The new companions are all the same and you get tons of junk ones which don't even have any voiced lines or more than a few seconds connection to the character when unlocking the star fortresses, I really wish Bioware hadn't clogged up the companion lists with them. I presume that since people can invest in them, they'll be sticking around, annoyingly. Heroics being easy isn't a plus for playing them, they're just a mindless unchallenging grind now. It's not like any of their original story remains, aside from maybe that one with the colocoid implants.

But they're asking how do you die? Companions can solo everything up to even champions. It's pretty much impossible to lose right now. This a level 12 companion without all the datacrons, from the rate of influence gain these days they'd be higher than that just from doing their regular personal story conversations. Like, you don't even need to do anything, and you still win combat. If your companion is in DPS spec I guess you could lose against enemies that take too long to kill.

They should just go the guild wars II route and make a singular global platform for players to exchange credits : cartel coins on, and remove or raise the escrow cap while they're at it so that it's as productive as possible. Probably best to give a right click refund option on any item currently purchased from the market which was intended to be sold on the GTN. There is far more to buy on SWTOR's market than Guild War II's, and it's far far more appealing, and yet somehow GWII survives entirely off of that system. I'm fairly certain that Bioware is sitting on a potential gold mine there, but maybe they have some knowledge about why it wouldn't work for them. I'm currently on complimentary playtime, and the first thing I did was dump millions of credits on cartel market items on the GTN which I couldn't afford with the escrow cap, so much that I drove the prices of those items up for awhile. I think I calculated that it was over a hundred dollars of spending for Bioware which was going untapped because of the escrow limit system.

I think that's their argument, that it's no fun playing multiple times so there should be a skip option for alts. Dunno how I feel about it, I used to prefer doing it the regular way since there 8 stories, but now that there's just 1... Skip might be good. I might eventually manage to take 3 characters through it at most, which is a lot better than SoR, which I barely managed to get 1 character through before walking away for months in disappointment.

Still broken, for a year now. :/

You might be getting hit by the bug where items are missing on the republic player vendor, I'm not familiar enough with this stuff to know. Recently grinded the rep and certificates to get the hoverchair on my sage and found out it only shows up for imps atm.

It's annoying to scan the list and not find them, without being able to learn it, because it's always shifting. It's a core principle of UI design to not make people click more than they have to. But not only that, thematically it feels wrong, since there's 8 core stories and those are the 8 characters I'd like to have listed at once.

I think you guys might have misunderstood, I'm supporting giving them roles, but suggesting that letting them also keep their unique abilities (or get new mixed and matched ones from a pool to make them function uniquely) would also be a good addition to the current system, as currently they're all exactly the same (with a difference of whether they're ranged or melee, but that's it). e.g. Nadia's force explosion was totally awesome, and doesn't need to be gone. Lana could totally use a lightning attack to differentiate herself a bit from every lightsaber wielding companion, etc.

I never min-maxed with my companion choices, I always took the one I wanted so long as they could actually do a matching role. The new role switching is even better for that. However, completely removing all companion flavour by giving them identical abilities, removing Nadia's force eruptions etc, is a big step in the wrong direction imo. I'd wager that 99% of us don't care about the tiny wiggle room of min/maxing that it might create, and would prefer that our companions felt a bit different to each other. I'd love to see Lana use a combination of lightning and saber attacks, I'd love to see my Nadia use force eruptions etc. They're two of my favourite companions, but currently there's absolutely no difference to bringing them out, so it feels kind of... pointless.. to think about getting Nadia back, like she's just a reskinned Lana who has to be grinded up in influence too. Better I think would be for every companion to have a unique combination of ability pool selections, and don't worry about that relatively tiny balancing concern, we'd be far happier feeling like there's an actual difference when gaining them, and would make collecting companions from cartel packs etc more attractive too (currently I don't give a damn about more versions of the exact same thing just differently skinned).

This has been around for awhile. If somebody else has the same companion out as you, when clicking on your companion (and I think getting gift feedback), the voice comes out of the other person's companion rather than your own. Often so far away that you can't even hear it.

It just makes sense, since there are 8 prime characters in the 8 stories, and there's tons of room on the screen to show the 2 more in the vertical list. It's a bit of a pain for characters to disappear off the list and to then have to go scrolling for them, depending on how you've logged in lately. It's led me to not logging into my least 2 liked characters so that my mains don't fall from the front page.

Very weird bug, other roche vehicles are showing up, but not my own listed roche scyk. Searching for roche scyk returns nothing.

Read the posts which explained why it's not a satisfactory answer.

Yeah the droid was an awful hacked solution, it doesn't even look good. It looks like the dumbest droid in star wars which would struggle to stand up, then solos everything and makes the player feel irrelevant. Worse than the 4.0 companions. I like soloing fps, I went back and did all the ones I missed once I overleveled them, but there's a billion better ways it can be done than their silent stupid looking droid playing the game for you.

Right click companion portrait -> heroic mode. Reduces their power to the point that PvE content is challenging enough to be interesting again, without making the player feel like they're playing sub-optimally, unlocks a secondary loot table or something (more credits, increased chances of rare items) like quest drops. Only works if every companion in the party is in heroic mode, or potentially party leader sets it for the whole party.

I've opened a few dozen cartel packs which I bought on the GTN. Once removed buyer but presumably still creating the demand. Haven't bought the new packs because they just don't feel like they have the same appeal of range, when my characters do tend to need everything and I like selling things from different categories as they show up. I also like getting more stuff than less stuff when I open a pack. Though I also haven't seen any of the new packs on the GTN aside from the really crappy ones (emotes pack or something). Maybe if I saw a gold armour pack show up I might be intrigued.

This is my main which I've had since 2012 and somehow I never noticed this. Dunno if it's an easy fix, but now I can't unsee it. http://i.imgur.com/RXtUoW0.jpg http://i.imgur.com/0KJhESg.jpg It's head type 12 with mask type 9. The issue is pretty dramatic in character designer, so I'm not sure if anything has changed, since it seems there's no way that I could have missed it how it appears now. It appears to clip with every head, so seems a flaw in the hood. http://i.imgur.com/3CaGJId.jpg

Making the enemies stronger instead of companions weaker seems a round about way of accomplishing the same thing. Companions are already tougher than players it seems, so it would just further make the player irrelevant as companions and enemies get tougher.

The DA devs learned quickly that it was a mistake, and specifically promoted how they'd done away with that system in DA:I.

I pugged hundreds of times with the LFG back in late 2.x, back when forged alliances and weekly CZ tacticals were a thing. 99% of the time I had a group who knew what they were doing, although I do still remember one time when a Trooper healer showed up in tank gear and said it helped him somehow and we were all just bad for being melee who necessarily had to take boss damage in some fights (e.g. dragging the sandstorm boss in the CZ instance to the green nodes). Tbh I suspect the problem is that with 12xp, and now ultra OP companions, people just aren't challenged to learn how to actually play like they used to. The first time I reached the end of chapter 1, on my consular, I wiped hard on the boss, because I didn't understand the concept of interrupts. I didn't quit, instead I looked it up and found out how to do it, and ended up enjoying it because it made a much more nuanced game to have to manage that in fights. I've seen people say that they haven't even got interrupt on their bar any more because it's so unnecessary.

I'm just looking for polling opinions, rather than filling somebody else's thread with them.

So I spent a week with just 4.0 before KotFE regular access launched, and was one of the people here criticizing the state of combat. Then I played KotFE and didn't care once about the easy combat. Except vaguely once or twice in terms of bosses who offered no real challenge. I think it's possible that the brilliant rush of KotFE is enough to mask the companion combat situation. While I think that the regular daily sort of endgame play is still probably very negatively affected, due to invincible companions even against Oricon champions, I think it's easy to not notice while you're spending your post-4.0 time doing the story content rather than the sort of repetitive end game gameplay content which exists in the long months between. This has led me to wonder, do people who approve/disapprove of the current companion strength tend to break down on whether they've spent their post-patch time in the KotFE story, and those who've spent their time playing the weekly mission combat while waiting for the story?

So in terms of Bioware style story, yes, this is exactly what I want. The world design has also increased dramatically from the earlier modular feel, and going through these places is fantastic. The side conversations etc from NPCs are great, and the overall quality has been raised dramatically. In terms of completely unchallenging gameplay outside of that story, no, I think the game definitely isn't where I want it. That being said, at least now that I've finished the current chapters, the combat feels like it's about building up some other meta game in the alliance. When I was just playing 4.0 without KotFE, the gameplay was just stale and boring. I think that they really need to add some decent challenging content options for solo PvE players (with better rewards, so that they're having fun and feel like they're spending their time productively for the increased effort required).

edit: Oh I think this is new packs only, nvm then. I just opened two or three dozen cartel packs, never really done it before so I'm not sure what the results should be like. Does this look bugged to you? There are a few gold items which seems better than what you were saying. (Gifts, jawas, xp buffs, and rep items not shown here) http://i.imgur.com/vaZLusN.png The main thing bugging me is the obsoleted materials.

Doubt this was intended so I thought I should report it. I clicked a referral link I saw on the forums yesterday and then wondered about this happening, but looked it up and apparently RotHC etc aren't usually given in this scenario. edit: Ah well, maybe it was intended. I'll just treat it as a trial I guess, since I wasn't sure about getting the expansion anyway.