Difference between revisions of "Entertainer Experience (Game Mechanics)"

The pre-requisite, of course, is that you have to have novice entertainer skill. Even today, it's amusing to watch the non-entertainers type /dance and then say "Hey, my battle fatigue isn't going down!"

The first step is to create a hotkey bar just for entertaining. The hotkeys are that series of boxes across the top of your HUD that is labeled F1-F12. These boxes correspond to the function keys on your PC keyboard. When you press one of those keys, it runs whatever macro is attached to the corresponding box.

Pressing CTRL-1, CTRL-2, etc... will take you to the corresponding hotkey bar. You have six of them in all. Pick one that's currently empty. Now, run the cursor over the edges of the hotkey bar until it turns into an up-and-down bar. Click, hold, and drag down. Your 12 box hotkey bar will expand into a 24 box hotkey bar. The second row of functions is accessed by holding the shift key when you press the appropriate function key.

Now, type CTRL-A. This will bring up your abilities menu. Click the "Other" button. Scroll down the list until you reach the flourishes section. Click and hold on Flourish 1 and drag it up to the hotkey bar. Position the cursor over the F1 box until it turns into a hand, then release. Flourish number one is now attached to function key F1. Do this for all of the other flourishes. If you want to, you can also put stopdance, startdance, stopmusic, startmusic on hotkeys along with any icons you have for dances and songs you know. I normally just type the commands for those actions.

Okay, with your tools in place, you're ready to dance. You can dance/play anywhere and gain appropriate XP, but you can only heal battle fatigue in a hotel or cantina. That means you have to be in one of those places to get entertainment healing XP. You CAN heal mind wounds in a camp but not battle fatigue.

Type /startdance (or press the hotkey if you hotkeyed it). You'll get a menu of all the dances you currently know. Pick one and your character will begin dancing "in neutral". Dancing takes a certain amount of action points every tick, even when you're not flourishing. Once you're familiar with your dances, you can just type "/startdance dancename" to start dancing whichever steps you wanted to use.

You get dance/music XP by doing flourishes. Press F1. After a second, the words "You perform a flourish" will appear and your character will perform some dance steps. If you're a brand new character then you should get 2XP for this. After a couple of seconds, your character will return to "neutral". You'll then get another message that you get 1XP. Finally, you'll stop getting XP.

Try again. This time, press F2 followed immediately by F3. Firstly, your character will perform the two flourishes one after the other. Note that this will make a noticable hit on your action bar. Secondly, your first XP message this time will show 4XP instead of just two. As you can see, the double flourish doubled your XP. If you let your character drop back into "neutral" then the XP will degrade over time to 3, 2, 1 and then none.

Double-flourishing is as high as you can get. You won't increase your XP by spamming the flourishes

Now, it comes down to timing. Once you have your max XP coming in, you can maintain it by performing a single flourish every couple of seconds. At newbie levels, the easiest thing to do is simply flourish once every time you get an XP message. That will keep you going just fine.

Once more for emphasis: Spamming the flourishes will NOT increase your XP but it WILL drain your action bar! Unless you like having lots of downtime, then you should try to pace yourself rather than do constant flourishing. At higher levels of dancing, it's often better to do a couple of flourishes and then let the XP decay for a few ticks before pushing it back up with more flourishes. Medics are your friend.

Now, for entertainment healing. You only get this when someone with mind wounds or battle fatigue watches you dance. If you're in a group, then you'll get entertainment healing XP when anyone in the group is being watched or listened to. This means that it's to everyone's benefit if the entertainers in a cantina all group together.

Additionally, there's a group XP bonus that increases as the size of the group increases. There's really no reason to go solo as an entertainer unless you just can't stand to listen to SW1 any more.

That's the basics. It's up to you to decide what dances you like best and how best to choreograph them.

One last choreography tip: For each /flourish command, there is a corresponding /bandflourish command. /bandflourish will cause ALL of the dancers or musicians to perform the flourish. This sounds like a great thing, and it is. However, be aware that only the person initiating the /bandflourish gets XP for it. For everyone else, it's a wasted tick XP-wise and a drain on the action bar because bandflourishes use more action than regular flourishes. If you go crazy and start spamming the bandflourishes, you're likely to get kicked out of the group for being a control freak and an XP hog. Bandflourishes should be reserved for the occasional effect and for synchronized choreography.

Also, if you fnd that you've got an overeager person who macros bandflourish and then goes AFK, you can use '/bandflourish off' to cause your character to ignore bandflourishes entirely.

Finally, when you're done for the evening, use /stopdance to end your routine with a flourish. Then /bow to your audience and bask in their adulation and cheers.

That ends Dancing 101. Now, get out there and shake your groove thang!