Hmm, let me see ... oh. Heh. Wow. _That's_ what you're complaining about? Yyyyyeeah, sorry, I recently had the debatable pleasure of being on the same team with a Sting that essentially killed everything forever and got a whopping 35 kills (that's kills, not assists, not assists+kills, _kills_), and it was kind of silly to watch. Compared to that, this is chump change. Also, yeah, notice that the image in question shows the OP was flying on a _capable_ team and they basically spanked the OPFOR as a whole.

I prefer the minelayer myself. Not necessarily as versatile, but I like that it feels sturdier than the drone carrier. I do have to admit that I'm not that big a fan of seismics though. Granted, Seismic Mines will probably net you more kills, but much like what you're already dropping, they're very specific beasts. Seekers, while they might fluff damage numbers more than a bit, are more flexible, even if initially single-target only.

Seeker mines do that. They're essentially sitting there waiting until something comes into 4k range, then fire off like a missile, but sans lockon.

Less 'weird' more ... pleasantly surprising. This was a week or two back, and I was just derping around getting dailies/weeklies done. At this point, I just hit them for rep/cash/keeping my hand in while waiting for an associate to get geared for OPs (which he is already, but idiot players keep going 'oh noes, 32k PT tank isn't ready for storymodes!' without looking to see if he isn't in, you know, mitigation gear for some crazy reason rather than stacking endurance) but I usually get decently geared groups who don't turn their brains off too much ... ... this time was ... different. Czerka Core Meltdown pops. Okay, I say. Hmm, Jugg DPS, PT DPS, Sorc healer ... not a sniper or mara in sight. Novelty value! Zone in, first thing I see ... PT DPS is the only one with 30+k HP (other than my Darkness SIn anyway). Eyebrows go up. Okay, this might actually be fun. Healer is sitting at 25k ... inspect ... level 50 blue implants ... um ... PVP relics? Okay, I use some of those myself. Still, stats on the gear he does have look appropriate, even decent for what he's there for. ... PT DPS drops/disconnects. We wait for a few minutes, then kick and requeue. Merc DPS, HP and gear in line with the other two ... ... proof-positive that it's skill and not gear that's the deciding factor. This PUG Meltdown run ended up being the smoothest I've ever been a part of. Healer and DPS prioritized great, Merc occasionally threw in offheals where needed, no wipes ... ... it's stuff like this that gives me hope for this community.

Mines are one hit kills at almost any charge. Drones take a bit more, but nowhere near full. It's piss-easy.

And so, with toning down the amount of evasion and bypass ... ... not a thing has changed. Stings/Flashfires (and the occasional rocket-podding Novadrive/Blackbolt) still rip apart everything they get a bead on including head-to-heading strike fighters. News at eleven.

If the gunships are dominating that's the fault of exactly _one_ thing. The scout pilots in your game are dogfighting. Oh, yeah, sure, the Gunship can 'barrel roll away' ... saaay, don't scouts get that too? And nifty engine cooldowns? Not having invested in the FOTM Sting/Flashfire yet, I don't know how things look at that end, but while a Blackbolt can't quite melt a non-fresh GS in one pass, it can certainly get it scrambling real fast. Damping sensors, the appropriate crewmember, and oh, _not flying into the pack of enemies who could spot you/comm your location like a moron_ are important. The little targeting window that -shows the direction the enemy is facing_ is important too. It's kind of similar to how the situation was on Domination even before the current patch. Scouts would dogfight all over the place rather than booming and zooming and being objective fighters. It's an objective game again, only this time the objectives are gunships.

hmm ... lessee 1-7 Saber strike, Thrash, Shock, FL, Wither, Maul, Assassinate F1-F8 Overload, Discharge, Spike, Electrocute, single target taunt, AOE taunt, Slow, Phase Walk Q, E, R, F, V, C, X, Y Force Speed, Jolt, Recklessness, Dark Ward, Force Cloak, Deflection, Unbreakable Will, Force Shroud T, G, B Overcharge Saber, Pull, Stealth Just about the only other stuff I can imagine it could be useful to put on a bind that I might end up using modifiers for would be medkits, adrenals and relics. I use passive relics so that's out. And it's not like I don't have realestate still left on my number and function keys. Honestly, it's a lot like blind typing and works well enough for me.

So far I've been managing just fine. The last time I used modifiers was way back in WAR, and I've known since then that they just don't seem to work for me. And as I've yet to hear any in-game complaints about my performance, it seems to be going well enough.

I hate having key modifiers, so I follow the general approach of having my attacks/taunts on 1-7 and F1-F6, and utility/defensive stuff around WASD. I also tend to use the same key for roughly the same effect across my chars, which sometimes works and sometimes doesn't but Q is always my 'closer' (charge for those that have it, but for Sins/Sorcs it's Force Speed) and my interrupt on E. Interrupt mashing has never been so easy. What this generally means is that I have a lot of keybinds, but I can kite just as well as someone trying to do so with modifiers off of a programmable mouse (only have a basic one and by now my muscle memory's burned this stuff into my reactions anyway).

Sitting at 36k, buffed and stimmed, with around 23% Def, 35% Shield and 45% Absorb with my Darkness Sin. It's my main, but I've been playing on a few months, off a few months ... the one thing that hasn't changed since I started is that whenever I look at high end gear I'm forced to go 'oh dear god I just know people are going to wear this out of the box without swapping some of those mods out'. I've been putting off swapping out my enhancements (mostly crafted 66 purples with shield/absorb and one or two 69s with shield/def) for the disaster that are the 72s for as long as I could manage. Same with my crappy-end, crappy-will, 100/100 shield/def implants. Sadly, I doubt we'll ever be able to just, you know, buy the mods we want individually rather than a complete piece of gear. That would take too much away from the grind, I imagine. Hence, the overinflated tank HP disaster will likely continue. Oh well. At least it's good for a laugh and the occasional poke of '_why are you wearing Endurance augments?!_'

YMMV, but one thing that's consistently seen me through Duneclaw is popping Force Shroud right before Force Speed and heading for the green generator. Sure, you'll take his AOE smash in the face but there are other ways of mitigating that rather than relying on correctly eyeballing the time to Shroud through it (breakout and Overcharge Saber or breakout and medkit may not always be available). The important thing is that you get to the generator ASAP, and him jumping to you not immobilizing you for a few crucial seconds is nice.

Oh god, yes, the Spin Attack on Core Meltdown. It's freaking hilarious. It's like people can't be bothered to move away and usually ends up with two out of four down. At this point I've given up trying to tell people to use their breakouts/force speed/just run the hell away from the nice and obvious castbar. Hell, the exact same mechanic is used in a number of leveling heroics. I've been back with TOR after e few months of hiatus for over a month now and in that time I've had all of one Meltdown run where people would actually bother moving. Also, not really a GF story and not really a 'weird' story, but still, was getting people together for an 8man first run at Eyeless last night. Friend and I were tanking, the rest were random people from genchat who wanted to come. Our gear varied wildly (from high 20ks to mid 30s in hp scores), but there were no disasters ... but of course, the _one_ 40k DPS decided to throw a hissy fit before we even started and quit saying we weren't geared enough for it and he'd seen groups like this before. Well, DPS pops aren't exactly rare, so we got another in short order and went in. We wiped all of one time since we went in cold, then organized a bit better and cleared it without too much of an issue and had a lot of fun doing it. Props to everyone involved. I dunno, maybe I'm a little weird, but I don't really like just derping through stuff and felt this was much more rewarding than a 16 man zerg or just shrugging everything off because gear.

Now, I know I'm just speaking for myself here at the moment, but I for one find missiles to be just a bit ... awkward to use. Often I find myself releasing the right mouse button a hair too early, trying to anticipate the completed lock. Equally often, I mash it in frustration when for some reason (possibly distortion lock break) the locking process gets interrupted while the enemy is well within range. Be it lag, latency, or some other reason, it frustrates me to no end, and I _want_ to like missiles. Clusters, due to their low lockon time, are least affected, but still ... The one thing I think would help, and that I find myself wanting more and more often is a toggle in the GSF preferences menu saying 'launch on lock-on', that would result in the game not waiting for you to release RMB but fire the missile as soon as lock-on is completed. Another quality of life improvement would be for GSF to acknowledge that RMB being _pressed_ means 'I want to be locking on to this person' even when lock-breakers are used, so lock-on would resume the moment lock-breaking effects stop, should the enemy still be within the circle. Opinions?

Running Czerka HMs for the weekly comms, Group Finder ended up dropping a pair of Pyro-merc DPS on me. IIRC, we were running Core Meltdown and both insisted on a) getting into mobs' faces and using rocket punch/flamethrower for _some_ arcane reason. b)tunnel visioned on bosses/golds and ignored everything else. c)were hopeless about actually dragging the enduring AOE circle _away_ to where you wouldn't risk running into it. Sometimes kept standing in it. Incidentally, has anyone else noticed the reduced numbers of queuing Marauders? It's been a longish while since I've seen a pair and a few days since I saw as much as one, and instead got nearly consistent snipers/sorcs. Is it just nature's RNG messing with me, or did someone change the FotM while I wasn't looking?

Um. KBN. That's kind of our major gripe? Unique mechanic? Gutted? The thing that made us able to stand where others fell? Sure, we fell where others stood too, but _still_. The majority of the gripes seems to be that we are now samey and boring, or at least that's what it boils down to. It very much _was_ the easy way out.

Obvious troll is obvious. Seriously, dude, get new material. Anyone paying attention already knows you're just here for this. It's pretty sad.

Assuming we're talking a 1 on 1 situation (2 on one, you'd have been boned one way or the other, many vs many is a whole 'nother kettle of fish), if you can survive a burst that would have put you into the ground pre-2.5 the result is still going to be close enough as makes no nevermind. There are benefits to the way things currently work. Our weaknesses got a buff - taking damage from multiple sources/multiple hits is something SINs can deal with better now. On the flip side, our strengths got gutted. Things I used to rely on are no longer the case, and while I can shove some of the blame for that on the fact that 'change is scary', it's also a fact that while we go down slower now, we also go _up_ slower. It's a case of not knowing what you have until it's gone, IMO, and one of the things I've noticed I miss most is how relatively quickly our health pool could be built back up when we weren't taking damage for a little while.

Not just no. HELL NO. From a graphics indicator standpoint, we're hilariously busy _anyway_. Currently when there's a Darkness tank on the field it's this big black/purple/pink blob that occasionally appears to fart lightning. The HD stacks on their own were a good idea ... and then they went and did it to everything or damn near everything else and made the good idea more or less useless what with everything else going on. And really, do you want a graphical indicator for Dark Protection from the people who gave us the preposterously proportioned pink ... rotating jedi holocron?

... this might sound odd, but I've encountered this situation before and rather than lob missiles at them I do the standard strafing attack run ... then cut my thrusters when I go past. Spin slooooooowly to face them. And then fire everything. Granted, I have nowhere near enough of a sample size to say that this will always happen, but there's a reluctance from the gunship pilots I've seen to dart out from near beneath the sat, and some confusion as to where I'm shooting from as I sit there, near point-blank in range, and pew pew. It's like they think they have the monopoly for sitting in place like that.

Personally, while I could do with controls being a bit less twitchy, what I really want is a proper 3D (or dual-hemisphere, in that old X-Wing/TIE-Fighter model) radar and _more targeting options_. Target nearest enemy. Target enemy _targeting you_ (not just that sad excuse of a 'last one to deal damage' button which is nearly useless) And if I want to feel particularly fancy (though, okay, this might lead to button overload): Target nearest scout. Target nearest strike. Target nearest gunship. Target nearest turret. I'd also like the option to set my directional shields to front/back/equalize with their own keybinds rather than just having a setting toggle.

Knight ... was uninspired. I liked the doomsday weapon hunt, yes, but everything after that was just same-y. It's most certainly not KOTOR3 to me, to the point that I found it profoundly unsatisfying. Oh, and the lack of option to kill/shock Scourge made no sense - this guy is a hilarious failure _and_ he blatantly betrayed the Exile. Agent was quite good, but I think it might suffer from too much hype. Smuggler is just plain _fun_. Trooper and BH are solid enough, though starting off at their strongest. Have yet to do Consular. Warrior is probably the best story I've gone through here, possibly because the decisions seem like they have the most impact. Inquisitor isn't bad, but seems like it's too eager to throw you stumbling block after stumbling block after chapter 1, without so many attempts at enjoying your Unlimited Power as I'd expected it to have.

Balance is a myth and trying too hard to chase it down an exercise in futility. I'd have preferred them staying with unique flavor, even with the risks coming with that. Still, it's good to have more of an idea just whom we should 'thank' for such gems as not being able to summarily execute Scourge, Quinn, Temple and assorted others. Or the lack of power interactions that, IIRC, were at one point supposed to be in. I swear I remember something about Bounty Hunter's oil slick getting set on fire by Flamethrower. Instead we got near-cookie-cutter and the balance criers still weren't and aren't satisfied, surprise surprise.

Nevermind. Blame my brain and its lack of sleep. Nothing to see here. Move along.

Then sensor package should mean more. Communications should mean more. As it it, the tradeoff is not nearly worth it. The ranges involved aren't nearly sufficient.