Was able to get in some time in on the game this weekend during the stress test. Here's the view from a WoW addict: (Played a Jedi Knight/Sent. to L16)
Pros:
- The graphics weren't THAT bad..I did go in and enable everything I could and it looked decent. I could tell AA was disabled though. The starting area (Jedi Knight) looked good.
I agree
- Combat was fun, and I liked having to activly hit my skills to make attacks happen. I wish I had more "defensive" options that I could activate during a fight. Felt like I was a glass cannon and had no way to save my own butt when I got into trouble
Take a class that isn't a glass cannon? I played a tank spec Jedi Shadow and I wasn't a glass cannon at all
- Story was really good, and I liked having the choices available to me.
Same here
- Companions are neat, and they do help alot when questing. I don't like having to group up often to complete quests, so this helped alleviate that a bit.
I love the companion system. Groups are groups of 4 and content was designed around that. So if you only can find one other person to run a 4 man instance then you can still do so using the two companions. They aren't quite as good as real players, but they can fill the job.
- I only experienced a queue "issue" on Friday night. I Alt-F4'd the game a few times and checked different servers and found one without a queue. Once I was logged in, I never experienced any lag/peformance drop and did not get disconnected.
The flashpoint instances were buggy and dropping people. Also they were running code in the background to randomly drop people on purpose for which they stated to simulate some server instability or some such. I went 20 hours from Friday to Saturday with no drops at all. I had left my char macroing crafting while I was asleep. Then the next morning and after I would DC every so often. Once it happened 5 times in a row. Damn annoying.
Cons:
- Group questing, the bane of WoW, stinks just as bad in here. I know most group quests are not required to move the story along, but having to spam General looking for someone to help out with "Heroic 2+" quests seemed annoying.
Not a big deal with companions. Just need to find one person. My only problem is that if you did find one person, one of you NEEDED to be a healer. Reliance on healers for these groups is just too great.
- Elite Mobs need toned down a little. I know.. I'm used to WoW where if one is skilled enough with thier class, they could solo an Elite mob if needed. When going up against Elite mobs, even with party members, we'd sometimes just get our poo pushed in

They hurt! Might just be a tuning thing.
There are elites with the gold star, and then there are Elite bosses. Elites around my level or lower were easy for me as a tank spec Jedi Shadow. Easy for the healing spec Jedi Sage as well. At least one at a time. However some instances had 3-5 elites in a group plus a number of "strongs" which are slightly more powerful than normal mobs but are not elites. Those pulls were most definitely rough. In case you didn't know the system, here it is. Nothing special around the portrait or next to the mobs name was a normal. A silver star next the portrait and name was a Strong mob. A gold star was an Elite mob. A gold and silver star conjoined together was an Elite Boss mob.
- Current Group finding methods are not that great. Most players that will be coming to this game are WoW players. We're used to the Dungeon Finder. Having to rely on the "social pane" to find groups or spamming General is not that great.
Social pane, general chat, or hanging around the entrance to the instance always worked for me. Took less than a second. Aslo general is NOT world wide chat. It is just general for the main map you are in.
- WTB Healers? Hehe.. probably a byproduct of everyone wanting to play a Jedi.. could not find healers for any instance runs. Not the games fault, but I'm sad I didn't get to test Flashpoints..
Yah, this was a problem. EVERY base class has a healing subclass to be picked. In fact I thought most of the healing subclasses were way more powerful than the other classes. Still it was hard to find healers and tanks (at least I was a tank) as everyone wanted to be a dual wielding lightsaber jedi knight that was all glass cannon.
- Could not figure out how (if there is one) to display the combat log.
Combat log specifically removed for now. Which annoyed me because I KNOW based off the hover numbers that popped up that some skills were not doing what the skill description said they were suppose to do. For example I had 3 melee skills. My spammable weak one that costs no force. Listed when I logged off at 140-160 damage spread out over 3 hits. Which it typically did 140 to almost 200 damage over 3 hits. I had Double Strike for 25 force cost that did two hits in a row where each hit was suppose to be for 150-180. However all my hits were from 250-290 per hit. Last I had was my Shadow Strike which was a backstab ability. It was listed as 510-590 for 50 force cost. This one is the one that was broken. It almost always hit for 330-360 per hit. Was not worth the force cost, long animation, nor setup time to run around the back of the mob to execute. Only reason I found to use it was that it generate a TON of threat. As a tank, getting that agro fast makes a huge difference. So I used it once to get agro and then used my other two abilities after that.
Overall, I came away impressed. At first, I felt it was just WoW.. but with a Star Wars skin. After playing some more, I started getting really interested in the game and story. It'll be interesting to see if Bioware implements any of the feedback from this weekend, since I'm pretty sure MANY WoW players were invited and played.