**Spoiler alert: If you are super serious about spoilers, I do utter the name of your companion in this. Parental discretion is strongly advised**

Quick disclaimer, this is in no way a min/max type thing, nor is it guarenteed to be accurate on live. I just felt like doing something productive, and in typical college fashion, that means do anything but homework/study. A second note is that a Jedi shadow can completely use this as well, just be aware 60% of the names are different across factions, but they all do the same thing. This is meant to be a guide to those that may not know a ton about the game and want a good chunk of information in one area, hopefully I do a half decent job. Now, on to the "guide"


After making the best 2 decisions of your life (going empire, and choosing to be an Inquisitor), you will next face the very difficult choice of character selection. I will not get into this, however I will remind you that no one suspects the short fat guy to be a deadly assassin. Just a heads up. You then come up with a witty name like "Spanish" (keeping up with the 'no one suspects it' theme), and enter the game.

You will spend the next 5 levels or so in God mode. You will only have a few abilities to start off with, I will briefely describe each one

Saber Strike This is often refered to as the "auto attack" ability. With no auto attack in SWTOR, they decided to put all your damage into abilities. Most of these use force and/or have cooldowns, which means that some times you have no other option but to use this. When those times happen, dont be afraid that you are out of force, just use this ability and wait to go kill people later.

Thrash This will be your primary attack early on. It does decent damage and only costs 25 force

Shock This ability is very useful, but its damage at this point of the game is not great. Use it for its stun, and understand that with a force cost of 45, it takes nearly half your force to use.

Please dont forget to buff yourself This will be the first of a few reminders of stuff you could very easily overlook in your excitement of playing such an awesome class

Ok, so you are now level 1. Go kill some boars or something and level up to 5. In this time you will pick up 3 more abilities

Force Lightning This ability isnt very useful right now. With no companion and a 10 yard range, it never gets all 3 ticks off. You are still in god mode, so you can use it, but its not a great ability

Overload This is a great ability, both in terms of fun and use. It will knock down non elite enemies, which can often save your life if godmode gets to your head

Whirlwind This is a short term cc. group have 2 elites? think of pulling with this cast on one of them

Congrats on getting to 5. Hopefully you ignored my previous advice and did the story line instead of killing boars, because it will now start to send you into areas where the fights often include elites. Always kill the weak enemies first, as all of them do roughly the same damage, so just get there numbers down first. You will get to level 8 or 9, and then will get the mission that gets you your first companion. But first, the new abilities you pick up

Electrocute This is your stun. It does a small amount of damage, but is used for its stun. Use on those big bad elites

Recklessness This is a neat cooldown if you've been wanting to use force lightning for a while. It will make pulling with force lightning an alright idea, as well as making shock crit a lot more often.

So, you've gotten a mission to go wake up Khem Val. You walk into a tomb, and see something stuck in a lightning prison. Around the corner is a group of droids. Now what I noticed is that these guys are all at least level 9, and they can hurt a bit. If you are having trouble here, you can make this real easy by pulling the droids to an edge, moving so the droids are between you and the ledge, and using overload to knock them off. This will kill them, and you do get xp. Plus its a taste of what is to come in warzones, but that's for another thread. Finish this mission and you will finally have a companion.

Thats about all I have for advise in the starter area, for the most part its pretty easy except for the Khem Val area I found (I do suggest grouping up for the group quests as well), so finish it up, and get out of there. Hopefully you are level 10 or 11 when this happens. You will be sent to the Imperial Fleet, and from there to Dromund Kaas. Before leaving for Dromund Kaas, you should probably pick up crafting skills. I would suggest artifice/archaeology/treasure hunting, or synthweaving/archaeology/underworld trading, or if you like making consumables biochem/bioanalysis and I forget the mission skill you want (you can look it up in the codex). You may also want to try out the first flashpoint, but I'm going to suggest you get your advanced class first, so head out to Dromund Kaas.

You are now on the Sith Capitol planet, and you quickly will realize this is no Coruscant. You will get off at the space port, and will be a speeder ride away. If you are somehow not level 10 yet, or just like doing all the missions available (not a bad habit), grab the ones outside of the spaceport and go do them, otherwise hop on a speeder to Dromund Kaas's main city. Once there, navigate your way to the north of the city (the northern most point the roads go to on this map) take a free speeder ride to the Sith Sanctum. Enter the building and you should have a mission available in the bottom right of the central area. Take this, and you can go become an Assassin.

Ok, that's it for the overly descriptive beginner guide, now for the fun stuff.

I assume you picked assassin, since stealth is badass. I will assume that you can look up these abilities yourself now, so that is up to you now. My reminder at this point is to not be like 3/4 of the beta population (yours truly included) and not realize that your trainer has 2, count em 2, tabs now. Do not forget to train the new abilities available to you from both tabs whenever you check in.

I'm getting a little tired at this point, and will finish up the 10-25 section at a later date, most likely this weekend. feel free to mention anything obvious I missed, the guide is about as long as I planned it to be at this point, and I don't want to mention everything, but if you feel something warrants a mention then feel free to say so