No doubt.. Been a while since we have seen "force speed is OP" threads, just wait till everyone is getting 3s stun off the bubble you are casting on anything that moves in your team. Forums will be drowning in QQ. Just a shame we need to get "buffed" by stupid changes that aren't well thought through. The worst thing is it will be pointless QQ still - "that sorc annoyed me for an extra 5 seconds since their buffs before I could kill it!!!" I actually laughed out loud.

Excellent summary, thanks for posting. Pretty much confirms my initial thoughts when I read the blog and looked at the positioning in the skill trees of changes. Of course, they MAY change the skill trees but I doubt it very much. I'm fairly baffled by what appears to be the developers wish to get us all playing lightning when the tree is garbage for actual burst in competitive PVP. The game since 1.2 is ALL about who can burst who the quickest, any pretense that it isn't is simply window dressing a burnt out building. These changes seem aimed at the incoming influx of casual players and pugs who aren't going to be bothered to fully learn their class much less any other class. It is the only possible reasoning for the resolve changes and basically making PVP sorcs turrets in the lightning tree - because lightning you can only get away with against an un-organised pug.

Fadeout is currently 16 points in to the healing tree, polarity shift is currently 21 points in to the lightning tree. In order to take both a healing sorc would need to do without innervate and the AoE heal. I suspect that isn't going to be a route most healing sorcs take. I'd go further and say it isn't a route most DPS sorcs will take either. Depends really, as anyone will tell you force speed is not a get out of jail free card. You may think a boost of 8 to 15 meters is a "huge" boost, but actually of any sorc I played with we would all have taken just instant activation quite happily. Actually not much wrong with overload other than the animation time, it is hardly game breaking as the commando I believe has instant KB right now. The free heal is nice, but can't really see any reason to re-sub to play my sorc in 1.4. Probably reserve judgement mind you till the full patch notes and any skill tree changes, but it isn't particularly appealing (although admittedly better than a poke in the eye with a sharp stick). The core issue will be clueless idiots who think everything is possible on every build and we will no doubt at least see a resurgance of "force speed is OP" threads within a week of it going live. Assasins with force speed on 5s CD? That will be fun. Excellent summary of what Sorc/Sage changes mean IN REALITY here - http://www.swtor.com/community/showthread.php?p=5119977

Well they say they are on a 6 week release schedule for "content". So at some point (soon!) they will release the new OP or whatever the damn thing is (Terror from Beyond). Then 6 weeks later the new warzone I suspect. So at least 12 weeks would be my guess, unless they release the new OP and FP at the same time because people are complaining too much.

I can't find anything to back that up from the devs. The only reference to Illum lately has been Gabe putting his foot in it. You can forget any meaningful open world PVP unless and until they can do something with the engine SWTOR runs on. Quesh, Ilum, Hoth, Tattione... doesn't matter because the engine can't handle more than 16 players at a time.

While I'm a massive cynic - and we don't really know much about this new heal yet - you still have Rejuvination, so you can now cast two heals back to back while on the move. It doesn't take much, from nothing and depending on the order you cast them (e.g. rejuvination, bubble, instant heal) you can mitigate a lot of damage on the move. What did you expect, a 6k instant heal?

I did the daily four times I think (might have been 5 times with Ilum but honestly can't remember) and the weekly TWICE, usually with at least one or two guild members but sometimes in a pug. I cashed in all my ranked which probably isn't the best idea if you are seriously going for WH but I wasn't bothered. The reason I managed to do the weekly twice is my friend had the old Ilum collect boxes quests. That probably took an hour which I haven't included in the playing time and is something that not everyone could do so that helped a great deal. To be fair through what I didn't mention is that I queued from Outlaws den and collected chests pretty much all of the time as I bought the legacy travel to that area. But that is something anyone can do and actually I don't think it really accounted for a lot of comms (4 chests each with 20 wz comms, I think the respawn time on them is an hour but I'm not honestly sure about that). Also it is a tank class I'm playing with DPS gear, so medals aren't really an issue even if I get stomped - would have been a lot harder on a healer or some other classes I'm sure. I can't honestly remember how long it took to gear my heal operative to BM but it probably was about the same with my op even though I was already prepared and had full wz and ranked comms stored when I hit 50! I didn't time it or anything, I wasn't running with a stopwatch - but I played over the course of 4 days for at least a couple of hours per night mostly peak or late night.. Not saying it was easy, it was painful stuff for the vast majority of it. But really it isn't that hard a grind when you already have a couple of 50s and know the other classes mechanic - and ultimately compared to RNG for champ gear and a valor restriction on BM gear it was a breeze compared to my first char at 50.

Exactly. A lot of people liked the idea of shooting lightning our of their fingers. Sorc is good pre 50 before it starts to scale really badly due to the way weapon damage is calculated. Plus the bubble is relatively strong sub 50 before you have WH augmented gear etc. The game was also full of carebear PVPers with no skill that let Sorcs turret their way through an entire warzone.

Good point, I'd forgotten about the bombing ones.

I know Hickman tries to explain the thinking behind it but personally I don't get it. Simply put - the subs they have lost came and played the story, tried the rest and left. So now we have a situation where all the story stuff is free and the other elements - that are largely found lacking for one reason or another by the players - is the paid for part?

No hate, I just see this misconception or urban myth that once you hit 50 you are completely useless for along time in end game PVP repeated endlessly. The facts don't back it up. Sure if you are going to run a couple of warzones a week then yes, it is going to be a long time till you get competitive. Anyway, back on topic. The new weapon/off hand is just going to be the start. It will not take long before the vast majority of people still actively PVPing as their main focus will be looking for more significant gear upgrades and not just the cosmetics that ranked gear brings. Officially the line will be to stop people ripping out mods from the highest end PVE gear. Realistically, if you have 1200 expertise there isn't that much point going further, so chances are you already running some PVE stuff in your gear if you are full augmented WH and min/maxed already.

I can see a couple of issues with it, first DPS will end up in the Q longer than healers (like they do for PVE group Q). Second I doubt there is any real way to say what group make up should be for PVP - 2 tanks, 2 healers, 6 DPS? Maybe, but chances are everyone has a different opinion... do you even need tanks for a start? And as has been proved recently, 8 maras can do just fine in Huttball

Shouldn't be that hard no, but lots of healers are only spec'd part way in to their heal trees especially for PVP (I'm thinking sorc/sage especially). I mean they WOULD have spec'd all the way up to the AOE heal if that didn't mean they folded in 3 GCDs to virtually every class except another sage/sorc Been so long since I played my Operative but fairly sure most of them would be spec'd all the way up the heal tree. No idea on mercs, do mercs actually still play the game?

Wishful thinking. Even in the LFG PVE tool the game can't tell if you are heals or DPS.

- Free roam space flight Maybe, if the money from F2P and existing subs ever repays the $300 development cost - Guild ships See answer to first question - A paid character transfer service. This one is imminent, they have the tech and they will have the cash shop. It will happen. - Free roam Guild vs Guild space pvp with guild ships. See answer to first question - A game that is only offline to do maintenance 1 night a week. (time pending where you live) When the game hits "maintenance mode", sure. - Optimization of the Hero Engine. Never. Can't polish a turd. - Be considered a successful MMORPG by all or most of the community. Never. Can't polish a turd. - Massive expansions that can be bought in a store. (example: World of Warcraft expansions) LOL

So you do what you do best, guard and taunt. Guard your healers, taunt the enemy DPS, peel from your healer. Profit.

Why bother? Honestly you can, without even trying that hard and saving your comms beforehand, get out of recruit gear in a matter of a week or so at most. If you are smart and have done your homework you can negate the need for most of the bigger pieces of recruit (main, off, chest etc) without ever needing to wear them. Honestly the amount of crying about recruit gear in these forums you would think you had to wear it for months on end while playing 4 hours a day to get anything better. It is the most ridiculously easy gear grind to battlemaster ever. I just played a friends account who had never PVP'd for about 10 hours or so over the last 4 days. I had no wz comms at the start as he only ever PVE'd and now I'm in full battlemaster, it isn't hard AT ALL. There isn't even a valor requirement, all you need to do is play the damn game.

Google WARHammers "Khaines Embrace" scenario, there are some good explanatory vids on Youtube about it, that will tell you everything you need to know about the new SWTOR warzone. WAR actually had some pretty good scenarios. Huittball, for all the times it is lauded on SWTOR forums, is just a modified version of CTF (or you could say a modified version of Murderball type secnarios in WAR such as Mourkains Temple etc). Huttball bears more than a passing resemblance to WARs Serpents Passage too, the only difference being that you collect an item and take it to your own base in the WAR scenario and not your opponents. You could say most CTF games don't allow passing, but then I'd probably say you haven't played many games

Not sure how accurate that is though, most other quotes are saying 20 warzones a week. A weekly limit would make more sense, but who knows. It seems despite planning for it for some months BW doesn't really have a clue what is going to be available for free to play customers, probably as they don't have an existing WoW model to copy from.

Ah but I think that is shortsighted. PVP doesn't need the development time that most PVE content requires. You just need to maintain momentum and keep it within the realms of what most people consider "balanced". There is also a school of thought that says that as developers you swing the balance back and forth deliberately. Where SWTOR (and WAR failed) was that PVP balance was knee jerked in early stages to specific classes and too much was nerfed. They over compensated based on decisions made in a panic looking at the subs renewals at a time when the majority of the playerbase hadn't reached 50. As a result they now refuse to make the correct changes. WAR did the same thing with BW, despite everyone realizing that their mechanic (which in a nutshell meant they could do extreme damage but with a chance to blow themselves up) wasn't scaling correctly. So what we ended up with was a situation where the extreme damage scaled upwards with gear/renown etc the backlash damage to themselves remained fairly constant. Everyone knew how to put BW bombing groups together, and it was the very definition of e-z-mode. Regardless of what games promos showed the PVP "community" was very interested in SWTOR, you can tell that from a quick glance at the number of posts in General Discussion on this forum versus the number of posts in PVP forum.

I can't find many references to cross-server queues from a dev anywhere, have they ever addressed it at all other than to say it is "challenging" in the tech side of things? Game is 8 months old now. We have had 2 new flashpoints, 1 good event, 1 poor event, 1 new operation and 1 new warzone - plus legacy and things that should have been in the game at the start. At every content release they tell us content will come quicker. And yet it doesn't. You could argue that ranked warzones are content and maybe they are, but they should have been in the game at launch. Virtually everything they have done should have been in the game at launch. On the other side of the scales PVP has lost any semblance of open world PVP with the mothballing of Ilum. Due to be revised and revamped I can't remember the last time it was mentioned except for Gabes ridiculous comments. WARhammer was pretty bad but at least they tried to tell the community what they were doing with state of the game posts from time to time. Although generally communication from Bioware has been virtually non-existant the last few months I honestly can't remember anything relevant to PVP. Even the die hard FoTM rerollers would probably admit (offline, never on the forums) that certain classes are way too strong while being ridiculously easy to play (both heals and DPS). The approach to balancing has been heavy handed and the approach to stats, gear, augments and expertise has led to possibly the shortest TTK in an online game I can remember with the exception of Unreal Tournament Instagib mode. Ranked is fizzling out due to lack of cross server q's and poor matching (not helped by how few times are q'ing for it). 2 or 3 classes are basically locked out of ranked because they are deemed useless and we all know what the typical ranked composition looks like. We could still go and do our own thing in open pvp but there are no rewards. Why do you need rewards people say? Well the gear grind is a big factor of this game, and if I'm going to compete I need to be earning comms. If I can't earn those comms from killing players in the world I'm going to invest my time in warzones instead. It isn't rocket science for the majority of the player base. While on the subject of rewards why not increase the financial reward from warzones? Most of them take a good 10 minutes unless you faceroll a team. I want to PVP, I don't want to have to spend 2 hours or more running PVE dailies so I can buy an augment. I want to be rewarded for doing what I enjoy, so give us more financial rewards from the warzones so I don't have to run the same PVE stuff every day just to be able to survive.

Pretty much sounds like a mini content update every 6 weeks - so event now, then 6 weeks later we get an op, then 6 weeks later we get HK51 and then maybe 6 weeks after that we get a warzone that is virtually a direct lift from a WARhammer scenario. So at that rate you might get a new warzone every 6 months. You know I didn't list anything critical about that interview because I thought everything was bad. I couldn't find a single thing that was positive to say about the interview which was with the PVP lead of the game. If I was to list the bad points it would be a VERY long list. The worst thing about the interview? The references to Ilum. Everyone knows it was a joke from the start, despite the hype. To ACTUALLY make a joke out of it? When that failure was your design? Meh.

I guess there isn't. Check out the interview with Lead PVP dev Gabe (unless his title has changed) over at Darthhater. Sycophantic interviewing aside, there really isn't much to look forward to if you are serious about PVP. http://www.darthhater.com/articles/swtor-news/21321-gamescom-2012-interview-with-gabe-amatangelo

This thread certainly brings the funny. I also have lots of fun on my level 17 gunnery spec commando, as far as I'm concerned that class is fine and that tree is fine, I don't know why people complain about it so much? Of course sorcs are very strong in sub 50, why do you think the forums were ablaze with "nerf sorc" threads back in January? And more to the point back at launch there were actually some good PVPers in that bracket too. I can't wait for you to hit 50 and get BM gear (at least, throw augments on it too if you can afford it) then come back and tell us what it is like. What annoys me about the OP is that you assume rolling a class to 30 or so is in any way representative of class balance. If a sorc did that on a PT/Sent they would be instantly flamed to death by every FoTM reroller who visits the forums (and no doubt the OP would be chipping in as well, it seems to be what he/she does most). Even worse we get comments in this thread that seem to assume that sorcs don't know how to play their class, sorcs QQ because they haven't played enough or put the effort in and sorcs have no experience of playing with other people and co-ordinating. This is false (personally I've already min/maxed my war hero gear and it is fully augmented and I've been playing sorc in PVP since early access). Most of us have spent months theory-crafting and adapting to patch changes to squeeze every last bit of potential out of the class. Good luck at 50, get to valor 65 or so and then come back and tell us how much fun your sorc is. Until then, this is just another QQ thread.

Awesome.