I think they also serve as a "sanity cap." Some people will keep on pulling the lever on the ol' Skinner box until they waste away from Mountain Dew withdrawals. By informing them that the pellet mechanism has been disabled until next week, it tells them to go pull a different lever, maybe even go outside and verify the continued existence of the sun.

Your post suggests that you think EA/BW are aware of what the competition is doing and what has worked and failed for them. The history of SWTOR suggests that this is not true.

I don't RP and I see the obvious need for chat bubbles. If I want to say something to someone directly around me, a chat bubble says "Hey, that guy killing the next mob over is talking to me." Without chat bubbles, they have to be watching their chat window, notice that it says "Say" instead of "General" for the channel name despite them having the same default color, and then realize who it was nearby who was talking. That's not just good for RP, it's good for forming ad hoc groups with the people around you.

This information was available in the Dev post about it, and presented clearly in the game UI. I was away from the game for 10 months, came back a week into 1.7, opened my Legacy window and saw reputations, clicked on it, and was aware of this detail within minutes of coming back to the game. What more can they do to broadcast this to you? Spam people who aren't interested? Specifically tell you the optimal way to use your reputation items? It's a game. Relax. Open more next week.

I loved the pre-CU SWG. The class system was awesome. The combat was less "exciting" than WoW, but it was actually quite similar to KOTOR and a reasonable game design decision. The crafting was some of the best, if not the best, in any MMO Ive tried. However, with SWGEmu, the big catch is a pretty giant catch: there is no GUI! You can apparently connect via the old SOE client, but that requires having the disks for a game that took a nosedive years ago. SWGEmu has a command line client, but I'm not sure that will be appealing to anyone.

By insisting on viewing this through the selfish angle of what you want, you are missing the larger point. Absent any rewards, your guildmates would rather do something else. The reward structure is artificially motivating them to engage in a mode of gameplay that is clearly (as evidenced by their choice to not PvP without reward) not their optimal entertainment choice. If you ask yourself "why am I engaging in this game activity" and the answer is not "because I enjoy it," then you might want to step back and reevaluate your gaming decisions.

So true. And said by the same player in each case, not the usual MMO problem of a large audience leading to disparate desires.

1) End the Gear treadmill. Reward skill, not grinding. How? Establish a top tier item budget and stop changing it. Let the ability to beat content be skill based, not gear based, and tune Story Mode to simply require less skill, Nightmare Mode to require expert precision. This has a number of advantages. One, old content doesn't become obsolete. If you liked the fights in EV, you can return and still be challenged. Second, this treadmill quickly feels futile. You run and run to get the best gear, only to have something better released. Third, it's easier to balance. BW can assume a certain stat budget for all players and balance to that. For rewards, make them cosmetic (shells, crystals) and add meta-achievement style rewards, such as a mount for beating a certain combination of Ops at a given difficulty level. 2) Refine the UI to honestly reflect design intentions. This sounds odd, but take a look at your skill tree. How many of those are really options, and how many are either mandatory or worthless? In the end, being a Combat Medic Commando there is really only 1 optional point and two nearly worthless filler points in the entire spec. Out of 41 points total, you get to make one choice, and it isn't a major one (1% alacrity or a 0.5s cast time reduction on a DPS ability...for a healer). If choice isn't intended, just make the UI a screen where you select your tree and it fills up as you level, showing what benefits and abilities you have unlocked and which are still to come. This interface is more honest, more accurately reflects the design decisions, eases some problems with class balance, prevents unanticipated hybrids that then get nerfed, and eliminates complaints from theorycrafters and the hardcore min-maxers that the game design is simplistic. 3) Fix the respec UI. I bought the Legacy Field Respec. I never use it. Why? Because it doesn't save my quickbar setups or my spec choices. When I swap from healer to DPS, I lose a lot of abilities and gain new ones. I then have to spend five minutes reorganizing all of my abilities around the bars so they are where I want them. When I switch back, same thing all over again. Now repeat this for alts who can tank or heal and it quickly becomes a nightmare of constantly rebuilding my quickbars. 4) Move away from the "whatever isn't on cooldown" model of gameplay. Too many classes work this way. If the right answer is "whatever is clickable" and not "whatever is the best ability based on procs, buffs, debuffs, and resource level," then the fights might as well be automated. I know some people might like this, so leave one or two specs with this design if necessary, but right now almost every spec works this way. 5) Real space combat. Enough said 6) Put a wall between PvP and PvE. Stop nerfing PvE abilities and specs because they are proving too powerful in a weird hybrid FOTM build in PvP. Make all abilities have a separate effect if the target is a player. Now you can tune PvE and PvP separately. 7) Stop putting PvE content in PvP areas. I'm talking about you, Ilum. No one wants to visit you. You're cold, your natives are rude, and the food is terrible.

I'm pretty sure I'm okay with the learning curve...

Where did you see 4 Trauma Probes? Latest trees I've seen have still had a limit of 1 active at a time.

This article specifically says the Cathar are coming, and soon. No date given, but it was in an interview regarding 2.0 and the expansion and it suggests it will be via the Cartel Market, but that wasn't explicit.

Your prediction seems very reasonable, on grounds of cooldown restrictions alone. They also already relied heavily on instant cast abilities with no cooldown, which never before benefited from alacrity and now do. If we take your 8% alacrity bonus: MP goes from 2s to 1.84s. HS goes from 1.5s to 1.38s MP/HS/HS now takes 4.6s instead of 5s Using the current regen zones, at 8+ we would earn 0.6 Ammo per second. In 5s, this is 3 Ammo: a neutral rotation. With an 8% bonus we would now earn 0.648 Ammo per second. In 4.6s, this is 2.981 Ammo, not quite neutral. Or, you know, as you said before a 10% increase in regen is not equal to an 11% faster cast rate.

Smart healing means that a heal with limited targets will select who to heal based on a priority of lowest health first. So Kolto Bomb targets 4 people. If you throw it in a group of 6 people, 2 healthy, 2 injured, and 1 near death, a smart heal ability will heal the 3 injured and 1 near death. A non-smart (dumb) heal ability will decide some other way, in the case of SWTOR it is based on distance from center of the ability. So if the two healthy people are in the center of where you cast it, it will waste 2 of it's 4 targets on those two who didn't need it, and possibly not heal the near death player at all. This is an obvious problem when people cluster up during certain phases of fights, because it is highly unrealistic to expect most groups to quickly and efficiently sort themselves around based on health levels so you don't toss Kolto Bomb into a mixed group of injured and not.

Certainly, especially with their tendency to put cooldowns on most abilities (see the Kolto Pack change). For Commandos, the only heals without cooldowns are Medical Probe and Hammer Shot. So while Alacrity will definitely be beneficial now, it will not be a simple % increase in HPS as it does nothing for the cooldowns which are already a limiter on rotations. Likewise with pretty much every class and role. I'm actually working on making a new simulator to try and see how it views things in a more dynamic way than just discussion can handle. Do we have solid info on exactly how Alacrity is increasing regen?

Unless they change the itemization model to allow more mixing of stats. As it is, Alacrity is in competition with Surge, and Surge has a steep DR penalty above 300 rating. What this really does is make Alacrity non-problematic. With this change, cooldowns notwithstanding, your rotation will remain constant, only sped up with Alacrity. As it is now, increased Alacrity means more casts of free abilities (ie Diagnostic Scan or Hammer Shot), but not more casts of the real heals you want. What it won't do, is actually increase the power of your healing. So your HPS will increase, but the balance of that HPS increase vs the HPS increase from other stats will need to be explored. On the plus side, we can now safely say "take as much Alacrity as you need to feel comfortable your heals will land in time. It won't hurt you." We couldn't say that before.

I've you have been paying attention to the state of the game for the past year, you can see that this 2.0 update contains large numbers of fixes, changes, mechanics updates, ability redesigns, etc that we have been asking for for a very, very long time. There has been almost no progress on these issues in the 7 patches since launch. Now, with this one patch, a laundry list of things are being fixed. It is a good patch, perhaps the first good patch, regardless of whether or not you buy the expansion.

Interesting. I wonder if this means that the Scoundrel/Operative AoE is still capped as well. Relative strength of the HoT to the direct heal? Tick rate, number of ticks per cast, and typical tick size?

I agree, it certainly sounds like the cooldown is unnecessary. Let the fact that it costs 25 Energy and a TA/UH be the limiter. With a cooldown the length of it's HoT, it essentially becomes "use whenever it's off CD" as opposed to a choice you make between spending the energy on UWM or KP, with the HoT as a bonus for the consumption of UH.

Does it still do a direct heal, in addition to the HoT puddle? Does the direct heal have no cap as well, or just the puddle? By "no cap," do you mean the standard 8 person cap of Salvation, or can it heal 9+ people? If you throw KB, then active SCC, does the HoT add Charged Barrier? Obviously removing the cap solves the problem of the need for smart healing, as well as the fundamental imbalance with Salvation, although the balance of HPS and HPR will require further testing (or calculation in two weeks when this damn client is done downloading and I can read the data files directly). Any Scoundrels/Operatives know if your AoE heal has had it's cap removed as well?

Those patch notes aren't complete, and don't list any of the changes to the skill trees. That change was data-mined. If it isn't in, that's one thing for a tester to confirm. I'm going to try and (very slowly) download the PTS client myself, but it will be a week before it's done, easy.

This is a thread for healers to ask questions about the 2.0 PTS Patch, and for those who are testing to provide answers and reactions. Some of us (like myself) can't use the PTS for one reason or another, so here's a place for us to work together. Starter questions: Have they added smart healing, especially to the Commando and Operative AoE? The new Kolto Bomb HoT: How many people does it affect? What's the cooldown on the new Concussive Charge AoE heal? How strong is it?

Necromancer! Burn him! Burn him!

I just added a whole lot of Cyan to the list. Troopers getting 100 Energy Cells instead of 12 Ammo is great. That imbalance was absurd. The Alacrity change is much needed, and exactly what should have happened (as we detailed a year ago). Now let them put in a note about smart healing and I'll be pretty happy, even if it took a year.

Absolutely, the HM needs a gear check. Story mode is meant to be accessible by all. If it isn't doable with a PUG, it should be retuned.

If you want to level up Synthweaving, just roll an alt and get it to level 10 and off the starter planet. Then feed it all the materials. No need to waste the money and time you spent in artifice.