No it won't as you're still dependent on the third color in the chosen outfit being black. If its something else, like brown, you're not getting the black trifecta no matter what you do.

Some people may very well believe the healer suits them best. But that doesn't make it a fact that healers are better. I just means your playstyle isn't the same as everyone else's. I use all companion types. But these are the ways I found to be the fastest and least stressful for me. My tank chars use the healers set to dps stance. If I get into a spot I can switch it back to heal stance. My sorc healer uses Xalek as the tank ability to hold everything still without needing heals while I bubble him and aoe over his head is awesome. My consular uses Qyzen mostly. My Op healer uses vector, my smuggler uses Akaavi Spar, both melee dps comps. My bounty hunter uses healer set to healing mode. My sentinel uses Lord Scourge for most things and switches to Doc for hard stuff. My sniper uses Temple (range dps) and DokLok for hard stuff. I don't like my trooper so she doesn't get a comp and is my level 50 GTN char and going to stay on board the ship FOREVER! As as for needing to micro manage... you might find there are better ways. Don't let your comp attack, keep them on passive. You do your CC, then YOU move,LOS where possible... pull the mobs away from them a little and then let your comp go to town. If you can learn how to do this, then you never have to twiddle with their skills. Just keybind their attack and stop and use those. Your positioning is easy to control and no micromanaging required.

I leveled my last two chars with green mods and blue hilts/barrels all the way up to 58s. That was more than good enough. I changed my green mods every 5 levels or so, and my hilts/barrels every two levels. I did the same with my comp. I almost never died. I could use my planetary comms for whatever I liked as I wasn't dependent on upgrades from them, but I did buy some blue mods along the way, particularly the types I couldn't make. I have stacks and stacks of regular mats.... of all crafts, so I just churn them out. Green mods mostly only take 5 mins or less to make so it's no biggie to make new ones. At one point I had twenty levels worth in my mail box. I never had to worry about gear the entire time I leveled, I was always appropriately geared, and could upgrade at the nearest mailbox. Holding up your leveling waiting for the mats to make purples is just silly. You don't need them, you don't even need blues... The only thing that should stay current and blue if possible is the hilt/barrel. Save your money and run the missions at max level.... it takes a while to collect the mats for the 66's and you're going to go through a lot of them.

No. Chinese get a noticeably lower ping from West Coast USA than from Australia. It's painful to play on APAC from Asia except for a few South East Asian countries.

Besides getting 22's from drops and dailies, they're also not very good anymore. You get the 25's at 50 that are considerably better. No-one's going to spend big on 22's for one level. The reason you see them on the GTN for 2,500 credits is they're still not selling for that. .

Beats me why BW don't just use torrent to distribute their patches same as Blizzard do. They can still provide a static download for those that can't use torrent. But it has worked well for Blizzard distributing that way, I wish more games would do it.

There are a lot of incredibly ugly minded people in this thread. The toxic troll population of SWTOR is one of its more negative features. I would love to see a tribunal system implemented, similar to that Riot have created. It seems to be quite successful in making the game environment a better place to be. OP I understand your impressions and may well be following you out the door soon. I suspect, however, that EA doesn't really care a whole lot. My guess is they intend to hoover up as much money as they can from us, as quickly as they can, and then let the title die. Why? Because fixing the engine is too cost prohibitive and they know its garbage and very limited in its lifespan. They would rather spend the money to create a new title from the same IP they have conveniently just bought, taking with them all the lessons learned from this one, and start over. Cheaper in the long run and likely to return a hefty profit from the get go.

The problem I see with introducing dyes is that they appeal most strongly to those who care more about their characters than the average. Those people would be willing to jump through whatever hoops are in place, just to get the colors/schematics they want. The way they introduced them though was to cater to the instant gratification crowd who have money to burn. And that's where I see the bad feeling has come from. They went the path of the gamble, and let the market sort it out. Great if you have cash to burn in your pocket, but terribly disappointing to those who are willing to put the time into the game. IE, the die hard fans. They should have given more to the crafters, or at least made gaining schematics possible, one way or another. The rep vendors and the artifice was a start, but they should have tried harder.

Wait, pazzak is a TCG? I always thought it was Baccarat in space. If its a TCG screw that, not interested.

I totally agree with the gearing your primary companion up to your own gear level. But I take issue with the healers having a rough time of it. I've leveled two through makeb and had a fairly easy and quick time of it. The boss fights are considerably easier on a healer because the companions take a lot less damage from some of the attacks, plus you can switch between dps and tank to speed things up or take the more conservative route. The stealthing healer probably had it the easiest time of them all. My tank ripped through the zone very easily, the dps.. I honestly had to be more careful about how much I pulled at once. Most of my chars were 51 from just dailies before I bought RothC, but I kept doing dailies throughout which kept me at the right level. I didn't use any of those xp pots, but I was rested for a fair amount. I hit the end of makeb at 54 and 55 on my chars so far.

On the contrary, swtor unleashed USES the memory you have sitting around normally doing nothing and loads extra parts of the game into it. The more RAM you have, the more useful it becomes. It's effectively providing a work around for crappy coding by loading a lot of extra stuff into memory. This is particularly noticeable in PVP, when you pre-load all the spell effect details. The game runs fairly smoothly for me using that. I couldn't get his script to work, it kept returning errors on the virtual memory drive not being NTFS. So I put the commands in manually and then noticed a huge difference. I'll have to keep running swtor unleashed until Bioware clean out all the "quick and dirties" they had to code to make the crappy engine work at all. At least that's my charitable guess. My uncharitable one has more to do with young pc coders who can't wrap their minds around "what happens if 10,000 people all try to execute this awesome code I just wrote at the same time."

Give the trolling a rest there sparky. Crap computers don't get 100 fps at all. My computer was coping, not brilliantly, but doing somewhere between fair and good with all sliders on high except shadows... now.... I have to put all the sliders to low or off and run swtor unleashed to be able to play. And yet I can play other games with far better graphics very well. My system's bits and pieces are between one and two years old.. it's not a good business plan for EA to produce games that only run well on the latest generation PCs. I'm not upgrading my hardware every few months just to keep up with EA patches. That's insanity. So no.... the OPs point stands... when are they going to start giving more attention to performance.

^ This. I love watching those big CDs burn. Especially when I can see someone standing behind them dumping heals on me. I've used the barrier to wait out my CDs, and then come out of it and killed the guy who remained on me. Mostly though, I just use it as a self peel, and then get out of dodge.

The pugs I've done lately, I check the deaths of the opposing teams healers. That's usually a giveaway as to how bad your own dps was. I've seen a bunch of matches where multiple healers were freecasting over 1.2 mil heals with zero deaths. The complete inability of people to play to objectives that will win the game is why things seem so imbalanced now. Premades just tend to collect people who do understand the basics in the one group. So of course its an advantage... but there's nothing stopping the regular pug players from playing to objectives either.....

I've moved all my chars onto their ships so they can use the cargo hold/mail/GTN there. The lag on the fleet is horrible and all the while my latency stays pretty constant at normal levels. For what its worth, limiting the numbers of each instance isn't really going to improve performance. We've all seen the stop motion kick in when we get near to the GTN kiosks and now the appearance console. As said before, its the localised traffic triggering the problem and its caused by what I can only imagine, is god-awful coding in the engine. I really can't see this problem going away until there are less people standing where you want to go, or they bite the bullet and fix their engine. I'm pretty sure I know which one of those is more likely to happen first.

Way to completely misunderstand the issues.

When I was a kid, there was a saying that when it came to clothing "Blue and Green should never be seen." Now, thanks to the color blind devs, I can see why.

Totally this ^. I might have bought a piece or two I liked to use and have available on any and all characters should I choose to cough up the CC for it. But now, given how much I will have to spend to complete an entire set, I'm going to forgo the entire set and just buy maybe two jackets I want for two different chars and call it done. Stupid short sighted greed on their part that managed to miss the obvious.

Nestle got into trouble before because they wanted to totally privatise the world's water supply and charge for it. Even though they did nothing to create it.... purely because they would profit from it and we've become altogether too entitled expecting water for free (or paid for from government utitlities at subsidised rates). This is the world EA/Bioware exist in. These CEO's probably all play golf with each other.... Look at the bright side, we can walking away from EA and give them the finger. Not much we can do when one of these corporate giants (Nestle, Monsanto, et al) takes over our water and food supply. I don't think EA has a long term view of this game at all, and their plan seems to be to milk every last cent they can from us as quickly as they can before we get tired of it and leave. You mailiing around your toys was costing them money (using the same logic as the MPAA for lost sales here), so they fixed an obvious exploit (from their POV).

While your predictions may indeed turn out to be correct in the short term, I think things will be very different in the long term. People don't forget things like this and will continue to take part in it only in the absence of something else. The way EA are treating us here, engenders no loyalty whatsoever. That makes their entire player base, both subs and F2P, very likely to up and leave at the first sign of something shiny somewhere else. EA know this, so they will be milking this Cartel Coin stuff for as much as they can and then be quite happy to move the model to something new, and let this game fold. That is the problem I see with their attitude towards us with this move. Its the attitude of short term profits over long term goals, and thats something that works out very well for the big players, but not so much for us.

But unfortunately for the APAC servers, most of Asia cannot play on them with a lower ping than West Coast USA. Only some southern parts of Asia can use them successfully. It's not EA's fault, its the way Australia decided to connect to the internet. So, if they want to make a big splash into the Asian century, they have to put a server farm somewhere much closer to Taiwan, Korea and China. While I like the idea of APAC servers, they weren't put in a very good place. Great if you're an Aussie, but terrible if you live in Asia.

I have 4 toons running slicing missions and with maxed out affection, don't really return very much at all. I've found only the rich really return anything and they can still fail. And it seems BioWare agrees: Is that proof enough for you?

This clown is everything that's wrong with this community. And I agree with the above poster that says Mirror is Mirror. That should be the end of it.

These are the people who have been asked since beta to allow shift-click of items into the GTN search field... and they still can't do it. And you expect them to come up with something as imaginative and advanced as you are suggesting? Either the people working on this game left their skillz in their other pants, or else there are some serious limitations placed on what is possible by game engine. In either case, things aren't going to get any better until there is either an overhaul of the engine or the staff... and probably both.

Was beginning to wonder this myself...