I just added some things up. I've been a sub since pre-launch in December 2011. I went through my account listings and, to my astonishment, I've spend something on the order of $4,000 on this game since launch between sub prices and cartel market (If my wife knew she'd demand a Nieman Marcus shopping spree right the hell now!) Further, I just did a /played across all 22 of my characters on Jedi Covenant and find I've spent 9908 hours playing this game, including over 4000 hours on my main toon (Hypur) alone. I have a lot invested personally in this game. This game got me through rough patches and boring patches and all sorts of patches. This is the place I spent time while recuperating from back surgery. Its where I spent time while I was putting the lovelywife through college and graduate school. Its a place where I continue to find new friends, rejoice in being around old friends, socialize and ***** and tease and whine and... You get the picture. Nerf Operatives. I am going to put the message out to our entire guild (I'm VP Hail Skroob) that I believe it is in our best interests to fold shop, put accounts on preferred, embargo the cartel market, and wait and hope and pray that the powers that be finally begin to understand that we expect better. No game is without flaws. Technology is difficult at the best of times (I'm an Senior Infrastructure Architect for a Forbes 100 global company so I know better than all those crying for scalps and wanting new developers) and end users can be frustrating and have unreasonable demands. But they also have reasonable demands. People spend time in here expecting things to work. People expect that if something is broken, it will get fixed in a timely manner. People expect value for their time/patience/dollar/investment. Right now they are not getting that return. There was an earlier comment in this thread about our guild sucking at PVP. We make no bones about the fact that we are a PVE guild. Some of us do PVP (Some are quite good at it). A minority of us enjoy the story and the content. The issue I have is that, no matter your focus, this game is broken for all of your end users. That digression is to point out the following: every aspect of this game is broken with the exception of the cartel market, and even that is horrible. PVE raids are broken, sometimes for months at a time, with mechanical issues, mechanics that exclude classes, gear drop problems, etc.. PVP has been broken forever with no new content, stun wars, balance fixes that lead to matches like the one I saw earlier that had 7 operatives on one huttball team resulting in a 6-0 2 minute match. The cartel market is nothing more than new makeup on old designs, repeated every 3 packs. And then we come to story. The focus on story. Chapters 1-9 were a great effort. Chapter 10 was an hour. One whole, entire, unsatisfying hour. The re-addition of HK55 took another 10 minutes. The great part was that it took 3 months to deliver that. I will guaran-damned-tee you it will not be one month per chapter from here on out. And then there is the breathless anticipation every time you say there is a major announcement, and people wonder and speculate and hope, only to come away from those announcements angry and confused and disappointed. I don't get your mindset, don't understand the lack of connection with your community. The apparent focus on income is great from a corporate viewpoint. I know you have shareholders to please, I know you have upper management giving direction that can be uncomfortable. I know you attempt to streamline your time to accomplish your goals. I also know that it is not working. You are keeping revenue up at the expense of user satisfaction. That is fundamentally unhealthy. Anyway, this post could literally go on for pages. I am going to be encouraging our players to go on preferred status, join us in WOW, and continue to enjoy each other's company. Is it perfect? No. Is it where we want to be? No. Were we driven there? Definitely.

I've tanked all the ops on all 3 tank types. The answers above are correct - guard is a situational issue. A great example I like to use is the Bulo fight - I tend to guard healers on there, not because of agro issues, but because adds tend to come out and focus them. If I can buy a couple extra seconds where the healers are taking less damage from the adds while I'm headed over to agro them, it makes the healers complain less and makes the encounter go more smoothly. Guard to me is situational. Normally I don't guard unless the encounter calls for it, or the mechanics demand it. When the Juggy AOE taunt did not work in Underlurker HM I would guard. I don't guard on most of the DF/DP encounters. YMMV.

Man, I do so love a real discussion and not the typical flame wars that usually ensue any controversy. I loved your response to my original post. I would agree with your sentiments about how you do have to eventually distance yourself from a particular customer based on circumstances. I've seen belligerent customers, plain dumb customers, customers with that angle designed to take advantage of the owner. I think what I would argue in return, though, is that Eric and the Bioware team are not being faced with the post-customer service aspect. They are, in my opinion, either willfully or negligently sticking their thumb in the eyes of the pre-order crowd over this refund thing. Personally, being a long time forum lurker I would vote negligence. Historically there has not been much evidence to suggest that longer term changes such as this one have come about with possible consequences understood - and most importantly articulated defensibly. In fact, I would continue to argue that the way this team operates is in an almost never ending cycle of change > damage control. Ironically, it seems that the Bioware team would be able to collect so much good will, and increased player support if they seemed to be able to look beyond the here and now when making these kinds of changes. An acknowledgement beyond the easy fix. This continues to amuse and baffle me. The answers are so obvious and yet, so tantalizingly just out of reach of these folks. I don't think they are bad people. I do think they lack some of the necessary foresight required of a true customer-centric approach to this game. By the way, occasional hyperbole is enjoyable. It's like the unnecessary exclamation point at the end of this sentence!

I promised myself I would not do this but... This is the kind of short sighted, tone deaf response we have sadly gotten used to. I'm an older guy. My entire adult work life has had to do with some form or other of customer service. There are two basic tenants of customer service that have been drilled into my head for as long as I can remember. The first tenant is that "Rule Number 1 - The customer is always right. Rule Number 2 - If the customer is wrong, refer to rule number 1." This one is so important that a man named Stew Leonard had it carved into a boulder and displayed in his flagship Connecticut grocery store. The second tenant is that once you get a paying customer, you do everything within your power to keep them as your paying customer. You don't crap on, lie to, take advantage of, take for granted, your faithful paying customers. It is too easy for a customer to take their dollars elsewhere. What Eric and his team has basically decided is that the faithful customers that pay their subs and preorder the new content are ok with being taken for granted. It was ok to release the expansion full of bugs. It was ok to have folks play through the buggy quests, missing boss loot drops, non-functional dead trees, rarely finishable final Revan fights. It is ok to gut the class systems in the name of streamlining just to make it easier for the developers, at the cost of player uniqueness and enjoyment. Wall bangers and and dot smashers and hybrids - well eff you. We have your money. It is not the fact that the loyal player base supports this game only to get crapped on with an "Oh well this is a better approach" and so those that payed millions to level toons are left with bad feelings and being made to feel unimportant. It is more of the principle that it is ok to screw over the most important folks this game has - namely the subscribers. I'm willing to bet its the subs that not only pay their monthly fee, but also pay the vast majority of dollars into the Cartel Coin system. Eric and team, I think it is in the best interests of goodwill and respect for your players that you retroactively refund training costs for early subscribers. I think it would send an important message that you are not taking those players for granted.

Man, what a typical peanut gallery response. We know the mechanic. It was the original knockback that was killing the DPS. The full health DPS mind you. We have been clearing this raid content for months now with multiple raid groups so the mechanics aren't foreign. I do so love it when the holier-than-thou crowd comes out pontificating away. Makes for amusing reading.

Now crafting Hazmat FoeStompers MK-3 Device 108 Srrength 93 Endurance 60 Accuracy Rating 76 Power Mail Hypir

Looking for someone to craft 2 x Advanced Insight Enhancement 27s please.

I don't have to play these changes on the PTS to understand the impact on my own gameplay. The changes to Overload and Electrocute are going to have a severe negative impact on the way people play those classes. I am a hybrid lightning/madness sorc, level 50, valor 85 so I'm not exactly new to the class. My spec is built around damage and utility, and these changes are going to be fundamental and negative. Specifically, the change from 30 meters to 10 meters for Electrocute is bad from a utility viewpoint. I use Electrocute as an interrupt, to take pressure off teammates, and the like. Being ranged DPS means being able to perform most of my actions AT RANGE. All of the talents that I use are at a 30 meter range now. And yet with the proposed change for me to use a primary utility talent I will have to run in, cast, then run back to keep out of melee range - both in PVE and PVP. This is not only a poor design choice on the designer's part, but it absolutely confirms to me that although they may know mechanically how a class is designed, the designers have no idea stylistically how these classes are played. Fundamentally, I don't need an instant self heal. I have plenty of heal capability already, plus in both PVE specifically and PVP generally I run with a healer. The self heal is superfluous. And the idea I will get the self heal while removing a primary talent's usability is, frankly, indefensible. The changes to Overload are also heavy handed. When a light armor character is getting mobbed in PVP you don't have the time to think, move, turn, Overload. You tend to react instantly, cast Overload (hopefully with Electric Bindings talented), then try to run away for a couple of seconds to get out of range. As it stands the proposed changes are making this character class even more of a pillar hugger. And frankly I don't care if I get a "moderate" self-heal every 30 seconds or so. I'm full aug'd war hero and I'll still get burned down before getting the chance to get through one rotation, much less last long enough to get my free "heal". Again and again I read through the forums looking at the problems players have with their classes, some really intelligently thought out solutions, only to see in the end the developers and designers do something to add to a classes inability to not only survive, but participate. I've watched the decimation of the Bounty Hunter Class and the Operative Class already. Sorcerers already went through this process, to an extent, once - and now it is happening again. If the developers want to come out and categorically state that this is going to be a game for warriors, then fine. Just say so. There is certainly that feeling throughout the forum community. I love this game. I've missed being on one day since it's launch. One. I can't stand seeing the path that it is taking where the developers and designers can't seem to get not only the technical, but stylistic, details right. I am certain that, in the end, like the healer nerf in 1.2 people will find ways around the limitations and shortcomings of poor design choices. My problem is, though, why spend the time sticking your finger in the dike over here while the levee is breaking over there. Like I said, just my two cents worth. Hell, I might actually look forward to the day when everyone rolls a marauder and abandons everything else. Then it will become rocket arena. At least the playing field will finally be level at that point.

1. How do you think your Sorcerer spec is perceived by other classes? I think other classes see us as easy targets in PVP. We're an easy kill, have little to no mobility, have little to no real utility outside of spamming AOE in Voidstar and pulling players in Huttball. We're more common in PVE environments where some builds bring more utility in set-piece, story-driven content. 2. How do you perceive your own spec? I rolled a sorc due to the early problems with marauders (my first toon). I've also got a bounty hunter and an operative (stabby-stabby) and I can say I enjoy playing the sorc the most as it suits my playstyle. I see a lot I still don't like with my character, like I can steady DPS all day long but have almost zero real burst, have limited to no survivability when it really counts, things of that nature. Those are offset by the fact that, to me, I have better utility than most characters. At my gear level I can off-heal effectively, do lots of sustained damage, things of that nature. I think my number one complaint overall is basic survivability in PVP. Followed by allowing us more "bursty" damage.