This would be the issue. Resilence is what made healing king in WOW, thus leading to 80% healing teams. Many servers have seen the same thing here, mine included.

This would be the correct answer.

I would not mind seeing one type of gear only, if its equal for both pve and pvp. I played Vanilla wow, I don't want to see this game de-evolve into one where raid teams come in, with awful tactics, smashing people (1 raider vs 3 pvpers who can't kill them), and auto win due to the stupidly overpowered raid gear. Sadly, most of the politics for no expertise in the game, on these forums, are for that vanilla wow advantage. Ideally, gear should be a non factor. It should be so in warzones and world pvp.

Word, I was tired of dead ques myself prior to this patch. I even went back and added approx. prime time averages to that post.

Nope, they started to go twice as quick and they've been running faster than the month prior to 1.2 ever since. I had meant longer than the were the first month of the game. They had been up to 20 minutes during prime time prior to 1.2. They run about 5 now. During launch they'd que every 2 minutes on even the Imperial side (Blue side was instant then).

Equalization created an environment some people don't like. Not everyone practices sportsmanship or wants a fair game. Some want to hide behind gear. Some want to hide behind broken, imbalanced mechanics that steer people toward the favored classes and the favored specs. Those players are now faced with the environment they created for their opponents when the mechanics were more broken. Fixing the current resolve issues will create the same scream fest from those that benefited most. The "I get sixty individual kills farming, while the entire other team got 2 total" war zones was only causing the newer players to quit. We have longer ques now and they just kept getting longer prior to 1.2. Now with recruit gear and some newer players having a chance we might keep the pvp current base or actually increase it. Time will tell.

The expertise change is minimal. As noted here: http://www.swtor.com/community/showthread.php?t=423665 They adjusted the attack to defense numbers to deal with the way damage is calculated and then mitigated. Prior to 1.2 you got too much of a expertise defensive boost, which was further aggravated by healing stats that have no real mitigation in game. There are other tricks people are using to inflate damage as noted in © of Georg's post here: http://www.swtor.com/community/showthread.php?p=4066157#edit4066157 People have been stacking things like that since TOR's beta. The truth is it was far worse in the past. This need to be Superman in a pvp environment is a symptom of players getting used to an old WOW stat called resilence, that mitigated vanilla WOW's obsession with burst, and as an unintended consequence, made healing king because there was no heal counter that was perpetual the way the resilence stat was. It made 80% healing teams common in BGS in WOW, especially during the endless mana days of WOTLK. It made the same kinds of teams or healer / mitigation teams common here. It also made something else common here. It's called focusing fire on targets and mass debuffing them, which is what George was talking about in (d) of that post. In a paper, rocks, scissors match up, burst dps and debuffs is the only way to drop tank protected healers. Your listed marauders example above has to do with a class doing what it is designed to do. Further, they probably did it with support. Marauder's class type has had to use support since launch... Prior to 1.2, there were situations were people would focus fire on individuals, 4 v 1 and still not drop them. That silly version of the game is what most people are crying about wanting here. P.S. In your pre 1.2 healer take down strat, the opposing team's healers just have to hit one button to remove the CC. Trust me, as someone who mains on healers, I can keep fighting until you are OOM easy with just one or two healers as backup. The inclusion of pvp viable tanks in this game has made it even easier than any game before it.

Dear mods, sticky this please.

So you basically want to be a raid boss monster in a pvp zone?

Do you honestly think three people focus fire dpsing on a toon shouldn't kill the toon quickly?

Your logic has unintended results you wont like then. Healers quietly benefit the most from what you are talking about. We are talking about healing as in, WOW style, post resilence starting with the BC era. That era when blizzard moved from burst crit to a system that allowed players to spam heals endlessly by WOTLK. It created a time when the BGs would be filled with 80% or more healers. It was just like this game was on many servers pre 1.2. Blizzard's stupid mistake in game design grew an entire generation to think easy mode spam classes, with endless mana reserves, was some kind of intelligent fighting style. Spamming isn't tactical. It is straight up Corky. The news flash for the average player is simple. Toons are not supposed to be Superman. Marines do real life tactical fighting in the span of an eye blink. This long, boring dance people are talking about isn't pvp, it is a practiced dance of cool downs and mana reserves that certain specs and classes will simply do better than others, further complicated by gear issues. Your request eventually makes cookie cutter pvp. Something that a 9 year old kid can copy and do just as well as you can. Does that really sound like genius or skill to you?

So you want a return to tank / healer matches with 3 kills for an entire team? It is a pvp match not a raiding boss fight. If you want really crappy, made for toddlers, pve style BGs, maybe your guild should go back to WOW. Just saying, that style of game exists and if the player base here wanted that, they'd be playing that instead of reading these forums.

It was so much of a success that as they followed that philosophy they had to hide their number losses from WOTLK on. Blizzard actually resorted to padding their numbers with 5.5 million Chinese accounts and untold trial accounts that didn't actually pay subscriptions as many of their servers literally became ghost towns on both sides... Oh wait... That does sounds like Fail... Then again their Kung Foo Panda / Pokemon expansion will fix it. That will work to bring the numbers by focus expansion content on young kids who don't pay for games... Oh wait... That does sounds like Fail... Well obviously WOW was so successful you are playing that instead of reading the forums here... Oh wait...

I agree with that.

It is just war games. Police and military commands improve by using non lethal versions of this. How are you ever going to help your crew improve if you can't evaluate their performance in a cross setting? It's one of my toolsets for seeing if a player is performing correctly on a map. This is one of my guild's favorite parts of the game. They get to kill the boss from time to time. Perhaps you and your team needs to work on their sportsmanship and sense of humor. We call such situations practice and stress release.

Guild Wars 2 will do the best job yet and the other games will rapidly copy it if successful. That's one of the reasons world pvp currently sucks. Massive gear and class imbalances were the result of WOW cloning across the market for years...

This answer, exactly.

I find your lack of vision, disturbing. Here are 3 games you should see then if you are looking for a long term effect with your guild in something else. Sandbox: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=12_WbBLIAus&feature=player_embedded Mass pvp: Massive character control: SWTOR will grow just as every game does. No launch is ever perfect and this one was decent. People are quick to forget we started SWG with sad armor and sad weapons in its early days. WOW's horde content sucked for the first year, though paradoxically that first year was the best one for world pvp. With gaming, it is always better to look ahead than behind. Players play the games they do for those they fight alongside and against. It is the communities that make or the lack of them that breaks games. Communities are separate animals from forums however. It's always a matter of those who make a difference in a game over post count. The WOW generation never grasped that completely. The main issue for this game is that most players think in terms of one character. This game was designed for people to have several. There actually can't be a faction imbalance if people everyone is playing both sides the way the devs intended. It will mostly balance itself out in time. In the meantime, the game is what you make of it...

I think this is well stated. I'd add that it makes it easier for guilds and guild alliances to run together as well when you don't end up with the wow gear grind factor.

The game was built with a leveling curve that allowed casual players to make 50 in a month. The part you are missing in your arguments is that you are thinking this is a game to focus on only one toon. This isn't Aion where it takes 6-9 months for the average player to get to top level, then even longer to equip. "Hardcore" would be Battle Master on multiple toons in this game. Otherwise, you are only a casual player. If you are endlessly running around on one toon, you are kind of missing the point. In a game like this one, "Hardcore" would be an expert at multiple pvp play styles.

I'd prefer to see a skill based game. Gear advantages are for the weak.

You'd have to have cross server to have rated. Otherwise, you just have win trading for top ranks.

I would actually like to see much higher lethality, for all classes. That's every archtype, in every build, with every level of gear. Every class should be able to melt someone in 3-4 seconds, with guard and heals only able to add 1-2 seconds max. That's even 1-2 seconds max with 7 people healing you. We're all using some of the most powerful weapons of the future. Anyone else think its odd that hit like marshmellows? I'd rather see them make the game into something more like a good shooter. This letting people superman stack with heals and guard is straight up San Fransican. Make the game more like a real war, not a kiddie cartoon. The need for gear and class imbalances to carry someone is for losers. PVP is more fun with it is fast, high fatality, and utterly ruthless. If the devs added in an equal number of war zone kill maps, it would break the objective based CC cheese dominating the game right now. At that point, no one would care about this one power or another. It would actually be a skill based game rather than a WOW knock off. That is unless we really want to have balance arguments for the next 7 fracking years just like wow, with people lying and trying to forum politic for advantage. The same whacked gear grind and a repeat of the Blizzard devs lying about the actual subscription numbers when the largest part of their numbers base doesn't even pay monthly (i.e. China). That's my 2 cents. Your mileage may vary.

Except for the problem that Huttball is supposed to be a pvp map to begin with. It is the most played map in SWTOR by default at that. Skipping the pvp to win in 3 minutes while avoiding any actual pvp is the main strat now. It is extremely effective, but it is not pvp. Performed with peak levels, it is actually pveing past the environmental blocks. Huttball can't be considered anything other than a failure, at the design level, if the objective was a pvp map. It is a social event with minor scuffles, CC slow downs, and pve blocks, rather than a real fight. The lack of kill maps is an issue in most games with instances at this point. Focusing a large group of players on objective maps, breeds CC spam fests and a lack of focus on actually killing other players, which is kind of supposed to be the meaning to the term pvp. Since 2004, developers have been making pvp instances to force players to do objectives they have dreamed up and normally poorly balance for class performance. The lack of understanding that people que these things to fight is simply amazing. Your assessment is absolutely correct. That is how you win the average map in just about any game now. You avoid everything that the player base actually ques up for. It is just amazing how sad that truth is. It speaks volumes of the competency of the average design team's grasp of what the player base wants. The player base asks for a sports car. They get an enema instead.

Sadly, that's exactly what WOW arenas did. The Blizzard devs so gave up on it that 2v2 arenas didn't even count.