I boosted artifice over the weekend by buying mats. It was about 1m credits net loss once I'd sold back the excess mats (the stuff i crafted didn't really sell). I suspect it will vary significantly dependent on the skill to level.

Dulfy has a 5.0 virulence guide. I'd check the archives and see if you can find Yolo's guide from 3.0 though. The 2 cull rotation can still be situationally useful and if I recall isn't covered in the 5.0 guide. For Marksmanship rotation, take a look at the thread at the top. Most of the rotation sections still apply.

Character copy only works from the live servers to the PTS.

Let Them Eat Cake on imp (The Cake is a Lie on rep) is a guild for everyone. Members can do what they please, whether it's solo, flashpoints, story raids, join the progression group etc. without any pressure to do any of it. http://www.swtor.com/community/showthread.php?t=894238

When you say a crew skill and its associated gathering skills, what level are they at? Wondering if I can be lazy and save levelling a class.

Returning player here. I remember back in 3.1 someone had made a very useful spreadsheet which detailed every crew skill, the most efficient recipe to craft and the materials needed to get to the cap at the time. Does the same exist for 5.0 and if so, could someone post a link? Thanks.

GC is fine as it is bar perhaps evening out heroics for leveling, but it shouldn't be the sole way to gear (nor a requisite way to gear). Add back the ability to get unassembled gear from ops (guaranteed drops from each boss and no additional items, as it always has been) so that raiders can get their gear, have GC for solo players to get their gear and you've covered most of the population. PvP might need a way of gearing, but I never PvP so can't speak to how well GC works for PvP.

Only ability cooldowns are visible. Internal cooldowns (relics, set bonus etc.) aren't unfortunately. Most of the 1 minute procs are triggered by an ability falling in a set spot in the rotation though, so if you know how long your rotation is (my Merc for instance is 16.5s) you should be able to tell with a pretty good degree of accuracy when you'll get a proc. If you're really fussed then you could setup a timer in Star Parse or similar so you know when the ICD is over.

We did it with Merc knockbacks. There are a couple of points where you get stuck going up the wall and you can duel to push someone to the next spot. Once there juggs can leap or you can stick a sorc up there to pull. Not how it's meant to be done, but it gave my group a few laughs this afternoon.

I noticed when parsing that I was getting both Eliminator's set bonus to proc on serrated shot. I was using 2 piece 230 set and 2 piece revanite (198). Whilst gearing I'll naturally use both 2 piece bonuses, but at what point would the second bonus start to be overshadowed by higher mastery and/or the 6 piece set bonus? Has anyone got enough gear to test 4 piece 230 + 2 piece 198, 6 piece 230, 4 piece 242 + 2 piece 198 and 6 piece 242? I'm intrigued to see whether there's some benefit to using the old set bonus, at least temporarily.

Provided that you don't want to do NiM raiding (I won't speak for PVP as I don't play) then you'll be fine. A decent sage/sorc can handle HM bosses, although not as well as other ranged classes.

If I recall, the arguments against buffing Madness in 3.x was that it was performing well in PvP, mostly due to it's rotational dot spread. I remember a very lengthy post at the time of 3.1.2 (probably in the ether of the archived PTS forums now) about how Madness could be easily buffed to compete with Innovative Ordinance without improving the dots and whilst improving the flow of the rotation which was, at the time, very clunky as you needed to manage a 12, 15 and 18s cooldown/dot duration. At the moment, sorcerers need a buff to their dot spec. I would say leave Lightning as it is for the time being on the grounds of it being a highly mobile, easy to manage burst spec. Madness needs, first and foremost, a stable rotation (as with IO), followed by a buff to its single-target abilities. Dot damage should be carefully controlled to prevent dots becoming massively overpowered in AoE fights/PvP. Oh I do miss the days of 2.10 when I think pretty much every spec was viable in progression. Madness' only drawback was force management, especially if you were clipping your force lightning channel for the extra APM.

When 3.0 first dropped, sorc was in a fairly good place, although not top of the pile. Milas (iirc) from Zorz was proving that they could keep up. A Merc/sniper was better for HTL/Entrench for handling movement mechanics, but sorcs could keep up for damage out. Damage in was a bit more of a pain on bosses like underlurker compared to sniper/merc, but it was manageable. Once the 3.2 (I think) nerf came, most of the sages I knew (myself included) switched to mando/Merc. The fundamental issue is, as you've said, that both specs are at the bottom of the pile. A more logical order that specs should generally follow is (based on risk-reward): 1. Melee dot 2. Ranged dot 3. Melee burst 4. Ranged burst Specs like annihilation should be top, followed by madness/IO, then carnage, then lightning/arsenal bringing up the rear.

A side question to this, if I am returning and want to play my existing characters, do they start where I left off (i.e. level 60, SOR/beginning of KotFE), or will they be automatically ported to the new world?

Have you played the expansion? That game has me watching the text only cutscenes with a lot more interest that TOR. In any case, on topic, I'm not worried about change, only that they seem to have forgotten that this is an mmo. What we appear to be receiving based on the announcements so far is a subscription based single player with mmo elements. Whether this is the correct route to go down, only time will tell. If the story is the same quality as launch it could work out, but if it's the same quality as SOR, personally I would be rather unimpressed. The reason there are "butthurt" (oh how I hate that term) raiders, in my opinion, is that in the run up to SOR, statements were made promising that the content drought pre SOR would not happened again. What has happened? A single instanced boss and then rehashing of old content. Assuming that the "no new ops with KOFE" means the whole story, and the 1 chapter a month is kept to, it will be at least next summer before the conclusion and first new op, which would be 18 months since the launch of SOR.