Greetings TORWarriors and welcome to another edition of the Imperial Agent Weekly. This week we’re going to take a look at the IA’s primary stat and try to clarify just what it does in conjunction with some of the other stats. Grab your favorite frosty beverage, put your feet up on that crate of thermal detonators (gently now!) and lets see if we can sort this out.

Wait, did you hear something? No? Me neither I guess...

I’ve noticed some confusion over Aim and Cunning and how they apply to each class. I think this is mostly due to the fact that all primary stats fall in to two categories (Force using and non Force using) but also have some overlap in how they affect secondary skills. I’ll try to break this down as simply as possible today.

All character classes in SWTOR use one primary stat. For the Imperial Agent your primary stat is Cunning. Primary stats fall into two categories, Tech and Force. On the Tech tree Aim gives ranged crit and increases ranged damage. Cunning gives Tech crit and increases Tech power. This is true regardless of whether you spec for either Operative or Sniper because even your Operative melee attacks fall into the tech tree as opposed to say, Strength using Force wielders. In fact, since you rely on Tech, stats that affect Force wielders like Strength and Willpower are completely useless to you so don’t get fooled, particularly if you’re playing an Operative.

Interestingly, the primary stat for each class will also impact its shared stat. This means that if you’re playing an IA with your primary stat of Cunning, for every point of Cunning you’ll get a 0.2 bonus to ranged damage and tech power and you’ll also get a small bonus to Tech and Ranged crit. If you took gear with Aim stats you’d still get the other small bonuses but you’d be completely missing out on your primary stat of Cunning. This means you’ll always want to focus on raising the Cunning stat and choose gear that has as high of a cunning stat as possible.

So where do you get Cunning increases? There are several ways. First and most obvious is looted gear. Another option is relics. You can loot relics with the Cunning stat and you can buy them from some NPC’s like Light/Dark side vendors if you have the required alignment level. You can also search for Matrix shards which can be combined in various ways to give you a significant stat boost provided you have the right color combination and quantity of shards.

Another great way to get Cunning statted gear is to make friends with your friendly local Biochem crafter and have them make up some implants. The best of these will come with high stats and have open augment slots so you can customize them even more. The same goes for other types of crafters. As they improve their skills and recipes, top level crafters have some very nice stuff. Lastly, you can use stims for a temporary increase and you can recover Datacrons which give permanent bonuses to your stats.

Cunning in action, and if that doesn't work Scorpio is really good at blunt force trauma

I also want to mention briefly that Endurance gives you 10 hit points per point so stacking Endurance is always a good idea. There’s also the Alacrity stat which lowers the activation time of cast or channeled abilities (for you WoW vets this is comparable to the Haste stat in that game). It’s unclear at this time if Alacrity affects the Global Cool Down timer and there is quite a bit of debate on this all over the web. You can find evidence that the casting time is reduced but since the GCD may be unaffected the value of this is still subject to a lot of debate, particularly with skills that have a 1.5 second GCD. It seems like a lot more testing needs to be done before anyone can speak definitively on this particular point.

Tip of the week: Before you get back to rooting out corruption and sowing discord in the Outer Rim I’ve got a tip that comes in the form of a video walkthrough for getting a Datacron that will give you a permanent +3 stat boost to Cunning. This video is via Gamespot, check it out here:

Imperial Agent Weekly is an ongoing column for aspiring IA’s everywhere. For players who are just getting started with the Imperial Agent, check out our Newbie Guide here.