Skadge, of course... Seriously, I'm not sure how much "The Republic won't like it" matters, I assume that member planets choose Senators as they like, and it's just too bad if "The Republic" doesn't like it. Obviously it would make diplomacy that much harder. For the most "What the heck, but still not necessarily unreasonable" option, I'd go for Sana-Rae. Imagine the Galactic Hero, leader of a new Republic world, coming up to the podium with a Sith as their right-hand woman, and announcing a Voss as their Senator.

Turret mission is a lot worse, but it is possible. It's gone from just pressing the "1" key until completed to something that really requires use of missiles and shields at the right times. Does need some tuning, but it was probably way too simple previously. The other problem I had was with the H2+ Shiny New Toy. I used to be able to solo this, and was still able to do so up until the walker. "Shock and Awe" is a 100% kill if you don't move out of the red, I used to get around this with companions by using a ranged companion and not moving near them, so they'd stay put. Today, they would randomly decide to teleport to me next to the walker, even though I was well in range of their heals, so I don't know if this is something that was put in to try and fix some of the companion problems in late 5.0 or what. (maybe 20-25m away plus any sort of server lag means an instant jump?) But in this case, this is an H2, meaning at worst I should be able to duo with companions, and companions plus a death circle means I need to be able to reliably keep companions at a known location.

And did you miss my direct response where my first point is that the devs themselves have gotten confused over the years (as it's almost certainly not the same devs now...) Tell me this, if H4s have always been 2+2, what influence level do I need on my companion to press the right buttons on the H4 Macrobinocular quest? (and I believe the original Section X H4 was the same way, before changes) There isn't, of course, which means that those H4s cannot be 2+2s. It cannot get any clearer than that. And where does this leave H2s? Are you claiming H2s have really always been meant to be 1+1s? But that makes no sense, because nothing else is done like that. Other than starter planets, you're always assumed to have a companion out for solo content--some random guy gives you a quest on Tatooine to kill 10 Tusken Raiders, it's not a "Quest 2" it's just a quest, why would a solo heroic suddenly start counting companions? As I recall, Esseles was originally listed as a "Group 2" and hopefully we can all agree that this was not something intended to be soloed at launch--so "Group 2" means two players, but "Heroic 2" means one player? It seems to me that your best-case scenario is that Heroic missions suddenly take on a completely different numbering system from the rest of the game, where "2" means solo, and 4 sometimes means 2 players, or sometimes 4 players, but you don't know which one it is unless you play through it or have read spoilers beforehand. My argument is that H2/H4 has been confusing terminology for years now, we've finally gotten rid of it other than a couple historical artifacts, and we should not go back to the bad old days where everyone is having the same argument we're having now. This is a dev team that changed the name "Tactical" to "Veteran" because they thought "Tactical" was too confusing for players, yet they're OK with H4s that sometimes mean 2+2, sometimes require 4?

I guess I'm not understanding the significant difference between the "feels" of a H4 and instance if it's done correctly. My original suggestion was to set it up like the CZ-198 stuff. Is there really that much of a different "feel" between running into the purple instance wall there and the green instance wall of a Heroic area? I guess there's an additional loading screen in the former case, but I just can't see that being much more of a difference. And as I understood the later Dev post, there's not actually any gain in the armor tokens for doing the H4, you hit your target just as well by doing the solo heroics. And while there might be some edge cases where full guild groups can clear the H4 faster than a solo mission, I suspect for most of us, solo is probably going to be faster than getting a group together, even if it's only a couple minutes of standing around getting organized. Maybe it give a better rep token, maybe it's slightly better CXP, but I just can't see that being a big factor for any length of time.

Heroics were originally designated as multiplayer content. Within that class, there were H2s and H4s. If Heroics are multiplayer and H2s exist, then clearly that means H2s are for 2+2 groups, as nobody is going to leave their companion behind. So if an H2 is 2+2, then you're claiming a H4 is also 2+2? That makes no sense. Now, if you, on your first character, was playing a Jedi Knight, had Kira as a companion, decked out in whatever green quest rewards you had gotten, grouped up with another Knight/Kira combo, and managed to clear H4 content without problems, congrats, you're certainly a better player than I was, but I don't think that's what it was balanced for.

No, H4s were balanced for 4 players. Anyone doing them 2+2 was like someone doing flashpoints now--possible in the right situations, but not how they were designed. But thanks for providing further evidence that "Heroic" designations have been confusing terminology that nobody has ever fully been able to agree upon. LFG messages are not in any way encouraging chat. If I may be allowed a Monty Python reference, they "encourage" chat in much the same way that mindless contradiction is an "argument." If you yourself are not looking for a group, there really is no meaningful distinction between an empty chat and a chat of nothing but LFG messages. As for the idea of H4s being a "bridge" of some type between solo and flashpoints, we already have that, they are called Uprisings. Uprisings already have a group finder framework and give reasons for people to do that content who may not need those specific planetary rewards. Now, arguably, Uprisings aren't the most successful things Bioware has done, but if so, what, exactly, is this H4 doing that would make it more successful than Uprisings, and why does it need to be done in a H4 format? H4s failed because nobody wanted to bother doing them after a short-term flurry of people who have to progress through everything ASAP. So far, I have not seen any actual solutions to that problem listed. If you remove a mechanic because it wasn't working well, you shouldn't add that mechanic back in until there is an actual fix for it.

This seems a bad idea, for a couple of different reasons. First, the concept of "Heroics" has a long history of misinterpretation, one which seems to still be in the above. H4s were never 2 + 2 companions, H2s were 2+2, H4s were a full 4-man trinity group, no companions (at least at level with average skill and gear). Then, when planetary Heroics were all modified with 4.0, there was still confusion because Star Fortresses were way out of whack, as I recall, even Eric was confused, finally coming back and saying something along the lines of Star Fortresses were just more Heroic than normal Heroics (which to me suggests that devs got their wires crossed somewhere). Now we finally got to a place where, for the most part, Heroics are pretty normalized one way or another, and you want to go back and re-confuse things? Because clearly people are very confused. If you change nothing else, please change the terminology to something other than "Heroic," because we've finally reached a point where everyone left knows that Heroic means "harder than normal single player content." Secondly, what's the end plan for something like this? Because it's not just--or even primarily--the planetary Heroic changes that doomed all of the other daily H4s out there. Daily area H4s fail because of the lifecycle of daily areas--you start out with tons of people all running the new content. Then a month or two later, people max out on rep or don't need the rewards, so there's no reason to run the H4 anymore, and the people that still need it start to get more and more frustrated by the annoyance of having to get a group together. Then eventually either you need to redesign it to be soloable anyway (most of the old daily H4s), or you just ignore it and the content ends up mostly wasted (macrobinoculars/seeker droid). What, exactly, are you actually gaining by making this an H4? It seems like there's already a decent template for group content attached to a daily area in the way you did CZ-198 by attaching flashpoints to it--and since then you've added Uprisings as a way to do content that's maybe 4-player, doable as 2+2, maybe solo if you're good and/or geared. Those options give you group finders and reasons for people to join in even when they don't need that one specific mission. H4s end up with lonely people spamming "LFG" messages on instances with 5 people in them.

Since this thread was bumped recently, I finally got around to completing it (only took what, 4 years?). Sithspawn was the major roadblock for me when soloing as a Combat Sent, as it meant I needed a healer companion, and my stunbreaker is on a long cooldown. Note that the method listed above of just not killing the tentacles does not work at this time, he comes down regardless of if you've cleared them all or not, that may have changed since the earlier post was made. However, what I did find is that if you leave the room when the tentacles are there and the Sithspawn is not, the fight will not reset, so you can hang out and wait for your cooldowns to all finish (if you leave the room with the Sithspawn there, everything will reset, however). Put companion on passive as you leave so they follow, and then back to normal as you go back. This does cause some odd things--when you jump back in, the Sithspawn will often jump down to a random point in the room not targeting anyone, and then jump right back up, and your companion will often hang out in the doorway of the room. Not sure if it's because the companion was in the door or if I got lucky, but it consistently targeted me for coming down when the companion was in the door, which made getting him to barrels easier (as getting a companion to stand on a barrel is very difficult). The Sithspawn still does sometimes heal twice in a given cycle, and I couldn't stop the second one, but it ultimately wasn't able to out-heal the DPS I was able to do the rest of the time.

Woo Hoo! It's taken a year and a half of running the Nar Shadda Star Fortress to get Verona Deez up to 31 influence at 325 per Star Fortress Bonus mission, I might actually get her to 50 now before I die of old age!

I haven't run a lower rank mission lately, did they remove it from those? I know that additional tiers added after launch didn't have the flavor text, if the lower tiers are gone now too, my assumption is that it was just a matter of normalization. Easier to make everything uniform to try and prevent some strange bug/behavior if they make a future change and the back-end coding is slightly different for different tiers.

There are two problems with that proposal (three if you count the fact that this isn't the Suggestions forum ) 1) Most of the items from the event are available via some other method--you can get the broken down speeder now, you can get bowcasters, and I'm not sure offhand about the Tusken set, but if not, there are several similar Tusken sets out there. 2) The event itself was pretty terrible, with all of the bad things about open world events present. Yes, shooting things from a turret for a minute was fun. What was not fun was that only one person got to be on the turret at a time, so everyone else had to wait, standing in an orderly line, and getting upset when some jerk ran forward and spam-clicked to jump in first. And I seem to recall the DK portion having a laser/mirror puzzle where anyone could click on the mirrors to change orientation, leading to much trolling and frustration (I got lucky and found an instance with only 9 people in it, so I was able to get it done by myself while everyone else was screaming at each other in chat). So the rose-tinted glasses of nostalgia may tell you that you want this, but what you really probably want is it to be completely reworked with better-done missions and new rewards, at which point what you're wanting is a completely new event.

It looks like the current problem is that in the last patch they changed something on how self-destructing mobs work--I was able to kill one of the probes without it going into self-destruct mode and got the quest item/loot/CXP. But that's very difficult to do on even the normal elite ones (having to take out more than 10% health in one shot), pretty much impossible for the champion rare ones. Presumably this is an unintended consequence of trying to prevent some exploitable situation somewhere else in the game. They may just need to take out the self-destruct sequence entirely, which would not make me sad as it wasn't exactly a threat, just something that made me wait a few seconds longer to get the loot.

Do the math. It takes a influence 50 companion 7.5 minutes to run a bountiful/rich mission. For slicing, there are 2 rich and 2 bountiful missions, rich gives 3 signal disruptors on a crit, bountiful gives 2. Crit rate for a 50 influence compation is 40% (15% base + 25% bonus). So on average you can get 4 signal disruptors every 7.5 minutes, or 32 per hour. If you have 20 characters and want to spend your time flipping between characters, you start hitting 640 per hour. That's extreme, of course, but it's a good example on how fast the numbers start adding up. And while there almost certainly is some automation going on by some players to constantly log in and reset crafting missions (which is why the oft-requested offline app to control missions was always a bad idea...), simply having one guy sitting on fleet waiting for warzones to pop and getting his 32/hour is going to add up quickly.

Heroics aren't weekly currently, I've run Coruscant pretty much every day since I hit 70 and started the CXP grind. And credits may not be an issue to you, but I suspect they are one of the core reasons for the current situation. 4.0 caused massive inflation, I believe they're trying to control it both by reducing the incoming supply (nerfing grouped heroics, probably why we don't have grade 10 slicing lockbox missions) and by increasing money sinks. Grade 10 crew skill missions are, what, 4750 credits each to run? So if someone is running 42 of them every 7-8 minutes, that's almost 200K being yanked out of the economy every 8 minutes by one person. Enough people over enough time, and that's a lot of money vanishing.

From purely grinding mobs? I'm not sure about that. We've seen far too many problems relating to trash mob grinding recently. However, back in the day, I used to be able to get companion influence up by running the old Belsavis dailies since they all had conversations. As a modern version, I see no problem with gaining some influence via running planetary heroics and such. Also, note that there is something you can do now that is very similar--in the Star Fortress instances, there will always be a bonus mission of some sort. When you complete it, the reward is 325 influence for the companion tied to the Star Fortress you're doing (so the Sith apprentice gets it if you're doing the Nar Shadda SF, for example) and whichever companion you have out gets 650 influence. So if you're really wanting to grind it as an option, you should be able to run it to that bonus, exit, reset, and start again.

Hit them. The mobs, that is, not the companion. Mob AI works with an aggro table, the mobs go after whoever is highest on the table. If you have not hit them, your aggro level is effectively zero. Healing an ally generates a small amount of aggro, so if you are at zero and the companion heals you, the companion is now higher on the aggro list and they will move to attack the companion. Heals don't generate all that much aggro, though, so usually just something like an AOE attack to hit the entire group is enough to hold aggro through heals.

It looks like the video mentioned by the OP is over 3.5 years old at this point. Conversation affection points were changed since then. It used to be that companions that joined later got an automatic multiplier--the idea being that you've had Kaliyo since level 10 or so, so you've had lots of conversations--even at 10 points each they were supposed to add up. But Scorpio doesn't come until much later, so you got much higher points per conversation. They changed this--I forget which patch, but I think it was before 2.0--so that now it doesn't matter when you get the companion, just on your level/area. Overall a good change, but it means numbers from older videos like that are no longer going to be accurate.

The Scrapper from the Chevin event. If it was a 110% mount, I'd use it all the time. Since it's not (and it makes sense that it isn't), I end up only using it when I'm on the Fleet or otherwise in an area where I'm not getting shot at and not in a particular hurry.

It's not lingering any longer, remember the server maintenance happened a day later than normal, the normal Tuesday maintenance was for website work. As I understand it, it's not some odd "lingering" effect--it is something odd that causes the game to not save data for anything still on the GTN at maintenance time. Anything that was bought before the maintenance is fine, anything you newly list after is fine, only stuff still listed when the server goes down is affected (if an item doesn't sell and is returned, you get a much more generic message as well)

Yes, it would absolutely be terrible if I could get a drop in a FP, rip out the mods, slap them into one of the half-dozen or so Legacy armor sets I have, and send it to my alt. Oh, wait... As for the claim that people would stop grouping once they hit Social X, I'd like to see any actual evidence of this happening. My suspicion is that the number of people doing this would be balanced out by the people who aren't grouping on alts because they know they aren't going to get a high enough social rank to bother (which is to say, I think the numbers are pretty close to zero either way). Social points are the way they are not because of any desire on the devs part to separate player vs character actions, but because there simply was no legacy system at the time the game was launched. Trying to make it into a Legacy thing is probably just not worth the effort.

Wow, someone remembers my question to the Devs so very long ago! And yes, I'd still like it too, but fortunately, I'm not holding my breath.

My argument is not that it can't be done. My argument is that it is not anywhere near as trivial as people are making it out to be. You are effectively asking them to change the code on somewhere between many and all of the conversations in the story. That's a significant undertaking. "Affection gains disabled." Great idea, how do you do it? Granted, I don't have access to the codebase, but I suspect probably not just some simple toggle, so you might again be looking at making changes to every single conversation to try and remove the gains. Not to try and go into the "Hero engine/BW sucks" line, but this is a heavily modified engine in which the people who did most of the extensive modifications are no longer with the team. We have seen cases where seemingly innocuous changes have done things like prevent Inquisitors from being able to enter certain class story instances because some flag stopped getting tripped correctly. Now you want to take huge sections of code that touches character data hundreds of times and seperate it out so that it can run without modifying character data anymore, but possibly being able to read existing data. Unless you designed the code with that possibility in mind to start with, that kind of change is a huge task. I'm not saying it's impossible to do, or that I wouldn't like it to be done, I'm just not sure it's feasible to do with current resources.

This actually makes things more complicated, not less. You are now asking for them to modify every single cutscene so that instances of user dialogue prompts no longer prompt the player, but now calls back to the database and finds and uses the existing selection. That might not be an easy thing to do even if you had a clean, well-documented codebase being modified by the people who wrote it in the first place. Which we don't have. Worse yet, it's extremely unlikely that the majority of the choices are actually stored anywhere. Sure, important ones like killing people who might pop up later probably trip some boolean flag that can be checked later, but all of those other dialogue bits where your choice only really changes the NPC's next line before it moves on to the next scripted bit? Chances are, all the code does is just check for programmed affection changes to add to the total, and then forgets all about them when the conversation is done because they don't matter. So now you have a situation where you might be able to reverse-engineer the important choices, but not the unimportant ones. Which means, replay-wise, what you're actually asking for, in practical terms, would be a replay in which you can change all the unimportant things, but can't change the important ones. This is not likely to satisfy anyone.

FFXIV's cutscenes are very different though--you pretty much never do anything more than nod your head throughout the whole story. Here in SWTOR, a lot of cutscenes are much more complex. Perhaps not so much for flashpoints, but for the main story line, there's lots of situations where later cutscenes depend on choices in earlier cutscenes. Who shows up on Corellia to help the Jedi Knight, who shows up at the end of the IA storyline, etc. So clearly some choices are saved to character data. So do you allow users to "pick something else" for critical decisions in Chapter 1, and if so, do you try and save it in a sandbox so they can see the consequences of the choice in Chapter 3, or do you only make choices in the vacuum of one particular cutscene? And there are things like lightside/darkside or affection points that are attached to choices. It seems like you should remove any actual points from replays, but that also seems to cheapen those choices a bit--"Yeah, I want to play a morally upright guy, I'll just butcher the innocents on the replay feature which is consequence-free" just seems rather wrong. Also, on a practical note, since cutscene choices do build on each other, and do affect various character points, that means that all of them are tied to your actual characters. Which means that any messing about with such a feature means there's a reasonable chance that they'll have a bug somewhere that screws up character data. Don't get me wrong, here, I'd love to have something like this as well, but it is not nearly as simple a task as it sounds.

Fleet alone is a good reason. How many people actually know there's a breadcrumb quest to the Alderaan Bonus Series on Fleet because it's lost in a sea of low-level flashpoint couriers? Having all of this crap around the main Fleet level makes it much more difficult to find the ones appropriate to your level (and probably a good portion of the reason they keep having to shoehorn new content into new mini-zones)