I highly suspect that your suspicion is inaccurate. First, for those that like to craft, they are going to shift their crafting efforts to GSH items. They will spend their huge cache's of materials, including lower tier mats into the new GSH items. They will start pumping out tons and tons of this stuff to satiate the initial demand. That means they will not be crafting things like iLvl 156 gear that often sells in the 20-30K credit range (implants, barrels, ears, hilts, armorings, enhancements, etc.). This means that most of the crafted items on the GTN today are going to have a supply shortage. It may actually be brutal to get an MK-9 kit or augments shortly after the release of GSH, as those same mats could see better returns making something for GSH. And even if the GSH stuff doesn't sell for more credits/mat, they are still the new cool thing, so people are going to shift their crafting to that at least initially. I do agree, that even with the reduced supply of credits caused recently by the casino event, and then furthered by the credit sinks in GSH, that demand may fall a bit. But I also think that people are currently making a list of the things they want and what those credit costs are likely to be, and people are running far more dailies lately to save up. In the end, I don't see credits as being in short supply once crafters get the GTN stocked with goods.

I forgot about the HK-51 quest line. If you haven't ever done that, it's worth at least one play through. I almost never use my HK-51 companion, but I'm glad I've at least unlocked it.

There is only one person on the combat team...he drew the shortest straw.

I would suggest you do the following all together: Get the Loremaster, Datacron Master, Galactic Explorer, and Beastmaster titles, while doing The GSI and Seeker Droid dailies on every planet. Do these two tasks on both an imperial and republic character at the same time. This will take a little while to complete and expose you to parts of each planet you probably have not visited or visited rarely. Hopefully, by the time you get those 4 titles, GSH will be released and you'll have many, many more things to go "redo". Also, I would strongly suggest you give a serious attempt at doing Hardmode operations, including getting into a legitimate progression raiding team. The hardmode mechanics are just hard enough to be a challenge without being in your face difficult. And with the gear you have (largely comms gear, I assume), you should be geared well enough to warrant a spot. If you get into this activity, you'll find you need to learn how to min/max your gear, how to optimize your rotations, how to parse on a dummy, etc. All things you probably do not spend time doing today, but things if you did spend time doing, could give you the feeling that you are doing something meaningful with your time...where as chasing achievement points doesn't often feel meaningful. A simple measuring stick would be to set a goal like, increase your dps on an operations dummy by 500 over what you do today. I can almost guarantee you that this would be an achievable goal, probably within a week, if you've never measured your current dps and/or given strong considerations to playing your character in a way that maximizes dps. And then to do another 500 more after that. The same goals can be made for healing. Personal tanking goals are a bit more difficult to set.

I'm happy you were right. It's certainly better than the alternative. Your delivery still needs work. I wasn't able to hold my breath for OVER 5 months before we got our second vague whisper of confirmation. At least when David Blaine needs a stand in, I know who he should call first.

I was whispered while waiting to kill Xeno for the Gree event as recently as last night. And it wasn't the first time.

So, any chance you will give the majority of the player base, that was aware of the current point in the story, some insight into the yet unreleased part of the story? Even something as broad as, "in release 2.9 we will advance the story" would be vastly more clarity than we have today. Even if it isn't release 2.9, but some release later than 2.9. Or perhaps, "in the 3rd quarter". Or perhaps, "before the end of year". That's where my negative sentiment personally comes from. BW has delivered an amazing STORY DRIVEN MMO, but in 2014 has yet to deliver very much in the way of story content, and has not given us much information about when or if, during the rest of 2014, BW will deliver more story. In Feb, 2014 we heard as much detail as you gave us yesterday. So in more than 5 months time, the roadmap for story has yet to get any clearer, and that's not a good thing for a STORY DRIVEN MMO.

Honestly, that was a thorough waste of calories for everyone involved.

If you have to do anything at all, how about enabling mouse wheel to zoom in/out?!

If you max out Vette first, including marrying her, you can subsequently max out Jaessa and marry her. There's a point in the Jaessa story, where you piss off Vette and Vette gives her a "her or me" ultimatum. Since the "marry" dialogue choices yield so much affection, marrying both yields is the cheapest solution, if you are buying/farming companion gifts.

I have 19 characters on The Harbinger without any troubles. If you haven't invested much time in this new one, you may just delete the character and start over. Either that, or submit a ticket with Customer Service.

I read this 3 times, and read it wrong each time.

Nvm!!

I play on The Harbinger. I am *mostly* a PVEr. I do however, do some PVP. On raid night, as I'm waiting for the group to form up, if there are flagged people anywhere near the start of DF/DP, I'm going to flag myself and get some kills in, as will a couple of the other people in my ops group. In fact, if there aren't any flagged folks around I'm a little disappointed that I just have to stand around and wait, in which case I often resort to the tedium of banging out a couple of dailies. Since dieing takes literally 5 seconds to come back from, and costs me absolutely no repair bill, I don't give 2 flying rats if I "win" or "lose". The PVP is entertaining me, when otherwise I would just be standing around. I do not, however, roam around the open world part of Oricon, flagged, looking for someone to make a mistake and attack me. All of my PVP takes place in the area between the door of DF and the speeder. It's actually a pretty small amount of space and literally anyone, flagged or not, should be able to get from 1 spot to the other if they have their mind set on avoiding the conflict. Out in the open world of Oricon, if I were to accidentally get flagged (for which I'm pretty sure I need to do a direct damage attack on a flagged person), and I decided I didn't like being flagged any longer, I'd simply go back to "base" and wait out the 5 minute timer. Possibly q up for KDY or (egads) PVP to do something else "productive" while waiting out the timer. As well, there's a high likelihood on Oricon that there are two instances. Just switch instances and even flagged you'll probably be left alone. Anyway, there are simply too many ways for a primarily PVEr to deal with the "issue" that I personally find the occasional open world PVP to be a refreshing change of pace.

I expect people to play the role they queued for. If they queued as a healer, then heal, with occasional dps. if they queued as dps, then dps. I do NOT expect someone to respec, if they are healz, just because I thought it would be faster for the grp if they were dps. If they are spec'd healz, it's because that's what they are good at. If they were better at dps, and could respec, they probably would do that.

I'll throw in my vote of confidence for the Dev team for NOT allowing bind on equip/pickup items in the legacy bank. SWTOR is the only MMO on the market that allows legacy transfer of armor and weapons. We don't need the ultimate "I win" button of relics/ears/implants. If the folks crying for this feature got what they wanted, and you could transfer implants and relics: Progression raiding teams would force their members to have identical alts (mirrors) and run everything twice, each week, shortening the progression time by half to fully gear out your left side, while doubling the expected amount of in game time. For example, since my ops team is not allowed to exploit Nefra, we are not quite done getting a second implant for everyone (this is in part due to having replaced 2 members during this time as well). However, if this legacy bank thing could unbind an implant, we'd all be done weeks ago, including the 4 implants I need for my tank/dps hybrid, and our 2 new members. And that's why it shouldn't be done. Progression is too fast already. This would only make it insanely fast, and as an end game operations guy, which already has content coming out far too slow (imho), the last thing I want is to finish off the gearing game even faster, and sit on my hands even longer, waiting for the next content update.

Looks like I would qualify to make your list.

So the OP didn't like my thread and decided to make a new thread with the same basic subject. GG. Well played sir. I totally didn't see that one coming. The two basic arguments here are pretty interesting to consider: On the one hand, we have the existence of a roadmap announced in early February, which 2 months later was no longer accurate for much of the content that it included, but for which people still consider gospel. On the other hand, we have the pragmatic crowd that looks at all of the parts of the roadmap that were not delivered on time or have been removed, and speculate that the remaining aspects of the roadmap are suspect. In my thread, I simply wanted to know which way people were leaning. I personally think that at this point in time, based on the facts at my disposal, either position needs to be considered OPINION. In support of my opinion that the second expansion will likely NOT occur this year, I think it's odd that Eric would say they should update the roadmap, if no update to the roadmap was needed (ie, everything's still on schedule). Further, in my opinion, it's unusual for significant scope changes for two successive major patches (2.8 and 2.9), to not have ripple effects down the road. In the best case, those scope changes help keep the second expansion on track. In the worst case, those scope changes translate into development efforts continuing to take longer than expected, and more delays should be expected.

Clearly, you personally understand the threat mechanics better than AVERAGE. You are probably using parsec, and have your target of target enabled in your UI. All of those things are not AVERAGE. They are significantly above average. What you take for granted as a cost of doing business as a tank, the AVERAGE tank really has no comprehension for. I'm writing here to help the AVERAGE tank. The guy/gal that has never once visited the forums, or dulfy, or reddit. The tank that is just happy to give a HM FP a few runs to get their weekly done, and is considering doing SM Ops. They know how to avoid standing in fire and such, but most boss fights result in them losing aggro constantly. And all they know is that they are told they are a fail tank, or WTB Guard, or learn 2 taunt.

I love the banter between Darth_Wicked and Infernixx. You both look at the exact same data, and come to completely opposite conclusions. Personally, it's Darth_Wicked's conclusion that I tend to agree with, although I honestly hope that Infernixx is correct. In this post, I was attempting to gauge how far the community is leaning one direction over another. It's probably not a loud enough sample to get BW to comment directly, but hopefully someone on the community team will whisper in the ear of the Producer and we will get an updated roadmap to put the debate to rest once and for all.

In the producer's roadmap for 2014, published 2/3/2014, we were told to expect 2 digital expansions this year. One would be roughly the size of Galactic Starfighter, and the other would be the size of Rise of the Hutt Cartel. Release 2.8 was being heralded as "the biggest update up to this point". Obviously a lot has changed since this roadmap was published in February. On 4/23/2014 a Producer update let us know that Galactic Strongholds (originally slated to be part of 2.8 on 6/10/14) would be delayed until August 19th to give time for additional features. At roughly the same time it was announced that the additional ship in Starfighter was also removed. And in the end, 2.8 was actually the smallest major content update in history. To be honest, I'm not begrudging BW for making a "promise" that it couldn't live up to with the delay of Strongholds. Twenty years as a professional software developer myself, I know that kind of thing happens occasionally in big software development projects. What I am wondering is whether the delay of Strongholds is simply the first of two dominoes that are actually in motion, but that we haven't been told about the other domino (the delay of the second digital expansion). I suppose it's entirely possible that the one does not have any affect on the other, but in my experience that's rare. Resources are finite. The longer those finite resources work on the first expansion, the less time they have to work on the second. Anyway, when I read some forum posters say "just wait for the level cap in November/December" I completely laugh inside. My that's are "what are these guys smoking that they still believe that". Sure, we have not been told that the second expansion is NOT coming this year. But we've also not been given that "vote of confidence" that it is indeed still coming. And this, for me, is very telling.

Please re-read the numbers in my first post. No matter what, a dps in the same gear level will generate more threat per second than a tank. No matter what. It's not a situation of a tank having bad gear or being under-geared. They will always lose the threat battle (without using taunt). As a simple example, on my server there are 18 dps players with verified parses above 4000 dps. That equates to more than 4000 threat per second. Without using taunt, there is absolutely no way any tank can generate more than 4000 threat per second. (Sadly, there isn't anyway to do tanking parses to prove this, so you'll just have to trust me). Now, if you add to this known condition of dps generating more threat than tanks, and then have a tank with inferior gear to dps (new tank in comms gear versus experienced dps in min/maxed gear), and there will be very few tanks with the skill level to overcome the inherent challenge being presented to them by the threat mechanics in this game.

I would make the assertion, that if the healing packs are not needed, and that no player healing of any kind is needed (including bubbles, defensive cooldowns, etc.), and that a tank is not needed to kill a boss, then it becomes a fact that the boss does not do enough damage to kill people in the group. If no one can die, is it really a boss fight? Or is it just a loot pinata. Might as well just stick the loot in a box that you walk up to and click on. Only difference would be the time it takes to do so.

This is a great question, so thank you for asking it. A below average dps that doesn't know a decent rotation doesn't cause a SM ops run to fail; they don't cause a flashpoint run to fail; they don't really cause any problems...they just make things take longer to accomplish. There simply are not below average dps on NiM operations teams that will ever see a true dps check. in contrast, a tank that cannot hold aggro will indeed cause an ops or flashpoint run to fail. They will be called a fail tank. They will have groups rage quite on them. And here's my point: they don't know why they are failing! Seriously, no MMO out there makes holding aggro as difficult as it is in SWTOR. NONE. Comparing tanking to dps in general, I would say every tank must be able to play their class better than every dps, to be considered average at either. Straight up. In SWTOR, tanking is simply harder. in almost every fight, tanks have more things to keep track of and more overall responsibilities that they need to maintain, for the team to be successful. I think we all understand that it is quite true that with a "bad tank" there is almost no way for the group to succeed. A tank that faces a boss toward the group, that constantly stands in stupid, that doesn't pick up the adds in a timely manner, that doesn't watch their "stacks" and swaps before they die, etc., is simply impossible to workaround. Outside NiM content, a DPS that fails can be worked around. You can rez at least once. Heck, you can finish the encounter with them dead (I can't count how many times my group has been relieved our melee dps simply die during HM Tyrans, so that they don't leave fire puddles on the tanks). Their dps makes things faster, but it's not a factor for success in 99.9% of the pve content in this game. I'll repeat my position: tanking is harder than it should be in SWTOR, and a significant reason it is harder than it should be, is that a standard tanking rotation does not generate enough threat to keep up with a standard dps rotation for a tank and dps of equivalent gear. Add gear imbalances to the mix, and the AVERAGE tank will struggle to maintain control during any fight.

This generated a bunch of interesting responses. Most of which, quite honestly, are not going to be of benefit to the AVERAGE tank, when it comes to controlling aggro. For example, of course I have main stat armorings in 3 of my armor pieces and my hilt. I know that's going to help me put out more dps, which equates to more threat (and FYI, gives me higher defensive mitigation as well). But more importantly, what AVERAGE tank would know that. And HOW would they know that, if they aren't deep, deep into the numbers. It's quite honestly counter-intuitive to think you should put DPS stuff on your tank to make you a better tank. Further, the responses here were not from average players, or better yet, below average players. (little known fact: more than 90% of the driving public thinks they are a better than average driver) Judging from the information most of you have shared, you either want a more challenging game, or you already known all the "tricks of the trade" and thus don't need this change. Good for you. But what do you propose to help the AVERAGE tank? Are you HAPPY with more and more tactical flashpoints? Because they are making me absolutely sick. And I don't think BW is anywhere near done rolling them out. Will we ever again see something like pre-nerf Lost Island? Sadly, I think the answer looks more and more like no... As I wrote: I know the tricks of the trade as well. But I've pugged with enough average tanks (and sadly, the below average), to know unquestionably, that these tricks of the trade are not common knowledge. Further, I do not believe that "taunt and threat drop on cooldown" should NEED be part of EVERY SINGLE player's rotation. But that's essentially the state of the game today. And thus, I think the game is actually broken. I was indirect in saying so, but I believe the best among us have all learned how to deal with this broken game, but it doesn't change my belief that it is, in fact, broken. Sure, broken games are more challenging to work around. But broken is still broken.