Eric, I'm happy with the notion that BioWare doesn't want to divulge spoilers...or at least very many of them. That's pretty much always a good idea in my book. However, in the opinion of this subscriber, I think the the lack of details regarding almost any of the mechanics changes (itemizations, crafting, companions, flashpoints, operations, questing, new skills, etc.), which we know much exist in any expansion, even without ToS breaking data mining. continues a relatively long history of poor communication between BioWare and the players. Silence is never the right decision, yet for some reason, it continues to be the position your company chooses with all too much frequency. Can you please offer some explanation why BioWare believes this is the BEST course of action, despite continued requests from the community to be more open?

At least this play-thru will finally put to rest the silly notion that there is an hour of "story" (erroneously defined as cut scene) content in each chapter. We will all get to see just how much "story" there is in a chapter.

Please link a source to a dev that says that one hour of content is actually one hour of cut scene content. Because I don't believe it. Not even for a second. I can only find a post from a random person on the forums making this "claim". At launch, the devs said there was 300+ hours of story content. Yet, just doing the math for the cut scenes, there clearly is NOT 300+ hours of cut scenes. So the devs own past usage of the phrase "hours of content" clearly does not align with how you are attempting to portray it right now.

I've done every role (dps, heal, tank) at the highest levels. DPS == make the red bar smaller. Tank == stand in the right spot. Heal == make the green bar bigger. Each and every one of the roles has pretty much the same requirement to deal with mechanics. If you are talking about healing in a flashpoint, or story mode Ops, then yes...healing is pretty lame. Nearly everyone is Overpowered, so stuff dies super fast, so there isn't much to heal. But on the bleeding edge, when dps is sitting on the enrage timer (or beyond), the healing can be crazy. Last night, while doing Master/Blaster 8M HM, our Blaster tank died after carpet bombing, to poor positioning. We kept an "off tank" dps alive long enough to rez the Blaster tank, and get them back in the fight, while also keeping the Master tank alive. Putting out over 12k EHPS for 30 seconds is "as fun" as any high end burst you can do as a dps. And these events as a healer happen "unscripted". You react to the mistake of another player, and (sometimes) save the day. I do agree, that when everything is going smoothly, healing can be rather boring.

I should say, before I pseudo rant, that I think BioWare has created some amazingly interesting Operations. The Operations content in this game is fantastic. When the encounters work properly, they are extremely fun and challenging. This is why long draughts between this type of content causes people like myself, that are heavy Operations players such consternation. We love this content, which is why we want more. If the Operations were inferior, you wouldn't see such angst for getting more of them. However, if the (implied) timeline isn't clear for folks, in October, we get KotFE. Subsequently, there will be a bug and balance fixing period, which will lead up to December, when (as previously stated) the team will get their holiday break. In January, they will come back and clean up what they couldn't finish in November, and presumably start to work on the new Ops. They will also start to work on chapters 10+ (the first of which, as previously announced, are slated for March). If anyone thinks a new Ops will arrive before March, which is the timeframe planned for more STORY content, which is BioWare's #1 priority, they are truly fooling themselves. At the earliest, I think it's not unreasonable to think we are looking closer to June for a new Ops.

The savvier player understand bolster, and how best to gear, at every level, to maximize their expertise and their stats. Accordingly, the newer player probably doesn't even know bolster exists, much less how to gear themselves the best to maximize their effectiveness. I have a fairly simple proposal to narrow the gap between savvy and newbie: Today, bolster lowers your expertise, if you bring PVE gear with better stats than PVP gear to a PVP match. That's how bolster attempts to make things "fair". Except we all know it's not even remotely fair. I think the devs have it backwards. Instead of lowering just 1 stat (expertise), bolster should lower all of the other stats on your PVE gear to a 162 rating (or buff, as the case may be). Thus, regardless of what you show up in, if the gear slot does not have expertise, you are going to get the equivalent stats of the old "recruit" level. You'll be at a 5% disadvantage on stat budget, but you won't be at a 50% disadvantage on expertise, which is far, far worse. No more 50k toons in a war zone. No more 1k expertise. Just a reasonably level playing field for all. Also, and this is really, really important for 10-29, if you have no gear in a slot, bolster that slot as if there was _something_ there. Having no relics or implants or ears at level 10 puts the level 10 character at a huge disadvantage to even a level 20 player, with regard to expertise. This penalty needs to stop. Bring back Naked PVP!

No one knows what the raiding will be like with the expansion. BioWare has been extremely vague (as usual) with what's going on. As for RIGHT NOW, the 2 L60 operations are challenging. Very challenging. If you like a challenge, you will enjoy them, and there are still groups/guilds working on them.

@EricMusco is there anything you or BioWare would like to share with the community regarding this issue? This update was on 12/15/2014, and said, "in the next few months". It's now 6 months after this announcement of an upcoming announcement. So it seems reasonable to believe that whatever plans you have, you know what those plans are, and you can inform the community. Even if the plans are to "do nothing" (which is what I perceive that BioWare is doing).

To the OP, an MMO, of any sort, is probably not the game for you. That's ok. They aren't for everyone. The MMO experience isn't about getting to max level in 3 days. It's a social/lifestyle sort of game. The leveling game is a tiny cookie the developers give you to see if you are going to enjoy the game at all. In your case, you didn't. If the leveling game doesn't interest you, then surely the end game will not satisfy you at all, as it takes comparatively _forever_ to gear up. Think weeks and months, not days. And even then, you may never fully gear up, as only a handful of players are good enough to ever get the very best end game gear.

This is easy. If they don't up the limit, then my answer is none of them. Saves me 13M credits and hours in redecorating.

From a lore standpoint, it makes absolutely no sense to have a stronghold on Manaan. Manaan does not allow outsiders to have any property on Manaan. Further, it's highly, highly unusual that any non-Selkath species are even allowed to land on Manaan. It's a cool planet, for sure...but I would be stunned if there was ever a stronghold there.

Actually, since the weekly requires dailies that cannot be completed until "tomorrow", that's not the fastest choice. Going back and doing Forged Alliances is better. But either way, for those with many alts, it's time spent doing "old" content that you likely have no use for the rewards to do, other than because you need xp. At least doing the Ziost story unlocks the Ziost world boss, which has a purpose right now.

I'm standing on my ship, at level 59, having just finished the Shadow of Revan story arc (sans Forged Alliances and Ilum, as neither provided any use), and noticed I cannot start the Ziost quest line. It appears to be a level 60 only thing, since the terminal says to come back later. In the past, I've had toons finish off Yavin as early as level 58 (though only a couple of times, from toons that did all of Forged Alliances before the release of Shadow of Revan). So that would be my suggestion for a change: Make Ziost available to any toon at level 58 or higher, that has completed the Shadow of Revan story.

If you max your affection on your companion characters for your level 60's that's a 10 presence buff, per companion character. Plus 100 presence for a human at level 50. When that's the case, rocket boots heals them instantly, and you really won't have to stop for much self healing, if you send the companion in first. There are also a couple of classes that are just silly easy for quick leveling: Sniper/Gunslinger, Sorc/Sage, and Merc/Mando: All 3 have strong aoe skills that mow down packs of adds before you ever take a tick of damage. I just finished a Merc from 1-60 this week, and was pretty much under-geared the entire time. I think 3 times I went to the fleet and spent comms on gear. Had ~300 comms when I hit Rishi, and I skipped the forged alliances quest line that rewards 300 more.. I didn't spend a single comm pastI iLvl 116, thanks to the Makeb buff, and then getting free gear from the Rishi story.

Honestly, you would have a point, if leveling from 1-60 wasn't so darned quick and easy with 12x xp the way it is today. People are speed leveling in 10 hours. Even if you go "slow" it's more like 25-30 hours of play time. For some, that's a long weekend online. The leveling experience has never been better, so you might as well take a few play days to enjoy the scenery. Plus, if you are referring friends, they won't have level 60's either. What rush do you really have to have your whole "squad" over on PoT5 all at once?

Don't stop there, as a subscriber I feel we should all be able to change servers for free, perhaps with a 30 day cooldown at worst. And we should be able to class change to whatever the FoTM is for free too. I mean...servers are "dieing" left and right, and BioWare doesn't seem to be able to balance the classes in a timely manner...so this would fix both of those problems.

Dear BioWare, if you are going to say "learn to play", at least link a parse showing us how it's done...

I think the annoying thing about the lack of forward looking roadmap, is that Musco admitted it was a mistake during much of 2014 to release Forged Alliances the way they did, with very little communication, because they wanted it to be a "surprise". So at the start of 2015 it looked like BW was being smarter about communication. Except here we are, less than 5 months later, and they've actually regressed from where they were in 2014. My personal expectations are that the players should always know the rough content plans for the next two major releases. That would mean we players know roughly what to expect in 3.3 and 3.4 right now. And we would have the target dates. We don't know anything about 3.3, including a rough target date. All we know is they are preparing to put 3.3 on the PTS. That's good...because when they do that, we are going to learn what it entails...but ffs, they really need to stop using PTS patch notes as their communication vehicle.

SWTOR considers Ziost to be a player class story (annoyingly so). As such, they exhibit the behavior you are talking about. Rishi and Yavin are the same. In fact, I think Ilum and Makeb (main stories) follow this. This is contrary to most of the 1-50 side quest content, where that content was easy to enjoy being grouped up, and why you are noticing the difference now.

I think the new instanced boss is a Monolith. With the quest kill, we only need 49 more kills. I recommend a large squad of alts farming the Monolith weekly. 10 kills a week, plus the quest, and it's only 4 weeks for 10 alts to get it done.

I don't do much ranked these days, as my best PVP healer is a Scoundrel on Harbinger...nearly impossible for me to get a q pop, and I tried fairly hard over the last 2 weeks. For ranked PVP, if these changes go live, I doubt I would recommend bringing any healer. I would just go 4 dps. The Operative/Scoundrel healer is now completely shut down by this change. Sorc/Sage is probably now best, as Merc/Mando survivability issues are still significant (and why they don't represent on the leaderboards).

Merc/Mando have an AoE Single Target heal: It's Kolto Shell/Trauma Probe. This heal last 21 seconds (minimum) and while isn't capable of quite as much healing as 2 stacks of Op/Scoundrel HoT's over it's duration, it also does very little over healing...it's highly efficient (nearly 100% ehps, unlike SRM/KP, which admittedly has poor ehps). Sorc/Sage doesn't have a perfectly similar single target AoE heal, but they get bubble. Bubble has about the same absorb rate as our SRM/KP or Kolto Shell/Trauma Probe. In the current state, good Sorc/Sages are bubbling a lot, and far more than just the tanks, as they did in the 2.0 tier. Bubble (was) a very viable heal to spam in it's previous form. Energy management issues with the proposed 3.2.1 changes are making extensive use of bubble far less viable. I fully understand that Op/Scoundrel has a very nice AoE heal...I certainly use it a great deal. But it requires the raid to group up to be effective. DPS can't just wander in and out of it like a Sorc/Sage healing pool. Most of the Operations design in 3.0 penalizes significant grouping up. Since you mentioned it, have you parsed something under the proposed changes? If you have something simple, like a parse for HM Malaphar, I'd love to see your results.

Tin foil hat time: BioWare has finally realized that they simply cannot balance the game across this many classes, and so they are nerfing everything that isn't a Bounty Hunter/Commando. When the entire remaining player base is playing those 2 classes, they will have solved their balance issue. In the latest, "What are they thinking?", BioWare has announced proposed changes on the PTS for both Scoundrel/Operative and Sorc/Sage healing. In both cases, the changes are advertised as Quality of Life (QoL) changes. When I read that, I think...could, things will be easier. Except in both cases, the healing output of healers is being substantially reduced. Empirical testing of Sorc/Sage has healing potential down at least 10%, while making that output substantially more difficult to achieve...that's not a positive QoL. Operative/Scoundrel most used Heal over Time (HoT) was nerfed by 60%. Roughly half of the typical healing output of an Op/Scoundrel is from their HoTs...so nerfing it by 60% is...HUGE. Also, not a QoL change. Making your heals do less healing, is not a QoL change...that's a nerf. With both of these alleged QoL changes, one can only assume that BioWare simply wants everyone to be a Merc/Mando healer. I can think of no other explanation. I mean...we already knew the operations were originally designed to be completed by this class alone...these proposed changes simply reenforce that notion.

The team with the most healers wins. In solo unranked, it's almost always that simple. Are you queuing as a healer? If not, that's your problem.

To the OP: Did you parse during the run? What were your numbers? At this point in the tier, many groups are seriously over powered for the story mode content and groups are able to carry a few bad dps. And by bad dps, I mean those that aren't putting up the minimum dps to beat the boss enrage timer. Without Parse numbers, we don't know if you were carried, or truly pulling your own weight. Its the latter reason, that people are complaining about the viability of the melee classes. They know that to be a part of a successful group, they will need to be carried by the ranged players, because their dps uptime is insufficient to enable them to be on par. And it's a legitimate complaint. In 8man HM, it's really, really difficult to have enough DPS from the ranged to carry a melee in some fights. The enrage timers are just brutally tight, particularly when you are just progressing to a boss. Sure, once you begin to out gear a boss different raid compositions start to become viable...but initially, you need every bit of damage from every single player in the raid (often, including the healers).