Put your hand on your keyboard in a comfortable position and bind keys around your hand to various hotkey slots. The more important/highly used abilities should be on closer keys, and the less used/less important ones further away. In my case, I'm right-handed, so I use the setup I discribed a few posts up. Your setup would obviously be dependent on what hand position was most comfortable and what kind of keyboard you had.

I use W and R for Left Strafe and Right Strafe, and LMB + RMB for forward movement, and turn with the mouse. I also have the arrow keys set up for the more standard forward/backward/turn left/turn right movement, if I want to use that for some reason. Edit: FYI, Keyboard turning is FAR slower than mouse turning.

I'm perhaps using an odd setup... I'm lvl 35, still using Mako as my companion, and I actually DPS mostly, while throwing a few heals on myself and getting healed by her. Works fairly well atm...

Neither words nor pictures can express the inherent irony of this statement.

It does take some getting used to. Especially since I was also used to the WASD keys. But currently, I mainly use W and R for left and right strafe, respectively, and LMB + RMB for forward movement and turning. MMB is my CC breaker, and I unbound camera zoom from the scroll feature because if I hit the CC breaker wrong I would sometimes zoom in accidently. It’s just a basic 3-button mouse. Edit: I bound the arrow keys to forward/backward and left/right turn, in case I want to move around with one hand occasionally (like while consuming food or beverages, or some such). I actually had been using my 2nd and 3rd fingers for LMB and RMB (respectively) previously, but I’ve had to start using my 4th finger for RMB instead, as moving it between RMB and MMB when I got CC’d was putting too much strain on it, IMO. 3rd (middle) finger is now MMB, so if I break your CC I suppose I’m giving you the finger…lolz. I based my changes on a combination of this guide and watching some recorded/live streams of that guide’s author (taugrim, if anyone has heard of him) playing a Powertech/Vanguard. He seems focused on a keybind setup that only requires 1 keypress for each ability, which makes it easier to activate them. The way he has it set up, the top middle bar is keys 1 through =, and the bottom middle bar has bar slots 1,2,3,4,5,6,7,8,9,10, 11, and 12 bound as Q, E, T, Y, A, S D, F, G, H, MMB, and unbound respectively. (the 12th is for things such as your medkits) Then his left vertical bar has 5 abilities near the bottom, with bar slots 8, 9, 10, 11 and 12 bound to Z, X, C, V, and B respectively. Thing is, even those guide/videos don’t provide enough keybinds for all the abilities, so I've found myself throwing rarely-used skills (like unload or my 60s stun) on one of the side-bars, unbound, to allow for more often-used skills. I need to tweak my binds a bit, I think, but overall it seems smoother than my previous (default) setup. For example, I’ve found that it’s helpful to hit auto-run occasionally in PvP, to allow me to keep moving while firing off a Kolto Missile (as it requires targeting via the mouse, which otherwise inturrupts the LMB + RMB foward movement). Granted, I could just stop or strafe with W or R, but... Trouble is I still have it set as Numlock, which requires that I take one hand away from its normal position to do so, wasting a half second or so of time. I could go on, but… And it’s really dependent on your specific playstyle/preference – I was having trouble with my previous bind setup, so I applied Taugrim’s general ideas, and after a week or so it’s as if I always used them. And...stuff. Edit 2: On a side note, Mako apparently got a CC ability at some point around lvl 30 - now I can just DPS and heal myself while she stuns some targets for a bit - it matches well with my abilities that only work on an incap'd enemy, such as rail shot or Shoulder Slam (just got that one)

No. Or at least, I think it would require contacting customer support, at the least. Unsure if they allow it. Or if your current name violates BW's terms of use somehow, they'd probably require you to change it.

I PvP (mostly in warzones atm), and I actually have my rapid shots in slot 3. This is because I'm using W and R for Left Strafe and Right Strafe, which then places the 3 key directly (or nearly so) under my middle finger....hmm, hadn't thought about that before... Anyways, I run forward using the left and right mouse buttons, and turn using the mouse... Currently, I have Kolto Shell bound to E, Kolto missile bound to C, Rapid Scan bound to G, and Healing Scan bound to H (or perhaps the other way around, forget exactly). Currently my SCG is bound to Q. Vent heat is bound to X. Jet Boost is bound to T Electo dart is on 6. Most of my skills are bound to the number and letter keys that cluster around the W and R keys, which allows me to move while rapidly accessing various skills. I think I need to move some stuff around, but so far it allows me to rapidly shift between DPS and healing in warzones (especially helpful in Huttball). From time to time I get 70-80k dmg and the same amount of healing, in a warzone. So It's not too bad... I've been planning to use this spec (come 50): http://www.torhead.com/skill-calc#300bfRRRdcdkqZMcoZb.1 But as I'm only lvl 33 atm, I'm only this far up that path: http://www.torhead.com/skill-calc#300bfRMRdcbz.1

Perhaps it's a bug - if we're talking about what I think we're talking about - when you go back to nar shadda to find out who is auctioning off the list of great hunt targets... I got a mail along the lines of "you're great, and my mom bet credits on you to win the great hunt". Or something.

Since it was a fully moddable item, it's inherent damage stats were no better or worse than any other orange item of the same type - in this case, any other orange pistol. Not sure why you vendored it, I would say keep it around in the bank or move the mods from your current weapon over…

There are also medpacks that you can craft with Biochem which heal both you and your companion. I've made some, but I haven't used them, as I'm a healer... Example: http://www.torhead.com/item/Vu5Mao Note that the tooltip/description on torhead doesn't mention that the purple (reusable) biochem crafted medkits require a certain level in the biochem crafting skill to actually use.

I thought there was a recent patch that addressed that issue.

I'd say rather that you should make cunning a priority if you want max dmg/healing, and perhaps Endurence a priority if you want more survivablity in PvP. Aim is really completely unnecessary for an agent, but you're bound to pick up a small amount.

The Ctrl issue actually prompted/forced me to try out a completely different keybind setup, that doesn't use ctrl or shift as a modifier at all (so far). I'm not having an issue now that I don't even use ctrl...well except for occasionally chatting in all caps, since I use capslock as my PTT key.

So far as I can tell, Aim is for BH/Troopers, and Cunning is for Agents/Smugglers. Although if you somehow got a piece of armor for your agent that boosted both cunning AND aim, the bit of extra ranged damage couldn't hurt...

You can use a workbench if you wish, but it's unnecessary. You can simply Ctrl + Right-Click the item you wish to mod, then drag the mods already on it to your inventory, and drag the mods you wish to add to the now empty slots... When you remove a mod, it'll ask you if you wish to pay for the removal - click yes if you wish to keep it. Alternatively, you can simply drop the new mods atop the old, destroying the old ones... I think...