Frogdogs score!

[Nebu]

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

[Furiously]

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

[rattran]

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.

[amiable]

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.

[Furiously]

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.

[Fordel]

Yes.

[rattran]

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.

[Khaldun]

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.

[Sjofn]

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.

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

[tmp]

but I am beginning to suspect the sage AE heal will get nerfed instead.

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

Sage

            Salvation: No longer heals targets twice on application. It now correctly heals all affected targets once when applied.

[Nevermore]

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

[Sjofn]

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.

[Nevermore]

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. 

[Fraeg]

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. 

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.

[caladein]

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.

[Sjofn]

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

[Nevermore]

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.

[eldaec]

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).

[Sjofn]

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.

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.

[Zetor]

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. 

[Ingmar]

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.

[amiable]

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.  

Edit: I'm an operative.

[Nebu]

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

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.

[tmp]

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

[Riggswolfe]

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.

[Threash]

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

[caladein]

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.

[Mazakiel]

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.   

[Evildrider]

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

^ 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.

[Zetor]

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...

[Nebu]

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?

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

[Zetor]

He makes a few very good points (really, the unresponsiveness and control/ui issues drive me up the wall sometimes), some 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. 

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.

[caladein]

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?

[Fordel]

Why am I watching this video?

He just said dropping totems is fun, opinion worthless.  


-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. 

[Paelos]

Too many classes have stuns
Too many classes have knockbacks
The abilities are not "fun" or "unique"
The animations aren't big enough for the heals, no visual reaction
Ability delay - too slow
Camera Snap - always converts to looking forward
Nameplates - clicking makes targeting tougher in zergs
Raid frames will bug for health 25%
Ilum is a laggy zergfest
It's ridiculous how people just camp
There's no rated gear so it comes down to time invested
It lacks the hardcore pvp mindset
Skill doesn't exist - mastering you cooldowns doesn't matter
Healing is whack-a-mole
Interrupts don't knock you out of a spells
Loading screens take forever
Opening your bag causes lag when done rapidly
Your tooltip disappears when aren't over a target
DOTs interrupt cast times
Capture targets aren't obvious animation
We should compare WoW right now to SWTOR right now
You don't get gear by doing Warzones, you get gear through dailies
In WoW it takes 5 hours to get a weapon
If you don't do dailies - Weapons cost 72
RNG bags are horrible and costs are too high
3 commendations sucks

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.