If people we're going to pay ~2000 CC or $20 to blitz through their class story in half a day in a mad rush to 70.... Why not just spend 2000cc on an instant 65, save some time and have an added server slot bundled in? I understand some people want to play the story, but if you're trying to get to 70 in one day spacebarring then I don't think you're one of those people. Plus newer, hopefully not too much more expensive tokens will allow story and to start at 70 instead of 65. So yeah...this is for all intents and purposes already in the game.

You should! It's been almost a year since the last character slot sale, and I've been waiting.

Oh look, another reason to not waste money buying things off the CM. I thought selling items with broken textures and never fixing them was bad. But selling items that break other useful in game features? Let me grab my wallet ASAP. It's hilarious how much this is going to backfire.

That's a whole lot of caps lock over how they are going to implement a feature that in all likelihood isn't going to get put in the game for a very long time, if at all. But sure make em separate. Or don't and create a slightly larger credit sink for people stamping similar outfits with different weapons and increase the max outfit slots. I really don't care. The mechanics of Weapons designer are not the topic of this discussion. Preventing players from effectively taking advantage of legacy gear in a vain attempt at a cash grab is. Seriously even the crystals I paid for and then unlocked to account with real money are now unusable in legacy gear. This is just pathetic really. I was fixing to go unlock all the crystals I like/use to account in collection so that they could be moved around, but nope. I thought that would work based on the below quote from the patch notes, but no. Congrats on achieving the exact opposite effect from what you wanted, while also screwing players QOL. "Character bound Color Crystals and Weapon Tunings from the Cartel Market (direct sale or packs) can no longer be moved across characters via Legacy Weapons." Not sure what the word "Character" is supposed to mean here if this is working as intended.

First off, I must say that I am disappointed with this decision. You have placed your profits over player Quality of life. Combined with my growing frustrations about cartel market items you sold for real money that STILL have broken textures and I'm really disinclined to give you money outside of my sub. That said, this completely removes the value of tunings for me. I use legacy gear on Every. Single. Character. and I have about 40. I got my hands on two or three of these but now I don't even want to use them because they're too much hassle for what is purely cosmetic. I'm not going to pay 600 cartel coins ON TOP OF the price to acquire the tuning in the first place just to make my weapons flash when I could get something of real value like an extra character slot or two. While a lot of players are scrambling to unlock everything on all their characters, others are like me deciding that tunings and cartel crystals aren't worth the hassle. Crafted ones work just as well. If you want two make tunings/cartel crystals valuable, player friendly, and profitable I have two suggestions. Either add weapons to outfit designer by the end of the year (and drop some hint that this is being worked on) Or, completely remove the credit cost of taking cartel items out of weapons. It will still be a hassle to remove them when depositing gear back into the bank, but at least those items can sit in your inventory ready to be used, for free, on the characters for which they are unlocked. P.S. Anyone want to buy the volatile tuning I just bought?

Making ship progress legacy-wide or Faction-wide is something I've wanted as long as I've been playing this game. I understand that it would kind of suck to have mastered ships on multiple characters and have that not matter, but if it increases interest in GSF that should be an acceptable trade off for diehard gsf fans (or not, you do you). Plus, Legacy ships for GSF is essentially equivalent to legacy gear in PVE/PVP. I tried to get into it again the last couple weeks and although I had several fun matches in about two weeks I was sick of it and quit again. A major problem is also that there really is no learning arena. In PVE you can go from SM to VM to MM, in PVP you can go from Lowbies to regs to ranked, and before any of that happens you run around with your character practicing with random quests or smaller scale group content. But in GSF it's full throttle automatically and that makes it hard to get into. This is a tough nut to crack because GSF might not have the population to support different "difficulty" matches, but without these much of the population it could have has decided not to bother. For my specific circumstance I just joined a new raid team and am trying to get my Command level up there to where it's useful, so I thought hey let's give GSF another try since they just revamped it. It's a lot to learn. I read a lot of guides and came to realize just how much I didn't know. About the time I started reading the descriptions of various components I asked is it worth learning? Having to compete against max ships at a steep learning curve is bad but what really mad me settle on a "No" was knowing that I'll have to start all over if I ever want to earn CXP this way on another toon. It makes a lot more sense to me to just do ground pvp instead. Plus bonus I'm getting better at playing my character in ground pvp, which isn't true of GSF, and I can at least attempt to hold my own. So the short of that paragraph is that yes, you added "ground rewards" to gsf but without a legacy system in gsf those rewards didn't feel worthwhile to me. Not sure walking you through my thought process counts as valuable insight, but there you have it.

Fifteen. That's all I have to say.

How do you consider reflects/recoil damage in your damage balancing? With a lot of classes getting them, they're going to see bumps over classes without them on certain fights. But including that damage and nerfing a class because of it leaves them underpowered on fights where it can't be used to significant advantage. This seems to threaten any real balance that works for both PVP and PVE. Your tools make you viable in PVP but then your DPS/HPS is high (or DtPS low) so you get nerfed and your class is now UP for PVE. Or are people correct in assuming that you only do balancing off dummies and reflects are not considered at all (which, again, isn't true balance. Also it's really important which type of parse you look at, or if you look at parses of all types. Much of the following can be ignored if you answer that question "correctly"). There's just so much that seems to go unconsidered judging by this post. If you balance around single target only, then dot spreaders are going to always outshine others in multi-target situations, while matching them normally. Is this singular *pun intended* focus also the reason why sage healers are getting a nerf? Even though their AOE healing is way weaker than their single target (I think they are the worst AOE, but some say mercs are.) Also, your damage categories are nice and all but for as long as I've been playing this game Arsenal has been just plain average in theoretical dps parses compared to other classes. Maybe a fraction more, maybe a little bit less, but when it came down to it it was just average. I don't see why you need to change that now. When you've failed for 3+ years to achieve one of your apparent goals (assuming this methodology is not new) then maybe you should just scrap it and look at different ways to approach balance. (I know you compare to your value, not other classes, but when we know all the classes and what the general ranking should be, knowing the value isn't important in order to evaluate whether your balancing efforts are working as intended. This changes somewhat if you're going beyond dummy parses, due to what data the playerbase has access to) But really I just want an answer to the reflect/recoil question.

Okay devs please listen to this. The answer to true merc balance is right here. The problem with safeguards specifically is its Godmode against casuals and almost useless against skilled players. So taking it away leaves merc vulnerable in serious match ups (it can at least force a switch to slightly lower damaging abilities) /needlessly removes a fun PVE ability (RIP rocketpunch btw) and leaving it as is is going to continue to draw complaints from the community. If you can change it in such as way that it's moderately useful (we have two other better CDs) in both situations without taking away the PVE reflect fun I will be very happy. Very well said, sir.

It's 110% incorrect to say that Responsive safeguards is six seconds of immunity. It is VERY possible to die while that CD is active and if you are playing against people who are actually good at the game it's even likely if you pop it expecting a free heal when you are low. Literally switch to AOE and the merc will die. It's. Not. That. ***** Hard. Yes, merc's will destroy people who don't know how to play and that can be annoying in regs when your teammates heal up a merc, but I don't want to see the CDs/class in general nerfed because people are too daft to realize that this CD has a weakness. If it is mercs will just be all the easier to kill for real pvpers and depending on the nerfs suffer in PVE as well. Seriously, I don't even like R.S. in pvp because it's inconsistent. It's much more useful in PVE (Just like Trauma is much more useful in PVP)

This seems like a flawed methodology to me if you're going off player parses, and not theoretical values. When a class looks good on paper, it gets declared the FOTM and a ton of people switch to this class and start learning it and perfecting it. That the class becomes well known is a significant factor in it performing well because class/rotation knowledge trumps literally everything. Another example of the same concept: KOTFE Chapter 2 Monolith CXP farm. Was it a little too easy to sneak past most of the mobs? Sure. But what made it imbalanced wasn't so much that it was quick but rather that the community latched onto it and *perfected* clearing that instance. What took 12-15 minutes the first time eventually got shaved down to 7-8 minutes after every part of the process was examined and streamlined. I, for one, had it down to a literal science. The same thing happens with classes as players attempt to learn, say, arsenal merc or sin tanks and succeed it starts looking better, but less people try to push the limits of what lightning sorc or MM sniper can do because it's generally seen as a lost cause and a good portion of the community says that it would be better to put that effort into a "better" class. And they have a point. I'm not saying there's not a need to buff those two classes, just pointing out that there is bias, so to speak, in player data. P.S. Some of you are probably thinking that a massive influx of players to a class would bring down the average. While FOTM classes certainly attract bad players, they also attract the top-tier players most likely to actually perfect a class, which will boost it's numbers considerably. As for the average player I have a general faith that most players improve at a class the more they play it, even if the vast majority of FOTM chasers never reach the numbers of long time veterans to the class.

Can someone take a look at the Crystals on Iokath? To gather them, you have to click the base, not the crystals themselves but sometimes the base is inside another structure and the part you can click to gather is only a few pixels (even smaller than the section of the base you can see poking out of the structure). Taking an extra 4 or so seconds to find the sweet spot every time I come across one such node on gathering runs can get very annoying. It's not the biggest problem, but it's the kind of issue that becomes glaringly obvious after an hour of gathering. Would be a nice little QOL thing for me if you could make the crystals themselves clickable or just all of the base clickable when they are in those little walls.

There is a pretty decent youtube series that turns the class stories into ~8 hour movies skipping some, but not all, of the fighting, based on what's good story and what's not. But while that's interesting you're right it doesn't let you choose. Maybe you have more money than time, but if not you could level yourself up (buy some XP boosts and do it on a double XP week for minimum grinding), get some decent gear (augments are your friend) and then go back and do the story. You will kill stuff significantly faster, even with level sync. Or you could try raising the influence of a companion and setting them to dps, cause they will kill stuff very quickly as well. Hey, you could even buy a hypercrate to fund buying the gifts to raise your influence up to 50 with a chosen companion. All of this will have a similar effect to lowering the HP of mobs, which is a decent idea for what you want, but some mobs are shared by everyone so there's a limit to what they could do there. This is probably as close as you are going to get to what you want. Convincing BW to let instant 60s play their original class/planet arcs would accomplish pretty much the same thing and remove the need to do combat in order to do your class stories vastly over level (really over skilled, but those passives/abilities really help your damage) and then again you could buy a token to facilitate playing your way. Bonus - other players might like going back and doing the origin stories of their instant 60s, so it adds something for multiple playstyles. Not trying to be dismissive. I don't think this will ever happen (as a previous person said sometimes the combat is critical to the story), so offering my ideas at getting you as close to it as possible.

I want to report this I hate it so much lol. Three nerfs? You've got to be kidding. Rocket punch was amazing and it's sad to have lost it, if they take away another Iconic ability from my main class I will be quite upset. Let's just get rid of DFA while we're at it. When the net first came out I was like heck yes this is an amazing ability for a hunter for RP alone. It's a good ability, but it's cd is too high to consider it OP. Also why take away propulsion round? Every class has either a gap closer or a 18-20 mobility ability (or Operatives two mini ones), sometimes both. Sorc's are kind of an exception but their mobility is in a good place regardless. No reason to put mercs behind everyone else this is supposed to be about balance. Also Diversion isn't even a Bounter Hunter/Trooper skill, and 100% DR is crazy. All the abilities that resist/reflect 100% of damage only work for some types of damage, not all. 100% DR would be everything. Also, Diversion lasts for 8 seconds, 10 if you meant to say oil slick. Does this really make sense to you? 8-10 seconds of invincibility, AND prop round, AND Electro net on top of everything native to PTs? And then you worry about adrenal surge? You're trolling. You must be. There's no way you meant these ideas to be taken seriously.

Based on my experience in PVP the two classes I worry about the most are Sins and Ops (I can usually out-merc other mercs since I've got years of experience with the class. Been maining Merc since that first majestic rocket punch. RIP. Bring it back it was useless 95% of the time but fun as hell). Operative healers in particular feel a bit op to me, so in terms of what I'm surprised to not see, it's them. But that's just based on PVP and I have a greater interest in things being in a good place for Operations, since that's my favorite part of the game.