September 8th. Dealing it with it right now.

Thanks for the heads up on the new green mod stats. And for the crafting tip.

Thanks for the helpful responses, gang. Yeah, all of my toons have moddable orange gear (I had forgotten to unsub and racked up a good amount of cartel coins before I realized it...that kind of oversight just doesn't happen anymore now that I have a family. lol) so I can just buy the green mods for credits. Or maybe I'll just dig into my old abandoned professions and make some mods. As far as the end game goes, I guess I'll have to see. For now, it's getting my Sorc to 65 and then deciding on if I want to knock out the Marauder to finish out the class stories or choose which Reb and Imp class to take to the end. Thanks again, all and wish me luck.

Hi, all. Been back in SWTOR for a little bit before 5.0 after a long break. Despite having to respec all my characters again after my last return, I was pretty pleased with the QoL changes with 4.X...especially solo flashpoints and the many ways to whittle down the tedious traveling elements that I wish all MMO's would do away with. lol I did have some disappointments. I'd been enjoying finishing up all the class stories and racking up all the Legacy benefits/powers with each successive toon I was playing; nothing like finishing my JK story by literally kicking the emperor in the nutz! But, what motivated me to continue to keep finishing other class stories was reading posts about how badly the endgame storyline gels with non-force characters. Out of all the characters I've finished, I loved my female Twi'lek scrapper-smuggler the best but, even with SW levels of suspension of disbelief, I just can't imagine her personally punching her way to leading an assault on an empire full of epic force-users. I'd also been hearing about the 5.0 RNG changes to loot and didn't think much of them as I knew I had two classes left to level and I'd "cross that bridge when I got there". The thing is, it even seems to affect the last two toons I'm leveling now since I not only have to deal with RNG for for Heroics, but the RNG crates seem level bracket-locked to the mission level and my outleveled toons end up not having any real motivation just to get random bound gear 10 levels below them. With the crystal system, they could just hit hit a higher vendor at fleet and slot in mods that way or even buy mods for alts. Choice, practicality, and motivation have been taken away for leveling toons, so now I can only imagine how frustrating this can be at end-game level grinding and I haven't even dipped my foot into the new XP system. I guess my questions are: 1) Are these changes set in stone, gang? I've been gone a long time and don't really have a sense of how fast the devs respond to negative feedback to recent changes and 2) Does anybody have any tips to reduce the negative impact of these changes both on leveling toons and toons beginning endgame missions? I'd hate to enter the grind on whatever toon (probably a force-user now) I decide to push through the endgame content on the wrong foot and 3) Should I stick with it or honestly just drop the sub again and come back after this is all sorted out? My last long break seemed to have yielded a lot of positive results albeit only for a few weeks. Thanks, all!

Doh...should've wrote legacy CLASS buffs when I first posted but I do have the Human unlock, a few comp bonuses, and use presence food + stims while leveling. Thank you for the advice. :-)

Hey, gang. My weird quest to get all the legacy buffs from my characters ends with the Jedi Guardian (the Guardian voice-over being the less of the annoying evils to me). I'd like to make this is seamless as possible since seeing the same planets over & over & over is already making me start to twitch. LOL I'll be strictly PvE and would like to be able to tank a Flashpoint/Heroics every now & then and will be fully geared along with my companions which will include Treek's fuzzy OP'ness and Cartel crystals. Keeping all that in minds, what would you vets suggest as far as a leveling tree and which companion to level with in regards to the tree? Should I go Defense and let Kira DPS? Would having Treek in Healer stance while I tank mobs turn every fight into a 5 minute spectacle of boredom? Or should I go DPS and let Treek throw Ecto YAGGH-Bubbles with abandon? And, if I choose DPS over the Defense tree, should I pick Vigilance first and then go Focus later? Sorry for the wall of questions, but there's so much conflicting info at the moment. Thanks in advance!

I have to admit that this change makes me a little less motivated to level up my Shadow alt. Even though I understand why this change was implemented for endgame, the self heals pre-patch offered me a different way to tank (kinda like the Regen Scrapper in CoH) which was my motivation to roll a Shadow in the first place.

Followed your advice with a quick respec and the difference was like night & day on my lev 28 (now 30) Trooper. GOD, it went from boring & slow to fun & fast. Thanks a bunch for this LK. Highly recommended!

Great in-depth guide, LK. I look forward to trying giving it a go once my Commando hits endgame (Alt-junkie so it may take a bit!). Speaking of which...with the DXP weekend going on and many posters saying you're better off leveling with a certain spec to feel comfortable with it by endgame, would you recommend this spec for leveling as well? If so, would you knock out the smaller trees before finally going up the AS line or is there something you would prioritize? Thanks!

Having a feeling this promotion will pass me by. Not feeling the slightest regret about it, though. All my coin purchases through Paypal mean nothing as it's excluded and the convoluted way you have to purchase on the site and then in-game is ridiculous.

This. Age of Conan had potential, too. Head on over to the US forums and see how dead it is even as an F2P game...mainly due to them not attempting to utilize their potential until it was too late.

The whole process of harvesting and crafting in SWG was in-depth and fun. And...ya know...actually useful to your toons longterm.

Fanboys who won't admit they're FanboIs AND politico wannabe's straight out of Age of Conan world chat. This thread delivers.

4/10 ++'s for the Story/Flashpoint Questlines and Voice Acting. A metric crap-ton of --'s for everything else. It's sad to see an MMO with the amount of hype, money, and man-hours invested into it get cranked out with the same old dated coding & development of other MMO's that are old enough to be tickling double digit territory. "Lookit meeee! Ah'ma Force User/Non-Force-User-w/a-Speeder and I can't jump or climb over anything taller than a speedbump!" . At least when a game like RIFT pulled this crap, they actually added top-of-the-line graphics and a bunch of QOL features to at least attempt to balance things out. Outside of the cutscreens, I feel like I'm playing a less stable version of vanilla WoW in space. And I got tired of WoW after 6 months. To this, add bugs like the MANY variations of LoS Failure (nothing like you and your companion being gunned down by a boss that you "can't see" when he's right in front of your faces) that existed in beta and are still here @ Live, Customer Service response that can be rated slightly faster than a sloth on downers, classes with key abilities that are so poorly designed that the guide writers are telling players to leave them off of their hotbars...and you have even the most optimistic MMO vets only saying, "Well...at least it's Star Wars..." as a defining positive aspect of the actual game. I'm in this until my friends decide to hop out. It's not a terrible game. It has it's good parts. But it really didn't raise the bar for MMO's at all to me.

I must've moved to the wrong server (which I wouldn't have if the long queue times on MT didn't tick my friends off enough to move to this dead server in the first place). Both on Imp and Rep side, I've dealt with Sith unapologetically rolling Need on BOP Sniper Rifles and other Agent Gear and in the past 24 hours I tried to be nice and explain to a Jedi Sentinel what gear they should be rolling Need on after they rolled Need on BOP pieces of medium armor with Cunning stats. I teamed with this person again today after being patient enough to go through the entire FP with them last night...and they rolled need against me on a BOP Smuggler-stat Blaster for his 1st droid companion because "they can use it". You'd figure that I'd see more of this fail on an hour-wait queue server due to sheer volume but I didn't run into this once. Go figure. Could just be my luck.

So is knockback not considered CC for Entrench? I'm getting knocked back and out of cover buy weak mobs with rocket launchers. More of an annoyance than anything gamebreaking at this point but still, can I/we get some clarification on this?

I'm glad I came across this thread and learned some info about other stats. Having had way too many ninja looters on the dead server I let my friends drag me to (Sith rolling Need on Sniper Rifles...SRSLY?), it's good to know what not to do when leveling my Consular.

Another bump for Dev Response.

Honestly, they should just make one of the bosses lootable as this chest bug seems to be happening on multiple random instances. Even had it happen to us in a BT group an hour ago.

Same deal here. Heck, I knew I should've hit the forums before burning through multiple stacks of mats for zero procs.