too much beer, you can't be serious. This looks nothing like vaders helm.... at all. It looks like a badminton birdie stuck on our head and spray painted gold.

You forgot to mention the giant mud flap on the rear end of these things. From the backside we look like a Tonka Truck front end loader. Maybe they added that so we could take a force dump in our pants when we saw Ilum 1.1 for the first time. Also the mud flap clips through all the robes. The giant spiky shoulders are NOT cool. That is WOW's thing, let them have it, keep it off my jedi please. The shoulders on 50 pvp gear looks like some 5 year olds glued plastic sand shovels to either side of my neck, and the one side fell off. Oh BTW Bioware...while you're fixing the PVP gear, how about putting some USEFUL F&^$% STATS on it??!!! 2 Set bonus - Guarded by the force??!!! 4 Set bonus... 5 extra meters to Dispatch...WELL HALLELUIAH!! IM MELEE, I NEVER need more range on a skill that cost FOCUS. sigh You know what else is frustrating about all this armor. the RNG.. Yeah I know there are a million other threads about this, but this game has me on FIRE lately so I'm going off topic for a second. I am SO SICK AND Fing TIRED of getting the SAME pieces of armor from your rotten RNG system. Rank 59 (so this is almost pointless now) PVP and have YET to see my mainhand. However, I have got nearly 4 alternate sets to the one I am wearing, which is COMPLETELY useless!!! This seriously bugs the crap out of me cause I'm talking to my Guardian and Sage friends and they're like, "oh well I've built a DPS and Tank and Heal set and outfitted two of my companions!, you should do the same"... Well GREAT FOR YOU BUT I'M SENTINEL!!! I don't have another role to warrant two sets, I don't have any companions who wear STR/END medium armor and I can't use these pieces to buy anything for any of the other classes even if I WANTED to outfit a companion. The best I can do is open bag number 100 (not an exaggeration) and slowly....and I mean TERRIBLY slowly, build a set of crappy centurion for ONE companion, while my guardian friend has a fully decked out champion (or even battlemaster now) companion. 3 centurion tokens per bag, the mainhand cost 72 points alone. Figure out how long that would take you. Though, I don't know what the point is, cause companions are practically useless after 50 anyways so... I just need to stop now, cause I could sit here and write a book bigger than their Game Design Doc, of all the bugs, oversights and lack of attention that BW failed at when they made this game... it's really sad because there is a WEALTH of reference for costume design in this universe, a WEALTH of reference for how to build a successful MMO, and BW seemed to ignore it all.....

Come to Krayt Dragon if you're republic looking for raid content. Plenty of large guilds running all the operations, normal and HM. We form nice sized op groups to take Ilum when we want it. Warzones are pretty even match, except when facing one particular guild Imp guild.

Tunnel Vision Much? Why can't it be both?

For every problem there is a solution - some better than others. So one of the problems that people point out is that if crafted gear is the best gear, than it can be sold and therefore people who have put forth no effort can afford it. First of all, this a problem with a broken in game economy. If a player can afford the outrageous cost of BIS crafted gear, then logically they must have put forth some effort to obtain that amount of money... UNLESS, the economy is broken, which is likely the case. Almost every MMO has a broken economy because of the fact that money or (resources and value) are constantly being created, recirculated and never go away. Think about it.. what happens when a country continues to print money, the value of their dollar depreciates. That is essentially what happens in MMOs, every time you complete a quest, every time you run an instance you are printing more money into the game world. This naturally causes items to inflate. Anyways, jumping off topic . One solution (I'm sure I can spend 20 minutes and come up with a dozen more), is to have the player combine the materials into a crafters quest. What do I mean? So you spend weeks and months raiding, killed all the bosses and you finally have acquired all the materials to have your epic chest crafted. You right click one of the mats in your bag and it checks to see if they are all present and it creates a work order. Now the fun part. I've never seen this before, and I'd be shocked if there were a game out there that had this (aside maybe EVE), but. Lets say you take that work order and you dump it on the GTN, and instead of setting a buyout price on it with intention to sell, you set a Maximum amount you are willing to pay to have someone craft the item for you. Crafters browse the GTN (or town billboards if you're in a fantasy game) and they see a list of work orders. The crafters get to choose what items they want to bid on, and they bid lower than the max the customer is willing to pay, competing for the job, until the auction is over. If the crafter wins, they receive a quest to create the item along with the work order (crafting token or item). They craft a SHELL of the item, not the REAL item, and return to the GTN and complete the quest by fulfilling the work order. This gives them the money they bid on the job, and emails the customer the REAL... BOP item. If they accept the quest and fail to produce the item, the work order is useless to them, and the customer is never charged, the auction re-opens. Just a loose idea, and sure there are loopholes but, you get the point. Just because it hasn't been done before, doesn't mean there aren't other solutions. The problem is, ideas are a dime dozen in the game industry, and innovation=risk. Investors aren't willing to take risks and don't generally understand /have no passion for games. Since they are the ones with the money, they usually win, and in their ignorance we end up with the same homogenous BS over and over. Yup, WOW had 11 million users, make it just like WOW! Sigh.

I think perhaps there is a miscommunication here? I don't think anyone is advocating BOP materials or saying that only crafters should have the best gear. If I am speaking for the majority correctly, what we are saying is that everyone should be able to commission a high level crafter to create the best gear in game, in exchange for rare (required) BOE materials that drop off various bosses, and of course payment for services rendered.

Yes they use items as a hook to keep the player wanting more and better. You can have that AND provide additional hooks by allowing the player to slowly build up an epic piece of gear that is crafted. There really isn't any difference other than one rewards a player well for regular effort, and the other rewards the player significantly for higher effort. I don't see the problem and I can't for the life of me figure out why it hasn't been done. WOW to some extent had this right with Legendary items, but it has always been one piece for one class per expansion. MMOs need to expand on this system. Imagine legendary armor sets and weapons that take you months to build.... if players know it is possible they will grind it out. But the key is to give the power to the crafters to put it all together. Make them relevant and reward their efforts also. Promote the social aspects of the game by encouraging players to interact with crafters to have rare pieces made.

That doesn't mean what the OP is saying is irrelevant or impossible while still retaining the social aspects of the game. I have argued the OPs dreams for over a decade and dozens of MMOs and nobody ever seems to get it right. 1. Crafters should be able to create the highest level gear in the game. 2. The rare components for those rare crafted pieces of gear should come from Bosses. 3. Bosses should also drop the best "non crafted" gear in the game, but these pieces should never be better than a rare crafted piece. This promotes social interaction and group effort. You join a group and run raids, get some nice pieces of gear from bosses, and a few rare components from each boss you defeat to make something truly epic and rare.

I had quit playing my sentinel since 1.1 due to the Ilum changes and rolled a sage. Just read this thread and decided... why not, I'll try PVP on the old champ one more time. It's not just a button queue thing because I can drop off the spawn point, tab my target and the first action I hit, force leap... doesn't go off. ***, hit it again, doesn't go off again. Repeating this until magically it decides it's going to work. Same problem with other skills, Master Strike, Force Camouflage and Resolute are other frequent (major) offenders. The good news, my suspicions are correct. I'm dishing out 2-3x as much damage on my level 37 balance sage as I was with my level 50, full champion sent and doing so with half the effort....and by effort I mean...none of this ridiculous overly complex, need 5 hands, 2 naga mice and 3 programmable keyboards to play, carpal inflicting BS. So yeah, going back to the Sage, check back in a few weeks =)

You're wrong. And the reason why is, I'm almost 99.9% sure they reused the same skeletal rigs. It's just common practice and smart development. This means all they need to do is model/texture and skin a few new races. It's not that difficult, especially with MMO characters that run some of the lowest poly counts of any gaming genre. What WOULD be hard and costly is all the voice acting for those new races. Honestly, the largest number of complaints I see floating around various class forums, is how awful the armor sets look for the republic side... namely jedi consular and knight. If you have some time, look at the end game PVE raid gear and PVP gear, it's absolutely atrocious. Even Kira Carsen cracks a joke about how the Empire gets all the greatest fashion designers. The very FACT that a writer thought to put that line in, is evidence that Bioware KNEW they were making Sith cooler. This is why we have the imbalance. Empire Gets: Cooler Animations Purple Lightsabers (who the hell isnt crying about wanting one of these?) Better looking armor Better looking special effects Better story (trust me, play both sides) Bioware played favorites and its biting them in the ***..... They know how to fix it.

Every time I see a Jawa, I wish I could make a Jawa Sentinel. My guild gets tired of me saying it. I don't know if there is any record of Jawa's being force sensitive but if a fleshraider can be a jedi, I don't see why not. Not a fan of Yoda species companion, as the only other known characters of this species from SW fiction are all very powerful jedi masters... it just doesn't make sense. They are meant to be mysterious, unknown and very powerful. Lucas has gone out of his way to keep it that way.

They must have had the artist interns working on clothing and armor because everything looks like the back end of a bantha compared to other games. I'm not saying we need to have outrageously giant shoulder pieces or ridiculous shards of glowing crystals revolving around our heads like WOW, but FFS..... its 2012!!, we are supposed to be advancing graphic capabilities here!!! The models are extremely low poly, like crap from DAOC, and the texture resolution/quality is BUTT. Knight armor is pretty bad with little difference between the two, aside from color. Consular is just as bad if not worse, especially the Rakata gear, which makes them look like some whacked out super Ji'Lai athlete with a peacock on their head. To make matters worse their are really only 2 sets of armor per base class So in reality there are 4 PVE models and 4 PVP models for 8 classes, and the three ranks of PVP and PVE are merely gross, smudgy texture swaps.... HOWEVER! AT LEAST EMPIRE DOESN"T LOOK LIKE A BUNCH OF HOBOS AND SAMURAI CIRCUS FREAKS IN THE PVP GROUNDS!! CAUSE IF THEY DID, THAT WOULD JUST BE... GAME OVER MAN!!! CAN"T HAVE THAT! P.S. They also get purple lightsabers, cooler spell effects, better animations, better looking races..... ah F'it you get the point.

Quit hitting spacebar

Then why reply. The topic is level 50 PVP bracket. Go away.

This is great! http://img.photobucket.com/albums/v53/zindel/Screenshot_2012-01-18_13_43_10_334518-1.jpg /endsarcasm