Similar question for enhancements: I have a few Mk-2's laying around. Would it be worth it to upgrade from 37 Sturdiness / Immunity enhancements to a 38 Bulwark / Bastion enhancement? It looks like a +32 jump in endurance, +9 gain in Shield, and a -22 loss in def/ab and I may have to swap some augs to make up for the lost def/ab.

All: Thanks for the replies and the hints. I'll try on the Sin and maybe convert Mr. Juggernaut to DPS for this one. Yes. I took the talent for 5 second reflect and used it every time it was up for breath (Which is IIRC, ever other.) I was popping it right before initial breath but that wasn't long enough DR to cover it so I started hitting one of the two and a half minute CDs while moving him to someplace off of a rift and using that later in the cast. Would a click-relic help with this for the guaranteed CD or is there too much loss from the standard proc relics?

To start off, I'm relatively new to tank min/maxing in SWTOR. I follow the dulfy guides which have been suggesting the use of B-mods. Our strat is to ignore simon says and have a tank take all of the damage from his initial breath. We take one tank, three healers, one dps with taunt to eat a stack of the bite wound, and the rest DPS. The healers have to spam heal tank through breath when he's enraged. Is this tankable with Jugg/Sin and this strat? Has anyone done it? What was gear / cooldown rotation used? On my PT tank I'm fine -- cooldowns can cover everything. On my Jugg tank it's squish city. I have to use more CDs to survive and once I'm out of them I'm dead. Not even tried on my Sin. All are in 6 set 192. The only major difference is the PT has 198 B-mods whereas the Jugg is still mostly in 192's. Jugg: D: 1730 S: 1089 A: 578 PT: D: 731 S: 1840 A: 961

Clearly those who have accessed the content before it was officially opened are being made responsible for them through the punishments meted out by Bioware. But to turn the question around, at what point should game designers take responsibility for their actions? They were not transparent about the release of Ziost content. There are mixed messages from Bioware about the release of content and these messages have only been transmitted over forum posts. They even had to release a statement several hours into the patch being deployed saying that the blocked off area was "not a bug" http://www.swtor.com/community/showthread.php?p=8162140#edit8162140 And it wasn't until the following evening that killing things in the blocked off area was declared "an exploit" http://www.swtor.com/community/showthread.php?p=8164319&posted=1#post8164319 Insofar as actual cheats and exploits, players should be held accountable and punishments should fit the wrongdoings. I have not called for an absolution of players who have "cheated." Take the gear, the lockouts, and the achievements away. My point is to remind Bioware has a history of this and they are not a blameless party in this situation. There is a history and promises of less "exploitable" design that we are clearly not seeing any fruits of those promises. To use one of these cheesy analogies that get bandied about when these things happen: Punish the child for eating the cupcake that was put on the high shelf of the pantry and meant for dinner, but maybe you should also reconsider where/how you hide them.

Precisely. One cannot predict that a player will find a way over terrain. (As I mentioned, it is a time honored MMO tradition and to go explore hard to reach places. Furthermore this tradition has always been an integral part of SWTOR.) All the more reason to come up with a better design for securing the content than using an a terrain based blocking system. One can imagine the number of other options that could have been chosen: a debuff, an event timer; an exhaustion zone, patch the content in at a later time. My question was not really about the means, but about the process and the consequences. We've been down this path time and time before and they promised they would design smarter in the past. Is the uproar, the ill will, the finger pointing, bans, etc.. caused by that one very lazy design choice worth the time it would have taken to design it right?

In a game that encourages and rewards platforming and exploration, can you explain the design decision of poorly blocking of an area from access rather than inserting some mechanics that would prevent the bosses from being defeated? It seems like a no brainier. If you truly didn't want this content defeated before a certain date, why did you pick this design? Why not an event trigger or a patch? We've been through this before with Ilum. Players were going to the planet before lvl 50 and Bioware (in a poorly worded exchange) was interpreted as threatening bans to any low level players who visited the planet for breaking the economy. Veteran MMO'ers were somewhat incredulous at the thought of doing that as a cherished part of MMO play is exploring a world, etc. (Bioware later clarified that major bans were only against people who were "systematically and repeatedly looting containers".) The spawn rate of chests on Ilum was nerfed, nasty mobs added around them to discourage underleveled players, and BioWare vowed to adjust Ilum "in the near future" to "discourage" exploits. For now, though, the planet remains open to anyone who wishes to travel there." http://www.eurogamer.net/articles/2012-01-03-bioware-explains-recent-spate-of-swtor-bans But what happened to the promise of philosophy of "d'iscouraging' exploits"? No, not every exploit can be predicted, but you knew this was coming from the PTS. -- kuroyo

1. How do you think your Operative spec is perceived by other classes? Concealment / Leathality: PVE liability. Mediocre DPS output in PVE encounters -- positional requirements for dps on boss fights and other melee classes who do more damage make them less desirable. PVE operative in my raid group switched to PT and another unsubbed because of the state of the class. Medic now has decent healing output and the class has great synergy when paired with a sorc. 2. How do you perceive your own spec? PVE: After a rocky start Operatives are good healers after the 1.2 rebalance. Kolto Infusion is still need of love. DPS operatives were unfairly punished for being an OP PVP class early on and were nerfed too far into the ground. Both DPS specs could use an overhaul in terms of rotation as well. Acid Blade is a "meh" end-of-tree ability would prefer it to be an actual attack.

The interface feels really clunky coming from an environment with click-to-cast heals to an environment without it. I had to retrain my healing style to function wihtout it. I feel it when I'm healing 16 man content and have to rapidly swap targets. My reaction time just isn't as quick. Here's the Dev response to questions on the topic from the Austin Guild summit. http://dulfy.net/2012/03/05/swtor-guild-summitlive-blogging/#8 Q: Click to cast for healers? % bars for target of target or focus targets? A: Health % is in target of target. Click to cast is not in 1.2, maybe in 1.3 –1.4. In terms of target of target – you can see your primary’s target’s target of target and also your party member’s target of target even if you use ops frame in party. Unfortunately ops target of target is not in 1.2 but will be in later patches. Q: any simple macros? A: its on the list, no eta. No macros that affect combat directly. We don’t want a higher barrier of entry to combat. Mouse over healing is not considered as a macro. There is a way to use click-to-cast in game currently but you use a gaming mouse or be able to program similar macros in program like AHK. The second option is in a grey area with the ToS. Here's a set-up vid for click-cast heals on the Razer Naga: The second video in the series shows how to do it for spells, like reviv, with target reticles:

Lucky for you. By that time I had a level 50, two level 15's and a level 30 something. During the first wave of downtime we had when the servers first opened I started leveling a new toon on Canderous Ordo because it was a high pop server without the huge population of TJJT, Swiftsure and Harbinger... but it's and east coast server and was lackluster during my hours played. I just couldn't bring myself to go through the same zones for the 6-7th time. I brought two friends from another game to TJJT with me.. and I sort of feel guilty about it because I vouched for the server. One of them decided that he didn't like the game and bought an annual pass in that other game and the other is a solo player with an allergy to grouping with other people. I think the LGBT population is suffering from the same thing that the game in general suffers from. After you hit level cap and go through that content a few times there's little to do unless you can find a dedicated group of people to play with. I have a few alts in the LGBT guild and the news link at the top SWTOR guild of the page is directing people to a post that reads "RTGC Launches Forum Home for Guild Wars 2." Meh.

I'm rather happy that the Aussies get to play in a low latency setting. They don't enjoy that in Warcraft (the APAC servers there are housed in California -- the only difference is the server time stamp.) I frequently play with folks in India and Australia and I am aware of the frustrations that latency spikes cause in an MMO setting. Wiping over and over because your tank is lagging is not fun. What Bioware has stated in other threads, specificially to a player from Guam who's hours more closely mirror the APAC folks, is that he will have to pay for a server transfer when they become available. So let's say I want to do that and I have two lvl 50 toons that I want to move over. How much will it cost? I don't know, but I can speculate.. Let's say it costs the same as that other game. $25 a character. $50 to move my pair of 50's. another $50 if I want to bring the two in their 20's... it adds up. Add that on top of having the server population changed by direct developer decisions / server planning faults. So my question is why can't I get same considerations the Australians were afforded in terms of transfer costs? You can see where my server population's at -- we may not be a target for transfers off because it still better off than 50% of the other realms. That's why I started this thread -- to bring discussion and awareness to the issue.

I was doing dallies yesterday at midnight and there was one other person on Ilum – a month ago there would have been twenty. To borrow a quip from a twitter post directed to Bioware: No, I am not enjoying the “I am Legend” experience. I’m sure that the SW:TOR Austin office saw the The Jekk'Jekk Tarr often as the source server in transferring all of those Aussie/NZ folks over in the past week. The server that I had picked because it had would have a decent US late-night population is now a ghost town at the hours I play. Official posts from the devs suggest that there will be server mergers both free and paid coming in the early summer. While waiting for transfers to open up, I could level alts or re-roll on a new server, but I’m hesitant to do so. I really don’t want to go through the content that I’ve gone through twice already especially without support of a high-level main or legacy benefits to speed up the process. Leveling more toons means that I have more to transfer...and more to pay when the time comes for server transfers? My reason for writing is to bring attention to TJJT--here are many lesser populated reams out there (TJJT is ~50/120). There’s a chance that we might be over-looked when time comes for mergers/transfers. From my perspective it would be very unfair to charge players to transfer off of a realm that was gutted of its player base because of poor server decisions game developers. A little background on the situation: The Jekk'Jekk Tarr was a server that was assigned to several large guilds that had shared the same server space in Warcraft. It was also a destination for several large groups of Australian and New Zealand players. In short, it was a good server for me to roll on. I got to play with a familiar population that I had grouped with in Warcraft and because of my play ~8-12 PST meant that I interacted with a lot of Australians. At launch and for several weeks after it was a high population server often with 20 minute queue times to get on. With time the population as people stopped playing as much and as the population lowered the queues went away, but we were still a decently populated server. Here’s a snapshot of the data from TorStatus.net. If you looked at the usage profiles TJJT didn’t have the largest population peaks, but it had very few dips during the low population times. Now the population trend pretty much matches an evening post-work EST/CST(!) oriented schedule. Feb 12 2012 Average Population Index 1. The Swiftsure(PvP) 2. The Jekk'Jekk Tarr(PvE) 3. The Harbinger(PvE) 4. Canderous Ordo(PvE) 5. Ajunta Pall(RP PvP) 6. Space Slug(PvE) Then Bioware announced that they were opening servers in Australia which was great news for the Aussies because they could play with less latency, but it sucked for late night US folks because they were losing half of their player base. The week that the server change was announced saw the late night server go into a bit of a nosedive. However, as people realize that I would be some time before character transfers were available and they didn’t want to reroll, the population picked up to decent levels – it was more difficult to find a group, but not impossible. TJJT was maybe #25 or so in the TorStatus.net list. Now after the transfers have kicked in, we’ve fallen even further… #51. Apr 30 2012 Average Population Index 1. The Fatman (PvP) 2. The Harbinger (PvE) 3. Jedi Covenant (PvE) 4. The Swiftsure (PvP) 5. Canderous Ordo (PvE) 51. The Jekk'Jekk Tarr (PvE) This might come up in discussion. Yes, I know that TorStatus.net is not the most accurate source of data on the servers. But Bioware doesn’t share actual server populations and it is the best data metric that players have at their disposal for this info. Any other servers in this situation? The Harbinger seems to be the best option post-APAC Xfers. I don't know how hard they were impacted by the transfers--data seems to show that they're doing ok. What's the Imp/Pub ratio on the server? Are there any high PST activity oriented options Imp favored servers?

Got a funky work sched that means I usually play after prime-time hours in the US. I'm usually in groups with folks from Asia and Australia. With the recent opening of the AU/NZ servers I've noticed a huge dive in the realm activity late night on JJT. Are there any servers with high US late-night populations? Imp prefered. I don't really want to reroll, but it looks like this is going to force me to. Thanks!