The Old Republic Bounty Hunter Impressions - Jetpacks and wrist rockets make everything better

Earlier this week I gave you my opinion on the Space Combat Missions of Star Wars: The Old Republic. Now I'm back with more impressions from last weekend's beta test, this time I'm going to talk about my experience of playing the Bounty Hunter class that I played from level 1-17 and got to Balmorra, which was the third planet on my journey. Read on to find out how I liked my stint as a Boba Fett wannabe.
Unfortunately the screen capture feature is still disabled in SWTOR, so you're gonna have to make do with some stock Bounty Hunter screens.

I made a Rattataki Bounty Hunter like the one in this picture. The bald scalp is practical for those unfortunate flamethrower haywire moments

The Bounty Hunter is a ranged class that is all about blasting his enemies with various high tech gadgetry. You'll immediately be treated to the ability to fire a wrist mounted rocket, which explodes and knocks the target and anyone nearby to the ground. Perfect for giving you a little extra time to pepper them with some more blaster shots before they have a chance to fight back.

As you level up you'll be granted lots of interesting new ways with which to blast, blow up, incinerate, pummel or freeze your adversaries (no disintegration though... at least as far as I got). My favorite ability that I managed to get was probably the area of effect attack that lets the Bounty Hunter rise into the air using his jetpack and unleash a volley of rockets, which is a good way of giving a whole group of enemies a really bad start to their day.

Another favorite, if perhaps more for the looks than how much I actually found it useful, was the flamethrower ability that blasts out a cone of flame in front of you, handy for lighting large quantities of birthday candles or for melting faces.

Also handy for long distance crème brulée cooking

The Bounty Hunter starts of on the planet of Nal Hutta, captial of the Hutt Empire. It's a grimy and depressing place, polluted by the Hutt's complete disregard for the environment and with streets that are made unsafe by constant gang fights. So a perfect place for a new Bounty Hunter to star his career!
I won't go into details on the storyline, as I don't want to spoil anything for people that want to play Bounty Hunter on release. Suffice to say that your initial objective is to join a mysterious, but glorious, activity called "The Great Hunt".

Your quest to join the Great Hunt sees you dealing with the local Hutt crime lord, picking up a computer whiz companion and eventually making your way to Korriban, the capital world of the Sith Empire.
I found the storyline to be surprisingly interesting, with good voice acting and some genuinely tough light and dark side choices.
I'm normally not really into the sort of "rogue wise cracking renegade" type of character that the Bounty Hunter is, but Bioware has managed to craft a story that is good enough for me to actually care about it, even if it's not the sort of tale that I normally go for.

Go down the dual wielding "Mercenary" path and you'll be something of a Bounty Hunter cowboy

When I reached level 10 it was time for me to leave Nal Hutta and also time to choose the advance class that I wanted to play. The Bounter Hunter can choose between the "tanky" "Powertech" class or the DPS/Healing "Mercenary" class. As this was a character that I was only going to use for a few days and I wanted to just push forward through the content on my own, I figured that a DPS spec would probably be the best choice. Especially since the companion you get early on is capable of doing some decent healing, in case you find yourself facing some tough enemies.

With the Mercenary I was able to use two blasters at the same time Jango Fett-style. It also opened up some Mercenary specific skills, my favorite of which was the AoE blaster attack that let me hold my blasters out in front of me horizontally, like some sci-fi gangster, and then go full auto and fill the area with so many blaster bolts that your hair is going to smell of burnt ozone for the next week (another good reason to go with the bald Rattataki).

I generally found the Bounty Hunter to be fairly easy to play, once I had gotten the hang of some of the basic skill combinations, such as starting off with a charged power shot, following up with an instant sticky explosive charge and finishing off with a rail shot to the panicked enemy.
Doing a lot of damage at a distance meant that most melee enemies were dead before they even had a chance to take a swing at me and ranged enemies could be knocked down by various rocket attacks, or briefly stunned with an electric shock, which usually allowed me to decimate them before any serious amount of firepower could be thrown at me.

At around level 15 I got my bounty hunting hands on my very own spaceship. In the usual Bioware fashion the Bounty Hunter ship shares a lot of similarity to a very famous ship from the original Star Wars movies.
Yes, you'll get your very own Slave 1 look-a-like for you to use to travel between the different planets. Oh, and also to go on the not so great Space Missions.

It's just like Slave 1, only more boxy looking. So it's gotta be older!

Overall I was quite positively surprised by my time spent with the Bounty Hunter. I had chosen to sink the most time into the Bounty Hunter so I would not spoil too much of my chosen Old Republic class, which is going to be the lightning blasting Sith Inquisitor.
But I actually ended up having so much fun with the Bounty Hunter that it almost made me question if I should maybe join the ranks of Boba Fett worshipping hunters of bounties instead of the Palpatine adoring errm.. enquirers of the Sith.

The chance to shoot enemies with rockets, make them panic by throwing a sticky mine at them, or just going all "say hello to my little friend" on them is very rewarding and I think the pointy hunter is at the very least going to be a shoe-in for my secondary class choice of Old Republic.  



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