Game Guides Archive

• Turn the particle effects slider all the way down. This makes it so that all the sparkly particle effects of specials like jedi infusions, heals, bacta shots/tosses, launcher pistol explosions, CM/BH fire DOT animations..etc. use the most basic particle detail and gives your CPU a small performance boost. It can get pretty hectic in a spin group with everyone using specials and a large amount of mobs onscreen at once. Noone wants to lag or lose frames per second (FPS).


• Turn off player shadows


• Consider decreasing the terrain veiwing distance. Your group hunting and unless your a jedi keeping a look out for BH's, you really don't need 10 buildings, 2 lairs of creatures, useless trees and junk in viewing distance. It just puts extra stress on the cpu because your forcing it to draw extra pixels on the screen when you don't even need them. EVen if your a jedi, the radar is often more reliable than onscreen. Using the overhead map is good for spotting a BH from almost 1000 meters away, but that serves no purposebecauseyou can't examine or identify them until they show up on your radar. So if your radar is at 128 or 246 meters.....seeing the blue dot on the overhead map won't give you any extra time. So unless your paranoid, can't handle a BH attack or simply like using the overhead map, turn it off, especially when lots of buildings are around. AGain, this is for the poor CPU people, not you 1 gig ram, super computer guys...lol


• Turn off detailed water, uncheck render flora and all those options under the graphics tab. it just adds scenery to your gaming experience, but I'm willing to bet that you'd rather not lag than to to the nice forest around you....


• You can turn off npc names, static object names and any other option you feel will increase your performance. most people should be able to handle most options that don't force extra Processor usage. So just play with the sliders and stuff until you find your comfort zone between performance and lag.


• One more thing that I don't think people realize....at least I didnt' until I saw the big difference between my fresh new alt and my jedi. Carrying lots of items in your inventory or back pack can lag you also. My guess is that the server has to compensate for all your items crossing server lines and send data back and forth to make sure all your items transfer with you when you cross those lines. There use to be an issue where items would disappear from peoples inventory when crossing server lines. I didn't realize the big difference myself until I unlocked jedi and made a fresh new alt on the same server. When I logged my jedi, the lag wasn't bad but it wasn't perfect either.....then when I switched to my alt, I noticed she could go anywhere with virtually no noticeable lag at all. I couldn't understand why two different characters on the same server, on the same computer lagged differentlly. Later as my alt started to fill up her inventory, I started noticing that the lag she got started to resemble that of my jedi. low and behold, when I empty her inventory and backpack, she traveled with less lag than my jedi. FYI, my jedi keeps at least 60 items in top inventory and 40ish items in backpack (I don't wear robes). I won't say that this will affect you like it did me, but I did notice a small difference in lag in heavy traffic areas or when loading into a city or in a an area with a lot of creature spawns.

Get your Buffs,Armor, Weaponsready, prepare your macro's.

It's always a good idea to make sure your toolbar and macro's are in order before you join a group. making sure you have your inspiration buffs, doc buffs and food/drink buffs ready before heading out to a lair is always a good idea. By all means, if your doc buffer is on another planet, don't go looking for a group first and then leave planet to go get your doc buffs. I know you want to take full advantage of the short doc buffs like adrenaline boost, but really as long as you get into a good hunting group, you should never need most buffs. Inspiration buffs are clearly favorable though.The short buffswill only benefit you for a lair or two anyway...you can do without most buffs.

One thing I do not recommend is waiting until you get to the mission to get buffed. Sometimes though, there is a doc in the group who is already at the mission and will buff you when you get there. That's fine, but don't wait until the group starts fighting to askforor get buffs from the doc. While your getting your buffs, someone else may be dying and could have usedthe docs help and once in combat, there's no sitting down to regen the mind pool. So get your buffs and macro's prepared before you even join a group.

If your gonna be maxing xp in two different professions, by all means make sure you have a weapon for each of those professions. Don't expect group members to have extra guns or armor that you can use while you grind with them. Not saying someone won't have some to lend you or let you have....but don't depend on it. so have the equipment you need beforethe grind.

Change your affiliation

Before you even join any group, always and I stress always go on leave if your are faction affiliated. It is sometimes very hurtful to the group when the primary tank in the spin group is combatant or special forces and noone can heal them. I've seen this on meany occasions. One time a couple of days ago, I got into a group where I could only heal 3 people out of the group because they were all combatants and I was on leave.So go on leave before joining a group.

The reason I say go on leave is because your don't want to be attacked by the opposing factions npc's when your doing a lair. a lot of the times there will be 2 or more enemy bases right next to your mission. Having them attack you only makes it bad for the whole group because they most likely can't help you if they are on leave and your not. I've seen many people get slain (triple incapped) because of this.

If you forget to go on leave, no biggie, just do it at your next earliest convienance.....well unless your the primary tank, then go do it NOW.

Being invited to a spin group

Be polite and respect the other members playing time

Some things that really need to be understood when you first join a spin group (or any group) is to be polite. If you see someone in the group that you don't like due to a past experience. Politely either leave the group or ignore the person. That doesn't mean if you stay that you should not help the person during the mission.....teamwork is about working together no matter if you like the person next to you or not. Do not call names or be verbally abusive to any of the group members. It affects everyone in the group even though you are not directly talking to them. Noone likes to see another person being baited into a nasty name calling session. It's like trying to play a foolball game, but the quarterback is too busy screaming at the referee for a bad call. The rest of the players just want to get on with the grind. So be polite and curtious to your fellow group members even if you dislike them for whatever reason. Show you are the bigger person and just play the game and have fun. achieve your goals and move on. it's that simple.

Picking missions

If you get into a group, find out what type of missions they are doing and in what direction. Regardless if you get in a high level group or not, always pick the highest level missions you can get. There is a reason why your allowed to pull a mission 2 levels higher than your own. It's because you profession is capable of handling them, with a group it's even easier. So don't pick CL 78 bols when your group has 5 CL80 players in the group. It goes the same for the opposite, Don't pick CL 82 pickets when 5 of your group members are under CL60. They won't be able to support you and you will be forced to single pull all day. There is no way you can effectively spin a lair when there is 1 or 2 CL80 players in a group and the rest are lower than CL60.....and by all means if you have more than 2 CL 20 or below players.....your not gonna do any successful spinning on a lair that's CL 82. So pick the right missions for the groups level and abilities.

Also, if your group is a spin group (a real one, not a "I hope we can spin" group), then you should not limit your missions to bols and pickets. If youre group has done pickets and spun the whole lair with no casualties and not much healing, then your group is capable of handling any mission your group can pull. This means when your on Dantiooine, Graul Maulers shouldnt' be excluded from your mission choices.

First of all they give the best xp of any creature on dantooine. They give the basic xp, the group bonus xp and an additional 5% xp for being aggressive and another 5% for being a Death Blow mob. Don't be afraid to fight them....they actually go down faster than pickets do....by far pickets are the toughest mob to kill on dantooine as far as group hunts go.The only mobs you should consider leaving alone are the ones that spawn ranged creatures like savage quenker ravagers. They spit acid at range first and then resort to melee only if you get close. So even if a spin group is spinning the lair, some of them will stay out of range and use ranged attacks you your group.....not a very effective mob to use a spin group on.

Overall, don't be afraid to push the envelop of danger. A general rule that I typically follow is that if my health is not dropping to at least 50%, then my group is not grinding efficiently, especially if I'm the tank not recieving any healing. It all means that your group is grinding on the easy stuff and your depriving your whole group of good xp. Remember the goal is gaining good fast xp, not trying to avoid the clonining center. As I said, if your spin group is good, you'll never clone no matter what you fight.

Choosing where to hunt:

Sometimes you may join a group in one city or outpost and they are hunting somewhere else. Don't worry about it too much. many times the best way to fill a group is to go to the heavy populated areas, but the best place to hunt is often the least populated areas. On my server, the most popular place for groups is minining outpost on dantooine. Many people also hunt out of this outpost. There are some negatives to hunting from here though and often times, choosing to go to another area is best....even if it's another planet.

How long can you play?

Let the group know how long you intend on staying in the group or how long you have to play. Many people really hate it when you get a group together, go out and kill two lairs and then 4 or 5 people have to go eat dinner, pick up the kids or anything else that draws you away from the game. Don't waste peoples time. If your in it for the long haul, then let peole know that in advance. If all you have is 30 minutes to play, let people know that so they can decide if that group is the right one for them ahead of time. Remember, when your grouping your not just playing for you, your playing with the whole group and each person's success depends on every person in the group.

Group attitude and group chat:

Be prepared to enjoy yourself. Come ready to laugh, talk, make friends and just genuinely have a good time. the best groups are the ones where everyone can get along and does their job while at the same time they can joke around in a light hearted way. Don't know if the other person will be offended by your jokes orcomments? Then don't say them or clean them up a bit. The profantity filter will not block certain statements that may offend someone. If you really want to say something to a person your directing your comments at and want to be sure your not gonna offend someone....then do it in a personal /tell. There is no reason for you to be in a group with your friend talking about some girl you spent the night with last night.....save that for personal /tells or your guild chat if they allow that. The other group members may not want to hear about such things. Remember, your not playing with your friends or people in the same general age group as yourself. Understand that who's in your group may be religous or spirtitual and what you may think is not a damaging comment, might well be one to someone else.

• A spinner (A good tank that can spin attack).


• A healer


• A crowd control specialist


• A damage dealer

And an optional role

• A mezzer

Those are the most basic roles. However, to have a high level spin group you need to have a minimum of 2 tanks, 2 healers, 2 crowd control speicalist and at least 1 Damage dealer. Damage dealers are optional because it's not the damage of one or two players that does the job, it's the combination of all 8 players that does the job. Therefore, Damage dealers are simply a bonus in my opinion...besides, they can sometimes be detrimental to the groups progress if they don't use their damage right.

Primary and secondary roles

The Tank(s)

Primary: To spin attack the lair using any spin attack in their arsenal (saber dervish is the best of them all because of it's high damage for an AOE attack). The tank must hold as many (hopefully all) creatures aggro'd on them as possible. You want the mobs to attack you and heal the lair. This forces them into a tight little area where the rest of the group can effectively use their AOE's to attack the whole group of creatures at the same time. You must keep attacking the lair for this to work because the mobs will always attack the player doing the most damage. Even healers if their heals are healing more than the damage of the person attacking the lair. This is why 0020 sabers doesn't always tank well. It does work, but not in every situation. First of all it's too slow, second it's damage output is not enough to hold CL82 pickets on them for long, nor can you outdamage a rifleman to hold argo.d

Secondary: As a secondary role, the tanks can also be a mezzer if there are at least 2 spinners/tanks in the group. All this entales is the tank alternating between spin attack and a mezz attack while tabbing through the creatures. As long asthe other spinner can hold arggo until the second spinner can spin attack again, the mobs won't go anywhere except if a ranged damage dealer hits one of the mobs while the tanker is in the middle of doing his mezz attack. However as long as the tankers are fast, they should hold arggo very well.

Most effective tanks/spinners: Master Defenders with double blade tree in sabers or master sabers, Pikeman and TKM.

The Healer(s):

Primary: To keep the tanks healed while not taking argo from them. If the tank goes down, then the whole group is dead usually. Sometimes other group members are strong enough defensively and can temporarily tank while the healer gets the primary tank(s) back ontheir feet. however, if the tank should ever go down while the whole group is using AOE's, the healers usually won't get a chance to heal anyone. One overlooked aspect of healing is that many healers fail to realize that if your heals are stronger than the attacks of the person your healing, any creatures that person is attacking will immediately turn an arggo you. In most cases you'll go down fast if you don't have good defenses to go along with your healing. For this reason, The Healers in a high level spin group should have decent defenses as long as it's enough to keep you alive long enough to heal and get someone else out of incap. The number one heal that will get a healer into trouble is bacta spray. so if you can, try to use single healing and use area heals only in emergencies. Using single heals might draw a creature or two to you, but it's easier to survive 2 creatures attacking you rather than 20. One way to recognize when to use an area heal is when multiple group members have damage at 50% or under. If only 1 or 2 players are below 50% health, use single heals on them instead even if it means using only one type of heal.

A very good method to using one heal is to alternate between healing and shooting.For example, using bact toss to heal someone who needs it and instead of using bacta spray for the next heal, do a damage attack on the mobs, then next turn do another heal. Many times it's not necessary to totally heal people continuously....doing so can get you stuck in a situation like if a jedi or TKM accidently forgetst to reactive their aura/COB while tanking and your in the process of healing another player who has only lost 25% health....in a matter of 4 or 5 seconds the jedi or TKM could be down to 5% health and in need of a heal. So you shouldn't overdo the healing just because someones HAM is showing a tiny bit of black. The little xp you will gain from using a area heal verse the arggo you may recieve just doesn't pay off should you get incapped or slain.

Secondary: Well, not really much but to do damage here and there. Most of the time if the group is functioning properly, the primary job of healers will take up most of their time in a spin group. But if it comes down to it, they can do mezzes also.

Most effective healers: Medic 0440, Doctors and CM's.although jedi can heal, they are too slow for a spin group so not really that effective trying to keep multiple people alive.

The crowd control specialist:

Primary: I haven't had much experience with crowd control. Being a jedi myself, the only crowd control I've been able to do is sucking the creatures back in to me when I lose primary arggo due to a ranged profession using a very powerful weapon to do an AOE while I'm healing myself or reapplying infusion and aura. So about the only crowd control that I know of is what I witness others doing. The main thing I see is using area KD's, roots and snares to stop mobs from charging or chasing another player.Basically though, in my experience the crowd control specilist aids the tankers by not allowing the mobs to break up and go after individual group members like healers or low level group members. The other technique I've seen other than area KD is use a powerful AOE attack to catch arggo, run next to the tankers and stop attacking by hitting escape. Then the tankers, having already been attacking the lair with spin attacks, will immediately snatch arggo from the crowd control specialist. Once that happens, the crowd control specialist can focus on taking the mobs down, healing up or helping someone else.

Secondary: They don't really have a secondary role in my opinion. They are simply freelance combatants who can and should do a bit of everything if at all possible.As I said, I don't have a whole lot of experience with crowd control professions in groups. I usually serve as a healer or tank myself.

Most effective crowd control specialist: Smugglers, Pistoleers, BH's, Carbineers, Powers jedi (area lightening is really effective)

Damage Dealers

Primary:This is easy.....They do Damage, as much as they can as fast as they can. The key point to a damage dealer is they must stay within attack range of the tanks, but if using AOE attacks, they must be able to keep the mobs in their line of attack (cone or otherwise). The damage dealer doesn't have to use AOE attacks really, it's just a bonus if they have them. Like a commando with a AOE weapons. Commando's can do some pretty insane damage with the specials from other professions and their splash damage of their weapons. They actually can be good crowd control specialist as well. Something not many people know of is that you can take a commando weapon that does splash damage and use a single special like stopping shot or a single KD and all mobs hit by the splash damage will suffer from the special ability even though it's a single attack ability. That means a commando using a laucnher pistol can use stopping shot and the blast radius of the launcher pistol will apply stopping shot to all the mobs in the immediate area. I haven't tried this with other specials like intimidate and such....give it a try though, if stopping shot works, then everything else should.

Secondary: Another that doesn't have a secondary role as their main role is dealing damage.....the damage dealer should not stop dealing damage....so no need for a secondary role.

Most effective Damage Dealers: Commandos, Rifleman, swordsman, Jedi, BH's and probably a few others depending on the weapons they have.

The Mezzer:

The last role for a very high level spin group is one that not many undestand or want to do. In about 50 groups I've been in, I've only seen a handful ofother people besides myself who played this role without anyone having to tell them to do it. This role is called the mezzer simply because that's all you need to do.

That's right, a mezzer is very effective in any group, but even more effective in a spin group. It's not an easy role to fill because you can't really use macros. So it involves a lot of button pushing and manual recognition of what your doing or need to do.Any profession can be a mezzer so as long as they have status effects. The most effective mezzer is 0404 sabers or swordsman. The Armor Break (AB) ability by far is the strongest mezz becuase it makes it easy to kill the target faster than any other mezz in the game. I call this a mez because it affects the status of the target in that it lowers their defense. It's not a primary damaging move, it's not a utility move either. It's a status effect and in my book any status effect that hinders an opponents ability to defend or attack is a mez.

The mezzers primary job is to tab through each of the creatures that are attacking the tankers and damage dealersand apply AB to each of them. They can alternate between applying AB and other states. Jedi are the best overall mezzer simply because they canpossess blind, dizzy, stun, bleed, AB, KD, sap, shock, weaken, intimidate all in one template or any combination of them. It may be difficult to apply all of them sometimes, but when they work, it makes everything a whole lot easier.

after the mezzer has applied enough mezzes to the targets, they can decide whether they need to recycle through them and mezz again (in a high level spin group, it can take longer than 30 seconds to kill the big spawns) or they can pick off the creatures that are low on health. The mezzer really has the easiest job of all.The only hard part is all the manual button pushing and tabbing/clicking the right creatures. I've played the mezzer while tanking sometimes also, but only when I have another tank or 2 spinning with me. I have to tell you, when someone is applying AB to all the mobs, They go down faster than you can imagine.

I'm not totally sure where fencers fit into the fold. I haven't had much experience with fencer in CU.So If any fencer could give input on the role they best fit in a spin group, please leave a reply. For the most part though, I don't see many fencers in spin groups. I've only seen a total of 2 outspoken fencers since CU went live. Or maybe I just wasn't paying attention, when I did see them....lol

General tips for effective spin groups:

1. When in a spin group try to always stay close to the lair, the tankers and the healers. Make it 15m as a general rule.


2. Do not run off when you catch arggo and start taken damage from lots of creatures, noone can help you if you run...don't expect any group members to chase you down to heal you.


3. If your about to be incapped and can't out heal the damage your taking, don't panic. One or two incaps won't hurt you...just don't get a third incap if no rezzers are in the group.....after the 2nd incapp, ease up a bit on the damage or healing you dish out and you won't get a 3rd incap.


4. If your not the spinner/tank, do not startdoing AOE attacks before the tank has spent enough time drawing all the creatures into the lair.


5. The healer(s) need to focus all their heals on the tanks at the start of the lair....the tanks will take the most damage of anyone if the group functions the way it should. The first wave of attacks is the worst and the Tanks/spinners need all the help they can get, yes even if they are Master defenders or have Force Armor.


6. Don't rush anyone and be respectful of peoples time. They are here to grind just like you.


7. Don't be afraid to get to know anyone. Chatting is encouraged, communication is encouraged.


8. Be efficient, don't leave anyone hanging when they need your help. You just might need there help a few minutes later. Your a team and noone progresses by themselves.


9. For Squad Leaders and Group leaders, don't try to be the boss of everyone without everyone in the group agreeing that you will take command. If the group feels one person should be in charge, then fine...but if one or two people don't want one person telling them how to play, then as long as they are productive and fulfilling their role, you should step aside and allow them to play.


10. Anyone who thinks they are uber for whatever reason or you just like to go rambo (like start attacking the lair before everyone has arrived), please stop and consider the rest of the group members. Your not being a team member if your jumping outside of the gameplan. Stick with whats working for the group...don't get impatient and start doing your own thing. You can get the whole group killed.


11. Try not to step too far out of your primary role. If all goes well, you should only need to do your primary role. Of course don't hesitate to change up a bit...(maybe switch roles with someone). You don't want to become a robot...even though we already are one for the grind )

Drakenya - Master Smuggler / Elder Assassin / S. A. Ace Pilot
Raken - Commando / Elder Rifleman, Carbineer
Drak' - Bounty Hunter