Eric Musco, SWTOR’s Game Director, hosted a 2-hour “let’s play” livestream on August 20th, 2026, mostly about the new difficulty settings, but he also answered questions from the audience.
How Difficulty Settings will work in SWTOR
There will be 3 difficulty settings for the open world, just like how there are for group content. Difficulty settings only modify the following parameters:
- You (and your companion’s) damage taken
- You (and your companion’s) healing received
- Your XP received
Changing your difficulty is as simple as right-clicking on your character portrait and selecting the difficulty you want, the same way you change it for a phase.
The higher the difficulty, the more damage you (and your companion) take and the less healing and XP you receive.
Inside phases, like story areas, difficulty is controlled by the phase owner, but out in the open world, difficulty settings can allow for two different players playing on different difficulties can fight the same enemy and experience individual challenges while contributing the same amount of damage.
The idea behind getting reduced XP at higher difficulties is to prevent you from outleveling the planet, eliminating a big part of the challenge imposed, and ensuring gear doesn’t become irrelevant because of level sync.
We think this is the wrong way to go about solving this problem.
Leveling also serves as a way to introduce player capabilities over time and prevent players from getting overwhelmed, but if you’re managing to get through the game on a higher difficulty, you don’t need a slower pace.
Players should be rewarded by earning more XP when taking on more of a challenge, particularly when there are so many loopholes to make the game easier, like grouping, playing skank tank, etc.
The better solution is to reduce the amount of raw power provided by levels (both yours and that of enemy NPCs) and align the timing with which you get abilities, passives, etc. with the rate at which you go to different planets (i.e. every 4 levels starting at level 16).
It would also be good to source the healing reduction from the Trauma debuff used in PvP, which reduces your healing received by 15% during combat with an enemy player. This aligns the PvE experience with the PvP one and makes game difficulty is less dependent on companion balance.
Story Difficulty
Story difficulty is the same level of challenge you can get in SWTOR right now.
Veteran Difficulty
Veteran difficulty is intended to be reminiscent of the gameplay experience you could have at launch, so enemies hit harder and companions are less effective at healing, and you don’t get as much XP.
The fact that they’re going for an original launch experience is why the Veteran Mode Venture is called “Classic”.
Master Difficulty
Master difficulty is intended to be harder than Veteran, likely in line with MM Chapters and PvP, but they’re still tuning it. They expect you to care about gear and they expect you to heal up between pulls instead of chain pulling the entire planet.
Difficulty Settings vs Ventures
Changing the overworld difficulty is available to everyone, whether you’re F2P/Preferred or Subscriber, it doesn’t matter. You can change the difficulty in the overworld whenever you like.
Participating in one of the difficulty-centric Ventures is something you have to decide during the character creation process, like you choose to make a Venture character.
When playing on a Venture character, you’ll be able to progress the associated Venture (Classic or Expert), but you will be locked into the associated difficulty (Classic = VM, Expert = MM).
There is an escape pod of sorts, if you determine the Venture difficulty is too hard or you unsubscribe, you won’t lose access to the toon. You are free to permanently exit the Venture at any time, but you will have to make a new Venture toon if you want to continue progressing.
Venture toons are also locked into the original combat styles (advanced classes) for each origin story, so like Sith Inquisitor can only pick between Sorcerer and Assassin.
| Overworld Difficulty Settings | Ventures |
|---|---|
| Available to everyone | Subscribers only |
| Gameplay | Rewards Track |
| Change difficulty at will | Toon locked into difficulty (can exit) |
| Applies to any toon | Must set at character creation |
| Limited restrictions on combat styles | Original combat styles only |
We know there will be rewards associated with completing each Venture, but the focus of the livestream was on the difficulty settings, not the Ventures.
Legacy Perks and Changes
Legacy Perks are getting reorganized and 10 new levels are being added, so the new maximum legacy level will be 60. In addition, there will be 2 new Legacy Character Perks to acquire that are aimed at reducing friction introduced by difficulty settings.
It is a bit insane that both of these perks designed to ease the leveling process require at least legacy level 52 and fully unlocking both on a single toon will cost a whopping 49,000,000 credits.
Medical Probe Affinity
Calling a Medical Probe will not increase Medical Probe Timer until the 2nd | 3rd | 4th death.
Costs 3.5 mil | 7 mil | 10.5 mil (21 mil total per toon)
If you use the Medical Probe to revive yourself, you’ll get a 30s 2min 10min cooldown each subsequent time you do it before returning to Area Start or Med Center.
This series of perks extends the number of times you can revive yourself before encountering this restriction, so dying repeatedly is less of a setback.
Improved Rest and Recharge
Fully channeling a Rest and Recharge ability will refund 20% | 50% | 100% of your combat style’s ability cooldowns. Does not apply inside PvP Arenas and Warzones.
Costs 4 mil | 8 mil | 16 mil (28 mil total per toon)
This perk is a bit more straightforward. It can effectively reduce all of your cooldowns to 15s (outside of PvP matches), which is pretty nice in theory, though I’m not a fan of the implementation.
This series of character perks will be most beneficial in progression raiding, where you’re wiping over and over again to the same boss.
With these perks, everyone will be able to have all their cooldowns back for each attempt, which is particularly valuable for the battle rez, though unless they program it in, it won’t affect the lockout on raid buffs.
But there’s also another mechanism that would be more convenient: just reset the cooldowns on all abilities and purge all debuffs whenever a boss resets/respawns or whenever you revive to Area Start or Medcenter.
This way, the devs don’t create another barrier to entry into progression raiding for every single toon you might want to bring and make the whole group wait an extra 15s between every single pull.
The wasted time is the other part of the problem. Maybe it doesn’t bother you, but spending 15s between every set of trash is not my idea of a good time, especially when we have these nifty things called healer companions.
Attacks with longer cooldowns like Orbital Strike | Bombing Run and the one shown by Eric Musco on stream, Death from Above | Mortar Volley, don’t need to have such long cooldowns in the first place, not when you can spam attacks like Suppressive Fire | Sweeping Gunfire until the nerfs come home.
This implementation has the potential to create some balance issues as well for specs that derive their power from strong cooldowns, like Sorcerer | Sage and Powertech | Vanguard.
The economy on lower tiers of the perk isn’t great, either. Waiting 15s to get 20% of your cooldown finished on a few abilities is ridiculous. It’s not like it is for Field Repair Droid or Field Mailbox where you might not need those things more than once every hour.
At the very least, the perk should not have multiple tiers and should reduce cooldowns in chunks over the course of the channel, like 10% per second or something like that.
To be clear, this perk is a lot better than nothing, but I don’t think a QoL improvement that we have to earn and pay credits for on every single toon should have so many problems.
What we need are a more robust set of conditions where all cooldowns get reset, like reviving outside of combat, bosses respawning, in addition to channeling a regen ability and between PvP Arena (and Voidstar!) rounds, and alongside individual adjustments to abilities with unnecessarily long cooldowns.
Perhaps some of these conditions could come from individual legacy character perks rather than a problematic progression for channeling a regen ability.
Other Mentions
Eric also addressed things like DX12, restyling Character Creator, PvP Expertise gear, and more combat style updates.
DX12
DX12 is officially not part of 8.0 (nor was it ever) and Broadsword did not have an update to share at the time of the livestream. In general, we can expect to hear about DX12 in quarterly producer letters or as standalone articles.
Character Creator Revamp #backtoblue
Broadsword is working on a revamp to the character creator that brings back the hologram blue interface style used by the rest of the game.
Players have spotted a few other improvements to character select as well, like adding the ability to scroll through alts rather than click through pages and offering a search bar.
PvP Expertise Gear Returns
SWTOR used to have an extra stat called Expertise. Its sole function was to scale your effectiveness in PvP, both in terms of damage/healing dealt and damage taken.
Unlike other stats, it had a hard cap on the amount you could get, so max Expertise enabled you to deal 100% of the damage/healing you were meant to do and prevent you from taking extra damage.
The benefit of Expertise gear is that it created a stronger divide between PvP and PvE gear, making it clearer to players that you might need to allocate your stat pool differently, and enabling PvP to have a gearing track without incentivizing win trading to the same degree.
Combat Style Balance Changes
There are now 6 different combat styles with preliminary changes available on the PTS. The only combat styles missing are Mercenary | Commando and Assassin | Shadow.
- Sorcerer | Sage
- Powertech | Vanguard
- Marauder | Sentinel
- Sniper | Gunslinger
- Juggernaut | Guardian
- Operative |
Scoundrel
The changes are very preliminary. Right now, they’re taking another ability from the combat style and upgrading it with a discipline-specific effect, like they did at level 15, and sometimes, it’s the same ability upgraded again!
They’re also giving us a new discipline passive, but so far, it’s almost exclusively just been the most used tactical item, regardless of balance implications.
