Its never okay, even on an RP server. There is no RP community that encourages people be ***** to each other. If you have an expressed agreement with people you commonly play with and they are fine with that, it's one thing. If you are doing this to random people in your group, it's quite another. Part of RP is give and take and making sure everyone enjoys themselves. There is a difference between an RPer and someone who is a griefer hiding behind RP. This is a fairly obvious case of griefing hiding behind RP. One common tactic is to pick and choose to RP when it benefits them (ninjaing) and not RP when it does not. Loot rolls don't make any logical RP sense. In reality there is no pop up windows and no dice rolls. In reality items don't get stuck to you and can't be traded. In reality if someone steals from you, there are consequences and legal recourses. In this case there is nothing the person who is ninja'd from can do. Hell, even if they wanted to give the person a chance to duel them for the item or whatnot the game mechanics prevent it with binding items. So No, it's not okay. Its using RP as an excuse to pick and choose when to RP and when to hide behind game mechanics in order to grief people and its not acceptable in any serious RP community.

You can avoid fighting him as a Lightside option as well, but you have to be really clever. Also, you can nail Watcher 2 before you fight Jadus but only if you haven't flirted with Kayilo. Your dialog options may have something to do with it, too.

I gave the info to the Minister and went rogue. I considered staying a part of Imperial Intelligence or trying to work within the system but decided that was silly. Even if the sith recreate Intelligence it will always answer to the Sith. You can't pretend to be a good guy while willingly answering to people you know are insane monsters. Besides which, if anyone deserved to get the info it was the Minister. He fate is left unanswered but I would have liked the option to use the blackmailing info I have to protect him. He went through a ton of **** and was only trying to help you and the Empire. Yea, he signs off on the brainwashing but it wasn't like it was his idea. It was basically that or have the Sith kill you. Even after the Empire throws him away he calls in all his favors not to save his own skin but to secretly rebuild Intelligence just to give you a shot at taking down the Cabal, despite knowing he might be killed for it. That guy deserves my loyality, not the Sith who do nothing but worry about themselves to the detrement of The Empire.

Technically, alacrity doesn't reduce the GCD, the GCD just isn't triggered in the first place for abilites with a 1.5 second cast time. If you reduce the cast time below 1.5 seconds you can use abilites faster then the GCD would normally allow you to, but you aren't reducing it, you just aren't triggering it at all. This is why it doesn't help for instant casts but does for 1.5 second casts.

Okay, lets use an example with round numbers. Lets say I have an attack that does 100 damage. By default a crit would do 50% more, so thats 150. In this case, my crits increase my damage by 50. Now lets say I put on an item with 20 power and this particular ability sacles 1:1 with power. Now I do 120 damage on that attack. A crit of 50% bonus would result in 50% more, or 180 damage. In this case, my crits increase my damage by 60. So by increasing my power I've increased the amount my crits benefit me by as well. It was 50, now it's 60. This is why balancing both would be beneficial.

The energy return on the talented Stim boost in Lethality only works out to 0.33(Repeating, of course) energy per second which isn't really all that great, and thats assuming you pop it every 30 seconds on the dot. It's also costing you TA every 30 seconds instead of 45-60 so that energy isn't free. Sure you could wait til it's about to fall off and only refresh it every 60 but then you are only getting 0.15 energy per second or so. There is some utility there in being able to dip deeper into your energy pool and get back to high regen again, though. Just don't think it's a 'must have' because it really isn't. 6% crit is extremely nice, but I'd rather have Accomplished Doctor for 30% extra healing on Injection crits then Lethal doses 8% extra crit chance only on Kolto Probe. Something like this: http://www.torhead.com/skill-calc#401MffbzGoRzcZZGbbkM.1 I guess it kind of depends. If you are doing operations and main tank healing I'd say Accomplisheed Doctor is better, if you are group healing for some reason, then Kolto probe crits are probably better. For a 4 man it likely depends on the encounter, I would think and how much damage is directed at the tank as opposed to the rest of the group.

I noticed a severe jump in difficulty as well on the final two planets. One option is to use Dr. Lokin as he will help you survive a lot longer. I did just fine with Ensign temple though. Make sure your gear is up to date, use up those commendations or buy stuff on the GTN if you have to. Ditto for your companion. Take the time to CC mobs. Make sure you are interrupting when you can. Don't be afraid to use flashbang to CC a group, 8 seconds of a few weaks or a single silver not beating on you is huge. If you use a dps companion make sure they are focusing your target. Medpacks. They can effectively increase your health in any given encounter by a huge amount. Adrenals and stims can help too but might not be cost effective. Don't be afraid to LoS or CC and heal, even if you aren't a healer. Wait for your DoTs to fall out, Flash bang, use the 8 seconds to heal. It can save your life.

It's a matter of degree. It's okay for credits to enter the system, in fact thats vital for the economy to function. The problem is when the amount of incoming credits is completely out of line with the amount of outgoing credits. You can't farm mobs with 8 different characters at once while logged off. There are also only so many mobs and the only respawn so quickly, compared to the limitless number of slicing missions that could be run.

You're partially correct, there are those without slicing who think this won't effect them, and it will. There will be less credits coming into the economy and that will certainly effect everyone. The thing is, this HAD to happen. The alternative would have hurt everyone even more in the long run.

I think a lot of players are reasonable people who honestly don't understand the nerf because they never played in beta and they've never had another trade skill. They think it's perfectly normal to get profit from running gathering trade skill missions and don't understand the impact on the economy slicing missions were having. I never intended for this to be an 'end all be all' conversation, merely my opinions of what was wrong and why it had to be changed in the hopes that it would inform some people.

So you basically paid 250 for a 1-2 points of skill and a chance to get an item you can sell. Seems balanced to me considering other gathering professions pay 1250 for some materials that are worth considerably less.

I think you have a point here. I played beta and I knew the situation with Slicing was completely unreasonable. I had also tried out other professions so I was aware how out of balance Slicing was. Other players didn't have the benefit of that, and are blindsided by this. That's why I wanted to make this post to try to explain how out of control it was and why it had to be changed. They just assumed it was normal to be able to make money off running missions. They had no idea other professions can't do that. Perhaps slicing is less useful then other trade skills now. I don't think we'll know until things normalize. Right now there isn't much profit from nodes because there is so much competition and the market is flooded. So it might make sense for BW to wait a bit before making changes.

If we want to be pendantic.. "It is my opinion that Slicing, as a gathering profession, should not be intended to make money off running missions." I've given my reasons for why that is the case, if you disagree please post your reasoning and we can discuss it.

Supposing you are correct, then we could say you are no longer intended to profit off missions and are now intended to profit off nodes. Slightly different I admit but ultimately the same for our current situation.

You are losing money running missions. You were never intended to make money running missions. You make money harvesting nodes.

There seems to be a lot of misinformation about Slicing and it's nerf. I know it's probably a waste of time but I figured I'd try to explain what is going on as best I can. Let me start by explaining what slicing is and what it is for. There are three types of trade skills in SWTOR. Crafting skills turn raw materials into products which players use themselves or sell for profit. Gathering skills gather materials from nodes. Mission skills run missions to recieve materials. Slicing is a gathering skill. The confusion comes from the fact that slicers thought they should be making money off running missions with a gathering skill. This was never intended to be the case. Gathering skill missions are credit sinks. You can pay large amounts of credits in exchange for raw materials. If a Scavenger or Archeologist runs a mission, they recieve materials for far above market price. They don't rely on missions to make credits, they make their credits from gathering from nodes. This is the intended design for Slicing as well. Bioware doesn't want players to be able to press a button, wait, and recieve money. They want Slicers to make their money by harvesting nodes. A lot of slicers have complained that nodes are too difficult to come by, but this is a result of so many people going Slicing in order to benefit from the missions. If everyone went Scavenging, then Scavengers would have the same problem, it isn't anything inherently wrong with Slicing, and it will balance itself out naturally as people shift away from it to new skills. On the other hand, Mission skills do not have nodes, players need to run missions to recieve the products. So, Mission skills had to run missions, and gathering skills needed to gather nodes, but Slicing was the best of both worlds, having both nodes to gather and profitable missions. This clearly wasn't be design. Next I want to explain why it had to be changed. Slicing would have lead to rapid inflation, that is, everyone would have had far more credits then they knew what to do with. The cost of player made things would rapidly rise and become out of sync with training costs and other expenses. We would see player services and goods priced too high for those items to be purchased by anyone but established level 50s. Why would this have happened? Quite simply the problem with slicing missions was there was no dimishing returns on additional players doing it. Nodes are a finite resource, only so many exist, and they only respawn so quickly. The server essentailly creates X amount of resources an hour and players can never get more then that amount. More players simply means splitting that same amount up more times. Missions are entirely different. The game doesn't care who many missions are gone on, the costs and rewards are identical. There is no competition for resources, and no limit on how many can be created. For mission skills this is ok because of supply and demand. If I take Underworld trading on 1 character, then leveled up a second and also took UT, I wouldn't make 2x the profit because there is finite demand for those products. By increasing supply without increasing demand I'm simply lowering the value of what I produce. It's a built in balance. If everyone took UT, those products would plumet in value, turning a profit would become impossible and people would switch to different trade skills until it balanced itself back out. This would never had happened in slicing because it produces raw credits. Having 2 slicers running missions was twice as much profit as having 1 slicer running missions. Having 8 was 8 times as much profit. Unlike with UT and flooding the market, there was no reason not to have every character you had with slicing. So instead of the server creating X amount of product in nodes and splitting it between players, we had player directly creating credits with no limit or checks. It was an untenable situation. If slicing was free credits then there would be no reason to do anything else for credits, especally considering inflation would mean the amount of credits recieved from doing dailies or grinding mobs would be undervalued. When everyone has more credits then they know what to do with it means no one bothers to do their dailies, to gather items, to grind mobs, to actually go out in the world and play the game. Maintaining a balance between credits entering the world and credits leaving the world is absolutely vital to the survival of any game, and leaving slicing as it was would have made that entirely impossible. There are some who may feel there is a lack of credits entering the world now with Slicing nerfed. Even if this were the case, it would be better fixed by doing things like reducing training costs or increasing quest rewards, rather then returning slicing to the way it was. Also keep in mind there are far more credit sinks while leveling then there are at max level, and currently the vast majority of players are still leveling. I'm sorry for those effected, but it had to be done. There will be a short term deflation, and there will be more competition for other nodes as people switch, but it had to be done. There was simply no way to maintain a healthy economy with the way Slicing was.

The problem you are all having is you are trying to beat him in a fight. Maybe you should try to beat him -without- a fight?

Getting to play early isn't punishment and if you think it is, you could have waited until today to play, which would have put you in the exact position as people who didn't get early access. So really, worst case scenario, people who pre-ordered are equal.

No, they are players and use the resolve mechanics. No NPC uses resolve.

I don't really see it as a problem. Keep some stock on hand or Mail it to them COD. The fact that it takes time to create items has a lot of positive implications as well, and requires you to stock up on product ahead of time. For example if I'm biochem and selling stims, I know during the weekends demand peaks with people playing more and raiding, so during the week I build up stock so if I sell out I can quickly resupply and corner the market while my competitors are waiting for their stock to be made.

Orange items have no stats beyond what mods are put into them. You don't have an Orange item with 250 armor. You have an orange item with 0 armor with an armor mod inside it that is providing 250 armor in the same way it's providing the rest of the stats. An orange item you found at level 10 is the same with no mods in it as a level 50 orange. You can keep an orange item until 50. Purple items do not have an armoring mod so you will outlevel them eventually. An orange item with all purple mods of the same level as the purple itself will have equal stats. For all intents and purposes, purple items are orange items that have their armoring mod locked and cannot be modified. For armor, the base armor is determined by the Armoring mod. For weapons, the base damage is determined by the Hilt for lightsabres or by the barrel for blasters. This is listed on the Armoring/Hilt as Armor Rating or Damage Rating. The actual damage or armor amount will be based on the type of item. For example an Armoring Mod with a rating of 66 will provide more actual armor when slotted into heavy armor then it will when slotted into light armor. The level of the item make no difference, a rating of 66 in a level 10 medium armor orange will provide the same amount as a rating of 66 in a level 50 medium armor orange. It's somewhat confusing that Mod could refer to any modification that goes into slotted armor, or it could specifically refer specifically to Mod modifications, which are stat items that plug into armor and provide stat bonuses.

Diagnostic scan is for filling gaps in your healing rotation. If you are non-stop healing, you will run out of energy. By weaving it in between your other heals you can create an energy stable rotation in the same way a DPS would weave in their auto attack. The energy regen on crit talent is for climbing out of the energy hole after a situation that forced you to dump energy.

They've already announced Dual Spec-ing will be in eventually, but for now, you really shouldn't need to respec much. I've never respec'd once and I've healed and dps'd every flashpoint level 30 and below. You don't need to respec everytime you run a FP or join a group.

Stat upgrades > cosmetic upgrades. Whoever it is itemized for has priority, sorry. To put it another way: in MMOs where you can't customize your appearance, do most people go with what looks nice or do they go with what gives them the best stats? Overwhelmingly the latter. Stats matter more. Edit: This certainly IS a cosmetic upgrade. 'higher base armor' is meaningless because the armor amount is based on the armoring mod, so if you have to replace the armoring mod anyway then it doesn't matter if the item is level 1 or level 50. it's going to have the armor of the mod you put into it. Mods and Armoring both always have base stats, so the only mod on there that could possibly be reused is the enhancement.

We'll have no positivity, around here, thank you.