The OP offers some good advice, but good advice sometimes isn't enough even when followed. Like on PoT5, I still see Repub teams who can't pull a full team together throughout an entire match. If you are a 7 v 8, odds are you simply aren't going to carry the day regardless of how well you coordinate. Then thee is the issue of gear. Yet another problem I see more on the Repub side of the house than the Imps. An already weak team is made weaker because people bring in PVE gear that is above what can be properly bolstered. The worse part of that is many simply don't care. They aren't in it for the PVP, they are in it to do a daily or meet a requirement to gain their companion. Educating them is pointless because they don't PVP enough to justify gaining the gear. And then you just have the simply team make up. And this I see more of a problem on the Imp side than I do Repub, but that is more because the Imps far outnumber the Repubs on PoT5 by quite a bit. But the trend I'm seeing is on a 16 man match, at least 6 - 8 of the players will be playing some type of Inquisitor class with the majority being Sorcs. You will then have about 3 tanks, 2 operatives, and the rest being a mesh of everything else. The point is if you are facing the team where half the opposing team is sorcs, you might as well right that one off as a lost. They simply have too many escapes and their survivability is out the roof. And the sad thing is they simply don't need all of those abilities in PVE. At least not any more. If there were but one or two on a team at most, it probably wouldn't matter. But when you face a half a team of sorcs, it matters a lot. They simply got too much flexibility in PVP.

This is what I have noticed in pvp ... In 4 v 4, if you have one team with 2 healers and one team with one, the team with two healers is probably going to lose. Why? Because they lack the DPS to take out a single target when one healer is generally good enough to hold 2 DPS off. In a 4 v 4, if you have one team with three healers and the other team with just one, the three healer team is going to win almost every time. Why? Because no three dps is going to shut down 3 healers. Whoever they are targeting is probably going to receive more healing than the 3 DPS can dish out. Add three healers to a 8 v 8 and you might as well give it up. Ain't nobody dying on that team. They are very strong defense wise, and if they manage to take the lead, there is no taking it back from them.

Reasonable question to ask. The answer rather simple. Some legacy items are only per character if you use credits. Whereas if you use CC, they become legacy bound. For example, character storage can be purchased with credits or CC. But if you use credits, the extra storage is just for the character you spent the credits on. But if you chose to select CC to buy the storage, that storage is now granted to all characters in your legacy.

If credits are what you are concerned about, the best credit generation I think in game right now is the weekly heroics that you can pick up from the terminal at fleet. Each turn in gives you 18k and many have a secondary objective that can net you another 12k - 18k. Some are silly quick. Others take a considerable amount of time to complete. But these longer ones vary between factions. Do these will also net you resource containers which you will need when you complete the first nine chapters in the latest expansion. As to how much XP these generate, I have no idea. I don't have any characters I'm playing that would gain XP from them. But I would imagine that these are probably on the same level as the operations.

Just my two cents ... When we first come across the Gravestone she is buried up to the axles in swamp water and mud and can't even get in the air by her own power. She also has holes in the sides and ceiling plus has more gunk and critter eggs and body waste than I care to think about in her inners. To think she did LS and didn't fall apart is a small miracle. So what do I think, you let the Alliance clean up this wreck, get it "ship shape", and when they have their back turn take it for a joy ride and neglect to bring it back. Still quite a bit of fighting to do before we come to the end of this story. So who says the Gravestone still isn't going to end up in our hands?

I think you are missing the point Skaara. Can you CC the mobs so that they don't get to you and then use their stuns? Sure you can. But that just drags out the fight longer to. Because you either have to wait for your stun (and in some classes your mezz to go off cooldown) or you use your other CC to keep the distance. But depending on the mob class, they can leap back on you as soon as you knock them off. So either take the stun and stay out of the fight for 4 seconds. Or you use your CC, get off your rotation and still drag out the fight for about 4 seconds. Either way all those fights are going to play out the same way. And it is just silly. Being a level 65 in +208 gear being down graded to a level where I'm still above the mob level for the heroic I'm running. Weak mobs still go down in one shot or from one AOE, silvers two - three shots, and your average gold is down between 3 - 5. The only reason the fight even took 10 seconds is because you get knocked down on your $#% for 4 seconds of it. And then to face the same fight dynamic 20, 30, 40 or more times it just gets old quick. It is not that it is difficult. It is just repetitive on content that shouldn't be repetitive. It is like the Revan fight on Yavin 4. Where you spend 3/4 of the fight stunned, knockback, or otherwise emcompacitated. All you want to do is run through your rotation and kill crap but just as you are about to unload, you get taken out of the fight for a few seconds. Truth be told, a high level DPS companion could probably run the darn heroic for you.

There are a few weekly heroics I just refuse to do. Not because they are difficult (they aren't) but because I know with every single fight, I know I'm going to get stunned or choked by melee. It gets a little ridiculous to have to kill 30 or so melee NPCs and you end up taking a stun with every fight. That's 30 stuns, choke holds, or knock backs in a fight that is about as challenging as washing your hair when you shower. It is just annoying. Other than the initial stun, the gold mob isn't surviving long enough to ever get around to doing a second one. All that stun did was break my rotation. And then of course if you are facing two gold elites of the same type, they both do the same stun at the exact same time. So to make an argument that a stun is enough to equal "difficult" is silly. That stun does nothing other than annoy me for breaking my rotation and allowing them to live an extra 4 seconds.

Not any more. By Feb, you won't even be able to give jetpacks away on the GTN.

For PVP, healing isn't even part of the consideration. It all comes down to survivability. The Merc / Mando has none. All they can do is use their over abundance of utilities and hope like crazy they can outheal the DPS they are receiving. Universally, it is known that merc / mandos have very weak survival skills. They lack an effective escape or target break ability. And generally speaking if you get hit with a back to back stun, you might as well give it up. Your dead. The merc / mando require range to stay alive. And to be honest, too many classes have ways to break the distance. Add in the poor stealth detection of the class, and the merc / mando has players on them before they can even have a hope of enabling their weak defenses and / or fighting back. If your goal is to PVP, merc / mando is the absolute worse classes to play. If you goal is to run as a healer in ops and other PVE type events, merc / mando is still the weakest of the three healers. Go with sorc. And if you don't believe anything I say, then look at the leadership boards. The lack of merc / mandos on those boards should speak volumes.

I'm currently testing whether power or critical is best for merc / mando. On my merc, I went full critical augment on my pvp gear. On my mando I went full power. My crit percentage is right at 40% on my merc. Going full power on my mando, I want to say crit is around 30%. To be honest, the performance numbers seem to be about the same but the kills are more likely to happen on my Merc. This is because the crits hit you hard and the healers don't have a chance to get that player's health to recover. Where as with power, the damage is about the same, but the healers have more time to recover a player's health because the crits hit less often and for less damage. You would think that if the critical numbers are higher on the Merc, that the over all DPS would be higher throughout the match. But the irony on that is that the more of a killing machine you become, the more likely it is you get some very unwanted attention. I have been in more than a few matches on my Merc where after a few minutes, the opposing team is on me hard. As a result I tend to die more often. Whereas with the Mando, the damage stays more regular and constant and you simply aren't viewed as big as a threat. You get more time to free cast on the power mando simply because you aren't hitting like a mac truck and the opposing team tends to focus on the biggest threats first.

On PoT5, the server is slowing dying. As a result, the Repub population is suffering on an Imp heavy server. Most matches I play on PoT5 are Imp v Imp now. If I do face a Repub team it is in 4 v 4. Or if it is an 8 v 8, their side is lacking a team mate or two. I literally had to give up PVP on Repub side. Between the long queue times, the missing players, and the players in PVE gear, it was just an act of futility. To be brutally honest, if I were to do 100 matches, 85 would likely be imp v imp. Of the 15 facing repubs 5 would be 4 v 4. The remaining 10 would be 8 v 8. And of those 10, only two might be a dead out fight. The other 8 have the repubs facing a losing fight either because of missing team mates, poor gear, facing a FOTM heavy team, or sadly all of the above.

People will consider me crazy, but I'll put my mando and merc against any class 1 v 1. Sure the healer classes may prove difficult to kill, but with off heals, those classes aren't going to be killing you either. It will end in a draw unless somebody's resource management gets mucked up. The problem with mando and merc ... is pvp is never about 1 v 1. It is about 1 v 2 or more. And when considering that, these two classes are the worse to play. They have no way to force a disengage that so many other classes have. And too many of these classes' utilities are intended for single target. In a 1 v 1, these classes can kite till the cows come home and probably win the match. But as soon as a second player comes into the equation, you can forget about it. These classes survival is probably less than 8 seconds.

Ranked 8 V 8 simply isn't the wonder drug I think a lot of people hope it will be. The biggest issue is still going to be FOTM. Doing reg pvp on PoT5, and there are some rounds you just can't get anything done. Half the team is sorcs with three healers and two tanks to boot. Between all the heals and guards, you can't kill anybody if you are opposing a team made up like this. Be on that team, and it is an easy victory regardless of what warzone you are playing. All those overly generous "oh #$%$" abilities complement too much in warzones. One immunity bubble is fine for example. But have three players with access to them defending nodes and that player can fold off an entire team for 20 - 30 seconds. I've played more than a few rounds where I will do everything I can to shut down a healer only to watch their health go back up faster than I can take it away. And throwing all of the heavy attacks at once tends to overheat my Merc and I just can't keep the DPS up long enough to kill a player who is already being over healed. And then of course this leads to win trading or potentially facing an entire team made up of a single guild.

Actually, I agree with this poster. If you were around back in release, then odds are you are running around in level 50 pvp gear that is going to get you in more trouble than it is worth. Skills were renamed and these gear sets became obsolete. So some of the set bonuses probably don't even work any more. If you are in PVE gear, this has changed quite a bit too. The green mods you can get at level 50 are probably better than the mod items you have in your gear. Plus some items like belts and bracers are now modifiable in pretty much all sets that are active in game now. My suggestion to you (if you wish to continue on this same character) is to buy a cheap legacy set from the GTN and modify the gear. (Sets now come in three separate crates upper, lower, and supplementary). Once you have all the pieces and wear them, the set is then added to your legacy. Unlock the item in your legacy with CC, and it is now available for free to all of your characters. Otherwise, start a new character and start fresh. Milk the starter planet for all it is worth. As soon as you hit level 10, queue up for pvp. Interact with the terminal in the warzone, get your daily quest plus receive your pvp ear piece, implants, and relics. This new option only came out since 4.0 release. Each week, don't neglect your weekly heroics. They can pay out quite in credits and XP and give you boxes which you will need when you finish the first 9 chapters of the expansion. There is a terminal at fleet in the inner circle. It will list all of the heroics you have access to.

After a long break, I have suggested in the past that you just start a new character versus replaying an old one. And to be honest, it really doesn't take that long to level now at all. I did a couple of characters after 4.0 came out. Just to see. But I can't stress this enough. You need to go into your legacy and unlock the options for XP gain. If you don't have the funds to do this, run your old character through the entry level heroics to get the money (more on this below). For example, on a starter planet, it is designed to be run by characters between the level of 1 - 10. I was level 17 by the time I left Korriban on my warrior. Just do every quest, and then throw in a couple of warzones. Even without the warzones, you should still be around level 15 if you do all the quests. But doing the warzones gives you an added advantage early. When you interact with the warzone terminal (either at fleet or in the PVP warzone), you will receive a level 10 ear piece, 2 implants, and two relics so that your character will bolster properly. This is a god send as these items generally are only available much later in the game (unless you buy them on the GTN or craft them). So even if you have few skills in your low teens in a warzone, doing one or two gives you instant levels when you play them in your low teens. The other point is that because you now out leveled the content, maintaining gear isn't so critical. All you have to do is make sure your level is above Maximum recommend character level for the planet you are on, and you should be able to easily complete most content with ease. Some other recommendations for you ... Most companions have a favorite companion gift sold by the fleet vendor. If you can figure what your companion loves, you can buy level 1 or level 2 gifts and burst your companion affection level way up. It takes I believe 195 level 1 gifts (that your companion loves) to reach level 15 affection. Sure you might think, but that is 39k credits I don't have that kind of funds. But those funds are easy to get. Go to the heroic kiosk at fleet (large machine in the inner circle) and do the heroics for the planets you have already completed. Each one generally rewards you with 18k credits. And many have secondary objectives which can reward you with between 12k - 18k. Hell, just do the heroics on the starter planet and you have more than earned enough money to buy those companion gifts. Plus you earn massive XP and you gain item boxes which you can use once you have finish the 9 chapters in the current expansion. Restarting on an old character can be a bit difficult and confusing. The game assumes a certain level of understanding when it comes to the skills you have. It also assumes things like companion levels and knowledge of their three basic design types (healer, DPS, or tank). The class story can also be a bit lacking because you have been away from it for so long that you have forgotten the specific details and you are detached from it.

You want my take on this? Use it to unlock things in your legacy that matter. More storage, rocket boost, XP gains, companion bonuses, etc. Once that is done, then unlock any items you have in your legacy so that all characters can use them. The absolute last thing I would spend any CC on is decorations and gear. These things you can spend credits on. It may be a whole lot of credits (depending on your server and the item you are interested in) but credits are easy to make in this game. Heck, you can make a small fortune each week just running the weekly heroics.

The problem isn't that a healer class can out heal a single DPS. The problem is when a healing class that can out heal a DPS player is three deep in a warzone with a tank or two thrown in the mix with guard. In those case, the tanks can pump out about as much dps as some of the strait out dps classes and unless your team is equally as deep in healer / tanks you might as well bash your head against the wall because you are not killing any body. To be honest, I am glad there isn't ranked 8 v 8. Because what you will end up with is 4 healers, two tanks, and two dps sorcs facing off against each other or cleaning the field of any group that isn't made up like that.

Here is my take on Healing ... Honestly, the problem isn't necessarily visible when a team has one healer. The problem though becomes extremely obvious once you have more than one healer on a team especially if they are sorc or sages. On PoT5, I have been in more than a few matches where one team will have three sorc healers. In those 8 v 8 matches, if they stay together, the opposing team isn't killing anybody. The five remaining DPS players are going to burn you down before you have a chance to do much of anything. Because if there is one trend that I see way to often in regs it is that one team will have all the healers and the other team will be left to starve. And at some point the losing team is just going to get tired of bagging their heads against the wall while the opposing team cleans house with ease. It is truly sad how it will play out. One team with an overabundance of healers averages 30 kills a piece and the opposing team with nothing but a few off healers can't even average 5 kills each. The problem in my opinion isn't with a class or healer output. The problem is that the team dynamic in warzones allow for teams to run with multiple healers. That is what the problem is. No 4 man group should be allowed more than one healer which means no 8 man group should ever have more than two.

It has. It reached that point a year ago I think. This game is surviving on the Star Wars name only. But being on PoT5, I see the effects of a dying server. I don't even play warzones on my Repub toons outside of prime time. The queues simply don't pop because of a very low repub population. And when they do, you don't have a full team. PvP on that server has become Imp Wars. Play a dozen PVP events in an evening and may be one will be Imp V Repub. But FOTM is killing PVP in this game. When you go into a Voidstar match and 6 out of the 8 players on a team are stealth, you already know how the match is going to end. Same goes if you have s dedicated healers on team. Heaven help the opposing team if they face three healers and a tank. They aren't killing anybody. They simply aren't going to have the DPS to burn somebody down. But with all of that said, the Devs simply don't care either. Their goal is to make money on CC and keeping solo players happy with story content. Unfortunately, I don't think in the grand scheme of things their story content is going to end well. There is absolutely no replay ability. The story for one class is the same for any other. That leads to burn out and a very annoyed player base that soon finds some other game to play.

Yes you do have all of that. And that is half of the problem. All those separate skills are used in very specific situations yet none of them are an effective "oh $%#" skill that so many other classes have while this class is completely devoid off. As for your comment about kitting ... It is hard to kit when you don't even see the hit coming. This class's stealth detection blows. Almost to the point of being non existent. And this class has to have and maintain range in order to "kite". Give this class a stealth detection the same range as a sage's earthquake, and they stand a chance. As the class is now, it has no way to effectively detect stealth (other than pure stupid luck) and they can used those skills to kite classes such as inquisitors, consulars, operatives, and smugglers who all have to be almost on top of you to stun you. This class's stealth detection suffers three critical problems. One, when you cast it, everyone can see the droids searching. Two, the area of search is quite small. Three, the CD is longer than the activation time so you always have a window between casts. And once more than one opposing team player is on you, it is over. All those skills are only useful if you still have the initiative - which sadly is hardly ever the case in 4 v 4. Once you are double stunned you are dead.

Prior to the last expansion, I went full Overkill (power) on my augments on my Gunnery Mando. At the time people were leaning more towards primary stat than power but the difference then was miniscule. I chose to go power simply because my instinct was that primary stat would max out before power did. And with the changes to the datacrons to mastery, I can't help but wonder if this focus to power is still the better choice now between the two. On my healer operative, I started to focus on alacrity augments, but it seems to take about 2 - 3 augments just to shave off a tenth of a second from the cast time. It just seems to me that speed just doesn't pay off. Go full augment set with alacrity and you won't even shave off half a second on a two second cast. That and damage (either base numbers or crit numbers will suffer.) As for going crit ... I haven't tried this on any class yet. But this is something I will say about it. I have noticed in some warzones that some classes like merc, mando, and sniper can still get massive hits on me even in full level 65 PVP gear. By massive I'm referring to hits in the 15k - 17k range. I am assuming this is a direct result of these players going full critical on their augments in full Tier 2. I'm thinking of doing full critical on my Merc just to give it a shot and see how it goes.

If anything it made the situation worse. I say this because, when you leap back, you are doing so in faith that the leap won't put you in even more trouble than you were in before leaping. This new skill has got to be the only skill where you can literally push yourself to your death by falling, or do nothing at all because you literally bump into an object directly behind you but out of view. The only time I even use this skill at all is when I'm doing a 1 v 1 fight. If you got more than one player on you, this skill is worthless unless you want to put two skills on CD. That being your group pushback, and immediately follow it with your leap back. And then odds are, somebody who was on you was behind you to begin with so pushing them off you and then leaping back only put you right back on top of them anyway. This skill is a joke. And a bad one at that. It might have a use if you are solo kitting in PVE, but it is pure garbage in PVP where it was intended as a buff to those two classes.

That actually is how the bug started. People would deliberately delay turning in quests until they popped in queue and out leveled the warzone they were in. It was supposed to be treated as an exploit and I had thought the Devs had taken steps to prevent this from happening. And maybe they did at one point. But the funny thing about designing games. With every patch and game expansion, you tend to fix one problem but potentially create a new one or recreate an old one. Odds are that is what happened in this case.

If in regs and playing a 4 v 4, I simply let it run its course. The match is over in just a couple of mins and your can requeue up for the next one. But in case where 8 v 8 matches are so lopsided, there I times I just give up. Pushing it serves no purpose. You won't increase your kill count, or DPS numbers likely won't go up enough to matter, and the opposing teams egos just get higher. And more often than not, it isn't that your play style is wrong. Or that you even have team mates with ineffective gear. More often than not it comes down to one team having more healers than the other. I have seem more than a few matches where one team has at least three healers (each pushing over a million points in healing) while the opposing team has a few off healers who can't hardly break 150k because they simply aren't designed to pump out massive healing and the team falls apart before their eyes. I'm all for group play and team up. But if a team has more than one player who is full healer spec, odds are not in the favor of the opposing team.

On some days, it just doesn't pay to even play warzones on PoT5. You can almost always tell when the match is going to go south by how the opposing team acts. If they stay together and bunched up, there is no killing anybody. Because they have more than 2 healers and any damage you do (even when you focus on a single target) gets negated with multiple heals and protection. I've seen more than a few matches where entire teams can't even average 5 kills and the opposition team has +20 each. And it always seems like one team is starved for healers and the other team has an over abundance. And when the match is over and you see what you faced, it is the same couple of classes. The more I play this game, the more I realize that PVP simply doesn't matter to the Dev team. Some abilities they have given classes make solo PVE play doable yet those same skills are way over the top when applied to PVP. Yet, they remain and worse just seem to get buffed even more over time. Mean while other classes (like Mando and Merc) suffer in PVP because they are so well designed for PVE. And lets face it. PVE game play is the only metrics that the Devs seem to care about. Performance in PVP isn't. They showed that is the way the care long ago when PVP in this game became so neglected. When somebody finally write the Obituary for SWTOR, PVP is not going to be one of its shining moments to hold up on the pedestal for everyone to admire. If anything, it will be used to explain why this game (with such a rich IP "intellectual property") has been in gradual decline for so long.