Same reason they removed droid CC- they suck at making games! They get butthurt when players skip mobs, because they think that we will be tricked into believing that long, drawn out fights are actually content, and then at the same time they make the mobs so f'ing easy that brand new players can easily solo heroics. Asking questions like this will never get you a reasonable, logical answer. In fact, think of the stupidest, most illogical thing you can think of- and that will probably be what they will do. Example: Phase walk, HK's assassinate ability, treek, etc

Also, the "new" craftable gear is REable to 186 at artifact level. W...T..F?!? Clearly these devs havent been there since 3.0, because then they would know that 186 was the new tier given to craft with 3.0. *********** ridiculous!

In case you new devs dont know... 186 was the rating that the old barrels from 3.0 had. The new ones have to be higher than that to be meaningful. To follow the same pattern that 3.0 had you would need to make the new trainer craftable barrels 204 (or something better than 198). 186 rating MAKES NO SENSE! I know there's a high turnover rate at bioware but damn!

As a rule, you want whichever mod has the highest mainstat+power. Just add the two numbers up and whichever is better, take that, regardless of the actual number or color of the mod. If any piece has endurance higher than any other stat (and you are not a tank) that's bad. For enhancements, go with the best adept or initiative you can get. Once you get your accuracy to 100/110 then you can start worrying about adding some crit, depending on your class. When you talk about the offhand you mean the top slot, right? The 198 comms offhand barrel/hilt/armoring will always be better than the token 192, but if you have mods or enhancements from the 198 you will want to replace those with the min/maxed 192s. Keep your 198 comms armorings until you can replace them two at a time with set bonus pieces. Unfortunately the new set bonuses are absolute garbage, and for the majority of classes the 6-piece is the only one that matters. Some classes actually do better with the old set bonuses despite the loss of mainstat. So if you want to wait until you have all 6 to switch them out that's fine too. Unfortunately for mercs you get screwed by biofail's terrible gear allocation, IIRC only one set piece has decent mods or enhancements (i.e. agile mod, adept/init enh) so yes you will have to need on additional pieces that you will then have to redeem at other class vendors for your enhancements. The upside of that is that you will have additional 192 set bonus armorings and mods for your alts. As for maximizing your DPS, the best place to start is by reading the guides and studying the combat logs of those in your class who top the leaderboards. Assuming you don't make a fool of yourself by dying constantly and wiping the raid, you may become a regular sub for certain raid groups, despite being a solo player. Obviously youll want to make sure youre fully augmented in either reflex or overkill augs if youre not already. I wouldn't go with more than one accuracy aug. Also make sure to read the operations guides and watch the videos so you know how the fight is supposed to go. The fact that you give enough of a **** to ask about this stuff and to try to better yourself already distinguishes you apart from 90% of SM pugs. Most of them can't even do a proper rotation and put out terrible dps (due to them leveling to 60 in a few days and never actually learning to play their class) so you're already ahead of the game.

Summons do not count, there is no guarantee there will be someone in a group who can do it, thanks to another stupid oversight by bioware not letting people summon from their own personal credits. Secondly, it does not take "less than an hour" to do an undetermined amount of class missions, plus 4 flashpoints, plus all of rishi, yavin, and ziost. Many veteran players have multiple characters of the same AC, and for us there's no point in doing class missions on our second character, since it gives no reward. And "moaning about it" is the only way the devs will ever know they screwed up. Obviously. TBH the current devs need to spend some time playing old content. The original devs knew a thing or two about game development. The difference is so apparent when you run on old FP like Dir7, Kaon, or BoI/FE, and then run one of the new ones, which, with the exception of BloodHunt, are boring as hell and hold absolutely no replay value whatsoever. Simply a mindless grind of boring NPCs and mindless killing. The old ones had fun little tricks and stuff to skip that came with experience. How much fun was it to watch noobs face pull and die in Dir7 because they didn't know how to jump the tents? or traverse around the pipes after you blow up the bridge... The new content is boring boring boring. If the current set of devs don't want to play the game they should at least call up the original team and ask for some tips. An entire planet with only a single QT point and no interconnecting zones would have never slipped by in the old days.

Except there are operations located on the planet that you can't access otherwise. That is utterly retarded. Once you have unlocked the area on your main you need to be able to get your raid alts to the door of the damn monolith without having to pay to be summoned. Imagine if the Ziost Shadow was only accessible if you have completed your class story, or if you couldn't get to Ravagers or ToS without doing those story missions. This is a huge oversight and they need to fix it soon.

Some non story missions are definitely worth doing. Especially for new accounts, there is one on DK that gives a moddable orange offhand, which is the earliest you can get one in the game. And the revanite quest gives a sweet looking chest for inquisitors only. Other missions like [AREA - The Scar] on belsavis gives a purple armoring iirc (for your offhand and bonus damage) . Also there is no better way to teach yourself how to play your class than soloing 4 man heroics. Try to do them at level if you can, for the biggest challenge; they will quickly teach you excellent survivability skills, how to manually control your companion, and how to manage self heals, kiting, and CCs, how to not break CCs, and how to divide and kill enemies. Most of those skills translate to PvP as well.

Great, so that just means you would be more likely to get reported as a bot if you start acting like one. Of course that totally ignores the obvious question of why would you be camping a lvl5 mob spawn and macro attacking on a starter planet for fun. That would have to be the most boring play style I've ever heard of lol.

The bigger issue here is: who is it hurting? If the guy wants to pay 4 subs then that's 4x the income the game has to put towards new content. Who even cares if he is macroing? Its not like he has 4 characters out in the world stealing kills from people; they all move as one, and attack the same target, and he's not bothering anyone, not exploiting and not spamming gold websites. Maybe if he started attacking people in open world PvP I would start laughing, and no doubt whoever gets their *** kicked would complain... But he's not even doing that. If his idea of fun is running an entire raid team by himself then more power to him. Come back when he does something the least bit provocative or menacing to you. And the point about well you cant open 4 instances of swtor.exe on a single computer so it must be unintended... LOL! What program will let you open more than one? Go try to open two instances of photoshop or word, see how that goes.

Forcing people to complete SoR on EVERY character just to get to ziost is the most retarded thing I've ever heard of. I'm not going to do hours of pointless missions for no XP and no rewards just so I can take alts to that ugly planet. Having to be summoned EVERY TIME just to do the content on alts is likely one reason why people arent going there. If they put in some QT points or give priority access the population would increase dramatically. Also give rewards other than blue companion gear and people might have a reason to repeat the missions.

Nobody wears complete sets because bioware makes it a point to make sure at least one or more pieces from every set is ***-ugly, thereby forcing you to spend CC or comms elsewhere to get a full set of decent looking gear. Why do you think the best looking, most versatile pair of boots in game costs 1200 CC and cannot be duplicated by collections, despite being in collections? Same reason that the thorn and scalene boots cannot be dyed, because then they would match way too many outfits. Most of the time people attribute way too many things to some secret plan the devs have. 90% of the time it's not true, and it's just coincidence paired with laziness... In this case it's 100% certain. They do have a secret plan to make sure we spend as much as possible on decent looking gear. I wouldn't really mind- IF they fix it so all pieces are dyeable on all color regions, AND all pieces can be utilized cross faction and cross weight. They're slowly getting there, but the juggernaut legacy boots for example, are still jugg only, and there are no other similar pub side boots. The scalene-style boots are still medium armor only, unless you want bright colors that clash horribly with black or grey outfits, or want to spend out the *** with CC

I wouldn't expect any noticeable difference in credit-sellers. Until the devs institute proactive methods to grief these guys they'll just keep coming back with new accounts. It takes them about an hour to level to 7 and start spamming fleet, and they no doubt already have teams of little chinese orphans hacking peoples accounts for credits to sell

If the player is physically controlling the keyboard then it's legal, this has been stated before. If this is some Chinese guy leveling his bots, then report him. Generally if he is on hutta or ord mantell and has no legacy name or title, then he is a gold seller leveling bots to get to lvl7 so he can go spam fleet. You can try whispering him to see if he responds. Gold sellers will not respond 99.9% of the time.

If they abuse the power they don't get to do it again. Obviously there would be prerequisites to screen out the trolls, and most importantly, they would only be able to use the power against non-legacy accounts under a certain level. All the gold sellers are new accounts with no legacy name and are usually level 7 bounty hunters. Obviously these GMs wouldn't be able to silence random subs just because they don't like them. C'mon people use your imagination a little.

Because it takes significantly more time to level as a tank, due to companions doing a fraction of the dps as a player. Especially since the game is so noob-friendly, you should never actually need defensive stats as a solo player doing solo content. However if you aren't concerned with efficiency, and want to learn how to tank properly, leveling as a tank and doing flashpoints is a great way to go. Depending on when you play, even tanking or healing a flashppoint can be inefficient, for late night players for example, you can sit in queue for an hour or two even as a tank (DPS need not even bother after 03:00 on a weekday) Usually I will do the daily flashpoint for the great XP from the daily turn-in, as tank or healer, but in DPS gear in tank stance, and spend the rest of the time blowing through story content and leveling gathering skills. Honestly I think it might actually be faster to level to 60 and then come back and level your gathering skills as a 60, after the 12x is over.

Sadly bioware has nerfed the game so much you can pretty much level to 60 in the gear you get on DK. A big problem with 12x XP is that crew skills are not multiplied, meaning you have to spend about half your time gathering just to keep your skills from becoming un-levelable as you get to higher planets. Stealthers have it even worse. However, for those of you who like a challenge, you can still try to solo the heroic-4s at level. Otherwise just pick the spec with the best AOE and keep your mainhand and offhand hilt, barrel or armoring the highest level purple or blue you can afford. Go with 2x +41 crit crystals and blue surge augments (especially at low levels when they give a huge boost) and if you are biochem a reusable attack adrenal is a great way to blow through leveling mobs. Also get a few sets of purple battle or adept enhancements that you can switch out every 5-10 levels and send to your alts for the rest of your SWTOR days (enhancements work equally well on any dps class). Use planetary comms on mods for you and your companion, and for enhancements if you cant afford purples yet, but not for armorings, since they cost way too much (7 comms vs only 2 for mods and enhs) for the minimal boost they give. At low levels, your secondary stats of crit and surge are the most important. Don't worry about accuracy at all until you hit 60. Ideally you want to be able to come upon a mob of 4-5 standards and one silver or gold and take out the 4-5 guys with your first one or two AOE attacks, then finish the strong with the rest of your rotation. The key here is killing quickly and moving on. If you don't yet have Rakghoul relics, then go for a matrix cube and a use: power relic. If you want you can skip all the dialog cutscenes, and just spam spacebar+3, the alignment choices are always option 1 or 2, so by spamming 3 you wont ever miss one. No choice you make actually matters later on, so make sure to pick all lightside or all darkside choices, there are a few items in game that require you be level V alignment, but nothing that requires neutral, as far as mounts and decor are concerned. As far as your story is concerned, the ending is based on your alignment, but other than a few seconds of dialog at the end of your story, every choice is meaningless. Don't ever waste time leveling as a solo tank or healer (unless you do flashpoints, in which case, only queue as a tank or healer), and gear your highest-DPS companion the best you can. Also, rocket boots should be the very first thing you buy. They will save you so much time moving between indoor mobs. Obviously, keep a 25% XP boost on at all times, and always use rested XP when available. Also make sure you are in a guild with the full % XP boost.

Typical troll response; no actual substance as to WHY it would be a bad idea. The point of a discussion is to discuss, not mindlessly say you disagree with no reasons. No, actually that would work perfectly. Dozens of other MMOs have GMs. I guess most of you started playing SWTOR as your first MMO. Having players help ease the burden of administrative in-game duties is a well tested system, and by no means a new idea. Look it up. OBVIOUSLY you wouldn't give chat-banning abilities to everyone, or to new players, or to people who abuse the privilege, as some of you clearly misunderstood. As I said in my first post, it would only affect chat privileges, and would still have to be reviewed by a company employee before it became permanent. Bottom line here is that bioware is too understaffed and underbudgeted to properly handle this issue. Asking for help from players would in no way cause them to lose respect, quite the opposite in fact. This whole post by bioware is nothing more than a poor attempt to appease angry players by stating the obvious. All they really said was "we have banned some spammers based on your spam reports, keep it up" but yet the spammers are back as if they had done nothing at all. The problem is- currently you can report a spammer a hundred times and they can still post in chat, it takes a day to ban them sometimes. If they know they can post their spam for say 12 to 24 hours, per hour spent leveling, then that is a good payoff for them. However if they know they will be banned from chat after a few seconds, the hour spent leveling will be cost prohibitive. Not to mention why the **** are level 7 characters on new accounts allowed on fleet anyway? There should be severe restrictions on no-legacy characters vis-a-vis general fleet and starter planet chat. One should certainly be not allowed to post messages with identical content A simple algorithm designed to catch repeated messages with the same text would be incredibly easy to code as well. Furthermore, when a real player who knows whats going on comes across a family of 4 bots on hutta or ord mantell leveling in perfect sync, they cant do a damn thing about it to grief them (with a single exception, which is incredibly tedious to actually get them killed). There needs to be a way for players who went to grief these Chinese pieces of **** to do so. The only way now is to essentially turn yourself into a bot and try to steal their kills before they spawn, but that is so boring most people give up after a few minutes. The problem is that bioware is doing nothing to combat these guys except banning them based on spam reports or other retroactive metrics. They need to take PROACTIVE steps to make their lives miserable and remove their ability to get X number of guaranteed posts per account before a ban. That's what its all about for them- how many posts they can get vs how many hours spent getting to fleet. They are sitting in a room somewhere in China with dozens of computers each running dozens of virtual machines and maybe one guy checking each account for a few seconds every half hour or so. Whatever bioware can do to cause that guy to have to spend a few more seconds per account would be a huge victory, but sadly they are doing nothing. A simple CAPTHA popup that they would have to solve to avoid PVP on starter planets would be a good start. (i.e. if it is a bot, they fail it and are able to be killed by other players) But a far more simple approach would be to give a handful of trusted players the ability to silence spammers immediately. It's certainly worth a try. Maybe offer a CC reward for every 10 spammers they block or something. The point is that from a programming standpoint it would be very simple to implement a few ideas on how to be proactive against spammers, instead of simply banning people after the fact based on chat reports, or high-credit trades between accounts, or from tickets submitted against level 5s on starter planets. Currently the only way to get an actual human to respond within a day is to report a suicide or death threat, and only then if the player is in close proximity to you in game (???) My idea would solve that quickly and efficiently.

A simple solution would be to give a number of players GM abilities who can then instaban gold sellers from chat within seconds of their first post.

From a programming standpoint this would not be difficult at all. In the database file for your character they would simply have to change a few values associated with romance affection for companions. Any decent programmer should be able to take care of this in a few hours.

I just find it highly insulting that whoever the dev was who made these changes doesn't even seem to know that PVP and PVE are different enough so as to require different set bonuses; nor does he know enough about the game (or care) to go back and look at the old bonuses to see what the new ones should look like. First off, the 1% damage increase is the worst bonus ever conceived by man. Nuff said. Extreme laziness there. Extreme. As a jugg, who in their right mind would take a 1% damage increase over an 8% of full hp heal. Second, has anyone, in the history of the world, ever played a concealment operative in PVP, and said, "damn, I am so energy starved, I wish I had a talent that gives me back 2 energy on backstab"?!? Maybe this is coming from the same dev who thinks that agent tanks exist, and need patron gear, but I seem to remember something about concealment operatives being the quick sneaky killers who stealth in, make the kill, and then ****. If they are engaged in a fight for so long they badly need an extra 2 energy every 10-15 seconds, they are doing something wrong! Obviously whoever was in charge of set bonuses was so overworked that by the time they got to the set bonuses they had only a few hours left before the patch; there's no other logical reason why they would do something so sloppy as to give a worthless 2-piece across the board and a 4 piece that fails to come close to any previous ones. Honestly I don't think they could have possibly come up with worse bonuses if they tried.

Now that 3.0 has come, Revan needs to be updated to sell yavin gear. Nobody is buying black market gear anymore.

Both eyeless and xeno drop worthless gear. I know math is hard and all, but they are both level 60 bosses now so they should drop level 60 gear, not level 55 gear from two expansions ago. Please fix before these events come back around.

Anyone else want the option to get decent set bonuses on their pvp gear? Lets face it, most classes got screwed on the set bonuses come 3.0; why the devs would do such a terrible job picking set bonuses, and then further screw us over by making them the same for pvp as for pve (what sense does that make), I have no idea! For those of us who pvp'd seriously before 3.0 on multiple toons, we can just use our brutalizer armorings with the new mods and enhancements; but for everyone else, we're stuck with the worthless bonuses that come with the new gear. PVE'ers get to redeem arakanian tokens still, PVPers should get to spend their comms on brutalizer gear too if they want to. Its the least bioware could do after spending a whole 5 minutes picking the new bonuses for both sides of the game.

LOL This might be true if the devs had a clue as to how to develop a game properly. Countless times in the past we have figured out that due to a poorly designed system, the BiS gear was some crazy green craftable piece, or just going in naked. But they must capitulate to a bunch of whiny baddies who cant be bothered to play a few days in crappy gear in order to get proper pvp gear- and if they get their asses kicked for those two or three days it takes to gear up, they will quit playing and move on to another baddie friendly game... so we get the ever-broken bolster system. If only we could get a proper training dummy that allows us to set the stats to match a myriad of simulated players, and parse on that. But then again, f2p wouldnt know what to do with that, so it wont happen.

Much more important than this would be to actually let us dye the entire piece of gear. Single or double dyes are COMPLETELY WORTHLESS if the piece of gear has a third color region that stays some ugly silver or gold or red or whatever color and makes dying the piece black utterly pointless. Why bioware couldn't just copy guildwars2 or wildstar, who both have traditional, working dye systems, I have no idea. Making us pay millions for single use black dye that DOESN'T EVEN WORK is the height of laziness and incompetence! We all know bioware couldn't design a decent pair of boots to save their lives. But the three or four ones in game that actually look good on the majority of outfits are either cartel-coin-only or legacy bound to one single faction and class, or are no longer obtainable. The sith raider boots for example, would be perfect for many outfits if it weren't for that stupid white stripe that runs right down the middle that cannot be dyed. The thorn legacy boots/ gree boots would be perfect if not for the stupid red or orange lights that are non dye-able. Instead of allowing thousands of people to be happy and have decent looking outfits, now nobody wears the raider boots and only people with orange or red chest pieces can use the thorn and gree boots (if they actually care about their appearance and want to match)