They've been doing it all week, posting videos and stuff that trick people into thinking that they should be playing a Smuggler, rather than actually making the class worth playing .

. . .if they actually gave Smugglers some improvements (especially Scrapper Scoundrels). Instead, they have Smuggler weak right after nerfing what was already a hobbled class. Talk about rubbing it in. I really wish that they would have announced some plan to give Scrappers more Upper Hand procs (or a way to spend less of them), and a way to activate stealth during combat without resetting the enemy's health bars. What would you have liked to see out of Smuggler Week?

This is the main problem. Gunslingers can fight from cover, which is pretty much the strongest defense in the game. Commandos have Heavy Armor, and defense buffs. Sages get Force Armor. And all of them get their healing pets WAY before Smugglers do. Since Smugglers have to do their fighting toe to toe with the enemy, without cover, without heavy armor, without Force Armor, without shields, they need to have some form of reliable defense that allows them to survive for the same amount of time in melee range of the enemy as a Gunslinger would from behind cover. My own belief is that they should greatly lower the cooldown and up the uptime and strength of the "Dodge" ability, such that it's like a dodging equivalent to Force Armor, so that as long as the Scoundrel keeps applying it every twenty seconds or so, he can be permanently enshrouded in a defensive buff that makes him very hard to damage. I also think they need to change the way Disappearing Act works in solo, so that instead of breaking combat and instantly healing any enemies you were fighting, it just makes you undetectable for a few seconds, enough time to either A: run away out of combat range, which would break combat, or B: sneak behind enemies to activate positional or stealth-only abilities. As it stands it's only useful for running away from a failed encounter, it should be able to be used to increase your offensive potential by setting up new attack options. After those few seconds that this buff is active, you would drop into normal stealth and could be detected again.

Thank you, I find this a much more fair way to distribute it. I hope in future you guys give more consideration to the idea that this is not as much an "endgame" game as others on the market, and that plenty of your players are dedicated to the "leveling" portion of the game, and that this segment needs to be as fully supported as the 50+ game is (ie classes and content need to be just as well balanced and equal at level 30 as they are at level 50).

What the HELL?! So even though I've been playing almost daily since launch, because I've been playing alts rather than ramming one through to 50 I don't get 30 days free? That is bull####! I wasn't even considering cancelling my account any time soon, but I have to say if you guys continue to favor level 50s like this then I've seriously got to rethink things.

If you don't reach 50 you aren't likely to have 1.5m credits either. . .

Yes, and again I'll try him at some point, but from what I've heard he doesn't hold a candle to actual official healer companions, so he might not be an improvement over even my current weak-sauce tank companions. A Sawbones/Seer/Combat Medic is a healer. A Scrapper/Balanced/Artillery is a DPS. If I'm playing the latter, and not the former, then I should not have to spend any time healing, and I don't have to spend any time healing with my Sage or Commando, because neither they nor their companions die on me. All I'm asking is that my Scrapper have an equal chance of surviving the fight as my Sage and Commando do. If I wanted to stand on the sidelines healing up my pet, I'd be a Sawbones. I picked the Scrapper because I wanted to mix it up, bopping enemies on the head. Really if I didn't want to mix it up in melee I just would have gone Gunslinger. And even the healing thing wouldn't be a huge issue if we had more insta-cast heals. I mean, I have several "healer class" characters in DCUO, but in that game plenty of heals are instacast, so if you're in DPS mode you can just "punch, punch, punch, heal, punch, punch," barely breaking stride. You won't heal nearly as well as you would in Healer role, and it isn't as energy efficient as using the longer timer moves, but it does heal more HP than you're taking in most situations. That one boss is particularly hard, but that one case is just an example, the straw that broke the camel's back for me, it goes across the board. If there's a pack of four enemies that my Sage can ROFLstomp with 90% HP left and 50%+ Force, all fully recovered in seconds and with no damage to Theron at all, then my Smuggler will come out of it half dead and with his companion on the ground (or near to it if I'm very lucky). If there's a standard "blue diamond" or "gold badge" enemy in a mission that puts up a slight challenge to my Sage, it would kill my Smuggler at least 2-3 times before I managed to eak out a win, and I'd probably have to use all my tricks, like the Heroic moment or a stim or something to give me that edge, or maybe kill some of the small fry, die, and then come back and take out the boss himself, when my Sage could have just Force Lifted all of them. They have one, it puts them into stealth. The only problem is, unlike pretty much any other game that allows in-combat stealth, this ability also resets the fight, restoring the enemy to full health (although luckily enough, does not restore you to full health or your dead companion to life).It's basically like dying, just with less armor damage and downtime. Yay. If Disappearing Act worked like Smoke Bomb in Amalur it would be a far more useful ability, just throwing you into stealth without resetting anyone's combat status, allowing you to either leave the battle, OR to sneak back in and use your "stealth only" and positional attacks. And have a much shorter cooldown. Sages are ostensibly a "paper mage" class, and yet you can keep Force Armor up indefinitely, and it works even better than Dodge, all you need to do is keep an eye on its availability so you remember to refresh it ASAP. and of course my Commando is a fully ranged class, and yet has Heavy armor instead of medium, and solid +def buffs on her Grav Rounds attack. I was actually able to take a Tatooine 4-man mission (with some solid healers working on me). I don't think an entire raid group of all healers could keep my smuggler alive against a 4-man mission.

Perhaps, but when your tank companion is the only one you have because they don't give you a healer until near level 40, then they can't have that be your only option. If they intend that if you have a tank companion then you have to keep him healed, then they need to give you non-tank companions by level 25 or so, like Mako, Elara, and Theron.

Yes, but unless you're a Sawbones Scrapper, you shouldn't have to be healing your companion. You aren't built to do it well. Neither my Balance Sage nor my Artillery Commando have to heal their companions, they are all DPS characters, not healers. Again, it might be a sound strategy given the limitations of the class, but it's a patch that should not be necessary for a problem that shouldn't exist. I haven't tried the droid. I've always heard that he's underpowered compared to a standard companion, but considering that I can build my own droid parts, it might actually be worth giving it a try. But still, keep in mind, a Scrapper isn't half of a Gunslinger, they deal less damage without the ability to hide behind cover (without completely killing what little DPS they do have, at least). My Sniper was WAY more deadly in combat, I could do most content with him without even having the companion out, and still end the fight with solid HP left.

Theoretically this may be true, but if so they need to do enough damage to compensate. If ti takes a Sage 45 seconds to clear a boss using their best attacks, then they only need enough defense to survive maybe 60 seconds (a little buffer). If they have enough defense to survive for 120 seconds, then they'd be overpowered. If it only takes the Scrapper 30 seconds to kill those same enemies, then they wouldn't need the 60 seconds of defense that a Sage would, they'd only need around 45 seconds. The problem is, in actual practice, the mid-level Scrapper takes 43 seconds to kill those same enemies, maybe very slightly faster than the Sage, but not by much (and are getting nerfed in the next patch, so they will be getting even worse), while their defenses allow them to survive only 40 seconds, way less than the Sage. The Scrapper's defenses can be lower than the Sage's, IF their offense is higher by a relatively equivalent amount, the problem is that this balance has not been achieved, and is looking to only get worse. But that would force you to use tank companions, which is fine for Sawbones-specced Scoundrels, but is lame for DPS-specced ones, because it means that you'd need to heal them up after every fight and couldn't bring a medic along. The only way I'd be fine with them just buffing our companions would be if they seriously overhauled the way that they worked, making it so that they all rapidly healed themselves out of combat (no need to manually heal them in any way), and making it so that even the tank-specced companions had plenty of healing abilities as well, so that they can heal the player up on the run once combat is over. Each tree should be balanced against the standard enemy. Every Smuggler has to fight Skavek, for example, at around level 32. Every single tree available for Smugglers should have a roughly equal experience fighting him, all else being equal. This should be true for the majority of enemies in the game. "The curve" should be a generic thing, a curve that every enemy is balanced against. Then, every skill tree should be balanced against this generic curve, if they are too strong or too weak against that generic curve then they need adjustment. Every single pure skill tee should be balanced to be equally as viable as any other at every level range. In world content they can have some enemies that are weaker or stronger depending on your class, so long as on average each class has the same number of encounters that favor them as they do encounters that they aren't suited for, but every story mission encounter should be equally suited to any variation within a given class. Now as for hybrids, hybrids are on their own, if a hybrid build is not viable then that is on the player, because he chose to mix and match and those choices are on him, but if Bioware provides a "set package" of abilities then it is on their shoulders to ensure that each "set package" is balanced against each other one.

I definitely disagree. Space combat can overlevel you a little bit between levels 15 and 20, but that trend levels off rapidly. By mid-game you'd need to run the highest level space daily for a week or two in order to gain a single level.

I was responding to the quote in which the other player indicated that certain bosses were nigh-impossible to defeat at an appropriate level unless you made correct use of very specific tactics. Assuming this is true, and intentional, then they are doing it wrong. You don't teach people by beating them mercilessly every time they answer a question wrong, without indicating what the correct answer might be. If there is just a generally difficult boss, but one which can be defeating using any number of different tactics, then that's fine. If, however, a very specific tactic is required, then it's up to the developers to indicate what that tactic might be, at least until players learn the "tells" for needing to use that sort of tactic. ME3 did this very well in the early levels, having several points in which you pretty much had to employ a new covering maneuver, or movement style, or group tactic, but in each case a pop-up would tell you how and when to use these moves. That is how you properly teach players new tricks. If you fail to do that, then you can't blame the player if they don't learn that trick and continue to try using what tricks they already know. Oh, I most certainly can. The ONLY game in the history of MMOs in which I can't blame the devs for only focusing on endgame balance is DCUO, in which you can get a character to endgame in a single day without a ridiculous amount of skill or effort. Given the many hours that players have to spend to get a single TOR character to endgame, and given how fun the experience can be if the characters are balanced, and given how unique the experience is for each class, I think this is a game that very much needs to worry about the play experience at all levels. I'd hazard to say that the number of players who are between levels 1 and 50 in this game, when compared to the number of level 50 characters, are considerably higher than in most MMOs. Other than choosing to make a Scrapper Scoundrel, I don't believe I made any especially "substandard" choices. I stuck to a single tree, I got perfectly decent gear for my level, I use my skills to the best of my ability, so if my failure comes from making "substandard choices" then it could only be the choice of choosing to use that tree in the first place, which indicates that the Scrapper tree is not balanced. You balance the curve. You balance it so that you're meant to take level 31 content using a level 31 character, with a collection of level 25-31 gear (because organically gear is dribbled out and is rarely at your level unless you're min-maxing). If you have a bit less than that, then the encounter should be very difficult, but doable. If you have more than that, then the encounter should be VERY easy. If you're looking for a challenge, then you shouldn't be looking at it from even leveled content while wearing maxed-out gear. I'm just saying, my level 31 Scrapper is geared considerably better than my level 31 Sage, his companion is considerably better gears as well, and yet my Sage was able to take out her Act 1 boss on the first try, fairly easily really, while my Scrapper has died more than a half-dozen times without getting him below 5-10% HP.

Only in PvP, and only to a point. Operatives have different missions with different content balance, they have different companion loadouts. The biggest discrepancy for a while has been between Bounty Hunters and Troopers, the former having a considerably easier path (having played both myself). They are very similar, but not necessarily have the same experiences. Which, as I said, is a patch. It's an imperfect solution to a problem that shouldn't exist. If I'm level 31 I should be able to do level 31 missions easily enough, level 32/33 missions with some effort, level 29-30 missions fairly easily, level 27-28 missions effortlessly. As it stands, unless I'm a level or two above the content, it's a real challenge. I won't get my healer until Hoth, which is also part of the problem. And my gear is considerably better for my level than any previous character I've had, since this one is a Cybertech so I'm always rocking purple modded armors, and yet he performs worse. As I said, my problem is that I can't "figure this out," it's not that I can't figure out a way to make it tolerable enough, by, say, grinding space missions for a few levels from time to time. My point is that I shouldn't have to do this, that the class should be balanced entirely on it's own, so that I can have the same casual experience that I do with other characters and do just fine at it.

I played a Sniper up to around that point and didn't have any issues either, the ranged Smugglers/Agents seem to be fine, cover makes them a better tank than tanks, but the Scrapper spec is just not working at mid-levels. You have to get in close and melee, no cover, but you can't absorb nearly enough damage for that, can't gain Upper Hand fast enough to use your Scrapper moves, and don't have a healing companion until practically Act 2. I've heard that some very late-game abilities make them much more playable, but they don't have those abilities earlier in the game, so what does that matter. I asked for some suggestions and got things like "overlevel the content," or "glitch the AI," or "buy all the best gear at all times," or "hybrid into a different tree," all useful suggestions, but they are patches to the problems, ways to take a broken class and muddle trough it. None of those suggestions would be necessary for many of the other non-broken classes in the game, and should not be necessary for Scrappers either. I should be able to just wander into the story content, at or even slightly below the level of it, wearing whatever gear I happen to have slapped together from quests, and be able to beat the boss in a straight, non-exploiting fight, using my core abilities. It can be a tricky fight, it can be close, and I might die once or twice, but I should still be able to do it. If I come in over leveled, in the best gear possible, and with the most tricky tactics then I shouldn't just have enough to squeak through, I should completely dominate the boss under those circumstances. "Constructive" means pointing out what's wrong and how to fix it. I did both. How is that not constructive?

Well originally it was on the Smuggler boards, but I was told to move it to the suggesting board, so I did. It definitely is a suggestion though, but to boil it down: Choose one: a. Increase damage of Scrappers at mid-levels so that they can kill things faster. OR b. Increase defense capabilities of Scrappers at mid-levels so that they can survive battle longer. Also, If you want to teach players to use specific tactics, then you need to let them know what those specific tactics might be. and further: Classes should be balanced at ALL level ranges, not just at endgame, because there are plenty of players who don't care at all what goes on after hitting 50.

Recently a Dev posted in the Q&A that: Basically saying that they are aware that Scrappers are not as good as other classes at mid level ranges, but that they were only going to make them even worse, and that we should be fine with that. I'm not. If the DPS Scrappers are seeing is "good enough" by Bioware's standards, or even too much, that's fine, but if true, then Scrapper's defenses are not nearly high enough, because they have to work twice as hard to barely survive encounters that an equal leveled Sage or Commando can wrap up in half the time with twice the HP and Energy left over. If they're going to be keeping DPS the same, or worse than on live, then they need to greatly increase our ability to soak up damage, so that we can survive the experience. I would suggest giving an ability that is functionally equivalent to the Sage's "Force Armor" ability, something you can keep up pretty much constantly that makes you much more likely to dodge incoming attacks. All I know is, I die about five times as often with my Scrapper as I do playing any other class, both Bowdaar and Corso die ten times more often than Theron or Elora, I leave even successful fights on my last legs, while my Sage and Commando leave their fights in good enough health that they're ready to fight the next spawn as soon as they reach them without resting up. I was also able to defeat my Act 1 boss with my Sage, first try, no deaths, and with my Commando I believe I might have died once but was able to get through it just fine, but with my Scrapper I tried about a half-dozen times, including going out and buying better gear for myself and my companions, trying both companions, burning stims, etc., and still couldn't beat him even once before he killed both me and my companion. And that's before this supposed incoming nerf. Now, some people say things like: I'm concerned that the developers would agree. To me this is a stupid viewpoint to take. It assumes that the end-game matters. I couldn't care less about the endgame. I don't plan to spend any real time at level 50. I have zero interest in running raids ad nauseum. I'm in this game for the level 1-50 experience, the story. I want to play my Scrapper to 50 and then play some other class. Are Scrappers balanced at 50? Maybe, I couldn't care less. What matters to me is whether they are balanced at level 1, level 5, level 10, 20, 30, etc. They need to feel fully balanced at EVERY level in the game. If there are abilities that they get very late in their leveling that makes them much better than they were before, then those abilities need to be moved much earlier. IF this is true, if they are deliberately trying to teach players, then they are doing it wrong. It's be like a math teacher, without first explaining what "addition" is to the students, asking "what's 5+3?" "4?" "Wrong!" "12?" "Wrong!" "I don't know! 3? What?!" "Wrong! Idiot!" That's not teaching, that's just berating people for not knowing the answer. A game that does a good job of teaching the player to use new tactics, like Mass Effect 3 does, is by TELLING them how and when you use these new tactics. If you want them to learn to use interrupts, then you have to let them know that interrupts are the thing they should be doing, rather than dying a lot instead.

All I would say is, IF Scrappers are right where Bioware wants them on DPS, and maybe they are, I would be fine with that, but then they definitely are not right where they need to be on defense. If the DPS they have now is all the DPS they're getting, then they need to live longer to kill the enemies before getting killed themselves. I'm pretty sure my level 31 Scrapper could kill a story boss faster than my Sage could, the problem is that by the time he "does" my Scrapper and his companion would already have been dead for ten to twenty seconds, making his victory more theoretical than practical, while my Sage would still be very much alive thirty seconds later and standing over the enemy's corpse, rather than the other way around. If they intend to leave the Scrapper DPS changes where they are, then they most definitely need to figure out some way to boost their longevity in the mid-game ranges, some higher defense, for example. If they had a dodge ability that was as effective and always-on as the Sage's Force Armor then they could probably keep up.

From this week's QA: So there you have it. Scrappers are already underpowered and have a difficult time beating bosses, but guess what', it's going to get harder, and that's working as intended, because Scrappers are supposed to suck. And for the record, this is NOT true of all classes. Plenty of other classes have MUCH easier times against bosses at this same level range, in the same sort of content. My Commando and my Sage never had anywhere near this level of problem fighting story bosses that I have with my Scrapper.

Yeah, I'm not terribly interested in any of the above, if there were any "big picture" elements added to the game I'd prefer something like adding true flight/super jumping options to standard travel. I think it's a bit lame that you can't use Force Leaps or jet packs to reach ledges higher than 6ft tall, it'd be awesome if you could get a 30ft_ vertical (different classes could have different tools to achieve this). If it has to be something off that list, I guess I'd prefer 3D space combat, mostly just to shut people up. I rather like the corridor shooter myself.

But I won't get to 50 unless I get what you mean at level 31, which is where I am now. I'm not going to play through 20 more levels of suck on the promise that it gets better. "It gets better at 50" is a meaningless statement, the class needs to be great at every level. If they magically get better at 50 then they need to move some of that magic down the skill tree so you can get it much easier. My Commando and Sage are perfectly fine well below 50, it's not like every class is sucky until endgame. Also, warzones are meaningless to me. Really endgame is meaningless to me. I have absolutely no interest in running flashpoints and operations. I want to level my characters to 50 and enjoy the ride, I have absolutely no interest in grinding to 50 so that I can grind better and better gear.

Well, it's not that I won't take your advice. If I go back to my Smuggler then I will use it, and I'm quite grateful to you and the rest for providing what advice you have. But what I was hoping to hear is that Smugglers were as good as I wanted them to be, and I was just missing some trick that made them work right. What I'm hearing is that while I wasn't doing everything that I could be doing, I was unfortunately right that they just aren't very good, and it takes a lot more work to make them barely functional than it does to completely pwn the game with any other class (except, apparently, Sentinels, but if my beta experience was anything to go by, they were poorly designed as well). So my plan A was to come in here, have you guys tell me "oh, well if you do this one thing, it'll make you twice as effective as you are doing it your way!" and then I would and fun would ensue. Since the reality of the situation was more "well, if you do this you can maybe squeak out 10% more efficiency, or you could glitch the AI to muddle through it, or whatever," then plan B occurs, "attempt to make the class/spec better than it is now." Then what would be the right way for argue for the class to be improved? Which is bad design. There should be skills in the Scrapper tree that offset that effect, so that you don't need it. I never have to use heals on my Commando, I never have to use heals on my Sage, why should I have to use them on my sneak-thief brawler?

And have you been reading what I was saying? I was able to beat my Sage's class quest at level 31, with no deaths at all, not even my companions, no problems. I was able to do the same with the Trooper. While I admit that it's possible to defeat the quest as a Scrapper, I think it's fairly clear that it's not nearly as easy to do as with other classes. Even if it is possible to push through and win with enough skill, there is still an imbalance there. They are OK as stuns go, but most classes get just as good, and they don't need them as much. Being able to stun people twice per minute is not all that great when you need to get behind people to use your best attacks. If you need to get behind people to use your best attacks, you should have tools to get behind them almost constantly. If you can't get behind them almost constantly then you shouldn't have to. Most games solve this by either A: having the ability to get behind enemies all the time (like a "teleport behind" or a constantly available combat stealth), or B: by having a "backstab" style of move that you're only meant to use once per fight or so, capable of doing a ton of damage up front, and then it's up to you to finish the job from in front of the target. I'm not saying that mobs shouldn't recover health out of combat, I'm saying that Disappearing Act should not take them out of combat. It should just make you invisible to them, while keeping both of you in combat. This is how stealth works in Dragon Age, Amalur, or Mass Effect, if you stealth while in combat, the enemies stay exactly as they are when you stealth, but they can't see you, giving you the chance to sneak around behind them and backstab or whatever you feel like doing. I haven't played WoW in ages but I seem to remember Rogues in that game can do the same thing. They should remain in combat, and they should charge after you if you unstealth within their detection range or they detect you, but by using DA it should allow you to sneak behind them and use your stealth moves, without resetting the entire encounter. If you use DA and then retreat to a safe distance, where you could use your out of combat heal or whatever, then of course that would reset their health, just as if you just kept running without stealth until you escaped their agro range and they returned to where they started. Actually this would be a flaw in your own reading comprehension. Yes, it breaks on damage, but it also interrupts whatever they were doing, even if it only works for a split second, which is useful if all your other abilities capable of interrupting have been used already. Also, if you don't damage them then it can last up to 60 seconds, giving you time to use heals or buffs. I didn't get my Sentinel past 25 in beta, but if that's true then Sentinels need a buff as well. Two wrongs don't make a right.

And yet numerous people have made suggestions like using the Sawbones tree (which would mean that the Scrapper tree is not self-sufficient at all level ranges), or to over-level the content (which would mean that the Scrapper tree is not level balanced) I mean, technically pretty much any class is "viable" if your standards are that you power level them in the space combat until they're 5-10 levels above the content they're running and use money from other characters to twink them out in the best purple gear in every slot, but that doesn't mean that they're balanced. They should have the tools to be awesome at every level range, not just "possibly capable of squeaking by. . . if you do it just right" Only if the tank can both hold agro and not die, neither of which Corso or Bowdaar really excel at. Really you're kind of highlighting why the Scrapper spec is such a disjointed mess. A lot of the abilities seem to fall into the "back-stab/ninja" style of moves, and yet they aren't given enough tools to maintain that posture. Their stun's cooldowns are too long, they can't re-enter stealth without healing all the enemies (and even then they have a long cooldown on the move). If scrappers are meant to rely on abilities that attack from behind and/or require stealth, then they should be able to pop in and out of stealth fairly easily at least several times per fight, and should be able to get behind the enemy that they're fighting on a fairly regular basis, even without a tanking companion. Because sometimes they want to do somethign mean to me, and when they do I like having options to stop them. Sometimes both my interrupt and my other stuns are all on cooldown, so having the 60-second stun is sometimes a nice thing to have. When I was fighting the Act 1 boss with my Sage, I used Force Lift twice, just on him alone, and in each case it saved me pain. Also true. And keep in mind, the Sage is not my main, it's just I've been leveling the two classes at the same time, alternating planets, so I've seen them each do the same content at the same levels within days of each other, so the disparity is much more clear. My main is a level 42 Commando, and in beta I also played a Sentinel, Powertech, and Sniper (and also proto versions of the launch characters). So I've dabbled in just about everything. Yeah, I know that's an option, but as I've said, that's a patch, not a solution. You can outlevel the content, but the game should be designed so that you never have to.

I just ran my class quest for my Balance Sage with Theron, and had NO trouble. Same level, lesser gear, but no problems. I had to fight in a lot more fights, came out of most of them with 90% health and 50%+ Force. The final boss fight I ended with almost full health, although I was getting low enough on Force that I could basically just spam TK Throw, but by that point he was nearly dead. I'm sure had I used some more careful tactics I could have kept my energy much higher and had otherwise similar results. If my Scoundrel was half this effective I would have no cause for complaint. Isn't Shoot First a class ability, rather than a tree ability? In any case, this was an issue that came up during beta when they moved the Bounty Hunter's Rocket Punch back ten levels. I'll give the same answer I did then, they should add "exclusivity" branches to the trees. Don't make it so that the only way an ability can be made exclusive to a tree is by placing it at the top of the tree. Make a branch of the tree, with a unique color or something, that can only be pursued if you stick with that one tree. Make it so that you can only select any ability from that branch if you have no other exclusive abilities or abilities from above tier 2 in any other trees, and after selecting that power it locks all other trees above tier 2. That way, they could put abilities like Flechette on tier 2, 3, even tier 1 if they felt like it, but if you picked it then you could then only pick other Scrapper abilities, or tier 1 and 2 abilities from the other two branches. Yes, but the only practical benefit to the Scrapper tree is that you can mix it up in melee, that you can use Sucker Punch to smack people around. But you need UH to fuel that capability. You can't use it nearly often enough in boss fights. I wouldn't mind not having Upper Hand if Sucker Punch didn't require it. I mean, Grav Rounds in the Commando tree you can spam constantly. All necessary skills and talents. The way you play should vary as you level, you should get more options and ways to fight, but you should be balanced at every single level, you should have every tool that you need to fight the content at your level. You should have more options at 40 than at 20, but the options you have at 20 should be everything you'd ever need to fight level 20 enemies. Basically, to keep it simple, if you need "20 combaty points" to fight on even terms at level 20, and 40 to fight on even terms at level 40, then the game shouldn't leave you with only 15 "combaty points" at level 20, and then give you a skill that gives you an additional 30 of them at level 35, it should give you 20 by level 20 and 40 by level 40 in a relatively even progression. When asking for advice, the only available answer should never be "well when you get this ability ten levels later, everything gets a lot better." Nor should it be "here's a way to exploit the AI that will get you past this fight that you clearly aren't capable of overcoming fairly." Scoundrels may be great at level 50. That's nice, but they should also be equally great at 45, and 40, and 35, and 30, and 25, and so on. Healers should be the best companion to any front line fighter. If you bring a tank then you have to worry about healing them yourself. A solid DPS/Tank character should be able to run in, do the work himself, and be defensible enough that his healer can keep him topped off. I mean, I think that my Scoundrel should be at least as survivable as my "mage" character. If I can Sage with a healer companion and end most fights at full health, I should be able to do the same with my Scrapper. Boss fights tend to. Minions, no, but bosses often take at least a minute and a half, maybe two, at least with my Sage. With my Scoundrel I'm usually dead already.

That's possible, but if so, only because it's too difficult to keep them geared. I have several custom pieces loaded with level appropriate purple mods and armorings (I have cybertech), and after dying the first few times I bought as many strong armor pieces as I could find to fill in the gaps. I did the same on my companions, which is something I never needed to do on my other characters, neither in beta nor in live. My Trooper's companions did just fine with hand me downs (I don't think Elora has ever died in the life of the character), and my Sage companions have done perfectly well with whatever gear they received as mission rewards without putting any real effort into it. Qyzen would occasionally die, but only if my Sage was at full health by the end of the fight, and Theron would only occasionally die during a solo boss ambush fight (where a fight happens right after a cutscene involving multiple enemies that deal a lot of damage faster than you can prep for it), again with my Sage in good health. Both Corso and Bowdaar die almost every fight. This also may be true, but if so then their best isn't as good as the other class's worst. I REALLY wish I had Kaliyo. My first character in beta was an IA and I miss her, even with her bald head. I just have stupid Corso and Bowdaar the paper tank. It shouldn't happen. In any case where it does happen, the community should point it out, and the developers should fix it. It shouldn't just be accepted as "the way things are." If a class has periods in which they are incapable of performing well, then the developers need to move their abilities around to make them stronger during those levels, in a way that balances out by the time they no longer need that boost. For example, apparently a Scrapper becomes more viable once getting Shoot First and Flechette, so why not move those things to a lower level where they are needed? I have plenty of options available that I have no use for, like anything related to Tendon Blast, for example, that could be moved to a later level. Just treat it like any other action fleeing a given mob, if you leave the area far enough that you're out of its agro range entirely then it would heal up, but if all you do is stealth within his eyesight, move around for maybe ten seconds, and then continue the fight, it should pick up where you left off. The annoying thing is that even though Disappearing Act ends the fight for the enemy, instantly returning them to full health, it does NOT end the fight for you, preventing you from using out of combat abilities unless you can run far enough away to completely break combat first. At minimum, it could be designed to heal them more gradually, like slowly enough that a boss type character would take 30 seconds to heal from 5% to full HP, rather than healing them instantly.