This game fell victim to the same dev bias that afflicted WoW in it's early years. Frustrated programmers that weigh 8 stone soaking wet and were raised on a diet of heroic fantasy, think the only characters that can kill people have to be big strapping warrior-types and the ones in the dresses are just there as meatsacks for them to whale on. Incompetence is also a big part of it. Plus listening to nerf-whining babies QQ'ing about allegedly OP classes (Ravage buff says hi).

My main's a Sage. I quite fancy a bash at Shadow. They're both Consular's with regards to the class quests and ofc the side quests are the same regardless. Do I fancy running the same amount of quests on the same planets all over again and spacebar through the same old boring dialogue and cutscenes? No. I just want to get to 50 to start gearing up properly and start pvping. That 30% would cut my levelling time by nearly 1/3rd. Can't have it though, because I haven't played the stupid amounts of hours necessary to have unlocked Legacy 25 and I also don't have millions of creds floating around to pay for it. Penalised for having a life that doesn't revolve around the game. I could go play WoW, run some heroics and buy heirloom gear, join a guild and get the xp perk and run some dailies/quests to buy helm/cloak and lvl 50% faster. No basement dwelling necessary.

Dunno, but anyone with the required Legacy 25 to unlock all 5 ranks most likely has a truckload of alts already.

Some people have jobs, families, friends and other interests that extend beyond parking their arse in a seat for hours at a time. I'm sorry, but if you're packing full augmented WH or RWH gear I imagine one or more of the latter are taking a back seat in your life. That's your call, if you want to obsess about pixels then whatever floats your boat, but that doesn't mean the other 99% of the playerbase should be your ****** because of it. Look at Guild Wars 2. That game doesn't allow gear to be used as a crutch in PvP. You win or lose on your merits as a player alone, not because you're jobless or anti-social. It's like premiership footballers, who think they can cheat on their partners because they're Gods among men. I think it's called Narcissistic Personality Disorder.

Sorry, I don't subscribe to the "spend more time in our game and we'll give you more stuff" MMO business model. Encouraging unhealthy amounts of hours in gaming is to be avoided. Taking it to extremes, look at the asian cases where a couple left their child to die to play online and the other instances of gamers dropping dead in internet cafes after extended play sessions. They should be advocating moderation, not grind-till-you-drop. The Legacy requirements for the xp perks are too harsh. You can reasonably achieve L15 with one or two characters played casually. This should be the ballpark for unlocking the boosts all the way to 30%. Also the credit costs need to be toned down and some of the boosts consolidated into others. For instance, having a seperate line for map discovery xp is pathetic and ridiculous. This encourages players to roll alts, without having to roll other alts first to level their subsequent alts faster (why am I the only one that seems to see how stupid this is?). This in turn keeps subs up and players interested. All I thought when I logged in post-1.3 was, "oh great, MORE good stuff for the TOR no-lifers". Not, "oh great, I'll just go grind 8 more Legacy levels and 2 million credits before I roll an alt". I fail to see how any of it makes sense from a retention standpoint.

They aren't better for the most part. They just have better stats. The rest of your post was pro-grind, elitist, entitled ranting.

I know about the launch PvP gear grind, I was there. Repeatedly referring back to the fact that fresh 50's can grind BM is moot. There's now two tiers of gear above that. BM is today's Champ gear. The fact hasn't changed that the gear gap is such that WH or RWH geared players are roflstomping everyone not similarly geared and that's too much advantage just because of thier character database entries. PvP in any game should be about who's the best player. Who knows their own class, who knows the other classes, situational awareness, cooldown management, teamplay etc. Not who can grind better than the other guy and dump weeks of gaming into a massive timesink. I'm not saying equipment should be a complete non-issue, a la GW2, but it shouldn't turn EVERY fight into a lopsided travesty. This reminds me of that time in WoW where all the top raiding players were steamrolling peeps in PvP because they had top raid sets, weapons and trinkets.

Actually you are being punished for not playing mega-hours. Player X wants to roll a new alt. He already has 4 x lvl 50's and 3 other alts. He's ground out Legacy lvl 25 across these characters. He probably has a truckload of surplus credits to buy all the xp boosts (which is also a joke, there should just be one that applies to all aspects of the game, hi hi credit sink). This gives his alt 30% xp boost in anything he decides to do in the game. He levels nearly 1/3rd faster. FOTM buffs in a patch? no worries, be right there. Player Y wants to roll a new alt. He has one lvl 50 and this is his 2nd character. He's only Legacy 8, despite doing all class quests and a bunch of side xp from warzones while levelling etc. Maybe he hasn't been playing long. He can only buy the first perk, which makes him lvl 2% faster. This is ***-backward. One player clearly *needs* the xp boost more than the other, maybe it'll keep the sub running as he's maintaining interest in the game. Maybe he won't even mind grinding the 2 million credits to unlock the xp perks, get his speeder at lvl 10 and boost his companion affection gain. But he can't, because he has to grind a gazillion dailies, or lvl other alts so he can, doh, lvl an alt faster. Time sinks. Credit sink. Grind grind grind grind grind grind. Stupid system.

BM/recruit "skill" versus full War Hero w/ augments = auto loss, even if the other guy is just facerolling his keyboard. In similar vein to your suggestion I play another game, I suggest you get a clue. Oh wait, I don't care. You're the first person on my forum ignore list. Give yourself a cookie.

Stopped reading there. Blizzard has tried to do their best to make WoW less of a second job and have told the haters living Cartman-like in their mom's basement to stick it. Games should be games, not work. It's not about having an entitlement complex, there's many ways they could balance warzones so that it's more about player ability and less about using grinded gear to prop-up your failings as a player, as you hit your one-button Logitech keyboard macro and roflstomp new players into the dust. Look at GW2. Look at WoW's matchmaking system. There's plenty of examples. Bioware have to do things backwards though. If it's not a Legacy system that only encourages alt-levelling for people that play 24/7 (character xp perks and their associated Legacy and credit costs) and already have 8 x lvl 50's, it's something else. They persist in thumbing their noses at the majority of their playerbase, while they hand out free PvP kills and Legacy perks to the minority that have made TOR their job. None of it makes sense to me at all.

Pyro powertech's smash everyon'e face in PvP. The dps they can pump out in a very short period of time is insane. I thought you said they were a tank class?

Some peeps don't particularly enjoy playing losing games with losers. A gamers game time is their own, if they choose not to waste it with kill farmers and scrubs then that's their privilege.

My point is, gear progression is all well and good, but when you factor in the crappy balance this game has you are double-penalised for a) playing the wrong class (sorc/sage in my instance) and b) the lopsided travesty that the next tier of gear brings to fights. You have a recipe for suck and ragequit subscription. By all means reward the effort gear progression takes, but not to the point all new players are your cannon fodder for the months it takes for them to catch up. Erm, no. Most War Hero geared players have been playing since launch, or close to it. When they hit 50, it was a level playing field more or less, without classes like my own having been nerfed into uselessness and others like maras/sents one-shotting peeps with Ravage. Now they get to roflstomp noobs and pugs Yay them.

Free recruit set notwithstanding, what sort of impression of the game do you think new lvl 50's are getting when stepping into warzones for the first time after completing the levelling process and they get 3-4 shot by peeps with 20k hp and against whom they do very little damage? Expertise scales far too well, sort your game out.

Yeah, but you're not factoring into the equation the massive timesink that is legacy levelling in order to get that 30%. I have 2 x lvl 50's and a smattering of 25-40 alts and I'm still only legacy 17. Don't you think having to lvl loads in order to lvl quicker isn't counter-productive? But hey, let's just do what every other MMO does: reward no-lifers, obsessives and basement-dwellers who play the game 24/7. Take that time you spent getting to legacy 25 and spend it lvling your alt and I'd imagine lvling the alt without the perk would be much quicker overall. The whole system is counter-intuitive and just a massive timesink in order to keep subs up.

The perks are crap anyway. No thought went into them whatsoever. Assuming you have, say, legacy 15 and a truckload of credits, the best you can get is 12%. What sort of difference is that going to make? With WoW heirlooms and guild perk you can lvl an alt over 50% faster from 1-80, 25% from 80-85. The entire character perk system is a joke. Miniscule benefits for outrageous cost per alt, just another thinly disguised time/credit sink.

The general stony wall of silence about anything relating to TOR and more specifically, the complete lack of forewarning/information regarding patches to patch the patch that patched that other patch, are annoying a very large portion of your playerbase Bioware. You DO have an understanding of basic customer relations and business ethics right?

Also, Blizzard happily acknowledge that the rest of the planet exists and civilisation (which contains a hefty portion of paying customers) does not stop at the borders of the Ewww Ess of Ayy.

Seriously? What do you think WoW has been doing the last few years? Seperating regional servers and performing server maintenance at different times is not exactly rocket-science, but then we're talking about a company who've had their game unavailable for about 20 hours out of the last 4 days, because of patches to fix the patch that was supposed to patch the patch.

It's a shame the forum moderator going around closing threads milliseconds after they've been posted couldn't transfer to the community relations team. He's obviously serious about his job and it seems to me they need someone a bit more...proactive in that department.

Except those head enchants are bind on battle.net account, just like the heirloom armor and can be sent to any character on the same server, even if it's opposite faction AND on a completely different account. You're missing the point. Rolling alts is all well and good, but legacy CHARACTER unlocks are a step in the wrong direction. You pretty much have to roll alts to gain the legacy lvls to unlock the damn perks in the first places, the perks make nowhere near the difference to levelling speed the equivalent system in That_Other_Game make. Time sink after time sink and credit sink after credit sink. Economy blah blah blah. It's a crap system and it'll blow up in Bioware's face.

Legacy level perks should be their own rewards. Where's the sense in making players grind Legacy levels (time sink) only to force them to grind credits (time sink) to unlock them (credit sink)? Not everyone's minted in this game. By the time you've finished paying for your skills when you hit 50, you're not exactly rolling in money, given what the average character can accumulate through questing and loot drops. Put some damn stuff to do for casual players @ lvl 50 instead of creating poorly conceived "incentives" to continue playing the game.

Legacy perks, character perks specific to that character only. Pulling mods from items that cost a packet. Credits, credits, credits. Grinding credits from dailies. Grinding legacy xp/rolling alts to unlock legacy perks that cost....credits. How is this supposed to persuade me to continue playing TOR? That Other Game learned very early on that MMO players DO NOT enjoy being forced to grind anything. Why are you alienating your playerbase when you're suffering so much for subs?

There's an orange one using that skin available for commendations on Balmorra.

The 10-49 bracket in particular is full of fail. As mentioned previously, mostly freshly minted scrubs with no clue, no talent points to speak of, randomly humping the nearest red flagged player, even after they've been told what to do. No-one calls incoming to objectives, in fact, most don't seem to know how to use the /ops chat. Bolster can't make up for outright stupidity. Sometimes you zone into a game and straight away you're trying to do the work of 8 people on your own. The ultimate travesty is when these games happen on PvP servers and you see legacy surname players doing it, peeps that obviously have a main and should know better. You ask them to stop messing about and get told, "**** scrub, don't tell me what to do. I R here for teh lulz!!". After 5-10 minutes in a queue for a game only to be met with this sort of crap, it's enough to test the patience of even the most tranquil player. Some peeps have limited time to play and find that time wasted by never-ending rivers of fail.