The videos look way nicer (certainly the textures) vs the in game settings. It becomes a little questionable if you're forcing outside postprocessing like SSAO and special texture filtering. It feels like the only thing that is really solid in this engine is the lighting effects.

While my server Darth Bandon isn't dead it has gone from what was once the highest pop USEast server to one of the lower ones rather quickly. I find it amusing how early on we had multi hour queue times but we can't seem to field above 50-60 people in Ilum or on the fleet.

Thats pretty horrible then. Never ran into the problem myself, stun always faded when the mob died :/. The adds on the bonus boss are why I couldn't solo him on normal mode, when they do that AoE pulse it really freaking hurts.

Its always done that for us, he only does it for a little while though, not like the end where he does it until you kill him. We get it every single time a power core is destroyed.

The perma stun is meant to be like that, its a channel. A simple interrupt or stun from a party member on the mob will break it.

I just soloed Normal Mode with my Merc + Mako using a little bit of creative thinking. Anyways the chests up to the last boss dropped level 48 blues ala the other level 50 FPs and the final chest dropped level 51 Xenotech Stalker's Legguards equal to Tionese but non set. Instance as a whole isn't very long, you can skip quite alot of the trash. There is a bonus boss and hes fairly easy to activate (kill 50 mobs, turn on 6 antennas). Completing the instance continues the Tion Hegemony quest into another FP called Lost Island but when you talk to the droid it tells you the Flashpoint is not in the game yet and to check again after the next major update. Won't get to do hard mode till later when friends log in :/. Theres some weirdness going on with the color crystals too. Did the Rakata weapons not used to have Black-Red crystals or am I imagining things? I would assume it is going to drop one of the missing Columi pieces on HM, thats what Main Hands (unlikely), Helms, and Belts? PS: The last boss did seem completely underwhelming, they need like twice the health they have. So did the turret event. The instance was not very difficult to solo on normal except for the Behemoth.

Yeah Tech Power is a given, the only time it might not be worth taking is if the secondary stats on the weapon really screw things up. I'm still sitting in the low 30s on crit and mid 80s on surge while stacking power like crazy now. The DR on Crit and Surge are just too high now, Powers eems to be giving me the best gain currently. It gets confusing though because as power goes up it makes crit and surge more effective again so there is going to be some point where eventually power overwhelms those diminishing returns again. For the Adrenals and Relics it is hard to argue against Power though. When you're temporarily adding around 1000 of a stat (Adrenal + Relic) at the same time, the DR completely destroys Crit and Surge's effectiveness, especially when you're already starting to feel the DR just from normal gear. Tier gear really makes things hard too. I'm transitioning from Columi to Rakata gear now as Arsenal and it goes from being loaded with Power to being loaded with Crit. I had to use Crit/Surge (Medic) implants to cover the lack of Crit in Columi gear but now as I approach full Rakata I'll probably have to get my hands on some Power ones because my Crit will be way too high and Power way too low. I just can't stand being above 40% buffed power as Arsenal, the DR is just way too high at that point. I'm also noticing some severe DR in the crit gained from Aim as I am now over 1900 buffed and it barely even moves my crit rating anymore.

What I don't understand personally is where the talk of Pyrotech mobility comes from when they need to use Power Shot and Unload to proc their Rail Shots which is the combo for all their burst. The burst goes in the toilet just as bad as Arsenal when you are interrupted or have to move. I see both as being viable from experience but I see Arsenal as having the better Single Target and Pyro as having the better AoE (Dotting up whole groups of players is hilarious), both having pretty bad mobility to put our real damage and Arsenal taking a slight win for Survivability because that 10% shield is up all the time if you're doing it right. Oh Pyro also seems very nice for taking out high armor targets where the 55% armor pen isn't quite enough to turn them into paper.

I have to agree, my only gripe with Merc and its a very minor one is the lack of an interrupt specifically for PvE and I only care about that because there are so many PvE encounters focused around interrupts. Though if your tank is good this isn't a problem, but it can be a pain if you're Merc + Merc for DPS....

Get your Accuracy up.

Thats not the problem though. The problem are the people who already took the PvP mods out and stuck them into PvE gear yielding PvE set bonuses with PvP stats. Its really scary watching a couple of healing OPs with that running around with dual 2PC but still full expertise spamming their AoE heal for very cheap, and healing a ton or watching a Merc using 4PC Eliminator without giving up any Expertise. I guess bugs like this are pretty minor though compared to tossing the ball up to your own spawn point in Huttball and camping it there where its insta death for anyone who tries to charge/leap to it or gets pulled in.

But what are they doing about the people who have already made their PvE sets into PvP sets and are now running around with PvE set bonuses with PvP Expertise? I know for one if I were to do this as a Merc it would add a tremendous amount of damage.... Is this gear going to be fixed/removed from the game, or are they simply going to prevent more of it from being created? If its not removed then those people will be at an advantage over everyone else who did not exploit this.

I dunno if the compression was in the earlier stages in beta but the beta problem was when they tried to add high quality textures with the remote renderer it caused lots of crashes and corruption so they disabled them a couple of patches later and told us they would be added back in when the problem was fixed. To this day the problem has not been fixed. If the compmression was there it certainly didn't make the high quality textures look bad, in fact they looked great when they were actually still there. Clearly they just decided to abandon it because they could not fix whatever was causing the issues and now they are wrapping it up in press releases saying "Its impossible because its a MMO to have high quality graphics" and "It was performance issues" when in fact it wasn't a performance issue, it was much worse. Someone made those textures, they exist, the setting was meant to be there. They were removed and someone forgot to get rid of the setting at some point when they decided they couldn't fix it and those textures will sit there rotting because this engine can't use them properly. Its ok though cause theres some nice looking games from companies that actually know how to write a good engine around the corner. This whole secure rendering thing is crap.

Accuracy over the cap does not turn into Armor Pen, it turns into Defense Reduction (Reduces chance to be resisted/deflected). Beyond 110% special you gain nothing. The whole armor pen thing was a misunderstanding of people interpreting the term "Reduces the target's defense" as meaning armor pen, it doesn't. The 2 points in Accuracy are fine early on but later on in the highest gear you actually will be overbudget on Accuracy (I get up to about 112% in full tier 2) hence the 2 points turns into 2 points in Critical Reaction. Also Alacrity reduces the GCD for non instant abilities. So while it won't help for Rail Shot and Heatseaker it will actually reduce the GCD of Tracer below 1.5 and let your unloads go off faster too.

You don't have to care too much before level 50 aside from anything but the crit. You really want to get yourself over 30% crit if you can once you get Terminal Velocity because it will make your life a hell of alot easier.

Ironically enough I haven't really been reading anything or doing heavy math just kinda been playing it by ear and I landed at those exact stats sitting at unbuffed 110% acc (thats special acc, not ranged acc) 31% crit, 82% surge (I'll get a bit more surge finishing my last couple of pieces) and all the rest in power which is @400. Its very effective. I duoed HM black talon earlier with my assassin friend using double healing companions and we had no trouble clearing it or not hitting enrage timers.

As said the level 50 purple Biochem BoP items are all reusable and are all stronger than other consumables available in game. Its really the reusability that makes them OP though. You can make "Stims" that are almost as good as the purples and last 2 hours and persist through death but you need a level 50 HM endboss drop to craft each one. The amount of time involved in getting the materials to do that compared to everyone having a permanent reusable one is insane. Ditto with the medpacks and adrenals. Adrenals are hard to make and are 1 time use if they are not the BoP purples but add huge burst when you need it. Medpacks are pretty much required for HM and NM so if you're not a Biochem be prepared to be buying hundreds of medpacks and if you want the good ones they're crafted only. Biochem is the best money profession in the game imo not because of the money you make but because of the millions upon millions of credits you never spend.

They can't be too surprised by it. They already had to defend their texture choices vs WoW, The Secret World, and GW2 in an early dev presentation and they were defending the high res textures there and they still looked like the worse which the SW devs called "Artistic Style". Its clearly an engine problem. We've already seen playables of new MMOs coming out that put SW's textures to shame and they are scheduled for release this year, 1 year difference between your game looking like its from 5-7 years ago and looking like a 2010-2012 AAA title. Bioware's biggest problem is there is no way they will ever be able to improve this, so they just have to deal with their game looking horrible on the medium textures we have now which are a step down from the already ugly high res textures they had to defend.

What I don't understand is that if the issue is just performance then they should still include the option. Some systems will run it fine, some won't. Now if it is the problem they had back in beta when the high res textures were still enabled (and they were, up until the middle of last year) where it would constantly crash the game and cause the client files to get corrupted that is another story. But that is not what they are claiming in their incredibly dodgy statement about it... They certainly should not be using these high res textures in their trailers and previews though, I don't understand how that isn't false advertising. If you look at the new Rakghoul trailer that clearly has the high res textures and shadows in it....

Threads keep arising. Whats funny is the people asking for no DPS meters don't realize that the game is already loaded with level 50 content that requires players to output very high DPS or it is unkillable via hard enrage.... I feel like a broken record. The content requiring DPS is already there, people will be total jerks to bad DPS whether theres meters showing it or not because it is obvious when you fail to beat an enrage timer that someone's DPS is too low. People have this misconception that they are making a game where this stuff doesn't matter. They clearly have not seen the content within the game that already makes it matter. PS: This isn't a post commenting on whether DPS meters are necessary or not, thats subjective. This is just a post to hopefully bring some awareness that min-maxing and good play are already required at max level play, probably to a higher degree then some other games, particularly in HM Flashpoints.

There is no way that server side rendering is being done here, the amount of data being sent is wayyyyyy too small and the game clearly uses Client Side Prediction, which it wouldn't if rendering info was being handled remotely. There would be a much larger delay too when performing actions. The more likely thing as suggested is that the models are encrypted locally and are being decrypted by the second process which is behaving as a local server with an ip loopback.

I know its a side to what you were saying but the Biochem Adrenals are a separate item/cooldown from relics. There are non BoP one time use Adrenals that Biochems can make for other people, they're meant to be the equivalent of a "DPS Potion". I really hope the epic relics not having passive stats is an oversight. If it is intended its really dumb.

We did it as others have mentioned pulling Massey out of range of rockets and burning him down first. Afterwards we did Medic then Commander to minimize risk of loot not dropping. Was no problem, but the DPS is tight so make sure your tank is putting damage into his mobs while you kill Massey and interrupt heals.

I believe it is the same as the dailies, in our server's case that is 7AM EST, 4AM PST.

Its totally random based on class. This is a pain with the random drops that include stats as it may not be what you want but not a problem with Tier Tokens which you can trade in for the type you want. Those Tier Tokens are the real gems anyways, Columi is really good compared to the other stuff.