Legacy of the Sith

OK, I've played Legacy of the Sith for over a week now. Time for a more in depth review of what I think of the significant changes. There's no doubt plenty of little minor changes (according to the patch notes there certainly are) but most of them have only minimal impact on the game. Before I begin, I should point out that I'm almost exclusively a solo player. I've grouped up here and there for a few small things, like a heroic when someone else was standing around and invited me to group up, or something like that, but I'm not really a group player, and don't care about group activities. I've never played an Operation, I've only occasionally played a group flashpoint, or fought a group world boss, etc. This will have a significant impact on my opinion of the update. People who do grouping are very motivated into a kind of hyper min-maxing mode of thought which I do not share. So many of the complaints seem over-wrought to me, because I don't care about every little tiny point of advantage. I didn't even have level 306 gear for any of my characters when the thing rolled over; my semi-retired characters who had finished the main story ranged from about 284 gear rating or so to about 296. 

One. The obvious thing is the new content; the Manaan world area and the Elom flashpoint. I haven't played either yet. To be honest with you, while the story since the end of the class stories has had some pretty cool moments, the lack of diversity (i.e. class specific stories) has made all of that content less appealing to me than the original class stories. I've played all of it once with my Jedi Knight. I've played much of it with my Sith Warrior. Everyone else who's finished the class stories is at some level of completion between the post Corellia stuff and the Shadow of Revan; nobody else, however, has moved into the Fallen Empire and Eternal Empire expansions. I guess I just don't care that much about much of the new content. Complaints are that it's very short. OK. I could play it with my Jedi Knight; he's ready to go, but I just haven't been motivated to. I'm more motivated to go back and do more with the original stories, so I've started a whole host of new(ish) characters in the last couple of months. Not only that, reports are that the new content is pretty bugged, and the Manaan daily area hasn't even launched yet. No hurry. I've got plenty of other things to do.

Two. The class ability changes and ability trees have mostly been cried about by the fans. A lot of abilities have been removed, moved, adjusted, etc. Most of your characters now play a bit differently. Most of your characters no longer have abilities that they used to have. Ironically, some of these are the iconic abilities for your class, if the Heroic Moment is to be any guide. My commando and mercenary lost their sticky bombs, which is the iconic heroic moment ability, and my scoundrel lost his nut kick. They may still be out there on another combat spec that I'm not using, and honestly the commando had two sticky bomb options. I miss some of those, but overall I'm kind of in favor of the idea of trimming abilities. I used to routinely use four toolbars, although the two secondary ones were not full. I found that with none of my characters do I need a fourth one, though. I can fit all of them on three toolbars now. I suppose that's a positive.

Again, the min-maxers are bent out of shape that their "rotations" on longer work. Personally, I'd never play in such a way that I'd use a term like "rotation" but I do kind of get it. There's a little bit of a learning curve to adjust to the changes, and a few of the misses are a disappointing. Overall, I'd call this a mostly neutral to negative change. Good idea, not great execution.

Three. The transition from advanced class to combat style was one that I actually kind of didn't care a lot about, but I find now that having the ability to stick a stealth-using secondary class on literally every single character so I can have the option of clicking it on and skipping past trash mobs is totally worth it. There's things that I don't like about how it works; I think switching combat styles through loadouts is kind of clunky, and I dislike how it throws the gear from your other style into a random spot in your inventory instead of just keeping stored in the loadout. But in many ways, that's just an awkward feature of the new inventory, which I'll talk about below. A similar, although technically different change is the divorce of class story from combat style, where you can now play a character with a different combat style from another class. I didn't think that I cared about this either before launch, but now I'm getting a little jazzed about playing a vanguard bounty hunter who uses a bowcaster as his signature weapon. I just need that BBA event to come around so I can have enough of the event currency to buy the bowcaster that I want now! (which is, sadly, a lot. I'll be grinding like crazy that week, probably in March.)

Four. The new inventory UI is not good. This includes not just the inventory, but the class sheet, the outfit designer (which is now outfitter), the preview pane for gear, etc. It's super buggy, and a super bad design. The clean, easy on the eyes inventory system that's been in place since literally the launch of the game is replaced with a harsh grid that's a bit confusing to look at. Basic features like drag in the preview pane are mysteriously missing. Things like the unify to chestpiece color toggle are bugged and don't work. The outfitter didn't get the cosmetic weapon that we were expecting (to launch in 7.1, apparently... whenever that happens to be.) It's also no longer very helpful when it comes to actually showing you what your outfit looks like, because it's in a combat stance. If you have a blaster or sniper rifle, you can't even see your chest or face very well. You can no longer see your outfits without activating them. Loads and loads of what are inconveniences and bugs; all to replace a system that literally nobody had a problem with. Nobody asked for this. There's a lot of fainting couch drama on the forums, and outright absurd lies, like the UI is giving people headaches, hurting their eyes, causing them harm, etc. That doesn't help anyone's case to throw such an obvious, childish, dishonest tantrum like that. But the reality is that this whole new system wasn't asked for, nobody wanted it, and I haven't yet seen anyone that likes it. Honestly, if they fix the bugs, I can probably adjust to the other inconveniences, which are relatively minor after all. However, the cumulative effect of lots of minor inconveniences is a fairly major dissatisfaction with the change. And it's one that impacts you pretty much all of the time.

Five. Gearing has had lots of complaints. However, those complaints usually come from min-maxers at 80th level. (To be honest, I don't see the point in all of this level cap increase that they keep adding. If they level synch every planet, which they do, then why did we need any level increases at all? The complaints seem to be focused on two things: 1) getting top level gear is a major, tedious grind for all of your "alts" or "toons" (I cannot tell you how much I hate those terms) that nobody wants to do anymore, and 2) you can't get the highest level gear with the cosmetic weapons that you want, so you "can't use" your cartel market stuff until the outfitter gets the cosmetic weapon feature added. 

I agree that this is probably a bad system, but since I'm still operating at a less 1337 sub-306 gear level, I haven't actually seen any change in my own game yet. Other than that, curiously, I started getting a handful of 306 level drops here and there. This change was supposedly to alleviate complaints about the random nature of drops, but if so, I think that it overshot the mark; people preferred dealing with some RNG more than they like dealing with this new system, apparently. For solo players like me, I find the whole thing uninteresting. I still don't even have a character that's got all the way to level 80 yet, so I haven't even interacted with the new system much with the exception that I've got a few drops in my inventory that I can't use until I get to level 80. Which, even just running around doing Seasons grind and whatnot I'll probably start hitting with some of my characters in the next few days or so. I think my highest level character now, my grinder sniper (who ironically has among the lowest level gear of all of my semi-retired level 75 characters) is level 79. And that's just from grinding seasons and a few reputation tracks. Mostly seasons, though. 

Six. Rotating focus weeklies has had a lot of complaints. People have said, again, super exaggerated things like they took away things to do. No, they didn't. They did, however, take away some of the reward for doing them. You can still do all of the Heroics that you could before. However, there aren't weekly bundled rewards for doing them on every planet every week anymore. I think the idea was to attempt to funnel more players into the same activities, giving the illusion of more life when playing. A kind of Potemkin popularity, if you will.  Of course, the illusion doesn't work if you're doing the Heroics for another planet anyway. Last night, I was doing the Heroics on Hutta with one of my characters; my sniper or one of my powertechs; I can't remember now. For the first time in forever, especially on a Tuesday when the week resets, I could do it without having to wait for respawns, or do without the bonus missions because it wasn't worth it to wait for the respawns. Hutta seemed dead. I guess everyone was off doing something else. That hasn't been the case when doing Hutta heroics in forever, though. I was honestly pretty surprised. So anyway, no... they haven't taken any activities out. They have taken away some modest bonuses for doing certain things at certain times, though. Again, only the rabid min-maxer probably really cares about the difference.

Seven. Galactic Seasons 2 is the big thing that I've been working on. It's pretty cool, although some of the Conquest-like grind isn't always my favorite. It's nice that they give you a variety of things to grind, but it's not so nice that it's mostly a variety of things that were already in the game and had been for years. The new reputation track is honestly new, suppose, and the new currency (blegh; we've got too many of these already) but I'm finding in general that this grind, compared to more specific reputation grinds that I've worked on in the past, is a bit fresher, and the rewards are really pretty cool. Heck, among other things I've got 600 cartel coins out of it already. Combined with my monthly subscriber drop of 525, that's been enough to unlock most of my recently acquired collections. Along with next month's subscriber drop and what I should earn between now and then through seasons, I'm thinking of buying one of the hot new armor sets... and not actually spending any of my own money on it, which is the key. I know that the cartel market is what keeps the game afloat, but I hate putting more than a couple of bucks into it here and there. The microtransaction business model really kinda chaps my hide.

Conclusion. Most of the things that the player base is complaining about the loudest probably don't actually affect the majority of the player base. Here I'm operating under the assumption that the majority of players are solo and story players, not min-maxers, raiders or PVPers. All of those groups, on the other hand, seem unhappy. Other than that, the other new stuff that doesn't impact min-maxers, raiders and PVPers is a mixed bag of "good idea!" or "good idea, but flawed execution" with a handful of real clunker "why in the world did they do that?" ideas thrown in. But if they fix a few niggling bugs, and maybe tone down the ugliness of the new UI a bit, and I'll be happy to say that overall the change was a positive one, albeit somewhat underwhelming.

And I think that's the real story here, which I haven't really addressed. This has been pretty seriously hyped as this big 10th anniversary celebration, and overall, even if we didn't have a new UI that nobody likes and a number of other features that have taken the wind out of its sails—let's assume for the sake of argument that none of that was an issue—it'd still be a pretty darn underwhelming 10th anniversary celebration. A little bit of new content, a new way to use old content (combat styles divorced from class story) and... so far, that's it. And the new story content is underwhelming too, from what I've heard and seen, although it's expected that more of that will continue to dribble out throughout the year.

If this is all that they can muster for a big-time 10th anniversary celebration, then the game is running on autopilot with a skeleton crew of developers. Which, to be fair, nobody thought otherwise. But this is certainly confirmation of that.