This game, unlike WoW was designed day one to facilitate this type of balance. In WoW for instance you had all utility grouped up in one class, all CC grouped up in another class, etc. Made it notoriously difficult to balance. The classes in this game are "modeled" and mirrored in multiple places to make balance and comparisons more apples to apples. In short, I don't find team deathmatch to be a "step backwards" and I don't believe the types of issues here will be nearly as severe as WoW.

Carnage > Rage for skirmish PVP IMHO. Roots, roots, more roots.

If you're incredibly bad maybe. Arsenal merc will be just fine for arena. Electronet is great at breaking a healer - combine it with knockbacks and burst DPS = win. The whole assumption that a merc will be awful because of interrupts is very short sighted and depends on the style of PVP that they implement. If it is traditional "kill the other team" arena coordination will overcome this particular issue because the objective will be to control the enemy team, burst down the healer, then mitigate and focus down the DPS and both can achieve that with appropriate peels and have other assets that render them useful in this setting. Example - sorcs have immunity CD - very powerful in this setting because it precludes an instant burst beat down on them while they are acting as heals and gives them breathing room. Mercs have electronet which is insanely useful for dealing with ops healers because it offsets their hots and snares. If it's a real warzone, like king of the hill for 15 minutes but with only 4 players, or team deathmatch over 15 minutes, then the fact that they can be interrupted factors in more but is also useful for baiting - while a melee is on that merc he's not on your healer and while he's on the madness sorc he's not on your concealment op. Etc.

Did they say stealth is out? Because if not wouldn't scrapper/conceal op be one of the best choices? Can get into stealth, get healed while stealthed, open back up with lag...

Pull/Harpoon. Leap. Roots. Etc. The 1st door is impossible if the teams are decent on both sides. The 2nd door is seriously impossible. Need to add some fire pits.

Adding bold doesn't make it true. There's a lot of factors that come into winning a fight and when people fight with equal gear, you're not going to get a 50/50 distribution on who beats who (even with the same spec/class). The more skilled person is going to win consistently. So saying the only way you can become better is by getting better gear is wrong. I'm going to win almost all my fights because people think like you do, whereas I actually work on being better at the game rather than grinding out gear. To give you an example, I've played every AC to 50/55, played every spec, so that I know them all and know how to deal with them. That will make me flat out better at PVP than someone who doesn't do that. Gear has nothing to do with that. And if a class/spec consistently beats me I'm going to play that class/spec and see how people deal with it. This is how you become better at the game and a better PVP'er and this has nothing to do with an artificial grind. This, practice and metagame/mechanical knowledge is what drives real player skill. What you're looking for is a cookie/advantage for "trying your best" for longer than other people. Sorry but no.

There's lots of PVP progressions in various games that don't include gear and lots of progressions that involve gear that don't involve PVP. PVP is about player/human skill, not a cookie you get for playing longer. Almost every other game gets this right including a large number of 'MMO' style games. They make a new Halo every year because they *can* - people played Quake2 and other games for years and years without needing to switch because they were engaging on their own merits. I've yet to see any kind of argument that driving people to gain better gear *improves* PVP engagement. If anything it keeps people from bothering with it.

Then stop PVP'ing. I don't want people who are there for the comms on my team. They're almost always bad. PVE -> that way. I want people who are there for the sport. I don't even notice I have comms until I start getting the 'you're almost full' message. Fun and victory are the incentives. If that's not good enough then you shouldn't be playing PVP - you're hurting your team.

What are you talking about? Bolster evens the playing field between people who only run one toon or grind lots of hours for PVP and those whom don't. It has nothing to do with the *quality* of the match. A match where everyone heals and guards is boring, no objective, training dummy spam to see who ends at the highest DPS/HPS. The two are unrelated. Go back to yelling lightning bolt with your larp buddies and stay off the PVP board - it's clear you don't get it.

Yup, notice the lack of responses to my post on "what were you doing when you were winning that was more important than making sure you didn't lose your pylon?" 7 people thought scoreboard padding > defense - but clearly solo defense dude who made a silly mistake should quit PVP.

Fixed your post.

QFT. /Thread Picture of some exciting post-2.0 PVP.

To you maybe, not to the rest of us. To the rest of us PVP is about player skill and all forms of grind and 'seniority advantages' are bad. When the game first came out and you had champ gear + bm gear bags that were luck driven and required a huge grind, once you got that gear you UTTERLY DOMINATED everyone else. That's not fun for me - well - it was fun for like 2 days. Then it became boring. You also were stuck with your single toon because the grind made having alts impossible. This really exacerbates the "buff/nerf" cycle and is generally a bad thing. There's also no "grading" or "leagues" in PVP. When you ding 50 (55 now) you're in it with the big boys. It'd be like going right into NiM S&V with ranking gear. Getting obliterated all day long is a basic barrier to entry that keeps people out of PVP. All these reasons and more are why bolster exists and it's a good thing. Get over the fact that you're not as good as you thought you were and focus on why you're losing rather than asking to get your grind advantage back. PVP'ers adapt. PVP is about measuring yourself against others and part of that is the ability to understand how the mechanics work and use them to your advantage. Grinding gives you artificial power and it's really just a waste of time. Time that could be spent having more competitive games. I don't want this game to be my job, I just want to enjoy it while I'm playing it and so regardless of changes to bolster I'm going to min/max within my ability to do so and come out on top to the extent I can. But I'm not looking for a system where I win by virtue of my DPS on the leaderboard - use "training dummies" if that's all you care about. And FWIW - gear being a reward from PVP is part of why the baddies who don't give a **** are there. I'd love it if you had a PVP set that worked in PVP and did absolutely nothing in PVE...this way those people would go away and get off my team.

QFT. I understand the 'VoIP instead of typing' mentality. It's way easier when you're in a premade. That being said, why was he solo defending anyway if you guys were winning easily? Do you not think the rest of the team shares the burden of the loss besides just this one guy? Let's evaluate your options here : Scenario : You're winning Ancient Hypgergates. Enemies options : Attack/take your pylon with stealth. Somehow overcome their difficulties in running orbs and killing at mid. Enemies best option : Almost always stealth pylon - because its far easier than fundamentally fixing problems with the team, has the most to gain and the least to lose (1 death vs the option of taking that entire rounds worth of points). Your options : Increase offense to widen the gap. Increase defense to mitigate risk of losing your advantage. Your best option : Unless its very close, there's no reason to increase the offensive gap because the risk of losing the pylon is greater than the usefulness of widening the gap by some marginal amount. So the better question is, why was that dude solo guarding? It's because people wanted to earn better points on the leaderboard by being on the offense and not defense. There's no rational reason to solo guard when you're winning the game. There's certain responsibilities you take on when you solo guard sure - but there's also a larger team who is still ultimately responsible for defense who needs to take a break from head smashing once in a while - look at what the enemy will likely do - and act accordingly - even if that hurts their attempts at top dam eva.

Good catch. Looks to me like fail multi-threading code. I guess avoiding synchronization is one way to "improve performance" lol.

I'd like to see this fixed as well but claiming it breaks the state of PVP is slightly melodramatic don't you think?

I brought this up months ago when 2.0 first came out on a thread about ranked wz teams and was told engineer sniper is awful for rateds by nubs who didn't understand the implication of an instant 15k+ AOE burst every 20 seconds added to all the other massive AOE damage engineer does. Fact I seem to recall people telling me MM was just sooooo much better.

This part is confusing me. Scrapper DPS is probably the best single target PVP DPS in the game right now. And yes, better than deception sin because they are impossible to kite. DF DPS is the highest AOE DoT pressure in the game. If they're not welcome to the ranked teams you hang out with its because their comp won't allow it not because the class is broken.

People who think DF is bad for ops are still in a 1.7 mindset. DF - you get a speed buff on blaster whip, so you can run in, whip, step back. You also get a free heal on roll, and baseline kolto pack is much better than before and great for self healing if needed. The only thing scoundrel DPS really under-perform is in quickly clearly trash packs because their AOE burst is kinda limited regardless of which spec you go. That being said when the enemy starts dropping and you're getting upper hands off dot kb's your DPS isn't terrible either even in that scenario as long as you spread your dots first. The biggest issue scoundrels had pre-2.0 was the lack of a gap closer - making their loss of damage while moving incredibly huge (consider eternity vault - you're running from Soa to the traps to Soa...). The roll cures that problem and what you're left with is survivability - which honestly they're just fine. The only melee DPS outperforming them is sentinel, by design, because of no off-heals and stealth rez - both of which bring more to the table than an extra 70dps.

A scoundrel/operative should win any 1vs1 duel assuming they are very good. A scrapper for instance should easily take out a watchman sentinel thanks to the free cleanse on roll. A healer is even more OP though a slower fight. Despite what people say, I've found deception assassins tough but certainly not unbeatable 1vs1 as a scrapper. The key is just to use your roll to create gap and kite them during resilience.

Then I guess you're better somehow than the top rated teams on my server. Apparently they don't know what they're doing but somehow you do. Series of shots/speed shot is completely negated by dodge, which kills the burst off contingency charge->speed shot. Dodge entirely dodges blade rush, dispatch and precision strike and even the root from leap and master strike. Vigilance is a joke. Master strike is completely negated by dodge and the burns are physical so you can cleanse them. Even if you're doing full DPS by yourself, unless you're standing against a wall eating rolls from an engineer sniper, your HPS is higher with no channeled heals besides kolto pack (which you can start casting after a cloak to prevent an interrupt thanks to latency issues in this game) than their DPS is. You need two people focusing you, at least, and depending on if the scoundrel is cybertech or not he has 3-4 stuns he can use to make sure he can outheal you. That's not including taunts, peels, guards and cross healing. I just think you're either full of it when you say you're routinely soloing op healers easily or you have very selective memory and are discounting all the times you failed to do so.

You do understand that the actual output of a heal is based on factors like your level, bonus healing, PVP trauma, expertise of your target, etc? There have been a number of buffs to scoundrel heals. They got a direct permanent regen boost for 2.0 so that they wouldn't have to keep popping pugnacity. The ratio of bonus healing to HP has also changed drastically, plus cost reductions on SRMP, plus improvements to alacrity, plus reduction of crit across the board, etc. Claiming none of these things could possibly impact the balance of the game just shows you don't understand how those numbers that roll across the screen when you heal people come about.

You're so full of garbage its coming out of your ears. Apparently I'm godly powerful while playing my healing scoundrel and somehow all my skill vanishes playing a PT pyro. You're not good and your posts make me question if you even understand the game, so stop trying to label the success of operative healers now suddenly with you suddenly learning to play. Sometimes when a class does well its really because the class itself is good. Not because somehow your own skill improved. No one is on here saying 'kweasea is OP, he needs to get toned down', they're talking from experience of hundreds of warzones across the various servers, from fighting against and playing as this spec. When I play scoundrel heals, it doesn't matter how many other healers are in the match, I"m going to double the top DPS in HPS and likely have zero or a very small number of deaths. This is the same when I fight the premades from the best guilds on the server or random PUGs. That's not become somehow 2.0 turned me into god with the class, it's because its over powered. It's so overpowered that when I play scoundrel DPS - even finishing as TOP DPS, people make me feel guilty that I'm "selfish" for not playing as heals. That's how ridiculously broken this spec is right now.

That explains why you don't know what you're talking about.

Pretty epic. I wonder how you'd even beat that. You can't heal through it. You can't catch them. You can't cleanse it (except with like, dodge and etc). I hit the dummy once with just dots to see how well it did and in partisan its something like 600 dps for the two dots without weakening - which isn't bad.