The Things I Wish I Knew (Compiled)

[Deleted]

I don't claim credit for any of the tips, or responsibility if any are wrong. I filtered out any that had been changed or were known to be wrong (slicing/mod station being cheaper) But I have NOT tested each and every one of these myself, I just took them and arranged them somewhat from the 20 page thread.

Enjoy

General/Environmental

Don't click things labelled "Mysterious" ;P

You can fall off of just about everything. xD

NPC enemies bumped from high heights will die, unlike wow

Hold onto your medpacs especially after level 28-ish, this game does not mind killing you while questing.

Whenever you are doing a phased quest in which you talk to someone and then have to defeat them, get them to 1 HP, and then speak to them again: Always heal up after the fight before talking to them, especially if they're Elite mobs. Sometimes after talking to them again they go into "Stage 2" and fight you again.

The mount vendor on your Fleet sells 2 level 25 mounts. The mount vendors on Tatooine sell 6 different level 25 mounts that generally look nicer.

Make sure you buy a speeder before you start Tatooine, trust me... Tatooine is hot and big... and big

Being a completionist puts you 5 levels over content.

Modable gear including weapons can be worn indefinitely. You can just keep swapping out current level modifications and the stats will always be level appropriate for you.

You dont need modifying station to mod your gear!

If you get a BoE with that shiny orange color crystal in it, taking it out will make both the crystal and the item bound to you without warning

Most cantinas sell consumables increasing presence (companion power) and out-of-combat health regen, great for world PvE. Also look out for stim vendors, who can be anywhere.

Take you time with your first character and learn how the map functions work, e.g. it can save a lot of time if there is a GTN kiosk, and you traveled to a different planet to find one.

The Emergency fleet pass, IS an emergency pass, you have an 18h cooldown on it

You can buy a fleet pass (one hour cooldown) from the security vendor in the fleet for 1K credits each.
Here is the important part -
ONCE YOU CLICK IT TO USE IT, IT IS CONSUMED. MOVING TO INTERRUPT THE CAST STILL COUNTS IT AS USED

You do not have to return at your ship every time you leave a planet, your ship will follow you everywhere

Dotting an enemy will prevent him to any kind of tagging (activate world objects for example)

Pressing ESCAPE during cinematics will cancel it, and all your previous answers to the questions. Very useful if you did a mistake in any way. Pressing ESCAPE during docking/departing cinematics will cancel it aswell and not skip it.

Jumping while moving results in you moving slower. So jump bunnies from WOW/CS need to learn not to jump, it actually imparts a disadvantage

If you see an interactable object with red arrows pointing toward it, CLICK IT!
Seriously, do it. It's fun. It's quite amusing, watching my Sith Marauder use the Force to blow up a tank of flammable gas, incinerating the enemies that were standing around it (there's other effects too depending on the object). You still get credit for the kills, too!

Shift + drag to split stacks.

You can only have 25 quests in your quest log at anytime
I thought my quest chain was broken because NPC's would say YOU MUST COMPLETE MISSIONS and I thought I had missed a previous quest

THERE IS NO /roll EMOTE!!!!!!!!!!!

So far as Im aware, each planet(except starter) has a "Bonus Series" of missions that you get it you've completed the main class quests (and perhaps other quest?) on the planet

In the top right corner of your inbox you'll see two checkboxes, one is a mass delete, prett useful but nothing special... the other? the other is PURE win. It's the inbox version of mass loot :P got a shitload of succesful auction? select em all and push that button it'll get all the money and delete them all in one push. WINNING

Do NOT turn in a quest with a bonus mission attached to it if the bonus missions is incomplete…if you turn in the parent quest, the bonus mission will be removed from your quest log before completion. I do not think it it's possible to reacquire the bonus quest, either, if it's attached to a parent quest and not just a location or type of mob.

Rest Zone: Always log out in a Cantina. They are the equal to inns in WoW

No Symbol: "grey" mobs. You grab too many, and you'll die, but they also tend to die the fastest.
1 grey symbol: strong mobs. These are mobs that are similar, in strength, to you. Pull more than 1 or 2, depending on class/level/etc., and you're toast.
1 Gold Symbol: Elite mobs. These will make you dead if you pull one of these with too many of the mobs below it. Story bosses tend to be Elite level mobs.
Gold and Silver: Various "Boss" level mobs. The more overlays, the more difficult it is.

Once you hit level 50, you can farm lower level missions like Black Talon or Esseles for Light Side/Dark Side points on your own. Back to back, it doesn't reset once a day you can do it all you want

You can only have a maximum of 50 auctions up at the same time!

Selling things on the auction house is always nice, but if you dont sell your item, you get your deposit back ! If you cancel the item (because you accidentially put it up for 1499 instead of 499 (damn "1" bug thing)), you will lose the deposit
The higher your buyout price is, the higher the deposit also

Nar Saddaa Auction house is neutral. so if youre rerolling faction you can take your riches with you!

If you need more auction slots, its very fast to run a lvl 1 to the fleet and use him as an auction mule. Dont forget to send him some credits for the initial deposits

The auction house "default price" is exactly 450% of the vendor price. It does NOT change depending on what other people post the item for

Vendor sell price is listed right below the item name when you have a vendor window open


Companions

Gear your companions well, trust me, it's worth the investment for levelling. You can equip your soul bound gear onto your companion!

-There is a companion customization vendor (for all of them) on Balmorra which you can access the moment you get your ship. (republic)

If your companion comes with multiple stances like healing/dps, double-check a stance is actually active! My companions frequently lose their stance. Click the companion bar + plus sign to expand it and view stances. Unfortunately, companion abilities cannot be rearranged to put stances on the "short bar." The long bar clutters the screen so I close it again after checking the stance.

If you are a Consular and you like using Qyzen, do not spend hours and hours, asking in trade for Armstechs, upset that the only one you can get up to Coruscant is a lvl 10 vendor Techblade under the Senate, get frustrated and give up on it, then fly to Nar Shadar and grab the vendor one in 30 secs........

You can get your companions to go sell all your "Gray items" saves bag space while questing and instant creds

Íf your companion is low on health after a fight and you are in an outdoor area, just use your speeder to bring it back to full health. way faster then using your regen ability

If ur companion dies, don't rez him. Dismiss him and resummon returns him in less time and he comes back at full health.

Companion that comes together with your first ship is actually a healer and can be summoned. (Your first dialog with him suggests his not suitable for combat.)

If you're using a pet you want to heal, ALT+F him to set him as a focus. You can then set a focus modifier, to use skills on him without targeting them.

If you wanna romance Jaesa Willsaam dont be an idiot and go light side like i did

Using a medpack that affects both you and your companion will res them if they've died in combat

Your companions also learn new skills as you level up. Make sure your expanding the companion skill bar every level or setting it to the left side permanently so you can turn on these new skills. My companions weren't using some of their newer skills for I don't know how many levels lol

You can prevent gaining negative affection with your companion by sending him/her out on Crew Skill mission while you talk to questgivers. They will not gain any bonuses from these conversations while they are sent away.


Grouping

Only one person has to be present to turn in most group quests. Once they do, you get an option to 'holocall' and appear at the dialogue as a hologram. You can still make choices; however, you will be exempt from choices that perform physical actions

Any class can rez a dead person in their party when you right click on them (out of combat of course)

At the end a Flashpoint, you can exit the area by clicking the "Exit Area" button above the mini-map. True story, bro. Don't be stuck in an instance for 20 minutes...

If it says that you can't join a group because of area phases, right-click your portrait and go to the tab that sais: "Area Phases" and click "Reset Area Phase". Your problem will then be fixed and you can ask for a new invite. Winning.

When in a group, each person gets to make the choice how the conversation will progress. The game simply determines by random roll whose choice is used. Your light side and dark side points are rewarded based on YOUR choice, not the winning choice. However the results of the encounter will progress along the path of the winning roll. This may grant you a title you would never willingly have chosen to get.

Was happy to find out you can create a comment in the LFG page.. This is an AMAZING feature IMO. Pick up a heroic area quest or a flashpoint quest.. hit the LFG and find out who is looking for that exact thing. No more spamming channels or finding people in a general LFG that are looking for entirely different groups, find exactly what you want and when you need.

Here's a great piece of info from reddit: You can search for people who are Looking for Group regardless of the zone they and you are in. Hit up /who and do a search for "LFG". You can even refine to a certain level or class by searching for "LFG Sorcerer" of "LFG 50"

Group up! You get XP (25%) for your partner completing bonus missions

Flashpoint dailies are found in the "Supplies" area and ask you to do one of either two or three flashpoints for completion, yielding a decent chunk of xp


Settings

Camera zoom by default is not set to maximum distance. It can be increased in the settings

Don't be a twi'lek if you like wearing hoods.

Character names can include 2 apostrophes, 1 dash and there is a 15 character limit. - Bioware DO NOT offer any name change services unless you're breaking the naming policy. No paid service and sending a ticket to a GM won't help. Not even the punctuation can be corrected. (Hence my 2nd character lol)

You can enable an option that allows you to compare gear not only to your own, but to that of your active companion's when you hover over the item.

Target of Target is Alt T (look under the Key Bindings Tab). This one has come in handy many times.

When your UI is frozen and you can't press any functions on it just press ctrl-u twice and it will fix it.

You can set Shift-Right Click to be your companion gather, that way you can gather when you need to (it's generally a little bit faster to do it yourself) and not always end up waiting for your companion's pathing to kick in.

Spacebar skips cinematics of spaceships docking/departing.

You can turn on an option called "loot area" - this will loot all corpses in the near area when you loot the first one. So good.

Pressing ctrl + shift + f (I think) shows you your FPS in the lower left corner.

You can activate an option which allows you to see any light or dark gains during discussions.

You can change the ability used when right clicking an enemy by simply placing the desired skill in the "1" quickslot.
If you set a keybinding for "1" somewhere besides the first spot on the toolbar, you can have a different skill bound to right click and 1

The interface customisation doesn't seem to copy for each character natively. You can however copy the contents of "he6029_CHAR1_PlayerGUIState" to "he6029_CHAR2_PlayerGUIState", which'll be located for Win7 in: C:\Users\YOURNAMEHERE\AppData\Local\SWTOR\swtor\settings

Esc > Prefs > User Interface > Tooltip > Show Detailed Item Tooltips
Shows the mods in items.


Crew Skills

Don't go overboard levelling crew skills(professions) before you have your mount. Otherwise you won't be able to afford the 48k credit cost at level 25. The exception being slicing which makes money directly(as opposed to needing to find out which craftables sell well on AH)

It gets super-expensive to pull item enhancements out of your gear (upwards of 3k to pull out a lvl 30 purple item).
You can just over-write it, but it destroys the current enhancement in the slot.

When you craft superior quality items (at least, implants and earpieces) they will gain an augment item modification slot.

Your companions can craft up to five items at a time, simply click the craft button over and over.

What Reverse Engineering acctually was used for. All those things I crafted and just sold to a vendor...
So far the known RE schematics you can aquire in order are... Green (RE)-> Blue (RE)-> Purple T1 (RE)-> Purple T2

You Can "disenchant" anything that you have a craft skill for (and craft level) Armstech can DE guns/knifes etc.

You do not have to press the "Reverse Engineering" button again when using it on several items in a row, unlike WoW (used my stim when i tried to RE it :x)

Cancelling a companion mission or craft, gives you back the mats used or credits, but if you are in combat, your pet will not re-appear

Improving your relationship with your companion means they complete crew skill missions faster.

skill points are for your whole crew.. but some of your crew will get bonus for some kinds of craft/missions

You can have 3 crew skills, but only 1 of them can be "crafting" I believe

You can see what other players crafting recipes have available to them.
Select another player
Right click on their player picture (next to their health)
Select "Advanced actions/information" or "More actions/information" whatever the bottom one is
In the next menu down there is a "View Schematics" selection, click that guy

In the crew skill windows for gathering skills, there is a drop down menu in the top right. This will let you still go back and gather older materials even if you level your skill past them and move onto the next 'tier'. Don't think I noticed that until like level 18

If you send your companion on crafting/gather missions, and cancel the mission, you get your mats/credits back

Companion Missions: If you can afford it, send your companions on long missions/crafting sessions when you log out for the night/day/a couple of hours. When you log back in, they'll be done with whatever it was they were doing, and be available for more

I found out at level 50 that sending a companion off to with Archaeology to obtain Cortosis Substrates that I was actually making money. You can send them off on missions to obtain the basic raw material that you can buy from the vendors. I thought that was stupid since you can just buy it. However, at level 50 I'd typically spend 1400 credits to send dude off but I'd get 10 Cortosis Substrates from the mission. They cost 400 credits so I'm more than doubling my money. I don't know if the numbers add up at lower levels but if they do, even if you're low on cash its something you can make your companions do that is productive and can get you a little cash

This one might be well known and is kind of small, but you can double click on a mission for a crew skill to send a companion off to do it instead of having to click the send companion thing at the bottom

You can have your companions craft or run mission simultaneously, and the mats can be in your cargo hold, not just your inventory


Space Missions

You can buy Starship upgrades before even getting your Starship... Had I known that I wouldn't have done the 1st mission 8 billion times with out completing it.

You can access your ship's cargo hold before you have a ship. I just found this out, and it's going to help for me storing mats. You can deposit them in the Fleet. And I assume some other places as well, like Coruscant

As soon as you get your ship, get all the upgrades you can and do all the missions asap, you should complete all of all of them, and the xp is good.

Space missions (quests) give fast experience, and are easy with inexpensive Tier 1 ship upgrades available at any spacedock. It's a good way to add variety to leveling when you get tired of missions on a given planet.

Hitting Space bar in a Space Mission does a barrel roll. >_<

When you hyperspace to a destination, you can immediately depart your ship without waiting for the hyperspace effect to complete.

The ship missions are repeatable dailies

In the space missions u can hold the right mouse button and drag to select more targets and then release to fire up to 4 missiles together

Even with epic ship gear, some of the missions are tough! STOP SHOOTING WHEN THERE ARE NO BADDIES AROUND! Your shields will regenerate, but only if you're not firing. Start learning to make every shot count, so you get as much shield regen time as possible

If you're having trouble with the higher end space combat missions, make sure to buy a power conversion module.
Once installed you can press 1 for more blaster power (reducing shield generation) and 2 for more shield regeneration (lower blaster power).
You will want to be in 1 for most of the time unless your shields are super low. As long as you have a little but of shielding left you don't take damage to your ships HP. However, you want to flip-flop between 1 and 2 constantly.
When there is downtime, flip to 2 to get your shields back up and then back to 1. Even 3-4 seconds of swapping is enough to get a little bit of shielding back and will make it much easier to survive.


PVP

If you PvP before 20, enough to get at least a thousand commendations, get pvp gear from the fleet, its that good.

PVP comms cap at 1000, so spend that shit

Can just right click the warzone button to queue instead of opening up the window and thne press queue :P

Give MVP votes in Warzones, it helps your faction get stronger. I dont know if people are unaware or just very selfish, but I rarely see more than half the MVPs awarded. Also dont just give it to the person with highest healing or damage, try to give to people who are reporting in chat, or perhaps the 2nd highest healer, as lots of people just give to the highest, so number 2 isnt rewarded. Also damage is fine and good, but a bit unfair to someone who defends that west turret the whole game gets nothing, and the noob who blindly runs into the middle gets 5 MVPs every game


Class Skills

As a smuggler/IA you can press Shift + F to always deploy your cover where you are at and not roll to anything nearby. (EXTREMELY usefuly for bosses)

You get sprint at level 14. zomg, so much love for sprint!

Don't buy every skill before level 25 to help afford your mount as it costs 48,000 credits. Unless you have slicing of course.

nobody said it so i'm not sure how much of an issue it is, but once you choose your advanced class the trainer has two tabs at the bottom, one for regular class(consular, Bounty Hunter, ect.) skills, and one for advance class skills(powertech, shadow).

[philefluxx]

Sweet ty, that other thread was getting big

[Dakia]

Thanks for the compilation. The other thread was a bit chaotic.

[RushLimbaugh]

One other thing that took me a bit to notice. It's possibly a bug, I'm not sure, but it's something to note nonetheless:

Right clicking an item from your inventory to your ship's locker does NOT stack said item with identical items in the locker.

Reaaaaaaally hope this gets added in soon, as it is really annoying as hell.

Oh and also:

If you need to get back to fleet quickly and are on cooldown / don't have fleet passes, find the Flashpoint Courier on your planet. 1 Loading Screen > 2!

[target563]

+1 to the Flashpoint Courier, unfortunately at this time there is no icon on the map for them. So you'll have to find them and remember where they are on the planet you are on.

[Deleted]

+1 to the Flashpoint Courier, unfortunately at this time there is no icon on the map for them. So you'll have to find them and remember where they are on the planet you are on.

They are generally in the second big area of each planet, though some may be different (Coruscant for instance, has it in the central area I believe).

[Deleted]

...

Nar Saddaa Auction house is neutral. so if youre rerolling faction you can take your riches with you!

Been level 50 for god knows how long and only thing that was stopping me trying the other faction was this i thank who ever threw this in there!

[uopayroll]

The minimum requirements for your PC as labelled on the box and website are quite wrong...

[Deleted]

If you can get a token drop that nobody needs (from hardmode flashpoints), try and get it. You can buy awesome gear for your companions. The tokens themselves have class restrictions, but the actual items don't!

[ohnoto]

This all looks great. There are a lot of little things that most new players to the game don't realize.

I would add the option for showing companion customization under settings. That one is extremely helpful when finding new gear and seeing if it is good for your current companion.

[asharia]

theres an 18hour CD port/hearth to the fleet
you have to repair

took me until the 20s to realise both of these

[AlexTheGreat]

Awesome thread! Thank you for this.

[Littleshashi]

NOW this is worth the sticky.