I think giving them a 60% armor increase just makes things too easy. Somebody like Khem already draws his aggro. Incidentally: I saw 0 difficulty increase on the progression to 50. Nothing (except certain heroics.) Maintaining my gear, every mob and boss from 1-50 was roughly the exact same difficulty. I one-shotted the bosses of the sorc class story with Xalek (who's an assassin-style "tank," I think.) Giving them a 60% armor buff would have made "hard" encounters laughable, and if you're complaining about companions, you have to be talking about PvE. I was a HEALER but I almost never healed Khem except on bosses. Maybe in tough situations a DPS would have helped more but when I tried out Ashara or Andronikus I couldn't stand having scrub douchebags rush my comfortable sorcerer. I found tanks to be preferable so I wouldn't get attacked. And you certainly have options. I feel overpowered using sorc or agent with a tank (my sniper has no heals but I prefer the Kaliyo tank there as well.)

Yeah I got this bug too and put in a report. I beat him through tinkering around (when it says "cannot see target" he usually can't attack you either, so it's not as nightmarishly difficult as some people would imply, even if it sucks.) I think I pulled him off the elevated platform or something, somehow got him in a position where we were able to fight again. I'd use the fella's advice about drawing him off the platform with a knife-stun.

Every class story in TOR = killing Sith. Spoilers! They really did a good job of demonstrating how the Empire will be destroyed due to the Siths' insane internal contradictions. Of all the class stories I've played, Darth Baras seems to embody this most. He's frightening, selfish and almost idiotic. He should be fat--his whole psychology is gluttonous. But his voice actor is good and I kind of like him. I feel most like I'm part of some perverse Roman nightmare of power politics and Stalinesque purges.

I think marauders are trying to rush into battle to use their leftover focus, which disintigrates rapidly. ADD pullers are "Leeroy Jenkins" problems unto themselves in heroics if you're facing tough mobs.

I went in and helped a warrior out killing his sand demon. It's not like the jedi knight boss that's on an abandoned mining facility and nobody's around.

The main novel point of my original post is the combination of bad framerates in multiplayer (see maybe literally 100,000 "horrid fps" posts under "customer service") and the unique aspects of the class are what makes the class unplayable for me. Some of the complaints about Jedi Knight and melee classes might be tied up with the "horrid FPS" issue. I have no tactical awareness because I'm zoomed in with melee, I can't chase enemies effectively because of the slideshow effect, and that nonsense helps upset my management of the large number of cooldowns. The PvE is probably the hardest in the game at points, but I think it was manageable once I stopped sucking.

I don't see how "immersion" is helped by identical orbital stations--it powerfully reminds me of the corners the dev team had to cut to make such a massive game work, which is the opposite of immersion! Forcing the player to bask the beautiful work your design team did is misguided--this isn't even that, so it's borderline indefensible. I definitely feel like a chump running through the process for brief class quests (like one conversation back on Dromund Kaas or something.) A "quick-travel to ship" option would probably be simple/make everyone happy.

Yes, they should employ the entire nation of Bangladesh to answer each and every ticket personally. When I worked IT, our four-man team knocked out 2,000,000 tickets a day, no sweat.

My first character was a Jedi Sentinel--I abandoned her out of frustration when Valis murdered me 20 times in a row (which was harder than any single-player RPG I've played in 10 years, but that was with no knowledge of MMOs, and big blunders like not gearing properly or buying the right skills.) Recently came back after leveling various alts to different levels, learning the game and beat Valis. Knowing this game, sure I could use Sentinel as a powerful DPS. I ran some heroics and missions and a flashpoint, tried to master my abilities--I initially thought the class was viable, then...I think I've abandoned the character again. 1) The horrible "Crysis" framerate issue on wimpy systems is inexorably tied up with Jedi Knights--on PvP or heroics, doing melee, the slideshow effect is twice as bad, totally crippling any versatile gameplay. I mention this first because nobody else seems to mention it together (i.e., melee framerate just totally eliminates battlefield awareness and...the tactical game, i.e., framerate)--in PvP (where framerates are the worst in the recent history of AAA games) almost everybody has some framerate issues, even on the best systems, and Jedi Knight/melee classes are the twitchiest of all the classes/with the worst framerates. 2) Melee DPS doesn't make up for distances. I've leveled a sniper pretty high, and it's a comparative joke (I've also annihilated heroics with twin sniper DPS's where melee DPS's failed--the worthlessness of the class is evident in group play, oftentimes.) "Force Leap" is an integral aspect of focus-building and it's either on cooldown/unable to be used unless you RUN BACKWARDS FOR NO REASON. I hit "zealous leap" and maybe get a shot in (about comparable to "snipe" on my sniper, which I can fire again and again and again) and then the target's gone, and I'm spamming the focus-building normal attack, which feels like the weakest normal attack in the game. I feel like I'm in a perpetual state of "focus building," which is the equivalent of "running out of mana" with the other classes. With the other classes, panicked spamming of the main attack only happens after you've delivered devastating DPS, which you choose to do as a trade-off for conserving mana/ammo, to cripple the enemy. With Jedi Knight, you start off there. 3)Focus is a terrible system. Sith Sorcerer and Sage barely ever run out of mana except on boss fights, but every jedi knight fight pretends your major attacks are nuclear bombs to build up to--when they're barely preferable to the big attacks every other class has ready-to-go, to start with. Maybe with framerate/skill issues cleared up, the class works better, but I sure can't use it for group play.

Roll your Republic character elsewhere. I tried one in "The Shadowlands" and there were 60 people on Tython on a weekday afternoon (= pretty good.) "Darth" names = bad server for "republic" characters, with the way things have worked out.

The game's rigid linearity (YOU MUST DO THIS SPACE MISSION AT PRECISELY THIS LEVEL, YOU MUST HAVE THIS COMPANION CONVERSATION AT EXACTLY THIS LEVEL) is one of the bigger mistakes in design. Every alt I try to do space missions or companion conversations on, I just get frustrated and disgusted at the game.

<What I think would make ToR truly shine would be to unbalance PvE! And what I mean by that is that you should allow players to use whatever companion they feel like. Or not use a companion at all!> I'm glad you're not running a major sector of the economy since you have no conception whatsoever of scale or viability. The elite and companion dynamics are built into the game, inexorably. They can't be changed without overhauling every single combat dynamic in the game. Complain if you want. Yeah, it screws up "role-playing" of being a powerful Sith Lord when you have to team up to beat some random guy. It's something KOTOR did very well that the copied MMO+companion dynamics don't do.

People complain about Jedi Knight as an underpowered class--but the gear talk is also true. Upgrading gear on my new alt (I've already leveled a character to 50 and know the system), I was looking around at other players--one guy around my level had 2,000 less health than me--in his early 20s. 5,300 vs. 3,100, or something--and he was a Sith Marauder, the Jedi Sentinel. He was getting killed in every fight (we did a heroic.) I'm sure the same was true of other stats (i.e., I could probably hit 35% harder than him!) He didn't understand the gear system yet, whereas I was a veteran. I had all upgraded oranges and some purples specially purchased at the GTN. I mean that's a massive disparity. Also, people use Kira because they assume their new pretty Jedi friend will be better--which is not necessarily true (especially if you are short on health.) Tank companions are of special value in this game because the buck stops at you--companions can die, but you can't. If you're undergeared (i.e., low health is the biggest liability for sentinels), the tank would be hugely preferable.

The bubbles turned the tides in many a battle I oversaw. The bubbles are awesome. I went halfway up the left (healing) and right trees, being unconcerned with endgame stuff, and it seems like a excellent hybrid strategy/class. I lacked the AoE heal, but other Sorc healing tree perks seem so weak as to be a joke (I wouldn't have taken '1% less health used by consumption' if it was 10%, even 20.) It was almost like they nerfed the sorc healing tree since the sorc is so powerful to begin with. Otherwise my healing was robust while I had instant CCing and no cooldown on force lightning.

<250 hours> Can we make a rule that nobody who played the game nonstop for a month can say it "sucks"? I'm happy to hear complaints or criticism about particulars, but these are the most preposterous posts of all. Here's games I thought "sucked": "Civilization V"--played through one and a half games, maybe 10 hours. "Red Dead Redemption"--played it 12 hours, got bored since it had no cars or rocket launchers. "God of War"--played it 10 hours, never beat it. "World of Warcraft"--played it for 2 hours in 2006, couldn't believe there was no story. You're not allowed to say it "sucks" and is the "worst" if you played it more than 100 hours--it's just sheer absurdity.

And this is the moment these posts got more annoying than the other ones.

The barely even sell desktop computers at Best Buy anymore. This game is horribly optimized to run on weakling systems like recent laptops, which the game was ostensibly designed to run great on. Dev team was oblivious, as they didn't even include 640x480 resolution--which offers great framerates for laptop players of Skyrim, Modern Warfare 3 and Mass Effect 2 (all of which run great on my system, btw.)

<if there weren't so many obstacles in the way of questing, people would cap 50 in 2 days tops.> Kinda melodramatic--one class story is about twice the size of Skyrim, the heavyweight champion of huge SP games, in every way, even without orbital docking stations. There are 2 factions, so it's at least 4X the size of Skyrim in content.

Load times are the longest for any game since "Wing Commander III" on a Pentium 90 with 8 megabytes of RAM. Tattooine and Hoth fully take 5 minutes to load, for me.

Do your English homework. Do your math homework. Stop playing videogames.

Don't know what the philosophy was here. If anything, immersion is broken since the space stations and spacedocks all have the same layout. It's a telling reminder of the finite resources of the dev team to make a ginormous world, not a reinforcement of the world's ginormousness.

I think the people who gave it middling reviews are their publication's "MMO reviewers." If you played every MMO for 100-200 hours you might be sick of the samey dynamics of games copying WoW. You probably should be, considering the timesink. Even the forum complainers kind of match this profile--they seem to compare it to other long, long games they put massive time into and express lack of interest-- The extraordinary length and extent of MMOs make the MMO faithful particularly nauseated by the mirrored gameplay dynamics. "This again??" I never played MMOs, so to me, none of those games ever existed: this is all new. I couldn't even get into WoW since it had no story like a Bioware game.

I can't play PvP because I get such a poor framerate. So I can say "PvP is broken for me." For me, there's nothing beyond the stories and heroics, even though I'd like to play some PvP. Since the game was ostensibly designed to be wimpy-computer-friendly and runs like Crysis (with the amusing caveat that Crysis 1 or 2 will literally run better on your machine,) and the graphics don't appear to be all THAT great, that's akin to being "broken." Very few AAA PC games release with performance issues this bad--Civilization V was the last one, and that was similarly bewildering as the game was turn-based and the graphics didn't look all that demanding. Powerful machines don't have as many problems, but they have some (on both Civ V and TOR.)

<(it's not going to win the Booker Prize or anything, but by MMO standards it's decent)> Off-topic: it's odd how people compare things. I.E., professional wrestling is "like ballet"--but nobody like ballet. The rock music is "operatic," but people hate opera. Nobody reads the books that win the Booker Prize--everyone regards them as dull as ditchwater and incapable of maintaining reader interest--but somehow that's the gold standard.

I guess it would have arguably screwed up the dialogue for questgivers too much, but an HK-clone droid could have replaced the imperial agent. Could it possibly have been worse than what they "did" with HK-47 in this game? Forget HK as a companion: just make him a class.