Samurai aren't taught to strike with the full intensity of their hatred, though. ;-) Pretty much this. Suspension of disbelief is hard, but it's necessary for a lot of the story in Star Wars and most other fiction. As a software developer and computer security expert, I could easily talk about how ridiculous a lot of the "slicing" is in this game ("Just insert this computer spike and it will give us access to all their systems!"), but in the end it would just ruin everyone's enjoyment of it. Movies and video games rely on the fact that many of subjects they talk about seem arcane to the majority of their audience. It's like magic. Once you learn how a particular trick is done ("illusion, Michael!"), it no longer feels like magic; it no longer feels awesome.

There's a lot of finesse, yes, but there isn't just one style of lightsaber combat in Star Wars. Consider this: http://starwars.wikia.com/wiki/Strong_style

The problem is heteronormativity and exclusion. If you're going to include romance, only including heterosexual romance can easily make LGBT people feel very left out. You can say "it's just a game", but when this sort of thing happens to you in some form every single day (heterosexual people tend not to notice how heteronormative they are), it can have a huge effect. Straight people don't generally understand that, but might be able to understand these perspectives: - A friend's family throws them a surprise birthday party but doesn't invite you because of the color of your skin - A financially successful friend says you should buy the new expensive thing that just came out as if it's as simple as adding milk to the grocery list, not acknowledging that you're living paycheck-to-paycheck - A friend gushes about the awesome time they had with their dad on father's day and asks what you did with your dad, but your dad is gone from your life (died, ran off, etc) or he's an abusive/neglectful person or you have two moms instead One or two occurrences can be shrugged off but imagine any of the above happening to you every day. Imagine having to defend yourself every day against people who can't wrap their minds around you being the way you are. Imagine having to physically defend yourself because people think it's hilarious to "smear the queer". Continuously being told that being gay is wrong, either explicitly or implicitly (via heteronormativity), is psychologically damaging. To you, this may just be about adding more sexuality to a video game. To many other people, it's about acceptance. It's about letting gay people have the same experiences in the game that straight people get. This is a really big deal. With all that said, we've definitely seen in this thread several examples of "lesbian good, gay male bad" and I have no doubt that many of those people are indeed men that just want their voyeuristic fantasies represented in pixel form. However, taking everything I've just said into account, blanketing that over everyone that wants SGR is pretty insulting.

Any chance you people could be less disrespectful? The OP clearly doesn't understand specializations, which means you should explain it to them rather than belittle them for not knowing how something works. None of you were RPG experts in the first game you played, either. Stop treating people like idiots because they don't have the same knowledge you may have gleaned from possibly several years of gaming.

I think robes that have hoods for other races actually show up sans hood because of the lekku. :-(

Negative, Ghost Rider. Rapid Shots is classified as ranged. All tech damage uses yellow numbers in the combat text, while ranged uses white numbers. Same with warriors and assassins, their melee damage numbers are white while their force numbers are yellow.

When you're asking these kinds of questions, please specify what you're trying to do. Leaving variables leads to ambiguity and inaccurate information. If you're talking about PvE tanking, go with full tank gear. If you're doing PvP, go with high-endurance DPS gear.

Hover over your absorb amount in your character window. Check only the section of the tooltip that pertains to rating (not anything from skills/talents/buffs). If that value reaches 50%, you're capped.

This depends entirely on the diminishing-returns formula used. If the equation indicates that the multiplicative delta of damage taken stays the same for each point of rating, it isn't necessary to balance your stats since the value of that stat never changes. However, if the multiplicative delta slowly decreases, then you are right; for every level of each rating, there will always be one that is strongest. I have a hunch, though, that the values of each one would be close enough not to matter unless you're favoring one pretty heavily. Has anyone published the formulae for defensive stats, including diminishing returns? I'd like to play around with them.

That's a misconception that happens a lot in games. Diminishing returns may give you less of an additive benefit, but most diminishing-returns formulae are designed to give nearly identical multiplicative benefits for every point put into it. What this means is that while you may only see yourself going from 50% to 51% absorb, you think you're only reducing the incoming damage of shielded attacks by 1% (the additive delta), but you're actually reducing it by 2% (multiplicative delta). The best way to think of it is to get rid of the percent signs and base everything on 100 melee swings of 100 damage (after armor, in this case, to make absorb calculations easier). If you absorb 50%, you're absorbing 50 damage. That's pretty straightforward. So if you increase absorption from 50 to 51, that's a difference of 1 damage, which is 2% of 50. The sole reason for this is so that avoidance and mitigation stats don't get increasingly stronger as you gain more of them, but that they stay relatively equal in value. The same difference in percentage of absorption above only reduces your damage intake by 1% when you had 0, but 2% at 50. Blizzard made the mistake of not applying diminishing returns to anything other than armor in World of Warcraft prior to their second expansion, which allowed druids and rogues to achieve >100% avoidance, giving them immunity to all avoidable, physical damage. I'm not sure of the exact diminishing-returns formula used in SWTOR, but I feel it's safe to assume that they follow this reasoning, as well.

Concur. The power tech may have ranged abilities, but they can't hold ranged aggro off of ranged DPS. Their melee abilities generate 16 heat while ranged (>10 meters) generate 25 while doing less damage. If you absolutely had to step out of 10-meter range often, a Powertech would have a slightly easier time holding aggro against ranged DPS than other tanks, but it the difference would be only slight and any tank would generate better aggro by using taunt on cooldown.