You really think that people define WOW by having an LFG tool? One of the defining features of a WOW clone is an LFG tool? It's not possible for a game to have an LFG tool and not be a WOW clone? How can you be so blinded by your hate for wow? I don't understand.

The best thing to do to really learn a class is to watch someone stream their game, preferably someone who talks about what they're doing. For example look at: http://www.twitch.tv/directory/Star%20Wars:%20The%20Old%20Republic and try to find someone who is playing the class you want to learn. It helps to ask questions too. Also, google searches can help too.

Hammer Shot hits 7 times. http://www.torhead.com/ability/cEdZjin/hammer-shot Hammer Shot + Plasma Cell is not more than Grav Round Hammer Shot : 1.0 Weapon Damage 1.0 Ranged Bonus Damage Plasma Cell: .155 Tech Bonus Damage per gcd Grav Round: 2.11 Tech Bonus Damage Not even close. AP Cell > Rain of fire on targets with 18% armor. With a full stack of Gravity Vortex it's 14.75% armor. I've played Assault. It's bad because you don't have the ammo to do anything but run around like a headless chicken spamming a very low dps ability. Maybe if the difference between max and middle regen was less, Assault could be viable. Until then you either cripple your sustained damage for burst or cripple your burst for sustained damage. 18s low dps dot that costs 3 ammo is good? It's not the job of a high dps low utility class to get kills? A 33% snare that's dependent on spamming our lowest damaging ability while praying for a proc is good? If you really want to defend a point use Hail of Bolts, it's instant damage and can keep 5 people off the point for 3(?4?) seconds. Incend in that time can stop only 2 people. Maybe you like basing your strategies around how well you can perform while dead, but I don't. If you like the 33%snare on a proc, you would probably love the 5second 50% on demand snare from Gunnery, just a thought.

I guess that next time I need to make the statement even more over the top. lol

But if super casuals can play that means my accomplishments aren't worth as much any more. If some mouth breathing 1 hour a week causal can even attempt my hardcore content, how can I brag about it in the server forums or walk around the Fleet showing off my rare epics that everyone else can't get because they didn't put in the work I did of finding a guild? IMO LFD would ruin the community and shouldn't be allowed. Edit: A lot of people seemed to miss the /sarcasm spell I cast.

Spam Hammer Shot? Our worst damage ability? For a CHANCE to proc an awful dot and a 33% snare? You really think this is the intended mechanic and is actually meaningful? You still miss the point, if Hammer Shot( a zero ammo ability) is the only spammable ability, then the spec offers no meaningful damage.

Can you read? I never said you had to stand around for 8 gcds, I said you had 8 gcds to do something, anything, and I was asking how you do something meaningful with those 8gcds in Assault compared to Gunnery. Those 8 gcds were after you had used HIB, AP, IR and insert random GCD. You are really going to fill up 8 gcds with a Full Auto(2 GCDs, poor damage for assault) and one CB(1 GCD)? And then fill up the rest with Hammer Shot so you can hope for a Plasma Cell proc or another HIB if your lucky stars align? You really don't see anything wrong with this playstyle? HINT: Hammer Shot is awful damage even when including the chance to proc Plasma Cell. Yeah, I have no idea how to make a spec. Of course I included Muzzle Flutting in my comparisons. Choose FA over CB? Maybe, but you still have lots of spare GCDs running around(7). Still no where near as good as using FA in Gunnery. EDIT: CB + Hammer Shot deals almost the same damage as 1 Full Auto for Assualt. CB: 1.33 Weapon damage, 1.99 Bonus Ranged Damage, 320 base damage Hammer Shot: 1.00 Weapon damage, 1.00 Bonus Ranged Damage Full Auto: 2.1 Weapon Damage, 3.15 Bonus Ranged Damage, 507 base damage Difference: -.23 Weapon Damage, +.16 Bonus Ranged Damage, +187 Base damge The base damage part assumes both abilities are trained at level 50. Oh boy, I get to wait 2 GCDs of to get my damage increase if I get a proc! I look and see one spec that has so many internal problems, compared to another that is super easy to see the flow and play at a high level. Each tic of damage procs the Cover Fire talent. I assume it's the same thing for Hammer Shot, but I'm not sure. The descriptions are different; Cover Fire says "Slows for 2 seconds when Full Auto Deals damage", while Plasma Cell says "Gives all rifle attacks a 10% chance to proc." Very different wording, also worth it to note that the bottom talent for Vanguards gives Stock Strike a guaranteed chance to proc Plasma Cell. The problem you don't see is that Assault requires you to somehow fit in more than 1 GCD per 1.5second window to see meaningful damage increases.

How can people be so hypocritical against Damage Meters? It is literally the same thing as a combat, or the animations displaying on the screen. Damage Meters are a bar graph, the animations on the screen are a table with the information. That's the most simple comparison there is. They provide exactly the same information in different way. How can you be so selfish to say that you enjoy using a data table so much and hate bar graphs so much, that no one else in the entire game should be allowed to use a bar graph? And why is the "hur dur tools are the reason people are mean to each other in pug"(never mind how wrong that statement is.) a SUFFICIENT reason to prevent other people from PLAYING THE GAME THE WAY THEY WANT? (My guess: It's the burnout old school player who feels like WoW ruined his niche genre, and is so blinded by his selfish desires that the only way he can "enjoy" the game is to force everyone to play by his arbitrary rules.)

And you still completely missed the point. Spamming Charged Bolts, is how you are supposed to play Assault. Why else would you have so many talents that improve HIB, a 15 second cooldown ability? Oh, you have a talent that can reset the cooldown on it, but you need to keep casting Charged Bolts. That's the problem with the tree, why can't you see it? It wants you to spam Charged Bolts, but doesn't give you the mechanics nor does its synergize with the other buffs in the trees. Honestly what are you doing with those other ~8gcds laying around as Assault? I think you just don't understand how the tree comes together.

You fail to see the problem though. Gunnery CAN continue to spam a high scaling attack(Grav Round) when you have extra GCD's that aren't used up by high priority attacks. Assault, on the other hand, can't even fit its spammable attack(Charged Bolts, 30% to proc Ionic Accelerator, your only passive ammo regen and mobility increase in Assault) into its base "burst" rotation, let alone some kind of meaningful consistent rotation. If you start to through in Hammer Shots, you just fall completely behind in DPS. For my gear, full champ, Charged bolt is roughly 900 base damage higher, or 600 more base dps than Hammer Shot.

What else would he be spamming? Incend Round? HammerShot? But your "burst" damage also sends you into middle regen, while Gunnery's doesn't. Maybe you are trying to suggest that with an 18s cooldown and 2 15second cooldowns, he has no room in a rotation to have a spammable attack?

When your Sage gets to level ~25, that's when your Combat Medic starts to really shine. Yes, it's a joke. But really, Combat Medic/Sawbones is just so far behind Sage at this point from a game play perspective, it's not worth it to play anything but Sage. There's a million reasons, if you can't find them, then you probably don't play that a top level so it doesn't matter what you pick. In that regard, Combat Medic doesn't take off until you get both Medical Probe Shield(Your best health per GCD ability) and the talent that reduces your next Medical Probe after you cast Adv. Medical Probe. Before that you are gimped by your resource mechanic and will have a very hard time healing well.

The biggest problem you forgot to mention was the ammo difference: Assault: 12/12 .6 Incendiary 9/12 .6 9.9/12 .6 Assault Plastique 7.9/12 .34 8.67/12 .6 Charged Bolts 8.67/12 .6 7.57/12 .34 HIB 6.57/12 .34 7.08/12 .34 Gunnery: 12/12 .6 Sticky Grenade 10/12 .6 10.9/12 .6 Grav Round 10.9/12 .6 9.8/12 .6 HIB 8.8/12 .6 9.7/12 .6 Demo 7.7/12 .34 8.34/12 .6 Both cases assuming no procs and that energy regen happens every half second. If it happens ever 1 second then I'll redo this, but I think it becomes even worse for Assault. The Gunnery Rotation leaves you in the maximum regen, while the Assault rotation leaves you in the middle regen, which requires 3 seconds(2 gcd without ammo cost) to return to maximum regen. Assuming a 30% chance to crit, Gunnery would on average end at 8.66 ammo, a ~.3 ammo increase over no cell charger/crit. You only get one proc in this case because the ammo regen on Grav Round doesn't happen til the end of the GCD while Demo hits at the begining of it's GCD. Assault would average 7.8 ammo at the end(only if you use Charged Bolts for the proc), a ~.8 ammo increase, although you still need a GCD of no ammo cost to end up in the maximum regen.

Just to compare Sage/Sorc to Commando/Merc: Shield(Insta cast heal, awesome scaling, appliable to others, run speed buff(talented)) -> nothing aoe knockback(20s cooldown, 8m range), with talents immoblizes for up to 5s, unlimited targets -> aoe knockback(30s(20s talented) cooldown, 4m range(8m talented), with 4s slow, max 5 targets speed boost -> nothing 30m 6s slow, 12s cooldown -> nothing 30m Ranged Interupt, 4s(6s talented) lockout, 12s cooldown-> nothing Extrication -> nothing 4s stun 60s cooldown(50s talented), deals damage -> 4s stun 60s cooldown, no damage 3s 50% channeled slow -> nothing or 25 pts in gunnery for 50% channeld slow force armor aoe sleep(talented) -> stock strike single target knockback(talented) in combat rez -> nothing That's a lot of nothing that the other ranged dps/healer class gets. It's also nice that i get to spend talent points to make my abilities have the same effects that sage/sorc get base line. The only thing that commando/mercenary gets base line that sage/sorc doesn't is a 12second 25% damage reduction with a 2 minute cooldown. Your opponent would have to do 12k damage or more in 12seconds for that to be better. The downside is that reactive shield has a 2 minute cooldown, compared to the 20s cooldown on force armor and reactive shield can not be cast on other people. On armor: Most dps classes have ~50% armor reduction, or deal elemental/internal damage, so to say that 30% mitigation vs 15% mitigation is meaningful is about as truthful as saying that sorc/sage has better defense due to having twice the base avoidance chance(10% vs 5%).

The Assault tree is poorly designed and hampers your ability to do anything productive, killing people(And no, being able to DOT 4 people before you can no longer do anything in the fight because you're out of ammo is not something productive). Having to either pray for a Plasma Cell proc, most likely from Hammer Shot due to the number of hits per GCD(Yay for a play style that forces you to spam our lowest DPS ability), or use a 3 ammo no burst ability that has a good chance of putting you into a lower ammo regeneration rate if it's not your first spell. The problems with the tree are all over the place, most of the talents are worthless or worth very little. Burnout - Bad, 3% tech only effects Plasma Cell, Incendiary Round and Assault Plastique. (Also Plasma Grenade, but if you're using this 4 ammo ability you have other problems) The additional burn is awful, Plasma Cell doesn't scale worth the GCD, and Incend. doesn't tic fast enough for this to get a meaningful increase in damage. Adrenaline fueled - Not dependable. Most of your extra crit(66%) from the build only effects your dots and Assault Plastique(15s cooldown). Also doesn't help that neither of the two abilities buffed are very good, and it only effects the next fight, not your current one. Reflexive Shield - Same problems. Also includes the problem of a ranged dps class depending on being hit so it can enter the next battle with a higher chance of having a cooldown ready. It's a 50% cooldown redux, which sounds good, but only if you are hit the entire length of the cooldown. Ionic Accelerator - Just awful compared to the Vanguard version. Assault has no reason to use Full Auto, it deals very little damage compared to Gunnery's Full Auto, and you simply don't have the ammo to spam Charged Bolts because you don't get the "Ammo Regen" from the talent until 1 GCD later. (Yay for a "mobility" spec being dependent on having to hard cast.) High Friction Bolts - Awful ammo management compared to Cell Charger. (What talents you pick up at the bottom of the other trees) - IMO way to many trade offs, so much so that it's not a question of what you get(IE what Gunnery has for the bottom of the other trees) it becomes a question of what you didn't get. Higher burst damage? Impossible, the rotation you have to use for Assault to get the most out of the spec simply deals less burst damage than Gunnery. Assault: HIB needs a burn effect so you can even use it. Assault Plastique hits roughly 2 GCDs after the cast. Incendiary -> Assault Plastique -> some waste of a GCD -> HIB Gunnery: Sticky Grenade -> Grav Round -> Demo Round -> HIB IMO Gunnery deals a ton more burst damage. Half the damage increasing talents you pick up in Assault don't affect the big hitter, HIB, or what appears to be the big spammer, Charged Bolts. The tree is poorly designed for Commando, it wants you to use skills that aren't buffed by the tree(you actually deal more damage/get more talents with Charged Bolts in Gunnery than in Assault) to buff abilities that aren't very good. You also don't do it in a dependable way. Bioware needs to redesign the tree so it's actually good for Commandos not just Vanguards. It seems like they designed the Vanguard version of the tree first, then just ported a few abilities to their Commando "counterparts" without realizing that the tree ends up pulling you in 8 different directions. IMO, you could probably run 31 Assault with AP cell and actually deal more damage.(Something like this: http://www.torhead.com/skill-calc#800MzZMckZfI0bdGGro.1 while running AP cell)

Holy misinformation Batman! 35% armor penetration + 20% armor reduction is not 55% armor penetration, it's 48%. 90% armor penetration on rail shot? I thought we were talking about Commando/Mercenary not Powertech/Vanguard. If you interrupt one, it'll be 5.5 seconds before they hit you with another one, they literally have no other spammable skills that they could use in that time frame. If you interrupt the first one, they can't hit you with High Impact Bolt/Railshot, Heatseaker/Demo Round hit for less than Grav/Tracer, they can't cast Unload/Full Auto because if you're hitting them they lose 33% of the damage. It is an l2p problem here.

For all of you concerned about the "community," loosely based on the outdated technology of a server: Why is the "community" even a comparable thing to the ability of people to even have the option to attempt group based content? I would think gamers would value being able to see every part of the game, exemplified by the disdain for day 1 dlc that comes on the disc, over basically anything else. Are you really that selfish that you can't even understand that there are people who have trouble(for whatever reason it is, I've yet to see a "counter-argument" to this that isn't "I don't like people playing the game a different way than I do". Because it doesn't matter why people are having trouble doing the content, the problem is that they aren't doing the content.) and would like to ACTUALLY PLAY THE ENTIRE GAME IN THEIR OWN WAY? Why should parts of the game only be allowed to those who have "friends and guildies?" (A necessary distinction is drawn here between hard modes and regular modes, IMO even doing the encounters on "easy" mode is still doing it. No reason not to offer a harder version that requires more coordination and thus more rewards.) Why is that a good model for a broad audience of players?

How? What's the difference between hard numbers and smart gameplay? Why do you think it is impossible to represent smart gameplay and utility with numbers? The game already does that. ???? If you don't pay attention, you don't see the warnings, such as the fire on the ground, HP bar decreasing, boss emote, boss animation. Not sure how any addon significantly impacted this. Encounters never got simpler. MC is stupid easy to understand, most bosses had 1 or 2 abilities and if you were lucky you got three phases. Compare that to any encounter in cataclysm and you see even the regular bosses with more abilities and phases. That was the point. "Bring the player not the class." ??? What? How did DBM impact healing? Positioning easier? DBM didn't move your character for you. But the real question is: Should the difficulty of the encounter be your ability to estimate when the next "event" is going to happen or how you respond to the "event"? You, and most people against addons, seem to believe that the former is the more important part of the challenge, while most people for addons view the latter as the more important part. What's the skill check here? BOSS A emotes: "I'm moving all of the oxygen in the room to the left side." What's the skill check? Moving to the required position at the correct time? Or is it figuring out that you need to move in the first place? Again, you seem to imply that the difficulty should come through obfuscation, hence your belief that any way that makes it "easier" to know that you have to do something significantly impacts the challenge of the fight. On the other hand, if you believed that moving at the correct time was the important part of the challenge, you would say that any way the person gets the information that he needs to move is irrelevant, what's important is whether he moves or not. Bad players are bad players. Also do you have anything to back this up with? Other than some anecdotes of course. I ask because Recount/Combat log keeps track of everything you listed there. I would disagree. Encounters are made by the developers not by Recount. Again, you seem to imply that the challenge of the fight should come through obfuscation. That the difficulty of the encounter is figuring out what you did wrong without the tools to tell you exactly what happened. I believe that the difficulty should come from adapting and figuring out what went wrong, and that accurate information on what happened is an important part of that. Saying everything became about the meters is a null statement because meters keep track of everything that happens. You wouldn't say "Everything became about everything" that would just sound silly. No, you got the cause and effect backwards. "Internet tough guys & wannabe eltists" used Gearscore to please themselves. They found the tool, the tool didn't find them. Again, there seems to be some sort of arrogance here. That the "lower people," exemplified by your use of derogatory terms, should not be allowed to play the game a way different from "your interpretation." Why should the community not be fractured? Why shouldn't people group with who they choose? Why shouldn't I be allowed to segregate myself from the community? Why can't I form my own community within the larger community? Examples? And yet you seem to get so many things wrong. Argument from authority. Correlation not caustation. What you failed to explain was why mods were the reason that things changed, and why the change was bad. Why should the challenge come through obfuscation? Why is your way to play the only acceptable way? Like when they admitted to specifically designing encounters so that you did not need to download any addon? Or when they admitted to testing the encounters with the stock UI just to make sure? That seems like a good design choice not a bad one.

Why? I don't think they did in a negative way. IMO they never really changed the challenges of any encounters I played. Although the difficulty shifted from fighting the UI to fighting the mechanics of the fight, which was a good change.

The problem with disabling Recount, Gearscore, DBM, and PowerAuras is what addons can you make? What addons do you know of that a lot of people enjoy using that have zero overlap with those addons? Also, how do you define real time information? Does character health count? Then say goodbye to character frame changes. Do cooldowns count? Say goodbye to bar mods. Do buffs/debuffs count? Say goodbye to any sort of buff tracker. How do you distinguish between the "evil meanie, touched me in the naughty areas" mods and mods you are okay with? Because they use the same information, just in different ways. Your objection seems arbitrary.

I would welcome the idea of being able to respec my Advanced Class. IMO that would definitely separate this game from the others on the market by giving players more options. Points of disagreement: 1. Only permanent choices have importance. I just have to disagree with this idea. Partly because "permanent" is ill-defined and because it just isn't true. IMO the important choices/things in an MMORPG are the people you choose to play with, and did you have fun? Also, if the choice of AC is very important to you, simply choice not to respec. Why are you basing your enjoyment of the game on how others play? To me, this might be one of the most selfish arguments on the entire board, because you are basing the argument on how it affects other people instead of how it affects yourself. 2. "Every other game did it this way, SWTOR must too" I don't like this argument either. To argue that nothing should change because nothing has been changed is a null argument. Whatever limitations(yes, forcing someone to reroll to try a different archetype is a limitation for this generation of MMORPG players) other games have, shouldn't be forced onto this game unless they have sufficient merit in themselves. The fact that other games have this "feature" is not, in my mind, a sufficient reason not to include AC respec. In conclusion I think that AC respec would be a fun and new feature that could allow Bioware to take advantage of their game design, i.e. there are 4 "classes" and 2 "sub-classes" for each class, to really try something new. I think that having more options and less tedious game play (saying people are lazy for not wanting to do certain parts of the game, for example leveling a dps character, is a non-argument) is more fun and that should be what Bioware bases their choice on.

It's more important to them that the server they play "knows" how good they are at PvP, than the importance of other people enjoying PvP.

Why is this a problem?(Other than it's different from your view on "how the game should be played"). So you solution to "improving team play" is to prevent other people from using a tool that automaticaly puts them in groups? That sounds like hypocrisy. This has nothing to do with an LFG tool. Where did you make this up? Why are you so concerned about how other people play the game? Why must they play the game the same way you do? Except, you can still buy other kinds of Yoghurt. It's more like everyone else prefers the "lousy" version of Yoghurt and doesn't like it when you serve it at the Superbowl Party. They never removed "your" brand. Everyone else just preferred to use a different brand and you got butthurt that they didn't enjoy the same old school kind you did. How does it do that? I don't get it.

But if Bioware adds that "community destroying evil person maker" AKA automated LFG, then all of the "unwashed, uneducated, uncultured plebeians" will use this tool and the "Superior Hardcore Guild Patricians" wont be able to form groups with the "Superior because that's how we did things in my days" way. And we all know that our Patrician overlords know what's best for us.

Sprints, interrupts(!), battle res, ally pull. None of those count as Crowd Control? Holy cow have you separated yourself from reality. But really you are making a semantic argument, either because you are not able to see the important parts of what is being discussed, or you are intentionally deflecting comments. Both of which reflect poorly about you and your argument(a bit of a struggle to call it that). So please come back with a real response that addresses the central point of the debate.