You're not kidding about the number of comms; I'm leveling a character past 50 for the first time now, and I'm wishing that I'd known to save up my Planetary Comms for the mods vendor on Makeb. I can probably struggle my way through Makeb with the Corellia greens and blues that I've got, but it'll be a challenge now that the game is awarding me Basic and Classic Comms for the content I used to do for Planetaries.

A Google search for "t7 Dark Temple puzzle" took me here, where I found some decent videos and screenshots. Apparently you want to get the panels on all the columns to display a trapezoid shape, at which point the patterns on the floor will form the Imperial insignia and the chest will appear. As of the time that blog post went up, in 2012, the quest was bugged. The workaround was to reset the phase, either by running out or by queueing for a Flashpoint. I just completed the Jedi Knight for the first time last week, but I'm afraid I don't know whether this bug was ever fixed. I leveled my Jedi with Cybertech, which trivialized the issue of gearing T7 immensely. I was able to skip the puzzle entirely by crafting moddable droid parts and mods to put in them. T7 didn't last long when I did the Emperor fight, in any event. It seemed like using the pillars to break line of sight on the Emperor's one-shot attack was much more important than the companion's contribution.

I would kill to have your proposed "replace companions I don't get along with, with droids" option.

The Voss are just so cartoonishly racist that the thought of even one Gormak escaping appalls them. The Voss are jerks.

The torpedo takes a few seconds of holding down the right mouse button in order to secure a missile lock on the target. A good time to do this, on Archenar Interception, is during that second pass over the capital ship at the end, when your companion tells you something along the lines of "okay, now's our big chance, let's wreck that capital ship." The precise wording varies from one companion to the next, but you have the bridge in your view for a nice long interval then.

I seem to remember the ship interiors looking deceptively large in preview trailers prior to the game's original launch; the camera operators did a good job finding the corners of the rooms that offered the most flattering interior views. We'll see, though! I'm looking forward to it!

As a general rule, you can check out what weapons a companion knows how to use by looking for the Companion tab in your Abilities menu (default keybind "P") while that companion is summoned on the ground. I wouldn't mind if C2-N2 and 2V-R8 had some sort of stat item for their main hands, even if it didn't add any offensive functionality. I tend to play either tanks or ranged DPS, where survival comes pretty easily while leveling via missions, but I know that some DPS classes, like the Sentinel/Marauder, can be a real test for new players to level while they wait for their healer companions to join their crews. Every bit of extra bit of performance that might be squeezed out of the ship droids might help stave off some of the frustration that new players sometimes encounter.

I know that a need for more time to get all the strongholds ready was the reason for the Early Access delay, but I'm really hoping to see videos like this for the Coruscant and Dromund Kaas strongholds pretty soon. The Dromund Kaas stronghold, in particular, has been noticeably absent in the promotional materials so far, and I'm dying to see what it looks like on the inside.

I can confirm that today is before May 10th.

Note that shopping at the GTN or Commendations vendors isn't your only possible source of components for your gear. You can gather raw materials and craft the components with crew skills, as well. If you have Armstech and Scavenging, you can make gun Barrels. If you have Cybertech and Scavenging, you can craft Armoring and Mods. If you have Artifice and Archaeology, you can make color crystals, light saber Hilts, and Enhancements. Just one of these combinations can save you a lot in Planetary Commendations or Energy Credits over the long term.

I've done that at level 50; drop Slicing, crank up Diplomacy once I have all my companions free to work on it, then take Slicing back up again once I've unlocked the alignment-based companion/health management ability. Having a bunch of companion gifts to give to my crew helped me unlock those passive legacy bonuses, so that's icing on the cake.

I always leave Mako on the ship for the rest of the game once the other companions become options. She's a good kid, but she doesn't have the heart for field work. Let her stay on the bridge and find me jobs. I haven't reached this moment in the story yet on my current playthrough, but I'm experimenting with an ethical approach that eschews Jedi and Sith moralism entirely. "Bounty Hunters make their own rules," after all, and this character's rule is that she always sticks to the job once accepting it. The result, so far, has been a pretty neutral character, as measured by the game's alignment system. I may let Tarro rot in his cell this time around, for no other reason that venting my personal animosity toward him would be a distraction from the real target on the ship's bridge.

While leveling, I like to use Cybertech to keep myself covered in free, green quality, level appropriate Armoring and Mod doodads, with Enhancement components and gun barrels as the only gear I have to spend Planetary Commendations on. (I get implants and color crystals on the AH for now, but one day I'll get around to making some of my alts take Biomed and Artificer ). Being content with green mods, which are more than enough to do level-appropriate content, allows me to supplement Cybertech with just Scavenging, leaving my third profession slot (I'm a subscriber) free for Slicing in order to make credits. As the question in the title of your post implies, we have options, and the best one for you may be determined by personal preference, by the number of crew skills available, by the amount of time you have per game session, by the number of companions you have who can do crew skill tasks off-screen while your favorite companion adventures with you, or any number of other factors. There may not be a wrong answer, even if one answer fits your needs better than others.

The augment slots you can add to an item at the tables take components made specially for those slots. You can continue to keep that first lightsaber's stats up to par for your character level by updating its Hilt, Mod, and Enhancement components. No one crafting skill makes all of those types of components, but you can procure updated parts from crafting and/or the Mod Commendations Vendors on every planet. It's perfectly legit to keep your first lightsaber until you find another with a niftier looking handle or a snazzier activation sound. If you lost or sold that model, more moddable lightsabers can be obtained from variety of places, including but not limited to Flashpoints, the GTN, and some Equipment Commendation Vendors. And don't ever be shy about asking questions; everybody was new at the game not too long ago!

I think I know what conversation that was! My Mako story: With my Powertech, I decided early on that I would eschew the Jedi and Sith philosophies implied by the game's alignment system and have my BH be enough of an outsider to have his own code. He would always follow the letter of the contracts he accepted. Whether he was on a manhunt or a rescue mission, once he had accepted the job, he would turn down offers to betray the employer. It was in this spirit that I collected a bounty on a Republic scientist on Hutta, one which Mako had brought to my attention, instead of letting her go when she made puppy dog eyes at me. That got Mako to tell me, before we were even finished adventuring in Fa'athra's Palace, that she found me "disgusting" and that I wasn't "who she thought I was." The contempt very quickly became mutual, as her reactions to my behavior framed her in turn, in my mind, as a mere Bounty Hunter fan, a poseur who wanted the paychecks that came with running on a crew but who didn't have the stomach for the field work. I was relieved when I finally got the ranged DPS companion and could reassign Mako to shipboard Slicing missions that better suited her. When she and Torian hooked up, I didn't care.

Something like Force Charge to the opponent farthest on the outside, Force Push him into the middle of the rest, Force Charge to him again and Smash? Because I do that now.

You'll hit Light I at 1000 (and Dark I at -1000). You can see how far along your character is by mousing over the alignment gauge next to your character model in the Character Sheet © window.

It's this. Push allows the tank to try to round up the mobs and group them so that DPS can AOE them down. (INSTEAD OF SCATTERING THEM AGAIN WITH KNOCKBACKS, THANK YOU VERY MUCH.)

Subscribers get free rested xp when they cut open their complementary Tauntaun mounts and sleep inside them. Try to keep a lid on this, fellas, we don't want the word to get out and make the F2Pers jealous.

Investing points in the skill allows you to get the full duration and the full damage out of your channeled ability while someone's hitting you.

I've always found that reinstalls of this game in particular can take a day or two, using the digital download (I don't have a copy on disk). I always assumed that EA just really throttles the traffic down on the server end with a download manager. This seems like it would be a way of keeping free to play accounts from crashing the game.

Shadokiitty has it. The bonus xp that you get while being logged out at a cantina is extra xp waiting to be collected; upon logging back in, you gain xp at a faster rate until you've got all the bonus xp you're entitled to. This is so that you don't have to feel obligated to log in every day while you're leveling; the bonus xp is just a nice bit of extra to catch up when you come back from being logged out for a while. You can see roughly the amount of rested xp you've earned on your experience bar. It's a highlighted border or bracket extending to the right, past the experience you've filled in on the meter. The bonus to xp from resting in a cantina persists until you've filled the bracket out. Each character on your account or Legacy earns its own rested xp bonus, allowing you to possibly use rested xp to expedite exploring the stories of multiple characters; one can warm the bench and earn rested xp while the other is out in the galaxy, collecting the rested xp it has earned.

Use of Cartel Coins allows you to skip Legacy level requirements. Those apply only if you're using credits. Answered because you bumped the thread and brought it to the top of the list, not because you berated 104 other people for not giving you information you could have read in your Legacy window.

WHAT?

A budget-friendly way that I found to get a new PC was to simply look for recommendations for parts that would work well together, get the parts at a pace I could afford, and assemble a new computer once all the parts had arrived. You might be surprised at how easy the assembly can be if you carefully read the manuals. It's more of a World of Warcraft site, but MMO-Champion periodically posts recommended shopping lists for MMO gamers who would like to do exactly that. I did this last year and my new quad-core runs the game like a dream compared to the way my vintage 2007 single-thread PC struggled to. Their latest recommended lists of parts that will complement one another well, with current pricing information and Amazon links for all the listed parts, can be found here (you can scroll down past all the WoW patch notes and the PC builds are at the bottom, just before the comments section begins).