Yeah, all these people who tell the late night players to "get a life" when the game repeatedly goes down for maintenance, would probably start a revolution on these forums if the game went down in prime time multiple times per week, for 3-4 hours, instead. Imagine if 2-3 days per week, the game went down for four hours between 6pm and 10pm. This place would explode.

The occasional unscheduled maintenance is just part of life with MMOs, and can even be a good sign, as it means they are squashing bugs as they find them. However, there's also no doubt that this game has entirely too many unscheduled maintenances these days. The concerns of people who can only play late at night do not immediately become invalid because you utter some pithy line about how they should "get a life" and "do something else". They pay money for this service, the same as you do, and are being deprived far too often of the ability to play the game they are paying for. The SWTOR servers are routinely going down 2-3 times a week these days, for at least a few hours each time. That's absurd, and crosses the line from "hey good, they are getting rid of bugs", to "jesus, do you guys QA these patches at all before you deploy them?" And if you're someone who works a night job, it means frequent interruptions during your prime playing hours. Complaining about that fact is completely reasonable and valid.

I have no idea if he's lying or not, but I just wanted to say that I hate this line, and think it''s a BS demand every time I see it. Maybe it's a rare bug? Maybe he doesn't record video of every single PvP match he participates in? Maybe he simply doesn't care to spend the time trying to reproduce it, to convince a guy on the internet? The lack of a video has no bearing on whether he's telling the truth or not. Which isn't to say he is.

In no universe does an extra 195 expertise equal the difference between a balanced controntation, and what you described above.

You aren't "nullified" by it, any more than you're nullified by any AoE ability. And the trade-off of being able to continue attacking while it ticks, is the time we spend casting the ability. That's your chance to stun. Or pop a defensive CD, run in and swing away. If a sniper puts OS over themselves, then your melee may want to switch targets, but your ranged DPS can switch to them. It's pretty braindead strategy. This just looks like people who don't really understand how these abilities work, screaming about them because they seem overpowered on a surface level. I'll occasionally pop OS over myself as a deterrent for melee players, but it's hardly the overpowering "death field" you people are making it out to be.

My favourite part is when the OP says casting force lightning on yourself is totally fine, but casting orbital strike is "cheesy", despite being the same fundamental principle - casting AOE over yourself. Orbital Strike takes several seconds before the damage starts, and it paints a giant red target on the ground for you to avoid. Stop complaining and pay attention. Or better yet, interrupt the cast. Casting AoE spells in the vicinity of your own character has been a PvP tactic since forever.

My own PvP gear is currently a mix of campaign, battlemaster, and a few pieces of war hero - only totals 804 expertise - and I routinely sit up in the top 3 for damage (granted I don't play rated WZs). Expertise is an important stat in PvP, and if all you have is Rakata gear you should probably wear Recruit gear for your own good. That said, people focus way too heavily on it in determining a player's worth. Kicking someone for wearing all Rakata is kind of absurd - sure it might hamstring you competitively to an extent, but it isn't like "not being there" at all. I also tend to think the value of expertise depends on your class. If you're a ranged DPS class like a sniper, for example, you can probably get away with wearing less PvP gear if your PvE stuff is better, because the damage reduction and healing buff in the expertise stat are less important to you. If you're a melee class, that stuff is critical literally all the time. Ultimately, player skill still trumps everything. Any schmuck will eventually get full war hero gear if they play enough, with or without learning to play their class well. However, you need to recognize that you're part of a group in PvP, nerfing yourself for the sake of your character's appearance is pretty ridiculous, and walking around in certain gear doesn't really contribute to the "fun" of PvP. Feel free to put that stuff back on when you're at the fleet.

Or keep it exactly the way it is now, but cut down the cast time. I've got no problem with a reticle on the group, alerting people to where the OS is coming down - the real problem is the enormous gap from when you start casting, to when the OS damage actually starts ticking, with the reticle there the entire time. It gives players way too long to get out of the way, as opposed to the BH's DFA, for example, which starts pretty much immediately.

Well I can't argue with this well considered counterpoint.

Leg shot is a fantastic PvP ability - the only thing I hate about it, is that it's subject to being dodged or missing like any other attack, so it can be a bit nerve wracking when you're giving a last ditch effort to stop a ball carrier, only for it to not do anything. But aside from that relatively small wrinkle, it's boss. Bailed my team out countless times when I'm pugging warzones, and I get a team of dummies who spam CC's with no attention given to their resolve bar.

The only scenario in which we are "overpowered", is when we are completely left alone to DPS at will, which is the fault of poor opposition, not poor balance. If a team is smart, and immediately moves to try and neutralize the snipers, our effectiveness can plummet to zero pretty quickly. Particularly if you're a MM or hybrid spec sniper.

Imagine how useless snipers would be if they could be jumped to while in cover. The whole point of the sniper class is that you sacrifice mobility and melee range survivability, in order to be deadly at long range. Now imagine if melee classes had the ability to simply jump to a sniper's location - immediately closing that important buffer zone the sniper literally needs to be useful. Or imagine huttball, if snipers couldn't set up camp on the upper catwalk ledges, for fear that the opposing ball carrier could simply jump to them in a vulnerable position. The point is - quit whining. Good melee players are more than competitive against snipers.

Easy compromise/fix would be to make OS a channeled ability instead of casting first, like force lightning, death from above, and others.

Oh my bad - I'm not that familiar with the random drops in the EC loot table. I assumed he meant F&S had a chance to drop a random lvl 61 barrel/hilt mod.

Testing has shown that the internal damage proc relics hit for around 7 more damage on average, because despite hitting for less they don't get mitigated by anything. But yeah, the other guy is right - the PvP Boundless Ages relics are where it's at. Even if you just get the BM one, which is super cheap.

I'm a MM sniper. The first thing I pretty much always do, is run to mid, hug the inside of the right wall, and try to sneak up the ramp to the second floor. From the second floor on that side of the node, the enemy don't see you as they run into the building. You can typically get off a couple of shots before they even spin around and realize you're up there. If they start firing at you, back away from the edge to break LOS. If they run up after you, jump down and run to the second floor of the other side. They will run across the node after you, and hopefully someone else will pick them up. This is really easy when PvPing with my guild, because I can just use our voice server to quickly call for help burning the guy down. No strat is really perfect if your opponents do the smart thing and send a couple of people to prioritize killing you. All you can really do is try to drag them back into the fighting, and see if you can get help.

If you're fortunate enough for it to drop. We've been doing HM Denova forever, and never had a 61 hilt/barrel drop.

This is kind of true, unless nightmare mode for EC comes with significant changes to the fight mechanics. Just adding some extra health, extra hard hits, and one new mechanic to the same fights we've been doing for months, is not going to keep people around.

And wasn't it awesome when you managed to pull it off? These are those terrible but awesome white knuckle moments I live for when raiding. Where you should have wiped, but managed to tough it out.

You could make make the argument that a few of the enrage timers in HM EC are a little too finely tuned, by which I mean you're really shaving it close when you get them down. But frankly, I kind of like that. I like that there's a mechanic that puts expectations on your DPS, skillwise. The Vael BWL fight in WoW was always a favourite of mine, because until you overgeared for the fight, it was a great test of the skill of your DPS players, to maximize their output. There are people in my raid group who also hate enrage timers, and I just don't get it. The only other option would to make fights a lot shorter, but nerf energy/force regeneration significantly, so at some point the healers are literally incapable of keeping the tanks alive any more. But how is that practically different from an enrage timer? Where you really lose me, is when you mention that someone is guaranteed to die on Zorn and Toth, as an argument against them. No - someone is not guaranteed to die on Z&T, if your guild is prepared and coordinated, which is the entire point. Raids are rests of skill and group coordination. Enrage timers are the "test" for the DPs classes - can they take the boss down fast enough? If not, then maybe your gear isn't good enough yet, or maybe they simply aren't skilled enough. Otherwise, why not take half as much DPS, double up the healers, and make every boss fight insanely easy, since you can take all day to kill stuff? Lastly, enrage timers aren't even guaranteed wipes in this game. In one of my guilds most memorable (and terrible) Soa kills, we had one DPS disconnect early on, and another die at the last phase. The result was us fighting an enraged Soa for over a minute, and only one healer and one DPS standing by the end - but we got him down. One of the loudest cheers over our voice server that I've ever heard, because it was so terrible but awesome. If you are constantly running into problems with enrage timers, your guild members need to look inward, not outward, for the problem. The timers in this game aren't terribly forgiving, but they can be beaten.

These are ridiculous gripes. As a previous poster said - low level critcrafted oranges only give you a low level augment slot, because that item required lower crafting skill, and cheaper mats to make, than a critcrafted lvl 50 orange. That's the point. If you want to upgrade that augment slot, to bring it inline with higher level oranges that are more expensive to make, then you pay some money for a kit, and upgrade it. Or make a kit yourself, if you can. That's the way it should be, and it effectively ends the old problem of the market being completely crammed with expensive lvl 11 critcrafted orange items, and not much else. Now things will sell based on aesthetics, as orange shell items should.

The endless trash in the trenches is soul-killingly tedious stuff. We actually groan when we get to it. Oh, and please change it so the speeder will take you right to Kephess' area. Having to do that long run gets really annoying.

The FP is fine the way it is currently. I found the second boss extremely hard, for about two hours the first day the FP was patched in. Every time after that, it was one shot and move on. Maybe a two-shot, if someone catastrophically screwed up. And as a well-tuned fight should be - it's doable with lower-tiered gear if you're good, or you can compensate with better gear (i.e. Columi+) People who only run FPs need a challenge to aspire to, and LI is currently that challenge. All of the other FPs are too easy. If anything, I'd tune LI to make the all but the droid and final boss harder.

Finished this op in HM last night with a guild group. We had two Sorcs (one heal, one DPS), a Sniper (me), and a Powertech tank. Started off with a Jugg tank, who simply wasn't geared well enough for the fight, so we kept pulling aggro, and he kept dying. Must have wiped 10 times at the infamous first proper boss, until we subbed in the Powertech and a different Sorc. Then I'm pretty sure we got it in three tries. Our problem wasn't interrupting his Incinerate,; it was things getting too chaotic when the lava and the lightning, and adds are all going at once, and our Sorc having issues adjusting his force management due to the new consumption nerf. That first boss is really hard - particularly compared to the rest of the FP. I definitely don't see a common PUG being able to do it for a while (which is sort of cool, to be honest). I suspect we will see this fight get tuned down in the next patch, however. The next boss we wiped on twice - the first time because we went in blind and weren't prepared for his knockback, and the second because stacking on the boss still resulted in us flying into the lava somehow. After that, we got him. Bonus Boss we wiped on twice. First time because we went in blind (seeing a pattern here? lol), and got killed by the icicles. Second time we hit the enrage timer with about 18% left because we weren't DPSing him while we were moving around during the icicles. After that, he was cake. Doctor Lorrick took us three tries to get down. First time was because we went in blind, and our DPS got killed by standing too close to the boss. We did manage to figure out that we needed to destroy the kolto tanks, though. Second time we got to the second phase, and didn't know how to deal with the burning rakhgouls Third time we got him. Overall, I enjoyed the new FP. I like that it's probably too stiff a challenge for uncoordinated groups. Lorrick and the droid boss are probably too difficult for an ungeared, uncoordinated group to kill right now. The other two are pretty easy, once you understand the mechanics.

People who see everything through the prism of political tribalism make me laugh.