I'm so confused right now and I think I like it.

5k AoE Smash. Only possible by going heavy into the Rage tree and that spec pretty much offers nothing more than one way to slow someone down and a big AoE crit. A crit that is reliant on a 4 stack buff from one of two abilities and the use of another ability out of two to guarantee the crit. All of them with cooldowns ranging from 15 seconds to 1 minute and requiring you to blow 3 or 4 global cooldowns before you can use Smash and hope to god they don't manage to run away from you because believe it or not the AoE is a small area around the Warrior. The spec does not do the damage of other classes outside of a 5k Smash crit (mind you a 5k Smash crit is only possible with high end gear). Infact it is that 5k crit that allows them to be competitive. No stealth. No healing. Weak CC compared to other classes. DPS Juggernauts have weak emergency buttons. Marauders have a button they push near death to basically make them invincible for about 6 seconds, one to reduce basic attack accuracy of their opponent to nill for 5 seconds, and a 4-second stealth. What do you do if they do that? Push your own emergency button and wait for theirs to go away. You still do good damage and you still have some burst. You can heal. You have strong CC. You have stealth. As I said the only class you'll have trouble against and the one class everyone is having trouble against is a Mercenary.

Lol I don't need to play Operatives or Scoundrels to know that A) they were overpowered, and B) that they're not underpowered now it's just not faceroll anymore for them and those who played them when they were overpowered still aren't use to actually having to try. My Sniper, Juggernaut, and Vanguard can still get their butts kicked when a Scoundrel or Operative pops out of stealth and hammers them. I've watched them CC me, stand right in front of me, heal themselves to full, and blast away at me and kill me pretty quickly. I've watched them notice they were losing to me, hit their emergency stealth button and slink away somewhere else to hide or re-engage me and unload on me again. You're not underpowered. You're on more even ground now. You thought you were leet when you were owning people and now it's not so easy so your reaction is to claim you were nerfed too hard and now all other classes are superior to yours. It's not the case. The only class that needs a serious balance check right now is Mercenary/Commando.

Entry level raids are typically easy. Some of them are even retardedly easy. I wouldn't sweat too much about how they feel right now. If the leaked information on Torhead is to be believed there are going to be 4 operations added over the next 4 major content patches. I'd hold off any criticism on difficulty until we see the next level of operations. Nightmare mode may not give you bad dreams right now but I have a feeling (see; hunch and not claiming to know anything) that it will become a lot more difficult in future ops.

Most people just starting in Warzones at level 50 don't even have Centurion gear. The problem with Operatives/Scoundrels was that they were eating people alive in a matter of seconds by themselves. A Scoundrel with no PvP gear would kill, for example, a Juggernaut with no PvP gear in around 6 seconds. Even if they didn't manage to kill you with the opening bursts your health was so low that it didn't take them much longer to do you in. The combination of insane burst damage mixed with healing, the ability to jump back into stealth (on a long cooldown ofcourse but in line with other emergency buttons), and plenty of CC at their disposal meant that pretty much the only class that could go toe-to-toe with them were Mercenaries/Commandos. I agree that Mercenaries/Commandos need a look as they just seem to do way too much damage with little trade-off. However if your basis of argument is that your favorite class is underpowered becase another is overpowered the answer is not to buff your class alone because that puts Operatives/Scoundrels right back to where they were before, overpowered. The answer is to either nerf the current overpowered class or buff all classes except them.

I think they did this for story purposes. Not every planet has a fullblown starport you can land at either because the planet was not deemed worthy of the effort, your faction has not yet set one up, or the native population does not have one and won't allow you to in the case of Voss. Personally I also find it annoying any time I go to a planet with one of these. I go to the planet, loading screen. I'm now in a docking hallway. Run to the elevator, click the button at the end, black screen. Now I'm in a small hub area. Run to the shuttle at the other end, click on the door, black screen. I would say that this whole process should be eliminated for at least future worlds. Unfortunately there are current class storylines that are triggered in the docking hallways and quests that you take while running through the hub area of the docking station. Getting rid of these for the planets that have them would require Bioware to place quest givers on the planet and redo the cinematic sequence to reflect that as well as figure out what to do with class story plots that take place on those docking stations. I wouldn't hold your breath for the current docks being removed but at least you can push for them to never do something like that again.

Oh stop with your dramatic conspiracy theories.

Winning the duel is the reward. Duels are typically done between friends or two people looking to prove who is the superior combatant. Duels are more or less practice for "actual" PvP. I do like your idea however, though I would be cautious about it. Since duels do not take place in controlled environments a one-on-one contest where credits are involved could lead to some shady situations.

As I said in a post I made afterwards that I already suffer from frequent migraines and photosensitivity. Yet despite peripheral and direct stimulations coming from my hotbar after playing for hours I have yet to experience any negative effects. I'm not saying that no one here is experiencing these issues. What I am doubting are the mass amounts of people who seemed to be fine before but now are experiencing these issues when someone like me who already had prior issues with peripheral stimulations and direct photosensitivity has been completely fine with it. I get the sense that a lot of people here are just riding the complain train. For those who are actually experiencing it I would, as I said, recommend speaking to a doctor. If I'm not having these issues but they are they may want to make certain there isn't a greater reason for it.

I don't know what class you're playing where your hotbar looks like a disco ball at a roller skating rink but I wasn't seeing bright flashes. I was looking at my bar quite often and felt no different from the original hotbar, to the one before this patch, and now this one. The GCD is not blasting light into your eyes. I get frequent migraines and I have light sensitivity neither of which were affected by this new GCD effect. If I have yet to get a migraine from this I doubt that anyone who doesn't already suffer from such things is getting a headache or feeling sick after 10 minutes. Again if they are I would see a doctor.

I have no problem with the way it is now personally. One thing I don't quite understand are the people complaining about headaches and nausea. A game with explosions, blaster fire zipping by, glowsticks whipping around and through the air all very often in your face as well as many scenarios forcing you to constantly look around to see what is going on and think about your positioning and the thing that gave you a headache or borderline seizure was the GCD effect? It's not a blinding strobe light. Some people are a little too dramatic. If you are honestly having issues from something like that I would seriously (and I do mean this sincerely) log off and make an appointment with your doctor. I played for hours with no problems.

I think I can tell you why PvE gear has more endurance than its PvP counterparts. When I was playing WoW back during TBC I saw guilds that were requiring people to have PvP gear for its much higher endurance to help survival in fights that weren't DPS races. People were being forced by the guild leaders to participate in battlegrounds and in extreme cases even arenas. Now while you could always not raid with groups like that the problem was that it actually made sense because the differences in survivability were considerable. It wasn't like requiring someone to take the DPS spec that does 1 or 2% more DPS. It was a path many guilds took for PvE progression because it honestly did make a huge difference. Look at the stats of Rakata and Battlemaster gear. When comparing the two the only stats that are lower on Battlemaster gear are endurance and whatever basic combat stat that class uses. Other stats like shield absorption are the same. However, PvP has expertise. It is this expertise rating that makes the difference. Let's assume you have an expertise of 20% and your opponent also has an expertise of 20% and for the sake of this argument you have absolutely no other defense stats like armor, defense rating, and shield rating and no buffs or talents for additional damage reduction. It's your expertise against theirs. Some people automatically assume that the 20% damage increase of expertise cancels out the 20% damage reduction from it. It doesn't work this way. Let's say your opponent hits you with an attack that normally does 1,000 damage. Well with his expertise rating that attack now does 1,200 damage which obviously means he did 200 more damage. However... your 20% damage reduction from expertise reduces that 1,200 damage hit by 20%. This means that while he gained 200 more damage from his attack you then reduced it by 240. So you negated his 200 damage increase and then made him do 40 points less damage than he normally would. Instead of 1,200 or 1,000 damage he now only did 960 damage. This doesn't seem like much but when you add it up over the course of a fight and considering that this damage is even further reduced by your other defensive stats and abilities it does make a big difference. Also consider that crits or even higher damage abilities will be even more reduced by that 20% expertise. I'm not even sure how high it's possible to get expertise either. It could be even more than that. Now you may ask why they don't simply make endurance the same for Rakata and Battlemaster gear. That answer is simple. Because if you do that then Battlemaster gear is exactly the same as Rakata gear PLUS the expertise rating which means it would make no sense to wipe and wipe and wipe to get your Rakata gear when you could just get your Battlemaster gear through patience in PvP and depending on how frequently you PvP you could very well have a full set possibly months before someone got their Rakata gear thanks to week-long lockouts and relying on other people to not mess up the fights. All you have to do with PvP is show up. Sure winning makes it go faster but not tremendously so. You could have gear that is superior for both PvP and PvE without ever setting foot in hardmode Flashpoints or Operations. Now if you say to simply lower the secondary stats to boost the primary stats in compensation you'll have the same scenario that WoW had all over again. Guilds requiring people to do PvP to get the high endurance gear to make non-dps race fights easier to manage. Sorry for the long post but I wanted to make my explanation clear.

People are asking for target-of-target to be a part of the visual UI. Not as a button command. Basically what WoW already has. Something you can click if you're not good with keybindings.

I think I remembered reading that being able to queue for a specific warzone will be coming sooner or later.

From what I can tell your first companion is the one with the largest side story as far as missions you physically accompany them on. I think I've done 3 quests for Vette at this point. Jaesa just simply went out on her own and told me the results and I'm max affection with her. Quinn has yet to bring me on a mission but I'm only halfway with him. I hope that future content will give us actual missions for all of our companions.

LOL This is just ridiculous. You might be trolling but I'll bite. What exactly does Bioware have to be embarassed about when it comes to faction imbalance or low populations on certain servers? They should be embarassed that the paying customers mostly wanted to roll Empire? They should be embarassed that they didn't stop people from playing what they wanted to play and force them to play as the other faction just because Joe got the last spot for Empire players 2 seconds before they tried to create their character? They should be embarassed that certain servers ended up being unpopular while others were very popular? They should be embarassed that they didn't offer free Rakata and Battlemaster gear for those who roll on low population servers? They should be embarassed that they didn't deny people to roll on the same server as their friends or family and force them to roll on another server by themselves? When the game first launched people cried and cried and cried about having to wait in a queue to log into their chosen server and now people cry and cry and cry because the server they chose is currently light on players. They're damned if they do and damned if they don't. In many MMOs such imbalances work themselves out over time. People migrate to other servers for various reasons. New players choose servers that just happened to have low populations. Some players get tired of having no one to kill so they decide to roll the other faction. New players come in and roll Republic enough times to where it may not be exactly balanced but now there are more than enough to keep Warzones and World PvP going. The game hasn't even been out for two months. There is always a kneejerk rush to play the "cool" faction on a server with a "cool" name in the beginning. Over time things work themselves out and a year from now everyone will forget about the faction imbalance and low population servers and be too busy complaining about the next thing they feel entitled to and how Bioware doesn't care about them. This trend that you're seeing is Bioware listening to its players and seeing what they are very passionate about but not reacting immediately and to every outburst from John who sits in the forums and spams how much he hates not being able to change his advanced class. Seriously do you see how many damn posts are made every day on the same issue? Bioware is not obligated to respond to people in these forums on an individual basis nor are they obligated to post every day on the same issue that they don't currently have a precise answer to short of telling us every single day "hey we're working on that thing you've been crying about for the last 3 days even though we told you three days ago and every day since that we're working on it". Not only would it be impossible but it would be a waste of time as we've seen with people who even after being acknowledged are still kicking and screaming like neglected children.

I have serious doubts that we'll see new core classes ever added to TOR. I won't say that it will never happen but I do feel that it is highly unlikely. Adding new advanced classes would just be much simpler in almost every way. Let's say that Bioware decided that in the second expansion (assume a level cap of 70) they want to add a new core class. This is what they would have to do. Assuming that they don't want to add any new classes to the existing origin worlds Bioware would have to create two new origin worlds for this new core class. One for the Republic and one for the Empire. Alter the layouts of the fleet stations to accomodate the new core class ship as well as class trainers and class gear vendors. Alter the layouts of orbital docks and spaceports to accomodate the new class ship as well. Add class specific instance areas to all currently existing worlds. Acquire 4 voice actors for the new class. A male and female for the Republic and a male and female for the Empire. Come up with 2 completely new storylines (Republic and Empire) not only for the new 60 to 70 content but having to stretch back to level 1 all the way up through the current level cap. They would have to create 10 new companions, their own side stories, and dialogue with the player character. Create two new art directions for the class themed gear. A whole new set of core class abilities not to mention the advanced class abilities and skill trees. Then you have the balancing issues. However Bioware could just simply create a new advanced class for each of the existing core classes and at that point the only things you need to do are create advanced class abilities, new skill trees, determine what kind of gear/stats they use, and then commence balancing. Far less time and resource intensive. That being said I do agree with you that the advanced classes need to branch away a little more from how they feel now. They definitely feel different but I would like for them to feel a little more different. In the future I would like to see fewer shared abilities and more specific abilities instead.

Like all things in life the community is pretty much divided as follows. Haters - No matter how well the game does and no matter what is improved or just simply changed they will forever claim that The Old Republic and Bioware are terrible and that anyone who gives them money is a tool. They will constantly use comparisons of other products and companies and site the differences as to why TOR and Bioware are somehow worth less than dirt. Whiners - The people who cry day in and day out that this game is not exactly what they want and that if one particular feature or all features that they want are not added they will cancel their subscription (or already have) and basically claim that the game and company will fail if people like them are not catered to. Constructive Critics - These are the people who want to see the game succeed and they honestly feel that certain things added or changed to the game will improve it for everyone or a majority of the community even if they don't immediately recognize the benefits. They accept that problems exist without bashing the game or company and are willing to give useful feedback and civil debates on the matter. Even being willing to admit their idea might not be the best and even further accepting that not all ideas will be used. Supportive Compromisers - These are the people who like the game as it is and have no problem with it but do acknowledge that many people would like to see changes or additions. They are very careful about changing things and will often try to temper the ideas of the critics and ensure that overly drastic changes are not made. Dismissers - The ones who feel that the game is just fine as it is and do not want to see any changes made. Like the whiners they are day in and day out shooting down any ideas from the community and adamantly claim that the game shouldn't be changed (or at least their favorite part of it) and that if such changes were made they would cancel their accounts for feeling that other people were catered to and that this should have been their game. Fanboys - No matter what happens or how poorly the game does these people are deadset in believing that both Bioware and The Old Republic are the best things since sliced bread. They praise anything and everything about them mindlessly. They are similar to dismissers but different in that they will immediately embrace the change and claim it is further proof that it surpasses anything else. Indifferent - The ones who don't care either way. They just play and when they're bored they leave. No real input. Some will come to start flame wars and then eat popcorn. Others just have no feelings at all on the matter. The Constructive Critics and the Supportive Compromisers are the ones who will shape the game in a meaningful way. The other groups are either completely self-centered or of no use at all.

Yeah as an Immortal specced Juggernaut in PvP you are, as you put it, the Jammer. You can do damage from time to time but your focus should be to reduce enemy damage output, act as a damage sponge for one of your teammates, crowd control, and harassment. One thing I've found that Juggernauts are great at is locking down healers. Proper use of your CC and interrupt abilities can make a healer's life hell because you have a lot of them. Force Charge (it acts as an interrupt), Force Push, Force Choke, Disruption, Backhand, and Intimidating Roar used intelligently can almost completely shut a healer down. Unless their teammates rush to their defense a healer will be hard pressed to help them. I don't PvP too much on my Juggernaut but a friend of mine does and I've watched him do this quite a few times. It was often the difference between us taking/keeping an objective or watching the other team succeed.

http://www.facebook.com/media/set/?set=a.1599005057114.2077975.1295643547&type=3#!/photo.php?fbid=1178972716568&set=a.1599005057114.2077975.1295643547&type=3&theater Too lazy to upload to a picture site. So here's a Facebook pic.

Though I have been very much against the idea of being able to change your advanced class I would be willing to make a compromise on it. I would accept the ability to do so if... 1) It is very expensive to do so. I would say nothing short of 1 million credits and increasing every time you do it with no cost reset. Not only would this make the player cautious of doing it on a whim the increase in cost would also cover the fact that as the game expands quest rewards and cash drops will increase as we've seen in every other MMO. 2) A long cooldown upon changing. When I say long I'm thinking at least 3 or 4 months. For those economically crafty players or shady guild leaders who use guild money this would prevent them from changing constantly because they have the cash to do so. This would further help prevent people from becoming flavor of the month players as well as gear hoarders. If these were the conditions for those who wish to change, I would be fine with it being allowed.

I have no problem with class-specific companions. My problem with companions right now is that Tank and DPS players are pretty much forced to use their healing companion to tackle tough situations solo. As a Juggernaut, regardless of which spec I ran, I was almost constantly forced to use Quinn. I don't dislike Quinn but I enjoy the company of Vette or Jaesa much more. Whenever I tried to use them against elites or tough groups I had to basically focus fire each enemy down and hope that our combined damage was enough as well as pray that they weren't killed by AoE in the process. After a couple deaths I pull Quinn out and suddenly what was a hair pulling experience was now made tolerable. The fight took longer for sure but I survived it. This really shouldn't be the case in my opinion. I feel that I should be able to choose my favorite companion based on who they are and not what they can do compared to the others. The only thing I can really think of is to give our companions their own talent trees. One for DPS, one for Healing, and one for Tanking. Allow us to choose what role they play with us and allow us (for a fee ofcourse) to change them between fights to adjust to the situation when solo. If I want to play with Jaesa but am finding myself needing a healing companion I could change her talents to focus primarily on healing.

Please delete this post.

Yeah FFXI was probably one of the most extreme examples I could come up with but I suppose that since it was the one I was familiar with and that it illustrated my point of how far a company can take the idea of grouping I used it. As far as the linear fashion in which Bioware had us leveling I completely agree with you. For a game that was touted for its 'choice' I didn't really have one when it came to that. Vanilla WoW was great in that regard. I could level from 1 to 25 in Eastern Kingdoms and then decide I want to go to Kalimdor instead and there would be quests I could do there. Then I could decide at 40 that I want to go back and experience Eastern Kingdoms again from 40 to 60. I had a choice. I could also level a character completely on one continent and then the next character I created could be done entirely on the other. Then I could roll the opposite faction and have either completely different or somewhat different quests in those same areas. Bioware got that part right. Republic and Empire have completely different quests in the same areas and in the case of Balmorra and Taris (you don't seem to like how they did those but I enjoyed them) it was completely my faction's playground there. Being forced to level up through the worlds (zones) in a rigid order just didn't feel right. I know they're trying to tell a story and I commend them for the effort but you can still give us options here. As an example, Tatooine and Alderaan could have both been 24-32 worlds. Even if you want our class stories to take us to every world that's fine but still allow me to decide at least at certain points what part of the faction story I level through. I could decide on one toon that I want to go through those 8 levels on Tatooine and then run off to Taris, completely skipping Alderaan since I outlevel it. Then the next toon I skip Tatooine and go to Alderaan instead. Add in the fact that I have dialogue choices to make which can even change how I do certain quests and you now have a game that offers way more choice in your experiences. I would even like to see them go as far as allowing us to make class story decisions. I can choose if I either want to go to Tatooine to go after my target's former teachers and draw them out that way or instead go to Alderaan and target their family connections to draw them out. Whichever choice I make locks me out of the other. It's too late now but I really hope they take this route for expansions. Sorry for the long post.

When I played FFXI, forced grouping was one of the biggest complaints about the game along with the UI and maps. That after a certain point you couldn't really do anything unless you grouped up. TOR already has plenty of elements that require a group. Heroic Missions, Flashpoints, Operations, Warzones, and World PvP. Granted you can get away with not grouping for World PvP but more often than not you won't survive. People like having the option to do things solo while still having the option to engage in group content within that same game. They are already going to have to group up for most of the content beyond leveling so at least allow them to actually level alone if they choose. Games that force grouping from start to finish are not inherently wrong for that design choice. They're just not very popular and the numbers will probably show that today such games have a hard enough time keeping subscriptions nevermind getting them in the first place. With the world economy as it is most companies won't take the chances that they used to. There really isn't any room for failure right now. The safe route is the only route for most.