Reduce the rewards from Hammer Station + Toborro's. In fact, reduce the rewards from all flashpoints and ops, and substantially increase the reward from random queuing for all FPs/OPs instead of specific ones, so the reward from the roulette outstrips the total reward from any single dungeon. Boom, done. There's a smart way and a counterproductive way to solve problems like this. It's entirely possible to look at the dozens of other MMOs on the market who've had these problems and tried different solutions to solve them, and see which ones worked and which ones were ultimately detrimental to the game. It's beyond me why BioWare Austin has chosen not to do that, and insisted on repeating instead of learning from the mistakes of its peers.

I see that a vendor has been added with all the shells that used to be available from Command Crates, as well as (thankfully) the random legacy-bound 75 greens and blues that will no longer be available. However, the Command Crates also dropped schematics for various Synthweaving and Armormech appearances that are also unavailable now, including unique texture combinations of still-available meshes as well as unique meshes we can no longer get. I've been poking around in all the obvious places and found no evidence that those schematics have been similarly added back in. While those appearances are still available through players who got the schematics at the time, that availability will inevitably shrink as those people log off and move on to other games, unthinkingly delete characters with discontinued schematics, or simply stop crafting them if they seem unprofitable. Are there any plans to mitigate this by reintroducing the schematics, either for direct sale or perhaps in lockbox drops through gathering missions, or making those shells available by other means?

Just a little feedback on Fen himself, since this seems like a good place: He feels so utterly, utterly redundant. Especially in comparison to Altuur, who has quickly become by far my favorite companion. Our kubaaz friend has a unique ability in each spec that makes him second-best at absolutely everything, he can wear anything you want to put on him other than a hat, and you can buy his influence up to 40-50 for just a couple million in about twenty seconds, compared to five minutes of clicking or an eight-digit expensive Compendium for anyone else. Fen's rep may end up working the same - without cartel coins it's impossible to find out what he's like on an alt, which is a severe flaw on a test server, by the way - but his appearance is incredibly limited, and his loadout is exactly the same fourth-best-DPS as Theron's, Vette's, Temple's, Q0-77's, and every single other dual-pistol companion in the game, which we're already pretty spoiled for choice on. If you're not going to give him a unique skill set, at least let him have the much more rare 3rd-best-DPS dual-vibroblade, which (not counting the bugged DR-3D) is only accessible on one NPC for most characters, and then only if they can either solo a Star Forge or scrape up a partner to do outdated content that most people aren't doing anymore. Or give him Shae's DPS or Z0-0M's healing so we can have those best-in-slot abilities without having to listen to annoying voice lines. Right now he's just a discount Theron that I can't get free influence with in story chapters or put in a uniform that actually matches the rest of my Alliance on my military-type characters who do that sort of thing.

Hm, didn't notice that. Complaint rescinded.

Oh is that the problem. I noticed it randomly not working, but didn't pick up on the internal cooldown. Glad I already got my Dantooine achievement. I get the basic idea, people constantly re-mounting is degenerate gameplay that they didn't intend, but a) this is a level design issue at its core, and it's just going to breed frustration with your players if you take away our hacky solution to the problem without solving it properly yourselves, and b) at the very least, change the tooltip to reflect the nerf!

It doesn't break anything, it's just that every change you make automatically and immediately saves to the current loadout, so if you have Commando set up just the way you like it and then swap to Vanguard without changing loadouts, it will immediately forget everything you said about Commando, including what spec you wanted, what talents you wanted, and how your quickbars were set up, in favor of the default Vanguard set-up. Your Commando profile is now permanently lost. I cannot overstate how counterintuitive and badly designed this is. (Or how easy it would be to fix with a complete UI rework without having to change anything about the underlying system at all; just make loadouts the top-level choice and don't even let the player mess with spec or talent until they've clearly consciously chosen a specific loadout to modify). But @Trixxie's right, it's also legitimately broken in a variety of ways even on top of that. Sometimes you have to re-log after the quest in order to actually change styles for the first time or adjust their talents at all (this happened to my Guardian, but not my Sniper for some reason). Sometimes you select a second style and just never even get it on your sheet and can't get the quest back (this happened to my Sage). Sometimes the loadouts completely ignore your equipped weapons (this has happened to every single one of my characters so far) - this may be related to the fact that weapons don't work in the outfit designer, period. I haven't had the issue where I can only swap in a cantina even with the Legacy perk unlocked, but I'm sure it'll hit me in time.

You have to use loadouts to make switching work properly. Set up your primary combat style, create a new loadout, activate that loadout, and then set up your secondary combat style, and then never switch your combat style again. Just swap between loadouts. This is one of the things that wouldn't be an issue if the UI were set up properly. Did all your abilties work? It's always been true that about half of shadow/sin or sent/mara abilities work with just the single saber of the original base class. Only the shadow-specific abilities like Cleaving Cut or Force Breach would be blocked.

(double post)

Beyond the difficulty of seeing what's selected, having a "default" option isn't a great idea in the first place, not when some of the abilities are active abilities that go on your bar. You pick a spec, it populates your quickbar with a whole bunch of random abilties, you take your time figuring them all out and sorting them in a way that makes sense, then you go to adjust your talents, and, hey, look at that, turns out some of the things you just spent all that time figuring out are talents that you're about to replace with something else. Default should be nothing selected, just like the current retail game, and just like the Warcraft talents this new system is attempting to copy.

The preview window is broken. Left-click now just rotates the character, same as right-click; there's no way to move the camera relative to the character.

There are no complexions that have scalp hair but not beard or mustache hair. Several of the new hairs are weirdly threadbare and could benefit a lot from a scalp complexion, we should have that option without having to also have facial hair. The bars being click-through unless you land on exactly the tiny two-pixel tick you're aiming at is bad design. If I know the complexion I want is #34 and the one I currently have is #4 I shouldn't have to hit the arrow thirty times to get to it, instead of just clicking near the end of the bar and adjusting from there. The two-level zoom is terrible. Let me mousewheel to a precise distance, or at the very least, make the zoom in actually zoomed in. This new CC doesn't let you get anywhere near close enough to your charcter's face. Combat style descriptions don't refresh properly as you change storylines. Go from Sith Warrior to Bounty Hunter without clicking on a style can leave you with a description of a Bounty Hunter Guardian. Why change the armors? Half of them are still in the low-rez original iconic armors, and Shae's and Valiant Jedi aren't any higher-rez, and the red Havoc armor from the cinematic is 0% as iconic for troopers within game as the Clone Wars style mesh they have on retail. And quizzes are rocking Korriban gear!? Weird choices. If you wanna go for high-fidelity iconic stuff maybe use some of the Remnant looks? Not a functional complaint, but purely aesthetic: I do not like the new graphics at all. The class icons themselves are fine (although the sharp aliased pixelation looks very low-quality), but the all-white, the hard cornered highlighted borders on everything, the hyper-minimalist style, it doesn't match the rest of the game at all. SWtOR has a distinct look, and it's a strong, attractive, distinctive, space fantasy look. The gold, the blue, the clipped corners, the colorful detail, the iconic environment-as-background, all center the game really strongly in the Old Republic era, give it continuity with KotOR and with itself (both the character select screen before chargen, and the game once you launch), and ground the player in the game immediately. The new CC with its all-white, bright lines just feels like it's trying to ape Fallen Order or something. I don't have any illusions that you guys are going to change it at this point, but I really wish you hadn't gone this way. The order of operations is good, though. Gender, species and slider on the same screen is a much better flow. I appreciate the new hairs don't have to be paid for, and unlocking all complexions for all genders is a nice move. Unlock all tattoos, scars and hair across genders and species too and we'll really be cooking.

I agree strongly with the concerns I've seen about queuing (if I can be tank, dps, or heals by changing loadouts, I should be able to apply for all three at once in groupfinder). Requiring the field respec Legacy perk to actually hotswap loadouts in the field is... fair, I guess, but definitely diminishes the appeal of the system. The biggest issue in my opinion, though, is the utterly terrible feedback and flow in the user interface. Here's how this should work: Player opens the user interface. At the top level, the first and only thing they see is a list of all available loadouts. They can select an existing one, edit an existing one, or create a new one. If they choose to create or edit, they get a new level of the interface, and choose [sage] vs [sentinel]. Then they choose one of three specs. Then they choose their tree abilities. Then they click "CONFIRM". This is an incredibly important step and I can't begin to understand why you guys removed it. You could add a reminder to check gear and keybindings to this stage too. That loadout is saved, they go back up to the top level, and can apply that loadout, or go to another. 2/3 of the posts I've seen about loadouts so far are the same thing: "changing my style back and forth doesn't save my quickbar." The game doesn't give you any feedback whatsoever about the fact that you're modifying your current loadout every time you change your gear or ability tree, or that you should be using loadouts every single time you change anything instead of using the much more obvious and intuitive "interacting normally with your interface" method. All of this could be fixed by putting loadouts at the top and adding a CONFIRM button so the user has conscious and deliberate control over what's in each loadout at every stage. Loadouts should never change unless the player intentionally and specifically tells them to.

I copied a lvl 75 Dark III sage to the PTS. My legacy does not have the Dark V achievement. I was given the option to choose a secondary combat style on log-in; I had no option to change by primary style from sage to sorc. I did have the option to choose any Sith style as my secondary style. However, when I chose Sith Assassin, and left the selection cutscene, my character completely bugged out. I did not have a secondary style of any kind, any attempts to change my ability tree reset themselves immediately as soon as I closed the window or chose a different tab, and the combat style UI, when I moused over the empty second style, displayed a message telling me I was still on the quest to choose one. The quest itself was gone from my log and not regainable by any means I could see.

Double posted somehow, so I'll edit this one into something useful; sometimes UI windows will just ignore the ESC button and stay open. You can spam ESC all you like, all it will do is open and close the menu. The specific keybind for the bugged window will still work normally to close it. I can't reliably reproduce it, but I've had it happen to both the inventory and the character/loadout windows.

Character UI is just... too big, with too much wasted space. On 1920x1080 at the default size, I have to close my chat window in order to interact with the thing because it overlaps every corner of the screen. Meanwhile my tiny paper doll is drowning in all that empty nothing. Simultaneously, it is apparently too small; the loadout list has been clipping the last digit of my item rating on characters with triple-digit ratings (306 becomes 30).

(double post)

Seasons objectives don't seem to appear on the conquest page until personal conquest has been achieved for the week. If that's not intended behavior, it should be fixed. If that is intended behavior... it should still be fixed. Making class buffs passives is cool, actually, but take them off the portrait if you're gonna do that. If I can't interact with them, I don't need to see them, all they're doing is wasting space on my buff tray.

The trouble with that is that hating the Republic is one thing. Siding with the Empire is something completely different. Every toon has seen the recent history of the Empire. They started the war, twice. The entire game is fought on Republic planets, because the Republic is not even attempting to attack Imperial planets, while the Imps are running around conquering and glassing Republic planets. As a Pub toon you fight Imperial slavers and butchers and prevent Imperial genocides. You see them have zero issue with Vitiate right up until he turns on them, and you get to convert to non-lethal uses a weapon designed to murder a civilian populace in the event of political dissent. Now, sure, Acina says it's a "new" Empire under her command, but is there any evidence that that's true? You go to Kaas and listen to ambient dialog and it's clear she's still ruling through fear. You suggest taking Lorman as a slave and she doesn't go "oh we're trying to get rid of slavery;" she thinks it's the best idea she's heard all day. Even if you make an alliance with her, she violates your sovereign territory on Iokath in order to steal a weapon from you that she makes no attempt to tell you about. She can claim she's trying to "protect you from the Republic" all she wants, but her actions demonstrate quite clearly that she's still playing the Sith game of power and greed over loyalty or principle. If you side with her on Iokath anyway, she spends the whole battle crowing about slaughtering Pubs, and personally chokes her enemies to death after they're beaten (Pub side, we see beaten enemies being led away in shackles instead), showing the same bloodlust and abuse of the weak that has always defined Sith. And how does the war start up again? Just like the first two times, the Empire attacks a Republic territory for the sole purpose of butchering everyone there, destroying everything they value, and wiping out the last remnants of a struggling culture. Meet the new Empire, same as the old Empire. So your Republic toon, in order to want the Empire to defeat the Republic out of anger, doesn't just have to hate the Republic. S/he has to hate the Republic more than s/he hates slavery, tyranny, warmongering, genocide, and potentially being personally betrayed. You could certainly get there plenty of different ways on a Dark Side toon (maybe you don't mind a little genocide if it's against the Jedi because you hate them too, like my DS consular saboteur), but I don't know how you could possibly make it make sense for any character with any moral principles, no matter how angry they are at the Republic.

Since Blizz completely rewrites classes every two expansions or so, it'd be helpful to get a timeline for when you liked Brew and Enhance. Mists? Draenor? Legion? Anyway Guardian is pretty straightforward. You've got some strong defensive cooldowns, decent snap aggro if you're tanking, resource management isn't really any effort. Reasonably high skill floor; the difference between a good Guardian and a bad Guardian is your situational awareness and how well you're using your group utilities, not how survivable or deadly you are. Due to cooldowns, you may find yourself filling globals with basic builder/spenders more than some people like. The class story is basically KotoR III; you're the big hero doing big heroic things, with several really great companions and the most personal relationship anyone in the game gets with one of the big lore characters (Satele likes the Knight a lot, at least light side). It has a few glaring issues but they shouldn't bother you if you're into bombastic Star Wars hero's journeys, because the bulk of it is so satisfying in that way. Also if you like rolling off the edge of the platform like a fool on your Brew you're gonna love blade blitz. Shadow is more complicated. As a tank your skill floor is low; a good shadow is fine, but a bad shadow is squishy as hell, and you spend most of your time juggling maintenance buffs & fairly specific cooldowns with a relatively tight rotation that is extremely unforgiving of being stunned or knocked back. DPS is more forgiving, but still grapples with positional requirements or dot management. Either way you're very manuverable with excellent AoE and strong utility, but a lot of the animations and sfx lack punch. Story wise, most people find the consular lacking; both VAs lean hard into "serene Jedi," it's the most alignment-restrictive in the game (hard dark side just... doesn't work), and the story is a fairly disconnected hop from mystery to diplomacy to war depending on chapter. Personally I like it well enough and think the hate for it is really overblown - certainly the Knight has lower lows - but it definitely doesn't have the very high highs some other stories have. What it does have is stealth, which is the most awesome time-saver and annoyance-remover in the game and is very hard to lose when you go back to a different class.

All starting point terminals in all strongholds are bugged, this is not unique to Alderaan. Only the character who unlocked the stronghold to begin with can use them, and the choice made by that character then applies to your whole Legacy.

Is it possible to romance her as a new male character? I've heard that

A few problems with your idea: #1: The game isn't too easy because of companions. Companions don't help, certainly, but the game is too easy without them because leveling is too fast. Level cap for all planets is high enough and XP gain is so inflated that by the time you're halfway through the first zone of a planet you're capped and everything on the planet is a green-leveled joke to you. Nerfing companions again wouldn't make things genuinely hard while leveling (the meat of the game, as you say). #2: Even so-called Heroics (the part of the "meat" that's supposed to be genuinely hard to solo) aren't hard under level sync, just tedious. People weren't upset about the companion nerf because they were dying, they were upset because they had to spend 50% of their game time standing around between fights using their regen abilities. They were never in any danger either way, they weren't using stuns and interrupts either way, they weren't making it halfway through their rotation - they just had more downtime. That's not fun for anyone, no matter their skill level. #3: Making the default the "difficult" mode and adding a buff (presumably visible on the buff bar) to overcome it severely limits the likelihood of its use. The buff would be a badge of shame for arseholes to mock people over, and the requirement to find and activate it would make it extremely common for people to miss it; they have to not only find out *that* it exists, they must also discover *how* to activate it, and if they dare to ask in gen chat, once again, expect a lot of abuse and "you trigger it with Alt+f4!" from arseholes. #4: Rewards and incentives do not, and never have, made better players. They just encourage incapable players to worsen the experience for the capable ones. Because, you see, this game doesn't teach you how to play itself. The skills required to play the game at a high level - what to interrupt and when, who to mez and when, kill order, pulling mobs, when to cleanse, when to off-tank, how to turn a boss to prevent cleave, what skills are useful only for PvP - most players will never in a million years figure any of that out on their own, because the game never makes the slightest effort to tell you. It just throws abilities and bad guys at you and you're on your own to figure it out. A very small percentage of players will figure it out, and they typically tell everybody else, either in-game or on the internet, which is how most players learn. But many players don't know who to ask, don't even know that they [should ask because knowing what you're doing wrong is already a medium skill achievement, or don't feel like spending hours watching YouTube vids and researching on forums is a reasonable requirement for having fun in a game they pay for. They do, however, want more credits and comms, so they're happy to join groups and cause wipes anyway if the game tells them that's how they should be making money. Providing rewards for not playing "easy" mode will just cause them to try and fail and be frustrated, they still won't be able to get better on their own, or they already would have. The only effective solution I can think of is three-pronged. 1) Every mob on a single planet is the same level, and the level cap for that planet is one level higher. Heroics are all restored to exactly the way they were pre-4.0. This restores a baseline of genuine moderate challenge (and encourages grouping at endgame). You're still left with the issue of players having abilities they were never intended to have at a level (being 60 on Tattooine is easy these days and would let you solo areas five levels above you with little effort), but it definitely helps. 2) In the options menu, there is a "difficulty slider." Scrolling it up increases the damage done to you by mobs and decreases your healing and damage done. Scrolling it down does the reverse. Essentially, it's PvE Expertise that you control yourself. And like Expertise, it applies only in specific scenarios - you are not grouped, and you are fighting mobs you've tagged in the open world or are in an instance that you own. This allows players to modulate their experience without affecting anyone else or opening themselves to ridicule. 3) At regular intervals as you level, new quests automatically become available to you. These quests lead you to an instance where you don't take durability damage, and are made to defeat specific enemies in a specific way. For example, when you first get your interrupt, you are sent to fight a guy with infinite hit points, who has one channeled ability that can one-shot you but which will backfire and kill him if interrupted, and maybe there's even an NPC shouting "oh no better stop him from casting that!" in the background. Then you fight him again and he has a second channeled ability that doesn't do much and you have to save your interrupt or it'll be on cooldown when he uses the first one. Now *everyone* knows that interrupts are a thing and how to use them by the time they hit level 30. You cannot enter Hard Mode instances unless you are current on these "teaching" quests. This keeps easy mode players from being an excess burden to hard mode players when they decide to step up, and encourages them to do so by building confidence. Lots of work that BioWare won't do, of course, lacking the financial incentive.

I agree. Letting us kill Quinn (/Vic/Skadge/Xalek/Gault/Kaliyo/whoever) in KotFE is a nice consolation prize, and all, but ultimately it feels really meaningless and petty to be all "yeah I forgave you seven years ago but now you get what's coming to you, boy!" As long as the vanilla game remains as it is, the damage is done, and no amount of ex post facto punishment will satisfy the damage done to the storytelling by making all comps mandatory 1-50.

Lol, yes, it took me a long time to reconcile this, and also Ashara's later comment about "you could always join the Jedi, you know!" with my Assassin's LS "desperately wishes she had been able to become a Jedi" canon. (She didn't get along so well with Ashara at first, since Ashara basically had everything my assassin ever wanted in life and screwed around and threw it away instead of appreciating it.) I realized that it does make sense, though, it's just not well articulated by the game. If you're the kind of inquisitor who wants to escape the Sith Empire and join the Jedi, you're almost certainly LS, probably with a bit of a heroic streak/habit of risking yourself to avoid harming others. You're also painfully aware that the Sith response to traitors and failures is "wipe out everything that person has ever touched," just like Thanaton is trying to do with you on account of Zash. You're also responsible for an entire cult on Nar Shadaa (which is readily available knowledge, if Pyron knows), a Deshade, a former Republic officer-turned-pirate, and whatever else is left of Zash's power base, including people like your Sith contact on Taris who probably have avoided Thanton's notice only because he's still busy dealing with you. If you defect, what happens to all of them? If you're a light sider, you can't really have all those deaths on your conscience. You can tell Ashara "I thought the Jedi understood sacrifice," and she assumes you're talking about sacrificing your values in order to survive. But that's because Ashara doesn't understand Sith or the nature of the Empire at all. The LS Inquisitor has sacrificed far more than that, and for a reason even many Jedi couldn't live up to.

Hope you don't have any hay allergies, you're getting it everywhere from that strawman you're savaging. (Also, epic LOL at "OMG LANA RAISED THE GRAVESTONE, she's clearly more SPESHUL than the only character in the game other than the Knight to successfully throw off the Emperor's control, or a human who can see the Force more clearly than a miraluka in order to precision pinpoint Light Side Sith across the entire galaxy." Seriously. The slave outfit is weird, juvenile, sexist bantha spit, and pretending like it's okay to put it on some characters but OMG this one special character who you like is too good for it just makes you look juvenile and sexist too. If you think it's okay for any character (... ok aside from maybe DS Jaesa, she might be into that), you have no leg whatsoever to stand on trying to claim it's not okay for any other.)