Seconded. Annoying foley is annoying.

Eh, currently I'm considering keeping my account going after D3 goes live. We'll see if the 1.2 patch helps out in terms of endgame content.

I'm not quite up to you, but leveling my Operative as a healer is INCREDIBLY easy. I keep Kaliyo and myself geared up (I'm Cybertech), and I use shiv, backstab and explosive probe versus minions, shiv, backstab and corrosive dart versus strongs and above. Everything dies, I'm never in any real trouble, sleep dart and slice droid let me divide and conquer big spawns, and if I ever get CC'd enough that either myself or Kaliyo are in danger, I pop escape and plant Kolto Injection and Surgical Probe. As others have said, cutscene ambushes are probably the worst issue, but even then I just flashbang, heal and wait for Kaliyo to get aggro cemented, then go about my stabby business.

Really, so much of your XP comes from missions, and so much of your time goes into traveling, it just doesn't matter. Pick the play-style you enjoy and get out there.

The fight between PVP and PVE is that they shouldn't exist in the same game. In PVP, everyone should start out on an even footing each game, so that the object can be to beat the enemy team in a fair match. If you're not going to ignore gear in PVP, you may as well just compare item level and declare the winner based on who's got the best outfit, because that's very, very likely to be the outcome. Any other approach to PVP isn't PVP, it's a hazing, where people sulkily AFK in matches just to collect gear, against the eventual day when they've earned enough reward to compete, whereupon they get dragged down by the next set of AFKers who are doing what they did. If you want good PVP, play a FPS. Play an RTS. Just don't play a progresion game and then pat yourself on the back for beating up people who are weaker than you.

Look, I'm not trying to imply that Ops can't use some love in the PVP department, I just don't think that flattening energy regeneration is the right way to go about it.

I'm just saying I'd like more options not less. After all, the shell of your weapon isn't really that important, it's the mods you put in it. So why not let me uninstall aim mods out of a BH pistol and use it if I want to?

Just get all the Daily gear you can. Every armour insert, every mod, every enhancement should be from the 18 daily missions. Get crit on everything you can, it will make your heals average for more result, and ensure a better rate of energy return on Diagnostic Scan, which is the healing filler you should be using when you're in danger of going below 6/turn. At 27 daily tokens per day, plus 1 mod and one enhancment, you should be geared up relatively soon.

Maybe some of us have realized that PVP is a joke in MMOs, and is only included to mollify the kind of infantile bullies who enjoy abusing people and only enjoy an unfair fight.

Can Ops even equip pistols? And if not, why not?

Any spec should consider maintaining their TA stack for long fights, imo. 2-4% more damage adds up over time. Where it has little to no effect is PVP, because keeping a stack going against an enemy who's not sitting still is going to be much, much harder. I was initially enthused on the idea of more TA stacks, but I'm more skeptical now. It's just another stack to manage, and makes dropping your TA stack that much more unfortunate. I'd much rather see an improvement to the Agent's base performance, and maybe an extra 2 seconds of TA so you'd get one more GCD to play with to keep your stack going.

Concealment got as much sustained DPS as any other hybrid AC in the game. But, by all means, go right ahead and fight uphill against your class' mechanics. I'm sure your opponents appreciate the easy kills you're providing. I'm not making the DK comparison because their mechanics are similar, I'm making the comparison because a vocal portion of the player base is using their class mechanics badly and blaming the designers for making them 'underpowered'. In point of fact, the Operative has the most in common with a druid, minus the shapeshift. You've got stealth, heals, an instant DoT, and yes, some good burst damage. But you're not going to burn anyone who's not pathetically undergeared in the space of time it takes you to unload your full energy bar, not by yourself, at any rate. The ratio of player damage and player durability is far too low to allow that. If that were viable, then you'd just have a pair of DPSers wtfpwning people before the other side's healer can finish a cast. So you've got to use teamwork, interrupts, and yes, some sustained damage techniques if you don't want to lose every fight because you dumped your entire energy bar and then had nothing left in your tank.

You say stim boost is a joke, when at worst it's a 20% boost to your energy regeneration rate, and at best it's a 50% boost. It is fantastically good, and should be up for the Operative at all times, period. This is the fundamental failure to understand that bad Operatives are making: You're not a burst DPS class. The MMO world has moved on, and the time when you could play PVP and global people is long past. You HAVE to fight for the long game, and you should only dip down into the low end of your energy bar if it's going to make you win RIGHT NOW. This was the exact same complaint bad Death Knights used in WoW: Once I use up all my blue runes, I can't cast Chains of Ice and I get kited to death over the next 10 seconds. Well, I guess you had better learn to plan your resource consumption better, instead of mashing your biggest damage button the instant it comes off cooldown.

No, it's like saying that Photoshop is broken because a 5 year-old doesn't know how to apply an unsharp mask to improve the quality of an image. Don't blame the tool if you can't make it work.

For my part, I feel that flattening energy regeneration will accomplish nothing to make the Agent class better, save to lower the amount of attention players need to pay to their resource consumption.

Given that PVE group play is all about roles and specialization, I don't think being a jack of all trades can be considered meritorious in anyway. FWIW, I enjoy my operative immensely, but I haven't gotten to the grouping phase of the game yet. What I do know is that the operative is functionally either a healer or melee DPS. If you appear occasionally to be using ranged attacks in your rotation, don't let that fool you. The filler may be ranged but the essence of the class is up close and personal.

We'll just agree to disagree. I'm not interested in getting into a semantic argument about the definition of crowd control. My point is that it's only the long-term CC's that really affect your utility in a Flashpoint or Operation. Will stunning/disorienting trash mobs reduce their damage output during an encounter? Sure. Will any group bother to coordinate their use? No. Will the presence of that ability determine whether you're invited to run flashpoints with a team? No. If you drop flashbang in an instance, it's going to be broken the next time the tank's AOE is off cooldown. Knockdowns are just stuns with an annoying side effect, short term disorients are broken at the first opportunity, and roots are highly situational, especially roots whose duration doesn't exceed their cooldown. I'm not saying that you shouldn't bother to map these abilities to your bar, but if you think their presence makes your class more attractive to groups than another, you're mistaken.

Are you feeling okay? Feverish maybe? WoW was, and still is, by far the most successful subscription-based game ever, and leaves all competitors in the dust. Do you think 12 million subscribers coughed up $15.00/month for six years because the game was staid, stifling and predictable? Now it may be that what WoW did for the MMO genre doesn't appeal to your sensibility. If that's the case, I advise you to look for a different game, because portraying it as anything but a blockbuster success in the market is laughable. By comparison, SWG peaked at 1,000,000 copies sold, and active players had dipped to under 20,000 within 3 years of release. Now I'm not trying to defend WoW, or attack SWG, I'm just trying to persuade you that if the developers seem to have imitated WoW fairly heavily in the development of SWTOR, it is for a reason. Does that mean that there's no more scope for innovation in the MMO genre? Of course not! But coming at the developers and complaining that SWTOR is 'too derivative of WoW' isn't productive. It's not the kind of feedback that will really germinate into new features that might retain your interest. So, step back, think about what you'd like to see implemented in game, and give some constructive feedback.

They're not free. They cost whatever they cost to research and produce. Also, the alternative (buying/crafting non-reusable equivalents) isn't really that expensive. Finally, the BEST biochem consumables are NOT re-usable. That's the blue stuff, which you should be using for Operation progression content.

What does Blizzard do better? Everything except launch their games on schedule. Don't take it personally, Bioware, but you're late to the party. Get Macros, fix professions, balance the classes.

The game has potential to be much better, but overall I have to say yeah, it's pretty good for a game at launch. Yes, there are balance problems, yes, there are bugs. Yes, the professions are broken. There's a lot of work to be done, but I want Bioware to do it, rather than just unplugging my credit card and going back to playing Skyrim and waiting for Diablo III to launch. If Bioware shows good progress by the time DIII drops, I may even keep my subscription going. No pressure.

Apples are not oranges. Also, you're ignoring Stim Boost.

Note quite true, though the conclusions are not altered by this fact: Power and Crit scale linearly off of themselves, but geometrically off of each other. That's why you want to strive to balance your power and crit gains as opposed to exclusively stacking one or the other. In practice, it's not really difficult to figure out what to take when you're contemplating an upgrade for a particular slot.

Wildly imbalanced, will never happen.

An ensign is an officer, albeit a junior one, so it's not entirely ridiculous to suppose that she might carry a pistol in lieu of a rifle. Using two pistols is ridiculous for anyone, as is using two sword, but it's a RPG trope we can't seem to escape.