No, it's exactly the other way around. This is a game intended for the general public, not a bunch of people caught up in the idea of playing second life as an epic blacksmith. There has to be incentives to pick up crafting skills and those can't be BoE items, as it's by far more efficient to farm credits and buy them than crafting ever will be. Selling BoE items goes part-way of making up for the tremendous credit and time sink of leveling a crafting skill and re-engineering your way to decent schematics. And a lot of that stuff is in need of refinement, definitely. However, what makes people invest that time and effort is exclusive items. Items there'd otherwise be no way of getting your hands on. The rest, the things you mention, is just a bonus.

Burst is bad. No really it is, MMORPGs aren't your generic one-shot-one-kill shooter and aren't supposed to be. Burst is anathema to tactical gameplay, both from an offensive and defensive standpoint. I'd like to go out on a limb and say that the Operative/Scoundrel abilities aren't nerfed nearly enough. The problem isn't just that those abilities are way too strong, it's the fact that so many skilsl and abilities are used to buff up this one stealth opener to godmode while doing nothing for the rest of the toolset. Basically it's a problem of design. The skills and abilities buffing our stealth opener shouldn't be nerfed, they should be removed entirely and replaced with ones that improve other abilities - both offensive and defensive. That way the burst issue is completely addressed without rendering the classes weaker overall, and without making specific skills and abilities weaker because the situation they apply to is too delicate. This is a recurring issue with every MMO I've ever played, certain abilities can't be properly balanced because they're broken by design. Rather than still trying to do so it's better to remove them altogether and look to other things to improve instead.

No. Players from extreme niche games using their limited experience to bash design choices of popular games is really, really tiresome. WoW wasn't, and isn't, perfect. That said the assumptions about how the DAoC, or indeed WAR, PvP playstyle would be even remotely interesting to the playerbase of a game that hopes to be popular are ludicrous.

No, what's needed is more quality BoP items. BoE items don't motivate people to put in the time and effort with crafting, exclusives do.

Personally? UT. Not because you need it to get to 400, but because once you're trying to re-engineer better schematics it's going to save you more money than Scavenging. And Scavenging is by no means bad.

Without the voice acting and frankly awesome music pacing/adoption I probably would give this game a miss for a few months while things are fixed. Right now I'm literally hammering F5 and hoping to quicksave still, agonizing over even standard planetary quest choice to the point that I'm going through conversations 10-15 times and not caring the slightest bit about what level I am. I'm actually rolling more alts just for more story than leveling up my main characters to endgame levels. Luckily it seems my playstyle is the one most catered to, but that isn't really surprising is it? I mean, it's pretty clear this game was meant to put the RPG back into MMO-RPG more than compete with <insert random Korean grinder> for most farming potential at the endgame.

Oh god, this! I almost always end up playing female characters in-game because almost no game succeeds in producing a male representation I'd feel comfortable playing. Sure, body type 3 and 4 does well for their niches but I'd not want to play a Smuggler/IA or Sage/Inq with those body type. And body type 2 should be body type 1, it's certainly skinny enough to be the low end. The OP definitely has my support though, the changes made to proportions of the male body look much, much better - at least in these static images.

It's a RNG, sometimes it hates you. 30-odd tries is nothing, I regularly get 40-50 tries for many items and level 47 and 49 items may require hundreds of tries.

They have to be BoP to be worth anything. The only thing missing is actually making them unique, instead of reskins of existing models. That way I could motivate the crafting cost.

No. The credits added to the circulation from Slicing missions is entirely insignificant compared to even the most basic mission rewards, let alone vendor thrash drops.

Thank you for the thread, good reading and mostly good notes. Some personal notes: I, with two Cybertech characters on different servers, do not want the Cybertech speeders or other novelty perks made BoE as that would further devalue the skill. What's needed is more such unique perks given to other crafting skills, as well as making products competitive with vendor items and mission rewards obviously. Also, I would absolutely not want materials or items ending up in storage. That would be a major pain, since I don't have constant access to my storage bays and those are pretty consistently full anyway.

Times are a-changing, prices for Mandalorian Iron have dropped significantly - as have the price of UT missions. Also, the GTN being full of unsold missions at those prices aren't really compelling evidence. Not having any crew skills at all is ok! Why? Because you won't actually lose any credits from doing so. Your argument makes no sense whatsoever. Slicing doesn't exist in a vacuum, it's one of many skills any given character may pick up. Since any given character can't have all skills, why pick up Slicing instead of skill X? No reason, that's why. Thus Slicing isn't ok.

That's the point. Slicing nodes isn't bad, but there are better skills for that. Slicing missions aren't bad, compared to having your companions do nothing at all. But other non-crafting skills will net you a lot more than Slicing will. You're looking at less than 1k credits an hour, per companion. That's pretty damn bad. Moderate and Abundant missions are 1.4-1.5k credits, take 31-36 minutes to run and return 1.6-1.9k credits. So generally speaking you're looking at 500-700 credits an hour in profits. Barring extraordinary returns, which won't give a lot more credits (generally 2.0-2.3k instead of 1.6-1.9) but some missions (UT ones) can be worth decent sums. Generally I find the best return to be from rank 5 Moderate and Abundant missions though, seems to crit more often. Still, even at the best of times the returns are a far cry from the likes of UT, Scavenging or what-have-you.

Slicing can net you a few extra credits from nodes in the wild but the missions are pretty damn horrible at this point. Go with Diplomacy.

I'd like to know who, or what, uses vibroknives with Aim? Not vibroswords mind you, knives. Because the GTN is filled to 80-90% with Aim knives while the Cunning ones are few and far between. Anyway, this has my support as there's a lot of randomly generated loot with nonsensical stats on them. The other game removed all of that some time ago so it feels like a bad throwback to have to deal with that issue in TOR.

No, they aren't. There's some hopefuls still putting out UT missions for 20-25k but those aren't selling at those prices. And for other skills, such as Diplomacy and Investigation on my servers, I can barely give them away!

Uh yeah, that's already happened some time ago. People just aren't running Slicing missions anymore, and for good reason. The rest of us here, in this thread, are just hoping it'll be buffed somewhat again so we won't have to drop a 400 skill. I've yet to see anyone disagreeing with that particular issue.

Some healers perhaps, certainly not all. For my Operative I'd avoid Alacrity like the plague, since I rely to 90%+ on HoTs and instant casts. Especially in PvP, when the times you can afford to try for a cast-time (interruptible) ability are few and far between.

On average, yes. Given that you avoid the high-yield missions (Bountiful/Rich), as those don't provide any higher returns, and don't run too many mission with a high chance of failure (orange). It's not going to be competitive with returns from other skills but you're not going to be losing money, not on average anyway.

You have a chance of getting crew skill missions both from slicing nodes in the field as well as sending companions on Slicing missions. Note that Slicing is currently screwed when it comes to mission yield, don't bother sending companions on anything but Moderate/Abundant missions. The returns from Bountiful/Rich missions aren't any higher but the cost certainly is.

Yes, a lot more credits even. Crafting is a monumental credit sink, especially if you're trying to re-engineer any improved schematics, and currently crafted gear isn't anywhere near good enough to be worth the effort. Go with +crit instead of +efficiency, as the latter only speeds up mission times marginally while the former gives you a chance or more/better returns.

That assumes that all classes are perfectly balanced to begin with, which isn't the case. As of right now it's not possible to adequately gauge sustained PvE damage for the spec, at least not on the player end. While dropping armor penetration does amount to a PvE damage nerf there's absolutely nothing that indicate that would have to be compensated in any way. It might equally well not be enough of a nerf in PvE for all we know.

What? I've only ever heard of it reducing chance to dodge/parry (i.e. Defense), never that it grants armor penetration. Do you have any source on this, perhaps some statistics? Not that I disbelieve you, mind, it's just that if this is so it'd require some new theory-crafting on my own end.

Sadly that's very much true, because right now what we can craft doesn't even stand up to vendor items and mission rewards! Hopefully there's a remedy for that coming though, both for BoE and BoP items. While that's certainly true the only thing you need to do to end up with enormous amounts of credits is... not crafting. Thank you. It may come across as that on occasion but I'm not being disagreeable for the sake of it. I'm glad my point came across well this time around.

I can totally see that, I haven't really gotten around much to PvP at this point as I found it lackluster on my tank Shadow (perhaps unsurprisingly!) and it seems in need of some TLC to make it more balanced still. And yes, I were absolutely speaking from a PvE perspective as well.