f13.net

Currently on PTS (http://www.swtor.com/community/showthread.php?t=523625) - Bloody useless to anyone who doesn't raid.  :uhrr:

Yeah that's disappointing, but I think we knew it was just going to be an Op content-wise this patch so I got the disappointment out of the way already before.  :why_so_serious: There are a number of interesting PVP-related changes as well I think.

And finally, companion color matching, at long last.

There's a lot of interesting stuff in there. New raid to learn and a bunch of quality-of-life changes I'm always on board for. The PvP stuff and the class changes surrounding that largely don't affect me, so it's no issue on my end. I'm not thrilled that Guardian/Juggernaut tanking isn't being tweaked though, but oh well. Character moods sound fun, and companion color matching (and the fixing of those goddamn always-out weapons) have been two things I've been dying for.

All in all, I'm pretty excited for this, and it'll definitely give me and my guild something to do until the F2P stuff in Novemberish.

I am amused they have a new animation for Force Stasis. I am still going to call it Not-Force-Choke, though.

Where is Recruit MK2 gear compared to battlemaster and war hero?

'Cos when I tried some pvp on my sage and vanguard during the come-back-weekend (using the blue recruit set, since it had better stats than my centurion gear, and more expertise than my champion gear), it was probably the worst diku pvp experience I ever had in the "I can't put a dent in this guy" / "I just got 3-shot by a stealther through my damage reduction cooldown" department.

You know, it's odd, because I totally expected to have that experience when I hit the level cap and used the recruit gear on my scoundrel, but I didn't. I mean, I wasn't trying to kill anyone, as my smuggler is a healer, but I didn't get turned into a smear across the pavement nearly as quickly as I expected. I mean yes, when the assist train turned its eye towards me, I was dead pretty much instantly, but now that he's in battlemaster stuff ... that still happens when the assist train turns on me. As expected, of course.

I guess what I'm saying is, I think the PvP gear experience probably varies pretty wildly depending on what class you're playing and what role you're trying to fill. I am pretty sure my gunslinger would be nothing but misery in PvP at first.

Oh sure, NOW you give me companion color matching!

I already did it the hard way  :why_so_serious:

Someone screenshotted the moods you can set for your character:

My smuggler is going to be flattered, 24/7.

omg mine too


How you doin', ladies?

So your going to quirk your eyebrow?

Absolutely.

where's the /hood command!!!

Man, no kidding. Maybe they'll let me pay them a dollar for that function. I'd do it.

Well, here's the thing. I originally pvp'd quite a bit at launch (until january or so?) and got centurion/champion gear... I could definitely hold my own on my vanguard, and did pretty well on my sage too (who only had a couple of pieces of pvp gear), as I could kite and survive against multiple enemies while staying on top of the heal charts (yeah I know, charts don't mean crap). Back then everyone was around the same gear level except for some imperial supercatasses who played in premades 24/7 and got war hero back in early january.

Then I come back, decide to give it a whirl with the new shiny recruit armor (that I assumed to be baseline) on my healing sage and... wtf is this shit? I think my most memorable moment was when I was healing a group of 3-4 in the new capture-the-turrets warzone, and then a marauder with a war hero title beelined for me. I tried to LOS him when I saw him coming, but he was faster, charged me, dropped 80% of my hp in about a GCD, so I stunned him and bailed with force speed - he immediately broke the stun, was back on my face, ignored the 2-3 guys who've been beating on him, stunned me and killed me in about 2 seconds (I broke the stun immediately, didn't help). Then he vanished... it wasn't even a stealther class. :p

(yeah, I realize that getting guard or taunt would've made me live a few seconds longer.. but relying on that in pug pvp? eh)

I mean, it was BAD. Worse than "I just hit level 85 on my disc priest 2 years into cata, time to hit up some battlegrounds" bad, worse than "I'll try going into a rift battleground on my level 50 warrior in assorted greens and blues" (which was actually a surprisingly fun experience due to the pvp bolstering). Maybe I got unlucky with some sort of hyper-geared premade, but when this happened in about 3 WZs a row, I decided to just call it quits.

Things were a bit better on my tank-spec vanguard, except that I couldn't even come close to hurting anyone (back in Jan I could wear people down - even healers - by chaining my interrupts well). Almost everyone on both sides had war hero titles, some had battlemaster titles, for what it's worth.

So what you're saying is I'm not missing much in pvp.  :oh_i_see:

I liked to pvp in DAoC (even in Shadowbane!) but I've avoided it like the plague ever since.

The thing with the state of PvP right now is that Marauders/Sentinels and DPS-specced Vanguards/Powertechs absolutely rule the roost. The VG/PT is crazy survivable while also dishing out absolutely obscene damage (I've pocket healed a guildmate Powertech on my Sorc before in PvP; he guarded me, DPSed in tank stance, and neither of us ever really died) and the Marauder/Sentinel is similarly insane damage-wise, and can also be pretty sturdy if played right.

Snipers/Gunslingers, Operative/Scoundrels, and most other classes have their niches, but a team of 6 Marauders/Powertechs supported by a couple Snipers or Sorcerers and a healer or two? Unless they are grossly incompetent or facing a solid premade they will likely utterly decimate the opposing team, even as a PUG.


Speaking of gross incompetence, I decided to see about hopping on Test to check out some of the 1.4 stuff, namely how my tank's offhand will change once that goes in. Come to find out, copying characters to the PTR is actually disabled right now, and won't be back at all for 1.4 - the only timeframe for its return is "a future patch." The copy tool only sporadically worked for 1.3, so most people who have characters on Test are ancient snapshots from 1.2 back in, what, April?

Good luck having that brand new raid playtested by people in gear six months out of date, especially considering they're not giving people on Test tokens or comms to buy gear to test with.  :uhrr:

They've apparently invited a few 'special' guilds to copy over to the PTS. This is causing some rage on the forums.

As far as the patch goes, I pretty much do nothing but PvP, and 1.4 as it looks right now might just kill things for me. They seem to have made balance even worse. I'd like to do more testing (I have an old 50 on the PTS in semi decent PvP gear) but I haven't been able to get a warzone to pop - for some reason the place is deserted.  :oh_i_see:

PvP is pretty fun while you level up. There's no gear issues and everyone gets bolstered to roughly the same level (although obviously the lower level you are, the fewer abilities you have).


And I believe you, Zetor, I'm more just still surprised that didn't happen to me, because I was 100% expecting it. I decided to give a few level 50 BGs a whirl just to be sure I hated it (as I really did enjoy it while I leveled my scoundrel up), and next thing I knew I had full battlemaster gear without too much personal pain. I mean, we'd lose WZs and shit, obviously, but I rarely got completely obliterated (although if I did, it was a marauder or the assist train).

Clearly healing scoundrels are overpowered!  :why_so_serious:

(actually they sort of are, they are super mobile and have stealth and it is awesome)

Correct me if I'm wrong but haven't they routinely added new stuff to the PTS patches as time goes by?   Either way it looks good enough to get me playing again after BL2 and TL2.


A couple points to give you hope if you're actually still interested:

1) Recruit is "level 50 greens" basically.   It takes almost no amount of time to pickup BM gear.  Slap in augment slots with cheap blue augments and you're only a couple iLvL's below the best of the best.
2) His war hero gear had almost nothing to do with him destroying you.  It was about 90% him being a sentinel (which are getting nerfed hard) and 10% him having full augments.

Well yea, but there's also the "I can't hit anything worth a crap" issue on my tankuard. Which is ok if I'm supposed to just taunt spam people and act as a mobile annoyance, but it's a definite change from Jan... maybe gear will help (thinking combat tech set, since it's not like people prioritize the tank anyway).

I'll definitely give pvp a second chance after the game goes f2p... but like I said, last time I tried was a pretty big let-down. (insert lament about max-level pvp in DIKUs here)

Taunt/guard is actually quite effective, it just doesn't always feel good. It shows up on the final scoreboard but yeah while you're flailing away at someone during the actual match it can sometimes feel like you're pissing into the wind.

I'm pretty sure the only change to Sentinels is a fairly significant buff to their focus spec. Which was already a favourite for ranked WZ teams (I've seen focus sentinels pull out a cool million in damage on a civil war)

I went through the exact same thing as you did on my VG.  I came back with champ gear and it wasn't much better than recruit (had pve mods and everything).  Picking up BM and slotting it with augments is a huge deal.  Not having augments is like simply missing out on a 1~2 pieces of gear.

Also on the PTR is this little number:


Dunno if it's a new QOL change that managed to slip by the preliminary patch notes or if it's just a thing native to Test to facilitate easier testing (which I find a bit of a stretch all things considered with TOR).

Got this in the mail today:


Be interesting to see just how many people stayed on the old servers and get sucked in from this.

Those higher pop servers would be crazy.  I mean it already felt pretty packed at the beginning of the server transfers.   Imagine having like 10 Imp Fleets.

From what I've seen first-hand from my old server, I'd venture to guess there's maybe a dozen people per server who haven't taken the plunge and transferred, mostly out of a desire to farm as much shit as possible with zero competition. Everyone else with characters on the dead servers have likely quit the game long ago.

The High-Pop Server test's goals seem to be two-fold:

- To make sure that they can successfully merge all the inactive characters from the old servers to the new ones with no problems, also probably serving to test tech for future voluntary for-pay server transfers
- To test out the new expanded character limits and interface for them; my couple extra characters from other East Coast servers also appeared in the list alongside my 8 characters on Shadowlands, giving me two pages of characters to flip through, along with a displayed "10/12 character slots" message.

Also Dulfy.net has stats for the new tier of gear coming out. The itemization sucks, as per usual, with tanks getting bucketloads of completely useless Accuracy on their gear (after Bioware said that Accuracy on Rakata-tier gear was a mistake and they wouldn't do it again), Alacrity on Mercenary/Commando and Operative/Scoundrel gear (which is actually a harmful stat due to the way those resource pools work), and way the hell too much Surge on pretty much every DPS set. The new implants are very nice, but extraordinarily expensive at a whopping 350 Black Hole comms a pop, and the new Daily Comm relics are double the price of the old ones while only being about 5% better.

Maybe there's a patch note we don't know about yet to change how accuracy works? As it stands it is useless for everyone, a better answer than just not putting it on anything would be making it do something.

I don't want to transfer my extra people to Ebon Hawke, I want to transfer them to Jedi Covenant, waaaaaaaah.

But I'll settle for stuffing them on EH if it means I get more slots.  :why_so_serious:

Accuracy is good for some classes, like the melee DPS ones, who use a lot of attacks that can miss. With how tight Hard Mode enrage timers are, too many misses can mean a wipe. It's true, though, that it's not useful for many others, since they use Tech/Force to do nearly 100% of their damage.

The answer Bioware gave when asked why there's so much accuracy on tank gear again was, to paraphrase, "Accuracy is good for tanks because 10% extra accuracy helps keep your damage and threat steady!" which is kind of weird, since the big threat-generating moves for Shadow/Assassin and Vanguard/Powertech tanks are all Force/Tech, and thus can't be dodged. Even the Juggernaut/Guardian, whose highest-damage abilities can miss, doesn't want Accuracy because the class' damage is so pitifully low that it has to generate most of its threat via exploitation of the Taunt mechanics.

If there's some mechanic in Terror From Beyond that needs higher accuracy, nobody's mentioned anything about it yet, and guides for all of the fights are already going up.

OT but what stat is good to narrow variance in damage/healing? My sage heals from 1300ish to 2500ish. I'd like it to be 2000ish to 2500ish if possible.

As another aside, wth is up with these crazy numbers anyway (e.g. 10k health instead of say 1k or even 500)? I don't know why but I find stat inflation annoying

Because people love bigger numbers, until they get 'too big'.


With every ones definition of too big being different.

Not quite 1.4-related, but Bioware's now insinuating that we could be seeing more server merges in the future with the new uber server tech they have. This has, of course, started leading into a panic about character names.

Ohhhhh boy.

Heh heh.  Not playing now, but I started on Ebon Hawk, levelled a Jedi Knight to 20 and a Sith Warrior to 36, then I re-started on Shien and levelled a Sith Warrior to 43 (same name, same Legacy name).  So I think I'm set, as far as reserving my preferred names on the server that I'm going to end up on.  I kinda want to play again, but I looked through their Customer Support forums and the game seems as crappy as ever in that department (it was my reason for leaving).  This whole "accuracy for tanks" thing seems to be proof of how clueless they are.  So, it looks like I'm not going to re-sub after all.

If they're bleeding subscriptions faster than they can merge servers, my guess is that they're going to just shut it down instead of continuing to merge.

Almost all of the servers that were targets for merges have a ton of people playing in them. Shadowlands' fleets (both Empire and Republic) tend to have 300-400 people on during prime time, Dromund Kaas and Coruscant tend to have 140+ on, and most other planets tend to have 50-60+ at any given time.

I think there may be a couple of destination servers that got less overall servers shifted to them and thus don't have quite the same amount of activity.

If they merge any further they really will have to change the name system.  First and last name is easier to type than a bunch of ascii codes anyways.

Unless you have something lined up for a raid group I woudn't worry about the accuracy thing much.

This has not been the case for quite some time, at least on Republic. I haven't seen a second instance of the republic fleet in at least a month or two. At best it gets up to 200 for an hour or so - most of primetime it hovers at around 160. I can't say I've been on the Empire fleet in a good while, so it might be better there.

I'm annoyed that the Elite War Hero PvP weapon and generator for DPS commandos has a ton of accuracy.

They're finally implementing the super servers.  Player avatar cap is going up to 12.

http://www.swtor.com/blog/server-consolidation


Didn't see any plans to fix the other naming issues but they aren't merging any of the current servers yet.

But I need 16 slots!  :why_so_serious:

eta: no seriously: why 12 and not 16? is it some data storage reason? At any rate it doesn't matter; now I can make my female marauder and get that sexay top from hammer station.

They're probably planning to have 12 free slots and the rest unlockable via f2p purchases.  It's likely they originally planned for only 8 free slots, but the server merges kinda forced them to give us more slots so we could accomodate the many alts across multiple servers.

Well, at least I can transfer my gunslinger eventually.

That's weird. There were a couple fleet instances Republic-side last week when I was on doing some PvP, but I had no idea it was so relatively low compared to Empire. Empire fleet's almost always at one full instance and a second instance with 70-120 people in it.

It's here.

http://www.swtor.com/patchnotes/game-update-1.4/terror-beyond

GTN (Auction House) is disabled until further notice (http://www.swtor.com/community/showthread.php?p=5203995#edit5203995).  You can open the interface and search, but no items are found.

CrossFire and SLI setups apparently result in horrible frame rates (http://www.swtor.com/community/showthread.php?p=5205382#edit5205382) if the game's "new and improved shadows" are enabled (on High).  Otherwise (with shadows off), the game just stutters when you try to turn the camera to look around.  It's pretty headache-inducing.

Oh, and this (http://www.swtor.com/community/showthread.php?t=537139) is a fun bug (unconfirmed).

The new raid's fun at least. Got together with my guild and blazed through Story mode in about two hours to learn the basic gists of the encounters. Only problem is that while Story Mode TfB is probably as difficult as the now-nerfed SM Explosive Conflict, it's completely pointless to do since you get no comms whatsoever in TfB, while EC will shower you in Black Hole comms.

It's a gorgeous zone though, and some of the fights are really fun.

Also, the new "offhand items can now be modded" thing seems to have a weird caveat: Campaign shields that you get with tokens from Explosive Conflict drops have mods in them (like mine does), but Campaign shields that people craft after REing the normal Campaign shield (which have the exact same stats) do not.

My guildmaster discovered this last night, and has been absolutely livid since.

All crafting is like that.  You're not allowed to craft items with mods already in them.  I feel for him that he forgot that though.

The original orange weapons have mods in them, I'm not sure why nothing else does.

It's because mods are supposed to be restricted to the skills that can craft them.  The only orange weapons that had mods were the special ones that you need biometric crystal alloy for.   With that kind of material requirement they were no competition for the other crafters.

If they really cared about that, they shouldn't have put better mods on the daily vendor.

Right, but his shield isn't moddable at all; it's got the same fixed stats that all shields had prior to 1.4. It makes Artificers REing offhands utterly pointless now, since every offhand from any given Flashpoint is now moddable, and it's ludicrous that, thanks to the increased stats to shields via the mod slots, a stock Rakata shield that dropped from Story Mode Terror from Beyond now has better stats than the old Campaign shields two tiers higher. It's ridiculous and hugely punishing to the poor souls who actually spent time and valuable loot drops to RE the offhands from Explosive Conflict.

I haven't really looked at the new high end shields.  Why can't you RE the best offhands then sell them?