Mav

I haven't really played the game... for the sake of the game, in a really long time. I don't know if that makes sense or not, but basically I play cause there are people that I like playing with and that's really all that keeps it going for me atm.

"I modest to decent amount of in-game currency to get me started" Define "modest to decent"

I should probably check LF more often... I wrote a guide for Shadow Tanking but it's old and out of date with changes, dulfy started posting guides that her and her guildmates were writing and there is a decent one for shadow tanking: http://dulfy.net/2014/01/06/swtor-kinetic-combat-shadow-tanking-class-guide/ Shadow's don't really get tanky until the 40's, so good luck until then.

I guess I'm supposed to answer this one... As a Consular, Willpower is your mainstat, it affects your crit rate and your bonus damage. That being said when playing a tank yes you're going to typically choose armoring mods that are higher in Endurance than in Mainstat. At later levels you also have secondary tanking stats to worry about though, Defense and Absorb. At end-game, typically stacking Endurance over your mitigation stats (Defense/Absorb) is inadvisable. Shadow Tanks have tools to excel at both tanking single boss enemies, as well as packs of multiple smaller enemies. That being said, of the three tanking advanced classes, Guardian, Vanguard, and Shadow, by selecting to play a Shadow Tank, you've decided to pick the most challenging tank to excel at. As far as getting destroyed during a H4 mission, were you trying to do it solo, cause that'd be a bad idea. However, tanking at lower levels in general is pretty ineffective. While that is true for all the tank classes it is especially true for Shadow Tanks, you wear light armor and get shredded easily early on and you don't get some of your best tanking abilities until your upper 30's or lower 40's in levels. Honestly, I highly recommend that you level as DPS and learn to Tank when you level cap. Leveling just takes much longer when you're leveling as a Tank and especially with Shadows you don't feel very tanky until much later in the levels. Anyway, I wrote a guide for Shadow Tanks that is a few months old, but should provide enough of the basics... http://www.thewalkingcarpets.com/forum/m/3065305/viewthread/5383418-shadow-tanking-primer

Well it doesn't really matter how updated his guide is, it's pretty minimal as is and he hasn't even touched his Commando since leveling it. The point is get accuracy to 100/110, then go Surge. So there is no confusion ever again and so I don't have to answer this ever again I made a picture. Also as an FYI to reach that 100/110 on my Gunslinger takes ~400 points in Accuracy, leaving ~300 left to spend on Surge or Alacrity, Alacrity being useless, so again I have no idea where this 600 points in Surge comes from. Which takes me to my next point, the tank dying because you couldn't Purge fast enough in Hammer Station is not the fault of Alacrity. In fact Alacrity doesn't even affect the cooldown of abilities (unless they have no cooldown because Alacrity affects the GCD). You're mis-timing your Purge, you should only have to purge twice, at 5 stacks of that mining laser debuff each time and you should be healing in-between.

1. There are 2 types of Accuracy, Melee/Ranged and Force/Tech, the base accuracy for Melee/Ranged attacks is 90% and the base accuracy for Force/Tech is 100%. Certain attacks fall under each category, for example in terms of a Commando, Full Auto is a Ranged Attack, and Demolition Round is a Tech attack. Generally speaking most DPS classes will be able to use talent points in a skill tree to get +3% accuracy, you will get +1% accuracy from having max affection with your rDPS companion (I think), so what you are trying to obtain with your gear is +6% accuracy. That will bring your total to +10% accuracy from talents/gear, add that to you base accuracy of 90% and 100% and that is where you are seeing the goals of being 100% and 110%. 2. I don't think Jolg's Commando guide is up-to-date/usable right now, I don't think it was changed with patch 2.0. In the patch in addition to the level cap being increased to 55, the stat weight formulae for the secondary stats were adjusted to account for the greater number of available stat points in upcoming gear tiers. So basically where before maybe you could get to 100% accuracy and then have 600 points left to stick into Surge, that's not the case anymore as now it takes more points to reach 100% in accuracy leaving less points available for Surge. To be honest I'm not sure where he pulled the number 600 from anyway as I don't think that was true prior to patch 2.0 regardless. In reality how much Surge you have doesn't matter, your goal should be to get to 100% accuracy and then all from that point on just begin to stack Surge. 3. I don't know why Makeb rep tokens aren't sellable, they're eating up my inventory space!

Same formula for all mainstats, also I believe Sage's skill trees only gives a 6% bonus to mainstat so the unletttered mods would be even better for a Sage since there is less of a bonus with mainstat.

So first of all as far as Sniper vs. Gunslinger and 1 Gun vs. 2 Guns or 1 Shot vs. Multiple shots, don't let the animations confuse you. The animations are there to be pretty and are essentially just for show, under the hood the combat is still all dice rolls. That being said there is a slight difference, if you had 2 identically geared characters 1 being a Sniper and 1 being a Gunslinger you'd notice their base damages differ even though being identically geared. A Sniper's base damage may read 1700-2000 While a Gunny may have Primary: 1350-1500; Secondary 350-500 So while technically yes a Gunslinger has both his primary and his secondary weapon dealing damage, it takes both the primary and offhand weapon to total the same damage as the single sniper rifle. Now, the offhand of the Gunslinger has a different accuracy, so yes there will be very marginal differences, but basically in practice the end result is that if both classes are identically geared, then Sniper=Gunslinger. As to the argument that Gunslingers have 2 sources of damage so are less dependent on crits, again over a given period of time identically geared Snipers and Slingers will produce identical crit rates so it wont matter. Now going specifically over the argument of Power vs. Crit after patch 2.0, its true that after initial testing most theory crafters were saying, 0 Crit All Power. As more and more practical parses come through though, it became evident that gearing really does depend on what spec or skill tree you choose. Using the Sniper/Slinger as an example, the Marksman/Sharpshooter tree does not have a lot of talents that boost Crit/Surge on certain abilities so those trees benefit more from a Power build, while the Engineering/Saboteur and Lethality/Dirty Fighting trees have a lot of talents with increased Surge and Crit percentages and so they actually parse higher when they sacrifice some Power for Crit in their gear. Keep in mind though that the differences rarely exceed more than 50 DPS and when you're talking about dealing 2650 DPS vs. 2600 DPS it isn't going to be a life or death outcome. As to the question about lettered vs. unlettered mods there are a couple formulae you'll want to take into account. Basically every 1 point in Mainstat will give you +0.2 Bonus Damage and a very small amount of Crit%; and every 1 point in Power will give you +0.24 Bonus Damage. So lets look at the unlettered Artful Mod 31 69 Cunning * 1.09 (+9% from skill tree) = 75.21 * .2 Bonus Damage = 15.042 57 Power * .24 Bonus Damage = 13.68 Total Bonus Damage = 28.722 Now the Artful Mod 31A 84 Cunning * 1.09 = 91.56 * .2 = 18.312 32 Power * .24 = 7.68 Total Bonus Damage = 25.992 So again, you're looking at a 2.73 DPS difference.... which is pretty insignificant so it isn't a huge issue if you only have one mod and not the other, but when given the choice, the unlettered mods are just that tiny bit better.

she was dipping into the armor dye bins

I'm too lazy to respec and learn a new skill tree and then type a guide up.

Black Hole Comms are going to be converted to Classic Comms in 2.0 at a ratio of 1:1. In 2.0 Classic Comms can be used to buy various things, most notably, Campaign Gear (current set piece 61 gear). The problem is that they will cost more, so like 100 Classic Comms for Campaign boots, where currently you can get Black Hole Boots and Gloves for 100 BH comms. TL;DR: I'd say spend your BH comms now.

Eh there are times when you could be at 100% health and want to pop it. Blowing up assassin droids in EC is one that I can think of, as with all abilities you need to learn the mechanics of the game in order to make the most use out of it.

New Ops, if it was new class stories maybe, but it isn't.

Fix'd NO EXCEPTIONS