I'm not sure if it's new, but Focused Meditation/Indignant Rumination is really cool! Being able to spam my best single target/aoe for a few seconds is what gives me fealings of power.

Thanks a lot! So I guess it's settled then. I wish it was clear before, because I specifically spent 200 cartel coins to double dip on a free reward.

I can be ok with this, but I'd like to receive some kind of confirmation from a mod first before I start claiming rewards, especially rewards for new levels.

Came here to say this. Only the "subscriber" part is granted when clicking claim. I didn't lose anything super valuable yet, but it did bum me out. Now I'm scared of claiming anything.

I don't think it's a fair comparison. You were learning a new rotation, in addition to all the stress from nightmare mode mechanics. It's natural that you were lower on dps as you were struggling with your old habits. Results may be different if you get comfortable with the new rotation. But I can see how that can be annoying and unfun, since your muscle memory would be working against you.

I'm not sure how would this work. X-Wing Alliance was the latest game in that series, and it had been released in 1999. Trying to combine it with a modern mmo would cause all sorts of compatibility issues. In fact, I'm almost certain that it would be far easier and faster if they just scrapped that and started from scratch. At the end of the day this is just a question of: how much time should they spend on this minigame? The answer in my mind is - not much. This is why it's an on rails shooter - it didn't make sense to pool a lot of resources out of the other stuff.

Yes: we can swap specs on the fly, but it's inconvenient to do so, so we largly don't.

There was an (i think) interesting comment on this very topic by Bashiok. http://us.battle.net/wow/en/forum/topic/2140509123?page=32#622

Could you give the link to the meek of us, unfavored by google?

Can you provide quotes by the developers confirming that this is the reason why they have done it?

In what way has dual spec failed in WoW?

You're completely wrong. Aurora was easy to use. You could make maps easly, just pick up stuff and drop it on the ground. Making cinematics only took a little effort. Anyone could learn the scripts, if they put their mind to it. That's because Aurora was a tool created for players, and not developers. Advanced players with some developer skills, sure, but still. Creating such a tool is hard work, but doable provided that you have a finished product. I'm pretty sure that early version of Aurora tool pack looked nothing like what you saw as a finished product, if it was used during the development of NWN at all. It's more plausible, to me, that they have made NWN engine first, and Aurora later. Developing and maintaining something like that for an evolving game like SWToR would be a nightmare. Real developer tools are basic but powerful and require understanding of the game systems. They often have quirky bugs that are annoying, but would take too much time to fix, and so are ignored.

Dual spec is a relic of era gone past. Back in the day respecs in WoW were expensive and bothersome. You had to go to a specific place in a city, fork out a lot of gold, then spend your time putting your points and then had to readjust your bars and keybinds. If you were a druid and you wanted to heal a dungeon, then do some pvp and then switch to tanking in a raid, it would take a significant ammount of both gold and your game time. With dual spec, some of the problems were alleviated. You had to pay an upfront cost, but now you could switch at will between 2 specs. Dual spec would remember which skills you have chosen, and what your keybinds were, so it would literally take 5 seconds to switch from one role to another. WoW has changed a lot since then. Talent trees were scrapped and replaced with a completely different system. One that is easy and cheap to change on the fly. In this system, dual spec serves only as a way to remember your keybinds between different roles. In it's role, it's not "BAD" as it were, just outdated. This can be done in WoW by the use of addons. Some of us think that a system where you can save your keybinds and talent tree choices and load them later in the field, would be so much better. It would do all the things that Dual Spec does and more.

I agree that spec presets would be vastly superior to dual spec. I never argued against it, I just wanted to fix the misquote. Blowing things out of proportion is not a good way to argue for your case. At least in my humble opinion.

Actually what they have said was that dual spec made sense when they implemented it at that time, but is detrimental to the game as it is now. They didn't say it was the worst thing ever