Logging on to fleet always has at least a couple of spammers and unless you ignore them, that's about all you will see. You can try to immediately ignore them, but you'll get an error message that you have to wait 10 seconds between ignores. However, I just reported/ignored them on an alt, why do I have to do it again? So at a minimum, the ignore functionality shouldn't require a cooldown for ignoring spammers. Better yet, make it so I don't have to do this on every alt.

I submitted an in-game bug report for this and they claimed that this chain has been reset. However, since I can't restart it in solo-mode, it clearly has not been reset properly. Please try it again and reset the solo mode flag too. The current situation is unplayable.

The best pvp gear is about two tiers below the best pve gear when used in pve. The best pve gear should be about two tiers below the best pvp gear when used in pvp. Bolster should take every mod, armoring, hilt, barrel or whatever and map it to two tiers below (based on item level alone). If the item maps below the entry level pvp gear, make it equal to the entry level pvp gear. Don't try to preserve any stats on the pve gear at all. Just take the item level and replace it with the mapped item. Sure that'll mean the pve gear will all get mapped to the same secondary stat and will be far from optimal, but that's close enough to make the gear usable and scale reasonably well with tiers.

Convert nearly all stuns in pvp to mez. Fix what that unbalances. (huttball, op healing, escapes from stealth capable classes) That'll make it still quite useful to remove key players from the fight for a period of time (normal definition of CC). But it'd force people to outplay you when they try to finish you. Since as soon as you take damage, you'd be able to play again.

If you are playing as a healer, your own CC won't save you. The best you can do is reset the fight and try to run away. You have no hope to kill them before it wears off. Your attacker, on the other hand, can use CC as guaranteed several second interrupt to finish you off. Normal interrupts almost never matter since stuns are up so often and are usually sufficient to finish a healer off. In groups, yes, CC can save people. If when they stunned you, someone else stunned them. They can't finish you off, you come out of the stun before them and can heal yourself and survive.

Doing this as a healer doesn't prove much. Compared to dps and tanks healers scale really poorly with pvp gear: Healing is tuned around the healing target's gear (in addition to the healer's gear). If your target has expertise, he'll be easier to keep up with weaker heals. Dps scales better with expertise and stats so the difference in performance is less for a healer. Against incompetent attackers (who don't know how to focus fire, interrupt or coordinate stuns), even unskilled and undergeared healers are gods. Neither gear nor skill really matter against them. If your team has a tank, it is a near certainty you'll have a guard. That makes much more of a difference than gear wrt survivability. Healers don't really care about their opponents' health and mitigation so 2/3 of the gear difference is irrelevant. If you were to try this with a melee dps, you might find it a bit different. They kinda have to be in the middle of things to do anything so the likelyhood of being attacked by disorganized opponents is higher. They almost never have a guard. They they be burst down before a healer can react and land a heal. They must damage their opponents significantly more due to better mitigation greater health pools the fact that they do significantly less damage

It is hard to isolate because recruit level people tend to also be unskilled. However, as an operative healer with about 1/3 augmented WH and the rest BM, I can almost completely ignore 3-4 recruit level geared people beating on me. Interrupts or properly timed stuns might make a difference, but I can generally survive the random stuff they throw at me without even using my stun break. If I don't have cooldowns, a guard or taunt, a single WH geared dps can typically stun me to death from about 50% (and can get me to that 50% point through a well executed opener, a timely interrupt or just a couple of lucky crits in a row). My melee attacks (as a medic) tend to fall in the range of the dps classes you mentioned and I can occasionally 1v1 recruits without even stopping to heal myself. But it isn't just damage dealt. It is health. A recruit is around 13k health. An fully augmented WH is 20k+. Frequently, I can't even get a heal off quickly enough to save a recruit who is being attacked. I can actually use an energy conserving rotation healing a wh geared person and have infinite energy.

The new sound is almost impossible to hear over background combat sounds which makes it useless. The laugh was distinctive enough that you could pick it out from combat sounds. This isn't just a background sound, we are actually supposed to take action when we hear it. So make it stand out from the background sounds that we are supposed to ignore.

If you are still leveling, use whichever one you like most for the story. You get most of your affection from questing with them and some scenes include your companion. If you want fastest leveling, of the companions you mentioned, Vector will be the fastest. Since you aren't expecting him to tank, you may safely open up with aoe and use all of your TA for aoe. For tough fights, Kaliyo can generally tank things to death. Try with Vector first though since the difference in toughness isn't nearly as much as the difference in dps. Make sure you open your companion bar (in 1.2 you can do it without losing your second bottom bar) and familiarize yourself with all of your companion abilities. Interrupts/stuns/defensive cooldowns can make all the difference. Once you get Temple, she is easier to gear and makes a great replacement for Vector.

As a sound effect, the laugh was bad and the new sound is better. As a audio cue during gameplay, the laugh was good and the new sound is bad. It is part of the UI and replacing it with something less distinctive makes the game more frustrating to play. I've played using the new sound on the PTR and it takes significantly more concentration to pick up the new sound during combat. The more you have to concentrate to figure out the UI, the less enjoyable the game is. This is a bad change.

The new sound is quite subtle... until you mentioned it, I never noticed it. It is almost exactly the second half of the sound when you mount a speeder. It is completely masked by the sound of casting kInj if they proc at the same time as one goes off.

This is an unfortunate change... There is now no way to tell when you get a proc short of watching the tiny buff icon. At first I thought it was a bug and I came to the forums to search to see if it was already reported before I found that it was intentional. It should be put back until there is a reasonable replacement for letting us know when it procs. WIthout a replacement notification for the proc, this is a unnecessary nerf to operative quality of life. It doesn't really make the game harder, it just makes it a lot more annoying to track buffs. In WoW, I used a mod called "power auras" that gave a reasonable hud for procs if you want to get rid of the audio cue. Edit: In case anyone was wondering. Yes, I can confirm that the laugh is gone.

Inj+inf is certainly too expensive to use without the probe. However, with TA stacking to 3, medical engineering procs may be used for inf. Infusion is higher hps and hpe than injection so if you have the TA to spare, you should always pick inf over inj. SP is certainly another choice for the extra TA proc, but that is lower hps than inj and inf so should only be used when you are energy starved. Since the medical engineering procs will now increase your efficiency by allowing you to use inf over inj (rather than frequently being lost due to the two TA cap), you should have a much more dynamic rotation.

Even if the operative and sorc aoe healed for the same amount, sorc aoe healing is clearly superior. While a Sorc has a 2 second activation time and the op is instant, the first tick of healing for the sorc is at 2 seconds vs 3 seconds for the operative. The rate of healing is also faster for the sorc over the operative. People out of range of the sorc heal can run into range after it is cast and still benefit from the majority of the healing. It is hard to come up with a situation where the operative aoe is better than the sorc base abilities. Even in a high mobility fight where people have to stay spread out, multiple individual shields are going to be more effective at keeping people from dying than the operative's aoe.

That actually shows why enrage timers as they are currently used can't work in this game (as mechanisms you have to work to avoid hitting rather than just being there so you don't cheese the encounter by bringing a ton of healers). 1) Aggressive enrage timers mean that force healers are unlikely to run out of force. By the time they run out, you've hit the enrage timer. 2) Aggressive enrage timers also mean that healing through avoidable damage is preferable (borderline required) if avoiding it would cause a dps loss. Regen based healers cannot burst heal to cover avoidable damage without losing their regen. Force healers can. Because of point #1, the extra consumption of force doesn't typically matter. While I also believe that the disparity in aoe healing potential needs to be addressed, if force healers actually ran out of force if they tried to do this sort of thing, it isn't actually required.