Bottom line is that they're not going to merge servers anytime in the near future no matter how bad it gets. The main reason for this has absolutely nothing to do with player satisfaction, it's a money issue. EA's investors have absolutely no idea what's going on with the actual game. They're looking at numbers and statistics and they're already antsy about this game's success. If Bioware starts shutting servers down those investors are going to see it as "OMG! The game's dying! SELL! SELL! SELL!" without understanding or caring that it's normal for a game to need more servers at launch or that the merge is actually a good thing for the players. Unfortunately those investors are more important to EA than its customers because they give them more money than we do. So we will suffer to keep the ignorant rich folks from getting scared. Transfers are about the best we can hope for right now.

As a high rank operative, I gotta tell you that I just straight up laugh at most sorcs. There are very few that I'm even worried about getting caught out of stealth by. I have no fear of just charging them head on in most cases. However, there are 2-3 sorcs on my server that absolutely melt people, and at least one of them is running a spec similar to this because I've talked to him about it. I've seen him break 800k dmg in an Alderaan match. I'm actually here on the forums looking for info for my own sorc because I've seen what a well played sorc can do, and I've also seen how few good sorcs there really are.

It's not just taxes on shipping, it's shipping AND taxes. Meaning winning this thing is gonna cost you over $300 even if you do live in the US. However, the issue is NOT the shipping costs, it's contest rules and laws on international contests. That's what makes things much more complicated and why most of the time they choose to make it US only.

Sorry, but you ARE the only one or at least in a very small minority. In fact a lot of people have 2-3 50s or more. It's really not that hard to get to 50 in this game. I took my time leveling. I went through every conversation, did every quest, found every datacron, pvped, and crafted and I was still 50 in less than a month. If you've been paying $15 a month to play 2-3 hours a week or to walk around enjoying the scenery (which is honestly the only conceivable way that you haven't gotten a 50 if you've been playing since December) then you really have no room to complain about handing them another $15 when the people who have actually been playing the game and have run out of stuff to do get a free month to keep them from leaving. Maybe this way your multiple level 20s might have some alts to play with.

Then why are they down at 12:56 EST? I got a "5 minutes to shutdown" message and 30 seconds later I was disconnected.

Or commit to pandas and pokemon forever.

I completely agree that they shouldn't release rated warzones if they're not ready to be released. I think most people, including myself, would've been disappointed but understanding. Nobody wants to see them rushed and released prematurely. HOWEVER, and this is where I think most of the rage comes from, it should've been announced sooner. To get everyone excited about it, say the patch is coming out Thursday and then wait until less than 12 hours beforehand to announce that there will be no rated wz's is just wrong. They couldn't possibly have JUST decided today that they weren't ready. They knew before they ever announced the patch release that they weren't going to be included and waited until the last second to tell us so they could sucker as many people as possible into resubscribing or continuing their subscriptions.

Being able to use it or having issues with it not going off isn't what I was talking about. When you do use it, your character stops moving for about half a second while you do the kick animation regardless of whether you were running or not. The agent has no such issue, they can use theirs without slowing down. It's just another example of slow animations screwing republic classes and not their empire counterparts.

Bottom line is that most of the republic classes got shafted the same way. Their animations take more time than their empire counterparts, preventing them from doing as much burst damage. Consulars' Project ability takes a second to hit whereas Shock is instant. I forget which ability is effected for the trooper/bh since I haven't played one since beta, but I know there is at least one. Dirty Kick is another problem for smugglers. They actually have to stop moving and take the second to go through the animation while Agents can stab on the move. By themselves, it would be a minor annoyance, but when there are so many instances where the animation time screws over one class and it's ALWAYS the republic class it becomes a much larger problem.

Yes, much better that they don't do maintenance and fix things than to incur the wrath of one whiney 12 year old.

I LOVED the agent story. Particularly the second half of Act 2. I actually stayed up till almost 6am finishing it from the point that I got to Corellia because I just couldn't walk away and leave things the way they were at that point. I wouldn't have been able to sleep even if I'd tried lol. Bounty Hunter story so far is just ok, but I haven't gotten extremely deep into yet, I'm only 26. Only thing really getting me into that one atm is waiting to see when Tarot Blood gets what's coming to him. I will also say that the Inquisitor storyline (up to leaving Korriban) had me wanting to punch the freaking monitor every time Harkun spoke to me. If I ever hear the word "slave" again, somebody's getting their teeth knocked out. :-p

Came across something interesting that I don't think we'd considered before (or forgot about) while I was reading through sithwarrior.com. It changes things a bit and could make crit a little more important. Essentially, 3 of our major damage abilities do an extra 30% dmg on crits, making the base crit multiplier for them 1.8 instead of 1.5.

At least most of it can be changed around with mods. It also might be a lot more useful in raids if the pattern from previous games continues. +Hit from Rift for example.

So rough percentage of stats works out to ~50% power, 30% crit and 20% surge? I'm not sure how well the accuracy was figured into that equation, so I'm leaving it out for now. 2 points is a negligible amount anyway. ( < .5%) I'm wondering if that distribution holds true across the board or if certain stats weigh higher once you get to a certain amount of total stats. Like at 1000 or dropped to 250, etc. I'd also kinda like to see the formulas you used before we take your word for it, no offense.

Good to see some more advanced info. I was kinda hoping somebody who knew more than I did would take over since my calculations were very basic. Without knowing how the ratings translated into percentages, comparing just the % was the best I could come up with.

You can adjust the height of the health bars I believe. Haven't tried it myself, but it looks like he just made his really big.

I did the math on surge and posted it earlier in the thread. Power will give you higher crits than an equal % of surge. In addition it will make your non crits hit harder, so power > surge in ANY situation. Also, I plugged that formula from my last post into a quick spreadsheet so I could easily put in different numbers and I could not find a single combination of crit + surge + power that would yield more sustained dps than purely stacking power. So it's looking like power is going to be what we're stacking for PvE dps and either full crit or crit+power for burst in PvP. *Still not claiming to be an expert theorycrafter. This is just what my limited math skills are coming up with, if somebody with more experience comes up with a different formula to prove me wrong I'll gladly take back what I've said.

I did a little more thinking and a little more math on the power vs crit argument. Again, this is very basic math, just to get an idea. Example: 1000 base damage over 100 hits. 25% power vs 25% crit 25% power - Total dmg = 125,000 1250 dmg * 1.00 * 100 = 125000 dmg over 100 hits (assuming 0 crit) 25% crit - Total dmg = 112,500 1000 dmg * 1.00 * 75 = 75000 1000 dmg * 1.50 * 25 = 37500 75000 + 37500 = 112500 dmg over 100 hits (assuming 0 power and 0 surge) So over the long term 25% power is going to do more damage than 25% crit. There's a difference of 12,500, which averages to an extra 125 dmg per swing in this example. In PvE, this is a pretty big difference. Obviously for PvP the burst damage of crit is going to weigh a little higher since you're rarely going to stand there and slug it out for 100 hits on another player. (I didn't calculate how many points of power you have to have to get 25%, nor did I calculate it for crit. I also didn't throw surge into the mix because that further complicates things. You have to start somewhere simple before you throw in a bunch of extra variables.)

I wasn't really talking about power vs crit. Like I said I'm still up in the air on that one, the math is a lot more complicated there. I know a lot of crit comes with surge, so obviously if you have a choice of crit + surge vs power then things change. The only thing I can confidently say at this point is that if you get a choice of power or surge, I would take the power.

As I said, it was quick math and I don't claim to be any kind of expert. I didn't take time to figure out item ratings or any of that. Just saying that 1% power is better than 1% surge. That may or may not translate to 1 point of power being better than 1 point of surge. And again, this math ONLY relates to your crit damage. Surge does NOTHING for you except on crits whereas power benefits you every time you hit, crit or not.

I did some quick math and I'd have to say that Power > Surge for anything over 1%. For example: 102% dmg * 1.50 (crit multiplier) = 153 -2% Power 100% dmg * 1.52 (crit multiplier) = 152 -2% Surge In addition, your normal, non-crit hits are going to be higher with more power. That doesn't really help with the crit vs power argument, but I would fairly confidently say power > surge.

Well without mixing them, you're either getting more damage all the time and few crits or lots of crits that don't hit as hard. I don't know what the ideal mix would be, but I'm starting to think that somewhere in the middle would be the best way to go. *In no way do I claim this to be an expert opinion lol.

I've been stacking a lot of crit (and surge), but I'm thinking it's not a good idea to completely ignore power either. Higher base damage = higher crits and more consistent dps after all. Our best dps output may actually come from a healthy mix of the two. It just remains to be seen what that healthy mix is.

Your healing doesn't require you to be in melee range. You have as much range as any other healer if that's what you decide to do. As someone else mentioned, you can't effectively heal as a dps spec and you can't really dps as a healer, so the class's dps mechanics/range make little to no difference for healing. Personally I think it's a pretty nice little perk that I can play the class I want and still have the option to respec heals if needed for a group. Makes me feel a little more useful than if I was just playing a "rogue" class.

Talented it regens energy. It's not meant to be a huge heal, it's to help keep your energy in the green and something to do rather than standing there waiting or using your basic rifle attack between heals. Operative healing is about being proactive and keeping people topped off, this helps with that and keeps your energy up to boot. It's not going to save anyone if you spam heals and run out of energy, that's not what it's for. It's meant to help keep you from getting to that point.