They may have gone a little too far in the other direction, but what exactly was fun about facerolling through Heroic mobs before? Stomping everything in your path may be fun for five minutes but it very quickly becomes incredibly boring, particularly as hotkey combat is intrinsically dull. Ask yourself: what is the point of combat if it's almost impossible to die? You might as well remove enemies altogether if they're going to offer no challenge whatsoever. Overly easy content can be just as tedious as overly difficult.

With the exception of the KotFE/KotET chapters, solo content in this game is extremely easy. It's so easy that combat is a pointless chore, an irritant getting in the way of moving from A to B. I know people will suggest ways to nerf yourself, but that shouldn't be necessary. Many games have a 'story mode' difficulty, which is completely fine for those who just want to progress through the story. It is quite unusual though for this to be the only difficulty option. It's very odd and counterproductive for combat to be so lacking in challenge. I recently finished Onslaught, in which the devs designed boss encounters that had mechanics beyond just normal attacks. There were a number of other potentially interesting encounters. They didn't matter though because my health barely ever dropped below 100%. Why go to the effort of crafting boss mechanics if the player is effectively invincible? Why bother having fights at all? A lack of difficulty also undermines the story. The stories are always pitting you against antagonists of supposed enormous skill and power. Then you steamroll through them and wonder what all the fuss was about. This is part of the reason it's sometimes hard to pay attention to the class stories - I know the gameplay won't support the dialogue's claims that this particular opponent is a massive threat. I'm not expecting difficulty increases for any existing content (although it would be welcome); that would probably consume too many development resources. It would be great though if future story content could have Vet/Master modes to stop combat being so pointless. Simply boosting enemy health/damage is not ideal given that a lot of Knights VM/MM encounters are unbalanced, but presumably it's the least resource-intensive approach and is better than nothing.

Which parts exactly are you finding hard? It's a lengthy chapter. What class are you playing? Tactics in Vet and Master chapters vary a lot between classes.

According to the numbers from this calculator: https://torcommunity.com/guides/companions#calculatorthe cheapest approach to levelling up a companion from 1 - 50 would cost 3,466,600 credits. This consists of buying over 6500 gifts (Rank 1 Gifts for 1 - 40, then Rank 5 for 40 - 50). One would go comatose from the tedium of buying and giving of that many gifts, unless you can find a method of automating the process.

It would be messy, but as it stands a lot of crafting is pointless. There's no reason to spend the time, effort and credits making an unlettered 80 item when they drop so frequently from multiple sources. Unlettered 80s are not BiS though, and if the BiS variant can't be crafted, then obtaining it is entirely RnG. Although there's not much statistical difference between an unlettered 80 and the BiS item, people like to optimise. Maybe crafting variants should go side by side with reducing the number of alternatives. In my experience 306 gear drops are weighted towards unlettered 80s; I've received very little BiS gear.

Would just like to double check this before investing in 600+ crafting. Can you craft gear variants, eg R-1, AR-13, BR-7, etc versions of barrels/hilts, mods and enhancements? If not, I really think this should be made possible because otherwise a lot of gear crafting is pointless.

Heh, I did it. Barely. I maintain that it's very poorly balanced though. Having my toenails extracted would have been more fun.

I'm playing Chapter 1 of KotET on Master Mode. The balance in the walker part is still completely off. The walker has health of 368,370. The rocket skytroopers hit for 128k damage and usually appear four at a time. O I've painfully grinded my way to the boss walker, which has health of 760k. Rocket skytroopers regularly spawn. Now watch this video of someone playing in 5.0 days: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=AqJcYI17fHY. Note that his walker has over 400k health and the boss has 650k. Moreover, his heavy blaster attack can one-shot the troopers, while mine can't. He does so much more damage to the boss than I can. I'm all for a challenge, but this just feels like little effort was put into balancing.

I'm playing a PvE tank Darkness Sin and want a bit of DPS, ie 3 DPS mods. Is it better to get 1213 Alacrity or Crit? Jaydenz's guide currently says Alacrity, but IIRC correctly he advocated Crit in a previous version of the guide. Also, would it be right to still aim for 50% Shield and sacrifice Absorb? Thanks!

Relative levels make almost no difference to the difficulty of combat in the class story. BW opted a while ago to make progressing the class story easy to the point that your level doesn't matter. I stealthed through the Operative's class story, which led to regularly being several levels below enemies. I was only 46 when I finished the story. Fights against mobs 6 levels higher than me were difficult because they were literally impossible - you miss 100% of the time where the level gap is 6+. All other combat was trivial to the degree that I could have got up from my computer, made myself a cup of coffee, come back, and the fight would be over. I do wish that the combat in the class story missions wasn't so meaningless, at least for instanced areas. It does somewhat cheapen the story when you go up against someone who is meant to be a big bad but who dies in the blink of an eye. You also don't learn how to play your class while levelling. That's the way the game is currently designed though. If you want to make the the story at all challenging, you will have to do something unusual to weaken yourself like making your companion passive or not using all your abilities.

As has been said numerous times in the thread, increasing the number of CQ points for some activities (Uprisings, PvP, et al.) would be fine. You've just ignored those comments and continued to bang on about how awful it is that points are available for minor tasks. This is remarkably disingenuous given that you have repeatedly refused to acknowledge the point that the Conquest change is good for the bulk of players. And it's a very important point. The central reason why the current Conquest system is good can be expressed very simply: if most people enjoy a game mechanic it is a successful mechanic. because fun is the name of the game.

How are these two things analogous? In the former you join a group then immediately abandon it, which negatively impacts the other people in that group. In the latter you: a) haven't formed a group yet, so you're not causing a problem for anyone, and b) when you do join, it will be with people who are implicitly willing to do the same activity you are.

So what? Conquest is not the aim of the game. It's a bonus, a sideshow, not the main attraction.

On the other hand if your goal with the game is to have fun (and if it's not then you need to re-examine your priorities in life), the new system lets you meet the conquest target while playing just about any content. I'm playing my way through the bounty hunter class story for the first time. Previously, while playing a class story I just had to kiss goodbye to conquest. Now I can easily exceed the conquest target while enjoying the one type of content that makes SWTOR truly unique in the MMO world.

It's also nice for the lowbies that we don't have to wait until higher levels to participate in Conquest. It encourages alt-play. In fact with the double XP and other XP bonuses, my new Bounty Hunter has hit the Conquest target before even finishing the prologue.

Thanks. Is there any way to consistently keep the boss's aggro on me? The trouble is that if he starts attack Lana, it's extremely difficult to keep her alive because she won't dodge his attacks.

I've levelled Lana up to 32. I have a mix of 236/240 and 242 gear. Most Augments are 228 but have a couple of 236 ones. I don't feel like equipment matters that much though because The Horizon Captain's damage output on Veteran is utterly insane. I thought the Chapter 2 boss fights were as tough as it was going to get but this is ridiculous. I more or less know what I need to do - interrupt or cleanse Mass Affliction at all costs. So I take Watchguard to reduce the cooldown of Force Kick, Pulse to reduce the cooldown of Force Stasis, Expunging Camouflage to cleanse Affliction by using Force Camouflage. Also vital to make sure that when we get hit by Imbalance, the areas of effect don't overlap. I use Unity and Heroic Moment. The problem of course is keeping Lana alive. She'll stand right in front of the Captain's Thundering Blast which can do 40k damage to her, so I need to figure out how to keep aggro on me instead of Lana. Things get messy when the Skytroopers respawn as well. Any tips on beating this guy? I checked Youtube and I can only find two videos of people winning this fight on Vet or Master - one's a Scoundrel, the other's a Sage. Maybe do something radical like put Lana into Tank or even DPS mode?

Discovered this trick to easily get Empress Acina to level 50 influence without spending a penny. On Veteran difficulty the game instantly gives you 40,000 influence with Acina when she joins you, which brings her to level 20. Exit the area, start the chapter again on Master mode. You then get 210,000 influence when she joins, which together equals the cap of 250,000, ie level 50. Even if you revert to Veteran, she remains level 50. I came across this while looking for tips on how to beat those cats on Veteran at the beginning of Chapter 2 KotET. There's a Reddit post from the guy who beat the chapter on Master ( ) in which he said that Acina was instantly raised to level 45 influence. So I decided to try restarting the chapter in Master mode, and it worked. As the game gives you influence rather than just setting the companion's level, doing this the other way round (ie Master difficulty first, then Veteran) might work. If you're trying to progress through the chapters on Vet, that would save a step. There were no influence boosts on Vet in KotFE so this trick might not work for any companions from those chapters. Maybe it will work for other companions in KotET. I'll have to make my through the game to find out. PS: Bioware, I'm guessing this isn't intended. But given that you've put little effort into balancing Veteran difficulty, I hope you'll leave it alone.

I've read in a few Watchman guides that in the opening rotation, you should go Force Melt -> Zen. I don't understand why though; given that Zen increases the crit chance of all your burn attacks, shouldn't you do Zen -> Force Melt? What am I missing? Thanks.

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As someone who's primarily interested in having a fun, challenging experience, there's clearly too much XP available. Initially I tried to complete every quest out there. Result was that my Sentinel arrived on Taris at level 18, two levels above the recommended for a lot of the quests. That made combat boringly easy, to the point where I started taking C2N2 as my companion instead of Kira/T7 as his inability to inflict damage made things tougher. I still had to avoid doing a lot of quests on Taris, including all the bonus ones, to avoid over-levelling for Nar Shadaa. I don't like skipping quests but there's not much choice if you don't want to over-level. I realise there are some people who just want to get to the level cap as quickly as possible. I don't really understand that mentality, especially in an MMO which emphasises story. Simply destroying every enemy in your path because you're several levels higher than they are seems incredibly dull to me. All you're doing is pressing 1,2,1,3,1,4,4,5! etc. That gets old pretty quickly.

I'm an MMO noob having only dabbled in WoW so the obvious solution to me would be to eliminate "need" altogether. The potential for abuse was clear when I first came across it in WoW and I don't understand the point of retaining something that can be such a source of friction (just saying, "that's what MMOs do" is a crap reason). The mere existence of "need" encourages people to be selfish and you can't realistically expect that everyone's going to ignore the option.