buy it with tech fragments. you get 100 tech fragments every time you earn a "conquest rewards chest." you also get a variable allotment of frags for every quest reward in the game. Furthermore, you "deconstruct" gear (which is usually junk) that you get from completing quests and activities. DEing gear provides mats and tech fragments. the tech fragments vendors are in the supplies section of fleet. there is an empty shell vendor (3k tech frags each) and an armorings/mods/enh and non-set piece vendor. note that every piece of gear you get as a reward is no more than 2 ilvl greater than your current gear. so is a stupid, slow grind to get to 306 the first time. once you've reached 306, you can gear up 20 alts in a week (if you choose and aren't picky about stats). it's a stupid system, but it isn't very difficult. it's very grindy. but in a different way from daily quests (e.g., Ossus dailies for gear or locking gear behind operation tiers).

I must say, with the addition of tacticals and (especially) amplifiers, the gear gap has widened quite a bit since 5.0. It's not as big as it was without bolster, but it's very noticeable. With almost all periodic intensity amps on a 6-piece concentrated fire set and one amplified piece, the DPS on IO merc increased for me around 20% (even though the total amp % is closer to 10%). the only other problem I see with regs are these new rules about deserter debuffs. frankly, there's nothing I can do to "force" other players to play the objectives or to try during arenas. there's also nothing I can do about being dropped into OPG or another team purposely not scoring/capping doors to farm numbers. And hey, they pay their sub. they can play however they like. but forcing other players to sit through that instead of just leaving or forcing players to back fill (still a thing despite the deserter debuff) is truly infuriating. now that I have nearly optimized gear, I feel little compulsion to stick around, and if I do, I'll just afk and piss off one person or another. edit: just tallied my period intensity amps. it's 15%. so yeah, those amps are really big. that 20% overall from gearing is about right

my experience (observatory) is that permanent bans are for show. but anyway...I'm impressed that they would go after multiple accounts like that (unless it's just the bad actor doing the same thing that got the first account banned, which is just treating them independently. lul)

just creating new accounts? I'm impressed that BW do anything to stop that.

good gawd, man.... 2 force camoflages every 45s, enough breaks and immunities to be unkiteable. and burst to rival everything but AP PT. and your answer to that is..."but they're hard to play"? almost every reg WZ has a mara/sent with at least competent skill who is at the top of the dps and kill charts. They are easily as good as sorcs for burst spec. they die more often, as they should, but they're absolute wrecking balls. and when a good player gets on a mara in a reg, he cuts through just about everything like a hot knife through butter. so I'm sorry that the skill floor for carnage/fury is higher than merc and slightly moreso than concealment, but the ceiling is also noteably higher. and frankly, if you want a simple class, go merc or jugg. they're both more than relevant in regs. and juggs are only the best tank in the game by the largest margin of any class difference in the game.

I'm not sure either. SWTOR/BW is the most story-laden MMORPG going, too much so, one might argue (lack of updates to end-game content and spec balancing).

is that different from queue dodging?

that's a very good point. the thing that BW is by far the best at is/was story. it's the only "game play" area that SWTOR beats WoW in. TOR has more convenience perks and so forth, but in terms of actual game play, it's the tie-in between activities and story. and after the vanilla stories are wrapped up, it's all very generic.

I stopped reading here. Maras are warriors. Maras are beasts. Mercs have tremendous self heals, but their off heals are a complete and utter joke. Their self heals are high because all of their dcds heal them passively. active healing on a dps merc is trash. just spamming self heals might get you 50% in 5-8 gcd. I can't speak for sorc off healing, but ops have incredible off-healing for a dps spec.

yeah. I don't think any of the tacticals look so good for arsenal (vis-a-vis IO). I'm not sure if I missed it or the vendor doesn't sell it, but isn't the recommended arsenal tactical a single target dot? obviously the set bonus from the vendor (concentrated fire) is sub-optimal as well. the 2s on cool your jets is fine, tbh. I'm just not noticing even 2s of space lol.

carnage is the obvious one because it's predicated on 1.) arpen, and 2.) speed. but the real answer here is melee (b/c every ability is an instant). of the melee, ops are number 1, and maras are number 2. I think I'd put PTs at number 3. but the ordering here has more to do with ability to deal with snares, roots, and CC, since sticking to the target is the biggest problem for melee. trying to reduce the gcd through alacrity is immaterial. and none of the burst specs for these classes require a channel to execute their burst. not sure if that hits the mark for your question?

I agree that a new or rebuilt game engine would make this game a lot better, but I don't think it will bring back all the players who left it years ago. that ship has sailed, my friend. swtor is what it is, at this point.

In assault, I use Energized Cell, hands down. But in arsenal, I switch around between Cool Your Jets and Life Warden. (atm, I only have an IO set, so the gear is heavily amp'd for periodic dmg, and I don't have the ST bis arsenal tactical). aight, why even run this that, etc., blah blah blah intro is over. my question is this: does the Cool Your Jets root even work? do maras, juggs, and ops even notice a 2s root on propulsion round/jet out? I ask b/c it doesn't seem to affect any melee I jet away from, but I cannot tell if they're breaking it or just (virtually) perpetually immune to roots.

^this. wow. PTs didn't hit this hard when IO/assault was the burst spec. albeit the roto was less complex back in the day (3 buttons vs. 5?).

uh huh.

I don't play the GTN jawa scrap alone, with how easy it is to come by, is bad enough god forbid you have to use your crafters to do what they do look, man, there should be some effort involved here, not to mention a little realism. it's not even hard work. it's just a little effort. so yes. pass the gear to your crafters. OMG SO HARD! HOW CAN I GO ON?

meh. I was just pissed cuz I wanted a crit crystal. I could give 2 ****s about the special CM color combo. I pulled them out of my legacy hold (obviously unbound at the time). and let's face it, passing bound modifications in legacy gear has been a thing forever. so I just didn't consider the whole CM nonsense. again, mostly b/c I don't care about it, so I was ignorant of it. (weird, cuz I totally used collections to give most of my trooper alts havoc squad gear for themselves and their comps. heh)

the last thing I would want to see is reduction in the utility of support roles. there was a point many years ago (perhaps with sorc stun bubble?) in which WZs were cluttered with healers. I would say the number of healers in regs atm is in the high end of healthy. you also have to remember that focus fire in regs is really bad. dunno about the most recent season of yolos. but as a general rule, the specs that play yolos have good survivability without healers/tanks. complaining about slow TTK will prolly result in BW "solving" the situation by increasing burst. I caution you about asking BW for anything (like "stop ppl from quitting!" - I back filled 3 in a row last night. /sadface).

honestly, I'm just making augments and augment kits. but that does require a lot of crafting and DCing (when did they get rid of RE? I don't like that non-crafters can "RE" for mats as if they were crafters).

yep. this is quite annoying. I've also painted myself into a corner by min/maxing assault spec. BW is strange. it makes so many incredibly cupcake decisions that turn the game into /faceroll moosh, and then there are these outliers like leveling and gearing through pvp. w/o the WZ comms, leveling is just incredibly slow with no payoff. but pve leveling and heroics are so mind-numbingly easy that you literally just /faceroll through everything (including "story mode" solo instances). Then (seemingly) random gates for some bis sets but not others behind NiM/HM/whatever mode operations...but not other...it's just weird. this feels like the most kiddie-friendly, catering WoW clone I've ever played that has these occasional hiccups where Sidius comes flying back up from the bowels of the the death star and says, "oh. you think you can throw me in the lighting pit? I AM THE LIGHTING! Ride the lightning mutha$*&(er!"

so just close the window and resort each time?

I vaguely remember this issue a couple years ago, and now that I'm back, it seems to be the norm: I open the crafting window e.g., for cybertech, and the mats for an item are listed in the craft panel alongside the mats I have, and however many of the item I can make with those mats is also listed. The problem is once I start crafting, either the mats don't update in the panel or the number of items it says I can make doesn't change. This is particularly true after I fill one companion's queue and swap to another companion. The only way I've been able to resolve this is to close the crafting window completely and reopen it. But even this isn't without problems, because it resets the window completely. That mean having re-sort items and find them again. This brings me to the second issue I'm having with crafting: the default sorting filter appears to be "difficulty." Now you would think that's a reasonable and intuitive sorting method, but it's actually the worst of the three (the others are "level" and "rating"). I say this because what's most important (imo, ofc) is identifying items between A) xpack and B) tier. Coming back to onslaught, the onslaught schems are buried betwixt and between the Eternal Empire stuff. It's always been like this, and I've always had to re-sort the window every time, but it's particularly annoying now that the mats fail to update properly on a regular basis. Soo...what are ppl doing about this?

ah. I didn't realize those straited black crystals were in collections already. It also helped when I realized I could filter out all the stuff I don't already have unlocked in collections! (derp)

some classes have very strong "stay in the fight" dcds (merc, mara, jugg). Others have "escape and heal" cds: sorcs, sins, and ops have to use gcds or leave combat completely, but can also have excellent surviability. PTs have pretty insane burst, and given that burst, they live an awfully long time. this is all observations in regs since 5.x. I haven't been in rated for 6.x yet. so what do I think? I think the first thing BW needs to do is rewrite mobility abilities which would mean rethinking a couple of classes completely. this has nothing to do with TTK directly. it's more a matter of the game engine (or server/client communication) not being capable of keeping up with the action on the map. I'm cool with op roll as a thing philosophically, but in practice - under the realistic pressures of server-client handshakes and game engine/gfx rendering - they break the game. the second an op rolls up a slight incline, he rubber bands, often he will stop jittering, come into focus, be shown running on a lower level for a few beats, then he'll be rolling away on the upper level. it's just flat broken. the game cannot handle it. you cannot kill or combat something like this, so it is related to TTK, but it's not a matter of healing or dcds. it's certain movement abilities are simply beyond this game's ability to process. I would say anything beyond the sorc/sin "sprint" is asking too much of the game engine. so propulsion round, holotraverse, the sin equivalents...they all need to go, which would necessitate rethinking how BW addresses mobility, snare, and root abilities in pvp. even after that is done, some classes (thinking of ops) will need some sort of dcd b/c roll is so important to their defenses. as far as dcds go, I think the game needs fewer reflects and immunities and more DR dcds like reactive shield or saber ward. I like the idea of each dps class having one dcd for white dmg or yellow dmg, but nothing that grants immunity to both and then add one (maybe two?) flat DRs. in general, I want to see DRs rather than immunities. however, even if you move to DRs rather than immunities, you're still going to have a heck of a time balancing things because then everyone becomes something similar to a PT (maybe minus the burst but no dcd that can, on its own, force a focus swap). I don't have a problem with this. I think the immunities have gone overboard, but it does mean tweaking dps output for just about every class, either toning down or tuning up. TL;DR: it's an incredibly complex endeavor, and I cannot begin to micro-manage it in my own head. but I would eliminate game-breaking movement abilites (replacing with dcds and adjusting snares and roots) eliminate full dmg immunity dcds and keep dcds focused on DR and make them no higher than 50% dmg reduction (ala mando shock absorbers "take 30% less dmg while stunned and 30% less dmg from aoe"). anyway, none of this is going to happen, and even if it did, it would take about 5 years to sort out (given the established track recorded for re-balancing), but that's how I'd like to see balance addressed from a macro perspective.

why have legacy gear? because I have two sets of the best weapons in the game (furious s2 rated) and 26 "alts" to share them with.