SWTOR Difficulty Toggle for Class Stories being introduced with 8.0! Story, Veteran and Master Mode

The Star Wars: The Old Republic just announced a very exciting feature coming with the 8.0 Update – Difficulty toggles! Players will be able to set the difficulty of enemies relative to their characters after a long-awaited request by players to make the game harder. 8.0 is planned for release at the end of 2026.

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Difficulty Modes

Difficulty Modes allow you to set the difficulty of the game in the open world to Story, Veteran, and Master. The difficulty mode setting will affect enemies out in the open world and your enemies inside your class instances – it does not affect Flashpoints, Warzones, Operations or other instanced content.

• Story is the current game difficulty. You can move through most story content very easily with a healer companion.
• Veteran is a harder difficulty, their target is “when you played this game in the launch era” the “launch era of difficulty”.
• Master difficulty is for those of you who are really trying to challenge yourself. It’s going to be hard. If you want to challenge yourself in solo or out in the overworld.

The difficulty toggle impacts damage received, healing received, and experience gains. The difficulty toggle does NOT affect how much damage you do, so enemies do not die faster… but you will have to be more careful not to die!

Difficulty is a personal effect, so you can still play alongside others. For example, if you are in a group with one player who is in Story, and one player who is on the Master setting both fighting the same enemy, the player on Story will have an easy time and likely not die, while the Master player will be taking a lot more damage and be receiving a lot less healing, so they have to be a lot more careful.

Examples

Example: This is a level 7 gold star boss that is an early fight in the instanced Imperial Agent class story. The character is also level 7, and as a low level character, they won’t have a companion yet or many defensive abilities. On the left you have Story difficulty versus Veteran on the right – in the Veteran mode on the right , the healthbar is a lot lower even though the same amount of time has elapsed in the fight. The player will be close to dead by the time they win, and will have to be careful before they start the next fight!

Example: Story versus Master, even with a companion, Master Mode healing received is a lot less and more damage is received. At the end of the fight, against a gold star enemy, the player wound up with only 25% health left, but if he accidentally pulled any other enemy wandering by, he would die. Gear, medpac, etc, actually mattered. Resting between packs matters. Evokes the feeling of the original era of SWTOR and its difficulty level.

We don’t have much more information available than that so far! More will be revealed by the developers as we get closer to the launch of 8.0. It is not up on the Public Test Server yet.

Ventures

Ventures are a way to earning rewards by playing content on certain difficulty modes and across various classes. There will be a venture for Veteran Mode (Classic) and one for Master Mode (Expert). Learn More About Ventures

SWTOR Classic and Expert Modes being introduced with 8.0! (Veteran and Master Ventures)