Housekeeping Woes

One thing that has been bugging me about KotFE is that logging into any alt for the first time since 4.0 feels like a considerable chore. I did sort of allude to having inventory problems in my first impressions post - sadly that hasn't remained a singular occurrence.

I think the biggest problem have been the heaps of companion gear that I received on every character. Players did ask, what with companion gear becoming purely cosmetic, if it would be possible to get back some of those original outfits that each companion comes with. Some of them look pretty good, but obviously a lot of players had discarded them in favour of something with higher stats over time - after all stats were what mattered for the past four years. It's nice of Bioware that they decided to fulfil this player request; I just wish that it had been optional somehow, or something we could deal with on our own time by pressing a button when we were ready.

As it stands, every single one of my characters had her inventory filled with companion gear, whether she wanted any of it or not. (Plus there was that problem with characters taking their trousers off and putting them in my bags for some reason - some even decided to get completely naked; don't ask me why!) So if I wanted my bag space back, I kind of had to prioritise figuring out my companions' outfits or at least whether I was interested in any of their old gear before doing anything else. I actually enjoy that kind of busywork sometimes, but not when it's forced on me while all I want to do is go do the new missions! It wasn't even done properly either, as I got some rather... odd mails in some cases, with gear for companions that I didn't even have as well as duplicates of other pieces.

It's not a big deal in the grand scheme of things and in a few weeks I'm sure we'll all have forgotten about it, but at the moment it's really rather annoying. Two weeks in and I still haven't sorted all my alts out. It's not hard for me to imagine a returning player taking one look at the mess in their bags and mailbox and going "screw this nonsense" before logging right off again.

Oh, and did I mention that all my characters who are crafters had to spend several hundred thousand credits on training a whole new set of level 1-65 schematics?

At least our specialisations didn't get reset for once - just the utility points, and those aren't too tough to re-assign quickly.

Relearning to Play in 3.0

During my first operation at 60 I really struggled with healing. Not just because some fights were harder than story modes usually are or because of the heightened movement requirements (which I'm not a fan of). Something just felt "off" about my healing - I ran low on ammo at unexpected moments, things were on cooldown when I didn't expect them to be and my heals generally felt vaguely sluggish... but I wasn't sure why.

It was only when I sat down after the op and had a closer look at my talent tree discipline railroad and made sure to read all the tooltips that I realised just how much my spec had actually changed. Clearly I shouldn't have trusted the devs quite so much when they said that gameplay for individual specs wouldn't feel all that different... because "under the hood" they changed a lot more about Combat Medics than I had expected. I suppose the linearity of the new discipline system lulled me into a false sense of security, making me think that surely everything I was used to would still be there... but this was not the case.

For example they swapped the cast times of Medical Probe and Advanced Medical Probe around, and more importantly, they completely reversed their synergy. It used to be that you wanted to cast AMP first, and then follow it up with a MP, because this MP would now cost less ammo. Now it's exactly the other way round, and by casting up to three Medical Probes you can make your next Advanced Medical Probe cheaper. It's no wonder that I was struggling while doing exactly the opposite of what I'm supposed to be doing under the new system.

The new indicators on the UI that highlight procs and the like are also of limited usefulness from what I've seen, because they don't take into account that abilities can be affected by more than one proc.

As an example, the above screenshot could mean that my next Advanced Medical Probe is an instant cast... or not, as it looks exactly the same when I've cast three Medical Probes to simply reduce the AMP's ammo cost, without affecting its cast time. Again, during my first op I was actually kind of confused by this, frequently hitting the ability when it was highlighted, expecting it to be instant, and then being thrown for a loop when it wasn't. I've since learned that I can't rely on the highlight to provide me with useful information and have to manually keep an eye on which effect is about to come up - but that kind of defeats the point of the feature, doesn't it?

If this sounds kind of like a rant, it's not really meant to be. I can stomach having to relearn some things; I guess I'm just a bit disappointed that it's going to be more work than I expected. I'm not a fan of the nitty gritty of calculating perfect ability rotations and stuff like that. I suppose if anything I would like this to be a warning to people to not make the same mistake I made and expect that their class will play just the way it always has - or you might be in for an unpleasant surprise.

Shadow of Revan First Impressions

After a tedious but expected amount of patching, I logged onto my Commando, where a conquest reward awaited me... which immediately granted me some XP. Levelling again, hurrah!

The discipline system immediately prompted me to get my abilities all set up. My first impression was actually kind of underwhelming, but not necessarily in a bad way - if that makes sense. Just clicking "Combat Medic" got all the important bits sorted out, without me having to faff around with individual talent points. (That's a good thing in my eyes!) The utility points all seemed about equality irrelevant to my impending questing experience, so I just picked whatever. I'm sure that once I get back into max-level PvP and group content, the decisions will seem more interesting.

I was a bit bewildered that some abilities had disappeared from my bar even though they hadn't really undergone any significant changes. Having to pay to re-train six ranks of Charged Bolts felt like a pointless money sink more than anything else.

A message in my mailbox reminded me that it was expansion time and explained where I should start the new missions. I kind of miss the times when these messages were written more "in character", but I can only guess that some people found that too confusing? Oh well.

If you haven't done the Forged Alliances story arc, you get directed toward its new solo mode I believe - I don't know yet whether it's mandatory to complete this before you can start questing on Rishi or just recommended. As my main had completed all parts of the story when they were new, she and her pet tank were ready to go to Rishi anyway.

 

They have bird people!

It immediately became apparent that the devs were speaking the truth when they said that they had learned lessons from Makeb and Oricon. Rishi is much smaller and no longer requires you to complete a circuit of a huge area just to complete a single mission, nor do the bonuses involve ridiculous numbers of mob kills like they did on Makeb. So far my pet tank and I have only completed the first sub-zone and the quests have been flowing nicely, while also giving out solid rewards (though nothing that would have rivalled our operations gear of course).

There's definitely a certain "WoW-ification" of the questing process to be noticed, which isn't always a bad thing. For example we had a quest to gather meat from some beasts, but not all of them seemed to drop it - which is when my pet tank noticed that when you hovered over a monster, its tooltip now showed if it was eligible for one of our quests, like it does in WoW.

 

The biggest shock to me though was that Rishi introduces quests that are given out in the form of bog-standard quest text windows. Now, the game has had some of these since launch - but only from terminals or other inanimate objects, like lost datapads. If you actually talked to an NPC, it always launched into a full-fledged, animated conversation. Well, not so on Rishi. I was genuinely taken aback when my pet tank approached an NPC with the tell-tale triangle icon over its head and I waited for the usual green "waiting for all participants to start the conversation" circle to appear, but nothing happened. No, I had to click on the NPC myself, to receive a little text box pop-up with the mission while the NPC just did a little voice-over in the background.

I'm sure some people will rejoice over this - after all the complaints about the voiced side quests supposedly being a drag have been numerous. But I liked them, damn it, and I hate the very idea that progress in a theme park MMO apparently has to mean "regress towards the way WoW works". That said, I will admit that this is a matter of principle more than anything. In practice it's not a big deal for me to pick up a bunch of side quests in text form; after all I've been doing it with dailies for years. If nothing else, this format seems to have allowed Bioware to include more of them at less of a cost, which is good for flavour. Makeb felt oddly devoid of side quests to me sometimes, with the odd daily on some mesas being the exception. On Rishi on the other hand I've only completed the first area so far, but aside from doing the main mission, I've also hunted down several types of wild animals, freed some slaves, retrieved the scattered parts of a broken droid, and unearthed more than one sunken treasure.

I've also done my one new class quest already. I've recorded it and plan to upload it on Youtube, along with all the other new class missions, once I get around to them on my alts. How much is there to the new class missions? Well, like they said, it's "just" one class-specific quest. You pick it up, do some stuff, then hand in - but the story behind it seemed quite meaty to me, at least for the trooper, like they could have actually made more out of it if their resources weren't limited. I might have more to say about the exact implementation once I've seen how it's been done for other classes.

Another thing that caught my attention was that what used to be group phases for the main story mission are now all personal phases, like the ones you get during your class mission. I thought this was a rather odd choice. There was one quest in a phase that transitioned smoothly into the class mission at the end, and in that one case I can understand that it had to be a personal phase - but for all the others it just felt weird to me that my pet tank and I were forced into separate instances (if we wanted to complete the mission simultaneously) just to have a simple conversation or kill a couple of mobs. I'd quite like to know what Bioware's reasoning was behind this change.

Thoughts on Disciplines after the Livestream

I said I was going to write down my thoughts on disciplines in more detail.

First off, let me explain why my initial reaction to the announcement and the idea that the new system might resemble WoW's current one was negative.

Most people who argue about talent trees on the forums one way or another seem to be divided on the issue of which system is deeper and/or provides more meaningful choices. While I've always resented the argument that old school talent trees result in nothing but cookie cutter builds (since this has never matched my personal experience at all, neither back in WoW nor in SWTOR), this is actually not that big a concern for me. I don't care that much about theorycrafting. I also don't have enough experience with any alternate system to genuinely say whether it would be better or worse in that respect than our old school talent trees.

However, when I briefly checked out WoW's Mists of Pandaria expansion at the end of last year, there were several things that I immediately hated about that game's new levelling/talent system and they had nothing to do with depth.

- Levels basically exist as markers that you've earned enough experience to improve your character in some manner. If there are times when you level up and nothing whatsoever actually happens, levelling up becomes meaningless and kind of boring.

- Regardless of whether speccing into "+2% damage" is a meaningful choice or not, actually taking the action of spending your talent points always made me feel connected to my character. It engages me in their progress. If they just gain most of their new abilities automatically, they feel like automatons that level themselves and on whom I have no influence. In fact, since it happens without player input these days, I sometimes missed my WoW character gaining new abilities altogether.

- While WoW's interface for its new talent system is clear enough, the way the old talents/specialisations were baked into the base classes is horribly obtuse. The old talent trees provided a clean overview of what it meant to invest in a certain spec, how one ability was an improvement over another and so on and so forth. In current WoW, the formerly talented abilities are a jumbled mess mixed in with your regular class abilities in your spell book - good luck with figuring out how they're supposed to synergise and with keeping track of what's a class and what's a spec ability.

- I also do not like the way WoW's talents are meant to be easily swappable on a per-fight basis because I don't enjoy respeccing. I want to pick the way my character is supposed to work and then go play, without having to worry about rearranging my UI every other fight. Yes, some people like doing just that (we have some in my SWTOR guild too), but from my experience there are at least just as many of us who don't. And while you could argue that the ability to change things on the fly is optional and I don't have to use it, in practice fights tend to be designed with the idea in mind that people will use all available features to their advantage.

Now, so much for my "why I don't like the way talents currently work in WoW" rant. After watching the recording of the developer livestream devoted to explaining disciplines, I actually feel reassured about some things at least. Base class and advanced class abilities still won't train themselves. Spell ranks are not going away either. (I never thought I'd be rooting for spell ranks, as they are kind of silly... but having seen the alternative of gaining nothing for many levels, I'll take the placebo of new spell ranks any day.) SWTOR will also retain a clean interface to show what specialised abilities your character gains along the way and in what order. These things matter to me and I feel reassured that Bioware seems to want to refine their current talent system instead of completely replacing it.

On the livestream it was even said that they don't plan to remove the intro quests you currently have to do in order to choose your advanced class, even if you will now be able to just make a choice straight from the UI. I thought these quests were a nice piece of flavour.

I'll admit that some of their arguments for making this change are absolutely fair. It is kind of silly that you can choose to be a tank and not actually have any tanking abilities for several levels. (Ever tried tanking Hammer Station before you even got your basic taunt?) Raising the level cap is always an issue with old school talent trees, and since Bioware seems to be on track to release a story expansion every one and a half years, it's understandable that they don't want to have to re-jig the whole thing every time. (Though the way I see it, more levels will still require the system to be re-tweaked every time. Maybe it will take less effort though.)

Nonetheless, some concerns of mine remain. They claim that this new system will make it easier to balance the classes, however I remain sceptical. I know that in WoW, low-level class balance got worse every time they changed the talent trees, with side effects such as tanks doing five times as much damage as damage dealers in lowbie dungeons, and some classes being able to literally one-shot other players in certain level ranges (and that even without having particularly good gear). Admittedly I don't know if that's a problem with changing talent systems in general or if this is caused by the way WoW calculates its numbers. However, you'll forgive me for being wary of the potential fallout of this, especially considering that lowbie PvP and group content in SWTOR are currently pretty well balanced and highly enjoyable.

Likewise, I'm not really sure how the new utility skill system is supposed to be that much easier to balance. I understand why and how hybrids have been an issue, but now you'll just have people choosing a combination of 7 out of 21 utility skills to go with one of three specialisations for one of eight classes instead. That's still a lot of room for people to find some overpowered combination, and maybe it's because I'm not a developer, but I don't see how it's going to be easier to balance an utility skill that all three specialisations of a class will always have access to than it was to balance skills that were limited to a single talent tree. I expect that a lot of utility skills will suddenly seem very overpowered when given to a specialisation that wasn't originally supposed to have them, and I fear that class balance post 3.0 might be a bit of a nightmare as a result of this.

On the whole however, I already feel a lot better about the upcoming changes. I have to admit, I thought that the way they presented the new interface in the livestream looked cool, as it struck me as both intuitive and relatively hassle-free. They also seemed so genuinely excited about the new system, I found it hard not to let that rub off on me at least a little bit. I'm almost looking forward to trying it myself at this point.

Quick 3.0 Announcement Thoughts

At last, it's official: the next mini-expansion is going to be called Shadow of Revan and will be released on the 9th of December. I'm still trying to sort out my thoughts on all the news and I'm quite tired right now, but here are some quick first impressions of the announcement details:

It was kind of amusing to me just how uninformative and full of stock phrases the trailer is: "War is coming." "This is where we make our final stand." etc. I love Bioware and SWTOR, but I always find their trailers (for anything really) to be pretty underwhelming. Sorry, trailer guy at Bioware!

I'm surprised to see Lana and Theron feature so prominently in the expansion artwork. I hope they won't hog the centre stage too much. I like both of them as characters, but let's not forget who this story is supposed to be about.

I'm not thrilled by the 12x class experience boost for pre-orders... and that it's applied automatically. Don't force me to outlevel stuff, Bioware. Also, this means that I'll have several weeks of agony in guild chat ahead as certain people won't stop going on about how awesome it is that they'll be able to acquire another three max-level characters in exchange for minimum amounts of engagement with the game. (Honestly, I don't think it's a terrible idea for those who want it, but I dislike that there's no way to pre-order and opt out of this.)

The price is £11.99? But that's twice as much as they charged for Rise of the Hutt Cartel! Talk about daylight robbery! And to think that WoW players complain about a 20% price increase in their expansions... /muttermutter.

I hope everyone realised that the previous paragraph was a joke. I obviously pre-ordered already.

Two new planets instead of just one sounds great. Even if we don't actually get more story content than we did on Makeb, it will be nice to have a change of scenery.

It sounds like there will be a solid amount of new endgame content. Two brand new operations and two entirely new flashpoints is actually more than we got with RotHC.

I'm not at all keen on the sound of this new discipline system. From what I've seen in the associated forum thread, the reactions to this part of the announcement basically fall into one of three categories:

1) Awesome, it's going to be just like WoW! I love it!
2) Oh god, it's going to be just like WoW! I hate it!
3) Uh, that's going to be just like WoW, isn't it? I'm not sure how I feel about that.

I'm inclined to count myself as part of the second group to be honest, however I do understand at least some of their reasons and don't want to dismiss the whole idea before we've even heard any details about it.

I'll definitely be writing a longer post to talk about my thoughts on disciplines at some point though.