Let's Talk About Czerka Combat Enhancers

During the last Galactic Season, we were introduced to the concept of experimental Czerka combat stims, which were supposed to bring a breath of fresh air to an old type of content that turned out to be the season's theme: uprisings. The reality of that didn't really match my expectations, and I discussed in this post how and why I thought that the effects of the stims were mostly boring and useless. I suggested that at least two of the three needed buffing, but nothing of that sort ever happened.

When new stim effects were announced for this season, I didn't get my hopes up too much but figured that they could hardly be worse than the ones from Season 8. Again I ended up slightly disappointed... this time not by the new effects themselves, but by the fact that all the old ones were still present as well, so every time you use a stim, you only have a two in five chance of actually seeing one of the new powers. I think it took me three or four weeks until I finally got sufficiently "lucky" with the random numbers. (Later I would always click the buff off if I didn't like it and reapply the stim until I got a result I liked, but early on I didn't have that many stims from drops yet and I didn't care enough to buy extras from the vendor.)

The two new effects are both decent actually: One gives you two floating probes over your shoulders that add dps by pew pew-ing everything you're in combat with, and the other one gives you a temporary action button that allows you to pick up a mob up to silver strength and throw it at another enemy. That can be kind of fun, especially when it leads to somewhat unexpected results (such as being able to pick up and throw a stationary turret), but it does kind of lose its lustre after a while - in my opinion at least - mainly because I think the cooldown is too long, and the fact that the throw causes everything in the vicinity to fly off in ten different directions is actually kind of inconvenient in AoE situations.

Anyway, talking about the different enhancer effects wasn't actually going to be the main point of this post. Instead, it's that this season has kind of made me wonder about the concept of these stims as a whole because I've noticed some friction for the first time that I never encountered last season. Back then, the main thing that stood out to me was that in any given uprising, I was often the only one to pop a stim, which gave me the impression that people didn't really know or care about the feature. If people were ever confused by some mobs growing big and red, or my character leaving pink puddles of poop on the floor, nobody ever said anything.

This season though, I've noticed an increase in friction around the stims. I still see few other people using them in pugs most of the time, but I actually had two runs of the featured veteran flashpoint of the week (both on the Leviathan server) where someone asked for the stim buffs to be removed. I didn't want to, and since I'm not fluent enough in French to have a discussion about it, I unfortunately turned into one of those pugs that just follow along silently and don't respond to anything, but it was still awkward.

On the other end of the spectrum, I've experienced (and heard of other people's unpleasant experiences with) people popping combat enhancers in master mode flashpoints. Now, best case that just turns the whole run into a big of a slog, but in some instances it can actually seriously kneecap you - for example on a boss fight where you're supposed to kill adds quickly, having those adds suddenly quadruple in health when they spawn in can pose a serious obstacle. The solution is obvious - get rid of the combat enhancer - but having to be the party pooper that asks someone else to please click off their stim buff isn't really any fun either.

What I'm getting from both of these scenarios is that the trade-off the stims ask of you (gain an extra ability in exchange for some mobs gaining more health and hitting harder) doesn't feel worth it a lot of the time. I'll be honest myself and admit that I'm 100% only doing it for the achievement that requires you to kill 250 enhanced mobs in flashpoints. This has turned out to be much easier to achieve than last season's equivalent for some reason - maybe because flashpoints are generally longer than uprisings?

On Darth Malgus, where I always do my weekly flashpoint with guildies and we all agreed to pop a stim at the start, we were all done with the achievement after only four or five weeks (though the fact that we're the kind of people who will do the bonus boss in every flashpoint certainly helped with that). On the other servers it's still a work in progress for me, but the reason I even considered this one achievable on all servers is the fact that even in a run where only one person is using an enhancer and we skip a lot of mobs, I'll still be able to make a decent chunk of progress on my tally.

However, once done I'm not really interested in continuing to use the enhancers after that, because I'm honestly inclined to agree that they just make everything take longer without a sufficiently fun pay-off and I don't want to get into arguments about it with the rest of my pug group. I don't know what kind of systems the devs are planning for the next Galactic Season, but I don't really feel like this whole Czerka stims thing has been a huge success, at least not the way it's currently implemented.

Still, I'd love to hear other opinions on this. What have your experiences been with the Czerka combat enhancers this season? Do you find them fun or tedious, and have you experienced any disagreement about this in your flashpoint pugs? Let me know in the comments. 

Looking forward to 7.8

I learned long ago not to get too hyped about new content for my favourite MMOs as it's too easy to end up disappointed, but then, what's life without a little bit of happy anticipation? Patch 7.8 can't be more than a few weeks away now, and I'm very much looking forward to us getting our first story update in one and a half years.

That alone would already be something to celebrate, but this week we found out that there's more to come in this patch. Keith had already hinted in his producer's letter at the start of the month that Dantooine would be in for some dynamic changes, and then last week the official YouTube channel dropped this nice little teaser video:

I had a bit of a chuckle at Musco describing Dantooine with the words "it's usually pretty quiet there" when that planet is either being raided by pirates or overrun with swoopers on the regular, but either way the news of the Dantooine stronghold and the devs trying something new with the dynamic encounter system there were great to hear. With both story and new gameplay in the pipeline, this may well shape up to be the meatiest content patch we've received in a while and I'm here for it.

Side note: If you're someone who doesn't always keep up to date with what's been happening in SWTOR recently, I've got a new permanent page for you called "The State of SWTOR", which is linked from the sidebar on desktop and the drop-down menu at the bottom of the page on mobile. I'm planning to keep it updated on the regular and we'll see whether it gains enough traction to reduce the number of people asking on the subreddit how the game is doing every day.

Galactic Season 9 Progress and Goals

We're eight weeks into Galactic Season 9 at this point, which means that the first players are getting close to hitting level 100. I tend to think of that time as the season's unofficial halfway point, because while there are technically still eighteen weeks left (meaning we're actually only about a third of the way in), this tends to be when I'm about halfway done with the meta achievements and thereby my own seasonal goals.

I've got to say I'm actually really enjoying this season so far, despite the lack of a narrative theme. Flashpoints are just my jam, and even if I miss the cut scenes, it's been nice to run more of them again, especially on servers other than Darth Malgus where I'd done very little grouping/pugging prior to this season.

My "secondary legacies" are all making good progress as well, and the other week I hit level 80 on Imperial side for the first time on Leviathan, Tulak Hord and Satele Shan in quick succession, meaning I now have two max-level characters on each of these servers as well. Not exactly an amazing feat, but considering how thin I spread myself playing on all servers, progress on the ones where I don't play as much has been pretty slow and even these minor milestones feel quite meaningful.

From left to right: Chonkov, my bounty hunter on Leviathan; Dormahla, my Sith inquisitor on Tulak Hord; Yin, my Imperial agent on Satele Shan. 

Back in Galactic Season 3 (which feels like forever ago now... hard to wrap my head around the fact that this was only less than three years ago) I actually ended up setting myself the crazy stretch goal of doing the full meta achievement on all servers - this ultimately failed because the advancement of the seasonal reputation (which was one of the things that was required) was so heavily time-gated (and most importantly, had no catch-up mechanic) that I was already too far behind by the time I even started getting interested in the idea, but I did still end up completing the 100 weekly objectives on all servers. I think my ultimate takeaway from that was that while I felt pretty proud and pleased with myself, I probably wasn't going to go and do that again because of how much effort it took.

Except here we are three years later, and I'm actually considering it again this season! The simple reason why is that aside from the 100 weekly objectives, both of the other meta achievements are about doing flashpoints, which is the part I'm having the most fun with and want to do more of anyway. I'm not 100% committed to the idea yet - we'll see how things play out over the next few weeks, but I've definitely been thinking about it.

Date Night Data

Earlier in the year, Narrative Director Ashley Ruhl gave a talk at 2025's Game Developers Conference, on the subject of SWTOR's date nights. I believe it's technically available to view online, but only if you have an expensive subscription to the GDC website. So I was quite pleased when /Jawaface pointed out to me last week that at least the slides for the presentation were now freely available to view for everyone.

Slides alone obviously don't give you the whole picture, but they do give you a pretty good idea of just what was discussed. It being from a conference for game developers, the talk was obviously primarily targeted at that audience and covered things like the technical side of setting up certain cut scenes for example. If I as a layperson had to sum up Ashley's message to other developers based on these slides, I'd say it's to not give up on passion projects for your game because your time will eventually come, and that you can get a surprising amount done by repurposing existing tools.

What I as a player found the most interesting though was the below slide, clearly added to show that date nights were a success. It shows the completion rates for the new main story added with patch 7.5 (that was Desperate Defiance) compared to the four date nights that were added in the previous patch (for Lana, Theron, Arcann and Koth).

It shows that 30 days after release, more players had completed at least one of the available date nights than 7.5's story. Now, you could argue that maybe that's not an entirely fair comparison, seeing how date night missions only take about five minutes and are available to anyone who's completed the "Knights of" expansions, while 7.5 required your character to be all caught up with several years of additional story updates added since then (plus it also took more time to complete). Nonetheless...

I thought this was quite impressive. As someone who's generally less interested in the romance aspect of the game compared to others, I was kind of surprised just how popular these were. Also that Lana looks to be about twice as popular as any of the other three companions in this comparison, but then I guess she's the only woman running against three men. I guess this is why those of us who aren't that crazy about Lana will never be able to get rid of her... (I'm joking. Mostly.)

I suspect that the numbers for the date nights released after that must have been less exciting, considering that all the other companions are limited to specific classes as opposed to being available to everyone. Personally I still haven't done any beyond Theron and Arcann, as I just don't have the right combination of characters far enough progressed through the story. One day I guess...

Anyway, I just thought that was an interesting little insight into content performance, of the type that devs usually don't share with players (while at the same time we as players love to get our hands on it - as was also evidenced by all the excitement about John Hight's leaked slide about WoW subscriptions from his GDC presentation last year).

What Will the EA Buyout Mean for SWTOR?

In case you managed to miss the big gaming news on Monday, Electronic Arts announced that it's going from a publicly traded company to a private one, thanks to a 55 billion dollar buyout. This is unusual as generally, large companies strive for the opposite, to go public. You hear about things going the other way a lot less often, never mind with such a large sum of money changing hands.

I wasn't sure whether I should write about this on the blog because I'm not really an expert on all this business stuff. People who seem more knowledgeable on the subject mostly seem to think that this will enrich a certain number of individuals while ultimately being bad for EA itself, likely leading to a lot of lay-offs and perhaps even bankruptcy further down the line. So not great news for fans of Bioware games and the like.

However, many of the comments I've read on social media about how this is likely to affect SWTOR have been so utterly hyperbolic and divorced from reality, I feel we need to clarify some things. Remember, The Old Republic is NOT a Bioware game anymore, not in the technical sense anyway. It's being developed by Broadsword!

Also, if you read the article linked at the top, the transaction "is expected to close in Q1 FY27" so nothing's happening as a result of this for at least another year.

Whatever is going to happen as the result of this buyout eventually, I do not believe we have reason to worry about SWTOR in specific. Keep in mind that SWTOR isn't something that EA wholly owns; it's a collaborative project between Disney, Broadsword and EA.

Disney may be making the smallest contribution at this point (unless they are secretly responsible for a lot of the investment in the game) but they are actually the ones with the ultimate power due to owning the Star Wars IP. They could theoretically cause the game to shut down at any time by saying "we no longer want this to represent Star Wars" and that would be it. You can't take the Star Wars out of SWTOR and still have a game. This seems unlikely to be a problem though as based on various dev interviews, the Disney peeps seem to love the game and are quite happy with the work the devs have been doing with it.

The interaction between Broadsword and EA is a lot less clear. Unlike Bioware, Broadsword as a studio is not owned by EA, however EA still serves as SWTOR's publisher. Wikipedia actually has its own entry for video game publisher - and from the sounds of it a publisher's influence can vary a lot, from being heavily involved in pretty much everything but the coding to basically just handling distribution. From the outside we can't really tell just how much involvement EA has in SWTOR nowadays. We know they provide customer services, distribute the game through Origin the "EA App" and handle payments. But do they actually put money into the studio to develop the game and give any direction in terms of what the devs should be working on? For all we know, Broadsword might simply use SWTOR's revenue to pay the devs and then pay EA their cut. We just don't know.

I would personally be wary of assuming that EA in its publisher role is this all-powerful entity that controls everything. It's very much possible for a game dev studio to break ties with a publisher and continue doing their thing without them, such as Bungie did with Activision in 2019. I'm not saying that's what's going to happen here, I'm just saying it's within the realm of reasonable possibilities that Broadsword, with the approval of Disney, could continue to develop SWTOR even if EA wanted to stop being involved with the game for whatever reason. EA doesn't have the power to simply unilaterally shut them down on a whim.

Not that I think it's likely that this question would even come up. SWTOR seems to currently sit in this relatively comfortable spot where it's small enough to not draw unnecessary attention in terms of opportunities to cut spending (What's even left to cut when the team is already this small?) but simultaneously profitable enough that none of the bigwigs feel the need to get rid of it. When EA's new owners are looking into cutting costs, they'll probably look at single player focused studios that are using up money without sufficiently high returns, not so much at live service games whose development teams are already small while contributing a steady pay check month after month.

Yes, there's always a chance that something weird and crazy happens, but that's like worrying about being hit on the head by a meteorite when you go outside. The more likely scenarios are not immediately concerning to SWTOR players, not unless or until we directly hear otherwise. To re-use an image from a few years ago (yes, we've been through this whole panic thing more than once at this point):

(P.S: To be clear, I'm not saying this isn't big news, and you have every right to be concerned about games directly owned by EA as well as the devs working on these games. However, this blog is about SWTOR and my point is that for SWTOR in specific, there is currently no reason to assume that it will impact the game in a major way.)