Sure. My little kids like to goof around on the starter planets, I actually think it's good for them, they're reading, following directions, typing, using a map, solving problems, and learning that people will screw them over if they let them. All important lessons for a 6 Y/O.

1. You can buy the l50 version for basic coms on the fleet near the Makeb mods vendor. The L55 set most folks are talking about comes from L55 ops. 2. Don't see many people running old ops on my server outside of guild events, it's too easy to gear solo until 60. They really should tweak the rewards to keep 50-55 content populated.

I'm going to say 100 hours if you really push. 200 if you take your time. It took me 9 RL days/ 78 hours to get to 55 w/o any double-XP buffs in 2.0, and SoR goes fast. Way better to take it easy and enjoy it though, pick a class (or at most, two) and stick with them. alt-itis will burn you out before you see everything.

The problem is nobody is willing to invest the resources necessary to have an MMO ready to compete in the marketplace at launch. SWTOR needed another year's development time and another beta cycle prior to launch and decent server population management, if it had gotten those things the revenues would have been there to retain staff post-launch. Same thing happened to ESO.

They're abundant enough there isn't much point in saving them up IMO, I've ended up with capped characters who had several of them that way. What I do is finish out a quest hub and do all my upgrading/crafting/inventory stuff before turning in all the quests, use the bonus item just before turning them all in, and then move on to the next area, get as much XP out of them as possible. Also log out whenever one is active and you're not doing anything.

What do you mean you type in your name? Just open the GTN, choose the categories you want and press search.

This game's problems all stem from needing another year's development before launch and not reacting fast enough to server pop issues the first year. They lost too much talent too early and didn't have enough elder game and testing done before they did. I don't think they have the budget or staff to fix it and at this point the suits are just focused on milking as much cash as they can from the cartel market. It's a shame, I love the game, but it is what it is, the whole industry seems to keep making the same mistake too, not investing enough time into big releases before launch. The game is actually quite good now, if it had launched in its current condition it would have been a huge success and the bugs/issues would have been easily resolved, but the playerbase isn't there now to support development. I agree with a lot of your points, there's a ton of great content in the game that just isn't accessible or rewarding to play anymore, it would be great if they made solo and HM versions of all the FPs and scaled the old ops up too.

I think maybe the best thing for you to do is respec into a DPS tree, google the damage rotation for it and then go do missions on Makeb and Oricon and CZ until you feel comfortable with it and you have all 156 rated DPS gear, then que for group stuff and follow the other DPS's lead for a bit. Tanking isn't all that hard but it's a leadership role, you determine how everything happens, not for everyone. If you want to tank read up on tanking and watch videos of the fights before you que so you'll know what to do.

Low-level gameplay isn't a very good indicator for class balance. I'm more concerned about end-game sustained dps being in the ballpark. What I noticed about class quest bosses in general and the smuggler ones in particular is they seem to be designed to require you to use a particular tactic or ability. The lightspring is an obvious example of this, that fight is basically a check to see if you know where your interrupt is. This is actually good game design, a level 50 player should understand his class. I'd actually prefer more of that kind of thing because most fresh 50s do not. It's a lot more work to get to par for dps on a scoundrel, without more data I can't tell whether there's any reward for all that work and I understand why people think it isn't worth it, particularly at low levels compared to say trooper which is so much easier to get acceptable results from, particularly for clickers. OTOH I've seen a TON of people basing their assertion that scrapper DPS sucks on very bad indicators like speed on the council fight or a supposed enormous downtime disadvantage vs other classes that is often eliminated by appropriate tactics or offset by the burst potential or necessary energy management FOB globals that are in the rotation anyway. With other classes also getting adjusted the only thing that really worries me about the patchnotes is balance vs darkness assassins and marauders, primarily in pvp. Although I am a bit disappointed in the direction things are going, I really can't take any issue with the answer given to the question. The really lame thing about that particular Q&A exchange is that that's the question they chose to answer, rather than one that more directly addresses the concerns we have about the class.

Scoundrels are a lot stronger than most people think IMO. Doing good PVE damage at endgame requires using ranged abilities, mellee abilities, and cover abilities at the right times, and positioning carefully, it's difficult and incredibly fun. I agree at l32 the nerfs have little or nothing to do with the difficulties you're having. You have a huge toolset as a scoundrel, you need to use them all to play the class well. I have nearly a month /played on my scoundrel and only now do I really feel like I understand all the abilities and how to utilize them, my guess is there's abilities you're not using or not using to their potential if you're having trouble with leveling content. You need to CC whenever you can, interrupt whenever you can, and when all else fails use your root and kite. Companions don't matter that much really, the tanks work well but leveling with a tank can be tedious. Guss actually works fine with a scrapper, his damage isn't too bad and he has a CC that lets you get in extra backblasts, with the stuns/CCs we have available you shouldn't miss too many BB cooldowns running with Guss. Risha does a ton of DPS and she works great with a scrapper because nothing lives long enough to do much damage to you. What matters is that you gear your chosen companion up and use the right tactics for the duo you've chosen. After trying everything I've settled on a 5/31/5 build with incisive action and survivors scars and taking utility over raw DPS, it's not an optimal max-dps build but that really doesn't matter, I still do top dps in my PVE group and in WZs and enrage timers aren't really that tight in this game. The reason you're not making the timers if you're geared properly isn't that you're not bringing enough DPS, it's much more likely your tactics are sub-optimal. While leveling, incisive action makes a huge difference when you're alternating between dps and throwing a heal to your companion. As a scrapper you really can't just spam heals on your tank, or ignore healing and charge in and DPS, you need to get good at doing both as appropriate, use stuns to get enough time to throw a heal, manage and bounce aggro, it's all about tactics. I have my concerns regarding balance as well, don't get me wrong some of what's happening in 1.2 seems very contrary to what I see in-game, particularly regarding scoundrel adjustments compared to tankassins and marauders, but don't take the QQ on the forums too seriously, the sky isn't falling and our class does not suck, it's just a very high skill cap, you have to work harder than the commando does. I have a powertech, assassin, guardian, and commando as well, all of them are easier to play at an acceptable level, but it's scoundrel I main.

Cross server isn't going to solve the problem either, the difference in progression speed, economy and so on between the low-pop servers and the higher pop servers are going to make it extremely difficult for low-pop server teams to compete. This game needed transfers/server mergers months ago. There are no new lowbies whatsoever on my server, just a few alts here and there from those of us with too much invested in legacy to bail, we also are now down to one significant guild on each faction and the empire guild officers are all playing on fatman atm, we had two guilds running multiple ops groups republic side in Feb. and now we're having trouble filling a single ops group even after merging guilds. This seems to be true for the majority of the current servers, even a tenfold increase in server pop wouldn't really make the world feel populated outside the fleet. It's universally felt that BW is ruining this game by not doing something about pop out of financial concerns, how it will look, on my server and people are leaving which makes the situation worse. I still haven't seen all the FPs because it's impossible to get groups and I'm legacy level 29. Releasing 1.2 isn't going to fix the pop problem BW, transfers/mergers have to come soon. BTW, with all the significant balance changes, nerfs, and buffs to classes coming in 1.2 this would be an excellent time to implement the one-time AC switch you talked about pre-release, make us retrain AC skills so it carries a cost, it will reduce the QQ and alleviate some of the role imbalance issues we're getting on low-pop servers as well.

I really like the idea of making it crit automatically if used from stealth, with maybe a little bonus on top. It wouldn't be an easy thing to pull off because you'd need to maintain an UH to do it but it would give us a useful stealth mechanic as healers. I should probably use it more than I do as sawbones as the thing I like least about the class is how far behind the action I get when reactionary healing with UM. I use it all the time as scrapper, I take incisive action and survivors scars, gives me a lot more survivability, much stronger self-heals and a lot more capability to clutch heal when the raid healer is mind-trapped, the tank is out of cooldowns facing a frenzy phase or the ball carrier isn't quite going to make it to the goal line.

Three Amigos.

I hope it isn't that bad. I hear a lot about how concealment/scrapper is way behind on sustained DPS in PVE but that hasn't been my experience, when I play well I think I do more damage that anyone else in my group, I often top charts in WZs too. I hear we have no utility but that hasn't been my experience either, I've even come to believe we play a crucial role in huttball. Mobility issues in PVE can be mitigated by using the right tactics. We're a class with a high skill cap, they told us as much, the question is if there's going to be a reward for the effort, and right now it seems there isn't....we seem to be way behind our chief competition for mellee spots, and another high skill cap class, the mara/sent. If it turns out when we finally get parses on normalized logs with equivelent gear and all that we're way behind on DPS then I'll be really upset if it isn't addressed, right now I'm worried, but I think the QQ may be a bit over the top. The nerfs aren't that bad IMO, unless you just happen to use the build and playstyle that gets hit the hardest. There are viable builds that actually use none of the tree talents getting nerfed, I'm not nearly as worried about that because I've always felt point starved, there are other talents I'd like to have in their place. It seems to be an overall nerf to our damage but if it is I believe it could be completely reversed, and the class changes would completely make sense, by increasing the proc chance on collateral strike/flying fists. 100% rate on flying fists would make everything they've done make sense IMO, total gamechanger. So if it turns out we're actually as bad off as many fear there's a really simple fix for it that doesn't require redesigning the entire tree yet again. I think they never got flechette right, it was completely changed from how it was throughout beta right before launch and they obviously weren't happy with it, the class is fun and so long as it's competitive in output it will be fine. I just need to see hard evidence that it is.

I'm surprised there isn't a longer thread and better theorycraft on this topic. All players have 5% base defense, so it's usually worthwhile to shoot for 5% accuracy bonus so our tech accuracy will always hit anyone but a tank, particularly since there's so much accuracy on our top end gear. That's three 140 level peices. I'm very interested in where the crossover point for DR on crit/surge is vs power, my sense is it's somewhere in the 250-300 range for both. UM gets down to 1.8 sec with only 2 peices of alacrity? I'm surprised by that. I've never really tested alacrity as it seems to be the weakest stat, I thought our healing throughput is energy capped and I play primarily scrapper, but I off-heal a lot so it would be very useful to get my burst healing output up.