jedimasterjac Posted December 22, 2021 Share Posted December 22, 2021 (edited) Hiya! Hopefully a whole thread is appropriate. I'm trying to take notes of everything I notice while going through the whole experience with a fresh toon, so I thought a condensed thread might be better than replying to each subject thread one-by-one. I'm only still on Tython, so I'll have to update this over time, but here are some of the notes I have so far: Character Creation The new system is nice. The UI is very clean and modern. While I have nostalgia for the old way, I understand the need for an update.Some weapons took more than 30 seconds to load in when previewing combat styles, but the animations would still play. This makes a bad impression!The shadow lightsaber clips through the information text on combat styles and origin stories. There should be a background of some sort, or at least something behind the text.Character creation feels a little bit zoomed in. I think newer players wouldn't have a good impression of body type sizes and such, going off of the current zoom in creation. New Content The "Lessons of the Force" quest was generally enjoyable. The complete lack of VA was a bit odd -- it may have felt better if Satele or some other Force Sensitive character were speaking to us.I really enjoyed the new combat style class. I've missed choosing ACs, and this feels like a nice little callback. It also reminded me of choosing a prestige class in KotOR 2, which I adore.I can't seem to figure out how to actually toggle to my other combat style. I made a Guardian, then chose Sorcerer as my second combat style; how do I activate it? User Interface I like the new look of the interface. It seems to load much faster, and not cause my game to freeze, which many old UI elements do for a half-second or so.The inventory can be opened with "I", but won't close when I press "I." I have to press ESC, or C, and then C again to close the new character menu.The character menu feels oppressive with how much room it takes up, but I do appreciate the amount of information condensed within.Many of the new icons look nice. It will take some getting used to, but there is generally a much more modern feel to the user interface.I REALLY like the new outfitter. The UI is much more obvious, and I think players will more easily see what's happening there and how to navigate costume tabs. Jedi Guardian Getting Force Sweep and Riposte at level 4 doesn't quite feel right. I think we should still get Force Sweep earlier, at either 2 or 3. Bugs I killed a Flesh Raider and it dropped an item called "Underworld Syndicate Plans." Is this intended? It seems to be a turn-in on Nar Shaddaa.The Tythonian Battler Practice Blade -- a reward I received from "The Path of a Jedi" -- has the icon for a lightsaber. Edited December 22, 2021 by jedimasterjac Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Ulathar Posted December 24, 2021 Share Posted December 24, 2021 I'll join your thread on this, because I have taken a similar approach while working on the PTS rewards. So here are my notes on this entire experience (please bear in mind, I had this differently structured than the forum allows): First of all, the reward checkmarks: - Log in to PTS: Done. - Complete class story on any class: Done. Chapter 1: Done. Chapter 2: Done. Chapter 3: Done. - Complete all expansion story content: Done. Makeb: Done. Shadow of Revan: Done. Knights of the Fallen Empire: Done. Knights of the Eternal Throne: Done. Onslaught: Done. - Overall gear score 322 on one character: Done. - Weekly missions: Done. Heroic: Done. Flashpoint: Done. (Veteran) PvP: Done. (Unranked) - Time spent overall: 60 hours. Now for the actual feedback: Levelling (some notes may not be relevant to 7.0 testing, but are things I noticed throughout): - Original storyline: (16 hours 50 minutes played) Smooth experience, although it felt a bit more difficult than on live. Still easily doable, but it was tighter in some spots than I am used to. Finished at level 50. I only did side missions on Korriban and later on Belsavis. On every other planet, I just did the main class story missions. (!) Inquisitor specific: I believe in one quest I was supposed to get Lord Kallig's lightsaber. However, I wasn't rewarded the item. Could it be because I was combat style Juggernaut instead of Inqusiitor? I received the "a successful ambush" ingame mail from Lord Anathemos even though I didn't go that route in the story. - Makeb: (19 hours 30 minutes played) Finished the story at Level 56, so great level pace I thought the fights were well balanced, most being easily managable with only some tougher foes here and there to spice things up. Granted, I'm an experienced player and was playing my main class/combat style, so difficulty may vary for newer players. - Shadow of Revan: (23 hours 30 minutes played) Finished Rishi at level 63 so a lot of XP to be had there. Fights are definitely easier by this point, because I have more of my combat style's top abilities (like ED). During Confederacy on Yavin, the sensors were quest marked on the mini map, but no purple markers were visible on the large map (M). Bonus mission quest marker was there, though. Even reload UI didn't help. Once I had clicked all 6 sensors, the final sensor was correctly marked again. Finished at level 65, so perfect for the upcoming KotFE chapters (considering I'm skipping the prelude). Fights were rather easy, even the boss fights. Revan took the longest, obviously, but it was more because of his health than his difficulty. - Knights of the Fallen Empire: (32h 20minutes played) (!) When switching difficulty between Story and Veteran I got a popup message telling me "Your selected scaled difficulty preference is differen then the difficulty just set [...]". Shouldn't it be "than"? I received 1.1 million XP for completing chapter 1, but only 56k for chapter 2 and 3? Is this intentional, depending on the level or what's the reason? In chapter VI, arriving on Asylum, Rolo thanked me for keeping his people alive back in chapter I. However, I had ESC the light side choice and gone for DS. But apparantly LS got flagged regardless. Finished KotFE at level 73, so quite over level. But then again, as I would on live, I used all my heroic reward items (transfered over) to gain Alliance level 20 on everyone which enables me to complete all corresponding quests which give quite a bit XP. Although not a focus of this PTS test: the sky trooper ambushes and wave style combat remain annoying and are probably one of the main reasons I don't replay the chapters often. (again, just my opinion, obviously) - Knights of the Eternal Throne: (37h 53 minutes played) Chapter 3: During the mouse droid part, the red area of the guards indicating their field of view is wrong. It's larger than the UI shows, making the whole thing more difficult and unpredictable than it has to be. Finished at level 75. Onslaught: (40 hours 27 minutes played) (!) During the fight against Gnost-Dural on Ossus, he used a Phantom of Darth Baras against me. Baras coresponds with my combat style class of the Juggernaut, but not my Origin class of the Inquisitor. Is this intended or should it have been Zash or Thanaton? Finished at level 80. Scaling: As a boosted and geared Level 80 character, I will of course get scaled down on lower level planets. However, compared to live, I feel way weaker on the PTS, even though I technically have better level/gear/stats. I've had several close calls simply doing the heroic missions, whereas on live I just breeze through them - which is way more appealing to me when doing a "grind". While I generally like it when I actually have to think during the fights, use CC and everything - I'm just having fun the first few times. After that, if I'm just doing a grind, I prefer to be able to faceroll it. Gearing/Weekly missions: I like that all currencies needed for gearing and upgrades are Legacy bound, so that I could do the same weeklies on different characters, but use the tokens to just gear my main or alts later on. So the system is more alt friendly than I had first feared. If I understood correctly, though, one of the goals of 7.0 is to make everything easier and more friendly to new players. Introducing so many different currencies for various gear and upgrade paths doesn't seem to go with that philosophy and feels more complicated than it has to be. I will adapt, of course and this is just my opinioin on this, but there you have it. I also find it a bit sad that PvP armour starts at a lower item level than any other gearing path, even though I feel like getting 4 wins in PvP is more difficult than completing conquest or finishing 3 Veteran FPs. I've done heroic weekly missions via the "Groupfinder" Solo tab and when I looked at the heroic terminal in the combat section on the fleet, it also displayed the weekly after I had finished it already. Is this intentional or a bug that I could do the weekly more than once? I also have a suggestion here: make the final mission reward of a multistage bonus mission also grant some(2?) aquatic resource matrix, to give some incentive to do them. Another thing regarding the aquatic resource matrix: Having one conqeust item upgrade cost 60 of those tokens seem a bit much. My suggestion is to lower it to 40, or have heroic weeklies grant 30 of them instead of 20. Either way it would mean 2 weeklies for one item upgrade which seems better to me. Flashpoints and groupfinder: - I believe (and please correct me if I'm wrong), another swtor philosophy is to have us players play the way we want. With how gearing in 7.0 and the various weekly quests will work doesn't seem to go along with this, in my opinion. The flashpoints only seem to count towards the weekly if done via groupfinder, and also only if all FPs are selected. That means I can't opt out of some of them or just queue for the ones I enjoy. Not only that, the available FPs rotate so those FPs I like may not be available this week. Again - and just in my opinion - this does not seem to go with the above mention philosophy. Similar with heroic weeklies. I had Taris available this week, but not Balmorra. So if I like the Balmorra heroics, but not Taris, I'll have to wait and hope that the weekly becomes available next week? I'd rather have all available and I choose which I want to do. - Also, and this could be a PTS related bug, but I found it weird that I was not eligible for using groupfinder during the levelling phase of my character. UI: (!) I *love* the new search field in the ability menu, including pets and especially mounts I'm not a big fan of the all caps text, though. Especially the error messages like "not eligible for this conversation". It just feels like the game is screaming at me. When special abilities pop up (using heroic moment, for example), there seems to be a small window also trying to appear - maybe the border of the ability frame. It immediately disappears again, but I haven't noticed anything similar on the live servers, so I thought I should mention it. Maybe I did something wrong, but Loadouts do not seem to save ability tree selections. I wanted to have the same combat style/discipline but with different abilities selected in the ability tree for PvE and PvP. But it doesn't change when I switch the loadouts - (!) When levelling up grants abilities, they flare up for a short time, but especially if the level up happens during a fight, it is not very noticable. I think getting skills from trainers makes it easier to take a loot at skills first before aquiring them, even thought it might be slightly inconvenient. Although I'm pretty sure you'll stick to the new approach of automatically granting them: I suggest leaving them *flared up* until the player hovers over them with the mouse once. That way they are noticable even after battles. It could also be interesting to look at a toggle in preferences where the player chooses between auto granting abilities or having to go to a trainer. So, there you have it, my notes after spending quite some time on the PTS. The tldr version is that even with the reservations I still have and things I'd like to see tweaked here and there, 7.0 is definitely looking better than I had feared. Anyway, I hope my notes will help. Cheers. Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
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