You can certainly learn the 28 schematics (as greens) from the trainers, and you can then learn them up to the purples, but there's no trainers for 30 or 31. The way people used to do this was to buy the offhands with Commendations and reverse-engineer them -- I believe this gave you a 20% chance to learn the schematic. Once learned, the item could be crafted, and would not be bound to the offhand. It isn't worth making 30 hilts any more because with a little reputation with the Czerka vendors and 350 comms you can buy a mainhand. Also, unless the "Vial of Stabilized Isotope-5" makes a return to vendors, hardly anyone is going to be able to get the 31 gear crafted.

Err. I'm pretty sure that there's no serial numbers on those credits so this really doesn't seem possible. It really does sound like an effort to drive someone out of the market, but not a very smart one.

Seems to be gone from the vendors -- I think that means that the only remaining source is the Golden Fury droid in Toboro's Courtyard. I really wish I'd bought up more with the basic comms sloshing around on my lvl 55 alts -- this pretty much kills the crafting of 72 hilts/barrels and other mods stone dead. I really hope it's an oversight.

On the plus side, I believe that F2P'ers can PVP to their heart's content without needing a WZ pass?

I agree entirely with the OP. The difficulty of this encounter, at least on 16-man story, is WAY out of line with the rest of the instance. It's now fair to expect everyone that joins a Group Finder Story mode operation to be in full 66s (because you get that just by completing the Oricon storyline) but such a group is just going to get annihilated here.

Well, shadow's shelter would certainly be of little value to tank specs with the proposed Shadow changes to remove self-heals from Combat Technique and Harnessed Shadows, so even that existing use of Phase Walk will need to be re-thought. While it's handy for now to be able to buff the healers in Ops groups (given the removal of the cooldown if not used to teleport), it won't be of much use most of the time -- especially compared to how frequently the likes of double saber throw, saber reflect, and scoundrel/operative rolls are used.

Don't you think that actively maintaining 2 buffs to keep your mitigation somewhere near what the other 2 tanks get passively from just their heavy armor should be worth something extra? This change addresses many of the conceptual problems with Shadows, including the fact that we were far too good in lower level content, then shockingly bad in high-end content (16-man ops and nightmare) -- if the design team can be sure that all 3 tanks are pretty much as "tanky" as each other, it significantly reduces the amount of effort they need to spend on making sure that one category of tanks isn't being insta-gibbed while another can sleepwalk through it, and hence work on making the rest of the events actually fun.

Unless we missed some major mechanic to this encounter, the difficulty of the Story Mode version seems way out of line, at least in 16-man. We went in, without having read spoliers, as a mostly guild group using TS, and picked up 4 pugs because we didn't really need the gear. The first boss was trivial, then the 2nd was a very rude awakening. We weren't expecting the Mass Affliction the first time, so that was a quick wipe, but on subsequent runs we still had several wipes before the boss finally died. Even in story mode, he hit hard enough to take me down from 20k to zero very quickly (almost full augmented Underworld but with useless enhancements swapped out). The rest (except for Brontes), including the actual weekly boss were easy -- we didn't have time to finish up on Brontes last night.

While the tanking changes appear to be in the right direction, I'll reserve final judgement till they actually appear on PTS and I get to see what it does. The removal of self-heals will also mean Shadow's Shelter is actually worth much less -- only the "increase in healing received" part directly helps (5% increase on the 15% self-heal from Battle Readiness is barely worth mentioning). So much for a "signature ability"....

Granted that the OP doesn't understand, but it certainly wouldn't be unheard-of to have Bioware nerf one of the classes most in need of help (Shadow/Assassin tanks) to buff one that is most over-powered (Sniper/Gunslinger).... Speaking of which, our Answers are now more than a week over-due...

Given that your guild mostly runs premades of experienced PVPers using voice chat vs. random hordes of PUGs (naturally, not ranked), I'm not too surprised by "your experience"

And that would guarantee that no-one caps. The number of games I've lost because I was the only person to go for a node, only to be jumped and killed because no-one would even provide cover for the cap, is not trivial. And with Operatives, they can get to me from their side, as fast as I can, in stealth. /sigh.

I really hope you didn't actually put aug kits on your Partisan gear, because the only way you could have upgraded to Conqueror would have been to trade those modded shells in. (I agree with Raansu about that being a silly way to gate the purchase of the second-tier piece). As for the rest, unless one of your companions can use the old stuff, or one of your alts, it's just vendor trash -- no refunds. I generally use one of the Bind-on-Legacy sets for PVP -- the Gree stuff is the cheapest, but there's others now that are nearly as cheap and have a variety of different looks -- and put aug kits on that. In this way, I can send the gear set to other characters in my Legacy, and still be able to upgrade the gear without having to spend a fortune to re-mod everything.

You're the one that hasn't done the research, and actually, your post title is in fact dead wrong. Here's the evidence. The 2.4 PTS notes have now vanished from swtor.com but Dulfy posted them when they were released. Here's the relevant section regarding the PVP missions: So: Under 55 Daily: no change. Under 55 Weekly: 3 wins previously, 3 wins now (but also 5 losses). 1st 55 Daily: no change 2nd 55 Daily: now 4 games played or 2 games won, up from 2 played/1 win. Note: Currently, there's 2 lvl 55 dailies, one for 4 games (wins count double) then one for 2 games (wins count double). The notes seem to indicate that BOTH of them are being changed to require 4 games (wins count double). 55 weekly: currently 9 wins, now 8 wins will do (or 15 losses). This last change is the ONLY one that has the "just lose to win" potential you describe -- and even there it's not massive, just 300 ranked + 300 regular comms a week. There's still a big incentive for winning as opposed to just giving up and "turtling" every game, in the number of commendations awarded -- but now everyone can, despite poor luck with the teams they are in, or the premades that steam-roller over them, still get their weekly done.

Depends on what gear you already have, but if you've saved up enough, usually mainhand and offhand are the biggest boosts, although also the most expensive.

Lots of Class missions give minor XP boosts, which combined with daily FP and PVP missions makes for fairly rapid levelling. IF you're not just trying to grind on 1 character, the "rested XP" can also add significantly. Being a stealth class, you can skip a lot of content which, while it can save time, can also mean that you are somewhat under-levelled for your Class missions unless you're careful.

I'm pretty sure the 'new' Bitraider client is actually torrent-based. That it doesn't work very well for some people is a different matter. And, even if you did have the files from the original DVD, you'd still need the launcher to patch most of that data to be able to play.

46 days left here -- I have a number of account-wide unlocks ready to use already but yours is a useful cross-check. I believe you get 2 crew skill slots as Preferred so you've probably bought 1 too many, and 3 too many action bar unlocks. Also, unless you really like the look of the headgear you and your companions use, you might want to buy the "hide head slot" unlock too.

Subscription renewal is cancelled, 55 days left. If some positive changes for Shadows/Assassins turns up on PTS before then, I'll renew (it's only been, what, 2 months since they said they were looking at tank spikiness with changes?). Seems to me that other people are doing similar things already, by the way the server populations seem to be plummeting again.

What I have is various hard-to-use key combinations (e.g. ctrl-shift-F1) on G keys, put the abilities I want to use on hotbars, then use the "key bindings" tab to map hotbar activations -- generally for things like mount/dismount, force speed, rocket boost, and the "out of combat recovery" ability. I have these abilities in a generally consistent manner, so hitting a certain G key will activate rocket boost on all of my characters, and another one activates the "recovery" ability on all characters.

WoW's Heirloom gear scales with level and then becomes worthless once you hit its' level cap. SWTOR's Bind-on-Legacy gear becomes MORE useful at the level cap.

This post has nothing to do with ranked warzones, which is the only place where there actually CAN be a full 8-man team. 2.4 will do nothing to alleviate the OP's concerns. Apart from that, you're absolutely right.

Maybe everyone else understands it, but it's not clear to me what "literally globalled" means. Could that be rewritten?

Taratahi: Could you confirm or deny whether what was reported on dulfy.net ? If this is truly the case, then I think I'll cancel my renewal and wait till patch 2.5-2.6 to evaluate whether that will change.

I'd pay for a "real" Chapter 4 for each of the 4 Republic classes, and if my Imp characters had finished their stories I'd probably pay for those too