f13.net

Wouldn't let me spoiler for some odd reason, just deleted my wall of text.

That's really hard to read.

http://www.swtor.com/community/showthread.php?t=363056 Direct Link to notes.

hah yeah I was trying to clean it up ><

"Tactical Advantage no longer triggers a "grunt effect" when it occurs."

No!  My uncontrolled giggling, gone forever.

The Jesus patch at last.  Looks decent enough...hope it goes live soon.

I'm a little sad, to be honest, the male IA has a lovely chuckle.

Seriously, can someone /spoiler tag the OP, please?

Also, a lot of these notes I'm seeing are things they could have probably squeezed out in their weekly patches weeks ago.  Not that I'm bitter or anything, just sayin'  :why_so_serious:

Perfect timing for the 3 monthers...  :oh_i_see:

Kaon Under Siege
    The health of KR-82 Expulser's probe droids has been increased significantly.

Who the fuck thought making the hardest fight in Kaon that no one does even harder was a good idea?

Unfortunately I don't see any fixes to the problem I have with tanking on the JK.

"Wall of Text" is an understatement for those patch notes...


Hmmm...

So, it turns out that taunting when you have aggro increases your threat in SWTOR. Work taunt into your rotation, threat problems go away, apparently.

Yeah I alternate my taunts in when I'm tanking.

That's what they believe, heh.  Problem is, all the talent and tanking guides have been saying "Use your Taunts, Luke" since before release, so I'd guess people were already doing it, and still getting bad results.

They've moved some of the rather important talents around, and they're apparently changing the power curves (and caps?) for the secondary stats, so hmm, I guess we'll see what happens.

My main problem was I was taunting anyway. Apparently I'm terrible at tanking in this game.

I wasn't using mine, I was assuming incorrectly they'd work like WoW taunts - they'd do nothing when you didn't have aggro. I have mostly been playing my gunslinger recently, I'll have to try tanking again and see if taunt spam helps at least solve the issues I was having personally.

Pictures of the new gear: http://dulfy.net/2012/03/17/1-2-new-armor-models/

Hahahahaha, wow. Some of those are hilarious. Especially the hats.

Why the heck would they take an axe to BH/Trooper healers but leave Sorcs/Sages relatively unchanged?

They key word there is "relatively". Sorcs not only lost 6% dps and some crit (so less procs unless you change your gearing), they really took the bull's piz' up the marmite motorway with the healing changes. The hybrid dps spec is as dead as a can of spam unless you go higher in lightening and pray for LS to proc insta CL - but doing that you gimp your control. Sorc has no burst whatsoever now while still being subject to 6k+ HULK SMASH PUNY SORCERER from Juggs/Guards and Maras/Sents while at the same time having weaker healing and less control over their Force pool (without cutting their own throats, killing themselves).

GZ tried to calm things a little by suggesting that there were certain "changes under the hood" that made extrapolation of the patchnotes actual effect on gameplay impossible to judge by - you know - reading the patch notes... "Like, really guys, it's not as terrible as it looks... honest."

He may be right, but as I can't get onto PTS I have to watch the tears wash in while I cling to my orange crate and paddle for sanity.

Lot of p.o.'d people in my guild on both the empire and republic side.

I feel really sorry for JK's, that armour is just  :uhrr:

All of it is ugly.

All

The PvP gear outside of Trooper is not good, but I like the PvE gear.  Smuggler's a little... odd and I really hope the other colors are better for Agent, but I like them.

Holy crap, the hats. And the sorc pve armor is just kind of hilarious on it's own.

Darth Hater has some highlights (http://www.darthhater.com/articles/swtor-news/19982-guild-summit-patch-1-2-hands-on-highlights) of the legacy perks.

Looks like Legacy level 10 to unlock most of it, with almost all perks being available by 15.

I'm up to 20, so hurrah!


Sjofn what's your legacy level.  :why_so_serious:

They probably have to patch in her legacy level.

Some clarification on the credits thing for broke folks like Sky.

Is it just me or do these two things seem contradictory?


So if I want, say, a Chiss scoundrel, is it free because my legacy level is over 8, or is it that level 8 has unlocked it and now it is 1.5 million spacebux?  Basically, what counts as "other things" vs. "some things" for that second explanation.

I'm not sure if this is correct or not, but I thought it was:

Get Legacy to level 8.  Additionally, either pay the space bucks or get a character of that race to level 50.

Edit:  I guess it could be getting to level 50 unlocks that race regardless of anything else, or you could get to Legacy 8 and pay the space bucks.

(http://i53.photobucket.com/albums/g52/msbae001/Do%20Not%20Want/Yoda_Want_Do_Not.jpg)

Have to agree... those armor models outside of Trooper look horrid. WTF is the sorcerer get up doing with all the sickle stuff?

That JK hat and Sorc...I am just amazed. Do they even focus group this stuff?

I think part of what upsets me most is that they're not even trying to make these outfits look even vaguely Star Wars-y. No one in any of the films looked as fucking silly as this, not even the senators or ambassadors or Queen fucking Amidala. And they especially didn't have to fight in it.

They're trying too hard to appeal to a WoW demographic with this crap. One of the reasons I left WoW behind (beyond how bad the game had become in general) was the distancing between my aesthetic preferences and the current dev team's. The appearance transmutation option was a welcome addition that came far too late but WoW has 7 years of gear history to fall back on. SWtOR simply doesn't have the range of gear to choose from and of course, there's only a tiny selection of OJ, moddable gear to tweak from that.

Silly fucking shoulderpads, all over again.

The two things I want to see:

Legacy bank (guild bank doesn't cross factions)
Character slots (8 more per server, thanks)

Some nice things in the quality of life dep't, but not a ton of meat. And the BH nerf. Happy to have (maybe) RE fixed and some appearance options.

Twenty-nine or thirty. I can't remember! ME3 slowed me way down.  :why_so_serious:

Edit: Never mind.

Was going to troll miracle patch talk but whatever, too easy.

RE rates are to be 'significantly increased'. Hope so because it's seriously pissing me off. RE'd 20 earpieces and not a single blue. Bad enough they're going the random chance route, but to make it so low? Fuck'em.

 

Uh-oh. Gird your loins, people round here don't take kindly to that sort of talk!

But I agree, those armour sets are truly terrible. Some of the most out-of-place armour design I've ever seen in a game. Such a shame to have such a capable engine and ruin it with clueless design.

I'd be more concerned about the amount of smeared brown and red/orange gear. It just looks so unappealing. Sorc sets make them out to be hilarious Star Wars runway models.

Bounty Hunter PvE looks good.

There's not much games can learn from FFXIV, but by god, armor sets are one of them.

Sorc healing changes were relatively minor compared to the absolutely comical nerfing of Troopers/Bh's (and I say this as an operative healer, one of the few classes looking at a buff).  It looks like GZ decided the best way to balance the healing classes was to make them all equally terrible.

PvP wise me and my friends have a really hard time with a specific operative healer on our server. He regularly heals for about 600k and he seems to have close to no interruptible skills, which makes it pretty hard for us to counter-anything him. Since no one of us is an Operative, or a Scoundrel, we can't really figure out what he's doing, and any kind of help/advice here would be appreciated. Especially if a buff to Operatives healing is coming.

Operative Healers have a talent that lets them spam a instant heal when the target they are healing is below 30% or something like that. You need to save stuns for that window.

How it works is the instant heal needs tactical advantage to use, but there's another talent that will cause the instant heal to not use up the tactical advantage if the target of the heal is below 30% health.  That Op is also probably spamming the instant HoT on everyone to get those kinds of numbers.

Oh, dear.  Seeing that immensely fugly armor and hearing of rampant nerf-bats is making me doubt my previous idea to resub when 1.2 goes live.  Who wants to guinea pig for me and report on things after it hits the production servers?

The change to Conveyance will probably hit Sorc/Sage healing quite hard, especially in warzones. Rightly so as not running out of mana force for heals is hardly balanced. I had to check what you meant by the BH/Trooper nerfing and realised it only applied to Commando/Merc as my Vanguard is all but untouched.  :grin:

The nerf to DFA is fairly rough. Rather than make the graphic bigger, they made the effect smaller; if I'm reading it correctly. Since it already wasn't big enough to catch most pve groups, now it will most likely only be able to hit two mobs at best in a pve grouping, pushing it out of the 'best opener' slot into a 'decent opener' slot. Not the worst thing in the world, but annoying...especially as a pve nerf due to pvp. Is it really so difficult to apply different rules in WZs and PvP server environments?

Did they say it was nerfed due to PvP?  It's way, way more powerful in PvE than in PvP, so I really doubt the change was made due to the latter.

I'm not even sure it's been nerfed, the wording is awkward using both radius and range. If it's been reduced to a 5m range, then it's actually more useful than it's previous 30m range.

Dunno. I know people were bitching because you could move outside the target indicator and still take damage. I assumed this was the impetus for the change.

Ah, those people don't seem to realize that the target thinger is smaller than, like, all the AEs. It's a complaint I personally have, not being able to REALLY see where to move my ass to not be in something.

From the Trooper perspective, the change to Mortar Volley/DFA will probably end up being a minor buff in PvP - it was so backloaded as to only hit stupid people and cappers, and should still more now.

I'm more concerned with the tweaks to the Gunnery tree - The reduction in power of Grav Round should be mostly compensated for by the increases in Demo Round and the proc chance of Full auto, but I'm more concerned with the nerf to Charged Barrier and the Concussion Charge talent. Those talents may be borderline pointless now.

Amazed that Vanguards didn't get hit, given that at least on my server, everyone and their dog appears to be playing a DPS Vanguard/PT. Those things kill waaaay quicker than I can.

Maybe I should switch to the dps tree!

DPS Vanguards did get hit, they broke the OP hybrid spec everyone was using. No more Assault DPS while keeping 80% of the tanking abilities. It was obscene, that much survivability and burst coupled together.


Tank Spec vanguard got buffed a bit though. Energy Blast is off the GCD entirely now.

There is a decent Sorc thread on the SWTOR forums that outlines where sorcs stand in Patch 1.2 right now.  (http://www.swtor.com/community/showthread.php?t=364287)

It seems that those of us who were using 13/28 builds are going to move over to 1/12/28 builds (http://www.torhead.com/skill-calc#201oZdcMMbZcrcRsMkrc.1), and pretty much ditch using chain lightning.  Essentially we're giving up burst damage for sustained damage.

For healing sorcs though it does appear that most sorcs healing got fried due to cast times and force management issues due to the changes proposed in Patch 1.2.  If these changes make healing sorc's a liability to take in raids, then a whole lotta people are gonna be upset if they have to reroll.

Sorcs in PvP are pretty retarded OP, that comes from a 50 sorc.  Bubble, heals, sprint, player pull, knockback, lots of CC, decent burst DPS, decent AE, etc etc makes them a stronger PvP class over many others.  Not to mention that I see more Sorcs then any other class in PvP only exasperates the OPness.

SorcsSages are free kills for both my OP and my Sniper.  I fear commandos/sentinels FAR more.

Yeah, as a BM commando, I mostly worry about Vanguards and Sentinels. Sure, 3 sorcs will take anyone down, but so they should.

So. I'm hearing that you no longer get any credits for doing warzones in 1.2. That's a big deal for me (possibly a deal breaker), as I have zero interest in PvE at 50. It is also upsetting people who level via warzones alone.

Ha.

*mistakes*

Er... What did you think you were replying to?  :why_so_serious:

Oh. I really misread what you wrote.

Sorcs are glass cannons, get through the bubble and they fold like a paper bag. If my Tank Vanguard can blow them up, anyone can. The things that are actually OP about them are their channeled AE for turret/door interrupting and Force Speed. Force Speed is such a incredibly useful thing, I can't stress that enough and good luck opening a door in voidstar when one team has 3+ sorc/sages.



I don't get why DPS sorcs just don't go down their trees, the DoT at the end of the Madness tree is going to equal or exceed any potential Barrage procs.

They prefer the spike damage from the instant Chain Lightnings to the DoT.  Of course, that's being nerfed so we'll see how things shake out.

On my sage I vastly preferred the pure balance spec to the balance/tk hybrid even before the first patch - it had a lot more survivability and control. Not as much burst (though getting that 'your next 10 dot ticks do more damage' thing was nice), but eh.

Do roots still ignore / bypass resolve?

As far as I know, yes.

So cross server war zones didn't make it in 1.2? Or I miss it? Its a deal breaker for me.  On my server matches are regularly 6v8 and the pve is unbearable without warzones to break it up.

Nope. Go reroll on a populated server.

So I just read that if you have say a full set of PvP BM gear, when 1.2 goes live your gear will change to the new stats with much higher expertise, etc...grats.  However if you have full BM gear and modded it in any way, you wont get the stat change and subsequently f*cked.  To top it off the new "recruit" level gear will be better then your modded BM stuff.  Here is an example pic:

(http://dulfy.net/wp-content/uploads/2012/03/battlemasterptrlive.jpg)

This is insane! Can you please point me to the thread where this is being discussed? I need to follow the developments very closely...

There are a couple:
http://www.swtor.com/community/showthread.php?t=370963&page=4
http://www.swtor.com/community/showthread.php?t=372522

I am only halfway through the whole threads, but apparently a Dev stated:


Which I think means that if you put the original mods back in the BM item, they should all get updated seamlessly as if you never modded touched it. Hopefully.

Because everyone keeps the old mods?  :uhrr:

I am a hoarder, so i did. "Just in case". I mean, there's no point in destroying them anyway, so I kept them. But yes, it's still a supershitty things on Bioware part to punish people (no matter how much) for modding their equipment CONSIDERING THE SYSTEM is meant exactly for that.

Punish? Really?

EDIT: This really just sounds like a technical limitation to me. "Punish" makes it sound like they're deliberately screwing people over, which is certainly not true.

Apparently it's only ok to swap out enhancements in ways that don't highlight their shitty itemization.   :why_so_serious:

I think cunning gear with shield on it is my favorite so far.

I'm having trouble seeing an elegant way to deal with upgrading customizable gear actually.

1) "Default gear is changed to new version, everything else left intact."  Screws over players who modded the gear without saving the mods, which isn't a reasonable expectation.  Also probably the easiest to do.

2) "All gear is changed to new version."  Screws over players who want the gear with the stats they put in it.  Also depending on the implementation, it encourages gaming the system to allow holding on to the old mods to use somewhere else in addition to getting the gear.

3) "All mods in gear are bumped up to the new level."  Probably the best solution from a player's perspective, but potentially overpowered (as "bad" itemization is often intentional).  Also can be gamed in some awkward ways.

4) Variations on "Strip all mods on gear and place in inventory, give players updated ones in the mail."  My favorite option that ignores the fact that giving away free stuff often isn't brilliant design, but much like talent resets it would cause a lot of complaining over having to put everything back again.

How about

5)  Understand your stats model and consider the ramifications of your system in development and beta so you don't need a miracle patch to keep your playerbase from jumping ship.

 :grin:

Look, I understand that I exaggerate, or to put it simply my choice of words is sometimes overdramatic. But if you are one of the players that have to earn his/her Battlemaster equipment again -and that's no joke- while some others won't, and that's just because you used one of the feature of the game without a hint of exploitation, you definitely feel punished, or at least treated unfairly. You and the time you put towards legally getting that stuff by following the rules of the game.

Can we admit that, prior to the level 50 only bracket, most Battlemasters were a joke anyway?  Most players got battlemaster by killing ungeared 1-49's or kill trading in Ilum. 

I'm happy that the patch will make PvP gear easy to get.  The faster pvp has a level playing field, the better. 

I don't see how that's unreasonable.

Or, they could just convert the mods to the new version. (58) mods are not too hard to track, are they? Or they could just upgrade untouched BM equipment to the new version, and simply flat out add +25 expertise to any existing level 58 mod that comes from a pvp item, even if you have it sparily in your inventory. They are easy to track since they are very different from PvE ones. And if they think that by doing this some mods would get too powerful, just transform "untouched items (with mods) to the new version, and add a "consolatory" +15/+20 expertise (less than the intended +25 but better than zero) to any spare BM mod you have hanging around.

I mean, Ingmar, I know they are not doing this on purpose, and the patch is still in testing, but I am sure they can come up with something better then "oh, sorry", and I certainly hope they will, even if the worst case scenario is not gonna affect me cause I kept all the mods.

Aren't the mods exactly the same as PVE ones pre-patch? So there's no way to know the source of one that has been removed?

I saw the 1.2 Legacy system video.

I'm not sure how I feel about allowing skill intermixing, especially this early in the game's post-launch cycle.  I mean, what's the logic in my IA using Force Choke?  I never saw Han Force Push a bitch off a cliff.   :uhrr:

So don't use it.

You pick the ability (and probably can't undo your choice once made), and it's a 20-minute cooldown (shared with your heroic moment ability)... I wouldn't pick Force Choke or Force Push.  I might pick a combat rez.  I'm not sure what else is worth taking as a 20-minute ability.  Stealth?

Can you use heroic moments in flashpoints if you have your companion out? That's the only place I can see a combat-rez being useful given its usage limitations. You won't get to use it while solo questing otherwise.

Coming up with new, in character, abilities would be :effort:

Well, there are several characters in TOR alone who quit jedi training (or were kicked out) and became something else. Plus a bunch of independent force users. So your character could well have that ability.

And of course if you cant make an ability fit your personal back story, you really don't have to use it.

Force abilities are easy to retcon in. I'm more intrigued to see how you give a jedi full auto or death from above.

Doubt your commitment to sparkle motion, do I.

Genndy Tartakovsky (https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=7A07WNupEXk) got away with it...   :drill:

Bad example.  Tartakovsky can get away with anything, since he still has my heart he stole from not finishing Samurai Jack.   :heartbreak:

You don't choose your legacy force ability. There is one per class. For example, I think a bounty hunter gives flamethrower to another character as a legacy ability.

Healing was too good, so we had to nerf it:

I'm always of two minds on the healing thing. On the one hand, if it's too easy, I hate it. On the other, everyone else in the world likes it being easy.  :why_so_serious:

This is nice.  I was worried we'd have even more buttons when getting the other class buffs, but they actually consolidated these!

Of course, once everyone has the all-in-one superbuff it kind of makes me wonder what's the point of having buffs at all when everyone has the exact same ones?

Most people won't have that. Finishing Chapter two is like level 40 for most people.

Hmmm, need to get two more characters to 50 for all the buffs...

(eyes the L25 Gunslinger and the baby JK)

Overview of 1.2 UI customization:

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=LTAfjTxguB0

I will ALMOST have the fattest buff of all ... I should probably get to work on my IA, since my gunslinger is not going anywhere without Ingmar's trooper, and Ingmar has not been leveling his trooper.


EDIT: Oops, wait. I WILL have the fattest buff of all, Joshua is totally into chapter 3! I forgot!

I don't even have my alt far enough for a second buff yet :(

I am so ready for this patch to hit, do we have a date yet?

Last rumor was mid-April.  The PTS patch notes are dwindling to almost nothing (mostly flashpoint fixes, it seems) since the initial 1.2 hit there as well.

As the 3-month subscriptions will start lapsing by the end of April, I'm expecting it before then, with huge fanfare when Patch Day is announced.

That seems to have everything I could have asked for, including saving profiles to load onto all my characters.   :thumbs_up:

Yeah, that's really looking great.

The only thing I would add would be having attaching/aligning interface elements together and setting manual offsets instead of just dragging things around.  Hopefully I can easily edit the XML file to clean things up.

This is pretty slick, Im going to spend the first 2 hours on 1.2 day setting this shit up lol

Bit nebulous at this point, but it appears next week sometime for 1.2 (http://www.darthhater.com/articles/swtor-news/20063-star-wars-the-old-republic-patch-1-2-starts-to) is not out of the question.

I sure hope so, I'm itching to play but almost everything I want to do is improved with 1.2, so why would I bother playing before then? I even got a 'Mako misses you, Komoto' email  :why_so_serious:

Me myself, I am farming mats in anticipation of the RE changes.   :grin: :drill:

Does anyone know if you will be able to use hotkeys on hidden bars finally?

I believe yes.  Not completely sure on that, but mostly sure.

It was announced for next week at PAX.

http://massively.joystiq.com/2012/04/06/pax-east-2012-swtor-1-2-coming-next-week/

So no patch today. It could be later this week but lots of people on my server were expecting it for this Tuesday and they canceled between last night and today when it became official it wasn't going to happen. That was after another streak of nights with close to no WZ starting. I'm sure the Biowares are doing their best, but I seldom noticed a "bleeding" of subscriptions as much as this time around. Every day seems to count, and there's only a set limits of wasted nights in a row some players can tolerate.

Not that 1.2 will fix much, we all know that in order to fix the problem server mergers and cross-server queues are needed. But the patch will certainly bring back a few players, while the lack of it is literally bleeding the game to death.

Heh. I love mmo players.

Seriously the only ppl that claimed it was coming this week were some of the SWTOR sites that misheard or misread the info and put it all out there.

Yes to all, but you are missing the point where, in a subscription based game, you are paying for something you are actually unable to play due to slow patching/fixing/expanding of some poorly implemented features. The people I'm talking about are not ragequitting. They are not paying anymore because all the game is offering them _at the moment_ is "Star Wars Republic Fleet - The 3D chat". The patch is necessary to justify money at this time, and to give people a reason, any reason, to keep logging in.

Ok?

Yeah, I was mostly venting MY frustration. Maybe because I didn't cancel  :grin:

If you insist on making yourself miserable playing a game you don't like the fashionable thing to do is to play non-stop multiplayer Mass Effect 3 looking for a particular reward.

A lot of people are stuck in pre-patch limbo, usually those who need their ding grats progression to have fun.

This is excellent advice.

1.2 hits tomorrow night.

So funny that SWTOR might actually be less commercially successful than SWG.  Not that that would vindicate Sim Beru or the nuking of said Sim Beru, twice. Just that SWTOR has a lot red ink to overcome.

http://www.swtor.com/blog/scheduled-maintenance-game-update-1.2-april-12-2012

10 PM Pacific time tomorrow night they take stuff down, their maintenance times are really strange.

Ahahahaha! This totally made me laugh out loud. :heart: :heart: :heart:

The funny thing to me is that they cancelled, but their paid time won't run out until after 1.2 is live anyways.

Yeah some commented on that, but I think their point was to send a "Fuck this shit I'm out" message (while not canceling sends the "Alright guys I know it's tough I'll support you and patiently wait for patch" message) to EA-Bioware, and make sure the sub didn't auto-renew out of distraction.

Canceling is the only actual means of telling a MMO to actually fix its shit. To be fair.

Cancelled in March (expired on 3/20).  Waiting until a few days pass after they release 1.2, and for a BIIF (but is it fixed?) report from you guys.  Specifically on whether I (or the CSR's) can get rid of stuck quests.  Then I'll resub, maybe.

This makes me feel like that dog in the Larson cartoon waiting for the cat to step into the washing machine... "oh please, oh please".

I dunno, how much did SWG make catering to the autistic demographic?

edit: nevermind i cant read rite

So they announced today that ranked warzones arent going to make it in 1.2 tomorrow but down the road and the intended gear from them will be obtainable via another way which they dont tell you :P


"It is with great reluctance that I have to announce Ranked Warzones are not going live with Game Update 1.2: Legacy. We had a fantastic run of testing on the Public Test Server and I can’t begin to thank the community enough for their tireless advocacy for this feature and the time people took to file bugs and voice their concerns.

After careful consideration, it is clear that to make Ranked Warzones the feature we all want it to be is going to take a bit more time. I apologize for any disappointment this may cause and ask for your patience as we work to make sure the Ranked Warzone Preseason launch is polished and fun. With Legacy, the new Warzone, Operation, and Flashpoint, as well as many other amazing features of Game Update 1.2 ready to go, we're very excited for tomorrow's additions.

In the future we'll be rolling the Ranked Warzone Preseason out in phases, listening carefully to player feedback and making adjustments as we go. The first phase will be full team, eight-player queuing only and from there we'll look at next steps as Preseason progresses. In the meantime we have provided an alternate purchase route for War Hero gear so you can start building your set while figuring out your teams."

This makes me very happy.  Ranked Warzones without cross server queuing would have been terrible on those servers with smaller PvP populations, especially with the original plan of filling the ranked WZ with people who queued for an unranked match if there weren't enough people queuing for a ranked match.

Yea, I really wasn't looking forward to having 8 man teams rolling pugs and junk.

Agreed, que times are too long on a lot of servers so splitting off any pvpers to ranked Warzones was a stupid idea.

And so....  It begins.

(waits for patch)

I'd rather they put solo q's in before 8 man.  I have been screwed out of my 8 man warzone team.

Wow, they weren't kidding about the "up to 1GB" of patches for 1.2, were they?

Betting $50 servers are down again tonight sometime.  No way they got this patch right

Initial thoughts after 15 minutes:

- much improved response at the fleets
- where did my bottom center quickbar go?
- going to need to seriously re-tweak the UI
- my legacy level unlocked most everything for purchase, but I can't afford to buy any of them except the unarmed stuff.   :sad:

My initial thoughts... oh boy, I needn't have worried about the commando grav round nerf.

My demo round crits for over 6k now when I charge it up, and full auto is both much better (and almost always available).  :grin:

Also, Mortar Volley is now a thing of beauty, and the Voidstar WZ ends immediately in the second round if the attacking side gets further in. I love this patch already.

Thats a sweet change, sucks to just keep playing once you already lost :P

In the UI preview video, they said they were resetting the UI. Both the default UI and the one most people used (all hotbars) are set up as presets using the button on the hotbar by your portrait (in the default layout).

I'm with you on not being able to afford any legacy unlocks. I'm perpetually broke in mmo.

That will be nice!

Rank II speeder piloting, now only 150k, woo!

The new customization is indeed fairly nice, but the initial setup is kinda annoying.


Everything is JUST, KINDA, SORTA, "wrong" until you nudge everything back in place.


You can manipulate the action bars pretty nicely though. Lengthen them, shorten them, stack them, make cubes or rectangles out of them.

Title edited for accuracy.

Now quit talking about cancelling your preorders and post your goddamn interfaces.

(http://i.imgur.com/TS9L1l.jpg) (http://imgur.com/TS9L1)

I still wish they would've built the engine with a proper mod api from the beginning but letting me at least move my hotbars around is a start.

Here's my work of art  :why_so_serious:



My companion bar opens up to a similar double row of 6 above the companion party frame.

The new UI is pretty awesome all around, though there are three little things that still irritate me.  Warning: these are very minor nitpicks, and one is just a bug.

1)  In all the MMOs I've played, I always detach a window for guild/whispers so they don't get lost in the shuffle of general/party/ops/whatever.  Well, the window I detached in this UI has a very annoying bug that keeps resetting the font size back to 14.  I even tried editing the XML itself and changed all the chat window font sizes to 12 manually, but still no joy.  It must be a bug in the coding of creating a new window or something.

2)  I too move my chat windows to the bottom of the screen, because having them up top where you're constantly clicking on them by accident when you're trying to target a mob on that part of the screen is retarded.  But I can't find a way to have chat scroll down from the top of the window instead of up from the bottom.

3)  I can't detach and resize my buffs/debuffs.  It would be even better if I could just indicate a select few proc buffs that I could grow about 1000% bigger and stick right in the middle of my screen with say 33% alpha or so, so I don't have to stare at that tiny little bar to see when they go off.

Other than that, the UI is about as customizable as I could hope to ask for.  So kudos to that.

On on unrelated note, I was finally able to drop a mission that I'd been stuck with for months.  So I'm happy about that, too.

Sure, take a screen shot while I curse. People will think I'm uncouth!

I'm pretty sure you have natural couth repellant.  :grin:

Mystery patch tonight, patch notes "to be posted after."  :headscratch:

Sploitz?

(http://www.filedump.net/dumped/queue1334283428.png)

Yep, that's a 600 man queue.

Dammit Fabricated, get to Fatman.

Oh, also they didn't add any of the warzone changes they said they would. I am sad. I am really tired of queuing with only 4 people and having to re-invite every time.

(http://www.filedump.net/dumped/screen1334284421.png)

Okay, there is a huge bug for people who run in windowed fullscreen mode.

Apparently the game is changing the refresh rate of your windows desktop to match the max FPS in-game while the game is running. Unfortunately, if you tab out, or crash, that refresh rate/resolution suddenly gets fixed to a lower/higher/different rate that may not be supported by people's monitors. Possibly, it's happening from people who are re-selecting windowed fullscreen mode, then the game blank, so they tab out and kill it, and then all of a sudden they're fucked.

The bad news is that this is changing the windows settings itself, so it persists across reboots. Hope people know how to hit F8 and go in and re-install drivers!

Basically, this is second only to CCP's boot fuckage. There is an emergency patch at 3am, if it doesn't address it I'm sure there will be another very quickly. There "Fix" is to edit a configuration ini file.

Ahahahah, that's awesome. Weird, I thought that refresh rates were tied to each individual application by the graphic card drivers.

I am watching Sjofn tab back and forth in windowed full-screen mode so there must be something more to it than just that.

Dam, 250 people in the republic fleet on my server.  Havent seen it over 150 in a while

Kinda glad I run full-screen non-windowed really. So far I'm decently impressed with the patch from a technical standpoint hilariously-terrible bugs I'm not experiencing notwithstanding. The UI customization is better than I thought it would be. I can also get around the fleet with like 200 people on it with better FPS than I got when it was like 30 people.

Mortar Volley actually fires instantly now instead of like 4 fucking seconds after I cast it, I can actually make stuff to reverse engineer and know I won't waste stacks of mats on nothing, etc.

I don't PVP however, so there is that. Hopefully they get their shit straightened out and get the WZ queuing working.

New RE rates seem to be 20% for greens, 10% for blues.  In 15 minutes I got schematics I hadn't obtained with 30+ tries before.   :heart:

Ironically, because the UI modding is IN the game, and not tied to a bunch of downloads from outside... I've actually customized my SWTOR UI far far more then I ever changed my WoW one.


Which isn't a lot still by any means, but there's that!

It's sexier when I do it.

I dont know wtf they are thinking with PvP.  Losing a WZ now you get about half the comm's as before, so if you arent in a pre-made you can lose all night long.  Since launch the level 20 and 40 gear is now over 4x higher then launch prices and this Warhero gear is RETARD pricing.  I mean they are making PvP to be a stupidly massive grind.  As for testing feedback, all that fell on deaf ears.  Where is my GW2?

The extra 100 are people checking out on free time, of course.  How bad is it that I don't feel inclined to do even that?  I'm so sad, had many hopes for this game.

Anyone know a good site where they are puttign up custom UI's I can import?  I am terrible at that kind of thing but would like to use someone elses custom healing UI. 

http://www.swtorui.com/addons.php (http://www.swtorui.com/addons.php)
http://mmo-mechanics.com/swtor/uifileshare/ (http://mmo-mechanics.com/swtor/uifileshare/)

Servers down again for a patch to fix the patch that fixed 1.2 and made much of 1.2 disappear.

 :heart:

It WAS a massive grind. It's not now.
War Hero gear isn't harder to get than the original Battlemaster stuff or even the Champion stuff when you had to randomly find it in bags (and you could find doubles).
And it's only temporarily hard, consequence of the fact we can't aquire ranked WZ comms. It'll be a breeze when we will.

You can (allegedly) currently trade warzone comms for ranked warzone comms so you can still get War Hero stuff even now.

You can, but only at a 3:1 ratio.

It'd take about 90 warzones (averaging a little over 100 commendations a go, which is rather optimistic) to afford your chestpiece - assuming you already have battlemaster gear.

My UI is just the extended hotbars one. I didn't have much of an issue with it before.

Kinda got bummed out about the skill reset, I forgot how I had everyone set up and didn't really feel like spending my limited gaming time last night monkeying with it.

Also cruel that they give legacy alt options this far into the game when I have no character slots left open.

All the new end game stuff is group content, so Komoto stays on a sunny beach sipping tequila for a while longer.

A note from the management : Those responsible for patching the patch, have been sacked.

Oops.

Especially funny with the patch notes as fixing only a char deletion issue and stuff about support tickets. Why would they even have to touch the content data for that?

They probably wouldn't have to.

The first thing that springs to mind is some seriously sloppy version control. Mister EmergencyPatchDev working on a pre-1.2 copy of code, running a diff against live code, and hey presto.

Friday 13th. And some developer probably hadn't had his morning coffee at usual strength.  :grin:

Yeah, sloppy is probably the right word. They don't even seem to keep backups of the state before server changes, so they now have to rebuild their server side data files from source...

I'm used to projects with much, much smaller budgets putting more thought than that into their change management.

All of this reeks of them battling their engine/backend to me. Shit, they should've just developed their own considering.

Are you a wizard?

These monolithic patches are brutalizing them.

By the way, the new dailies on Corellia aren't too bad, in that you pick them all up at the same spot, do one trip through the (smallish) zone, and you're done. WAY better than the other dailies.

They also knocked the heroic 4 Belsavis dailies down to heroic 2.

Servers up much earlier than expected, good job Bioware.

Wait for it...

They are a little bit harder then the previous Heroic 2 on Belsavis, with all the Gand, but easier then the Illum Heroic 2. Rewards are the same, 3 comms each, a fancy armoring and fancy companion weapons. The companion weapons now include modable techblades/techstaves so that might be worth doing for some people.

I have felt this about a lot of the problems they have had since launch.

I doubt it's the specific off-the-shelf stuff we're thinking of.  Their version control is just laughable though, which may be a consequence of said stuff.  Don't know.

At least on imperial side you could get those for dromond kass commendations. Don't now about republic.
Probably way easier to do the heroic L>20 missions for commendations

Oh ya back for the free week. Did they put searching the market in this patch or a previous one. It wasnt there when I quit.

Also the quick trip to your ship thing is a bit misleading. You can quick travel to your ship just fine now though most planets have a 1 click fleet transport anyway. But, you still have to enter the planet through the old slow way. So no real improvement there.

Prior to this patch, there were no moddable techblades or techstaves. You are thinking of vibroblades. Yes, for some reason, these are different things.

Actually, no, the patch is a work of art.  Kinda like that other game's ending.  They meant to do that.

The patch for the patch is taking longer to patch than the patch.

After playing with the UI customization for a bit I gotta say they did a really nice job.

Oh ya guess my memory is playing tricks. Like it did with the search thing. I could have sworn there was no search on the market before but then I remembered there was. It was body part searching I remembered the absence of.

The new raid definitely separates the "Story" mode from the hardmode. Holy shit.

We decided to just blast straight into hardmode since pretty much 90% of the raid is in full Rakata. First trash pull and half the raid instantly dies. We got the first boss(es) to 50% each but the damage is unmangable...probably due to use relying on information from second-hand PTS reports. Also there's the problem with lots of abilities that SHOULD NOT TARGET THE FUCKING TANKS TARGETING THE FUCKING TANKS.

It's also pretty buggy, so there's that.

Here's my "okay, I'm sort of happy now" pass (XML (http://dl.dropbox.com/u/40252/swtor/CalWoW-13-04-12.xml)):

(http://dl.dropbox.com/u/40252/swtor/Screenshot_2012-04-13_18_43_15_474200.jpg)

Tried to get it close to what I'm using in WoW (http://dl.dropbox.com/u/40252/WoWScrnShot_041212_174208.jpg).  Still want to play around with the Ops frames and general alignment.  Didn't notice it was this bad until I looked at a screenshot :heartbreak:.  To the XML file!

On that same note, you can edit the scale above the 1.25 the in-game editor allows pretty easily.  Just bump the "Value" in the <scale> tag up (http://percentsign20.com/wp/wp-content/uploads/2012/04/ui-scale-npp.png) (did a write-up for my guildies here (http://percentsign20.com/wp/2012/04/14/how-to-swtor-ui-elements/)).  Textures will start to look blurry though.

Man, I don't know who Lost Island is for, but it's definitely not for people who need the gear.

People complained the "PvE was too easy" so they put out two retardatron instances.  

Poopsocking guilds completed both of them within hours, everyone else is left to die horribly over and over again because they have that one friend who is .5 seconds too slow getting out of the fire or misses one interrupt.

Good times.

Edit:  anyone get the feeling that SWTOR is making all the same mistakes that WoW made, only at a much faster pace?

Pretty much.

I fucking hate the retards who are like, "IT'S NOT TOO HARD! I MEAN, OUR FULL RAKATA GUILD GROUP WIPED 9 TIMES ON THE FIRST BOSS BUT WE BEAT IT! IT'S FINE!". Die. Die you fucks. Why can't someone literally kill you so I stop having to run into you in every MMO I try?

We could turn F13 into some sort of gaming hit-squad.

I guess you hate me then.  I like encounters to be hard.  Difficulty makes the encounters more fun (assuming the difficulty isn't the result of a bug).  If my group can plow through all of a new dungeon on the first try it really kills the excitement of the encounter. 

I don't care about the loot.  So I want the encounters to be relatively challenging.  I don't mind an evening of failure as long as we learn something during the play session. 

Oh they hate us, they hate us very much.

I don't think either one of you is faux-hardcore over the top to the point where you whine about difficulty while in top tier gear.

So, the tooltip for Rocket Boost completely fails to mention that it can only be used in vehicle areas.

You have been warned.

Nebu's post (which sum up my tastes as well) is pretty much in line with what Fab wanted people dead for.  Has nothing to do with whining.

Only difference is that I (and maybe Nebu) acknowledge that "our" game isn't very compatible with the one many people on this board want.

The revanchists over on EJ would argue that the more difficult game existing is integral to the enjoyment of the other.  The "faux-hardcore" would just say that you're bad and you should feel bad.  Still leads to wanting a "ruined" game though.

Listen, i don't mind approriately difficult encounters, but if you have the gear already provided by the instances, it shouldn't be a hassle to get through it.  Especially in "story-mode" content.  From what I understand the new operation has folks consistently wiping in rakata gear in story mode.  that ain't right.

Well the main problem I have with that line of thinking is that higher difficulties cap your game in terms of subs, and capped subs mean less development of that game.

There's hardmode raids for that. Hardmode FPs are supposed to be for gearing people TO raid, with Lost Island having the bonus of a Rakata chestpiece at the end. If Lost Island was tuned to be as difficult for a group in Tionese/daily-modded oranges as it was for us in literally full Rakata I'd say it would be about right, minus some tuning needed to make it less melee unfriendly.

Note that I don't give a shit about the loot myself either; I'm full Rakata. I needed nothing from that instance, neither did any of my guildmates. We ran it just to check it out and it was a horrific unfun slog with an easy group makeup (Gunslinger, Scoundrel, Sage, Vanguard). We had pretty good players from our raid group all around and we wiped more on the first boss of Lost Island than we did on the first two bosses of Explosive Conflict. The first and final bosses are not tuned very well.

Wiping is fine; it happens even on stupidly easy bosses. Being stonewalled is another. Unless Lost Island is designed for people in Full Rakata to get dressup items for their companions, as of right now it's pointless for the non-raiding population or people gearing alts/mains to get raid-ready.

Content should be graded. Normal mode for "most people will see the content / PUGable", Hard mode for the organised raiding guilds and achievements for the elitists.

I don't even get why designers can still get this wrong.

Because they are all elitists deep down and get wildly offended when their "buddies" call them out for their content being too "easy."

I am pretty sure the intention is to do that, they just tuned it badly.

As if people stopped complaining about how difficult heroic Cata 5 mans were.

You emphasized the wrong part. Heroic 5 mans

Did I miss somewhere in the patch notes that the mounts don't drop from HM 8 mans any longer?  Was a bit of a surprise last night when we ran KP real quick for a mount and it wasn't there.

Also no Blackhole comms.  Is it only for Nightmare mode?

I really didn't have a problem with making 5 man heroics dick-punchingly difficult.  But if you are going to do that you are sort of obligated to put the gear on par with the raid gear.  maybe diffrentiate the sets by having a dungeon set with different set boni but the same overall stat distribution.  Requiring folks to overgear a dungeon just to have a reasonable chance to complete is moronic.

Someone will point out "Well then no one will ever raid!!!!"    

1.  So what does that tell you about your raid game?
2.  Why do raiders even care?
3.  Peoiple will raid if raid gear looks cool, give cheevos or titles, or offer special mounts.  People love that crap.

I'll field those questions!

1 - It usually tells you what it always tells you about MMO gamers, they follow the path of least resistence. Given a choice, nobody wants to assemble large groups because people don't have large groups of actual friends in the game.
2 - The high-end raiders don't care. They will do what they do for the challenge of beating each other, faster. The pretender raiders are the ones that bitch and whine because they have a disproportionate amount of self-worth tied to being special in a game.
3 - Absolutely. Titles, pets, mounts, and cosmetics should be the rewards for achievements at the highest levels, not stats.

I don't know 100% but the only old content I think Black Hole Comms drop from is Nightmare Karagga's Palace.

The mounts from Hard KP/EV weren't 100% drops, so you probably just got unlucky.

Learn something new every day.  I've never had it NOT drop before so I just assumed it was a 100% drop.

:mob:

So, today's patch fixed Trooper's Demo Round incorrectly benefiting from other players' Grav Vortex stacks (which explains the regular 6-7k crits!), but in the process seem to have stopped it from benefiting from their own stacks as well - leading to a huge damage reduction.

Sigh.

Where is my companion trinket/earpiece fix!

They didn't fix the jet engine noise, either.

Verdict on at least Story Mode Explosive Conflict: Eh.

Two Giant Guys: Don't even care to remember their names. On hardmode this fight is pretty ridiculous and is a huge fuck you to healers and the gimmick mostly revolves around the bosses behaving properly when taunted and DPS/Tank switches never ever ever fucking up. On normal mode it's pretty boring.

Stormcaller/Firebrand Tanks: Basically TOR's "The Olympics of Not Standing in Shit" fight. You run away from the yellow targeting circle, you run away from the red ones, you run from the pillars, you run out of the AOE and under the shield. Two of your most tanky DPS need to eat a debuff for the guy tanking the stormcaller tank, the firebrand tank needs to swap with the other tank (or if you have a tertiary tank, him/her) to dump a 100%+ damage debuff. It's a fairly amusing fight to me but you need to have your shield groups sorted out and your bolt kiter must not be retarded. Hardmode is basically a shitload more damage. On normal you don't need to tank swap on firebrand, just pop CDs. On Hardmode he'll melt your fucking face off so you need to.

Minesweeper: Fun but 100% dependent on two things: 1) The guy playing minesweeper (I'd make a tank do it) needs to be able to quickly solve a path, 2) People paying fucking attention when they get the defuser kit and doing so. On storymode if you miss a defuse you're hitting the enrage on the minefield. The guy at the end is piss easy if you have smugglers/agents to stun the turrets and people can stay out of the big red circle.

Kathless or whatever: If your DPS can focus fire quickly/properly this is pretty easy up until the end. Don't stand in bad stuff. Kill a couple gimmicky add groups. When the boss is finally knocked off his walker he is very, VERY mean to the tank and must be kited while being DPS'd.

Thank you for reinforcing that cancelling my sub was a good call.  That doesn't sound fun at all.  I'm for a challenge, but it should be a fun challenge.

Also the trash is HORRIFIC on hardmode. Like, you pretty much die instantly if hit by any of the AOE effects they use. Also, the flashpoint gimmick of making shitloads of mobs spawn out of nowhere when you walk past invisible barriers is there. CC is absolutely a must. You do get rewarded for killing trash though since each major groups of trash after the first boss have a chest with the new crafting mats, crystals (Orange/Black) and Black Hole Comms.

The Minesweeper fight is kind of a fun novelty but very simple.

I should have seen the Rakghoul place as a sign of things to come.  Too many trash mobs with gimic abilities, overly prolonged boss fights, and a bonus boss that is poorly balanced for the encounter.  Seems the new place follows a similar trend... some fun to be had, but not much.

The first boss is a cockblock for sure. The tanks have more reasonably avoidable damage and there's plenty of ways to handle the fight based on group makeup/mindset (people can't seem to fucking move? Make everyone but 2-3 people stand on the tank!). The minesweeper boss is tightly tuned but you have to be really dumb to fuck it up and it's kind of fun. Kathless is probably my least favorite type of fight where you have fairly easy stuff to do until the last "20%" or so where it's OHGODOHGODKILLITKILLITKILLIT as Kathless chases your tank around in a circle, nearly globalling him every few seconds.

I imagine when we get to him on hardmode, we'll wipe 1-2 times getting to that phase, then like a half dozen+ wipes finishing it. I fucking HATE fights that usually wipe you right at the end.

It's definitely a bit overtuned on hardmode as far as I'm concerned. The problem with TOR right now in terms of encounters is that all of the new shit HATES melee DPS. Melee somewhat make up for this by being way overpowered (Sentinels blow everyone CLEAN out of the water on DPS. Even the bugged Commandos couldn't keep up), but pretty much all of the bosses in EC hate melee and Lost Island/Kaon definitely hate melee.

Also...the bonus boss in Kaon is pointless since it drops a belt (Rakata-level belts can be crafted cheaply if you're armormech/synthweaving, or you can buy Columi/Tionese level stuff off the GTN which is perfectly accepable). Also unless they fixed it, if you insist on killing it just kite it alllllll the way back to your friends in the quarantine area and smoke it before the probes show up.

The trash in Kaon was pretty fun.  Did not think that during Story Explosive Conflict, which felt like a slog.  (Part of that was due to my wanting to stab half of my raid in the face though.)

It's not a bad set of fights, even comparing it to current WoW content, but the raid metagame surrounding it still sucks.

Even Komoto has a rakata belt and bracer set. And I'm some kind of measure for not playing an mmo properly  :grin:

I don't, but only because I need the stupid materials for the Synthweaving stuff.

That's why I had 127 credits the other night. Someone had the components I've never seen (ops maybe?) up for 45k each. Since they were going for over 100k, I decided to grab a couple, would've bought the third to flip if I'd had the cash.

If you bought Rakata Energy Nodes or Self Perpetuating Power Cells you need plans that drop from Ops to use them as far as I know. I think Bioware mentioned adding tons more craftables to both trainers and making BoP items BoE and other shit but who knows when they'll bother doing that.

The four rakata recipes I have are from the trainer (two each belt and bracer).

The Rakata plans from the trainer only require the Biometric Crystal Alloy or whatever which drops in Heroic flashpoints. The plans that drop in raids require Data Cubes, Rakata Energy Nodes, and Power Cells that only drop from raids.

It's a really stupid system however since the plans (outside of implants which are harder to come by) typically are complete shit compared to the items that actually drop, and produce Bind on PICKUP items. Normal EV/KA shit loot all over everyone and are really easy.

I officially hate the shit out of Toth and Zorn on hardmode now. 8-man HM was done by some of our 16m group before the last lockout just to check it out and they had far less issues than we did on 16m.

Last night we ate shit for 2 hours before just saying "fuck it" and going back to story mode after having almost completely random aggro drops, or toth jumping at literally random percentages, or taunts not working AFTER the boss' untauntable period was over, or people getting the fearful debuff despite being halfway across the map with no boss looking in their direction.

I am getting the feeling that 16-man is getting less testing.

Yeah we didn't have much luck on those two bosses either.  Finally said fuck it after 2 hours of wiping as well.  I don't mind having cock block bosses in raids buy why do they seem intent on doing it on the first boss?  Pretty hard to gear up when you can't kill anything but trash.