This is one of the biggest issues with the level sync system they are going with. When it comes to gear progression, suddenly several stats become irrelevant outside of a few FPs and a single Op. Basically all that matters now are Accuracy, Crit, and Alacrity. Also, go take a look at how much it will cost to craft the MK-11 augment slots, and the Augments to go in them. Add up the material costs for augmenting a full set of gear, and you might just be glad that the new augments are irrelevant.

Looking at these numbers, the first question that pops into my head is "Has anyone at BioWare actually tried to craft literally anything with this system?" The numbers for the Legendary items are obviously insane, but even trying to craft Premium or Prototype items should have shown them that all of their numbers are so out of line that the system is just broken. Hell, someone experienced with crafting in this game doesn't even have to try the new system to realize that it doesn't work. So I just don't get how these numbers were ever implemented in the first place. They're so crazy they never should have been proposed, much less made it through internal testing and onto the PTS.

Has anyone from BioWare actually tried crafting *anything* with the system on the PTS? Because it seems like 5 minutes of just looking at the numbers should tell you that the system is completely broken, and will remain broken even with these changes. First off, the cost to craft the basic green components/cell grafts/etc. are way too high, and need to be reverted to the 2/2/2 cost of every other tier. You can't just increase the cost of the most fundamental crafting item by FIVE TIMES and expect everything else to be fine. When you need three of the premium components to craft a prototype, and three prototypes to craft an artifact, that means you need 90 of each green mat to craft a single artifact component. That is just way, way too high. Second, the number of rare materials required for everything is also completely impractical. The numbers for artifact and legendary schematics need to come down. More importantly, the correct number of flashpoint, Ops, or Conquest materials needed to craft Premium and Prototype gear is ZERO. Any other number is wrong, and will completely break crafting. Third, the Reverse Engineering chance needs to be completely re-evaluated. Right now, Prototype Gear is vastly more difficult to make than for any prior tier, but the lower RE chance means you will go through way more Prototype items trying to learn the Artifact schematics. End result is the cost of learning a schematic is going to be astronomical. I'm talking orders of magnitude higher than the cost of learning schematics for Grade 10. The combination of these issues isn't just going to make crafting inconvenient, it will be completely broken. Nobody is going to bother crafting when the time and credits required to gather enough materials to craft even basic items makes their cost so extraordinarily high that nobody will being to pay for them. Seriously, we're going to be looking at millions of credits for a stack of artifact Stims, where a similar stack of their Grade 10 counterparts would be <100,000. Considering the hilariously marginal stat improvement, nobody is going to buy the Grade 11s, and nobody is going to waste their time crafting them.

I'm really hoping this window gets an overhaul soon, because right now, it's a total mess. There are just way too many categories, and simply finding the companion you want is way more annoying than it has any reason to be. The Alliance Alerts should be moved to a separate tab, and please let us silence ones we have no intention of completing. Like, I don't care about Qyzen Fess, so I'm not going to bother with his recruitment mission on all of my alts. But having a single active alert means that the icon will be flashing forever. Also, having to scroll past alerts that I don't care about whenever I open the window is lame. Just move them to a new tab within the window, and let us track or untrack them like we do with missions. Next we have all of the companions we can summon. I'll use my Smuggler as an example. On this character, I bypassed kotfe/kotet and jumped straight to Ossus. So first, I have, under "Main Characters", a giant list of Influence 1 companions that I don't care about and never intend to use. Then I've got a tab of Other Followers, another tab of Companions, a third tab for Companions: Smuggler, and a FOURTH tab for Recruited Companions. Best part is that my class companions are scattered across these tabs. Guss Tuno and Bowdarr are in Other Followers, Risha and Corso are in "Companions: Smuggler", and Akaavi Spar is in "Recruited Companions". Just.... why? These tabs could easily be condensed into one or two. Please give us some sort options. So the companions we have available are currently scattered across five or six categories, and within each category, they are sorted alphabetically. Please, let us sort the *entire* list companions both alphabetically and by Influence. This would dramatically reduce the difficutly of finding a specfic companion. Finally, we've got the list of contacts. Some were never available as companions, others were temporary companions, while still others are companiosn that have left and not returned. Alliance Specialists in particular should be moved with the Alliance Alerts to a new tab. The old companions that can't be summoned normally, but are available from the Odessen terminal could get their own tab, or just be moved to the same tab as the Alliance Alerts. Basically, any character that isn't available to be summoned should be moved so they aren't making the list longer and more difficult to scroll through. tl;dr: Move everything but the actual companions we can summon out of the first tab of the Companions and Contacts window, give us some sort options to help find companions, and let us stop tracking Alerts we don't intend to finish so the icon finally stops blinking.

Well, for starters, you're not going to be able to find any MK-11 Augment slots unless BW completely overhauls the crafting system. The current material requirements for MK-11 slots are completely and utterly insane. So you're probably not even going to be able to think about augmenting your gear, since nobody is going to go through the hassle of crafting the slots in the first place. Second, even if the crafting aspect is fixed, augmenting your gear is going to be impractical with all the unmoddable gear that you are forced to equip. The next patch is *supposed* to increase the drop rate of moddable gear, but we are still likely going to be forced to use unmoddable gear when it drops. The other problem with all the unmoddable crap is that it makes cartel market weapons useless. That lightsaber you paid real money for? Gotta stick it in your cargo hold because you're forced to use a stupid green saber with annoying sound effects. That ****** assault cannon that you've been wanting to buy? Better not waste any CC or credits on it if you can't even use it at max level. BW really needs to get it through their heads that *all* gear at max level needs to be moddable.

The event should go live when the next Conquest starts, in about 1.5 hours from the time this reply is posted.

I wouldn't worry too much until they completely overhaul the crafting material costs. Even if they did release new schematics, they'd probably be like similar to most of the Grade 11 Biochem stuff - only marginally better than their Grade 10 counterparts, but with downright obscene unit costs. Right now there's absolutely no point in most of the Grade 11 consumables, unless you think it's a good idea to pay millions of credits instead of like ten thousand credits per stack, just for a few percent increase in performance.

From other reports, it appears that general gameplay difficulty has been increased for solo content. First, companion healers have apparently taken a bit of a nerf. Second, the level-sync has been adjusted. You are now set several levels lower on a given planet than you are on Live. So the difficulty will likely not reach pre-4.0 levels, but it should be a bit more challenging than the current face-roll leveling experience.

BioWare, I need to re-emphasize that if your goal with the current system is anything other than "Kill crafting entirely", you have failed. Horribly. I honestly don't know how these numbers even made it to the PTS. They're not "too high", they are completely absurd. Just look at the number of materials to craft the grade 11 components - there is no reason for them to require 5 times more materials than all previous grades. The materials are already more expensive owing to the increased cost and time of relevant missions. Speaking of which, why on earth are the mission times more than doubled compared to grade 10? Every other tier has been an incremental increase. Now look at how many components, and how many other materials, are required to craft things like MK-11 augment slots, or the new medpacs. The total material cost per item is absolutely staggering. These numbers don't need to be reduced by 20%, or even 50%. Most of these numbers need to be reduced by 80-90%. I don't know how these numbers even reached the testing stage. You don't need to test these numbers to realize they don't work. Anyone who even touched the crafting system in this game should be able to tell you that these numbers are completely crazy. That's not even mentioning the fundamental design flaws in the new system. First, not only is requiring 20 conquest materials to craft a single green item completely crazy, why do crappy, borderline-irrelevant green items take any conquest materials at all? Those mats should only be required for crafting the top 1 or 2 rarest, most powerful tiers of gear. Second, there's just way too many new materials. The old system of one white mat, 2 green gather mats, and a blue and a purple mission mat was perfectly fine. Crafting doesn't need to be more complicated - we don't need green/blue/purple tiers for every single material type. As it stands now, crafting is dead. Nobody is going to pay millions of credits for a stack of 6 purple medpacs, and the greens cost more in materials than just buying them from the vendor. Nobody is going to bother with the MK-11 augment slots when it will take 10s and 10s of millions of credits just to add augment slots to a single character, nevermind actually getting the augments for those slots.

So many of the numbers we're seeing are just completely absurd. Like, I have no idea how these numbers were ever proposed, much less approved and passed through whatever BW has for internal testing. Anyone who has played this game should realize that this stuff is just ridiculous. 160k to earn a single Reknown crate is one these numbers - we're going from multiple crates half an hour of dailies to *maybe* one crate an hour. But look at the crafting stuff - Augment slots, Biochem supplies, etc. are seeing material costs go up by ~20 times, while mission times have doubled. Seriously, Medpacs are going from taking 10 materials to TWO HUNDRED SIXTY! Oh, and they heal for a lower % of your health at 75 than the grade 10s do at 70. I don't get how these numbers ever made it to the PTS.

So let's see here... Mission times have more than doubled. This cuts how many materials we can gain through missions by over 50%. Meanwhile, the number of mats required to craft Components has increased 5 times. And the number of Components to craft an Augment slot has increased nearly 4 times. That's 20x the material cost, at the same time mission output has been nerfed by half. BioWare, these numbers are *insane*.

Another vote for reducing the weekly to 10. Iokath, Dantooine, and now Onderon. Weekly missions that require you to return at a later date and repeat some of the missions are just terrible design. A lot of people can only log on a few days out of the week, so if they decide to spend their time on a daily planet, they really should be able to knock out the weekly in one sitting. Making you come back another day to finish the weekly just means people will always repeat the easiest missions, which gets boring and repetitive.

Agreed, it's a complete mess. Main Characters, Other Followers, Companions. Class Companions, Alliance Specialists, Unavailable Contacts.... there's way too many categories, and there's no reason for some of the categories to be on the same page. It makes it a royal pain to find a specific companion. Alliance Contacts could easily be split off in their own window. Never made sense to have them cluttering up the list of companions you have available. Likewise, the unavailable companions could be split off, since you have to go to a special terminal to summon them anyway. As far as available companions, apart from some reorganization (mostly some way of getting the class companions back in one spot), we also need some sort options. If I have a class companion at level 50, I don't want to sort through a bunch of Influence 1 KOTFE characters that I don't care about. At the very least, sorting by Influence would be immensely helpful.

I get the idea behind limiting RNG crates and drops to your current spec. If you're a dps that has no interest in tanking, getting tank gear would be a frustrating waste of time and effort. However, I run multiple specs on all of my characters, and it makes gearing both dps and heals/tank rather tedious. Let's say my dps gear is "good enough" for now, but I want to upgrade my heals set. If I'm running dps for dailies, or if my group already had healers, I have to respec to heals just to open crates. That means messing up my quickbars, and resetting my utilities over, and over, and over again. So for the new gearing system, I'd really, really like the ability to toggle which spec I want for gearing purposes. Let it default to your current spec, but give us the ability to override it and receive healing gear while in dps spec, dps gear while in tank spec, etc. without actually going through the respec process every time.

I use this list for heroics. It's a nice guide to which heroics are worth the effort on a given planet, and also indicates whether there is a bonus mission to go with it.