Oh now you've done it. You know when you mention Redmarx or, Force forbid, quote his constructive post about issues with 1.2, the thread will not just get locked down but erased from all existance! Are you mad! I better finish this post here or the thread will be gone before I'm done typing.

The best you can do, in your position, is invest in a full set of Recruit gear and band together with three other people in a premade. Of course ideally people with great gear and skills, but really anyone with half a clue and some Recruit gear would be better than solo queuing. Then play some WZs. You definitely won't win every time, but you'll win more often and have more fun since you'll be in with friends. Oh and don't worry about the 5 seconds thing - that's happening to everyone to a greater or lesser degree because of the Expertise changes.

Premades may have a lot to do with it. If you roll in a 4 man premade you'll find, even if you aren't hugely skilled or in the best gear, with just a little basic communication and coordination, you'll win way more games than you would solo queuing. Not all of them, but more of them at least. So it could be you're solo queuing at the times you play and a lot of people on the opposing faction are in premades, so (at least) 50% of your opponents in a match are somewhat organised and know what they're doing. Sure they may have some bads in there too, but only a maximum of 4.

Ah yes quite right, this'll be the one you mentioned: http://www.swtor.com/community/showthread.php?t=399000 I still think they could have been clearer about it. He does say the set bonus from WH gear moves with the armoring, but doesn't specifically say that won't happen with older gear. I haven't personally even tried to move any mods around myself, but evidentally plenty of people have and found out (to their cost) they can't keep the PvP set bonus with anything other than WH. So it would have been helpful for them if this was made very clear or, even better, older gear had its set bonus moved from the shell to the armoring.

Haha, good call! Wait, maybe everyone's planning to use their second spec purely for duels. How do YOU know?

The patch notes mention: They don't clarify which armorings do have the set bonus attached and which don't though. For that you need to dig out an obscure post from the PTS forums which, hmm, kinda clarifies it: http://www.swtor.com/community/showthread.php?p=3512899#edit3512899 Really though you could take that post to mean that "new" gear includes the newly itemised BM gear that came out with 1.2. But that's not the case. Long story short - you can only move the armoring from WH gear (or the new PvE stuff) and have the set bonus go with it. Otherwise - whether it's old or new BM gear or earlier - don't bother.

Yeah I'm pretty sure you can too, although I haven't tried it yet either. I'm sure I read you only need the shell of the old BM piece to trade in for WH. So you can take all the mods out and then do it.

Yep. The thing is there's no reason for them not to leave, and in fact in this patch Bioware just gave them more incentive to leave rather than more incentive to stay. I don't know what else they expected to happen.

Well, prior to 1.2, I would have said healers were slightly overpowered, tanks were okay, and dps varied but some could use a small boost. Now, due only to expertise changes, we have: Healers got hammered (once by the healing nerf, and again by the damage reduction nerf), tanks got worse (dps went up, damage reduction didn't go up as much), and dps got much stronger (as well as easier to kill, like everyone else). Basically Bioware have overcompensated and also made everyone die way too fast. It's not an improvement.

You can do that, but you'll only get to keep the set bonus if the armoring came from WH gear.

I'm guessing then that it's 5 comms per medal (max of 8 medals count), and another +20 for winning. So 60 sounds like the new max no matter what you do. Edit: Ah never mind then. So 40 (max) for medals, plus whatever variable amount for winning depending on the WZ?

Actually - yeah. After having done several WZs now and looking at the % differences, something definitely seems off. As a tank I'm dying way, way faster than before. As has been said it feels more like that 19% difference rather than just 3-5%, as if you're not even getting the DR at all, but that can't be right. I dunno what's up.

Check out the tooltip on Expertise: Everyone is dealing more damage, reducing damage less, and healers are healing people for less. So yep - everyone is dying much faster as a result. Seems that's what Bioware wants.

You're right, but it'd be nice if someone else on the team still went healer though right? Shame my main is a tank. With full tank gear. I know that wasn't optimal before, but it was entirely playable. I really (used to, pre 1.2) like playing as a full tank in PvP. No way I'm regrinding full BM DPS gear though, but I guess there's always the orange stuff.

From the summit post linked on the last page though, it implies that these buffs will apply in WZs. Of course you'd expect one of every class buff at the start of the WZ, but I'm assuming people are talking more about when you respawn solo and that kind of thing. It still makes a difference to have players coming in missing three class buffs because they didn't want to level three alts to make their main better.

Has it been stated somewhere that 1.2 is out next week though? I haven't seen a post about that, and while I'm not on the PTS it doesn't sound like things are ready for live on the 3rd. Maybe the week after.

That's fine that Bioware want us to try out the other classes and level up alts, keep playing the game and seeing the rest of their content. But the legacy buffs should all be convenience things. Something like having the self-buff from all four classes definitely makes a difference in PvP, and especially so with rated WZs coming up. Sure you'll get them all at the start, but if you die and spawn by yourself it's a different matter. So (assuming this does apply to WZs) they're kinda requiring people to level up three alts for a while if they want to have the best stats possible, and I thought the idea was to move away from requiring PvE for PvP.

No, everyone doesn't have the same chance of being on a similar team. If you're part of a premade you've got a 100% chance of being in a team with at least 4 premade members. If you're queuing solo, the chance will be less than that. Three people keeping stats is nowhere near enough to mean anything statistically. Even if your 18% figure was true across all republic solo queuers, you'd then need to compare that with empire solo queuers and see if they're doing any better. Or if it's just that premades are way more likely to win, which everyone knows already.

Well this is regarding Rakata gear, but I'd hope the same applies for BM: Source: http://www.swtor.com/community/showthread.php?p=3534712#edit3534712

Haha yeah looking at the figures the monkeys theory seems strong. But Bioware knows much more about how this will all fit together than I do I'd hope, so it could well be the stat allocations for top tier gear make good sense in 1.2 with various changes and whatnot. Err, maybe.

Yeah that'd be nice. (Edit: at least for pulls, charge - not so bad) Also agree that roots (and snares when talented to 100%, same thing really) should add a little resolve.

Thanks for the info and images. Kinda weird what they're doing with some of the sets. For example my own (Supercommando), as you point out, they dump Aim at one tier only to give it back at the next while losing a ton of Acc, and meanwhile play about with shield/absorb/defense between tiers, all for no obvious reason. You actually lose a little End going to WL, and while you gain 99 Exp and a good amount of Shield/Absorb the former is pretty minimal benefit at that level, and the latter two are of limited use in PvP anyway. Hmph.

Great. Thanks very much for the assessment - that's exactly what I was looking for, and I'd agree then that it's excellent on its own but not worth the reach to get there, at least for me. Likewise though I'm not sure the deeper skills in Assault Specialist would suit my playstyle so well. But it's really good to hear everyone's opinions on the various builds. Still some tweaking required for me I think.

So okay, I haven't actually tested out Hold The Line before (always been too deep shield spec), but the tooltip says "Grants 8 seconds of immunity from all movement-impairing effects, knockdowns and physics and increases movement speed by 30%.". So I took that to mean all snares/roots/knockdowns and knockbacks/pulls (that's the "physics" part), but I guess I'm thinking it's better than it is. All that AND a sprint. So what does it not work against? I'm very unlikely to give up Storm for it anyway, but curious all the same.

I'm using this 28-13-0 spec right now, but with the change to DoTs not affecting node caps in the next patch I'd be interested in dropping Gut if there's anything particularly good to take instead of it. I'd agree that there are more useful talents at the bottom of the Tactics tree than Assault Specialist for me, but I could spare a few points. Those would usually go into Heavy Stock in most builds I guess? Soldier's Endurance really isn't great per point, but every bit of Endurance helps.