I have a question, how would you change this, if at all, for pvp? Like would you use an expertise crystal instead of power, or would you emphasize crit chance and crit power more?

One thing to keep in mind is that level plays a HUGE factor in pve fights, since both you and the enemies get very large level-based damage/defense vs damage boosts based on level. As an example, you can barely damage an enemy 5 levels higher than you, but you can damage a player 5 levels higher than you with no problems. So with this in mind, if "within level range" means 1-2 or even 3 levels under the enemies, this just changed that fight to "really really hard" - check the level of the enemies vs yours and see if this isn't one of the issues you're facing. By the same token, 3 levels over the enemies just made it "really really easy" (Some players purposely under level to get this level of challenge, but that's because we face roll over content otherwise) With that out of the way, general tips: - Disable Qyzen's AoE damage abilities, (not his aoe taunt though!) because they break crowd control - Open up with a force lift vs the strongest elite enemy. - Kill the weaker enemies first - Use ctrl-1 to make qyzen attack the same target you're attacking so you kill them faster - Refresh his bubble as soon as it's up - Be very careful with your own AoEs With these basic steps, it should be possible to handle groups of 1 elite and 2-3 strongs or 2 elites without any problems. I have less experience with TK than with balance (read never played at level 40+ with it), but essentially with balance I was easily beating the crap out of enemies, only using Qyzen, and soloing heroics-2 with no problems. (heroics 4 if I was 3 or 4 levels over them). I suspect TK is similarly capable, since it has a similar damage output. I just liked the mobility and insta-lift of balance better.

Sadly, this would be true. There's a reason the elite war hero is just barely better than war hero, to minimize the QQing. On the other hand, they could design alternate same-power-leve-overalll gear sets, with better default mods, so that you can work towards that if you haven't yet gotten a BIS mods setup, but won't be affected negatively if you already do. Make them pricier than current same level sets to compensate for the extra effort to obtain better stat distribution the old fashioned way. In a similar vein, they could introduce better battlemaster gear, gear that allowed you to swap in the mods to orange shells and keep the bonuses, like you can with war hero. There are things they can do with pvp gear without increasing the actual power level.

I'll play devil's advocate and hope to avoid getting lynched. While I have other toons, my fav is a DPS Sage ie the definition of squishy. Thanks to these changes, I can now use my abilities to extend my life more, because every target of consequence won't have his resolve maxed by someone popping an aoe knockback right in the same spot another aoe was a second ago. I like the current changes, even if I have to get within 10 meters to stun, now I use force speed offensively to finish off the guy. However, I would not be against fine tuning the system by lowering the CD on stun break and/or having the cooldown reset on death. Please don't hunt me down and kill me. ::cowers::

Wow.. as a sent you're by far the sturdiest of the DPS classes, having similar damage mitigation to tanks and in some cases better damage mitigation than tanks (see BH Tank) while doing massive burst damage. I dream of the day when the DPS Sage has either your survivability OR your burst DPS. Yeah, we'd be happy with half a mara's worth of abilities Hey, a well played mara is a beast, it has insanely high defense and very good burst, making them a serious threat. But they're also nearly extinct. Used to be you saw teams of only PTs/Maras and healers and just got roflstomped. Yet the other day I kited TWO attacking me. I was like wuut, this fight is taking 25 seconds instead of 4, what gives. So in essence, currently, the number of bad or learning players makes most class balance issues moot. That doesn't mean that if you pit top-rated groups against each other some classes will get laughed out of the WZ, and that as overall skill progress, the general experience will approximate that of the top rated groups.

^This. Those bubble sorcs have many other disadvantages in huttball and in other pvp matches. This is one of their few strengths. Also, the bubble is a mere 3000 hps give or take, no different from popping a health buff on a mara or something else. Just because the health bar didn't move doesn't mean the player didn't take "any damage" I guess guardian leaping and the other leaping past traps should be disabled too. Oh and using hooks and force pull past traps. Oh and any sprint ability. Oh and roots. And slows. and knockbacks. And armor. And defensive cooldowns mitigating trap damage. Or maybe we don't have to change anything and people can just L2P. Still, I wouldn't mind a different huttball map for extra variety, one that favors ranged classes kiting and provides less advantage to leaping

See. this were my experiences before: Pre 50 pvp/open world pvp: Looser goes out of his way to engage my DPS Sage even backtracking to come after me, even when I'm retreating to avoid a conflict (heading to a mission objective f.ex) - looser gets pwned. Sorcs/Sages are simply more powerful at lower levels. 50s PvP: Mara (Sent) jumps me, and either of these two would happen: I manage to annoy him enough so that he stops bothering with me by kiting him around, slowing him, etc, or he kills me if he was persistent. If another melee jumped him, he would usually turn to face the melee rather than continue chasing the sage nuisance. Now free to fully DPS him + the extra damage from the other melee, he died easily. Also if he jumped me at just the right time, he could kill me in a few seconds. (say if my stun breaker was on cooldown and he had all his damage cooldowns ready for a massive burst vs the squishy) I was therefore always afraid of a mara jumping me in 50s pvp unless I had a friend backing me up. Now post 1.4 My experiences thus far have been: An inordinate amount of good pvp players have left, and a huge portion of the maras left are just flavor of the month people with no idea what they're doing. It seems we gained a lot of new level 50 pvpers, who are just bad, in all classes. But as a result, and until the skill level goes back up, I'm no longer particularly concerned when I get jumped by a mara. Sometimes I'll still get killed in seconds when it's one of the few good maras left, but usually it's more like yawn, kite, kill. (then again, this does not apply to only maras: I'm horrified when I'm attacking a DPS sorcerer and I'm left with 90% my health on my sage, and can only wonder *** the other guy was thinking/doing)

While 2k per kill is a bit extreme, the second example could in fact show that you're playing smart and looking for targets being focused fired and killing them quickly. For example, I often save a burst DPS combo for when I see an enemy with half health or less engaged by someone else, hit them with a stun if they don't have a defensive cooldown up, and unleash it, killing them outright. I do overall a lot less damage than if I were using max DPS on a fresh target taking forever to kill it while the healer constantly replenishes his health and my healer replenishes mine. I think the solution could be to eliminate AoE damage from the scores in this form: If I hit 3 targets with death field, one for 1400, 1200, and 2700 for example, I should only get credit for the 2700 damage. Same if I use a sorcs quake/lightning fest I should only get credit for one target, with the highest number. Likewise, you should only get dot damage from one target at a time. This will result in much lower numbers by sorcs and other such classes, and might finally lead to those classes being boosted instead of being kept back by artificially high numbers that don't mean a thing.

This can be a big problem. I sometimes see new people STATE they are new and some ****** replies when they ask for advice "Don't suck" to many LOLs. These are the same ******s who then ***** and moan the entire match because people "are terrible" and "it's the worst team I've seen in my life" etc etc. Of course, taking charge of the team, giving specific directions and advise, helping out, trying to get them to improve, yeah those things are beyond these wannabes. Add them to ignore, which should prevent you to cue up with them again.

It's completely false First of all, your commendations cap at 2000, so essentially you've by now wasted easily 10s of 1000s of commendations at valor rank 40something. Secondly, you can purchase gear (except maybe war hero) at valor rank 0. The first thing you do when you reach level 50 is go get your FREE recruit set. The next thing you do is work towards battlemaster (warning, 1 or 2 pieces of recruit may have better stats than battlemaster, also some items have better stats than others, pick and choose, but with an eye towards war hero, since you often need the battlemaster base item to get war hero) PvE gear (rakta/columni/black hole/etc) gear has often better stats, but no expertise. Do not fall for the trap, you need expertise, and lots of it. Having one non-expertise item isn't a big deal if you have a truly exceptional non-pvp item (say 1 black hole off hand thingie when you're starting out with recruit gear) but in general, work for battlemaster asap, prioritizing the set bonus if it's very good (some are, some aren't) or the items which yield the greatest benefit to your class/role.

Very simple, for some the game STARTS when you hit level 50. Raiding, PvP, gearing up, it all starts to have a point AT 50, since before whatever you do to gear up will be obsoleted within a few days. You also need to learn teamwork, master your class, and learn mechanics, because before 50 the entire game is frankly a bit of a joke difficulty-wise. Anyone soloing can easily master it. For others, who are only after a story, the game ends at 50. They'll miss out on the awesome stories inside the OPs and some flashpoints, but oh well, that's their choice. If this is you, then you can start a different character type and experience his story, skipping the general quests you already know/don't care to repeat.

Sometimes I'm a in a bad group. It lacks coordination, or one or two people .. might as well not be there. But there's still a full 8 on the other team, and 56 more on this team, whose experience I'm ruining by quitting instead of just trying hard. If we loose, we loose, but we gave them a fight. Of course, those times when you still win in spite the odds are all the sweeter. When you quit, there's a very good chance you're ruining the game for others. I think it's the other way around, if you want a perfect team then you should stick to guild-only ranked. If you're queing randomly then you should be prepared to stick it out. In that vein, I fully support a penalty, and a much higher penalty for any AFKer. That's not to say I'm against the other proposed solutions of also allowing a majority to kick a bad player, but I submit 4 votes should not be enough, you'd require 5, so that a premade can just kick anyone they want. If the person is ruining the warzone, getting a 5th vote will be easy. As for the threats of quitting of it's implemented, shrug, people will quit either way. It is getting very frustrating to wait for a match only to have it ruined by quitters. TL;DR Those who can only play with great teams and can't tolerate otherwise, should only play with teams and be discouraged from queuing randomly and ruining other people's gaming experience.

Mouse over the expertise stat. It's a pvp-only stat that effects damage done, damage taken, and healing done. Works in open world pvp. As to your question, it depends on whether you already have enough expertise. Although frankly I'd choose power vs expertise, not critical. Crit is easy to max imho, but ymmv depending on other gear.

It's a balance. A shadow can skip the irrelevant mobs and only kill mobs when there's optionals worth doing. However a DPS sage has very nice AoE and CC abilities, allowing it to kill very quickly with a tank companion, while minimizing downtime. But in general, DPS will level faster than non DPS.

If you want to level up faster, make one friend in your time zone and level up with him. Quests take half the time with another person, you can easily do heroics 2+s for extra exp, and you get an exp bonus for being grouped. I've found cybertech to be REALLY good to level up a tank, since it becomes possible to create very good armoring mods for your armor, which allows you to easily tank content you should not yet be able to do. Once cap'd cybertech ...leaves a lot to be desired. It has some use in pvp. But while leveling up, I found it awesome. In a similar vein, I've found synthweaving of little use leveling up, but really useful once cap'd since it helped me make a ton of augments and augment kits without spending a fortune. Lastly, craft gear in advance. Make sure your crafting skills are higher than your level. By the time you reach level 35 for example, you've been working on making purple armorings at level 35 since level 30, and have a nice stash of materials waiting. Use some, sell some to get the cash back you invest in this. PS: You can control your PC from your iphone/similar phone, and thus issue crafting orders during lunch breaks/when you're bored/not busy, but this may be a bit too hardcore for your tastes =)

^This. I consider it the highest compliment when I get the most mvp votes in a group of strangers, without having the highest damage or heals, just because 3-4 people noticed what I was doing to help the team. However, yes, many times you will score/make the play to score 3 out of the only 3 goals in huttball and won't get so much as a single vote, but that's life. What's important is what you do with your own vote, try to remember someone making a difference, or helping you. (And then very rarely, you'll be particularly happy you can't award negative mvp votes:cool: )

She's pure DPS, but she does have a buff that reduces her incoming damage. When she's in really good gear (say columni or betteri from your castoffs) then she can tank by virtue of gear and dps

As a vanguard, please don't remove all the references. After hours of googling I finally found this, which is an incredibly good source of info. If anything, add more vanguard info/more vanguard names pls - New Fan

"Until now I have never seen vote kicking being misused. I myself only use vote kick when someone for example disconnects and after several minutes isn't back in, or only when it is truly necessary, like when, due to one or both damage dealers being more than poorly equipped or underskilled, simply can't succeed on a boss, and have already wiped 4 times due to enrage and the DDs simply don't want to acknowledge that for hard mode FPs there IS such a thing as having way too poor gear." The english leaves a little bit to be desired, but I tried to maintain the original German phrasing as much as possible, to keep the flavour It should nontheless be a lot easier to understand than the auto translate giberish.

You're mistaken, the person getting kicked is very much part of the group and has to be taken into account. Indeed he could be of the opinion that the one who should be getting kicked is the one who started the vote kick, and the other pug could be in agreement with him, but because the vote kicker grouped with his friend who will back him up no matter what, the opinions of half the group are not taken into consideration. This is also an issue because in such stalemate stituations the arse hats are the ones who will hit kick first, while the nicer folks will be trying to reach an understanding instead/would make an effort to put up with the jerks. TL;DR : I think a 3 vote system is a good idea, or at least a system which looks at your history. If you are often kicked out of groups then 2 votes may be enough, but to kick a fresh 50 who is geared and doing everything ok but isn't space baring, because nobody told him to, you'd need 3.

If I'm not mistaken, Jung Ma is an RP-PVP server, meaning players there kinda like it all, but are (usually) not hard core about any of it. A pure RP server might be more what you're looking for, if you want to have a shot at walking up to strangers and RPing. However, finding an RP guild is probably best. Look for one that's as hard core as you expect and you'll be happy ("ie always in character, only occasionally in character, only in character at special RP meetings, etc) Nontheless, if I'm not mistaken The Ebon Hawk and Shien are east coast RP servers, with the Ebon Hawk probably having a higher population. Maybe. (I see it as 'heavy' often enough when switching servers). Couldn't hurt to see if you don't like it there better too.

Yeah, I'd love it if there were real consequences, but then you'd see stuff like "wanted jedi sage healer for X Operative, must not have sacrificed 50% healing ability to save some pixels..." However, the way I'd have done it is to make a debuff that only worked during class-based missions, and then provide a way to cure it at the very very end, so you could choose to have an easier time without the debuff (dark path) or harder time, but still end up the same after a long road. Perhaps a nice unique title to show off that you pulled off the class quests at 50% strength =) Anyway....

Based on the number of people that are posting that quitting because of X is ok, and how they'll go to any lengths to justify it, then yes, I agree with the OP, an increasing penalty is the way to go. If someone crashes/quits once in a long while due to an emergency that's fine. Anything more than that should not be tolerated, because at that point you're systematically ruining the game for many other players on a regular basis.

Just to add 2 cents, yes the Sage (balance DPS spec) soloes heroics 2+ just fine, and several heroics 4, although not most of them. (Ie those were you HAVE to fight 4 or 5 gold elite enemies per group are not going to end well, unless you go in there when they are much lower level than you (but still green so you get exp as opposed to grey) I'm not sure if flashpoints are doable though, have never tried ::ponders:: but they can be 2-manned. I may have something new to try just now, heh.

Balance DPS Sage: 1. Extremely weak in PvP where we are essentially a glass cannon without a cannon: No burst ability, lowest survivability = easy kill. (yes we can run away from some classes, but even then that means not defending) Respectable in PvE, welcome in most operations/flashpoints. 2) Pretty much as above. However, it is a very fun class in PvE. Unfortunately this means I'm more or less locked out of competitive PvP unless I go play a class I do not want to play ================ Telekinesis Sage: 1. Even weaker in PVP, about as useful in PvE as balance. 2. I do not like it at all, the way it plays feels very gimmicky and hunting for procs means not being able to look at the situation/playfield and just staring at some buff bars to see when to launch X attack. Very stationary too. I do not enjoy this in PvE, and it's laughably bad in PvP. =================== Healing Sage (no longer played): 1. Useful in PvP, Useful in PvE. 2 The #1 asked for Sage build. Too bad I hate healing. Also annoying to level up with, since essentially you have half the DPS and have to rely on companions for DPS - too bad your heavy DPS companion comes around act 3...