You sound geared properly, assuming your splits are def/shield/abs (actually if at all possible, you may want to drop some of the shield into absorbtion). Just a few suggestions on technique: 1. When fighting the trash mobs in HM's don't try to have every mob focused on you at all times, let some of the dps take the aggro off of you for normal enemies. They don't hit hard enough to seriously damage a DPS member, but 4 of them focused on you + a couple of strongs or an elite will drain you fast. 2. For boss fights on HM the enrage timers are more important than anything. It could be the DPS that are bringing you down. 3. For the two bosses you mentioned - Bonus HM BT: kite him around a box and just hold his aggro while DPS go at him, you will have to pop out every now and then to hit him with something; Bridge Boss on False Emperor: he does a whirly move that hits hard, get out of the way of that or it doesn't matter how good your healer is. Also, in False Emperor there are a lot trash mob "drop-ins" that happen close to ledges, use your knockbacks to blow them off the ledge. 4. Know what your groupmates can and cannot CC. 5. Probably most importantly in fighting trash or multiple NPC boss fights is to set a priority of kill. This should start at medic, then go to easiest to kill to hardest to kill. All the while make sure the hardest to kill is focused on you. The reason to take out the medic first is obvious, but your group should always kill the weakest first and then kill the hardest mob due to you taking less damage in the quickest fashion. Other than those things know the rotation. There is a good guide here and also on sithwarrior.com. Another thing is if your guild isn't playing very often then you may want to get you and your friends into another guild. Undergeared Assassins are good off-tanks (you'll be dpsing most of the time unless the main tank gets defeated) in the 8 man raids, and that is the quickest way to get a couple of pieces of columi gear. edit: one of the most overlooked things in this game is that since you only get two dps slots in which to party with, a subpar dps member can really kill your chances at killing a boss since they are all on enrage timers.

In my opinion the only way the story can develop in expansions is through fighting over resources so it will be more controlling planets since the all-out war the game constantly alludes to can never be realized since it will not fit into canon for an Empire story (where you as the Empire player "win" the war) since we all know how the story plays out and the Republic is saved. I hope it doesn't focus on space combat since that is more of a mini-game anyways and is in no way MMO style play.

So the other day I did a raid with my guild and got 2 token for chest and boot pieces of Columni gear. So I went to trade the piece tokens for the actual gear and noticed that the gear has an enhancement mod that gives bonuses to Absorption (good, usable for a tank) and accuracy (***?!?!?). So in comparison I stroll over to the Jugg Columni gear vendor and see that it gives bonuses to Defense and Shield. So my question is why doesn't Assassin tank end game gear give something like Defense instead of Accuracy? Is it because the set-piece bonus gives a +5% to shield (2 piece bonus) while Dark Ward is active?

Me too, if you look at OP's post history he has been saying he has unsubbed for about 2 weeks and actively trying to get others to unsub too. He is a troll. Oh, and yeah it was his thread he started where he read that.

They have more than one team of programmers. Since when could companies only do one thing at one time?

The lack of endgame content has nothing to do with dual speccing and has everything to do with this being a new MMO and the content not being developed yet. Dual speccing actually allows people to experience endgame content more freely, becuase they won't always have to wait on a certain role to fill the group or turn down other players because that role in the group is filled. And yes, the story is what is bringing some people into the game. But you are flat out lying to yourself if you think packing 8 stories into a game is what Bioware was trying to deliver or that is the reason most people bought this game. If I wanted 8 story lines I would just go buy 4 Bioware games since all of them come with 2 story lines a piece (good or evil). The story is what is going to make leveling an alt worth it to me. Because the only reason I am going to level an alt is for the profession, the story is just a bonus so it won't be as monotonous.

First of all, this isn't a discussion about respeccing. This is a discussion about dual spec. If this quote is really what you are basing all of your arguments on then you need to quit. Dragon Age is a single player RPG. This is an MMORPG. Very different in the ways the game is structured. MMO's have PVP and PVE where Single Players just have PVE. This is one reason for dual spec. Single Player RPG's also don't have multiplayer groups. You take your companions and you roll with them. Not true in MMO's where players fill the role of tank, dps and healer. And really the concept of companions fulfilling the off-roles of tank, dps and healer are fairly new for Single Player RPG's (such as DA and basically all of Bioware's console games). Granted, most had mechanics that used this thinking (two lines of characters where chars up front would take physical damage), but they weren't fully fleshed roles as they are now. Dual spec in an MMO allows a player to fulfill two group obligations for his guild in different circumstances. In an Op where the group may not need that player to tank he can switch to a DPS build. In a Flashpoint where the group may need a tank, the player can switch to a tank build. I'm not advocating being able to swith AC's as the AC is really your class. And I also think you are misunderstanding what the Role in Role-Playing Game video games has historically meant. It typically has meant fantasy. Where you are a character in a story where most of your progression is rigidly determined from your stats to your abilities (think NES through Playstation RPG's, notably all Square and Enix RPG's, who were the big boys back in the day). Even Zelda, which is an action-RPG, is very rigid. But Zelda is an RPG because you are playing the role of Link. RPG's fall into many sub-genres including MMOs. MMO mechanics are different than Single Player mechanics, so you can't really base your argument on the fact that BW introduced respeccing into DA as a reason that dual speccing will hurt this game. tl;dr - There are many types of RPG's and basing what you think should be in an MMO off of a Single Player game is doing a disservice to you and your argument.

You want a Jedi without a lightsaber? Seriously?....Seriously?

They did several roll-backs in Beta.

^This, plus I would add to that, that I am less likely to die in a fight, especially in a fight with a gold elite with trash mobs. Plus Talos has a stun that will interupt some abilities that I've found useful.

If the skill that it takes to harvest the node under the name of the node is gray then yes you have outleveled it. If it is green then most of the time you get one point. If yellow, two points. Same as your gathering missions that you send companions on.

Pretty sure it is a mistake to be even be showing you those items. I've noticed it too, but have read where they took mod crafting away from Artificers in beta and gave all mod crafting to cybertech maybe? Anyway, those learnable schematics aren't supposed to show up period for Artificers.

I don't think you get the mats any harder to get, you make the REing harder to proc to be able to craft uber mods/gear. Make the raid bosses drop the schematics.

At first glance I would tend to agree with you. Smart phones are currently around 30% of the mobile phone market and a huge chunk of that includes basically two groups - techies and people that have them for work. Not sure what the dynamic is there, but I would assume most (50-60%ish) people have them for work. Now part of that group would also fall under the techie title too. Gamers for the most part are considered techies, especially gamers that play on PC's. If I had to throw a percentage out there of MMO players that had smartphones I would probably land between 60-70% and think that is a conservative guess. One thing that really influences my guess is that WoW had a subscription based app that they wouldn't have produced if they didn't think they would make money with. So surely they had to assume that enough people would use it and subscribe to it to make it worth their while to create it. My 2 cents though.

My solution is similar to what a lot of people are saying: Have raid bosses drop gear that they do now and also drop craftable green items. When the craftable recipes are RE'd all the way to max then they should be slightly better than the raid gear that is dropped. Make it so that crafters have to do a lot of legwork to get craftable items that are better than the equipment raid drops. Right now the system is crafters do a lot of leg work and their gear still isn't up to par. This solution makes the hardcore crafters still have to participate in end game content, but gives them a reward that they can turn around and market to the player base that the players can't get anywhere else if they want to be maxed out. And I'm not just talking about dropping mod item recipes. Drop recipes for the professions that make armor and weapons too that will be equal mod items once those are maxed RE'd also. That way everybody can hang on to their orange items and mod them out or they can purchase a crafted piece of armor or weapon that won't hinder their effectiveness.

So lets hold people that do have those devices back because everybody else doesn't have it? No Child Left Behind!

The experience of getting your first smartphone is comparable to the first mobile phone you got. Before you have one, you think, "I don't need that." Before everybody had a mobile, they said, "well I have my landline that can do everything a mobile can do so why do I need that?" Then they got a mobile and the freedom to be able to call anybody from almost anywhere was a luxury that people really liked. Kind of like now with a smartphone, people say, "well everything I can do on a smartphone can be covered by either my cell phone (calls, texts) or my computer (email, games, etc.). A smartphone is another type of those luxuries that once you experience the freedom of the mobility it gives you (not always having to be around your computer to have access to email, game apps, other useful apps for facebook, twitter, etc.), you will start to question how you got along without it. That is my best attempt at convincing you - that you basically just don't understand what you are missing, just like before you got your first mobile phone you didn't realize what you were missing then either. So, if you get one be prepared to never turn back, just like you can never give up your mobile phone now. There is a reason that Blackberry's, the first widely used smartphone, was nicknamed "Crackberry". Just don't get a Blackberry, they are going out of business soon unless they change their corporate structure quickly.

Nope, you're right.

People were told that craftable gear would be "on par" with raid gear; which would allow people to be unique in their look. It isn't. It isn't even close. Why shouldn't somebody that is willing to do 1,000 RE's on their final craftable items not get something equal to raid gear? You don't think doing that many RE's is as time consuming and expensive as raiding?

Nothing in that post is educating anybody. Most of what that post implies is that success is bad! and anybody who has more than someone else is bad too! So I guess if you want to start educating people then you need to list ways to fix the system. So take you best stab at being the new Adam Smith. But I'm going to go ahead and give you some advice, you won't change anything by just criticizing, youactually have to have a way to fix the problems if you want things to change. And by the way, keeping the GTN clunky and difficult to use will only make it more difficult for you to make a profit off of your items you are selling. That's because people won't look at what something can sell for, they will keep posting it at the suggested retail price the game provides them with. Which will in turn make it easier for those that want to manipulate the market because they are going to figure out how to do it anyway. And those people are obsessive enough about it to jump through any hoop... just like in real life.

Bill Gates, Mark Zuckerberg, Warren Buffett, Sam Walton. All people who made billions and were nobodies even though nobody has a chance in real life because of the megacorps "holding them down". Yes, there are 5 or 6 mega energy companies, 4 or 5 mega media companies that own all your media content and now about 7 or 8 huge banks that are deemed "too big to fail", but that doesn't stop people from being able to be successful on their own. That is just a cop-out for people who aren't either smart enough or hard working enough to justify their lot in life. Tell that to people who owned Lehman Brothers, which failed hard; and basically every other major bank on the planet if the government had not stepped in to bail them out. And of course the owners of a failing business will restructure it. If they don't they fail - which is what is basically happening to RIM (Blackberry makers), they aren't adjusting with the times and Google and Apple are basically killing them. Point is, savvy people survive, people that don't change die. Plenty of people enjoy playing the stock market and those that are good at it are profitable. Typically those that aren't profitable at it don't enjoy it and those that are profitable do enjoy and tend to spend many, many hours analyzing information in order to know what moves to make. Even though the game is new an economy is forming. If people aren't researching what people are buying items for then they have no idea what items are worth, thereby stunting the growth of the economy and the game. Yes, even when the economy stabilizes people do get into "undercutting wars". This is typically when you see one person buy up all the product and corner the market at their prices. This is not a bad thing. I see it as a very good thing as this is the introduction for most people of how an economic system actually is. MMO's are actually great at showing the two dominant market theories in work. AH's and GTN's show capitalism at work. Most guilds share resources between members which is a form of socialism (what is funny is that in WoW, guildleaders could control the guild vaults, basically making them like the Kremlin in Soviet Russia by determining who got what and how much and when).

You don't think this is what happens in the real-life economy? Basically, in my opinion, the more real-life like they make the economy the better. If somebody wants to corner a market then good for them, they take all the risk and sometimes reap a giant reward. But they can also be caught when the burble bursts and they go broke. Kind of like the large banks of the world, it's just that people in the game won't be labeled "too big to fail" and won't receive a government bailout. Plus, SWTOR does not currently support add-ons so people would have to do the legwork that the add-ons you mentioned did for them. By the way, while we are fixing the GTN, lets get rid of the asinine suggested retail value. This is causing the market for ALL items to be severely undercut by people that don't want to research the value of an item, which hurts the crafters of those items.

So you are why I have to sell an item at 1778 credits instead of the 3000 it is worth and will bring?

Yes, yes it was.

My Artificer can craft shield generators for Str and Aim tanks but not Will tanks (Shadow and Assassin). Does anybody know if anything crafter makes these or were these just left out? I can make offhand focus items that have will, just not shield generators. Was this just left out or does another crafter make these?