Patch Notes

[Paelos]

Torhead released some patch note "leaks" that project the coming content. Grain of salt.

http://www.torhead.com/guide/leaks

[Sky]

What were you expecting? Everyone in the world told you this wasn't innovative at the top end. You're basically saying "why is this game I'm playing not a completely different game?"

IF ONLY I WAS TOLD

[Miasma]

Torhead released some patch note "leaks" that project the coming content. Grain of salt.

http://www.torhead.com/guide/leaks

and face off against The Dread Masters

I knew I shouldn't have never rescued them from Belsavis!  I'm a fool.

[Mazakiel]

I guess that means they'll never teach me how to do their tricks like they said they would.  Those double crossing bastards!  If you can't trust a Dread Master, who can you trust? 

[Phred]

Circling Shadows: Now requires the purchase of the Shadow Technique skill. Shadow Technique must be active in order to trigger the Circling Shadows buff. This skill now also triggers from Spinning Strike.

This completely and utterly destroys my favorite Kinetic hybrid spec.  They seem to be going out of their way to fuck over any Shadow hybrid with those changes.

Isn't this more correctly a bug fix? On the assassin tree it says that surging charge had to be active so as this is the mirror skill I assume it said the same thing for the shadow.

[Nevermore]

Circling Shadows: Now requires the purchase of the Shadow Technique skill. Shadow Technique must be active in order to trigger the Circling Shadows buff. This skill now also triggers from Spinning Strike.

This completely and utterly destroys my favorite Kinetic hybrid spec.  They seem to be going out of their way to fuck over any Shadow hybrid with those changes.

Isn't this more correctly a bug fix? On the assassin tree it says that surging charge had to be active so as this is the mirror skill I assume it said the same thing for the shadow.

No, they stealth changed the text last patch.  It didn't used to say anything about needing to have a specific stance for the proc to go off before.

[tmp]

Isn't this more correctly a bug fix? On the assassin tree it says that surging charge had to be active so as this is the mirror skill I assume it said the same thing for the shadow.

It didn't say anything to that effect in the shadow's tooltip and the specific stance wasn't required. If that's the case with assassin then i'd be inclined to call it a a change that levels the field down to the less entertaining and more rigid level ... than a bug fix. And the reverse approach (removing this limitation from the assassin) would be preferable.

[Furiously]

When did they change the heal on the consular tank stance to actually heal for a decent amount?

[Nevermore]

Last patch.  Same patch they stealth changed the text on Circling Shadows.

[Der Helm]

"If sprint was active when a player died, it now remains active when the player is revived"

 

[Lantyssa]

One step closer to being passive and obtained at level 1...

[luckton]

Companion resource gathering AI seems to have improved slightly.  They no longer try to harvest the node if they're out of range before trying to move into range.  Shaves a second or two off of total time.

[eldaec]

I think they've done something to the healer companion channeled mez. I don't know what but my guy seems to use it sensibly now and it no longer gets resisted by everything.

[Secundo]

Didn't any of you notice the horrible, horrible changes to the UI? Regarding cooldowns, grey-out and various flashes that seem intent on blinding you.

51 page thread in just a few hrs: http://www.swtor.com/community/showthread.php?t=277883

And this was supposed to be an improvement.. 

[Shatter]

Didn't any of you notice the horrible, horrible changes to the UI? Regarding cooldowns, grey-out and various flashes that seem intent on blinding you.

51 page thread in just a few hrs: http://www.swtor.com/community/showthread.php?t=277883

And this was supposed to be an improvement.. 

Cant wait to hop online tonight and have a seizure

[eldaec]

I've been assuming the cooldown UI was meant to be unintelligible for old people since last month. They can do whatever they want, I still won't understand wtf.

[Jherad]

Didn't any of you notice the horrible, horrible changes to the UI? Regarding cooldowns, grey-out and various flashes that seem intent on blinding you.

51 page thread in just a few hrs: http://www.swtor.com/community/showthread.php?t=277883

And this was supposed to be an improvement.. 

It's a mess. Nearly impossible to see what abilities will be next available when the GCD is in effect - and the flashing is very distracting. Altogether far too busy.

[Sky]

All that was needed was to add a dark blue or reddish tinge to the abilities which were on cooldown, as the old GCD effect was sufficient and didn't obscure vision.

This is close to what I'd have suggested (if I didn't need my security fob to log into the forum ).

I'd reverse it and have grey GCD, grey CD (with the timer) ((these are how I think it worked originally?)) and red for unavailable (due to range/condition/etc). Not sure why that wouldn't be easy and sufficient to the task.

Personally, I'd throw in a lit border effect ala EQ2 for queued abilities, but that's just crazy talk.

[caladein]

It's a lot better than it was before as I can actually see what abilities are on CD and I have some idea of what abilities are on or off the GCD, but the full flash is a bit much.  I've had those kinds of things turned off in my WoW interface forever.

[Nevermore]

It's much, much worse because I can no longer easily tell what's in range and what isn't when all those fucking lights light up.

[Minvaren]

Add another voice to the camp of "not liking the new cooldown changes."  Way too hard to tell what abilities are up and what's in range.

Which makes me wonder, did they actually playtest this change?

[Ingmar]

Is there a toggle?

[Nevermore]

Not that I could find.

[Mattemeo]

On the one hand, I have a slightly better chance at deciphering what skill is almost ready to use now. This has been making combat decisions as a Combat Sentinel very fucking frustrating for a couple of weeks now.

On the other hand, I have no idea if I'm in range to use it. And that flash... is so completely unnecessary.


Does anyone else think the cooldown graphics were fine at release and all they've done since is screw them up?

[Shatter]

The UI changes suck balls

[Paelos]

It's awful. I liked the old way.

[lesion]

I like the bright line on cooldowns (is that even different?), but the flashy-flashness is a bit overkill. To be honest I don't look at bars much with the 1s queue. They'll likely change it!

[apocrypha]

This game so badly needs mods. I want space-Bartender and space-Grid/space-Clique quite a lot.

[Fabricated]

Hey, they fixed the stupid bugs on Soa that stopped the raid I was in and we one-shot him last night.

Pylons are still bugged though; never ever let north pylon solve theirs first.

[waylander]

They broke Ilum with yesterday's patch.  You don't gain valor after a random number of enemy kills (it feels like diminishing valor returns), and your daily and weekly quests take forever to complete if you are fighting the same enemies (due to the diminishing returns or its failure to count kills).

Ilum is just a terrible idea that will never work for this game.  I'd rather they have queues and do something like WoW's AV PVP instance where you've got 40 vs 40 or something rather than what we have right now.

[Khaldun]

Ilum is the single element of the game that fills me with the most fury at the designers' inability to learn from history. Six years ago, I might have said, "Well, let's see how this works out". Today? Yeah, let's have a world PvP zone, peg some important gearing progression to participating. Let's not set population caps or have a mechanic (broken as it has been) like tenacity. Let's put the little thingies you have to collect in one very tight space, and have some far less important objectives in the rest of the zone. I bet it will be fun!

And you know, once in a blue moon it is. It reminds me almost less of good times in DAOC and more of how everyone used to go to Southshore right back at the beginning of vanilla WoW and beat on each other for no particular reason. Slideshow framerates included.

Every other time, it's the larger faction cruising around bored collecting armaments, occasionally catching a stealther of the other faction desperately hoping to get his last five armaments for the weekly. Maybe they eventually drop into WZs long enough to let the smaller faction assemble an ops, so they get one or two rounds of possession off, and then the bigger faction comes back and just zergs the whole thing.

It's a terrible design to begin with, and now they're tinkering with it in ways that make it even stupider to deal with problems that a five-year old who'd played even one MMO could have anticipated.

[Sky]

Does anyone else think the cooldown graphics were fine at release and all they've done since is screw them up?

They did need to tweak it for conditionals (range/position/prereq). Other than that, yeah.

[Lantyssa]

Six years ago, I might have said, "Well, let's see how this works out". Today? Yeah, let's have a world PvP zone, peg some important gearing progression to participating. Let's not set population caps or have a mechanic (broken as it has been) like tenacity. Let's put the little thingies you have to collect in one very tight space, and have some far less important objectives in the rest of the zone. I bet it will be fun!

Six years ago was when they drew up their design document.  There's something to be said about reviewing your design every so often.

[Crumbs]

Six years ago, I might have said, "Well, let's see how this works out". Today? Yeah, let's have a world PvP zone, peg some important gearing progression to participating. Let's not set population caps or have a mechanic (broken as it has been) like tenacity. Let's put the little thingies you have to collect in one very tight space, and have some far less important objectives in the rest of the zone. I bet it will be fun!

Six years ago was when they drew up their design document.  There's something to be said about reviewing your design every so often.

Not to mention reviewing the countless other pvp zones in other games.  It's like free data on someone else's dime.  There are dozens of other features in SWTOR where this applies.

[Morfiend]

Does anyone else think the cooldown graphics were fine at release and all they've done since is screw them up?

They did need to tweak it for conditionals (range/position/prereq). Other than that, yeah.

Version one was bad. Version 2 was good. Version 3 is an assault on my eyes, and makes playing a marauder very frustrating. Honestly, I could see myself quitting over this. I loath the way it works right now. The fact all abilities are grayed out during GCD is horrible.