The only people I can legitimately have compassion for complaining about this update are GTN heroes. There's a few in every guild, their idea of SWTOR is as a day trading platform, to each his own. Other than that, I get the mats I need, the tech frags I need each week with relative ease, don't have to EV farm to get 20 toons to cq cap, and can focus on raiding, which is what I enjoy most. I do find earning large amounts of credits is a bit harder now, but mostly it's just more tedious. Instead of selling a few conquest mats each week I'd have to sell a LOT, so more mouseclicks. I've been putting that off since I find GTN overall unfun, personally.

4 man-ing SM ops is quite fun with the right group, gz. Never tried Dxun 4man how long did it take to clear?

reformed, now able to enter, but still...

Server is kicking every member of our ops group out randomly, can't enter ops, can't cast any skills, but we can see chat (updating), move our toons, etc...

I wouldn't be concerned with what role you play for raiding - pick one you enjoy the most for starters. While it's true that tanks and heals are easier to land in casual pug raids, it can actually be harder to get a heal or tank spot in a static raid group (guilds are where all my raids start) just because of numbers. 1-2 tanks, 2 heals, 4-5 dps per 8-man raid group. Also, as you probably already know, heal & tank classes always have dps specs too, so that gives you more flexibility if you're filling etc... I'd level as dps, it's fastest and (to me) more fun. Then practice whatever you enjoy the most - really leveling doesn't teach you very much about endgame these days. Get to 75, hop in some story mode ops to get the feel of what you're doing, and have fun. Soon enough you'll find a guild that has raid teams and open slots.

I have the same issue, submitted bug report (in-game) and cs request. Guess I'll keep trying to decon for schematic, thanks!

I realize you're mainly PvP, and unfortunately, although technically you CAN gear through PvP, it's waaaaaaaaay slower than doing group PvE content. You mentioned 1 or 2 points a day... for PvP I suppose that's normal, but if you optimize your runs as described below, it's feasible to go from 270 to 306 in @ 12 hrs of play. Bite the bullet and que for vet mode Hammer Station (or whatever fp you're comfy doing), you'll gear up in a few more hours of play and then you can get back to PvP full time. Master mode drops better gear, so if you can find a group to que random fps (you get a big bonus for that)... well you'll be getting so much gear & tech fragments you won't know what to do with them all. Also, yes, buy your set pieces with tech fragments (though I advise tactical first as it's the biggest bang-for-buck), especially since if you're doing fp spam you'll cap out pretty fast. For augs, perhaps you know someone with the crew skills to make augs and you can supply them with ingredients? I do that for guildies whenever asked.

Seems like Aggressive + Regenerative Waves would be great for HM Red, ppl tend to be grouped very tightly in that fight, and dtps is very high. 3rd boss as well. I have Aggresive 6 pcs but haven't put mods or augs in them yet so haven't tried it out, but planning on it maybe next week. Tactician is my go-to set, but that's because I main lethality, so it's a bit of a hand-me-down with sub-optimal stats. At some point I'll make a Tactician healing set, probably have enough spare pieces already.

No doubt, without participating in some sort of credit making activity (other than running content for credit rewards) it's a losing proposition, and a ****** time to be a new player with few resources and perhaps not enough understanding of how to earn credits in-game. Lucky gold sellers!!! XD I'm sure there'll be a patch at some point in the not too distant future with cost reductions and/or reward increases. I can imagine player retention is going to be a problem if they don't either lower costs or increase mission credit rewards.

Ok first I read OP and then kinda skimmed/skipped the rest so sorry if I'm going over already covered ground here... Lots of stuff in OP & a lot of it I agree with. I think on balance this is a good expansion, I'm enjoying the game for various reasons, and have managed to fully gear (bonus & tacticals, close to min/max but not perfect) 8 classes/disciplines, and I play 1-3 hours most but not every day of the week. But the comment that stood out was @ credits. Mainly because at first I was shocked how fast they were draining! I was frustrated because I couldn't really see a way of managing that myself. But at this point things seem to have really evened out. My repair bills are covered partly by guild funds (not all my toons are in guilds that have this, so 'partly'), but more than that, since I'm not spam acquiring set bonus gear and getting most of my augments via crafting, credits are coming in faster than they are spent. I did finally break down & set aside some time to study crafting and get level'd / RE'd up to 74 augments, and i'm working on BIochem now as well. Between selling mats and crafting for myself or throwing the odd augment on GTN, my bank balance is on the upswing again.

From my perspective it completely depends on what you are going for in-game. If you enjoy story 1st and foremost, then starting over again can be fun, and since you've not played in such a long time it should be pretty fresh. Note that there are a lot LESS quests required to progress through levels now than there were when you last played, side quests, even planet arcs are totally optional and not needed to 'keep up' with leveling through the main story arc. If you enjoy endgame - raids, flashpoints, crafting, playing the GTN, whatever, then I'd advise progressing on at least one toon to lvl 75 and then gearing up for that content. There are new raids and flashpoints, and lots of players have come back so there's a pretty steady pop in the groupfinder for group activities.

It sounds like you might not understand SWTOR gearing in this expansion. No problem, plenty of people here and in-game that can help clear that up. Vertical progression is only the first part of gearing, and it's really the easiest. There is no need to buy any gear until you reach 306, just group up and do flashpoints (fastest way to get to 306) and story mode operations (more fun to me but depends on what you like), gear will drop so fast you'll spend more time organizing your inventory than clearing content. Once you hit 306 it's time to get a tactical and some set bonus gear - that's when you visit the vendors. There's nothing wrong with getting a tactical (should be your first priority) or set bonus gear before that if you have enough fragments (you'll want to buy _something_ just to avoid hitting the currency cap), but just know that vertical progression is based on your current irating (avg gear level), so always wear the highest numbers no matter what the stats are, until you hit 306, then min-max and horizontal progression takes place, like getting different tacticals/sets to play different ways in your class, etc...

Same issue here - this delay seriously affects rotation as abilities appear available off gcd but aren't, and vice versa, during the delay which seems to vary from .5 to 1 second. As others mentioned, it's 100% consistent, and nothing seems to fix it, and it started immediately after patching. Before patch this did not happen.

I think the option of having more is fine, just don't remove the bonus for deselecting something, that's all. It's broken and HUGE BS to punish a group leader for making a GF choice.

Patch later and still no fix? Most of the toons i've run without issue, but one of them has an open Kotfe chapter, I never ran Kotfe on this toon (leveled via Bughunt, and I don't do story, definitely not on that toon). Anyhow, no Jakarro, so the bug is still ongoing. How hard can it be to fix this? At least let me abandon the infernal open story chapters that I don't want or need...

That's not really true. The cq point rewards are SIGNIFICANTLY higher than they were before, so it more or less evens out. Some things are slower, some things are faster. I can get at least a couple of toons to 50k in a casual few hours of play doing ops (25k cq points plus whatever grind points), but after running out of big numbers quests it gets a bit slower. But my 4 man guild was able to get 500k without too much trouble, feels like maybe 10-15% slower than before patch?

I agree, mobs up front are stronger than they were before, and take too long to kill, even with a reasonably high dps party. It's just plain annoying unless you're an all stealth party. I think HS goes faster for non-stealth.

Or run FPs with guildies and friends. Don't forget to establish loot 'rules' before going in.

https://imgur.com/2OzJ5tb Above is an example of more targets being affected, in this case all but one. The tooltip specifies _ALL_ targets affected by toxic haze, but this definitely appears to be RNG.

This appears to go against the tooltip, and in fact seems to be somewhat random as on other occasions I've seen health bars of various numbers of targets affected by a viral elements strike. As you can see in this parse breakdown, there are 6 targets affected by toxic haze, but only 2 registering as affected by toxic hazed lethal strke: https://imgur.com/VCA17GY thanks in advance for checking this

Reached it in my smallest guild with only 3 active players. I can't tell if it's harder to reach than before because of all the gear grinding I did last week, but I think if at all then maybe by only a few percent.. I 50k cq on one toon today running 1 fp and 2 ops today.

Trust me once you're geared again you'll be taking the bosses down even faster than before. Just like before. If you're avg dps for a boss fight was 8 or 9k before 6.0 it's probably down to 3 or 4k until you gear way up. I've got my main fully geared now with set bonus, tactical, and augments on every piece and I can tell you that i do as much or more dps than I did before, and bosses are going down just as fast as ever. On my other toons with scrubgear (even 306 fully augmented, the set bonus makes a BIG difference...) i notice the difference. Its just a matter of gear / stats. End of story. If you don't have the stats, you don't have the dps, all else being equal. There is some slight variation to before based on the level sync in fp and ops, but it's working well right now, even if I disagree with hardcapping primary stats in level sync. I'm not experiencing sluggishness on new planets, so can't comment there.

Yep going after whales has just ended up punishing the majority of players. I know something needed to be done to fix the economy, but this isn't it.

Shark - altogether it wasn't cheap. I bought 5 pieces of bonus gear (one from Kai Zykken), so that's 13.5k frags and 5mil credits I think. Add to that 200k per mk-10 augment kit, and around 90k per 228 augment (though I did have a bunch of those lying around). I also wasted credits pulling mods out of gear drops to get my gear up. That adds up fast! Probably millions just on that, which was probably unecessary.

Everybody's entitled to their opinion, and regarding crafting I agree - it's a huge mess and hopefully will be addressed quickly. Comp healer nerf is welcome to me, I thought they were too overpowered in 5.x . I find gearing to be quite straightforward. I was able to gear my sin main to 306 with full set bonus and 2 tacticals (1 for hatred, 1 for deception) in under 5 days. Compare that with pretty much any other gearing experience I've had in this game and I'm going to say this is the best so far. I also have full 306 (minus weapons) for every single alt. That's 306 sha-tek gear with augments, stats balanced to run pretty much any pve content including Dxun. I personally enjoyed the story and the new planets. While it was not as long as previous expansions, I think it was well done, the textures and environments are really nice, enjoyed all the voice performances, and had a generally good time. I'm not _THAT_ into story or lore, so it was more than enough for me lol, though I totally get how people used to the longer storylines would be disappointed. Hopefully they add more mini-expacs wtih the same level of production value. I agree there are some bugs to be worked out with Onderon dailies, haven't tried any Mek-sha dailies. I primarily do ops, dailies are kind of a low priority for me. Overall I'm pretty happy with the expansion, with a few very serious caveats. The bug on last boss of Dxun is a bummer, though we managed to clear anyway but it was pretty damned hard for SM. And crafting. Holy hell please BW do something about crafting. It's obscene right now.