SWTOR (KotFE) Core World Changes

The number of changes coming up in SWTOR’s Knights of the Fallen Empire (KotFE), it is seeming less like an expansion and more like an almost complete-rewite! In the most part these are good, though I will cover some of my concerns in later posts about KotFE.

I will also throw in a bit about how these changes affect my Fibromyalgia relaxation time, as the two things a tightly interwoven!

So this post is about the new SWTOR Core World Changes, which is a set I am pretty much in favour of, as detailed on the official post here.

Core World Change 1: Critical Path

I don’t want to reproduce the blog post here as that will help neither SWTOR’s sites or my own, but this phrase I want to reproduce here as it resonated with me. They stated that they want:

…to create a tighter leveling experience that alleviates the fatigue associated with having to complete dozens of Missions per planet

As someone who has 13 Characters on the Red Eclipse Server, I have at least one character for each class. If it wasn’t for the recent Epic Story boost the fatigue mentioned here would really be in play. Planets like Taris, Tatooine and Hoth have immense planet-specific storylines and under normal XP rules, you would need to complete a good chunk of those to be of a high enough level to progress.

By implementing the critical path, BioWare have appealed to (especially, in my view) the long-standing gamer who doesn’t want to repeat the same missions over and over. It also appeals to the impatient player who just wants to get to L60 as fast as possible (that’s not me!). The critical path update resolves that need, while leaving the option open using Exploration Missions if you want to.

Core World Change 2: Heroic Missions

Ironically, I love SWTOR, which is an MMO. But in reality I find multi-player missions being enforced really stressful, which increases my pain and anxiety. I game to relax, not to find an alternative source of stress!

Numbers Required for Heroics

They are changing [Heroic 4] Missions to [Heroic 2+]. So even with Level Sync in play (a post for another day), if you’re geared well enough, are pumped with enough Stims and Medpacks you should (in theory) be able to play this with a companion. What would be awesome is if you could play a Heroic 2+ with more than one companion (as I discovered they have sort of done in the Trooper storyline). But that’s probably wishful thinking at this point.

Heroic Mission Terminals

Love, love, love this change. It can be complete farce trying to find the repeatable missions. They have used these terminals for [Dailies] and [Weeklies] so why this wasn’t available for [Heroics] already I don’t know.

TL;DR – Core World Changes – Thumbs Up

I think BioWare have got this set of changes spot-on and I look forward to them. Do let me know your thoughts on this in the comments. I’ve now posted my initial thoughts on the SWTOR Level Sync feature, so do start a conversation over there.