It won't be any of the fixes you were waiting for, because those can wait till a scheduled patch is deployed.. This is most likely a fix to some sick exploit or something like that. Nothing that couldn't wait till both US and EU are off peak time, but that's the way MMORPG companies work.. it's sad but true.

Some of those patch notes make no sense. At first I thought they were just clueless, now I'm thinking that maybe they are so desperate to retain customers that they would do anything to keep people in game for a little longer. According to the patch notes, Ilum will be useless. Not that I liked Ilum much (it needed fixes and improvements), but why kill the only non-warzone PvP option we had (and let's not say "there's still open world PvP", because most server are extremely underpopulated and it's impossible to find any open world PvP)? Etc etc. I like this game and I was hoping they'd improve it over time to the point where it stays enjoyable for a long time after reaching lvl50 (which is what a mmorpg should do, you shouldn't be forced to roll alts due to lack of content), but it seems to me they are going the wrong way and the game won't last long How is it possible to spend 300M on a mmorpg yet go for a wrong business model and allow incompetent people to make the important decisions is beyond me. Mmorpgs aren't a novelty either, so there's plenty of past mmorpg failures you can study to avoid making the same mistakes etc.. and still, companies won't do that. I can understand those cheap independent mmorpgs screwing up, but a 300M beast with names such as LA, BW, EA..

The combo with Alacrity really is a waste of points, because Alacrity in this game is useless. Except maybe (maybe) for healers, but even there, a good healer needs to give priority to strong heals (and obviously a nice energy/force pool when needed) to be realiable and to keep up his group/tank, strong heals also means less heals casted and therefore, lower "mana" usage. 5-10% faster (but smaller) heals will save your life now and then and are sure helpful in PvP, but still, higher base heals + higher healing crit ratio/magnitude are much more useful. As a Bounty Hunter (both Arsenal Mercenary and Powertech), Alacrity is absolutely useless to me. Some people claim it isn't, but it really is.

Yeah well I couldn't agree more. I understand this game allows hybrid classes and everyone gets a little bit of everything because you're meant to be able to solo most of the game, but all the CC gets old really fast in PvP. As a Mercenary I'd gladly give up my stun in PvP (they can easily make it work in PvE only, like other skills already do) if they'd find a way to balance all this. I understand some classes need to cc and are even meant to fill the cc role in PvP, but the constant stun/snare is annoying. I don't mind the pulling/knockback much to be honest (though being immobilized for 3 seconds after a pull can be irritating, at times).

What a huge nerf. I had 77.71 surge before, it turned into 71.26 now. If they had just added diminishing returns past a certain point I would understand, but to lower the ratio this much.. I mean if they don't want us to have 90+ surge fine, but to think all the surge stuff I had translates into a 21.26% points increase over base crit magnitude, come on! Also it would be more bearable if we could efficiently stack other stats, but due to poor returns, lack of certain combos in mods and also due to some stats being useless (alacrity, for example), this is depressing. Edit: I just tested it and my 220 crit/surge relic raises my surge back to my pre-nerf value (pretty much). This is quite a huge nerf and I really don't know if it's even worth it to use a crit/surge relic anymore, not to mention it is definitely not worth it to stack surge in the first place anymore.. I guess I'll wait until someone posts a chart with the new values to see if it's worth investing into surge at all, or if it's better to stack heavily into power, for example.

No, you should keep pinning fire. The amount of end you get out of custom suit is negligible and the bonus to healing received is only interesting in PvE situation but the point is, as an Arsenal Mercs you're supposed to stay out of trouble and avoid being hit in the first place. If you play your role properly, the snare on Unload helps a lot in PvP.

People do use those. But they all have a cooldown and you need debuff/buff to use them or you need to use tracer to reset the cooldown.

It has been explained before how the whole Arsenal spec depends on Tracer to build debuff/buffs, how our hardest hitting abilities are Heatseeker Missile and Unload (Railshot can go quite high too) but you need to have applied the debuffs or procced Barrage before you can get the most out of them and they ALL have a cooldown. It has been explained before, but either you didn't bother reading, you're trolling or you aren't smart enough to understand how it works, even though many people took the time to write about it and explain it properly. What class are you playing? Because if you're playing anything other than a Sniper or a Juggernaut, you should be ashamed of yourself and I can prove you how your class is more powerful than Arsenal Merc. What really baffles me though is how pretty much everyone doesn't understand that Pyro is more powerful than Arsenal. And that a Pyro Powertech is a much tougher foe than any Mercs. I really think Bioware is partially responsible because Tracer, unlike other skills, is very easy to spot and recognize and therefore people think all the damage is coming out of tracer, when you're actually eating Heatseekers, Unloads and Railshots too (and some other skills that are used less often due to heat/cooldown issues). Some more food for thought: Tracer Missile is quite low in the Arsenal tree (which proves the whole tree revolves around it), yet you won't find more than a few dabblers who get tracer missile and put the rest of the points into Bodyguard or Pyro tree. Why's that? I should say because you NEED the rest of the tree with its bonuses to Unload, Heatseeker and all the rest to be good. Otherwise people would just spend 11 points in Arsenal to get Tracer (13 to get the crit bonus as well), then 30 (or 28) points into Bodyguard for healing or into Pyrotech for dots etc.

Huttball is boring, however I rather play hutball than Voidstar and Alderaan, mostly because Huttball is the only one you can win without a premade or at least very decent pug.

Skype all the time, I even use it when I play COD or BF on PS3.

I didn't say paid, I meant free switching, but perhaps with a time limit to prevent people from hopping faction everyday.

Faction switching They'll have to put a timer on it, but it's the only solution unless we believe in fairy tales and think thousands of new customers will purchase the game and everyone of them will roll republic. From a "lore" point of view it makes sense: Jedi turns to the dark side, Sith finds redemption, Commando goes rogue (BH), Imp Agent goes privateer (smuggler) and so on. I would admit I'd hate it to "lose" my BH to go Commando because I love being a bounty hunter, but it would still be better than nothing.

Not to mention, SOE used that "vast majority of the players is happy and therefore they are in game playing, not on the forums whining, the whiners are the minority" clever line when they released the NGE and we all know how wrong they were.

It is a good idea, but I'm afraid they'd have to postpone it until bigger issues are fixed.. like you said, even Ilum isn't working in the first place. Then they'd have to address low population and unbalanced factions.. But it is a good idea and I really think we need more PvP and "free" open world PvP. They could throw in some form of PvP rating or minor cash loss to spice it up, as long as they implement mechanisms to make sure ganking and ganking lowbies doesn't work (release to bind upon death, kills counting only if the oppoents is within x lvls etc). I think we could also use some community tools, starting from chat bubbles and up to cross faction communications: some of you who have only played WoW won't believe it (nothing against WoW, just saying WoW provides lots of content and is polished) but the community can make up for missing content in a game (and if the Devs are good, they will work on content in the meantime) and make it much better. For example, in SWG of the old days there was no such thing as battlegrounds and certainly no arenas/warzones. Yet player would organize guild wars, PvP events, PvP tournaments and so on. That (and mostly player bounties, which I loved more than anything else) kept me busy for years on SWG and made me love not just the game, but the community so much that I could have kept playing for 10 years (then they did the NGE and the rest is history :/ ). So there are easy solutions to improve the game, make it more appealing and above all, to add variety and build a community (it's quite important in a mmorpg). With a little bit of effort, they could give us the tools to keep ourselves busy when we don't feel like playing Hutball yet again or running flashpoints/ops.

It is the same old music. I will put up with the game because, as always, I have high hopes that the company will improve the situation. However I don't think they're going in the right direction because there are issues that need to be solved asap and they're not working on them (as far as I know). For example, low populated servers and extremely screwed up reb-to-imp ratio. Bugs are not that important to me and I can put up with those, after all I played SWG for over 3 years and Vanguard.. I really don't mind bugs much But the 12-16 months.. no, that's not true. Most mmorpgs are dead after 12-16 months, or have a very low population and a thinned Dev team due to low resources. Besides, I pay a monthly subscription so I would like to enjoy my first 12-16 months. I'm not looking forward to GW2 or any other mmorpg by the way, in fact I didn't even want to buy SWTOR at first but I followed it during development and I decided to preorder because, in the end, it's a SW game. But honestly, they have to understand that many good games died because the companies did not handle them properly.. they invested quite some money in this game, so I assume they want to do all they can to make it profitable.. but mmorpgs don't get a second chance, so either they get their priorities straight and start improving this game AND to work on player retention, or SWTOR might end up like many other good games before it did.

Only to a certain extent. They're called daily for a reason and this game isn't supposed to be for hardcore players from EQ who'd play 10 hours a day. Then of course it depends on skills and luck too, unless you're in a premade, but they should monitor the average time it takes to complete them and adjust accordingly if needed.

Well it ain't gonna happen. However I could live with simple open world PvP as an alternative to warzones and camp-rep-base-or-camp-crates Ilum. But in order to do that we need much higher population, better balance between imp/reb faction and possibly a reason to go to some planets other than Ilum at 50. Imp and Rep Fleet are ok on PvE servers, but on PvP servers it pretty much means you have no reason to go to any planet other than Ilum post 50. Unless you're going after a world boss. It would help immensely if they could merge servers and allow faction switching in some form (to balance population, 5:1 imp/rep ratio isn't going to fix itself) and to implement some better community building tools such as chat bubbles, cross faction communication and so on.. I played quite a few mmorpgs before SWTOR and this is the first time (well actually no, that crappy DCUO was the first) I don't feel like I'm part of a community in game.. There are names in warzone etc, but that's it. It's boring, because it feels like I'm playing a single player game or a coop game when I'm grouped with my friends. I remember SWG where we (Eclipse server) had the best community, rebels and imps would organize player events, wars and so on.. and you would get to know other folks at the starport etc, then perhaps head out to grind together or w/e. Hell even a crippled game like Vanguard with all its flaws had a better community than this: I was on the FFA PvP server and it was a blast while it lasted, despite all the bugs/exploits and the poor way SOE handled the game (like they usually do). For open world PvP, there are two things that are easy to implement, add spice to it, yet don't piss the more casual gamers off: -PvP rating, although we already have Valor. No tangible rewards other than a visible rating or titles. Open world PvP rating could eventually lead to infamy and player bounties in the future (just saying ) -Money loss: they'd have to allow us to deposit money in the bank first, of course.. then the system could be something like if you die, you lose x% (10% perhaps) of the CASH money you're carrying at the time (so not the banked money). Nice and easy, would give some reward for killing yet it's not as severe on the person dying as losing equipment and if you make sure to deposit your money in the bank often, you would lose nothing or next to nothing. HOWEVER, before they do any of the above, they would have to allows us to release to fleet or release to bind upon death (with a cooldown, to prevent people from using it as a form of instatravel). That's because nobody like to be ganked over and over and there should be a way out for when you just don't have the numbers to fight or such.

I didn't see any real numbers/formulas from the Devs, but from what I understand they are 1)making it so that you need more points of surge to get 1 point in crit size 2)adding diminishing returns Depending on how much surge it will take to get 1 point of crit size AND on what kind of diminishing returns we're talking about, this could be a minor/mid nerf that mostly affects those who stack surge past 80% (but I doubt it) or those who stack surge and use crit/surge relic, or it could be a massive nerf where, say, if right now with all the surge stuff you have your crit size is +30%, post patch (with the same gear) it will be say +15%. It would be a massive nerf for pure dps classes that normally stack crit and surge (then power). We won't just lose damage, we might have to re-mod all our gear. Edit: I was actually reading the patch notes again.. the first part is not clear to me Depending on how the other damage ratings work, compared to surge, it might be that surge will stack higher before cap if you stack surge mods post-patch, however the per point damage contribution has still been reduced by 10%, so I still don't see how this could actually be a boost.

What a stupid nerf, although I'll wait till it's on live to see how bad the diminishing returns are. I say healers can heal enough as it is now, nerfing DPS for everyone is only going to make healing more powerful :/ And obviously make premades even more powerful because it will take more focusing to take down healers etc. I think this game has far too many important issues (low population, unbalanced factions etc) that should have priority over these issues, not to mention these kind of changes should not be done in a rush and tested properly, it's far too easy to screw up with these changes when you don't test properly (for example, it could happen that healers become too powerful etc).

How are they nerfing surge? Does anybody have a link?

Oh ok, so Sorc is weak now? HAHAHAHAHAHAHAHHA, that's a good one!

On my server, it's imps circling at central and you hardly get any rebels at all. Sometimes we get some PvP going but the republic folks get tired of being outnumbered pretty fast and either log out or turtle into their base. Sometimes they won't come out of their base even tho it's 15 of them vs 10 of us.. It's sad, I never thought SWTOR would have to deal with these problems and with extremely low population so soon :/

Kills not counting in Ilum AND even crates occasionally not counting - it happened to me and a guildie of mine. I'm beginning to think this game is actually run by SOE. Come to think of it, even SOE wouldn't make so many blunders and so often. EDIT: my g/f and I play this game together on the same internet connection. If she takes the taxi from Ilum spaceport to the PvP area, the game will kick her AND me out as soon as she lands at her destination. Yeah, even though I'm not even on Ilum, we both get kicked.. it happened 3 times in a row now, exactly when she arrives at destination.

I don't know the details about the nerf, I don't even know if it was needed or not. What I know is the majority of player who didn't renew the subscription or will quit soon, won't leave this game because of Assassins being too strong.. most will quit over serious game issues, low population, imp to republic ratio being ridiculously screwed on most servers etc.. It would be about time to work on SERIOUS issues, fixing classes only when something is unbelievably broken (for example, an ability that oneshots people) or when animation delay makes a republic mirror class totally ineffective compared to its imperial mirror (and I'm imperial so it doesn't even affect me). Other than that, work on SERIOUS fixes and improve the game (oh, and start banning cheaters please) first, before everyone leaves.. mmorpgs don't get a second chance. Edit: just to clarify.. I don't have an Assassin character.

Because all our other skills are on a cooldown, yet we are supposed to stick our STACKING debuffs and buffs before our DPS begins to shine: they stack "up to 5 times" for a reason. So, if you want us to do that without relying on Tracer Missile only to apply all the effects we need, then you need to change ALL our skills to make sure we can still apply the debuffs and buffs the way the Devs intended us to. And you have to make sure our DPS stays consistent to the amount of DPS our class was designed to do. Given that Pyro mercs can deal less burst but more sustained dps than we (Arsenal) can, I would say our DPS is balanced. If you don't like Tracer doing all it does, then change the whole classe BUT make sure it will work as intended. Edit: and don't go comparing with other classes, it doesn't work: agents have stealth and mobility, we are turrets. Sorcerers can spam lightning and permasnare you, they also have force speed etc.. classes are too different to be compared. All you have to consider is: -Was Arsenal meant to be a "dmg turret"? It would seem so, given our abilities. -Is it effective at that? Yes it is. -Can it be countered by other classes? Yes, interrupts and melee abilities can tear us apart. -Is the DPS balanced? Given that Pyro can deal as much if not more damage and that often you will find other classes (including sorcerers, but not limited to them) topping damage charts in arenas, I should say so. That's it.