I loved the Sith troopers in KotOR. It would be great to see that style offered as Cartel Market adaptive armor.

The random name generator currently generates random names, but does not eliminate unavailable names from its selection. On my past two characters I had to roll five or six random names before I came across one that was available. Randomly suggesting unavailable options is useless.

Does Paul get a shield? That makes all the difference. Also if it's Paul from the movies, who can shout and make people's internal organs rupture, it could get kind of rough. Not only that, his reflexes are enhanced through thousands of years of breeding and Cymek engineering. It's not a Jedi's short-term prescience, perhaps, but it could well mean that thought would translate into movement faster, which could make all the difference. It could be a very close fight. Really though, I'd think Paul would be squared off with Vader, and Luke against Leto II. It's a less entertaining challenge though, since Leto II would spell an unpleasant and unavoidable end for the last of the Jedi.

I don't recall the NPC at the end of Act 3 clearly enough to make specific analysis of his features, but since it's relevant generally, I thought I'd note that I played out a Sith Pureblood character in the game who started with orange skin and no face tendrils. I went purely with dark side options and by Dark Side level V, the character's species was nearly indistinguishable from human. It's entirely possible that, thanks to Dark Side corruption, the Emperor might have lost the signature hue of his skin that would have made him more obviously pure Sith.

This strikes me as a flaw in game design, although I suppose it could be chalked up to people liking to play this way. Personally, I just want to get into a game and play... if I have to possess Jedi-like prescience to accomplish a task in game, then I tend to find it irritating. I spent decades in school, study things all the time for work, and I've no interest in focusing that sort of non-game attention on a game. It's not fun. I like the idea of multi-player missions, and will enjoy the occasional heroic, but this sort of nonsense is why I tend to avoid FPs in general. When I did PUGs before, on several occasions the group would insist on these bizarre circuitous routes to avoid any of the boss fights, and then be upset at me for not already having the gear that comes from those boss fights. When I explained that, the answer was inevitably, "Why aren't you in a guild?" Thus, it's become mostly a single-player game for me.

I'm not sure those guys are heroic, but they're definitely level 40-ish bonus quest guys around the dam. They're pretty easy to circumnavigate though.

Very true, but unfortunately also beside the point. Double checking ye ol' wiki, there are indeed various councils for various purposes, but in order to become a Jedi Knight, one must finish the trials, and alas, their own council does the High Council keep on who is ready to take the trials. Thus it really is a body of only twelve that makes the final determination on each prospectus. They're busy, so I doubt they're reviewing thousands of those a year, although I guess it's theoretically possible. Given that they are also the principle governing body of the order, it seems really unlikely they are reviewing millions of candidates a year. I mean, they have magic powers and all, but with a million candidates per year that would mean the council administers Jedi trials to a different candidate roughly every thirty seconds without pause! Which is not to say there aren't entire planets of force sensitives, but sensitivity alone does not a Jedi make.

This is why I'm talking about scale! Earth has roughly six billion people. Coruscant alone likely has a hundred times that, given the density of occupation on that world. Places like Corellia and other core worlds are similar, even though various fiefdoms like Alderaan and Belsavis are might only be in the lower billions. There are dozens of worlds referenced within the game, and hundreds of Senators from worlds of varying populations. Supposing each of them only represents an average of a billion people, there are still hundreds shown in the Senate chamber, which makes over a quadrillion people. Harvard has about 2000 students out of 6 billion people. That means Coruscant's equivalent alone should be boasting two hundred thousand students. Not graduates, mind you, just currently enrolled students. How many Jedi and Jedi-ish do you suppose there are in the galaxy? If there are thousands of Jedi students, they are exclusive beyond any institution we have on Earth, since if there are only thousands of Jedi students, to scale that would be an organization that admits less than one person here on Earth. Let's say there are tens of thousands of Jedi and Jedi-ish students... across quadrillions, or possibly quintillions of people? Still a fraction of a person in Earth equivalent exclusivity. So you're looking at there being hundreds of thousands of Jedi padawans at any given time. Imagine even half go on to be Jedi; you'd have an army of nothing on the field but glowsticks. That seems an insurmountable power beyond anything ever shown in Star Wars, but even if they had that, it would still just be dipping near the level of exclusivity of Earth's finest institutions. If it's a poor analogy, it's because there exists nothing on Earth that can approach that scale of limited candidate selection. In Earth equivalencies of scale, that's less than one person being required to forego romance. They're competing to be burdened with it! They're abandoning all worldly possessions and hopes of a normal life in the hope of being able to have the Jedi council (apparently a group of less than a dozen people!) decide they are ready to face additional trials to become a Jedi. Acting like they are just poor regular lovestruck kids is missing some very important context.

I don't think Anakin destroyed the Emperor... Vader did. As Yoda said, there are always two, a master and apprentice. Vader was pitted against Luke and was losing, dying, and in his final act turned on his old Master, fulfilling the prophecy of eliminating the Sith by killing one while dying as the other. There's nothing particularly 'light side' in his attack on Palpatine. It may have been a virtuous result, and the Jedi way of life may be unpleasant and wrong for a number of reasons, but in terms of managing Jedi, I think they're right. If love brought the Sith to their end, then it was Vader's fear for his son that killed Palpatine, not his compassion for a fellow being. I have to imagine over the years, especially given the way he managed his own subordinates, that Vader probably witnessed similar scenes many times, but yet only acted to put a stop to it out of selfish love for his own son. It does not mean that it was not a positive result in the end, only that it was still Darth Vader, dark lord of the Sith that killed Palpatine, not the redeemed Anakin, who supposedly died shortly thereafter. The light side won that struggle because it was Luke's refusal to fight that forced Vader's defense of him, and it was his suffering and forgiveness that reminded Anakin of his training. That was what redeemed Vader in the end, and love was only an element of the admixture. Unrelated to that response... The other day, it struck me in considering this issue that there's a sense of scale missing from this discussion. We think of Jedi as being exceptional, but often fail to grasp how exceptional. A vast multitude of hopeful students apply to Harvard every year, and almost all are rejected, save for an exceptional few. That is one small group out of the whole world who accomplish that. Despite all being exceptional, only one of them a year is valedictorian. Millions of boys dream of playing professional basketball, and hundreds make it into those ranks of exceptional athletes. Even more exceptional players emerge from that competition, and one a year makes MVP, but even then there are always people who complain the current MVP is no classic player they recall, these days usually Michael Jordan. Imagine, then, the Jedi order, a handful of Knights selected from potentials throughout the galaxy, many of whom never pass their training. It's easy enough to imagine the students at the academy struggling with their training to be accepted into the order, but where were they before that? They are the exceptional culled from thousands of worlds, most of which presumably have billions of people on them. It's as if once valedictorian of Harvard, or MVP of the NBA, only then do you really meet judgment. All those great players, over the years, but they must be Michael Jordan or greater to move on to the next step. It seems like an absurd degree of perfection to demand, and yet those are the numbers we see reflected in these stories. Those Padawans, while great in many respects, probably aren't Michael Jordan. The characters in these stories, while driven by us, are far more than we could ever hope to be ourselves; the Jedi characters we play are exceptional beyond exceptional, the valedictorian in a class of Michael Jordans. The Jedi Order isn't just asking random nobodies to be Jedi and then wishing for the best. They are culled from throughout an entire galaxy, pulled from countless trillions and trained to be the best of the best in a field of bests beyond the scope of anything possible here on Earth. Not all of them make it, nor should they, given the things expected of a Jedi. A little more can be asked of them.

Actually, as I recall, they do know who you are at the beginning of that quest, so it's not entirely random. Second, neither of those two was more than fifty yards from a small encampment of full Jedi. Third, they knew their own Padawans and thought the two of them might be sneaking around because they were in love, they didn't have any reason to think they'd become full blown serial killers because of it.

Well, you have to figure some percentage of every reward goes to ship maintenance, tibana gas cartridges, flamethrower fuel, that sort of thing, then you've got taxes, social security, not to mention the health plan for yourself and all your companions, and by the time you get through all that, you're lucky to see a few hundred creds out of those million credit rewards.

The difference is that the LT is not empowered by killing the men he cares about. In the end, thinking bad thoughts about his men leads him to be unhappy... but that unhappiness largely stops within him. If the LT's unhappiness instead made him into a Colonel, he'd have a chance to turn around, but seeing what that unhappiness can do for him, he's more likely to increase it and become a General. As a General, he can now sacrifice people in droves, for whatever petty goals come to mind, without ever seeing them or thinking about it, and would be encouraged to do so. He would no longer be struggling with the sacrifice of a handful of men he worked alongside, but rather preventing the need for it by sacrificing strangers in droves. Instead of working hard and becoming a worthy officer, he would be raised solely through his capacity for evil, thus ensuring vast widespread destruction on epic scale. And that's why the Jedi should be kept apart from attachment. They are not like lovestruck teenagers, or military officers, or whatever else you might compare them with in the real world. Attachment does not encourage detached self-control, and part of maintaining detached self-control is surrendering attachments. If someone is unwilling to do that, even for noble reasons like love, then they will not make a good Jedi, should be removed from the order, and be thankful that they will have an opportunity at a normal life.

I agree in abstract, but as we don't have very many windows into that philosophy, we have to go based on what we do have... none of which is as 'gray' as advertised.

Honestly? I mostly just put it down to bad writing.

There are all sorts of reasons why a Cathar might work for the Empire. Heck, the cosmetic surgery options becoming available throughout the game mean that an Imperial Agent might just look like a Cathar to throw off the enemy. Seems pretty easy. Here, off the top of my head... A Cathar slave discovers a gift for the Force (Inquisitor). A Cathar foundling with a penchant for rage could be raised on Korriban (Warrior). A Cathar might seek fortune as a bounty hunter just as easily as any other species, and those guys only gravitate to the Empire because of the pay. A Cathar could simply be a patriot raised in the Empire the same as any other alien, or might just be another race surgically altered into a Cathar to deceive the enemy (Agent). And that's everyone. It's no more of a stretch than any other race, aside from that more of the Cathar are in the Republic than the Empire, but then, more humans are in the Republic too, and no one seems to think anything of that.

That's why I'd recommend eliminating them entirely. They're too dangerous. Freedon Nadd once caused a supernova just to evade arrest by the Republic. Find a nice primitive world to settle them on, let them live in little Force sensitive medieval villages, drop them food and very basic supplies, annihilate any ship that violates the blockade, and any development below that seems too risky. It's the only way to be sure. The 'gray' Jedi thing is pure logical fallacy. You've got two ways to access the Force; raw uncontrolled emotion, or emotionless self-control. Absent serious psychological problems, you cannot do both of those things at once. You can't, for example, love with passion (even selfless passion) and let go of all passion. It's possible to imagine someone who alternates between those extremes, or just doesn't go very far down either route, but they wouldn't be good at either, rather than having the benefits of both; uncontrolled emotion on useful occasions is not really a raw emotion so much as a feigned one, and self-control that is surrendered to emotion from time to time is not really self-control, but just a lull between storms. Is the Jedi's priestly restriction a rough life? Sure. Is it a life I'd want? Heck, no. Luckily, I'm not saddled with that condition. As another poster commented, people tend to project those Jedi restrictions on their own lives, and imagine those restrictions placed on themselves, instead of recognizing those limitations in context. It's like imagining the life of a professional athlete, playing a game for a living, being rich and famous, but overlooking that they don't just play the short game you watch and then goof off the rest of the time, but instead must practice and work out constantly, and diligently monitory everything they eat in order to stay in shape and be competitive. If the Jedi could just wave their glowy wands and do their magic, it would be Harry Potter fighting the Sith. While I'm sure that has appeal to some, at the end of the day, that's just not the Star Wars setting. So that's why, in the end, the only 'good' option is to turn them in. Let the lovers get help, or be evicted from the order. Chances are, they should just be removed from the order, and consider themselves lucky to have found love and avoided a life of pretending to adhere to an aestheticism that clearly did not suit them.

That is a really great encapsulation of why love and attachment are forbidden. You are absolutely right.... they are more willing to protect and fight for what they love. That right there is the exact line of thought that led to Darth Vader. Pride was a fault shared by many of the Jedi, so that wasn't the source of his fall. Anakin's anger grew directly from the things he loved, from seeing his loves endangered, and fearing for them. Every bad thing that came from Darth Vader originated with that love. And THAT is why the only good option when dealing with force sensitives who refuse to obey the Jedi code is to kick them out and refuse to train them into the living WMDs that are Jedi knights. That, or get your own version, one dedicated to galactic civilization, to eradicate them and leave no survivors.

Except for all the times velocity and kinetic pressure has been clearly shown to matter. For example: 1) Sabers clashing against each other. If they can impact each other, and the defender doesn't swing as hard as the attacked, he'll end up cutting himself with his own blade. 2) Glancing blows that burn but do not cut through (Vader's shoulders, the walls in Naboo and Mustafar, among many other examples). If the beam cut through without kinetic pressure, Vader would have lost his arm at the shoulder before he could cut off Luke's hand. 3) The blast door in the opening action of Phantom Menace, where to cut through the saber must be pushed slowly through the door, then, and apparently with great effort, manually pushed around to penetrate and cut through the thick metal. If pressure did not matter, Qui-Gon would just be standing there whistling Dixie while he waited, rather than leaning in towards the saber and appearing to put so much effort into cutting through the door. By most impressions from the films, it's like a hot knife... it will cut through many things much more easily, and burn as it does, but it does not simply snicker-snack and let the Jedi go galumphing back.

In directing ANH, Lucas apparently told the actors they should act like the sword was heavy. Whether that was because the handle is made of some super-dense materials that make it weighty, or he imagined the activated beam would create some sort of downward thrust, or whatever, the seeming weight of the thing is pretty consistent across all depictions of the weapon. There is also clearly some benefit to the impact. For one, swinging would increase the force against another 'blade', making a strike less likely to be parried, or a parry more likely to deflect a blow. For another, the blade clearly has some sort of resistance to passing through objects, and additional kinetic force would be required to turn a surface burn into a more severe strike. Luke's glancing blows to Vader's armored shoulders clearly depict the ineffectual nature of a glancing blow... sizzle, but no cut.

That would make sense too... maybe they're supposed to, but my instance was bugged? I failed it the first try, and Force Sweep just turned them from smashing up my droid to smashing up me. The Emperor kept vanishing and re-appearing elsewhere too, and the only way to pick him out of the crowd was to keep hitting tab until I saw his lower health bar. If not for the 140 ranked armor and bending the mechanics of 'evade', I'd have lost the second time too. I really felt like there was some sort of trick I was missing, but maybe it was just a weird error.

I'd turned off his AoE attacks, so that might explain why I never saw that happen. I don't remember any clues hinting at that, other than he wasn't able to be mind-controlled, which didn't seem to be the issue. I pulled it off though, but boy am I glad I didn't attempt it until after the expansion.

So final mission spoilery stuff follows... In that final battle, he pulls out ten clones of himself. At level 53, with most of my equipment in the 140 range, I could handle one ok, but a decade of level 50 gold stars was a bit much. Recalling the lessons of the Impossibles I found that if I focused on the original, he'd take a knee and be willing to talk. His clones, however, continued to wail on me. My solution was to run. I ran out of the room, and eventually 'evaded' the clones, who disappeared in a poof of smoke, but that seems cheatsy to me. How was I supposed to manage all those guys? Is there some trick to getting rid of them? I looked around for glowies or puzzles, but never found anything. Seems like that mission would be crazy brutal pre-expansion.

The 'free gear' at 50 wasn't because there's something magical about the end game, but rather the reverse... the difficulties were suddenly ramped up to accommodate players who had been grinding at 50 and gotten far more advanced gear, and because of that, players newly arriving at 50 were so far behind the curve that they couldn't handle many of the missions they were supposed to go through for gear. No one had patience for gearing in pickup groups, so the answer became either to get a guild or similar group to sponsor the 'new' 50 and help them grind through it, or, what I always did, quit and start a new character. There's also the nuisance of setting the mission complexity on some of these so high that people apparently have to watch someone else play through first and have active voice chat on to be able to complete the mission. No offense, but I don't want to talk to any of you, and I've got my doctorate already, so these days I don't study for things unless I'm being paid. That's just not fun. The free Tionese gear was a goofy stopgap, but the problem remains for Flashpoints scaled for 126+ which new 50s are under-equipped for now. I suppose with access to 140 gear, they can now upgrade a bit at a time until they hit the cap, then run missions hoping for more planetary comms, but seeing as there are no planetary comms on Illum, that leaves them with either lower level missions, or else headed to Makeb where everything is scaled for that 126+ gear and levels 51+. If there's a Makeb planetary comm vendor on the fleet though, then that problem is greatly mitigated, since 50 usually hits on Voss, giving the player a planet and a half worth of comms before having to grind dailies and etc. Now the only problem is that fleet is godawful, laggy, overcrowded, and now will be harder to avoid.

I guess I missed the vendor on the fleet! That addresses my concern then... also, since someone said it was do-able in the Corellian gear, then that should be more than sufficient. The top level of the hook was rough for me, but I stumbled into two gold star guys at once, and I think had I been more careful, I could've avoided most of that.

(spoilery discussion of Makeb below) There used to be a mission that gave everyone an almost-full set of Tionese gear at 50, but that's gone now. For the Republic, it's a non-issue, since you can skip on over to Makeb, buy the shiny new mods, and be well above the 126 setup you started with as Tionese. For the Empire... less so. You've got to fight your way through a bunch of level 51 goons, hitting several locations before you get to the base area where you can get new mods. I've tried it with a character in Tionese gear, but now I'm wondering how well that works for totally new 50s, who have the prior maximum upon hitting 50, which was like 116 or so, as I recall. Can they manage that crossing and those fights to get to the main base? The gravity hook fight was a little hairy with the Tionese stuff, so I'd think without that, the crossing could be pretty rough on Imperial characters without new gear.