Today BioWare announced several major changes and new features that are coming alongside the Legacy of the Sith SWTOR 7.0 Expansion!
Daily and Weekly Mission Reset
First, we’re making some changes to how Daily and Weekly Missions reset. Currently, uncompleted Daily and Weekly Missions sit in that character’s logs until the Mission is completed. Once the Mission is completed, that character can no longer pick up the Weekly again for that week (or daily for that day).
In 7.0, uncompleted Daily and Weekly Missions will be removed from players once the Daily or Weekly reset time passes (currently Tuesday, 12:00am UTC). The primary reason for this change is that we are restructuring the way we present content each week. Weekly Missions will rotate in availability each week in 7.0, and we want to ensure that all players are on the same Weekly Missions each week in order keep those Mission areas feeling dynamic and filled with other people to group or share Mission credit with. This should result in content like Heroic Missions being completed more quickly and efficiently. You can still access Missions that aren’t a part of the rotation if you choose, they will just have reduced rewards.
Alongside this change we will also introduce a number of quality of life improvements, including auto-completing Missions where we are able to when characters are on the turn-in step.
It is unclear what is meant by “rotating in availability”. Currently we have weeklies for the following content:
- Operations – Complete a specific Operation
- PvP – Win a specific number of matches for each of Unranked, Solo Ranked, or Group Ranked
- Flashpoints – Complete a specific number of Flashpoints at each difficulty
- Daily Areas – Complete a specific number of daily missions in a specific Daily Area
- GSF – Complete a specific number of GSF matches, wins count x2
- Heroics – Complete a specific number of Heroics on a given planet
- Uprisings – Complete a specific number of Uprisings at each difficulty
Are weeklies only going to be available for select types of content or will there only be a certain weeklies available for each type of content? For example, will there only be weeklies available for GSF and Operations one week and PvP and Flashpoints next week or will it be like there’s weeklies for 3 specific operations this week and only the VM flashpoints weekly? Will there even be multiple types of weeklies available at the same time or will it be literally only a single type of weekly per week?
BioWare needs to be careful in how they design this change. Herd players too much and it feels like players are either being forced to do content they don’t want to do or otherwise don’t feel like they are being rewarded for the content they actually want to do.
It’s also unclear what problem this actually solves. SWTOR is a theme park-style MMO. Most players don’t like all types of content offered by the game. It’s reasonable to entice players to try new types of content, but the incentive shouldn’t be so strong that players feel like they’re wasting their time doing the content they know they enjoy.
I am concerned because weeklies usually give a ton of rewards for completion, and if this remains true in 7.0, it’s probably gonna feel like you’re forced to do content to get gear, much like the Masterwork Data Crystal Weekly at the end of 5.0 that most people hated. Galactic Seasons and Conquest are better paths for trying to get players to try new content because the rewards are less consequential to core gameplay.
In general, incentives to play specific content should only serve to entice players to try something that they wouldn’t have otherwise tried. After that, it’s up to the content to speak for itself. People should want to continue playing it because they find it fun, not because they feel they have to in order to gear efficiently.
If something remains unpopular despite these incentives, it’s time to examine what makes that content unpopular and either try to improve it or reallocate development resources to more popular types of content.
Economy Adjustments
We have been studying and measuring economic indicators around the game’s economy, specifically in regards to Credit inflation. What this means is that more Credits are being created in the economy than are being spent, which drives the GTN prices upwards over time on all items. One of the steps we’re taking to address this is the reduction of credits awarded by completing Conquests.
We’re also planning on removing Solid Resource Matrix items from Conquest rewards and instead putting them on Jawa vendors available for purchase with Jawa Junk.
This will help address Credit creation issues in the economy. We will be sharing more details on these changes in a follow up post in the near future.
I imagine that BioWare has access to metrics that explain which sources of credit creation are the largest. I know a lot of people have blamed gold farmers for inflation in this game, but it is reasonable that Conquest has also been a major contributor to that given how many credits it awards and how much easier it is to reach Conquest now.
I really hope that BioWare pays closer attention to the economy in the future though. There have been far too many major blunders in that department that have resulted in the hyperinflation we are experiencing today. Whenever they make a change that affects credit creation in any way, they need to be sure to immediately counterbalance it with some other credit sink.
Reducing credit generation will help to slow the rate of inflation, but it doesn’t do much to actually remove existing credits from the economy. I wonder what sorts of credit sinks we’ll see in 7.0 to combat the trillions of credits in circulation. I wouldn’t put it past them to have individual gear pieces from the Tech Fragment vendor equivalent cost 10mil rather than 1mil.
Shared Tagging
Another big improvement supporting the new weekly content rotation is Shared Tagging.
When we refer to ‘tagging’, we’re talking about who gets credit for defeating an NPC (Mission credit and ability to loot primarily). Currently, the default tagging behavior is tied to whether or not the player is in a group or not. So if you are grouped with other players, and someone in that group does damage to an NPC, credit is shared for the entire group.
For 7.0, we are changing this default behavior to be tied to the faction instead. So if a player is attacking an NPC, and another player of the same faction helps kill the NPC whether grouped up or not, both players will share Mission credit and loot on that NPC.
In some cases, we will allow credit to be shared with any player regardless of faction. The first content that will take advantage of this ‘open tagging’ will be World Bosses. This should minimize griefing opportunities and really encourage players to help each other out in order to defeat these bosses!
As an added bonus, we’ve also updated the rules for tagging to include healers. In addition to dealing damage to an NPC in order to tag it for credit, healing another player who has damaged that NPC will also grant credit.
These are great improvements. It will be really nice to just jump in and participate in an ongoing world boss fight that you see happening. Honestly, I’m surprised these changes weren’t made sooner. That said, there will still be major issues.
World Boss griefing from individual players will remain quite possible by just taunting the boss and dragging it out of its aggro range, causing it to evade and reset.
The Mek-Sha World Boss, Dread Pirate Karvoy, attempted to alleviate this by creating a boundary of fire around the area.
I’d like to see something similar added to all the other world bosses where once you enter, you get killed if you try to leave and that area is smaller than the aggro range such that you can’t drag them out of their intended area.
It would also be nice if World Bosses were a bit more consistent in the time it takes to defeat them. The more recent endgame bosses like those found on Ossus are okay at this, but it would be better if their health scaled directly with the number of players engaged with it.
In addition, if proper performance optimizations can’t be made, it’s time to just get rid of 24m groups altogether. Have these bosses scale their health between 8 and 16 players and just accept that after 10 years, that’s the largest size group that is remotely acceptable in terms of performance.
Combat Change – Vanish
“Currently, Vanish (editor’s note: AKA stealthing out) allows players to circumvent intended game mechanics, especially ones that require a target. It also allows for players to revive out of combat, and change their ability/discipline in the middle of an encounter. Vanish abilities are being slightly redesigned to remove unintended use, specifically dropping from combat and reviving in specified situations.
For all Flashpoints and Operations, Vanish abilities will instantly drop all threat and allow players to enter stealth at max level, however, players will no longer exit combat. This restriction does not apply to the open world PvE/PvP or Warzones.
We understand the benefit of resurrecting more frequently in group content, so we are removing the Operation wide lockout timer from combat rezzing. As a balance measure, we’ve made it so only healing disciplines have access to combat revives. We’ll be monitoring this and will adjust the cooldown as needed.
This is a massive change for PvE and is perhaps the biggest change BioWare has ever made globally to Operations. Just so we’re all on the same page, I’m gonna reiterate what was said in the post. BioWare is making it so stealthing out in Flashpoints and Operations, doesn’t actually cause you to exit combat.
This means you won’t be able to stealth rez, swap gear, or change abilities / utilities mid-fight. It also means you won’t be able to reset casts by stealthing out, which is sometimes done by Assassin / Shadow tanks as a last-ditch effort to delay a mechanic or taking damage.
Now, I actually don’t consider that to be terribly significant. Stealth rezzing is virtually impossible in some fights and if your group doesn’t have a stealther, you just flat out don’t have that capability. The big change is removing the 5 minute groupwide lockout on battle rezzing. Even if they’re removing battle rez from DPS, that still means you get at least 2 battle rezzes per fight in 8m and 4 in 16m and depending on how they choose to balance it, these numbers could easily double or triple from what they’ve been for the past 10 years!
BioWare has been moving in this direction for a little while now though. If I recall correctly, the final boss of GotM, Izax, was the first boss to offer a shorter rez timer and I think now it’s just a global thing for all SM raids.
Given that BioWare is now willing to play around with the number of battle rezzes available per fight, this opens the door to a more well-rounded experience throughout raiding. Imagine if rather than putting battle rezzes on cooldowns at all, players were just given a set number of charges of battle rez to apportion for the entire fight. Now imagine if this number were to change depending on the fight and difficulty of the encounter.
Suddenly, SM raids can return to having more punishing mechanics like they used to, but still be quite forgiving if rezzes are handed out like candy on Halloween. By switching to a rez charges system, BioWare could make it so that it’s practically impossible to wipe on SM encounters, which I imagine is what they want, while still having the fight be engaging and challenging.
For players that want to do HM and NiM, fewer rezzes could be available, similar to how things are now. This would result in less forgiving fights and raise the requirement for how often players must correctly execute mechanics. BioWare could also opt to make battle rezzes abundant throughout all difficulties, but only grant achievements if the fight were completed when using X number of revives or less.
I am very interested to see how BioWare will end up balancing battle rezzes in 7.0. This change has the potential to greatly improve (or completely ruin) raiding depending on how it is balanced.
Weapons in Outfitter
Finally, we’re excited to share details with you around one of the most requested features of the past several years: Weapons in Outfitter!
Beginning in 7.0, you’ll now be able to use Weapons in a similar way to Armor in our existing Outfitter system. This means you can have one weapon equipped which will determine the stats applied to your character, and stamp the appearance of another weapon of the same type via Outfitter.
Weapons have several properties that are unique to them as compared to Armor. They can have unique audio, Color Crystals, and Weapon Tunings. The weapon assigned to the Outfitter slot, or slots for dual-wielding combat styles, will determine which of these customization options are seen and heard in the game. If a weapon is not assigned to an Outfitter slot, the game will use the options from the currently equipped weapon instead.
I had a feeling BioWare would do this for 7.0. Imagine if you still had to manually equip your weapons even after loadouts became a thing. I am a bit surprised at the supposed prior limitations though. From an outside perspective, it doesn’t sound like it would be too much work to pass weapon audio, color crystals, and tunings through.
I always figured they didn’t add weapons to the outfitter before because of their impact on stats and animations, but now I wonder if they just really couldn’t afford to invest much time into creating the base Outfitter system to begin with and were able to very quickly do that part.
Regardless, I’m glad we’ll finally be able to use non-legacy weapons without other annoyances. I expect that weapon prices on the GTN will spike and remain high as a result of this information, and that may have already happened by the time you read this, so I’d highly recommend buying weapons now in anticipation for 7.0.
If you have weapons currently for sale on the GTN, you might want to take them off and wait for a few days or maybe even until the expansion releases to sell them. You’ll probably make more credits that way.
I hope this change opens the door to more types of tunings as well. It would be nice if weapon audio were completely decoupled from the weapon itself and included in a tuning so you could combine any weapon model with any weapon sound effect you wanted. ‘d also love to see a new type of tuning that can include backpacks and jetpacks (and perhaps decouple those from existing chest pieces).
We’ve already seen that weapon tunings can apply their effects to other parts of the body, like the Dreadseed tuning puts some dread goo on your back, so let’s extend that to have jetpacks for bounty hunters!
You can now read the new dedicated guide to Weapons in Outfitter in SWTOR. It will show you more information about this great quality if life feature.
Concluding Thoughts
As a whole, these changes mostly seem like welcome QoL improvements. I truly believe that changing battle rez is going to be the biggest change to raiding BioWare has ever made. The only thing I’m truly concerned about are the changes to weeklies, and BioWare doesn’t have a very good track record when it comes to herding players to do certain types of content like this.
This article is based on the forum post published by SWTOR game designer Eric Musco on October 27 2021.
At the same time with all of these announced changes BioWare also dropped the bomb about the new Legendary Items coming to SWTOR with 7.0. Don’t miss out on this reveal as well!
