Thanks for that. I had no idea. In fact, nobody I know had any idea of this feature. But it helps. By the way, I was not saying that the entire game is no longer an MMO. I was saying that the new content is fundamentally not MMO content. Which it's not.

I get randomly kicked out to the KotET splash screen, usually in the middle of a fight. The splash screen loads and then it goes back to the game so it just means I can't control anything for about 10 seconds. Happens once or twice an hour and is massively annoying.

Last night my wife was playing through the last of the KotET content and was struggling at one point. We are older gamers and one of the main reasons we play MMOs is so we can help each other and do things together. But last night I realized that all of the new content does not allow grouping at all. Personally I don't play MMOs so that I can be dragged along like a puppet through a pseudo-interactive cartoon. Especially not if it's in mandatory solo mode. There was a bit of this back in the original game's class stories but at least those stories were tailored for each class, mostly made sense, and COULD BE DONE IN A GROUP IF DESIRED!! Other major MMOs like WoW and Final Fantasy are now channeling the player down a very narrow and controlled path. Open world elements have fallen away and you are forced to be the big hero in THE BIG STORY. But at least you can group and in some cases (Final Fantasy) you are forced to group. I've played SWTOR on and off since release and have had a lot of fun with it. My desire to play took a huge hit back when all the companions were homogenized. But I still came back. This current emphasis on layering a single player story game on top of the half-dead carcass of an aging MMO is almost certainly the thing that will now drive me away for good.

My wife and I recently returned to SWTOR. Back when KotFE first came out I started it with a couple of characters. I can see myself enjoying the expansions stories maybe 2 or 3 times at max. So I was wondering if it was a viable option to simply not advance a character into KotFE but to just stay behind and level up doing other things. Because of the XP bonus I now have a character who will be coming out of Revan at nearly 65. My wife and I are casual players and mostly enjoy running heroics and seeing what we can handle as a duo, such as doing flashpoints with our companions. We have absolutely zero interest in group content. Is there anything that we would be blocked from doing on a character who leveled to 70 on old content? Would we still have access to the new level 70 command system or does that require actually running through all the KotET content?

I think it's more indicative of the fact that credits are easy to come by in the game and there is very little worth buying any longer.

My wife and I are playing out the base game stories that we still haven't completed. After that who knows. I consider all the expansions to the base game to be quite weak with the quality declining as the storyline becomes less personalized. It's obvious that Bioware is simply not given the budget to really do anything exceptional any longer. And the game is suffering badly from the current gameworld psychosis that feels the player must constantly be crowned the one great hero who save the entire galaxy. KotFE is a huge flop in my opinion. A mildly amusing interactive cartoon that makes zero sense for non-force classes, ends quickly and then plops you back into grinding old content with all sense of continuity down the drain. People said they wanted more story. But they meant more story in an expansive interesting MMO world. Not more story and then go back and do old stuff some more and then some more.... I think there is a very slim chance that SWTOR can survive thru 2016.

There is only one thing that Disney is guaranteed to do with Star Wars. They will cram it into the narrow and simplistic Disney model of storytelling and then they will milk it for the absolute maximum short term profits. Disney doesn't give a rat's *** about canon. They may pay a little two-faced lip-service to it just to molify the hardcore fans. All they care about is buying up properties that have become a widely accepted part of popular culture and then figuring out how to make the maximum amount of money by appealing to the broadest market. They don't care about canon because their target audience doesn't care about things like continuity or believability. For an example of what today's movie going audience wants consider that brain-dead, snore-fest Jurassic World. That movie was a massive degradation from the original yet it is the 3rd highest world wide grossing movie of all time. I fully expect the new Star Wars movie to be Jurassic World in space once it get's the full Disney treatment.

Crafting is completely worthless for leveling characters because you can get basically the same blue gear for each tier by running the heroics. All heroics give the same reward so even a weak player can just run the easier ones and keep himself geared up. This is true all the way up to item level 178 items for character level 56. After level 56 there is absolutely nothing to craft until 64. But all the crafted items for level 64 require special rare mats that only drop from hard mode flashpoints or ops. If you are a solo player or casual player then there is literally nothing for you to craft without spending a huge amount of credits at the AH buying rare drops. Trust me, I wish it wasn't so. I've been leveling 4 characters through the base game story and all of them were crafters. Finally I figured out what a worthless waste of time it was since I could just run heroics instead. So I checked endgame to see what I could look forward to and just found a void. Now I feel like a chump for all the time I invested.

Hold off on the restoration of faith until you have a chance to test the changes tomorrow. Nerfing a value by 75% and then buffing the remaining 25% by 40% still leaves you over 60% reduced from the original value. The end result is that companion power tomorrow will still be a lot closer to the nerfed value than the original OP value of 4.0. How much this pleases people will vary enormously.

It most likely won't work either of those ways. Take as your starting point the original power level of companions after 4.0 = 100. They were nerfed by roughly 75% which puts the the 4.02 power level = 25 Now they are going to buff them up by 48% from their current level = 37 So the companion healing power will still be down by 63% from the original 4.0 level. I think they are counting on people being confused about the huge difference between nerfing down from a high value and buffing up from a low value. So the 48% buff sounds much better than it is. If it's still confusing think of it this way. You have a dollar. Somebody takes away 75% of it and now you have a quarter. Then somebody adds 40% to your quarter and you still only have 35 cents.

Nothing about companions standing around doing nothing. Not a word about healing companions relentlessly attacking with their pathetic default attack instead of healing. This is almost as big an issue as the companion power problem. Nothing quite so annoying as dying to a bunch of trash mobs while Mako stands transfixed, meditating on the nature of her pistol, and then finally popping off a pathetic shot.

You must be the most easily amused person on the face of the earth.

Considering what the guy up above said about gathering at high level and then selling on the Auction House and buying the rare crafting materials from group content, I decided to go check it out. Level 8 material from gathering and running missions sell for horribly low prices. Gathered green items typically for 200 to 400 and even the blue items from missions for just 400 to 600. Meanwhile the rare items you need in large quantity to make anything for level 64 sell for 60 or 70k each. This system is crafting disaster. There's no reason to craft from levels 10 to 64 unless you are incapable of running heroics to gear up leveling characters. And the only way you can craft at 64 is by running a ton of group content to get rare drops.

Most of this seems to be saying that I should get to max level and then primarily be a gathering and auction house trader. That's all well and good if a person finds it rewarding. But I want to craft and supply my own characters in a meaningful way. I still have 4 classes that I have yet to finish leveling through the base game. I was working towards having all the crew skills covered so I could supply my own characters. But then I discovered that it's pointless because the same gear is available by just running a few heroics. All the way from 1 to 56 there is virtually nothing you can craft that has any real worth because it's pretty much all obtainable from heroics or vendors. Then from 56 to 64 there's nothing at all to craft. Then at 64 everything requires items that drop from hardmode flashpoints or OPs. Leveling from 1 to 65 and leveling worthless crafting from 1 to 500 just so, at endgame, you can run around gathering material and playing the auction house just so you can afford to buy the rare materials that you can't obtain on your own as a solo player is just about the most fail concept I've ever encountered in the world of MMO crafting.

I had the same issue on multiple crafting characters. The rate of crits returning purple items was far lower than it was prior to 4.0. To the point that I just gave up on RE altogether, crafted blue items only and then moved on. Of course, that was all before I figured out that low level crafting is completely useless now.