They may have gone a little too far in the other direction, but what exactly was fun about facerolling through Heroic mobs before? Stomping everything in your path may be fun for five minutes but it very quickly becomes incredibly boring, particularly as hotkey combat is intrinsically dull. Ask yourself: what is the point of combat if it's almost impossible to die? You might as well remove enemies altogether if they're going to offer no challenge whatsoever. Overly easy content can be just as tedious as overly difficult.

With the exception of the KotFE/KotET chapters, solo content in this game is extremely easy. It's so easy that combat is a pointless chore, an irritant getting in the way of moving from A to B. I know people will suggest ways to nerf yourself, but that shouldn't be necessary. Many games have a 'story mode' difficulty, which is completely fine for those who just want to progress through the story. It is quite unusual though for this to be the only difficulty option. It's very odd and counterproductive for combat to be so lacking in challenge. I recently finished Onslaught, in which the devs designed boss encounters that had mechanics beyond just normal attacks. There were a number of other potentially interesting encounters. They didn't matter though because my health barely ever dropped below 100%. Why go to the effort of crafting boss mechanics if the player is effectively invincible? Why bother having fights at all? A lack of difficulty also undermines the story. The stories are always pitting you against antagonists of supposed enormous skill and power. Then you steamroll through them and wonder what all the fuss was about. This is part of the reason it's sometimes hard to pay attention to the class stories - I know the gameplay won't support the dialogue's claims that this particular opponent is a massive threat. I'm not expecting difficulty increases for any existing content (although it would be welcome); that would probably consume too many development resources. It would be great though if future story content could have Vet/Master modes to stop combat being so pointless. Simply boosting enemy health/damage is not ideal given that a lot of Knights VM/MM encounters are unbalanced, but presumably it's the least resource-intensive approach and is better than nothing.

Which parts exactly are you finding hard? It's a lengthy chapter. What class are you playing? Tactics in Vet and Master chapters vary a lot between classes.

According to the numbers from this calculator: https://torcommunity.com/guides/companions#calculatorthe cheapest approach to levelling up a companion from 1 - 50 would cost 3,466,600 credits. This consists of buying over 6500 gifts (Rank 1 Gifts for 1 - 40, then Rank 5 for 40 - 50). One would go comatose from the tedium of buying and giving of that many gifts, unless you can find a method of automating the process.

It would be messy, but as it stands a lot of crafting is pointless. There's no reason to spend the time, effort and credits making an unlettered 80 item when they drop so frequently from multiple sources. Unlettered 80s are not BiS though, and if the BiS variant can't be crafted, then obtaining it is entirely RnG. Although there's not much statistical difference between an unlettered 80 and the BiS item, people like to optimise. Maybe crafting variants should go side by side with reducing the number of alternatives. In my experience 306 gear drops are weighted towards unlettered 80s; I've received very little BiS gear.

Would just like to double check this before investing in 600+ crafting. Can you craft gear variants, eg R-1, AR-13, BR-7, etc versions of barrels/hilts, mods and enhancements? If not, I really think this should be made possible because otherwise a lot of gear crafting is pointless.

Heh, I did it. Barely. I maintain that it's very poorly balanced though. Having my toenails extracted would have been more fun.

I'm playing Chapter 1 of KotET on Master Mode. The balance in the walker part is still completely off. The walker has health of 368,370. The rocket skytroopers hit for 128k damage and usually appear four at a time. O I've painfully grinded my way to the boss walker, which has health of 760k. Rocket skytroopers regularly spawn. Now watch this video of someone playing in 5.0 days: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=AqJcYI17fHY. Note that his walker has over 400k health and the boss has 650k. Moreover, his heavy blaster attack can one-shot the troopers, while mine can't. He does so much more damage to the boss than I can. I'm all for a challenge, but this just feels like little effort was put into balancing.

I'm playing a PvE tank Darkness Sin and want a bit of DPS, ie 3 DPS mods. Is it better to get 1213 Alacrity or Crit? Jaydenz's guide currently says Alacrity, but IIRC correctly he advocated Crit in a previous version of the guide. Also, would it be right to still aim for 50% Shield and sacrifice Absorb? Thanks!

Relative levels make almost no difference to the difficulty of combat in the class story. BW opted a while ago to make progressing the class story easy to the point that your level doesn't matter. I stealthed through the Operative's class story, which led to regularly being several levels below enemies. I was only 46 when I finished the story. Fights against mobs 6 levels higher than me were difficult because they were literally impossible - you miss 100% of the time where the level gap is 6+. All other combat was trivial to the degree that I could have got up from my computer, made myself a cup of coffee, come back, and the fight would be over. I do wish that the combat in the class story missions wasn't so meaningless, at least for instanced areas. It does somewhat cheapen the story when you go up against someone who is meant to be a big bad but who dies in the blink of an eye. You also don't learn how to play your class while levelling. That's the way the game is currently designed though. If you want to make the the story at all challenging, you will have to do something unusual to weaken yourself like making your companion passive or not using all your abilities.

As has been said numerous times in the thread, increasing the number of CQ points for some activities (Uprisings, PvP, et al.) would be fine. You've just ignored those comments and continued to bang on about how awful it is that points are available for minor tasks. This is remarkably disingenuous given that you have repeatedly refused to acknowledge the point that the Conquest change is good for the bulk of players. And it's a very important point. The central reason why the current Conquest system is good can be expressed very simply: if most people enjoy a game mechanic it is a successful mechanic. because fun is the name of the game.

How are these two things analogous? In the former you join a group then immediately abandon it, which negatively impacts the other people in that group. In the latter you: a) haven't formed a group yet, so you're not causing a problem for anyone, and b) when you do join, it will be with people who are implicitly willing to do the same activity you are.

So what? Conquest is not the aim of the game. It's a bonus, a sideshow, not the main attraction.

On the other hand if your goal with the game is to have fun (and if it's not then you need to re-examine your priorities in life), the new system lets you meet the conquest target while playing just about any content. I'm playing my way through the bounty hunter class story for the first time. Previously, while playing a class story I just had to kiss goodbye to conquest. Now I can easily exceed the conquest target while enjoying the one type of content that makes SWTOR truly unique in the MMO world.

It's also nice for the lowbies that we don't have to wait until higher levels to participate in Conquest. It encourages alt-play. In fact with the double XP and other XP bonuses, my new Bounty Hunter has hit the Conquest target before even finishing the prologue.