Definitely agree this is going to be a big change. The neutering of Smash takes out one of the few specs designed to overwhelm clumps and spread damage in an unguardable manner. By default I expect Maras will turn to Carnage and DPS Juggs will turn to Vengeance, giving up Rage' 2.7's pathetic AoE in favour of single-target assist train play. That happens to be where Guard shines the most, as good tanks can and will respond to every assist switch with an instantaneous guard switch. There are still a fair few specs out there capable of putting out decent AoE (4 ticks of AP's snaring, armor-bypassing Flamethrower will still do solid AoE), so 2.7 might not necessarily see more stalemates on mid Novare, mid CW or Voidstar second doors. That being said, if it is Bioware's intention to reduce the efficacy of AoE in PvP in favour of focused ST trains, they need to be careful. The Guard mechanic - which I love; I think it's part of the distinctive flavour of TOR PvP over competitor MMOs - is at its strongest in a pure ST environment. I tend to track my Protection ratio in matches (Protection done / Total damage done by the entire opposing team). Assuming adequate heals to keep me up, a match with lots of competent AoErs will result in 15-20% Prot ratio; a match with a premade's pure ST train will see that ratio spike to the 25-33% range. More single-target opposition makes tanking matter more. Too much focus on single-target damage vs guard-swapping comps will mean kills come in too slowly, making node flips that much harder to achieve. Remains to be seen whether or not the Smash nerf is a prelude to further nerfs of AoE gameplay in PvP. If it does, definitely anticipate a new era in 8v8 PvP with more frequent stalemates and a lot of complaints about tank-healer combos.

Bumping this thread because... fingers crossed... the bug seems fixed! Not had any ghost GCD bugs since 2.5.2, and the improvement in gameplay quality is significant. Most other players I spoke to also report facing no more ghosting -at all-. If anyone still has the problem, please do chime in so we can gauge the breadth of the fix!

Wow. I have often criticised Bioware for letting this problem linger, so it's only fair to congratulate them on this one. At least from my dummy tests so far, the GCD bug is well and truly fixed. Gameplay is tons more fluid, and DPS during uptime is gaining a solid 5-8% bump on all my toons. TOR 2014 is getting off to a surprisingly good start!

I've posted multiple times on this topic, and on the ghost GCD bug - the two issues that cripple gameplay the most (especially for Juggs/Guards). At this point, I really think (for the medium term at least) that we need to consider buggy leaps/cedes as part of the game's new class balance. Screwed up as that may sound, to pretend otherwise will result in a downward spiral of frustration for the hopeful. In an effort to be constructive, just want to ask all leapers facing this problem (which is pretty much every leaper I know): does the problem increase dramatically if you're jumping to get LoS on your target? Huttball involves a lot of forward motion with the ball, trying to reach people at different elevations and it's instinctive (and, pre-bug, hugely beneficial) to jump-leap to secure the earliest possible window on your Charge/Intercede. Try a few matches of Huttball where you FORCE yourself to not jump for a single Cede/Leap, and see if the problem is lessened. Just to be clear: I am NOT advocating that we should be barred from jumping to get LoS on our gap-closer. I'm just trying to build a consensus on what the problem is, so if Bioware ever looks at this thread again, they might maybe investigate why jumps are affecting point-to-point leap accuracy.

Going to echo everything Madtycoon said here; I'm really not sure how to be truly competitive in this game when literally 1 in 12 GCDs misfires for me. I do enjoy the game's mechanics, and things like Huttball had the potential to really delineate TOR from its competition in PvP. But a combination of ghost GCDs and buggy leaps/rubberbanding (both of which I think stem from poor synchronisation between client and server) add -way- too much randomness to the outcome of a tight match. I've seen tight 1v1 matchups turn on which player got an ability misfire at a critical time... really wrecks the potential for sharp gameplay. As for the queue action window feature in Preferences, I've tried all sorts of windows; 0.25s, 0.5s, even 1s... doesn't really help, ghost GCDs and animation-but-no-action (like on Ravage) will still occur. Which is really odd because if it's queuing up the abilities properly, it should be setting them off sequentially as each GCD ends. As far as my experience goes, queuing abilities does nothing to mitigate GCD ghosting. Insofar as this topic has been brought up countless times to complete radio silence from Bioware, I really don't expect a fix anytime soon. The things I still wonder about: a) How widespread is this? Does -everyone- suffer from ghost GCDs? Note, this will probably not occur unless you are really pushing the envelope, minimising the gap between a GCD's end and the next ability's usage. But if you are, and somehow immune to ghost GCDs, I'd be interested to know that some players do get to play the game flawlessly. I have to believe that if it's synch'ing properly for some players, there is the possibility that it could someday work for everyone. b) How do hardcore PvE'ers deal with this? It always baffled me that anyone would put up with any sort of tight enrage mechanic when a significant proportion of their output (5-10%, say) was being lost to ghosting. Do you guys just muscle through the RNG of ghosting, or do the ghost GCDs occur less in PvE, or...?

I hate to say this, but I don't foresee a fix anytime soon. This problem isn't being really acknowledged by Bioware, therefore I count it as beyond their scope for medium-term fixing (same as the ghost GCD bug). My advice? Factor buggy Leaps and Cedes into your class balance analysis. I now just accept that between 20% and 40% of my Leaps/Cedes in Huttball will fall short of the mark, dropping me in a fire, or in acid, or in the pit 5m short of the ledge. I also accept that I'll sometimes waste my Force Charge's root just running up to the guy, and that as Veng I'd sometimes waste my Unstoppable uptime doing the same run. All in all, it's fair to say the Jugg is a lot less fun to play now than it used to be. No one likes being unreliable.

Think for Jugg/Guard you mean -2%; interesting study though. If it's quick to run, may be worth calculating the d's for the top 5% and top 3%. Reason is, if you just browse through the tail end of the 10% mark (say, ranks 1000-1329), you'll find a fair few names on single-digit wins, some as low as 2 wins. I'm not sure 10% is a suitable threshold for gauging upper echelon over/under-representation in arenas: if 2 wins and 8+ losses can put you in the top 10%, then some of the rankings that far down the list are being produced by very sparse data, straining credibility. My hunch is the skew will become more pronounced with a higher threshold, and I'd be curious to see the results.

Bumping this for what it's worth. The problem has become bad enough to make me simply not play my Juggernaut in PvP anymore; it's a melee class with a random chance that its gap-closer won't gap-close at all (I've had leaps where I literally jump on the spot). As for the failed Intercedes, they happen in every Warzone but are most noticeable in Huttball due to the map setup... you can't be tactical when a crucial set play is so erratic. I keep remembering this minute-long segment at 3:50, and how awkward it must have felt for both the teamplayers, and the commentator. Good gameplay has to be responsive and reliable. Unreliable team-mates will (rightly) feel like liabilities - I know plenty of Operatives who feel dire everytime they experience the lolroll stuck bug. Bugs like these really have to be top-priority, OR publicly acknowledged as unfixable so we can plan around them. As it stands, I'm not sure whether my buggy leaps are a temporary thing, or something I should factor into class balance analysis. Regrettably I expect it's the latter.

Wow. I just resubbed an hour ago to give the game a fresh whirl, see what's new and hopefully reignite my passion for the game. Where first impressions are concerned, hearing... **Please do not attempt to log in or patch at this time.** ... in other words, "you can't play now", is a pretty ugly start. You might want to consider comp'ing a free day for your userbase.

Seems to me Bioware is pretty clear on this one: no macros whatsoever. It's more than a little disingenuous considering their co-branding with Razer, but I'm not really sure I expected any consistency of thought from this developer anymore. I mean hey, not so very long ago in-game macros were to be a feature of the game to ensure it was 'competitive'. "Ask A Jedi: What about player customization, such as scripting or macros? James Ohlen, Lead Designer: That’s something that is pretty important for MMOs. It’s another feature we want to get in for ship, but its definitely a lot of work. So we’re trying to figure out how to get it in for ship. We might have to have a limited version at first. It’s a competitive feature, if we want to be competitive against a lot of the other MMOs, we eventually have to have it. I’ll just say its very high up on our list. It’s something that a lot of people want to see in our game, not just fans but even high up EA execs mention that its important." "Greg Zoeller, Principal Lead Combat Designer: Macros are a pretty broad term for certain convenience and advanced user functions at this time. Some of those features are present as possible key binds in the game, others are not. We’re not opposed to macros, we don’t hate them, in fact we will probably add them, but probably not for launch." I guess basic in-game macro functionality turned out to be too hard to implement on their tight budget, so now they have to bar even simple things like text macros - things that they always intended to make doable. I will say this much though: a customer that read the above quotes from the Lead Designer and Lead Combat Designer might be forgiven for thinking that basic macroing with their SWTOR Razer Naga was an acceptable stopgap measure. At least, until Bioware implemented the macro features they -explicitly- had "high up on their list". Turns out no, you bought an expensive piece of plastic with bannable software.

I don't entertain high hopes of a dev reading this, but on the off chance that one does: here is a piece of crisp footage showing THREE consecutive occurences of leaps falling off ledges, starting at roughly 3:55. All of this is happening in an RWZ, and is the sort of bug that'll often end up deciding a tightly contested matchup. This is very much a malfunction. You can see where the intercede target is each time, they're deliberately leaving plenty of landing space, the Intercede is just landing the Jugg too far from his target. This is probably the same issue others report as Force Leaps landing them out of melee range from their targets. I've done the same Intercede in Huttball countless times, often it works, sometimes it magically fails and drops me through the floor back into the pit. As for third party viewers, they will sometimes conversely see me fall when in fact I'm up top merrily trudging to the goal line (something that appears on their screen with a 5+ second delay). The synch between client and server is messing up frequently, moreso in TOR than in any MMO I'd care to name - and is perhaps also the cause behind ghost GCDs. I can't help but think that if they prioritised this problem, they could undo a lot of the synch errors that have crept into the game and were, for most users I've spoken to, minor to non-existent at launch.

Bumping this just because it's the primary reason I, and so many people I know, started giving up on the game. You can't ever hope to be competitive in a game if you lose literally 10% of your output to ghosts (I parsed myself on a dummy, counting the lost GCDs: was between 8% and 12% in 5 separate 3-minute tests). In PvP being on-the-dot is utterly critical, and ability misfires often mean the difference between finishing off that low-hp healer and failing to capitalise (hello buggy Vicious Throw that twirls but never lands!). As for PvE, I can't imagine how raidgroups would plough through truly difficult Enrages (the type that no guild worldwide clears for the first several weeks) whilst subject to the RNG of losing 10% of your DPS because hey, the abilities won't fire. It is an odd bug because I don't recall getting ghosts AT ALL until 1.7 hit. Then suddenly ghost GCDs become a constant occurence in my gameplay; I'd be curious to know if others had the problem since launch, or since a specific patch. Any info we collate MIGHT help Bioware fix this (though I'm not really optimistic on the prospects).

This is more of a general question on how specifically Juggs/Guardians deal with solo node defense in CW. The reason I bring this up is out of concern that we're singularly inadequate at node defense against a competent Shadow, an issue that is never really thought of in class balance issues. Suppose you're defending the CW node at a solid distance, on one of the corners - definitely >10m away. This is the scenario I'm picturing and having issues with. I'd love input especially from players who face these situations in RWZs and might've worked out reliable defenses - or, simply, come to the conclusion never to put a Jugg/Guard on the job (or a Mara/Senti, for that matter). 1. Shadow approaches in stealth, drops Phasewalk portal at the turret, on the side opposite the defender. 2. Shadow saps defender, ports and initiates cap out of your LoS. This does NOT leave enough time for you to eat the full sap and strafe>Saber Throw. To reliably defend from this, you are forced to cc break it, strafe and Saber Throw. 3. Shadow starts capping again. Your only remaining interrupt from >10m distance is to Leap in, at which point Shadow simply Shrouds and initiates Whirlwind. Force Shroud makes him immune to your Fear, Push, Choke and grenade but ALSO, absurdly, Disruption (off-gcd interrupt). Basically, there is nothing you can do to prevent his whirlwind going off at this point, giving them a free cap. The typical defense against a good shadow occurs at step 3: you simply never put yourself inside 10m range, so you can never be whirlwinded. You attack from 20-30m for safety, and never expose yourself to the risk of cc cap. If you've called, help should arrive in time to clear the area and someone with a free cc breaker can relieve you. Juggs/Guards can not stay outside of 10m range; they typically HAVE to leap in for the interrupt, and expose themselves to the shroud>whirlwind>cap. Tenuously, I've come to the conclusion that we have a few ways of dealing with this. a) Don't leap, the moment you do it's game over if the shadow knows how to play. Instead, weave into the 10m range late in the cap, interrupt with Force Choke, if they trinket it and shroud+ww, then pull back to 11m. Wait out Shroud, Leap > cc the shadow and interrupt any attempt at a whirlwind. b) If they eat the Choke and then start capping again, stay on the 10m line and use Scream / Force Push / Mez nade to delay. c) If you've not been given team support by the time your limited 10m arsenal is used up, game over. But at least you bought your team some time, the most that can be done as a Jugg/Guardian. d) Shadow, if tank specced, may wait for your Resolve to tick down just enough to Pull > Shroud > Whirlwind. If so... uhm... bad luck, you lack the rolls/Force Speed/Shoulder Cannon tricks needed to deal with this. Honest question to Jugg/Guard PvPers out there: has this been an issue for you? Do you do CW node defense following the a/b/c malarkey above, or is it by default assigned to other classes with stealth or, at the very least, spammable ranged interrupts? More generally, are SW/JK balanced around being unviable for node defense roles in places like CW/AH?

Interesting. I've never had any issues defending a node in Novare given the cap mechanics make outright ninja'ing impossible. Curious to see how widespread the sentiment is, though, that juggs can't defend. The lack of ranged interruption is a hindrance, but never seems to come up as a cause for concern balance-wise. Makes me wonder if perhaps it should...

Definitely agree that AH is, contrary to devtalk about it being 'deathmatchy', the most ninja-sensitive WZ in Regs. Equally willing to believe, though, that an RWZ team makes it somewhat counterable with good communication and dedicated rapid-respondents. I still get the impression that portal allows for all kinds of neat tricks that make me horribly jealous. Regarding Agents' Flashbang still being instant, the only difference with Sins that I can point to is that without a trick like Phasewalk*, the time it takes them to sap->run around turret in CW->cap is JUST long enough for me to wait out the sap, strafe and Saber Throw. If they recap, I can leap in, trinket the flashbang and proceed as normal on full resolve; if my team isn't swapping me out for someone with a fresh cc breaker by the time my resolve is back down, then my team screwed up. Phasewalk may be the single biggest culprit in all this: it gives the means of forcing out a cc break on the opener, which I don't think existed before. From there, it's game over for me if you have a second instant mez. Maybe that's the no-win situation Bioware wanted to remove from the game for JK/SW. *I have yet to see a Scoundrel/Agent successfully sap->Exfiltrate+break LoS->cap in the requisite short time to make my eat mez->strafe->Saber Throw a losing strategy; I always have just enough margin to pull it off. I'm led to believe that the roll just isn't precise enough, or the right range, or fast enough to allow the class to force a cc break on the opener. That's not to say it's impossible, and I'm open to correction if some Scoundrels/Agents have been able to achieve this.

Given the sheer importance of doing node defence well, I'd be very wary of giving instant whirlwind back at this juncture. My view is perhaps slightly tainted by playing a Juggernaut as main, but I cringe at the idea that one class should get a -trivial- ninjacap against a Jugg defender. As it stands, if you had instawhirlwind as a Sin facing a jugg defender in CW: 1. Approach in stealth, plant phasewalk on turret, opposite side from defender (I'm assuming defender is staying at the right distance, on one of the corners). 2. Sap -> portal -> cap. This forces the cc break; I've faced this situation and the time it takes to strafe into LoS>Saber Throw is longer than the time it takes the Sin to portal->initiate cap. 3. Having forced my cc break and Saber Throw, just cap again. I now have to Force Leap or get in 10m to Choke; whatever it is, just insta-ww and cap away. Call me nuts but I don't think mezzes should last the same duration as the cap timer, let alone be longer than caps (like in Ancient Hypergates). I might be less averse to the notion if my class had a viable tool for interrupting at range, perhaps - even if it was high up in only one of my trees, I'd accept that. But until then, objective-focus wins games, and insta-whirlwind would completely bar two ACs from taking on one of the most important roles in a CW or AH.

Oh, totally agreed Battyone. By 'undergeared', I really meant undergeared: comparing PvP 63's (Partisan) with for example PvE 63's (EWH). There, the impact of Bolster is at its strongest and bridges most of the gap between the two sets. The higher you go up the PvE scale, the more Expertise you lose in the process, as it should be.

Sidrath - Juggernaut - The Progenitor Damage/Protection: http://tinypic.com/view.php?pic=4iizqq&s=5. 557758 damage, 561217 protection. Damage Taken: http://tinypic.com/view.php?pic=r2osbk&s=5. 1225638 damage taken. Most Medals: http://tinypic.com/view.php?pic=na0sj&s=5. 24 medals.

As far as I can tell, expertise differential between the fully PvP-geared and the somewhat undergeared is small, and doesn't actually make much of a difference. What -does- make a difference is which side has fully aug'ed people and which side doesn't, as that extra 3k hp + 420ish mainstat still matter a lot. It's kinda silly in my view; Bolster aimed to reduce the disparity between PvP gear have's and have-not's... but what it's really done in practice is magnify the relative importance of spending those 2+ mill creds on aug'ing up... money you sure won't get from doing PvP.

Based on some preliminary tests, it does look like shielding works on guard damage - not been able to confirm it 100%, but guard damage transfers over with a level of variation, in controlled tests, that exceeds the ordinary damage range of abilities. That being said, there's no contest between the two on those grounds. - 4% shield chance of shielding (if geared for absorption) 30% of damage is going to reduce your damage intake by 1.2% on average. - 4% damage reduction is ADDED to whatever you had, so for kinetic/energy you go from 47% to 51%. In relative terms (the only metric that matters), you reduce your kinetic/energy damage intake by 4/53, ie 7.5%. (your internal/elemental damage intake drops by, assuming all buffs, 4.7%) And again, that's not factoring in the biggest advantage of Veng/Immo: the Enraged Defense change. Whack 15% on top of the 4% and you're staring at 19/53 = 35.8% damage reduction to kinetic/energy. Suddenly all those Smashes and sniper damage are doing a whole lot less, for 10 seconds... out of every 45. My main reason for bringing this up is simple, really - Bioware seems hellbent on destroying hybrids, by making pure specs really strong. Given the above, I get the impression Immortal is outshone, for PvP tanking at least, by the hybrid spec. It's something they ought to know about, in the interest of future balancing..

Bumping this with another suggestion I've come across lately: to take Guard off the gcd. It won't dramatically increase the effectiveness of Guard, but from a Quality of Life perspective it'll help with those ghost-gcd or lag moments that make your Guard apply later than it should. Will also make Guarding that little bit more clutchy, which always make for more fun gameplay.

Just wanted to ask the PvP community at large about this as I'm not sure it's clear-cut at all. For PvP - purely for PvP purposes - would you go full Immortal with Crushing Blow, or something like 24/22 for Deafening Def? As I see it: Full Immortal: 10s longer Endure Pain 4% ele/internal damage reduc via Dark Blood 3% damage reduc after Crushing Blow is up (which is a lot of the time) 24/22 Hybrid: 4% damage reduc from Deafening Def, a further 15% during Enraged Def (10s duration, 45s cooldown) 9s cd on Scream instead of 12s, so faster rebubbling Shien+Unstoppable option for stance dancing into Shien, leaping someone and stance dancing back to Soresu in Huttball (stance switch doesn't activate the gcd, you can go Shien+Leap in the same split second barring latency issues) Both specs get Invincible (slightly shorter cd on Immo but not that much, only down from 3m to 2m30), both specs get Instachoke and Backhand. Immortal definitely has a bit more damage via Crushing Blow+more frequent Retals, but actually deploying that damage may mislead a tank into staying closer to opposition than is ideal for protection (eating additional AoE damage like Smashes that would be quite avoidable by playing off Guard's 15m range and Scream's 10m range). Mainly though, because of the way Deafening Def works additively, your Kinetic and Energy mitigation ends up going from 49% to 64% for 10 seconds out of every 45... in practice, a 30% relative damage reduction to K/E (note in passing that Invincible isn't like that: it's 40% multiplicative rather than additive... so the Hybrid's Enraged Def is almost as good as Invincible on a 45s cd instead of 2m30). It's so useful, it makes me question whether full Immo's marginal benefit over Hybrid is really worth the loss of arguably the Jugg's most valuable defensive cd. Thoughts?

I think I understand what you mean, and sure - there is a tank learning curve like with any role. The only problem is that unlike with dps and healing, a 'bad' tank doesn't just contribute less than a good one; it actively undermines it. Insofar as Guardswapping is at the heart of PvP tanking (sure we have cc, but then again who doesn't), I'd just love players to have firmer control of this role-defining mechanic - it'd be a big deal for our quality-of-life. As for the learning curve, it will definitely still be there: the tanks that guardswap pre-emptively will still save your team better than the slower, reactive tanks. And those will still be much better than the passive, "i guard my guildie" tanks.

Spot-on. I definitely understand that this will be no issue for RWZs since you can count on your players not unwittingly undermining the team. This fix is primarily for normal WZs - still the bulk of what gets played I imagine! - where I bet every guard-swapping tank has occasionally had their effectiveness dented by a pug tank who just didn't know any better.

To my knowledge, the Bolster system automatically scales up ANY weapon/offhand you use to 1006 Force/Tech Power, which is the amount on Underworld weapons/offhands. I'm also told it bolsters the Weapon Damage ranges to Underworld levels. That being the case, any Partisan->Conqueror upgrade results in a fairly small boost in primary stat, endurance and secondary stats. You're not getting the massive weapon damage and Force/Tech boosts that you'd have seen from, say, replacing WH with EWH. In other words, PvP weapons are indeed just stat sticks at the moment - they're not a top priority when upgrading, in light of their price.