No change in 1.2, FWIW; it still claims that she's gone even though nothing is different.

I got that part. What I was missing is where the new augments would come from, if we have no existing augments to RE for the schematics. Chicken-and-egg problem; apparently we're meant to get some starter schematics from slicing crits (thanks Serbegorn), and then start cycling from there.

This has got me a little confused. Slicing missions can't retrieve augments anymore... but the only way to learn the augment schematics is by REing augments. And apparently we can't blow up augments from before the patch. Is there another source of augments that I'm just completely missing? Something to start the trickle-down effect that we're apparently depending on?

/facepalm You know the time spent downloading and applying the patch is a great opportunity to read the final version of live patch notes... where tech parts are even mentioned in their own note.

Unfortunately, hotkeys don't work for any button that isn't currently visible. That meant that, in the old way, choosing to display your bar meant that you could only use hotkeys for the first 4 (hardcoded) companion abilities. The cooldowns and mode/stance toggles couldn't be used... completely defeating the point of hotkeys. Displaying the companion bar allowed all those Ctrl+whatever hotkeys to work again, but at the cost of not seeing one of your own precious bars. Or being able to use any of those hotkeys. So I for one am liking the separate companion bar. If you don't want it, you can still toggle it off (and view only the first 4 abilities).

I know. I've always had it on the left. That has nothing to do with the bug report. If I hide the companion bar -- say, because I want to use the left and right and bottom bars for my own abilities and items -- then the hidden companion abilities become unusable. (Try it yourself and see.)

I've done zero research to see if this idea is already coming down the pipe, mostly because the forum search engine is crap. Anyhow. We can already bring party members on board our ships. BW even handled the case where the player takes off on a space mission with other people on board (they can bail out with the escape pod). But what would really make the game feel more like the original movies is letting guest players on the ship sit down at a deck gun and help shoot stuff during a space mission. Maybe the guest-deck-gun would be a ship upgrade that we'd have to purchase. That'd be understandable. Maybe having a guest help in space missions raises the requirements for each mission (e.g., shoot 60 things instead of 40, etc), so that they wouldn't be completely cheesed. Perhaps having a guest player unlocks additional bonus missions. Give us a 5th button on the ship abilities bar which emotes "great, kid, but don't get cocky!" At any rate, there's currently no other reason to bring another player on board your ship, unless both of you have a load screen fetish. It looks like BW has already laid the groundwork for something like this.

I submitted this as an in-game bug report, and was told to post in the Suggestions forum instead. So: The hotkeys on the companion bar are only usable when the specific buttons are visible. This means that Ctrl+1 through 4 are usable all the time, but if you've collapsed the compansion bar, the other hotkeys have no effect. For example, the DPS companions can't be switched between single-target and AOE mode by using Ctrl+- and Ctrl+=. This completely breaks the whole point of having them hotkeyed. /facepalm

Actually, as I wrote in the OP, the green->blue->purple thing is well understood and not what we're asking about. But thank you anyhow. The "(42)", as it happens, remains the same whether the modification is green, blue, or purple. So the quality of the modification is irrelevant here.

So I'm having a debate with a friend. The topic is the green-quality gear that is both modifiable and specific to a particular companion. Random examples: http://www.torhead.com/item/voxRwh/zeniths-summit-rifle http://www.torhead.com/item/18joG5N/m1-4xs-first-rate-blaster-turret His opinion: even if they're moddable, it's still worth replacing them with an orange item, because green is largely crap. My opinion: these are equivalent to oranges because it all depends on the mods, not the quality of the main item (there's no "multiplier"). Normally greens would never be moddable, but these are exceptions only because they're locked to a single companion. Anybody want to weigh in with informed opinions? ("Yeah, you're ugly too!")

Most of this thread can be summed up in a single image.

I find the current space combat to be more fun than most of the planetary quests. Certainly far few bugs and crashes and lockups, graphics-wise. If they fixed the interface for proton torps, that'd be all I really want out of space combat until the rest of the game got unbuggered.

Frankly, if patch 1.2 does nothing more than fix the current glaring bugs, that'd be enough to keep me around for another content patch cycle. Plenty of alts to level.

Meh. That's not very "heroic". That's just questing in a phased area, and we have plenty of those already. There should be some challenge! My gf and I do that already. Good communication between the two players is key. Even then it's not always a steamroll through the place. Posters upthread said it best: grouping-to-level just isn't viable for most players, and the planets are deserted now that the rush is done. I agree that there should be more Heroic 2+ and not as many Heroic 4's, or at least move the 4's to earlier in the planetary quest hubs. Little reason to do them when you're leaving the planet, extra content or otherwise.

WoW has a "loop music" toggle. You can have nonstop music if you like. I don't actually know what the music sounds like in this game. Ever since getting my first shipdroid, I turn off my computer speakers while waiting to login.

Check the vendors on each new planet. Not the commendation ones, but the oddball specialty/armor/etc NPCs standing around the first major quest hub outside of the spaceport. My Shadow has gotten to the mid-40's using blue-quality willpower shields from rewards and vendors. (I doubt I'll play the game long enough to reach 50, too many bugs.)

Yeah, the server is hosed. Customer Service has some threads active: [Anchorhead Login Issue] Can't get past the first splash screen. Anchorhead needs a reboot... No response or acknowledgement from BioWare yet.

They can be tabbed. Or rather, each tab has its own list of displayed channels. Right-click on the tab and play with the settings; uncheck the things you don't want to see. I tend to move all public channels off the main NPC conversation tab because... there is no traffic in public channels, because there are no people in the planetary zones. Might as well avoid potential noise when trying to follow conversations. When I'm back on the Fleet and there's a chance of actual public chat, I display the secondary tab instead. Can also filter out a lot of the annoying system messages that way too.

I dread going to Taris on my Republic toons. I make it a point to do nothing but class storyline missions and leave as soon as possible. Why? Because it's the size of later planet/zones, and it's spread out like later planet/zones, but at levels 15-ish through 21-ish, you're still stuck walking around. The levelling experiencing there is mostly spent slogging around identical swamp, identical grass, identical walls, and not enough time spent playing the game. Fighting, talking, learning how to use that new ability you just trained up, etc. On my first toon there, I made the mistake of doing alllllll the side quests. (Interesting story and lore with the rakghouls, well written, but godawful travel time.) I kept waiting to visit areas that were... well, within walking distance. I hadn't learned yet that every new mission involved 10+ minutes of just walking through the exact same trees merely to get *to* the mission area. Later I did the Bonus Series -- but by then I had the basic speeder. HUGE difference -- most of time was spent actually DOING things, with a bare minimum of wall-clock time spent zipping around on my Hovering Lawnmower of Justice. So if they do anything for the future of Taris, it desperately needs to be for higher levels, and not just alternate places to go at the current level bracket. 10 minutes of walking IRL? Enjoyable minor warmup to a real hike. 10 minutes of walking in-game? Tedious drudgery.

(1) There's no way to lock a window's position. Then they put the resizing grab point further out into the game field than any other part of the UI, where I most likely to accidentally mouse over it when trying to target mobs in the upper-left quarter of the screen. (2) The amount of useless crap dumped out during login: "You are leaving a rest zone." No, you idiots, I wasn't *in* a rest zone. I was *logged out*. "User1 has joined /LFG." "User2 has joined /LFG." ... "UserN has joined /LFG." During anything remotely close to prime time, this can scroll everything else off the screen past the point of recovery. I really don't need a complete dump of every stranger who's in a public channel. (For that matter, they didn't "join" the channel, they were already there!)

The problem is that LFG would also turn into cross-one Trade, PvP, guild recruiting, general chat, flaming, etc, all in one. Shoot, how often do you see the existing Trade and PvP channels actually used for those topics? Maybe once a day? That's because they're all just dumped into General chat, and that's because there's no special restrictions on General *or* extra features on the other channels. Make restrictions like not linking items in General, and you'd see Trade see some activity. (They'd have to fix linking *anything at all* first, but you get my point.) Make extra features in the other channels like [3 - PvP] [somebody] LFM for that one warzone, [click here] to see current group comp with a useful popup window, and you'd see more people using it. Make a special LFG channel with the ability to link something unique there, and spam wouldn't be as much of a problem. I don't think the global LFG channels should be automatically split up by level range though, because like you said above, I want to be able to find groups for my lower-level alts. The current /who window can search the content of the LFG Comment, which right now is the only way to find people outside of your current zone. This is good, since the average planetary zone holds about six people, but a failure since you can only see the first 10 letters of the LFG Comment. >< We desperately need a global LFG.

This. Usually it's a bonus quest, but not always. Except, you know, when the mission takes place in a phased area now locked out. Being on the same planet doesn't help. Hell, I'm standing next to the questgiver, and it'll let me reset the mission back to the beginning, but not abandon it. (Why the freak would any mission not on the class storyline EVER be marked as "cannot abandon, player is doomed to do this mission or else"? Let alone the bonus ones.)

Aha! That was the crucial bit of info that I was missing. Thank you muchly. My next quest is to find out exactly what "other one-handed melee weapons tied to the Aim attribute" are out there besides actual techblades. Assuming that there are any and the text isn't just another bug. Cheers.

I know about the generalized restrictions, I was wondering about scatterguns in particular. If they're just "stat sticks" like everything else, then great, I'll treat them as such and compare them as such. If there's some unique scattergun-only ability that simply doesn't mention it on the tooltip (which I've learned is not uncommon), then I need to keep the scattergun around. For example, Tharan can use blaster pistols. If I can toss an orange blaster pistol in his offhand, then it's worth spending the time and effort to acquire one. If it's going to turn out that one of his abilities actually requires a scattergun but due to a bug doesn't list that... you see where I'm going with this. :-)

/facepalm Because it's tedious and expensive to do so for no reason other than experimenting, and I thought a helpful community might be able to provide an experienced answer? You know, like the word "community" implies? Seriously, if you can't say anything constructive, don't post.