I've just returned and took my assassin from 55 to 65 in solo PvE mostly as Darkness spec, just for the joy of using more lightning With the companion revamp ithe solo content is all about what you enjoy doing most, as they'll all work - traditional positional melee DPS (Deception), more DoTs and lifestealing (Hatred) or AoE and Force lightning (Darkness). Obviously if you're going to join flashpoint groups then Darkness isn't ideal unless you actually are willing to be the tank for the group and gear appropriately

Seriously? Is the OP complaining that it's so unfair that he picked a class with a positional damaging attack, and he has to (shock, gasp) GET INTO POSITION to use it? Why not have a whinge about the fact that Maul doesn't have a 30m range while you're at it?

The original films don't need remaking, but it might be interesting to try. Give the director job to Joss Whedon. He's more than proven he can ensembles (just about everything he's been involved in), that he understands space opera (Firefly), that he can direct a damn fine SF movie (Serenity) and barring unforeseen disaster this year THe Avengers should show he can handle blockbuster budgets. Get Joss to do the script too. Strap him in a powered chair with intravenous caffeine and cocaine, clone him, threaten to feed his children to the midichlorians - whatever it takes. The man needs to do both jobs. Casting I'd mostly leave up to the director, part of his job is to put together an ensemble that works together. They could be known actors or unknowns, as long as they fit the roles and each other. Probably means we'd get Nathan Fillion as Han Solo - fair enough, there was a lot of Solo in Mal Reynolds' DNA anyway. As a bonus, that probably means Morena Baccarin as Leia. Morena Baccarin is ALWAYS a bonus. I'd ask for Michael Fassbender as Tarkin. Hugo Weaving is now Hollywood's go-to man for masked menace so he would be an obvious choice for Vader. I think they should resist just so they aren't TOO obvious, but wouldn't be heartbroken if they did. Having said all that - given those people and that budget, I'd remake episodes 1 to 3 instead. Those are actually flawed films where a glimmer of decent plot is buried under trite dialogue, wooden acting, uninspired directing and a kid-in-a-candy-shop unrestrained orgy of distracting CGI. Creating masterpiece versions of those films would be a real service.

Well, I'm waiting for my copy to arrive from Amazon, but thanks in advance for your hard work in giving us Sith heads something to meditate upon My only question is whether I keep mine at home to inspire me while playing TOR, or on my desk at work so my colleagues can see that here is a senior call centre designer with the full power of the Dark Side at his command. ... and no, I can't afford a second copy to do both!

I'm not sure I LIKE the Empire, but I can sympathise with them. Firstly, it's my character's birth nation. That has to count for something, a man who has no loyalty to his own people has no loyalty you can trust at all. It's possible for something to break that loyalty, but it should be there to start with. Secondly, the Empire has a just casus belli - the Sith Empire of today is descended from the survivors of a small fleet that escaped while the Jedi and their Republic allies waged genocide against the ancient Sith race. You've seen Battlestar Galactica? Well that was the Sith. They escaped, they rebuilt at their ancient sanctuary and now they're back to settle scores and remove the ever-present threat of the Republic. Better that we CONQUER you than you EXTERMINATE us - which is the evil faction when you look at it that way? Thirdly, I don't have to agree with everything a fellow Sith or Imperial does. There are definitely some headcases out there who suffer from an... excess of zeal. All I can do is work around them, make sure that my own decisions may be ruthless but are never wasteful, and reach a position of power where I can make sure that the Empire's watchwords are pragmatism and efficiency rather than pointless atrocity. Yes, I'm aware that position my have to be the Emperor's throne itself - that's what makes life interesting, eh?

This - plus, in games like The Sims Online that did have such a system there were reputation mafias that would hit up players for protection money to avoid getting a mass of downrankings. One of the laws of game system design - however you design a system, players of ill will will find a way to game that system. In practice, as long as things remain on a single-server basis then the community is small enough that people get to know the few genuinely bad characters on their server and shun them. Others who might have been douchbags if they can get away with it behave because they know they can't - it's much less tempting to ninja loot or AFK and let a group carry you when they price of doing that is finding it much harder to get a group in future. Frankly, this approach worked pretty well for a long time...

Wolfshead doesn't like SWTOR. Film at eleven. This is not news. For those people who are familiar with gaming blogs, Wolfshead is one of the standard bearers of the "back to the glorious past" movement. They have happy memories of the older games like the original EQ and DAoC where there was less direction, less hand-holding... and also a hell of a lot less people. Back in those pre-WoW games having 500K subscribers meant being the biggest subscription MMO in the market, now having only that many is seen as abject failure. I'm not sure whether these guys are convinced that all of the WoW era players would love the old fashioned forced-grouping, camp monsters for XP game if only they were forced to try it, or whether they just want all the kids to get off our lawn and have the MMO hobby shrink back down to 1/20th of its size but with the 'right' sort of people and all the rest can go hang. Regardless - SWTOR is not the sort of game that Wolfshead wants, because it 's very much an MMO in the post-WoW themepark mould. He's never going to like it, because it's not built for him. And he's not objective enough to review it fairly for what it IS and decide whether it's a good example of a themepark game, because he's locked into the "themepark = bad" mentality. On the plus side, at least he hasn't embarrassed himself as much as Syncaine has... If you want a counter-example of a popular MMO blogger who has played the game to level cap, is still playing and has admittedly mixed feelings about what is there, check out what Spinks has to say

There's an advanced class for that. It's the Operative. One of the types of mission they undertake is assassination so yeah, there are 'assassins' that do what you want. SITH assassins, however, use lightsabers and the Force to kill their targets. Because they're, y'know, Sith. Or put it another way. A big part of the archetype for the Sith Assassin was Darth Maul. I must have missed the bit in the movie where he stealthed up to Qui-Gon, yelled "LOL STUNLOCK NOOB" and bursted him down

I think a lot of the assumption about "what assassins are" comes from other MMOs, not necessarily from history or films. An assassin is someone who kills - specifically, selectively kills high value targets. How they do it varies. They might be stealthy backstabbers, snipers, demolition experts or the guy who charges in the front door and beats his way through the guards. The Sith Assassin is a Sith who combines martial training with a mastery of the Force. They have more melee skills than Sith sorcerers, and more Force skills than the Sith warriors. Stealth is just one of their bag full of Force tricks. Maybe Bioware should have called the class Sith Battlemages or Sith Reavers to avoid confusing people with preconceptions from other MMOs. Or maybe not. After all, anyone with assumptions on 'how paladins work' going between Rift, WoW and DAoC is likewise in for a surprise. Don't make assumptions. See the class for what it is.

Really? Let us know when you've actually found a link to back up your "quotation" there kid.

That would require some attention and intelligence on the part of the player. You know, the stuff that went out of style when "being skilled" became defined as "having the right add-ons installed".

Unfortunately Dark Charge also increases your threat, which means you're much more likely to pull aggro off the tank and will piss off both the tank and the healer... unless they both shrug their shoulders and let you die, at which point you do zero DPS. DO NOT RUN IN DARK CHARGE IN A GROUP UNLESS YOU ARE TANKING. EVER. Accept that you can't get the maximum damage out of your build (you should still do 'good enough' damage for most content in Lightning Charge) or else switch to a build that does work to full effect in Lightning if you plan to group up regularly.

Congratulations, this may be some of the worst advice I've ever seen anyone give, and trust me over the years I've seen some REALLY bad advice given out. I have to assume that this is an attempt at absolutely deadpan sarcasm because even a gerbil couldn't manage to be so utterly wrong on every single point without fail... but just in case anyone actually looking for advice reads this thread, please ignore the poster above

Tell me all about GW1's regular free content patches...

It's not 'of no use'. It is of situational use - meaning, you don't ALWAYS use it, but there are times that you will want to. But no, if you're expecting a 'LOL stunlock' style of play attacking out of stealth, then Spike isn't the ability you're looking for /jedimindtrick

It's situationally useful - pop Recklessness to give it 30m range and you have a long range attack to bring down a runner or slow down a ball carrier in a Huttball game. It's not one of my bread-and-butter skills though.

Shrug. You call it micro-management, others of us call it gameplay. Rift has more of the macro system you are looking for, give Trion your $15 per month and be happy.

Just did this at the weekend as a level 45 darkness/madness assassin, dying once to Thanaton. Yes, it is difficult. No, it is not impossible. I didn't LOS him or Zash at any point but I did make a point of not standing in the AoE and making good use of my interrupts, medpacks, Force Shroud... basically, know your toolkit and use it. Personally, I like a game where you can't always faceroll to victory

I've started a Zabrak SI to go sorcerer, to complement the human Sith Assassin I already have. You definitely get an extra helping of contempt from the NPCs on Korriban for being alien scum as well as being a slave. Especially the sith pureblood with the purity test, unsurprisingly.

Combination of things, I think - Deception is a bit more of a glass cannon than Darkness, unsurprisingly, so it doesn't cope with some of the solo PvE fights as well. It's also seen as "the DPS spec" and the spec with more of the stuff that people who played rogues in other games expect to see. That attracts players with certain expectations, the "I played class X in game Y and this class sucks because it isn't the same" crowd. No disrespect to the many good Deception assassins out there, but my experience is that most of the bad assassins are Deception.

Hmm, I'm in the opposite situation - at 44 I've still got level 38 quests on Hoth to do, never mind most of the Belsavis quests. I've done each flashpoint once along the way (with the exception of Boarding Party 3 times and Cademimu not at all) and I've done some space missions and PvP games as the mood takes me but I've not really been grinding either of those much. I tend to do story quests as level but the other quest content I'm outlevelling unless I make a concentrated effort to do it - I've completely skipped the bonus series for Balmorra and Alderaan. So I guess the question is - have you done any space or pvp missions at all? Flashpoints? Did you pick up the daily space/pvp/flashpoint missions in each case? All of those add up to a significant amount of XP.

Well, the problem is that adding special mechanics (AKA mini-games) for a quest is a LOT of development work. WoW only really started adding them in Burning Crusade and later, when the engineers weren't so heavily occupied by building the core game systems and providing support for the first year or so (which is when the biggest, nastiest bugs tend to be found). Don't be surprised if they add a few quests with 'interesting' mechanics down the line, but doing all that work for the sake of one quest that a bunch of players will miss or skip anyway isn't the best use of developer time at this stage in the game's lifecycle. WoW tended to go the other way - once they'd built the mechanics, they over-used to the point where it seemed every third quest was a bombing run because gosh darn, we've added this feature to the game so we are going to use the heck out of it! Also, please bear in mind that not every player likes mini-games. There's a school of thought that says this is my character, with the skills I've learned to use, and I want to use that rather than some sub-standard arcade game with an ew hotkey bar that has nothing to do with my character's skills, gear or training. Those players would be actively turned off by having too many 'special' quests in the game.

That would be stunlocked and bursted down. One-shotted means killed with a single move normally. In SW:TOR, one-shotted means "I'm massively exaggerating and everything I say should be taken with a pinch of salt."

Well, when you make an assumption you make an *** out of u and mption - and mption just left town

I'm going to guess - for the benefit of all the people who are trying to play the class as a WoW rogue instead of what it is, and then crying about it...