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This might be prudent if you want to tell your companion, say, to taunt a particular target or use a stun at an opportune moment.ģ. If you want to manually trigger those skills, you can do so from your companion's hotbar, or better yet, your own - you just need to drag over select skills from his/her/its bar to your own. It's pretty easy: Expand your companion's skill bar (the little plus + sign) then right-click to turn off automatic usage. If your companion is using certain skills that are causing you grief, you can toggle these skills on and off to prevent their automatically being used.
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Once you gain companions, you'll quickly learn that they have their own AI in combat that may or may not clash with your own fighting style. You can tell your companions what skills to use and which to avoid. Pro-tip: If you're having a hard time finding a group to do your starting planet's heroic quests, which require two or more players to do, just wait until you get your first companion, at which point you'll find they're utterly doable.Ģ. Hey, you call them "companions" I call them "minions" or "cannon fodder."
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For instance, when I played the Trooper, it wasn't until I was about ready to leave my starter planet that the storyline finally gave me my first minion. So don't expect to see your first companion until a bit into your class' prologue storyline. There's a lot of information to process when it comes to rolling a new character (and particularly for going into a game for the very first time), so it's understandable that BioWare didn't want to foist companions on you right when you're just figuring out all your skills and what's going on around you. You don't get your first companion right off the bat. Yet in MMOs, companion NPCs aren't that common, and if you're feeling a little bewildered at the thought of having one at your side at all times in Star Wars: The Old Republic, then we're here to lay out for you 10 reasons why companions are as useful as all get out - and why you're going to love them like crazy before too long.ġ. In the past, BioWare companions have often been cited as the most memorable parts of the studio's games, from Baldur's Gate II's Minsc to Mass Effect 2's Mordin (to name two of my all-time favorites). If so, we're guessing you've never been into pet classes, either.Ĭompanions are one of the long-standing features of BioWare RPGs they're both useful fighters who help keep you alive and persistent beings whom you get to know, develop relationships with, and affect in significant ways. After all, in MMOs we're so used to jaunting off into the wilderness solo without some semi-intelligent NPC tagging along for the ride, so for a game to inform us that we not only will have them but will have to use them all the time may feel odd. For those of you who have never played a BioWare RPG before (or any single-player RPG, really), the concept of "companions" may initially strike you as strange.
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