Hmm, after reading this I might have to put my sage down and go full retard.

The concepts in SWG (early SWG) were just awesome. Things like bio-enginered creature handles, combat medics, weapons specialist (carbine, pistoleer, rifle etc), having to earn your jedi and my personal favorite bounty hunters with real missions to hunt jedi. The problem is it wasn't very well executed and very OP. My TKM with doc buffs really was unstoppable. SWTOR doesn't have all the cool ideas that SWG did, but it has better control and more well thought out. I really wish we could have bounty hunter missions in this game, that was just awesome.

Well I have every class in the game over 20, most over 30 and a few to 50. IMO: Range: Pure range I like Gunslinger or Sniper. Something about the feel Gunslinger though makes me like it better. Hybrid Range: Powertech Pyro, Not really an holes with this class and it actually has decent range. If your target starts gapping you then you can grapple them right back into the hurt. I prefer the PT/Pyro over the Vanguard just because the animations are better imo. Melee DPS: Its off an on between my sentinel and my assassin. Sentinel is stronger imo in better hands, but not by much. Assassin is easier to play and the Tank spec/DPS hybrid with DPS gear is a great grouping spec. Taunt and destroy people. Sentinel though is just beast mode, but most people don't bother to slow or interrupt you . Fairly weak when CC'ed if you mistimed your defensive cooldowns. Healing: Operative over Sawbones for animations on healing, but dirty kick still one of the coolest animations. I also found it easier to level as a healer on my operative vs. the smuggler (which is fairly brutal). I actually like healing a lot on my sorc and my sage, its just more challenging. Others: Balance/Madness specced sages and sorcs are really fun in the 1-49 range. If you know what your doing its very mobile, very active and very versitile. I am trying out a balance/seer combination right now that lets me off heal and dps, its proving to be a good node/door guy when coupled some stealthers. Also pretty good at kiting due to the dots, self heals and slows. Meat shields: Can't beat guardians and juggs when you use your in-vulnerabilities and have pocket healing. Problem is good teams will ignore you until everyone else is dead so learn how to taunt right. Current favorites in this order: Assassin, Operative, Sage (I like pebbles), Sentinel, Gunslinger. Story wise: LS Sith Warrior, LS Knight, LS/DS Operative, DS Assasin is ok. That's all I got, just my humble opinion. Most important thing is to pick the playstyle you like the best and then build your spec around it. I like support so you can see that Assassin, Ops and Sage Hybrid are my cup of tea.

nm already got my answer, thanks

I logged into PotF today, my normal republic server) and noticed that all my Fatman (empire) characters are now on this server. Well that is fantastic actually, but here is the problem. I have 14 total characters and only 12 slots. The 14 is showing red, but so far they are all there. Has anyone else had this problem and if so do they really make you delete your characters or are you allowed to be over the mark? It seems to me that they should have accounted for at least16 slots :/

OP speaks the truth. Fact is I have seen very good commando's and mercs that do just fine and I have seen people playing the perceived OP classes do average. Problem is the people who suck complain about the people who dont. You dont get help desk calls very often to tell you about how good of a job your doing. Here is another fact based opinion: balance is a myth, it never has and never will exist and furthermore its not even important in group played games. If this was 1v1 24/7 then it would matter, but 2v1 of equally skill players will always trump mr. bad ***. Always. What we have most of the time is Mr. Bad *** vs. 2 people where one or both are back pedaling wasd tunnel vision button spammers with no clue how to interrupt, guard or anything else. You know, the kind that generally foucus on 3 or 4 abilities and dont think about chains or positioning.

hmm, signs point to troll, i'll bite. So when you quit your former MMO, Did they tell you that you can never come back? SW will never die, this game might but it takes a LOT to kill a game. Basically it has to remain profitable to keep the lights on. We aren't at that point here and they can always cut costs which will just mean not much new. Only problem is we are trending the wrong direction and doing so at a rate faster than most probably anticipated. It hasn't even been a year, we should be growing in subscribers.

Are they twins? Why else would they both retire at the same time other than they are burnt out of EA over BW. Seems highly unlikely that we shouldn't read anything into this. Think of everything that has happened since SWTOR went live (layoffs, mismanagement, broken promises, shareholder profits, transfers and now retiring) and keep throwing up the blinders if you think none of this is related to EA's history with games and the gaming industry. Some of you see "nothing new" and I agree, its nothing new with EA. Retiring in this sense is equivalent to "I'm out, deuces". I wouldn't be surprised if we see something soon from this game that we all [customers] absolutely hate. I am speculating as I am free to do that EA or Mr. Hickman announced something that was a last straw type thing. My guess would be paying for Makeb or something ridiculous on the F2P front.

Its more like we are all hiding on dagobah and tatooine waiting for a new hope. This game may survive yet, they need better marketing and better 50+. Really not that hard to do if they focus on it. If it were up to BW I am sure they would do it, but its up to EA. They put mr. Hickman in charge, he doesnt have a good track record, the force is not strong with that one.

You want the impossible!

It is so unlikely that any game will ever "balance", has any game ever achieved this for real? I think that they could spend their limited resources on things they can affect. Only fight battle's you can win as Dr. Phil said. X-Q would be on that list, as would world pvp and many other things. I like this post, I mean it took 6 movies for the real SW to bring balance to the force, we shouldn't expect rookie mmo to do it in a year.

sir, are you suggesting that marauders, as a pure melee dps class, have an extremely powerful chain that starts with a channeled ability and ravages (pun intended) paper targets when teams refuse to slow, interrupt or taunt them? Take it back now you liar. Seriously, did you notice how 90% of those beat downs were on players who ate a 3 second channel before they even knew they were getting wailed on. If your reaction time is 3 seconds your going to die. Now I am not saying they are not really good at melee dps, but operatives are really good at healing and power techs are really good at face stomping and assassins can put a hurt on for extended stretches and so on and so on. This is how the class is supposed to work and it does have counters that pugs just cant figure out. Look, maybe i am not saying it right, here listen to this guy: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=m_N1OjGhIFc

And the reasons you mentioned are part of the reason why people get irritated when the company does things that don't make SWTOR's strengths strong and its weaknesses weaker. The fact is the Star Wars franchise is arguably the strongest backbone any game could ever ask for, its timeless in the same way that Tolkein fantasy has supported orc/goblin/elf games for so many years. The problem is they are not taking fully advantage of the potential here and the engine is preventing them from it. To me, the most important aspect of the SW lore that is missing is the epic conflict. The whole thing is a battle of good vs. evil and epic at that and this game is missing the epic part. Epic space, epic ground, epic story. They put all their chips into the epic story and may not be able to afford to keep it that way.

And it depends on how well they adhered to OO practices. Not enough cohesion and too much coupling means changes to A also change B. Could be they cant fix one thing without breaking another. I love C++, but its easy to make mistakes if your careless (not saying they are). Lol Hollerith cards. I remember learning about those in college when classic asp was the new thing, Y2K was making COBOL nerds rich and Microsoft acknowledged the Internet.

So the story that never ends actually does end at 50 and then you have...............nothing [new] to look forward too. Interesting approach, is this game run by the government now? I never thought I would say this but I actually miss wow now. Much more bored as hell stuff to do in that game. Also, hasn't it been 6 weeks since they said 6 week intervals or are they counting the last mini event as an update?

TBH, this is par for the course. The gear has been dog ugly, especially on the republic side, since launch. For as much as people hate WoW and gear grinds, they expect to look bad a**. Nobody wants to look like a bloody finger BW. This crap is really starting to piss me off. Bubble butt brown robes to red and yellow condiments.

how else do you expect "frequent content updates" to be frequent if they don't copy and paste. Seriously though, SWG armor was better than this crap. Why is it in this day and age that we have to look like condiments. Why can't we look like toppings instead. BS. Man the eff up BW.

Why would you call BS? I am a Software Architect for a major project at the Air Force Reserve Command. Before that USARC. I have been using Agile philosophies for about 6 years now. Mostly Agile Model Driven Development and Test Driven Development. You might think its impossible to release software every 2 weeks, but I assure you its not. With regular scrum meetings, lots of coordination and excellent testing its very possible. Some things take long for sure, but you should be able to break it up into iterations and release SOME content. Is it too hard to believe that someone writing software all their life might also enjoy gaming? As I said before, they are probably not doing that here because customers would not be satisfied with partial content updates. We want complete packages. Probably why they chose 6 weeks and staggered teams. Oh and I chose the comparison because as I said that is what I am used to where I work. never expected BW to be able to do this, but actually their sustainment team was going pretty close to 2 weeks with bug fixes for a long time before 1.2 (as stated earlier).

Pretty sure I read/heard BW right when they said that frequent content updates was a big part of the plan, in fact they said they restructured their team so that it could happen. Since that was said we got 1 new mini event. Is this what they mean by frequent updates? What do you expect or what would you be happy with. Myself, I was kind of expecting a little more than this. At my software company we release something almost every 2 weeks, sometimes its a lot, sometimes just a little, but that is what I am comparing too. I doubt they follow Agile though, so their iterations are probably a lot longer.

I wonder what we have more threads on, SWTOR is dying or Sent/Mara nerfs. Figure it out guys, they are working EXACTLY as intended. Its no different then an extremely tanky tank. This class is designed to be deadly, if it can get its hands (sabers) on you. That's the rub though, pretty vulnerable to CC. There is no lack of CC and therefore no excuse in this game. Your not supposed to 1v1 them. Your not supposed to let them roam around pillaging your back lines. Your supposed to CC them and burn them down as a team. Figure it out guys, its not hard. Teamwork trumps firepower.

omg this happens to me all the time, especially after every patch. No fail its always almost to the end of the match then kicked. No credit, another 10-15m wasted. You know in GW2 if you get disconnected in a match you can reconnect to the same match (or so I have been told, never actually been kicked from a match). Why can't you do that BW? At least give me partial credit, like save points or something. Makes me want to cook kittens.

Ed knows his stuff, been watching his video's since he played WAR. FYI on his website he has some pretty informative guides on keybinds/specs etc. He also does a couple of spots on gamebreaker. He made some good points in this one, hopefully BW has the same thoughts. F2P is going to be a game changer for this game, its still up in the air if it will be good or bad for us. L50 in general needs to be re-thought.

Give me you wallet noobs, this shiz going Free to Pay "this fall" -- BW/EA

Uh, I am pretty sure they do play the game, if you watch it they even say that the participated in the events and were asking their guilds about things. I don't think Taugrim plays much if at all anymore, but I believe he is still subscribed. They could be lying I guess, but it doesn't seem like it. I know for a fact that people that watch gamebreaker still play the game because I am one of them. I think what I took from it most was that it is time for BW to actually follow through on their promises and that they have a track record of not following through. They have promised some pretty ambitious stuff and especially regular and frequent CONTENT. They have to deliver now and it has to be quality. If we wait 4-5 more months for Makeb and its full of bugs and especially if they charge for it I am guessing it will be end subs for a lot of people.

Of course it will take some hit, who knows how much. I can tell you that from a pvp perspective GW2 has a lot more variety. Tournaments, structured pvp, WvWvW pvp with sieges. Not only that, but the customization of your character is far more than you can in this game imo. Yes the gear is normalized, but you instead customize the arrangement of gear. What runes, what weapons etc that you use determine what stats and abilities you have. What abilities you want is determined by what you want your role to be, or in a tournament, what your team role will be. As far as pve goes, the worlds are very detailed, the animations are unique and varied. Both games have stories, and while SWTOR's story is more in depth, GW2 stories actually change the game for you. TBH, I am just bored to tears with SWTOR right now, especially for pvp. Been playing the same damn WZ's forever and after you have hit 50 its diminishing returns on the alt scenario. One nice thing about GW2 is you can completely change your playstyle just by changing gear and abilities. The pre-made pug thing has never worked in any game. What happens on my server in pug land is I que up for a pug, the second we match against a premade and start getting our arse kicked (as we should, they are organized) our team starts imploding. "you guys are noobs!" all that junk, people camping nodes for defender medals etc. It makes for a lousy gaming experience. I don't know what they can do about it, but it has to be addressed. Also, for some of us, the deciding factor is the world/realm pvp option in GW2, its just better than anything we have or have seen from SWTOR.