Your theory is sound, still for some reason alacrity works better for me. I tried stacking power first as I was told by some guide on the Sithwarrior forums but losing the power to stats like alacrity didnt make the difference that it should, on the contrary for my playstyle it made everything better. Its hard to explain, maybe its because I still percieve UI sluggishness, like keybinds not registering, me losing 0.2s to realize and press again stuff like that and maybe alacrity makes up for that. I may try next though, with the surge nerf and all, to tone down the crit/surge and put the balance back to power, while trying to keep the alacrity.

My personal priority goes like: Expertise when ever possible and then willpower>alacr>crit>surge>power Alacrity makes all the difference, especially in PVP. I was skeptical as all heck about alacrity before I got to hard modes and PVPing more seriously but having gotten to about 10-11% speed increase has fixed a lot of problems for me. I would say, try to get about 10% speed, 33% crit, 66% surge and 50-100 bonus heal and then balance it to your play style from there.

This. As said by others you may be fine for some encounters but if you plan on endgame raiding the 31 point AOE heal is sought after and not only nice to have.

Hi, this weeks Q&A reveals Georg Zöller saying that the "exploit" involving Force Bending in combination with an ability queue time of 1.0 will be removed in patch 1.2 source: Community Q&A: Feb 17th 2012 My own view on this is that I would call it borderline exploit since you still pay twice the force cost for example to get two Dark Infusions at 1.3s each and with some of the burst damage coming in in hard modes at times it appears as if it is actually needed. Now, I know this may be because our teams don't have the mechanics down 100% perfect and then there's also the posts saying NMM is too easy and I start to wonder could that be a large part of it. I am slightly worried with the surge nerf and now this coming about that I may have problems keeping up in dire situations. If you play a fully healing specced sorc and even any other healing class what's your view on it? Discuss.

Power Conversion module, Whirlwind tactic to avoid frontal fire, and maybe even EWP for 10s invincibility (not sure though what level you are). Also try lowering your gfx settings just for the space missions because the flying into asteroids problem is intensified by fps stuttering. I assume you have read the space mission sticky guide in the new player help subforum.

Personally I would have preferred the old greyed out look plus a red number counting down the seconds in front of the center of the icon. I understand though that this is an improvement in a different direction which makes it so you dont have to actually look down or to the side all the way to see when a CD is available. You can focus on the center of the screen better. After what little playtime I had I think this is a solid patch. I notice FPS improvements again, and thank god for the perma sprint after death (yes, Im serious).

What are your plans for adressing server population issues (i.e. low population and faction imbalance)?

While point 2 is generally correct, maybe there is also the possibility of having mastercraft mods coming from a blue item as starting point, e.g. blue > purple > purple (mastercraft). Im not an artificer though so I dont know this as a fact.

I look for medium str/end armor for my Ashara all the time. I could imagine the assault rifles mentioned are for another companion perhaps? Although I think its a bit strange that a purple coming from crafting should only be useful for companions.

In prefs theres a setting for Camera Max Distance if you set that to 100% you can zoom out with your mouse wheel until your char is about the size of a thumb placed on the monitor.

I will support that they do it eventually. I am a Mac OS X user myself, but, honestly, right now there are so many more concerns they should address first before they spent time to develop a native client just so that I wouldn't have to reboot any more. Until then there's Bootcamp or my custom build gaming PC.

Agreed. They should have prefixed it with: "Your mission log is full (25/25). You must complete more missions" or something along those lines. Maybe even mention that you can drop/abandon missions if you need the space right away.

LS vs DS is mostly what color you can get for color crystals (you can sport all colors but only the appropriate for your alignment gives you the stats), and there are 2 different speeders for LS and DS. Other than that theres Sith corruption (but which you can choose not to show via prefs) for DS. The rest is pretty much mirrored (Relics, etc).

Short answer: yes. Longer answer: think of orange gear as just empty shells. The only thing that matters is the armor type (light, medium, heavy) which gives a base number, different for each type. The base number is multiplied (modified) by the stats on the mods.

Well for me even if I have queued something up (like Dark Infusion or Innervate) on my sorcerer, I can still just cast Jolt to interrupt someone. It cancels whatever is executing and casts Jolt instead. I don't know if that is exclusive to abilities that are specifically made for interrupting but it should be fairly easy to test.

Example: You cast an ability that takes 1.5s to execute with an ability queue time of 1s (max possible currently). 0.5s into the execution you notice that you need the ability executed a second time right awy. Now if you press the keybind for the ability again, it will queue it up to start executing again right after the current execution is done. This is because your max queue time set in prefs is not larger than the amount of time still needed to end the first execution. Had you set your ability queue time to something lower than 1s, you would have gotten the message "Not Ready" instead at the 0.5s point mentioned above.

I even think the best matrix cubes are built from three same color shards.

Yeah I always have that when I battle the two elites in front a chest and someone just runs up to the chest and loots it. Yeah its rude but I won't let that destroy my good time with this game. Chests respawn usually quite fast so I just stick around a little and get the next one.

I agree with those 2 paragraphs. I had to adjust to the new state of the cooldown indicators as well. I think the best solution would be to just overlay a red seconds number over the blue gradient that swoops down on a countdown timer. Shouldnt be too hard to implement since its only display stuff taking advantage of logic that is already implemented.

For me its the opposite. Performance improved after the patch. I can now turn on high shadows even with more than a few people around fighting. Also loading times improved. I mean the point at 33% where loading freezes for a bit is now reduced. When actually reading from the harddrives it was always fast. i7-3960X 3.3GHz Win7 x86_64 16 GB RAM GeForce GTX 550 Ti 1.2 GB RAM (my GTX 580 3GB is in RMA) Full SSDs

Haven't seen this mentioned yet and its more of a workaround than a tip, but as this happened a lot on my server I thought I'd mention it. The Reset All Flashpoint Phases Bug If everyone in your team can enter a flashpoint but you keep getting a message along the lines of "the party leader must reset all active flashpoint phases" and it wont let you enter any flashpoint, the fix for this is to leave the current group, create a new one with a friend/guildie/random who does not have this bug, promote them to party leader and then leave the group. The bug will not transfer to the other player but your server side state will be reset (as the tooltip requested). Actually using the feature in the UI (as suggested by the tooltip) via right-clicking your portrait and then choosing Reset All Flashpoint Phases does not seem to work in some cases. It has been theorized that this happens because a flashpoint group you were the leader and/or story keeper of earlier, disbanded, or had member(s) leave with you still being in the flashpoint. LFG Comments Can't Be Read Due to Being Cut Off If you mouse over the purple group icon to the left of a player's name in the Who window (click your planet's name on the top left of the UI to open it) it will show the full comment. Also, regarding I haven't tried it (currently not ingame) but I imagine this only works if the player who switched the LFG mechanic on didn't change his/her default LFG comment. Mods If you receive an item with mods in it that is still Bind on Equip and you CTRL+right-click to remove a mod, it will bind the mod to you and the full item.

To the OP: You say that you have found the option in the Preferences to "Enable Focus Target". If you have that enabled, it works like this: You assign a keybind that toggles "focus target" status for the currently selected target. You also assign a modifier key that when held down, will make the action you are executing go to the focus target, regardless what your currently selected target is (provided of course, the action you are executing is valid for the focus target). In the default UI, the selected target is shown as the right side portrait, while the focus target appears a bit above the right side portrait and is usually a smaller health bar. The point being, you now have 2 targets that you can address, determined by you holding down the focus modifier key, and the focus target being permanently adressable until you assign a new one, which leaves you free to selected other targets at will.

Really nice thread, a healthy contrast to all the rage lately. Just turned 32. Communications designer by trade which expanded into visual effects, motion graphics, 3D animation, web site design and programming. After working for national and international design agencies I went self-employed and haven't looked back.

I bought one on Balmorra. You might want to research a datacron guide for Balmorra (Empire) since the vendor that sells the lost code cylinder to get to a specific datacron also sells a "... code cylinder" that opens a chest in a tent near the vendor that contains a dissassembler core. They are both called names ending in "code cylinder", but one is 5k creds and starts with "lost", the other for 8k is the one you want.

The most simple solution for this, which can be implemented right now, is: Establish before taking on content, that ppl should ask "can I need for my comp pls?" if they intend to need for their companion. If the majority of the group says yes, its official he/she can need. If theres a draw between yes and no, he/she can't need. This goes doubly so for PUGs. Example of establishing the rule: "Please only need for companions if u asked first, come roll time, and the majority says yes" Couple examples on votes: One guy says "go ahead". Others say nothing. He/she can need. One guy says "sure", another says "nope I rly need". He/she can't need. Two guys say "nope", one guy says "idc". He she can't need. If you are the person who asks, to be sure wait a few seconds, before pressing NEED so anyone has the chance to say "no". That's how I have done it up to this point and I have never gotten any complaints either as rule giver, or as the person who asks.