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.

Not the point. Valor or whatever gotten from this isn't what the OP is after. It's about the trill of the chase. Some players might make it too easy to catch them, while others would hide or be tough nuts to crack. Lots of fun to be had if you happen to find a player up for a good game of cat and mouse. The problem is the way you make this work, game mechanic wise. With people being able to just hide on republic/empire only world until their bounty wears off. Especially if this is between lvl 50's they hardly have a reason to ever leave the fleet other than world bosses. What you'd need is an incentive for hunted players to go out into the world and be vulnerable. They should stand to gain something if they can reach open PvP location X, before being killed. This could be done through some kind of quests, probably something you'd que for so matchmaking can do it's thing and make it fair. Of course any class could be pitted against any opposing class this way, not just bounty hunters hunting others. The following is pure brain fart, take it only as a possible suggestion for a hunting mechanic. When a match is found you get a quest to to go to the bounty board in 'the middle of no where', whomever gets there first is the hunter and the other becomes the prey. The hunter is rewarded for killing the prey the prey is rewarded for killing the NPC that posted the bounty for him/her. (if there is no pay there is no bounty right?) Mission failure on the first death of the prey seems kind of unfair, so the hunter would need to lose on the first death too, which makes this way to short lived. So instead we should use a time limit (to prevent just hiding in the fleet until the hunter gives up) each time the prey dies the time limit goes down 2 minutes, each time the prey kills the hunter it goes up 2 minutes. The hunter would not know where the prey is, but both contestants would know where the NPC that posted the bounty is(random place, if its a Hutt crime lord he's on Nar Shada, An exchange smuggler with a grudge hiding in the tantooine dune sea, or an SiS spy with kill orders on Alderaan). Maybe add some sort of checkpoints, so that the hunter will be informed if the prey is getting close to his boss.

/signed I can't count how many times I've hit it by accident.

Sorry. This thread was based on false assumptions and insufficient testing. There is a bug where abilities mapped to mouse buttons become unusable while the mouse is over a interface element like the raid interface or the chat box. I mistakenly though that the time it takes for me to select a target and move my mouse was some kind of time or lag issue, while it was simply a programmer that likes to activate all skills by clicking. Resulting in a control scheme that was confusing the heck out of me. This still needs to be fixed though.

In PvE I have no problem finding out who I am targeting. Because I've set name tags to only show up on the targeted mob. The name tag + health bar is 6 times the size of the red arrow, I can see it. I could turn off nameplates for enemy players and fix the problem of being able to see who I target. But I do not want to because the red names approaching in the distance are the only warning system I have for distinguishing enemy players from NPC's in open world PvP. It would be helpful to set health bars to be show separately from names on nameplates. I have no need to see the name and guild of every player all the time, I just need a colored indicator above their head indicating their side. Seeing a load of red/green healthbars and 1 of those has a name above them would make it plenty clear to me that, that healthbar was the one I'm lowering/raising. Even weirder is that you can only have your own health bar above your head along with your name/title/guild. And you can turn off the healthbar display, and just have the name... Wait what? Why would that be the key information?! Even if I managed to forget what I named my character at what point do I need to be reminded of it? I want to see a clean non intrusive display of my healtbar and energy bar, same for my companion.

As a medicine/lethality hybrid operative I feel your pain. The tab-targeting order is terribly bugged. I've switched to using center of screen targeting because it is slightly more reliable. But that too is bugged selecting targets closest to the top center of the screen rather than the actual center. You have too look at your own feet just to select a target attacking you in melee, if there is another target standing behind it. It also selects corpses for no useful reason at all. Yet it's still faster than tab targeting for DoTs. I really want some smarter target selection methods, maybe something you can configure yourself, to select only the targets you need. Also that target marker crosshairs that shows up on distant targets at times, should have the option of always being visible. I often have trouble seeing the arrow above my target's head or the ring around their feet, due to spell effects .

Yup, a simple display copied from the focus target GUIelement will help me group as a tank. Or solo as a healer. I would also like the option to enable "target skill forwarding", so the DPS can actually hit the target aggro is being maintained on, by selecting the tank and using damage abilities.

I've managed to keep my operative keybinds pretty clean, Having around 20 abilites bound. Around WSAD & mouse buttons, Slice Droid, Execute & Medpacks by clicking. Problem is, I'm left with too few keys for target selection. (been considering buying a Naga) As an operative you need reliable target selection so you don't break your own CC As a healer I need to be able to select the person to heal really quickly. As a lethality hybrid I need to flip through many targets consistently to refresh poisons. There is not targeting option that is reliable to do any of those! I use tab targeting. (which occasionally bugs) Target of target, targeting. And center of screen targeting. (which regularly bugs, and can't be modified not to select corpses) Clicking portraits in team interface. (they fixed the delay, thank god) now if only companions showed up in the team interface I wish there was an option to make selective targeting Macro's, like Tab targeting though allies (below 75% health) only.

I was wondering if a Naga works with ToR. It would suck to plunk down €60 and find out the controls are not supported properly. Anyway for lack of a Naga mouse I have had to use some creativity in my bar setup. I use the following because using modifier keys seems to cause me problems. Mousewheel up. Switch main bar to Hotbar 4 Mousewheel down. Switch main bar to Hotbar 5 On hotbar 4 ` Escape Mouse 4 Kolto Injection Mouse 5 Rifle Shot (replace with surgical probe in 6 levels) 1 Stim Boost 2 Corrosive Grenade 3 Corosive Dart 4 Carbine Burst On Hotbar 5 ` Stealth Mouse 4 Shiv Mouse 5 Backstab 1 Sleepdart 2 (reserved for shield probe) 3 Cloaking screen 4 Evasion On bottom hotbar Q Debilitate E Frag grenade R Toxin Scan Z Adrenaline Probe X Flash Bang C Sever Tendon I really wish I had a 'select most hurt teammate' macro I could keybind. Used by clicking: Health pack Sneak Slice Droid I'm going to have to make some changes to this