I have definitely not seen that before. I just finished Hoth two days ago. That said, on my Imperial Agent character, I was questing with a Bounty Hunter the other day, and they did some sort of rapid-firing blaster attack that wouldn't stop until they used it again on something else.

I fail to understand exactly what the problem is with the Rakghoul plague. If you get it, you have 20 minutes to cure yourself with a vaccine available at every med droid for 2,000 credits. And if you don't cure it...so what? You explode, you instantly revive (without even losing any gear durability, mind you) and it's like nothing ever happened. Literally, the absolute worst thing that happens is you lose about 10 total seconds of your life.

On that note, can you do something about the absolutely stupid taxi routing? The most obnoxious one I've noticed is on Coruscant, where some of the outlying taxi destinations connect to the central Senate Plaza taxi before going to another branch...I understand the desire to make those routes cost the extra credits, but those are such long taxi rides, and it's really annoying when you have to go almost double the distance because the taxi goes from one point all the way to the Senata Plaza point, only to turn around and go almost completely the opposite direction to the final destination.

I'm a Sage healer, full Seer spec, so Tharan is automatically pretty much useless. I used Qyzen pretty much exclusively until I got Zenith, then worked with him for a while on Quesh and Hoth. I tried Iresso, but he seems less useful than Qyzen, probably due to me keeping up with Qyzen's gear and Iresso still having his starter gear, and now I'm on Belsavis using Qyzen again.

My Sage healer. The armor is an orange piece called Muse Vestments, I've had it for a while so I'm not sure where I found it. I'm level 42 now. The rest of the armor is nothing special, mix of quest loot and my own Synthweaving products, with the color scheme set to match the chest piece. http://img94.imageshack.us/img94/4186/screenshot2012042904070.jpg http://img20.imageshack.us/img20/1909/screenshot2012042904071.jpg

Purple > blue > green > white > gray. Orange is unique, I'll explain that in a sec. I don't think I've ever seen gray gear other than the very first stuff you have equipped when you make your character, and it's highly unlikely you'll ever see white gear after your starting planet. Green gear is basically the "normal" gear, and by far the most common. Blue gear is more rare and has better stats than equivalent green gear, and same goes for purple compared to blue. When you're making your own gear with crafting skills, often you'll buy a recipe for a basic bit of green gear from your trainer, then when you make that green gear, you can reverse engineer it for a chance to learn a schematic for a blue version of that item, which looks the same, but has slightly higher damage (if a weapon) or armor rating (for armor), and an additional stat as well. For example, you make a green armor piece that has Strength, Endurance and Force Power. You reverse engineer it, and learn a schematic. Now you can make a blue version of that item with a higher armor rating, and now it has Critical Rating in addition to the other stats. Orange gear is kind of unique. On its own, orange gear is basically an empty shell with no statistics or armor/damage rating of its own. But, orange gear has multiple customization slots. Orange weapons have either a Hilt slot (for melee weapons) or Barrel slot (for blasters). This slot determines the base damage of the weapon, and the primary stat (Strength vs. Willpower for sabers, Aim vs. Cunning for blasters). Armor works the same way; there is an Armoring slot, and what you put in it determines the base armor rating, and primary stat. The other slots (usually Mod and Enhancement, also Color Crystal for weapons) allow you to add secondary stats, such as additional Endurance, or Critical Rating, Surge Rating, Alacrity, Power, Expertise, etc. Armor and weapon mods for these slots also come in green, blue and purple varieties. Long story short, an orange armor piece with all slots filled by blue mods will be pretty much equivalent to a blue armor piece of the same level. So, green/blue/purple gear is much more straightforward and simple, while orange gear lets you fully customize it and improve it as you level up, but it can be a hassle to manage all the different mods in all the different slots of multiple pieces of armor and weapons.

Also, do your daily repeatable missions. Heroics and Flashpoints can be hard to find a group for, but at the very least, do your space missions. It costs next to nothing to start them, they take 10 minutes max, and it's basically a free farming source for credits, XP and fleet commendations.

It's definitely a large investment at first, but in the end you have the potential to make gear equivalent to endgame PvP or raid gear, and can even make it better by getting a lucky craft with an additional augment slot. But you're right, it's definitely hard to see any payoff while you're leveling it up. I'm doing Synthweaving right now, and I'm at about 300, and it's just starting to be actually useful. Also, even if you don't want to craft, you can sell crafting materials from Underworld Trading, schematics from Slicing and so on, for a lot of money.

As a healer Sage, I honestly prefer crit rating over alacrity. The much higher crit chance is much more valuable than quicker casts in my opinion. And you need to stack alacrity in all of your gear for it to really have a noticeable effect. But for a DPS companion like Nadia, crit, surge and power are what you want.

I'm at about 250 synth on my Sage, and I have to agree with some people here; it seems like the RE number generator isn't working right or something; I've RE'd the same thing with a 20% chance for a schematic 20 or 30 times and gotten nothing, and by the time I blow through that many materials, I've outleveled that gear anyway. It's still useful, but occasionally frustrating. Also, I've come across 5 orange custom Synthweaving schematics so far, and 4 of them have required Sith Warrior/Imperial Agent or Sith Inqusitor, so basically useless to me, and I can't sell them on the GTN for crap either.

I named my scoundrel Crackerjak, based on the little bit of ship dialog from my old Gunslinger.

I'm a little disappointed. Regardless of certain people choosing to nitpick the choice of "unique" vs. "exclusive" and trying to prove a point by looking in the dictionary, the fact remains that the Razer gear was advertised (and still is) as having a color crystal that could not be obtained by other means. And let's not kid ourselves about the color difference; I would not be able to tell the difference at a glance without inspecting them up close at the same time. There is an obvious visual difference between blue and cyan color crystals, for example. Sure, they're both blue, but cyan is clearly way lighter, and even at a distance you'd never mistake the two. That's what they should have done with this; made the new black/green an obviously different shade of green. My point is, you used to have to spend over $100 on computer accessories to be able to get the black-green color combination. Now anyone who stands on their fleet to get exploded on for a few hours can get it. I still like my Razer mouse, and I'm not disappointed that I bought it, I just feel like something that was supposed to be relatively limited in availability is now pretty much free for everyone.

I leveled my first character, a Gunslinger, to 50 on Hedarr Soongh (East Coast PvP). It's absolutely dead; there was no endgame. No ops/HM flashpoint groups, rarely a PvP queue, and Ilum was empty. I've been the only player on the Republic Fleet on that server on plenty of occasions. Since then I've re-rolled on Infinite Empire (West Coast PvP), and it's much better. Usually Standard or Heavy population, sometimes dipping into Light at odd hours.

That's not true; you still can't use the pre-order vendor if you didn't pre-order. I have the black-green Razer crystal. I bought the mouse primarily because it's a useful mouse, binding my entire skill bar to the side buttons...but the exclusive crystal sure was nice incentive, and honestly, it looks cool as hell on my Mirialan Consular's lightsaber. I haven't seen the new DNA sample reward black-green crystals in-game yet, but I really hope they're not exactly the same as the Razer crystal. I will say that it's nice that these new crystals are available in higher level variants; the Razer crystal is stuck with one version only, with +4 Endurance.

No, it costs health. In that regard, it's the same as it's always been; you spend 15% of your maximum health to gain 8% of your maximum Force. This patch added a new effect to it, though; when you use it, your natural Force regeneration is reduced by 25% for 10 seconds, and it stacks up to 4 times, so if you cast NS four times in a row, you'll have no Force regen for 10 seconds.

Protip: when activating cover, if you hold Shift when pressing the button, you will just crouch in place, regardless of available environmental cover. No need to replace hotbar stuff.

I'm level 40 Gunslinger, almost entirely Sharpshooter tree. Long story short, Sharpshooter is all about ranged damage, primarily using your blasters from cover and against single targets. I'd say this is better for taking down bosses, and you'll still have some AoE damage and CC options for groups (Thermal Grenade, Flash Grenade, Sweeping Gunfire, etc.). Saboteur focuses more on AoE, mostly via explosives. I've only invested a couple points into this tree, for reduced cooldown of my grenade abilities. Dirty Fighting, the shared tree, seems more PvP-focused, so I guess you can ignore that. As for Gunslinger vs. Scoundrel, as others have said, Scoundrel is more mobile and focused on getting in close with stealth, dealing massive damage and getting away, possibly healing as well depending on your tree and not much focus on cover. GS is just raw DPS, and especially with the SS tree, more "turret" style. You're usually rooted to the spot to deal massive damage.

I'm wondering that myself. Corso is my favorite companion by far in terms of personality, even if his combat viability is much more limited now than it used to be, even with good gear.

Why all the hate for Corso? In terms of personality, he's my favorite Smuggler companion by far, with Guss just slightly behind. He's my bro for life, through and through. I guess if your character plays the role of a self-serving criminal, then Corso's moral fiber won't mesh well with you, but my Smuggler is more of the lovable rogue with a heart of gold. In other words, Corso wouldn't like Han Solo as he was in the beginning of A New Hope; a criminal who would turn his back on his business partners as soon as he gets his credits. But he would probably get on pretty well with Han in the two latter episodes; willing to do what's right even if it means not running off with a million credits at everyone else's expense.

Gnoams pretty much nailed it. Sharpshooter focuses almost exclusively on blaster-based abilities, usually dealing with taking cover and dishing out the maximum possible damage to a single target. Reducing cooldowns on powerful attacks, buffing cover and providing brief protection upon entering cover, reducing warm-up times upon entering cover, adding some follow-up shots that only work within a few seconds after another particular shot, etc...that said, there is a bit of love for AoE; there's a skill that reduces the Freighter Flyby cooldown, and possibly more that I don't remember off the top of my head. The Saboteur tree deals more with AoE attacks, often through the use of Thermal grenades and stuff like that, reducing cooldowns for such abilities and so on. There's a bit of DoT in there too. Skills in this tree also tend to be less focused on cover; you can throw Thermal Grenades on the run, for example. Dirty Fighting, as others have mentioned, seems to be more PvP-oriented. Lots of DoT skills and abilities in this one, as well as other unpleasant effects to your enemies, reducing accuracy, etc. I'm personally rolling Sharpshooter right now, I'm level 40 with just a couple more points left to max out that tree. I do have a couple points invested in Saboteur, though; namely, cooldown reduction for Thermal and Flash Grenades.

This fight is very solo-able. It just takes a lot more thinking and tactics than any previous boss fight. You can't just blast through this fight with raw DPS. The trick is to focus entirely on Diago at first. Corso's Harpoon Shot is a good way to separate Diago from the rest of the fight. The Jedi/Sith (depending on your choice) will keep him CC'd for quite a while. As soon as you get him out of the way, unload on him with all you've got, and have your companion do the same. You may not kill him before he recovers, but you'll do a huge amount of damage. Once he's fighting you, you have to manage your interrupts, because his Med Scan will more than likely out-heal your DPS. Just use Distraction, Dirty Kick, Flash Grenade and Pulse Detonator to interrupt that whenever he starts using it, and you'll have him dead in no time. In the meantime, the Jedi and Sith ladies will remain deadlocked against each other until you intervene. Whittle your target down; she won't focus her attention on you until you get her down to 1/3 health or thereabouts. At this point, the fight becomes much more like "normal" boss fights. Nope, it just reverses which lady is in which role. If you side with the sith, then she will be the one CC'ing Diago and tanking the Jedi, and you'll get your reward at the end. The two choices are fundamentally identical, it just comes down to your preference of dark or light side points.