These are Battlemaster crystals and come in Battlemaster weapons. Red/black for Empire, Blue/Black for Republic.

Who cares? At level 50 you get your Matrix Shard and can easily acquire a pvp relic that's better than any of the alignment relics. They're adding relics for daily comms in 1.2, which are better than alignment relics. You're missing out on...relics while leveling? Big deal. Hit 50, get better. Neutral relics are WAY down the list on things needed.

Right, but we can follow trends and statistics to estimate growth. Every company in the world does it every single day.

I don't understand why idiots are mourning the death of a game that's thriving. I'm currently leveling my 3rd toon. I'm level 25. I've been able to find a random group for EVERY heroic quest in less than 5 minutes. Sorry your server's dead. Reroll to a higher pop or quit whining.

I'm currently working on my 3rd character after maxing out two. I've found that the most effective way for me to level is to take the following skills: 1) Crafting 2) Gathering 3) Slicing I gather every resource and keep my crafting leveled up. I slice nodes in the wild and send companions to run slicing missions when my gathering is high enough to hit every available node on the planet I'm currently leveling through. By the time I'm 50, I have more than enough money coming in to buy my speeder training and all of my level 50 skills. Each toon is completely self-sufficient this way. I drop slicing and now have 5 companions to send out at a time to level my corresponding mission skill. --Crafting still provides bonuses, as it's easy to keep current with green gear. You level so fast that it's not worth the time/money investing in blues/purples. Mission skills are not needed to craft greens. --Slicing makes a ton of money. Seriously. I'm usually sitting around 500k credits AFTER speeder/skills, which is a nice amount to gear up for normal ops. Individual slicing missions might net you -200 to 1000 credits, but nodes in the wild quickly make up the difference. TL;DR- Take Crafting, corresponding gathering, and slicing. At 50 drop slicing and power-level corresponding mission skill.

Pro-tip: When Fury pops, dump focus, switch to Shii-Cho, pop Fury, Slash spam for free focus, dump focus, switch back to Juyo. Or just use Predation and give everyone run-speed and 10% defense, but I've always been too hesitant to use it. Can anyone confirm that you can without getting invinc?

Annihilation isn't a raiding spec? On what planet? Here, quoted from the link that you provided: "An Annihilation talent tree Sith Warrior Marauder DPS Build optimized for Flashpoints and Operations with sustained DPS in single target boss encounters. This Marauder build aims to augment the DOT mechanics of the Juyo Form for massive sustained damage."

1) Don't buy anything until you have your speeder, especially since you don't have one at all. A) Train only skills that you use regularly. B) DO NOT buy gear off of the GTN. You're around the level where you start picking up lots of orange gear--learn to love it! Use commendations on the highest level barrel each planet offers, then switch between upgrading your Mods and Enhancements. We'll get to Armoring in a second. 2) You're at a point where the money you start making from questing will ramp up significantly. To put things in perspective, at level 50 running my dailies on Ilum & Belsavis nets me ~200k. You won't be pulling that kind of money in, but you should be pulling 60-70k a planet from quest rewards alone. 3) I recommend that you pick Cybertech. Earpieces are difficult to come by, and Armoring is the biggest commendation sink. Crafting your own will help you and your companion stay up to date relatively easily. 4) If you don't care about having blue armoring (and honestly, as a Trooper, you can get by with just greens fine), I would take Slicing and Scavenging as your other 2 crew skills. Run mission skills to get these up to the level where you can comfortably harvest nodes on your planet. Once there, do not run them unless you're short on mats for some reason (you shouldn't be). Taking Underworld Training to 400 isn't all that difficult once you hit level 50 and have 5 companions to send out at a time. When you have 2-3, it's a pain. 5) Vendor, vendor, vendor. I've found that it's faster and easier to just vendor everything that's green, white, and grey. Blues are sometimes worth putting on the GTN, Purples and Oranges almost always are. Get a feel for your market and go with it.

I leveled a Commando DPS Trooper to 50. Frankly, I was bored. Sure, Mortal Volley is AWESOME, but it's a 1m cooldown and has no applicable single target or pvp purpose other than spamming Ilum. I rolled a Watchman Sentinel and hit 50 last night. Let me tell you, the Sentinel does much, much more damage. Assuming that MV is on cooldown and I have to fight a group of 3 non-elites, my Watchman kills them faster. My Watchman kills Strong/Elites faster. I take less dmg because of interrupts. The more tools in your toolbox, the better equipped you are to handle problems. The same goes for Sentinel vs Trooper. Yeah, Commandos are powerful in their own right, but at the end of the day they just don't have the same damage or utility potential as the Sentinel. Plus, JK is much more fun to play.

Why is this still an issue? Combat logs are coming. You won't be able to parse them in-game, but during the guild summit they said that it would be possible with a 3rd party program. I took this to mean something similar to World of Logs.

This happens frequently on my Sentinel. It's a visual error only. When I activate the skill, it refreshes. It's pretty annoying and sometimes causes me to miss activations.

They said that 90% of the layoffs weren't from any game development departments. The 60 developers fired weren't working on WoW. The layoffs WERE WoW-related. My friends who were let go yesterday were CSRs for WoW, specifically GMs. "Approximately 600 employees were part of the layoffs, with Blizzard, "[anticipating] approximately 90% of the affected employees will come from departments not related to game development." They also specifically noted that the World of Warcraft development team will not be affected, nor will any other development of publishing schedules. "

http://pc.ign.com/articles/121/1219674p1.html Blizzard Irvine laid off 600 people yesterday. While I feel terrible for everyone who lost their job, including a few friends, I think this is more than proof positive that SW:TOR has lasting power and has made its mark in the genre.

...and you're telling me that this game hasn't been a WoW killer?

The daily isn't broken anymore. As soon as I dinged 50 I went to Ilum and ran everything but the Heroic+2 by myself. None of my friends have told me that it's hard. No one in my guild, either. It sounds like your character is suffering from user error.