Carnage has two main problems. Poor rage management and poor damage (burst and sustain). This new tactical tries to increase burst and sustain damage, but at the expense of turning poor rage management into practically non existent rage management. Rage issues could be fixed by adding an extra passive to Ataru form that causes it to generate rage whenever the extra Ataru strike deals damage. If that is too much, simply add a short (3?) second rate limit on it (that goes down with alacrity to prevent complications). The rage generation limit could even be temporarily disabled during berserk windows to allow for one or two more uses of gore. A change like that + the new (worse) fanged god form shard thing + another couple buffs should get the spec into a solid but not op spot. Other options could involve: Promoting a playstyle that alternates massacre and other abilities - giving non-massacre abilities bonus crit chance and damage Using massacre to stack a passive that procs when using devastating blast. Each stack (up to say, 4) causes devastating blast to basically turn into force crush where for each stack, there's a dot tick before a final big hit. Each stack increasing the damage via extra ticks of the dot and a buffed final big burst.

Glad to see an update post and I sincerely hope that we see these types of posts pop up at least every two weeks, if not every one. Having a weekly or bi-weekly update talking about the game and showing players that you do listen is extremely important for the health and sanity of the community. I am at a low point in my faith in the dev team and currently have no desire to resub until I see pre-7.0 promises being fulfilled in the forms of more content, PvP rebalance, active class rebalancing and new tacticals / set bonuses. Now about the rotating content, I dislike it - but not because it's shoe-horning me into specific content. I dislike it because some of the content is HORRIBLE and the rewards are imbalanced. Flashpoints: For example, most of the new flashpoints are horrendous to run in a pick up group - especially ones such as Nathema. I flat out refuse to play that flashpoint if it pops up in group finder because it is so challenging to random groups even in veteran mode. Other flashpoints also take waaaaaay longer than others - yet give the same rewards when they should give more. Daily / heroic areas: Personally I love shared tagging and have wanted it for years - but respawn times on mobs and respawn times on interactable objects are still too high in many areas. If I am being forced to play a certain heroic, I don't want to have to wait multiple minutes for an item to respawn and also worry about it being sniped by another player. Some heroics and dailies also take a very very long time to complete (at least for non-stealthers) yet give the same rewards as easy to complete content. GSF: Perfect. Honestly maybe my favourite content to play right now. PvP: Terrible. Not only am I experiencing even worse desync than before and the times to kill are still high because of the extreme health scaling (390k while damage barely increased), but also you need to WIN. This means that every match you lose is a complete and utter waste of your time. The daily and weekly MUST be changed to games played like galactic starfighter. I have very little hope for the big PvP update that will come in maybe 6 months. Rebalancing classes and removing abilities was supposed to be done partially to benefit times to kill in PvP, but nothing has changed and PvP modes feel laggier than ever.

I uninstalled the PTS and my subscription ends today - so I'm not going to bother testing more 7.0 things, but one thing here seems strange to me. Why is testing being done using 330 rated gear when gearing for everything apart from mastery mode operations cap out at 326? You can't even get 330 gear from veteran ops so why should testing for this be done using gear intended for nightmare modes? If the operation feels fair or just right when using 330 gear, it's going to be harder for the actual intended audience - those with 320-326 gear who may not even have augs yet because of the whole augs breaking if you don't remove them before upgrading thing. If players with 330 gear and augs are the intended audience for veteran content...why doesn't solo and veteran mode content grant gear up to 330 rating?

I don't know what your point here is, it's been a known issue for as long as I've been playing the event and should have been fixed literal years ago.

7.0 can be summed up so far as - play more for less. More grind for less tangible feedback from the new gearing systems. I've gone from being able to conceivably and comfortably outfit all of my characters with at least max level gear, (even if they don't have best in slot set bonus gear) to consistently playing about two characters and just funnelling conquest rewards from the other characters into one of those two til I hit the medal limit. (I have 32 characters) I have ZERO incentive to even attempt to gear any of my alts because currencies are legacy capped and you need to run multiple weekly areas to pay for one gear upgrade. Also paying 6,500 tech fragments for a 3% damage boost legendary is just lazy design...legendaries were supposed to be new and exciting, not just rebrands of old content. Don't even mention the fact that a bunch of tacticals were removed and no replacements were offered so we're actually losing end game gear this expansion, not gaining it. And once again, the ability morph I complained about the entire length of the 7.0 pts - Polarizing - is still useless The only response we have gotten about the poor reception to 7.0 was half mostly useless, and half telling players to stop targeting devs... We need roadmaps and DETAILED explanations as to why the devs are doing what they are doing.

I'm not going to bother installing the new PTS patch because I know that the vast majority of constructive feedback will be completely ignored, same as it was for the whole runup to 7.0's launch.

Practically every single new piece of information about 7.0 is making things worse. It just keeps adding up. I am struggling to see any reason to keep my subscription.

I made a post about this in the bugs section last week or so, hopefully it gets fixed.

I did some parsing yesterday just to see what dps was like at level 80 with the base 320 gear. I got exactly the same dps as I did when running with augmented 306 gear. So, despite supposedly having less dcds, we do the same damage - but now have 350k base hp. If pruning does nothing for the time to kill, why was it even done in the first place?? Also yeah, it is absolutely hilarious seeing all the Merc players whining and crying that they have to choose between shooting on the run or being even more tanky than they were in 6.0 - because you can pick every single one of your old defensive utilities while also having a buffed version of chaff flare. Seems like we have to wait for 7.2 in 6 months or whatever for the big PvP update which after this "expansion", I have no hope for.

It's funny cus this was the claimed reason alongside an inability to balance the game - but now at level 80 you have 350k hp so even without as many defensives, the time to kill is basically the same in pvp. We've been calling for PvE and PvP to be separated and balanced differently for years now. Either the devs aren't listening or there is some strange engine limitation preventing them from doing it - which would be weird considering there are PvP zones which disable certain abilities, so we already know that different areas can affect abilities. We also know that the devs can transform the player into other characters with different ability sets, so it stands to reason that PvP loadouts could be created and applied whenever a player launches PvP. That all being said, there is a "big" PvP update coming in 7.2 which may fix things, though considering how "big" this 10 year anniversary expansion was, I'm not holding out much hope at all.

I'd love to know why too tbh. The delay fixed a few bugs sure, but it sounds like players are still experiencing bugs that we told the devs about on the PTS...

To be fair, the devs made it explicitly clear that we wouldn't find out what Malgus is up to in the "expansion" itself, and that it would be the start of a year of content. That being said unless they plan to release this same amount of content every couple months for all of 2022 (similar to kotfe chapters), then I guess it's just confirming that the devs are jumping ship? I hate all the swtor is dead things but my god is it getting harder and harder to ignore.

I think some people are struggling to find the vehicles tab/rocket boost too because for some players, you have to scroll down through the dropdown menu to find it.

This is one of the only positive things about 7.0 so yeah, will be fun to roleplay old content with different combat styles even if the levelling process is much worse.

If you take the level 39 passive "Voltaic Engine" for Deception Assassin, it works as intended initially. However... If you then use lacerate to build stacks of Voltage as per the level 43 discipline passive, it overrides the Voltaic Engine buff and removes the 10-20% crit buff. This means that you cannot use lacerate - your only AoE ability - because it removes a substantial rotational buff.

Trust me, those of us who tested things on the PTS were extremely vocal about how negative a lot of things were. We were barely listened to and there was practically no back and forth between the players and the devs.

Heroic moment was removed from my quickbar, but I dragged it back on out of the general abilities tab. Activated it and was given my bonus bar with all 8 abilities as normal.

If only people who took the feedback to heart at an early development stage were working on this game. Whether due to a lack of resources to implement fixes or arrogance, us playtesters got ignored. We tried to give feedback and say what should be done instead, but it didn't matter. Back in July I said there was no chance that what was on PTS would be finished before release, so the delay was not a surprise at all. I thought maybe with the delay they could fix some things - which they did - but the rest is unchanged, like the placeholder inventory and garbage new character profile tab. I don't think I commented on the inventory UI on the PTS because I looked at it and thought, "this is horrible, it must be a placeholder so I'll wait for the real thing." It wasn't a placeholder.

You think that's bad? The final story flashpoint boss didn't spawn their model in for me. They were a floating lightsaber (which also insta-killed me consistently due to a floor killing bug).

If I was given the option of 1-2 hours of content, a gear update, combat styles and a cinematic or JUST more content, I'd take the content all day every day. What's the point in making a fancy million dollar budget cinematic if the expansion itself is unfinished and lacking in every aspect. The devs overhyped early on, overpromised and just didn't have the resources to succeed on any front resulting in all the marketing being completely negative: we can't do this, we have to push back that etc. Such a shame.

Yeah we were told that they had big plans for 7.0. Turns out the big plans were to try and drive as many players away as possible!

I am actually being very generous with the time I stated because I did the bonus missions and was stuck for at least 10 minutes finding out from other players in the flashpoint general chat how to cheese the final boss so that I could actually complete it. If you're a stealther, you could maybe do it in an hour or less...

About 2 hours of content. That was it. This wasn't an expansion, it could have easily just been 6.x. It was smaller than Onslaught and Onslaught felt fast. I don't even know what to say because there's nothing to talk about in terms of the actual expansion content. Like, sure it was cool going to Manaan for 30mins, getting romance baited by the only good new character AGAIN and then I had to sit through a 5 minute final flashpoint boss battle letting my companion kill the boss because it was bugged. If nothing else, I can see why BioWare did not build up any hype whatsoever for this release, it really didn't warrant any of it. I'm not angry, just disappointed. The gameplay changes on the other hand? They can be summed up as follows. Polarizing. The Sorcerer Corruption ability morph called Polarizing. A 3% heal buff to innervate once every 2 minutes with polarity shift. I said that it needed changing on the pts and nothing was done about it. I said I'd laugh if such a pathetic ABC choice made it to live, and it did. Some combat styles don't even have art for the ABC choices. There was no quality control. PTS testers were completely ignored and now all I see is a general chat full of salty players who didn't realise they'd be losing so much with 7.0. What a joke.

Can confirm this is happening to me too and is happening to literally every other player I see talking about it in general chat.

Same here.