To clarify, when you open the Legacy window and look at the Imperial classes page, do you see Ashara's face, or do you see a padlock where her face should be? If you see her face, then you have unlocked it, but after the first unlocked companion of a role additional ones just give bonus Presence. If you see the lock, then you may have run afoul of a bug and should contact customer service.

This, exactly. There's something satisfying about giving the "Yes sir" or "Understood" responses to General Garza in the briefings and seeing affection gains from all of your companions, at least in Chapter 1. And even then, once you get towards the end of the storyline, seeing everyone else give positive affection while Tanno rolls his eyes has its own charm.

This matches my experience. One thing to keep in mind, though, is that Vanguards don't have the same kind of spammable AoE options that Sages and Mercs/Commandos have, so your experience may not be similar.

I'm a big fan of Yuun for the different perspective he brings. I need to farm up some more Columi for him to gear him out as well as Aric and see who brings the better dps.

If you're practically in full Columi, than you're probably overgeared enough to be faster with a DPS companion as opposed to a healer. You should be able to kill things fast enough to only have to spend a couple seconds recharging every few pulls against the usual trash. Works even better if you have a Rakata Medpac and can pop that baby on cooldown; that's how my Vanguard does dailies with a DPS comp and never has to stop at all.

Aluminum nodes don't seem to spawn as often as other types, but (Imperial) Balmorra should be a good place to look. If your schematics that use Desh and Silica are still yellow and you have a decent supply of those, you might keep making those to get your skill up and try to reach the schematics that use grade 2 mats. Bronzium nodes are all over the place.

I'll admit I haven't done a side by side comparison, but they looked pretty close to me in the character creation screen, and at the very least the female type 3 is more than large enough to not feel like a fragile flower in the middle of a battlefield. Personally, I went female type 2 on my Vanguard and never felt like I was too small to sell the role (might have been different if I was carting around an assault cannon...).

So don't be tiny. Body type 3 is just as huge for the female as the male . I mostly go by voice actors. I quickly discovered that I found the voice actor for the male consular insufferable, and I'm a big fan of Jennifer Hale, who voices the female Trooper, so that played a big part for me. I'll echo Flaminica in saying that the male Agent has fantastic voice acting, particularly if you like snide/sarcastic responses (my favorite so far: "You know, normal people don't have this problem.").

I like the female voice actor better, but on the other hand, you're stuck with Corso as your only romance option, which may or may not be a bad thing depending on your perspective.

Legacy Gear is gear you can get for alts. It's very good for the level you can start using it at, but because obsolete over the next 5 levels or so. Look over the Rakata stuff, a lot of the pieces are BoE, so you might be able to sell on the GTN to someone who doesn't want to go through the trouble of farming 120 daily comms.

Defense augments would increase your mitigation by a greater degree than absorb augments at this point. As far as more defensive stats vs. more Aim/Endurance goes, that's a hard question to answer. Use a combat log parser to determine just what percentage of incoming attacks from bosses are defendable/shieldable, talk to your healers to see how much trouble they have keeping you up, and watch your health during the heaviest damage phases to see how quickly your HP buffer evaporates (and then check the combat log to see if the incoming damage during the damage phase is defendable or not). Incidentally, I know you're asking about gear and not spec, but why no Power Armor? That DR applies to every single attack.

Reminds me of the guy on Hutta who threatens to make someone eat their own eyeballs. My response: "That was pretty over the top." Baras should have been voiced by BRIAN BLESSED.

Until you take into account that there are hundreds of thousands of slicing missions being run every day, at which point a streak of 60 non-crits doesn't seem so unreasonable. It is in the nature of truly random sets to have streaks. Consider that in your average run of 100 missions, you're looking at somewhere in the neighborhood of 10-20 crits, which means that 80-90 have to not-crit, and they don't have to be evenly distributed.

Question about the Guild Banks. When we recreate our guild on the new server and petition Customer Service to give us the bank we had on the previous server, will we get the items in that bank as well, or just the tabs we purchased? Basically, I want to know if we should be moving everything from the guild bank we want to keep into Officer banks to ensure it gets transferred or if it's fine to leave it where it is.

Because rather than one semi-active forum, we should have a dozen dead subforums.