Heroic Moment And Legacy Abilities

The legacy abilities that you unlock by completing the class stories of different characters were one of the patch 1.2 features that caused a lot of confusion before the patch's actual release. People were just going completely wild imagining themselves killing others in PvP by spamming legacy force lightning on their smuggler or whatever, and these fantasies got spread around as misinformation and caused some seriously skewed expectations in some players. I always figured that the actual implementation in the game was going to be a lot tamer and I was okay with that.

However, now that it's actually in the game, I have to admit that I still feel a bit let down. Last night I was really struggling with a boss fight on my Jedi knight, so I started looking for any useful abilities in my abilities panel that I might have overlooked and that might give me that extra edge needed to defeat the guy that was repeatedly kicking my behind.

It hit me that I had both Legacy Sticky Grenade and Legacy Project but hadn't used either of them yet - even though I had used my Heroic Moment itself multiple times since the patch. I'm not sure what exactly I expected, but I did think that there was going to be some sort of prompt for those abilities whenever you triggered your heroic moment, whether it was a new action bar, a button flashing up on the side of the screen... I don't know, anything.

By treating the legacy abilities like any others, the devs are basically asking us to reserve up to eight action bar slots for cooldowns within cooldowns that you'll only be able to use while soloing and even then only once every twenty minutes or so. Considering that at fifty, my action bars get pretty cluttered with my regular abilities as it is, that's not something I particularly like. I mean: yes, if I'm really struggling with a fight I guess I am willing to rearrange everything to fit those extra cooldowns on my bar somewhere, but rearranging my action bars all the time definitely strikes me as the kind of thing that nobody should be expected to do.

The even bigger letdown for me however was the fact that every legacy ability also has an individual ten minute cooldown on top of the Heroic Moment cooldown. I actually recall hearing about this pre-patch and thinking that it must have been a misquote or something because it just sounded so nonsensical. Is this really fun? Hit Heroic Moment, hit Legacy Sticky Grenade once, hit Legacy Project once, continue fighting as normal because that's it? That's what I put those abilities on my bar for?

It's not even as if they do amazing amounts of damage, it's just another special which costs no resources. Throwing a rock at my enemy for once instead of hitting him the normal way is more of a flavour thing than anything else, but there isn't much flavour to be had if you only ever get to do it once. I'm not saying these abilities should have no cooldowns at all (presumably the devs don't just want us to spam them, even while being heroic), but considering that Heroic Moment lasts a whole minute, would it be that bad to let us use each skill at least a couple of times during that time? I think there are enough limitations on the system to prevent it from being ridiculously overpowered, even without the extra ten minute cooldown on each individual ability.

I really hope that this is something they'll revisit at a later point to spice it up a little. I think it's a neat idea, limitations and all, but at the moment it strikes me as so limited that you can pretty much blink and miss it, which is simply a shame.

(I did manage to beat the guy with that extra edge though. Cursed random security guys that are tougher than darths...)