Obviously, the question though is why try to "hack it" as an Op? The sorcerer is a high utility healer, with friendly targetable haste, , a shield, armor boost tied to a heal ( not that that means much in PvP ), better offense and offensive utility ( since Sorc is at its core a ranged class ) and very little ramp up. By picking a Medicine Operative instead, you're trading all of that in.... for what? Stealth? It's always nice to throw out a card like "Well you're just not good enough". But to be entirely blunt.... why bother being good when you can just bring more firepower instead?

It's fun, but they definitely have issues. Essentially, my complaint about Operative healers is that they have the fewest secondary benefits of the healing specs. Pretty much every talent in the Medicine tree either increases direct healing power or increases your survivability, with the exceptions of Sedation and Precision Instruments (mercs are only a little better, but they have a pro-active heal and an armor boost. Sorcs have a shield, speed boost they can put on friendly targets, and an armor boost). Past that, in terms of offensive support, the Operative is a melee class, while Merc/Commando and Sorc/Sage are ranged classes, which means they'll have a tendency to provide more utility and damage at long range ( unless you go hybrid medicine/lethality.. but then you're no longer a proper healer, you're sort of.. half and half. ) The problem here is that despite having less support ( offensive or defensive ) than their counterparts, lacking any indirect healing tools, etc... the operative really isn't that much better at their particular niche than their counterparts are. Plus the niche that the operative best fills (steady damage on a few targets ) isn't really relevant in PvP. Essentially you're going to have worse AoE healing, longer setup, less damage (at least at healer range), less utility, and no secondary mitigation effects, in exchange for basically having the same, possibly marginally better single target healing power.

Arguing that the current UI is so bad that giving players access to a clean and responsive interface would give them an unfair advantage is a pretty strong argument in favor of addons, not against it.

Not really. That was the norm early in WoW's life (the entirety of molten core, most of BWL, etc.etc.) but a lot of raiding content post Vanilla ( and even some of Naxxramas in late Vanilla ) was tuned to be less of a hard gear check. ( C'thun, Four Horsemen, What's his face in Black Temple, M'uru, Algalon, Alone in the Darkness, Mimiron HM, etc. were all legitimately hard encounters rather than just item level walls )... can't comment on 4.x raiding since I never did it. Overtuning wasn't much of an issue either, other than a few stupid examples like Ouro or Vanilla Patchwerk. The whole point of creating hardmode raid content though is specifically to be able to simultaneously cater to casual and hardcore tastes.

Running up to a Sith Lord and smashing them in the face with your rifle >>>> Pretending to be Ryu from Street Fighter.

Seems like I'm missing something here, but these missions seem useless. They cost about twice as much as a 'moderate yield' lockbox mission, but both sets of missions give the exact same reward as far as I can tell. Unlike other crew skills I've never gotten a larger quantity from a rich yield slicing lockbox mission, always just one lockbox with a quality relative to the mission and the same relative number of credits. I'd normally chock it up to bad luck, but I've done dozens (maybe hundreds) of them and never gotten anything special, whereas when I do Rich Yield missions for scavenging/bioanalysis/archaeology/etc. the difference is almost always immediately apparent. Am I just ridiculously unlucky or are these missions bugged/worthless?

The only quest so far I've thought was really out of line is one on Ord Mantell where saving a bunch of dying republic soldiers nets you darkside points and helping a group of criminals (those criminals being the reason the republic soldiers are going to die) nets you lightside points. I agree with you on the point that more options would be nice ( it always would be though ), but disagree about your specific examples being particularly egregious. Since someone else mentioned the first two, regarding the one about the villain: That one is pretty straightforward, killing an enemy in cold blood after the battle is already won is simply not a lightside choice. Forgiveness, redemption, justice are all strict tenants of the light side, not vengeance.

Except it's not changing it for everyone else. It's changing it for people who want to customize their UI and leaving it the same for people who don't. Kind of like how I don't like raiding on my Sentinel, so I avoid PvE Operations on her. Were I more like the OP and friends though, I'd be on the forums asking Bioware to never make another raid again, because people who like different things than I do don't deserve to be able to play the game the way they want to... Which is just a stupid and extremely vindictive way to look at things. Bringing up the "bad" of meters would be a valid point... if it weren't already clear that the people who are dumb can manage to be perfectly dumb without tools assisting them.

Marauders think you're OP and want to be able to force leap at Snipers in cover and be able to interrupt you while in cover. A couple have proposed putting a 20 second cooldown on cover or removing cover screen entirely and forcing you to use natural cover. >.>

Oh no. I completely understand that. I just don't get why. Sure, maybe for things like High Impact bolt that have special projectiles. But for things that just have standard blaster shot animations? Yes. Raging. Frothing with anger. I've already broken two monitors and my cat over this gamebreaking issue. So angry that I even had a Sith Lord tell me to chill out.

Why the hell do the vast majority of my attacks stay red/orange when I put a blue/green/yellow/whatever crystal inside my blaster? This is absolutely disgusting.

On my server (empire ) Sorcerer Mercenary [Juggernaut Marauder Assassin] Operative Powertech Sniper The three classes between the brackets seem interchangeable, haven't been able to establish a proper hierarchy.

What does skill have to do with this argument at all? With wanting more UI customization or the ability to parse combat logs effectively? (nevermind that staring at tiny buffbars for durations isn't really meaningful skill to begin with ) That has to be the silliest complaint I've ever heard. Obviously. The argument just is though that by allowing modders to create addons for free, it saves Bioware time and money to develop content in other areas.

What's with this "Have fun my way or don't have fun at all" mentality going around? If you don't want to use addons... don't. That doesn't mean Bioware shouldn't ever allow them. I honestly can't see any actual negative impact to allowing players to have more UI customization and allowing Bioware to spend less time tweaking the UI and more time adding content or fixing bugs.

Uhh.. Force Pull is a talent for Darkness assassins and Kinetic Shadows. Not Sorcerers or Sages. And Marauders don't have force push.

I really like PvP lethality, but it has a few issues: -Dispels really ruin the specs damage. -The spec has no "proper" way to generate TA for itself. You either have to spec medic and offheal to keep TA up or get into melee range and shiv, both of which are counterintuitive to the spec's goals. -You're squishy like all Ops are, but you can't go in and out like Conceal does. Despite this, you still have to sit at 10m or less for optimal damage. As far as balancing ideas to make the spec stronger... only two to really make it an awesome tree: -Let DoTs and/or grenade/dart/blast activate TA. -Bump the range on Cull and Weakening Blast to 20 or 30m.

My favorite idea in the OP is proccing off grenade or Dart ticks, fits best with the theme of the class. Someone earlier mentioned "why does it matter it you're in melee range"... Survivability. Ops are squishy. Concealment gets away with it with a "burst and run" strategy, which Lethality doesn't have ( at least not to the same degree) with more damage being spread out. Being DoT based, squishy, and melee is basically a death wish... Actually I'm not even sure if 10m is enough. I'd love it if Cull and WB had 20 or 30m ranges.

Powertechs and vanguards are not ranged classes.

Yeah. When I was doing Balmorra I'd frequently go AFK for extended periods of time after putting my character on autorun when traveling between the main city and the quest locations... I'm not sure how anyone can seriously say that my gaming experience was enriched by spending 10 minutes on the forums while trying to travel from the questgiver to the field. Doing the first half of Dromund Kaas and Coruscant without Sprint was only slightly better...and again, I really can't see how my gaming experience would somehow be worse if it only took 3-4 minutes to travel between quest hubs rather than 5-6.

I still notice this a lot. Primarily with my Knight's riposte and my Agent's corrosive dart. If I get mashy with the key the animation will clip itself several times, and the move won't actually land until the animation completes. It wouldn't be a problem itself if for whatever reason so many attacks weren't tied directly to the animation ( or at least, that's how it appears to be, given the stuttering issue and the issue with dodged attacks interrupting abilities that are mid-animation ), compared to most MMOs where the animation doesn't actually mean anything. I'm also having some issues with animation de-sync on ranged characters still. But not as bad as pre-patch, and it doesn't appear to have any effect other than cosmetic ones ( though it is silly to get credit for completing a quest that involves killing an enemy before my character actually starts shooting their gun )

Only partway through the story, but so far I've spent virtually every mission chasing down relics buried in tombs and occasionally helping someone else do something underhanded and dastardly. And the only lightside person I've had more than passing contact with is apparently incorruptible. The class description refers to the Inquisitor as a ( paraphrasing ) master of "scheming politics and dark secrets" calling the SI a "manipulative genius" and "architect of the empire's future" The storyline descriptions made it sound like the SI would be some evil mastermind.. instead I feel like a crappy evil Indiana Jones. Does this ever change? Or is it just going to remain a series of glorified fetch quests for vaguely defined artifacts of power?

Yeah... I remember getting feared into the middle of the woods into a sub-zone full of mobs that were 8 levels higher than me and having to spend two hours trying to find my corpse again without dying to recover me gear. I remember struggling to get a perfect group together so we could kill the exact same mob sixty times in order to gain one bar of XP...and I remember losing hours of grinding because some ******e/idiot decided to train thirty enemies onto our group while we were farming the one mob. I remember running into players triple your level who'd one shot you and then proceed to take every item you had, which could permanently break questlines in some cases. Or even better, a character the same level as you who'd been handed endgame level gear by their alts. I remember being given vaguely defined quests that didn't actually tell me what I was supposed to do and where I was supposed to do it, forcing me to either spend an absurd amount of time running around trying to figure out where I'm supposed to stand for the quest item to be usable, or to alt-tab and google it. Wait no. I don't miss any of that ********. That said, I do agree on two points: -For an MMO, the social interaction pre-level cap in this game ( and a lot of other new MMORPGs ) is ridiculously low. There's so much content that's easily soloable... to the point where doing a normal quest in TOR with two or three people basically feels like cheating... and it makes finding groups for heroics/flashpoints kind of hard, since people are so conditioned to basically ignore everyone else's presence until endgame. - The lack of meaningful effect on the rest of the world. I like instanced PvP, and I liked instanced dungeons... but it feels lame and immersion breaking that nothing you do effects anyone other than yourself ( and whoever you're grouped with ). No faction reputation, no meaningful world PvP objectives... Nothing. But a lot of that crap? Naw. I think people are confusing "Time consuming" and "tedious" with difficult. Farming mobs at high level in EQ wasn't challenging. Killing Ouro the Sandworm in Vanilla WoW wasn't a complex or difficult encounter ( amusing that we're calling Vanilla WoW hardcore when at the time everyone was marvelling over how casual it was compared to EQ... ). The encounters didn't require an especially high level of thought. Group content was pretty much always just a gear check or a composition check, with little more depth than "Run away from X spot when Y happens" "kill or CC the adds when they spawn" at best. I admit, at the time there was a sort of mystique to them, with how daunting and grandiose everything seemed. But looking back? Meh. Even though Wrath had arguably the hardest encounters in any of the game's expansions? At least in terms of meaningful difficulty. secret world looks gdlk... Though then again, so did a lot of MMOs.

Not sure how to word this properly, but... Is anyone else frustrated with the storyline they chose to give the SI? Not necessarily the delivery of the story ( which is okay ) but the entire plotline they picked? I feel like more like a Sith Archaeologist than a "master of manipulation and deceit"... meanwhile my juggernaut alt is lying, stealing, and cheating her way to the top... which was everything I expected the Inquisitor to do honestly. Granted, I only just started Act 2, so maybe it'd pick up. But that's the impression I've had so far.

It makes sense when you actually look at the class' toolkit though, as the assassin is thematically basically the game's battlemage. From a lore standpoint, you reach a point in your training where you either choose to improve your saber skills in order to augment your force power ( assassin/shadow ) or choose to essentially abandon your lightsaber entirely to go all out with magic ( sorcerer/sage ). I'm not sure what's "weird" about it. It's a logical progression given that the base class ( consular/inquisitor ) is going to be using both force and saber attacks too. Heck, if anything the shadow/assassin has more in common with the base class than the sorcerer does. As for the OPs suggestion, my only question is... Why? You're asking Bioware to remove one class from the game and butcher two other classes (by remaking and redefining them) ... for what end?

I find her incredibly obnoxious and having her follow you everywhere makes it really annoying to play the Imperial Agent straight (though one of my complaints in general is how hard Bioware seems to want to shove the idea of playing a renegade IA down your throat )