CG has a fairly small radius though and after some experience you'll learn when you can use it w/o breaking CC. "Normal" fights are the weakness of lethality though. It shines as a boss killer and not so much against weaker foes.

cunning always. You get more benefit from cunning than power, especially if you have a +% mainstat talent (which you generally should take). Critical % is based on two factors (Primary stats and critical rating) that are on two separate diminishing return curves. When people talk about a "soft cap" on critical, they mean critical rating. It's always helpful to get more cunning as it boosts damage directly and the critical % increase has a very weak DR curve. Cunning gives 0.20 bonus damage/point, +X% from talents, +5% from class buffs, +it's effect on critical Power is a straight 0.23 So for augments (which is really the only time you can swap cunning for power 1:1), you want cunnnig. For mods, you want to maximize cunning+power as they're fairly close in their effect and you can't trade them 1:1 b/c of how the mods are itemized.

Please. The freebie Tionese given out to every single L50 is more than enough to do all the HM FPs other than HM Lost Island. If you're skilled, leveling blues are sufficient for most roles (It's not easy, but it can be done). So why shouldn't a "not lowest tier available" PVP gear work? And PVP gear at a similar tier is already worse than PVE gear for raiding. BM gear is comparable to Rakata in it's tier.

The combat rez comes at endgame.

I've done Kaliyo all the way so far as healing. She feels like she has better AOE than the 2nd companion, but that's just impression. I swap her in and out of tank stance depending on the situation which gives a fair amount of flexibility.

Operative - a little awkard from L10-20 from a lack of skills (some heals, some melee, some ranged but not enough of any of them to make a full rotation at that level), but easy to solo throughout. With stealth and numerous CC options, you can control the fight and when/if it occurs. If a heroic can be soloed, an operative can do it. Healing specs are generally preferred at endgame. The best PVP healer, but DPS in L50 PVP is tough. Sniper - Late game, solos pretty well with little downtime and fast kills. Really easy with your healing companion. Early game can be tricky because your healing companion comes so late. Generally hard to solo heroics unless you're well overgeared. Great end game PVE class and good at PVP.

Same. I bind the heals, relics, adrenals to the bottom two rows of buttons on the Naga mouse and click people in the ops frame. Left hand to move/strafe (other than mouse turning) and activate lesser used skills. If not, you just want to have a movement key bound to a "finger" that is not used for casting skills on the move (i.e, use middle finger on E or W to move and use pointer or ring finger to cast skills on the move. Channeled skills can be assigned to your middle finger, as you can't move with them anyway)

IMO, until level 20 there is no meaningful difference between the different specs (this goes for all advanced classes). The few talent points you get do not differentiate the various builds appreciably. You can take a full DPS spec operative and have him essentially heal as good as a medic operative. For operatives, I think this L10-20 range is really awkward as that L20 skill really is key to making the class feel whole. You've got really clunky rotations before that and not enough melee or ranged attacks (or heals) to really string together a coherent rotation (kolto - kolto - kolto is pretty boring). You'll start to see a difference when you pick up the first talented skill at L20. That's the first point there is meaningful differences between the trees. By about L30-32, you basically have all your healing abilities and perform similarly to a L50 (in terms of playstyle, rotation, feel, skills, etc.).

I thought the same thing. It looks as though you're itemized incorrectly. Rule of thumb is about 350 critical rating, then go power. You really need a critical % up around 40% to keep up with energy management in a sustained fight for lethality.

The internal damage proc for snipers. You're armor debuff is not enough to make kinectic better than internal. Arsenal Merc/Gunnery commandos are the only ones to go with the kinectic one. Couple that with a DG of boundless ages.

You definitely need more than 16, and he's a completely different animal going from 4 to 5 stacks. Even a full 24 man it's insanely tough. With all the heavy AOE smashes the healing reqs are super high. You really need a large number of healing puddles to keep up with his raid-wide dps.

That's pretty much it. Additionally, PVP is about bursting a ~25k health target down as fast as possible. Sustained DPS is much more important for PVE as boss fights can go 5+ minutes.

Generally go straight up the tree to get to the new powers earlier. Within a teir, pick the most useful one first.

The storylines and voice acting are very good, but how many times do you watch the same movie over and over? Even the best movies out there aren't all that interesting to watch back to back, or multiple times a month, or dozens of times a year. Now cut it down to about 5 minutes of dailogue/acting and how many times can you watch it before getting bored? I remember the one BT I did with a group, they watched every line of dialogue. Fine, np. I get it, as it was their first time(?). I'd done it probably a dozen times by then so I wasn't thrilled to watch it, but understood the team wanting to do it. Then we did it again immediately after with the exact same 4 people, and they still watched every line of dialogue and choose all the same responses....AAAAHHH!!!

The datacrons that match your primary stat are the most useful to you. There is also a secondary "primary" stat that will benefit you as well, but to a less extent than your primary. You can get the "somewhat" useful ones below if you want, but they are a lesser priority. (There are some good descriptions of what each of these actually benefit elsewhere.) Essentially, Cunning - Agent/smuggler, somewhat useful for troopers/BH Aim - Trooper/BH, somewhat useful for agents/smugglers Strength - Knights/Warriors, somewhat useful for assasins/shadows and sorcs/sages Willpower - Inquisitors/Consulars, somewhat useful for Knights/Warriors. Presense - useful for you when you use your companion. Endurance - useful for all classes

Hybrid builds (pretty much all of them regardless of class) are only viable for PVP. And then only a few specific ones. They are not PVE builds. If you want to do endgame PVE, you need to specialize.

The best medpac is the exotech, but there is no point reverse engineering them. Just buy the schematic and build away. They are not resuable though so it can get expensive to keep burning through them. However, as a biochem you can craft the rakata reusables. These are almost identical to the exotech, and are vastly cheaper. Build 1 and you're done. This is the real benefit to biochem as you can save huge sums of credits by not needing to use the consumable versions. Same with stims, use the rakata versions and save yourself all the credit/sresources.

Pretty much. If it weren't for the BH comms and the daily/weeklies, the hard mode flashpoints would be obsolete. That is reason just about everyone does them. The freebie gear is better than most of what drops in them, and story mode operations are much more effective for getting gear and not any harder.

For single target, yes. You should pair it with a DG boundless ages as well. Those will provide the best single target DPS gains, assuming you're decent about using the on-demand DG boundless ages on cooldown. HOWEVER, since the damage procs are limited to 1 per X time, they do not become any better the more AOE skills you use/foes you hit. In those situations, power ones become proportionally better as each hit's damage is increased.

+1 The DR on critical chance gained from main stat is barely worth worrying about. mmo-mechanics has the plots showing the DR curves if you want to look it up yourself. Get main stat augments. They're better, especially if you have the +9% mainstat talent.

Ok, talking semantics. (we seem to like that ) Typically around 350 critical rating, the value gained by adding an additional point to critical rating is less than gained by putting points into other stats. This is what I mean when I refer to a soft cap. You still gain something from additional points in a stat, but others are (likely) better.

Saying crit chance to X% is what you should get doesn't work because critical chance is based two different stats with differing return formulas. Your critical chance gain from mainstat is more or less constant. Critical chance from critical rating has a stronger dependence on the total amount and has a more significant diminishing return. This part of the formula does have a soft cap around 350 critical rating. As you get better gear, your crit chance will naturally increase as you have more cunning. For lethality (sniper) builds, I find anything under 35% critical chance to be really hard on energy regen. I currently sit around 38.5% buffed and wouldn't mind having a little more.

Hate to tell you this, but you can do the HM flashpoints (other than LI) the moment you turn L50 in the free recruit gear. As of today, you get free tionese which is plenty. It's even enough to do the story mode operations (EV, KP, and EC with EV being the easiest). Just watch some tutorial videos first so you know the fights. The relics are about the only gear worth buying with daily comms. The daily comms modifiications are garbage (especially for time vs. reward with the new tionese freebies or even the old recruit freebies).

After you get up past ~75% critical bonus damage (IIRC is about 250 surge rating), the diminishing returns for surge start to really kick in. At this point, you gain relatively little by getting more surge. Alacrity is a fine stat to get at this point (you have no other options that are helpful to a healer). The only downside is that operative healers tend not to use a huge amount of channeled skills (compared to say a sorc healer). If you look around at places like mmo-mechanics.com you can find the exact formulas and see the fall off in benefti of surge rating.

They are pretty good for their level. If you already have 1000 warzone comms, I'd definitely think about getting them as you should spend the comms on somehting if you PVP often. The next set of PVP gear doesn't come til L40 (IIRC), so there is a large gap where there is little to buy (other than ranked comms).