Legacy Perks in Patch 1.3

Legacy is one of the unique and defining features in Star Wars: The Old Republic. Some games, through the years, have rewarded players for playing by granting free levels and other rewards. A great example is Dark Age of Camelot which offered players who already possessed a level 50 to type /level on under populated realms to skip ahead (dependent on how bad the population was). Of course, in SWTOR the Legacy system is there to promote leveling other characters, primarily to view the personal story of each.

Up until now, the Legacy system was useful – but not exactly amazingly helpful. Sure, you can have different race/class selections, heroic skills, and other neat things that promote the desire to level another character, but you don’t necessarily have the tools to make leveling a new character easier. That’s why Patch 1.3 will be introducing new Legacy abilities that make leveling easier and faster.

New Legacy Character Perks

Legacy Perks work in conjunction with the current available Legacy rewards. The current system is a set of global awards that affect your character creation and skills, while perks are character specific (so far) “perks” that enhance gameplay, both while leveling and at the max level. They require both credits and specific Legacy levels to unlock for each character.

The different ranks are additive; that means that they add on to the previous rank (so 2%, 4%, and 6% would be 10%). The different perks were sold as a way to “customize the leveling experience,” but in general the entire system is all about making life easier.

Available Perks

The two most important perks are the experience and droid ones. You can get up to 30% additional experience from Warzones and Flashpoints (the two that I believe are defiantly worth going for) and the ability to respec anywhere makes life a little bit easier whenever you want to switch between DPS for questing and tanking for flashpoints.

• Improved Experience: You can unlock extra experience from Warzones, Flashpoints, Class Missions, Exploration, and Space Missions. There are five ranks and the total amount of extra XP you can earn is 30%.
• Priority Transport: There are three locations you can transport to, The Black Hole, The Outlaw’s Den, and your Capital Planet and all three transports share a cooldown. You can also unlock a teleport to your fleet’s vanguard vessel, but it shares a cooldown with your fleet pass.
• Speeder Piloting: You can pilot your speeder soon. Rank 1 is level 10, Rank 2 is level 30, and Rank 3 is level 40.
• Legacy of …
  • Altruisim: Increases companion affection gain from gifts.
  • Persuasion: Increases companion affection gain from conversations.
  • Crafting: Increases the chance of an augmented slot.
  • Leadership: Decreases junk sale times.
• Field Repair / Mail Droids: Droids that you can sell items to and buy items from, in addition to a mail droid.
• Field Respecialization: A respec droid.

Perks, Perks Everywhere

My biggest complaint about the system is how a lot of the perks feel like filler. Additional experience from exploration is neat, but not necessarily game breaking. Companion affection is annoying to grind, but 15% for 250,000 credits is kind of silly when the gifts can cost less. Of course, BioWare changed it up to 30% for 90,000 and they’re continuing to make improvements. The transports are neat, but the only real “perks” is additional XP from Flashpoints and Warzones, along with repair/respec droids.

Those two features make the Legacy system move from the shadow and into the spotlight. A lot of players will be grinding Legacy experience in order to make leveling alts easier and to be able to respec out in the field. You only need Legacy level 10 in order to utilize the respec droid and the XP boosts start at Legacy level 5.

I think it’s interesting that these perks are character specific instead of “buy it and forget it.” On one hand, it’s kind of lame paying 100,000s of credits per character for a bit of extra XP, but on the other, meatsinks are designed to help players by funneling money into the void and out of the game to keep inflation down. Prices are also constantly changing and BioWare is trying to balance the right cost for the amount of gain that you receive.

The whole point of the Legacy perk system is to be a major quality of life increase for characters who have reached the maximum level and to that, it achieves its goal, but ultimately “perks” are just that, small perks that assist with day to day activities within the game and leveling.

What do you think? Are you drooling over the Legacy updates or have you yet to even look at the Legacy tab? Let us know in the comments section below.