Should we be recieving an e-mail alerting us of this? A guildie commented during our operation last night that he'd just gotten an e-mail alert, and between pulls he said it was about this promotion. I've recieved no such notification, though I definitely qualify.

PVP encounters are more accurately measured in seconds, not in minutes. This change won't affect PVP much, if at all. If you'd bothered to read the developer post on this subject, they made it abundantly clear that this change was being made to limit how much healing can be done in a hard mode encounter (both in flashpoints and operations) by external sources. That makes it easier for them to tune encounters based upon current healer-spec abilities. The side effect is a good one: this forces healers to learn the finer details of their class mechanics. In essence, this change -- when combined with the healer balancing changes in this patch -- adds a skill curve to the game. Glory glory hallelueah, that's something this game has been missing since launch.

This is only true for the 10-16 zones, though. The 1-10 zones are fairly compact. Making it a level 10 ability would make more sense. You don't really feel the need for Sprint until you're making those long walks through Kaas City anyway.

I remain skeptical. Assuming Backstab is used on cooldown in a 5 minute encounter, we lose 8 backstabs per encounter. Based on math done earlier in the thread, this works out to a loss of 10k damage from Backstab alone, not counting damage lost from Laceration's change, additional damage lost from Shiv, or the 8 Acid Blade procs we're also missing out on. If the energy adjustments were good enough to give us a perfect world scenario in which those 8 GCDs were replaced by Overload Shot, we still come up short on damage -- and somehow, I doubt we'll be in taht perfect world scenario where we have the energy to spare. Worse still: It's a ranged attack. If OS becomes part of our core rotation, suddenly we're inserting an attack that uses that god awful weapon damage (remember, blaster rifles do less damage than any other MH weapon of the same item level). If we're exchanging Tech Attacks (which benefit fully from the stats we stack) for Ranged attacks (which do not), we're losing right off the bat. I don't mind adding a new attack to my rotation (I'm fond of mechanical complexity, and I keep OS on my bars anyway so I have something that hits harder than Rifle Shot after a knockback or target swtich). I do mind trading relevant damage for pillowfight damage, though. Other melee specs have self-only AP talents, so I don't think the fact that AB only benefits us is an oversight. I would really like to believe that the damage lost from fewer AB applications is just an oversight, but let's be honest: they know the combat formulae much better than we do, they can model our damage better than we can, and if they missed this, that's a terrible sign. I don't think it was an accident.

The only time we're truly competitive is when the DPS window is narrow enough that we can attack full-tilt without regard to the energy regen consequences. In this type of encounter, our burst really shines and we can push some huge numbers. Unfortunately, this really only happens in two encounters: P3 Soa (since we can only DPS for 15 seconds out of every 45) and Fabricator (since the scaling damage reduction mechanic means doing as much as you can before he starts restacking). There are a few isolated opportunities elsewhere (right before a transition against Gharj, for example), but they're less predictable, and on fights like Karagga, our scaling energy regen mechanic works against us.

The only way that's possible would be if they dramatically improved how much bonus damage we get from Cunning. It's a long shot, but that is one way to improve Operative and Sniper under the hood without buffing other classes at the same time. This is why we need combat log numbers, not theorycrafting. Because they've been nebulous about what the under the hood changes actually are, the current formulas we use for theorycrafting could be way off.

Bingo. All existing PVP tier gear has the same bonuses. All existing PVE tier gear has the same bonuses. They're adding new tiers to both. PST reports indicate that the PVP set has the same bonuses as existing PVP gear. The same reports say that the new PVE tier set currently lacks any bonuses. Every pattern points to the same thing: the new PVE tier will have the same bonsuses as the existing ones.

If you only look at a single Backstab in a vacuum, this looks like a buff. Unfortunately, operations bosses don't go down in a single Backstab. Let's look at a 5 minute encounter. Currently, in that time, you can Backstab 33 times. Let's say it does 1800 on a non-crit. 33 * 1800 = 59400 After the patch, in 5 minutes, you'll only be able to Backstab 25 times. 1800 + %5 = 1890 1890 * 25 = 47250 Total damage lost over 5 minutes: 12150 Overall, that's a %20 nerf. I don't know exactly what the new talents give in terms of bonuses (they're listed in other threads), but I do remember it being single digit. I want to say it's only %3. %3 more damage on Backstab isn't going to offset the loss of all those Backstabs we won't be doing. But it gets worse. 8 fewer Backstabs also means 8 fewer Acid Blade DoTs. At 1700 per application, that's 13600 more damage lost. If the math under the hood doesn't change, this is a significant nerf. Every ability will be hitting for less damage except Backstab, and Backstab will be used %24 less often than it is now due to the cooldown increase. In addition, we lose the bonus damage for attackign a poisoned target, and we will be critting less. But...in PVE, we're the lowest DPS spec. Why would they nerf us this significantly? One of the following is going on: 1) They fail at math 2) They don't intend for the spec to be used in PVE 3) They're offsetting some of the "under the hood" changes they've mentioned. I'd like to explore that, since I've yet to see a real analysis of what these could be. They've reference "under the hood" changes before, but won't state explicitly what those changes are. They've implied that part of it will involve diminishing returns, but I'm guessing it goes deeper that that. We're not the only spec whose across-the-board crit bonus talent is getting nerfed. Mercs got the same change (I don't know if other classes have similar talents). This could mean that they're adjusting for new item budgets, or that they're altering the rating-per-percent formula, and this nerf is just to offset the change. So we gain X crit% from the under-the-hood change, and lose %2 crit from talents. Or, they want everyone having less crit than they have now. This is a very real possibility. What if other stats are being tweaked? What if we're gaining more damage from Tech Power, Power, Cunning, etc? The optimist in me would like to hope that we're losing damage on the visible end because we're gaining more damage from stats. That's the one thing the patch notes don't spell out for us -- they say there are changes to the combat system, but not what they are. Has anyone been able to test this stuff at level cap? Any operatives participating in the high-end guild testing? Anyone got an Op to level cap in PTS? This would be great to know.

He's almost correct. Your Shiv, Backstab, Lacerate, and Hidden Strike damage is based on Tech Power, which is granted both by your Rifle and your Vibroknife. The damage values on the Vibroknife are irrelevant, and have no bearing on the damage you do. This effectively makes the vibroknife a stat stick, not a weapon.

This is common to MMOs, as someone said above. At higher levels, more crit rating is needed per percentage. This is going to be true for all stats. It's usually a curve, rather than a linear increase. So if your crit rating remained static from 20-30, you'd see a bigger drop when you hit 30 than you did when you hit 21.

While EA/BW probably make %100 profit on digital copies sold through Origin, the margin on physical copies is very low. There are manufacturing costs, packaging costs, distribution costs, and the retailer's cut. There's a reason why EU players are paying so much more than US players for the game. Shipping cargo overseas isn't cheap. Heck, shipping freight domestically isn't exactly a bargain, either, and as gas prices go up, so does the cost of shipping hundreds of cases of DVDs to retailer warehouses. I wouldn't be surprised if there were taxes or duties associated with importing the product as well.

Because they require development time, and that development time can be better spent on actual content. Remember -- ships aren't vanity items. They're functional zones. They require far more design time, far more development time, and far more testing before they can be added to the game. If it were just a matter of reskinning, that'd be one thing -- but if they simply reskinned the existing ships, people would cry foul. That's not a bad idea for some time much further down the line, but right now this game despeately needs content, so any time spent working on new ship designs is taking time away from designing new questing regions, warzones, operations, and flashpoints.

Then step it up. You have 3-4 weeks to get it. The reason given is that they wanted some of the vanity items to function as a reward for the people who put the effort into getting them early. Much like the Founder title (which will be permanently unavailable to accounts made after a certain date), these items are time-limited rewards.

You won't lose the vehicle. All they're doing is removing it from vendors.

Isn't this kind of like buying Battlefield 3 and then ranting that it's just looking down the sights of a gun barrel, shooting bad guys, and picking up ammo? Or buying Starcraft 2 and complaining that all you're doing is farming crystals and gas and building structures so you can build units? The shooter hasn't really changed much since Wolfenstein. Considering it's been 20 years, the number of mechancal changes is actually rather miniscule. The RTS has changed even less in that time. Why then, do we expect the MMO genre to reinvent the wheel every time someone releases a new game? File this under "exceedingly unrealistic expectations" and move on.

That's unfair? No, you're arguing that you should get a 2.5 million credit luxury item for free simply because you rolled a dual-wielding class. You're demanding 2.5 million free credits. Get over it and learn how to work for luxury items.

Let me guess, you don't have a large vehicle, so now you want those of us who have one punished by making sure we can never actually use them, right? Here's a solution that's actually a solution: put a barrier around each mailbox and locker that prevents mounts from sharing space with them. Those of us with big mounts can pull up alongside -- but not cover -- the object. Blizzard does this in some places for this very reason.

Reuseable stims/adrenals are too good. From a cost/benefit analysis, endgame players are pretty much required to go Biochem for this benefit alone, simply because the cost savings are significant and the other crew skills offer nothing to endgame content (with the sole exception of the Cybertech grenades, which are a very minor benefit considering the 5 minute cooldown). Any situation where one profession obviously eclipses all other professions is a major nerf waiting to happen. That said -- they have explicitly stated they aren't removing anything. Your Rakata Medpack isn't going anywhere, and you can use it 5 years from now if you want to. All they said is that they won't add new ones to the game. This is a much bigger deal for stims and adrenals than it is for medpacks. The Rakata medpack is so much better than anything you can buy off a vendor, and it's unlikely that a new medpack will be added to vendors on patch day. Stims and adrenals, on the other hand, will possibly get an upgrade -- but those upgrades will always be consumed.

Actually, it's the other way around. That promotion was added right as the game hit it's pre-expansion dead zone. We won't see new content in WoW until November. People are goign to get restless because Dragon Soul isn't good enough to hold people's interest for a full year. As a result, they came up with this promotion to discourage us from cancelling our subs during the dead period. It worked amazingly well.

Most MMOs have several patches worth of additional content in the pipeline prior to launch. That's not what's taking so long. This is also a major class-balancing patch. This is what's causing the delay. It's much better to get this done right the first time than spend another two months patching weekly trying to get the classes in line.

More likely, they applied the fix, restarted the servers, and started making sure the fix worked before they brought them live. Considering that the problem had to do with fleets instancing at absurdly low levels, they need everyone in-house logging on and hopping on the fleet to make sure servers aren't instancing the fleet too early. I'd much rather them do it this way than have to restart the servers again in half an hour because the fix didn't do the job the first time.

36 hour patch "days" were not uncommon in EQ. WoW's notorious for long maintenance and disasterous patching. As a friend of mine who used to work for Blizzard ranted for three months afterwards -- Patch 3.1 broke everything. The next week's maintenance lasted 9 hours beyond it's scheduled window. When patch 3.2 dropped, mailboxes and looting were unavailable until 9 PM that night. When a minipatch between 3.2 and 3.3 came out (that updated a classic raid), palyers in Dalaran were subjected to a 2 hour long lagspike. These weren't new-MMO patches. These were year 5 patches. MMOs are exceedingly complex pieces of code, and they only get more complex the older the game gets. If you can't handle this, you should avoid MMOs entirely until humans perfect infallability. It should only take about 1000 years.

Then you may want to give up on MMOs entirely for about 1000 years or so. That's about how long it will take humanity to perfect infallability.

Which number is greater: 1) The number of players who quit because the patch came out rushed, buggy, and largely unplayable because BioWare was pressured to release the patch before March 20 whether it was ready or not Or 2) The number of players who quit because they don't want to spend another month's subsccription fee waiting on a patch BioWare's already taken a lot of flak for releasing the games with as many bugs as it had. To rush the patch out would doom the game. This is one situation where BioWare really does need to take a page from the Blizzard playbook and hold off on releasing the patch until it's done, and done right. That means thorough testing. This isn't a minor patch, this is a patch with new instances, new systems, the works. They can't test all that in 14 days (fewer, since the patch isn't even on the PTS yet). Saying that BioWare absolutely must release the patch by March 20 only puts them in a situation where they're guaranteed to fail.

Crafted Columi implants/earpieces that crit are going to be far superior to the Rakata anyway due to the Augment slots. It takes a ton of crafting mats to get enough crits to outfit an entire Operations group that way, but from a min/maxing perspective it's more than worth it.