Is there any value in going: http://www.torhead.com/skill-calc#500cZI0rorudzMMZGr0zz.1 Deep vigilance forgoing Zen Strike and Plasma Brand, but going deep enough into Focus/Rage for Zealous Leap?

I think all 3 specs are viable for Guardians and Juggernauts in PvP and I am curious as to which ones the community plays. I think it basically shakes down like this: Immortal/Defense: Maximum damage reduction and bonuses for remaining in Soresu form. Least amount of damage output of the 3 specs, but the best guarding spec. You'll spend most of your time in Soresu. Vengeance/Vigilance: Maximum damage with the least amount of defense of the 3. You can still effectively guard people in this spec, but it requires form swapping between Shien and Soresu. Focus/Rage: Highest amount of movement/utility. Lots of snares and movement speed increases for staying on target. Most of the time spent in Shii-Cho. All 3 specs can guard and taunt. I'm wondering what everyone else has been trying so far. For the record, I have been playing Vigilance and have had mixed success. My damage output is good, but I do run into survivability issues.

It's interesting from a design standpoint. Classes that have a higher skillcap will appeal to a certain type of individual, but will feel gimped by people who are unable to achieve those results given their own ability. So if class X requires 50% effort to achieve result Y and Class Z requires 100% effort to achieve the same result Y, most people are going to say that X is underpowered, when in fact they are both capable of achieving the same result. I suppose it take an honest look at oneself to see if they are capable of putting in the required effort to achieve the same result as someone who has to spend less. Some people will find that "fun". Others will not.

You don't use 20 every fight, but you do use I'd guess 9-12 heavily and about 10-20 others situationally. It's not just the abilities but your medpacks, stims, adrenals and relics that need to be bound as well. Just because you only bind all your keys to Tracer Missile/Grav Round doesn't mean that it's the most effective way to play.

I would disagree. I don't necessarily agree with the OP that Marauders are difficult to play for why he suggested but I do think that they along with most of the other classes are hurt by the UI limitations and lack of macros in this game. I especially ran into this problem on my IA and to some extent on my Marauder. If you're any good you have all your abilities keybound for easy access. The problem that you run into is that this game has ability bloat and without a more advanced UI or macros you can run into some annoying issues. If they were smart, they would have had the marketing folks add something to the character selection screen that said You have selected to play an Imperial Agent. Would you like to purchase the SWTOR 15 button IA mouse? You will find gameplay without it very difficult unless you are a Polydactyl

I am fascinated that this thread has hit 18 pages so far and is still going. TM/GR requires you being hit by it over and over again to make it more effective. If you let someone wail on you repeatedly, then I'm sorry, you deserve to die.

Turrible idea. Pugs are pugs. You can't control who you get in your group unless you're queuing with friends/guildies. In most games you're going to get a random bunch of people who hopefully know how to play and follow the objectives. Every once in awhile you get put into a group of people who have no idea *** they are doing or have no interest in playing for the objectives. Odds are, that for every time that happens, you'll also meet the perfect storm of getting put with people who have a clue, and know what it is they're doing. If you find yourself consistently being grouped with people who lick walls or ate to much lead paint as children, take a break from queuing in order to get yourself out of their queue cycle. Most people immediately requeue for a warzone as it's the default action when you leave one. If you're still running into queuing with these same people, you may want to look into playing on a different server. Part of the issue with PvP now is that you're only being matched with people on your server. This game does not have Battlegroups or linked servers for PvP queuing like some other MMOs. This leads to a smaller sample size of players that you're running in to. It's a double-edged sword. I play against the same people more frequently so I almost develop rivalries playing against them so often. On the flip side, the smaller sample size exacerbates skill differences, especially if you queue frequently against skilled competition on the other side. I have played plenty of warzones on a few different servers and have not seen a pandemic of medal farming like which other forum goers describe. For the most part, people conform to the rules and play to win. There are always exceptions but on the whole I think this problem is being blow way out of proportion.

I did over 200k damage done on my first WZ on my Trooper using nothing but Hammer Shot at level 11. Nerf Hammer Shot!

The type of server you play on has no bearing or indication of your own skill level. I would argue that players on PvP servers have inherently less skill as they are the ones feed off imbalanced game mechanics (no PvP bolster, uneven odds, spawn camping, etc) for their enjoyment.

How about stop whining, accept the loss, wait for a combat log to be implemented so you can get a clue how you died. So you duelled someone and lost. The game isn't in any way shape or formed a balanced around 1v1 combat.

Abilities with channels and activation times, are balanced around the need to channel or activate said ability. Removing those mechanics would fundamentally change those abilities and require them to be rebalanced around a different mechanic. This would essentially make most abilities the same, but perhaps button A would shoot blue lasers and button B would shoot red lasers. You could then alternate A and B to create your own psychedelic laser strobe. Perhaps this would increase your enjoyment of the game. For the rest of us, I think it's fine.

Isn't this just a bug? I would think that if a ball carrier is in possession of the ball as he crosses the goal that's a score. If he gets gibbed afterwards, fine, but the score should count. The fact that the score is not currently counting I would say is a bug. Is it fair play? Yes, absolutely. There's no glitching or hacking of the game code which is allowing this to happen. It's something that's available to both sides to exploit. It's just something that BW should fix in a patch moving forward, either by extending the spawn zones to prevent it from happening or fixing whatever is causing the score not to count.

I can see a 2v2 and 4v4 arena bracket being very viable in this game. Arena only gear is a turrible idea. You can create incentives to participate in Arenas and high level PvP without creating a competitive inbalance. Ladders, titles and cosmetic items (stylized Arena-only armor Orange pieces) are more than enough to keep people coming back. No need to dig yourself a hole trying to itemize PvP and Op gear.

Open World PvP is a joke and I wish game developers would let it die. All it generally does is turn into a griefing cluster. For every 5 seconds of evenly matched enjoyable content that Open World PvP provides, there is another 30 minutes of spawn camping and griefers who have nothing better to do than annoy you. The typical Open PvP world encounter starts like this: Do I outlevel him by at least 5 Yes - kill him, No - stare at him from afar and run away if he comes close Does my group outnumber his group by at least 3:1? Yes - attack, No - shout insults from afar and run away if they try to engage It's lame, it's annoying and effort could be better put into more warzones, rated warzones and possibly an arena combat system.

^ this guy gets it. The solution to long term PvP viability is to take the gear grind out of it. And for you people who want to add Expertise to Raid gear, what exactly does that accomplish? Now if I want to PvP, I have to raid? What? You want people to care about PvP, create a ladder system and organize it. Have people compete for epeen. Post stats on a leaderboard for top healing/kills for the day/week/month. PvP doesn't have to be about only getting PvP gear. If you remove the gear from PvP you also no longer have to tune your PvE content around people using PvP gear in PvE. People can no longer skip doing HM FPs and lower level Ops by grinding their way through Champ gear. You might actually have to PvE to like.. do PvE content.

You're absolutely right. If a combat log is in the works, which it appears that it is, then there will be a 3rd party meter/parser like the one from Rift in short order. To all the people who want a meter but don't want it to be linkable, just stop. That doesn't solve the elitist problem. Please remember that you're on the Internet and elitism is in no way limited in scope to games, MMO or otherwise. I disagree that they're essential. Trust me, when you get to playing with people like you do with guildmates you get a grasp of their ability, so essentially you know who you're carrying and who you're not. Yes, it's harder with PUGs but content that you're pugging isn't usually tuned to the point where that last 5% makes or breaks success.

I'm confused. The only people who could be offended by the removal of Expertise on gear would be people who are using PvP gear to PvE. If you remove the Expertise from gear and bolster everyone to the same stats for combat you have an even playing field. Why would you not want an even playing field for PvP? Is it because you somehow feel you're owed easy kills against undergeared competition? That by playing longer than someone else you're owed a cheat? Its like playing CoD and hey, since you've been here since release we're giving you a special aimbot. It gets more and more accurate the more you play, so keep coming back.

I think one of the things that often times get lost in this discussion is the Pandora's Box that gets opened once you reveal some of the black box info about how damage is dealt and healed. Once the lid comes off on what's best and what's we'll say, less than optimal, encounter tuning by the developers becomes much more difficult. I'm not necessarily saying that it's a bad thing, but it creates a greater divide between the haves and have-nots, when it comes to information. Look at WoW. Players of that game have an exhaustive following who dissect every change and find out the optimal rotations. The problem there becomes all of a sudden, there is one and only one way to play. If you're a Maurader, you have to play a 31/7/3 Annihilation spec or whatever, because it does 5% more dps than the other specs. And so on, and so forth. It creates a big problem on the developer end for them to create all specs to be equal and for all things to scale for a virtual limitless amount of factors. Why do you think WoW has rewritten its talent system 3 times in the last 3 expansions. I'd rather have them spend development time in writing new compelling story arcs rather than open the door for them to follow along like every other MMO. I think the biggest mistake that BioWare can make with the game is to do things like all the other MMOs, just because it has been done in the past.

Couldn't agree more.

I didn't read the first 47 pages, but I will say that there's no need for a special PvP stat to make me grind hours on hours so that I can be competitive. Equalize all stats for people when they enter a Warzone. If you want to have a grind, have people grind ranks or some other bs non-combat influencing factor. Give them cosmetic armor changes, companion customizations, non-combat pets, whatever. You do not have to introduce a mechanic that unbalances a competition between two people by creating an artificial grind. If the gameplay is enjoyable and compelling people will play for that alone. Just because ToR is an MMO, doesn't mean that they have to approach PvP in the same way that all the rest of them have. Fix the problem now and aggravate a few people to foster compelling and fun gameplay for the next few years.