Just a quick and friendly suggestion . . . make sure to specify if these are PvE or PvP specs. For raiding, the above spec just needs one tweak: Move the three points in the AS tree into accuracy instead of endurance. That is the spec I am using in raids, and it works really well. For rotation, open up with grav rounds instead of FA to maximize raid DPS due to reduced armor.

Whether they are boring or not is up to personal taste, but running both Ilum and Belsavis only takes 1.5 hours easy when running with 3 of my guildmates. Out of that run I get an armor, enhancement, mod, and 24 daily comms plus 150k credits. That is totally worth the time. You get less reward off of a 2 hr hardmode FP run. My suggestion here is the same that I have suggested in other threads. Find a fun guild to join. Grouping makes MMO's a lot more enjoyable.

I have always loved the "root and nuke" classes. Gunnery is the perfect spec for me. I also love to see the big numbers pop up from my grav round and demo round. I tried the Assault Specialist spec, but the strong steady damage just doesn't do it for me.

It would be nice to have an interrupt for the council fight in EV, especially if you are taking on the champ in 16 man normal. That channel ability hits like a truck. However, it appears to me that troopers are pumping out a ton of DPS while wearing heavy armor. I think we should have one feature that we are lacking to balance out all of the positive attributes. I don't know about you, but I am the only one in my raiding group that is able to pull aggro off the tank.

It was in the same patch that gave lightning to Sages.

We won't know if a power build or a crit/surge build is best until we have combat logs, but due to the ammo regen from crits in the gunnery tree I think it is heavily tilted towards crit/surge at the moment. Your DPS is limited by your ammo regen, so the more you can get back the better. I would shoot for a minimum of 30% crit. With the smuggler buff and the 15% increased crit from the 2 set bonus this puts your grav round at 50% crit. You will be refunding 1 ammo with every other grav round if you spam it continuously making the actual cost just 1.5 ammo (assuming you put points in Cell Capacitor, which you should). The three off spec talents that are a must (IMHO) are the added ammo regen and crit from the medic tree and accuracy from the AS tree. Crit is obvious. More base accuracy allows you to move the accuracy mods out of your gear and move crit/surge back in when you hit the accuracy cap. Ammo regen is also a must since you want to burn your ammo as deep as you can during DPS spikes in Ops (final burns to kill off bosses).

If your plan is to get geared as quickly as possible, then your best bet is dailies (PvE and PvP). If you run all of the heroics on Ilum and Belsavis you can kit out one piece of gear a day. If you take the cash from one PvE daily run you can also buy a few of the epic mods from the GTN and speed up the process. Even better, join a guild and get epic mods for free from people who are already geared. I am currently helping two commandos gear up by giving them my mods from heroics. Also, keep an eye out for blue belts and bracers with augment slots on the GTN. These two gear slots are difficult to fill in endgame, and the augment slots make these blues worth getting. I would disagree with the poster above who said that a fresh 50 can run HM's. You may be able to run Esseles/BT, but the other HM's are going to be difficult for you. The enrage timers are tuned for geared players so you may get a bit frustrated with the number of wipes when running HM's. Instead, you should be finding a group/guild for normal mode EV raids. These are much easier than HM's, believe it or not. They also drop great columi gear.

You don't. If you run all of the dailies, including the heroics, you should be ready for hardmodes in 5 days. You can run normal mode raids as a brand new 50 and get columi gear if you have skill. Many people don't realize that HM's are designed to be much harder than normal mode raids. The enrage timers in HM's are tuned for well geared players while enrage timers in normal mode raids are not. I roll on a PvE server where no one interrupts daily runs, but even then it shouldn't be a problem if you group up with 3 other players. It would seem to me that the OP should consider rolling on a PvE server or joining a guild to have people to run with. You can knock out all of the Ilum and Belsavis dailies in 1.5 hours with a group of 4, and then run an HM if you have time afterwards. All you need is 8 to run EV normal mode. Once you get into raiding and HM's you will find that you have much more to do.

IMHO, the faction imbalance is due to people wanting to be on the zerg side. It became apparent early on that the "cool" hardcore PvPers were going to go Empire, so everyone decided that they wanted to be on that side too. People are only now rationalizing their decision with claims about animations, story, and art. These imbalances existed in the guild launch program before anyone saw the end game gear or played the stories. On top of that, most PvPers are spending the majority of their time in warzones anyway, and only do the class quests when necessary. Most of the my guildies in our PvP division hit space bar through the dialog. Quite frankly, I think a lot of people are trying to cover up the fact that they wanted to join whichever faction was most populated so they could easymode PvP. My advice is suck it up. Huttball matches is what you get. If you don't like it, reroll Republic. No one is stopping you from doing it.

If you can run dailies with a full group you can be ready for hardmodes in 5 days. Each day you should get an armor mod, mod, and enhancement just from the heroics. Use the money from dailies to buy epic mods off GTN as well if you are in a hurry. At a minimum, run the 2+ heroics for the enhancements and mods and use your daily comms for armoring. Keep an eye out for blue belts and bracers with augment slots on the GTN. The augment can bump these up to 90 aim.

You also have the 15% increased crit on grav round. If you stacked crit and surge that should put your crit chance (with raid buffs) at ~55% for grav round which refunds one ammo (limit once every 3 seconds). That means just 3 ammo for every 2 grav rounds, on average.

A grav round followed immediately by demo round will take down a lot of weak mobs. If both crit (40% crit chance with smuggler buff) I can get 7.5k in instant damage. If just one crits it is still close to the 4k needed to take down a weak enemy. This is one of my personal faves when playing my trooper: watching health bars disappear on weak enemies. On boss fights the important skill to learn is knowing when to burn your ammo. This will take some practice, but if you time it right you should be out of ammo the second that recharge comes off cd and you should end fights with nearly zero ammo. However, you do run the risk of the other dps wiping just before the boss dies leaving you with just hammer shots. If you trust the other DPS in your group go for the deep ammo burn, it's a blast.

Simple motto: Have boomstick, will travel.

Actually, there is word from BW. Emmanuel Lusinchi commented on it here: http://www.swtor.com/community/showthread.php?t=141027

They did appear to fix one combination of skills that was causing problems. From the patch notes: "Corrected an issue where activating cover, using Explosive Probe, and then using Snipe could cause Snipe to be interrupted." That is for the Imperial Agent. They may be fixing these issues in a piecemeal fashion instead of all at once. Just as a general statement (not aimed at you), just because they are fixing other bugs does not mean that they are not actively working on these issues. I think BW is capable of walking and chewing bubble gum at the same time.

So you are bored with the MMO features. That's fine. That is your opinion. However, being bored with the MMO features does not stop TOR from being an MMO. It is like saying that IHOP is not a pancake house because you don't like their pancakes.

So I guess SWTOR is not an MMO as long as you ignore all of the MMO features. Right. Gotcha.

I can read more of you being wrong. For example: "no u can group up for some things but to few and boring and yes u may see 20 other players whoop and pvp rofl . excuse my full stops but for a MMO that m8 is crap)) " Group up for some things? Wrong. You can group up for EVERYTHING, including other people's class story. I know because I have done it. Have you been to the fleet? More than 20 other people around. Again, you are wrong. And PvP? Have you played Warzones? Did you notice that the other characters on the screen were controlled by real people and not computer AI like on single player games?

Where and when . . . what? You are not even making sense now. At least try to be an entertaining troll.

So you admit that there is group play in an open world? That would be an MMO, not a single player game.

Why doesn't it feel like an MMO? It has multiplayer warzones, multiplayer open world quests, multiplayer instanced dungeons. You travel in an open, persistent world where you run across other players doing the same quests as you. You can even group with the players you see in the open world to conquer easy leveling quests or group specific open world quests. Have you not done any of this?

My troll food is about to expire. No sense in just throwing it away. Besides, this troll sets a good example for the others. He complains that this is not an MMO, and then immediately complains about how he does not like group play. It's like someone claiming that IHOP is not a pancake house because they don't like their pancakes.

A few? I was grouped for a majority of my leveling. I was playing with someone for the majority of my time since release. Single player? Please. Again, you claim it is not an MMO, and then you complain about the MMO features. Fail troll is fail.

You should have said that right up front. Everyone agrees that this is not a sandbox MMO. It is a theme park MMO. It was always going to be a theme park MMO. Being a theme park MMO does not disqualify it as an MMO. Not now. Not ever. It is funny that the OP claims that SWTOR is not an MMO, and then it lists all of the MMO features one by one. This troll is fail.

I have yet to wait more than 20 minutes on my server, so I guess our experience differs. Also, you got in before release. I don't see that as having to wait for 4 days. You didn't get in on the 24th, did you?