I hope you guys are ready for another weekly emergency maintenance.

Dug around and found the game I was talking about earlier: http://img716.imageshack.us/img716/9439/screenshot2012020921543.jpg Helps a lot if the other team is bad and clumps up together, making a combination of Explosive Dart -> Fusion Missile -> Death from Above give you hilarious numbers.

I routinely hit 300k+ (450k in one game) as a Arsenal Merc in the sub 50 bracket. Really depends on the map. On Alderaan, I sometimes don't even break 250k since I'll be busy guarding a node. On the other hand, Voidstar tends to be really good for padding damage.

The OP's method worked out OK when the level 50 population was relatively small back in December and all the 50s knew each other. Now? Good luck. You have a better chance of being put on the ignore list than a positive answer to join your group. Never had it work for anything higher than Esseles/Black Talon for the lower level FPs, either. Honestly, if you don't have an active guild, you're just going to have to wait for the LFD system that Bioware said they're currently working on.

Ok yeah, no denying that the dungeon sets were pretty horrible for most classes (the upgraded dungeon sets that were added later on were much better itemized). Paladins were an anomaly though; it's like Blizzard had no idea what they wanted that class to do. End result is as you said: Holy Paladins wearing a mixture of cloth and leather until their gear was itemized correctly (something that wasn't done until BWL, possibly later). WHile I still think that some MC mechanics were challenging during their time (Ragnaros and Baron Geddon mostly), I agree entirely on the gear aspect; I still remember getting some buff from a mind controlled mob in LBRS for fire resistance for Ragnaros (on top of fire resist pots and fire resist gear). I honestly think that some form of a timesink would have served this game well. Instead you have people getting fully geared in Columi on fresh 50s within a week or two of reaching the level. Giving people gear makes them feel great about it, but you have to realize that SWTOR is one of "those" MMORPGs when it comes to endgame; when players reach and eat the carrot that you have dangling in front of them, they'll eventually get bored and quit; most will quit temporarily until new content arrives, some quit permanently. Eitherway, it's a loss of money for Bioware eitherway. I completely forgot about the AQ 2.5 set pieces, lol. Good times back in vanilla WoW but yeah, I don't want to derail this thread any further.

Lots of misinformation in this post. Hey, I'm bored so here goes. Actually, the itemization wasn't that bad. People remember the green plate +spirit armor while leveling up and seemingly just make up stuff on the spot. Raid tier armor was pretty well itemized. The only real changes to raid itemization was the warrior Might set (T1) some 2 months after launch. The set was extremely good for DPS warriors and they turned around and it made it into tank gear. More than a few warriors in my guild were displeased. Molten Core mechanics back in 2004 and very early 2005 were actually pretty challenging. Why? Because many of the boss mechanics seen in that raid were never seen before in any other MMORPG. Raiders migrating from EQ mostly knew boss mechanics that involved pulling & splitting mobs (via Monks/SKs), Mez/CC control, tank & spanks, CH rotations, your PC screen dying whenever the boss used AoE Flash, and tank swapping. Also take into consideration that WoW is a much faster paced game than the EQ era of MMOs and you'll realize why it took even the best guilds in vanilla WoW 4+ months to fully clear MC. In contrast, nearly every single one of SWTOR's operation boss mechanics (save the Droid in KP) have been seen in some shape or form. Raiders migrating from WoW have long been conditioned to avoid standing in fire, moving out of the raid when they have a plague/bomb debuff, interrupting the boss on rotation, killing/avoiding adds, not get hit by cleaves, etc. It's simply to the point that it's not challenging. Also, the Mage tier sets never had any spellpower on them until TBC and beyond. Mages gained all of their spellpower mainly from their mainhand (Spellblade from Golemagg, Staff from another MC boss) and trinket slots. In fact, MC held one of the two infamous spellpower trinkets (the other from ZG) that ultimately got Mages the nerfbat. We used master loot starting back in December 2004 with 40man UBRS raids. We never had an issue and continued using it all the way into WoTLK. While I never really ran into any problems with it, I do recall a thread on the RnD forums about Master Loot not locking the drops and players could just shift click loot all of the items. Not nearly as bad as SWTOR's version, where Master Looter straight up eats all of your loot. Completely untrue. See above. All in all, it's pretty disheartening to see how buggy SWTOR's endgame is even after 2 months. If your internal raid testing team needs help then for the love of god, give us PTR premades or just allow us to copy our characters, remove the operation lockouts and let us help you fix it.

For those of you that missed it: Still under discussion, but with the GCD cooldown UI fiasco that's been ongoing for several patches, I wouldn't be surprised if the devs over at Bioware have finally begun to realize that it would probably be a good idea to support player made addons/UI due to everyone having different preferences.

And this is precisely why Bioware needs to hurry up with user add-on support. Everyone has different preferences, the default UI will never be "good enough". Quite honestly, I'm shocked that you're even wasting resources on it when you could be freeing up said resources by allowing players to do the work for you. The same could be said for internal testing; not having a level 50 pre-made generator or character copy system in place for PTR is horrible. Every single weekly patch seems to introduce unwanted changes that sometimes get reverted/hotfixed (resulting in even more downtime) and even more bugs. To be rather blunt, it seems as if there was a real lack of foresight.

The responses you've received are entirely warranted given how terrible your suggestion was. Interrupts are already a joke as it is and you want to completely remove them from the game? Seriously? If anything, interrupts need to be buffed so that they lock out your entire spell tree (DPS spell = locks out DPS abilities, ditto for healing). With the way interrupts are right now, there's zero need for me to juke my heals - if one of them gets interrupted, I just start casting the other. Also, if you're having trouble getting any spells off period, then it's most likely because you have terrible situational awareness and bad positioning. It's not anything new, I'd say the large majority of healers I've seen have terrible positioning which ultimately lead to their or their teammate(s) death.

Maybe if Bioware actually had premade characters or character copies for the PTR server we wouldn't have 2-3 maintenance days every week along with even more bugs being introduced every patch. But obviously that's too hard of a concept. Let's just allow all of these bugs to go live along with other horrible changes (hello there, ability cooldown UI change).

Damn man, how are you so good at this game? Look at that pro positioning and cleansing.

Nerf Rakata stims, still don't fix Exotech Adrenals/Stims to be learnable. Take notes kids, this is Bioware's amazing brainpower at work.

I'm at 48 and was pretty much on par with Alurez until a week or two ago. Leveling new alts is a slow way to go if your sole goal is to speed level your legacy. All you really need to do is your dailies everyday (I'm pretty sure he did it across two different 50s) and you'll hit 50 legacy fairly quickly. It should be noted that dailies on Ilum used to give 8k? or so Legacy EXP. This was ninja nerfed down to 3k not too long ago.

Fully support this, was surprised they didn't take advantage of this seeing as how each force user class was already mirrored. If anything they should make it a Legacy system feature in the future.

Lol, why would you ever link Halion as an example of a "difficult" WoW fight? And I'm pretty sure everyone knows how fundamentally basic this game's endgame content is in terms of difficulty. No boss really changes mechanic wise (with the exception of the Droid in KP) on harder difficulty settings so it's pretty faceroll for the most part. Highly doubt they'll buff the current endgame content available; you'll just have to hope that future operations will be a bit more creative with boss mechanics.

If people care so much about their community then make the LFD pull players from your own server only. There's really no reason for a AAA MMO made in 2012 to not have some form of LFD system.

All that means is people are going to level Synthweaving/Armormech, crit an entire set of orange armor for augments, then swap back to Biochem. It changes nothing. Bioware needs to look at crewskills and do an entire overhaul.

I'm only losing 24STR and I think 10 power? Not much of a nerf but rather the intent seems to be that other players will also be able to use stims on par with our re-usable ones (Energized vs Rakata). And yes, this nerf STILL changes nothing; Biochem is still the best when you throw in re-usable Adrenal and Medpack. This is made worse since you can just crit your bracers/belt/relic etc (Artifice/SW/Armormech) for augments and go right back to Biochem without any penalties. <- Not complaining about that, especially since I'm one of the people benefitting from it but it just seems to me that the Bioware developers don't have a clue when it comes to MMO tradeskill balance.

From the PTR server forum (http://www.swtor.com/community/showthread.php?t=260938): All in all, I'm sure many of us saw this coming. Unfortunately, there's still no buffs of any sort to crew skills like Armstech, so it remains terrible.

Droid can still be solo tanked even post patch. And lol @ trying to pull the "go back to WoW" card if you want easy faceroll fights, especially when you're using it in an attempt to defend this game. Nothing in endgame SWTOR is remotely hard, even on nightmare. Some of the hardest fights in MMO history is located in WoW: pre-nerf Twin Emps, C'thun, vanilla 4-Horsemen, Kel'Thuzad, pre-nerf Sunwell (in its entirety), pre-nerf Ulduar, etc. Blizzard adapted to a "nerf content gradually over time" path so that everyone, even terrible players, could eventually see all the content which ultimately culminated in the LFR system.

You don't need any fancy mouses or keyboards to do well as a keybinder. I play a Sentinel/Marauder which (arguably) uses the most abilities in PVE/PVP combat and do just fine with your average run-of-the-mill keyboard with a Logitech MX518: http://img52.imageshack.us/img52/6301/screenshot2012020115101.jpg All you need is your standard keyboard + a mouse with two, preferrably 3 side buttons (2 on the side, 1 in the middle in between LMB/RMB) and you're set. Switching from a "clicker" playstyle to a hotkey playstyle will be very confusing for you initially and you might even do worse. Just keep at it for a week and muscle memory will come into play soon enough. Edit: almost forgot. If you haven't done so already, rebind A and D to strafe left and strafe right. That frees up Q and E for you right there.

Melee in general tend to be overlooked for ranged DPS in this game. Throw an AC like the Guardian in the mix that has little to no raid utility and inferior DPS to its Sentinel/Marauder archtype and you have a recipe for disaster. That being said, SWTOR endgame is pretty easy so any balanced composition will work. Nothing in this game is so difficult that you'd need to stack a raid in order to beat it. Your best bet is probably forming a guild with some friends if you're having trouble finding a DPS slot as a Guardian for HM FPs/Operations.

Ahh, I see. There is a semi workaround, though - if you run with a premade group for HM FPs and everyone is geared, just grab the Columi class tokens that have Power/Surge on them (e.g. Agent/Smuggler helm) and just steal the enchants that way. Those that do Operations will also find a level 58 version of Power/Surge enchants from the Bounty Hunter fight in HM/NMM Karagga's Palace. Using these two methods, I've been been dumping my crit rating in exchange for power whenever I go above 30% unbuffed.

What? Surge is better than Power for Annihilation until softcap unless the stat weights have changed since I last looked (or they're somehow different for PvP). I only started stacking power when I hit the softcaps for crit/surge in PvE.

Level 56 aka +41. Black-Blue/Red, Cyan/Purple all give this amount on the Columi/Rakata weapons. Magenta is nice for entry level.