Crew Skills changed. Some stuff operates differently, some other stuff disappeared. As the other helpful player said, talk to a crew skill trainer for Biochem.

You CRAFT the greens and RE THEM. REíng box-rewards or FP-boss-thingies won´t work.

The game evolved with different mechanics for level tiers. Different reward policies on different expansions. You may be having trouble with loot because of that. Since you are both on different level tiers (under 60 and aboce 60), you will follow different reward progression rules. ALSO, adapting the OLD loot rules for the NEW loot rules always leaves glitches behind. That happened recently. Remember that.

Ok ... so the old cartel packs won't be comming back as such. New model and all that . I get it. I do not have a problem with the new model per se. HOWEVER ... some of those packs had reputation items. And now they are not comming back. That means relatively new players will no longer have the option of increasing reputation. Some lazy older farts like me will face the same trouble. One has to wonder if this was thought out beforehand. And if there is a contingency plan in place to allow players to increase reputation with the new model. If not, I would personally suggest adjusting the existing Flashpoints to include reputation items in their loot tables and reward those as boss drops, regular drops, and even FP-rewards. Just like KDY. Might be a simple and elegant solution. One just has to take care and make sure the thematic of the Reputation and the Flashpoint are more or less compatible.

I'll use this to try and offer an excuse for the game. What if the lightning does not come from YOU, but from THE DEVICE? Non-Force-users also access the Force, but uncounsciously, or maybe subconsciously. Call it "Luck" (affect changes in the enviironment) if you want to, call it "Intuition" (sense stuff around you or about a situation), call it "Unexplained Survival" (control your body to somehow adapt and allow you to survive a deadly situation). Those are all things that Force-users do consciously, but can happen to anyone. If you are dealing in energy, specifically Lightning, you have to worry not just about Amplitude/Intensity, but Frequency/Filters,and even Modulation as well. Some wavelengths will be more effective than others in a given situation. Basic example from your home : microwaves will cook stuff from within, keeping the whole stable, while longer wavelengths will burn the outer layers of your food before heating the inner stuff.

First of all, folks, stop worrying about power creeping. Companions have their uses, we all know that : Convos add depth to character story. Appearance can make playing more enjoyable. Crew skills and crafting. Support Role in exploration and combat. If we analyse the impact of the changes to companions we notice the following: There will be no change in the basic story convos, or the expansions already active. There will be new convos available in the next expansion. Conclusion: no problems appearing, and new stuff will be available. Hands down a positive result. Companion appearance is no longer affected by gear. We can equip the companion with any gear we want. This can only be considered positive in my opinion, as it takes nothing away from us, and gives us more freedom and more joy while playing. The companion changes in KotFE will have almost zero impact on crew skill stuff, for example. "Almost" because of the individual bonuses each companion has, as we may decide to run around with a less favored companion while the most favored one does crew skill stuff. So this can be slightly affected by the chamges to support role. But it will be affected in a positive way as well as a negative one. The fact that any companion can take any role is a boon to our gaming experience. We are no longer tied to a particular companion in more difficult missions because of our class, and can run around with our preferred partner. As an example, I'd use Ashara and Khem for the Sith Sorcerer. Sometimes a Sorcerer needs a tank (Khem), but I'd rather walk with Asharra all day. This versatility comes with a price: stat streamlinning and the obvious implication that min-maxing is no longer possible for companions. Is that REALLY such a big deal? Should your purely-virtual sidekick be more important/effective than another player? Companions were always intended (since BETA, folks) to be less effective than anohter player. Yes, you can do a flashpoint with a companion, but another player in thesame role was supposed to be better at it. Aint always the case if you are able to min-max your companion and you have lots of extra commendations. And if you are feeling shafted because you spent many credits crafting or buying stuff in the GTN to equip your companions, let me remind you that you ARE ALREADY RECEIVING the benefits for that, and that NO ONE EVER gave you any guarantees that your spent credits would buy you a permanent edge. If that was the case, Rakata gear would still be around, and no new-and-more-advanced gear would have appeared in the 2 active expansions.

The old packs are sold again from time to time. One can wait and buy the packs then. The Sword can be found for a rather expensive cost in GTN. One can farm credits through dailies and mats.

Maybe this will help: If you do certain things, your companion disappears, as per game-design: 1) Using a taxi or your own speeder. 2) Changing instance in an area/planet. **** This includes map-instances, some elevators/floors, some doors. Now, if you are solo'ing content with your companion, there is an in-game-design command that automatically makes your companion reappear. It would be time-consumming, boring and absolutely not-fun to have to re-summon companions all the time. The same is not the case if you are in a group with any other players, because the Devs correctly consider players more valuable to groups than companions. Therefore, the game-design tries to keep the spots open for new players in a player-group. Which then makes it time-consumming, boring and absolutely not-fun to have to re-summon companions all the time, if you are not solo'ing or in a full-group.

A few comments about your test: 1- As was already stated, HK-51 does use some non-damaging abilities, where Ashara doesn't. That means there's a gap of a several seconds where she keeps DpS and HK looses his. That's fine if you are comparing overall usefullness, but not if you are comparing pure damage-potential. Also already mentioned, Assassinate on a strong-target completely re-writes the results, but on the other direction. Make sure you are comparing the same thing. ***** When comparing only DpS, use DpS-only abilities. 2- When deciding on a target, you should make sure both test-subjects are on equal footing. If a champion is immune to CC, as most are, CC-abilities should not be used. Check comment #1 for clarification. ***** Keep test subjects on an equal footing as far as the test-premisses are concerned. Otherwise you get a "doctored/biased" result. 3- When choosing a target, you have to make sure that the subjects have more or less equal "penetration" with their abilities on that particular target, or that all targets behave the same. Case in point: Droids usually have heavy armor, which has DR against direct weapon damage, but not against force-based powers that do elemental or internal damage. ***** If the target has particular weaknesses towards one of the test subjects, but not the other, you get a biased result.

Vik IS "explosives-expert-number-two". He's not a sociopath, just a hardcore criminal. "Number-one" is a traitor to the republic, at the moment sitting in a republic-military-prison ... or dead. Just thought I'd mention it, in case you missed that.

Nope. Companions are part of your story, not just tools. The only "tool-companion" you get in your story is the steward-droid for your ship. You want an effective "tool-Companion", you open your legacy screen, buy your droid-vendor for your ship, and get one of the special mods for your steward-droid, that will make him adequate to your crew-skill-selection.

NOT the class vendors. The "general purpose" PVP vendor near the PVP-mission terminal in the fleet. Those schematics can be used by all classes, yes? AND they are high-level. Why would ANY Dev create 8 copies of vendor-stuff, for all 8 classes, if they can use a single copy for each faction and make the game that much lighter on the server-load?

If you have any healers, you don't really need reusable medpacks. Let them craft other stuff. The implants from Biochem can be mailed to your other toons, you really only need one Biochemist with the "full" implant list, preferably a Jedi Knight for the companion bonus. Reusable stims and adrenals are always usefull. However ... if a healer REALLY needs the 15 second-boost from an adrenal, it probably means that healer won't have those 15 seconds. Let the healers craft other stuff, and not Biochem.

1) If you are a Trooper or BH, Aim will improve A LOT OF secondary stats, including Tech-stuff. If you are any other class, it will improve your ranged accuracy and ranged crit-chance. 2) If you are Smuggler or imperial Agent, Cunning will improve A LOT OF secondary stats, including ranged crit-chance. If you are any other class, it will improve your ranged accuracy and Tech-stuff. 3) Similar situation can be seen when comparing Strength (Jedi Kight / Sith Warrior) and Willpower (Jedi Consular / Sith Inquisitor). ... do you see the pattern now?

The problem of picking the wrong AC for your character? I'm pretty sure many had it.