Darth Baras is the reason the dark council cantina no longer features a buffet.

And the empire subsequentely isolates corellia, making the win practically meaningless (black hole questline) and shutting down their ability to contribute to the war. Furthermore, the empire is in a situation where they are about to unify, and its quite clear that the reason the republic is winning is due to how divided the empire has been lately; A truly unified empire would be a completely different matter, which the ending cinematic of Makeb insinuates. It is likely that we will see the republic suffer some truly major blows in the next expansion. Right now, the alliance is set to be on the offensive, and not expecting that they are about to throw their forces against ready and fully armed isotope-5 defenses instead of the disorganized empire they are used to, and it seems Marr is planning some major counterattacks to exploit the chaos that will ensue once the republic attack falters and begins disintegrating. I am also confused by the entire talk of hutt-republic; Empire had the option to negotiate with the hutts, and the empire forged strong tied with some hutts during the agent storyline, and really, since when was an alliance with a hutt a good thing? According to the jedi path, the war after the treaty of coruscant lasted a thousand years, so we can pretty much confirm that our characters will not see the end of the war in their lifetime (convenient for bioware ), and we still have not reached some of the major turning points of the war, which apparently did a complete 180 several times.

So, what would happen if you were to pack up said sith in a torpedo and shoot her into a star? And, while the person can be shielded, it seems like dealing the amount of damage usually needed to kill said person would be enough to at least put them out of action for a while? Or are we just assuming that every SI in swtor is a god that cannot be defeated without knowing the counteritual?

Hey, I would gladly trade! I couldn't get my collectors with all the awesome physical extras because they were completely sold out!

Just got out of a match with 5-6 healers, they won purely by being immortal. The main problem of healing in pvp right now are not the healing quantities, but the fact that you cannot shut it down effectively in any way. Unlike other MMO's, interrupts in swtor do not shut down the entire healing school, but only the specific heal in question, which in turn means that a healer who is interrupted simply casts another heal without actually losing any healing as such. In other games, a succesfull interrupt sets a healer back by at least 2 seconds. This in turns means that currently a lone healer can be focused on by two dpsers bursting their all on him, and he can simply heal his way through it, which is not the way it should be. Yes, he should be able to outheal or at least match the dps of a single person, but 2 people should be able to overtake him and it should never be impossible for a person to kill another. Another problem is the lack of in-combat CC on some classes. Most all CC breaks on dmg which again prevents you CCing and nuking down a healer, and the unleash+knockback+shields of some healers mean they can keep countering you to infinity, especially as I have yet to meet a class with knockback that did not take the talent to root on said knockback. So, either reduce amount of healing done, or at least give dpsers some actual options for countering healers, beyond just reducing said healing by a measly 20%. Of course, healing is far from being as big a problem for the pvp in this game as the disproportionate distribution of CC and CC countering, but that is an entirely different discussion.

I get where you are coming from, but the problem here is that it makes NO sense in terms of the story being told and the developement of the character. If it was a natural consequence of the choises, sure, it would be understandable. However, light side Jaesa finds herself in a spot where she has found the groun beneath her crumble and the reality she thought she had, revealed as lies and people just trying to use her. The way the story develops, you become her new foundation and help her find her way again, she goes from serving you as your apprentice, to eventually warming up more and more and going from respect into proper friendship and creating a bond of trust with the sith. Just take the scene where Pierce walks in on them, i found that to be one of the most telling moments in terms of the relationship between the characters, and the way the characters move closer and closer, not beng able to romance her actually felt waaaay more out of character as the story had been following a natural developement in that direction. Some people say "jedi dont date", but she is NOT a jedi, and there is not at any point given any indication that she hasn't potentially developed feelings beyond merely being close friends. Again, if the story supported it, like them having a heartfelt talk about why they should just be friends, or hell, even a throwaway line with her smiling and going "you know, if love wasn't forbidden, i might fall for you." would have been all that was needed to have the story make sense. Right now, it just ends in the middle of it all and without a proper resolution. By contrast, the actual only romance option for light-side SW's is one that ends up feeling forced and fake and where the story more supports the "friends" direction that gets forced down our throats with Jaesa. Interestingly, in discussing romances, it is insanely common to hear people describe vette as "more like a little sister", and the story is kept at a distance where you dont see the feelings develop, they just suddenly pop up because the story demands at least one romance option, and the logical one isn't available. In short, the problem isn't the story, but that IT MAKES NO SENSE IN TERMS OF THE STORY BEING TOLD.

Well, Marauder DID use heavy armour originally, which is why most of the preview material for the game feaures marauders in gear they can never wear and up until 1.2 almost all NPC marauders wore armour that was impossible for actual marauders to wear. Hell, why you think marauders dont get LS/DS items? This was effectively a last minute change, although not sure why they did it as most initial marauder concerns would have been solved by it, and to this day our aestetics suffer due to that change. So I'll re-pose the original question, as it is something that baffles me: Why did they change it so marauders cant use heavy armour?

Hmm, WoW, wasn't that the game that lost around 1.8 MILLION players (1 in 6 players!) last year and is expected to face even bigger losses ths year? The game that last i heard got evicted from MLG due to pvp imbalance and whose main pvp was a glorified duel, in spite them in 2005 explaining why that very pvp system would never work in an mmo? Seriously, look up the blizzcon where the original wow dev team explain why deathmatches don't work in an mmo and why they decided to not include gurubashi arena. Now, returning to the discussion at hand, the entire situation is sadly also a bit of a catch 22: - You need some form of progression in order to give people an incentive to play said content and feel like they are getting somewhere. - But you cannot allow progression to be too high, or we get what we had in wow where it becomes impregnable to new players simply due to the gear gap. - But if you base it purely on stats, pve gear will be more powerfull and make the rewards from pvp pointless, and likewise if you make pvp gear too good for pvp, it becomes a way to skip pve progression. -So, to ensure that pvp gear is more viable than pve gear, you include expertise, which then means that anyone without it ends up being kinda screwed. So, you either sacrifice a sense of progression and reward, or you wind up in a situation where gear becomes the center of balance rather than skill. Personally, I would prefer a system where gear would be purely cosmetic (let's ignore that the cosmetics for marauders are a cesspit in this game ), however from a Dev's point of view, i can see why it would take away incentive to actually do the pvp. Although as pointed out by others, MOBA games have had no progression as such for years and still work, however they also provide a more varied experience. I love myself some akali, but having to play only her would get old after a while and it would certainly lead to a faster burnout. In an mmo, you typically have 1 main, and that means that you cannot rely on the same variation as MOBA's to keep interest going. Ideally, they should leave normal pvp where it is, but at least make all stats equal in ranked pvp, as the entire model of competitive gaming based on gear just screams frustations and fail, especially as the gear gap will increase drammatically over time. We are looking at this from the point of view of a 4 month old game, but we also need to consider the effects of the current model a year or two from now. In my opinion, the outlook is not so good.

So, uhm, why is this an issue? Battlemaster was purely timerelated. Not only that, but due to the way items worked, there was a huge gap between attaining your champion gear and up to battlemaster that just felt like a huge grind that wasn't related to individual skill. As others have noted, it is not that huge a speed boost, and the little it is just helps to reduce the amount of time spent grinding levels instead of grinding to get the gear (which feels a lot more rewarding than just playing warzones to get that level you need in order to buy the gear in the first place)

I have run battles with HOUNDREDS of people on screen on an old trash computer back in the Tarren mill vs Southshore back in the day, and you are saying that modern computers shouldn't be able to run 30 players on illum? Hell, a game like WAR again we needed to get into the houndreds of people before getting huge slowdowns. While I don't claim that they are the same engines, or directly comparable graphics wise (swtor has had art direction of it for once, something which WAR never seemed to have ><) it doesn't make up for why there should be such a huge discrepancy in what the games can run before lagging, especially when those two games were running on computers that nowadays wouldnt work as trash compactors. Being able to play stuff like witcher 2, Crysis 2, and Shogun 2 flawlessly, yet even loading a single republic player on illum causes the game to stutter and almost fall over dead. Once we get to several players, its unplayable, and 10+ republic players it just goes into stupid territory. Most of the time the only thing i can do is: Target one guy in the middle of them, charge, smash, pop camouflage and run like hell, hoping i tagged someone who is about to die, why, because i cant actually play when the game drops to a 3-4 FPS slideshow. Notable moments of slowdown: - Capturing points, almost causes the game to have an instant heartstroke, prolly from updating quests and buffs all over the place if i was to give an unqualified guess? - Loading any republic players. It loads imperial players just fine though. But even a single republic player causes major slowdowns. - Whenever a kill is made. Might be related to the damn thing insisting on printing on screen how much valour you get, as well as put it in the chat log, whatever the reason, killing people also cuases major slowdowns and FPS drops. Now, I will be the first to say that I am no expert on programming, but at first glance it seems that the engine has issues loading enemy players and it seems like both objective capture and killing awards are simply doing too much stuff at the same time. Clean up the damn place. We dont need the chatlog or the floating text to tell us how much valour we get. And while it looks fancy when a point is captured and im sure oyu love the quest log, both are unneccesary. Get rid of having to update quests each time it changes hands, we can look at the map. And pretty animations for captures are pointless if they mean that the place becomes unplayable. [rage mode] I hear that WAR employees will work for food, hire some of them and get them to tell you how to put a world pvp engine together already!

And you don't have any problems with how SI's can use their sprint to JUMP THE BRIDGE gap, thus allowing them to cap the 2nd set of doors without defenders being abel to do anything about it because they are unable to reach the zone and defend it because bridges are not up yet?!

Since almost everything that needed to be said has been said, but Bioware as a rule don't consider sith warriors worthy of their time: /Signed.

Keep in mind that if you are a lightside sith warrior, you can ONLY romance Vette (yes, i know there is a way around it, but that would be a spoiler ^^). Anyway, so far I have put all interaction with Vette on hold, in the hope that they may implement a Jaesa romance later.

A major issue for Marauders is how NONE of their gear looks like; the progression video, the trailers, screenshots, NPC marauders, or even what most asociate with sith. Are there any plans to adress this, what was the thought process behind the change in marauder looks?

Simply revert us to the beta with heavy armour and give us force pull back. Force pull would give us the ability to get targets to us and help control the battlefield without simply being yet another knockback, hell, it might even make us usefull in huttball, and allow us to counter CC spam: Initiate with charge, they blow one CC, we can break it and pull, they block their next CC which knocks us back and roots us, at least now we have the option to charge and stay in contact rather than merely stand around looking like fools getting shot in the face while waiting for the root to end because unleash is on 2 minute CD ><. It would also mean that we got a little more to do in huttball than simply get knocked down and be unable to do anything but stand and watch while ranged classes can still contribute even if knocked down. As for heavy armour, said it before, will say it again, it will both solve our item issues in hardmodes, give us our looks back that some of us rolled this class for in the first place, and give us a little more survivability without going over the top.