Star Wars: The Old Republic. Its very name has made many a gamer shiver in delight. I was no exception.
I've been playing since mid-to-late beta, and was among those lucky ones to be invited on day one of early access. I tried a number of classes both on the Imperial and Republic sides, and ended up choosing to play as a Sith Inquisitor. It seems that it's a popular choice, since several times when I entered a Warzone, my entire side was Inquisitors.
As I played the first few missions, I made the decision to take my Inquisitor, Scin, fully to the Dark Side. As far as I've been able to tell, all this really affects is the kind of gear you can get at endgame. Since Scin is a fully heal-speced Sorcerer now, it seems odd to make him a Dark Sider, but I don't want to have to grind Light Side points to overcome my Level 3 Dark Side corruption.
Though my guild, the Imperial Army, chose a PVE-RP server for its home, I've been doing a lot of PvP in Warzones. They're similar to WoW's Battlegrounds in concept. One of them, the Voidstar, reminds me of Storm of the Ancients - one side attacks, the other defends, and the attacker must make their way through several gates to the final artifact. It's faster than SotA, though. One of the oddities of Warzones is that players of all levels can be found in the same instance - while stats are normalized, the levels are very unequal due to the number of tools and level of player experience involved. Right now it's not so bad because most people are new to the game, but I can see this becoming a major problem as the game ages. I've read on TORWars that the developers are testing several potential fixes for this, so we'll see how it turns out.
Playing a Sorcerer-healer, there are a few things I've noticed that seem odd to me. We don't get a burst heal until level 20, and even then, it's very weak - a small burst, with a small HoT attached. Scin still doesn't have an AoE heal, and this seems odd since a Talent for AoE healing is available early in the healing tree for Sorcerers.
As an aside, a great tune to listen to while frying enemies of the Empire is the newly-released Binary Suns by Coyote Kisses. It’s a great electronic remix of the song of the same name from the Episode IV soundtrack. Heavy on the bass, with some nice bass drops and a great melody.