I understand that dying might be a little frustrating, but please take a step back. It's just a video game, and it's harmless, and the plague itself has few ill effects, and death is recoverable from in mere seconds - and it doesn't even cost you durability damage. So - hey, the plague will peter out over the next little bit as characters lose it. Don't think of it as griefing. Think of it as a little random change from your routine - something that games really ought to be striving to give us, as the word 'routine' and 'game' don't actually go very well together in the end.

Do note, your companion will still cast and use those abilities (at least those you don't deselect the little green box on) - but if you want to hide the bar away, that just lets you do that.

You know, I've had some trouble getting groups for heroics - yet even at the worst of it, I'd say I've managed to run a heroic about half the time I was looking for a group for one - and then hey, you get together and you manage to bang out a couple. Try .. you know, talking to people, okay?

I'm unsure of how seriously I should take the complaints about having to buy a vaccine, or the inability to 'opt out' in a more complete sense. To me, dying in a video game carries extremely little emotional weight. The idea of getting infected by a virtual virus and having my avatar explode 10-20 minutes after that, only to be able to immediately rez and continue playing .. well. It hardly seems worth complaining about. In fact, I'd go so far as to call it almost petty, and to class such complaints in the same bin as those who continually complain about 'development resources' going to X, Y, or Z, instead of their own particular pet problem. I will simply say this: you can't have in-game events that are all roses and bunnies (though a few such things are no problem). I applaud the taking of a risk, the introduction of a little randomness .. even into the life of those who are hyper-focused on mmo-based efficiency, powerleveling, etc. You just don't make a memorable MMO by smoothing out all the rough edges - no, what you make then is a boring old platonic-ideal SPHERE.

I'll just add my voice to the people saying it's always awesome to have events and things to do. I'll also just say that perhaps the number of days you had to do the quests, versus the number of quests you had to unlock, was a little tight. That's all.

Orange-moddable techblade - with good quality mods installed, now available from one of the Belsavis heroics.

You know, it's an odd thing to suggest being as a resource for a different MMO.. But check out wow.joystiq.com - particularly the drama mama's and Officer's Quarters columns they do there.

Difficult issue. The trade-off is having large, expansive worlds to truly feel like you can explore and get lost in .. versus having smaller, tighter, more easily accessible worlds.

They've probably got it as EDT - Eastern Daylight Time, actually

It's changed a little in patch 1.2 - you need to go into the game menu - hit escape, and access the 'interface editor'. I won't bother really trying to explain that thing in detail -there's actually youtube video guides; it's a little complicated - but the easiest way would be to just select 'extended quickslots' from the drop-down menu up top of the editor, and hit 'load' . As for the question of the other poster.. the default keybind is 'P' to see the listing of all of your abilities. There's also a button for it in the row of icons up top of the screen.

Seriously, no problem. It's not intuitive and there's no help in game - hell, it should be one of the first tutorials a new player sees. I understand people getting rude over it - it's like a sacred rule of mmo grouping, but we gotta remember there's newbies too!

Ah, you're misunderstanding the system, Mugetsu. There's three options; Need, Greed, and Pass. 'Need' rolls get precedence over greed rolls. Anybody who needs will win over somebody who only hits greed. The general MMO etiquette is that you only 'need' on items your character can actually use. Otherwise, you're depriving people who worked just as hard at getting the item to drop of at least the chance to sell the item for a few credits - if nobody needs to wear an item, everybody greeds, everybody gets an equal shot at the spare cash, yeah? Need if it's an upgrade, something you would -wear-. Greed for all else. SWTOR has this little wrinkle with companion gearing, and it's generally settled that they're only worth what you would get with 'greed' - in other words, not as important as gearing up an actual player character. Hope that helps! It's just a matter of politeness, once you understand how rolling works.

You can meet him at a certain place. You can talk using /say, but not in the same channels, and you can't group up or share quests. The only real way for you to help him with quests would be outside of quest zones, by attacking mobs he's attacking, I'm afraid. For two people to really group up and help each other out in the fullest sense, you really gotta be same faction.

It should open up when you hit 'Y' - there's also a legacy button in the menu row up top of your screen. Remember - for now, at least, the legacy name is permanent - and attaches to all of your characters on that server. Pick something awesome, and more importantly, that you'll be comfortable with! The weapon kit is exchangeable at some vendors on the plaza at Coruscant, or on Dromund Kaas.

Says no such thing. It talks about unlocking emotes for finishing chapter one, and unlocking buffs for chapter two - that is, if you finish chapter two with a class, when you cast your buff on any legacy character you get each class's buff.

Frankly, I would be fine with every piece of armor being customizable. That and they work to make the set bonus tranfer retroactive.

The oomph factor? Maybe it's the fact that the music is so minimal and non-intrusive. Other than that, they could stand to have more npcs just wandering about doing scripted environmental stuff. That's about it, though. The game, for me, has the 'grab' factor .

Look... I see this kinda comment about every software/game release out there that's buggy and has issues. I understand why you think like this, but it bugs me every time because it's simply unrealistic. Every new MMO, every new bit of software or new game, is not simply improving on an older model - we can not expect seemless improvement over time. Instead, every new game launch is literally reinventing the wheel. They don't pick up an old design and tweak it. They build a completely new model, not based on any previous work. It's not like a new car coming out. It's like one game is a car, and the next is a motorcycle, and the next is a glider, and the next is a submarine, and each one is the very first of it's kind. In other words, very little relevant previous models to draw on.

Well, if you want whiz-bang story from the get-go, the agent is full of twists and turns. Mm.. consular. God, I *love* the game play - but the story starts kinda weak, though it gets better. Smuggler is highly enjoyable, but the number of times this world-weary struggler lets himself get ambushed is disgraceful. Trooper story is okay, but it's a bit constrained by the military feel - it honestly feels bad to try and be a bad boy rule breaker in that role. Inquisitor story, at least as far as I've done it, captures the whole 'dark sorcery' vibe pretty well. The others I haven't gotten far into, yet

Super cool you're even asking this question. Hah - um, hmm. I thought Unity was a neat situational survivability cooldown. But given that we're going to be able to acquire it anyway.. What to put in it's place, hm. Seriously, what about something fluffy, just for fun? Give us something like a wow priest's mind vision. Call it attunement or (sith) insidious vision. That or a one-off full companion heal . Edit : just to respond to the person above complaining about noble sacrifice. It's a freaking cool idea; single-handledly incorporates some warlock into the jedi sage. But I'd say the cost/benefit is a biiit off, that's my only complaint. After healing yourself of the damage, the amount of force you get back in total is really negligable.

Unless you're a little more clear in your question, I doubt you'll get much help. But in the meantime, try reading http://www.swtor.com/test-center/patchnotes and perhaps something like http://www.darthhater.com/tag/update-1-2 just to see the screenshots and guides to all the new stuff.

Well.. simply put? They're so not everything in the game is about credits. They're so we're able to earn our gear and items at a sorta predictable pace, rather than be forced to wait on the god of dice rolls to get any particular item. They're so that we're rewarded with space gear for doing space missions, and with pve gear for doing pve missions, and pvp gear for doing pvp, and that nifty CorSec outfit for questing on Corellia. That's all, really.

First off.. welcome to SWTOR. Seriously, we're generally a nice bunch. Hope you're having fun, despite any problems - and I will just add that if you haven't, try and find yourself a good group to guild up with. Being social in this game - talking turkey while running flashpoints or quests, makes the game ten times as fun. Phew. Jerks are never going to be pleasant - they're apparently always a hazard in any online game, I'm afraid. I'm going to refrain from making any sweeping statements about the character of people who choose to play the 'bad guys'.. . Uh .. tck, tck. As for different classes having different strengths and weaknesses.. well, heck, that's the name of the RPG game. You won't find a compelling RPG game where great power in one area isn't balanced off by some sorta weakness. Stealth is certainly powerful. Healing is also immensely powerful. The way the classes and talent systems are set up - and OUGHT to be, by all rights, god darn it - are that you have to make tradeoffs. Become really good at one thing, lose some flexibility and power at another. Not every heroic daily is soloable via stealth. Make note of these jerks's names, and laugh them off when they come begging for a powerful healer to run them through some flash point. Be pleasant yourself, and win a long list of people willing to help you out, or beg you to come on runs with them. It comes down to the whole idea of trade-offs again. But there's also special considerations when you're running in a multiplayer game. For instance - well, what if a healer really could continuously cast, forever? That'd make the game terribly boring from a mechanics standpoint - the healer sits in back, and the rest of the group just lazily mosies along killing things with no sense of urgency, no sense that they could actually be KILLED, because the healer is so omnipotent and long-lasting. Believe me. I've seen MMOs where healers had managed to get virtually unlimited mana or resources or whatever .. through sheer bad design, the encounters the developers of that game were forced to design had to try to kill the group through being merely blinding storms of fast-paced damage - fighting not the healer's resources and skill, but the pace of his FINGERS. Not fun. But uh .. hey. Put talent points into being able to do damage, get better at doing damage. Put talent points into healing, become a powerful healer. I will ask this - are you sure that you're playing your healer well? Getting the knack of managing your resources with the tools given you is a huge part of it. You get procs. You get talents that reduce the costs of your spells. You get free spells now and then, or super-power heals that are best saved for high-stress moments. You have the tools - mastering them, though.. now that's the challenge. Also - are your teammates being smart, or are they standing in gigantic puddles of electricity and ************ at you when they die of it? There's all sorts of reasons healers shouldn't be 'able to heal stupid', and damage-avoidance is everybody's responsibility. 1. The devs will or won't. We can't really say - all we can really do is provide feedback that certain quests may be far easier than intended. That may cause the devs to add stealth detection to mobs in future quest zones, if they think it's really that huge a problem. 2. Your healing spell cooldowns are there for a reason. They're not meant to stymy you; they're meant to make healing about choosing the right spell for the right job, not merely the most powerful spell all the time. Healing is extremely tactical, and it's a sort of gameplay a lot of people enjoy . 3. Well, the healing medpack thing is actually meant to help the devs - as well as the players, if you believe me, in a roundabout way. If you have some people popping medpacks every 90 seconds, then.. well. Hey, the encounter becomes stiflingly boring and easy for the group of people who can afford to do that. That, or the devs have to design content that is so hard that it basically assumes people are using medpacks all the time, each time they can - and then it just becomes a boring extra button to press, and just a tax on playing the game. For reasons I've tried to explain, it's better that the amount of healing that can be done in a group is a liitle bit predictable and limited . I do hope you're not too frustrated, Sith. Using the abilities you're given - IE, stealth - isn't cheating. Iiif there's areas where stealth classes have it unfairly easier than others, well - remember, it's a small part of the game, and those guys will always pay for it in operations, when they're sitting in melee range of every gigantic droid doing the dancing lawnmower act all over them, while you're sitting pretty at 30 meters range. Every good game is about those kinds of tradeoffs - the single-shot NUKE that'll take out a room, or the fast-firing but low-damage needler? The RTS horse-archer unit that's really fast, but tissue paper if the enemy's got spearmen? Use your invincibility cooldown when you're in trouble, or rez your teammates? All I can say is - try playing those classes, if you really think they've got all that and a package of peanuts to go with it. The game's made for alts, anyway. But always, always - make friends and avoid the jerks.

I'm really sorry, but I always found Kreia a bit pedantic, as a character. She was always the sort that'd passive-aggressively say, no matter what you did, that 'ahah! I got you! this is why what you did was really evil, and not as good as you thought!' .. while employing the kind of reasoning that was fashionable, for a time, with the goth subculture. In other words.. sophistry for sophistry's sake, grey for grey's sake, without real meaningful insight. A teenager's angst-ridden view of the world. I'm not saying there aren't shades of grey. I'm not going to say that moral complexity doesn't exist. I'm simply saying that sometimes, there ARE definable, dictionary examples of good and evil in the world - and that intentions are what matters, not necessarily results. Kreia is the kinda gal who'd look at a fire fighter walking into the world trade towers and ask if he weren't saving the ancestor of a future world dictator. That isn't sophistication, that's stupid. If we let fear of the unknowable consequences of our actions prevent us from doing what is right in the here and now, we become like these people: http://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/worldnews/asia/china/8840381/Chinese-girl-run-over-by-a-car-dies.html .. in china, last October, a toddler was hit by two cars on the street. She lay there dying, or dead, while people - perhaps afraid of being caught or sued or making ripples or whatever - walked by, aware of her presence, but not willing to help. That's Kreia - that's all I can say, that kind of story reminds me of Kreia. Only, you see, that girl.. she do it out of calculation, not meekness. And that's a black and white case - indefensible, dictionary-perfect evil. I don't care if you or anybody else wants to argue with me on that point. Evil is too .. glorified nowadays; we act like it has to be hitler-equivalent monstrosity to be called evil at all. It sure doesn't.

Ladies and gents, I'd like to present Hallowed Voice as a candidate for whatever next story chapter we're getting - our new companion! Now, I'm going to try not spoiling this for our younger consulars - suffice to say, the man kicks much ptootie, and out-Qyzens Qyzen. I was a bit disappointed when he and that other guy (we all know who I'm talking about) turned out not to be our companions - they're both seriously well-written, and unique characters. I realize there is a certain faction of users who are passionate supporters of same-gender romance arcs. And that Hallowed Voice may not seem the most ideal candidate for such a relationship. But who are we kidding, seriously? Tharan. Tharan cries out for this particular role in our roster. Ladies and Gents - Hallowed Voice. If we can't have a Talz or an ortolan, the man is it. We need some serious color added to our companion roster. Hallowed Voice 2012!