Choices, well its not a choice if it doesn't matter is it? Without getting into a whole philosophical debate here, is a choice without consequences a choice at all. Story... well what makes a story is the consequences of choices made by the character prior to and in the narrative observed or in the case of SW:TOR interacted with. I'll use the The Matrix since I assume everyone here has seen it. Neo gets to pick between a blue pill and a red pill, based on what pill he takes his personal story changes. In SW:TOR if I make the choice to ram a lightsaber through someone's face or to give them a hot stone massage that doesn't really change anything. I do find it a bit ironic that Bioware spent over a 100 million on a game where the focused on voice acting and narrative, yet not a single character I've ran into so far had a personality. So to make a quip, apparently 100 million doesn't buy a personality. I've read pretty much every classic novel in western literature and watched just about every movie deemed a classic because I love story and narrative but what I come back to is that what Bioware have done is to create a game with mediocre story and mediocre gameplay.

Yeah, definitely not a WoW clone, I couldn't stop playing WoW for the first year I owned the game and right now about 12 hours after hitting level 50 in SW:TOR I'm looking around for new TV-shows or movies.

A lot of my negative feedback are in the form of "You'd have to be an idiot not to sort this" type things. - Having to redo my keybindings every time I make a new character. - UI elements being placed in a way where you either have little clue to what is going on with your abilities or have are unable to pay attention to the combat. - Abilities not firing correctly when a button is pressed. - People teleporting around in warzones. - "Fake" warzone invites, sometimes 3 - 4 times in a row. - Companions not moving out of aoe unless you put them on passive, then put them back on attack once they are out of the aoe. - Companions getting stuck on things. Basically, if this is where they are after over a year of testing I want to know why the first 3 years of development was spent smoking weed and watching episodes 1 - 3 over and over again.

Grinds are grinds, I found the 32000 or so quenkers I had to savagely murder for my Jedi in SWG to be much less "grindy" than SW:TOR 40 - 50.

That was the OPs problem it seems, it doesn't matter what kind of flashy justification you give for having to collect 20 bear asses, as long as you are still collecting bear asses. They could have skipped the entire voice over and video because quite frankly they make up 20 - 30% of the time you spend to level if that, the rest consists of the same gameplay 100 other games in the genre have. Imagine that you've been married for 30 years, at this stage it doesn't matter if your wife colors her hair, puts on new lingerie and so on, because in the end you are going at the exact same thing you have been going at for ages.

This sounds a lot like the old "all skilled players rolled rogues" argument.

1. Get developers to realize that nobody is going to bother going for objectives and thus just create deathmatch battlegrounds. 2. Abilities firing when I hit the button. 3. No more teleporting around warzones due to lag. WAR had better scenarios and that game sucked in just about every aspect of gameplay.

That happens so often I thought it was a feature that LOS pretty much doesn't matter.

The thing is, the game has everything the films have, it's just that once that "story!!" novelty wears off at around level 30 you start to realize that you are doing the same exact quests as in every other game. Overall the game feels a lot like a One Piece storyline, you really only need to get from A - B but you can be sure that they've put every detour you can imagine, plus some you couldn't into the game.

If a healer can keep a target up against 2 dps, that means the healer can heal for twice as much as anyone can deal in damage. If you add interrupts and CC to that, it still means that the healer can easily outdo 1 dps. In the case of your partner in the 2 v 2, he or she needs to do something too, not just count on you to outdo their dps with heals. In essence, if you outdo the damage the two of them do and your partner equals one of them in DPS, that means you are fighting 3 v 2 not 2 v 2 because you are equal to two players in power. The mindset you represent was the core problem in WoW and the PvP in that game is evidence enough against any argument you can think up.

No, if you can do this and your friendly isn't a tank that is unbalanced and exactly what pissed on the poor abused carcass of WoW PvP. If you can keep a friendly up against 2 attackers, you can keep yourself up against one with ease, and if that's the case and the definition of balance hasn't changed, then healing and dps are not equal and by the definition of the word "balanced" not balanced.

I tend to be in the camp that says that its been a week since the official release, most people are still not max level and those of us who are are not fully geared up so it is a bit early to tell how the whole thing will balance out. As it stands I've seen healers do very well, I do agree the UI is bad but it sucks for all of us and we all wish that Bioware wouldn't have outsourced the UI to DE's kids as a school project. Oh and I'm also on the side that says that 90% of the knockbacks/pulls could probably be remove and the game would be more fun. And no, I don't play a marauder.

Fine, remove the 30% but in exchange I want my interrupt on a 6 second CD and I want your entire healing school plus your CC locked out during the interrupt not just one spell.

Yes and no. If taking down a healer takes 2 coordinated dps, then it becomes a lot like the BH who defended his damage in warzones by saying "You can do the same, just get a pockethealer" when he did the damage without one.

given the current zerg-mode of every BG, imagine if you had 8 healers spamhealing 1 person, because in essence that's what happens in every warzone most of the time. Namely 1 target being hit by 3 - 10 attackers. It's what happens when 60% or something of your classes can switch targets with almost no delay.

The problem is that the MMORPG genre has stagnated completely in PvP. If we look at 3 major titles WoW, WAR and SW:TOR, you have pretty much the same objective based battlegrounds. Aldaraan, Arathi Basin and Nordenwatch are all the same gameplay with a different scenery and the same can be said about voidstar and Huttball as well. Sure there is comfort in familiarity, but I hardly find it all that fun to go from Arathi basin for 5 years to Aldaraan. If they had to use modes that had been used before, why not take pre-nerf Alterac Valley? PvP focused players want new content as well, how would the PvE crowd feel if the instances and raids in this game were carbon copies of the raids they've been grinding for years? In my experience, the excessively hate filled posts are rarely from people who qualify as "good" PvP players. In this case I mean "good" as in "can analyze, theorize and verbalize PvP gameplay. Heck the lead raid designer in WoW Tigole was one of the biggest psycho-crybabies in the history of online gaming when he was leading his guild in EQ, however we can't deny that he did in fact do a lot of nice work on raids.

I know, but requiring 2 abilities with cool downs in order to get 1 of them to fulfill the function it is supposed to fill doesn't seem right.

I used Deception from 1 - 50, but if I had to do it again I'd go Darkness just because your tank companions gradually become less and less useful unless you constantly gear them up. To be honest, I loved the companion system initially but in essence all it means is that I have to gear up twice as many slots, keep an eye on twice as many healthbars and so on. I've never liked pet classes to begin with and having to do all the micromanagement for companions is something that has been annoying me for quite a few of my levels.

Do you really need to ask why? WoW : Constantly plagued by excessive class imbalances, the PvP content consisted of compulsory organized duel gameplay or grinding the same BGs that had been in since launch, broken up by the odd wintergrasp once they put that unbalanced lag-fest into the game. WAR: Constantly plagues by excessive class imbalances. The RvR mechanic was bugged in so many ways it makes SWG look polished, the castle defenses themselves represented a bit of a problem, it does strike me as odd that me on a single BW could keep an entire warband at bay. Add to it that the itemization was so screwed up that the rewards from PvP were less good than pretty much everything else. Those are the two games in recent memory and truth be told until they decide to actually go out and hire regular pvp players as consultants as they have done with PvE players for development of raiding content. Until they start forcing every developer working on PvP to regularly play both organized and unorganized PvP and so on we will have the same old PvP.

No, at that point the system takes away any point there is to level your toon beyond level 10. If you want everyone on an equal playing field without any regard to how much effort and time they have put in, go play an FPS game.

Assuming no interrupts/CC used by either player, it should be a stalemate. The healer shouldn't be able to outheal the dps IE gain health while the dps is doing damage to them, they should however be able to heal for a similar amount as incoming dps but not outheal incoming dps.

As I was leveling and now at max level, I've noticed that abilities with travel times knock you out of stealth mode after having vanished on occasion. For instance, if I'm fighting a Jedi Shadow and they hit project as I vanish, the projectile being thrown will knock me out of force cloak. I know that dots and such seem to be intended to knock you from force cloak, but given lag issues with abilities that have travel times, are they also supposed to knock you out of force cloak? If this is intended by the developers I guess I'll have to learn to live with it, but it does take a lot of the usefulness away from the ability.

You have to keep in mind that resto druids make Bright Wizards right after the WAR launch look underpowered. We're talking about a class that gives you grade A results for grade Z playing abilities.

I quite like huttball as an assassin, of course I have been considering going tank just because I find myself instantly targeted and hit by half the opposing team. They just need to put in place a few things that mitigate the massive advantage ranged currently have, this would include items on the walkways that can be used to break LOS and reviewing some of the knockbacks in use here. To be honest, I'd be in favor of reviewing the range of knockbacks and especially those that root after use. I'm almost inclined to say that knockbacks, especially the ones that knock you halfway across a map need a balance pass because unlike stuns, mezzes, slows and roots, you can't use your CC breaker on a knockback. The second I saw skill lists pre-release I was somewhat quizzical in regards to why they gave just about every ranged class the CC arsenal of a frost mage. If it wasn't as easy to get LOS on a person on the walkways, then ranged wouldn't be able to sit in certain positions and have almost complete control over the walkway.

Considering that I on my assassin more or less have the "Not enough force" message burned into my monitor, that's not a healing only issue.