As a Sniper, I picked up Loken and haven't looked back. Kaliyo and Vector were serviceable, but Loken makes things sooooooooooooo much easier - especially boss fights. It's a shame that we don't get him sooner. My only complaint is that I'm not getting much of a personality from Loken, but I suppose it's better than Kaliyo....her character is completely inappropriate for her role as an accomplice to an Imperial Intelligence agent. She's dumb, brutish, capricious, and unreliable. What idiot writer decided that Keeper would consider her to be a good tag-along for sensitive, clandestine intelligence operations?

1. X-Wing, TIE Fighter, and X-Wing vs. TIE Fighter 2. SWG 3. Anything else. I've played Dark Forces, Battlegrounds, and some other stuff but none of them left an impression on me. Damn I really miss X-Wing & TIE Fighter.

Evasion is garbage, the tooltip is enormously deceptive. To the OP, take heart. Snipers will be improved, but it probably not as soon as some of us would like. It takes time to gather and analyze the statistics - who is playing what, how fast are they leveling, who is dying the most often, where and how, etc. The devs have to monitor this stuff for quite a while to get meaningful information. One problem that a lot of classes suffer from is the way abilities, talent points, and companions are distributed. As many people have pointed out, Marksman picks up when you get Followthrough, and Shield Probe is very helpful as well. But these abilities don't come into play until the 30s. Instead of getting a useful ability to round out your performance, you're spending 6k credits to add a bit more damage to Shiv. Additionally, many of the talent trees, across all of the classes, are set-up in such a way that you may end up spending points on talents that effect abilities you don't have access to, or are mostly unhelpful for rounding out performance at a given level. And finally the companions - honestly, they should have given every class their two most complimentary companions right off the bat. For a sniper that would be your Tank/DPS and Healer/DPS. Kaliyo isn't terrible, neither is Vector, but together they don't fill in the weak spots.

The trolling is pretty evident.

If I recall correctly, this guy is a melee fighter right? Big sword? TBH, I've made it a point to be 1 or 2 levels above every planet because of encounters like that. I've noticed that the hard-hitting melee enemies typically don't have any casts that can be interrupted. You've basically got two longish cool down CCs and Leg Shot to kite him with. If you're engineering, you've got access to a reliable slow that will help. Your companion will almost certainly die unless you try to pro-actively juggle aggro, but between trying to DPS him down, employing CC whenever possible, and having to move->cover->move->cover...well, good luck trying to juggle all that. Keep a medpac on hand and bind it to an easy key to reach. If this is not the boss I'm thinking of, then just ignore what I wrote. However, if you make it past this guy, you should do yourself a favor and look up some videos for the final boss encounter for agents in Chapter 1. Spoil it for yourself so you can avoid that fight altogether, it's really not worth the frustration.

After leveling up several different classes and specs, Snipers really seem to fall behind the curve all through the 1-40 range. The 30's seem to be a particularly rough spot, though a lot of that is dependent on -how- you are leveling up; If you're doing heroics and/or space missions, you will almost certainly be 1-3 levels ahead of each planet you arrive on, which makes a tremendous difference. That said, other classes really don't need to over-level their content to stay with the difficulty curve. I am in agreement with the issues that the OP listed, and I would also add that Evasion is pretty much worthless/broken, although there's a whole different subject on how armor, defense, and attack types are completely mismanaged in this game.

That Lucas took SW in a direction that his fans didn't like doesn't bother me. As an artist, I can appreciate that. He is not obligated to please anyone with his creations...well, unless he needs to make a pile of money, but that's a different topic. However I reserve the right to criticize ****** writing and directing. I reserve that right for any director, artist, musician, etc. Lucas is not above scrutiny. The guy made some trashy, inept films. The fact that he still made money from them speaks more to his legacy and the draw of the Star Wars brand and the appeal of the SW universe. I was a pretty big SW fan with the OT, but when I watch them today, they aren't masterpieces of exception writing and cinematography - at least not how I remembered them as a kid. It's just a really cool universe, that's it. I can't look surprised when, many years later, he came out with some more cheese. It's also poor form to go back and attempt to "fix" your earlier work, rather than simply learning from it as you move forward. This holds true in all creative fields and mediums (especially journalism). That said, it's both revealing and petty to begrudge this guy so much that you eagerly wish shame upon him, and desire him to abandon the one thing that he is passionate about - even if he's not very good at it. If someone said to me, "Please just go away, we're sick of your paintings, you don't know anything about color theory or anatomy, we don't want to see anymore, just give up." ...I'd politely tell you to go **** off.

Something tells me that you haven't done the math, either.

Tylerlee, I encourage you to avoid responding to the trolls who want to suffocate reasonable discussion. If someone wants to challenge the information you've presented, they can do so without resorting to logical fallacies. Anyone who can't meet this elementary standard should be dismissed from further discussion.

False dilemma, straw man etc.. Try again. But for the record, **** a dungeon finder - I would've happily waited another 6 months for a game that doesn't require me to stare at the lower 1/3 of the screen to monitor tiny icon timers and cool downs.

Ehhh I scrapped the agent and started new. Of course now my friend says it looks like Olivia Munn...I can see it now. I'm just going to go with it, it was unintentional. http://img9.imageshack.us/img9/2261/swtoragent.jpg

If you decide to make an MMO, and you have a couple decades worth of MMOs to reference for ideas about what you should include in your new MMO, such as LFG tools, flexible interface, macros, etc.. is it reasonable for people to expect that you will have them? Of course WoW didn't launch with a dungeon finder, that idea emerged from years of play testing and analyzing. But once the idea occurs and is successfully implemented, the onus falls on other MMO developers to make sure they are offering a competitive product. Note the distinction: arriving at the concept was the lengthy part, not the actual development. You should take advantage of the years of system refinement that other developers have made, rather than regressing half a decade.

I paint pretty much exclusively in Photoshop these days.

Started on some character portraits... I think I'm pretty much done messing around with the Jedi, just started working on the agent - face is kind of getting away from me, gotta reign it back in http://img714.imageshack.us/img714/2491/swtorchars.jpg Anyways I thought I'd share this one in process, rough as it is.

What is with the sado-masochists? I think they must have some kind of parental/authority/guilt complex that prevents them from enjoying anything if they haven't first been punished for it. Color rarity is just dumb. The idea that you absolutely must tie fun cosmetic fluff (ie., lightsaber color) to achiever-oriented grind tasks should have died the very moment that City of Heroes was born. We have definitive proof, across several titles now, that letting players control the appearance of their avatar with few restrictions is fun for everyone, and does not cause people to become bored. It causes people to experiment and have fun. Or did we all forget that having a bit of fun is the whole point? This is basic wish-fulfilment, pretendy-fantasy stuff. We're all playing dress-up with virtual dolls. **** gaming achievements, they are intrinsically worthless. **** the selfish desire to deprive others of a good time so that you can be a unique snowflake. I believe in the democratization of color - there are plenty of other ways for the sado-masochists to waste their lives away for a game, cosmetic customization should not be one of them.

What a spectacular failure of an analogy.

Yeah I can't disagree here. I like the spirit of cover - I want Snipers to use the cover system, but I want it to be attractive. What we have right now is just an obstacle. And that's ignoring the bugs. If it were my call, I'd remove the requirement from abilities. I'd add some defensive/accuracy bonuses to using cover, along with bonus damage to certain abilities (snipe, ambush) if they are used from cover. Basically, try to make cover attractive to use, but not necessary. Honestly this is just basic good game design, 101.

The asinine replies from the apologists in this thread made me curious, so I took a stopwatch and measured the amount of time needed to Fleet-pass from a planet, and then get back. So I did exactly that, transiting to the Fleet for a GTN dump, and the trip back. The timer starts after Fleet Pass finishes channeling and the screen goes black. Time includes black-screens/load screens caused by zone transitioning and entering/leaving ship. It does not include time spent running through spaceport areas or through my ship, or time spent at the GTN terminal. Ship take-off/landing cinematics were skipped. Total time: 00:04:13:04 Interesting to note, my total time traveling from Balmorra, to Fleet, back to Balmorra Spaceport (I won't even include taxi time getting back to my original location) was 00:10:15:23. In other words, to transit from a planet to Fleet, spending a few minutes at the GTN, then returning to a planet took just over 10 minutes. Nearly half of that time was spent in loading/black screens. In other games, loading screens actually aren't a bother as long as they are brief, and have moving progress bars. In this game, however, load screens are lengthy, and the progress bar tends to hang for a while before picking back up. This makes a slow process feel slower, and wears patience thin. The spaceports and shuttles might not seem so bad if the load screen were very brief, OR the load screens might not be a bother if there was less trekking through unnecessary transit areas. But we have both. Together. At the same time. I'm not sure why I'm bothering though, since the slack-jawed posters whose hearts beat for the status quo can't imagine a situation where tedium is lessened without making the game less immersive.

Does anyone happen to know what the possible outcomes (female agent) throughout the quest chain involving Chemish, Sanju, and Gray Star? Looking through Torhead and Darthhater, it's hard to get a sense of which decisions lead to which conclusions. For what it's worth, I've been through this quest chain a couple times on different characters, I'm just wondering what the possibilities are. Actions taken in one step of the chain seem to determine the possible actions in the next step. Actually, has anyone attempted to map out quest chain outcomes? Seems like it would useful to start organizing quest data that way.

Why did you spend so much time and thought constructing an argument that hinges on a basic logical fallacy? And then you went on to gloat about it?

No, it's not actually. For an average person, the amount of items that need monitoring in SWTOR is pushing the limit for what the brain can keep track of simultaneously. For a seasoned gamer, especially an MMO vet who is accustomed to this gameplay, it's within reach, but can still be frustrating because we lack the UI functionality to organize the information in a useful manner.

Wouldn't that be nice? It's really a shame they didn't go this route. As a Balance Shadow, I feel almost bound at the hip to the doctor. I can get along alright with Qyzen, I suppose, but all of the other companions are worthless for me. Well, I don't have Nadia yet, but I can't imagine that a DPS companion is going to work better for me than a healer (though I'd be thrilled to be wrong) Personally, I don't even like the idea of running around with a ship full of companions that never see the light of day - just having one that could be tailored for the individual player would have been a much better solution.

This game puts a heavy emphasis on interrupting enemy casts, there's no way around that. I've found from about 1-30 you can get by with offensive button mashing, but not so much after that. I learned this the hard way, but I think a lot of the struggle comes from the UI limitations. In a nutshell, a lot of players can easily find themselves being overwhelmed by information overload - too many individual things to keep track of and monitor, without a decent UI that makes this kind of gameplay feasible for people who are not hyper-reactive. Physiologically, most people have trouble keeping track of more than 4 items, give or take. This isn't stupidity, it's just a basic limitation. Now consider: Basic attack chain Keeping de-buffs/dots up Reacting to ability procs Interrupting enemy spell casts Staying out of fire/monitoring environment Monitoring cooldowns Nevermind having 36+ abilities, many of which are very situational, to keep track of. These are just the requirements for a basic fight, and right off the bat it is pushing the average limits of human attentiveness. Of course the developers want an element of stress, but where this game failed was in the UI. Other games have accommodated this type of gameplay with customizable UI and alerts. They also have basic macro functions to ease the burden of having so many abilities. We don't even get the luxury of grouping important information on the screen. Enemy portrait is on one side, my portrait is on the other, companion is somewhere else, buttons and cool downs span across the entire screen and up the sides, buffs and debuffs are only indicated by tiny icons that run across the entire screen. If you look at your quick bar for a second to monitor your cool downs or look at your buffs to check for a proc, you can easily fail to notice that the enemy is casting, and not react in time. Is it any wonder that at least some people are being frustrated? Until we get a proper UI for this type of gameplay, I can totally understand how people miss things like their interrupt windows. Also, someone pointed out the number of interrupts available to a Shadow, but failed to mention that Force Wave has a lengthy animation, making it unsuitable for interrupting many casts, and Force Pull is only available to 1 build.

Can anyone point out, since I've only played up to 30-35 on a Consular and Agent, an instance where a choice taken through dialogue options had lasting effects on their character story? Everything I've seen, up to this point, suggest that choices only adjust your storyline in the most superficial ways, immediately changing a bit of dialogue, but having no other memorable effect. For instance, choosing to spare a ruthlessly evil Sith, only to have that character come back later on, or forever change the possibility of options and outcomes later on... that would be an example of lasting effects. When interacting with an NPC, you might choose some insulting words, the NPC makes a resentful remark, but then otherwise continues the conversation as if you'd done nothing wrong. This is to be expected to a large extent, since writers don't have enough time to write out branching story lines with multiple possible outcomes - what you really get are a few "flavor" options, but eventually all roads collapse to a single point, with a single outcome. So far I've accepted this for what it is, but there seem to be some people in this thread who claim this isn't the case. I'd like to be wrong. I don't care to discuss the matter of light/dark points, it's a stupid, inarticulate system that isn't worth thinking about. I just want to know about ramifications.

Setting a flag on an actor (critter, NPC, etc) from "Hostile to "Friendly" doesn't eat up more resources. You're simply taking the existing population, and re-purposing some of them.