If you read my review of Star Wars: The Old Republic you know that one of my few gripes with the game was a small delay in ability activation that could cause some frustration, especially between the most competitive players among us.

Today BioWare rolled out a new patch (numbered 1.1b) that fixes that delay almost completely. Having just tested the patch myself, I can say that the improvement is significant and easy to notice, making combat much more fluid and responsive both in PvE and PvP environments.

BioWare stated earlier in the week that the delay was caused by multiple issues, and that the coders will continue to work to eradicate the problem completely, but as of now noticing any real delay is almost impossible for most people, marking a very solid step in the right direction.

In addition to the ability delay fix, frame rates have improved significantly across many systems (mine included, not that I had real performance problems before, but I never say no to a 10-15 fps increase).

You can read the full patch notes below:

General

• Implemented optimizations to improve performance on Republic and Imperial Fleets.

Classes and Combat

• Significantly improved the delay when activating player abilities, particularly when in lower framerate situations. This allows for improved ability responsiveness in hectic combat situations.

Operations

General

• Operations will no longer allow more than 16 Operations Group members to enter concurrently.

Karagga’s Palace

• Operations Groups will no longer be forced to reset the Operation if the group wipes when attempting to defeat G4-B3 Heavy Fabricator.
• Fixed an exploit that would allow players to repeatedly loot the chest after defeating Jarg and Sorno.

Miscellaneous Bug Fixes

• Fixed an issue that could cause graphical inconsistencies, which most often manifested as random screen “flickering.”