7.7 Dev Stream: More Alien Colours Are Nice, but Still No Story

Yesterday it was time for another dev stream, this time focused on the upcoming patch 7.7. There was some competition for my attention as the new pope had gone live mere moments earlier, but I loaded up Twitch on my laptop and dived right in.

There was a new Twitch drop to be earned (a purple-framed Dromund Kaas poster), for watching one hour of live SWTOR content, but apparently Twitch measures time a bit differently from the rest of the world as it took almost the full one and a half hours of the stream for it to show as earned. Yes, the stream lasted one and a half hours! I wish I could say this was a sign of it being chock-full of exciting updates, but to be honest I get the feeling that they've just got better at fluffing up what they have to make it look bigger. For example there was a whole section about fixing a bug with the sprinter guild perk, which... don't get me wrong, fixing bugs is a good thing, no arguments there! But is a single bug fix of that nature really important enough to warrant a segment with the game producer on your livestream to get players hyped up? Personally I don't think so.

The thing that we of course all wanted to know above all else was whether there was any update on the story content and sadly, the answer was not really. Basically, they've built 7.7, but the voice actors' strike is still going on, so we're still not getting anything. The only thing I noted down here was that they showed the little trailer from Star Wars Celebration again (the one that included [Spoiler?]) and the accompanying slide said it featured "a mysterious figure that has been pulling the strings behind the scenes", which does seem to confirm that this person's role is going to be more than a throwaway cameo.

Anyway, having the second major patch in a row release without story content will be a bummer, but I guess I can't really complain as we know the voice actors' strike is still a thing. I'd just gotten my hopes up a little as a "datamining-adjacent" friend had told me that something had happened and somehow the 7.6 story looked ready for release now. (You know who you are; consider yourself given the side eye!) But that's not the devs' fault, and just goes to illustrate once again why you shouldn't put too much stock in things that are datamined.

Anyway, they still managed to fill a one and a half hour stream, and it wasn't all bug fixes, so there obviously were some other things announced.

Among a number of UI updates to the mission log and map, the one that stood out the most was the addition of the so-called "eras window", a new tab on your mission log. All this does is basically show you the storyline split into "eras" (which mostly align with expansions, but not 100%), to show you where you are and what's coming up. This seems like it could be a major boon to returning players who don't remember where they left off in terms of story. It was also noted that it doesn't "currently" include notes on any decisions you've made, though I guess this is something they could expand on in the future. Either way, it's a good feature but won't do much for me as a "power user". I wrote about how I had to create a spreadsheet to keep track of all my alts' progress almost seven years ago, which is much more detailed and most importantly, let's me see where each character is at without having to log into them in game to check. I still rely on that to this day, but for less hardcore Swtorites this new window will be useful.

In terms of group content, we got the official announcement for master mode XR-53, which is cool for the relevant target audience but I suspect it will be too hard for me and my guildies so I can't muster too much enthusiasm for it right now. I was also a bit disappointed by the clarification that the new augment schematics it will drop will be brand-new gold augments that will outclass the purple ones that people spent the last few months researching and crafting. We don't even know whether you'll be able to reverse-engineer the gold ones by deconstructing the purple ones (it was asked in chat multiple times but not answered). So eh. As a side note to this, they said that PvP weeklies will start rewarding small amounts of corrupted bioprocessors, the (until now) unique crafting material dropped by XR-53, which is nice I guess, though for me personally the bottleneck has actually turned out to be other mats.

Speaking of PvP, PvP Season 8 will launch with 7.7 and in order to align it more with how Galactic Seasons work, it will now also include an option to just buy out levels with Cartel coins. I've got to admit there was a small part of me that bristled at this because isn't PvP about skill? You shouldn't be able to buy that, right? But then, these new PvP seasons have always been just about participation with no particular requirement to succeed, so I guess it's not that big a deal.

They talked about Nar Shaddaa Nightlife returning in July, which just felt weird to think about this early in May, but I guess summer isn't that far away. The main thing that irked me here was that there was no comment about making the various slot machine chips a legacy-wide currency. They talked about this last year and said it was complex and would take time - but then they managed to change the DvL tokens from character- to legacy-bound within a couple of weeks, so I was really hoping we'd be able to start this year's Nightlife with something similar. But nope, nothing. I guess I can still hope that it will be addressed later, but for now I'm just disappointed that the main thing I was curious about in regards to this event was not mentioned at all.

The biggest and most universally accessible bit of gameplay to be added with the patch will be new dynamic encounters on seven planets, which will include all the starter planets, the two faction capitals and Ilum. The starter planets won't have that many encounters due to how small they are, but still. I thought going for these early planets next was an interesting choice when I first heard chatter about it during the previous PTS. I thought Tatooine and Hoth made great sense as first locations for this new feature, and in my mind the best place to use it going forward were going to be other large planets with a lot of empty space, such as Quesh, Belsavis or Voss. Cramming them into the tiny starter planets is kind of the opposite of that, but I can understand the devs wanting to introduce the feature to new players early on in order to get people interested and familiar from the get-go. I'm still a little concerned that it might end up being a bit of a pain to have god knows how many players compete for the same six k'lor'slugs on Korriban (which would not improve the new player experience I reckon), but we'll see how it goes. In general I've really enjoyed dynamic encounters and am looking forward to getting more of them.

One interesting thing they announced closer to the end was "combat updates", which is to say they are going to make some changes to combat styles, such as which discipline is selected for new players by default and what order you get some abilities in. The example they gave was that Guardians/Juggernauts don't really have any AoE other than Force Sweep/Smash for a long time, so they want to pull Cyclone/Sweeping Slash forward and grant it automatically at level 7 instead of making it a level 27 optional choice like it is right now. This sounds like a good idea in principle, though I could have thought of better examples to choose. From what I recall there are currently some utilities that actually give you buffs to certain abilities several levels before you actually get that ability, which is just weird, and I'm hoping that this kind of thing will also be included in this overhaul. (I quickly logged in to find an example and e.g. Deception Shadows have a talent option at level 27 to add functionality to Force Cloak when they don't actually get Force Cloak until level 31.)

I do wonder a little though, as another example they gave about something they want to change was to make the default spec for Shadows Serenity (the dot spec) instead of Deception (the direct damage one). I just wrote down "why?" in my notes here as the latter is much easier to play, so why change to the more difficult one as default? So I have some reservations as well, not fully understanding what they are going for here.

The big surprise at the end of the stream (including one here seems to be a pattern they are settling into) was that they'll be adding lots more skin colours for aliens in the patch, and I do mean lots. Like, Nautolans will go from having 10 colours to 95 different shades. Now, only some of those will be completely new colours, like the (inexplicably, to me) popular purple Twi'leks, but just getting a lot more different shades of say, green, will be cool too. I think this was the most exciting announcement of the stream for many players, and I liked it too. It's just no replacement for actual story content, you know? I continue to wait.

Meanwhile, further info about the patch and stream, should you want it:

• VOD on Twitch
• VOD on YouTube
• Article on the official website
  
• Swtorista summary
• Today in TOR summary
• Vulkk summary

A Productive War Week

As mentioned previously, last week was Total Galactic War once again. It was a very successful one for my guild, as we conquered Hoth, which was one of four planets remaining that we had never won before (this includes the two planets added with Legacy of the Sith by the way).

That aside though, I just had a really good time playing. Total Galactic War is one of the rare occasions when I make a point of logging into and playing every single one of my (Republic) alts in the same week (in order to spread out the Conquest points and maximise my rewards), which makes for a pretty varied week of gaming. Sure, a lot of my focus was on high-yield objectives like the GSF and warzone weeklies, but once those were out of the way, I'd usually also do a bit of whatever progression was specific to that character.

I got two more alts to 80, and another three are now sitting at 79, with less than a full level to go to the cap as well. In fact, I realised that it's been so long that I made a new Republic alt on Darth Malgus that I only have a single character left in the lowbie PvP bracket (sub level 45) and even she will outgrow that soon. In midbie, I also have only three more characters left, aside from the level 79s I already mentioned. That feels strange and like I should really roll up some fresh lowbies at some point.

Then again, keeping track of how to play all these alts is a challenge by itself. One of the characters I got to 80 was my Sentinel - probably my least favourite combat style in general. I did a story mode operation on her to progress the implant mission and realised only afterwards that I'd done so without realising that one of my spec's main abilities wasn't even on my bar.

Two other lesser-played alts that got some love were my Serenity Shadow and my Balance Sage, who both saw some PvP action. DoT specs are pretty flavour of the month (year?) at the moment but personally I don't tend to get along with them that well. However, my Shadow had an absolutely insanely good time in warzones and it definitely made me re-evaluate my stance on the spec. Balance was a bit more of a mixed bag... I could kind of tell how extremely OP it was, but I repeatedly ended up in matches where the enemy enjoyed ganging up on me, and even as I was keeping three or four of them busy for a while my team mates got nothing done, which did not feel great.

I also pugged a few flashpoints, something I hadn't done in a while, and it was... interesting. With 336 gear being very accessible now, the content doesn't feel so tough anymore, but it's still possible for things to go wrong if people don't try at all. In a master mode Assault on Tython that I tanked, we got a Shadow dps with pretty low gear - I didn't think anything of it at first, nor was I upset when they wiped us by accidentally pulling an extra group on trash. After all, that can happen to anyone.

However, on the first boss I started to notice that things were dying really, really slowly, and just from the visuals, it didn't look like the guy was doing more than spamming a single attack. Okay, maybe someone new to the game and not great at it... that still would've been fine. However, by the second boss, he periodically stopped attacking at all, began spamming target markers around the area, and kept taunting the boss even though I asked him not to do that. By the end of the fight (which felt like it took ten minutes with only a single damage dealer really doing anything), the group had had enough and initiated a vote kick, and for once I had little sympathy. We'd really tried, but the guy was just not responding to anything and making things way harder than they needed to be.

After that much action, I've been taking it easy again this week... and we now know that next week will already bring the new seasons patch, meaning a return to that grind. I don't really feel ready, but I guess we'll see what it's like.

I Still Miss My Abilities

In her video "Is SWTOR worth returning to in 2022" from a few months ago, Swtorista had this to say about 7.0's update to class abilities: "High-skill players who were using every single one of their abilities often express frustration about missing having all their useful abilities at once, and that includes me - though six months later, I care a lot less. I haven't missed it quite as much."

When I first heard this, it made me think. We're coming up on the one-year-anniversary of Legacy of the Sith's launch, and back then I said in my first impressions that I wasn't sure yet how I felt about the ability pruning, as I liked some aspects of it but found myself somewhat frustrated by others. Do I also care a lot less twelve months later? Sadly, the answer is: not exactly.

To be clear, I don't miss every single ability that has been removed or that I've had to forfeit. Especially on classes that I don't play that often, it's not like I had ever truly memorised everything in the first place. However, on my Commando, I still have issues.

Specifically, I still don't like the level 68 ability choice, which at the start of 7.0 forced you to choose between Hold the Line, a movement speed increase that breaks snares and roots while also making you immune to them for a few seconds, Echoing Deterrence, a reflect that can be activated while stunned and that heals you for any direct damage reflected, and Cryo Grenade, the trooper's hard stun.

The main problem for me is that I just can't go back to a life without Echoing Deterrence, because I remember all too well just how much of a punching bag healing Commandos were before its introduction. Even if it's not quite as powerful these days as it used to be, not least because most players actually know to stop attacking you when it's up, I still can't imagine wanting to PvP without it. But even if I just look at PvE, it's saved my life so many times when I got healing aggro on trash or a tank was slow to pick up adds on some boss fights. It's just utterly irreplaceable for me.

Having to make do without Cryo Grenade has mostly been okay, except that I still haven't quite managed to shake the habit of reflexively wanting to stun people in the fire in Huttball, and I still get caught off guard by being unable to do it, but I'll fully admit that that's an edge case. Hold the Line was much more of an issue though, as Commandos don't have much mobility without it.

Now, over the course of several months I painstakingly trained myself to rely more on Propulsion Round instead - which doesn't help with roots, but it can get you from A to B more quickly. The only "problem" is that it goes backwards, so it's easy to get yourself in trouble with it as you can't exactly see where you're going.

And then what does Bioware do with 7.2? They swap out Hold the Line and Propulsion Round, meaning the the former is now baseline and the latter has to be chosen, meaning that just as I got used to relying on Propulsion Round, I can't have that anymore and now have to re-train for Hold the Line only. Argh!

My only temporary saving grace has been that the system is a bit buggy, meaning it granted most of my Commandos and Mercs Hold the Line or its Imperial equivalent without taking Propulsion Round away... this seems to be quite a common bug that fixes itself as soon as you switch loadouts - which has of course meant that I've tried hard not to do that. I dread the day when I either forget and accidentally make the switch or Bioware fixes the bug.

As mentioned, it hasn't been as bad on other classes that I don't play as much, but still, there are others where I'm in a similar situation of just struggling to pick one of two abilities over the other. For example my Guardian tank always feels like she's missing either Saber Reflect or Blade Blitz for quick threat, and while having to choose between Phase Walk and Force Lift as a Sage is not totally unreasonable, it feels like I find myself stuck in combat and looking for whichever ability I don't have at that particular moment way too often.

How do others feel about the ability pruning a year later? Do you also have that one choice that still feels bad? Do you have several? Or have you adapted just fine?

Warming Up to Combat Styles

I've said since shortly after the launch of Legacy of the Sith that combat styles aren't really for me. I think they're a solid feature that I can see appealing to many, but for me a character's advanced class/combat style is just too big a part of their identity for me to just start changing it willy-nilly. When I decided to add a second combat style to my Commando main back in May in order to be more flexible in harder operations, it was a big deal for me.

I'm happy to say though that as we're approaching eight months of Legacy of the Sith, I'm slowly starting to warm up to the concept. I still have no great desire to make such a big change to the characters I play the most, but I actually went ahead and added a second combat style to two of my lesser played alts the other week. Interestingly, I've actually found it a bit easier to make this choice on characters I'm not quite as invested in, as their identity still feels a bit more malleable you could say.

The first character to take the plunge was my dps Commando whom I created back in the day during the Dark vs. Light event. She's mostly dark side and I've always pictured her as a bit of a brawler who likes to punch people, so Vanguard/Powertech or Scoundrel/Operative all seemed like viable options. In the end I made the final decision somewhat impulsively on a day when I was trying to do some dailies/heroics for Conquest and found myself wishing that I had more suitable alts with stealth to make the process easier. So Zeresa went off to the GSI shop and learned how to be an Operative.

I haven't really done much with this new flexibility other than struggle a bit to get her gear sorted, spend some time trying to find a suitable outfit, and do some of the dailies I made the switch for, but I guess the option is there now.

The other character that acquired a second combat style was my second Sage Tiranea. Interestingly, this one wasn't really inspired by any particular need; I just happened to be reminded of her and it occurred to me that she was uniquely suited to getting a second combat style due to having undergone more changes than most of my characters throughout the years. Plus I also have this vague memory of actually being a bit hesitant when it came to choosing her advanced class originally as I was at least considering Shadow as an option well. Now she can be both.

As this was my first Force user to choose a second combat style and I hadn't looked anything up about how it works, I was kind of surprised to see that they don't get to see any kind of trainer but simply meditate and have a vision that then unlocks their second combat style. Still seems fitting enough though.

I actually have potential combat style ideas for a couple more alts, but we'll see when I get around to them. While the new loadouts feature is very handy for quickly switching specialisation, I'm still not a fan of all the faffing around that's required to get that properly set up in the first place, so I've got to pace myself with those things.

Combat Logging in SWTOR

Whether I like it or not, I've had a lot of reasons to look at dps numbers in SWTOR in the past few months: partially because I know I can't choose to hide my performance from others anymore, partially because certain operations have been so tough that looking at everyone's numbers and ways to improve has been very... relevant.

On a whim, I put "SWTOR combat logging" into Google today and was kind of shocked to see that most of the results were forum posts from 2012 full of now-dead links. So I thought to myself, why not use this as one of those opportunities to actually post something useful on here?

How to enable combat logging in SWTOR:

Go to your in-game preferences (bound to Ctrl+P by default) and select "combat logging" on the left. You'll see a checkbox called "Enable combat logging to file" on the right, which you'll want to tick. This will save all your combat data from each play session into a text file on your PC, which can then be found in your documents under Star Wars - The Old Republic > CombatLogs.

The game warns you that this is "a feature for advanced users that may require active disk management", which is their way of saying that if you play a lot, you'll want to make sure to clear out the combat log folder every so often or your hard drive might get clogged up with thousands of text files after a while. I hadn't cleared out my own since February and when I checked on it just now it was over 6 GB large, oops.

As for how to view the information recorded in these logs in a way that makes sense to a human, you currently have three main options that I'm aware of:

Ixale's StarParse

This is a separate program that you download onto your computer and run alongside SWTOR to watch your numbers (and now also those of your group mates) rise and fall in real time. Personally I find it somewhat clunky/limited for more detailed combat analysis (such as "just why exactly did we wipe there, I'm not sure what happened") but it's great for getting a quick overview of dps and healing numbers.

It also sports additional features such as timers and overlays. Timers can be a bit fiddly in my experience, but when they work they are the closest you can get to having something like a boss mod addon in SWTOR, as you can set them up to give you sound cues when certain abilities are triggered or to show countdowns to important boss moves.

Overlays can be set up to show you additional information on screen such as a boss's health percentage (without you having to keep the boss as your focus target) or to give a healer a better overview of their heals over time on different targets.

About the only thing it doesn't do is allow you to review your logs online and share them with others, but for that it has integration with...

Parsely.io

Not to be confused with the herb - I've mistyped this in my browser many times. Parsely is the longest-running site for people to upload their SWTOR combat logs and where you can compare your performance to that of other players, meaning it's full of interesting stats. With 7.0 and the changes to combat logging, it got a big revamp and now also allows you to do much more detailed analysis of your logs, making it possible to break them down in different ways and even allowing you to watch tactical replays of fights.

SWTOR Logs

SWTOR Logs is a relatively new kid on the block, but the site's creator isn't new as they also maintain well-known logging sites for other games, such as Warcraft Logs and FF Logs. I'd say that this has pros and cons: An example of a con is that SWTOR isn't their main priority, which is part of why it took several months for the site to be updated for 7.0. On the plus side though, if you're familiar with one of its sister sites, you'll find the UI very intuitive since it works in exactly the same way, and you'll likely appreciate the very powerful filtering tools that allow you to drill down to a very detailed level. I'm definitely biased here as I've been using Warcraft Logs for quite some time, and I've also spoken to the creator on Discord and found them to be very responsive to fixing bugs. You mileage may vary, but I can definitely recommend giving this one a try if you're interested in looking at logs at all.

Galactic Season 2 Complete on Satele Shan

Satele Shan was my second most progressed server after Star Forge in my belated "complete Season 2 on all the servers" project, but I knew I'd have to buy out at least a few levels to be able to finish in time. Since you can't buy out the last five levels with credits, I also had to do this before doing all my weeklies in the last week of the season.

After doing a bit of maths I eventually settled on buying my way from level 87 to 93, a step that only cost me 7.5 million credits - much less than I expected having to spend at the start. This left me a bit of wiggle room to reach level 100 easily by completing a few weeklies, without necessarily needing to capitalise on every single source of points available.

My season progress on this server was mainly carried by my Shadow Zilek, who was in his thirties when I started this project and finished at level 66, though with very little progress made on his class story. A general theme with my efforts to complete the season was that as long as all my characters were low-level, just questing along was one of my better sources of Conquest points for the daily objective, but past level 50 it was just more efficient to rely on reputations and companion influence for quick daily completion and to otherwise focus on the weeklies, which rarely meshed well with doing story content.

Still, having a stealther as my "season main" was a noticeable advantage compared to the other servers, as was very much in evidence this last week for example, when one of the objectives was to do the Black Hole weekly twice. This was quite a slog on most of my rather underpowered characters that did it, especially the heroic, but Zilek could just stealth past all but the couple of mobs directly required for the objective, making it a quick in-and-out operation.

In terms of experiencing what life is like on different servers, Satele Shan was a bit of a nothing sandwich for me to be honest. It's supposed to be the US west coast server (despite of no longer being labelled as such), but to me as a European either coast is just a different time zone from me, and I still ran into other players regardless of when I played. What little time I spent in group content such as veteran mode flashpoints and warzones didn't really feel noticeably different from the way I'd seen things go down on Darth Malgus or Star Forge. I still suspect that there are some cultural differences to be observed between the different English-speaking servers, but they may be too subtle to notice without spending more time there, reading general chat during prime time etc.

I mentioned in a previous post that I accepted a random guild invite on my Shadow. In fact, my lower-level Guardian also ended up in the guild shortly afterwards, simply because the recruiter was so zealous in whispering unguilded people that he also "caught" me while I was playing my alt and I was like: "Sure, I already have my main in your guild, why not?"

Since the guild seemed quite active, I eventually gave in and joined their Discord and Guilded site to have a bit of a look around. The thing that stood out to me was how convoluted the system to go up in guild ranks was, requiring attendance of dedicated guild events as well as proving certain in-game milestones such as class story progression, crew skill levelling etc. via screenshots. I didn't bother with any of that myself but found myself wondering how many players would engage with that system, considering that it's been my personal experience that it can be very hard to get people in a guild to do anything at all, never mind submitting receipts every step of the way.

Beyond having a look around and doing my Conquest I didn't really interact with the guild in any meaningful way, mainly because of time zones. Leadership was pinging @everyone pretty much twice a day about some event or other (though they've recently switched to @here, thankfully), but the events were always taking place at 2 a.m. my time or something silly, so I couldn't really have attended even just to sate my curiosity. I expect that now that my objective for Season 2 is complete, my focus will move back to Darth Malgus and I'll eventually be removed for inactivity.

The Big Decision

Almost from the moment combat styles were announced as Legacy of the Sith's big new feature, I was pretty sure that they weren't for me. I tried to think of some ways that I could potentially make use of this new option, but it was honestly a bit of a struggle to come up with use cases for myself. I didn't think that it was a bad idea by any means; I just wasn't really the target audience. I like to lock my characters into specific play styles, and if I want to play in a different way, I just change characters.

So the expansion came out, people around me changed combat styles left and right, and I did nothing. All of my characters stuck to their single combat style and that was that. However, I'd be lying if I claimed that I didn't think about the process at all, especially in the context of running operations with my guild and watching my fellow raiders swap frequently between tanking and dps - or melee and ranged dps - on the fly. The closest I came to doing something similar myself was to switch to healing on my Scoundrel on some nights... but as I noted previously, the new way in which Bioware has decided to handle the weekly ops missions encourages you to not change characters for any boss as it leads to you missing out on mission credit and rewards.

So as the weeks went by, I started mulling over my options. I became increasingly convinced that I'd have to choose a second combat style eventually, at least on my main - but what to go for? In my post from last year I was considering Mercenary, and while that would have had some RP value, it wouldn't have added any practical utility. Looking at the reality of my day-to-day ops experience, I figured that I was looking at either Vanguard or Scoundrel, with each one having its pros and cons.

Vanguard:

Pros:

• Would stay true to the trooper origin as it's the original second combat style option for troopers.
• I would actually get some old abilities back that Commandos used to have before they were limited to Vanguard only, such as Stockstrike and Pulse Cannon!
• Since a Vanguard's roles are tank and melee dps, it would enable my main to truly become a jack of all trades.
• From my experiences on alts, I quite enjoy Vanguard tanking and dps at least in casual content.
  

Cons:

• In terms of practical use, I don't think I've ever been in a situation where we wanted to have one less healer but one more tank, and in terms of dps we tend to have too much melee already anyway.
• It may sound wishy-washy, but I never considered my trooper to be the sort to face-tank things. It just seems a bit out of character.
  

Scoundrel:

Pros:

• Scoundrel healing is incredibly overpowered right now, to the point that having or not having one can make a big difference to how doable a fight is, and my progression team doesn't always have someone else wanting to play that role, so me being able to swap can be very useful.
• Scoundrel is at least somewhat adjacent to the trooper archetype, since I remember Elara Dorne being pretty much a Scoundrel healer when she first joined your squad early in the game, coming with a blaster with Cunning on it (the old smuggler stat) and a very similar ability set.
• Cut scenes always show tech users wielding a single blaster pistol anyway, so it's kinda canon that my trooper has and uses one already.
• Having access to stealth is handy in many situations, both when soloing and in small group content.
  

Cons:

• Considering how unbalanced Scoundrel healing is right now, I wouldn't be surprised to see it get nerfed soon, at which point I'd be "stuck" with just having two different healing styles, somewhat reducing the usefulness in ops.
• Wearing medium armour just isn't as cool.
  

Late last night I finally made my decision and launched the mission to choose a second combat style for my Commando. I hadn't looked into what to expect from that experience at all, so I was kind of pleasantly surprised to find that there was a little "mini story" attached to the process, similar to the little conversations you used to have on the fleet back in the day to choose your advanced class.

A GSI droid being your "trainer" is a bit odd but works for all tech classes, and I liked how you could ask it for a little demonstration of each combat style which then shows you a mini cut scene of your character pulling off some moves typical of that combat style.

So the deed is done - I thought of titling this post "Going Scoundrel", but that would have given the game away from the start! I can't really see it changing the way I see my trooper though, because I still vastly prefer the Commando healing play style in groups - it'll just be nice to have the option to synergise with my fellow healers better where appropriate without switching characters every time.

Force Imbalance

Back in March I wrote a post on here in which I basically gave Bioware a thumbs-up for the way they handled operations in Legacy of the Sith, mainly for the fact that they actually took the time to properly scale them up to the new level cap this time - unlike in Onslaught. I also noted that the content felt incredibly tough at first, but that it seemed obvious that the plan for the long haul was for things to get easier as we geared up, and I was fine with that.

One and a half months later, I feel like I have to qualify that statement a bit. I was fine with the "plan" as it was originally advertised to us, which included the new operation coming out a month or two after Legacy of the Sith's launch and providing us both with new bosses to learn and access to gear upgrades that would allow us to take our power level in the legacy operations up a notch.

Unfortunately, the reality is that LotS has now been out for almost three months and we haven't had any word about as much as a potential release date for 7.1. Raiders have had plenty of time to gear up to the current item level cap of 330, which has certainly helped with making content a bit easier, but truth be told, a lot of operations are still incredibly hard.

Last week my regular team decided to venture into Gods from the Machine on veteran mode, a difficulty setting that we'd cleared with relative ease during the 6.x patch cycle. This time around, we spent hours wiping on just the first boss. When we eventually got him down, one of our tanks commented that the fight had felt a bit like the way it was when it was first released, back when Bioware wasn't planning to ever add a master mode for Gods and intentionally made it quite a bit harder than other veteran modes.

I checked the public logs on Parsely after that and was shocked to find that not a single log for Izax (the last boss of the op) on veteran mode had been uploaded since 7.0. For Scyva, the boss just before him, there was exactly one recorded kill. Now, this doesn't mean that nobody has cleared Gods from the Machine on veteran mode since Legacy of the Sith came out - they might have done it and not uploaded a log after all - but it does point towards the number of raiders capable of doing this content being vanishingly small. And this is the "medium" difficulty for this operation we're talking about!

Now, you could argue that Gods is perhaps a cherry-picked example, as other operations are not as bad on veteran mode and instead have people running into a difficulty wall a couple of bosses into master mode. But regardless of where exactly it happens, it can still be kind of demotivating to come up against these massive number checks that make some of these fights harder than they've been in years. Again, I was totally fine with this being a temporary state of affairs, but the longer we have to wait for Bioware to release the new operation and its new gear tier, the more we run the risk of some people just throwing in the towel out of frustration. Because it's one thing to re-progress old content at the launch of a new expansion, and another to have that same old content actually get considerably harder.

All of this isn't helped by issues of class balance. It's a topic I actually really dislike because I find number crunching quite boring, and I usually don't play at the sort of level where small imbalances make that much of a difference. The problem is that Bioware made major changes to all the classes with LotS, which was pretty much always going to result in worse balance at launch than we've had in a long time - and when you combine this with the highly unforgiving content tuning, more players than ever are going to find themselves in a situation where their preferred class might not be able to do the harder content at all.

Good luck doing some fights without a Scoundrel/Operative healer for example, who can put out nearly twice the AoE healing of a Commando or Sage due to a new, extremely overpowered utility they've been given. The situation is similar for damage dealers - again, Parsely provides some interesting stats here if you look at their numbers for Nefra NiM for example, who functions almost like a target dummy and shows dps Vanguards/Powertechs being able to do nearly twice the damage of Gunnery Commandos. It doesn't really matter on Nefra, but it's not hard to see how on fights with tighter dps checks (of which there are plenty now), you'll have issues if you have people who play classes that do significantly less damage than others.

I know that this isn't really a pressing matter in the sense that it only affects a very small portion of the player base - after all, only a certain percentage of subscribers do operations at all, and an even smaller slice of that group does the harder content. However, Bioware has already decided to commit some resources to ops players this expansion by taking the time to re-tune the legacy operations and giving us a completely new raid (eventually...) - I just don't want them to stumble so close to the finish line by frustrating and losing their audience.

(And on a completely selfish note, as an officer in a long-running guild, I want my loyal ops teams to thrive and have fun, and we're definitely at risk of having certain people run out of patience.)

Mores Notes From Abroad

With Galactic Season 2 wrapped up on my main server, I've been spending more time playing my mix of ancient and new alts on the other servers. On any day when I have enough time, I currently try to log into each of them in order to at least achieve the 25k Conquest point daily objective. Without any real stronghold bonus this requires some work, but it's not too bad.

However, today I'd like to focus more on my experiences on each server than on my Season 2 progress. I've been finding my encounters there quite fascinating.

Star Forge

Star Forge is probably the server where I've spent the least amount of time recently, simply because I have access to a high-level character there who in turn has access to the reputation Conquest objective, which makes getting the daily season objective done much easier and faster than anywhere else.

I did get a generic whisper and guild invite once though, but declined it because it struck me as too weird. One of the benefits said guild was advertising was a dedicated "military section on Discord" - I know Americans have a reputation for loving their military and guns in general, but is this a common thing? It just seemed very alien to me. A less weird thing they were also promoting was that they were apparently running D&D events, but I still found it surprising to see that as a selling point in a SWTOR guild.

Satele Shan

On Satele Shan, I did not decline when someone whispered my Shadow with a random guild invite, because the tone sounded more welcoming and appealing to me. The guild was smaller and fairly new (it was only guild level seven when I joined), and as far as I could tell they were inviting guildless levellers pretty indiscriminately, but I was still kind of impressed by the amount of effort that seemed to already have been put into giving the whole thing some structure. I've already seen guild messages of the day advertising Imp side events and datacron hunts.

I also played my little Guardian a bit and found that the texture of her trousers had gone missing, making them render an error message in the character window and displaying as bright pink in game. I found a replacement quickly.

I also did some heroics on her when this was relevant to a weekly season objective and was amazed by how much I struggled... I actually died quite a few times! (Note that this is the same character that made me bemoan the mindless ease of SWTOR's outdoor content a few years ago... so I got what I asked for I guess!)

After the first couple of deaths I had a look at my gear and noticed that I was wielding a cosmetic weapon without any mods in it, meaning it basically had zero stats, so I actually made a point of travelling to the fleet and grabbing some level-appropriate modifications from a vendor. This didn't prevent me from dying some more later, but it did make me feel at least a little more powerful - it's kind of wild to me how the new scaling actually gives gear a bit of a purpose even on low-level planets again.

Tulak Hord

It was immediately obvious that the German server is quite a bit more quiet than any of the English-speaking ones. The first time I made it to the fleet (which was admittedly quite late in the evening), the only real signs of life in chat were one guy angrily talking to himself about how some pug had mistreated him (nobody was engaging with that) and another person looking for one more to help them form a casual PvP guild.

The guild guy eventually ended up next to me at a mailbox and whispered me directly to ask if I wouldn't mind helping out, and I didn't, which meant that I soon became a founding member of "The Relentless Justice". The guild message of the day instantly became a long and excited statement about how much fun we were all going to have while still maintaining a relaxed atmosphere, and to please be active and recruit. I thought about leaving right away since I hadn't really meant to join this guild, but decided to stay for the time being, out of curiosity about how things would develop. A bit less than two weeks later and I'm the only person left in there besides the original GM. I wonder if I'll end up outlasting him too...

On a different note, I was low-key delighted to see several references to TeamSpeak in general chat. My own guild still uses TS for voice comms and generally limits Discord to written communications, which people always seem to find incredibly weird when they first join, so I felt oddly pleased to see that TS still seems to be a thing at least among the Germans. Unless it was all a big coincidence and I just happened to run into the two people on the entire server who still use TS over Discord.

The Leviathan

To be honest I was least excited about playing on the French server simply because I don't really speak the language. I had a few years of French in school, but that was more than two decades ago now and it was never one of my favourite subjects anyway. But hey, I've actually been OK saying "salut" and "merci" in groups. (Though I did not respond to the random guild invite someone sent me; that was still too terrifying.)

Aside from that, my first impression of the Leviathan has been that it's both kinda dead and extremely polite. By kinda dead I mean that there's only a single instance of the fleet even at prime time and it's barely half full, and despite of queueing for hours, I've only ever been able to get into a single PvP match so far, which was a 3v2 arena that we still managed to lose somehow (lol).

The politeness is mostly on display in the form of everyone being all please and thank you in general chat all the time, which even I with my limited French was able to take note of. The one exception here was the GSF match I joined, where there was a lot of chatter going on that I wasn't able to follow but which I strongly suspect wasn't all polite.

Anyway, what's really sold me on this server so far is that I really love the Sage I made here for some reason. I bought her a Cartel Market outfit and everything. Which is a funny counter to my original inspiration for wanting to play on these other servers: wanting to earn some extra Cartel Coins from seasons - well played, Bioware, well played.

The New Character Experience in LotS

I'm kind of at a point in SWTOR where I feel that my several dozen alts are enough to experience what I primarily want out of the game and that I don't really "need" any more, but that doesn't prevent me from occasionally rolling up a new alt for a specific purpose anyway. For example I've been very curious about how the 7.0 class and UI changes feel on a brand-new character. Long-time players like me complaining about losing their 29th ability button are one thing, but I was under the impression that a lot of these changes were primarily targeted at new and returning players anyway, in order to make things more appealing and less complicated for them.

While I can't un-know everything I know about the game after ten years of playing, I could roll up a new character on a server where I don't usually play very much and where I have no notable legacy unlocks, to see what that experience felt like. I already mentioned in a previous post that I created a new Jedi knight on Star Forge, but with the Shadow combat style, which was previously reserved for consulars.

First off: character creation. My opinion on the new character creation screen has largely stayed the same since I first saw Swtorista tweet a screenshot of it during LotS PTS testing. It looks good, but the overall look is just very generic. Obviously changing the first half to accommodate the decoupling of base and advance class was needed, and I also like that gender is simply a toggle now instead of a separate "step", which always felt unnecessary to me. But I do miss some of the flavour that was lost, such as having information about the different species. Also, before this change I'd never really thought about it, but the previous way of having character creation take place on a space station was actually a nice story tie-in, as each class story starts with your character taking a shuttle down from orbit to the planet. Now your character's simply "born" in a black void like in some generic shooter game.

Some problems are still the same old, same old, such as finding a name. They really need to do another round of freeing up the names of unplayed characters some time, because none of the suggestions the game itself provides are ever available. Also, I found myself wishing for a back button when I accidentally overwrote all my initial choices by hitting "random". (I thought it was for randomising the name, not the appearance...)

Anyway, enough about character creation. Once you get into the game properly, the traditional scrolling Star Wars intro is notably absent, but this has been acknowledged as a bug. I know many people still hold up the class stories as the best SWTOR has to offer, but I've got to say that going back to the starter worlds it always strikes me how far the game's come in terms of its storytelling. Sure, the original class stories are still engaging, but everything from the writing to the cut scenes to the quest flow has come a long way in my opinion and is actually a lot more enjoyable in newer story installments. It's just the fact that you've got those eight completely different stories to choose from at the start that makes going back there so appealing I think.

Gameplay-wise things immediately felt a little off though. No, I don't expect the starter planets to be a huge challenge, but that's not what I mean. For example, one of the first abilities a Shadow is given is Force Breach, which starts as a damage-over-time ability. It immediately struck me what a terrible choice that was in terms of fun, because every enemy in those early levels dies within literally one or two hits, so that applying a DoT is utterly pointless.

New abilities now appear on your bar automatically whenever you level up, which is something I grumbled about when WoW first started doing it and I'm still not convinced it's an entirely good move for SWTOR either. Mostly because I think there's value in making a conscious choice to see a trainer at a time that's convenient for you, so you can actually take the time to read your new skills and acquaint yourself with them at your leisure. A new button just appearing on your quickbar in the middle of combat is easy to overlook... admittedly less so during the earlier levels when there isn't much on there yet, but it becomes more of an issue as things fill up and become visually busy.

I also found the lack of AoE for the first few levels very noticeable, as all the mobs come in groups so you're just running up to them and then whacking them to death one by one. I don't remember when you got your first AoE under the old system, maybe it took just as long, but I don't recall it feeling quite so bad... maybe because you generally got more abilities sooner. This time around, I only had enough combat abilities to fill up a little over half a bar by level ten - again, I don't have exact numbers, but I remember those skills coming in much faster during the early levels within the old system.

At level ten I also went to look for some sort of prompt to choose a specialisation and was surprised to find that the game had just put my Shadow into Infiltration spec by default. I guess I can see why the devs would do that, to avoid players accidentally gimping themselves by potentially never even choosing a spec at all. If you do discover it later, the game now let's you change specialisation with the push of a button anyway, without requiring a special legacy perk or that you visit a guy on the fleet. On the other hand though, it makes specialisation a very passive thing to begin with, and I suspect that might lead to casual players being even more likely to remain completely unaware of the concept.

For the Shadow in specific, I also found it interesting that I gained stealth at level ten, but not a single ability that only works from stealth or that behaves differently from stealth, which means it's kind of introduced as just a way of avoiding mobs instead of something that affects the way you do combat. Again, my memory may not be 100% on point here, but I seem to recall that stealth pretty much used to come combined with things that you could actually do from stealth.

On a totally unrelated note, "Introduction to Conquests" is now granted automatically when hitting level ten, which I did think was neat, as it was too easy to miss on the fleet terminal previously.

In the area leading to the Forge on Tython, there's an optional champion droid which used to be quite tough back in the day when you couldn't have a healer companion at this level, and who became utterly trivial to solo after 4.0. I thought I'd give him a go to use him as a sort of measuring stick and was kind of pleasantly surprised to find that while T7 kept healing me, without legacy buffs or anything he couldn't entirely keep up with the damage, so that my health started to slowly but surely decline. In the end I ran away and had to start kiting the droid around a pillar for the last part of the fight in order not to die, which was quite satisfying actually.

Another thing I liked was that upon finishing up my class quest at the Forge, I actually received a dual-saber right away. That may not be a brand-new change actually, but I do remember how awkward it used to be to forge yourself a special one-handed lightsaber, just to then instantly have to replace it with some green that was actually suitable for your advanced class/combat style.

After finishing Tython, the first thing I did on the fleet was to queue for a PvP match, which was a stark reminder that you really shouldn't do that at level 13. I mean, it's always been a bad idea at such a low level, but now it was even worse because I had even fewer abilities than I would have had previously. I could stealth but had no crowd control, so literally all I did for most of the Voidstar match I got into was put my single DoT on every enemy and spend the rest of the time saber/double striking. Unsurprisingly we lost, though at least the Introduction to Warzones quest gave me a few nice pieces of starter gear.

I also thought it was quite noteworthy that I didn't gain any skills at levels 11, 13 or 14, but then when I dinged 15 in the middle of a Coruscant heroic I suddenly got four new actives and a new passive at once - and worse: the passive was the one that completely morphs the way Force Breach works. I was just getting the hang of putting my DoT on every mob, then I dinged, and suddenly my DoT wasn't a DoT anymore, and couldn't be used at all unless I used other abilities to build buff stacks first... not the best experience to have while buried under a pile of mobs in the middle of a heroic. Again, this is why trainers are a good thing in my opinion.

At the end of the day, I'm not a truly new player though, so who can say how they perceive this kind of thing? To me personally it doesn't seem like a significant improvement, at least not in these early levels. For my taste, you spend too much time spamming your most basic attack simply because nothing else is available yet, and the pacing of new abilities feels awkward. I may keep experimenting with it some more though, to see how it feels as you go up in levels or when you play a combat style other than Shadow.

PSA: Struggling with Chapters?

I've got some videos on my YouTube channel of me killing a number of KotFE and KotET chapter bosses on veteran and master mode. You can find additional info about that and links to everything in this post - one of the few pieces of blog content I've put out over the years that vaguely resembles something like a guide.

I've noticed that over the last month there's been an increase in people watching and commenting on these - now, some of that might simply be more people playing the game again after the launch of the expansion, but it's not just that. A lot of players seem to be struggling even with story mode at the moment - as was highlighted by fellow blogger Roger from the Contains Moderate Peril blog:

Stuck fighting Vaylin in Visions in the Dark – KotFE Chapter 12. Firstly, why haven't I got the option of a companion? None are available according to GUI. Plus being a ranged DPS class is a real liability in this boss fight. Any suggestions? #SWTOR

— Roger Edwards (@ModeratePeril) March 14, 2022

He eventually got the fight down, but was not at all happy with the experience. I did try to assist a little on Twitter, but it's not a great format for giving detailed advice on anything. Above all I felt like I must be missing some crucial bit of information, considering that he was playing on story mode, which is often so easy that it borders on boring... heck, my last post on here was about a story fight that is so easy that it can literally complete itself without any player input.

Then again, we've also just had a new expansion and that can sometimes cause strange things to happen with tuning. A boss fight having the wrong damage and health values for its designated difficulty is certainly something we've seen happen before, but without more information it was hard to judge what exactly was going wrong.

The post I linked at the start already contains a bunch of generic advice for beating the harder fights in KotFE and KotET chapters, but I suppose the overall tone of that is aimed at players who are already at a more advanced level since they're intentionally looking to challenge themselves with the higher difficulty levels. I thought I'd use this post to present a few bullet points for more casual story players that might find themselves stuck on a fight.

• First off, make sure that you've got all your active abilities on your bar by checking the abilities tab (by default bound to P). The class changes that came with Legacy of the Sith may have caused some things to disappear from your bar. You can also change your ability tree on the combat styles tab of your character sheet to see whether there are any abilities there that you can swap around to be more useful in the particular situation that you're stuck in. If you've just been playing through the story and not much else, there may well be a number of buttons that you've never bothered to use before because you simply didn't have to. However, if you're struggling to stay alive, make sure you find all your damage reduction or self heal abilities and then remember to actually use them during the fight - all classes have at least a couple of these. This is particularly pertinent for fights like the one against Vaylin in KotFE chapter twelve, which was the one Roger struggled with.
• The fight against the Purifier Droids in KotET chapter four seems to be giving people the most trouble at the moment. First off, try using the somewhat counter-intuitive strategy demonstrated in this video here. It's counter-intuitive because according to the story you're supposed to be defending the room you're in, but in practice it's much easier to run out and fight somewhere else. If you're still struggling though, it's worth noting that Bioware has acknowledged this chapter as currently bugged (too many droids, potentially also an issue with the additional NPCs not engaging properly). There's a patch meant to be deployed next Tuesday which is supposed to fix a load of bugs, but I don't currently know whether this issue will be one of the ones addressed.
• It's worth knowing that while chapters can only be progressed solo, other people can join you to help out with a fight. To do this, invite them to a group, right-click on your portrait and there'll be an option somewhere to invite them to your instance, which should give them a teleportation prompt. This might not work in all situations (I found this out the hard way when I wanted to help a guildie kill the rancor in KotET chapter six but it kept putting me in there in Zakuulan knight disguise and therefore unable to fight), but it's a workaround for some.
• Finally, if you're just replaying the story and actually already know what happens because you previously did it on another character, keep in mind that if your level is high enough, the console on your ship should let you skip ahead to the start of KotET (if you're stuck in KotFE) or Iokath (if you're stuck in KotET). Potentially you can skip even further ahead to Ossus, but I'm assuming that you do actually want to play through as much story as possible. You might not like this option since it will resolve important story choices for you automatically based on a template, but I'm just mentioning it as another possibility if you're stuck and really want to move on.
  

Echoes of AFK-ness

6.2's Echoes of Oblivion story was a very good content update, but in terms of replayability I've found it to be quite limited as time has gone on. It's exactly the same for both factions and there are few opportunities for interesting choices or unique dialogue based on your class or previous decisions, so it feels very same-y on each subsequent visit.

Also, I strongly dislike the final boss fight. As far as I'm concerned, it's right up there with the solo version of Revan among the worst encounters in the game, due to how redundant it makes the player character feel. I don't need my fights to be difficult, but if the abilities I press make no difference to the outcome at all, if the encounter just resolves itself without me, then the whole thing would've been better off being a cut scene.

I was pondering this as I was somewhat dejectedly dragging my primary smuggler through the quests leading up to this particular set piece, in order to get her to level 80 and caught up with the current story content, when I suddenly had an idea: If the player character was really as redundant as it had felt to me on previous playthroughs, maybe I could actually avoid dealing with the fight altogether by simply going AFK and letting the NPCs do all the work! It seemed like a win-win scenario: If this experiment resulted in my character's death, I'd at least know that my input wasn't totally pointless. If not, I could be away from the keyboard doing something else for a bit while the friendly NPCs dealt with the tedium of the boss fight for me.

As a result, I was actually more excited to face down the triumvirate of Emperors than I'd been in a while. When it was time to deal with the first of the Emperor's incarnations, Valkorion, I turned on video recording and then shot him once to engage, followed by me walking away from my keyboard. I'll be honest though: At first I popped back really quickly to check whether my character was even still alive - I strongly suspected that the fight was designed to make it impossible to die, but I wasn't entirely sure. But indeed, it didn't seem to matter how much pink crap my little smuggler stood in and how low her health got, Master Satele pulled her back from the brink of death every single time. I felt comfortable getting myself a drink and busying myself with other things.

I did take a peek at the screen every few minutes though to see how things were going, and was pleased to see Valky's health slowly going down... until one of those checks suddenly showed his health having gone up again instead of further down. I didn't even remember him having a healing ability! But I thought I'd let my NPC allies have at it for a little longer to see whether they could out-damage his healing.

Unfortunately, after a total of twelve minutes or so I came back to my game to find that the fight had seemingly reset. I consulted my video recording and it showed that one of Valkorion's abilities included a very small pushback, which had gradually knocked my character further and further back (but so gradually that I hadn't noticed during my quick check-ins) until she eventually fell off the edge of the platform and died. Oh well, no full AFKing phase one then!

I re-engaged the boss and did that part of the fight "properly" this time, though even as I did so I noticed that the area was actually partially surrounded by low walls... so maybe AFKing through phase one is still technically possible as long as you position yourself correctly in order to not get pushed through one of the holes in the walls? Maybe that'll be something for me to try on the next alt that makes it to this point in the story, but I didn't feel like intentionally wiping the fight just to try AFKing through phase one a second time.

Anyway, as soon as I'd downed Valkorion and the fight transitioned to Vitiate, I stepped away from the keyboard again, because a new phase meant a new chance for my NPC allies to prove themselves. Vitiate starts with an immunity shield and a lot of adds, so that he initially didn't seem to take any damage at all, but my allies were very diligent in hunting them down and eventually his immunity ended. Whenever I checked in on them, they were making good progress and I wasn't in any danger of flying off the edge this time either. The only odd thing I noticed was that at one point when I took my usual peek to see how things were going, most of my friendly companions were standing around my character not doing anything, with only brave Darth Marr continuing to whack the big bad. The others eventually got back into the action though, and after eight minutes or so they got him down and I could only applaud their efforts.

Finally, it was time for Tenebrae, who turned out to be the weakest of the three, as my little helpers killed him in only about seven minutes or so, time that I mostly spent putting away some laundry. The ending was even a little exciting, as I returned to my PC to find that Tenebrae, too, had a little knockback, and I could see that it was slowly pushing my character across the platform and towards the edge on the other side. I considered interfering if it looked like she was about to fall off again, but wanted to hold off as long as possible... fortunately for me, he did some kind of phase transition just as I was getting close to falling off, which meant that he stopped doing the ability that kept pushing me just in time.

Instead he summoned some adds, at least one of which I saw coming my smuggler's way, just to witness Meetra Surik do a heroic intercept before it could reach me. Meanwhile Master Satele ended up in a state of perpetual indecision as the AI script that's meant to prevent healer companions from getting stuck out of range kept calling her back to me at the edge of the platform every time she tried to attack Tenebrae. In the end they got him down though, and once again without any help from me at all.

All in all, I spent a little over half an hour on the fight this way, which is of course a lot longer than it would usually take... so I guess this experiment taught me that the player's contribution isn't completely useless, as it does speed things up considerably. I'm also still not sure just how "AFK-able" phase one really is. Still, the fact that my companions were able to kill two of the three bosses with zero input from me on the first try does go to prove my initial point about this being a badly designed fight I think. Powerful NPC allies should never be so strong as to need no assistance from the player character whatsoever.

Early Musings on Combat Styles

When combat styles were first announced, I said that "depending on the exact details [this feature] has the potential to be a huge game changer or to make no difference to many players at all". In a follow-up post I tried to think of some ways in which I could/would utilise the ability to change some of my characters' advanced class but admitted that based on my personal play style, I couldn't think of many.

Four weeks into Legacy of the Sith, it's time to admit that I've ended up being firmly in the camp to whom combat styles make no big difference. I've toyed with a few ideas, but knowing that whatever choice I make would be permanent (for now) has kind of put me off the whole thing for the time being... plus as I've said previously, for me my characters' class and spec are a big part of their identity. I've rarely even changed specialisations, as I'd rather use a desire to try a different spec as an excuse to roll up another alt.

So I've not even done the mission to pick a second combat style on any of my characters - I've just untracked it on all of them and then forgot about it. (Part of me actually feels like this must be slightly offensive to the devs... "We put all this work into this new feature and you're just ignoring it?!")

That said, there's no escaping the fact that a world in which base classes/origin stories and advanced classes/combat styles are decoupled from each other feels very different in some ways. It used to be that if I saw another player out in the world shooting lightning, I immediately knew that they were a) a dirty Imp and b) a Sith inquisitor in specific. Now they could be any kind of Force user... a Jedi even! Unless you're in a PvP instance, it's hard to actually tell the difference between members of the two factions - as far as I can see, the only giveaway is the little note saying "Republic/Empire player" at the bottom of the tooltip if you hover over them, but nothing you can easily spot at a glance.

You could adopt a philosophical view on this matter and say something about how that just goes to show that people are ultimately the same everywhere and that war is pointless, which is something I strongly agree with in real life, but in a game based around a deeply ingrained faction conflict, it feels rather odd.

Even looking purely at my own faction it bothers me slightly that I can't tell a character's origin story anymore unless they are low level and have a class-specific companion out. However, I can't really explain why. I guess I just liked being able to identify players that were "like me" in the sense that they'd played through the same story, even if that knowledge had no practical use in the way knowing someone's combat style does.

Within my guild, combat styles have also added a level of confusion in the sense that after years of playing with many of the same people, I had a pretty good grasp of who had what alts and was capable of what. Now Sentinels are suddenly also Shadows, Gunslingers are sometimes Scoundrels, and who knows what else. It would be interesting to see the stats on whether there are any particularly popular combinations across the player base as a whole.

Looking at the strangers I encounter out in the world, my vague impression is that a lot of players went for a stealthy combat style if they didn't have one before. I complained on Twitter about my experience doing dailies, waiting in front of a clicky objective, and having someone pop out of stealth to "ninja-click" it ahead of me as soon as it respawned multiple times.

Warzones have also seemed more clogged with stealthers than usual to me, at least initially - and it was very obvious that many of them had absolutely no clue how to play a stealther in PvP. Then again, that might not necessarily have been due to them trying a new combat style, but could just as well have been inexperienced players trying their hands at PvP for the first time in order to earn some of the new reward crates. It'll be interesting to see whether people will hone in on some kind of "meta" in terms of what's the "best" combination of combat styles, even if I'd rather not see the community go down that route.

In general it does seem like people are getting good use out of the feature - I've seen many happy comments from players who love to level alts about how refreshing it's been to combine a familiar story with an unfamiliar play style. I also created a baby knight on Star Forge for whom I chose the Shadow style to see what that would be like, but didn't get very far before the pull of focusing on my home server and gearing my main there became too strong again.

Also, while putzing around the NA servers, I noticed that some sub-10 alts I had on Satele Shan and who'd never chosen an advanced class were apparently auto-assigned a combat style, though I can't tell for certain whether this happened with 7.0 or before. Too bad all the choices were the opposite of what I was going to choose for them, but I guess that's my own fault for leaving them in that state for too long. I can always delete and re-roll them if it really matters.

On my main I'll just continue pondering my options for now. I've pretty much discarded my initial idea of perhaps going Mercenary for my main's secondary style as it wouldn't really serve any purpose. Comparatively, choosing Vanguard for example would enable me to also tank on that character, or going Scoundrel or Operative would enable me to bring a different healing style to operations (which might be handy as those two are particularly OP at the moment). I just can't quite decide. I keep coming back to the notion that usually, if I want to play a different role or style, I'd just log on an alt - I do have something for pretty much every situation after all! However, the new setup for ops missions punishes this play style, as completing the quest to earn a reward crate requires you to be present for every single boss kill inside the operation - meaning no more swapping to a different character just for one boss to help out. Not if you want to earn any of the rewards, anyway.

But while I continue to fail to make any decisions on that front, I'll admit that one thing that has made me consider my play style at least a little is the loadouts feature that came with combat styles, aka an easy way to switch between different specs, utility point distributions, gear sets, action bar setups and outfits with a single button press. While it's true that I very rarely respec any of my characters, it's not something I've never done. On my Scoundrels for example I've dabbled in both healing and dps, and my Sage healer respecced to Telekinetics for some fights during master mode chapters because I just couldn't beat them any other way. And I did kind of like the experience of playing around with more than one spec there; it was just annoying in practice to rearrange my bars, remember my utility point setups and so on every time. With loadouts, I actually made a point of creating both healing and dps loadouts for these characters for both PvE and PvP, and it's been fun to have more flexibility on that front without too much additional UI fiddling. We'll see whether that goes anywhere.

First Impressions of Legacy of the Sith

I can't lie, my first impressions of Legacy of the Sith are not as positive as those I had of Onslaught, though it was hard for me at first to articulate what exactly is wrong, because I am having a good time. Trying to sort out my thoughts for the purposes of writing this post has certainly helped with putting things into perspective though.

If I had to sum my issues up in a nutshell, I would say that one is that there are a lot of mechanical and visual changes that I'm not sure how I feel about yet, and the other is that the content feels incomplete.

Point one is about both the UI updates made with 7.0 and the class changes that included some ability pruning. The UI updates have generated a lot of public complaints that I've got to say feel very out of proportion, buuut... I do have at least a little bit of sympathy because I can't say that I really love them myself. I'd like to think that there were probably good reasons for all of the changes the designers decided to make, which may not be evident to me, such as needing to increase scalability for larger monitors, improving accessibility or whatever, but the main thing I see as a long-time player and layperson when it comes to UI design is that a lot of things that used to be very colourful, detailed and representative of a style that strongly set SWTOR apart from other MMORPGs... are now more flat, less detailed and minimalist in a way that makes things look a lot more generic. It doesn't really actively bother me, but I can't claim that it feels like an improvement to me personally either.

Old class/origin story icons vs. new

As far as the ability pruning goes, the situation is actually kind of similar, though here it's more a case of "I'm not sure how I feel about this yet". What changes I experienced on the PTS for myself didn't seem too bad. Playing my Commando after the update has been fine too! In fact, I did kind of like having fewer combat abilities that don't fit onto my main two action bars, because that does feel neater somehow.

On the other hand though, I've already been in numerous situations where I found myself missing almost every single ability that I now had to cut out of my arsenal due to the new system forcing you to choose between different options. I can't tell though whether that's just a temporary thing while I get used to the new normal or something that will bother me in the long run. Either way, it's once again a change that I can't simply gush about as a cool new feature.

As far as the content feeling incomplete goes... I was perfectly fine with Bioware delaying the release of the new operation, because other MMOs also stagger the release of new raids and that seemed completely reasonable to me. I was fine with them leaving crafting updates for some time after 7.0, because I'd rather they had a good think about them than rush out something that feels bad. When they said they'd have to push weapons in the outfit designer back to 7.1 as well, I was like: "Whatever, it's just a small cosmetic feature!" But when I wanted to do the new daily zone on Manaan and was told that this, too, had been cut out of the initial launch, that didn't feel good at all. Apparently Bioware had announced this somewhere previously, but I'd completely missed the memo somehow. It does mean that once you've completed the story, there's nothing to do other than work on getting new gear through existing content and re-running the new flashpoint perhaps. That's a pretty thin offering.

Speaking of the story... I won't go into any spoilers in this post, but I can't deny that even I thought it was kinda short. Now, people have complained about SWTOR's expansion stories being too short pretty much since Rise of the Hutt Cartel (aka the very first expansion), and I've always found that ridiculous because a lot of these complaints tend to be rooted in comparisons to certain other MMOs that are made by much bigger teams, and which also charge a lot more money for their expansion content.

But in this case, you can very easily compare to what we got only one expansion ago in this very same game, with Onslaught, which launched with a story that spanned two planets and a flashpoint, while this time around it's only one planet and a flashpoint. I had some hope that Bioware would compensate for this by making Manaan bigger and longer, but that simply hasn't been the case, so we got about thirty percent less story than last time. That's very noticeable.

As for the content of the story... again, I won't go into spoilers until a later post, but again the comparison to Onslaught is quite striking. Onslaught had three acts that were logically tied together and finished with a solid climax, followed by a little epilogue that teased the next update. It also made great use of the large existing cast of characters, showing lots of love for little details. In contrast, the story that LotS launched with consists of two parts that are completely disconnected and which focus on a much smaller cast, leaving you with a certain sense of: "Where is everyone?" It's not awful, but compared to most of what Bioware has served up over the last couple of years, it falls rather flat.

All that said, I'm still managing to have fun. There is something fascinating to re-discovering your class with the combat changes in place, and gearing up through group content with my guildies is as fun to me as it has always been. The new season has also been enjoyable so far. It's just that... I should really have better things to say about a freshly launched expansion than merely that? I'll continue to focus on the bits I enjoy for now and here's to hoping that 7.1 fleshes things out a bit, considering how much content they held back for it.