Too much XP is too much - OP Companions - Badly tuned level sync

The new SWTOR, level doesn't mean anything except for gear requirements anymore. I've been going back to Coruscant and Tython and doing all the old exploration missions over. It's kinda fun, the rewards are actually worth doing it, plus I'm almost 65 now. It's a good way to pay for Rakata decos, and get comp influence with your class' comps. Granted only the comps that you would have had at that point in the story grant influence at all.

Level sync isn't that bad overall. Never had much issue with the leveling down part my only argument was the PvP and leveling the field, which it doesn't unless you got a few people with expertise gear and all the datacrons to give some beef to the lowbies. With all crons except Rishi and Dark Reaver, I have max expertise, 32% crit, 77% surge (since tert stats don't scale), so I got like twice the HP and mastery as a lowbie starting out on the really low planets and a whole lot more crit and surge. Even then it's still a 2-3k hp difference throughout all the planets though the percentage difference will of course decrease.

Maybe a mob of lowbies can take out 65s now though so that's good, but they still are undergunned relatively speaking.

Yes, wanting XP to feel like an accomplishment rather than having it handed out like Halloween candy is sure dumb. Wanting leveling to feel like an achievement rather than feeling like it's being handed to us is just plain nuts.

Excessive rewards invalidate the any feeling of reward. You wouldn't show off your participation trophies in a trophy case, would you?

You want xp as an accomplishment go do exploration and heroics, and then i bet you wouldnt feel that dumb anymore. Want level to feel like an achievment? Dont use companions, and try to take on World Bosses by yourself see if you feel better.

It doesn't need to be mitigated. Do you just play to gain xp?

There was this game called Guild Wars...I am talking about the first one, which was a much better game than the 2nd one....it had max level 20. By the time the expansions were out 80% or more of the game was for level 20.

It didn't matter because the content was fun by itself and there was story line progress. I think SWTOR is starting to see that this can be just fine.

What do you want them to do? Raise the level cap with each new chapter that comes out? At some point people need to just level to max and the rest is just for the fun of the story and going to different places.

I seem to remember you were against level sync altogether because it would make everything a chore and you had not reason therefore to go back...ever.

So now it's not such a chore. You were wrong.

But hey, looks like you found something else to complain about. Seriously, let it go and just enjoy the game for what it is.

You know... I was one of Level syncs harshest critics before 4.0 launch... and now, I honestly have to say I don't mind it. When I found myself under leveled for Alderaan yesterday, I went back to Dromund Kaas and finished off quests I hadn't touched there, ran the Black Talon twice, and finished up quests on Balmorra. Doing that allowed me to get ahead of the leveling curve, and I am no longer having trouble.

Companions are not overpowered. They are tuned just fine. It is just that you are used to the worthless companions we had before the expansion, where you might have well not have had one at all.

Of course there is too much XP if you do EVERYTHING. The game is designed so you can get to 60 doing only story missions (the purple ones). If you do exploration missions, heroics, dungeons, pvp, etc, you are going to find that you are collecting way too much XP. This is even more so if you use the XP boosts OR the guild and group XP buffs.

The ONLY criticism I have is that level sync should be disabled in the phases on the origin worlds. Darth Baras and Darth Thanaton are level 12? Really? Dark council members are level 12?

Disable level sync in those two phases, and any like it.

You want xp as an accomplishment go do exploration and heroics, and then i bet you wouldnt feel that dumb anymore. Want level to feel like an achievment? Dont use companions, and try to take on World Bosses by yourself see if you feel better.

As has been stated multiple times, people want to do all the content, heroics and exploration missions included, without leveling up too fast. So congratulation on trying to make others look stupid but instead just making yourself look like someone so unconcerned with both sides of an issue that he can't be bothered to know what the other side is saying.

Oh, and by the way, saying things are badly balanced now isn't even remotely the same as saying things should be insanely hard. I'll give you points for gall; it took a lot of it to write those last two sentences.

I did enjoy it. For what it was.

But you seem so determined to make every change a "good" thing that you'll conflate the leveling experience (which is where gaining XP even matters) with the post-leveling experience... and ask "Do you just play to gain xp?" of someone who said "this change makes avoiding a constant excess of XP unavoidable"... and never mind how little sense that makes, how very much of a stretch it is to get from what I said to what you asked.

Seriously, someone else says that they're gaining too much XP, and the person who points out that before sync they'd have hit a point of diminishing returns and now there is no such point because of sync... that person is "just playing for XP"? How the blazes do you ignore the blatant context and make that sort of leap? How the bloody hell does that even make any sense in your head, let alone while you're typing it out?

Never mind post after post after post where I've rejected and railed against the notion of playing content simply for any kind of "reward"... and said over and over again that people should be playing content because they enjoy it.

But then, what anyone else actually posts, their actual opinions and actual reasons and what they actually enjoy about the game never really does matters to your ilk, does it?

The part where it's a chore, where it's tedious, is tied into the very attempt to make all that old content "relevant" long after it's been left behind, in the story and in character progression. And yes, they've made going back to those areas more of a chore -- not more a challenge or "risk", whatever that has to do with anything in a game -- just more of a tedious nuisance. It's not worth the slog to go back and do deal with random trash mobs to get to the things that some of us actually enjoyed going back there to do before levelsync. XP, credits, how "challenging" the random trash fight or driving all over the place to get around them might be, all of that is utterly beside the point. It's the very point that all that trash cannot simply be ignored, that it now has to be slogged through at all to get to whatever we would have gone to that planet to actually get done.

Of course, that's the part none of you ever wanted to hear, ever wanted to understand -- it was always much easier to pretend it was about "difficulty" or "facestomping" or whatever, because then you could make it about the person you were responding to, or some cardboard caricature, instead of about their actual position.

And so here we are, with you latching onto something I said rate of XP gain and twisting it around to pretend that the "chore" I was talking about had something, anything to do with the speed of leveling.

Oh well.

I've said it a couple other places - the "critical-path" XP gain is pretty much on target. The non-critical path XP gains are in need of some attention.

One thing I found interesting. L61 to L65 were basically dead levels. 2 utility points (one of which you used to have at L60), 2 passives, and 1 new power. That's an interesting design decision. We didn't get any new crafting levels (though crafting overall got a bit of a boost relative to crystal (ex-comms) vendor mods.

Congratulations you just been promoted to level 65 dumb ***!! Let me guess the next title of your complaint: Bioware remove mounts cause we need to make the game more challenging by only walking. Ffs, im done here bro.