While I applaud the restructuring of lockouts (Story, Hard, NM all separate), structure for time dependent titles and temporarily harder NM mode is not what I want to see them spending their development time and resources on.

The gearing sounds similar to how Kell Dragon was BiS at the time and could only be obtained through token drops from the most recent NM instances. At least I assume DF/DP NM will drop a new tier of gear that is only tokens. That they make future HMs easier and drop better gear than previous tier NM sounds more like a design decision to placate casual players. BioWare caters to casual players, and they always will. As for titles, that's only relevant now, and I think it's wasted e-peen nonsense. You get a timestamped achievement when you complete a NM operation for the first time. You hear anyone talking about their raid accomplishments from EV or Denova? No. Just let people get titles. If individuals really want to feel important, they can link their accomplishments in general. Or print out a screenshot and frame it on their wall.

This seems weird to me. Title is nice to have, but I find it a little weird that the gear drops (81?) will be from hard mode difficulty + additional mechanics per boss? Plus, you can run two HMs per week to get 78/81 gear drops (yes, plus "additional mechanics"). It doesn't say anything about how long the NM buff lasts (1 hour, 2 hours, 4 hours, forever?). I prefer the current timed system. If they really want to make this stuff exclusive, just remove the trigger for the title in future updates. "As a future date we will remove this buff..." -- Is this so much more complicated than removing the triggered update, death proc, implementations, etc that grants the title? Hopefully no one new ever wants to play this game and have titles. This kind of says, "You want titles? **** you for not playing this game when we thought you should have played it."

I find it unlikely they wrote entirely new game mechanics when the engine already supports stuff like this. It's just an assumption, but I would think they added enhancements to the existing combat system to support new mechanics. I assume accuracy = accuracy and evasion = defense, then we follow the same rules as normal pvp. We all even have a shield stat with bleed through being the absorb percentage. Again, all assumptions, but it makes more sense to use the existing engine instead of writing an entirely new combat workflow. EDIT: I also do not think that missiles care about evasion, which could mean something as simple as damage type or being a special attack.

Subscription MMO. Yes, their goal is to get people to play stuff over and over again. Leveling, grinding gear, pvp, etc. It's all about spending time playing the game.

Fixed. This is space. Come on, man.

I think the best solution is that when a player dies: The player who got the killing blow gets the kill All players who did damage receive an assist If the killing blow on the dead player does not come from an attacking player (whether they suicided on purpose or just happened to run into an asteroid while trying to avoid a missile), the same effect as using /stuck in pvp should happen. That player should receive additional time on their respawn timer. I've seen a lot of players at full health make stupid decisions running into walls. But I've also seen a lot of players at low health run into walls when you get a missile lock. The only real way to solve this is that all players are negatively impacted because some people might be abusing the benefits you get from assists/kills against the opposing players, or create logic that still rewards players for playing the game as normal. You could enhance the logic by checking if the player running into asteroids/walls has full health, is currently in missile lock, etc.

Just because they have open positions doesn't mean they just created or opened these positions. I applied for two positions at BioWare (including one of these) all the way back in March. For the Tools position, I was told that a senior and tenured developer did vacate the position, but they also had plans of expanding that team by a couple members. I thought it would be cool to get into the games industry since games have been my biggest hobby since I was about four years old. The games industry seems to have become more aligned to what I consider the more mainstream development community, but they still count years in the games industry and shipped titles as a serious consideration factor. I thought it would be really fun to get involved (and I've played the game I'd be working with since beta), but it wouldn't be almost like hitting reset on my career. Not to mention a significant salary reduction (20-30%).

Melee survivability is not a Marauder issue. That is a class balance and content design issue. Warriors are actually one of the stronger melee classes in terms of survivability because they have so many defensive cooldowns.

The reason some people are saying ops are bad while others say they're viable for regular warzones is because there are a lot of bad players out there. As an operative (concealment or lethality), you're a stealth melee with burst. That burst is either coming out of stealth (concealment) continuing through stuns or after setting up your dots (lethality) and spamming cull on people. For concealment, if your target can survive the first few GCDs (and by target, I mean a solo dps target, don't try killing healers or tanks), you have a chance to vanish and repeat yourself, but don't get mad when you lack the sustained dps to kill them after that. For lethality, your best chance is tossing out dots or doing group aoe and trying to pick off low people or find people that don't move. If you find people that engage with you, cull hits hard and you can kill them before they realize you've hit the sweet spot of your rotation and just run away. Where operatives are completely lacking in pvp is that almost anyone can turn the odds from your favor into theirs. You're a melee class in medium armor with horrible cooldowns. Shield Probe is maybe 3-5k it absorbs, Evasion is weapon damage only, so it's only useful against some classes (free cleanse is nice). If you get focused, you're probably screwed. You're very easily controlled because you're not really dangerous outside of 4m and everyone has a knockback, stun, root, snare, and movement ability. If anyone snares you and then runs away, you can't afford to use your gap closer to catch them. Just kite an op. *Just* rolling isn't that bad if you give yourself that window to let your energy come back up. However, if you're trying to dps someone while rolling, you can find yourself in a hole quick. If you see an operative attacking, just don't stand next to them. They'll either run off for 1v1 fights against bad dps or get killed in the giant melee aoe mess. Some guy posted a video of how concealment works great against 1 target at a time. Every single target stayed engaged and failed to knock him back, snare/root, and then just stay out of his reach. And that's why they're in the video. He doesn't have any videos of a sniper knocking him back, then using heavy or leg shot when that root wears off, rolling away if you do get close before you die, and now you're farther away than when the first started and almost dead. A lot of operatives seem pretty content just running off on their own trying to pick people off in 1v1, and that's fine. But for every second you're sitting around in stealth waiting for an advantageous situation, your team is 8v7. Operatives are fantastic pvp healers, though. When I pvp on my op, I usually heal for things like defending or the entirety of Huttball, then switch to lethality for attacking in VoidStar. It's nice to be able to pick what the match needs and do that, but matches with good inquisitors, warriors, snipers, and mercs are going to leave you chasing a lot of targets as dps. I find that op healing has nice enough burst you can take out low targets. Shiv + EP + BS on a low target works great. Capturing nodes as a healer works just as well 1v1 as a dps. It takes longer, but every Shiv and Surgical Probe is a swing of 6-9k hp in your favor. These things aren't the be-all, end-all. Catching people unaware happens a lot in regular warzones, but the majority of decent ranged players and warriors will just keep you outside of 4m. Good luck killing anyone that way.

If 2.4 is the introduction of 4v4 arenas, will 2.5 be a balance patch? Or are we just going to say that if you want to be competitive in 4v4, you need to be bringing correct composition and we can finally filter out some of those crappy pvp classes? Bringing the team size down to 4 will only magnify any class imbalances. IF there are any, of course. You brought a PT and Operative dps into an arena? Our two snipers 20m away from each other with a tank and healer floating in the middle think that's cute.

I never said Operative DPS wasn't viable. I'm perfectly happy with my damage output. The only thought about Operative DPS that stood out to me worth gauging community feedback is the default duration for Tactical Advantage. If you do run TC with an Operative DPS, ask him about how he keeps his stacks up during the laser. Some Operative DPS run out as soon as the laser spawns. That's fine, it's safe. Many people have commented on my unusual methods of staying within 4m of the boss while he's channeling laser so that I can get off a 0 damage Shiv to keep my Tactical Advantage buff long enough to Shiv almost immediately after the laser (unless you got lucky with the timing and have Fatality proc). There are a lot of similar situations on other boss fights. I just wanted to toss out the idea of making TA a flat 15 or 16 seconds. 30 seconds, 1 minute, etc, that's a long time for a buff like Tactical Advantage. The difference of 10s to 15/16s isn't going to create a giant power shift, it's mostly to try and help fill in the gaps where I believe the class and content design teams fail to understand how the variety of classes will be interacting with the content either due to lack of knowledge or understanding.

It appears that I'm the only player with an operative on the forums that thinks Tactical Advantage should be longer. Since no suggested shortening the buff, I have to assume that all of the viewers are perfectly content with the current duration. It appears that I'm the only person who has ever lost stacks of Tactical Advantage when someone leapt or ran away in pvp, maybe knocked back, root, run away, or lost their TA (or had to use extra Shivs just to keep TA) on fights like Titan 6 transitions, Olok disappearing, avoiding Sunder's Fixate, bad timing with Ciphas leaping, Operator IX in general, Kephess jumping into the air, TFB tentacles spawning, Golden Llama's Laser, in between droids/adds on Minesweeper, Kephess jumping into the air in another fight, Annihilation Droid knockbacks, Gharj transitions, Soa transitions, Vodal transitions, Ortol movement/roots, Mavrix Varad transitions... I understand a lot of classes are the way they are, but I was hoping someone else might agree with my opinion on increasing the buff duration by a few seconds...

The safest way to Vanish is Evasion + Vanish. If your companion is out, put them in Passive mode. That drops them out of combat.

As an progression raider and someone who enjoys playing all of the classes, I definitely understand the desire for a parser, but I can't believe this many people are surprised that torparse is going down. It's written in ActionScript or something, has no data integrity whatsoever, and the reporting is lacking. I'm surprised the SW:TOR community never picked up on ACT. It's also surprising how many people I run into that have no idea you can view MoX parses on the website to get at least some depth of raid data.

I do that for my solo build, but I can't imagine doing that for end game raiding. That's 2 useless points just to open that 3 point ability, which means you have to take those from the top of Lethality or out of 6 really important points at the bottom of Concealment.

Before 2.0 I had done very little dps on my operative but gave it another go after the expansion release. The title of this thread is the first and largest criticism I have of the class but wanted to ensure I put in the hours and got enough experience to contribute to the conversation. Whether in PVE or PVP, I find the short buff duration of Tactical Advantage to be the largest hindrance I have in dealing damage. Since Operative is a melee class, my effectiveness is almost entirely limited to being within 4m, but with the extensive amount of knockbacks and movement abilities of most classes in PVP (plus PVE boss mechanics added on top) it can sometimes be difficult to function with a rotation. TA is the limiting factor with either Concealment or Lethality if you plan on dpsing for more than just a few GCDs, and I really don't think the buff time has been considered well. There's no shortage of Inquisitors or Warriors in PVP, and unless one is actively engaging you and/or letting you stay near them, it's easy to lose your stacks. All of the fights in TFB, several in S&V, and even TC have moments where you can lose your stacks if you're not paying attention, lose your stacks no matter what, or will lose your stacks if you don't take extra measures to retain your stacks (usually involves a Shiv for 0 damage, on the wrong target, or rolling to Shiv). I've been in a few PVP matches where the constant onslaught of roots, snares, and knockbacks made operative dps essentially unplayable because you rarely got to build 2 stacks and have the time to use them. I don't think making Tactical Advantage's default duration 15s (or just the 16s that the healing tree gives) causes an unfair advantage to anyone and only helps encourage the use of dps Operatives much more so than they are now. I don't think the number of stacks needs to increase, only the duration of the buff.

Increasing the enrage timer is nerfing the fight by definition. Decreasing boss health, increasing player damage output, or increasing the time before enrage are all changes that make the boss easier. I don't know why you assume that I'm a troll because I want difficult fights, to be challenged and pushed in a game that has had very little difficulty. I haven't been the only voice that has asked for more difficult content. They gave us difficult content. Do I believe that the overall difficulty level of TFB NM was increased from PTS to live? Yes. Do I believe that each boss was thoroughly tested in an attempt to cater to a certain percentage of raid teams? No. However, I don't care. Meeting the challenge is more important to me than beating a nerfed boss. Or if I beat it first, or tenth, or last. It's a challenge that will either force players to give up or to work to improve themselves. If a raid group after only a couple hours believes that there is nothing they can do to improve, then that's just arrogance and an excuse to never get better. No single player in the game is so amazing and perfect that they cannot improve themselves by working on more difficult content. Rising to meet a challenge makes you better. I'm not the best player in this game. I make mistakes, I know I do. Everyone in my raid group makes mistakes, but I've never once heard any of them say that they could not do something to improve their performance from the previous fight. No player makes the absolute best decision about movement and which action to perform every GCD for five minutes. If you think that you do, you're delusional. However, I also do not think I'm a bad player. I don't care if you like me or not, but the childish attitude and remarks about how I cannot possibly participate in this content are unjustified. Any player with any skill level can have a valid opinion on how they like their raid content. Just because we don't agree, and you believe yourself to be a superior player does not mean that your opinion is right and I'm trolling. I happen to be a player that enjoys extremely difficult content and am frustrated to clear content in the first day. It makes me not want to waste my time in between content patches just going through the motions every week. Several people have made comparisons of the difficulty and knee jerk reactions of the Dread Guard fight to (I'm in there somewhere, hard to remember after you have 16 end game raid characters). It took longer than two hours to beat, but I'm proud to have been in a group that stuck with it and was rewarded with breaking the notion that it was "insanity" or impossible. You never know what you can or cannot do until you find something that you can't, right? And then what kind of person you are is defined by whether or not you accept that or try to exceed it.

I didn't lose the original purpose of the thread. One guild arrogantly claimed that because they couldn't beat a boss after a couple hours, it was mathematically impossible (a term that is not subjective). Apparently unable to cope with not being as perfect as they claimed, they chose to move on so they got points in a thread, exalting in celebration after defeating a bugged boss. I think those two points sum it up nicely. Having beaten 16M NM EC tanks pre-nerf (US First since you guys like to toss that kind of stuff out) and working on this fight for a few hours, I can draw parallels. At no point in that progression did I ever question whether or not it was mathematically impossible and give up. We kept at it, beat it.

Well said.

I really don't think there's a need for them to respond. Nightmare mode. That's one of those things where I imagine you can toss it over the fence and check back in a month. There might be a couple of legitimate bugs here and there, but in general this isn't stopping the average player from participating in the game. This really only seems to affecting the entitled who expected to get the NM title just for showing up.

That doesn't seem to stop you from thinking that you're the best players in the world. Other guilds fly under the radar, too, but that doesn't mean they lack skill. The arrogance I've seen you display in the last day indicates that given the quoted perspective, you cannot ask for the benefit of merit if you're not willing to give it.

After a couple hours on DG, I enjoyed seeing the progression my raid group made through the fight. While I may sometimes be arrogant within my raid group or guild, I have an extremely difficult time boasting in general because you never know who you're talking to on the internet. Obviously, you're the best player in the whole universe so we should all do what you say. I change my entire argument. Krazy_Karl is the best player ever. BioWare should just ask him how to do everything.

No, but I think they've created a situation in which defeating all of the Nightmare content is actually a challenge. Can the entire NM instance be defeated right now? I don't know if the TFB Tantrum bug is present in NM, but the answer for everyone right now is: I don't know. Can parts of it be defeated? Yes. That means that progress can be made. As S&V is released, there stands the possibility of more progress. As the potential for progress increases, so does the chance to beat previously "impossible" content. I like this current situation. I like a challenge. I wanted this to be hard. My raid group spent a few hours last night on the Dread Guards just to work with this difficulty of the fight. At some point, we will move on to get gear. Once we get more gear, we'll come back to this fight until we can defeat it. We found Writhing Horror to be a joke, and (based on the available information) Operator and Kephess don't look hard. I prefer there being content in the game that I can't beat. It helps me from feeling as arrogant as a lot of people seem to always feel.

There's a 75 main hand. That's probably pretty useful. Can you get it yet? No. But I'm 100% comfortable with knowing that the other half of the 75 gear will increase my chances to defeat this boss and is coming soon. The competition to defeat both NMs going on in parallel is much more interesting to me than guilds whining to nerf this boss so they can beat it in two hours. Will that upset the people that think the NM title should just be given to them? Yes.