You can't just generalize everything that can possibly happen as 'derping'. For example, say you're on the cannon closer to your starting spawn, you see an enemy approaching. Since the cannon is closer to your side, the smart thing would be to wait for reinforcements to arrive rather than go out and engage him solo. Here charging up would be 'derping'. But if the cannon was the opposite cannon, the longer you wait the more likely the other side will have reinforcements coming. Here you want to charge up to the other guy fighting in the middle of nowhere because if you wait, you'll get overwhelmed by their reinforcements. In a game of Huttball, it's easy to find yourself separated from the main pack with a bunch of reds surrounding you. By keeping them occupied, you delay their reinforcement from catching to your ball handler. Disengaging from PvP is very hard if the other guy at all knows what he's doing. I often pick off people making a mad dash for an objective and kill them while taking no damage since they're trying to get to the objective. How can whatever they're doing possibly be useful to their team if I killed them before they reached their destination while moving the same direction? When two people encounter each other in the middle of nowhere, it has to be advantageous for one of the people to engage, and you don't necessarily have to even know who it favorites because if the other guy isn't stupid, he's not going to let you disengage anyway (and if he's disadvantaged you won't let him leave either). Yes very rarely you can disengage with a quick CC or whatever but it's rare. I'm not saying everyone has something great worked out when you see two guys fight in the middle of nowhere, but the cost of disengagement in PvP is usually death, so even if it was a bad move, you don't really got a choice.

I think people overestiamte what loss of character does in this game because most of them came from an environment like WoW where if you're not using a move every GCD you're falling behind. In TOR it is very easy to be completely resource starved. If you got no resources available, being stunned is pretty much no loss to you since it's not like your autoattack is going to do any meaningful amount of damage. Of course it still sucks (especially if you're rooted on top of a flame trap) but this isn't a game you lose if you're not using every GCD. In fact getting CCed while your major abilities are down might even be advantageous because it means the other guy can't CC you another time when you're ready to unleash doom.

Sometimes I see people drop a bomb in the middle of a fight in Voidstar and that needs like 8 seconds or so, so it doesn't seem at all unlikely that a guy sneak up and capture the point before anyone noticed.

Force Lightning benefits from nothing in the Deception tree but it has an extremely high damage per Force. I'm pretty sure it's better than Shock even with 2 stacks of Induction in damage, and it's also better than Thrash. Volatic Slash might change things at level 40 but until then I use Force Lightning as long as it's up and it's not going to be overkill, and against mobs without KB. Force Lightning isn't too useful against standard or weaker mobs, since it's probably overkill.

It's not that easy to disengage if you're already at about the 10m range, and there's a lot of ways to find yourself in a situation like that (most often in Huttball). You're not going to just stun the guy and make a run for it because he'll just break stun and snare you and beat you down while you're trying to run away. Maybe if you see another guy well outside of engagement range you can avoid him, but that's not exactly common. In especially Huttball/Alderran, a lot of time it makes sense to simply fight anyone within melee range of you who is attacking you, because to ignore that guy means you'll die long before you reached whatever objective you're trying to get. Now in Voidstar you should never leave the door area as the defense unless you're absolutely steamrolling the other team. In Alderran you should avoid fighting in the middle of nowhere that's closer to enemy spawn (because you're likely to die with nothing to show for the effort). Of course you should keep objectives in mind but dying without putting up a fight is a very quick way to ensure you fail all your objectives.

I find CC to be really no big deal because it is easy to be resource starved in this game. If all my major moves are on cooldown and I got no Force and an enemy stunned me, I might as well just stand there because I can't do anything to begin with. The only time I need to break CC is if I'm on a full bar of Force. Even if I can break every CC as many time as I want, what am I going to do with no CD and no Force? Saber strike everything to death?

The only class I consider as 'range' is someone kneeling down on a cover. Those guys will own me pretty badly if I didn't see or can't get to them somehow, but once I do they're usually in a significant disadvantage if I didn't take too much damage. I don't consider someone who can range attack while maintaining mobility as a real range class, and never had problem getting close to them, and as far as I can tell they can shoot their guns at point blank range anyway. I may or may not beat those guys, but it doesn't feel like the game is skewed toward either me or the enemy. The cover type guys do hit hard, but they're easy to find too unless it's Huttball, and it's probably intended to be hard to get to the cover guys in Huttball.

I don't have problem with ranged classes in open ground as a melee. Now in Huttball I get sniped by guys I have no idea where they're even shooting from but that's the nature of that map. In that map it is crucial to find the snipers and knock them off the high ground or they'll just continue to rain down death from where you can't even reach.

Had that dilemma came up too when I noticed yesterday too. I guess the question is how hard are the mercernary commendations to get? Is it worth converting them at 3 to 1?

Usually the guys not doing objectives are the ones killing people. You've total damage, damage in one hit, 2Xtotal kills. I'm assuming it's not practical to try to get solo kill on purpose. There are something like 3 or 4 medals associated with Defender and I think that's objectives (defender points, defender points in one live, something else?). That said the DPS medals tend to be stuff you'll get just for playing the game anyway, and the guy getting mauled by 4 guys in the middle of nowhere could've kept them busy while you're capping an objective. Also, if you found yourself at say the bottom level of Huttball at the receiving end of a knockback and there are 3 enemies down there, you're not going to just politely walk your way out to join the team effort. You got to fight them there because they will definitely kill you if you try to run out there. A lot of the time you see two guys fighting in the middle of nowhere and you say to yourself that's dumb, but think about it, if one guy gets 'smart' and starts running the other way, the other guy will just kill him while he's running away and now you're accomplished nothing except another trip to bind. In especially Huttball you can see this 'break off from the pack' happen a lot because if you just continue to run one way toward an objective with an assailant, pretty soon all your team is going to be dead anyway.

This isn't a heal-strong game like most MMORPGs out there where if you didn't kill a guy in 3 seconds you'd expect him to regenerate like a T-1000 to full health, and this greatly weakens the ability of coordinating focus fire + good healing. Most of the WFs tend to favorite small scale encounters (Alderran, Huttball) and in fact moving as 8 people together at once is a very good way to lose the two aforementioned WFs. Now of course if the other side is coordinated and higher level than you they do have an advantage but it's not insurmountable, and the reward is given proportional to your accomplishment and not so much as whether your side or won. I've been in a game where our team got rolled but still got second highest medals even though we lost badly. The only exception to that is the 6-0 Huttballs, but I think those are more due to the other side knowing the map well to get the ball across very quickly.

If you split WFs into brackets it will solve all the imbalance problem because you'll never see another WF unless you wait for an hour before they pop up. As an Assassin my primary moves are Shock (1), Maul (10), Discharge (12), and Force Lightning (probably 2) in PvP. Yes being higher level gives you some cool bag of tricks but the primary damaging stuff doesn't require a high level. No you're not going to be an effective ball carrier without say Force Speed or something similar, but not everyone has to be the hero. In fact the guy getting mauled by 4 guys while your ball carrier moves or you're capturing an objective is probably just as valuable, and Bolster ensures you got enough HP to keep the enemy occupied a while. Obviously a level 12 isn't going to expect to win a 1 on 1 against a level 40 but that's not the sole or the even the prodominent form of fighting in a WF.

Force Lightning has one of the highest damage to Force ratio and should be used on anything you don't expect to die before you run out of Force going all out using Thrash the whole time, which should be a Strong or higher mob and certainly any player. The only time you shouldn't use it against mobs is if you know it's a mob that uses knockbacks frequently. This isn't an issue against a player since you're likely to be CCed half of the time anyway.