No I don't think gear is a problem, in fact I love how we can tailor our gear to go with our play style. What PvP needs is for guild on guild action in the form of asset destruction. Gear wasn't an end all say all in Shadowbane, but what made for a fun system was how you could add rings/necklace to your gear to go again with your play style; either covering a weakness/flaw in the character or pumping up a strength.

1.02 Patch notes stated they took out high level resource nodes from some planets; Tatooine being one, which I'm sure they are talking about Outlaw's Den. Patch Notes 1.02

+1 If the 10k heal is on 90 seconds, why can't the 5k damage be on a 90 sec timer as well. I would love to make a few of these grenades, but at this point they are a 1 trick pony for PvP, and don't speed up fighting in PvE.

If he was on my server, or in my guild I would give him armoring/mods for free. I don't know how it's hard to keep orange gear up to par when so many of my quest reward choices are for enhancements or armoring/mods.

My suggestion would be to put the commendation items at a stat rating somewhere between the green & blue of what a crafter can make. Normally I can make a green with say +20 to a main stat, and the blue for that armoring/mod piece is +22. So why not allow the blue commendation piece to be +21. It makes it easier to stay equipped during levels, but will always make the crafters gear superior that what players can get from commendations. I rarely, rarely use the commendation vendors for anything other than picking up a new knife or piece of orange gear. With quest rewards and cybertech I stay ahead of my level most of the time by having blue or purple modifications in my armoring slots. BioWare is really screwing the crafters over by not allowing the best in slots to only come from crafters. Raids should drop the mats that crafters use, but the actual crafting and gear should have to be made by crafters.

In PvE there is always a coded solution. It by nature is restrictive to how the devs coded the AI. In PvP no human plays the same 100% of the time. The players can adapt and adjust on the fly, they are free to make changes that devs would have never though of. PvP is more of a challenge, and that's what makes it fun for me. Honestly how many times do you die in the world doing quests? One maybe two times tops during a day. Now take the average PvP match and play those throughout the day and see how many times you died. Even winning in PvP there are small losses. There is just something about playing against another real life player instead of a scripted AI. For me the best kind of PvP is asset destruction as seen in EvE's sovereignty system or in Shadowbane's city siege system.

I ran into a bug last night - or something I have not seen yet. I have my 6 companions (5 + the ship droid) and I'm allowed to send out 4 at a time. However as of last night I was only able to send out 3 at a time. *Minor Spoiler* I had one companion taken from me (unavailable) but that still left me with 5 companions. I take one along with me, but I have 1 sitting doing nothing. I'm hoping it's not a bug, however I keep wondering if because I have a companion unavailable atm that the code is such that it reads me as only being able to send out 3 companions at a time.

They (meaning BioWare) mentioned it in a set of recent patch notes.

If you mean an armoring mod 23-25 then you will not find them on a trainer, as they are only dropped in raids. If you are referring to a 22B then I didn't know something like that existed.

Yep, I think they should adjust the use of the grenades to 90 secs just like the med pacs.

I picked up a mission last night, or a schematic that I already knew, don't remember which. But I was surprised that I got it, and thought it was one of my companions coming back from a mission; lo and behold it was something extra in a slicing box. This is the first I've seen of this and it was in a level 45+ area.

How would critting on an orange piece make it unbalanced if the only thing that is added is an augment slot. Augment slots can be added to purple crafted gear as well if it crits. As far as getting the Orange schematics they come from UWT missions. Personally I bought 4 last night that I love the look of the pieces so have them for my synthweaver.

Lol Arenas aren't skill first off, secondly I like areas too, because there are many great areas in the game that have wonderful scenery. As far as ARENAS go, they should have not place outside of FPS games. MMORPGs are all about guild warfare and giving the players the proper tools to exchange blows how they see fit; even if that does come with zergs. As a side note to BioWare - what we really need is for you to open up a few new planets for Guild PvP; where we can build mini cities and fight over those cities and resource nodes in the area. Just implement a DaoC or Shadowbane style guild warfare and PvP would be great.

They shouldn't do it, as the Empire players would have a longer time sitting in queues. The reason they gave us huttball was so we could start a game when enough players from any faction were ready. With faction ratios being around 2:1 or 3:1 it would mean that republic players would play 3 warzones for every 1 warzone the Empire player would. No thanks. I'm sure this same message has been said before.

Would you really complain that a Glass Cannon like the Channeler in Shadowbane was able to 3-4 shot a Mino Barb? Ops if they spec for it are glass cannons, and in addition to that they have to do it from within 4m, not the 30m that snipers can. Ops are fine.

Lol you have it totally wrong. Guild vs guild is the only true PvP that matters. When you can win using only 5 against their 20 then you know who the true PvPers are. Guild vs Guild is THE way to go in SWTOR. Open up planets that guilds can build mini cities on and have resource nodes to fight over, and allow destruction or capture of the guild cities. This is the awesome sauce when it comes to PvP. Basically make Shadowbane 2.0 on a few more planets. Premade 4v4 or 8v8 are sports competitions not PvP. I don't want sports in this game, we already have the horrible Hutball and other 2 warzones. If they want to make PvP great they would ditch warzones and truly open up all the planets and implement an Outlaw's Den ruleset on all PvP servers.

Yes because then you have to code almost all the other universal mods to be item specific. It would be a better system, but it would also be way more tedious. Right now they have a system that allows players to make 1 armoring/mod/enhancement item as a universal item; if they change as you and others have suggested then they have to code not just 1 enhancement for 1 type, but 8 enhancements for each type: 1 for the helm, 1 for the chest, 1 for the boots, 1 for the legs, 1 for the waist, 1 for the hands, 1 for the wrists, 1 for the weapon. It is a lot more work to have to code all of that and set it up correctly. No they should just allow the schematics to drop more frequently and allow crafters to make the top end raid modifications using end raid boss drop mats.

Lol, this made me laugh; ruining the artists work. How about the artist that came up with the cool Orange looking gear that everyone wants. The issue is that players were able to get the best gear using an easier route than the devs intended. I doubt they could care less about what we look like while we are raiding; they just wanted players to actually make the effort into slaying the last boss in order to benefit from the chest piece that drops. A simple solution is for BioWare to actually allow the schematics to drop from a raid and allow the player crafters to make the level 58 armoring/mods/enhancements etc. Since I would imagine that these modification items would also need raid mats (dropped from the end boss) it would mean that people would still need to raid all the way through, not just stopping at the earlier easier bosses.

I just wanted to say Thank You for this information. I went on last night after reading your post and found 4 different orange schematics that I was only hopeful to find; I found my helm that I want to keep. Now comes the arduous task of creating all these helms in the hope that 1 crits for that elusive augment slot.

Eventually I will want a crafted piece of Orange armor; but it will need an augment slot. So I will help my guild mate out that crafts by paying for tries in advance, but I'm not paying him for just another orange item, I want that particular look of orange item with an augment slot. Answering your question more directly; I have already found the style of helm/legs that I want, and I have found the orange schematics for those items. Now I just need a crafter to crit on those items and I will be set. It would be slow going for me to craft 100 orange items with the schematic that I bought since I would need to make an alt specifically for synthweaving. But when I do I will bring results back here. As a side - I created my first earpiece with an augment slot last night.

Lol - Exactly. The OP wants to vanilla every class so we have an FPS. I'm here to play a Star Wars themed MMORPG (emphasis on RPG) where I know my role and I want others to play their role. Actually the OP is not concerned with classes as much as he wants to have cross server queues. His real intent is hidden but not deep enough that you can't see it clearly. He cleverly used Tank/Healer/DPS as a way to show that a cross server queue is needed. No on cross server queues. Yes on better tank aggro mechanics. Even then, better AI for the mobs is not going to take away the fact that you will need some type of heavy HP meat shield, a healer to heal anyone and everyone in the group and someone to do damage to the mob.

This is something I don't like. I don't want to interact with everyone on every other server. I want to know the other guilds/players on my server. This is yet another reason that BioWare needs to build in great guild utility tools so that the game becomes guild based and not solo player based. Dungeon finders are the wrong way to go.

Tank, Healer, DPS come from Pen and Paper games - where you have what I like to call a meat shield, healer & damage. I like having classes and I don't think that classes are the problem here. If BioWare changed one thing I would ask them to change how they script/code their raids so that Tanks are not needed. Dedicated Healers and off-healers are always going to be needed. So by adjusting the coded content to allow for a wider range of class setups you allow us to break the traditional 3. I am not advocating that raids be made easier, just that the mechanics known as tanking are changed. EvE has 3 forms of tanking (4 if you are really a man): Armor, Shield, Speed (Hull for the men in the group). Each of those tanking techniques requires a unique setup and mentality to play. But in SWTOR we basically see 1 type of tanking: collect agro while the healer heals me. I don't follow you on your timesink logic, any character is going to be a time sink, and classes just reflect the real life aspect of everyone not having the same skill sets; sure you have athletes that will generally be good at anything they try, but even Jordan wasn't spectacular at baseball. If this is a cry for x-server queues then just stop. That's the last thing we need for the game to be successful.

Don't worry about color; compare the stats (not armor value). If the stats of the Blue are superior then use that, If you like the Orange and want it to be superior just upgrade it's mods.

This all depends on what crafting you are talking about. Since I don't know about armormech/synthweaving/armsmech etc. I will only talk about Cybertech which produces armoring & mods for gear slots and earpieces. Just this morning I made a bunch of green earpiece 22s, then RE'd them; I got back all 3 of the available tier 1 blues, critical, endowment and the other one I don't remember by name (starts with O I think). Now If I was to make enough of those 3 and RE them I would have the chance to get 5 Tier 2 prefixes. So progression is 1 x green -> 3 x blue -> 15 x purple But with my armoring it doesn't work this way. I don't have 3 different versions I can get from a green item, I have 1 linear progression - 1 x green -> 1 x blue -> 1 x purple. Then add on top of that the chance to critically make anyone of those pieces of gear and you can get an augment slot.