Here's my spec, pretty straightforward Assault DPS: http://www.torhead.com/skill-calc#801fhrbzGhrsZhMhM.2 I primarily PvP, but it's done just fine for DPSing ops/HMs as well. Your core skills are: Incendiary Round - spammable, instacast, does a lot of DoT DPS. I often spam this on every enemy in a fight before I pick a target to burn down with single target DPS. It's ammo-intensive, but if you have extra ammo to spend and any enemies nearby not already affected by the DoT, it's almost never a bad idea to hit them with incendiary. Ion Pulse - this is your main single target DPS attack. It procs free High Impact Bolts, it does good elemental damage, it's instacast and spammable, and it's surprisingly ammo-efficient. High Impact Bolt - basically, you use this any time you can as your first priority. The only time you really wanna save a HIB is if you just used Assault Plastique and are trying to line up the burst DPS, but for the most part you want to use this ASAP so you can proc another free one. With your spec, you get big boosts to damage and crit rate for this skill, and frequent cooldown resets that also make it *recharge* 1 cell instead of costing any. If Ion Pulse is your bread, HIB is your butter. Stockstrike - this is your secondary single target DPS attack, when you can get to melee range. Ion Pulse / HIB / Stockstrike are the main three hotkeys you spam while burning down a single target - in a pinch, you can just button mash. Since you can also proc Stockstrike cooldowns with Ion Pulse, you usually want to use this whenever possible, second only to High Impact Bolt. Assault Plastique - this is great for burst DPS. A lot of this build centers on DoT (incendiary round and plasma round procs) and steadily pumping out Stockstrikes and HIBs for sustained DPS, so it can be hard to get that burst you need to finish someone off before they can get healed. The best way to do this is to try and line up Assault Plastique and High Impact Bolt. In BM gear, I frequently get 2.5-3k crits from each, more against undergeared enemies. That's one heck of a damage burst! both taunts - even though you're DPS, you can easily snag a few medals and help out your teammates a bit by using your taunts. They work best when the enemies you taunt CAN'T or at least won't attack you (melees that are far away, around a corner, just too big of a fight for them to notice the taunt, etc.). If they attack you, you're fairly squishy. If they keep attacking a teammate, they get a huge debuff to their DPS output. In a pinch, you can tank a bit with your defensive cooldowns, but you're better as a DPSer with taunts as a debuff than as an off-tank. There are lots of other skills worth using, and of course you want your defensive cooldowns and whatnot, but these are the core ones that give you an idea of the playstyle. If I end up fighting nonstop through a full WZ (instead of guarding vacant objectives, etc.), I usually break 300k and sometimes 400k DPS, and if we don't have a real dedicated tank I'm usually top Protection as well. I can spread DPS around to pressure healers in long fights, or I can focus entirely on single target DPS to burn down key targets, with pretty much equal efficiency. I can keep up very steady DPS indefinitely with good ammo management, or I can spend it all on some crazy burst DPS. It's surprisingly dynamic for a 'straight up DPS spec'.

Three things: 1. You're undergeared. As others have pointed out, tanking is always gear dependent, so you won't feel very tanky until you're closer to average PvP gear. 2. Tanking in PvP is largely about guards and taunts. It's not just about being able to take lots of hits. You can still be useful as a 'squishy' tank by guarding healers and taunting deepsers. Somewhat counter-intuitively, the best way to use taunts is usually to make sure they *can't* attack you, so it can act as a huge dps debuff instead of a taunt. 3. The fact that some damage types melt you doesn't mean you can't be a tank. It means that there are specs in the game that are good at countering tanks. High HP and guard/taunt are good against any spec, but shields and armor are only good against certain damage types. So, you're nearly immortal against some specs, but *almost* as squishy as other players against dedicated tank killing specs. Itemization in PvP is kinda stupid given how dramatically your expertise scales moving up the tiers (if it was a smaller range from bottom to top, it wouldn't be such a problem, but as it stands a lot of matches are over before they start due to one side being way better geared), but if and when you get an even match in terms of gear, tanking specs do just fine in PvP. I actually think the ways they adapt tanking skills and builds to PvP is one of the most well-designed and balanced parts of SWTOR.

He's a paying customer. He doesn't have to be the majority of paying customers to expect to get what he paid for. This "corporations can do whatever they want, **** if you don't like it" attitude may be acceptable under US law, but many countries still offer basic consumer protections that companies are required to live up to.

It's a pretty big middle finger for those of us who play during these hours to schedule THREE long downtimes in a single week - a week where many of us just resubbed to try out 1.3, no less - and put them ALL at the only time I had available to play the game. Stagger the timings, FFS!

zomg this man can see the future!

That's exactly what this guide has you do, by figuring out which items people will overpay the most for and selling them on the market. Playing the market/auctionhouse is pretty much how the "1%" in WoW style MMOs make their money, at least in games with no player corporation mechanics like the ones in EVE. Most people will 'grind' money doing a variety of things while playing, and spend large amount of that money on overpriced gear and crafting mats at the market. Selling those overpriced items is pretty much the only way (aside from buying credits or having friends/guildies just give you free money) to earn credits faster than the maximum rate possible from dailies, grinding mobs, etc. You can't magically make your character have access to a new method of grinding credits that other players can't do. Let's say the max creds/hour with perfectly efficient grinding of whatever in-game reward (mission payouts, resource nodes, whatever turns out to have the best theoretical creds/hour output) is 200k. If you want to make 400k, that requires you and/or other players to spend 2+ hours earning those credits. If you want to make 400k in less than 2 hours, you need other players to spend that time making the money, then sell them something. To sell something, you have to have that thing. Ergo.... The best possible way to make lots of credits per hour is to grind whatever gives you the most valuable loot at current market prices, bearing in mind that with the current state of the SWTOR player economy only a few items sell reliably and at consistently high prices.

Vanguard is supposed to be able to fill EITHER the role of Tank or DPS. It should be viable at endgame for both. If they wanted Vanguards to suck as a DPS spec, they wouldn't have listed it as one of the AC's roles. I'm not taking a stance (pun intended) on the abilities themselves as I've only played shield spec on my Vanguard, but mocking people for suggesting that their AC should do reasonable DPS as a DPS spec doesn't make any sense. Should every AC besides Gunslinger and Sentinel suck at everything since the rest have 2 roles each? No, every class should be viable for each of its intended roles.

I was gonna point out that you never actually specified what was wrong with any of the things you said were terrible in this game, but when you got to the point where you were dismissing entire types of content while admitting that you haven't even tried it once, I decided it would be a waste of time. Back to playing TOR. You obviously decided to hate the game before you even played most of it, and have no interest in giving it a fair chance, so why are you wasting your time posting about it here?

I'm not sure where that 200 000 figure is from, but it's sure not from swtorarena's population stats. Nowhere on that page does it give any indication of an actual number of players - not the number subscribed, not the number logged on at once, nothing. It is based entirely on the Light/Normal/Heavy/Full population levels that BioWare shows us. We have no idea what those labels mean in terms of actual population count, and any given 'population dip' on swtorarena could just as easily be expanded max population per server. If the server doubles in capacity, and the player count doesn't change at all, then the graphs on that site will drop by half. Its only purpose is to let you know how close to full each server has been over time; it gives absolutely zero information about how healthy the game's subscriber count or concurrent login stats are.

If anyone was doubting that it is literally impossible to please many of the haters, just count the posts on this thread accusing BioWare of 'blaming the customer's computer'. What they actually said: Their engineers found an issue on their end, and they are testing fixes on their end. They wrote bad code, and that coding issue becomes worse when there's a lot for the local client to process (e.g., "fast paced PvP" with lots of other player characters onscreen) and when the local client processes things less quickly to begin with (e.g., slower CPU hardware). Anyone who reads that and claims BioWare is passing the blame to customer hardware issues either has terrible reading comprehension or is being willfully deceitful because they already decided to hate everything BioWare says or does regarding SWTOR. They say they are in the late stages of testing a fix that will significantly improve performance issues that players on slower hardware are experiencing. Trying to spin this as BioWare snubbing customers on the lower end of the system requirements is not just misleading, it's the exact opposite of the truth. This is why I check the official forums about once a week before leaving in disgust. Everyone interested in having serious, rational conversations about this game, problems and all, has settled on a third party discussion site. All that's left is noobs and nerdrage. It's like Mad Max, but with less guns and more neckbeards.

Are you talking about item modification stations? Those are an obsolete remnant of early-mid beta, when you actually had to use them to modify socketed items. Since late beta, you can just ctrl+right click on an item to modify it from anywhere. The item modification stations in towns are 100% useless. If you mean something else by "forge," please clarify.

The point isn't that he's trying to do something that is only *possible* on a PvP server. It's just that the overwhelming majority of players who focus heavily on PvP play on PvP servers. A lot of people roll on PvP servers even though they don't care about non-consensual world PvP (or even view it as a downside), because they know that's where the structured PvP community will be as well. There are certainly exceptions on both extremes - structured PvP fans who hate world PvP and roll on a PvE server to avoid it, and people who don't care about WZs but like the idea of fighting enemy faction players they encounter while doing their PvE content so they roll on PvP. My perspective is probably biased as a more 'hardcore' competitive player, but at least in the hardcore/enthusiast community, PvP is the norm and you'll get made fun of for rolling on PvE, no matter what kind of content you spend most of your time playing. PvE servers are generally seen as an 'easymode' or 'carebear' server for bad players who only do solo PvE content and don't like to be challenged. That's obviously an unfair generalization, but it's one a lot of hardcore MMO players make. OP is interested mostly in structured PvP, and the things he's worried/unhappy about are that his PvE server doesn't have a strong structured PvP community and that being at level cap will make the situation worse once 50s are in their own PvP bracket. Rolling an alt on a PvP server and PvPing in the 10-49 range seems like a perfectly reasonable suggestion. It's the quickest way to get him playing the content he says he wants to be playing. The potential problems he's concerned about are all ultimately about the pool of players that will be available for WZ queueing. The only things he can do on his end that will change that are to play on a character that is in a different level range (i.e., a non-50 instead of a 50) and/or on a different server with a bigger WZ-playing community. Tl;DR: the actual game mechanic difference between PvP and PvE servers is fairly minor and doesn't affect how WZs work, but at the end of the day, players who like PvP almost always roll on a PvP server.

I agree with every single item on the list, but two criticisms: 1. The title is flamebait. If you want people who don't think the game is dying to read with an open mind, you should probably change 'Resuscitate' to 'Improve' or even 'Fix' if you feel cheeky. Anything that doesn't explicitly mean "this game is currently dead" would do wonders for your credibility at first glance. 2. There's a mix of small, targeted changes/fixes that should be near the top of BW's priority list, and much larger suggestions that would obviously take a lot more time to develop and test (e.g., complete space overhaul). It may be more helpful in the short term to work on a list of things that are (or at least seem like they ought to be) fairly quick to implement and would substantially improve the game experience over the next few weeks.

I don't know about letting people pick a specific warzone, just because it would make it hard to test and find groups for new or less popular options. I'd rather see them respond quickly to feedback to improve unpopular WZs, but it would be nice to have a veto option for one or two of them once they add a couple more to the pool. I friggin' hate Voidstar, so I would love to be able to veto it until it's patched into less of an AOE-fest. THIS! They really need to add a LFG system for FPs at the very least. I loved the first lowbie FP, but I haven't done a single one beyond that on any of my alts, because it takes so long to find a group that the already mediocre xp/loot rewards become totally atrocious. This is by far my biggest complaint with my TOR gameplay experience - if I could reliably find a group quickly, I'd do a FP almost every night, but instead I have had to skip what would almost certainly be my favorite PvE content in the game if I could actually play it. This x1000. Any real money microtransaction that has any in-game effect that isn't purely cosmetic or for convenience would be a deal-breaker for me. Things like a custom mount are fine, because you can only use one anyway and the only in-game effect is getting around the one-time cost of the mount (which is already tiny, the big in-game cost is speeder training), and something like a repair vendor / galactic market console on your personal ship might be okay, but anything that affects combat is a big no-no. As long as nobody ever wins a fight they would have otherwise lost due to something they paid for as a microtransaction, I can live with it, but I'd prefer no microtransactions of any sort.

Holy crap, major new endgame content coming in the game's second month? If the new content has the same cinematic quality of sets/environments and voice-overs as the existing content, "impressed" will be a massive understatement. These first few months of an MMO's lifespan are so crucial, and so far TOR has enjoyed smooth functioning and impressive developer support. I hope this keeps up, because I'm awfully sick of promising MMOs getting crushed under the weight of having to compete with WoW. TOR is the first major title in a long time that actually tries to grow the MMO target audience rather than joining the long list of WoW clones competing for disgruntled ex-WoW players.