Every time there is a 0.X patch BW says that they will be making class balance changes more frequently. At first they said class changes would be more frequent so they could be smaller in scale. Then they used the delay card - wait til 1.7! No, wait til 2.0! No, we want to see hoe the new skill trees are working before we make changes. The truth is unpleasant but it is this: BW doesn't like making class balance changes because whenever they do, they get torn a new one by the player base. Consequently BW has resolved not to make many class balance changes and instead camouflage their inaction by telling people changes will be coming "real soon now".

That team would not have 3 Electronets.

>Advanced Prototype- Why it is one of the Least Powerful DPS classes Seriously? What other dps subclass can use a shield effectively and guard team mates? At least for pvp purposes AP has some salient advantages that no other dps class has. I think the OP needs to stop reactively clicking the "queue" button and read his ability/skill descriptions more closely.

I think you hit the nail on the head. Survivability with Assault/Pyro is totally centered around your ridiculously salient (from a graphics standpoint) shield. For the 12 seconds you have that up, people will simply avoid attacking you and you can dps unhindered. Thereafter in 8v8 warzones you need to blend in with the crowd, find a place to hide or simply be lucky and avoid being attacked. In 4v4 arenas however, good teams will studiously attack you until you pop your shield, then shift away from you for exactly 12.1 seconds. Then they come back and you are dead. Your Kolto Override even in buffed form is irrelevant once you get focused. Your only chance of winning is to get the first kill within that 12.1 second window of respite. But there's the rub. The Assault/Pyro is not a burst class and thus completely ill disposed to achieve that quick kill objective. Simply put, Merc Pyro is the worst class in the game for pvp. If you want to play a ranged DoT class, go Operative Lethality. Better damage output, better survivability and better utility.

Sorry, but I have to chuckle a bit about this thread now. Many player responses to the heat/resource management issue. All different. No consensus. There will be no changes. Mara and Snipers have a bit too much utility. No time table on when that might be fixed. If it ever happens, they'll still do 50% and 25% respectively more damage output than Merc Arsenal in pvp. Merc Pyro is even further behind. Merc healing.... well at least Sorc healers are even crappier than you in arena pvp. Too bad you (Merc healers) are the worst in the game for pve. Thing is, when the devs say they think "Mercs are in a pretty good place", it is actually true. In a relevant sense. You guys remember how crappy things were 12 months ago? Now we live in a slum. Before we were homeless!

Well it is good that you can acknowledge that Merc/Commando has specific weaknesses that other classes do not. However, I for one, do not believe the correct response is to reduce those weaknesses. Rather I'd like to have them offset with greater strengths in other areas. Philosophically, if each classes weaknesses are hammered down to be similar to those of the other classes, classes become more uniform and the combat experience becomes more boring. Right now, due to interrupt susceptibility, limited mobility, no access to auto-crits and long CDs on their key abilities, Merc/Commando is one of the most challenging classes in the game to play well. This is why so few Merc/Commandos are utilized in ranked pvp. Yet I do not want to see the classes weaknesses ameliorated so that the class is easy to play - we all know that will just lead to nerfs to the class in the future. Leave the salient vulnerabilities of the Merc/Commando class. Just give us a reward to go along with that risk so that IF you are successful playing a Merc/Commando, IF you can figure out a way to get your casts off and survive, you at least do damage equivalent to that of the preferred dps classes. Right now for top pvp players, Merc/Commando is lagging about 50% behind the best dps classes. That is not a good balance of risk/reward.

I'm sort of in this camp. The classes with an AoE mezz ability really could care less about this change. For all the subclasses with minimal stunning ability (Sorc, Merc), this is a nerf. It also significantly devalues Cybertech as a crew skill. Previously I would carry the blue DoT grenades. When and if the right opportunity presented itself I would use them and get a 20+K DoT attack rather than the mezz. But now that strategy is kaputt. You simply can't take away from all your teammates the ability to use a grenade.

Speaking from a pve perspective, you guys use Unload a lot less than I do. IMO Unload is your bread and butter ability as Arsenal. The whole functionality of your rotation should be to optimize Unload procs. That is why (with the exception of HSM), I save my instants to use after I proc Unload. That gives me abilities to use in the 6 sec interregnum when I can't proc Unload and thus will not be using TM. That is my movement window. HSM is an exception because it does so much damage that I want to use it on CD. In the PvP environment that all goes out the window of course...

Certainly the dps Merc is more effective now than it was in 1.4-1.7 era. And personally I feel that I can 1v1 99% of the enemy melee players in normal wz and 90% of the enemy melee players in ranked wz. That sounds pretty good, eh? It's not. I can deal with 100% of non-healer enemy players on my melee toon. Melee toons are simply stronger at the higher skill levels. The ranged toons are better against low skill players. But that is not an advantage that can be relied upon in ranked pvp. Things could be worse I suppose. I have this feeling that Sorc dps is really going to fare poorly on the arena maps.

There is no way your HSM hits for 10k all the time. You need a crit to get anywhere near that. And you do not have an auto-crit capability.

The only way they should add new classes is if they add a third faction (Hutts or whomever). PvP in this game needs a third faction if you are ever going to have anything persistent in pvp, either open world or via the super secret space project. However, as someone else stated, that would require a ton of new voice acting, script/plot writing and class balancing work. Not gonna happen.

Rage/Focus is not OP. Not compared to healers. And certainly not compared to operative healers. Rather every other dps subclass is underpowered. When teams of high skill players meet. no one dies. The defense is always stronger than the attack. This is more than enough evidence that healers > dps.

I actually think that from a map design standpoint, BW has made outstanding pvp maps. There isn't a single one that is a bad *MAP*. The problems start because the combat system is broken. It is far too easy to defend. Thus boring stalemates that last for longer than the intended total length of a match often occur when two good teams face each other.

In an ideal world, this would work fine and less seasoned players would learn from their experienced teammates. In today's real world, three-quarters of the player base was raised under a super-nurturing philosophy that features their parents, teachers and peers constantly telling them how good they are even if they aren't. Then when they fall flat on their face, they have a strong tendency to blame others, fail to own up to their own deficiencies and become belligerent towards those that do point out those deficiencies. Just sayin...

HSM does not routinely hit for 10k+. HSM usually hits for around 5000. The fact of the matter is that you need the right set of circumstances (power relic up, weak enemy with no defensive abilities active) in order to get smash to hit for 10k. For HSM to hit for 10k, you need all of those conditions AND you need to roll a crit. Right now rage/focus is as good a single target dps platform for pvp as Arsenal. And it is a much better AoE platform. Therein lies the problem.

Let's be honest. These buffs were not planned in advance by BW. They were an emergency reaction to the sh*tstorm unleashed by the Vanguard/PT player rep questions. Thus, the complete imbalance between pve and pvp considerations. I don't think you will see very much in the way of class changes from here on out. The devs are going to be super gun shy about doing anything from here on out.

C'mon, you don't really believe this do you? Ever since 1.3, the devs have always used the "it will be in the next patch" excuse. Seriously, with 2.5 we will be literally a full YEAR since 2.0 and almost none of the class imbalance issues introduced with the expansion will have been addressed. Mark my words, 2.5 will come and go and no class rebalancing will happen. Because the devs have a fundamentally different view about which classes are OP and UP compared to the player base, the changes the devs make predominately invoke the ire of the player base. So the devs have simply opted to not make changes. Similarly the class rep system is kaputt because the devs don't want to risk a repeat of the sh*tstorm that happened with the Vanguard/PT questions.

I have to chuckle when people say that Arsenal is fine because it can land a 10k crit with HSM on a weak foe. Compare that to smash monkeys who can land 10k smashes all the time on weak foes AND have it be AoE. The reality is that Arsenal is lacking in dps output compared to rage/focus and lethality. Arsenal is more closely aligned with hybrid dps Sorcs. The dps Sorc does about 25% more combined damage and healing, but is modestly more squishy. If the devs were willing to think outside the box, they'd consider making Merc dps into a better healer, opening up new ground as a character type that doesn't mimic the other classes. For example, if each player healed by a Kolto Missile had a 15% chance to make the next Rapid Scan have zero heat cost and be instant cast, Arsenal would then probably have better healing numbers than Sorc dps, while retaining the lower damage output. It probably still wouldn't fit very well for a 4 man arena team, but at least it would have some added value over its current status.

The thing is....Elder Scrolls Online has chosen to use the Hero Engine as well! One of two things is going to happen here. Either.... A) ESO will have the same inability to support large player concentrations and everyone with SWtoR experience will nod their heads and say, "I told you so" while the rest of the MMO community is shocked that Bethesda stumbled so badly. Or... B) ESO will manage to get large player concentrations to work (perhaps with lower ability counts and hence less ability interactions?) and the SWtoR community will turn to look at BW and sneer, "Dayum, you are even worse than we thought!". And honestly I do not know which one of these will occur!

This is exactly how the devs think. The devs do not manage class balance based on the best practices for each class. They manage class balance based on meta averages from their in game stat collection system. This results in FotM classes being buffed because they are filled with new migrants who have low gear, low experience and low output. In contrast the weakest classes are played only by a few hard core adherents - well geared, knowledgeable about their class and thus well performing. Only when black swan events occur will these classes get buffed (i.e. a dev actually responds to a player questionnaire and exposes his views to ridicule by the entire player base). You might try applying for a job at BW. You'd fit right in there.

Because the queue depth was unable to support 8v8 ranked, let alone two ranked queue types. And this is also why they chose to halve the player count in a ranked match - to try and increase the queue depth. And this is also why they chose to allow solo queue assembled ranked teams - to try and increase the queue depth. The current shallow queue depth means that low rating teams would very frequently get paired with high rated teams - since they would be the only teams in the queue. And that results in lower rating teams always losing and eventually stop queuing. Which then leads to mid ranked teams being on the bottom rung of the eco-system and then they stop queuing. Repeat until queue depth gets so shallow, ranked matches become by appointment only. Thing is, they are going about this the wrong way. The 4v4 ranked eco-system will suffer the same fate as the 8v8 one. It will just take longer to kill off the lower rating teams. The correct solution was to eliminate the match on demand pairing system and instead allow match pairings only at specified times, for example only at 20 min after the hour, 40 minutes after the hour and on the hour. That is how you increase queue depth. You have to accumulate teams in the queue if you want to be able to pair teams of similar skill. And that is a prerequesite for a stable ranked pvp population.

I think the more telling aspect is that there is no prospect of any of this having any effect whatsoever on 2.4

Even with the reduced heat cost, Merc Pyro is still woefully inferior to Sniper (or Operative Lethality) as a ranged DoT class. For example, the new lower cost IM still costs 60% more resources than Corrosive Grenade. And Corrosive Grenade is AoE. Yes! A. O. E.!!! This is why cleansing IM is a viable strategy against Merc Pyro, but cleansing is a futile strategy against Lethality specs. Merc Pyro is easily the worst class in the game for PvP, and arguably for PvE as well. The fact that BW would buff Merc Pyro less than they buff PT Pyro shows the fundamental disconnect the devs have with this class. I am totally against this suggestion. Arsenal is not a heat constrained class (unlike Merc Pyro). So lowering heat and damage just decreases dps output. Moreover the current casting time for TM is already 1.5 seconds. The only thing that reduces it further is alacrity (and Power Surge). Now if you are suggesting that they re-introduce abilities to reduce TM cast time below 1.5, then that is a different matter...

Honestly I think the "please comment on how Merc can do well" type questions are going to get the predictable answers from the devs. It's probably far too late in the process, but I think a more numerical and comparative (to other subclasses) approach would be more successful in highlighting game balance deficiencies. And I think you need to highlight these deficiencies otherwise nothing will be achieved. For all the criticism of the questions the VG/PT crowd had, they actually achieved something. They exposed bad philosophical approaches by the devs and forced them to make rules changes. It wasn't a painless process for anyone involved, but they actually moved the ball forward. I don't think the VG/PT questions were insulting to the devs, but they did get issues right up in the dev's faces which the devs were not able to parry with boilerplate responses.

Much more mobility? Well sort of. You still need to stand still if you want to try and proc Rail Shot. Even if you proc Rail Shot occasionally, your sustained damage in PvP is the lowest of any dps AC in the game. Without Rail Shot procs it is even worse. The Merc Pyro snare is the weakest (30%) snare in the game. Every class the Merc Pyro would like to kite has a stronger snare than the Merc Pyro has. So the Merc Pyro can never win the snare game. Which makes the Merc Pyro an incredibly poor kiter. In contrast the Merc Arsenal is a much better kiting platform since it has a root (Merc Pyro has none), a stronger knockback and a longer lasting sprint. All this despite the Merc Arsenal being supposedly the less mobile platform. The damage shield is nice except it is up only 15 seconds out of every 120. Most opponents know to stun/mezz a Pyro when that shield is up. So your actual uptime on Pyro Shield is well under 10%. Again, contrast this to Merc Arsenal who can easily get 20% uptime on their Shield. Yes, the DoTs are nice against stealthers. But Lethality snipers/operatives have the same advantage AND are much more powerful DoT platforms. And have better survivability. Finally, I must remark that against stealth dps at least, I really don't feel threatened when I am on my Merc Arsenal. The Merc Arsenal is gimped because it must use a series of its defensive abilities to achieve the result that other classes can achieve with a single defensive ability. But against stealthers, every one of those weak abilities results in a 1-2 second delay for the stealth dps. And stealth dps hate delays. Merc Pyro just doesn't have as many defensive abilities and thus is much more likely to be caught without that same delay ability. Which against a good stealth dps means you probably die. Finally is Missile Blast really that much more powerful for Merc Pyro than for Merc Arsenal? IMO it needs to be more powerful. Missile Blast should trigger CGC on each target, just as Flame Sweep does for PT Pyro. Then it would be much more powerful.... Honestly, I'd love for Merc Pyro to be viable. But it's just not. It's clearly the worst AC in the game for PvP, and arguably for PvE as well.