1. Cosmetic Slots on gear-- I love being able to play mix and match on gear, not just to find the set/look I like but to be able to also switch it around every so often without having to shell out mod-extraction fees everytime. (if I took nothing else away from my time in Lotro it would be that it has the cosmetic system I'd love to see all MMOs emulate). 2.Mount "augmentation" kit-- This could go one of two ways. The most basic idea is to be able to convert any mount into an adaptive one, as I'd love for the scrapper from the Chevin event to have rank 3 status. The alternative being that you could tweak your mount slightly via augments in slightly helpful ways, such as a minor passive speed boost (say 5% blue quality 8% purple), or an on-use speed jump that's higher (15-20% for 10 seconds) with a cooldown, or additional armoring to be even harder to dismount. Make it a single-slot thing where you choose which you'd want.

And folks wonder why so many are switching to the f2p w/cash shop system. Hell I consider myself a cheapskate and have dropped about $40 beyond sub. cost already myself, and while I won't do that every month I could easily see myself putting an extra 120-150 bucks a year beyond sub fees.

I'd say this, by the time you are finishing up act one Tanking companions begin to scale very horribly. As a healer you can make it work reasonably well as they survive well enough that you can keep them healed up and whittle down the opposition, but for pure dpsers like Sniper/Mara/Sent/GS tank's go down hard and fast. A big reason for this is that while they tend to have abilities that ramp up the shield chance considerably, they lack any true mitigation benefits from going into "tank" stance, so they'll have the heavy armor but lack the additional boost stance yields. Just to illustrate how drastic this difference can be, On my rage (i.e. dps) specced 49 Juggernaut No Stance-- 28.01% Dps Stance-- 31.01% Tank Stance-- 44.59% That last number would be 50%ish were I tank specced. So there is a drastic difference in this game with regards to how heavy armor impacts. Becaause of this, anyone without a tank stance up would be the equivalent of higher end medium armor other similar games.

Yes on the sniper rifle and as far as alacrity goes, meh it will help some aspects but the benefit is pretty mediocre. Depending on the content you run with a companion little bit of accuracy wouldn't hurt (just obviously not a full 10%), beyond that I'd only worry about alacrity if you are overflowing on all the other stats (i.e. over 80% surge where it the DR curve becomes mountain-esque)

The reality is some small-mid market sandbox MMO is going to have to far exceed expectations and become a near 1 million sub hit in order to truly trigger an interest in companies to make a AAA sandboxy MMO

Ok rephrasing from an all encompassing statement that the prior poster used The vast majority of mainstream MMO's in existence utilize a group-centric endgame progression design whether it be raiding (ops), higher difficulty standard size dungeon (flashpoint), or pvp (arena/warzone/battleground/etc.) The implementation of 1.6 has no bearing on a distaste for this design as the only thing it changed was A.Eliminated the tier 0 gear grind (I call it tier 0 because it is filler while you are really going after Columi or better once you hit 50) B.Shrunk the gap between pvp gear tiers C.Made the pvp min/maxers crazy with poor itemization on Elite War Hero gear that make pvp BiS a huge grind compared to just being functional D.Added high difficulty space missions for someone really bound and determined to have solo content Out of all of these A, B, and D are all beneficial to the game. One could argue C both ways (being that it gives the min maxers a longer time to work towards something while B means that those who don't will be more competitive in the meantime). So again, sounds like themepark MMO endgame is not your taste. That is fine it is not everyones, but don't blame a patch for being the final straw here-- this was billed as entirely themepark from the outset with the added benefit of good leveling story. If you have no interest in endgame and have seem all 8 stories while capping what you can do without being group at 50 then it is likely time to move on, but bear in mind you probably got a a heckuva lot of total hours playing time in the meantime.

While I am not terribly vest in it, being someone that does not partake in space missions at all, I can see where folks would start to get upset. On one hand it can be argued it is a pure soloists activity with a path (albeit obscene in cost) in existence, that said it could be argued that it is endgame gear of a kind and thus should be completely separate from marketplace. At the end of the day this isn't a dealbreaker, but I think it really edges the boundaries to where one might call it a deal-crackers as it really starts the cracks showing at the seems. I think they are looking to push to see where folks' uncrossable line falls and this tends to step right on it for a lot of people, nudge anymore and the dropoff will start to far outweigh what can be gleaned by those it did not impact.

Ermmm... no.Free BM would be pretty bloody ridiculous since a pve-er could buy his free tionese set, swap out the armorings and have a gearset that can stand up to basically everything short of progression content. Remember on BM the stats on mod/enhancement are identical to rakata, it isn't until WH v BH that they started gapping those out too not just armorings

Actually my sentinel would.probably make pretty good use of it-- Pvp and ops trash: focus Boss fights and areas where trash needs a lot of cc: watchman Heck as it stands I'll spend some time in almost all three specs in a given week just playing around with variety

Which is to me the perfect way to do it. For the "casual" the gear gap just got a whole lot lower, making it much easier for everyone to be competitive, while still having those minor upgrades to give folks something to work for and have a tiny boost over those that didn't sink the time into BiS. As someone who was shifting more and more over to the pve side after being almost exclusively pvp for a long time, if EWH had a large stat edge on WH it might have compelled me to drop that side of the game fully

Well one should probably have seen it coming when WH was introduced and BM made obtainable far easier then it used to be, or EHW weapons hit and made WH weapons far cheaper.and easier to obtain I.e. I wish I didn't have a re-grind when my secondary pvp character was just about finished with the old one. But at the end of the day I can't be upset about it because I knew it would happen just as I know in 3-4 months most likely EWH will see the same thing happen

Well it sucks for.someone wanting to level predominantly through wz's (like my.43 vanguard who hasn't touched a planet since alderaan) but I guess its a good thing for those who want to hang out in the 10-49 bracket longer, more time to pre-save comms with the higher cap.

If you look back I said "while not the literal mirror" smugglers are the spiritual equivalent as the ones grounded in self interest and profit over pure imp v pub aspects While force users run parallel in both aspects I'd say tech classes are inverted in terms of stylistic mirrors, not pairing up with their mechanical ones

While not.the literal mirror, smugglers are the spiritual equivalent so if it is.about mechanics make.a.trooper and.think it.a soldier of.fortune. if it is about the vibe/style pop a smuggler into BH esque adaptive gear

It would be too easy to game that, a lot of us run 1150-1250 expertise as it is because mixing in an item or two with pve stats can be beneficial. What this would do is make someone able to drop in a few campaign armorings into elitewar hero gear to hit the "recruit" bracket with stat superiority.

Is making for a good excuse to finish leveling a 43 and a 44 I've had stalled out for quite some time. Not that I intend to do much pvp with them but both have a bit over 2k ranked comms allowing me to buy a few more pieces for the two characters I do pvp on.

A puzzling game professor Falkon, the only winning move is not to play .... How about a nice game of chess?

I think it also has the steepest learning curve. It may take a good bit of effort to evolve into a good healer, but it usually isn't that bad becoming a serviceable one. Same not necessarily true on tanks. Would venture that choosing a 4 man flashpoint setup instead of 5 (wow) or 6 (lotro) exacerbates this as it becomes a 50/50 dps to heal-tank ratio instead if 3:2 or even 2:1, lucky for me 3 of the 4 characters I consistently play are healers and I've a guild with a disproportionate number of tanks

To many variables to extrapolate anything. Could easily have been a tank/dps/dps combo group queueing and only being in need of a healer. In my guild we often end up with two or three of us queuing looking to fill that one or two slots. Would have to happen several times for me to take anything away from this

Seems like a solid setup overall, good bang for the buck of a very solid but not top of the line machine. Really once you start stepping up in performance tiers beyond this the price point starts jumping in a hurry. Just switching Nvidia/Intel of similar performance would probably jump you a good hundred bucks.

The thing that quickly becomes apparent to me is that essentially every MMO board now has similar lamentations. The song changes but the tune remains the same as folks have aspects they enjoy and a whole host of issues they hate. Perhaps the problems at hand are not indicative of Bioware/SWTOR specifically so much as the mmo industry on the whole. The demands of the consumer coupled with the profit margins expected by companies oogling WoW in its prime just do not jibe together, leading to an ongoing string of "below expectations" AAA titles that are decent but not stand-outish. I know for example that while there are plenty of things I would love to tweak within this game, and for that matter plenty of things from other MMOs I've played that I think they do better (Lotro's cosmetic armor/wardrobe system, vanilla WoW's capacity to choose between several zones in any given level range, etc.) at the end of the day this game still offers me enough to be my subscription choice-- warts and all it still holds up in general to the competition by virtue of the IP, story, class design/mechanics, and the general aesthetic.

There are a few ways to go about this all of which are plenty viable 1.If an alt simply purchase field respec, especially if a subscriber it is probably the most worthwhile investment of 200k credits you can put into a character, allowing you to dink with spec tweaking or flat-out change trees as you go. 2.If field respec is out, level as a healer. It is not particularly difficult to be effective as a healer with a tanking (a little slow but unkillable) or dps companion. I have all three healing types and depending on the situation will often do my dailies at 50 as a healer, never facing much issue. 3.Level as a hybrid spec-- It really won't matter in low level instances where you can just heal in dps spec (especially since they all have low level talents in dps trees that support the healing aspect well). Once you get into 31 or so pick up your 11-point healing and dps talents to have a good blend, works extremely well for leveling versatility while still being able to heal.

Been on pts a couple weeks so best bet is.probably just before Christmas

That can be a strategic item in and of itself, my scoundrel will often try to break up a group, move them away/etc. by fake-casting (or even actually casting) the big aoe.

The point would be someone already have a WH offhand, buying a second one (especially since there is no trade-in prereq. and only 2k cost) and putting that armoring (and possibly mod) which will easily outstat just the regular non moddable WH belt/bracer.