Greetings fellow SWTOR Fans! It’s Darth Kraze again sitting here at it again with another Holocron. Yesterday we had a pretty small, but exciting update especially for all you future Smugglers out there! Just incase you missed it, yesterday’s update was the “official” reveal of the Smuggler class with the addition of it to the “Holonet”.  

(edit: even though all the gameplay vid’s and screenshots have showed single wielding Smugglers check out below for some dual wield action!)

“Whether sweet-talking an attractive alien or bargaining with a hardened criminal contact, the Smuggler’s charm is a notorious asset, and often the ticket to turning around a deteriorating situation.” To start off on the basic level this could mean they are the class with the strongest “persuade” skill as in the kotor games. You get to say those wild and outlandish dialogue options… and actually get them to work! You get that poor slave to give you his last credit, that gangster to give you his last blaster and that politician to hand over his seat in the senate. You sir are one smooth talking criminal.

On the game mechanics aspect of the Smuggler what does this mean to you? Solo, you’ll be able to pull out a few extra credits, maybe an extra reward or two from missions. Maybe it will let you prevent combat situations that you may not be able to handle, maybe a patrol engages you right after you finish a fight and you’re still recovering, BUT instead of just auto-attacking you, you get a set of dialogue beforehand. “Hey! What are you doing over there! Why are you looting my best friends corpse!!!!!” “Oh…I just found him like that…I was looking to see if he had an emergency contact on him…” “Oh, okay carry on then.” Obviously it wouldn’t go down exactly like this, but you get the picture.

In groups the ability to prevent useless and pointless fights will definitely save time, as well as maybe saving your groups butt on more then a few occasions. Another added group benefit will come in the form of the newly introduced “group dialogue” yes maybe you will be the battle hardened Soldier of the Republic, but that doesn’t mean you can’t benefit from having a Smuggler with you! Sure you have zero charisma and when confronted you are compelled to try to instigate combat, but! With your handy dandy Smuggler with you, maybe he can pull out one of his miracle dialogue options that can prevent just another endless battle you Soldiers are so eager to get in to.

So in short, why bring a Smuggler with you on your adventures? Increased rewards, less pointless battles, in effect “crowd control”, and a time saver shortening the length it would normally take you to clear whole bases of NPC’s. Sounds like nothing but good things to me! “If circumstances get too complicated, though, count on a Smuggler to always have an escape plan. Experienced in flying under the radar, Smugglers are amazingly elusive. Yet when backed into a corner, they quickly become cunning and often deadly combatants.”

As far as actual combat mechanics, they are the official “rogue” of TOR, they sneak from behind cover, they drop ambushes on you with a flurry of blaster fire before you even know where it is. I need to make a quick comment on the small combat clips on the Holonet page, that second video is by far one of the most exciting pieces of actual combat yet. It brings the realism of MMO combat back to life, even though we haven’t seen it yet and with the promise of choreographed fights, I still imagine two characters slashing each other over and over till one falls over and leaves the other victorious. With that clip of actually seeing a smuggler roll into cover and immediately lay off some suppressing fire brings glee to my MMO roots. Seeing cover as something more then just say, “+50% defense and +25% increased accuracy” statistics basically, is amazing and I’m sure a welcoming change to MMO’s I think you all could agree.

I wouldn’t be surprised to see some old SWG Smuggler moves brought back, some low blow action, maybe a little feign death with a side of spice for all! Any other spice addicts out there? I know I was probably this close to ending up in a spice rehab myself.

I’m kind of mixed on my feelings of “space” and “space combat” in TOR, if you would of asked me a few weeks ago, I believe I would have told you, “maybe in an expansion”. But now, I’m mixed. The basis behind my theory is… you can’t have a Smuggler, who doesn’t actually Smuggle anything, simple! When you read over everything that’s been written about what a Smuggler is, and actually does, it all talks of actually “smuggling” either weapons or plans even the dilemma of smuggling slaves or doing jobs for the Sith. Unless Bioware’s idea of smuggling is accepting a job from the Sith to smuggle some slaves from one location to another and inserting “5 wookie slaves” into your inventory then making you run from point A to point B… then I don’t know what else they could mean.

So if anyone from Bioware is out there reading this, I speak for all the Smugglers out there, please, PLEASE let them actually smuggle! Give us space! Give us ships! Give us random events where we get pulled into a giant cruiser by their tractor beam and forced into an instance where our group has to split up and deactivate the tractor beam while the others save the princess and the Jedi fights Vader…wait what was I talking about again? Oh right, smuggling, give all the future Han Solo’s out there their very own Millennium Falcon/Ebon Hawk that is used for more then a loading screen between planets. Please!!... that is all.

 

 

This idea would make more sense if bounty hunters and smugglers were both under the same faction, but imagine if your buddy bounty hunter catches a major high profile bounty, but can’t seem to get the bounty to the buyer. In comes you, and your handy dandy smuggling skills and your super fast cargo ship! It would make for an exciting adventure full of boarding encounters and rival bounty hunters trying to take the bounty from you. As well as the final reward negotiations where your Smuggler skills will also come in handy. Maybe you can get a fat reward, or maybe you’ll set the bounty free on the ‘bounty placer’ adding a companion character to either you or the bounty hunter.  It would definitely make an interesting dynamic in creating your groups as well as straying from the norm and the “holy trinity” aka “LF TANK AND HEALER ANYONE OUT THERE?!”  

 

 

That's it! See you guys next week! Thanks for reading.

Ps: EverQuest 2 had /pizza linking you to Dominoes, WoW had /panda that linked you to Panda Express well at least for a day during an old April Fool’s day. What should SWTOR have? Feel free to leave your comments here, this articles thread on the kotormmo.net ‘s forums or on the official SWTOR forums!