The wheels are now fully in motion for Star Wars the Old Republic's next major patch. We've now had an 8.0 focused livestream, and even have some content on the PTS available for testing. In regard to where I'm at with SWTOR, similarly to my current situation in WoW Classic that I previously mentioned, I'm mostly in a sort of waiting state beyond casual log-ins. I tend to play SWTOR in an unconventional way anyway, a lot of my time on the game is just doing the vanilla 1-50 story content on repeat.
I've played the game on and off since launch, and the furthest I've ever got in the story is when you go to Iokath, which was released in 2017. Furthermore, I never really planned to play in this specific way, it's just naturally what I have gravitated towards doing in the game for many years now. I do still plan to eventually take my "main" character to the latest content, but I've never been in a rush to do that, and I usually end up running an alt through the vanilla content again instead.
I've had many characters, and deleted just as many characters over the years (I am one of those that likes to keep the character screen quite clean). My current furthest along character is a Sith Warrior just about to start Makeb, after doing all the vanilla content including group content. Fun fact, despite playing like this for years, I've never actually finished the trooper story, so the legendary flair still eludes me.
Why does this mean I'm mostly waiting for 8.0 to release? Well, Broadsword announced some big new features and changes to the levelling process for the game that has me very intrigued, and looking forward to playing through the vanilla story once again when they come into effect. The first is that they're slowing down the overall XP gain, I've seen quite a few veteran players not happy with this change, but I personally think it can only be a good thing, and from the sounds of it, it's mostly focused on the early levels, which are in my opinion, absolutely much too fast nowadays, slowing these down will be beneficial in the long term, especially for newer players coming in which seems to be Broadswords focus. I hope it's quite a significant nerf personally, but I think in actuality it'll be quite a small one, but that's better than nothing at this stage.
The feature announced that caught my eye the most was the levelling difficulty options introduced. This is something I've wanted in SWTOR for a long time now, and is probably the closest we will ever get to an official classic SWTOR version. One of my biggest issues with current SWTOR is how brain-dead easy the levelling content is, especially in the earlier levels. Adding these difficulty modes will hopefully fix this, while remaining the best of both worlds for everyone, because people that enjoy the lack of challenge don't have to engage with it if they don't want to. There are some side effects due to this, mainly in that the damage you do cannot change, but I'd gladly take that trade-off so people playing on different difficulty modes are not in separate instances and can play together.
These new difficulty modes combine with the new upcoming levelling "ventures", personally I'm not too fussed about this one, but I'm sure I'll end up doing at least some of them due to how much I play the vanilla story content. I know we've had a venture already in that dog droid companion, but I don't have that done yet, as I haven't got far enough in the story, or I've just not engaged with it if there's no story progression requirements tied to it.
Huge bonus points to Broadsword bringing back the old class icons as well (including the beta Imperial Agent one). While I don't want to be disrespectful to people's work, I do think the original logos are better overall than the ones we've had since, and I think bringing them back is the correct decision. I'd love to see the ship hangar on character creation come back as well one day to replace the black void we have now.
So with the knowledge of these levelling changes now coming, I'm mostly just waiting for them to go live, as I'd rather be playing on one of those new difficulties as I play. I'll maybe still do some casual levelling, and maybe progress my Sith Warrior some more, but I'm not sure yet.
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