What Will Combat Styles Mean for Me?

As mentioned in my post about the expansion announcement, there's still a lot about the new combat styles feature that we don't know, especially relating to how changing between different styles will work and whether there'll be any sort of limitations on when and how often you can do it, but it does seem pretty clear that you'll be able to swap between the existing advanced classes with everything that entails - including both their weapons and abilities - and I see no reason to assume that e.g. older characters will be excluded from this feature (though I did see that line of thought floating around on Twitter as well).

With that said, what is this going to mean for my stable of alts?

The thought of Shintar the Commando being anything other than, well, a Commando seems kind of absurd. I mean, it's in the blog name! And I've always had a giant assault cannon on my banner! That said... no, I don't think I'll change her play style, though depending on the ease of swapping, I might experiment with using Mercenary style some time. Same basic gameplay, but two blasters. Plus I mean, all tech-using classes have canonically always had at least one blaster anyway, considering the ever-present oddity of wielders of big guns and rifles suddenly holstering their weapons in cut scenes to threaten their enemies with a small blaster instead.

Looking at my alts, I honestly can't see myself making a lot of changes to them either, because I've never been fussed about weapon choice and if I made them one specific advanced class over another, there was usually a reason for that. Still, I could imagine some use cases for swapping combat styles:

One is for Force users whose alignment doesn't match their faction. I have thought occasionally that it's a bit weird that my Sith Sorcerer is still shooting lightning all the time, considering how much of a goodie-two-shoes she is. So I could see myself changing her to Sage for the more appropriate visuals. I think on a low-level character it would feel a bit strange to use opposite-faction Force powers, because you'd think that would be very alarming to your fellow Sith or Jedi, but if you're already the Commander of your own Alliance, I reckon you don't have to worry about hiding your true nature anymore if you don't want to. The same would apply to my light-sided Juggernaut tank.

I've said before that I'm terrible at playing dark-sided characters, so there aren't many contenders for a transition the opposite way among my Republic alts. The closest is probably my somewhat ruthless Sentinel, but I'm not sure she's evil enough.

Speaking of my Sentinel though, that does bring up another interesting line of thought. I've made alts of every single advanced class over the years because I simply wanted to know what they played like, but I can't say I actually enjoyed them all. Sentinels and Marauders look cool with their two lightsabers, but the play style has never appealed to me at all. My second least favourite is probably Sniper/Gunslinger.

So the question here is: Would it be worth speccing out of the advanced classes that I don't like very much? It has sometimes struck me as a bit of a shame that I find myself avoiding playing these characters purely because I don't enjoy the way they play very much, even if their story choices would make for some interesting content to experience. But at the same time, I specifically created them because I wanted to have a Sentinel, a Sniper and so on. Is that still going to be that meaningful when we can all swap combat styles though? Something to think about at least.

And of course there is always the option of new alts. As if I need even more of those! But then, there could be synergies with other things I want to do. For example I've talked about how I like to play healers in lowbie PvP, but just how many times do I really want to start over as a consular or inquisitor? Now I could level up through the knight and warrior stories to add more alts to the stable while having a bit more variety in my story content.

Do you see yourself making use of the new combat styles feature?