In an effort to point out all the ridiculous people out there that lack common sense, I have expanded the hall of shame to include bad names. Enjoy!
These two were in our pug. Could NOT stop laughing. In fact, I croaked trying to get screenies. I’m a moron.
Hey folks,
Over the next ten days, starting tomorrow, we are going to be offering a 50% off sale within the Appearance Designer! Here are the details:
Start: 11 AM CDT Friday, September 13th
End: 11 AM CDT Monday, September 23rd
The Sale: All Appearance Designer changes and Appearance options will be 50% off. Note that subscribers will get this discount in addition to their normal subscriber discount!-eric
Um, GO GET IT! Even if you don’t want to get a change now, you might want to pick up the unlocks that you think you might use later (I did). If you’ve been hankerin for a species change, this is the week!
Please don’t turn yourself into Barbie. There are enough of those. Kthx.
I haven’t done ANYTHING for the second Bounty Hunter week. I’m so lazy! And I probably won’t.
My world-event participation reasoning, after the initial “see all the content” pass, goes something like this:
1) Is there a pretty outfit involved? If Yes, go to 2.
2) Will it take an unreasonably long time to get said outfit? If no, go to 3
3) No, really, just how hot is this outfit? If “rly hot” ok, fine, grind the event.
I have already received my bounty hunter armor which is “rly hot”. It was also available at “newcomer” [edit: oops, not friend] level which I consider to be a reasonable but not excessive amount of work to get.
If it had been a few rep tiers up, I probably would not have bothered, because the armor was for an alt and not my main. Having said that, I’m still completely done getting what I want from the bounty hunter guys, so I see no need to repeatedly planet-hop after I’ve already seen all the event content once.
So now, I’ll just sit back and wait until the next “rly hot” armor is introduced in some way. Any day now…
Guys, this stuff just got added in the latest patch. Totally unexpected and awesome. How I’m going to scrape together the credits and/or cartel coins, I have no idea, but I will find a way.
That way will probably involve dailies for the cash to buy things on the cash side. I was going to use the 50% first-time-in-game-subscriber-cartel-coin-buyer-discount to buy a BIG PACK, and then use cartel coins on the unlocks that I could, but that was delayed.
Quick Travel Time Reduction. With a 25 minute base, 3 ranks of reduction, each rank at 5 minutes, we’re looking at 10 minute quick travel. This would save me a lot of time, especially in areas where the taxis don’t quite meet up with each other (such as North Belsavis).
This is my top pick and I got it last night. Each rank can be bought with credits or cartel coins. The amount of credits increases (100, 200, 300) by rank, but the amount of cartel coins remains the same (75 each rank). I decided to do a combo and bought the first rank with 100k credits and the remaining 2 ranks with cartel (75×2=150cc).
Fleet Pass Time Reduction (to zero). Lemme see if I have this right. Subscribers have a 9 hour cooldown now. There are 3 ranks of time reduction unlocks at 3 hours each. So it’s a fleet pass available on no cooldown. For whatever reason, this can only be purchased with credits and not cartel coins, so start running those dailies.
As the proud owner of an authenticator, I already have 1 hour cooldown fleet passes in my inventory, but zero still trumps one hour, especially when you don’t have the annoyance of remembering to buy new passes when you use them up. And then get stranded somewhere with no pass. Not that this has ever happened to me.
I will definitely be getting this perk but, since it’s not an emergency and I can live with the 1-hour passes for a little longer, I have time to make sure I’m financially stable before investing credits in this. It is also embarrassing to run out of repair money mid-raid. Not that this has happened to me either…
Guild Bank On Personal Starship. I already have the rest of the starship junk on my ship, but I’ve always parked on the fleet specifically because of the guild bank. Well no more. So long, fleet losers, I’ll see your lag and load times in hell.
Given that I’m no longer GM of anything and no longer paw through the gbank on a daily basis, this one can wait a while until I manage to casually gather the cash or find myself rolling in cartel coins.
Did I miss anything? What are you excited about for this patch?
After being thoroughly disappointed with the empire-side boytoys, my assassin met Andronikos Revel, pirate of mystery. Rawr.
But she wasn’t ready to settle down on a moisture vaporator farm and pop out horned offspring quite yet. On the very next planet, an eligible suitor appeared!
***OBLIGATORY SPOILER WARNING*** Continue reading »
You know that a sith is trying to kill you if…
He/she wants to meet you in a tomb, a temple, or the ruins of a temple or tomb.
He/she wants to meet you in his/her office.
He/she wants to meet you just about anywhere, actually.
He/she is in competition with you for anything.
He/she is helpful in giving you information, advice, or items.
He/she is your master or another apprentice of your master.
He/she is your apprentice.
He/she is a Lord/Darth who is an enemy or ally of your master, or that darth/lord’s apprentice.
He/she comes into contact with you in any way. It’s just a matter of time.
So I invested in a Mira’s headband for my assassin. I like the way it sits a bit higher above the eyebrow area than most circlets or headbands.
Things were going well until I got on my speeder. Is that a visor? A beak?
But, hey, I’m not on my speeder ALL the time, right? I can live with that.
Then I log out to the load screen and it’s doing a lovely job of forehead clipping.
I discovered shortly thereafter that it forehead clips in-game whenever her head is turned. That, ladies and gents, is a deal-breaker.
And the search for the perfect hat continues.
I love world events, but I am not a fan of the pressure to complete all the things in a limited timeframe. At times like this, though, I remind myself that I’m an adult and I can simply choose NOT to participate in whatever I don’t want to participate in. Neiner neiner.
Most WoW events were on an annual calendar, so even though the event would come back, it was on such a long timeframe, continuation seemed impractical. Knowing full well that I haven’t a prayer of finishing most WoW events, I didn’t do more than dabble in them.1
But SWTOR events are different and better, in my opinion. Or at least, after a few hiccups, they’re becoming better.
I really enjoyed doing the bounties. I chose to do them without really reading a guide and just picking planets as the mood struck me. I purposely didn’t “grind” or try to pokemon catch them all this time around. There will be time for polishing off any stragglers that I haven’t finished later on when the event comes back. See? My attitude is already improved by the fact that I know it WILL come back and about WHEN that will happen.
So as not to drive myself totally nutto with this event, I set my goal for this week as “newcomer” status for the armor.
This worked out pretty well. I spent some days doing a lot of bounties, some days doing a few bounties, and easily made my goal by mid-week. It was great to then let myself off the hook for the rest of the event. Any bounties I did after that would be “gravy”.2
Next BH week, my goal is to get to friend status for that awesome-looking pistol-blaster. Nothing says “I am overcompensating for the size of my nonexistent e-dong” like a comically oversized blaster in each hand.
So, as you probably know, there are class reps for all the classes now and they’re asking the devs the class’s top questions that the devs will totally answer and not dodge, right? The first batch came back for Sentinel last week.1 We should get the marauder ones next go-around.
You’ve probably read these already but just in case, I’m going to give you my commentary. I’ve already incorporated all this STUFF into the sent/mara guide.
This first one is the “PVP” question, though really it applies to all watchman/anni specced sent/mara:
Q: Watchman/Annihilation currently suffers from a very long ramp-up time and is severely punished for any downtime due to the Merciless/Annihilate stacking buff. This ramp-up makes the spec nearly unconscionable in competitive PvP, and the downtime penalties cause severe issues in both PvP and certain PvE encounters (such as Titan 6 or Dread Guard). Would it be possible to improve the ramp-up and downtime penalties in this area? Perhaps by talenting Valorous Call/Frenzy to build Merciless/Annihilate stacks. Another idea would be to decrement Merciless/Annihilate stacks upon expiry rather than removing them entirely.
A: The stacking Annihilator/Merciless buff and the stacking buff from Juyo Form are both too short at their current 15 second durations. We will increase the duration of these buffs to give Marauders/Sentinels more time to get back into action before needing to start back up on their long entry ramp. As for a faster way to ramp up, we plan to give you something to help in this regard, but it will not be coming anytime soon. We may also experiment with decrementing the stacks on expiration, rather than removing all of them at once, but we cannot make any promises at this time that you will ever see it decrement stacks in the Live game.
Oooo, “decrement.” Fancy.2
I am psyched that the devs acknowledge that this slow ramping is a big deal, especially for encounters that are “hit and run” and require you to lay off the boss for a while and hide behind a rock. It sounds like a step in the right direction but, unfortunately, on a hugely long timeline.
Q: While Focus/Rage has excellent AoE DPS and on-demand burst, it falls significantly behind in terms of single-target DPS. In fact, dummy parses in the hands of skilled and geared players show a roughly 9% disparity between Focus/Rage and the other two specs on a single-target fight. This represents an unacceptable liability for most serious progression groups, as the majority of DPS pressure in current content comes in the form of hard enrage timers in single-target encounters. Despite this, the community is concerned that an increase to single-target DPS might make Focus/Rage the “go to” spec for sentinels/marauders. What are the design goals for Focus/Rage in PvE? Is the spec currently meeting those goals? If low single-target DPS is indeed the balancing factor for this spec, how is this justified with the current PvE design focus on single-target bosses?
This answer has a lot of parts and a lot of information, so I’m gonna break it up, k?
If Rage/Focus had the best burst damage, the best AoE damage, and the best sustained damage; then there would be very little to no incentive for a Marauder/Sentinel to ever spec anything else. Rage/Focus is the top burst spec for a Marauder/Sentinel, and that is by design. Right now, it is also the top AoE damage spec for Marauders/Sentinels (by design) – but that is something we would like to get away from in the future…
It will take some time to right this ship, as it has already sailed and must come back to port for repairs (so don’t expect Annihilation/Watchman and Carnage/Combat to be pumping out massive AoE DPS or for Rage/Focus to get a huge AoE DPS nerf next patch)….
Right now, the goal for Rage/Focus in PvE is to be good burst damage and good AoE damage, and it already does very well in these respects. In the future, when the other specs have improved ways to do AoE damage, then you can expect the sustained damage gap between Rage/Focus and Carnage/Combat to shrink a little bit. In summary, yes we know that Rage/Focus is the worst Marauder spec for single-target sustained damage because that is exactly how we designed it.
It is on purpose that Focus/Rage rules at burst and aoe, but lags behind in single-target DPS, because otherwise it would be the all-around best spec and nobody would use the others.3 So the single-target DPS for focus/rage is actually limited not by the aoe prowess of the focus/rage spec itself, but by the AOE suckitude of the other trees.
They want to fix it. At some future point. Far in the future. Like long white beard far in the future.
Ideally, any damage spec should be able to deal formidable AoE damage when necessary (and should prefer to leave most AoE attacks out of their rotation in a single-target fight).
But many DPS specs have a long-cooldown AOE dps ability that they use for a single-target dps boost in their rotations. Orbital strike, for example or fusion missile. I wonder if the devs are trying to axe those too.
Annihilation/Watchman is intended to be the top sustained damage spec for Marauders/Sentinels, while Carnage/Combat is meant to be better sustained damage than Rage/Focus (but worse than Annihilation/Watchman) and better burst damage than Annihilation/Watchman (but worse than Rage/Focus). As a result, the top damage over an extended period should go to Annihilation/Watchman. The top damage in a short fight should go to Rage/Focus. Carnage/Combat should hold its own in both situations, while not being the best at either – think of its strength as versatility.
This outlines the intentions of the 3 specs, with watchman/anni as sustained single-target dps king, focus/rage as burst/aoe king, and combat/carnage as somewhere in the middle (single target with burst, but less sustained damage).
I haven’t found that combat/carnage is worse at sustained single-target tank-n-spank dps than watchman/anni. If that’s the goal, it fails. I also haven’t really found focus/rage more bursty than combat/carnage, but having played focus/rage very little, I’ll have to take their word for it.
Unfortunately, because target dummies never drop in health you cannot use them as a 1:1 replacement for Operation boss encounters. Only certain specs (Rage/Focus is not one of them, but Carnage/Combat is) can use execute abilities on a target dummy. It is also unlikely that you are testing on a target dummy with your own personal armor-debuffer (which you should definitely have against a real raid boss). So that 9% gap you may be seeing on target dummies is closer to approximately 4% in reality.
Combat dummy numbers are bullshit, to a certain extent, they’re right about that. However, I do not think, by any stretch, that using one execute every 20+ seconds in a combat/carnage rotation is going to account for 5% DPS.
OK, last question.
Q: Centering/Fury does not build for the duration of Zen/Berserk, Inspiration/Bloodthirst or Transcendence/Predation. This is a somewhat odd design decision since sentinels/marauders are penalized significantly when these raid buffs are used. This is a noticeable DPS loss for Watchman/Annihilation and Combat/Carnage, but it is absolutely devastating for Focus/Rage as their rotation is actually dependent on consistently building Centering/Fury (due to the Singularity/Shockwave mechanic). As such, most Focus/Rage sentinels/marauders actually click off the Inspiration/Bloodthirst buff when another sentinel/marauder provides it. No other DPS class is handicapped in this fashion. What is the design rationale for suppressing Centering/Fury build up during these buffs? Could this restriction be removed (especially when *another* sentinel/marauder has supplied the raid buff)?
A: We agree that it seems an odd design decision was made here. While Bloodthirst/Inspiration and Predation/Transcendence are active, we see no reason why you shouldn’t be able to build Fury/Centering stacks. However, being allowed to build Fury/Centering during Berserk/Zen would be a substantial damage increase that would only serve to widen the gap between Marauders/Sentinels and the rest of the pack that they are already leading. We may change it in the future, but for now Berserk/Zen will continue to block Fury/Centering generation while we will make changes to allow the building of Fury/Centering during Bloodthirst/Inspiration and Predation/Transcendence.
Hell. Yeah. Reiterate “long white beard” timeline.
