I'm hoping someone can explain these changes to me? I played when the game first came out, and I stopped a few weeks in and recently came back about a month ago. I was having fun with a Juggernaut and Guardian, both Vengeance/vigilance. So, clearly I'm not an expert in this. I was marginally able to tank smaller things before, and when I used the group finder people would complain if I wanted to be DPS because supposed Jugg/Guardian DPS was mediocre. As far as I can tell with the changes, my DPS has gone down because the new ravage/blade barrage is a lot worse and I lost Soresu form, so I basically can't tank either. I don't get the changes. Ravage went from an ability that was situationally good, to an ability that's just bad. Maybe if I completely ran out of other things and I was out of rage it might make sense, but that never happens. What am I missing here? Thank you in advance.

Jugg and Sin. Not in nightmares yet. Jug with either 31/10/0 or 14/27/0. Sin with the only darkness build Wearing equivalent gear and no buffs beyond the tank stance and adding in the combat buffs (like blade baricade), (tested when I was using all oranges with epic mods in them), the jugg is statistically slightly tougher. AC is comparable (.8% bonus to the jugg). Jugg's DR is higher for Kinetic/Energy by 2.5%. Ignoring the clickies except dark ward, the stats are otherwise similar, except for a increase in shield change while DW is up for the assassin of about 7%. So, the assassin is slightly squishier. You notice it a little, but not a huge amount. The "OH SH#T" buttons don't feel as super, but the 5 secs of force shroud is pretty awesome for cleansing things off, and the cooldown is a lot shorter than Invincible or Blade Ward. Tanking through trash and group things is CONSIDERABLY more enjoyable with the sin. You have a CC, and force pull. You don't need to plan out how you're going to force push/charge people around. Wither does great damage, can be cast at range, and includes a threat component, unlike smash. I've regularly had shock and chain shot crit (due to energize, it's common) for 3200 and 1600 respectively. Adding in the threat component, and it really becomes a one-stop go to. You can also tank at 10m without a huge hardship, so you can stand outside whirlwinds and the like and still be fine. In fact, as long as DPS isn't going crazy, you can actually kite tank some mobs with shock, wither and discharge. You'll take a threat penalty for doing it, and Assassinate requires melee range, unlike vicious throw. Of course, you can also use it at 30% instead of 20%, and it does more damage... so, clearly again win for the sin. Force usage vs Rage takes some getting used too. The jugg feels more like wave, where you build up then dump, then build up, etc. The assassin is about keeping your energy in the sweet spot of never getting low and never hitting max. So, there's advantages and disadvantages. That said, I'm generally frustrated with the jugg. In straight tanking situations you can sort of see the give and tank between the two, but outside of it the jugg fails at everything vs the assassin. Soloing is considerably worse. PvP is worse (would be even more so if Force Cloak actually worked right). I stick with the jugg because nobody else in my guild will play one, and I figure that eventually they'll do something about it. But it's a rare day when I don't scream some obcenity at it. And any farming or soloing or helping of guildies, I use the assassin, as it's just 5x better outside of the op/fp, due to self-healing, stealth, CC, etc.

Or d.) If it looks bad, you can just turn the helmet off in your own options, and give the player the ability to control this. Instead, we had to remove features because some people were offended by other people's clipping. I still think this was fallout from the Lekku change, and not really to do with the space pope issue.

I found the Inq storyline to be a lot more interesting. Companions wise, it's basically the same to begin with. Warriors get Vette, Quinn and Jaesa early on. Inq get Khem, Andronikos, and Ashara. Statisticallys peaking vette is exactly the same as andronikos, as ashara is with jaesa (at least light-side jaesa. Is dark side different?) Eventually Quinn is exactly the same as Talos. So really, the tanks are the only different part. Since my assassin and jugg do the tanking, I don't really use them. The warrior quest between korriban and chapter 2.5 was pretty lame to me. It was just a long chain of Darth Fatty sending you to murder people on his bucket list. Even after chapter 2, there's a few parts where I just wanted to punch my monitor given how completely irrational and illogical the warrior's actions/options were.

50 Assassin, 50 Jugg, both speced to tank. And between the two, Juggs really are worse. At almost everything. I disagree on "hardest to play" though. I'm not sure if they're harder to play than the BH, as I never got one past Dromund Kass. I find them easier to play than the assassin, just worse. It's a systemic failure too. Juggernauts are harder to level. No stealth, No CC, No pull, You don't get viscous throw till 46 and it's worse than assassinate (Seriously? ***) . Going up the immortal tree results in a decrease in damage abilities and DPS (vs what you can get in the other two), while darkness actually accents and boosts your tanking and DPS. Switching into tank stance for the assassin has zero effect on your ability to push out abilities (The DPS drop is a wash, as juggs get a DPS boost from the non-tank trees). Tank stance on the immortal has a minor reduction on your rage generation (once specced). Hell, assassins get a 30% INCREASE to energy generation in their tank tree. Juggs get some talents that MAY decrease rage. And starts another heap of issues, talent trees aside. Immortal tree spends a lot of talent/text on reducing rage costs or increasing rage generation. In the assassin tree, you get increases to your tanking stats. So basically a lot of the immortal talents/abilities are there to make up for something the assassin never has to worry about (the reduction in rage/energy production for the tank tree). As it is now, GCDs spent attempting to generate rage are wasted. You're not increasing your TTL, and you're not generating (much) threat or damage. Saber throw? Only really useful on the start of combat, and then only if there are no mobs which are going to charge you when you start it, since you have to wait on the GCD before you can charge (otherwise, it's a wash, as you could have just charged). Force push/charge? Only if you have space behind you. Who want to force push a mob into the mobs ahead of you? Force choke? Well, it's probably immune to the stun, so it just turns into a poor version of enrage with a minor DoT component, and a wasted GCD. All these abilities mentioned? Buttons pressed just so you can press your next threat attack. Assassin? You just get it back for existing. Every button you're pressing is either increasing your TTL by wiping debuffs or buffing you, or it's generating threat. And many of the assassin buff/debuffs don't take a GCD. So, when you're sitting on the fleet looking at stats, the paperdoll shows the jugg as the defense king. But once you're in combat, the assassin has the higher defense, higher shielding, etc. It's not that the assassin needs a nerf, it's that the jugg needs to have something compelling to play it. Add in a CC, Add in a pull, Reduce the rage reduction in Shien, Increase viscous throw to 30% and adding a lower-level tier to it, Increase internal/elemental resistances through talents instead off some of the rage-returning talents, reduce the CD of backhand and removal of the stun (seriously? Stun? who cares about threat on anything that can be stunned?) so it can be on par with the other Tier-4 abilities. Reduce the CD of saber throw and/or make another ability that's a rage consumer and has a threat component for a ranged attack. Adding a threat component to Smash and/or adding a threat AE wouldn't go amiss either. That would go far to making the jugg at least be on par with the assassin.

From the other camp, I have a 50 darkness assassin and 50 immortal jugg, and from a purely effectiveness standpoint, the jug is worse at all but a tiny problem of hordes. I wanted to disagree on the "ranged tank" statement though. Both assassins and BH can tank (some) at 10m. A juggernaut has nothing. You have force scream, but you're out of luck after enrage, force choke, and saber throw; and force scream doesn't have a threat component to it. With the assassin I can ranged-cast wither, shock, dark-charge discharge, and force lightning at 10m, outside of many PBAoE and Spinning blades range. It has little to no reduction on my threat generation, but decreases damage intake considerably in some cases. It may not be tanking at 30m, but 10m is a lot better than 4.

I find Vette to be better DPS than Jaesa, when equipped equivalently. Jaesa spends too much time running around, and has too many DoT abilities. I find that outside of heroics, that it's faster to use Vette and heal every few fights. I stay in soresu form generally. I only bust quinn out for doing heroics. It's nice, as he shares the same gear as vette, so I don't have to keep multiple companion gear updated. The bad part is you need to keep a spare shirt/pants/shoes around for him, else he stands on the bridge of your ship in boxers.

Having both assassin and jugg , the jugh is worse than the tankasin for most PvE things (I'd flop that for PvP though). I think in practice since jugg DPS is mediocre, if someone roles a jugg they feel that about the only thing they're good at is tanking, so they all tank. There's plenty of assassins that are playing it more for the rogue aspect than the tank, so there's some variety. It's also likely that people feel that "prot warrior == tank, jugg == prot warrior" and so they're drawn to that without doing much research. I suspect as people get further into the game that you'll see a lot less juggs and mostly PTs or Tankasins unless they do something to jugg to make it more compelling and/or less frustrating.

Habeas Corpus He just sort of explodes at the end and disappears. Considering he's invincible during that time. I figure he just did the force-version of bubble-hearth. I was more sad about HK-47.

So, during Ep2 Anakin goes in search of his mom's finds her dying in a Tusken Raider camp, and then proceeds to murder them all. This is supposed to be a powerful and pivotal part of the story (baring questionable acting). And yet, for my Jedi Guardian, that's like.. a drop in the daily bucket. I wipe out sand people camps, whole stations of imperials, etc. I'd say in the average questing day, I must kill at least a thousand meatbags/humanoids, along with various droids and critters. And yet, I'm a glowing bastion of light and peace. And I'm pretty confident they're dead, as it's pretty obvious that shoving a lightsaber through them 20 times and then leaving them collapsed in the sand is not a path to continued health. It doesn't make a lot of sense to me, the mass murder aspects of bonus objectives. It really should be the exact OPPOSITE. "Were you able to sneak in and recover the data WITHOUT murdering everyone between there and here?" I don't get why the mission areas aren't more like Deus Ex with methods around people that don't involve baseball bat swings to their midrif with a lightsaber.

Thing is, you don't produce something BETTER with reverse engineering. You just learn how someone did something. As someone said, what you really are doing is closer to Research. Though in the SWTOR world, research is done by completely untrained and incompetent researchers who just throw crap randomly in a vat until something good comes out. With no past or fore-knowledge to be able to effect the results. Ironically, about the only people who do that in the real word are in the pharmaceutical companies, and biochem is the one least affected by the retarded SWTOR RE system. Every wonder why name-brand drugs are so expensive? SWTOR is here to show you how a terribly inefficient system comes into being. Then again, to continue the analogy, we can all just go down to Target and buy off-brand drugs for pocket change of "commendations".

Slicing is a gathering profession. It's in the same group as archaeology, bioanalysis and scavaging. You go out, find lockboxes, and loot them instead of finding resource nodes and selling them. It makes sense in that regard and in that vein. As opposed to people who don't want to craft who just gather nodes for selling, just let them gather credits instead. The issue was the addition of crew missions for the gathering skills. People got hung up on running lockbox missions, maybe because it feels odd to have companions around that are idle, I'm not sure.

SWTOR crafting is basically a result of conflicting requirements. It will never be compelling or enjoyable to the masses until such time as they fix the conflicts, and even then it will only appease one of two camps. There's two ways to look at crafting in an MMO: 1.) As a profession to make money 2.) As a method of advancement for a character's ability/power/status. I'll call them camp1 and camp2. Camp1 is easily defined and demonstrated by Eve Online. It's a system that hinges around a forced consumption of goods (Players primarily produce the best and most items) and a forced restrictions/limitations on production (Blueprints are resources which are limited and tradeable). It's a rational system, and it works. Unfortunately, for it to work you have to keep in mind that not everyone wins. The market is only interested in certain items, and only those people who can provide those items are in a position to make any decent money. That said, if you're into crafting as a profession, it's a compelling system as it's modeled after a system we're all comfortable with - reality. To some extent, the early MMOs were actually in this vein. For Camp1 to work, you also need market tools to make it more viable. Camp2 is more loosely defined and ,for the sake of identifiably, I'll just call it WoW-post vanilla. Your crafting skill is basically a secondary (or tertiary) XP bar. As you level your crafting up instead of unlocking new powers you buy at a class trainer, you unlock new items to buy/learn from your crafting trainer. Since this is on a personal level, these items need to be BoP. (You can't trade your powers to someone else, nor can you trade your items). It's on par with the FPS XP system (like Modern Warfare) where you get new guns as you level up. In a completely pure world, camp1 is all BoE and camp2 is all BoP. It's safe to say that camp1 can't work in SWTOR. Gear is given out all over, and without restriction or limitation. The only way to make professions would be a WAR system of consumables combined with Eve's BP restriction; which has proven to not be enjoyable for crafter or consumer. So, ruling out camp1, leads to a focus on camp2. Again, the problem is, someone at Bioware made (and extremely poorly thought out) requirement that "crafting shouldn't be required". Crafting is basically viewed as one of three "options", in regards to PvP, PvE, and Crafting. So, in some Bioware designer's mind, it made sense that doing PvP results in you excelling an PvP (Better PvP focused gear), doing PvE results in you excelling at PvE (PvE focused gear), and doing crafting results in... Nobody got that far. They just hacked the current system up and called it a day. You can't have "Crafting focused gear". It serves no purpose. There's no competition in a Camp2 system, so what would you be doing with it? The only purpose on crafting is to produce items to excel at combat, or to provide vanity (excel at social if you will). Right now the social aspects of crafting (customs) are terrible. They're BoE, and they're just recolors (at best) or the exact same as items you can get in-game. Making gear for alts is great. It's a nice way to have non-combat experiences in the game and in some cases to build social webs. It's just not a good foundation to base a part of your game that's generally important to many MMO players. To some extent, you can blame DAoC and especially the later incarnations of WoW for making Camp2-style crafting, where people feel it's now a secondary XP bar. One way or another though, I think the general consensus at this point is "I should craft to level to fulfill my character" and for that to happen, there needs to be a personally-compelling reason to craft, which their currently isn't, because Bioware has stated in writing that there should be no in-game bonus for crafting that you can't just get through some other method. People will rarely choose the irrational option (which in this case is to spend a huge amount of time and resources/credits to level a skill that results in no gain). As an aside, Reverse Engineering is basically a really poorly thought out Camp1 feature, stuck in a Camp2 system; which is why it's so terrible. The idea is to create false limitations by using serendipity to limit production options. Unfortunately, it's as poorly implemented as it was conceived. If there was a fixed limitation (you're allowed to randomly get one item per level) it would work marginally, due to being enforced. As it is though, there's no limitation on production except for time and resource input. There is no skill or ability involved in the development or production capability. Just luck and sometimes patience. Since the system is OTHERWISE a Camp2 system, people just assume they have to crank through the crafting to "succeed" which means they're spending an inordinate amount of time and resources to produce.. nothing. Gear for alts basically, given the fact that the system was designed to deter people from trying to make everything to try to implement production limitations. So people get into the crafting skills and come to the realization "this system sucks". TLDR (and no real news): Crafting in SWTOR is poorly thought out, and a direct result of conflicting designs and requirements. It will continue to be an eyesore until the requirements are made consistent. My guess is they know this, knew it when they slapped this system together, and didn't really care to worry about it till an expansion.

So I just RE'd 46 green mods, and got nothing. So you're saying this is fair, because we won't overload the market with blue mods? So.. why is it I can kill 5-10 mobs, get 2 planet tokens, and go buy the mod? Without any crafting requirement, without any materials, without anything. It takes longer to farm up the mats to make an item than it does to farm up the tokens to go buy it. I can't imagine that it's working perfectly. Not to mention, REing shares the same randomization pool as the rest. Since this game clearly doesn't use a truly random system, if you RE things in a bulk, you have a higher hit rate than you do otherwise, because the probability of hitting a successful RE is higher because the game isn't actually random. I prefered Aion's system. In fact, this is honestly the worst crafting system I've run into since Tabula Rasa. You have no control over what you produce or what you can produce. It's a completely irrational system. Imagine if you were out questing and the game just decided that you get 0 xp every quest and mob kill. You went to a planet, did all the quests, and got nothing for it except a repair bill. That's what crafting is like in this game.

Yeah, problem is, you can't have a player-driven economy when crafting isn't required or even desired. Since one of Bioware's design requirements is to make crafting optional, you will never have a crafting economy. What you CAN do though is make crafting compelling on a personal level, which is what WoW and some of the other games have done by putting in the BoP items you're talking about. If you want a player driven economy, you need to set the game up more like Eve, where the ability to produce an item is restricted, thereby making crafting worthwhile. In a game where schematics are plentiful, the act of producing is worthless, since production actually converts materials from a generic state of worth to a more specific state of less worth. Rift tried a middling system of this initially by putting in crafting tokens. It put an artificial restriction on production for the initial period of the game, but cyclically it became worthless during large periods as people became able to produce anything until new things showed up. At the end though, BoPs were the only bonus to a crafting profession. The reason Bio is currently considered useful is primarily because the item is BoP. If it wasn't, people would complain intially because people would be selling a bunch, but in the end everyone would have a buddy with Bio who would produce all their needs for cost, and the profession would go back to being anything but. TLDR: Either restrict schematics permanently or put in BoPs that are better than anything else for that slot, else crafting is not compelling and is a huge cash sink. There is no middle ground. Bioware SHOULD know this, but clearly don't, because their design requirements are contradictory. Until they actually get around to resolving their requirement problems, crafting in this game will always be a black mark against it.