I'm actually tempted to get some of the force master gear. But based on what everyone is saying here, and looking over the stats, the Stalker gear may be the real winner. It seems that the DPS gains outweigh the potential survival gains with the Survivor gear. I'm sure other folks here will chime in with better explanations.

I just made the switch to a stalker focus myself, after doing some math estimations and also reading here on the forum, and then my champion bag popped a focus/shield choice last night. Basically what I was seeing with Combat Technique is that I had about a 20% shield chance, with a 24% shield absorb. So on average, that works out to 4.8% mitigation on white damage (clearly not all damage). That's nothing to sneeze at, of course, but I found I was getting hit by a lot of attacks that are not shield blockable, and usually I either died quickly enough, or escaped early enough, that a 2-5% difference in survivability wasn't a huge deal. Given that, right now my strategy is to keep stacking force power, power, and willpower (the expertise gain would have been the same whether I took a shield or focus) as best I can. Even though I have more points in the Kinetic tree, I'm still thinking of myself as a DPS build. Since I dropped the shield, I also dropped Kinetic Ward, which saves me from managing one more ability. Here's my current 23/0/18 build: http://www.torhead.com/skill-calc#601rcrozrskZZf0cRrR.1 I had tried Mental Fortitude at one point, but it only made a difference of about 400 health? Useless.

Nicely written. /agreed.

Personally, I don't know for sure, except for the fact that "Q" doesn't intrinsically have a "W" sound with it. It's just that people often think it does, since most words in the English language that start with "Q" happen to immediately follow it with a "U", such as Queen or Quick. If they had spelled it "Quyzen" or "Qwyzen", then that would be different. But since we hear two pronunciations in game, I'm inclined to go with the one that more closely follows the rules, which is to pronounce it as though it were just a "K".

This is exactly the sort of thing that's worth taking note of, since it could be involved in these rare-item sorts of puzzles. Good find.

I didn't track the credit yields very closely, but after the nerf to Slicing, it felt like Slicing was still generating more credits. TH doesn't really make money when you do lockboxes, as it's almost always a mild loss. It's really more of a way to level up TH without spending much money along the way. TH is really more about the gems.

Yep, the gear system drives everyone toward uniformity. Everyone will look like clones before long.

What I've seen over the last few days, on the few occasions I went to Ilum, is that on my server the Repubs actually outnumber the Imps, but only slightly. The Repubs circle like vultures looking for the crates, and then occasionally a couple of stealthed Imps ambush one of them, get a kill, and then get swarmed by the 5-6 Repubs that are there. Occasionally these faction populations are reversed. So it feels like there's no more than about 8 PVPers there. And this is during prime time.

I agree that the 90, 100, 110 speeds are too slow. I would much prefer something like 100, 125, 150.

I have no problem with earth tones, but technically earth tones can include some very dark browns, greens, and off-whites. I'd like to see more of those, but more specifically I'd like to see better looking armor models. The Consular raid/ops gear in particular looks terrible, IMHO (wedding gowns or pope-wannabes). The PVP gear isn't so bad, but it's all one design in a couple of colors. Whatever happened to tasteful robes?

Seriously. Iresso gets it right when he pronounces "Qyzen"... but my toon does not? Arg.

Man, that's a tough question. I found extremely few nodes when I was questing there. It's almost completely devoid of archeology nodes.

Wow. All I can say is that I'm glad I'm doing PVP instead of doing raids/ops.

Well, that is certainly a good point. I've found in nearly every MMO I've played, that there's always need for cash sometime down the line, as more content is added to the game. If nothing else, it affords you flexibility to be loaded. But then again, sometimes all you can do is buy up every vehicle/mount or pet... heh.

Thanks for your advice.

They send you a few emails for a few days. Not much after that.

I loved solo play as my Shadow, all the way up to 50. The stealth allows you to avoid trash mobs that aren't part of your objectives, and Qyzen helped me rip through everything with minimal downtime. Tharan works great when you have to fight a boss/elite, and with the right stuns and interrupts, most of those fights weren't too difficult. On the whole, it's very viable and moves quickly.

Well, I'm not that happy with my chosen crew skills (Artifice backed by Archeology and Treasure Hunting). I'm not patient enough to grind out the artifact quality versions of the few items that I could probably sell, and try to make money that way. In WoW, I started enjoying myself a lot more as a pure gatherer, and just sell the mats on the AH. So my question to all of you is, which gathering professions seem to be in the most demand? What would sell the best in the long run? I'm tempted to keep Archeology, and drop the other two in favor of Bioanalysis and Scavenging. I suppose I could make one of them Slicing, depsite the nerfs, since there are plenty of lockboxes out there. Viable?

Welcome back. They did say they were working on it. I'm pleasantly surprised that the fix came quickly.

Works for me. It's really impractical for Republics to do the daily/weekly at this point, and clearly not much better for the Imps.

Maybe I should roll a light-side Sith with a blue saber and be just as annoying?

Yeah, people have been begging for that level of customization. It's unlikely we'll get a full color palette to choose from. But BW has said they're going to re-evaluate some of the existing color limitations, mostly over the community upset over purple being Empire-PVP-only currently.

Seriously. I'm probably only going to get to play for an hour later tonight. Dang it.

Maybe they both lose? I have no idea, that's a great question. I was about to say time-taken, but if both timed out, I don't know that there really is a clear winner, unless you then score off of kills or something.

True, if you're Republic, better wait til at least 55.