Sith Warrior Beginners Guide

Torwars just published an excellent newbie guide for the Sith Warrior class. It includes many beginner questions and answers and for those of you still undecided on your class choice, hopefully this will help!

Why Pick a Sith Warrior?

The Sith Warrior has a number of cool things going for it. Among them:

Force Charge enables the Sith Warrior to leap across a rather vast distance and attack his foes. It is also, quite possibly, the coolest and most utilitarian ability in the game.
No matter which advanced class you choose, you’re pretty durable.
At level 10, you get one of the best companions in the game – Vette. She’s cute, she’s snarky, and aside from dishing out some serious DPS, she’s the kind of girl you’ll want to take home to mom.

The Sith Warrior as a Character:

As a general rule of thumb, Sith Warriors are very melee oriented with very few ranged abilities. However, they’re generally very durable, very good at straight up melee combat, and quite anxious to kick the butts of all those goody two-shoes Jedi. When a Warrior gets to level 10, he quickly learns that there are two sides to this coin: the heavily armored Juggernaut, and the damage dealing Marauder. Choose wisely.

The Juggernaut Advanced Class gets heavy armor, and wields a single lightsaber. Any build that goes deep into the Immortal skill tree can be a very effective heavy duty tank. They have numerous damage mitigating abilities but, generally speaking, their DPS isn’t great.

There are, however, DPS variants of the Jug (those that ignore the Immortal tree, and instead go heavily into the Vengeance and Rage skill trees) that sacrifice some defense in exchange for offense.

In contrast to the heavily armored Jug, there is the Marauder Advanced Class. The Marauder dual-wields lightsabers, and trades off heavy armor (he can only wear medium) for some impressive mobility, stealth, and melee DPS. The Marauder has got a number of tricks up his sleeve, enabling him to get his groove on with with some over the top hand to hand combat.

Be sure to take a look at this guide which should further elucidate the two Advanced Classes.

Species:

The bottom line is, it just doesn’t matter what species you choose. There is no statistical difference or advantage and the differences are only cosmetic. Each species does get a unique ability all their own, but these are essentially species-specific emotes, and have no effect on game play whatsoever. So, feel free to make that uber-sexy Zabrak that you’ve always fantasized about, because you’re going to be staring at her butt for a very long time.

Appearance:

Like choosing your species, appearance choices are entirely cosmetic. Choose whatever appearance you want. In this regard, the galaxy is your oyster.

There are two small exceptions to this rule, for all you super leet min-maxers out there. If you are a hardcore PVP player, you may want to choose the teeny-weeny body size because of the so-called “ghetto stealth” factor. It’s simply a little bit harder for an enemy player to click on wee little you during PvP combat because you’re so teeny. While most players don’t think this is a big deal, for some, this is the .001% advantage they’ve been looking for.

The flip side is if you’re playing a tanking Jug, picking one of the two bigger body sizes can be a good idea. In some fights, where everyone is getting knocked around and confusion reigns, it may be a bit easier for your healer to find your beefy butt in the midst of the fray. Again, you’ve got to be the judge if this is significant to you.

Primary Stats:

Strength and endurance are your primary stats. Strength affects virtually all of your abilities as a Warrior. Want more melee damage? Get more strength. Want your Force powers to be more effective? Get more strength. Want your shields to absorb more damage? Get more strength. While it’s not entirely intuitive, the idea is that strength will affect every one of your abilities far more than cunning, aim, or anything else will, ever. In fact, you could pile on all kinds of other stats, and a small amount of strength would still outperform them all combined.

Endurance increases your hit points. Want to be tougher? It’s pretty simple: find and wear the gear with lots of endurance.

From level one through level fifty, you’re simply much better served if you focus on strength and stamina than anything else (unless, of course, you want to end up as Bantha fodder). If you want more offensive power, go for strength. Want to be able to suck up more damage, go for endurance.

Armor:

Whether you’re a Maurauder or Juggernaut, armor is the thing that keeps your butt from being knocked into the next galaxy. Common sense will tell you that if two pieces of gear are statistically equal, go for the piece that gives you the most armor. Very simply, mo’ armor = mo’ better.

For Jugs, Soresu Form increases your armor by sixty – yes I said sixty – percent. Think about this for a second: bracers with 100 armor on them instantly become the equivalent of 160 armor bracers. When you consider every piece of heavy armor that a Jug is wearing, this is suddenly statistically significant. This multiplier is a huge factor, so armor becomes equally important as Strength and Endurance for tanking Jugs.

Let’s talk Rage:

The other classes in SWTOR generally start off with a full bar of force or a full clip of ammo, but not us Warriors. We have zero Rage when out of combat. We start out empty and have to fill up our unique little love tank in order to, well, tank (or to DPS, but that wasn’t all cool and catchy right there).

Thus, Warriors have a back and forth kind of mechanic going on. We use some abilities to generate Rage and other abilities that expend it. This requires a certain amount of attention on the part of a Warrior, and it’s one of the things that makes Warriors both different and interesting compared to other classes.

Skill Rotation:

Whenever possible start combat with Force Charge. Not only do you look bad ass, but it does some pretty good out-the-door damage. It also generates 3 Rage. This should be followed by an Assault (which generates 2 Rage) or two if you’re feeling plucky. One can never have too much Rage. After this, you can begin to alternate Rage building skills (which are generally low damage) with Rage expending skills (which are much higher damage).

At very low levels, your skill rotation should be:

Force Charge > Assault > Vicious Slash > Assault (then repeat as needed)

As you progress toward level 10:

Force Charge > Ravage > Assault(x2) > Smash > Assault > Force Scream > Assault > Vicious Slash (then repeat from the first Assault in the rotation)

While over-simplified, this rotation gives you the basic idea. Force Charge gets you into combat, builds a bit of Rage, and immobilizes the target. Ravage (on a long 30 second cooldown) will probably take that target out. Taking out a target at the start of a fight, even a weak one, minimizes the damage you receive and gives you an edge.

Next comes a sequence of Assaults (doing a little damage but building more Rage) mixed in with Smashes (AOE damage for fighting groups, with a nice little stun thrown in), Force Screams (single target DPS with a stun), and Vicious Slashes (high single target DPS).

The whole point is that a Warrior needs to 1) take out a weak target early, and 2) keep generating enough Rage to utilize his/her higher DPS and AOE skills every time those skills come off their cooldowns. (Master this, and you’re going to be a god among your fellow MMO gamers.)

Even Simpler:

There are some Warriors that like to keep things as simple as possible. Their “rotation” goes something like this:

Force Charge >Ravage > Assault (x4) > Smash > Force Scream > Vicious Slash (then repeat from the first Assault)

The advantage to this simple rotation is just that: it’s simple. In fact, it’s nearly mindless. The disadvantage is that the Warrior isn’t maximizing his stuns and interrupts, or optimizing his cooldowns. However, it’s really hard to screw this up.

Starting World – Korriban:

At first glance, Korriban looks like a bunch of angry Egyptians strolled over and furiously puked on this desert planet. The place is dry, hot, and sand gets all up in your naughty bits. There’s nothing but temples and tombs (seriously, how many ancient tombs could the Sith really need?) full of ravenous sand worms that want nothing to do but spit on you with their acid-laced drool. Even your Twi’lek companion says that the Sith Academy is the scariest school she’s ever been to. That being said, Korriban really sets the tone: you’re a Sith, and the Sith aren’t a snugly, cozy people. You’ll have a lot of fun killing everything that moves, and the views of the Empire ships cruising in the atmosphere are awe-inspiring.

Your primary quest on Korriban involves becoming accepted as a Sith Lord’s apprentice. Be advised, both your main quest and the side quests are basically a tutorial in how to be truly ruthless and evil….oftentimes making you, the player, feel VERY bad about the choices you are forced to make. Truly, the Dark Side will have it’s way with you on Korriban.

Leveling Guide:

Although this guide is really only designed to help you get a great start as a Sith Warrior, all these principles will help guide you all the way to level fifty.

Follow your main story quest. It’s not like you have a choice anyway in how many people you actually put to death, so you might as well enjoy it.
Pick up every possible side quest along the way and complete them. These side quests give you a lot of bang (and experience, equipment, and credits) for the buck….no matter how many sand worms or lost zealots you have to slay with your powers of evil.
As you’re attempting to follow rules one and two, kill every single living thing along the way. On your way back, after you’re quest objective is complete, kill every single thing that has respawned.

Follow the above guidelines, and you’ll be at level 10 in no time. Heck, keep playing according to the above principles, and you’ll be at the level cap in no time. This collection of beginner leveling tips should also come in handy.

In Summary:

We hope you’ve enjoyed this guide; it’s intended to get you off to a great start as a Sith Warrior. Instead of having you fumbling around with your class like Helen Keller (was that mean? C’mon, folks, we’re Sith, mean is our middle name) we hope we’ve been able to answer a lot of common questions from your very first day as a Sith Warrior.

Truly, we hope you find these fundamentals helpful. Of course, we’re happy if these get you to level 10, where you pick your advanced class and go out to kick the galaxy’s arse. We’d be even happier, to be frank, if these basic skills continued to help you thrive on your evil, bloodthirsty adventures as a Warrior for another 40 levels after that.

Leveling, advanced classes, quest guides, spell rotations, mechanics and more… You can find it all in this guide specifically written for Sith Warrior players!