I am going to get a new Desktop Computer soon with both HDD and a SSD (Samsung 970 EVO Plus 500 GB) . My question: Is there generally any benefit in putting SWTOR on the SSD? This old thread makes me believe that the benefit is at best small: http://www.swtor.com/community/showthread.php?p=8830010 In my own experience there seems to be little difference, as my old Laptop with HDD was rarely slower than my Ex-Girlfriends SSD powered SWTOR. However modern SSDs (like mine) are way faster than the older ones. So....to SSD or to HDD....please tell me what to do so I will do what is best.

I must admit it, seeing people complain about the H2 Walker on Dantooine makes me wonder if my game is bugged. So far I soloed this mission twice (on rep side if that matters) whitout any issues. The only thing the walker does (in my game) is shield himself and fire a ground aoe that does not move so I can easily move out of it. He does not seem to attack me in ANY other way. If that is indeed the intended behaviour however then beginn the fight with a rocket to his face and attack him. Interrupt his shield-channel as long as you can. Then just keep moving arround until he does his shield-channel again(he does the shield-channel while shielded too and has his abbility thus on cooldown afterwards which will grant you more uptime). After he has finishe his channel fire a rocket at him and attack him. interrupt his next shield channel and move out of the ground AOE when necessary. Rinse and repeat. If you have trouble keeping your melee companion alive (although I don't think you even need one if you move out of AOE fast enough) switch to a ranged one (and don't stack up with him if you are ranged yourself) I did it on a Sentinel so I had no attacks that needed to be cast or channeled but even with channels/casts it should only take longer and be more annoying but not more difficult. For me the hardest parts of all the Dantoine Heroics are the trash mobs and only because the may swarm your healer if you don't pay attention.

Sadly the part about there actually being no patch to download tomorrow makes me believe that there won't be any new packs tomorrow. They are not yet in Collections and thus probably not "ingame" yet.

This actually made me think, it would be nice if instead of XP they would hand out something else instead. Possibly credits and maybe something like an "exploration box" that offers special random rewards like railshooter gear, Social/Expertise/FP-/PVP- XP boosts and stuff (speeders, pets whatever). Basically mostly stuff that encourages to try out other facets of the game (to enforce the "exploration" part in the name of these mission since they are in general not hard to find if turned active)

TLDR: Signed. Exploration missions should be turned on by default. It baffled me at first why a game so content starved like this would actively hide content from new players. The box to turn these missions on is not in a very prominent place meaning that new players are also unlikely to find them by chance. New players may be missing out on more content that contains voice acted cutscenes and dialogues. Exploration missions do have a downside though. I recently began to replay the Knight Storyline with Exploration misssions turned on and the goal to "replay" my first character where I completed every single mission I could find. With the XP requirements and amounts handed out and no level caps on planets and missions my character hit level 70 way before the end of chapter 1. Achieving max level so early in my opinion negatively impacts the flow of the overall story and also leads to more confusion as to when what should happen. Some missions have level and no story requirement and become available long before their premise in the story would make any sense. Thus I think the default OFF-state was used as a simple but very unelegent way to deal with the problems of hitting high/max level very early. That being said I would still rather prefer more missions and more content available than the current version where only the "purple" quests and some selected sidequests are available by default. I may be biased as I played the game beforehand but I am sure new players will also have a more positive impression of the game with more optional quests directly available instead of having to turn them on in the map window (and thus possibly never knowing about them). So I am all for changing the default state to ON.

Since 4.0 there are only Power and Defense Mods so there isn't any real choice there for the most part. DPS and Healers should always use "unlettered" Power Mods (i.e. Lethal Mod 48 and NOT 48A or 48B). The lettered Mods either give you high Mastery (A) or high Endurance (B) and little Power. All purple and yellow pieces come with unlettered Mods. For Tanks it looks a little different as Health/Endurance actually has relevance to what they do. While unlettered Warding Mods will give you the highest theoretical damage mitigation, Tanks suffer from lower health pools since Tank augments and relics don't offer any Endurance. Because of this some Tanks prefer to use either Lethal B and/or Warding B mods to increase their health pools to make spike damage more comfortable to deal with. Due to the very high total amount of defense stat, the Lethal B mods are also a strong option as the reduction in Defense has only a small effect on overall mitigation but the extra Power adds a nice amount of extra damage (and thus threat if that should be an issue).

I already filed the bug report ingame but to warn all you guys: It is definetely not only connected to logging off in SectionX (If at all). I travelled to SecX today via the GC daily mission. I picked up the missions and after a couple of minutes travelled to fleet to grab an extra command boost. Upon arrival on fleet I checked my alignment points and they had reset. I currently believe that travelling to the fleet from SecX may be enough to have it reset (So might be safer to travel to SH first). Not sure if its the only condition that needs to be met to have the points reset but I am also not very eager to "sacrifice" more of my chars to find out. I was in group at the time and my group member was not on SecX.

So this doesn't get forgotten: I am still missing T-7 and Torian Cadera from my companion list. I made an ingame ticket some time ago and apparently it was forwarded to the bug team, yet it remains unfixed for months now, T-7 apparently gets removed due to a bug when replaying certain chapters. I do not have him back yet it said this was supposedly fixed in the patch notes in the past. Torian Cadera can potentially die in the Kotet story. The Console on Odessen should give you the abbilitiy to readd him to your companion list. Yet when I do so and actually get the option to chose him to return, nothing happens and I have Master Ranos as active companion for whatever reason. This was supposedly also fixed in a past patch but does not work. Please fix this absence of companions. And please everyone else encountering this issue. Please post here to support this patch request. Or if you know a workarround please share it with the community.

It is not some random european holiday. It is a christian one. "ascension day" or whatever you translate it. While many people in europe do not consider themselves religious it is still a state holiday in some countries. Including the largest gaming markets in europe. You can think of religion what you will but more people in europe "celebrate" this holiday than people will ever live in australia. So yeah. Market makes things matter.

I have that one already and actually sold 3 for horrendous prices recently. But Revan REBORN REVAN REBORN REBORN REBORN REBORN REBORN! make it happen pretty please!

I can't express how much better explaining the reason behind server maintance is than simply staying silent! As a tip for the future if you can not share the reasons: Just blame Eric Musco (don't worry we have been doing it for years ) some examples: - Eric Muco's dog ate the harddrive. - Eric Musco wanted to cheat himself a Kai Zykken companion. The possibilities are endless

I agree that our differences mostly lie in different "design philosophy" and not on a need to nerf/buff basis. When I advocate a buff for Watchman though I would be willing to compensate it with a nerf in other abbilities. Personally as I like switching speccs for specific fights I would like the speccs to be more tailored to specific fights. Since that will probably not find a majority however, I would then rather go the route to try to make every specc equaly useful instead. Watchman is currently the highest parsing Sent/Mara specc. However I still believe that Combat/Carnage is the specc that is least punshed by mechanics, due to its strength in various fields. I would say the fights with good uptime and little target switching are fewer than the ones that require to do so. Also in situations of little uptime (because of AOE or other mechanics) I find that being able to have the full monster burst of carange off the CD is more worthwile than having some dots tick on the boss (allthough admitedly I can not verify this statement with numbers) when running out of AOE or hiding from mechanics. The most dummy like ops fight for me is Nefra (no matter what mode) and you could easily beat that thing with 4 carnage/combat marauders in NiM. Except to move out of droid explosion circles you would not have to move there, yet there is no reason to bring any Anni/Watchman. Other fights however greatly penalize Watchman/Anni and greatly favour Combat/Carnage. And therin lies my perceived problem. The fights where Anni/Watch are preferable to Comabt/carnage are from my experience less frequent than the ones where combat/carnage provide larger benefit. My suggestion to give watchman a buff was just a simple solution to tackle this problem. I would be fine with nerfs in one abbility and buffs in others if Watchman would then be less penalized in target switching situations. Currently (imo) as it stand in PVE, you are a bigger asset to your group as a carnage/combat than anything else (Watchman group heal is nice but at the end of the day its not your job to heal people). I advocated a buff for watchman as I wanted to make it shine more than combat/carnage in the fights where Anni/Watch should shine but combat/carnage is currently way more than sufficient. Of course I would be also ok with a redesign of the dps abbilities to make the dot specc more desirable in target switching situations as long as watchman stays on top for single target damage. Again I do not want to touch combat/carnage. Leave them where they are. They are solid and strong. I also think noone can be against a PVE sustain buff that doesn't negatively impact PVP too much for Concentration/Fury. The specc while not my favourite needs some love so it isn't the "unneeded stepchild" in Ops any longer. That all being said I also agree with your assessment of the 4.0 DPS ranking. (except for Carnage combat again being too good at everything and Watchman suffering in some situations) TLDR: Buff Concentration/Fury for PVE sustain. Make Watchman/annihilation less punished by target switching. p.s.: It is quite possible that I simply suck at Watchman burst situations but it doesn't feel like it. Dot spread is nice but in most situations stuff doesn't live long enough especially with Juggs or Snipers in your group. Single target my highest DPS is with Watchman. When I run into target swapping then I do waaay better in combat. I simply find there are way too many target swapping situations in ops. EDIT: Multiple edits to increase understanding as I am not a native english speaker. EDIT2: I don't know if a return to the often hailed rotation of 2.10 would fix my issues as I don't remember it all that well ( back then I still was mostly playing Combat with my precision strike and cauterize available for all speccs) I remember that the cauterize dot was shorter than the abbilities CD however and that there was a RNG mechanic on slash to reset it which I did not like. I prefer RNG to a minimum in rotations.

Thank you for elaborating on this. While having server downtime on a holiday is hardly desirable, I applaude you adressing the reasons behind it. "Background Maintenance" is always a very vague term and knowing what is going on always goes a long way. I am very happy with what seems to be a more open communication policy ever since you have become the producer.

Diclaimer: difficulty wise I only do master uprisings, HM Fps and HM OpS. Did some NiM only in the past. For PVP I only do regs. I currently do not think that we need a defensive buff. In the content that I do, I am happy with what we have. While not making us unkillable it makes us live long enough to kill some of them. When we have a healer we are truly dangerous. In short: it feels sufficient for group and solo play. If I would add a true self heal then I would replace interloper or make "hidden advance/Impsidename" a passive that is granted at some higher level and add a new utility to legendary that heals 10% (?) of max HP on use of "blade blitz/Impsidename". This would also create a synergy with the other legendary utility reducing the CD. At the same time rotationally dropping aggro would be rewarded with a slight dps increase. (unless you need camouflage for something else that is, but that would be like it is now). And you could blitz away, camouflage and then attack with a buffed attack from "stealth". To make this truly useful though force leap should be changed to a force attack. Generally though my problem with our class is not how it performs compared to other classes but how the differwnt speccs perform compared to each other. Right now we have some speccs perfoming badly to the point of not worth playing in pve and weak in pvp. Watchman/Anihilation: I used to play combat before 3.0 but now mostly prefer this specc. Since 5.0 I am also exclusively playing it in regs pvp. It has selfheals and aoe heals which help your group. It is a dot specc though and dps is droping as soon as you hit a target switching situation. Thus it also suffers from low burst. If you want something "small" dead fast, this is not the specc to look for. I like the selfheals and dotspread in pvp though even if it won't kill anyone it creates pressure (and fake better numbers on the leaderboards if that should be your concern). Concentration/Fury: Absolutely not my favourite specc. I used to play it in pvp in 3.X times. I find it feels sluggish and I also don't like the rotation. It still performs strongly in pvp though as it has very good burst and a Stun/movement immunity as well as a second leap with no range restriction. In PVE though it is by far the weakest specc and there is really no reason past really enjoying it to play it, in that environment. Combat/Carnage: This was the first specc I ever played. I enjoyed it greatly until the end of 2.X where my dummy damage used to be higher in watchman so I kinda began to switch when it mattered. I absolutely despised the 3.0 and after combat/Carnage changes though. The changes made, removed the fun of the specc for me. Yet Combat turned out to be the Sent/Mara specc that is "jack of all trades". Combat/Carnage has great AOE, great Burst and good sustain. Combat/Carnage does really good in all scenarios that don't generally punish melees. And there in lies my gripe. Combat/carnages is too flexible, too good in every situation compared to the other two. Combat/carnage can simply perform too well in all fights. Instead of asking yourself what to play in pve for a specific boss you might aswell play combat/carnage. Because neither Watchman or Concentration will give you any meaningful better results. Now I do not want to nerf combat in its current form so I would propose the following changes: Combat: leave it at is. Watchman: add a passive (or add to a passive) that your melee damage to a target affected by your overload saber is increased by X% this would increase single target damage of the watchman specc, help with bursting down adds and improve the specc in pvp. Concentration: Since increasing burst would negatively impact PVP, I would suggest to atleast increase the sustain by sligthly raising some passives like increasing the energy damge on slash.

I think we are mostly if not completely in agreement that all NiM bosses should drop yellow tokens. And as such this is the change I would like to see. I generally prefered it when HM FPs were a stepping stone on the gear and learning treadmill towards ops/higher difficulities. But I guess that is completely out of the window. So if they change something I would rather have the nim change than the component change (disclaimer: the only nim ops I completed were EV, EC, KP and SnV all NOT at level).