I realized what was distorted about the "in my experience" part of it. On strikers, I've spent the most time flying with CP on a Clarion with 2 heal buttons, leading me to underestimate how much hull damage I'm really taking. On the bomber, I guess I don't see too many BLCs getting in my face and I'm pretty good about GS awareness and breaking line of sight on satellites. Plus I guess I don't see much of the middle ground in matches because on my server it's always either against 2 ship teams that get rolled over or the mumble premades that have 3 guys focus firing their targets. Makes me realize some of finer points of builds are a bit irrelevant in that sense. Lately I've been noticing how odd it is that I can still get top damage and kdr in a brand new undeveloped ship in matches against 2 shippers, and then do nothing productive in mastered ships against premades. Ah well. Thanks for the replies.

1) I disagree on the "16% hull damage" part. That is when you are directly hitting an unshielded hull. It does not penetrate the shields. Shields have to be gone for the 16% to do anything. 2) Read all the related tool tips closely. Bleed through is not damage reduction. The part where 50 points of the 500 are applied to the hull happens before damage reduction takes effect. The weapon damage is being done directly to the shield, not the hull. The shield is then like a mediator of damage and moves its damage to the hull, but the original weapon damage was still against the shield, giving the shield to hull damage full damage reduction. I don't know, you might be correct. It just doesn't match my experience for how much damage I can take. But look at the main component description: "Half of all damage done to the shield bleeds through to the ship's hull". This certainly seems to say all damage first goes to the shield and then of all that damage half goes to the hull. Hence, it bleeds only what hurt the shield and then distributes to the hull. If the 16% hull damage or the Ignore Armor doesn't hurt the shields, it won't suddenly magnify damage on the hull (it's already been negated by the shield). At least not by the component description.

From what I read here, there is an unchallenged misconception on how Charged Plating works. At least the way I understand it to work (which I may be wrong), but I do quite well with the component. As far as ignore armor weapons; they bypass your armor component, not your shield component. So it is not completely worthless against that list of ignore armor weapons listed on one of previous pages. So anyone using Charged Plating is using Deflection Armor, right? Here is mechanic being overlooked; Charged Plating transfers damage from the shield to the hull via bleed-through, so that 20% damage reduction from Deflection Armor is credited regardless of what weapon is hitting you because it is the shield transfer doing the hull damage, not the weapon. Say you get hit for 500 damage. 400 goes to the shield, 100 goes to the hull. With the ability active, 80% of the transfer damage is reduced leaving 20 damage to the hull (or 89% and 11 dmg with the crew skill) . It is the same if you are hit for that amount from a BLC or a QLC, because of the actual source of the hull damage is being transferred from the bleed-through effect. The Ignore Armor versus the Deflection Armor won't kick in until the shields are gone and it is directly hitting the hull. Right? For that reason, the T4 Shield Piercing instead of the Ignore Armor on a BLC is more dangerous to a Charged Plating ship. In my experience anyway, I don't have as much of an issue, with say, a BLC as I do being eaten up by mines (direct hull weapons) or getting clocked by a railgun while the ability isn't active. Edit* I've been thinking of this in terms of Strike Fighter builds, it's worth mentioning that properly built T1 Bomber with Charged and Shield Converter is amazing. As you can see, the trick is keep the shields up and hydrospaner when it starts to get out of control. You get amazing shields and symbiosis between Plating and Power Converter (Plating gives more engine power per hit, which in turn, gives bigger shield buffs using the ability) and Power Converter gives you another 15% shield strength on top of the Charged Plating pool, crew skill shield buff, and large reactor. You can do some nasty things with that build and will win any bomber vs bomber attrition battle.

I've been flying a Stinger with Cluster Missiles with MZ12 and the Spare Ammo passive ability for 25% more ammo. I've had 25 missiles. I switched to a different Offensive crew member without that ability and was wondering why I still had 25 missiles (not knowing if that number was supposed to be the base amount or enhanced amount). For a second I thought maybe only the active Co-Pilot gave the passive abilities (hoping not), but when I tested MZ12 as Co-Pilot, still had 25 missiles. As your ammo capacity is the most measurable passive ability, that led me to a troubling thought. How would we even know if any of the passive abilities work? It's not like you can tell if you are really 10% more efficient in maneuvering, reloading 8% faster, pinging an extra 6% on accuracy, ect, ect, ect. Can anyone confirm that Spare Ammo or any of the passive abilities function? Maybe I have an isolated bug or it doesn't apply to Cluster Missiles or something, but this has me curious.

The game has been great about developing a variety of adaptive gear. Although, it's almost to the point where there is too much of it available. Now days, I see new cartel packs or reputation gear and think "that looks cool, but do I really want to replace the gear I already like on any of my characters?" It gives me less incentive to buy packs or grind reputation. The variety available would best be utilized if you could have your mods in a base set of gear and have different gear tabs to switch between. Or better yet, be able to preselect what gear you will wear by default on certain planets or in certain warzones. Digging through your cargo hold and replacing tons of mods for a new look is not practical (especially if you would like to switch back). It would be great to be able change with a few clicks or change automatically when you load into certain areas. Thinking back to when I was I kid with star wars toys, one of fascinating things was that you had "Hoth Luke", "X-wing Luke","Tatooine Luke","Dagobah Luke", ect. That is much of the appeal and mystique of Star Wars. That functionality would add so much immersion to this game, while being a relatively simple programming update.

I was trying to look for non-customizable Synthweaving schematics that I do not have for Medium armor items. It was the first time I've tried doing this and quickly realized what a lost cause it is. As all schematics are categorized as "Level 1" with no inherent attributes, this leads to: 1) You can not filter items within a certain level range. 2) You can not filter armor types into Light, Medium, Heavy. 3) You can not filter armor types into item slots; Chest, Legs, Bracers, ect. This leaves people with over 100 pages of items that can only be filtered by price and someone would need to check every single item individually to find what they wanted (unless they happened to know the name of a specific item). This makes schematic searches a hopeless endeavor. I would suggest assigning attributes to the schematics so they could be filtered by level, armor type and armor slot.

My lowest piece is a lvl 33 purple belt (rest is 35/37 purples). It has a rating of 92. I bought a lvl 37 blue belt that also has a rating of 92, but the level 33 has more preferable stats so I was sticking with it. But as you were saying, do you think I lose something because of that level difference and the effective rating part is irrelevant to bolster? (It's not something that I can test here, as the lvl 37 piece is only str, end, and a little power, while the 33 piece has crit + surge on top of those). But I have been curious about that because there are times when I'll have, say, 2 implants with an Expert design 8 levels below me, but the only thing I can find at my lvl is something like Fervor or Commander designs. I get more usual stats from the under geared pattern, but don't know if I'm gimping myself by not using the less useful up to date gear.

On my lvl 37 Marauder my normal surge is 78.46% but when I go into a WZ it is lowered to 78.21%. It's not that I'm worried about it, it's a small change. But I'm at a loss to understand what about the bolster mechanic would reduce a stat? Only two things I could think of: 1) Diminishing returns are not at a universal rate and change at higher levels, so when the stat is converted to lvl 50, it uses a different formula and loses a little. 2) Once I heard someone insisting that main hand weapon stats do not get bolstered. I didn't believe that and am still hesitant to, but that could make since for the decrease as my main hand has 23 surge on it. Any ideas? (and note this is not about optimization, the point isn't whether I have too much of the stat or if I should have more power, ect.)

I know what you mean with wasting time running around. But here I had the boosts there the whole time, so how much time was not maximized does not make on impact on where I should be level wise at a particular point in the game. I'm thinking this might be 1 of 2 things: 1) The boosts are made for FTP players and don't work for maximized XP subbed players (after all, the cartel market does allow subbed players to buy all the things that they already get for free). 2) The boosts don't apply to the experience gained from turning in missions, only kills in the field, exploration, ect. If that were the case, most XP is gained is from turning in missions anyway.

No, I'm a sub.

Today I started a new alt and have been using the 25% XP boosts that last three hours. I have had these active the entire time. On my other characters, it's always been that if I do all the missions, bonus objectives and skip most all the heroic missions, that keeps me at the same level as the current area I'm in without having to do WZ's or FP's as filler. I finished the 1st planet at lvl 11 and the 2nd planet at lvl 16. It struck me as odd that the last mob I fought before getting into my ship was a lvl 16 champion. It looks like it's exactly the same as characters I've played with no boost. Of course, it would be silly to think I should be a flat 25% higher and be at lvl 20 because of the way levels and XP scale and increase, but still shouldn't be the same as not using them at all. If it is working, maybe I got an extra level out of it, but even then it works out to be around a 1% overall xp increase. If that is the way 25% scales with leveling thresholds, it doesn't seem close to worthwhile to use. Has anyone had different experiences using these?

TrollBerzerker- I have not read this entire thread but what you've repeated over and over is that Star Wars clearly defines good and evil. If that is the basis of your argument, it is wrong. First: - "The truths we cling to depend on our point of view" - "Good is a point a view" - "The sith are evil", "From my point of view the Jedi are evil" May not be exact quotes, but suffice to say that cannon presses the issue of subjectivity far more than it presses to "clearly define good and evil". And while Lucas may have once said that Star Wars is the classic tale of good vs evil, it is reasonable to say that applies to Rebellion vs Empire more than it does Jedi vs Sith, as the word Sith was never mentioned in the OT. As for the cannon quotes above, are you going to claim that Palpatines/Anakins quotes are irrelevant while everything the Jedi say is absolute cannon? Whatever Yoda may have said is Yoda's opinion but not to be regarded as the unmistakable truth. Second: From the time of the movies we only have a small selection of Sith from the Rule of Two tradition to form opinions on, which are a different breed than Sith society at large. To understand them we have to look to the Old Republic when they were plentiful and varied as a vast organization. Of course nothing in the movies could possibly reflect that, being a different era than movie characters would have sufficient knowledge of. If someone wants to argue that EU is non-canon, then the topic of this conversation can't be addressed by canon sources. Part of the reason the Old Republic era was made was to open up new lore and broaden the understanding of the Star Wars universe. Third: I saw you say "Dark jedi are basically the same thing as Sith." This gets to the heart of this misconception that Light-Sith and Dark-Jedi are an impossibility by definition, as you are basically saying the definitions are "Jedi means good" and "Sith means bad". 1) The only way Jedi were ever defined were as "the guardians of peace and justice in the Old Republic." This definition doesn't include a moral stance. Can a Jedi who commits evil deeds for the sake of defending the republic not still meet that definition? 2) Dark Jedi/Sith are not basically the same. Every Sith we saw in the movies was personally trained by Palpatine. That means being a Rule of Two Sith requires some specialized knowledge. Obviously a Jedi from the prequel times who does bad things would be darkish but by no means would have the knowledge to be a Sith. Conversely, a Sith can have good intentions and a fair heart while feeding on emotion without being redeemed as a Jedi by default. My final take: In the end both Jedi are Sith are merely Institutions. And nothing is inherently good or evil about institutions, as we see mirrored everyday in real life debates on religion and politics. You can have evil Christians or kind-hearted Satanists (look satanism up on wikipedia, not once does it mention the word evil or that they are committed to performing evil acts). So no, the question of "are Sith really evil" is not clearly defined and is not a self-contradictory.

Thanks. That was a lot of good info. Actually, my question was not so much about making money on sales but to have my alts help each other most effectively. I know I'll end up with four characters, so I was thinking about the best way to distribute the skills overall. It sounds like it's worth it to have one character who is a grind gatherer without slicing. That would leave the other 3 with having a craft, slicing and a mission skill.

I don't know how this system works and I don't want to find out by making the wrong choice in the game. So let me see if I can get this question right. Let's say I pick Scavenging and (to pick an arbitrary number) let's say every gathering mission brings back an average of 10 resources. Can only one crew member go on a Scavenging mission at a time or can all five crew members go on different Scavenging missions at the same time? Because in the second case I could bring back 50 resources at once and still have crafting/mission skills. But in the first case I could only get 10 resources in the same amount of time regardless, making it more viable to pick additional gathering skills. It seems like choosing all gathering would be wasteful if your net return could potentially be 50 bulk resources whether it's 1 gathering skill or 3 gathering skills, even though the actual resource types would be more varied.