The main thing I find unacceptable about the new gear grind is the weekly cap for comms. We've seen it added for the gree reputation, now for gear commendations. It's almost as if there's a deliberate move to slow down players gearing speed. Personally I plan to grind through makeb in a day or two with a group to get started on the new op and back to ranked wz's. But these comm caps will mean having to do this on several alts as well just so I have a few 55's to avoid hitting the cap limit after a couple of days so I can properly gear one character within an acceptable time (to me) for new end-game content. To make it clear - I'm not concerned about a new gear grind at all, but why add arbitrary limits on gear progression that only punishes people who play a lot or clear content at speed ? Yes I know we can work around it with alts and legacy gear (as long as the comm limit isn't legacy wide), but the fact we'll have to use alts to gear mains at the speed we would normally do so, isn't right imo.

Oh it's not meant to be, it's just to annoy them and lower their dps output a bit...and gives our juggernaught a leap to point on them if he wants it. So many ranged don't expect a squishy to be charging at them and don't think fast enough to entrench. (you get to learn the good players that do and avoid doing it around them). That and we get bored enough just laughing at the melee being stunned for most of the wz that we have plenty of time to annoy the other teams healers and ranged too.

Going ranged won't help much if your server has a couple of sorc or sages that team up and know what they're doing. My sorc often bubbles himself then force speeds into the enemy teams ranged (they almost always seem to group up in the same areas), bursts the bubble to stun them, then our other sorc uses extraction to pull me back. A few seconds later he bubbles up and does the same thing. (use grenades as well when off CD on any you miss with the stun). Rather a fun way to annoy the ranged while you keep the rest of the team bubbled to shut down the lolsmashers. Realistically though changing bubble stun without fixing smash would make the lolsmash problem a lot worse. Both need changes but until that happens expect more bubblestun to counter the huge amount of people re-rolling sent / mara for the easy mode smash specs.

This is true, raid-awareness is far more important than dps meters in end-game content. One server I play on with a guild that doesn't use logs - all content is on farm easily because everyone in the raid is watching out for each other instead of fixating on getting an extra 1 or 2 dps. The other server I play on used to be with a guild that decided everyone needed to log with parsers to "improve their play" - result was the raid aware players left and formed a new guild. The parser using guild still can't clear half the new content weeks later.

Word of caution to anyone using the character slot unlock:- After using one I logged out to character select screen to create a new character for that slot - and found a red exclamation mark next to most of my other characters names. Clicking on those characters to play told me they had to be renamed and couldn't log into them until renamed. I closed the game and logged in again to see if this was some strange bug and everything seems back to normal. So if unlocking a character slot, restart the game client before creating one or it will try to get you to rename some of your other characters.

Only really interested in the Overlord’s Command Throne. If I don't get one from a few packs then I'll pick one up off the GTN (guessing they'll sell for silly prices at first, so may hold off for a few weeks though).

Supreme Inquisitors set (mainly the chest armor robe) - there's currently no black robes for a true dark jedi look republic side. Satele Shan outfit - mainly the boots. The long black imperial operative trench-coat (black talon operative chest ?) - would really like to use this on my gunslinger.

Not really, so many players can already craft the bh mods / armorings / barrels / hilts etc that shutting down the way to get bh comms is pointless now (at least for this tier of items). Anyone with credits can get those items off the GTN for no effort. All this change does is give an advantage in game to those of us who RE'd the items when the comms were a lot easier to obtain, while newer players will face a very long grind to get to that point. (crafting professions for new players to make lvl 50 items becomes worthless as older players are flooding the market with lvl 61 items they can't craft for a long time). If it was a new tier of items (such as the dread guard/hazmat) then it would be understandable and a good change, but the way this was done - a stealth nerf without any mention in patch notes that I could see, just makes no sense if it's not a bug.

Really long queue times - and when you do finally get to play there's huge unplayable lag spikes and lots of random dc's. Not sure why they thought it would be a good idea to throw so many onto "mega servers" when it takes half the night to get enough guild members logged in for a ranked warzone or operations team. (and then finding 2/3 members of that team get dc'd when trying to play).

If you're looking for a fun burst class try an infiltration specced shadow, having a lot of fun with mine in wz's with the stealth to creep up on single / double targets defending nodes and bursting them down.

This is good advice - if you think something is priced too low, buy them out, if you think it's too high - just undercut them. People often buy out whole parts of the market on servers I'm on and relist a lot higher, if you time it right you can wait for it to happen then dump a lot of stock you've saved for a good profit (and then they have to buy your items out as well or wait for you to sell yours). Reason it happens is there's so little credit sinks in game (very few seem to bother with the legacy ones) compared to ways to obtain them (and no in-depth crafting), so people amount massive sums of credits to be able to manipulate the market so easily. Prices will be always be set by those with the largest credit balance in this game, if you can't compete then find a way to cash in on their market manipulations until you can. If you're looking to buy materials on the GTN for crafting items to resell at what you consider a fair price - there's never going to be a profit in it - the implants / stims market is just the same. For the record on servers I'm on the molecular stabilizers etc never sit on the GTN for long even at 150-200k each, same with radioactive paste at 12-15k per unit. People buy them at those prices to craft items not just for their own use, but for alts, companions and off-specs etc. tl:dr version - the value of an item is whatever people are willing to pay for it, there is no "correct" prices - find ways to profit from that.

Up until you're 50 credits will come slowly no matter what you do really. Once you get to 50 - the way to avoid that awful grind of dailies is find a guild that runs Denova hard mode, reverse engineer campaign barrels / hilts / offhands / pure 26 armourings that kephess drops - if you get the schematic you're pretty much set for quite a few million profit a week. Or to a lesser extent the mods, enhancements and black hole implants can make a nice income too. (a good guild should run you through hardmode ops to get you geared for denova within a week or two, then the same for denova gear - after that just reverse engineer the items you get and don't need). Other people seem to make a fair amount from the GTN, buying cheap items at low population times and reselling.

I've also seen the ice scrabbler jerky recipe drop in Kaon under siege hard mode as well.

There was a lack of end-game content at launch, content that's been added since has been nothing to keep the interest in operations for more than a couple of weeks sadly. With still only 3 operations after all these months, most people who play for end-game content already have full best in slot gear for pve - even on alts. The fact black hole comms are so easy to obtain now, means most who play for any length of time have those 61 armorings+mods just by doing dailys. Crafting has been rendered pointless for anything other than reverse engineering campaign / bh mods etc - and even those aren't that profitable now as so many have alts crafting those items. PvP is the only thing holding the interest for some, but with class imbalances, no real open world pvp since ilum got removed and no cross server rated warzones still, even that's becoming pointless - some guilds even seem to have characters on both factions and just trade wins with their own teams as there are so few ranked wz's happening. Now with the announcement of limited weekly access to the wz's that F2P's can do, we'll probably see more people in recruit gear running into the concrete wall of teams of fully augmented wh's. The only choice for pvp then will be to play in pre-mades as solo queing and getting 4/5 F2P people on your team with gear they can't compete in will be no fun. The game needs to bridge the gap of pvp gearing, add new end game content for PvE that isn't finished in a couple of weeks and find a way to make crafting worthwhile. An mmo should have something for you to do most days if you log on - when all three end-game operations can be done in one evening and you spend hours every day the rest of the week waiting for a rated wz, then new content needs adding - and soon.

If there's an update in august as it says - they really need to put the test server back up. Releasing an update without people having time to test it properly isn't a good idea.