I know they were removed for crafting item rating 156 gear but they are still required for crafting higher level gear. If they are now only available from TC to craft 72 gear then that's ridiculous.

Set Bonus It really was a pretty horrible change. It's 8% damage increase on Rail Shot. Since it's damage is already increased by 36% (Tracer Lock + Power Launcher) that's taking it from 136% damage to 144% damage which is a 5.88% damage increase. Considering Rail Shot can be used at most 10 % of the time (15 sec CD with 1.5 sec GCD) that's at best a 0.588% damage increase for a 4-set bonus! Note: Calculations for Arsenal only. Heat I don't mind the general idea behind a quickly regenerating small resource pool. It allows for burst when required but encourages a more conservative rotation for sustained DPS output. What I don't like is how badly you get punished for overheating. If you have used your heat recovery cooldowns and are forced to Power Surge + double Rapid Scan in a tight situation you can be left in the lowest heat regen bracket and it takes forever to recover. You are virtually useless if you try to cast in that bracket. I'd still like to see a punishment for overheating but make it more reasonable. I think a good guide is that if you overheat you should only be punished for a few seconds max (4-5 seconds?) before you are back in the game. I'd ideally like to see something like 70% of your bar for max regen, 20% for medium regen and 10 % for low regen (or 60/25/15, 50/30/20, etc). Lower heat regen brackets take longer to get out of so they should be smaller. Really, after two ticks of Terminal Velocity you should be in the clear to start casting again. That's 6-12 seconds which is forever in a raid or PvP. The regen amounts could possibly be tweaked as well but what I really think should be the test is recovery into your normal rotation from Max heat. It should hurt, but not cripple you.

From all the MMORPGs I've played this strategy does not work. Most DPS in the raid are brought purely for their DPS with the exception of possibly one or two for powerful utilities (e.g. B-res, Sniper shield) and even then, only for certain fights. If you make pure DPS classes do higher damage overall it means they are more useful for progression raiding for 90% of the DPS spots. All DPS classes need to be within a few percent of each other (both single target and AoE) or one will get preference over the other. Utility can simply not be used to balance lower DPS in PvE content as most of the time it will not be required. On the other hand, if you do make that utility required in most fights it just means you can not complete the encounter without that specific class and at best a single spot is reserved for that class in the raid. I think the best option is to give all classes similar amounts of utility whether it be shields, off-heals, mobility buffs etc and the same DPS. If one class has inherently more utility (e.g. off-heals) then make sure it uses resources/GCD so using that utility is a trade-off with their DPS. That way if their utility isn't needed (which it isn't for most fights) they can still do as much DPS as any other class. Keep in mind this trade-off is not (and should not be) equal to the DPS loss. A Merc off-healing will not be like having 50% Merc DPS and 50% Merc heals. It will be more like 50% Merc DPS and 30% Merc heals.

Actually, most people aren't complaining about the time of day - they are complaining about the huge amount of unscheduled maintenance days that have been happening recently. We have no problem with *scheduled* maintenance happening in the middle of our prime time. It's all the other days recently we have been missing out on. If BioWare stuck to their schedule like most other MMOs do then no one would be complaining.

I've been raiding since just after release in this game and maintenance has never been an issue because it was always on the scheduled maintenance day (Tuesday). Because of this we raided Wed/Thur/Sun. Too easy! BUT... Over the last month there has been maintenance almost every Wednesday and a few Thursdays. Since it falls right in the middle of our peak raiding time these unscheduled patches (even if it's only 2 hours) wipe out an entire day of raiding for us. That's the issue.

See my post above. I only really play this game for the 9 hours a week (3 hours over 3 nights) we raid and maybe another hour or two for some dailies. This unscheduled maintenance in the middle of our raid times cuts out big chunks of that time.

Not completely accurate. If you look at the Steam online users and download graphs the 2-hour period when the least people are on is about 10:30pm - 12:30am PDT (LA). That's 3:30pm to 5:30pm AEST (Melbourne). Steam seems to give a good international cross section of players. http://store.steampowered.com/stats/content/ http://store.steampowered.com/stats/ We have been playing since release with the same maintenance times without any issues. It's only the last month or two where BioWare has thrown the schedule out the window and started patching on random days. You're flat out wrong with those days. In the last two (three?) weeks BioWare has had minor patches on a Thursday and a Friday. In the last month our guild has lost about half our raid nights to unscheduled patches. Raiding is all about having set nights everyone can commit to raid so unscheduled maintenance affects badly. It's not something that can be easily changed to accommodate the whims of BioWare. This is our raid week for the last month: Monday - No good for our guild Tuesday - 'Scheduled' maintenance Wednesday - Regular unscheduled maintenance! Thursday - Occasional unscheduled maintenance! Friday - People are out doing stuff Saturday - People are out doing stuff Sunday - Only regular raiding day left! I don't think it's unreasonable to ask for some consistency or even pulling maintenance times back a bit to affect LESS players.

Thank you for acknowledging the three previous pages of posts about constantly interrupting APAC raid nights with unscheduled maintenance. /sarcasm

If this issue has been going on for 5 days it makes you wonder why they couldn't have performed this patch yesterday on the standard maintenance night with the added benefit of people having access to all their characters a day earlier...

So you don't care about maintenance during our peak time because it doesn't affect you but expect us to care about an issue that doesn't affect us but does you (I'm assuming)? Wow... I guess some people really are just arseholes. It's two hours in the middle of our main 3 hour raid night for the week. For the 3rd time in 4 weeks.

I don't care if it's just two hours. It's right in the middle of our three hour raid time screwing us out of a night. And then they will probably break something during the patch and screw us out of tomorrow night as well to fix that.

Haha, I wish it was because of my thread but I doubt they even saw it.

It was actually our Friday afternoon I was referring to (Friday morning for the US) but I've never been in a guild where Friday or Saturday has been a viable raiding day - a few people at least normally have plans. Don't get me wrong though - I'm not saying it's a great option - just that for raiders it would be slightly better than Wednesday or Thursday.

Excellent news. Thanks!

Your standard maintenance starts at 8pm over here (or 6pm depending on timezone). I'd prefer it didn't but I understand you have to pick a time that inconveniences the least amount of people possible. That is why we raid Wednesday and Thursday - because we expect the servers to be down Tuesday evening. Lately though there have been a lot of patches on Wednesday AND Thursday. This takes out our two main raid days wasting an entire week of raiding - which sucks when you subscribe purely to raid. I'd really like to see the following happen: 1 - Stick to your regular maintenance schedule most of the time. The way things are going now I'd actually prefer it if you simply took the servers down whenever you felt like it because that would end up interrupting less raids. Or, if you miss Tuesday, then patch on Friday or Saturday? 2 - If you need to do a 2 hour follow up patch can you not pick a different time to do it? E.g. Schedule it towards the end of the normal maintenance time instead of the start. Better to interrupt a different group of people than the same people for a second night in a row. Nothing I love more than losing a second raid night in a row for something that does not affect us at all (I'd swapped my Scalene armor pieces already last time and removing a banner today?!). 3 - Don't break so much stuff when you patch! XD Thanks