I heard there was endgame content in WoW, enjoy your pandas no? How about some Heroes of Newerth or League of Legends? Age of Conan, Star Trek Online and a few other games are F2P now. Y U STILL HERE!?!?!?!?!?!?!

I thought you were leaving? Also, you realize that if you run into a warzone you might get killed right? That PvP isn't just a cakewalk with free cake at the end and possibly some cake after? That it might require you to compensate for fail pugs in the end? No? You didn't realize any of this from the dozens of videos out there showing warzone PvP pre-launch? You didn't realize this from all the QQ that's been around since beta 1?

ITT: PEOPLE THAT NEED TO PLAY 30 MINUTES OF QWOP FOR CONTRAST http://www.foddy.net/Athletics.html See, now there's a game that needs macros. I think we can all agree that SWTOR's controls and general gameplay are quite smooth and nice Less buggy than most launch MMOs fer sure.

Some points for improvement as I've been on both sides of this article - before reading it and after. 1. Summarize your stuff next time. 2. I agree with you. 3. I will gladly join you in taking out sorcs with my marauder in Huttball. That is all. Have a good day all.

what is this i don't even

PvP is much more a work in progress than anticipated, the medals are a clear sign of that. Obviously BW didn't get a whole lot of data on the kind of play they're seeing right now and I'm sure they'll balance out this stuff soon. I've had situations like yours where I Huttballed the balls off the other team and got nothing for it while some steamrolling 50s in the middle took 8 medals and went home laughing. In Alderaan there doesn't seem to be a perfect spread either. When you actively defend 1 or even 2 stations (by ping-ponging from one to the other) you get nothing for it besides the kills you participated in. No defender points if you don't afk / chill at a point. But again, I'm sure BW is looking into this. Wasn't there a PvP coordinator guy in charge of all of this that we could address?

It's not broken if you don't like the fix. The fix is Huttball. You're broken. Roll Republic and enjoy the game. That is all.

Becuase now you can insta-switch stances / weapons like warriors / rogues in WoW used to do to compensate for bad game design. Oh wait, wrong game. Maybe he has trouble reading and writing and considers the reading skill involved in learning TOR macros to be part of the combat system. NUMBERS R HARD BRO!

I much preferred launch on the 20th to being delayed due to security hardening tests and exploit scenario running on the macro / addon system. Thanks Bioware

Best thread in the PvP forums. Kudos sir.

Client-side lag from spamming keys should be fixed. I think spamming keys might not be the most efficient way to play in PvP, though I do it myself, but it shouldn't affect the actual game's performance. I think this is a software issue and QA should have rooted this out before launch. I know every professional ever.

I'm almost inclined to agree with you. Too many people complaining about the class when, to be perfectly honest, this is a freaking game. They're always so quick to point out that BH has more AoE and the Assassin gets stealth. Well then, if you like that so much - play the other class. It's not that hard, just go to char creation and freakin' roll it. Obviously the mara wasn't for you then. I love the class, having a ball with it and looking forward to steamrolling through people and npcs alike when the 50 bracket starts filling up. Anyway ... Lol, maradur sucks bro. Too many skillz liek how am i sposed to keebind lol There's like a milliun skills and idk hwo to use quinn med watch. Don't roll marauder lolol it's nab class spam force lightning ftw death from above is win

I'm on a carnage tree build at the moment as well. I took more of a PvP spec obviously for levelling. The added control makes for better fun in warzones Can't wait for your treatments of anni and rage though. I'll be bookmarking this.

My Personal, Incomplete and Mostly Obvious Observations By Kaelthun General Something with a 1 minute cooldown is not something considered a major CD. It's a skill to be used in tandem with other, less heavy skills. In the case of Cloak of Pain, it's used all the time. You barely exist in between the times you have Cloak up. The Marauder class requires some form of mitigation to be up at.all.times during combat. If you're running into an encounter with anything, get ready to pop some kind of defensive skill like Cloak of Pain, Sabre Ward - hell, even Predation is better than nothing. Yes, there are a lot of abilities to be used. Yes, they're all necessary if you want to be effective. Stuff like Disable Droid and Call on the Force are not there for nothing. Sap those technological marvels and quickly aid yourself in times of need. No use shying away from these just because they don't deserve hotkeys. A lot of abilities will be useless on their own but be immensely powerful when combined with others. Learn to combo up your abilities and realize the potential of every single one. This can only be done through practice and experience. When you find yourself getting a feel for the class you'll start prioritizing things like Battering Assault and using Cloak of Pain routinely naturally. If you want more choice in companions during levelling, go elsewhere. Not being rude, just realistic. Obviously Bioware has the Marauder in their current incarnation running with Quinn. Nothing wrong with that, it's just a different design. We're a medium armor "glass cannon" and I don't see that changing any time soon. The marauder shines in groups and PvP premades. Get an unlucky group in Huttball and you'll get ripped apart, have an absent-minded healer in a flashpoint and your toast. But then, that goes for most squishies. We're Rogue / Frost DK / Fury Warrior without the stealth / strangulate / bladestorm Beating the Environment Sometimes you'll have to take a few seconds to wait for a CD to come up on Cloak or Ward. Wait, be patient and realize you're not supposed to charge in like a tank. Don't forget your role in groups. Take out adds first, then big stuff. Some may disagree but in my experience it's always best to eliminate anything you can as quickly as possible. Getting rid of a complete source of damage beats killing a boss quicker imo. Get consumables! They work wonders and help in tight situations. Get medpacks, stims and anything else you can get your hands on. On the Jedi Sentinel forums they advocate getting Biochem, I can't blame them. It gets you a reusable medpack and stims that stay through death. Not a bad choice Holocrons give stat boosts, don't forget about them. They rack up quite the difference if you get all of them before leaving a planet. Gold mobs are doable, even though we don't have Death from Above (are you kidding, that's what everyone keeps saying). We're not any other class, we're Sith Marauders. However easy or hard others may think something is, we do things differently. Stack your Ward and Cloak, use Predation whenever it's up (another 10%) and use Call on the Force if you can / need to. Med packs speak for themselves. Don't be daunted if at first you don't succeed. Check Quinn's settings, take out all of his DPS abilities if you need to and make sure he's in Med mode. I have yet to see any challenge I can't do myself other than instanced Heroic areas. As mentioned, Pommel Strike hits freakin' hard. Use it to your advantage when you need to get rid of something quickly. Remember that 100% armor pen isn't anything to scoff at: Gore (Carnage only). Frankly, PvE is mostly just a matter of really getting to grips with the medium armor / dual wield thing. If you can get a grip on your tree and abilities you shouldn't run into too much trouble. I'm running Carnage and I find it very enjoyable but then I do quite a bit of PvP so I usually outlevel my PvE enemies by 1-2 levels. Destroying Players in Warzones Don't take on full health tanks / fully buffed inqs / healers. Just don't. All it takes is for one other person to come along and throw a buff / heal on them or a couple of hits on you and you're done. We're just not those guys. GTHO if you need to. There's no shame in the game if you survive and leave him/her to be destroyed by your team mates. We don't get speed boosts on Predation and Force Camouflage for nothing. Use it. Charge, slow, bleed, EVERYTHING ELSE. That's what I live by and it lands me on top 3 damage and top 3 kills most of the time. No shortage of solo kill medals either. If someone decides they're gonna get out remember that a) once their speed buff runs out they're usually perfectly in Force Charge Range b) you can immobilize them very easily with your Deadly Throw if you've got the Displacement talent c) any Assassin/Shadow will probably come back and try to finish you off anyway. Preparation will take care of that. I usually don't pop Cloak until I am getting targeted. A lot of players get confused, target whatever is in front of them, don't change targets based on threat, don't understand PvP or just plain don't consider you dangerous. This is great because it allows you to solo those Inquisitors that stand on the overlooks in Huttball spamming Force Lightning at some random guy in the distance. It also means that if you pop Cloak before they do anything and they leave you alone for 6 seconds you've just wasted your most powerful 30 second mitigation. If you get targeted by more than 1 person with stuff on CD and none of your team around - just leave it. Inflict whatever damage you can but don't pop anything that'll take more than 30 seconds to come off because you'll die, rez and run back in with the same CD problem again. Do a Smash or two and just leave it. PvP means you'll die every now and again, especially if you get more than 1 person on you. Force Charge can bring you into an encounter but it can also take you out of it. Creative use of it can help you cope with difficult enemies and even win matches. Think of yourself as a pinball that's trying to hit all the right buttons to make the lights come on. If you bounce between enemies at 60%-30% health and help finish them off you'll live a lot longer and be more useful than taking that one sentinel out solo. As Baron Deathmark says: Grab the ball, throw the ball. Don't try to get it across the opposing team's line because you're not built for it. Unless you're willing to pop every single ability you have and see some nab standing ON THE LINE you can Force Charge to, just pass to a healer or tank. Your team will thank you. Put Force Scream on an easy hotkey because it'll be your goto skill for finishing off enemies that pop some speed buff while you've got stuff on CD. It's probably my most spammed hotkey (bound it to F). PvP consumables are very powerful, do not underestimate them and stock up every time you go in. I keep a stack of 6 of each and bound them to Shift+3/4. The heal brings you up about 35% (feel free to correct, I'm just ballparking here, on the feel if you will) and the expertise buff helps considerably when you've got your mitigation buffs up. Get those damage buff items that are strewn about. In Alderaan they're the easiest to get, I find that the Huttball ones are the most out of the way. They're great help in taking down specific enemies that you're looking to solo.

I rolled a warrior, got to 10 and decided on a marauder. I levelled some more, got to 15 and decided to read up a bit on what others have been experiencing with this class. There's a lot of people out there saying the class is too hard to play, there's too many buttons, you need to be situationally aware etc. And then there's an element to the conversation that says otherwise, that if you read your tooltips and actually get to know the class instead of spamming vicious slash that you'll do fine. It's hard to sift through these threads to find nothing but responses from bad players, trolls, easymode nabs, force lightning spammers or players that don't really want to play - just win. I can't, for the life of me find anyone in any of the threads about this class / AC that doesn't completely ruin their credibility via one of the following methods: Being low level. Your opinion doesn't matter until 50. Level 20 characters aren't fleshed out and aren't meant to be competitive. Whiners that keep saying BH merc spec is sooooo much better because it has more dmg mitigation and straight up dps. Bull, just because it's easymode - doesn't make it better. Those that don't have specs to show, thus making all of their "I'm win at this" bullcrap useless. Trolls that just say everyone that's having trouble sucks. Not everyone has your daddy issues, stop trying to prove your manhood. Go home and talk to him instead - it might actually help. Or get some damn therapy. Defensive whiners. It's not an attack, we're just talking here. Useless "I agree with the person quoted above" responses that add absolutely nothing to the conversation. In between all this there's a couple of you that actually seem to have figured out this stuff. Some of you are actually running content, tearing up PvP and having a ball with it. Sure, the class still lacks CC and BW needs to address that if they want to keep people playing the SW but we're on post-ship right now. There have been no patches and we're sure to see some balancing. Someone mentioned that between the final beta and launch there was some tweaking that made the mara harder to play. Anyway, screw all of you guys. I rolled this class, chose mara and I'm sticking with it. If only to see whether all the whine is actually true. At the moment, I get top 5 damage done in warzones, no trouble in flashpoints and I'm peeved at the choice of Vette to be our first comp. I'm running a DH spec like this: http://db.darthhater.com/skill_calc/sith_warrior/marauder/#::f3ef4ef5cef4e9fefe7f6ef3df9 But then, I'm only 28 so what the hell do I know right? Glass cannons for the win. Frost DK / Fury warr anyone?

I've been on heavily imbalanced servers and frankly, that imbalance isn't generally present across the board. WoW for example has both Ally and Horde favoured servers. I have yet to see anyone give any properly sourced numbers from BW that would indicate such an imbalance. Next to that, who cares. This game, more than perhaps any other, is about playing whatever the hell you want. In the WoW servers I've played on your theory held no sway. Zerg rushes merely made the enemy (side I was on half of the time) demotivated and lead to consistent losses. No "what doesn't kill me makes me stronger", no epic BG heroes that win them on their own - just plain steamrollin' without resistance. This is not real life, this is not a hollywood film, this is PvP and those getting steamrolled don't come out on top. Ever. They're more likely to give up and server switch.