Galat'ion

Although Graggory, my first character, was a powertech bounty hunter, I was still learning the game with him, and I'd even thought I'd screwed up his story and cut it short at one point. I turned out to be wrong about that, but thinking what I thought, I created a second powertech and played him. I kept Graggory because he was a maxed out armormech, so he was useful (and I later got to finish the story with him anyway, once I figured out that I could) but in the meantime, I had the worst named of all of my characters to "replace" him, Galat'tion. Galat (a name I probably could have used, but I didn't think of it) ended up looking just a little bit different, and after his playthrough, I ended up equipping him a little bit differently. I also kept them on two different combat specs; Galat is on the damage over time pyrotech spec, while Graggory is on the direct damage advanced prototype spec. While Graggory tends to "dress" and I guess in my mind behave more like your prototypical gunfighter in space, Galat is a bit more a merc, a gangster, and a thug. The look I have above, from the character select screen, is the one I now consider his most iconic look.

Galat also became my biochem crafter, so I still keep him around even though I have two powertechs. My Jedi shadow and Sith assassin, on the other hand, never had any unique crafting skills, never got out of the 60s in their levels, and I didn't enjoy either of them as much, so lacking any compelling reason to keep them, they're the only original set of characters that I don't still have.

I do have another powertech now, Vash Galaide, but although he's a powertech, he's playing the agent class story, and is significantly different in look, style and everything else to Graggory, even though both are advanced prototype powertechs in terms of their mechanics.

I know he's not real, obviously, but sometimes I feel a little bad for Galat, since I don't like him as much as I feel like I should. But he does have some cool looks, and as a fictional character, I could find more use for him than as a "spare" powertech in game.

This is a very similar look to what I have for one of my Phillip outfits, although obviously he uses a different gun. I actually used that helmet for Phillip too, until I changed it. I guess they could have been twinseys with different guns. 

Speaking of guns, Galat is the only original tech class character who got no love when it came to cosmetic gun usage; he just uses the same one all of the time. I actually installed that gun into his cosmetic slots, to free it up to go into my legacy bank, but still, Galat has it with every single outfit. That said, it is wildly appropriate for the bounty hunter; a triple-barreled huge hand-cannon. It especially works with these heavy armored outfits. I don't have tons of them for my bounty hunters, but Galat has two, both using this very iconic SWTOR bounty hunter helmet, which is a world drop.

Here's the other version of heavily armored Galat, using the same helmet, and another iconic early bounty hunter chest-piece (although dyed to that interesting copper color). I did swap out the original armored leggings for this ragged leather kilt once I had access to it, but other than that, this is a very old-school outfit, and one I've had for some time. The screenshot is one I normally wouldn't keep, what with the gun ending up being right in front of his face, but it shows the gun from another cool angle.

The first of my overtly merc-looking outfits, with the awesome Star Forager chestpiece, which almost makes him look like he's got some kind of cybernetic power armor arm on the right hand side (of course from this angle, you see his left arm better. Whoops.) When I created this one, it really kind of changed the way I pictured Galat as a fictional character, and one that I might think of adapting in some format to Space Opera X; that more merc/thug idea.

I really like this armor piece, and you'll see that I used it on a number of characters, although rarely with a Mandalorian-style helmet. In particular, most of my agents (other than John himself, my first agent) use a variation of this as a black ops fatigues suit of sorts.

This outfit was first created as a bit of joke; a kind of street gangster look, but I ended up actually quite liking it. I doubt I'd use it for most characters, but it works quite well for Galat, and further fleshed out this vague idea in my head of what kind of character he was.

I do kind of like to have some environmental outfits. A heavy coat for Hoth and Ilum (and maybe Belsavis and Alderaan, for that matter, although I rarely end up with one there.) And a wastelander outfit specifically for Tatooine, although there are other places where it would look good too. Maybe a jungle explorer look for Taris, Yavin IV and Rishi, ettc. This one is the Tatooine-inspired desert set. I don't always create these, and even when I do, I don't always keep them, but I like Galat here. You'll see other of my characters with that same trenchcoat and chest piece, but not worn the same way Galat wears it, with a space Spartan Mandalorian style helmet and super heavy vambraces, which gives the whole thing a much heavier armored look.

The thing that really makes this look like mercenary is the hat, of course. I couldn't use it until I'd acquired sufficient reputation from Makeb to buy it. which didn't happen until Galat's playthrough was finished, or at least nearly so. That said, I still feel like this is his most iconic look as a character. Although this chestpiece doesn't really look like the Star Forager, with a completely different color and that weird neck wrap thingy, it actually very nearly is, and you can see the cybernetic power-armored right arm here.

Phillip'pion

My commando. I was a little reluctant to play him for three reasons, so he lingered as almost the last of my original run of characters: 1) I don't like the concept of a soldier running around following orders and saluting "superior" officers who, most likely, were going to be dumb as a box of rocks and hardly superior at all. No matter how well written it would end up being, it just wasn't a concept that appealed to me nearly as much as... well, any of the other classes, actually. 2) scuttlebutt before I played it was that it was one of the weaker stories as well, and 3) the commando was the iconic version of the class to play, with the big autocannon that he carries around like Jesse Ventura's character in Predator, but it was a healing class, and I thought there was no reason to play a healer in solo play.

Most of my reservations ended up being not too bad; 1) this is still true; I have little use for the concept overall. It's also why I eventually kind of gave up on Galaxy's Edge in spite of how good it was, after finishing the first "season"; I just don't care for military science fiction; I like more Western science fiction about rugged individuals. 2) it's actually written quite well, and in fact, better written than I'd have thought, given that the concept doesn't give the writers nearly as compelling a thing to work with. It has its flaws, but the most egregious ones aren't the class story; they're the faction and exploration stuff anyway. The class story overperformed against my expectations, and 3) you can always pick a direct damage spec, which I did, and the healing isn't a big deal. In fact, I now kind of like having a few healing abilities like the commando, mercenary, scoundrel and operative have, because it means I don't have to put my companion on heal mode all of the time. I actually like the gameplay of a direct damage character with a companion in heal mode, but the reality is that the game, when in heal mode, has kind of obnoxious audio and visual cues of your companion throwing green mist at you all of the time and acting like you're dying just because you fast-traveled or got off of a speeder, or finished a cut-scene or something else equally inane. 

Anyway, as always, not all of these outfits are original (although the first one is literally the one I started with on Ord Mantell) but for whatever reason I either didn't get as in to playing "space Barbie dolls" with Phillip compared to the others, or just couldn't find the look that really popped for him. I have fewer outfits, and I've used them longer, in general, than the characters which we've shown before.

I also keep Phillip around, not only because he's the only character I have with an autocannon, but also because he's my slicing gatherer. This is a weird gathering skill that doesn't correspond to any specific crafting skill, but you need it for all kinds of higher level crafting on all of the other crafting skills, so someone has to be dedicated just to doing it.

While this armor set isn't particularly heavy, it has a kind of outdoorsy "armored fatigues" look that works quite well. I actually played Phillip with a succession of crafted cannons, but I also had this big mamma-jamma which I used later on in his career from the GTN. Later, with cosmetic weapons, I gave him a number of other weapons that I couldn't resist buying on the GTN.

For Phillip, this was a pretty iconic late game "jungle stormtrooper" option that I used a lot, and played a lot of events and other temporary things with. The gun's a little exaggerated. Actually, most of them are, but this one is especially long, if not especially bulky. I think it's funny when I see someone who creates a skinny little girl character, who wears regular clothes and not something that could reasonably look like powered armor, carrying around these super over-sized guns that probably weigh more than they do. But whatever.

My snowtrooper option; I created it before doing Hoth, and I particularly like using it there and on Ilum, where it fits amazingly well. The gun is a specialty vendor pickup on Tatooine, of all places, but it fits this colder-looking outfit better than anything deserty. I actually really like the Tatooine vendor weapons. Most of my characters have an option from there. The little rinky-dink pistols are especially appropriate for my girlfriend companions. And by "rinky-dink" I mean normal sized ish.

Whoops! Forgot to turn off the interface for this one.

I really wanted that chest piece, but it's a trooper and bounty hunter exclusive that was really expensive (by the standards of my in-game finances at the time) and required pretty much max level, so I didn't get it right away. Turns out that it didn't look quite as good as I hoped in practice, or at least I could seem to find the right combination of other gear to pair with it to make it look good. There's a white and black one that you can get from the alliance crates, but because those are random, I haven't managed to get it to drop yet. Arghh! It's almost the only piece I don't have that I want.

My Sith warrior has almost this same look, but what can you do? Power armored space soldiers are power-armored space soldiers, whether they're Sith Warriors, Republic troopers, or even Warhammer 40k Space Marines. I don't really like the white plastic "stormtrooper" look associated with the Republic troopers all that much anyway, and actively avoided it most of the time. My "Hoth" outfit above was the closest I got to it.

A bounty hunting outfit that I trotted out for the bounty event. Plus, it's the only one of these (right now, anyway) that shows his face. Not sure why I gave him a gray beard, but it's a different look than any of my other characters have, at least.

J'ohhn

I really like the concept of the agent. James Bond in space, as he's often called, is a great idea. I don't know that the SWTOR concept is really very James Bondish, but I think people think that because he has a British accent and tells a spy-thriller story. Because I love spy-thriller stories when they're well told, and many of my favorite movies and books qualify as such, I think its a great idea to adapt them to space opera. I'm hardly the first; Poul Anderson write James Bond in space, in the form of Dominic Flandry, in a short story in 1951—two years before the publication of the first James Bond story, actually. He then went on to star in a series of novels and collections in the 60s and 70s, and no doubt took inspiration from 007 by this point.

I can imagine all kinds of ways in which spies in space would feature in my own Space Opera X series; like Star Wars itself does, I'd probably just adopt spy or noir or other types of thriller stories directly and put them in another setting. The first issue of Galaxy may have thrown shade on the concept of the space opera because it wasn't "sciency" enough, but screw 'em. I'm tired of the ideas of a bunch of nebbish betas defining what science fiction is. Science fiction in the early part of the 20th century had mainstream appeal because it was just good storytelling, and characters like Buck Rogers and Flash Gordon were (and honestly still are) household names. Part of this is because they didn't devolve into a nerdy purity spiral, the likes of which Joseph Campbell, Isaac Asimov and L. Sprague de Camp advocated. Their baleful influence has poisoned the field even to this day, many decades and much more than my lifetime later (and I'm not exactly young. I have two grandkids, fer cryin' out loud.)

In any case, I played a sniper first. I've since started an Operative, and while I like the idea of sneaking around and popping out of stealth to murder a trash mob, I otherwise find normal combat to be less appealing than the sniper. However, I think the sniper rifles are too exaggerated to be cool. When the tip of the barrel is banging against the heels of the character while he runs around, and the gun is literally longer than he is tall, something is wrong. To the rescue comes cosmetic weapons. Although it was never advisable to do so, because your stats weren't as good, for some reason snipers could also equip regular blaster rifles. This means that you can now equip regular blaster rifles cosmetically while still having a sniper rifle equipped for your actual stats. Most of my weapons, now, are no longer sniper rifles, honestly.  Anyway, on to the outfits! I've done a lot of things outfit wise over time, as with all of my old characters, but this is what I've settled in on now. About half of them date back to halfway through my playthrough of the game, and the other half are ones that I've designed since. John has become in some ways my main character now, although he's not as far into the expansion stuff as Mark or even Matthew. He does the most work on grinding through Seasons, or events, or what-have-you, and he does the most crafting. He's also my banker and broker; he does almost all of the buying and selling, and holds almost all of the money, other than a million or two credits that everyone holds for stuff that they may need. He was also my main grinder for tauntauns, although now I just buy them straight out and don't blink at the cost. When I was poorer in game, it was nice to be able to get them for time instead of credits, though.

Anyway, although I know that Nar Shaddaa isn't really the best place to take these screenshots, because the lighting is dim and neon, the Star Cluster Casino Royale really seemed like the most iconic place to take pictures of him. 

In some ways, I actually like my current, newer "powertech" agent's outfits even better; he has more of a classic SWAT team or black ops fatigues kind of look for more outfits. But John was the prototype for much of it, paving the way first, and he still is a little more avant-garde in what he chooses to wear.

This first one is one of the few "real" sniper rifles that I have in my rotation right now. I do think that this would have looked even better with a black/black dye in it, but those are too expensive for me to normally think it's worth it to buy them, and yes... you have to pay real money for them most of the time. The cost in credits on the GTN is insane.

This is another new one, but I've been doing trench coat variations for this guy since forever. I have one further down that's quite old, in fact, although it technically uses a different trench coat, it looks pretty similar. 

This one is more of an outdoors outfit; when he's out in the deserts or the jungles sniping at enemies. 

This is another real sniper rifle that I still use, but it's not an insanely exaggerated one, and it is one of the earliest GTN snipers I got. When I played John through, I actually only used crafted guns until I leveled out past them. Each time I hit a new level threshold and could get a new rifle, I'd retire and sell the old one, or drop it on a companion or something.

Another old one, although I've tweaked a few things about it over time. For instance, I gave him this bulky cartel market blaster rifle that I bought long before I even had a character who could use blaster rifles normally. I just knew I'd want to use this one someday. However, I don't like it as much as I thought it would, because it has a weird pink tinge on it a lot. I don't know why, because in the outfit designer, it doesn't look like that. But when on an actual character, it usually does. Weird.

OK, this obviously isn't an agent outfit. I created this one for the bounty event just this week, and I consider it a pretty iconic yet unique take on the Mandalorian idea. That said, I don't have any bounty hunters who are in need of a new outfit right now, so I'll probably leave it on John for a while.

I actually started this off as a robot agent; by using cybernetic parts and a robotic-like helmet, the entire character was meant to be a robot. However, I ended up swapping enough of his pieces out that he just looks like a guy with a weird helmet and gun now. 

Here's a better view of him without his gun in the way. He does have a kind of official uniform kind of look to him, which I like. Curious, because I think when I created this outfit, to make room for it, I got rid of an actual military dress uniform outfit that I had. That's OK; while the idea was cool, I found I wasn't ever wanting to actually use it, so it didn't serve much of a purpose anymore.

My original trench coat outfit, with the awesome world drop goggles that you get on the first planet, fer cryin' out loud. That is probably my single favorite item of world-drop clothing in the entire game. In the older versions of the game, it only dropped on agents, but my Vanguard playing as a bounty hunter got it too, so you'll see it make an appearance in a number of his outfits too.

My most iconic and most-used black ops outfit for this character. That's actually not the sniper version of that rifle, it's the blaster rifle version, even though its long enough to be a sniper. I like it better also because of the strap. The sniper isn't that much longer and still looks pretty good too.

These last two images are of an experiment with some odd elements. I don't actually like this outfit much, although I've used many of its elements in better contexts on other characters, but I haven't gotten around to changing it yet either, so here it still is, I guess.

Like I said, John was always a bit more experimental and avant-garde in his outfit choices, and not every one of them worked. My newer agent, Vash Galaide, has benefited from John's pioneering experimentation, and tends to look better. But he's a powertech, so he only has a single blaster pistol rather than a sniper rifle. With his bevy of wrist gadgets and stuff, as well as the pistol, he actually feels more like James Bond than the sniper does. The sniper almost makes me think more of space Sam Fisher from Splinter Cell than James Bond. Which... is a cool idea too, of course.

Lu'ukke

 
As always, the spelling is for the game's sake, because it doesn't allow more than one person to have the same name in game. Luke is how you should read this. Luke is my OG smuggler; a gunslinger, or two-gun wielding gunfighter type. There are two completely separate double-gun gunfighters, including one that was (originally) a bounty hunter class.

Luke, and the whole concept of the space gunfighters, is pretty iconic to me. I think that's the most iconic character type on either setting, quite frankly, or even the space opera genre overall. In fact, in the 40s and 50s there were magazines that lamented the idea that space opera was just reskinned "horse opera" with green-skinned Martians standing in for Injuns, and astronaut colonists standing in for homesteaders, and the main, heroic characters being... basically... cowboys.

I'm not sure what else to add to that text, so let's just get on to the pictures. I will say that even though Luke predates the cosmetic weapons, I ended up carrying around a number of weapons in my inventory with the mods in them so that they'd be good enough to use, and I'd go back and forth between them. So even before I had weapons matched to outfits, I still had too many cool blaster pistols that I wanted to use. Actually, now with the cosmetic weapons, I can even use lower level guns, like some of the crafted ones, if I like the look of them, and sometimes I do.

Although I've customized the color somewhat, this is the truly iconic look in SWTOR for smugglers. I kind of like it for that reason alone, but otherwise, it's kind of silly. He looks like he's wearing a bib in case he spills his soup on his shirt, and the jacket has a neck pillow like he's about to go on a trans-Atlantic plane flight and take a nap on his chair. These are some pretty honkin' big guns, but then again, most of mine are. I know its kind of grossly over-sized, but I like the exaggerated look.

I like this one as a kind of high-class privateer, with a fancy outfit and plenty of money from his success.

On the opposite end of that spectrum, here's a more thuggish version of my smuggler, who I use during bounty hunter week, and other times when I want to look more like a criminal.

When it's hot and he wants to go sleeveless. The bared midriff on a guy looks kind of gay, I admit. I'm not sure that I'll keep it. I may switch to a normal shirt underneath the vest; I have plenty of options that work that way already.

Trench coat gunfighter. I worked this up after watching that Cad Bane episode of Boba Fett. But it's a good noir-like look anyway.

A Han Solo-esque outfit. I really like this one, but it's a cartel market item, so you have to pay real money for it or something.

This hat/mask combo is a smuggler specific thing that only smugglers can wear (although there is another version that's slightly color-swapped that anyone can wear. It's a pain to try and get, though—takes tech fragments and stuff.) This jacket is also another smuggler specific one, that you can craft if you can find the schematic, and goes back to the very launch of the game. It's a kind of vintage look for smugglers. 

Another Han Solo lookalike outfit, and one that's really easy for anyone to get. This is also probably my biggest type of blaster pistol. It's bigger than some of the rifles, and I'm dual-wielding them. The purple pants are based on a bunch of purple dye modules I got from seasons.

I've had this outfit for a long time, although I had a black and gray coloration on it, and only recently changed it to brown and white. The original colors are really strange; bright orange, mostly. 

I'm not sure if this is him hanging around casual on his ship or one of his strongholds, or if this is a stripper outfit. I created this on a whim, and I've got a lot of characters that have one of ten outfits shirtless, but I'll probably get over it later.