Ok, so i asked this in the PTS forums and had my message removed "Because this is just a question about the new content and not feedback from actual testing, we have removed your thread" despite the fact that really only those on the PTS would know the answer to this question. So, asking again here... I'm sitting on over 300 daily commodations in the hopes that they would have some new uses in 1.2. With the reveal of Black Hole comms and the rewards offered there, I was wondering if any additional items of note have been added for belsalvis/ilum daily comm rewards with 1.2. If not, i'll use them to get a friend of mine his rakata implants now. Thanks for any responses.

I think most things listed here are pretty good explanations of what's going on. I'm not going to comment on the Merc or Op changes, because I don't play those classes and honestly don't know how big the changes will be to them. That's not to say that mercs in particular didn't get nerfed hard as well. One thing to add for the sorc changes is the removal of the double-proc of force bending (the ability resurgence opens up for us which gives for example the -30% AoE cost). Now, I'm not complaining about this change, it was a bug to begin with and we all knew it was coming. Regardless, this fix to the skill tree alone will greatly change the healing ability of sorcs, let alone the additinal changes. To put this into numbers, before 1.2, in an emergency, I could use resurgence (instant) and dark infusion twice at 1.3 second casts due to the double proc of force bending in 4.3 seconds. This would heal for somewhere between 7500 and 13000 depending on my luck with crits. Now, for the same rotation it would take 6.1 seconds with that first big heal hitting 1 second later than it would have before. While probably far from impossible, this greatly reduces the utility of sorc emergency healing for operations.

So, as a level 50 sorc healer I, like many, dislike the changes to the class. We all knew that force bending would be changed to how it reads in the tooltip (2x procs were nice while they lasted), but I don't think anyone foresaw us getting such a hard swing of the nerf bat. (This isn't to say we're the only ones as BH/trooper healing took a hard hit too.) I will do my best to work with the changes as really I have little other option. However, what really annoys me is with these changes, my supposed to be "best" healing item (at least as it started out) available as a biochemist is actually now a detriment rather than a help. I'm referring to the Rakata med pack. This item has been nerfed repeatedly and now its only benefit over a normal reusable med pack is that it grants +15% HP for 15 seconds. This affect is never particularly useful as rarely is it used to get my health ABOVE 100% and it doesn't heal as a percentage of my health. But, with the change to the sorc skill tree, this will now result in my consumption which was once free actually taking away MORE of my health. So, now rather than using my "money saving BIS endgame item" as it's been labeled, I need to RE and use the normal level 49 item (of course the prototype of this is better now anyways, but that's another discussion).

Regardless of my opinion, I just wanted to add that there are daily missions on Belsalvis as well. In fact, these missions give nearly twice the total number of daily comms as Ilum missions. If you do all of them, it's something like 25 (26 for space mission) comms a day...that's 3 mods for orange gear per day (not to mention mods received from the heroics) or 5 days for a rakata piece (implant/earpiece). It's quite fast to get your gear up to hardmode standards. That being said, it's not actually needed...I ran my first HM (BT) as a fresh 50 with no orange or purple gear on (as a healer).

Both Columi/Rakata and Champion/BM gear have different set bonuses associated with the gear for DPS (ex: less force cost for force lightning for the 2 set) and Healing (ex: lowers the lockout on static bubble or cd of innervate for the 2 set). The actual stats are pretty similar, though, you'll be able to choose what balance of willpower/endurance you want. I, for example, after getting my set bonus to 4, picked a force-masters (rather than force-mystic) lower robe as it had substantially more willpower.

The rationale behind respec costs goes back to bioware's policy of "we want decisions to matter." ie: pick a spec and stick with it. The respec is designed to fix small or large mistakes in talents selected, not to allow people to flip-flop between roles or PvP/PvE builds all the time. As for how cheap respecs can affect that community...Healers and tanks often dislike cheap respecs in endgame (though this issue will become moot once dual and multi-spec hit the game) as it allows people who focus on DPS for faster/imho more fun leveling to simply switch to fill the role that they spent a longer time building for their character. This makes is more difficult for people who wish to play one of these specs to find groups as the majority of classes can fill a dps AND tank or healer role depending on spec and groups will not be nearly as limited for finding these roles. Just my 2 cents. In the end, respecs are available for those that want them...abuse them and costs go up. At the end of the day though, dual spec is coming, so just be patient.

Totally depends on what build you're going. Death field and chain lightning are both tier 3 abilities in the lightning and madness trees, so they can be picked up as early as level 20. If you're leveling as a healer I think force storm becomes available at level 34.

No. You won't be able to play guardian/sentinal...this is no advanced class crossover or switching. What this means is you will be able to make 2 sets of skill tree builds for whatever advanced class you have. So for a guardian you could make a tank spec and a dps spec, or a tank-dps hybrid for pvp or whatever. Using sorcerer as an example (it's what i play) I could make 1 spec to go into the corruption (healing) tree and another for madness, lightning, or a hybrid of the 2 for dps. Then, I would be able to switch between these without visiting the skill resetter and paying the cost/rearranging my skills each time.

For the force issue, I can tell you that once you have innervate crits proccing free consumption the issue of force becomes almost a non-issue as even if your sorc 0 crit chance with the force bending buff gives ~70% chance that innervate will crit. I run out of force only if 1) I simply don't have time to waste a GCD on consumption or 2) I'm actively DPSing as dps rotations will quickly burn force. As for dark infusion heal amount, it very quickly begins going up once you hit 50 and start getting some T1/T2 gear. As a fresh 50 my dark infusions were healing for ~4000 with nealy full columni normal crits are 5500 and with relics/adrenals somewhere around 6300. Even in endgame this is ~1/3 of players health.

Call it what you will, but it seems that probably in 1.2 force bending will do as the tool-tip states and affect only the first spell. Just wondering what people intend to do for their healing rotations. I'm a full heal-spec sorc who is very used to proc-ing force-bending and innervate-1.3 sec dark infusion casting followed by consumption when time is available or popping my cooldowns and force bending-2x-dark infusion when health is really a problem. The biggest issue I see with this nerf/fix is a likely hit in force management, so...my question really is with the upcoming changes, would it be more important to get the quick-cast dark infusion first and then innervate with the reduced crit chance (still around 70% chance for consumption proc with 30% crit) or keep innervate on the force bending proc at the cost of full-cast dark infusion. Thoughts? suggestions? Appreciate it.

Only other thing I can think of is if you're running Heroics or anything which requires CC, take off his AoE attack. It's great for generating threat, but will break any cc you or your party members are throwing out

As many people has said, there's very little reason, other than story to complete the normal mode flashpoints. Getting up to the point where you can run hard modes really isn't that difficult. If you have 1 hour a day, run daily missions on Ilum or Belsalvis. Even in that short time, you'll be nearly fully modded in a week or so, making HM BT and Foundry a breeze (when they don't bug).

Seriously? Why should a dps or tank class be able to get healing medals at all? As a heal-spec sorc, I can't get 300k damage (heck, I've yet to get 300k healing, though I'm around 275k most warzones)...should they increase the damage all my spells do? It's far easier to get medals as a DPS class than a healer.

This sounds like the problem I was having on my laptop. For your sake, I hope it's not the same issue, but for me, my graphics card didn't have the minimum specs required to run SWTOR. (mine was an Intel integrated graphics with 125 DEDICATED graphics). try left clicking (hold) and moving the camera for me I found this resulted in seeing more, but polygon atifacts and such. In the end, I had to use a different computer with a different graphics card. If you run dxdiag (search this in the start menu) and save the files, you'll be able to see your video card settings.

There's actually a reasonable amount of things to do. Just not all of it appeals to everyone and it can get redundant. At 50 there are: 1) 7 hard mode flashpoints which can be completed daily. These are basically the same as the normal modes, but with stronger mobs, faster enrage timers, etc which can allow you to gear up your character with T1 and T2 gear. I think part of the annoyance players have with these are you really don't even need the T1/2 gear in order to defeat most of these. 2) There's also the 2 Operations which have normal, hard and nightmare modes (the latter two mostly being a gear check from what I understand). 3) There's always PvP if you're into that (grinding/gearing up to battlemaster), but the 3 warzones (with heavy emphasis on huttball if you're an imperial) can get really monotonous and Ilum PvP on most servers is severely lacking at this time. 4) Belsalvis and Ilum have daily quests which can gain you daily tokens for mods and gear. This is about all of the current CONTENT that's out. In addition you can of course, gear up companions, hunt datacrons, defeat world bosses, max your crafting professions (if you haven't already), unlock all the codex entries, space combat, etc. If this isn't enough to keep you busy, I'd recommend re-rolling an alt when you hit 50 for the time being. It's already been discussed by BW saying that new endgame content and flashpoints will be rolling out with the upcoming patches. By the time you level an alt or 2 up to 50 as well, I'm sure there will be substantial increases to what's available.

First off, I want to say, I play a 31/7/3 sorc healer and have never respec'ed him. If dual spec is implemented, I will get it at the first opportunity and use it whenever I pvp or wish/need to fill a DPS role. That being said, I don't think it's necessary. The argument that healers and tanks are gimped out and more difficult to level, I don't find particularly true. I personally find it to be far more fun to play a dps class than it is to play a healer for solo content, but with the addition of companions, TOR has made solo healing perfectly viable. As a healer I can even solo most heroic 2+ content that was my level. For everyone who argues that leveling as a healer or tank is slower than a dps, I agree, it is. But there in lies a fundamental point, the advantage of taking the extra time to level as a healer/tank is that when you want to PUG, groups are nearly always looking for your roles. For those who are complaining that they can't just switch to a healer/tank/DPS role at will in order to fill a PUG or even for a guild party, why not tell the party members, you'd be happy to switch to that role...if the remaining 3 split the cost for your to respec. Shelling out 100k credits (which isn't even that much) yourself is harder than having each of them give you 35k. Or, alternatively, pay the respec cost, but for doing so, you get first dibs on any loot (assuming the group has more than one of your class). Just my 2 cents.

I think trading the tionese crystals in for higher level crystals/gear is a nice idea. Right now, they seem totally pointless to me. they're character bound, but by the time I have enough of them to purchase items, I'm already mostly decked out in columni gear.

you can reach L/D V even if you've obtained the opposite alignment points. Once you have 10,000 of either, further points will decrease the opposite alignment until only 10,000 point of the one alignment remains.

I agree that this is very frustrating. I literally just last night got my first rakata item for my biochem, made the stim that I use regularly and was very excited. To know that it will now be exactly the same as my reusable stim that I had already made (and spent all the time and effort to get) is quite disheartening.

I don't get it. The forums are FULL of people DEMANDING various fixes, changes, services, etc. And yet, when BW takes down the servers to actually do some of these things. The forums become full of people complaining about the down time. Sure, there's a lot of patches, that just means that BW is actively trying to make this game better. No matter when the server is taken offline, it's going to inconvenience people, it has to be done sometime and picking a non-peak time only makes sense.

I feel your pain, I've RE'ed maybe 200 lvl 50 blues, I did actually get a purple schematics...the same one...twice. Why that's even a possibility I don't know. But honestly, I was more annoyed when the "you already know this schematic" flashed across my chat than the failure to find schematics.

i'm using this build: basically a 32/7/2 build. http://www.torhead.com/skill-calc#201GGdRbdbdGzZf00MZ0M.1

So, I'm now a level 50 sorcerer running a little over 1400 willpower (almost no expertise as I just recently began PvPing). I keep hearing and reading how amazing sorcerer healers are in warzones, healing over for 300,000+ with little effort while putting out decent damage and almost never dying. Personally, I never see anything even remotely similar coming from my toon. Thus, with the exception of gear, which I know is a contributing factor (I'm working on it), I'm assuming I'm doing something wrong. In terms of healing, if I do nothing other than spam heals i can get around 175,000 in healing and my crit Dark infusions are healing for maybe 3000 or so in warzones (though I'm getting 4000 crits outside). Given that even with force bending up, that requires a 1.4 second cast time and can't be cast on the move, I find myself completely unable to heal even a single target (myself included) to keep them alive in most scenarios. When i get targeted by a merc or sorc or anything else, I find it typically difficult to get away. I bubble (if it's not up already), and stun (if i can see the target) and force speed away. Most of the time, however, i find myself stunned, ratcheted back by some ability, force leapt towards, or some combination of the 3 which results in me trying to run away again. Given that the heals I can cast while running are far from sufficient for outhealing the damage I'm taking, I die a lot. God forbid I ever try to actually deal damage (yes, I know it's not my purpose, but when my healing is futile, it's nice to fall back on something). I'm nearly always in the lowest 3 of any warzone for damage even when I'm credited for having 10 or 25 kills. Typcically i see my force lightning ticking for like 125 a hit against just about anyone I attack, which, given that characters have 15,000 hp+ may as well be a bee sting. given that every other class seems to be hitting me for 500-4000 with every hit depending on the skill, I find this rather frustrating. In the end, I'm not trying to say sorcerers are underpowered or other classes require any sort of nerf, but...Any suggestions for what I'm doing wrong or how to improve would be greatly appreciated. I love this class in PvE, but in PvP find myself wishing I was just about anything but given my current spec.

From what I've read, generally the healing builds put the first 5 points into the lightning tree for the +100 FP and -9% force cost (that's what I did at least and it worked great). then it's fill in the healing tree however you want and add a couple points to getting the +6% willpower and increased lightning barrier damage.

I, too, wish that a developer would comment on this. It could even be something as simple as the wording was poor, but as it is, it STILL seems like this skill in unequal between factions (not saying that salvation needed any sort of nerf, but whatever is done, they should be the same). Interestingly, a dev rerouted another topic to this one, but failed to actually answer anything here. lol.