It isn’t a problem with the game, it’s mechanics, or the content that I never saw. I want to get that out of the way right now. The game was entertaining, and my guildies are all fantastic. However, I’ve hit a point where I’m just not having fun with it any more. I’ve seriously been coming up with ways to avoid the game because of that. It isn’t anything that anybody’s done, mind; it’s just that I’m not having the fun with it that I thought I would.

Not only that, but finances are a little limited for me right now. In the real world, I work a part-time job that currently does not give me a lot in the way of hours and I consider myself lucky that I get the shifts that I do at all. I’m looking for a second job right now (or at least something better), but until that happens, I’m limited in my funding and can only maintain one game subscription at a time. I figure that subscription should belong to a game I still actively enjoy.

So, as of today, I cancelled my SWTOR subscription. Perhaps I might pick it up again in the future, but, for right now, that’s just not in the cards.

Of course, if you’re unfortunate enough to have received an email like this, you might be wondering what to do with it. Blizzard provided us with an email address to forward all phishing emails to, but once I had gotten my first SWTOR phishing email, I realized that I didn’t know what to do with said email apart from deleting it. Did the devs have an email to send all phishing emails to like Blizzard did?

Curious, I scoured through pages and pages of the Customer Service forum and then finally the FAQ when I couldn’t find anything more recent than January before I finally found something of a solution. If you receive such an email and aren’t certain what to do with it like I was, here’s what you do, taken directly from SWTOR’s own FAQ:

Emails sent to you from Star Wars: The Old Republic are sent from the mail domain @email.swtor.com, and this domain should be the only one you see in the sender and reply-to headers in an email that is genuinely from us.

Please also be aware that we will never request your password details or the answers to your Security questions via email.

If you receive an email claiming to be from Star Wars: The Old Republic that asks you to provide this kind of information (either by replying to the mail or by clicking on a link inside it), please do not reply to the mail and do not follow any hyperlinks in the message.  We would ask you to please forward any suspect mails to support@swtor.com so that we can investigate them.

With this information in hand, I made certain to copy the full original header and paste it into the email (habit from forwarding phishing emails to Blizzard) before I forwarded my first SWTOR-related spam mail off to the bolded address above. I actually got two very quick responses from the CS team once I did so: one to confirm they had received the email within five minutes after I had forwarded it and one at least an hour or so later confirming that it was, in fact, spam (which I knew already) and tips on how to tell the real thing from the phishers.

Essentially, though, guys, if it looks suspicious, it probably is. Even if you aren’t sure, you can always forward it off to the support team to make sure. They’ll tell you whether it’s official or whether it isn’t. If you’re worried about someone guessing your password and getting into your account, though, make sure you invest in an authenticator/security key. Either buy a physical one or download one from your iTunes/Android app store and get it attached to your account, which makes it much more difficult for people to get into it if they manage to crack your password. There have been many WoW horror stories I’ve heard where guild banks get cleared out, characters get transferred and/or stripped of their equipment just for the gold. Please do not let this happen to you.

As we all know, Bioware has been making some interesting changes lately to SWTOR. One of these seems to be making mega-servers, and, to accomplish this, they have been offering us free server transfers to certain destination servers of their choice. Honestly, I didn’t think that Lord Adraas, the server I’ve had since launch in December, would ever be touched. I had been under the impression it was one of the larger RP servers, and, if anything, would have been a destination server.

Turns out I was wrong somewhere, as, last week, free transfers opened up from Lord Adraas to The Ebon Hawk.

Up until my guildies mentioned something to me over Twitter, I honestly had no idea this was something that was open to us. Because I had these strange beliefs about our home server, I didn’t even think it was a possibility. However, we collectively decided to make the leap and move over. To my surprise, the server transfers went through very quickly, despite the quoted time for each transfer being about an hour. In about ten or fifteen minutes, I had all of my girls moved over and everything was just as I had left it. Bioware, if you ever happen to stumble upon this and read this post, thank you again for the speed in which all the transfers happened. I loved that I was able to be online and playing again in a matter of minutes as opposed to a few hours.

There were a few renames I had to do, of course, but that was to be expected. I was saddened that I lost both the unique names I had associated with one of mine, but I was able to claim her surname as her Legacy name on the new server, so I was still able to keep a piece of her (thankfully; she wouldn’t have been the same, otherwise). However, my guild was also faced with the unexpected dilemma of choosing a new guild name. To be honest, though, I like our new name better than our old one. >> Hail to JOUST Squadron!

As of today, new servers are open for transfer, so check the list to see if your server is on there. Yours might become a destination server, so if that’s the case, see who might be coming to join you. If you’ve made the decision about server transferring and are faced with similar problems like my guild and I were, Anexxia of Inquisitor’s Roadhouse has some wonderful tips regarding choosing new names for yourself and your Legacy and some fun ideas for new guild names, so be sure to check those out.

I will say, though, that it’s nice seeing a ridiculous number of people on the Republic fleet. I’m so used to there being only a handful of us there. It was kind of lonely.

Then Bioware had to go and screw all that up by unleashing patch 1.2 in Star Wars: The Old Republic last Thursday.

I’d be lying if I said I wasn’t excited for the patch. I was. What was there to hate about racial unlocks, family trees, and a whole slew of other new things that came along with it? (Not to mention the stealth inclusion of the rakghoul plague spreading to Tatooine, but I digress.) The new patch meant that something I’ve wanted since the game began was almost within my reach: a twi’lek bounty hunter. I really don’t know what it is about the race that I love, but I love everything about them, and when the game had first begun and we had limited information as to what twi’leks could be, I was a little disappointed that they couldn’t be bounty hunters. This disappointment grew exponentially upon game launch when it turned out there were twi’lek bounty hunter trainers. I was very sad. With the new patch, however, as soon as I got a twi’lek to level 50, I could finally have my wish. It really didn’t take long for this to set in for me.

Out of the two twi’lek characters I had, the closest to level cap by the time the patch rolled around was Bel’neven, my Sith Sorcerer, who was level 40 at the time. Keeping this in mind, there was really only one thing to do: go on a leveling binge. I had the day off, after all! So, after going out to stock up a bit on necessary supplies, I went a little crazy. That first day, I was fortunate enough to get Bel’neven to level 45 and get her off of Belsavis. I’ve been working on her ever since, and then, late last night, I finally achieved the dream:

After a brief conversation with Khem Val, Bel'neven finally hits level 50.

Needless to say, I was excited and had to flail about it over twitter. (I even got an early congratulations from the official SWTOR twitter account! I’m still floored about that.) Was it worth it? I can honestly say that, yes, I feel like it was. By the time I hit Corellia, the Sith Inquisitor storyline was really picking up, and I was excited to see where it would go. I won’t go into the specifics here, if only because that’s another post unto itself. I will say, though, that if there’s one thing Bioware really knows how to do, it’s create a good story and keep you invested in it. You may switch to other alts, but you still remember most of what’s going on. You’re still invested in the arc, your character, and your character’s companions. So, yeah, definitely worth it. Now I can finally explore the bits of the galaxy that were previously unknown to me, and PvP my little heart out with other people at my level.

Plus, you know, there’s that wonderful added bonus of finally being able to start my twi’lek alt army, starting with the twi’lek bounty hunter I’ve yearned for. Be afraid, citizens of Lord Adraas. Be very afraid.

And yet, somehow, when a guildmate of mine and I had been talking about warzones (SWTOR’s version of battlegrounds), I thought diving into one without a friend was a good plan. Now, prior to the other night, I had never even touched warzones. Operations and flashpoints are also things I’ve never really touched, but, you know, that’s something for another time. Warzones, however, are infinitely more terrifying. Now, you have to understand that on the Imperial side, I’m a Sith Inquisitor and a healer, besides. My primary goal is healing people and making sure the people who are qualified to take out the opposing team can actually do it. Unfortunately, being a healer in a battleground is the equivalent of being a giant target. See, once the opposing team knows you’re the healer, you might as well have one of those giant flashing neon arrows over your head. They will come after you, and you may wind up a smear on the floor if you can’t heal yourself quickly enough.

Despite the fact that absolutely terrified me, despite not knowing what the hell I was doing, I thought it was a wonderful idea to queue up for a warzone. It was only when the queue popped that I started to panic. I had absolutely no idea what I was doing, what warzone I was going to be thrust into, or even what the goal of said warzone was. Despite this, I clicked the button to enter the warzone anyway, and was faced with a loading screen I did not recognize at all. Now, I know I could have asked what we were supposed to do once we all came into the warzone (that I later learned was the Voidstar), but I decided against it. Instead, I plunged in, taking minimal instruction via BG chat. Apparently, Voidstar’s two rounds: one where you attack and another where you defend, all in the span of a few minutes. All in all, I think things went pretty well, since both sides never let the other near the datacore, and there were victories all around.

Emboldened, I plunged in again. At least if I got Voidstar again, I’d know what I was doing! It was not to be, however, as I found myself in Alderaan. This time, someone asked if we had any healers in the group, and I was brave enough to pipe up and tell them that I was. Someone was kind enough to bubble me, and the battleground began. I had the most fun in Alderaan, I think, and I found it to be a much friendlier experience than the Voidstar had been. As the Empire ran out to claim the center turret, I followed, and there I remained throughout the battleground, keeping everybody alive as much as I realistically could. Some were higher in level than I was, others were lower, but, to my surprise, I helped make some of the people around me unbeatable, and, under my watch, most of us were. In Alderaan, I didn’t die nearly as often as I had in the Voidstar, and, in the end, several members of our little band even voted me an MVP!

I’m not certain what an MVP vote does once the warzone is over, mind, but the fact that people had voted for me at all made me all kinds of happy, and gave me the confidence to dive in again. This time, I got Huttball. I was most certainly not a fan of Huttball. I died many times there, mostly due to not knowing what the hell I was doing, but I tried to heal whoever was carrying the ball as quickly as I could. Sure, I died several times doing it, but, you know, that happens.

In the end, when all was said and done and I returned to the Imperial fleet, I realized I was actually enjoying myself. Sure, I had no idea what I was doing and I had died multiple times, but I was having fun nonetheless! And I was earning commendations I could spend on pretty moddable gear once I hit level 40 so I could finally wear something that actually matched. Long story short, I tried something that honestly scared me, and it turned out that I had fun doing it. I encourage everybody to give something like that a try because it really isn’t as scary as you might think it is. You might even have fun.

I’d like to share one such example with you. Now, I’d like to preface the following story by saying that I’m aware it’s SWTOR-specific. However, as everybody has their own personal breaking points, the concept is in no way specific to any one game. From a roleplaying perspective, our characters are people, too, and they will react as they will to certain events. Some will react more dramatically than others.

For those of you who are unfamiliar with the Sith Inquisitor storyline as dictated by Bioware, you begin life as a slave (made worse for those who choose to play an alien as the Empire dislikes aliens immensely), but are discovered to be Force-sensitive and are raised for a very specific purpose to become Sith. I won’t say what that purpose is because, you know, spoilers. Suffice to say that in your trials, one Sith Lord likes you the best and makes you her apprentice. As you go throughout the galaxy, obtaining various artifacts, a few of the NPCs may make note that you used to be a slave. If you’re an alien that isn’t a pureblood Sith, they’ll make note of that, too. Rather loudly. According to them, you’re inferior whether you like it or not.

Now, my Inquisitor is a twi’lek woman by the name of Bel’neven (or Belne Ven, if you choose to break her name down into it’s core components). I don’t have to use Bioware’s given storyline as a base to work with for IC purposes, and yet I do anyway. Belne is a former slave, and she knows it. She doesn’t particularly try to hide it, either. She is what she is and she’s come to accept that. Since her status has been raised, however, she feels like she owes the Empire, but there’s a part of her that’s still… a bit pure-hearted, I guess you could say. As a result, I opted to make her a healer, and I’ve mostly been choosing the Light-side dialogue options for her. The reason being that I think it’d be interesting. After all, killing everything in sight doesn’t always get you to your end goal. Sometimes, you need to be diplomatic.

Unfortunately, things didn’t quite go as planned. I had broken my Light-side streak once already on Korriban. Once Belne arrived on Balmorra, one quest in the course of the Inquisitor’s class storyline forced me to break my Light-side streak again. An Imperial that she had been dealing with decided she wouldn’t get what she wanted from him unless she found his son, another Sith, who had gone and gotten himself caught by Balmorran rebels. So, after slugging through Balmorra and dealing with all sorts of crap from various people, she grudgingly decided to find the man’s son for him. Once she found him, the human Sith apprentice decided the best course of action was to greet her by calling her a filthy alien.

At that point, Belne snapped. The “filthy alien” had just torn through a number of people and, oh, look at that! She hadn’t been stupid enough to get caught. She was there to save his butt, and he had to start off being ungrateful. So, to her, it made perfect sense to call him an insufferable fool in return. The sniping continued for a good few minutes, and I kept being prompted with a choice to let him go. I could have, but then he made the mistake of mentioning a Sith weapon he had been after, which I thought Belne’s master might want. Power, after all, is very important to the Sith, and the weapon could be an additional edge.

In the end, the jerkiest Sith apprentice Belne had come across since Ffon on Korriban told her he wanted out of the cell he was trapped in and I was prompted with three dialogue choices: I’m sorry (but you have to die), No (the only way you get out of that cell is in a body bag), and let him go (for the… what… fourth time? Fifth? At that point, I lost count). I weighed my options. I could take the insults like a man and let him go. After all, opinions at likes mouths; everybody’s got one. However, she was above letting people call her a filthy alien now. She was Sith, damn it, and that earned her a certain amount of respect from anybody, whether she was an alien or not. She wasn’t about to just let him walk out of there, not after that, especially after she had tried to negotiate and tried to get him to give her the holocron that revealed the location of the Sith weapon. She had tried to be nice, and being nice hadn’t worked so well. The only option was to kill him. She didn’t want to piss off his father, either, but, in the end, I chose the first option, fighting happened, and Belne emerged victorious, complete with a new weapon to show off to her master once she saw her again.

The whole incident, however, got me thinking. Generally, Belne is a nice woman, at least until you insult her. All bets are off at that point. For Belne, that’s her breaking point. Like it or not, she’s Sith now and she will be treated as such. Fail to do it and shit will hit the fan. This, also, was what sadly got the ex-apprentice’s father killed shortly after when he failed to show the proper respect. The fear was nice, though.

So my question to you, dear readers, is this: what is your character’s breaking point? What’s one thing that will cause them to snap?

The prologue made the trooper’s Chapter One story arc obvious enough. Havoc Squad, the unit you served with on Ord Mantell, defected to the Empire, leaving your trooper and Aric Jorgan the sole members of said squad in their wake. The trooper player character (in my case, Vordane) was promoted to the leader of Havoc Squad, with Jorgan serving as it’s first official member. Your task, laid out for you over the course of the first chapter, is to find, put a stop to the plans of, and either apprehend or kill your former unit mates. Every step brings you closer to Tavus, the former leader of Havoc Squad, and every little thing you do winds up irritating the Imperials more and more. You do, at least, pick up a few new members for Havoc Squad along the way. My personal favorite is probably M1-4X, if only because he’s my tanking robot buddy, a wonderful compliment to my combat medic spec.

And, at what seemed like long last, I did it. I pushed Vordane to 31 and got to the end of Chapter One of the storyline. And, well, I needed to flail.

The thing about the villains we have to face is that they aren’t two-dimensional. They’re living, breathing people with actual motivation. In the trooper’s case, early on in the game, we learned about the battle of Ando Prime, and we know how the then-Havoc Squad felt about the whole thing. The Galactic Senate abandoned Havoc Squad against an overwhelming amount of Imperials, and we know Havoc felt betrayed. So when Tavus and the rest of Havoc Squad threw in their lot with the Imperials some time after, it really made sense. After all, the very people you were supposed to protect and serve, the people who said they were the righteous ones abandoned them. What else were they to do when they felt the Republic wasn’t much better than the Empire?

Naturally, however, the betrayal was a harsh one, and Vordane’s first mission, it seemed, was to go after Havoc Squad. Wraith managed to elude her, two former members of Havoc Squad surrendered peacefully (it was nice to see Fuse sticking to his morals; I honestly thought it was a trick at first before I realized he was sincere, and Vordane wound up saving his life as opposed to the plans he had been working on. Vordane will never leave a man behind ever), and the rest, unfortunately, had to be gunned down. This culminated in a Moment of Awesome for me on Alderaan when Vordane was finally able to go after Gearbox, the first person she had ever spoken to on Ord Mantell. Not only was I able to take down his elite death machine robot, but, utilizing a lot of healing probes and Forex taking most of the beating, I was able to take down Gearbox himself (also elite) immediately after. I wanted to cheer and shout from the rooftops, but, sadly, people were sleeping and that wasn’t an option.

There were a few moral choices afterwards that left me questioning myself, several that I agonized over for hours until I realized that, sometimes, Vordane couldn’t save everybody even though she wanted to. She’s always been a bit idealistic, I guess, but orders are orders, and she wasn’t about to upset anybody from House Organa after General Garza told her to keep them happy. Thus, Markus Thul, the man who had helped her to find Gearbox, had to remain a prisoner of House Organa. His wife and daughter were furious with me, though Markus seemed to accept his fate. I left that conversation feeling a bit broken and disheartened. It wasn’t the outcome Vordane and I both wanted. She wanted to let them all go free, but she was already in trouble with her superior as it was. However, the fact that Markus had to remain in that cell, left to whatever fate the Organas had in mind for him, killed me, and I could hear his daughter’s harsh words long after I left Alderaan.

At that point, I  was informed to head to Coruscant. I should have slept at that point, but I couldn’t. I had to continue. I knew the end of the first chapter was near, and it’s like when you’re reading a good book. You know something amazing is coming, but you can’t put it down because, if you do, you’ll forever be thinking about that wonderful thing that’s coming and you won’t be able to focus on anything else. I had thought that, perhaps, the storyline with Havoc Squad’s betrayal would stretch out across multiple chapters, but it seemed as though Bioware determined one was enough. That was a bit disappointing to me, but I was also curious to see what the rest of the trooper arc would be. So, after reporting briefly to General Garza, Vordane was rewarded for her persistent efforts with the one thing she had been searching for the entire time: the location of Harron Tavus.

Determined to stop him, Vordane and M1-FX snuck aboard the Imperial ship, systematically going through it room by room and disabling their hyperdrive, only to finally be confronted by Wraith shortly after. Vordane had no choice; Wraith had to die, and she soon met her end on the engine room floor. The Imperials kept coming, but every time, Vordane and Forex would push them back, killing many of them to clear a path to Tavus on the bridge. Until that point, Vordane had hoped that she could convince Tavus to come quietly. Tavus, it seemed, had other ideas. He was determined to have an epic confrontation with his former squad mate, and Vordane had no choice but to oblige.

The battle raged all across the bridge until, finally, Vordane and Forex managed to cripple Tavus enough and he began to see reason. Though Vordane tried her best to convince him to become a prisoner of the Republic, to surrender, Tavus refused. The way he saw it, he was as good as dead anyway, and would rather die in battle than be executed by the Senate. He wanted an honorable death. A warrior’s death. Vordane couldn’t deny him that, and so she killed him, shooting him at last with a blast from her cannon.

And I, to my surprise, felt myself start to tear up. I didn’t want this to happen. I’ll be honest. I did not want to kill Tavus. He was misguided, yes, but I understood where he was coming from. I tried so hard to convince him in the end to just turn himself in, but, no, he wouldn’t let me talk him into it. Apparently, he can be talked into it with certain dialogue choices (my guild leader, also a trooper, managed to convince him to surrender), but, in my personal story arc, Tavus was killed, and after coming off another quest where I wasn’t able to save a man who had helped me, it kind of broke me.

This is why I love this game, though. Every choice you make shapes your character’s story. Other people might not choose the same exact option as you. They might choose something completely different, and that’s okay. It sparks debates and controversy, and people will spend hours asking others “well, why did you do it this way? Wouldn’t it make more sense to do things this other way?” I love that we have the freedom to shape our own stories in the Star Wars universe. It’s perfect and I can’t imagine things any other way in here.

Now… onwards to chapter two.

So, shamelessly borrowing this from Miss Anexxia, today I give you Thyanel’s MMO year in review!

What were you most excited about in the past year?
Too many things to count. Chief amongst them, however, was probably SWTOR. I’ve been waiting impatiently for this game for what honestly seemed like forever, so to finally have the release date and joining the entire fandom in the countdown for it was nothing short of entertaining for me.

Troll druids, and goblin/worgen ladies were also very high up there on the list, and to actually see these things become a reality in World of Warcraft was probably the most fun I’ve had in that game. I was beyond excited to try out the worgen starting area and the redesigned questing zones, and I was most certainly not disappointed.

What was the best thing you bought?
I can’t think of anything major in World of Warcraft, but I can think of numerous things otherwise. Oddly, they’re both mount-related, though. Last night, I finally had enough credits to my name to spring for Vordane’s first speeder and training. I don’t know how I’m going to manage come 40 for the new one, but I suspect I’ll cross that bridge when I come to it.

In Lord of the Rings online, after driving myself insane trying to get the correct amount of tokens given to us during the various seasonal festivals and failing the race once or twice, I finally was able to obtain a Yule Festival Glittering Pony for Anthyllis, my hobbit minstrel. I love this pony so much that I have no intention of riding anything else ever again, and I’m currently in the process of re-dying most of her wardrobe so she can match it.

What would you like to have in 2012 that you lacked in 2011?
Characters at the various level caps would be nice. I have yet to get a character anywhere near level cap in LotRO, despite it being out for ages, and I’m eager to get Anthyllis further out into the world and on to Isengard.

Also, once I get back to it and am no longer feeling burnt out, more roleplay for Adaret would be fantastic. The girl has been stuck in the closet for far too long.

What was your biggest achievement of the year?
Probably having enough money to get Vordane her speeder in SWTOR. I honestly thought I wouldn’t be able to do it. Also having enough gold in LotRO to even think about getting a nice little hobbit hole for Anthyllis.

What was your biggest failure?
Not listening to myself, I think. I wasn’t willing to admit to myself that I was feeling a bit burnt out on World of Warcraft at the beginning of December. I love the game still, but I needed a break. It wasn’t until SWTOR came out and I started playing it that I realized the burnout was there, I just hadn’t wanted to admit it.

What do you wish you’d done less of?
WoW: logging in pretty much daily and ignoring the burnout
LotRO: Hiding from the RPing folks on Landroval. They aren’t scary, I just need to tell myself that.
SWTOR: Queues. Oh, god, waiting in queues is terrible. Also getting stuck in Taris and stuck watching an elevator slowly moving up and down wasn’t very fun.

What did you do in your MMOs in 2011 that you’d never done before?
Apart from, at the very end, being able to run them in ridiculously high quality thanks to a new computer, probably explore like a fiend. There’s so much to see and do in all of my games, so much so that I never really got a chance to sit and just explore every inch of every world/zone that was there.

What’s your favorite new place that you’ve visited?
WoW: Mount Hyjal. I love that zone. That and Uldum. Two of my favorite zones because of everything ever in both of them.
LotRO: N/A; anywhere I’m able to get to, I’ve actually been before. It’s still pretty cool seeing Weathertop, though.
SWTOR: Probably Dromund Kaas. You get to see Coruscant, albiet a future version of Coruscant, in pretty much every single Star Wars thing ever. Dromund Kaas, nothing. So it’s pretty cool to see the home of the Empire.

What’s your favorite blog or podcast?
I don’t want to pick and choose and offend anybody, but all the bloggers I’ve met and all the blogs I read for any of my MMOs are amazing. We’re all a great bunch of people.

Before this year, though, I hadn’t really touched podcasting before. I’m now a big fan of A Casual Stroll to Mordor, though, on the LotRO front.

Tell us a valuable lesson you learned in 2011.
Have several.

- Admitting burnout isn’t a bad thing.
- Slicing is an awesome way to bring in the money.
- Every community is going to find something to bitch about; take it in stride.
- Not everything wants to be your friend. In fact, most of them will eat you.
- If all else fails, remember that shooting things in the face is a wonderful way to relieve stress at the end of the day.

Quite possibly the best thing about the beta, however, was that it allowed me to test the various classes that I had been waffling between for ages. I did let myself test the Jedi Consular, and I discovered very quickly that it felt like I was coming home after a long time away from it. After coming to that realization, I had to stop playing for fear of spoiling the story for myself and I knew I had to come back to this class after launch. Unfortunately, I didn’t have the same resolve with the Sith Inquisitor, taking the character (not once, but twice) through their trials on Korriban and winding up with my first companion character. I’m planning on taking her a bit further simply so I can explore the talent trees in a bit more depth (and so I can figure out whether or not my Consular will be wielding a dual-bladed saber or a single one).

However, on the last few days of my first weekend in beta, I decided to do something different. I decided to try out a class I had no desire to play come launch, just to see what the story was like. High on my list of classes I was so certain I wasn’t going to touch was the Trooper. In the past, the trooper had been presented to me as a heavily armored tank, the exact sort of thing I swore to myself I was never going to be. I tried that back in World of Warcraft and I sadly came to the realization that tanking was too high-stress for me. Back then, it was the very last thing I needed in my life. However, after exploring the trooper a bit more, I came to the startling realization that if I chose the Commando Advanced Class option, I could heal. Healing I could do! And, from the sound of the things I had heard at the time, it seemed like they would be similar to paladin healing in World of Warcraft. I could do that! Paladin healing had always been my favorite kind of healing!

Armed with this knowledge, but still very certain I was going to hate the trooper in spite of this, I logged into the beta that first beta weekend and rolled myself a trooper based on one of my oldest characters: a paladin from the Warcraft universe named Damaris Vordane (called Vordane in-game). Once I finally adjusted her looks to SWTOR standards, I logged in, the opening crawl rolled, and I was ready. Vordane’s story, same as the story of every trooper in the game, began on Ord Mantell, where the Republic was fighting valiantly against separatist forces. Even as I made my way through the first few minutes of the opening movie, I knew something was something off about the separatists, namely that they seemed to have weaponry and knowledge they definitely weren’t supposed to. By the time the opening movie was over and Vordane was ready to set foot into the world armed with little more than a gun and the clothes on her back. She knew with absolute certainty the separatists had to be stopped before they destroyed everything she loved with a cannon they had stolen from us.

At the time, I had just finished playing a few levels of a smuggler, and I found myself missing having the cover system to hide behind at first. However, the more I played my trooper, the more I realized I wasn’t missing it at all. I had a giant rifle, after all. Four or more average level mobs? No problem with a big-ass gun! A stronger mob and an average one? Also not really a problem once you got the rhythm down. I had an amazing gun, and I was going to use it.

As the story continued to unfold during this most recent beta weekend, so did Vordane: a soldier dedicated to the Republic and doing what was right. She didn’t need the Force or any other fancy gimmicks. She was a soldier. She didn’t need to be anything else. What she had was her conviction and her faith that they would be capable of doing the right thing in the end, and, you know, a big-ass gun. I suspected things were getting bad for me when I discovered I had gotten a gun that I fell in love with before I had gotten the chance to take it anywhere (I dubbed it Bertha), but I pushed it aside, engrossed in the story. By the time I was done with Ord Mantell, I was confronted with several plot elements I had never anticipated, and it was in that moment, faced with that surprising plot twist, that I said something I honestly never expected to.

“I’m in love.”

Vordane the trooper around level 9 or so, about ready to leave Ord Mantell.

That’s right. The one class I told myself I would never like or love was the one I had fallen completely head over heels for. It was the perfect class. I got to stand at a distance and shoot at things, but I was well-armored enough for it to almost not matter if I got hit. I was a freaking wrecking ball with a gun, and I didn’t care what got in my way.

Even now, as a commando that has gotten hold of a cannon (this thing is the best thing ever, I swear) and her own starship, I still love it. I’m still trying to make sense of the abilities I’ve got, but I know I’ll be back. I’ll probably have an all-new character ready to go by then, as Damaris’ proper story lies outside of SWTOR, but I’m definitely having a trooper in my alt arsenal.

Now, before we had a full list of race and class combinations at our disposal, I thought I knew. From the get-go, I knew I wanted to play a Twi’lek. There was really no way around it for me. I was going to play one and no power in known universe was going to stop me from doing it. I’ve found them fascinating ever since we first saw one in Jabba’s palace back in Return of the Jedi. I blame the lekku, not so much the skimpy dancer outfits he had them shoved into. I knew they would probably be like the blood elves in WoW, but I didn’t care. It was what I wanted to play, and that was going to be it.

With my race definitely solidified, I immediately went out on the internet to see what classes they could actually be. In every MMO, there tend to be racial restrictions. Certain races cannot be certain classes for one reason or the other, whether because of game mechanics or otherwise. However, for some reason, this never occurred to me at the time when the only information available to me told me that Twi’leks could only be Jedi Consulars and Smugglers. I didn’t exactly know what I had been hoping for, but that was certainly not it. It wasn’t that I didn’t like these options; I thought they’d be quite awesome, actually. The problem was that neither of them really appealed to me. I was hoping, at the time, for at least one Sith option, but, at the time, I had nothing.

Now, there’s nothing wrong with the Republic. After all, the majority of my internet friends seem to be going Republic, and I knew that if I did, as well, it would give me the opportunity to actually play with them for once. While that was a strong selling point for the Republic, I wasn’t completely happy with it. Don’t get me wrong. I would love to play with people I know for once, but it didn’t feel right. I’ve spent a bit over two years in World of Warcraft playing an undead shadow priestess who’s almost fanatically loyal to her people. After that, the Republic seemed far too good for my taste.

Admittedly, a smuggler would be my Republic fantasy. (Specifically, I’d probably be a gunslinger; they look badass.) Other girls my age wanted to be Princess Leia or Queen Amidala after watching the films. I wanted to be Han Solo. Not only did Han have Chewie (possibly the best companion out there), but he got the princess in the end. Not to mention the smugness and the blasters and so many other things that I can’t even list or else this post would get far too long. I will probably be playing one as an alt; my altoholic tendencies can never be ignored. However, that didn’t help me when trying to figure out my Twi’lek. I had a story for her in my head, and I soon discovered that I couldn’t think of a way to make the story I was working on work for a smuggler. It did take me awhile before I realized that I shouldn’t compromise my girl’s story just to make a class work for her. After all, it would be my money I’d be spending to play. Shouldn’t I play what I want?

Then, like a sign from the Force itself, I discovered something wonderful: Twi’leks could be Sith Inquisitors. For that matter, the class story seemed to match everything I had been working on for her. There was confetti, there were explosions, there was a mental celebration of epic proportions! I thought I was set!

Then, just to spite me, Bioware put out the Jedi Consular trailer. It just made the class seem so awesome that I almost reconsidered. Almost. But the more I thought about it, the more I realized that I was doing it again. I was trying to sacrifice something I had worked fairly hard on for a class that just looked awesome. So I stopped, took a step back, and watched the Sith Inquisitor trailer once again. It took watching that video along with a few other snippets of Inquisitor gameplay before I realized I knew what my time as a shadow priest in WoW had been preparing me for: being a Sith, specifically an Inquisitor. So, I’m sorry, members of the Republic, but the Empire is where I belong. Prepare yourselves. We’re coming for you.

Now if I could only figure out my Inquisitor’s name…