I cannot begin to express how excited I am for this. MY WALLET IS READY. I'm so glad I came back to this game recently. Re-subbed and ready.

On most servers, if they did this, the queue times would go up. The pool of queuing players at 50 is limited by server size, it wouldn't even make sense to divide it further.

You don't ask a question in your post.

Arjen - Vanguard (I like Dutch names) Tubbs - Commando-to-be. Guess what body type he is? Was pumped to actually land that name on an RP server. Sergeant Tubbs, mega-fatty ordinance expert!

Whatever amount of time and money they spent on making these videos... i LOL'd. So it was time and money well spent.

Hi! My fiancee and I recently started some new characters on a busier server. On our old server, we each had multiple characters of at least level 30. We normally would play different character classes and help each other out with class quests, which allowed us to "double-dip" and see 2 character class stories develop and thus allow her to see what it was like to be a Jedi Knight, because she doesn't like melee characters and would never play one herself just to see the story. Anyhow, I have a high level Assassin and really like the playstyle of the tanking tree, so I want to make a Shadow on our new home server. I've seen the first 2 chapters of the Consular story played out through 100% LS choices and it seems like the story was designed with lightside choices in mind. For those of you who have played through the consular story as a darkside-aligned character, how did you feel about it? Did it seem disjointed at all, or were some of the choices really out of place/out of touch with the consular character? Having seen a lot of the story/plot, I don't mind spoilers if you want to give specific examples. Please use the spoiler tag if you choose to share them though, as I don't want someone to stumble on this thread and nerdrage about something spoiler-related. Thanks in advance.

I have posted a thread in the Suggestion Box forum (under General Discussion) regarding Force Clap in 1.2. As this is an issue PVP Guardians are passionate about, I encourage you to chime in over there as I feel it has a better chance to gain the attention of the Bioware staff than it does in the class forums. http://www.swtor.com/community/showthread.php?t=370472

Looking through the Knight and Juggernaut forums, there are massive debates about the current implementation of this ability on the PTS. The arguments center around a core class ability being modified in a way that will drastically and negatively affect PVP players by forcing this core ability to add to a target's resolve bar. This change discourages the use of these classes in coordinated PVP, where teams (especially those who are going to be playing heavy amounts of ranked warzones) need to coordinate their crowd control abilities to be successful. Force Leap is THE iconic Jedi Knight class skill, and the Knight's primary tool to close gaps to melee in PVP. Discouraging the use of this skill by adding a passive effect that many competitive PVP players do not want/will not take is a crushing blow to Guardian and Juggernaut gameplay. The current, passive version of this ability should be changed to either a toggle-able version (in the same way stances are set up, as an example) or an on-use ability with a cooldown that will affect the next Force Leap your character uses. This would allow players to play their classes to their full potential in group play, and provide them with more diversity in their playstyle. It will also discourage the exclusion of Guardians and Juggernauts from rated teams based on their core ability's detrimental effect on coordinated team play. If anyone has other suggestions regarding this skill, please post them below and I ask that you remain constructive in doing so. Thank you. Karo, Jedi Guardian enthusiast

The solution is so simple... Make it a toggle-able ability, like the stances. Want it to activate when you leap? Toggle it on. Want to keep it off? Toggle it off. Doesn't mean this is going to happen, but it seems like an easy solution that everyone could learn to use simply. It does add a pinch of micromanagement and another keybind to a class that has a ton of them already, but nothing too drastic.

I'm looking for some tips on healing in PVP. I've played a lot of MMO's over the years and have always been drawn to melee damage and tanking roles, and have a good handle on that particular playstyle and feel confident in my ability to learn how to do those things if I roll up a new character with a new playstyle. Healing, on the other hand, is foreign to me and I also haven't played a lot of ranged classes over the years. My first reaction when I see a bad guy is to run toward them in order to dispatch them and it's taken a while to even break that particular habit. The server I play on is not very populated, so practicing healing in FP's and Heroics while questing is not really an option. Here are some of the issues I've run across (at level 29 at the moment, full Medic) and I'm hoping some of you with more experience can help me out. 1.) Every match puts the Republic at a numerical disadvantage (6 on 8, 7 on 8) and there are a few panty-waist quitters who leave when they see this, which only makes the problem worse. This isn't specific to commandos, of course, but it doesn't make things easier. What types of players should I focus on healing when we're short-handed to at least give us a chance? 2.) Dealing with being focused... at my level, my options include my 2 minute cooldown shield and my AOE knockback. Do we ever get another snare or escape ability of any kind? 3.) The UI and lack of mouseover abilities... I've done as much as I can to put the team's health bars somewhere easy to reach but the targeting still seems clunky and slow. Is it faster to just try to click actual players on the battlefield? 4.) Lack of other players guarding and peeling. I can't control how other players play, but it seems like this kind of awareness is sorely lacking. I don't want to be that guy who berates teammates in chat but what kind of things can I do gameplay-wise to encourage people to do a better job of this? It's especially frustrating when the same people that aren't helping to keep the other team off me are the ones complaining that they aren't getting heals when they're jumping into the middle of 3 sorcerers and doing their best lightning rod impression. (I'm used to this kind of verbal abuse and accompanying tactical stupidity from years of tanking randoms in WoW so I've grown kind of numb to it... Sometimes you tank the boss, sometimes you tank the mobs, and other times you tank the rest of the group.) 5.) Supercharge usage - best to use as frequently as possible, or best to save for when it's needed? I like this mechanic but forget to activate it as often as I feel I should so I'm working on that. 6.) Switching to DPS mode... when the team isn't taking a lot of damage, what abilities are actually worthwhile to help go on the offensive? Sticky grenade seems lackluster, as does Full Auto. Is it just straight-up CB spam and hammer shot to keep ammo decent? Thanks in advance for your replies.

I remember the day I bought my Naga a couple years ago. So skeptical, and so wary of spending a good chunk of my hard-earned money on a mouse. It seemed so wrong at the time. Looking back, it was the single best investment I've made in my gaming hobby. I've played a lot of MMO's and generally gravitate toward melee and tanking classes, and the ability to have 15 buttons on my mouse hand allows me to fight and move at the same time. Once you get used to it (there is a learning curve involved, though it isn't terribly steep), there is no turning back. If it was a blessing for WOW, it's a freaking godsend for this game, where keybinds are at a premium early on.

I agree... I think.

I play on Thana Vesh, with characters on both sides (currently playing on my Republic characters most of the time). Shoot a tell to any of the characters listed in my signature. I play during the day pretty frequently and it's hard to always find groups outside of prime time.

The player I mentioned is 50. I have a 50 (Sniper) and have played my share of WZ's on him. The fact that it's not an assassin is irrelevant - I've seen enough of them played well at 50 to know it's possible.

Address the content of the post, please. I'm not an idiot, I know I'm not 50 yet. I have played at 50 for quite some time on another character, and seen this class played well (in all specs) at level 50, and look forward to doing the same in a week or so. There's a Shadow on our server named Crytika who would make you cry rivers blood if you ever fought him.

I rolled a tank assassin ON PURPOSE. See, I'm not a stealther who can tank. I'm a tank who can stealth. In PVP, I'm the guy who runs around snaring, debuffing, stunning, interrupting, and generally getting under the skin of the opposing team. And capping points, and making killer huttball passes, and scoring "touchdown" after "touchdown" because my class is designed ridiculously well to accomplish such things. Addressing this post issue by issue... Stealth: Same viability in stealth as other classes who can use it in this game. We get a vanish, we can use force speed in stealth, we can use force shroud to wipe DOTs to remain in stealth. I fail to see the issue. DPS: Show me your damage meters. Yeah, that's what I thought. Heals: We don't have any, and you knew that before you chose your AC. Tanking: We have fantastic defensive cooldowns, accuracy and damage debuffs that are easy to maintain on groups of enemy targets, we have taunts of the single target and AOE variety (that even work in PVP!), and more than satisfactory damage for a tank spec. The only drawback is we don't have as high of an armor rating, but this is not gamebreaking (and will likely be something that is adjusted over the course of time). Sometimes I wish we had a direct charge like Juggs and PT's get, but Force Speed that breaks snares on a 20s cooldown is pretty slick and offers extra utility when you don't have a convenient charge target. You can use it to chase people trying to kite you, advance the huttball, recover quickly from a knockback, so on and so forth. TL,DR: Problem with YOUR assassin class exists between keyboard and chair. My class is working correctly.

While I wouldn't say you should play like this all the time, there is a time and a place for kiting. The idea of not using thrash is a little ridiculous to me, though.

Darkness in PVP is not a traditional "assassin" type of class. It's the complete opposite. Your playstyle needs to adjust to reflect as such. THINGS YOU ARE AWESOME AT AS DARKNESS IN PVP: Breaking up clumps of enemies. Run into the middle of them and hit your mass mind control (AOE taunt) to gimp their damage for six seconds. Use your AOE knockbacks and AOE snare (Wither) to sow seeds of chaos and confusion in the enemy ranks, and prevent teammates from being chased and gibbed by bad guys. Force pull. Pull supporting healers away from their team. Pull people into acid. Pull people into fire. Pull huttball carriers into places that make their job more difficult. Use your single target taunt ability liberally. Bind it to your middle mouse button. When you see someone attacking the ball carrier, or your healers, or anyone other than you, taunt them and gimp their damage. Be an awesome ball carrier in Huttball. Once you're within sight of the "end zone", pop your deflection and force shroud. Hit Force Speed, score points. Laugh at opposing team, powerless to stop you. Get all the chicks. Use stealth to get into a good position to receive a pass in Huttball, then see above paragraph (assuming your team knows how to pass and actually has "Throw Huttball" on their action bars somewhere). Keep people from capping points in Voidstar and Civil War. Overload, Wither, Lacerate, so on and so forth. Harass healers and ranged DPS. You have an interrupt on a short CD, and Electrocute. Make their jobs miserable. THINGS YOU ARE NOT AS AWESOME AT IN PVP AS DARKNESS SPEC: Bursting enemies down. Everything is a war of attrition. GEAR STUFF Many Darkness players recommend going with the DPS set of gear, and I would say by the time you get to 50 you'll have a pretty good idea of whether this is right for you. Defensive and shield-related stats don't work effectively against all damage types in PVP, but they will help against white-damage attacks. Since you'll be using Dark Charge as your lightsaber charge in PVP, I'd still say go with the shield generator over the focus as the focus is basically a stat stick where the shield generator will provide some usefulness. ROTATION STUFF You didn't elude to what build you were looking at using, so I will assume it's 31/0/10 and that you have access to Wither - especially since the upcoming patch will make this a much more viable build if all of the notes make it into game release. The general rotation is pretty simple: PROC AND SHOCK! Use Thrash as your main attack and use Shock when you get a proc of Energize. Once you have three stacks of Harnessed Darkness, unleash a Force Lightning (pop Recklessness first if your target is running away from you or is otherwise outside of your base 10m range) for some channeled damage and self-healing. Use Assassinate when your targets health is low enough to do so, as it is a huge damage upgrade over Thrash. IF YOU ONLY LEARN ONE THING ABOUT THIS SPEC FROM READING MY POST... You are a tank. Act like one, play like one, and focus on good individual and team defensive skills because that is what you're designed to do. Hope this helps.

I think there's a great sense of community with no LFG tool... I really get to know the fellow players on my server when they spam LFG ____ for an hour. Even when there's 90-100 people on the fleet, it's impossible to find 3 other people of the correct spec and level to complete flashpoints and such and, to be honest, I think there are a lot of players who are completely uninterested in ever doing any of them. A cross-server system for FP's should be added, but I have a feeling it's a long ways out given the laundry list Bioware already has of things that need to be fixed/tweaked/improved.

The missions you can buy the discoveries for are one-time use, regardless of what profession they are for. While it might seem expensive, they have better rewards and guaranteed purple materials when used for mission skills (such as TH). So, it might still be worth it to buy the missions if the materials you could receive are super expensive on the GTN - or if you want to turn around and sell the materials for profit.

I have been gearing Khem as a DPS since I got him. Just activate their non-tank stance and they lose their threat gen and DR bonuses and gain bonuses relating to making things dead. Works just fine.

Ranged tanks are a myth. Troopers and BH's still do the dirty work up close. Not to knock your work - just pointing it out as it will make your knowledge more applicable to those classes.

Your own ship takes very little damage. The advice about killing all of the turrets on the capital gunships is key - they need to be taken out ASAP. Couple things to add... 1.) Turn your power converter to your blasters and hold down the left mouse button THE WHOLE TIME if you have to. You will not die. 2.) When you enter the canyon, note where the enemy fighters are coming from. Keep your blasters hot and just spray all over the place to kill as many as possible. This will reduce the amount of damage the shuttle takes during the canyon. Even at level 50 with all purple ship upgrades, the shuttle still takes about half of its health worth of damage, but it's doable with level-appropriate ship parts. Just need to destroy everything as fast as possible.

I'd be all about being able to craft items (don't even care if they'd be BOP or not because they could be a good moneymaker) that improve your weapons. Jarvistech X-17 Featherlight Trigger - Attaching this to a blaster rifle, pistol, sniper rifle, or assault cannon increases your alacrity rating by ____. Terk Industries LR-35 Targetting Scope - Attaching this to a blaster rifle, pistol, sniper rifle, or assault cannon increases your accuracy rating by ___. So on, so forth, you get the idea. I'd love to help my server community have better, more B-A, and more effective guns!

Mods and enhancements with tank stats are hard to find until late in the leveling process. I took synthweaving and spent a lot of my level 50 sniper's money to buy mats and make my own tanking armor. Having purple armor with defensive stats is well worth it. If you can't make some, save some money and just buy it. Always check the GTN for mods and enhancements that can improve your situation.