I think you completely missed the problem that some stated here, if you have 5 targets that can be torpedoed for example like a battlecruiser, currently you have no choice but to expend 4 torpedoes first before you can use missile on the last one, if some of the targets are harder to kill with missiles (like the bridge) then you have to make sure that you kill this target first if at all possible. this is less of a problem per say since usually the rail sequence gives you a shot at the harder target (usually) but it's an unnecessary complications given you are basically forced to expend the torpedoes at the earliest convenience to allow missile usage on the last one. (preferably a shield generator). ie: yet another problem of context sensitive command that were not well thought out.

to the best of my knowledge, balmorra does not carry ashara's customization... iirc most of the one on balmorra are for companions that classes should have at that point in time when they arrive in balmorra, ashara naturally not part of it unless this changed since the last time i remember. on top of my head balmorra carries: mako, khem vall, vette, kaliyo customizations... and no other companions that i recall of.

ah ur right, i forgot the color crystal on weapons (i forgot the armor are missing 1), in which case it has 4 slots just like regular orange weapons.

that's until u find a commando that actually knows what he's doing... most of those with their 50 commando are now in the 50 bracket usually fully geared, so ur spared of us (or else we would exterminate all of the lower levels more or less like 50 mercs) the damage output of a commando or mercs on a single target is basically monstrous... and while he needs a sec or 2 for most of the real damaging abilities he does all this from 30m range. don't get me wrong, vanguard can do powerful single target damage too at short range... but if the commando know what he's doing and have line of sight on you from 30m, then you are about to taste a wall of pain with several thousands worth of damage per grav shot coming your way in a short order. in either PvP or PvE, the ability to dish out full damage at 30m range (and a hell a lot of pain that is) gives commando extra flexibility to compensate their skill's limitation...

indeed, but just to point out that as a vanguard DPS you are about as squishy as commando so ur trading the long range punch since vanguard DPS still have to close to 10m range at least to do their most effective damage while commando just rip you to pieces at 30m range with grav rounds, in exchange for having most of your ability being instant well.. TOR 'instant' anyway which is not technically real 'instant' but usable on the move i suppose is what matters here.

it's not any better than other orange, it's just an orange with the wrong color marker on it, likely an artifact of the development that was not noticed as previously mentioned. i tested it with my older orange blaster, i filled both with identical barrel, mod, enhancement, the result is identical to the t statwise. it's an orange... with wrong color marker... that's it.

actually you are no different really in terms of ur ability to withstand damage as the commando if ur a dps vanguard, i mean u got a shield generator yeah ... with a single digit activation chance so it might as well be a power generator with less tech power.

Normal orange have 3. not 4 1. primary mod (either armoring, barrel, hilt, depending on the item type) 2. mod (adds secondary stats) 3. enhancement (adds more stats especially ones related to defense or offense) and the blue blaster you find in hoth quest line is indeed a mistake, it has absolutely no difference to regular orange item. if you take an orange blaster and compare it with that blue blaster with identical mod pieces in both of them then they have identical stat, no difference whatsoever... statwise so it's just a regular modable equipment like any other orange gear. and i can't believe u vendor orange gear... what's the point of orange gear you ask? So ppl can keep items that have the visual and sound/fx they like throughout their levelling instead of being forced to replace their gear every few levels and be forced to wear things they do not like visually. Essentially TOR version of 'costume' that other MMO uses.

following the topic though, he's not actually wrong... as far as jorgan is concerned, only the commando part is inaccurate. jorgan can use the rifle, and loses none of his ability iirc. only thing he loses is the stat difference (since AC tend to have higher min/max dmg, tech etc... several other companions are similar, they can utilize 2 weapons, and loses none of their abilities between them. on top of my head, kaliyo is another companion with similar attribute, she can use both blaster pistol and blaster rifle and still utilize all her skills.

i don't know where u hear that but with my 47 vanguard which i cannot stomach anymore and refuse to use i can say that is full of BS. both class have access to a slew of AoE attack, commando have most of theirs on ranged attacks while vanguard have to go close for one of their bread and butter AoE. even fully spec to maximize the vanguard pulse cannon, you are NOT any better for area dps... in fact most of vanguards talent spec have their dps mechanism based around single target attack skills, usually either ion pulse or stockstrike.

in PvP u cannot beat biochem unless they have changed it because biochem's reusable chems and pots run on separate timer to the standard version u can't beat that, you go to PvP against him and he has 2 meds for use in a fight, you have 1...

i can understand why he would be annoyed though... as a jugg for instance u can use vibroblades to do any of ur moves, mainly because they use identical animation anyway so it's not like it's much of an extra work for the dev. this technically should hold the same for electrostaff. aside of that, there's something seriously wrong when ur companions are getting more gears out of these drops than the players themselves are...

Even Moff or any non sith personnel in general of the imperial military understood that the sith is the center of the empire, everyone else is underneath it, crafty Moff may exert significant power for example but overall he is fully aware that a sith with a high stature can quite easily remove him if he is not careful on who he cross while playing the deadly game of politic. This is a significant difference to the republic where their military exist without direct interaction from the jedi, they don't report to the jedi council, they report to the senate who may or may not always act in the same interest of the jedi, the senate are after all acting for the interest of the republic not the jedi. Contrast it with the empire where the emperor is at the top, and the dark council (all sith obviously) right below it which pretty much have complete authority to every single working of the empire including the military. There is a significant difference between the authority level that a republic military personnel can achieve (which can act on equal level to the highest jedi depending on circumstances) to that of imperial military.

an MMORPG bots are typically third party programs that allows the player to gain rewards (be it xp, items, or otherwise) without needing a user to play. like any programming language they are typically made of sets of instructions for the 'bot' to act, which is effectively no different than macros instructions. if ur third party macros allow u to gain rewards without your active participation then THAT IS a bot, and in clear breach of TOS as per the rules of conduct "Use or distribute “auto” software programs, “macro” software programs or other “cheat utility” software program or applications."

let me give u a simple rundown to see if u can spot the signs: A. it moves to predesignated point on the map without fail every time. B. it spams the same list of emotes C. it respond to aggression with the same basic action list or not at all (sometimes they just move to the next predesignated point and completely oblivious that they are being stabbed and shot). D. it does not respond to any chat or action of other players. and it does this repeatedly for several days... yeah sound TOTALLY like human. in that case i totally am the president of United States.

there is no status quo in the market, the market area is basically open to whichever side wants to open fire, so if there are more imps around the market then the republic will have to massacre them unless they choose not to fight, and vice versa hence why i am asking. there is no guard or anything stopping you from it. the NPC don't react to it either.

I am curious if this is an intended design choice, it seems Voss market have zero functional guards, so we can hit the opposing factions while they are in the mixed area (alien market district) with no repercussion. Given the lore of the place seems to contradict this completely i can only see 2 possible explanations: A. it's intended and we're supposed to massacre each other if we want to shop in the market in peace and they don't give a damn of the lore or sense. B. someone forgot to insert the proper AI code into the guards or place them for that matter to regulate the area. So, was this actually intended?

u'll have to be careful though when considering the viability of vanguard in ranged department for PvP. in warzones where pressumably u'd be among the group this works fine where u can lob ur mortar, sticky, and generally dispense some munitions into the fray and duck out if necessary while waiting for cooldown. If they focus on you, then it's not a bad trade since you are fairly robust and the rest of the team should pull their weight meanwhile. if you are engaged directly however in smaller scale or worse one vs one by any ranged classes, attempting to fight them at range as vanguard is effectively suicide unless you have a usable location advantage (showing only for throwing munitions out then ducking back to obstacle to break LOS for instance). do NOT expect to be able to fight against equivalent player with similar or equivalent level class of ranged spec beyond 10m range and to be able to win reliably because you will not.

no single abilities can kill anyone outright in warzone PvP, even assuming u fully crit with all the damage wave and had maxed out surge so that's a bit of an exaggeration but it is quite useful as it is among the few AoE ability that can be aimed after fired.

The simplest breakdown: A. vanguard crucial abilities are tailored for 10m range to point blank. B. they CAN do some damage at 30m max range but the dps is pitiful. Vanguard needs to be at 10m range at least or closer in order for most of their ammo generation mechanism or their strongest dps ability rotation to work. You are free to play vanguard as a ranged character firing from 30m just like scoundrel can keep shooting from 30m with their blaster pistol if they desire till their target is dead. however do so with full expectation that your dps is incredibly poor because that is not the range in which vanguard is built for, nothing stops u from playing it that way... but do not be surprised if you cannot function properly or if your peers seems to completely outmatch you by playing at the correct range and style. if ur a tank, expect to lose aggro and constantly taunting to force them back, if ur in PvP expect to lose against any ranged based advanced class in a shootout. If you played vanguard because you liked blaster rifles (and hate assault cannon) and the trooper's overall armor style like me that's fine, that doesn't change the fact though that the class is NOT built around ranged engagement. You have tools to do some damage at range, but you are NOT designed to function at range properly.

read ur ion cell description, it's not hard... (god i seriously want to slag meatbags that never read their codex or description and stamp a big "READ THE FARKIN MANUAL" to their meatbag's head). the ion cell gives a natural 15% bonus to shield activation chance that stacks with everything else. so assuming u have no shield rating bonus on gears and no other talent tree spec, simply activating ion cell gives u a total of 20% chance (5% base + 15% ion cell). ion cell also gives u bonus to armor rating. nothing on defense last i recall. if u use any other cell then u lose the 15% activation bonus which leaves u with 5% base shield activation chance before other things like shield rating from gears. each tree usually are tailored around their ammo cell type to some extent, using ion cell with the tactics talent specs for example is fairly oxymoron since the main ammo generation mechanism for tactics won't work without the correct ammo cell. You can try to use the shield spec to generate ur ammo instead, but that naturally mean at least 11 points (12 at least more likely) spent on shield talent in order for u to get the ammo generation working, and u'd naturally be less effective at this since in order to maximize it u'd want the late shield spec activation bonus talents.

for those who didn't know, enemies often use the fire pulse animation... if u see any soldier type enemy NPC fires some sort of fire shockwave blast around them... that's fire pulse animation which is indeed very similar to explosive surge. visually it's quite dissapointing, nothing at all like the vanguard shield spec energy blast (which has a sync kill animation tied to it), in fact most vanguard abilities overall are visually dissapointing... and i seriously think i should've just rolled a commando instead to satisfy my blaster action crave. but damage wise it's excellent, because despite it's cooldown timer it only cost a single ammo point and does decent elemental damage, that and it gives free stockstrike with the tree spec.

While i don't personally had enough problem with the quests to whine about it, they do exists... Nar Shadda merchant quest with the turret and the enemy not spawning being one of the more easily remembered one from memory. The size of the world though like in tatooine or Hoth is frankly not what i'd call an issue, the area should damn well consists of large open area... else it would do no justice to it's lore. What i have much bigger beef however is the load time on these planets. Hoth, Tatooine, Balmora to an extent, and any other planet with massive amount of space tend to load astronomically longer than other more condensed planets. It can't be helped perhaps since they are a lot bigger, but that's not acceptable when the load time jumped to stellar amount.

http://i.imgur.com/jATJV.jpg Hoth, would be so much more pleasant if it didn't take forever to load.

Not an expert, but just an observation after using vanguard up to 40 now and using commando back in beta. The dps is not gonna be on par with commando of course, now that we get that out of the way... there's a second point, you have to be at short if not melee range, or you have to bring them towards you with harpoon (which is not gonna work beyond most world PvE mobs) as strange as it may sound, vanguard have to be at very short or melee range to do the bulk of their dps and maintain it, it's theoretically possible i suppose to use the plasma cell tree and do a decent dps at range, but it's not gonna cut it really until u get closer (10m range at least) to open up other abilities into the rotation. and technically you should be familiar with it, since it's identical more or less with powertech bounty hunter.