Here's the problem though, that works fine only on easier content where you don't need the DCDs. In HM+ ops this will quickly turn into a flame war in which Mercs blame healers for not keeping them alive, healers then go "why aren't you using cooldown X to mitigate this portion of the fight" and then you have to admit you're not even specced into that for various reasons. And the you look at Maras and you see they have EVERYTHING: high dps, good DCDs, good utilies, gap closers, etc.

There would be MANY people playing Arsenal if it wasn't so bad right now. Mercs and PTs are very popular choices for obvious reasons. I'm not sure why SWTOR insists on making players feel weak when playing them. DPS wasn't great in 6.0 but between Blazing Bolts on the move and other utilities I could make up for it. Now they've removed those abilities and put them up in a "choice" against essential DCDs and dps is even weaker comparatively than last patch. WHY?

I actually prefer gearing in 7.0 to 6.0 because you get something to work towards for a while. I disliked the multiple gear lines at the beginning but now I'm realizing it's making me play a bunch of content I wouldn't have attempted otherwise. My problem is with gating the best gear behind MM ops aka NiM. It's really hard to form a progression group that meets regularly and does that content, particularly with SWTOR's player base right now. Aside from that I'm forced to farm Nefra and Dash'Roode on multiple characters each week hoping for lucky drops. That is not the way

As long as the rewards for GSF are MILES better than anything else and as long as they don't require wins but just participation I'll be farming GSF. I'm gonna try at the start but if I see multiple red arrows near my spawn I'm suiciding.

I don't afk, I run maximum burn to objectives, try to dogfight, get instant missile lock the moment I get close, dodge dodge dodge and then eventually either die or smash into a rock and die. That's pretty much the cycle right there.

Nefra, Dash'Roode and who knows what else. If I were in a progression group, I'd do proper raiding. But I'm not so I'm just going to farm what I can.

The weekly & daily rewards given for playing GSF are RIDICULOUS. No other activity lets me get the riDONculous amount of tech fragments that I get from playing GSF. And trust me, I've never played GSF before this expansion, I never liked it, but you bet your behind I'm farming it on multiple characters each week now. Flashpoints don't even come close to being as rewarding. Veterans are easy enough to do though they only give useless green gear at this point and the weekly only gives 100 fragments and a green gear piece. IF you're very efficient you can do 1 vet in the time it takes you to do 1 GSF match, aka about 15 minutes. However with weekly + daily I get 1500 fragments in an average of 3 GSF matches (1 win 2 losses is the average I'm on) plus a Thyrsian gear box PLUS other stuff. MM Flashpoints aren't much better. Yeah you get better gear in them and an upgrade box + 200 frags for the weekly but they can take a LONG time to finish. Some, you CAN'T finish (e.g. Crisis on Umbara) or you have to boot one or more of your teammates, reform and retry one or more bosses. Even if the fights are easy, which is not always the case, they often have a particular mechanic that especially newer players don't know about. Some learn quickly, others don't. Some people are decently geared, others decide to ninja MM FPs at level 76 and have 100K less hp as a tank than me as a dps and then surprise surprise they get squashed by a boss. Point being, it can take a long time, you HAVE to finish them or you don't get the reward AND you can add a long queueing time as a dps on top of that. Warzones, as many have pointed out, only give you rewards if you WIN. That right there is a BIG if. I've had many stretches in which I've failed at warzone after warzone and while I'm not a GG pvp player, I'm not a hopeless suck at it either and I play objectives as hard as I can. Warzones make sense to play when you go into them with a premade. And even then there is no guarantee because you can run into another premade that's just better or has better composition, etc. Point being queueing solo is a massive time waste if you do it for the rewards. And then there's GSF. I'm not a thrower (at least not until the enemy team goes something like 20 5 in a Deathmatch, at which point I'm like '**** it'), I would describe myself as cannon fodder. I'm throwing my posterior at objectives and at other ships as much as I can. Ultimately, what I do in said match is completely irrelevant and negligible. I do SOME damage every time, sometimes I even get a kill or 2 before dying 10 times. I cannot aim a missile to save my life and no, I will NEVER be able to as long as it involves sound. I'm watching TV shows while farming GSF and that's how it will be! Mostly I can do some dogfighting which I end up losing most of the time but usually I kinda get sniped by gunships from God knows where. But you know what? All of that doesn't matter because in 45-50 mins on a character I'll have farmed 1500 tech frags (Daily + Weekly) plus a bunch of other useful stuff. Daddy needs his implants on multiple toons and GSF is THE WAY.

Bumping and agreeing with pretty much all the points made here.

Honestly I don't get the point of having so many currencies and different lines of loot. Why do we need Supreme Decurion AND Columi when they can be the same thing governed by 1 currency instead of 2? Why can't all gear upgrade from green to blue to purple like the pvp gear? I mean in 2 hours of GSF I can get purple 326 gear for any toon, as well as a LOT of tech fragments to upgrade my implants. I'm farming this stuff on multiple toons and I can promise you I still don't know how to play GSF, as in how to shoot a secondary weapon what the abilities actually do, etc. It's actually faster if you suicide when your team is clearly inferior because some genius decided to make suicides count as points for the opposing team in Deathmatch. I mean why play VM flashpoints or SM ops when those only drop 322 gear that cannot be upgraded past that point? Much faster to play GSF....not normal PVP cause there you have to WIN to get the good rewards, whereas in GSF I just have to camp objectives, hide behind rocks and sometimes suicide myself....also I can repeat the same weekly 3 times per toon and get gear upgradeable up to 326 purple.

..or refund me my 6 month sub please. And the CC I spent on cosmetics that I now can't use because the failures you call developers released the game in a state where you have to equip the ugly weapons you get as drops. But never mind that, can you explain to me why you have nerfed the damage of Mercenary Arsenal, a spec that wasn't topping the DPS meters anyway but also removed all the fun utilities? And make no mistake, you REMOVED them, because if you force me to choose between having a defensive cooldown and a fun utility, guess what everyone playing anything more difficult than Heroics and dailies will choose? Examples: Hold the Line vs Responsive Safeguards, Thrill of the Hunt vs Kolto Surge, but probably the most insulting is Chaff Flare vs Supercharged Celerity vs Power Overrides. So let me get this straight, you're forcing me to choose between being able to lower my threat as a dps (as well as a minor dcd), being able to provide a buff for my raid group and an extra heat management option. Next time when you copy WoW can you please move forward with the timeline to when THOSE failed developers realized what a BAD idea it was to remove utilities from classes? Can you please explain your idiotic logic on WHY it's a good idea to nerf utility in all classes but predominantly why you hate mercs so much?

I concur, I main Arsenal Merc, it's the spec I enjoy playing the most. In 6.0 I wouldn't break the DPS meters but I could hang decently with people and engage in all content. In 7.0 I'm struggling to get past 20K dps in HM+ while other specs do 27K without even breaking a sweat. I've got 110% accuracy, 13.7% alacrity (I hear 15% is the target but that's hard to get in 326 gear) and honestly it's not like I can massively screw up the Arsenal rotation, it's kinda one of the reasons why I'm playing it. Not to mention I now have to make fantastic choices such as do I take Hold the Line to help with various mechanics or should I opt for the Responsive Safeguards (reflect) defensive cooldown? Do I want to have a useful defensive cooldown such as a 60% Kolto Overload or do I want to do more dps by activating Thrill Of the Hunt? Why does Bioware hate Mercs? Can someone from the balancing team actually explain their moronic decisions for this patch? Are we all supposed to play Juggs and Maras sitting on the boss's behind 24/7 as dps since apparently it's evil to have other utility skills?

Another thing: Didn't they say Tait was supposed to post constantly in this thread and give us updates? When it's announced to be a matter of minutes to restart some servers, a rule of thumb is post every 5 minutes to answer some people and keep everybody informed and feeling like they're not ignored. When was Tait's last post, I've been monitoring the thread for 30 minutes now hoping to catch an update from him/her but have not seen any? P.S.: I now have the feeling we sort of misunderstood what Eric Musco said. I feel he emphasized the restart were going to START in a few minutes, not that the whole affair was a matter of minutes, in which case they're doubly at fault for misleading people to believe it will be a short fix and for not giving us a proper ETA. Edit: Thank you Tait for the update, I was hoping you'd post before I finished writing my response:)

I understand they're trying to fix something promptly but I'd like to know if it's really a matter of minutes (in which case i'll stand by and wait in the hopes of raiding later) or hours, in which case I'll know to go have fun somewhere else. I think it's not hard at all to give an approximated downtime up front so that people know what to expect. And if you run over have the decency of notifying us and updating your estimate.

Well at least the World Cup is starting today, I have that to look forward to. Also, I reinstalled Skyrim. I probably know the layout of every vanilla dungeon in there by heart but it's still miles better than wasting hours trying to move from one spot to the next. Btw, I expect a refund of the days I haven't been able to play. Already 3 days of downtime, that's 10% of a monthly fee. Cartel coins are fine, cause you're never going to refund real money anyway, BW. P.S.: I'd like to report a bug in the mechanism that keeps making me put in that "one-time password". It does NOT work properly, I'm using the same computer every time with the same internet and it still keeps asking me to input that damn password whenever I like to post on forums and half the times I log in the game.

mohawk? I'm afraid to even look at other customizations...no wait, I CAN'T, because I CAN'T GET MY OTHER TOONS THERE!). But nah, not "unplayable" 100%, only about 95% so. Some sheeple think we ought to thank BW for the privilege of letting us pay to play the game. It makes me sad to read those posts. On a more serious note, how can you not figure out what the problem is exactly in a few hours and repair it within a day? I mean I'm not a true programmer irl, I only work with easy-to-use programming languages such as C# or Java or Matlab to create financial software applications, but I just don't understand what kind of company tolerates this level of mediocrity that entails people not being able to figure out and repair their own mistakes in 24h even though they went through MONTHS of development and testing (including PTS). There is no excuse for this, the people behind this are just weak at their jobs. Oh and btw, given all of this, the least you can do as a company is give us updates every 2 hours, I mean at least PRETEND you're trying your utmost to solve the problem. You have a twitter account + forums, posting on it every 2 hours is the least you can do.