Hey there, just a quick thumbsup for the new German voice actor for Consular origin story. I noticed the change in the last patch, but it became way more evident with this one that has much more lines delivered by player characters. It used to annoy me a lot, how immature and eager the old German consular sounded, especially in comparison to the brilliant German voice acting on Knight origin story. Knights used to sound so calm and composed in comparison, I always gave my Shadow and Sage characters the Knight origin story, since that is possible. The new German voice acting is still not on par with Knight's voice acting but much, much better. So thanks for that change and kudos to the new voice actor :-)

What makes you think I could?

Analysts say it's because it's the only MMO with consistently voiced cinematics for hundreds of hours of vanilla content on eight classes with male/female performers and still lots of it in its expansions that also include "space barbie" changes you make to your character. That USP makes for a constant influx of new players, makes existing players create alts and also makes it rewarding to revisit characters you made at times. That "stickiness" is what you aim for in a business context and you can see how most of SWTOR's decisions point in that direction. This is relevant to the ongoing PvP discussion as well insofar as it shows the nature of the players this applies to: they're not the competitive/minmaxer type. The usual forum bewilderment how discussions there differ from what's ultimately done in the game shows that, too: Forum users tend to be more involved in and critical about what happens in the game than the majority of players that form the game's backbone from a business point of view. That explains why changes made often will and must differ from the "consensus" on the forums. Internal surveys e.g. of sticky gameplay vs. abandoned gameplay are simply much more relevant. If they weren't, "game would have shut down years ago." Which is still not saying the Star Wars IP doesn't help. But ask Ron Howard and Alden Ehrenreich if the Star Wars IP alone saves you from failing if you don't get the basics right. 🙂

You don't last as long as SWTOR already did if you chose to use the same content for customer surveys and internal evaluations of user behaviour that business decisions are based on.

I strongly assume devs have used more detailed and specific numbers than that to base their business decisions on in the last 10 years.

That kind of comment is exactly what I meant when I said "tend to underestimate" 🙂

The amount of dev resources that go into scripting boss fights will be about the same as balancing (!!) PvP. It's an area that players and devs (of new games with that focus) alike tend to underestimate the most. You gave the reason yourself: Fighting each other is the content. But if your subjective (!) impression is, that you don't stand a fair chance, reactions tend to be much more salty than when something doesn't work quite right in PvE. That's also why it's not exactly a rewarding area to work in as a dev. The question though is if it's a reasonable allocation of resources. I'm pretty sure the way PvP has been handled in SWTOR in the last 10 years didn't fall from the sky 🙂

Because it shifts development resources to the areas of the game that are most played. Anything done there will have a much greater effect on how satisfied the majority of players are with the game on average.

No, because OP-1 is group content reward and chapters are solo play. It's pretty neat they still let solo content drop group rewards, but it has to be less then. SWTOR is already very much tailored to solo players, but for the aspects of the game that are still centered around group play to remain relevant at all, there needs to be a reward advantage for playing in a group. Otherwise the game loses any incentive to do group play whatsoever in the long term.

That's one of a variety of possible sales strategies. Imo DNA of SWTOR doesn't work with hardcore PvP audience in general, so I'd tailor PvP around players who dig SWTOR DNA in the first place, because that's the players you got now, and design PvP so it enhances their experience. The amount of work you'd need to put in to satisfy or hardcore PvPers (or NIM raiders as well for that matter) just doesn't pay off, because the target group is so much smaller than the amount of people already playing what SWTOR offers these days. A solid business plan will focus on securing their sticking to the product.

Came back for the new FP and daily area (which is really done well this time, kudos to the devs!) and played both on Vigilance Guardian, which I had chosen as my secondary combat style for my Sentinel Main (it has now actually become my main specc, for the reasons I stated in opening post). Either way I just HAD to do another test on Watchman - and it still bores the hell outta me. Force Melt being the top priority as the blandest dot ability imaginable and infinite Slash spamfest. I've tried so many other speccs in this and numerous other games and I'm all the more bewildered how one of the most elegant and fun to play speccs for years of SWTOR could deteriorate to the pinnacle of boredom as of now. A suggestion regarding Force Fracture: That rotation is pretty repetitive too, admittedly Force Fracture is a more interesting ability than Slash though (functionality, animation and sound). Force Fracture build just lacks a tactical item that boosts it like the Spiteful Saber tactical does to become viable and maybe stops the repetitiveness. Something like this: "Force Fracture has a 25% chance to reset the cooldown on Blade Barrage or give you the Mind Sear proc (you could make it so it alternates between the two effects). Both blade Barrage and Twin Saber Throw apply the the double amount of additional Elemental damage that Force Fracture does regardless if dots are ticking on your target or not." That way the rotation would become less repetitive and with a proc you would use Blade Barrage and Twin Saber Throw not only in the last two GCDs before Force Melt becomes available and the dot isn't ticking anymore but with proc you'd actually use them rotationally. That'd be fun to play and could get the build a bit closer to Slashfest dps wise :-) And I still think Spiteful Saber shouldn't be allowed to be the max dps tactical item. It's just mindunmbing to play (except you like cowbells ;-) ...

No offense, but I'm not looking for insight on how to play the specc 🙂 I've known Watchman rotations inside out in all forms from 1.0 on and had top Watchman/Anni and partially top overall dps parses in several expansions and have also written a few guides on the specc (including Dotsmash, when that was a thing). Character name is El'ethon, if you care to know or are looking for reference. Not saying this to show off, but to undermine that I do know just how boring exactly the current rotation is in comparison. Let's take a look at the spec's current top parse as of today by Keetsune: https://parsely.io/parser/view/731139/0 If you look at ability usage you see Slash listed in top position with 111 Usages out of 242 abilities, meaning 46% of actual abilities used is the base class' blandest filler ability. (Not counting off GCD stuff here, except for Overload/Deadly Saber which actually is a rotational ability, unlike say Adrenal or Valoruous Call/Zen. Even if you chose to count everything you press, it'd still be 111 out of 280ish which it still roughly 40% even counting pocket Sarlacc 😉 ) You have 5 Slashes in a row at 14:49:31.545, 14:50:17.351, 14:50:51.783, 14:51:25.533, 14:51:59.817, 14:52:33.822 6 Slashes in a row at 14:49:41.616 and several instances of 5 or 6 Slashes that have just one Merciless Slash among them. What's probably even worse is that Slash also does the most damage (not even counting the burns it ticks, just its own damage) with a whopping 21.8%. Saying that all the nice things you learn as Watchman like Merciless, Cauterize, Force Melt, Overload Saber are just sidekicks to your main ability Slash that every Knight knows from the very beginning. And this is for a specc that had rotations that used to keep you on the edge of your seat several times in 4 GCD cycles (yes Merciless/Annihilate once had just 6secs cooldown when fully stacked - meaning you could use that awesome signature ability with its satisfying animation and sound much more often instead of spamming boring ole Slash). The rotational interplay was absolutely entertaining and the payoff if you got things right was enormous - both dps wise and regarding what it felt like to perform it. At the same time specc was still doing more than ok if you couldn't manage to get the necessary procs consistently, which again was absolutely achievable with dedicated training. I'd also say that when you had learned how to do that by heart, your muscle memory allowed you to watch your surroundings excellently. Which also has to do with the fact that 4 GCD rotations have a unique internal rhythm to them compared to the pure priority system we have now. But how did all that come to be? We have had this Slash spamfest ever since Merciless CD was lengthened and we got Watchman Vital Shot (also know as Force Melt/Rend) as our "spectacular" new ability when other specs got stuff like Vigilant Thrust 😉 There was just too much room in each rotation cycle that had to be filled somehow. Consequently devs have been tampering with filler stuff ever since, imo not very successfully. One of the strongest arguments against shorter rotation cycles, i.e. shorter CD on Merciless/Annihilate, was that the then 2 GCD long Blade Barrage (then called Master Strike) didn't allow to get all the other important abilities in the rotation and play them on cooldown. Mind you, that's no longer a point since we have one GCD Blade Barrage. So today you could easily implement a rotation like this: Merciless Force Melt Cauterize Blade Barrage Merciless Filler/DST Cauterize Filler Merciless Filler Cauterize Force Melt .... You could go back to Merciless/Dispatch-ViciousThrow shortening Cauterize's new default 12sec Cooldown (which would go back to be a 6sec dot that REALLY hurts and not just tickles) by 6 secs on a high percentage and Slash doing it on a mid percentage. In the old days Merciless and Slash completely reset Cauterize's cooldown, meaning you could actually reapply it too early, thus clipping the dot. So you had to memorize the GCD you had Cauterize in last time or actually track the dot on your target. Both was indeed a bit distracting from playing the more difficult mechanics in the game. By designing the proc to instead shorten the remaining Cooldown by exactly 6 secs the earliest time you can reuse Cauterize it is in the exact spot of the 4 GCD rotation you had it in before. That way you also prevent multidotting with Cauterize's hard hitting dot which resulted in potentially too much burst on multiple targets. Nowaday I'd also add a failsafe mechanic that apart from the percentage based chance to proc Cauterize CD reduction by itself gives you stacks: 2 with Merciless/Dispatch-ViciousThrow, 1 with Slash. At 4 Stacks the 6s reduced CD on Cauterize is guaranteed. Every proc, no matter if by ability chance itself or 4 stacks, resets all stacks. In addition Force Melt has a 15 sec Cooldown here and will thus move through your rotation on the filler spots in GCDs 2 and 4, adding more dynamics to the rotation. This is a hybrid form of playstyle: a short rhythmical rotation with clear priorities. It would also give Watchman a bit shorter dots, making target swaps and burst a bit better - which is absolutely needed, since devs also still refuse to dump that stupid Merciless stacks rampup problem with Watchman that is no longer justified by superior overall dps. Even if you don't go for that faster and more entertaining playstyle there must be something more meaningful you can do with all the filler GCDs in the current rotation that come from way to long a Cooldown on Merciless Slash than having players spam Slash - for the love of the Force 🙂

Beats me how any class designer would think "Hey let's set up a specc that has players use the blandest filler ability of its base class three times more than anything else". Slash-fest is not a rotation. And by no means an engaging playstyle. It's a mind numbing exercise in boredom. I mean this is a tab target game with very little positional or situational combat, no active aiming, blocking, parrying or countering. So performing a rotation according to situation is the only engagement left. In comes Watchman doing Slash - Slash - Slash - Slash - Merciless - Melt - DST/BB - Slash - Slash - Slash - Slash - Slash.... How can anyone think that's fun? Even if you let a tactical item like Spiteful Saber pass through QA, you can't ever design everything else to have this come out as the goto choice for highest dps. Should have become a meme playstyle if anything at all. Specc needs some interaction in its rotation that's more than "do I get enough crits to have resources for enough Slashes (and activate my simple off-GCD-dot)". It needs some kind of interaction between the specc's core abilities to be tracked/looked out for. Something that actually gives players a feeling of meaningful interaction with the rotation that makes a difference if done right.

The state of Watchman on live and PTS are a typical consequence when a rotation has been made too long and therefore too filler heavy. Instead of streamlining the core rotation they are now desperately trying to do something with filler abilities in the talent tree system. However, that way you just don't end up with smooth rotation that has a reasonable skill to effectiveness curve.

Same. Which is a pretty big oversight on BWs part, since I'd even spend Cartel Coins on them if they persisted - and I suspect I'm not the only one: Why would anyone spend real money on something you have to reactivate every single time you change location for it to actually work?

That's all pure polemics.

I'm not dictating anyone anything, I just believe that there are several good reasons to respect the way professionals have designed a game's reward system. If you believe in paying for stuff that's all yours and you're certainly not alone with that. Let me be totally clear: Everyone can have their own opinion and act upon it. They just have to live with what other people think of that opinion and the behaviour that's derived from it. More clever people than me have shown how underminig a reward system is bad for long term motivation of a player community as a whole. Which is why this is not true, if you look at it from a broader, long term perspective. Of course one singular sale run doesn't do anything to a player who's not even involved. But the possibility of doing them changes the game's environment as a whole and thus for everyone. It's certainly easy to call BS on that and ridicule it, as it's not so obvious. That doesn't make it less true or relevant. In my opinion anyone participating in stuff like that is contributing to a community based game deteriorating. If you and anyone else choses to still do it, well, agreed: it's a free country. I just take the freedom to call people out on that. Accordingly you're all free to not care about that either. ^^

I'm way to bad a player to be elitist, my friend :-) I don't want to rewrite the whole thread, as the arguments why it is bad for players are already in there and easy to comprehend if one is inclined to do so. Of course sellers and buyers like the system, otherwise there wouldn't be sellers and buyers. But that doesn't prove it's a brilliant idea the same way as my claiming "everyone" hates it ;-) Let me be a bit more precise on that: I've discussed sales runs with a lot of people in a lot of different games, especially in the guilds I've been in, sometimes also considering if we should do it or not. What I meant is that the people I thought had good knowledge of said games, a supportive and constructive attitude and a way better understanding of how online communities work than I do, tended to come to the same conclusion: Bad idea. Point taken that this is still subjective, but I think that when you look at how reward systems in a game are designed and assuming that people who designed them didn't do it half-heartedly, it has repercussions to undermine those systems. In a positive fantasy you might even get players to help each other reaching certain goals that are not yet attainable to them instead of selling them the reward. But that's probably an old f***'s unrealistic humanistic ideals. I still think that decreasing the chance of that happening is not a brilliant idea and I will not ever participate in it and will always be happy if it's prevented. I remember how SWTOR player community was, before these things started happening on German Servers (you're right, that those are especially active on that, which is just because German players suck at the game in the first place ;-) ) and I can assure you it didn't help one bit. There's numerous reasons why some things became more and more meaningless and the game's experience arbitrary, but, as in any other online game, it has a lot to do with the people actually playing the game. It takes a lot of experience to get designing the framework for online communities right in the first place and, maybe even more so, how you act in that framework as you go along. Both determine the game's experience as a whole and thus for every single player much more than you might think if you look at a game just in terms of its coded content. It makes a big difference what you do with posts like the OP or not, if you comment on it or not, if you just let it pass through.

Best ever It was a close call for our guild's name: either the one it ended up to be (as you can see in my signature) or "We're all little", which I personally would have preferred.

A lot and some have it, and everyone hates it. They are explicitly forbidden und prosecuted in BDO and unheard of in LOTRO afaik. Yeah you have them in the likes of WOW and ESO, but that doesn't make the idea any better. You have all the reasons why it messes up a game's environment laid out in this thread. I hope devs will someday act on it.

I agree with much of what critical posters wrote here. I wish that (like in some other MMOS that are well maintained) people responsible for game development and player community would prevent this from happening - even if it takes some effort to track this ingame (it is possible though, if you really mean it) it should definitely not be possible to post something like this on the official forums of the game as it has a negative impact on the game and its players.

...says the person that puts their own oh so high cognitive capacity as a measuring point for everyone else although their writing clearly shows that neither the stage in which development and communication currently is and none of the broader design choice has been remotely understood. It amuses me when people accuse other people for the exact same thing they've been doing and can't see it, because they are equally self centered to take their own perception and thus subjective reality as the only reality there is. Special snowflakes everywhere.

On level 65 and 75 it says "New ability granted but there is no choice to be made and it is not discipline specific". I'm sure though it will NOT make up for Blade Blitz and Guarded and I hope it won't. Is it really so hard to see that every other class you will be pvping will have the same thing happen to them? Devs explained very well that they're taking defensive ablities out of the game across the board. From my gaming experience I say this shifts the key to success away from which button to press when to a more movement and tactics oriented gameplay that many other MMOs have implemented (or tried to do so) long ago. You're basically whining about balance lost an account that you don't yet know what will be on the other side of the scale once that has been designed. Yeah I'm "whining" if people don't take the chance to improve things. Assuming they're not five year olds who are only stomping their foot in anger but are clever enough to understand what the procedure layed out in front of them is, how it's about to evolve and how you best play a part that does what we all want: Make the game enjoyable on the class discussed. And if all that doesn't help try imagining you're working on this and what kind of feedback you'd be inclined to work with given you have limited resources. Some of what has been written here really makes you wonder what people were thinking when they wrote it...

No, I actually read the OP and listened to the livestream about 7.0. Again: What you wrote has its place somewhere else but not in a thread that's about constructive contribution to a development process in stage 1. And it is - again - making points that are not what isbeing worked on atm. Balance is logically the very last thing to happen after you established class mechanics, ability interaction etc. etc.. If PTS state in late November hasn't alleviated what you're afraid of, it might make sense to discuss what you wrote, but for the purpose the devs have communicated for this iteration of PTS it's simply irrelevant.

Declaring one's own personal experience on the base that is a long experience to be valid for everyone else is a bit immature, to say the least. Granted for a lot of players who do this it might have to do with passion for their class and the game, it is not helping the cause. This is the first time in about 10 years players have been given the chance for feedback in a very early stage of development. That's a very good change of procedure on Bioware's part in my opinion. A lot of posts here unfortunately do not yet reflect any understanding as to how the state of what we find on PTS differs from previous iterations and hence how we as players deal with it in a constructive manner: We don't yet know what the new abilities mentioned in loadouts are, for example. They will propably be core parts of new rotations. The opening post is very clear: This is about gathering information about the feel for the class, about essentials. Talking about balancing and stuff is like discussing the taste of a cake before even the dough is prepared. I'll be waiting for the icing to do that and that will be a lot of PTS iterations later. I've seen the lack of construcive attitudes ruin several development processes and I can thus only emphasize: Don't get carried away - especially if you're passionate about SWTOR. Stick to the facts and describe your findings matter-of-factly instead of attacking people working on the process. The more constructive feedback is, the better it is to work with and the more benefitial back and forth processes of changes we can work with will be. Going hard enrage on stuff that isn't even the point at this stage is just not wise. I also think it helps to look at the whole concept of cross class combat gameplay, it opens up a lot of possibilities, especially with one-click presets. If you can even switch what is now different classes for different bosses or even during PvP, the specs are naturally going to be a bit simpler. If the gameplay experience is rewarding or not is absolutely not a matter of how complicated rotations and defensive CDs are. In fact a lot of recent MMOs work with a lot less abilities but a lot more engaging encounter design, which is more fun in the end imo. Good thing, if SWTOR grows to live up to that challenge as well. (On a side note, every other MMO I've been playing recently has much shorter PVP TTK than SWTOR, no matter the group composition. Engaging enemies in the open field without working with your environment a lot means instant death in BDO everytime e.g.) Either way, if development is a collaborative process of developers and players as offered here, both parties will decide how good things will work out in the end. Regardless of how long someone has been playing the game, regardless of they're PvE or PvP, regardless how skilled they are: Everyone who claims they want the game to improve should test their own writing on wether it will contribute to that - or not...