1. The recent addition of Nightmare Pilgrim has for the first time in the history of SWTOR created a situation where a 16-man group is REQUIRED to get full top-tier gear (as opposed to 8-man operations). Why was this designed in such a way considering that server populations are already declining and it is increasingly becoming harder to get full 16-man raids? In update 1.3 will we see more 8-man content to restore the game to a state where top-tier gear is obtainable from ONLY 8-man content? 2. Why is the respawn timer on Nightmare Pilgrim 2 hours while it already locks out everyone from repeating the boss fight for a week? PLEASE READ THIS FOR BACKGROUND: http://www.swtor.com/community/showthread.php?t=452898 Are there any plans in update 1.3 to change the respawn and/or lockout for Nightmare Pilgrim?

So here's the deal. It can be very difficult to get 16 players online at the same time to run Nightmare Pilgrim. Our guild doesn't even have 16 people, so we regularly run all the 8-man Ops (on hard/nightmare). Tonight for the first time we coordinated with another 8-man guild so we can start doing Nightmare Pilgrim. However being able to schedule this is very difficult as our two guilds have very different raid schedules, which leaves only tiny windows where we can actually gather all 16 people. Unfortunately for us, there is already a different guild (actually a team of 2 guilds) that run nightmare pilgrim JUST before we scheduled to do it. This other guild starts before we can even get all of our members online (due to work schedules etc), which means that we have no choice but to wait the full 2 hour respawn before we can even attempt it. I talked with the other guilds, and they do Nightmare Pilgrim at the same time every week, so this effectively blocks out ANOTHER two hours where we can't schedule. Nightmare Pilgrim already puts a debuff on people to prevent them from even being able to farm it (so they can only do it once per week), so why does it even have a respawn timer at all? At the moment the 2-hour respawn effectively just makes it more difficult for people with scheduling constraints to enjoy the content. So please, remove the respawn timer, or at the very least make it much shorter so you can give more players the chance to fight this boss.

TLDR Version: The real problem is that the 3D game world and the 2D UI are not synced. I'm not taking sides on which one (3D vs 2D) needs to be fixed, and in fact think that both are going to need to change depending on the specific situation you're looking at. For the time being, I want Bioware to focus on the 2D part so that it accurately reflects what actually happens in the game and makes super clear all the current game mechanics. Then work on changing any "broken" or unintended game mechanics.

I'm not going to take time to find all the examples, but the easiest one to see is the well-known speeder mount-dismount glitch. I didn't claim that there weren't any "bugged" or incorrectly working spells. I'm just saying that the 2D UI needs to maintain synchronization with the 3D game state, even if the 3D state is "wrong" or "unfair" or "bugged" etc.

Now there have been tons of threads about the ability/skill/spell delay or whatever you want to call it, and it invariably ends up with everyone calling each other "bad" or "unskilled" or "not playing the game right" etc. Few people seem to point out what the true issue is and instead focus on what they believe is the correct "solution" to it, leading to endless and useless bickering. The self-proclaimed hard-core twitch pvp players are essentially complaining that the "animations/skills timing is screwed up" since you can't cancel animations, which seem to play longer than the actual skill time, and don't let you immediately perform a second skill when the first is "done". These players want the animations to clip to simply remove the delay. The rest, which I'm not quite sure how exactly to classify seem to argue along the lines of "it's more realistic this way" or "learn to play the game and forget other games like WoW". Both of these approaches are failing to illuminate the true issue. What's really going on here is a failure to synchronize the 3D game world with the 2D UI. To deny the previous sentence, one would need to ignore the mountains of video evidence (which I can proudly say I've watched may times, even some of them going over frame by frame). Allow me to elaborate a little bit on this, and explain why this presents a MAJOR issue for the "hard-core twitch pvp players" and not everyone else. Different people take different approaches to how they learn to play the game, and how they "cope" with the various game mechanics. The people claiming that "there is no problem" most likely hold this belief because they tend to focus more on the 3D game world than on the 2D UI. They pay attention to the animations, and maybe even some of them mash spell buttons perfectly when the gcd is up. But to them, they watch their character, and they're constantly moving, always doing something. To them they see constant action, and no pauses in between. To Bioware's credit, they did do an amazing job on making the combat animations epic. The other type of gamer is more stats oriented. They couldn't care less that their character is doing a backflip right now. They're focusing on the 2D UI, paying attention to the precise frame that the cast bar reaches 100%, or when that spell goes off cooldown. In WoW and many other games, when the spell bar reaches 100%... the VERY SAME FRAME (and sometimes even earlier) they can move their character or cast another ability and be sure that the first ability completed. This type of player notices the tooltip says it takes 1.5 seconds to cast, and you can be sure that they're going to try to move their character exactly 1.5 seconds after they start to cast, or they'll have already attempted to queue up a second spell, and expect the second spell to start exactly on time -- regardless of what that spell is. Now this is the problem: The 3D world and the 2D UI don't match up. For some spells it's just fine, but for others, the cast bar is just wrong -- and perhaps it's only certain chains of spells that expose the problem. You can let the spell bar get to 100%, and even pause there for a whopping 10 frames staring at the glowing FULL 100% cast bar, yet if you move right then, your last 1.5 seconds (now really more like 1.7 seconds) of channeling are completely wasted. Now here is also where it completely enrages the "self-proclaimed hardcore pvp-oriented" players. The game is seemingly unfair; it is lying to the player. They could have spent hours theory-crafting the "perfect" order to execute their spells, ensuring maximal dps and rotating spells to get the hardest-hitting ones right when they come off cooldown. Yet this terribly annoying inconsistency has thwarted their masterfully crafted plan (ok sure, they didn't actually do that, but they're going to pretend that they did anyway). THE SOLUTION: You're probably thinking right now "so you agree there is a problem; you're siding with the whiners/complainers". Well, not really. What I'd like to do is focus on the 3D game world, and completely ignore the 2D UI for a brief moment. We need unambiguous statements from the game designers on if the combat system as is (ignoring the UI) is what they really intended. Did they intend spell animations to not be cancelable (even if the animation is longer than what the tooltip cast time says)? I think yes is a perfectly fine answer to this question, if the designers in fact want this (it is their game after all -- they can do as they please). If this is the case, the problem is not the game, but the 2D UI display. Now it might very well be the case that the answer to that question is "no". The designers perhaps did not intend it, but the way the programmers crafted the engine, and how the artists are using this engine is ignoring the rules that the designers originally wanted. It may even be some combination of both of these answers. Regardless of how the game designers want the combat system to work, they need to fix the 2D UI to accurately reflect the game combat rules (even if the combat rules / engine are incorrect right now, and may change later). This may mean changing the values stated for cast times (for purposes of the UI). It may mean adding a "new" stat to cast times to state a "warm-up" or "cool-down" time and coming up with a clear way of displaying this information to the player, so that it is more transparent and clear how the ability actually works. Most importantly it means not blindingly taking a UI from another game (WoW) and slapping it on their game with a different set of combat rules and nuances. One of the biggest overlooked points of synchronization between the 3D world and 2D UI is this: The EXACT frame a cast bar reaches 100% (and starts glowing) must be the same frame that a new ability can start executing, or the character may start moving (this seems to be one of the most important "UI queues" that people use to know when their character is allowed to perform a different action -- and the major one that swtor gets wrong). I don't care if this means adding .2 seconds to many spells stated cast times. It NEEDS to match up accurately and consistently (or perhaps find a new design for the UI such that it does accurately represent what is going on). I'm not trying to sound harsh, and I recognize that this problem does not exist for every skill in the game. However it exists in enough of them that a large portion of the players are noticing it, and that is a problem.