Class balance and class bugs were the biggest problems in WAR and I can give you a brief list of things that happened. I stayed the course until they brought in city sieges which were absolutely horrible. WAR without city sieges was still fun, once sieges started being easy to get to the game was terrible. Ok so now for the bug/balance problems: 1. Bright wizards were ALWAYS OP. I think there was a month when they were slightly less insane. Sorcs were OP too but less so than BWs. AE damage was king and they had CRAZY AE. 2. Witch elves with 100% armor pen and double buff stacking exploit. You think operatives were bad? This was pre-nerf operatives on crack. Then WEs got nerfed pretty hard. 3. Black Orcs insane, then they got nerfed into mediocrity. They got off easy in all honesty. 4. People discover that you can stack resistances insanely high. All magic classes are basically gimp for a couple weeks before it's nerfed. 5. Ironbreakers remain awesome. 6. White Lions get game breaking bugs that last months. When not bugged are pretty OP. 7. Shadow Warriors remain UP forever, have certain cool things nerfed. 8. Shield spells changed to not take mitigation into account, one spec of swordmaster destroyed utterly by the change. 9. Shield spells have values buffed instead of just reverting changes, remain largely useless since unmitigated damage insanely high. 10. Warrior Priests and Disciples of Kain remain incredibly OP at all times, small nerfs do nothing to change this fact. 11. Patch buffs the previously irrelevant Chosen into godhood. FOTM cycle continues. 12. Marauders that are only good because of a bug letting them double hit with an ability off the GCD get the bug fixed and never recieve buffs to make them worthwhile. 13. Knight of the Blazing Sun and Blackguard introduced. Knights are OP, BGs are UP. 14. Slayers and Choppas introduced, choppas have 1 OP ability that gets quickly fixed to the shock of all the players. 15. Archmages buffed into relevance, still not nearly as good as warrior priests. 16. Witch Hunters go through crazy buff/nerf cycle from OP to UP back and forth. 17. Magus remain crap except for the AE pull ability. Not chronilogical and I'm sure people could add more but that game had some of the most whack class balance ever seen. The fact that the PvP remained fun through most of the changes is a credit to the design of the PvP.

Pyro/Assault needs the nerf. Highest PvP damage in the game right now and it ignores armor. I have a BM vanguard and have played all 3 specs, assault is just insane. You get a little bit lucky and you gib anything. BW has taken a stance that they don't want fast TTK in PvP. Pyro/assault with some luck is almost as fast as a pre-nerf operative.

This is *********** amazing. I love this change (I have 2 BM toons, one repub, one imp) because it will make it so much faster to gear up new people. Fighting fresh 50s is so goddamn boring.

The damage you gain from expertise is mitigated by the defense people gain from expertise. The healing gained from expertise has no counter part healing reduction (trauma doesn't count since it is there expertise or not) so that the gains are huge. The only reason your damage goes up with better PvP gear against equally geared players is because of better stats. Healers get better stats AND expertise and they stack incredibly well.

2 fully geared healers cross healing is basiclly impossible to kill because of the expertise bonus. It takes way too much effort to break 2 healers at high gear levels. Even with interrupts it is really hard. Healers scale with PvP gear much more than DPS. People who don't realize this are morons. With guard and taunts and CC being used, killing 2 healers in almost impossible. While people say healing nerfs will fix this scroudrels/operatives are getting buffed and they are already a massive PITA to kill with 2 of them around. The stats changes in 1.2 may fix this so I'm not too concerned just yet. Now if a team has too many healers it's generally pretty easy to beat them as the lack of DPS is really noticable. The biggest problem with healers in PvP is people not attacking them. A free casting healer is godmode for a party in PvP.

People are such srubs. Learn to play. Doing this would ruin huttball.

Combat tech is the way to go for tactics. The key to playing it in PvP is using hit and run. You are REALLY fast in combat. Pop hold the line and you can get out of almost any situation pretty easily. You can circle strafe most melee and they will have trouble hitting you. It doesn't have the burst that assault has but it has crazy sustained damage with no ammo issues and IMO better suvivability. The pulse cannon AE is also insane. Taking 3+ people down from full to half in 3 seconds is pretty fun. Ion pulse critting for over 2k is a lot of fun.

I actually just re-specced tactics today for fun (normally run IF and have played assault a fair bit) and have been pleasantly surprised by it's crazy sustained DPS and infinite ammo. Pulse cannon is insane AE if people stack up.... if it gets buffed, wow.

Huge buff to IF builds with riot strike no longer costing ammo. That's basically +1 ammo every 6 seconds when I'm attacking healers. Carolina Parakeet build is dead as HiB refresh requires plasma cell. Tactics buff with a snare on gut. Might make a full tactics build more playable. Assault is losing it's insane RNG burst (6s CD hurts) while gaining (I assume) a more controllable proc rate.

The game is poorly optimized but a couple of things generally stand out to me from people who have high end rigs and have problems: 1. AMD processor. I have yet to hear of anyone with an i5 or i7 with bad FPS. This game is hugely processor dependent and getting an i5 or i7 is the single best upgrade you can make. 1/2 my guild upgraded our 5 year old machines to i7s and not a single one of us has had any issues at all. 2. Nvidia video card. Again the game seems to run more reliably on ATI cards. Probably a driver issue. A big thing is going into the properties of the shortcut and disabling visual themes and desktop composition and running as administrator. I know guys that had this increase WZ performance by over 10 FPS.

Honestly against the double VG+commando healer the best group would be 3 snipers. Whichever sniper gets the incendiary round on him blows his 100% defense CD to make the first 2 HIB miss while they just destroy 1 PT because he has no real good defense against snipers. Between all the snipers roots, KBs, blind grenades and melee stuns the VGs won't be able to get into that 10m range to proc the HiB refreshes. 3 snipers can easily kill an assault VG through a merc healer. 3 snipers/gunslingers would actually be interesting to see in a competition like that as they can insta-gib just about anything and have enough CC (and CC immunity) to give melee teams huge problems.

Any good team will target and kill Pyros ASAP. Pyros have no survivability at all. There are a couple I play against and they are a priority target and can generally be taken out even with 1 healer healing them. The problem right now is people see VGs/PTs and think tank not DPS so generally don't target them fast enough. I run ironfist for guard, interrupts and mobility. I like pyro but it just dies too fast and honestly if a healer is guarded and you're taunted IF spec has the 6s interrupt to keep a healer out of the fight even though you can't kill him easily. When I run Pyro I just feel to squishy and my playstyle is very much "**** the healer" and that gets me focus fired on my server. As IF I can survive, as Pyro not so much.

this is actually a good idea on the PvP forum.... *** is going on.

The real FTP winner is League of Legends. Not an MMO but all they sell is champs and skins and they make buckets of money. There are numerous people that have spent upwards of $3000 on that game.....

o/ 5char

The reason people ***** about resolve is smart player know how to use the system to their advantage and bad player blows their CC breaker early or blows all their stuns right away to give a person full resolve while only being stunned for 4s. Resolve works perfectly and is actually a really good system. I like it a lot. I think they maybe need to give melees a CC breaker specific to snares though. I'm not 100% on this though because melee characters have the best DPS tools in the game and without any CC ranged are food for melee.

People just don't take the time to look at the abilities other classes have and then figure out counters to them. I'm old school though, from DAoC, so my MMO PvP experience is 11+ years at this point and I've played everything but Shadowbane because while it had amazing ideas and systems I knew it was a buggy piece of crap. You play that much PvP in essentially the same style of gameplay you get good at seeing how things work. It also lets you appreciate just how balanced this game actually is and how much huge whine threads could hurt that balance if the Devs listen to every whine. Classes in this game have big advantages and disadvantages in PvP. Once you get to know how to exploit those disadvantages you win. A good example is whining about sorcs. How do you kill a sorc? You take his bubble down relatively slowly while keeping your resources extremely high and then once the bubble is down you use burst and CC to gib him without him having a chance to react. If you blow your burst on the bubble you will not have the resources to kill him after it is down. For Pyro PTs, to coin a phrase from Day9, just go freaking kill him. There is very little he can do about it.

My guild knows how much damage they do so we focus and kill them easily. The reason they're so amazing is they basically ignore armor. If you leave a pyro PT alive he will destroy you. Luckily they are insanely easy to kill. They also have problems with ammo/heat. If you can heal through their initial salvo and they don't get super lucky with procs their damage drops off a ton. If you want to counter one play an assassin/shadow or jugg/guardian and pop your +50% defence CD and laugh as you deflect every railshot/HiB. Their hardest hitting attack is hit hard by the defence stat and accuracy debuffs.

I just got an alt to 50 last friday. I have 500 expertise now. Almost entirely centurion gear (god, the stats suck, but who cares, I can win with it) and I think the gear curve is fantastic now. You get your initial PvP set very quickly now so that you aren't useless for 2 weeks if you have ****** RNG luck. I like that gear is going to be even because when it is I win. Hell, our republic re-roll pre-made went undefeated last night (well we lost one when not all 4 of us were there) and we even had our guardian (DPS spec) with under 12000 HP not die in his 2 first WZs at 50. 3 of us have mostly centurion gear and not one of us has more than 14500 HP. We won against full BM and champ squads. Keeping the guardian alive as long as possible even became a game within itself. There will still be plenty of gear differentiation to strive for in PvP as you work on the perfect set with min-maxed mods and enhancements to get that extra 2-3%. I love that part of maximum optimization at the top level. Getting the perfect mods, enhancements and augments with the right looking set will be a lot of fun for me. The crutch of gear mattering a ton in PvP started with WoW and I always hoped it would END with WoW. Looking cooler is a genuine goal for many people in games these days (and definitely for myself and my guild) and I hope that SWTOR embraces it and makes the high rating PvP sets look amazing. If you only want time = gear = power = free wins to be your progression than I feel bad for your shallow goals. Live a little and be happy that if you're amazing at PvP people will be able to take one look at you and say "holy ****, that guy has over 2600 rating" with out being able to say "lol, yeah but he had a huge gear advantage and was just facerolling to the top with his no-life pre-made, those guys suck without the gear".

Reavers! Get your chain-whips ready!

It's the Jesus patch so clearly it's being released for Easter.

lvl 10 because the exp is insane at that level. Slow down on PvP 35+ because the exp slows down a lot at that point.

Against heavy armor they don't hit hard at all. DPS BT/troopers are the cure for assassin tanks.

AMD processors are much worse that Intel right now. I'm playing on a i-7 2600k (not overclocked...yet) with an old ATI 5770 vid card and it runs great even in Illum zergs. Anyone who buys a PC for this game should get an i5-2500k or better processor and go cheap on the video card. The only things you should have to do to Win7 for this game are disable visual themes when the app starts (a HUGE FPS boost). Hell, my buddy got my old PC (athlon 64 2.0 Ghz dual core) and the game runs BETTER under win7 64 bit than under XP pro 32 bit because he can use more ram.

Played against a few teams like this and beat them a number of times because they can't kill fast enough to take an objective. Also a PT/VG with 6s CD riot strike can take any healer out of a fight by himself. It doesn't matter that the healer is guarded because the healer simply gets interrupted too often to do any worthwhile healing. With a VG/PT on one healer you focus the other first and it's GG. 1 healer on your side can heal through 2 tank DPS without a problem. The team I would use is a merc/commando healer, PT/VG ironfist build to guard said healer and interrupt 1 of the enemy healers, mara/sent DPS and jugg/guardian DPS (lots of interupts and gap closers) to kill the other healer. While assassin tanks do good damage it is HEAVILY mitigated by armor as they have no armor penetration at all. A darkness assassin can't kill heavy armor targets at all. Merc healers are the bane of their existence. They can, however, destroy sages and sorcs. 1 healer 1 tank and 2 DPS is generally a much better option in a 4v4 situation. 2 tanks can't kill a guarded healer, period. 1 tank can keep a healer busy enough that 2 DPS can wreck the other healer.