It's not an engine problem. The fact is that because it is a teleport, there is no 'in between position', ever. No matter how it is rendered on your screen, it's irrelevent because the person rolling was never in any of those position to begin with. If you have perma Force Speed you can easily outrun someone who has perma scamper, but you can definitely stun/root someone in the middle of Force Speed at exactly where you see them assuming no lag is involved because a person with Force Speed has a known position at all times. This is not true with Scamper. From the start of the roll to the end of the roll, the engine apparently treats the user as if he's in the middle of the limbo. The animation you see is purely cosmetic and does not tell you where your opponent actually is. That's why it's so hard to target someone who is using scamper because what you see on the screen has nothing to do where he is actually at.

If you have 200% chance to resist something, it takes at least 201% accuracy to even have a chance of hitting you. There's nothing in the game that gives anywhere close to 100% additional accuracy even factoring in every cooldown and adrenal, so 200% ought to be enough to defend against everything, except when it does not.

The advantage of a premade is that you know the composition of half of your team ahead of time. Let's say you queue up with 4 Assassins which is hardly a super strong combination, but at least you know you got 4 stealths on your side so you might be able to have 3 guys stealth attack some place. Of course usually premades tend to self select toward group composition that makes sense and will tend to feature classes on the upper end of the power spectrum. The premades that are strong usually have a composition consist of solely of the most powerful classes at the moment, and that's really an issue with the class balance.

All the games that are popular hides the rating from the players anyway precisely because you don't want people to realize they suck at the game. There's literally nothing good that can come from showing player their rating because people will just cry about it.

I'm sure they just forgot to put a value on it and fixing them is not high on the priority list. I can't see any hidden motive to make these things unsellable.

Shields inherently have a lot less force power than a focus of the same rating. Even if you're using Dark Charge, the tradeoff is usually even (you gain about 7% damage reduction and lose about 7% damage). Shields do not work without Dark Charge to begin with, but even if it did, since that build does not have Dark Ward you lose a larger % of damage compared to the expected damage reduction.

No what I mean is that if you ever get a WZ where all 16 guys are people on the same faction, then that's enough for a matchmaking system to work. The problem with matchmaking is that suppose 8 Republic superstars queued up versus 8 Imperial newbies queued up, there's obviously no way this matchup is at all fair, and you could be waiting for a very long time before more guys show up to even attempt to make this a balance game. But, if those guys are on the same side, then matchmaking is trivial, as you'd just divide them up with 4 superstars + 4 newbies on each side. Assuming the rating system remotely reflects the player skill in some way, you can always have a pretty decent matchup. The only case it wouldn't work is if the top 4 players (in a premade) are so good they can beat the next 8 best players by themselves, though if that's the case then those 4 guys are just unbelievably good so it was never going to be fair anyway.

The tooltip is written in English, as we usually think something that works 100% of the time as something that always works. The game, however, works in math. 100% chance to work, subtracted by some accuracy %, is no longer 100%. Therefore for game calculation purposes, Resilience is 200% resistance. You can verify this by going into your character stat. Force Barrier is 20000% chance to resist everything. Imagine if they put that on tooltip, you'd probably have people ask "What does 20000% chance to resist everything mean? Do I resist something and then automatically resist the next 199 times it's cast on me?" So instead Force Barrier just says 'immune to everything'. It accomplishes this by giving you an unbelieveably amount of resistance/parry/dodge behind the scenes.

Scamper should have a 20s CD when you used out of combat, and 5s when used in combat. For the non healer types, they should get a talent near the top of their tree that immediately resets the CD when you enter combat, as well as lower the overall CD by 5s (so 15s out of combat, 0s in combat). If you don't want to repeat the exact talent twice feel free to add some more random stuff to make these talents seem different. There's no possible way to stop the roller from getting the ball first without one of your own. You can't pull him because he's outside of your 30m. All else being equal, the team that gets the ball first has a pretty significant advantage in Huttball. Pulling someone into fire pit is a universal solution that is hardly unique against rolling, and this can actually fail if you try to pull someone mid-roll since the game considers the roll a teleport. While there are various ways to avoid grapple, this is very unintuitive, as it seems like you ought to be able to grapple someone in a mid roll into a fire pit, but it doesn't work so people are more likely to repeat this mistake. For Alderaan the most problematic part of rolling is this allows you to cap your own turret without interference unless the enemy has the same ability. Transcedence didn't let you do this. You always had to contest your own node though Transcendence gives you a very large head start such that if the rest of your intercept optimally you usually can have your own node uncontested. But it's not guaranteed to work. For Voidstar you should just cleanse yourself and roll ahead when the door blows up. It isn't as powerful as it sounds because Voidstar is now usually decided at the first door due to healing being way overpowered, so if someone blow up your first door you usually already lost the game. It'll be a more significant problem when healing is nerfed such that outcome other than 0-0 is more likely.

If your server has same faction WZ then you server has enough people to do matchmaking, because by definition that same faction WZ you just played can be trivially rearranged to allow optimal matchmaking, since all 16 members of that WZ can be rearranged to form a balanced team. With matchmaking you might see less WZ against the opposing faction (you have far less control on how you can rearrange the teams there), but I think that's a small price to pay. There are a lot of time I get nothing but same faction WZ already simply due to a lack of players on the other side.

Usually the stuff that says 'avoid everything' actually gives considerably more than 100% resistance to ensure no amount of accuracy can actually pierce it. For example Evasion dodges 200%. Saber Ward on a Jugg parries 150% in the first 2 seconds. Force Shroud is 200% resistance. Force Barrier is 20000% resistance/parry/dodge (I guess they want to be extra sure it works).

Right now with healing being unbelievably strong #2 is overwhelming the better choice simply because if you blink at the wrong time someone might get back to 100% so you can't take that chance unless you know for sure there are at most only one healer on the other side. Right now DPS basically favors killing whoever you can possibly kill just because if you don't do that, nobody will ever die. It's not clear how killing a random guy helps your team win objectives, but it's still better than not killing anybody at all. The first two order of priority is simple: 1. Anyone who can be executed. 2. Any healer that you have a clear shot at (this means no nearby obstruction, so a healer near a pillar does not qualify). After that, you should generally attack whoever is furthest from their healer, or whoever is standing in a position that is unlikely to have LoS to their healer. For example, anyone standing in the south control room in Novare Coast most likely do not have LoS to their healers. If they do, then you usually have a clear shot at their healer as well as a healer has to stand away from a wall to heal someone inside that room.

That's because it took an expansion to gear up your raid in EQ to be able to beat the gear check encounter (usually the final one, but could be earlier). Further, weapons are usually rare drops and without them you have no hope of beating a DPS check encounter. When properly geared top guilds are usually beating the encounter in one night even in EQ. You don't see that kind of dominance very often because it usually took an expansion, sometimes longer, to gear everyone in your guild.

A top guild absolutely should defeat an encounter in one day if it's not a challenge type encounter or a gear check. This is clearly neither due to its place in the progression. MMORPG encounters are pretty much at a logical deadend unless you're talking about truly gimmick situation. Do you really think a top player is going to say, "I only know how to dodge green circles on the ground what do I do on the new red circles???" Most of the time an encounter only stays unbeaten because it's broken in some way, since gear check are relatively trivial now. This isn't the days of EQ or even early WoW where you actually need several months to equip your raid. Top MMORPG players really don't get better because at the top level any limitation is mostly due to a matter of reflex/reaction. I see a consistent design theme where assuming you hold player capability constant, you'd start out with an encounter that has a boss with X HP and people can beat it, so they raise it to 1.5X and some poeple can beat it, and then they raise it to 2X HP and so on, and the dev seems to assume there's this infinite ability to improve, even though after say 1.8X HP nobody can possibly beat the enrage timer. They look at how a top guild clear and say 'wow their DPS makes this look easy!" Yes it looks easy because you're dealing with the best players doing the maximum possible DPS. Top players make near perfection playing look easy which leads dev to think that it's somehow possible to do better than perfection, since perfection sure looked pretty easy. Asking why someone who does 2400 DPS can't do 2500 DPS with gear held constant is as silly as asking why can't a 100m runner run in under 9s, it's only 0.5s faster than the world record.

Smash is overpowered but because healing is even more overpowered, it's sort of balanced right now.

There's no way any high end encounter is tested internally. That'd imply that all MMORPG companies secretly employ teams of players that are better than the best known MMORPG players, as these guys would have to be able to beat absolutely every encounter while testing, including stuff that's obviously broken. The alternative would be that this super secret team is useless as if there exists some encounter they cannot beat and yet pushed live anyway, that'd mean clearly nobody actually cares what they have to say internally. Either way the conclusion is that internal tuning is impossible. Now being a good developer means you can make better armchair decisions about things you ought to be able to do, but in the end they're still just guesses. Throughout MMORPG history you can see raids that totally miss the mark on either side of the spectrum. There's no grand plan in tuning these encounters. If they exist it implies the guys who designed these encounter can also beat them, which is absurd as it is totally not the job of the developer to actually beat the said content. Now you can argue whether something should be beatable by 1% or 5% or 50% of the population and that determines how exactly you tweak those parameters, but 0% is definitely the wrong number. Keep in mind 0% might be borderilne okay for a challenge encounter (like say Yogg+0), but there's no way this encounter qualifies for such. The fact that people can beat the encounters after this one is definitive proof that there's no way this encounter is intended to be beaten by 0%.

You can get 156 with just crafting though I rarely see people at that level. Usually you've people either way above (full 162s usually looking for just the arkanian) or way below.

The problem with theorycraft is that they usually assume players are 100% perfect, ignoring that the chance of having all 8 players play 100% perfect is an astronomically small number. Nobody is close to 100% perfect and in generaly any mistake cascades to the entire raid, so the effort required is exponential to the number of players. Further, people tend to confuse the fact that if you try enough times, one of those times your players will be more perfect than other times just due to sheer chance. It's not because your players suddenly learned to be more perfect than before. Most likely your best attempt is just the one where the RNG happened to be most favorable to you, and that's hardly something you can count on. If Olok the Shadow can only be beaten with an ideal setup of initial droid placement, then the encounter isn't balanced unless the point is that you should just keep on resetting the board until you get that ideal setup. Likewise it's almost certain this encounter is beatable if you have every RNG break went your way and everyone plays 100% perfect. But why should this be the requirement? What if the RNG doesn't go your way? Do you just say: "Sorry guys this mechanism targeted soandso and now we're all dead, let's try again and hope this mechanism targets theotherguy instead!" Similarly, saying '100% perfect on everyone' sounds cool, but it's not something that can be accomplished by skill because nobody is 100% perfect all the time. Until humans can be replaced by bots, perfection is the product of RNG. Each of your players has some % to be perfect, but even if they're say perfect 90% of the time, there's only a 43% chance that the entire raid will be perfect (0.9^8), and honestly someone that perfect only shows up on theorycraft.

Practicaliy trumps theory, even if theory is correct. You could take this encounter and present it to whoever is the best MMORPG players in the world and they might say "LOL SWTOR has terribad players, all you need to do is L2P", and it's entirely possible they are actually correct and that if they were playing SWTOR they'd beat this encounter fine. But until these guys actually log onto SWTOR and beat the encounter, the existence of such players and thus theory is irrelevent. Occasionally it's possible for an outside observer to have a 'think outside the box' moment, but again you've to ask why on earth do you need a 'think outside the box' moment on the second encounter of a zone? Never mind that 'think outside the box' is usually a synonym for exploit. We're not talking about a challenge encounter or even the final encounter of a zone.

Soft enrage and hard enrage aren't really any different. If you add a 0 to Dash'roode's HP nobody's going to be beating him either. Enrage is just a way of devs saying they can't think of any way to kill a player without having something that one shots you. I'm pretty sure Yogg+0 was beaten by stacking on Warlocks because they do not have to face him while doing DPS with one of their spells. When you have to rearrange your raid composition by rerolling classes that's usually a sign the encounter is not beatable with any sane composition.

Determining impossibility is extremely easy on any game with any reasonable participation. If something is unbeatable by the game's best active players it is by definition impossible. It doesn't matter if a team of Korean All-Stars can beat this encounter on first try because they're not part of the game's population. Even if it turns out everyone who posts on this encounter being too hard turns out to be unbelievably bad, it still doesn't matter because it's clear these are the best players we have anyway. There isn't anyone who is actually beating the encounter. At its place in progression you can rule out that it's supposed to be a gear check, and the mechanisms are hardly anything new that'd require learning. You can basically say this encounter may require people playing 99.99% perfect and players can only manage 99.9% or less. Sure there might be some people who can be 99.99% perfect (like a team of Korean All-Stars) but they're not actually playing this game right now so it doesn't even matter. There seems to be this belief that if you've a game whose playing population solely consist of terribad players then it's perfectly fine that nobody ever beats anything in that game. That's not how you'd maintain your subscribers. If you've a game with only terribad players then the game must be easy enough even the terribad players can win. On the other hand a game with a large Korean presence can be a lot harder than a game without Koreans, just because Koreans appear to be genetically superior in gaming compared to the rest of the world.

Because parse dummies don't fight back, which prevents you from gaining any Force from making defensive rolls (shield/parry/dodge).

Unless an encounter requires some kind of brand new mechanism never seen before in MMORPG (say, to damage the boss you must enter the konomi code each time before you do any attack), the notion that top tier guilds need time to 'learn' an encounter is ridiclous. There's nothing new to be learned and a day is more than enough to determine how viable the encounter is. The only way to slow this down is with a gear check, which doesn't even make sense here because it's the second boss in the instance. If you tune TFB to require full 75 gear you can at least argue you have 4 bosses before to potentially farm that stuff even though it's still at best a dubious decision. There's nothing meaningful to farm on the second boss of the instance that'd improve your chances. Mathematically impossible usually gets defeated simply because as time passes people start trying more desperate things like rerolling your classes to optimize for the encounter, to downright exploiting and these are usually powerful enough to overcome the impossible part. By the way, the whole argument about 'finally tuning stuff hard' is absurd. That'd imply there's this team of internal testers that are actually good enough to beat it and say 'yeah that'll totally challenge those players'. That's simply impossible as that'd involve internal testers that are better than the best players in SWTOR. No these numbers are literally tuned as the result of armchair quarterbacking and sometimes they turn out to be good but sometimes they turn out to be terrible as well. I could design Xenoanalyst II nightmare mode by adding 2 0s to his HP and changing nothing, and just say, "Yeah it's meant to be hard because it's nightmare, L2P". Of course in this way too blatant, but what if I only add 1 zero? How about just 3X more HP? There's a point where it'll look like I know what I'm doing while still making the encounter unbeatable, and if I'm a designer, that's not my problem because it's not my responsiblity to actually beat the encounter.

There's nothing premature about declaring something is mathematically impossible because it's very easy to extrapolate what your DPS is going to be compared to what is needed. Now a lot of 'mathematically impossible' fights are beaten because people usually find cool tricks or outright exploits to get around the mathematically impossible part. In fact, mathemticaly impossible should really be 'mathematically impossible to beat legitmately'. If you allow for illegitmate tactics, including possibly undiscovered ones, things suddenly become very possible. But that's hardly a good way to design a game.

I don't get why people keep on bring up rated as if it's magically different. No it's still the same but because both team's healers are good and someone has to win, the team with the better overall skill will probably win after a very long stalemate. I say 'probably' because it's entirely possible you lose due to some gimmick, though gimmicks are usually done by Operatives and it's likely both team will have access to them in rated so at least it's fair there. It's basically saying if you smash your head against a wall carefully it doesn't hurt as bad. It's still broken. A 0-0 Voidstar is not decided by just luck, as the better team is the team with more kills, but this is not something you want to do regularly because if you can't take any doors on either side why not just deathmatch instead?