Because of the large number of heat reducing abilities, an optimal rotation for mercenary should be slightly leaky. Unless you purposely lower your APM, even in an optimal rotation you'll start running into energy problems around the 90 to 100 second mark. A small reduction of 15 seconds on Vent Heat's cool down would go a decent way to solve many of the class problems heat issues without terribly increasing burst HPS or burst DPS, and it should have almost no impact on PVP. This should keep much of the important feel of the class, including the somewhat hectic and enjoyable feeling of "oh I'm almost out of energy", but reducing the feelbadness of how long it is until the next vent heat.

Aren't you on "The Bastion"? Master Dar'Nala is Oceania's pvp server.

The Imperial Synthweaver Springtide discovered this: http://db.darthhater.com/recipes/4902/dread_guard_weaponmasters_boots/ Orange shell

Yes there is a special animation where your right hand will make an additional strike, and the target will take yellow damage indicating an ataru strike. You can see this best when you proc it off of either a force charge or a force choke.

While several <Ewok Pest Control> members had downed the Terror from Beyond, including last week in a 5/8 guild run, this week we managed to down the Lovecraftian horror in one sitting as a full 8 man guild. http://i.imgur.com/TjxlW.jpg We began around 10 PM PDT and downed it at 1:36 AM. A full 5/5 clear.

Because it's been broken before? Because other things that *should* be simple, and *should* be random were broken as well? I personally witnessed the old Conversation roll winning bug that Bioware fixed a few patches back. You're right, there's a ton of thoughtful easy solutions to programming it. That's not how Bioware solves things. If an overly complicated solution can be implemented, it's preferred to a simple one. Quite frankly, the whole game has lots of rushed parts to it, things that were not properly checked and overall amateur in presentation. It would not surprise me if a developer had some pet way of seeding random variables that was just broken in general. Or their random seed generation code is off. Or the code is significantly more complicated for some stupid reason then just a flat 1d5. I don't know. I don't work for Bioware. If I had to guess, yeah it looks like a poorly implemented streak breaking code, or that when an item crosses over a load screen, the game has a chance to 'not like' that item anymore for RE chances. Which is weird, but not unheard of in some games I've played. When an object hits a load screen many games store that object differently then when it's first generated. If I was to come up with programming technobabble, when an object is generated by the server it spawns it in the local item table for the zone and the local memory for that character. Once you cross over a load screen, it 'saves' it to long term storage, so that if there's a server crash or the servers go down, the game has a record of the items on your character. However, when you reverse engineer and item that's on your person, it has to check the 'stored' data along with the local data, so that it can verify it's deleting an item and you don't dupe items in the game by say, Reverse Engineering then disconnecting, or reverse engineering an item right before a server goes down. Something bad is happening in this process. And rather than give you the code "hey you got a new schematic" it's instead giving you nothing. You *should* get a success, but the game just does nothing. That reminds me a bit of mission discovery missions post 1.3 and pre 1.2. If you click on one that your companion is already on, it will 'eat' the item forever rather than hitting the "you are already on that mission" code. Why is this? I don't know. The server seems to favor doing nothing when something goes wrong or it's confused. The player just loses the item. But what I've just describe above, is a BUG. meaning not working as intended. I think we're in agreement actually. I don't think bioware cares. But *I* do, and I Think other people do too. I think there might be a bug, or maybe they might have made the rules of the game more complicated then they let on. The only way to prove it, one way or the other, is to have lots of tests done, and to have people be in the look out for it.

I'm an extreme crafter, as in I'm one of those crazy people working on unlocking all the schematics in the game. I've been talking with two other people in my guild who are also equally as crazy as I am. We had a conversation recently about whether there is a hidden variable in the reverse engineering. Since this would determine the guild policy on reverse engineering our EC Hard Mode Armoring Drops, it was an incredibly important conversation. One of the crafters insisted that crafting items in a string, and not logging out, increased your chances of reverse engineering. Or, rather, *didn't decrease*. We, of course, informed him that 20% is 20%, and that that is a common human error in probability, blah blah blah. I've been testing what he said though the past week, and I'm starting to believe the hidden variable theory. I think this hidden variable is effected by loading screens. That if your character moves across a map so that you're in a new zone, or if you hit a loading screen, or if you logout, it does something to your chances that drastically lowers it. It also seems to happen if you are cross reverse engineering (as in reverse engineering one item, then a different item then back to the first). Which is to say that if you crafted a bunch of items all at once, never logged out or moved meaningfully from the location, and reverse engineered them all at once, you'd maximize your chances of success. Which sounds like a bug, or Bioware has hidden variables that modify RE chance and that player behavior can screw with the algorithms. And in a way, it makes sense that their engineers *wouldn't catch this*. Because if you used programming and testing macros (or hired testers) to make a ton of items and RE to verify it's at 20%, you wouldn't catch the important something: that moving about the world and doing activities lowers the chance of success. Of course, the only way to verify the above is statistical testing. I'll plan to do that with my next alt once it hits 50, but it could take a while to gather the data and verify or deny the hypothesis (along with some other questions I've been having, like if crit crafted items have lower chance of REing, if the number of schematics known effects discovery rate, and if there's some difference in discovery rate between crafts [is one more broken then another]) And guys, this isn't the first time Bioware's random number generator has broken. Remember just a couple months ago you could drastically increase your chances of winning conversation die rolls by being in a certain spot in the group or by choosing a specific response. Or how medium orange bracers and belts were not showing up in loot tables. Or how you'd have a low chance of getting medium armor dalarian and exotech schematics from ops bosses? Or pre 1.2 how loot tables worked for operations and flashpoints, and even though the developers insisted it was 'random', every end game raiding team could tell you there was something wrong with it. Or how if two KP runs start and finish at about the same time they will both get the hat or neither will get the hat. Is it really that much of a stretch to think something is going on here? That the RE Chance is dropping from 20% to the old defaults of 5% or 10% or 0% because of something players are doing? One last thing, and this is anecdotally. I've noticed our implant crafter has a ton of success with RE'ing over Kephess's body, but our cybertech has very low success in RE'ing the armoring when it's mailed to him. At first I thought it was a bit silly that Kephess might be 'lucky', but now I'm wondering if the fact the item isn't hitting a load screen is what's doing it. I've noticed that bound items I've been wearing rarely give schematics either. Again the item has hit a load screen between its creation and eventual reverse engineer. Go ahead and test some of these tricks out then fellow crafters, and let us know if it seems to effect your discovery chance. This could all just be nonsense, but if enough people test these things out, we can get to the bottom of this quickly.

I've been running some numbers in spreadsheets for carnage, and you actually want more crit and surge, since ataru only benefits by .092 damage per point of power, and your offhand doesn't benefit at all, but both can benefit from crits. Fully buffed in basically full campaign, of the over 900 points given to us for the secondary stat (Power vs Crit) at full campaign and stim, I estimate about 600 should go to critical, and the rest to power. I haven't yet calculated in precisely the effect of accuracy since some bosses have much higher defense and others have very little. Further the automatic critical on force scream would reduce it slightly as well, so probably in the 450-550 range is about right. This holds mostly true regardless of the strength of your surge

If you're soloing content it can be useful to pop a rupture when you're about to go into a force choke on an elite mob. Such a narrow use though.

Some people suspect that execute, the marauder ability to get an additional 10% bonus damage on 30% of ataru procs for the next rage expended, is not working. Given that the disparity between carnage and anni is almost exactly 10% it appears as though the on paper comparison of the numbers would suggest that they are supposed to be much closer. That said, I really enjoy carnage and have yet to find content in the game that requires the extra 100 dps. We'll see with nighmare mode, but for the most part the fights in this game are not about achieving certain numbers but executing precise timing and coordination. For instance, the last fight of EC HM is mostly about knowing when to save your berserks, when to save your force charge, and when to hit predation to minimize raid damage. On the note of survival... I've looked at a lot of raid parsers and it appears as if a traditional annihilation rotation over heals itself by 2/3rd's. In practice I've noticed that the 1/3rd reduction in area damage and the healing from other marauders comes to about the same for most fights. The real advantage comes from hypothetical fights, such as doing a raid with 8 marauders is theoretically a viable setup for *most* of the raid boss fights, and a 4 marauder run could probably beat any hard mode flashpoint in the game. Something to consider, but not that important.

Bioware has said that when they design new warzones they often look towards FPS and other games to get gamestyle ideas. I think this has overall benefited their product and resulted in some of the most unique PVP experiences in the genre. With this in mind I'd like to suggest that Bioware closely consider another popular gametype that they might not have thought of. One of the most successful new genre's in the past few years is the Dota genre, sometimes called Multiplayer Online Battlefield Arena or Action Real Time Strategy. Part of the reason these games are so successful is that they combine intense real time action and strategy with some of the best elements of RPG games, namely leveling and buying cool items. In essence they condense the MMORPG experience to a 20 to 40 minute match and add strategic depth in the form of constant team based PVP. One day while doing my dailys on Belsavis I noticed something. Mobs constantly spawn outside the Imperial base, then charge the turrets and Sith, only to be quickly cut down. Why *couldn't* there be a warzone where Mobiles are constantly spawned? Why couldn't SWTOR have a MOBA warzone? Let's look at what systems the game has 1: Mobile Respawning. 2: NPC vs NPC interaction 3: A store system that works in Warzones 4: A currency that can be generated on killing players (Mercenary commendation, which is mostly out of the game at this point) 5: A loot system that lets that currency be picked up from dead mobs 6: Turrets: Both the kind like on Minesweeper or outside of bases, as well as much stronger and interesting ones like the two at the start of Eternity Vault. 7: The game supports abilities and buffs that can be applied for short duration. 8: The game supports multiple XP bars that are tracked separately, as well as a way to buy or expend resources through a system outside of skill points or leveling to achieve new abilities and buffs. (legacy) 9: A mission item system that lets the server add or remove items and abilities from a player's inventory that can do a large variety of short term effects. That's basically all you need right? Which is to say, the tools to make a MOBA like League of Legends already exists inside Swtor are all there, with sufficient creativity and lots of coding they can be manipulated to bring this pvp archetype here. If I were to do a proof of concept it, I'd design it like this: Imagine two identical bases, with a shielded rest zone similar to voidstar. Each base has a N. Coast style objective site that has to be channeled to win. This objective is guarded by a giant turret like the one outside of Eternity Vault that can be killed the same way. As long as the turret is up, strong and elite units will spawn in each base and slowly walk to the other one. If they run into another player, turret, or a npc of the enemy faction they stop and attack. When killed these units will drop Merc Commendations that can be looted and used at a base store to buy cool pvp adrenals with various effects. The effects don't have to be very large or interesting in the prototype. 10 mercenary commendations for a stim that gives a 10% bonus to expertise for the remainder of the match. 20 for a 200 increase in endurance and power. 30 for a reusable vanish 'stim'. 20 for a buff that gives you a full resolve bar on activation. When players leave the zone all excess commendations are converted to warzone commendations at some ratio, and all bought mission items removed. At this point you'd have a very viable and interesting Warzone, and once you got the balancing done you could even release it as is. The real question is can we improve on this? Maybe. Perhaps an internal leveling system only for the warzone could be done, where your character goes through the 10-50 track again, at an accelerated pace. Or perhaps there are new abilities and powers that can only be unlocked within this warzone, similar to "throw huttball", that are only available in this zone and only if certain conditions are met like "requires Moba warzone level 3". I'm not really too sure about the difficulty of adding a new XP system to the existing ones, especially one that resets itself to 0 upon leaving a warzone, but if it's doable this could open up a huge design space. Bioware could use this as a testing ground for post 50 abilities and skills. Imagine a Bounty Hunter "party bomb" that made all allies the Unshakable buff for a few seconds. Imagine a Sith Warrior passive that applied a bleed on all attacks. Or a Sith Sorcerer "Battle Meditation" on a long cooldown that gave everyone their heroic moment. These abilities wouldn't be available at the start, but instead are unlocked throughout the warzone, perhaps by a special trainer only available in the warzone, and are removed upon completing it. If this is too complicated, perhaps using the bonus mission system to grant "mission items" could be used to similar effect. (Say on completing Bonus step 1: Kill 10 Units, the player gets a mission item in their inventory that on activation gives a cool activated item. Similar bonus missions could exist for reaching a level of protection or healing, or "objective points".) Once the warzone proof would be built, then the difficult process of balance and map design would come about, but I think even the rough bare bone ideas listed above could go a long way to getting it started.

I'm interested in learning more about accuracy. Can you provide some examples of between normal and special attacks? How does defense play in the equation? Is it (Accuracy - Defense) vs Roll, or is it more complicated than that? Does every mob and boss in the game have the same defense stats? How does level and operation difficulty play into this? What sort of defense do various bosses tend to have, and as a player what numbers should I be aiming for in terms of Accuracy? If an attack is an automatic Crit, due to a class ability, is it an automatic hit as well? Comparing my in game experience I've noticed the game tends go out of its way to hide my misses (small text, only on screen for a short time, rarely shows misses for multi-hit attacks if any part hits) and showcase the big numbers. I think this has caused players to undervalue accuracy. I'm wondering what the design process behind that decision was.