BioWare brought the SWTOR 7.0 PTS back up with new and improved UI elements, character creator, Gear, Loadouts, Cartel Market Items and more!
The 7.0 PTS has been reborn, just like Darth Malgus. It contains loadouts along with a more complete version of the character creator that we showed you last month. In addition, all Combat Styles from both factions are finally available.
It doesn’t appear that there are any new Combat Style changes though because ability tree icons are still missing and not everything is still functional, so I think BioWare just hasn’t gotten around to balance changes yet. This makes sense since it wasn’t the focus of this PTS update.
Note: This is a test server and things are not final yet.
New Legendary Items Intro Mission
Legendary Items are now locked behind an introductory mission.
The mission giver is in the same location as the Tech Fragment vendors alongside the vendors for new PvE gear, so I assume this is meant to be an endgame tutorial that also presents the transition from Set Bonuses to Legendary Items.
It seems that progress towards unlocking Legendary Items is weighted towards difficulty and balanced around the time it takes to complete the content, so more challenging and time-consuming activities will allow you to unlock Legendary Items faster. The rate could probably use a bit of tweaking though, at least for higher difficulty content.
It takes 10 solo ranked matches or 9 MM bosses (almost 2 whole MM operations) to complete this mission and about twice as much for unranked and SM operations. That’s a bit much to do on all alts unless you only have to do it once per Legacy.
Loadouts are now almost working
Loadouts! They’re finally here! Unfortunately, they’re still extremely buggy. You can save things to them, but they get overwritten if you try to change anything manually, like swap choices or disciplines, it overwrites the loadout.
The UI is broken into two panes. The one on the left shows detailed information about the specific loadout that is currently selected (not necessarily active). The pane on the right shows a list of all loadouts and provides an opportunity to create and edit more.
Overall UI
The layout of your buttons on the quickbars is also preserved, though that isn’t presented visually in this window.
Left Pane of Detailed Loadout Information
On the left of the left pane, we can see everything preserved by the selected individual loadout including:
- Loadout name
- Combat Style (by name and new icon)
- Discipline (by name) and role (by icon)
- Specific ability tree choices (by icons)
In the middle of that pane, we get a visual representation of the character according to that loadout, which primarily presents the outfit associated with that loadout, though it also emphasizes the current combat style by having the weapon out.
On the right of the detailed info pane, we see information related to equipped gear, broken down into categories.
Loadouts List
In the right pane, we have the list of loadouts. You can rename the loadout by pressing the pencil icon and the copy icon (2 overlapped rectangles) takes whatever your current build is and saves it to that loadout slot. Each list item displays the high-level information about each loadout and the name conveys the rest of what you need to differentiate each loadout for yourself.
Loadout Slots
It appears that there are 10 total loadout slots you can have. The UI is still a bit of a work in progress, so it’s possible that 10 is just a temporary number, but at least right now, there doesn’t appear to be a way to have more than 10. It’s possible that we’ll get 10 more when we can add a second Combat Style to our toon, but I wasn’t able to test that today due to the restrictions currently in place on the PTS.
Even if it only ends up being 10, it isn’t the end of the world. That gives you 1 loadout for every single possible discipline you can have on a single toon and then 4 left over for specific builds, and I’m sure most players out there don’t even utilize all 3 disciplines on a single toon, let alone all 6 from having access to a second Combat Style.
Even for someone like me who will use everything, I think I could make do with 10. I’d need 3 or maybe 4 loadouts for a single discipline at most, and that’s only if I need specific ones for single-target damage, AoE, and PvP; maybe I’d need 2 for PvP, 1 for regs and one for ranked.
I don’t need all of that for every single discipline though. I only PvP on some disciplines and I don’t heal or tank very often, so I’d be fine with only a single loadout for each of those. As another example, if one discipline is a lot better at AoE, then I don’t need an AoE build for the weaker one.
You don’t want to have too many loadouts either, because at some point you’re gonna waste more time finding the specific loadout you want when it would have been faster to just swap the ability choice or tactical instead.
Have I said the word loadout enough yet? You can learn even more things about how to use Loadouts in SWTOR 7.0 from my detailed guide!
Character Customization Window Updates
A lot of work has been done to the Character Sheet window since we last saw it in November.
Outfitter and Weapons as Outfits feature
There’s finally a weapon slot on the outfitter tab! For now, we’ll have to be content with just admiring that empty slot though because the game doesn’t actually let you put weapons into it yet. When you try to put one in, it just says “This type of item cannot be placed in an outfit”.
All other Character Customization Tabs are also redesigned
Here are the rest of the tabs in the Character Customization Window. It matches both the new character creator UI and the existing game UI far better than the previous new version of the UI we saw on the PTS.
The tab style is very reminiscent of other existing windows while we see some colors, buttons, and font that match the character creator UI.
There’s still a bit of polish that’s needed and some elements are clearly unfinished, but I imagine that updates to other windows will feel similar to this one. Also, it is still unclear how the Damage, Survivability, and Support stats are calculated.
Updated Character Creator
We got a preview of the new Character Creator on the previous PTS build, but it’s now a lot more polished.
The red and blue fire effects are animated and present throughout the character creator, despite being a bit hard to see in the later images. It feels super cinematic to make all the choices. Honestly, it looks so good that it’s a bit jarring once you get into the actual game and it’s still SWTOR
New Endgame Armor Models
Earlier this Fall BioWare revealed how Endgame gearing will work in SWTOR 7.0. Now we can add some visuals to the Decurion and Thyrsian armor sets.
We now know what the base Decurion endgame gear will look like. It’s unclear if this will continue to look more decorated as you get pieces with higher item rating, similar to how the Onderonian gear works or if it will just be a single set of armor like the Sha’tek stuff.
The PvP gear costs a new currency, so I wasn’t able to equip it on PTS, though it appears to be using the same model with slight modifications to the textures and details, similar to how PvP and PvE gear have been differentiated in the past.
Keep in mind these are the Decurion and Thyrsian armor sets for Conquest / Flashpoints and PvP respectively. We still don’t know what the Tionese, Columi, and Rakata will look like, which are the raiding gear.
More small, but important changes
There are a number of smaller tweaks and improvements to certain art, style or gameplay features that are worth mentioning, at leas briefly for now (and in much greater details after 7.0 launches)
New Combat Style Icons
As you may have noticed throughout this article, there are new icons for each Combat Style. To go along with these, there are new versions of the mini icons that show up above your nameplate as well, but those are too small to photograph.
Quickbar Ability Icon Frames
Ability icons on your quickbar now have a light blue frame. This makes it easier to distinguish between quickbar slots that have abilities and ones that don’t.
Changes to Weekly Missions and what new rewards they offer
Some weekly missions have been updated with their new rewards and shorter completion requirements.
Gold Augment Materials in 7.0
The CM-1337 material, which is used to craft the current gold 300 augments, is available for purchase from the Spoils of War Vendor for 10k tech fragments. You can also turn in 7500 Tech Fragments to complete the “A Surprising Offer” mission that gives either an OEM or RPM. These prices don’t appear to be balanced properly yet.
Remnant Gear in Collections
The Remnant gear that you get from the Alliance Supply Crates you get for doing Heroics is now showing up in Collections. It’s unclear if these armor sets will be sold on the Cartel Market or if you’ll simply be able to store them in Collections instead of having to waste almost 4 full tabs.
List of new Cartel Market Items coming with SWTOR 7.0
Some of these items were available in previous PTS builds but now we have actual previews for all of them.
Galactic Season 2 “Shadows of the Underworld”
The Galactic Season 2 rewards are available on PTS as well, but they will be in a separate article, coming up soon. You can check out the new article at the link above. There are quite a lot of new items to preview.
Concluding Thoughts
If the current PTS build is relatively recent compared to what BioWare is actually working on, I can definitely see why they opted to delay the expansion. Everything is beginning to take shape, but there are still some features that aren’t quite working yet and a bunch of polish.
February 15th seems like a pretty safe bet for when the expansion will actually be ready. I’m still super curious about the rest of the expansion though. By the time 7.0 releases, it will have been over 9 and a half months since the last major content release, which was the Secrets of the Enclave Flashpoint with 6.3.
Normally, we get about 2 planets worth of new assets with each expansion, but so far the only new area we’ve seen is Elom, and that is already basically finished. Based on the screenshots from the story livestream, Manaan is only using existing models and the R-4 Anomaly operation seems to be a mixture of new and old assets. What have all the modelers been up to?
