It's my assumption that the Emperor was using Revan's scheme at the Foundry as part of the Emperor's genocidal plan to ascend to godhood. Revan's droids were to be the Emperor's means of sacrificing Imperial lives, without Revan being aware of how he was being used. You can see more of Revan unwittingly playing into his emeny's hands on Yavin 4. I kind of like the fact that Revan's this clumsy fool whose messes we have to keep fixing; it makes him slightly less of a Mary Sue. Anyways, whether Malgus was aware of the Emperor's end goal or not, Malgus had a hand in saving countless worlds when he sent the heroes of the Empire (funny how even evil has its heroes in this game) to stop Revan. That buys Malgus a little forgiveness in my book. That, and his rejection of the Empire's racism toward nonhumans. Not a nice man, and clearly not unselfish either, but not as rotten to the core as many genre fiction villains.

Has anyone tried just vending these things? (I'm rerolling new toons and haven't done any high end crafting yet). See what the vendor gives you for it. It may be something as simple as a worthwhile way of liquidating old and superfluous crafting mats from the previous expansion into credits, for people who were at the old level cap long enough to have a stockpile that's just cluttering up their inventory now.

Yeah, the developers have been fantastic about responding to player requests for customizability when it comes to our characters' clothes. It's for this reason that Adaptive armor was added to the game after launch, along with the ability to craft Augment slots (originally found only on Operations gear) to the gear of our choice through crafting. Your Omenbringer robes can literally be endgame raid or PvP gear on the inside, if you earn that gear but want to keep the Omenbringer robe's look.

I'd suggest crafting high level goods with the blue mats and whatever crafting skills you have on your characters. Someone might need a good supply of blues to reverse engineer, so that they can learn purple schematics. You might need to reverse engineer a bunch of blues yourself, to learn high end purple schematics in your own crafting skills. It depends on what your needs are, really.

You've got it, OP. Note the effect that this has on leveling: you can have spec-defining abilities real early in the game, now that they don't have to be buried deep into the old talent trees to keep hybrid builds from complicating class balance. This is a boon to classes like Jedi Sage, for example, which used to have to go to level 40 before it had anything but the baseline class abilities from Tython in its arsenal.

I'd invite you to check Dulfy's list of the packs from the 12 Days promotion here, if only because that site has been tracking the contents of all the different packs since they were first released. On the list I'm linking you to, you can find visual guides to all the armor, weapons, vehicles, pets, et cetera in the different packs. It's all stuff that's geared toward customizing your character's appearance the way you want, so which packs you pick up are a matter of personal taste. It's probably best to just show you where you can find previews of all those items. Note that the contents of each pack you buy are a randomly determined few items out of everything that type of pack might contain. It's like a pack of trading cards, in a way. This could end up saving you some money, if you have credits to spend on the GTN. Items found in Cartel packs have a temporary (I think 36 hour) bind on trading. About a day and a half after someone opens a pack, they can put the vehicles, armor, and stuff that they don't want to keep up on the GTN. This can lead to prices for those items really dropping if the market gets flooded with them and people start trying to undersell one another. If one pack has an outfit you like, you might get a great deal on it on the GTN a couple of days after that pack goes on sale.

The number of companions that you can assign missions to at the same time increases as your character gains class levels. Crafting of any kind will become much less of a hassle once your Sentinel completes his/her class story missions on Coruscant. At that point, the Jedi Knight player will have the ranged tank droid companion, a melee damage dealer companion, and a protocol droid who comes with your starship. (The protocol droid can heal, a little bit, but he's realy intended as an extra pair of hands to work crew skill missions for you). Adventure with the one you like the best, and let the other two companions gather and craft for you. Synthweaving will make armor for that melee damage dealer companion, as well. When you're not keeping them busy crafting, I know that Slicing really takes off once you have a couple extra sets of hands looking for lockboxes off-stage, as well. Another thing to keep in mind for any more characters that you create later: talking to all the crew skill trainers unlocks Codex entries on the crew skills that they teach. You can find a lot of information there on what each crafting skill can make, and which gathering skills support which crafting skills.

There's point in the game where even your quest reward armor is moddable gear with preinstalled purple mods; at that point, you can always pull those mods out and install them in gear that has the look you want.

You can also craft stat parts for the Armoring and Mod slots on adaptive armor, with the Cybertech crew skill. Cybertech can craft armoring and mods for any class' stat needs, allowing you to keep your Sith and his companions in up to date adaptive gear that has the stats they use. By crafting these parts instead of buying them from vendors, you could potentially save yourself a ton of Basic Commendations to spend on good high level gear at the level cap. A decent starter kit for the endgame content, anyhow! You can also earn these commendations by the bucketful from repeatable daily missions at level cap, so there's really no wrong answer when it comes to your choice of crafting skill. Since you're playing a Sith Warrior, you might want Artifice for your crafting skill instead, which will make Enhancement modules for adaptive armor and moddable weapons, plus hilts and color crystals for your moddable lightsaber. The hilt in your lightsaber has a big impact on the amount of damage your attacks dish out, and Artifice can also make the otherwise rare stat items for your character's two Relic slots. Again, it's an interesting option, but I don't think that going either way would be mandatory for you to enjoy your gear. When you get to the point where the best gear in the game comes from either drops or commendations, all the crew skills look like they're just different roads to the same destination.

When an item's durability is reduced to zero, the stats on it are deactivated until you repair your gear. I'm pretty sure that set bonuses are carried on the Armoring item plugged into a piece of armor's moddable slots. Move the Armoring that has the set bonus over to the gear you really want to wear, and you should be good to go. If I'm not mistaken, your newly modded armor should now have the durability of the gear you stripped the parts from, also.

If you found choosing talents to be a complex and challenging experience before, you're probably a lot less 1337 than you imagine yourself to be.

There's enough of a surplus of content that you can pick and choose, really. If you really like the story of one given planet, go ahead and do it all. The only issue that crops up for me when I linger on a planet too long while leveling, is that it starts to get hard to find crafting materials for gear for my character's level if I've outgrown the content on the planet I'm on. That's always enough to spur me to wrap up business where I am and move on.

.....

That monster is difficult to beat until you figure him out. He's got three abilities: Obliterate, Extract, and Absorb. Obliterate will knock you back a few feet, but it doesn't do very much damage. Extract and Absorb heal the monster, allowing it to wear you down, and these are the two that you need to prevent the monster from using. When he's casting Extract, have your interrupt ready and use it. The monster is draining health from you to heal himself. Don't let him. When he's casting Absorb, there's a tentacle somewhere in the room. Kill it, quickly, before the monster can drain health from it. If you're doing those two things, interrupting Extract and killing the tentacle during Absorb, you and a companion can quickly put the monster down. I've done it as a squishy Sentinel with a DPS companion, no tanks or heals, and we were able to outlast this guy. Kill his heals and you kill him.

I can't comment on which spec is "better" now, as ideally they're pretty close, but Flaming Fist does, indeed, replace Rocket Punch for Pyros. In developer blogs about the class changes just before the expansion launch, they said that they wanted to be able to remove baseline class abilities from your menu when a new, spec defining, advanced class move replaces them in your rotation, but they're still working out how to do that in the game's code. Hence the shared cooldown as a stand-in solution.

Currently, you don't even have to do the puzzle. Placed where you have to pass it, atop a stairwell before you reach the room where the final fight takes place, there's a deactivated astromech droid on the ground which you can just loot for parts, as if it were a chest. It's a full set of gear for T7. This was as of a few days ago, so I don't know whether this change is for the duration of the x12 XP bonus, or whether it's a permanent change to a puzzle that people were running right past because its design wasn't apparent.

Everyone on my ignore list is someone who thinks bigoted jokes in chat are okay, or a Consular/Inquisitor who thinks that their knockback button is a standard part of their DPS rotation. I'm not grouping with either more than once.

I cursed out loud when I realized I was probably looking at the sites of another couple of datacrons.

It's generally true that Jedi Knights and Sith Warriors get a lot of their defense from activated abilities, rather than passive armor. This is true of the tank specs as well, which is what sets them apart from Trooper/Bounty Hunter tanks; Jedi and Sith have unlimited resources once combat begins, but have to manage cooldowns to stay alive, while the ranged tanks have colossal passive defense, but have to be smart about budgeting their energy. Having played Guardian and Juggernaut before, I had already gotten into the mindset of having to actively defend myself before trying Sentinel and Marauder, and I honestly haven't seen a major problem with squishiness in solo content with the medium armor classes. I use DPS companions instead of healers, and while I have to recover between fights, the only times when I die are when I either bit off a bigger number of Elites than I could chew, or when lag interfered with my ability to react. Maybe the issue is one of playstyle? There are solid classes in the game that have more passive defense than the Marauder, if having to juggle cooldowns to stay up isn't fun.

The Cybertech crew skill can craft components to plug into the Armoring and Mod component slots on moddable gear. Artifice can craft items for the Enhancement slots, as well as color crystals and hilts for lightsabers. Armstech can craft barrels for moddable Aim and Cunning weapons (including the techblades used by the few melee companions who use Aim as a primary stat). Clothing gets its stats for protection from the Armoring slot, and weapons get their base damage from their hilt or barrel, so those are always worth keeping up to date. Select one of those crew skills if you'd like to wear moddable gear early on, as they'll allow you to save on the cost of keeping your moddable gear up to date. If you're still learning about crafting, talking to the trainers for each crew skill unlocks a Codex entry, where you can find the scoop on which gathering crew skills can provide raw materials for which crafting skills to work with. If someone didn't already mention it, it's worth pointing out what adaptive armor is. A lot of the moddable armor in the game, including crafted gear and high-end rewards for endgame, come as either heavy, medium, or light armor, as appropriate for the class they were intended for. Adaptive armor is special; it's moddable gear that behaves as if it were the appropriate type of armor for whatever character is wearing it. Gear from Cartel packs is usually adaptive gear. For example, when a Sith Juggernaut puts on an adaptive chest, it will apply the heavy armor multiplier to whatever armor rating numbers are on the item in the Armoring slot. If he takes it off and gives it to his companion Vette, the same chest piece will function as if it were Medium armor for her, since that's the armor type she wears. It will apply the Medium armor multiplier to the Armor Rating on the Armoring component. (He should remove the Strength Armoring and place a Cunning Armoring in that slot, since that's her primary stat). This type of gear gives players a very wide variety of options to customize their appearance and keep a look that they like. If your Twi'lek Bounty Hunter needs a Mandalorian chest armor without a jet pack, to avoid model clipping with her lekku, there's adaptive gear out there for that. Since the high end rewards from endgame PvE and PvP are moddable items, themselves, you can remove the components from an Operations or Warzones reward whose look you hate, and put them into clothes that you prefer, keeping your character's customized appearance while still upgrading your stats as you make progress.

I've found Dulfy.net to be an invaluable resource since coming back to the game, myself. The information there continues to see updates and user-submitted photos, with news from developer tweets as well as dev blogs. Their database on adaptive armor alone is pretty impressive, heavily screenshotted and sortable by profession, armor type, armor slot, class, or a host of other criteria. The catalogue of stronghold decorations could use some better organization, but it's just as heavy on visuals. There are ability rotation guides and talent calculators for every class and role in the game, and I don't expect it'll take long for the staff to update them when patch 3.0's new class abilities come online. There are even guides for major quest chains like the mission to score the HK-51 companion and the more recent seeker droid and macrobinocular quests.

Garrisons are a cross between a Crew Skills mission interface and an RTS style base building minigame, that's incorporated into the upcoming expansion's new leveling content. It's totally different, not least because it's a temporary assignment to faction-owned real estate which will be left behind upon the release of the expansion after that. Blizzard is so bent on getting players to do the raids, however many carrots and sticks it takes, that they'll never allow player characters to have permanent homes. Never, ever, never ever. When the game finally shuts down, WoW still won't have player housing. They have too little confidence in the the raids' ability to attract players, to give players some place comfortable to spend their time.

Note that there's a difference between the Outcast Prototype gear (the Taris mission rewards) and the Outcast crafted gear: The crafted gear has a class requirement of Troopers and Jedi Knights only, which means that it cannot be worn by companions. This means that if you want to put together a matching "squad uniform" look for your companions when they're all in cutscenes together, you can wear the crafted Outcast, but you can repeat Taris Heroics to get the Taris Outcast Prototype chest and legs for them. I haven't found a good answer for the boots, gauntlets, and helmets (for Aric and Elara) that will match your Trooper's crafted Outcast Prototype well. This isn't helped by the fact that armor dyes don't show on companions during cutscenes; I'd love to have a screenshot of my current Trooper's crew looking like they have a standard issue of gear when they pose together at the end of Chapter 3 on the playthrough I'm doing now.

I find the higher level missions to be a blast. They're not everyone's cup of tea, but I find them to a refreshing change of pace from other game content. There's a reputation that you can advance in by doing the level 50+ space missions daily. It's likely that a lot of the crafted ship parts you're seeing on the GTN are gear for that difficulty level. A lot of high end space gear can be had for Fleet Commendations from a vendor as well, but acquiring credits to spend on the GTN is likely to be a faster means of entry for some.

Update after about an hour on Makeb: Hahahahaha never mind, Makeb is fine. It's fine. Either I was seriously underestimating my own strength, or severely overestimating the gear level that Makeb's story quests were tuned for. I'm having no difficulty there at all. It just feels like a natural progression from Corellia, in terms of how tough the enemies are. It's fine. I just psyched myself out, that's all.