f13.net

http://www.swtor.com/blog/game-update-2.5-class-changes

These aren't story spoilers, just enormous change log spoilers for class balance.


Some pretty big ones, like Operatives not being able to gain defensive benefit from cover anymore. Snipers remain the same as before in that regard.

I remember cover being a big deal for healing scoundrels / operatives before. It also allowed you to 'teleport' to certain cover spots, which was useful in voidstar and huttball -- I guess that'll be an option even after this?

That said, these almost all seem to be pvp changes. Is pvp that popular compared to raids / group pve? When I last played swtor (which was a while ago, before the expansion even), it was a strong contender for 'least fun pvp in a mmo ever' for me, while its pve content was much more enjoyable.

PVP is very popular yes, from what I can tell it is probably the single most popular thing in the game.

Well, I'd much rather pvp than raid, but what I liked the most was the class storylines, so right now I'm mmo-less, which isn't necessarily a bad thing heh.

For those of you who are inclined towards character name drama:

Hooray, the nerf to operatives/scoundrels nerfs something I barely ever used anyway! Hooray!

Ingmar, I'm sure I did something to deserve that post  :grin:

Noooo, my Scoundrel is getting nerfed!  Meh, I can live with it, only cowards hide behind crates anyway.  I really need to get back in this game, but GW2 and STO are taking all of my time right now.

So I started this up again. I just can't quit Korriban, for some reason. I wish I liked the rest of the game as much.

I kind of screwed myself re: my previous acct. (sorry I'm not going to admit just how stupid I was lulz) so I created a new one.

I really can't bring myself to play right now. Used to enjoy the PvP for all its balance problems, but I can't stand arenas, and there's no avoiding them now (short of ditching your team every time one pops).

arenas are the no -rez ones? I've only been in lopsided affairs.

No rez, 4 player team deathmatch. Standard warzone rotation includes arenas (since 2.4) which have no matchmaking/team balancing of any kind, and you can also queue for ranked, and ranked solo arenas (the latter of which does have matchmaking). Not my cup of tea as the format really exacerbates balance issues way beyond problems evident in 8v8.

OTOH I don't think I've been in more than 10 WZs in SWTOR that weren't a complete steamroll for one side or the other -- and most of those 10 were near launch and/or in the lowbie bracket.

The only good-ish thing about arenas is they're always over pretty quickly. I'm also usually on the winning side, though, due to playing operative-style immortals. Basically whatever side lucks into one of those seems to win.

Arenas are so goddamn dumb.

The lowbie brackets are far far superior to the level cap bracket. The likely hood of there being a pug vs premade in the lowbie bracket is dramatically lower.

I'm amazed. I logged in for the first time in over a year and actually got the name "Reg" back. Not on my sith warrior who originally had it but on my level 1 bounty hunter. I guess I`d better go to work on him to get him high enough level that awful things won't happen to him. This would have to happen when I'm distracted by XCOM and X3 of course.

I did get one back, sort of...my jugg Haruspex...but it's on my alt jedi :|

Did you get "Sky" back? Losing all my names infuriated me. I had no intention of ever coming back to the game up until now. I'd like to finish leveling my sith warrior but all of his skill points have been refunded and I have no idea how to spend them or how to use the 9 million buttons I'll have to deal with.

Nope. It's funny, with all the nonsense of mmo, I'd have been subbed the whole time if only they hadn't yanked my names. For the most part, I really like the game.

And I found the serious issue with some of the funky characters I had to use to preserve some of the names...I can't type them, so I can't send that character any mail (my jugg/synthweaver).

Ouch that hurts. Is there an inexpensive way to rename them? My Sith is the only one I put any real time and effort into.  All the rest I just created on day one to lock up the names I wanted. Still "Reg" was really the only important one.

I'd have stayed subscribed too but the clownshoes way they handled the server merges just pissed me off no end.

Inexpensive, not particularly. AFAIK the only way is via the cartel market, unless you could get yourself reported for a bad name somehow.  :why_so_serious:

They gave out one free rename but I think that might have only been to people subscribed at the time.

I had a bunch of cartel credit stored up from whatever promos whenever. Took about half of them, but I deleted the Jedi and changed my jugg's name, so that's cool at least. That they took it and it would've cost me money to get it back...meh.

Is there some kind of Legacy bank? If not, I should probably look into making a vanity guild to get access to a shared bank for my alts. Pain in the ass trying to manage crafting mats across a few characters.

If you friend your own alts I think it'll auto-complete their names when you start to type them in the box to mail things to them, but I'm not 100% on that.  That won't work if you're trying to mail things cross-faction though, but neither would a vanity guild.

My fiancee thinks I'm setting myself up for frustration, but I think I broke through some wall of not giving any fucks about pugs. I was in one terrible pug for about an hour the other night because it was so entertaining to see how bad they would fail. Every damned one of them ran into aggro range of other groups repeatedly and no amount of discussion led to a smooth game plan. Eventually we did finish the heroic, so there's that.

Then the next night I join two others for a 4+ and one says 'let's just see how we do!'. Well, ok. I don't think anyone said a word the entire time, nobody broke my CC, everyone stayed on target and we smoothly finished. I think everyone was surprised gauging by the post-quest chatter.

Last night, join a group for a 4+ and one guy dies three times traveling to the group, by falling off various things (including the elevator to the quest area). We talk specs and one guy doesn't know what a spec is "I'm an assassin" There is quick talk amongst two of us about roles, no tank no healer...but given no tank or healer the night before I'm game. I do mention I'm getting a bad feeling about this. I say we skip the bonus and one guy says "Nay, I need that"...forgoing the elizabethan verbiage, I mentally shrug and ready myself. Falling man dies one more time and we try to find out how the other assassin is spec'd..."I'm an assassin!" I've got a bad feeling about this.

Fighting droids, so I can't Mind Trap...but the dps agent has launched in already anyway. So I cc one of the golds and nope, everyone is attacking a different target. When the agent goes for the guy I just cc'd (after I watched him attacking a different mob), I just let them know I can't function in that environment and bolt. Two were already down and the third went down as I ran. Took maybe 5 seconds to wipe (except me, though I miss my old feign death from EQ).

Queue "LF1M - healer" just as a healer LFG's for the heroic. I pm her and warn her what had just gone down, she thanks me. Then I continue soloing and the agent shows up and generally douches around snagging clickies while I fight the mobs.

Oh, mmo. Thankfully I am in a place where it entertains me now.

Sky: I have a well geared 55 op healer if you ever need/want to do heroics.  I have a 50 smuggler healer as well that I could get to 55 in a day or two.  The issue is getting on the same server.

It sounds like he's talking about the Heroic 2/4 outdoor quests, not hardmode instances. What server are you on Nebu?

I'm level 22 or whatever. I don't know anything about dungeons, because they're generally not worth putting up with pugs that long.

I've done the first dungeon for each faction a couple times, but only a couple after that, and those I just rode someone's tails through it. Too bad the good gear is all shut behind such nonsense.

Jedi Covenant. 

My bad on the outdoor stuff.  I never bothered with it.  The FP's are pretty easily doable with 3 people and a companion if your tank knows what they are doing.  Hell, we've even had a companion tank the instances with a decent healer. 

Double xp starting today until 2 Dec if people are interested in levelling alts.

Actually, it's not. They've added a bunch of stuff at level 55 to get you geared up for the latest operation they added that doesn't require more than two people (and you only really need two people for the end's heroic quest). It's a nice quest series you can do in one night, has a decent storyline (although I admit the VERY end of it is in the aforementioned operation), and by the end you have a suit of just-shy-of-top-gear purpz. They also added two flashpoints that in non-heroic mode is meant to be as easily done as Esseles (in that Ingmar and I duo it, and the group finder will just shove four people into it regardless of role, and it's doable, although if you're duoing, it's probably easiest if one of the real people is a healer OR a real tank) that also drop decent purple BoP stuff (which is nice for kitting out alts or companions).

Yeah except for the stuff you only would ever need to do the harder versions of raids pretty much everything is achievable otherwise. Leveling dungeons are a way to get blues in greater volume - although you have to deal with bad loot rolling etiquette sometimes, so maybe not - but not the only way to get them.

I'll just dump my old lady and find one who plays TOR, then.

If you're already pugging heroic quests, ain't no need to stop doing that at 55 is my point! The Oricon quest for easy purpz ends with a heroic 2 outdoor quest. The flashpoints I mentioned are more to reassure you that they're easy enough to brave pugging those too.  :why_so_serious:

This double XP weekend is the shit! My buddies and I went back to this game for a bit, rolling Empire alts, and we are leveling up just fine simply by doing each others story missions with each other. The three of us all bought a sub, because despite some of the shamelessness of the F2P stuff, we felt they really earned it.

I'm digging the assassin. Great for soloing Heroic 2+. Stealth through, mind trap one mob, take the others down, use emergency in-combat stealth if needed to break the combat. Just great solo control, almost as good as the old EQ1 necro used to be.

They've buffed the Consular/Inquisitor quite a bit since a year ago.  Or at least it seems that way to me.  Taking the Sage DPS talent tree, it's a lot more WoW mage than priest.  A lot of the talents either make your abilities hit again (for free) and/or make them instant, so it's pretty awesome to get a 6-shot insta-cast opener and take the boss to half health before your pet even leaps to attack.  Add the crowd control ability and multiple interrupts, and I've soloed equal-level heroic areas with 2 bosses and 3+ minions in each pull. 

Having fun.

The extended double-XP Thanksgiving weekend got me to 25 or so on just class quest and some space missions, and now I have 12 free bonus xp cards that I got awarded as quest rewards that I have to use.  Legacy unlocks mean I can teleport to the mission hubs every 10 minutes, to the fleet every second, and to the ship every hour.  Between those 3, I almost don't need my speeder.

Really ?  That sounds interesting.  Got a link to your build by any chance ?

I'm in the Assassin(Shadow) stealth dps tree. A couple nice tweaks for getting around, after a while slogging through every mob ever started getting tiring. But it's also based on similar free/instant/triggered stuff. Main thing is paying attention enough to notice which one is up for free/instant. I made my buff icons much bigger which helped a lot.

Still pretty squishy and I do miss having Sorcerer healing for Khem, even in blue gear he drops pretty regularly and I don't last long after that without ditching combat entirely.

Double xp weekend got me into the 30s, but I was around level 20 when it started.

I've mostly been playing Republic side lately but I think I set it so everyone in Bot Country on Ebon Hawk has invite/promote permissions. I can check it tomorrow, I have a deployment tonight so I won't be able to get on.

You might want to try bumming around with Andronikos (or Ashara when you get her), I found burning things down quicker to be a little more successful than hoping Khem outlasts whatever we were fighting.

Yeah, I just got Nicky and was getting wasted in his initial quest, beat the guy down with Khem tanking and then pulled out Andronikos to do the dialog. I'd have to gear up Niko...luckily my old main was a BH so I should be able to whip up some good crafted gear. Speaking of, not a fan of the new schematic grind, at least the old one let you keep the items while you ground out schematic upgrades (blue etc).

What's the new way?

BTw speaking of crafting I've noticed I can't queue a bunch of items anymore. Is that because I'm not sub'd or did they nerf crafting?

I am subbed and I can queue 5 items per crew person, so it might be a sub thing? I honestly don't know.

Just level 33 now, I don't really want to visit the talent build sites since they sometimes have viruses in the ads.  They've pretty much removed choice from the talent builds by discouraging cross-speccing.  You just pick a tree (Heal, DPS, or PVP) and just go up the tree.  It pretty much clearly says "30% that ability X will fire again" or "50% chance that the next time you use ability X will be instant cast," and there are 4-6 of those in the tree. 

So, if lucky, I cast a 1.5 second Disturbance blast, which then shoots again and makes the next AoE Telekinetic Wave instacast and freecast, so I shoot that and it hits twice (takes out all the minions), and then I activate the normally instant Project which shoots two big rocks instead of 1, and continue with the channeled TK throw (pebbles).  Basically 6 shots in quick succession, followed by a stream of pebbles.  The rest of the talents in the tree make me crit like crazy and make minions get stunned by almost any attack from me, so they spend a lot of time prone on the ground.

Against bosses I open with a 2-second-cast mind crush dot and instacast weaken mind dot, and send the tank in.  The minions around the boss gather on my tank, and so it's the perfect time to continue with the 6-shot sequence above, then refresh the dots and do one more 6-shot.  By now I'm shooting AoE's at the lone boss, but who cares as they don't cost mana and do damage.  It's pretty cool. 

Only issue is, I have a priest shield, a fast heal, and a slow 3-second heal, and it's very hard to keep the pet tank up with those.  Basically, kill fast or Qyzen dies.

The healing talent tree is completely different; you get NONE of the niceties above, and instead get a lot of the WoW druid HOTs, complete with crits and bonus AoE healing happening based on what triggers.   It's very druidy, but for damage you're reduced to non-critting 1.5 and 3-second casts, so you'll do maybe 3 spells by the time I do the rotation.  Healing, though, you'll dance with 3-5 tanks around me.

Where you get schematic upgrades (the blue version etc) from disassembling the item rather than from making the item. That's a new thing to me, anyway. At least the old way you had the items you were grinding, I'm sure that's why they changed it to kill some of the bloat in the GTN. But it's brutal to start destroying blues like that, vs pumping out a bunch of blues to advance to a purple. It really kills any motivation to make purples while leveling up, and I don't play at the cap, so....blah.

Yeah it's been that way for awhile. I just level in blues for the most part.

 :headscratch: Weird, I don't remember it ever being like you describe. Old age.

Leveling up in certain crafts (synthweaving and armormech only, I think), there are occasionally random blue recipes you didn't have to RE for. It doesn't exist in, say, cybertech or whatever. So it's not actually a new thing, some crafts (and Ingmar leveled cybertech first) have always been that way. It's not a change.

I remember Biotech you always had to disassemble or whatever the stuff you made to try and learn the blue and purple space potions and implants (or was it ear pieces?  I forget).

It's a change to those you didn't have to RE before. Synthweaving, artifice, armormech are three I'm working and it sucks a bit harder now.

Still complaining about crafting and RE, heh. I gave up on it for my Assassin, it just burnt up too many resources without leaving me anything to recoup costs. Trying to get it going for some alts, but it's pretty annoying and I generally craft up stuff for all my alts in most mmo.

Finished the Assassin story line, sooo much better than the Bounty Hunter story imo. Lots of !!! moments and real good Sithiness.

It's not really worth it to RE up to purples except for current-endgame mods and the special biotech stuff, IMO. Even the mods are questionable.

I found it handy to do so when I first played, it allowed me to solo many of the champion mobs on each planet (powertech/mako) . But then I could dump the blues on the market. I just can't afford to do it now. Even with being overlevel and geared from the next planet's comm vendors, I couldn't tackle any champs with assassin/khem (and later /xalek).

I like to rush one character to cap and then play all the 'alts' /really/ slow and digest the content, poke into all the nooks and crannies and side activities. And be as twinked as possible while doing so. It's about the journey to me, when I hit cap/endgame, the character is done and there's nothing left to do.

Well even doing that, it makes more sense resource/time-wise, I think, to wear orange stuff and invest in keeping your mods up to date, rather than swapping out for purple modless gear all the time. Plus that way you can look flash while you're doing it.

Uh, being in purples wasn't exactly the edge your powertech has over your assassin, if you're trying to solo champions without a healer while your powertech had Mako.

I agree with both your points. I did try to gear up the assassin's healer buddy but I rely on a tank so I can get in the backstabs (and he's pretty squishy).

As far as oranges vs purps, I only had two outfits the entire time I played the assassin, and they were merely ok, I like changing it up even if some aren't as cool as others. Oranges definitely blow an equivalent purple away even with mostly blue mods installed, but it's a pain to manage all of them for you + companion. And I miss crafting, it's something I've always enjoyed. Buying commendation gear is just kind of lackluster for some reason.

One edge the assassin had in orange gear was being able to nab all the heroic 2+ quest oranges along the way. Being able to knock out one mob and then stealth out of combat if things went pear shape (or just to further break up the group) was really nice. Mostly for instances as the 1m cooldown was a bit long for breaking encounters up in the open world.

Thinking of doing trooper next, though I have a newb marauder I started along with a friend's jugg (she's a comic book artist I know from painting forums, but is in Australia so it's sparse).