The Weekly Innervate - Star Wars: TOR - End Game Gear Is Making Me RAGE

Welcome to the Weekly Innervate where I go over and share my thoughts about something going on in the world of video games! This week was originally going to be about my thoughts of Guild Wars 2 after playing during it's free week. Then I was going to replace it with SWTOR Patch 2.4 notes, and then I got in game to take some pictures of the Jedi Consulars end game PvE/PvP gear. The Conqueror gear, as usual, looks absolutely awful so I decided to try the Obroan (Ranked) gear in hopes it looked better. And I actually really liked it! So I decided to see what the other classes end gear looked like... and this is what I found.

This is the ranked PvP gear that is currently the highest you can get for the four Republic classes. See anything odd happening here? THEY ALL LOOK THE SAME! Every single class has exactly the same armor design except for minor changes with the chest piece design. Fair warning I am going to rage about this because I think this is completely unacceptable.

This is end game gear. The absolute best of the best, you cannot find gear anywhere else that's better than this in the game until their next content patch which is months away now. So for the entirety of this patch everyone in end game PvP who does ranked Arenas will look exactly the same unless the use Adaptive Armor. And that's the excuse; "It doesn't matter what the end game armor looks like because everyone is just going to use Adaptive armor anyway". NO! This is your END GAME ARMOR. This is armor that is going to take people months, hundreds of matches to play before they get their entire set. Something that takes that long to get should be shared, I for one would want to show off my gear and I do. When I get end game gear that is current I like to show it off and not cover it because it says "look at me, I do end game content and I worked for weeks to get this gear! Look at me!". Now, there's no point in doing that because every single person, not just all of Jedi Consulars will look exactly like me and this forces people to either look the same as everyone else (making the gear you worked hard to get completely bland and not unique) or cover it with Adaptive Armor so they feel unique in an MMO. You should not force players to make that decision because you're too lazy to make gear class unique.

And that's what this is completely. Laziness by the design team. "People are going to wear adaptive armor anyway so it doesn't matter if the end game gear looks the same because no one will wear it". What kind of mentality is that? In an MMO, your end game is your everything. If you don't have End Game that people want to do then people won't stay to play your game. I mean, that's what we saw go wrong with SWTOR in the first place. And instead of listening to the community and fixing their mistakes, they would rather tell their design team to hurry up and finish the end game gear in 2 hours so they can spend the next week working on the gear they put in the Cartel Market packs. And that's what makes me the most angry. We get a new Cartel Pack every month with 2-3 sets and 5-10 individual armor pieces that people will spend hundreds of dollars buying but we get a new tier of raid content every 6-9 months and we get gear that looks exactly the same between all four classes. It feels like, to me, Bioware and EA have completely given up on the game succeeding because they couldn't keep their subscriber base during it's early stages. They would rather just design Cartel Market items and make as much money off of the game as possible until it dies and that's all they care about. They don't care about fixing the game or improving it, it didn't stay popular so they call it a failure and move on.

What would happen if World of Warcraft took this mentality. What if in Tier 16, Blizzard released the 11 gear sets and they all looked exactly the same except each class had a different chest piece pattern and Blizzard came out and said "Well, we thought about continuing to release unique gear but everyone just transmogs it anyway so it didn't seem important to do that anymore". Do you know how much their fanbase would rebel against that? No, they wouldn't. They would never be so stupid as to do that because they know that people are going to be wearing this for 6+ months and they want it to look good. Why? Because they understand end game is important.

One of the worst things about this, is that this gear will not be easy to get. It will take people weeks if not months of straight grinding to get this gear. Not because they cost so much or because Ranked Arenas are hard. But because before you can even buy this gear, you have to grind out the Conqueror gear, which comes from Unranked Random Warzones. So we have to not only grind out a complete set of gear through regular Warzones but only then can we use our Ranked Warzone commendations to buy the end game gear. This will take so long and the reward is reskinned gear that everyone looks like. The reward is to go into a Ranked Arena and having not only your entire team looking the same but the enemy team and every team you come across after that looking exactly like you unless you or they change into different Adaptive gear. Months of hard work and that's what you get.

OH, I almost forgot. As if it couldn't get any worse, I found this.

Look familiar? This is the End Game (non-tier) PvE gear that can be bought with Ultimate Commendations (the highest form of PvE currency). The Tier Gear with the set bonuses look exactly the same as this except they are recolored Blue and Gold. So not only does every classes gear looks identical but the end game PvE and PvP gear is exactly the same aside from color. There is NO difference. And SWTOR wonders why it isn't succeeding as a top grade MMO. People wonder why it can't compete with WoW on the smallest scale. Laziness. Plain and simple. Absolutely disgusting, abhorrent and inexcusable laziness.

I don't usually get angry about MMOs in general, but this is something that absolutely just sent me off of a cliff of emotions when I discovered this today. What do you think? Is it acceptable for the gear to look the same? Do you not care because you're just going to pull the Mods out and put them in something you like better? Or does it annoy you that your end game gear looks exactly the same no matter what activity you do besides a recolor?

Project Innervate Special - Star Wars: TOR - Patch 2.4 Release and It's Problems

Welcome to a Project Innervate special for SWTOR's new patch! Two weeks ago we had Patch 5.4 drop for World of Warcraft so it shouldn't be any surprise that SWTOR now has a new content patch of it's own right on their heels. However, with the bad press it has received I doubt this will be a boost of moral to SWTOR players.

Launch Night Issues

Last night my Twitter absolutely blew up over SWTOR and it wasn't anything good. Last month, with the new launch of Patch 5.4 for World of Warcraft I resubbed after letting my sub drop for a few weeks due to lack of things to do and my Gamer ADD being set on SWTOR. I wasn't able to pay for both SWTOR and WoW at the time so I had to let my SWTOR subscription lapse. I hate SWTOR Free to Play model so much I lose all motivation to play unless I'm subscribed because the game is so gutted and unnecessary all it does is make me angry.

Last night, every SWTOR fan was warning people to not attempt to Patch or Log In until tomorrow morning when maintenance was complete. If you were unlucky enough to try before word spread or are casual and don't follow news about SWTOR then your client corrupted and you had to re-download to client. This is pretty bad since SWTOR is about 20 gigs (or more) now and having to download everything over again would make anyone want to not bother, especially if they are free to play players or subscribers considering leaving anyway.

Patch Notes... Kind of?

New Planet - Oricon: Oricon (which is technically a moon, not a planet) is very prominent in the Dark Side of the Force (for currently unknown reasons) and is where the Dread Masters have run too. This planet, like other planets, will have a mini story line for players to go through as well as house the new instances and dailies.

4v4 Arenas: No one can deny that SWTOR PvP has been in a pretty bad place since they had a near 10 month period where they had no content patches at all. This patch not only removes the 8v8 Ranked Warzones that have been in Pre-Season for a year and a half but it introduces 4v4 Ranked Arena. Players will be able to queue up solo or in a group and come against groups who have a similar composition to them (so if you have a healer, the group you face will be more likely to also have a healer). Ontop of this, there is a new of gear for PvP called Conqueror and the Ranked gear is called Obroan. You must first grind out the Conqueror Gear before you can buy the Obroan Ranked version because it is a component of the currency.

Jedi Consular/Sith Inquisitor Changes: There is none. That's right. 0. Not even any bug fixes. This gives the illusion that they may have finally balanced healing/ranged dps Jedi but those who actually play them know that that's not the case at all. Oh well, maybe next time.

Treek Has Companion Quests: I was super irked when I bought Treek on my main 55, raised her affection to 10,000 through gifts just to learn she didn't have any quests apart from her introduction. If I had known this I would have just put her on my Jedi Knight I was having trouble leveling due to constantly dying because Bioware thought it would be good to make a pure tank/dps class to get their healing companion at level 36. Apparently, this was just a bug with any characters made prior to Patch 2.3, the patch she was introduced in. All toons now have her conversations unlock. (Republic side videos coming soon here!)

Two New Operations (Maybe Soon?): So needless to say EA/Bioware done goofed on this one. Apparently, there is a breaking bug with the final boss of Dread Palace where one of the council bosses in the fight doesn't recieve a buff during a phase transition making the encounter unkillable. This means that there will not be a completion to World/Realm first kills (if SWTOR still even has a competitive raiding scene left) until the team can fix it. How on Earth did this make this past testing...?

Shift + Left Click Puts the Name of Something in the CTN Search Box: Speaks for itself. Quality of life change that is important and work mentioning.

New Dailies and Reputation: This is the Oricon planet reputation. You MUST complete the planets story line before you can unlock the dailies for the grind. Reputation rewards include two adaptive armor sets (both look pretty awful for Republic), a pet that looks like a roided up rakghoul, a mount that's got to be close to be reskinned in every color and Black/Red Dye.

Good content patch, little irritated that the raid doesn't work but I'm sure I'll be over it once they fix it. However, there is something that I am really pissed off about that will be out later tonight that will be linked here once it is finished.

Monday Morning Musings - General MMO - The Companion System: A Unique Leveling Experience Other Games Should Adopt

(Author's Note: Sorry for the one day delay, I got sucked into SWTOR and couldn't get out.)

Leveling – The Bane of Healers everywhere. It is the time of the gaming cycle, whether it be launching the game for the first time or an expansions launch night, where we have to run back to our class trainers and respec into a Tank or DPS specialization so that we can get back to max level. Personally, I hate DPSing in general and will always be a healer main spec in all games that I've played. So being forced to choose between going DPS spec so I can experience the new questing content or having to grind the same PvE/PvP instances one hundred times just so that I can stay in my healing spec.

When people talk about Star Wars: The Old Republic's unique leveling experience the thing people most talk about is the voice over questing, the class specific story lines and the Roleplay quality to tailor your character to how you wanted to play. But when I think about SWTOR's unique leveling content the first thing that comes to mind is the companion system. SWTOR was the first game that I played that had a companion system where you had a secondary AI that could do a range of tasks from the traditional triad system.

The companion system was one that added an extra layer to the leveling experience that is overshadowed but to me one of the most important features in the game especially since the game did not launch (and still doesn't support) a dual spec feature. Having to respec from Healing to DPS every time I wanted to do a dungeon or wanted to do Dailies at max level content would have definitely been an issue that could not be over looked. Having the companions however made it possible to level up in a healing spec from level 10 until level 55.

Healing is truly the only spec that has a difficult time leveling in the spec through questing content that it is nearly impossible to do solo which is what questing content primarily is. It is also one of the roles that is the most difficult to learn to do in a brand new game and having to read all your abilities at once and figure out how to use them properly in an environment where people are quick to blame the healer on wipes is extremely discouraging. The companion system allows someone to level as a healer, which gives them the same luxury of gaining their skills at a slow pace and even gaining experience in high pressure situations such as accidentally pulling too many mobs and needing to keep something that may not be quite that geared alive.

When I play through Healing characters in SWTOR I tended to pick whoever my romanced companion was (because I'm a big ol' softy) which was generally a DPS of some kind and I would heal them while they killed people. Neverwinter is the most recent game in memory that also had a companion system that was a lot simpler than SWTOR's system but kept the same principle. You could pick one that performed a role for you which allowed you to heal your way through leveling (and tank, since Neverwinter's threat system was broken and Cleric's had to kite while healing because we generated more threat than tanks did in end game content but we won't mention this).

Allowing players to level in the specialization that they truly want to play end game content with will not only make players want to level and keep them interested in the game longer but will also increase success in PvE/PvP end game content as the backbones of the group will have hours of experience that they wouldn't have had in other games playing their specialization.

I'm truly hoping that more games begin to adopt the companion system into their games as they develop to make their questing experiences much more dynamic and set themselves apart from the World of Warcraft model of questing that has been a bane on the community for nearly a decade. As a main spec healer in nearly every game that I play any reason to not play as a DPS through half of the content is always something that keeps me subbed longer and generally a lot happier to go and do my dailies or level up a new character.

Monday Morning Musings - Star Wars: TOR - What Bioware Could Have Done Better With the Chevin Event

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I completed the world event this week and I have to say that I was extremely disappointed. I loved the Rackghoul Plague World Event and it set a lot of expectations for the world events that they said they would be releasing in the future. There are a few things that made this world event not as exciting.

No World Bosses/Not Multiplayer Friendly

There was no community in this world event that I experienced. There were no world bosses you needed to complete, last world event you needed to kill the World Boss inside the World PvP area of Tatooine to receive a Codex entry that gave you the title of the event. This was before the server mergers and it was hard to get a group together for the boss and anytime you did there would be 5 or 6 of the other faction grieving you to the point where I wasn't even able to kill the boss. But it was still fun to have that World PvP that you don't really see in many games.

The event itself was not multiplayer friendly at all. None of the items that you needed to gather were in an instanced area and were out in the open world and some were even cross faction. This meant that 10+ people were trying to click on the same things and the only times that you grouped with people was to have a higher chance at clicking the items before anyone else. People didn't communicate with each other while in this group if they chose to get into the groups at all. In particular, the second days item (the Black-and-Orange sphere) was particularly annoying. You had 1 terminal that 20+ people were gathered around and we just stood there trying to click it before every other person there.

Very Little Play Time Required

SWTOR has been dipping in subscribers, that is no secret to anyone, and this world event didn't exactly take a lot of time to complete. Some people might call that an improvement but I actually kind of find it annoying to get onto a game, especially with a World Event going on, and spend 10 minutes in game to complete the days tasks and then be completely finished with everything required. I liked the time it took to do the Rackghoul Plague events, you spent a lot of time on the first day to complete the very first quest and then 30 minutes - 2 hours doing the dailies for the rest of the week; this not including the time it took to do the world bosses.

I imagine the World Event is something that Bioware was hoping would improve subscription sales for at least the month in which the World Event was taking place. I streamed every second of the World Event and it literally took me 4 hours to complete the entire thing. Someone watching my or anyone else's stream might look at that and say "is $15 really worth 4 hours of gameplay?" If I was someone not invested in SWTOR I would say no.

Rewards Aren't Entirely Worth It (IMO)

This time around we have a few different things in terms of rewards. You receive about 110 Tokens at the end of the event (this does not include any extra farming of the Smuggler Crates). And you can buy a few things with that.

• Sand People Bloodguard Gear - Cosmetic Armor set that is a reskin of the Social Sand People gear. I have no idea what exactly Sand People has to do with this event at all. You never see a Sand Person, Sand People have nothing to do with Chevin's or the event, and you never set foot on Tatooine. I feel like they stuck this armor set on the vendor because they didn't have anything else to put there.
• Legacy Non-Force User Weapon - All of my leveling characters are on a separate server. I had characters across a lot of different servers and my 50 main is alone on The Bastion because all the other servers sent my characters somewhere else. So these are completely useless to me personally. I also don't see much point in having a World Event reward things not for the character that did all the work to complete the event. I might be alone on this but when I'm done with event I want to show it off on my main, not use something on my alt that I will ultimately replace. And from what people are saying the items aren't even that well itemized. And the color crystals are yellow, so you can't even buy them for the cool color crystal.
• Non-Combat Pet, the Lobelot - This pet is TWICE AS MUCH as the mount. 250 tokens are needed for this guy, by the time you farm all of those tokens from the Smuggler's Crates that have a 10 minute respawn timer and EVERYONE is looking for you might have found one inside the Crates themselves. They have a small drop chance so if you have anything else you want to buy, buy them first.
• Speeder, Hyrotii Scapper -One of the quests requires you to ride a speeder to a broken down part of Nar Shaddaa to receive an item. It looks like a spare speeder you can drive around on Nar Shaddaa except one of the back lights is busted. You can buy this for 120 Tokens. I have no interest in mounts in this game because they are all just speeders. Let me ride a Bantha!

And the best part of all. The pet you receive at the end of the event for completing every quest is... a reskin of the pet everyone who is on a merged server before the automated server transfers and subsequent shut down of the downed servers got for free! That's right, anyone who transferred to their decided servers recently got a Non-Combat pet (kinda looks like an Akk Dog, can be seen in the above picture) in their in-game mail. The final quest at the end of the event gives you the exact same model except grey and not orange. So you do all of the work and get the same pet you got for free for transferring before they make you transfer.

I got the Sand People Bloodguard armor just so it could match the Imperial Containment Officer armor I got from the last World Event and plan to sell the rest of my tokens showing just how worthless they are to me personally. You also receive a title based on your faction and what choice you make at the end of the story line. Which brings me to my last point.

Story Left In A Cliff Hanger/Unexplained

This was something that ticked me off with the Rackghoul Plague event as well. SWTOR is such a story driven game and I hate it when a story is started and then the ending or the entire point is never explained. In the Rackghoul Plague I suppose the point was to find out what exactly started the plague outbreak (which you do find out through reading the Codex Entries you're given after the daily quests). But it is never explained how the plague is stopped, the event ended and the plague was just kind of gone.
The quests for the Chevin world event show your contact sending you on missions to tap into Chevin transmissions and you learn that the Chevin might not be entirely truthful and might be using the items you plan to give them for good. At the end of the event you can choose to give the items to the Chevin or keep them for your faction. It doesn't matter who you give them too, it never explains why the Chevin want the items for, what they end up using them for, or the whole point in the event in the first place.
Here, go collect a whole bunch of things, the people sending you to do this may or may not be completely shady. Oh, you got everything? Kay, thanks, bai! ... I hate that! I freakin' hate that! That's the second event where there's no explanation what-so-ever as to why exactly we're doing this or how it ends.

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Needless to say... there were A LOT of things wrong with this event. The whole fun part of the Rackghoul event was that there were world events to do, world bosses to kill, just generally whole server fun that was kind of brought down by the fact that there was no one on the server to play with. The server mergers fixed a big part of that and then the world event that they release has nothing really to do with the world. It feels like everyone was on the same Single player quest and it was more annoying to have more people doing it because you had to wait around and try to be the fastest clicker in the group.

They took the WORLD out of the World Event this time around and they really need to fix that for the next one! I feel like they took 2 giant steps back with this event and I hope they get back on track for the next one.

The Weekly Innervate - Star Wars: TOR - A Resto Druids Review

This weekend I was able to get one of the one million+ Beta Keys that Bioware handed it out to many MMO websites. I originally had no interest in the game what-so-ever even with all of the hype it was receiving. I still felt extremely hurt with the way Rift turned out and didn't want to be hurt that way again. I pre-ordered Rift, played it for a month and found out how generic and boring it was and then stopped playing. I was not going to be sucked into this time. And then one of my guild mates began talking to me about the game after one of our raids. When an officer in your World of Warcraft guild that writes about WoW for a living is talking about another MMO you listen. He told me about how everything in the game, every quest, every cut scene was voiced was the first thing that caught me. I love voice acting in games and was happy when WoW started putting it in a little when Cataclysm was released even though it was still minimal.

Then he started telling me about the Choice System, in quests you have a choice between two and three options as voiced replies to quest givers. And then there is the Light Side Choices and the Dark Side Choices. In some quests you have a choice to do something Nice or Naughty and those choices can come back at later points in the game. He gave this example. As a Level 10 Jedi Knight. you come across a Sith Lord and you have a battle, at the end of the battle you have a conversation and you have two choices. You can either choose the Dark Side Choice which is to kill him. Or you can choose the Light Side Choice which is to allow him to live to seek Redemption. 40 levels later, you can be questing and come across a life threatening scenario, that Sith Lord that you let live can come back and save your life, impacting your story in the game.

This was something that interested me a lot. I have always loved the World of Warcraft Lore but find it extremely confusing to follow. I also feel that questing in WoW is extremely boring because of how linear it is. Nothing every changes aside from going between different faction or the zones you decide to quest in. So I decided to take a look into the game to decide for myself. And boy... was I surprised.

Anyone who says that SWTOR is WoW in space is on crack and the statement still boggles my mind. The games are so radically different in so many important ways. Yes, they both do quests to get experience and there's PvP and Dungeons. I heard that WoW was that first game to do these radical things in an MMO (give me a break).

The Questing Experience should honestly be the reason why you try out this game and this is the primary reason I am buying the game. The Questing Experience has basically made this game such a radical change from all other MMOs on the market today. Every single quest in the game is voiced and the voices are absolutely amazing. I did the beginning of each side (Republic and Empire) and they were extremely compelling. I was so immersed in my characters because I could go from my Jedi Counselor and be curt and polite to my Sith Inquisitor who was snarky and ruthless. Not only did the voice acting make Questing immersive but it was the actual quests themselves. In the twelve levels I got through on my Sith Inquisitor I think maybe four of the quests involved Kill 10 of X and Gather 6 of Y.

Almost of the quests involve you going from Point A to Point B, finding some mystical item or artifact or exploring the depths of a tomb while fighting off the enemies inside. And there was ALWAYS a reason. No, kill 10 of these boars because we need to clear them out, and they just keep re-spawning anyway so what you did really does nothing. It kept the world extremely immersive and I absolutely loved it. I generally absolutely cannot stand questing in games. It's the most boring part for me and yet I spent 20+ total hours over the weekend doing quests. I did nothing else in the game and I wanted to KEEP doing it. Even though I told myself I shouldn't because I'd just have to do it all again when the game released, I wanted to know how my story continued. I wanted to know if Ffon and I would get into a large battle, I wanted to know if Khem Val would eat someone, I just wanted to know! Even if you don't want to play the game like an MMORPG I would encourage you to buy it and play through it for a month like it was a single player console game if only to experience the amazing story they have put together for this game.

Oh, and some little awesome thing. When you quest and you do have to collect things from corpses, not all bodies drop loot, and if it drops a quest item, the body will send off a Yellow beam instead of the usual Blue beam so you don't have to loot something useless to find it doesn't have a quest item. I found that pretty awesome!

I tried out both of the healers. The Jedi Counselor and the Sith Inquisitor. Both of these classes are the exact same thing except they are on opposite sides. They use the exact same attacks but with different names so you don't have to choose a specific Allegiance because you want the healer only they offer. However, this is where the game kind of lacks. They both don't get heals until Level 10~12 when you get the quest to choose your calling. The healers only have two or three total healing spells and they are your Flash Heal, Greater Healer ext. I feel like the niche of dedicated Tank, Healer, Damage has been broken in this game. Many classes can spec into a heal but still be damage. The Sith Sorcerer has a spell called Dark Bind (your Heal) but it's three Talent Trees are Healing, Damage, Damage. I feel like the game wants everyone to be able to DPS and throw out heals on each other if someone gets low but you shouldn't have some one dedicated outside of the group to standing there and healing. Until I reach end game level I won't really know for sure.

I got to go through the first Flashpoint (dungeon) and it was a lot of fun. Unlike WoW the Flashpoints are 4-player groups that you can technically 2-man (with 2 Real People and 2 Companions). Again, they are completely voiced from the beginning to the end and extremely immersive. Black Talon, the level 10 Sith Empire Flashpoint, takes place on a spaceship where you face to clear out the rebellious crew and the oncoming Jedi droids from your ship then get on the Jedi Ship and kill/capture it's captain. And this is where I discovered Group Conversations. Group Conversations are when you and your party members are all on the same quest/Flashpoint. It synchs up your cut scenes so that you both hear the same things and have the same options. If you choose the same option of speech as the person you're with you gain Social Points and your character has the ability to speak instead of the group leader. But if you choose differently the group leaders speech prompt is selected and you get a few less Social Points.

As a WoW Player who has no plans of quitting WoW for pretty much any game ever, I pre-ordered the Digital Collectors Edition the moment I got through Level 3 of the Jedi Conselor. I have absolutely fallen in love with this game and I would suggest that you do the same. I do not currently plan on Raiding or PvPing in Star Wars: The Old Republic. I am buying the game solely because I want to play through the Jedi and the Sith Story Lines until their conclusions because I want to know how they end. My current plans are to play until I have completed every quest on either side and then ending my subscription until more content is released. And as someone who generally hates questing and buys a game for it's end game content that should tell you something. I may change my mind and continue playing casually but as of right now I will be playing the game as if it were a Console game. Personally, I feel as though SWTOR would have made more money if they had actually made the game around their questing which is pretty much single player for the most part. But I suggest you at least check it out in an upcoming Beta Weekend. You won't be sorry!