Also: If I read it correctly, it seems they're doing 2x XP weekends this weekend and each of the next three.
It doesn't make the missions drag any less, but you do ding a lot faster. I took my level-20 Sith Sorceror on Balmorra to 22, then did the last class quest ('into the Pit', a putatively level-19 mission with an annoying elite boss and add spawns that will chew you up if you don't hoard your AoEs), then did the bonus missions, getting 23 and about 3/4 of the way to 24 before departing to Nar Shaddaa. Then I switched to my level-18 Jedi Knight on Taris and got her to 24 and a bit in the middle of the bonus series before hanging it up for the evening Sunday night (play sandwiched in around baking bread). I find, though, that I get a
lot more mileage out of characters with Stealth (my 26 Jedi Shadow and 30 Sith Assassin) than I do out of the straightforward 'boom in and start laying down the hurt' classes; I would start an Operative or Scoundrel for the stealth, but I still prefer ranged to melee combat; I'll probably get around to it at some point.
I'm still not particularly happy with the game-balance issues that restrict ranged combat to 30 meters -- except for the extravagant extra 5 meters on snipes (in the face of the dozen people with confirmed sniper kills beyond 1,250 meters), or some of the wierd disconnects in the game:
- The datacrons scattered across the landscape appear to be molecularly-bonded to where they're sitting, forcing everyone to go through annoying jumping puzzles to get to them, rather than the first person to find one carting it off so no one else can benefit from it (Imperial) or taking it to put someplace where everyone can get to them easily (Republic)
- Despite being able to leap up to 30 meters to enter combat, Jedi and Sith are unable to jump on top of a 3-meter-tall storage crate. Unless there's an enemy on top of that crate they can leap to attack, in which case they can leap 30 meters up or down without a problem.
- The skill of climbing is apparently utterly unknown in both the Empire and the Republic, despite some ambushes where the mobs abseil into position around you, allowing the devs to channel your movement by the simple expedient of putting in barriers at least ten feet high. This is one of the biggest letdowns after CoH, which actively removed obstacles to your character getting around zones to poke into odd corners.
- Line-of-sight handheld energy weapons with the range of a thrown baseball, while fixed-mount weapons appear to have unlimited range.
- Characters who are active members of their faction's government forces (Trooper/Agent) who nevertheless have to pay for equipment repair out of their own pocket and either pay for new equipment out of their own pocket or scavenge it off the dead bodies of their defeated enemies. And I can understand why a bounty hunter or a smuggler would be wearing gear assembled from a bunch of different sources, but there's a reason they're called "uniforms" -- NPC government personnel wear uniforms, but the PC government personnel wear whatever they can get their hands on.
- Whether a particular action awards light-side or dark-side points seems capricious at times. In one of the Sith missions on Korriban, for example, you recover the body of a Sith Guardsman's son and bring it back to him; in your conversation, if you admit that he was killed in the entrance of the tomb, before he ever got inside (reaffirming the guardsman's impression of his son), you get dark-side points, while lying to him that his son died bravely (because it might make him a little more well-disposed to you, which could be useful later) earns you light-side points.
And that combines with the various game-mechanics annoyances -- mission levels are hardcoded, the aforementioned lack of any sidekick/exemplar capability (which works to hinder people bringing in friends to start playing the game with them), the ongoing aggravation of people ninja'ing open-world mission goals (or just clearing them, in the case of mobs -- I did the series of missions in Station 5 on Taris that felt like the Great Tsoo Winnowing the day that Icon opened, what with all the dead or missing rakghouls), the limited variability in characters and NPCs (sometimes I think that there are only four or five NPCs of each gender and they just change costumes offstage), the repeated re-use of the same gear models for different equipment (and how the models are class-specific, so that the same piece of gear can look different when you wear it compared to when your companion wears it), the fact that you can't just go back to your ship (in my case, for the GTN kiosk I bought) without having to take off for orbit... The list goes on.
All that said, the game is still enjoyable, or I'd have stopped playing it some time ago. But each time I log in, I keep running into things that City of Heroes did
better, and how much SWTOR sometimes feels, for all the chrome of the setting, like WoW after someone did a global search and replace on all the nouns. And then I look at some of the incidental visual bits, like the rolling terrain or the eddies of windborne dust on Tatooine, and imagine how much the Paragon Studios could have done with it to make a second-generation City of Heroes that much more impressive without losing the things that made it what it was.
