Star Wars: The Old Republic Discussion

People respond differently to change and SWTOR isn't any different especially in every major updates.

Now, I understand the general grievance about the Galactic Command system. Gear drops from the crates and the ranking system is punishing and its purposely done so considering PVP/PVE gear are streamlined. It took me nearly a month and a half just to get one complete 230 DPS set for my Marauder/Sentinel, let alone the DPS/Tank/Healer sets for Juggernaut/Guardian, Sorcerer/Sage, Assassin/Shadow, Mercenary/Commando. Powertech/Vanguard, Sniper/Gunslinger and Operative/Scoundrel and I play all of them. I'm not even a frequent raider or an avid pvp player and I'm not even a recurring subscriber and I play mostly as a preferred player and I've been playing almost daily now and I'm not even nearing Tier II. 

So yes, I know, it is frustrating.

Understandably, the current problem regarding the endgame gearing system was also rooted with the removal of crystals and warzone commendation. In the last couple of years, anyone would just play once in a while and grind enough comms and crystals and trade them between characters so you could get easy gearing especially for PVP players who could amass thousands of comms in a legacy and wait until the next update. But there have been several persistent exploits relating to these currency that was abused by the players and many profit from this including credit sellers and farmers which drive the inflation. Its not uncommon in 4.0 to see on GTN of players undercutting by selling legendary gifts in stacks of 99 to 999. By removing the currency, it mess with all endgame commendation gear vendors. Now, this is a problem for me too as the vendors is the only way for me to gear my alts quickly without grinding through Ops or buying overpriced crafted mods or subscribing.  So now, I'm left with none of my 70 toons being geared even with the basic of Healer or Tank gear and because of the RNG, I have to forgo choosing Tank/Healer to favor DPS gears.. and likely for the entirety of 5.0. People who always geared through PVP and Ops might find the tokens as good compromise but... preferred players still get mightily shafted.

But with the introduction of level sync and bolsters in lowbie and midbie PVP and SM Ops, you don't really need to worry about being geared to the teeth. Even in tier 1, the crates drop a lot of schematics which also make this update more feasible to crafters. They're also useful for gearing alts, especially earpieces, implants and relics. However, the system's main appeal was toward players who dedicate their time into 5.0 for their specific main characters.... as opposed to grind-once-in-a-while-with-friends-every-once-in-a-year-or-two-since-launch players who also play other MMOs to fill the two-years-no-new ops drought (since Heart of Ruin which is really April 2015 but too bad, WBs  wasn't real Ops enough or new enough or l33t enough). And since 4.0, we had regular world bosses and Ops included in the weekly as priority missions. We have Gree and Rakhghoul event recurring every month with each their own world bosses and Ops. Since 5.0, we have 20 new DvL world bosses that exist randomly only in victory state... but even in the most populated servers, hardly anyone would group up to do them and even those who do, they just end up on the fleet genchat constantly spamming LFM for hours even if its something on the groupfinder. With this in mind, I really couldn't blame Bioware for favoring easily manageable 4m content over 8/16m group content. While there's still core players and guild but they're just a niche that was getting smaller every day.

And to be honest, I'm pretty much fed up with this topic from the genchat, forums, reddit, twitter and all of these is making me even more sarcastic and bitchy than I like to be and I'm still feverish from this persistent flu...so... I'll make another post about cxp later. Gonna sleep.