I'll have to look into that once I can spec back into DPS (boo tanks for slacking off!) But I'm pretty sure I saw my DPS increase once I moved Master Strike (Ravage) to top priority post-1.2 patch, due to it's buffed damage and free cost (less GCDs wasted on Strike).

Except that chest can get bugged and you won't be able to get anything from it. Still, even if you buy him good lvl 50 gear from GTN, he will die so quickly that it doesn't really matter. You could manually toggle his skills and use passive mode to move him out of LOS to avoid attacks, but that's like playing two characters at the same time and you might very easily end up getting hit yourself or miss an interrupt and die.

Training dummies cannot dodge, but that shouldn't bias Guardian DPS results one way or another because we have enough hit rating anyways to make our hits never miss even against real bosses.

Why wouldn't you take Insight, +6% crit chance to most of your attacks is really good way to spend 3 points. Remember that only Crit Rating is affected by diminishing returns while buffs and talents will always give same amount of crit regardless of how much crit you already have. DR graphs can be found here: http://mmo-mechanics.com/swtor/forums/Thread-Stat-DR-Graphs As for the relics, I prefer using two Campaign relics, one with on-use +power and other with 30% chance for 261 kinetic damage. Power relic is obviously useful for burst damage in nuke-phase but other one is pretty good too, looking at my most recent Karagga 8man HM log the relic itself did 34.5 DPS over the course of that fight with 59 procs. Average damage was 234dmg per hit and 22.45% crit rate. Sure, that 34.5dps is just 2.25% of the overall 1530dps, but it's free damage that doesn't require management on your part.

Yeah, it's bit of a bummer that to be effective Synthweaver you need Archeology, Scavenging, Underworld Trading and Slicing. I assume it's ment to encourage trading but that's not really happening and you're far better off leveling an alt to get those materials yourself. Since you don't need to hit max level to get top grade materials, all you need is few companions and that character can sit at the fleet, pumping out materials while you're doing something else. And because of how Archeology missions are split, you kinda want to have second character with Archeology to collect grade 6 artifact fragments because those are in fairly limited supply despite being used for everything you craft.

There's no need since your faction capital has vendor which sells moddable bracers and belts for every class.

While Guardians don't bring any unique group buffs, additional armor reduction debuff does help and ability to act as backup tank is not something you should completely ignore.

It's actually quite easy if you stay focused and remember to use Sunder Strike whenever it's up. Master Strike is the highest priority attack but it doesn't cost any focus. Then you have Plasma Brand and Overhead Slash that have 30% chance to generate 2 focus and reset Master Strike cooldown, for more free damage. Then you have both Combat Focus and Saber Throw to help you out in a pinch. You will still run out of focus here and there which will force you to throw in a Strike, but overall it's very well balanced and learning manage your Focus will reward you with good DPS. On the flipside, getting greedy and blowing through all your focus for big burst will cripple you for next few GCDs. As for Vigilance in PvP, problem is that it it requires some setting up, you cannot use Plasma Brand unless you first hit the target with Sundering Strike and most of our damage comes from combination of four "damage-over-time" effects (4xGCD = 6-7 sec depending on lag) and Master Strike that has 3 second channel.

Didn't realize this was even possible but sure enough, he's getting minor affection increase from Technology and Republic Memorabilia gits. Hooray for new crafting-*****!

While I don't think top-tier PvE mods should be craftable at all, there is still plenty of things that could be fixed without pissing off the playerbase. One of the problems I've seen is that most people are actually barely making by, we still have people having to borrow money for repairs and cannot afford augments (even when I'm crafting them for guildies without making profit). As for me, even before 1.2 augment boom, I was doing well and for first few weeks after 1.2 I felt like Uncle Scrooge but most other crafters in my guild didn't seem to take advantage of the situation. Now the prices have settled down for the most part we're talking about 20-50k profit per item, whether it be augmented piece of custom gear or augments themselfves. There's plenty of competition by now and GTN mechanics favor those who can post same item multiple times to keep matching lowest bids, players with less resources can't really afford to do that because you won't really make money if you keep cancelling and reposting due to high deposit cost that you only get back if auction expires. My idea for helping the economy is to give oppoturnities to those players who do not have the knowledge/crafting to start trading or crafting. Think about other MMOs, what is usually the easiest way for new players to earn money and doesn't require any investment, just time? I'm talking about resource gathering of course. Currently the way SWTOR gathering is implemented is that vast majority of crafting resources are generated by crafters themself and there's no reason to go out there and gather resource nodes because the yield is so small. And because the gathering is not worth it, there's not enough suppliers to bring prices down to the level where crafters would rather buy them directly than wait 25min for crew skill missions. Just from top of my head, two things that could help is to either increase the node yield so that it would be worth putting in the extra work and gather the materials by yourself or there could be some additional crafting reagents that you can only get from common resource nodes, this would give real reason for people to go gathering and all those other materials they get on the side would end up on the market. I guess the bottom line is, most people will never be able to support themselves with crew skills and they need other avenues rather than just few daily missions.

I'm beginning to get convinced that there's some difference in crit chance between different items (not just based on color/difficulty)... here's my two recent orders I filled up for my guildmates who ordered a sets of augmented pvp gear: Battlemaster Stalker (light armour) -Number of items crafted for one augmented version. 5 boots 4 hats 32 gloves 20 dresses 10 robes War Hero Weaponmaster (medium armour) -Number of items crafted for one augmented version. 1 gloves 1 leggings 3 chestpieces 8 boots All the crafting was done using Kira, who has +5% crit for Synthweaving and another +5% crit from max affection. Sure, random is random but it's like a lottery and cost of a single augmented item can vary from 5000 to 150.000 or more.

Kira is still your best choice for synthweaving because of his crit bonus that gives him 5% edge over all other companions. Droid equipment is only meant to make up for what he loses due to not getting affection bonus. Just don't expect her to do miracles, sometimes you get augment slot straight away but I also just wasted 32 pairs of pvp gloves before getting augment slot on them....

I really liked hunting for Datacrons, it's pretty much an achievement system done right. Proper challenge with actual rewards that are nice but not required. It's a bit unfortunate that I can't get few of them because of my broad shoulders, I'd have to hire a sage to sit there and pull me through tight spaces over and over again.... I'm way too cheap to do that.

Point being, we're expected to do something we don't like to perform better in PvE. It's not really a huge issue for me because I just watch Youtube/TV while grinding ranks, but that doesn't mean I'll enjoy it. As for the question in the title, it's technically false but it's really the only practical way to get them.

There's a huge difference, for augmented pvp gear you only need to get rank 60 which only takes little bit of time and then just buy recipes, which only require cheap standard materials to make. If you want to get augmented gear from PvE, you first have to be able to beat EC Hardmode for the gear, then destroy them and hope you get the recipe and then keep crafting them using expensive materials that you only get from EC. Even with the optimal companion crafting your stuff, on average you'll end up spending month's worth of material for a single pair of gloves. Even for PvE'er like me who doesn't like PvP all that much, getting rank 60 is the best way to get augmented gloves and boots, period. Let me drop some facts for you, now tell me which would you rather spend days making in hopes for augment slot: Battlemaster Vindicator Boots (custom) 4x Primeval Artifact Fragment (Grade 6 green, basic reagent from archeology missions) 6x Upari Crystal (Grade 6 green, basic reagent from archeology missions) 4x Ciricium (Grade 6 blue, basic reagent from Underworld trading) 4x Cortosis Substrate (Crafting Material, sold by vendors for 400 credits) Campaign Vindicator Boots (custom) 2x Synthetic Energy Matrix (Grade 8 purple, drops from EC bosses) 2x Mandalorian iron (Grade 6 purple, rare drop from Underworld trading missions) 2x Molecular Stabilizer (Grade 8 blue, drops from EC bosses and chests) 2x Primeval Artifact Fragment (Grade 6 green, basic reagent from archeology missions) 4x Upari Crystal (Grade 6 green, basic reagent from archeology missions)

Going over 100% accuracy only reduces the chance your Strike gets dodged by the boss, making it pretty much useless stat to stack after that point. Bosses do have 10% chance to dodge and you counter that with accuracy, but all your special attacks already have 10% accuracy bonus added to them, so it's not really an issue. That tooltip is still worded pretty poorly... Edit: What the guy above me said

Focus = PvP DPS / short fights Vigilance = PVE DPS / long fights

Why not just go full DPS spec? There's no solo content that requires tanking spec and Vigilance Guardian can even tank normal-mode EV/KP just fine. Granted, it's not very fun to tank as Vigi because focus generation is so bad, but it works. If you lack survivability in solo-content, pull out Doc.

It really depends on how well you play and how you balance out your stats. As a Vigilance Guardian, I can keep up with our Sentinel while DPS-Commando and Gunslinger are way behind on most fights. That being said, every class has their role and uses, so you shouldn't pick one purely based on their damage. Vigilance Guardian just isn't DPS-powerhouse in PvP because it requires setting up the armor debuffs and getting DoT's rolling while lacking good burst, so many "OMG Class Sux" comments are just based on people seeing them not getting high damage in Warzones that easily.

Isn't that partly due to the bug with dummies who cannot dodge your attacks, meaning Marauder/Sentinel off-hand attacks never fail to hit? Also, classes who have armor piercing attacks or large portion of elemental/internal damage will perform better against dummies compared to classes who's attacks get mitigated by armor.

That's pretty accurate, at least for first two acts of Trooper story. Smuggler on the other hand starts off great with very strong antagonist who is constantly in your face and you really want to take him down, but then quickly devolves into a role of inter-galactic deliveryman. For the epic Star Wars story, you definitely want to go Jedi Knight even if it occasionally feels like bunch of James Bond movies in a row because almost every planet has a evil villain with a superweapon.

Tooltip damage is adjusted according to your talents/buffs which boost that particular damage type. There's no favoritism here, just use same classes with same spec and relics should look identical. http://img215.imageshack.us/img215/7420/campaignkineticrelic.jpg Republic- 261 kinetic damage

Cunning version of the DPS Matrix cube gives +72 CUN but for the others it's only +58 str/aim/will, which probably explains why it's significantly better for cunning-based classes. For the others, 2x Campaign relics should be the way to go and for deciding on which damage relic to go for, check if you have talents that increase either kinetic or internal damage and whether or not you're running operations where you usually have at least one full stack of armor reduction up at all times (which increases kinetic relic's damage). If you have the patience, you could do the math on all trinkets to know how much they increase your DPS under optimal circumstances. Damage trinket is fairly straightforward to do but on-use trinkets take bit more work.

Rusk seems to have better AoE damage for clearing out those normal mobs, but also tends to pull mobs away from you unlike Kira who jumps in with you. But I'd still use Doc for doing dailys just so I can watch TV at the same time...

So, you just pick the two fights where ranged has less up-time on boss because they have to keep avoiding things while melee can stay on DPS all the time? Foreman Crusher -Ranged needs to keep avoiding rocks, lowering their overall DPS. Rocks never hit melee. Karagga -Ranged needs to pay attention and run out of gravity wells while melee just needs maintain position on Karagga's side to not get hit by flames or rockets.