I'm trying to pick up my level 30 sage where I left off years ago. I'm a recently returning player, and have gone to Dulfy and seen the 3.0 guide...and it's probably great for a level capped person. But at level 30, trying to use the healer companion, I seem to be...weak. I'm trying to run as balance, which may be part of my problem. And it probably wouldn't hurt to really check my gear. Beyond possibly going to another spec, and checking my gear...any tips for a returning sage? I enjoy PvP, and may just go healing all around (if it's possible to level in a healing spec?).

Honestly, in light of the way they scale for PvP, I'm surprised there isn't a system to allow players to scale up to play with their friends. Just do it EXACTLY the same way as you do for PvP. Your friend gets the levels, but doesn't have access to all the class skills. They can choose to gain XP by doing high level stuff with you, or by hitting stuff that's more level appropriate for them. They'd likely XP faster doing stuff solo (assuming that XP gain scales along with levels), so the incentive for them is there to level "for real" to be effective at higher level content...but you're not kept from grouping with your friends entirely for a little bit of benefit to both players.

I'm not sure how anybody can argue it's not a privacy issue. It doesn't matter if the people I would invite (if I could, but since I'm still on my free 30 days I can't) are people that already know me. Heck, one invite would've gone to my wife. Privacy is a serious issue, and any disclosure of real identifying information without express consent from their players is a violation of privacy.

I'd go one further. Just have us auto-loot the successful mission, similar to what happens when crafted items come in.

My vote's no. Out of game logs are fine to help guilds fine tune their tactics for progression, and for the community to get numbers to see how classes should stack up against each other in some scenarios. When raiding in other games that had in-game combat logging (and add-ons to parse them), we never used them for raid tactics. Players might brag about the numbers they pulled on specific encounters, but it was the overall raid logs that mattered and that were used to help fine-tune tactics. I never saw in-game logs used in a constructive manner outside of regular groups, and regular groups can also get the info they need from out-of-game logs.

I'd add the ability to set up default UI and keymapping profiles to copy them to characters as needed, without having to reset all your hotbars for every new character. Allow auto-accept of crew mission results. It's not a big deal most times, but every once and a while the mission complete box pops up at inopportune times. I'd love to be able to have no pop-ups, similar to when a companion is crafting. You just get the results in your bag. If a warzone is going to auto-close because of lack of players, just give a standard reward set to all players rather than have it gated by progress through the WZ. Server and faction transfers would be a big plus, especially as more players come on board. In my perfect world everybody would get one free per month (or some similar cool-down) with the option to purchase more later.

The reason not to have it in game is to offer the socially inept players on less thing they can use to try belittle other players with. Over time there will be more gear disparity between players leveling, and people filling group chat with useless numbers as long as it shows how good their doing. It'll breed more players that don't care about interrupts, or standing in fire, as long as they can pull big numbers. Logs outside the game give players every chance to rate their performance. Community sites that will invariably pop-up will let players gauge their performance against their peers, and forums will always give people a chance to find out what they're doing differently. Adding them in-game will almost certainly only lead to epeen contests and ignoring fight mechanics.

Pshaw. I live in Austin, have played MMO's long enough to be a fogey and have years of software QA experience I could leverage for both a player feel perspective and a "does it work" perspective. I've got you beat You're right though, as tough as it is with the entitled communities MMO's seem to breed these days, it's nice to feel like there's a more open communication path all-around.

The lack of macro's is odd. I can understand, on some level, not allowing really detailed macro'ing like some MMO's do...but none at all is odd. For CC'ing, a simple macro that's something like "Taking %t out of the picture" then casting you CC on one button is hardly a game changers, or letting the game play it for you. I won't lie, I wouldn't be opposed to having more conditional macro support. It's handy in games that allow it. But even a macro system that allows flavor text plus casting one ability would be a huge improvement over nothing.

This is the crux of the problem. In-game logs these days are too frequently used for the wrong reasons. Used in a guild, or among a steady group, logs can be great tools. Used by people looking to out epeen someone in a random PUG, or to set arbitrary requirements without taking into account different play styles and mechanics, it's just a PITA. Even raiding in games that had in-game logs, we didn't worry about the numbers until we could parse full logs after various attempts. Offline logs work great for the first purpose, and they prevent misuse and epeen gloating. They allow players the tools they need to see how they're doing, and let community sites post averages of large number of players for different classes. I don't even mind the after-action kind of logs that we get in WZs. But logs during an instance would likely get misused far more often than they're used properly.

It'd be nice, assuming that none of the other information about where I'm trying to connect from changes or if it's one of a few known locations I log in from, that the security key wasn't required every time. Maybe go to once a week if it's from a previously known place, plus every time you log in from a new location.

I may be a bit of an old fogey about this...but I don't miss only worrying about logs and parses after the raid is completed and figuring out what we can do better. It worked great in EQ, and even in other MMO's prior to everything being in an add-on. I also don't miss socially maladjusted folks spamming raid or group chat every time their number was a tiny bit higher than somebody elses. Or ignoring the fact that everybody else was playing to beat the encounter while they were all about big numbers. Parsable logs outside of the client will help raid leaders do what they need to do, while eliminating some of the crappy behavior that happens when it's immediately available. Win-win. For those that never played games where this was the norm, raid leaders and trusted group members would supply the logs that get parsed. There was no danger of someone beefing up their numbers outside of the game, because it wasn't their copy of the log that was looked at. There was also no danger of some nuance of an add-on making your numbers come out abnormally high or low.

With another MMO I was able to have multiple security devices configured on the same account. It came in handy multiple times, once because that mechanism allowed me to re-sync my security key after a phone update wiped my phone...and more often when I'd leave my phone in another room but have another device handy nearby to use for generating the code. It'd be nice if the mobile app would allow that to happen. It's essentially just enabling the same security key sequence on multiple devices. Less secure than having only one device, but handier.

I've gotten a Sage to 22, and a few other classes up to around 10 or so, and I'm sort of playing around to see who I settle on as my main. I understand that playing a class you enjoy is key to enjoying the endgame, but I've got some questions around it. 1) Are there any classes in particular demand or over-abundance at higher levels? I know typically in MMOs DPS is easy to find. Healers, tanks and support classes (for the few MMOs that have them) are in short supply. Does that trend tend to stick true in SWToR? What about for PvP (probably mostly Warzones). 2) If I play an empire character that makes a fair number of light side choices, would I be hurting my character progression overall? What about Republic making dark side choices? 3) Is there any way to not have to set up my key bindings again every time I roll a new character? 4) Are any classes more challenging that others to do well with? Not necessarily because they're under powered, but because they're more complex? What about incredibly simple to play well?

I'd love the option to respec advanced classes. And I can probably make semi-good arguments for it. But then I thought about the only other MMO to have the same sort of system, at least on release. Everquest 2. You chose an archetype when you made the character (mage, rogue, fighter, priest if I recall correctly). Then you got to choose a sub-class (or perhaps you started with the subclass, been a while), then you got to choose your specialty. Once you had your specialty, you were done. Some of the specialties were restricted by alignment, but most were not. And, unless you were going to betray from one faction to another, you could never change your specialty. Some good RP reasons for not allowing it would be something along the lines of the character mindset is too focused on this other way of doing things, so there's no way to go from one to another. Eventually, whether to simplify the game or eliminate some confusion, they decided to just have people choose their specialty at character creation, rather than spend 10 levels as an archetype before getting into specifics.