If someone asks me to take off my clothes, I refuse, and they ragequit because I hurt their feelings by rejecting their advances, should I be put on 2 month suspension? (Not entirely on topic, I know, but someone did do that once.) People are responsible for their own actions. No one is "making" other people leave. Unless someone in real life unplugs your internet connection. Which I suppose is something an angry family member might do if you are trying to ignore their requests for help until the warzone is over, but isn't something Bioware would have any power over.

This. And the people who still leave, rather than staying but putting in no effort, will probably be the ones leaving for legitimate reasons to begin with, or at least reasons other than because they were losing. Disconnects, memory leak crashing, other crashes, permastuck-after-scamper, real life emergencies. Or those matches where the scoreboard and rewards never appear and *everyone* has to leave. As annoying as people who give up at the first sign things aren't going smoothly are, it could be worse. They could grab the Huttball, run back to our goal, and wait for the enemy to kill them and score.

Well, I could completely ignore the companion conversation, and in my head do the whole Captain Janeway tough love act and lock him in the brig / put him on kitchen duty / whatever act, and while I'm at it re-write those love-letters in my head to letters telling me how his therapy is going, but it would be nice to actually be able to do it in the conversations Bioware wrote, or if they they want to spare me the trouble, they could just write a less clingy character to begin with? I've read with the male smuggler, if you romance both Risha and Akaavi, at some point you have to choose between them, ending the romance with one, and also that you can end the romance with Risha by advising her to marry some other guy late in the story. So, there are ways to end romance with other characters, and I can't see why they couldn't easily throw that in with Corso too.

This. I want to lock him in the brig or put him on kitchen duty for a week. Then kick him off the ship if he still doesn't get the memo. My ship, my rules. If he doesn't like it, he can leave.

The question has already been answered in more detail. Others have stated that in order to kill the Corso romance, one must tell Corso to "Sleep in Off" in Happier times, a level 18 quest with a minimum level of 1. http://www.torhead.com/mission/hnPPCdu/happier-times If you do not kill the romance off in that early conversation, before it's even started, and decide later that you don't like him, whether you *really* don't like him, or just not enough to have the serious relationship he clearly expects, it's too late, he'll never take the hint, just continue to stalk you, be jealous as you pursue other interests, grab you and kiss you even after you tell him no twice, propose marriage even after that doesn't go over well, keep talking about having kids even after you turn down the marriage proposal, and keep sending love letters talking about settling down even after you say you don't want kids. Which answers my question on how to avoid the problem of avoiding his unwanted attentions on my Twi'lek gunslinger, other than his jealousy which is apparently there whether you flirt with him or not, but doesn't leave my scoundrel feeling any less like locking him in the brig or marooning him on some random planet.

As you say, Tatile, it's not just a surprise kiss on an interested (or supposedly interested) girlfriend out of the blue. It's a grab and kiss after the lady smuggler picks "no" conversation options *twice in a row*. I solved the lack of retribution in conversation options by using the slap emote on him after the conversation was over.

I don't see how the words future, babies, and commitment would be any less scary for a disinterested guy? Unless your idea of "babies" is just impregnating the woman during a one-night stand (or brief temporary relationship) and your idea of future and commitment is sending the occasional child support payment, men may not be the ones carrying the baby, but in a serious relationship, he's still expected to provide physical and emotional support over the course of the pregnancy, and potentially equal responsibility raising the kids after they are born. (And there's always the risk the woman will die at some point and you'll be left raising the kids as a single dad -- especially with that war going on.) All of that is well and good if she's really "the one" and you want to have "a family" together, but coming from someone you once found mildly cute when you first met them, flirted with a bit, and lost interest in? Really?

There's a huge difference between flirting a bit with someone and maybe even going on a few dates, and being in a real long-term relationship and eventually marrying. It's not "cheating" to decide after a bit of flirting and maybe even a few dates that you really aren't at all fond of someone and don't want to have a relationship with them after all. Seriously, how would you feel if the first woman you ever even flirted with expected that meant you wanted to commit to a having a future together with babies? Future, babies, commitment, future, babies, commitment. Scary words from someone you never had more than a mild passing interest in?

This is exactly the biggest thing I can't stand about him. Clingy, obsessive, can't take no for an answer. The jealous outbursts every time I flirt with someone else in front of him is the second biggest.

Yeah, just the conversation is bad enough. Corso thinks I'm so unattractive that no man but him will want to settle down with me, and furthermore, that I'm desperate enough that I'd take him at that point just rather than just saying, "I don't need a man anyway." Plus it reflects lack of self-respect on Corso's part. A man with more self-respect wouldn't want to be a consolation prize after I didn't get the guy I wanted. In that video, the person selected "Don't love me" followed by "I don't want to hurt you". The "Give it up" is a stronger no than "I don't want to hurt you", and I think he still kisses you even then, but I can't remember for sure. In any case, even the "I don't want to hurt you" is a loud and clear enough no that he should keep his hands off. Also, no matter what you pick, he doesn't get the memo and still proposes next conversation, at which point there's a fairly massive affection loss for turning him down. And even after you turn down his marriage proposal, he still keeps sending these love letters, saying he wants to settle down on a farm on Dantooine and so on.

My scoundrel takes a liberal attitude towards flirting. She'll flirt, date a few times, dance with, maybe even kiss just about anyone who seems interested just to test the waters. But it's not going past first base unless they impress her more than any of the NPCs have managed to do. If there were one of those speed-dating services where you can have 20 3-minute dates in an hour in some SWTOR quest, she would totally go for it. My Twi'lek gunslinger will be playing the role of an escaped slave, and will definitely want nothing to do with possessive jerks like Corso.

I can't remember for sure, but I think he kisses you even if you click both "Don't love me" and "Give it up" in the "No Walking Away" conversation. Anyway, I'm glad my gunslinger can tell him to sleep it off and avoid all this nonsense. Although if he's still going to be a jealous wannabe boyfriend, I do wish she could kick him off the ship. Or at least throw him in the brig until he cools off. So what happens then? I just get the same conversation options with him as the guy smugglers?

I've been through the Corso storyline on my scoundrel, and I have to say the further I got in, the more I disliked him. Jealous, pushy, and has a sense of entitlement. As an example: "I love you. What more do you need to know?" So just because he loves me, he feels *entitled* to have my love in return? Is there any way I can spare my Twi'lek gunslinger from the unwanted attentions of this guy, short of not doing the companion quests? Or is he determined to propose even if you never flirt with him once?

How many of your average PvPers do you think actually read anything on the forum, let alone this specific post? Also, the fact that even the thread opener's post contains errors about the function of bolster, in spite of the extensive time he obviously put into testing it, demonstrates how confusing it is. I already pointed out the errors on page 2, but here's a repeat in case you missed it. Lots of great information here, but this part is incorrect. While replacing war hero with Partisan/Conqueror armor, one piece at a time, my post-bolster expertise gain was exactly 1 expertise per piece. With full war hero (except the relics -- relics were matrix cube and light side relic), I had 2004 expertise. It went up to 2006 when I got a Conqueror blaster and Partisan scattergun, 2007 when I replaced an armor piece, 2008 when I replaced another armor piece, and so on. Perhaps it is true for people with higher rated stuff than war hero, but for old non-expertise armor from back when the level cap was 50, there does not appear to be any expertise bolster penalty for mixing sets, so long the PvP and PvE mods are on separate pieces of equipment. Since I had 2004 expertise before I even started getting Conqueror/Partisan, or in other words 2018-14, or -1 expertise per piece of gear, I don't think this is correct. I take an expertise penalty if I unslot my relics altogether and leave them empty, or if I use old war hero relics that already have expertise on them, but as long as I have any old non-expertise relics there, bolster seems to bring them up to Conqueror/Partisan minus 1 expertise. For the record, I'm using a matrix cube and a light side relic. If even those of us who are testing bolster to try to explain it to others are making mistakes, how much more confusing must it be for someone just hoping that whatever they already have is good enough? To be sure, many of the random people I inspect in warzones have less expertise, by several hundred points or more, than I had before I even it 55, even when they have more pieces of Partisan/Conqueror gear than I do.

Ah, I see. Cool.

I'm somewhat confused, because although most of your post seems targeted towards sages, unless I missed something, I'm the only one who specifically discussed rescuing low health targets, but I'm a scoundrel and obviously have different skills and buffs than those. If this was directed at me, then I'm really not convinced such a combination is any substitute for the scoundrel's emergency medpack, which is instant cast, has no energy cost, and has no cooldown other than the global cooldown, with the only limiting factor being the requirement of a buff called Upper Hand (which is easy to get, plus on targets with under 30% health emergency medpack will automatically re-grant Upper Hand upon use, so you can just spam it again without having to wait for more stacks of the buff). With Emergency Medpack, I can rescue someone who runs into my healing range at 1k health and keep them up as long as my heals exceed the damage they are taking (or my heals combined with other people's, as the case may be). A 1k health target would often be dead before a sage could get through a Deliverance activation, if the sage were the only healer trying to help. However, such a skill combination could work if there were a scoundrel around to keep the target from dying until the sage had time to get the big heal off and get them out of the immediate danger zone.

Does the champion set still have expertise? If so, get ride of it and replace it with level 50 PvE gear. Or just fill the slots with any cheap level 10 green gear you can find. Any expertise gear other than the lastest Conqueror/Partisan sets will get penalized from bolster in warzones. Basically, if there is even 1 expertise anywhere on the gear, you get no bolstered expertise for that gear. With no expertise gear, before hitting 55, I had 2004 expertise post-bolster, 14 points below the new 2018 maximum. (After hitting 55, each piece I replaced with Conqueror/Partisan only resulted in a 1 expertise increase post-bolster). There's a bolster penalty on high rated PvE gear, but you shouldn't have to worry about that at level 50. (You don't have to worry about it until the item rating of your gear gets above 152, as I understand it.) If you fill all your slots with low level greens, you should get enough bolster to be competitive. If you leave them empty, there's a penalty for that, so make sure you put something in every slot even if it's only a level 19 light side relic. If you want to twink, the Rakata set from the Classic vendor is probably pretty good, although I haven't actually don't extensive testing to be sure the level 10 greens wouldn't get bolstered more.

So the instant cast sage AOE comes from a temporary 100% effective alacrity buff (with three stacks) only on that one skill. So it's not something other classes are likely to see just from stacking alacrity, without any procs like that. Good to know. :-)

Cool. Alacrity no longer affects only activations/channeled skills. It now also lowers the global cooldown and increases energy regeneration by the same amount. One of the things a scoundrel healer can do is a skill called "Emergency Medpack", which a moderate instant cast heal with no energy cost. It requires and consumes a buff called "Upper Hand", however, on targets with less than 30% health, it immediately regrants Upper Hand (specced properly). Thus on a target with less than 30% health, a scoundrel who already has at least one stack of upper hand (which is fairly easy to get) can spam Emergeny Medpack every time the global cooldown is over. This is how scoundrels can do crazy healing on low health targets. Sometimes, it's very close whether or not the scoundrel can keep up with the damage, so even a slight reduction in the Global Cooldown can make the difference between life and death for the target. I'm curious how you manage to turn the AOE to instant cast? What is the activation normally, and how much alacrity does it take to make it instant? Right.

On enhancements, alacrity isn't competing with power or critical. The only place where alacrity could compete with those stats is on augments. On enhancements, alacrity competes with accuracy, shield, and surge. Shield is obviously utterly useless for a scoundrel since we have no shields. Accuracy is basically a damage stat, and, as I understand it, of limited use even for damage scoundrels in a PvP setting -- they may have added resistance to PvE bosses, but not to players so far as I know, and I've heard most scoundrel skills count as tech not ranged. (I'm not sure which ones -- if the tooltips make the distinction anywhere, I haven't noticed.) I guess it would be nice to have accuracy for Flurry of Bolts when all I want to do is interrupt a bomb plant or node flip or what have you, but I would rather keep the damage and tanks alive so they can take care of the interrupts. (And if I'm the only one paying attention enough to interrupt for any extended period of time, we're probably going to lose anyway.) Which means the only real competition for alacrity is surge. And since I stack power over critical whenever I get the chance, surge is of limited use. (Critical heals often fail when you need them and are wasted when you don't need them, so I prefer a good base healing output from power. And if the critical is wasted, the surge would just be even more wasted.) If I were damage, crit/surge would help create spiky damage to cut through heals, but since I focus primarily on healing, except for the offensive portion of Voidstar or when I'm busy being a ninja (stealthing at Huttball endzone or whatever), I choose power over critical when I get the chance. I see surge as nice to have, if there's nothing better to put on, but lowering the global cooldown so I can spam everything faster, including emergency medpack, has tangible benefits. At the same time, I realize Bioware is only going to let me reduce the global cooldown so much before diminishing returns kick in... not sure where that point is.

In all the confusion about bolster, has anyone tested post-2.0 alacrity much? I've heard vague rumors of activation skills becoming instant cast, but haven't actually seen it happen. I understand that it now lowers the GCD, increases animation speeds, and increases energy regeneration to compensate, but I am unclear how it compares to other tertiary stats like surge. I have a 55 scoundrel, and my healing rotation is primarily slow-release medpack/emergency medpack/kolto cloud/triage, so I avoided alacrity where possible before 2.0 (not that I had a great deal of time to twink from the time I hit 50 to the time 2.0 came out, but still), and have been trying to increase the alacrity on my gear as I switch up to Partisan/Conqueror, but I'm not sure how far to take it. I strongly prefer power over critical, so I don't really consider surge an important stat, except in so far as it's more useful than many of the alternatives (my base healing is high enough that I can get the medic medal just from a single non-critical Underworld Medicine, and, while the trauma surgeon medal would be nice too, I'm not going to centre my build around it). Currently, I have a 5.88% alacrity bonus to global cooldown, activation speed, and channel speed. 4.88% of that comes from 360 alacrity rating, and 1% comes from the single spec point I spent on Black Market Mods in the Dirty Fighting portion of my spec tree. With that, the activation time for Underworld Medicine is 1.89 seconds, and 1.42 seconds for Kolto Pack. Kolto Pack is 1.5 seconds without alacrity, which if I understand it is the same as the global cooldown, so, if I'm not mistaken, my global cooldown is also 1.42 seconds now. Which is great when I'm spamming Emergency medpack at someone with less than 30% health. I have 234 surge for a 14.43% bonus, or a total of 64.43%. 18.26% critical chance with both Lucky Shots and Force Valour. The Force Valour is from another player, so my critical chance will go down slightly when it expires. I'm tempted to replace all my surge with alacrity as I switch to Partisan/Conqueror just to see how low I can get my global cooldown, and if I can get either Kolto Pack or Underworld Medicine to be instant cast, but I understand there are soft caps / diminishing returns to discourage people from doing that sort of thing. Has anyone figured out where that "soft cap" is?

Is it possible the queue popped for 6 people, but 2 were AFK so only 4 accepted? Regardless, it would be nice if they introduced a couple 4v4 maps for off-hours when not many people are queuing. Sometimes in the early morning it can take 3 hours or more to get a pop. For that matter, I wouldn't mind 2v2 or 1v1 maps. I wouldn't want to see them during peak hours, but if they could make the queue sensitive to traffic and switch to fewer-people maps during off hours, that would be great.

If you'd actually read the whole opening post, you would realize bolster is in fact creating a huge stat gap in ways people don't even realize until they enter a warzone and start inspecting and seeing people who have significantly better gear than them have significantly worse post-bolster stats or vice versa. To make it perfectly clear from those who can't figure it out from the thread opener's post, quoting something I typed in another thread because I don't want to type it all out again:

You didn't read a word of the conversation beyond the title line, did you? Bolster does not remove the gear gap. In many cases, it widens the gear gap. This is because it behaves in ways that are completely unpredictable to the average player who has not done extensive testing to figure out how it works or having read the findings of someone who has. If you had actually read what we were talking about, rather than putting words in people's mouths because "Bolster is supposed to remove the gear gap, and there for anyone who is collecting numbers on it must be just want to outgear you, therefore they must be complaining about the lack of gear gap", you would have noticed the following issues, which I shall now reword to attempt to make it more clear why people might go in with gear that gets under-bolstered. (This is without even getting into exploits people have been complaining about in other threads.) * A jedi sentinel who turned 50 and got the Recruit set just before the expansion came out goes into the level 55 (or pre-55) warzones wearing this, assuming that since his gear has at least some expertise, he'll be better than everyone who doesn't have expertise gear yet. Little does he know that the small amount of expertise on his gear completely negates all the expertise he would've gotten from bolster. * A vanguard who had a full mixture war hero/elite war hero before the expansion comes out continues to PvP in this gear while working on replacing it with Partisan/Conqueror. He's disappointed when the expertise is removed from all but the relics, but figures it's still better than anything else he could hope to get before Partisan/Conqueror. Little does he know he's receiving a bolster penalty on his two relics, not getting bolstered expertise on them because they already have some relics. After several weeks of PvP with this disadvantage, someone points it out to them, so he removes the relics and leaves the slots empty. What the person failed to tell him, is that since they "fixed" naked PvP, there's also a penalty for leaving slots empty (empty slots receive much less bolster than if you put something, anything, there), and he's still at a disadvantage relative to someone who even put in a couple cheap lightside relics. * A scoundrel also has war hero from before the update. Not only does she not know to get rid of her war hero relics, she wants to keep her old 2-piece war hero healing set bonus for the +15% Kolto Cloud healing. Kolto Cloud is her only group heal, and she likes that old set bonus much better than the new +10% defense screen absorb set bonus. So she decides to leave the war hero armor mods in place on two pieces of armor, but replace the mod mods and enhancement mods on those pieces. Little does she know this actually results in less expertise, due to bolster not adding expertise to any item that has even 1 expertise on it already, and looking at the item as a whole, not mod-by-mod, and she would've been better off to just leave the war hero mod mods and enhancement mods in those armor pieces, if she wanted the two-piece set bonus so much. * A commando grinds out Basic gear on Makeb, and, seeing that recruit gear has been replaced with bolster, figures he can PvP with it. Little does he know there's an expertise bolster penalty on higher rated gear. Not even knowing that there is a penalty, let alone how much of one, he doesn't bother to calculate whether the increase in other stats over his old gear from level 50 is worth the expertise loss. None of these are people deliberately or even accidentally exploiting bugs. In fact, their gear is putting them at a disadvantage. They just don't know it, because they have no idea how bolster works. Back when there was no bolster in endgame PvP, it was easy to see how good your gear was; what you saw was what you got, other than the -30% healing penalty in PvP which was at least simple and easy to calculate. Now there's this mysterious black box that transforms one set of stats outside a warzone into another set of stats inside the warzone, and people who figure out how that mysterious black box works are going to be at an advantage over people who just leap into warzones with no idea how it works, hoping for the best. And if you were referring specifically to the lack of post-bolster expertise gain between war hero (relics excluded) and Partisan/Conqueror, that does not negate the gain in other stats. Even if you manage to avoid tripping over any bolster idiosyncrasies that leave you under-bolstered in terms of expertise or anything else bolster affects, there are still definitely gear gaps in other stats. And the gear I've personally tested is only a small sample; there's more out there than just recruit, war hero, Conqueror, and Partisan... that said, inspecting random people in warzones, people are ending up with a wide range of different stats and are definitely not all within 5-10% of each other. In my very first level 55 warzone I was out-statting people who had several pieces of Partisan/Conqueror already, but somehow had significantly less than I in terms of both post-bolster expertise and primary stat.

I could agree with that. I might occasionally be willing to try out endgame group PvE content, when I have the time, to see the storyline or help out friends who are short one healer because that person unexpectedly had something going on in real life that night, if the gear I have was considered acceptable for that purpose. As it is, if they're willing to take someone in PvP gear, either they're really desperate for one more person and probably not doing anything more difficult than a storymode flashpoint, or their gear is so top-end on the PvE side that they don't mind carrying "dead weight". Since I am insufficiently interested in PvE, and would rarely have the time to run any serious group PvE content anyway (part of what I like about PvP is that you only have to commit to short periods of time, and if something important does happen to come up unexpectedly, you can still leave and have the system automatically find a backfill to replace you), I basically don't bother with any PvE more difficult than heroics, in which PvP gear is good enough. Call me lazy, but I'm not willing to spend months and several-hour-long-blocks-of-time-I-don't-have grinding for something that would never be more than a passing mild interest. If top-end PvP and PvE gear offered comparable stats, but with set bonuses optimized for either PvP or PvE, and maybe even a way to convert between warzone and PvE commendations in case someone wanted the others' set bonus for their unique spec/playstyle, that would allow people to easily dip their toes in whichever activity they like less, while still making it of some benefit to have gear for the one they like more. But I suppose the prevailing view is work in PvP shouldn't count towards PvE, and vice versa, to some extent.