He has it, or at least I can confirm that the Biochem improving sensor unit works, despite not showing the bonus in the dialog window. My C2-N2 can build a stim faster with the sensor unit equipped than without. Edit: And my C2-N2 doesn't have full affection yet.

Your surge rating is 0, but what is your Critical Multiplier? I have the bonus from Yuun and I get +1% (for 51% multiplier) without any surge rating equipped.

Have your droid start a mission/craft without the sensor unit equipped. Cancel it, equip the sensor unit, and start the exact same mission/craft again, and see if the time to completion is different.

I'm definitely enjoying having Energy Blast and Smoke Grenade off the GCD, along with free Riot Strikes. The loss of shield chance is more than made up for by the gain in absorb, considering absorb is so difficult to stack (at least prior to T2 gear). I just need to relearn my PvE ability priorities, because the easy EB combined with wanting to have 4 stacks of Power Screen up and maintained is causing me to push my ammo farther than I normally would.

What, you expected consensus before the patch is even deployed? The direction Bioware is taking things, the only point to any crafting skill is going to be more convenient access to certain items, and how much money you can make with it in your server's economy. BoP is going away. The only question mark is how long it'll take the itemization to advance far enough to leave the current BoP crafted items behind. We haven't seen a significant upgrade for Biochem consumables yet, so having the Rakata reusables is still an advantage, but it's only a matter of time.

I think it's a tooltip problem, honestly. If you look at the damage Shadows get off of Combat Technique, it's right in line with the observed damage we get out of Ion Jolt, whereas if we got what the tooltip says it'd be much higher.

If DoT ticks can trigger the proc, you probably want item 1.

My guess is it will have the T2 armor "skin," but be empty of mods if made by a crafter. So you can get the look without doing operations, but to get the actual stats you'll need the mods from operation gear.

Whether that has the effect your want is another matter entirely. Just look at what the whining of DPS Scoundrels/Operatives got them in 1.2...

Not normally, but sometimes you hit a string of bad luck. When I was reverse engineering 48 stims, I got my reusable fort stim in just a couple tries, but it took me a few dozen to get my reflex stim. You might double check your recipe list; I've had it where I've RE'd a ton of implants looking for a recipe only to discover that I'd already learned it and completely missed the notification.

I'd call distracting half the enemy team from the entirety of your team and the objective pretty effective, although it's not nearly as gratifying as putting up the big damage numbers. @Wren_atticus, just one correction: Jedi Shadows are in the same position as you, where their 60 second CC has to be used from stealth outside of combat. In fact, you have a lot of similarities with Shadows, although there are significant differences such as energy regen and the fact that your mobility increase is more restricted in that you have to spec for it. In general, from everything I've been reading, I'd expect every class to see a few tweaks to their abilities and talent trees as well as other quality of life improvements. Just because they consider Scrappers to be on relatively even footing compared to other classes doesn't mean they plan to leave them exactly as they are.

Take away the need to hammer shot and all that will happen is we will Ion Pulse more, which doesn't exactly make gameplay more interesting. Ammo management is what creates challenge in Trooper play, considering that any given build has few procs or short-term effects that need to be managed.

The trick is that it's not a matter of Power vs. Alacrity. You can't trade Alacrity for Power on enhancements and vice versa because there's no crit/power enhancement. The real comparison is Surge vs. Alacrity, and the diminishing returns on Surge after a certain point mean that stacking more of it is of questionable usefulness, making adding some Alacrity more reasonable.

Interesting, if this happens and they also phase out BoP items for other professions (either through being replaced by moddables or better endgame gear), then we'll end up in a situation where no crew skill has any advantage over any other save for being a different way to make/save money because everything that can be crafted can be bought and sold. So a boon to the merchant crafters and a curse to the min/max crafters. And a boon to people who would rather skip crafting entirely and just grind credits to buy the best gear.

I'm testing this with a General's Nano-Optic Response Implant vs. a Veracity Nano-Optic Response Implant, so the only difference when I swap equipment is 40 shield rating vs. 40 Presence. When I put the General on my companion, his health, bonus damage, and crit all stay the same. When I put the General on my character, all those values increase. Perhaps the companion display is bugged or maybe it only works with augments, since AtPlay seems to be getting some results from that.

I just checked this on my character; Presence doesn't have any effect when it's worn by companions. Yes, the mouse over will say that they are getting +X bonus, but if you look at their actual health and damage numbers, they don't change if you replace a piece of gear with another piece that's identical except for having Presence.

Depends on which class's gear you're talking about. Mods on Trooper gear go up to +10 or +11 for secondaries on endgame sets. I think Battilea is talking about Shadow gear, though, whose mods have lower Willpower (compared to Aim on the Trooper mods) but secondary stats at +27 or +29. For example, the mod in Rakata Survivor's Headgear (Shadow tank piece) has +37 Will, +48 End, and +29 Absorb. The mod in Rakata Supercommando's Helmet has +37 End, +61 Aim, and +11 Absorb.

On the other hand, as Elara's quest line shows, having all the proper documentation submitted and in order can be invaluable for doing an end run around the bureaucracy if they try to make life difficult for you; and Elara has been more than willing call out BS on certain occasions, such as when Tanno Vik joins the squad despite being a career criminal, or when you are commanded to free war criminals to reinstate them (Dagger Wing, though she quiets her objections when the real story comes out). She defected because she witnessed corruption and war crimes in the Empire and got administrative BS when she tried to report it; she's not going to just twiddle her thumbs and put up with it in the Republic.

And significantly less armor, once you start comparing it to Columi/Rakata gear. Armor may be less useful than the other defensive stats on a point by point basis, but the difference between Veracity gear and endgame gear is still significant. This is why if you're going to use Veracity pieces, you're better off doing it in the Ear/Implant/OH slot rather than armor, which costs you a lot of Armor, or MH, which costs you significant damage. And a lot of Veracity gear doesn't have much absorb on it either, unless you get a piece with an augment slot, because Veracity RE boosts Shield and Defense, so you're stuck with the absorb provided by the basic recipe, which isn't much more than you can get from an endgame mod.

Take a look at the Columi Helmet, it has 29 defense and 48 shield, and you can pull the enhancements out of extra helms (and gloves have the same one I think) to replace the crappy accuracy ones on other pieces. Veracity will still come out slightly ahead in terms of defensive secondaries, but Columi comes out ahead on Aim and Endurance and Armor.

I agree with you that Cybertech needs something more than just being handy for twinking alts, but I disagree with your proposed improvements. Credits are so easy to come by endgame that unless someone has to swap out their mods frequently removing the cost for Cybertechs isn't really going to make it more attractive, and making armorings only removable by Cybertechs would completely obviate their effort to improve the other non-Biochem professions by making orange gear more viable (and valuable). Perhaps one way to make Cybertech more useful would be to give them schematics comparable to endgame mods but with different combinations of stats. I use several Advanced Immunity Enhancement 22's (which cannot be acquired from endgame missions, only from Artificers, to my knowledge) in my tank's gear because the extra defense is worth missing out on some of the shield rating from Columi enhancements (and don't get me started on all the accuracy-heavy enhancements). If I could buy Aim mods with higher than 10 or 11 points in the secondary defensive stats I'd be all over the GTN looking for that, even if they had less Aim or End than the Columi/Rakata mods. At any rate, it's hard to talk about what needs to be done until we know what is already going to happen in 1.2. We have no idea where the various crew skills will stand in relation to each other once that patch hits.

Because Garza always makes the right decisions Actually, that's a good point; if you think Garza has the right idea most of the time you're probably closer to Aric's point of view and likely to see more friction with Elara. On the other hand, if you think Garza doesn't have her priorities straight, you're likely to have more agreement with Elara and less friction and more issues with Aric.

Swap for some Columi enhancements with Shield Rating and Defense; it's more than worth going down a "tier" in order to shed that useless accuracy; Rakata still has the superior armoring and mods

Giving the devs the benefit of the doubt, I'd say that they intend for players to customize the stats on endgame gear by swapping out mods and enhancements from different pieces, rather that using everything "straight out of the box." In addition, the lack of enhancements with high absorb or which combine crit and power suggest that the devs don't want it to be too easy to get your stats exactly how you want them and instead want you to make sacrifices to optimize. Not giving them the benefit of the doubt, I'd say at some point accuracy was much more useful in endgame and they neglected to change the itemization when they changed how accuracy worked.

Therein lies the rub, as you need enough DPS to maintain threat over your DPS in rakata gear. That's not saying you can't use Veracity implants and ears and hold aggro, but it's something to keep in mind before you replace all your gear for mastercrafted Veracity in the name of greater mitigation. Also, having a little bit more DPS coming from your tanks during burn phases can help in beating enrage timers; I keep my damage cooldowns and a DPS adrenal handy for fights that need burn but don't tax my surviveability. Which is another point: talk to your healers and find out how difficult it is for them to keep you up. If they're not having any problems, there's no point in drawing out fights by trading damage for being unnecessarily harder to kill.