Small nit pick here, Blizzard started using Phasing in Wrath, showcasing it heavily in the Death Knight starter area.

Plus running around with Dark Charge is just awesome. Seriously, it has to be one of the easiest ACs to level with early on, and I've tried em all up to around at least 20. Although you could run Dark Charge with an early madness spec, I really like getting 15 sec Force Speed ASAP, especially since you'll have another 9 levels running around on foot. Also, don't be so quick to dismiss Force Lightning at this level, it still ends up being very efficient damage and great for finishing mob 2/3 in a pack after you beat the first one in the face with Thrash/SS. Shock is more situational at this level, basically I'm treating it as a ranged execute since Thrash beats it when you are in close quarters. Also works as filler when gap closing on a mob too. I just hit 16 on my Sin last night and I have a 27 Jedi Shadow that I is Kinetic as well, so I'm pretty familiar with the play style. Started the Sin since I wasn't enjoy the story/dialog much on my Shadow.

I think this largely depends on what you are looking to get from the story. Do you want lots of funny dialog? Go smuggler. Do you want mysteries and powers of the force? Go Inquisitor. From what I've seen across the forums, every story has someone who really enjoyed it and someone who thought it was pulp writing at its worst, so personal tastes play a big part. Also, don't forget that much of the time you actually spend in game is doing stuff that has nothing to do with your story, so game play mechanics and the generic quests should be considered as well. If you are particularly put off by one faction or another, the class story isn't going to help much. Same goes for game play, 50 levels of painful grinding can weigh done any story. Also, searching the forums might answer this question for you, the advanced search lets you drill into the specific class boards and there are several threads about the story already. Just Search for the word "story", select search titles only and select the Sith Inquisitor forum(or Smuggler)

Err, never mind, just saw all the recent posts about this

Is this a recent bug? Seem pretty game breaking for a couple of builds...

Wookiepedia refers to them as such, so I just went with it, heh. http://starwars.wikia.com/wiki/Lekku

While playing my SW, I often see a graphics issue with Vette where her Lekku start doing the "tentacle twitch". Does this happen with Ashara as well? While obviously not game breaking, it is rather annoying. Anyway, I'm not happy with the game play on my Juggernaut after having played a Jedi Shadow for a while and am thinking of switching out to an Assassin and am wondering if I can expect the same thing when I get Ashara.

Cool, thanks for the info guys!

It's funny, between Khem and Qyzen, I find Khem to be pretty cool and Qyzen to be a complete tool, but I generally lean towards light side choices in my play style. Qyzen just seems like he's trying too hard and his stupid scorekeeper religion irks me to no end. I would have much preferred a cliched wookie/life debt companion to that fool. Give me Zaalbar's great great grandson or something! Don't tell me, that falls into Bowdaar's story somewhere, heh. Since I haven't seen much mentioned about Bowdaar one way or the other, I'm guessing he ends up being pretty middle of the road as far as story goes.

I've been hunting around the BH and trooper forums and haven't seen much info on this. Can PT DoTs be cleansed? If so, does it matter much? With Bursting Flame, it seems like keeping a target burning shouldn't be hard but I have no experience with this and in general, DoT specs seem particularly vulnerable in PvP, at least when you have people paying attention.

That's a bummer about the title and no shag option for males on this chain. I'm rolling up a PT after getting bored with my Merc and squat-shot spam in PvE and was hoping they had fixed this and gave an interesting cut scene when you finish it by picking Lady Aitalla. I guess not though. On a side note, what kind of affection hit do you take with Mako if you mow 'em all down? How many DS points? Though I'm not playing a particularly dark character, I could see taking this option. From what I recall, the two dudes where scum anyway and she wasn't exactly a bright ray of sunshine either. Since I'm taking Diplomacy, I'm not too worried about messing my points up too much as it is and really the affection doesn't too much either since I can always buy it back up later, heh. More just curious as to how "dark" this option really ends up being.

This is pretty much how companion/crew quests have worked in KoToR and ME(guessing others as well) Basically you get some dialogs, get a quest or two and that's about it. It would be nice if they added some shoot the sh*t dialogs that are randomly selected when you try to talk to them after completing their quest line and that are based on how you interacted with them. That said, from what I've seen of the companion quests in TOR so far, they are pretty lack luster. I would really like to see more in-depth companion quests like ME2 had, the Kasumi one seemed particularly cool to me. Technically this seems possible with what they already have in the engine, so fingers crossed.

I'm actually about to do the opposite, I've got a 33 Merc that has basically been shelved because I got tired of squat-shot spam and being a turret in general. I have no interest in Pyro or Bodyguard, so I'm kind of at a dead end there. After having played a Kinetic Jedi Shadow for a while, I've found I really like the mobile tank style and now want to go back and roll up a PT and go shields. I'm just hoping I don't miss stealth and force speed too much while leveling, heh. As long as you enjoy the story or at least don't mind it too much, you should be okay there, the play style should be different enough that you won't be bored there as long as you enjoy the AC(more than I did anyway, heh) For myself, my biggest concern is running through the same imp generic quests again, particularly through Balmorra since I've played that content a lot trying several different ACs… at least I've got the space bar handy

Pretty sure they get two options if you turn her dark. Also, Mako for BH is pretty good, a lot of build up since you have her the whole way. Nice that she is pretty useful in combat and doesn't seem as annoying with the combat emotes too.

I was actually thinking they could have built up the storyline with him a bit more before he takes off with your ship, have it be more of a personal betrayal instead of just a near-random ship-jacking. Have it be something like, "Hey, thanks for getting the shipment here but we gotta do x, y and z before they can take delivery. You gotta help us out here, your name is all over this deal, so it'll be your head too if this doesn't get done." Once you've done some work together and helped each other out, have the seps break in and him take off leaving you holding the bag.

This seems to be an issue with all classes and early companions. I had similar issues with Mako on my BH. At around level 20, I received a quest from her that was marked level 30. I didn't attempt it until around 28 and then once completed, still didn't get any more conversations with her until I completed Ch. 1 and had started into Ch. 2. At that point a massive queue of dialogs opened with her and I went through something like 6 quests in about 10 minutes and then hit another quest that was about 8 levels ahead of me. They really need to work on the pacing of how the dialogs are opened, since it appears to be randomly tied to 3 different progression stats(level, story and affection) which creates some really unnatural dialog progression. I think they should have either made it largely dependent on your level(E.G. something like 1 dialog per level), had affection as a purely secondary gateway and have story only be required as a tertiary gateway if it wouldn't make sense for something to happen in the companion story before your main story. The other option would be to remove all story/level requirements and just make it based on affection and make the quests trivial in regards to level requirements. Since the intended goal seems to have been to spread companion progression out over the entire leveling process, I think the first option would have been much more inline with that.

I think it's less a matter of too much lightning but instead that most of the lightning looks basically the same. I think if they just mixed in some different effects, it would be enough to keep things fresh, while still keeping the basic idea of a lightning slinger.