After playing a bit the beta weekend I have a few tips to help you out when the game launches.

Get your harvesting skills right away.

If you’re a trooper or smuggler when you go to the fort after your first quest you’ll see a place where you can take a shuttle to the republic fleet.  If you’re Jedi it’s on the top floor of the Jedi temple  directly west of the starting area.  Before you do anything other than your very first quest take this and talk to all the crew skills trainers.  (you’ll be level 1 or 2) each one gives you 450 xp and there’s also a quest to talk to all of them which gives you a bunch of xp.  This will put you at about level 4 or 5 when you go back and start doing your class quests.  With this advantage everything will be easier, you’ll get more money from harvesting and you will be about 2 hrs ahead of the other players meaning you wont have to fight for mobs and whatever else.  Plus you can skip the low xp side quests.   I did this and was the highest level player on my server throughout the whole beta weekend despite spending most of my time not actually playing.

Your crew skills are slicing, bioanalysis and salvage.

These are the 3 harvesting skills.  They cost nothing to use and are basically free money.  Slicing gives you boxes full of credits.  ALWAYS tap slicing nodes, even if you have to kill a few extra mobs to get them.   Bio and salvage you can either squirrel your resources in your ship’s locker, vendor them or sell them on the GTN (auction house).

The reason you want to use these skills is because, at least under level 20, all the other trade skills are just money sinks and you’ll end up being broke.  If you arent broke it’s pretty easy to buy everything you need off vendors or the GTN.   It’s VERY easy to respec and level up a new crew skill if you have a large crew (which you get at later levels) and a bit of money to burn.   You also go through gear so fast at low levels there is no point in making something that will be replaced in 20 mins.   With all the money you make from harvesting you’ll easily be able to buy what you need from the GTN.    Save your mats if you plan on switching to an actual crafting skill later.

The only crew skill that (at low to mid levels) gives you something you cant just buy is Diplomacy which can give you light or dark side points.   But you dont need that because…

Choose light or dark side before you start playing and stick with it.

Decide when you are creating your character if you’re going to be light or dark side and ALWAYS pick that option.  When you mouse over conversation options you’ll either get the white start (light) in the middle of the compass or the red triangle (dark) pick the option you’ve pre-chosen.  I was going to be darkside and picked the light side option twice and regretted it.   There is no benefit to being grey.  If you make a mix of light and dark choices you’ll have to grind with diplomacy later.  You can buy nice gear from the light and dark side vendors.  There is nothing for neutrals.

Ignore companion affection.

The reason I picked light side choices was because I knew my companion would be pissed off by the dark side options.   Picking a choice he doesnt like gives you a -1 affection.  Picking one he likes gives +15 or +20.   Affection means very little and you can literally buy it.  Companion gifts cost 200 credits from a vendor, and give 24+ affection.   200 credits is nothing when you have 20k in the bank at level 20, and get 200+ credits from a single slicing node.  High affection only gives you access to side conversations and makes your companions craft slightly faster.   It’s something you can wait for.   I guess ignoring it is the wrong thing to say.  Never base any decisions on companion affection.

Get every taxi and bind point.

This should be obvious if you’ve played WoW or Rift, but there’s LOTS more taxi and bind points in TOR.  Be sure to grab them all.   You’re likely to find yourself wondering where the class trainer is.   If you have a bind/taxi to republic fleet you can always go train there.  Make sure you remember the way back to fleet.  I was drunk as shit my first play through and kind of forgot everything.

Warzone wisely.

As you probably know you have to do your linear class quest do get your crew and ship.   Warzones give pretty good XP and money, I found that doing a WZ was a perfect way to wait for my “recall” to cooldown at the end of a class quest.  This also allowed me to avoid having to grind side quests.  Additionally dont do space battles until you get the quests for them.   This will give you huge bonus xp.

Flashpoints are hard, give Blues.

If you want blue gear do a flashpoint.  Flashpoints are harder than solo questing.  If you’re not in a guild group then you probably have idiots in your group and it’ll take 5 tries to kill that boss.   Yes, all of the things are true of every other game, but dont forget them when playing TOR.  Really the best piece of non-super-totally-obvious advice here is to have one person from each base class in your group so there are no fights for gear.  Jedi knigh, jedi consular, smuggler and trooper is your perfect group because you get all the drops for your class.   I’d suggest you do each one once when it’s level-appropriator, reject and groups with under leveled players or no tank/ no healer.  Your level 20 blues wont mean shit when you are level 30, much less level 50.  But again, all of this should be obvious.

Pick a tanking or healing AC

There are two advanced classes which can only be DPS.  Dont pick one of those.  Pick an advanced class which can heal or tank.  Seriously, dont be stupid.  Respeccing is easy and the respec dude is a 30 second run from the flashpoint.  Healers and Tanks dps just fine in PvP.

Ignore any of my advice that doesnt make sense.

Remember who this is for.  This is a 15 year old Republic PVP/Raiding guild.   If you really want to do side quests to kill 10 womprats.  Go do side quests to kill 10 womprats.  If you really want to awkwardly romance an NPC, then awkwardly romance an NPC.   I’m going to be ignoring some of this advice myself.   This guide is to help you avoid doing things where you say “I wish I’d known not to do that.”   If you want to get to endgame raiding and PvP this guide will help you get there ASAP.