It’s Tuesday and you know what that means, time for some SWTOR server downtime. BioWare will be performing their weekly maintenance starting at 2AM CST (12AM PST/3AM EST/8AM GMT/9AM CET) on the 28th and hope to be done by 6AM CST (4AM PST/7AM EST/12PM GMT/1PM CET) of the same day. As usual they cannot guarantee that the servers will be back up by then, but there is also the chance that they will be back up before that.
No word on anything specific that will be patched this week but there is a good chance that most or all of the recent changes implemented on the Public Test Server will be included. If the maintenance start time is changed for any reason we will update this post with the new information.
BioWare recently released patch notes for update 1.1.2, which is currently live on the Public Test Server. It includes the usual plethora of ability, mission, and companion fixes as well as some tweeks to the Biochem skill.
Biochem users will now be able to give/sell Energized and Exotech stims and adrenals to other players as they are no longer bound to the user nor do they require skill in Biochem to use. There seem to be two big reasons why this change was made. First of all it removes the pressure on players to take Biochem in order to optimize their performance, particularly at endgame. Second it opens up more options for Biochem players to make credits by selling these stims and adrenals on the Global Trade Network. Biochem also will be getting another nerf as the effectiveness of Biochem exclusive Rakata stimpacks have been reduced to be equal to Energized stimpacks. In fact Bioware announced that they intend to reduce, over a series of patches, the effectiveness of situational consumables on endgame combat resolution. The end goal being to make the outcome of endgame combat be based more on player skill and less on what items they have on hand.
BioChem is just the first of the crafting skills to see tweaks in order to make all the skills more applicable to end game content. Major changes are currently on schedule for the next major content patch, such as extractable basemods (armoring, barrel, etc.) from purple items, critical crafting successes on orange outfits, more bind-on-equip schematic drops for artifice and other professions, increased relevance of augments, better reverse engineering chance, and other improvements. PvP is also going to see some changes in the future, with the power difference granted by PvP gear being reduced to make it easier for new level 50 players to compete in PvP.
You can read the developer post about the crafting changes here, and the full 1.1.2 patch notes after the jump. Continue Reading »
