Just dug yourself a hole there -- by your definition, lethality is a dot spec because it relies on its dots to do most of its damage. Reason being: Brutal Shots is worthless without dots present. Without Brutal Shots Ruffian is completely worthless. .

Sorry to burst your bubble, but Hatred's burst puts lethality's to shame -- heck, just about every dps spec in the game shame's lethality's burst. Assassinate hits 9-12k on a regular basis. Serentity strike does 7k, Death Field 6k, all while real dot damage ticks away (that's not even considering the insane damage of Crushing Darkness). With the exception of Brutal Shots, none of our attacks hit that hard. NONE. While its true that 40% of lethality's damage comes from Brutal Shots, it's not because BS is some awe inspiring burst attack, it's because every single attack we have is pitifully lackluster. If Shiv, Lethal Strike or Frag grenade do not crit, you're doing 1.2-2k damage (crits off these moves hit 4-5k) -- you think AP does that sorta damage with their burst moves? Furthermore, Brutal Shots must crit on all 3 hits to be effective, or once again you doing damage in the 1.5-2.5k range (crits hitting for 3.5-4k). So go ahead and spam 3 Brutal Shots -- which equal 9 individual hits with a rough chance of seeing maybe 2-3 of those hits critting -- and congratulations, you just did as much damage as a rail shot or volatile substance (while taking much much longer to do so). Lethality is NOT a burst spec. If you want to call 7 gcd's worth of moves a delayed burst spec, then ok I guess? That sounds super effective. IF anything I'd classify Lethatity as a sustained damage class with terrific off heals.

The majority of premade's I'm in are spur of the moment: we just see who's on in our Friend list and team up. We play whichever character we feel like at the moment and at best queue with 1 healer, at worst no heals, but we never stack Fotm's or double heals, because quite honestly it makes for lame games. We want challenging matchups played with our friends, win or lose; we're not interested in stacking the deck in our favor. When we get in Mumble or TS most of our strategy consists of backing up nodes or sometimes focusing a particular target. Beyond that we don't coordinate -- the hardcore playstyle you described earlier has its place in ranked, but in regs we're just here to relax and have fun.

Bioware has a horrible habit of overhyping everything. They piss themselves in giddy excitement over everything they do -- who can forget the whoops and high-fives from the Ziost livestream? If the 6-15 announcement is anything but stellar then they only have themselves to blame for the resulting backlash. Afterall, they're the one's who decided an announcement needs an announcement made weeks in advance of the actual announcement.

Who asked for this? The same people who asked for massive healing restructuring (ie; no one). I only had time for a civll war against 3-4 healers. The other team spent most of the match on snow. 1 or 2 of their dps attempted to spam-cap the node while their heals kept them up; all i had to do was stand back and pot-shot the cappers. For. the. rest. of. the. match. They would not stop spam-capping, so I continued pot-shotting them. Of course we won because they couldn't cap with that brilliant strategy. Is this what warzones are to become? Is that supposed to be fun?

Heals + Tank combos are the #1 reason we have stalemates, but Bioware seems to think the real culprit is AoE stopping caps. IMO Guard is too strong. I'd love to see guard disappear entirely and let tanks rely solely on taunts, but that's just my opinion.

Either let healers cleanse dots or bring every class's dot damage down to Ruffian levels. Then increase the TTK. As far as the pts problem goes, people want to check out the healer changes so everyone's queuing heals. Yes it's boring when half your team is heals but until we get normal teams (ie no more than 2 heals each) it'll be difficult to gauge where healing is at in pvp.

Those suggestions are serious no-brainers. Who green-lighted sonic the powertech? Why don't acid/fire traps override all immuniities? Has the lead combat Dev ever pvp'd?

Is that a yes?

For clarification's sake, both of you are fine with passes from the ground floor to the third floor in Queshball?

How does queuing with friends in an MMO = bad player? I take issue with a premade queuing 2 heals, dps and tank because I hate boring warzones, but accusing normal premades of "discouraging generations of possible PVPer's" is just drama queen exaggeration In my experience these types of matches are far more likely to happen vs. premades.

The biggest difference with this tactic in original huttball vs quesh is that a defender on the bottom floor(pit) can still stop the ball carrier by A) using pulls and B) intercepting the pass with a leap. Because of LoS and targeting issues, this simply isn't possible in Queshball. That in no way justifies the mechanic, but thanks for sharing!.

I've been wondering if Sab's 30% surge bonuses are working...Granted I'm just a lvl 57 sniper, but I have not noticed any difference in damage after getting the talent Experimental Explosives :/

I don't know what to tell ya man....if you don't see people pulling this off on a semi-regular basis then you must not pvp much. In fact, from your wording I'd wager you don't know what we're talking about. The reason this doesn't happen in regular huttball is because it simply isn't possible. Reg. HB requires the ballcarrier to clear the Ball spawn area (mid), drop into the pit, get within a reasonable distance of the opposing ledge and then pass to a receiver. Queshball just needs the ball carrier to walk 30 steps and pass. There's no pulling the receiver from down there and no leap to intercept because the opposing team cannot target the receiver (due to LoS reasons). You don't have to "see" the recipient; merely have him targeted and then spam the Huttball throw keybind.

You can have both swoop racing and pazaak! Except they're called Chocobo Racing and Triple Triad, and sadly exist in a game supported by their corporate masters...FFXIV

Wow so let get this straight: we get a week or so of slot machine simulator while FFXIV gets the Golden Saucer (mini-games, triple triad (pazaak), chocobo racing (swoop racing), etc). Yay? For the curious check out the wikia: http://finalfantasy.wikia.com/wiki/Manderville_Gold_Saucer

If you have 100 people in your guild alone logging on POT5 on a consistent basis then I fail to see where the population problem lies. Even if you could only coordinate half that many people's playtimes and no one else on the entire server logs on that's more than enough to field teams for regs/ops/ranked/gsf and fps. And lol at mandatory sunday meetings

Curious statements. How is Ruffian not a dot spec? How would you define Hatred? In answer to your first question: I don't believe dots should be a strong source of damage, especially when cleanses do not work on them. Madness has its own issues -- they need more burst, not more dot damage. I would lower DoT damage and give Madness some much needed umph -- increase the damage of Telekinetic Throw and also make Project worth using. Give Force Leech added kick. Currently the spec is worthless in PVE. An additional bonus to lowering DoT damage across the board for everyone would be a drop off in number padding. Currently, Ruffian dot's are so pathetic that tab dotting simply won't do anything for your scorecard -- it's all about Brutal Shots. Give madness something to care about aside from their dot's and I'm sure tab-dotting would drastically drop off. Ditto for Hatred. Furthermore, pressure comps would not be king of Ranked -- we'd get some much needed variety to compositions, which would make everyone happy (ier? maybe lol)

Personally, I'd like to see endgame move away from gear progression and level based expansion (ie. stop raising the level cap). Sure, raids can stay in the game, but make each raid reward unique gear pieces, perhaps each raid possesses 2-3 pieces of a set per class. The main point is to stop phasing out your own content (ie. level cap increase devaluates all previous content). Offer alternate methods of progressing your character -- perhaps something like the merit point system used by FFXI (xp used to lower cd's or grant minor abilities buffs at lengthy-to-get intervals), or any number of mmo's (eq2, AoC, Wildstar, etc). Give us something meaningful to pursue that isn't gear. MAybe quests linked to raids or bosses necessary to unlock "hidden" skills or abilities -- get creative.

I disagree. Lethality dots should do the same damage as Madness -- absolutely no reason for them not to. When Bioware asked us to list 3 things we wanted addressed I posted a link to a pvp match circa 1.5 (thereabouts) and another link to a match posted a few weeks ago (at the time) to present proof that our dot damage is the same now as it was then. Makes no sense to me.... In regards to distributing some of our damage away from Brutal shots, I again disagree -- we would lose all semblance of burst. Also of consequence from Bioware's Ruffian's QoL adjustment was a post from John J. acknowledging they'd look into Lethality DPS: The above quote is an answer to NASP's question: This seems to indicate they believe Lethality DPS is too weak -- when and if they make adjustments is anyone's guess.

^^This exactly. Plus the acid pits are buggy beyond reason. Somehow the acid hits you when you are well out of visual range. Additionally, I'd like to see immunities attached to abilities like HtL and Force Speed become ineffective while in acid (same for fire traps in regular huttball). The snare/damage attached to those obstacles should overpower all immunities. And what's the purpose of the middle level? There is literally no reason to ever go across the middle platform because the ramps are on the sides. IMO they should move the ramps to the center sides (top and bottom, north/south) on the ground floor, leave the side ramps on mid, and create a giant square hole in mid. Oh and remove the ability to pass beyond a level.

Drewlik's podcast entitled, SWTOR - Is it worth playiing ( ) has some great insights on the current state of the game, as well as some innovative ideas for it's future. He posits that SWTOR needs a new class to inject much needed life into the game, and proposes a great method that Bioware can easily implement: Add an extra Discipline to each Class. As an example: in addition to Sniper and Operative, introduce "x" (droid builder, for instance). No new story quests, equipment/gear, voice actors are needed. In short, this is the easiest, most cost effective way to inject new life into SWTOR. While some of you may not agree with Drewliks point of view or his opinions, I believe this proposition is exactly what SWTOR needs to flourish, and it's the easiest, most cost effective thing Bioware can implement that would yeild the greatest return - plus it would make an excellent splash in E3.

Back during the QoL passover given to Ruffians the devs PROMISED to look into Lethality dps: as well as another PROMISE to fix carbine burst (explicitly stated but not given a time frame other than "soon."): WIll Bioware follow through on this and keep their promises? Time will tell, but I'm not holding my breath given it took over 3 months to overhaul healing (something no one asked for). Heck, even before 3.0 the dev's promised to help out the spec but never got around to doing it.

^^This Most budding Operatives will quickly discard the class once they hit 60 because they'll discover things aren't quite as faceroll easy as they thought.

This plus Tank = autowin. Turtle comps are and have always been king in swtor pvp. Thanks to the removal of field respec in wz's this problem is somewhat alleviated, but Guard is still way too strong. Therefore guilds of late queue with 2 heals, a tank and dps and hope to win by attrition, which hardly seems to be in keeping with the spirit of PVP warzones (ie. boring).