They may not be intending to add misery and frustration, but they aren't going out of their way to avoid doing that, either. The only stated justification was to bring Slicing "into balance". No details on exactly why it was so out of balance that it needed a 70% hit. No clarifying statement of what Slicing is supposed to be. No word on whether this was based on number-crunching or in response to whining. In short, we have only their actions to judge their intent, because they are so close-mouthed about everything. And when in the first month they slash a skill by 70% it is hard to be generous in characterizing their attitude.

I agree with that assessment, but you do realize, don't you, that enough people repeating this will just ensure that those skills are soon nerfed to the point they are no longer so much better. Perish the thought that they might actually beef up the other skills to make them better; it's so much easier and lazier to just smash the few good ones.

The OP was at best a joke or at worst a troll post intending to line up the next nerf target. Anything that stands out as an excellent skill will be hammered despite it being available to everyone. The only logic that would fit that is an overwhelming concern that all choices in the game be equally viable. Except, of course, whatever choice just got nerfed.

With Slicing, there are missions that go for credit boxes and there are missions that go for other items. If a credit mission does not return a profit (assuming the crew member does not fail the mission), then there is no point in having such a mission. We have a choice of which type of mission to run. By making one of those choices so much worse than it was, they are implicating their own apparent error in giving us that option in the first place.

I like that. It's quite similar to what I'm thinking about, except I took Exsanguinate instead of Electric Bindings while pushing to Chain Lightning, and I'd do without Force Bending in favor of (probably) Haunted Dreams. I also skipped Oppressing Force because CCing two normals is something I've never felt much need for, although any lowering of Electrocute's cooldown is great. I'm not as high on Wrath as some seem to be. I took Lightning Strike off my bar so the only cast-time skill it really applies to is Chain Lightning (and maybe Corruption?). But I guess it's as worthy of a point as other alternatives.

Since most people seem to be saying crafting other than Biochem is worthless (with a few excpetions like Cybertech), then odds are Biochem will be next on the nerfing block. Instead of aiming for a whole set of excellent crafting skills, they seem to be intent on diminishing any that approach excellence so we are left with a whole set of lackluster (at best) crafting skills. This perception would have been greatly altered had they made a more modest adjustment to Slicing instead of the 70% gouging. To be so heavy-handed implies that they care more about something being potentially better than about everything being at least good.

And that right there is why I will be seriously evaluating whether I will cancel my subscription when my 30-day free period nears the end. I'm not eager to commit to yet another MMO that instead of enhancing fun as time goes by chooses instead to whack things that people have invested in. The game is fun, but it won't be so fun in a year's time if half a dozen enjoyable things are nerfed as hard as Slicing just was. How could they have been so incompetent as to make Slicing so supposedly out of proportion that it demanded such a heavy-handed nerf?

I'm thinking of going for three 11-point skills: Chain Lightning (already have), Madness (working toward), Resurgence. Then I'll fill in with whatever looks most useful; maybe Death Field, Electric Bindings, Haunted Dreams, Lightning Barrier. That seems viable since I'd be well-rounded true hybrid. I wouldn't be a great healer or a great damager but I should be able to heal most non-raids and solo very well. I don't like the sacrifices I have to make to go for a 31-point skill in any of the trees.

Another minor issue - I have to disable showing Sith corruption every time I log in now. The setting is not sticking like it used to. I've already bugged it in-game. I'll echo the frustration at Khem's enormous hit box that causes me to waste time moving the camera every time I want to harvest or activate or talk to an NPC. It's gotten to the point that I now try to race to an object as soon as combat ends, hoping to click on it before Khem can show up and take up almost my entire clickable screen area.

At 30 I still use my lightsaber when I'm in close range and in-between cooldowns. Once I get Madness (removes cooldown on Force Lightning), I'll probably stop using my saber. I'd have Madness already but I decided to get Chain Lightning first to give me an AoE option for packs.

Yes, and I'm getting sick of that. I've seen that same stupid tactic over and over in MMO after MMO. I'm about to give up on MMOs entirely because of it. Why can't games make you feel more powerful over time without feeling the need to keep whacking you down every few months? I don't get that punishment in single player games, and I see no need for it to happen in multiplayer games yet it does every time. I was hoping this one might be an exception and find a better logic, but alas no.

Exactly. If a skill is working too well, it must be imbalanced and hence in need of a nerf. That's the simplistic logic Bioware seems stuck in. They can't seem to grasp that the bigger issue was the lacking quality in other crafting skills and that they should have been bolstered rather than hammering the one that was actually doing its job by making money (just like the job of Cybertech is to make mods). I'm so sick of this MMO tactic - nerfing the best things to please whiners instead of boosting the rest so everyone has more fun instead of just increasing the overall frustration level.

On average it seems to be netting me a small profit (skill is mid 300s), but I pick and choose which missions to run (only Rich and up). I get losses on about half my missions; not big losses, but enough to make me grumble. Fortunately, I still get enough crits that in the long run I eke out a slim margin. My overall returns are just enough to convince me to keep Slicing for now, but I feel the nerf was easily two or three times as harsh as it should have been for the sake of balance while still maintaining the full seeming intent of the skill. If it can't make you a profit, there's no point in it existing.

I know what the OP means. This quickness to nerf something so harshly troubles me because who knows what they'll target next. It would have been much less jarring if they'd made a minor tweak. Now we're left to wonder whether some aspect of our class or the game that we've come to rely on and enjoy will be smashed into frustrating impotence.

Starting out, I placed points to reduce the heal cast time (Dark Mending) so I could heal Khem better and be an okay group healer early on, increase my base Force (Reserves), and lower Force costs (Electric Induction). After that, I had two good options: work toward Chain Lightning in the Lightning tree or work toward Madness in the Madness tree to remove the cooldown from Force Lightning. One way gives you an AoE to use against weak/standard groups, the other makes a great filler out of an already good skill.

Many people spend considerable time in real life worrying about making ends meet in their finances. When they play a game they don't want to have to do that. How hard is that to understand? Games are for fun, to escape the frustration of whatever else is going on outside the game, to see achievement on a scale not ordinarily possible. If they find a way to get extra in-game money and use it, why punish them or denigrate them? If they spend it, it helps the economy; if they don't, it has no impact.

I'd say it is barely profitable now. Half the time (skill in low 300's now) missions return slightly less than they cost, half the time slightly more, but maybe one out of ten will give me a good return almost like what most missions did before the nerf. This nerf bothers me not so much in-and-of itself but because it shows BW will be quick to hammer nerf things that are actually useful and worthwhile. Meanwhile, they ignore all the people complaining about how the other crafting skills do not flourish because of the competing quality of drop and rewards. Too many MMOs drop the nerf hammer on what may be the single or one of the few bright spots in a dark blotch instead of fixing the bigger issue.

If they're going to listen to whiners this much, I may have to cancel my subscription. This bodes ill for the future. They should have beefed up the other crafting skills instead of nerfing one. That is a stupid mistake all MMOs seem to make.

How do you make a disabled companion ability stay disabled? I keep disabling my companion's AoE ability yet after he's resummoned it's back on, which is very frustrating. Such settings should be remembered. Is this a bug or working as intended?

You have a valid general point, but my years of IT work allow me to comment with some awareness even if I don't know the details of their infrastructure. Having both programmed web applications and managed hundreds of servers, I know some of what is possible. I do take your point about how the ability to effectively troubleshoot can factor into design. I just can't believe that there isn't a better way to distribute players among servers without causing most of them to wait in queues for extended periods.

They did raise caps and alleviate much of the queue problem. However, I still maintain they could have taken a much smarter route and avoided queues altogether by locking server and providing a mechanism for people to apply for access to servers if they had a guild or friends there. Those people would be a small minority of the total player base, so having them face a minor inconvenience in the form of some red tape would have been far better than the vast majority of players facing the major queue debacle. Like most past MMOs, though, they took the easier route instead of applying more brain power.

Some of the names I see in this thread break the naming rules Bioware made clear in writing (don't have the link handy). Are they not even enforcing their stated rules? As I recall, those rules were pretty comprehensive and would not allow "ladygaga" or "solo" as names, for instance. No pop culture names, no Star Wars names or variations thereof.

In other parts of this thread and in other threads I've added that they should have a procedure to apply to join an old server, maybe or maybe not with an invitation from a player already there.

Exactly. This is obviously what they're doing. But that is the easy route instead of the smart route. They had plenty of time to make a way to lock new character creation for new players on older servers.

They lowered caps on servers to push new people to new servers, but that inconveniences all the people with established characters on that server. The only reason to do that is because it's the easy thing to do. The smart thing would have been to lock the server to those without established characters except by special request/invitation. That would have put new people on new servers without the massive inconvenience to previous players. Surely this situation was foreseeable to anyone with half a brain, especially if their job is making an MMO game. With all this time for development why not design a smart route instead of falling back on the easy route that others had in the past. I don't care if it is your first MMO, this problem is so obvious that even people that aren't in the IT industry could have predicted it.