Put your companion to passive, that's what I do when doing story until kotfe.

Also came back from WoW. That's just not my thing, that's an endless grind without any meaningful story, my character has no personality, the endgame community is the most toxic thing I've ever seen, every 4-6 months your hard earned gear gets reset so you have to start over, finished with that game.. SWTOR is more like my playstyle, much more casual friendly, if you step away from the game for a few months, your gear won't be trash, can acquire gear through ANY activity and it has a nice consistent story, my character is an actual person, the ingame community is nice and friendly (mostly..) and I could go on. Might not be everone's cup of tea though, as much as I like SWTOR, many people prefers competitive hardcore endgame and SWTOR does not really shine on that part.

Definitely not an expansion, if it were then it would be in production already but from the dev stream it was clear they have no idea what to do yet.

ESO is built on the hero engine and the performance / graphics is night and day. No, the game engine would be quite capable of handling a massive multiplayer game(as we see in ESO), the issues we see in swtor was imo because the incompetence of developers who was working on it. BW games : Kotor, Mass Effect, Dragon Age, all were train wrecks in technical terms, they were successful, because the compensated with story, lore and characters. And I say this as a BioWare fan. Having an optimized game would have certainly helped, but I would not blame the engine.

CPU is always the bottleneck in swtor but if someone has 100+ fps in other areas of the game I do not think having 30 in that particular flashpoint is justifiable, it's just sloppy work.

At least You have 30 fps there, I have like 15-20 with extreme stuttering

This is for only FPs: Basically in swtor You have many kinds of players mixed together in group content. As swtor is kind of a hybrid of mmo and story based rpg, there are players like - -people doing flashpoints for the story while leveling up (before you say it they should do sm, sm flashpoints s**k and they are boring, many people do not play an mmo to do stuff alone) -power levelers -end game grinder elitists -casual players that run them only for fun Now You mix these 4 together, and this is the perfect recipe for toxicity. The solution is either find an active guild and run with them, or LF players in fleet chat and form a group before You queue. Then You can LF with something like -LFM Taral V story chill run with cutscenes -LFM Taral V grinding fast runs, lvl75s only!! etc... That being said, pugging is a deep dive into the unknown in all mmorpgs, or if You know one where in every run everybody is super nice and friendly, please let me know

I would also love it with mandalorians uniting under a powerful mandalore and starting a campaign against the weakened republic / sith. I assume they still hold a grudge against jedi, because they defeated them in the mandalorian wars, and the sith manipulated them into a war they could not win, so they would have motivation to go against both factions. This would end in the ultimate defeat of the mandalorians which they will never be able to recover from (in the tor universe at least, in disney canon as far as I know they are still kicking in the clone wars) , like in Kreia's prophecy: "They will die a death that will last millennia, until all that remains is their code, their history, and in the end, the shell of their armor upon the shell of a man, too easily slain by Jedi."

I remember I've read something years ago one guy from Austin said that it's a hacked together spaghetti code and even modifying one little thing can cause havoc in other areas. Also many veterans left the company who had knowledge about the engine, furthermore Austin got SW:ToR like here you go fellas, from now on You support this. Not really any documentation or training, have fun guyz. I tried to find the source, but did not have any luck. Maybe it was just a dream. If BioWare is anything like my company, then the aces go to a profitable new project while you put the juniors and less skillful seniors to support previous projects. Hope this is not the case at BW. Also hope none of swtor devs read this and get confidence issues

This skipping tradition makes me think why people play this game. Like You are literally skipping the game You are supposed to play. Is a running simulator your desire? Because then im sure you have better options than swtor. Do you hate combat or something ? Its like life nowadays everyeone is in a rush and cannot stop for one minute to enjoy the view :/ I had a maelstrom prison a week ago we did not skip anything, killed most of the mobs, completed the bonus objective, was fun and smooth everyone was very friendly and talkative. In the end of the fp i said this non speed runner run was nice for a change, everyone agreed. Someone wasnt skipping cutscenes and noone was spamming spacebaaar omg skip skip skip. Wish every fp run was like this

I'd love something chapter based and longer story like Kotfe with the chapters being replayable. Only with added endgame group content and more non-force user friendly story. But as jedi that is my favorite expansion. Rothc was very meh SoR had fun flashpoints and I just played onslaught a month ago and already forgot what was it about. I think mandalorian wars v2 will be next .

It was certainly a success, because many new and returning players joined the game, make subscriptions, CM purchases, etc.. So financially I would assume it was totally worth it for BW . But one thing is for certain. swtor WILL NOT retain most of this player base. Most MMOs and the new brand "looter shooters" are trying to retain players by giving them an endless climb where you can never reach the top (for example, I played Destiny 2 before, they increase the power lvl cap each 3 months, so you are just doing the same climb over again), where in SW:ToR You have a clear set of goals and they are reachable and also it does not take that much amount of time. Now personally I think this is awesome, that's why I came back to SW:ToR, but many players will just play through some stories, do some end game and find a climber mmo (that's how I call those), because SW:ToR will not produce enough dopamine in their brains. SW:ToR is the type of MMO that has its lows and peaks in terms of population, it's more of a story based game than endless grinding, but stories has an end. After that either someone can find his fun in the game (RP, decoration, space barbie, alts etc.. ), or leave.

I could live with abilities staying the same, but still most of the fights are dull and just chipping away the enemies health faster than yours goes away. I'm not sure how it is now, but in Kotfe (4.0?) i liked the star fortress bosses to solo in heroic because it was dynamic. Also eternal championship was fun. This would be so cool in the classic stories overall. Now it's just go in with your immortal overhealing companion and do whatever . ask your cat to walk over the keyboard and you win every boss fight. Even in flashpoints let's say KDY is just about spanking the boss for an hour and occasionally run to the healing station to get your health back up (veteran). Not too interesting imo and would need some refactoring which will never happen but in this topic we are in a fairy world

Combat wise .. kinda:D

Completely overhaul the combat system. "Dumb down" abilities so You would only have 8-10 and make the game challenging based on positioning, cc, interrupts, so make the mechanics challenging instead of executing your rotation perfectly and hope the enemy healthbar goes down before yours. Overhaul the old quests story etc to reflect this. Get rid of the god companions and change them to useful instead of immortal in story.