SWTOR's Advanced Classes revealed
Exclusive info on class specialisation.
Eurogamer can exclusively reveal that Star Wars: The Old Republic's eight character classes will each split into two specialised Advanced Classes, giving the player a total of 16 choices of career in BioWare's MMO.
The first Advanced Classes to be revealed are those for the Sith Warrior. Choosing Juggernaut will shape this warrior into a tough, damage-soaking tank class, while the Marauder is all about channelling rage and maximising damage output.
Looking at the first exclusive screens of the two, it looks like the Juggernaut will feature the heavy body-modifications of Darth Vader, while the Marauder will be able ape Darth Maul's twin-lightsaber fighting style.
Choosing your Advanced Class is a pure gameplay decision rather than a story decision. Advanced Classes will share the same epic narrative, but have different combat styles and play different roles in a group.
Each Advanced Class will have its own skills and abilities that define its role on the battlefield, and in some cases grant access to new weapon and armour types. Choosing one means you won't have any access to the skills of the other.
And each Advanced Class will have a further three branches of skills to specialise in (equivalent to World of Warcraft's talent specialisation options on a single class). Unlike the Advanced Classes themselves, you can mix and match these if you like, although they're all trained from the same pool of points.
The first two skill trees are particular to your Advanced Class, while the the third is a shared set of skills which expand on the core abilities of the main class.
There's much we still don't know about Advanced Classes: what the other classes will advance into, when you'll make the choice, and whether you'll be able to change your choice at a later date. But it's already clear that the range of options they'll offer the player is impressively large.
You can read more about the Advanced Classes, as well as impressions of playing as the Bounty Hunter class, in our hands on report on Star Wars: The Old Republic.