Heals alone are not the problem. It's the synergy between a really good healer and a really good tank. All other things being equal, a team that has 2 heals, 2 tanks, and 4 dps, is going to win every time against an 8 dps team. I guarantee it. Thing is, that's kind of how the game was designed. Trinity comp, you know? And if you buff dps or nerf heals / tanks to the point where an 8 man dps team can take down a 4 dps / 2 tanks / 2 heals team, then there won't be any healers and tanks left that play anymore. What would be the point?

This. Surge to soft cap then alacrity. You don't need accuracy or crit at all. A little crit doesn't hurt, but it's not needed. Power for every mod / enhancement. Mainstat or power augs, don't think it really matters - buy what is cheaper and what you like more, the difference is pretty negligible.

The old school bonuses (charge gives us damage) were more "fun" in my opinion. I don't think that having a set bonus that goes "Using ability X will make your next Ability A, B, or C, an auto crit, with a 1 minute rate limit" are as fun. For PvP, how about spec specific set bonuses? How about you bring us a Smash set that sets smash damage to what it used to be (scaled up for health of course, so it would hit about as hard as Raging Burst does now)? How about an annihilation specific set, that further improves that tree by giving X% of health every time a dot does damage, or increases the radius of smash to 8 or 10 meters? I'm not saying that I want those changes specifically... (well, maybe the smash one. I want to be feared again dangit!), but something along those lines, you know? PvP gear is very easy to acquire now, and it would keep people playing to try out different sets. Making these changes PvP specific on PvP gear would mean that you could customize a spec to tailor it more to PvP through gearing, without destroying PvE balance.

I wouldn't hold your breath. I sincerely doubt we will see any new balance changes until 4.0, as that is where all of the developer focus is right now.

That's how I feel as well. I've said it many many times. Mara/Sent is a pure dps class. Snipers are the only other pure dps class in the game. Since snipers are ranged, their theoretical burst and overall sustainable dps need to be a little bit lower than a maras, because you have to account for time not on target. Currently this is not the case. Mara has always been a high risk class. You are jumping into the fray with medium armor. You don't have a ton of escape mechanisms. We need to HURT when we are in there. That, or other classes need to be toned down, both damage and burst wise.

20M aoe pull. Bring back full on smash (smashing for 9-14K). As glorious as it would be, yes it would be 100% broken and overpowered.

3 healers and a good tank, asuming they are decent and have decent dps with them as well, can be pretty stupid. There IS a large disparity between healing numbers and damage numbers - quite a bit larger than it used to be, however I think that is by design. If anything, I feel like its the guard mechanic and taunts that make me feel like I can't kill a healer. You have to get creative in these scenarios. Pull the healer out of guard range and stun while simultaneously pushing the tank in the opposite direction can work, preferably while also CCing the other healers, but that takes coordination and voice chat to pull off. Not something you're going to see a PUG do. That's pretty high level 4v4 group ranked type strategy. What sucks is, let's say you have 3 healers + a tank and 4 dps on one team, and 8 dps on the other. The 8 DPS team is definitely destined to lose, although that isn't to say that it will be a cakewalk for heal / tank team. I mean they still have to deal with a lot of pressure from dps and their dps have to be good enough to get kills. What really irks me is when, as a player that typically tops damage numbers, tanks on the opposing team know who I am, and they will assign me as their focus target. Then they just keybind the "target focus target's target" to automatically guard whoever I'm on. I can swap targets every GCD and literally see tanks that will do nothing but change their guard target every GCD for 20 seconds in a row. Nah, I get far more annoyed when I see a tank that I know will guard my target and taunt me 24/7 when they aren't slowing, stunning, or otherwise preventing me from killing. The only healers that are actually annoying to me are operatives, because they are so much harder to kill than a sorc or merc. Sorcs and mercs have good damage stop cooldowns (well, mercs dont have a "hard stop" cooldown, but they have good cooldowns), but those will eventually run out. Operatives I feel like can kite me for days, however, when they are kiting me they aren't healing. I find it easier to kill squishy dps than to try to kill operative healers many times, and this is a pretty viable strat since operative single target healing throughput is not really that great. Throw in a few CCs/stuns on the healer and boom, you've got a dead dps. I don't know if heals and tanks are OP or not. It's certainly better, assuming player skill is equal, to be on the team with tanks and heals, but I feel like that's just.. synergy. That's by design. This game was designed around a trinity comp, just like almost every other MMO, so it shouldn't really be surprising that having heals and tanks on your team makes you win.

Everyone is focusing on leveling alts right now or just taking a break until Tuesday. I have tons of comms on the toons that I want to gear out, and got them to 60 already. Not much point playing them at 60 with crappy gear, and not much point buying items now when I can buy them for a fraction of the price next patch. And the toons that I do have geared.. eh, I really don't feel like playing mara / sent and letting my team down in ranked, so yeah.

You mean so the melee can LOS his own healer and die at the hands of all the ranged?

Only one of those classes is a true melee class. Powertechs might as well be ranged, they do everything from 15M. Assassins also have the best anti CC and defensives in the game, not to mention the best dps and best overall control through stealth, stuns, etc. Juggs have 2 lives at minimum due to DCDs, although they are definitely the weakest of the above mentioned classes. Operatives have very powerful off heals, stuns, vanish, stealth, just overall a decent class, although I would certainly rank them behind PTs and Sins.

I'm completely fine with the current set bonuses. There are many problems still to be addressed with Mara / Sents, but I don't think the 2, 4, or 6 piece PvE or PvP bonuses are the way to go about fixing them, as that leaves pre level 60 fully warzone geared players without those vital parts. Also, I apologize on behalf of the sent/mara community. I know the devs are trying, but it just hasn't been enough yet. This class is difficult to play, and not really all that rewarding for the level of skill that is required to play it. Why play sent/mara when I can do more damage, take more damage per life, control fights better, have taunts or off heals, and have a much easier time doing all of the above through a simpler rotation and/or having many medium / long range abilities on one of the holy trinity classes (sorc, powertech, assassin). Why would I gimp myself like that? As fun as I find mara / sent, they're still a pure dps class without enough dps to make up for their lack of other utility (read: taunt, off heals, stealth, better "stay alive" mechanics, cc/stun/knockback immunity). Melee by definition has less time on target than ranged. Because of this, we need higher dps, or guaranteed ways to stay on target. This goes for both PvE and PvP. For PvE, the solution is simple: stop creating operation mechanics that overly favor ranged and harshly punish melee. If there's something that makes melee's life hell in a fight, there should also be something that makes ranged life hell as well. Look at WoW. Blizzard is notoriously good at doing this. For PvP, it's not as simple, nor do I think it's feasible to expect a pure melee class to have close to full up time on ranged players, but when they ARE on those ranged players, it needs to really count. It needs to HURT. I don't know how to fix this class. There are a lot of things that, given the resources and time, were I working at BioWare, I would try out. Things like making taunt only effective in pvp if you are a tank. Big, sweeping changes. I think making resolve affect root (to only slow) is a great idea and a step in the right direction. We need big sweeping changes like that. What I do know, is that I perform 10x better playing my Vanguard / Powertech, so I will continue to do so, until sent/mara is viable again. I sincerely wish you the best of luck BioWare, and I hope that with the expansion, you sell tons of copies and you can throw money at these balance issues until they are solved, but I've given up at this point.

That depends. Is there a sex tape of you and Kira? I mean that might get you expelled from the order, just sayin.

That seems like a weird way for DR to work. I mean yes, you get a static % from being Fury specced, and that portion is completely outside of DR, because it is added as a percentage, not a rating, and the % is added on top of your rating.

Depends on the match. I don't disagree that its... small. I mean at best, after you get 95% accuracy and 70% surge, you're looking at the possibility of getting 3-4% alacrity from gear at very most. It does make fitting ravage + blast into your gore or ravage + furious strike into your cascading power windows a lot more feasible though. Also, the amount of surge you gain past 70% is pretty minimal, and considering only 40% of your attacks at most are going to be crits.. I mean 2-3% extra damage on 40% of your attacks isn't a lot.

I just wanted to chime in here. I'm frequently on both sides of the coin. I queue up with friends whenever possible, but sometimes they are all playing imp and I am working on a pub toon, or vice versa. Midbie pubs on Shadowlands can be truly horrendous at times. I'm talking the most idiotic gearing, keyboard turning, back pedaling, not calling out / leaving nodes empty, ability clicking, mouth breathing scum to ever grace the warzones in this game. That, against a premade of my friends? Dear god it's horrible. We lose so baldy. I won't lie, after a few games of that, I just say screw it and go do something else. It's not so bad when it only happens once or twice a night, but when you go against that team, with full blown baddies on your team over and over, it is frustrating to the extreme. Unfortunately, sometimes there really just aren't any good players on in the midbie bracket pub side. I mean it's all good and well to say "find a few good players to group up with", but if they literally don't exist because your entire team is that bad.. well. *shrug*. At that point I just go level a different toon or play a different game. SWTOR.. how can I put this? For some reason, SWTOR tends to attract PvPers that are new to MMOs and PvP. I was a noob when it comes to PvP before I started playing SWTOR, although I was certainly no noob to MMos in general, having played WoW from the time it was released until SWTOR came out. Anyway, the point is, the skill gap that you can sometimes see in this game is just appalling. Now, what people like you want is to do away with queuing as a group in pvp. I think that is a terrible, terrible idea. Or, you want to have a separate queue for groups. Sorry, but there is not enough population to support that, so that's out too. Instead, what we need is a MMR system to match up teams appropriately. However, for that to work, we need a larger player pool in pvp (and having a larger pool of players would solve some of this stuff anyway!), and for that, we need mega server. There are a lot of symptoms in PvP of a larger problem right now, and that larger problem gets solved by increasing the population. People don't mind getting stomped by a premade once in a while. It SHOULd give you something to aspire for. But they certainly do mind getting stomped every game. It's humiliating. It makes you feel like crap. I don't blame you if you stopped queuing. But I think that removing group queuing from regular pvp would be a huge mistake, and it would go very much against the idea of what an MMO is. On the flip side, I have met people in PvP doing midbies, grouped up with them, taught them a thing or two, and we have done really well. I've even beat those premades a few times, once I got some good players to queue with and coordinate with. It's just.. it's like a top 50 SC2 player going against someone in Gold League. I mean the Gold League guy just didn't have any chance at all. With a larger population though, the top players won't be facing the Gold league player. The fact that they are vs eachother is obviously a sign of a population problem.

Alacrity is a straight up dps increase.. every % of it that you get is 1% more damage. When you consider that after 70% surge, you're looking at serious diminishing returns.. and the fact that the surge bonus will only apply to maybe 35-45% of your attacks anyway. I'm not saying stack it like crazy, but a few pieces can help a lot. Faster rotation is more dps, period, not to mention shorter cooldowns.

For PvE? Reroll Merc or Sorc. They have our PvE dps doubled basically.

Marauders and snipers suck in solo ranked because they offer mediocre dps output and none of the utiltiies of the other classes. We do damage, period, and our damage is not the highest in the game right now. PTs, Sins, and Sorcs all do much better dps and have tons of utility in the form of heals, taunts, better stuns, and overal better class balance. If I were to compare SWTOR to WoW, the sorc is like some ungodly combination of Priest, Warlock, AND mage. It takes the best ideas from all 3 of those classes and rolls them into one, while having some unique abilities that none of them get in wow, like godmode during Barrier. Compare that to a Marauder, which is basically a watered down Fury warrior, and we wonder why they can't compete? BioWare made tons of unwarranted changes to the Marauder in 3.0. TONS. They lowered our offhand damage. Why? The offhand damage was so minimal anyway, and it has such a high miss rate that it's honestly inconsequential, so why did you need to lower off hand damage? Ravage got a huge nerf. It's no longer worthy of having a long cooldown. Undying Rage nerfed. Carnage - huge nerfs. Gore window shortened, does no damage. Retaliate, the only off the GCD ability that we can use during a Gore window, removed from the game due to "ability bloat". Deadly throw now requires multiple utilites that we simply can't afford to take just to get it back to baseline of where it was pre 3.0. There have been positive changes, but I just don't understand how BioWare could look at this class 3.0, after having completely cut the balls off of Rage spec in 2.8, and say "oh you know, I think this class needs to be nerfed while we simultaneously buff every other class in the game, including the ones that were already overperforming in Solo Ranked. That sounds like a great idea guys! Let's make Marauder abilities hit for about the same that they did pre 3.0, while we make other burst specs capable of doing 50% more damage. Yeah I'd like to see PTs critting people for 16K, with lots of 8-10Ks thrown in for good measure. We told them and told them, dot spread is OP. Sorcs too strong. PTs too strong. This was told to them again and again on the PTS. They. Don't. Listen. Their team does not play pvp, and when it does, it's an amazing **** show. Have you seen Musco stream pvp? He stopped, and frankly I don't blame him, because he was getting dunked on so hard it wasn't even funny. The best thing BioWare could possibly do is to offer some of it's best pvpers jobs trying to balance the classes. I really think that if they took some of the top players and sat them down over a weekend, those players could come up with a balanced game in one weekend. I think the other thing is, BioWare is just scared to death of creating another smash monster. People HATED Rage spec, even though it was a super high risk / high reward class, and it wasn't THAT overpowered. It did not deserve to have it's nuts cut off like it did. Small adjustment? Ok. But in todays game of the overpowered holy trinity (PT SORC SIN), I feel like old school smash would feel just fine and dandy for power level.

To the OP: I think you have unrealistic expectations of how much effort the devs would be willing to put into a 1v1 ranked mode. The ideas you outlined do have merit, but simply put: this game was not designed around 1v1, and trying to force a game mode that is 1v1 would be cumbersome to the extreme. Given the devs track record for PvP changes, and how much work doing this would entail, I really doubt that it would even make it past 5 minutes of discussion at BioWare HQ. Sorry.

Are you saying that you can't beat an NPC for a quest? Go upgrade your gear. This class is so insanely easy, you can press buttons in almost any combination and win. Has to be your gear or level.

You're doing it sooo wrong dude. You have 2 dots as Hatred. I'm going to use pub side terms, but it's the same for imp side... Open with Spike from stealth Apply both dots Spread your dots with death field if possible.. and if not, just hit him with death field as it increases his dmg taken Assassinate may proc by now. If it does, use it. Use Leeching Strike at your discretion, preferably to heal yourself but it also does great damage Using Assassinate should proc Demolish. Use Demolish. It's instant cast, and the CD on it resets when it has like 7.5s left on CD from normal hits. Start spamming your double hit ability.. forget the name. It's your filler. If you get an assassinate proc, use it. If you get a demolish proc, use it. Re apply dots as they expire. You'll notice that they will line up with your death field cooldow nicely, so just make sure when your death field has ~3s left on CD, you use the next two GCDs to apply dots, then death field and start the rotation over. You should never ever be hard casting demolish. Oh, and you have 19 seconds of CC/Stun immunity through two of your Utilities (12s on Deflection and 7s on Force Shroud). You're pretty much untouchable during that time. All they can really do is roll away and pray. If things really look dire and it's a 1v1 situation, stealth out, sap them, and heal2full. Hatred Sin is the best 1v1 class in the game, bar none. If you're losing, you're just not playing it right.

I can't remember the last time I didn't get at least 1 MVP when playing any of my toons, but I almost always top damage by a mile and play exceptionally well. Then again, if I didn't get any, it wouldn't really bother me, I mean they don't really mean anything. If there's a healer that's decent, I almost always vote for the healer. If I'm healing and there's a DPS or tank that really shone through, I'll vote for them. If a sorc out dpses me though, I'll immediately think "flippin dot spreadin piece of crap, I did 90% as much damage all single target", which while true, is still flawed logic. I usually persuade myself to vote for them even if I feel that way.

Those goddamn Mean'Canadians. Always messing up our numbers

2v2 is a really interesting format, as the meta isn't really fleshed out, but I'm sure it will be two dps classes that can off heal very well, like operative and sorc.

I had a lot of time on my hands waiting for regs to pop yesterday =). If the sent / mara class is what you like, then go for it, but I know how soul crushing it is to face inferior or just "as good" players that win through class imbalance. Not that I place any blame at all on the players - they're going to do what works, and right now that has a very limited meta. What disappoints me is that the meta has been the same since about patch 2.8, and BioWare has not done enough to improve other classes to make different comps viable. We had far better overall game balance back in in the 2.0-2.6 era sadly. Balance should get BETTER as they work on the game - not the opposite. Not that they haven't made some improvements - they certainly have, but it just isn't enough yet. Personally, after playing Mara / Sent since beta of this game, which was what, 3 years ago now? I've played them pretty much exclusively since then. Playing other classes gives me a refreshing new look on the game. And really, you should at least understand how to effectively play every class and every spec in the game if you want to be able to counter them properly.