Check the date on the post. If you can't do that and don't know what the balance was like at the time of the posts, than you shouldn't be allowed to post. Simple as that.

The community is what you make of it. MMOs are mainstream now and as such the community will reflect all facets of society. The difference is that it gives all members a widespread voice. The people who you'd like to be around are still there, they are just vocal within their guilds and not in fleet general chat. However, I will point out that right and wrong are relative. Offensive is relative. There is no solid set of things that are right and solid set of things that are wrong. It's all relative. Good luck with whatever you're headed to do. I don't emphasize with you at all, but I respect your right to have an opinion and to act on it.

Hehe. ===MOST FEARED=== Guardian/Juggernaut Vanguard/Powertech Gunslinger/Sniper Sentinel/Marauder Scoundrel/Operative ===LEAST FEARED=== Commando/Merc Sage/Sorc Shadow/Assassin Think about it. Not a lot of people go charging at a Guardian/Juggernaut. It's a pretty dumb move unless you're bringing like 3+ people. Even then it takes way longer than it really should. Vanguards/Powertechs are at the top of everyone's hit list and the topic of most QQ posts about how they're 20 feet tall with 6 instakill button and 3 unsub buttons. Kinda like the Braveheart class... Not as impressive as people believe. Gunslingers/Snipers make people QQ a lot too. People try to kill them right away and fast or avoid them like the plague. Sentinels/Marauders are last weeks QQ class. Still makes people shake though . Scoundrels/Operatives when played correctly and burstly will make people always wonder when they're gonna insta-die next.

99 .

RVRVR isn't innovative, I'll just point that out. The concept is almost as old as MMOs themselves. That being said, that makes it all the more disappointing that an MMO with PVP, an intense faction vs faction history and back story, and exists in 2012 lacks any capability of large scale PVP. However, it is what it is I guess. There is open world PVP btw. It happens all the time. Been in some fairly decent 10 on 10s or on one occasion, 20 on 20 fairly recently. Happens mostly on Voss. If you want open world PVP, it's the best place as both factions travel the same routes and there is usually something going down. Not organized or game created, but it really doesn't have to be and some would say it shouldn't be. If the game could handle more people at a time, it would be great. For example, GW2 doesn't bat an eyelash when there are like 50 or 100 people fighting in the same place. Organized RvR isn't really needed. But, large scale fights should be possible without ****** high quality machines down to single digit FPS. That would make common end-game areas ripe with large scale battles as a lot of people would hang out there just for that. Sure, people would whine about it, but if it's on a PVP server, you agreed to the disclaimer.

I'll toss in my two cents. Guardians/Juggernauts are both DPS and have tanking ability. Infact, the main parts of PVP tanking are covered without putting a single point into the Immortal tree. You get your taunt/AoE taunt at a certain level(30% less damage for anyone who doesn't attack you in PVP) as well as Guard(take 50% of the person who you are Guarding's damage onto yourself). You also get the tank stance at a certain level, which boosts your damage reduction significantly and allows you to use guard. Most people go with a hybrid build as a PVP tank, which means you grab up to Invincible and then go up the Vengence tree to get Impale and Unstoppable. From here, you'd have two choices. Go further up the Immortal tree for a free stun(only hard stun for this class) and a bit more survivability, or go further up the Vengeance tree to get Rampage so you can pull off more Ravages and still get quite a few nice survivability boosts. As a DPS, Juggernauts still do well. Rage Juggernauts can turn people into mincemeat pretty quickly with their sweep bombs and really high hitting Screams. A lot of teams like to have them because they do serious damage. Vengeance Juggernauts are much harder to get the bigger numbers with. But they have all single target attacks and can still drop people pretty fast. It takes a lot of skill to match/beat the numbers of some other classes, but it can be done. Either way, you can swap stances for more damage or more defence depending on the situation. You can cripple the enemies attacks and protect a healer. Run the ball in Huttball. Drop people. Peel people. Mass Mez. Slow an entire team's advance with an AoE slow. There is a ridiculous amount of utility in this class and at high levels, it's a really amazing class and asset for people who are skilled with it.

They can't after a leap because of the root. If they wanna waste a CC breaker, that's fine. But with the extended root and unremitting, they can either A) eat it or B) waste their CC breaker. The DoTs damage is pretty insignificant in PVP, so losing it doesn't really matter. It adds up, but it's not a big deal. Anyways, the best Vigilance build in my mind is this. For one, you get the really useful ability to spam Freezing Force forever with no Focus Cost. I omit the DoTs because they don't really help enough compared to Freezing Force spam and +20% damage on a focus generator(Force Sweep). Yes, Force Sweep generates Focus in Shien with Effluence. However, Focus is great when you get the hang of it. This is what I use when I'm using Focus and it's pretty snazzy. You can burst down single targets with ease. It's actually laughable how good Focus is for taking down individual people. Only morons use it to just pad numbers, the real usage is to use your ridiculously high Force surge to burst individual targets down. It really works on everyone, regardless of the theory crafting that may follow this post. Once you get the Focus management down, it's really easy to play and just take whoever apart.

There is nothing wrong with missing your names. It's natural that when you invest time into something, you get attached . Everyone just needs to calm down and not go overboard with it and everything else. Yes, BW either changed their minds or had it planned all along. They never actually lied. They didn't say there would never be server mergers and they ARE offering optional character transfers at the moment. They didn't say they would be optional forever though. However, the worst thing you can do is withold the truth/facts from your customer base and rob them of their right to make informed decisions. This is a bait and switch and can be easily seen as a money grab and trying to keep people paying as long as possible by telling them what they want to hear and casually forgetting to mention what they may not want to hear. Bad PR is bad PR. So far, here is what the community actually gets from BW: 1. Canned answers, run arounds, excuses, and finger pointing. 2. Selective reports on what is happening in what can be seen as an attempt to keep people waiting in-game to leech money rather than giving them the information NOW so they can make informed decisions on whether they wanna play or not. Making money from the game is fine. But once you get the reputation of being only for the money(which A LOT of people already believe), people will either jump ship and/or stop trusting the company. Oh well, I really hope they switch courses before it's too late.

On my Guardian, I mostly levelled through PVP. Maxed out ranked and normal comms and went into the Emperor fight with almost a full Battlemaster PVP Set with a couple Recruit pieces. The fight lasted about 3 minutes, all I did was beast the Emperor and I didn't gear T7. He was in the same crap he came with when I fought him. It was one of the easiest fights in the game. Get level 50 gear... Recruit gear is free now, just have to walk the 2 inches from the PVP Quest Terminal to the drop box for a full armour set for free. Then walk over to the Recruit Vendor and buy a lightsabre and focus. Decent level 50 gear and MORE than enough to destroy the Emperor.

If you don't mind, I'll quote you for a point Danask . I really think Bioware is pissing away money with this. I wonder how many people would pay 5 bucks for an extra 5 slots and 5 bucks for a transfer to where they want. I'd venture to guess around 5 000 for the extra slots, 5 000 for the transfer, and probably around 1 000 who want both. $55 000 instantly is nothing to poo-poo. Plus, people are gonna want to transfer and have more characters over time. So, they'll keep expanding their character slots and keep transfering. A pretty huge cash cow and the majority of people who want to transfer anywhere and want more character slots are satisfied. Spend $10 bucks for both and allow more character slots for $1 each to a maximum of 24 or something like that. Nothing wrong with a huge leap in profit .

See, that's the thing. If they'd of said: "Hey guys, We're going to test out our server transfer code and load test it by allowing you guys to transfer from your dead server to a populated one. You will be getting a reward for doing a transfer, so we encourage you to try it so that we can get a small scale production test completed and can move onto large scale server mergers. On top of testing our server transfer code, we are also using this as an opportunity to further load test and improve out current game servers and game engine so that we can provide the best, uninterrupted, and large scale MMO we possibly can. We are trying to put the massively back into this MMO so that we can have a healthy and happy player base and add some much sought-after features such as larger scale open world PVP. Thank you for your understanding. We will be monitoring your input closely and please don't hesitate to send all the bug reports you can so that we can further enhance this game for you. Sincerely, BW Dude" people would have been much happier. It's a short write up and it is very transparent and indicated the future. Sure, people would whine about the usage of the word 'test' and such, but it's the nature of an ever expanding game. You can't reliably fully test anything for an MMO in-house or on a test server with limited population can only get you so far. It's best just to get things into the hands of users ASAP so that they can give feedback and such, that way the game will improve much faster. And being transparent will make people less frustrated because they know it's being worked on, how fast it's being worked on, and know that their concerns aren't being overlooked. Posts like the one I made up would make the reasonable people happy, which is probably the majority of people, including those who don't visit the forums. The whiners will whine regardless, so it's not going to change.

At some point, I'd venture to guess that this will be the case. However, the game is still in it's infancy and trying to find it's player base. So, if people leave and are waiting for the bigger content update set for later this year, I'm guessing BW wants to have their accounts the way they left it. I wouldn't expect this kind of automation until some more bugs are fixed as they will(hopefully) have priority over small comforts and maintenance things such as recirculating names. Also, to do something like this they'd likely need to do analysis of exactly how long to wait before the name cut off kicks in. Picking arbitrary times will result in more unhappy people. So, if 90% of resubs occur within 3 months of their unsub date, then they'd have to set it at like 6 months for maximum coverage, at least that's my thoughts. They could just slap a 1 month and call it good. On a different vein and to act as a foil, I've been using the same 3 names in games for about 10 years and no one has ever had any of them. So I've never had to deal with someone taking a name that has been mine for so long. I get where you're coming from, but as a developer, I can see where they're coming from.

If you're names are taken on the destination server, you won't get them back no matter who you call. It's the easiest and fairest solution whether you see it that way or not. Giving it based on who had it first chronologically is ridiculous because potentially it could result in you taking someone's name and then you losing it to someone else anyway. So, the most logical and sensible solution when looking towards the future is to use the current system.

Interesting. Looks like server merges after all, though it was pretty obvious from the get go. Kinda time consuming to: Give people the choice to transfer. Give them a reward for transfering. Stop people from going to anything but the destination servers. Auto-move anyone left on the dead servers to the populated ones. Instead of just, I don't know, call it a server merger and just merge them from the get go. Oh well, I guess it's a good way to extend people's subscriptions. Make them wait for transfers, make them wait for a reward, then merge servers any way. People who don't want to be on super populated servers add another couple months of cash and people who do add more cash. Cloak and dagger tactics, very interesting approach to dealing with a player base...

No one can stop you from queueing, but only you can stop yourself from QQing... .

Nice thread. Can't wait for the article .

Yes, a Guardian can provide comparable DPS to a Sent in a PVE setting. The catch-22 is that this is very difficult to accomplish. There are screenshots and parse logs and such kicking around that prove this. But, it is hard to pull off. PVP, different story entirely as damage is done differently against other players. Armor means quite a bit in PVE, but it doesn't have a huge effect in PVP. However, medium armor is more than sufficient for story content and end-game stuff. Especially since during the harder stuff you'll have a tank anyways. PVE is basically all about either doing damage, taking damage, recovering damage. Taunts and such are very useful for the tank or offtank. Basically, if you're not tanking and not a healer, you're a DPS. So, if you don't want to be a tank and don't want to be a healer, you're limited to either trying to become an expert Guardian so you're a competitive DPS or play a Sentinel and get decent damage to start and exceptional damage with a bit of practice. It's all about play style. Being a tank isn't hard and is even easier with the changes to threat generation. You just have to watch everything around you and ensure you are tanking the stuff that matters. People will look to the tank to take a more leading role as they are in high demand and you have to go in first anyway. It's definitely not for everyone, but there is no harm in trying. PVP is pretty slow-paced in this game. It's pretty simple and very forgiving in the 10-49 bracket. You even get stat boosted to a level 49s level. Easy way to make some xp if you do your dailies from level 10 on(just have to PLAY 2 games, not even win). You may even begin to enjoy it. It's really not that bad and the people aren't are cruel as some people believe. I think that PVE people are more harsh as they actively exclude people much more(kinda comes with the whole percieved advantage of certain classes/specs in certain roles, and some not being seen as ideal). PVP, meh, you can hop in solo any time. Only takes a few mins for a pop and then you can play a little 5-15 min game.

Easiest to play... Hmm. In what context? As a Focus Guardian who has tried numerous specs and really only does PVP, I'll add some input I suppose. From the PVP side of things, Guardian aren't really easy. It requires effective use of taunts/rotations to be valuable. Vigilance/Hybrids/Focus are the best bet for PVP. All can be very effective tanks and all of them have Soresu(tank form). It all boils down to how well you use what you have and how smart you are with taunts. Vig has some nice single target DPS with burst based on Master Strike resets/procs and you can still be an effective tank with a simple switch to Soresu form. It's probably the easiest to play for Guardians as it's really hard to become focus starved in Shien form and the basic rotations are easy and kicking your damage up several notches just requires you to pay attention to the enemies CDs as well as your own(where the skill comes in). Hybrids are either leaning more towards Warding Call or more towards Zen Strike. In my opinion, anything less than Warding Call from the defense tree isn't even a Hybrid as it's just a Vig guardian who wanted a free freezing force in most cases. But anyways, this is a popular tank build because you get the must have skills from Defense(Warding Call) and Vigilance(Overhead Slash). Focus is the controlled burst spec of the class. You can take down single targets or groups of low HP enemies or just make a person/group panic when you drop a 4-6k bomb on them. When used effectively, you destroy everyone who ever gets targeted. I sometimes feel that it isn't fair to steamroll Marauders or Pyrotechs, but hey, that's life . Main problem people have with this spec is not prepping their sweep bombs properly, not using their sweep at optimum points, and being focus starved. These are truly L2P issues, but they're not too hard to overcome. This spec will take the most work to become most effective at just due to the steep learning curve of resource management. So, as a whole, Guardians are easy to play. Really easy. But to match/surpass other classes requires a fair amount of skill and maximizing this class's potential(there is a lot of it) requires expert usage. Sentinels are much easier. You choose either damage, damage, or damage. You have really good defensive CDs(best in the game actually...) and with a bit of skill and practice, you can easily top the damage charts. Resource management is really a non-issue as so many things generate focus. Watchman spec is popular and rips things apart. It's a simpler class and doesn't take any real effort to hit the same level as 99% of the rest of the sents/maras. However, with great skill comes extreme rapesauce. The difference between your run of the mill sent/mara and the skilled players is the difference between you fighting one sent/mara and fighting essentially 3 ultra-skilled players in a row. If you're not as crafty or craftier, you'll lose. So, the long and short of it is: - Guardians = tanks/dps, easy to start, difficult to match other players/classes, really diffcult to 'pwn' with, but when you get to that point, it's usually over before it's begun. - Sents = dps, easy to start, easy to match other players, slightly difficult to 'pwn' with, becomes a serious massacre when you add some seriously skilled player behind the wheel. The above is a summary on the two classes from my PVP perspective as I've tried them both in 50 PVP and seen a lot of both of them and their mirrors. The main thing is what play style appeals to you? Do you want to be a damage monster? Do you want to be the Bob the Builder utility man of the land? Do you like one sabre or two? The real thing is to just pick what you want to play. If you've got the skills, you'll tear it up regardless.

Meh. It's actually funnier this way. Make sure you have a Rakata stim or something active and you're in Vindicator Gear. Then try this on a sorc: Sabre Throw->Zealous Leap -> Master Strike->Get Knocked Back->Pop Combat Focus->Force Leap->Sweep->Blade Storm-> Dispatch It's funny because: 1. Zealous Leap is close range. 2. A Master Strike fake is good because if they eat it, cool, if not, the fun is not over . 3. You get a second to pop Combat Focus. 4. Force Leap with Vindicator Gear causes a 10% increase in damage... 5. Sweep will hit ridiculously hard with an auto-crit, a powerful stim, 10% damage increase, and the 6% Shi-Cho increase. 6. Blade Storm is a free cast(if you speced it). 7. Dispatch will wreck them if it lasts this long. Ah, the fun of playing things that people aren't familiar with and totally don't expect.

Well, that's a logic fail. You need the equivalent BM piece to get the WH piece... How does buying the BM piece and then the WH piece immediately after save you comms O.o?

I had ~3050 ranked comms and 2000 normal comms when I hit 50. 5050 comms. I bought: Helmet - 1075 comms Chest - 1425 comms Legs - 975 comms Lightsaber - 1550 comms ------------------------------- Total - 5025 comms So yeah... I spent a couple credits filling out the rest with recruit gear. Didn't really put any work into this, just hate PVE and played casually, so I ended up with a lot of comms. I also had both the 20 and 40 sets from the PVP vendor and weapons from the PVP vendor all the way through.

The best tip I can give you in space missions is don't get tunnel vision. Make sure you're situationally aware of your surroundings and what's going on. For example, in Fondor Escort, did you realize that enemy ships are out at an extreme distance coming towards you(they look like little red dots) and blast your escort ship as well as your own? You can kill these ships out on the 'horizon' very easily at extreme distances way before they touch anything. The other good tip I have is with flagships. Always try to destroy the turrets that are closest to the direction you will be moving. The ones on the end. These are really the only ones that will effectively engage you for a decent period of time and really appear to be the only ones to do damage to the escort ship in this mission(I've gotten through this mission with both of us at 100% numerous times). This mission doesn't really need any upgrades, you just need to watch everything around you.

Hi Shipwright. You can skip any story content using this little trick I figured out while wading through story content I really didn't want to go through: Just press 1 and spacebar at the exact same time really fast until you're back in game. You won't see or hear anything. I mean, anything. You may hear a stutter, but it really just jumps through and you have no idea what happened.

Not true. My back is rarely to them. I use pure mouse for movement(hold left+right buttons to go forward), so I use that with strafe and a kinda jerk press if the angle is off a bit. For the most part, the glitchy game plays right into this. It takes a bit of practice, but if you're used to twitch action games, it's really easy to get your rotations off.