The cynical side of me says they did this on purpose. Overload the servers, give it a few weeks or maybe even a month for people to get sick of it and then the big announcement: "We are excited to announce the new Paid Character Transfer service is now available! You can transfer any character on your account to any server you wish for a nominal fee!" Then they get to rake in extra cash to fix the problem they created in the first place. And if you think this surge of people is bad just wait. This is only from people trying out the transfers; what happens to the pops when a major content patch hits live? What happens to the pops when the expansions hit? It has to be all set up for Paid Transfers. It has to be. No sane human being would look at a server already pulling triple digits on the fleet and decide it'd be sweet to quintuple the population. No one at any kind of professional level could honestly think loading a server up until the login queues return could possibly be good for the game. Surely not.

THIS. Sweet Jeebus THIS. People on Origin servers had a choice... you could go to the new ultra max pop server or stay behind if that sort of thing wasn't for you. People already on the destination servers had no choice in the matter at all and frankly that decision was crap. This was all solely done for all the people whining about pvp/lfg queues. Well yeah I guess if you're going to spend all your time sitting on the fleet talking in general and waiting for a queue to pop then the new server pops give you funny feelings in your pants. Everyone else however is screwed. I spend the majority of my time with alts and questing/leveling. The population on the planets now is abhorrent. I literally stood in a LINE to do a quest the other night. And I've given up trying to dailies at all. Where once I could do Ilum or Blackhole in 15-20min it now takes me close to an hour per planet (Belsavis considerably longer). Seriously, dailies are mindless grindy and soul crushing enough without adding in hordes of people to fight with for spawns. Just not worth it anymore. I want an answer from Bioware about what they intend to do to facilitate every other aspect of the game that doesn't revolve around a bloody group finder as the rest of the game has been severely and negatively impacted by all of these merges. Will they be giving people on the destination servers the choice to move off if the ultra pop thing isn't for them? Will they be drastically reducing the pops for the planets (and dear god especially the daily planets)? Will they implement a command that FORCES a person to accept a group invite so we can all move through the content at a reasonable pace? What's the plan? I'm utterly baffled why Bioware chose to shove everyone on to existing healthy servers instead of merging dead servers with other dead servers. Or why only the origin people got a choice while the destination people got none at all. All I know is that I put up with the questing nightmare at release because, hey, it was release and to be expected. But if this kind of population is going to be the new status quo then forget it... time to move on to a different game. Then again maybe that's what Bioware wants; someone cancels and that's the signal to dump on 5 more servers! Yay! Then maybe eventually everyone like me will be gone too and the only people left will the the ones who enjoy doing nothing but standing around on the fleet using the group finder and Bioware can spend all of it's time and resources trying to beat Blizzard at their own game! World of Torcraft ftw!

Someone already did one for single bladed way back during the early days of release... the pic is linked a couple pages back in this thread. The hilts in that pic aren't matched to the tooltip icons though =(

Perfectly done!

As much as transfers and increasing server pops can be a good and healthy thing for the game, I beg Bioware to keep in mind that there are servers out there that already have plenty of people on it and please PLEASE don't allow transfers to these servers - free, paid or otherwise. While having a massive pop is awesome for running Flashpoints on the new Group Finder tool, let's keep in mind that the vast majority of the content in this game is quests and the vast majority of quests are not phased. Already on my server several planets are maddeningly frustrating to quest on due to population. It's bad on the end-game planets too - ever try to do dailies with 40+ on Ilum? Yeah.. thankfully I normally play during my server's "off-time" cuz if I had to deal with that every day I would seriously quit. The planets may be massive but the truth is they really can't handle a large population all attempting to do the same content. I understand there are a lot of servers out there underpopulated - maybe even most - and I'm glad you poor guys can finally get a solution. I just want Bio to acknowledge there are a couple out there that are far from under populated (some days I'd even go so far as to classify them as over populated) and to please keep us in mind too when making transfer decisions.

Just want to pop in and convey my gratitude as well for this thread. My group has always been the same 4 people and we plowed through all the FPs in normal mode without much trouble (though as a melee tank, my hatred for Kuon is endless) and then we hit HM Esseles and got utterly smeared by the bosses. Repeat attempts always ended in abject failure. We considered trying a different HM but our logic was if we were too fail to handle the "first" FP then we should definitely stay out of the "harder" ones. Now we know the HMs don't follow the same difficulty scale that their normal counterparts do. Then again, the last time we did HMs our 2 dps hadn't yet finished Corellia much less done the Ilum/Belsavis stuff (which has since been rectified) so maybe we wouldn't have so much trouble now. What I liked most about this thread is it was pure help and no troll/flame/game too easy/l2p garbage.

The grind in this game sneaks up on you when you're not looking.. While leveling you're driven by this terrific story and interesting characters and companions. Then you hit 50 and finish all of the planets. Suddenly you're looking around and noticing that the story is over, your companions have all gone silent, and the game you thought you had been playing all this time really isn't what you thought at all. You stand on the Fleet and realize that you're now expected to spend the remainder of your days grinding out dailies, or, begging for a spot in a group/raid and doing Ye Olde Gear Grind until the next expansion. And to make things worse, this gear grind suffers from the same problems as Cataclysm - if I'm going to be stuck doing this forever then I don't want to spend 2+ hours per run. Gear grinding is already a mind numbing, soul deadening, endeavour so at least do me the courtesy of letting me blow through it quickly and relatively easily. In the absence of actual content, the grind needs to be far more instant-gratification-y Or.. just.. yunno.. pump out more content and less raid crap.

I'm not actually one of those people who enjoys making a new thread on an existing topic just for laughs or whatever. I guess with the search being disabled for so long I got out of the habit of checking first, so I apologize for that. By all means use anything you found relevant in your thread.

The Jedi Knight Guardian was perhaps my most anticipated class prior to release and has, regrettably, become the biggest disappointment in this game to me. In fact, I’ve found my Guardian tank to be so un-fun that I cringe when logging him on and would ditch the character entirely if it wouldn’t mean I would be leaving my guild tankless. What prompted me to post this instead of silently cursing my choice was a low level seeing me on Carrick one night and asking me how I liked Guardian tanking, as it was something he was interested in doing. After telling him my opinion his response was that nearly everyone he had asked hated it and he was now firmly decided against trying it. So now here I am in hopes that my opinions and suggestions are glanced at by some Dev (I don’t even know if they read the Advance Class forums) and while I do not expect this post to be implemented verbatim, I do hope it can help them as much as one player’s insights can, in making this class truly great. What I want from the class? To be fun and enjoyable to play as well as providing the same level of performance as its peers (as right now I feel I put in twice the effort for half the performance of the other tanks). What I do NOT want from the class? I don’t want Guardians to be overpowered, I don’t want them to ever be considered “the best”, and I do not want them to be played ala KotOR wherein I kept Master Flurry queued up and then sat back and watched the pretty lights. With that in mind if you agree with my thoughts and suggestions great; if you don’t that’s great too. But my purpose is to voice my opinion in as constructive a manner as I can so if you feel the need to reply then please keep in the spirit of that intent. Replies of “u r dum!1!”, “l2p”, or other such nonsense please keep to yourself. Finally I will say upfront that I know nothing of PvP as I have zero interest in it, so how my suggestions impact that aspect of the game is for others to figure out. With that, let’s begin.. ROTATION “Rotation” is a generic name I use for the buttons you’re supposed to press to do your job. This game doesn’t use a rotation system (most games have started to get away from that) and instead uses a priority system. This is fine with me and I have no trouble with it; the problem I have is that Guardians do not have a priority system either: they have TWO priority systems. The first is for generating focus and is three abilities long consisting of Sundering Strike, Strike, and Combat Focus (an ability that we are incentivized to use often as evidenced by the Cyclonic Sweeps talent). Then we have the focus spending priority system consisting of Riposte, Blade Storm, Force Sweep (for the debuff), Guardian Slash, Hilt Strike, Slash, and if we’re feeling especially ambitious, Dispatch. That’s a single target fight using 10 abilities (not counting tanking cooldowns or things like interrupt) running on a dual priority system. Considering as a tank my attention is already divided in many different directions, keeping track of all that too is punishing. So let’s clean it up a bit… The first thing I would do is add a talent affect (maybe high in the tank tree if you don’t want others to get it) that reduces the cooldown of Sundering Strike by 5 seconds. This would make it spammable and would instantly allow me to remove Strike from the rotation. Now for building focus the only ability I need to keep an eye on is Combat Focus. Next, we’ll change the Dust Storm talent so that Guardian Slash also applies the debuff. With that I can now move Force Sweep to an AoE only ability as it should be and it removes one more thing from my single target rotation. There we have it; two small changes and my quality of life has dramatically improved. The only other things I would add is firstly, Riposte - for some reason every game has this type of ability and I have no idea why. I’m going to warn the Dev’s now that it will share the same fate as they all do: the second you allow macro’s in game, every tank is going to bind Riposte to all of their abilities and then take it off their bar. Just letting you know. Finally, Hilt Strike; I’m mentioning it because it’s kind of a clunky ability but I have no idea what the design intent behind it was so have no real suggestions. Pressing it once a minute during boss fights isn’t onerous but could we maybe make it more interesting somehow? Also using it makes me look stupid – the glowy laser end is the dangerous part not the carefully crafted intricate hilt. GROUP THREAT I hope by now everyone everywhere acknowledges that Guardian tank aoe threat is laughable at best. In some games this is ok – you have tanks that specialize in groups and some that excel with single target. The problem is that TOR is not a single target game. Almost all trash comes in large packs (often spread out packs.. thanks for that extra twist of the knife), there are even several boss fights where you engage in multiple bosses instead of just one, and even on the boss fights where there IS just one boss the encounter often spawns adds during the fight. So here we are, single target tanks in an AoE world. Not good. And not a problem shared by all tanks. Let’s fix it! First off let’s pump up Soresu threat modifier to +75%, a quick and easy change that will help everything. Next we need to also clean up the AoE rotation. Generating focus is fixed now but spending it is still awkward as I need to fit in so many single target abilities even while aoe’ing. Riposte and Blade Storm need to keep getting used in order to keep Blade Barricade and Blade Barrier up – I’m a tank, being squishy is not allowed. Let’s keep Riposte in there so to keep some of the complexity but then let’s allow Blade Barrier to proc off of Force Sweep and, just to make sure no sneaky tank’s try to double bubble, let’s give Blade Barrier an internal 12 sec cooldown. Next we’ll make Cyclone Slash a proper AoE instead of this cone nonsense. In other games I could position mobs how I wished with varying degrees of effort. In this game the bad guys insist on surrounding you so cones as a melee is frustrating. And even when I tab around the circle, Cyclone Slash has an annoying habit of never hitting the guys I was really trying to build threat on. So now with the threat bump to Soresu and the freed up focus from dropping Blade Storm (so more Cyclone Slashes), and making Cyclone hit groups properly I think we’re doing pretty good. In fact I don’t even think we’ll need to bump up damage any. Oh wait.. we forgot about those ranged guys. Crap. Ah yes, there I am scampering around the room hitting all these spread out wackos so by the time I get to the last one, the first one is no longer mad at me thus allowing me to repeat the cycle. Joy. I think most people would like to solve this problem with Force Pull. While part of me would enjoy another Force ability as I don’t feel this game reflects properly that Knights too are Force Users, I will have to disagree (also I’m scared that even if implemented then it would be made useless by too small a radius or a retarded 2min cooldown or something lame). There is a far more elegant and vastly more iconic solution to this: Blaster Deflection. Currently I see myself bouncing blaster bolts back but when they return to sender they never do any damage. I can easily see how this change could have dramatic repercussions in a PvP scenario so my proposal would be that the deflected shots return only a small fraction of their damage (say maybe 10%?) but then tack on an extra threat modifier to the ability to make it serve its function in PvE. In all the movies, Jedi take out their opponents quite frequently by simply deflecting the shot and letting the bad guy fall to their own attack. This was also true in KotOR and was extremely satisfying to do and I think would handily solve this particular problem with Guardian tanks. MISC Finally the leftover stuff. We need a real range ability. I don’t want to take the niche of Troopers but I do need SOMETHING. Your new Flashpoint even has an encounter that is designed to be a run-n-gun and while my Bounty Hunter tank can spam Rapid Shots (amoung many, many, others) from now till the servers melt down, my Guardian can only participate once every 30 seconds. I loathe Saber Throw from a RP perspective: I have this super ****** weapon that can cut through everything and bounce lasers off of it – why in the nine hells am I throwing it away?? But I digress. It’s in the movies; it’s iconic. So let us use it! Take out the cooldown so I can spam it when needed ala Rapid Shots. If that’s too dangerous to PvP then drop its damage and up its threat. I need a reliable ranged ability. Just one is all I ask. Force Push: One of my few abilities that lets me use the Force and it’s dumb. Dumb, dumb, dumb. I’m a melee class with nearly exclusive melee abilities and.. I’m shoving things out of melee range. Really? Why? Because it’s iconic. Force Push worked in the movies because then the guys with blasters would get their shots bounced back to themselves and effectively killed themselves. It was a dual part ability Jedi had and in this game I’m missing the second part. Hearing that Force Leap was going to get something to reset its cooldown made my heart sing. Hearing that it was being linked to Force Push made my brain bleed. How did that decision make sense to ANYONE? To allow me to leap to melee range so I can start hitting the mob I need to shove it out of melee range? Boggle. I’d like to see Force Push put to some kind of use, maybe up its range to make it a higher damaging (but cooldown restricted) alternative to the new Saber Throw? Ironically my melee Guardian shoves things away but my range filled Powertech has grapple to yank things to him. I laugh to keep from crying. Mob Crowd Control: If there is one thing in this game that will end up making me quit one day it’s this. Almost every freaking thing in here has a stun or knockback or knockup or knockdown or something. I remember doing a Heroic quest on Voss where we faced a group of five or so Silver difficulty dudes with guns. They ALL had a knockback and your AI is good enough that they used them sequentially instead of everyone blowing it at once. I was bouncing around while vainly trying to get back in to melee range for most of the fight. The room was filled with Kolto tanks and one of my guildies jibed over Vent that I was a human pinball bouncing from tank to tank. They all said it looked very unfun. And it was. Hair rippingly frustrating and unfun. Even WoW learned that extensively losing control of your character was bad for the game and worked hard to keep “stunlock” eliminated. While I don’t know if you can “stunlock” in PvP in TOR, I DO know that you gave your NPCs the ability to do it. This HAS to change. Put in some form of diminishing returns so that after, say, the third 90 mile knockback I become effectively immune to them for a while. I WANT TO PLAY MY CHARACTER. STORY Below contains extensive spoilers for both the Jedi Knight and Jedi Consular Class Stories. You have been warned. So anyways.. 3 books and a comic strip later and I think that’s all I have to say on the subject. Maybe in the end the Jedi Knight just isn’t the class for me but then again, after having that conversation with the new player and the feedback he had gotten from other people, maybe I’m not alone. Either way, thank you all for enduring this never ending wall of text and remember, if you need to reply then please keep it constructive.

Finished fight without exploits / LOS Level 50 Guardian spec'd 31/10/0 tank. I saved the companion. I went in with my wife who is a level 50 Sage spec'd for heals and this fight still took us multiple attempts. I finally decided that trying to in any way shape or form to deal with the clones is futile. The only way we were able to win was to mark the Emperor before the fight, use T7 (who had not be upgraded in quite a while) to tank until dead as some kind of cruel temporary buff to keep me alive, while she, I, and her companion (Nadia) burned the real Emperor down as quickly as possible while my wife and I interrupted the Emperor's many many spells as often as we could. The end result was a dead T7, a dead Nadia, a nearly dead wife, and I managed to end up around half health. This fight is ludicrously difficult. It didn't feel heroic or epic, just asinine. What's with the adds anyway? I'm a Jedi Knight supposedly a master of lightsaber combat, so why isn't the final epic conclusion of my story a one on one duel with the Emperor? Running around the room chasing the fool down doesn't have quite the same effect irregardless of the obscene difficulty level. Oh and by the way.. the bugged chest for doing the puzzle was a nice touch. As well as the description for the Valiant which seemed to think I was there to save it from Warren once again. Oh and let's not forget the bug trapping other people on Dromund Kaas. My wife's fleet pass was down and now just because she came to help me she is locked out of her character for 14 hours. Fan-freaking-tastic. Seriously, was this quest ever played in beta? Ever? By anyone? Between this bucket of fail and the Kira bug (yep I got that one too) and the general crappy place melee tanking is in - my pathetic aoe threat combined with every mob in the game stunning me or knocking me out or throwing me back 900 miles every 3 seconds requiring me to trudge back up in range to hopefully get one or two abilities off before the cycle starts again - I have got to say that my Jedi Knight tank has left a deeply bitter taste in my mouth and is by far the poorest experience I've had while gaming in a long time. My advice to everyone: avoid the JK at all costs. If you want a Jedi experience then head on over to Consular land -

Same problem - body type 3 and can't get through. Wife using body type 1 slips in and out just fine. Really lame. Please fix.