Thanks for all your guys' support. I'd actually be really interested to hear your guys' experiences where you really fell in love with the class. Anybody got some awesome shadow stories?

^Especially appreciative of this. Wish more people in the community would be experimenting with unorthodox shadow builds and providing feedback. Good on you. It's an awesome class that is far more fun to play than some boring grav round spamming commando.

Feel free to reply if you support this message.

*Disclaimer: I am Not a Bioware fan boy, and this thread is simply a personal opinion, Therefore due not criticize it as if it was intended to be factual.* It is true, Bioware has never been my favorite, but i have noticed a dangerous trend among many of the threads currently being posted within our class forums. The QQ trend. What is the nature of this trend you ask? Excessive complaining due to what is -in my opinion- a simple lack of understanding of our own class mechanics and purpose. I will begin by stating a couple IMMEDIATE corrections to some of the SWTOR communities perception of shadows/assassins. Infiltration shadows are NOT intended to have comparitive survivability to Kinetic. It's a DPS/Burst tree. There is no such thing as a FOTM spec. Quit thinking in the juvenile min/maxing terms of Rotation, "Best Spec", and perfect gear set up. This game has been designed to compliment individual play style. If you feel you lack understanding in a specific area, do some PERSONAL RESEARCH. Find out what works best for you, or perhaps visit some of the guides posted by active members of the community. I Personally recommend Powerr's guides. They are informative, and at the moment he is probably one of the most active members we have. IMPORTANT: Have fun. Seriously. Take a step back from the constant QQing and just have fun playing with your guildies/friends. I don't mean to hate on everybody and their mom, but the priorities of this community are currently rather dismal. Perform personal research, contribute to the knowledge base so that future players can benefit from your trial and error. Don't forget. This game is only a couple months old. We essentially are the founders of what i hope will one day be a flourishing, informative, and constructive Shadow member base. I can promise you this: The developers will appreciate constructive analysis of game mechanics FAR more than "This sucks, this is stupid, NERF THIS, BUFF THAT" So buck up and help make this one of the more Bad-*** class communities in the game. Let's send those Imp's to Hell. -Grim Jedi Shadow The Maw

Seeing as you're a fresh 50, probably go Kinetic Combat and gear yourself as the above people have mentioned. It's way less gear dependent than Infiltration, and far less complicated (and practical) than Balance. When you start getting BM gear with all that crit/surge, infiltration can be quite the beast. Of course, by then i'm sure there will be numerous changes to the talent trees anyway rendering this advice null and void, but don't let the baddies trick you into thinking Infiltration is at no point viable. Once you're rocking the BM gear, and are playing with a premade that knows how to communicate and target swap effectively, that infil. burst is absolute insanity.

In regards to the pros and cons of Upheavel vs. Extra pts. in Kinetic, I would personally take Upheavel everytime. This is mostly a play style and management issue. The purpose of upheavel is it's ability to do that much more damage over a very short time interval. While it is rather impulsive, the role of an infiltration shadow in competitive PvP is not sustained damage. The name of the game is burst. I personally run a premade featuring a Kinetic Combat Shadow, An Infiltration Shadow (myself), a Commando Dps, and Sage heals. With correct and succinct target/burst switches, Upheavels ability to do that much more extra burst damage over such a short time interval is what makes the skill worthwhile. People love to compare damage stats in Warzones, and that's fine, but what i care about is getting wins. I'd take less overall damage, but with more ability to burst and quickly send imps to their graveyard while we cap any day.

I talked about the ability delay issue. It is horrible, and I agree that a change is a must. It completely ruins the mechanics and movement of combat between players. Luckily, that will soon be fixed (at least according to Bioware). As for World PvP, while there obviously exists the beginnings of what could be a fun system, I agree that some development is required. Whoever it was that stated there should be mercenary commendation awards for world pvp kills was fairly on the ball (so much so that when i first began playing the game, i honestly thought that was how it worked in the first place).

Thanks.

My dear fellow players, Seriously. This whole QQ system needs to stop. After reading your ridiculous post complaints for nearly an hour, my eyes are on the verge of bleeding -and quite frankly i feel rather nauseous. I'd like to address some of the issues that have been so thoroughly complained about with what, in my mind, are valid and logical reasons for why things are the way they are. But first, let me preface all of this by saying that PvP is no where near broken. In fact, quite frankly it seems to me like a bunch of scrubs heard about a new mmo and thought: "I'll be one of the first to play and be auto-good! no one will touch me!" However, being a relatively experienced PvPer myself, as well as having a great many friends who play this game with even greater PvP credentials, i can safely say that perhaps some of your complaints are spawned from a more internal issue, being your lack of skill. One more side note, those complaining about the mechanics behind character animations and delay time on your instant ability damage are absolutely correct. But i have a strong feeling bioware will be fixing that sometime soon. 1) Sith vs. Republic Warzones I struggle to believe that people actually think that it is a good idea to mix republic and sith players on the same team. In what world does that make any sense? Not only does it COMPLETELY conflict with the lore and entire setting of the game itself, but it is ridiculous to suggest that it is "unfair" for a certain faction to be superior to another. You both have mirror classes, stats, and controlled environments. If you are losing, its because you are legitimately a worse player than the opposing team, and if you think a corporation like bioware will make excuses for that, then you really are stupid. 2)A Separate 50 bracket I completely understand the desire for a bracket of 50s to be separate from the 1-49 level players which do not have access to PvP gear. The expertise stat absolutely changes the game once you receive it in large quantities, and no amount of level bolstering is going to make a level 10 be able to compete with a 4/5 piece champion lvl 50. HOWEVER: I agree that this needs to wait at least 2 more weeks, possibly even 3-4. That may come as a shocker, but I think alot of this premature bracket stuff is coming from a lack of perspective. I suspect many of you are playing on early access servers, and thus the level 50s on your own server are certainly in large quantity. But if you were to log on to MANY of the servers newly released on Dec 20th, you'd find that there are as few as 7-11 50s (the lower numbers most likely being republic factions). Do not despair. You will definitely get your way, but just be patient. 2 weeks isn't a very long time, and it will save all the people NOT on early access servers from their 30 minute que times. 3)Inquisitor/Sage Fix them. I agree. Though i hope they manage to do so without somehow hurting their advanced class partners, the Shadow/Assassins. Those classes require no nerf whatsoever, and may possibly need a bit of a survivability buff as is. But more to the point, the inquisitor/sage is certainly over powered At Low Levels. If you are a mid range to high level player and still complaining about these guys then you need learn to take full advantage of your class mechanics. Forgive me, but i really dont understand why people might consider it difficult to interrupt force lightening and dark fusion (or whatever that ability is called). In general, it is quite obvious to me that the majority of complaints are surfacing from bad players. Please do not seek to ruin this game further by asking for quick fix solutions to your mediocrity. Because in the end, you wont get better, and no matter what bioware does, scrubs are scrubs. Love, A Satisfied Player. p.s. stop complaining about Hutt ball. if you dont see the potential for that game to be absolutely amazing in a premades later on in the games progression,than you have truly gone to the dark side of button mashing brainless PvP.