What to DO and NOT DO as a new player in SWTOR (or a returning veteran) to make sure you are not missing out on great content and to have a great experience!
With over thirteen years of experience and with the help and support from the SWTOR Community, I am happy to share with you tips and tricks to help and guide your first steps in this game. Enjoy!
It is important to note that this is not a speed-leveling guide. Every single piece of advice you will read here is aimed at creating the perfect and smoothest possible experience for you, the player – to allow you to fully enjoy the adventure and gain as much out of your investment, be it time, money or both.
Start the game from the very beginning. SWTOR’s classic storylines for each of the 8 available characters are incredible and very deep. Following the heavy story-driven Knights of the Fallen Empire and Knights of the Eternal Throne expansions, it became more clear than ever how important it is for someone to have played the origin stories of the classes.
The characters we meet, the companions we take in and push away, and the unique dialogues, all bring a unique level of personal attachment and experience of playing the game as a whole.
Sometimes it may seem like it doesn’t make any difference if you destroy or save a secondary character for the main plot of the storyline, but the developers direct the narrative of the game in a way that these decisions will matter to you at some point, sooner or later. And that’s something not easily achievable.
Every time you are about to cast someone off, reject someone, or make an important decision, you should stop for a moment and think, how will I feel after I click 1, 2 or 3 and make my choice? You will often not even care if this decision is important to the story – present and future chapters, no. You will be worried about your own conscience.
This game has a beginning (which is long in the past now), a present and a future. don’t start from level 70. Don’t skip the most important part.
Start your adventure from level 1, save yourself the money for that token (if you got it for free with your Subscription, save it for later usage). Starting from 1 will help you learn better the world of SWTOR. It will teach you what the game is about, it will allow you to fully experience the real power of this MMO – its story aspect.
Well, it’s not the end of the world if you scratch this advice completely and ignore my words, but I secretly hope that one day you will indeed go back, play all the 3 original chapters (lvl 1 to 50) on your favorite class, come back to this guide and tell me “I loved the beginning, you were right to advise us to do so.”
If you start a class and realize you are not enjoying it, DON’T give up on the entire game, try another class and story. Not all stories are equally dramatic, engaging and entertaining. Each class has its own individuality and gameplay style. You may think you enjoy ranged gunplay the most, but end up loving the melee or vice versa.
When you are creating a new character in SWTOR, don’t rush through the initial character creation process. You can customize your outfits later on, but if you want to change their physical appearance or species, this will cost you a lot. We have a fantastic guide to help you design a unique and original outfit for your character.
If you do end up desiring an entirely new look and feel for your character, you can still do it by using the Appearance Designer kiosk.
After you gain some awareness of what’s what in the SWTOR HUD and UI, go ahead and DO customize your UI to best fit your screen and personal preference.
Chances are you have played another MMO, RPG, or a third-person action game before and you should have at least a vague knowledge of how and where certain elements should appear on your screen.
I have a tutorial on how to install a custom SWTOR UI, but you don’t have to use my specific UI. Design your own and enjoy the game at your own pace.
A minimalist UI will help you to immerse yourself in the story and environment you go through better than, say, sticking to the standard (rather large) default UI.
This is especially true if you are a returning veteran, who knows the game already at least a bit. If you prefer to click abilities with the mouse, a minimalist UI is not a good choice for you.
Move the camera closer to your character to help with immersion. If you are wearing a relatively new outfit, designed and released in the recent years, chances are this outfit will feature higher quality textures and details to look at and enjoy.
This will also help keep your focus on your character and the action rather than allow your eyes to wonder around too much.
SWTOR is an old game, and its age is showing in a lot of places. The devs are constantly revamping, upgrading and improving various elements of the game, but they do it at a slow-ish pace.
Broadsword tweaks and updates the game’s user interface often. Pay attention to new, moved, or changed elements as you play more and more and get better organize.
Advance through the story and take your time to learn how to use the many in-game instruments and tools at your disposal.
When you are doing more challenging group (or solo) content, consider moving the camera further away. Having a clear overview of a larger portion of your surroundings is crucial for PvP as well.
Don’t spend too much time early on trying to learn all the different game systems SWTOR throws at you. When you first arrive on the Fleet, circle it once or twice, but don’t waste time trying to explore everything.
A lot of the vendors and even entire areas on the Fleet are for high level players and endgame content. Focus on your story and progress.
Things like Crafting and Ability choosing may seem like a constant, but Expansions always change them among many other elements of the UI.
Visit the Supplies section and vendors on the Fleet every 4-8 levels to upgrade your gear. Companions don’t require gear but scale automatically with your character’s level.
Don’t Augment your gear at low levels. Getting individual Mods to put into your gear is the best and cheapest method to upgrade your character. You will not need anything else. Augmenting is helpful in SWTOR’s Endgame.
There’s this classic appeal and satisfaction to craft your own gear when playing RPGs. You can do that in SWTOR as well. However, it is better to gather just enough crafting materials to progress through the crafting tiers and start saving materials when you reach higher levels and tiers.
Don’t bother crafting gear while leveling. What the vendors on the Fleet offer, is often more than decent. If you are not in a rush or that aforementioned “classic appeal” is strong within you, by all means, spend all the time you want and make your own crafted gear.
When you clear up your mind as to what type of career you want to pursue in the Endgame, then you can choose your Crafting and Gathering skills.
The gathering skills scale up every time you pick up a crafting resource from the ground, making the farming process much quicker and simpler. All nodes on all planets will now give you an adequate level of experience and help you grind through the tiers.
If you care about your character’s appearance look at planet vendors and GTN for outfits. These NPCs sell unique items for credits or special tokens, which you can acquire through quests (such as the Bounty Hunter vendor, attached to the Bounty Hunter Recurring Event).
A new outfit could be the thing you need to push forward if you are feeling bored or uninspired to play further.
If you only rely on the items you loot or earn as you play and level up, your character will often look like a clown. You can always purchase something from the GTN, but prices there might be out of your range as a new player.
Another alternative is the Cartel Market – this is the in-game cash shop, which sells all kinds of decorations, outfits and non-power-boosting items. You pay real money for all items this store offers.
There is a difference between an Outfit and a Gear Set in SWTOR. You can use every single gear piece in the game both for its visual appearance or for its stats.
Veteran players, who are returning to the game after a long break, check your stashes. You may have some old gems that you never used after you quickly out leveled them.
Everything can be used as an outfit today. You can even include weapons in your outfits. This feature is known as “transmog” in old classic RPGs. There are some limitations to that system, of course. You can’t use weapons in the Outfitter that your class isn’t proficient with.
Don’t spend all your Cartel Coins, just because you have them. You never know when Broadsword might release the next best outfit that perfectly fits your character.
Register a 2FA token to your SWTOR account. This will not only increase the security of your account and personal data it holds but also grant you 100 Cartel Coins every month. A subscription grants you 600 Cartel Coins each month while it’s active.
It won’t hurt if you do the Daily PvP missions and, of course, it can only help if you do the Flashpoints, especially now that most of them have a “solo” mode.
Quests are the best way to level up, not because they are the quickest, but because they are the most entertaining ones. Level up mostly through quests to get the maximum out of your playtime and efforts.
If you are a Subscriber, the game will make your leveling and overall experience a lot easier, but a Subscription is optional and will not hurt your experience if you only care about creating and living in your own Star Wars adventure.
If you are a returning veteran, consider doing some side missions. With the amount of Double XP events we have been getting each year and the quick leveling through main missions alone, you may be surprised how much of the planetary content and other optional missions you have completely forgotten existed. If it’s been a long time, you may feel like they are new missions while you are replaying them
As a subscriber, you gain the ability to choose a second combat style for your character. With Update 7.0 the devs detached the class stories from the classes. Advanced classes are now called Combat Styles and you can play, for example, through the Jedi Knight story as a Shadow.
If you struggle to come up with a build, check out our full catalog of the best solo build guides for all classes and disciplines.
If you are new, I would recommend that you play a traditional class story with its “default” combat style. On the character creation screen, after you select your class origin story (top left), the first two combat style options are always the “default” ones that used to be attached to this story from launch until Update 7.0.
Level Sync is something great, but it is designed for the more experienced players, those who have already played through most of the content years ago. Don’t level only through Heroics, Flashpoints or PvP.
Leveling through PvP exclusively can be frustrating, because it will take you much longer to level up relying only on PvP.
It’s so much fun playing the lowbies, though. I strongly recommend you not completely avoid PvP at low levels but also avoid Warzones before you reach a reasonable level. Entering the battlefield at a very low level is no fun. You lack many of the abilities, perks and boosts for your class.
My personal recommendation is to start joining PvP games after level ~40 or so. It is a lot more fun when you earn a few extra abilities, so you don’t have to spam the basic attacks like a mad monkey all the time.
The best experience you will have with PvP is at level cap. This is the true competitive scene. Broadsword created the classes in a way that no matter how much balancing they do for PvP, one class or spec will always have an advantage over another and a weakness against a third one. This is the way!
A few words about Heroics next. They are efficient. But can get depressingly boring to farm. Even if you do them with a team. You will have more reasons to farm Heroics when you reach the SWTOR EndGame.
All these make them become incredibly boring very quickly and the last thing I’d like to see is a new player getting bored of the game, because they approached the leveling process the wrong way.
SWTOR is not about farming. There are only a few of us left now who truly care about collecting everything everywhere all the time. And even we started out slowly, just enjoying the vast worlds full of NPCs and all kinds of characters and companions that you do not wish to skip or avoid.
You would want a Stronghold. So, get a Stronghold. Get one of the neutral strongholds first as that will allow you and your future alts to travel to it freely any time you want to.
If you find the use of a Stronghold as early as possible appealing to your style and gameplay, you can purchase a faction-specific Stronghold at a much lower price compared to the neutral ones.
SWTOR offers a variety of methods to travel from one place to another quick and easy. When the game launched, we had to go “on foot” everywhere. Today you can simply quick travel from and to your Stronghold and Ship in no time.
You can also use the handy quick travel icons available in the quest tracker next to the mission objectives. Make good use of the quick traveling opportunities around you.
Several times during the main storyline you will have to go to your Starship and the quickest way to get there would often be to travel to your Stronghold first and from there exit to your Starship.
Your companions can fill any role and since Game Update 4.0 they are no longer locked to one role. They also don’t require any gear.
Influence is a powerful Companion-specific stat that will make them stronger in any aspect. This stat is personal for each companion and if you want to make your first steps in the game easier – focus on one companion first and get their influence higher. This will make them perform better in combat as well as do their Crew Skill duties more efficiently.
Of course, with the game lacking challenges at lower levels these days, this is not a must-do, merely a suggestion if you experience tough times while exploring the worlds as you level up.
Speak to your companions as often as possible. Their personal stories, struggles and adventures will allow you to immerse yourself even better into the world you play in.
And as a Star Wars fan, I assume, this is what you want. It certainly was what I wanted when I played all of these stories for the first time myself.
Sometimes they will just want to share something with you. Other times they may invite you to join them on a quest. Every time you talk to your companion and they reveal something new about themselves through a new quest or just a conversation, you increase your Influence with them as well.
What are Datacrons? You will surely hear about them at some point or you may stumble one by accident. Datacrons are cubic items that contain knowledge.
Finding Datacrons will grant you stats that will help improve your performance in combat. Each Datacron also contains what I would call “a lore patch” – information about events from the Star Wars Legends (SWTOR itself is considered Legends as well).
You can skip the Datacrons on your first character while you are playing the main story. I would recommend you pick up as many Datacrons as you can when you are near level cap or after you reach it.
As you level up the story of your class is what you should pay the most attention to, if you want to fully experience SWTOR as a Star Wars game.
You can opt to leave the datacron hunt for later or do them while expling each planet for the first time. In any case, they will be more important for you in the Endgame and the stats gain you will receive from each individual Datacron, are nothing to be excited for. In the Endgame, though, everything matters.
Last, but not least,
Play the class you enjoy the most and don’t listen to people telling you that your choice is bad for Endgame PvE, PvP or something else. It’s your game, your time, your decision.
I’m sure I didn’t exhaust all the possible tips I could or (perhaps) SHOULD have shared. But, well… one day we may come to a “Version 3” of this guide.
There are a lot more things I could add. No matter how much I share here, there will always be new and cool tips and suggestions useful to a new SWTOR player. If you believe there is something that a beginner player should absolutely know, share it in the comments and I will add it to the guide.
I would like to extend my gratitude to the SWTOR Community for providing more and interesting tips that I have, am and will be including in this guide to expand upon it as time goes.
Thanks to:
