Some of the threads on this forum and the people crying on them are so far out there, I don't really know what to say. I cant even tell when we are being trolled or not, so high is the level of incompetence and idioticy. Either way, we need the Picard facepalm icon something fierce.

This post is complete nonsense. It doesn't even make any sense. First of the weekly is trivial to get. I don't know anyone in the game who can't win 9 wzs in a week, and I call bs to anyone who plays this game with some regularity who claims they can't. Second of all, WH gear is only ~3% better than BM gear. Third of all, if your side has only 10 people and they were all good, you would be in the situation I explained before where your side wins a huge amount of games. Fourthly, throwing games to your own side is pretty ridiculous and far from optimal use of your guildies time. So I mean, yes it does come down to how good your servers pvpers are, but that has nothing to do with population perse. If there are only 8 players on your side, and 7 of them are bad, then yes you will lose a lot of games. However if you added 1000 players to your queue that were all baddies, it wouldn't improve things in the slightest, and would actually make it a tiny bit worse statistically.

As I said, the highest I have seen post 1.2 are from a Sorceror and Rage Juggernaughts respectively in the 950k range, just shy of 1million like that screenshot. The highest I have seen from a Marauder is 800k. And indeed Rage Juggernaughts in my experience tend to outdamage sentinels by 15% or so in Voidstars. There is a certain element of randomness to the whole thing, but its pretty easy to see that in a pure theorycrafting world the rage specs will always outdamage the Watchman tree assuming you group people together like lemmings and have tons of healers present. Anyway, all this to say that damage logs don't mean anything!

You still aren't making any sense dude. Why exactly does the higher populated side steamroll the lower populated one in wzs? You claim that people throw matches to gear their buddies, but well that doesn't make any sense (firstly b/c there isn't much of a difference between winning and losing comm wise) and second it actually stunts your own growth, so why would you do that? =/ Simple counterexample.. Assume there are 8 pros on the pub side of a server, and they go up against 8 pros and 100 scrubs on the imperial side. Clearly the 8 pros will always play together, and pretty much win every single game whereas you have ridiculously long odds to get all the imperial pros into the same match.

I actually enjoy going up against premades as a solo Q, and beating them. I have seen pug groups beat some of the very best PvP guilds in the game, so I happen to know it is very possible. I guess I just take issue with the idea that its only fun if you are winning. I happen to like losing sometimes, as it forces me to get better. As for premades vs premades. Actually the current Q system tries to put them together. But if there aren't any spots, then it fills them with soloers as it should be (no one would Q as a premade if they had to wait 3 hours for a battle)

This is mostly a myth. Population density actually can hurt the higher populated side, as it dilutes the talent base. For instance on The Fatman (the highest populated server in the game), Republic won a good 80% of all warzones from december all the way till early April, despite being numerically disfavored by nearly 4 to 1. At the time, Imps had more bm players than we did b/c of Ilum, however the Republic players were typically more battle hardened and just better on average. Imp side had a few great guilds but they were so diluted by their numbers that it actually ended up feeding Republic a ton of wz wins.

This post is symptomatic of the problem with the current breed of MMORPG players. Bunch of whining babies who want everything handed out to them, as if they actually deserved any of it. The whole point of competition is to win, and indeed there is typically a prize at the end. The losers aren't supposed to get the prize, it's reserved for the winning team. At the end of the day, everyone in this game started with the same exact set of tools and its all about making the most of them. For the complainers on the low population servers, simply put, get better. Oh and perhaps help your odds by countering their premade, with a premade of your own. It just isn't very difficult to organize, and I assure you, getting BM can be achieved in less than 2 days (at which point it comes down to skill). Stop making excuses and point the fingers at yourselves for once. Eesh!

I happen to think certain specs of Marauders/sentinels are overpowered, but the OPs argument is ridiculous. When will people learn that damage numbers and screencaps are completely misleading.. Currently, the two highest scores i've seen post 1.2 are both ~950k by a sorceror and rage Juggernaught respectively. The latter player actually routinely gets ~700k+ I doubt most people feel either class is currently massively overpowered, however the simple fact of the matter is that if played properly and if the other team lets them they can output damage outputs that are probably superior to anything a Sentinel can do (particularly if they are watchman or combat) simply due to the AOE nature of the damage potential. Sorcerors were never overpowered, but they basically ate nerfs b/c Bioware seems to put way too much credence on numbers and not enough on the TYPE of damage. Eg not all damage is created equally important.

Rage Juggernaught by a country mile, and its not even close with the AOE factor. Sorcerors are not far behind (i've seen both get 900k post1.2) Its so very artificial though, as it requires basically a team full of healers on both sides keeping everybody alive, and nice and grouped up. In terms of (real) dps, then Mara's, PTs, and Slingers.

Right, so thats the primary question mark. Is the mechanics of the catch calculated right when the ball is passed, or when it lands? Eg is the player closest to center when the ball is passed going to win the ball, or is the player closest to the center when it lands going to win? Anecdotally, it seems to me that the center calculation is when the ball *lands* (as I feel like I have definitely moved into position to catch the ball before). However, it seems to me the determination of whether I am stunned or not, is made when the ball is PASSED, as I have definitely received the ball having been stunned for at least a second before the ball landed.

See here: http://mmo-mechanics.com/swtor/forums/Thread-Stat-DR-Graphs Expertise scales better across the board than any other statistic. It improves your damage output more than power or your primary stat does, it improves your healing more than your primary stat or tech bonus does (point for point), and it improves mitigation more than defense/absorb. Its unclear when it actually turns around, but certainly well past 1300. In practise, with warhero gear, you hit DR with every other major statistic long before (surge + crit hit massive DR) with the exception of power. But power never competes with expertise, at any level, hence it is always best to have as much expertise as you can find.

Its a standard calculation that has been done several times over, see sith warrior forums (google) and the theorycrafting sections. There isn't a sharp consensus on the exact point of DR, but its closeish to the numbers the OP listed.

In PvP, you always want the expertise higher than anything else. Its more important even than your primary stat. You definitely want to shoot close to ~1200. This was proven on the sith warrior forums mathematically, and its not even close.

So there are a few problems/subtleties with the original post and link. First of all, b/c it only considers battlemaster gear and not warhero gear, and the problems min/maxing with warhero gear are quite different. In general the trade off is between surge and alacrity/accuracy/somethingelse (depending the class), which means in practise that you can find enhancements or mods that are identical except with one replaced by the other. Since eg alacrity is useless to me in rated pvp, I stack surge which brings it to levels that are much higher than advertised (eg I have 477 surge on my wishlist toon). The primary hardship with warhero gear, is in getting crit over 300, much less to 400! Which means trading off endurance (for instance assault enhancement 26 trades off endurance for crit relative to efficient enhancement 26). You can also trade off your primary stat for crit. (I believe this is always a bad idea, no matter when).. So for instance keen mod 26 vs keen mod 26a is always best served by picking the 'a' version

4 good dps can easily drop 20k burst in 2 gcd against a guarded target. You could have 8 healers, it wouldn't make a difference, b/c no one can rescue a player under that type of focus fire. For instance, pre 1.2 a group of rage Juggernaughts on my server would time their smashes at the same time, and literally kill everything (tank + healer + anyone nearby). Completely unhealable!

Ops were actually nerfed last patch. We were just not nerfed as much as commando and sages where, hence the reason we are top of the heap. Atm, i'd say the biggest problem is not operatives, its the fact that commandos were way overnerfed, and b/c of the ttk changes, their primary raison d'etre (the ability to tank better than any other healer) is essentially irrelevant (they live approximately 1 second longer than everyone else under focus fire). Sages are still the best huttball healer by a country mile (so thats 1 out of 4 wzs), but again the ttk change has really hurt them as they can't stay alive long enough to truly be effective (and the only way sages are effective is with guard + offheals). If mitigation in general was revamped somewhere halfway between 1.2 and pre 1.2, the other two healers would do a lot better relatively speaking.

This is completely wrong, and upside down. The biggest difference between full premades (both pre and post 1.2) and pug play is that TTK is considerably faster for premades. We've had a few 8-8 guild on guild occassions on our server, and its always the case that things move much faster win or lose. The focus fire is more bursty and its much harder to keep people alive. Pre 1.2 it was almost all about area cc and guard/taunt to give a person a chance to stay up (healers are more or less shut down and can only insta heal). Post 1.2, it doesnt matter, people die so fast there is literally no tactic available that even comes close to being effective.

I am only talking about high level play by geared players who know what they are doing. Currently in a 2-2 situation, 2 damage roles will always beat a healer and a tank. In a 3-3 situation, 3 damage roles will beat 1 healer and 2 damage and so forth. In fact, this was almost the case pre 1.2 as well. In most of the money competitions across servers (3-3, 4-4 tourneys), pure damage teams did exceptionally well (particularly those with rotating guard/taunts) it was only b/c of the great survivability of commando/merc healers that allowed them to actually contribute (smuggler and sage teams lost pretty much everytime). Further, healers typically always lose 1-1 duels. They simply can't outheal damage when they are being interupted, stunned and so forth. I bring this up, not b/c I think 1-1 has any relevance, but simply to illustrate that when 2 or 3 dps are on them, their contribution basically shrinks to nothing. Look, one way or the other, healers are the primary assist train target in MMOs. They are the first targets in any wz, and if as the current game allows them to be cc'd, interupted, rooted as well as burnt down within seconds, then there is literally no point to having them present. You would be better served by having another dps present (preferably one that has cooldowns that allow them to be invulnerable for a few seconds). This is of course about rated teams, and not simple pugs where no one focuses and healers are allowed to run around casting freely.

I actually think it used to be overpowered pre 1.2, b/c it was one of the primary ways to really destroy healer+tank combos in high level warzone play. 2 or 3 guardians/Juggs timing their ability together could kill a healer and tank every 10 seconds or so, more or less guaranteed regardless of what the opposition did or how many healers they brought. Now, that is less important, b/c every dps can achieve the same results, but with more sustained abilities.

Blah blah blah, TTK is too low currently. 2 good DPS shouldn't be able to plow through a guarded healer like they were butter and have them dead before the root breaks. Currently warhero Marauders and snipers can have people dead in 4 global cooldowns. That's 2 gcd if there are two of them, and 3-4 together if the target is guarded and being healed. It removes all skill from the game! It was the same problem back in January, where you had overpowered combinations that were able to 2 shot people. Further, its utterly ridiculous that pure tank specs are dying in seconds to the same dps. If you want to make pure healers or dps squishy, fine, but main tanks are supposed to have some ability to take and mitigate damage, and that is not happening right now. They are dying almost as fast as everyone else. Atm healing is approximately equal to damage (eg a good healer outputs about the same as a good dps to within 5% or so). Which makes no sense at all. There is no point to having the healer then. They are supposed to be able to outheal the net total damage of a single dps in a wz (worse that dps is often single target, whereas healing is typically benefiting from aoes relatively)

I've definitely healed for over 700k in Alderann pre 1.2, but definitely not post 1.2. I think my max post 1.2 is a 700k game in Voidstar, and maybe 500 something in Alderann. The only way to hit those type of numbers is if you get one of those matches where the sides hold but mid is uncapped, and you have most of your team in mid with rolling HOTs. It's rather artificial.

Its not the healing that is the problem, its mitigation! In particular for tank specs, they should survive much more effectively than current values.

The game shouldn't be balanced around 1 on 1. IT should be balanced for 4-4, 5-5, 6-6 which is what the majority of encounters look like. Atm, the low ttk is killing the skill required to perform the latter. Between two good teams It's basically coming down to gear, luck (crits) and in either event, win or lose, the whole thing lasts maybe 15 seconds. People don't even have time to switch guard and cc, and dps doesn't even need to interupt or CC offhealer. They don't need to pull tanks away. 3 Marauders on a target = target dead in 3 seconds, regardless of what the other team tries to do.

Everyone knows the math. But it's not stacking with observation either. white damage from my blaster pistol has gone up nearly 30% relative to prepatch. Yes we know battle master gear was changed, but the fact is there is still an substantial delta increase on full BM players... So something is very wrong.

They stealth nerfed pugnacity, which returns far less than it used too..