You should certainly be able to use blaster rifles. I wonder, are you dragging the weapon itself onto your quickbar slot (the horizontal bar of icons at the bottom of the screen)? If so, that's not how it works. You just need to equip the weapon in your character sheet (keyboard shortcut is C by default), but your default attack is still "Hammer Shot". If you've removed that from your quickbar, hit "P" to open your Abilities Panel, click on "Trooper", then find "Hammer Shot" and drag it back to your quickbar. Hope that solves your problem, but if not, can you give some more details about how you're trying to "use" your rifle?

This is especially true of your crowd-control abilities (stuns and interrupts, mainly). These tend to have "upgrades" which give you a tiny damage increase but don't actually increase the effectiveness of the skill. If you train them all to max level at 50, I reckon you'll have spent over 100k for a negligible damage increase - best to keep your credits for something more useful , IMO

Not a great screenshot, but what the hell: http://i284.photobucket.com/albums/ll12/zhaharik/zhazha.jpg

I don't remember what level I was for that quest, but for me the run-up to fighting Vengean was probably the hardest sequence of fights in the whole 1-50 run, including the big fights at the end of the class story line (no spoilers please folks!). I died a couple of times, and had to wait between each elite to let my cooldowns come back up. The boss in the chamber surrounded by force-shield walls definitely needed Heroic Moment to get him down. Maybe I was missing some big attack that needed interrupting, but he really hit me hard. That said, it's hard to suggest what you might be doing wrong without more details. Are you an appropriate level for those mobs? Are you using all your medium-length cooldowns for each elite? Maybe try it with a DPS companion if Vette or Jaesa are reasonably well geared - I was a Rage Marauder running with Vette, and I've heard some people say they found it easier with a DPS companion and just burning the elites down as fast as possible. If you do have a geared DPS companion, try having them get aggro initially, so they soak up some damage while you get some cheap shots in before the mob starts hitting you. Good luck, hopefully someone else may have some more specific advice Edit: Here's another thread on the subject, note the mentions of the aspirants' "death fields", may need to interrupt or move out of those... http://www.swtor.com/community/showthread.php?t=384765

The stats on TORHead are wrong. V1 Seismic Grenades do 110-130 kinetic damage, V2 do 190-230. Personally, I just use the V1 grenades anyway, since they're quicker and cheaper to craft. The damage component is pretty much irrelevant to me, it's the 4-second knockout I'm using them for, and that is the same across the different versions.

The thing is, they don't *have* to screw over anyone. I do wish BW would just admit that the reason they do global maintenance is because they *choose* not to make the client more flexible, not because they can't. OK, the client version needs to match the server version, which is the reason given for the global maintenance. In simplistic terms, you can't play on a v1.2 server with a v1.1 client, and vice versa. I do not see any reason why the client can't be improved so that, during maintenance times, it checks which regions have already been updated, and offers you the choice to upgrade right then in order to play in those regions or to retain your existing client and play on the regions which have not yet been updated. Once all regions are updated, the client would update automatically the next time you start it up, if it hadn't already. You'd need to add some logic to the server selection screen as well, to cover people trying to log in to regions with an incompatible version, but seriously, how hard can that be? And my day's going fine, thanks for asking

Alas, it's not that simple - I've been able to add offline people to my friends list, and sometimes I've been unable to add people who were online at the time. I think there's something fundamentally wrong with the whole friends / guild functionality. Sometimes people in my guild who are online and actively chatting in guild chat don't show up in the guild details (and yes, I checked the option to show offline members). Sometimes I can add friends when I roll a new alt, sometimes those same friends "do not exist". It's just all-around flaky at the moment