<Sithhiker's Guide to the Galaxy> has defeated Nightmare Grob'thok (Lite)! <Sithhiker's Guide to the Galaxy> has defeated Nightmare Corruptor Zero (Lite)! <Sithhiker's Guide to the Galaxy> has defeated Your Mom!

<Sithhiker's Guide to the Galaxy> has defeated Nightmare Draxus (light version)! http://www.sithhikersguide.enjin.com/gallery/m/10631012/detail/112822#pid=1871868 Yes, we are still playing! Yes, attendance problems suck!

<Sithhiker's Guide to the Galaxy> is recruiting again! Our ops group has been running short on dps recently, so we're opening our rolls to skilled damage dealers everywhere! Exceptional tanks and healers are accepted as well, as we have players with alts who can swap to fill multiple roles. Interested? 1) Do you have experience with endgame ops in SWTOR, WoW, or a similar game? 2) Do you have full Oriconian/Dreadforged gear or higher, fully augmented? 3) Can you raid from 8-11pm EST Tuesdays and Wednesdays? 4) Do you want to tackle NIGHTMARE MODE? If you answered "yes" to 3 or 4 of the above, you should send us an application at http://www.sithhikersguide.enjin.com/recruitment This is your chance to join one of only a handful of Jung Ma guilds that can clear all of the HM Dread bosses, and is actively pursuing Nightmare mode! (1 boss down, 4 to go!) As always, exceptional PvP players are always welcome to join our fearsome group ranked PvP squad as well.

Is it possible you got your rating using match fixing?

<Sithhiker's Guide to the Galaxy> has defeated Nightmare Nefra! http://sithhikersguide.enjin.com/gallery/m/10631012/detail/112822#pid=1773484 Now obviously I fouled up the screenshot something horrible by forgetting to take it until the boss had already vanished. I submit that the loot message in the chat box should suffice as proof, but in the event this screenshot is not acceptable I will take another one next week when we knock that loot bag over again. Also, the repair droid is NOT part of our progression team!

Help! I am not able to count higher than Season 1! Will I be okay to play in whatever season comes after 1?

Are any top group ranked tanks using dps gear? According to this thread from the tank forums, tank gear is too weak: http://www.swtor.com/community/showthread.php?t=731614&page=5 However it's been my assumption that all tanks have been wearing tank gear since 2.0. I'd be interested to hear from someone who's tried both and know which one they prefer.

It seems the community is broken into two camps. The pro nerf camp seems to envision a world in which the gunship functions as a support vessel, and can be easily hunting and slain by a skilled scout pilot if teamwork is not used to protect it. The anti nerf camp envisions the gunship as a standalone fighter that should be able to stand up to a scout in a 1v1 fight, or at least be able to flee from them indefinitely. Personally I am pro nerf. I think the gunship and bomber should both be support classes that need to work with the more traditional fighters to win matches, although I understand the chagrin of the gunship aces who shudder to think of having to rely on puggers to help them win matches.

Yeah, I'm not sure we have time for it either. I guess it comes down to if every guild has a twitch stream running regardless. If so, then the records will come naturally. If not, then they'll likely be no competition.

This is the part that confuses me. They nix cross server because it would swallow all other development. Then they release GSF, a massive minigame that surely must have swallowed tons of development itself, but that requires cross server PvP to succeed. Without cross server you can't guarantee matchmaking will work, and without matchmaking in a small community like GSF it leads to massive team imbalances and farming, and ultimately quitting. If you're going to take cross server off the table, you should probably not design alternate content that will benefit from cross server even more than the existing content.

While I'm not on The Bastion, I would generally disagree. Most PvPers will choose the venue that gets them the most wins. A lot of teams tried ranked warzones the first few weeks it game out, but most of those that lost more than 50% of their games stopped queuing. So if you're on a good team that wins a lot of RWZs, but then a better team shows up and starts farming you, what do you do? You switch to normals and farm comms. It's a consolation prize, but it beats losing rating or logging off.

This is where the disconnect lies for me. When I'm watching <Vicious> pull off these amazing burst kills against my teammates and am in a state of constant panic that if I'm a millisecond late on the guard swap they will die, but at the same time am completely confident that they won't try to target me personally, and if they DID try to target me personally they would fail, I DO feel like a tank. I feel nigh invincible. And this is in a match against a superior team that nearly always beats us, and every other team I've faced in RWZ as well. But every team I'm aware of runs 2 dps, 1 tank, and 1 healer. Due to guard being tied to tank stances, and dps specs being tied to dps stances, you have to run a tank. Bringing three "4/5 survivability" dps players is generally not a good strategy because you can easily control the healer and pop the dps when there's no guard. I guess what I'm getting at is KBN's numbers are an excellent and useful piece of information, but total mitigation isn't the the most important stat. Victory in RWZ doesn't come to the team with the better damage:mitigation ratio who just grinds down their opponent. Kills in high level RWZ happen because of coordinated use of stuns, cooldowns, switches, and positioning. The winning team is the one who creates a "kill window" when they can deal 30k to an enemy before the tank or healer can get off their heals/guards. The most important stat is really Time to Kill, with longer TTKs requiring wider damage windows. Remember, deception assassins are one of the more feared dps in RWZ, even though their sustained damage is pitiful, because of their excellent burst. Tanks may only have 20% or so more mitigation than other players, but this makes their kill windows much harder to achieve. Add that to the fact that powerful tanking cooldowns can essentially slam that window shut the first one or two times you try to open it, and most players ultimately just stop trying to kill tanks. That's why I'm asking for input from the some of the top arena players, to see if their tanks experience what I'm experiencing.

I'm worried about what will happen when they eventually create an Asteroid model that has sensor dampening. With Asteroids appearing and disappearing from my visual scanning as I fly, I will become disoriented and probably fly into asteroids. Or even Asteroids.

Thank you, KeyboardNinja, for another epic thread. I feel like you are personally responsible for half the constructive feedback that happens on these forums. However, I believe we may be too hasty in identifying this as a problem. This is the input that we're missing. What do the top arena teams run? Are they in tank gear or dps gear? Have they tried both sets and decided dps gear is the way to go, as your numbers suggest, or no? While I am not part of a top RWZ team, I do have considerable experience in tanking RWZs as a fully tank geared assassin tank. And I die first only once every month or so. No teams focus me, or if they do, they lose the round and then never try that strategy again. Even hyper aggressive teams that use rapid coordinated switches will swap quickly between the other 3 players on my team, but never me. Additionally, my team has occasionally tried various strategies, specs, and compositions that are designed to kill the enemy tank first, but none of them have yet been effective. Now, I'm not on a top RWZ team, but I have over 30 games of experience against Vicious/Shots Fired, the top PvP guild on Jung Ma, and I've seen some absolutely nasty burst kills by them. But they don't attack me, and when they beat us I'm not the first one to die. Are there top arena tanks who fear being slain by the opposing team, or are you like me and spend all your time worrying about keeping your teammates alive? Now I'm not going to look a gift buff in the mouth, especially if assassins are behind as your numbers suggest, but these arguments about tanks being too squishy sound quite strange to me. I would like to know if tank stats are not competitive, though, so I can switch to dps gear for Season 2, if that's how the meta is.

Should I spec my Asteroid for Rock or Hard Place?

If you parked your Asteroid on the spawn point in a TDM where the noobs don't know how to change spawn, you could probably rack up 40 kills.

I've also noticed that the tracking penalty reduction talents don't show up on any tooltips, which makes me wonder if they function at all. While it is probably true that the current RI tooltips aren't confusing, they are inconsistent. No matter how minor the issue is, I'm going to side with Ramalina on this one on account of her being technically correct. I also note with amusement that for each post she makes about that mistaken preposition, she generates 2-3 posts yelling at her for even bringing it up.

In the case of match fixers, hopefully the answer is "no." If you could match fix, then transfer to the PTS to see if they caught you or not, people would be able to refine their methods and learn to fix matches without being caught.

In 2.7 operatives are being nerfed, and it's possible that the buffs to the other 2 healing classes will not make them as strong as operatives are currently. So to answer your question: probably about a week.

<Sithhiker's Guide to the Galaxy> will be there too, if you're queuing tonight! Our group rating is fairly low, so we're really looking forward to <Systems Commonwealth> teaching us a thing or two.

In my mind, <Fear Remains Eternal> has the server first kills of NiM Thrasher through Cartel Warlords. One pug doesn't seem to me like it suddenly changes the nature of the run from a "guild run" to a "pug group." In fact, I would say as long as the majority of the players in the raid are from the same guild (5/8 or 9/16), it seems like a guild run to me. You could also make the rule like "minimum 75% has to be from the same guild" or something, but in any event disqualifying someone over a single pug seems pretty harsh. If we were to apply the "one pug disqualification" rule, we could probably pour over the screenshots from a lot of the kills over the last 2 years and disqualify all sorts of kills from all sorts of guilds.

Group *rating* is a meaningless joke, but I would argue that group ranked is the purest form of ranked. As others have mentioned, the population on Jung Ma is far too small for the ELO to accurately measure the ability of group ranked teams, but that doesn't mean the format is broken, just the scoreboard. As most people know, much of the time in solo queue you can simple look at the two teams in the starting pens and know exactly who's going to win the match effortlessly in 2 rounds. Even in the competitive matches, neither team is likely very familiar with each other or in voice chat. Strategies are usually simple, while coordination is rudimentary and ad hoc. Players who excel in this format must watch their teammates and react accordingly, but they can also take advantage of huge mistakes in the opponent's strategy. In group ranked, the competition is taken to another level. Both teams are in voice chat, strategies are discussed beforehand but also changed on the fly, and the team as a whole learns new strategies and adds them to their playbook. Tactically, CC can be better coordinated and countered using voice chat, and surprise switches or other activities can be executed nearly instantly. Solo queue may have the more meaningful rating, but group queue has the better game, and is home to the arena's true metagame. It is unfortunate that match fixing is going to tarnish the meaningfulness of owning a rancor mount, however

<Sithhikers Guide to the Galaxy> has defeated the Nightmare Dread Guards! http://www.sithhikersguide.enjin.com/gallery/m/10631012/detail/112822#pid=1711509

The Leaderboard does not work well. If you look closely, you'll see many players ranked completedly out of order of their ratings. Sometimes it lists multiple copies of the same player. I have no idea when it updates. There was a time it didn't update at all for 3 weeks over the winter holiday. The Leaderboard needs major bug fixes.

In theory, ELO is supposed to compare your ratings and give different amounts of points depending on if the higher rated player won or lost. In theory, when the higher rated player wins few points are gained/deducted, as that outcome is expected. When the lower rated player wins lots of points are gained/deducted because it suggests that the scores are inaccurate and need to be adjusted. In theory, getting +8 rating means your team had a significantly higher rating and beat a much lower rated team. Likewise, a -15 would mean you lost to someone who was rated lower than you. In reality, I have no idea how it works. I've had teammates with higher ratings than me get more points than me when we play together on the same team. I've heard guesses that more ratings are giving when the total number of games played is lower. I've heard that high ranked players both gain and lose ~10 points per match, even when they are hundreds of rating above their opponents. TLDR: I don't know, and I fear I have wasted your time with my post.