There seems to be a gap between leveling/solo content and endgame content that is very hard for casual players to bridge. As an admittedly "hardcore" player (Legacy Level 33) leading a casual guild, I've found that we've hit a brick wall when it comes to story mode ops and hard mode flashpoints. The other guild members reached level 50 about a month ago, at which point we started looking at Eternity Vault. After multiple attempts on EV story mode, we've been completely unable to make significant progress in the operation. This is despite having a person who has completed hard mode EV leading the op, having the entire group in level 50 gear (gained from doing their dailies), using voice communication for the op, and having the recommended balance of 2 tanks, 2 healers, and 4 DPS.

Given the problems completing the operation on story mode, which is supposed to be the introduction to endgame play, I'm worried that my guild's players are ready to call it quits. What can I tell my guild to reassure them that endgame content is worth doing? Are there any plans to adjust the difficulty of story mode operations?

P.S. It's very demoralizing to a casual group when they go into Hard Mode Esseles thinking it will be the easiest HM flashpoint (since it is the first one you take on in normal mode), only to be repeatedly stomped into the ground by Ironfist.

This cannot be contained within one question, but I'll make it as brief as possible.

RE: Server Transfers

Rumors have been circulating that you'll only allow server transfers from high-pop to low-pop servers. This is not acceptable. Many servers are lucky if they see greater than 10 people on the fleet at any one time. The fact is, you folks had way too many servers at launch, you dumped pre-order guild launches are servers that haven't proven themselves in the long term, and allowing a handful of people to transfer to these low-pop servers will not save those servers from dying.

So this is a multi-part question:

When 1.3 comes live, will server transfers be to ANY server? Will our legacy be in-tact? (or for example some of us rolled on a server to try out the community on that server, will you allow us to take the higher of the two legacies when we transfer those characters?.,..which is after-all...fair. Will we get to keep our perks that we earned on the old server?

I think to resolve all this, it should be handled in this way:

When you transfer, you should have two options:

Transfer a single character.

or

Transfer your entire legacy

The single character is straight forward.

The legacy would simply be: Transfer your legacy to the new server, if one exists on the new server, the legacy of higher level is kept and any pre-existing characters on that server are absorbed into the transferred legacy.

at that point, all character names in the legacy are re-set, thus allowing the player to rename their characters in the event they have single or multiple characters with the same name on two different servers.

Are the sound issues caused by 1.2 going to be fixed in 1.3?

 

(Background: In operations, after you have been playing for 'awhile', you begin losing sounds until you lose nearly all audio -- 'awhile' depends on the player but is typically 1-2 hours. Quitting the client and re-entering fixes the problem. There is a large thread on this in the CSR forum).

Will the AUDIO CUES for encounters be looked at first? The robot in Eternity Vault Comes to mind.

How do you plan to build player confidence in this game after what was the best launch in MMO history and a disastrous first 6 months with needless updates and a complete refusal to keep your player-base happy.

Let me clarify:

Everything that was released in 1.2 should have been released at launch anyways (everything except the new operation and the new warzone) new crafting elements, augments, the garbage script you call a combat log all should have been released at launch. And I still don't have a decent combat log.... And this was the biggest patch in MMO history according to you...

The failure of ilum killed the open world pvp experience which this game lacks and people will go to other games which will have open world pvp, i.e Guildwars 2.

If you had a polling about what the players really wanted, I promise you legacy is on the bottom of the list, yet this is all you work on and believe will be the factor that keeps players happy. Quit working on legacy and work on other projects like the so called 1.2 rated warzones that never happened?

Work on stuff people care about, stop working on useless features that are nice but don't define this game. Diablo 3 killed the population of my server twin spears. If we're lucky we can get about 5 warzone queues ALL DAY at primetime at the level 50 range. With guildwars 2 around the corner, how are you going to keep the player confidence in bioware/ea games high?

Cause right now, bioware/ea games... Your players are not happy.

Is the Electrostaff ever going to be a proper full substitute for the Double Bladed Lightsaber? Because right now its not working 100% as intended.

First off, attacks that don't indicate that they require a double bladed lightsaber in their tool-tips, such as Lacerate, do not function when an electrostaff is equipped. Given the animations for the Electrostaff attacks are the same as the double bladed Lightsaber, and the fact that the Assassin gets the Electrostaff added as a proficiency as soon as they hit the advanced class I would think that it should be that way already. Afterall, people who wield Vibroblades instead of Lightsabers don't seem to have their abilities affected like this. Is the Electrostaff going to be re-evaluated... or at least its tool tips corrected?

Will server transfer release before 1.3 or with it?

Can you offer any further specifics to the many players affected by low server populations?

What was the logic behind choosing which crew skills get to craft augment kits? In 1.2 and before, if a player wanted, for example, an augmented lightsaber, s/he HAD to buy it from an Artifice. Post-1.3, if a player wants an augmented lightsaber, s/he chooses a lightsaber s/he already owns (probably acquired through raiding or questing), and... buys an augment kit from an Armstech, Armormech, or Synthweaver, effectively cutting the Artificer completely out of the market for augmented lightsabers. Why was it done this way, rather than simply allowing Artificers to make augment kits that could only be applied to lightsabers/relics, Synthweavers to make augment kits that can only be used on force armor, Cybertech on earpieces, etc?

One more thing, there are 14 weareable items on a character and all of them will be able to be sloted. So 3 crafting professions get to make 14 augment slots + 14 augments (double for those that PvP and PvE) per player, a huge market opens for them while other 3 professions get nothing. Seems a bit unfair to me. Are there any plans for making artifice, cyertech and biochem viable after 1.3?

And another question, is there a chance that we'll be able to buy a droid sensor with +crit on artifice?

Is this your plan for release?

1.) Free transfers to Super Servers, then

2.) Release of 1.3 including the addition of Ranked Warzones.

3.) introduction of a new World PvP system (a couple months? 6 months? a year?) Some kind of ETA would make a lot of players happy. And one suggestion would be to make fun PvP areas on multiple planets to mix things up and keep it interesting.

Also, once we are in Super Servers, will you have server specific forums? It would help to build community as well.

I have a few questions I would like answered....

Is there some way that the use of a BH Healer's use of rapid fire healing can either be used on the healer or have some way for some(or all of the abilities) reflect a portion of the healing back on the healer himself...especially when I don't want to burn a hot heal for minor damage.

Is there some way to make Kolto Rocket healer on a basis of need and not just a roll of the dice?

Are there any plans to start a large scale consolidation of servers after a few months of server transfers so that there are few ghost town servers...I (for One) wouldn't mind a few whole server consolidations...so that all the friends on one server (guildies and otherwise) are moved wholesale to a new server.

As a fan of crafting useful items from leveling low all the way to end game I am really sad to see the heavy turn around on the equipment based crafting. As great as the customizable orange gear/weapons and how fun it is to add modifications and augments to them, it seems like Bioware, you really have shot yourself on the foot with that one. Prior to 1.2 and the promises to extract armoring from end-game armoring to transfer to use on custom gear to have a certain appearance for your character and still have your high-end stats, in turn made all previous purple [Prototype] gear with locked in armoring mods pointless and essentially turning them into purple customizable gear too. With all your attempts of letting players look the way they want only resulted on turning most equitable recipes to fluff. ***Would it not have just been easier to add a custom wardrobe feature to the character profile that players can just throw in any wearable item into the slots to retain they're desired outfit instead of throwing an over abundance of orange gear + augment slots at us?***

Even though in 1.3 will let us make augment kits, If everyone will have the opportunity to augment every one of their items and not need to craft it themselves removes the NEED to craft it yourself and just purchase it from another player. Resulting in nothing truly unique for becoming a craftsman so in turn might as well become a Biochem to make your own reusable consumables for end-game raiding, btw which you previously nerfed so to make others crafts feel more useful (which failed).

Is there ever going to be a point of usefulness to the equipment crew skills (Armormechs, Synthwweavers, Biochems, Armorstech) that wasted all that time and research placed on figuring out all that hard work Bioware put into the Prefix Reverse engineering items that will simply be forgotten since their stats with or without an augment slot amounts to nothing with all the orange gear we got instead of a wardrobe system?

As many others I like very much in TOR how we keep seeing our characters, companions and others players in full screen during cut scene. However seems to me there are too few body and head options, even more less "good" ones.

--------So question: are there any plans to add say the much asked after 2.5 body type, more head options (from hair styles to dyeable tattoos) and finally a post creation character and companion customization tool?

P.S.: IMHO contrary to others MMO theses would greatly help the game and the feeling of ownership for the players and make TOR stands apart in a good way.

The itemization of end game gear continues to be ridiculous. My stealth-spec operative has a choice between accuracy and alacrity gear. Accuracy is nealy useless since all my attacks are tech and have 100% anyway, and Alacrity is even more useless since ALL my attacks (except orbital strike:rolleyes:) are instant attacks. They are held back by only the GCD or their own cooldowns, neither of which are affected by alacrity.

Effictively the stats worth adding are crit, surge, and power. Why is there not a single piece of battlemaster agent gear with crit/surge or crit/power or power/surge? The only way to get reasonable stats as an agent is to repeatedly buy the same pair of War Hero Field Medic's Gloves to strip the mods for use in all the other slots. This is 7000 comms x 6 plus the cost of getting the battlemaster and warhero gear for the slot in question (98000 comms) another time for the armoring alone since the mod and enhance slots are useless. This boils down to a 50% tax because the stats provided on 11/12 of the moddable slots are terrible.

When will gear with reasonable stats come out? with Tier 5? Longer still? Never? Is this an effort to deliberately reduce agent DPS effectiveness? Why do these sets have over 400 alacrity or accuracy? These are ridiculously useless.

TRANSFERS....that's the only thing many of us care about.

1. What are you using to decide what the to/from servers are, what guarantee do I have that I'm not transferring to another dead server?
   
2. Are we going to be able to transfer all our characters?
   
3. Many of us have created new characters on more populated servers since our servers have such low populations. Will we have the option to transfer our characters to those servers?
   
4. What will happen to our legacy xp/names?
   
5. What happens with our legacy xp/names if we transfer to a server where we already have characters?
   
6. Do we get to keep all our items, credits, cargo holding?