This. If they can release *something* before the end of the year, I think it would be a big morale booster & a strong indicator that content will be coming out at an improved cadence. Or if they announce something substantive *and actually deliver* before the end of February. If we don't see anything until "the end of February" (i.e. delayed to late March, April, or May), it will seem like same-old-Bioware, and I worry/suspect that a lot of people will leave (or be gone) to play other games until the next major update.

Speaking just about snipers, I can tell you that all of their abilities are *highly* useful in PvP Sure, even in NiM raids, there are several abilities I never touch (like shatter shot). But in PvP, they are all situationally vital. Shattershot timed with a ally's elctro net is a powerful ability for burning down healers. I was reading another post today about how mara's and sins are OP, but a 1 v 1, (in general) a good sniper can methodically take apart a decent mara or sin because of their wide array of dcds, knockbacks, roots, & movement abilities. The variety of abilities across the board on classes, IMHO, makes it so that every class is at a disadvantage against *at least* one other class. Speaking just from my experience as a sniper & a sorc, I suspect that *most* abilities people ignore as worthless in PvE, are in fact quite useful (if not outright vital) in PvP. So .. as several others have said. If you *never* use an ability, just take it off your bars. Just because you find it useless, that doesn't mean it that it actually is, or that it should be pruned.

IMHO, the combat in this game is outstanding. PvP & Raids are the only thing that keep me subbed. If they boiled the combat system down to some simple minded 3-5 abilities, that would be the nail in the coffin for me. If I wanted to play ESO's combat, I would play ESO.

I've been getting Legendary Amber some of the time on the un-lockable grade 11 missions that come from the one-use tokens. I've gotten 3 Amber randomly from regular missions & deconstruction. I've gotten 10 Amber from the one-use token-unlock Missions. NB: I've run a *lot* of them, but nowhere near as many as regular repeatable missions. So ... it *seems* like they are the "best" way to get Amber. Just my observation from my personal crafting endeavors so far. Also, congrats on unlocking a repeatable. I'm still stuck in RE-purple-purgatory =(

That would be fine. But, I kinda like that my sniper can pull an electrified blade from his boot and chuck it 10ft. Seems like a ****** move.

I agree with the point you're making here. However, running away is often counterproductive in wz's. Sorcs/Sages lack the ability to stand and deliver (as you pointed out). But IMHO, having a beefy DCD on a 3 min timer would not be broken, and would do 2 things: 1) it would let sorcs defending a node do more than bubble for run away 2) it would even the playing field a *little* bit against maras and operatives, which are incredibly sticky and burst very hard. Bubbling and teleporting away might allow one to survive, but they only delay the (often) inevitable.

Hmm. Good to know. Out of curiosity, are any of you still leaning toward Established Foothold for the other benefits +3% dmg., or are you leaning toward another set. I'm quite torn, myself.

It's not he launcher. It's your internet connection.

But ... you tested w/ corrosive dart. So you're bonus dmg. for any global window in which it ticks will be divded by the DoT's timer. +70 dmg. per tick doesn't seem necessarily off, given your 6 empty shells, but ... What was your CD dmg. listed as on your bar? What was your spec/the timer for the DoT? Also, does anyone know, if you Imperial Prep into an immediate 2nd Entrench, does the 5 stack stay up long enough to allow for an secondary full 20 sec window at +15%?

Madness/Balance self-heals doesn't really come together until you have all your abilities & utilities. Also, a sage's best defensive cool downs are its stuns (sadly). So, when pulling a mob w/ multiple gold, you should always be whirlwinding one of them to remove them from the fight. And remember to burn "up." Trash first, then silver, then gold, then champs. If you find yourself running away ... that's a correct move. Sage's are built to "kite" (i.e. dps while running away) in PvP. Meaning, you will never be able to just stand & deliver against solo PvE content the way some other classes (or companions XD) are able to. Eventually, you'll get you teleport ability, which you should drop before difficult combat, which will let you re-establish range if things go sideways. As the more "thoughtful" Jedi class, you *actually* do need (sometimes) to prepare before entering combat --- for better or worse. Also, if you leave Balance behind while leveling, be sure to give it a look at max level. Especially if you decide to step into raids with it. The optimal rotation for Balance (barring tactical changes) is a short, set rotation, with an inbuilt timer for dot refresh on your FiB's cooldown. This makes it IMHO, a much easier spec to use (as opposed to TK's priority rotation, which requires more looking at abilities if you don't know them cold) when first attempting to learn optimal rotations for harder endgame content. Good luck, happy Sage-ing

Last week, my relatively small guild had no problem hitting conquest. On my main toon, I leveled, casually worked on crafting as I went & cleared 5 weeklies (Onderon Dailies, PvP regs, GSF, Vet FP's, & MM FP's). And I think I had just under 500k conquest points. A handful of active players can hit the small guild goals very easily. That being said, I'm sorry that you're finding conquest difficult. In your OP you mentioned your "family" guild. How many people are actually in your guild? And how many active players? One of my alts is in a guild with 8 people, and we casually hit the small CQ goal w/ no real focus on CQ. I would humbly submit, that if you're not reaching the small goal, maybe you have unreal expectations about how many people make a "guild," and how many active players should reasonably be playing. It seems to only take 4-5 very active players, or 8-15 active but casual players. I would consider both of those group sizes "small" guilds. Do you run with any friends that might be willing to put some active alts in your guild to help you out? I imagine it would only take 2-4 more active players in your guild to start hitting the small conquest goal.

Yeah. I tried half-a-dozen "fixes" from the EA support site. No Dice. Then I changed to SSN & BitRaider disable: true, and deleted BitRaider. Reinstall of assets took 2.5 hours. But ... launcher works fine now.

I can't patch at all. It just keeps saying "Unspecified Error."

I heartily agree with you in general. But under the auspices of the new Keeper, Jadus is Imperial Intelligence's #1 most wanted---wanted dead or dead. To honor vanilla agent story choices, Jadus is a mandatory kill on sight for any of us Agents that love the Empire and hate the Sith (especially ones like Jadus that are completely insane & attempted to murder us).

Interesting. That sounds like a really fun way to play the Agent. I'm taking a rather different approach, which I didn't initially expect to be anything more than head canon, but is turning out quite nicely. That is, after Jadus & Vitiate/Valkorian, my Agent loves the Empire but hates the Sith (yeah, Sith want you to believe they're one and the same) and is determined to wipe out the Sith Order & free the Empire that he loves. However, the Republic/Jedi/Red-Tape-Senate "clearly" isn't up to the job. So, pretending to be totally loyal to the Empire, my agent has bided his time, and was rewarded with the opportunity to take out 2 Dark Council members under the auspice of "following" Acina's orders. Now Acina wants me to be her Keeper? Great. Imperial Intelligence is back baby, and now I've got the all clear to kill council members at my own discretion when/if they don't "follow orders"?. Should be able to wipe out the Sith, take control of the Empire, and finally sweep the Republic into the dustbin of history. What could go wrong? XD I can't help but wonder if we're chosing a lot the same options, except that I'm also intent on destroying the Republic. Cheers!

I find some of your threads overly sunny & optimistic, Zion. But I think you've hit the nail on the head here. Group content requires groups. Getting BiS armor/mods/enhancements is only going to take a few weeks of regular playing. And building the perfect gear set will take months, as it does in any MMO. And people are angry about all of these things. I, too, am unhappy with the state of crafting. But the gearing system is probably the fastest stat increase I've ever seen in an MMO. Some people *already* have BiS modular pieces. And (some of) the tacticals are cool & *worth* getting. The set bonuses are interesting. And while amplifiers are sort of nausea inducing when I think about the credit cost, I must admit. The prospect of getting 26.4% DoT dmg reduction on my PvP armor set? Delicious. Even if it takes me a year, it's worth working toward. I don't understand why people are upset about having to play the game to get cool stuff, and keep calling it a "grind." Isn't everyone here planning to play the game anyway?

In what other MMO is it even *possible* to get (near) BiS armor w/in a few days/weeks of a major expansion? From my perspective, it looks like a lot of people are so infected with the need for instant gratification, that having to actually play the game for a few weeks or months (or days for the crazy focused) now induces rage. Take a step back man. It used to take *months* to get BiS gear *AND* require running NiM ops. Do you really think that system was better? Playing exactly what I wanted to over the past two days, I picked up 278 gear and my first tactical (the one I most wanted). Gearing has never been faster or easier. If you don't enjoy playing the game, getting gear faster isn't going to help w/ rage or an empty life. And if you do enjoy playing the game, then just play the game. Admittedly, picking up the set bonuses I want is going to take a while. So what? I love playing this game, so I'll get them sooner or later. But if I don't *need* them for NiM Dxun, which my raid team will be starting next week, then what's the problem? It's not like the gear is a preventing anyone from playing what they want. Heaven forbid there's actually cool things that take a while to get. Sheesh.

To be 100% fair in your listing, there *is* a world boss on Mek-Sha. The Dread Pirate, 38 mil hp. Otherwise, I agree.

I keep wondering if the devs intended for crafting to take a year (years?) to level up. I mean ... *eventually* dedicated players could work through this crafting system. But .... isn't the whole business model for this game built around the expectation that people are going to unsub during the long, long content droughts? If I had any real optimism left for the development of this game, the crafting system might lead me to imagine a new, increased cadence of content over the next year(s), in which case, if the current gear tiers were meant to last a *long* time, I could see some kind of logic behind the current system (though still a bad decision). But ... I have no optimism left. Add it to the endless pile of incomprehensible, bad design decisions, I guess. I can never wrap my head around these design choices that are just *not* fun to play. When stuff like this makes it through internal development & PTS, it's really hard to believe that the people making decisions play this game (or any other MMO for that matter). And if they don't .... ffs, hire someone who does and give them the authority to prevent the dev team from constantly shooting themselves in the foot.

Respectfully, I couldn't disagree with you more. I managed to find all 4 datacrons w/out using a guide (first time ever), and got all of them w/in 10-30 minutes each. They required some concerted thinking, observation, and testing, but are all quite reachable. Some of the original datacrons are built around a much higher number of platforming jumps, where failing any of them requires a restart from the beginning. *and* it's legacy wide. You only have to get it once. Makeb datacrons on every toon .... that was *not* fun. Anyway. I think these new datacrons were just about perfect. Good luck! You'll get 'em.

There are issues as many people have noted already on the forum. That being said ... I just wanted to congratulate the devs on making two absolutely fantastic planets. They are beatiufl, detailed, look totally unique, and incorporate the best use of vertical geography of any planet in the game. Really great work on the new planet design.

Thank you for finally acknowledging this issue and for looking into the matter. If would be really nice to have this functionality back, but if it can't be fixed, it can't be fixed. Either way, it really makes an impression when issues like this don't even get acknowledged for over a year. And it really makes an impression when they do get acknowledged. So, thank you very much!

This is some absurdly bad intel. Snipers/Gunslingers have defensive cooldowns for days (literally the most of any class in the game, 5 before talents, plus refresh for 9 effective when needed), as well as multiple roots, multiple slows, three potential stuns (1 in engineering being on a 15 sec cooldown), and multiple knockbacks. They're the only class that can execute four consecutive knockbacks (in marksman) in six effective global cooldown windows, 4 actual ability activations. They're more mobile than sages/sorcs, better at kiting (as any huttball match will illustrate), but also able to remain stationary and defend a node with the potential for 40 consecutive seconds of immunity to interrupt/knockback with 60% aoe damage reduction. All of that to say, sniper/gunslingers and mercs/commandos are both great choices for ranged dps. Mercs only have a couple of defensive cooldowns, but they're very powerful and can be linked to powerful burst self-healing. Snipers don't have the burst healing capabilities, but, w/ several "mandatory" talents, enjoy a baseline 30-35% damage reduction & 1%/3 sec heal, and a 10% heal with their roll. Being able to do either (the self-healing or the mitigation/slow healing) and still dps effectively in pvp requires learning the class. Using sniper cooldowns effectively probably requires a greater working knowledge of the other classes in game, so for that reason, merc is (IMHO) a little easier to be great with in pvp. Both are significantly more tank-like than sorcs/sages. For PvE, as others have said, any class is fine. If you know you're rotation or ability priority and are comfortable with the class, anything is fine. For Master Mode operations, some classes/specs will be much harder in the current meta. Sorcs and Mercs are at the bottom of the dps chart in their burst specs. Their dot specs are more viable, and they all bring different & good utility to any raid group. Unless NiM raiding is your chief concern, better to just play whatever you want. They're all fun in their own way. Hope you have fun with the class stories =D

I'm sure most of these ideas are problematic in terms of balancing ... but I think they would be cool XD Force Armor & Static Barrier seem like an ability that could be changed in interesting ways. Though there are already the talents that modify it, in the spirit of making "tactical" changes: Perhaps force armor becomes a single toggle (like guard) that can only be placed on ourselves, preventing the "bubbling" of other characters, while providing a flat, permanent damage reduction, rather than full absorption up to the damage threshold. In raids, as a dps sage, my force armor is useless if there is another sage healing. Having a flat damage reduction for myself would be a powerful tactical modification of force armor. I also think I would use something like this in PvP, since sage's excel at dealing with low damage over time, but struggle to go toe-to-toe with more directly resilient classes. More/some usage of light saber abilities are also something I would enjoy on my sage and sorc. Perhaps a tactical item could turn saber slash into a saber throw? Coupled with the top tier root talent, this would be an incredibly strong tactical option for PvP, and would make that talent actually useful. Or, perhaps disturbance could be changed into a TK powered saber strike that is melee ranged (4m) but does more damage, or does less damage but w/ a decent knockback (5m?) A few other random ideas: TK throw/Force Lightning could be modified to siphon a % of dmg to the caster but deal a bit less damage, or become 100% siphon abilities that deal significantly less damage. Groundquake could be modified to root enemies while filling their resolve bar equal to the length of the rooting, allowing maybe 12 seconds of consecutive rooting at most (since it wouldn't actually stun). Sage/sorc defensive cooldowns don't really allow for going toe-to-toe in PvP. It would be really nice if we had something on a 3 min cooldown that allowed us to fight on a node and temporarily stop kiting. Ever since DoTs become uncleansable, the "cleanse" ability has been useless outside of raid boss mechanics. The sage/sorc cleanse could be a *great* ability to heavily modify with tactical items. It seems like a prime candidate to become a dcd by increasing the ability cooldown relative to the power of the defensive boost it provides. I think sages could benefit from a 1.5 minute cooldown defensive abilitiy, providing modest defense (something akin to saber ward).

Wow, that is really great news. Thank you for letting us know about this.