I hadn't played this game in over a year, but recently renewed my subscription because I vaguely remembered enjoying some parts of this game.

I wanted to finish up my Sith Inquisitor's storyline, build my Legacy a little, and maybe start a new character and explore some of the other stories.

But NO! All the skills appear to have been reworked, so I'll need to redesign my character's combat abilities (actually quite tricky at higher levels) and then I just wanted to advance the storyline a little but was forced to wade through legions of mooks and incredibly aggressive wildlife to get anything done...

The fact is that the game just felt like work. Repetitive and annoying.

Mass Effect had a "narrative" mode where the combat was partially glossed over and the difficulty set way down. It was good for when you just wanted to see how things unfolded and enjoy the ROLE-PLAYING aspect of the RPG. Can they make that mode for SWTOR? Then I might be able to enjoy playing a powerful Sith Lord who is conquering the galaxy without being bored to tears having to murder stray dogs on Taris.

I agree. Even though I'm a new player I am surprised that almost every single NPC/monster outside of towns is bent on killing you. It seems too 'convenient' that there happens to be all these aggressive gangs and separatists and god knows what else waiting to kill anything that moves. How do they know that you're not one of them, or a civilian?

To me, it detracts from the realism of Star Wars, if that's possible.

I agree. Even though I'm a new player I am surprised that almost every single NPC/monster outside of towns is bent on killing you. It seems too 'convenient' that there happens to be all these aggressive gangs and separatists and god knows what else waiting to kill anything that moves. How do they know that you're not one of them, or a civilian?

 

To me, it detracts from the realism of Star Wars, if that's possible.

Heck, how are there even any civilians at all?

I'm a high-powered Sith Lord with a face eating monstrosity of a bodyguard following me around and I still get massacred by random animals and street thugs from time to time... all the normal civilians in the galaxy wouldn't live long enough to pick up groceries!

If you're finding SWTOR hard, then maybe the game isn't for you. As for you not knowing your class abilities, even if nothing had changed since you left, you would still have no clue of what each thing does. It's called being out of practice.

Nonsense, I still remembered the exact sequence of buttons that I pushed in each and every fight to trigger my abilities in the order that worked best. Combat is fairly routine against the legions of mooks. The problem was that all my skills had been reset and many of them changed so I had to learn a new sequence of buttons to push each time I entered combat, and didn't have the benefit of slowly leveling up to organically learn my character's abilities.

I simply take issue with the fact that native wildlife and what appear to be bandits are capable of going toe to toe with my character. It's absurd that every forty yards or so is a life threatening monster or gang of super-powered thugs. If the planets were really that dangerous, no one would be dumb enough to try and live there.

I agree, it would be handy to have "easy mode". Unfortunately, the game can't do that - the closest would be KDY boost/similar boosts in local areas, but they don't power down monsters, they just boost characters, and it doesn't help much. Also, KDY is extremely boring.

Overleveling yourself by six or seven levels will work, though - I went through Heroic 4 with my overlevelled Mara like butter.

As for "new skills", I might be wrong, but we don't really have many of these. You're mostly still getting the same abilities, it's just your skill tree got reset. All you need to do is read the abilities' names again and click the buttons, shouldn't take more than five minutes. Anni Maras still have their Deadly Saber, snipers still own with Sniper Volley, and so on.

I agree. Even though I'm a new player I am surprised that almost every single NPC/monster outside of towns is bent on killing you. It seems too 'convenient' that there happens to be all these aggressive gangs and separatists and god knows what else waiting to kill anything that moves. How do they know that you're not one of them, or a civilian?

 

To me, it detracts from the realism of Star Wars, if that's possible.

SWTOR is an hack & slay game - and thus following Blizzard's overwhelming success formular. Hack & slay RPGs SELL SO MUCH, that ALL OTHER ways of playing RPGs have been ERADICATED in the past ... Except with Indies, maybe ...

And Aventure Games are hated by "the industry" ...

If you just want to enjoy a good role-playing game with an more or less "living, breathing" environment, then play the offline "Drakensang" games ...

If you just want to enjoy a good role-playing game with an more or less "living, breathing" environment, then play the offline "Drakensang" games ...

Might indeed be time to take that one out of the shelf again. That's proper role-playing.

All the skills appear to have been reworked, so I'll need to redesign my character's combat abilities (actually quite tricky at higher levels)

Welcome to MMOs, gameplay is subject to change. I played WoW for 8 years, along with Lotro and these days, swtor, and I can assure you this is typical of the game development process. Bloat is chiseled down, abilities streamlined, bugs fixed, stats re-tuned, redundant abilities removed often to be replaced by equally redundant abilities, etc. It's normal in an MMO game because when you have hundreds of thousands of people playing the same game at the same time everything has to be balanced within reasonable fairness. That's an ongoing process, sadly.

and then I just wanted to advance the storyline a little but was forced to wade through legions of mooks and incredibly aggressive wildlife to get anything done...

I get the feeling you don't play many MMOs. Again, this is typical of an MMO. If this frustrates you, it isn't just SWTOR, it's the entire genre that is not for you. I'm sorry, but it's the way these games are, if there were a suitable alternative that appealed to the vast majority of the playerbase while keeping the leveling grind from approaching Warp 9 or Ludicrous Speed, rest assured it would be industry standard by now.

The fact is that the game just felt like work. Repetitive and annoying.

Then it's not the game for you.

Mass Effect had a "narrative" mode where the combat was partially glossed over and the difficulty set way down. It was good for when you just wanted to see how things unfolded and enjoy the ROLE-PLAYING aspect of the RPG. Can they make that mode for SWTOR? Then I might be able to enjoy playing a powerful Sith Lord who is conquering the galaxy without being bored to tears having to murder stray dogs on Taris.

Mass Effect is not a massively multiplayer online RPG. It doesn't require the constant fine-tuning, content pacing, balancing, and on-going tweaking that a game as massive as SWTOR requires. This game has to appeal to hundreds of thousands of players all at the same time. You can't please them all, but you can certainly please most of them, and as far as MMOs go, swtor is quite popular.

That said, might I make some suggestions to streamline your leveling experience? Stop doing sidequests. Just ignore them. They're tedious and dull. Do your class story, the main planet arc (picked up at the space port or orbital station), and the main objectives for the bonus series. Skip the sidequests and fluff. Do flashpoints or warzones instead, and buy the legacy XP boosts or minor XP boosts off the GTN--or both! My first two or three playthroughs were great, completionist and all, but these days I can't do the sidequests anymore. Doing this will see you completing content at level, minimum, but more likely you'll grossly over level your content until your high 40s where it starts to even out and you've gotten bored of flashpoints lol.

But yeah, I'm not trying to put down what you're saying or anything, I totally get it, I'm just trying to say that this game is mostly industry standard as far as mechanics are concerned. Balancing a single player sandbox game--something you might see a handful of people play together at a LAN party or something--is vastly different from balancing an MMO. Pacing content behind packs of mobs, level, story progression, etc is standard. If it were asy to bypass all those mooks far more people would complain that leveling is too fast and/or too easy than people complaining about the tedium of killing mobs now.

An MMO is an entirely different beast from Mass Effect, Dragon Age, KOTOR, and other games. Those games are bugtested and released, and often glaring character build/class/type imbalances are picked up and exploited by the gaming community from the start. That would never fly in an MMO, and that's exactly why your inquisitor's skill tree has been reset (perhaps several times) and your rotation changed. Single player sandbox games rarely get this kind of attention, even though they probably desperately need it.

SWTOR is an hack & slay game - and thus following Blizzard's overwhelming success formular. Hack & slay RPGs SELL SO MUCH, that ALL OTHER ways of playing RPGs have been ERADICATED in the past ... Except with Indies, maybe ...

 

And Aventure Games are hated by "the industry" ...

 

If you just want to enjoy a good role-playing game with an more or less "living, breathing" environment, then play the offline "Drakensang" games ...

I'm not objecting to the hacking and slaying... I would expect nothing less from a game that gives me a lightsaber!

It's just having to hack and slash meaningless minions that I'd rather do without. The trailers and hype building up the game promoted the "cinematic" feel quite a bit, and while the game certainly has those moments they are only after the monotonous slog of punching through legions of meatbags.

As for addressing concerns about re-learning talent builds and rotations, might I suggest noxxic.com?

I got it mostly figured out after a bit of playing, but this site looks helpful as far as gearing up and fine tuning. Thanks!

Welcome to MMOs, gameplay is subject to change. I played WoW for 8 years, along with Lotro and these days, swtor, and I can assure you this is typical of the game development process. Bloat is chiseled down, abilities streamlined, bugs fixed, stats re-tuned, redundant abilities removed often to be replaced by equally redundant abilities, etc. It's normal in an MMO game because when you have hundreds of thousands of people playing the same game at the same time everything has to be balanced within reasonable fairness. That's an ongoing process, sadly.

 

 

 

I get the feeling you don't play many MMOs. Again, this is typical of an MMO. If this frustrates you, it isn't just SWTOR, it's the entire genre that is not for you. I'm sorry, but it's the way these games are, if there were a suitable alternative that appealed to the vast majority of the playerbase while keeping the leveling grind from approaching Warp 9 or Ludicrous Speed, rest assured it would be industry standard by now.

 

 

 

Then it's not the game for you.

 

 

 

Mass Effect is not a massively multiplayer online RPG. It doesn't require the constant fine-tuning, content pacing, balancing, and on-going tweaking that a game as massive as SWTOR requires. This game has to appeal to hundreds of thousands of players all at the same time. You can't please them all, but you can certainly please most of them, and as far as MMOs go, swtor is quite popular.

 

That said, might I make some suggestions to streamline your leveling experience? Stop doing sidequests. Just ignore them. They're tedious and dull. Do your class story, the main planet arc (picked up at the space port or orbital station), and the main objectives for the bonus series. Skip the sidequests and fluff. Do flashpoints or warzones instead, and buy the legacy XP boosts or minor XP boosts off the GTN--or both! My first two or three playthroughs were great, completionist and all, but these days I can't do the sidequests anymore. Doing this will see you completing content at level, minimum, but more likely you'll grossly over level your content until your high 40s where it starts to even out and you've gotten bored of flashpoints lol.

 

But yeah, I'm not trying to put down what you're saying or anything, I totally get it, I'm just trying to say that this game is mostly industry standard as far as mechanics are concerned. Balancing a single player sandbox game--something you might see a handful of people play together at a LAN party or something--is vastly different from balancing an MMO. Pacing content behind packs of mobs, level, story progression, etc is standard. If it were asy to bypass all those mooks far more people would complain that leveling is too fast and/or too easy than people complaining about the tedium of killing mobs now.

 

An MMO is an entirely different beast from Mass Effect, Dragon Age, KOTOR, and other games. Those games are bugtested and released, and often glaring character build/class/type imbalances are picked up and exploited by the gaming community from the start. That would never fly in an MMO, and that's exactly why your inquisitor's skill tree has been reset (perhaps several times) and your rotation changed. Single player sandbox games rarely get this kind of attention, even though they probably desperately need it.

I get what you're saying, and I suppose I was unfortunately aware of it even before I posted this. I think it just upsets me that BioWare was willing to shell out tons of money and pull out all the stops on certain aspects of the game (voice acting, original score, etc.) and yet in so many ways was too nervous to try anything really new.

Instead they simply mimicked WoW's formula for an MMO and threw their hat into the ring. It felt awfully half-hearted, as if they were simply reskinning that formula. Blizzard owns that genre, it's just stupid to try and beat them at their own game. I just wish BioWare had played more to their strengths, and focused on telling a good story that had exciting gameplay and worried about balancing the books after creating a great game.

I find it a tad bit insulting that they pad all the really cool content (the stories, climactic scenes and encounters, epic moments, etc.) behind mountains of repetitive encounters basically to just drag out the gameplay and maximize the subscription model.

The problem is that it's a themepark MMO. They are obligated by the model to pad out every area with side quests and wildlife to fight through to make it take hours to get through. If this was a true KOTOR, we would have only the class missions and a couple or so side quests per area, but no, unfortunately it's an Everquest/WoW style MMO.

It's for the same reason why every military force, science expedition and colonisation team seems utterly incompetent, requiring the help of random passers-by for a multitude of tasks. If you don't have the manpower to handle the pirates, mutant wildlife and soldiers then you need to fire your managers.

I handle it by just doing to class missions inbetween PvP and space missions, much less stressful lore-wise!

Instead they simply mimicked WoW's formula for an MMO and threw their hat into the ring. It felt awfully half-hearted, as if they were simply reskinning that formula. Blizzard owns that genre, it's just stupid to try and beat them at their own game. I just wish BioWare had played more to their strengths, and focused on telling a good story that had exciting gameplay and worried about balancing the books after creating a great game.

I don't think it's beating them at their own game so much as riding on their coattails.

I find it a tad bit insulting that they pad all the really cool content (the stories, climactic scenes and encounters, epic moments, etc.) behind mountains of repetitive encounters basically to just drag out the gameplay and maximize the subscription model.

I totally get that, it can be tedious and grindy for sure. I played WoW for 8 years and it was a common complaint there, as well, for a time. Blizzard introduced "heirloom" items to speed the leveling process for veteran players and now the complaints are the opposite. Many people feel they've ruined the leveling experience, that letting people blow through content so fast has cheapened the experience, and puts the focus on the game almost squarely at end-game content. The average player that once lamented the tedious level grind now misses a little bit of the artificial gating and slowing of content progression.

There's probably a happy medium there, but the truth of the matter is any MMO that tries something new has a tendency to be poorly received. They're criticized for not thinking outside the box, or when they DO think outside the box they're criticized for X mechanic that didn't work out as planned and most people turns out don't like it. Didn't ESO try to do a few things differently? Seems to me that's where the loudest complaints lie. The average MMO player wants the WoW formula, whether they will admit it or not. WoW is THE MMO for a reason. It's an anomaly, it's impossibly successful (probably because of timing and now nostalgia and familiarity), and deviating too far from its formula causes even loyal fans and subscribers to throw fits of epic proportions and unsub.

The standard MMO formula is the go-to because it's safe and it works. Most people don't mind it, or even outright enjoy it. Thinking outside the box usually gets written off as gimmicky or turns out to be clunky, tedious, and dull. Even SWTOR was heavily criticized for the voice acting budget that supposedly could have gone into filling the game with more gimmicky fluff to be criticized by the same people.

MMO's come with the expectation of periodic content updates and expansions. The problem is that the devs can't keep up with the end-game crew, which makes up a very sizable chunk of their paying customer base. Those guys will blow through content faster than *insert MMO developer here* can put it out, but that company can artificially gate content, slow the pace down, and stretch it out a little while longer so those players don't complain of boredom 2 months after an expansion is released and complain or move on to another game because the next content patch is still in development.

The game has to cater to the casual player, which makes up the majority of the playerbase in any given MMO these days, but it also has to cater to the power gamers because they are still a large chunk of the playerbase. That's why these games get so grindy and weird with the "you're a cut above everyone else but you still have to wade through insignificant mooks" theme--they have to keep people busy long enough to keep the player's attention while they develop new content for that player to burn through lol.

What I'm hearing is 'why is there a game in my movie?' Which is a fairly odd question about an mmo.

It's more of "why do parts of this game feel more like homework than fun?"

So what you want isn't a game but an interactive movie (full of second rate - as far as movies go - CGI and hilariously campy lines). Furthermore, since when did an RPG become defined by dialogue choices? Poorly worded vague ones at that? Playing a role goes far and away beyond what pre-determined choices you make at certain times.

None of the dialogue or story in this game can stand alone without the gameplay elements, mainly combat and social activity. It would be a terrible movie on it's own. But if you want to experience that, there's a series of YouTubers who do a choose your own adventure kind of thing with the dialogue scenes.

Mass Effect was a very generic space opera that relied on the gameplay to prop up it's story. Mass Effect only shines in the department of character development. No matter how watered down it was in the casual mode, it wouldn't be half as entertaining without gameplay (or else you wouldn't buy it and play it, you'd watch it on YouTube).

It's more of "why do parts of this game feel more like homework than fun?"

We've got an entire week of 2XP coming up. This should get you sufficiently over-leveled that even the largest mobs will seem like nothing more than mosquitoes buzzing in your ears.

We've got an entire week of 2XP coming up. This should get you sufficiently over-leveled that even the largest mobs will seem like nothing more than mosquitoes buzzing in your ears.

And drawn to the bug zapper that is your lightsaber like lambs to the slaughter.

Overlevelling doesn't get you all the way, because well, guess what? There is the XP cap, after which you have a rude awakening of being on a level with the content. On a deserted (but full of digital enemies) high-level planet. Then what?

I overlevel content like crazy, by the time I begin Makeb I'm overleveled for the vast majority of it, and by the time I'm at level (54-55 mobs) I've blown a ton of comms on Makeb mods and really don't have any problems. Done it with a sage and merc so far, at least, without problems.

I hadn't played this game in over a year, but recently renewed my subscription because I vaguely remembered enjoying some parts of this game.

 

I wanted to finish up my Sith Inquisitor's storyline, build my Legacy a little, and maybe start a new character and explore some of the other stories.

 

But NO! All the skills appear to have been reworked, so I'll need to redesign my character's combat abilities (actually quite tricky at higher levels) and then I just wanted to advance the storyline a little but was forced to wade through legions of mooks and incredibly aggressive wildlife to get anything done...

 

The fact is that the game just felt like work. Repetitive and annoying.

 

Mass Effect had a "narrative" mode where the combat was partially glossed over and the difficulty set way down. It was good for when you just wanted to see how things unfolded and enjoy the ROLE-PLAYING aspect of the RPG. Can they make that mode for SWTOR? Then I might be able to enjoy playing a powerful Sith Lord who is conquering the galaxy without being bored to tears having to murder stray dogs on Taris.

Every class has standard cookie cutter specs.Nothing tricky about it.

Regarding difficulty, you can first level the chracter till 55 or 50 with exp boosts,get best gear, and do the class+ companion stories after.