I have found that while yes, having guardians/sages and equivalents is a huge help to moving the ball. If your guardian(s) are chain cc and your sages are focused before they can get in good positions, it can mitigate some of this. When going up against the better premades on my servers I tend to be cced a lot so as to do their best to ensure the guardian does not get the ball. This is a good strategy. Also the benefits you are talking about with the ball mobility only work if you let them get the ball to begin with. Since 1.2 came out even good geared guardians ie full tank spec over 1,200 expertise are rather squishy when focused by 2-3 people. And also on the flip side on defence both guardians and sages have it roguh compared to the vanguard and the shadow who can harpoon / suck the enemy to a specific position as opposed to attempting to push them and perhaps having a slight delay and pushing them in a slightly incorrect direction. Getting sucked into fire when you have already had to use your move to break out of the cc earlier works very good. Just remember vanguards can storm, shadows can speed run... and smugglers can heal their butts off or control mid without being nice force leap targets. I probably win around 84% of the huttball games I play (5/6), and the ones I am involved in winning I get the ball and score quite a bit. Some of the games I am in that I do not win, I am kept away from the ball. What do teams do in basketball when they are up against a stud? They double team him, think of huttball from a sporting angle as well.

After your a certain level above an enemy their normal attacks wont hit you hard so you will only be concerned with special abilities and some AOEs. I reember when I ran Taral V on my main one time and I outleveled it, I could pretty much take very little damage except for on the lightning boss... all my team mates died as they did not move out of lightning in time. But I still managed to survive it ok without a companion. If you are 6+ levels above the mobs I think you will take miniscule amounts of damage. Not sure how it effects the companion so much though as I am a tank.

Well I hope when it is implemented it works good. To be honest I hope they add cross server queus when they do ranked.

You can buy the armorning and barrel/hilts from the vendor for 8 daily commendations. You get an enhacement and a mod level 22 (purple) from the 2+ heroics on Ilum and Belsavis happy hunting!

Our guild had trouble with soa, but now have taken him down a couple of times on HM no problem. All of our guildies are in western quadrant around soa... not too far away from boss, have 2-3 ranged on mind traps, backup tank and melee dps stay on soa, move towards the lightning balls, it just seems easier now... but it took 3-4 weeks for us to down him. Just a matter of perseverance.

I dont know if you have same issue with republic bonus series on Nar Shadda, but Republic bonus series is 31-33 level, while nar shadda is like 23-26 or something like that. You may be beter of going to Tattoine and then coming back for bonus series.

When will loot in normal modes not be pre-assigned. The round robin looting works very poorly for raid leaders and tanks sometimes and hurts others as well. People are getting bypassed for the loot they need because they are pre-assigned something that they dont need, also sometimes the gear they were pre-assigned would be an upgrade for someone else!

One last question... Could there be a proper Bioware / EA guide on how Reverse engineering works, not information from third parties only whcih is not always 100% reliable. I kind of hoped that there was going to be a nice manual with the game I was dissappointed. The BG2 manual was one of my favourite manuals of all time, especially the Tolo and Elminster notes.

On Taral V there are a few bosses and mobs that do things that may be mistaken as losing threat. Boss 1 - the lizards just charge random people every 20 seconds or so Boss 2 - the big lizard man guy has a fairly good aggro table, sometimes the man does seem to occasionally jump aggro Boss 3 - the scientist guy with adds, normal aggro table Boss 4 - bonus boss, normal aggro table, but he will randomly cast lightning attack on RANDOM person not necessarily number 1 on aggro Boss 5 - robot boss, he will do a missile salvo that he hits every 1 at least once, actually even though you have not lost aggro not a bad idea to taunt here to reduce damage done to team mates Boss 6 - hail of bolts seems to hit random people not always no. 1 on threat... To be honest with many bosses and mobs have some aoe type dps or cleaves, I find having taunt in the rotation can help minimize some damage and keep the aoe heals better, it also helps keeping aggro if the DPS is doing a good job of pulling it:)

The one problem with PVP, is not disparity in gear. But why that disparity gear is coming. There were some good sith PVPers on my server (I am republic on PVE Correllia run). Now they seem to have dissappeared. Now there are a bunch of PVPers who got way too much benefit from Ilum on both sides, and with the current ilum system, the sith who have more PVPers are getting more valor and dailies done so better gear, hence gear imbalance. If it were just on warzones I am sure the difference would be small if not reverse. At the moment 75% of the time the sith own ilum, and it is hard to go 10 - 20 vs 2 - 4 and do any better than picking off one here or there... and that makes a very boring 4-5 hr grind to get 30 kills. I dont mind ilum being their but there needs to be changes. I am surprised they are still allowing for quests to be done on Ilum as it is just helping the faction which has the most 50s on the server. However I still enjoy WZ very much, just wish the people who are BM who probably dont really deserve it were no more.

I think this is as intended, and to be honest I do not necessarily disagree with this. If you can beat nightmare why would you need better gear? I believe the nightmare modes are there more for achiemvenet getters.

Ilum is a big dissappointment to me. To be honest it is about purely numbers, and the people with the numbers gain the valor and dailies completion, the other side does not. I was at valor 45 in early January, and I am only at 52 now, as I am not exploiting ilum because it is a broke system. Either they need to limit the number of people in ilum! Or they need to buff the side with less numbers. The result of a broken ilum is now the overgeared other faction is making WZ not enjoyable.

Dungeon find is 100% needed as the populations on servers are not so great at the moment. Either less people are playing or they are playing alts more as they are finding lvl 50 content not so fun as they dont want to wait 30-90 mins to form a group for a hard mode.

Yeah ILUM pvp is not the most enjoyable experience, seems as a guardian I am meant to hide in the group and saber throw when it is off cooldown to get credit for kills as shielding the people doing the hitting or the healing doesn't count... and when you are outnumbed in pvp 2 - 1 and have some FPS issues with sorcerers spamming lightning... Not the most fun experience. To be honest wintergrasp and other wow pvp zones had it right, control who is in the zone, buff the side at the people disadvantage. As it stands now as republic on many servers you need to rely on guerilla warfare (or maybe that is meant to be gorilla) to get your 30 kills a day. The problem with me bypassing ilum, and not having so much wz time lately is I have fallen behind the pack of the many sudden BMs, who seem to have spend a ridiculous time in Ilum. BW maybe look at the wow model for wintergrasp or what is the one in Cata I forget... it is more enjoyable than ilum. Ilum at beginning was a joke. Ilum at the moment is a matter of purely having bigger numbers. Also minimizing the animations from lightning would help my FPS... why I am hitting 10-20 FPS with dual 590s is beyond me when I have 10-20 sith sorcerers spamming the lightning aoe stuff

Now that I am fairly well geared still only 2 rakata pieces as I got pwned on HM EV rolls:( I use Kira more and more, especially since she has a dancing girl outfit and a pink lightsabre crystal... oh and 15.8k HP:)

Guardians perform good as tanks, I have not had the opportunity to run with skilled guardians in other roles however. Vanguards seem to have some benefits over guardians for tanking... but I have not seen anything in game so far that a guardian tank could not handle. I am 5/5 EV normal 4/5 EV HM/nightmare and 3 bosses down on karaggas on normal mode. The only guardian dps I have run with were not so impressive, but it may have been the player and/or the players plus mediocre gear. I have enjoyed guardian very much as I have to press more than 3-4 buttons mos of the time. Also having to use taunts for reasons other than pulling aggro, makes the game more challenging too, taunting before bosses decide to missile volley each player so it gets the taunt / damage reduction buff. I also like bacon:)

To not do it lame way, stay up and AOE. If people are around him in a circle before he goes stealth he says something like "Master Woad blah blah upgrades blah blah". He will freeze the tank and face his assasination target. If a guardian (or I assume sith equivalent) guardian leaps at the target it will interupt HK47, and you can hit him for a short period (probably better to use aoe to not have to target him to permanently break the stealth), be careful when guardian leaping at people... as you can sometimes knock them off the edge, with hilarious results:) If no guardian, I believe a sage can use the ability thta pulls the target of HK47 to sage to also temporarily interupt the assassinate. YOu need to hit HK47 to break the stealth. If no sage or guardian or equivalent... when you see who is targeted have them stand still and spam aoe on top of them, make sure tank is ready to taunt after HK47 permanently out of stealth as his aggro seems to be a bit dodgy at the beginning. HK47 always gives away who he is going to assassinate, so you can use this to your advantage and feel like you are using strategries as oppose to stack aoe spam. I like how the shields on the turrets despawn after a certain time of HK47 being dead now... didn't seem to notice that before;) Remember to collect your tion equilvaent weapon loot.

I am for enrage timers. I remember when heroics were brought into WOW BC. At very beginning they were kind of rough, but after awhile they were ganked to be more accessible. If there were no enrage timers a half decent tank and healer could 2 man most heroics. As it is some of them could be 3 manned + companion if really needed. No enrage timer would just be free gear to good tank/heals tag teams. The enrage timer is there so that tanks and healers have to bring dps players. Seriously though: (1) WoW BC, after one of the patches, heroics were 2 mannable, it felt bad being no. 1 on damage and dps as tank and the healer being no. 2 on dps (2) WoW LK many of the fights again could be 2mannable (3) WoW Cata some of the bosses can be just about soloed I have found many bosses that seemed to not have enrage timers on HM or the enrage timers were so ridiculously long that the only way you could not do it, was if you were trying to run it with 3 players or less with mediocre gear. To be honest the only bosses that sometimes I see enrage timers on are sith entity, vokk, kilran, that bonus boss in taral v, HK47... Except for HK47 when he goes with stealth, the tank can still stay up for a good 30 - 45 seconds if they use cool downs, relics and their DPS (beneficial tanking abilities). Being good and quick with the interups helps a lot too... On a side note, if you are having trouble with enrage timer maybe your team mates should be using stims to give a slight increase to their dps output.

I would actually propose something more drastic a 5% decrease in Valor Level. We have people on republic side who quit WZ right after it starts as it was 3 on 8, we get to 8 on 8 about 40 seconds into the WZ (it was Voidstar). We still managed to win the WZ. I like the idea of deserter debuff 30 mins no warzones, no flashpoins, no quests... just make them have to sit around fleet or something and a 5% decrease in valor level you need to take your wins with your losses!!!

Mate I do not believe there is a map. There are too many planets and new planets will be available all the time. Yes I remember the old BG2 maps with cloth if I remember, I also believe Skyrim and Oblivion both came with cloth maps for collectors editions. I am guessing there will be an SWTOR atlas out before too long or it may be bundled into the prima guide... *YAWN* Here is hoping I get access tomorrow!