Greetings and salutations, TORWarriors! My name is Frank Lancaster and I’m a new writer for TORWars.com. I’m very excited to be a part of the team here and I sincerely hope you enjoy my writings.
Insert info into Astromech droid = Theorycrafting made easy!
You are a Jedi Sentinel. With seven focus and all cooldowns unavailable, is it better to use Cauterize or Precision Slash to finish off the boss in your Flashpoint? Your tank is down to 20% of his health and about to take another massive hit, would you be better off casting Healing Trance or spamming Deliverance? You’ve offered to tank for a group with an overgeared damage dealer and he keeps dying when your Taunt is unavailable, are you doing everything you can to keep the boss’s attention?
The answers to these questions (if there are any) can be found via theorycrafting.
Theorycrafting in an MMO like Star Wars: The Old Republic is like opening your computer tower to see how all of the pieces fit together and interact with one another. It’s using math to determine the relationship between your stats and your abilities and using that information to increase your performance. While individual results may seem overly simplistic, (like using the resource generating ability that will replenish the most resources without going over the maximum) when put together in aggregate they can tell you everything from which piece of gear is an upgrade to which abilities are best used in a specific set of circumstances.
The flowchart below (created by Elobi on the sithwarrior.com forums) is an example of the result of theorycrafting. It shows the optimal threat generating move for every possible situation by a Jedi Guardian (with a few misnamed talents because it was an early Beta build) facing a single target.
Don’t worry if you have no idea what any of the above means. Unless you played a Jedi Guardian or Sith Juggernaut in the Beta you’ve probably never heard of half of these abilities.
When beginning Star Wars: The Old Republic you’ll become familiar with your character and his or her abilities pretty quickly. Once you’ve got the basics, you may want to devote some time to researching the work that theorycrafters have done on your class. This is especially important for those at max level who wish to tackle endgame content with a group.
(A caveat: Please note that I am not advocating extreme min/maxing unless that is how you enjoy spending your time. I do believe that everyone, especially those wishing to run Operations or Heroic Flashpoints should familiarize themselves with what the theorycrafting community has to say about your class and role, e.g. if there is a defense or accuracy cap, or if Alacrity doesn’t have the same value for your spec as Power.)
Despite the NDA being lifted only a short while ago, there are already two very promising sites out there devoted to SWTOR theorycrafting.
SithWarrior.com has been hard at work preparing for launch and their forums are incredibly well developed and have already been very active with some great work by the theorycrafters there. There’s even a Chat Room for registered users. Of special note is the OpComp Tool which allows users to check off what classes will be present for a given Operation to ensure that all available buffs and debuffs are available. There are forums for every class and just about anything SWTOR related that you can think of with active users in every one.
Tormonger is another site that is put together very well. It offers a page for every Advanced Class with links to forums and videos. There hasn’t been much theorycrafting on the site as of yet, but they offer an absolutely fantastic introductory video guide to theorycrafting and it looks as though they intend to continue their Theorycraft 101 series. (The site also sponsors Bootleg Radio, a radio station devoted to SWTOR and is certainly worth a listen if you have the time.)
There you go, TORWarriors. I hope you’ve enjoyed this introductory look (and my first post) at theorycrafting in SWTOR. If you’ve got any tips for new players on theorycrafting or if there is a theorycrafting resource that I missed, please speak up in the comments.
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This is super helpful. As an alt-oholic, I have a hard time keeping track of useful rotations. And I hate being THAT guy in a group.
lol I’m an altoholic too, but I just generally map out my rotation by the numbers… 1 2 3 4 5 6 7 8 etc.
Flow charts are just plain confusing. That one isn’t right by the way. Theory Crafting is something I enjoy but I never bother theory crafting for alts, I’ll look it up for them.
Nice article. can I ask will you be continueing this and adding actual theorycrafting for all the classes and advanced classes? Im someone who strives to do well in an mmo be it simple stuff as keeping ppl alive or holding aggro or just plain doing high amounts of dps without pulling aggro or causing trouble for others in the raids or groups. However Im not very mathmaticle so I do tend do struggle with that side of the theory crafting and min/maxing. I normally rely on ppl I know (good players from my servers) or ppl I play with and trust be it copying a spec or talking through rotations. So having a place like torwars to come and get all that info from would be great for me tbh torwars.com has been my main sorce of info Tor related for a good few months so it would be cool to keep using it.
Can we please get away from using this Starcraft as we are getting away from the Blizzard universe. . .
Theorycraft is dead. . . Long live Theorysabering!
Come visit us at ForceHeal.com. A great healing community growing everyday.
Thanks for the heads up. I’ll add your site to the list of forums I regularly lurk.
Great article, I can certianly overcome the next two or three days with those websites
Um, why would torwars show sithwarrior and Tormonger?
Someone should really look at what they write.. Most of the information is actually wrong..
JC/SI Rotation/Priority list is Wrong.. the pots they recommend is wrong..its always Willpower not crit/haste…
Tormonger has NO GUIDES.. so I dont get that eather..
@michael
Because the article is on the theorycrafting community and sithwarrior.com is the only site doing it at a high level. Not to mention you would make a horrible theorycrafter. If you are going to say “something is wrong” you need to follow it up with WHY and provide factual evidence. That’s what this article is about, using math and solid evidence to form theories, dicsuss those theories, and improve upon theories. The game isn’t even released yet and both of these sites are already developing a community and building a theory base.
Keep up the great work torwars! Excellent first article from Frank!
sithwarrior.com, is worthless, its full of older beta builds info, making most of the theory outdated and simply wrong.
futhermore there is no info there on the classes about skill rotations, min/max of stats. Its a forum of wrong or speculative info.
@father11 haters gonna hate, the article is about theorycrafting and you trashtalk a site. i go to sithwarrior a lot and they are by far the best theorycrafting site out right now. “skill rotations” HUH? skills are from skill trees. I assume you mean ABILITY rotations? Every single compendium addresses rotations. Min/max of stats? Have you been to their mechanics forum and looked at their charts for diminishing returns?
You are severely misinformed or from another fansite.
Great article on theorycrafting from torwars, hope to see more of it!
Awesome. I’m glad someone at TORWars will be writing about this. I tried to do a bit of theory on the Trooper during Beta, but I definitely was feeling my reliance on mods (particularly damage meters) built up during WoW. It’ll be easier to get more good info once we, you know, have a combat log. Can’t wait for BioWare to get that back into the game.
Thanks for this very helpful introduction. I look forward to reading your columns!
Could you please do one for a Smuggler Scoundrel?
Thank you.
Tough crowd. I am looking forward to mid-january when real data & #s from live game are used.
Wonko, sithwarrior is already using real data. We’ve managed to get an app that can read the data files included with the client (which is currently on the version slated for the Early Access release on Tuesday), and those client files contain all of the base damage and coefficient information for every ability in the game. The theorycrafting we do is very much based on the game as it is, we don’t just make up numbers.
There’s a decent chunk of threads out there still from early beta, or containing inaccurate data because the author has stop updating it, but in most of those cases we have another guide being built in our incoming threads section to take it’s place. Over the next week we’ll be pruning the forums of most of the outdated Beta information anyway.
@Kor Easy bro, I aint hatin. I am glad for a site with accurate info. I was only saying I like real firm #s, thats all.
I do love me some char-op (as it’s called in PnP). My far-too-long-since-last-played DA:O party is a well-oiled machine that’s pretty much steamrolled most of the game, although I’m playing on Normal so make of that what you will.
Of course, D&D 3.5 is pretty much the best game for this kind of thing. I have a (sadly) unplayed warblade sitting in my Documents that at 17th level would be able to deal 1000+ damage in the second turn. For reference, the most HP you can expect to see on an enemy of that level is a few hundred.
I’ve just visited the Tormonger site and when I clicked the top link to their forums my Kaspersky Anti Virus suite warned me about a malicious phishing URL for http://109.236.82.79/?site=19
This may be a false alert but I would strongly suggest you proceed with caution especially if you don’t run a phishing blocker…
I also got message from Norton that ‘Web Attack: Exploit Kit 11′ was attempted when I tried to check Theorycrafting 101 link .