What Are Guilds?
Guilds are an in-game mechanic that feature various perks and bonuses to gameplay, as well as offer great social opportunities and even guild strongholds and a flagship.
When you create or join a guild, you are essentially teaming up with other players in the same guild to conquer in-game territories on different planets. Joining a guild not only allows you more social opportunities, it also can give you bonuses towards experience gains, weekly rewards when you and your guild hit your conquest goal, and a lot of other cool perks that vary from guild to guild.
Each guild is different from others, and each guild has its own focus and play style ranging from dedicated conquest hitters, PvP/Warzone oriented environments, and even just for roleplaying. Anything you can think of, there’s likely a guild for it. And if not? Go ahead and create your own!
Benefits of A Guild
Benefits of joining a guild include:
- 5-15% Permanent, Passive XP Boost
- Access to a Guild Bank*
- Access to a Guild Flagship*
- Access to a Guild Stronghold*
- Access to Repair Funds*
- Bonus Rewards for Personal Conquest Goals
- Varying Guild Perks
- Show Off Your <Guild Name>
*This varies from guild to guild, as not everyone has unlocked or allows these.
Creating or Joining A Guild
The very first choice you’ll need to make about guilds is either seeking one to join or creating your own. Both are good options, so let’s see what each is about.
Joining a Guild
Joining a guild can be a lot of fun, as well as provide some serious benefits right off the bat. For starters, you’ll get an immediate XP bonus and, depending on the level of the guild you’ve joined, this bonus ranges somewhere between 5 and 15%. That’s a lot of extra XP as you adventure!
In addition to the obviously wonderful, permanent XP boost all guilds provide passively, most guilds also offer perks. These can range from bonuses to crafting time, decreased GTN listing prices, physical speed boosts while sprinting, to even MORE XP boosts. Each guild gets to choose it’s own perks from a rotation, and each perk has varying countdowns for how long they’re active. It’s good to check the Guild Perks page often after you’ve joined a guild!
Accepting Invites to Guilds
There are a couple ways you can accept invites. First, there are the guilds that do what is called “cold” or “ninja” invites. These guilds usually are after a large number of members for one reason or the next, including maybe conquest or activities. The second invite is one that either you ask for after seeing an ad in general chat for a guild or one that someone has asked if you would like, whether through doing an activity with you or whispering you to see if you would like to join. The second invite guilds are more likely to have a solid base that sticks around due to more personable approach, but the choice is yours.
Using the Online Guildfinder
To find a guild online, head over to the SWTOR Fan Community Guildfinder. Here you can search by names, servers, factions and more.
Creating a Guild
Creating a guild can be simple. Or not! That depends on how much time you want to put into your own guild running it, as well as what your vision for your guild is. Running guilds can be time consuming, if you want them to be, or they can be casual for you and a few friends. That choice is yours!
To create a guild, you’ll need to go to the Fleet and find the Guild Registrar. They can be located in the Strongholds and Crew Skills section of the Fleet.
Next, you’ll need to have a group of 4 guildless members, yourself and 3 others. After you’ve formed your group, it’s time to talk to the Registrar. Here you’ll type in your desired guild name and pay the 5,000 credit guild formation fee, and voila! You now have a guild!
As a Guildmaster, you will be able to control and customize many aspects of your guild from guild ranks, guild bank and access, what perks are active, and so much more. It’s good to open your guild window (default “G” in game) and check out what all you have available to customize.
Guild Levels
Every guild has a level, whether you’ve just formed it or it’s been around for a while. This level is displayed when you open your Guilds window in-game.
In this example, you can see that our Guild is level 11, its experience bar pretty close to being full, and underneath listed +10.75%, which is how big of an XP bonus you’re currently passively receiving.
Everything you do in-game that earns XP earns you Conquest Points, and every Conquest Point you earn contributes towards your guild’s level. The higher the level, the higher the XP boost up to a hard cap of 15%, excluding other perks you can obtain for your guild.
Guild Perks
Guild Perks are nice little bonuses each Guildmaster can choose for their guild. The perks available varies, and here you can see we have two active, one blank and four locked. To unlock more perks, you need to upgrade your Flagship by unlocking specific rooms that will enable you to add another perk. Fully unlocked Flagships have all perks available.
The empty perk slot is only used when you have a set bonus active. When at least four of your perks are the same category, a set bonus will become active.
Set bonuses vary depending which set you’ve chosen, so choose wisely!
Guild Invasions
You’ve probably noticed the Location, Invading and Invasion Progress listings. This is your Guild Invasion information.
As you can see, this guild is currently docked on Mek-Sha, is invading CZ-198 and its invasion progress is 339,372/500,000.
Invasion progress is determined by the overall amount of Conquest Points members of the guild have earned. This is a guild-wide pool of points, so every Conquest Point every member earns contributes to this goal. When a guild sets an invasion, all points for the Guild’s conquest have a bonus 15% added. There are three goals available to choose from- Small Yield (500,000), Medium Yield (2,000,000) and Large Yield (5,000,000).
Once a guild has reached it’s invasion goal, every member who has hit their personal conquest goal will receive a bonus conquest reward when conquest resets every Tuesday.
Stronghold Bonus
There’s a mechanic in the game called “Stronghold Bonus”, which is a percentage of additional personal conquest points you will earn. When you open your Conquest window (default “L” in-game, Conquest Tab), you will see a green number. This is your current stronghold bonus.
For every fully unlocked stronghold you own, you will receive a 25% bonus to Conquest Points earned. This caps out at 150%, or 6 fully unlocked strongholds. This bonus is passive and permanent, as long as you keep your strongholds and they have all their expansions.
