Uprising Rebalance
Uprisings have been rebalanced in SWTOR, now correctly scaling to level 75 as intended. Introduced during the Knights of the Eternal Throne era of content, Uprisings were group activities optimized for level 70 - the maximum at the time - and endgame gear as it was back then. Essentially, these were shorter takes on the Flashpoint formula. Since the launch of Onslaught in late 2019, the level cap has been raised to 75 and much more powerful gear became available. Unlike other content, Uprisings didn’t scale players back to being as powerful as a level 70 character, which made Uprisings soloable - this wasn’t the intention with this content, and now BioWare has rebalanced the encounters, once again making them only possible to complete with a group of max-level players. On the flipside, they compensated for this by making Uprisings faster to complete, while also increasing drop rates for exclusive loot. Additionally, if you intended to make use of Uprisings during leveling a new character, Story and Veteran difficulties are still available for level 70-74 players, while Master Mode difficulty is now for level 75 only. These changes certainly do not benefit the solo player, as now you can’t complete Uprisings alone anymore - however, making them shorter and increasing drop rates are bound to make them more popular, so it should be easy to find a good group with the Activity Finder from now on.
Conquest Changes
The biggest guilds in SWTOR race to conquer planets every week by racking up the most conquest points, and in such a competitive environment some players have tried exploiting some game mechanics for an unfair advantage. With Update 6.2.1 BioWare has implemented a few changes to how Conquests work in order to level the playing field. As of today, characters joining a Guild will not contribute towards the Guild’s conquest pool during the week of joining, only once the next Conquest week begins. Plus, if a player leaves a Guild on their own, the conquest points they had collected during the week up until then will still count towards the Guild’s progress - however if a character is kicked from the Guild, their points go too. Additionally, many Guilds with high populations were farming out conquest points via the infinitely repeatable crafting Conquest objectives, leaving other group and PvP content with too few players. Now, crafting objectives have been updated to be daily repeatables, so there is no Conquest benefit of completing them more than once every 24 hours.
Amplifier Update
The third major improvement brought by this patch concerns Amplifiers, advanced endgame stat bonuses introduced in Onslaught, giving max-level players a new layer of depth for character customization. Amplifiers aren’t like your usual stats that affect your performance in combat - though some can - and instead focus on a wide variety of other effects, such as boosting your gathering yield, increasing rewards from certain mission types, or buffing the potency of specific ability categories like Force or Tech. Previously, switching your Amplifiers was reliant entirely on luck, and some of the rarity classifications didn’t make a lot of sense. BioWare has implemented a new Amplifiers pane in the Character sheet, where you can view all the possible Amplifiers that you can roll, lock rarity and have greater control over what stats you’ll get. A new White rarity colour has been added, as well as a Weekly Cost Reset to make rolling new Amplifiers less expensive.
Other Changes
Certain outstanding bugs have been fixed in Update 6.2.1, such as the comical error that showed Satele Shan’s contact entry with the icon of a Voss mystic and the character bio of Revan instead of her own. A number of outdated in-game descriptions and tooltips were updated and corrected, and new intro movies have been added to the game when you launch it - there is still the option to auto-skip these, but all players will have to watch them at least once after first booting up the game following the patch installation. BioWare is still in the process of cleaning up the Spirit of Vengeance Flashpoint, which launched in a highly buggy state alongside Echoes of Oblivion late last year. A total of 30 fixes and tweaks were applied, but we’re still not sure if the whole Flashpoint has been properly fixed - stay tuned for our walkthrough to learn more. You can read about the plethora of minor tweaks and bugfixes in the patch notes here - none of the class changes will have any great influence on the balance, so PvP should be unaffected by 6.2.1.
