It works, it just sucks. Ranged attack = Most Sniper-exclusive attacks, some BH attacks that don't get used. Melee = Sith Jugg/Marauder attacks. Everything else is Tech or Force, which cannot be countered. Just take it off your bar, save yourself the headache =P

I play Light Side and kept Kaliyo out as my primary companion up through Taris, when you get Lokin who is just plain better, mechanically. I had zero problems with keeping Kaliyo happy and staying true to the light side. It's much, much, much simpler than people are making it out to be--I only ever sent her out on one mission to avoid losing affection, and that was the end of the Nar Shaddaa bonus series where you choose to deliver the threat/peace/blackmail message. I took a few -1s, of course, but getting +15 with her is easy, even with staying light side. That said, I picked some dark side options over the course of the thing. I don't know what my storyline alignment is any more because of Diplomacy, but I believe I'd be sitting at ~5k Light, ~500 Dark by now (With Diplomacy it's 9898 LS, 1349 dark). The secret to Kaliyo for me was Firefly. When I started thinking of my dude as Mal and Kaliyo as Jane, it just clicked and the conversation responses became easy as hell.

I just started an alt with Artifice and I'm finding it pretty useful. The important thing is Hilts. You're right that "anyone can buy" upgrades with commendations, but have you ever tried that for an extended length of time? It's really expensive. Commendations are really expensive, not in terms of credits since they're free, but in terms of something more important: Time. After all, you can always grind more credits in the game, but in life you've only got a finite amount of time to spend. (Strictly speaking, Cybertech is better for this because you need to buy a lot of Armoring and Mods. But I already have a Cyber alt) Crystals are good money-makers. People will pay ludicrous amounts for customization, and in this case that means colors.

They're on separate cooldowns. Use both! (Or use neither, since they don't work in PvP...)

Slicing is great for getting your bankroll, well, rolling. I went Bio/Bio/Slicing while leveling up to 35, then dropped Slicing in favor of Diplomacy when the price of purples got too outrageous. You won't be rolling in money the way you did pre-balance, but you'll have all the money you need and then some. Forget what people are saying, do the missions, just know the information ahead of time: 1) Run moderates. 2) Make sure you have good Affection to reduce the time and increase the level of the lockbox. 3) Once you get access to Spy Droids and Missing Probes, stop running other stuff until you're ready to log off. That area is the optimal income per minute, anything above that will net you higher profits, but takes longer to get, thus lowering your income per minute. However, since you're not able to send people out while you're offline the per minute part of the equation is dropped when you log off and all you care about is net profit. For whatever craft you pick, get the blue/purple materials off the Galactic Market. I only dropped Slicing once I saw people charging 4k for Bioelectric Whatevers. No way I was paying that outrageous amount when I could just get it myself.

Not even before you got Ballistic Shield? That's impressive!

Funny, I'm on Po5, too, and sometimes I think I'm the only Sniper in the game, let alone the server

If I had fraps, I'd post a video and it'd be pretty clear what I'm saying (Which might still not be a bug, but it certainly doesn't make sense otherwise). But I don't, so I'll try and draw it out with characters. While standing on a pipe, I can move back and forth this far: |----------| That's fine, that's as it should be. If I try and go this far, I fall off and again, that's fine, that's as it should be: ---|----------|--- However, if I hit spacebar to jump while on the pipe WITHIN that range: |------x---| Then instead of jumping up, I do a sort of quick up-and-down jerk and then fall back to the ground, as if I'd gone too far. This happens even if I stop moving forward once I see the jerking. As you said, though, this still may not be a bug. There may just be a very tiny jumping window--but then why that window is tinier than the moving back and forth window is mind-boggling.

First the bug, then the feedback (ie: Opinion). Bug: When jumping from pipe to pipe, there has to be some sort of bug or another. You can shuffle back and forth a bit, no problem, but if you try jumping at any point in that shuffle you often wind up just falling off. I've seen it on Nar Shaddaa and Tatooine while trying to grab datacrons--back and forth? No big deal. Forward a tiny bit and spacebar? Fall down start over. It has got to be a bug. Opinion/feedback: I love exploration and think the datacrons are an excellent way of rewarding that. They aren't game-breaking, but they give you a bit of an advantage and something to do. They should by no means be easy to get (Well, okay, the starting planet ones should be easy on the "First Hit Is Free, Kid" principle.) and the puzzle-solving aspect of them is a lot of fun. But jumping from pipe to pipe across the entire planet isn't a puzzle: it's Prince of Persia. It's the kind of "We can't think of a puzzle right now, so let's just put six jumps together." (And for the record because I know someone is going to say it, yes, I've turned off sprint. I've turned it off, I've turned it on, I've toggled walk instead of run, I've done things while mounted and dismounted. The responsiveness for Jump is such that using it will often cause you to simply fall off the pipe rather than actually jump. If anything, you should have trouble landing on the next one, not jumping off the first one.)

I can see doing this to keep Ballistic Dampeners up, but I think it's a waste for Snap Shot... Snipe's cast timer is only 1.5s, moving gets you out of cover so there's no time lost there, but entering activates the GCD. So you're spending 1.5s to enter cover to save you the 1.5s cast timer of Snipe. ...Right? Or are my numbers off?

Sorry if I wasn't clear, but what I meant was that it's 300 per UNIT, meaning if you sell a stack of 10, you're going to make 3000. So I spend about 15 minutes or so on Dromund Kaas in that Heroic area (near whatever the Sithspawn quest is called) and make a killing. Save your time on Microscopic Symbiote, though. Absolutely no market for that one...

Because they aren't useless, they just take effort to make work and people don't want to put in that effort when they can just be given things easily?

Totally worth it, yeah. The thing is you can't obsess and try to collect ALL the schematics. Just make the greens to increase your rating, then RE the ones you've made to get the materials back. If you get a blue and it's an upgrade, send your robot buddy out to make it for you and then start using it. It's especially worth it in regards to Armor Plating. All armors take the same Plating, meaning you can kit yourself out on the cheap and still be able to make a little profit with extra stuff. Don't bother trying to get purples, blues are good enough. Consider the following: To fully kit out one orange weapon and two orange armors you need 1 Barrel, 2 Plates, 3 Mods and 3 Enhancements (and 1 crystal, but we're not counting that for reasons that will become obvious later) for a combined cost of 33 Commendations per planet. That takes a loooong time to get. To fully kit out the same with Armormech providing your Plating, you only need 19 Commendations. That's a significant discount right there. The discount is magnified further if you're using more Oranges. Hell, if you're dead set on spending 33 Commendations and have Armormech, you could kit out FIVE orange armors and one orange weapon for only 31, leaving you with 2 leftover to... I dunno. Rub together for warmth, maybe?

From what I've noticed, at least on my server, the money isn't from what you craft so much as what you use for it. Green Goo alone goes for 200-300 per unit.

The 50s definitely need to be fixed, yes, but even with non-50s queing togeher it's still more efficient to prolong the warzone as long as possible so you can farm more. It won't be quite as easy as it is now, of course, but it will still be the optimal outcome. So scaling the rewards to promote faster completions over dragging it out is the best solution, in my opinion at least. (And, yes, I heard it was coming next patch, too. But I'm not sure where I heard it, so it might be one of those rumors that everyone has heard, but no one can verify )

Huttball was an excellent little warzone even a few weeks ago when people were playing it as intended. Now that it's become a farmfest it's just dull--And not just for the folks being farmed. Farming is just as boring. So an easy fix: Give bonus valor/commendations/etc for quick completions. Enough so that winning in the first 5 minutes gives as much as farming for the full 15. The longer the match goes, the lower the yield. Incentivize winning the way the game was intended. Thanks.

I rolled a female agent because I played a Witch Elf on WAR, and they were female only. Come to that, my Agent resembles my WE quite a bit, with the obvious exception that she wears a lot more clothes.

I've been running around trying to find Blue Goo, but the only place I seem to get it is from gathering missions. The hell do I have to go in order to find it? The worst bit is that I can't even ask in chat. Oh, sure, I *can* ask, but what do you expect the response to be when you ask, "Where do I find Blue Goo?" I've heard more Smurf jokes than you care to imagine...

Well, bad luck is still luck of a sort, now isn't it? But, seriously, as mentioned you can sell them on Nar Shadda (and buy as well, which is nice because there are guys on the other side with your same problem) or simply vendor them. If you can't justify it, then simply vendor or destroy them. It's worth pointing out that having Imperials able to find Republic items (and vice versa) is a nice stroke of RP, whether intentional or not. If you kill a Jedi, for example, you might not be able to wear his robes, but you could still take and make more of them, you know what I mean? it never made sense to me that some things were ONLY for one side or the other and I simply wasn't meant to even know they existed.

It's intended to be either a primary skill for people who don't want to craft, or a supplamental skill for people who do want to. You use it, essentially, to craft money. This money is then used to buy gear for non-crafters, or rare materials for crafters (and gear).

Yeah, he's pretty cool. I ran with Kaliyo as a tank and, so long as I kept her geared, I never had any problems fighting level-appropriate stuff. She might have died from time to time, but I didn't and that's all that matters to me. I never really liked Vector, though... Good storyline, nice character, just not very useful in a fight when I'm the one doing DPS. Once I started using Lokin I had a lot less downtime between pulls. I have a little trouble with Champion fights because his gear isn't as good as it should be so his healing isn't quite up to that job, but that's my fault not his. Right now I'm using Temple, though. She seems to be the exception to the Vector rule--Her DPS doesn't feel redundant the way his did.

Also wanted to throw out my own two cents about Instant Snipes and energy management. Maybe things change at 50 and you're suddenly always in energy debt, but at least for me from 20-43 I haven't had any trouble with energy. I'm using Sniper's Nest, but not Energy Tanks, and both the Instant Snipe and 1.5s Ambush on a crit abilities. In most PvE fights I don't need to worry at all, but in longer ones I'll hit Adrenaline Probe once I've bottomed out. If absurdly long fights Advanced Recon will be used to recharge Adrenaline Probe immediately, but that's a rare circumstance. In PvP I've found things to be the opposite--Fights don't last long enough to run out of energy. When six dudes are wailing on you, it doesn't really matter what your energy level is But more realistically, if you're staying out of harm's way then people are going to break LoS, get out of range, or otherwise fizzle your casted abilities, which winds up refunding the energy.

It does both. ---------- Excellent guide, but you might want to tell people how to actually Crouch In Place, since the game seems to want to hide that info from you. By default, it's Shift+F, but I kind of recommend binding it to F and binding the combat-roll Crouch to Shift+F so that you don't do silly things in combat (like rolling into a pack of mobs, rolling into cover and facing the wrong direction so you don't get cover, etc). You'll still get cover and its associated benefits, but you have to Crouch In Place directly on top of a green arrow to do so. You'll know you're doing it right if the mobs/players in your frontal cone have a green shield above their head--that means you've got full cover.

It rolls for each item. So if you're RE'ing 10 medpacs, most likely you're going to hear the little "WOOWOOWOOSH" that means you learned the upgraded version, and you're going to get a bunch of materials back. It's a nice change of pace from when I was doing weapons and had to click each one individually!

The base-level purple is one thing, the CRITICAL purple is another. Then you've got equivalent stats plus room for the augment of your choice.