Same reason they removed droid CC- they suck at making games! They get butthurt when players skip mobs, because they think that we will be tricked into believing that long, drawn out fights are actually content, and then at the same time they make the mobs so f'ing easy that brand new players can easily solo heroics. Asking questions like this will never get you a reasonable, logical answer. In fact, think of the stupidest, most illogical thing you can think of- and that will probably be what they will do. Example: Phase walk, HK's assassinate ability, treek, etc

Also, the "new" craftable gear is REable to 186 at artifact level. W...T..F?!? Clearly these devs havent been there since 3.0, because then they would know that 186 was the new tier given to craft with 3.0. *********** ridiculous!

In case you new devs dont know... 186 was the rating that the old barrels from 3.0 had. The new ones have to be higher than that to be meaningful. To follow the same pattern that 3.0 had you would need to make the new trainer craftable barrels 204 (or something better than 198). 186 rating MAKES NO SENSE! I know there's a high turnover rate at bioware but damn!

As a rule, you want whichever mod has the highest mainstat+power. Just add the two numbers up and whichever is better, take that, regardless of the actual number or color of the mod. If any piece has endurance higher than any other stat (and you are not a tank) that's bad. For enhancements, go with the best adept or initiative you can get. Once you get your accuracy to 100/110 then you can start worrying about adding some crit, depending on your class. When you talk about the offhand you mean the top slot, right? The 198 comms offhand barrel/hilt/armoring will always be better than the token 192, but if you have mods or enhancements from the 198 you will want to replace those with the min/maxed 192s. Keep your 198 comms armorings until you can replace them two at a time with set bonus pieces. Unfortunately the new set bonuses are absolute garbage, and for the majority of classes the 6-piece is the only one that matters. Some classes actually do better with the old set bonuses despite the loss of mainstat. So if you want to wait until you have all 6 to switch them out that's fine too. Unfortunately for mercs you get screwed by biofail's terrible gear allocation, IIRC only one set piece has decent mods or enhancements (i.e. agile mod, adept/init enh) so yes you will have to need on additional pieces that you will then have to redeem at other class vendors for your enhancements. The upside of that is that you will have additional 192 set bonus armorings and mods for your alts. As for maximizing your DPS, the best place to start is by reading the guides and studying the combat logs of those in your class who top the leaderboards. Assuming you don't make a fool of yourself by dying constantly and wiping the raid, you may become a regular sub for certain raid groups, despite being a solo player. Obviously youll want to make sure youre fully augmented in either reflex or overkill augs if youre not already. I wouldn't go with more than one accuracy aug. Also make sure to read the operations guides and watch the videos so you know how the fight is supposed to go. The fact that you give enough of a **** to ask about this stuff and to try to better yourself already distinguishes you apart from 90% of SM pugs. Most of them can't even do a proper rotation and put out terrible dps (due to them leveling to 60 in a few days and never actually learning to play their class) so you're already ahead of the game.

Summons do not count, there is no guarantee there will be someone in a group who can do it, thanks to another stupid oversight by bioware not letting people summon from their own personal credits. Secondly, it does not take "less than an hour" to do an undetermined amount of class missions, plus 4 flashpoints, plus all of rishi, yavin, and ziost. Many veteran players have multiple characters of the same AC, and for us there's no point in doing class missions on our second character, since it gives no reward. And "moaning about it" is the only way the devs will ever know they screwed up. Obviously. TBH the current devs need to spend some time playing old content. The original devs knew a thing or two about game development. The difference is so apparent when you run on old FP like Dir7, Kaon, or BoI/FE, and then run one of the new ones, which, with the exception of BloodHunt, are boring as hell and hold absolutely no replay value whatsoever. Simply a mindless grind of boring NPCs and mindless killing. The old ones had fun little tricks and stuff to skip that came with experience. How much fun was it to watch noobs face pull and die in Dir7 because they didn't know how to jump the tents? or traverse around the pipes after you blow up the bridge... The new content is boring boring boring. If the current set of devs don't want to play the game they should at least call up the original team and ask for some tips. An entire planet with only a single QT point and no interconnecting zones would have never slipped by in the old days.

Except there are operations located on the planet that you can't access otherwise. That is utterly retarded. Once you have unlocked the area on your main you need to be able to get your raid alts to the door of the damn monolith without having to pay to be summoned. Imagine if the Ziost Shadow was only accessible if you have completed your class story, or if you couldn't get to Ravagers or ToS without doing those story missions. This is a huge oversight and they need to fix it soon.

Some non story missions are definitely worth doing. Especially for new accounts, there is one on DK that gives a moddable orange offhand, which is the earliest you can get one in the game. And the revanite quest gives a sweet looking chest for inquisitors only. Other missions like [AREA - The Scar] on belsavis gives a purple armoring iirc (for your offhand and bonus damage) . Also there is no better way to teach yourself how to play your class than soloing 4 man heroics. Try to do them at level if you can, for the biggest challenge; they will quickly teach you excellent survivability skills, how to manually control your companion, and how to manage self heals, kiting, and CCs, how to not break CCs, and how to divide and kill enemies. Most of those skills translate to PvP as well.

Great, so that just means you would be more likely to get reported as a bot if you start acting like one. Of course that totally ignores the obvious question of why would you be camping a lvl5 mob spawn and macro attacking on a starter planet for fun. That would have to be the most boring play style I've ever heard of lol.

The bigger issue here is: who is it hurting? If the guy wants to pay 4 subs then that's 4x the income the game has to put towards new content. Who even cares if he is macroing? Its not like he has 4 characters out in the world stealing kills from people; they all move as one, and attack the same target, and he's not bothering anyone, not exploiting and not spamming gold websites. Maybe if he started attacking people in open world PvP I would start laughing, and no doubt whoever gets their *** kicked would complain... But he's not even doing that. If his idea of fun is running an entire raid team by himself then more power to him. Come back when he does something the least bit provocative or menacing to you. And the point about well you cant open 4 instances of swtor.exe on a single computer so it must be unintended... LOL! What program will let you open more than one? Go try to open two instances of photoshop or word, see how that goes.

Forcing people to complete SoR on EVERY character just to get to ziost is the most retarded thing I've ever heard of. I'm not going to do hours of pointless missions for no XP and no rewards just so I can take alts to that ugly planet. Having to be summoned EVERY TIME just to do the content on alts is likely one reason why people arent going there. If they put in some QT points or give priority access the population would increase dramatically. Also give rewards other than blue companion gear and people might have a reason to repeat the missions.

Nobody wears complete sets because bioware makes it a point to make sure at least one or more pieces from every set is ***-ugly, thereby forcing you to spend CC or comms elsewhere to get a full set of decent looking gear. Why do you think the best looking, most versatile pair of boots in game costs 1200 CC and cannot be duplicated by collections, despite being in collections? Same reason that the thorn and scalene boots cannot be dyed, because then they would match way too many outfits. Most of the time people attribute way too many things to some secret plan the devs have. 90% of the time it's not true, and it's just coincidence paired with laziness... In this case it's 100% certain. They do have a secret plan to make sure we spend as much as possible on decent looking gear. I wouldn't really mind- IF they fix it so all pieces are dyeable on all color regions, AND all pieces can be utilized cross faction and cross weight. They're slowly getting there, but the juggernaut legacy boots for example, are still jugg only, and there are no other similar pub side boots. The scalene-style boots are still medium armor only, unless you want bright colors that clash horribly with black or grey outfits, or want to spend out the *** with CC

I wouldn't expect any noticeable difference in credit-sellers. Until the devs institute proactive methods to grief these guys they'll just keep coming back with new accounts. It takes them about an hour to level to 7 and start spamming fleet, and they no doubt already have teams of little chinese orphans hacking peoples accounts for credits to sell

If the player is physically controlling the keyboard then it's legal, this has been stated before. If this is some Chinese guy leveling his bots, then report him. Generally if he is on hutta or ord mantell and has no legacy name or title, then he is a gold seller leveling bots to get to lvl7 so he can go spam fleet. You can try whispering him to see if he responds. Gold sellers will not respond 99.9% of the time.

If they abuse the power they don't get to do it again. Obviously there would be prerequisites to screen out the trolls, and most importantly, they would only be able to use the power against non-legacy accounts under a certain level. All the gold sellers are new accounts with no legacy name and are usually level 7 bounty hunters. Obviously these GMs wouldn't be able to silence random subs just because they don't like them. C'mon people use your imagination a little.

Because it takes significantly more time to level as a tank, due to companions doing a fraction of the dps as a player. Especially since the game is so noob-friendly, you should never actually need defensive stats as a solo player doing solo content. However if you aren't concerned with efficiency, and want to learn how to tank properly, leveling as a tank and doing flashpoints is a great way to go. Depending on when you play, even tanking or healing a flashppoint can be inefficient, for late night players for example, you can sit in queue for an hour or two even as a tank (DPS need not even bother after 03:00 on a weekday) Usually I will do the daily flashpoint for the great XP from the daily turn-in, as tank or healer, but in DPS gear in tank stance, and spend the rest of the time blowing through story content and leveling gathering skills. Honestly I think it might actually be faster to level to 60 and then come back and level your gathering skills as a 60, after the 12x is over.