Q&A Analysis and Commentary: April 27th, 2012

So, the Q&A this week was informative enough that I feel it should be highlighted. Some of these answers have been given before (at the Guild Summit for example), but others are new. You can click the link above to go directly to the Q&A, but here is my summary and my comments:


Dual Spec will not be making it in for Patch 1.3.

That awkward moment when you realize you're not specced for healing, so you call a medical capsule immediately.

This is a disappointment, but I can live another patch without Dual Specialization. I know a lot of people in the community and in my guild will be upset by this one, but this is something that needs to be done correctly and thoroughly before it is added to the live client. This was probably the biggest thing to come out of the Q&A.


Character transfers will be available in early summer of this year.


Exciting news. Basically they will be allowing free transfers from high-pop servers to lower-pop ones first, and then after all of that is done they will open up paid transfers. This is good as it will allow players to re-assess the community of their server before forking over money for paid transfers. Kudos to Bioware for having this done so quickly.


Social gear will scale to your armor type automatically in Patch 1.3.

You can't tell just by looking, but she has a 23% chance to deflect and a military-grade shield generator.

This is exciting news for all those who do not wear Light Armor. What I would love to see in the future is some limited functionality to allow you to wear different kinds of modifiable armor (for example, there are some Light Armor legs that look a lot like Revan's robe, but I can't use them because they are Light and I am a tanking Juggernaut). As far as we know, this armor scaling feature will work only with Social gear - but I would love for them to expand it to all gear. Probably a pipe dream, though.


New species will be added sometime this year.

This cheerful looking guy could be the nail in my Chiss Operative's coffin.

No word on what kind of species we're talking here, but this is exciting. Hopefully they add extra character slots around the same time, because mine are already full. If they put Nautolan in, someone is going to be getting deleted.


Datacrons may be made Legacy-wide!


They are considering it, so this is not 100% guaranteed. I liked the datacron hunt thing, but a lot of people seem to dislike it based on the fact that it requires a time investment on mutiple characters. The stat bonuses individually are very minor, but they do add up. I'm interested to see where they go with this.