In general I agree with you, the developers in this game has made PVP fun. Some of the major positive points is the varying styles of the battlegrounds, and allowing all trinity roles to have their place in PVP. I just came back after a ~6 month break just to play some more WZ's, and compared to other MMOs I've played this game has the most fun WZ/battlegrounds around. This doesn't make it perfect, and there are obvious issues that could/should be fixed to make it even more fun to play. First and most important is an update to how rated WZs work. Sadly this game made the same mistake WoW did in having rateds being a full team queue only system, which caters too much to FOTM setups. Keep the 8 man full raid rateds by all means as an "endgame" style of WZs, but it would give more fun games if there was a rating mechanic for pug 1-4 man queues. More even games, less stomping those poor 14k health fresh 50's, and less being stomped by elite war hero geared players when your alt is a freshly dinged 14k health 50. The rating doesn't need to give any reward beyond giving more even games. Let's face it, winning a huttball with 3-2 by a cap in the last few seconds is just far more enjoyable than a 6-0 steamroll in 4 minutes, and so is losing under the same circumstances. I'd take a 10 minute queue for a good game over a instant pop for a bad game any day of the week. Second is the speed of PVP balance fixes. These need to be MUCH faster. No PVP class/spec imbalance should be allowed to last longer than it takes to reroll and gear up an alt of the appropriate FOTM class. Bug fixes should be made within a few weeks. Balance changes should happen within 2 months maximum, preferably within 1 month if the balance issue is large. This is a huge issue for me personally, and the reason I quit the game for the first time half a year ago to take a first hiatus. Slow balance fixes is also a common issue for both this game and WoW. The thing is, most people overestimate the size of the imbalances, and seemingly also so do developers. A fast 10% nerf to an overpowered ability may be enough, but often after 6 months the impending nerfs or buffs are overdone, leaving the game in a new state of imbalance. This leaves players who happen to draw the short straw for the latest rounds of balance changes feeling like they should reroll, and if you should reroll why not just do that in a completely different game? After all, this game just showed that balance isn't likely to happen any time soon. Third is that balancing seems to be done a lot by feeling. Judging by most developer answers I've seen it's often argued on so to say soft grounds "We don't think blah blah X is a balance issue...". This is a seriously huge issue. Now i might be mentally damaged by my work as an engineer in nuclear safety, but if it isn't measurable then it's useless. Don't think and go by feeling, create measurable items that you can evaluate and make sure these measurable items are within the range you find acceptable. There are 8 classes. On average in rated battlegrounds there should be 1 of each advanced class if the game is perfectly balanced (including all classes are played as much at level 50, which should also be a metric to keep track of if not for PVP balance primarily). Now perfect balance is unachievable, partly because the metagame may change in unexpected ways. But let's say anything between 0,6-1,4 of each advanced class normalized for the population at level 50 should be possible to achieve. Any measured value outside of those should lead to immediate fixes in the form of buffs or nerfs where appropriate. Then on a longer term aiming for 0,8-1,2 but allowing those type of balance changes to take longer time. Further within each class which has different roles aiming for some sort of balance between either tanking/DPS or healing/DPS. Again the balance can never be perfect, but there has to be a number, say less than X % of all commandos/BHs in rated playing as a DPS spec, should raise a warning flag implying that something should be fixed, and a lower value Y % implying that fixes should be immediate. This would also strengthen the argument for developers when answering balance complaints on these forums. Instead of "we feel blah blah blah" you could get the answer "Our metrics show the class being played less than we'd like to, and we're looking into buffing the class in upcoming patches. But we dot not see the class as in such a bad state as to warrant immediate fixes as there are still quite a few people who seem to make the class/spec work in its current form".

Bulk healing isn't an issue. The AOE heal is amazing in that regard and getting upwards of a million healing in a perfect setting should still be possible. The perfect setting being a full length voidstar where noone goes for you. I wouldn't call 800k "common" by any means, even though the 800k+ games does happen on occation. However... Beating stupid and poor scrubs who fail to go for a soft healer has never, and will never, be a problem. You will beat those types of teams regardless if you had that sage/sorc healer or not. The problem is the the combination of being a soft target while also being reliant on cast time heals. Good players understands that going for a sorc pretty much nullifies their healing at worst, and at best gives you a pretty safe kill. What patch 1.2 did for sage/sorc healers was nerfing their burst healing, and without damage reducing cooldowns sage/sorc survivability has been very centered on that burst healing. Pre 1.2 with the buff double dipping a force speed, knockback or stun bought you enough time for two large heals. Post 1.2 you only get enough time for at most one large heal. Pre 1.2 the time you bought with a force speed first topped you off, then allowed for a few globals of healing others allowing yourself to be damaged, then cycle next escape ability and repeat. Post 1.2 that same escape ability doesn't give you time to top yourself off, DPS catches up, and you're stuck to healing yourself and if lucky drag it out enough to get assistance. The main problem with patch 1.2 was that a fix of an obvious bug (the double dipping) grating burst healing was combined with a further straight out nerf to burst healing (reduced force cost instead of cast time on the large heal). In my opinion the combination of the two changes was a step too far. While the bug - as all bugs - should have been fixed, combining it with a further nerf to burst healing was overkill. Especially seeing how PVP survivability for sages/sorcs was heavily reliant on escape followed by burst healing.

It happens occasionally. The only way I've found to break it is to get "Rescued" by a sage, which seems to remove the stun. Weak workaround, but if you're playing a sage/sorc and see a stunned person at the spawn don't hesitate to waste that 1 min cooldown.

If you get around to trying it it'd be nice to hear what you (or someone else) thought of it. Not so sure about the changes to the talents you proposed, DW mastery simply seemed to give the most benefit per point, exchanging close quarters vs watchguard possibly. As for centering, stick over 5 focus at most times and all you need to do is 5x or 3x cyclone slash to get back to 30 centering depending on how many groupmates you missed. at 4 centering per focus spender it's rather fast building 30 if you actually go for building 30 centering. You do give up some killing potential for sure. Even if you don't see yourself playing this in a premade, or later for rated WZs, I'd still recommend trying it out for a few games before making up your mind.

Having thought about trying a utility spec for a while i finally got around to trying it out... and well... when doing WZs with a few guildies it sure seemed to give some absolutely ridiculous results, especially in huttball. So if anyone is going to spend the weekend doing some premade WZs, I'd recommend at least trying this spec out: http://www.torhead.com/skill-calc#501bIbRrzrZbZGR0rdM.1

From what I've seen speed buffs/debuffs seems to be additive. Which means the acid pit still snares a sage/sorc but... Normal run speed is 100%, the acid pit snares you 50% leaving you moving at 50% run speed. Sage/sorc sprint adds 150% speed, huttball carrying/acid pit snares you 50% leaving you still moving at 100% above normal run speed. Mostly this is from what I've gathered playing sentinel with transendence, both the 50% and 80% (watchman) movement speed versions. The snares from either are not really noticeable as Sage using sprint.

Thank you, i appreciate the appreciation Glad to hear it will be resolved, and in a way which increase the burst from Zen, which should help PVP somewhat.

I might be wrong on this, but the marauder tooltip displays the correct damage for the equivalent ability Rupture. So if both cauterize and rupture is doing the same damage, rupture tooltip displays that damage, but cauterize tooltip displays 33% lower damage, then odds are the issue is with the cauterize tooltip and the ability is working as intended. Lesson from this: If two things contradict each other and the information is insufficient to judge which should be correct, don't jump to conclusions. Instead try to gather more information.

Anyone? It won't really take long, just need non-crit and crit damage numbers and the paper doll crit bonus. It might be the Marauder talent is also bugged.

Playing a sentinel, but using solely marauder ability/talent names to avoid confusion: Since it seems Sentinels aren't benefitting from the talent Bleedout, which is supposed to add 30% to bleed crit damage. I was just wondering if Marauders are having the same problem? Can some Annihilation specced marauder please post their normal hit and crit damage numbers using bleeds. Both Deadly Saber and Rupture numbers would be of interest, and the value your paper doll shows for crit damage bonus to force attacks. Thanks in advance.

I did not test it by not having the talent and then picking it up point by point. But will likely respec tomorrow (european) and run a full test depending if i get time to play. What i noticed was burn effects having the exact same crit bonus as any other ability, even though i should have an additional 30% crit damage boost to them. As in... having 79.5 % damage bonus to crits (50% baseline + 29.5% surge rating) on the paper doll my burn DOT crits were exactly 79.5% higher than my hits. They have no damage range so it's always the same numbers popping up. It wasn't the expected 109.5% damage bonus (50% baseline + 29.5% surge + 30% talent) Testing with other, non-burn DOT, abilities they also had ~79.5% higher damage on crits. The ability damage range made the numbers i got vary a bit, but all were close enough to 79.5%. It quite simply seemed like burns did not have any additional crit bonus, which they should if the talent worked as the tooltip suggests.

After some testing with both Cauterize and Overload Saber i seem to only get the crit bonus from Surge Rating, Searing Saber doesn't add 30% crit damage. Is this some known bug? Or the tooltip being outdated on the talent? Googling it came up blank.

You seem to cunfuse it with overload saber, i have mostly 136+ and get 250 hits and 450 crits.

It would be really nice to have this feature. But, people have not yet set their finger on the by far biggest issue, maybe due to their class. But, levelling a Sage alt, and doing some PVP on the side, i noticed that the only way to keep gaining distance while kiting (or lose less distance) while reliably placing my targetted AOE "Force in Balance" is to backpedal. MY SOUL IS DOOMED TO ETERNAL DAMNATION BECAUSE OF PRESSING THE DAMNED "S" KEY IN PVP! I HAVE BECOME AN BECKPADDLER!!! While it's only for that one second while placing "Force in Balance" i still feel dirty...

Golden cyber samurai with baby blue lightsabers.