Not asking for specific spoilers here but: 1) Will the story give us the opportunity to alter the personality of our companions? 2) Seeing as years have past and things have...well...happened, what will the status of our ship be? Will it be there waiting for us in some form or will we have to get a new one, and if so then can we pick a different class's ship? 3) As all of the raids are being brought back and re-tuned for the new level cap, will we have the opportunity to gain older shell pieces (and named items) that have since been removed?

Makeb was more general content for all classes, while SOR was about bring up the feeling that you are the one leading the fight to stop Revan. I would bet money that the new expansion will be heavily instanced though, and mostly solo instances too because otherwise they wouldn't be able to accurately reflect the decisions that the character has made in situations where our choices matter, as they've said that they're going to. The only way around that would be to give the group leader's story/decisions priority over the other group members...or if they're telling us half truths and "our choices matter" really means that we play a role in reforming the shatters Empire/Republic...

Probably, otherwise I don't see how they could present a lot of story heavy content in a manner that's consistent with the choices that we've made along the way.

This is pretty disappointing to hear really. (one minor spoiler below) The only reason to hold onto the faction system at this point would be because they intend to have the story take the turn where the Sith Empire and the Republic resume an all-out conflict at some point in the future. From a RP standpoint, it makes more sense to have cross-faction grouping and content since the standing governments are gone and we're essentially left to our own devices; and while there is a lot of bad blood between the factions, and in general they would hate or be distrustful of each other, there's no reason that small/select groups wouldn't be able to get over it and work together for survival purposes (they've done it before, and more than once already in the storyline, example Imperial Oricon storyline where republic troops willingly fight for the Empire if you take the light path, and then one of them sends you a mail saying he liked it so much that he's staying with the Empire). It wouldn't be forgiveness for what's happened, it would be that the enemy of my enemy is my friend, and it would open up entirely new avenues for story, and solve the population problems on different servers. Look at it this way: If the Sith and Jedi have really retreated to the temples then that would mean that the Empire is in complete disarray since their society is built upon obedience to the Sith; while the loss of the Jedi wouldn't mean a whole lot to the functionality of the Republic, meaning that their entire government and military command infrastructure would have had to have been outright smashed for the Republic to collapse. That means that, in the Empire, only a limited number of Sith would still be other there and they would be vying for control of what's left, while trying to fight the new faction, which translates to limited civil war within the remains of the Empire, while the new faction is still out there (and probably hammering them day by day). While in the Republic, the individual planets would be looking out for themselves, some planetary/former republic leaders would have taken the initiative and banded together with each other for protection and made whatever agreements they had to with local republic military forces in order to fight the new threat and protect against raids from Imperial or pirate forces. Story-wise, that translates to new alliances, some new areas for political corruption and oppression, all while trying to defend against the new enemy. Even if either of the factions were able to miraculously defeat the new faction tomorrow, they would both be too weak to continue the all-out fight against each-other for another 10-20 years, during which time they'd have to rebuild and re-establish themselves (a dominant Sith would come out and the Republic would likely be reformed but at a smaller size and still re-absorbing old member planets). But that's just assuming that the new faction is defeated by some miraculous means the day after we wake up from carbonite, which they won't be. Due to that (and even if it did happen honestly), there's no reason to believe that one of the few remaining light-side Jedi on a boarder world that's reasonably secure, wouldn't see an opportunity to help a struggling former Imperial world from some problem (pirate/mandalorian raiders, extreme internal corruption and/or oppression, heavy raids from the new faction, and so on) that they work together to defend one-another. The same could be said for a level-headed and opportunistic Sith to try and gain the support of a former Republic world to gain access to whatever resources that world had. That's all that would be needed to be the basis of cross-faction content; the two factions wouldn't have to unite, only a small portion, while the larger entities remain in disarray for decades to come. Thus solving population problems on servers, and creating new RP opportunities for the community; and if you're going to say that it makes PvP make no sense, then you're wrong there too because the warzones just become simulations and the open-world pvp stays in its time period when the Imps and Pubs were still at war so that doesn't matter anyway. Ultimately, cross-faction just makes more sense based on the game's needs and where they're taking the story, and I'm pretty disappointed that they're not going to do it and I hope that they change their minds.

Pardon my ignorance, but would you please elaborate on how I'm wrong and what makes what I suggested better?

As I recall, his military had the Republic at its knees until his apprentice betrayed him at a critical moment and the resulting devastation of that internal conflict allowed the Republic to rally and win... Not exactly Naga Sadow's fault there... I think that most people put him on their top 10 list because of what he was able to achieve right up until the betrayal (and even after is since the Empire still put up a brutal fight to the end as I recall) rather than his inability to quickly reforge the broken pieces of an Empire following a massive betrayal.

I don't pretend to be an expert in SW Lore as I haven't read most of the books but for what it's worth here are my two cents... (spoiler tag is used since some story elements in the game are used) Anyway, just my two cents on the subject based on my limited knowledge of SW Lore.

There are various quests around the fleet (different ships too) that will start you on different Operations. The older operations are EV (Eternity Vault), KP (Karagga's Palace), and EC (Explosive Conflict), though you'll normally see people trying to get groups together for EV HM (Hard Mode) simply because it's the quickest of the Classic Operations. The mid-level ones are currently TFB (Terror From Beyond) and SnV (Scum'n Villainy), and you'll normally see group requests for people trying to complete either the full run or just enough to get the Weekly mission done in SM (Story Mode) The current top Operations are DF (Dread Fortress) and DP (Dread Palace), and you'll again normally see groups forming to get the weekly mission done in SM. While you can do Classic operations like EV and KP in basically the gear that you leveled with, you'll want to run FPs (flashpoints) in order to get gear drops or commendations in order to gear up for the top stuff today. A good place to kick-start your gear quality is on Oricon and you can find the missions to start the Oricon questline starting at lvl 55 on the Fleet; these missions will give you a number of 66 quality items that will be enough to help you contribute in HM 55 FPs. In general, you can run any of the SMs with 69 gear (you can get away with 66s in some cases), though for HM DF/DP you'll want full 72 minimum and you'll have to work out the stats on your gear so that you don't have anything useless like Alacrity on a pure melee class. As for getting a group for operations, when you're on the fleet you'll often see people spamming in general chat things like "LFG" or "LFM" followed by a either a linked mission or an acronym like those I listed above; and these translate to "Looking for Group" and "Looking for More" respectively. Typically you'll be able to send a whisper to those people and tell them the class that you are (tank, healer, or dps) in order to get an invite. Hope this helps. EDIT: NiM stands for Nightmare mode, and you normally don't see people trying to group for it. EDIT2: There are certain stats you want to shoot for as well depending on which role and class you play (i.e. if you're a dps then make sure your Accuracy is topped out before stacking other stats, and so on); there are guides all around that can give you the starting knowledge you need in this regard.

Hardcore raiders are hardly disappearing, what's changing are the games that they play. Ask any of the WoW refugees that you might find in this game and they'll all tell you the same thing, that the Pandaria expansion ruined WoW. How much do you want to bet that if Blizzard went back to a system similar to what they had during The Burning Crusade, that the subscription numbers for WoW would go right back up and stay there? EDIT: I'm not saying that they'd get back to the 12-13 million subscriber numbers that they've had in years past, it is a 10 year old game after all, but the raiding mentality is hardly gone, the system it ran on so well just got messed with when it shouldn't have.

A lot of things contributed to the game's fall off months after launch, most notably the lack of strong endgame content to rival WoW as both EV and KP were extremely easy and boring for veteran raiders, so they went back to WoW and TOR ended up with a reputation for weak endgame content. They (BW) helped the difficulty issues with the release of EC, but by then it was too little and too late. The eight storylines kept people around (and drew them in when the game's F2P model started) for a long time until they finally gave up waiting for new class specific content to be implimented but that only lasts so long before people complete all that there is to complete. If you want those players who wanted the storylines back, then you've got to give them class-specific content.

Well, there are a number of things Blizzard could do to stop the bleeding in WoW, but that's another discussion. As for an expansion, I completely agree with you that they should do a full expansion with class-specific content. Those stories are why people were convinced that TOR would be the ultimate MMO and redefine the genre (and why the game's pre-order numbers were so high), but new storylines weren't released in a timely fashion and now they'll probably never be released. Makeb was a perfect opportunity (to an extent, same with Oricon) but the idiotic penny pinchers at EA kept looking at short run profits over long-term sustainability of the game. Classic EA.

I'm aware that the class stories are not being further developed, it's no secret that places like Makeb and Oricon originally had class specific stuff that was cut for budgetary and speed purposes, and that's my point. People started playing this game for the storylines and character development, and that's what's been cut out and what they'll have to decide to go back to or seriously press their Ops and FP content in order to be competitive with the elephant in the room. Essentially, if you want to get back the subs you lost because of the lack of expanded storylines, then you're going to have to give them class specific story to come back to.

Class specific story, everything is neutral now.

The focus of WoW, and what keeps people around, is the endgame content and Blizzard knows that; they also know that one of the main complaints of players is that they don't want to level up that many levels on extra characters, which is why they let you instantly level one character in order to get to the endgame content faster, which is where Blizzard knows that they'll make their money by keeping you interested in it. TOR is different because it didn't build itself on its endgame content, it built itself on its story, and they've let that go by the wayside for the most part. Eventually they're going to have to either really push their endgame content hard to make it a real competitor to WoW's endgame, or they'll have to go back to class-specific story to get people to hold onto that after they've experienced all eight of the storylines two or three times.

Yeah I've seen terrible lag before, and experienced it before too (ever played WoW on dial-up? I have, lol), but there are tell-tale signs that a person is lagging and when they're BSing you because they have no idea what they're doing and this person gave all the signs that something was up with him and not his connection.

While it's not all doom and gloom, it's still not a great sign. Subscription numbers will continue to fall until there is more content worth subscribing for, be it storyline expansions, new operations, mini story expansions, and so on; at which point the sub numbers will see a varying increase until the content has been burned through. It's no secret or great revelation that they need to continually release new content in order to keep people interested and keep people subscribed to the game. In my opinion though, the game will continue to decline so long as they keep doing Story-neutral content, since the game was built and sold on the storylines, which they've since mostly abandoned. Yes there are 8 full storylines to experience in the game, but that is eventually used up and people who played the stories want to see more, and they'll only wait so long. Yes it's more expensive and time-consuming to develop class-specific content, but it's the only way to hold onto and get back the players who play the game for the story, so you stand to gain more than you would by just developing stuff quickly for a quick buck. But then again that's a constant problem with EA, their thinking is constantly in the short run, whether by necessity or stupidity I can't say, rather than trying set-up significant long-run gains, so this game will probably be dead in 10 years and nobody at EA will care.

You wouldn't be stuck in a quarantine zone, you'd just be hunted if you tried to go onto the fleet, so you'd have to group up with friends in order to live; could actually end up being an interesting little mini-event to try and stay alive through the rakghoul containment squads. Alternatively, the event could also remove the sanctuary protection on the Fleet and turn it into a Lawless zone, where having the virus auto-flags you so that other players can enforce Imperial edicts by destroying the infected.

So I was on my tank a couple of weeks ago and I teamed up with a friend of mine who's a healer to get the weekly hammered out pretty quickly, sounds good right? Well.... ...... oh boy..... So we queue up and get the instant pop for Mandalorian Raiders and we're grouped with a Mara and a Jugg (the Mara's gear wasn't very good but the Jugg had High HP and was from a good guild so I figured he was geared and left it without inspecting and didn't give it a second though....big mistake) and so we start along our way. The first couple of pulls don't seem to have any issues, everything dies but us and it doesn't feel like it's taking too long, but all that changes at the first boss. I tell them where I'm going to be tanking the boss and mark the first dog to be targeted, everybody says they're ready and we start. I'm off tanking the boss and the dogs are over in the rest of the group, and I happen to notice the Jugg just sitting there, at first I figure that he's DC'd but then he starts to move again so I keep going. He does it again, just stopping and standing there, then attacking and then standing and then attacking and I don't quite understand what's going on. However in my overconfidence, I only see that the first dog is dead and figure that the mara is doing a great job, and oh man was I wrong, and I didn't realize just how wrong I was until I killed the boss all by myself, and went over to find the enraged dog still at half health!!! We kill it without a wipe, but people do die before it goes down; after which I take a long look at the Jugg's gear to find out that he's actually in full tank gear. When I ask him about it he responds by saying that he's switching from tank to dps and needs to regear, and that this (his current gear) is the best gear that he has. We talk to him about his choice in queuing up like he did, but I want to help the guy out because we've all been there trying to gear a character before, so I tell him that he can stay so long as he actually participates and tries to actually DPS the targets. He agrees and we move on and clear through to the second boss, and since the trash mobs went off without much trouble I figure that everything's going to be ok, right? WRONG!!!!!![i/] It ends up taking forever to kill the second boss(es) and the Jugg ends up dying because, for some crazy reason, he taunts the gunslinger off of me during his Last Man Standing AoE and gets wrecked. That irritated me and he doesn't really answer me when I ask why he taunted, he just respawns and keeps going. My friend tells me to just push through since we're almost at the end but the Mara really really wants the Bonus boss so we agree to give it a shot, but once we go in the Jugg alternates between just standing there and running around the room like a chicken without a head until we have the boss down to about 50% when he finally attacks, and by attacking I mean he uses three random attacks and then backs out again and goes back to what he was doing. We end up hitting the enrage timer on the bonus boss and we all die, and when I ask the Jugg what happened, he replies by saying that he was "lagging bad that whole fight." I tell him we'll try it one more time and that he must be attacking or we'll hit the enrage, but when we go in and start the fight again the Jugg does the exact same thing and my friend realizes this too late and tries to dps but it's not enough and we hit the enrage again and wipe. I'd had enough at this point, I think you can guess what happened next (might just be a vote followed by finishing without issue, lol).

True, yet assassins have naturally higher defense stat than both PTs and Juggs (10% base for Sins, and 5% base for the others) so we're not completely left out here

Nice post KBN, I'm not pretending to be an expert or anything (I haven't cleared all the HM content so I don't deny that I'm not perfect lol), but I do things a little differently on some of the bosses and I wanted to offer my perspective for the hm 8m ops that my guild runs: Nefra: -Since she does her Dot cast every 45-50 seconds after the first, I spread out my CDs along those lines; i.e. everytime she hit the group with the Dot I fire either an Overcharged Saber, Deflection, or Adrenal (or Relic if you run that way) in order to prevent any strain from hitting the healers during the phase were they have to be cleansing. The CDs will all last long enough for your healers to finish cleansing the group and then turn their attention back to you, and when executed with good timing the CDs will all be back up again (or damn close) for the 4th and 5th Dot casts if you go that far. Draxxus: -Normally I save my Deflection specifically for wave 5 (double corruptors in back); I wait for him to land, let him finish his AoE without issue since it doesn't hurt and once he begins using his main attack I fire off Deflection. I do this because I'll basically take no damage from the boss with Deflection up and it will allow the healers to focus on the group while the corruptors are up. Assuming DPS is good then the corruptors will be dead before deflection is done and DPS will be working on the the other adds and heals will be more able to focus you, thus sparing your other CDs (exception being shroud if you get randomly focused by the lightning). Like I said I'm not an expert, but these have worked for me

A Rakghoul infestation is a fun idea for an event, but the event really has an immersion breaking element to it, and that's the virus. Don't get me wrong, a Rakghoul event would be incredibly underwhelming without the potential to be infected by the rakghouls, especially when NPCs constantly talk about how nasty the virus is and how it turns anybody into rakghouls soon after the slightest scratch. Having the virus isn't the issue, the way that it's implemented is. I know that it's more or a Lore and RP issue but sitting in the Imperial Fleet, with the Announcer going on about quarantine and disposing of the infected, while about half the fleet's population is infected, then reading people wanting to go and spread the virus to starter worlds just to troll newbies, really takes the wind out of the sails for the event. It's not quite as bad as it was during the last event when you got DNA for blowing up and you had masses of people just standing on the fleet waiting to blow up then get re-infected so they could farm the DNA, but it's still pretty bad. So I suggest the following: Add very powerful Rakghoul containment squads to the fleet (and necessary areas) that will roam around and shoot people with the virus on sight. Make people who want to carry the virus on the fleet have to bring a lot of friends and have to fight to live. They had similar mobs on the fleet in the old event, but they were ineffective because the NPCs that would shoot you if you had the virus were only lvl 28, so a lvl 50 could easily get past them. Make the new mobs max level and minimum elite strength (preferably champs) so that no individual or uncoordinated group could survive them.

I'm not entirely sure what you mean by combining things for "bulk" as you put it, do you mean combining the post-recruitment missions to be similar? Or did you mean have them be neutral to your character's alignment? Sorry for the misunderstanding regardless. But still I strongly believe that this sort of thing would be a welcome addition to the game for most people, even one that they'd pay Cartel Coins for if they had to

Damage taken per second isn't reliable because of the variances in tank setups (most notably the difference between an Avoidance Sin/Shadow and a Mitigation Sin/Shadow) and boss fight; though highest hit taken is an interesting stat to note for direct comparisons to the tank classes on the same boss fights. If I might, the parse does allow reasonable comparisons of the following stats: -% of attacks Dodged/Parried/Deflected (Once broken down they're all the same, the only difference is the boss that's attacking in reference to the tank class that's handling it) -Total Damage taken -Total damage absorbed -Threat Generated on Single Pulls (on boss and not counting AoE pulls unless it's in a separate category as being the add tank would distort this stat). -Threat per second (same conditions as above) *EDIT: You could also add Heals Taken as a category if you wanted in order to show who's needing the most healing or getting the healing, though that could also be distorted I suppose; just a thought though

I totally agree with you, there's definitely a sizable portion of the game's population that wants to see a continuation of the individual character stories in the game, and doing something like this would be a good opportunity for them to introduce new story without needing to take an enormous amount of time and money to develop full new planets that they only have time to develop general stories for. Hell, if they like what I wrote in the first post then I'd gladly write the content to save them some of the development costs if that's what it came down to. Regardless though, this game is extremely story driven, and new stuff like the THORN event will probably keep occupied for a week or w/e, we still need something long-term to look forward to.

So we've all been in an Operation, Flashpoint, or a Heroic quest where people are getting there slowly but some are coming from other planets/stations or whatever circumstance that they're in, but the punchline is that your group is waiting on one or a few people to get things rolling. So how do we alleviate the issue and keep things moving? For a while now I've been hoping for something similar to the Warlock Summon powers, but finding a way to make it work in the game and not be absurd within the Game's Lore has taken some thought, but here's what I've come up with: Grant Smugglers and Agents a general class power that allows them to teleport a groupmate exactly where they are at the time of the ability cast. Call them: -Smuggler's power could be called: Smuggle In... -Agent's power could be called: Transport Asset Power would have a 5-10 second cast with a 10-15 second CD (or no CD) and wouldn't be useable in a WZ or while in combat. Anyway, what do yall think?