Not true rancid. Go to this thread and look at the character stat sheets when maxed out with tank gear and you will see you are wrong. http://www.swtor.com/community/showthread.php?t=616779

The point of sending out companions isn't to get credit boxes when you send them on those missions, but instead to get crafting missions. Will you lose some money trying to get them? In a sense, yes. That is the credit return on the boxes themselves is a loss, but it's not like you are losing 3k per mission. I was losing on average about 800 credits for each mission that didn't return a crafting mission. When I did get a mission, I was able to sell the mission for about 50k and I am getting one in roughly one in every 5 missions. Also, you can get augment crafting mats. You can make a bit of money each time you send out a companion if you sell the blue mats, but the real money is in the purple mats you make. All in all since the xpac release, by sending out companions on two different characters a few times a day I have made about 2 mil creds by selling crafting missions and purple augment mats. So to say you only lose tons of money from slicing missions is total false.

You also have to look at the ease of which you can obtain the mats. Biochem/Artiface mats are pretty hard to come to by on makeb. Depending on how much of a difference the patch they put out today makes on sending out your companions for the mats, it is most likely still much easier to obtain armormech mats.

So I have a few characters with different crew skills maxed out and had decided my main would end up being a sage so I made sure to have biochem on him for the potions. While fine and dandy, I ended up changing my mind and am going with a gunslinger that I had leveled before, but the problem is he has 400 armstech. Now am I missing something here or is still better to regulate your crafters that use anything other than biochem to your alts? Biochem gets the reusable potions which come in very handy for pretty much anything you do, but I fail to see the benefit of having any other crew skill on your main character. Did they ever add some sort of bonus like free augments on the character or something like that? So am I missing something? Or is there some secret bonus to having something other than biochem on my main character? I sort of feel naked not having my buff/healing potions around whenever I do anything. Yes, I can make pots for my other character, but with the way it is gathering mats on makeb, that would be a lot of time and aggravation working on that.

OK, thanks for all the information, I really do appreciate it.

Ok, thanks for that. So I guess it's safe to assume that the best trinkets would be an on use power gain relic and a relic that has a chance on hit to give you x amount of power? So basically ignore the one that does damage on hit and the one that gives static power. Does that sound about right?

Talking about the damage, say it does 194 tech damage... Then with a 4.5 sec ICD with a 30% proc chance, we will say on average it procs every 7.5 seconds or so. With no crits that is a dps of ~26. Adding in crits with say about 25% crit chance, that means 1 out of 4 will do 110% dmg (if using 60% surge). So say there's a 5 minute fight, or 300 seconds, that is 40 procs. 30 of those procs will do 194 dmg, totaling 5820 dmg and 10 of those will do 407 totaling 4070 dmg, adding those together you get 9890 dmg. So over 5 minutes that is a dps increase of ~33 dps. So the question now becomes... does the ~33 dps the relic does equate to an overall more or less dps increase than the static power relics? I know the on use power ones are great, but for the second relic is it better to go with the one that gives static 100 power or one that will add ~33 dps?

Nobody knows?

I was looking at relics, specifically the proc damage relics and I am wondering about something when it comes to them. First off, it says it does like 274 tech damage... That doesn't seem like a lot, does it scale with your tech stats and bonus power making it hit harder? The other thing I would like to know is when you look at the relic you can buy with basic coms, it says it won't proc in pvp. Now if you go to a pvp vendor you can buy a proc relic that has almost identical damage and stats (if memory serves me correctly it only has like 10 less power on it) but doesn't come with the caveat in the tooltip saying it's limited to only pvp. Does that mean if I get the pvp version it will work in operations and flash points?

If you roll into cover, doesn't that give you a 20% chance to evade ranged attacks? Or does it also work when you just take a knee?

So I dusted off my old lvl 36 sniper because my friend is leveling up a tank and I wanted to quest with him. I am going down the marksman tree and with the change to follow through, I really enjoy the class a lot. Great damage and it flows nicely... and that makes me happy. Then, I fight tank type npcs and I feel sad. It's not the high armor of the target because I use that one move to reduce their armor. But instead, it's seeing their constant shielding of my moves. With only mainly having white damage moves, I see so many of my shots being reduced in damage by a great deal and this makes me sad. Is there a way to avoid this? Like, if I get my accuracy really high I can stop seeing that? Or do I just have to resign to the fact that when fighting tank type enemies my guy will be super weak vs them?

I've been hearing how hard these new level 55 HM FPs are so when I went in there with two friends I expected us to wipe. We all have gear that is modded with the makeb mods (58 mods) and quest green implants and earpieces from makeb. The 4th person in the group was a dps sniper with mostly 69 mods. Anyway, we cleared HM athiss no problem, including the bonus boss. Now you could say that the dps guy was carrying us, however the three of us use damage meters so we can see how well the other guy performs. Long story short I was averaging 1550ish dps, tank was averaging 900 dps, and when the boss was dead, when you add up the total damage done by my friend and myself, the 4th dps guy was about midway in between myself and the tank. In other words, despite his vastly superior gear, he wasn't a very good player. So long story short, if you know how to play your class, know how to interrupt, know how to cc, the new 55s are easy. If you don't, then I can see how they can be hard.

If sage healer is your favorite play style, then play it without worrying about companions. Here's why... The only time you will really engage your companions is during the story. And even then, once you get passed the planet you get the companion on, they don't really add much to the conversation. You will get some dialogue on your ship or in a cantina (same dialogue) when you get to x point in your story or get your companion's affection to a certain point, but even then it's only a few minutes worth. Once you finish the story and see all their side story dialogue, you'll tune them out when you are doing anything because you'll hear the same thing over and over again. Ultimately you'll be playing your character and that's the main thing that matters when it comes to enjoyment of the game. Your companions compose about 5% of the total game when it comes to what you experience in the game, so don't let them influence which class you play. If you are really interested in what happens with a companion and want to see it, instead of spending many hours leveling up a class to experience it, save yourself and just watch it on youtube.

Taunts don't build aggro, they basically put your aggro to the highest person's aggro on the target and force the enemy to attack you for a few seconds, in that time you have to hit the enemy a few times to get over the enemy's target. If you go into a fight and use your taunts right off the bat, you are doing it very wrong. I'm an assassin tank and have zero problems holding aggro. But if I do lose it for some reason, I taunt the enemy and end up keeping threat on me. If I notice the same person pulls aggro again, then I guard that person.

You'd think they would try to encourage crafting in this game. But from what I have been reading and hearing from guild mates, they have done the complete opposite and have left crafting to the most devoted with all their changes with material gathering and recipes. Such a shame, I was planning on raising a crew skill for augment making. But now? No thanks. I will say this though. After reading this thread I went to the GTN to see the prices of the new crafting materials and they must really be a pain to get. On harbringer server a majority of the new mats are selling for 9-10k for one of them. Looks like it's time to raise my gathering skills so I can make lots of cash.