it's wonky, but mainly because of bugs. If you think of the 'cover' system as a 'stance' (warrior, WoW) or 'form' (druid, WoW) suddenly it's not all that foreign. as they work the bugs out of it it's gotten more and more easy to get used to

it's a separate playing style. Think of a sniper in real life. Does he go running right up to the enemy and smack him in the face? no. is he the center of attention on the battlefield? no. the key to playing a sniper is to stay out of the limelight. if you call down an AoE and everyone is focused on you, get out of there. your job is not to take hits. in PvE, your best bet is to have a geared tank as your companion. this way you can have the enemy dead with your massive DPS before they can kill your companion. heals are nice, but your survivability is so low your healing companion probably wont be able to keep up with the damage you're taking. I've got a lvl 50 Sniper who consistently leads teams in DPS in War Zones-- it is a very competitive spec when used properly. If you're interested I can msg you some of the finer points of sniper dps

my personal complaint is that the PvP gear is too good at PvE. there's really not much point to getting separate sets, you might as well just get PvP gear if you're dps. the general complaint is that you have to slave away to get your BM gear, which is only a slight improvement over your Champion gear. I concur with this complaint, but I haven't got my BM gear yet so I don't have any firsthand experiences with it.

basically there are 3 tiers of end game pve armor and 3 tiers of end game pvp armor PVE: Tionese Columni Rakata PVP: Centurion Champion Battlemaster the problem is, my Champion gear lets me do better PvE damage than Tionese or some Columni gear, so I question the point of obtaining a whole PvE gearset. I have to sacrifice a ton of min/max damage just to increase my crit chance/ surge rating, which seems a bad trade imho. the benefits don't outweigh the positives by enough to make me want to build a whole second gearset. my Champion gear lets me breeze through Hard Modes

yeah ilum kinda sucks right now but on the bright side if you do your dailies that's 2 more bag of champion gear for ya. even more if you do your weeklies

I just set it up so that both bars are exactly alike. that made it a lot simpler

in my experience you only get kill credit post-humously in wzs. if you die on Ilum you don't get kill credit for damage inflicted on targets who die after you.

I am playing a Sniper BECAUSE it is one of the hardest classes. Sorcerer= easiest class

...or because a Star Wars universe where I am a Sith and have to watch a Jedi just stroll on past me is totally pointless. it detracts from the integrity of the game to play on a PvE server. that's why I play PvP servers. obviously you still run into some of the same issues (I can't attack coruscant???) but there you have it. people work so hard to get 'powerful' in a game like this but then they act like powerful people should only fight other powerful people or they're somehow 'being mean'. nonsense. what's more fun, watching Iron Man fight some other big robot, or watching him take on 30 regular bad guys at once? of course the answer is the latter. watching two guys of super-strength fight is just like watching 2 guys of even strength fight. half the point of being powerful is to be able to take on a single powerful opponent, but the other half is to be able to take on dozens of lesser opponents. pretending somebody is 'mean spirited' or 'unsportmanlike' for winning battles heavily in their own favor is entirely missing half the point of becoming powerful in the first place.

you dont have to be exploiting to be 35. I bet I would be darn close if I didnt have to work all day. if you took off work yesterday and today...I got my invite at 6:42 am yesterday. I could have been playing for almost 36 hours already if I didnt have to work.

...to my knowledge there IS NO 'open world pvp' on PvE servers. at least, not if we're defining Open World the same way.

I dont even want that. I want to be on the pvp server where nobody likes pvp but everybody is on it anyway, getting owned by my pvp guild. then they will all come to hate us and band against us, making us the 'Mordor' sort of guild. that would be awesome. what fun is it if they actually enjoy pvp??

i played during beta and yes, lower levels are disadvantaged but this is true in any game. In bf3 lower level tank drivers dont get the guided missile or the troop detector--but i do. in CoD 3 the higher level player has more/better guns unlocked. It's not supposed to be a completely level playing field. If you were automatically as good as the best guy the moment you logged in, why bother sticking around to level up? why bother learning the tactics? etc... all that to say, it's not insurmountable. I consistently scored near the top of my team despite being only lvl 17.

um, that wasnt the way it was planned. clearly you were misinformed.

i've been told this game is more CPU-heavy than video card. so as long as you have a high powered cpu it supposedly won't strain your graphics card much.