generally i agree. one of the quiet problems with having so many skills is that it gets to a point where the player spends more time watching their skillbar than actually watching the fight. I've been raidhealing end game content in WoW for years, and i gotta say: watching healthbars and cooldowns, and co-incidentally only seeing the battle animations out of your peripheral vision, really detracts from the cinematic visual experience of the fight. I feel like this is an aspect of mmo gaming that we can and should evolve away from. i really liked the early levels of playing my assassin; i appreciated that the game didnt have a true auto-attack and the situational use of most of my attacks gave the battles a certain sense of kung-fu style timing. i was able to watch the fights unfold; you really feel like a bamf when you watch your character actually parry/deflect attacts via animation, rather than just getting a fly-text notification. now that my assassin has grown to lvl 33, my bars are almost completely full, i find that i use/need most of my skills and so am reluctant to trim my bars down, but i also am only barely able to watch the battle. that... well, frankly, isnt fun. epic glow-stick duels is what we like about starwars, right? let me watch the glowstick fight, then, and enjoy it. dont force me to dart back and forth all fight long between the skill bars, then checking to make sure i'm not standing in anything bad, then back to my skill bars just in time to catch my next important move as its cooldown finishes. let me see my character skillfully swordsmanshipping his way thru the fights like a hero. in guildwars 1, there really was kindof an undersized skill bar; you used the same rotation for every fight. but i am looking forward to the slightly (only slightly) more strategic skillbar for guildwars 2. ten fighting buttons sounds just about right. =)

purely theoretically speaking.. what are some of your ideas for future character classes? I was thinking, many quests in the game refer to slicers, hackers, etc; especially in situations involving "sliced" droids or computer systems. my concept for a Slicer character would be a sort of puppeteer, controlling a handful of small droids or perhaps a single tougher one. this would fill a niche that is available in other games, often referred to as a minion master, etc.; which at present doesnt have an swtor equivalent. for equipment, the slicer could wear light armor, possibly medium. it isnt exactly his role to do his own dirty work; he has droids for that =P and successful slicing implies a certain need for stealth, so he probably wouldnt choose thick, bulky protective gear. for weaponry, probably a single hand blaster or possibly a rifle. for skill trees, the slicer could have one spec dedicated to swarms of droids, making a pack of small drones more effective. alternatively, there could be a spec based around making a single, more powerful droid even tougher (for tanking?). lastly, there could be a spec that focuses on the hacker aspect of the slicer, improving his own effectiveness as a debuffing/crowd control monster thru slicing or sabotaging an enemy's gear, cybernetics, using emp abilities to cc droids and interrupt tech attacks, etc. so, what do you think? questions, comments? what future classes would you like to see come into being as the game evolves?