On my level 53 juggernaut (I have low-level guardian as well), I have my most used abilities on the bottom two bars. Everything but the final two in each row are hotkeyed. I found that there's *exactly* enough room that I can function in Vengeance/Vigilance with those two bars, and for now I am clicking things with long cooldowns (kept on my other bars). Combat is completely smooth for me. If I want to tank more, I think I'll have to hotkey 1 or 2 more abilities. But DPS is definitely doable with 2 bars. But you *must* have those keybindings ready. By the way, I don't find Vigilance/Vengeance hard to play. Not that many procs to watch for. But it's very fun and feels more dynamic than some other specs (like Marksmanship). No need to keep Introspection, Soresu Form, Force Might, Heroic Moment or Shii Cho Form hotkeyed. If you're not pressing them often in combat, get rid of them. At least I just confuse myself if I hotkey absolutely everything. You're only level 15 now. You'll get many more important abilities. But don't worry if combat sucks at the moment. Guardians aren't great at level 15. Once you get to mid 30s it really starts to pick up and you will be steamrolling everything soon after.

I apologize in advance for attaching myself like a leech to this thread. But I too am looking for roughly the same thing as the OP. I'm looking for a relaxed, smaller and mature guild with chatty people. MMO-wise I am experienced enough, but In SWTOR I am a new player (with a sub) and need to find the right character, stick with it and level up at my own pace. I am very familiar with raiding (as healer and DPS) and as long as it's in a friendly group, that's definitely something I could do. I want to run a healer or DPS character. Tanks are for other people to play, and for me to latch onto and shower with praise so they keep the scary bad guys from tearing my eyelids off and sewing them to my earlobes (I imagine this is what bad guys like to do) PS: I'm > 30. I hope I won't be the oldest guy around!

That's a good point. I hadn't really done the math and I guess maybe I'm only swimming in comms since I am still in the early levels and did ALL the heroics. Maybe I won't get rid of Cybermech just yet!

When I last played, I played with Biochem, Bioanalysis and Diplomacy. I have been trying to read up on the changes, but I'm still not quite sure what to do for my next character. I tried Cybertech, thinking it would help me mod some oranges. But as it turns out, the commendation system has been changed so it's now entirely trivial to mod your gear. I'm swimming in comms. Is there some upside to Cybertech that I'm not seeing? I hate to have to ask this noobish question, but is there an upside to *anything* but Biochem (leveling wise) if you are using orange gear? I know I can read all the lists, but sometimes other people can point out something you haven't noticed.

I honestly don't see the point in Sniper Volley anyway... It just seems like a waste of points to boost your ability to do something that would make you run out of energy. I just think the benefit for PvE seems negligible. Maybe I'm missing something though.

This is just another example of how badly combat logs are needed. If there is indeed a bug, it should be fixed. But it does not end here. If this nerfs damage too much, then a compensation should be given, perhaps by boosting the damage of the ability. Of course, without the ability to see damage meters, it's difficult for us to tell. You don't just bugfix and leave it alone if game balance is based around this bug being in effect. That's silly.

To the poster recommending merc instead. Yes they are much easier to level. I played a commando for a bit, and I really got bored. It's so easy it's not even funny (Death From Above/Mortar Volley are just plain overpowered if you ask me), and there's too much emphasis on Grav Round (Tracer Missile equivalent). This isn't a plea to nerf them, I don't even want that. But for all their awesomeness, they still aren't for everyone. On the other hand, I am enjoying the dynamics of Marksmanship at the moment. You really need Followthrough before it becomes fun, but once you get that it's great. Engineering is also a lot of fun, but I have only tried at until 20 or so.

I'm not having much luck AoEing things down with MM though. But single-target and CC work great for me. Maybe one shot will kill one mob and I can use Followthrough on another. I chew through groups fast enough that way. At 30+ I started sending Kaliyo after the weaker mobs while taking out strongs myself. She dies too quickly otherwise, and I can easily kill a strong without taking much damage. Had less downtime that way.

Not as raid quality DPS anyway. Scrapper is melee. No excuses. Dirty Fighting CAN be played as a mediocre ranged DPS if you use heals to get Upper Hand. This isn't max DPS, but you'll see some people with that kind of spec. But I'd always rather have a player in my group who focuses on his job 100% of the time instead of exploiting the healing tree to avoid going in melee range.

I'm at 33 with my sniper now and Kaliyo has really good gear. She still goes *squish* much too quickly. My experience from my operative tells me that Lokin is far better the second I get him. Sure he doesn't really do any damage, but I'm already doing 80%+ of all the damage.

Whatever you do, do not get fooled into thinking you need the health regen talent for when you use Adrenaline Probe. I tried it and found it utterly worthless. Had it been 20% health, it would have been something. But 6% is ridiculous. Engineer's Toolbelt, however marginal, is a better choice.

I think it's fair that you get owned out of cover. However, I do know exactly what you are talking about. I am on the Alderaan class quests at the moment with my sniper, and those are a bit painful even when cover works. In general there just shouldn't be any cover bugs. But it's equally important that mobs do NOT have an ability that keeps you out of cover. No other class I know of gets hit by something that locks out their abilities like this. On Tatooine the droids on Jawa Trade even managed to chain this ability so I was out of cover for twice as long. It's annoying enough that you have to spend time getting back in cover after being knocked back 30 cm, and that this happens often. But there's actually an ability in the game that only targets snipers. How unfair is that?

Sure. It's harder with higher-level stuff though. Everything below Raiders is definitely doable without a tank.

First of all, I also like the game overall, though I wholeheartedly disagree with pretty much every patch they've released so far. I just want to point out that SWTOR builds on the principles of WoW rather than EQ. WoW was much more casual-friendly, and so is SWTOR.

Agreed that this is a big part of the problem. However, we need a tool so it's easier to find the people who actually want to do dungeons. The current flag and text we have in the game are ridiculously poor. Even if people did want to use them, the UI doesn't permit a very long text, AND the text is sometimes cleared and replaced by "LFG". If you want people to use a system, implement it properly. A proper tool would allow you to quickly see which other players are interested. It doesn't have to be exactly what they had in WoW. Today we were looking for ages for a tank and healer and could not find any. After trying for a very long time, we had to give up. 5 minutes later TWO tanks show up on Fleet and start announcing they want to join a group. Information is lost like crazy because there is no system, and even if there are interested people, it's hard to find them. Keep in mind this is on a server where we have 150ish people on Fleet. You do realize the game was made that way right? It's very hard to complete flashpoints without tanking and healing, at least later in the game. This was a deliberate design decision by BioWare to have the old MMO trinity in the game. Oh and in the dungeon finder from WoW (and yes, it is completely legitimate to seek inspiration in other games, which SWTOR has done quite a lot already, by the way) there are spots for the different roles. You can't have too many DPS in a group, so nobody has to leave and go back. Pretty much yeah because they designed the game around this trinity. Not exactly a surprise. You also have to remember that even if DPS have to queue for 20 minutes to find a group, that still means they actually get a group in 20 minutes. That's way better than it is now where you often just have to give up. I agree that something most be done about server populations. If that happened, there could be a single-server LFD system. PS: I'd be happy if they just made a way to flag yourself as LFG for this and that, and you could easily search for other people who are flagged the same way. The current implementation does NOT work and doesn't help you look at all. Why would people use it then?

I did read all of it. I did understand it. I'm pointing out that even if you are social and even if you do have a guild and ingame friends, it doesn't mean you can always avoid teaming up with random people to get things done. For those times when you have to find a group with random people, a LFD tool would be better than spamming general. Yes, it would mean some people wouldn't have the same need for a guild to get things done. Maybe some of them would be less social. So what? I want the people in my guild and my ingame friends to be people that actually ENJOY playing with other people and are not just there because otherwise they can't get things done. I don't want to be missing out on an excellent tool for finding groups in some misguided attempt at forcing people to be more social. The LFD tool didn't destroy my guild in WoW, by the way, far from it. We always played with the guild and our friends first, and we used the dungeon finder if not enough people were online. Sometimes we signed up 2-4 people up if we couldn't quite find 5 and we got some randoms to join us. So we still got things done by playing with our friends. Is this antisocial?

Ah the old "you just need social skills you nerd" argument. I have a guild. I don't expect them to pull me through low-level heroics and flashpoints. For max-level content, you don't always have enough of your friends online at the same time. There should still be ways of forming a group. To everyone who has 200 friends online at any given time (particularly in this game with all the low pop servers): congratulations, and I don't actually believe you. But should the game really not have proper tools for grouping just because you are King Social?

Sentinels/Marauders by far. I've seen many sentinels who just force leap whenever they want, break CC like crazy, forget any utility the class has and just basically do random things they think a dual-wielding superhero might do. Anyway, that's what the bad ones do. Good ones are always a welcome sight.

There's nothing wrong with worrying about that at all. However, you have to realize that there's nothing social about the process now. It's really quite mechanical, except you have to do the mindless work yourself. Writing LFM messages on general chat is annoying and only serves to waste time, and it only works in one zone. Do you think at any point someone starts chatting with you based on your LFM spam? It doesn't even mean people talk when you get the group together either. People treat groups exactly the same as they did with the dungeon finder in WoW. The only difference is, in WoW it does the LFM spam for you without disturbing general chat. Even ninjas are rampant as it is, so I doubt that's an argument against LFD (and certainly never an argument against single-server LFD). I've seen more ninjas here than in WoW after the dungeon finder was implemented. It's not even close.

You complain about the forums being a cesspool, and yet If you really wanted them to be a better place, you'd perhaps ask for advice on how to beat scoundrels or care enough about the class you want nerfed to learn which abilities it has and what it's even called. Should BioWare nerf the class based on your opinion when you don't even know which abilities it has?

You forgot the part where sorc sustained damage in PvE is nerfed because people didn't like getting backstabbed

I don't get it. It was so easy for me the first time and I killed him in one try at 32. I don't understand how he is killing everyone so quickly because with me stunning and interupting him, he didn't manage to do much damage. I'm about to try a second time soon. We'll see if I get destroyed then

The first thing that happens is that snipers get nerfed because someone got killed from stealth. So... No thank you

Exactly! My experience from WoW was that some people were protesting it, but I didn't know a single person in game who did not use and benefit from dual specs. For example our healers who could now have some fun throwing out some damage outside of raids, or our main tank who could do the same. As DPS I used it to optimize my performance in raids, others used it switch between PvE and PvP mode. Sure we got PUG tanks in DPS gear, but on the whole it was a positive change. And I think it even helped us get rid of a lot of the PvP-specced people underperforming in PvE groups. The reason it's JUST dual-spec and not quadruple spec or something is because your spec will still matter. You don't have infinite possibilities with the same character at any given time unless you pay for it. It isn't meant to give you everything at once and completely remove all meaning from skill trees, it's just meant to give us some flexibility.

I am leveling as engineering at the moment. Started as MM. I like engineering a lot better. Energy management is horrible for a low-level MM sniper because you are missing some later talents like Followthrough that would make your life much easier. Furthermore, there are a lot of starting talents for MM that just aren't all that great. Basically you have some 6% better damage on Snipe and 20% armor reduction on Ambush, but that's really all you get damage-wise early on. Engineering on the other hand has a huge AoE advantage. It's really very easy to AoE things down with engineering. But that doesn't mean you're no good at killing silves and golds, because explosive probe is super-buffed (+15% damage AND 3 cluster bombs). For golds, Interrogation Probe does very high damage with instant activation an low cost. On top of all that, I find energy management a tad easier with engineering. Even before EMP that lets you use your Adrenaline Probe twice as much. If I had to point out a weakness in engineering, it would be the absence of Ballistic Dampers and the +3% to accuracy. It's not a huge deal though.