Star Forge ranked is pub dominated. Which faction is winning in regs at any given time is determined by which faction the small amount of pvpers that matter feel like playing at any given time.

This ^ I would take the word of people who thoroughly enjoyed and competed at the top level when 8s were around- it worked wonderfully when level cap was 50, but even at level cap of 55 there started to be serious issues as TTK got too long and classes became more mobile. In games with even teams, civil wars were about whose combat sentinel popped transcendence fastest to cap the offnode in a 30 minute slugfest at mid. Voidstar became one of the first arenas essentially, the first door was never capped and it was about who had more kills. AH often ended because a hidden time limit was reached. Novare partially worked because at the time, you could use seismic grenade mez rotations to cap the node. With the bastion debuff, that is no longer possible. Vanilla huttball would still be fun, but unless it was a huttball-only queue, 8s would not be fun. The tl:dr is the proliferation of defensive and mobility cooldowns outgrew the vanilla maps starting at level 55, and now at 70, 8s are not a viable form of competitive pvp. Arenas are what we have, and at this point, what I prefer.

If you have extra components scattered among different toons, buy items requiring UCs before the merge and keep them to refund post-merge and buy the items that you want.

From a pvp perspective, bringing back old weapon/armor sets from past ranked seasons would be alright (I already have them but some people may want to try and get them). Under no circumstances should you allow people to buy past ranked season titles with anything, ever. For example, "All-Galaxy" should be a title reserved only for people that were top 3 in season 2. Each title represents what era of pvp the player was top in, and would be degraded into complete irrelevance if provided for the masses.

I’ve seen some bizarre ideas tossed around on this forum, but this is probably one of the strangest. I guess when Winston Churchill was describing the “equal sharing of misery” he was talking about Swtor ping, not Socialism after all.

The change to carnage is a tragic gutting of an iconic spec that takes discipline and focus to play at the highest level in both competitive pvp and pve. Multiple people have already alluded to the fact that a ferocity window was 4 abilities with beserk and 3 abilities outside of beserk, so the 2 stack proposal surely shows a lack of understanding for how the spec works. In the 1.X era Carnage's beserk ability caused massacre to be on a 0.5 GCD CD for 6 stacks of the ability. You essentially popped beserk and smashed your massacre button 6 times. You rightfully made the spec more sophisticated and not only a joy to play, but a challenge for skilled players to master. I would've rather seen a flat DPS reduction than this awful change. You are essentially forcing people into fury spec which is easy to play and doesn't offer top players a spec to differentiate themselves with. Carnage, which is supposed to be a melee burst spec, will have significantly less burst than fury. Very disappointed with this change. You hit some of the right notes with mercs/snipers, but missed the mark on PTs (they need their stun DR), deception (weak dps right now) and chiefly Carnage. Proposal: At least make ferocity 3 stacks or no one will play carnage in a competitive environment.

This is simply not going to happen, and I'm not going to type paragraphs explaining why. The optimizations you're talking about are relatively nominal, not 75% increases you are throwing out there. Especially becuause BW is not an ISP and can't control traffic allocation.

I live on the east coast and I'm frustrated with this change. The way it was handled was dishonest and misleading. Ping is vital to enjoyment of this game. You can compete in pvp and pve with higher ping, to a point. I did 100-180 on Harb for two years because that's where the pvp was. Once you go higher than 250 m/s, I would no longer choose to play this game. Anecdotes of awesomesauce players with 1k ping aside, you are at a real disadvantage in ranked and ops with that type of delay between your brain and the action your character takes. Especially in relation to pvpers such as myself who are sitting at 12 m/s on EC. West Coast needs their own server if you want to maintain the player base.

You don't "work out the kinks" of latency caused by physical distance. It will simply be a fact that APAC and West Coast players will have a degraded play experience and claiming otherwise is asinine. If you could "smooth out" latency due to physical distance I'm sure actual tech companies like Oracle, Amazon, and on the cable side Verizon/Comcast would love to purchase your proprietary technology and leverage it to be ridiculously profitable. I think we both know that's not the case. I'm an East Coast player so this doesn't even affect me directly but this may be the most bizarre and tone-deaf thing you've done, particularly to pvpers.

I've been here since launch and this is probably the most bizarre thing I've seen Bioware do. Why even have 2 servers at all if they are based on the east coast? Not to mention the complete lack of communication that this was happening.

What would be interesting is if you transfer to a server right now with your name already taken (which prompts a name rechange on the new server and gives you a temp name like WSDGJKJUYT) and then you wait until the server merge to claim your permanent name. Then you could take any name if your time played was high enough if it required the other player to change their name. I don't think it will work that way but it will depend how BW codes it. If the coding says you both have to have the same name the instant you are merged then it wouldn't apply.

:cool:

In my post I was speaking in a group ranked context relative to carnage and marksman which have burst rotations entirely independent from RNG, unlike deception with its discharge stacks. The RNG nature of it is a huge disadvantage in a burst comp when you are hardswapping at a defined cadence. The abillities that proc discharge stacks have variance whether you notice it or not. Depending on the cc used you have typically 2.5-6.5 seconds to apply burst during windows and if you have 1-2 stacks but were expecting 3 it makes a difference. And to Doc's point, the RNG combined with defensives that are actually used offensively in pve to produce competitive dps put the class in a weird place. Would really like to see deception reworked slightly or buffed.

Ha I started playing again last week after a long break (how good Destiny 2 is will determine how long I stick around). As much as I would love to cash out and then level up a couple toons I bought this game in beta and it's tied to my origin game library so I'm stuck with it. I don't think anyone else aside from me has all the top 3 titles on one toon + WZA from 8s so the thought is fairly depressing.

I've always thought it was a shame that after season 1 and briefly whenever the stance bug was deception didn't keep pace as a top tier group ranked burst spec. The class has so much utility and could be extremely powerful in the right hands (exhibit A: Roudy) but these days there's little reason to take one over Mara/sniper because its burst is inconsistent/heavily RNG dependent on building discharge stacks while being somewhat of a glass cannon. Granted I don't miss the days of OP hatred sins running amuck. Deception needed a survivability or slight dps increase and instead they got a significant nerf.

Honestly I was expecting this game to last until early-mid next year but they are investing a decent amount with the Q4 2017 patches and their success will either bring players back or continue the decline brought on by 5.0

As a whole, the average skill level in solo ranked these days is so low that it's not your class; your queue strategy, or your lucky armband that get you a high (2.5-3k+) rating. Hackers, queue syncing, 3v4s, throwing, tantrums etc. come with the territory and top players usually drop the majority of their points in these scenarios but they are canceled out in the long run. Yes some players game the system on their dead servers but the ranked community knows who they are and we ignore or laugh at them. Participating in solos since it came out has showed me that, for the majority of your games, you simply have to carry a collection of individuals that have no business winning the match and do little on or off-scoreboard to contribute to a win better than your counterpart on the other team can. This is easiest to do as a healer; moderate as a tank and hardest as a dps. You also should be able to maintain a 75-80% total win/loss with a real win/loss taking out the situations I mentioned at the beginning of around 90%. From a dps perspective, you won't get 3k if you can't win 1v2s consistently, peel/mitigate effectively, survive focus, call correct & simple strats that include a KO and cc target that even your brain dead "teammates" can understand, and you must tend to double the dps output of the rest of your team combined. The bottom line is solo ranked is filled with goldfish that think they're sharks; it's not hard to get a high rating if you are skilled and there's no one to blame but yourself if you can't achieve tier 1. If that's tough to hear, regs may be more your pace and there's nothing wrong with that.

Dear God.

Ah interesting insight. I do agree SF could potentially have more balanced factions as you mentioned. The split between solo and group would be somewhat surprising. The few group ranked players left also tend to solo ranked in my experience. Though that may just be because 4s activity is inconsistent typically.

I'm interested to see where people intend to pvp on their primary chatacters in NA. Not since Season 3 on Prophecy of the Five has the East Coast had a viable competitive pvp server with the player base to support it. As we all know, Harbinger has been the de facto hub of swtor pvp for a couple years now. One thing I was thinking about was how populations on the two coasts would be affected by mergers. West Coast: Hot Prospect Harb- Current NA pvp hub, largest ranked participation BC- Probably has decent regular war zone participation, never played on it Bastion- Dead East Coast: Star Forge Ebon Hawk- 2nd largest pvp base, less ranked participation than Harb Jedi Covenant- My original server from 2012-2013, once had a number of excellent pvp guilds but now primarily regular warzone participation that is likely less than BC Shadowlands- Average regular warzone community comparable to JC, small ranked community Jung Ma- Life support Pot5- What is dead may never die Looking at this list from my opinion, the server merger will benefit east coast more than west coast. I believe EH + JC + Shadowlands surpasses Harbinger + BC in regular warzone participation and may be comparable in ranked post-merge. An additional small benefit is EU players will have better ping and time zones to play in on East Coast should they choose to play there. My personal preference will be East Coast as that's where I live, and it's a matter of 15 m/s versus 130 m/s. I haven't been (cautiously) excited about a swtor patch since the 3.0 era but the prospect of finally being able to return to East Coast with a population that supports a healthy endgame pvp scene is very appealing to me. I would imagine endgame PvE will see a boost as well. West Coast should still have a very healthy pvp scene (for 2017) but in my experience with prior server merges and character transfers, ranked pvpers tend to gravitate to one server and it will be interesting to see where those chips land.

I haven't looked forward to a swtor patch in years, this is the first. About time we prioritize end game group content in both pve and pvp. No updates to ranked but I'll let it slide since east coast will finally have a viable competitive pvp server again. Hasn't been one since Pot5 season 2. I couldn't care less about a vocal subset of the game's lessened ability to dress up Theron Shan and pretend to be The Dark Lord. The fact that RP and solo players in an MMO was ever catered to was a waste of resources and time. The stories post 50 vanilla class are cringe-worthy B sides from a high school writers club. Give us more competitive group content in the form of raids and ranked and the game might just grow again. Server merges have been needed for 2 years, better late than never I suppose.

Hey Junkie- Wanted to give you a heads up that my sub runs out in a few days, and I won't be renewing or planning on playing swtor for the foreseeable future. GL with the tournament mate.

Oh you sweet summer child.

I'll touch on why probe is a problem in regs and group ranked, starting with group ranked. Engineering sniper is indicative of a systemic problem in how Bioware has decided to increase relative power of classes in each expansion. In order to understand why engineering is the top pressure dps spec for team ranked currently in the game, there's a few things you need to appreciate. There are two primary ways to play group ranked: pressure and hardswap. For historical context, there has been an uptick in viability and relative strength of pressure comps in each major class balance change since 2.0 due to a proliferation of defensive cool downs. In the past, hard swap was always the strongest way to play because if you mezzed the tank, controlled the healer, and controlled your kill target to cycle through that kill target's defensives, they are dead. In current state of the game, mercs and snipers as classes are overtuned defensively. The three main dps classes you will see in team ranked are snipers, mercs, and maras. Good Maras are also difficult to kill but not overpowered. Because the three main dps classes have such strong defensive cooldowns, playing hard swap successfully literally requires you have players that are top at their class and have been educated in how to play hard swap through multiple seasons of team ranked. Mercs, for example, have to be cycled through 4 times >maybe< land a kill on them, it's usually better to just go for their healer instead. Snipers are extremely difficult as well, and should be near impossible if you don't have a sniper of your own with diversion. Because landing burst kills is so hard in the current meta, pressure comps have resurfaced as a legitimate competitive strategy. That's the defensive cool down side of the coin. Snipers always had great defensives and utilities in group ranked but they were reasonable and you could cycle through them. The added self heals from 2 legendary utilities and bonus to dodge duration tipped the scale. As a quick aside for solo ranked, in past seasons like season 4 where I held the #1 slot, sniper was miserable to play because like mercs our defensive cooldowns were abysmal and we were focused first. I currently hold the #1 slot for season 8 and I rush in for aggro because I know I can take it while dishing out damage. Totally different dynamic and sniper has never been easier to play in solo ranked, not even in season 2 when wallbang was strong. But back to my point, Some have touched on defensives and identified that as the root cause. While I would say it's a major problem, plasma probe is also a major issue. Engineering + Annihlation is currently the strongest pressure pair. Explosive probe with its ridiculous radius allows a sniper to trap at least 3 of the opponent in cleave. Using escapes or boosts such as predation is futile, the probe has no cooldown. What the probe also does is buff all aoe damage by 10%. This means you can often trap the other team in a plasma probe + suppressive fire + orbital strike combo (while your interrogation probe with no cool down is ticking and your explosive probe + its cluster bombs are triggered by suppressive fire) and an emp discharge that acts as a strong tech aoe + energy regeneration is being spread to at least 3 players every 6 Gcds while acting as an additional hardstun which from a dps perspective is unprecedented in swtor. That's just the sniper side, and because engineering has ridiculously strong energy regeneration, it can sustain that kind of aoe pressure better than any other class. Remember, the probe is slowing at least 3/4 of the other team to 70%, increasing all aoe damage taken by 10, and it's pretty much inescapable. This allows your Mara to easily dot spread with smash and overcome the classes historical limitation on low uptime to give it plenty of options to hit. The probe is the key to the massive amounts of damage that pressure comps can do, and shifts the meta in a way I haven't seen since 3.0 era power techs and sorcs. Power techs and sorcs, however, were always far squishier than current snipers and engi snipers in particular. Engineering as a rotation in pvp is very similar to its pve rotation. It's incredibly easy to execute in pvp and there's little you can do to disrupt it, especially if you don't have a sniper or your own. How do we fix it? Engineering needs to have more difficult and taxing energy management Plasma Probe radius needs to be decreased and the slow decreased to 50% Plasma probe needs a cool down- It's too easy to spam when players move out of it. Snipers as a class need to lose one of the legendary healing utilities But balance isn't done in a vaccum. Snipers are the valasa raptors keeping the t rex mercs and (only team ranked) maras in check. Swap koltos of pt and merc, make the pt one passive to heal double ticks to 70% instead of a utility like it is for merc Increase the cooldown while taking damage of the ridiculous reactive shield + its heal from 30 seconds to 1 minute- this is broken for ranked, teams in particular Nerf obfuscate utility for maras In combonation, these will better balance team ranked, and allow more representation from hard swap comps which in my opinion is the end game of team ranked skill in a relatively balanced swtor. You'll also see slightly more class diversity from these changes alone- deception sin would become tier 1 again instead of tier 2. Much if what I said also applies to regs, but multiple engineering snipers compound mobility and survivability problems more than stacking the same class normally does.

Engineering pretty clearly needs a nerf to its aoe damage and slow capabilities. While they're at it, move buffed kolto overload from mercs to powertechs. Engineering has always been an annoying troll spec that's dead easy to play in pvp while. From the days of wallbang to the current black hole vortex that is plasma probe, Bioware have never gotten it right with this spec.