Bad design. Some areas are unnecessarily huge for the sake of impressing pixel junkies. I can't use my speeder in a huge *** hanger, so I have to run 400yards to the elevator, push a button in the elevator, then run another 500 yards through a cookie cutter spaceport with a total of 3 NPC's worth talking to, just so I can get outside and use the taxi. And quick travel works for everything on a planet except my own spaceship or hanger where I parked it. yep, SWGetUsedToRunning.

Or the obvious, quick travel to your ship. Several quests also send you to a different planet, go halfway across the map, run into an unnecessarily large building to get to a specific room, only to talk to a hologram that will send you somewhere else. Couldn't just Holocall that one? Or at least use my ship's hologram? Add in taxi's and load screens, I wasted about 20 min last night doing that twice.

As annoying as all the running of the previous quest was, the line on Dromund Kaas after it was soo much worse. That was about 6 trips from mulgore to Xroads. And to make matters worse, a couple destinations were running across the map to access a hologram either in a room or on your ship. Very klunky quest design if everyone is carrying around a holocall transmitter.

The one button Rift macro spamming is more of a product of spec design. The shaman is a 1 button monster, but 6 melee attacks have cooldowns, 4 are reactives, and it only has 1 non cd, non reactive attack. Most specs had 5-8 button rotations, that you could condense down to 3-4, and still have your long cooldowns and situationals within reach. The advantage there is you could take your eyes off the hotbar and see the fight. It made it a lot more mobile and you could still maintain steady dps on the move. Swtor has the same reactives, conditionals and cooldowns, but without macros you have to have more of a feel for your keybinds - because there's a lot of them - and you'll be missing out on dps/dying stupidly because you can't see everything all the time. Example: Trooper has 2 casted heals, almost identical in size, one's a bit faster cast but has a cooldown - macro it in and It'd free up a keybind and get used without first checking to see if it's available. Trooper also has a hard hitting shot that can only be used on a target with a dot on it - but trooper's only dot is a random chance that you can't control. Healing without mouseovers is a pain too. I don't want the game to play itself, I want to play efficiently without turning my left hand into a pretzel. I have a decent keyboard, but I can't really make macros on it, and saying that this is an effective solution only gives people with the money to get one an advantage.

There's been a few times that I took the LS option because it'd actually harm the empire if i went with the DS. Just last night, a quest on Tatooine has you capturing a force sensitive Jawa. DS option would be to kill the Jawa and bring a non force using jawa in it's place, to disprove that such simple creatures could ever be a Sith. LS option would be to bring in the Jawa to the commander as intended. As I see it, even if it is a low creature, the force can be wielded by anyone and we shouldn't underestimate any enemy, or turn away a potential ally. The whole starting area, my character was degraded to an alien slave that had could never rise to power in the Sith... then I killed them. I go DS most of the time, because torture and killing is fun, but I still read the text and choose according to my code.

Grats!

I'm at work. nothing to do, so I'm hogging the computer.

I played female in a few games because the female models are smaller, easier to click at objects, easier to position, harder to notice in PVP. With the body style 1 in this game, that kind of negates the gender size advantage, but I still have a few females in the ranks for variety - they have different voices and combat animations, it breaks the monotony if you only have a male character. It's a game, I'll play who I choose. If I want to make a toothpick skinny female and make her into a tank, I can. I know just as many gaming chicks who roll big brutish male characters - because they can.

I'll agree that they look silly, but is it really necessary that the fleet ships and cities are so damn huge? Fleet ships are bigger than Undercity was, and about as convenient to traverse. Kaas City and Coruscant space port are about the most needlessly grandiose gaming hubs I've ever encountered - and you get there before lvl 14, so it takes ages just to cross them. Hall after hall, building after building and virtually no vendors, no questgivers between things, no reason for it being so damn huge. It's not really a loading issue there, as everyone clusters in the same crafting/auction/trainer areas anyway, but our ships are a zone away from where the nearest speeder lands. On a speeder, it's at least accessable. On foot without a sprint or dash, it's mindnumbingly boring.

Yes. Occasionally a blue will have slightly better stats, and a purple will be better. If you get a good drop, you can bank the orange and just upgrade the mods when you get enough commendations and replace your blues with the orange again. I don't know if they'll have purple level mods later, but if that's the case, you probably can keep a lvl 10 orange well into the 50's if that's the case. The lvl of the orange item will scale with the highest lvl mod in it.

There's a few builds in Rift, Shaman specifically, that could be played well as a 1 button spec. That's the spec's fault, not the macro. Most rift specs can be whittled down to 3-5, but you'll also have 6 other situational abilities and 2-3 long cooldowns at the ready. The fewer things to keep track of, the more you can actually pay attention to the game. Boss mechanics and overall raid awareness in Rift is probably the best I've seen, there's not one boss that you can just zone out and hammer keys without moving. I'm desperately hoping they'll allow some macros soon. Using reactive abilities and cooldown abilities without proper macros is a pain. I don't want the game to play itself, but right now it's a choice between missing out on abilities or hotbar tunnel vision. It's not gamebreaking yet, but I've already got 3-4 similar abilities with special cooldowns that don't mesh and procs that I can't easily predict. For example, Commando has a hard hitting shot only usable on a target with a dot. I don't have a castable dot to pair that with, I can only hope that phaser bullets set him on fire, notice the graphic and then I can hit him. I have 2 castable almost identical size heals, one has a cooldown and is a slightly shorter cast, and imo barely worth even using if I have to watch the hotbar to see if it's available. And mouseover healing is about the best way to keep a healer happy. I also have a lot of other specialized abilities, so hotbar space is limited. To play at max, I either need a macro, more efficient class design, or more fingers and another eye.

Rift Chloromancer does exactly this - dps is converted into heals with some casted heals to boot. Very very fun to play. I have a harder time healing as a pure healer, I get bored with just spamming heals and doing 0 dps. Commando healing lower levels is very similar to OP's plight. We have 2 casted heals, one on CD with a shorter cast time that isn't any better than spamming the long heal. hammer shot heals are laughable. If all you're doing is spamming casted heals, any dps that locks on you can burn you down. Healing PVE as dps works pretty well, as long as you're not the only one healing. Did hammer station with 3 dps commandos and a knight tank. It would've been a struggle if it was just me healing.

I just want to shut them up. Qyzen Fess, I can't understand you. Stop following me so closely and ****.

/signed I've sold 2 things on the AH since I got in, and I've been putting about 20+ crafted and BOE items on it a day, well over 100 auctions and lots of credits lost. 2 items. working as intended.

It's a minor thing out while questing, but it's very annoying in quest hubs and cities. When you first get to Coruscant and have to run for 5 min to get to the upper deck of the Senate tower, that's just annoying as hell. It's like the developers were saying "Hey, we could have put everything on one deck or in the same building with lots of elevators, but instead, we locked 50 interns in a room and fed them nothing but red bull." It's impressive and very pretty, but about as convenient as having a bathroom on the roof.