Okay, so there are two separate points floating around here. One, the "show me where this is specifically stated in the rules" is basically an obnoxious skeptical argument. Obnoxious because it is never possible for any set of rules for a complex activity to include all possible cases. That's why certain "weasel words" are used ('harassment' and 'griefing' here or 'slander' and 'libel' in normal law) and it's up to entities with judicial power (BioWare representatives here and courts of law in the real world) to decide on a case-by-case basis. That doesn't mean that someone who does something that hasn't specifically been condemned is doing something within the law/rules. For the sake of dicussion, it is sufficient to show that the person in question is indeed disrupting play. Like Einlanser pointed out, it is all about the tacit/implicit agreements we make. In warzones, it's the agreement to work together to complete an objective. Moreover, warzones are a team effort - it is necessary for all members to compete for the rest to stand a chance. Hence "disruption by omission" - by not helping your team you're actually hurting your team. For the second argument - giving players power to decide. Obviously, a /vote kick mechanism would be absurd (I can already see people kicking low-geared participants from warzones to make place for their better-geared friends), but again, this is why we pay for this game on a monthly basis - so that there are gamemasters employed who can examine each case and decide based on the evidence. Obviously, there can be no algorithm. Is a player who agrroed a set of mobs in a flashpoint during a boss fight while running away from a boss attack, then disconnected due to his computer crashing guilty of disruptive behavior? Certainly not. Now, is a guy who enters flashpoints, aggroes mobs during a boss encounter, gets the party killed, then leaves the group (and does this repeatedly) guilty of disruptive behavior? Most certainly yes. Can their behavior be described in the same manner using a particular objective viewpoint? Yes, it can, but it doesn't mean that it's the same behavior.

Not at all, just save the link to the original plz :>

Apart from the 46 lvl PvP stuff (which I didn't know about at the time since I didn't level through PvP or play any pre-50 level PvP), yes, this is exactly what I did.

Sage has no stealth :<

This forum has enough negative threads as it is, so, inspired by some reasonable answers in the topic for "lowbies", I decided to try and post something constructive. Annoyed by the gear disparage in PvP? Getting owned by players who have 18k HP while you have 12? It doesn't have to be that way! There are two major things you can do to help your PvP experience. 1) Learn to play well within a team A lot of frustration with people playing PvP is just due to the fact that they expect to go out and win 1v1 fights. PvP is not about 1v1 fights. Most times, when you see people battling 1v1 in PvP situations, it means that they are bad players (or they are consciously playing badly, eg. farming medals). The reason for that is, the PvP warzones feature objectives (I'm not going into open-world PvP atm because it's too much about the numbers to say anything reasonable). You should be focusing on objectives and your team should be doing the same. If you do, good things happen. In order for them to happen, however, you (and other players in your team) must take some necessary steps: * learn the specifics of your role and other players' roles Get to know how tanking works in PvP, how healing works in PvP, what strengths and weaknesses PvP various classes have, how certain special abilities can be used to your advantage (pull on huttball, aoe damage on voidstar against bomb planters / alderaan against turret cappers, mezzes on single objective guardians and so on). Recognize what you can do to fit in. If you're a healer, try to mostly heal, only dealing damage to finish off < 20% opposing targets and/or using aoe to protect objectives. If you're a tank, soak up damage and protect your healers/dps. If you're an assassin, target down opposing healers/squishy dps. Don't work solo, don't try to be the lone hero, and don't resort to blindly pushing buttons. * use damage focus, mitigate damage focus on your side People don't understand how important focus fire in a PvP situation is. In a 6v6 battle, a team that focus fires enemy healers first, then dps and then goes after the tank is going to be victorious most times, even if the gear is disparate, if the other team just blindly assigns damage to random targets. See a teammate targeting down a player? Great, help them instead of picking your own "personal nemesis". See two teammates targetting down a player? That's even better - and you can also help by interrupting his abilities, stunning him if he's not resolve-capped, slowing/rooting and/or pulling him closer. See guys getting hit only to see their health go up again? Guess what, it doesn't take Sherlock Holmes to deduce there are healers nearby. Maybe go after them? Yeah, they might stay in the back - but that doesn't mean that they can't be taken down, especially if not allowed to run by pulls/stuns. Also, healing works very badly under concentrated firepower. See your healers getting targeted down? Use what you can to help. Use pulls if you can to take the healer out of range of melee opponents, if you're a tank, switch guard and use taunts. Teamplay is contagious - as soon as you start to help, other people will start helping too. That way, even a much worse team can get wins against a much better team. 2) Mitigate gear advantages on entry Yeah, Battlemaster gear is not available till valor rank 60. Guess what? There are still tons of reasonable stuff to gear yourself with. First of all, level 46 PvP gear has expertise enhancements. Now what? Enhancements are switchable. Meaning that if you buy 6 copies of your PvP weapon, you get 6 enhacements with expertise. Time to put them to good use... Here comes the next part - proper "normal" gear. At level 50, you should not be wearing a single green item. You should also not be wearing any blue items in slots that allow for moddable equipment (all besides implants/earpieces/belts/sashes, although there are moddable sashes/belts, but they're extremely rare and hard to get). You should have your optimal matrix shard relic (nothing but laziness precludes you from getting one) and another blue level 50 relic, giving you a significant stat boost, especially with endurance. Okay, what if you don't have the orange gear and/or the mods for it? Well, grind dailies for 2-3 days. Dailies give you money and daily commendations which you can use for the level 51 mods/enhancements/armor/barrels/hilts. Moreover, there's this wonderful place called Galactic Trade Network. Have too much money? (you should after doing all the quests + dailies) Great, someone probably has some stuff to sell for it. Use the GTN to equip yourself with the best possible lvl50 earpieces/implants/belts/sashes, preferrably purple ones. Also, use your crafting skills to obtain purple recipes - if you crit on them, you get an item with an augment slot. All of this should give you really good entry level gear. There's nothing worse than a player complaining about gear imbalance in PvP when he's wearing all greens. 3) Know when to recognize a superior team or objective reasons for your failure. Dying all the time? This must be the problem of gear, right? Grind to battlemaster and you'll show them! Wrong. I'm currently a champion (valor rank 50), 500 expertise Sage healer. When I get focused down by an enemy team, I die instantly. Simple as that. If you're dying, chances are it's not due to gear. Chances are, you or your team are doing something wrong. Maybe you shouldn't be fighting in the open? Maybe you shouldn't be fighting 1v3? Maybe you should wait for the rest of your team and team up instead of rushing solo in a lemming-like fashion? Maybe you play a squishy support class and your opponents are just focusing you down? Finally, there's just the situation of the opposing team being better. Might be due to them being a premade, or might be about them not reading points 1 and 2 above. Might be both. Not much you can do about that. If your team consists of people randomly running around in weird places and opponents are organized and well-geared, there's nothing you can do. Move on to the next fight.

Oh no! How about you set your camping perimeter 10 feet further so tha they can't AOE you from within the safety line? Nah, that would be too hard :/

Yeah, because of course he'll time his attack at the perfect moment I put up my bubble. Right. The problem with your reasoning is you assume worst-case scenarios on everything. In that case, of course you lose. Problem is, most cases you happen to be in won't be worst-case scenarios. I'm extrapolating from personal experience. No, I'm just factoring the damage you're talking about into the overall count - either he does that attack after I pop my bubble up, and then I get no bubble but more HP, or he does it before I pop my bubble, which gives me less HP but a bubble up. I never said lightning forces him to use CC breaker, stun does. Lightning just slows him down nicely and stacks with slow for an almost-root. My TK throw deals 2750 base damage. Want the screenshot? What is it with the "geared player" part? Last time I checked, equal expertise counts cancelled each other out. If your opponent beats you with gear, maybe that's the reason you're losing and not his class being OP? Dunno, maybe a full-geared 600 expertise battlemaster vs. a lowbie. No, I'm saying that ops should win against support DPS in stealth situations. A majority of the time. You're making your scenarios sound like they occur 100%, matching best-case against worst-case. That way you can prove any class imbalance. My response wasn't a fool-proof way to win that encounter, since that would mean sage/sorc is OP. It was only a way of saying you're not helpless. Last time I checked, you're not alone in a warzone, so as long as you stay alive, you have a chance of winning that fight. Maybe you specced your healer wrong? I easily get 75k damage, 10 kills, quick blow and sometimes assassin medals in warzones while dishing nice amounts of healing. AOE is hardly crap, it's an excellent way of mitigating opponents' healing / guard when they are clumped up, as well as a primary method of defending objectives. We had a little friendly fight in a republic group while waiting for a world boss and healers won most of it. Even if not, the fights were very close. If you're killing healers 1v1 so easily, that means the healers are not playing it properly. Many healers don't even have proper offensive rotations prepared and cannot do anything outside of healing - they don't use their CC, they don't use their kiting abilities etc. I never said I "own them" as a healer. What I said is that I hold my ground as a healer long enough for support to kick in, or I die and I accept the fact that I got solo stealth-killed in a corner by a class that's specced to do exactly that. Again, you make it sound like a black-and-white scenario, which it isn't. Most 1v1 fights in warzones aren't really 1v1, they are so only until someone from either side shows up and your role in this situation is to survive until that happens, since a targeted-down op is very squishy. It's my first MMO, my only character is a healer-specced sage, so sorry, no bonus.

Bump :>

I got 2 chests when I instarushed to the location just after the reset, but they don't seem to be respawning since then.

This. Basically, to stop a healer you have to learn their abilities, then: * ignore their channeled heal (pretty much cancels out with any dps they receive) * ignore their HOT (does pocket change healing) * interrupt their first heal * stun on their second heal Pretty much guarantees a dead healer if your team is also focusing on him.

How can he hit a normal attack when I'm already 10 feet away? He uses his CC breaker? Great, then I use force lift, which has a huge duration period during which I can heal up to 100% while he helplessly watches. Also, force speed overcomes slowdowns, which is what's so nice about it. 3 seconds to heal? Basic heal takes 1.5 seconds, as a healer class I have my hot heal / reduced healing time combo when my stronger heal also takes 1.5 seconds as a result. TK throw = lightning. It's really sad that your lightning does almost no damage, mine does 2700. TK throw = 2700, slow = additional 700. That's assuming no crits. What I describe is a trained response when you react fast enough and you actually have your actions prepared ahead of time as soon as the stun ends. If you hesitate / delay your actions for even a second, that's when the extra damage kicks in. I have never, even against battlemaster stealthers, been hit for 14k without being able to do anything. You're making it seem like you should win a 1v1 against a stealther who snekead you every time - but if a support dps class wins a 1v1 against a stealther dps class even 50% of the times, then something is seriously wrong about class balance. You didn't answer my question about his response to your dot/dot/stun/lightning spam opener. He doesn't have "everything", he has a very strong burst stealth opener, which is what he should have, plus a bit of other stuff so he isn't completely useless apart from that. Similar as I as a healer sage have also some decent dots, reasonable main damage attacks (project/TK throw), area of effect attack, knockback, two different cc powers (mezz and stun) and so on.

This is going to be a long post since I don't believe that the Ilum problems can be solved with a simple solution. As recent events have shown, simple solutions are very much exploitable, while other simple solutions are just against the spirit of MMO. What I'm proposing is based on a couple of principles: 1. People actually want to play open world PvP Well, apparently those have been successful in quite a few MMOs and also here in SWTOR on more balanced servers those seem to enjoy huge success. Open world PvP simply has a dynamic that warzones don't offer. So, it's not the case that you need to encourage people specifically to do open-world PvP, you just need to make sure it's enjoyable for them. 2. Fights in unequal groups are pretty much unwinnable. This is not Quake, where a good player can come in and own a group of 5 others. Basically, any semi-competent group of 2 players with expertise 350+ can own any single player, regardless of the skill level / gear. With team focus firing, this becomes even more apparent. A group of 5 has completely no chances against a group of 8, much less a group of 15. 3. People don't enjoy getting stomped. You can easily assume people are not masochists. Nobody will run in single-handedly into a group of 5 people, die, then repeat the process over and over again. The most you can count on is somebody trying that a few times to see if they can get an isolated kill, failing, then resigning. Then, when people learn that it's undoable, they simply stop doing it. Today on Ilum in the morning I roamed round the central area looting armaments, an imp came, I killed him, another imp came, I almost killed him (he escaped), then two imps came and the third joined, I got killed and simply flew away from the PvP area. Similar thing happened yesterday, only on a larger scale (had an ops group, quit when imperials strongly outnumbered us). 4. You need to equalize incentives To keep people playing open PvP, you need to give people reason to do it even if groups are imbalanced (as they will often be). On the other hand, any solution equalizing incentives has to keep in mind that you can't make it unplayable for the side that has an advantage. 5. You need to promote teamplay Open world PvP is all about teamplay. Teamplay is not only zerging in large groups, it is also communication, coordination and stuff like that. 6. People will exploit systematic advantages. MMO is a game of exploitation. If the system allows an easy exploit, people will use it. If you make one strategy clearly reward more points than others, people will use it. With all that in mind, here are my ideas for Ilum PvP that attempt to meet the abovementioned 6 points. * Force the side with an advantage to defend objectives If one side has an advantage, the easiest thing they can do is just zerg any opposing players to hell. It's the most efficient strategy - everyone gets valor - and doesn't incur any real penalties. Sure, the opposing side can regain objectives - but they earn no rewards for doing so and the diminished valor gains can be quickly regained. If you force a side to defend objectives, by lowering their valor gains, you force them to split and/or use scouts (more on that later on). If you force splits, you encourage even play because now, even though there might be 50 imperial players and 10 republic players, the imperial players have to defend each objective and the republic players can use guerilla tactics (just as in real life the less-numbered side would). Right now, guerilla tactics are completely useless. The idea is to base the number of objectives you have to control on the imbalance. For example, if imperials have 50 players and republic has 10, imperials have an obligation to control all 5 areas. For each area less than 5 which they control, republic gains valor points each minute when this happens, while imperials get their valor gains reduced. This number shrinks to 4 for a 4:1 imabalance and so on. Of course, for this to be enabled there'd have to be a minimal number of players present in the area, to remedy situations of 3 afk'd players vs. a single republican ninja getting constant valor. * Reward sides with valor / commendations for taking objectives if they are outnumbered / evenly matched Right now, there are no incentives to actually gaining objectives. If you reward the underdog side for obtaining objectives, you give them the incentive to do so and also give the opposing side incentive to defend them. * Reward people with mercenary commendations for killing others As of now, kills in open PvP areas only give valor points, which makes it unfeasible for people who actually want to obtain some PvP gear. Symmetrically to warzones giving warzone commendations, open PvP kills should yield mercenary commendations. * Reward people with additional valor / commendations for defending objectives Currently, there's only a valor bonus for defending objectives, however, one should also get additional commendations for that. * Divide valor gains among all groups defending objectives Right now, there is no incentive to split groups. A zerg is the most efficient way to get valor points because everybody gets the points and it's also the most efficient in killing people. If you award people defending different objectives say half the valor points for each kill your side gains, you actually reward people for defending objectives and make it reasonable to split groups. * Remove the proximity messages and implement a scouting mechanic Currently, since there are warnings about people approaching zones, there's no use for scouts in the game. However, with splitting groups and hit-and-run mechanics, scouts could be an important factor in the game. For that to happen, there need to be incentives for scouts. Being a scout ATM is probably the worst role in the game - you gain no benefits, you have no chance standing a fight, you don't even get any bonuses since you're not defending any objective, you miss out on fights and so on. I propose implementing the following scout mechanic: - remove automatic proximity messages - add a "tag enemies" ranged ability for all classes that places a circle anywhere within line of sight. What the circle does stay active for some time (say, 30 seconds) and automatically tag opponents that enter it. When opponents that haven't been tagged in the last 5 minutes enter the circle, you gain valor points, with increasing returns based on the number of opponents. Additionally, for a sufficient number of people tagged you get scouting status, which nets you a percent of all valor gains for your side, similar to what objective defenders get. Also, tagged opponents trigger proximity alerts similar to ones that are generated now and appear on the map for all allies - give valor points for successful scouts that avoid detection - give players valor points for killing good scouts I believe this solution would allow for good and balanced and most importantly, strategically interesting PvP sides, in a way that rewards all roles in a strategic battle, not just participants in a dominant zerg group like it is at the moment. In this way, more people could actually contribute to open PvP areas, which would increase their popularity. Any comments / feedback?

Yeah, it's getting ridiculous, spamming "focus fire healers first" in the chat since some people simply don't get it :/ The problem with sage/sorc healing is that none of it is instant. Damage interrupts healing really badly, a healer getting damaged can't even heal themselves, much less their teammates. That's ignoring interrupts and stuns. This means that yeah, a sage/sorc healer is ridiculously overpowered when everybody's merrily pounding on tanks (I once spent half a round just pounding my healing hotkeys since nobody bothered to attack me, my team was pretty much invincible as a result with a second healer as well), but they're very squishy when focused down. Once people start teamplaying, strategy kicks in - with people using chain healers (healer healing another healer), other side using guard, the other side responding with forked focus guardian/healer, then the other side using knockbacks/roots to protect healers and so on, it becomes pretty fun.

But why should he have problems with (a) a squishy class (b) in a stealth situation? I mean, that's exactly the perfect scenario his class was designed for. If he's having problems doing damage in such a situation, his class is completely worthless. As a sage, if I get caught in such a scenario, I get down to 30-40% HP, then immediately out of stun, I do bubble -> force speed -> stun -> heal -> slow -> TK throw. This levels the field, with him now at ~70-80% HP and me at around 60-70% with bubble up. Obviously, if I get caught down with my force speed and/or stun on CD, I'm pretty much dead. Then again, that looks pretty much fair. Sure, it's annoying if you're running to join the frey only to get caught and killed by a stealther, but that's what their class is all about. He could reverse the question and ask whether you have problems with stealthers on which you opened dot/dot/stun/lightning.

Come over to Luka Sene (PvE server, very nice and balanced PvP with occasional Ilum battles even going since the Imperial advantage is no greater than 2:1, good and mature community).

I think you've fallen prey to a phenomenon which has been dubbed "fanservice" on TVTropes. Basically, most of the target populace for SWTOR is male 16-24 years, which makes the various character types you mentioned appealing. You would need a game targeted to an older / more contemplative audience in order to have different archetypes (see eg. the new Battlestar Galactica and the character of Starbuck). That said, I agree that it would be nice to have at least one character be of a more complex personality, but I guess it's too much to expect of a casual video game.

How about you untrack the mission in the mission tracker? Been doing that since the bug first appeared for me, haven't had a game not count since (unless I forgot to untrack )

I've got 15k HP and I'm a willpower focused healer. 13.5k HP is way too low for a tank. You're probably missing out on good relics / implants (which is the pieces that most people neglect most). Also, make sure you're not using green mods/barrels/enhancements for your items, in fact, you should be going with purple ones only. Usually, you can buy reasonable gear on the galactic market, check daily and just save up money.

I must say, I am utterly puzzled by the developers' claim that they never intended spawn farming to be possible and that they intended for people to get killed when they enter an opposing base. The base consists of a single turret, 1.3 million HP or something like that. Since people are killing 800k HP world bosses with an ops group of 8, how hard is it to predict that a group of 50 people will easily kill that turret and that the damage done, if it isn't aoe, won't be enough? There's an old pen&paper RPG gamemaster adage: if it has stats, it's killable. Basically, if you want spawns to be non-campable, implement a system similar to exhaustion instead of placing a turret. However, the one thing I'm really puzzled at (consindering this is a game with a multimillion budget for which people pay tons of money monthly) is the complete lack of scalability analysis on the developers' part. You do have statistics regarding the number of active PvP players on the servers, right? So how hard was it to at least insttitute a single brainstorm on the topic of "what will happen if 100 imperials meet 30 republic players on Ilum", let alone beta-test that? The fact that the game has huge performance problems when doing a 30 vs 30 fight (been there, done that) - crashes to desktop, performance down to 2 FPS on a really decent machine with details turned down - suggests that it hasn't been tested at all at that scale or, what's worse, it has been tested and then somebody made a decision that amounted to "let's ignore the problems, they won't be playing 30vs30 on most servers anyway". So, one thing I'd really like to know is not only what you intend to do with the current situation, but most of all, what steps do you intend to take not to let this sort of situation happen again. As another old adage says, it's human to err, but it's a fool's thing not to learn from mistakes.

Workaround: untrack quest in mission log. Works for me 100%.

My observation is that, as the level of PvP play on my server increases, I get guarded increasingly often (I sometimes need to spam bubbles around people to get the guard, but it works). By "increasingly often" I mean it went up from 2% to like 20% of warzones I play. It's still far from optimal - tanks should realize that putting guard on healers benefits _both sides_ and they should _always_ do it. However, your initial post actually points to the fact that, at least in this respect, the PvP mechanic works fine. Healers are not solo artists, they have to teamplay. In most games where I play without guard, I switch to DPS mode with occasional healing (it's not fun healing when you instantly get ********ed by 4 opposing DPS and you don't have guard, my DPS sucks compared to DPS-specced sages, but it's still reasonable, I just have to use a rotation and not spam light^H^H^H^HTK throw), so I usually get about 120k damage and healing both. I did recently play a game with a competent tank though and he guarded me most times, so I switched to almost pure healing and we really were quite invincible (being able to protect objectives in 2 vs 4 decently geared opponents situations).

It's a known bug. Untrack the daily/weekly for a workaround.

The instant/non-instant imbalance has to be fixed, it's a huge thing in close PvP battles. I can't even count the times where my Project (the big rock) hung in midair because my opponent vanished in between, or a healer got their heal up because of Project's delay, or finally, I got killed in between the moment when the rock was up and when it was supposed to hit and then it never hit the target. Also, we just lost a battle in Alderaan by 5 - needless to say I'm pretty pissed at the devs right now.

In case you haven't noticed, the AOE in question do their damage over time. If you're disoriented / lazy / unskilled / slowed down / stunned enough to sit in the area for the whole duration, then yeah, they deal quite a bit of damage.

Obviously, this is a question of gear. Apparently, you need full PvP gear to heal properly. /rant Actually, healers should DPS as part of the battle - as I said, focus firing is a critical aspect of PvP and when you have geared opponents, focus firing the opposing healer requires all firepower there is (if you trade their healer for your dps which you neglected to heal, it's still a good trade). However, people fail to notice that healer is a really difficult class since you are, after all, primarily a healer - apart from special occasions, you should focus on healing and you should never fall into a useless battle when there are companions to heal nearby.