it's true this game is full of nobodies and nobody watches it, but i pity any pvpers who play in order to get views and clout. Don't those people play fortnite or something?

Matchmaking based on dmg/healing would probably work in arenas. It wouldn't work in all WZs, for me at least, because while I generally parse in capture matches, I have low numbers in huttball. If your matchmaker doesn't realize that then I would confuse it. It's all moot though because this game's population barely supports the current pvp queues. Any matchmaking i fear wouldn't really go well.

A few feelings I've had in the past year: the players that used to keep me humble are mostly not around anymore I am astounded at how bad people are at pvp, including people I would have thought were good (I don't mean bot level, I just mean being unimpressively decent) I am astounded at how bad the floor is, with how frequently there are bots who get globaled. even during season, queue pops took 10+ minutes for me, as if I am doing every other warzone, and I get bored. I remember the days of instant pops during 2.x. I do notice Q times are way longer these past couple of weeks, admittedly because it is off-season. It's possible that I've improved at the game, but I doubt it. My guess is between the pruning of 7.0 and the removal of ranked, most pvpers quit the game. Now, there are more players who play for the rewards, who are bad, and who don't enjoy it inherently.

Marksman spec is very disappointed you forgot about him!

First, your post: 3 players melting you seems fair if there are 3 of them and only one of you. Next, your video: Thanks for posting it. Seems like there are things you could do to improve: [1:56] The gunslinger at the beginning surprised me as the viewer. You should increase your camera zoom distance (There's a slider in preferences). This will improve your situational awareness. [2:09] After he knocked you back, you were jumping, which is a tell-tale sign of a Knight trying to Force Leap (sure enough you were spamming the keybind). Gunslingers are immune to leap when their blue shield is up. Correct Move 1: is to tab-target to the other player and leap to him, then tab-target back to the slinger. Correct Move 2: use Mad Dash since it breaks the 4 second root, to get into the fight sooner. [2:38] You use Focused Defense way too early, and wasted part of it by healing past your full health. Do some quick math based on the number of charges (12), the heal per charge (read the ability tooltip) and your max health. I would guess that you would need to be at about 40% health before you should use Focused Defense. Do not use the ability at 70% health just because it becomes usable. [2:56] You are capping the pylon but there is clearly a Juggernaut in the distance. You should be paying more attention to the distance than to your immediate surroundings, because it takes more effort to notice things far away. [3:09] You use Mad Dash for some reason. This ability is not an ability to deal damage, and definitely not to cleave multiple opponents. This ability is only used either to break roots, dodge powerful attacks, or close range. None of those uses applied here. [3:29] You use a medpac. There are no level 80 medpacs, so medpacs are weak. Also, all players receive 30% less healing in PvP. You should use the Warzone Medpac instead. You can buy them from a vendor in the Combat Training area of fleet, and they are rewards from playing. [3:37] You try to use various moves as the Sorceror force speeds away, but he has already made enough distance that he is out of range of all of the moves. You Force Leap at the correct time (when Force Speed has ended), but only by accident. Know what defensive options your opponent has before you engage. Whenever you engage a sorcerer, save Blade Storm for Force Speed and try to get it off in time. [4:40] You seem to correctly know that Mad Dash should be used to mitigate large hits, but that Assault Plastique was attached to your teammate, not to you, so your ability was wasted. [10:43] You and 2 other teammates actually melt someone down! Pointing this out because we tend to forget when we steamroll people and really remember when we ourselves get steamrolled. [11:20] You use Warding Call at really low HP. Warding Call is hard because you need to anticipate damage before you take it, and then use it. General thoughts, with no particular timestamps: You are playing Defense, a tank spec, so you shouldn't expect to do a lot of damage. If you want to damage groups of enemies, play Vigilance Guardian. If you want to delete a single enemy, play Focus Guardian. You use Force Sweep a lot, hitting 1 or 0 (!) people. Stop it. You often hit abilities that are on cooldown, or out of range. You need to use an ability every 1.5 seconds without fail if you want to deal damage. You turn with the keyboard, which makes it hard to follow enemies. You should be holding down right click and use your mouse to control the camera and turn your player, at all times. If you don't want to practice that, play a ranged class. In this match, the other team is better players with a healer. In your role (melee character) there's not a lot you can expect to do in this game, other than die and suck it up. If you want to salvage fun from games like this, you need a goal: If you want to avoid dying, play a stealth class or a ranged class and practice staying alive through positioning. If you want to take someone down with you, play a burst class like a Powertech/Vanguard, which is semi-ranged. There's a few minor game knowledge things you need to figure out, but otherwise the biggest problem I see in this clip is you need to use your mouse or play a ranged class.

Is Accuracy in the game essentially because its a stereotypical RPG stat and WoW has it? This game is already willing to put in silly stat-fudges into the game for no reason except for design, which is why tanks get free accuracy. I dont really see the point of accuracy or what it accomplishes from a design perspective. The class balancing doesn't take Accuracy into account, because at no point is "white or yellow damage" even mentioned. Accuracy's main effect seems to be to make white damage specs feel bad in PvP. I guess I'm late to the party as far as this issue goes?

Don't we already have that problem where new players can play all 8 tech combat styles with a tech class, but can only play 4 force combat styles with a force origin? They have to *unlock* the ability to play cross-faction/alignment force combat styles. So there's already a kind of "unbalance" There's already a problem of combat styles not matching origin story roleplay. An imperial agent wouldn't use an assault cannon or shoot missiles. It is completely unreasonable and unpragmatic to expect a new origin story. That is wishlisting for sure. Getting a new combat style is more within the realm of possibility. When other games make new classes, that level of effort is comparable to a new combat style. On the other hand, a new origin story is kind of like making a new game.

Yes. Crouch mentions "taking cover" with that verbiage because crouch is still capable of giving you the natural cover bonus, which is the green shield above enemies head. Even if you're not 100% on a cover point, crouching behind an object still gives you the green shield. If you crouch in the middle of an open field, then you don't get the green shield at all. "Crouch" will never ever move your character.

The ability @Nee-Elder is referring to is called "Crouch" and its icon is green, whereas "Take Cover" is black/orange. I only have crouch bound because I don't want to spare another keybind for Take Cover. I used to use the cover bar (R.I.P.) to save keybinds and I will forever be annoyed they silently removed it.

Thats true, and most likely the reason something like that doesnt happen is ultimately because this game has to ship last Christmas. if I recall, Rateds weren't even added to the game until later, and as is infamously known, some devs say that the game as it was at 1.2 is when they would have considered it ready for release.

There's been a lot of back and forth on ideas between skill-tiers of reward vs the current participation-only setup. One of the points that wasn't discussed a lot, but was hinted at, was that a lot of developer resources went into the old ranked season rewards that a really small portion of the playerbase had. Presumably, an even smaller portion of players than Wings. Maybe one of the reasons BW went with the current approach is that new rewards are available to a high number of players to justify development costs, and old rewards are no longer time-gated so that new players can "retroactively" earn old rewards. What if skill (as measure by win rate or elo or something) rewarded tiered currency (gold/silver/bronze tokens) and could be redeemed for rewards? Tokens carry over each season. Goals: Gold rewards are retroactively attainable for new players, in theory Bioware only needs to create new gold rewards infrequently Skill-based (to an extent) An argument could be made that this still has an element of grindi-ness to it: over a long period of time, i might "get lucky" some seasons and get some gold tokens when i really only deserve silver. Maybe in a couple years I get a gold reward. But at least it feels skill based? Kinda?

Seems like inventing a problem to me. Why would there need to be an equal number of force and tech combat styles? What's unfair about it, it's not like there's a competition between force and tech.

Just play a ranged class, they have spammable aoes that can be repositioned every second, you can clear the endzone pretty quickly. Stealthers in the endzone is really a non-issue, especially compared to the mobility and plenty of other scoring strategies out there.

The OP proposes increasing the rewards cap so investing more time can convert into more rewards. I'm not sure I would call that "harder" than the current pvp seasons. Unfortunately, achievements, seasons, etc. are all built around grinding, not around impressive feats. I'm dreaming, but what if we rewarded winners more than losers, not the current direction where winners simply get their currency faster? My guess is isn't workable with swtor's low pvp population.

Back then, ranked players correctly said ranked matches were for skilled players and unranked matches (warzone or arena) were for unskilled players. Now, some arena players incorrectly say arenas are for skilled players and warzones are for unskilled players. It doesn't seem bioware intends it to be like that. I would have predicted this state of affairs before seeing it because most people seem to think arenas somehow take more skill. You phrase it like, "rated queue is for everyone" instead of just, "there is no rated queue" E: I guess you phrased it both ways nevermind I don't know what you found unclear about my original post

Unsurprisingly, some people still treat arenas as if it was ranked. I tried out a class I was bad at in arenas and got globaled, and kids act like warzones are the proper place to practice. What if objective players also don't want global garbage in their warzones?

Overall I prefer 7.x because I was starting to feel talent-bloat with 6.x. I mostly stepped away from the game when 3.x hit, playing less and less with each xpac. At the time, I could read skill trees for classes I had never/barely played and basically fully understand them. By 6.0, it got to the point where I barely knew what other classes talents were, unless I played the class deeply. Small utilities like the operative getting 6% DR on kolto probe were things I welcomed at the time as they would improve my gameplay but i think the game is better off with a smaller number of more impactful choices. I like that some silly talents like the flashbang flash powder, or the holo-traverse TA-generation were merged into their base abilities. These talents are too insignificant to be a meaningful choice in the current Ability Tree system. Legendaries are better than Set Bonuses for what BW wants. They introduced 6 piece sets because they wanted matching different sets for 4pc and 2pc bonuses to be viable. The problem was that 6pc bonuses were always way better than 4 piece bonuses, so everyone was just running the full set all the time. Legendaries let us mix and match 2 separate impactful choices (of course, for some classes there is basically no choice...it's not perfect)

For those who don't know, Finish the Job is the MM passive: Ambush buffs Takedown's damage by 20% Early on in the game, Takedown was about as strong as Ambush, and it felt really good. As it is now, Takedown is marginally more powerful than followthrough. It seems underwhelming to me. For Virulence it makes sense why takedown shouldn't be that powerful. But for MM, the current 20% boost to Takedown seems so unfun. Should it be boosted to 75%+?

Since tank players equip DPS gear and suddenly do massive DPS, why don't DPS players (PTs, Juggs, and Sins) just equip tank gear to get massive survivability? The answer is of course that most of the DPS a player does is based on their gear, but most of the mitigation a player has is based on their tank spec. One solution could be to rebalance this, and make it so baseline class abilities are really weak, but DPS abilities & talents are much stronger. Or, to go the other way, heavily nerf tank spec abilities and talents, and move that survivability into tank gear. This won't ever happen, though, because the number tweaking would be tons of work, a complete itemization rework.

People are acting like snipers are losing the movement speed boost on countermeasures. If you go back to read the original post that has been edited, it is very clear that ALL snipers get the movement speed on countermeasures. This means that your current playstyle, using the movement speed boost and the knockback, is still possible. The changes as suggested now are a strict upgrade. Snipers will even get 25% suppressive fire buff, admittedly kind of useless. I suppose if you want the knockback AND the self-heal then that's not possible, presumably because the ability tree choice would be a no-brainer. I agree having the knockback on the suppressive fire talent is kind of silly, it's not very thematic. It would be more thematic for the knockback to be on pillbox sniper, but then you'd have to choose between ballistic dampeners. I think it's reasonable to have to make hard choices, that is after all what the ability tree is for. 3% every 2 seconds seems very reasonable. Another person suggested 3%-5% every second, which at a 400k health pool is 12KHPS-20KHPS. I think the key here is that poster suggested every second which is ridiculous.

Talking about heal-damage balance and the time it takes for an arena to end is really besides the point. The OP is really just complaining that every class has some sort of hard-mitigation "get off me" reactive cooldowns. At launch, the only ones who had that were stealthers with vanish, and marauders with undying. My guess is he remembers the old days when it was possible to global people most of the time. I admit that now, I can execute a sequence of buttons (my burst rotation) and can never seem to kill anyone. That would be OK if the target had to rely on an equally difficult sequence of movement positioning, or multiple interacting defensive options, but when most classes have a single "get off me" button it feels very boring to play.

It almost certainly only applies to stealthed enemies that were revealed. Firstly, the "them" pronoun grammatically refers to "stealthed enemies," and secondly the way stealth scan works today is it immobilizes enemies that are revealed, not just all enemies.

Are we sure the knockback removal is to avoid gimping pve players? It's not a balance thing? It would be hard to know without hearing more from BW during the PTS phase. If they want reestablish range to be free, but not gimp pve players, they could add a new passive, call it "Re-establish range" or something, and have it be a toggleable passive with a little bubble, like how sprint is, so that snipers could turn on and off the knockback as they please. Cons: Slight rework of abilities and effects, much harder than copy + pasting the talents into "all snipers get this" ability package. Makes class more complicated for newbies, arguably goes against the 7.0 pruning philosophy. Even more flexibility for pvp snipers is potentially OP, although this one is a stretch Pros: it would be awesome

In Huttball, getting 50 kills and 1 score will lose against a team that scores more. In Voidstar, getting 50 kills and 1 door will lose against a team that gets more doors. In Civil War, Novare, Yavin, and Odessen, getting 50 kills and holding 1 point will lose against a team that holds 2 points All of the above are true. However, Hypergate is not intuitive In Hypergate, getting 50 kills and 1 pylon will beat a team that runs orbs and has 1 pylon. If your true desire is to win warzones, your reaction to learning this would be to kill the enemy and avoid dying. Saying "that is such a terrible design" or otherwise being mad that AH is a deathmatch only makes sense if your true desire is to interact with blue clicky things. I suspect this is the case for most "objective players." The developers have designed Hypergate so that kills are the way to win. Go forth and kill the enemy (if it's Hypergate)

I dont know what he meant by weaker version, but powertechs have to forgo hydraulics to get a stun, which is unwise in most pvp matches, and marksman snipers choose between evasion and stun, and completely lose their mezz. In my experience operatives keep their stun, but typically lose their mezz in order to get shadowstep. For marauder I think it can go either way.