If these changes are aimed at PVP, I can't really understand where they are coming from. It is so easy to shut down a Merc/Commando healer - interrupt the Medical Probe/Scan and you reduce them to one small heal roughly every 6 seconds. Sure, if you're a geared Merc/Commando facing poor players with terrible gear, I have no doubt you can live forever. But facing a decent group of players with equal gear, they'll shut you down so hard you'll probably get nothing off aside from the aoe heal and the instant cast 20 sec cooldown ability. Every time I struggle to shut down/kill a healer, it isn't a Mercmando.

I have been involved in 0-0 Voidstar games, and some of those have been wins. They do not mean a loss for both sides. I can't say what determines the winner, though - no one in our guild has worked that out yet.

Those stats are a LOT higher than mine, so that certainly explains a lot. I'm a relatively fresh 50, so I feel like I barely scratch the geared 50s right now. I'll keep plugging away - thanks.

How on earth are you putting out some of those numbers? My Vig-spec JK doesn't hit for anywhere close to that. Does our damage really scale that well from full BM gear?

I play a Guardian main, and I completely agree with the OP. It's ridiculous how easy it is to score on certain classes in Huttball. Combined with a sage, I've performed chains of 4 leaps in the space of 5 GCDs. I've run straight into pits and leapt up to respawners (who have NO realistic way to avoid a leap if they want to get back into the game). It's very rare that I find myself in a tactical situation where it is more prudent to throw the ball than simply leap it around, and that's not right. The game is designed around limited mobility (hence the perma snare) for a running or throwing game. Abilities which increase mobility with the Huttball dumb down the teamwork required and simply turn the game into an arms race where the team with more ball moving abilities (force leap, storm, force speed, etc.) wins. Not allowing the CARRIER to leap or speed boost with the ball doesn't remove the skills from Huttball. Non-carriers would be free to use them, so they would still be useful for defense, support and/or positioning for an offensive play. The best games of Huttball I've played always involved teams who had little to no ability to break the ball moving mechanics with class abilities.

Only 1 in 10 of mine goes where I position myself for. It's very frustrating when you try to do something like Force Leap in, run around a player, back off slightly and Force Push them back to your team mates....only to see them get fired AWAY from your team mates.

Re-roll healer, then you'll always have one. If you're not prepared to do that, accept the hand you're dealt when queuing solo.

That's flat out untrue. There is nothing you can do to stop people from abusing a game's rules. In tennis, you can theoretically trade points every serve if you want to. Is it a failed game because of that? In football (soccer for the yanks), you can trade goals if you want to. Is it a failed game because of this? In WoW, you could dual queue against a premade on the other faction and farm PVP achieves in BGs if you wanted to. Is it a failed game because of this? Games are generally predicated on the idea that people want to play to win. If they don't, and they play to cheat, there is nothing you do to safeguard against it short of not having any rewards whatsoever for winning. And then, people complain about no incentive for taking part. The problem here isn't Ilum, the problem is that some players are more motivated by gear/valor than they are by winning. It's a sad reflection on the playerbase, not Bioware.

All I can tell you is that every single person in my guild does this, and no one has experienced a problem with non-updating PVP quest objectives since.

And why is that? It's a piece of software. Software has bugs. Sometimes, you just have to work around them. If two clicks once per day is too much work for you to sidestep a bug that can prevent you from achieving quest objectives, you should probably just stop using software.

Untrack the PVP quest.

You don't actually need to hide behind the pillars. It's a close range AOE, you can just outrange it. This fight seems very difficult unless you utilize strategy to counter his attacks. If you do everything correctly, he dies pretty fast.

East and west are far, far easier to defend than the middle node. It amazes me that so many people haven't realized this yet.

I agree 100%. The difference is amazing, and our entire guild has had an absolute BLAST PVPing this evening. We all agreed that we weren't going to rush to 50, since we didn't want to be in a position where all content was complete and we were short of something to do. As a result, most of our guild is still sub 50, and PVP prior to today was an absolute chore. The majority of the guild just stopped queuing, since the just got blown up in around 4.5 seconds against the Imp battlemasters. Today, what a turnaround. Instead of losing 9/10 games, we're now winning 9/10 games. You can't tell me that our entire guild suddenly developed skill overnight, so the conclusion is pretty obvious. In one game, our highest player was 32 (with most mid 20s), and the entire enemy team was 41+. We absolutely wrecked them. Anyone trying to claim 50s with expertise are no harder to kill than 40s is dreaming. This is a fantastic change, and I'd like to thank Bioware for putting this much needed bracketing change into the game. Our guild doesn't really care if we win or lose as long as we can play a fun, competitive match. Today's patch finally gave us that reality - kudos. To echo some of the other posters, I really wish I could stop leveling at 49. The prospect of entering the 50s bracket and seeing expertise again just doesn't appeal at all.

You want someone else to do the maths to prove your argument? This is absolutely the most ridiculous thing I have ever heard. You're making assumptions, presenting them as fact, and then expecting other people to spend their time finding the obvious holes in your assumptions. You don't even NEED to do any maths to see the glaring flaw in your arguments for expertise. If you can't see it without doing the mats, I suggest you actually calculate the impact of expertise before making obviously incorrect arguments about its impact.