I did it as a heal spec Operative without much issue. Died twice at the captain but that was more about learning the fight than not having enough dps/heals. I set companion to DPS. On constructor, just hit the console asap and toss a grenade and a carbine burst or two on the adds. HoTs should keep companion up easily. On the captain just gotta interrupt the stacking DoT right away and hit the clones quickly. Admittedly I spent most of this fight healing, while throwing a poison dart and some knife attacks when possible.

The \ key by default sheathes and unsheathes your weapon. Kind of cool for a Stalker.

A much easier comparison to make with Wildstar is GW2 - it's basically GW2 with tanks and healers when it comes to combat. There's no CC to speak of except things like quick stuns or knockdowns/backs and interrupting bosses requires group coordination. I'll be playing the game but I do have issues with action MMOs in general. Wildstar uses a limited 8 slot action bar which seems to be catching on in popularity, and EQN will be using a similar system as well. I absolutely hate this kind of thing and in Wildstar in particular, it means my dedicated healer is literally unable to attack. TOR might have some skill bloat but I'm capable of working with a large set of tools. I don't see what forcing me to switch out abilities for certain pulls really does for the game - it just places an emphasis on knowing the encounters before you experience them. One of the worst offenders in Wildstar in my book is dispelling. In the first two dungeons I have no need for dispel except for a few trash pulls and it does help immensely for these pulls. These aren't consecutive pulls however so I'm having to go through the set builder UI multiple times while everybody else is running full speed to the next pull. I could leave it on my bar all the time but space is at a premium and you don't unlock the 8th action slot until level 30. idk - maybe it's just a healer problem. Speaking of healers, aiming heals at random jagoffs in PUG is really frustrating on 2/3 of Wildstar's healers. I'm talking about Espers and Spellslingers, though Espers have more options of good old-fashioned targeted heals. Spellslinger not so much, and that's what I played the most and will play at release. Charging up a heal that has a narrow telegraph only to have the injured party dodge out of it or run around like chicken is rage-inducing. People play like it's GW2, trying to avoid unavoidable auto-attacks, kiting when the fight doesn't call for it, and spreading out. I had to keep reminding myself that this sort of thing will hopefully work itself out as people get more used to the game - and when I get the nice heals that are just beyond the level cap in beta. I don't think this method of aim healing is inherently any better than traditional target healing like TOR has. Another thing I like about TOR is my resources as a healer are limitless if I pace myself. Healers in Wildstar are the only ones who have to deal with a limited resource (Focus) and it can be painful to get regenerate - roughly 4s for 1% at level 20 is what I observed. You need items and runes to approach the point where Focus is a non-issue. How one obtains such items is beyond me. Dungeons are challenging, fun, time consuming, and very unrewarding. I would normally level as much as I can through dungeon runs in a game but I don't think that's feasible in Wildstar. Falling behind questing in terms of money is understandable, but not being able to keep your gear to par from dungeon runs is not. The art style doesn't bother me at all and it will age well. There is a lot of campy humor in the art and the entire game for that matter. There's also lots of referential humor - one of my favorites being a Chocobo racing challenge. There's also a DDR challenge. And there was my post beta-weekend rant. All said, I don't think Wildstar is a model of what TOR should have been. I appreciate the traditional aspects of games like TOR, WoW, Rift, FF14, and prefer them in many cases. Variety is good thing. With the big 3 MMO releases of ESO, Wildstar, and EQN all being action-based games with limited hotbar slots I'm glad TOR is what it is.

I have a feeling they lost a good number of subs this month. I cancelled a little over 3 weeks ago and now nobody in my guild is left. It was a small guild (~10) but we were all serious raiders and longtime MMO players. It can't just be us. However, any losses from Jan/Feb will probably get overshadowed by new box sales next month.

There's an app for that...and EA charges a subscription for it.

Use Kaliyo until 40, then switch to Raina and demolish things. Kaliyo starts to suck after 30 but imo she's still a far better option than Vector since she can AoE. If you keybind her grenade ability and sync its use with your frag grenade it makes for a pretty potent way to open up a group fight.

Why come I didn't hear the Endar Spire theme a single time in this game?

You know what I miss? Mana batteries. I loved my Enchanter in EQOA, just filling peoples' mana bar, enchanting their weapons with a damage proc (also a huge reason I enjoyed pre-Wrath Shaman), and doing a bit of damage.

Same server LFG only benefits the people who are in the best position to get groups already. This is something that became pretty apparent from Rift when they first implemented LFD. I still spent hours in a queue and the server I was on wasn't low population or anything. It would need to be a cross-server system so there's a larger pool of tanks and healers to choose from since many in those roles don't even PUG. Bigger pool of people means faster queues. Faster queues means less time standing around the God awful fleet. I don't understand why some people on these forums seem to have such an aversion to the notion of switching your spec. 1) It adds more flexibility to fill out a group and lets you play with somebody that a singular spec wouldn't allow. Two healers on that need something from the same HM FP and only one tank to run with? This wouldn't be an issue with dual spec. 2) It lets you change between specs you use a lot cheaply and quickly. The whole reason it came about in WoW was mainly so people weren't paying a fortune to go from an arena spec to a raid spec. Re-spec costs raise exponentially in this game so what if you're somebody who enjoys both PvE and PvP and like having a specific setup? 3) It provides the option to break the routine and helps keep the game somewhat fresh. I loved my Resto Shaman but it was always fun when I could switch to Ele for a fight or a dungeon run. Keeping up with two gear sets and knowing how to play two different specs is also good time sink for max level. The argument that one spec is hard for some people so nobody should be able to dual spec, in my opinion, doesn't fly. In Rift for example where people had 5 specs, if somebody didn't want or didn't feel capable to heal they just said so. People will play what they enjoy and a lot of people, myself included, enjoy multiple aspects of their class and can play them effectively.

And we come full circle. It's not an unreasonable expectation when other games came out with comparable features at launch

I don't assume that at all but it's something that should have been in at launch. It stuff like that which would have kept me busy when I didn't have a raid. It's the fluff that would have made the wait for any kind of word on balancing my class easier. When you have this stuff in at launch you expand upon it. You add more collections, more pets, etc. You don't add it all in at once and say, "these are all the achievements and pets this game will have".

This ignores the fact that other games recognize the importance of these diversions and implement them at launch. I wasn't talking just WoW. Rift has mount collections, pet collections, lucky coin collections, and achievements. EQ2 had collections before any of them.

Don't know about the OP but it's become a habit for me. I simply don't trust queuing up a heal 1 second in advance. Not spamming keys to me would be as uncomfortable a change as suddenly not using my keybind setup.

Oh, I have no problem with the amount of endgame raid content. It's the quality of it. This game has a lightning fast leveling curve. It's so fast that I was usually 5 levels above my quests. Then you hit max level and it's got lightning fast gearing which presents multiple problems. The amount of FPs doesn't matter too much when there is no reason to run them. If this game had achievements for FPs (ideally with some recognizable reward) I'd be all over them. In most MMOs I spend most of my time doing small group stuff. You can really bypass them completely if you want to. A fresh 50 can step into normal EV and do well. Went into normal EV half PUG and half guild. Cleared it, cleared KP, then did the same thing with HM versions the next night. The biggest challenges we faced were bugs. There's more to an MMO than just PvE and PvP though. Again, the strawman argument that people want 8 years of content. It's about features and quality. And they absolutely should have tested and fixed issues in their HM FPs and Operations. These were not "little things".

Oh God. He's wrong for hitting his keys multiple times (in a game without auto-attack of all things) and he needs to adapt to where he enjoys red text in the middle of his screen? Do you hear yourself?

The way 8mans are designed doesn't seem to mesh well with the lack of dual-spec. I agree that it's something this game really needs. For my own use of it I'd like to be able to switch my Sorc between healing for PvE and madness for PvP without having to deal with exponentially expensive re-spec costs.

No. There is only the one version (lvl 7) of this crystal.

Not trying to come off as superior to anyone and I fail to see how anything I'm saying is fanatical. I'm not boycotting EA (in fact I pre-ordered an EA game yesterday) or BW and I don't have brand loyalty to anyone so where's the fanaticism? It's just this notion that people argue, that you can't compare two games that are on the market at the same time and want the same amount of money, that I find absurd. As somebody so aptly put it in another thread not too long ago, I'm not investing in this game. There's no payoff in it for me. So what it comes down to is am I being entertained and is the content that's available any better than what the other guy is offering? For me it's been a no. It's not about how much content there is so much as the quality. The raids in this game simply aren't enough to hold me here and there's not much else to do at max level. Believe me, I tried very hard to find something to do that didn't involve rerolling. Also, I'm not sure what points I made about the timeline that you find so wrong. It was you that characterized the game as being something developed in 2006/7 so the end product should be of that time. I pointed out that Rift started development in that time as well and managed to have features from Wrath. This point seems to get ignored repeatedly by the people that really do BW no credit by downplaying their ability. The point being that a game with reportedly 1/4-1/3 the budget of TOR managed to emulate WoW better and offer more current features.

This game was in beta for, what, a year? There was a lot of feedback and very little dialogue from the devs. There still isn't the kind of dialogue here that you'd get with even Blizzard. It's a community manager who posts more on Twitter than here and the odd blog post that doesn't say very much. Are you telling me BW lived in a bubble since 2006 and just figured they'd borrow ideas from WoW at the time they started development? That would actually make sense when looking at the current product. But WoW isn't this game's only competition. Rift started development in 2006 too and has way more to show for it. Soon this game will be competing with Tera and GW2 which don't fall strictly into the WoW/Rift/TOR formula. Ah, BioWare the underdog. An...interesting persona. Isn't part of this team from Mythic? The people that made WAR and DAOC? As a brand name sure BW is new to MMOs but are we to believe EA didn't put together a team with MMO experience? You know, you sure have a way of painting BW to be quite amateurish. I'll go back to the lack of communication. I'll also throw in the incompetent CS team that by many accounts isn't fluent in their customers' languages and relies on cut & paste scripts. Seems more like a giant corporate operation being handled poorly than the new kids on the block. Trion was a real underdog and I think that made them better. They tried harder, made a better product, and treated their fanbase better.

So explain Rift. Less money and a new privately owned company and they manage to make a game with just about every feature WoW developed over the years. UI is highly customizable and the game came out with plenty of diversions in the form of collectables. It also built upon the PQ system from WAR. What wasn't there, LFD, was added shortly after launch. What does this game have in abundance that others lack? Voice acting? Is that enough to warrant a $15 monthly subscription? I think a growing number of people are realizing that, for them, it doesn't. Were this some struggling African country you'd think the price would be lower but it wants the same money as a more developed game.

What a leap of logic. There's a pretty enormous difference when comparing products and nations.

Pretty horrible comparison. TOR has a hard time standing up to current WoW so you go back 8 years to make the game look better? WoW was still quite a step above a lot of its competition at the time and moved the genre in a new direction. Nobody wants 8 years of content from TOR at launch -- that's a strawman -- but they do expect the features that have been implemented over the years to be in the game. Rift did it pretty much, so you're saying BioWare and EA couldn't? I'd say Rift probably even set the bar for what a new game's default UI should aspire to.

I'm far more likely to go back to Rift if anything. Nothing against WoW but there's just nothing there for me anymore. I've completely missed an expansion, all my friends have long since quit, etc. But even Rift is a longshot. What I'll probably end up doing is just go back to playing single player RPGs and grand strategy games while I wait for GW2. Possibly will try Tera. I've just gotten no indication from BW that this game is really going to become something I'll enjoy. Will future PvE content be more challenging? Will there be collectables or some other kind of diversion? Will gearing get slowed down? Will the Medic Operative ever be balanced and have bugged talents fixed? I don't want to have to reroll constantly. I want to play my Operative, have things to do, and not feel like I'm playing second fiddle to a Sorcerer.

Sexual violence? What? You mean shocking Vette? You could just, y'know, not do it. Take the collar off of her.

The Republic ultimately wins and I think that victory probably isn't too far off from the current time in the game. Granted, we'll never see the real end of it in the game and things will go back and forth a bit but I can't see this conflict dragging on for hundreds of years. The Empire seems to spend most of its time fighting itself. Say this game gets to expansion #6 or whatever someday how many times can the Empire spring back from its infighting and loss of major characters?