I had a similar feeling about PvP in SWTOR. At the moment I have mostly stayed away from it because it definitely reminded me too much of how WOWs PvP was for battlegrounds. It was a bit too frustrating then, when I played WoW, how closely PvE and PvP were tied together and how a change in one affected greatly the other. Balancing both PvP and PvE at the same time seems like someone is always going to be upset. I think what they should do in SWTOR is take advantage of the companions for PvP. I would suggest a PvP system where players could use any of their companions to play as in the BG for the PvP battles. Each companion could serve different roles so any player could play as the role (Tank, Caster , Melee, Heals) that was needed for each battle that they queued into. It would be even better if before the battle was started a list was shown that allowed each player to make choices on which companion to bring based on what roles had already been chosen via the companions their teammates selected. (Similar to League of Legends Selection Screen before the battle starts where you build a team composition) The advantages of such a system would be instantaneous balance to the PvP especially if the moves each companion had were limited to only one Quick slot bar (So at max a total of 12 different abilities) as well as homogenized so that every role has essentially the same abilities as every type of role that companion was. Thus Ashara Zavros (Melee) would be similar to Jaesa Willsaam (Melee) but i suppose you could name the abilities different names for uniqueness. It would also separate PvP from PvE which would allow for better PvE balance changes and would probably make it a lot more competitive and fun in a battleground because no one class dominates. I would still suggest keeping rewards in the form of armor as is currently the way things are, but the armor that would be obtained would be for each of your companions. It would require more of investment to gear out all 5 of your companions ,if you truly were into pvp and so desired, than a single main character would... but might give players something worth grinding several BG's out over and over for. As for how it affected the Players Main Character, maybe make certain Augmented Orange Sets, that have a certain PvP look to them, purchasable in addition to the armor for each companion. This way players would have a look in PvE that represented their accomplishments in PvP. I also think this system would not be to big a stretch in the lore aspect as it is very plausible to consider your character sending off a minion to champion or fight for your cause in a battle. Anyway love it or leave it thats my suggestion on why you should hold of on Rated BGs and how to fix PvP! I

by generator i mean the dps ones, not the shield generator btw!

hehe whats really annoying is hearing that sound and getting the Purple Offhand Generator that has shield rating, can someone explain that one to me?

I think I was level 28 or 29 SIN Assassin when i did this quest. I was only wearing greens at the time because of my playstyle, I believe in doing all the bonus series and regular quests on each planet before moving on so im usually over level for those. However for class quests every now and then ill start plowing through the class quest story lineand skipping every other non class quest until I reach a point where the quest is impossible at my current gear level or i couldnt get the new quest because of level requirement. I do remember having quite the time with her as a boss fight though, I found it to be a challenge which I kind of enjoy for class quests since most of the time I outlevel the other regular quests its a nice break from the easy breezy regular questlines. I will say that It did seem that sorceror could do this a lot easier as being melee is quite a pain for this fight. I followed the advice of several others on the forum involving using the pillars and running away with hit and run tactics as well as interrupting her heal but honestly none of these seemed to work. At the end I finally tried to just go balls to the wall DPS on her as fast as I could and blew everything all my cooldowns as fast as I could to DPS her down. I just ignored her heal and didnt bother interrupting that at all, instead saving the interrupt for the other big damage spell she did. When I did it this way I one shotted her and it was much easier but scary because it didnt look like I was going to make it when I was watching both of our health bars dropping. I dont know if this will help but it seemed much easier to do when I did that way. Good Luck!

Guess it depends on how much time on your hands you have and whether you have any Artifice recipes you care about losing. Yeah Bio-Chem is nice right now and better for end game, but they have already said they plan to phase out the reusable stims and health packs in future expansions and patches. So you might be able to enjoy it for a short period of time and then find out its not anymore useful end-game than any of the other crew skills later on when changes are made.

I have played on Sith Side and have relatively little trouble finding a group for HM's when I party with a friend who is a healer, ( I tank) but I have started some new republic characters and the population difference does worry me some. The empire fleet has about 120 people on at peak times on Daragon Trail, sometimes more. The Republic fleet at the same time has around 30 people so it does seem like it will be harder to form a group for hard modes. I do understand the fear of adding a LFG dungeon finder tool which did eliminate the painful process of finding a group on low pop servers that WOW went with, but it also made the encounters much more trivial. Most of the time you never spoke with the people you were running heroics with so you never built any lasting friendships or associations. I think maybe the LFG Dungeon Finder tool was overall a good idea though with maybe a few improvements. I think having the option for cross server partying in low population servers is a must, but instead of just throwing people together arbitrarily I would suggest some sort of pop up list that lets you see all the players flagged for LFG on every server. Then allow players to invite or whisper those players and then form groups to do HM's. Im not sure how difficult such a system would be to implement but I would prefer it that way. In a sense you allow people the benefit of the Cross Server Population but still give them the freedom to choose who they want for there group instead of being thrown together like WoW did. With such a system I would be able to meet someone from another server and add them to my friends list to form a party next time if I liked having them in my group or on the opposite side, if I hated someone I could choose not to invite them to my group next time.

From an examination of the vendor, I did not see any Magenta Crystals on sale but a schematic was available. So for now the Artifice profession seems to have gotten a bonus at being able to craft the Magenta Crystal without having to do the quest chain that you had to do before. As for it killing artifice, the vendor seems to sell only end game crystals. A simple addition of artifice only craftable low-level versions of these new crystals would be a boost for the artifice profession in 1.2. Since they are planning to release the legacy system at that time and with many people potentially rolling new alts to use it, that would be a great market for Artificers.

Great Guide! Two Thumbs Up!