One would assume that it will work exactly the same as how it works right now. We don't recognise players by their origin style / base class on live anyway and we'll still only be using one combat style / advanced class in 7.0. You can't change your combat style in a phase so swapping between your two styles won't affect the ui in warzones and flashpoints etc either. For guild windows and /who lists it'll probably automatically update as you swap your styles - just as how they update when you relog onto a different character.

Questions so far that haven't been answered: 1) Why can't players from certain countries (Brazil, Romania, Russia and Ireland among others) take part in the competition? 2) Can screenshots be taken from within strongholds, flashpoints, operations and any other phases or do they have to be from the "open world"? 3) For players with higher native resolutions than 1920x1080, how should they submit their images? Do they: Temporarily restrict in game resolution to 1920x1080 before taking a screenshot, Take higher resolution screenshots and send those in for the SWTOR team to crop themselves, Take higher resolution screenshots and crop ourselves before sending to the specified email.

From the main status updates / known issues stickied thread: "Players will not be able to queue for group content at level 80 via the abilities window, so they will have to have to manually walk into any content they want to experience" Maybe they played in a warzone on a previous PTS cycle?

Honestly, PvP shouldn't be affected by your stats at all. Expertise isn't a way to balance PvP and PvE because all it does is make it so that one player with a higher stat does more damage than a player with a lower stat. That isn't balance - that's gatekeeping based on gear. To actually separate PvP and PvE, passives, utilities/ability tree morphs, availability of certain abilities etc. would all need to be taken into account and balanced separately for each mode. Having a different gear stat doesn't change anything. On the other hand, having a set bonus or tactical that only works in PvE and another that only works in PvP would work.

Before I write out my thoughts on all the passives and how the disciplines perform, the Sentinel still feels like it has been overpruned. The Sentinel has some 16 abilities baseline, 17 with the level 70 choice from what I can tell. There is no reason why something like force camouflage should not be a baseline ability when it is one of the most well known sentinel/marauder abilities and what helps set it apart from the guardian and juggernaut. Just like with my latest bit of testing on the Guardian, I tested combat capabilities on Onderon at level 80 with 328 gear and no tacticals. I also fought against the champion Imperial Guard enemies due to their higher health (3 million vs 50k of normal mobs) and damage allowing me to test sustained damage, rotations and defensive capabilities. I'm skipping the universal/ general passives because there isn't really much to say beyond transcendence and force camouflage should be baseline abilities. Sentinel has 4 or so less abilities than everyone else and has no self healing. It needs something. Watchman Combat Concentration Now for something that affects how much I enjoy playing Concentration and how it could be resolved. Concentration on live is actually my least favourite discipline to play because out of the three Sentinel disciplines, it is the most dependent on having 30 stacks of centering before a fight. Due to this, and how annoying it is for all the disciplines to sit and build centering stacks between fights, I propose that Valorous Call have its cooldown reset after a fight. This means that instead of being forced to wait between fights, you can just force leap + valorous call + zen every time. This is akin to how all Guardians now have the cooldown of force leap, saber throw and combat focus reset after every fight and follows the same reasoning. This would be a big quality of life improvement and would absolutely result in me playing the combat style more. For group and ops content, you'd still be able to build centering before a fight as normal so that you can pop both inspiration and zen in a row. But, for solo content, players would be free to jump from target to target without extended periods of downtime between fights.

Since there weren't any updates to the Guardian this last PTS patch, I'm going to reconsolidate my thoughts having done some more testing with the previous set of changes (saber throw baseline, ability tree reshuffle). Testing was done with the new level 80 boost, 328 gear and no tacticals of any kind. Since normal mobs don't offer any sort of challenge (beyond the abundance of abilities that slow the Guardian - who has even less means to escape slows now), I decided to fight the champion Imperial Guard mobs that usually defend speeders and medical droids. Normal mobs have between 50-170k hp while the Imperial Guard has 3 million and thus is more like a parsing dummy that fights back - allowing you to test your damage, rotation and survivability all at once. General Thoughts and universal passives Vigilance and Focus performed fairly similarly though interestingly I seemed to be taking less damage on Focus than on Vigilance (on live, Vigilance tends to be more survivable). I attribute this to the lack of a permanent 5% damage reduction passive for Vigilance (it appears to have been removed), and a decently high uptime 10% damage reduction granted by the level 80 passive for Focus. Both Focus and Vigilance kept high levels of focus throughout the fight resulting in no need at all to use strike to regain focus. Rotations remain unchanged from live though have more room for higher focus attacks. On the other hand, my health bar did not move at all while playing Defense in DPS gear (I didn't even have a shield equipped). Not only that, but it appeared as though I was doing more damage as a skank tank. Due to the marked focus passive, I only needed to use strike a couple times over the course of the fight. From this initial comparison, combined with the fact that Defense actually has more abilities baseilne and is thus more interesting to play, leads me to believe that Defense will be the go to class for many players in solo content. Defense feels like the true Guardian experience while Vigilance and Focus are missing that extra oomf to make them feel like an unstoppable juggernaut of combat. Shared Passives: Essentially, Saber Reflect should be baseline. Force Leap and Guardian Leap should be merged, Guardian and Juggernaut need more tools to deal with movement impairing effects baseline. Right now when hit by any amount of slows, you have one movement tool baseline and no way to deal with slows. Whereas on live you could use DCDs to partially negate this, on the PTS you are just a sitting duck. Combat focus breaking movement impairing effects is nice, but when you consider that ranged classes such as a sorcerer can target you with a movement impairing effect with nearly every one of their abilities (at least for lightning), breaking one of those effects every 30-40 seconds does nothing. I'll briefly cover each discipline only passive below: Focus Vigilance Defense My overall conclusion is that Defense feels like a Guardian. Vigilance and Focus feel like low mobility budget versions of Defense since they seem to do about the same amount of damage with half the survivability. The animations for Focus make you feel like a zealous warrior jumping into the thick of a battle, but despite your heavy armour and brutal attacks you are easily slowed and shut down. Vigilance still feels too bursty to me. Focus is supposed to be the burst spec, yet vigilance is capable of reaching the same high damage crit hits, auto crit blade storms etc while also having better sustained damage. All disciplines need better mobility tools, whether this be through merging force leap and guardian leap, granting more means to deal with movement impairing effects or other. Fighting mobs that slow you every other attack and being forced to walk slowly between them because you've used your only mobility ability as a melee only class sucks. This will only get worse in PvP where ranged classes are gaining even more means through which to slow and root despite their inherent ranged advantage. Saber reflect should be baseline. We also still need confirmation on what is happening with threat and why some classes are receiving AoE reduction passives / ability tree choices, why other classes have no threat drops etc. There doesn't appear to be any consistency between classes for how threat drops and threat in general is going to function as of 7.0.

(timestamped, discussed between 40:00 - 42:30) Some popular/rotational tacticals and set bonuses will be baked into the combat styles themselves. Chris said that "maybe 10% of the combat tacticals" will be rolled into combat styles in this way. The cosmetic tacticals probably won't change at all. So, we're definitely keeping tacticals. Some are going to go away because of overlap with the new ability tree system, but we haven't seen any new ones yet on the PTS (we're expecting a gearing phase of the PTS to come about at some point). Apart from that he said that they're not ready to show all the details yet (especially details about the "long view" multiple tiers of gearing that we're getting next year).

Theoretically, balance patches could be rolled into the current bi-weekly maintenance patches (though every two weeks might be a bit much considering the type of game SWTOR is). Further, a lot of balancing would be adjusting numbers and percentages - likely in an internal database - and I don't imagine that would be too difficult in practice to accomplish. The harder part would be establishing a team that constantly checks player feedback, PvP stats, times to kill and dps levels for PvE etc. I'd rather have more frequent balance patches where the combat styles go up and down in terms of viability over the course of a year, than what we have currently where a poorly performing class will sit in the gutter for over a year with no changes. Further, with combat styles, we'll have two combat styles to switch between and 6 disciplines within those. This means that even if one is over-nerfed, we can simply swap to our other combat style until the next patch. The devs also talked about making PvP changes next year, and part of that (though we don't know what these changes are yet) depends on how well the combat styles are balanced. You can improve the quality of life for PvPers, add PvP gear for e.g. but if a combat style feels terrible because they're underpowered and haven't received a buff in months - players won't want to play it in PvP. Hopefully the fact that the devs are going through the effort of rebalancing every single class and setting a new bar + creating new set bonuses means that they do care and will begin to balance more often beginning with 7.0 If we could get one balance pass each month I'd be happy.

Looking through the requirements and it would be nice if this part could be clarified: "Image Size: 1920x1080 The team will crop the chosen screenshots to a 4:3 format." Since I use an ultrawide, my native resolution is a lot higher than this. Does this mean that to participate I would need to: Temporarily restrict my in game resolution to 1920x1080, Take 3440x1440 screenshots (my native resolution) and send those in for the SWTOR team to crop themselves, Take 3440x1440 screenshots and crop myself before sending to the specified email. I love taking landscape shots whenever I find a pretty view, so hopefully having a larger screen doesn't prevent those of us with higher resolutions from participating!

I've always felt like powertechs and vanguards should be these beefy brawly characters, jumping into the middle of fights and tanking large amounts of damage. Currently, mercenaries and commandos are the ones doing that...

It has been confirmed that the current 6.0 set bonuses will not work for level 80 players - there will be new gear sets and we will likely see them on the PTS in the next couple months.

You're welcome and I hope you have fun using it! At the very least it has more place in a Shadow or Assassin's kit than a Sage or Sorcerer's (aside from last hitting people in PvP for the lols).

From a follow up by Max and Sema, who approached the devs for a few clarifications after their interview with Chris Schmidt:

For Deception and Infiltration, saber strike is rarely used if at all in the rotation that is true. Darkness uses it a decent amount but only if you start to run out of force. For Hatred and Serenity on the other hand, saber strike is actually fairly important to the rotation because of how much force it regenerates (each saber strike hit regens 1 force, proccing lightning charge or force technique also regens force). If you don't use saber strike in your rotation for these two specs, your rotation becomes energy negative. What's more, if you really like using it I have a bonus tip for you: Two time trouble is the best in slot tactical for hatred and serenity (for single target damage) and causes all your melee attacks to have a 50% chance to proc creeping terror or sever force for extra damage. Saber strike hits three times compared to double strike/ thrash which hit twice. This means that there isn't that much of a difference between using saber strike and double strike due to the extra damage proc chance (though double strike has a higher damage ceiling with crits) and you'll never run out of force. (Saber strike = 3 white damage hits, 3 x 50% chances to proc lightning/force technique for energy damage, 3 x 50% chances to proc two time trouble for internal damage) Saber strike will never be a proper damaging ability because that's not its purpose. The purpose of saber strike is to be a 0 force cost filler and regeneration tool that still does some damage if you mess up your rotation. (It is still fun using saber strike to last hit things because of the kill animations ) If you haven't been using serenity or hatred, I do recommend trying it.

This is absolutely correct. You can pick both a Mercenary and Powertech for your two combat styles which gives access to all three disciplines from each - allowing you to play a tank, healer and damage dealer. For the amount of loadouts, it has been confirmed that the current plan is to have 4-5 loadouts depending on whether you are subbed or not. What we don't know is exactly how many each type of player gets. The current assumption being subbed players will have 5, preferred may have 4, f2p will have 4 or lower.

They're still useful for increasing your alliance specialist influence levels, doing the resistance missions on other characters, getting companion gifts and the remnant set gear. At the very least you can just sell the duplicate gear and companion gifts for a few more credits. I doubt they'll disappear because they're still used for kotfe content and due to the reasons listed by others - they weren't removed in 5.0 or 6.0. Would be nice if we were given a choice between the current heroic crate and a new one. That way players who have finished the alliance specialist missions and completed their remnant sets gain another reason to keep running heroics.

In the Christ Schmidt interview, he implied that combat styles is a step in the direction of breaking down the barriers between all origin stories and combat styles, but this is currently unfeasible due to the amount of animation work needed (he gave an example of how if you gave a tech character a lightsaber, they'd shoot them like a gun because animations aren't tied to weapons). So, there's hope that in the near to not so distant future (still talking a year plus most likely) we will be able to have powertechs with rifles, sniper rifles, pistols etc - especially if players continue to be vocal about wanting it on the forums.

This is one of the main misconceptions I've seen on the forums where people confuse classes, origin styles, advanced classes and combat styles. To be very clear: Base class = origin style (new name) Advanced class = combat style (new name) When 7.0 launches, your current origin style does not change. You will however be able to choose a new combat style. Origin styles have no attachment to combat styles beyond the force and tech barrier. Origin styles do not grant any abilities for use in combat. Origin styles solely dictate your story. When you pick your first and second combat styles, you do not gain access to more story content because combat styles solely dictate your in-game combat. If you are playing a jedi knight origin style and currently are a jedi guardian, when 7.0 launches you will likely be able to choose a different first combat style, or continue with the jedi guardian combat style you already have. Then you will be able to pick a second combat style. If this were say, a jedi sage combat style, you would still be playing a jedi knight, just with the jedi shadow combat style. This is because the jedi shadow no longer has any ties to the jedi consular origin story.

I don't mind having to get new gear with a level cap increase and it provides an opportunity for a load of new sets that will work with the pruning/rebalancing. 6.0 has been out for a good while now and just being able to get end game gear and best in slot items without having to spam the same operations over and over has been enjoyable for me. The things I would change with new gearing are the number of modification variants and amplifiers. The amount of rng for those who are trying to achieve the perfect stats is obscene. There needs to be a better way than having some 30 odd variants, especially when it's been widely accepted that you should just aim for one specific variant. Amplifiers are also really annoying and in my opinion should not offer any combat advantages. Yes, those with billions of credits don't care, but those with only a few million or less who just hit end game get gatekept out of harder content and ranked PvP because they simply don't have the currency to sink into gambling stats. Amplifiers would be much better if you could straight up pick the one you want to get and pay a tech frag cost to apply it without any RNG (much lower than the cost of the gear itself). Apart from those rng elements, I'm looking forward to getting new gear and levelling up again despite having spent the past several months getting set bonuses for every advanced class and 306 for all my characters.

This alone is a pretty bad change I agree. Doubling the time it takes to use an interface goes completely against everything I've learned about user experience design. You want the process to be as simple and quick and engaging as possible. The dropdown menu not only takes twice as long to navigate - more than that actually - but it also hides its contents which leaves newer users guessing where they are supposed to find their abilities or vehicles etc. This really is unnecessary and realistically we would all have likely been fine if the current window on live was just added in its entirety to the new one. I get why it's being done, to reduce the large number of ui components (and we don't even know details about what the ui updates are going to be next year), but this has gone just a bit too far.

Assassin is a combat style that I've played extensively in all aspects of the game - I even once made an assassin who levelled up solely by playing PvP and levelled another to 75 in the past couple weeks. While my knowledge and experience is primarily from a damage dealer's standpoint, I've recently been dipping my toes into tanking on an Assassin and so have at least a basic understanding of how to play one and how they are supposed to function (at least in current content) when played optimally. Writing this has been a lot more challenging than writing the Sorcerer feedback as I feel that Sorcerer genuinely had a lot of good options, and the bad options can easily be fixed and buffed. Assassin on the other hand, has had drastic changes to its survivability and cc potential across the board. Assassin didn't have as many abilities to lose as some of the other classes and as such, moving 5 abilities into the ability tree really hurts and requires a more complex response. Echoing my Sorcerer post - all my testing was done without using tacticals of any kind because we still have not received confirmation on which tacticals are being baked into the base classes, which are staying and which are being removed. As such I think that it is completely pointless testing with tacticals which may or may not even exist in 7.0. If this changes during a later PTS stage, I will begin using them again. General choices and ability options: Since the level 20, 35 and 70 opt ins and choices aren't as neat as the Sorcerers, I'm going off the rails and combining them anyway into the "general" choices category. Spike - one of my favourite abilities in the game - is now gone completely from the damage dealing specs and is an opt in ability for tanks who arguably have made better use out of it due to tanks negating the stealth requirement and granting DR with a certain set bonus. I'll discuss Spike heavily later and why it should stay in an altered form. Guard is also finally gone from the damage specs as expected. For tanks, Spike is the level 20 opt in while severing slash, whirlwind and overload are the level 70 choices. For dps, overload is the level 20 opt in and severing slash, force shroud and whirlwind are the level 70 choices. Both tanks and dps can opt into overcharge saber at level 35. Before we even get into specific passives and choices, there is so much to talk about here that I'll put it inside a spoiler tag with a TLDR. (Sorry it's so long and congratulations if you read it all, I really needed to list all my thoughts and reasonings for why I'm suggesting these changes.) TLDR version of my thoughts and suggested changes for the general options and ability choices: Force shroud baseline for all specs Shroud of madness level 80 passive extends Shroud duration by 2 seconds rather than granting 2 seconds of Shroud when activating Force Cloak Overcharge saber grants 25% damage resistance for all specs or 25% DR for tank, half surging charge rate limit for deception and much higher lifesteal for hatred - stays at level 35 Overload becomes the level 20 option for all specs Level 70 choice becomes Severing Slash, Whirlwind and Electrocute for all specs Severing Slash is buffed to incorporate AoE tacticals for each spec - reset death field for hatred, arc discharge for deception, reset discharge and wither for darkness Whirlwind - bake in current utilities -> instant cast version + multi target for PvE Add Spike baseline for all specs as their base stun. Cooldown changed to 30 seconds, stealth requirement removed for all classes. Damage lowered if not used from stealth. Only knocks down weak and standard NPC targets. Maul spike level 20 passive changed to provide a 90% 3 second slow to targets after Spike's stun ends Bake Force Phase into Force Speed so that it always removes movement impairing effects and replace Force Phase's slot with a 30% slow when the target is struck by thrash or voltaic slash All players in PvP matches should gain an increased detection radius of 10m to allow room for stealth classes to have better defensives. Essentially a revert to the days of blackout and sneak but without ruining quality of life in PvE or adding more buttons back in. Now onto the discipline specific options and overviews. Darkness Darkness feels mostly the same - with the caveat that you have to opt into overcharge saber and force shroud lasts 3 seconds instead of up to 5. Honestly I'm pretty happy with the Darkenss passives, there are some fun options and combinations here and even some options that make sense for off tanking. Deception Deception has some extremely fun options. Finally you can make reaping strike feel like part of your rotation rather than that one button you press once per 18 seconds. Has the highest survivability potential out of it and hatred due to retaining rotational damage reduction + the new voltaic defence. Burst is the name and there are many ways to do it. I love that you can opt for safe passives that provide flat buffs, or opt for crazy combinations that drastically shake up the rotation with a higher skill ceiling. Deception feels more fun than on live for sure with these changes. Hatred Oh my sweet summer child, you have good AoE but the rest is just kinda meh. There are at least 3 clauses that begin with "killing a target" or "when a target dies" - which sound great! But if your target is dead, why does it matter? The answer is more AoE. Madness got some awesome buffs to its sustain but none of that translated here to hatred - the melee and thus squishier version. I'm a bit disappointed but as always I have solutions! This took me about 3-4 hours to make in total and is probably the most comprehensive and thought out post I've made on a game forum. I have given justification for all my suggestions and at the very least I hope it was an enjoyable read and gives the devs some more ideas for how they could improve each spec. Hatred absolutely needs the most work if we're talking specific disciplines and is the only discipline so far that nerfs its rotation over live. I really do urge you (the devs) to consider shifting round the level 20 and 70 abilities and reworking Spike to establish it as THE assassin hard stun - creating a stronger differentiation between the skills available to a sorcerer/sage and assassin/shadow. We don't have base classes anymore, so why do they both need electrocute - a shared ability - baseline? Spike is way too cool an ability to be left in the dirt for damage specs and I won't feel the same without it. To end on a high, Deception feels fantastic. Love it. Amazing work as well with all the passive names, I got a kick out of reading them. Thanks for reading!

Glad you're enjoying it so much! That's what playing video games is all about Engineering is also getting some fun options on the PTS to look forward to such as explosive probe resetting on kills and laze target provides a buff to probe damage as well as the auto crit.

For galactic seasons 2, there are substantial changes to the way dailies and weeklies work. There will be no random objectives and you can instead simply pick the 7 weekly objectives you want to complete out of a pool of 10. Current daily priority objectives are being removed and instead you just have to earn personal conquest experience - which you can do however you'd like. Quoted from this dev post: Examples of what the weeklies might be can be seen in this post.

My first and main character is my Sorcerer and I've played every spec in every iteration of the game since I started playing, so, here are my thoughts! All my testing was done without using tacticals of any kind because we still have not received confirmation on which tacticals are being baked into the base classes, which are staying and which are being removed. As such I think that it is completely pointless testing with tacticals which may or may not even exist in 7.0. If this changes during a later PTS stage, I will begin using them again. Discipline independent choices: It seems like the only ability that has been completely removed is force slow, but due to some abilities doing conditional damage based on the target being slowed - this feels more like a bug. If it's gone I won't really miss it, especially since both dps specs already have means to slow and/or root targets with rotational abilities. Ability tree opt in abilities are cloud mind and unlimited power - both expected. It's nice to see cloud mind gain the 25% damage reduction baseline, but echoing other posts on the forums, we need to know the dev's plans for threat in 7.0. If tanks aren't going to be generating far higher amounts of threat, dps characters not having threat drops baseline makes no sense whatsoever and this will simply give the illusion of choice as those characters will be forced to take the "opt in" threat drop. Unlimited power I was expecting, honestly I'm surprised that the raid buffs are still in the game at all. Level 70 choice is between extrication (most useful for healers in all content and PvP hutt ball), volt rush (garbage ability I'll never pick) and force barrier (absolutely mandatory to survive in PvP). Corruption Corruption has gained the one thing I've been missing while healing in PvE content - the ability to tech further into aoe healing. This is huge and allows for group compositions with multiple sorcerers, one who focuses on single target and one who focuses on aoe healing. Lightning Lightning feels more or less the same, but with the ability to tech into higher aoe or single target damage - or gain even more damage reduction, up to 32% with one of thundering blast's new passives. This gives a lot more sustained negation, but lightning is still very weak to burst - even more so without force barrier baseline. Madness Madness self healing can reach very high levels - perhaps too high in aoe scenarios. The amount of self sustain this spec can reach is amazing but just like lightning, it is still weak to high burst without force barrier. Overall there are some good passives in here, but also a lot of bad or redundant ones that need redesigning. I'm also confused as to why Sorcerer retained both whirlwind and electrocute as base abilities - but if they are to have one single not great defensive baseline, it kind of makes sense. I'd prefer to have force barrier be a baseline ability and move instant cast whirlwind up to the level 70 choice. Force Barrier is THE defining defensive cooldown for Sorcerers and Sages and without it, they just die to any form of burst. I'm happy with how the pruning has turned out for the most part, but still confused as to why a threat drop is being considered an opt in ability. Something I've really noticed with the ability tree is that your first two discipline specific abilities get 3 dedicated passives. But, your last two discipline specific abilities do not. Further, we go from having an ability tree choice every 5 levels between levels 15 to 40, then skipping to 50, 55, 60, skipping to 70 then up to 80. This means that we have the space for the second two discipline specific abilities to gain their own sets of passives/morphs, so why don't we!? For example, death field gets unrelenting affliction, death brand and sustained corruption at level 15. Force Leech and Demolish get nothing. Is there a reason why there are some 10 level gaps and no ability morphs for the last two discipline specific abilities? It seems clear to me that there should be something there at level 45 and another set of ability specific choices at level 60 (moving the current level 60 passives up to 65). This would provide the players with even more ways to customize their combat styles to be different from each other and would offer ways to include current mandatory tacticals into the ability tree. For example, Demolish could gain a passive that causes it to affect all nearby targets with a deathmark - the same as a current tactical (though maybe nerfed to just initial damage). It could then also gain a burst option where it deals all its damage in one hit consuming any remaining deathmarks for extra bonus damage, and a sustained damage option that increases its duration and does something else. In general, all the specs play more or less the same as they do on live, but with better self sustain options and the ability to tech into higher single target damage. Corruption feels amazing and as someone who frequently heals as a Corruption Sorcerer in ops, I can't wait for these changes - but some of them, just like the other specs, need a bit of reworking to be considered useful. Force barrier should be baseline rather than whirlwind as it is their only powerful defensive ability besides self healing and stacking DR. Volt rush is still terrible and I won't use it or miss it. I've said my piece about threat drops and I'm sure everyone else will mention it too.

Slight typo, don't want anyone getting the wrong idea and posting in the wrong place