I’ve been playing SWTOR since early access back in December of 2011, where there was only Eternity Vault, and Karagga’s Palace only had one boss. I remember being on Keller’s Void before Bioware closed down a lot of servers to populate others. I went from Keller’s Void to Jedi Covenant with the guild I was in. I spent years of my time playing SWTOR up until a few months before Shadows of Revan came out, and that’s when I decided to take a bit of a hiatus, from the game. I’d pop on every now and then, do something or even just sit there not doing a thing and see who was online. I’ve got over 19 characters on Jedi Covenant, enough to have all 8 class stories done, and to have multiples of the same class for different things.

My guild had pretty much taken a hiatus as well, and our guild was transferred from different people to different people, the name changed, its reputation got destroyed, and then finally it got to someone where they kicked every one who was a bad influence out, and it became one of the best raiding guilds on Jedi Covenant. The whole time while I was on my break, a couple of the guys that I played with kept trying to get the guild back because of the guild ship we had worked so hard to get and purchase all the decorations for.

With Knights of the Fallen Empire coming out the past year, I created a new character and played through her story line before stopping again for a few weeks.

I’m a Star Wars fan at heart, and I can’t not play a Star Wars game. So I came back to SWTOR full time again. I started getting the ‘band’ back together, reaching out to the old friends I had played with, rejoined a social club that I had been a part of, and brought myself back to the game I had missed.

The downfall, Bioware hasn’t brought any more raids since Shadows of Revan which is causing a lot of people to unsubscribe, and leave the game not caring about the subscriber benefits that are purely cosmetic.

Bioware needs to change something soon, while yes they are pumping out new chapters on a monthly basis for the Knights of the Fallen Empire story line, and they did just bring out new player versus player areas, the raiding content has become stale, especially with the changes they did to story mode and hard mode.

Story mode is now everyone getting to level 50 can do a raid, and be ‘bolstered’ to stats that are of level 65 and they also dumbed down the strategies for a lot of the story mode raids. Hard mode is like business as usual, but now Bioware has what is known as ‘highlighted’ raids for a week. This is where you can do hard mode of a the highlighted raid and get gear that should be in nightmare mode only. That being said, no one really does nightmare mode because the nightmare mode gear doesn’t even drop from it. I am hoping that Bioware decides to crank out a new raid or two sometime soon, because the game I love might fall apart if they don’t. One thing I am annoyed about still is that the achievement for the nightmare run of Karagga’s Palace is still bugged, and while I do have the title and everything else, I’m still missing several of the achievements.

I love the fact that Bioware put all of the Heroic 2+ missions on the fleet and at a single terminal so that you can just click the ones you want to do, and head off to that planet. I’m close to getting all of the heroic achievements done because of this, and only a few more on the Republic side and I’m done.

I do know that they are fixing the internal systems, to allow for cross server instancing, which will allow people to get those PVP achievements on planets when they have been locked in on PVE servers. I know I would love to get those achievements done, and that’s just because I love getting achievements done.

So far since I have been back, I leveled the following to 65, my juggernaut tank, sorcerer healer, and my powertech tank. The only one with actual gear is my juggernaut tank, with a lot of 216 gear. The changes they have done to gear though, has made gearing anything easier. Instead of your character focusing on strength, willpower, aim, or cunning, it has been all grouped into being known as mastery. And like before the big changes, you can still put all the gear on legacy gear and transfer it between characters and have the same set for the same character type.

On my main character, I’ve decided that I’m going to get every companion possible while playing on another character and getting every single on of them either killed or rejected for the achievements. I love the fact that I can actually get every companion in the game now, and at the same time kill some too. Also, the best feature with these companions is that I can now have them all set to either heal, damage, or tank for me as I play instead of having to specifically pick that one companion who is a healer, yet he sucks aka Talos.

Planets have been all scaled so that if it is supposed to be a certain level to be played at, Bioware made it so that you are now brought down in level so that you are not too overpowered for the planet you are on. This means if you are level 65 and you are going to a level 10 planet, your stats will decrease to that of the planet, giving those that are actually of that level a chance to kill things instead of you walking up to them and hitting stomp and one shotting them.

But all in all, with all the changes, and even though there is a lack in raiding content, I still love this game and will still play it until the day it shuts down.