In LotRO you get all of the above plus if you drink enough you eventually pass out and wake up in some random part of the world with no pants on. There's a game that takes drinking seriously.

I play mostly healers with a few DPS for variety. I'm not afraid of tanking - I just know I'm no good at it. For starters, people expect the tank to lead the team and I have no sense of direction. I still get lost on flashpoint maps I've played a hundred times. I don't enjoy mob skipping, let alone boss skipping, I don't know or use all the conventional shortcuts and people get *****y if I go the long way. This is why I respeced my Shadow into DPS and retired my Powertech because I can't afford to re-gear him. Healing... pfft. Follow the tank and watch the health bars. Easy. As a healer I can compensate for poor DPS or bad tanking. As a tank, if the heals or the DPS are sub-par I'm the first to die and usually eat the blame for it.

My outer-space ray guns shoot sideways because they're make-believe.

You're not alone. I thought Watcher X was fascinating enough that after leveling a sniper I modeled my operative after him. I just swapped races to mask it.

Annihilation's DoT self-healing reduces down time and makes it an efficient solo and leveling spec.

Can you define "odd hours"? Because I play at off hours and I'm sick of being the only person online in a guild of 300+.

Or they could make love, not war.

Leveling as a healer is fast and easy. Fight what you want, stealth when you don't and do lots of flashpoints with the healer's advantage of fast queue times. I didn't personally notice any drop off at any level. Keep Kaliyo well geared and the two of you can manage any +2 content comfortably. Vector is a buzzsaw and makes a good leveling companion too but he suffers versus elites. If you only have the resources to keep one companion geared, focus on Kal. If you have the cash and the crafting, by all means gear both.

Viva La Skimp!

This happens to someone almost every time I've run Esseles. Relogging is the only way out, they always get booted from the group and If the group was formed via the LFG that person can't be invited back. I consider that game breaking. I can easily see a new player being turned off and quitting after such a bad introduction to flashpoints.

This is far from the first time this topic's been discussed, but I do think It's getting a bit out of hand. People will make the argument of hard modes especially that "you've already seen the cutscenes in regular mode, right" except lots of people haven't. There are no shortage of players who only start FPs at 50 and never saw the lower level version. Then there's the native level 50 flashpoints, like False Emperor and Ilum. I've been 50 for months, have healed these two FPs dozens of times and I have never once seen the cutscenes to either. Unless I try YouTube I probably never will. Players are so rude and so arrogant now that even the healer or tank will get votekicked for even asking and replaced by someone's Rakata-geared companion. And that's nothing to the first time ever I ran Taral V with my Commando (who had been soloed to 50 back in the day) and the whole team literally ran to the end, clicked a console and left. The total number of mobs defeated was countable on the fingers of one hand. What's needed is a redefinition of the LFG tool's completion requirements. Make the non-bonus bosses all mandatory. Set a kill threshold of a minimum number of trash mobs defeated. Tweak some of the maps to eliminate the worst of the skipping (Taral I'm looking at you). Oh and add incentives for cutscenes -- like bonus loot, titles or legacy perques unlocked only by viewing uninterrupted cutscenes.

Gene Roddenberry was once quoted as saying he'd always wanted more alien-looking aliens on Star Trek but that "There were very few in the Screen Actor's Guild."

There's one born every minute.

Somewhere out there is the person who enter the first vote for Ugnaut.

^ yes.

I'd play a Weequay in a minute. Would make a great Bounty Hunter. Which list they're on should reflect their objective appearance, not your subjective opinion of them.

Clever solution. The other (assuming the offender isn't also the team leader) is to put the instance on Master Looter. If he bails in a huff... well, yesterday I tanked FE HM on a Commando with Tanno Vik: an ungeared Vik at that, so the tank isn't quite unreplaceable.

CoH did exactly this. Side-scrolling multiple character select palettes with click and drag functionality for character listings. They also moved the "delete" button to the top left, well away from the character selection and creation UI elements. Maybe they could just copy that?

Offending players have their character cosmetically transformed into a Gungun in overalls for the duration of their probation.

1. Devaronian 2. Weequay 3. Voss

People don't get it, do they? Conceptualise it this way: The Op's cool-looking syringe gun is military tech, probably covert military. The Merc's clackity-clack ranged heal is probably a hacked or reverse-engineered version of that same tech and shoots dissolving micro-needles or something. It always looks like it probably hurts anyway. As a Scoundrel you probably have hacked or stolen versions of civilian tech, rather than military, and Republic civilian tech at that. Hence the uncool, non-threatening datapad of the sort that doctors in general practice would use to heal the boo-boos of small clumsy children in a manner designed to sooth panicky parents.

Just to clarify: Right click on the target's portrait in your UI, NOT on the target itself. That will attack if you're in range to do so.

And post screenshots.

This is the spirit. I'm still tickled and need to share a story that illustrates the good side of things. The other night, my guild decided on a last-minute run at HM KP. We threw the op group together rather quickly, with a lot of alt swapping and role dickering over Vent. I was a little nervous because I'd healed KP on story but never HM. It was a little hectic at first but I kept up alright. We downed Bonethrasher with one death toward the end but smoothly overall. We struggled on Sorno and Jarg. It seemed to me that the other healer was slow off the mark and that her team wasn't getting the heals they needed. I started throwing a few over to help. It wasn't enough, we got overwhelmed, I ran out of energy and we wiped. As we ran back someone asked "What happened there?" and the raid leader's response was "The healing wasn't there." I was crushed. Maybe I wasn't ready for HMs after all? The second run went better. The second team was still struggling but I pulled out every trick I ever learned healing bad PuGs and kept them upright. We still lost both tanks in the final push but won the fight. The next few trash pulls went fine. You're wondering where this stupid story is going. Ok, we were discussing strats and fetching cola for the next boss when the raid leader gave instructions to the other healer, who replied in confusion: 2nd Healer: "Heals? I thought I was DPS?" Leader: "No, we said to respec heals." 2nd Healer: "Ohh... I thought you said..." And that's when we all started slapping our heads and laughing like the idiots we were, because my little Operative had just healed half Karagga's Palace on hard mode solo. That's not me bragging about how uber-leet I am. I figure I'm a pretty average player, but bad PuGs taught me to overcome anything thrown at me. I think I'll heal a hundred more -- the dumber the better.

^ This. Athiss can be soloed in the 30s. At 50 you'd have to make a real effort to die. Flinging yourself down the initial elevator shaft will cut the wait time.