Mercenary: Heavy armor, shields, decent enough AOE damage to blast down groups of mobs in PVE and scatter healer groups in PVP. All heals are there and ready for use, they just rely on having the heat capacity. Combat support cyclinder means you can just shoot heal people when too overheated to use regular heals (when you fire your bacta missile at people for the heal boost residue this can be a life saver specially in PVE boss fights). In pvp few people will run from you but being a heavy you can take the beating they dish out without having to completely stop healing to try escaping/fighting. Not being spec'd in DPS it can be almost impossible to drop someone in decent gear, maybe if you can survive the damage long enough to wear them down in a 1vs1, it's happened a few times vs PT's and such...they couldn't drop me with their alpha strike so I got the chance to drop them through keeping them isolated and slowing chipping away. In pve it's a beast, you can send in a tank companion and stand back blasting fools with the AOE. It's easy mode really, most PVE mobs won't be doing enough damage to be an issue by the time you have all your core abilities and some points in healing..specially that bacta bubble thing with kolto residue on you/companion. Operative: Medium armor, stealth, seems better than merc at burning down a single target, more CC options. Some heals require you to have tactical advantage, if you're spec'd for that to fire off constantly from hots then you can do some impressive instant no energy cost heals. That's all chance based though so there are times when you're have to stand still to heal people, standing still as a medium armor healer in pvp is just suicidal atm. Without combat support cylinder you're at the mercy of the power bar, once it's gone you can't heal by just shooting people like a merc can. In PVP I find healing on the Op is more of a chore, once people realise you're the healer they'll be after you. Without the luxury of heavy armor, shielding and ability to blast people away from you like a merc you need to stop healing other people and focus on trying to stay alive and escape. It can be fun to sneak around capturing points or just going all stabby on peoples backs but that ain't healing. In PVE you need to focus more on where the aggro is going, who's getting what heal cooldowns, CCing problem mobs. It's nice if you like to micromanage your character during every fight and you can pull off some impressive stuff when it all goes right but it can go wrong just as easily. Once some key skills are on cooldown you're usually at the mercy of a patrolling mob who takes a liking to you. The other downside is it's easy to get lazy and just sneak your way to objectives meaning you blast through quests without gaining the extra few lvls you would with normal killing and area missions so you need to make a conscious effort to keep gaining that extra xp by space/pvp/not stealthing as much. All personal opinion based on having a 50merc and 35op, I find Merc to just be better in every single way..better looking, better playing, better abilities, better survivability.

The guild started when Starwars Galaxies started (around '04 I think), made it through vanilla, CU and NGE together and then all rerolled on the same server here..few months later and they've all quit due to boredom, I'm out in 9 days myself. Due to my ghost town of a server there isn't much choice but PUGs, if you can even scrape together enough for one.

Merc was fun to begin with but the pvp is killing it for me lately, got to 47 and see no real point lvling the final bit to 50 I imagine the ******s will just get more frequent and last half as long once I do. I've tried PT to around lvl20 but I just can't be bothered going through the whole storyline/same quests on the same planets yet again so he's retired at that lvl. Unsub'd rather than spend my evenings bored out of my head trying to enjoy the broken aspects of a genuinely good class. Makes me wonder if they would've been so quick to kill off SWG if they knew how this was gonna turn out.

Hope they add it I'm sick of my miralukas mask, it was decent to start with but now makes my setup look awkward.

Seems inevitable considering the design of the factions. Better looking gear Better looking races Better looking class abilities(lightning-storms instead of pebble-storms as example) Better functioning class abilities I find (merc healing feels way more fluid/mobile than commando healing) Everyone has their favourite class but given the choice noone wants to spend hours staring at a horrible looking, clunky moving lump if they can wear epic looking gear and shoot flames/lightning at things. Most servers have a much more active imp presence so you can actually do things that require a group instead of standing around spamming for people who don't exist/don't group. You can regularly get gear for all levels on the imp side, with my republic toons I have to log on my imp alts to buy things like mods and mail them across now, if the gear isn't lvl50 it's rarely crafted or sold on republic.

This is why I don't bother doing pvp for more than 2 matches now before logging off in disgust, on the rare occasion I can outheal the damage on anyone all 4-5 mando's/bh's in that particular match can just switch the spammin' in my direction for 5sec and it's like "3000,3000,3000,3000,3000 healers down lets get back to ****** everyone else in here." When it was the occasional match I could deal with it as bad luck getting that combo to fight but now it's every single match. Between the regular lag and speed they can fire off that many rounds LOS rarely works, I'll get behind something and the dmg keeps coming.

I ran back out of the arena to the room before you enter it and played the LOS game with him and the crate stacks, it was a lot easier on my merc with him only swinging at me half the time. I'm guessing I had whatever the difficulty bug is aswell, nothing I tried would drop him or even get close before I was hammered flat.

I so badly want to love this game, I did the pre-order/early access and sat here with a grin doing the intro on my first jedi but it's becoming a chore now. I'd honestly take nge swg over things as they are and do it gladly, man I miss that game. Unsub'd a couple days ago with 23 days left 1. Bugs, bugs, bugs...resetting npcs, vanishing npcs, unresponsive companions, missing sound/voices, 2-5 daily crashes, constant lag (I've watched it climb over 300000ms and suddenly drop back to 200ish followed by an explosion of lagged red combat text over my corpse), character stuck running, abilities not firing but cooldown still activating....and so on. 2. PVP balance or lack of, being forced to play class x,y,z to be competitive in pvp and getting steamrolled for playing the class I'd enjoy because it's not fotm. 3. Dead server with no ability to transfer, I know it's coming but I'm not gonna p**s away money on an eventually considering all the other issues with the game. 4. Everyone I know has already quit the game out of boredom, combined with no.3 it means I have to following. I've ground out my alts to see the storylines, I'm so sick of doing the same quests over and over that re-rolling on a new server isn't an option. 5. Can't think of anything else at the moment.

It'd be pretty dull to watch specially on my server, been in a queue for 40mins so any matches are gonna be poorly balanced ones against a mad geared premade. Last match I played my team had a consular on it..not a shadow or sage, a consular with training stick.

My role is usually dictated by the group I end up with: With a decent team I'm pure support, throwing kolto bubbles and heals all over the place, stunning healers and blasting people around the arena with the jetpack. Against the suicide kill farm groups I throw some heals on my team until I get focused by several enemies then I take them for a trek around the arena usually leaving my entire team with half a team to fight. It's amazing how focused people get on dropping a merc. With my kolto residue, shield, hots and cleanse I takes a while to drop me. Against the noob team full of lowbies I just take my time enjoying the few moments of power I feel on a merc, fire the dots into a group and start blasting fools with my twin beauties. With a noob/lowbie team against a decent group I just accept I'm gonna get farmed, not much I can do about it but make them earn the kills or mess up their day disrupting stuff.

Ah the joys of individuality, I have thought about it and really don't see how silly it is (I wasn't actually requesting it I was asking if it's something in the future direction of the game and pointing out the things I have issues with). I don't expect them to rewrite the game for my sole enjoyment, if it becomes enough of an issue I'll simply play something else. I'm not a star wars fanboy with the obsessive knowledge some have so apologies if I get some of this wrong or offend anyone: 1 - I imagine a lot of things are outlawed by the republic but they still happen, there's the black and white veneer and then there's huge grey area foundation it sits on during a war. Troopers probably aren't meant to be beating confessions out of civilians, paying off crime syndicates for spice and such, commanders happily sacrificing civilian lives for little victories... 2 - Paying money to fire lightning from my fingers feels a lot better than paying money to throw pebbles at something, just personal opinion but it seems to be similar across the classes. If I want to play the decent class I'm stuck with a specific faction. 3 - The game has shut down in some ways, searching dead trade networks and cruising across empty planets or waiting hours in queues that never move. I'm hoping the migrations will fix most of that but I can't really get excited about grinding out more levels and more story on classes I don't really care about just so I can bypass having to be a tool to everyone I meet.

I'm with you on them fixing the issues already in-game before anything else so we get some people actually playing, a large part of the problem I have with some classes is the lack of gear on my server (short of rerolling alts to lvl up all the crafting professions I'm usually stuck with farming commendations to buy mods, noone actually sells anything if it's not for lvl50s anymore aside from the various low lvl orange armor for 1-200k a piece). Grouping isn't really an option since I'm in the UK playing on a west coast server so it's always dead when I'm playing during the week and just mostly dead when I play on weekends. With BH's being a money ally I buy that yeah, not saying the republic doesn't have money to hire some or that by the time you're champion of the great hunt and a galaxy renowned hunter who can name his price motivation might be more of a factor than imperials paying me an extra 20% I don't need/want. I've got my commando to around lvl23 but can't find the love for it, the ***** extension gun bugs me so I end up using an assault rifle instead (only losing 2 weapon specific attacks that I weren't that great anyway), the ship is by far the ugliest thing in the game so space is just a horrible chore with that and I'm still trying to track down the havoc traitors as I have been for the past 3-4 months. After playing bh with more or less the same skillset as a trooper it just feels so average I can't bring myself to play it for more than a mission before logging off. Exception being the stuff liberty prime says, I mean forex..some of his lines are solid gold. Anyway cheers for the replies, maybe they'll fix things enough to gloss over the issues I have.

Hi all Are there any plans to allow cross faction classes like they've allowed with the race unlocks? I've been trying to love the republic classes since starting the game, with the exception of jedi knight I find most of them lacking or just plain useless compared to the imperial counterparts. The problem comes when I roll an imperial character and start the grinding process, the class quests are generally great I'm loving the bounty hunter and assassin stories at the moment but that's just a small part of the grind. For every cool story mission I run I'm then forced to go out and be a complete tool for all the other side missions, often the difference between light and dark is torture the npc myself or ship them off to be tortured, the option to turn around butcher the imperial soldiers hasn't really popped up much at all. Given the numerous npcs who defect or try to defect it wouldn't be a stretch for a bh, officer or sith lord to be on the republics side (even hitting 50 on my bh and then starting over as say lvl10 republic would be ok with me (skipping the starting area intro bit maybe)). This allows me to enjoy the DS class bioware have put more time into than the LS counterpart and also lets me avoid being forced down the "Grrr I'm an really bad guy even when I don't want to be" path.

Just finished it on my 46 shadow with doc for backup, much easier than I was expecting it to be if you keep the interupts flowing..blast him away, pull him back, stun, spinning kick..whatever it takes. Playing hide and seek by the rock wall next to the ladder is useful too. Also had the same issue with him vanishing when it's time to speak, as with the posts above he reappeared after maybe 5mins and I got to finish the quest.

Just a shame the low lvl weapons don't last long, I got a legacy double bladed saber for my shadow and it was only worth using for less than a day before there were better blades available. I haven't bothered with the other 3 kits they're just sat in the cargohold looking pretty.

I use the same setup for every MMO I play and place the same type of skills in the relevant slot so I know in every game that main heal is F, main interrupt is shift+1 and so on. My mouse has 2 extra buttons on the side, it's not a gaming one though...I go with: 1,2,3,4,5,6,F,T,G,V,mouse thumb button 1, mouse thumb button 2 and then the same setup with shift+ on a second bar..everything is close by for 1 hand leaving the other free to target stuff and use the mouse buttons. Abilities I don't need instant access to go on a 3rd bar that I just click on with the mouse as and when I need them like pre-fight buffs, vehicles, weapons..

Aside from making sure you're using the best gear you can for your level (stats aswell as armor, I usually take defensive/endurance gear over crit). It's a bit of a slog until you get doc, once you have him it's a game changer. The biggest problem I find with boss mobs is the specials (assuming you're geared to tank stuff), interupting at every opportunity is a life saver..don't just rely on kicking to prevent stuff..force push interrupts(still works on the huge elite/champ enemies for me), then following up with force leap interrupts a 2nd time often that's given me enough time to kick interrupt again for the 4sec skill lock, stasis is a great one aswell if you use it wisely since the cooldown is longer. To begin with using Soresu defense form is a pain for the lack of focus but once you get saber throw and combat focus it means you can keep the defensive moves cycling while loading up some dots or slashing away if that's your thing. Sorry if I got the names wrong for the moves but the descriptions should let you know what I meant, not on my machine at home so I can't check. EDIT: just remembered aswell I used some of the seismic mines that low lvl cybertech crafters can make, it does an area knockdown that effects everything you're able to hit..it has a long cooldown (3min I think) but can save you if other interrupts are on cooldown. They're usually not that expensive on the trade terminals or just roll/hire a low lvl cybertech alt to make some for your.

I can't speak for sage since I only got mine to around 20 before deleting it out of boredom. Shadow however seems like a beast, I did some kind of pvp round for the first time last night on my 36 shadow, 30 kills - 2 deaths and a crushing defeat for the enemy side. Stealthing seemed to work fine as long as you pay attention to the dots loaded on you and the aoe you're working near, I was sneaking past the lightning storm of dps and butchering the healers..I was actually feeling bad by the end because I was killing them so fast. Even had some marauders trying to run (turns out you can't run fast enough to avoid a crit project to the back of the head). I was expecting to die a lot since I'm in cloth but on more than one occasion I was tanking 3+ and still coming out on top as full defense spec.

My shadow's lvl36 atm, full defensive tree. I have 3 bars set up and they're full, mainly I just use double-strike, kinetic ward, force breach and project. With my spec I win 99% of fights by putting up ward, using breach for the 5% miss chance then spam double-strike until particle acceleration triggers then I fire project (hits for around 1200 now), immediately double-strike and repeat the 1200 hit as projects cooldown is cleared when particle acceleration triggers again. If it's a tough fight then I hit force potency before doing the projectile double as it pimps up the damage even more, plus use some of the other abilities on the bars like stuns, interupts, heals and so on. All the missions I'm doing are lvl39-40 and I can still breeze them, it's only hard if the mobs are 5-6 lvls higher then my accuracy dies off.

My 26 sage has been useless since the patch, I don't even bother touching it now..almost no damage or survivability, qyzen was tanking on tat and I couldn't even keep him up with heals vs 1 regular and 1 strong and that was fully heal spec'd with the best gear I can get hold of easily on my server. I know to cc this and that as needed but I should still be more than capable of outhealing that kind of damage from 2 non-elite mobs without needing to cc..the shield now only lasts 2-3 sec before dropping.

I'd be busy crying and slapping myself in the face for killing any replay value in the mass effect series.

Just far too many servers, they don't need that many. Halve the number and the remaining would rarely drop to light use I'm guessing. It's amazing what a proper server community can do, it's worth paying a monthly sub for that..at the moment I log onto a ghost server, it can get dull fast. Free boredom would still be boring.

It wouldn't be much of a problem if most of the servers weren't light to no population, I've got a couple high-ish lvl guys from early access but they're on a server with barely any people. I can craft all sorts of stuff, no-one around to buy it though. Rarely enough people on to actually do something requiring more than 3 people...can't wait til they let people transfer to a server with life on it.

Just finished it on my 47 guardian, chest appeared but bugged out so I couldn't open it..had to finish the mission with t7 using gear around lvl35 (except for a 47 weapon). Emperor was easy as vigilance spec, kept t7 on passive while I used to dots and the pilars to build up some agro then let t7 fire away from a distance while I carried on with the dots.