cool beans, thanks for the thoughts. makes sense though... the tankassin seems to excel at living for a long time while harassing and otherwise pissing the other team off. good times.

in a thread that is meant to HELP fellow assassins, calling any one of our three trees a "crutch" is about as detrimental and non-constructive as anyone can get. props for the attempt to be constructive, but you pretty much ruin the thread once you get people on the defensive about their chosen spec. as for problems... i think the typical issues with the animation delay for things like assassinate, or the sometimes-fail of force cloak (vanish) should be on the list... e.g. i'll vanish but still get slapped around by the critters or what have you regardless -- as if i never vanished at all... i'd also ask that maybe an audible cue for 3 stacks of harnessed darkness might not be such a bad thing... even though they annoy some, an audible cue for major procs/stacks like that has proven very handy on my other toons (agent oper/medic and merc/pyro BH). i really have been enjoying the tankassin gameplay though... it's just fun!

I agree it's a little odd to price +33 magenta schems at a whopping 250k/each. I can't imagine how you'd ever recoup the cost of those. The recipes are there for completionists who don't want to kill the world bosses I guess... or maybe they will completely phase the +33 crystals from the game forever after 1.2 hits. Who knows. As for the +41 crystals... i think landing them at 125k-250k isn't bad... it's still a chunk of change, and gives players something viable for L50 as it currently stands (since there is no L50 crystal unless you strip out end-game gear). If anything, it helps bracket what they will cost on the GTN once it is revealed how the schematics will be obtained (be it trained or dropped). Rest assured, they already said v1.2 will bring T2 loot content, so there will be another step of crystals beyond +41 for sure. Now the white crystals are a pure credit-sink to drain banks prior to 1.2 hitting. No question. Especially since I believe they have stated that these are a "limited time" item that is not assured of return in 1.2 (or any time in the announced future). So, for those who can save or afford them now, they are a good way to make them poor on the eve of a huge economic and crafting reset (of sorts) come 1.2. I think they are doing it correctly even if it does hurt artifice in a small way for about a month's time. Let's face it, being such a visible and vanity part of all force-users (lightsabers), the color crystals were the lowest hanging fruit to begin an economic sink for credit. Notice they also lowered the top end speeder costs from 1.5M to 1M as another incentive to sink out chunks of excess cash, making them BoE and salable, it locks up more credits for speculators who are going to bite on that future-sales aspect of the speeders being discontinued. I think they are on the right track... let's just hope they follow through and deliver the fixes to crafting as they promised...

Just curious... most people seem to go all out 31/0/10 for a pvp Darkness spec (other than the other 27/0/14 type specs). I'm curious why people don't trade 2 points in Torment (-2 force for thrash and -6 force for shock) for 2 points in Dark Embrace (+25% force regen when exiting stealth)? Do people just not open up from stealth enough in PvP to find the 6 seconds of ability spam/burst to be useful vs. the force reduction in thrash/shock? Thanks for any thoughts! PS I absolutely am loving the Darkness Tankassin in pvp... so much fun compared to my Merc/Pyro BH it's just crazy...

The ship droid primary stat is Aim and yes, you can set him up with gear if you so choose... there are moddable ship parts that show up as "Green" in our Cybertech crafting list, but function exactly as orange mods would on a droid (Core, Parts, Sensor, Motor). For a cybertech to gear out their ship droid for healing purposes really is quite trivial if you can stomach him... the full stack of green moddable parts plus all the +aim armorings and mods you can stuff down his gullet! That said, at the Guild Summit, they alluded to a few things coming for ship droids... a) craft-bonus specific attachments for your ship droid to boost his crafting ability b) working affection (Luxury) for the ship droid c) the rumor that the Assassin droid will surface at some point TBD in the future (no ETA) and most importantly d) a voice restraining bolt for the dude... WOOT. End game oper gear was stacked too heavily by the devs with alacrity, so most opers want no more extra, so in many cases, the mastercraft Expert Serenity Relay is probably BiS for a while.

I remember reading your post over on DarthHater forums, if you are the same person. Good guide. One comment: Based on what I've learned, Alacrity is not very favorable for Cunning (Operative) healers end-game. Instead, they typically advise stacking Power/Surge. Thus, I'd recommend that the preferred setup for their earpiece should be: Expert Serenity Relay (RE from Overkill +power blue) I'll comment further if anything else comes to mind. Great guide and definitely worth a sticky if only to prevent people from bothering to post 3290842039483 auctions on the GTN for purple prefixes that make no sense!

Minor fix to the above... Q1 NG/L Q2 NG/L Upon turnin: Q3 O2 +27 Sorry about the confusion

found one more for Gault on Belsavis... weird i missed this one too: Quest: Droid Malfunction Where: Signal Monitoring Center Given By: SD-9 Q1 O1 +27 Q2 O3 +27 Q3 NG/L

np. can you tell i've been trying to get Gault's affection up? lol. thanks again.

Small correction: Q2 O1 actually gives -1 affection... use Q2 O2 instead. Also, add this one: Quest: Deadly Mutations Where: "Monitoring Station" in tunnel to The Tomb, Icewall Ravine (-883, 125) Given By: AR-72 Q1 O2 +27 Q2 O1 NG/L And also, this one on Ilum: Quest: Rightful Owner Where: Imperial Waystation Given By: Captain Barstead Q1 O2 NG/L Q2 O2 +27 (I think this is the turn-in step, else it's Q3) All of these corrections/additons are for Gault, btw. Thanks for posting this info!

This is pretty much it... these are the universal "needs" in the eyes of the players, and most imporantly, the most visible sign of "wealth" for most characters (well... blaster users kinda get the shaft on showing off color crystals by the bank... I think they picked the right place to sink out excess credits for sure. Yeah don't share the secrets! I have been pleasantly surprised by the profit from Artifice while everyone else and their grandma goes Biochem...

Yes... I run it on my BH since I like the look and simply can't stomach the end-game PvP or PvE look, so sure, my stats get gimped a bit (so looking forward to extractable base mods)... http://www.torhead.com/item/fCo9Y7G/rd-12a-assault-chestguard I haven't found a perfect match color-wise, but the closest I could get such that the "tail" of the pants at least matched the chest color (for now) is the L40 PvP pants (these have an ivory-colored "tail" patch): http://www.torhead.com/item/65Q21H/td-15a-pyro-tech-leggings The only small issue with the colors is that the L40 pvp pants have a "shiny" sheen to them, and the plates on the legs are a darker/gold shade, but it's as good as I could get. Do note the "color matching" features for armor are coming very soon (v1.2 I think?), so this may eventually be a non-issue. I can update this post with a screenshot of my toon in this outfit later... need to dig through the pile of screenies to find it.

yes... nevermind the safety aspects of it!

Something that really bothers me, especially since I'm actually running more of a "dps" companion for the first time on my SI tank-assin (other classes I did prior were dps merc and healer operative)... for the other two roles, the default behavior is arguably correct, however... The "response" AI settings for the companions appears to default to immediately attack any mob that attacks the main character even if it is not being actively tanked... which is great if the companion is in a "tanking" role... however, when *I* am the more effective tank, the dps companion needs to default to the "assist" role where they attack MY target and let ME tank... This is especially bad for characters like Ashara or Andronikos in the DPS role where they wear medium armor and get destroyed by elite+ NPCs in a heartbeat when they do not assist me. e.g. I will pull a pack of 3 mobs, one of which is ranged and to the side.... i attack the first mob and command my dps companion to also attack this first mob. However, immediately upon the third ranged mob firing a shot at me, my companion leaps off to attack the "add" even though I do not need/want them to, immediately pulling aggro and thus tanking the mob when that is NOT the desired behavior. As a result, I must explicitly taunt or otherwise attack the 3rd mob so my companion doesn't get themselves killed in the process... and re-command them to attack the primary target... it's almost like our companion is a bad PUG in that respect... The micro-management component here is a little beyond what should be required to effectively use a dps-companion, imho. Please take a look at this, and perhaps some development into some basic "directive" commands for companions would be in order... e.g. tanking stances are aggressive at collecting aggro from any mob that attacks the main character while dps stances are more relegated to the "assist me" role in killing the primary target. Thanks. PS I should add, at least the healer-companions tend to heal you, them spam their CC ability when not healing, rather than trying to help by tanking off-mobs... while this is probably not the design, it just happens to work out that their CC-spam keeps them out of trouble (usually)...

This isn't a huge thing, but it occurred to me today that when I execute the sheath/unsheathe weapon command, it would be nifty if it also made my companion do the same... it'd make for nicer screenshots if you want the "ready" poses. As it is, there is some kind of bug going on right now where my companion will randomly have their weapons out at the ready even when idle and not in combat... bizarro. Anyhow, thanks for listening.

just FYI to everyone who isn't keeping score... here is the info from a recent QA: http://www.swtor.com/blog/community-qa-feb-17th-2012

That is excellent info... and is in-line with reports on the BH forums in debates of Gault vs. Torian dps (our companion mirrors). Just curious... on Ashara do you just stack +power on her to maximize the bleed DoT? Thanks for doing this!

i too made the "mistake" of learning all the L43 enhancement recipes, boggling at how many there were, until i realized that all of them are at least duplicated and, in some cases, triplicated. lolwut. honestly, until this fixed, i'm just going to save a few creds and stick to the enhancements that i KNOW i'll use... and only one version of each... Adept (power/surge), Immunity (shield/def), Battle (crit/surge)... does anyone actually use any other stat combination? lol. Thanks to the OP for putting this up. PS why isn't this post stickied?

oops... duplicate post... (why can't we delete our own stuff on these forums?)

That's good info. I forgot about the *type* of damage that Torian dishes out being a key factor. Anyhow, running with Ashara by my side for a bunch last night, she's plenty capable of shredding things in short time once you get her some gear. I set her up with level-appropriate orange gear/mods and she's fine (no pun intended). She's not the AOE machine Andro is, but she shreds single targets pretty dang quickly... Nope... people who think otherwise are being silly. That said, she seems to take aggro just fine... moreso since the AI that runs the companions is horrible at simply assisting you on your target. I'll target something, attack it and pwwwwshhh... Ashara leaps off and attacks something else, prompting me to have to run around to collect the off target that she decided needed to die first... kinda frustrating how the companions can act like BAD PUGs...

People on my server, Space Slug, don't even seem to realize/believe that lightsabers with augment slots exist. hah.

i kinda like the idea of two girls with lightsabers running around shredding stuff, personally. my tank-assin is the hotness! anyhow, all debate of ash vs. andro aside... i'm more curious about those who run ashara as their main dps companion, what stance seems to work better for you? arpen vs. the bleed stance... there was lots of discussion on the BH forums that Torian (Ashara's mirror for BH) does a ton of dps in bleed stance, so that is what most people use... but i'm curious if that's the same case with Ashara? i guess it's time to experiment a bit... PS i should add, there are those in the BH discussions that will say Gault (Andro mirror) is the higher dps comp compared to Torian (Ashara mirror)...

nice... thanks for the shot. i was mostly curious what the suffix would be for the augmented oranges... and it looks like it's [Exceptional] (e.g. same as "green" quality items).

It seems like the way they designed this, for flat out AoE type dps, Andronikos is the man. For touch-of-death bleed dps, Ashara is your gal. The BH dps companions (and pretty much every other class) is set up similarly, in terms of basic role/playstyle configuration. Torian = Ashara, Gault = Andronikos... etc. I just use this example since I am most familiar with the BH class so far. The only thing we SI's don't really get is a "ranged" tank, but even the ranged tank companions actually have PBAoE type effects in play which means they go to melee range to be most effective (e.g. Kaliyo and Blizz).

This would make combat with Khem oh-so-much-more-fun... "Is that you, my morose monster?"