If you've opened 35 bags and one of them contained an item token instead of commendations, shouldn't you have 238 Champion commendations and over 500 Centurion commendations right now? What is this post about? They drastically lowered the chance of getting an item token in favor of 7 Champion commendations per bag. Who ever said it was supposed to be 20%? Where is this figure coming from?

My queue screen has always listed Alderaan, all alone. I noticed this weeks ago, and have never seen it list Huttball or Voidstar. The warzones still pop, it's just a display issue.

My main is a Guardian whom I love in PvP regardless of spec. I don't know if it's fair for me to make a comparison to my Shadow alt, because he's too low level to max out the spec the way I want it, but so far the Shadow class just seems underwhelming as a whole. Perhaps I just need to bring him to 50 to compare to the Guardian, but my Commando, Scoundrel and Sentinel alts are all more fun than that Shadow.

If they pop Zen, push them away or use your Force Stasis. Sentinels are not terribly tanky. Force Push > Saber Throw > Force Leap actually does not do terrible damage and keeps them from hitting you for a few precious seconds. Remember, they can't Force Push you, they don't have it. Enure is your friend. Usually when I end up 1v1 with a Marauder the fight goes down to the wire, often with the Marauder at a slight HP advantage, and they will pop Guarded by the Force at around 20% HP or less, which cuts their HP in half. For 5 seconds, you can't really damage them at all. Usually they think this will get them the win, and typically it will against any of the number of people who think Enure is a worthless skill. Guess what? If you pop that Enure before they drop you, their defensive cooldown wears off (it doesn't last long) and they're vulnerable again and have taken out 50% of their current health. If you have 16000 HP and throw your Enure up, you just got almost 5000 HP for free that lasts 10 seconds (I believe). Now they're at a serious disadvantage from using their health sucking cooldown. All you have to do is make sure they're below 20% and boom, Dispatch. I really don't find this fight to be terribly difficult. In a 1v1 situation, Enure > Guarded by the Force. I'm sure I'm gonna get some crap for this, but I honestly believe it's a better skill. Now if you're getting beat on by several people, I'd take Guarded by the Force any day, but your post seems to be referring to a battle between a Marauder and a Guardian. You should really not be losing to Marauders with 0 expertise if you have 600.

Lowest of all classes? I strongly disagree. In DPS spec and DPS gear, I don't last very long when focused, but should I expect to? At that point I'm just like any other DPS. Perhaps a Sentinel has a few more "get out of jail" cards, but adding survivability to a class and spec that already dominates in PvP is a bad idea. DPS Guardians do significant damage and can shake things up and disrupt healers/back lines quite easily. Saber Ward is better than people give it credit for, mostly because a lot of players tend to stop attacking you when it's on as they overestimate it's ability to absorb damage. Also, regardless of what anyone says, Enure does make a big difference. It's bought me precious seconds to protect a point or accept a heal that saved my life on many ocassions. I use it every time my health is around 10-15%%. Here are a list of DPS classes that go down easier than me or a Jugg: Operatives (Non-heal spec) Mercenaries (Non-heal spec) Assassins (Non-tank spec) Snipers And a list of classes that are roughly as survivable as I am: Powertechs (DPS spec) Marauders Sorcerers (Non-heal spec) I don't find that any class in a non-heal, non-tank spec is surviving significantly longer than me. When fighting my mirrors (other DPS Juggs), I find them slower to take down than all of the classes listed first, and about the same as the classes listed below. The only AC's/Specs that significantly outlive me are healers, tank specs, and hybrid Assassins for the most part. Sentinels have some nice cooldowns but they go down just as fast or faster than a Guardian in most situations. I have no trouble fighting Marauders and winning. We know that heavy armor sucks in PvP, but it does still make a difference. It's also worth considering that of all the classes I listed above, there are only two other DPS specs (Assassin/Powertech) that can taunt and hence get protection stats and prevent damage to their team while in an offensive stance/spec. Perhaps in this case it is necessary for a class like a Sentinel to have a few more defensive cooldowns. Yes, I know Sentinels have a few good team buffs too, but they cannot be used constantly like my taunt and AoE taunt can. Those pure DPS classes also do not have the permanent option of switching to defensive stance for Guard even if damage specced. Overall I think DPS Guardian survivability is fine. I'm only wearing Champion gear with a piece or two of Rakata, so I'm not geared out the ***. I die a lot, yes, but I also do a lot for my team and rack up a ton of kills and damage. If you don't like rushing into danger and dying a lot, then this class is not for you. If you really need to escape, Guardian Leap to a friend or Force Leap to a distant enemy, but really you shouldn't be trying to escape from anything. You're gonna go in there, blow your load and probably die if you don't have a healer, but you have plenty of time to cause problems for their team before you go down. TL;DR I think the class is fine and right where it needs to be. A buff to DPS Guardian survivability would unbalance it.

A lot of times I have these two guys in the same warzone... Guy 1) Super awesome elite epic godly PvP monstrosity. Kills everything he touches. Fights 50 yards outside of the point on Alderaan and racks up 500k damage. Never defends a point. Never stops fighting. Demeans everyone "worse" than him. Earns 10 medals. Team loses. Guy 2) Just terrible. Defending a point with another player and still loses a 2v1 when someone attacks. Can't hit a barn with a machine gun. Stayed at the point for the entire game and even called for help. 50k damage. Earns 2 medals. Team loses. Guess who's more likely to get an MVP vote if I had to choose between the two? (HINT: It's not the first guy).

I'm not trying to be an *** here, but hasn't stealth always been considered a gap closer? If you need a better snare, so be it, but giving an additional gap closer to a stealth class with high burst seems to be too much. EDIT: Then again, now that I think about it, Assassins/Shadows have stealth and Force Speed, so maybe I'm mistaken. I don't play an Operative and don't see many of them around anymore, so it's kind of hard for me to tell what they do or do not need.

If you don't have a 2 minute attention span to read something, please go run into traffic. TL;DR: If no read go run traffic.

Where are the notes for the next patch? I don't see anything on the PTR forum where I usually look.

Because I want it to improve. Even if they aren't responding to most of these posts, it's clear that they are doing some modicum of listening, as they've made several changes already that align with what the majority of the community has complained about. The PvP still has a lot of problems, but they did get rid of the RNG on Champion bags. They put in a 50 bracket. They got rid of point swapping on Ilum. They debuffed the advantage given to Biochems and Cybertechs. They're (apparently) attempting to even out the gear balance of new and old 50's. These are things that were/are frequently talked about and have been addressed. Even if some of the solutions were poor or abysmal (*cough* Ilum *cough*), they're still trying, at least.

I like Vigilance (Vengeance) better, but that's just preference. I can do equally well with both but I prefer the slightly better survivability of Vigilance over the mobility and increased burst of Focus (Rage). I think I've gone back and forth 20 times or so. Frankly though, I don't find either one to be much harder than the other. Vigilance doesn't require any setup at all (unless you count sunder), but the setup for Force Sweeps isn't exactly challenging, and it's not hard to avoid the knockback and save your leap/sweep for after you get hit by it. If you know how to play your class, both are relatively simplistic. I just think Vigilance is more fun. They're both quite good. Some people have raved about Focus (Rage) specs with some points in defense, staying in Soresu and avoiding the Shii-Cho specific talents in Focus. I've tried and tried it. It's nice and easy to get defense medals and you survive a bit longer, sure, but hybrid/cross specs don't seem to lend themselves well to this class. I found myself completely focus starved in this spec.

I think the Centurion and Champion weapons are the same color? I could be wrong. I don't know if I've ever actually seen a Centurion lightsaber on anyone, Republic or Imperial.

PT's are awesome. I have trouble with the good ones on my Guardian, and they can easily match or beat my DPS even if I'm specc'ed as a Focus bomber. I don't see any problem here.

It's worse when you get one of the loading bugs. I don't know if anyone else experiences this, but sometimes the warzone (or any zone) in the game will just hang on about 25-30%of the loading bar and take way longer than it should to load up. When this happens, I hit my spacebar and often get put on the speeder when the warzone has already begun or is just beginning. I end up flying around helplessly on the stupid thing while my team is already defending, and they are now temporarily short a player as I have to ride it in and then wait for the first respawn since the door has closed.

I seriously doubt that you actually know what critical thinking is. You are pretty good at finding ridiculously ineffecient paths to a poor conclusion though. That's not really the same thing. This is how logical thinking would work post 1.2: - I want to leave the warzone because I'm losing, but in order to complete my dailies I need to perform actions and earn medals/commendations. If I leave the warzone I won't earn these, and I'll also be penalized for hurting my team by quitting. I won't be able to rejoin a warzone and complete my dailies in a timely fashion. If I AFK in the warzone, I won't earn these and will still fail to complete my personal objectives. I will also eventually be labeled by good players and non-quitters as someone who gives up when he doesn't want to play, and eventually will stop receiving assistance, guards and heals from those players. The best thing to do would be to play each warzone to the best of my ability, achieving the highest possible rate of completion towards my objectives while also helping my faction earn theirs. This is how your thinking works: - I like to leave warzones. I'm really, really mad because I won't be able to do this without being punished anymore. I don't want to do anything that isn't a perfect situation for me, so I'm going to take this out on other players by hurting their warzone experience by AFK'ing, in a horribly misguided, roundabout attempt to try to get Bioware to listen to me cry. Then, in order to cover up the fact that I'm actually whining about the leaver penalty, I'm going to call everyone who disagrees with me a whiner. Hopefully nobody will notice how ironic this is.

I asked him the same question. His terrible explanation is right above your post if you're interested. Sounds like he's just throwing a tantrum because he won't be able to quit on unfavorable situations without penalty anymore.

When they remove the requirement to win to get your bags and change it to something else (probably performance based), which they are doing according to the recent dev post, why would you join a warzone just to AFK? At this point you're just screwing over the rest of your team for no personal gain. That just makes you an ******e.

Sundering Strike suffers terribly from this, as does Blade Storm. It actually seems to have gotten worse for me with the latest patch. In the past few warzones I've played, I notice I will frequently hit Sundering Strike (which really should be pretty close to instantaneous), and my character will sweep his lightsaber about halfway through the animation before it simply resets. Usually it doesn't take the cooldown, but I've had a few situations in which I've had to click this 4-5 times before it actually stuck on the target who was standing stationary two feet in front of me. It's actually not a minor problem when I'm Vigilance spec and can't even use my Plasma Brand if I can't land a Sundering Strike. It's absolutely ridiculous. I've lost fights because I can't use one of my primary damage skills and waste 5 seconds or more (an eternity in PvP) trying to land a single Sundering Strike. Blade Storm is even worse. It was working fine prior to this week (mostly), but now I almost can't even use it, and this skill has range, so you'd think it would actually be easier to connect with. No such luck. I frequently watch my character with his sword held high in the air, like he's unsure of whether or not he wants to do that Blade Storm, sometimes for several seconds before he just puts it down and decides "Nah!". Maybe he's just a pacifist and I don't know it yet, but it's incredibly frustrating.

Every time I think I understand who wins in what situations on Voidstar, the game laughs in my face and says "HAHA, NOPE!". I'm convinced that there is a little troll sitting underneath Voidstar that flips a coin to decide who wins. For instance, the other day we attacked second. The first team downed two sets of doors. It took them about 4 minutes to break the second door. Now, in my experience, I've always thought that if the second attacker reached the same position, they would win. So we (as the second attackers), also broke down the second set of doors, but we did it in about a minute and a half. Then we were just halted and couldn't get further. So we won, right? Nope. We lost. Even though we attacked second (which I thought mattered) and reached the same doors faster (which I thought mattered), we still were handed a neat little loss. Why? Well, I frankly have no idea.

Precisely. That's the stance I'm taking, and as I said in an earlier post, I support doing this with trees even for my own class (Focus tree for Guardian). I don't support any dumbed down play that achieves success with little effort. Mercenaries deserve to do DPS, I don't want them to take a damage hit, I just want a little bit more to be necessary to achieve what (right now) any incompetent player is capable of. Frankly, I currently cannot distinguish between a good Merc and a bad Merc, because if they're Arsenal spec, they're all doing the exact same thing. With any other class, I can tell pretty quickly if the player is skilled and know if I'm going to have a hard time. Arsenal Mercenaries are just a blur. No idea if I'm fighting a 15-year veteran PvP god or a 10-year old on his dad's account. Can't tell the difference and I disapprove of that.

After several pages, those threads tend to get so cluttered by meaningless posts such as yours, it becomes impossible to have a real discussion amidst all of the garbage. So people start new ones. This is how forums work.

Did you even read my post? I never said it was overpowered. I said it was too easy to do incredibly well with because it's a poorly designed system.

Where are you guys getting the impression that he's losing to them? Just assumed it, I guess? He never said that. He was describing the problem with the design of the talent tree around the use of one skill, a skill that is supposed to build other ones but simply does too much damage on its own and can achieve success on its own merits. He is correct. These points can be applied to any other class, ranged or melee. They aren't Marauder specific. Mauraders may have the least problem with them, but other classes still have to suffer. That entire talent tree and the skills it buffs needs to be rethought and reworked from scratch. You can't just put a cooldown on TM at this point. It would gimp the class. They have to go back to the drawing board. I play a Guardian and I would love for them to do the same with the Focus tree. It's good, but it's just so stupid. Everything revolves around building up the Force Sweep crit, then rinse and repeat. It's terrible design and it's not much fun. So I don't play Focus anymore, but a ton of people do, just like a ton of people play Arsenal because it's so damn easy to be good with. I see people on the forums all of the time defending the Mercenary class in these threads, and a lot of them will say "Well, Pyro does better damage anyway and you don't have to stand there and turret". OK. I think I believe you, so why don't I see a bunch of Pyro Mercs running around? In fact the only Pyro specs I ever fight are PT's. Why is this? Could it be because it really doesn't do all that much more damage? Or could it also be that maybe it has a bit more potential, but Arsenal is so stupidly easy to melt people with, that's what everyone chooses? This is not a problem of "Oh you can just interrupt them" or "We have to use other skills, too". That isn't the issue. The problem is the design. It's boring and stupid to give poor players the ability to obliterate people effortlessly. So, what? You cast tracer missile a bunch of times and your target has a huge chunk of health gone. Then you use your Railshot periodically in there and maybe a Full-Auto? 3 skills and zoom, right to the top of the kills/damage charts. If it took some effort or skill to achieve this as it does with Marauders, Pyro specs, pretty much any other DPS class in the game, it wouldn't bother people so much. It is too dumbed down and too easy to reach lofty kill/damage numbers with this particular class and spec. There's your problem. It may not do too much damage compared to say, a Marauder in your face, but it's just so damn mindless. What they need to do is re-work that tree so that the damage stays roughly the same over time, but make the class use more than one skill 80% of the time, for gods' sake. I'm going to clarify one more time before someone flames me for this. I don't think the Arsenal tree's overall damage needs a nerf. They're a DPS class with very little CC and should be able to do significant damage, but for the love of everything holy, make it a little bit harder to accomplish. A monkey shouldn't be able to achieve 500k+ damage every warzone.

I like your ideas, mainly because I've been wanting something similar. You're right in a way. They can't really force open PvP or "implement" it, per se; not without a huge change to the game ala WAR. They can (and did), however, do the opposite. Instead of implementing or encouraging open PvP, they managed to discourage and ruin it by funnelling all of the level 50's into one place in order to complete the arbitrary quests to get new gear. Instead of having a mercenary token system like they originally were planning - in which tokens drop off of players killed anywhere in open world PvP - and implementing a valor gain system for ALL kills rather than just kills on Ilum, they force us into one place. This is simply the worst way to encourage PvP. It's not a bad idea on a PvE server, but I didn't roll on a PvE server, and I'd imagine most people reading these forums didn't either. I had the occasional fight while levelling, but almost all of the planets were designed in such a way that there were only a few instances in which I could be confident I'd run into some Imperials to battle. Just like Ilum, every player is put on rails and tend to avoid each other through 90% of the Pre-50 content, and then at 50 they are again put on rails and told that they need to go to this one place if they want any kind of valor/gear gains. The game is supposedly PvE centric, I get that. So why do they almost intentionally make Republic and Imperial players avoid each other while levelling? Put their quests near each other - always - from level 10 and on to level 50, so we can fight. If you're on a PvE server you won't care; you'll have to flag yourself if you want to fight. No harm done. If you're on a PvP server, you'll have something fun to do instead of having 6 (about the number I had) fights from level 10-50. If their end-game PvP is going to be PvE centric (because that's what Ilum is. It gives PvE players somewhere specific to go to experience PvP when they so choose), then at least do something to make the PvP servers different. You have a bunch of them. Why even bother putting them up if we're PvP'ing in the exact same manner as those on PvE servers? I would be fine if there was no valor system, no PvP gear, no benefits to PvP at all. Even that would encourage more fighting and in different places than the current system. At least that way the people you'd find to battle would be people that simply enjoy PvP for the pleasure of it. Unfortunately, this is a new age MMO, and people want gear and PvP levels. That's fine. I have nothing against this need to have a visible progression, but when you make it so the only way to actually go through that progression is in a single instance or in warzones, open world PvP effectively dies. There are not enough players running around in random places doing other things to have any actual free PvP. They're all busy spinning in the gear grinder in one particular place that the developers chose. They'd have to do a massive overhaul at this point to actually encourage open world PvP, so that's probably not an option. What they should do though is to find a way to discourage the sole use of Ilum as a battleground. Allow valor gains anywhere. Allow tokens to drop that you can buy bags with, even (gasp!) Battlemaster bags. Don't make everything contingent on these 4 quests that must be repeated in 3 warzones and on Ilum exclusively. It sucks. This is not fun PvP.

The real sad thing is that people resort to this, and it's mainly because Ilum is so unbelievably not fun and unoptimized, that there's really point in doing it the "right" way. I mean, ya, I guess they could have a real fight, but what's the point when 90% of the players are going to have 5 FPS?