SWTOR player quirks

A few personal quirks of how I play SWTOR. All of them mentioned before, but never gathered in one place until now:

1) I prefer the tech classes to the force classes. I like the stories better, mostly, I like the mechanics better, and I kind of like thinking about the space, the final frontier (yes I know) as a frontier with settlers, homesteaders, cowboys and injuns rather than space wizards, templars, and weird monks with weird cult beliefs. I probably have at least twice as many tech classes as I do force classes in terms of active characters.

2) I prefer the more independent classes; bounty hunter and smuggler, to the ones tied tightly to a faction, and in fact kind of resent (sometimes) doing the faction stories on each planet. I do them anyway, because you've gotta grind for XP, and that's a good way to do so (plus, it gives you a steady progression of the XP booster items) but I wonder sometimes if I wouldn't almost rather just grind heroics instead of the faction stories. It's not the faction stories are bad, but it is that they don't always fit every character, especially the more independent classes, plus because there's only two of them per planet, you get tired of seeing them over and over again sometimes.

3) I'm not alone in doing this, but I always kit out my new characters on starting. I ESC out of the opening cutscene, and then send the new character a bunch of money. Then he'll go to the mailbox, get the money, expand his inventory, open my collections, etc. and end up looking way cooler than the basic character for the opening cutscene. The trooper origin story is the only one that doesn't give you as much flexibility here as I'd like, but you can still do collections, at least.

4) On the other hand, what I do do that is unique, I think, is that I also run around, open up all of the planet map, kill a bunch of enemies, do first planet heroics, etc. until I get to 10th level before I even start. This allows me to go to fleet and access the legacy bank before starting too. It also allows me to have a headstart on leveling, so if I want to skip something or even just have an easier time, I can. This is getting a little out of hand with my latest batch, where every week when the weekly heroics on the starting planets reset, I try to do them again. Each time I go through this batch, it's likely to give me at least one level, so I'm getting to where I'm closer to 20th level before actually starting the story. These guys will not have to do the faction stories very long, which I suppose is a good thing.

5) The light side and dark side dichotomy in the game is ridiculous, and sometimes blatantly evil actions will give you light side points and blatantly good actions will give you dark side points. I tend to use my own more functional moral compass when making decisions for characters, so everyone ends up a bit "chaotic good" and gets a fair number of dark side points, although not nearly enough to overwhelm the light side points, even on the Imperial side. Where I also play most of my Imperial characters as pretty "chaotic good" too, because anything else is kind of more dumb and juvenile rather than mature roleplaying of bad guys.

6) Speaking of chaotic good, none of my characters handle being told what to do very well, and I tend to have a number of pretty cheeky responses, even to authority figures that I suppose I'm supposed to defer to. This is especially noticeable with the Jedi, the Sith, the Trooper and the Agent; the bounty hunter and smuggler are already supposed to be anti-authoritarian anyway. I'm not sure why I need to play it so many times with characters who look different, but who basically all make the same choices, but y'know. The game is actually pretty fun.

7) I really like the sniper mechanics, and while I equip sniper rifles on them, as normal, I use the outfitter to put a cosmetic blaster rifle visual over top of it. because I think the sniper rifles all look ridiculously unwieldy and absurd. I have several snipers, and each of them have 8-10 outfits. But I don't think I have more than one or two where you can actually visually see a sniper rifle among them. Honestly, plenty of the blaster rifles are really long already. Plus, the visual cue of a rifle being longer meaning that it's a sniper is kind of silly. The range of even the longest range weapon in the game is woefully short compared to even the shortest range real firearms, so effectively there aren't any snipers in this game. Taking an aimed shot at a guy a hundred feet or so away from you is not a sniper shot.

8) All of my lightsabers for main characters are black-core colored. I have lots of black-core colors; blue, purple, red, orange and green, though, and I use all of them, sometimes in different oufits on the same characters.

9) I don't really like to go with very "traditional" expected looks. My Jedi characters do not wear rough brown robes. My bounty hunters and troopers don't really wear sorta Mandalorian or sorta stormtrooper looking outfits, even though that's the default expectation. I tend to think of everyone of my tech classes as more like gunfighters in a western... except in space. Most of my characters will either wear something unusual, like Anstal Tane's 50s biker in space look, or they will look more like what people tend to expect smugglers to look like, because those are the closest to "normal" clothes that people would actually be wearing if running around doing this stuff that the characters do in game. I know that the concept is often mocked as "space Barbie" but I kind of enjoy using the elements in the game as if I were a professional concept artist or costume designer. That's part of what makes the game fun for me. I also tend to look at concepts and archetypes created via costuming as able to jump out of SWTOR into my own space opera setting (SOX, or Space Opera X.)

Johhn in a fringer disguise

If spies had BDUs, this would be Saxon Hettar in his. This is his Dromund Kaas outfit, but I'll also use it on Hutta when he's not in his Red Blade disguise.

Beorn Hengest, a bounty hunter who focuses on the sniper rifle approach (i.e., he's a sniper, but his rifles are all blaster rifles) in his savage Hutta outfit. He'll be slicker and more professional looking on Dromund Kaas.