I was reading an article on cell phones with batteries than can be charged with kinetic energy and was inspired to create a Force user that uses energy absorption in combination with a lightsaber or vibroblade The idea is, his weapon(s) come with a power source designed to hold a larger charge than normal and to be charged through rapid motion. The perk is, it will never run out of juice in the middle of a fight because, as a melee weapon, it will be in a constant state of motion for the duration of the battle. In addition, the Sith could absorb the charge from his weapon either in small bursts throughout the fight and unleash it through telekinetics or lightning. The technique is called tutaminis, and in addition to absorbing energy to discharge into Force attacks, can be used to deflect or block attacks that use energy. For reference, it is used by Yoda to catch Dooku's Force lightning in Attack of the Clones, Satele Shan in the Hope cinematic to stop Darth Malgus' lightsaber with her bare hand, in Empire Strikes Back when Darth Vader deflects blaster bolts with his hand. In the EU it is the signature technique of my favorite character in Star Wars lore, Corran Horn. I was hoping to mimic Horn's battle style for my Sith character. Specifically, he would compensate for his complete lack of talent in telekinetic attacks by absorbing power from his saberstaff and discharging it as Force lightning, in addition to employing Force sense and Form V in battle. He would then build the charge back up through melee attacks, while making sure to keep enough in the cell to keep the weapon from shutting off. To sum up, tutaminis for defense against energy attacks and to cast Force lightning, Force sense to make full, safe use of a saberstaff and to maintain situational awareness (30 meter range in combat, 50 kilometer range with time to focus), and Form V with greater preference and personal skill towards Djem So (melee combat) versus Shien (blaster fire deflection). Thoughts?

...are there any missions on Coruscant that build off of it? After completing The Black Talon, on Dromund Kaas you get a mission to give an after-action report to a minor Sith Lord that rewards a quest green. I just made a Republic toon and was wondering if there was a similar line building off completion of The Esseles, and if so, where it is. I haven't been able to find it anywhere. Also, a few years too late, but I'm somewhat disappointed to see the Esseles isn't the Republic-side of the Black Talon. For some reason I went in there thinking it was. Would have been neat.

Or not.

So, I'm making a male Sith Marauder and I'd like to explore the romance options with him. I went and took a peek at the Sith companions guides on the website and it says that both Vette and Jaesa are romanceable. However, for Jaesa, it says you can only romance her if she is Dark Side. Yet, if she is Dark Side, she is indifferent to Courting. Whereas as Light Side, she accepts Courting gifts. As such, I'm a bit confused at on how exactly to woo Jaesa. Any help would be appreciated.

I wish to find an opposite-sex partner to ride the Jawa hot-air balloon with. Must be opposite sex and must know the full lyrics to "A Whole New World" from the Disney movie Aladdin. I have male and female toons on Empire and Republic that can function on Tatooine. Please respond posthaste.

So what's the happy-haps today, forum peeps?

Does the tech crit buff from Field Training stack with the tech crit buffs in Special Munitions? Both of them can give my AS Commando 3% crit increase and I'm planning on speccing both if they do stack.

This conversation isn't about PvE. In the actually fun PvE you don't move except to avoid hazards and the only people who should be getting hit have a team of healers keeping them alive, all while fighting an unthinking enemy that can be beaten using nothing but trail and error. Stealth and gap closers in PvE are luxuries and nothing else. Stealth classes are the trolls of PvP. In PvP if you're knocked back you can just hit your insta-poof, back off and wait for the guy to spam his AoEs, then go right back in and do some burst damage while his knockback is on CD. Stun after the burst rotation and wham. This is, of course, assuming the match is one-on-one and you're not one of the morons who thinks they should be able to take on two people at once and win. Vantechs have a pull with a minimum of a 35 second CD, and only if the player in question thinks two talent points are worth knocking ten seconds off a 45 second CD. Compared to stealth classes, standard knockback CDs, and the two distance closers available to Knights and Warriors, that's a gimp that now makes it hard for Vantechs to keep up with the other classes in terms of PvP performance. Having one of the best burst damage numbers in the game isn't worth a thing if we can't keep our opponent in range long enough. This was compensated for by the fact that our best abilities had 30m range, but since the range has been shortened we need a way to keep enemies in range, and a constant snare with one single pull isn't cutting it. Grapple should be a tank-only ability and the tank's leap should be available class-wide.

Assassins and Ops both use Stealth, and Operatives use stunlocks and snares to keep the enemy from running away. And, unless you're a tank, all PTs have is a pull with maybe a shorter cooldown. Which means jack diddly squat when every ranged class in the game can just stun you and hit a knockback. Knights and Warriors have a distance closer, snares, and if they go Focus/Rage, they get ANOTHER distance closer. Pretty much all a DPS Powertech can do now is hope their resolve bar gets filled. Oh wait, that's DPS. PvE has nothing. It's like the design team though every Vanguard and Powertech should be tanks and only put in DPS trees to even them out. I'm fine with all the other PT changes, because speaking as a PT player I was seriously overpowered. But since we have zero ranged capability now, not having a distance closer can make PvP annoying as hell now.

People are just ticked the Vantech AS/Pyrotech isn't a range/melee hybrid anymore. These are the same people that rolled the class because everyone said it was so good. Now you need to adapt to the changes and a bit more skill to play it and people don't like that. This is the standard story for every popular class that gets a nerf in every PvP MMO ever made anywhere. I just laugh, kill them all with my perfectly find Powertech, and move on. Enjoy the free kills while they last.

In the SI story line you learn it under similar circumstances. A Sith hermit makes you, a former slave, fight failed and weaker acolytes before telling you the Sith Code. Likewise, he informs you that if any of the acolytes had killed you they would have taken you place. Zash sets this up for you because she thinks your super special, as opposed to your overseer who tried to set you up for every accident he could think of. The Jedi use their own Code as teachings for anyone who wants to learn. But knowing the Sith Code and being allowed to recite it is a sign of power among the Sith and the Empire.

Because there's a difference between being a dark side user and being a Sith. Tremel's objective was to push you through the Academy as quickly as possible so you could get into a position to kill off a star pupil of his rival that he considered unfit to be Sith. Thus, you were never taught the Sith Code or the philosophy behind it until Baras himself decided you were worthy to become Sith, which he did by using your fight with Tremel as a test. The Sith Code is considered sacred and only to be heard by those who the instructors feel are ready to be Sith. Granted a lot of Sith have fun quoting it to use as reminders or taunts, but still, it's not meant to be known by every guy off the street who thinks he's worth something. For example, in the US Army anyone who is not a Ranger but is heard quoting the Ranger's Creed and Ranger sayings are not only looked down upon, but it's very likely the real Rangers will whup your tail if they hear you doing it.

What's the problem? Give them the same body types, fix the bugs for gear, make them like Twi'leks and remove the helmets and hoods if problems persist. And how many voice actors do you need to make a Wookiee say OOOORRAAAAWR? Same with Trandoshans. We can make Trandoshan and Wookiee NPCs, give them subtitles, then tell the playerbase it can't happen because of facial experessions? Shenanigans, I say.

I noticed this too. It's not just on players. I jumped into a group of mobs like I've done since rolling my toon and went for Smash....they just laughed. My slick killer Zabrak got trolled by Jawas. I'm not amused.

Empire gets Trandoshans, Republic gets Wookiees, people can abuse the Legacy system if they want them for opposing factions. New planets to play through, new planet and class stories for Kashyyyk and Trandosha, happy players. What's so hard about this, devs? Give me my gun-wielding velociraptor already.

I have this....thing....against furries. No offense. They just rub me the wrong way. Probably because most of the fans are all OH LOOK KITTY PERSON and are sickeningly overjoyed about it. With little hearts posted in the details like this <3. Personally, though, I'm all for the Jawa idea. If for no other reason than so when I need my "do horrible things to squeaky little people" fix I don't have to fly out all the way to Tatooine or to Belsavis to make Blizz tank a rancor. Almost makes me miss the gnomes and goblins from WoW.

I submitted an application! (bouncebouncebounce)

It was an excuse to change my Legacy name since I decided I didn't like the story I came up with for my Chiss. Now I've got something sounding Trandoshan, throw full-face helmets on my BH and IA, and tell all haters to shove it. Never got a full name change though, but I think I can work with the ones I got. Other than that, it's nice to be able to run a Heroic Mission on my alts without having to wait an hour for one person to get interested, only to watch them leave when they decide they're too chicken to try and 2-man a 4-man.

Weird. I said the same thing about Cathar.

And now people are complaining about being able to groin kick somebody. To be brutally honest, I think a Dirty Kick/Force Choke/Flamethrower combo is by far the single best way to mess somebody up I've ever seen in a video game. I'm genuinely surprised SWTOR can get away with a T rating. I think questioning this is worse than when all the newbie Jedi and Sith players came in and honestly wandered why their lightsabers weren't just one-shotting other players. If you want to ROFLstomp everything and be a Force-mad Jedi, some great games for you would be any of the Jedi Knight or Force Unleashed games. Heck, even Battlefront 2 had it's moments. One time I was playing Darth Maul and one-shotted a tank with my Sprint attack Preferably Jedi Knight. Mad love for Kyle Katarn and his beard.

The single biggest problem with this game is that EA/BW just doesn't think about what they're doing. They're so wrapped up in making something new they completely skip over things that STILL need fixing and push in new content that's nothing to brag about anyway. For example, the Chevin event. "Travel to the far reaches of the galaxy!" only got us to Nar Shaddaa and our capital worlds. They were so hung up on making sure it was accessible to all players no one stopped and thought, "Well, two planets is kinds of skimpy, maybe we should throw in Ord Mantell and Hutta as well? Some stuff around the Fleet?" And the only worthwhile rewards were lowbie gear for three Advanced Classes. Mounts and pets are just vanity fluff for collectors. All for a scavenger hunt that was so easy people had walkthroughs for it online by the end of the day. I'm a SWTOR fanboy and have been for almost two years now. It's a Star Wars MMO that starts where KOTOR left off. What's not to love about that? But the designers are the ones destroying this game. The "armchair MMO generals" need fuel to get going and as much as I hate to admit it, SWTOR keeps giving it to them. I'm not talking endgame content, I'm not talking story, I'm not even talking PvP. WoW is their biggest competitor right now. Hate it all you want, it's the truth. WoW had all the problems SWTOR did when it was first released and had most of them fixed within six months. Their first expansion brought two new races, four new zones on Azeroth, a completely different world with it's own zones, ten extra levels of content, a new Profession, reintroduced four major lore characters, and the only major problem with it was that the endgame gear made you look like orange sherbert ice cream. For content difficulty pre-release, C'thun was nearly impossible to beat because when he was first released the gear you needed to beat him did not exist. Versus endgame content on SWTOR people had completed within the month of release and their upcoming "expansion" consisting of five levels, one new race, a new companion based off an existing character, and one new planet for a story spreading across an entire galaxy. Now, WoW as all sorts of features, ranging between major ones (dual-talent specializations, true open-world PvP) to minor ones (Auction House doesn't make you input the same price over and over again when your selling multiple stacks of an item, you can change character features without rerolling the character, and there are multiple zone stories to level through like the Barrens, Silverpine Forest, and the Ghostlands), all of which people are seeing and comparing to SWTOR. And SWTOR doesn't want to copy WoW because they want to be the new thing so badly they're not bothering to check and see if they're the BETTER thing. The "SWTOR is new!" argument has been played out. And I should know, I used to use that one a lot. And truthfully, I don't think this game will ever be as great as it has the potential to be, because EA just sees it as another little pet project.

I too would like to know why this has happened. Lets play Blue's Clues to find out where all the guilds went!

It's good to see the return of the bounty board. Makes for some highly entertaining RP encounters. Name: Banik Faction: Republic Profession: Arms dealer, though unconfirmed rumors link him to a 2-5 man smuggling operation Mission Type: Traditional Bounty Reward offered: 5,000,000c Reason for Bounty: "Captain" Banik recently placed a highly public ad on Coruscant featuring the Mandalorians as users and endorsers of natural male enhancement stims. Target is to be eliminated and decapitated. Any who wish to claim the reward must present the target's head to a Mandalorian representative on Dromund Kaas. Sergeant Gojo, an SIS sniper, is a confirmed associate. Edit: For assistance in hunting the correct target, a text file of the advertisement will be provided to interested parties. (hologram of a shirtless Mandalorian appears) Ladies, look at your man. Now, back to me. (camera begins moving lower down the Mandalorian's body) Now back to your man. Now, back to me. Now back to your man. Now back to me. (camea stops at crotch level) Sadly, your pathetic man will never be a Mandalorian man. But he can imagine he is. Try Mandozac today, the only male enhancement stim endorsed by the Mandalore the Vindicated. I'm on a rancor. (Mandalorian walks away whistling)

Don't randomly walk up on someone else's conversation either. If they're serious roleplayers, they'll act hostile towards you because you're a stranger butting in on a private conversation (just because you can hear people talking in the cantina clear over by the GTN does not mean the conversation isn't private). If they're not serious they'll just assume you're trolling or a moron and ignore you. If you really want a circle of friends to RP with, get yourself in an RP guild.

Sith Lord: YOU'RE SUPPOSED TO BE BOWING TO ME AND RESPECTING ME. Bounty Hunter: But I'm not Imperial and we're not in Imperial space. Sith Lord: I FORCE CHOKE YOU TO DEATH HAHAHA Bounty Hunter: I shoot you. Sith Lord: NO YOU'RE BEING FORCE CHOKED YOU'RE DEAD Bounty Hunter: You're holding my throat. My blaster hand is free and has a blaster in it. You're also a moron.