SWTOR Offers More Information About Gearing And How Itemization Will Work From Here On Out

As you all know, Bioware announced a while back that they were going to be changing Combat Styles and Loadouts as part of their work on the Star Wars: The Old Republic 7.0 content update. Since then, they’ve offered looks at different styles (no longer classes), but they haven’t gotten into the ultra-nitty gritty on how the whole new system would work. Today, they have. A rather lengthy post on the SWTOR site explains the philosophy behind the upcoming changes and how they will impact not only the players, but the various features of the game, such as conquests, PvP, and operations.

The biggest takeaway from the post is that in order to achieve what they’re going for, the dev team is removing “nearly all” RNG and the Renown system. As pointed out in the post, neither of these, in their current iterations, has a “significant positive impact on the experience of the player”. Instead, players will be provided with a limited set of Flashpoints and Story Operations per week that will drop a guaranteed upgrade to the player’s lowest gear slot. This is, of course, provided the player’s gear isn’t already maxed out. It should be noted the upgrade is only guaranteed for three runs a week. After that players will receive currency to put toward upgrades.

Depending on your style of play, you will have options on how to go about earning the new gear. No one’s going to be stuck having to do Flashpoints all the time. If you want to, you can go for the solo option with conquests or even opt for PvP. A full rundown of how each of these will work is available in the post on the SWTOR site.