I should have come here for my rant instead of making a new topic called "RANT!". Back in the day of EQ when you earned something you were proud of it. Epic wepon, killing a god and getting a drop from it, full suit of no drop planar armor. Now days its just pathetic. I agree with the not likely to raid much post as that is my outlook.

Im not going to read thru the 51 pages of posts to see if mine is original or not. Surname is Lung'pu with first names being Ayph, Weeph, Hooph, Deyph, Jooph. Jeez, 10 more pages passed by as i typed this out. I did see one bounty hunter with the name Blubba Fatt with the male character model 4 (the rotund one)

Yes, artifice.

I wouldn't go as far as to say 'HUGE' in the amount of work. The database programmers would just need to create an extra table or so and link them with foreign keys (or what ever the specific DB calls it) to the item creation tables and set basic IF/THEN/WHILE type statements. Probably a days worth of planning and another hour or two of coding. Most of the item creation takes place in the DB. Then again these 'odd' stats are likely there just to create 'junk items' in which you vendor for extra cash. The items sell for more than what the mob would drop in credits so your better off at times getting a green POS item than a fraction of the credits. Anyway, everyone benefits in some way from all the stats if they could use the specific item (ie: sith dont use guns so tech bonus doesnt help, but doesnt rocket punch gain benefit from str dmg bonus? (albeit not as much but some)). Use your imagination and try to climb outside the box once in awhile. The broader view is much more pleasant than the squinted eye. Redoubt is useful to nearly everyclass or at least can be. It provides defense boost and everyone could use some extra dodge. As for shield rating and absorption that I will agree is wasted on classes that cannot use shield generators but there are companions as stated that possibly can. Lieutenant Pierce comes to mind but he personally doesnt use sniper rifles (blaster rifle is his preference). Redoubt is primarily defense rating with shield absorption or shield rating appearing sporadically (and only in the rarest chances all 3 together but usually when the base item originally had shield rating and absorption and no defense (which is added upon RE and gaining a redoubt prefix)).

Raiding is still the only way to get THE BEST gear available. Of course there is nothing extremely hard in game just yet. Crafting can get you so far but to have bragging rights to anything you gotta raid. Back before the crybabies and whiners got to EQ there were extremely hard events that took place with raid sizes larger than 72 people coordinated to one single goal. And even then it came around to chance that could cause a whipe. The only solution was to have a tank with enough HPs to not be one shotted long enough for the complete heal chain to tick by once more and restore him. If crafting gear is equal to raiding rewards or superior no one would be raiding much anymore. What is the point when the reward is nil? Making recipes tradable is a start but if everyone and their tukata hound have it whats the point in pushing further. It is obvious in all the other MMOs that once a new expansion comes out the old is obsolete. WoW added achievements and short of those no one would have even set foot in the old raid zones due to the gear not being worth the effort. Effort and Desire = Reward Crafting skills = Everyone has it therefore should Effort and Desire = Reward = Everyone has it

Yay someone else has experienced this too. No codex gains what so ever anymore. Lore items, killing new beasts, datacron history lessons, etc etc.

<Bump> Am I the only one that has experienced this?

This is why I stated the Sith are more REAL than the Jedi. No human can completely cut themselves off from their emotions. They are a natural part of life. Sith as a whole are not evil, but individuals within are.

I have been gathering datacrons quite considerably lately on my main and no longer receive the galactic lore associated with them. I questioned this in guild and someone responded that maybe there is nothing to learn from them...... I continued my gathering of datacrons and went to Hutta for such. Having played a character there I knew there were some Evocii totems that give lore as well.... clicked them, channeled the studying of it and still got nothing. In my codex it says I have 31/110 .... what happened?

Linguistic skills is how people understand the Wookies. Grr Grr GrrrRowl can be anything from a single word to a dissertation on universal peace. I do like the way Farscape answered the lack of comprehending languages by injecting translator nanites into John Crichton. Perhaps at birth they have these injected into the children. Regardless of what they speak verbally, its still understood.

Good, bad, which is the guy with the gun? Perspective is the ultimate deciding factor. While it has been stated that Jedi shun emotion and the Sith embrace it, it still comes down to relativity of which side you are looking out on the universe from. IMO the Sith are what would be referred to as "REAL" while the jedi coddle and nurture even the weak. This is why it typically takes more than one Jedi to defeat one Sith. Neither side are really good or evil as both have tendencies for both. Good, bad, its relative to who is holding the gun.

My main at this time is an inquisitor. I would have liked to have had a differing asignment of appretntice out of the 4 starting ones than to have the same as everyone else. I think that of the 2 or 3 choices given for responses in dialogs a counter should have started accumulating and based on how that number grows and apprentices failed (died) it should have given each player a seemingly random apprentice. Not to say Xalek isnt cool, but to see a 3 eyed companion, a twilek or human one would make things a bit more interesting. They should work on something similar to this. Nothing short of knowing how the response counter works would allow a player to fix the final outcome and would make things different and slightly more prestigious.

In short the lack of a shield generator for the assassin tank is far more an oversight than it is a bug. A bug would indicate that the items are there in the database but aren't showing up, where as oversight means that the item just is NOT there. Oversight in regards to an item in game is far easier to fix. I could fix this myself if allowed to. Just take any of the other shield generators and copy it. Then edit the one stat that belongs to another class (aim, str, cunning) into will power. Viola problem solved. Now insert new items into DB table and update. All artifices will eventually see the new schematic on their trainers having been unlearned but available.

I did. But more of it was pvp related or the other faction. People complaining that this is an MMO should take in account that in ALL of the StarWars movies no single pilot did the job by themselves but had a squadron. They could leave the current space missions for those flying solo while having other space operations that require a group.

I personally refer to it as Free Flight. But you missed out completely on some very very very important starwars games that came out a couple decades ago well before our computers were giant gaming machines (actually somebody did mention them). Tie Fighter and X-Wing were flight simulator type games that had dog fights as well as battles against Corellian Corvettes and Star Destroyers. You had to balance your shield power, full frontal, balanced front and rear and rear. You needed to keep energy balanced as well between the engines and blasters as well. When approaching your target(s) you needed to shift shields to full front, pull power from engines into blasters so you could take out the enemy while surviving. Once you pass them you had to reverse shields to rear, and if no other targets required to shoot change back from blasters into engines so you could speed away for another pass. Another thing these two games did differently is the amount of laser fire coming at you. Evasive maneuvers were mandatory as there were literally hundreds of shots coming at you. But also you weren't alone, you had the rest of your wingmen with you in the battle. They took casualties just like the enemy. In the space battles here it certainly feels you are alone and the enemy has a pisspoor targeting ability as you dont take nearly as much damage in each of the runs. There is next to no way to die IMO in this 'Tube' space battle (or what ever it is) short of crashing into asteroids. Even suicide missions are out of the question, but werent in Tie Fighter and X-Wing. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Star_Wars:_TIE_Fighter http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Star_Wars:_X-Wing I even played Secret Weapons of the Luftwaffe on one of my oringinal 486dx machines. X-wing and Tie Fighter were barely playable on our schools tandy 1000 hx/ex machines but we did it. Not to mention that Freelancer mentioned has been out awhile as well when our computers were half the power they are today, so we know it is entirely possible for this to be done. Just need to have the will to provide it eventually. I personally havent experienced many of the bugs people complain about in game. It feels quite well made to me but maybe I have my computer much more well built and in tip top shape for a 5 year old hunk of junk.

In all honesty, the ones most complaining about homosexual relations are single males wanting lesbian encounters in game. I am most certain that this has been pointed out already considering previous threads have been filled to capacity while this one is well over 50 pages (500 posts). I could really care less as a monogamous relationship is the healthiest it is not really what is desired. This is one of very few games that even begins to allow any PC to NPC relationship building. I did catch one post where someone stated that (and this is not a direct quote but pretty close to what was said in summary) 'perhaps a player chose the wrong sex at character creation'..... Seriously? Delete and remake if that's the case. Leveling is not that hard anymore. Back in 99 when i started playing EQ it would take a month of 8 hour days to get to 30 ish. In this and many others you can be max level and fully raid/op geared in barely a week of dedicated playing. Lets not make excuses for this. There are children playing and homosexuality in action is a choice regardless if the attraction is biological. Our children do not necessarily need to be exposed to everything, and this is something they should decide on their own. Please make relationship encounters switchable in the very least within the parental controls section of preferences.

an earring made from cybertech? it can produce an upgrade path, you have just possibly been unlucky.

I am not going to even try and read thru all of the posts. But everyone seems to be forgetting about the crafting of EQ. EQ provided a far more realistic approach to crafting than many of the other MMO out there IMO. For example WoW and engineering, in order to make a flying machine you only need a few parts to do so? No sprockets, no leather panels, a handful of bolts, no struts, no form of padding for a decent comfortable seat, no shafts to attach the sprockets to, etc, etc, etc. In EQ (back to the original not after they tried to mimic wow and all these other preschool MMOs)to make a piece of armor you needed even the lowest forms of materials as well as higher ones. You also needed other tradeskills. Blacksmithing by itself was just a small portion of the story... the end. You needed leather working, tailoring, brewing, among other tradeskills in order to finish a product. Now lets say you gathered all the materials to make your item, you just need the skill to do it. IRL even on a mechanized assembly line the machines occasionally fail to produce a flawless product. EQ also had this factored in. WoW and many others had 0 failure chance. So you use your materials to fashion it and you fail. You will get your smithing hammer back, possibly some other tools but the materials used in the products construction are gone. You need to get them again. Practice makes perfect. Eventually you get your product, but thats not the end of it. Some items such as the gnomish shrinking device required batteries for continued use. Original EQ was probably one of the best MMOs still being played today that had the best crafting professions towards realism. None of this instant gratification everyone is crying about. Even our computers now days dont use 100% platinum for every connection in the integrated circuit board for greatest conductivity. No they use some cheaper materials that can accomplish the same task. Even the most expensive computer available has copper, tin, aluminum and cheap plastics.

"10 Years and over 20 Mmo's and i still miss the first" What do you consider 'the first' to be? Personally i will say the first out of the bigger more significant ones was EQ, and back then in 99 up till about 2004 was probably the BEST. Then Sony ran out of the ideas Verant had lying around on the side and they started jacking it all to hell.

This is a very simple remedy within the database to add the recipes to artifice. Not hard at all. Likely will only take a skill database entry person about an hour to do. Wouldnt even really need a special patch either. Could be one of those types of patches like wow was starting to do behind the scenes and it gets updated once the download is complete and implemented the next time the game is restarted.

Presence benefits a pure heal spec player. They have weaker offensive capabilities and rely more on their companion or group mates to deal the damage for them.

Missions fail many times not just due to the fact that you dont have affection bonuses but likely because your companion isnt the only one going for that particular reward. Underworld trading for instance is won by the higher bidder or who threw the money at the owner first. Scavenging by going to get the stuff, but maybe someone beat your companion to it. Rather than just looking at the outcome, try to enjoy the story part of it. The game is a journey and all the levels along the way are steps in that journey. If all you can see is your destination you wasted your trip all along. These games now days are fun to people who dont expect everything to go their way. I kinda miss the days of EQ back when it was difficult and players actually had bragging rights about what they were wearing or making. Instead of looking for instant gratification on every venture go back to that single sentence i typed above.

Most are only usable by cybertechs. And by the time the cybertech can use someone elses grenades they can make their own.

Such a generalized title, i'm glad you made this so I wont have to make a thread of my own. I personally am annoyed by the fact that when opening up of my crafting skill window I am set at the default of DIFFICULTY.... who the hell cares about the difficulty? Preferably I would much rather be able to set the default to order by level especially now that the skill is maxed. The biggest factor is that even when sorting by level, difficulty is still visible on the left hand side of the list. And unlike EQ where difficulty is a viable issue, it is not here. The companions have very rarely failed at crafting anything I put them to do (in fact I don't think I recall them ever failing at the task of a crafted item). Difficulty is such a waste of space on the drop down menu when it is combined with the other two already. Also when my companions return from a mission with anything (success or failure) it forces closed anything I was working on at that time. I could be in the middle of mailing various items and have been halfway thru a dissertation only to have the companion force it all shut resetting everything I previously did to nothing making me start over once more. Why do they HAVE to shove everything in my face? If they succeed they can vocally state such and toss it into my bags. If they fail I beat them severly and go about my business. Why must a window force everything shut I was working on to make me accept the item? If it isn't satisfactory do I have an option to tell the companion so forcing them to return back to the mission for better results? I only see one button, ACCEPT. Since there is no other choice why not just toss it into the bag with the rest of the junk or put them at the top right of my screen with the other pending incoming reward windows rather than erasing everything I was currently working on making me restart from the beginning for such a triviality. In short who cares about crafting difficulty and stop closing off my windows.

Schematics from my experience are dependent upon the primary material being used by the crafting skill. Sythweaving = fabric mostly (though it does use underworld metals for heavy) so send companions on missions for luxury fabrics to get those schematic recipes. Armormech is more metal based as well as Armstech so send them for underworld metals. Cybertech can sometimes come from underworld metal missions but mostly from slicing. Slicing has also netting mission discoveries for most everything as well. Hope for crits when sending your companions out and you will likely get better returns. Investigation, diplomacy and others have opportunities to bring you other treasures. Do like I did and make alts to cover all the ends and you wont need to ask these questions here. You will discover your answers will come to you as fast as your companions return.