Bought one pack here. It had 2 chance cubes. Both chance cubes had a title. Total haul: 2 titles, a blue rank 5 companion gift, and 1 green jawa scrap. Definitely not wasting my money on any more of these.

A large part of the problem is that Tactical Flashpoints in particular should NOT go bad, ever. Most of them can be solo'd by a level 65 with a companion, but you need to suffer the random group finder to get the comms or fulfill conquest objectives. When I get in a group of 4 who are unable to get past the first trash pull without wiping, in an instance that I could otherwise solo, I am sorely tempted to lose my cool. It is incredibly frustrating to be held back by players who are so bad they lack basic competence in their class, and are furthermore not interested in even learning. They seem to exist solely to make group content a chore for everyone they get stuck with.

Not a complaint, just honest and, hopefully, constructive feedback. I'm someone who does flashpoints and story mode ops on a regular basis, so the Eternal Championship is probably not meant for me anyway, but: the rewards are not just weak for this, they are actively a pain in the butt. Even on my lowliest mule alt I that never does an op, I would never use that gear. I'm going to have pieces of useless armor on 2 hour timers sitting in my inventory for months on a dozen characters that I play maybe once a week? It's not going to happen. As there has been no new ops content in forever, and the once monthly story missions don't take terribly long to complete, even if you're wallowing in the story and exploring literally every corner of every map, and as they have limited replay value, I was really looking forward for something new, challenging, and rewarding with the Eternal Championship. It appears as though we're not getting it. As it is, the rewards for the Heroic Star Fortress aren't worth the minimal effort to run it. It's too big a pain in the butt for what you get out of it. I'm guessing the Eternal Championship will be on par with that in challenge, which means it will basically be something to do with no reward. I wouldn't mind having Bowdaar, but I honestly will probably not run this just for the companion, when there are so many others to choose from. He's not that special, and if I really want him, I have him already on my Gunslinger. The gear rewards for the Eternal Championship must be moddable. The item levels are fine. The lack of a set bonus is fine. But as a casual raider with a lot of alts, if I am looking for a way to help gear up some of my underused characters for farming heroics or just for being a slight cut-above in the bolstered GF content, this needs to be a key way of doing it, and it is not. There's an opportunity for this to be a real big deal, on par with an event. In addition to moddable 204/208/216 gear, and the already-mentioned pet and mount drops, this needs a range of items that can be purchased with the token rewards: recharge toys, dyes, the moddable 204/208/216 gear, a unique weapon skin, maybe a unique color crystal. Decorations. The Eternal Championship needs to make the player say, "Holy &(*@(*#@, I can't wait to play that!" Instead, it seems to be making the players say, "Great, more vendor trash with a 2 hour timer." I concur. Not going to engage in any type of content that requires more than pressing the 1 key over and over again to be successful, if the reward is nothing but comms and vendor trash. I can get comms and vendor trash farming a heroic area on Dromund Kaas or Coruscant with my companion doing 90% of the work. As it stands, there is nothing special about the Eternal Championship as you've described it. It's just a harder way to get what you already have, so you can wait out a 2 hour timer and sell it to a vendor. Pass.

Ran a Heroic-2 Star Fortress on a level 65 Arsenal Merc in 220/224 augmented gear with rank 50 Mako on heals. Got completely owned by the first Paladin. Ran again on a level 65 Guardian tank in 192 gear with a rank 20-something Lana as a healer. Health bar didn't move a smidge until Lana got knocked off the catwalk by the Praetorian. Didn't live too long after that. I'd say, on the whole, the healing nerf was too strong and too inconsistent. In the Star Fortress, Mako was completely unable to compensate for the damage being dealt by a Paladin and 2 standard trash mobs when the player is a well-geared DPS. On the other hand, my tank's health bar never even moved (even during the Praetorian fight) in much worse gear and with a much lower ranked companion. In all honesty, I think you kind of have your design goals a little backwards. The game should be MOST challenging (but not frustratingly so) for new players in the leveling experience. Once you reach 65, get decent gear (like 208/216) and have a companion approaching rank 50, content SHOULD be as big a cakewalk as it was before the nerf. By that point, you've earned it. A well geared veteran player should be able to blow through heroics and dailies without any pause, because those players are doing those things numerous times per day on several different characters. Having to stop and rest up between pulls makes it tedious and boring and not worth the effort. Someone earlier in the thread noted that, while the current heroic Star Fortress IS soloable under the current conditions (and I suppose I could probably go back again and do it on my Arsenal Merc if I CCd things and did a lot of kiting), the rewards in the end just aren't worth it. It's not worth the time and hassle invested, so I'm just not going to be doing it. My personal preference is that I want end game operations (and to an extend, hard mode flashpoints) to be challenging and require good gear, tactics, and cooperation (and, ironically, a poorly geared group can absolutely FLY through Eternity Vault on Hard Mode). I feel like, for a veteran player, everything else in the game should be trivial. When starting a game fresh, from a new player perspective, I want things to be challenging enough to keep me interested, with the knowledge that I'm going to get stronger over time and look back and laugh about how hard all that was back when I started. That's my two cents. Maybe the nerf was necessary. That's a matter of debate or personal preference. Personally, I liked it the way it was. But I think at this point most folks agree that the severity of the nerf was uncalled for. I'm hoping those changes are rescinded or at least reduced.

Then you just don't get that companion. You're not entitled to have absolutely everything in the game. If you don't like PvP, you miss out on that companion. There are things in the game I don't care to do, and so I don't get the rewards associated with them. If I want those rewards, I do the thing. Running 20 warzones is not a huge deal. Eat a couple Valium and queue up. They're just pixels the same as every other pixel in the game.

Money. Lots of money. Also, just because you haven't started the expansion yet, doesn't mean you eventually won't. The crates are legacy-bound, so if you do the expansion later on another character, you can bank them. But most nights we'll get people together in groups of two, draw the heroics that we know are instanced, and then just go on a murdering spree. Can easily make a half million or more credits in an hour or so. Third, some of the conquest events give points for doing certain planetary heroics. Lastly, because they're fun. They're easily soloable, but if you do them in pairs (and split up once inside the instance) you can knock them out super fast.

This is what I'm thinking, and makes the most sense from a design standpoint, but it still seems like the warnings aren't entirely clear and I'm not sure I want to gamble on it. Especially with Mako.

So now that the companion terminal is working -- complete with half a dozen "are you sure you're sure" pop-ups, I'm still not entirely clear on one thing: If you use the terminal to recover a companion (in my case, for crafting purposes), will you be excluded from the portion of the story arc that later returns them, or is it only warning you half a dozen times that they won't be part of the official story until that point? I'd like to have a couple of them back for mission skills and crafting, but not if I'm going to miss out on story content later.

The Alliance drops alone are worth it. The money from the missions and bonuses are, as mentioned, on par with or in excess of what you get from doing regular dailies in terms of efficiency.

Going back to lower level planets will be like... holy crap, killing random mobs on Ziost. You know, the ones that die in 3 hits? Probably even easier than that, since the mobs were designed to be killed by characters who don't have a full rotation. Plus, the nodes will give you more per harvest than you're currently getting. The sky is not falling, no matter how much you want it to be.

That makes sense. Thanks!

Hey gang, been searching through the various guides for answers to a couple conquest questions and coming up empty. Was hoping someone here could help. 1) I could swear there is a cut-off day during the week after which you cannot invade a planet, but I can't seem to find any information on that. Am I misremembering? 2) Assuming your guild places in the top 10 for a planetary invasion, who qualifies to get the reward? Only those who met their own personal conquest totals? Only those who contributed at least something? Everyone in the guild who logged on? Everyone in the guild whether they logged on or not? Only the guild leader? Thanks!

Gear is for all the people who think they're going to be 1-shot by level 1 Korslugs on Korriban. Level scaled dailies and heroics will require good gear to do efficiently. Story mode ops or hard mode flashpoints may have bolster, but hard mode ops will likely not. It will be less important for casual players to have gear to get into things like flashpoints and ops. But you will still need to improve your gear for soloing dailies with any efficiency or doing the hard mode operations. I'm pretty sure Bioware thinks these things through, despite what the forums would have you believe. In other news, the sky is falling, and I think I see a wolf.

I am assuming the stories you haven't finished will be "completed" in your history. You won't be able to go back and start them, not because they've been removed, but because the game will assume your character has done them in the canon. New level 1s will still be able to do them all. If the missions were truly being removed and locked out, you wouldn't be able to do Oricon, Rishi, Yavin, and other daily areas that require unlocking. The sky is not falling, Bioware is not taking your quests, and Obama is not taking your guns.

I think people must not remember very well what the NGE actually was, or did. The NGE completely changed SWG in every aspect. Controls, movement, combat mechanics, combat calculations, classes, crafting, interface, and made it into an entirely different game that happened to use the same engine and art assets. It was no longer the same game that was originally shipped, in any meaningful way. No change that SWTOR has made or is likely to ever make (no game company is ever likely to make such sweeping changes again, we can thank SOE for that) will ever be that total. Any suggestion that this or any other update is the "NGE of SWTOR" is textbook hyperbole. The same thing has been said about every major release to this game, especially Shadow of Revan, which was (if you'll recall), the NGE OF SWTOR and the doom of the game. It's ridiculous.