This. When I think sandbox, I think of... mortal online. Where there is absolutely no personal quest line, it's just a world, and you go out and do whatever you want in it. There's no way to add elements of that to a game like tor that I can think of... the sheer act of adding a personal story makes it not sandbox.

1.3 isn't going to help... there's nothing in 1.3 that would make anything better. server transfers need to happen by the end of next week, but they wont.

I'm not debating the need for a new system of some sort... all I'm trying to say is the *pitch* they gave everyone was WOW with voice overs for leveling up... but they left out all the things that make wow addictive and kept people playing it. They basically took all of the BAD parts of mmos and added it to a single player game, instead of taking the *good* parts of them.

The formula that TOR was *trying* to copy goes like this: You put in incredibly difficult raid content, with the best rewards, so that the top 1% of gamers looks absolutely awesome in their gear. This gives the other 99% extreme gear envy, and makes them want to play more so that they can feel awesome like the 1%. For the most part, none of the 99% ever get there... so you throw in some holiday events (monthly or so) with some cool fun items to still make them feel like they're progressing closer and closer to that 1% even though they're not. Rinse and Repeat. The entire WOW formula is keeping the majority of your player base constantly chasing after that carrot (looking as cool as the hardcore raiders do in their gear) while *NEVER LETTING THEM CATCH THE CARROT* Bioware took that mentality and said... well heck guys, if people play this game so much chasing the carrot all the time, I bet even MORE people will play it if we just give the carrot out for free.

Guild wars 2. The combat is super fast paced, and it's the only other MMO out there that doesn't have you running up and clicking on a guy skimming quest text and then killing 10 rats. In GW2, if there's a quest to defend a town from an invasion, you actually see a town getting invaded as you're adventuring, you run over, defend it, and complete the quest. The entire level up game is a series of mini events... there's no quest text at all. TOR killed quest text for me, I can't stomach it at all anymore....

There isn't even enough raiding for those that love raiding. In a typical raiding focused game, loot is rare, and hard to acquire and takes 5-6 months to fully gar out your toon. As it is now, we cleared hard mode in two weeks of attempts, and some people were already max geared. If you make end game focused on raiding, you can't make it casual, otherwise you have ZERO content.

how silly of me to be looking on the official forums for updates about the Q&A today... I should have known that it makes WAY more sense to talk about these things on twitter.

I'm running on an incredible system.. core i7 16gb ram, 2 6970s in crossfire. Windows is on an SSD raid 0 array, tor is on a completely seperate SSD drive. some planets still take 3-4 min. (not exaggerating) to load... taris is a good example.

You get PvE gear for questing, and leveling up.... you get Flashpoint gear for doing flashpoints you get Operation gear for doing operations you get PvP gear for playing in PvP.. what's the problem? you get gear for the activity you want to do, by doing that activity.

Just to add some more clarification to the issue, the AOE range of the damage spell is larger than the graphics it puts down on the floor by a good bit. Not sure if it's a bug or intentional. If you just get a good 15 yards away from the outter edge of the graphic, you're fine.

Our guilds mara in full rakata was pulling 1500-1600... 1400 in champ doesn't sound off base.

are you serious? there will be NO end to my rage is we lost everything in our guild bank.

Only use shock when you're moving out of fire, or some other mechanic in the raid prevents you from standing still and doing your normal rotation.

when lightning barrage procs, you if you spam your key you can get two FLs that take advantage of the barrage proc instead of just one. It's a bug.

Going great, U.S. 4th, World 7th right now. Nice to see you're still in the theorycrafting biz

Hybrid is still the top dps... all specs got nerfed about 200dps across the board when we were already not the top dps class.

Nice work dae.

lightning won't be viable until the UI supports something like powerauras. Having to tunnel on your tiny little buff icons to react to things makes it impossible to pay attention to raid mechanics.

I could care less about pvp... but for pve: in our own guild testing, we've found sorcs averaging around 1200dps on the combat dummy... snipers average 1500, marauders average 1600, and mercenaries average 1800 (round about) I imagine sorc numbers will go up to 1400 in a raid situation with full buffs, stims, adrenals, etc... but everyone elses numbers will go up too. We're still incredibly far behind all of the other classes... I'm a guild leader for a world top 10 guild (7th right now) and I play a sorc... and I'm going to be asking DPS sorcs to sit for progression fights (myself included.) That's how bad it is.

Operation end game has NOT been a priority for them. Compare how bug-free PvP is with the myriad of bugs in operations that are STILL not fixed. Most of my guild is waiting for 1.2 to see if Operations become a bigger priority for bioware moving forward, and if not, we'll move on to the next game.

*in any non-raid situation.

never tell me the odds.

the numbers at 50 on the PTR suggest that all three builds (lightning, madness, or a hybrid) are all around the same dps. DPS across the board for all 3 builds is about 200dps less than on live.

So I was lucky enough to get my character copied over to the PTR for working with a fan site. Here are ACTUAL numbers so you can see what we're working with here. First PTR DPS: Using the combat log, I tried out all 3 current builds for 5 minutes each against the operation level target dummy on the ziost shadow. I was using self buffs only and no stims. Nor where there any debuffs on the target. Hybrid build: 1050 DPS Full Madness Build: 1011 DPS Lightning Build 980 DPS Please note, I don't typically play lightning, so the lower DPS in that build is likely due to me not playing it perfectly. Those numbers seemed REALLY low compared to what our estimates were on live for DPS, so I decided to do a direct comparison of PTR to Live. On hoth, tucked away in the starship graveyard, there are champion mobs with ton of health. (I can get exact health numbers when I get home if requested.) By using a stop watch to time how long it takes me to kill these guys, that has been the best way for me to estimate DPS on live server. So I decided to compare kill times on this mob on both the PTR and live. Let me clarify. Same character, same gear, same build, same rotation, same champion level mob. Results with hybrid spec: Live: Took around 1 min, 35 seconds to kill the guy, resulting in 1350 DPS PTR: Took around 1 min, 59 seconds to kill the guy, resulting in around 1100 DPS. This is a *significant* drop in DPS to a class that already was not top of the DPS chain. To give you an idea, I compared combat logs with an equally geared marauder, and the maruader produced around 1350 DPS compared to our 1050 DPS.

Honestly, I don't disagree with you... my point is, If you limited PvP so that people could only play PvP 4 hours a week, there would be a massive riot. Why is it acceptable to do the same thing to raiders? You say half the server would have full rakata without lockouts, and I agree, but OVER half the servers have full battlemaster now... so all the same issues exist in BOTH PvP and Ops... so why limit one and not the other?