Yeah, see I don't have either of the first two, so they're no help. If I had them, I'd use them. I use the middle three. I don't use the latter two, because they're completely unsupported by the spec. I may give them a shot, but they shouldn't be necessary. My Sage and my Trooper can do it faster and with more health and energy left over. and usually at a lower level. That's no excuse for bad design. NO class should take until after Act 1 to "bloom." Really no class should take until after Coruscant/Kaas to bloom. It has it's uses, but it should be like Smoke Bomb in Amalur, allowing a player, in the middle of a fight, to drop into stealth, reposition, and make a stealth-based attack for a second time during the fight. It's long cool-down (even with talents) should keep it from being abused, it'd just make it useful. And yet my Sage, who can heal better, and tank, gets hers at 25. And my Commando who can also heal, and tank, gets hers at 20. Mercenaries even get theirs at level 8. This is just poor design. So will I, as soon as I beat Skavek, You see the problem here? If our tanks suck, they need to make them better. At the very least start Bowdaar with better gear. Perfect. It would come in handy during any fight that lasts longer than a minute. My Sage routinely uses the equivalent ability on enemies to throw them off when her other stun/interrupt abilities aren't available. It kind of makes it seem like they wanted this to be a kick-### stealth class, and then forgot to put in the kick-### part, and instead we're just really weak. Like if we could do way more damage out of stealth it might be worth it, but as it stands it's just a minor trick that you can only (maybe) do anything with once per fight, and after that it's worthless. I've been playing both Amalur and Mass Effect lately, and both have MUCH better uses of stealth. Only DCUO's is worse

I really don't care about PvP, all I care about is being able to get through the PvE content in a fun and successful way. I want a 100% Scrapper to be viable, and feel that the scrapper tree alone should provide every tool my Scrapper needs. I don't believe this is an unreasonable request. Any suggestion that I dip into the other trees, while appreciated, is not something I intend to do to cover for Bioware's design-fail. Instead I'm just planning on shelving my Scoundrel until the spec is fixed. I really want to like my punchy Scoundrel. The story is engaging and the concept of the class, ninjaing in and punching things to death, is fun, but the application of those concepts is a complete mess. The class just doesn't seem equipped to do the things it's meant to do, except perhaps at the endgame, once the story is already over. That's unacceptable. I'm just trying to fight Skavek. One gold enemy. No ads to worry about, no real positional strategy beyond killing him before he kills Corso and then me. The fight doesn't take more than sixty seconds, I'm just dead at the end of it (unless I Disappear and bug out, but that's still no closer to victory). Fights against packs of standard enemies I tend to do ok with, even if I do leave them with far lower HP than my Sage or Trooper ever have to worry about and have to spend twice as much time recovering afterwards.

So basically, what a lot of what you're saying is, "Don't be a scrapper." Utuwer is saying to play like a Gunslinger, using cover and ranged attacks and avoiding any abilities that the Scrapper tree uses, Lifewaster is saying to mostly rely on Sawbones abilities to keep my pet alive. I'm already doing most of the other stuff you guys listed. Shouldn't Bioware fix this? Shouldn't it be on THEM to provide options that make the Scrapper viable at ALL level ranges? I mean, my Sage doesn't have these problems. She can use Force Armor to make herself super tough (or her companion if using the tank one). She has Theron to keep her healed up as she fights. She has a 60-second stun that doesn't require that it be used before the fight starts, AND has been upgraded to insta-cast and multi-target, and stuns enemies after wearing off. The Scrapper just doesn't seem viable at level 30. They took too many essential abilities and companion options and moved them to the back of the curve. Really any class should be mostly set by level 30 so that they'll be competitive for their Act 1 finale missions. Here is my wish-list: 1. Greatly enhance their defensive options. Maybe make that Dodge ability more like Force Armor, where you can throw it up every twenty seconds and it makes you almost invulnerable for most of that. If they're meant to me in melee range then they need to be able to survive there. 2. Disappearing Act, ***? I thought this was going to be a great ability, and it would be, except that when you use it it resets the enemy's life bars! No no no, this will not stand. You should be able to use this ability without resetting their life bars, like you can in, say, Amalur. The use of this ability is to take the immediate heat off you and allow you to set up your next move, it shouldn't take a nearly dead boss and restore him to full health. 3. Stealth. Ideally this should be a bit more flexible too. I wish that you could tell your companion to attack, and he would do so, without breaking stealth on you until you got involved. 4. 60-second stun. This needs to work without needing you to be in stealth at the time. 5. Give me a healer! My Trooper had a healer at level 20, my Sage at level 25, even though she's a better healer than my Scrapper is. Where's my healer? Instead I just have two bad tanks! A Healer companion is absolutely necessary in this game. Either give one of the existing two companions healing abilities, or make the existing healer available sooner, or something, but we need a healer and we need it now. 6. Make the tanks better. Correlary to #5, the existing tanks suck. Their abilities are a bit too all over the place and lack luster, and they die way too easily. They're also a serious pain to keep in proper gear. I got them the best gear I could via missions, and still had to drop thousands on better stuff. My Trooper's companions were much easier to equip since they could just use my own hand-me-downs, but the Smuggler's are much harder to keep geared, since they don't even use the same type of gear between them! And if they don't have top-of-the-line gear then they die that much faster! 7. Give me more Upper Hand! I have heard it gets better at higher levels, with better abilities, but at level 30 it sucks. I don't have enough to large spawn fights, and have even less during boss fights. There needs to be some kind of modifier, because for a character that's meant to be in melee slapping people around, most of my abilities are either on cooldown or missing Upper Hand most of the time. Make Blasterwhip zero cooldown. Make it grant bonus Upper Hand. Whatever. All I ask is that I be able to spam melee attacks continually (as energy allows) and always be able to either Blaster Whip, Sucker Punch, or use some other, new melee attack without having all of them blacked out. Whatever benefits are gained for lower levels can be phased out or offset by higher levels so that there would be no change at higher levels if necessary. 8. Dirty Kick, make it up more often. Reduce the cooldown so that you can keep more enemies stunned more of the time. 9. Cheap Shot. This doesn't seem to work. Many of the effects I have that "incapacitate" targets still seem to leave this one blacked out. Make it work more consistently. 10. If all else fails, make it better. No class in the game should feel this weak. Maybe all of that would be too much (though I doubt it because my Sage can do most of that at once), but we should get at least several of those things.

Ok, I have a level 31 Scoundrel (don't stop me yet), and I'm Brawler specced (you still probably shouldn't be stopping me yet, but I suspect you might), and I really suck at it. I'm not a newb at the game itself, I've been playing since beta, have played most classes, and been quite successful at other ones. I have a level 31 Sage too, and she is WAY more effective than my Scoundrel is. WAY more. Like my Sage can take either companion and solo large groups of strong enemies without losing more than 10% HP and maybe 30% Force, no problem, even if they are higher level than herself. She can even solo content without her companion around. My Scoundrel, on the other hand, dies constantly, and even the easiest fights he comes out of them with both he and his companion at 30% HP or less, boss fights he barely survives if using every trick in the book and with his companion long dead. Now I'm on my Act 1 finale mission, trying to beat Skavek, and I just can't swing it. I even upgraded Corso's armor as best I could, spent a fortune doing it. So what am I missing about making the Scoundrel work? I use the strongest abilities I can find as often as they're available, I use a medpack when I need it, I use dodge when I'm getting beat on, interrupt and stun when they're not in cooldown and the enemy is using a "blue bar" attack, I use Sucker Punch whenever I have Upper Hand (which isn't nearly as often as I'd like), I use my Relics to buff my stats, what moves am I missing that would make the Scoundrel half as effective as any other class I've tried?

Because this is the ridiculousness that must occur to make double blades appear functional:

Instead, give us the option of refunding them once after the patch hit. You guys have claimed repeatedly that you aren't fans of "theory-crafting" or whatever, of using patch notes and ability descriptions to design a character, rather than gameplay experience, but the way you've set this up would force us to do exactly that. If I like the way my character is set up now, but significant changes in the new patch would make me not like that build anymore, then if my points are reset the instant the new patch hits, my only option for testing out my old build again would be to put all the points back where I found them, test it, and if it turns out it now sucks, I'd have to pay for a second respec. It would be far better to just allow players to try out their current build on the new patch first, and then, IF they don't like how it performs, they can choose to accept a free respec of their skill points.

When will we get an ETA for an appearance customization feature that goes beyond orange gear? We really need an appearance tab system similar to DCUOs at some point here.

If Bioware wanted to make crafting as prominent in TOR as it was in SWG then they would need to have spent as much development time on it as SoE did, and would have had to make it as necessary to the game as SoE did, and if they did so then they'd lock in the couple hundred thousand players that SWG did, but lose the couple million players that TOR has earned. A fair trade-off, I suppose. I imagine that TOR's crafting system will continue to grow in complexity and usefulness as time goes on, but they did the right thing to give it fairly minimal priority until they get the rest of the game locked down, something the SWG developers got completely upside-down on.

When will we getting an appearance tab, or some other appearance customization function that does not require you to purchase orange versions of gear that you already have green/blue/purple versions of?

If you're thinking of selling gear, you really can't consider the cost of REing up to that recipe, you can only consider the cost of the materials to make that one piece, and the mats for a level 29 purple aren't more than a few thousand, certainly nowhere near 15K.

I didn't bother with it on my first character, but my second two I've been leveling together, alternating between them, and one is an Artificer and the other a Cybertech, and they each give each other the stuff they make. While I'm adventuring with one, the other is craft-muling. The real problem is that the game is a bit broken when it comes to leveling a crafting skill. Basically, they don't give you the ingredients you need to do it right. If you're at, say, level 25, then the area you're in will have, at best, level 25 materials, and most of the materials you find will be level 20 materials, which are completely worthless to you. What they need to do is drop everything down a tier, so that instead, at level 25 you're finding level 30 materials, because what you want to do at level 25 is be grinding away at level 30 gear, so that by the time you hit level 30 you'll have the purple schematics ready. If you're grinding away at level 25 gear at level 25 then by the time you get the purple recipe you'll be level 27-28 already. The only reason my Cybertech is able to keep ahead of the curve is because my higher level character was feeding him all sorts of leftover metals, and also from buying from the GTN (Desh is practically worthless). My artificer doesn't have anyone to send her materials, so she's way behind the curve, and has to spend half her companion's time running archeology missions (which, btw, archeology is WAY harder to do than Scavenging, since there are no droids to harvest, and the nodes themselves seem much more rare in the open world.

That'd be stupid, it's a color, there's no reason for a color to be level restricted.

Where are they? I went to the vendor on the station, but he only carried level 50 ones. That's all well and good if you're level 50, but if you aren't level 50 you can't equip those. I sort of feel like I shouldn't have to explain that but it seems to have completely slipped the developer's minds.

Just because an ability is up doesn't mean that you have to hit it as soon as it's up. That's not a problem. If an ability is up more often than you can use it without running out of energy then don't use it as soon as it's up, put something into your cycle as filler, or even just do nothing for half a second if necessary. That's your problem, not the game's. But if you can't use that ability because it's not up, then that is the game's problem, there's nothing you, as a player, can do about it. So no, it's not better for Scrappers to not have enough upper hand to get the job done. When my scrapper ends fights with a dead companion and low health, but a nearly full energy bar, even after using every useful ability as often as possible, I'd sure as hell wish that I could have used some of them more often. Maybe you can't use it sustainably. You don't have to. Not every combination of moves needs to be "sustainable." Some are designed to be used infinitely without ever running out of energy, and some are designed to leave you on empty within thirty seconds. You use the former when you expect the battle to last a minute or more, you use the latter when you expect the battle to be over in thirty seconds or less. I have both options on my Sage, I have both options on my Trooper, I don't have the latter option on my Scrapper.

Considering how vital UH is to Scrappers, having team mates, much less companions being able to "Upper Hand steal" from you can't be "working as intended". If so, that would be some serious design-fail.

There are a number of ways for Scrappers to regen energy though, including Pugnacity and I think at least one talent. In any event, I almost never have any energy concerns when soloing, it rarely falls bellow half and I hadn't had to use the "recover energy" emergency button more than once or twice since I got it. I would LOVe to have the problem of being able to use Sucker Punch too often leading to burning too much energy, at least then I'd have the option of either being energy efficient or being high burst, as it stands, I don't have the option of being high burst and instead of sit there with nothing better to fire off than the default shot.

I have to say, I want improvements. My first post-launch character was an Artillery Commando, my second and third are a Scrapper Scoundrel and a Balance Sage. The latter two I've been leveling alternately, one planet each at a time. Of that experience, by mid-game, I have to say that while the core of the Scrapper is interesting, he's much more frustrating, fragile, and slower than the Sage or Trooper. The Sage can just ghetto stomp just about anything, no problems. The trooper is a beast, technically a DPS spec but actually able to tank 4-man Heroics if the rest of the team is good, while laying considerable DPS. The Scoundrel is very weak, barely sc****** through the most basic encounters that the other two would leave at near-full health, and taking longer to do it. I don't even attempt those gold/silver badge rare enemies that are sometimes around, because I know he'd be dead in a heartbeat (right after Corso or Bowdaar), while I'm confident that my Sage could massacre him, and my Trooper could do a decent job of it. I'd like to like the Scoundrel, I think he has a great storyline and ship, but he just feels very weak. I think it would help if Blaster-whip was able to be made always-up, so that I could build as much Upper Hand as I needed, that alone might solve the problem.

They do need to make it easier to gain UH as a Scrapper. It's vital to using our core damaging ability. The way I'd like to see them do it is to have a higher level (level 25 minimum) talent to greatly reduce or even remove the cooldown on Blaster Whip, so that it's (almost) always available. Balance Sages have this sort of benefit for TK Throw, I don't see why Scrappers cant have it for Blaster Whip. Scrappers should not have to dive into the Sawbones tree to power their DPS. This is fine for if you're looking at it from the endgame and building your tree with all the points already, but you should be able to put all your points into Scrapper until you max it out, and only then worry about the other two trees. You shouldn't have to consider putting points into Sawbones at level 20 because you can't use Sucker Punch often enough.

I miss out on Upper Hand constantly due to this bug. It's really fun when I'm able to Sucker Punch three enemies in a row and recover UH each time, but in many cases I'll kill an opponent, turn to the next, and not have UH available to use.

If the problem was that all pets were dying too often, they yeah, not Bowdaar's fault, that's bad playing. If the problem is that Bowdaar dies (and/or fails to manage agro well) against opponents where Corso handles them perfectly fine, then clearly there is a problem with him, as they are both tank pets, and should each do equally as well at it. Bowdaar should not need any extra attention to do just as well as Corso does. Likewise, you shouldn't EVER have to gear Bowdaar for Tatooine, as Tatooine is the first place where you are able to use him. He should start out with gear that is comparable to whatever players are likely to have on Corso at that level. After that, of course it's your responsibility to keep him geared up properly, but you should never have to regear a companion immediately after acquiring them.

I just got Bowdaar with my Scoundrel and I really wanted to like him because I really didn't like Corso, but he really sucks. Obviously the big problem is that he dies too easily. He dies, or nearly dies in fights that Corso would escape with half his life or more. He's also terrible at gaining and keeping agro, usually only snagging one enemy out of a pack, if that. He's also much slower to get into the action, since he has to run up to the enemies, while Corso can just shoot from where he is. Given how he can't attack from range, he should do WAY more damage, have WAY better defense, etc., but he isn't even close on any. Now maybe he gets better later, but he should be plenty good when you get him, and maybe if you upgrade his equipment he improves, but he should come with all the gear he needs to compete at the level you get him. You shouldn't need to overhaul his kit until at least after Tatooine.

Sure there are. The ones that tend to have channeled/casted abilities benefit from it, while the ones that have more instants don't benefit as much. Also, while most classes can get at least some benefit from it, some benefit much more from things like crit, so if you focus on alacrity instead you're just leaving performance on the table. There are definitely classes that benefit from alacrity better than others.

The thing is, they aren't equal. Nextor are Erlam+, Erlam are I think mostly level 15-20 stuff, Nextor is 20-25, or something like that. I too was having a lot of problems keeping in Nextor crystals, which were needed to make the recipes I needed to make. If you're just powerleveling to max as fast as possible it isn't a huge deal, but if you want to actually make the stuff in that level range, you need the Nextor crystals. If it helps, since they are the higher end ones for that tier, I believe you have better odds of finding them when you do missions that are higher level, so if some are green and others gray, do the green ones, if they're all gray, do the ones that are more expensive/time consuming.

When they finally get around to implementing a proper appearance tab system of some kind, you'll be able to use whatever color you want with whatever saber stats you have.

I think the release was very cute, although it would have been nice to also have a concise, official breakdown of what will be happening. I really really hope that purple crystals won't be limited to expensive, hoop jumping, high level options. I mean, they can offer powerful purple crystals, ones that are much higher stats than base crystals, in such a way that it requires a massive effort/expense, but just getting one that makes your saber look purple shouldn't be any harder than getting a yellow one. Anyways, I'm a tiny bit bummed that they're dropping the speeder price immediately after I bought them for both my mid-tier alts, but that sort of thing happens. I don't know what the deal is with the high-end speeders. Are those the giant boats that people are driving around the station? I don't know that I want those made in any way more common, I wish they could make them unusable on the station (while still allowing the "bike" kind).