Another thought -- Rather than a self-punt ability, in order to save development time, I suggest simply giving the Mercenary the intercept ability, but remove the protective benefits from the ability for the Merc/commando. Basically, it allows you to jet pack to a friendly target, out of harm's way (one hopes) without dealing with potential issues with self-punt/terrain interaction.

Meh. Wrong thread.

Biggest three items: 1) Find some way to allow us to use Missile Blast. It's only ever used when I have some spare heat and I'm having to run away (as a finisher, or because a melee guy is coming to kill me.) Either give us an ability to fire at half heat cost for a few seconds (2m cooldown?) or lower the heat cost outright -- something along those lines. 2) A jump-back ability. So, you know that cool mechanic where someone punts you around? Give us a self-punt that launches us up and back at a 45 degree angle for roughly 15m, and increases run speed by 50% for 4s. Alternately, have it punt us back and slow anything within 4m of the launch point for 4s. 3) Concussion Missile -- The cast time is a joke. Drop it to 1 second, or make it instacast. Having to burn our instacast ability on this sucks.

See, I played on Badlands, too. Though I wasn't one of those OP BWs, like Tink. And, totally off topic, hope your health is good these days! On topic: the sense of community that Badlands had made WAR great. Fighting known good players always brought with it a sense of excitement. WAR's setup allowed for PvP variety. THAT'S what SWTOR needs. Ilum really needs to be three different planets, all with large and small objectives that encourage the zerg to split up. SWTOR needs Ilum to affect both factions in a substantial way.

Wow. Revisionist history much? At release, WAR suffered /exactly/ the same problem SWTOR did. The lore and art were more interesting on the destro side (and arguably, they had a few classes that were simply better than their Order counterparts.) The writing was on the wall before the end of Beta -- everyone was going to roll Destro on release. So, release comes. There was something like a 1.2 or 1.3 to 1 ratio across all servers of Destro:Order. The Destro classes in general worked better than their Order counterparts. /Most/ (not all) of the good PvP guilds rolled Destro because of the above perception. Result: Order gets crushed in general. Destro players whine (rightly, on some points) that Bright Wizards are over-the-top OP. Sorcs (Destro mirror to BW), meanwhile, are just as bad, but their true power lay in single target damage rather than AoE. The Mythic devs didn't favor Order any more than the BW devs favor Republic. No company in its right mind sets one faction up for failure -- they have invested many millions of dollars, not to mention years of their lives. No, WAR died due to failure to address some fairly integral game mechanics. Physical damage was simply worse than magic damage. Classes that relied on it had issues. The changes to Open RvR (I forget that patch number) that made it basically a matter of NPCs doing all the work killed WAR, for me. That said, there was no dev bias. I laugh at people who think devs sit in a room and decide to make one faction intrinsically better than another. It happens, but certainly not on purpose.

Better odds than Powerball. He should have bought a ticket.

I really don't know how you can say on the one hand that 'DAOC was GREAT!!!' and on the other hand, say the cc in WAR and this game was and is too much. Nostalgia must be rearing its head. I loved DAOC, but the 1 minute mezzes, the lack of certain types of cc for some realms (Stungard, anyone?), and an over-reliance on 20 minute cooldowns (Purge? Hello?) made the CC in DAOC, at times, crazy. Doesn't mean I hated DAOC -- I still miss it, so very much. But keep things in perspective. Many was the time that I sat there, unable to do jack, as a Mid or Alb pain train smashed my party one toon at a time, and I sat there with 'Zzzzzz...' over my head. Conversely, many was the time that I was part of a pain train that smashed one person at a time, and there was nothing they could do about it.

Actually, as one of those aforementioned nerds, I went on to found a software company and take over the world. Who needs steroids? Or jocks?

Because there are no individual stats kept in team sports, amirite? Please. The real issue is that the scoreboard doesn't really show how much of an objective-based effort you made. Huttball is TERRIBLE at assigning attacker and defender points. Where are the medals for scoring? Passing? Assisting? Voidstar is just as bad. Alderaan is great for defensive stat collection, but where are the medals/points for disrupting single reinforcements, etc?

If 'not many ppl know about it' then it is not, by definition, flavor of the month. Also, enough with the nerf cries.

Yeah, so....what are classes who do not get a recastable bubble supposed to do when they ding 50, then?

Only 1 of those abilities is a specced ability. Everything else is baseline.

I'd settle for the ability to move my hotbars somewhere close to the middle of my screen. Or to be able to move any UI element besides the chat window and raid frames, for that matter.

It's a GCD traded before they matter. And, from my POV, it's not the bubble that's OP. It's Force Speed + AoE KB/Root + channeled attack that slows + self-heals + Bubble that's the issue.

Really? When did they say that?

Actually, one of the biggest issues I have with huttball is the 'you cannot see your target' message you get trying to pass to levels above you. Because of the way the camera works, when you're under another level, it can be devilishly hard to pass the ball. If they fixed that, the game would involve more actual passing.

I have to disagree, RE: the IA storyline. After Act I, it's the best storyline in the game, IMO. The fact that you're forced to sniff Sith posterior is central to the theme, and serves as a useful emotional motivator for the things that take place end-game.

Having seen combat logs used as 'proof' in many MMOs previous to this one, I can't really blame Bioware. They have enough problems getting things done without the addition of threads that go much like this: "I'm a Gunslinger, the supposed BEST RANGED DPS IN THE GAME! Why do I only do .05% more damage than a Sage against a Powertech running Columni gear using a 2/8/31 Pyro spec on tuesday when it's raining in Chicago!!!!!!!111!" All it will do, in the short term, is add so much confusion and noise that nothing will get done in the sea of QQ that will inevitably follow. Later on, after more major issues like the UI, graphics and network optimization, and semi-serious animation issues are addressed, fine. For now? I'd prefer the UI team give me a UI where I can at least move things around to my taste.

WAR had a DR system. Not Resolve. Also, WAR had (and still has, AFAIK) huge issues with things like magic versus physical damage mitigation. DAOC is where we should be looking for inspiration. Gear should be a means to an end (reaching PVP-specific stat caps). The REAL differences should come in what PVP-specific skills you buy with Valor. PvE is completely unaffected under this system, and PvP balance issues are tweaked on a skill-by-skill basis. The granular nature of that system makes for easier balancing going forward. Ilum would be redesigned to have a few major goals that affect the entire faction, and lots of little goals that encourage the player base to spread out and fight in non-blob warfare. This isn't friggin' rocket science. Devs need to learn to stop trying to re-invent the wheel. Execution matters more than trying to come up with new ideas just to appease the folks over in Marketing.

All I know is that I just created Terry Tate, Huttball Linebacker on my server.

I play Republic, and think most of you need to put your tin foil hats on. I have played, in dozens (maybe hundreds, lost count) of Alderaan WZs, exactly ONE time where the score came down to a 0-5 match. Are the animation bugs annoying? Yes. Yes they are. They are also in the pipeline to be fixed NLT patch 1.2. Learn some patience. None of the existing problems are game-breaking.

Talk about an apples to oranges comparison. Heck, it's more like apples to pickled pigs feet. Ops came out of stealth with an instant 5k+ attack that required no setup, applied a KD, and was followed up with another instant ability before the target could even react. Juggs/Guards build up 4 stacks of an ability over time in full view of God and everyone, and can be cc'd, killed, etc, while they do so. It's an entirely different scenario. Are people not going to be satisfied until every class sits at range spamming one button for 5 minutes until someone is slowly whittled down?

You say that now -- we don't have anything resembling light cavalry here, which, once in range, destroyed archers. Being an archer sucked. ...until advent of massed gunfire, which changed all that. Entire companies of cavalry could be annihilated long before they got close enough to threaten anyone. Really, this game just proves something everyone instinctively knows already: don't bring a knife (or a lightsaber) to a gunfight. The only real fix is some sort of ability that provides immunity to damage and cc for ~5 seconds for the pure melee classes. That would give them enough time to actually create some measure of chaos.

But it's not a single hit. It's a series of moves that culminate in a Smash. The fact that the preceeding moves don't do all that much damage is made up by the end-point Smash. I'm not saying that the skill doesn't need to be adjusted, but at least get your facts straight.

What's truly sad is that Powertechs, in their tanking setup, get a stun, an AoE stun, baseline 8sec interupt, credible ranged attacks, Force Leap (different name, same thing), a pull (which is also a root -- everyone takes that talent), and FAR superior burst to the Jugg when running the CP spec. Their defensive CDs are superior to Juggs. It's not that Marauders and Juggs are a bad class -- they are just, relatively speaking, monkies in a time of chimpanzees. Powertechs trump both classes due to all the utility + ranged attacks they have. Bioware's justification in beta for removing Pulls from SWs/JKs was that they are then 'unkite-able' Apparently, though, making powertechs have all those tools + good ranged ability is okay? Give JK/SWs a pull in the Rage/Focus tree, at T5 or T6. Problem solved for everyone.