Well, aside from another gunship with a damage overcharge hitting you, or a Proton torp with damage overcharge hitting you, you're almost certainly not getting one shot. Sure, one particular shot is getting you, but the real problem is the 3, 4, 5, 6, or more shots that landed before it, which apparently you're not noticing. Don't feel bad. Lack of situational awareness tends to plague all beginners in GSF, and honestly, can even occasionally snag a very experienced pilot. Gunships, as nice as they are for beginners in the sense that they have a weapon that hits hard from a long distance, are notorious for their tendency to get pilots focused on looking down the scope at their current target, and ignoring the 1 or more ships coming in from the side with murderous intent. A good exercise for a beginner is to take two rail shots, go back to lasers, look at the mini-map, and reposition, then repeat the process. Do this until frequently looking at the minimap to spot ships sneaking up on you from the sides or behind is so automatic that you don't have to think about it anymore. That should increase your survivability significantly. If you used a missile breaking engine maneuver then you didn't get locked one second later. Sorry, but the game doesn't work that way. The engine maneuvers give a 3 second immunity. Which in battle when you're feeling overwhelmed, may feel like only one second, but the silicon in your computer experiences time in a less subjective manner than humans do, so we can reliably bet that it's actually 3 seconds, no matter what it feels like. Distortion Field is not an engine maneuver. It is a shield ability, can only break locks before the missile is fired, and provides no immunity period at all. DF is a good choice for gunships, and using it before going to an engine maneuver is often a good play, but it does not work the same way as engine maneuvers anymore. Don't confuse/conflate the two, and be aware that guides written before the 5.5 balance patch may not be updated for the current game mechanics. In terms of not being able to connect with missiles, part of your problem may be not knowing the difference between the rules for lasers and the rules for missiles. Lasers need to have the target inside the primary weapon arc (usually, but not always the larger one), and then you need to line up your reticle over the lead indicator. Missiles you just need to keep the target SHIP, not the lead indicator, inside the missile firing arc while holding down right mouse long enough to get a solid lock, then release. If you can hit, at all, ever, with railguns or lasers you should be able to land any of the missiles on targets quite reliably once you correctly understand how the missiles rules works. The geometry/mouse movement for missiles is significantly easier (less speed needed, less precision needed) than it is for lasers or railguns. Figure out what you're doing wrong in terms of process, and it should be pretty easy, since it sounds like you have some degree of competence with lasers and railguns. https://www.youtube.com/c/GSFSchool has plenty of examples of lining up missile shots, laser shots, and railgun shots, in an instructional format. In the channels section of that page, there are other good channels such as: Drakolich's Channel has a mix of instructional, at a more advanced level, content and also a whole bunch of just PoV of what it looks like on the screen of someone who is very good at killing stuff in GSF (and also at staying alive). And here's a brief vid I made for another person that was having trouble landing missile shots. The mechanics are the same for other missiles, but in general they have wider arcs and quicker locks so are easier than torps. Note that for the current game mechanics, if you want to learn by watching, you need videos from after Oct. 2017 in order for the mechanics to generally be up to date. Also as mentioned, hit up people for advice, grouping, etc. here on the forum, on the GSF Discord, or in the /GSF in game chat channel. We are, generally speaking, happy to help if we can.

First check your server for current quantity and price on the GTN. Use that as a guideline if there are a significant number of them. If there are none? Well you can advertise on fleet chat and annoy people. Otherwise, at a guess, try around 15 to 20 million, post for a few days, if they don't sell work your way down in increments of 2 million or so until they start selling. May take a while, it really depends on what people are or aren't looking for. For old timers, things that unlocked via reputation grinds can also be niche enough to sometimes have significant value, because not every crafter will be able to craft them. Color crystals, craftable dyes, and consumables (stims, adrenals, medpacks) aren't big ticket items, but there does tend to be steady demand.

In the upper right corner of the GSF hangar there is a tiny icon that will load you into the GSF tutorial. The tutorial kinda sucks. There is a GSF forum here, with plenty of guides, on every server if you do /cjoin GSF you will get into the custom GSF chat channel, and there's a fair chance of being able to ask questions there, and there is a GSF Discord channel where you can get lots of expert advice, though at present probably best way to get a valid invite link is to ask in the /GSF channel or for a message from someone on the GSF forum as there was a spam bot epidemic a couple of weeks ago so I think they're trying to be a little cautious about access until whoever it was gets bored and wanders off to target some other channel. Basically you can get any question you want answered, if you can record footage of you playing with OBS or similar people will watch your tape and give detailed feedback on how to improve, and if you like and schedules work out people will even group with you ingame and get in chat to give 1 on 1 tutoring. It's sort of insanely nice/friendly for a computer game PvP game mode community. Well, unless you're in game and looking down the wrong end of a railgun barrel, then you're toast. But people will be happy to tell you how to avoid that, and how to do it yourself if you ask in the pause before the next match. For credits: Fast and easy: Buy armor sets with CC and sell on the GTN, though with the anniversary sales this may not be the best time to do that. If you have old unbound adaptive armors in storage they might be worth a lot on the GTN if they look cool and aren't widely available anymore. Crafting: If you have old armor sets that have more or less disappeared, crafting them for outfits can be profitable, again, if they look cool. A blue level 34 chest piece or helmet can go for tens or hundreds of millions of credits if it's good looking and doesn't have equivalent models available elsewhere. Crafting: At max level, anything that can be broken down into Mk-11 augmentation kit components will sell for decent markups, probably around 150 k to 300 k credits per unit. You have to move a lot of volume to do this, but it's pretty reliable if you have time and a lot of alts with a lot of max level companions. Run FPs and Ops. The loot and rewards add up, and at higher difficulty levels the Ops crafting materials drops can be quite valuable. Any activity that earns a lot of tech fragments. Get 10 k fragments, convert to an OEM or RPM crafting mat (little quest datapad near the spoils of war vendor) and sell for something like 30 to 50 million credits each. Daily heroic missions from Ossus terminal. Turn in the alliance crates to Ogurrob, Aygo, Sanaa, and Visz. Aside from the credits and gear that you vendor, the real paydirt is the legendary quality companion gifts. Roughly a 20% drop rate, and worth 250 k to 300 k each on the GTN. On a stealth character with the easier heroics it's an easy 1 to 2 million credits / hour played, but a bit grindy. Playing the GTN. Spreadsheets help a lot here. Look for stuff that sells well, get a feel for what the market price is, and buy low, sell high. There are weird opportunities here like being able to buy crafting materials for more from the GTN kiosks on fleet than from the vendors standing around on fleet. Why do people pay a markup instead of just walking over to the vendor? No idea, but the price difference is yours for the taking if you want it.

Keep in mind that the hook counts were based on conditions when getting a stronghold bonus had pretty substantial in game perks, and the number and accessibility of decorations was substantially lower than it is now. Getting to 100% stronghold bonus, was a fairly significant grind, especially if you didn't want to just fill ever small hook with whatever the cheapest thing the vedors were selling up to the cap for that particular decoration. If you needed to fill every single hook to get to the cap, which is how the bonus was calculated, then the mob would have been out with their torches and pitchforks over the size and expense of the grind. Basically hook cap number is a legacy feature from when the strongholds update released, and they've kept newer strongholds more or less in line with the original ones as far as that goes.

The Bioware stance is more or less: "Absolutely not, under no circumstances whatsoever!" There is a slight distinction here, in that you can read the combat log, and display calculations based on that with tools like Star Parse or similar, but the thing to note here is that this is not a mod that modifies the game in any way. It's just reading text output, and then processing that output in a completely separate program, and if displaying, displaying using that completely separate program as well. So I suppose you could come up with maps of your own, and a display program for them that would bring up an overlay window, but for input you'd probably need to open the map in game, get your map/instance name, and your current coordinates, and then type them into your mapping program, because I don't know that location data is in the combat log, and if it's not there's no way I know of to get location data from the game to a standalone program other than manually checking and entering that doesn't involve touching the game's code, and touching the game's code is extremely, extremely against the TOS. Ban, account terminated, cease and desist letter from legal department level not allowed. Which is sort of a shame, because if modding were allowed we'd probably have a highly functional map mod in a month or two, instead of a map that doesn't even show things like vendors on fleet that it's supposed to show because somehow they broke something in how the map updates display selection categories years ago, and haven't figured out how to fix it. Because after all, telling people to log out and log back in again is totally the way to address map functionality issues:rolleyes:. To be fair, coordinating development when important game functions are outsourced can have significant downsides. Like you change something you need to change for good reasons, and suddenly everyone's UI mods are broken and they more or less can't play, and you, the developer, don't have the intellectual property rights to go fix the mod, and your base UI is so rudimentary and fossilized that it's not a workable substitute. Then the mod developer gets run over by a bus. What do you do at that point? It's a tradeoff of: problems you know and control, vs fixes you don't know or control. Bioware chooses control, about as strongly as they can.

Two reasons, one good, one not so good: Not everyone does "content creation stuff" on the developer team. The people coding the new abilities, rescaling all the content, and generally doing invisible back end stuff don't necessarily do story and art and music. If they have time and can reorganize things to be a bit less "spaghetti code" under the hood it's a sensible use of their time. Exploring every possible iteration of the square wheel before moving on to the pentgonal wheel for an expansion, before reverting back to the familiar comfort of the triangular wheel "is the BIOWARE WAY child. :csw_fett:" "Useless to question why, it is. :csw_yoda:"

I mean in terms of loss of existing players I'd guess that 1.0, 3.0, or 4.0 would be worse than 7.0 will likely be. They didn't do well in terms of having an endgame to retain endgame players for any of those expansions. I mean, they also didn't for 5.0 or 6.0, but by then they had already shed a lot of the players sensitive to that. The thing that's most unusual for 7.0 is that it's the first expansion where there seems to be a conscious decision to sacrifice previous QoL improvements in service of other goals. For example: ability bloat, GTN inflation, Conquest spamming, etc. In a past expansion you might see that sort of trying to fix a problem, but it would be targeted in a way that didn't walk back other forms of QoL.

So from a developer's perspective: You're planning to play for at least an extra six months before you think about unsubscribing due to boredom with 7.0's content releases? That's GREAT! Game design working as intended. Oh, yeah baby. Remember kids, always check your posts against your official SWTOR Dev-speak decoder ring before posting to make sure you don't send messages that don't mean what you thought they meant. I jest a bit here, but there's an element of truth too. From the publisher's perspective, having a slower less pleasant game experience for the players might not always be an entirely bad thing.

I don't think it makes things easier for new players. As things currently stand, I think it's actually a bit more difficult in solo leveling due to the adjustments to scaling (not enough to really matter though I think. Mostly it's just a bit slower, and you can compensate with rested xp, xp boosts, and double xp events, which are granted things that new players won't know, but they'll survive anyway.) In low level group content, I think it will make things significantly more difficult. Tanks won't have the tools needed to tank, healers won't have the tools needed to heal, though I suppose DPS will just be a bit underwhelming. As it stands, in groupfinder flashpoints at low level you'll basically need to queue as DPS at low level and hope there's a surplus of high level tanks and healers queued up. Everyone always levels as DPS after all, right? By the time you get to KotFE / KotET levels though, I think things will be about back to where they are on live, more or less, if you're well geared and have figured out how your class works with the game's mechanics. In terms of quality of life improvements, it looks like 7.0 will mostly be neutral to slightly negative for players, or perhaps slightly positive if you really wanted to downsize the number of alts you play to just one or two, and were wishing you could cram several advanced classes of combat roles into one character. Unclear how much QoL the devs will get for themselves in terms of ease of maintenance and content creation out of 7.0. Honestly, it looks like little to none of the expansion is really targeted at new players, and distribution of abilities as you level in the new system makes it feel like almost no thought was given to new player experience/QoL issues until they started asking for feedback on the forums a few weeks ago. Not that I think there are really significant new issues for new players, but the longstanding ones are more noticeable because the leveling slog has been stretched out to 80 levels now. I do hope that the requests for input from the devs do reflect enough interest in new player retention that they actually put in some serious work to address some of the leveling QoL problems.

So, what? The David Bowie armor set? With matching hair, makeup, and some sort of glitter based weapon particle effect? O.k., yeah. I'm on board. Especially if there are custom sound effects thrown in.

Yes, the ship hit/collision box(es), the camera location, and the "shot origin" coordinates are indeed three separate entities and they aren't exactly the same location. The terrain object surfaces are also one way with regard to collision detection for shots if I recall correctly, at least in some cases. So yeah, if you get "inside" a "closed" terrain object, a ship can shoot out, but other ships can't shoot in. It'll also affect things like mines that have LoS detection, so even AOE effects aren't a reliable solution. Only following them into their burrow or using AOEs that ignore LoS will work. Note, that the misalignment of game objects does mean that it's possible to maneuver so that you're behind cover, but can still sort of poke a gun out and shoot from behind cover the way a sniper in a FPS game might, which isn't an exploit. If this happened in a TDM match, you can report it, but they probably won't do anything about it. The easy solution is just to stay out of range of the bomber. If you saw this in a Dom map, and it's within say 17 km of a satellite, this is a serious terrain bug, and you should report it with some screen shots of the exact location in a DM to the devs. Mostly because the prospect of a gunship having protected free fire covering a sat is a serious problem. If reporting: message a dev via the forums targeting Kanneg, Musco, or Hoffman, if you drop a GSF bug into the bug report system it'll just get eaten by hyperspace monsters, but those three all have a history of actually responding to serious GSF bugs. You could try Jackie Ko too I suppose.

If the design is functional you shouldn't need separate queues, because doing the group content as a group will be so appealing that solo would be a barren wasteland as a result of player choice. Ie. basically the opposite of how SWTOR works. So in terms of a few concrete examples of terrible social design in SWTOR: Communication. Teamwork requires communication, especially in pick up teams. In SWTOR the communication tool is text chat. What's the problem? Well, since the game is a keyboard and mouse interface, in order to communicate you have to stop playing the game because your interface is locked up in communication mode. In PvP, you really need to be able to play and communicate at the same time. There are a bunch of options here: in game voice client, canned hotkeyable messages (ex: west node under attack, send help), or even working with a third party like Discord to have some sort of game integration where if Discord is running and you get a PvP pop it auto creates a channel for each team and auto invites all the queued players or something along those lines. The bar here is low, the communication just has to be a global positive, not a zero sum "choose to impair my team by not communicating or to impair it by not playing actively while communicating." Communication doesn't always pay off, so the clear incentive here in the base game mechanics is to discourage communication, because it competes in an exclusive fashion with active play, and active play is more reliably rewarding. It's terrible design. Reward structure: The reward structure is zero sum, and individual performance isn't worth anything unless the team as a whole wins. So the reward seeking strategy is to discern if you think your team has a good chance of winning, and if so make an effort, and if not to abandon hope and put out no effort, because you're not playing against the other team, you're playing against the other team and some portion of your own team. And people wonder why PvPers in SWTOR act toxic. How smart was it to set up a reward structure where your own team is easy to perceive as enemies? Not very. A reasonable alternative, one that incentivizes teamwork, is an additive reward structure. So set goals that reflect individual performance, and measure those. Give some reward for individual effort, and some reward for team average effort, and a bonus for actual victory. Now there's incentive for individual effort, incentive for group effort, and incentive for group success. If you're especially smart as a designer, you also target cooperative behavior as a specific area to reward, probably generously. SWTOR's PvP isn't a toxic cesspool because that's what's players were hoping for, it's a toxic cesspool because there are a host of design features actively rewarding players for making it a cesspool and impairing any efforts to change that. I don't think that the developers set out to design a deliberately dysfunctional unappealing PvP system. I think they just got told to build a near copy of Lich King to Cata era WoW PvP, and did exactly that without thinking about whether that was a well designed PvP system or not. I suspect that they were also thinking almost entirely about designing balance of abilities and design of maps, but not thinking about how social interactions and reward structures would steer player behavior, and how to steer it into a fun and rewarding experience. Separate queues aren't a fundamental design problem, and they're therefore also not a design solution. Fixing the dysfunctional design features is what would fix things, and mostly need to focus on social interaction and reward incentives and the interaction of the two. Solve those, and most of the other issues become more tolerable, because even if there's still a lot of crap design in things like class balance, at least there's some prospect of having fun with the poorly designed systems. Conversely, suppose they got perfect class and gear balance for all classes and specs. PvP would still be a toxic swamp because it's not those mechanical balance issues that are causing the toxicity. This is solvable stuff, reliable methods for solving it are out there in the design community it's not some sort of secret. It does however require some deliberation in terms of wanting to create an enjoyable experience for the players, and designing, or in this case redesigning, game systems to make that happen.

The way BLCs are designed also encourages good gunnery mechanics. If you miss because you didn't line up your shoot, it is a relatively long time before you can shoot again. So with a huge firing arc that makes lineup fairly forgiving, and huge hits (especially if you crit) rewarding success, it really motivates practicing good habits. Those good habits pay off in all the other cannons, even the high rate of fire ones, later on. You don't have to use BLCs to succeed with a battlescout, but they're definitely the best choice to start with.

Ralphie, you keep saying the system is unfair. It is not. Unfair would be if the game forced a decision at character creation to be either solo mode or social mode, then prevented solo mode characters from being able to group and then threw them in a mixed queue. In the game EVERYONE is able to group and gain the advantages of grouping. Deliberately choosing to opt out of an available competitive advantage is not unfair, it's just stupid. It's, a game though, so if being stupid is fun, then go ahead and do that because that's what games are supposed to be about. Just don't expect to win against people who are playing smart. As for the anti-social argument, that's a bunch of rubbish at it's foundation. Social primates are deeply social animals to the point that lack of social interaction causes physiological stress that is clinically measurable. What people don't like is negative social interaction. The problem in that respect is that the game design does almost nothing to incentivize positive interaction or discourage negative interaction. The relative state of the solo and group queues doesn't reflect on deep truths about what awful people gamers are, it reflects game design that horrendously fails to encourage a species that loves and even needs positive social interaction to have those interactions. The design is basically actively causing problems here. If it were at all functional the tiny handful of genuinely anti- social would be complaining about how dead the solo queue was. Given how bad the current design is with respect to social interaction, it might make sense to surrender to the way things are and go full solo. Just realize that that wouldn't be a design success so much as an aknowledgement of how badly the original design failed to do what it should have done. Being social in a multiplayer game can be fun and should be fun. Designers have to do quite a lot to break things to get to the point where a majority of players are actively avoiding social aspects.

I found it fairly intuitive and easy to use, but they have a point with respect to the ability tiers in which there are "PICK ONE" style choices. For one thing, the display in monochrome (possibly placeholder) icons doesn't distinguish well from the classic full color icons. The other significant problem is that the highlight of the active choice doesn't have enough contrast to be apparent unless looking closely. Giving the same sort of highlight border you give abilities on the quickbars when something has procced would be a significant improvement for identifying the active chosen abilities, and having some sort of grayed-out effect on the non-chosen activities would also help. If you wanted to be really blatant about it a different color/illumination background (think highlight in a spreadsheet) for the "pick and ability" tiers wouldn't hurt either.

So I've got a followup for the respawn timer comments. Deciding that I had better things to do than wade through while undergeared, I transferred a handful of characters to the PTS so I could quickly craft a full set of gear mods on the new character I was leveling. I didn't bother to think about the fact that this would bring legacy levels, and most of the available datacron bonuses into play in my favor. So looking at finishing that [H2+], the state went from mix of drops acquired naturally during leveling play, resulting in an Item Rating of about 39 on a level 18 character (all gear slots filled), to a character with moddable gear with crafted mods at a gear rating of 59 and I believe all the datacrons except for the 6.0 ones which I haven't gotten around to yet. This increased the health pool by almost 50%, and presumably mastery got a similar level of boost, though I didn't check that beforehand. It took the experience from say challenging 1.0 era/ harder HM Ops/ easier NiM Ops level difficulty down to say easy on farm HM Ops or maybe MM FP level. It was pretty drastic. Though, it was a somewhat selective change. Single Champion NPCs were not at all bad even in "true new player" mode, but a Champion worth of health pool divided into 4 or 5 Elites became massively easier, I think due to a combination of higher companion presence from datacrons and a bigger health pool making incoming damage a lot easier for the companion to heal through. Here's the thing though, as an experienced player with all the goodies and advancements, yes, it's really nice to be rewarded by having avenues to make the content a lot easier on subsequent alt levelings. This will be maybe my 5th, or 6th shadow leveled, so been there, done that, definitely don't need it to be as time consuming and aggravating as it may have been the first time through. I don't really need the help though. Honestly, from a design perspective, in some ways it would make a lot more sense for the new player on their first time through have things like datacron bonuses and a quick way to get bleeding edge modded gear. They don't have the experience and know all the little tricks that can get you through content without the edge in gear and stats. On balance, I'm pleased that there is an option available in the PTS for a new player who is leveling to find content that is genuinely challenging if they go looking for it, or ignore cues and accidentally blunder into it. That said in terms of the gearing experience at low levels, if you don't have a stable of max level alts that can provide the crafted mods, the moddable shells, and the datacron stat bonuses, it's a lot easier for a new player to get into a place where they're honestly sort of stuck. There's content that's beyond what they can handle in large part because of gearing/stats, and without the benefits of being established in the game already there's a shortage of good options for them to get properly kitted out in a reasonable amount of time. I'm not saying they need stats and gear handed to them on a platter, but it would be nice if they had an option to get kitted out at a speed and cost (credits/played time/etc.) so that if they're interested in that sort of challenge, they can get geared for it before they just massively out-level the content and as a consequence no longer really need the gear, and also are no longer getting the increased challenge they might have been looking for. There's a sweet spot that's easy for an established player to hit with say half an hour or an hour's worth of play time, but for a new player to match they're probably going to be a couple of planets past the content by the time they can close the same gear gap. So things like having the fleet and world gear vendors have blue quality armor/mod/enhancement/hilt/barrels for example. Or making the crafting a bit speedier, because stopping to craft enough with just 2-4 companions available is very slow compared to say 30+ high affection companions with crew skills maxed out. The TLDR is that at low level if a new player goes after challenging content it's easy for them to outrun the gearing and end up undergeared without a good way to catch up before they wind up just massively outleveling the content. Unrelated notes: The little patch enabled choosing discipline below level 23 which was very nice and appreciated. The "Choose your second combat style" cutscenes were nice, and had an appropriate level of bludgeoning the player with, "Are you sure you want to do this permanently permanent thing?" warnings.

It has been a very, very, very long time since I've really interacted with the respawn timer in solo world content. Cause yeah, I'm geared, a retired raider, and even most MM content isn't that hard. However, for the lulz, and because it's the sort of thing a new player might do, I've been doing primarily story line quests and just running along in whatever gear drops, and have been picking up [H2+] dailies as I level. Red H2s, current example is lvl 18 fighting lvl 22 NPCs, can actually provide some level of challenge, given that "natural" playstyle can easily leave a character undergeared by 10+ levels. Eh, whatever, it's all easy right? Well, no not always, but that's not really an issue I think. One can gear to the max at level rating, even if it's illogical given the pacing of content and kind of a hassle, and one can improve companion levels beyond "normal" rate, etc. so it's possible to be prepared to handle this sort of thing with some level of ease in terms of over-prepping for the abnormally challenging content option. What is a problem I think, from a new player perspective, is how quickly the respawn timer stacks. If people want to try and fail at a difficult encounter, they're already sinking "wasted" time into it as they break gear, deplete consumables, get frustrated at not having any tools at low level to: interrupt, CC, mitigate damage, etc. So they're banging their head against a wall, and somehow, still sticking with it. This is the sort of "sticky" player you want to retain! The problem is that a new player is going to be slow to implement the various forms of prep, learn the skills, etc. If they're in a situation where it's going to take 15 tries to down a [H2+], what you as a game dev absolutely should not want, is for the game to start telling the player: **** YOU, GO AWAY AND STOP PLAYING OUR GAME! Which is pretty much what the stacking respawn timer does. For open world, instanced [H2], really ANY content that's intended to be played solo, I'd recommend capping the timer at 30 seconds. For group content, especially stuff vulnerable to expoits/non-intended usages, sure have a more punitive timer scaling if you want. For low level solo introductory content though? That's atrociously bad game design, and quite frankly if you keep that sort of thing in game you richly deserve to lose players to QoL issues. It is bad. I mean, I had fun in the encounter, but if a new player asked me if this sort of thing is representative of how SWTOR is developed and whether they should feel justified in quitting and not ever coming back in response, I'd have to say yes to both. It's very much an "I quit" moment sort of thing, it doesn't serve much of a purpose in low level solo content, and it hopefully not that hard to fix. So fix it. SWTOR already has FAR too many reasons for a new player to quit, and the game desperately needs to retain new players instead of driving them away.

Well, I went and asked Kai about that and: There you have it, from the man himself. It's Kai, honestly, what did you expect?

TLDR version: It doesn't really matter if people other than Raiders get BiS gear or not in this game, and it's unlikely that a gearing system reminiscent of 1.0 but slightly worse will bring back raiding in a big way when what really killed the raiding scene was a content drought that started after 3.0 and hasn't really let up since. By my recollection the gearing system had almost nothing to do with it. By the time 6.0 rolled around an ill considered and unnecessary change to the gearing system with every expansion was what everyone expected. What hemorrhaged raiders was the years in which first: new expansions were almost barren of endgame content, and second: endgame content that was being recycled and for which you had to regear was also being nerfed heavily to make it more accessible. So faced with regearing in a new and annoyingly RNG grindy gear system, doing content that you'd already been doing for years, and which was dumbed down because not standing in the glowy green crap which kills you is too hard for some people, lots of people quite reasonably decided that raiding endgame in SWTOR was basically dead because Bioware had abandoned it, and left. They weren't really wrong. Quite a lot of high end raiders in my experience did most forms of content in their MMO(s) of choice. Usually in a WoW-like one you can get gear that's usable, if not the best, from multiple content avenues when a new expac drops. Sure, what you got out of PvP, or MM FPs, or HM ops might be vendored in a few weeks when a proper optimized piece drops in your progression Op, but for a short interim period it might be a minor upgrade over the last tier of BiS gear, and raiders are all about the upgrades, even minor ones. It's also nice to have some level of fall back if RNG is being a complete and utter b****. That's where the alternate currencies and assorted "gear source other than content drops," really came from in the first place. Drops tended to suck once you got to a certain level of gearing because the drop was never the piece you needed. Which led to "generic BiS chest" but then there was "trading generic BiS chest to a vendor on fleet feels less epic than looting off the boss (because it makes total sense that say: Karraga, The Terror from Beyond, or Soa wears a tanking, healing, or DPS outfit in exactly your character's waist size), but complaints are complaints so it evolved into currency systems. Then people, including raiders, started asking for more activities to drop the currencies because the Ops reward rates were stingy enough so that you still felt at the mercy of bad RNG to get that offhand that just wouldn't ever drop, and hey you're doing all that other content anyway, and if the only reasonable way to get your Ops offhand is from currencies gained outside of Ops, well it's still an improvement over bad RNG. Leaving aside the social preening which is, like it or not, a big chunk of what drives the desire for BiS gear in raiders, there's a game satisfaction issue going on here. The rate of endgame content release in this game is glacial in speed, and tiny in size. Raiders will be out of new content to play with most of the time. Which leaves gear grind as the only avenue for player retention for them if they're not interested in what the rest of what the game has to offer at endgame (not that much). It's not like people are really keen to grind gear for a particular Op the 3rd, 4th, 5th, or 6th time, but what else is there to do? It's a lose-lose proposition for Bioware. Either people are unhappy that there's nothing to do or they're unhappy that the only thing to do is a super grindy regearing for the umpteenth time. I don't think that trying to go back to 1.0 levels of grind for gear is going to solve player retention problems though. Gear progression is nice, but what you really need is something to keep from being bored out of your skull after you've got the newest raid on farm, and all the older raids on farm again. I'm not sure I really care one way or another about gear availability. It's not like good gear is needed for much of anything in SWTOR, and it doesn't really impair raiders if everyone eventually winds up running around in BiS gear to do Heroic dailies. Raiders will still be the only ones with raid achievements, and given how much cartel market cosmetic gear drives looks in the games it's not like gear is particularly effective as an epeen flex in SWTOR, you need a mount or companion for that really. I think the expected outcomes here are: Brief glory of being able to epeen flex again fades for raiders after they realize that there's still only one new bit of content for them and no one is looking at their gear stats anyway. Casuals get really cranky and storm the forums with gearing complaint posts. People who left due to content drought, if they come back do so long enough to clear the new raid and then leave again, because they left due to being bored not because they were pining for a sucky gear grind. Bioware after realizing that an unsubtle attempt to present a gear grind in old content does not fool any players into thinking it's new content walks back the 7.0 gear gating in some way or another, probably managing to annoy a bunch of players in the process.

Minor error here, range determined base accuracy is a flat rate from 0 to 500 (or whatever upgraded min range is) with respect to range penalties/bonuses. Then there's linear interpolation, rounded to integer values, from the short breakpoint to the mid-range breakpoint, and again from mid to max. Tracking penalties apply uniformly at all ranges. I get what you're saying I think, but to be clear, the cone is a circular cone that doesn't change shape with range. What tapers, both with distance past min range, and angular displacement from centerline, is the hit probability. A good analogy would be a spray bottle where the droplet dispersion of fluid sprayed is densest near the middle and also the spray is fine enough so that as you get farther from the nozzle less and less of the droplets land on an object in the spray volume. So since I'm in math nerd-out mode right now, I'll finish up with some of the math reasons that ultra-close range is hard. Because both whether you're in the firing cone at all and tracking penalties are based on angular displacement, this means that a close target has to move much less in order to change their relative angle to you. It also magnifies the effect of lag with respect to displacement in the firing arc angle. If both of you are flying toward each other, depending on ships and depending on if one or both are boosting, at a lag of 0.1 seconds the "real" positions according to the server could by off by from 100 m to around 480 m compared to what your client is showing. That's more than enough to put a ship from the center of your firing arc to the edge, or even outside of it. At a range of say 1 km, with a short range cannon like BLC, RFL, or LLC, that's not that much of a big deal most of the time, but at sub 500 m ranges it's very significant. The other issue, is that the camera, the ship model, the ship collision box, the UI overlay, and the origin point for shots may all be separate objects internally to the game. This can cause something called parallax error. If there's a slight difference between location of these elements, that means that what is "seen" from one point might have line of sight or a particular angle, but it could be different from the other point(s). The closer you get to an object the more parallax error gets magnified. This may be worsened because I believe that there's actually a bit of slight of hand with respect to ranges in GSF. The engine isn't built for environments with distances in hundreds of kilometers, so often the workaround is you just mess with UI scaling. So that gunship 15 km away, the engine may be treating it as 1.5 km or even 150 m and then just adding a zero or two before presenting it to you. For most cases that's no big deal, but when calculating close range parallax effect, a 10 or 100 fold difference in range is potentially a big deal (note this may or may not be happening in GSF, in scaling tricks when you apply the scaling in calculations has a big impact, choose right and this actually wouldn't be an issue). You can hit at point blank range. I've blown up turrets from inside the turret. It's just that hitting is more a matter of learned "feel" and a bit of luck, because the UI is not entirely reliable as an aiming guide sub 500 m. If you're both slow moving or stationary, just search around a bit with your firing and you should be able to find the correct offset for parallax. Also make sure you're not super close to an obstacle (like 10 to 20 meters apparent distance) to make sure you're not running into LOS issues (though in theory, there should be an animation of your shots hitting terrain if that is happening). A useful application of parallax in GSF is firing from behind cover in a gunship. The railgun is "above" the hitbox for the ship, so if very careful by strafing up you can poke your railgun out from behind terrain and shoot people while your ship is still protected from them by the terrain. Especially good technique when dueling another gunship.

Have you seen the change list for Guardian/Jugg for the most recent PTS build? I think it's about as long as the original Guardian PTS description post. Get out there, do some saber throws, and see if it's sufficiently rehabilitated or still needs more work. I'm still working on Sage, Shadow, and Gunslinger so I haven't tried Guardian yet, but the list looked promising. There's still a ton of stuff they need to work on, but the current PTS is a VAST improvement over the last one, and a lot of the improvements do seem to be based on feedback from the previous build.

Could use work: Ability gain rate. In theory, with 80 levels and 20+ abilities that's an average ability gain of about 1 ability per 4 levels, or perhaps for some classes closer to one per 3 levels. This is front loaded a bit toward lower levels, but not as effectively as it should be. What I mean, is that the way the frontloading is done, it's not doing a great job of serving the functions you'd list as a game designer to answer the question of why abilities should be frontloaded in the leveling process. Things like: feel like you're "winning" frequently in the first hour of play, learn how the ability system works, learn energy management, learn DCDs, etc. Crafting is pretty bloody useless, good gear, but doesn't remotely keep up with current character leveling rate. Historically the blue crafted gear has been excellent in terms of gear quality as far as gear that can be equipped at a given level. Better than the stuff available from vendors. However, for a new player, or a new legacy on a different server, or really any case where you don't already have an army of alts with maxed out crafting and a backlog of obsolete materials, crafted gear is pretty useless because you'll reach the level cap by the time you can craft say around level 30 gear. Basically crafting has cosmetics from some but not all crafting skills, some consumables, and augments from what will be 3 expacs ago when 7.0. The crafting level of grind hasn't meaningfully changed since 1.0, but the level of leveling grind has radically decreased. The mismatch leads to a situation where crafting could be great in that it has excellent products, but the products are gated behind a leveling process that's so out of whack with character leveling that crafting might as well not exist for a new player. Which is kinda sad. Also likely to lead a new player to conclude that crafting in SWTOR just generally sucks, which it sort of does, but it sucks disproportionately more for a new player than for an established army of alts. Why include this in leveling feedback? Because for a new player exploring what you can do in the game is an integral part of the leveling experience, and right now the crafting portion of that experience is not a good one because the progress scaling is so badly out of touch with how leveling progress is scaled.

Positioning requirements, stealth, basic attacks, so to an extent yes, but I normally level as a tank, and the total lack of defensive abilities other than medpacks and heroic moment feels a bit weak/absent in the first few planets. As of level 15 or so and finished with Coruscant, no, not really. As a long time player it's not a big deal, as a new player it might feel a bit slow, but then again with the whole game being new territory there's a virtue in not overloading people with things faster than they can absorb them. I think it would maybe feel ok during a double XP event, but through normal questing it feels slow. Yes, even when pushing the limits with things like Heroic quests still at Orange/Red difficulty level. No, not really. Shadow by level 12 has force management issues. Upside is that you have to learn force management, downside is that your two hard hitting 40 force abilities are basically never available so you just spam the basic strike over and over and over and over. Actually, I take back that upside. For it to be an upside, people would have to generally actually read the tutorial and figure out resource management. That's a stretch even for a space-opera fantasy setting. More likely that people will think it's just bad design. It feels clunky compared to max level playing. Not sure if there's really anything to be done about it that would be workable in the time frame you have though. Max level on live plays very smoothly, even if you get pretty non-optimal and mess up the rotation. Low level PTS plays like important parts are missing, because until you level up they are missing. Aside from feeling very spammy of basic attack though, it's not bad. Project and the back-stab do impressive chunks of damage, at least by Tython's standards, and that makes them feel pretty good. Good enough to want to use them often enough to run completely dry on force in just a few seconds. So, could be quite a lot worse I suppose. It's not like you don't have any buttons to press when the tank is empty. I think the biggest difference vs. the level cap is that at level cap you tend to be cooldown and proc limited and there are always multiple buttons you could push once the "cool" hard hitting abilities are on CD. At low level instead you're easily able to blow through your force pool with just two abilities, and once empty there's really only one button left to push, which gets monotonous. Speaking of monotony, building a full stack of force breach takes fooooooor - eeeeeeevvvvvvv- aaaaahhh. At higher levels you have so much other stuff going on that you don't notice it because you're too busy, but when you've used your force pool, are spamming basic attack, and there's nothing to do but watch for force breach to stack, you start seeing just how long it takes. It's probably fine for say level 50 and above, but at low levels there's a bit of a watching paint dry vibe in there. Note, given the legacy class designs that you're trying not to mess up too much, I'm not sure there's a great solution for the "missing parts" syndrome. You don't want to overwhelm at the start, you don't want a 70 level ability granting drought, you don't want an ability that's super cool at level 9 that scales to oneshotting NiM Ops bosses at level 80, and you probably don't want the class to work in a significantly different way in an insect complete metamorphosis way: egg, larva, pupa, adult where it's like playing different classes every 20 levels. So being both smooth and engaging right from the start may be out of scope. Tweak it to be better if you think y you can, especially in the 1-20 range, but don't lose sleep over it if it ends up being not much different than this current PTS iteration. SWTOR isn't really designed around the idea of a four ability rotation.

So my impressions from leveling to lvl 9, consular shadow on tyhon: Greatly improved from last PTS: Gear is level appropriate and cosmetic theme appropriate. Some of the new gear is really nice looking. Difficulty "lumpiness" smoothed out nicely as well, I think mostly due to gearing improvements. Needs serious work: Ability grants as you level. This is terribly inconsistent. There is the original system: level up, go find a trainer and train, this is what the tutorial teaches. There is full automatic granting: Level up and the ability is automatically trained and placed on the ability bar. There is stealth automatic granting: Level up and the ability is automatically trained, but is not placed on an ability bar and no notice is given that you have a new ability. There is combat style granting: choices in the combat style tree. Ideally, there would be ONE way of granting abilities, and there would be notification each time an ability is granted or available for training. Given the way combat styles are implemented, I don't think it's practical to have fewer than two ways (though if you go full automatic for everything, then you could implement talent tree choices as a pop-up dialog, which would be effectively be a single system, as the player would never need to actually learn anything about leveling systems to level, they could just read tooltips in the pop-up and pick an option [Note if this were implemented there would NEED to be very blatant distinction between active abilities and passive upgrades when there's a choice between the two.]) The stealth auto-grant is the worst possible option. You get the ability, but unless you are an advanced user and know when you're supposed to get it, or notice that you're getting passive buffs for abilities that aren't on your bar, you'd have no reason to ever go find the ability and use it. I'd recommend either going full auto (probably best since it's already substantially implemented) or full on classic class trainer mode. In either case the process should be consistent and the in game tutorial pages should be updated to reflect whatever system you go with. To repeat: leveling ability grant system should be Consistent Provide notification of new abilities Be accurately documented Will post again with impressions after getting off the starter planet.

Initial character creation screen republic screen came up as a female trooper for me, but with an invisible/unequiped weapon. Swapping genders fixed it. Same for consular and knight. No weapon equipped for first selection, swapping genders fixed it. Smuggler had a weapon equipped, though from the looks of it, they stole the trooper's blaster rifle while the trooper wasn't looking (or won it in a game of Sabacc or Pazzak). Note, in subsequent swaps of origin story they were somewhat inconsistent in their ability to aquire weapons. Combat style text does not update with Origin story change, at least across force-tech divide. I was rather surprised to find out that gunslingers will be wielding dual sabers and embracing the combination of force powers and melee combat. In character creation the default miraluka female had a nice beard, about 3 days worth of stubble I'd say. Ok further investigation reveals that all texture based beards and moustaches are available, but volumetric beards are apparently not. Not sure if this is a bug or a feature. If we're allowing Imperial agents in really top notch infiltration disguises they should probably be allowed the volumetric beards too. If you're gonna go for it, go all out. The lighting is VERY blue. Accidentally picked gray hair instead of white because the color shift was so extreme that the gray looked white and the white looked like it had a blue dye/tint. Was very different from "natural" light on Tython. Aesthetically sensitive people will likely be cranky if characters in world turn out to look significantly different than they did in the model viewer due to this level of color shift from lighing. For the model viewer, a wider zoom range and the ability to rotate the model faster at max rotation speed would both be great. The models have enough detail around the face and eyes so that people picky about appearance will probably wish for closer zoom. Zoom out to see the hips and legs better would also be nice. Massive improvement from last PTS build. Change the lighting, increase the zoom and rotation speed limits, and figure out how to update all fields when swapping Origin or Combat Style and it should be pretty good. Overall a very nice looking interface, just color correct the lighting (getting repetitious I know, but this is a fairly major issue for it I think), and iron out the bugs and it's a very nice update over the current creation screen.