Gotta go with KotOR 3. Maybe if Bioware had stuck to modestly budgeted single player games they wouldn't have had to sign the deal with the EA devil that'll be acomin' for their souls all too soon. Yeah, maybe they wouldn't have stuck the Exile with that awful, cringe inducing name or butchered the plot of KotOR2 they way they did. It's pretty good. Although since the combat in the KotOR games is so tedious and dull I sometimes prefer rereading Scorchy's KotOR2 LP over replaying it.

There are lots of reasons to be disappointed with SWTOR beyond the abuse of the patented Bioware "nothing you do matters beyond the next line of dialogue" method of 'player choice.' Poor pacing, lack of scope, short length, uneven writing, annoying characters, and other things abound. Personally, I find that the most consistently disappointing aspect to be how at odds the plot is with the game mechanics. What I mean by that is that the structure of the leveling game, i.e. quest hubs sprinkled around with bread crumbs leading the player from one hub to the next, is not especially conductive to telling a strong story. What happens is that it gets muddled with all the other little stories that you have to pick up at these hubs so that you can advance properly. It's very easy to lose interest in a story if you keep having to dip in and out of it all the bloody time and can almost never really immerse yourself within it for any real length of time. I mean, look at all the crap you have to keep straight when you're leveling: the class story, the planet story, a story for each of your pets, a story for every dungeon, and a story for damn near all of the incidental quests you have to pick up along the way. Having to pick up and drop stories so damn often is a lot to ask of someone in any medium, but even more so in a video game because you already have to drop in and out of the story a lot since video game stories are almost entirely told via cut scenes anymore. The part where you run around killing everything in sight rarely helps to move the plot along. All this track switching all the bloody time is not a task many people excel at. For a good example go watch the ending of Ep. 1, which has 4 bloody concurrent plot threads for the audience to keep track of. As a result they don't ever get to spend too much time on any one thread and the audience never really gets to be immersed in any one part of the story. It's always switching back and forth between crap that should[/i, in theory,] be interesting, but isn't because they can never become engrossed in any one segment long enough to form any sort of emotional connection to it. So we have that crap going on almost the entire length of the leveling game in SWTOR. It's one of the major reasons that the non-planet quests you typically get near the end of the chapters tend to feel so much better than the ones you get on the planets as part of your allotment of xp grinding. There are certainly other issues with the game, but I feel that this is probably the biggest one. Most of the others can be mostly forgiven due to how infrequently they appear or excused as personal taste, but I don't believe this issue can be hand waved with such excuses. Yes. Expectation management, both for the developers and the players, has obviously been way out of whack for a long, long time with this game. I mean, even with ~6 years and their hundreds of millions of dollars they still had to cut a lot of crap and scramble to launch when they did with what they had. The sort of rampant, runaway hype that their marketing people cultivated years back is absolutely toxic to both developing and playing games and I have trouble fathoming why the industry still encourages it. How predictably pedantic. The illusion of choice is still important, especially when it's one of the major taglines used to sell the bloody game. You do realize that most people don't actually expect that every facet of a story be absolutely and utterly original, right? There are good reasons for things like genres and tropes to exist. Mostly people just want an engaging tale. Part of being engaging is not being too predictable because that's boring as hell. Unfortunately, not being predictable isn't something Bioware is very good at. They're typically much better at making interesting characters than interesting plots and the writing is uneven at best (ref. the 'payment in kisses' issue.) And people think I'm insulting. Has it occurred to you that maybe, just maybe some of us have done all that jazz and still found the whole vaunted 'Fourth Pillar' to be, shall we say, underwhelming? Maybe, but that doesn't explain why there is so very little carryover from one instanced area to another. There are a couple of nice touches here and there, but by and large it feels unimpressive and exceedingly minor to me.

Uh, WoW? Rift? Any other game that has multiple skill trees per class? FFXI? DAoC? CoH? WoW and Rift again. I'm not sure I follow the logic here. Are you saying that we're lucky to have PvP rewards because they could have launched without them? 'Cause under that line of thought we're lucky to have bloody keybindings and lucky to not have a $30 subscription fee too. Don't see many people counting their stars over those things do ya? Well they would have to be better in this game wouldn't they? Considering I can't think of any other game that has them and all. Though I think they could have been far better had they left the ability to switch their combat role around intact. I'd much rather use the pet I like for story reasons than the one that is mechanically best suited to kill crap with me. Yes. An event where the easiest way to participate and obtain the rewards is to sit in front of the daily terminal and click the rez button every 15 mins is a groundbreaking achievement. I think you've never played both sides. If you did you would understand that, apart from very few select areas, the Republic and Imperial questing areas are almost totally segregated on all planets. That is the main reason for the lack of World PvP, apart from not having any rewards for it of course.

I can never understand why people like to gush about the Agent story as if it's some glittering opal of writing. Seeing posts like this make me flashback to bloody TVTropes and it's legions of far too emotionally invested fanboys. I'll agree that Ch1 is good, really it should be the poster child for all the other Chapters in the game. But that's only because the end is really head and shoulders anything and everything else the game has to offer. That last mission is wonderfully executed and makes up for stuff like Dromund Kaas and Alderann both being so boring that I can't remember what the story on those planets were or Watcher-X being so transparently shifty and backstabbing that there was never any tension or conflict for the entirety of Nar Shaddaa, just a plodding, interminable wait for the inevitable. Coming off the high that is the whole You Know Who encounter, even though it was horribly bugged, I had high hopes for Ch2. Especially since the lead up seemed so promising: a deep cover infiltration mission as a double agent. Finally! Real spy stuff instead of bloody terrorist hunting. Too that that anticipation got stuffed into a refrigerator part way through the first quest. From there on lots of words and phrases come to my mind when I think back to Ch2: disappointment, very silly, contrived plot device, poor attempts at trying to screw with perception like Philip K Dick, a BBEG that's just kind of a chump; even if he does have a glowbat, rakghouls are, and will remain, utterly stupid no matter what anyone tries to do with them, Doc Lokin is easily the best of the Agents pets, even with the rakghoul idiocy, Ensign Temple is mind bogglingly dull and uninteresting, the Chiss commander guy in Hoth makes a much, much better love interest for the chick Agent than bugboy and his ilk, despite that Hoth is still hands down the best zone in the game because it's completely opposite annoying crap like Voss and Nar Shaddaa, and did I mention the horrendous disappointment? Well after that I wasn't about to get excited for Ch3 and boy-howdy am I glad I didn't. If "very silly" is the descriptor for Ch2 then then for Ch3 it must be "extraordinarily silly." There is no pretense of subtly here, just vast collections of *** pulls that to attempt to ramp up the villain's threat level while also making them as uninteresting as possible. The kind of one-upmanship between protagonist and antagonist that you typically see in soap operas and animes that have run for far too long. Not to mention the unwanted and unneeded plot twist that added nothing but plot twisty-ness to the whole endevour. At least the ultimate conclusion was vaguely satisfying, and I'm glad that at least one class story has multiple endings that differ fairly significantly from each other and doesn't require a "CHOOSE YOUR DESTINY BUTTON" like Deus Ex: HR had. That being said, I do want to reiterate the points that I liked. Lest they get lost in the sea of sourness. 1) The ending of Ch1 is just great. All other stories in this game wish they got wrapped up with such care and attention. If you haven't done it yet then go do it now. Preferably as an Operative so you can skip the bullcrap parts like The Unending Corridors of Sameness and The Ugly Bug Ball. 2) I genuinely like Doctor Lokin and Kaliyo as characters. I thought they added to the story as a whole in an enjoyable way, unlike the other 3 chuckleheads you get saddled with. 3) The ability to get different endings, some of them very radically different from the others, was a very pleasant surprise and one that I welcomed wholeheartedly.

Personally I feel that the first group has a pretty valid point since Bioware seems to believe it's perfectly ok for marauders, hybrid sorcs, and tank assassins to have their cake an eat it too. Denying the huge advantage those classes and specs have thanks to the gross discrepancy in survivability and utility they can leverage in addition to their damage is just sour grapes. A couple of things: 1) Current game conditions are never moot. Poor experiences are what make people quit and reroll; or just plain quit of course. 2) Waiting for a miracle patch is, essentially, never the intelligent response. Because, unless you're very lucky, they never come quick enough and you just end up torturing yourself for little to no gain. You can feel noble about rolling with the punches if you want, but most people are just going to go find something that isn't frustrating to do instead.

Some day I'll learn to stop making posts at the end of the week when I'm going to be busy all weekend. From http://www.swtor.com/blog/community-qa-march-23rd-2012 Note how he talks about 'role' and only mentions Commandos offhandedly. Also note how he specifically mentions that endgame content was the focal point of the nerf. So we either accept that rational as the method behind their madness or we believe in wild speculation and conjecture instead. I know which I prefer, however pigheaded it may seem. Depends on what your definition of "on their own" is. 1v1 tanks are ok but, as I've stated, 1v1 doesn't matter in a team game. I define "on their own" to mean queuing solo, where tanks are very marginalized. Guard is a death sentence without a healer around and without autobalancing and the like it can be very easy to get tossed around between both extremes if you're actually trying to be a tank instead of a dps class with better armor. Do try to pay attention, I wasn't trying to say that the magnitude of the nerf was justified. Merely that the comparison that was put forth was flawed and not relevant to the issue at hand. Not all throughput is as valuable as the damage/time or heal/time numbers would imply. A 10k damage ability on a 20s cd is far more valuable than a 20s dot that tics for 1500 damage every 3s on the same 20s cd. This is plain and obvious for everyone to see, despite both hypothetical abilities delivering the same damage over time. What you call simplification I call hyperbole for the sake of drama, something that has no bloody place in such a discussion. Personally the only adjustment I'd like to see to resolve is for breakable CC like mez to not generate it's full amount of resolve all at once. Instead I'd like to see resolve tic upwards after application so that you only gain an amount of resolve commensurate to the length of time you were CC'd before some idiot broke it with a careless AoE. Sigh, another false comparison. Comparing gear sets from totally different tiers with completely different stat budgets is a vaguely amusing mistake at the very best. Pre-1.2 it was utterly trivial to put up largely similar numbers in Champion/Battlemaster (or more likely, Champion/Rakata) gear. Adjusting is different to wholesale nerfing that would only serve to devalue an entire combat role. The thing you're advocating for tanks is the exact same kind of sledgehammer that healers just got clobbered with in 1.2. There are better ways to adjust the extremes of balance without throwing the baby out with the bathwater and making PvP even more of a deathmatch than it already is. For example, they could nerf the base value of Taunt and Guard and then make both of their effects scale with tanking stats like defense, absorb, and shield. They could make it so that you have to be in the tanking stance to use Taunt. They could give Assassins/Shadows and PTs/Vanguards more ally support abilities like Intercede. They could increase the damage split from Guard to something like 50/70 but also allow Guard damage to be mitigated by defensive stats. And on and on. I feel that ideal composition for a PvP team should be to have an even balance between dps classes and support classes, with a tank being support on par with a healer. I believe the best way to achieve this is to roll back many of the healing nerfs from 1.2, nerf the bleeding edge of the outlier dps classes, and adjust tanking mechanics so that there is incentive to spec and play a team damage reduction role instead of the heavy armor dps role they find themselves in now. As an aside, apart from huttball, the current WZs favor defense far too much. They really should be adjusted so that either A) defense isn't so damn easy or B) so that offense plays more of a role in the objectives. Civil War especially could benefit from a mechanic where the team that has the fewest number of turrets gets a temp buff one or two of them can pick up that drastically increases their damage so long as they remain the underdog. Warhammer called them Murderballs, and they could be quite effective at breaking objective stalemates. It would also be nice to have at least one WZ where the entire objective was to kick the ever-loving hell out of each other It would also be

A laughable presumption considering we were explicitly told that the healing nerfs were done in response to raids being too easy. Ah, good old "complaining about tanks" posts. I haven't seen any since Warhammer. How I've missed the inflated sense of self worth and unspoken condescension. Being good at 1v1 is not a viable role for any class in a team based PvP environment and advocating such pigeonholing makes you an utter pillock. Furthermore your knowledge of the tools the different tanking specs have is pathetically inadequate. I challenge you to name these 3 damage reduction CDs you think all tanks get. Easily. DPS and HPS are effectively meaningless terms in PvP. So referencing them in this context is flawed. What matters is burst, for both damage and healing. Pre-1.2 healers had a large advantage in that department since they have very little to no ramp up on their burst heals, and what little they do can trivially be triggered before the fight, whereas many dps specs need several seconds to ramp up to their burst. That is a significant advantage. Or was until they decided that burst healing shouldn't exist, which was stupid as all hell. The complete castration of burst healing is the main issue for healers in 1.2, not HPS. You obviously have no idea how resolve works. Go read Taugrims guide or something. What needs to be fixed are the display issues surrounding other forums of CC immunity like Force Shroud, Unstoppable, and Entrench. No. Apart from the soft cap issues Expertise was fine pre-1.2. If anything it should return that that model. No, no, and no. Without Trauma heals are too powerful for their opportunity cost when compared to damage, see what I said about ramp up time earlier. Nerfing Guard and Taunt does nothing but dilute the already weak differences between tanks and dps specs. I can almost agree with you here. Healers still have an important part to play in PvP. But post-1.2 I don't consider a solitary healer viable. You need the support of a dedicated tank and/or another healer to prosper, and even then it can be an iffy proposition. Basically, 1.1.5 PvP was largely balanced with a few outliers. They should return to that instead of following the hamfisted nerfs and buffs of 1.2 with even more hamfisted, reactionary adjustments like you're proposing

That's a very logical train of thought that is almost entirely tangential to the issue at hand and all too capable of upsetting your customers more than they already are. Well done. You're an engineer aren't you? Between your posts and GZ's posts I'm willing to bet that the only reason the entirety of the SWTOR Community Management team hasn't already died of blood alcohol poisoning must either be A) an inability to comprehend written English, B) gross incompetence, or C) unusually high alcohol tolerance, or D) some combination of the above. A slightly less logical idea, that doesn't aggravate customers whom you've already irritated, might be to recognize that a certain significant fraction of customers will be annoyed by any tweaks to their class and give free respecs to all players affected by any change to their class at all. I cannot imagine it costing your guys too much in the way of effort and, while it might not gain you any good will, it certainly wouldn't increase your net ill will at all either. Something to think about.

Leathality's pros lie with its lesser dependance on cover and in being less apt to getting totally screwed over by armor and defense chance. Not necessarily higher burst, but more flexible, easily usable, and consistent burst. (As as aside, note that just using grenade/dart immediately followed by Cull isn't burst, it's your bread and butter damage.) That being said, I do see 2 things wrong with your actual burst rotation: you don't mention using Ambush or Interrogation Probe. Both of those are important components of your max burst damage. Ambush because it hits like a freight train and can be timed to hit in the same global as Explosive Probe. Just because you have to hardcast it doesn't make it taboo to use as Lethality. I also like to use it to try to scare people who are trying to get open to catch a ball pass. Typically they either see the mark on them and try to run for LoS, or they take an unexpected 4k hit and run off try to heal up. Interrogation Probe is important because, even though it doesn't interact with Cull, it is still a hard hitting and cheap DoT if you take 2/2 Efficient Engineering and it also has the bonus of possibly masking your more important DoT effects so the healer you're trying to dismantle doesn't totally neuter your followup Cull. Your best burst damage is going to be Corrosive Grenade/Dart, Interrogation Probe, relic/adrenal, Ambush, Explosive Probe, and Cull, with Takedown either being used ASAP or whenever it's most likely to kill the target outright. If you really, really need some extra damage on top of that then Series of Shots or Frag Grenade. The whole rotation is often overkill, but when you really need someone to die it's worth it. (Technically, I suppose true max burst would be to do the above with Orbital Strike going while you Ambush/Ex.Probe/Cull, but I don't think it'll work out very well too often.) That reminds me, you are using a Power relic and a Power adrenal right? They're the only ones worth using.

You're missing the point entirely. Having Revan in the game (and novel) AT ALL is mucking up KotOR. Same with having the Exile around screwing up KotOR 2. There's a very big problem with making games that purport to have meaningful choices in them, then you go back a few years later and say, "Right. This is what actually happened and if you didn't follow these steps to the letter then you're wrong and I'm right. To hell with your nostalgia and such." More than anything else, nostalgia is what Star Wars freaking runs on . Damaging that in any way is absolutely retarded. This game would never have come to pass were it not for people's love of KotOR, yet they went out of their way to make it so that anyone who didn't play a male, pure Light Side Revan and a female, pure Light Side Exile with a goofy name objectively wrong. That's like if Lucas made a new, Laserdisc only, Special Edition of the Original Trilogy where Luke dies when the Death Star explodes and he's replaced by Biggs for the rest of the movies, and then Lucas declared that only that one particular edition counts. It's just plain dumb. And like that above example, it's dumb for no reason other than to be dumb. There is zero need for it from a story standpoint. Obsidian went to great lengths to make sure that whenever KotOR 2 referenced Revan, and KotOR in general, that you could make it true to whatever choices you picked in KotOR. That's good writing and attention to detail. Obviously that exact method wouldn't work too very well here with the multiplayer conversations, but there are other ways to honor people's prior choices and still tell a good story. Here's one that's in the game right this second: the Revanite quest line on Dromand Kaas. One of the NPCs specifically states that they don't even know Revans gender and, while they talk about how Revan mastered both the Light and Dark Sides, they never make any mention of what alignment Revan was at the end of the war. Ambiguity allows the writer to call back to KotOR and still respect whatever choices the player made way back in 2003. That is much better writing and shows far greater concern for the feelings of loyal players than anything in the Foundry and the bloody tie-in novel.

Undoubtedly the best plot twists were all the times I was betrayed in every bloody class story I've done. I mean who would expect that in a Bioware game of all things eh? I don't even think I could recount all of them. Good thing I didn't make a drinking game out of it. I was really surprised that the only good plot in the game is the one from the very tail end of the Agents Ch1. It takes balls to market a game so heavily on story and then utterly fail to deliver everywhere but one place. I was also heartily surprised to see them take such massive dumps all over KotOR and KotOR 2 just for the sake of a mid-level dungeon and a crappy tie-in novel. Especially when so much of the rest of the game almost feels like KotOR fanfiction at times. What hard drugs the development team was on. Especially the class & UI designers As a runner up, how big is the rod that's stuck up GZ's backside and who thought it would be a good idea to let him post on the forums when said rod drives him to be such a dick in the majority of his posts?

The Skipray could be cool, I do love having the working s-foils on the X-Wing and the lack of retractable landing gear is why I've never gotten the Imperial Shuttle, but it seems like such a shame that something as iconic as the basic TIE Fighter has never had a UCS set. It's not like they're adverse to doing cheaper UCS sets either, the other two TIE sets and the Jedi Starfighter were both only $100 and the AT-ST was only $80. As for capital ship models, I have to vote for the Nebulon B Escort Frigate. Those things look so damn cool. It would be a real pain in the *** to keep it from collapsing though.

Pretty sure the UCS TIE Advanced was only $100. Just like the UCS TIE Interceptor was way back in 2000. Now the UCS Millennium Falcon was $500; and also amazingly cool. Wish I had one. It would look really good next to my X-Wing, Y-Wing, Tantive IV, TIE Interceptor, Star Destroyer, Death Star 2, and soon-to-be B-Wing. I hope they do an A-Wing and maybe a TIE Fighter or a TIE Bomber for 2013. I'm annoyed every time they waste a UCS set on something lame like the Darth Maul bust or other prequel induced crap.

Yeah, I hate having to get to know a new character. It's so much easier to get used to the 19th vastly different version of the same character. Retreading old ground is just so damn comfortable. It's like you don't even have to think after a while. "Oh there's a new dire threat looming large over the galaxy? Jolly good! I wonder what combination of Luke, lightsabers, new Force shenanigans, X-Wings, and good old fashioned drama will be used to overcome this one in 3400 pages, $64, 9 books, 6 months, and 600,000 totally superfluous words." I can't until someone tries to push the History Eraser Button and reboots Star Wars like they did with Star Trek and the DCU. Then we can do this whole thing all over again. What fun.

Couple of nitpicks. wat Are we talking about the same FFXI here? PS2 game that was ported over to the PC? Released in Japan back in 2002? 'Cause the only UI modification FFXI had by default was changing the background color of the chat log and the colors of the different chat messages. To do anything else required modding the game files. Likewise, any addons you might find for FFXI are ones that piggyback on a 3rd party app that was used for esoteric functions like: not crashing the game when you alt tabbed out. And used to cause a whole hell of a lot of drama to boot. So that's not really fair to SWTOR. At least FFXI had the option to turn off the damn smart camera at launch though. I assume you're talking about stuff like WoW's Dungeon Finder? 'Cause Warhammer never had that, but LotRO added one about a year ago.