One of the great things that came with amplifiers was the capability to have "crafting/gathering" gear, because we could have amplifiers on gear for things like general and specific crafting critical's and efficiency. that's gone now, and it really is unacceptable to not give us something in its place. Since the launch of the Strongholds update, stronghold enthusiasts have been begging and pleading to have decorations made for those machines in the crafting area on fleet, and on your ship if you have a crafting profession. So maybe its time to give us these decorations, and make them functional. Give us the ability to pay credits, medals, whatever, to apply a series of personal buffs that would replace what we lost when amplifiers were removed. In addition, you can make these decorations "expensive" in terms of what materials are needed to pick one up from the utility decoration merchant for example. a couple of dark projects, 10 each of the prefab kits, 1 million credits, etc....

Heres my thoughts so far: 1. I actually like the new character creation interface, although it took a few tries to get weapons to show up when switching around between the different combat styles. 2. I created a Jedi Knight Sage and played through up to level 10. Like someone else mentioned, I have to also think the leveling will be faster once you get all of your perks added. I sort of liked the automatic adding of abilities, especially when I got something in the middle of a fight. Although afterwards i had to remember to set my hotbars up the ways I like them. 3. I also created a Smuggler Sniper and played through up to the first little bit of Old Galactic Market on Coruscant, and hit like level 19. For me, not getting abilities for several levels felt off. Having no crowd control or stun type abilities by the time you get to Coruscant was weird. I felt like I was healing alot more between fights, even easy ones. 4. I guess since you have a scarcity of abilities is why you locked Group Finder. New characters especially would get kicked fast if they didn't at least have a stun. So looking at ability tree I'm guessing most people will not want to group with anyone under 50 then. 5. Not sure what the thinking was for not being able to set your discipline, or get the first discipline ability until level 23. I guess Keith like Michael Jordan or something? It just feels like a really long wait.

so much this! the alt guild i'm in had so much talking and laughing on discord last night, i got emotional. we were down to 3 or 4 active players up until tuesday, most of us being only concerned with getting our imp and pub mains their CQ and then usually logging off. I figured we might get a little active because of double XP, but holy crap! we've even picked up some 'strays" and new players who are showing excitement for the game. we were making plans last night about which area of our flagship to open up in a month or 2 once we started getting the encryptions, and had a plan by the end of the night for the rest of the year on unlocking the flagship. i know the naysayers will be like, "see! you shouldn't be unlocking a flagship in a year, it took us 20!" yeah well, your exaggerations aside, i'm freaking ecstatic, and its all thanks to these changes. again, some balancing should be done, but if you want to go back to running the same 2 or 3 ops and flashpoints over and over and over and over and over... you can actually still do that right now. i just saw a shout for an EV farm pt you can join.... i'm going back to leveling my alts!

I am ecstatic about these new wide-ranging changes, especially in regards to the effect on low-level players and small guilds. I admit the numbers need to be tweaked for things like selling vendor trash, giving a companion a gift, and raising the influence rank of a companion, because the current 5k does seem really overboard. I know the detractor thinks this is an easy login and win system, but I saw yesterday some new and returning players in my recently revived small alt guild get excited when they saw they had helped the guild get to rank 9. they were shouting in our discord and it felt great to hear. Its not something that I've heard in quite some time. so thank you for these changes. hopefully this will give our new and returning members the incentive they needed to stick around and play this awesome game.

I absolutely LOVE these new conquest changes, especially seeing them while i was leveling up a new character yesterday. These changes help new low-level members of guilds feel like they are now helping, it helps small guilds to work toward the frameworks they need to expand their flagships, and helps them with ranking up. I had characters in two of the old mega-guilds on Imp and Pub side, helping them rank up, and working on my Conqueror titles. It was fun back in the day helping and feeling like i was contribution. And then the change happened, and all of a sudden, i'm having to micro-manage how and when I can participate with stuff. "Oh no, I can't go to Nar Shadaa and level up because i need all of those NS Rampage conquest points on my Imp main to help with conquest." "Great, I can't go jump into a flashpoint today because the once per day conquest is needed on my Pub main to finish off their personal conquest, so i can try to work on another pub character in that guild...": I will admit however, that these changes need tweaking. 5k for a comp leveling up, giving a gift to them, selling trash, yes it does seem a bit overboard. With the repeatable mission ones, the gathering ones, etc... these more general ones could be adjusted. 500 conquest for selling trash. 1k for giving a comp a gift, or raising their influence. the devs have said the numbers might be changing in the future as they analyze the numbers, and thats good. I am just really excited for those small guilds that first got to experience getting a flagship, and now can actually start working on expanding it. Thank you devs!

i get that the jawa junk, like Kai Zykken is not supposed to be the primary source of getting crafting materials. but if you are getting pennies back, for items that cost so much to make in the first, its just not right. I was getting jawa junk back for deconstruction, as well as some, not all of the materials used to make the item, then it would be okay. in addition, when it takes 10 weeks of personal conquest to get enough materials to craft a single green item by yourself, then the system is SEVERELY broken. like someone above mentioned, i don't mind the longer gathering mission times, but the return has to be worth it. if its a failed mission that takes 28 minutes, and all you get is 4 purple, 7 blue, and 6 green jawa junk, its not worth it. thats the equivalent of getting a single drop in a FP and then deconstructing it. If you succeed at the mission, and only get 10 green mats, then it doesn't feel worth it.

-- Do you feel like the time investment for harvesting is worth it? (please check harvesting only on Ossus for Grade 11) Given the steep cost for creating the items you need to create actual equipment, trying to fight for resource nodes, or robots/creatures that can be harvested which have been nerfed apparently, does not feel viable. if the costs were decreased significantly, then getting 1 or 2 items per node might be okay. I would suggest though, that you bring back a message that can be logged, saying what was just harvested. I was having to stop, check my material list to try and figure out how much i was getting per node, instead of just being able to look at my chat log. -- Do you feel the time and cost for crew skill missions are worth it? I do not believe getting 2-4 items per crafting mission seems viable, again because of the high cost of making anything. I received 2 Wealthy missions from Treasure Hunting. The first one, rank 50 companion, 700 Archaeology, no amplifiers, and i got 2 prototype (blue) crystals, 2 prototype (blue) artifacts, 2 premium (green) crystals, and 2 premium (green) artifacts. The second was a rank 50 companion, 700 scavenging, failed it and got 4 purple jawa, 3 blue jawa, and 4 green jawa junk. None of that seems viable in the long run for me. On top of that, you are still requiring low level materials to make the items needed for conquest, so its not like I can send companions out to get the new stuff exclusively. -- As a crafter, do you feel like you have a place in Spoils of War? I can see how I have a place, but not a very profitable one. With the high cost of making everything from right-side equipment, to left side implements that actually give the crafting/gathering amplifiers, on top of the requirement to runs ops and lots of conquest in order to get the additional requirements for crafting items that should not be competing with the drops from those operations. I can still make more money turning cartel market items, than losing thousands or hundreds of thousands of credits trying to craft a single item. -- How do you feel about deconstruction and its contribution to crafting? I do not like the new deconstruction system. Getting back jawa junk alone is not worth the effort, given the current costs for new grade 11 items from the jawa vendors. If you are not getting back a portion of what went into the item, then the system is worthless. It takes 10 greens x2 to make a single bonded attachment, and lets say it takes 2 of those attachements to make a single green earpiece. If i get 3 purple jawa junk, and 2 green jawa junk when i deconstruct the earpiece, and it costs 200 jawa junk to get a single grade 11 resource, its definitely not worth it. -- Do you feel the inflow of Jawa Junk from deconstruction helps to supplement harvesting and missions? (reminder: Jawa junk is not meant to be a primary source of materials by itself). While I like getting jawa junk from failing a gathering mission, or deconstructing items, it doesn't feel worth it given the time it would take to get the amount of jawa junk to purchase a single grade 11 resource. if you go to Macy's to purchase a 3-piece suit or a designer dress that is going to cost you thousands of dollars, and decide to make your own clothes from those items, so you take them apart, and all you are left with is a 2" x 2" piece of tattered cloth, thats what it feels like with the current system as it is on the PTS. -- How do you feel about the new materials window? While I do like the new materials window, we need some chat logging to know when resources are being gathered and sent there. I had to keep checking to see what was in there.

was going to go through this morning, and post a list of all of the decorations that are broken since the 5.10 patch, but adding them here should also work. Missing Textures: All of the 5th Anniversary Posters Missing Effects: Holocron of Ancient Masters -- the floating holocron no longer appears Replica Sacrificial Sphere -- the orb thing does not appear Seed of Rage -- seed is missing Does nothing when interacted with: Multi-State Mainframe Terminal Steam Channel Distributor All of Ambient Machine: decorations i'm pretty sure there is more, probably decorations i do not have. if you see any others, be specific and list them below. I will tweet their attention to this, since they rarely come in the SH forums.

There is nothing in here about returning some conquest objectives that could be considered alt-friendly, such as turning Craft an Invasion Force into a once per day per character objective, instead of the once per day per legacy it is now. I brought this up during the last livestream because it was occuring what had previously been considered a crafting week for conquest on alts. However when the conquest changes went into place, alt-friendly conquest went with it. Just to reiterate what we are seeing: Daily repeatable quests like Inventor, or Heroic Mission, or Socialite i believe, give paltry 200-300 cxp per completion. When combined with the once per day objectives like Craft and Invasion Force, they can be a little more bearable, but you can only do those once per day per legacy. So if I have 10 alts and I craft an Invasion Force on each, only one will the 1500 cxp, the rest get squat Can you please finally address the alt-unfriendly nature of most of the conquest objectives, ie. the once per day per legacy objectives.

agreed. it would be so great if there was a place on the site to download the music from the game, especially the newer songs. say a new song or two was added to the latest update, and a month after, so people can experience it in game first, then the song is available on the site. based on the music video they did before launch, there seemed to be like 5 or 6 composers working on music. I'd love to get an update on who is still around, and who's creating the new tracks.

i sent a tweet to Brian and Chuck at the Bad Feeling Podcast to see what they might be able to do!

however, the point of conquest has fallen by the way side. originally it was their for some bragging rights, but mostly for guilds to purchase their flagship and expand it. for the guilds that were working toward this, including the new mega-guilds, they are complete. the only reason now to do it, is to help the members get their Galaxy Conqueror achievement. and for that, most mega-guilds will welcome in an alt, and its been like that since population sizes started to dwindle especially pre-server merge last year.

this is very similar to an idea i had back in 2016 regarding designing your own stronghold. like yours you would pick from a set number of maps from a planet, each with its own structure hooks and such. you would then buy the structures for those structure hooks, like warehouses, different planet unique buildings and such. you could even turn a structure hook into a a decoration hook, like a starship or centerpiece one. after the purchase of the stronghold and all, then you could get in and decorate. heres a link to that blog post from august 2016

October 14, 2014 -- Galactic Strongholds released. Maybe Bioware can help celebrate this great update with our very own forum icon! by the way DuchessKristiana, your SH forum post, Strongholds going Forward, has really lit a fire under me regarding other SH topics that should really be addressed. we really need an influencer in on this as well. I know Brian with BadFeelingPodcast is always going on about decorations, so maybe they could get involved. I'm not sure if swtorista, kid lee, vullkk, or any of the other streamers would be interested in hosting a discussion like this. Then maybe we can get Charles and Eric on board, send in questions regarding different things about strongholds like hook placement, increasing the x-y for movement and such. just a thought.

after the server merge, I had well over 10 strongholds, and I've liked it because they have been decorating them according to different themes for the purpose of RP. Jedi and Sith academies, ancient ruins, smuggler bases, etc... in order to buy the Rishi stronghold next week, I'm having to go through and deactivate several strongholds to get to that magic number of 9, with at least 5 of them being unique to help with the stronghold conquest bonus (6th would be Rishi). If I had the ability to save the layout of that Jedi Library, Jedi Academy, ancient ruin, or smuggler hideout, it wouldn't be so hard to deactivate strongholds. just like the Outfit Designer, I could easily switch between saved layouts for that location, and not feel like i spent hours or days setting it up for nothing.

I think part of it has to do with resource allocation. If an area designer can take something that exists already, like the Reaver area and turn it into a new Rishi stronghold, and we get more strongholds because of that, then more power to them. If they could take the Copero area, remove alot of the outside decorations, keep the inner base but remove alot of those decorations, maybe open a house or five in the market area, and then put down some sensible hooks, i would be subbed for life. I do agree that Manaan is the worst designed stronghold so far because it lacks the ability for the player to enter half of the visible space

I saw someone mention this on reddit and was sad that decos were not part of this sale, so i tweeted this: i meant to add a #HintHintNudgeNudgeNoWhatIMean to that, but forget... Anyway, Charles mentioned during the swtor_central stream some experimental stronghold things, so maybe changes to decorations is part of this??? i know speculation. Its still a missed opportunity though for sure. It is good to see fellow stronghold enthusiasts making their voices heard here though!

the idea behind the threshold was a good one. the fact that they screwed up the objectives was not. if i remember correctly, launch conquest had repeatable objectives like the craft an invasion force that could be done by any character on a legacy. they came back later and made it to where these objectives could only be done once per legacy. that was a bad move on their part. its the same thing with what they've done now. Total Galactic War used to be a crafting week along with Titans of Industry, but because they all but removed conquest crafting, its harder for small and medium guilds to participate. When I logged in yesterday, I only saw the invasion force and donate war supply objectives, not a single craft a war supply. did they make these one of the daily objectives, like today is Craft 20 Infantry Kits, tomorrow is Holocrons, etc... I have a friend who is in a small RP guild who just completed their fully unlocked guild stronghold, and was going to start working toward a guild flagship. They were looking forward to the part about not having to be in the top 10 for a planet to get the rewards, because they could only attempt this during crafting weeks and then it was taking away from their time to do guild RP stuff. They were looking forward to only have a few people or alts needed to hit their threshold and then they could do other things. Since they screwed up the objectives, thats obviously not going to happen.

that was the primary way to get them before 5.8, as well as crafting a ton during the crafting weeks. Now, these guilds can actually do conquest, hit their goal and collect the rewards the next week. and the good things is they do not have to be in the top 10 or anything.

The only good change with the conquest overhaul, is the fact that small and medium guilds have a viable way to get flagship plans -- all they have to do is hit the guild mark for the planet they are invading, and the following week they should get their rewards. Unless they are trying to get a conqueror title, then its a win for the guild -- closer to unlocking all of the areas in their flagship. The rest of the overhaul has been crap. I work 10-12 hours a day sometimes. the last thing I want to do is come home and chain myself to my PC for 4 or 5 hours. its the biggest reason i never became a hardcore raider in any MMO i played. the rewards are not that appealing for the amount of work required. i realize i'm not that close to maxing out my crafting utility deco's but come on. the increase in flagship blueprints is good based on the planet size but the rest of the rewards are crap. and even with some of the other changes in 5.8a, you didn't touch crafting because you wanted to "wait and see...." well i'm waiting too then. i've got my companions going out filling up on grade 8 and 9 materials hoping you come to your senses and stop requiring a whole bunch of useless low level materials to craft war supplies. again, i don't have time to farm these low level materials all day, its too much of a chore. I want to be playing your game and having fun.

all in all, the proposed changes are like taking Tylenol to cure your cancer... we'll have to wait and see... in the mean time, you have effectively killed crafting for conquest, even for non-crafting focused weeks like this one... unless we get our normal War Supply crafting recipes back during those crafting focused weeks, ala the current Biochem bug where you can see all of those old, good recipes. if you want to keep these changes, then crafting and gathering needs an overhaul in 6.0, and it starts now: 1. I need to be able to craft a whole lot of these assembly components now, especially those silly low-level ones that you require 6 to 8 of per War Supply. I see at least two ways of handling this: a. Per companion, I need a way to set how many items I want them to craft, up to a maximum of 100, 5 max is no longer an option. b. Change the recipe output to be like 10 or 20 items produced, and keep the maximum of 5 crafting items queued. This would also entail updating the assembly component recipe as it wouldn't be economically fair to keep the same materials and increase the output. For example, currently it takes 2 Silica, 2 Desh, and 2 conductive flux to make a single assembly component. if you would increase the output to 10 produced, then the updated recipe would be 20 silica, 20 desh, and 20 conductive flux. 2. switching between a whole bunch of alts in order to get them doing low-level material gathering runs is not fun. most sado-masochists wouldn't want to do this. So the gathering missions need to be overhauled, and I see two good ways to do that. a. increase the amount of items a significant amount, based on their yield type. For example, level 50 influence companion, doing a grade 1 Rich yield mission, takes ~ 1 minute to complete, and nets by default if I remember correctly, 8 items, with a bonus of 2 or 3 items if the companion crits the mission. Tie the output to the character level if you have to, so that a normal leveling character is not producing tons of goods, but the output needs to be increased. That grade 1 Rich Yield, should be dropping at least 50 materials, Bountiful ~ 25, Abundant ~10, Moderate ~5, and the Wealthy ones from found missions should be at least 100 items gained. And yes, if you crit the mission, tie the companions influence into the bonus items, with a level 50 companion doubling the amount. give me a reason to have multiple level 50 companions. b. or i need a way to have that companion queued up for several runs of that gathering mission, except for those found wealthy missions. For example, I want Elara to run the grade 1 scavenging mission "The Junk Armada" 10 times in a row, with the final tally of what she finds presented when the allotted time for running them all is up. I don't need to see 10 reward windows popup. And yes, there would be a max, lets say 10 for now, of how many times that mission can be ran for that companion. c. the existing gathering missions will need to be fixed as well, and missing missions added. for example, grade 4 archaeology is missing the Rich and Abundant Power Crystal missions, and the Bountiful Artifact Fragment mission. d. regarding your mentioning of turning in those War Supplies, which actually is just the Invasion Forces for the Aid the War Effort objective, who in their right mind is going to do this on any type of consistent basis? you need Invasion Forces to create Dark Projects, which are then used to get Flagship pieces as well as some cool decorations. You also need 5 Invasion Forces and some credits to get any of the new decorations available from the conquest vendor. so who is going to be really doing this objective, especially with it being one of the few "infinitely" repeatable objectives? So theres a few ideas to help fix your blunder with making conquest crafting a thing of the past.

Yes, thank you so much for all of the decorations that were added with the new flashpoint, and allowing the existing ones with solo versions to drop theres as well. I was so happy when I saw this in the patch notes, as its literally a suggestion I've made in the past since the Vet and Master mode drop rates are pretty abysmal. I've got lots of Tython and Korriban runs to do in my future, as I really want those statues for my temples!

its good to hear that it will be fixed next week, but what about until then? what if i start crafting using those mats in my legacy hold? is that going to screw up your stuff?

I'm in this boat as well. I first logged into my main that was from JC, and it looked like my JC legacy storage was all there. i had cleared out tab 6 across all 5 servers to make sure that it would get filled first with overflow before an overflow storage was needed. After logging in, tab 6 was tab 1 from my Shadlowlands legacy, and i had no overflow storage to speak of. i tried logging into other characters, checking mail, cargo bays and inventory, and none of them had the missing items. I was definitely expecting things like crafting materials, war supplies, and anything else that could stack, would have, but it doesn't look like thats the case.

we could split hairs in this thread for eternity, the simple fact is this: When they screwed up the loot tables in 4.0, they messed with how people could acquire things like decorations and mounts doing in game activities. before 4.0, I only had to go against 4 other people in order to get a chance to get a FP decoration drop. Now you have to pray the group wants to do the bonus boss since you don't get enough CXP from it, then you have to win a freaking lottery, with a 1 in a trillion shot or more that the decoration will even drop, and then still have to gamble against the other people who might it. FP decorations should not be 50M credits on the GTN, which they are because its near impossible to get them nowadays. And as far as Cartel Certificates, the minute they removed them from Cartel Packs they messed up, because they removed the one regular avenue to get them. if they had changed vendors that require Cartel Certificates to credits when they removed them from packs, they wouldn't be a part of this discussion.