Wow, now that was a useless piece of advice. Care to tell us *how* do we avoid equipping an item which was already equipped prior to the patch downtime without logging in? Oh, wait, that's impossible. Oh well, thankfully it's only one week till Diablo III goes live and I will have something else to do instead of pondering what the heck will be broken next Tuesday.

I wonder how big is the pile of chickendung they are trying to feed the players here about the "limitations to how much they can change the items already owned"? I mean, seriously, the whole statement is a cover-up for laziness, IMO. Let me quote that piece here... 1) It's not new. Extractable armoring was an early alpha/beta feature which was deemed "unbalanced" and removed. 2) Not only armorings extracted from previously owned pieces do not carry over set bonuses, the new Tionese/Columi/Rakata gear purchased/exchanged for tokens post 1.2 DOES NOT allow for set bonus extraction. Misinforming much? Or was it too much to update the old set pieces with new item IDs?

Umm, mate, you might want to do something about those links. Try as I might, all I got from opening them was thumbnail-sized mini pics.

Definitely H4 (End of Torvix), I think it was one of the elite droids past the elevator.

Yup, logged onto my Artificer toon to double check. Pre-level 50 magenta crystals can be crafted with Alderaan shards alone (and require just one), the level 50 +41 stat version (I got mine, a +41 crit from one of the elites in Black Hole new daily area) requires two Alderaan pieces and one Ilum piece (well, technically it's Tatooine -> Hoth -> Ilum, but you get the point). Screens: http://img823.imageshack.us/img823/6053/l31k.jpg http://img208.imageshack.us/img208/7118/l50j.jpg Also, I have no idea where the l31 schematic drops - got mine off the GTN for 2,000 credits or so.

Okay, this has been asked numerous times, but between the waves of posts it gets lost every other page and never gets properly answered. The first post states that Excuse me, how depriving the ONLY equipment piece craftable by Biochem of an augment slot is a "minor" change? This is effectively killing the whole crafted implant market, and compared to adding augments to just about every other piece of equipment this seems like a really bad nerfhammer swing. If anyone has access to PTS, please confirm if Biochem can no longer produce slotted implants, and if so, time to start crafting those as crazy if they will become a non-replenishable supply come 1.2. P.S.: I really hope this whole "no more augments for implants" is just a typo, or a misplaced bit of information.

This is how the market is *supposed* to work, except that it doesn't. No other profession is currently viable in the endgame, bar the few and far in between grenade uses for cybertechs. Everything Armormech, Synthweaving, Armstech and Artifice can produce has either better versions or exact counterparts in PvE and PvP. Oh yes, you can craft the "skins" for your armor, but this is only viable pre-50 at the moment. Once you hit 50, if you're going to start raiding or PvPing you only need consumables, and maybe a starship upgrade or two, if you're still not sick and tired of flying that arcade game called "Space Combat". Bottom line (and I'm repeating myself here): You don't fix the situation by making the only good crafting profession choice worse. You fix it by making the other crafting skills better. Tell it to people who spent days and weeks farming commendations. If it's "just an advantage", then it's far faster to get a set of Columi/Rakata gear, maybe a color crystal with +41 bonus from Kaon flashpoint with rougly the same stats and forget about the repetitive and tedious Valor/Ilum/Warzone grind. Oh, wait, that would kill the whole PvP system for good. See the problem here? if you follow the logic of "top PvP gear provides too big an advantage" you might as well start thinking in the direction of "Rakata gear makes running normal mode flashpoints/operations too easy" and scrap the whole idea of PvE itemization and progression. Thing is, if a game is built around obtaining better gear, the better geared will *always* stomp the freshly dinged into the dirt. You want it fair and square? Follow Guild Wars logic or remove gear bonuses altogether, leaving armor as a social "choose your skin" feature only. Otherwise it's a vicious circle.

Pretty much this. Not only chemists will have the benefit of never having to spend a penny on consumables once they get Rakata items, now they can also pretty much rip off everyone else who doesn't have biochem. Way to go if you wanted any semblance of "balance". I am sorry for being blunt, but your devs or whoever is responsible for "balancing" the crafting in SWTOR is thinking in a wrong direction (if at all). Seriously, you cannot make a game better by making the only viable crafting skill LESS attractive. You have to make all the others MORE attractive to players, not the other way around. Doing what you are doing now is going to produce more frustration than relief. Also, if you want to and You might as well remove consumables and PvP-specifig gear from the game altogether. No one in the right mind will spend in-game credits or grind valor/warzone commendations is consumables/PvP gear don't provide a significant edge. Obtaining a power difference is a goal many seek. Remove it, and you will have an army of disappointed players.

As I see it now, there are several points which could use improvement in the current mechanics (mostly speaking about tanking): 1) Keeping the sunder stacks up. Either decrease the cooldown on the Sundering Assault itself, decrease it on the Crushing Blow (even it it costs us some damage on it), or make the debuff last longer. It's a joke when a missed cooldown and/or monster dodging an attack can mean losing the stacks. 2) Blade Barricade duration needs a boost for the same reason - Retaliation *might* not proc and you lose the precious buff way too fast. Juggs are single-target tank types anyway for the most part, so surviving/avoiding those really big hits is our primary concern since we should get to MT a lot. 3) Endure Pain, even with Dark Blood doesn't last all that long. Maybe a couple seconds more? 4) Backhand could use a shorter CD as well. Four seconds of stun aren't all that needed in the Immortal tree anyway, since it's largely PvE-oriented and stun doesn't work on any bosses we tank, so we could do with a shorter stun but a shorter CD as well, and then we could rely more on it for reliable single target threat generation along with Crushing Blow.

Allow me to salt the wound while we're at it. ToFN also happens to be one of the servers designated for Russian PvP-oriented guilds, it seems. Considering it's full to the brim with just EGA players, come "normal" launch it will simply become the King of Queues, no less...

Spot on, btw. Why on earth doesn't the game save my spot for at least 3-5 minutes? Got disconnected earlier today, quickly logged back in hoping to finish the flashpoint, and guess what, got stuck in a 1100-long queue. Yay, time to wait. ...Only to be disconnected AGAIN somewhere in the last hundred (yeah, the link stability is an issue with my current ISP here), so now I'm facing a 1600+ long queue. Way to go, especially when I think back at how much time I wasted waiting instead of playing.