I just respecced back to biochem - even so, still happy.

For one class then, recruit has a decent stat spread - for all the ones I've checked it's straight alacrity/accuracy, no surge, etc. It doesn't matter if it takes a week or a month to get full BM - the power difference between entry level and final tier gear should not be this large for any reason.

PT has higher base mitigation, the marauder 20% is only 6 seconds +refresh every time hit, maximum 30. Full pyro has a shorter cooldown than cloak of pain if in combat the whole time. Plus the self heal. And can switch to ion cell when necessary for things like ball carrying and such.

The gear gap was increased, not decreased. Yes the initial expertise values are closer... but you're looking at 250-300 less endurance, same for main stat, and a couple hundred less secondary stats as well as poorer distribution of those secondary stats. Recruit gear vs post-patch BM is a bad joke. Cent Vs Pre-patch BM was at least a fighting chance, and champ vs Pre-patch BM was almost totally even.

The question is can two hybrids put out the same healing/damage as a DPS + healer? In my experience no, they cannot.

I've been playing MMOs since gear was nothing but a status symbol and had no real impact on combat - I guess you are new to MMOs.

Not only can you not make a coherent argument but you can't even handle basic math? Let me break it down for you nice and simple. Force master recruit: Recruit - BM 758 willpower 996 811 end 1063 180 power 358 294 alacrity 204 309 crit 265 126 surge 337 1136 force power 1224 896 expertise 1164 That's recruit vs unmodded force master. 252 endurance. Before % modifiers. Lets talk Survivor next, just endurance, 1399 vs 1107 - just under 300. Oh and that's before any passive endurance modifiers you might have. Basically everyone has the 5% fort buff now, plus class talents. 14~% more for a kinetic combat shadow in survivor, slightly over 14% due to stacking, so lets go with 14% of 300 - 42 more. 334~ more endurance. Don't even get me started on the fact that it's also less expertise, less damage main stat, and has an overall worse stat spread in most ways. Whoo boy alacrity for sage DPS, that's always good. And check out that sweet low 100s surge. There is no way for two competent people to play of the same class to perform even close to similarly when they have thousands less hp, take more damage and deal significantly less damage. Oh and for ***** and giggles lets throw on the fact that it has 14 Ilvl of less armor rating to make that damage taken even higher. It's not balanced, not even close. Orange 126 modded gear vs pre-patch BM was a closer fight, centurion vs pre-patch BM was a closer fighter, champion vs pre-patch BM was an almost equal fight. It doesn't matter if it takes a week or a month to go from recruit to BM. The difference in power should not exist in PvP, if you want to parade around feeling superior to people simply because you play more, stick to PvE - PvPers don't need or want gear advantages. And protip: This is coming from someone who has better gear than you, so don't act all high and mighty about how you 'walked fifteen miles in the snow, up hill, both ways" to "Earn" your gear. Time played should have no direct influence on how effective someone is in PvP beyond simply having more practice at the game.

It's not the bloody expertise, did you read my post? It's that you have thousands less health and significantly less primary stat and far less secondary stats, it's not the expertise. Don't waste my time replying to my posts if you can't even take the time to read it. I've got better gear than 99% of players in PvP right now on my alts. I can handle the gear grind - that doesn't make it acceptable or healthy for the game, stop deflecting away from the point - the fact that you need that gear advantage while the rest of us don't.

I regularly 1v2 good players that are in recruit gear. I can 1v3 bad players in recruit gear. 1 piece of war hero, rest BM. Modded the one WH piece, one non-set piece BM modded and a modded weapon. I have two other chars in full BM. All three of them can 1v2 recruit players except when it's healer + tank or they CC very well - in which case I'll still kill at least one of them. There's nothing competitive about missing 4k hp and a comparable amount of damage AND having less expertise. You're not good, bads like you just need the gear advantage to win. I'll never lose to anyone in recruit. Never. It's not fair. You don't get it at all - I have three very well geared characters, I'm already past the gear grind - that doesn't mean I'm just going to tell the poor saps that aren't to suck it up and feed me wins for a few days or a week just so I can feel good about myself and not feel like I wasted all that time grinding for gear. The only steps one should have to take to be competitive are to be skilled at the game, not grind for gear.

How is grinding and suffering through being dead weight to the rest of your team learning to play? There's nothing skilled about simply having the necessary masochistic tendencies to accept being dead weight for a few days before you can have fun and be a useful addition to your team instead of a liability.

"Another game has the same mechanic but it's even more draconic and terrible, by comparison this is easy!" Is idiotic. One game having the same mechanic but a worse version of it does not magically make the mechanic acceptable, how do people like you even get through the day when your malformed brain can seriously try and use such logical fallacies?

So because it only takes a few dozen hours of warzones to be able to even hope to be competitive it's okay? You should step into PvP with no chance of being able to seriously contribute for several days of PvP? It's poor design, no matter how long or little time it takes to get around it.

Recruit vs BM is worse than cent/126 modded oranges vs pre-patch BM. The gear gap is asinine now. DCUO, DAoC, UO, AoC - there are more. Grinds are skinnerian mechanics of bad developers that cannot create enjoyable content that people do for the sake of playing it. They are there literally to manipulate players into playing more. Gear progression is just another form of it, and it's completely unnecessary. UO had essentially no gear progression at all. Same with DAoC.

Bumped for emphasis, they need to make PvP stims much cheaper and/or free. Preferably bring back the resuseable PvP stims that were in beta... The stims are worse, correct. The only reason not to use exotech is because they're not sustainable for PvP, at least not on my server. The raid mats/consumables themselves are not widely available enough to supply myself continually. If it didn't require raid mats, simply more purple mats I could, but alas. Can't gather for raid mats heh. The adrenal/medpak have no real counterpart. The adrenals simply cannot be mass produced for their single use nature, the requirement of blue mats makes them prohibitive. With 5 gatherers, it takes about an hour of gathering to make two being generous. If you had half a dozen 50s with full companions gathering round the clock you might be able to afford adrenals. Medpaks on the other hand are somewhat more affordable. 2/2/2 mats, I can make about 5~ per hour of gathering with 5 companions. Also rather cheap on GTN at least for my server. Ultimately though, once you get rated warzones, the team willing to buy warzone adrenals/medpaks has a huge advantage over non-biochemists, and only a small one over biochemists. And of course biochemists have a moderate-large advantage over non-biochemists, and a small disadvantage to adrenal/medpak buyers but they'll gear up significantly faster than those buying warzone adrenals/medpaks.

^ yep. Poor bugger didn't know it was a display error, I had a few guildies try and tell me the same thing on patch day and I somberly told them it was a display error. Sadness.

The problem is that due to de-sync issues it might as well be random, just like all the knockbacks right now are currently a gamble, a bad gamble against anyone moving in something other than a straight line at that. I can't count the number of times I've been force-pushed INTO the goal rather than off the ledge, or seen someone much farther from the center than me catch it, it's a bad joke right now.

A: all 4 class buffs with much higher uptime due to legacy changes. A small increase. Class buffs translate into more DPS than damage reduction. B: Expertise used to reduce damage, now it increases it relatively speaking, though only a small amount. C: Anyone with lower expertise/gear takes more damage than before, expertise changes are only equalized when at the same gear level. D: Several classes were buffed, several were nerfed. Sentinel gained damage in watchman, lost utility, both other specs gained damage and utility and survivability. E: Healing overall was nerfed for commando/sage, buffed slightly for scoundrel. 7.5 second rotation on sage lost about 4k hp healed. As in, 4k less HP healed every 7.5 seconds. burst healing with cooldowns significantly lowered. Interrupt vulnerability greatly increased for sage. Lastly, your anecdotal evidence of 'nothing changed for me' does not mean 'nothing changed' as you try and extrapolate it into. Anyone with eyes can see there were moderate to massive changes in TTK post-patch depending on your class and the classes of opponents. Scoundrel healing was indeed buffed, and is one of the reasons you saw a smaller change than most, it wasn't a large buff, but scoundrel healers were already exceptional in PvP, just underrated. I have 7 50s, I've played every class and every spec excluding gunslinger - with all the changes combined I notice a decreased TTK even against buffed classes with nerfed classes. If you ever find yourself on the lower end of the expertise spectrum - anyone gearing up an alt or entering PvP for the first time you are also at a larger disadvantage than previously. Centurion 1.15~ as well as columi/rakata were both serviceable, champion was almost as good, in some cases even slightly better than BM. Now however, recruit > All PvE gear and: Remodded and augmented War Hero > War Hero > Battlemaster >>>>> Recruit The gear gap is effectively larger post patch, recruit gear is under budgeted, they need to increase the amount of expertise it gives even further - it needs to give even more expertise than war hero, or at the very least the same amount, I understand the need to make sure it doesn't overtake PvE gear in PvE, but right now anyone in full recruit is someone that is cannon-fodder due to missing out on hundreds of endurance and main stat + secondaries.

Aikiyc: Can we get a clarification on how interceptions in Huttball work? Currently, it seems to be mostly random, with a somewhat increased chance of intercepting if all the allied receivers are stunned. Does the number of allies VS enemies factor in? Closest to the center of or edge of the passing zone? Gabe Amatangelo (PvP & Endgame Designer): The player closest to the center of the landing spot circle who is not stunned or mezzed will receive the ball, regardless of what team they are on. Please tell me you all realize the problem with this in a game where positioning on your screen and positioning according to the server are nine times out of ten incorrect by varying margins that this is a huge flaw. For those that don't realize how big of a problem client/server positioning is, simply think back to the last time you were on one side of someone, and your knockback pushed them in the opposite direction, that's what I'm talking about. And now they tell us that interceptions are based off this buggy-*** system? No wonder there were so many conflicting reports on the closest person catching it or not - because the server and ever client seem to be horrendously desynced at all times, you might be the closest on your screen by a few meters and it still goes to them, just like they might be stunned in one spot, you knock them back, and it turns out they were in a totally different spot.

Two things: If the express goal of PvP gear is to A: Remove PvE gear from influencing PvP (A good thing, imo) while B: Still allowing us to customize our stats, then it's fine. When it becomes instead a simple grindy progression system, it's bad. It still does A and B, but it's grindy as all hell, and creates one mother of a gear gap. Recruit vs bm is unfair as hell, recruit vs Augmented War hero with remodded for perfect stat spread is going to be a disgustingly unfair gear gap. I'd prefer equalized stats tbh. or at the very least PvP gear be free - ie; war hero costing credits but having more expertise and way less other stats so as to not interfere with PvE content. Even playing field but still allowing us to move mods/enhancements around so we can build our stats how we like, I do enjoy that, just not the grind.

For pure tank the PvE set bonus is better for sins, DPSing in kinetic combat, stalker is king. Marauder set bonuses are junk all around iirc. Which is the best junk? couldn't say.

He's ignoring set bonuses. 4 piece stalker for shadow for example blows PvE out of the water for kinetic combat shadows. 4 Piece stalker actually is better for DPS sages too, once you remod out the accuracy. 2 PvE dps 2 PvP tank is also a good setup for shadows that want more control instead of burst. 2pc/2pc pve/pvp for commando, 4 piece PvP for pyro - the eliminator set for 15% more rail shot crit chance. I think 4 set PvP for scoundrel DPS is good too, though might want 2/2 for increased orbital strike/15% backstab crit. Definitely want 4/4 PvP for guardians. Don't remember off the top of my head for sents. Need to take everything into account, not just the stats people.

Everyone gained 1% crit, surge, accuracy. Some players gained all three other class buffs. Everyone gained expertise damage 'increase' through the removal of reduction. And this is all compounded by the fact that he who has the most expertise has a huge advantage that is compounded upon by better overall stats - pre-patch champ vs bm, a champ could pretty easily beat the bm. Maybe had to play slightly better in a mirror match. However postpatch - recruit vs edit: Battlemaster*.. It's not even a contest. Recruit geared players are canon-fodder right now. I can literally 2v1 any combo with most of my BM geared characters if they're wearing recruit. Except perhaps tank + commando/scoundrel healer. Sage healers though, hot knife through butter with their nerfs + the hidden relativistic nerf to all pre-bm gear due to the increased expertise on it. The primary/endurance stat deficiencies are too massive on recruit - honestly they need to buff recruit to what champion was last patch - give it even more expertise than battlemaster/war hero but way less main stats if you're worried about it replacing gear in PvE, but it needs to be able to compete and once we're all wearing war hero gear which has higher base itemization and SIGNIFICANTLY better stat spread (Surge/power/crit primary spending + the ability to remove our accuracy/alacrity eventually), once you throw in full hero + remodded war hero + augmented remodded war hero? Anyone in recruit (New players or alts) is in for an absolute world of hurt far worse than it was pre-patch. You could at least gear up in PvE and be sub-par for PvP, but you weren't totally worthless. Now? Yeah good luck if you aren't BM geared by the time everyones in BM and kiss your *** goodbye once they're augmented/remodded war hero.

I just got my first war hero piece, can confirm the same no RE chance given, not about to try it without some confirmation from bioware. If we can actually confirm we cannot RE war hero mods/enhancements... Crafting is woefully unbalanced for PvP compared to PvE. I was really hoping to be able to fill out of my 7 50s with crafted mods after farming a few pieces for RE on my Cybertech, but it looks like only PvErs have any real benefit from crafting beyond augment slots.. Very disappointed... Thought crafting finally had a point for PvPers, but I guess not - guess we should all go back to biochem since the warzone adrenals/medpaks are too expensive to use now. Thanks BW.. Crafting PvP Mods/enhancements was the sole reason I got interested in crafting pre-patch, was really excited it would finally have a purpose for PvPers beyond biochem or go home... I guess not.

... No, it's not pure luck, if it were, the stats would do nothing. Would you rather need to roll 95+ or 75+ on a 100 sided die? You're giving terrible advice and I hope nobody listens to you.

Bump. Still want to know.