7.0

I'm trying to log in on the side while getting caught up on some work stuff on my other computer after my unexpected personal day yesterday while I was sick and had to have a furnace repairman over. I played a fair number of hours yesterday evening after the work day was done. And I've looked a lot through the forum discussion on SWTOR's website. There's... not a lot of positivity about this update. Very few people believe that it was worth it, and if there's a feature that they think was a good idea, it's balanced out by several "features" that were a bad idea as well as a fairly buggy or inconvenient, at least, rollout makes even the positive features difficult to enjoy. Anyway, I can't because the servers are down for some kind of fix, so I thought I'd make a post.

I'm not willing to be too judgmental too soon; I might end up liking things when I get used to them that I don't like all that much now. I will say, however, that I think some of my early impressions will likely remain. Let's cover those.

• When loadouts and combat styles work properly, instead of scrambling your ability set-up, it's a pretty good idea. I already love that I can add a stealth secondary combat style and when I'm done fighting pointless trash mobs, I can switch to stealth and skip to the good stuff. I strongly suspect that every single one of my characters will have an Operative or Scoundrel if they're a tech character and a Shadow or Assassin if I'm a force-character, just so I can avoid fighting the stupid trash mobs.
• The idea of being able to play, say, a Vanguard in the bounty hunter story (one that I'm specifically intending to do) is pretty cool. That's a positive, although it's not anything that I've actually done yet... For the most part, I didn't mind that the classes and the stories were wed all these years. In fact, it all kind of made sense to me. This whole paradigm of changing that seems like trying to take old content and make it feel fresher by putting it in a different context rather than actually giving us new content.
• Almost all of the UI changes are terrible. Some of them actively so, some of them I'll probably get used to and not mind as much in a few weeks. But none of it needed to be done, and I'm not clear why they thought it was a good idea to do so.
• We get these ridiculous new Shaka Zulu hairstyles which most players will never use, but we still can't get Theron Shan's original hairstyle? Sigh.
• The grind and gearing system is also not popular. I wish the Seasons felt different than a more tedious version of Conquests. Which is already kind of tedious, because it tries to force you to do all kinds of stuff that you may or may not want to do.
• Not all of the abilities trimming has been bad, although it's been a common complaint. My sniper has evolved into one of my grinding backup characters that I play a lot of, but finding that I can now do all of my abilities from behind that little force field thing was an improvement. I presume that that change was mirrored to the Gunslinger too, but I haven't played much of my Gunslinger yet.
• Why in the world did common fonts change here and there? It feels like someone was trying to justify that they were actually doing something; please don't fire me.