Advice? Completely ignore crew skills. You'll be rolling in the dough soon enough.

Whatever the emo in this post, if the stupidly OP sith inquis's can get a ranged interrupt we deserve one too. Today I totally lost a 1v1 on a sith inq because of his well used ranged interrupts. Kudos to him using his interrupt but I don't understand why this fairly standard functionality was ommitted from troopers. It seems like BW doesn't care to touch troopers seeing as how 30% of the people playing are troopers. A bit of rerolling through attrition can't be bad?

Slowly getting the picture that the best crew skills for making money... is not to take any. and imokwiththis.jpg Crafting in this game is fairly self-sufficient, and if I can sell or re-engineer a few things to get back some of the cost... even better.

Been playing your specs, a lot of fun, especially the hybrid one (#3). What do you think of this variation: http://www.torhead.com/skill-calc#800rdRoRzfdzZMczZfcb0z.1 Thinking being to trade off some survivability for dps (incend + more HIB's). A better-than-nothing burst with Charged bolt > Incend > HIB

How do you choose? You need to stop and think about what you would like to be doing most of the time and then what you can settle for doing part time. For me this means making sure you find the class suits you from a "coolness" factor first and foremost. For me, really looking at the classes I realized that I prefer Commando, Vanguard and Juggernaut. After that you should try each exclusively until at least level 20 to get a feel for the mechanics of the AC'S various specs. You can see with Commando Assault for example you are going to be doing a lot of Charge Bolt>Incend>HIB combos. For Vanguard Tactics you will be doing Sticky>Ion Pulse>Stock quite a bit. Juggernauts, Charge>Smash>Force Yell etc. etc. All should be fun, but you can look out for which mechanic is the one that feels the most comfortable and satisfying. For me that was Commando. On top of that I love the big gun, love the big ranged nukes, and the gear. So I decided to level the Commando as my main, and level the Vanguard and Juggernaut as alts, at a pace that takes advantage of dailies and uses up their rested state. At any point I feel like it, I also don't worry about jumping on an alt - I'm here to have fun, not work a second job. Also, the idea of using the mirror class is good in theory, but having tried it, I find I don't like the animations of the BH AC's at all. IMHO better to just space bar through the same quests for your alts and level faster. TL;DR? Pick the one who's mechanic you feel the most satisfied with and level the others on dailies and rested state.

Wow, interesting read and good looking specs. Would you be able to indicate at what level you think these specs become viable?

When playing PVE, you can start at lower difficulty and work your way up by winning those encounters. You try and succeed. This is fun. In PVP you cannot win. You are just dog food for the geared PVPers. Until eventually you can do the same to other newbies. This is not fun. The PVP model will discourage new people from PVPing. The PVP model will cause seasoned PVPers to not have fun. As an example, would someone in top end PVE gear go back to the newbie planet and lay waste to level 4 npcs? Why not? Cause it's not fun. Why not have a gear progression of: - entry level gear that is 90% effective - reasonably easy to grind gear that is 95% effective - advanced gear that requires a significant grind to be 100% effective. A 10% gear on top of the experience advantage should be all you need to dominate ungeared nubies.

re your questions: Use armor piercing: will make your grav and high-impact bolt hit harder, plasma without skill points is not worth it. It's mainly for the knockback effect which is a badly needed interrupt for us. Everytime you get hit the thing you are casting moves back a bit. therefore it may take 2 or more seconds to cast a 1.5 sec grav round if you are being hit. The Steadied aim skill helps with this but you really shouldn't be face tanking anyone unless you are sure you can drop them. If you insist on Gunnery I would suggest this at your level: http://www.torhead.com/skill-calc#800ZMIkoR.1 Keep in mind you will need to play as a sniper with Gunnery and will die a lot, though many people will be going down with you. I personally prefer Assault: http://www.torhead.com/skill-calc#800ZZfhMdz.1 You wouldn't go wrong to put 2 points into Quick Thinking for the quick heals for yourself. Quite often the lowest health is the one targeted, if you can throw in some heals to keep yourself topped up, you will be less attractive as a target.

I heart jaxo

Um no, I also have this issue and my ip is not changing. It's annoying to have a double login. The additional security from this is weak at best, and annoys customers. Get rid of it.

When I'm on a planet, say Alderron, I need to go and pick up the daily pvp quest, so I take the "Shuttle to the republic fleet". When I get to the station, there is no way back to the planet other than to run to my hanger, get my ship and fly back. Am I missing something? Seems like there should be a way to port back to where I took the shuttle? Obviously the shuttle got on the planet, so it must be making a 2 way trip... Halp

Also have to agree that dailies are not fun. Anything that is not fun means the game risks losing me as a player. Does every MMO really need to feed the ever-hungry crazed kids who play 24/7? I pay the same as them and I would prefer to have a sane way of progressing through the game without having to give up my life to do it. In most MMOs people just allow themselves to be food for the gear-rewarded 24/7 basement dwellers. I approve of the way BW has made only small difference between the top two tiers of PVP gear. I am ok being *a little* less effective than someone who grinds their life away.

I attempted to finish off the mission but it ended up being a part of a questline. I had to do around 5 further quests to be able to abandon the next step. Also there is one, "Stay Frosty" that requires me to go to an area I cannot (Tavis's ship - there is a red gate preventing me from entering because I finished the main questline). I understand wanting to prevent players from unknowingly dropping important quest, but once it turns grey, you need to let players drop any quest as long as it's not related to something mandatory such as companions - but these are usually labeled class quests.

wat?! this makes alacrity important for pvp gunnery specs too then...

I have an ssd drive and I don't notice any difference in load times or performance . I only have SATA 2 with no ahci support.... So it really depends on the supporting hardware.