Good question. The general consensus is that the jedi storylines are a *bit* goody-goody, which is less satisfying for a lot of people compared to the horrifically evil/backstabby/powermongering sith storylines. They tend to start slower, too, but do fair justice the archetypal jedi type moments from the movies. All depends on taste, of course. I'd say go Jedi if you want to be a hero. At the very most as a sith you can manage to be an anti-hero.. and sometimes, a complete *monster*.

http://www.swtor.com/legalnotices/rulesofconduct Take a look at section D, naming policies. If your character happens to break one of those rules, I'm sure it'd be more likely. That said.. if it doesn't, you gotta realize it may not be possible. Unfortunately, it's a case of 'if we let one person do it, we gotta do it for everybody'.. and lordie, that'd mean Bioware's entire support staff'd be tied up with tens of thousands of request .

Much like a map book would substitute for a fancy GPS addon on your car.

SO MUCH. What the people who are complaining forget is how little they actually do in WoW's end game. How repetitive and grindy it is right now - because they remember AQ and Ulduar and always have a shot to go solo for the raven lord now and then. They think there's more end-game in wow than there is .. there isn't, there's just more solo content a max level character can go out and fart about in. In TOR, as yet, it's alting, datacrons, codex, etc. Some folks just aren't into that.

Vader hunt down and killed the majority of the jedi.. but before that, as Obi-wan said, 'For a thousand generations, the Jedi were the guardians of peace and justice in the old republic'. We're three thousand years before the movies. This is the high era of the republic. Jedi.. force sensitives in general, still make up a vanishingly rare percentage of the population - but this is a galaxy populated by literally trillions of sentient beings. There's a lot of freakin' Jedi. 1% of one trillion is 10 billion. .01 percent of one trillion is one hundred million. Think about that. We know Coruscant alone has a trillion inhabitants. We'd have to assume that Jedi represent just .0001% of the population to work out that there'd only be a *million* of them on the planet. If we go down another notch and assume they're just one in a billion, there's still 1000 of them on the planet. The numbers are rediculously beyond comprehension; this is a highly populated GALAXY. That said, it's all got nothing to do with the fact that a lot of people want to PLAY as Jedi. For heaven's sake, let them and swallow your disbelief .

Matter of appearance, too. You get those high light or dark rankings, you can put together a look that's fairly distinctive.

The people in the thread have said it pretty well, but to summarize.. Knockbacks are a 'know when to use them, and when not to' sort of ability in instances.

Best so far.. oddly, 'Captain Ulysses Winchester'. I'm not sure what strikes me as so epic about that.

What are your future plans for orange/custom gear?

Aahhhh! The content locust speaks!

Oh, well said, OP! I couldn't agree more about the pretensions of the grisled hardcore - what they define as hard, a sane person would usually define as pointlessly tedious - and this is coming from a vanilla Naxx raider! Now, I'm going to say that I do have issues with WoW - not to do with tedium, but the sheer speed at which the carrot in front of our faces is simultaneously dangled, given to us, and then devalued - but anything pre-wow was actually a far worse, more niche, less generally saleable product for very, very good reason.

Well, I regret I am not logged in just now and can't check it out to be super specific, but the different colors are damage from different sources. Green is heals, yes. One color is your damage, another is your companion's. There might be a fourth color yet for 'dot' damage - that is, those spells you cast on a mob that just quietly tick away over time. Red will be damage being done to *you*. Crits will flash up with a significantly bigger font .

I suggest first of all making sure you read this site's dev tracker. But I'll summarize the relavant points we've gotten from the devs so far - they're working on something. Having those super high res textures in a world where you're capable of seeing dozens, or 100+ characters on the screen at once, in a way that can not be controlled by the devs .. is a monumentally system-straining thought. You'd need a freaking monster rig, but they're working on putting something in for those higher-end folks to burn electricity with. They've never been in SWTOR. The consensus from the community is that they would certainly be nice. I'm fairly sure they'll be put in at some point in the future. It's a very annoying bug, yep. We can't know what exactly the devs are planning. We do know they're planning to expand it in a totally unspecified way, though . May I ask, though - why is space so disappointing? Sure, it's not X-wing vs. Tie Fighter 2.0, but it's a fun diversion, and that's basically all it's meant to be at this point. Dunno. Never noticed.

Holy mother of god. Are you absolutely sure you aren't trying to download a few movies in the background? And that your ISP doesn't suck? Uh.. just in case you're actually confused, and not trying to play a prank on all of us - you want your latency to be lower. It's the amount of time information takes to get from the server to your computer and vice versa.

Tanking in an MMO can be super intimidating - but if you're the type who can handle the stress, it's extraordinarily rewarding. You get to be the lynchpin of the whole group. Just.. take a deep breath, do your best to trust your groupmates while keeping your camera zoomed WAY out to see what the heck they're doing, and don't worry too much about mistakes. A single one won't necessarily kill you; it's how you recover from it.

I'll do my best . Not sure it matters so much, so long as you gather up the non-cc'ed mobs somewhat away from the cc'ed ones if possible, and use your aoe attacks or space your attacks out between targets to keep them all glued on you. It's more important to set up a kill order beforehand, really, than to worry overmuch about which mob to target in the pull. Some abilities will have the phrase 'does high threat' in their descriptions. In addition, any AC capable of tanking will get something - a lightsaber form, a special ammo cell, etc, that will be your tanking 'stance' - it increases your armor and threat generation. You want to make sure you're using that. Only super familiar with tanking on a vanguard, so for that class, it'd be ion cell, for instance . It's generally nicer to take out the weaker mobs first. They're capable of dealing major damage to you, but you can kill them a lot faster - with them gone quickly, you take far less damage overall. An exception would be any mob that heals others - those have to be interrupted, killed, ASAP. There are tricks to move mobs, even the ranged ones that like to sit there and fire at you from their little spots. You have a kind of grapple shot, and then there's the always favorite MMO staple - the LoS pull. LoS is short for 'line of sight' - and it simply means pulling monsters, and running behind some obstacle that'll force them to run right up to you to hit you at all. It's cheap and extremely effective. That said - yeah, sometimes you just have to kick your aoe attacks in the head. You have single-target attacks. Your priority isn't to kill things as a tank, it's to keep threat - so tab target around and use your single target attacks spaced about the different mobs if you must . It is generally true, yes. Though.. SWTOR doesn't have so many group-buffing skills as WoW does; you won't have that attack that makes everybody in your party do X amount more damage to a mob. As far as which mobs cast specials spells or heals, you can only learn that by experience. But you *CAN* see a little bar under their name plate that shows them casting a spell. Generally, a green spell icon means a heal. If you can, set up with another player you trust to trade interrupts with them on a tough mob. Hard-hitting nightmares can become pussycats if they're reliably interrupted. Definitely take a peek at the class forums - I know the Vanguard forum has a good tanking guide. It's focused to troopers, but perfectly applicable to powertechs, too, if the powertech forum doesn't have one..

It was originally created in WoW to stop one source of gear - raiding, from being the absolute best option for every single encounter - the PvP-biased crowds were feeling left out in the cold with no gear progression route, and were equally justifiably upset about being systematically crushed by raiding guilds. So wow created resilience - a stat which is really *really* good in PvP, but which really really sucks in PvE. You might well ask - why not give PvPers equivalent gear, or simply higher stamina gear, than you'd get from PvE raids? - because there's always idiots who, if the game offers the slightest reward for kiling yourself by running progression PvE raiding while at the same time pouring as much energy into competitive pvp as possible, they'd DO IT. Is it ideal? No. It creates a hell of a barrier to entry to people who just want to hop into a warzone and have fun; it kinda sucks from that standpoint and I really wish they'd just say to hell with it, and offer higher-stamina but otherwise equivalentish gear to PvPers with no special 'pvp make better' stat.

You can't, actually. Not even with macros, not even in WoW. The ability delay thing is a combination of issues which is being addressed. The last patch cleared up a lot of issues some people were having, the next one has yet more fixes. It's principly about abilities not firing off responsively, mostly in high-activity environments like pvp.

Hi! Could you be a bit more, uh.. specific with your question? I can't figure it, but the nearest thing I can think you might be asking about is the ability que. That is - there's an option in the preferences about the ability que window - you can set it from zero to 1.5 seconds, I believe, and that is how far in advance of you finishing your current spell you can 'que' your next one to be cast.

I'm so pleased to see a generally positive thread on these forums - and more pleasing yet, most people are being pretty honest and thoughtful in their posting. For my P.O.V - yeah, I'll agree with the guy who said that voice-over questing has killed text boxes for me, and also with the guy who said that wow has been running flat for several years, releasing little innovation and content at a glacial pace, and also with the guy who said that SWTOR is a game with rough edges that has a ton of room to grow. There's a certain magic butter zone for MMOs, I think, that can appeal to both hard-cores and casuals. Vanilla WoW certainly had it; since then with their expacs and content patches Blizzard has been fluctuating wildly trying to find that sweet spot again and either going way too far in one direction, or way too far in the other. Significantly, it has lost that magic touch of adding sweet truly optional content in between super-mungous raid patches. SWTOR? It has that vanilla feeling for me. Contemplating gearing my companions up, getting my codex entries, doing my datacron hunt, engaging in a wide variety of flashpoints and warzones totally satisfies my casual bone. And the raiding's there, certainly, but not yet at the point of 'raid or die' that Blizz so loves - and so, I feel so happy that there's the option but not the necessity, and that the 'treadmill effect' as yet hasn't happened to SWTOR. We'll see how it goes. The treadmill resetting itself every three months is what did it for me in WoW; I lost all sense of meaning. Will SWTOR focus as hard on raiding? Will they run multiple concurrant tiers of content, or will it be 'current counts, nothing else is relevant, enjoy the nerfs to the old stuff'? More importantly - will they continue to release stuff that can occupy us in between raid nights?

I sincerely hope so.

MMO players have a strong culture of wanting people to generally act fair to each other in group content, regardless of how it might seem from the outside. So yes - definitely. Need only if you're actually going to wear the gear - otherwise, let everybody else get their fair random shake. Companion gear is a bit of a new issue for MMOs, but it's generally settling down into companions being tossed in with the rest of the luck of the draw folks in greed territory. Other issues, like custom/modifiable gear not for your class - something you could build up to be useful though, that looks good? Oo, hot issue. Greed, or ask around the group if anybody minds! You can always come back.

Hio! 1) When you hit throw huttball, you get a targetting graphic on the ground the same as you would for any area-of-effect spell. You hafta aim to hit another player. If there's enemy players nearby, it can certainly manage to be caught by them. Helps to throw .. hopefully before you get zerged, and helps to keep your camera way out to see the situation. You can adjust max camera distance somewhere in the preferences menu. 2) Not sure, not having done stealth classes much in Huttball. I would imagine not, given that they've just introduced a fix that specifically prevents you from entering stealth when trying to access a node in the Alderaan warzone. I believe entering stealth with the ball would cause ya to drop it. Fact check that, though.

I don't think the 40+ ones are bad. I think the level 25 ones look like you'd need the upper body strength of Dog the bounty hunter to ride them without getting charly horses. They're insanely, insanely uncomforable-looking. Where are the seats!?

Maybe they ought to have a 'trial period' just after selecting it at level 10 - but honestly, you wouldn't ask to be able to change, on a whim, from a warlock to a mage in WoW - and this is what this is equivalent to. If they're going to allow it at all, after a brief trial period after level 10, it ought to be insanely expensive. Like, 5 million cred.