It isn't even 2% since in order to make the gear work for most classes you need to rip out the mods, rendering the stat increases virtually meaningless. If moving from Champion to BM is a big deal for someone, it is only because they haven't previously pulled out mods before (gimping themselves in the process). In any event it won't take 5 months as BW is already planning to do for BM bags what it has done for Champion, i.e. the tokens will be replaced with comms and it will probably be something like 15 comms per bag and it will take 4 bags to get a piece of gear, etc. System is quite silly yes. So enjoy pvp for pvp. Cant possibly enjoy it for the gear progression. it isn't there.

The past is the past. BW will catch up on Battlemaster stuff and the BMs are not as tough as you think. I wonder if there would be any posts in the PvP forum if all the complaints were temporarily shut off?

Most of the problem here has nothing to do with the nerf. It is the focus of attention because there is nothing being ADDED to the game to supplement the nerfs (I guess until mid March) so they stand out. One of the ironies is that BW creates a medal for WZ for 5k damage, and then it wears down your ability to actually attain it. A sorc is never going to get that 5k damage medal now. It was almost beyond a full BM's ability to achieve pre-patch. Why they don't allow it for aggregating a successful AOE attack I don't know. But if you put an achievement in the game, everyone is going to want to achieve it. Whether damage or otherwise. Efforts by BW to put those achievements further out of reach is actually quite annoying.

Let's hope that the rated war zone system provides a new way to obtain gear upgrades rather than pointless valor grinds ......

Probably the only way to hit 5k as a sorc heh. Enjoy it until patch 1.3 when a surge nerf will likely kill it So sad I missed the heady days when death mark could hit 5k.... oh well. Here's to longer WZs! (as if that helps anyone)

It drives me insane to read posts like the ones above me with such simple intelligent concepts that the player base can come up with off the top of their heads. How could BW implement such a terrible system and not consider this stuff? Sigh. I love the idea of using the extra tokens to buy mods. That is absolutely brilliant.

The last poster is exactly, precisely correct. I heartily endorse his message. What I find amusing is that the OP puts something out there for discussion and then flames those who disagree or where he/she feels they are off message. Let this one die. Having said that, I really wish I had options in pvp. I'd love to be full madness (and of course lose most of my mobility talents) if I had some really strong counterbalances. For example, add some kind of Drain Life ability (beyond the meagre Death Field/Parasitism) to mitigate against the loss of Bindings or Backlash. The DoT at the top of the tree is virtually worthless. Alternatively, lets make Thundering Blast something you really would fear in PvP. How about a blowback or stun and some crit modifiers so that if its coming you better do something to interrupt it. Do that, and I'll gladly consider some modifications to Wrath CL. Personally, it isn't my favorite thing to be a hybrid. It is, however, an unfortunately necessity.

Can someone break some concepts down for me as a non armor crafter. Two newbish questions: So can each armor crafter make crittable orange gear to give you an extra slot? What advantage is there over the existing orange gear? That it has an augment slot?

Please stop. The end game pvp is all about.... W I N N I N G As you are aware, you get no BM bags for losing. None. So its 0-5 in Huttball and you should be forced to play the extra 11 minutes? It's 3 turrets down and 500 150 and you should be forced to stay in game? You are in a game where 6 of 8 go left in Alderaan? You are in Voidzone and no one is fighting at or near the doors? All of the above = Loss. So the problem is the mechanic, not the leaving. Rated warzones will probably fix this if all war zones go to a rating system where people have to be in it to win it. But then again no information has yet been released on this.

Going from Champ to BM is actually a let down. The grind factor alone should warrant much higher stats or some other factor. Heck if the gear even LOOKED better than the prior pvp tier sets I would have joyfully ground it As for mods, who designed these sets anyway? The Sorc set has TERRIBLE mods in it and requires you to engage in serious swap page unnecessarily (but then again it justifies accumulating all the comms or you would be bored about that too!)

I wish we really had a drain life capacity in the madness tree. That is what the 31 point talent should have been. Some kind of channelled life drain lightning attack like a buffed version of the WoW Warlock Drain Life. Whatever. A Hybrid's Life for me..... It is sad how bad our 31 point talents are in Lightning and Madness.

Gong show.... bahaha. I love the analogy. You always know a game is going to go south when: 1. The majority of the 50s in your group are unguided. 2. No one responds in ops. 3. One of the players appears to be slowly zig zagging toward the corner of your starting spawn to prepare his or her bot program. 4. Before the match even begins, you have 50% turnover in player composition in your game and those who come in have well thought out names like wtfpwned. 5. No one is interested in the ball carrier or the team carrying the ball carrier. 6. Six players go left in Alderaan. 7. Five of those six players end up defending a node that is not being attacked. And on and on....

In similar pvp gear (champion etc) it is a very tough battle isn't it? I would love to hear starts against the Sorc Healer. You're getting burned down while they have a versatile arsenal of heals at their disposal. Interrupts only get you so far....

I wish your crafting actually had some teeth. Makes you appreciate the experimentation system in Star Wars Galaxies. Crafted stuff was fantastic. Players were actively engaged in game in crafting. Right now the system is so incredibly pedantic. Anything the players make is largely dwarfed by end game stuff. Why not allow the players to modify that stuff or extract new schematics etc and make crafting something worthwhile? Nerfing Bio while you figure things out for the other professions is silly since 90% of the player base is probably Bio now. Better to shut down the whole crew skill business and come up with a much better system. One day I hope there is a system in place where there is exceedingly well crafted gear available in a robust economy where every profession brings something unique to the table and it is painful to choose any one crafting profession over another. Unfortunately I think that is going to be a very long time if not never (the latter being more likely despite what BW is suggesting).

I disagree that PvP Gear is wrong. I do agree that the way it has been structured in game is wrong. Gear progression is great and it is fun. It is the point of PvE progression and carries over nicely as a "spoil of war". It is all about how it is implemented honestly. WoW had a decent idea at the outset with battlegrounds. You play and the wins/losses add up and give you a weekly rank. That rank allowed you to buy any gear you wanted that was available at your rank or lower. You could then buy the gear (expensive as it was) and use it to better yourself. Very fair and very reasonable. No RNG. No gear slaughtering arena nonsense or expertise. And the PvP gear was, at the time, on par for the most part with raids. That later changed of course with arena, advanced raids and so forth. Of course, you would have to ensure that PvP and PvE gear had the same effectiveness in PvP if you remove the PvP stat. But then, of course, PvErs will complain about how time intensive and difficult it was to get the PvE gear vs. the PvP gear and the PvP crowd will make similar noises about players fighting NPCs being easy etc. So there is no simplistic solution. I do think that Ranked purchase of PvP gear is a much better system than what we have in game, however.

one of the other issues I see is that if the best crew skill items at 400 come from PvE, like Ops schem drops, PvPers or casuals will never see it. I just haven't done enough research to find out if that really has yet become an issue. But I see it coming.

What would be cool in a PvP MMO would be to kind of instance player progression similar to leveling, where valor ranks would allow you access to new planets and higher level gear that you had to work for and open pvp areas where you needed to have a certain valor rank to attain. THe catch is that one you got to that point there was no going back. You couldn't get to a War Hero zone and take the gear back and camp people on Ilum as an example. And everything in that zone would be harder including NPCs, etc. I love the idea of characters becoming more powerful. That is what everyone wants. Not to lord it over players who don't have it. Just to give the battles a more epic feel.

What stuns me about this isn't the changes at all. What stuns me is that they put in the existing system at all. PvP Exp exploits leading people to hit 50 too early. BAD Expertise system creating immediate disparities in PvP combat. BAD RNG system creating completely disproportionate gear disparities where luck > skill. BAD Open World PvP on ONE PLANET with worthless base assaults and armament captures. BAD Requiring war zone wins to advance battle master gear as opposed to medals or a ranking system that allowed you to purchase gear. BAD (because it encourages war zone abandonment). Bioware had Years to develop something in PvP. They also have/had onboard designers in pvp from other good and bad pvp moms. THe only thing I can imagine is that the good ideas were abandoned in favor of more expedient solutions with the thought that "we'll just fix it later." But see, later comes too late for the hardcore. Perhaps they think the hardcore will come back if things radically change. Look at WoW. It took Wow to add arena to bring the hardcore PvPers back to WoW and yet it was a disaster for the game and began its decline due to all the changes that arena required to skills etc in order to make all the classes competitive. Heck, the Hunter class only got its null zone eliminated because of arena). I dont pretend or profess to know anything about game design. But I am an avid PvPer and I have played many of them. And this system is terrible in comparison even to the basic ranking system WoW had when titles meant access to higher levels of gear.

Is it a surprise? All of the advanced loot in pvp (read: Battlemaster) requires WINS. Not play. WINS. If you have a finite amount of time, no need for valor, and a need to win games that last on average between 10 and 15 minutes, why would you stay in a losing game? Answer: you wouldn't. The system starts out with gearing through bags acquired through comms. Arguably a bad system, but at least you acquire from wins and losses. And yes, at Battlemaster level, you should only acquire gear by winning games, again arguably but I tend to support this. So you can't blame anyone and I don't think anyone supports deserter debuffs precisely because of this.

Guys..... seriously. It will get fixed. You don't spend hundreds of millions of dollars to fail when you are an established successful company like Bioware. Honestly I think they were totally caught with their pants down when Ilum was rushed out. Heck, they admitted that they didn't finish what was supposed to happen there (read: timers on assault bases). THey came up with an interim solution next. I agree. PvP is horribly mangled because of the gear progression system. And while it seems like an afterthought, I sincerely believe we will see a lot of positive changes in March and through Spring and Summer of this year. I lived and breathed SWG despite its insanity, lack of content, etc. Still was an awesome game. And this one could be 10x better if they do it right.

So THAT is the issue. I wondered why it was happening. Another bug to fix. Hope someone posted this.

Over 40 trial litigator here. We need to start a guild for the older crowd!

One of the things I like about this is that there is an actual game here on Ilum in concept. There is no "game" right now. Again, bring this or Wintergrasp or something better to this god-forsaken zone!

The magic of the sorcerer class is that it requires cunning and deception to use properly. Unless you are playing war zones against bots, no one is going to allow you to sit there and blast them with lightning or dot them up. You have to use the chaos of the war zone to your advantage. Pillars, walls, corridors, height, distance .... these are all your friends. No, you can't charge in and blast away without reprisal. That isn't our way. If you watch any good PvPer with their class, you have to know your strengths and limitations. Remember, the Emperor only fought in combat when he believed he had a decided advantage. Think of it that way. You can do very well in 50s brackets with this philosophy in mind. And you'll take a lot of lumps too, but that is the nature of the beast.

Because of the following, Ilum remains: 1. New warzones/rated war zones are two months away. 2. There is no other world pvp. 3. There is no viable alternative to players to grind valor other than Ilum right now. 4. Players are tired of war zones, particularly huttball which dominates the selection of war zones because of faction imbalance. I dont understand the WHY of any of the above. I don't understand what Bioware wanted to accomplish in its vision of Ilum at all (assuming it had one). But there it is and there it will stay as is until a major patch comes along. Sad but true.