No, I'm a "if it's a team gorup, it's the team who won". If you want to know how good you are, go solo him. Then you know how good YOU are, not your group.

Some of you also forget that a lot of people played the Beta. I leveled to 41 on a Sage during Beta, and I play a Sage now. Story hasn't changed, nor the have the missions. So I sped through them until I got to new content.

No, but DURING combat, it DOES give an unfair advantage, say if someone removes your buffs.

As someone else has said, All I have heard as a justification is the desire to punish players who aren't as good. No talk of, say, helping group mates improve. Just the desire to punish people for not dedicating an inordinate amount of free time to a game. In short, further proof people want these additions in order to be jerks.

If the boss dies, again: Who cares?

Another was SWG. I had a macro that was perfectly timed to use my abilities exactly to perfection. Allowed me to focus on nothing but positioning and communicating.

Simple, you said, in short, "how do you know if you're doing well". The boss died. They did well. What more do they need to know?

Good threat means that he's holding aggro. It doesn't matter by how much, or how fast he stacks it. If he keeps the boss off the party, who cares how much? As long as the boss dies, why does it matter the details? You beat the boss, you get your reward. Who cares if Player A was 10% below your "expectations".

This. WoW-clones fail. It has been proven time and again. Trying to recapture WoW's success is pointless, it was a fluke. It took something, and more or less perfected it. And the MMO genre has been stagnating ever since. No one is willing to risk change, they are content with their MMO lasting 2-3 months until everyone realizes that they've played the game before, and it slowly dies off. Bioware has the chance to do something new, something to revitalize a genre that hasn't changed much in YEARS.

Why does it need to compete with WoW? Why not try to do something NEW, something that isn't about turning the game into a glorified spreadsheet?

So what you're saying is, you want this to be just like the game you just stopped playing? MMOs do NOT need to be WoW. Seriously. Stop trying to replace your old addiction with a new one thats the exact same.

Also, just for the record, I love the fact some people are assuming if you aren't in favor of things like a damage counter and such, you are a bad player. I'm playing a Sage, and I have my talent spec done just about perfectly. I never run out of Force Power, in PVP I ALWAYS top the charts as a healer, usually outhealing everyone else by 2x, and have never wiped in a Flashpoint(Except for the one with the turret intro, which once I stopped getting into the turret and just healed people in it, we did it with easy)

I think you're missing the point of video games as a whole. They are meant to be entertaining. Fun. Not a way for someone to feel superior to others because they googled a talent spec online.

Bad analogy, although it shows that you take video games way to seriously. It's like telling someone they can read a book, but criticize them if they don't read it sitting at a desk, instead of laying in bed. One might be better for you, but they are both doable.

Again, someone who started out with Themepark MMOs. Look at SWG. It had over 20 professions. And you could take multiples. Did people need to min/max? No. Sure there were combinations that were stronger, but everything was viable if you took the time to learn it. I say they need to rework the talent trees so that any combination is viable(to a certain extent of course. I'm not advocating, say, putting 1/3 your points in each tree)