I remember watching Star Wars as a young boy and thinking to myself, “These stormtrooper guys are terrible shots.  Seriously.  I mean, can’t they see out of those helmets?”  I was not wrong.  The Empire had to cram twenty-five of those guys in a narrow corridor just so they had a chance to hit someone.  Han Solo, caught totally by surprise, not only manages to avoid being gunned down by a wall of stormtroopers who were ready to kill him dead in the face, but actually manages to kill one of THEM just by falling backwards and firing in their general direction.

That scene was a defining moment for the Empire’s mighty cannon-fodder.  It showed how one screaming Amish madman was enough to terrify six armed and armored stormtroopers into tucking tail between legs and running like Hell.  It told us that giving a stormtrooper a gun was like giving Stevie Wonder your car keys.  Finally, in a display that defied science and logic, Imperial stormtroopers seem to attract laser blasts.

 I can’t put the helmet on.  It smells like urine and failure.

I suspect the SWTOR developers were drinking quite heavily, and probably something that could only be classified as “dick-punching potent alcohol”, when they first decided to include the trooper as a playable class.  Then, once they’d regained their eyesight and were released from the hospital, they realized they needed to do some heavy PR work to improve the trooper’s image from “galactic joke” to “galactic badass.”   This video is definitely a step in the right direction – the direction of Trooper Progression.