Affection can't drop below zero, and nothing happens. In one of the early beta builds companions would leave if they disagreed strongly enough with your actions, but that was removed (along with the possibility of companion death).

I easily keep up with Sorc/Merc healers in PvE. My theory about the people who complain about our healing is that they burn every TA on Surgical Probe. If you are using SP as a bread and butter heal, you are doing it very wrong. Compare its HPS to Kolto Infusion sometime.

That isn't true across the board. Operative Medics get +15% crit to one of our primary heals and a 20% cost reduction on our AOE heal. Those aren't trivial bonuses. Orange gear can't be crit crafted. There are crafted Armoring mods that are about equal to Columi gear, but they are extremely difficult to come by (they require Rakata Energy Nodes which only drop from hard mode/nightmare mode Soa, while Columi can be obtained from flashpoints/normal mode ops), and Rakata gear is still better anyway. Long story short, we will be seeing Attack of the Clones very shortly as people start gearing up. It's already happening, in fact.

The first rule of MMOs is that anything the developer does is guaranteed to make people mad. Then they all show up on the forums and complain. This is why you can't go by forums as a true barometer of overall player opinion. There is a huge amount of self-selection going on.

You just got lucky. We did it once rotating clickers per side, all 4 locked no problem and we got loot. Next week, we did it exactly the same way and the consoles kept turning un-clickable after the second row. There is a whole long thread about it on this forum, actually. No one has found a consistent way to avoid the bugs.

I don't think Soa hard mode is bugged, but he is very difficult compared to the other hard modes. There is a fair amount of RNG in terms of where the lightning balls spawn, who gets mind trapped/force cycloned (both healers cc'd at once is almost a guaranteed wipe), etc. It's not the most compelling or "fair" fight design I've ever seen, but I don't think those are bugs per se. Occasionally he will actually bug and fail to respawn the floor after a wipe, which requires an instance reset -- no big deal since he has no trash anyway. Ancient Pylons is the one that is genuinely, frustratingly bugged on HM/NM. Sometimes it works, sometimes not, and there's nothing you can do about it but manually reset and reclear the trash.

The stuff about "burning energy faster" is nonsense. It gives you the option to burn energy faster, which is a good thing. You can never be too rich, too thin, or have too much HPS. But the complainers are right for the wrong reasons. Alacrity sucks for us because it has no effect on instants, which comprise a good chunk of our healing. It should be avoided as much as possible.

There are many ways to set the difficulty of content. By far the worst way is to handicap players with a terrible, unmodifiable UI, so that information they are legitimately entitled to have (such as remaining duration on HOTs, proc notifications, target-of-target, etc.) is either inaccessible or very inconvenient. If current content is, in fact, tuned to the assumption that players will be running it with a UI that is the equivalent of wearing mittens and blinders, then BW needs to change their fundamental development philosophy. IOW, if you're right, then the game has much bigger problems than just a bad UI.

The level of cognitive bias being demonstrated in this thread is enough to write a PhD thesis on. The encounter is bugged. If you completed it successfully, then that means you got lucky and did not run into the bug, not that you discovered the super secret solution. My guild completed it first try on NM, came back next week, did it exactly the same way and ran into the bug 3 times in a row. As others in the thread have posted, if this were an intended mechanic then there would be some indication of that -- it would be a raid wipe, most likely, rather than a forced manual reset of the instance. That just screams "bug".

You can do dailies for one day at 50 and get: an artifact Enhancement 22 an artifact Mod 22 an artifact Armoring 22 and enough tokens to buy 3 more artifact 23 Armoring/Hilt/Barrel components. Not to mention that normal mode raids are so easy, a guild can do them in blues. We walked into EV and one-shotted every boss but Soa. Soa took longer because we decided to figure the mechanics out for ourselves rather than watch a YouTube video, but it was still a very easy fight when we understood it. There is no such thing as "gearing up to raid" in TOR.

Crafted item chat links are bugged and seem to only show the "base" stats of the item, without the extras from [superior] prefixes or augment slots. The items themselves do provide the correct tooltip stats (I have tested this in game just to make sure).

The problem is NOT biochem/cybertech. The problem is everything else. If those two get nerfed into uselessness the way Slicing did, then no one will bother with professions at all. I don't think BW's vision is to have crafting be a mini-game that's even more pointless than space combat (hey, at least space combat gives you credits).

The problem with SP is its terrible HPS. I'm not saying it's a worthless or even "bad" ability, but I see Operative healers saying things like "abuse KInj+SP" without realizing that, in fact, they are the ones being abused there. I think a lot of the complaints about Op healing stem from misuse/overuse of Surgical Probe. Is it a good TA dump when you need energy and have nothing better to do? Sure. Is it a good last-ditch effort if you're out of energy or someone is likely to die within the next 1.5 seconds? Yes. Is it a staple heal -- absolutely not. There's no alternative PvE build that makes any sense. And Nano isn't useless by any means, it just has very limited utility. HOTs are supposed to be a lot more efficient than direct heals in order to make up for being so much slower and less "smart" (i.e. they overheal more). Resto druid Rejuv in WoW is 4x more efficient than any of their direct heals, both in mana cost and casting time. Kolto Probe is only about 1.6 times as efficient as Kolto Infusion, and that's not nearly as efficient as it should be. It either needs to heal for more or cost less. My suggestion for KP would be to remove the cumbersome and annoying (especially considering the shortcomings of the UI) 2-stack system and simply have one cast heal for the amount a 2-stack currently does.

Dailies give you 150k/day at 50, which isn't enough to support a serious crafting habit but will keep food on the table easily. There are also certain items that sell for way more than their default value on the GTN, and occasionally the ignorant will post them for the default, which gives you the opportunity to turn them around and pick up some quick credits. No, I'm not going to say what they are.

I think you were looking at a sub-optimal schematic. I have a crafted earpiece with 90 cunning (including cunning augment) and way more secondary stats than even the Rakata earpieces. It's BIS as far as I can tell.

No they're not. Cybertechs can make [Mastercraft] earpieces that are better than Columi, or Rakata for that matter. I'm definitely with you on that one. Biochem is about in line with the benefits a 400 level crafting profession should provide, given the time and expense involved in leveling it. The problem is that other professions (with the exception of Cybertech) aren't.

Technically, no. Purple armor has a "built-in" non-removable Armoring component; that's the only difference. So if you had an orange piece with the same item level Armoring in it, it would be equivalent to the purple item's base stats. However, since good (raid- or Champion-level) Armoring components aren't craftable, it winds up being better to use the purple gear because you simply can't find a good enough Armoring to mod your orange gear up to the same level. Supposedly, high-item-level Armoring pieces can drop independently from operations, but I have yet to see any. Edit: There are set bonuses to consider as well.

Max level blue stims persist through defeat. The perk of biochem, besides saving money on mats, is having the Rakata level stims, which are (slightly) better than blues and "normal" purples. I can't believe how many people in this thread are complaining about things that are just completely false. Adrenals give you +50% crit? I freakin' wish!

I agree, our HOTs are very underpowered compared to what they should be. The entire point of HOTs is efficiency, but if you look at the numbers, KP is barely more efficient than a direct heal (it's probably LESS efficient when you consider the higher overhealing of HOTs) from both an HPE and HPCT standpoint. The larger problem is that the damage profiles of current raid encounters simply don't support HOT-based healing; when players are getting plowed for 60% of their health or more per hit, it doesn't matter whether they have a HOT on them or not. You can't trickle your way to victory against Soa or Bonethrasher, you need to get people up quickly and that requires direct healing. It's pretty sad that the primary role of Kolto Probe in operations is as a TA generator. Nano is even worse because, in addition to lacking efficiency, it's rare to have the opportunity to use it on 3+ people who actually need healing. As far as I can tell it doesn't even smart-target, meaning if you throw it on a cluster of players, it's just as likely to target the ones already at 100% health. Surgical Probe is really, really bad HPS/HPCT compared to pretty much any other direct heal in the game. Yes it's an instant, but being hard locked for a 1.5s GCD (not reduced by alacrity) is not worth healing someone for ~1300 non-crit if there is any pressure at all. That said, I don't think our casted direct heals are as bad as you're making them out to be, and no class in the game can spam direct heals without running out of resources.

OK, true, I forgot about the BOP Rakata belts/bracers. Pretty crappy reward for leveling a crafting skill to 400, though, considering you can't sell them and the Columi ones from flashpoints are almost as good.

http://www.swtor.com/community/showthread.php?t=45866

Overkill is a blue recipe (the +crit one), and yes, it can be RE'd to get a purple schematic. The chance of success is very low, estimated ~5%.

Crafted arms and armor are not worth making in the end game. You can get better items from running hard mode flashpoints or normal mode operations, and mods of identical quality from doing dailies.

The craftable earpieces and implants with [superior] prefixes and augment slots are BIS. I have a Supremacy Serenity Relay [Mastercraft] with 50 endurance, 90 cunning, 25 power, 40 crit, 69 alacrity. There is no raid drop better than that. (There would be better schematics for me but I don't think anyone on my server has learned them yet.) Rakata Field Medic's Relay is 98 endurance, 85 cunning, 51 crit, 51 alacrity for comparison's sake.

Crit adrenals don't give anything like +50% crit rate. It's more like +8%. Everyone sees a big rating number on the adrenals but doesn't realize that the actual in-game effect is pretty minor. Secondary stats have steeply diminishing returns, as well. Anyone who thinks reusable adrenals are in any way game-breaking has no experience with them.