I'll really miss the range on Vital Shot. It's my ultimate spammable objective denial tool for Warzones. I just ping this onto every Imp near an objective and I can rest easy for the next 12 seconds

I really liked Balmorra, Tatooine and Corellia. Hated Voss and Nar Shadaa. Voss is so incredibly dull. Ok, there is a funky quest where you, the environment and all the mobs turn yellow to simulate being in some kind of trance-dream thing, but that's about the only thing of note on a planet where everyone talks like a High-Elf from a fantasy game.

I know the one you mean, but I think the model is used again later - all over Corellia as just a regular freighter. It looks like a cross between the XS Freighter and a Star Trek ship. Sadly I doubt there will be any alternative ships for us until the Space expansion whenever that might be.

Yeah, I think Shift-F does that by default. You just kneel wherever you are standing. You won't get proper cover as if you were behind something, but you will be able to use all the abilities that require cover.

Scatterguns are just offhand stat sticks. They're used for two damaging abilities plus a snaring skill, and the rest of the time they're invisible and unused. I believe DPS Scoundrels and Gunslingers are supposed to have equal DPS, but in practice, you will find a Scoundrel spends half of every fight running towards his targets rather than just switching targets and continuing to blast away as a Gunslinger does.

Gunslingers are the Cover class. Scoundrels don't use cover much, and I believe Dirty Fighting for Gunslingers doesn't use it as much as the other trees, but I'm afraid the Cover mechanic is central to a Gunslinger. If you really don't like it your best option is to pick another class. I have seen many Gunslingers say that by altering their keybinds - changing F to "cover-in-place" from "roll to nearest cover" - makes the mechanic less hateful.

I've found that it is often used on Ilum with large forces on either side to push back one side. On my server the Imps tend to outnumber the Republic probably 3:1 in any outdoor fight, so Ilum battles with sizeable forces inevitably end up at the doors of the Republic Base, and it's only a cluster of XS Freighter Flybys that ever seems to stop the Imps overrunning us completely.

I've seen 30 Hamsolos or variants thereof on my server. I wonder, however, about Legacy surnames... I got my smuggler through to the end of Act 1 pretty fast on my server and so I now have the Solo Legacy... though my character's first name is not any variation of Han.

Well that's just it. Is 1 extra cast every 30-50 seconds depending on your cast rotation and amount of alacrity, worth more than a similar amount of Surge in the same rotation. Going by the Sorcerer example I would suspect not.

Good. If accurate at 50 too, which I'd assume it is, then that means... 27.5 Alacrity Rating = 1% Alacrity (at level 50) approximately. Edit: oh, diminishing returns - I had thought that did not kick in until a certain threshold?

(AlacrityRating / max(Level,20) ) / 0.55 = Alacrity% That calculation may be a bit out of date, I think it was worked out based on Beta information, but when I'm in game again I could easily calculate it. The above means that at level 50, 300 Alacrity Rating, which is easily obtainable from a full set of artifact gear, the formula becomes: (300 / 50) / 0.55 = 10.9% Alacrity

No, I agree. I play a Sawbones Scoundrel. I have one spell that Alacrity helps, my primary heal. In the absence of any instant or faster cast heal without some sort of prerequisite (like Upper Hand which is granted mainly by the primary heal spell), I can see that it might be nice to knock 0.5 seconds off it's cast time, but that's the ENTIRE function of the alacrity stat on my 'Field Medic' Artifact gear. To be clear, Underworld Healing has a cast time of 2 seconds with first tier Sawbones skills. I could choose the first tier Dirty Fighting skill to give myself 4% alacrity off the bat, and with full purple gear I could have another 15% or so alacrity, reducing the cast time down to quite close to the minimum, which is the global cooldown of 1.5 seconds. Every other ability I have other than my DPS AOE which I would barely ever use as a healer, would not benefit. Needless to say, I attempt to equip more crit, surge and power instead.

Extending the time it takes to get to 50 can be done in several ways: 1) Increase the XP requirements per level, and add more content to fill it. Downside: longer development period for the game, later release date, higher cost for voice actors etc etc. 2) Increase the timesinks while playing. Longer runs, slower travelling, more back-and-forthing with less well organised quest hubs. Downside: More of the boring stuff per hour than we currently have now. 3) Increase XP requirements per level, but don't add more content. Downside: Grinding mobs/daily quests/warzones to make up the XP deficit in between levels. Do you want any of these three things to happen? If No, then rethink your post, OP.

I've tried to go for that twice, the first time I got to the sandcrawler in the SW just as the balloon as like a meter out of reach, and the other time I got to the sandcrawler to find a group of Sith stood waiting. I play Republic on a PVP server, and didn't fancy my chances of stealthing the entire way in the balloon basket. Since then I haven't bothered, but I think it's a really cool idea to have such difficult to reach items. What would people do if everything was easy and quick?

Haha. I promote limiting fatties from achieving certain things. Also they should get charged double for taxi rides due to their mass costing more fuel and taking up more space. I seriousness, this is quite likely unintended. Most games in the past have made character creator appearance choices make no actual difference in-game, eventually even if they didn't start out equal. In WOW a shallow swamp used to drown Gnomes while the rest of us waded through until they fixed that...

If either faction had anything entirely unique, the other faction would complain until our star explodes that this is the reason they always get beaten in PVP. It has been tried and tested in other games, and it has been found the only realistic way to give balance to two factions is to make both factions the same as each other. Besides which, your complaint is rather late - to change this now would be to tear apart the slowly-stabilising fabric of the game for no good reason other than that you don't really like it.

The tradeoff for Pure classes is that they have more options - more different ways of doing damage. I know that in reality, proper PVE players will find the one spec that does the most damage, and that by itself eliminates choice, but until we get parsable combat logs, we cannot know for sure. I play a Scoundrel myself, and choose - usually - to be a Healer, speccing Sawbones. However, when I have tried DPS in an Ops, I have found being a DPS Scoundrel is frustrating because we have no mechanism to either deal damage at range, or anything to close the distance to a mob quickly (such as a leap or sprint or grapple), so most of my time is spent chasing mobs rather than doing damage to them. Other hybrid classes don't have such problems though. Does a Jedi Knight (who can choose to be a tank or damage) with a full Vigilance spec - who also has at least two ways to leap between mobs at either 30 or 10 feet - do as much damage as a properly played Jedi Sentinel? Who knows until Damage meters are enabled?

Cannot make a Shimmer-silk purse from a Bantha's Ear, FYI!

I had fun getting the datacrons myself. A few people have complained that jumping is not very accurate - while this is somewhat true, I have found that some jumps require sprint disabled to land in the right place without overshooting, so that's something extra to figure out, which - for me - is extra fun. To address the chap who mentioned that he'd rather work more efficiently spacebarring the quests to get what he wants from the game... I feel you're rather missing the point of a 'Game'. Games are made for human beings to entertain them and cause them to have 'fun'. TOR in particular attempts to provide this entertainment and fun by telling a story and using voice actors in abundance to make it feel more real than having to read a paragraph of text. If you skip this and look for 'effective' methods of playing(?!), you're turning what should be fun into work. Why do that?

That budget is pretty big really - you could get a Core i7 and a GTX580 with 12gb RAM, 10TB of storage and a genuine version of Windows 7x64 for that kind of money if you were willing to build from parts. http://www.cclonline.com is a UK vendor that does motherboard bundles - which is Mobo, CPU and RAM already put together which is perhaps the trickiest part of building a new computer. Those specs would easily last a couple of years - however when Crysis 3 or whatever comes out in 2014, don't cry to me that DX12 isn't supported, that'd be true of any computer purchased today!

I don't quite understand the complaint. If your enemy is making use of obstacles to avoid your LOS, then they can't be doing much damage back to you. If you disagree with that mechanic, then what is it you're asking for? Would you like to be able to shoot people through walls and rocks and hills in addition to having 30m more range on your skills than most other classes do? And what is wrong with using the WZ objectives to hide behind? Even a melee has to chase their target around those to land a hit, and you do get an entire 8 seconds to stand the hell up, run until you do have LOS, and then ping a Vitalshot or something in, preventing them capping for another 12 seconds unless they have a cleanse skill.

I suspect the OP was made to lampoon the constant 'breast size' comments made by women on MMO forums... It's not just women's breasts OK? Most real men have significantly smaller chests and arms than those in almost every video game out there. Just as with comics and cartoons, the digital people are exaggerated ideals of their gender - whose ideal is really the question.

The different playstyle combined with the Rest XP that I never really had when levelling my main (since I'm still very active on my main), and the different class quests, plus putting a bit more focus into PVP and Space missions, should mean not having to do very many regular planetary sidequests. My main had to skip a couple of planets (besides primary quests ofc) to stay within the level bracket too, which I could spend more time on with my Alt. I'd say the game has easily enough content to make a mostly unique game for two characters per player. More than that might stretch it a bit, but perhaps there'll be new content by then. Either way, it's still better than any other game in the genre.

I'm a Scoundrel, and have specced both Sawbones and Scrapper for PVP. As a Scrapper (that's the DPS tree), I regularly get the most or nearly the most damage or kills or killing blows, and I have - occasionally - had 5 or 6 MVP votes, but I have noticed that I would only get that if I'd really made a big and obvious difference to the match. When I spec Sawbones I often get most or nearly the most healing, and regularly get 5 or 6 MVP votes. In fact I often see the top healer or the healer that made the biggest impact on the match get the most votes. Now, I have had 6-9 Medals as a Scrapper but never more than 6 as a Healer that I remember, and that would include a >2500 damage medal from ambushing someone probably while trying to defend myself. I'm wondering if the MVP votes should award relatively more than they do to address the balance? Most people no matter how dumb they are - seem to recognise that it's the healer that often wins the match - especially on Alderaan.

It is unfortunate, but there comes a point in every big MMO's development when the publishers, the sponsors, and the rest of the investors demand that they start to see a return on their money. I'm a fairly small-time developer myself, but I just write maintenance apps for business systems, and I know full well that every program that it is possible to write is inherently bugged. Even if the program works perfectly how the designer wants it to, the users will disagree with the way things work, and that is also a bug. The larger a program is, and the more different hardware a big graphical program like an MMO is expected to work on, the more bugs it will have even with years and years of polishing. SWTOR - just like any other MMO - will always be bugged in some ways, it will never be perfect, at least not for the users. As such - unlike big-name console games - any MMO is going to get to a stage in development where all the content is finished, and the devs are just fixing bugs. Considering that the devs will never iron out all the bugs due to the sheer size and complexity of the program, and the different expectations and requirements of the millions of users, the software house has to make a decision on when to just call it 'good enough' and ship it. They don't get much of a choice, the people paying their wages demand it. Anyway - all that is true of most games. Even the console games I mentioned have started to go that way since the latest gen consoles allowed after-sales patching. But of all the MMORPG launches I've been part of, this has been the least troublesome and least buggy I've experienced since I began playing them in the late 90s. Besides which, levelling to 50 gives you 150+ hours of entertainment for your $60, more hours than any console game since Final Fantasy X and only then if you hunted down every secret. I'd say even without subscribing for a second month you got your money's worth.