Entertainers can be rewarding, but you need to know how to make them rewarding to you. There are small rewards for being an entertainer, and most of them come from the pride you get from completing the entertainer quests.
Many people feel that Twi’leks are the only good entertainers. Sure, once upon a time they had bonuses in the skills that all entertainers needed. In the current era of Star Wars Galaxies, however, you can be just as good as a Bothan as you can as a Twi’lek. Choose the race that fits the character you want to portray. My entertainers are either funky, or aesthetically pleasing to me. Human or Twi’lek females for pleasure, and my Rodians or Wookiees for fun.
If you go through the tutorial, you will get a bit of experience that you wouldn’t get if you didn’t go through it as there are several quests that give you your first few levels. On the other hand, in order to leave the space station, and even the very first moments of existence before the Millennium Falcon, you have to attack, which will allow you to become attacked for ten minutes.
Starting Out
Once you are done with the tutorial, or if you skipped it, you are left with a slitherhorn, a purple looking dress, and directions to a helpful individual in Mos Eisley who is looking for entertainers. They will provide you with a few missions for the Mos Eisley Cantina for credits, and to help you figure out how to dance and play your slitherhorn.
For most of the first tier of Entertainer, the next steps I would take would be to get missions from the Entertainer mission terminal, and to sit quietly in a cantina or hotel and either play or dance. You need credits in order to buy resources and new clothing, and you most likely won’t get them from customers, since you can’t provide bonuses. The missions will give you roughly two thousand credits every ten minutes.
To decide which you want to do, look at your skill tree. Whatever the most recent skill you earned, you want to practice. If you just learned Star Wars 2, for instance, you want to pick a Musician mission. If you just learned Rhythmic, you want to choose a Dancing mission.
Flourish!
Just hitting /dance basic may get you the credits, but it’s not going to give you the experience you need to move up in the world. Learn to flourish.
You have eight flourishes available to you. To perform a flourish, you can either drag the icon from your ability screen (the ; key by default), or you can simply type /flourish # where # is the number of the flourish you want to perform.
Now you can hit these manually, but most people will create a macro to help out. A macro I tend to use for most songs/dances is below.
To create a macro, go to your ability screen (the ; key by default). Select Macro and click New. Select an icon, type in a name (no spaces), then type in the below in the macro text area. You can copy and paste if you have these functions set up in your keyset.
/flourish 2;
/flourish 4;
/flourish 1;
/flourish 5;
/pause 4;
/flourish 3;
/flourish 6;
/flourish 8;
/flourish 7;
/pause 4;
/macro #macroname
Change the #macroname to just the name of your macro (without the # sign).
Now you can drag the icon from your macros to your toolbar and click on it. It will perform flourishes at will.
If you notice that you need more time in between flourishes (the above was made for xp gain mostly, not for beauty of tone or dance), just add a line that has /pause #; where # is the number of seconds you want to pause for.
To stop the macro, enter the command /dump
Buying Resources
Now that you’ve gotten a little higher, you probably want to add a prop or get a new instrument. To make either you need to get a Droid, Weapon and Misc Item crafting tool from a crafter. Many will sell them in Mos Eisley just for this purpose. Check out the bazaar under the category tools.
You can find what resources you need either from your datapad (k by default) or from using your crafting tool. The most commonly needed resources for instruments and props are metal, fiberplast, and wood. You can find resources on the bazaar under the Resources folder. Many crafters that are in the cantina may provide you with some minimal resources free of charge. It never hurts to ask!
Watch Me!
If you can get people to watch you, you do get an experience bonus for giving people inspirations. Also, try to either join a current entertainer group, or start one yourself. The experience someone will gain from someone watching one of your band-mates will provide xp to you as well!
Also always make sure you have an Entertainer inspiration. Ask around in the cantina, and usually someone will provide you with one, and don’t forget to offer to other entertainers! The inspiration will provide a bonus to your experience gain, which will mean less time grinding, and more time at a higher skill level.
Image Designing
At certain levels, image designing will provide you better experience than just dancing or playing an instrument. It doesn’t hurt to stop dancing once in awhile, and image design yourself a few times. Changing your hair will give you 50 points of experience. Changing your eyes will give you 100 points, and changing a body part will give you 150 points of experience. You gain double experience for changing someone else, so if you have a guildmate or friend who is willing to be a guinea pig, be sure to enroll their help!
To image design, simply click on the image design icon when you have the person you want to image design targeted. You can image design yourself by either targeting yourself, or by having nothing targeted. Click on the kind of change you want to make, and click on accept. If you are designing someone else, you can set a price, and when you click accept they have to either accept or reject the changes you’ve given them. You will not be able to do another design until they accept.
AFK/ATK
You will constantly hear the terms AFK versus ATK entertainers and entertainer grinding. Be warned that AFK grinding IS against TOS. Currently action is only taken against AFK combat grinding, but it is not a given that AFK grinding will be left alone. Many players grind AFK, however, simply because if they stayed at their keyboard, they would be required to socialize since the current entertainer system is not very interactive.
Gaining experience will take time – especially in the higher levels. Enjoy the people around you. Take time out to decorate a home, or buy a new outfit or two. Put together some lyrics and write a song macro. Check out different cantinas around the galaxy, and enjoy your time as a dancer or singer!
Special Effects
Entertainers have a series of particle effects in the game that they can use to enhance performance. You don’t gain any bonus except an aesthetical one. Several of the effects have multiple graphics, but there are no icons for the separate graphics – you MUST do the command line for them!
For these simply do /colorlights 1 or /colorlights 2 or /colorlights 3 and you will get 3 different effects!
Dancer:
/colorlights
/dazzle
/spotlight
/distract
/smokebomb
Musician:
/colorlights
/dazzle
/spotlight
/firejet
/ventriloquism
Courtesy
Remember that afk spam is annoying to everyone. Instead of getting that extra five thousand credit tip, you will most likely just get added to their ignore list.
A “highest” tipper list in your bio brings no one joy except for you. It will make people feel bad about not being able to tip you more, and other entertainers will feel less because they only made 10k instead of 100k.
Be friendly to your customers, and to your fellow entertainers. Without other people, an MMO would be a lonely place indeed!