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Plenty of news this week, including the joyous if belated end to Nightmare Lootgate, the change to the Cartel Packs in Game Update 4.1, and the upcoming conclusion of the KotFE revamp of crafting. We then debut our Academy segment for new players, and conclude with a discussion about whether raiding has a future in any MMO, especially SWTOR.
1. Introduction
Here is the special achievement that Blay created for his inaugural appearance on OotiniCast:
2. Tip of the week
Congratulations to this week’s winner, Teadra! Thanks to Johnny (@BornToEatBacon), Styrka, ElionD and Uwen for entering.
Please send your tips to ootinicast@gmail.com by next Tuesday for a chance to win a Taunfawn or M8-3R droid code, courtesy of BioWare, and an OotiniCast-provided Cartel Market pack from the latest shipment.
3. Holofeed
- There was a two hour server-side only (that is, no client patch) maintenance on Tuesday.
- The gear sets that come with each Advanced Class will become Bind on Pickup (rather than Bind on Legacy) in Game Update 4.1. Those gear sets will be obtainable via Alliance Supply Creates or crafting.
- In Game Update 4.2, all bosses in Nightmare Mode operations will drop rating 224 gear; in Game Update 4.1, only the last boss will be guaranteed to drop 224, with the other bosses only having a probability of dropping 224.
- The changes to the Cartel Market coming in Game Update 4.1 have been revealed!
- Crafting is also being overhauled, or perhaps updated to where it should have been when the KotFE expansion launched with Game Update 4.0. Note that the gathering nodes for the Grade 9 materials will be located in all “public” (non-instanced) areas of Fallen Empire, such as the Zakuul Swamp.
4. Community
Thanks to our latest Ootini Patron: Sean B, John L and Scott S!
You can find our OotiniCast shirts linked in our store.
All the details about the Ootini Events that Djredd has organised for February can be found in his forum post.
Lauren (@_BlushingFox, blushingfox.deviantart.com) drew this picture of Aaree’s main character (her Jedi Sage):
You can see Lauren’s creating this picture in this sped-up YouTube video.
5. The Academy
Our guest Swtorista answers the following question for returning and new players:
I’m a new player who’s got a character to 65, done with the story for now, and am doing the Alliance grind.. but what else is there to do? What do I do now?
6. Force Feedback
Here is Billy-sai enjoying a blue milk at the local cantina at Disneyworld:
Stephen Cyr sent this video of he and his son joining forces as two unlikely, and overweight, Jedi heroes!
George Takei posted this example of not-too-bad Star Wars humour:
He’s collected his bounty.
7. Sarlacc Digest
We discuss the question raised in this thread on the official forums: does raiding have a future in any MMO, and SWTOR in particular?
8. Outro
On the show this week were Chill (@BrandonLStarr, twitch.tv/chillswtor), Teo (@jasonetheridge), Swtorista (@swtorista, swtorista.com, swtorstrongholds.com) and Blay (@Blachloch).
Information about our guilds on The Harbinger, Ootini Knights (Republic) and Ootini Rage (Empire), can be found here.
You can email questions and comments about the show to ootinicast@gmail.com. Follow us on Twitter via @OotiniCast. Check out our website, ootinicast.com, which has links to our presence on Google+ and Facebook. You can subscribe to us on iTunes, and listen to us on Stitcher and Spreaker. We record the show live every Wednesday at 4:30pm Pacific, goto ootinicast.com/live to find out how to join in!
One thought on the new accuracy stims: since we only need 110 accuracy for tough operation bosses we can now change our gear mods to have more DPS stats for higher DPS with a mastery stim, and switch to accuracy stims for bosses only. It effectively lets us not have to spec in as much accuracy on our gear when we only really need it for about 1% of the time we’re playing.
Hey guys, thanks for another good show. I haven’t played the game in a few weeks but still gotta listen to my fav SWTOR podcasts!
It’s good that BW have finally backed off the nightmare loot idea. I always had a feeling they would eventually come back and play the “companion nerf reversal card” and give themselves a pat on the back for how much they listen to the players. Given how long it took them to reverse on loot-gate I think that BW deep down thought this was still a great idea; especially given their reasoning that they were gating and slowing down 224 gear progression. That doesn’t make sense to me if you’re targeting the guys who can clear NiM they most likely can farm HM on multiple toons and send the gear through legacy so that point is moot. Allowing 224 to drop from HM, I’m looking at you: KP and EV – those are snoozes and give the best gear? Doesn’t add up. I’m glad they made the choice but it just seems so long for such an easy call.
In regards to future group content – I have suspected we won’t be seeing any new ops until 2017 since this dev post back in December. http://www.swtor.com/community/showpost.php?p=8692294&postcount=783 Factoring this post with what they told us back during the KotFE buzz: ‘There will be no new operations with KotFE’ and the announcement the operations team lead leaving it became apparent to me that ops content wouldn’t even be considered until August or September when they finish the “story, story, story”. I think alot of us hoped against hope that, ‘There will be no new operations with KotFE’ meant … “at launch” and hoped they’d have something out early 2016 — clearly not the case. The best case scenario is that the new operations are completed and they’re sitting on them until August or september and the operations are the close of the KotFE story. Worst case is they’re totally done creating operations and we get no more ever (and we could speculate to eternity about the possibilities inbetween).
Before I heard the podcast I had glanced over the thread you were referencing of removing raids from MMOs and I thought this guy was a total troll. I agree with alot of what y’all said – if there is no group content why have MMOs? There are plenty of games that are much cheaper to play alone. I don’t think you can get rid of raids or group content and still have an MMO, at least that I want to play. I think there might be an argument to be made that there will be a reduction in scale. That is, games focusing on smaller and smaller groups. Perhaps anecdotal but you can all ready see it with WoW moved away from 40 mans and SWTOR was always a 16/8 man set up. Perhaps the next gen of group content (read raids) will be 5 – 6 man content or even scaleable depending on group size.