Rise of the Fabulous

Yesterday was the big day: the Rise of the Emperor Fabulous went live. In this post I'll share my first thoughts on the update. Just in case you have missed it:

1) Why have you been living under a rock for the past few weeks?
2) The ♥ Outfit Designer ♥ is here! Fashionistas rejoice!

Don't worry, I'll bring you up to speed. The ♥ outfit designer ♥ is a pretty intuitive system: you'll get a new tab in your character panel and any gear slotted there will simply override your gear's cosmetic appearance. It also means we can now use legacy gear without looking like something the cat brought home!

The pain is deep, but temporary

Oh yeah, and there's also something with continuing the main story line on the Imperial planet Ziost.

Non-outfit designer related changes:

• All mounts are now Adaptive, meaning their speed increases with your Speeder Piloting rank.
This is actually a nerf to the cartel market, because it means both cartel market and non-cartel market mounts are equally viable. It makes me happy to see Bioware puts player quality of life above their own immediate monetary interests.
• All taxi destinations are now available to all players and all quick travel bind points within a map region are now automatically discovered when the region is revealed.
This will speed up leveling in the light of the coming 12x XP buff considerably. I could see a lot of players being happy about this.
• The cooldown on the quick travel ability has been reduced. For subscribers and preferred players the cooldown is now 6 minutes. The legacy travel I, II, and III unlocks now reduce the cooldown of the quick travel ability by 2 additional minutes each.
A continuation of the trend aimed at convenience following the reduced cooldown to the priority fleet transport skill earlier. As I already bought one of those unlocks, my quick travel cooldown is now down to 4 minutes. If you buy all the unlocks, you'll have no cooldown at all. This is a great quality of life improvement for getting about quickly.
• The base cooldown on the priority transport: personal starship legacy perk has been reduced to 6 minutes. Each improved priority transport: personal starship unlock will reduce that cooldown by an additional 2 minutes.
Same story as the previous point. I usually go to my starship by mapping to my stronghold (which has no cooldown), but I'm considering actually getting this with all the unlocks for my main characters if I have some money leftover.
• Cooldowns have been removed from the priority transport legacy perks.
I thought this sentence was a bit confusing, but what it means is that the priority transport skills (to Coruscant, the Gav Daragon etc) have no cooldown anymore, whereas they used to have a one hour cooldown as default. This means they are actually worth getting now. Again, when I happen to have some leftover credits.
• The planetary modification and equipment vendors have gone through a large rework: the vendor's stocks have been adjusted to have a better variety of modifications at a lower commendation cost.
This is great for keeping up with the gear while leveling characters. Also, I hope "a better variety of modifications" means we got rid of those endurance-heavy mods that forced us to buy mods of inferior level or skip gearing up for some levels altogether.
• All class missions that previously rewarded 1 or 2 basic commendations now reward 8 basic commendations.
Another sweet buff for leveling characters. I guess Bioware really wants us to subscribe for that 12x XP!
• Reduced the health of the Lurkerlings in the Story Mode Underlurker encounter.
I almost can't believe that they actually did it. Everyone has been calling since the release of the current endgame raids that this encounter is way too hard for a storymode operation. This is great news for Temple of Sacrifice storymode pugging.
• The Squadron now utilizes low smoke emitting ammunition, reducing smoke during explosions and increasing visibility.
I never had problems with this, but Conrad tells me I'm the exception. If less people are wiping because they can't see the circles clearly, that's only a good thing.

• Reduced damage done by Quartermaster Bulo and Sword Squadron in all difficulty modes.
I'm not sure why this happened. Bulo and Sword Squadron are a step up from the first bosses, but they are easier than the ones following. My guess is that Bioware wants to ease the pain a bit of the many guild raid groups getting stuck on these bosses on hardmode. It will be interesting to see how we'll fare with Asylum on these next Monday.

♥ Outfit designer ♥

Now we got that out of the way, let's continue to the interesting news: the ♥ outfit designer ♥! I only had a brief time to fiddle around with it yesterday, but here are my findings.

Money-saving tip

The price of unlocking a legacy wide outfit tab (cartel coins only) is always the same, regardless of which tab it is you want to buy. Conversely, if you buy an individual slot per character with in-game credits, the price goes up the more slots you already have unlocked. This means it's economically more attractive to buy account wide slots last. So if you plan on spending some cartel coins, but also buy some slots with credits, spend your credits on all your characters first, so the cartel coins account wide unlock will count for the more expensive later outfit tabs.

Bugs

I guess it's too much to ask for a perfect system. I found some minor quirks; luckily nothing major.

My operative on the character selection screen (left) and in-game (right)

After logging out, the dye of my operative's equipment does not show on the character selection screen. This scared me, as I had just found out that the dye she is using is not currently sold on the GTN and its mirror dye goes for 2.5 million credits! Luckily she looks fine when logged in.

Another thing is that you can only unify colours after applying (and paying for) the pieces in your outfit tab. So if you want to check out what unify colour looks like beforehand, you'll have to oldfashionedly unify the colours of your equipment and use the preview window (ctrl + left mouse click) for the items you want to test.

Unify colours may also not show correctly in the outfit designer itself, while it luckily does show correctly on your actual in-game character.

Discoveries

These are some things I found out while fiddling around with the ♥ outfit designer ♥.

Conclusion: sorcerer gear looks terrible on a shadow

Faction-restricted gear now shows correctly on preview windows regardless of on which faction you're logged in. It used to be that you saw the Republic skin for equipment restricted to Imperial characters and had no way of telling what if would actually look like on an Imperial character without logging over the the Imperial side and somehow find that equipment again (and the other way around). My guess is that this is something they had to fix in order for the ♥ outfit designer ♥ to work without any armour restrictions.

Edit: when I logged my synthweaving shadow later on, I could not see cross-faction previews anymore, so maybe it was actually a bug that I could earlier on and I've been cheering too early.

Furthermore, I traced down a bunch of unmoddable items with unique looks that I'm excited about. I'll be looking for more for these (and circlets in particular) in the future. I'll make sure to write about them on this blog.

 Is it really? No, it cannot be... a red robe without hood?

My miraluka sentinel Haradwen is on an everlasting quest for a red robe without hood. Because she is a miraluka, I can't hide the hoods that accompany almost all medium armour jedi robes with special circlets (or I'll have to deal with the glasses of doom). This unmoddable unhooded version of the veda cloth crafted gear (Ruusan Dynamic Defense Vestments, to be precise) might be just what she is looking for! If I can get rid of the grey at the back, that is.

F.l.t.r.: Overkill acolyte bracers, Resilient polyplast headgear, Relentless synth headgear, Peacekeeper's headgear

I'm really excited with the Overkill acolyte bracers, a unique set of unmoddable bracers that I have been wishing to use for a very long time. Furthermore, I found some craftable non-unibrow circlets. Some of them are moddable, but have armour class restrictions. I'll now be able to use them on any class I want (read: saaaage). I'm sure there are more circlets I've missed, especially the world drop ones, so my quest has only just begun.

What Rise of the Fabulous things are you excited about?


Special thanks go to Conrad for letting me use the title and intro he came up with.