Focusing on your strength is nice, but not at the expense of all else. It's like trying to stick a bandage on your leg after it got amputated. There has to be a skinner box outside of the story.

No. Petition EA for KOTOR 3 if you don't like it. I want my Star Wars MMORPG, not some abortion trying to be both single player game and mmo with a very hands off dev team.

You mean like trying to be a single player game and an MMO at the same time?

4k, not so bad. But then it hits you that's ~60 runs just to max out Vette. And without running it with different companions, you don't even know if companions still get varying amounts of influence like they used to(which I'm doubting, tbh). So that's 420 (ayy) runs just to max out the companions you had before KotFE released. To say "they left room to grow", as someone else has stated, would be an understatement on the same magnitude of what they increased the cap by. I have no problems grinding, but this isn't mindless mob farming where I can just turn off my brain and put on some music(or any number of other systems that Korean MMOs have traditionally employed). (No one says you have to do it all at once, blah blah blah, it doesn't change the end amount if you were to go about it like this ) edit: wording

This IS 4.0 - just because it's early access for people that subbed between x and y dates doesn't change the fact that KotFE is live for everyone. Zero things will change between now and when everyone has access to the 61+ content. One for the pile: Andronikos has apparently forgotten how to dual wield as well, and can't even equip the off hand blaster he came with.

Homogenization doesn't have to be a bad thing. In this case, it's opening up choice for which companions we use and how they look(without juggling mods if I'm understanding correctly). Will the current companions lose some of their identity? Yes and no. It's hard to imagine DS Jaesa or Broonmark as a healer. But IMHO, what some companions lose, others gain. As a marauder, I never used my tank companions - what was the point? they were never tanky enough that I couldn't kill something with them that I otherwise could not have without them, so I'd rather a healing companion for less downtime or a dps one to reduce time to kill. Having multi-purpose companions is one of the things I'm looking forward to most in the expansion. One of the single best changes to the game IMHO.

A terrible practice IMHO. I know that that's 'just the way things are now', doesn't mean I have to like it.

Plainly put: It felt disjointed.

As opposed to Crippling Slash, which now has the effect baked into it, as well as a slow/root depending? I'm not saying that Sent/Mara doesn't have tools to gap close, but taking away one of the few ranged abilities we had only to bake the effect into something else is silly.

Are there any plans to update marauder gear to be more in-line with the progression videos and screenshots and general consensus of how the class should look like? IMO Juggernauts have more armor that are marauder-esque than 99% of the stuff marauders have.

I am: Marauder I fear: Good Scoundrels/Operatives and Madness Sorcs/Sages Buff stacking concealment Op's just tear me down, and healing Op's with any sort of gear are just a pain in the *** to kill and make a whole team deadlier. Madness Sorcs cause they just continuously CC me and burn me down from range while I am relatively helpless.

Need if you need, greed if you don't. Ask your party if they care if you can need on something that maybe isn't an upgrade for you, but maybe your companion or if you just like the style of said item. Just seems like good manners and common sense.

None of them work on elite or greater mobs, players are classified as elite or greater and therefore do not work on them. That said, I sure would love to be able to Force Leap -> Deadly Saber mid flight -> Savage Kick -> Battering Assault -> Annihilate for some nice bursty deeps.

It's not. Purge is 2 negative effects, and they have to spec into it to get the physical removal part. Toxic Scan is the same way, but they have to spec for the Mental part. It's pretty ridiculous that all 3 stacks of deadly saber and rupture can be cleansed with a single GCD though. Make the DS stacks count as a debuff per stack or something. That way our DPS isn't floored instantly by losing that damage on a target.

You're right, you could compare it to WoW, but then you could compare it to more recent MMO's too. Rift is a fine example of an outstanding start with very few bugs, and almost none(I don't think there were any) of them were game breaking. As it stands, the ability delay and the plethora of other bugs plaguing SWTOR is going to be what kills it before it ever gets its sea legs.