Did my first real grind and got a set piece on level 12. Lost it, conquest and a lot (for me) of other stuff when Harb rolled back. emo unsubbed

No game is perfect. YMMV For 14 months, WoW dropped *zero* content; SWTOR was delivering far, far more content than WoW. Looking at WoW Legion, e.g. 7.1 is the Kara patch, both are doing a lot of nostalgia and reuse. WoW is much bigger than any other MMO (content and population) but SWTOR is the #2 revenue Western MMO. WQ tell me what slot drops. However, the gear I want is RNG; do I get a +5,+10, +15 piece of that slot gear. I want a 855 head so I do the head daily, 845, for the 1-in-36ish chance of a head ug. And the entries in the Emissary caches are completely random. I only used the class hall head for a bit before it was replaced and most of the other class hall pieces were obsolete before or soon after getting them.

Good questions. At some point, it would be nice to know the numbers, to speak about. It does not matter what the number is, they could be rating 500 but since BW controls the scaling of gear and NPCs, it will behave however they want it, regardless of whether it is 240 or 600. But it would be nice to know the range idk 230 base from R1s, 248 from rank 100 crates. Then we can put the crafted gear in context. How many "tiers" - not sets with bonuses but bands of ratings - will there be, both from crates and crafted?

What is the status of companions and affection in 5.0? Can I safely raise Treek and Nico to near 50? As I level now in 2x XP & DvL, companions being at 50 instead of 1 helps, at least until they peace out or join the enemy. But if affection is not used in 5.0 or is reset or you can only take very specific allies into Uprisings, then I would annoyed ant the credits and hundreds of clicks to raise affection. Could you give us some insight as to how we can play companions in 4.x knowing 5.0 is in a month.

Isn't the set bonus 6 of 7 slots? So as soon as you get 70, you can buy crafted, so you are going for set bonuses. Once you get 5 set pieces, then 54% of the people will get one of the two remaining slots for their 6P bonus within 5 crates. I have read 1-1.5 hours per crate.

Someone who does thirty hours solo will get inferior rewards to someone who does thirty hours of NM Ops. It is just that theorhetically they have a chance at getting any gear in the game versus before they had a 0% chance of getting some gear.

I really want to know the answer to this. I hope B2L still works but would guess it does not. Regardless, I hope they answer this pretty soon.

What about B2L and mirror alts? Will the crate gear (or crafted gear) be something that I can pull the mods from? Or just BoP gear?

But your WoW experience is out of date or fictional. My hunter with no heroic or mythic raid gear or mythic dungeon gear and with no valor upgrades dropped on a Iron Wargronn (elite) with 5 times my health in the daily quest zone. I did not press a button; I did not tell my pet to attack. The npc attacked me and the pet responded. It was a tanking pet so took nearly three minutes to kill it but the pet did not drop below 90%, A Fel Overseer and two scouts got the pet to 75%, Four Felsworn Vanquishers got the pet to 60%. But the pets passive self healing usually had it back to full health before the fights were over. It is ok to think 4.0.0 was bad or unintended design. But the claim that 4.0.0, R.I.P., was significantly easier than the largest 2015 MMO is just demonstratively wrong.

The point is that was the past; I am talking about the present. In the past in WoW, you had to heal but you rarely need to anymore. Buffs for the tanking skills/stamina/armor of the pet along with Spirit Bond Talent (completely passively generates 2% of you and your pets health every 2 seconds) If you pull a lot, you might need to heal, but that is not the norm. Wow replaced the 40+ talents with 7 choices of one of three talents and Blizzard insures there is at least one passive talent option per choice that does not require an elitist button press to activate. Besides, there is still the point that you can level from 90 to 100 without leaving your instanced garrison or engaging in combat. From your garrison table, you can send followers on facebook-type missions to get LFR (storymode raid) gear. How is being able to get to max level and get equipped with raid gear without ever entering combat harder than 4.0.0??? Note you can hit max level without combat in GW2, LotRo, STO et al, but the raid gear from garrisons is WoW. IMO, people who think 4.0.0 was significantly easier or more passive than you optionally could play in the much larger World of Warcraft are either very out of touch with WoW 2015 or misrepresenting things.

Even for extremely skilled BM hunters in a mythic raid, the pet can do more damage than the player. For BM hunters and warlocks, the pet can easily kill opponents without assistance from the human. In fact, this is the most efficient way to play; tag the mobs and then the human runs arounf and gathers the Skinner boxes (resource nodes or quest items) while the pet kills them. After the mobs are dead, the hunter does not have to walk yards for the loot, the Fetch command has the pet go and area loot the mobs. BM hunters have a constant passive heal that heals the pet and the player so the player does not need to remember to press Mend Pet. A Spirit Beast has a heal on a cooldown that it will automatically heal the player if for some reason the player were to take damage. Hunters are the most played class in World of Warcraft. Just how long ago did you play one?

I explicitly spoke of WoW. It has 5.5M subs and is certainly no harder than 4.0.0. You can level 90-100 in two hours, level 90-100 without combat, wear heirlooms and never die, autoattack during the LFR raid and eventually end up with the legendary ring. The difficulty with leveling WoW pet classes is that you don't get XP if the pet kills the mob before you tag it.

TL;DR: most Western MMO players today play MMOs that are perhaps easier and certainly not appreciably harder than SWTOR 4.0.0. It is fine for you to have an opinion that 4.0.0 was not good game design and/or you did not like it. But it say it was somehow much easier than the norm is IMO clearly not correct. It used to take a decent player 8-10 hours to level the WoW expansion from 90-100. But there is now a way for vets to do it in under two hours, no skill and very little combat. You could level from 90 to 100 without ever going into combat since herbing and mining give XP. Hell, you don't even have to leave your instanced garrison. I have 14 nax level characters and I think I had to use interrupts twice and of course zero CC. If you think 4.0.0 was an abnormally easy outlier, you need to realize EQ1 is not the norm in 2015.

30% * 1.48 is 44.4% so the 4.0.3 nerf will be 55.6 of 4.0 which does strike me as that different from 70% although clearly better.

Thank you. For feedback, let me share why my unsub will stand. I play multiple MMOs and I was in SWTOR for a solo, low hassle entertainment; great story, great IP. The KotFE marketing seemed right on target. But clearly you want to move in a very different direction. If you want to, IMO, squander the IP and be another WoW clone, then I don't need that. I am going to grind, practice on training dummies, and raid on one character and that is going to be in, for the foreseeable future, WoW. With this new direction, it seems to me like KotFE spent way too much on story and way too little on new raids. People who are so concerned about challenging content expect a half or full dozen of raid bosses with a new expansion. I question whether you can devote the resources to compete with WoW, FFIVX, GW2 et al and it seems like the IP and story is wasted with this new direction. I just don't think a single setting works. Can you have content that skilled, gear raiders find challenging and casual, undergeared, here-for-the-story players find enjoyable? IMO, no. As an aside, if customers are enjoying content in ways not sanctioned by the design goals, couldn't the problem be the design goals and not the customers or content? I don't want to plea bargain over percentages and whether it should be x% higher. It is very clear that SWTOR is going in a radical new direction that I have no interest in and it is just better to walk away now. Thank you for your efforts and best wishes in your future endeavors.

There are the game people who expect increasing challenge and the virtual world people who expect Masters to be more powerful than Padawans - i.e. you level & gear to make things easier. Neither is wrong, just different views of MMOs I would like to say that my experience in other MMOs, things quickly get easier. Raid bosses that took very skilled players 400 wipes to defeat are killed by very unskilled players at the end of the expansion due to gear. Daily NPCs that are a challenge when you hit max level with 590 greens are quite easy by the end of the expansion when you have purple 715 gear.

Regardless of the state of their game, I would expect every video game company to have a sale/promotion for this Friday, Black Friday.

Does *A* viable power even exist? 4.0.0 or 4.0.2 are neither right or wrong, just different design goals resulting in different games. Too easy and some traditional MMO players leave; too hard and some here-for-story players leave. IMO, obviously the best number for BioWare is the one that generates the most revenue. But reading too much of these sort of threads, is there really a single difficulty level hat works? Even if you got thousands of people in focus groups and did lots of real market research (not the very skewed forums), does any power level really work? Whether they roll back 5% or 50% or 100% I despair that any really works. Is there any single difficulty level in this game that would allow ops-geared, ops-skilled players to feel challenged and at the same time allow under-geared, un-augmented, here for the story/ip players to have fun? I increasingly think that is not possible. I have come around to thinking, if they don't want to make it select-able (e.g. Makeb buff) then BW is probably best to choose 4.0.0 or 4.0.2 difficulty - not a compromise - and walk away from some potential customers. My guess is some compromise is likely just to make everyone unsatisfied; why not please one group?

There is a recent guide on WoWhead about leveling an alt from 90-100 - the entirety of the WoD expansion - in under 2 hours. I believe this involves very little combat. I also assume you have never played a beastmaster hunter in full heirlooms, including the new trinket which does major dps for 15 out of every 120 seconds. I am not saying which is easiest or too easy, just that IMO easy is not unique in modern MMOs.

IMO, this attitude is "worse" in this game because it has a larger % of non-MMO players than other MMOs. E.g., nearly everyone who played Rift has probably also played WoW. Whereas due to KotOR and SW IP, there are a lot of people who aren't really MMO players. Which is necessary; Bioware is spending millions on licensing the IP. If all they attract are MMO players, IMO they have wasted opportunity and squandered money, IMO, a lot of the people who say "we don't need their money" were not here in 2012 or at least don't remember it.

Can you think of a AAA MMO that can be successful and profitable by only appealing to skilled players? Are there any dev team so self destructive as to only appeal to skilled players? The latest example was Wildstar last year which was targeting serious, skilled players. Last quarter their revenue was what some Japanese mobile games earn in a few hours; not a success.

Adding new Ops and BGs to the game along with these 4.0.2 companions is a logically consistent design. A pretty standard MMO in a post WoW world (a/k/a WoW Clone) Level then grind to raid. BTDT Solo & Story & fourth pillar and 4.0.0 companions also seemed like a logically consistent design. They are no right or wrong answers; just things that appeal to different people. There is clearly crossover, but it seems to me the people most interested in a 4.0.2 traditional-MMO playstyle are the people least interested in the story. If BW is trying for a traditional MMO, then it seems like a lot of the KotFE story budget could have been better spent on on raids and BGs. If BW was trying to appeal to the "solo, story and IP" player, then 4.0.2 does not make a lot of sense to me. Discussions of lack of product focus frequently reference the SNL skit with "New Shimmer is a floor wax AND a dessert topping!" It sure seems like spending less money on story and more on MMO would have been more consistent with this new direction. Unfortunately.

So why is there no debate that a companion nerf was needed? What great social or moral injustice is committed if people who are here for the story/IP have an easy or even trivial experience with a companion out? Companions aren't used in any ePeen content anyway and tbf if you care about epeen you should probably be playing another game. Certainly not a game that has an new expansion with zero new ops or bgs.

I could group with people. I have no desire to do so. Read these forums; why in the world would I want to be grouped with a random selection of these people????????????? It is so much more enjoyable to be able to answer the phone, visit the refrigerator or bathroom on my own schedule. And modern MMOs are solo friendly. There is no reason to play a forced-grouping MMO when there are so many solo friendly ones available

The IP is a huge deal for this game, certainly for me. I don't see how this game could compete that well with the older and larger games without the IP. So making changes to drive away the people who are here for the IP not the WoW clone MMO seems like a bad business decision. Even people who supports these changes can't think the nerf - marketing KotFE as solo+story, then 4.0.0 then surprise - was smart. Besides, I think people confuse what I can do with what I choose to do in my leisure time. Could I do most/all of these things? sure. But it is easier to see that BW is going down a path I am not interested in and move on for now.