That was a serious oof for me today - I'd just bought the fourth piece the day before the patch, today I log in to find that my much anticipated set bonus is gone and has been replaced with something that's garbage to me and that I never would have gone for. They should at least refund the tech fragments when they make such massive changes; 12k down the drain...

OK, I know you said not to focus too much on visual fidelity, but getting the deconstruction results as what looks like one giant text file on screen right now is a big yikes and makes it hard to keep track of what you got. I think if you deconstruct several things at once a summary of everything you got would be sufficient, you don't need it broken down item by item. I was also a bit confused by how some things broke down - it seems newer pieces of gear give you junk, but I'm a bit mystified as to why things like old level 70 gear seem to break down into rank 1 artifact fragments... Don't really understand the logic behind that.

First off, I did have trouble finding the amplifier window. I found it unintuitive that it would just be a button in the character panel. I would have expected amplifier interaction to involve some sort of NPC/console instead of being a random UI element. Later I did notice that you can also access the re-roll window by clicking on a gear item to modify it, which made more sense to me, though I admit it's still nice to have a separate window to give you an overview of all the different amplifiers you have equipped. The main amplifier window is weird at the moment. I don't know what the order of items/amplifiers is based on, but it makes no sense to have boots above head and so on. The item order in it should be the same as on the character panel IMO. I also don't get why we need to double-click on the little arrow on the side to open the re-roll window? Nothing else in game requires double-clicking! I thought I was doing something wrong at first and only finally figured out how to open it more or less by accident. Also, I agree with most posters on this thread that more information about amplifiers needs to be part of the UI. I don't know if we necessarily need to be given a full list from the start... maybe there could be something like an "amplifier collections" window where you slowly uncover them all, with each reroll result being added to the list? Just a random idea; I'm no game designer. But as it is, I didn't find it very compelling to keep rolling with no idea what I was even shooting for. Aside from not knowing what all the different effects are, it's also hard to tell which numbers are good or bad. I don't like that +1 can be a green on one stat while +0.9 is a purple on another... just makes it very confusing.

I transferred my level 70 Guardian tank over and ran a MM Hammer Station and SM Karagga's Palace with my guildies, and my main takeaway from this was that you clearly forgot that people will also be running this content below the level cap because while my guildies were ooh-ing and aah-ing about a supposed deluge of loot, I got absolutely nothing from most of the bosses (besides being allowed to roll on the shared drops) and the few times I did get something it was an empty green shell which I wasn't even able to equip as it required level 75.

Did MM Hammer Station with some guildies tonight and it felt about right, similar to live. Obviously it's a bit hard to judge current gear levels vs. what we're given on the PTS, but basically it felt easy enough when we were co-ordinated, trash still nearly killed you as a non-tank if you pulled stupidly, and the Asteroid Beast wiped us when we were goofing off too much instead of focusing on the fight. As it should be.

Some feedback on the tacticals for healing Sorcs: At the moment, the one that gives Roaming Mend an extra bounce seems to be the only really good one. Both of the ones that increase/decrease healing done by Revivification based on the number of targets it's affecting feel way too weak. I tested it with my guildies on the fleet and in full 306 the healed HP only went up/down by ~30 per tick for each person added or removed, which is nothing when people have 100k+ health. Maybe the one that increases healing when there are more targets could potentially be useful in a really AoE heavy operations fight, but the one that increases healing the fewer targets there are seems pointless. Even with only a single person in the circle it's basically a waste of Force because using any other ability on them would heal them more for less.

Conquest has never been about doing just anything though; it was always objective-based, even pre 5.8. I guess you just liked the objectives back then more, and hey, that's fair enough. Personally I've been finding it much, much easier to do Conquest in the past year than pre 5.8. But either way, it's not like I would have been opposed to maybe adding some more objectives. I'd still like to know what's supposed to be the value of turning Conquest into Galactic Command v.2 though. What's the difference between working on your CXP and working on your Conquest now? Because I don't see one; they are both just bars that fill themselves.

I meant that the patch broke Conquest, not my guild. Previously there was value in working together to achieve the bigger objectives, but the change makes most of them utterly worthless. Why would you invest time in chasing objectives that are barely worth more points than killing a few mobs? Now the most effective way to gain points is basically to mob grind. If get that there were people who didn't like the objective-based gameplay, but we already had a "fill your bar doing whatever you like to get a reward" system in Galactic Command. I don't see the point in having two systems that are pretty much the exact same thing.

See, for me it's the opposite. Me and my guild have loved Conquest since 5.8, but this change effectively broke it. You say yourself that you hit your target on four characters without doing a single objective... what is the point of even having objectives then? It's just a passive stream of points now that gives you free stuff. And yeah, I get that people like free stuff, but I liked Conquest as an actual gameplay system...

With the move back towards having more actual gear drops, will CXP packs still be a thing? Since they feel like something that was introduced mainly to replace actual gear drops and having a higher Command/Renown rank won't improve the loot you get anymore, I'm not sure they'll still serve a purpose. If they are going to be retired, what will happen to any packs that players still have stashed away?

One question that occurred to me only after the stream... it's kind of implied but wasn't explicitly stated: If all loot drops scale based on the gear I'm wearing, does that mean that all loot going forward will be personal to your character, even in group content like operations? (At the moment it's a mix of personal loot and shared loot that everyone gets to roll for.) If so, will you still be able to trade with group members? (E.g. if I get a set piece I don't need/want but one of my guildies could really use it.)

I noticed this while doing the Star Fortress companion recruitment missions, on the part where you're supposed to scan the shield bunkers. When you try to use the scanner on the spot marked on the map, you literally can't see anything, you pretty much have to walk right up to the bunker to get it to appear and to be able to scan it; otherwise it's invisible.

Historically different maps of the same game mode didn't increase that mode's chance to pop. I also noticed that I was getting way too many Huttballs today, so I'm wondering if they accidentally reset it to pop more often with patch 5.10.1 (back to how it was in 5.9.3 basically).

There seem to be oodles of problems with the guild perk display. For example I know that there are perks for extra conquest objectives for warzones, flashpoints, operations and GSF - I've only seen the first two myself though and only know about the other two from seeing others talk about having them. More recently the flashpoint perk also just disappeared from the list on our own guild ship display, showing as neither available nor unavailable. I don't know if this is just a visual bug or something that goes deeper, but the result is the same, leaving us unsure if we should even bother with purchasing more perks until Bioware fixes this, as we might be missing out on much better ones that we simply can't see at the current moment.

We bought this for our guild because we have a decent amount of people who like to do unranked PvP. Unfortunately it doesn't seem to work as advertised, because we found that simply queueing for PvP with a group of 4 guildies did not complete the objective. We weren't able to verify this completely, but it seems that to count as a "guild group" the entire team inside the warzone needs to be in your guild. Since the game doesn't actually support queueing with 8 people, that means being able to achieve this in unranked is pretty much impossible unless you either get lucky and end up in an arena or you queue with several groups at the same time and hope to get lucky enough to have two of them end up on the same team. This should either be fixed to always count if you queue with a group of 4 (the common sense definition of a guild group in PvP) or the description needs to be changed to clarify the limitations of how it works. At the moment it is disappointingly misleading and we basically wasted those resources on buying this perk as almost no-one in the guild does ranked.

No offense to CS, but I wouldn't put too much stock into their answers about this. The person who responded to mine didn't even read the ticket properly and said something along the lines of "I'm sorry that some of your companions appear to be missing, please check the forums". Never mind that my problem was the opposite of a missing companion, but rather a dead one coming back to life in the story. We'll just have to hope that it actually manages to come to the devs' attention when they come back from their Christmas break.

These objectives still exist, they are just hidden/locked now until you actually complete Nar Shaddaa Rampage I, at which point they appear on the list. Sooo... you could try completing them and that will probably make them go away?

Just adding my voice to the choir. Hoping this will be added to the high priority issues, because it effectively blocks progress through the story unless you want to risk re-recruiting a dead companion and everything that might potentially get messed up by that...

Well, that was decent fun! Can't really comment too much on the gameplay changes as I didn't see a lot of them in action (e.g. I got one Queshball but nobody ever seemed to explode while carrying the ball. I once got randomly teleported down two floors while walking towards the goal line though, that was weird). Cross-faction seemed to work as intended, though not all the assets seemed to be updated properly. We noticed that in Civil War for example both factions started from an unholy amalgamation of both the Republic and the Imperial ship. Also, can we please pick a colour for the updated scoreboards? I don't mind if the teams are purple and yellow or green and red, but all four colours mixed together make for a serious eyesore. The role matching unfortunately didn't seem to be quite there yet. The very first 8v8 that popped for us was a Yavin Ruins where our team had four healers while the enemy had two. At the very least it should have been split into three per team, not to mention that the changes as posted shouldn't have let that many healers into a warzone to begin with.

Time for the annual bump! Still around six years later and still going strong. Also been experimenting with some video-making...

I understand the OP's point but I feel this whole discussion is looking at it from the wrong angle. This isn't about solo players vs. group players. Someone who likes operations will do them whether there is a story arc attached to them or not. The point of having arcs like the Oricon one has nothing to do with people who already love doing this kind of stuff and everything with incentivising players who've never done an operation before into finally giving them a try. I've heard quite a few lovely stories in my time from players for whom the Oricon story arc was what finally pushed them into trying out operations and they ended up loving them, grateful that the game gave them that little nudge. So really, the issue being raised here is that some solo players don't want to see other solo players get rewarded for stepping out of their comfort zone. Is that not it? Again, I do understand the argument for disliking "crossovers" like that, but they do serve a point in encouraging people to try something different (also with the 4X/Pierce Alliance alert for example). You have to remember that not everyone is an ancient MMO vet who knows exactly what kind of content they like; new players in particular really benefit from the game showing them what else is out there.

Learning curve: There are definitely too many instances of the game not giving you enough opportunity to get used to how things work, but it also just makes it hard to understand what's going on. I think I went through several hundred matches before I realised what evasion was... after reading about it on the forums. It's not like the game shows me a difference between a ship evading and me missing by a fraction. I just thought that I was the lousiest shot ever. Ship balance: I think "general chance to compete" is more of an issue than balance between ships due to the extremely low time to kill that can be achieved by good players. Being blown out of the sky in what feels like one or two hits without having any idea of what just happened is frustrating and makes it hard to figure out how to do better. You could argue that this is just how shooters are, but I'm guessing that most SWTOR (and probably MMO) players prefer a more stately pace to their gameplay. New things: I'm not going to say that stagnation is the only reason I'm not playing more often, but it certainly doesn't help. Above anything else I would like to see some more game modes (not just maps). I wouldn't do as much ground PvP as I do either if every pop was simply a 50/50 chance of either arena or Alderaan Civil War. Matchmaking: Hard to judge when there simply aren't enough people queuing to get more than 1 or 2 matches going at a time. Character vs. legacy based: Even though I don't do a lot of GSF, I have to disagree with many here and say that I like "levelling up" a new character's ships and would miss that if it was made legacy-wide. Once you've bought all the upgrades, the incentive of further character progression is lost. Maybe there could be some legacy perks to make gearing up alts easier without completely taking away the option to start over from scratch if you want to.

Just adding another voice to the chorus. Really annoying to see everyone talking about how cool her dialogue is while being unable to get the mission myself. Never thought reaching the top tier of the event would end up being a disadvantage...

If you want HK to stay dead for story purposes, then you don't want to play the bonus chapter anyway, as it takes place after he has been revived (which is why the related Alliance alert is a requirement - they are part of the same story).

That is indeed one question that has been brought up that I probably should have asked but missed. Unfortunately neither I nor any of the people I consulted for suggestions thought of it at the time, probably because none of us are huge item collectors. Sorry!