ETA on Advanced Class change?

I'm sorry, no. Paladin is a CLASS.
Mercenary is a CLASS
Powertech is a CLASS.

Merc and PT share a STORY, some skills and Companions.

That is where the similarities end.

http://www.swtor.com/holonet/classes
For those who are confused about classes.
Bounty hunter is your class, Powertech/Mercenary is your advance class (Spec, Soul, ect).

http://www.riftgame.com/en/characters/
http://us.battle.net/wow/en/game/class/
As you can see, each game has its BASE CLASS. Then theres the detailed class, whatever fancy name they want to give it.
Base class --> Detailed Class = Your character
^do not change ^ what we want to change

Originally Posted by Daniel Erickson

"The advanced class system exists because we’re already making the game story-wise bigger than every other game we’ve done put together. We pretty topped out at eight. It’s already huge and ridiculous, but for an MMOG, we wanted more classes than that for a variety of gameplay. Each of the advanced classes is basically a full class that we would have done."


Originally Posted by Daniel Erickson
"We had alot of internal debate whether to release the advanced classes, and people need to understand they are "works in progress". We have a very complicated class system. The advanced classes are TOTAL class systems by themselves. You can't think of other games where you have little offshoots.
Obviously, the ideal is that people don't ever need to respec their Advanced Class. There are additional measures we are putting in place to improve the communication about that choice to the player before it happens. Ideally, we would also allow you to 'test drive' the AC , but that's fairly expensive and unlikely to happen. It's more likely that we stick with a short period (a few levels) during which you can change your AC class for a credit cost before it locks in. We might attach other limiters than just credits (e.g completely disable the option past level 20 instead of a very high cost of credits.). That's what testing will determine."



A few things from our point of view (the devs):

"Your Advanced Class choice very much defines how your character plays from the moment you choose it. Their impact is more akin to that of a different class in other MMOs than that of a different 'spec'. A Sith Sorcerer is very, very different from a Sith Assassin.


As mentioned before, the ability to respec your skills is definitely in the game. At this point, it costs credits but has no other requirements or limitations. The exact cost will be fine tuned, probably until ship, in conjunction with the rest of the economy - so giving precise numbers at this point isn't helpful.


We haven't made up our mind yet about the availability of an Advanced Class respec. We are evaluating all options (no Advanced Class respec, fixed cost respec, respec cost increasing with level, etc.).
A lot of thought currently goes into the consequences of Advanced Class respec - if we allow it, it will require players to relearn their entire approach to combat (which they learned over many many hours before) and replace the majority of their equipment, so it's not a thing we would want the player to do lightly, or just out of curiosity.

Ultimately, testing will tell us what we'll go with for launch, but even then - MMOs change, new content is added, player preferences emerge and change, so this is likely one of those topics we will be frequently discussing even after launch to ensure the design matches the expectations of our players and does not introduce unwelcome side effects.

With all this said - thank you very much for your continued feedback and thoughts on the topic. We are actively reading and discussing the topic frequently."

http://www.swtor.com/holonet/classes
For those who are confused about classes.
Bounty hunter is your class, Powertech/Mercenary is your advance class (Spec, Soul, ect).

http://www.riftgame.com/en/characters/
http://us.battle.net/wow/en/game/class/
As you can see, each game has its BASE CLASS. Then theres the detailed class, whatever fancy name they want to give it.
Base class --> Detailed Class = Your character
^do not change ^ what we want to change

None. But I can go through other games that have the similar situation as this game biggest one being Rift. If you start out as a Warrior in rift, you then pick your Soul (which is similar to AC). And your able to switch between all the souls in the Warrior because your still the warrior. World of Warcraft is similar to how SWTOR is. You start out a paladin, at level 10 you pick what you want to be as that paladin, they just dont have as many skill trees as swtor does for each class.

Each game has their own unique way of going further into each class. In the majority of games your able to switch around within your base class. As long as its not CLASS switching, and switching ACs is not class switching.

Bioware has stated that they view ACs as their own class. Switching ACs is indeed switching classes. Bioware gets to define the game, you do not.

Because I don't go read through 250+ pages of people barking at each other i'm ignoring reasons that your refusing to put on the table? I'm trying to have a debate with you about this, if your going to stand up for something then speak up and lets debate, if you don't want too quit replying to me trying to make it seem like i'm refusing to talk about this.

After going back through some of your posts, I believe you are confused with story/class. Bounty hunter is indeed a class, not just a story.

Bioware also made a statement towards allowing AC change. Since they do, indeed, get to define the game then they may believe that switching AC's is NOT switching classes...