The problem with not releasing new raid tiers in my opinion has more to do with MMO gaming culture. Once a raid has been out for several months, a year, or whatever extensive period of time, the requirements that raiders expect for the entry level into those raids becomes inflated. "Must have finished the basic quest line" and "must have augments" later becomes "must have completed this raid before" and "must have most of the gear that drops from this raid". This is especially true when pugging. New tiers reset that nonsense.

There are light gray close and minimize buttons in the upper right hand corner of the new launcher. They're sort of hard to see against the current background art.

That post was pretty misleading. Consider that in actual gameplay, dogfighting ships are unlikely to be at full hp if they are engaging the enemy at all. Consider also the effects of overcharge powerups. To better understand what players are talking about when they report being one shot, and when theorycrafting in general, we must pull some data from a model of the gameplay itself rather than merely listing base stats and trying to infer from those what conditions are common. To illustrate this necessity, is some recent Drakolich footage in which most of the game (TDM) is spent in a T1 gunship. The T1 is flown from 3:02 through 12:16. Within that slice of play, around nine minutes, the gunship destroys 31 ships. Of those, 21 are single shot kills. That is, the gunship lands one shot, which immediately destroys the target. These shots appear to break down as follows: - 0% shield, 3% hull - 5% shield, 75% hull - 100% shield, 40% hull - 100% shield, 100% hull - 100% shield, 100% hull - 5% shield, 100% hull - 100% shield, 100% hull - 20% shield, 80%hull - 18% shield, 100% hull - 100% shield, 60% hull - 100% shield, 100% hull - 100% shield, 90% hull - 100% shield, 100% hull - 100% shield, 100% hull - 0% shield, 70% hull - 100% shield, 8% hull - 5% shield, 4% hull - 100% shield, 50% hull - 0% shield, 95% hull - 100% shield, 100% hull - 95% shield, 98% hull In red I've designated those kills I suspect will tend to be perceived as a "one shot" by casual players of the game. Looking at the footage in general, I can see the argument that these are "rare" in the respect that a gunship often must fire two or more shots for a reliable kill. However it is also evident that the circumstances are still common enough to occur many times within the span of a single TDM.

If you have your sorc and companion geared for the planet, and you have the dps part of the class down, and you're still dying, you might be running into a damage mitigation issue. Here are some of the ways you can reduce your incoming damage on a sorc, if you haven't tried them already. Make sure you're interrupting the heavier attacks - like the 3x missile barrage that large droids use. For most fights you technically have three interrupts: Jolt, Electrocute (stun), Overload (knockback). Sometimes mobs are immune to the stun or the knockback. Some instance bosses are immune to all interrupts. But especially on gold mobs and quest bosses, you may be able to keep them interrupted for the whole fight, resulting in your sorc taking significantly less damage. Something else you could try is using a tank companion (like Khem Val) and then spot healing yourself as needed. In Lightning or Madness spec, your sorc will receive four healing spells. These are Unnatural Preservation (instacast), Resurgence (HoT), Dark Heal (hardcast), and Static Barrier (bubble / HoT). A rule of thumb could be, if your health is below 90%, use Unnatural Preservation whenever it is off cooldown. Throw in two or three Dark Heals if you're below 30% health. Use Resurgence if you need to move. Cast Static Barrier on yourself if you pull aggro, which can also eventually be talented to provide another HoT (Corrupted Barrier). With a three minute cooldown, Force Barrier makes a good panic button, but I don't remember which level you get it. The sorc has a range of crowd control options. Force Storm can stun up to 5 standard mobs. Overload is a knockback that will also stun up to 8 standard mobs for 3 seconds. Overload can also be talented to root the mobs in place for 5 seconds (Electric Binding). Shock will stun a standard mob. Electrocute can stun most silvers and golds for 4 seconds. Static Barrier can be talented to mesmerize up to 8 nearby mobs for 3 seconds (Backlash). If you need to engage a pack of mobs with two or more silvers, use Whirlwind to mez one until the first is defeated. Puts a lot of incoming damage on hold. You probably don't need to use all of this. Work just enough of this stuff into your fights that you aren't dying anymore. The rest is dps.

I think this narrative can serve as an excuse for players to make the old MMO mistake of confusing casuals with scrubs. It sounds to me like something to use sparingly if at all.

WoW's population looks like it's crashing at the moment. Blizzard having already cancelled their next MMO. Has Wildstar flopped? People say the demand for MMOs is eroding. If this is true, it would make some sense to shore up an MMO you want to preserve by tying it into other markets. EVE Online went with Dust 514, SWTOR has GSF, WoW added battle pets... who knows if there's even a limit to this sort of thing.

In chess, the material is capped throughout most of the match. Each match starts with two rooks per side, two bishops per side, eight pawns etc, and some of these pieces are also trapped in the early game. Games don't have 10 rooks and 6 bishops as this would skew the gameplay in a mechanical sense. By this measure it seems like GSF games tend not to have piece development or strategic progression (early game, middle game, late game), aside from simple conventions such as T1/T3 scout rush, telemetry pop, switch in domination games. When the average player does encounter something like that, it's probably just a premade queuing to stomp pugs, which means it has been opted for instead of required. Whereas in chess you have development through stages of each game regardless of who is playing because the rules construct that scenario.

feels slow can't turn missile locks take too long

This may be down to some form of attrition bias rather than something caused by the community itself. That is, the smaller GSF gets, the more homogeneous the views of the remaining pilots tend to become, as players with unaddressed concerns eventually stop playing and so you hear from them less.

But how do we reconcile this with the cratered population in the queue? Agreed, I think GSF game design is remarkable, differences on the roles aside. Yet it seems that its population has declined anyway. Not enough maps? X-server queues for GSF would probably help the current version, but it seems like that only alleviates problems caused by low population. What led to pilot loss in the first place? GSF had a strong release.

If I'm playing at all, it's probably in a T2 scout. I am less concerned with whether floating in space makes the gunship "bad". For every floating scope in the match, there is one less moving ship. From my perspective there seems to be a tipping point where the number of maneuvering ships in the match is low, because the number of gunships is high, and the play at all objectives becomes characterized by standing off at 15k, los in closer, and occasionally alpha striking into the shielding of fleeing T1s. Doing this to avoid being assist walled from beyond missile range might be considered responding to tactical value that gunships bring to the match. But it also suppresses GSF's flight value in my view.

The inputs that GSF wants from pilots in a dogfight are a lot like the ones the latest Elite wants. Banking improves turn speed, you have limited sublight boost, leading reticles that you orient the entire ship to (turrets aside), there's a tight perspective lock to your ship so you do some flying by radar, weapon and shield regeneration rates are limits and this drives the engine-shield-weapon gear shifting associated with that. It's interesting to me that in your comparison of the two, you don't mention this at all. The inputs Elite wants are more numerous, in that you have more thrust vectors and you can lock target to engines, FSD, etc, but some of that has to do with interface limitations. In that game you can fly with a stick. I think the illusion of speed and the sense of actiony craft flying that BioWare achieves in GSF is masterful. They hit a lot of these standards and this demonstrates GSF was designed with the understanding that part of the fun of a good flying game, for a lot of players, is getting good at the flying. Gunships are stationary and out of range. You don't dogfight with them. Do gunship players fly a lot of T3 these days? I'm used to seeing T1. If there are four gunships and they stack on A, then there aren't any at C and there's probably a dogfight there. If there are eight gunships, two sats may have walls and the game becomes hide n strike. What I see in this deep tactical forest of depth is a hole in the shape of a stealth fighter.

If I recall correctly, gunships were provided free (the Mangler I think?) only to subscribers during the GSF prerelease. So when GSF went live for everyone a week later, or whatever it was, there was an influx of players to the queue who either did not have the gunships or did not yet have upgrades put into them. I remember it being rare to see more than three gunships on a team at the time. Which soon changed. I can't think of a game I've played with flight pvp that had a stationary scope sniper role other than GSF. But if you want a specific example of one without, Elite: Dangerous is a recent game that has some arcadey flight pvp and lacks this role. I think the comparison with GSF is fair, but see for yourself: Fun game, too. My gripe isn't that gunships are OP or that the stacked gunships are not possible to deal with, just that gameplay gets boring in my opinion when you start getting a lot of them in the match.

The fact that GSF has arcade rules instead of sim rules for stuff like targeting, acceleration, damage and aerodynamics is a separate matter. In fact some flight sim games have control modes that you can toggle between. One being arcade and the other more realistic. That is not what I was talking about. I'm talking about pvp. I don't see that the role of a stationary scope sniper is "important" to pvp in free 3D movement / flight environments. This role is more common in ground pvp gameplay. You might personally enjoy the effects that the role has on gameplay in GSF, the sort of tactical flavor they bring, but that's about it. Some do not. I have never done this.

Sniper is not a typical role in air combat simulators. Sniping is more of a ground role. So if by "important" you mean you like FPS mechanics, that's one thing, but if you mean the role is essential to air pvp, that is evidently not true.

GSF was different before gunships became common. For a moment there it was pure dogfighting. I still think the total number of gunships should be capped per team, maybe to three each, to ensure that dogfights always have ample room to happen. The change in gameplay caused by large numbers of gunships in a match was noticeable enough in domination, but it is eyeroll inducing in deathmatch.

Just from browsing the GTN, I get the feeling that the cybernetic gear sets are the least popular. There are a couple of pieces that are exceptions. But I also notice that characters in the KotFE cinematic are having cybernetic work done during the storyline. And we do see a twilek sith appear to take a light saber. Everyone thinks she's dead right now. So this would be a good time to gauge how players react to seeing twileks with cybernetic or even amputated lekku. BioWare could show a range of options. If the reaction to at least one were positive, then there would be reason to add helms like those to the game. And those helms might finally allow twileks to at least wear hoods. Although, if twileks were real, their traditional hoods would probably be ridiculous lekku-gloves. So be careful what you wish for.

A "pet class" is any class that relies upon player-directed AI. It doesn't have anything to do with the species of the pet. An archetypal pet class in RPGs is the necromancer, who might use reanimated people. Other common pet mechanics include charm spells, which can in many games charm humanoid mobs. The companion combat system in swtor is a pet system. Companions are pets. They follow the player character, you put them on active or passive, you select the spells they use, you can direct their attacks, and their stats and roles are meant to compliment those of the player character. That said, I don't think any classes in swtor rise to the level of pet class, as they are all designed to forgo the pets in multiplayer settings (flashpoints, ops etc).

If it is true that we have the liberty, Quinn shall have no chance of survival. I would run my warrior alt through the content merely to see him ejected into space.

Jaesa Willsaam

I think to some extent most players make this kind of value judgement. Like I'm not going to drop 2.5m on whatever the latest saber hilt to hit the GTN is. The relatively small stats boost to my character is not something I find worth the time it takes me to farm those credits. The expense would become worthwhile if the stats boost were permanent, like a datacron, or virtually permanent, like an extremely long tier. Or if I were in a hardcore progression guild, where small stat tweaks are considered major decisions. So I skip that. But I will also usually spend ~1.5m or whatever installing current augments every tier as that return on my time is more favorable. So the matter might have something to do with the way a player's in-game loot flow and in-game goals intersect, which of course varies by playstyle. An efficiency problem.

Six months sounds like a content cycle that might keep me subscribed over longer periods, if BioWare continues releasing quality story and companion updates. I found myself getting bored during the Dread Masters cycle. The content itself was fine, but the guild I was in had cleared normal ops and was working on heroics and alts within a few months. So this was a casual guild and even then we had already seen all the stuff that we were going to see.

Lana did heal using sorc spells during the Revan fight. New concept art depicts Lana dual wielding lightsabers like a marauder. So if she is really a companion, it could go either way.

SCORPIO Evil Twilek Jaesa Willsaam HK-55 Talos Drellik Lana Beniko HK-51 Treek

Agreed.