i disagree. it should be free for everyone. the whole purpose behind movable mods is so people can wear what they want. we've already earned the modded gear (rakata, black hole whatever), and we've already bought the gear we want to wear. we shouldn't have another credit barrier between having the gear and wearing the gear. put the gold sinks somewhere else, like an escalating GTN deposit fee per item or something.

yes, please do this.

the vip vendor and the ce vendor are not the same vendor.

they're reducing the cost by about 30%. it shouldn't cost anything, but i guess there are enough people running around with millions of credits that they need credit sinks for them.

i'm not saying it's a problem that prevents progress, that heroic isn't exactly difficult. it's just that they're badly designed encounters. those instantaneous knockbacks negate a tank's gap closer to the status of irrelevancy. and it's not just in that heroic. it's all over this game. and it's not just knockbacks, some NPCs even stun a guardian before his leap lands. guardians have a very cool gap closer ability that for 25% of the mobs we encounter is not a viable ability. we're better off running up to the mob like a face-pulling idiot, getting the kockback, and then leaping back in. and with other encounters like the bots in EV (after the first boss), holding threat on all of them is literally impossible, no matter how much they buff our threat generation, because the fact of the matter is, if at any time we have threat on the entire group, we will spend the next 15-20 seconds being passed around between bots, as each one pulls, then knocks back in quick succession, one after the other, over and over until you've lost threat on all of them.

one of the most frustrating things about being a guardian tank is that while i already do so little dmg when i'm able to attack (making threat a problem, so i'm glad they're boosting it), the problem is compounded by the fact that many humanoid NPCs (and even many bots) are loaded to the gills with knockbacks. worse still, being computer controlled, they're able to engage their knockback before i even land my leap, negating the whole purpose of the leap. guardian tanks who've done the black hole daily heroic quest can back me up on this, those golds simply will not let you get near them, and when engaging the fight with a leap, getting knocked back before you even land is just about the most annoying thing the game does. and god forbid you're actually able to hold threat on all of the floating bots in EV, your feet will never touch the ground with all their chain pulls and knockbacks they'll inflict on you. loss of control of character is not a fun mechanic, and while i understand that these NPCs should have these abilities, they probably don't need to be able to use them every 3 seconds, and certainly they don't need to "act" like they're computer controlled and knock a guardian back faster than his leap can close the gap. it's so bad in the black hole that leaping isn't even an option really. you have to leap on something else and run to them. that's not really a gap closer anymore, that's just a rage builder.

actually everyone stop for a second. go watch the new video on the site. it's slightly different from the IGN version, because on this new one you can see the LFG tool has the different tiers of content broken up into different sections. you can also see that everything other than story mode flashpoints rewards BH commendations. i'm pretty sure gear check is already in there.

a new level 50 tank in quest appropriate gear will have something like 12-13k health. a columi geared tank will have upwards of 19k health. to spread the content out, the developers will make a boss hit for 18k, ensuring only a columi geared tank can survive it. that's how gear-gating works, and without the game blocking people from entering content they're not geared for, the responsibility lies with the players to do the gear-checking. it's as simple as that, and there's no elitism involved.

i don't know either. i think it's basically come down to "mean people suck!" so whatever, you win Socrates.

i'm starting to think you never actually played wow when it had the LFD tool. the LFD tool automatically excluded people who did not meet some minimum gear requirement, as determined by some formula that nobody really knew, but was easy to cheat by simply buying the wrong but high iLVL gear. in that case, many people did defeat the gear gates and were 'carried' by people who actually worked their way up to that content. in many other cases, the entire party wiped repeatedly without knowing the real reason because in fact, skill does not beat out gear on every fight, especially fights that are designed to hit you for more health than you have or bosses that enrage if you don't defeat them fast enough. it was only with the use of tools like recount or gearscore that people would be clued into the fact that "hey what the heck? that hunter has greens on! we'll never beat jindo..." you've already conceded that the game has gear gates. you accept that they're real and that they serve a function. and yet you still believe they should not be enforced. the only possible argument against player enforced gear-checking when the game doesn't do it automatically is that you think undergeared people should be carried. and that's fine to believe that, but what it will mean is that nobody who could actually do the carrying for you will ever use that tool. this is exactly what happened to the LFD tool. TANKS. STOPPED. USING. IT. so blizzard gave them candy every time they did. and still, it wasn't enough for most tanks to waste their time trying with idiots who think gear gates don't apply to them. those are the 'bads'. people who think they're so special they can down the lich king at level 75. or think they can cleverly outmaneuver Foreman Crusher's fists with their leet pwnage skillz.

because players have to be the ones doing the excluding if the game doesn't do it itself. you understand and agree with gear gates, but you don't think players should enforce them. but the game doesn't, so who should enforce them? the ravages of lost time with repeated and fruitless wipes?

this. if the tool doesn't do it automatically, the players have to do it, and the people who feel entitled to skip to the end start throwing out the "elitest" canard. elitests didn't make the Rancor enrage after 3 minutes, or make the Foreman Crusher smash tanks for more health than a new 50 even has. the developers did that. and they did it because they don't want fresh 50s to finish that content. they want them to burn through other stuff first so that they don't have an entire playerbase beating the end-game on the same day they reach level 50. actual bona fide elitests don't use LFG tools because they form premades with like minded people. but for everyone else who's done their time grinding out the gear they need to tank the Foreman Crusher, it's a huge letdown if the LFG tool matches them up with someone who believes they deserve to run the content because they just hit 50.

without a gear check, the LFG just simply won't be used, because LFG-made groups won't complete any of the content and people will quickly tire of wasting their time with it. we don't know what the final product will be like, but given past examples of half-measures and shortcuts that this dev team takes for literally everything, i would be very very surprised if the tool somehow knew that a fresh 50 with level 45 blues and greens is not ready to tackle KP. and to the people that say it's elitest to suggest that anyone isn't ready for the content, grow up. if you weren't ready at level 45 to beat Soa, you're not ready at level 50 wearing level 45 gear. it's the way videogames work - you don't get to skip to the end before you're ready. and in an mmo, "ready" means you have the appropriate gear. but by all means, form your LFG groups with everyone wearing greens and go smash your faces into the Rancor for several hours without coming close to beating him. i suppose it'd be elitest to do otherwise, because it's all about skill right? enrage timers are a myth! or maybe they're a mechanic specifically designed to prevent undergeared people from completing the end-game content...

they weren't photoshopped. they were french servers.

my guess is since the foundry and Malgus' new station were destroyed, the imperial fleet is pretty screwed w.r.t. ship procurement. what we saw was probably the empire's new shipyards, and if we do see them, we (being the republic) probably invade and blow them up, too. the second image is baffling. it's a holographic display of what looks like a mon calamari in a ridiculously star wars sized room. if i were to hazard a guess, it's probably the imperial faction's version of the shipyard invasion. maybe they kill some republic faction leaders?

well that was hostile. anyway, since you assume everyone ever is lying to you, here's Daniel Erikson's most recent quote on the subject:

before the election.

yeh, basically all your dudes are dead. anybody the republic would be fighting would just be some Darth Imnewbutstillyoushouldfearme.

i think they actually have a very good system for character customization (the whole orange gear system is great). it's just that it's so prohibitively expensive to use that everyone ends up looking the same anyway. kind of like transmogrify.

they have indicated that this is so. and if you already have a legacy on the new server, the greater of the 2 legacies takes over. however, they've also said they want you to keep all your unlocks. so it may be that if you've unlocked sith on server A with legacy level 15, and ratataki on server B with legacy level 10, transferring to server B gives you both species, but the legacy level and name will be that of server A.

those were all french servers. but more importantly, light, standard and heavy are all internally defined benchmarks that can be anything in any region. so even the french servers might be light by US server benchmarks. any way you slice it, that was a deceptive slice of video there, and it wasn't even necessary. they could just have easily shown a level 50 loading up on fleet and we'd all think "oh yeh, he just transfered to a new server!"

some abilities (that most players and even some bosses have) lower the total defense of the target (the tank). very few things affect total health (rakghoul plague being one of the few). so, averaged over all fights, greater endurance would seem to be more beneficial than greater defense. that said, all things being equal and no debuffs on the tank, anything that avoids dmg by some percentage is the same as having more health by that same percentage. stat itemization usually isn't about which stat provides a greater survivability for each percentage of avoidace/mitigation, but rather how much of either avoidance or mitigation percentage you gain per point of the stat after diminishing returns. of course all of this changes when bosses hit for more dmg than the health of the tank before combat table calculations, as often happens in other mmo's, but not this one.

"we don't have an answer for you" is not an answer.

this isn't the full picture. it's true that the client-server communication is what slows it down, but it's more precisely that the game institutes a blocking call during this communication, rather than finishing the load and waiting for the server to respond with the other data. while the client is loading the world, it should be communicating asynchronously with the server, but it doesn't. it completely stops the load every time there's a client-server request. so it's not exactly that their servers are slow, or that our connections to their servers are slow, it's that the load is never fluid and continuous. it starts and stops repeatedly during that loading screen. that's just bad programming.

well i thought of that, too. but that would mean when a particular skirmish ends and you heal up your tank/dps near a cap point, after a couple of seconds, your healing throughput falls through the floor. i suppose they can just as easily use their self-heal meditate, but so far, bioware has not said that this is the intended behavior, so i'm curious. given the developers' propensity to take the absolute easiest path to a solution, even if it doesn't make sense, i wouldn't be surprised if expertise's effect on healing is always on, but that it's essentially meaningless and you're just as competent with either your primary stat or expertise in either context.