Frogdogs score!

[kildorn]

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.

[Threash]

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.

[Fraeg]

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.

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 

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

[Fordel]

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.

[Fraeg]

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.

[Samprimary]

huehuehue.

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

[Threash]

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

[Fordel]

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

[DraconianOne]

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.

[Fordel]

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.

[Zetor]

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...

[DraconianOne]

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.

[kildorn]

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.

[Zetor]

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.

[Samprimary]

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

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.

[Zetor]

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.

[Samprimary]

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.

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

[Nebu]

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.

[MisterNoisy]

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.

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.

[Zetor]

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.

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

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

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+.

[Nebu]

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'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!

[Fordel]

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.

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.

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  .


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.

[MisterNoisy]

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  .

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.

[Velorath]

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.  

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.

[Sky]

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 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.

[Nebu]

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.

[Threash]

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.  

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.

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

[Sky]

If you want to pvp and enjoy it, you NEED pvp gear.  

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

[Nebu]

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

Such is the mantra of MMO's.

[DraconianOne]

Gabe Amontillado's PvP Blog update.

Level 50 Bracket Warzones: Level 50 players will have a bracket of their own, playing in separate Warzone matches to lower level players. This is something we have wanted to do for some time and now that there is an increasing number of level 50 players we will be implementing the feature in January.

 

[kildorn]

"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

[Arinon]

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.

[trias_e]

Gabe Amontillado's PvP Blog update.

Level 50 Bracket Warzones: Level 50 players will have a bracket of their own, playing in separate Warzone matches to lower level players. This is something we have wanted to do for some time and now that there is an increasing number of level 50 players we will be implementing the feature in January.

 

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

[amiable]

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

[zardoz]

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.

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.