Consular is indeed probably the most boring storyline during Act 1. It is literally the exact same planet on repeat until Act 1 is over; I'm not even embellishing that.

This is a good point. I've noticed I can occasionally fly straight through other ships, too. This is good, because if I could kill things by just ramming my ship into them, I would probably be too tempted to try it.

I was kind of the opposite of you on dark/light side for Sith Warrior. I started out trying to play total dark, but it just got to the point where I couldn't continue choosing dark side options because they were all stupid. Dark Side Sith warrior essentially boils down to you being a total douche and killing everything without regard for any form of tactical or utilitarian considerations. I think the best displayed case for this is on Nar Shadaa (though this isn't really specific to the warrior): It just seems to me like Dark side choices for the empire turn you into some anarchical, nihilistic, jackhole teenager that wants to kill everything to feel dark and brooding or something. edit: More on topic, as mentioned above, Sith Warrior gets better after Act 1. This is true for a lot of the class stories.

Yeah, it has to suck pretty hard to fly a one-man small craft and be unable to control your ship speed. If the small-craft pilots magically found their throttle, you would be screwed in space missions.

Yessir, I am pretty bad. Not bad as in the "you fail repeatedly on space missions" version of the phrase, but just thematically bad. Role-playing-nerd version of bad, if you will. I totally blow my EMP right next to my own capital ships and I do not give a ****. That ship captain knew who his wing mate was going to be and if I want to blow my EMP like a boss, I am going to blow my EMP like a boss. Friendly fire? Do not care. Possible civilian casualties? Not a single **** is given. Like if hitting your EMP next to your own ships gave you dark points, I would be full on Sith douchewaffle despite playing almost pure light all the way to 50. And while we're on the subject of me being a terrible pilot, I swear to god I hit an asteroid every time I do Impossible Sector. It's not even a good reason to hit an asteroid, it's just the first space mission I do every day after getting up or getting home from work and I'm half retarded. So I hit my one asteroid and then I'm good for the rest of the day on doing stupid crap. Yeah, cool story bro. So how was your day?

If you honestly think that the addition of dual-spec will make the game "too easy," I am close to speechless in response. You have obviously never done anything in any MMO that was of appropriate difficulty if you believe that spec restrictions actually confer encounter mechanics difficulty. The only difficulty spec restrictions cause is administrative on behalf of guild leaders, raid leaders, party leaders, etc. and if you think that is the kind of difficulty that needs to be in a game for it to not be boring, you're probably playing games for the wrong reason.

I make so many friends in the 5 meters between the Consular hanger and the nearest mailbox.

Class trainer, Skill Trainer, and Skill vendor on the ship would not be a big deal. Quest comment is just overdramatic hyperbole that has no relevance.

The two most important things to Sage healing are managing your Conveyance and Resplendence procs. The first you get fairly low level and should already have at 23 if you went straight up the Seer tree rather than putting points into the first tier of Telekinetics for force management skills (this is what I would honestly do). Your most effective use of Conveyance is casting any heal of your choice (probably Healing Trance or Deliverance at higher levels) and following it up immediately with another Deliverance, if you think that your target needs any more healing. The way Conveyance works right now, you will get an extra 1.5s Deliverance rather than having Conveyance drop after your first spell. This only works using Deliverance second because the Conveyance effect is applied at the start of its cast rather than during it or at it's end, like all your other heals. You should use Healing Trance as often as possible when you get higher level so that you can get Resplendence and use Noble Sacrifice without incurring the HP or regen penalties. With Resplendence, Healing Trance is actually a force-positive skill, so you wind up with more force after using Trance and sacrificing than you had prior to casting it. Rejuvenation -> Healing Trance -> Deliverance (immediately afterwards to get 1.5s cast) -> Noble Sacrifice is a very powerful sequence in PvE that will give you hefty throughput while at the same time remaining as close to Force-neutral as you can get. It's not necessarily a "rotation" as there is a deadzone before you can do the exact same sequence again, and sometimes situations may dictate that you use different heals such as Salvation or something, but a lot of my healing comes from that sequence. And as always, remember to keep Force Armor on your target as often as you can. It's fairly cheap and prevents a significant amount of damage. edit: I also agree that learning to heal in PuGs is going to be rough. It's a great way to perfect your emergency healing, reflexes, and get you to stop panicing in tough situations, but for starting out healing, you're in for a bumpy ride. Particularly since a lot of PuGs seem to believe that healers have infinite resource pools and god-like healing throughput innately and will berate you for not being able to fix their screw ups.

Yeah I'm totally with you, there's so much meaningful social interaction that goes on when I board the republic fleet, run 5 meters to the mailbox, 5 meters back to the hangar, and board my ship again without saying anything to anyone or even seeing more than the 2 other Consulars doing the exact same thing I am. Whatever would happen if we removed that in favor of the mild convenience of getting mail delivered to your ship.

... I want to drop-kick a Jawa. Seriously. Why do they RP walk when put on passive during combat? Is it just some twisted way to screw over healer specs forced to let their companions hold aggro?

I unfortunately do not have any recording equipment on my PC to demonstrate it for you, but my fellow Seer-specced Sages should be able to corroborate that this is how Conveyance works. I also logged in before this posting just to make absolutely sure it wasn't hotfixed or something. This thread also deals with the Conveyance bug. As for respeccing from Balance to Seer, I am woefully ignorant of which would wind up being the better choice for PvP.

The last part of that statement is untrue. Conveyance will drop when your channel of Healing Trance ends, not when your Healing Trance crits. This is why it's possible for you to take advantage of the game engine's latency and cast a 1.5s Deliverance at the end of every crit-boosted Healing Trance. Conveyance works this way for all spells; it always drops off about .5s after your effected spell finishes its cast. All Seers should presently be aware of this so that, if needed, they can capitalize on it for an extra 1.5s Deliverance. It's kind of going to be a sad day when they fix that bug, but I say make the best use of it while we have it.

You shouldn't have to interrupt his channelled lightning AE. The idea behind it is that it's the last desperate part of the fight and you're supposed to burn him down before you die. What is most important is that you interrupt his Blast ability in the second portion of the fight by any means necessary. The debuff left behind by getting hit with that ability will significantly increase your damage taken, even at only 1 stack. I did this fight on a seer-specced sage and went into the lightning phase with 1 stack on Nadia and 0 stacks on myself. Right when lightning started hitting, Nadia just got destroyed, but I was only taking ~400-600 damage ticks, which was minor enough for me to shield myself and burn the last bit of his health solo with little issue.

Qyzen will eventually get an AE ability that will virtually always keep threat over heals. Until he gets that, you're kinda stuck having him target switch, which is miserable to deal with. You just have to be careful when you get that and start lifting with Qyzen on passive, running behind an LoS obstacle, and then setting him to attack or something.

I honestly think she does just fine tanking. It might just be because higher stats from hand-me-down gear counteracts the lower armor class, but I switched out Qyzen for Iresso and then Iresso for Nadia and they were all equally easy to keep healed on easy mobs and challenging to keep healed on mobs with heavy AE damage.

******* signed. If I'm going to have a boring companion, I may as well have one I can give my hand-me-downs to and who I can understand without having to look at the bloody chat box every time he says something. All of the consular companions are pretty boring in terms of personality. Theran is probably the most interesting of the bunch, but you can't really use him as a Seer companion. Nadia can pump out some pretty impressive damage and, because you can give her hand-me-downs, gets more impressive quicker. Lack of a taunt can be kind of annoying, but I haven't seen many situations where she can't get aggro on something before my shield gets taken down.

Not to mention the fact that you couldn't admit to anyone in "real life" at work or school that you played an MMO because it automatically branded you a social outcast unless by some miracle you encountered another member of the tiny population playing the game. The time and effort it took to play older MMOs meant the genre would have never gained traction in the broader mainstream, which comes with all sorts of nasty details like never being able to admit you play them, chronically low game budgets, etc.

So far on Ilum, just doing the single-player intro quest chain for Republic (Crystal Ball -> Gentlemen's Agreement), I have encountered the following: -Strong mobs with an AE spell that will kill my companion from 100% in under 5 seconds -Strong mobs with CC abilities that have no DR and no CD, which they chain on my companion -Entire rooms of mobs pulling with specific elites -Random groups of mobs that are linked and pull together (including pulls with 2-3 Elite and Strong mobs) None of these are in heroic areas or have any indication that they are designed for groups. They're still doable, but it makes me wonder if it is intended that these mobs go so far above and beyond the level of difficulty that we've seen on previous planets (I could solo heroic 2's on Corellia more easily than I can do single-player quests on Ilum), or if things (e.g. CC abilities with no CD) are just simply bugged.

It is kind of a cop out compared to an elegant solution like making a better companion AI. That said, I am perfectly willing to forgive a cop out in the name of making the player's life less frustrating in areas like this. It's perfectly acceptable, given how much the devs have on their plate right now, to use a bandaid solution in lieu of one that takes significant time and resources. What isn't acceptable, in my opinion, is punishing your players because of your unwillingness to do the former and your inability to do the latter.

Fully support this notion as well. Has at least a player-skill-based work around in that we can adapt to the actual AoE size after seeing the spell, but it's still something that annoys the first time you see a new AE ability.

Then they need to similarly give up and bandaid it with AE damage mitigation until they can either make the AI less retarded or remove the command delay so I can micromanage my companion. As for the second bit, that's an entirely different complaint of mine - and along with it, can we at least change it so that when I turn off my companion's AE move that breaks CC, it bloody stays off? It's only ever been an issue for me on things like class story bosses and Illum, and I can usually just power through it by healing my brains out, but that doesn't make it any less retarded or any less frustrating to deal with after going through 50 levels of it and watching the problem absolutely defy any level of player skill (see story about Nadia) over and over again.

Do the devs not understand that we have companions out virtually 100% of the time while solo'ing? Do they not understand that the game is essentially balanced around having companions out? Most importantly, do they not understand that our companions are not only retarded as hell but also refuse to react to player commands with any semblance of urgency, resulting in them taking virtually 100% of all avoidable AoE damage that is being thrown at us? Hell, I play a Jedi Sage and use Nadia predominantly as my companion. I saw her about to take an AE spell to the face and had the clairvoyance to actually pull her out of it with Rescue and set her to passive to prevent her from running right back into it afterwards. The result? Despite the passive command being given at the same time I used rescue, she leaped back into the AE before the passive command activated. She then turned, looked at me for a solid second, and proceeded to RP walk back to me, all while taking heavy burn damage from an AE that anyone with half of a functioning brain wouldn't have stood in in the first place. What the ****? I'm fine with ground-based AoE's in content where it's expected that you'll have full-player groups, but don't throw this crap at me in solo content and then punish me for your inability to develop a non-retarded companion AI. I thought the idea was for me to enjoy having a companion, not curse them repeatedly for getting hit by stuff that even a drugged up PUG could avoid (and taking the full brunt of such attacks - at least the WoW developers understood that their pets were retarded and didn't penalize the player for it).

my lone pity bump for visibility.

cross-posting from the Consular forums for visibility: I'm not entirely sure how something like this survives testing, but I'm fairly certain it would be a pretty simple bug to fix, so I'm hoping we'll see a fix in the next patch.