The cover bar shares keybinds with the standard bar. I hear that many people disable the cover bar altogether because it can make things disorienting when you get knocked out of cover in the middle of a rotation. Also, even though crouching doesn't trigger the global cooldown and lets you immediately use cover abilities, the cover bar has some animation/transition time to it which can mean you might set off an ability from your regular bar when you wanted to use a cover ability. What I do is I keep the cover bar on, but I keep the majority of the bar the same as my regular bar. This way I can crouch and start Snipe or Ambush without having to wait for the cover bar to appear, but I can still have some things change when I'm in cover, like Escape (the CC breaker) gets replaced by Entrench since if I'm in cover it means I'm not CC'ed.

I am hoping for Ranked Warzones by the time my free 30 days run out, but I'm expecting the real updates (1.3, 1.4, etc.) to come out closer to quarterly.

I've seen at least one person who seems to roll FOTM whenever it changes (they follow a naming scheme and are in the same guild so I'm sure it's them) that was on a lowbie Sniper yesterday.

Hey guys, has anyone else noticed an influx of Snipers in 1.2.1 from the new damage boost? One Huttball match I was in tonight, there were a total of 8 Agents (according to the scoreboard at the end). My team had myself and a second Sniper, with no operatives. I don't know how many operatives they had, but that is up to 6 Snipers on their team. I'm positive they had at least 4 Snipers. It was a pretty crazy snipe-fest very low scoring match because the ball carriers died so quickly every time. I believe I was the highest level Sniper in the match, at level 42, didn't see any Orbital Strikes or Ballistic Shields used, and the occasional 1on1 with another Sniper gave me the impression that they weren't very practiced, so it could just be people giving their Sniper alts another chance after seeing we got some love in the latest patch notes. So has anyone else seen this? Are we the new FOTM because of 1.2.1?

How fast does it make you go? If it's potentially spammable or close to it, I can see it being useful. It's an instant cast mount, good for moving short distances like between mobs, vendors, quest locations, etc.

I think they may have nerfed it a bit with a recent patch, but I always make sure to do my space combat dailies on my alts. They're pretty solid XP for how fast you can get them done. Each daily is typically 2 space missions and give around 15k XP last time I checked, plus the XP from the individual missions themselves and for kills during the missions, etc. Also, use rested XP! Make sure that you log out in cantinas, and if you run out of rested bonus, level a different alt for a while to maximize your XP from time spent. You actually gain a fair bit of XP from kills as long as you're rested, so if you're looking to minimize how much content you grind through repeatedly, rested bonus can help a lot to get the most out of the ones you have to do.

It IS pretty bad. I don't really know about the loading screens, but you definitely know there are issues when the entire client lags up whenever you open a UI panel like your inventory, or dismount, like you mentioned. I'm also a game developer and I cringed the first time I opened my inventory. Try running around while spamming your open inventory key... yuck!

Am I the only one that sees this promotion for what it is? It's an attempt to get everyone to give 1.2 a solid chance and maybe stick around for the next patch. They're trying desperately to stop players from deactivating their accounts. My account was actually scheduled to expire on the 21st, and if it had I probably would've left it. Strangely enough, it has been sitting in a perpetual "will expire soon" state since, and I expect I will gain the free 30 days tomorrow. It would surprise me greatly if there wasn't another patch before the end of the month as another attempt to hold onto players. My guild is empty, and as a PvP'er, the only part of 1.2 that I was looking forward to was cut (Ranked Warzones). I enjoy the game enough that as long as my sub is active, I'll play it, but I wouldn't pay for another month at this point. So this free 30 days is keeping me around for at least a bit longer and if they deploy Ranked Warzones successfully by then, they might get me resubbing. To me, this free 30 days is their way of asking for another chance.

I actually kind of doubt that this instance of world PvP was planned by BioWare, sadly. That's part of what I enjoy about good PvP though, it's unexpected!

You are never forced into having sex with any character in this game. Sometimes turning them down hurts their feelings (affection loss) or earn you Light Side or Dark Side points that you may not want, but you are never forced to. These sort of systems are worthless without there being some hard decisions sometimes, but you can always regain/eliminate the penalty points later with companion gifts or by taking your desired LS/DS level beyond 10k (after 10k DS, every DS decision you make will remove LS points, and vice versa).

MMOs have to be the cheapest form of entertainment out there. It's only $15 per month, and you expect to get refunded when the game goes down for scheduled maintenance 4 hours per week? Come on!

I'm at 44 and went Madness, and I feel the same way on most bosses. Against non-bosses I still feel too squishy. I admit though, I have PvP'ed most of the way up so all my companions are wearing pretty bad gear and don't help much. Most of the time I end up swapping into Dark Charge and I tend to still need to kite the boss around a bit. It leaves a sour taste in my mouth when I'm specced Madness, which boosts Lightning Charge, but am forced to sit in Dark Charge for any encounters with Strong or tougher enemies in them.

Accuracy doesn't give you a damage bonus. If you get it over 100%, it lowers your target's defense (aka deflect, dodge, shield) chance. Generally, it's seen as useless to have over 100%, for PvP. I believe it's the main stat that people have typically tried to replace by swapping mods around in their PvP gear.

The reason for having separate gear for PvP and PvE is to prevent players from skipping over the content. End-game PvP is a different time sink than PvE. The devs don't want someone getting all the PvP gear then jumping to do the top tier Operations and miss out on the earlier Operation content. Same goes the other way, they don't want a top tier raider to hop into PvP and bypass all the PvP content (there is no real content progression for PvP, but its the same idea. To be allowed to compete with the top end PvPers, you are supposed to earn it by going through the standard PvP warzone quota). IMO BioWare is on the right track with this. They have stated that they don't want to use gated systems that lock you out completely (aka raid keying to force you to play through the mind numbingly easy content first to be allowed into the challenging stuff), so making gear, modified slightly by player skill, the determining factor is good. If a group is just really good at the game, they may be able to skip tier one content, but generally you flow through the content as you get the better gear. They don't want you to get the good gear from one content path and use it to skip over most of the other content path. If you want to play both types of content, then just build up two sets of gear.

As many people have already pointed out, the reason for rated warzones is so you can play against other players that are at a similar PvP ability level to you. It will also help deal with gear discrepancies because if you're a fresh 50 with no gear, your PvP rating will be low. If you are really good and can handle better geared opponents, then your rating will go up quickly and you'll start to be pitted against players with better gear (and therefore a better rating). Think of PvP reward gear as a PvP meta game. You are competing indirectly wih the other players to get better gear.