You can look at the move animation if you really want.... nevermind that the idea sort of falls through if you're using an orange color crystal anyways... Doesn't seem like a good excuse.. IMO.

Vote now!

It's amazing how many people actually let me get all the ticks of master strike off.

The people arguing over whether crafted gear should be better or worse than raid gear are missing the point. This is just talking about mats. And the answer is yes. It's no good that you can't access high end crafting gear if you aren't a PvE player. Especially since outside that one item, crafting and PvE are entirely separate. Preferrably there should be a PvP way to get them, and possibly an expensive mission/gathering skill avenue to gain them.... probably should make 'em BoE too.

Well. Some of it Cybertech mods/armorings under the described 1.2 system will still be throwaway items endgame, leaving it only with earpieces ( unless space suddenly becomes popular again and the high end space craftables become more important ) as craftables. Slicing is also getting indirectly nerfed again by Bioware making high end augments craftable.

logic macros can be bad for a game, but all macros period? That'd be awful.. there's so many keybinds in this game that being able to consolidate some of your skills with macros would be a massive help.

You're right, the cost wasn't very high. But I still can't see how that cost generated any benefit at all. Cost with no benefit is always bad. Only when the unaligned gear is equivocal, which isn't the case. On the contrary, what falls apart is the idea of character choice, because I'm worrying about gear instead. You say "just use a yellow crystal", but I don't want a yellow crystal, it doesn't fit the character I'm playing... And I'm sorry, you can't have it both ways. Either aesthetics don't matter, in which case the entire argument over color crystal restrictions is pointless. Or aesthetics do matter, and you can't simply brush off my point with "well don't use red then lol". Your choice. Nothing at all about giving you more options can possibly result in restricting your gameplay. Worst case scenario is that you ignore the new options and you're back exactly where you started. To just re-iterate though: -Being forced to kill an engineer on the Esseles every time I make a light sided decision in order to keep my lightsaber from spontaneously failing is not compelling gameplay. -Attaching restrictions to LS/DS hurts immersion and storyline because managing your alignment becomes more important than playing your character if you want to use certain gear. -This won't matter for most, but for big fans of the setting, color restrictions based on alignment are disconcerting because they go against established SW canon -These restrictions, despite their many negatives, don't actually have any facet that tangibly improves the quality of the game.

It's not that the system doesn't give anything in and of itself. It's that I felt ( and I know other players have felt ) that the rewards system attached to alignment almost forces you to game the system rather than allowing you to play it smoothly. As a personal anecdote.. I had a relatively neutralish jedi knight who at one point was using a red crystal. I'm sitting towards the light end of the alignment, and when I'm presented with an option in game to choose, I'm worried more about whether or not the decision will cause my lightsaber to stop working, rather than thinking about how myself and my character should be reacting to the situation. I suddenly have a quota, where for every person I save from being eaten alive by monsters, I have to go kick a puppy.. which felt very disconcerting to me. With the color crystal restriction gone, that burden is lifted, which (IMO) is for the better, because I'm less worried about making sure my numbers lined up and more able to engage myself in the actions of my character.

The requirements weren't meaningful though ( because as you pointed out, they have no intrinsic meaning and could be easily manipulated thanks to the existence of Diplomacy and Black Talon/Esseles ). Neither were the visual cues particularly strong ( considering the wide range of alignments involved, the fact that exceptions existed, and alignment neutral crystals, especially with how they tend to be the dominant choice at endgame ). What's worse, they perverted the way players handled the light/dark system, by making it a matter of balancing and grinding in order to obtained desired gear, rather than an element of personal character development ( as the game actively punishes you for playing anything other than pure light/pure dark. Running the risk of your weapon nonsensically failing because you're playing a more "human" character was just silly ) "stripped for meaningful purpose" implies there was meaning and value to begin with. There wasn't, so stripping away the restrictions isn't a bad thing. The first sentence doesn't say anything. Why isn't the setting suitable for personal expression? What do arbitrary and nonsensical restrictions actually do to improve the quality of the game as a whole? The second sentence is reaching pretty badly... the setting itself is the key here, not a few arbitrary, microscopic distinctions. It leaves me wondering about one's belief system is the color of a character's weapon is really the only ( or primary ) thing that gives the series integrity in one's mind.. I mean, are we really that shallow here? That's for another topic though I suppose.

So... to try to put it more succinctly: You're quitting because the Republic decided to try playing smart?

Removing uniqueness? Not really.. it's increasing the choices I have to make, not decreasing them. I really can't wrap my head around this idea that giving players more customization, especially when it's not a game balance issue, is a bad thing. Nevermind that it wasn't even hard to game the system to use the crystal you wanted, just tedious and slightly obnoxious that I had to go shoot some guy in the face on Black Talon every time my Operative decided to be nice to someone just to make sure my blaster wouldn't spontaneously stop working. Essentially. The OP claims that light/dark alignment restrictions are about having "consequences for your choices" and "making alignment paths unique"..... but I think he has it backwards. These restrictions make your alignment about the rewards, not the other way around. Especially given the fact that in the vast majority of cases, light/dark decisions don't actually effect anything significant about the quest grind.. what happens is you end up making choices based on what look you want your character to have, rather than playing your character through the story.

Attempting to twist the argument around or make yourself into a fake martyr ( by pretending people who disagree with you do so because they don't care about star wars, and then pretending people are attacking you for loving star wars) isn't doing you any favors. One must question how much of a "true fan" someone is if Bioware making the game more in line with established SW lore and removing an arbitrary and pointless restriction on a secondary aesthetic element "ruins" the game for them.

Except according to the OP and his supporters, he shouldn't have been able to, because it's "immersion breaking" for color crystals to not have alignment restrictions.

If it weren't for the fact that most of my attacks defaulted back to orange regardless of the crystal I was using. I'm perfectly cool with attacks that have special projectiles using their own colors and animations. Grav round, high impact bolt, etc. But why in the world do moves like Snipe, Hail of Bolts, Carbine Burst, Charged Bolts, et al. need to have a default color attached to them?

I'm not saying it entirely makes sense, just letting you know that the thermal detonator is, officially, a fusion bomb. They also claim it avoids unnecessary collateral damage because the reaction collapses upon itself after reaching a fixed blast radius.

It's not thermobaric... it's a fusion weapon, (supposedly) designed to atomize things with an expanding particle field.

I can completely sympathize here. TOR ruined me altwise, haven't gotten anything past act 1 finale because I keep trying out something new. Champions was.. terrifying if you weren't incredibly decisive.

I haven't independently confirmed it, but supposedly there's a second bug where high velocity cylinder was subtracting a flat value rather than its implied scaling value, adding up its damage. There's no doubt though that Arsenal/Gunnery is one of the strongest RDPS specs in the game right now solo, I think they're closer to snipers than some of the people here try to make it sound though ( it's hard to tell when theorycrafting still isn't totally solid and we don't have parses though )

A troll. The entire SI story is full of little jokes and gags. Ashara is the biggest of those.. Think about it. The inquisitor is billed as a master of dark politics and manipulation, but the only Jedi you spend serious time with is essentially uncorruptable? That's golden. Especially when you look at the Sith Warrior, the supposed brute of the pair, and how utterly trivial turning Jedi dark is to him.

Your quote cites tradition and general themes, it does not at any point state a rule (notice the use of words like "most" rather than words like "always"). The point stands that alignment requirement on crystals goes against established SW canon (where Sith sometimes use blue and Jedi sometimes use red). Pointing out what's normal and what's possible are significantly different things, and I'm not sure why people have so much trouble understanding that. Nevermind that if we really wanted to get serious about lore based coloration, we'd restrict guardians to blue, sages to green, and sentinels/shadows and all Sith to red to yellow regardless of alignment, since those are the traditional colors for those subclasses. Since you like to quote... Here's one for you from some Jedi knight: Worse, that quote is from the top of the same page you're taking your own. Further down the same page it notes that Jedi were "discouraged from using them", but at no point does it every say that a Jedi was unable to use one, or imply that said discouragement was anything enforced as a rule. I guess I just can't understand why someone would get so worked up over the idea that someone else's character might behave or look different than their preconceived notion of an archetype. Sure, maybe if the character is played terribly, but that's not the point of contention here. One might wonder why you'd make a discussion thread on a topic if you're unwilling to actually discuss the topic. Were you just hoping for an echo chamber? Improvisation and Abstraction ("It's not force lightning, it's a wrist mounted pulse cannon") and compartmentalization ("Ignore that IC, it's not RP relevant") are both pretty significant tools for RPing in general, and especially so in RPing over a medium like a video game. To be entirely blunt, if you have trouble with those, maybe this isn't for you.

Listing off a series of talents is not "shedding light on imbalance"... it's just a list. Kinetic/Darkness is certainly a good spec, but broken? Hardly. I mean, I guess it looks that way with how 'wonderful' infiltration/deception is. But the spec itself is largely fine.

Except no one is talking about Yoda. We're talking about some RPers specific Jedi character. I admit though, I still can't fathom how you can call the concept, as sickening as it is, of character customization immersion breaking while simultaneously pushing Bioware to keep something that doesn't exist anywhere in Lore and directly contradicts SW canon. Then ignore it. Treat it as a non-RP relevant perk, in the same fashion that you tend to ignore the fact that every single bounty hunter has the exact same set of companions and exact same ship and that there are several hundred champions of the great hunt. It's not like the cross class abilities aren't heavily restricted anyways (since you can only use them every twenty minutes and only solo or in a two man group ). Or hell, you could try to use your imagination to find an alternate explanation for it if you really wanted to get crazy.

How so? There's nothing in lore that indicates a hard rule on color crystal usage (quite the opposite actually), only tradition. The whole concept of "Sith can't activate blue lightsabers" is actually entirely lore breaking. If you want to talk about immersion breaking, how about the nonsensical "I was too nice, so now I have to go steal candy from a few children so my lightsaber doesn't stop working" crap that dictates the way you have to play right now in order to customize your character in a way you want? How is that not far, far more immersion breaking than customization? That would be a horrible idea. Not sure why you want to screw people who rolled on RP servers. You should definitely avoid doing the Jedi Knight story then.

That's probably because of the multiple bugs enhancing merc DPS, which those calculations probably don't take into account

I'm a bit confused. If the OP is concerned about "progression raiding" why does he want open testing? Open testing kills progression raiding because it means an encounter is already fully explored and publicized before it even hits live servers. It basically ends up meaning that progression doesn't exist for those encounters. You saw this rather blatantly in WoW, where there'd be bossmods for an encounter before the patch even hit live, and where Blizzard intentionally avoided publicly testing certain bosses for that reason.