Dark Side Jedi Guide
Overview[]
When gaining levels in your Jedi profession, it is important to keep in mind what kind of role you wish to play within the game of Star Wars Galaxies and how you want to exist as a Jedi. Every two levels (past level 10) you will receive an expertise point which you can spend in the expertise tab. The choices for a Jedi are as follows: Grey Side - Your general tree allowing you to add skills such as Sabre Block, Cloak and so on Dark Side - Used primarily as Damage dealers Light Side - Used primarily as Tanks Beast Master - Self-explanatory.
In this article, I shall be focusing on a strong template for a Jedi that chooses to go down the path of the Dark Side.
Getting Started[]
When you first enter the world of Star Wars Galaxies it is important to remember that you can't jump into the boots of Darth Vader straight away. Becoming a powerful Dark Jedi takes time and patience if you wish to be a strong damage dealer. You'll start off with an Apprentice Robe and a Jedi's starter weapon, neither of which are especially powerful, but they will allow you to progress to a level where you'll be able to gain items of higher ability.
Without knowledge of how the expertise tree works, it is very hard to be able to make an informed decision on how your player can be most effective. Strength: Increases the maximum possible damage a player can deal with a melee weapon Constitution: Health is increased by 25 per point spent Stamina: Action is increased by 25 per point spent Agility: Increases the chance at which a player can evade and block attacks As you can see all areas of these are useful to a player, however you need to ensure that when spending your expertise points, that you could possibly use them elsewhere to have a greater impact on your character. With your first four expertise points, I would advise placing them with two in constitution and two in strength. This gives you a basic template for your character having increased damage, and being harder to kill due to more health.
Do not forget that although you haven't yet received any skills from your expertise tree, you will have a number of base skills from levelling up your profession. By level ten you will have the following skills: Strike 1: Your basic special attack move Focus 1: The Dark Jedi's basic stance improving your combat attributes Force Spark: The first level to force lightning Force Throw: Your character throws the melee weapon you have equipped then uses the force to return it to them Centre of Being: The Light Jedi's basic stance improving defensive attributes Sweep 1: A 360 degree area of effect attack Mind Trick 1: A skill that allows your character to confuse an enemy causing them to forget you as a threat.
So you have your very very basic template for becoming a Jedi, let's move forward.
Grey Side expertise[]
If you wish to survive in the big bad world, it is imperative that you spend several expertise points in the general branch of the expertise tree, not doing so will result in your character visiting the re-spawn rooms, ALOT. Now the [[General expertise tree [1]]] has several useful skills within it and they must be properly utilized for your character to be a killing machine!
The first skill which you need to train up is Alacrity which increases the chance that blows will glance off you by 2%. Although this may not seem like much, it is vital that you spend the maximum four expertise points in this because the higher the chance of you receiving no damage per hit, means the longer you stay alive and the more you can kill.
Following Alacrity players should train up Exacting Strikes which increase a player's Sweep damage by up to 2% per point. Although once again seeming like a trivial amount of damage, Strikes becomes one of your most useful melee skills as you progress up the ranks. Let's say your character deals a nice whole number of 1000 during a sweep attack. With the four points spent in Exacting Strikes, this will increase the number by 8% allowing the damage to raise to 1080 which could be the difference between killing a creature before it kills you while waiting for your next attack to re-charge.
The next skill is absolutely imperative for a Jedi to require as soon as possible. As level 26, a skill is received entitled Sabre Block which increases your parry skill for a period of time deflecting incoming attacks away from your person. With the expertise point, Stance Sabre Block this chance to deflect attacks from ranged weapons is increased by 10%. On paper this may not seem like much, however, when you get onto the battlefield and are fighting higher level mobs, you will appreciate the usefulness of this expertise point.
Following on from Stance Sabre Block is Improved Sabre Block which increases the Jedi's chances of deflecting attacks by 8% per point spent (maximum being three) leading to a total of 34% chance to block when topped on top of Stance Sabre Block. This expertise is a must for any Jedi whether Dark, Light, or Grey. Without a doubt, one of the most useful skills in the game, use it wisely.
Ok there you have your Grey side expertise points sorted out (at this stage) so let's move forward.
Dark Side[]
Now it's time for you to spend some time really getting to know the power that comes with Dark Side abilities. Switch into the expertise menu and select Path. The screen that you'll see before you will have Light side abilities on the left and Dark side abilities on the right with Improved Cloud Minds down the middle. We'll be focusing on the right side of the tree. When you reach CL 90 you will have the exact number of expertise points to fill up the entire Dark Side tree, but I’ll go on to the description of each area now.
Remorseless Nature is your basic Dark Jedi stance which will increase stamina by 10 points per expertise point spent (the maximum being 4). This skill with 4 expertise points is a pre-requisite for any further expertise points to be spent in the Dark Side tree.
Your character now has the choice of 3 different areas to train up in which lead to skills being learnt which will inflict devastating damage and so it is your decision as to which you'll train first. My Dark Jedi chose Brutality first so that's where I shall start.
Brutality is a pre-requisite for Dark lightning (a large upgrade from Force Spark) which increases your damage of critical hits by 1% per point spent. If your critical hit does 2000 damage, with this area of expertise trained to the highest level, it will add a further 80 points of damage to the strike.
Beyond this, you are able to train up Dark Lightning which is a base stone for any Dark Jedi. Much stronger than force spark it can inflict a considerable amount of damage and can also be used as a skill to pull mobs in a group individually without cause aggro from adds. If training this at a higher level, be aware that you shall receive most probably at least two further skills which are viewable in your Commands window, and both will be a step up from Force Spark, and then Force lightning. Ensure to place the one with the highest damage on the toolbar instead of your base spark, as it will not do it automatically.
Following from Force Lightning it would be smartest to train up Tempt Hatred as to train up the following expertise point from Force Lightning; it requires 12 points spent in the path section. Tempt Hatred is the pre-requisite for Force Drain and increases the chance by 10% per point spent for a Dark Jedi's opponent to lose 5% of action per successful strike on your character. When in combat, you won't often notice this skill in effect but when fighting those to whom action is essential (Medics and Light Side Jedi) you will be thankful that they can't get the huge heal of theirs off at that time so you can hit them even more.
Force Drain is possibly the most effective and important skills that a Dark Jedi can have. In essence, what it does is it takes some of a Dark Jedi's opponent's health and siphons it to your own character. At first, it will be better off to use your character's regular heal (if learning this at a 50+ level as I did) as the amount which is healed at first is minuscule. However, as you increase in level, the amount which you can drain from an enemy becomes significantly higher where a maximum heal can be used for around 5000 health!
After Force Drain (although not seen on any of the expertise calculators currently for an unbeknown reason) comes Improved Force Drain (if I recall correctly) and it is this skill which helps your drain increase. It increases the amount by which a Sith can drain the enemy for per point spent. This just allows for a greater loss of health and hence a greater heal.
It is now time to return to the lightning area of the tree where you will now be able to learn Force Maelstrom. This skill is a cone area of effect(AOE) attack which will cause severe damage to all enemies in front of the Jedi up to a certain point. It is not advised to use this skill in small crowded areas as you will attract unwanted attention from other mobs if you hit them. It can be used versus 1 opponent but be sure he is the only one IN FRONT OF YOUR CHARACTER!
Beyond this is the expertise area Wracking Energy which is a skill that increases the effective penetration of Force Lightning, Force Drain, and Force Maelstrom. Every mob/player you fight against will have a set of armour protecting it/them in one way or another. What Wracking Energy actually does is increase the armour penetration by 25% per point spent, it also adds a snare effect to Force Lightning and increasing it by 2 seconds per point spent.
The next area of discussion is moving up the side of Force Choke now my Jedi is only a level 72 so I have yet to train it up, but when it is used upon me, I have to say it has little to be desired but it is down to your own personal preference. Despite what skills calculators say, you cannot get force choke immediately after remorseless nature, you must spend a further 4 points in a pre-requisite (at this stage I am unable to tell you what it is because the servers are down...again). Force choke is basically a damage over time attack (DoT) and when further points are spent in it, the snare time increased as is the damage.
As I have yet to properly use this skill, I shan't write the report as of yet, look back later for an update on it. I have also a contingency if I do not have Force Choke trained up.
Useful alternative expertise points[]
If you choose to not train up Force Choke because you think it's not worth the 9 expertise points you plough into it, there are several other options which you are able to consider.
If returning to the General tree, when you were levelling up you may have noticed the skill Force Cloak and Improved Force Cloak. These areas of expertise do exactly what they say on the tin, however, the difference between the two is that when you train up Improved Force Cloak, you can actually turn invisible during combat. This gives you several tactical advantages. You can either escape and heal yourself to stop you from becoming food for an unfriendly creature. Or (used most effectively during PvP) you can cloak for a short period of time causing the opposing player to not be able to shoot or locate you giving you time to move around behind them and use your most powerful attacks to surprise them. Take note that the longer you spend in cloak, the more time they will have to allow their heal to recharge. Also, ensure they don't have Sense Danger as they will be able to uncloak you and continue on the fight (this is a Jedi skill received at around lvl 74). If they do have Sense Danger, make sure you move around the back of them quickly before they can hit the skill.
Another possibility, depending on your playing style, is the desire to move up the beast mastery tree. If you open your expertise window and his Beast Mastery at the top, you'll see your base skill is entitled Incubation which basically gives you the ability to pick up and move an incubator, extract DNA from dead creatures and make an egg (see beast mastery guides for more details). To the right of this skill is the Bio Engineer end of the expertise tree which will have no effect on the combat side of your creature but will simply improve the statistics it will have when it is being made etc. To the left of Incubation is the combat side of the tree and as you can see, there are plenty of things to learn. If you can spare the points, the very minimum I would suggest in Beast Mastery for your pet to be effective in PvE and PvP is the skill Mending which allows you to heal your beast for a certain amount of damage. The benefits of having a good high-level pet in PvE is that it allows it to tank the enemy for a good period of time while you can cause some serious damage. In PvP, if the player has any sense they'll go straight for the other player rather than their pet so the advantage would simply be some extra damage allowing you to drop the enemy quicker.
This concludes my guide at this stage, I shall be adding to it at a later date to supply you with information on Robes and such. If you have any questions, feel free to contact me if your character is on Bloodfin give either Taalun or Richawraa a tell
Regards Teewed McGee,  nowayhome Taalun Sheer - lvl 72 Dark Jedi Richawraa - lvl 90 Armour smith