Root problem here is too many people queue for HS only which leads to HS popping in "random" queues more often than not. In turn this means players looking for the quest reward for queuing for random FPs will most likely have to endure 15 to 20 minutes playing HS. Solution: Realistically a major update like separating queues is never going to happen. You could also argue players looking to grind gear "miss out" on the same quest reward because they have to select multiple FPs they don't want to play to get it--which is something I've run into gearing my toons. Doing a yards run when you're gearing is annoying. There are a couple easy fixes. Devs could remove the quest, which removes the carrot, and no one will feel they're missing out on something they are "entitled" to. Even easier would be for the players to realize the carrot in question is really a meager value and they'd be better off not chasing it if it impacts their enjoyment. You'd likely get more rewards just from being more engaged and playing longer than if you're poo pooing over the quest. Now if I'm wrong about the root problem here and the OP is more concerned about bad groups, then the solution is different, but easy. Join a guild, make some friends, and play with them. If you don't want to bother with making those connections then suck it up and deal with the joys of pugging.

I run grade 11 lockbox missions on 3 toons to produce wealthy missions that I run for embers. Then I use the embers to craft alacrity or critical augments. Right now on Star Forge the alacrity augments are being listed for 8.7m, so the batch of 4 I'm crafting should net at least 16m profit. If I get some criticals each one is pure profit. I've been doing this for the 4 months I've been back and have around 300 million. At this point I don't even know what to spend it on and have enough that I can snag great deals on bulk mats.

I'd have to agree with the above re: alacrity. As a HoT class the higher the alacrity, the quicker your HoTs tick, which leads to higher HPS. I don't think the lower critical is going to lead to lower overall HPS.

I'm leveling a hatred sin right now to test it out in PvP. The new tactical bonus where you spam leeching strike seems intresting. I'd like to try a high alacrity build to see how it balances against a lower crit too. It seems to have a really fun playstyle and I like the idea of applying pressure instead of burst.

I commented earlier about conquest controlling player behaviour and received a response players don't want their behaviour controlled. The irony, and reality, is the genre is all about controlling player behaviour and providing a series of dopamine rewards for actions. The flashy animations, exciting sounds, and numbers all help give our brains a spurt of this delicious chemical. Regardless of whatever rationalization our conscious minds create to explain our desire to play, this dopamine hit is underneath it. We can even look at KP farming for an example in SWTOR. Once that was established as the most effective way to hit conquest, which in turn provides a few million credits worth of rewards, everyone spent their time doing that to the exclusion of anything else. In time people get bored of that, but still don't do anything else since the ROI is so high. Like it or not the Devs have to consider and control the behavior of the player base by controlling the carrot.

It's absurd and I question why they wanted to make it more of a for sure reward. Are they trying to pump more SRM into the economy? I know I'll likely be netting 25 SRM this week, which will be turned into 5 augments for sale on the GTN. The only thing that really limits my crafting is the price of SRM and Embers and if I can obtain one of them free my policy is to buy one of the others. Mind you I still don't see this as lowering the prices since I price according to the market and avoid undercutting too much.

I was going to make a satirical post asking why there isn't any conquest goals for logging in or going afk. Like you might as well considering the low effort of the new goals. I've only logged on to do crafting since the patch and somehow my main is at 15k conquest. My crafting main is at the same after I switched my utility points. Okay to be fair I didn't switch any, only reselected them. On the one hand this does help my altitis and let's me spread my time between more toons. Once I get my alts past 71 it will also means more SRM to feed my crafting. On the other hand it makes the system a bit pointless. When I came back to the game I figured conquest existed to shape player behaviour towards certain activities over others. These would be grouped loosely under a specific theme. I know it got me to try FP group finder and focus on areas I might not otherwise. But now it just seems like a bonus for putting time into the game doing whatever. I have to play some more, but I have a feeling the OP is accurate in saying you could finish your weekly goal without ever leaving the fleet. The only upside I can see is the price of SRM going down since there will be a greater supply, however that won't happen until the demand for augments and other gear crafted by them drops.

Having items exclusive to OPs makes them worth running and that's a good thing. It gives PvE players, who are the majority that keep the game afloat, something to chase. When it comes to PvP the gameplay itself should be enough of a reward and I wouldn't care if they stripped what little rewards you got there. I'd still play it. I also find the idea there are essential items gated behind Dxun suspect. Do you really need those items to compete? Are alternatives 100 percent useless? While I get gear can be super important in PvE, I didn't think gear was weighted so heavily in SWTOR PvP, at least to the point where having anything less than BiS means failure. Turth be told I see people complaining about being under geared in regulars where bolster means BiS gear only provides a minor boost. It's a matter of perception where someone just entering regs thinks their poor performance is a matter of gear instead of a matter of learning the class as well as people with hundreds of hours of play. Maybe the same thing is happening here with the idea the Dxun gear is so important. Simple fix: run Dxun and get the gear.

I don't disagree. On coming back I quickly found that you ate basically invincible while leveling, even if you decide to ignore gear completely. It's a bit silly. One way I up the challenge a bit is to do a few of the heroics as I make my way through the planets. Like you said it does lead to some disappointing immersion breaking moments like being ambushed in the story and then one shotting them all. On the other hand the ease of leveling is great when you're on character two, three, four, or more. Still you do get a situation where new players will never actually be forced to play their class and end up thinking the game can be played by sitting one button. Difficulty does ramp up in flashpoints, so this leaves people unprepared. Ideally it would be nice to see a difficulty selection like for some of the expansions applied to the original story content.

There is no world PvP to speak of anymore. Word on the street seems to be that Star Forge is the goto server, unless you're European, then it's DM. The only PvP guild I'm aware of is PvP Daycare because the GM streams and showed up in my YouTube results. I'm sure there are others, but I don't play enough ranked to recognize specific guilds yet. My guild does PvP events every once and a while, including a little open world during the Gree event, and I'd imagine other guilds are the same.

I'm only just starting my first tank (darkness FTW), but I main healers and can tell you there is a big difference between a tank spec'd and dps spec'd Jugg/Sin/PT. The WZ you were in had to have been mostly DPS since tank spec'd toons are rarer than healers. Also I don't think there is much you can do about people preferring jugg as a class. If people are going for Vader or obi wan feel, they're gonna pick it. It's not like people purposefully stacked those classes just for huttball.

The huttball sounds annoying, but honestly if they want to sit in mid while my team caps the other two, they can go ahead. Their meta game might be topping the leaderboard and big numbers, mine is the objective, so if we win that awesome. Besides if they were decent PvPers they'd be able to win the objective easily while farming filthy casuals.

I did a spreadsheet to help me calculate augment costs if I were to buy some or all of the mats. It takes 468 T1 mats, 234 T2 mats, and 96 T3 mats to make a single augment. It's typically not profitable to buy mats from the GTN since they cost 5k or my e each more often than not. Since you pretty much have to buy solid resource matrix (since embers can be produced from grade 11 mission), you'd have to rely entirely on crits for profit. Having to craft up the tiers is tedious and ultimately to "play" crafting you need multiple toons. The only saving grace to the system is it blocks out potential competition because most people won't bother!

Yeah I couldn't help by go full light side because it felt like you were the single rational person in a world of madness. In fact I end up playing the majority of my toons lightside because the dark side choices are so psychopathic and often irrational.

I still gotta go with PvP being the fastest. I've never paid much attention to how much I get from crafting (doesn't hurt to have companions doing this to help either), but I know you can expect about 1k per warzone. I hit dark/light V very quickly. Although I do craft on all toons so that might be speeding things up too.

I might queue, but my gear isn't 306 and I hear people pitch a fit if you queue with anything lower. There is the other problem of it being arena only, which as a healer means I get to look forward to being focused and running away most of the match. And of course it has a reputation of toxicity. I'd rather not listen to 1337 pvp folk complain and trash talk. What I think they should really do is get rid of the ranked queue altogether and give rewards for regular PvP instead.

This would be very nice. I have a strong preference for objective maps and it can be disappointing spending a night only doing huttball/arenas. Arenas can be fun, but too often it's either a faceroll or drags on forever because the healer/tank combos can keep the teams up forever. Plus as a healer it's alot of running away and self healing. Of course I can imagine it might mean less frequent pops, but to be honest I'd likely be queueing all of them during non peak just to get a pop. With ranked and unranked I'd almost rather see the two merged. Maybe full teams with as many ranked players as possible, then fill the gaps with unranked. As a ranked player you can expect to a higher challenge because you have a higher chance of facing other ranked players, so you still get the bonus rewards. Ranked being tied to arenas only is the biggest disappointment. I started PvPing in games like Warhammer and Aion, which were open world and didn't have WoW arenas. Afaik the ranked population is small, so merging queues would be the only way to see ranked 8v8, besides cross server, which is a highly unlikely update. Plus it's kind of neat having the top players mingled in with the flithy casuals. In those other games certain players would develop reputations for being absurdly good which added an extra layer to the game play.

If you already had light side toggled then clicking it when the warzone pops won't change anything because it is already selected. Just click the button below to enter the warzone. I wasn't playing when the feature was implemented, but at some point there was an update to the light dark system that made it a priority and apply to almost everything you do. Warzones happen to give a huge amount of points for it, so expect to be light V pretty quickly.

Sure the gear itself is equal on power to what you get elsewhere, but people are also factoring in the time and credits to obtain the gear. Crafting just isn't viable for new or returning players. After two months of playing and crafting augments I'm just hitting 100 million credits. 30 times that amount to craft end game gear is just crazy when a single hammer station run can drop six or more items. The fact is the developers made bad design choices when it comes to crafting that make the gear you can obtain there much worse than what you can get elsewhere. If you're an established player with the capital to invest, sure, it's going to be profitable and can likely be your main source of gearing. But for the rest of us crafting is only useful for arguments, pots, and augment kits.

I personally use diagnostic probe (if that's the correct name, not in game to check) for the instant heal after three emergency scans. Anything that gives a boost to mobility is good. If I get it as a random drop might try the medic one, although the instant rez is pointless. Kolto waves might be useful for ranked, since you're always in arena, but I don't think I use it enough to justify taking it. I've only but max a couple of weeks ago so I haven't tested them all extensively yet.

The above is exactly why crafted gear is inferior to dropped gear. The cost is beyond absurd. Unless you have multiple toons all in guilds, all hitting conquest weekly, plus millions of extra credits to buy mats, you'll never be able to craft a full set of gear. Plus you don't just need to worry about armorings. You need mods and enchantments too. Once I saw those costs I focused on crafting for augments, augment kits, and pots. With those you don't need to waste rare mats trying your luck at a higher level schematic.

I play a merc and OP healer in reg PvP (still gearing). I assume you've been having trouble taking down healers solo. It's true I can typically out heal a single DPS and sometimes even continue to heal the team while being focused. However in most cases I have to focus on self heals to survive, so am effectively countered even if the DPS will never kill me. Plus if the DPS is persistent enough I am going to run through all my DcDs and deplete my resource. That's when they'll eventually be able to burn me down. A single DPS can still act as a counter point and once you get two or three, the healer will be 100 percent locked, and unable heal the team. When it comes to healing other people my HPS doesn't come close to keeping up with someone being focused by more than one good dps. I think that's why you hear complaints about healing being in a bad place. In an arena if the other team can ignore the healer completely, by focusing DPS one by one instead, then the healer because a moot class. Numbers might seem high at the end if the match, but if those numbers don't translate into players being saved, then it doesn't really matter.

I came back about 2 months ago. Used CC to buy loot boxes, sold the stuff for capital, and maxed crafting on 4 toons with an eye on critical augments. I'm just at the point I can craft 6-10 a week which gives me a huge amount of money to play space barbie and gear at 75. It's been fairly enjoyable and engaging. That being said it's a pretty shallow system in some ways. Besides augments, augments kits, and a few stims there isn't a market for anything else. Mat costs + 5% chances to learn new schematics, and the fact there is no need to buy or even bother crafting the items, make them terrible investments.

I know I'm gonna buy those gloves and they're going to drop in the very next FP I do.

The fact people are self isolating and bored is all the more reason to fix KP. It's the type of activity that so be fun at first for all the big numbers, but then get old since it's mindless farming. It'll end up burning people out.