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.

I haven't ever hit those numbers yet, my best numbers are about 350K in civil war and huttball and 500K in voidstar, (I just hit battlemaster this weekend) but I'm not surprised it can be done when the stars align, you've got someone guarding and healing and the opposition isn't the greatest. Our class is very strong when played to it's strengths. I don't always get those numbers though, sometimes I end up spending the whole match defending, or stealth capping, or just harrassing people to delay a cap knowing I'm going to die, PVP is actually very dynamic in this game I enjoy the variety. I also have come to believe we're not as useless in huttball as is commonly perceived as DPS, yeah we don't have the leaps or pulls or the durability of some other classes, but a team doesn't need 8 ball carriers, it needs somebody to destroy the oppositions healers and quickly deal with anyone who's making themselves too useful to the opposing team, and occasionally throw some extra heals. (I spec into incisive action and survivors scars for both pvp and pve) We excel at that. Where our weaknesses really get frustrating is when you're in a bad pug and people aren't working together, but I think that's true of all the classes though maybe more for us since we can't really pursue the primary objective of the game as well on our own as other classes. I think when ranked warzones come along people are going to be surprised at the composition of the top teams, and the top huttball teams will have a scrapper/concealment or two. I use flyby quite a bit, it becomes much more useful when you have a healer because you'll spend a lot more time with resiliance capped. I almost never bother with it unless my bar is full.

Play what you like. nothing in current ops is difficult enough to make the difference an issue, and I think the difficulties with scrapper in ops are overstated. If you get knocked back or need to reposition you just use your 30m abilities while you close. In many encounters I seem to find myself at range just often enough that I need to refresh my bleed and/or regen some energy and often we have the perfect ability available for a target switch or ranged attack anyway...example foreman crusher, our tank-capable DPS/ off-tank AOE taunts the adds, I drop flyby on them and go right back to DPSing the boss, I never need to move. on bonethrasher I toss a grenade at the red add and a bleed if nobody is close, and then evaluate depending on relative positions of me, the add, the other players, and the boss. Nearly all encounters are better off if you take the time to stealth in and open properly so you don't pull aggro off your MT, and you have the option to open with a ranged attack like flyby. Scrappers just need to adapt tactics to the encounter, you can't constantly use your melee rotation, you have to think fast and use all your tools. We have tons of buttons for a reason.

It's been mentioned elsewhere and it's not my original idea but it's an extremely good one. If the goal here is to prevent the double opener I think that's fine but it will really hurt the classes gameplay if we can't switch targets because of it. Just make it so we can't use it on the same target for the cooldown period.

This is actually the hardest fight I've come across in ops as a scrapper, if you're on an assassin or Jugg, which is where the DPS should be, it's pretty tight if your gear matches the difficulty level you're playing on, but it is doable. My guild understands perfectly well how much of my DPS is tied to backblast, it's a ton if you think about it as it's one of our best damage abilities, only way to apply our best bleed and it's energy free, so it completely screws up our usual rotation. you have to watch your energy as it's really easy to get low trying to beat what you know is a tight timer without our usual free shot every 9 sec. That said, I've always made the timer even if I'm the last one, without using flyby, always figured it was too risky. If folks are getting away with using flyby it should be fairly easy to beat the encounter. My last run my GM Shadow took my usual assassin and put me on his marauder for the first time to see if that was better, I was the second one done and he didn't even get close, we all had to take our one hit to beat the timer, and he's geared to the hilt. So it's not really THAT bad, it just makes us look bad. I actually wonder how much of the "scrapper PVE DPS sucks" mentality in some guilds is related to ignorance of the difficulty with this encounter, I've never felt like my DPS was weak in PVE elsewhere, and this is the most visible DPS race between classes in the game.

I don't have any trouble pulling my weight in pve, perhaps scrapper is the weakest pve spec of them all (and perhaps not), but that means little when the content is quite easy anyway. And none of the talents mentioned have no pve utility, particularly survivors scars, which even if you never throw a self-heal or have to clutch heal in an emergency or throw an extra heal in during a frenzy phase still reduces your drain on the healers throughput by 9%. increased in-combat speed is useful in PVE too, the class lacks mobility and the game often calls for significant repositioning. The notion that the only talents useful to a dps are those that directly increase damage abilities is too narrow IMO. These abilities increase your DPS by keeping you in the fight, keeping you on the target, and reducing the load on your team in various ways.

Others have addressed leveling and given some good advice, the thing I want to help you out with is pvp. PVP is complicated, particularly for scoundrels. The main idea I want to leave you with is that as a scoundrel you always want to be in stealth, you can't always be but you always wish you were. You look for an opportunity to make a kill or cap an objective and you do so, at the edges of the battle...you kill healers, you sneak in and steal an objective, you emerge from stealth to interrupt an essential action by an enemy player at just the right moment, you throw a heal on the ball carrier as he passes you, or stun/kill the guy about to attack or stun him, or drop a freighter flyby into a mob of enemies zerging an objective (which incidentally can do upwards of 30K damage all by itself once you're geared).. Once you get used to the mechanics of scoundrel DPS, of opening up with shoot first from stealth with flechette round loaded, chaining damage attacks and stuns to quickly kill your target without giving him an opportunity to successfully fight back and then IMMEDIATELY reentering stealth to do so again, scoundrel is quite capable of topping the DPS chart, but that is not your goal, your goal is to win the game, and your class is actually quite good at facilitating that as part of a team. Topping charts is good for the ego but it doesn't decide matches. Unfortunately low-level pvp is typically more of a street brawl than a team sport, but the other thing I want to say about PVP as a scrapper that I think a lot of players, even players who consider themselves good, don't fully comprehend is that despite the apparent lone hunter vibe of the spec pvp is going to suck if you're not working as part of a team, and if you don't understand the capabilities and weaknesses of the other classes in the game. If you have a healer healing you, and a tank guarding you, and other people dpsing with you, and you do the scrapper thing and burst from stealth, exploit the weaknesses of your opponents and sieze opportunities to turn the tide of a match you can completely change the course of a warzone as a scrapper in a way no other class can, but you can only fill your role, and that role is not charging into a mellee and beating on everyone for six seconds at a time. And keep everything on your bars, there's lots of slots for abilities, I know there's a ton of buttons to push but you really do need them all to play the class to its potential, although your main rotation may only be half a dozen buttons you stll need all of them available, try to fully explore the utility of the abilities you're not using one at a time, understand it, memorize where you've bound it, so you don't have to hunt for it.

Why not fill empty slots when they do the changover? whether it's got a 58 or a 56 or whatever in it now we'll all have to pay for the mods to pull them out, so if folks were to pull mods out to get extras they'd have to pay for them and they'd only be getting the old mods anyway. That would give people the option to retain their mods they like or get the new ones as they wish.

I'm the only active l50 scoundrel on my server, I was the first to hit 50 Rep side and nobody has leveled up another since the nerf. I believe there are 2 operatives on the server, they're both alts. This class is dead, I love it but it's laughable the way the balancing is in this game. I had high hopes for something significant to happen this patch, I have a 50 pwrtech too and assassin and knight, so I think I'm fairly well informed on the current state of pvp balance. 1v1 we're balanced allright, in a team environment scoundrel/operative DPS sucks as it is. Unless things change there will be nobody playing the class and it won't matter anymore. On another note, my server is dying, there's rarely enough 50s on to get a pvp queue to pop, planets are empty, 5 people on fleet 20 hours out of the day, progression completely fubar because we can't get groups. I've been one who's defended this game from all the massive QQ over every little thing but something needs to be done about balance and population issues soon. I'm legacy level 28, I've got too much invested to start over on another server.

I still think many people are focused on the wrong things when trying to fix this spec, adding a buff to defense won't make the class better, it'll make it easier to play but it won't play like a scoundrel should. Same for overwhelming burst, we need burst to get the stealth mechanic working properly but they've made it clear we aren't going to have as much as it would take with the other mechanics as they are. What we need IMO, is shorter cooldowns on vanish, dodge, escape, interrupt and dirty kick, we need to be trickier to fix our problem in tight situations in PVP, not tankier. I do think a grapple that pulls us to the target would be a huge improvement for pvp and would fit the class, since the PVP scenarios they've created reward leaps and pulls so heavily, but only because they seem determined not to let us actually play as a dirty tricks stealth class should. I understand why they felt the need to nerf our burst, if they succeed in getting sustained damage balanced properly and give us these tools to improve our survivability I think the class would be excellent without causing the QQ that the alpha burst did.

I love the giggle, really need an audio cue for UH procs anyway, can't imagine what they're thinking on this one.