I'm coming to realize that there is no best stat. The more power and aim you have, the better crit and surge become because they multiply on to a larger number. The more crit and surge you have, the better power becomes because it's multiplied by a larger factor. So if you have a lot of any one stat, then that makes the other stats better, so it's not a question of which stat is better, it's a question of how much of each stat you want. It would be that way even without diminishing returns on critical chance! Calculations just on the stats won't give you very meaningful information as the situation is much more complicated than that and you get into things like procs from criticals and the exact rotation used. However, from what simple calculations I could do trying to take some of that into account, it did seem that for gunnery you want as much aim as you can get, some crit, a little bit of surge and a lot of power. There is a point at which you wouldn't want aim any more, but you can't put all your gear points into aim anyway, so it's not easy to reach that point. You can make any one stat (say crit) worth twice of any other stat (say power) just by increasing the one stat way more than the other one. So if you have 1000 power and no crit, you'll do a lot more damage by changing that to 900 power and 100 crit.

That'll do. Thank you!

I believe that if an ability would ordinarily do X damage, and you've got a critical damage modifier of Y, then the ability will do (1+Y)*X damage on a critical hit. This is what the tooltip in-game seems to imply is what happens. Is that really what happens? I'm seeing some posts in here calculating crit damage as only picking up the bonus damage that you get from your primary stat and power - so no benefit from base damage of the ability. If that is true, it makes crit much less useful. So what I'm asking is if crit multiplies *all* components of the damage an ability does, including anything that got buffed, for example the knight/warrior +5% buff to bonus damage. Please don't respond with "of course it does noob!" if you haven't personally verified this in-game looking at actual numbers in the combat log.

The knight/warrior bonus is actually a 5% bonus to bonus damage and healing. The counsilor/inquisitor bonus is 5% to aim. However, the bonus damage from +5% aim also benefits from the +5% bonus damage, so aim benefits twice from these buffs while power only benefits once. These bonuses then indirectly affect crit as well since it now applies to a larger number.

Are you saying that a critical only affects the bonus damage of an ability and not the total damage done by an ability? So if I had 0 bonus damage, then crits and non-crits would deal the same amount of damage? The in-game tooltip says "Critical hits increase the damage dealt by this percentage", which to me reads as saying that critical hits apply their bonus to all the damage of the ability, not just the bonus. Are you sure it's only the bonus damage that gets critted? If not, that increases the usefulness of crit above what you calculated. It also makes the bonus damage different for every ability, so it becomes more complicated. There are also 2 talents from the Gunnery tree that increase the value of crit and surge above your calculation: - Cell Charger: crits add 1 ammo (at most once per 3s) - Deadly Cannon: critical bonus damage from Full Auto and Demolition Round increased by 30% With crit being worth more like this, the question becomes if crit might be better than aim for reasonable values of crit and aim. I don't know! We get back to the point that you can't ignore the exact rotation used when calculating the value of crit, because it for example depends on how much of the damage is coming from Full Auto. In gunnery, if you do less grav rounds, you also get fewer Full Auto's. The value of crit through triggering Cell Charger is also significantly different depending on whether you are using an ability that hits just once (high impact bolt) or something that hits many times (full auto). So it really just gets very complicated to figure out

If you are going to be snarky, you should make sure you are right. As far as I can tell, that tool just shows you the same thing you'd see in-game. It is a simple-minded calculator like the one the game has, it is not a simulator of an encounter which takes all of the factors into account such as amount of movement needed, which is what I was stating is not so easy to do.

Great! Have you made a SWTOR simulator that we can all use to check out different rotations and gear loadouts? That would be awesome.

Does criticals also affect bonus damage or only base dmg? Because if it also affects bonus damage, we have quite a complicated function for average damage to optimize: (base dmg+bonus dmg) * (1+crit chance*crit multiplier). Each of the components in there are complicated just on their own. Then you've got abilities that proc off of criticals and the impact of alacrity is hard to quantify too. A lot is also going to depend on talents and the choice of rotation and how much movement is needed. I don't see how to get any kind of definitive answers without either tremendous time spent on the training dummies or implementing a swtor simulator where you can plug in different loadouts (including rotation) and see what the average DPS really becomes after taking everything into account.

Thank you. That was very useful. As far as I can see, 1 point of aim has a similar effect to 0.1900 point of crit and 0.8696 point of power. The sum of those are 1.0596, so if crit and power are all the same to you, you should go for aim, but it's actually better than than since the added crit chance for aim and crit rating have separate diminishing returns. By the same token, at high levels of aim, the added crit chance from aim becomes worthless and without that aim is just a worse version of power. From these formulas the exact most desirable amount of aim, crit, surge, power and alacrity to get within a given budget is hard to figure out analytically. Since the crit effect of aim is so low, I suspect the diminishing returns of aim are low enough that the simplistic rule that aim is just better is good enough in most circumstances that it's very unlikely to really hose you. Especially since it's impossible to put the whole point budget into aim. I'm somewhat at a loss as to why Bioware felt they needed such a complicated system. Anyway, I'm off to replace some +crit augments with +aim augments thanks to your excellent reference. Thanks again.

How do you know? As I understand it, 1 points of aim gives the benefit of x points of crit plus y points of power. The extra power is where the bonus healing and damage comes from, effectively, though it is reported as separate from power in the ui. Both x and y are lower than 1 as far as I can determine. If you know what values x and y should have, or if you know that the actual mechanic is different, feel free to provide that information.

Aim gives a little less bonus damage than power, and a tiny amount of crit. What is the argument that makes aim better than power if you are going for power, and that makes aim better than crit/surge if you are going for that? It seems like aim is just always going to give you less of what you are looking for while giving you a little bit more of what you are not looking for. Everything I've seen takes it as a foregone conclusion that aim is better than all other stats for DPS and everything else. What is the basis for aim being the best stat always?

Fleet passes only cost 1k each. All of the fleet pass unlocks cost 600k IIRC. Your argument is that it will take years before it has happened 600 times that you can use the emergency pass instead of a 1k pass because of the lower cooldown. That is not why you buy those unlocks. The first reason is if you are not using a security key and thus don't have access to the security key vendor. The second reason is that using the emergency pass does not trigger the cooldown on the 1k passes. So if you are planet hopping, you can find yourself in a situation where you save 5 minutes because you can do 2 teleports to fleet in quick succession by combining the 1k pass and the emergency pass. It doesn't take much time to make 600k if you are doing it right, so the fleet pass can be a financial win, and that is for reasons beyond just saving 1k off a fleet pass.

The razer naga mouse has 15 buttons, though 2 are quite hard to reach, so let's say 13. You can bind mouse-wheel-up and mouse-wheel-down too, so that's 15 easily accessible buttons. 15 abilities at your fingertips should make you able to get very close to what someone with 2 hands can do. I suspect your are being handicapped more by using a touchpad instead of a mouse than you are by not being able to use your other hand to press buttons. That said, I also don't see the problem with limited combat macroes, things like making a button do different things depending on whether you are targeting a friendly target or a hostile target.

I did a trooper recently where I did every single quest including every single bonus series. I started out doing all bonus quests too, but I quickly changed my mind and only did the ones that say "stage X". I did not do any space mission twice and I didn't do the high level ones. I did a total of 1 warzone. I skipped past killing any mobs that I could skip past, including doing things like running to where I needed to go past many mobs, dying and ressing in the right spot. I was always a level or more (usually 2-3 levels) ahead of the content throughout levels 10-50. I got to level 50 a few minutes after I landed on Correllia. So if you are finding yourself underleveled, there is a large amount of quests that you have skipped somewhere and that you can go back and do. You can also gain about a level per chapter from maxing companion affection and talking to them on your ship. There are bonus series that don't unlock until you are a higher level. For example there is a level 40 bonus series on Alderaan. Edit: I didn't do any heroic quests (except for the single one I soloed once) and I didn't do any flashpoints.

Chat bubbles and ready check are the obvious missing elements. Let me set key bindings by clicking on a hot-bar inside the UI editor instead of in preferences. Figuring out which bar is "bar 3" is a chore. Allow me to split an action bar into its individual slots and let me place the slots anywhere I want, for example in a circle around my character instead of as a bar. Allow me to add a bar (bar as in a bar-chart) that shows the cooldown on an ability. Also allow me to add bars that key in on things like a buff or a debuff and make the bar show how much time is left on the buff/debuff. Add a way to add customized notifications. So I could add rules like "when X show Y". For example: when I get a second tactical advantage, flash the screen blue. When there is 5m or less left on my class buff and I'm not in combat and not on the fleet, put a skull in the middle of the screen. When the cooldown on full auto is done, play this MP3 file Oh, and add a button to res at start point in ops so we don't have to all wait for the guy with the 10m loading time every single time. Waving your weak point (load times) in people's faces like that just isn't such a great move.

Yes! And don't make it even consult your computer's clock either, even after translating for the server timezone, since people's computer's don't necessarily have the correct time. Use a time actually gotten directly from the server.

Also, have the keybinds be saved and in-game selectable options just like the UI files are. So if all characters are set to have the key-binds of character X, then once you change X's keybinds, all your alts get the same change. Also, companion abilities need to be able to go on any bar, especially the 2 abilities that are used constantly - companion attack and companion passive (we also desperately (!!!!) need "companion move to where I click and stay there").

Can you clarify that for combat parsers that are shown in real time as an overlay on top of the game?

Has anyone actually taken out the bridge on Archenar Interception with missiles? I can do it almost every time on Nez Peron Sweep, where I usually get the bridge taken down just before it flies past for the final time. Nez Peron Sweep gives you 3 passes over the bridge, while Archenar only gives you 2, and for the first pass there is a huge asteroid that hides the bridge while flying in. You can shoot through asteroids, but targeting is tricky. I want to say that the Archenar bridge is impossible to do given that you get less passes than Nez Peron, and Nez Peron's bridge is only barely possible. However, maybe it's possible to get it with perfect targeting through the asteroid, even though I really doubt it. Hence my question: has anyone actually taken out the bridge on Archenar Interception with missiles?

Every once in a while when we get to the second phase of Soa, he will keep casting an ability called Power Orb Detonation. It is a hard-hitting invisible AOE centered around himself - the animation for it has orbs circling around him. Most of the time he won't do this. We suspected it was tied to killing the pyramid things on the transition/falling phase, but he's been doing it even though we've killed every one of those on the way down. By now we just jump over the side and try again if he starts doing this, but that's getting old. Is there a way to get him to never do the Power Orb Detonation? Is it a real mechanic or just yet another bug?

There is no point to having a running start. Standing still, jumping and then pressing forward launches you the full distance that you can possibly jump even with a running start. If you get just a tiny bit forward, you didn't press W soon enough - you sometimes have to do it right after the jump. Running for 0.5 meter before jumping is more error prone and it doesn't get you any further than jump+W. So do all your jumps from a standstill. Getting off any speeder and not using sprint makes the jumping more precise. However, your movement speed determines how far you will jump, so for very far jumps, it will be easier with sprint or a speeder. So make yourself slow for precise jumps, make yourself fast for long jumps. Also, to jump up inclined surfaces, you often don't want to stand right at the base of the thing, because you'll hit the incline immediately and that will halt your forward momentum. For those, you sometimes need to stand back a little and jump from there. This will take you up many, many inclined surfaces that initially look like they cannot be jumped up.

Mission: fix the crew skill UI. Different prefixes of the same recipe need to be collapsed into one item that you click and only then do the available prefixes appear. Grey out the non-learned prefixes and have a tooltip describing how to learn them and the percentage chance for each step in that process. There needs to be a free text search textbox. Fix the bugs! Using the drop downs mess the whole thing up. For example selecting "custom" quality makes all the schematics that are custom but not of the same type light/medium/heavy disappear for my armormech. Fix the performance. Opening the crafting window takes too much time. You are dealing with a list of colored text. That stuff was instantaneous on computers 20 years ago. Introduce a favorites system. Most of what people craft is the same thing over and over again. Make a schematic item SAY on mouse-over whether you already learned it so you can tell on the GTN. Then make it so you can search for only schematics you don't know. When you cancel a craft, make it return the mats to the place those mats were taken from . that means into your hold if that's where the mats came from, not into your inventory. Don't close the crew skill window just because I sent a companion on a mission - select the next companion. Also don't move the scroll bar to the top just because I select a different companion. Giving random missions with a reset on loading screens, and then having loading screens take forever, is a terrible design. You got to come up with something else. For example have missions reset every hour, with an optional extra reset from using some kind of extremely cheap consumable. Bonus mission stage 1: Have a list view of schematics you haven't learned yet, so you can see what they are, along with having all schematics indicate on mouse over where that schematic is available in the game. Stuff like "drops from EV HM/NMM" and "obtained from Underworld Trading". Bonus missions stage 2: Make it possible to craft using mats from any character's hold in the same legacy. Bonus mission stage 3: make it possible to set mission and crafting products to appear in the hold instead of into inventory. Bonus mission stage 4: If a mission discovery is in the hold of any character on the same legacy, make it available right then with no learning involved. Make mission discoveries stack. Change they icons so no two discoveries use the same icon, and so the icon is not the same as any other object, including companion gifts. Bonus mission final stage: Do whatever you have to do so that you do not have to scroll the mission window. For example make the story description only appear on click or set it in a smaller font.

Some of my guildies just are doing something like half the DPS their gear should allow them to do, and we have no way to tell why. I suspect that they are not activating a new ability right away when the global cooldown comes up. Is there a log parser that will sort out things like that and give helpful advice?

The codex in this game is very bugged and it's been like that since launch. There is a very large amount of codex entries you can't actually get. I guess this new one is another one of them.

Open world PvP is imbalanced by its very nature. It's the wild west of PvP. You can run into a whole guild and they'll take you out in half a second. You can run into someone who is 20 levels higher than you are. You can have someone attack you while you are at 10% health after fighting off some mobs. You can be in PvE gear to kill mobs and then someone in PvP gear can easily kill you. The whole point of open world PvP is that it is not a controlled environment, and you need a controlled environment for balance. Wanting balance in open world PvP is like wanting to be dry at the water park.