A Rocky Start

I've made it clear that I wasn't enthused by the announcement that the current Galactic Season's theme would be uprisings, but I was willing to give it a shot to see how things would play out. Specifically, there were three items that stood out to me as promising during the announcement dev stream:

1. The talk about the Czerka combat enhancers and the fun effects they'd have on your enemies reminded me of WoW's Mists of Pandaria Remix event from last year, which did something similar in an effort to make old content interesting to replay in a new way, with special gems empowering your gear in that content only. I played a lot of that and it was quite fun whenever I'd fire off a simple attack just to trigger a hail of meteors around everything in the vicinity for example. Now, things got a bit crazy in Remix due to the fact that the gems also levelled up, with people being able to one-shot raid bosses solo in the end, and I didn't expect (or even want) SWTOR to do anything close to that, but I figured there'd be some flashy effects and we'd get to feel a bit OP in uprisings compared to how our characters usually behave.

2. There was mention of uprisings being something that you could do solo, which implied to me that either as a side-effect of the above making us OP or through re-tuning, uprisings might become easy enough for the average player to solo, at the very least on story difficulty. This struck me as a solid idea to expand their appeal, especially considering that the three existing difficulties weren't really differentiated by much other than mobs having more health and doing more damage.

3. With the minimum level to queue for them dramatically decreased, I imagined levellers that had only just arrived on the fleet queueing up for uprisings instead of veteran mode flashpoints, and "levelling through uprisings" potentially becoming a new way to spice things up for long-time players who are levelling their umpteenth alt.

Unfortunately, none of the above actually matched the reality of what we got.

First off, there are only three different buffs you can get from the Czerka boosts, and they are mostly underwhelming. The one I've got most frequently so far is the one that supposedly makes every fifth enemy explode, but in reality only counts personal killing blows, so if you're in a group and/or (god forbid) not in a dps spec, you can forget about this doing anything at all. When I got this buff as a healer, I saw it go off maybe twice during a run. Utterly useless.

The one that makes you leak puddles of "radiation" is a bit better, though I wish they'd given it a different animation than the pink agony circles from the DvL bosses, because my brain does not like that the exact same visual effect is something to avoid on penalty of death early in the evening and then something to actively stand in two hours later. Still, it's decent in boss fights when you can place it directly under the boss's feet, though it's pretty useless on trash, especially if you're ranged, as you generally won't be pooping out circles anywhere near to where the actual mobs are.

The one that summons little droids seems to be the only one that manages to be both useful and fun, and naturally I've never gotten that one myself yet in more than half a dozen runs. As a result, most of the time the buffs feel like they make zero difference to your runs and you only apply them since they are required for one of the meta achievements for the season (something I wasn't aware of until I actually saw it in game).

The devs also did not retune uprisings to make them soloable in a way that is comparable to solo mode flashpoints. I know that someone, somewhere is gonna go "well, I solo them all the time" and you know what, good for you. But they are only soloable in the same way that other pieces of group content are technically soloable if you min-max your character's output and are willing to bash your head against the wall repeatedly until things go just right. I was expecting something that would be accessible to the average player and would be quick to do, in order to make the uprising of the week an attractive seasons objective to complete. This has not been the case.

Well, at least it should be easy to run them in group finder if they are kind of like veteran flashpoints now, role neutral and accessible from a low level? Also wrong! I was surprised to find that at the start of the season, story mode uprisings weren't in the group finder at all, only veteran mode. As all my own uprising runs have always been with guildies, I have no idea when this happened, but I'm pretty sure you used to be able to queue for story mode as well.

Anyway, having veteran mode accessible from level ten but still having it require a trinity group and be somewhat challenging was just a disaster. People were reporting everywhere that queues took ages to pop, even on the biggest server, and that the groups that did form seemed to struggle more often than not. I ran the first uprising of the week, Done and Dusted, on veteran mode with a group of guildies and was surprised by how hard everything hit. We were all max-level in top-end gear and still suffered some deaths, so I can only imagine the kind of shit-show a pug consisting of low levels would have been.

Oh, and the whole "levelling through uprisings" idea was also dead in the water since the devs changed it so only the featured uprising of the week is available in group finder. I mean, you could still technically just spam that one over and over again, but why would you want to? I can understand why they did that, but it was still another small disappointment.

Basically, my first impression was that the much-hyped buffs were boring and useless, and the devs were funnelling people into a mode that took ages to pop just to provide a terrible experience, something that players were understandably balking at. I was just baffled by how undercooked this all seemed. I can imagine people making arguments in defence of some of the decisions they made, but only having veteran mode in the group finder and funnelling low-levels into something with a similar difficulty to a master mode flashpoints was just such an obviously bad idea, I couldn't believe they went live with that.

Now, in my earliest draft of this post I was going to make a list of bullet points for what Broadsword could do to still salvage this whole thing, but fortunately they did actually take some actions already. Most importantly they took vet mode out of the group finder and put story mode back in, as well as further tuning down the difficulty of both modes.

Veteran Firefrost with my guildies this week already felt a lot easier to me, and I successfully pugged story mode on all the other servers. I even got a quick pop on Shae Vizla! A lot of people were clearly new to the content as well, as I saw visible confusion about where to go and what to do more than once, and in one run, two of my group mates immediately jumped to their death upon spawning in, not realising they had to wait for an elevator.

I was surprised by how many of them didn't use any of the Czerka buffs either. Yes, they are mostly useless, but usage is required for one of the meta achievements. I wonder if maybe people haven't quite "got" how this is supposed to work yet and buff usage will go up as the season progresses or whether they just don't care at all.

With the group finder and difficulty fixes applied, I guess doing a quick story mode uprising once a week will be an acceptable effort for a weekly seasons objective for many, but I still think it's a far cry from the way all this was promoted on stream. In my opinion the devs would have to go ahead and significantly buff at least two of the three combat enhancers to actually make them worthwhile and fun, but I'm not sure they'll actually go that far. It just strikes me as a missed opportunity.