!)

YT-ARIZONA     gunslinger
YT-FOG     marauder
YT-FLAME     Jedi (assumed Sentinel)
YT-FROST     mercenary
YT-HURRICANE     powertech
YT-JETAN     assassin
YT-POLARIS     sniper
YT-SHAFTOE     vanguard
YT-MIST     generic warrior
FOGHAWK     mercenary
SANDHAWK    consular sage
SPINDRIFT     commando
SUPERSTITION     gunslinger
SURFHAWK     Scoundrel
WHITEHAWK     gunslinger

Update: 6/2/2012  So I level capped in the last two weeks with my Sith Marauder and took a look around - what to do next?  I found that everyone has left the game (hopefully temporally) - it is is a rare time on any planet that I see double digit numbers of players.  The fleet can be a bit better but still pretty empty compared to when the Rakghoul event was going on (can you say laggy?).

I've been occupying myself by doing Daily Black Hole missions for the commendations and credits.  Today I also managed to find two quests that I had not done which gave out Alignment so I could get myself capped at Light V.  Interestingly enough, I got a very cool Orange headpiece on Hoth for finishing the bonus series, a random drop Orange armguards drop (my last piece that was not already Orange - now I just need the mods to make it better than my greenies).  I was still 150 or more away from 10,000 Light and I realized I had never done Black Talon - the level 10 intro quest.  I soloed that (almost every single mob was a oneshot - lol) and picked up enough to cap out my light side.  Which has allowed me to mount my Light V relics for more endurance.  My morale/HP is now over 12K for the first time - so if you read below and where somehow getting the idea that I am the uber Marauder - that is definitely not the case!

A lot of the fan podcast and fansites are pretty depressed right now because there has been such an abrupt drop in players (Corellian Run is a middle to high population server and nobody is playing and I mean nobody).  That along with the recent layoffs at BioWare Austin (including the community manager and guild liason manager) has got everyone wondering about the game.  I have never experienced a launch of an MMO before - I joined LoTRO a year after launch.  I have no idea how these play out but it seems to me they have enough players paying a fee - for the moment - but they need to collapse the number of servers rapidly so people can find other people to play with - Warzone PvP and open world PvP can't exist without enough players to queue up - people give up when it takes too long to find opponents.  Same with other end-game raiding.  If BioWare is quick with condensing the current community together then people wont drop but if they take months and months to do it, people will let their subscriptions lapse.  My free opinion - worth what you paid for it!

Update: 5/19/2012  I posted this to our Guild website forums, but since that thread is protected, I thought I would post it here.  If you are interested in our Guild, we are recruiting.

Solo Leveling a Marauder for Dummies
By YT-Fog
http://www.sixthelement.org/swtor

modified:  9/29/2012 - The post lvl50 world, patch 1.3

Why a solo leveling guide?

Because while there tend to be lot of easily found end game guides, finding something for the solo leveler is darn near impossible

Who is YT-Fog and why should I care about the rubbish from your pie hole?

Haha – you are a rude person… but seriously, I am someone of rather confined MMO experience. Playing D&D out of the blue box in the 70’s (talking pre AD&D folks) me and my brothers really wished MMO’s were out there. Fast forward to 2008 and I tried Lord of The Rings Online as my first MMO. I solo leveled an Elf Guardian sword and board tank and maybe grouped a half a dozen times on my way to level cap in Moria. Since then I level capped a healing minstrel (I stink at it) and my new main which is a Captain (Fogsong - I live near the Golden Gate bridge and its fog horn in SF). If you do not know the LoTRO Captain –it is a very effective all-arounder hybrid class if played correctly. I also dabbled in the Warden class –having several mid level ones. Alt-alholicism is rampant with me.

What about SWTOR you wordy SOB?

I joined my launch guild on SWTOR pretty early – about 5 or 6 months prior to launch but did not get accepted into the closed beta until the November 2011 semi-open testing beta weekend. I was day two of the pre-launch and have been playing since. The majority of my launch guild seemed to be oriented towards healing, tanking or just plain throwing the lightning. I had never seriously played a pure DPS class so I decided to try going pure DPS with the Marauder just to give the kin balance – little did I understand that it would take me a verrrrry long time to level cap. I made it to the early 40’s in the Marauder before starting some alts and I got slowed down and have only made it to 48 so far. 50 is looking really close now – just need to ignore that real life stuff and PLAY!

Ok – you have convinced me you are neither a power leveler nor a smart person – maybe you are the Dummy leader I have been looking for all my life. What is your overall feeling about the Marauder class? And why would I want to level one?

Besides being awesome you mean?

First off – the Marauder is a very fun class with a strong class story (I play Light side for that extra bit of intrigue within the Empire). It is a very fast class in combat – you are a hoppity frog with your FORCE CHARGE that brings you up close and personal and then it is Ginsu slicing and dicing time. The Marauder is VERY strong in one-on-one combat – with some caveats – so leveling solo, when done with care, can be very fun – I will get to that in a moment

What are your thoughts on the Advanced Class Tree’s?

Well – that is pretty easy. The far left tree is Annihilation, middle is Carnage and far right is Rage. I’ve tried them all and frankly I don’t have much use for Carnage or Rage. The main reason for that is that both of these tree’s are pretty bursty in damage and/or have very specific group advantages that don’t necessarily help you much when you are leveling and/or are going solo. I just couldn’t make them work myself so far – the burst damage wasn’t strong enough to finish off the stronger mobs quickly and in PvP it seemed pretty hit or miss as you ran through your best DPS and then you were on cool down and waiting to die.

Annihilation however has a huge thing early on in your level 2 advanced class tree – HUNGERING. This passive skill gives you morale back when you critical on a bleed attack on your opponent. If you fully spec into this, you get 2% for each of the three ticks of a bleed attack – 6% morale return. AND THERE IS MORE (catch the nice Ginsu reference there?) – this heal is group wide so it includes your active companion if they are close enough. This AC tree has several bleed attacks – so you can self heal yourself as you are fighting which is always very nice and especially the way I play. More on that latter.

Don’t hold out on me – why is healing important?

Impatient AND rude – you will go far in this world!

No, seriously why?

I tend to play with a DPS companion exclusively – currently Jaesa Wilsaam – instead of a pocket healer like Lieutenant whats his name. The main idea is that if you are PvP as a solo queuer, you maybe get healed once every 30 warzone matches. I am assuming in Operations and Flashpoints, the DPS isn’t going to be a priority either – so better get used to it from the word GO and learn how to survive on your own.

That seems rather masochistic – how has that worked out for you?

Surprisingly well actually. First off – you have to accept that you are occasionally going to die. Second, don’t be afraid of almost dying since you will do even more of that. My record is that after a bad accidental double pull, I had lost my companion and was bouncing around going crazy. Finally with a litter of bodies around me, I was victorious but I had gone from over 9K of morale down to a grand total of seven – yes 7 morale. I was very glad not to have a bleed ticking on me!

Aren’t Marauder’s pretty squishy – how do you pull off something like that?

I have leet skillz mon! (ummm - that is so not true...) However, if you are in tune with your Marauder you can do some amazing things. The Marauder has a ton of tools – the trick is actually using them at the right time. This includes mixing in your defensive moves. Depending on your level you have several that you can mix in with your DPS moves. You normally don’t have a fixed rotation – instead you pull from your bag of tricks depending on the situation.

I find that combat with the Marauder in Annihilation spec is very rhythmic – charge into combat, target the weakest/most annoying mob, build Rage points and then tab to a stronger mob, smack down with a bleed attack and hope for a critical bleed attack to get some healing rolling and then if you have an really strong mob in the group (or bad pull), fire off a defensive move and then more dps. Eventually you build up enough Fury points as you build and spend Rage (30 points of Fury) that you can go BERSERK which increases your Rage generation speed. Space out the bleeds, Rage builders, heavy DPS and defensive cool downs and you can go a very long time on your own. You can get it so that the cooldowns mesh together with only small gaps.

I haven’t quite gotten to the point where I can just self-sustain indefinitely off of my own skills but the difference between these tactics in PvE and getting whomped on with other medium armour classes like Sniper or Gunslinger is amazing

When fighting a Champion level mob, I generally have found that I don’t have much of a problem with guys who are 3 times my morale. I recently bought my first medpac from a vendor – in general the self heals and random medpac loot drops are all I have needed to level up to 48 (this was my level at time of the original edition - been level50 capped since 6/2012)

Ok, that all is very well – how about gear?

This is where some of the downside balance on the class seems to come in – I have found the class to be pretty gear sensitive. If you are not keeping up with your gear every 2 or 3 levels, you can definitely feel the difference and run into trouble. For comparison purposes I was working on my alt toon addiction and my Operative Sniper became a bit difficult to level – then I noticed as a level 18 or so Sniper, I still had level 7 armor on pretty much all over – whoops!

Marauder’s main stat is STRENGTH just like the Juggernaut. What I emphasize almost equally with Strength is ENDURANCE and CRITICAL CHANCE for a balanced build. I recently moved my Critical chance up over 20% but high teens seems to be enough to get of one or more heals per fight via the critical on a bleed attack – so you don’t need to go nuts with this.

What about PvP?

Ha ha- I am not that good but I do have delusions of adequacy (The reality is probably more like a military target drone - ask me about my Legacy name in-game sometime). My basic philosophy as a solo queue guy is that my job is kill people and if you can help prevent people from capping an objective that is a bonus. But what I bring to the party is – I can put the other team flat on the ground and then back to their spawn point where they can’t bother us. As a Marauder, if you have yourself mentally organized, you can be pretty tough one on one against pretty much everyone.

While very difficult, you sometimes can take out a tank spec player who is getting constant heals – though you will have burned a lot of cool downs and will probably die yourself. You just burn them so hard that the healer runs themselves dry and you should have enough left to take out the unprotected player- of course this is kind of doing it wrong – but you have tied up two players to your lonesome self which could be a decent trade off if the rest of your team is on the ball.

The one area I have problems with is getting owned by a well played class that has a lot of crowd control. You don’t have a lot of tools to break cc and still close with a highly mobile player. So, my basic strategy is to pick my target, try not to get over whelmed by too much superior numbers and then make that person die – no matter what.

Skills – you said that Marauders have a lot of skills?

Oh yeah that – I have my main bar fully filled and keyed to the numbers on the keyboard and then I have my full 10 key pad mapped as well. I have used my Naga but don’t like it much so I am experimenting with the Corsair M90 Vengeance mouse which has a different placement of buttons – all to map to other skills. There are a large amount of situational skills that actually are pretty useful a fair amount of the time – so it is hard to prioritize what goes where for me. Your mileage may differ.

What about relics, clickies, weapon swapping and other stuff?

I have that but honestly, there is so much going on with the Marauder and the visual cues are not that good for processing effects (Fury build up, Juyo form build up etc…) that I don’t really remember to do anything with them. There is too much else to focus on. I definitely found the learning curve on many of the other classes to be a bit gentler – but also, this was my first toon and the game was totally new to me so you definitely will have a different experience unless you are brand new to SWTOR

So with all that time in on a pure damage class, what is your DPS?

That is a big unknown – I haven’t had a lot of time to play lately so I haven’t made it to the Dromund Kaas training dummies yet. What I have found is that when I am awake and on top of it, my DPS is waaay more than when I am just cruising along. I would be very interested in numbers from the kinship – we have a couple level capped (50) Maras

Some useful links
A guide on the forums (used to be stickied but the author is not currently playing) - detailed skill by skill and advice on Annihilation. Aging info, but still has some good stuff here.

http://www.swtor.com/community/showthread.php?t=72872

There are several attempts at guides that are end game like above you can find via Google - which is why I decided to go more with the Zen of the Marauder style

>>> Drikinju from Ctrl-Alt-Elite (Corellian Run server) has an EXCELLENT and up to date Marauder guide on his Guild website.  Very good distillation of the details on how to play the class.  Props!

http://ctrlaltelitesith.guildlaunch.com/forums/viewtopic.php?t=8248834

My current mouse - i really like it
http://www.corsair.com/us/vengeance-gaming/vengeance-gaming-mice/vengeance-m90-performance-mmo-rts-laser-gaming-mouse.html

The post lvl50 world, patch 1.3

• PvE edition:  As a soloist, there may not seem much to do once you get over that 37 second euphoric period immediately after linking in your final DING to Guild chat (ah the joy - but so fleeting)- but there is actually a fair amount to do.  If you have not capped your crafting skills, now is a good time to do that.  I also have been running the daily quests on Corellia from the Black Hole (shuttle is to the right as you exit the spaceport on Corellia).  Ilum and Belsavius have dailies as well but there is a lot of quest giver blah-blah-blah and general running around that gets annoying.  Corellia is straight forward with a quest terminal/drop box setup and a compact area.  There can be some competition for quest nodes but it usually is not too bad and there usually is enough people on so that you can group for the weekly 4 man (The End of Torvix).  I actually like doing the dailies here and there is some good credits to be had
• PvP edition:  Frankly, I had heard many, many bad things about level capped Warzones - so I had not tried them since capping - however, I tried them for the first time tonight.  In actuality, I found it harder than the 1-49 PvP experience but not absurdly so - I actually had a good time and killed some people.

That is not what I wanted to here you idjit - I want to know how often you got your face rammed to into the bulkhead in Voidstar!    Are you that rude person from months ago and why are you still here?  Regardless - We got consistently rolled by what looked like some pre-made Republic group (or sets of groups - they were too organized to be a PUG like we were on our side).  I was using Recruit gear that I purchased with credits from the PvP vendor (mk1 gear) - so my Expertise was low.  However, I did manage to have fun in a laughable way on my own.  Finishing your first level 50 warzone gives you a quest turn in for the PvP terminal on the fleet.  You get a complete, upgraded Mrk 2 set of PVP gear and weapons.  I did a few more warzones after putting that gear on ( you will need a fair amount of open slots for this since they give you EVERYTHING!  I didn't have enough room but after I cleared space, I was able to unpack the gift box successfully) and did better - I even won my first MVP vote - mostly because I was blatantly obvious about seriously destroying a gunslinger who was being a pain.  I definitely still have a poor win/loss kill ratio compared to the 1-49 level PvP Warzones, but once you get that first Recruit Mrk2 gear, it is pretty fun and enjoyable.  Definitely harder than while leveling but still fun.

11/30/2011 - Quick update here - Beta weekend was extremely fun.  I submitted about a dozen bug reports on Saturday - all relatively minor - no game breakers that I saw up through level 11.  Story is truly fun - even though I played a Republic Trooper so as not to give any Sith side story up before the actual game.  I got very attached to my toon even in one day - a good sign.  I am now all over the map in terms of what type of toon I start with - I have no idea - Sith Marauder, Bounty Hunter or what??  Game time decision I suppose. 

In other news - a new John Carter trailer is out and it is AWESOME!  The 'Incomparable Dejah Thoris' truly is incomparable - ;-)

  (click picture to go to the site, click here for fullsize)

  <<-click picture for full size

Thanks to Bill and Sue-On Hillman's ERBzine site for the screen captures and photos (Edgar Rice Burroughs Zine:  http://johncarterofmars.ca/  - pictures from their News section here: http://www.johncarterofmars.ca/news/ )  ERB's work is at its centennial and the fandom pre-internet was the Zine - a fanclub newsletter for those who kept the torch alive across the decades and now into its second century!

11/24/2011 - Switched the floating tool tip from R2-DB to Darth Hater's DB.  I have been enjoying the Darth Hater back catalog of podcasts on iTunes very, very much - so I think I will give them the support here.  Corso's Prototype Rifle 

11/23/2011 - BETA stress test weekend coming up.  I am having difficulties getting the client and it is Thanksgiving weekend so I might not be able to participate - not sure if that is a bad thing either - BETA is not early launch game play - it is testing and it could be ugly

11/23/2011 - Added a new link to R2-DB - a database driven site that has some interesting information - specifically interesting is their skill tree calculator for advanced classes.  It is difficult to understand what any of this will mean until we actually play the game and who knows how supportable this will be after the first patch/update to the game?  They have an interesting Amazon S3 powered tooltip system

9/27/2011 - I have continued to dig around and there is an amazing amount of people who have poured an tremendous amount of energy digging into the various released video and public statements.  This site (starwars MMO leveling guide) has some amazing charts on the classes and how they think the various crew crafting skills link into each other.  Oh - and the game is launching on December 20th (earlier if you pre-order and remember to register your purchase)

CLICK on each picture to view full size 

9/17/2011 - I found some more information about skill trees for crafting and crew member mission skills.  This is from a guild forum (Trifecta Star Syndicate ) and it is unclear where they got this information - so double grain of salt on this pre-release related info - it could be complete bantha poodu.  See the link for Crafting above - I've added this info on my crafting page

9/7/2011 - I have now created at PvP page - since we are currently doing the crucial debate on whether or not to be on a PvP server or doing PvP on a PvE server (player versus player/environment).  There is actually some good information out there on general gameplay of PvP - in that it is fun!  Bioware has also done some homework trying to make sure that there are options for PvP regardless of the faction/class balances on any particular server.  They also seem to be working hard at making other options than pure death match - cooperation and team goals in particular have a place.  I think this could be quite fun (considering I am many decades away from being 14 yrs old and I was not very fast twitch even then!)

8/28/2011 - I started to work on my Crafting (Crew Skills) page - see the top menu here for the link.  This is obviously highly changeable, but it looks like they are trying to make crafting very strong in this game.

I also have been doing a lot more digging into the various Imperial classes, PvP, Huttball (official video | Darth Hater video) and what I want to start with.  I think that my initial thoughts on going Sniper may not be what I want to go with - instead, I am thinking something in the Bounty Hunter line might be better for me - the cover mechanic looks to be something that could be difficult in PvP for the Imperial Agent and Smuggler.  From what I can see based on what has been shown so far, without cover, the Imperial Agent is very squishy and has significant problems.  This could very well get worked out by BioWare- but the Bounty Hunters look like they have a lot of cool class options. 

So - I changed my guild roster information - Bounty Hunter to start :-)  | Image One | Image two |

8/23/11 - I've been actually getting a bit excited about this game.  Star Wars and Tolkien IP are my two favorite things.  I like LOTRO very much and I am hoping that Bioware does a good job with this new title.

Another IP that I love is Edgar Rice Burroughs - for those who may not be aware, A Princess of Mars live action film  - called "John Carter" - is coming out in March of 2012 (Pixar/Disney).  The story is a great swashbuckler and I think this is the 100th anniversary of it.

Project Gutenburg version of the book (the copyright has expired) http://www.gutenberg.org/ebooks/62

Here is the Amazon paper version

And here is the official movie site

8/22/11 - I am looking to break out of my melee combat rut in Lord of The Rings Online and give a try at becoming a faceless Imperial Agent sneaking around the galaxy in this sweet little number - the X-70B Phantom

fonts from David occhino design:    aurebeshalternate, ASTRO se SOLID ALTERNATE ,

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