I am looking to roll a new toon which I will primarily be healing dungeons/raids with. The problem of course is that I cannot decide between the three. I know that they are all viable in raids even if they are not perfectly balanced so I am curious as to the specific playstyles and strengths/weaknesses of each.

What matchmaking? When I'm on a team where all of my allies have 5 mastered ships and my enemies are all F2P with only 2 ships and almost no upgrades, where is the matchmaking? BioWare needs to make up their minds. Either we need real matchmaking or we need to be allowed to change our setup pre-game.

They are called Centurion Force-Master's Vestments or Centurion Force-Mystic's Vestments and they do not have a valor requirement. Beware that applying a dye to the robes will not change the color of the outer robe. Only the base robe underneath and the hood will change colors. The outer robe will forever be that brownish color.

It has long been known that once the Force was discovered, all scientists and engineers in the galaxy went on strike, or perhaps were converted into Jedi/Sith . According to the timeline the Force was discovered some 36,000 years before the time of the movies, and technology really hasn't changed since then aside from more streamlined lightsabers. Just look at the Millenium Falcon vs Ebon Hawke...yep that's 3000 years of scientific progress right there...

I agree with the need for choice. You should not be able to build your scout to be able to be everywhere at once and be able to render GS/Mines/Turrets ineffective at the same time. That being said, we definitely need a loadout screen because Domination and Deathmatch require very different tactics, and thus very different ship components. Building a scout to optimize on Domination strategies leaves it more vulnerable (not useless, but not as good as it could be) in Deathmatches and vice-versa. Being able to change our loadout before the mission starts would be amazing. We are allowed to switch between entirely different ships during the game, so why are we not allowed to switch out individual components before the game?

Why not make GSF queues cross-server? That would bring together everyone queuing up and reduce queue times. The increase in queues would also allow a proper matchmaking system to help with the facerolling of premades vs newbies. Normally I do not like cross-server queues because they tend to destroy communities by introducing a whole new level of anonymity. However right now the GSF queues are so small that combining the queuing pool with cross-server queues would not hurt the community nearly as much as a cross-server LFG queue would.

It would be cool to have new advanced classes. I would really like to see an advanced class that could spec for melee DPS or for ranged DPS. And no I don't mean like the current Madness/Balance Sins/Shadows. I mean a class where you can be a pure ranged DPS or a pure melee DPS depending on your tree. It wouldn't be hard, just make all the abilities start off as melee and then put a talent in one of the trees that increases the range of that tree's primary abilities to 30m (like the Transmission passive for the Sorc). Or perhaps an advanced class that can spec into healing or tanking. That idea would be difficult to implement properly though, because a class that can tank, heal, and DPS would need it's own special niche or people would whine that it is too versatile. Aside from more advanced classes, a new tree or expanded trees for the existing classes would be cool, but I would still rather a new advanced class. Regardless, a whole new class is definitely not going to happen; too much time/money would have to be spent on a brand new storyline, brand new companions, and brand new voice acting for the class and all of its companions. Plus there really are not any class archetypes left. There are plenty of advanced class archetypes left, but as far as the overall classes go, we pretty much have everything covered.

As far as combat goes there is no difference between the two. The visuals of the Sorc give it a very slight disadvantage in PvP but that's about it. In OPs there is no difference at all. Having played my first toon as a Sage and bringing him to 55 and then creating a Sorc, I have to say I enjoy the Sorc a lot more. In my opinion the SI storyline is better than the JC one and the Sorc visuals are much prettier, especially since Project was changed to spawn the projectile right next to the enemy as opposed to right next to the player. My vote is Sorc.

I agree. I would personally rather see evasion reduced or removed, but in the meantime we definitely need an indicator to tell us when our shots do not connect due to RNG. The ground game has these indicators, I don't know why GS wouldn't. Unlike changes to evasion, adding flytext for evades/misses would be very easy to add to the game.

So I know the class standings can change dramatically in a single patch (and there's most likely a patch coming next week), but I'm curious as to the current standing of DPS classes. Assuming equally skilled players, gear, etc., which classes generally put out the highest DPS on single target raid bosses? Also how much do the classes differ from each other on DPS? Are they all pretty balanced or do some classes fall significantly behind? More specifically, my old toon was an Assassin and I'd like to know how viable they are in hardcore endgame content. I've seen a lot of posts about how Sin DPS is low right now. Is that true or is that just classic QQ? Thanks in advance!

This. The default ranking should be based on number of defends or assaults, not kills or damage done or medals earned. Especially with F2P access coming soon, it would be so nice to have more people care about actual objectives rather than their own personal score.

As elitist as it sounds, your issues really are almost 100% "learn to play" problems and have very little to do with the actual game. Controls in GS are very similar to most space sims and there is nothing inherently unresponsive about them. All you have to do is spend some time in the tutorial or read dulfy's guide and with a bit of practice you'll do fine. Next time though, try to actually learn a system before you start blaming it for your downfalls.

Normally I would agree with you in that the size difference is a bit off. However that argument is already hypocritical because the GS sizes are already unimmersive when you really think about it. Every ship brings a crew of five including yourself. Do you really mean to tell me that five people who are responsible for things like engineering, tactics, shields, and offenses can fit in that tiny little cockpit on the Blackbolt? The F-T6 and F-T2 are the same, how do you fit five people who have very different jobs into that tiny bit of space? That would mean those cockpits would have to be at minimum three to four times the size of an average jet fighter, and that would mean that the rest of the ship is not that much smaller than the class ships, which also have a crew of around five. All in all BW already showed that they are willing to bend the size rules, so it wouldn't be a big stretch to make the class ships slightly smaller than they actually would be when in GS, thus bringing them roughly in line with the size of all the other ships. Also I'm not really sure what you mean by the model ships. If you are trying to say that the GS ships use models of the same size as the pets (how would you even know that?) then that is completely irrelevant for two reasons . Firstly it is very easy to scale models like that without losing details, and secondly there are already models of the class ships that can be used.

I'm sure this has been suggested before but I couldn't find any similar posts so here it is: It would be cool if we could use our own class ships in GS. In order to maintain balance between ships I would suggest these be applied only as a cosmetic model, and maybe even restrict which ships they can be applied to (for example the Fury would be a cosmetic for SF ships, Phantom a cosmetic for Scouts, etc). It would be nice to be able to use our class ships outside of those incredibly boring rail-shooter space missions. If people worry about not being able to determine what type of ship they are facing and thus not knowing which strategy to use against them then BW could just make nameplates for the ship you have targeted easier to see. That's just my two cents, what do you guys think?

Spoken like someone who only vaguely knows what he's doing. First of all, don't use MOX for gathering information about specs and priority-rotations. It simply does not offer enough information to be useful. When theorycrafting use a more powerful parser like ACT. MOX should really only be used during OPs/FPs so you can share your parses with your raid members. Second, if you had used ACT you would have seen that Shadow Strike is our second hardest hitting ability behind Spinning Strike. When it crits Shadow Strike can do even more damage than a Spinning Strike crit, making it our hardest hitting crit. Your little priority that you wrote is not based on DPS, DPCT, or DPF. It is based mostly on ability count with a small influence from ability damage, which is not at all what the OP was referring to and is not nearly as useful as other representations of data. Shadow Strike can easily be used during a fight through the usage of: Low Slash (4s Incapacitate of 15s CD) Force Stun (4s Stun on 60s CD) Project (3s Stun on Standard/Weak enemies) As Leafy_Bug said you should never use Shadow Strike without the Find Weakness buff. This means you should never open with Shadow Strike. You should also never be using Project without 2 stacks of Circling Shadows. In general your priority-rotation is as follows: Spinning Strike - Target < 30% Shadow Strike - Find Weakness (use a CC ability to get behind target) Force Breach Project - 2 stacks Circling Shadows Clairvoyant Strike Saber Strike Also as said above, using Nadia as Infil is not a very good choice until you are in full endgame gear. Until then Tharan is a much more efficient companion choice.

If you use ACT (Advanced Combat Tracker) you can set the minimum out-of-combat time before the parser creates a new encounter. Unfortunately ACT does not allow you to connect to other raid members, so you will not be able to see raid DPS and they will not be able to see yours. Pretty sure you can still upload to MrRobot with ACT though. P.S. If you use ACT, make sure to download both the program itself as well as the SWTOR plugin.

Actually Hizoka has a very valid point. The only time a 10 second parse would be useful information is in 1v1 PvP. In Flashpoints, Operations, and anything greater than 1v1 PvP no one cares about what would happen if you had all your CDs up and did burst for 10 seconds (Yes that's right; in PvP if you are going up against any competent players, especially if they have a healer with them, the fight is going to last longer than 10 seconds). Anyone can do massive damage over a very short period of time, there is nothing at all impressive about that. True skill is shown over long periods of time. This is because as a fight goes on you have more opportunities to make mistakes. Also, doing big numbers on a training dummy shows next to nothing about your skill. When you are standing in one place staring at your actionbars anyone can do big numbers. True skill shows during high-mechanic boss fights and/or evenly matched PvP encounters. Your damage over 10 seconds relies on nothing more than gear and class. Skill has absolutely no impact here. If you screw up your priority rotation after just 10 seconds (that's 6-9 abilities) then there is something seriously wrong with you. This thread is fine for determining which spec is the best at ganking players in PvP, but otherwise there is no point to this discussion.

Except that all of the abilities shown are Shadow abilities...

The only reason I can think of for this is in a PvP setting. Kinetic Combat in PvP already has plenty of survivability from Combat Tech, Kinetic Ward, Harnessed Shadows, and all the passives, so the tanking gear becomes pretty redundant. PvP tanking is not about sitting there letting enemies wail on you while your friends finish them off. Without aggro tables and with the way taunts work in PvP you don't take nearly as much direct damage as you do in raid environments. Because of this, the term "A good offense is the best defense" really makes itself heard, even for tanks. That is most likely why people recommend Stalker gear. Aside from a PvP scenario, I can think of no reason to use DPS gear as a tank.

This is the reason it's the most reliable for damage and healing numbers. Had the OP posted a screenshot of doing 600k damage in Huttball, I would have been disappointed because to get those numbers he would have to pretty much completely ignore the objectives of the game and thus he would have most likely been a detriment to his team. But with Voidstar doing objectives pretty much means melting face and little else (assuming you aren't leaving a door unguarded of course) so the numbers for healing and DPS are most accurate here. Of course Voidstar is notorious for being AoE friendly, and Sages are one of (if not the) most powerful AoE damagers in the game. So when I say Voidstar has the "most accurate" numbers, this of course needs to be taken with a grain of salt.

If you mean this then no, you cannot.

Clearly! We are just so incredibly under-powered that we could probably do more damage by spamming Double Strike! In all seriousness though, if that's you in the SS then nicely done. And if it isn't you then well done mysterious Twi'lek Sage! You gone done us proud.

I quite agree with you there, going full healing is pretty inefficient for just straight leveling. And even if you plan on doing FP's while questing you will still find very little use for the full healing build.

I couldn't agree more. It really is a funny animation that adds just that little bit of levity to raids and PvP. I'll be sad when/if they ever fix this.

100% True. And for those that don't care about lore and still want pants, guess what? You still get pants! So stop whining.