The SI is not supposed to be a tactician so the brainstorming is usually up to the crew. I see nothing wrong with that. The SI has stated that he really doesn't like people randomly backstabbing him and that's got to change once he's in charge even if that's how he got up there in the first place, so he really has no motivation to make Ashara fall to the dark side because then he'd have to watch his back from his own apprentice. He values loyalty because he knows you can't spend all your time fighting your own guys and still get anywhere. He might not be someone you'd ever trust, but he certainly doesn't want his crew to model themselves after him, because that'd totally suck for him.

Assuming a standard ELO system, you'd need roughly 10^[(2400-your rating)/400] number of players with the same rating as you to have even one person with a rating of 2400. That is, it'd take 10 players of rating 2000 to produce a single player of rating 2400, and 100 players of rating 1600 to produce a single player of rating 2400, and so on. This of course assumes you're the player who never loses. Note that if you lack this number of players, it is often not possible to hit the score simply because there aren't enough players to beat up.

Healing debuffs are just a dumb concept when tied to a specific class. If healing is overpowered and you need healing debuff to counter it then that means people without healing debuffs are useless. If healing is balanced then the classes with healing debuff are now the healer killers and what exactly is their reason for being healer killers, given heal debuffs currently belong to two classes that have almost nothing in common? They should simply get rid of all healing debuffs and just make trauma more potent, and it's one less thing to worry messing up on balance. I don't think we need faster interrupts because it's not like there's any skill in interrupting the big heals while DPS through the rest back when healers were weaker. Right now the healers that are overpowered not because you can't interrupt their spells fast enough. It's because there's basically nothing to interrupt.

I don't recall ever seeing enrage on the Republic squad bosses. The last one will generally hit so hard with its AE that it feels like he's enraged, but unless the last one is Jedi Knight they can all be stunned so it really doesn't matter. The non JK bosses have the buff 'Alertness' which makes them immune to crowd controling effects that break on damage.

It's ironic that due to healing (and in particular Operative healer) being blatantly overpowered that this leads to surprisingly balanced WZs since there's no possible way to hide this so every WZ is filled with healers.

Waiting for 3 stacks of Harnessed Darkness before using Force Lightning is generally a terrible idea against any class besides an Operative healer. However since Operative healers are probably the alpha class of 2.0 this turns out to be not as bad as it sounds. Basically you want 2 stacks of HD on a target in melee range and 3 stacks of HD on a target outside of melee range. Since Operative healers are almost guaranteed to be never in your melee range for more than a few seconds, saving 3 stacks of HD for them is very safe.

Actually escapes for healers are pretty much a PvP mechanism. If you tried to roll or force speed away from a mob in PvE it'll generally just pull out a gun and shoot you instead, and if players could do that nobody would be complaining about escape mechanisms. The problem with Guard is that it only works if everyone is balanced. Guard is a force multiplier effect, so if you're guarding a living god it's kind of like having 2 living gods. Now it also works the other way around as guarding a useless class is like having 2 useless classes, but of course the person doing the Guard gets to pick who he guards. As long as some classes are of the living god status, you'll end up duplicating that by guarding the said class. The biggest problem with PvE to PvP is that escape mechanisms are basically useless on mobs but super effective on players, and yet heals are balanced with the assumption that escape mechanisms are minimally effective, which is definitely true in PvE but not PvP.

The advantage of group finder is that you can actually do something else while waiting besides spamming in fleet. For example I do GSI dailys which take a pretty long time while I'm queueing up for a raid. The queue might never pop but it's quite painless to join queue and just go grind until you get bored.

The only guys who say numbers don't matter are the guys who can't put up good numbers, which isn't even very hard. All these stories are basically saying my team had great numbers but I was dumb so we still lost. Well thanks for being honest but people who put up great numbers that aren't dumb usually don't lose. I had a game of Alderaan where the other side had 60 kills and we had 10 (and also dominated pretty much everything else). I sap capped their node at the very end and won because they left only one guy defending. Had they left 2 guys guarding they'd still have outkilled us something like 55 to 10 and they definitely would've won. So yes it's always possible to win if the other side is dumb despite putting up huge numbers but that's because your opponent is dumb. If they were not dumb, they'd win and still put up their awesome numbers. Having one more person guarding a pylon isn't going to make the side with 60 kills lose half of their kills.

Matchmaking is a solved problem. Just look up wikipedia and then check any of the FAQ of any game that has a working matchmaking system and you pretty much have the exact code you need to implement it. It's mind boggling that such a trivial thing has not been implemented since you can literally steal from any existing matchmaking system by looking at its FAQ. You don't even have to loosen up the criteria as long as you got at least 16 people on your side that are actively playing PvP, because it is trivial to matchmake 16 characters whose order can be rearranged arbitarily. It's impossible to come up with a same faction WZ where matchmaking cannot be solved trivially, unless you've a case where a given premade of 4 can defeat the next best 8 players by themselves, though if that is indeed the case then obviously no matchmaking algorithm could possibly match that set of characters evenly.

If you wipe before 20% your raid is nowhere close to actually beating the raid so there isn't even a point to talk about it. There's a fairly obvious design pattern of difficulty ramping up as the boss gets into execute range and the ramp up is so strong that there often is no point to worry about any point before that. If some guy somehow died prior to this point, he'd most definitely die during the soft enrage phase anyway and you'd still fail.

With healers being very strong at the moment it's not like separating the healer from his tank for a few seconds is enough to take him down. Sure it's better than nothing but it's just not reliable if you don't have any obstruction/elevation involved. Usually it's best to try to move the healer forcefully because they tend to hang out near obstructions to take advantage of LoS, so you can use this against them. Tank tends to stand in open areas since that's where they excel. There's just no way you can create any meaningful separation on a tank standing next to a door in Voidstar because that area is just too open, but his healer hanging out by the pillar might be moveable to a vulnerable spot with a carefully timed force push/grapple.

This is why matchmaking is in most competitive games that have an active population. People don't like to play a game where they think they'll lose 90% of the time. It's not even very fun to play a game where you win 90% of the time (though better than losing 90% of the time). I see people always say there aren't enough people for matchmaking, but nobody ever thought that perhaps we don't have enough peopel because there is no matchmaking. I don't know if matchmaking will suddenly bring everyone back, but you sure aren't keeping the guys who are losing 90% of the time without matchmaking.

The way the raids are setup in this game your DPS is generally completely irrelevent until around 20% or whenever the boss starts fighting for real. This greatly favors burst DPS classes and especially classes that can execute. I don't really like this design. Most of the time it feels like what I do in the first 80% of the boss's health is completely irrelevent. The only way anything I do would matter is if I did something spectcularly dumb and wiped the raid. There is no positive contribution any player can do until the boss gets to the 'fight for real' phase, because it's all trivial compared to when the boss actually gets hard.

I don't think the level 50 Ops will be used very often in group finder, but I don't see how it can possibly hurt. You're allowed to queue for level 50 flashpoints as a level 55, and that seems pretty useless too but having the option doesn't harm anyone.

If you assume that the average player isn't very good, why should the fact that you have a guildtag suddenly make you good? The group finder tends to self select toward bad players anyway, since there just isn't much point for a good player to do these raids. Now getting bad players is fine, but getting bad players who don't listen, or worse yet, have a majority, severely limits your options. If you can't tell that DPS with 23K he's the reason why you're failing the enrage timer because his guild has the majority, your options are extremely limited. Note that even if you're in a PUG full of bads, most people can usually agree on that the DPS with 23K probably should be replaced first, so at least you've some hope. Of course people are always surprisingly bad no matter how low you set the bar, but as long as people are willing to listen it's usually salvageable. The problem is when you get guys who don't listen. I had a Madness Assassin who claim he was getting aggro on Titan probes, and I'm not even sure if that's physically possible even if you're casting Death Field the moment the adds spawned since Madness has nonexistent AE power. I'm 99.99% sure he confused Lots of Missiles with adds but of course that guy said he totally knew what he was doing. The difference is that in a PUG you can usually get rid of that guy, but not in a guild run when that guy also has the majority.

Dealing with the tank first only works if you think the healers are bad, which happens surprisingly often but just isn't something you can count on. This strategy works mostly because a lot of bad players never notice anyone else taking damage but they always notice if they're taking damage. The amount of distance you can move people is irrelevent due to the fact all tank classes have superior movement abilities (Force Speed/Phase Walk/Intercede/Charge/Hydraluics). If you're attempting to separate the tank/healer somehow, make sure there is some kind of obstruction involved. For example pushing a tank off a cliff in Novare Coast usually does ensure he won't be coming back for a long while. Pushing a tank or whoever he's guarding on flat terrain, however, is a waste of time. Separation in this game is created by LoS/elevation, not distance, because tanks can bridge distance trivially.

The easiest way to do matchmaking without significantly impacting queue time is to greatly favor same side faction games. If we have 8 superheroes queue up on Republic side and 8 newbs on the Empire side, it'd be very hard to think of a way to balance this team. But if they're on the same side, the task is trivial. Obviously if you got the right guys from both side you should still use them, but it is way easier to have a balanced team when you can rearrange the ordering of all 16 players.

The multi healer isn't any different from the versus single Op healer (unless there are no Op in the multiple healers). You attack the person who isn't the Op, and you stun the Op when the person you're trying to kill is at 30%. It can take a very long time to get this to work but that's what you're supposed to do, and if their both healers are Op then you're pretty screwed. Smash is pretty much the only attack that can do enough damage to even get someone low enough to be killed. Focus fire on this is pretty much a waste of time, though it's not like you've anything else better to do if you don't have Smash.

Why are you making up hypothetical situation that may have never actually occured, and if it did, is certainly something too rare to be seen with any regularlity to defend your argument? Even as dumb as Hypergates is, it's awfully hard to win that fight without killing anybody unless the other team just fell asleep.

I think heroic 2s should yield a purple mod or enhancement and heroic 4s should yield purple armoring/hilt/barrels + mod/enhancement. This might look weird for planets like Alderaan that have like 4 heroic 4s but there really shouldn't be that many heroic 4s to begin with.

There's something wrong when the winning team has problem getting the '10 kills' medal. I know some people like to think that's totally awesome, but in reality it's just dumb.

I still don't get where you've these games where tanks of any type is being focus fired outside of Huttball. There's no point for a tank to have any higher survivality than your best DPS, because your best DPS most certainly beats the tank in DPS and if he's easier to kill than he's always a more attractive target than the tank. You can achieve this trivially even in full DPS gear with only Disjunction and Dark Charge. If you're the last person left standing, stelath is far stronger survival tool than any other CD in the game. If you're the second to last person left standing, the enemy, if they're at all good, should be focused on taking out the guy that isn't you. The only time I see tanks being focus fired is if people confused them with a Smasher, and that's simply from laziness. A tank's role is necessarily offensive in the current game because if you want more defense, bring another healer. There is nothing a tank can do that is remotely as useful as having him replaced by a healer if all you're interested is defense. I always see these tanks doing like 200K damage saying 'but I have X protection and I snared these guys 75 times." That's irrelevent because a second healer can do far more than X protection and snaring people 75 times. The only thing the second healer cannot do is DPS, and while the tank needs not to be a DPS machine, he can't be doing the same damage as what a second healer would've done, because then you might as well just have another healer.

Single target DPS is pretty much useless on any healer that is guarded and often useless even if they're not guarded. If you look at the total HPS versus total DPS it's just inconceiveable that you can possibly threaten a healer when that damage is spread out to two characters. More importantly single target DPS are usually very vulnerable to other DPS or any form of CC. Those two Marauders chasing your healer sure looks like a pretty juicy target for your own DPS, as they're way deep in enemy territory and possibly outside of their own healer's range/LoS. The 'DPS on the healer' is likely the easiest kill you'll ever get in the heal-strong environment just due to proximity issues, and even if you don't know this, it sure seems like a good idea to hit 2 guys that are in the middle of 6 of your guys. It's because of this that tanks are sometimes better than DPS for the harass role, not because tanks do anything amazing against healers but that the 'DPS attacking healer' role generally gets focus fired so you want your tank to take that damage instead. Smash is the only attack that can possibly break Guard, as the sudden drop in the tank's HP if he and the healer both happens to be in Smash range can leave the tank low enough to be executed since he's basically taking 150% the damage of a Smash. Yes people will just say don't do that, but it's not like you can always magically stay exactly far enough from your own healer to not get smashed. More importantly, no other attack even has a chance of replicating this. After all if you hit the healer first it just gets shared 50/50, and if you hit the tank first that's pretty much exactly what the healer wants you to do.

Random team is quite a popular form of playing in Warcraft 3, with the top player having about 80% the games played compared to solo ladder, which is the only type of games with more games played. And Warcraft 3 requires considerable more coordination to actually win in a team game as it is actuall important to know what the heck your teammates are doing, while in SWTOR it's usually optional as long as one guy knows to stay behind to node guard. So you absolutely can come up with a good rating with completely random players based on the standard win/loss adjustment on winning. I mean seriously do people think the top of the solo queue is just going to be some guy who is inexplicably lucky and always have the best teammates? Well if that guy is just so lucky maybe he rightfully deserves his spot at the top. If you look at the Warcraft 3 random team ladder the top player wins about 60% of their games, and that's not an accident when you consistently win 60% of your team while matched up against guys who are of comparable skill against you. Obviously the guy at the top is extremely good to even win 60% of the time. Same thing will happen if there's actually some degree of matchmaking, as you'll quickly find winning more than 50% of the game when you're not playing against inferior competition is very hard to do unless you're simply a lot better than everyone else.