Note that the above 2 answers do not apply to Rakata re-usable recipes which you learn straight from the trainer when your biochem is at 400.

None of the HM flashpoints require you to do it on normal first. If you can't get the hardmode quest but you have the quest for normal mode, drop that and you can get the hardmode one. Only requirement is for Foundry which requires you to do Boarding Party before it, Republic has similar pair but I can't remember the names for those.

Not even close. You've likely seen people commenting such when they're gaining rest of their experience from pvp and skipping other quests besides class ones and that is completely possible to do.

Implants are BoE, earpieces are BoP. So, either those for selling or alts is probably the best options atm or you could gamble and collect them in hopes of new gear coming available later for same commendations.

It doesn't affect how fast you attack. Every ability you use with very few exceptions triggers a thing called global cooldown which basically means all your skills will be locked for 1.5s after that and you need to wait until it's off to be able to use another (or same) ability. The ability queue option affects how much before the next ability is available you can insert it into a queue so it will activated as soon as the global cooldown wears off. A short example: Your ability queue is set to 0.5s. 0s - you activate ability A, global cooldown begins. 0.2s - you try to activate ability B but nothing happens since global cooldown is on. 0.5s - you try to activate ability B again, nothing happens. 1s - you try to activate ability B once again, this time it's placed in ability queue. 1.5s - global cooldown is off, ability B is activated. So the value does not affect directly how effective you are and is purely a personal preference.

Because it doesn't affect instants and dots which make up a good proportion of sorcerers damage. Other stats affect all our spells.

Totally agree with this. MMO forums are infamous for people telling their own class sucks/is difficult in hopes of it getting buffed and often lack personal experience of classes they say are easy or overpowered.Relative power of classes is also subject to changes in MMOs when the developers feel need for it so picking one which actually would be easy and powerful now does not mean it would be that after a week in "worst" case. Try them yourself for some levels and pick one which you like. If you later change your mind, just make another char of another class. You're not restricted to playing only one character, in fact you'll get more out of the game by trying several different types.

A dps character has picked gear and skills that improve mostly his damage done rather than survivability or healing abilities and therefore he deals good amount of more damage to enemies than tank or healer. Without dps characters things take longer to kill or in some cases on higher levels become practically impossible to kill since they have time limits. A balanced group has generally 1 healer, 1 tank and 2 dps characters. As juggernaut or guardian you're not automatically tank, it depends on the skills you have picked; you can specialize in tanking or dps. As a tank you're doing your job perfectly when the enemies are hitting or trying to hit you and not the rest of the group. It generally really doesn't matter how you achieve this. Often when a tank is as asked to kite a boss enemy around the area it means moving slowly while hitting him with your attacks. Reason for said kiting is the boss attacking the area you are at rather than actually you which means when you move you get out of the damage receiving area. Most of the time it also means just moving occassionally out of bad stuff rather than keep moving all the time. This varies according to situation. Kiting as term is flexible. It might mean just running around with enemy following you and just occassionally hitting it to keep it interested in you rather than others for the sole purpose of keeping it away from action. As before it can also, and usually in the case of tank needing to kite, moving around slowly while hitting him in pretty normal fashion and keeping him following you. Sometimes a boss enemy might be at low health, tank dies while everyone else is alive and in such case the boss will turn to attack someone of the rest of the party and unless that character has some tanking abilities, which he likely does not, it's best to try to avoid getting hit while allowing rest of the group to hit the enemy, thus kiting it around until he turns to someone else or dies.

Probably not since most people hang around their fleet, not Nar Shaddaa. Neutral is useful mostly just if your main target customers are players on the other faction.

Considering normal mode drops columni as best loot asking people to be full columni is beyond stupid

Exotech is similar quality as Columni, 136. Energized is similar quality as Tionese, 126. Neither will provide set bonuses though, they're just single items.

If you have the normal mode quest you can't get hardmode one before you drop that. The story quest for the flashpoint is different, you don't need to drop that, just the normal flashpoint spesific one. After this you should have the hardmode available from NPC near the flashpoint entrance and he has 2 quests to offer, normal and hardmode provided you're level 50. Also, does the flashpoint you try actually have hardmode? Not all of them have one. The ones with hardmode are: Black Talon (imperial) Esseles (republic) Boarding Party (imperial) Foundry (imperial) Taral V (republic) Maelstrom Prison (republic) Directive 7 Battle of Ilum False Emperor Kaon Under Siege

They can't. This same feature was introduced in WoW at some point with main reason being to fight gold farmers laundrying currency through marketplace. The logic behind it is somewhat shaky but it seems BW decided to use the same method, just in case.

Gifts you should use are sort of tiered. For your example, handing out rank4 gift to companion on 1000 affection does not yield full potential affection gain of the item and similarly handing rank1 gift to very high affection level companion gives hardly anything. Gifts are giving most affection roughly at these affection levels: rank1: 0-2000 rank2: 2000 - 4000 rank3: 4000 - 6000 rank4: 6000 - 8000 rank5: 8000 - 10000 The further away from these you are, the less gain you will get. So rank4 gifts are still pretty useful up to 10000 while rank1 gifts give barely nothing when above 8000. The limits aren't exactly those but it should give you rough idea. Just check when the same rank gift suddenly start giving out less affection.

You shouldn't worry about the affection level of your companion, it just makes them finish crew skills slightly faster and that's pretty much it.

Healing is what you're supposed to do as healer and nobody is going to be mad if you don't attack at all. However, if the group isn't taking much damage and you find yourself standing doing nothing you might as well assist by attacking something to make things faster. Never let it disturb your healing though.

I didn't notice you mentioning if you're playing dps/tank/healer in swtor but in this game that choice matters even more: group is 4, not 5 like wow, which basically means 2 instead of 3 dps characters and that's a huge change percentage wise. However, there's only 2 advanced classes each side unable to play either healer or tank role so there's more room to maneuveur around the dps player per group limit by speccing to another role. Especially for healing you're pretty well off in exactly same gear as your dps gear is, not perfect but well doable. If either of you can provide even just heal or tank you're already much closer to getting a group than being 2 dps looking to get in same group. The server populations appear to be smaller than in wow, which doesn't help grouping. I could also claim that other games having automatic grouping systems have taught people to not see the "trouble" of manually creating groups, just a hunch and not a fact. The reward-trouble -ratio also favors both ops and pvp over hardmodes. Ops people mostly do with guilds. Pvp with their friends or queue randomly alone.

That's not true, it existed but was very rare on items outside MC drops and even there items had very small amounts of it. You're right though that the itemization was somewhat strange at that time.

On RP -type servers roleplaying your character is considered to be the way to do it, so the players act as their character would. On normal PvE servers people rarely if ever roleplay, they just kill stuff, collect things and such.

It is installed automatically when you log to the game.

They don't care what happens to their buddies, just themselves. There are some boss(es) that might go nuts if you kill their companions but those are rare occassions. Like some post said before, agree on killing order with your team and focus on the one that's either currently being killed or next to be killed. To make things slightly harder though, you need to do more than just initial damage to rest also since healing generates threat and unless you hold the mobs they will go straight for the healer even though he has not done any damage to them. Usually aoe abilities can handle this very well though, the threat generated by healer is nothing like dps player attacking a mob. Unhandled mobs will though tear the healer to pieces and as a result getting anyone else needing heals getting killed. There's a saying: "if tank dies it's healers fault. If healer dies it's tanks fault. If dps dies it's their own fault." Though of course not always the simple truth it has a lot of wisdom behind.

Depends but the main goal is to get as many mobs as possible on you instead of others. If there's single dangerous mob away from a group it might be worth slapping the single first with ranged attack while going for the group. Generally though make sure the stronger mobs are concentrated on you, dps can often handle the regular type mobs just by themselves if the pull is big. Unless the attack has a mention of it generating extra threat on its description then the one with most damage yes. Remember that taunt without damage ability by itself does not generate threat, it just puts you on the level of threat highest player had on that target. This is somewhat circumstacial. With a lot of weak mobs you need to put some attention on them. With a group having several strong/elite ones and say 2 normals just leave the normals to dps to kill first and make sure the more dangerous ones stay on you. You'll get the feeling on this by practice and on new places you just have to make a guess. If stuff dies before it can do meaningful harm to group you're doing it right. Usually it's best idea to kill the mobs from weaker to stronger as for example strong ones often do same damage as elite ones while having considerably less health. Sounds pretty working for swtor as well. For interrupts, the mobs have casting bar above their portrait for some of their skills, these can be stuns or heals or just damaging abilities, and those generally can be interrupted. It they're instant you can't do much about them, for stuns you can use your ability that frees you from cc, unless it's on cooldown naturally. Which ones to interrupt and which to ignore is encounter spesific. Note that interrupting isn't just tanks responsibility, it's just as important, if not more so, that dps handles it too. Healer is usually excused from it

You get the affection points for your choices awarded upon completing the quest but the amounts are awarded based on which if any of your companions was present when you during the quest actually made the choice. Whether or not your companion is present when you finish the quest doesn't matter. So when you see affection amount displayed during conversation, it is not actually added to your companion yet but just added to quest rewards of the quest in question. An exception to these are certain class related conversations you have with your master in your ship as they affect all of your companions.

When you visit fleet and to lesser degree other ares, you can probably see decent amount of recruitment messages from guilds in general chat often coupled with their website, that might be a starting point as well but unless you actually know someone from the said guild it's always a lucky try if you actually fit in. When you're grouping with people (with guild) and you like them, maybe just casually mention you haven't found a guild for yourself yet but are keeping your eyes open. Small things like that might open up some door Don't get upset if some guild refuses you, possibly even in a rude way, just consider that they probably weren't for you anyway.

This is a good one. In addition, while you're either in flashpoint or zoned quest area don't try to run away from mobs thinking they lose interest in you after a while like in the open world since they don't. They will follow you until you run out of the flashpoint, die or someone else grabs their aggro, or they evade.