I didn't say lightning will be weak. I said you can shut it down outside of polarity shift, meaning shutting down its burst. So games with healers or healer/tanks, teams can slow it down without attacking it. You can't do that to it right now. If your team isn't killing the lightning sorc, you can't limit its damage without taunts. From my experience, you don't attack the lightning sorc first unless its on a team with sins and jugs, maybe operative or you have net. Even with net its dangerous going lightning first, especially if the team has a PT, marauder or sniper. So most games the lightning is free casting. With conducted fixed, now you can actually slow its output by not attacking it, so it gets bumped down the list. On a healer, stopping thundering blasts will be huge, because that's where the burst comes from to kill people. The only time a lightning has killed someone I'm healing through heals is from a thundering blast combo which I couldn't stop because of this bug. Stopping burst for 4 seconds plus cast time in a game where someone can die in 2 seconds is huge.

I never go out into the world and you can't use mounts in warzones/arenas, so don't care about the mounts. Cartel mounts look better anyways. I think I've used the rancor once. There are too many titles in the game to make any pvp title distinguishable. Besides showing titles just makes it harder for people to identify your name with your ops frames, meaning you'll be cleansed/healed/gripped/etc slower. The black/X crystals are ugly imo. Though black/white might be an exception? A nice armor set would have been best. The lite up versions of obroan was a disappointment. The only pvp rewards I've ever used are the weapons, because of the unique sounds.

If you have higher hps or dps (protection is a little different) in arena you are probably not very good. Unless you are playing a class without much utility. Good players are going to spend at least 1/5 of their globals using CC, cleansing and other things. And what about burst specs? Take a deception sin, because we're talking sins. He opens and doesn't blow reck, because whoever he is attacking pops all his defensives. So he just builds stacks and peels during those defensives, then unloads on the kill target without any defensives up and kills it instantly. DPS low, but outplayed situation and got a kill. High dps, dot classes can cost games. If someone is dotting everyone and the strat is kill X, CC the rest. Well no one can CC anything and then it just becomes a race and classes like mercs, snipers and even powertechs that die through freecasted heals and focus fire would go down. But that hatred sin has high dps or lethality op has high dps, because everything is grouped up for them. Say a sniper is trying to survive against 3 targets. He is attacking the kill target best he can, but ultimately he only has a limited amount of time before he dies. He stuns something. They trinket. He flashes, but because the sin on his team didn't stun the other target and whirlwind it, then root it off, but instead dotted both targets and didn't throw an off taunt after his aoe taunt and instead wastes a stun into a kill target powertech, the sniper dies. The sin is by far the weaker player, but will probably show up higher in a system like this. And what about people using their defensives poorly? I've seen this all the time. Powertech getting focused gets gripped back. Is the only one taking damage and only has one person on them while getting healed. Decides to pop shield and kolto for no reason. Dies when everything connects, because now doesn't have his defensives. Got a lot of damage out when he was alive, but it was meaningless damage, because it was into a juggernaut who just healed it back up. And as far as apm. Well tank jug comes out on top, because of riposte and so many little things off global. But APM is a bad indicator. If you're kiting around a box or line of sighting to get topped off or waiting for a cooldown before going back in, etc. You are seeing an APM drop. Unless you count movement keys. And if you count movement keys then great. I personally get bored and spam strafe and jump on instant casts, but i shouldn't be rewarded for doing that. As much as tank/healer/double dps mirror games feel like PvE. It's not PvE. PvP shouldn't just be about numbers. It should be dynamic. I would love to see other things tracked on the scoreboard. Time putting people in crowd control and amount of interrupts, cleanses. More interesting would be a % of interrupts I was in range of that I didn't land, casts i let get off around me, cleanses I missed or taunts I didn't hit. Wasted development though. The real reason this topic is coming up. 4v4 is bad. One player cannot impact a game enough with these limited classes when dealing with 7 others. The effective skill cap is too low/game is too easy to be effective. Healers for example practically cancel each other out, as long as both are using their healing abilities.

1) You get medals for guarding a node. The warzones with guarding are designed bad. They should remake them to not require a team to have people guarding. It's boring. 2) No. 3) Not a large enough playerbase. The bracket needs to be addressed, but its probably too late for that. A new player's first expression to pvp most of the time is in this bracket and its a pretty horrible experience. 4) This happens because someone is usually afk waiting for a queue to pop. Its a lack of playerbase and backflow. 5) Lockout won't work. Not a big enough playerbase. Just makes games take longer to pop. Especially 15 minutes. Someone disconnects or gets into a game against a premade with a team full of people in -2018 gear. They'll either sit afk or log off if they have to deal with a 15 minute deserter. 6) Good idea. Definately agree. 7) Another good idea. I think you can make warzone adrenals, but you have to buy the mats with warzone commendations and I think its cheaper just to buy the warzone adrenals with coms or close? Makes no sense. Warzone adrenals and medpacks should also be tradeable on the GTN, but frankly the whole idea of consumables and pvp shouldn't exist. It's bad on a number of levels. It homogenizes the classes and gives an advantage to people who pop them like crazy compared to those who don't. 8) Good idea.

When you turn on highlight buff/debuff, the icons of your buffs/debuffs have a yellow border.

Lightning works against bad players. Anyone good after the fix will throw the lightning sorc on focus and interrupt thundering blasts. Two good players and lightning is shut down outside of polarity shift without fake casting. It's too bad you can't outplay the rest of the damage other classes can do this same way. Game might actually be decent.

Taunts don't stack. You only want to taunt a healer if he's doing damage and if there is not going to be something better to taunt in the cooldown. edit: or if you are going to get sapped and its the only way to get into combat. It's situational from my experience. You have to learn to get a good read on the incoming damage. The best taunters have high awareness. Commando just popped reactive shield at 100% and you have guard on him. Probably don't need to waste AoE taunt here. Ven Jug Ravaging that sage (no fadeout) with relic procs and unstoppable up, definately blow a taunt. As for mechanically taunting well. You need to use the focus frame and you need to change your focus target a lot. Say three melee are attacking your guard target and you have to blow aoe taunt, but that aoe taunt can't reach that merc who is just about to finish casting tracer missile. That's where you want to have him preset to focus and focus taunt him.

Dying in a stun chain has nothing to do with crowd control. It is more a problem of inflated damage due to not having a tank on your team. Crowd control is very weak. Possibly the weakest it has ever been, because almost everyone plays aoe or dot specs and most classes either have multiple CC breaks/immunities or their break is reduced by 30 seconds. All mez CC aside from low slash comes with a long cooldown. This means that one person alone cannot off-CC chain someone for a long period of time without help from another person. The swtor playerbase is so bad at off CCing that using crowd control on an off target is usually a waste of a global. When you go into solo ranked. Usually someone will say kill X. But rarely if ever someone will say I'm CCing Y, you CC after first white bar etc. Rotate taunts or roots on Z. The playerbase is that bad that their only solution to say stopping someone from free casting is to have one player ride them, instead of being able to interrupt and CC that second target and still dps the main kill target or heal their teammates. As for cleansing CC. There are too many cover debuffs (from raid utility) to cleanse most crowd control. I barely ever miss a cleanse that I can get and I doubt I even average two cleanses an arena round. On the flip side I barely will ever get cleansed, even if pregame I say. X is going to CC me be ready to cleanse. That being said, I think I've only lost maybe two rounds because of CC chains on me in like 70 games.

They won't add a stopcasting bind. Few are even aware enough to understand this problem. http://www.swtor.com/community/showthread.php?t=773858 I post about this every time I come back to the game and it never happens. This is not exclusive to force barrier. Workarounds for thundering blast. Move 180 degrees from your target. It will cancel. Won't work in operative root, so not 100% reliable. Better workaround: Rebind ESC on your keyboard to a more accessible key. Spamming it though will break your target and pop up your main menu. Jumping won't work with barrier, because barrier doesn't go off when you're jumping. You'll die with your character's hands up in the animation, but it won't actually go off until you hit the ground. The jump animation takes about a second to land. It doesn't cancel cast while moving anyways. The fix for barrier. Useable midair and on all terrain. Sometimes it won't go off if you are standing on a rock and it should cancel all casts when you hit the button. This does not fix the overall problem though. Just be glad the game is so easy there isn't school lockout or fake casting. Just another reason why they need an in game macro system.

I'm 1900 in a few days of coming back to this game. Now it takes forever for queues to pop. I can't even tank my rating, because of the new rules. I go in hoping for loses. I would rather play lower, because there's barely a difference in skill between low rated players and high rated players and at least you get pops. Thinking 1700 is the sweet spot? Game state how I see it. Group Ranked dead. Solo Ranked worse. Most the playerbase not interested in ranked. Don't blame them. They need to first shrink the brackets. 4v4 requires too many players to queue. I also play WoW (R1 in MoP). WoW has cross server matches/grouping and like 100x the playerbase? probably more. 5v5 barely pop. But 3v3 and 2v2 are active even at 2800+. How can anyone believe that with swtor's tiny playerbase and no cross server capability that 4v4 would work? Let alone support an elo system. They have to adust how guard/tanks are designed or simply remove them for pvp, adjust damage and healing values (through expertise) and shift ranked into 3v3 or 2v2. They could introduce both 2v2 and 3v3 and just allow someone to queue for both simultaneously. They also need to make ranked factionless (if this is even possible) **** immersion. Secondly you need to force people into ranked with gear. Not ****** titles or rewards that don't mean anything. They need to get rid of the com trade-ins with the next tier of gear/season and introduce weekly ranked warzone com caps with a catch-up system. This has been a proven method of getting people to play ranked content. Pvpers log into WoW every week just to cap out. It keeps people playing and makes queues more active. Also you need to make bolster idiot proof. All non season pvp gear needs to be bolstered down to just under the low tier pvp set and expertise needs to be removed from gear and just given to everyone baseline. And for those that say. This isn't WoW. Don't remove or change tanks. Think of what someone has to go through to make a ranked team. They need to find 3 others and 3 separate roles. The tank is by far the hardest to find. MMO pvp works without a tank. The role can be trimmed from the pvp combat. Not to mention the damage/healing inflated values in ranked games that not only don't have a tank, but that tank is replaced by another dps. The above will never happen though. Game will never be good enough to attract actual good players. SWTOR pvp will always sit in the rat leagues of twitch. Eventually solo will die out on the 1 or 2 servers that it even pops on now and then ranked will be completely dead. It has honestly only lasted this long, because the die-hards only know swtor at least from a competitive pvp level.

Haven't played a tank in awhile. Logged on to do the weekly. One of the ways I guard swap is off acquire target's target. It seems bugged. It's picking up targets next to the target it should be picking up. At first I thought people were tabbing to other people to maybe predict the swap, but that clearly wasn't happening. Any other tank notice this? Targeting in general seems worse. Target Next friendly and Target Next Enemy isn't grabbing the targets they used to. It's skipping targets. Grabbing things not even on your screen. Did a patch mess this up?

lol no idea what you're talking about. This game is so much more homogenized than wow. Everyone basically has the same stun, interrupt, mez. Most classes share abilities. Aside from cover and the post level 50 talents, how many abilities are unique to their own class? Not many. 2v2 could work here. Could even be better than wow's current 2v2, because blizzard balances around 3v3. A healer in wow is supposed to have the tools to out heal 2 dps with decent peeling, because its designed around 3v3. Normally this can throw twos into an imbalance. Wow handles this with a progressive dampening that slowly makes healing weaker. It isn't perfect, but it's a lot better than the garbage arena you remember from BC. Swtor wouldn't even have to deal with this. A healer in this game cannot consistenly out heal two dps. PvP output numbers are based around guard. Dps can more frequently spike harder than healing. In swtor, double dps can win against healer/dps a lot easier. In healer/dps mirrors people can still die, because healers have the consistent ability to assist dps. Whereas in wow healers can help burst, but those windows generally have longer cooldowns. They would have to disable guard, not allow double heal specs to queue and maybe tweak expertise/trauma values for 2v2 only. It wouldn't be hard to make healer/dps and double dps viable comps without altering warzones, 4v4 or pve. Only real concern is do teams of two have enough CC to get a kill before acid.

Bumping this again, because for some reason this still isn't fixed.

The grind keeps people playing. You take away the grind and less people will pvp. How many times does someone play an extra game just to get a piece or finish the daily? Die-hard players will pvp whether there's a gear grind or not. It's the more casual player that needs the gear progression to keep playing. The issue is bolster doesn't drop down higher ilevel pve gear. People assume their leveling or raid gear is better to start pvp with than low level blues. Bolster should just make all non season tiered pvp gear the same item level. A little lower than the first pvp tier. And they should just remove expertise from the gear and make it baseline for each character. Deactivate non season set-bonuses and relics in pvp and this issue is fixed.

People in this thread act like this game is not designed for clickers. I just assume most people click some of their abilities/frames or are former clickers and still carry the bad movement habits. You can tell by how people move. People can click and get by in swtor pvp. The globals are that slow. The rotations are that forgiving. It is a very simple game. Is this player mechanically good? No. Not even close. Could he attack one target, interrupt a second and taunt a third all in one global without losing time? No. But most players can't. It's not like doing that matters anyways. Would he be fast at anything that takes reaction time? Cleansing or interrupting in general. Of course not. He's not getting first tick innervates or lightnings on an off target. But who does? It's rare if none existent to see someone actually good. Besides most mechanics in the game don't require a fast reaction time to counter. Put this player in a better game and not only would he not be able to see rating, he wouldn't even be able to dent a health bar. So don't be mad at the guy for clicking. Be mad at the game for being so horrible that mechanically bad players can succeed.

You go full resolve after 2 saps. Don't see the problem. Both saps are now cleansable. Three people capping and the sin has to white bar things fast or open. If this isn't low level warzones, most classes have the tools to get the sin out of stealth, especially when you know they have to stop a cap. Can a stealth class guard a node a lot longer than most? Yeah. That's a flaw in channeled cap objectives as opposed to just being in the area capping an objective. As for just putting a cooldown on sap. No. Sap is probably the weakest 8 second mez in the game, because it requires the target to be out of combat in a game where you don't drop combat by being inactive. Once everyone gets in combat there are only going to be two times you are going to sap in group play. If someone vanishes and you sap their vanish or if someone is stupid enough to only be in combat with a sin and they vanish and sap that person.

All this suggestion would do is kill CC chains. Hurt cleansing even more and make the game easier. Off CC chains are already incredibly weak. Like stupidly weak. When you are facing 2 or 3 people, your mez and root CC should be going into people you aren't attacking. That's the big part of the skill in using crowd control. It is then on whoever is being off CCed to manage their breaks based on situation. People shouldn't be able to break every root or be immune to roots for extended periods. Consular root break on sprint and Vanguard hold the line. For full root protection you should need to be cleansed by your teammates. This builds synergy between classes and expands the skill required to play the game. For some reason most root abilities either come with a knockback, damage or gap closer. This is the problem. It is 100% fine when someone trades one global to root someone as long as it doesn't also do damage, because this encourages off root CC chains = skill. Cleansing also has a really long cooldown for what it brings and has other problems in pvp which means it usually isn't up to remove people's roots like before 3.0. If you're going to look at a DR system for roots. You should just remove resolve and go with an entire DR system similar to WoW. Problem is, there isn't enough CC for that to work (the cooldown on most CC is way too long/No spammable polies/fears). Secondly, you would need to add something to the UI to track Diminishing returns on separate targets. There's no way they do that. And without addons, there wouldn't be gladius or sarena or custom scripts which are essential for playing CC comps in high rated wow arena. They could attach a DR to the damage threshold on the root break or make it that if you are rooted with full resolve, direct damage breaks you out of the root instantly instead of after x amount of seconds. This would just hurt knights and warriors though, because part of their meta in dealing with a kiting ranged is using their roots properly. I play a melee and ranged and think it's 100% fine. My tank doesn't even have a root break and I don't find roots as an unreasonable problem. Now is anyone good enough to throw me on focus, knock me back and chain their roots into me while I'm white barred and out of the fight? No. But that's skill.

It's the post absorb, not barrier itself.

With guard disabled and a couple other tweaks, 2v2 could be pretty good.

The gas as a whole is beyond stupid. Poorly thought up. If both teams go into gas with a full team, to me it's a draw. Especially if people still have most of their defensives. Dampening or a damage increase build up after 5 minutes would be a lot better. Barrier's absorb shouldn't work on the acid. I'm sure it's not intended. Just something they haven't got around to fixing or don't know about.

This is bolster's fault. The majority of people on harbringer that don't queue as a group won't have 2018 expertise. It's pretty rare that you even get a match where half the people are in full expertise. Bolster is confusing. A normal player is going to assume that their leveling gear/higher item level is better than low level blues for pvp while they try and gain their pvp sets. And why shouldn't they? Bolster needs to work on all gear. Lowering and raising stats to the same item level just under the first tier of pvp gear. They also need to remove expertise from all gear and give every character 2018 baseline. Copy wow. The system works.

Arenas were only a mistake, because you had people who would not crack 1500 in WOW design them.

Because Roaming Mend is an idiot friendly instant aoe heal. Because they barely have to worry about force anymore. Because interrupts do next to nothing to slow this spec down. Because they have two CC breaks which makes off CCing them really difficult. Because cleansing is next to useless, so those globals now go into healing. Operative still better with guard.

If you can type, you should be able to keybind 50 things just from the left side of your keyboard. (As long as you can hit 6) You can already hit alt which is normally the hardest for people. Shift/Ctrl gives you triple the keybinds. A lot of people remap the capslock key, because it is useless. Recommend making it a modifier for either focus or self target. Your pinky should be mostly dedicated to hitting modifiers. A non gaming mouse also gives you a ton of binds. Middle mouse button. Scroll up/down. The 2 side buttons. That's 20 if you add modifiers. You should also be able to hit F1-F4. (though the game does not like shift F1-F4 for some reason) I would just start over if I were you. Unbind turn left/right. Force yourself to use the mouse to move + strafing. Bind targeting first. Sin needs at least 7 keybinds for targeting, because of guard swapping. Bind all your CC abilities and things you'll be using off focus to keybinds that are easy to hit with your modifier (things off global like taunt and interrupt with priority). Then bind all your rotational attacks and important defensives. Work your way out with abilities you barely use to slower to hit keybinds. Like your aoe or free attack which you'll barely use? throw those on like sh-6 sh-5. Then just hit the target dummies or go out in the world and kill things. Get used to your new set-up. Or you can bind like 10 things, click the rest and still get by, because the game is garbage/has a slow gcd and the rotations/damage is forgiving. Or buy a naga.

These videos show how bad swtor arena is lol Not the player's fault. Just the game is awful in group play. PvE has more depth. There's no clutch either. Or anything going on really. Even when you make a nice play it doesn't do anything. This marauder had some nice off interrupts. Literally did nothing. lol It's 90-95% attacking. Even more simple as a healer. And the communication required is non existent except for switching targets.