Well there is that, too. Satele could do it before you even made your character up (she does it in the old promo movie of her vs. Malgus). So my uber-powerful JC should be able to do it. But, it's clearly meant to be interpreted in that cut-scene that V gave my JC that power, not that she always had it herself.

The sad part is, I don't think it was. I don't believe the devs decided to make an uber-weapon that you HAD to have, and then chickened out over putting it into the final battle as 'you lose without it' because they were afraid players who deleted it would complain. After all, if they were worried about that, they could have prevented that from happening by making it no-drop, no-sell, no-delete. Secondarily, they could have recorded the weapon's version somewhere in their DB for each player, and put the appropriate boosted weapon into your inventory at the start of the battle, in case you'd accidentally dropped, sold, lost, or deleted it. Hell, they could have just put a vendor droid at wherever the death respawn is from the Arcann fight with all the flavors of weapons and let you buy it for a couple creds. People who have the weapon and win the fight would never see it, so it wouldn't ruin the story for them to have it just 'be there', but people who lost because they forgot it back in their cargo hold or whatever, would be able to get it back. Or, perhaps my most outrageous suggestion of all -- they could have had that weapon's stats actually be higher and better than any other weapon you can buy or make in the game, so that players would WANT to keep it, instead of doing what I did, looking at its stats, and going 'why is THIS thing an uberweapon, its stats are identical to my existing orange saber'. No, I think what really happened is BW has no idea how to make an enemy that is actually challenging to defeat. Their big ideas seem to be turning off half of your abilities (anything that does any sort of mez or interrupt), and giving the enemy mob all those types of powers they won't allow you to have (so that you get repeatedly held, slowed, stunned, and KBed). My guess is, they actually think those things make the game more fun and challenging to play. They probably thought I would actually *need* those paltry and ineffective special abilities my magical grey-side saber gave me (I did not... I noticed they were there and then proceeded to ignore them because Arcann was a wuss who could not have won that battle fair and square against my JC with just the existing game mechanics). Just like they think you need the healing droid in solo FPs (I almost never do and usually dismiss him for the duration). What I'm saying here is, I don't think they tried to make an encounter in which you really didn't need the uber-weapon. I think they didn't even think about it. The shield mechanic is like a lot of the other boss battles into which they put almost like a 'mini-game' that they *think* make it hard, because you have to 'learn the trick' to win the fight. It's in fact perhaps the most annoying thing about nearly every BW game I have ever played, that there is always some stupid class-independent trick to winning the climax battle rather than using he abilities you've spent the whole game developing and learning to use. That shield was signature BW -- nothing matters but if you figure out and use the 'trick' to the battle. And I think they knew they were going to do this all along. Which makes you ask, if they knew you needed the trick and not the uber-weapon why have us make the uber-weapon? It's like everything else -- it's just for the story, just like V's power. You don't *actually* have his power whether you accept it or not -- there is ZERO in-game consequence of having him or his power. You don't get a special ability like a force choke or chain lightning or something from it. The ability is only shown in cut-scenes, which means you don't really have it in-game, just like your uber-weapon doesn't have any marked in-game effect. It's just there for the story going on in the cut-scenes.

Yeah the leveling speed is insane. My Sith Warrior just hit 50 yesterday and she is about to start Quesh, which in the old days you did at like level 38. She's been like +12 to the last two worlds she's on. And that's +12 to the world cap, which is a couple levels above the highest mob on the world in the first place. Which means she's like +15 to most of the planet. I really wish we had the option to turn off the higher leveling speed. I don't want or need it. I throw out every single XP boost they give you because we get too much already. I have to try and be careful to log out in non-rest areas or the damn rested XP doubles me up even if I don't want it, on top of the already ridiculously high leveling speed.

I would like that too, but I don't see it happening. BW has pretty clearly decided to do ONE story and everything you do leads into their plot regardless.

Alderaan is one of the best worlds in the game. I always look forward to doing it on either side. Very pretty, very immersive. But it always makes me a little sad since we know Tarkin is going to blow it up in the future, and all that beauty will be gone.

This. If I had 8 characters at level 65, capped and stories completed, I'd be gone. I'm very slow at leveling and stuff because I only have a limited amount of play-time, and I play with a friend so we have to coordinate schedules on most of our characters. Thus, I don't level quickly. I will remain subbed until I am done with the 8 stories and level capped on my 8 characters. I will play that stuff. KOTFE, once but never again. KOTET, maybe not even once. Those expansions are not sufficient for my sub fee. The rest of the game is.

This is probably my #1 complaint with the encounters themselves, even more so than stealth-negation. I rarely use stealth anyway (other than to avoid annoying encounters that bore me), but I do use my interrupts against bosses when possible. So I hate when certain powers just 'don't work' for my character. It actually makes the fights more boring, because my options are limited (basically, to DPS, DPS, DPS). Holds, snares, interrupts, push-backs, none of them work. All of those things make for a more interesting fight because you have to be tactical... they have cool-downs, so you can' just use them willy-nilly. You have to think about what you're doing and decide, do I use this NOW, and stop the hit coming right NOW, or do I wait for the next hit because it could be worse? If you can't interrupt, stun, etc., at all, then there's nothing to do but just pound the enemy with DPS. Which makes the fight a lot easier, since you just spam your highest damage powers as soon as they refresh. There is no thought involved. And it's not like these bad guys can kill you even without the immunity.

Well, hardly any of it is a choice you make. That's part of the problem. But I would argue that my pure-LS character 'reflexively' using V's very clearly dark side powers is pretty darn out of character for her, and a pretty dark episode, even if it is not a 'choice' I get to make as a dialogue option. Again, BW made this a grey-side-only story. Even the choices you get, which are supposedly LS/DS, either are not really LS/DS choices, or if they let you make them in the convo wheel, they negate the results in a cutscene anyway. The end result of the story progression and what your character actually does on screen, is that dark characters end up behaving 'lighter' than they should (either via cutscene or wheel choice or what have you), and light characters end up feeling 'darker' than they should.

I've only played it with a full LS JC, but I feel the same way as you in reverse... like my Light JC was forced into 'darker' decisions than she would have otherwise made. For example, my level 65 JC who was so powerful that she healed the Jedi Plague and made her own holocron and so on and so forth... are they really telling me she would just roll over and let the V-man inhabit her brain without doing anything to kick him out? All you get if you don't want him there is some very weak, half-hearted protests that you won't use his power... and then you use it anyway, whenever you need it, like at the end when Arcann tries to kill you and V's power protects you. Sorry, my JC thinks some things are more important than winning, or even living, and staying away from the Dark Side, from what V represents, is one of them. The problem is that in KOTFE, grey side is transcendent. There are no real light or dark options, there is only grey. Think about the end of Chapter 16. If you opt to kill Arcann (twice), he lives. If you opt to save him, twice, you don't actually 'save' him... you just don't try to kill him. Your character is forced into a neutral (w/r/t LS and DS) stance in almost every chapter. This means that to a DS character, it feels like you are being 'too light,' and to a LS character, it feels like you are being 'too dark.' This is the problem of grey side... it doesn't satisfy people who want to go Dark *or* Light.

"If you enjoyed KOTFE then you are going to love KOTET" ... and it would follow that if you did not like KOTFE, which I did not, then you probably won't like KOTET. So, I'm not looking forward to it much at all. I'd say at this point its even odds whether I will even run my one and only level 65 through it. I've only got 2 completed class stories and I like those a lot better so I will keep working on those, so I'll probably be in-game when KOTET comes out, but as for playing it? I'm not sure I will bother. I'd rather work on leveling my alts through the class stories.

And I would say, to those who argue that the whole game is like this, that is untrue. I actually really enjoy the level 1-50 content. There is almost no grind at all to that unless you force yourself. Sure a lot of missions have those "Kill 30 of this or 20 of that" bonus but they are just that -- bonus. You do not need to do them to complete the quest. Also, often times you can't help but do them. In the base game, the bonuses go by so fast it doesn't feel like a grind. You are on different planets every so many levels. You see different wildlife, different sentient enemies. Each world story is going on along with your class and the heroics and the side quests and if you follow it all, they all are inter-related on the base worlds, so you can actually have a pretty nice and varied experience doing the stories in each zone and fighting whatever is in that zone and moving on to the next. And I feel like they got it just right in the base game, in that just as I am maybe getting close to being tired of, say, the Nikto sector of N.S., sure enough that is when they send me to the next quest hub to start up the next batch of assignments. And just as I get ready to become tired of each world, well don't you know it is time to move on to the next world. In contrast the KOTFE stuff was just you against Zakuul over, and over, and over, and over again. Skytroopers, more skytroopers, and then for a change, even more sky troopers. No side quests. The only "Heroic" they have is 6 copies of the SAME mission with a different name for each boss (but effectively nothing else about them changes other than that). No actual companion story you can follow. Only one world to adventure on (Zakuul) and one world to do your downtime on (Odessen). They effectively took the content equivalent of the H2s and world story of ONE world, and made that into the entire 9 month KOTFE content. That's just not enough for what they are trying to do.

I suspect BW did this in an attempt to make the game more 'challenging.' If so, they failed. The game was not *harder* for me to do with my tank-specced Jedi Consular (even without the healer companion, but certainly with), but as you said later on, this made it more annoying. I suspect they also did this to prevent people like me who hated the repetitiveness of it from just stealthing from one end of their snaking one-path corridors to the other without having to fight anything, just to get it the *bleep* over with. Especially they had a number of chapters with major anticlimax, where you would end a cutscene and then, instead of just escaping from place X or Y, you had to fight your way through trash mobs for 10 minutes for no apparent purpose other than to make the chapter last longer. I think this all ties together... they wanted to make it feel challenging and last longer, and we can't have people stealth through it in 60 seconds because it is both too easy and too quick, and then they will gripe that the chapter they waited a whole month for only took a couple of minutes to play through (i.e., just the cutscenes and a couple boss encounters, if you eliminate all the trash mobs). The other thing I'd say is, trash mobs are all well and good while you're leveling. I don't mind them, hey, they give me some XP and contribute to my leveling up. But at level cap, there is literally zero point to them. They pose no threat. I get zero reward for fighting them (no xp, trivial amounts of credits), so they are just there to take up my time. On top of that, it feels like the entire Shadow/Assassin play style you could use throughout pre-KOTFE has been nerfed, as stealth is effectively non-functional for probably 75% of each chapter, if not more. It's not that I needed stealth to survive, but dammit, stealth is a SIGNATURE ability of my class and BW pretty much disabled it for the entirety of this expansion (certainly any point where it would be of any actual use, it cannot be used). This is equivalent to disabling the trooper's ability to use guns or the Mara's ability to equip dual lightsabers. Yes, it's annoying. Again, I think it was a misguided attempt by BW to make the game more 'difficult' and also make each chapter take longer. Apparently they did not get the memo that annoying someone, pretty well precludes that person having any kind of fun, because fun and annoyance are polar opposites for most people. I would not say that I felt powerless. But I felt, for lack of a better term, generic, i.e., my Jedi Consular Shadow Tank (a very SPECIFIC type of character class with a specific play style, at least in theory) didn't play like that, but just played like a generic 'Jedi' character, and had the things that make her unique compared to something like a JK or a Mara completely negated by the sky trooper mechanics. This didn't make her weak but it did mean that I can't conceive of why I would want to replay this content as, unlike the rest of the content in the game, I don't see how my other characters would play any differently. This is a really good analogy. I'd say though that they didn't tear apart your power fantasy... they erased whatever made your character unique, in terms of class and talent tree. It's almost like my Shadow Tank had effectively no talent tree. Still powerful, still level 65, but... generic.

Yeah, sure, take the throne to fix things and then step down once everything is OK. That is exactly what Palpatine promised to do in AOTC.

Yeah the KOTFE story fails as fiction, not just gameplay. It's badly written -- to the point where it is nearly incoherent. Stuff that happens in one chapter seems to be ignored in other chapters. There is weak carry through of several story elements.

Not going to get into the ranked vs. unranked debate, because to be honest, I don't even know what that means. I don't do PVP, ever, in any MMO. No interest. Don't like the idea of it, regardless of the mechanics. I do not care to 'compete' against other players in any form. So, I'm not doing the PVP missions on the alliance alerts. If that has some consequence down the road, I'll accept it. I don't care that I can't win the droid to my side. Like I need him. My Jedi Consular can solo everything in the game other than world bosses and ops as it is. Including Arcann except when BW decides to employ the cut-scene exploit. I don't care that there is no non-PVP way to win the droid. As I say, I don't need him. However, I would love a way to wipe alerts I don't want to do off the damn board so the stupid icon would stop freaking glowing at me trying to get my attention. It's irritating. Kind of like when I had a bug at one point that even though all my mail was read, the stupid mail thing kept saying I had 1 unread mail. So to BW, if they read this (I know they won't, but what the hell) -- leave the mission as is, let it require PVP, I don't care, but let me take it out of my queue so I don't have to keep seeing a mission I refuse to do.

Main and only 65 - Li-Ya, Twi, Consular, 100% Light Side, follows the Jedi Code perfectly Syrin - level 50 (cap when I played back at launch), Mira, Knight, 100% light, but sometimes will do grey things/not follow the Code exactly Shyon - level 44, currently leveling, Zabrak, Warrior, 100% Dark Side, brutal killer Aylessa - new level 24, currently leveling, Cyborg, Trooper, Grey with Dark leanings Grenja - level 42, kind if fallen by the wayside while doing other chars, Human, IA, 100% light, heart of gold

Your analogy is not correct. You said the choices are Vote for X, X wins, or Vote for Y, X wins anyway and you get punched for good measure. But that is not really what BW did. A better analogy would be, you can vote for X or Y, and it doesn't matter because your vote is not counted at all. There is a huge difference between, I went to the polls, my vote counted, but the other side won and my guy lost... vs. I went to the polls and the polling place discarded my vote after I left. THAT is what BW did. They gave you a vote and then decided your ballot had a hanging chad and threw out your ballot without bothering to tally your choice. This is MUCH worse than if they tallied your choice but the votes went against you. Think about the regular game. You play with 3 buddies. At the end of Esseles, there is a LS/DS choice. You choice DS, the other three choose LS. By random selection, one of the LS guys wins... are you mad at BW because of this? Odds are, you're not... because you got DS points, and because the game registered your DS choice (it counted your vote) even though you didn't get the on-screen outcome you wanted. I don't know that I've ever heard anyone complain about this, because their choice, even though it is not coming true, still, in a sense, mattered -- just like my vote for the losing candidate mattered, because it was counted. But in KOTFE, you don't make a choice and then have it out-voted or something.. you make a choice that the game, as far as anyone can tell, utterly fails to record. The cutscene can only go one way, and the choice you make is utterly cosmetic. The game doesn't count your vote at all, but just does what it wants. This is much worse than the vote analogy you suggested.

Yup the more I think about it, the more I like the idea. Make the ZK a 9th class, a prestige class unlocked by getting to level 60. At that point you can start out as a level 1 Zakuul Knight. Give us some pre-story about how V-man had us assigned to his throne room detail, so when the kids stage their coup, and V-man dies, he picks us and travels inside our head. We get stabbed, thrown into carbon freeze, awakened (doesn't have to be by Lana), and we are now a level 1 ZK prestige class character. Race is up to the player, as is gender. Only need TWO voice actors to do all the lines now instead of 16 (8 male, 8 female). Saves 7/8ths of the Voice budget for the main character. Now, as you go through chapters, set up the XP and combat so that you gain 2 levels per chapter. By end of season 1, you are a level 32 prestige class ZK, and by end of season 2 you would be 65 (well, 64 but they can fudge that easily enough). Your 'magic' weapon would be that spear-saber thing and you'd have the shield too, since ZKs have that. Abilities would be a hybrid of the 4 Force-using classes for your main class stuff. Then, to make choices matter (!), you could have three talent trees, which may be accessed based on light/dark points. There would be the Zakuul Knight Paragon, which would only be accessible if you are Light 0 and above, and would use mostly JC talents. There would be the Zakuul Knight Plague-bringer, which would only be accessible from Dark 0 and above and use mostly SI talents. Then there would be the Zakull Knight Battler, which would be grey side and only available between Light 2 and Dark 2 and is a hybrid SW/JK. At level 10 you have had enough L/D choices to be somewhere between L2 and D2. Which one you are, determines what you can choose. Then later, if you move the needle to the extent that your talent tree is no longer valid, you have to (free) respec. Now, choices matter without them having to do a single thing to change the storyline. They wouldn't have to spend a dime on animations or abilities... just draw from the existing JK, SW, JC, and SI ones. Talent trees already exist, just adapt them. YOU control your fate by which LS/DS choices you make -- which determines which talent tree and thus which special abilities you get. Want to retain all 3 options? Then just stay grey side. (And this would even provide a game-mechanic reason why grey is 'better' because if you go too far one way you lose all but one talent tree option). This would have been FAR superior IMO... I would have been willing to make a new toon and play it grey side and 'care' about Zakuul, and lead a plucky resistance of (new) companions in the fight against Arcann, and submit to V-man, and all the rest. But no. They tried to make this happen with my existing light-side character, and it just does not fly.

Wow, that is just sad. I have played only LS past Makeb, so I had assumed that agreeing with him would net you something. I know disagreeing at every turn has no negative effect, but I'd have thought kowtowing would have a positive one, or at least make him happier in conversations. That it does not, that he claims you've resisted him when you have not, shows how truly lazy they have been with this expansion.

This brings up a very good point. You've hit the nail on the head here. BW didn't just make a single story for all classes. What they basically did was decided to make a story about a Zakuul Knight. There is absolutely no reason to use an existing character to play this story because, as you say -- we don't get most of our companions. Our previous story is erased in chapter 1-2 as being utterly irrelevant, since whatever you did to help the Rep or Imp side was undone by the ZE. Whether you are LS 10K or DS 10K or somewhere in between, does not matter. The old Jedi and Sith ways are put aside, you don't really belong to the JC or JK or SW or SI classes anymore -- you're a Zakuul Knight, Grey Side, now. Period. It really feels like they should have actually made up a 9th class, and given ONLY that class access to the KOTFE and 61+ content, and told people to make up a new character to play this story because the old ones don't fit in it. If they had done that I might actually have liked the KOTFE story a tiny bit better (I'd never have loved it but I might have liked it better). Just set this story in a different time period, not 5 but say 50 years in the future, and keep it separate from my main and alts, and I'd be OK with it. Make ZK a prestige class that gets 'unlocked' by getting to 60 on a regular toon, and we make up a new ZK class toon who starts at level 60, and this story would be OK. But that's not how they did it and thus people are left justifiably feeling hard-done-by.

And that, right there, is the crux of the problem. They began with the premise that you cannot win by playing your character the way you always have. The change to grey side is FORCED on you. You cannot choose, in this expansion where 'choice matters,' in the most important decision of all, which is to go light, dark, or grey. THIS should have been the choice, if no other, that they let YOU make, and then YOU live with the consequences. But they wouldn't even give us that, because it would have put paid to their whole premise, which is that grey side > all.

This. To the above poster, THIS is why I interpret them as making me shift toward the Dark Side. The BS about 'transcending' the old ways is literally them telling a LS Jedi, you need to add some Dark in there, and a DS Sith, you need some light in there. But as Anakin has proven, you cannot mix in 'some' Dark Side. Yoda says 'Once you start down the Dark path, forever will it dominate your destiny.' BW is trying to have their cake and eat it too, here, with some crap about how the key is 'balance' between dark and light. Yeah Qui-gon tried that... Anakin will bring 'balance' to the Force. How'd he do that? He turned evil and killed off every Jedi but Yoda and Ben. So now there are 4 Force Users left, 2 dark, 2 light. THAT sure had a happy freaking ending to it, didn't it? Sorry, no. Yoda was right. You cannot go 'a little dark'. The Dark Side is corrupt. It is evil. I have fun playing a DS Sith, I'm doing her right now she's at level 43... but I'll not pretend it's 'just another way to use the Force.' It is evil, and what Satele is telling you to do is evil -- she is telling you to let the end justify the means. She's telling you it's not how you play the game that matters, but whether you win or lose. That is Dark Side teaching, plain and simple. My Jedi believes 100% the opposite -- it's not whether you win or lose, it's how you play the game. That's Light Side. I agree. But they didn't because they couldn't. Because the underlying premise is this nonsense, derived from EU sources, I believe (because it sure as hell is not derived from the movies) that grey side, mixing light and dark, is not just possible but superior to either light or dark. Their underlying premise is that you can have your cake and eat it too -- that you can use both light and dark powers, and it'll work out and you will be able to fully access both. This is a complete break with the established movie canon, which unambiguously shows (see Darth Vader, Palpatine, and Kylo Ren for reference, among others) that, as Yoda said, once you start using the Dark Side, you cannot just stop. It corrupts you... it consumes you. It's like an addictive drug. Once you start using that evil power, you start to want it more and more until it becomes ALL you use. BW has ignored all that canonical information to go with some BS theory that it's somehow possible, just because it works better for their story, to go half light, half dark, as if you could somehow not slip down the dark path. And that is why they don't let you reject the saber or the teachings (other than giving token resistance). Because if you do, they'd have to allow for the possibility that grey is not greater than dark or light, and they don't want to allow that in their story. Their story is about how grey > all.

Except this is Star Wars, a swashbuckling fantasy in which, in every single movie, a selfless act like that *is* taken by the heroes. This is the universe in which Ewoks take down Scout Walkers. And lest we forget, Yoda made the exact same decision in episode 2, when he turned away from his fight with Dooku to save Obi-Wan and Anakin from the falling pillar. By doing that, Yoda allowed a known Sith Lord to escape to unleash his evil, including a war, on the galaxy. You going to say Yoda doesn't know what the Light Side choice is here? Yoda?? And then there is the game... and my character's personal history. This is a 100% LS Jedi who has spared her enemies against the advice of others every single chance she has had to do so. And guess what? It has always worked out for the best. And although this may have been a surprise to others, it was never any surprise to Li-Ya (my Consular), because she trusts in the Force and in the Light Side completely. It's not 'plot armor' she believes in, but the Force, and the fact that following the Light Side teachings will inevitably lead to a positive result. You say, if she stayed behind and died trying to save him, the Alliance loses its Commander and the Zakuul guys could thus win, so it is a 'stupid' choice. But Li-Ya would tell you, this would not happen unless it is the will of the Force, and that if it is, eventually good will come of it, perhaps in a way you cannot foresee. And this is not just blind faith -- she has 65 levels, 3 class story chapters, several expansion chapters, and how many world stories as PROOF that following the Light Side never leads to a bad end, but always to a good one. Follow the will of the Force, which to her, is the Light Side, and good will always come of it. She does not fear death. Nor would she believe that her death would necessarily be an evil thing, provided she dies serving the Light. You may not agree with her, but this does not make her stupid, and again, she has plenty of evidence from 65 levels of game-play, that sparing her enemies, in the long run, leads to a net positive, not negative.

And I did NOT use his power EVER (unless a cutscene forced me to), and rejected him every time. And nothing happened regarding that, either. The story continued as if I had not made any decisions, had not rejected his power, etc. Whether you accept it or not, you get his power. And whether you want to use it or not (my Consular would have died before she used his dark powers), you use it.

This is a really key point, and bears quoting. The apologists for this awful story claim that the choices we are saying don't matter... will matter down the road. Maybe they will, maybe they won't. But you are 100% right, BW didn't even respect the choices they gave us within a chapter. If they knew we weren't going to be able to kill Arcann why even give us the choice? It's like they were trying to frustrate people. Right. Arcann is the protagonist. The story is about him. Which is why the outlander's choices and actions are utterly irrelevant to the main plot.