So I just re-subbed and caught up with the story. I hit 75, finished onslaught, saw the open ended nature waiting for the rest and I'm lost. Looking for a casual helpful guild which can help me because i'm lost (or even just a helpful discord). I don't know where to start in terms of getting my gear up to snuff. I've heard horror stories of the lfg tool in master flashpoints and lots of toxicity. I'm mainly looking for just a bit of help in getting started on flashpoints, gearing, maybe an op or two, learning my class in the current meta (Scrapper), and just general help in all content of the game PvE and PvP.

AoC did most of everything wrong for the first 2-3 years of it's existence. Funcom is an awful company. Even now they still screw up their game but the fact of the matter is, as pvp in mmo's go, to this day, that game is the only one that relies solely on the skill of the player and not their gear (arguably now the AA's ruined everything but that's another tale for their forums) I'm talking about swtor, and how it's nothing but a giant gear fest at the moment. I don't disagree that the client-server sync is awful, this needs to be fixed. This is a forum, and as such, is an area for discussion. As an area for discussion, i feel that carebear features, and lack of skill gap is going to be the last remaining wart on this game's pvp once all the major issues are ironed out months down the road unless some thought is brought to light as to eliminate the crutch of gear from pvp. So please, offer a counter opinion, don't just troll someone who is attempting an honest and intelligent dialogue about the skill gap issue of this game. I am actually quite curious to hear your stance on the topic, despite your attempts at trolling me.

That is quite a poor excuse in my opinion. There's nothing keeping you from holding right click and moving your screen to stay faced with your oponent, and that's how it should be. Autofacing leaves ZERO opportunity for anyone to outplay anyone else by way of movement and positioning. As i stated in my op, this is one of the few areas AoC did well.

Yeah, remove auto facing entirely. It has no place in any game where skill can come into play, especially one with backstabbing. Thanks for bringing that up actually.

I've hit people who were 90 or slightly over degrees to my left or right. I've even hit people who were behind me at time's but I've always attributed that to lag. I think directional combat needs to be refined more to create a more skill based combat system. I'm aware of aoe's and their effects, that's not my argument. I'm speaking strictly of melee to melee combat, and making directional combat more seamless and streamlined so people with good movement and positioning can excel over keyboard turners. I won't even go into LoS issues. As for the troll, don't be an idiot, i want nothing more than for skill and only skill to determine the outcome of fights. If it were up to me every warzone would put everyone in the same exact gear (class specific of course for the stats) to remove it from the equation entirely.

Something I've really began to notice by 1v1'ing unskilled players playing such classes as marauders/sentinels is the lack of the need for directional requirements. Aside from back stab moves, which are really a 180 degree stab, directionality is really kind of lost. I say that back stab's angle should be reduced from around 180 degree's do anywhere from 45-65 degrees, maybe closer to the high end to account for lag, but 180 is too much. As for other attacks it should be changed so you actually have to be facing your opponent to hit them with a single target damaging ability. Bring some skill gap down to a 1v1 so that someone who utilizes movement and terrain to their advantage can actually thrive. This is one of the few things I think AoC did correctly was not allow keyboard turners to stand toe to toe with someone who mastered movement (I'm not saying you need to begin to add combos and missed melee hits). This would spice up pvp, especially on the 1v1 level, and make it so that someone under-geared can actually compete by using movement to their advantage. Note: I play a shadow, and I'm full champ gear. I don't want to feel like i get the majority of kills due to gear. People who can out maneuver me deserve to get the kill. I want more skill and less gearfest.

Mandalore server The reasons and fixes people have stated here are strictly based on rumor and random chance. Something else is the root cause. Here's my experience so far in ilum. Yesterday I logged on early and my 150 weekly was done in about an hour. Towards the tail end of me finishing my weekly I noticed the kills that counted start to slow down and people start to complain they weren't counting. Some kills I had no part of what so ever counted for me while people i actually had a part in their death, didn't. This was when i realized something strange was going on. At first I thought it was fine for me because every so often i would leave the rep base, go cap northern assault and the imp base, then fly back. But, as you will read on, this isn't the case. I logged off for a few hours and waited on guildies to come on vent before going after the WZ daily/weekly. 4-5 hours later, i logged back in, did some WZ's, crashed once and relogged and we decided to go out to ilum. We were in a small 3 man gank/roam squad and we started hitting the assault points, capping them and getting 3-5 kills at each. These are people far away from the zerg at the republic base, none counted. We tried this for about a half hour and counted 40 or so kills with zero credit; towards the quest or valor. In these small skirmishes we all died a couple of times, and that made no difference. The people we killed had not died recently, and the few of those who had died recently by our hands were killed at around 10 minutes later, not 2 or 3. We then headed down to the zerg at the republic base after getting frustrated that we would have to partake in the fishing. We joined the ops and set up shop as usual, but still no credit for the kills pouring in. After an hour and a half, one of the three of us received 2 armaments, and the other 2 of us received none, and I received no valor. All during this time we experimented with relogging, going out and dying ourselves, etc. Nothing made ANY difference whatsoever. If you had luck with any of these rumored fixes, you simply were lucky and the game randomly worked momentarily before breaking again. TL;DR- Ilum is broken, rumored fixes are unfounded. P.S. - This simply favors the imps even more since you have armament crates centralized on a single point in central assault. They are now the only ones who can get the crates as they camp there all day. This will lead to more unbalance with your PvP bag nerf which is putting republic behind even more (I have full champ already, but the VAST majority of the republic on my server, does not, and this will just keep them from catching up even more).

Not surprising seeing as the geniuses behind WAR are the same behind the pvp in swtor. hate to say i told you so but...

I called this from day 1 of this game being announced. They are using the hero engine which began developement back around 2003 or 2004ish. It's old, and unoptimized. Not having access to the engine itself, i can also tell you why the engine is most likely not very good. It was created by simutronics. Never heard of them? Let me tell you about simu. Simutronics is the number 1 company in creating MUDs (Multi User Dungeons) and have been since the mid 1990's. These are text based mmo's basically. Gemstone IV (and the previous incarnations of gemstone) is their flagship MUD having been operating since around 1992 i believe. While they do an excellent job with their MUD's, the game that was announced in 2003, Hero's Journey, was never released and is the game the Hero engine was build for. This is a company who has NEVER released any graphical game of any kind, relatively small, and whose engine is build off a small revenue of MUD players in games like gemstone iv, dragon realms, modus operandi, and cyberstrike II. To put the "small" in perspective, as an on and off gemstone player, there's typically 300-500 on average players online in gemstone at peak hours, and around 150 during off peak (paid subscription like most mmos). Good idea in licensing an engine built by a MUD creator. /sarcasm

Scound operative: Temporary respec to heals, or picking out oportune targets and being an annoyance, cc Gunslinger/sniper: Aoe's on the doors and other objectives, keep people off objectives, cc, Kiting away from objectives Sentinels/marauders: Have plenty of survivability in damage mitigation abilities, Buffing teamates, Choking opportune targets, Slows to peel people off teamates, BECOME the target to draw focus from your teamates, Temporary dot spec to keep people off objectives, general annoyance. Moot point, every class has something they can do to be useful without gear and not just QQ they can't get kills.

This is called skill gap. Skill gap gives people who haven't polished their skill something to achieve and aspire to. How can you see this as a bad thing? The counter-strike community has survived on this very concept and is one of the single most successful, and healthy, communities in gaming history. 1.6 is STILL played as the main competitive e-sport and has a huge amount of servers purchased monthly. Watering down the games just leads us to what cs:s and call of duty have become, stale, stagnant, and boring to play with out the skill gap. Also, ungeared 50's with any semblance of a brain can still have an impact in WZ's if they know their class. When i fresh dinged 50 on my shadow, I had no issues acquiring medals and even MvP votes because I utilized my toons strengths and avoided situations which exploited my weaknesses, ie: picking important targets, utilizing cc's properly to interrupt healers, capping points and my personal favorite, spamming taunts even though I'm infil spec to lower the damage done to my better geared 50 partners. Utilizing these strengths landed me valor, and only one piece off of full champ gear in only 2 and a half weeks. I'm sure any other class can find a way to do the same, even if it means a temporary respec to do so. I very rarely will say this statement because it's complete troll, but seriously, people need to simply learn to play. Catering any game solely to casuals leads to stupid ******** like kill and death streaks ala call of duty garbage post cod2.

Around 3-4 EST i plan on beginning my trek through corellia to hit 50 on my final planet. Anyone on the mandalore server republic side looking to begin corellia and wants some company to roll through the quests as fast as possible, hit me up in game. name: priestizzle. again, republic side, mandalore server