I know you guys mostly get criticism on the forums or suggestions about stuff that needs changing but I think this thread is a great opportunity to tell you and the rest of the devs how much I have enjoyed the new expansion. I think that the gearing system is the best its ever been and I'm so glad you took the time to delay the expansion and take all the feedback from PTS into account. New tactical and set bonus items are a great addition and the only thing preventing me from testing all of them is that I'm stuck between using my tech fragments for gearing alts or exploring all the options on my main which is a great way to keep me playing. I think having more tech fragments and gear from dailes and pvp to balance it a bit more with flashpoints being king right now in terms of time to reward ratio is the only suggestion I would have. I feel like the game is in a great spot and the rest of my year is basically going to be devoted to Star Wars with swtor, Ep9 and Mandalorian coming. Would love to see some armor sets or tie ins that take inspiration from those sources. Star Wars fans are divided on a lot of things but I think swtor has done everything right recently by listening to the fans and players and as someone who has played from launch I can't believe it is 8+ years since beta and I still love the game and feel like it is just as fun and gives me the same feeling of being transported into the SW universe that I had on day 1.

The set bonuses for assassin specifically for deception are very underwhelming. You get some stat buffs for 2 and 4 piece set bonus and then the 6 piece bonus are worthless. You will largely never be using phantom stride from stealth so the crit is going to be unused. Especially since you use phantom stride to proc your discharge it really seems like you will never get any value out of it. The other options are either inherently defensive or just give some more melee damage. In the original post about set bonuses you listed this Death Knell – Killing an enemy during Overcharge Saber refreshes the duration of Overcharge Saber. Can occur up to 5 times during one Overcharge Saber. However on PTS the death knell set does something completely different and just gives a refreshing melee buff which is not as impactful as the over charge one so I don't know why it was changed. Overall compared to the set bonuses on the live server these seem to be much less inspired having minor stat buffs on the 2 and 4 piece bonuses doesn't even make mixing and matching worthwhile since only the 6 piece bonus has any impact on gameplay. There seem to be more diverse set bonus options for the general items and for other classes.

Really like most of these at least for deception I find that you can lack some aoe damage so new severing slash and the discharging voltage are looking awesome and just what I wanted. For burning bolts how is the burn damage gonna be calculated? Does it turn all the damage into a dot effect or is it additional and how is that additional calculated? The hatred tree is one I don't have much time playing as but these new tacticals do make me want to test it out. Only thing is the high roll of 3 leeching strike in a row vs not getting the crit. Most of the darkness tacticals and set bonuses seem very strong compared to the others. Shroud is one of the most powerful abilities in the game and having a shroud last for like 5 seconds on 2 people could really break alot of stuff. Not even considering ranked but just things like in normal pvp huttball will become a complete joke if you can shroud and run half way across the map during its duration.

I personally find it better than previous event areas. Things are pretty contained and linear making the dailies relatively quick and the heroics are instanced so you are not competing with ganks or waiting for stuff to respawn. Ilum it feels like I spend a lot of time driving from place place and there isn't really a linear path since the area is so spread out. Rakghoul tunnels the heroic and daily quest is annoying with a full instance it feels claustrophobic. Dantooine is a nice throwback to previous lore and well designed in terms of the map and game flow. The rep armors and decos are lacking for my taste but the mounts and companion are great. I also hope that such a rich lore planet gets additions in the future. Right now there are 6 daily and 3 heroic which maybe they could add a few more missions where you transport to the jedi enclave or visit the old star map location with all the droids and traps from KOTOR.

When you say in inventory you mean actual inventory or can the system check for what you have in storage as well? I obviously only will have one tactical equipped and I don't want to run around with an inventory full of tacticals if I am trying to get a specific one and avoid duplicates.

How is my position in queue increasing? Like I don't even understand how that is possible even disregarding whatever bugs are happening my queue should be going down not up.

If this wasn't the bug they delayed the update for initially I don't even want to know how broken it was initially. Might as well start pushing 6.0 back a few months already if they can't even do minor updates like this without crashing all the servers. It took me hours and hours just to update with the lousy bit raider tech and then the servers are still messed up makes me sad I resub for the new event and can't even play.

Can we get more info about how the vendors will work? What are the plans for how much these are going to cost in terms of the currency you earn and how is the limited time/rotating vendor going to work exactly? You say that RNG protection is built in but how is it actually going to function if it is cost prohibitive? Like are you able to earn enough currency doing daily quests to buy 10 pieces of gear per day or only 1? Will the vendor that sells fixed items also be tied to your item level or is it just selling set bonus and tacticals with no stats? How long will the vendor be around for and how often will the item offerings rotate? If currency is hard to come by or buying it is expensive what incentive is there for players to buy random gear when they should just save everything for the guaranteed vendor whenever it appears. If the vendor has an item I really want will I be able to earn enough currency in a day or a week or however long to get what I want before they leave? I imagine most of this is gonna be determined through testing and PTS but would like to know how you envision this new currency economy actually functioning.

How will amplifier stats be distributed? Will the stat value be tied to item level or will amplifiers have there own rating or tier system? For example if I have max rating gear and I pay to reroll will my amplifiers all be max stats and I am simply paying for the type of amplifier I want or will the randomness also involve stat values? How will these stats be distributed will they be tiered or will the random generation be truly random where you can get a bonus stat of like 1-100 and you have to keep rerolling until you get that 100 in every stat you want. If the amplifier stats are truly going to be random I think that is a huge negative. Having to pay however many millions of credits to get the max amplifier in the type of stat I want for every piece of gear sounds like a huge headache. So far I havn't seen any concrete info on how these stats are actually determined and if rerolls are only for the type of amplifier or also include numerical values which will make the entire system a huge pain and totally RNG.

These changes ruin what makes hutt ball actually fun. The fast pace and mobility options being eliminated means there will be much less scoring and many more boring stale mates. Playing a 0-0 game where the winner is determined by who gets lucky enough to be holding the ball last is not a warzone I look forward to playing. There is already enough stuns and CC in the game where you can stun and focus down a ball carrier even with the current mobility. Also having stuns disrupt passes also ruins any point of passing to begin with. Why pass when any form of CC can potentially ruin it and turn the ball over. These changes basically mean the best strategy is just to have the whole team group and have a single tank slowly walk the the ball with as many healers as possible which is pretty much the least fun way to play hutt ball. If you just want hutt ball to always devolve into a 12 minute long team death match since actually trying to score will be pointless I guess these changes are the way to go but I much prefer the current version cause even in the event of a 6-0 blow out it means you can just move on to the next map. With these changes now if one team is clearly better it will just take two or three times longer to lose which seems pointless.

I think this is a big problem in design because it puts fun stuff behind an artificial gate where you have to grind non fun stuff to access it. You can't play as tyth unless you run the OP and then grind the iokath currency, you can't play as a walker or use any of the other fun stuff without paying for it. Even if you want to argue that it is for the balance of non existent world PVP the PVE side is just not fun at all the quests are all basic kill quests with the fun stuff all being gated for no reason. Add in the fact that the story content isn't even repeatable and the whole thing is a big step down from previous major updates. I mean they could have just let us pilot Tyth in the story or even bring back the giant robot from kotfe for us to use but putting everything behind a grind wall means 90% of players are not even going to be using or able to see the content in the patch. Just seems counter intuitive from a design aspect where they put a bunch of cool stuff in the game but you don't even get to do it. If I'm paying for a sub I don't also want to have to grind and pay in game currency to get the full experience.

Can someone tell me what happens if you join the republic? The imperial side seemed to just sort of end abruptly. I like that it carried over your alliance and romances you developed in the rest of the game but other than the nice moments with Lana it seemed like the story was just tacked on to justify the operation existing rather than the story coming first. The daily area itself is fine but the quests themselves were just basic kill and seek and to do the fun one where you pilot a walker you actually have to pay tons of the new currency it didn't make much sense.

Have they announced if you can recruit companion independent of your faction choice? I really want to stay empire but I also would like to bring Elara back into the empire as well. I dunno if that would qualify as a spoiler I just hope you don't get locked out from getting companions, or killing them because you choose the wrong faction.

If they were doing this as an emergency fix for an exploit then whatever, but no explanation or response to feedback is pretty insulting. They need to buff XP for pve quest rewards instead of nerf it. If you want to nerf mobs than make each heroic give 200 CXP and increase the planetary rewards to even more. Increase flashpoint CXP in response as well along with operations and uprisings. Right now the fastest way to get CXP is through PVP but I get tired of playing it since I still get horrible FPS and it is barely playable in arenas but ranked queue rarely pops unless you play at the right time. TLDR the whole system is a mess and needs to be fixed. If there isn't a patch that improves some of these issues by the time my sub runs out I won't have any reason to stay subbed I can run the occasional flashpoint or heroic as a preferred to get my star wars fix instead.

Yeah after getting a couple crates in a row of duplicates or inferior gear I'm already getting tired of it. I'm only like 10 levels in but no set bonus gear and getting duplicates already is just tiring. Probably even more tiring is if you get your full 230 gear in like 30 levels then you have 60 levels until tier 2 just praying for set bonus and everything else will be trash. Atleast make the orange gear legacy and not BoE cause even that is useless.