There's one slight but significant issue that you run into. People who are getting stomped are making mistakes, loads of mistakes. There's the exceptionally rare competent, or even skilled, pug, but I've yet to see one of them complain about premades and there's few enough of them that I'll write their existence off as chance error. Someone loses a match either because their team made a mistake or because they made a mistake. If someone habitually loses, the chance that the rest of the team is at fault rapidly diminishes. Some bad players will get upset and leave, but I don't necessarily want a game with an additional (let's say) 200,000 people, but they're all horrible. Unlike Bioware, I don't make money off the number of players in ToR, though.

*facepalm intensifies* Those heals already exist in the game. Slow-Release Medpac and Kolto Probe. They both do that much healing over time and they're both cheap as hell. Similarly, cleanse negates some damage that would be dealt over time, since cleansing a dot it preventing periodic damage, not blocking direct damage. Cleanse isn't a direct heal, it serves the same purpose as a HoT. In conclusion, your thought experiment was bad.

They would need to find a way to make people stop sucking, which seems impossible. What you just described is a matchmaking system that actually pits similarly skilled players against each other. People tend to mistakenly believe that this means separation of premades and pugs because they inherently view premades as a group of skilled players and pugs as horrible, despite there being plenty horrible premades and some skilled pugs. What you experienced wasn't the success of 2 premades vs 2 premades, it was 8 good players vs 8 good players. Once again, people, please push for matchmaking rather than queue separation.

Explanation: He activated Wounding Shots at 19:31:05.521 and again at 19:31:11.630. That's a 6.109s cooldown on Wounding Shots. Later, he activated Wounding Shots at 19:34:33.672 and again at 19:34:39.594. That's a 5.922s cooldown on Wounding Shots. Just to clarify, Wounding Shots has a 9s cooldown. Conclusion: He altered his log at least twice to shave off 3 seconds from 2 Wounding Shots. He lied. He's a liiiiiaaaaaaaaaaaarrrrrrrrr.

He's in <I'd Rather Be ERPing> I've been gone for a few weeks, but I've never heard of them.

NERF MADNESS Assassins

I've managed to shoot my rating back up, it's just that pub side can only be done at certain times. There's a specific, long list of people that you cannot queue if they are online. This is probably the first time I've ever considered effectively queuedodging my own faction.

I just wrecked my rating by queuing for more or less all of last night. A quick leaderboard search just showed me that the 3 sents I was getting grouped with are 682, 1009, and 842 rating. It was sad, but I don't really care about yolo rating, I value output more.

I had several ranked matches last night with him. I'm pretty sure he's just horrible. Last night was rough.

That is both silly and entirely irrelevant. Sorry, I guess the sentence that directly preceded my request for a contrary argument didn't quite lead into it obviously enough. Cleansing promotes knowing what dots to cleanse and when to cleanse in order to disrupt an enemy's rotation. Immunity from dot cleansing promotes dotspamming without any requirement for thought. If you're going to argue skill, it'll be fun to see you defend how dotspamming is more skillful than cleansing. Anni has just been a wreck from the start, since the brilliant devs at Bioware decided that the core burns for Anni should be Physical dots and not Force dots. Ya know, since Physical dots can be cleansed by everything other than pure dps Sages. By sheer population statistics, Force dots are more rarely cleansed, so Anni dots should have been made (in 2.8) or, better yet started as, Force based. And, conversely, a cleanse for a healer requires a gcd + resources + delays important abilities. Rather than direct healing, they are investing their time and energy in preventative healing. Dot specs play differently than burst, and you did a rather poor job of attempting to relate them. Burst classes don't get impeded by cleanses, but dot specs don't have huge portions of damage (proc'd Full Auto, Master Strike, Gore windows, 3 stack Pulse Cannon, etc) immediately stunned or interrupted. Dot specs are considered more mobile and are marginally harder to shut down with stuns and interrupts, and provide formidable, consistent damage. Additionally, Dirty Fighting and Balance can provide decent area pressure with their mindless dotspamming. Just because you don't understand the concept of "pressure" doesn't mean dot specs have poor performance in pvp.

Such logic. Much agreement.

Whoops, I mixed up when 8v8s were removed with when 8v8s died on my server, although that's worse for your argument, since 2.0 Balance Sages were entirely fine, Assault Commando were worlds better than they were pre 2.0, and Dirty Fighting Scoundrels and Balance Shadows were still paper. That's at least 3/6 (more probably 4/6) dot specs being viable, and that's only because survivability was enhanced. Again, if you have an argument or recent example of a dot spec becoming viable because of an increase to their dots rather than a buff to survivability, I'd love to see it. I guess I'll address the other incorrect stuff you posted before, if you're gonna get all mopey that I didn't respond to it. Cleanses only purge 2 effects from the target being cleansed, including the slows that dots may apply (ex. Shrap bomb + Shrap bomb slow = 2 effects purged from 1 cleanse), and they only will cleanse a dot if it is of the appropriate base type. So, if you wan't to be at all useful, a healer needs to understand which dots can and can't be cleansed by their specific cleanse. That takes, comparatively, a great deal more skill than uncleansable dots, which promote mindless dotspamming. Again, I'd love to see an argument against it. And to the claims that cleanses destroy the dps of a dot spec, no, they don't. With the exception of Crushing Darkness, and to a lesser extent Assault Plastique, every dot can either be quickly reapplied or isn't a massive portion of their damage (Sever Force). Weaken Mind, Vital Shot, Shrap Bomb, Incendiary Round, usually Plasma Cell, Force Breach, Interrogation Probe, and arguably Sever Force can be promptly reapplied upon cleansing. Cleanses don't gut damage like you seem to be deluded into believing, they simply disrupt the rotation of the dot spec dps, which if the person is blindly dps'ing can result in missing out on damage. Either way, you seem to have a fundamentally flawed view of how cleanses affect pvp.

Yeah, and that's why 4v4 arenas with 1 tank, 1 healer, and 2 dps on each side always lasts till the acid phase. Wait, no they don't. I guess it doesn't take literally 6 players to down a tank and healer, even a good tank and healer. Also, all you did was link another QQ thread that you started.

Let's see, 8v8s was pre-2.0 and Lethality Sniper and Pyro PT were the only 2 (according to you, I'd argue Balance Sage) viable dot specs. - Balance Shadows weren't viable because: horrible survivability, hell their burst damage was even in a better spot before 2.0 than it is now. - Dirty Fighting Scoundrels weren't viable because: just as bad survivability as Balance Shadows. Fluff dot damage was, and still is, amazing but they'd get nuked if they wen't within 4m of another melee - Balance Sages: were fine, bad energy management, but fine otherwise - Assault commandos weren't viable because: It was a pre-2.0 Commando.... the whole AC was underwhelming pre-2.0. It was ridiculously cast-reliant and had no good escape. So yeah, I guess Assault Vanguards and Dirty Fighting Gunslingers were the only(-ish) ranked viable dot dps pre-2.0, but it had nothing to do with dots. A lot of ACs were just horrible back then, but that was due to their survivability and the existence of bubble-stun. If you could somehow argue that Commandos, Balance Shadows, and Scoundrel dps somehow had viable survivability, but not enough dot damage, I'd love to see your attempt.

But dem Scoundrel DPS casted self-heals man, they totally need to factor into the total survivability of the AC

You're using a specific ability to counter the damage output of a specific player. It is a small display of skill. Do you have any argument to the contrary?

You're stupid if you're compaining about a buff to Balance Shadows. Out of every spec in this game, full Balance was the least survivable and least desired. They've been horrible in PvP since 2.0 and now they can hopefully get better. And no, Dirty Fighting dots should not be uncleansable, hell, they already apply a secondary dot after the initial one has timed out or been cleansed so that Wounding Shots can still deal full damage. Full Balance Shouldn't have gotten uncleansable dots, it took away the only special cleansing capabilities that Sages/Sorcs had and set a precedent to dumb down the game. Even Watchman dots should have been made Force type rather than Physical and there wouldn't have been a need for a change. Uncleansable dots dumb down pvp and dumbed down pvp is boring.

In order of efficiency of searching, the leaderboards are broken up by classes, but so far the benchmarks set for ranked rewards have been constant across all the classes.

I had a 2v4 with a Vig guardian friend of mine. Their team was 3 dps and 1 tank, ours was 1 healer 1 dps. He switched to Soresu form and Guarded me. We won. It isn't impossible odds, since the only way the 2 of us won was by the enemy team being incompetent. Now I would support ToR implementing LoL's style of queues, where every player needs to accept before the match starts. It would marginally increase queue times, but it would remove matches where one team is just outnumbered because stupid people afk while in queue.

Those are all bad examples. Watchman Sentinel got a buff that it needed, Combat wasn't changed, and Smash got a bit too much of a nerf but it was ridiculous in PvP in general (if you have a good argument for smash only be crazy in arenas, I'd love to see it) Healing/Tank as a pairing hasn't changed at all. Sages and Commandos got a buff while Scoundrels got a nerf, but there is no argument that can be made that the changes only effect Group Ranked Flash Bang was a 35m aoe insta-cast 8s soft stun. No other class had any kind of CC that powerful, probably because was stupid. Flyby was a huge aoe that was so powerful that it was used for single-target dps. It had no maximum number of targets, so it had even more potential damage in regs than arenas and very effectively held nodes. Most of your claims were about specs that affected regs more than arenas.

So do you actually have any examples of Bioware buffing a class specifically for Group Ranked and not just pvp in general?

You changed your sig It actually makes sense now.

Counters to guard: 1.) Its 15m range- separation 2.) It only applies to 1 target- Stun the tank and hard-swap to a non-guarded target (very popular in arenas)

So you think that Madness Assassins, not Madness Sorcs, are going to be wrecking balls now? You really should proofread before you post. The changes to PTs is incremental and wouldn't really affect their status as a formidable melee dps anyway. Although, Bioware.... that change to Oil Slick.... do you want hybrids? Because that's how you get hybrids. Juggs just got a tone-down, so I wouldn't really call them a monster now that any full soft stun can ruin at least 1 of their big defensive cooldowns. The change to Anni doesn't solve their issue of ramp-up time, although if any class should have gotten uncleansable dots, it should have been Anni from the start. Sidenote: Since I am of the position that uncleansable dots are stupid, DS and Rupture should have been Force dots rather than Physical dots from the start, that's just been bad design that has never been addressed. Especially since 2.7 was the ranged patch, and 2.8 still substantially buffs Sorcs and Mercs, your views of class balance can be considered either odd, at best,or wrong, by any normal standard.

I've also played since launch, done ranked warzones and arenas, set server records, and set Torparse records. Neither playing since launch nor their self-assessed skill level has any bearing on whether or not they actually grasp the current state of class balance in the game. While Bioware does balance around the average performance of the playerbase, pre-1.2 Sages did have the issue of double-tapping their 1.5s Deliverance and godly energy regen, Commando healing had some excessive energy management as a healer while the dps specs just didn't have any escape, and fully-specced Shadows were a bit useless. Although Scrapper was hit way too hard because of a mix of bads crying and old adrenals/clicky relics, Bioware made changes (poorly) in response to actual problems with the game. Just because you didn't notice a problem didn't mean they weren't glaring. If you don't believe there were any issues with the imbalances I had previously listed, then your credibility has just diminished. There was a clear and significant imbalance between Sage, Scoundrel, and Commando healers during 1.2, regardless of whether or not you thought that you simply had to adapt. As for dps, there are a lot of specs and I neither need to nor want to list their imbalances to prove something so obvious. Interestingly enough, I also pvp main a Scoundrel. In 1.2, Scrapper was not ranked viable, Dirty Fighting was not ranked viable unless all you wanted to do was stay at 30m tab-dotting, and Sawbones was the strongest healer in the game so it was ranked viable. For Scrapper, the cooldown of Backblast was increased, overall damage was decreased, and ability costs were increased. Unless all you did was run around hunting for solo kills, your assessment was incorrect. For Sawbones, they were significantly buffed and their energy management became a joke, of course it was a blast. For Dirty Fighting, they were down with Balance Shadows for survivability, so no, it wasn't survivability at its best. Btw, you may want to know the names of the 3 trees of the class you play. Lethality =/= Fatality. Yes, I've seen people play toons horribly wrong, and I've also seen people on the forums posting horribly wrong information.