He was just playing mind games. But yeah, I woulda joined him for sure.

I understand it's probably uncomfortable for you to have us occupying the "masochistic" moral high ground when you're forcing someone else to endure something you can't stand to do yourself. When you abandon a losing match, you're forcing someone else into it except they have even less chance to get something out of it. I have nothing but disdain for people who say "staying is too painful" and then force someone else to zone in by leaving. Guess what, that spot you left doesn't stay vacant. You got one thing right, though. Deserters are lamers.

I can definitely blame them. No one wants to get stomped fighting a premade, so why should you be allowed to pass the buck to someone else? All the arguments I've seen against some kind of penalty for leaving early boil down to "My time is more important than anyone else's." It's really frustrating getting thrown into a WZ with only a few minutes left and no time to get three medals.

Tyme is pretty good. I saw a character with the legacy title Time on my server. The character was "Story Time." When my brother saw him, he commented that apparently Bioware has started putting story into PvP, now. Mine is Heals. Sorry Heals, Damage Heals, Need Heals... I was thinking that "Drunk" would also be a good legacy title. Then I'd make characters with names like "Probably" or "Mostly" or "Almost."

Report him. It's not acceptable behavior.

We are not prepared!

Have you done Belsavis yet? You wanna talk about getting screwed over... man. There's some good things about it, to be sure. I enjoyed the end of act 2. I get kinda annoyed, though, when my trooper says things like "Sir, nice to meet you Commander Sir" or "It's my solemn duty to serve the Republic!" Sometimes I just pretend he's being sarcastic.

And this is where ultimately I don't think you can reconcile the two stories, even though neither one causes huge changes. Another issue is the vision the mystics had of an outsider who would save the Voss. It's too bad, really, because they probably could have written Voss in a coherent way for both stories. I don't think that my character has to "win" on every single planet for the story to be interesting. I think it would actually have been kinda cool to have a story on Alderaan (for example) where your faction ultimately loses.

Gotcha. I just finished Voss today on my consular, after I made that post. I could actually see an argument for both the Republic and Imperial stories on Voss being "true" with Voss leaning Imperial, depending on what you tell the Three. Hey, how about that, I just got out. Spent my last few years on MSG, but I was an 0651. You? Out of curiosity, have you played the trooper, and if so, what's your opinion?

Um... what? We're talking about military operations, here, not evolution of a gas into an Erlenmeyer flask. Part of making military decisions involves considering factors you can't observe. There's a reason neither historians nor tacticians are taught "the scientific method." Ignoring other possible factors is a good way to get an answer you like, though. A major consideration you're ignoring is the fact that the Imperials on Balmorra had every confidence of winning--and would have, without the PC. They had a fairly solid plan, if you think about it. It's always rough going against a character with plot armor, though. I chalk it up to bad writing. They wanted to give the Republic quests the same urgency early on that the Imperial ones do, and instead of fighting pirates they made it the Empire even though neither story makes a lick of sense when taken with the other. These prison guards support a system that keeps third-generation inmates who haven't been convicted of anything, and then does medical tests on them and pits them against each other in war games. How do you accuse them of idealism? Not all of them knew everything, but certainly the most senior guards did. Sometimes I wonder if the guy who wrote Belsavis secretly supports capital punishment and is just making fun of people who think the death penalty is wrong.

You're assuming this is a zero-sum game and that these events are taking place at the same time and there weren't other factors keeping the Empire from reinforcing Balmorra. In fact, Balmorra is deep in Republic space whereas Taris is in Imperial space. But if we want to talk about stupidity, how about Hoth? The Empire uses a small force to harass the Republic who are searching for salvage. The Republic seems to think they'll win the war on Hoth; meanwhile the Empire is laughing at the resources they are pissing away on a glorified salvage operation. The Republic looks even more stupid when you consider that they're looking for yet another superweapon that they somehow lost the schematics for and only ever built one. Yet, a band of pirates on Hoth of all places manages to reverse engineer and mass-produce the thing. But, yeah, guys, I'm sure *this* will be the weapon that ends the war, and not one of those half-dozen other superweapons we've already chased down for you. That's not even getting into the general incompetence and corruption you see at all levels in the Republic military. It's embarrassing. Heck, on Quesh, the CO was ready to roll over and die after his XO got captured/defected, despite all the previous victories.

That's not remotely true. Alderaan, Hoth, Tattooine, and Nar Shadaa all have functionally identical storylines: Alderaan - Fight against the opposing faction, kill King Ulgo, and help the Panteers crown a new king. Player's faction "wins." Tattooine - Deal with Sand Raiders and face the Rakata prisoner. Hoth - Desperately fight off attacks by the opposing faction and secure your own presence. Heck, some of the planet quests are almost exactly identical in resolution. Nar Shadaa - Secure aid from the Hutts. Belsavis - Stop the Esh-ka. I've never finished Republic Correllia or Voss, but I strongly suspect both end with the Voss ignoring the opposing faction's embassy and with Correllia firmly in the PC's hands. The only planets where we can say with certainty what happened are Tython, Ord Mantell, Hutta, Korriban (starting worlds) and Taris and Balmorra, because the Imperial and Republic stories are consecutive rather than concurrent. If you think Alderaan, for example, clearly shows one faction or the other winning, you're either delusional or clueless as to how the quests on the opposite faction work. We're left to imagine whatever we think really happened for most of the planets.

Maybe you missed it, but "canon" in SWTOR is that the Empire did destroy Taris. It's a Republic starting world, but Imperial characters don't go there till mid 30s. The imperial bases don't even exist on Taris when you do your Republic storyline. I think the Republic story on Taris is much dumber (we're colonizing Taris for propaganda!). The Republic and Empire both put a fair amount of resources into Taris, and the Empire wins that fight. Unfortunately, IMO, most of the other storylines are concurrent so you just have to pretend one faction or the other "really" won.

Not so much. If I choose to play a commando because I like the class concept and I want to kill stuff with a big gun, I shouldn't get forced into mediocrity. Plenty of people play AVs that can theoretically spec into healing or tanking but have absolutely no desire to do so. Failing to balance the dps specs is bad design because, in this case, you risk alienating roughly 3/4 the dpsers out there. Heck, even Blizzard realized the "you have more options, so you should suck more at all of them" concept is a bad design plan.

Although one might wonder if it's really good vs evil after playing Republic Belsavis. And the chairman of the Senate's penal oversight committee is right there in the thick of it. I thought what the Republic was doing there was bad, and then I did the trooper story. Wow. More and more I feel like the Republic is only somewhat less evil than the Empire, only more hypocritical about it.

Agent, IMO. I don't like the trooper one especially because of the multiple levels. I play on a lot of alts and can't take the time to memorize where all my companions are, so a ship with multiple levels is harder to navigate when I'm trying to find someone to talk to. I'll give the Jedi ship points for easy egress, but I prefer the orientation of the Sith ship. Agent and Sith ships just look way cooler in space combat, whereas the Jedi ship looks like a flying brick.

On my other characters, I'd definitely look at immobility as one of the core problems with commando survivability. That and gunnery overdependence on grav round. The whole talent tree is a long succession of "if you mash your grav round key a little more, good things will happen!"

I have two 50s on imperial side (agent, inquisitor) and a couple 40s (consular, trooper) on Republic side. I assume I still qualify? I'm 26. Currently I'm not playing any other MMOs, though I am leveling one character with my brother in SWTOR with some regularity. We're up to Belsavis, so hopefully we'll be done soon. I'm available Tues-Sun after seven pm (central time), but probably not more than four or five nights a week (as I said, I'm leveling with my brother). I think this sounds like an interesting idea. I usually RP my toons in the sense that I have a character concept, but I've never done that with a large group before and I'd like to try it. I'm mostly indifferent to what role I play--I've done and enjoyed them all. The AV's I've played a lot are operative, assassin, commando, and sage, so I'd rather do something that isn't one of those. I favor the empire over republic, and there's two stories I haven't seen on each side so it doesn't really matter.

About halfway through Republic Belsavis for the first time. I didn't used to like the place, but taking the imperial and republic stories together I'm starting to like it. Among the highlights, an imperial scientist gushing over how great things are going: "Now we can let the galaxy know what kind of experiments the Republic was doing on these prisoners! And we get to keep the test results!" Good job, Republic. Let's keep second- and third-generation inmates who are completely innocent here, and then do drug and medical tests on them and then give them weapons and have them fight each other in war games so you know how to fight the evil Empire. Pro.

Touche.

On healing the Jedi masters: At one point I was surprised to find I had made a DS choice when I told a hostile Sith to defend himself. I guess maybe I was supposed to convince him of the error of his ways or something. Generally, I feel like the consular and trooper stories particularly on Republic side are a long string of missed opportunities for greatness.

Only class that brings a healing debuff on top of Trauma, quick interrupts, group buffs. It's almost like a WoW warrior in arena before they gave mortal strike to everyone, except much harder to kite and there's no frost mage to do it anyway.

I thought a lot of the DS choices on Balmorra actually made a lot of sense (not all, but many). Or are you talking about somewhere else? Just as a point of trivia, I understand that most scholars think Machiavelli was actually being sarcastic when he wrote The Prince and intended the book to be a satire of how contemporary Italian politicians thought. Apparently, they didn't notice the sarcasm.

Because contrary to what you want to think about Bioware knowing how to balance the game, they don't. Tankassins' damage was too high before the patch. It's still too high because they didn't touch it, but now they're squishier in PvE and there's still no reason for a tankassin to gear as a tank except HP. If this were Blizzard or another company with a good record of balancing multiplayer games, your statement that Bioware would fix problems if they existed would make sense. As it is, honestly, you just sound like a fanboy. Don't get me wrong, Bioware is one of my favorite developers, but that doesn't mean I can't see their faults. I lost a lot of my faith in Bioware after the repeated nerfs to concealment operatives early in the game while leaving other serious issues unfixed. Like you, I want the game to succeed, but honestly I think Bioware is out of their depth when it comes to balancing games. None of their single-player games were really balanced either, which was fine (I guess). When you look at things like the sorc AOE heal in PvE, though, and read statements by Bioware saying that they don't see an issue (despite most healers, including sorcs, seeing one) you have to wonder if they know what they're doing.

I do think it's really weird that marauders have a healing debuff. I thought the logic behind Trauma was something like: originally in WoW, only warriors had a healing debuff. Then they realized it was too valuable and gave it to pretty much everyone, meaning that effectively healers in PvP were dealing with a 30-50% healing debuff. Ergo in swtor you just slap a 30% healing debuff on everyone to limit healing. Except 1 AV and only 1 AV brings an extra 20% coupled with multiple interrupts on very short CDs.