I want to see the end of the story that is what I'm most excited for, just to put an end to the Emperor storyline once and for all. That and any new gear, abilities, cosmetics. Could care less about RNG gear since I mostly play solo or tactical modes but I think it is a bad deal for everyone else. I guess it is bad for solo players as well since if you want a specific look from new gear that will all be RNG as well. New uprisings could be good but the one they showed looked kind of meh with all the AOE and mob spawns. Basically just play the game for fun and to get cool looking stuff for my character so it really comes down to whether they have enough diversity and good new designs to make me want to grind for any of it.

So command crates don't give gear with set bonus automatically it is random. Yet you are tuning veteran mode for tier 2 with some tier 3 gear, plus set bonus, plus augments, plus stim and adrenal. Basically you put veteran at launch but we can't even play if until months later that it will take to gear up. If you can run a story mode uprising twice in the time it takes to run veteran mode once since there is a chance of wiping or people not being geared why would anyone play veteran at all. Basically the fastest way to gear is just going to be speed runs of story mode and then that gear may not even be what you want or need and there is no incentive to run veteran anyway since it is exactly the same just more dmg and hp. From the stream it just seemed like veteran uprisings don't have much reason to do them since by the time you are geared enough to do them nightmare mode may be out.

I understand the changes made to deception. Giving sins 2 free escapes with phase walk and force cloak may have been too much. However taking away phase walk from tanks really hurts their ability to re-position in fights and it was incredibly useful in a bunch of boss fights. Either make it exclusive to darkness spec or give darkness spec a new ability or passive to offset this. Maybe let darkness tanks be able to phantom stride to allies or something else since they seem to be getting nothing new aside from the utilities.

As someone who spent way too many credits, IMO, to get a senya pike I have to agree that plat rarity has some issues. The problem isn't having something above gold it is how it is implemented in game. If they introduce plat items they should be truly special and unique yet what we get now is multiple items per pack that dilutes the amount of items people want. The reason why vented saber is super duper expensive or nonexistent yet vented dualsaber is cheap is because it is clear there is a vast quality disparity between the two. Same with senya's saber and the pike it feels like one is a plat item and the other is just thrown in the normal saber shouldn't even be included. For future plat items they should make rules to make the plat items more special. 1. Only 1 plat item in each pack. Having 3 plat items in a single pack is dumb because even if you hit on plat you then still have a 1/3 chance of getting what you want. Put senya pike in one pack and then a month later you can do the normal saber. This way the initial supply of plat items is more stable yet they remain exclusive. 2. Make plat items special. Luggerwahl was a bit disappointing it seems like just a normal mount. If it is plat it should definitely have a special flourish or visual to justify it. Simply being ripped from the movies isn't a big enough feature IMO. Weapons should have built in tunings or other animations, mounts should have flourishes, and if they ever do plat armor you should get the entire armor from one box.

I wasn't expecting an actual reasonable and positive response. I guess Bioware gets some kudos for that. Especially if the special guests include getting some of the voice actors on stream that would be amazing. If you included this great info in the original post I wouldn't have gotten worried.

It is pretty game breaking for me. The most annoying bug in the game. When I preview stuff it breaks pretty much every single time. It happens every time I zoom or rotate my character in the preview window I lose my character model or the preview screen goes blank entirely. Switching to companion and back does fix it sometimes but this is incredibly annoying if you have to do it every time you preview a different piece of equipment or dye. Especially annoying because it isn't a viable work around to have to teleport to stronghold if you want to preview stuff off of the GTN from fleet.

They are not responsive to people's concerns to begin with. They are not changing gearing at all other than the discipline change and they waited the full week until the DvL stream to even address it. They could have the live stream on a monday and spend the rest of the week posting in the forums. Maybe this post is sarcastic, but you can't say they are avoiding doing it because of poor communication when they are the ones that are in charge of everything to begin with.

Why make a schedule if you can't follow it? Why not give a better explanation for why you are changing things? It only gives a bad impression as if you don't actually know what the class changes will be 1 month before the launch. Knowing the class changes is something everyone wants to know I would rather learn about the story and difficulty as I play.

There are also many new, casual, or other players who don't have tons of cash either real or ingame that would be willing to drop 10,20,30 bucks for items they want but won't partake in high stakes gambling. It isn't an either or model. The reason why they put the Nathema armor set for direct purchase is likely for new players who are willing to drop some cash in an initial investment to look cool. If they couldn't make money off of direct purchase options they wouldn't put them in the game yet they continue to do so. It seems odd that a high profile item like a saber pike be made purposefully so rare. I mean you meet dozens and dozens of enemies in game that have them yet you can't loot them or just buy one directly seems counterproductive and like bad marketing. Making force awakens items like the luggerwahl and vented sabers rares I don't have an issue with because those things are not commonly found in the game world. Making standard equipment seen all over the trailers, screenshots, and gameplay have a 1% drop rate seems silly. If a random kid sees the trailer and wants a saber pike they will quit the game when they realize it costs either 100mil credits or 100 bucks in real money. I don't find it unreasonable that players would want a more commonly available simple option for saber pikes. There are vibro blades and then there are cathar honor swords. There are tons of bronze and silver armors that are retooled or simple versions of gold ones. Giving different types of players what they want just makes smart business sense.

Here is a question would they make more money of having a highly desirable item available for direct purchase vs. having it be available randomly at a very small percentage. It ultimately depends on the item, but I would really like to know why items like thexan armor and saber are direct purchase and senya saber is in a pack. If the items are so rare then people will lose any desire to buy packs because it is a waste of money whereas they could consistently spend money on direct purchase items. There are also two types of customers. Some people just won't gamble period but they will spend plenty of money to get exactly what they want. Also that video is largely about trading cards which are a totally different property than an MMO. Random packs of trading cards are different than MMO items. The shiny or gold cards are vanity you can get a normal card and it functions the same in the game. In card games your gameplay is directly part of getting rare cards. Card games have an established history of being pay to win or requiring you to buy lots of packs or pay more for better cards whereas that is viewed as a negative in RPG type games. They also brought up the fact that if you buy packs in hearthstone you can use the crafting system to offset your expenses which creates a feedback loop. This is something that you can't do in swtor. I wish I could turn my bronze items to dust in order to craft a senya pike but I can't. There is also not a silver or gold version of the pike which is what people want there is only the platinum version. It would be like if a card game introduced a great card which the only version was super rare shiny and foil with no other versions. People would be very upset. I don't think swtor system is comparable to a card game system but even if you use that comparison there are plenty of things that swtor is doing wrong with its system. Compared to other games and even hobbies that operate on real money.

It is kind of a joke that this is only obtainable as a plat item. That would be like making vibro blades a plat item and only making one kind of them. Make a simple version of the pike either as gold or buyable from CM or as part of the new expansion in some way. I'm assuming it is plat because of the extra animation on the hilt but many people would want just a normal hilt pike anyways. I got a couple hyper crates and got nothing and don't have enough credits even after being a sub for a long time and playing since launch but I have several thousand CC saved up that I would be more than happy to spend on something worthwhile. I don't even think the vented sabers should be plat either though. Plat items should be truly unique with special animations and blade effects or built in tunings. I don't know why luggerwahl was a plat item besides the fact that it is from force awakens it doesn't even have special flourish or effects or anything and is lesser than many other mounts previously released. Obviously they think packs are the way to make money but when the top .1% of the player base has enough credits or in real cash to spend and get items you make the rest of your player base feel like they are wasting their time. With the rampant inflation and the rich players manipulating the in game economy this is becoming a game exclusively for a small group of players.

This looks awful not from a gameplay standpoint but from a performance standpoint. I run swtor on a pretty low end system and often times struggle with fps drops or things not loading properly but am still able to play pretty much all the content aside from warzones which are unplayable for me once you get to the highest tier and people are spamming all the aoe and stuff. It seems like this will seriously lag my system and even on tactical mode I will die by standing in aoe not because I'm bad but because I will have single digit fps. Please tell me this is optimized or has been tested on all types of systems because I'm not optimistic when you guys have a professional dev stream and even in those videos you got insane fps drops and hitches. Why would I want to play uprisings at all if it is a slideshow. You could have made normal flashpoints just without the cutscenes you can already do most tactical fp in 20 or less if you spacebar and they all have bosses without crazy aoe or tons of mob spawns and they work just fine. I really hope not every uprising is like the one you showed on stream and that you take performance into account.

Pretty sure dulfy works with bioware and only posts official info from streams, dev posts, or stuff that accidentally ends up in the game ahead of time like the pack previews. Reddit posts everything and some of it may or may not end up being true so safe not to reference it or repost it on the forums. As for the actual topic lots of people are posting wish lists or requests or stuff that isn't even in 5.0. For stuff we players actually need to know What is the conversion rate for all warzone comms and crystal types? What happens to all the crystal vendors on fleet and on odessan? Will they be converted to credits or removed? If removed will any new vendors be added to gain those items? What happens to Odessan vendors for companion gifts and crafting material? What happens to all quests that reward commendations or crystals? Will those quests simply see an increase in credit rewards or will new rewards be added? Will alliance crates still exist and the KOTFE content remain unchanged? Will contents of the crates change? Will KOTFE content be scaled for end game in any way or currency/rewards changed? Eternal championship gear still the same item rating or will it be upscaled? Star Fortress changes? Will any of these or other daily/weekly quests be upscaled with new rewards as part of galactic command?

We need to know what happens to gear vendors and all the vendors who accept crystals for items. If they are all staying in the game except taking credits instead we need to know both the new cost of items and the crystal to credit conversion rates before 5.0 in order to know whether to spend them before or after the patch. Hopefully they don't screw stuff up too badly. Another issue is that you can buy companion gifts with crystals as well as the rare crafting materials which depends on the GTN but you can sell these items for a fair bit of money so if the conversion rates are bad and you can't cash out before the expansion hits you will get screwed over and lose money. They may not even announce it before the expansion if it is going to effect the in game economy that badly but that would also be kind of a bad thing to the players not to give them the info in advance of what crystals will be worth.

Again that is the whole point of the union is power in numbers. I don't actually know how strong their union is but a few years back when the writer's guild went on strike the quality of several major television shows suffered and some even went on hiatus until it was resolved. Voice actors may not be as localized as part of the hollywood system I don't really know, but if you look at game credits you can see the same people appearing over and over for a reason. I doubt there is an abundance of talented people floating around who all want to be voice actors. Now for most games sure you can fill in with non union people to do random yelling but some are really not easily replaced. If the next Mass Effect has a different actress for FemShep I know that community of fans will not be happy. Also it is a question of cost and leverage for video game production time=money and delaying production is often times the worst thing that can happen. It might be worth it to shell out however much money it takes rather than have your AAA game miss its ship date because you had to re-record all the dialogue.

I hope you realize most musicians don't have record labels and are selling CDs out of the back of a car and playing in small bars trying to make more money. The same is true for all types of artists. For the 1% that become very well known and wealthy there are thousands of other people who struggle every day for a variety of reasons and voice acting is no different. Knowing the hourly rate really tells you nothing cause they could spend all month auditioning trying to get parts and then end up spending 15 minutes doing one line for a commercial and making a couple hundred bucks. I mean in 4 hours you could record the dialogue for an entire game and then you start the process all over again. Unions don't exist to protect the well known people and the celebrities because they are famous enough to get by on their own. The only reason Jennifer Hale is mentioned is because she is one of the most famous voice actors and the strike wouldn't get publicized the same way if they had one of the hundred unknown actors doing work.

It is a bogus argument to say that giving voice actors compensation would somehow upset the industry. Everyone on the payroll of a major development studio or publisher is on salary at least for the duration of the project and even then they will bring in tons of free lance artists or consultants if they need to. If some major studios can afford to pay hollywood actors for roles in Call of Duty and other games they can afford to pay out for voice work that is just as good if not better. If a hollywood star has a hit movie they can put it in their contracts to get a bonus once the box office hits a certain point. No way that voice actors shouldn't get the same option especially since gaming is already closing in on or exceeding the film industry in terms of profits. This won't be an issue for swtor since it only mentions new titles, but it could impact the new mass effect or any future star wars games. More game companies should shell out for quality voice acting because it really shows. I don't know how much say Lucasfilm has on this but it seems like they treat their voice actors with respect judging from how the animation studio runs so I hope the game companies can adopt the same stance.

If they are only doing 9 chapters I hope that means they continue to focus on alliance alerts and we can get the rest of our comps back. I would even prefer a focus on uprisings and other group content along with alerts for the rest of our comps rather than more chapters. I mean by the end of KOTFE I highly doubt the galaxy will be unaware that the outlander has this giant alliance there would be no reason for your companions to just sit at home and do nothing especially the apprentices and love interests it is just a huge plot hole.

I don't think Marr or Satele are reliable as far as knowing everything about the force. I mean they admit that they both screwed up and your character can call them out on it. The point of the chapter is that your character is simply undergoing a spiritual journey and it is up to you who you believe and who you don't. I don't think anyone in the story, Valkorian included, has a clear grasp of what the force is because the force is infinite and all powerful. Just because your character becomes stronger doesn't mean that some neutral path is now superior to the dark or the light it is just that your character knows more at the end of the story than at the beginning. The fact that you are allowed to choose to reject Satele or Marr and stick with the sith code and the story ends the same conclusion leads me to believe that the chapter was just to show the progress of your character powering up and Bioware or Lucasfilm isn't making a canon statement on how that happened or what the "correct" use of the force actually is.

They said that the hardest difficulty requires level 70 you can choose from story, and veteran which is basically easy and medium from the start. If it is as hard as they say it is you will probably need end game gear to beat the hardest difficulty which is why you can't start on that mode at 65.

Light and Dark has nothing to do with the philosophy behind how to use the force. You can have Dark Jedi and Light Sith or Dark/Light Zakuul knight. Also depending on how you choose the options in Ch.12 you can totally reject all of the mumbo jumbo and stay true to the sith or jedi teachings from the beginning. All I took Ch.12 to mean is that your character had to expand their understanding of the force to a deeper level to beat Arcann. Whether that means more or less dark was something up to choice there isn't a definitive answer. Also game mechanics really have nothing to do with the main story anyway they just are introducing it as a new system to keep players active I don't think that when the light or dark wins in game and the jedi or sith bosses spawn that it will have any effect on the story it is purely a game mechanic.

Well unless gear has an additional command rank requirement aside from level 70 you should be able to swap tier 3 gear to alts via legacy shells once you hit max rank. You can also save up boxes and then swap disciplines to gear up alts that are tank or heals. So the first character will be the hardest and it is more economical to grind levels on one main rather than on an alt since you can get tier 3 gear straight away for your alts unless there is a lockout of some kind I'm unaware of. At most you will need 2 max characters to cover all disciplines and then they serve to feed your alts with tier 3 gear and while playing on alts you will also fill out additional slots naturally. If you have lots of characters to gear you should increase in speed unless there is a strict rank requirement for tier 3 gear but so far they have not mentioned anything like that. You could also spend credits and gear out everything aside from set bonuses with crafted stuff.

Only between similar gear? That means RNG wins again. Could be sitting on 5/6 set bonus waiting for a long long time for the last piece to drop mean while you can get 20 pieces of gear with nothing to show for it aside from grinding more. The fact that each additional rank takes longer to get means disintegrating gear is offset and the grind gets progressively more frustrating. This just proves RNG is not a good system.

I'm pretty sure they meant whether or not the set bonus was tied to a specific slot. Like you can't put your boots armoring in your chest and you can't transfer a set bonus. Either way they need to clarify because that is pretty much make or break on whether you can actually get the gear you need or not. You should be able to remove armoring from any gear and put it on any other piece of legacy gear.

They said they didn't know. Seems odd that 3 people on the dev team don't even know the answer to a simple question. The grind and RNG rage won't be nearly as bad if you can freely rip set bonus armorings and put them where you need to. If they don't allow all mods and armorings to be freely removed and put into any slot then the whole system remains garbage.