I double queue premades with 4 marauders in each. When we finally get a warzone with all 8 of us on the same team, the game doesn't last longer than 2 minutes.

Guarded healers were practically Immortal. You would have to have a train of 3+ DPS on them with near perfect interrupts and have absolutely no DPS peeling you. If that happened, they could be killed. If it didn't go exactly as planned, you just spent 60 seconds accomplishing nothing while their DPS whittled down someone else on your team. Healing now requires team support and skill. You need consistent peeling, a healer who knows the benefit of kiting, and a good tank who taunts on CD and doesn't stray from guard range. Healers can and still are the decisive factor in many engagements; to deny otherwise is being completely ignorant of many objectives and strategies in warzones.

Annihilation - solo play Carnage - team play Rage - bleh

Careful Houdii. It's not just 2% expertise that you're giving up. To obtain 190 power and 240 surge, that's 5 enhancements you're swapping. I can guess the 5 you're swapping are all 5 of the tier piece enhancements, and if i'm right, you're not actually gaining 190 power. It's more like 100 power, as some of the original enhancements already contained 37 Power each (I think 2 of them). The others contain 37 Crit. I'm going to ignore Accuracy due to your stated argument of 'preference', i'll leave you to that. Instead of your stated trade, the actual trade is more like: 125 Expertise (i'll leave your 2% guesstimation) 74 Power 111 Crit *** Accuracy for 190 Power 240 Surge So you're really only gaining 110~ Power and 240 Surge, and you're losing a considerable amount of Crit and bonus damage/innate survivability garnered from the Expertise. (The above numbers are guesstimations of the original enhancements in current BM Marauder gear. I'm going from sketchy memory.) Then there is the middle-ground. Believe it or not, if you left the original Accuracy/Power enhancements in your BM gear, and only substituted 2 of the Accuracy/Crit for Power/Surge, you would maintain your heavy Power base and only drop 5% surge (down to 73%). You would basically have the best of both worlds. You would be sitting at around 100% Accuracy (103% if you spec into the accuracy talents) to help counter some of the tanks, sorcs and assassins that you fight in warzones, as well as the Accuracy debuffing Powertechs (oil slick) and Snipers (some random shot). It would also reward you with 75 extra Expertise rating. I'd do the very least and consider it the next time your Annihilate gets parried by a Sorc. I've personally tested running 95% Accuracy as Annihilation. With 95% Accuracy, Sorcs have an innate 15% chance to parry some of my strongest attacks, my charge root, and the required white attacks needed to apply Deadly Saber. It was far to devastating when you got an unlucky string of parries. I'm at a comfortable 102% Accuracy and 74% Surge (I use 1 Surge Augment), and I can claim first hand that i've Annihilate and 3rd hit-Ravage crit BM Sorcs for over 5k each. That is very sufficient in my books.

Power/Surge and Crit/Surge enhancements, with Expertise, do not exist within current Imperial-side Battlemaster gear. It only exists in the Republic Trooper BM blaster cannon. Unfortunately, the only way to obtain these enhancements is from War Hero gear (for PVP purposes obviously).

I nabbed the vindi saber. I wanted the Power it offered, as the guy above who mentioned crit-stacked War Hero gear is bang on. Also it offered more Endurance (it uses the heavy Endurance enhancement) which is always nice for PVP. I basically traded Crit for Bonus Damage and Health.

About a week ago, I was in a Civil War match and ping-ponging between Snow-Mid to defend as needed. I answered a Snow Inc x1 call, just in case there were stealth, and when I got there my teammate was at about 60% HP and the enemy 15%. I quickly finished him off, nabbed enough Fury to pop a Pred and headed back to Mid. I got a tell a minute later saying that i'm an *** and I should have let him finish off the enemy for his solo kill medal. The next time I saw a Snow Inc call, I ran over and noticed that it was a Sentinel this time. Same health percentages. I stopped and watched like he asked me to. The Sentinel popped his bubble, health pack, cycled his defensive cooldowns around his Obfuscate, and managed to finish off my teammate and start capping. I gave him a pat on the back and said "GJ", then finished him off before he could cap and waited for my teammate to shuttle back to Snow before I returned to Mid. About a minute later I got an angry tell asking why I didn't step in and help him. The grass is always greener.

Allowing 8-man queues in normal warzones would pretty much kill solo queueing. 8-man queueing should remain as Ranked only. I know it sucks to carry 4 scrubs with your premade, but lets face it, it'll give us something to blame loses on.

"DPS who aren't gearing properly". I'm really confused as to what you mean by this. You're saying that DPS make the mistake of gearing for survivability over damage? How the hell are we doing this? By using Expertise? Sorry to break it to you, but Expertise is the best way to boost your damage done. You could delete your entire thread and instead say, "A well balanced team, coordination, and proper gearing/spec'ing leads to victory". Say it ain't so.

You're missing the point Houdii. If you're wearing full BM, than you're sitting at 65% surge. Replace the Boot and Leg enhancements with Power/Surge, and you're at 73% Surge. After that point, swapping out any other enhancements or mods is actually wasting stats, because you only have 2 Enhancements to chose from: either Crit/Surge or Power/Surge, and to gain the remaining 2% Surge would be an utter waste of 60-80 stat points. There is not a single Enhancement after this point that will yield a greater DMG return than Accuracy/Power. At this point, Accuracy/Power becomes the best Enhancement, which BM is loaded with, so swapping out anything else for non-expertise Mods/Enhancements will be a damage loss. You also have to remember the damage reduction component to Expertise. 18% damage reduction with 1283 Expertise is nothing to shake a stick at. I'm afraid your system of using PVE mods and enhancements in all your gear isn't the best way anymore. Whats the point in doing 5% more damage if you're taking 10% more damage from everyone who's properly wearing full Expertise gear? You're just hurting yourself in the end. Not to mention, Accuracy is also a DPS stat believe it or not. If you're getting Ravage hits or Annihilate or Massacre or Gore parried, guess what, all those nice pretty PVE mods/enhancements mean nothing. Accuracy at or even slightly above 100% is quite healthy, especially against Sorcs/Sages who carry 10% defense baseline.

Stat itemization on full BM really isn't too horrible. You can wear full BM and then swap out the boots and leg enhancements with the old power/surge enhancements that we used to use. At that point you're sitting at a comfortable accuracy amount (I personally hate dropping below 100% physical accuracy, even as Annihilation, wiffing Annihilates and Ruptures are devastating), surge capped at 73-74%, and have roughly 320ish power and crit rating. To be honest, you could have a lot worse. You're also maintaining max expertise, minus 50 (which is about .6% damage, .3% DR, etc. by that point. That exact gear set would work well with either Annihilation or Carnage, but it may be a tad accuracy heavy for Rage. Once you start ripping out any more mods or enhancements passed just 1 or 2, your really starting to lose that needed survivability and probably not gaining enough damage to outweigh the loss of expertise. To be honest, once you're surge capped you really don't have many good choices for Enhancements. Crit/Surge is a waste of surge, Power/Surge the same, your only other choices are Accuracy/Crit and Accuracy/Power, which BM is loaded with. BM isn't as horrible as people make it out to be, provided you do only the above modifications to boots/legs and use the entire set. Though, once you pick up your War Hero weapons, you can swap the old BM weapons enhancements over to your boots and legs to maintain max expertise and still be surge capped (WH weapons both have surge). That's the point i'm at now.

When I see people in full orange gear, I usually tell them to immediately leave the warzone and return only when they have a minimum of full Recruit gear. I then proceed to use him as bait for the rest of the warzone.

You're complaining about RAGE Marauders? Rofl.

Yea, but Marauders can buy the BM weapon and rip the enhancement out of it. Though with the cost of it, you might be better off buying War Hero gear (which comes with considerable amounts of Surge).

This. Ancard, the reason you had so much fun before is because healers were extremely difficult to take down. On my server, in pre-1.2, warzones became a game of who had the better (or more) healers. They desperately needed to be toned down. A healer that can stand alone and tank a DPS indefinitely was not an ideal PVP system. Healers are meant to be powerful when they are supported, not immortal. They are meant to increase the survivability of their team mates, not turn the battle into a 4-minute session of bashing your head against brick walls, where whoever kills a healer first wins the rest of the war. This is what 1.1.5 became for 80% of the games on my server. http://i.imgur.com/HXGJI.jpg No thanks.

/thread

/facepalm See you in Rateds.

Then you obviously play against complete morons. Or, more obviously, you're exaggerating for the sake of exaggerating. The people in this thread who are thumping their chest and saying they never have to use cooldowns in 1v1 are hilarious. Yes, if I walk up to a Recruit-geared Sorc, I probably won't have to use anything important to win. But when i'm going up against an Assassin, Concealment Operative or another Marauder that is rotating his cooldowns properly, who is equally geared and equally skilled as me, he will rip my face off and laugh at me for not using cooldowns. Just as I would laugh at any one of you that decided to take me on 1v1 without cooldowns. I would destroy you every single time. But you didn't mean that did you? You meant only in certain scenario's, against certain classes, with certain gear types, with certain player skill levels, in which you don't have to use cooldowns, right? Stop being tards and arguing for the sake of arguing. Anyone with a top-end skill set and equal gear would dance over your corpse.

You shouldn't, especially as Annihilation. Unless you're surrounded by 4+ enemy players, Smash is an utter waste of 3 rage. Don't sit there and say, "But i'm surrounded by 4 enemies all the time!", cause you're not. The only way you use Smash "all the time" is if you're blowing it on 1 or 2 targets, in which case I might as well leave you to your delusions of grandeur. I can guarantee you, beyond a shadow of a doubt, that moving the 2 points into Ravager will yield a larger DPS increase than Decimate across the length of a Warzone, even if you're just using the first 2 hits of Ravage (as most Anni spec'd Marauders should, since we have no active armor pen).

This is a perfect example of why the current rewards system is utterly broken. Novare Coast. Queued with a buddy. Basically battled for South the entire time, with a quick rush to West to see if we could ninja it. Our team was just getting dominated. I'm a Marauder, so we have some difficulty in obtaining medals in a slaughter-fest. I am also one of the better burst AC's, so I rarely sit and defend. Here was what i was rewarded with after my warzone. http://i.imgur.com/n9rQH.jpg Thanks Bioware. I'd really like that 15 minutes of my life back (queue time, start time, play time, zoning time).

LOL. Yeah ok. I would utterly destroy you if you used none of your cooldowns. It's more like I would come out of it with 75% health after I just finished killing you with a single Gore - Ravage - Force Scream combo. A Marauders performance is utterly dependent on their cooldowns.

Watch out for the Sarcasmbulance. Though the OP is bang on. They are penalizing half of the people that enter warzones (the half that lose) with extremely low Valor/Commendation gains. I was in a Huttball for 13 Minutes, (almost a full game), we lost 6-2, I finished with 9 medals, and I walked away with less than half the commendations and valor that the winning team did. They said themselves: I didn't give up hope. I played my *** off and was the deciding factor in those 2 goals we barely managed to score, as our team was getting utterly dominated. We played our hearts out and were rewarded with next to nothing. It's your system that is flawed. I wonder how much testing Bioware even did on the PTR for 1.2. They obviously had to have seen the gain rates for losing. Did they just think that it was O.K. as is? How could they think it was O.K.? If Bioware fired every person who has made dumb-as-**** decisions since launch, they'd be through half their staff by now.

I prefer lots more as Carnage. Like 105%'ish. When my roots miss, **** goes bad. Sorcs have innate 10% defense chance, and sitting at 95% Acc, that's a 15% chance for my stuff to get parried. I want to minimize that as much as possible. They reworked Accuracy to make it better for us. 300 Accuracy rating = 10%, that will get you to 100% by itself. If you're Carnage, you're probably running the 3% talent, so all you need is another 80ish and you're at 105%. I'm using full BM, original mods, except for 2 Enhancements that i've taken out for the 23End/34Power/48Surge Enhancements. That puts me at 107% Acc, 400 Power rating, 300 crit rating, and 240 Surge rating. It's very nice in huttball, my roots never miss unless they are running defensive cooldowns, and i'm still hitting like a truck.

Lackluster and the worst class in the game, but only if you're utterly horrible at said game. I love how people haven't noticed the complete lack of Marauder changes from December to the end of March. Then when we get 15% damage boost to Ravage and quality of life changes on utility abilities, we're suddenly the god of SWTOR. I love all the FOTM Marauders who have rerolled and are playing warzones in full Recruit gear. When they are on my team, I do my best to not rage and grind me teeth. When they are on the other team, I go out of my way to completely and utterly humiliate them in every possible way. Scrubs, go back to your Sorcs. You can tell they've shelved their Sorc when they mash UR at full HP to Pred through 1 fire trap.

Most of my games have been with premades and i'm constantly on objectives instead of flexing my DPS muscles. I usually don't exceed 300k because of it, but am usually sitting with 14+ medals by the end. Though there have been a couple Voidstar stalemates today that yielded 650k as Carnage (5/33/2). While i'm usually in the top 3, there are plenty of other classes that are just as high as I am. The PT, Merc and Assassins that I group with off and on pull just as much as I do, with everyone sitting in full BM. The Ravage damage increase by no means turns us into a god mode class. People who are aware of you and aware of your spec will always been watching for your ravage. I'm starting to have to become tricky with using Ravage - Scream combo's, as i'm noticing everyone saving their knockbacks and stuns/mez's for it instead of hitting them as soon as I pounce. It adds an even higher technical aspect to our class, so the people who excel make us seem like powerhouses, but the very same can be said for many other AC's at the moment.