The difference between clickers and keybinders is not in how fast they activate their abilities, 1.5 sec global cooldown is plenty of time to move your mouse to any point on the screen. Its in weather or not you find the loss of mouse turning acceptable. Which many feel is a mobility issue, and thus affects speed of gameplay... While in fact circle strafing is equally available to both solutions. I am a keybinder and I admit SWTOR makes it hard on me. Not only having a large amount of skills that need to be bound, but also having no hotbar lay out that matches the positions of: ~12345 tbQ[]ER [][][][]F []ZXCV Requiring me to mentally map 2 rows of darkened cooldown positions to 4 real life keyboard rows. The key binding unfriendliness goes so far that TOR even has bugs mapping friendly targeted abilities to the 4th and 5th mouse buttons (when the mouse is over the chat or in the team window the keybinds stop working) At times I've been using 1 hand to drink coffee, I can just switch to clicking my main rotation without missing a beat, global cooldown gives me plenty of time. Its just that I can't click and turn at the same time.

At some point between level 30 and 45 the green companion gear missions give you does not cut it anymore for tank companions. At this point you'd want to have Synthweaving or Cybertech as your crafting skills or an alt with one of these, so you can pump out blue gear/mods for your tank companion to use. My operative had Armstech as a crafting skill and halfway through Alderan Kalyio was just so weak of a tank it wasn't fun anymore.

I agree, inquisitors get 5% to every ability except presence and endurance. That is 3 more than we get, and they additionally get 10% reduction on armor piercing damage. Now Sorcerer is the lowest armor class and Assassin the lowest armor tank, so armor piercing is less effective against them than against BH's. Still I'd prefer to have only the 10% internal/elemental reduction as a buff over the 5% endurance. Base unmodified strength + 5% extra strength on a Assasin is enough for 1% extra melee crit chance

But since my tank specced powertech used hypothetical mercenary gear for PvP that would remove a lot of my choice by flipping the stats around to tank gear... On the other hand if you had a single armor mesh for each separate class/spec to go along with those stats (automatically changing into that armor when entering a warzone) that would reduce the amount of textures and models needed to load and make warzones run at a proper FPS...

So if we changed the current gear vendors to allow paying for your raid gear with either raid tokens or PvP tokens (or a combination of both to please people like me) you could do away with expertise on gear altogether?

Doesn't that glowing outline/letter symbol near the question mark, mean there is someone in the live agent chat waiting for you to talk to them about the bug?

Hello, I don't claim to be an expert on all things game design, but I think we can all agree when you add a mechanic as a designer/developer you ask yourself, is it fun. Everything you add to the game is supposed to increase the fun factor for the players. Where is the fun factor in Expertise on gear? Expertise adds damage dealt to players and reduces damage taken from players. For 2 PvP geared players it increases damage dealt and decreases damage received by the same amount, so it adds exactly nothing. Against players not fully geared, a fully geared player has bonuses of their better equipment anyway. So the only effect of expertise to me seems ruining the PvP experience of players in lesser gear. Now I'm not saying expertise is bad, several other MMO's have a mechanic that changes PvP damage dealt. So there has to be some design bonus that makes it desirable. Please help me understand why expertise is a good game design decision?

/Agree Some companions are not that welcome an addition to the crew of some players, choice in the matter would have been nice. It should be possible to turn Ashara, or maybe it is and its just a really hard thing to do with the conversation options for her. Instead of getting replacement companions (which is a lot of extra work and voice acting for bioware to do) you should get an upgrade kit for RV-28(the useless ship droid) that changes his look and allows him to preform that companions role, by changing his skills and what weapon and offhand he can equip (but he always keeps aim as his main stat) Hopefully also changing his extremely broken in combat dialog. Even if he just bleeped like other droids he'd sound better. P.S. I actually like Gault's personality, but the story for how he joins is just appalling. It would have worked way better if they'd started him with trying to buy you off, while the other bounty hunters (a group of 4 brothers, spread over 3 appearances, so you get to kill some) would keep barging in whenever you caught him, distracting you and allowing Gault to get away. By clumsily trying to fight both you and Gault at the same time. It would have been a way better chance to show off Gault's razor wit and make you like him more, as he makes fun of the clumsy but persistent other bounty hunters. Skadge is just annoying and 1 dimentional and I want to push him out of the airlock.

Well it does internal damage, which will help match the damage per use, when used on the aforementioned merc's in heavy armor. And even more against those 60% armor world bosses. But that is basically the only redeeming quality thundering blast has...

Deals more damage than basic attack, when you have heat blast and don't have to worry about overheating as mutch. Also might be resetting your railshot cooldown or making rocketpunch free. Depending on what hybrid build you are using.

Don't we technically have an execute ability? Burnout in Pyrotech tree 30% more damage with Incendiary missile & Combustible Gas Cylinder DoT on targets below 30% max health. Those 2 DoT effects combined do slightly less damage, than Assassinate, but they are elemental damage so that make it the same after armor. However you have to spec heavily into the pyrotech tree to get burnout... Not to mention be limited to the combustible cylinder.

+1 This ^ is a great idea.

Ok, so I'm debating with myself what would be better for tanking. 2% resistance to ALL damage or 10% extra chance to shield. This is my build for now, I had heat blast before and was disappointed, so I decided to spec for a Incendiary missile Hybrid. But I noticed I do not have enough points to get both power armor and empowerd tech. Doing Some math: Empowered Tech So 10% extra chance to reduce damage by 20% = 20 *0.1 = 2% damage reduction. But shield does not work against everything, I'm pretty sure most force and tech powers just ignore shield. Power armor 2% damage reduction, against everything. Even attack that ignore/penetrate armor and internal/elemental damage. On the other hand Flame Shield and Shield Vents are very important to my build and I want them to trigger as often as possible. But I could spec some shield chance items to get the 10% chance out of those. Shield absorption can also be increased by items pretty easily getting 30%, making Empowered Tech absorb more damage theoretically. So which should I pick? I'd like some advice from those who consider themselves seasoned powertechs. I wanna tank flashpoints but I also want to get my 75K damage medal in PvP and I don't want to reset my skills every time in between (switching equipment between a defensive offensive set is what I plan to do)

Soo much hate for the patch in this thread... I'd like to share that as a lethality operative I'm largely unaffected. (I did use hidden strike every now and then, but it has no knockdown)

I find recuperative nano tech circumstantial at best, if it could heal more than 4 targets it would be great for raids, but I really prefer the direct heals... Taking the medical tree up to surgical probe and it's enhancements, gets me what I need from the tree. Putting the rest in lethality for the shorter cooldown on adrenaline probe and both extra energy gain skills, seems to be a way better investment for me. Still hitting nanotech every 13 seconds, opposed to rolling hots on people like I do now was way easier.