Traditionally in SWTOR in a FP it was one piece of gear for each player at each boss that was basically "at level" for the difficulty of the content. In terms of rewards that are worth something for gearing that either means non-moddable gear with slightly abnormally generous stats, moddable gear at level but where you might have to pull all the mods and replace them, or one armor/mod/enhancement/barrel/hilt with optimized stats for at level stat budgets. So basically you can a generous amount of fixed stats poorly optimized, a shell with RNG mediocre stats, or one modding component that is well optimized for something (hopefully related to your class and spec). So it's RNG, but you at least have a shot at having an upgrade that's meaningful in some way. Or in other words everything but the mod you're looking for gets vendored or deconstructed. So at expac drop the tradition is basically a piece of gear for each boss, minus duplicates, is an upgrade. After say a dozen runs of MM FPs you taper off and can still upgrade, but figure one component for every 2 to 4 FPs, until your moddable gear is optimized with respect to the MM FP rating cap. At which point you should be fine to jump into a HM Op without being undergeared. No idea what they're actually going to do, but that would be about "back to normal" if you classify say 2.0 or 3.0 as "normal." It was a grind, but set up so you got a lot of dopamine hits at the start to keep the not-very-good-at-calculating-probability lizard brain pecking at the shiny red button long after it stops making sense. Once you were fully MM FP geared, then everything after that was vendor trash or feedstock for crafting via deconstruction. There wasn't additional gear progression. Very old school WoW sort of gearing model to start. But SWTOR embraced currency/crate based supplemental systems early and enthusiastically so I doubt that's going away completely.

Here you go: .

Thank you for the sudden attack of sanity. Personally, I think the feature set of 7.0 is very much a mixed bag, but for the good features to be able to offset the bad, they desperately need to be working and working well. There was definitely some good response to feedback on the PTS builds, and I hope to see at least one or two more PTS builds before launch. There's definitely features that had strong potential for game improvement, but you guys definitely had bitten off more than you could chew by Dec 14. It might have been a tough call internally, but I very much think that it was absolutely the right call. Grats on being brave enough to do it in the end. If there's a next time for a release delay though, you might want to move notice of the postponement a bit earlier. It was clear, at least a couple of weeks ago, that you weren't going to make it by the proposed release date.

This was almost certainly your problem. You can't start a missile or torp lock unless a ship is your actively selected target. I 'll still do the walkthrough, but 99 percent chance that's what was the cause.

Ah, well this is helpful. So in terms of having the target in the firing arc you are doing just fine, those green boxes are well within the arc and you'd have to have horrendous lag to have that not register with the server. I'm short on time now, but tomorrow I'll do a short walkthrough video for you on one of my starguards, and try to get it posted and linked for you to take a look at. As far as data about components for GSF, make sure you have advanced tooltips turned on in preferences, otherwise it hides a lot of rather important information.

There will definitely be new gear levels. If you don't do NiM raiding the stats may not be better than current BiS gear due to poor stat allocation. Existing gear will continue to exist, mostly. New gear that is not from NiM ops will not be moddable at 7.0 launch. As 7.0 progresses and new gear tiers come out it's highly likely that PvP, HM Ops, and MM FP at the least will eventually yield moddable gear. Depends on your advanced class (excuse me, combat style), and which path in it you pick. There are 12 sets, so if you're too lazy to go look at the PTS forums you'll probably have to wait till launch and look it up on Vulkk or SWTORista or something, cause I'm too lazy to spoon feed it all to you here. Little change from 6.0. Utilities get baked in, most classes see one or two abilities outright deleted, and there are typically 3 tiers where you have to chose ability upgrades or abilities from a selection of 5-7 existing abilities. Net effect is that overall you loose 3 to 5 abilities compared to live. Choices are somewhat more meaningful than the utility points were even though there are less of them. You need 100k No changes. Vague hints that there might be some changes at some point in 7.0 Your augment mats stockpiles should retain value nicely for at least several months.

Stealth is attached to advanced classes, which are being renamed combat styles in 7.0. Which advanced classes have stealth is not changing. Real stealth: Operative/Scoundrel or Shadow/Assassin Budget stealth I bought on sale from a jawa: Sentinel/Marauder If you chose one of the above combat styles on a character, that character will have stealth. In principle, that means that before you pick all your combat styles on a character that character has the potential to pick a stealth combat style. However, if you pick non-stealth combat styles for all of a character's combat styles, for example a Vanguard + Gunslinger, then that character would not have stealth because it picked zero stealth combat styles.

More information would help. One of the key ones being, what's your network latency to the SWTOR servers. So step by step: Select a ship as a target. Cannons, railguns, and rockets can all fire without a target selected, missiles and torps cannot. Get the target ship inside the missile/torp firing arc (the smallest one if using torps). The lead reticle that's used for cannon aim has nothing to do with missiles. Get the actual ship you want inside the arc. If it goes outside the arc, even for a fraction of a second, the lock on is broken and must restart. The same holds true if any object gets between you and the targeted ship. Latency above say 175 ms or so can be an issue with this, if where your client thinks the ship is and where the server thinks the ship is are different. To help with this, move your firing arc so that if the target ship flies in the direction it currently is going it will have about 66 to 75% of the circle to still cross, don't center it. This gives you some buffer for maintaining the lock if there's significant latency. Make sure the range is valid, 10 km baseline for torpedoes, and hold the right mouse button until the lock is complete, then fire by releasing the button. There's an audio tone, and arrows that progressively march into the center of your cursor/reticle as it locks. Note that if a ship has used an engine maneuver within the last 3 seconds, it will be immune to missile locks and you'll have to wait out the immunity to start locking. I believe the same is true of EMP field with some of the upgrade options. Distortion field can also break the lock on process, but doesn't have a subsequent immunity period. The range with respect to a Clarion has nothing to do with torpedo range. That's default max cannon range if using RFLs or LLCs. The farther out you are, the easier it is to lock torpedoes because trigonometry operates in your favor by reducing the angular velocity of the target ship across your firing arc. The tradeoff is that at longer ranges the target has a bit more time to use an engine maneuver before the torp hits. The arcs on torpedoes are small enough that they become significantly more difficult to lock at ranges of say, less than 6 km. Firing arc upgrades in the component upgrade tree and from Offensive category crew members can help with ease of keeping targets in the firing arc. If Concussion missiles are working for you, then in principle the torpedoes should also work, as the mechanics are exactly the same, it's just that the torps have longer range and smaller arcs. This is why I somewhat suspect latency issues. Concussion missiles have an arc large enough so that there's some built in buffer space against client/server disagreements about whether a target is inside the arc. Oh, unlikely option, but possible, if you have hardware issues with your mouse, like a worn switch on the right button, if the button press isn't continuous due to bad electrical contact that could also do it. If the above doesn't solve things post again and we'll work some more on getting you sorted out. Happy flying.

Ah, hm, well . . . . They have a ridiculously strong faith in their judgement with respect to what constitutes good and engaging game design. To the point that if all the PTS forum feedback on a feature is negative, there's theorycrafting and game theory backed up with math to explain why a design choice is a terrible choice, they still need another 9 months of overwhelming negative feedback on live and a trend of decreasing time played/subscription renewals/cartel purchases before being willing to acknowledge that it might have been a mistake that will need a fix in the future. So in a sense they may have excessive faith in their product. On the other hand, if you go to the PTS forum, and look at the thread covering what's being tested, you see that on their own list of things to work on 4 weeks before release: 0% are considered done and ready to play, 0% are considered buggy but pretty close to playable after minor fixes, something like 20+ things with major issues or substantially incomplete WIP, and everything else is so unfinished that it's not done enough to meaningfully test. So their self confidence perhaps had a full speed collision with reality and came away slightly bruised? They want to do cool things, they believe they can do cool things, judging by the PTS though, they cannot finish doing the cool things they hoped to finish doing by December 14 by December 14. I believe they can ultimately finish the cool things, and that indeed some (but not all) will indeed be pretty cool. I also believe that having seen the launches of 2.0, 3.0, 4.0, 5.0, and 6.0 as a subscriber that it is extremely likely that 7.0 will be the most problematic and buggy major version number launch in SWTOR's history. If they had until March I'm sure it could be a smooth and kick *** launch, but clearly someone with lots of authority and little common sense is telling them they have to release on 14th Dec. no matter how unready the product is.

I'm not after keeping premades vs pugs, I'm after Bioware fixing broken game design. From an "as intended" design perspective, the simplest thing to do would be disable solo queue for arenas and warzones. Since it's designed as group content make it like Ops, can't get in without a group. It would kill PvP in SWTOR, kill it stone dead. The playerbase has changed and the game design hasn't kept up. I suppose my views are partly colored by having been on a PvP server where in 1.0 and 2.0 there was something vaguely approximating a healthy team PvP community, and even if you mostly soloed it was pretty easy to hook up with a team with a quick chat message on fleet. When a lot of teams are what fill the queue, the content works well with respect to game design. What I'd like to see, is either changing the interface and reward structure enough to incentivize team play again, (an uphill battle to be sure, but if you look at the popularity of duels and world PvP I think the overwhelming evidence is that SWTOR's current player base doesn't like PvP period, they like winning and they like rewards), OR changing the content design enough (not just the queuing) to work with the de-facto solo-PvP population we currently have, which is definitely the more logical approach. Just to emphasize the severity of the design problem, I'll repeat reworded, "If the only option for PvP content was to queue in the group size that the original design features were intended for all of the PvP queues in SWTOR would be completely and permanently dead." If given a choice between playing as intended and not playing, your customers universally choose not to play, your game design needs revision. SWTOR's PvP game design desperately needs revision, it has for years. Sigh, 7.0's launch woes have me cranky about all the legion, "why have I been putting up with this crap" design flaws in SWTOR. My posts here are carrying about 8 years worth of accumulated PvP annoyances and frustrations in them. Not really having a go at your 2 person suggestion Trixx, but at this point even though I normally don't care about PvP outside of GSF the "eh, I'm used to it," for my occasional warzone has worn thin in terms of tolerating the design problems that are fully the Devs' responsibility. What I'm tired of is justifiably unhappy solo-players slogging through group content because that's the only place there are rewards for PvP. That's a failure of design on the Devs' part and it's one they should attempt to fix. Really properly fix, not just tinker with queues.

Well, they might not want to attract new players until AFTER they've got most of the worst bugs out of the new update. No point attracting new players only for them to look around and leave swearing that they'll never come back. We don't know how much ahead of the last PTS version the live release will be, but the PTS build played like a game scheduled to release 6 months in the future, not one that did release over 9 years in the past. Given how untested and unfinished things like character creation, picking combat styles, and the leveling experience (gear/content/abilities) were, and given that those are all things that new players will run into immediately and form their first impressions on, trying to attract all of your hoped influx of new players before you've had a chance to find and remedy any critical bugs in those systems would be somewhat risky as a business strategy. Not that risk would deter Bioware, but there are potentially good reasons to NOT hype the 7.0 release early.

Ralphie, the fundamental important item that you are completely failing to grasp is this: They are not evil premades polluting your solo-queue, you are a solo player whining that playing as solo it's hard for you to succeed at their group content. The premades are the ones playing the content as intended. Everyone else, including me, is doing the equivalent of soloing MM PvE group content with a companion, because the game does allow it, even if it's not meant to be played that way. This is one of the driving factors of SWTOR's PvP woes. The game design features are all based around the assumption that SWTOR will be like 1.0 to 2.0 era WoW, but with lots more players because wookies and lightsabers are sexier than orcs and swords. The assumption is that all players are hardcore (they'd have to be to put up with the grind), know class mechanics due to the difficulty of PvE leveling content (and of course from getting ganked hundreds of times as they leveled), and are in large vibrant guilds (because the bulk of endgame content is either intolerable or literally unplayable if not in a group of 8 to 40 people working together). Warzones are designed to function under those assumptions. Ditto arenas. Solo queues were added as a sop to people who maybe logged on a bit earlier than the rest of their guild and didn't want to spam the toxicity of fleet chat to put together a group to get into a warzone. After all it should work anyway right? If you have one or two singletons on a team, they already know their classes, are correctly geared, are used to communication and teamwork, and know the map objective. It'll be a little rough, but they'll fill the gaps for groups that are a person or two short for some reason. It'll be fine. SWTOR did not turn out like that from the start, and by design choices over the years the Devs pushed it farther and farther away from those assumptions. After the hardcore and the social players abandoned ship due to content droughts, Bioware pushed to cater to the casual solo player who's after a KOTOR III experience. Despite this the content design has not changed and is still a group content design that no amount of queue tinkering will ever make truly suitable for solo play. Can you have good well designed solo play PvP? Sure. Fortnite and PUBG style battle royale modes are a great example. In large part because they are designed for and marketed to solo PvP players. The design features work well with solo play, because the design intent facilitates that. The problem here is that Bioware either needs to swap out its customer base and get a PvP population that's interested in the team PvP content it has, or they need to realize that over the course of 10 years they have been very successful at driving away the fairly small team play population that they initially had, and make new PvP content designed for solo play, and integrated into the game's reward structures (See duels and world PvP for what happens when the love of solo PvP has to compete against the love of loot). That would be a logical plan for overhauling PvP in SWTOR with an eye toward success. Design for the players you actually have instead of the players you were dreaming about 12 years ago. The devs are even good enough at game design that I think that they'd have a good chance of producing decent content for solo PvP play. However, being logical and likely to work, it's extremely improbable that this would happen because it would also mean admitting that they've been failing on PvP design since the very start of SWTOR development. Or at least failing to design for SWTOR players. The team content is pretty decent for team players, there just aren't many of them playing this game. Minor tweaks to team PvP content result in slightly different team PvP content. If you want solo PvP content, ask the devs to design some PvP content designed for solo players. It would be an excellent idea, and it's what, at least 6 years past due? Would it kill warzones and arenas? Probably, but it would kill them by being a much more popular success, which on the whole would be a good thing. The TLDR I'm trying to get across as someone who has been both a team PvP player and a solo PvP player is this, If you want to play PvP that doesn't heavily advantage teams, you should be looking for content that is not deliberately designed by the game designers to heavily advantage strong teamwork. If you want solo PvP in SWTOR you need to duel, do world PvP, or ask the devs to create the content that you want that currently does not exist in game. The whole situation is messed up and frustrating, but it's not the premades that are messing it up. They're doing their hyper-niche team content the way it's quite literally designed to be done.

Oh, it will release on the 14th. It shouldn't, but it will. I almost like thread title more than Bioware's publicity, because "patch" is a much more accurate description of the scope of what we're getting than "expansion" is. Anti-patch might be the best description though. A patch is supposed to fix bugs, not deliver more bugs than a freighter full of Kubaz could eat in a month. We'll all be playing on pts servers from the 14th until probably sometime in February or March. It's not that bad though and some of the bugs can be pretty funny. When Guardians could do a melee cone attack with a range of 90 or 100 meters, the number of groups of angry NPCs that would come running was hilarious. They fixed that one alas, but expect things in that vein. Make sure your sense of humor is well exercised and ready to go, and 6.4, er, 7.0 should be plenty of fun.

My observation of actual player behavior though, is that "fairness" is not what the complainers for the most part really want. They want to win, most of the time, to get rewards, without putting significant effort into the things that contribute to winning. Learning your class is one of those things, learning other classes is one of those things, and using teamwork is also one of those things. Warzones are fundamentally a team activity. That's why they don't have 1v1 Warzones. You're still allowed to participate even if you do none of the things that help a team win. However, you shouldn't expect to win against people who are doing more things to win, doing them better than you, and doing them consistently. Personally I'm not a super high effort person in Warzones. The thing is, if I'm on a team that gets rolled by a premade, I know that the reason we're getting rolled is because they're putting more effort into doing better at playing a Warzone than we are, and that if we want to win, the solution is to get off our lazy rear ends and counter with an even greater effort of our own. We almost never do, and consequently usually lose because that's the PUG way, but honestly, they're well deserved losses that we could have avoided if we had cared enough to make an effort. If you don't care enough about winning do something about it then you don't care about it all that much. I certainly don't, but I'm at peace with that and if a premade beats a team I'm on, good for them for actually genuinely caring about PvP enough to get good at it. Even the icky social interaction and all the cooties or whatever that come with that. If they keep showing up in queue it's likely that the social interaction isn't fatal, or at least is very slow acting.

I'd call Squadrons a version of the X-wing series with modern graphics and focused on 4v4 PvP. There are enough similarities that GSF premades absolutely dominated Squadrons tournaments, but a lot of them also have experience with more flight sim type games too, so it probably not all GSF skill transfer. Having a HOTAS helps, but you can do ok with m+kb or a game controller. Fairly well designed as far as being input hardware neutral. Concur that it's a good buy on sale. There will still be a learning curve when you first play. Expect to suck for a while.

I have no qualms about bursting your bubble of self- delusion, so here it goes: Solo ranked is not, never has been, and never will be seriously competitive PvP. Why? Because Bioware will never master class balance and make solo ranked a 1v1 format, and those are the two conditions they'd need to meet for solo ranked to be seriously competitive. I was only semi-serious about PvP for a brief period years ago, but I did have friends that were seriously competitive, and for a truly serious competitor the lack of group practice time alone is a deal breaker for group finder teams. Nevermind the random skill, gear, and team composition. Solo ranked is by the fundamental design of team selection not seriously competitive. It's not like Bioware has ever shown any sign of thinking that PvP is anything more than a checkbox that has to be ticked off because RPGMMOs are supposed to have some sort of PvP. So it's not surprising that serious PvP is pretty much non-existent, and that un-serious PvP is deeply flawed. My approach is to be un-serious myself. Bioware isn't serious about PvP, the player base isn't serious about PvP, trying to be serious about it is just asking for a lot of avoidable grief and frustration. Sure, still try to excel, but think of it like deciding to excel at throwing pies. It's excellence in a silly and pointless endeavor, and not worth getting stressed about. Serious competitive computer gaming PvP is out there in many genres of game, it's just not in SWTOR. The changes needed to bring it here seem . . . unlikely.

Ah, yes, the old "I want easy PvP wins even though I refuse to do any of the things that help my team win," argument. It's a team game, if you show up to a team game with a random group of people that are not a team in any meaningful way you're obviously not truly serious about wanting to win. It's not fundamentally a fairness or quality of play complaint, but a "loot requires effort," complaint. The proper solution, or at least the only one with a shot at working, is bribery. Bioware could implement a lobby where you get opt in rewards for communication and coordination related activities. Roles, groups, objective priorities, probably in a pre- baked UI sort of format. DOTA has this sort of thing for something like 30 seconds after a match is formed but before play starts. It was part of a suite of design elements that were put in to address the anti-social herding cats problems you typically see in computer game PvP. It's possible to design for team building and collaboration, and to bribe players to then use those features, but it takes more than just weekly quest reward amounts being tweaked.

No, not yet, I still have 13 more days. Aside from changes that I may or may not end up liking I want some in game cosmetic items for the expac launch: Rancor sized bottle of bug repellent. Bug swatter. Bug zapper. Bug killer. Ithorian pest management technician companion. Ahem, not that I expect the launch of 7.0 to be anything but flawless of course. Honestly, as long as they don't accidentally break GSF while changing other stuff I'll be fine, unless they drive off so many people that the queue dies.

:csw_yoda:The PTS forums you must search padawan.

You're lightly touching on the true purpose of gear grinds here. Grind as a game design feature is basically an admission by game developers saying, "The gameplay of our game isn't really all that fun and has very low inherent replay value, so if we don't provide some arbitrary social status reward in game that requires a tedious level of repetitious play, we expect our players to get bored of our boring game, quit playing it and quit paying for it." It's an admission of failure to design engaging gameplay. It's also an admission of failure of ability to create content at a rapid pace.

Some of the MM chapters may not be doable for some classes without HM Ops equivalent gear, and for some specs, may be rough even with NiM equivalent gear fully kitted out. Of course, if you're trying to take a healer through the Geno Haradan encounter in chapter 2 of KotET, it's really an opt-in of not strictly intended play (cause everybody's supposed to do all solo play in DPS spec after all), so it's not the end of the world if it becomes effectively out of reach (ditto for soloing FPs). PvP doesn't require "best" gear or even gear at all. What it requires is that for any person willing to put in X amount of play hours (where X is whatever the devs think is reasonable, provided it's within the attention span of a critical mass of players), they can get to a gearing level where additional play time does not provide additional gear advantage, and therefore everyone at the gear plateau can compete on a combination of player skill and selecting the most advantageous combat style out of a selection of combat styles that aren't nearly as well balanced as you'd want if SWTOR were a dedicated PvP game. The motto of 7.0 is not anything about discriminating about any particular style of player though, it's best summed up as: "We have no real content for you, so embrace the grind!" Reputation faction for this expac should probably be called the, "Gear Millers and Grindstone Manufacturers Association" Legendary reward: "Millstone Around My Neck," emote. Even so, it's a fairly mild increase, nowhere near what grind was like in 1.0 and 2.0. It just feels bad because we're coming off of a 4 expansion streak of QoL improvements built around reducing grind.

I can't remember which forum/social media source I saw it on, but I think there was something from the devs somewhere about there being no changes or new content for crafting with the release of 7.0. Any crafting changes will apparently come in Q1 or Q2 of 2022.

All the rep craftable dyes can usually be found on the GTN. Average prices seem to be in the 120 k to 200 k range, at least on Star Forge. Fairly affordable by today's standards. There are a lot of Black/X X/Black Gray/X X/Gray and Red/X X/Red options that work well for Sith and are solid choices, or at least good stand ins while sc****** up credits for Black/Black.

I expect a desperate scramble to deal with all of this: Plus whatever new problems crop up. They've had two weeks to work on things since this was posted, and have about two more weeks to try to complete it. So I also expect that servers will be going down for hotfixes several times per week between the 14th and 24th of December.

Typically between about 25k and 350 k per character played during the week, usually 1-5 alts. I don't target conquest though, it tends to just happen organically. In general if I play at least half an hour of anything other than purely crafting or messing about on the GTN the alt I'm playing will hit the 50 k mark. I do have the stronghold bonus though, so that does make it easier.