I have a question for you guys. How much benefit do you see in having multiple classes on one character? I myself am having some difficulty seeing it. I know there my be many people who do not have multiple characters. I myself having been playing a little while and I have leveled about every class so I don't feel like I need another class on my characters because I can just switch to that class on another character. Now I can see some benefit in being able to switch to tank, heal, or dps on one character, however again if I needed to I can switch to another character. Also many of the currencies have been set to legacy so all of your characters can contribute to your stash. I find myself switching between characters to complete dailies and weeklies so I feel like having another class on the same character may not be needed because I will likely switch to another character to complete their dailies. I also had another question. They had mentioned that through this change to combat styles it could open the possibility to *** more classes. Now I know that this would be way down the road, however I am also under the impression that when you pick your combat styles you are locked to that choice. So does that mean that if all my character have their secondary combat style I then need to make another character to play the new combat style? Is this change more intended for newer players?

I guess I am curious on how this will affect the ability to gear alts. I remember the gearing being more difficult to manage if you were going to gear more than about 2 characters. I think that was when we had mercenary comms and ranked comms. They eventually came out events like the X12 xp event and the dark vs light event. These events were to inspire people to create more alts and go through old content and I think they did this because of how long it was taking them to release new content. Eventually they changed the gearing which made it easier to gear these multiple alts people made. Also with the introduction of multiple combat styles on one class also adds more gear that could potentially be needed. Now I know there are those that only play 1 or 2 characters, however I feel like this game has put heavy emphasis on making multiple characters. So my concern is that is gearing alts will become more difficult on cause more people to go back to playing just 1 or 2 characters. I feel concerned about this because I feel like this counterproductive to what they have done in the past with making the game more alt friendly. Am I thinking about this the wrong way?

I will say that it does seems disappointing to see the game take this path. I haven't tried out the PTS for myself but based on videos and posts I have read from other players and the devs I am not overly enthusiastic about the changes for classes this next expansion. This to me does seem like a nerf and I think it would be difficult to argue that point since Bioware has used terms like ability pruning which to me sounds like a reduction or nerf. Now, from what I have seen in the videos I have watched it looks like many of the abilities are still there. However, it probably doesn't feel like that because you only have access to one of three. So while technically not as many abilities have been removed your access to all of them at one time has been. This will cause some to leave and others will stay because its Star Wars. It being star wars is a big part of the reason I have played for so long. This to me seems like a way to level the playing field for new and casual players which I think it the audience they wish to keep. I think they are banking on long time players sticking around because they always have. I would guess that they make more money off new players buying new and shiny things from the cartel market. When the new and shiny wears off the new players will leave and new players will rotate in. This does aggravate because I feel I am not always part of their consideration but they do still have to make money. Now, that doesn't excuse things they have or will do but I do understand it. If this is to be launched in holiday of this year then I would say they are already mostly done with the classes or reaching its end and are asking for feedback in hopes to reduce the amount of veteran players that will leave. This will change the playstyle of the game but one thing I would like to point out is when they use words like choice. I would assume they think by splitting up the abilities this will create more diversity in the builds being used in the game. The issue I have with this idea is that not all abilities are created equal. My guess is that once this hits people will find the a build that works best in pvp and a build that works best in pve. Once that happens those will probably be the new meta builds for that class in new era. They may create more choices by taking or separating things but people will always go with what's more efficient and there will again probably be a couple of build people go between. This to me would reduce the choice to a degree because many people stick to what's best. This already is not being well received and is not going to go over well when launched and it will launched in some form like this. They will tweak the system to try and appease more people and it will get better to a degree. The people that hate it will leave and everyone else will be new or accept it. I feel thats what happened with the Command Rank system when it launched. I would agree that I would rather them bring up the old content instead of lowering the players abilities and a big part of my reasoning for that is the long development time for this game. Over the years they have done things to get players to replay old content like when they did the 12x XP event or when they did the light vs dark event ( which I got frustrated with because after I got legendary status they took the achievements from me). When they finally did release a new operation after years of waiting they released it slowly only giving us one boss at a time. If they expect us to keep replaying old content I think they should put some effort into spicing it up to make it more interesting. Another thing I wanted to mention is Biowares tendency to over buff or over nerf something. I think that in the past when Bioware makes class changes more often than not it is one extreme or the other and I am not sure if any class has been nerfed more than operative. I also dislike is when they discuss how a class or the game is intended to play. As I remember it part of the reason they went to the discipline system with utility points was in part due the the ability to create hybrid or tribrid class with the old system with skill point. During the old system you had choice on where to put your point and how to create your build, but was changed so that you had to play one spec of your advanced class. If they were worried about that shouldn't they be worried about builds we will make with this choice? They also nerfed the command XP earned from npcs as well when the command rank system first hit because people figured out how to grind the old KP op to earn ranks much faster. They nerfed it because that wasn't how they intended the game to be played and then tell us to play our way which I find to be a contradiction. If they would have brought up the KP to the new player standards people might not have been able to do that grind by themselves or otherwise might have been more trouble that it was worth. Sorry for all the text and sorry if it doesn't all make sense. I was just putting down my thoughts as they came to me. I like many have played this game for sometime and I was caught off guard by this change. Take care and have a good night.

This server has many members to it and makes another great place for meeting new and old friends. It also has been very helpful when you get into a random Que for group content because with as many members that have this discord there is a good chance someone may have it and/or share it with the group to improve communication with the group improving chance of success and adding more people to the community for future content.

If they nerf or remove guard like you are suggesting do you think we will begin to see fewer tanks in pvp? If they removed guard or nerfed it to the point were its usefulness is questionable would there be a point to having a tank in pvp? They could still carry the ball in huttball effectively but you never know what warzone you will get since you can't que for a specific one. Warzones like CW, VS, and NC they would probably be stuck as node guarders since they would probably live longer than an average dps and no one really likes to guard anyway. You are right about other games I haven't seen anything like the guard system in games like WOW or ESO. Although I will say this when I went back to try and play ESO again I had met up with some old friends and asked how to best gear for pvp as a tank and I was told that at least in ESO I should probably switch to DPS because if I am not putting out damage I won't be very effective in pvp. I know that most of the tank/heal combo's you see out there are jug/sorc, but I would be afraid that to nerf or remove guard would really hurt the other healing classes more specifically mercs. I do play as a merc healer and having that guard is one of the things I think helps make it manageable to heal as a merc because I only have one CC break and I don't think the rocket out escape works like it should. it is very easy to stun me and lock me down and having that 50% damage reduction gives me a fighting chance when I just can't run away from stuns and roots that this game as aquired. I guess I am a bad player for saying this but LOSing as a healer as not always as easy as it sounds. From and operative perspective they can roll away and use evasion but once those are used up and you have people still chasing you ops don't not have as much ability to burst heal their way out of it becuase they will be rooted in place and sometimes when there is no where to go you have to stand in place take the damage and hope you can out heal it, and sorcs have bubble and can phase walk but if they use those that means that their team will probably die and then they will so it only helps so much. If they did nerf or remove guard I hope then that dps will pay more attention to their own healers and help them out if they see them being focused becuase my experience has been that many dps have a big tunnel vision issue because really objective based warzones are nice and another interesting way to win but not many people go for objectives anymore most of the time they just want to kill people and so when they get focused on one person and (hopefully the one they are beating on is the enemy healer) forget there are other people on their team that need some help. Which if they manage to kill the enemy healer and clear the team that would be fine I would hopefully still be alive, but there are times when dps just beat on a tank and I don't fully understand why. The same could be said of tanks since many of them are wearing dps gear anyway but I have seen it more in dps. It can also be very tough to heal as well when you are fighting guilds like Sick Twisted Individuals and Lukewarm Tauntauns that are very good at focusing down the healer.