It says he is on Soresu. This extends to servers that aren't really lacking in population too. The activity level of the Republic on Keller's Void is quite low. This was originally a very heavy population server when I joined it too. You might get 100 people in the Republic fleet at peak times, but it goes deeper than that. Nobody is ever talking or looking for groups in the general chats of the different zones. Compare this to my Imperial characters on The Fatman: there are people constantly running everything. The fleet is always packed (250+ people even at off times) and the people just seem more engaging and active. Keep in mind that Keller's Void is not even a low population server. There are probably 100 low-standard pop servers that I'm guessing are MISERABLE to play on.

Madness is mind-numbing? Try arsenal mercenary. Tracer missile tracer missile tracer missile heatseeker rail shot unload tracer missile tracer missile tracer missile tracer missile tracer missile tracer missile tracer missile.

I miss games with loot that didn't just have some core stats that were unequivocally better than any alternatives. This is a WoW design thing that bugs me. Ever since they focused the classes (warror, pally, DK = strength; priest, mage, druid = intellect; so on) every game has followed suit and it makes gearing up boring. Mathematically speaking, the same thing happens to secondary stats like critical rating. None of these item properties are interesting. This is the part where I talk with rose-tinted glasses about Diablo 2's itemization. Diablo 2 had the best itemization in any game ever, especially with the implementation of items like Enigma and Heart of the Oak. Now, NOBODY agrees with me on this, but it's a fundamental difference in design philosophy between older games and newer games. People complain about the balance problems that Enigma brought to the game because having teleport on any class is *********** broken. But they're wrong. Having items in the game that fundamentally alter the way you play makes gearing interesting and fun, especially when there are a lot of viable choices on how you build characters off of those goofy unconventional items. There were paladin builds in D2 that depended on stacking up ~4 damage auras off of really rare and valuable items. It's this really cool and interesting thing that you can build a character off of that and have it be viable. There are other such examples of how items fundamentally altered the gameplay of D2. Items don't do that anymore. Items buff your numbers now. They don't change mechanics of how you create those numbers through player input and strategy, they just make the numbers bigger. Items in MMOs are built around this very vague notion of "balance". Balance is achieved by limiting classes: all you get to do to customize your character through gear is make your numbers bigger. They balance things by limiting your viable options down to practically zero. Diablo 2's design philosophy allowed balance to bloom out of overpoweredness. Every class could acquire these fundamentally balance altering items and in the end, things were not nearly as imbalanced towards hammerdins as some people would have you believe. It's this beautiful thing where everybody is overpowered. Everybody has some cheesy mechanic that makes them strong instead of everybody being fundamentally the same. An even better (though considerably more obscure) example is MedianXL mod for Diablo 2. This mod completely revamped everything in the game. Replaced every item and every skill, adding literally hundreds of items that were on or above Enigma's level of power. You could make any character into anything you wanted with these items. It is the most interesting itemization you can possibly imagine. You can make a paladin that uses crossbows, an assassin that uses scythes, a sorceress that uses swords. They had this vast freedom in how you built and geared your character with tons of viable and powerful builds. This meant that the possibility always existed of a FOTM overpowered build occurring, and they definitely did, but they were often fixed. And there were so builds ways that were just viable and fun and interesting. Balance depended more in that game on the player's creativity and skill rather than the developers placing low skill caps on how you build and play your characters then allowing every player to hit that skill cap and calling it "balanced". Ultimately, I'm very bored with better items equating to slightly higher numbers. Better items should be able to fundamentally alter the game, not just make your aim stat, health total and crit chance slightly higher.

In the beginning (like, 2005) most servers favored Alliance. This was because nobody liked the the primitive, traditionalist Horde lore and races. The Horde were gross monsters, and traditionally considered the "unappealing" bad guys. Ugly, brutal and primitive. The Empire is these sophisticated British space nazis. They represent a much more appealing style of evil because they aren't ugly monsters.

Because it's physically impossible for someone to enjoy taking a game seriously and playing it on a high level. Those football and basketball players are stupid. It's just a game, right? I mean, sure they get paid for it, but professional gaming (playing games on an extremely high level for money) is in it's nascence right now. Every big multiplayer game has the potential to grow into this. But you're a closed-minded, ignorant fool, so you probably don't look at gaming as anything other than something you do in your free time for fun. Please, stop talking about things.

Unload functions differently when you first get it from how it functions when you spec mercenary and use it with dual blasters. When you first get it, it keeps a running total of damage from each blaster hit. When you spec mercenary and use it with dual blasters, it ticks 3 times just like full auto does. Unload also loses a tick of damage at least (at level 12 on my mercenary) from a single hit before having the talent to reduce pushback. They are not nearly as different as people think. It looks a lot different due to the animation not shooting for a second, but the damage is delayed by the same amount.

I love when people post things that are complete and utter BS.

Why? They are literally all the exact same building with no personality or definition. Same with the orbital stations, only those are even more minimalistic in a cynical attempt to reduce the amount of work they have to do.

did you just tell them to fist their hero engine

Arsenal spec is a one trick pony. Tracer missile spam into heatseeker, railshot and unload does a lot of damage, but offers no utility or mobility. It's easy to play but the skill ceiling is quite low. What more can you besides this? If you are in a position where you have to run away (and you will be against decent enemies) your CDs are terrible, your gap opener is pretty good, but lots of classes can close it again without issue. The class has a lack of viable options and focuses too heavily on tracer missile. There are so many abilities that are completely pointless past level 20 when you get tracer missile. Yeah, it's easy to play a positioning game and deal ****loads of damage, but it's hard to contribute beyond that.

Mercs and BH's have no mobility and no survival cooldowns worth a damn. If they get into a bad situation, they can do 1 AoE knockback and a 12 second 25% damage reduction shield. Plus casted abilities (like tracer/grav) tend to get interrupted and pushed back and be generally useless when you get into a bad situation.

The damage isn't actually delayed all that much, but you are guaranteed to lose 1/3 of the damage from taking any damage. Here's my theory: The talent that reduces pushback suffered while channeling full auto does not work on it. I don't know if the mercenary equivalent works on unload, but I do know that the commando version works properly on grav round (it affects all rounds and full auto). You suffer almost no pushback ever while firing grav rounds while you lose a lot of channel on full auto. To compare it to another class with similar mechanics, sorcerer force lightning gets a talent from the madness tree that reduces pushback suffered while casting it by 70%. You feel the difference of this talent: force lightning suffers very little pushback with it and you typically get all 4 ticks of the damage with it.

I don't know about the numbers on Swiftsure or Crucible, but I do know that Ruin Gaming is super active on the Republic side of Crucible, so even if they are technically outnumbered, they can zerg things hard. Dara Mactire is on the Empire of Crucible, so on the whole it's an interesting server.

Alacrity should function something like haste did for DK's in WoW to make it more desirable. It should affect resource regeneration (or in this case, degeneration) rate. It should speed up heat dissipation by some coefficient.

Yeah I do so much running around in this game that I'm really thankful for a second monitor. I always have some video or a stream or forums up on there for the times when I'm autorunning across vast, empty spaces full of a whole lot of nothing on the way to an objective.

Baddies use this excuse in TF2 also. "Working towards the objectives" is a faulty excuse in this game because everybody is always at the objectives because that's where the action is. A player who mindlessly tries to accomplish objectives even while under fire is completely wasting his time. If you are a DPS class, you should be dealing damage. You can wipe people out really, really fast if you focus 2 or 3 really good players on a single target. If you're a healer, you should be supporting your strongest players. If you're a tank, you should be holding a point single-handedly because you are incredibly hard to kill. Each player has their role to fill, but when people finish a full length game with 20k damage, 0 protection and 2k healing, they are not contributing ANYTHING to the game and should just leave. You cannot excuse them as "trying to accomplish the objectives" or "supporting their team in a non-damaging way", they are simply garbage players. If you want to campaign against scoring people in competitive settings, perhaps you should lobby to remove the grade system from public schools.

I am inclined to agree. The republic is really, really bad on my server. If you don't queue with a premade, you might as well just not play.

The Crucible Pits. http://www.twitch.tv/towelliee This guy and the Ruin Gaming network of guilds pretty much own the Republic side of this server (probably over a thousand members across several different affiliated guilds). They are extremely active and do a lot of things as a guild. This guy Towelliee actually makes his living streaming the game to around 2k viewers at a time through ad revenue.

How are people still impressed by voiceovers telling you the story of unimportant sidequests after 100+ hours of it? How do you not grow tired of spending exorbitant amounts of time on things that aren't interesting? Voiceovers and cutscenes work for main story quests and class story quests, but they represent an enormous time sink for both the player and the developer as well as a money sink for hiring voice actors for thousands of dialog lines that don't make boring sidequests any more interesting. It's like people don't understand that intrigue in a story line doesn't derive from it being voiced. Certain tasks in an MMO will always be tedious and uninteresting. We've accepted that fact by playing it. But adding voiceovers doesn't make that any less tedious and uninteresting (it actually makes it MORE, especially when you level through the SAME quests on an alt). You cannot make the task of thinning the ranks of enemy soldiers or killing arbitrary numbers of manka cats interesting with voice acting. You can supplement emotional events within the game by voicing them, but tedious BS will forever and always be tedious BS. It would actually be much better if they reserved voice acting for special occasions when they knew they would be telling a story that wasn't MMO filler content. Whenever a cutscene or voice acting started in the new old world of WoW or in the Cataclysm zones, I knew **** was getting real. It meant that they were telling a story that they felt deserved more than text to tell it. Made it more special, made it more interesting. The fastest way to spoil your pleasures is to make them routine.

Server transfers don't fix the problem because there aren't any servers that are so overwhelmingly full that you'd have people willing to leave them. Back in the early days of WoW it was a good solution to allow 1 time free transfers off of the uber populated servers because there were a lot of them and they were laggy and consistently had huge queues. I remember my entire guild transferred off Skullcrusher to Smolderthorn because it was so bad. The only server that might get that kind of response in SWTOR is The Swiftsure. They need to consolidate multiple low population servers, not allow transfers.

It would be much easier to detect these things if we had proper combat logging and didn't have to sit there in combat comparing results to expectations.

Yeah I like how you can make it instant cast, affect 2 extra regular targets, and stun those targets for 2 seconds after it breaks in pretty much all the standard hybrid sorc/sage builds. Balance.

For realsies, they should try playing commando or mercenary. Who needs any button but grav shot/tracer missile?

But... but what about when there are no other shards of that world and there's a grand total of 20 people there during peak times?

...is playing Counterstrike and Quake Live competitively, not playing MMOs. MMOs are games of numbers, not of skill. The skill is in manipulating the simplest game mechanics to achieve something very close to perfection.