I would like to suggest changes to the seasonal blueprint drops. I appreciate these replace a reputation grind, but the drop rate is abysmally low. I am a daily player and without specific grinding focus I doubt I will complete the achievement before the season ends. I would suggest increasing the drop rate, even slightly, of blueprints. I would also suggest lowering the price of Bbrazz's gift (500 purple Jawa scrap is so expensive), and/or make the consumable Legacy bound, so we can send the gifts to more 'grindable' classes

Thanks for this. Can you (or anyone) please clarify a few things? Is there a stat threshold change, or are they the same? (2964 acc, 2054 alac etc) If we enter MM Ops with 340 R-4 gear (blue and purple), will 340 Rakata gear start to drop immediately? Does Rakata gear have an item rating cut off? Will it only be upgradable to 344 via Ops vendor, or will 344 gear drop from Ops? Do we need R-4 tokens (blue and purple) for anything in preparation for the launch of 7.4? I've heard we need some tokens to upgrade our Virulent gear to Rakata. Presumably Rakata gear is still un-moddable, so are we reverting to gear where we have to mix and match based on different loot specs? (eg using several Pummeler, Demolisher, Force Lord etc pieces) Gist of the questions: for gearing our 340 toons, can we just spam easy MM Ops to get 340+ Rakata gear immediately?

I'd love to see the Outlaw's armour set. It's the only one in game that the Chiss Ascendancy soldiers wear and it's nigh on impossible to find these days! Also, if possible, it would be fantastic to see some of the unobtainable decos put into the game as CM items. There is an extensive list of them here

Bump. Has the drop rate been increased as of the patch?

I am mass crafting prefabs to buy decorations en bulk. I am using a Jedi Knight with Biochem and a Smuggler with Armstech. Both toons have max level companions and the guild crafting perk. The companions are a mix of class companions and seasonal ones. My JK almost always gets crits on every craft. My Smuggler is lucky to crit on 50% of them. Right now I have 1280 more crafted prefabs on my JK than I do on my Smuggler, which started out with the same amount of materials. I have taken several screenshots of late to track the progress because something is clearly off here. Does anyone else have discrepancies between characters? Do the companions have different internal crit chances, despite all being rank 50 and purportedly having a 79% crit chance each?

Can you confirm whether the Dark vs Light bosses are returning to the game? The achievements and subsequent decoration rewards for these bosses are still 'live' in game, but the bosses have been removed. I recall a yellow post saying they would be re-introduced, if so is there an ETA? It's frustrating having a missing achievement for something that is literally unobtainable in game at present.

There are quite a few Stronghold decorations in the decorations listing that are unobtainable in game, for whatever reason. A few examples are: Ood Bnar Memorial Imperial & Republic Travel Station The clickable barrel decos: Coolant, Hazardous, High Voltage etc Withered Tree Could these either be made available or removed from the list? There are some great ones that are simply unobtainable which is very frustrating. Would even be happy to buy these for Cartel Coins.

Name: Eleri Sarah Server: Darth Malgus Points: 77015 Screenshot: https://imgur.com/a/wKesFsF

The guide on Vulkk is erroneous. The mechanic is that if you break the CC (telegraphed by a wire like Vanguard harpoon) the boss will enrage. It has nothing to do with interrupting Full Auto, or anything else you mention. It is interrupting the CC he places, which (inconveniently) doesn't have a debuff icon. You just have to look for the harpoon telegraph. Any CC breaker or movement speed altering effect will break the CC and thus trigger the enrage. So Hold the Line, Transcendence, Force Speed, Shadow tank Project buff etc etc will all trigger it. Basically any movement altering/CC break. The surefire way to avoid the enrage is, when he harpoons someone, just stand still and don't press anything for 3 seconds. It's a bit silly, but it works. I've done the 25 master clears and this was the strategy that worked well in PUGs. Also, remember to have your tank guard the full auto target, and ask them to pop a defensive. That attack hurts. Good luck!

On small wall hooks in Mek-Sha, if you place a new decoration rather than removing the original one, the old one remains and the new decoration sits on top of it. Here is an example

I hope my feedback can be valuable to the team going forward. Firstly, I must say I am pleased to hear this. Since the announcement in the original 7.0 livestream and subsequent radio silence, I have not expected a master mode R-4 at all. This post confirms my suspicions, and I am relieved. Current R-4 is a buggy nightmare with wildly varying difficulty levels, and mechanics which force regular raiding teams into specific compositions. I am all for diversity and expanding gameplay, but when a boss forces your tanks or healers to play DPS to overcome the boss mechanics (and this is on top of the bugs like disappearing bosses or mechanics not even showing as debuffs) then it does not make for a happy raid experience. That being said, mechanically, R-4 was interesting and a step in the right direction. The entire operation requests everyone to perform mechanics appropriately to overcome the encounter, especially if they want the mastery achievements. What wasn't great, however, was the bizarre scale in difficulty. IP-CPT is challenging but fair, whilst Watchdog and Kanoth are among some of the easiest operation bosses in the game. Dominique is then 10 minutes of dull add clearing, with 2 minutes of intense burn phase that is heavily RNG dependent (red circles killing adds, Recursive RNG etc). It definitely does encourage smart play, especially with tank swapping to save DCDs, but the bugs make the fight very frustrating. I echo others here when our raid team decided that, after killing Dominique, we only return to farm Kanoth for a chance at the wings. I would welcome the wings being purchasable for say, 1-200 blue tokens, but I understand that that will likely not happen to encourage re-playability. Dominique is such a frustrating fight that doing her simply for the very small stat boost the purple tokens give is not much incentive at all. I also suspect that the wildly varying difficulty of IP vs Watchdog was to ensure that another 'Nefra situation' didn't occur with R-4 as it did with Dread Fortress. Do I even need to mention the 'Thrallway'? It is great to hear that the team is prioritising 'additional challenging 8-player encounters'. One takes this inference to mean a new operation, and I would really encourage the team to learn from the errors in R-4. If a new operation is released, please don't force us into group compositions that upset raid teams, but please do continue to implement mechanics that require the whole group to perform, rather than just the tanks. But most importantly, please don't release a bug ridden mess and go radio silent for a year when it cannot be fixed. It was obvious a long time ago that no R-4 master mode was being released, so more transparency with the community would be great. I appreciate there's probably a lot more too it, though. Finally, I appreciate the master mode PvE community is probably a very small %age of the player base, but whilst delivering master mode Flashpoints, World and Lair bosses is absolutely fantastic (I love them all, and any content is good content!), please do not be fooled in thinking that these will satiate the raiding community. Oh, and regarding the Flashpoint, all of my comments about bugs apply for Ruins of Nul. As an achievement enjoyer, that FP was a total pain to slog through 25 times. The mountain stairway, urghhh. However, Secrets of the Enclave was a pleasure, mechanically, nostalgically and aesthetically. Would love to see more in the vein of the latter. Hope this feedback helps!

The in-combat run animation for Sith Assasssin is still bugged. The legs reset so it looks like the character is stumbling around. Normal run animation works fine in-combat during Force Speed, and works fine out of combat. The run animation in-combat on my Shadow characters are fine. This has been a bug for well over 5 years now.

The animation for Kolto Waves is bugged. The actual AoE circle is 10% smaller than the telegraphed AoE circle when positioning. However, the 'true' AoE circle still heals targets that are a few meters outside the circle. This is very offputting when trying to position Kolto Waves on groups of people as the actual healing animation is smaller than the telegraphed circle before casting.

Oh, for sure, it's a big DPS nerf. I don't disagree with that. I think that the other passive damage increases will compensate for it a little. BUT, if there was a choice of the two, I would rather keep the damage nerf but retain the 10 Centering stacks to keep the rotation the same. Otherwise it's just going to make the class feel, as you say, clunky and unreliable for no apparent reason. The best thing they can do, as many others here have echoed, is just leave Melting Centre unchanged

I agree with this. Nerf the damage, sure, but retain the 10 stacks of Centering it will build, otherwise you are not 'smoothing' the rotation at all, you are elongating it. Judging by the majority of posts here are focused on Annihilation/Concentration and not many other proposed changes, you should be able to tell the community is very adverse to this change.

The nerf is not the 4x Force Melt damage (which is compensated by minor passive damage increase on other abilities). The nerf is the 10 Centering that activating Force Melt builds. Currently in the rotation, we use Zen before a filler and Force Melt so the 6 Zen stacks activate on 2 Cauterize/Overload and 4 Force Melt stacks. We cannot build Centering during Zen, so the passive 10 stacks contribute towards the next 20 we generate after Zen, meaning that once Force Melt comes off its 12s cooldown, we have 30 stacks of Centering and Zen is ready to be used again. The nerf here that is masquerading as a buff is that we will not be able to use Zen for each use of Melt, unless we either delay/elongate the rotation, or just use Zen for Cauterize and Overload. It makes the rotation much less precise and results in a DPS loss that is, as many others have said here, unnecessary. This is even more poignant because the OP states the changes are to 'smoothen' the rotation. What they are intending will do the opposite. What needs to be nerfed is the group-wide healing, for sure. Sentinels will always be in-demand due to their raid buff and Transcendence, but Concentration is often unviable in PvE due to Zealous Leap landing you in bad stuff, and Combat requires Hidden Power and full Focus to utilise it correctly. Therefore Watchman is the go-to spec but some people definitely use it to compensate for poor healing. Therefore a healing nerf is to be expected, but not a nerf to the rotation and thus our DPS.

The Draining Center/Melting Center ability mod has been redesigned. It now reads: “Force Rend deals twice its initial damage whenever it consumes a stack of Berserk and heals you for 50% of the damage that it deals.” The Watchman/Annihilation changes are just passive DPS increases that do nothing to 'smooth out' the rotation and just unnecessarily increase damage. How is having a few of our abilities smoothing it out? It's a very strong spec as it is. The only reason I can see for these changes is to compensate for the masquerading nerf to Melting Centre. Currently, with this utility, we can cast Zen before a filler + Force Melt as soon as it comes off cooldown. Removing this will just elongate the rotation and Centering build up. It seems totally unnecessary. The spec is strong and the damage is not OP. The healing slightly is and I wouldn't be surprised to see a straight healing % decrease, but changing Melting Centre and just giving random passive DPS buffs is the opposite of 'smoothing' the rotation.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=2BSRalkzNIs&ab_channel=RhysThomas I posted on this threat in November 2021. Just made this unlisted video of a compilation of the bug. My lvl 58 Shadow does NOT have it, however my max level Shadow's/Assassin's ALL have it. It doesn't seem to matter about spec or outfit. I heard somewhere it might be a bug on classes who have completed KotFE + content. Other people report it, some say they've never seen it. It's incredibly jarring and immersion breaking. Is there any update on it, or possible ways to fix/reset it?

Do you feel your group was able to progress in power through the Operation? Yes we were. The damage and healing increase in power were tangible and significant. The difference to tank gear/stats was less so. Do you think improvements could be made to make it easier to progress as a group? If so, what do these improvements look like? Yes, absolutely. The first boss is significantly harder than the 2nd, 3rd and possibly even 4th. The HP nerf will not really make much difference. Perhaps a general damage decrease, or a lower frequency of grenades will make this boss easier. Although perhaps the HP nerf might mean groups can actually bring a tank to handle the droids that spawn. However, the main issue that needs to be addressed for easier progress are the bugs. Specifically 1) the door after IP-CPT being closed and requiring a Gunslinger to blast people across the chasm. 2) the Overgrown Corridor on Veteran is overwhelming and almost always results in a wipe. This is made more frustrating as it requires a few minutes of travel to return. 3) The entire raid has to alt+f4 before Kanoth in order to see Vertical Growth. I've only just begun progressing on Dominique but so far it's pretty bug free. However these bugs combined (plus things like random crashes, being returned to starship, and players appearing dead) all just contribute towards delays in the operation. Did you want to upgrade your Hazardous gear? Yes, but due to the loot system we prioritise other members who need the upgrades. This is fine within a team, but it causes a bit of derision, and some wealthy players are offering billions of credits in exchange for loot tokens. How quickly were you able to upgrade your Hazardous gear? Pretty quickly, but I play a lot. A group of us farmed Watchdog and Kanoth, and were able to gear up to 339 within a few weeks. Was Hazardous gear helpful in completing The R-4 Anomaly? Absolutely, yes. The DPS boost is necessary to beat IP and Dominique, and helpful for the middle bosses. I am excited to try legacy master mode operations with the new gear. The R-4 Anomaly came with 12 new sets of vanity armor, purchasable with Story and Veteran R-4 tokens. Story tokens can be used to purchase 4 sets of armor and Veteran tokens can be used to purchase 8 sets of armor. Do you like the look of these armor sets? These questions are obviously subjective, but yes, I do like the look of them. I probably wouldn't choose to wear it all the time, but the gear fits the theme of entering a hazardous area. Did you attempt to clear The R-4 Anomaly to earn these armor sets? No, I would not do the operation simply to get the armour sets. Is there anything you’d like to see from future Operations armors? A more obvious variety between light, medium and heavy armour might be fun. Some animations or special effects might also be nice on the armour. The R-4 Anomaly also came with a new mount, the Wings of Nihrot. This mount has a small chance to be rewarded when defeating Lord Kanoth. Do you like the look of this mount? I do! Did you attempt to clear The R-4 Anomaly to earn this mount? Yes, we kill Kanoth frequently for a chance to get it. Is there anything you’d like to see from future Operations mounts? Perhaps a flair/animation would be fun to see.

The health nerf on IP-CPT is not enough to make the encounter more accessible. The health of the boss is not the problem. The problem is the sheer amount of mechanics, damage, animations and clutter on the screen. Despite the health nerf, the DPS requirements to burn the droid adds is still required which means we still have to bring 6 DPS and 2 healers (unless we're in the top 1% of teams). The RNG is absolutely insane; if someone gets 4x large grenades in a row they are basically dead if they are not in range of a healer. There is so much on the screen that it's really difficult to tell what the hell is going on, with your new 'friendly' expanding debuffs. If you really want to nerf this boss, just reduce the large grenade damage, or even remove one grenade. Or make clicking the consoles a non-channel and just a simple click without wasting a GCD. I actually think this boss is a good challenge, and is probably one of the hardest bosses implemented in the game, but it is way too hard for a first boss in the only new Ops content in several years. Watchdog and Kanoth are so much easier by comparison, and (despite doing it in PUGs), Dominique is arguably easier than IP-CPT. This is not to mention that we've had no word since 2021 of a Master version of R-4 Anomaly. If the intention is to keep R-4 Veteran as hard as it is, please give a slightly more kind nerf to IP, and, dare I say it, buff Watchdog and Kanoth! This insane difficulty on the first boss of your new raid is alienating teams, causing contention in gearing PUGs/later bosses, and alienating the vast majority of your playerbase. I know people who can't even kill Lady Dominique on SM. Imagine them trying the first boss on Veteran and thinking they have a chance, lol. I understand the difficulty might be to stop people doing a 'Nefra 2.0', but all you have done is force a 'Lockout Dealer' system where people spam discord and, at worse, sell locks to other people. Coupled with the insane fact that R-4 is the only way to gear up past 330+, I have no idea what the devs are smoking. Probably Nihrot

What aspect of the game are you playing Watchman/Annihilation in? I main a Watchman Sentinel and I am one of the top parses in my R-4 Veteran raid team, and I also offer significant group heals, frequent movement speed buff and raid buff. Are you basing your post simply off Parsely? You do realise that 'live' combat situations are drastically different to dummy parsing? By comparison, Combat requires two tacticals to even be considered viable in terms of parsing (Hidden Power and Defel Spliced Genes) because you need the full Focus stacks, and if you mess the rotation up your damage tanks massively. Concentration is a nightmare for the first three bosses of R-4 simply due to Zealous Leap, and whilst it parses higher than Watchman it offers no benefit on Lady Dominique due to Watchman's DoT spread and, once again, group heals. Yes, it is a much more intensive APM spec to play, but it's not that bad once you learn it. Watchman is a very strong, if not one of the strongest, specs in 7.1, it offers huge utility and absolutely does not need a nerf. It is still weaker in PvP due to its cleansable debuffs and the potency of Concentration, but that is no reason to nerf it. I would say, however, that in fights that don't require delicate movement/ 0-meter instant boss kill, that Concentration would be a better spec for some legacy Ops.

There has recently been a post about the harder/longer Master Mode Flashpoints being auto-leave events for most players, in favour of requeuing for shorter ones. I would like to further this argument, by saying that the current state of the game and gearing system means that all Master Mode Flashpoints are being neglected in favour of Story Mode Operation runs. Pre-7.1 I would queue as a tank or heal and almost always receive and instant queue pop, especially on Empire (Darth Malgus). These days, even at prime time, we can experience waits of up to 10 minutes for Flashpoints. Why is this? Well, it's simple: Story Mode Operations can be done with 7 DPS and 1 healer, take 15 minutes to complete, and offer more gear and tech fragments than any Flashpoint does. The 7.0/7.1 gearing system regression has further alienated game activities. You even get Activity Finder from Operations. So really, what is the point in doing MM FPs, other than the enjoyment? Gamers will always find the quickest, easiest and most lucrative way of spending their in-game time, and the 7.1 gearing system has put another nail in the coffin for a large aspect of the PvE game system. Even Veteran Flashpoints are being ignored in favour of Nathema farms due to the experience boost on the penultimate boss. Not only has 7.1 alienated a huge proportion of the playerbase to 330 gear due to R-4 Veteran being the only way to get 330+, it has also removed a staple PvE aspect of the game in favour of SM Ops for a quicker ride. It's inconceivable to think that a Dev team thought these changes were of benefit to the game. I can't be the only one to experience less activity in guilds and all game modes across the game since the 7.1 changes were introduced.

Yeah, the Assassin is now one of the weakest tanks, for sure. Mainly due to the change of cloak. We can no longer 'mitigate' abilities by stealthing out, so we rely entirely on our defensives which have long cooldowns. Unless you specifically need an Assassin for FotF/Shroud like on Dread Guards, they aren't the best choice at all. The Ballast Point implant is a joke, too. Most smart tanks I know take the implant that decreases the cooldown of Recklessness to use as a defensive. Why waste an implant of what is essentially Hydraulics when you can just bring a PT?

I agree with you. As a lifelong Watchman main, I was very disappointed to see how Concentration was so buffed in 7.0. Watchman is still competitive and I can pull good numbers, but I feel that I am mostly asked to play this spec due to the great group healing it provides, rather than my choice to play it. However, each boss in R-4 is bad for Concentration simply due to Zealous Leap. This is always been a sore spot for Sentinels, but as a class we now feel shoehorned into a spec because our raid wants the heals as priority. I want to play Watchman because I want to challenge myself to utilise the spec well, not because our healers need the extra boost. Hell, I am even trying out Combat for the first time in 11 years because it doesn't have Zealous Leap and is quite competitive! But it's the story of the 'month' of this expansion, as you say. Add heavy? Bring a braindead Guardian to spam slam. Bring 4 Pyro PTs to break burst DPS windows. Don't allow your players to play what they want, gods forbid, or you won't meet DPS checks or clear a fight. That is not good encounter design, lol

I also think it's important to note that most people who frequent the forums are going to be 'hardcore' players who will likely represent a small majority of the community, eg high end raiding and PvP. However, it's equally important not to dismiss some of the changes. For example, the Balance Sage tactical for high end raiding/PvP seems useless, but this could be great for a solo player who wants to kill large groups of enemies. No doubt this is the majority of the Swtor community, the casual/solo player. HOWEVER, please yellow posters, recognise that you have made the ONLY way to gear past 330 currently to clear R-4 veteran, and it desperately needs attention. That is why there is so much focus on this. If all legacy Master raids dropped a 340 token, or you were able to get a 330+ token once per week from a weekly or whatever, you'd have much less focus on R-4 being too highly tuned. Sadly this community backlash is a product of your own making, but can easily be redeemed in the near future.