f13.net

So, PvP on PvE servers. Let's have a thread for that.

Played a few matches last night and got to Valor 3 and TWO currency units (?) shy of the stupid orange legs I was going for (183, need 185). Blah! Overall, it was pretty enjoyable. 2 rounds of huttball and 1 of some other three objective thing with guns.

But it really made me yearn for multiple roles ala Rift. And sad that TOR will likely be saddled with the antiquated WoW implementation of dual spec. Because one thing I liked about Rift was the ability to have a full-on pvp spec (I was jonesing for the Grapple upgrade last night). With dual spec, I'd use up my alternate spec for pvp and never have a dps spec or operations spec.

CC seemed a bit annoying but not too bad, spent most of the match adjusting to the requirements of pvp (instants and ranged). BH seemed pretty damned good, I was in the top five for damage twice and better than middle of the pack the last round. I walked into the fire in huttball so many times I felt dumb. The map was a bit frustrating and I relied heavily on my ranged explosives.

The three cannon map was interesting but then I got frustrated by a good team while playing on a zerg team. There was a combat medic trooper and a dps shadow, trooper was obviously guarding the shadow. They completely locked down the third cannon while a few folks defended the first one and everyone fought over the middle one. So I tried to crack the duo for fun, just no way I could get around that combination, and the rest of my team just let them hold the objective. The guard ability, heavy armor and healing is a hell of a combination for pvp.

Just a thought dump to get the thing rolling.

I played one of the games where you have to capture the turrets so they shoot the Rebels ship. I died a ton (didn't know the map at all, kept getting ganged up on), but I did have a few kills and pretty good damage (playing a BH at level 12).

During Huttball in Beta I also didn't do that great, playing a JK - so far, the BGs/Huttball are much tougher than I expected, mostly because I have a hard time juggling targets and abilities quickly (how many times did I hit an AoE ability like Death From Above when I meant to hit an immediate skill? Too many!).

After I get off DK I plan on spending a bit more time in BGs so I can practice how PvP rolls in this game. Since I run around with my PK flag on all the time, I should figure it out before some random Rebel ganks me...

They put the pass button next to my oil slick, so I've yet to pass but I spill like the drunken captain of an Exxon vessel. My DFA key is a bit funky (Alt 5) because it's so situational and usually an opener in PvE. I've been having trouble with it in PvP action. Another reason I'd like to see the Rift implementation with at least 3 roles available with a keyboard layout so I can remap it to make more sense in pvp. I mean, I'm somewhat competent and at least I'm mostly aware of the game mode goals; so for a newb I did ok. But with the fast pace, I need thought to map to action faster and hitting wonky keystrokes because that works in PvE doesn't work in PvP.

All that aside, it's FUN. Masochistically, I got the urge to pvp after plugging through the Mandalorian flashpoint where we wiped a few times to the republic npc group (one of each archetype). It was initially frustrating (and expensive 2.5k in repairs), but ultimately trying to figure out what the hell they were doing (without a combat log  :why_so_serious:) got me in the pvp mindset. I'm not sure I could overcome that tank/dps duo on Alderaan (I looked it up!), for instance.

Also the first time I was wanting some kind of voip with BC backup. I bet a few of us working together would be mayhem on the warfronts.

While they buff up the lowbies, having more abilities makes a pretty significant difference. Stuff like flame sweep, grapple and oil slick are real nice to have in the bag of tricks, as well as having more talents.

I mapped throw Huttball to shift-mousewheel up, but I've been doing a lot of it (valor 20ish). I've set up a decent ladder system with the other 3 I consistently go into warzones with and we basically pass over every single firetrap to the endzone. Works pretty good until we get punted off the catwalks.

Merc is ridiculous in Warzones right now, I'm usually top 3 for damage and kills, especially in Voidstar where everyone seems to like to group up and stand still for me to DFA the Hell outta them.

You also max commendations at 1000 so I have my full set of level 40 pvp gear waiting in the bank  :drill:

Thanks for saying that, I was about to cap in that case.  I would definitely be doing more warfronts, but we just get so much damn Huttball on my server.  Got up to V10 and decided to call it outside of the Daily until launch in hopes that the server evens out.

I am enjoying Huttball quite a bit, though I am *better* at the 3 turret and the spaceship door BoomBoom one.  Huttball is still amateur hour with a few ringers in it.   Perhaps it is from doing pvp in MMOs too much and not enough FPS? But taking the Z axis into consideration isn't something I am used to .   Too much time in fantasy based pvp running around in a green field fighting, not enough time with catwalks and ramps and such.  I will be standing there zapping someone when suddenly my health bar starts vanishing, and it will take me a few moments to realize there is someone on a catwalk directly above me lighting me arse up.

I am enjoying the warzones a lot right now, in part because my gut says that a few months from now they will be full of farm teams crushing random solo scrubs like me.

I haven't found where to buy pvp gear yet, well, I have but am a bit lost. I saw the vendors on the space station but it seems to be for a commendation type I don't have yet? Anyway, I'm playing a scoundrel as my main and on Shien server I've more or less stopped pvp. The republic sucks, so badly that the only match I won was in a huttball scenario where it was Republic vs Republic...

I wish we could select which of the WF(s) to queue for, or set a filter. Huttball (or rather, teammates not knowing wtf to do) is already getting old. The other two BGs are fairly straightforward assault / domination maps, and I find them a lot more fun.

I haven't pvp'd that much (valor level 8 or so), but BHs/troopers in general seem to be really high damage and lead the charts. Since I'm tank spec, I have some pretty good tools for controlling the enemy and keeping our team alive... as long as there's a healer on our team. Most of the time there isn't.  :awesome_for_real:

Best thing about the Alderaan map was the end and seeing the losing spaceship crash (in this case, it was ours). It makes it all so much more relevant than sitting around the blacksmith or the stables wondering what the hell the point of the map is.

That's really the thing. I got into a huttball match last night against a premade and we just got absolutely slaughtered. I think it was 0-7 when the buzzer sounded, I think my team gave up at some point. I did better as the match went on, because I spent time analyzing what they were doing and trying to counter their tricks. While there wasn't much I could do about their gank group, I had good success against their ball runner, a SW who abused the shit out of force leap (or whatever SWs get like the JK) to hit the end zone from the pit area in front of it. I would hang out on the raised area to shock anyone moving over the top or grapple back the SW when he did his leap crap.

I bound the ball passing ability to a mouse button, and that changed the game. If only I was on an actual team it would've been a lot more fun. I did start to get things moving, distracting the entire enemy team and making a great pass to an open assassin, but then he didn't know what to do and got quickly slaughtered. Later in the match when I was mostly taking notes of what the opposition was doing and trying things out, I would just play ball denial and flame sweep to make everyone jump back and then quickly pass it to open ground to reset the ball.

Again wishing for the multispec, there are several things I'd like for a huttball build. Lower CD on electro dart (the BH CC), lower CD on grapple, stun on grapple, speed buff on the rocket leap thing (don't have that yet, just sayin'), and the rail shot buffs I'm skipping now, because it's a great instant for pvp.

Some random things:

Force leap to an enemy emerging from the spawn point when you're the ball carrier. Easy score.
A 2 minute CD on my only CC-breaking ability is teh sux.
CCing someone on a fire pad never gets old.
Grapple is your friend, BHs.
Map pass to a button.
Passing to open ground is better than going down with the ball (it resets the ball to the middle).

What is the limit on team queue size? We should get some guild matches in.

I think I was playing 8 player matches, but I think you can only queue a group not a raid.

I want to grab the orange chest to go with the legs I got last night, and a blaster. After that it's just building up points for the level 40 stuff. Since Murd said that caps at 1000 I don't see doing a TON of pvp before 40, since 5 or 6 matches got me almost 300 commendation currency thingies.

After 40, though....I've got at least two full suits of gear I have my eye on.

As a  sniper I hate huttball with a passions. Most retarded map . Classes with leaps, sprints and knockbacks rule the day:/  I still top damage charts ( along with sorcs) but my contribution to win is near 0

How on Earth do you top the damage charts?  Every match I play, I get targeted and rushed immediately.  A BH in my guild routinely puts up over 200k damage and it's almost impossible to match that with 6-8 deaths.

Do you use the air jet jump pads?

I only once broke 200k  (typical is ~175k) ,  and usually my main competitors are sorcs.  My damage is basically I spam frag grenade on cooldown and use cover-sniper (have perk for instant snipe in cover) sequence. Channeled shots are tricky to land on this map so i try avoid them. If someone gets on me I use debilitate, shiv(now at lvl 28 I will use eviscerate instead), ambush knockback  and at that point I can usually just kill before enemy closes again, use flashbang if more than one enemy (and if you are chain ccd well its gg no matter what class your are : ) . And generally I try stay away from aggro range of large mobs (but close enough to frag grenade em)

I feel better now.  I can manage 160-180k every match, but almost never come higher than 3rd on the charts.  I use the insta sniper and the finisher when able, drop frag grenades while moving, and use the ae knockback when I get melee on me.  I'm still trying to find an "ideal" rotation, but sniper is so situational that a rotation doesn't really seem in order.

Thanks for the info Max

Knock backs into the acid are almost as much fun as stunning someone on the firepads. We do a lot of throwing the ball up onto catwalks from the pits and that seems to get us a lot of space. Huttball is capped at 6-0 and if you hit that you get dick for experience, so you'll see the good ol' farming kills at 5-0.

Already seeing a lot of idlers, especially in Alderaan. There needs to be a report button.
I hit 25 on my  bounty hunter today and the only quests I've done past Hutta, is the class quests on Kaas and Balmora, the space missions and ran each FP up to the Mandalorian one at least once. Crafting is all in the 175 - 225 range and I'm sufficiently geared up imo, do leveling via PvP is entirely viable. Not hurting for too much and thoroughly enjoying my class quest. Making sure I grab the daily space and PvP quests help a ton.

With all the instakill fire around and Z axis shenanigans, huttball is basically tor anroc from WAR, only worse since it requires more from people than just holding the 'flag'. If you have lots of knockbacks, stuns and charge abilities (that can easily get you to a top platform), you'll probably enjoy it. It doesn't help that pvp in this game is STILL not as responsive as WOW (and to be fair, most games aren't) and doesn't give as clear feedback regarding which people are stunned / mezzed / etc. I've stunned / harpooned people many times only to find that they weren't actually standing where my screen was showing them to be. Hope you don't have 200+ ping!

Re the huttball pads: they seem to be mostly random... I first thought the direction they blew you in depended on which direction you approached them from, but that doesn't seem to be the case.

PVP with knockbacks and insta-kills is not fun.

mapped the huttball to a mouse key, but not working so hot, wish there was a way i could practice it.  I guess I could roll a BH cause one of their skills uses a similar targetting method.

I hit hutball, see the target pass thing then click again and nothing happens.. sometimes it is cause i am stunned other times it clearly seems like it should just be working /shrug.  I am sure it is a user error issue, but just not certain what I am doing wrong.

As for knockbacks/grappling hook is not fun pvp.  Are there any classes that don't have some sort of kockback or grappling hook? and if not that then the *leap a tall builging in a single bound jump* thing?

KB abilties are not a game-killer by themselves (though annoying - especially in a game with less-than-ideal responsiveness like WAR and SWTOR), but when you add instant-kill mechanics and annoying Z-coordinate shenanigans, they turn into very Bad Things.

In either case, more classes having abilities like this makes things worse, not better... at least IMO.

You guys are very serious.

What has happened to the world when I'm a cheerleader for grouping and pvp?

Did you play warhammer?

Huttball is a blast and very different for Tor Anroc. Don't get insta-killed on firepads by passing over them. The acid isn't insta-kill either. You guys are very serious about this  :oh_i_see:

Having said that, I can see why people wouldn't like it and it'd be nice to be able to queue for the Warzones individually. I went on a losing spree the other night that resulted in me just not queuing anymore because I couldn't handle another game of Huttball, but would have been happy in Voidstar or Alderaan.

The last couple of days were nice as the spread of games was pretty even, but up until that point it was 75% Huttball since (I'm assuming) Empire outnumbers the Republic by a considerable amount.

Yeah, most of my pvp has been empire vs empire huttball.

Fire pads make me laugh, because they trick me every damned time. While I rarely die to them, I usually slash my hps down. I see it as handicapping myself so I don't steal all the glory and purpz. Yet to splashdown in the acid wading pool.

The first warzone I got was Voidstar (I think, the one where you have to breach a series of doors and download some data) and there are plenty of places you can get instakilled by knockback on there, by falling to your death.

Love Huttball.  My Marauder tears things up and is actually pretty damn mobile, although the 2 minute cooldown on CC break is  :uhrr: I've yet to be chain CC'd or anything too horrible (unless I was carrying the ball, where it would be expected).  Force Charging up the z axis is win.  Force Choke/2 snares make me very good at dealing with the carrier and good at CC in general.  Last of all, the game is just straightfowardly fun!  If only it didn't de-activate sprint every time you died.  That shit is beyond annoying.

I get my Shield Tech rocket jump thingie that's basically BH force leap in two more levels, so I'm excited to have both that AND grapple. My CC is only a couple seconds with a pretty slow regen. I do have access to some great things I've mentioned before, a couple decent snares that talent onto other abilities...but without multiple specs I won't be using them (pvp would be my 3rd spec after tank then dps). I think the BH's best role is to be obnoxious with AE stuff and guard the goal against stuff like SW leaps.

Marauders Force Leaping into the end zone is just  :heartbreak:

As a heal spec Sorcerer, I get chain cc'd a lot.  It's very frustrating on top of the 30% reduction to healing in pvp.

I might have to give this a try on my Sorcerer.

Maybe I'm mis-remembering when I got the ability, but there's that "break CC" power for inquisitors/sorcerers .... I haven't had to deal with chain CC tho, so maybe that's the difference.

I think every class gets a version of it, but it's on a 2 minute CD.

PvP is utterly frustrating and sucking out my will to even log in. Empire players seem to be to dumb to grasp even simple basics of teamplay.

I think I lost 15 battlegrounds in a row today to people running into enemy groups single file one by one.

Raging in the /ops channel might  very well get my banned.  :why_so_serious:

PUG PvP in any game is shit most of the time.  Any game where you have to essentially rely on morons will just make u want to slit your wrists.  I personally enjoy Pvp in TOR including Hutball.  My Sorc tears people up and I top dmg 99% of my games.  I love killing newbs at this stage of the game :)

Just queueing with one other person who knows what they are doing lead to 8 huttball wins in a row this morning, all of them 6-0.  My guess is about 90% of the people playing huttball don't have "pass ball" on their bars at all.

PVP in this game is broken in so many ways it's not even funny. It's probably fun to slaughter newbs if you queue into them as a level 40+ (preferably 50 with pvp gear) premade group, but that's not really my cup of tea...

Empire the new Alliance? c/d

i think the best use of grapple I saw was a powertech standing right in front of the hazards in huttball, then pulling players onto the fire when it came up.  Some guy got me twice a few games ago with this little trick.  Haven't seen it since.

Bars? MOUSE BUTTON  :grin:

I actually mapped mine to "F".

Has anyone figured how gear works in PVP? Apparently stats are normalized to some "80% of lvl 50 in blues" level, meaning if you have too good gear it gets normalized down. You can notice this by having more HP outside warzones and in them you sometimes have less. So what's the point of PVP gear?

I :HEART: huttball.  Not with pubbies though.  Pubbies make me stabby.  If you are playing with pubbies, you can find out really quick who knows what to do.  Send them a whisper and tell them to work with you.  


Good stuff.  Just to add:
Forward positioning and escort are the keys to Huttball.  
Spam the ball carrier with heals and bubble protections.
Force slams and knockbacks on the walkways/near acid pits/fire = win
Force leaping (or guardian leaping forward) = easy advancement
Don't use your CC breaker ever.  Unless you're the ball carrier.  If you're not the ball carrier, take the death and respawn.  The CD is too high to justifiy otherwise.
Don't use your CCs ever.  Unless it's on the the ball carrier.
Taunts / AoE taunts are awesome.  Unless they target you, they're going to do 30 percent less damage to whoever they are attacking.
Inquisitors/Consulars and Guardians/Juggernauts make the best ball carriers, IMHO
Zoom your mouse out as far as you can when escorting.  Position your character forward, run backward as you're looking at the ball carrier.  Ignore damage done to you unless you have the ball.
Pass early, pass often.
In the event the game ends in a tie, the win goes to the team that has possession of the ball.

In huttball, the CC breaker REALLY should reset on death....

I seriously doubt it gets normalized DOWN, i can see how lowbies get bumped up to that level but that is it.

I'm scared to PVP with my toon because I'll outlevel everything.

I'm not sure, but got a taste of endgame pvp last weekend.  A level 50 juggernaut carried the ball from one end of the board to the other while only taking about 30% damage.  He wasn't getting all that many heals either.  (I think I was the highest level other than the Jug at 41)

PvP in this game will need a) some adjustments to gear and cc timers, b) more variety than 3 instanced matches and c) some decent open world rewards in order to survive.  

I'm not optimistic about seeing changes in these any time soon.

Single best change they could make.

One thing to note: the tank Powertech becomes a pretty good ball carrier when they pick up Jet Charge at level 32. Basically a force leap.

I haven't had much trouble with cc and i carry the ball a lot.  The immunity kicks in fairly fast.

What immunity ?

And I find carrying the ball almost impossibe, it seems to have a automatic runspeed debuff.

Resolve, the silver bar that fills up around your portrait and below nameplates.  Once it's full, you're immune to CC.

Edit: Yes, carrying the huttball does reduce your movement speed.

For 8 seconds.  Which is a lifetime literally in a pvp fight.

My only shallow complaint with pugging is most people don't respect my awesome protecting. I'll mitigate like 40k damage through my protection abilities and they all vote for the best healer who only did like 10k healing, mostly to himself. 

The reason the Sith melee train hasn't killed you the entire game Mr. Gunslinger, is because I am granting you like 80% Damage Reduction !  :why_so_serious:

Yeah, the first few days were actually fun when everyone was a lowbie.  But now there are poopsockers running around in full champion gear slaughtering everybody.  i ran into a level 50 Trooper in full champion gear yesterday and he literally could not be killed.  We had 4-5 people on him, we were spamming stuns/ interrupts, but he was taking so little damage that he could easily heal through the dps.  One interesting thing about his game:  It is much easier on hardcasting healers than wow because interrupts only lock out that ability, not an entire class.  So if I hard interrupt his short heal he can just cast the long heal and there isn't boo I can do about it (unless I have another stun up and his cc bar isn't full).

Because there isn't many 50s yet most 50s will drop down.  But when they start populating your server you should start to see less of them in the lower bracket.

i don't believe there are any brackets.  Evertone plays in the same bracket, be it a newly minted level 10 or a pimped out level 50.

At some point the 50s will settle on the PvP that is most fun / quickest and easiest to complete / best resources versus time invested. This could include the lowbie ones, especially if the slots fill up quickly with lower level characters.

From what i read, the system is actually quite more sensible -- the game compares your gear to some expected "decent standard" for your level. This difference is then applied to your scaled up character -- if your gear is better than the expected you get a bonus matching that, if it's worse then your final stats are reduced accordingly. That means people in good gear for their level can actually benefit from it, while ones who don't... well, don't.

THis is third hand info though, no clue how accurate it is.

I absolutely adore playing my agent in PvP; she's on the absolute high end of the PvP imbalance spectrum.

That may change if the CC breaks are adjusted to reset on death, but for the time being, I frequently nova people to death before they have time to move. Again, and again, and again. DON'T EVEN CARE ANYMORE, WANTONLY ENJOYING IT

My experience on my healing medic is... different...  They nerfed healing 30% in warzones making it almost impossible to keep someone up against two dps, or yourself up against one who is correctly cc'ing you (if 2 dps are on you forget about it).  If support +dps can't beat 2 dps, what is the point of playing a support class?

I've had much more success fake dpsing and using my heals on myself to stay up while 1v1ing folks.  I think thats kind of sad.

PVP is in a pretty sad state. My shortlist:
- bad ability responsiveness compared to WOW and RIFT (but still better than many other games). Skills can go on cooldown but not go off, or appear to go off but not actually do, your CC break ability isn't guaranteed to work even if you mash the button, etc.
- related to the responsiveness issue, many movement abilities are buggy as heck (grapple/harpoon are prime offenders here) and sometimes don't work at all
- level 50s in the same bracket as level 10s... heck, even level 40s have a huge advantage. Similarly, no queue logic for matching premades v premades (even WOW has this, iirc)
- animation speed disparities leading to 'mirror' abilities not actually being mirrored (mortar volley <> DFA)
- healing is not rewarding, and very annoying due to the bad UI; positioning yourself as a healer can be aggravating due to the aforementioned responsiveness issues (try to heal+strafe+heal)
- PVP gear acquisition is kinda clownshoes
- Ilum

Interestingly enough, class balance isn't too bad *at 50* (level 50s with pvp gear against lower levels is ridiculous though). Each AC has a specific role and they excel at it, but they also each have weaknesses.


edit: there is no reverse bolstering, so the more epics you have as a 50, the more you will wreck people. I'm a fairly new 50 with only 3 pieces of pvp gear (rest greens/oranges) and I play the lowest damage tank class in the game, but I still hit top damage even if not focusing on it. 1v2ing level 10-25s isn't hard at all either, despite me not having too many burst abilities.

When grapple doesn't work it is usually because the target had the immunity going.

Nah, I make sure they don't have the immunity bar when I harpoon them. It works fine if the target is stationary, but if he's moving (or worse yet, charging at someone) there are a few seconds where I can't hit them even though they're in front of me on my screen, then they rubberband to a completely different location. It's not really a problem with harpoon/grapple itself, but rather their netcode / how they resolve conflicts.

Yeah, you see this with Mobs from time to time, too, if they're wandering or running in to beat on your comp and you try to grapple them to you.

The ability animation firing but not triggering the ability thing is frustrating as all hell in PvP and PvE.  You'll be locked-out from doing anything until the animation completes, but you're really just standing there doing nothing.

Most matches I have been in have been rather laggy.

Yeah, this is my #1 issue really (and just as much in pve as in pvp). Say what you want about WOW, but it has the most fluid / responsive abilities I've ever seen in a MMOG -- and I play on a west coast server from Europe with 700 ping! I only have a 130ish ping in SWTOR, but it feels sluggish and unreliable when I hit my ability hotkeys. It seems like the client prioritizes animation completion in favor of player input, which is a huge no-no in my book...

I to also regularly throw a knife before my arm swings.  :oh_i_see:

I should add to that list:

No AFK detection/reporting, single-server queues. And for many servers, you'll end up with multiple known afkers on your team every queue.

There is some sort of afk detection, i got booted of a game for missing the portal opening once.

If you walk out of the portal and find a corner to hide in you can AFK to your heart's desire - so long as nobody kills you before the match ends.

Yeah, the detection debuff is "leave the spawn point", but makes no attempt to deal with "and afk stealthed 15 feet from it"

Though with how awards work, is it even worth afking here? You get a shitload of your merits that I've seen from actively doing shit and getting medals.

It's "worth it" because the alternative to afking is not participating, it's not queueing.  Someone sitting in a corner doing nothing isn't doing it because its more fun than actually playing, they are trying to farm points while they can't play.

Look at how cute and naive I was...   On my server the warzone that pops is almost always Huttball, and it is appears to be mainly full of lvl 50s waffle stomping people like me who are only lvl 35.  I realize the game just came out, but to not have had a lvl 50 only bracket in place at release is  :geezer: :angryfist: :tantrum:

Curious to see what the *world pvp* on a pvp server ends up being like. 

In the leveling zones? Stupid as it always is in every open PvP server that has ever existed.


In the level 50 pvp planet, it has potential to recapture some DaoC glory days, but it could easily fuck itself.

potential is good, and I definately had a great time in Daoc.

huehuehue.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=7ykBaecLfjg

Two minutes ago i thought the one thing this game had going for pvp was fairly balanced classes :P

All the ranged DPS specs have some variation of that nonsense more or less.

Yeah. Also, it's a level 50 taking out lots of people who are far lower than him in level (all but 2). If it had been a video of one match where he dominated everyone then I'd be more convinced but lots of little shots from different matches.

Most people are claiming JC/SI is most OP in PvP.

They probably are, be it healer or ranged DPS. My Win/Loss in warzones is seemingly proportional to the number of them on my side vs. theirs.

They're the shadowpriests of SWTOR, so they can pad the numbers really well... they are also the only ranged class that can really kite, which works well against the average PUGger (keyboard turner / clicker) in a battleground.

IMO the other ranged classes (especially mercenary/commando) are much nastier since they have burst that can kill people in 5 seconds or less. Sages/inquisitors kill a lot slower...

I was in a semi pug group (3 of us joined as a group) last night that got absolutely steamrollered by an Empire side made up of 4 SIs and 4 IAs. I didn't think you could join as a raid ops and I find it hard to believe that it was purely random - especially given the way they played.

Sages/Inquisitors are considered mean because they can kill at a decent rate, and can be pretty obnoxious to kill if they want to be.

After playing my Merc/Commando for a bit this weekend: looooool. Seriously, looooooool. I just got grav round. I don't know how to explain to the entire enemy team that if you let me stand somewhere and hard cast for a solid 20-30 seconds, you're all going to be dead except the crazy geared tank. I had two matches where I just stood somewhere off to the side and proceeded to absolutely murder everyone. And then I had a few where someone noticed me, and pretty much kept me from doing much of dick.

What I have noticed is that people aren't clued in yet on either side that the AE ground templates aren't actually the size of the AE. You need to move a few feet farther back, folks. Not stop well within DFA's radius when fleeing it.

Healing isn't that bad in this game's pvp, what makes it win matches from what I've seen is that in both the door busting and turret games being able to stay up contesting a point for 15 seconds longer = winning. Just due to how close the spawns are, and how long the caps take.

Yep, grav round and tracer missile is insane. I make it a point to get in the face of enemy mercs whenever possible. Otherwise I just get on a healer and do the 'have fun trying to get a single heal off' dance.

Speaking of healers - the issue with healing isn't really teh healing numbars, but more the fact that it doesn't feel rewarding (you fight the game's UI and the unresponsive skill system and everyone on the enemy team trying to kill you -- and pvp healing isn't anywhere near as strong as in other games) and it only gives 2 medals if you concentrate entirely on healing. You NEED to do damage and snipe kills as a healer if you want the same rewards as a DPS. FWIW I can easily get 8-9 medals every game as a tank without any substantial effort -- guard a squishy, aoe taunt + aoe nuke the zerg, taunt whoever's trying to kill our squishies, etc. Yeah, you can get MVP votes (I always give mine to a healer), but relying on puggie goodwill... haha no.

Voidstar is pretty much 100% about the rez timer; on defense you can get good results by staying away from the zerg and moving in after most everyone has died, and just put DOTs on everyone / harass / stay alive as long as you can, buying time until the next rez wave.

Most of this is anecdotal/armchair gametheory, but I like to think of myself as a good pvp analyst as well as someone who could fly a helicopter and deliver a baby at the same time if I really had to. I am also, like 100% of other people, self-assured that I am an above average driver. So there's absolutely no way that this analysis could be anything other than pure, unalloyed truth:

- Smugglers/Agents are insane in pvp when played well. GS/Sniper have excellent positional capacities and roles in all of the current warzones (in effect, there's always a place where they can situate themselves against where the warzone objectives force the enemy to tread), have a wonderful snap/nova kit (including a very, very long period of uninterruptability while in cover). Ace Scoundrel/Operatives are even more hilariously warzone-breaking, cycling through a series of quick-refreshing battlefield CC and ambush damage that defies comparison. If SWTOR had arena, I don't yet see how anyone could manage a top team that isn't a combo of the smuggler/agent AC's. I know that's a fairly bold statement, ultimately, but it's difficult to fathom otherwise. However! They are only insane in pvp when played well, and the average smuggler/agent player is just meh. But fortunately for the average player, we have

- Consulars/Inquisitors, whose primary strength so far seems to be the best skill-to-payoff ratio. Unlike the rogues above, who really have to put in some good play to get the op-ness, the wizards give the best payoff for the average player and provide the best and most straightforward strategies (a large part of this is that a mana pool is the least cognitively taxing and best suited for a battlezone environment, since it frontloads all your power and gives you plenty to burn through well through the standard warzone lifespan) for hammering at people in the sluggish mash of swtor combat.

- Troopers/Bounty Hunters are just there, without either the op-ness factor of agents nor the easier overhead of consulars, and are consigned mostly to spamming grav round/demo round/hib/fa patterns into the enemy. They can, though, take solace in the fact that they are not

- JK/Warriors, who are mechanically underwhelming and do absolutely nothing that other classes can't do much better, and whose kit leaves them precipitously open to the many tools of harassment in the kits of everyone else's classes. They have the biggest struggle with the game's presently unresponsive combat system and engine/combat animation goofiness, and have the resource management system least suited to warzone PvP. It's going to take a wide range of buffs relative to the other classes before they are worth dealing with as pvp-centric toons.

I mostly agree with that, some contentions:

- The agents' deadliness diminishes as the enemy zerg grows larger, and they suffer a lot from the presence of a tank as their sustained damage isn't as uber as other ACs' and they go splat quickly. If I (tank) am next to the agent's victim, I can stun the agent when he does the opener stun, and taunt him if he trinkets the stun... meaning he'll do 80% less damage and the gank target will get out of the stun soon with a white resolve bar. Once the burst is spent, the agent is squishier than almost all other classes.

- Sorc/sage are really the 'pressure' class, they can put out a lot of damage but it is mostly through DOTs and channels. They have one burst skill that can do about ~4k on a long cooldown... that's very far from agent/commando/juggernaut/sentinel burst. I agree though that in a typical pug v pug scenario (without heals, guard, peels, etcetera) this is more than enough to chain-kill people.

- Juggernauts/guardians are better off than marauders/sentinels imo, as they can do insane AOE burst (6k+ to 5 targets) while in a tank stance with the sweep if they spec right. Both sentinels and juggernauts have free melee snares which + the charges makes them have very high damage uptime on their kill target. Combine this with a healing debuff and they're the MS warrior of SWTOR. NB: I'm not sure how much *damage* they do, but the utility seems to be alright.

I would say that this is an easy theorycraft scenario for managing typical, average-skill agents/scoundrels. It's its own caveat.

All of the pvp assessments are premature.  Now that I have a decent amount of champion gear, I can see that gear/level will matter more than it seems superficially.  As a sniper, my damage and survivability went up significantly at 50 and has improved with each improvement in gear.  When the majority of the playerbase is 50 and has at least champion level gear, we'll start to see a more level playing field.  

Two things:

1) Anecdotally, the top performers on my particular server are a sentenel and a scoundrel.  I'd say that the scoundrel is due to mechanics, but both are beginning to build battlemaster suits.  As in all MMO's, gear > all.

2) The cover mechanic causes a LOT of lag and unresposive play for my sniper in pvp.  The class can be a real challenge in games where play is constantly moving.

This has been my experience as a marks sniper too - it amazes me that so many enemy teams will let me set up my blinking/glowing red shop on the edge of a fight and just lay waste to people.

I don't disagree with that... I'm on an RP server so the pvp player pool is  :awesome_for_real:

Still, as a tank I can (and usually do) make life hell for ganker classes. It's probably the biggest redeeming factor actually, as my own damage isn't anything to write home about!


And re Nebu's point: yes, gear > all... and as I posted before, it makes you a lot more deadly vs lower-level players as well, since there is no reverse bolstering. There's a HUGE difference between a green-geared fresh 50 and someone in full champion gear. The gulf will get wider as the poopsockers hit rank 60+.

I'm constantly surprised at how many people will stand in my orbital strike for the full duration... and I love them for it.

I almost forgot... FIX RESOLVE PLEASE!

It's been that way in every bit of MMO PvP to date. The people who theoretically are supposed to cross the field and shut you down, just die in no mans land and your counterparts on the other end are busying doing the same to your team.

The whole 'get the healer in the back' thing that sounds like such a simple idea, but the reality is unless your own support is moving in pace with you, you are just sending your boys off to die, as they'll be out of range of their own teams support while their targets will have all the support they need.

It's how I make my living as a tank in pvp, making sure my own ranged and support stay alive while holding down a position. Take how annoying you are behind that shield now imagine I'm there peeling, stunning and providing you with 50-80% Damage Reduction the entire time  :why_so_serious: .


Then there's the simple fact that currently the number of people who can lay waste from range compared to the number of people who can shut that down isn't equal at all. The number of sorcs/snipers/commandos shitting things up is much higher then the number of people who can lock them down.

No doubt - one of the reasons I like the non-Huttball modes is that I get to play defense after a point is captured - if I've got a tank with me, they're going to have to send 4+ people to dislodge us in a reasonable amount of time, and the rest of the team gets to raise hell elsewhere.

Additionally, while I haven't seen an actual breakdown in how the stat works, from what I've been hearing the Expertise stat which is on most PVP gear makes a big difference in PVP, so having good PVP gear is more important than just having good gear in general.

I don't know if it's my powertech's purple gear, but the pve game can make you very lax about that. I cherish stumbling across a champ mob who can actually wreck my day because it snaps me out of the 'stand and destroy' loop. Even gold mobs it doesn't matter one way or another if I stand in the fire or not, I just interrupt to try and stay in practice.

A bit worried about pvp gear, since I decided to stop gearing early and it's the same old reward the victors so they vic more scenario; especially when they nerfed loser rewards.

If you want to pvp and enjoy it, you NEED pvp gear.  Now that my champion set is almost finished, I'm routinely doing 250-300k damage in battles (when there is a good healer).  Having expertise does wonders for both damage and survivability.  Low levels don't stand a chance against a well-geared 50.  The 50 has far more tools and better gear.

I also encourage you all to play a scoundrel before they get nerfed.  The class is ridiculous in pvp.  I routinely get killed by them before their 4s stun wears off.

It increases damage done and decreases damage taken, it's a huge bonus vs people without it.

So I have to not enjoy it so I can enjoy it.

Such is the mantra of MMO's.

Gabe Amontillado's PvP Blog update. (http://www.swtor.com/blog/new-year%E2%80%99s-pvp-update)


 :awesome_for_real:

"Oh shit, this was a terrible idea. On the short list"

Props for fixing it quickly, but still guys.. this isn't exactly a new problem :P

I've been hoping they would separate out the 50s but I'm just about to hit 50 so now I want my easy lowbie farming before they add that shit and force me to fight crazy geared people 24/7.

Thank god.  Hopefully this gets in sooner rather than later so I can enjoy PvP from 40-50.

Crap, I pretty much guarantee the day I hit 50 they will implement this :-(

I like the idea, need only one more item to finish my pvp set. No I did not grind, only valor lvl 29 but I got very lucky with the bags.

Fresh lvl 50 are like lvl 10 with the lvl 50 bolster buff, fresh meat for my scoundrel.   :drill:

Everyone is fresh meat for scoundrels.  The class is stupid overpowered in pvp when geared.  There are three scoundrels on my server that routinely do 350k damage in the warfronts with the next closest person being in the 180k range.  I have nearly full champion gear and a scoundrel can kill me shortly after stun wears off.  That's about 15k HP in 6-8s

(http://4.bp.blogspot.com/_iRFa-dX-qzU/S4EC3zK9lsI/AAAAAAAABr4/UEW-RXF1Ijk/s400/HanSolo.jpg)

What do they actually do? I'm IA and yet to find my can of whoop-ass. I'm only lvl 27 though. I can just shiv and backstab during the 4s stun I have.

1) Get to 50
2) Get your Champion set
3) Determine a solid rotation
4) Stun and burst people down.  The forums have all sorts of posts of scoundrels doing 600k+ in single target damage.

As made popular during a certain cantina scene, Scoundrels shoot first.  :drill:

Faceitousness aside, at level 36, Scoundrels get an ability called Shoot First which is a traditional, behind-the-target-in-stealth opener and can be talented to incap the target. The 31 point Scrapper talent is Flechette round which a) doesn't break stealth and b) buffs Shoot First so from level 40, the opening rotation from stealth after popping a relic and adrenal will be Flechette Round, Shoot First followed quickly by Cheap Shot, Back Blast and Vital Shot.

You'll have substitute your own Operative skills in for the above.

You need a couple of more lvls then you can turn your Hidden Strike into a 3sec knockdown and after that you get access to acid blade
dot with 50% armor penetration that works with hidden strike and backstab and ignores global cd. Plus a few extras then like to add
a root to your snare or get lethality for extra 6% critical chance and so on.

lvl 50, add pvp gear and stack expertise......



Well it depands on the team. Sure I can post excactly one screenshot as you describe.

(http://img703.imageshack.us/img703/2452/pvp2k.jpg)


But still we lost. If you get in a team that has more 50th, the difference ist not that much bigger.


(http://img696.imageshack.us/img696/2842/pvp1da.jpg)


IMO a lvl 50 bracket will fix most of that stuff, ok after all gear up........

Zardoz: I'm in full champion gear and, as a sniper, I can NEVER produce numbers like that.  If I shoot non-stop with zero deaths, I can muster a score close to 300k.  I can't touch the kills/damage that an equally geared scoundrel can. Ever.  Are you suggesting that I always finish second to a scoundrel in the tables just because they are a better player?   Scoundrel is the only class that not only outperforms me, but they do it consistently by a HUGE margin.

I wish I could say that but today was the first time I saw a lvl 50 sniper on the enemy team.

On my server I have bounty hunters and sith inquisitor that can produce the same numbers as I do.
Sometimes I finish the map at 3 or 4 dmg rank with ~300k dmg. Maybe you should try Lethality skilltree and see how this works for you...

Oh and yes our burst at last with the scrapper tree ist very high but well we are a enhanced wow rogue copy v2.0 class what do you expect from this.

I've seen Sorcs pull 300k rounds now and again.  That's what I'm running so I watch for this.  That's probably tab dotting and AoE channels which aren't nearly as effective as the single target clownshoes/killjobs I see the IA classes doing.

If they are bursting down reasonably geared people in a 4 second period that obviously needs to change.  I know I've been hit with back-to-back 5k+ hits but as a softie I've been holding judgement until I have some expertise.

Is the problem just the scoundrel opener?   I know all the good ones on my server but I've never been really pounded by them on my tank.   I wonder if their dps drops off after the target fails to die quick?

It definitely drops off after Acid Blade + Hidden Strike, but it's certainly not bad if we can squeeze a Backstab in every 15s to keep our Armor Pen buff up.  There's also the risk of the re-open with Cloaking Screen at a two minute CD talented.

I tested this with the pimped out Scoundrel in my guild and he hits pretty hard but definitely a good chunk less than vs non-tank classes.   My additional health pool means I'm only half dead when he finishes the combo.   After the combo it's far more manageable.    Vanishing to do it all over again is  :uhrr: though.   Nerfs will happen so enjoy scoundrel/operative now.

Well I play swtor only for the free month so nerfs want hurt me and as a scoundrel you can allways go healer and still make some dmg.


After respec yesterday to sawbones with 170k dmg and 360k healing:

(http://img545.imageshack.us/img545/5093/heal2v.jpg)


Oh and some bh, jedi sentinal with 500k, some with 600k+ http://www.swtor.com/community/showthread.php?t=136113&page=1



In the end, I still prefer pvp in fps like battlefield 3. It's enjoyable in small doses here but nothing more................

Yeah, you wanna know what fucking freaking sucks, and you should never ever make one if you like PvP unless you are seriously into masochism? A Vanguard.

Bioware people, I have insults in multiple languages for you.

Fordel has been kicking ass doing the protecting thing on his. You have a role as a tank in PVP in SWTOR, which is pretty unusual for an MMO.

Yep. Vanguards probably do the least damage/burst out of all classes (even among tanks - jedi guardians can do monstrous damage, and shadows can gank), but they're freaking hard to kill. Putting guard on people + taunting / aoe taunting enemies is where it's at, along with using the various cc options available. You don't have the burst to kill a healer that's any good, but you can make his life a living hell -- while protecting the squishies on your own team.

"Freaking hard to kill"?

Let's say I'll get back to you in a couple of weeks. I am not sure what are you playing but I usually die in a matter of seconds, while watching my character spasming for this or that CC.

You had an awesome role as an anti-magic tank in Rift too up to a certain point, but casters where complaining so they changed that. I am not against specialist roles in PvP games, but I really have a hard time finding any real use for this class so far that can be in any way rewarding or recognizable. It really doesn't feel like they get any significant survivability option, especially considering the lack of anti-cc tools and the patheticness of the self healing things.

That said, still working on it. More comments when fully PvP geared.

EDIT: Another funny thing is that when I play full DPS just because I am very frustrated and want to dish out some rage I easily end up in the top brackets for damage in my team most of the times. Which says a lot about how many poor players are around these days.

Vanguards/Powertechs are a total bitch to kill. You can assist train them down like anyone else, but as far as "if I'm going to shoot someone with grav rounds", the answer is "and they're going to DIE" unless it's a Vanguard/PT. At which point they're going to giggle madly at me.

Are you tank specced? IE: Shield Specialist ?

Or did you spec the Vanguard DPS tree? IE: Tactics?


Tactics is pretty much a load of shit atm, it's a bunch of pressure and mobility with no real kick to back it up. Like you are fishing for high impact bolt crits every 15 seconds, WOOO big time burst :P


Shield Spec is working fine as far as I can tell, it's not OP and not UP. It has a job and it's useful in every scenario I've run so far. We'll never do the damage some other specs push out but we can survive and protect against things no one else can too. Don't try to be a lone ranger or anything though, leave that to the Stealthers and Ranged DPS with heals.

The short coming of the Tanky Vanguard in pvp, is once your IN a fight, you are IN IT, the end. You have no real escape unless it's huttball and you can storm 3 levels away. Don't even bother trying to run, it's not like you can 'heal up' behind a corner anyways. Like yea, if you can LoS enemy damage, go for it, but its usually best to just stay in the fight. Like half my medals in any match are "you lived through 5 normal healthbars of life you crazy bastard".


Your not going to light the world on fire with your burst either as a tank vanguard, but its usually enough to finish something off. Also don't try to solo a healer 1v1, they'll just laugh at you  :why_so_serious: . You can do a good job of shutting on down, but not killing it on your own.

I ran a few warzones with some BC people, had lots of fun but had to drop out rather quickly due to real life "issues"  :why_so_serious:

If anybody is interested to do that again, I am usually game, no matter what character I am playing atm.

I even got us a free mumble (http://www.mumble.com)server, pretty sure voicecom is needed for stuff like this, since entering a warzone BREAKS UP THE FUCKING GROUP and you have to REFORM IT EVERY SINGLE TIME.

Fakeedit: I don't have access to the server info from work, gonna add it later.

As a 42 scoundrel, I find I do ok but not great  in everything BUT huttball, but maybe that's because I hate huttball. But I'm specced healing at the moment, so maybe if I was dps, I'd be doing more than ok.

As the gear gets better I've seen Huttball becoming mostly about who has a tank beefy enough to abuse the resolve system.  Otherwise it's who makes the most use of the pushes and pulls.  I like Huttball but will welcome a more even spread of matches down the line.

Some tanks (guardians/juggernauts) are also More Equal than others for Huttball, as they have 2 charge abilities. Charge to an enemy standing on one of the platforms close to the center, charge a friend on one of the last platforms (preferably a stealther so the enemy doesn't expect it), and run for the goal!

Hoping for some better WZs myself... a 16-person 5-node domination map (Arathi Basin ++) would be good. Alderaan is nice and all, but "hold 2 of 3" has a lot less strategy than "hold 3 of 5".

Here's an example of the scoundrel stuff I was talking about.  Consumables need to be toned down as does this class.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=wW2ZB55pF1E

Look at how fast he's blowing people up.  I can't think of another class that can do this. I also wish that I got to play against people this bad.  1 v 3 and noone stuns/roots him?  Lol

Their ranged counterpart can do that, as can Commando's/Mercs.

There were only like two moments in that video where she was actually being attacked, there was almost always something else grabbing attention in the fight.



It's a lot of damage no doubt about it though. My Vanguard will never hit that hard is my guess, but my Vanguard will also come out of that full opener burn sequence with like 50-70% Hp still  :why_so_serious:

The consumables are a bigger problem than the class (which is just like an ambush rogue was in vanilla wow, 1-trick ganker pony... yeah, it's not good design either way). That scoundrel stacks up at least two burst cooldowns with the red buff, the expertise stim, a damage trinket and an adrenal. All of that (except for the expertise stim which is cheap) is reusable since bioengineers get infinite adrenals. At least 4 of those buffs scale with attack power / crit / surge, which makes them even nastier.

To abuse another WOW parallel, burst cooldowns were made exclusive with each other (double trinket AP POM pyro mages) in BC or so. This means we have 2 years to go until TOR fixes this, as well...  :why_so_serious:

I go through the level 44 vendor-bought potions as a Vanguard like crazy. I consistently pull top medals, in the 8-10 range, as Shield Spec.

Obviously, the Vanguard survivability goes insanely up if you have a pocket healer you can queue with. I live 4-5 times longer if I'm guarding the healer and just keeping people off of them.

Their main job is to just keep people off of control points, and to move around like crazy. Seriously, with the charge and +30% movespeed buff, along with a single and multi target stuff, as well as harpoon on a 35s cooldown, you are a ridiculous annoyance.

And, of course, Expertise makes ALL the difference.

From the relevant thread (http://www.swtor.com/community/showthread.php?t=141362) it sounds more like it's mainly the consumables, and calling for class nerf along with changing them may be premature. Trying to adjust more than one factor at once is kinda basic error.

Yeah, tank specs have it (relatively) easy when it comes to medals. Guard itself can guarantee you 3-4 medals, and you can also get those with taunts (especially the aoe taunt!) without any danger of dying. The burst damage (2.5k/5k?) medals are out of reach, and so are the healing medals unless you're a dirty cheating cheater biotech.

My biggest issue as a vanguard is that I can't really burst people down (especially healers... scratch that, anyone with 5-7 points in a heal spec), but I guess that'd be crazy overpowered. I can stack my level 50 skill (+25% crit) with a damage trinket and the red buff to do some real damage, but even that comes slowly. It'd be better if I wasn't cheap enough to stock up on those red stims, but alas.  :awesome_for_real:


edit: totally called the consumables thing!

Yea, we are at best a damage add and a finishing move on things already nearly dead. We do just enough damage to not be totally ignored, but not much else when compared to DPS Commandos doing twice our stockstrike damage every cast.  :why_so_serious:


Not why we are in the BG though, so I'm okay with that for now.

Wow, the damage numbers went through the roof when she popped the red buff icon thingy. Consumables were definitely making those fights lopsided, but also a good player with a pretty awesome spec for pvp. Good stealth, good damage, healing and cc? Sheesh.

That's the problem right there.  Stealth is tough.  Stealth + stuns is worse.  Stealth + stuns + overpowered consumables + healing is nuts.  It's even more out of hand when you're a well-geared level 50 facing adjusted level 10's. 

Not much thought went into the whole pvp process, though I am having more fun at it than I probably should.

I disagree, I think a great deal of thought went into their PvP process, it's just incredibly hard to get right and even harder to test for.

This isn't a system they just stapled on like WoW.


Does that make it great on it's own? Of course not, obviously some big issues that need to be fixed here... but someone actually gives a shit on the development side.

Anyone got a list of the wz medals and what they require?

If that's true, then you just made my day.

I don't think a lot of thought went into the PvP gearing process.  The random loot bag approach with booby-prize commendations is pants-on-head retarded.  After about five days of PvP dailies/weeklies I have eight slots Champion'd out but most other people with similar time invested have maybe two with a purchased Centurion piece. 

The win trading on Ilum could have been easily predicted, as could someone using all the damaging consumables available to them.  (Assuming that level of burst isn't something they intend.)  Not to say it isn't going to turn out well but if someone with dev powers is giving PvP serious thought s/he needs to speak up more in meetings.

Totally agree with Nebu though.  Having way more fun than I think I should be. 

I tend to avoid PvP in MMOs, but I find myself enjoying it in TOR.  Though I prefer the other two maps over Huttball. 

So there's a cute thread out on the swtor forums doing some research into damage and tanking in pvp.

Basically what it found was that almost every attack in the game cannot be dodged/blocked/parried. If it says "____ Weapon Damage", you can shield it, or dodge/deflect it. If it says anything else (kinetic, energy, whatever), it ignores shield chance as well as dodge/deflect.

This is why operatives are dismantling tanks (almost all of their skills are Kinetic), why knights/warriors have a rough time against some classes (almost everything they do is a weapon attack), and also explains why some heroics/FPs absolutely destroy people: the mobs are spamming special attacks, and pretty much ignoring every tank stat you have except Armor.

I'll go ahead and say:  :awesome_for_real: At the very least shielding needs to work against special attacks, at least to proc all the tank on shield/avoidance abilities.

That would explain so much in PvE. So damn much.

As a tank I agree!  :grin:

But the Op does Internal on specials, right? Iirc, armor (and avoidance/absorbs) only works on weapon and kinetic. So pretty much any special is going to avoid that anyway, some classes will have an edge over others of course. The BH can deal fire damage, but at a high resource cost, short range and flamethrower is channeled and aoe cone; so one of our better pvp tools isn't great for pvp.

Kinetic not being shielded would explain a lot, for sure. I got tore up by two agent-type silvers last night - actually died once! Second time was pretty damned close, too. Interesting.

I wonder if that's a bug or by design, because if that's true, as is, it's going to make boss fights either incredibly one dimensional or it's going to make defensive stats virtually useless.


If the important mobs are blowing past all our defensive stats, we might as well be stacking DPS stats, since there isn't any way to stack endu/armor.

Ops do almost entirely Kinetic. Their DoTs are internal. What a lot of Ops (and mercs/commandos) have is a shitload of armor penetration built into their attacks as an extra fuck you to mitigation.

On the other hand i've ran into plenty of tanks in pvp that take 5-6 people beating on them to bring down and it still takes quite a bit of time, i am not sure outright survivability buffs are the answer.

It certainly sounds like one side of the power development team doesn't know what the other side is doing. Because giving each class a few armour piercing attacks is fine, but making one class mostly AP is a big problem.

You mean, someone finally took time to read with comprehension what it says in the tooltips for "accuracy", "defense chance" and "shield chance", on the characters attribute sheet? :why_so_serious:

("weapon damage" are melee/ranged attacks, other types are either tech or force abilities. Only melee/ranged are subject to defense and shield checks. Tech/force is only reduced by passive resistance and armour --though armour doesn't reduce internal/elemental damage-- Having accuracy above 100% means the target suffers reduction of the passive resistance, though, when subjected to tech/force abilities. For melee/ranged accuracy decreases the target's defense score)

Yeah I just lectured Kild in IRC about this, but PVE tank stats beyond health not mattering in PVP is same as it ever was.

Anyone have any experience as a Powertech in PVP? Looking to know which talents to focus on, I figure the Defense tree is probably the way to go to make earning medals easy, plus so I can FC in Huttball.

go 21/2/18, you waste a couple talents in the dps cylinder but you are basically a tank with great dps.  You gotta be at least 48 to make it work though, before that i had great success as pure pyro. 

So hit 50, decide to pvp a bit to at least start building a set of pvp gear (and learn how to pvp! :))

First match, Alderaan, for the daily mission. We lose by a decent bit (my team always loses), but I rack up 7 medals. Then die just as the warzone ends, it spawns me back at the fleet with no rewards and a repair bill. Awesome start to level 50 pvp.  :oh_i_see:

Just wait until you get a few wins in a row and none of them count toward your daily!  :why_so_serious:

I run a 26/13/2 hybrid build that gets me Gut, but drops out a lot of the mostly worthless for PVP tank stats (I'm looking at you, shield chance). Dropping a Stockstrike + Gut combo makes them feel a bit worse about themselves. I run the 4-piece DPS PVP set as well, so my Stockstrike crit chance is hovering somewhere around 70%.

http://www.torhead.com/skill-calc#801GoRrdRroMZMsrMoZb.1

Adjust as you will for BH equivalent. You rarely have ammo issues in PVP, as you're autoattacking a lot anyways to apply the snare.

I'm Valor 58 and this has never happened to me and don't know any of my guildies that have been gotten by that bug.  Not saying it doesn't happen, just that it's rare.


This happens the most in Voidstar for me.  In Hutt Ball it usually only happens when you go 6-0.

Happened to me twice so far (valor 41). Seems to happen if you die after getting the 'final warzone heal' when the scoreboard pops up (you're pulled / rooted in acid/fire, die from voidstar fall damage, etc).

Hello, I am a DPS Rank 50 Vanguard, and I melt your face. You are welcome.

(was: PvP equip changes everything)

My PvP experiences on Keller's void as a heal specced agent (about 350 expertise) have been pretty bad, Empire here is terrible and I will be lucky to win one out of every 6 or 7 games.  The only game I won last night is when a tank FINALLY decided to throw guard on me.  I basically followed him around the entire match as we wrecked face, holding off 4 or 5 opposing players at a time.  I now am desperately looking for a tank spec guard to play with, it completely changes your play experience as a healer.  (one of the guildees is at 40 and I am begging him to level faster).  Icing on the cake:  I didn't get the credit for the one damn win I had the whole night.

Normal match:  I will heal and and pillar hump until 2 or 3 enterprising opponents realize I am the healer and all go after me simultaneously, I kite for a bit but eventually am beaten down and stand as a target for the rest of the match.  Not a single dps gives me a peel or even attacks the folks who are bashing me, instead they are tunneling some dude over in the corner who is being healed and thus not dying.  I will easily top the healing charts (at least for my side) but not a single player will vote for me for mvp, that distinction going to the asshat who did nothing but farmed the middle and is siting on 350k dps and 3 times as many medals as me.

I am a determined son-of-a-bitch though and I will keep playing until these jackholes get better or they give up and re-roll republic.

To be fair, playing pug pvp as a healer in any game is always a recipe for frustration - either because it's weak and plagued with UI issues, or because healing won't win a game if your entire team consists of keyboard turners who don't know how to prevent damage with their defensive cooldowns, use interrupts, CC... or their damage is so weak that they can't kill a single target before you OOM.

In SWTOR it's worse than most games, as burst healing is relatively weak and relies on cast time abilities. I have been in games on my sage where I wasn't touched the entire game and kept our entire team going as a steamrolling engine of destruction... but yes, if your opponents are any good you need someone with guard who isn't terrible (knows how the objectives work, uses interrupts, survivability cooldowns and taunts). On my server MVP votes seem to be split between 3 categories:
- most damage
- "active" player / organizer: used ops chat, called out stuff, directed people, protected nodes, etc. This only applies if the game was a win, obviously.
- most healing (I -always- give it to the healer with the most healing because I know that getting medals otherwise as a healer is a huge pita).
This MVP distribution is fine for me as a tank - I sometimes get MVPs from the first two categories - since tanks have it easy when it comes to medals.

Playing a healer in a pug in ANY pvp game is a nightmare.  Nobody ever peels for you, few will guard, and fewer will keep line of sight in mind. 

On the bright side, most people playing SWTOR haven't learned that their class has interrupts or what a healer looks like.  I've been in matches where 6 people will beat on a tank while the healer sits in the background keeping him alive.  It's humorous.

I always give it to the most healing, unless i am close to him using just my medpacks.

The funny thing is that I play with my wife sometimes, who is sitting right next to me as I heal her (she is an SI) and even she doesn't do these thing.  "Peel, PEEL!"  "What's a peel hon?  Look, I'm top of the damage meters!"

How is one to learn without a teacher?

Part of it is that, part of it is that this games UI and key bindings are very difficult for left handers.  I lot of the shift and alt keys do not work with numberpad for some reason.  As a result she can really only effectively use a toolbar full of skills as switching toolbars or clicking are a bit of a pain.

Also, I prefer having a healthy marriage over the "You see you are doing this all wrong honey..." speech.

Question:  How is population balance on Shien server?  I want to level a Republic toon to 50 and it would be fun to kill you guys in the warzones.

Any of you playing Republic side anywhere?

Ingmar has a guild on the republic side.

Empire plays huttball all the fricking time so I assume queues will be short for the republic. I haven't seen any shortage of pve players around my (low level) rep alts.

I just started playing my newb JC a couple nights ago. We could group for an hour before you blaze past me. Took me three nights to make level 10 :)

So apparently in the 1.1 Ilum you get valor for killing turrets in the enemy base. The turrets respawn quickly. They are also on top of the Rep/Imp spawn points (that they are supposed to protect).

Given the population imbalance, the obvious result is Republic characters getting permanently corpse camped at the spawn point while the Imps rack up the valor super-quick with a zerg: http://img696.imageshack.us/img696/9164/ilum1j.jpg
Free Battlemaster in 2 hours, as long as you're imperial*. Woo!
edit: video from the Bloodworthy  :awesome_for_real: server here - http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=TL0kDP_Cexo#t=9s


* yeah, this probably works the other way around in republic-heavy servers... if there are any.

Those towers are no joke actually, one of them is mowing several raids worth of imps on my server with only small repub support.

I'm not sure any of us besides Fordel and proudft are ever PVPing, but I could be wrong. I keep meaning to try it but getting distracted by alts and crafting.

I probably won't PvP anything serious for another month or two yet, let all the Illum nonsense settle and get some more 50's going for it.


Maybe some low level Warzones for the level 40 gear again. I really like matching armor.

There are ways to explain what peeling is without being a mansplaining dipshit, though. I have faith in you.  :oh_i_see:

The other part (it not being lefthanded friendly) is the price you pay for marrying a mutant.

Speaking as a left handed person, people who use their mouse with their left hand are crazy.

The reason ppl are raging over the valor thing is because of gear really.  The longer you are out of pvp the more ppl are geared.  I'm in full champ and have like 12% bonus to dps, heals, and defense.  I destroy newer 50's.

Really?  I thought most lefties use the mouse in their left hand?  Considering she has been doing this for over 2 decades I doubt she is willing to change now...

The lefties I know mostly use the mouse with their right, but a couple of them do like to be special and use it with their left.

Left-handed here and have always used the mouse with my right hand.  I can't imagine having to swap it around.

Regardless of the current valour situation, this sounds as awful as DAoC ToA.

Presumably the top gear sets are even worse?

Surely you could just bind keys over on the rhs of the keyboard and go nuts with a left handed mouse?

Sounds like these so called lefties are in fact attention seeking righties.

Yo momma!

I use my mouse on the left hand, and until mmos it worked beautifully because the arrow keys are on the right. SWTOR is a bit horrible for lefties though because the Guardian has a stupid amount of skills.

PvP tip from Nebu the moron.

Don't bind your bottom center hotbar to Alt + #.  I swear I've alt+tabbed myself to the loading screen a dozen times in the last few days. 

I need one of those fancy 80 button mice!!!

Elite games can click mouse buttons not just with their fingers, but also with their palm muscles. *flex* *flex*  :grin:

I suppose that way you can update your Facebook page with your left hand while pwning noobs with your right hand.  AMIRITE?

Dude, it's check Facebook for noob tears, real gamers don't "facebook".  :grin:

Wow you guys are harsh on lefties. 

I would absolutely love to get my wife a left handed razer naga, if they made those.  I think she would love it as she has small fingers that could easily access all the keys.

Undeniably, a 5 buttons mouse comes in handy in this game. Also, autohotkey.

I have a 5 button mouse, but it seems inadequate.  Were I playing melee, particularly something with positionals, I'd prefer at least a 10 button for strafing and spamming positionals. 

I'm not using the two extra on my mouse yet. Wait, not, I do have one bound to throw the ball for huttball.

I bought a razer Tron mouse which is pretty nifty, and it technically 7 button; but the angular edges suck. Technically beautiful mouse, though, love the buttons themselves, the high dpi laser, the scroll wheel. But the layout and actual design is balls, the side buttons are huge and right in the center where I grip the mouse. So angular design + cramped hand = bleh.

Need to sell it on, I guess.

I have a three buttons mouse and I play a melee dps vanguard. I have to say, it's crazy. There are like 890485 buttons in this game and they are all important. To play with my left hand I have to do stuff that reminds me of my piano years, cause basically I use q, w, e, r, t, y, u, a, s, d, f, g, z, c, 2, 3, 4... and the ALT (with the alt key pressed) version of most of them. It's probably 20 keys if not more. I mapped the AOE stun on my mouse, but I miss the interrupt there and the personal shield. 2 more keys would definitely help, as I could put the potions macro on it or the harpoon/cryogranade. So yeah, while I'm managing with a plain old 3 buttons mouse, a 5 to 9 buttons one seems very necessary to PvP decently. At least with certain classes.

Also, how do you set up your movement for easier strafing+hitting on your left hand? I'm always curious about these things. Over the years I developed a personal system which I call the "pedal". I never met anyone who uses it, and that's why it is probably idiotic, but works for me. Basically, I strafe left and right with S and F, and use my middle finger to hurt people, so main attacks are on E and R. I never move backward, and I move forward either with the two mouse buttons pressed together, or with the Z key, which I reach with my pinky finger. The Z thing is so counter-intuitive that I often wondered if I could get some efficiency boost by mapping it on a pedal set, to just go forward by using my foot, as in a kart of sorts. So how do you people optimize your keys and hand setup for pvp?

One through Six and Shift+One through Shift+Six.

If I need it, Z, C, F and G also get used. I'm not currently using these though.


Everything else is default.

Also Ctrl+these.

Ctrl+w for snare, Shift+w for the sprint burst (or the leap for knights, i guess)

E for target's target.

Yea, I have used a Ctrl+Four and Ctrl+Five before. That's true.

Generally though, if I am breaking into Ctrl+Numbers, my class/spec has to many buttons and some of them are probably useless or not useful enough to warrant their own key. They can go on the click bar beside my class buff and stimpack.  :why_so_serious:

I use the Ctrl combinations for some highly reactional abilities, usually (cc break, interrupt, hit on paralyzed target, that sort of thing)  Just finding it easier to memorize this way, and they are the sort that has to be used faster than mouse clicks would allow.

I use 1-8 (7/8 are more situational / out-of-combat skillz), shift/ctrl/alt+1-5 (ctrl for less-used skillz), qezxv, shift+qex, alt+qez, tilde and the 6 G15 buttons. The two mouse sidebuttons are mapped to selfcast / focus cast on my healers (middle button is bound to set focus), and more skillz on my other characters. I try to keep conceptually similar abilities on the same keybindings across all characters/games, which helps  :awesome_for_real:

Binding the backward move ('s') to another ability can work too if you *only* do pvp (backpedaling in pvp = baaad), but I do enough pve tanking where it's useful to backpedal occasionally for mob positioning / making sure the mob is hitting my face and not my sides/back.

edit: ctrl-q/w/e/r for stances or auras, if there are any

See, I wouldn't KeyBind Aura's. I've never felt such a demand to switch from say Ret Aura to Conc or whatever.

The only things I will click on are stimpacks or mission item thingers, everything else gets a keybind.  

1-6, Q, E, Z, X, C, V, B and shift- and alt- all those (and control- being pet abilities).  I haven't run out of keys yet on a level 30ish guardian or commando, actually, which is better than a WoW warlock so far.

I also follow the trend of keeping similar abilities on the same key - E is an area thing that needs to be targeted, shift-E is another one, so on a WoW mage, E was blizzard and shift-E was flamestrike, on a hunter it was volley and flare, on the commando it is that AoE hose of bullets and mortar.   

This is the thing that is getting to be sort of unwieldy because although most SWTOR abilities can be found somewhere in WoW, sometimes there are way more of them on one class in SWTOR.  There are like 4 different 'things I used to put on my defensive B key' for the guardian, so some of them end up on 'weird' keys for me.

Also my guardian keeps moving melee keys around as I get space-whirlwind, oh lemme put that on my old cleave key, and then space-cleave shows up.

I click lots of stuff.  :grin:

Which one of those is Iceblock.

:mob: At least you don't keyboard turn, right?!

Srsly though, clicking is fine for pve, and since swtor has autofacing, click/keyturn is not AS terrible in pvp as in other games. Still not a good idea, mind... but you probably know that. :awesome_for_real:

Oh, that one I click.

(alt-1 if you really must know)

Only when he gets flustered  :why_so_serious:


Total KeyBinding in of itself doesn't make you better or worse. Like, Proudft binds *everything* and Ingmar binds very little, but they both smell the same in my experience. It's not a improvement when half the time you don't remember what your Q key does or you constantly press E when you you really meant R.

I'm not a keyboard turner, no. The only special bind(s) I ever have are for interrupts. Interrupt on F, possibly something on G if I'm feeling saucy, and 1-6, otherwise I basically am a clicker.

It hasn't even been that bad in PVP, honestly, Fordel can attest that I'm not as bad as proudft.

I keyboard turn AND click a lot of shit. Somehow my paladin was still fine in PvP in WoW.  :why_so_serious:

Actually I do mouse turn SOMEtimes. Just not all the time.

Yeah, closely clustered keybinds of vastly different abilities run the risk of fatfingering something in a tense pvp situation (I try to bind heroism and stuff to harder-to-reach keys for that reason). Of course the best thing is when you hit \ and two ticket creation windows pop up to helpfully cover your screen and disable further input until you close them.  :why_so_serious:

Ugh, that \ thing I am hitting constantly when I want to open chat.

It's extra fun on my Hungarian keyboard as we get an extra \ in the bottom left corner (between shift and z... the shift key is a bit smaller). Good Times sometimes ensue when I hit z... that happens to be my ohshit / medpack button.  :oh_i_see:

I wonder how the keyboard turners do the Colicoid War turret part... :ye_gods:

It's not like I'm stupid, if something obviously works better using the mouse, I use the mouse. I just don't NEED to use the mouse 90% of the time, so I don't.

Yeah i wasn't thinking of you specifically; it's just fresh memory of trying to get that FP done before it got figured out that it's possible to turn the damn things with the RMB... :uhrr:

So I messed around in newIlum a bit (after the clownshoes were patched out)... but it still doesn't seem to work. My server has a roughly 70/30 imp/republic population in pvp and ilum, so we got steamrolled by zergs even when we got a 16-man operations team together. The only way to get kills was to play guerilla and snipe a few people off from the zerg, then die and regroup. Extra fun bit: you don't get daily credit if you're dead when your team gets the kill. Since I'm a tank that needs to be in the thick of things, I'd only get one-two kills before being zerged down. This all in 0.5 FPS.

Even wotlk wintergrasp with tenacity would be better... I just don't see underpopulated sides coming out to play in Ilum if things stay like this.

A bit like in the films then?

In RvR you have to accept that there will be asymmetric fighting, possibly the problem is that EA haven't set up the rewards and zone structure to make that fun and provide rewards?

if by asymmetric you mean having a size 24 clownshoe rammed up your ass, then yes.

Ilum is still silly, in fact in some ways worse.   Pre 1.1 I could just go in there chasing after nodes and resetting them and be done with it in a short amount of time... then go wash my hands and avoid looking at myself in the mirror.   No it is run around in circles until your fps drops to nil and you are suddenly dead.

Sad but true. Personally I love a dangerous environment with hard to insane odds, love being the underdog, but this is just so not fun. In a way, as bad as it is, it would still be quite masochisticly fun if the fps were smooth. Your reaction times being untouched, the guerrilla tactics would prove enjoayble in what would still reward a bit of skill, eventually, in hit and run attacks. But this way, not only you just die as soon as anything red appears (if you are lucky enough to not be stunned by a stealthed char and wiped before you get out of it), but if you ever manage to put up a fight (that you are gonna lose anyway) cause you got a full raid, it's so choppy that it wouldn't be fun even if you were winning. Let alone if you are just dying over and over and getting zero daily objectives.

Huttball sucks. Huttball sucks really badly when you have 4 players on your team, the '120 secs to abort' thing keeps resetting as people join, look at the 0-4 score, and quit.

Then getting the ball passed to you, running all the way to the endzone, and getting grappled into the enemy spawn (Instant death) so you don't even get a lousy 1-5 in the end.

A solution to this is to get a ambidextrous game pad. I use the ideazon fang which gives a decent number of buttons arrayed conveniently for the right hand. I've never seen a really feature packed mouse that curves suitable for left hand use so I'm using a Logitech G3 (which is decent, but discontinued in favor of a right hand only model, /cry).

This.

Huttball gives me Tor Annroc flashbacks.  Being bounced/pushed back into lava/poison isn't fun EVER!

I like the new pre-50 warzones a lot more.

I dislike how the game frequently decides to drop us into a 4 v 8 match and start the game up immediately. I really dislike this on voidstar, since your times before you get 8 players determines your win condition. So basically: haha, you lose because the "needs more players" counter doesn't start until the match is in progress.

Huttball is the only thing keeping me queueing.

I get Tor Annroc flashbacks as well as Magus (the dude on the frisbee)  as well when i get yanked into a dogpile of red names.

This. The SOTA clone wouldn't be awful except it's stupid map covers up important skills at the top of my right hotbar, but the AB clone is horrible. The map design makes spawn camping way too easy, and the noise those lasers make...  :ye_gods: Is there a deserter style debuff in SWTOR? I'm debating just leaving and requeuing every time i get not-Huttball.

There isn't and that is exactly what i do.  Granted being empire means its almost always huttball, but in the rare times it's not i sure as hell don't sit through them.  I have a huttball specific spec too.

The lack of a deserter debuff is another very, very stupid move on Bioware part. It's hurting Republic even more, as people leave spots in your roster as soon as soon as they think the match is not gonna be a win. Also, they often do that to get a free pass to the Fleet.

So... play hutball with me. I'd love to get a semi organised group going.

Let's talk strategy ?  :grin:

One doesn't need a deserter system when the difference between winning and losing a match is small.  Of course, they changed that for other reasons, and didn't bother to replace that incentive with something else.

That's the mistake.

You'll end up needing a deserter penalty purely because people abandon games if they don't like the map that gets selected.

Or you know, letting people queue for whatever freaking wz they want like any sane developer.

WoW strongly incentivizes you to queue for random or the CTA; in theory you can queue for whatever you want but your rewards will be shit if you don't join the crowd.

One good Sith Sorc and one good Jugg can make the difference between a win and a loss.

They can just move so fast across the map it sucks.

Maybe that's why I like HB so much; I play a Jugg and queue with my friends who are a Sith Sorc and a Sniper so we wreck house.

ATTN: Bounty Hunters.  This is how you too can beast in warzones for phat medals.
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=SUUWIgm5ssE

Well that seems simple enough :oh_i_see:

tracer missle tracer missle tracer missle tracer missle...

Did I miss anything? 

Want to mess with a Merc?  Interrupt their second tracer missle and watch them stand there for 4s doing nothing.  :grin:

I assume that ugly as hell armor is some kind of PvP reward ?

The armor with the bolts in the back is from Hard modes.  The plain ugly stuff that looks like a gay samuri is the (Pvp) champion armor.  

I came across this picture  (http://img713.imageshack.us/img713/1567/duuude.png)on the forums.  Guess which class is the easiest to be successful on?  I've been putting up 200k consistently on my level 26 sorc.  The class is stupid easy to play compared to my jedi knight and my sniper. It's about as easy as the merc.

Combine it with them not bothering to put in any real afk detection/reporting system, and, well. Game looks hopeless for your side? Two or three people go stealth in a corner and alt tab out to play bejeweled or whatever. It's gotten pretty consistent!

I don't know what mercs you are playing you with against, maybe the one from the video. The mercs I know spend those 4 seconds either using unload in your face or healing themselves, after casting the personal shield and pushing you away so making sure you won't be doing much unless you instantly charge them back or hook them away (if they are not immune). Both things are gonna eat seconds away from those 4 and the tracer missiles are going to be back online in a matter of instants. They are so damn effective and that's what I hate of having just one real interrupt. You don't expose a merc that much when you interrupt them (for a mere 4 seconds) as they have the survivability to endure that and the DPS to fry anything that doesn't kill them fast enough. It goes slightly better when I can cast the cryogranade right after the first interrupt, but if I don't kill them in those 4 seconds he or she is gonna blast my face away with those missiles as soon as s/he can move again.

Man pure dps classes get royally shafted on medals.  My assassin and bounty hunter easily snag three free tanking medals even in dps spec/stance just by using taunts without sacrificing getting any of the dmg medals.

And?

The taunts are a huge amount of mitigation for your team.




Also I've been telling you people since Beta that Merc/Commandos would be the future OP class/spec after everyone burns out on Sorc/sages  :why_so_serious:

Healers get kinda shafted on medals too, especially if your team isn't very good (so you don't get the 'X kills' medals). You can get the 2.5k one-time heal and 75k healing medals easy, but anyone with biochem will get at least the first one as well. You can get the killing blow medal if you snipe a kill from a DPS (they won't hate you as much if you keep healing them after)... that's 3 medals. The 300k healing one IS achievable in a long game (I got it twice so far), but then you basically lock yourself out of the damage medals. I have yet to get the 5k healing one on my heal-spec sage, as my biggest heal (deliverance) only crits for 3.5k or so. I *can* get the 75k damage medal as a healer, but then I have to nuke a lot and possibly let people die. That's... 4 medals you can get on your own.

As a tank I'm basically guaranteed 4-5 protector medals (x amount of protection / y amount of protection in one life), the KB medal, probably a one-on-one kill medal if I am guarding a node, and the 75k damage medal. That's 8 medals... twice as much as my healer gets! Plus as a tank I'm probably guarding nodes a lot more than my healer in Alderaan, so I'm likely to get some defender medals there as well. If I had biochem, I'd be getting the 2.5k heal. I got close to the 300k damage one too, once, so that one may be doable if you use tanking gear and a hybrid tank/dps spec, easier still with dps gear and a pocket healer. The only medals out of reach are the bigger heal medals and the 2.5k / 5k hit medals. That is, unless you're a guardian/juggernaut with the cookie cutter pvp spec and your force sweep/smash crits people for 7k while still having guard.  :why_so_serious:


e: the saving grace (kinda) is that people are inclined to give healers the MVP votes, which is +~2-3 medals a game if your team wins. MVP votes are much harder to come by if your team loses, even if you healed your little heart out.

They removed that.  Also mvp votes don't count as medals, they are just a free commendation.  One medal is 5 commendations and 50 valor.

I've never given or gotten any MVP votes. Does someone bother with them? Most people just exit/re-queue immediately after the countdown.

I always just voted for the person with either the highest heal amount or highest protection amount.  Don't know that I ever saw it actually matter.

Many people group for war zones and will vote for group mates regardless of performance.  I personally give my vote to the best healer since healers seem to be screwed in the badge department.

I always vote otherwise i can't see if i got any, and i usually do get several.

It's a damn good thing the next patch nerfed the shit out of scoundrels/operatives. Cause, you know, those two classes were owning the battlefields unlikes troopers/bh and sage/sorc. That just pisses me off so badly.

When it comes to mvp I almost always vote for the person with the highest objective points. My view is that means they were focused on the goal of the match and not on farming medals.

Ops/Scoundrels have more tools than anyone in game and it gave them a ridiculous advantage.  Fixing the biochem issue was a good start, but Bioware screwed up when they gave a class stealth, a knockdown with a long animation, high burst damage, the ability to vanish, and a heal.  A well-played Op/scoundrel can get a target to 20% health before they can even react.  How is that fun for the person being attacked? It's no wonder the forums were filled with nerd rage crying for nerfs.

I do agree that Mercs/troopers and sorc/sage are stupid easy to do well with.  I can routinely get over 200k damage with my poorly geared, level 26 sorc in the warfronts.  These classes need to be brought in line as well.  The biggest difference is that you can see them coming and be proactive about limiting their output.  

I encourage you to try another class and see what life is like from the other side.  It has been an eye opener for me.

I'm sorry but the out of stealth burst of ops/scoundrels was pants on head retarded and needed a severe nerf.  Spamming the same ability over and over is not "op", its boring and pointless, mercenaries are not that great.

As a healing op, mercenaries are cake, all you have to do is run around a corner or interrupt them (same with sorcs really).

Concealment Ops/smugglers were a rape train however.  It was crazy and the nerf is probably deserved. 

On the plus side now that I am up to 400 expertise healing on an op is a LOT less painful.

So last night I decided to really do a shitton of PvP before I hit 50 on my scoundrel. I'd done a bit here and there in the last few weeks, but never a concentrated dose. And as always, the first problem is Other People before we ever get around to Game Design.

Got into the one where you've got to attack through the doorways and then defend on board the ship. I sort of like the design on this one the best. Defending, basically it's just zerg-on-zerg. I defend the door where the zerg isn't. One guy manages to set a bomb, I flash grenade him and defuse it. Someone on my team sez, "lol whos bothering with bomb". But I stick to my lonely post and the Imps don't go anywhere. When we go on attack, I'm thinking, let's win decisively, yeah. So first I use the scoundrel ability to stealth other players and say, "Ok couple of you go back to visible, go left decoy, people still under stealth will go right, one person set the bomb, others cc anyone close." One guy goes "wut did u do to me", everybody else just makes like a beeline for the mass of Imperials and destealths as they attack. Ok, so I go where the Imps aren't, they haven't even set anyone on the other door. I set the bomb, dirty kick the one Imp who comes over, then flash grenade him when he comes up from it. Bomb goes off, the zerg on both sides rolls through. I do it again to get us across, do it again to get us into final chamber. Zerg mass is still writhing around and so I'm like, ok, nobody is actually playing. So I do a bit of healing, a bit of fighting, whatever. End screen comes up, we win so I can get my quest done at least, but of course I'm low on the score even though I was the only one actually playing the scenario.

Then I get into three of the Arathi Basin-esque big guns one. Two are against Imp premades and there's absolutely zero point to it, might as well just stealth and go masturbate in a corner and get whatever points that gets. Third one is exciting--for whatever reason, the folks on our side are actually into winning and there's coordination and people use chat to call incoming and we win, fairly narrowly, against a premade.

Then three more of both. No Huttball, thank god, because I really dislike it. All the rest are pointless: either people so stupid that I don't understand how they're able to operate a keyboard, or people who just want to farm kills. I see a couple of very smart strats from the Imp premades that are interesting to consider, otherwise it's a total waste of my time and thoroughly unfun. I can't think that's it's any fun for the premades to just steamroll and farm people, either--it's just another grind for gear.

You can't see how utterly destroying those people you just got done complaining about would be fun?

Once or twice. Regularly? That's like sneaking around the VA hospital at night sabotaging the brakes on wheelchairs.

PvP in this game is SO much more fun in a premade with voice com.  Especially with a good healer.  It almost feels unfair some matches.

Well I hit 50 with my op on Friday. So I went off to Ilum for some open world PvP.

It was mostly boring farming of crates for substitute kills. However every once in a while the Repubs would show up en masse and some fun would break out. It is going to be a long slog to get enough commendations to get geared on an even basis with the psychos.

Overall I rate it a C. The only reason I'll go back is I love PvP that much. I hope they come out with some more interesting open world objectives and a way to convince the raving horde of Imps to go Repub so the odds are more even, I reckon we outnumber em by 2-3:1.

Is Ilum 50 only? I seem to recall getting a tutorial message at 40 saying I could go there; does it have bolstering, or will I just get instantly roflstomped?

True for all pvp. My BF1942 clan used to love a good pub stomp for an ego boost if we lost a league match. There was one horrid clan that didn't use voip at all, needless to say they never won and only played one season. There's a reason we've moved beyond signal fires.

I played a match with my level 15 Jugg just to complete the 'welcome to pvp' mission (just play one match), got 5 medals pretty easy just guarding folks and force leaping at people and beating them until they died or I got swarmed. Always going for objectives, too; think I turned 2 of the controls over on Alderaan.

Still haven't won anything. Maybe Komoto won a round of huttball in pre-release week. I would really welcome pre-mades and voice comms if I were going to pvp. Let me guess, Neb's guild didn't roll on Shien :p

I mostly get roflstomped except in a furball where I do ok. No bolstering afaik.

The server I got us expired because I could not get anybody interested in logging in, but there should be lots of places avaible to get free mumble servers for US folks.  :grin:

They're usually the same person in my experience.


Even if a DPS spec is only tossing out their taunts/guard for the medals, it's still a huge benefit to their team. Throwing that AE taunt on the enemy train for the medal still probably just saved a teammate. The amount of damage you can mitigate through taunts is kind of obscene at times, especially considering the low cost of them.



I usually vote for the dude who I end up working with on the loser node of a match. Defending the non-zerg door or standing watch on the quiet turret. The one where if someone ISN'T there then one random dude from the other team will take it and cost you the game. Thankless bitch work basically.

But you get to eat snacks while you stand around bored!

I've had a really good streak going on Republic Shien sub-50, played about a dozen games since Friday and lost, like, two.  Maybe Commandos are overpowered.   :-P

I really like Huttball, too. 

I see a Trooper and healer standing on a node, I stay the hell away. It's effective.

Most commandos seem pretty easy to abuse in huttball, interrupt/root/knock into acid. Only one that gave me issues last night was 'Reyn' or some such from Slap in the Force, jerk kept not dying on schedule, and killing me  :why_so_serious:

And Alderaan people don't get that you win with big medals if you take and hold 2 turrets. Defense is easier than offense, except when 6 team members all run after the 3rd objective. 1 person defending gets ripped apart by the first stealth Smugglertype

If you mean Reys, that's me.    :heart:

Or "inc 2 mid" = "SEND EVERYONE TO MID AND LOSE THE POINT WE HAD"

I'm also fond of when people let me cap by dropping AE on the other side of the point, not understanding that the cap point blocks LoS.

I like Ald the most I think, even if it's a shitty map. It has enough going on that you can actually try to approach the terrain creatively without demanding charge/harpoon abilities like Huttball seems to. My commando feels next to useless in huttball due to needing to stop and hard cast all the time, and lacking any real mobility abilities.

You're going to point to this every time Fordel verbally abuses you now, aren't you.

Despite the fact that both of my characters (vanguard / sage) have a good amount of abilities that were obviously designed to win Huttball, I just don't enjoy the gameplay in pugs where people don't know what the pass ability does. Matches usually devolve into 'Knockbackfest 2012 until Guardian / Vanguard / Sage Bullshit happens and one of the teams scores in like 10 seconds'. OTOH it's a warfront that has the potential to get really tense/exciting in a premade vs premade match.

Now that I've figured out the map, Huttball is actually my favorite warzone.  Which is a surprise really, since I didn't think I'd like that one. 

Voidstar is pretty good.  It's like Strand without the BS demos.  Dots interrupting caps is  :uhrr: though.

I hate Alderaan though.  The map is too small and it's way too easy to defend with only three capture points.  It's the same reason I intensely disliked Battle for Gilneas even though Arathi Basin was one of my favorites.

I think the fact he didn't realize his heals worked on other people till like level 25-30 proves my point  :why_so_serious:

It was, like, level 23, tops.

If anybody was interested in some occasional (non-level 50 so far) guild pvp I would be up for it. Even small groups working together could be great fun and very effective.

I've got access to a Ventrillo server if needed. A problem for me would be timezones. However weekends might work - late night EU/mid-afternoon US or early morning EU/late night US are both possibilities.

If anyone's up for it let me know and I'll set up guest access on the vent server and you can have a laugh at my British accent  :awesome_for_real:

I am up for it. And, for the record, German accent > British accent.  :grin:

Awesome, we have Newkirk and Klink, I'll play the part of Hogan!

Haha, brilliant! I'll sort out the vent details then.

I may have to join you guys.  I'm becoming very fast at leveling 1-10. 

Is this Republic side?

Gearing up to stand a chance in the 50s bracket is not going to be fun.  While a big part of why I failed to be on the winning side in a match last night after dinging was that it kept throwing us against a premade, it didn't help that I was absolutely useless.  I know I'm not that great at PvP, but I'm usually able to at least support the rest of the team or stay alive long enough for others to show up and do some good, but yeesh.  I was just a points pinata for the opposing side.  I may have to just not queue up for awhile so that I can unlock all of the dailies and get some mods to toss into my gear. 

I was lucky in that my first 50 was among the early few, so gearing up was painless. As I'm gearing up my alts now, the best advice I can give is to a) stay with the pack and b) do your best to fill a support role.  Heal/interrupt/cc as best you can to disrupt the flow of the other team.  Something as simple as snaring one player away from their herd can help diminish their numbers and bring your team a victory.

Empire I think hope ?

Yeah Empire, but sub-50, so you could always get an alt to level 10 if you're Republic based and wanted to join in.

All of my toons are on another server, but who doesn't love alts?

I am shocked how hard it is to get a tank to put guard on a healer.

I'm shocked at how many times I put guard on a healer, then they run into the middle of the pack of red guys and get us both focused down.

I'm shocked that my AOE heal requires me to stand in the middle of the fight for it to be at all useful.

Do sorcs have a massive ae heal? Cause I'll heal the whole fight and maybe get 160k and one of them will be sitting at 300k.

Yes.

Not running into the middle of the fight, running ahead of everyone else into the republic pack. Lots of sorcs seem to think guard=god mode.

Well, I'm certainly finding out that the scoundrel heals SUCK in PvP, not so much because of strength but because so many of them require standing still. The AOE heal is very weak comparatively. About the best I can do is jack up a whole squad of folks with a double dose of the DOT heal, which returns me Upper Hand pretty often. But to really heal a tank means I have to stand relatively still. Works pretty well in PvE so far (haven't done a hard mode yet) but in PvP, standing still is like painting a big KILL ME sign on myself.

The sorc/sage AE heal is really, really, really good. The AE heals the other classes have are fucking insulting awful compared to it. I hope they buff the shitty AE heals, but I am beginning to suspect the sage AE heal will get nerfed instead.


EDIT: INGMAR DIDN'T LIKE ME USING THE WORD INSULTING

I'm under impression they already nerfed sage AE healing somewhat, in the recent patch.

The Commando AoE heal is a ground target, which is just awesome when there's lots of movement going on.  :awesome_for_real:  So yeah, I have no problem with the word insulting.

The sage AE heal is also a ground target (and has a cast time, wheras the trooper one does not), that's not anywhere near what the problem is with the commando AE heal. It just doesn't do enough of anything (although when it's supercharged it crawls up into "acceptable," although then I'm using it not to heal, but to prevent damage more than anything).

The bug fix is interesting, I should do some healing with the sage because I honestly can't remember if I've done any since the patch. The double heal does explain some things, though! I think even "nerfed" I am going to find it just way more useful than the scoundrel or commando version still, though.

If all three healers have to put up with ground targets for their AoE heals, then I don't think I'll bother with even the token healer I was going to have.  :oh_i_see:

hmm?   they aren't pbaoe heals for the Sorc/Sage you can place them wherever you want above you, below you, at the voidstar door while you hide behind a piller and it heals any friendly in the area grouped or not.

Hmm I guess it would be nice to have a group heal that heals anyone within X range of the healer, but I love my sorc AE heal.

For reference:

- Recuperative Nanotech / Kolto Cloud: Instant cast, 12s cooldown.  Target friendly, apply 15s HoT to up to 4 friendlies within 10m.
- Kolto Missile / Kolto Bomb: Instant cast, 6s cooldown.  Target 8m area, instantly heal up to 3 friendlies.  (The "thing on the ground" you see with this heal is a +10% healing received effect, not the heal itself.)
- Revivification / Salvation: 2s cast, 15s cooldown.  Target 8m area, heal all (up to 8?) friendlies in area and leave healing ground effect lasting 10s.  (It's a ~1:2 split in healing between the instant part and the ground effect.)

From my experience, if you can stand still, the Sorc heal leaves the other two for dead.  I'd be sort of okay with that, as there are also times when it's hopelessly impractical, if more of those times occurred in the current set of Warzones.

Yeah I actually really like the ground target aspect, that's not an issue for me in the least.

Well, I guess I'm the only one who finds ground targeting a heal to be clunky and slow compared to just clicking a button and BAM! everyone around the target, who can't run out of the AoE, is healed.

I find the whole 'ae heal up to <a very small number> of allies' limitation much more annoying than the ground targeting interface.

Ground targeting needs to be queueable though. (and queue extended beyond 1 second).

Well, for starters, the sage one leaves a big-ass area that people can run into for healing even after it's been cast. I like how it works, and I don't find ground targeting in this case to be clunky, as I have it on one of my main keys (NUMBER FIVE) and I don't find picking a place to plop it ... difficult or clunky or however you want to talk about it. Certainly no more "clunky" than any other ground target, and I like not having to depend on anyone but me for where that AE puddle is going to be placed. If it was targeted, my target could happen to get knocked away from everyone else during the cast time, that target could be running off to peel something by itself, etc. Ground target gives me LESS to worry about, really.

I find myself using the ground AOE heal on my sage quite a bit even if only 1-2 people are in it... mostly because it doesn't require me to switch targets (so I can stay on the enemy healer for interrupts/CC or the huttball carrier for heal spammage) and can be used to heal targets that keep running in/out of LOS. Click casting or a focus target function that actually works would help.  :awesome_for_real:

Ground targeting is a little harder to use probably but the upside is much higher - unless all the players are stacked up on the same spot you'll almost always be able to hit more people with a ground target than a 'heal around target player' spell, given the same radius. At best the 'target player' model can tie the ground target.

I'm up to 400 Expertise and I heal on average between 200k-300k in every match.  If I am guarding an objective it will be lower and if I am chain healing Voidstar and not in any way being focused I can flirt with 400k.  

I have seen Sorcs with half my expertise healing for 500-600k in warzones.

I am beginning to get discouraged.  :heartbreak:

Edit: I'm an operative.

Two factors are at play here:

1) Their AE heal is amazing.

2) They have a huge power pool by comparison making their ability to heal much easier.

300k heals on an operative is outstanding.  Don't get down on yourself.

Sounds the warzones should grant extra medal "Is not playing the sorcerer".

sorc/sage and commando/bh are brutal in pvp. Luckily Bioware is on the case and is nerfing the scoundrel/operative stealth attack because we sometimes kill 1 of these 2 targets or players in green gear.

Quit your whining, that nerf was needed more than any other.

In terms of PvP balance?  I think there are some bigger issues, especially with everything going through Huttball on a lot of servers.

In terms of the perception of PvP balance?  It's vitally important.  Having that level of an alpha strike just isn't fun for the vast majority of the player base.

After I got tired of feeling useless in the 50s bracket, I decided to PvP instead with the BH Powertech alt.  While a big part of is it probably playstyle related, I feel like in the lower levels at least that I'm more useful for the team on my powertech than I was at similar levels on the sorcerer.   

^ This.  I'm a Battlemaster BH Merc and when hit by an operative I was down to close to about a third of my health before I can even stand up. 

I do see a nerf to Arsenal BH's and I won't cry about that.  Sorc's will have to have their day as well.

So has anyone else been getting client lockups and crashes in voidstar after 1.1? I crash every 2nd-3rd voidstar match at the bridge / second door, and when I login I'm back at the fleet (sometimes dead, which has the extra bonus of repair costs). I know there were reports of charge abilities DCing you on the map, but I make sure I don't use any such abilities in that area. In fact, most of the crashes seem to happen in the area right before the bridge...

I love the leveling, the PvE, and the world that this game is set in.  Now, it's not that I agree with all of the points in this video, I do believe that he hits on a few of the things that make me feel that SWTOR is lacking.  I thought I'd share it and let you come to your own conclusions. Note: The points he makes at the end of the video about grinding gear by commondations (68.5 hours to get your weapon without dailies), is pretty well done.

Why does SWTOR miss the mark? (http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=nnKYF_ZZQDE&feature=g-all-u&context=G280e043FAAAAAAAAAAA)

Maybe I should have given Blizzard more credit.  Certainly Rift did a more masterful job at pvp.  

He makes a few very good points (really, the unresponsiveness and control/ui issues drive me up the wall sometimes), some :headscratch: points (yeah so the guild window is unoptimized and lags you for a second or two when opened... how does this kill the game exactly?), some very minor peeves (healing animations? srsly?), and a lot of his monologue is pointless filler he probably threw in to match the pvp videos running in the background. Yeah, you don't want to make your viewers angry, we get it. You don't need to repeat that 30 times throughout the video -- though it makes sense that people skip forward just for that reason, if not turn it off entirely. Not a good use of 30 mins imo, though for me it beat idling in the fleet while in the pvp queue.  :awesome_for_real:

I found rift and (non-vanilla) wow pvp better than swtor, sure... but swtor has far better class balance than either of those games imo (yeah, 'lol operatives' aside). Not to mention that playing SWTOR for the super serious competitive pvp is missing the point.

Last reply got eaten.  Anyway, I tried to get through that, but the guy just didn't bother to do any homework on his first major point and then described WoW totems as "fun".

As to the point you highlight: I don't see a problem having PvE-style loot randomness with a points-based back-up system in the PvP side of the game, if you're going to bother with loot in PvP in the first place.  I'm very apathetic about loot in general (a ye olde shooter background will do that), but it makes a lot of sense as people seem to find random loot kind of fun at the same time they find it kind of frustrating.

Maybe the rewards just aren't up to par (but I've read a lot of complaints on EJ about it being too fast already) or there's some kind of frustration limit your systems reach and having random loot on top of the more frustrating PvP is too much?

Why am I watching this video?

He just said dropping totems is fun, opinion worthless.  :why_so_serious:


-edit- holy fuck string together a coherent thought video dude.

-edit2- Dear god Ilum the large scale pvp zone, has large scale pvp in it.  :ye_gods:

Ok so that's pretty much what he detailed rambling along in that video, in between telling people it's just his opinion, that he wishes the game well, and comparing things to WoW. To the points that too many things are homogenized, that too many people have the same abilities, and there are too many knockbacks. Well, ok. I'm pretty sure WoW haters point out the homogenization of skills all the time, but whatever. He didn't think it was subjectively fun, but totems are fun. YMMV.

Healing animations aren't cool enough. I facepalmed at that one. We've yet to actually get into anything pvp, and I'm hearing about animations and knockbacks. He goes into ability delay which the universe agrees is shitty. Camera snap, I didn't think about that much, but I agree that it's not a good thing for pvp users. Nameplates. I have no idea what he's referencing here that is different in WoW other than the fact that he has mods? Can someone explain? The raid frame bug sounds awful for healers tbh if that's a true percentage. Ilum's a shithole. Yep. You'll find almost nobody who agrees that they did that well at all. What he didn't mention is they patched it and fucked it up further, which I would have piled on about. Gear comes down to time invested? Oh duh, it's a fucking MMO.

Now we get into the stuff that's truly insane. He goes on for a while about how there's no skill in healing in SWTOR, that you're just playing whack-a-mole, and that you never manage any cooldowns which is somehow the crux of pvp skill. He really doesn't go into how healing is different from WoW other than the lack of cooldowns. He points out that SWTOR actually has cooldowns, but they are "garbage" so cooldowns are non-existant. Granted I have no pvp experience at the high end, so I don't know if pvp skill in WoW comes down to cooldowns, but perhaps someone can fill me in on that.

There's no rated pvp yet, and he disliked that. While I think you can compare things, that's about the most unfair comparison to WoW given the timing. Expecting SWTOR to have rated arena type combat when they haven't even subjected a playerbase to month than 2 months of regular pvp? You're pushing it from a design standpoint. Also, the bag thing and tooltip thing he mentioned were dumb. Nobody runs all over creation spamming their bag or guild screen. That's like a two year old saying it hurts when I poke myself repeatedly in the eye, WATCH!

Now, the gear thing. He compares getting a centurion weapon to getting a 2her in WoW. He says in Wow to get a weapon you need 3400 honor. This is true, you can get the weapon that's a season behind the best Gladiator weapon for that amount. It's also true that the pvp requirements right now in this game are totally fucked. SWTOR has fucked this up, and he's right. He's too many commendations, it's way too fucking confusing on what does what, and everything can be exchanged back and forth. You don't, as a person walking into it, have any idea what you're shooting for. You don't have any idea what comes from what other than drilling into the tooltips, the vendors, the bags, and the exchanges. It's borked. PvP gear positioning sucks right now, and he should have just spent the video focusing on that instead of rambling about the stupid shit.

The Gearing system is fucked, but his argument for it is also shit.


It would be like if I argued getting honor was too hard in WoW if I decided to only use wintergrasp honor token turn ins. Purposefully going out of your way to do it wrong, then bitching that it sucks isn't going to win any arguments with me.

Honestly I have fun in the warzones unless it is a blowout either way.  And I play what is generally considered a gimp spec (healing operative). 

Ilum is beyond shit though.  It makes me yearn for the fun times of the entenmoors.

Yeah Ilum is just plain broken, the warzones would get old but empires gets 9 out of 10 huttballs so at least that keeps it entertaining.  The random bag system isn't very good but at least they throw bags at you fast enough that even with RNG it doesn't take very long to gear up, it really sucks when you are trying to get that last one or two pieces you really want specially if they are weapons.

The operations frames and nameplates are still crap compared to say, Grid and TidyPlates Neon respectively, but they've been working fine for a few weeks now.

I can sort of get the cooldown thing, as it's satisfying to be able to go up a gear to match the situation.  The thing is, SWTOR has that kind of play baked in with variable resource regen for the throughput cooldowns and everyone instead of just tanks and healers having major defensive ones.

Instead of pressing a button to make punches harder, you just press more (or more damaging) punches when it's really important that you do so, and then deal with that choice down the line.  When it works, I find it much more dynamic and satisfying than asking "Is my CD up?"  That said, adrenals and on-use trinkets are plentiful so it's still there to an extent.


I disagree with you completely.

I agree that the stream-of-consciousness talking and constant apologizing gets old.  I just happen to think that he hit on a few things that bugged me that I couldn't really nail down.  The ability to pan and act is one, the fact that jumping slows you down is another, and the constant knockbacks make me rage on my melee toons.  He doesn't have the luxury of playing melee and having things like the animation go halfway and the ability not work because lag prevented a positional. 

Anyway, I love this game but am finding the pvp to be more and more frustrating rather than fun.  Sadly, there isn't much else to do but level and pvp after your toon is geared.  I'm on my 4th alt now.  

Coming with the mindset of "Like, I know perfection; perfection is Warcraft" probably does make this game seem irritating at every corner to someone.

True.  I found plenty of things wrong with WoW pvp.  I did appreciate the fact that there were class-defining abilities that were unique, fun, and effective.  I almost feel that SWTOR suffers some of the same blandness that Rift did.

There's something in the ability to play the warg, spider or orc that's utterly endearing. Think the character models and animations had a big part there, they're fun to even just watch and emote with.

Ilum should be a 25 on 25 match, in a smaller area, with a 3 battle field objectives; near, mid, far.  Scoring goes near < central < far.  Team with the most points wins.  One thing I never liked about Wintergrasp was the attacker/defender thing.  Anything that promotes one team turtling in ruins the fluidity of play.

Alternatively, these games could learn a LOT from WoT.  Play until you are killed kind of matches force you into better and more strategic decision making.

Wouldn't that just be another warzone? Ilum is supposed to be open world pvp, because this kind of game has to have everything for everyone no matter how little sense it makes.

Open world pvp is a pipedream unless you remove any reward system that adds to player power.  Today's gamer will exploit any system they can to speed the power curve.  I think that WoW really focused gameplay on the reward rather than the fun of the game itself.  Now gamers are hyper-focused on this or any reward system and how it can be manipulated to their best advantage.

The biggest problem keeping regular people out of PvP as it stands right now is that the regular person has absolutely no idea:

1 - What they win if they win
2 - How to work together in the zones
3 - How to improve their character for it

Yeah i've had to explain the whole "turn warzone comms into mercenary comms then buy a bag" thing to practically every single member of my guild.

And that's because it makes no fucking sense.

I still don't know where Battlemaster stuff comes from? Why are there 3 tiers already? Wouldn't it make more sense to just have 2? Are there two? I have no idea what's going on and I play the game enough to have a 50 and a 25.

I am terrible at PvP in this game, that's the main thing I've learned!  :oh_i_see:

Three matches is not a proper sample size Sjofn.

My experience so far is that serious pvpers seem to pick the "evil" side, while all the people I play with hate that. So I end up on the side that can't find their asses with both hands (Alliance and Republic).

True of every single game i've played so far.  Guardians in Rift were pathetic, heroes in DCUO sucked, even in something like warhammer where everyone technically should be a pvper the good side got crushed more often than not.

It's totally a proper sample size!

You'll only know if you're good at PvP after 100 matches of having your face ground into the dirt.

At that point you'll start having fun. Or so I'm told.

Being good at your class and pvp is only part of the equation.  Good players stuck on bad teams can be equally frustrating... or so I'm told.

Perhaps I should just say I am terrible at PvP on my assassin. I'm sure I'd be fine healbottiing as my sage.  :why_so_serious:

I think jumping slowing you down is the greatest thing ever for PVP purposes. Die bunny hoppers die.

I'm going to miss playing in the sub-50 brackets on my Sniper.  For the last 2 weeks or so, I've been avoiding leveling outside of PvP, but I'm getting to the point that I can't avoid it any more (40K to 50).  I'd even come to terms with Huttball, but I'll be damned if I slog through their bullshit post-50 PvP gear grind.

5 pairs of champion shoes.    :why_so_serious:


thank you that is all.

That's why you roll a trooper, so you can outfit all your companions (except for Forex, but even he uses trooper gear in the non-robot slots) with your extra pvp gear! :awesome_for_real:

Yea all my companions are rocking pvp bracers. I did get gloves once. 

Level 56 just seems a bit high. Talk about a good way to discourage new people from trying pvp.

In a week or so of 50 pvp I've got my op mostly outfitted in Champion gear. Now that I'm somewhat decently outfitted (exp 400 or so) I don't roflstomped any more. If I'm in a decent group I do quite well, if I'm in a crap group ...

I'm not worried about Battlemaster gear, as long as I can compete. It's fairly easy to get 2 bags a day in an hour or so, longer if you want to finish the weekly but each weekly gets you 3 bags. It can certainly take a while if you need to get a weapon for 72 comms but I've been getting about 1 in 3 bags have a piece of gear.

Ilum is boring except when an even fight breaks out about 2-3 times a week and needs a serious makeover.

/rambling

Yeah, the system is idiotic but it doesn't really take very long to gear up.

I'm still stubbornly sticking to the heal spec on my scoundrel, I dunno why. Because in PvP, not only do I have to stand still to deliver my most effective heals while staying fairly close and LOS to my heal-targets, pretty much any enemy team worth its salt sees me healing and I have six Sith on me in seconds. Unless I'm on a really good team, nobody's guarding me, nobody knows to CC the people dogpiling the healer, so I go down constantly. Meantime the Jedi healers rack up the healing numbers because they have way more survivability.

I'm starting to like Huttball better though--once you understand the map, it's a bit easier to make smart tactical decisions that are class based about where you can do the most good. The other two are entirely dependent on the gear levels and non-idiocy of teammates in a way that is brutally unfun when either or both of those factors are subpar. The number of times I've almost had the bomb on a door planted after stealthing to it and then get hit by one shot from the one Sith who has noticed what's going on, while two or more of my teammates beat on the Sith without using an available CC *before* he shoots me...

I had my first fun in Ilum--two big groups on either side being smart, pretty even fight, good leadership and group discipline. Both sides kept using the smuggler/operative ability that cloaks large groups for a short moment to spring surprises--you'd send a vanguard forward that looked easy to smash, but they'd have a big cloaked squad or two in their midst and suddenly you'd be deep in the middle of the enemy zerg. Lasted about an hour before the Republic, to my surprise, started being so coordinated that we smashed several rushes very effectively and the Imps sort of gave up and went back to doing something else.

Most of the time Ilum is just a horrible, boring slog. Either you're cruising around in a circle like an animal in the zoo along with six or seven others and occasionally ganking the shit out of an opposing faction player who just wants to get a few armaments, or you're the one being ganked because you just want to get a few armaments. It's a terrible design and it's kind of unforgiveable because by this point they should know better. That's my beef with the whole game: they were so focused on voice acting and character narratives that they forgot they were making an MMO and then just stuck in some ramshackle shit that might have seemed like a decent idea six years ago before we found out why it wasn't a good idea.

Anyone see this warzone exploit happen?
http://www.swtor.com/community/showthread.php?p=2350970

I have seen something like that happen once back when there were no brackets... we had 11 people in a voidstar, and about 4 of those joined very shortly before the game ended. It may be related to people getting DC'd, but their spot still being 'reserved' so if they log in and requeue they get put back in the warzone - even if a replacement has already been found in that time?

Only semi-related to that, but I stopped soloqueuing for WZs altogether 2 days ago. Republic on Lord Adraas ALWAYS (and I mean always) starts with at least 1-2 people down, and it either stays that way until the end, gets worse (because some people leave after they see we're outnumbered), or we get some extra people at the late midgame where it doesn't matter anymore. Missing 2 people in an 8v8 warzone is brutal, especially if the other side has a partial premade (and they often do). I just wait until there's a premade (with a 4man premade we can win even 6v8), or log and do something else.

I suspect it's due to republic only having enough people queuing to fill one WZ at a time, and several republic characters who join WZs instantly leave. (one of them also keeps rejoining only to instantly leave again, or sit in a corner doing 0 damage). I've seen them do this a few times, they are also getting reported when they do it, but... yeah.

I'd imagine if you were a real pvp'er you would think seriously about pvping on an empire dominated server. Lots more warzones. Instead of endless huttball.

Well, I do play republic on an empire-heavy server (not 4:1, but something like 7:3), and being the underdog is not really fun... even though I get instant queues and almost always get alderaan/voidstar. Ilum is pointless, and - as I posted above - my side only has enough 50s to almost-fill one WZ, leading to being constantly outnumbered in supposedly-even-size warzones. Mix that up with the number of battlemasters / war heroes (what rank is that, 80?) and 'elite pvp guilds' on imp side vs. republic side... yeah.

This happened to me once yesterday after getting in a match that appeared to be half way done already - although a message came up (didn't see it properly) and booted me out with my stats showing up as 0's.  It looked like it booted a few other people out as well. 

http://www.swtor.com/community/showthread.php?t=254317

I saw it last night, actually: we were up against 10 and once 11 in 8v8, with us capped at 7 for some reason. Couple of people put in tickets, no reply so far. I've also seen what I think are speed hacks, and one Sith juggernaut we did some serious testing on--five of us swarmed him and we staggered our ccs at 4 second intervals, he escaped out of each one in sequence for the entire WZ--I never saw him cc'd at any time under any circumstance--it was like he had unleash and invincible on continuously.

I think that came from EQ, since the WoW dev's were pretty hardcore EQ raiders. You can even see the transition when a boss mob meant to be epic, but not really killed, started getting zerged down. At that point the "building a world" faded to the "building a challenge" model. Though I think MMO PvP has pretty much always been focused on being able to manufacture an advantage.

I don't particularly care about any one persons opinion, especially one that goes for 30 minutes (wtf), but you can somewhat judge a game by how quickly the community turns on it and how one sided the general mood is. The SWTOR honeymoon seems to be proving to be fairly short, and the story isn't helping them come up with new answers to old MMO problems.


There's some videos on youtube of SWTOR speed hacking, so it's possible there are other hacks as well.

You can endure speed hacks when your PvP is a sideshow. But right now the PvP is a big part of gearing up even for PvE--the Champion tier stuff is what you'd need to do Hard Modes, mostly, enough to earn the crystals to get the PvE endgame gear. So endgame progression routes through PvP, and they're being very slow to respond to serious hacks and bugs. Another WZ I was in last night, the Republic players were all falling halfway through the floor the whole time, which added a delay to the animation of every move--every ability had to not only do the animation but had a delay where you were pulled back to standing on the floor while the ability fired and then you fell halfway through again. This is not the first serious glitch I've seen in PvP that is more than cosmetic.

Depends on where you're sitting. I had a feeling the end game daily grind stuff would get old quick, I didn't even start it. Just ran an alt, and I'm having as much fun as the first beta weekend, I have to force myself to log off every night.

Most people don't realized how burned out they are on the genre, nor how much damage WoW has done by training bad habits.

My fiancee accuses me of being easily amused. I'll take that all day long over the alternative.

I did a WZ last night and there was a player who no doubt was using a speed hack.  He had a constant 3x speed over any other player and in Voidstar he could cross from door to door in 2 seconds stopping us from getting the bomb up.  Everytime I got near him he would just float away in all his a-holeness, thankfully I didnt get him in more then 1 WZ.  Sent in a ticket but I already know they ignore those.  I have been ticketing another AFK player who for over a week has done constant AFKing and he is still around.  GG Bioware.  They dont appear to have any systems in place to catch player hax or afkers.  

It seems like people are starting to 'get' Huttball a bit more now, but they can't seem grasp Alderaan. I cannot understand how Alderaan is too complicated for, what seems like, the vast majority of people.

Voidstar is my favourite WZ right now, which surprises me.

I have no interest in getting my Bounty Hunter to 50 right now, I play alts until guildmates want to PvP and then I'll log him in if it fits the group.

I play Operative now and its scary how often I have ninjad in Voidstar and Alderaan.  You can have someone literally standing right next to the objective and I can take it cause they arent watching, that or no one bothers to stay and defend.  Ive single handedly turned around multiple losing games to wins due to ninjaing.  Sad part is I see very few stealthers doing this, they just want to DPS. 

Also in news of the hilarious:  the Operative "Nerf" now makes the 1.5 opener not fill the resolve bar completely...  So...

An operative can knockdown, backstab, debilitate and then continue the rotation, so instead of being stunlocked for 3 seconds the opposing player will be stunlocked for 6.  I predict much hilarity on the forums about this...

On a separate note, if you are jacked by a scoundrel/op, wait until the second stun before you trinket, otherwise you are just locking yourself into a 4 second stun.

Spent last night playing warzones on two of my alts: A level 30 sorcerer and a level 30 Shadow.  It's ridiculous how much easier pvp is on a ranged class than a melee, even with stealth.  I could routinely put up 250k damage with sloppy play on my sorcerer but struggled to hit 150K on the shadow.  For the moment, I'm going to chalk this up to the shadow being more situational and gear dependent, but it's hard not to see this as a design decision.  

If you ever wondered if the game had too much cc and too many knockbacks, just play melee.  I think I spent half of the matches flying in the air. 

lol cant wait

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=fKHvwJjT12w
lol @ 0:45+

 :ye_gods:
he is healing for more than my healing spec sorc?

The notes say he's used adrenal+relic for heals, maybe that's why?

The shoving extra people over the 8v8 cap in Warzones... that would explain A LOT of matches I've had.

If you pop an adrenal/relic before your heals you will see big numbers too. 

There's a specific Adrenal for healers actually, it dramatically inflates your healing power and/or speed, but also reduces your damage dealt drastically.


-edit- My favorite part of the video is around 7 mins, "explosive round for on demand burst!"

*hits for 1000, 500, 1000*  :why_so_serious:

I also like how he's fighting level 20s  :oh_i_see:

The jump to cancel the animation for Tech Override and make it insta-cast is something I never thought of.

On stealthing in Voidstar: it's an either/or thing for me. Either you're against a pug where everyone just wants to kung-fu fight and so they're easy to just stealth around or you're against a tightly coordinated premade or otherwise alert bunch who not only watch for stealth, they actively anticipate it. What really burns me is when I tell folks I'm going in on an undefended gate, tell the two guys who are in the middle to cc anybody who runs over when I start, and then I get within 7/8 of the bar setting the bomb but take a hit because some goober didn't give a shit about cc'ing the incoming.

How the hell does a sorc get tanking medals? i just got out of an alderaan match where a sorc got 14 medals, including all dps healing and tanking ones.  I thought only taunt and guard gave those.

Sure it was a sorc and not an assassin?  Assassins have a tank tree.

Then how did they get the healing medals? including the 75k healing done, 2.5k, and 5k heal ones? i know medpacks don't count anymore.

Good question.  I have no idea how a sorc could get tanking points, but they can get turret defense medals. 

Just throwing out ideas.

Assassin Madness has a few abilities/talents that heal the user, but my guess would be Pure Shockfrozen Water (http://www.torhead.com/item/gW66Dxg/pure-shockfrozen-water), especially as they have the 5k medal.

Spoilered the screenshot for size, dude was even 50k away from the 300k dmg medal.

Does the absorb shield thing count as protection maybe?

I wish I had as many free button slots as you do...

One big reason i like the powertech more than my assassin or marauder.  If that healing water thing works for medals then that is likely the answer, and another broken thing about this game.

Don't know about their absorb but Sith Sorcerer Static Barrier counts for healing when it takes damage.  First thing I typically do in a match is shield and run through fire on my way to mid for the 2.5 k heal medal.

IIRC DPS Sorc has almost all the heling-Sorc utilities - the only difference is cast time and maybe some percentage decrease.
I run constantly with sorc who is doing >300k dps and min. 75k heal. At the end of hutball she is standing in fire and heal herself.

You don't even need the fire.  Sorcs get a lifetap.  Lots of times when defending some objective I'll tap a few times and heal up, or let others heal me.  Not sure how the defender points are awarded but lots of times it will proc the 1k/3k defender medal.

My Jugg is about to get 50 and unless you have a pocket healer with you I see no reason to play that class over the Sorc.  Melee in this game is messed up.

 I have my list of medals I shoot for now, 2.5K+ heal...check.  Heal over 75K....check.  Damage over 75K...check, etc etc.  While I always try to win the match I focus on the medals heavily now.  TBH its kind of fun trying to get as many medals as I can, or at least if we are losing it gives me something else to focus on.  Here is the medals list:

Medic – 2.5k healing from a single heal
Demolisher – 2.5k damage from a single attack
Trauma Surgeon – 5k healing from a single heal
Anihilator –5K damage from a single attack
Quick Draw – Getting a killing blow on one player
Combatant – Dealing 75k damage
Destroyer –Dealing 300K damage
Healer –Healing 75K
Savior –Healing 300K
Defender – Earning 1k Defender Points
Warden –Earning 3k Defender Points
Assassin – Killing a player in a one-on-one fight
Shield – 5k Protection
Protector –50K Protection (thanks meatballz/adlarn)
Guardian – 2k Protection since last death
Paladin – 10k Protection since last death
Commando – Killing 10 enemy players
Soldier – Killing 25 enemy players

It's interesting how many of the medals incentivize losing play, though. On Voidstar last night, most of us just wanted to win, and then two complete assholes were screaming at the middle gate to stop trying to open the gate so that we could just farm the unusually hapless Imps. In some sense, they're perfectly right--once you have a win down by getting farther than the other team, there's no real reward for wininng all the way.

I was so proud the other night when my powertech got both the 50k protection and 300k damage medals.

That's pretty impressive.  My sniper has to play all out to just hit 300k and protection isn't even an option. 

This happens all the time in 5-0 Huttball games too. There's no real reward for getting that 6th score and ending the game early.

The more I play the more I feel medals/MVP have to go.  It incentivizes all sorts of crappy behavior.

I think revamping the medal system and coupling it to the daily would help. Something like "Win a warzone while also completing 6 medals".  Healers would need more ways to attain medals first.

Oh god no.  That we create horrible matches with idiots sitting in hazards and healing themselves folks leaving nodes to get into fights, etc....

I disagree, they just need to revamp it a little.

I'd like to see some WZ specific medals ie Goals/Assists in Huttball, planting/disabling bombs in Voidstar.

Yeah, don't get rid of the medals, just add some to encourage people to work together and go for the actual win conditions of the map.  I'd hate having to save up for the gear if I wasn't getting bonus commendations from medals. 

Add medals for doing the mission objectives. Scoring goals, making passes, setting bombs, capturing nodes, etc.  There seems to be achievements for all of those, so it shouldn't be too hard a jump to toss some medals at people when they do that stuff.  And award some of them to the whole team when an objective is met, or to everyone in the radius of the person who scores a goal or whatever.  Encourage people to work together to get a goal instead of punching it out in the middle of the map. 

It's so cute when you guys try to come up with ways for people to play as sportsman rather than opportunistic selfish retards.

I sometimes like to imagine the NFL played in an online pvp fashion.

You can't beat human nature, folks.

The reward for winning fast simply has to be better than the reward for milking medals.

Is it as cute as you being condescending in a gaming forum?   :grin:

Indeed.

Here, have a Rodian Mayonnaise Sandwich.

As far as I can recall there is no individual reward in hutball for scoring.  There is no reward for successfully setting off a bomb on a door in Voidstar or activating the bridges.  No reward for taking a turret in Alderaan.  Correct me if Im wrong. 

You are right. We tried to cap 6 points as fast as we can with friends - ending up with almost no medals. Zerg in the middle got all.

Thats how you tell who played the game to win, least medals in the end.   

Give Medals for offensive objectives then you just have everyone clicking the doors like idiots instead of one guy doing it with the team trying to cover him.

It also doesn't solve the issue of one dude carrying the ball 90% of the way, but tossing it to the cherrypicker at the very end for the score. It also doesn't account for the people running interference, healing, supporting, peeling etc.


Winning fast IS already better then farming medals, its just you don't see BIG NUMBAR on the score sheet and people can't figure it out.

I play to win and get plenty of medals in the process, it's only when you are destroying the other team that you get less.  For most people winning is more important than medals because they are there for the daily/weekly, not for farming valor.

I generally try to cap points or do whatever makes us win because farming medals is absolutely no fun and anyway pvp gear looks terrible, also I can't imagine bothering with pvp once in the 50 bracket so it doesn't matter, otoh winning makes me feel warm and fuzzy.

Plus it's a nice chunk of exp and money while leveling.  In happier news it appears the bug that made some wins not count is gone.

Most of the medals come from things you should be doing to win anyways.

It's only from those edge cases where some DPS sorc stands in the fire to get a healing medal near the end, cases not really worth fussing over really.

Argh, you fucker.

No no, some corner case person is getting something they might not deserve! BURN THE WHOLE SYSTEM DOWN.

Man, I don't agree. When there's a scrum of people just killing each other over and over and no one is really trying to cap a turret or plant a bomb, that's not about winning. And it's what happens a decent proportion of the time.

You can't cap a turret or plant a bomb until you are done killing each other, not against any half decent team. 

I had been saving up my commendations to buy my last couple pieces. Then my daily bbag dropped legs. I then spent most of the points on the bp. Give me about 100 more expertise. Only boots to go.

Yes, sometimes teams will stalemate or tie, it happens.

But there's a difference between a coordinated team and a PUG / one that is just out there for themselves.

The single question that devs need to ask themselves about players is, "Where does the advantage lie?" because that's where players will head. If there is more reward in not winning the game the devs have designed, or standing in a fire and self-healing, or flipping keeps or whatever, that is what players will do. Looks like you might lose? Screw the team, earn the medal.

Then the game moves on from being Huttball to Earning Medals, which is an entirely different focus.

There's no difference if the two PuG's are equally shitty, you'll still end up with a stalemate. Just because it arrives through inability rather then ability doesn't really change the situation.  :why_so_serious:



There isn't more reward from just Medals, is the thing. Winning itself is still going to net you more reward, largely because winning and gaining medals are not remotely exclusive. Almost all the medals come from natural proper play, with the dude standing in the fire healing himself being the aberration.

Or look at it another way... Medals reward PARTICIPATION, by far the single most important thing in any PvP game. Because of Medals, there's reason for people on the losing side to keep playing and trying. Maybe they won't capture a second node all game, but now there is incentive to at least keep putting out an effort. Without the medals you just get people waiting a match out, afking in a corner or flat out leaving the zone entirely. The Medals are rewarding the effort, not necessarily the success.

That "I'll just farm medals" is still far and away better then "I'll just tab out till I get my token" in the same situation without medals.

We kept having groups of 10-11 in the Warzones last night. The funny thing was that if the other side didn't get the bug as well, the WZ ended early as the teams couldn't match the same amount of players. We did have an Alderaan game that had to be 11 vs 10, made for a packed WZ.

My personal fave are the sorcs standing way off to the side spamming consume and heals to the exclusion of everything else.

I really have no idea why Sorcerers even have Consume.  I've never had to use it on my Sorc even once.  Are there really any out there having problems with force use?

The only time I used it was if I accidentally pulled more enemies than I expected and had to jump between healing my companion and nuking stuff and the fight was taking forever.  So normal use?  Never.  I forget it's there most the time. 

I use it all the time in pvp if I have a healer in my premade or in really long boss fights when I know I can run to the healing sorc's Ae heal for health. 

My sorc is heal specced and I use consume regularly when soloing.

With a DPS companion (using Ashara atm) I heal her and get the free consume proc often enough that I never run out of force - means I usually have zero downtime between pulls. Couple of seconds of Seethe for a double pull or an elite/double strong.

A +1 or +2 elite pull means a lot of Consume being used, but again only when the free proc is up. Without that proc I'd never touch it tbh.

Yeah, I use consume every time it procs, which is pretty often if we're fighting something hard (on my healy sage). I have to try REALLY HARD to kill my force enough for me to consider using it without the proc, though.

PVE, or in voidstar when the action is nonstop and I am not dying.  The channeled hot making your next consume not taking any health off you trait thingy helps though.

So, anyone up for some below level 50 PvP today/tonight ? Did the ts/vent/whatever server materialize ?

Sorry, I've not got round to sorting that out yet. The guy who rents it has been away working a lot this week, I'll hopefully chat to him tonight and get him to show me how to add users etc.

I think I reached my limit with pvp in SWTOR today... which surprised me as I'm usually a huge fan.  A powertech spent the entirety of every hutball match that I played with and against him doing nothing but standing on the edge of an acid pit and pulling people to it and stunning them there.  Seriously, all match, every match. 

Between things like this and getting bounced around the place like a pinball, I think I'm just going to skip huttball from now on. 

Maybe you need to reroll again Nebu. The grass is certainly greener SOMEWHERE.  :why_so_serious:

I'm leveling a toon on Shien as well as 3 alts all approaching 50.  I gave up on my sniper.  Even with lethality spec, the class plays too slow. 

Tried PVP for the first time today.

Huttball is by far the most fun, but I did have one Alderaan group that got the 'hold two cannons' concept. I think I ended up with Valor 5, about halfway to 6. I bought an implant for 175 WZ commendations.

One more match should get me to 47, which was the goal. Huttball would likely be more fun if people didn't just cluster in the middle and go for kills. The matches that were fun were the ones where people actually focused on the ball carrier.

A lot of times they're not clustered around the middle just to get kills.  Controlling the middle is important so you can get neutral balls.

And that powertech doing nothing put pulling people into the acid?  More than likely he's not contributing all that much to his team.

Everything about Huttball is positioning. Everything.

PUG vs PUG huttball at 50 on my server mostly boils down to a simple condition:

"Do we have at least 4 vanguard/PTs and sage/sorcs combined and do we have a guardian/juggernaut who knows what he's doing? If so - win. If this is true for the enemy team - lose. If this is true for neither team - it'll be 0:0 and won by whoever can hold the ball last."

Those are the classes that provide superior positioning!

 :heart: :awesome_for_real:  :heart:

I think it has been changed to whoever has more medals.

Ugh, I hope not.  Holding onto the ball when you're tied is strategery I would not like to see disappear.  I've been that glory person a couple of times, even!

He must be trying to be sarcastic, because it's still whoever is holding the ball last.

Nope. I lost a few times beeing the last ball carrier. Other team was farming us for medals. At the end 0:0, me with the ball, almost all member of opposite team full gold, our team almost all silver. We lost.

Well, as Doyle said in Sling Blade, "Fuck me."

Can anyone confirm whether queueing in a group causes you to be matched with others who've queued as a group? 

I highly doubt that.

Queued as a group literally hundreds of times.  Never seen any sort of trend to suggest this.

Hm.  My buddy and I queued as a group several times, and went up against teams that seemed way too coordinated to be pugs.  Later we queued solo and repeatedly won matches.  Not exactly what you'd call scientific data collection, to be sure, but it made us wonder.

The change to resolving ties sounds about right; we had a match where I scored the typing point with ~1s left on the clock. The game ended before the ball respawned (with the score now tied 2:2) but gave us the win. We weren't sure why but a lot of us had 6+ medals so that explains it.

It might be damage too? Dunno.


Been fooling around on my Vanguard in Warzones again, I'm not faring to badly considering I don't have a single piece of PvP gear. My natural tankyness helps a lot. My Damage is really fucking bad though. "Oh yea, crit for you 800 bitch  :why_so_serious: "


This is my highscore so far:


That's an anomaly protection wise, I'm usually averaging half of that. 50-60k. Goes way way up if I am getting actual heals though. It's a very throttled mechanic, you can only taunt so many times a match and guarding will whittle you down without help.

It is not.

Pretty impressive.  You're going to be a beast with good gear.

I had two Huttball tie score games yesterday.  Both times it went to the team that was holding the ball.  I've never seen a team holding the ball lose the game in a tie score situation.  Now if the ball is neutral I have no idea.

I've hit over 500k and 65 kills in Voidstar when i was in mostly champion gear.  This is as a BH Pyrotech Merc.  So yeah your numbers will go up.

500k protection?  :-o

Check out the protection.  It's amazing considering he also did 130k damage. 

Yeah my powertech is mostly tank specced in full champion gear and usually has someone guarded the entire match and i use taunts on cd and my best protection score was like half that, around 70k.

Best I've gotten on my baby Assassin has been 65k Protection, also on a nearly full-length Voidstar game.  A few more levels until AOE taunt, then :drill:.

500k damage for a mercenary sadly is not that impressive. 500k protection would be a different story.

Also, I've seen Sith sorcs (but not Jedi sages) heal consistently in a WZ for 660k. Have you seen more than that? Not e-peening, just curious about how crazy high that value can get.

To add generic informations, with my Vanguard DPS I got as high as 380k damage, but the sad thing is that while I've never met a DPS vanguard that scored higher than me, I met more than a Powertech going way over it. Which makes you wonder "am I doing it wrong or no matter what Bioware says that are some imbalances between mirrored classes?".

There are some minor differences in animation times and stuff that they're trying to iron out, but there are no Large Differences.

This might be better addressed in the "noob questions" thread, but here goes . . . When do I start getting commendations other than WZ ones? Is that lv 50 only?

When you sell your WZ commendations for the merc commendations.

Which, by the way, is yet another "WTF" thing. I don't know what the point of that is. Tons and tons of people need to have explained to them--it's a completely obscure mechanic.

Yeah I don't get that one at all. It seems like some temporary workaround or something that just ended up going live.

or get them from chests in the Dune Sea pvp area I hear.

Haha my bad, I play too much DPS.  My powertech is at 46 but I've broken 100k prot with 2 pocket healers.  :D

Oh Phew!


I was like "What am I doing wrong then  :ye_gods:"

Hmm? Wait? Which vendor buys the WZ comms?

the pvp vendor.

you need 800 commendations to get the 200 x 200 bag

so turn in 30 normal pvp commendations for 10 merc commendations from the pvp vendor... if in a click fest you over shoot, you can sell 10 mercs for 30 normal.

Incorrect you can sell 30 merc for 10 warzone.  It's not an even trade.

None of the pvp vendors in the area seem to buy comms. Is there some other vendor elsewhere on the fleet?

The tradein is right next to the PVP mission terminal I think.

Ah yes.  That guy. Right there.

You can also buy them from the vendors in the PvP warzones.

Hutball, the better people get at it, the more frustrating it becomes. When no one was clued in really, it was fun, shit was happening everywhere and people slowly dragged that ball across the field.


Now? Now you can't even stand on your own upper platforms without giving the other team a point. The efficiency at which teams move the ball now is just silly.




Also, all my tanky guarding in PvP is useless if the enemies are aware enough to realize I am a tank that is guarding/taunting.  :why_so_serious:

I agree with you about Huttball.  If I'm in a pug against a premade, the game ends quickly.  Teams have become very efficient at using a few select mechanics to score quickly. 

I look forward to a time when I can queue for just the other two warzones.  I've run out of love for huttball. 

Despite much fun I have with it personally, I almost want to say you shouldn't be able to charge with the ball anymore.


The conundrum I keep seeing is this. If you don't hold your own platforms, the enemy just sets up a little pass chain right?

Yet, if you do hold them, your just another anchor point for a enemy charger to use. The only people who can actually 'guard' the platforms are the cover classes, since you can't charge to them, and even that is risky in that all you need is one stun on the dude in cover and he's an anchor again.

Like at one point, I was guarding a gunslinger on our platform from underneath our platform, because if I went up there, the enemy BH/Jugg would just get a free ride. If the gunslinger isn't there to knock off enemies though, then you get someone cherry picking on your platform, one pass and a force speed to goal.

If you're the ball carrier, charges, sprints and that Sage lifegrip thing don't work for/on you.  There, fixed.

Huttball is perfect just the way it is.

Huttball is just fine.  I just don't like it.  I'm sure that has more to do with acid pits and the matchmaking system than huttball itself. 

The evolution of the mechanics in Huttball has meant that I only really want to play it with my guild now, who have it down solidly. If you've got two premades against each other, it's like a game of chess--it's all about control of the center. Once you get out of the center intact, both teams typically have an assembly line to pass it all down.

In fact, I'm starting to see an evolution in good premades towards an all-or-nothing kind of dynamic. A lot of good Voidstar matches mean neither team gets out of the first room or ever sets a bomb--you just keep 2 people on each gate and the rest in the middle, forming a protective cordon around a bomb-setter is almost impossible in that situation, and folks very rarely fall any more for stealth tries. I'm going to experiment more with the scoundrel mass stealth mechanic to see if that can pull off a surprise, but I doubt it. Good teams even know the paths that stealthers are likely to take--I get other stealthers criss-crossing me now all the time unless I go way, way, way around.

Alderaan matches are essentially all over in a good premade v. premade once one team has capped mid--what I see now is each team caps the most accessible turret on the side and then it can take 2-3 minutes for a window to open up for a mid cap, usually determined by who has the best healer(s) and the best focus-fire discipline. Once mid is capped, it's almost certainly all over--good teams are not sending a scrub to guard their far cap any longer, but one of their best instead.

I stopped queing as guild pre-mades because it became too easy and boring.  Our 4 people would just lineup based on skills and run the ball in a pattern game after game that it wasnt even a challenge.  PvP essentially became like scripted PvE.  Id rather que with PUGs and fight my way through games.   I still win 50% of the time but at least its not boring.  Sure I get games that are balanced heavily one side vs the other or I get qued with morons but I dont expect to win every game.  Id take challenging games with PUGs even if its a loss over win win win with no challenge and playing the same every time. 

Premade v. pug is boring. Just like being in Ilum on the vastly larger faction side is boring. It's entirely about tolerating dull gameplay in return for gear. Which is a bad thing for an MMO's viability if it becomes common.

I had the pleasure of watching a really good Sage in Huttball tonight. He basically won the game by himself carrying the rest of us on his giant beefallo back. Half the game we were SHORT two people, and we still won 6-0. His pulls and knockoffs and healing were all pretty much perfect. Where ever the ball was, on either side of the field, he was there to save the day.

Yeah, huttball is the one WF where a team can win (and win decisively) even if they're outnumbered/outgeared simply through superior tactics and positioning. Of course it does require some degree of cluelessness from the other team, but that's a given in a pug match.  :awesome_for_real:

I'm amazed how many teams just LET the other team get the ball from the middle.

Have we bitched about the PvP gearing system enough yet? I could add a few more rants I think.  :why_so_serious:

Gearing system is fine now really.  It's not their fault I suck with my RNG on Battlemaster Bags.

All the token swapping for other token stuff is still retarded.

I find it humbling to imagine the sheer number of man hours that seem to have gone in to making sure there is absolutely no way to get loot through any means other than the single intended method for each item.


Keep that horrible trading and helping friends aspect out of my multiplayer game!

Yeah the PvP gearing system is total shit still and why I stopped playing my 50 Sorc.  The whole idea behind getting a bag and "maybe" getting some piece of useful gear out of it is an interesting mechanic to piss off your player base.  The PvP dailies/weeklys are equally as shitty.  While I expect to grind a little for my gear...I expect the gear, not a chance to get it or f'ing tokens to buy it later.  Wonder who the idiot is at Bioware who has the grind erection.

They already changed the bag system to be a lot more even than before.  Now the chance for a random piece is much smaller but you get tons of commendations so you can buy champ pieces after a few bags and centurion pieces almost immediately.

Yeah I know but I dont have my next toon to 50 yet to see how effective that change really is.  Sounds like Ilum PvP on my server is getting better, either empire has lost a lot of players, many re-rolled rep or a combination of both but there are actualy battles out there now where the ratio isnt 5:1. 

Define 'few bags'   :why_so_serious:

7 Champ comms per bag and each piece of gear is 45-70 comms each. Three bags per day for anyone reasonable, doing both PvP dailies and getting enough WZ comms for another bag. That takes up pretty much my entire evening of playtime. You net half to a third of a piece of gear, while still being rolled the entire process.

I'd be better off making an second Vanguard and going back down to the 1-49 bracket, at least there any decent set of blues will be on par with everyone else.



The actual PvP gear itself is very frustratingly itemized for my spec. They give me fuckloads of absorption rating, but no shield rating, with a little dash of defense mixed in. Defensive stats are already questionable value in PvP, but at least give me the correct ones for my spec dammit.

Also the armor itself looks terrible and whoever designed is an awful person who should feel bad about themselves.

Yeah, ive started buying other classes pvp gear and taking out the enhancements.  Agents have some nice power/surge enhacements i like.

How does it not piss off the player base when it happens in PvE?

(And yes, the end-game sets are pretty awful looking and questionably itemized across the board.)

Well it does piss me off in PvE for one.  :why_so_serious:


But the big difference is when you do a dungeon for X tier of gear, that dungeons mobs don't get better gear overtime that you need to keep up with if you want to stay relevant. The NEXT tier of dungeon does, but you don't need to go into that dungeon till you are done the previous one.

The same can not be said for PvP. Which is why I beg and plead for stat caps and equalization in PvP.

The fact that all end game gear looks terrible is an enormous help to me in giving no fucks about end game "content" - it reminds me to go play an alt without the slightest worry about missing out on stuff.

One of the reasons I hate my sorc, the PvP gear looks like crap...f'ing conehead.  Yeah I know I can turn it off but that's besides the point :P   Troopers look pretty cool as do some Jedi armor though IMO

My bounty hunter looks like some sort of retarded space orc, while leveling i had bad ass blue mandalorian armor. 

The Trooper PvP suit would be fine if they just removed the decorative rockets/spoiler/wing on the shoulder and toned that backpack down some.

The Shadow PvP set makes them look like homeless people.

Yet another thing I don't understand not being standard at this point: allowing people to use the appearance of any gear item they've acquired to express the stats of gear they've upgraded to.

The thing I don't understand is programming such a system in, then taking it out again for no appreciable reason.

What's depressing is that basically the PvP gear looks the same (or very close to the same) across the 3 tiers. The differences are so laughable you really wonder how lazy were the artists or how small (probably not small at all) was the budget for arts.

Let's face it, I remember complaining about the graphics (among a million other things) during the beta only to be told that whatever it was just my taste and it doesn't really matter. What I believe instead is that a MMORPG, something you spend hours and hours everyday for weeks if not months only to impove your virtual self of a digit or a pixel, is a sum of many parts, and among those parts there are lots of tiny rewarding elements that can be discounted in the grand crush that we experience at launch, but gets to feel really shitty once the honeymoon phase is over.

So not only the grind for the PvP gear is not fun because it has to be done only in Warzones for the most part (as it's better to pretend Ilum doesn't exist considering how pathetically imlpemented it is), which is bad cause you can't organize your game with friends since you are forced to play with random monekys, but finally working your way through the tiers (before the changes, so hard hard hard!) feels utterly disappointing when you realize that you look quite horrid, and you don't get any significant visual cue of the fact that you "achieved" something. I've been a Battlemaster Vanguard for a while now, and I am so so tempted to just get Champion gear from other classes and just mix and match mods and enhancements to create my own unique looking clownshoes PvP outfit. I already have a friend who plays a Jedi Knight with a troooper looking armour. I guess that's the way to go, damn you Bioware.

Is this a major issue? No, just the one at hand, and one of those "tiny elements" that constitute my overall satisfaction or dissatisfaction with a given game.

My beef with SWTOR is huge, and travels across many planes. The majority of which I mentioned before it was even launched and it's not changed at all, actually it got worse considering how disappointing Ilum and open PvP is, something I couldn't check in beta. There's no way to explain how much of a wasted opportunity this is, how many great things they could have done with PvP and how bad they failed so far. Hard not to ask yourself "what the hell were they thinking at Bioware?".

On another note, I've been toying around with Tera beta in the last few days. This is not new, but hell, feels like there's about ten years of developing and technology (and talent) between one game and the other. Considering SWTOR is probably the biggest budget MMORPG coming out in the West in the last few years, I rest my case about what a low quality product it really is, and how we, the MMO players, sometimes would play anything if we are starved enough and silly enough. Oh, I ranted.



FAKE EDIT: Since I spew so much loathe on SWTOR all the time, I want to celebrate here the ONLY thing I thank the Bioware devs for and I hope will be present in every future MMORPG. The resolve bar. Being able to see if an enemy player is immune to Crowd Control and for how long is just brilliant and awesome. This is seriously something I am grateful to SWTOR for, and I know I will have lots of problems in the future with any game without it. Everything else? Terribly sub par, terribly underwhelming, terribly uninspired, terribly disappointing.

And since we are talking about it, I don't usually care about class balance. Neither I think this is a problem of class balance, more like an oversight on class potentials and roles.
I am sure many are going to disagree with this statement, and I can't prove it, but reality is that all you need to win PvP warzones is a team of just Sith Sorcerors and Mercenaries. (Theoretically Jedi Sages and Commandos are the same thing even though as we all know there are some subtle discrepancies between the two factions).

So can I prove such claim? No, and there's no way to prove anything when it comes to this things, neither this nor the opposite. But it's obvious enough that both classes have access to an insane amount of utilities combined with ridiculous damage and crazy survivability.

Extreme long range? Check on both classes.
Extremely high DPS? Check on both classes.
Self heal? Check on both classes.
Shields? Check on both classes.
Situational immunity to interrupts? Check on both classes.
Knockback and snare stuff to keep enemies away? Check on both classes.

And channeled spell that takes away insane chunks of HP _while_ snaring from 35 meters away? Fucking clownshoes.

So seriously, whoever thought of two classes that can dish insane damage from insane long range while managing to keep themselves alive with shields and heals and keep enemies away is a complete cretin.

You are free to disagree and provide your hardcore techniques that melt teams of Sorcs and Mercs away and show in details while I should l2p. It's OK.

I do find it odd that range seems to be ignored by EA in making balance decisions.

I look at it like this:
- The pvp seems very rock-paper-scissors balanced.  Smugglers/shadows are the bane of sorcss.  Use stealth to close distance.  I often hit sorcs with my shadow and use a stun early to see if they have their cooldowns up.  If they do, I vanish and come back.  They are easy to kill without cooldowns or between bubbles.
- The key to beating merc/sorc is to win the interrupt war.  If you can keep them interrupted, you win.  You have to be very judicious in which spells you choose to interrupt.  Letting them spam tracer missle is a key to a quick death.
- This is not a 1v1 game.  Team play will dominate a wf regardless of the class balance involved.  Good coordination is vital to success.
- Sorcs big damage numbers in any wf rely on heavy use of AE.  If you don't cluster together, they won't do more than 300k.  All ranged classes can manage that.
- Gear gear gear.  It's not enough to have battlemaster gear any more.  You need to be thorough about mods.  The sets often have some crappy stat choices in them.  The best pvp gamers in my guild will buy multiple sets of gear to get all the mods they want for a custom set.  It's crazy the lengths people will go to have a 2% advantage.

On a side note: Granted that my sniper is a ranged class, but despite what the whines on the forums say about snipers it can beat any class 1v1 if I play my cards right.  The classes that I have the toughest time with are sentinels.  A well played sentinel can keep me perma snared and dish out more single target damage than I know what to do with.  Similarly, a well-played vanguard gives me fits.  I consider smugglers and counselors to be free kills the vast majority of the time (see rock-paper-scissors above)  

Exactly, this is not a 1v1 pvp game, Nebu. That's why I wasn't talking about class vs class imbalance. I said that a team of 8 Sorcs+Mercs is pretty much ridiculously better than any other team. It melts things too fast and when needed can stay alive. Exceptional players aside, I can't see how any team composition could be better than this, and I think it's a design flaw.

I agree with everything else you say, but that's because it doesn't really address my complain. The counter-classes you mention are, in my experience, going to be erased from existence before they can do anything by a barely decent team of sorcs and mercs.
Just as a side note, I've been exploring the PvP of this game since day 1, and I've been digging and undigging everything in game for weeks, learning as much as possible from other players, forums, guildees, exploiters, everyone. I am by far not the best player in the world/server/househod, and I am not even remotely trying to say that "I know better than you" but I certainly am not in that phase where I need to be told that it's about gear and mods (I know), or interrupts (I know), or teamwork (I know). No offense Nebu, you know I hold everything you say in high consideration and respect, but the issue from my perspective isn't the kind that can be solved with common gaming sense. I researched a lot, and I think that, given the actual build, a couple classes are outperforming all the others in TEAM PvP (Huttball aside, which is still sorcs/sages heaven anyway). Hell, I am actually tempted to say that a full team of 8 sorcs/sages is unbeatable, due to that fucking ultra-ranged damaging snare thing.

I can think of a number of teams that could destroy 8 mercs, 8 sorcs, or any combination of the two.  Sorc heals are interruptable... they have no instas.  Merc's overheat too fast to be viable healers.  They also have noone to guard their team's healers effectively. 

The team balance is better than you think with gear being equal.  That's what I'm saying.  You have to get by the gear cockblock to have fun... that's my issue. 

I am way over the gear cockblock. And what I'm saying is that theorizing about a team that can wipe out 8 sorcs is one thing. Actually seeing one is another. Also, just as a proof of how easy things are on paper but they are different on the field, sorcs can become immune to interrupts (so can mercs). Also, once again, you can interrupt a sorc or two FOR 4 SECONDS, not the whole team while they are wiping you out during those 4 seconds.

Have you played a sorc or Merc in the endgame pvp?  You should try it.  It will tell you a lot about their weaknesses.  Hell, just play a sorc into the mid 30's.  

A good player on any class will make them look dominant.  I'm far more terrified of a well-played sentinel or vanguard than either of those two classes.  Both can dish out a ton of uninterruptable dps.  Mercs and sorcs rely on cast times and channeled abilities for their dps.  In pvp instas, cc, and interrupts are everything.

Any good player with an interrupt kills Aresnal Mercs.  This seems to be some huge secret that people can not grasp.

Which reminds me, what kind of interrupts do mercs get ? So far I have Electrodart.

Almost none that I'm aware of.  It's a huge weakness of the class.

If you mean the chest color matching, that's supposedly coming back again in 1.2.

There's nothing stopping you from making a group with your friends and joining the Warzone queue as a group.


For someone who seems to hate the game so much, you sure do play it a lot..

Edit so I don't have 3 posts on a row:

Re: Sorcerers.  They're nothing new.  They're Shadow Priests with an AoE Knockback instead of an AoE Fear.  If I remember correctly, Shadow Priests were also very popular in early WoW because they're easy to learn so you can be effective without having to master anything complex.  I don't think their ceiling is as high as some of the the other classes, though.  A good Vanguard, for example, can be much more powerful than a Sorcerer in my opinion.

None. You're expected to use knockbacks and your stun to function as interrupts. It's extra fun in pve, since it forces you to play really stupid LOS games with some elites.

The fact that I am gonna get 4 more monkeys beside my guildees and such monekys are probably gonna quit as soon as the win is not obvious?

Also, everyone seems to think that interrupts are such a big deal. I wonder what game are you playing. As I said above both sorcs and mercs can get immunity to interrupts under certain circumstances. Also, an interrupt doesn't silence the class of spells, it just silence _that_ spell, so it's not like an interrupted sorc/merc is sitting on his/her ass for 4 (FOUR) secs. They usually use such circumstance to cast a heal, a knockback, a shield or some other damage.

On Vanguard/Powertech, that's exactly my class and I am very efficient, thank you. I can kill and interrupt like hell... the things I can get close to. What part of a team of well placed/spread sorcs and mercs hitting you from different directions 30+ meters away you think you can solo or take as a team before they wipe the floor with you?

If we take into account player skill and gears, everything can happen. But to deny that Sorcs and Sage dominate in PvP is bold.

Finally, yes I play a lot cause I have very good friends I'd play Shit Online if they developed it, and don't care if Sorcs are the carbon copy or any WoW or Asheron's Call class, what I know is that they should at least not fucking slow you down with that ridiculously long cast which constantly defies LoS anyway. At least Mercs don't slow you down, but they can still disgregate players from the other side of any map WAY before you can even get to them, or get in any kind of cover (as if hiding behind a column unable to heal yourself ever won any PvP match).

To be quite honest i feel like my powertech is far superior to sorcs or mercs.

Superior how exactly?

You are not going to pull out their dps.
You are not going to heal yourself or others, nor protect for what they can heal.
You are not gonna be able to kill anything from long range.
You are not gonna be able to kill a Sorc/Sage or a Merc/Comm if you cannot get close to them.
You are not gonna be able to kill them or even interrupt them if you cannot get close to them, which is something they are quite good at preventing.

So superior in what? You having fun? You bashing some noobs to a pulp? Good, me too.

But the funny thing is I am not complaining about some classes being overall inferior to others, they actually did a good job in giving each class a reason and a way to have fun. I am just saying over and over that making two classes capable of superior ranged dps, the ability to preserve such range, and good survivability with heals shields and immunities, wins matches with an alarming consistency. I am curious to see what will happen when the rankings, and team rankings, will come out.

Superior as in i run into one and i kill the fuck outta them.

We just went over on the last page or so how organized Huttball games go.  Mercs can play good defense but can be charged to which is a massive issue.  Healer Sorcs can pull friendlies, but that's it.  The classes lack stealth, any team cooldowns/taunts, guards, and most of the gap closers.

The complaints you're making Falc aren't unique to your class or even this game, they're the complaints all non-stealth melee make of ranged classes in every game when they think they can do everything in their toolkit at once.  They can't.

Just because the raw protection number is smaller on the score sheet, doesn't mean it's actually less effective. The ability to nullify the burst and smooth out the damage is just as important as recovering from it. Most folks still haven't actually caught on that tanks are the ones enabling those unstoppable Commando's or whoever.

Like they'll see the Sage, see it's healing and their decade of MMO PvP training tells them to zerg that Sage down asap. "Kill the healers first" and all that. They'll ignore the dude in the armor beside the sage, the one that whenever he stands near the Sage, causes this weird blue tech bubble to show up around the Sage. They also ignore that they are only doing at best, half their normal damage to this Sage, and just keep merrily beating on it.

Turning otherwise lethal amounts of DPS into perfectly sustainable and heal-able damage. Freeing the Sage up for other tasks, like healing people in the group or contributing to the DPS train, instead of focusing solely on keeping himself alive.



Odds are, if you are in a WarZone and you are cursing Merc/Sorc's name in a match because there were 5 of you on him and you still couldn't make a dent, he has a little guard buddy that no one is paying any attention too but is the cause of all your problems.

I really recommend shield spec for a vanguard, something like this (http://www.torhead.com/skill-calc#801GRGozRroMZMcrroZb.1). With that spec I can beat most classes (though not very quickly)... merc/commando is probably the easiest as they only have one scary ability and I can completely interrupt-lock them (riot strike, charge, riot strike, ae stun, riot strike, stun, riot strike, charge, riot strike, dead). All this while I'm tossing out an AE taunt in the enemy zerg, and probably having guard on a healer. I can't really be kited either (15 sec charge that roots, 35 sec harpoon that also roots, built-in snare in my autoattack). Of course it's not so hot for pve tanking, but considering that nobody runs hardmode FPs/pug ops on my server... yeah.

Damage sorcs have a lot of instants, but they aren't bursty... and locking down their main nuke (force lightning / chain lightning - thundering blast) really hurts them. Healer sorcs are tougher to lock down (since they have 4 heals + 2 instants), but it's usually enough to interrupt them once or twice, yank them out of their friends' LOS (harpoon) and stun them. By the time they get back to the fight, their friends are already dead.

That said, I don't really like pvp in this game either, but that's kind of expected -- it's a diku after all.


Edit regarding interrupt immunity: I thought mercs/commandos only got interrupt immunity when using their 2-min cooldown shield with 11+ points into the healing tree. What is the sorc 'immune to interrupts' ability?

I don't get the fascination with Gut at all. I see so many tanking Vanguards go for it. If you are going that deep into shield spec, go all in and get EnergyBlast, it's going to do more damage then Gut once you factor in the energy return.

This is what I'm running: http://www.torhead.com/skill-calc#801GoGrdorogzZMcbM.1  if I was super duper serious about PvP, I would swap Ceramic Plating and Defensive Measures... maybe.

I was talking about how in the original design all stats were delivered through swappable mods in all items. This separated appearance from stats exactly like an appearance tab which someone mentioned above my post.

EA took it out because players started using it to develop their own personal look and stuck with that rather than using the horrible end game gear models.

Gut isn't really the most important part of the spec (2 seconds off Riot Strike is - you can't get that without skipping EBlast either)... but it's a nice enough addition, especially for fights that last a while.

I did run an energy blast spec for a bit... main problem is slow interrupts and shield being useless in pvp (so you waste at least 5 points getting to EB). Ammo is not really an issue for me since I weave in hammershots for the snare anyway... yeah, it's probably more useful in pve for energy management. Rebraced Armor isn't that hot in pvp either, unfortunately.

The 'uselessness' of armor and defensive stats is very overblown I'm finding. There's more then enough shield-able and mitigate-able junk flying around to warrant them both.


For starters it basically lets you ignore Jugg/Guardians almost entirely.  :why_so_serious:

That's coming back, too.  I don't remember the eta on that one, though.

Reading between the lines, I suspect they were experimenting with a colour dye system which they believed would keep the artist egos intact while still supporting customisation.

Now that they've realised the original design was perfectly ok, colour matching just means reopening the option whereas the slotting system will mean reitemisation, which I guess will require more work and more internal pissing contests. I wouldn't be surprised to see happening principally for new rather than existing drops. I'd be perfectly happy with that since existing content will probably be out of date and worthless by the end of the year anyway.

My Merc is running around in full Sith warrior oranges  :drill: Hooded cloaks and dual blasters.

My favourite, is watching a Merc stand there doing nothing but spam a Tracer Missile button that doesn't work when you interupt them. A decently played Merc knows that there's more to it than spamming Tracer Missile Tracer Missile Tracer Missile (though, that does happen when you're being ignored).

The customization was removed because you could get a whole endgame set from killing one single boss over and over and using your shoe stats on all your pieces.

You need to switch to the cookie cutter 31 point assault spec.   Sorcs are crazy but they are not going to outdps a vanguard.

Battlemaster Bags
Empty Of All Hopes And Dreams
Battlemaster Bags

 :angryfist:

Sentinels/Marauders and Assassins/Shadows are mostly ignorable too I find. Anything that tries to smack you with a Lightsaber is defend-able it feels like.

Well geared and played marauders really hurt. They are the only class that sometimes gives me problems kiting (unless I luck out and get my slow off right after they force leap and before they can apply their own).

Also;  the last three levels of the BM grind are making me dead inside.

To my knowledge, there was never a system that made set bonuses portable (or the set nature of an item portable, which is what they're planning on adding) so we were always going to be stuck with wearing items from the most recent set of sets.

Re: Assassins, one on one sure, but I find I have enough non-weapon damage to keep going against tanks in normal group combat.

Assassins who ignore what they are hitting is a different thing.

They need to change the WarZone daily from 3 victories to 3 completions for two reasons.


One: So I can do Warzones at any time and not have to try and dodge the Empire/Republic premade hours.

Two: So people actually stay in these fucking things till the very end. I don't think I've had a full 8v8 this entire past week.

Cue the "WE SHOULDN'T REWARD PEOPLE FOR FAILURE" people coming out of the woodwork in 3, 2, ...

Sooo... for AFKers we were debating using the Sorcerer Extrication ability to deposit them into fire/acid. Seems like almost too much effort, but the tears in /ops would be delicious.

Nice heals there. He even died twice.

(http://dl.dropbox.com/u/3584773/SWTOR182.jpg)

Should be able to get them into the fire in one go. I'll have to try it next time I see an opportunity.

Are they actually afk or simply not doing anything? you'd think a bare minimum of attention is being paid so they can requeue and get to a good spot.

Completion + 4 medals and I'm totally down with that as the criteria for daily/weekly awards.

That is a great solution.

I've seen guys on autorum into the corner of the defenders zone in Huttball or just standing around stealthed. A bigger problem to me is jerks who leave once they have decided they can't win. I may just be stubborn but I fight to the end even when I'm having a bad pvp day and I can't do anything right like the time I hit stealth by mistake just as I was about to score with the huttball. After that I moved where I had my stun breaking skill away from stealth.

I think I was in a Huttball game with you on the weekend  :awesome_for_real:

When only the wins count for anything (only way to get battlemaster bags is to win) that's going to happen.  Wasting 15-20 mins on the off chance the idiots who just got scored on in the first 20 seconds might pull a win out of their ass is not exactly my idea of fun.

I like the "you're running the wrong way!!!!" people.

Heheh, fortunately I have my moments where I'm competent. Unfortunately I doubt we're on the same server so that means there are others who are as bad as I can be but all the time!  :ye_gods:

This.

And they patched in more rewards for the victors and less for the losers not long after launch.

I don't really get why pvp is fun in mmo. Rather, I have a ton of fun with it for an hour or so and then it's just exploits and shitty behaviour and getting slaughtered by people who play it obsessively.

PvP is a fun distraction in MMO's when you start to feel the samey-sameness of things.  I treat them like space missions: as a palate cleanser.  For that, they do a fine job.  MMO in PvP's can't be considered as a stand-alone entity.  It's a distraction from normal PvE play... unless you have a rare instance where the MMO has a decent pvp design strategy. 

Have they made it so 5k heals give you a merit yet?

This.

Although I do enjoy a tight pvp match more than any other MMO activity. Unfortunately that's quite rare.

Notice his assassin friend with 150k protection and 400k damage  :why_so_serious:


Heck his team has a bunch of 20-50k taunters too.

You'd have to expand the healing medals imo first, but otherwise yea good deal.

I rarely get 4 medals in Huttball on any of my guys, cuz I run the ball and don't medal farm.  So that would suck for me.  It is funny seeing me with like 40k damage and 5-6 kills then get MVP tho.

I run the ball and end up with 6-10 most matches.

if they gave objective point medals or medals for scoring/assist I'd be golden.

If they did that nobody would pass the ball unless it was to someone at the goal line.

http://www.swtor.com/community/showthread.php?p=2842864#edit2842864



So good news?

Great news if i last that long!

There are way too many ppl that don't pass now.

done it more than once.  every time I pass the afker (usually stealthed) I yank em a bit closer to the next nasty thing until they end up in it.  More than once I have had help.  What generally happens is they die, auto release, then get dumped from the WZ at the rez area.

I have come full circle.  Now that I have some decent gear, and have finally realized that this is the WZ for my class (Sorc-Healer), I love huttball.  Granted I don't dig being ground into the dirt in a 5-0 loss, but if it is a somewhat even match, it can be a blast.  It is always a hoot to beat teams that out damage, out heal, out everything, but don't play the WZ as it was meant to be played.   

Had some goodluck with Battlemaster bags recently and it definately shows.

I disagree.  How many medals does the guy watching the left turret get when it turns out it's only attacked once or twice the whole match?  He sure as hell helped the team but he'd be penalized for not 'participating' enough.  I've also had Voidstars where we win the match because I set 3 or 4 of the bombs but I ended up with less than 4 medals because I was watching the 'off' door on defense and focusing on planting the bombs on offense.

Overall, I think medals are a poor measure of how much someone might or might not have contributed.

They need to do another pass on Objective points anyway as Voidstar is pretty stingy about giving them out and I believe only gives them out on one side.

But for the record, that person guarding by themselves in Civil War will probably get four medals: 1k objective, 3k objective, a solo kill, and a killing blow.

Just standing at the cannon the entire match is a guaranteed two.

But if he's smart and calls incoming, there's a good chance he doesn't get one or both of those kill medals.

Nevermore has a point, being the guard dog at a node can be very limiting medal wise, its very dependent on the matches flow.

This just in, rewards in pvp punish people who play with good tactics.

It's why I never hit max level in Planetside, and had almost no CEP even though almost everyone quickly maxed both BEP and CEP. I dislike gaming the system, and I like playing tactically.

No that's just incorrect too. Being tactical doesn't exclude the scoring scheme. There are times when doing a important job limits your potential yes, but those are the exceptions.

Conversely some of the most important things I've done in a voidstar match is being the bait. Causing the defenders to pull away from their door and fight me and my support away from a node. We'll get tons of medals doing that but we also enable that sneaker to grab the node since everyone is focusing on us and we've moved the fight away from the doors.

Or forcing the engagement at the middle on Civil War, because two commandos and myself can keep twice our numbers occupied and locked down. It's not uncommon for us to keep middle unclaimed for the first half of any civil war match. Letting everyone else take up the sides because the enemy team must send more people to middle to simply prevent us from capping it.

Or even just being the mobile on a 2 base defense. Is the guy who bounces between the two nodes to reinforce being less tactical then the guy on guard duty?


I've never gone out of my way to 'farm' a medal, I just play how ever best I can help my team and still end up with 6-10 per match. The exception being the quiet door or quiet node guard dog, then all I usually get is the two warden ones and maybe a 10 kill from proximity.

I really despair at how hard it is to convince a pug to sneak-and-bait in Voidstar. If you:

a) send about half the team unstealthed to one side
b) 2-3 players unstealthed to the other side, and have them back up as they get attacked, pulling enemies off the gate.
c) 2 stealthed players to other side, one of them on guard to cc. anyone who tries to get back to stop a plant, the other of whom plants


you'll get any team but the most skilled.

But instead, everyone just shouts, "stealthed right, unstealthed left". That doesn't work any more unless you're playing really clueless people.

I often find the best strategy is just EVERYONE goes one side and just out kills the other team, they can't disarm if they are all rezzing  :why_so_serious:

It also usually opens up a sneak plant on the opposite door about 5 minutes into the brawl.

Yeah, pretty much this. I never 'farm medals', but most of the things that get you medals are helping the team win, and vice versa. Roaming defense by itself is pretty huge (and most puggers don't know about it, sadly), and sheer raw damage/healing will make a difference in all WZs except huttball. Random midfield fighting is very beneficial if you're winning; sending out a small team of 2-4 people to pressure the 3rd node when controlling 2 usually elicits a frenzied defense from the other side and nullifying any attempts at an attack (also known as the 'At Least We Got Stables' strategy  :awesome_for_real:) Heck, as much as I dislike it, that elitist trashtalking stealther in full battlemaster gear farming kills in the middle of nowhere (even if the team is losing) is probably occupying 2-3 enemies by himself, giving the team a numbers advantage and making nodes much easier to capture.

Like in Fordel's example, 2-3 people drawing away extra defenders against superior numbers, weakening a node defense and allowing for a cap can work great. I had a memorable Alderaan win where the enemy team had 3 [!] geared healers sitting on the right node along with a dps or two, and kept the bulk of their forces in mid - no roamers. The guys at the right node were smart enough to split and move to the middle node when it was threatened, so instead we sent two healers and a tank from our side to make a nuisance and keep them there... we obviously couldn't kill them, but they couldn't kill us either. Everyone fighting over the spot racked up tons of medals (protection, damage, healing, warden), but more importantly we kept their healers from reinforcing their mid (predictable pug tunnel vision). Meanwhile the rest of our team ground down their middle team, and by the time their healers figured out what was going on and tried to reinforce, we could CC them long enough to secure the middle cap.

Yeah, Joe Pugger who runs off alone to hit an enemy base and gets 3-shot isn't doing anything to help the cause... but in general most 'medal farming' activities are helping the team win. They would definitely need to add more healing medals (a few 'x healing in one life' would be fine I think) and guard medals for the 4-medal concept to work, though.


Re voidstar, I've also had good success with pinning down the enemy team at one side. Due to the way rez timers work, it's better to keep enemies alive until it's possible to chain-kill at least a few of them. The usual strategy of 'gank the healer and we're good' can work (assuming there's only one healer on the enemy team, obv), but more often than not that healer will be back in ~15 sec, and the other enemies can easily keep the doors clear until then. I don't doubt that organized teams keep an eye on the rez door timer, and try to time their kills so the defenders have to wait 30 sec or more (aka an eternity) to get back in the fight.

Cant explain why but playing as Rep now at least on the server I am on(Rp-PvP)  the Pub players seem much more team / winning oriented on a consistent basis.  Far more healers then I ever saw as Empire, people work together, etc.  They talk at the beginning to decide a strat.  Think I might of just got lucky on my server choice.  Overall, this has made my win rate over 80% since I started here a little over week ago, Im now level 32.  I already have all my 40 gear and have started to get more for my companions.  WINNING!!

Conversely, on Shien as Imperial I have lost once on Voidstar, and no times on Alderaan.

Not that I've played an enormous number of the things - but like you say, seems to a be a server culture thing.

I have found PUGs are perfectly willing to listen if I talk to them, but mostly, fuck that.

Shien's pvp population is so small, it's almost entirely based on when you play.

You'll get like 2 hour chunks where the republic wins everything, then 2 hour chunks where empire wins everything, then 2 hours chunks where its nothing but huttball because there just isn't enough on the other side period.

*edit* dropped in pet peeves thread

I am constantly amazed at how quickly the WRONG person holding the huttball or even just standing in the wrong place, can fuck your entire team over.

If you are a ranged class that isn't a cover class, either get in knockback range of the enemy BC, or get off our fucking ramps already. You knocked the enemy BC into the pit? Good job! NOW GET OFF THE ENDZONE LEDGE BEFORE HE CHARGES BACK UP THERE! Either BACK UP, or JUMP IN, do not just stand on the edge so the enemy can just charge the fuck up again.

New Patch PVP reward system, same as the old patch!  :why_so_serious:


Credit for Ilum through warzones? It's complete warzones. As in 30 10 Warzones a day.


Single BM token? 1000 WZ comm, 1000 Merc comm. BM set pieces take 2 tokens, Weapons take 3.


-edit- Its apparently 3 per WZ, which is only mildly ball-busting, instead of abusive.

Keep in mind you can still mix and match getting Ilum credit through the WZ completions (not wins, just completions) and the old fashioned way with kills/armaments on Ilum.

Plus I'm getting an average of 3 times as much valor per WZ as well.  I get over 3k valor per win now.

That will be easy.  It takes 10 just to get a win on my server. 

I hate people. 

Complete warzones. Not wins.

Yes, I know. 

I have to play about 20 matches to get my 3 wins.  I'll have Ilum done far sooner than my win 3 quest. 

It's way to grindy, no matter how you slice it.

Ten Warzones is like, 3-4 hours in my experience. That's basically my entire evening play session.

Then don't.  Just keep bike riding around central.

That was shitty too!

Gotcha, misread what you said.

That's three nights of gameplay for me.

You guys need better premades if you are having problems winning.  :D  My group wins about 80% of our wz's.  But I do have one of the best pocket healers on the server.   :awesome_for_real:

And here I was hoping Ilum Nascar would go away.

Does that mean that you're good or that the opponents are bad?  It's all perspective.

If I could get my guild mates to care about the pvp in SWTOR, I'd have it made.  They're all outstanding pvp players, they just don't see a reason to participate.  I can't really blame them.  They're all off playing ME3 for their shooter fix anyway.

Id rather lose 50% of the night pugging and actually have fun and challenging warzones then premade it and win 100% with no challenge.  It sucks that I hit a wall last night...got level 43 on my scoundrel and im capped on valor rank...meh. 

feh

The term on our server was Ilum 500.  Obviously Indycar > nascar.

In all the MMO's I've Pee Vee Pee'd in, I don't think there is anything quite as demoralizing as watching your own ball carrier in huttball, go the wrong way.


There are tons of ways to screw up in huttball, but none are as direct and easily avoided as going the wrong way.


When I say wrong way, I don't mean the don't take the correct bridge, or fail to sprint or jump or whatever. I mean they decided, that yes, this ball belongs in our own teams endzone, on our half of the field, in front of our rez point.


There isn't a damn thing you can do to fix it either, short of letting the other team kill him and score.

I know, it's great!  :why_so_serious:

Oh yes, that and the ball carrier not even realising they have the ball. Add to that the frustration of having your entire team, minus one, pointing out the mistake in chat 'YOU HAVE THE BALL XYZ, YOU'RE GOING THE WRONG WAY!' only to be ignored.

Bonus points if/when they carry the ball to the goal line for the opposing team. Happened just the other day - half the team immediately left the warzone.

Sounds like a votekick situation, as much as I usually hate those.

The text that comes up when you get the ball that says "Take the ball to the GOLD/PURPLE side" in caps + the fact that half the board is decorated as gold and the other half purple still isnt enough for some people to avoid that walk of shame to the wrong end.  I love it when this happens so I can send them tells about how f*cking stupid they are..good times

That just makes you an asshole.

... at least in my experience.

Sorry, I was totally fucking confused the first few times I tried it.

First, I could not find a way to throw the ball. I had to ask my roommate. Oh, it's a magical skill added to general abilities, silently, with no notification and then I was expected to drag it to my bar? What? Thanks for telling me this shit.

Finally, yeah, I get the ball and I don't know where the fuck to go because the arena has no obvious gold/purple sides. You have to look up and hunt for banners because all of the catwalks and such are the same fucking color both sides! I still can't easily tell at a glance so I look at my minimap for the quest icon and then run in that direction. Maybe if the flames were different colored it'd be more obvious.

So no, while you may think it's clear, it's simply not obvious to someone who has never played huttball before. A few banners in the background are NOT enough when you suddenly end up with the ball and 5 people are after you.

Edit: I should mention that no, I am not retarded and I quickly pick up game new concepts and video games in general. If *I* have trouble, that means "casuals" are fucking lost.

The ability is added automagically to your next empty action bar slot on your first zone in. (I don't blame anyone for not figuring out how to throw it their first time)


-edit- I also want to say its explained on the loading screen for the zone itself, like the graphic, not just the little TIPS section at the bottom.

It's really obvious if you go in right around level 10 as you still haven't gone past your first bar, but I can understand not seeing it if you don't jump right into Warzones.

My bar was completely full so no, I didn't get the icon on it. I also have a i5-2600 with a SSD so the loading screen is about 2 and a half seconds long, so I didn't see that either.

Honestly I don't think you should allow level 10s on pvp anyway, at least for sage/sorc, because over the next 10 levels you get abilities that turn you from worthless into a functioning member of the team. I am of the opinion anyone that low level is simply dead weight. At level 10, I didn't have sprint or shield or force speed, and only about half my attacks. It really should be a minimum of level 20, when you get your ship.

No, it's perfectly understandable why you'd be confused. I know I was at first.

As Fordel said though, it is demoralising for those who have played enough to understand the ins-and-outs, particularly at 50. Yes, everyone starts somewhere, and some don't start until 50. But when you're looking down the Op list in the pre-WZ warmup, counting how many players have sub 14k hp (and hoping the other side has at least as many), and the first person to get the ball runs the wrong way - while Warzones Won: 0/3 has been staring at you for the last 2 hours...  :grin:

Yes yes, pugs and all that.

They could do a much better job of explaining how huttball works to new players.

I can understand not getting the throw the ball icon thing when u r new, we all did that most likely.   But its funny to see people in the 50 bracket go the wrong way.  Its not typically new players who are doing their first warzone at 50, if it is thats laughable in itself but experienced players who get turned around and simply go the wrong direction...thats worth a good reaming. 

Im in Ur Warzon runing Ur chancs! Too bad. I level up all my toons with pvp and storylines only (FP's here and there) as soon as I hit 10 I go to fleet and queue up. I'm a reasonably competent player and do gear up (supported by my main) but even if my gear was crap I would still queue up. Don't hate the player for badly implemented warzones. They should have been divided by levels from the start, and cross server to boot since most of the servers can barely support more than one WZ at a time. And yeah, I do feel pretty worthless though you do get bads on the opposing side concentrating all their attacks on me (yay, a level 10, easy kill!) that they actually leave the door, or turret to mow me down, allow someone else to cap. Don't waste your heals on me either unless I'm doing something worthy. Just don't throw the huttball to me, I don't even have sprint yet. You level up fairly quickly doing warzones.

On my original server, a pvp one, I was definately a liability.  On my current server, well I am pretty amazed at how much everyone sucks. I've capped turrets and planted bombs while everyone else is god knows where off fighting.

That is the opposite of what I found when I tried it - I moved much faster PVEing.

As someone who leveled a toon from 1-50 only pve and one 1-50 through PvP and class story.  It's definitely faster PvE.

Before they nerfed the experience for losses, leveling via pvp and story quest was quite viable.

The answer is actually a combination of the two. There are plenty of quests sprinkled into the worlds that just don't have a very good rate of return - a lot of running, or you didn't pick up any other quests in the area, or what not.

Really, the "Fastest" way to level is to do the daily pvp, the daily space combat, and level normally, avoiding going places that don't have stacked quests. Sprinkle in a bit of pvp when your 30m travel thing isn't up and it would be faster to warp back somewhere. Oh, and only level during rested, of course.

I did some lowbie PvP on my scoundrel (yes, I made a dude smuggler on some other server don't judge me). It's sort of a shame it goes all gear-based stupid at level 50, I actually had more fun than I expected, even though I was terrible. I really shouldn't go back until I get space vanish. :P

You always have more fun then you expect whenever you PvP :P


But yes, there is very little reason to WANT to enter the 50 bracket.

Look, I suck at PvP and I am often unhappy when I suck at an activity, okay!