Both are stealth based, imo. They use different skills from each other, one being a more standard rogue and the other being more of a...new kind of stealth class. But both are equally stealthy.

As much as it pains me to say so, a dungeon finder (On server only!) might be needed. People are too spread out. Servers aren't populated enough at most levels to find a group through chat spam. And the fact that FP's for your level are not in the same area you're leveling in, which means you have to stop levelling and go to the fleet to do an FP, takes away a lot of the incentive to group as well.

Yes, no mmo is perfect at launch. No MMO can live up to WoW which has been out for years, at launch. However there is a certain degree of improvement you can expect from an mmo that just launches, compared to WoW's launch. You can expect companies to learn of past mistakes and instead take the good and improve on that. But they don't do that. They instead try to either copy WoW, or do their own thing not looking at past mistakes of other mmo's at all. Bioware did this too. They didn't learn from the past. They instead just tried to copy WoW to make a cash cow similar to it. They failed. The game is great, don't get me wrong. But at the same time the game is also boring. Hugely long travel times. Repetitive gameplay that's worse than WoW. Performance issues that still don't have an ETA on getting addressed. Three small pvp maps that are fun at first, but also get repetitive very quickly. Etc, etc, etc...

Ugh the amount of ignorance in this topic is staggering. "I don't experience it so it's not real!" Right...clear indication of an ignorant person. They think that just because someone has similar specs to them, they should also run the game fine. Never do they even stop and realize that hardware in a PC is very complicated. There is already a lot of difference between having an ATI HD6870 and an ATI HD6970. Or an ATI HD6870 with 8 or 12GB RAM. Like I've been saying in other topics, it is CERTAIN SETUPS of ram/cpu/gpu/motherbuard that causes the problems. A slightly different setup can already give a totally different result. However that is NOT OUR FAULT. That's a poor game engine, and Bioware's fault.

Typical human behaviour. "I didn't see/experience it so it's not true!" Funny then, how we still have religion. Since no one ever truly see/experiences god. But that's beside the point. This really is a problem. It affects certain set ups of cpu/video card/RAM/motherboard only. Most people are fine enough on anything outside of Ilum. I remember Bioware saying only like 5% had problems. But that it still tens of thousands of people with problems. And THEN there is still Ilum. I bet a lot more than 5% has Ilum problems because that place is close to unplayable for a lot more people than whom have performance issues in general. I know this will fall on deaf ears, but all you nay-sayers: Face it, just because you don't experience a problem does not mean it doesn't exist. This problem is real and Bioware seems to refuse to properly fix it, instead giving lame band-aid fixes that don't really fix the problem.

Rage timer is to prevent a group from just bringing 2 tanks and a whole bunch of healers. Why is this bad? Because 2 tanks and a whole bunch of healers are UNKILLABLE even against a raid boss. Raids are supposed to be challenging, but without the enrage timer a 6 healer, 2 tank group could breeze through it without any problem whatsoever. Granted it's not a perfect system. A perfect system would allow any mix of classes with the appropriate gear to do a raid. However unless you can come up with a perfect system to allow that, I suggest you just deal with what you are given.

Runescape: 1 or 2 years in the time that I didn't have internet myself and it was the only browser mmoprg that I could play at someone else's. What ruined it: I got internet. Ragnarok Online: 4~5 years. It was my first 'real' mmorpg. The community kept be going for a very long time even though the game didn't offer any real quests, no real dungeons, and was a huge grind all the way to 99. What ruined it: Newer expansion patches they brought out, and the community going to hell. WoW: 7 years. Easy to learn, the best out there back then, friends played it, fun pvp and dungeons. What ruined it: WotLK and up had things way too easy. More and more features came in that only catered to the below-casual player, heroics weren't 'heroic' any more and raids were accessible to any noob that had run those heroics for a few days. DCUO: 3 or so months. Fun gameplay that made you pay attention. Dungeons were pretty good as well. PvP wasn't really my thing in there. What ruined it: Endgame consisted of 95% old content with level adjusted. Playerbase dropped immensely so it was hard to find groups. And they tried to be too new, making quite a few things at max level confusing. DDO: One month, maybe two. Great game. D&D is always fun. The game was unique and -required- group play to progress, like D&D should be. What ruined it: Game was incomplete compared to what they advertised when it came out. (literally, levels and features were missing) Game world was fully confined to the inside of 1 city. The combat mechanics were poorly done. And the catering to casuals started. PvP was added (they promised they wouldn't), lame attempts at raids were added, solo content was added, etc etc. AoC: Three to four months. Best looking mmorpg of it's time. Incredible visuals. Fun to play for the first 20 or so levels. PvP was interesting and the combat mechanics as well. I loved dungeons in there as they did give a kind of epic feel. What ruined it: Game was unfinished. Game engine was kind of badly optimized (not as bad as swtor). Endgame was boring. After level 20 the alive feel of the game totally disappeared. (Even worse than swtor's 'dead' feel) Aion: 2 months. Awesome gameplay. Interesting skills/classes. Wings to fly with. Huge RvR/GvG. Pretty visuals. What ruined it: After level 25 or so the game revealed to just be another asian grinder. Just with better graphics and more thought-out combat than the standard 'run up and hit hot bar key'. Guild wars: 5~6 months and still playing it a little every now and then. No sub, which is awesome. Mercenary system was interesting. Visuals were pretty. Story was interesting. PvP was the best I've seen in the mmorpg's I've played. What ruined it: Too much focus on pvp. pve felt left behind a little. Combat started to become repetitive pretty soon as all quests were just 'kill X' or 'go to Y while killing all X under way'. Too instanced, combined with the mercenary system made it feel like a single-player (more so than swtor) Rift: 3~4 months. It was fun. awesome graphics. familiar gameplay. Dungeons fun enough. Rift events pretty fun. What ruined it for me: Too familiar. It's a modernized WoW. Yet it lacks in certain features and mechanics compared to wow. Graphics aren't that important for me so I went back to the game that did it better: wow. Swtor: 3 months so far. I plan to let my sub run out and maybe come back later to see how it's going. Awesome story. Great graphics. Easy to learn and familiar, yet still new in a way combat. PvP is fun enough while levelling. You won't run out of quests unless you're doing something seriously wrong. What ruined it for me: Optimization is still crappy as hell. Quests outside of the main story are very unimaginative and very repetitive. Your personal story, while fun, doesn't matter at all in the end. Endgame is still a bit lacking. PvP becomes too repetitive at max level. Having to wade through dozens of trash mobs for no good reason but to be a time sink. Travel times becoming longer and longer as you progress. Game is too instanced (instances for a single world/place) and people are too spread out from each other. Quite a few others, mostly free ones I played in between here and there. Nothing to really write about I think.

Hm, I play juggernaut and both as immortal and as vengeance I don't have that much of a problem in pvp. Jugg vengeance is about the same as powertech pyrotech. You just have to pay attention for a a few more abilities and have to think a bit more with jugg, whereas powertech is more of a 'use highest damage ability' class in pvp. The only real advantage the powertech has over jugg is that it can shoot at range.

It's bioware's cheap *** strategy to put time sinks in the game. Long travel times, and basically pointless travels to your ship/the fleet. That and trash mobs littered all over everywhere. Which is, in my opinion, very bad game design. I think that if you removed the long travel times and pointless walks you could get to level 50 in 2/3 of the time that it takes now. Then also remove the trash mobs that are clearly just there to be a time sink, and I bet you could get to level 50 in 1/2 the time. Don't get me wrong, I love this game. But small annoyances like this combined with upcoming changes that pander to the whiners/lazy asses, I don't think I will keep playing swtor...

It all basically comes down to this. People want to have a sense of accomplishment in what they do in the game. During levelling you can get new gear and get levels. At level 50 once you have the best gear and can't get levels any more there is nothing more to accomplish. Sure, you can still run the same instances and the gameplay won't be different from any new instances they add later. All instances are the same in their basics. But the feeling of accomplishment is gone once you have all or at least like 3/4 of the best gear you can get and managed to beat the available raids.

I figure lightning is more of a PvE single target spec. Not so much a pvp or aoe spec. And I've found a few talents in madness that just...seem un-missable for PvP. Like the double cast chance on shock or a chance to make lightning strike instant on force lightning.

Sorry, but this is ********. It's a lame excuse film makers still try to use to sell you low fps stuff. There is DEFINITELY a difference between 30 and 60 fps to your eyes. Sure, both will look smooth. But if you first play with 30, then go to 60 fps you will notice that is it 'smoother' than 30.

People like you clearly don't have an eye for the actual details of the graphics. SWTOR's graphics are only a bit below RIFT's, just a lot more stylized.

Races don't matter anyway. They're all just humans with a different skin and some different small details. No real difference in appearance, imo. And no difference in stats or anything like that either. (though no difference in stats is a good thing.)

You'd think that after half a dozen failed mmo's in the past few years, pretty much all because they got rushed to retail when they weren't properly finished yet, companies would learn. But apparently not. SWTOR is the same. Unfinished and still feeling like a beta. Even more so than half the other mmo's that came out in the past years.