Other than the "elegant" or "slavedancer" stuff, what top looks good? I really wish I could make Nadia Grell's starting gear; I'd totally wear that. I like the coat look a lot, but both the pve and pvp sets look terrible for non-shadows, imo.

That's not my thesis. I don't have a thesis. I'm going off what the game tells you: it's a specific ritual ("shielding") used to counter another specific ritual ("Morrhage's plague"). It severs the link between the plaguemaster and victim. Period. End of story. There's 0 evidence it can do anything more. The consular tried to uses it for something else, and it didn't work, and there's no evidence it would have worked. There is no case where it's used to counter possession, unless you want to say the plague itself is possession. It's really very simple. I don't know why you're trying to make the shielding ritual into something it's not. Well, except for the fact that there's no instance of this phenomenon occurring without Morrhage's control. But whatever. I'm sure that's not relevant. You keep on saying untrue things. The consular failed to expand its use. Saying "well it would have worked!" is nothing more than speculation without support, and I find it irritating that you keep on insisting on this point. That particular piece of evidence is not in your favor. Ok... so you're insisting on this possession angle despite the fact that that's not how the consular describes it? Can you find any place where this ritual is described as an exorcism type deal? Big whup. Jedi Masters are not all that. Look, let me put it this way.

Just to play the devils advocate... on my op healer, I did do a few WZs with 0 expertise--in my raiding gear--and I was still able to do ~400k healing with 4ish deaths. I got stomped fast against any decent team, of course, so I had to be pretty strategic about where I did my healing.

Yes, Zenith is TOTALLY an expert on arcane force rituals and we should take his word on it. /sarcasm. But seriously, that's your argument? Zenith, or maybe the Consular (who is probably just making some BS guess like doctors do). The ghosts don't give combat experience. In point of fact, the inquisitor has a heck of a lot more combat experience fighting powerful force-users than the consular, with or without ghosts. Heck, the inquisitor takes out a Darth before leaving DK or getting any ghosts. She used a trick, yes, but that's war.

Minus the "gear is fine" comment, the gear gap between BM and WH really isn't that bad.

You kinda just demonstrated that it can't do more.

No. The shielding technique is a specific ritual designed to sever the plaguemaster's link--Morrhage--from controlling his victims. That's all it ever does. We may as well pretend that the ghostwalking ritual also allows the Inquisitor to bind the Consular in some way because at this point you're just trying to put a square peg in a round hole.

I wouldn't take them off the GCD, but I would take away the 5s cooldown. I remember a thread from a while back when hybrid sorcs were FOTM, and a sorc made a thread about how to beat sorcs. His entire strat--and it was a long post--revolved around cleansing force effects.

I've wondered off and on, what if they just made it so all pvp tiers had the same amount of expertise? Would that cause scaling issues or something? Seems like it would help decrease the recruit -> BM gap without making recruit gear even better for pve (atm it's better than almost any pve blues). But to respond to the OP, yes, recruit to BM is a pretty big gap. As a tankassin, I can kill a recruit marauder 1v1 and still have most of my life--almost all of it, if I use CDs. I'm in augmented BM. If the players are bad, a BM can 1v2 recruits fairly comfortably. I don't feel like there's a huge gear gap between me and the war heroes I've fought, just going off titles like war hero and warlord and whatnot. A WH fotm PT will probably beat me, but I can make it a close fight. In summary, BM vs WH is tough but doable 1v1, but recruit vs BM is a slaughter. The gap gets amplified with every character, because although a single BM vs a single WH has a chance, if you make it 2v2 it starts getting ugly.

Not really.

Kinda a moot point. It's not worth healing either player; they go down too fast. Rakata does have slightly better survivability, when healing is ignored--if you compare what would be 150,000 damage taken over the course of a match, the Rakata player will die 7 times and the Recruit player will die 9 times, if neither gets healed. If they do get healed, though, if for some reason the other team just doesn't focus them or whatever, I'd much rather heal the Recruit geared player just because my heals will go 15% farther. That's big.

TTK of someone wearing recruit gear vs leveling greens is significantly longer. Depending on your class and how well you kept up on gear, that could be 3k more hp and what, 15% damage reduction? You could last twice as long, more if you get heals (since you're surviving longer, you're more likely to get some in the first place).

Um... you're not fighting the environment. You're fighting players. By definition, that's PvP. Players can use the environment, but that's hardly new or unique to huttball. Heck, by this definition Voidstar is also PvE. Besides, Huttball rewards teamwork more heavily than any other WZ.

I don't understand not getting recruit gear. Even if you don't plan to PvP, it's still better than leveling blues and greens by a long shot. And it really does hurt your team. I'm not in amazing gear (just under 1200 expertise and around 20k hp as a tankassin) but today I was able to cap 1v2 vs some shadows alderaan because neither had pvp gear at all. You just get shredded in PvE gear; skill hardly enters into it unless you count not getting targeted.

Uh... where is it stated that he's more powerful? You missed a lot of dialogue if you think you can use the shielding technique and be just fine. It's stated that it almost kills you. Of course, they screwed the pooch when they wrote the consular and that doesn't really show up beyond dialogue, but it's there. Besides, we're talking about who would win in a fight. What's the consular gonna do? Shield him to death... from... uh...? It's a technique with a pretty limited application, whereas the Inquisitor's story ability seems pretty good for defense and attack. As a bonus...

The Republic one had its fun parts (the old guy), but I thought the Imperial one was better because it was more purposeful. You actually had some idea of what you were fighting and what its capabilities were by the time you got to the end. On Republic side you hardly learn a thing about the artifact's capabilities until you fight it.

Only because... I didn't see a lot to indicate the Consular is really all that powerful. Spent most of the story doing diplomacy, whereas the Inquisitor has some of the most powerful Sith out there gunning for her from near day 1.

Marauders and PT pyro have been great for ages. People just didn't notice until hybrid sorcs and grav round got nerfed.

Did anyone else notice that in this hypothetical situation where the operative outgears the PT and manages to get all his openers off, and has full health to the PT's 40-50%, he still needs someone else to come along and finish the job? I got a kick out of that.

Don't be bitter cause you got fooled. What gets me about a lot of the forumites here calling "photoshop" and whatnot is how unlikely it is someone would actually photoshop something so.... unrealistic. I mean, if I was trying to convince people, I'd probably use a scoreboard that showed someone winning 2% to 0% or something, and definitely take out the mumble overlay and probably a few other changes. As for the sorc only doing 10 damage.... look at what the opposing dps are: sorcs and snipers with one warrior and a tankassin. I don't know about y'all, but I usually don't run over to snipers to use a knockback on them. For all we know, the melee were all at a different node while the sorc healed mid.

You seem to be forgetting that the "class" (agent) doesn't have interrupt immunity or cc immunity. Snipers do. If you don't consider a ~5s delay from the start of the cast to the first damage a weakness, I don't know what to tell you. If you plan to continue to ignore all the counters that have already been listed--like using a defensive cooldown or just killing someone else--I have to conclude you're here to whine about something you find annoying rather than an OP ability. Juggernauts can become completely immune to CC more often, have mulitple leaps, and spam a free aoe snare. Go complain about that. As it is you look like yet another Marauder who thinks he's awesome because of his skill and wants things that annoy him to be nerfed. Marauders are FOTM even though they've changed little since launch. People are just noticing now that grav round and hidden strike are basically gone. And you know, coming from a guy that has played an operative since release, it's *really* funny hearing a maurader complaining about the woes of melee. "Ohhh, I cannotuse my gap closer. Woe!"

Yeah, I don't have much to say about how guilds handle these things internally. My point originally was just that if you intend to pug regularly--and a lot of people do on my server--requiring everyone or particularly a single role to already have experience and outgear the place is bad for the server, long-term. I agree about having fun getting things done; it's one of the things I appreciate about pugs. I often prefer a full pug to a partial guild run because a lot of times the guild members cut each other slack , goof off, take breaks and do other things that slow things down.

I'd laugh at you. I don't even want in a group that thinks it needs to overgear everything with experienced players to be successful. Heck, I saw this in WoW--"PST for invite with ach link"--and I didn't join their lousy groups either. The rest of what you said isn't even worth responding to. It amounts to "I've heard a lot of people say this, but all of them are wrong and I am right." You have your reasons, of course, for thinking that the people who disagree with you are lazy or ignorant or whatever, but people always have reasons for thinking what they do.

For someone complaining about being taken out of context, you sure didn't worry to much about trying to understand where I'm coming from. Where do "people" come up with this stuff? How about "not all people are exactly like you." I pug. Period. I'm not interested in joining a guild because for RL reasons I can't raid regularly. This point here is really at the core of your entire... misunderstanding, I guess. If logging in with plans to pug something doesn't make sense to you, I'm not sure we have any common ground. You could have save d a lot of typing if you had just said, "that doesn't apply to me because I rarely pug" or something. Honestly, dude, if you don't understand something, instead of throwing a hissy fit, stop and think for two seconds.

Oh, yes, marauders are so flawed. They need buffs. They're not FOTM, and never will be. It's a shame Bioware and the other players can't see all the terrible, terrible issues your class has to deal with. Clearly, they need buffs relative to the other classes, or at least those classes that can counter them need nerfs.