Also it keeps you from just farming gold and then buying everything with money. For PvP in particular it would rub a lot of players the wrong way if you could just buy your way to victory. And it would wreak havoc on the game's economy if you could buy endgame gear with credits. I'd love to see some kind of tradeup system for the planetary commendations, though. Hell, at one point I would have loved to be able to trade *down* even at 1:1 -- I had finished every non-heroic quest on Voss and I was one commendation short of buying a new orange item. I farmed mobs for about half an hour but didn't get a single commendation drop, then gave up and just bought some mods...

Unless you're actually running out of RAM, adding more won't help very much. You can check peak usage for an application in Task Manager while it's running, as well as physical memory usage for the system. The game uses a 32-bit executable, so it tops out around 2GB of memory usage. Technically they can use up to 3GB in 32-bit mode, but not on WinXP at default settings, so to be safe most games cap their memory allocation at 2GB. In short, no, I don't think it will help with runtime performance. It may help loading slightly, if the OS can cache more of the game's files in memory.

Yeah, definitely not understanding the issue in solo play. Make sure Doc is in his 'Med Watch' stance. You can even throw Guard on him if you want even more threat reduction. Almost anything you've actually hit will stay on you. If you're using a DPSy companion, or Doc in Blaster Stance, turn off any of their high-threat or AOE abilities, and they should just focus on and burn down one mob at a time. Against a group of regular/weak enemies I usually engage by leaping in, then using a (free) Force Sweep, then throw a Cyclone Strike if I can hit at least 4 enemies. Against a whole group of weaks you can even pop Combat Focus and then throw a few more Cyclone Strikes and nearly kill the whole group. Against a strong with some weaks/normals I'll Saber Throw at the strong, then leap to a normal and start wailing on him until he's down, which is usually just a few hits between some combination of Opportune Strike, Master Strike, Blade Storm, Hilt Strike, and Pommel Strike. If the other normal went for my companion, I can either Taunt him back or just run over and hit him a couple times to get aggro back. I'm specced pretty much full Defense, but a hybrid Defense/Vig build should be fine too.

Light armor, unfortunately, so not optimal for a Guardian. Bracers and belts ARE out there, but they are rare world drops, and so they are expensive to buy on the GTN. 1.2 should help, since crafters will be able to learn and make a lot more orange patterns.

Also check out the JK and/or Sentinel forum for advice. The melee classes are definitely more gear-dependent and have a steeper learning curve than the ranged ones. Trooper/BH are VERY straightforward by comparison, plus they get a healer right off the bat...

Right now they don't have this. Hopefully they will add this in the future, but at least you only have to do it once per character...

They HAVE said they may do mouseover targeting in the future, but it's not in 1.2. (This is very helpful for healing in large groups.) Macro functionality will probably always be limited compared to a game like World of Warcraft.

Finally got to this on my Guardian the other day. I had been forewarned about having to use T7, so I spent some cash and commendations on Voss and Corellia (and doing some crafting) to get him geared reasonably. I don't know if they nerfed it since the start of this thread, but the trash is very doable. You have to use stuns liberally against the big droids and the elite Guards. I could see Sentinels having more difficulty, but if you used T7 as a tank it should work. It's obviously going to depend on your level and gear, though. And if your T7 is in terrible shape gear-wise it's going to be very difficult. It took me a few tries to figure out that one of his abilities is a one-shot kill. Not having a combat log made it hard to figure out what was causing me to instantly die and get blown across the room. It would be good if it was WAY more obvious when he was doing this, as missing that interrupt results in immediate death. (In that "other" MMO, they would have the mob emote, or do some very obvious glowy windup animation or something.) It's also sort of weird/buggy that Force Sweep doesn't work on the illusions when T7's AOE energy blast does. Took me a couple attempts to figure that out too. Once I figured out what was actually going on, it was very doable (but challenging). It's just NOT really obvious what is happening at first.

I don't think you can right now... this may be fixed in 1.2, though.

Yes, you will be gimped as a Sentinel if you only use one saber (or as a shadow if you don't use a saber staff). Many special attacks will do less damage or be unavailable. If you want a single saber Jedi DPS you should be a Guardian (melee focus) or Sage (ranged/force powers focus).

Try the Customer Support forum. They also have some stick posts with known issues. Or you can use the in-game feature, as described above.

It's buried somewhere in your forum profile settings. For some reason they don't ask you at signup and default everyone to GMT.

You can't 'outlevel' your class missions. But if you don't care about getting companions (maybe you only want to do pvp), you could just not do them once you have your ship. If you are under-level for where you should be, people seem to have covered that well. If you're in the right level range but still getting your butt kicked, try the guide in my sig.

Try a site like Torhead that lets you search and sort equipment. If it's an 'orange' (moddable) piece of equipment, yes. If not, no. If there is a crafting pattern for it, yes. They are adding more craftable orange items in the upcoming 1.2 update.

I'm not so sure you understand what "optional" means. It's different from "has no impact on your combat effectiveness". It's also more difficult to play if you don't spend your skill tree points, or equip a weapon, or choose an advanced class, or upgrade your abilities. But you don't have to do those, either. Complaining that the single-player content is tuned to be played with a companion is like complaining that the single-player content is tuned with the expectation that you choose an advanced class. You're welcome to your opinion, but demanding that Bioware rewrite their game because you'd prefer it to be different is kind of... silly. Also, some people consider it a badge of honor to do things that make games harder. e.g., making it all the way to the final boss of the NES Legend of Zelda without picking up a sword.

That. Healer specializations get those. Some DPS specs have them, but not with a short enough cooldown to keep something locked down indefinitely. The tradeoff is you get a big pile of single-target control abilities.

It's possible they popped their 'break CC' ability very quickly after you cast Stasis, and with server latency it looked like they never got frozen on your end.

With the Companion system, any character can solo reasonably well, even a tank. A tank with a healing companion can take on Champion-class mobs that other characters couldn't possibly kill solo. This is probably the *strongest* setup, but it can be challenging, since you don't have any true CC and you have to tank multiple mobs a lot. Ranged DPS+Heal is probably the *easiest* role to play, since it's more forgiving of mistakes (assuming you're using a companion to tank). Trooper/BH in particular also get some ridiculous AOE attacks (on cooldowns) that let you tear through groups of weaker enemies.

Additionally, systems where you HAVE to deal with a player economy to get 'the best' stuff can have their own problems. I think the biggest factor is speed of leveling early on. Not that I'm complaining, but you go from 10-30 pretty fast, probably gaining a level every couple hours at most. Green gear or mods of your level become obsolete pretty quickly, blues don't fare much better, and purples are usually too expensive unless you're playing an alt with a high-level character to feed you money from dailies. With the changes in 1.2 you may see more of a market for low-level gear, if more people start playing alts to unlock stuff in the Legacy system.

Yes, you can only bind abilities to quickslots (so far), and the quickslots must be visible to have the binds work. The one that annoys me is that if you have your companion's bar expanded, any quickslots covered up by their full skill bar ALSO don't work. That's almost gotten me killed a couple times.

You should level faster playing together. Experience from kills is split between you, but you also get a bonus for being in a group. I'm not sure of the exact amount, but it's probably something like 10-25% more compared to solo kills. That makes up some of the difference, plus you'll probably chew through groups of enemies more than twice as fast overall. Also, with a good group setup you can handle Heroic 2+ quests (and maybe some Heroic 4s), which give great rewards and lots of XP. You can either play through the class quests together if you want to see them both, or split up to do the instanced parts solo. Generally they structure the class quests so they work out of the same hubs at about the same time -- usually there will be some big base or common area (cave, temple, etc.) that has an instance for each class close by.

Some drop in Flashpoints. There are also quite a few you can buy with Commendations once you get off the starter worlds. Weapons cost 14 commendations. I think there are also some BOE ones that drop randomly in the world, which you can probably buy on the GTN for a large sum. Try a site like Torhead that has an item search feature. Also, if you didn't realize it, you can just keep upgrading the initial one forever with new crystals, hilts, mods, and enhancements. There's no need to replace it unless you find one that you think looks better.

Messed around with this, but wasn't able to reproduce anything wonky. Animations look funky sometimes, especially if you mix in a Riposte, but everything seems to go off fine. I *have* seen some weird behavior around an NPC doing a KB/stun/knockdown as you're firing an ability with an animation (like Force Sweep), but without a combat log it's hard to tell in the heat of battle if the damage was actually applied or not.

You can. These values depend entirely on the 'rating' of the barrel/armoring/hilt. So if your current barrel has a rating of 100, a barrel with a rating of 105 is an upgrade in DPS, and 110 would be a bigger upgrade. 95 would be a downgrade. It doesn't display the exact min/max damage or armor values on a 'raw' mod, because that depends on what kind of weapon or armor you install it in. e.g. the same rating armoring in a piece of light armor will have fewer armor points than in heavy armor.

It doesn't have anything to do with faction stuff (IMO). It's more so they don't have to worry about balance between classes where you get a companion of the 'same' class (such as Trooper) and ones that don't.