Housekeeping in the Old Republic

Various RL factors kept me from really playing Knights of the Fallen Empire on Tuesday or Wednesday evening like I wanted and intended to. That's not to say I didn't log on, just that I didn't actually get to play, instead getting caught up on various "chores" in the game.

There was a bunch of inventory and mail to take care of because of changes to companion stats, plus items returned from the GTN because of a reset. On top of all that was the swag for having been subscribed for several months leading up to KotFE. Plus I bought a GTN node for my stronghold and ended up reconfiguring a space into my utility wall.

Just days ago, I decided it was time to do something about the monstrosity of my action bars. There are many temporary buffs and conditional abilities that I have tended to neglect if they weren't on my main hotbar, which is tied to my Nostromo (I'm a bit of a button masher). One thing that I really like about GW2 and especially TSW is the limited ability bar; which, while requiring some tactical planning, frees me to concentrate more fully on the action taking place in the game environment, instead of what is happening on my UI.

So I changed my UI around to hopefully pick up on those situational abilities and remember to use the battle buffs. Last night, I did some further tweaking to accommodate the altered companion ability bar and take advantage of the new snap-to-grid to properly align some stuff. This led to two annoying discoveries.

First, even though the grid origin has XY axes running through the center of the screen, and many UI elements expand from their own center, they have no center anchor point, only edges. And the various elements don't match perfectly to the grid. So snap-to was not helpful for stuff I wanted centered (or some stuff at the screen edge, but that was not as critical).

Second, and even more annoying, the new Heroic Moment ability and related Legacy abilities are only situationally available at all even from the ability window (P). I am forced to mouseclick the pop-up ability bar, when I had planned to use a secondary bar and switch to those abilities on my Nostromo. Now, these abilities may be pure cheese, inferior to any regular ability, but if so, there's not much point to putting them front and center during the two-minute (for me) Heroic Moment period. And there's not a good way for me to check their effectiveness, since they are not available to even check on if Heroic Moment isn't in effect. My first request would be a permanent return of those abilities to the Ability Window (and optional hotbar placement), even if they are not active all the time.

The third UI annoyance, which I discovered later in the evening, is that the group member map icon that used to be an easily distinguishable purple figure has been recolored to a pale blue, which causes it to get lost on the overall blue of the map interface. (Thanks to Antuan of The Ebon Hawk server for his assistance getting the above screenshot.) I was only able to see Scooter's character on the Vaiken Spacedock map because she was in motion. Otherwise, it faded into the map background. all the other map legend items are a different color than the map, from Mission givers to vendors and trainers. Why did the devs change the group member icon?

I wasn't able to jump into the new content tonight (Wednesday) either, because Scooter isn't available. And I had to go back into town on an extended errand anyway. So I'll probably do more housekeeping and work on leveling some of my Republic characters. Gotta get Legendary status!

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