I'm not sure exactly what I'm doing wrong, but this can't be right. I'm currently playing commando. DPS/Healer hybrid spec, mostly just experimenting. With Elara or Jorgen I usually don't have any trouble - Elara has no trouble keeping me healthy, and Jorgen dishes out the dps fast enough that healing isn't an issue on most regular mobs. But, I just got M1-4X. "Great! A tank!" I thought, and put him in my party for Tattooine. I'm level 27 BTW. He gets decimated. By like three mook-level guys. I'm not saying he dies because of no healing. I mean within four seconds he's below half health, WITH me desperately throwing heals on him. I didn't even have time to do any attacks, everything was going to heals. When he went down, I beat the two regular mooks, and fought the silver to a standstill (I couldn't muster the dps to beat his heals, and he couldn't muster the dps to beat mine) I went back with Elara, and beat the same three guys with ME tanking, without dropping below 3/4. Decimated them within a few seconds. Noww, I've got a Sith Assassin, and I used to run around with Khem Val all the time, and I never had this problem. I couldn't heal Khem, but against guys like that, he never really needed it, and I could safely leave him. But M1-4X right now is squishier than Elara is by a frightening degree. I've checked his abilities, and he's got his tanking ability checked, so... what am I doing wrong?

I vote we petition the mods to correct the thread title. "If you could swap out one companion for Blizz, who would it be?"

I get the feeling given Thana's prominence in the Taris plotline meant that originally you were going to have a choice of companions: Ashara for Light-side Inquisitors, Thana for Dark-side Inquisitors. However, it was probably cut due to time constraints. I could be wrong, but otherwise her presence throughout the entire storyline feels unusual.

Thana Vesh? No thank you. No, really. You can have her. Me personally? I found her incredibly annoying. She's a spoiled little poser who talks big but can't back it up, who's master fawns over her for talent she's never demonstrated, and her only remarkable ability is her astounding skill in dismissing reality in favor of her 'Thana iz bestest' worldview. It's so blatant it's painful. It's suspect her of some kind of Sithy trolling, but she's obviously not smart enough. I'd only take her as a companion if I was also give the option to jettison her out of the airlock as soon as we cleared the atmosphere.

So, basically, the Sith Emperor is a Force Ghost. An absurdly powerful Force Ghost. And as we've seen, NO ONE seems to be able to deal with even minor Force Ghosts. In the Dark Temple, Sith were getting possessed and murdered left and right. In the Jedi enclave on Taris, they struggled to deal with just one, who didn't even want to appear. Nobody could do anything about it. Except... ... Yeah. I think I know who's gonna get last crack at the Emperor once the rest of you have killed enough of his Voices to weaken him. Hey, we Sith Inquisitors are already on the Dark Council. we've made a career of doing horrible things to our bosses. Eating the undying spirit of our last remaining direct superior is really just natural progression. ... Still, bet he gives us an awful case of indigestion.

Actually, if you want a game where you are continually relegated to the roll of 'faceless mook', play Final Fantasy XI. In that game, you can quite easily proceed through an epic quest chain to eventually defeat a GOD, and by the end of it... No one remembers your name. Not even the NPCs you adventured with! You are again anonymous and forgettable, and you will get your *** handed to you by a pack of schoolkids in a cutscene. Honestly, I DID that for a bunch of years, and I never really saw the appeal of it, because and the end of the day, you never get to be the hero. You are a random stranger tag-along to the main characters, who observes their story, does some stuff behind the scenes, and is ultimately forgotten. you are forced to become whatever THEIR story demands you to be, and you never have an identity of your own.

I've personally found that it can be fun to play against the grain, at least on the Force Users. I played my Sith Inquisitor light side, and I feel that it added a lot of depth to the character. Instead of being just another baddie fully immersed in the insanity that is the Sith, she's a basically good person, trying to hold the Empire together, and derive a moral code from the Sith philosophy. She's no Jedi (And from the dick moves the Jedi pull in the Imperial storylines, I can't see her ever wanting to defect to them), but she does her best to guide her motley crew, and not let the darkness of the dark underbelly of the Sith Empire overwhelm her. And in the same vein, I've started a Jedi Knight, and I'm playing him Darkside. Not relentlessly so, but making choices based upon the character of a knight who is arrogant, power-seeking, and very much feels the ends justify the means. And again it gives depth to the story, how he is slipping to the dark side, while his Masters miss the signs, while praising his accomplishments. Each of his decisions is justifiable, at least in his own head, but in the end, he is seeking power for power's sake.

I find it interesting that the one thing the establishments of BOTH the Jedi and the Sith agree upon, almost universally (Though with different methods of enforcement) is that attachments such as love, strong friendship, or family, as bad things. For the Jedi, they can lead to grief, anger, and the Dark Side. For the Sith, they lead to hesitation, a weakness for peers and enemies to exploit, and a softening of the constant rage a Sith must maintain to support his power. Both sides take measures to prevent attachments. Sith train their acolytes to distrust, disdain and fear each other from the start, and Jedi train their Padawans to distance themselves, control their emotions, and sever attachments. The amusing part is, in both cases they are fighting a losing battle. People form attachments. It's part of our natures. Remove family and friends? Students bond with Masters. Even on the Sith side we've seen students who are devoted to their masters to the point of sacrificing their own bodies and souls willingly. We've seen Jedi Masters driven to the Dark Side from their loss of their Padawans. We've seen both Sith and Jedi literally come back from the dead to help those they cared about. Even canonically. Obi Wan and Anakin. Their relationship is that of two brothers. They're a family, and remain so even after Anakin is a Knight in his own right. Qui Gon was a father to Obi Wan. There's no blood relation, but the relationship is there. I'm pretty sure half of the Jedi who go Dark side is just because the Jedi are so utterly lousy at dealing with the problem. I'm sure anyone who knows anything about psychology, grief management, and how to raise healthy and emotionally stable individuals would tell the Jedi You're doing it wrong. As for the Sith, well... Maybe if they got more hugs they'd be nicer?

Actually, I wanna touch on the Malgus side of things. The feeling I get from Malgus in all these Flashpoints that we do for him, as well as his appearances in the Ilum quests, is that he is rational and effective. He seeks to understand what he faces, he works to turn opponents into allies, and problems into opportunities. He doesn't have the same kind of crippling hubris that a lot of Sith Lords suffer from. He's rational, and will take the facts at face value, even when they don't tell him what he might want to hear (For instance, Hammer Station, the logs we recovered indicated it had fallen into the wrong hands through a botched Republic attempt to dispose of the station, rather than malice on the Republic's part. Rather than cover it up and use that to fuel the movement to restart the war, and discredit the Republic, he accepted the truth, and shared it freely with us) He's also the guy who lead the sacking of Coruscant, and personally slew who knows how many powerful Jedi. This is a guy who is powerful, rational, effective, and charismatic. Why, exactly then, would we NOT defect to his side when he decided to secede? Bounty Hunters? They go where the credits are, and Malgus pays well. Sith Inquisitors? Just about every other Sith Lord has either proven to be incompetent, corrupt, or actively trying to kill them in their experience. The Emperor is basically in absentia, and at the end of the SI storyline, you're a Dark Council member... the logical next step is to take a crack at the reins of power themselves, and Malgus' campaign would be a good shot at that. Sith Warriors? Malgus is your archetype, for crying out loud! Imperial Agents? How many Imp agents have complained about having to kiss Sith booty? Wouldn't it be kinda nice to get some respect back and shake up the status quo? Not everyone would want to join his cause, of course, but among all my friends, we basically all agreed that we couldn't see why our characters WOULDN'T join Malgus, or see him as a better Emperor than What's-his-face-who's-been-too-busy-mind-******-Revan-to-show-his-face-for-the-last-three-centuries. And we run the gamut, from pure Darkside to disgustingly Lightside. So... Why are we trying to kill him?

My bounty hunter friend and I wonder about this, after she fell to her death for the second or third time, and did not save herself with her rocket boots/pack. My guess is there is some Mandalorian code of honor that requires the use of a rocket pack only in certain situations, and that death is preferable to breaking the code, even for the most unscrupulous bounty hunters. So far, we'd discovered the Rocket Pack Code prohibits the use of rocket packs in the following situations: 1. Falling to your death 2. Trying to jump up to a platform to get something, or moving about the world in general. 3. Anytime it would provide a logical or convenient escape from something nasty about to give you a hard time 4. Anytime it would give you a tactical advantage. 5. Basically, anytime you AREN'T doing 'Death from Above' or venting heat.

It could be worse. If FFXI, the skill bloat was rather extreme, especially for mage classes... in fact, any magic using class was guaranteed to have more than 50% of it's abilities be completely useless by max level. Mages were closer to 80%. That still left a huge number of abilities that you had to hotkey. But that wasn't all! Oh no... because FFXI allowed... nay, required on-the-fly gear swaps. For instance, say you're a Ranger (Ranged DPS). You would eventually get yourself an arrow called Patriot Protector Arrow. This was ONE ARROW (Unique/Untradeable too, so you could only ever have one) that was stupid expensive, but had really high damage. To use this, you would need to create a macro that would swap the arrow into your ammo, pop the ability that allowed you to fire a shot without consuming ammunition - allowing you to use the arrow's stats - Pop the actual attack you wished to use with it, then swap your regular arrows back in. In endgame, you did this sort of thing for EVERY. SINGLE. ABILITY. Want to heal? Gear swap to healing buff gear. Buff? Another swap. Tanking? Gear swaps for your taunt, weaponskills, self-heals... DPS? If you weren't blinking like a Christmas Tree light from all the gear swaps, you got the boot for Doing It Wrong. So EACH SEPARATE ABILITY involved about 8 different actions. Sometimes you would need to chain macros to accomplish everything. So... yeah, TOR has a lot of abilities. But it can ALWAYS be worse.

Step 1. Go to Taris Step 2. Find 'Suspicious Jedi Corpse' Step 3. Click out of curiosity Step 4. Replace underwear Seriously though, it varies. Some world bosses are up and wandering about, others are a force spawn, usually by finding a rather conspicuous pile of corpses and clicking on it.

I haven't played anything but Assassin yet myself, but comparing notes with some friends who have played other classes, like Bounty Hunter or Imperial Agent, a Darkness-spec Assassin seems to be pretty good. You have the survivability of a tank (And to be honest, companions just don't tank well in the later stages of the game), plus you get sneaky sneak abilities (Including Force Cloak, which can get you out of sticky situations if you get in over your head). Assassin hurts a bit for a decent healer until you get Talos, but Andronikos is a perfectly good DPS companion and you get him early on. When compared to my Bounty Hunter friend who's playing a Merc, I've found I can breeze through most things, the stealth abilities, CCs and sneak attacks allowing me a lot of control over the battles... including whether I even fight them or not. And then once I DO fight, I can mix it up without fear, with enough AoE taunts and damage to keep my Companion from eating floor.

Except... it kinda doesn't make sense that way, for three reasons. 1. One of an Assassin's jobs is to tank. Using a doublesaber allows them to use a shield, where two sabers you can't. Assassins are also, at the core, Inquisitors, who focus on a lot more use of the Force than Warriors, so they can also use that slot for a Focus. 2. A saberstaff is functionally a quarterstaff with blades. It works pretty good for defense, but for offense it's awkward. It's major advantage has always been an opponent's unfamiliarity with it, and in the Cold War era, they're fairly common. Functionally, it is a single weapon, and is suited best for inflicting heavy, unopposed surprise damage, or fighting defensively. Dual lightsabers, however, ARE independent, and are more difficult to defend against... a more suitable attacking weapon. 3. Throwing a saberstaff is even more problematic. Given the length of the blades and your typical throwing motion, you'd lop your own arm off. you'd need to throw a saberstaff like a javelin to do it safely.

I would like to get that Dream-walking Gormak from the Voss series as a companion...

I think you get some of the most interesting characterizations and concepts by playing 'Against the grain' so to speak. Light side Sith, Dark side Jedi, etc. It's a little less dramatic with other classes, since by definition they are naturally 'grey' and not as polarized. However, I play my Sith as someone who sees and recognizes that at the very top the Empire is broken, that the Emperor is insane and the Empire does not adhere to the values it espouses. However, she firmly believe sin those values, and believes that if the Empire could be brought in line with them, it would be a good thing. She believes in the idea of a meritocracy (Being a slave who became a Sith Lord by her own merits, that's an understandable position). She doesn't coddle the weak, but at the same time feels that people should not be held down, and given the chance to show that they can be more than fodder (The troops on Hoth, who she endorsed as being able to surprise the Moff who dismissed them as 'disposable'). She's not seen much from the Jedi that's so admirable... her experience has shown her Jedi who have abandoned and dismissed those that loved them and sacrificed everything for them to pursue the power the Order could give them, Jedi who manipulated whole races to fight their wars for them, creating the schism between the peoples of Voss and condemning them to eternal conflict. The Sith are no better, true, but they are at least honest about what they do and what they are. I'm planning a Jedi alt next, darkside, and see how that goes.

Ah good. I've already been doing this (since level 20, really), and all but my bracers are now orange (working on that). Also got Artificing up to 400 (I'm Sith Inquisitor) so it's just a matter of grinding RE to get some of it. That's a relief, really, 'cuz most of the SI gear is pretty awful looking.

And before any of you say 'You don't HAVE to do anything, just like you don't HAVE to play this game', let me elaborate. I don't really enjoy PvP, really in any game. I'm not any good at it, i generally just find it frustrating and demoralizing, and either I feel like a failure, or like I'm curb stomping some poor kid who's even worse at it than I am and/or simply killing him with the superior math of my better gear. My first experience with Huttball didn't dissuade this idea. A bunch of random level 20's vs a level 50 premade. Now, I like PvE stuff. I love Flashpoints and questing and Heroics, hunting Champions and Elites, and all that stuff. I'm really looking forward to Hard Modes of all the Flashpoints. However, all of the guides and information I see about endgame talk about getting your PvP sets, and I'm not entirely clear on it, but... Is this gear a necessary tier for endgame? do I need to get this stuff to do all of the challenging PvE stuff? I play on a PvE server, and was hoping I could just sidestep this whole thing. And please don't try and tell me how much fun PvP is, or extoll the virtues of ganking or honor grinding or whatever. I'm not interested.

I think Ashara qualifies as 'grey' quite strongly. You sometimes hear her combining the Sith and Jedi codes as she tries to find a kind of middle road to walk: "Peace, passion... Knowledge, victory... Freedom, the Force..." I agree that her story is still undeveloped, but she really is one of those unfortunates who, while not buying into the whole Sith philosophy, also is too passionate to really be able to follow the Jedi code.

Yes, we have. Unfortunately, the first test of the weapon misfired and hit Dromund Kaas, resulting in the entire Dark Council, and the majority of Sith Lords being turned into pedantic twits with way too much power. Hoth was a natural target, because without it, our troops aren't dumb enough to not say '**** this noise!' and desert when heat fails for the umpteenth time. Making the local Republic troops into morons was just a happy side benefit.

I would find it depressing and really unfair if the armor our ancestor wore was not equipable by our class. "Yeah, our ancestor was Kallig, a tremendously powerful Sith Sorceror. He had really cool armor. Wish I could get a set, but in the last thousand years or so apparently the Dark Council decreed that Inquisitors can't wear anything that looks like it could deflect a butter knife. We can wear TIE Fighter wings on our shoulders, though."

I think the main issue is that YOU, as the player, are in charge, and your companions are subordinates. However, in the SW universe, and especially during the Cold War, Force users are the upper echelons. They're the leaders, the generals, the strike team commanders. Even those who prefer to work alone generally give orders rather than take them, and aren't going to be inclined to follow the lead of a non-Force sensitive rather than their own instincts. Force users are rare, and a valuable resource. For a Jedi, it would be unusual indeed for them to let a Bounty Hunter or rank-and-file trooper boss them around. A younger Jedi perhaps, but for a Padawan to be masterless and out on their own is again extremely unlikely. A Grey Jedi is a possibility, but if he's not the sort to listen to the Jedi Council, why would he listen to you? Not impossible, but tough to write. For the Imperial side it's even worse. What Sith, even the mildest-mannered, light-sidiest Sith, would follow around a Bounty Hunter or Imperial Agent and do their bidding? Just to SURVIVE the Academy on Korriban requires an individual willing and able to stand up to the trials AND their instructors. The trained Sith response to authority is to plot to overthrow it, and any Sith who DOESN'T immediately loses face with his peers. And/or is killed. Again, not impossible, but difficult to explain WHY a Sith would obey the orders of a non-Force user. A Force user joining your crew would almost have to be a late-game add, after you've already proven you can hold your own against Force-users.

Which set is that?

Ah yes, good old Nomar. He's the one who cemented my belief that there's a good reason the Jedi reputation is in the toilet with the Republic. Also, Ashara's Masters.

I guess I qualify as one of those reviled 'casual' players who bring MMOs down, but I might as well chip in. I was never really into WoW, though it was a close thing. I was already playing FFXI, when a friend of mine convinced me to try the WoW open Beta. He was insistent he needed an adventuring buddy, and I said "Ok, as long as you show me the ropes, I'm new to this MMO stuff" I downloaded the game, created a Troll... something, I can't even remember, and told him. "Just gimmie a minute, finishing a quest." Ok, logged into FFXI while I waited. I poked him for the next 6 hours about when he was gonna come join me so we could try this out, and he told me "Yeah, I'm level 17 now, so there really isn't much point" My friend was a hardcore MMO player. But I did play FFXI, and I was witness to the single worst MMO launch I've ever heard of, FFXIV. In fact, I still play it, purely because I want to see what happens with Square Enix's frankly heroic efforts to salvage the wreckage left by a Dev team that apparently didn't give a damn. ToR was as far on the other end of the spectrum as possible. Granted, the character models are nothing compared to FFXIV's, but you quickly realize they were looking to evoke the feel of the comic book art in the environments. The quest lines are epic, the voice acting is superb, and lots of things to do to make leveling less of a chore. The game just feels polished, and not the rickety, content-barren mess that FFXIV was. Now, there are downsides. The game feels very linear. You progress through a planet, finish your quests, and then leave, without any reason to return. The space combat feels kinda tacked on... I enjoy it, but there's certainly nothing 'multiplayer' about it. But all in all, it's a game I'd enjoy if it were single player. Bringing a few friends along to access additional areas and content (and having that actually incorporated into the cutscenes and story decisions) isn't just icing on the cake. It's a complete second cake.