That was the elephant in the room during most of the development time, the fact that the initial launch is like a band's first album, it consists of material created over a long period of time whereas now they'll need to start creating content to keep up the level of story people have grown accustomed to. Personally, I find companions to be very badly done in comparison with KOTOR, Mass Effect and Dragon Age 2 (never played DA:O). Where my companions would add value in the formerly mentioned titles, I find that companions detract in a sense because they keep repeating the same dialogue the few times they do speak. They also add very little outside of in-ship/cantina dialogue, especially when compared with DA2 where I'd bring certain companions along because of their funny dialogue. Hearing Kaliyo scream "I'll show you my gun" or Khem Val muttering something that sounds like a dog growling is only entertaining for about 2 levels before I felt like duct-taping their mouth shut. Much of the story consists of poorly written clichés and 2-dimensional characters. The morality system is as always idiotic. Pretty much: Darkside choice: Kill people. Lightside choice : Keep people alive but force them to work with you. So, not only are darkside users too dumb to understand building a powerbase and gaining allies, they are so "corrupted" that their only way of life is short-sighted sadism? Add to it that the inquisitor story is just outright bad and gives none of the feeling I was expecting due to the "cloak and dagger, Machiavellian manipulation and so on" that seem to be implicit in every piece of lore about the class. Apparently my Sith Lord is the kind of leader that doesn't delegate but do even the most mundane tasks himself. Furthermore, the entire Sith Inquisitor story more or less consists of my character being the personal assistant of a Darth, followed by being the whipping boy of another Darth. It seems like non of the writers on staff understands the role of character and setting congruency in regards to suspension of disbelief. Lets say you are a powerful king, can you believe that if your tasks consist of sweeping floors and emptying trash bins? Lets say that on the other hand, your character is a Janitor, does it make sense that he sits in on takeover meetings and conspire to become the leader of the free world? The game just lacks congruency overall.

The thing that bugs me about hardmodes/nightmare modes are that they are in essence like beating a game on normal, then beating it on hard. Its the same exact game, the mobs just hit harder and have more health for the most part. Just having 3 warzones instead of 4+ with more same faction would be nice.

No its not an excuse, it is expected, the common thing and generally considered an MMORPG tradition. If the game wasn't delivered with a note that says "BTW work in progress" on it, it would simply not be an MMORPG.

Chiming in for Assassin and to be honest I could live with the fact that the shoulders are horrid. Plus the color scheme is just atrocious, the whole time spent leveling in awesome looking gear with main color dark/black, red, dark purple or something like that as "frill colors" The Helmet looks like something that would fit on a necromancer in age of conan or something. And for the love of god, what is the deal with the headpiece featuring the saucer mask? Why does my Champion robe look like someone accidentally put it in a shredder? It works if I'm a living embodiment of the Raven god, not so much when I'm a sith lord in a galaxy far, far away. I'm also unsure why my belt has doorhandles on it.

I'm in mostly champion gear and I got a 5.1k discharge earlier, regularly see 4k+ mauls, 2kish voltaic slash and 3kish shocks.

I read somewhere that what bolster does is bolster you to roughly the value of your gear at 50. So if you are level 30 with all level 30 epics you get bolster as if you were 50 in epics. However, if you're a level 45 in level 30 greens you get much less out of the bolster. Not sure if that's accurate but its the explanation I saw for it somewhere else.

Because as you scale it up a healer becomes almost exponentially more powerful. 1 v 1 if the dps can kill the healer, but the healer can also outlast the DPS then that's roughly equal. However, if you scale it to 2 v 2, a competent DPS + Competent healer > competent dps + competent dps. Its the same reason that tank + healer + dps > 3 x dps.

Whenever I fight a shadow and use force cloak, I have to pop force shroud at the same time otherwise I find myself unstealthed about 2 seconds later by an engine part, a rock or something else being flung at my head. All I'm saying is that it isn't always a bad thing that it backloads, although I think every ability should do what it is supposed to when you hit the button not X seconds later.

Dougan answered it very well, I just wanted to add that when you take expertise into account, you will at 10% expertise have: +10% damage - 10% damage taken. Meaning the two cancel each other out, however the +10% healing remains +10% healing, so Trauma at that point becomes more like -20% rather than -30%.

Project is the most frequent breaker of my Force Cloak in PvP though so that gives an advantage for the shadow.

A forum bane may be slightly on the harsh side, but I find that when it comes to nerf threads the people who post yet do not have enough knowledge of the game are more likely to not think critically about what they are presented with. This causes a "nerf bandwagon" and nothing good ever comes out of nerf bandwagons. There is also subjective bias in the mix and without the information to challenge your own bias, it is very easy to be dragged onto the bandwagon. The Warlock fear from WoW is the best example, when I played my lock it seemed to break as soon as I was done casting, when I played my non-lock toons fear always felt like it lasted for a good 5 minutes. When he takes on the well geared, experienced PvPers (except Maydie who I think had sold his toon at that point), he uses a very specialized rotation that keeps them constantly unable to act. The rotation required a specific spec that included both cold blood and preparation, it required very good energy management and used every cool down that what was the most CC heavy rogue spec had. The entire thing also hinges on the attacked player not having a PvP trinket on them. That's the reason he keeps maydie in combat so he can't put on his PvP trinket. Vs the poorly geared and inexperienced players he uses a rotation based on having enough CC to easily control players, combined with an ability that did static damage IE was unreliant on gear but that did very competitive damage.

Actually not really. The fact that you say this show exactly how much weight I should put on your opinion. World of Roguecraft isn't a "faceroll" its an example of what a rogue was able to do with a perfectly executed rotation against geared opponents, if the rogue had one specific spec and blew every single CD twice in under 3 minutes. Maydie, Pat and Hulksmash on the other hand were faceroll videos with personal healers usually hidden off camera, using recklessness, battleground buffs and so on. The difference is that whereas Pat, Maydie, Hulksmash and many of the other "warrior heroes" couldn't give a crap about what their opponents did so long as they didn't run out of whirlwind range. Mute gambled on the people he attacked in the open world not having their PvP trinkets equipped to break his stunlock and the warriors not being in zerker stance so that they could break gouge/sap with zerker rage. The classes of the people he attacks are quite obvious: 1 x level 50 poorly geared sorc, you can tell from the gear plus the amount of force. This is the first target he opens on, when he does the opener he has a trinket buff, a pvp consumable and a few other buffs up. He then goes after the level 19, while still having his consumables up and takes him out. The class/gear of this player is of no importance since being so much lower level against a 50 in battlemaster gear with consumables (most likely granting a tier worth of additional damage). After finishing off the 19, he goes after a level 50 sorc without a bubble up. This is not as you put it "Getting juggernaut high armor guy 30% hp in 1 shot then finishing him in 9 sec while he pop every defensive cooldown and pushback and one of his CC. " This is a poorly played sorc, IE light armor who either burned his electrocute earlier when the scoundrel had his 3s shield up or who for some reason though doing a knockback vs a melee class, then starting to channel lightning, rather than hitting force speed, running off, healing up, putting up shield and going back. Other fun stuff to keep an eye on: His resolve is at 0 after having killed 2 targets, meaning that the players sucked, with the amount of CC in this game, if you die without having put any resolve into your opponents bar, then you are bad. 21% of total HP healed with one heal, is hardly over the top. The guy has 15.6k HP, so a 21% heal is roughly 3.2k. It also sucked up quite a bit of his energy. Quite frankly, he could get a better effect from his channeled healing ability, but I'm guessing he was stuck in combat. He had at the very least: Trinket, PvP consumable, Surge Consumable at the very least. He also uses his vanish (2 - 3 min CD) and his cloak (2 - 3 minute CD) As for the Maydie bit, I'm fairly sure that 1 x recklessness vs the arsenal of buffs on this operative, is fairly equal. Oh and as a sidenote for your arrogant tone: THERE IS NO "JUGGER" in this bloody vid. If you think the guy in robes, doing OVERLOAD (a SI ability) and channeling FORCE LIGHTNING (SI ability) is a Jugger, then I'm sure you can convince yourself that the Operative is really an Arsenal merc as well. Posts like yours are kind of the bane of the PvP forum, a post made by someone who thinks he knows a lot more than he actually does about this game. I can see that we have 2 x sorc, one pretty well geared, one poorly geared and the geared one despite being less geared than the Operative, held out a pretty long time considering that he played like crap.

In the opening scene he takes on: 1 x level 50 with 11k hp (means the person had utterly **** gear) 1 x level 19. 1 x level 50 sorc with 13900ish HP, meaning the gear was pretty up to date, however it also took the scoundrel 17 seconds to kill this level 50. A level 50 who did not use any consumables, any CDs or even tried to kite or get away. So, I guess what I'm saying about that opening scene is that its like watching a Maydie video and then screaming nerf warrior, when he really had 2 pockethealers off camera throughout filming. He then opens on the poorly geared level 50 again, with a 3.9k opener which is really really OP I promise, it doesn't matter that I've seen people get hit harder by tracer missiles from 30m range. Again, the person doesn't use a healing pot and doesn't use a single defensive CD. The opener happens at 1:57 in the video the death at 2:03 so that's a full 6 seconds with no action what so ever taken by the person he's attacking. The second 2v1/3v1, the geared 50 sorcs bubble absorbs the full opener and with the exception of a 5.8k crit, nothing out of the ordinary happens when you take into account 50s in great gear attacking non-50s in poor gear. This video is no more evidence than that supposed video evidence of Bigfoot.

Didn't know that, its one of those things I wish the devs would have spelled out. I think one of the problems is that due to the inane placement of the character portraits and their relatively small size play into this. They are just placed somewhere I hardly ever look in PvP, namely my quickslot. I would like to see resolve work on anything that can lock your character in place, this means that if I have a full resolve bar and get charged, I should not be immobilized, when I have a full resolve bar and someone uses choke, I should get a damage dot, but not be lifted off the ground for the duration. Snares I agree should be unaffected for pretty much the reason you mentioned. I like the mechanic much more than I like diminishing returns, however I think the mechanic needs to be made more clear to the players since many struggle with understanding the fundamentals of it.

As one of the more experienced MMORPG players on this board, I have to say that I'm sick and tired of companies that make kneejerk nerfs with a sledgehammer and thus only manage to screw things up more the more they try to achieve balance. I used to read patchnotes then try to predict the effect the nerfs would have on arena rankings and the funniest thing is that in many cases the "balance" actions by the devs would have more of an effect than the players on each team. If you nerf things the way a lot of very loud posters demand, IE hit them once so they are balanced, then hit them a few more times for good measure thats the kind of game you get. A game where your class and your time invested could instantly become useless and where developers aren't so much seeking a way to balance things but seeking a way to shut people up. When you add to it that people who post nerf threads are generally the people who have the least knowledge about the game but a fanatical devotion and belief in their own ability and intelligence this starts a ball rolling that has anything but a positive effect on the game. What we want is for developers to make small, incremental balance passes over time, taking a break to observe the effects of the small change or changes and then deciding how to approach it further. We don't want WoW balance which is the devs hitting a class with a nerf-nuke or hitting it with a Captain America style steroid shot because this does not create balance, it creates more unbalance. Of course, I doubt that what most posters of PvP nerf threads want is actual balance as in classes being pretty much equal in potential, what they want is the kind of balance which means they win regardless of if they are a keyboardturning, clicking, level 12 playing naked against a level 50, battlemaster geared, consumable popping, keybinder with 10+ years of PvP experience.

I do tend to think that everything should be covered by resolve, including charge stuns and other immobilizes, snares, choke and so on. Furthermore, that the CC that fills your resolve bar should be reduced in potency equal to how much of "overfill" there was to your resolve bar. Lets say I have a 60% full resolve bar, get hit with a CC that takes my resolve to 120%, that CC should be reduced by 20%. The reason people think resolve doesn't work is because A: Intuitively it feels like resolve should break CC when it fills up, B: Resolve doesn't work on all abilities, so when it hits white and you find yourself rooted by a charge or held in the air over a fire pit by choke, you react with "***, I was supposed to be immune to CC!" Finally, resolve goes down pretty fast when you aren't CC'ed, so if you spend lets say 4 seconds in a stun, run around for what feels like 5 seconds without being hit with a CC, then get a second 4 second stun, then your resolve may only be at 90%, meaning that you could take another 4 second stun on top of that before resolve would kick in. Overall its a great idea, but like with much else Bioware wrote up the implementation on cocktail napkins.

You've probably had a 90% or something full resolve bar, not an actual full resolve bar. I have been CC'ed with a full resolve bar, but that seems to be due to certain things not being affected by resolve. Among them different charge immobilizes and force stasis/force choke. However, nothing seems to affect the charge immobilizes even force shroud/evasion.

Here is a hint on how to do this as a sorc/sage/assassin/shadow: You see your toon fall on its face: Hit CC-break since the Opener gives you full resolve and hit your medpack. Hit electrocute. If the Operative uses his/her trinket on the electrocute, use whirlwind/low slash/other CC. Hit Force Speed Do /giggle at the Operative as you run away. In most situations the Operative won't react fast enough to use their CC-break and sever tendon before you are well outside of the 10m range on it.

The stun lasts 3 seconds, which means you should be able to trinket out of it, hit your reusable medpack/Rakata medpack, thus negating most of that opener damage and thus rendering the operative the MMORPG equivalent of someone who can't punch their way out of a paper-bag. Let me put it to you like this, an Operative opens with a warzone consumable, most likely a stim, a surge adrenal, a trinket and a warzone buff, yet you expect to stand a winning chance without using a single medpack? As a matter a fact if you could stand up to the Operative unbuffed, that would mean your class is OP, since you just stood up to a guy using CD's, consumables and trinkets while using none of your own consumables, CDs or trinkets. News at 10, Sorcs shoot lightning out of their fingers.

I've seen as high as 5k in the same gear on my assassin without armor bonus talents, I can't call that OP since my Maul does pretty much the same thing and can be used out of stealth. Not a reply to ChrisGG: I don't see what the big deal is when we have SW/JK screenshots of 4 - 5k Smashes/Jedi equivalent.

Part of the challenge with stealth classes is that people hate them and always want them nerfed. This is because unlike most other classes, a stealth class is based on ganking you very quickly when you are not expecting it and people hate being killed in this manner. Now, I have a level 50 SA and a level 30 Operative in SW:TOR, I had a Witch Hunter in WAR and a Rogue in WoW so I'm quite familiar with how stealth classes operate in other games. In this regard the operative has lacks in its toolbox, the WoW rogue has crippling poison that is the strongest snare in the game as a chance on hit, the Witch Hunter has an ability that snares and does damage to a person when that person moves, my SA can open with Spike - Maul - Electrocute. An Operative on the other hand, can open with Hidden Strike, but can not stun after the hidden strike due to resolve, meaning that with the amount of knockbacks on every ranged target in this game, the operative is prime "kite to death" material without the powerful opener. The Operative also lacks a leap, grapple or force speed to catch up to a target who is kiting. The opener is also significantly less lethal against a target who has a medpack on them, since a lot of that opening damage can be negated the second the stun wears off. A loss in initial burst, would have to be compensated with a gap closer and potentially other things because right now the initial burst is the only thing keeping operatives viable in PvP. An operative without the initial stun + burst is a Sith Assassin with no force speed, no spike, no guard, no taunt, no overload and so on. If you add to it that Operative damage really isn't over the top, the problem people have is the manner of delivery of that damage. When it comes frontloaded it scares the crap out of any newbie Pvper making them panic, make more mistakes, perhaps even hesitate for a few seconds meaning they die. It's similar to interrupting grav round/Tracer Missile and just watching the moron standing there until they can resume the spam. If a BH does 300k in a warzone by doing 300 hits of 1000, nobody is going to accuse the BH of being OP even if that was all done by one ability. If an Operative does 150k with 21 hits of 7000, then the operative is considered OP even though the BH did significantly more damage. It doesn't help that without a combat log, people are unable to see that the Operative wasn't the source for all the damage they took, there was some AOE in the picture, perhaps a shot or two from a sniper or a lightning burst from an inquisitor but since the player was too panicked at the time, its likely that they didn't notice and thus think that the Operative has 4 globals to each of their 1. We've seen Operatives do 6 - 7k Hidden Strikes, we've also seen Rage Marauders and Rage Juggernauts deal out 5 - 7k AOE with Smash, so in other words the Warrior class is matching the Operative opener under the same condition, only they are doing it in an 8m radius around them. You can argue that this requires a setup with force crush and choke, but getting within melee range of someone, behind them also means spending time setting up your attack, it takes time to navigate 30 - 50m or more in stealth, with massive amounts of AOE being tossed around, especially when your target is most likely moving as well. This issue is a lot more complicated than "nerf the only thing useful that the arguably least played class in the game has"

No scoreboard during matches and no combat log. The lack of a combat log is in my top 5 severe game issues list.

The funny thing is that in the start of November a bunch of us guys over at http://www.sithwarrior.com (SW:TORs prime theorycrafting site) were having a chat about the warrior/Knight advanced classes since quite a few of us who had been planning on warriors ended up changing our choice because "The warrior/Knight classes are nerfed, the only good thing about them are the rage/focus specs focused on smash/force sweep".

Not that many abilities? Here is a list of the ones I use to be successful on my assassin: - Voltaic Slash - Shock - Saber Strike - Discharge - Maul - Electrocute - Low Slash - Force slow - Spike - Jolt - Lacerate - Force speed - Unbreakable will - Stealth - Force Cloak - Overload - Mind Trap - Blackout - recklessness - Force Shroud - Deflection - Force lightning. - Taunt - Guard - AOE taunt. And that's only counting what's on my main bottom bars. BH/Trooper may not be excessively OP, but Tracer/Grav Round spam has to go.

You will never have an even playing field in MMORPG PvP. If you raid you can't walk into the top of the line content the minute you ding 50, so why should you be able to stand toe to toe with someone who has been doing PvP for months? What you are in fact doing is killing PvP character progression.