I had two 55s and one on Makeb. Now I've got 8 55s. I've bought a few slots and rolled for the other ACs but I don't know if I'll grind anything else up besides my Operative. I've been having more fun tinkering with skill trees and comps for all my 55s.

You know that BH is my favorite character in the game. The dialogue cracks me up and whether LS or DS, BH consistently says the things I WOULD say in the same situation (granted Im not some weapons ****** so I'd get killed in my first fight but w/e). But I FREAKING HATE BH/Trooper playstyle. It has been such a struggle to move through the story. Don't pick a main that you don't like playing as. If you enjoy whatever you are going to switch to that is fine but if you don't enjoy it, it won't be worth it. LS Jugg for me. Love the playstyle. Love the story. If only they'd let me take one of those through BH Story, I'd be a happy man lol

Umm, well I don't know about all that but there are things that happen in JK that you will want to see and playing through it is a lot more fun than reading about it on Wikipedia. Whether some of the stuff that happens in JK will be relevant to future expansions/flashpoints/operations remains to be seen I suppose but it is fairly big for shedding light on how the Empire functions and answers a bunch of questions that were floating around after the end of the two KOTOR games.

Started a new BH Tuesday morning, am on Belsavis right now. Leveling has gone back and forth from being slightly above to just right. Planets with larger level ranges will get the mobs to catch up to your level. Haven't had gear issues that some are posting about but I have a lot of unlocks (Unity, all buffs, and all heroic moment cooldown boosts) so I just cycle my defensive cooldowns on tougher mobs. Did take a Sniper to cap in a few hours but she was already on Quesh and geared appropriately so my mid 30s was good enough to get me to Makeb.

They both had their highs and lows (LS Jugg and DS Mara for me). If you enjoyed the SW story as much as I did, you'll probably definitely want to try both paths. LS Jugg is my main, definitely my favorite character and story. DS had some cool highlights though.

This won't be a problem for you much longer though in general I wouldn't worry about taking a medium armor piece as you are leveling if the strength bonus is better. Your defensive buffs and healer comp will keep you protected well enough in solo content that you can focus on damage output. Obviously once you get to endgame you'll want to only be in heavy armor but you won't have to worry about that for awhile

In general you want to get into moddable gear. Orange gear is moddable as is some purple gear. This comes from quests/drops, crafting, and buying from the Cartel Market. Assuming you are F2P, you will probably want to hunt down some orange gear via quests and crafting. The game is fairly liberal about giving you weapons (ie Jedi/Sith get orange lightsabers to start, Bounty Hunter gets an Orange Blaster, other classes get an Orange weapon at the end of tutorial planet). For more oranges, you can use the Planetary Com Equipment Vendors. This is an easy way IE to get an orange shield or power generator, which you may have trouble finding otherwise. Some of the small pieces: belts, bracers, etc. are quite difficult to come across before endgame without just buying a set or oranges off the Cartel Market, but these are also not essential to leveling up. As long as you have your chest piece and some other major pieces moddable, you can keep boosting them up. You can buy green armorings on each planet with credits. This is a decent way to give yourself a gear boost on older pieces of gear and a fresh set of mods can make a HUGE difference. Enhancements and Mods are much cheaper than Armorings when you spend coms so a good trick is to buy green armorings and save your coms for the cheaper enhancements/mods so you can have everything maxed instead of just a couple pieces. I wouldn't bother getting caught up in the minutae of efficient statting as you are leveling. As long as you're not throwing tank mods onto your DPS/soloing gear, you can't mess it up that bad. Once you get to 55 and start gearing, then you can deal with making sure your secondary stats (power, crit, alacrity, etc.) are set properly. Make sure to do the Bonus Series quests on each planet. If you are F2P you will need the added XP rewards and a lot of times the Bonus Series quests will give you a very good piece of gear at the end of the quest chain. A lot of planets have an orange set where like a heroic will give you the boots and the bonus will give you the chest and the equipment commendation vendor will give you some other part. It is different from planet to planet but this is just an example of a way you can round up oranges that match with each other.

Liberal use of heroic moment and defensive buffs. Periodically buy green mods. Use your healer. Depends on what class you play I suppose but I've had few problems so far. Unity gets me through almost all the hard fights and keeping your weapon up keeps your DPS plenty high. Once you hit 47 and can get the Makeb gear boost, you will ZOOM. Arguably you don't need the credits for 154 mods right away thanks to gear boost though I still bought them for my sniper. One thing that kills it is I have very little interest in doing another gear grind. My SW has 154/163 and that is enough for me.

You need 90 to fully armor/weapon up on mods at 50. Keep that number in mind. BTW that is just for your armor/hilt/barrel not mods and enhancements, which you need another 50 for or something like that. But with the 100 comm cap, you won't be able to go full 140 at level 50 regardless. I usually start stockpiling at the beginning of Act III and burn off spare comms on Voss/Corellia gear (strip mods and give to comps if needed) so that I'm close to cap at 50. 98 comms means full armor and fully upgraded mainhand (minus color crystal but those are easily affordable on GTN or if you have a cartel crystal) Comms have good drop rate on Makeb so you should be able to get a lot of your mods and enhancement as you do 51-55. Gear your comp on GTN (easy with money made on Makeb) and you're all set for Oricon.

SWTOR isn't to picky about running as long as you don't mind not having maxed visuals. I game on a stock 2012 Mac Mini (core i5, 4 GB RAM, HD 4000 IGP) and I can still easily push 1080p resolution. Not much in the way of visual flair though. Alas.

If you're interested in computer gaming, it'll be good to learn about hardware: know what you got in your system and know the different specs that way you can glance at sys reqs and know if your system can run it. There's tons of computer buying guides on the net (just do a google search) though these get outdated fast, especially if they're using specific pieces of hardware as examples. Anyway, here is one such page that kind of breaks down the different components in a computer http://www.babble.com/dad/parenting-guide-family-home-computer-how-to-buy/parenting-guide-family-home-computer-specs-components/ Good news about running TOR is that just about any old thing will run it, as long as you don't care to much about how good the graphics look. If you are going to buy a prebuilt system (my guess since you don't know much about computers) look for something that has 4 GB of RAM. Most computers come with this standard these days so if it's got less then that, it's probably really low end and will have issues elsewhere (besides the RAM). I'd recommend an Intel Core i3 at a minimum. It's a sharper processor than the game needs, but if you're buying a new system, anything less than an i3 may have issues elsewhere (like with the RAM) particularly some of the questionable celeron and AMD budget processors they toss in the cheapest computers. As long as you get a Core CPU (i3, i5, i7 - higher number means "better" processor broadly) you'll have a reliable Intel HD integrated video chip (like the HD 4000) which is sophisticated enough to run TOR on basic settings. Very broadly, this would be an adequate baseline system http://www.dell.com/au/p/inspiron-660/pd?oc=w210911au&model_id=inspiron-660 But this is just the bare minimum to run the game. If you want to get something more sophisticated, you'll be looking at spending extra money on a dedicated video card. The good news is TOR doesn't have huge system requirements so if you want to buy a machine that can make it look pretty, you won't be out an arm and a leg.

Now I have been putting mods onto adaptive armor and my weapons to keep them leveled and this seems to work out great. But do base items all have the same stats? ie I am still using my first lightsaber just with better mods. Will I eventually come across lightsabers that have better raw stats or am I all set and will just keep upgrading my original lightsaber? For my companion Qyzen I just vendored some trash green techblade and put in better mods. It seems like just always taking commendations is the best thing to do for quest rewards but maybe I just don't know what I'm doing?