Why should snares and interrupts be on resolve? You are only locked out of one spell and you can move while slowed? I think the problem with slows though is that too many classes just have auto applied slows which take no conscious decision from the player at all.

Reading comprehension on this forum - 0% edit - you can probably ask on the dulfy website, I think you may get more help there.

I think you are misunderstanding me. First of all, I said you don't balance solely around arenas because people would complain about crap. If you make changes, you can use a) the bolster system b) small talent hotfixes which don't affect how the class is played and can be deployed quickly c) no major changes unless the class is shown to be imbalanced in multiple areas/PvP formats. It's not entirely about wanting SW:ToR to be like WoW. Why a dedicated healer and tank model was chosen for SW universe, why does this game play like WoW in the first place? So many classes have a WoW counterpart or a mix of ability from multiple classes that it is obvious where they drew their ideas from. A sorc healer is basically a priest healer with sprint and no fear. If you choose to be like WoW, why would you try to make the game with none of the QoL features? The point is that they started something and couldn't differentiate the product enough or refine it before many players basically stopped caring. Right now, the main problem in PvP is that they are losing the crowd that doesn't entirely enjoy warzones because there is basically zero to do outside of it. It's not that more pvp formats are not supported, it doesn't even exist in the first place. Regarding Open World PvP, I just don't see a community that will go out of its way to make PvP happen right now. Perhaps you are right that if the circumstances are right; proximity and convenience, players will go around hunting each other. For starters at least, they need to remove the inconvenience of going to level 50 planets. At the very least players have to have a reason to not be sitting on their fleet 100% of the time and then when they go to do their dailies they're not too far from the opposite faction to even bother. TL;DR The game should have been different but it isn't and is now paying for it by not having anything to compete with apart from the IP. Further, continued lack of support for other formats of PvP and community prejudice against it is just hurting the game because it is excluding more players.

sry. only bumping for today so maybe some of the 'issues' will get some attention.

It's not about the game having to be solely balanced for arena. It's about letting people play what they enjoy. 1v1 is terrible but people still duel pointlessly to kill time. Huge open world zergs happen for no reason in other games despite the fact it is mindless. You just want people to do things they enjoy but keep rewards in line.

Intro I understand that 99% of people who will read this won't care about the fact that I'm not resubbing for the near future when my game time runs out. I am only stating his because I won't be around any longer to reply to anything other posters will direct at me. A lot of it has to do with the fact that a lot of people I knew quit the game and I have had less motivation to log on and warzonefest for the past couple of weeks. With that aside, I don't believe that SW:ToR is a terrible game and I can't say that I disliked it. I wouldn't recommend anyone against playing it but if you're in it for PvP, there are so many issues that are both PvP specific and general that really devalues the game experience. A lot of stuff probably has been covered in a bunch of other threads but I wanted to consolidate what I thought of the game from my PoV. Performance I don't claim to know about how the game works or how it is programmed but a lot of the way SW:ToR runs is very detrimental to the quality of the gamer's experience. The engine I'm sure everyone here knows about the extremely long load times and poor graphics and performance compared to how much resources the game simply eats. The engine, for lack of better words, is extremely poorly optimized. This has multiple effects; you inherently limit potential players without good computers from playing the game and you cannot have large scale PvP. Desync The client server desync is possibly the most stupid thing I have come across in PvP. And no, it's not on my end; multiple people have experienced it on the same time and we confirmed it on vent. Occasionally, the positions of players and their server position will be out of sync and the game will take several seconds (eons in PvP) to correct it. This causes issues like being unable to hit players you should on your screen, players teleporting while cc'd . This is sometimes gamebreaking but is almost always frustrating because you can't connect with the target and they teleport past the fire vents in Huttball 5 seconds after they were stunned in it while taking no damage. Another bug I have observer while playing and levelling my marauder as I described in another thread is the Force Charge desync. If you charge and get hit by a movement displacement ability at the same time i.e. air vents, knockbacks, you will momentarily desync and then jump to your new position as if you got teleported there. Another bug is where your charge paths you into a 'stuck position'. Your client will eject you but the server will hold you there and keep you leashed so you can't run out of range and you can't hit anything unless you charge a player that is within range of both your client and server position. Lack of PvP variety We can classify PvP into several categories. These would generally be small scale controlled PvP such as duels and arena, objective based controlled PvP such as warzones and large scale PvP like battle of Ilum. We can also include open world PvP into this. Possibly the lynchpin of this post is that there is literally no PvP in this game. There is just warzones, warzones, and more warzones. Trivializing the matter by saying 'Oh yea but you can go play in outlaw's den or make open world pvp on your server blblablablblablabla' doesn't help the issue. Players are driven by rewards and success. If you do not incentivize an activity, most players will not take action period. The only problem is to bring incentives for each type of PvP in line with each other. For example, casual PvP should reward the lowest currency of commendations while competitive PvP should reward the highest or you can change the system to only have one currency but competitive allows you to gain it at a higher rate. What we need in this game are 3 things: duelling area on the fleet to kill time, open world and small scale pvp like arena (in no particular order). I will cover the latter two. Open World PvP In order to get players into the world, there has to be incentive to get off the fleet. Currently, the fleet is the one stop go-to point for your crew skills, GTN, mission terminals. Why in the hell should someone leave unless they are doing their dailies? Exactly. Here's some ideas for what you can do even though open world pvp will be severely hampered by the engine. Allow players to directly go to the surface instead of doing the orbital station loading screen and RP. If you want to keep the RP in, put opening quests, flashpoint quests and such on the orbital station. I don't think players like going through a bunch of walking to get to their hangar door, take the elevator, enter their ship into a loadscreen, fly to the destination point, exit their ship into a load screen, go down the elevator, walk to the ship door and take the ship onto the planet. It seems more like you are encouraged to sit on the ship than sit through this garbage. GTN, mission terminals and PvP vendors on a daily hub on the level 50 planets. Relocate imperial and republic camps so they are more likely to meet but do not share quest mobs/items or the lesser faction will get penalized. Faction controlled daily hubs or plain neutral hubs like on Voss. Make something in the zones for players to fight over but also keep in mind that some servers have different faction populations so you may have to instance some of the greater population. Give players a short sanctuary buff so they aren't chain ganked into oblivion by a greater party on top of their respawn but make it so people can't just direclty avoid conflict by sitting inside a heavily guarded camp. Only put this into effect on level 50 planets. Incentivize dailies and world PvP. Put some PvP rewards such as valor or a miniscule comm gain on your objectives/quests so not only do players get credits to dump for mods but they also get some gain out of it. Minor valor gain or small gain/credits/1-5 comms for killing single players same level as you so it's not entirely pointless. When a faction controls the objective of a PvP zone after a battle, give them a temporary buff that gives 5% more comms gained from warzones of some so (this won't penalize the losing faction much but the winning faction stands to gain from it). The point of this is if you want players to be actively pvping in the world again, you need something to give them a reason to be there. Arena The biggest stigma from the community will be about arenas because a lot of players won't cut it and they get mad about stupid stuff because it's from some 'other bad game'. Why should we not have arena? There is literally no reason to not have small scale PvP in any game. Why the heck do you have flashpoints and ops but only warzones as your PvP format? I know it's a terrible example but not everyone has great computers to run large-scale pvp and not everyone enjoys warzones. Here's a few pointers: Smallest bracket is 3v3 Allow skirmish modes where there is no effect on your rating but you get minor rewards Do not balance solely for arena Do not provide arenas with additional rewards or incentives to play it over other PvP formats Allow players to make premade groups against each other for no reward The ideal scenario is that arena is for people who enjoy arena. People who want to love their warzones don't get to cry about it and people who like arena don't get to cry about warzones. Balance tweaks might need to be made but they need to be along the lines of something that subtly changes the game. The ideal changes for PvP would have the following conditions: -Bolster can help tweak the gameplay as well -It does not adversely affect PvE or how the class is played -It is a small hotfix to an ability or talent which is easy to test and implement in a minor patch -It does not add or take away an ability from the class -Only blatant imbalances that cover multiple facets of gameplay will require a major class change. If you have any reason to dislike small scale PvP, then go ahead and diss it. However, do not diss the concept of arena based on WoW's implementation of it. Do not forget that a lot of community uproar is basically over incentives and emphasis of PvP which shifted to arenas in TBC. Your definition of fun isn't always anyone else's. Just like how a lot of people didn't like how the game became centered on arenas, not everyone likes how the game is centered on warzones. You essentially make another introduction of 'arena hate but it's the other way around. Rewards Rewards in this game need to be streamlined. Simply put, your reward should be a product of time and skill and also cater towards those that don't have forever to grind their gear to get their advantage. A lot of players would be slightly older than what one may expect from the gaming crowd. Commitments eat into their ability to find time to play the game and if you set a huge dependence of rewards on time, you will essentially exclude them from the game. What we need are smaller disparities in performance between someone who can only put in a meager amount of time into the game and someone who can spend ages on it. I'm not asking for a trivial difference but something that is not the difference between stock BM and fully customized augmented war hero. Here are a few things which should be done: - Lower the costs of the highest tier of armor - Abolish the daily 100/100 rewards and put something else in it's place. You can have a 'daily' quest that you can do any time several times a day but has a finite amount of times you can repeat it in a week or make comm gains higher in general to compensate for the loss of the daily. What I want to acknowledge is that not everyone can log on everyday to play the game - believe it or not ( I can but some of my friends couldn't). -Vanity rewards for the highest skilled player or those with a lot of time dedicated to the game. This can come in the form of crystals(already in the game), pets, usable items with a cool non-combat visual effect. Vanity armor shells(good looking armour) would also be a huge incentive. -Allow players to buy mods and enhancements directly from a vendor instead of forcing them to look for and buy an entire piece. You have to buy your armoring with the stock shell as usual though. -Allow slot-specific upgrades to be interchangeable between specs i.e. Marauder saber can be upgraded into a Jugg one. -Allow the lowest form of pvp currency to be moved to alts so they can get intermediate PvP tier faster so they can start their 'grind' sooner. -Improve the stats on recruit gear. My main argument for allowing 'bads' and 'casuals' to have competitive gear with other players is because this is PvP. This isn't a raid boss with artificial difficulties imposed by a gear check. You are a person playing against another person and your skill should be the primary determinant of the outcome. Recruit gear is currently a pile of crap. Sure, BM takes a really short time to purchase but here's the catch. People shouldn't have to slog through dying over and over and doing no damage/healing to 'earn the right to PvP'. When you are entirely fresh 50, you are penalized twice; you have no experience and you have no gear. Even if a good player with no gear has a low chance of beating another geared player, how would you feel when a new player basically has zero chance? And in his eyes (which is reality in this scenario) he couldn't have done anything to stop himself from being destroyed. But why have PvP gear then? The answer is simple. PvE is gated by gear checks and you want players of both endgames (PvP and PvE) to be able to cross over into the other type of gameplay without being excessively successful at it. Again, this is a matter of implementation and incentive. You want to make it so that players have incentive to play whether it be success or your next piece of cool-looking vanity armour without alienating half the playerbase. Why should casuals which are basically 90% of the population have to suffer so 10% of the players get to keep a massive gear advantage?. This is how I look at it; great players are incentivized by success and vanity/status and casuals are incentivized by their next piece of gear. The community It should come as no surprise that the core of an MMO is the community. One of the ways the game can be revived is through the community. I have been playing multiplayer games for ages and I know how every community is basically a cesspool but it irks me to find this one so vitriolic while the game is still young. Players on fleets don't respond and people trashtalk each other so much personally despite the hilarious fact that there's no rating system. Take one look at the forums and for every ten posters, 9 of them are just jumping at the opportunity to tell the other person L2P when they don't even know anything themselves. While you may not need an excessive amount of talent to get good at the game, attitude is so important. A good attitude fosters a better community and a better skilled playerbase. Where are the guides and friendly help from people who actually know what they're doing? Who understands the game and explains how it works to other people in a manner that everyone can see and learn? Many players lack the ability to reflect on their own skill level. They just want to think they're the best and they played the game perfectly. Here's the thing; no one plays the perfect game. Even the best players will almost never have a game where they can say honestly ' I did everything perfect' and by logic, you shouldn't either. It is alright to rage, cuss and get frustrated at losses but treat it as a learning experience. There is always something you can do better and it is not 100% your crappy idiot teammate's fault (even if the odds are impossible). When you play the game more, you develop your ability to understand and react to the situation but even then some players will fail to progress and get an even better understanding of the game. Why? They try to reason their mistakes in order to rationalize their actions which were the incorrect choice. A lot of trial and error in learning games is looking back and objectively identifying your mistakes and the opponent's mistakes and from there, you can learn what you did wrong. There are not many players that can do almost everything right because of the awareness combined with reactions necessary to do so. You will see many average players who do the 'right' thing but still have brain lag in doing so. Take for example, you get hit with a cc and you want to break it. Hit your cc breaker bind, simple right? Not so. Even with simple actions like these, you can have an edge doing the smallest things like breaking the cc the instant it hits you because you knew it was coming. How can you know this? Experience and awareness. When you start to become aware of how the game works, you will understand how to improve as a player. You can improve in so many areas; tactical awareness and strategy, positioning, gameplan, cd usage and reaction to your available cds and enemy cds, what to hit based on class hp and cds etc etc. The list goes on but the thing to remember is that if even one 'bad' changes his attitude and wants to improve at the game, it benefits the community. The little things I still do not understand why the developers don't want to implement some things that another certain game did. Why did it take so long to start implementing cross server rwz, lfg, combat logs and parsers etc etc. Yes, it takes development time but it seems like this was just some exercise of developer pride to deprive their players of such basic quality of life improvements which the game should have had long before many players lost interest. It's not a bad thing to copy other games especially when it improves the gameplay experience. Some things may also take less development time than you think. One last thing I don't even understand when I played this game was the reliance on a dedicated healer and tank mechanic in the SW universe. It feels so bland but perhaps the game would have sunk without the familiarity of these roles and the pre-existing knowledge of how this dynamic works. Final words I hope some people at least made it through this wall of text and perhaps this was good feedback for BW. As I said before I didn't dislike the game despite the criticisms. Thanks to all that I played the game with and it was an interesting run to say the least.

Should be 5% damage from slow time and 5% accuracy from force breach. Hitting them is also reliant on how much tanking gear they wear (defense etc). And having more shield/absorb reduces the size of your hits. But, one thing to note is that a critical is the first priority in a hit table so if you roll a crit, they won't shield. Don't forget a lot of sins don't use force slow because of slow time. Slow time however is only a 30% slow to make up for the fact that it's aoe and spammable but your crippling slash is 50% and physical.

Find me anything that resembles arena in this game that isn't going to outlaw's den with your buddies.

Btw in that "other game", it got changed to just the initial rage cost, and no additional enrage may be active while enraged regen is up. heals 3% flat per second for 10 seconds and that's it.

I think matrix cube gets more stats in 1.3 to compensate.

It's enraged defence btw and yea I think the initial cost seems a bit steep.

1) Not the worst thing to happen to the game - the bad community and most unfun expansion to date is. 2) One person, one interview, 3 years ago. They still continue to support arenas and Blizzcon 3v3 is still going not to mention player-ran tournaments through wargames implemented by blizzard. 3) Balance issues in all pvp formats, its a MMORPG what do you expect. 4) Skill in objective based games yet rating sells or carries are way easier to do in rbg(rwz equivalent) cos you can carry backpedalling idiots with no clue how to play the game 5) Huttball is more strategy and coordination dependent. Same argument as I will always give : I like how you people always try to talk garbage about arenas but other people don't say stop supporting wzs because it requires no skill. More pvp variety needs to be encouraged because this is what the game sorely lacks. Open world pvp and small scale pvp are nowhere to be found, yet people keep trying to argue against adding more things to do for players. You do realise you can implement arenas without balancing directly for it or making it provide extra rewards which everyone will inevitably qq about. Good luck with your narrow minded view of PvP.

Pretty much this. The fight is interesting when you have equal gear but if they severely outgear you, it is very very difficult. Here's what darkness sins can do and will abuse during the fight - Deflection kills your damage (physical) but your force attacks will go through. Deflection parries also denies Force Charge root. - Force Shroud makes them immune to force abilities and bleeds. - Force Charge root can be removed with Force Speed - They have ranged capabilities with Shock and Lightning. - Self healing (12% hp healed from 3 stack Lightning full Channel), passive healing from dark surge and 10% hp healed from their level 50 cooldown (don't remember the name). - Some of their melee abilities give them auto crit on Shock In 1v1, you basically have to keep them cripped when force speed is down, keep deadly throw up and know when you can trade cds and you shouldn't. If they make a mistake and lightning with 2 stacks of harnessed darkness, you can interrupt it, otherwise you have to deny it. You have a few options namely trying to LoS, camo, choke or fear it. A lot of it comes down to knowing what they can do and when. If you know they are going to stun and you're going to take a lot of damage, you have to trade a cd by pre-emptively cloaking/saber ward or camo the electrocute. One of the things they can abuse in a duel or 1v1 situation is forcing your unleash, vanish sap and seethe in your face while you sit the cc. In this case it's advantage for them. But you have a few options for it such as saving unleash, or trying to predict and sweeping slash into the vanish. If they force shroud and you smash the vanish by accident, you still keep in combat even though you did no damage so they can't sap you.

It's more like the client and server desync and the game takes forever to correct it. You will notice it heaps if you play a melee class. Crap like sap something and they teleport away while ccd or stun something and they are "out of range" then they teleport away a few seconds later. And the few incidents you described such as people teleporting past huttball fire. If you play a warrior class you will probably notice this occuring. If you force charge and get pathed into a 'stuck' spot, your client will eject you from it but your server position will have you in that stuck position so you can't hit anyone within range and you are leashed. Worst incident of clipping happened when I was carrying huttball and some idiot knockback me and I flew under and through the map to my death. Edit: I don't think this has to do with latency exactly

Sorry to say although I didn't get much feedback, I'll try to finish this up tonight and someone can continue on in future when things change. I have been losing interest in the pvp endgame due to lack of variety and I won't be resubbing for the time being.

Nothing official from Bioware about arenas. Don't get your hopes up.

Didn't like the rage vid as much as the annihilation one. Slo mo crits on smash is just so...yuck. Your annihilation vid had quite a few good clips and funny moments though so it was better for sure but I'm sure you're well aware of that. One thing I can comment on is that your music choice for both vids were good I guess. It's quite fitting. I think Two Steps from Hell was a pretty good choice because it brings the "epic feel". Not gonna rate based on skill but personally I thought they were fairly entertaining. I don't like watching swtor vids in general because most of them are bland and uninteresting not to mention almost none of them show the player's skill. But I guess this was one of those that I watched till the end - a rare quality i find in swtor vids.

Thread just highlights what 90% of the people playing this game are like. Main argument and attack against the OP is the fact he plays a PT. He may not have articulated his points well enough or shown a decent amount of knowledge about marauders but people continue with these stupid ad hominem attacks. There's nothing I can add to the thread that hasn't been covered in others. Having a marauder myself, I can see why they're so strong but it's a tightrope to nerf them without actually gutting the class.

move off the node then back in. usually works

And lose the bonuses from the set. There are a few things which I mentioned in another thread about being able to bridge the gap by optimizing your gear/stats early before you jump into the wh grind. I cba finding the post to quote it but you want to get your companion unlocks and crons to boost your stats. Buy your modded weapon(s) and augment it, throw away one piece of your BM into an augmented slot. Buy stims or level biochem for the rakata non-consumed crap. You'd be surprised how many people don't bother to do the simple things that give you a slight edge. These things cost quite a bit if you don't have any creds but you'll be surprised how fast you gain them if you know how to speed run dailies and vendor garbage. Regarding your thoughts on the low stats, don't forget this is an MMO so people who like to grind and better gear would cry if they didn't have the advantage. I understand that a lot of people in low gear will die a lot as a result and can't do anything about it. Bioware needs to improve the fundamentals of their pvp progression design in this aspect to bring stat gaps closer and incentivise pvp from both the low end and high end players. But alas, there is little to do apart from farming wz mindlessly and get your gear.

You can talent 80% predation. gr8 knowledge of your own class.

Even with semi-good pops like on my server, it takes a while and I do my dailies and a bit every single day. I do the weekly the night it comes out and I only have 3-4 pieces of wh (I only get one wh per week approximately). It's brutal for anyone else who doesn't have the time to commit. I'm sure a lot of people with full gear says it takes a very short time or that the gear difference is minimal. It most definitely is not. The grind to a fully optimized set of gear is staggering. And even with only a mere 6 item rating difference, you're looking at a huge gain the more WH you have, not to mention customizing your gear with the best augments and mods. But if you know what you're doing, you can bridge the gear gap somewhat between BM and WH. I got every cron while i was levelling and the +10 one so I had the best base stats you could have. I dumped a lot of creds into my diplomacy and purchasing companion gifts to get the companion unlock stat increases. I converted one piece of my "mainset" BM into augmented gear and did the same with my weapons. I got a matrix cube and modded belt/bracers with armoring 25 in both of them. Even with 1-2 pieces of war hero and optimization, I felt far stronger than I did with stock BM. The difference increases again with being able to optimize your WH.

it's in wow and is used to practice against other good teams or set up tournies. you make 2 groups and the leader /wg the leader of the other group. They get to pick the map type as well.

I hope you're not serious. The new expertise formulas make it so that players with equal gear will do damage to each other as if they both had no expertise. If you have a 22% increased dmg 18% decreased damage taken and 2 players with the same expertise value hit each other, they would hit the other person for 122% damage and the other person takes 82%(100-18). 1.22*.82= ~100% the damage is normalized back to a level as if expertise didn't exist

Almost ever player relies too much on incs or late incs instead of actively tracking enemy respawns and activity. I literally saw the most stupid thing yesterday on NC. We wiped the enemy team on South and out of respawn they decided to zerg it again. Meanwhile east calls 2 inc but we already have 2 defending there. 4 people leave south to defend east at exactly the same time it is being zerged by 6. I laughed so hard even though it was so sad.