I am also experiencing this issue. I get a "Login services unavailable. Check the Forums..." or something to that effect. Mt default server is Star Forge, but I can't even log into the launcher right now so I can't attempt to select another server.

Ah, well that makes it a -little- better. Thanks for that info Nabcobra Still though, if you are already at 300+ with a character the system is of no use to them at all which for me is the big disappointment. Your explanation makes the system make a little more sense in that for the first time, we can/will be using our -lowbies- to gear our mains: grind GC levels, save gold shells on all alts, upgrade as able. Seems odd but at least I can stop grinding on 3 characters for the most part now I still would like to see them remove the shell requirements, but I suppose the hardcore grinders (especially those who run WZs over and over all day) would gear out to 248 in a week.

NOTE: From the perspective a player who only does mostly basic content (MM FPs, SM ops, dailies and story content. Not really relevant to players already parting in content that utilizes UCs. I completely understand that swtor, swtor game design, and general gearing experiences do NOT revolve around me. I'm just using my personal swtor experience as an example as to how/why this change could been seen as useless to many players, especially the more casual ones. The answer to this might seem obvious to many, but I don't have time for MM (NiM) raiding anymore and ABHOR the stun-spam button-mashing horror that is swtor PvP so I've not dealt with UCs yet; will they still require the exact class/spec shell from the previous tier to upgrade an item? If so, then what good are the UCs to the average player? Unless you are progressing through the levels of GC AND getting the legendary drops to keep the shells from starting from now and moving forward, I don't see much use for them. Unless you saved shells for some reason, you still won't be able to gear a toon that isn't getting lucky with drops at GC 300+. In my opinion, that's the only tier this would even be worth grinding for. Once you get to tier 4 it rains blue set bonus gear that's better than all previous tiers (technically the same stats as legendary 242, but the armorings provide a little more armor rating due to the higher item rating). I got full sets of 246 relatively quickly as well. If anything, the tad bit of extra CXP from disintegration is far more useful to my current 300+ characters than UCs that I will never be able to use to upgrade their gear; it might mean an extra crate when opening enough of them (say, after running all the weeklies) which gives you another prayer to RNGesus for 248s :-P Unless I'm missing something, if they don't remove that restriction, this is really just a drip-feed bonus for those already gaining them from other sources and gearing with UCs from PvP and OPs where you can get the tokens to get what ever shell you want for an alt. Those doing GC will only be getting spec-specific shells for that class (which does nothing for any other alt unless it's the same spec and class ), and while that might help upgrade 236s to 242s, and 242s to 248s after you build up a ton of UCs leveling GC on multiple other toons, it's not a lot of help otherwise. Sure, you can grind to hell and back will pre-existing GC level 300+ toons while chasing shells with the specific toon you're working on at the time, but imo the small dribble of UCs from disintegration and shell-chasing would take more time than just blasting an individual toon through to 300+. By that time, you could have them in all 246s (except for armorings if you want a set bonus) from excess mods and enhancements and just grind 300+ crates for the 248s faster. In example: my shadow/assassin legacy set needs the 248 armorings for the hands and legs and a few odd enhancements. UCs will do absolutely nothing for that character what so ever, so I'm still relying on crate drops as I didn't save the shells for anything. I would have to either go PvP for MORE UCs, start buying the piece I need at 236, then 242, and continue grinding the crapton of UCs to finally get the 248 piece. I would rather staple every square inch of my body, or taze myself in the face 3 times a day; both would seem far less miserable to me. (No offense meant for those who enjoy PvP. Each to their own for sure!) The alternative, while not as distastful and unpleasant to me as PvP is running VM (HM) operations, hoping it doesn't end in rage quitters delaying/dismantling the group due to wipe-fests, and praying to RNGesus that I win the roll on the specific token for the piece I need. Then grind GC crates and more VM operations to get all the UCs to upgrade.I could in theory skip the whole shebang by running MM operations to (again praying to RNGesus) get the 248 drop to begin with, but I just have too many RL responsibilities to get large chunks of time to progression raid anymore :-( Now, the obvious rebuttal to this is that you start a toon into GC and send them all the UCs, then they gear up through the ranks and fill in the slots through use of the UCs when you (finally) get enough of them while saving the shells. As you progress to 300+, you use the UCs from other toons and this one and get a few pieces. That seems ok for those who have hours and hours to dedicate to running multiple 300+ characters through content to disintegrate GC drops to send the UCs to the alt they're trying to gear up. Me, I try to get 1 or 2 through all the major weeklies for daily areas and that's about it, aside from a FP here or there and if I'm lucky a GF op. With the doubling of the prices, the reality is this will be next to useless for those who only run general content and not MM ops and PvP. If they're doubling the prices at each tier, to get even simple pieces of gear like wrists or waists it will still take close to 1000 (est) UCs to go through 236, 242, and purchase the 248 piece. I know they haven't released how much we'll actually get from disintegration yet, but I think we can all agree it will be a very small amount. If anything, this more seems less about opening up the use of UCs to the average player than about enticing folks to try their hands at MM ops or further trying to coerce players into PvP.

Orbb: I can confirm this. I discovered last night that if I equip the shoto, then exchange it for the regular saber, the sound set works until you zone. Then you have to do it again. I was on my guardian, so leaving the shoto equipped as a second weapon wasn't an option, but good to know for a sent/mara that if they use one of each they're good to go until this gets fixed. And I feel you on the dying inside bit; this saber uses the ignition sound of Luke's RotJ saber as one of the effects (about 50% of the time), which I and many others have been waiting for since pre-launch :-P

This thread might well be dead, or falling on deaf ears even if not, but I hope that Toby is actually still reading feedback. After reading the forums and the assessments of the new design for the packs and crates, I had decided not to purchase either because it sounded like a really bad design with a greatly reduced probability of getting anything good from the new items. Today, I decided to buy some CCs and give a crate a shot, figuring the silver stuff used to drop like rain and I really wanted one of those Tempted Apprentice sabers; especially since I have waited for BW to finally give us a lightsaber with Luke's RotJ ignition sound since I started playing during 2011 early access (and we all know its in the game since it is used when you select a character to log in every single time). Well, I received 11 character items total (weapons/armor/crystals), 4 of which were duplicate supplementary armor boxes, 13 decorations, and 37 chance cubes (which all dropped bronze junk that I either already had or had intentionally not acquired). There were also several influence items, but these are in no way something I would ever purchase a pack/crate for when I get them for free in masse during KotFE game play/endgame. I will not purchase another pack, of ANY type again. I let my desire for an item overcome my gut feeling that these were an even worse form of digital banditry than before (and they were near-intolerably weighted against the player THEN), and I paid the price with real-world currency. As a side note, the lightsaber I wanted was not among the items, however I found one for 345k on the GTN so I bought it. Sadly, the sound set is bugged, making this whole experience comically more unpleasant. As a small business owner, I assure you that if someone in our regional network were using your gambling addict-based model combined with the recurring quality control issues, they would be blacklisted relatively quickly. I ask as a fellow certified retail merchant, and as a loyal customer to your product for nearly 5 years despite some periods where that loyalty was fairly unrewarding: please take a look at this cartel pack product design's glaring flaws and adjust it to show more regard for the hard-earned currency that your customers are paying. Thank you.

Good evening (at the time of writing anyway :-P)! My guild and I have a disagreement about the guard ability for tanks. We understand the basic tool tip functions (5% damage and 25% threat reduction for the guarded player in PvE and the 50% "damage soak" properties -for PvP only.- Our question is this: does the tank receive any increase in -their- threat from guarding a player? We've noticed an anomaly using starparse where tanks can sometimes have ludicrously high threat (I clocked in at 51,242 threat/second on the Karagga fight last night!). Some members of our guild have attributed this to "absorbing" threat from the DPS they guard, reasoning that the 25% threat reduction for the guarded player is being transferred in part, or in whole, to the tank guarding them. We have seen these spikes fairly often in starparse, and their explanation is admittedly sound in logic, and better than my shrug and "I dunno's." I have never seen anything that would even imply this propert for guard, and never saw anything like these threat spikes in parsec. However, I also have no explanation for these insane threat spikes when they occur and are logged by starparse. An intensive forum search and scouring the net with various standard and booleon-style search attempts have netted nothing that even hints of this. To me, this is a good enough indicator, but I'm tying to lay this impass to rest. Some of my guildies are convinced that this does function this way, and if I'm the odd man out in not understanding this feature of guard then I'd certainly like to know! :-P. Thank you in advance.

"Lastly, we have rearranged how we distribute ratings on items. Now, Power and defense share the first rating slot on modifications, while the rest of the stats (Accuracy, Alacrity, Critical, Absorb, and Shield) will share the second rating slot." -Rob Hinkle, Lead Systems Designer (Combat Changes in Fallen Empire) Thanks Hawk for posting that there. Made it easy to access :-) . Prior to 4.0, the first rating slot on modifications (not to confuse with "mods" ) was shield, alacrity, accuracy, and surge while the second slot was defense, power, critical, and absorb. So mods had mainstat+end+slot 2, and enhancements had end+slot 1+slot 2. With the above wording, it implies that the first slot rating, previously only on enhancements, has now had accuracy, alacrity, and shield moved out, eliminated surge, and had power and defense moved in. Again, if no other changes to the slots themselves have been made, this would leave the "mods" modifications to have any slot 2 stat (Accuracy, Alacrity, Critical, Absorb, or Shield), correct? EDIT: Never mind, KBN cleared it up there at the end of his post while I was typing this :-P Thanks guys.

Taking a different angle on this, my first impression with the much lower available shield/absorb, or rather that you will have to pick between one or the other, is what about resource management? Both the VG/PT and SHD/SIN rely on shielding attacks to regen their resource and keep their rotations alive, as well as to proc other defensive/mitigation based abilities. Even with the high numbers attainable in 3.0 this can sometimes leave us hitting "dry" pockets where we have to spam basic attacks to give resources a sec or two to build. Will this be meaningfully (negatively) impacted or is it not really an issue? Also, I have not seen or played PTS for 4.0 so I'm not sure, but folks are stating/assuming that all mods will be defense. Why is that? Currently, the mods have the defense/absorb stat tier. If defense is being moved out of that tier and shield is being moved in, and if nothing changes about the stat slots themselves on the gear, wouldn't this leave mods to have either shield or absorb in place of the old defense/absorb? Many of you have more experience and are much more savy (yes, I'm eyeing you KBN, Aelanis, etc. :-P ) so hopefully there isn't something obvious that I'm missing. Thanks!

I am also experiencing this today, where I log in and the game starts to load and "sticks" at the splash screen (SoR pic). Not sure what the issue is, as I was on an hour ago and had no problems, changed nothing, etc. I have (as of edit) tried this on two machines, checked all internet connections and tested other devices, as well as another MMO (Final Fantasy 14) and everything but swtor is working correctly.

The first thing to come to mind for me hasn't been mentioned here. All other crafting skills have items they can make that actually sell and make decent money. Biochem's main attraction wasn't really that you made money with the skill, though some who were lucky enough to get schematics for the implants were able to do so. The only thing that ever really made it desirable imo was the reusable stims and adrenals for my tanks. So what if I can make them cheap, because now I have to keep spending credits making the things without being able to really make any credits back; its essentially a dead skill compared to all the others (even synth weaving gets augments and augment kits to make money off of) unless you're in a guild that can farm Ops for implants to RE and have a -chance- at getting a schematic that can actually make some money. With the other skills, such as cyber tech, you can learn multiple schematics that make money for several different types of items (armorings, mods, ears, etc). In fact, -selling- the resusable stims was semi-lucrative as people bought them with new biochem characters rather than farm the schematics through RE. Now that market is gone too. For those of you happy with the change, good on you and enjoy the new process. I see your point, but as a casual player I just don't agree. I hope BW reviews this issue and reconsiders, otherwise biochem will have gone from a must-have for my tanks (who swap between DPS and tanking) to not worth taking with any character at all since buying the blues off the GTN is cheap enough to live without it.