That's 150 commendations per warzone. My average is about 80 from losing in PUGs, 120-150 (rare) from winning (as a tank, who has arguably the easiest time farming medals). If medals are an indication of valor gained, I get more than 90% of all players in wz (both sides) on my server.

I do have issues with having to spend 3+ months for a 5% stat increase. I fail to see that "casual" part.

Wonderful change. I needed a reason to stop logging on my main and they gave it to me on a silver plate.

Some nice info, thanks Our ability to ignore armor of the enemy is pretty solid, though. Many attacks important for our rotations are elemental, we can spec for elemental dot and internal damage dot, Assault spec has nasty refreshable elemental dot as a basic attack proc, and High Impact Bolt, the main attack skill for Assault and Assault hybrid specs, is usually specced to ignore 60-90% of the armor. I am not going to calculate it right now, but my guess is that at least half of our damage in most specs ignores armor and shield. Probably even more for some dps oriented specs.

Too much effort for too little profit. Those Mac users who are serious about gaming are already running Dual Boot configuration. Mac users are not typical gamers. Macs are not bought for gaming (well if someone does buy Mac for games, he needs a brain scan). The HW is too costly and rarely designed for gaming needs (often with subpar or average at best GPU). Macs still need a second OS to support most games, but at least they are using x86 CPUs now... On top of that, developing multiplatform projects for Mac OS X is a nightmare, for many many reasons that are not really important to end users, but very important for game developers, mainly programmers.

Combat Tech bonus for Neural Surge had an unpleasant effect of making the ability buggy, which was finally fixed yesterday. That's why I went for Eliminator set first. I figured out that I would have get more than enough PVP bags to get Combat Tech set later and I wasn't wrong. --- Against Sith Assasins, keep CC for their mez out of stealth, if in 1 on 1 situation with no backup. If you blow it on something else, you will give them a free victory. Their ability to vanish, drop combat, mez you and use their out of combat self-heal for the duration of mez is very powerful. You have to burn through their HP twice, if you let them do that. It doesn't seem our dots can prevent Vanish, they always seem to get away with both Gut and Incendiary Round ticking on them. --- But good sins, especially tank sins are hard to kill and I am hardly an expert. This is just something I picked up after seeing two sins duelling each other, a pretty cheap tactic.

One more thing about the damage. Sentinels have some kind of buff on 5min cd that will increase damage of their group by 15%. It works only for 4 man group in the warzone, not for all 8 teammates. It would be interesting to see PC/MV combo on a group with Sentinel's buff active Oldschool Bright Wiz/Sorc bomb groups anyone?

Ion cell stance increases your mitigation from 30% to 50% (approximately). That means you will be taking almost 30% less damage from attacks mitigated by armor. Lightning sorceres do mostly energy damage, which will be mitigated by armor. But their abilities are classified as force abilities and they will go right through your shields. Only weapon abilities (melee/range) can proc your shield.

As assault in Ion Cell, Gunslingers are good bet. When specced for Storm, assisting and guarding Sentinels is hard to beat.

Oh, it's actually today! A perfect time to respec and honor the memory of fallen avians by storming our enemies with HIB-induced laughter.

No, not Taugrim. Some PT came up with it and it remained in use precisely because it's so stupid. And sad. Poor birds.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Carolina_Parakeet 21/2/18

8% affects only the proc damage of Ion Cell, a few points of damage.

I have seen no kill trading on The Shadow Runner so far, and a lot of small to mid scale fighting. Good times, even though imps do outnumber us.

The left and right flank doesn't change either. It's always on your left, respective on your right when you enter the battlefield. bounty hunter voice You will pick up knitting and leave the pvp to people with a working sense of orientation. /bounty hunter voice

The concept of left flank and right flank has been used on the battlefield since the first bunch of apes decided to hit their enemy from more sides. ...

Bonus works across all tiers, at least according to tooltips. So you can combine Centurion and Champion pieces to get the bonus. Eliminator is good for builds using HIB "machinegun" mechanic. It can be used with all builds, but the bonus is wasted on builds that do not spec for HIB cd reset. Combat Tech is probably the most universal set for PVP, but until recently it was bugged. That's why I went with Eliminator first

Powertech is fun. He can be excellent PVE tank, solid offensive tank/shutdown class in PVP, highly mobile swiss knife of doom or a pyromaniac with possibly the best burst potential in the game. He can fight effectively against most classes in most situations. Meeting Marauders in 1vs1 with all cds is not one of them.

Marauders are getting worse and worse, and their numbers are increasing rapidly on my server. Most of them are still learning, but good ones are just insane. Last time I met a good one, even with bubble all my cds and relic popped and WZ Expertise buff picked up, he dropped me from full health to 0 in about 12s while keeping more than 80% after eating up my assault rotation. I was out of his melee range for more than half of that fight. I am in full champion armor and he isn't battlemaster yet, I am sure. No other class in the game makes me feel really outmatched. They have massive arsenal of tricks to stay in range. Stun on jump, Force choke, Obliterate short range jump, speed buffs and absolutely ridiculous dots..they just need to stay in touch for 3 gcds and I can say goodbye to more than half of my HP. If I manage to get through their initial leaps and cds and kite them in our sweetspot range, I can manage, but then they pop Force Camouflage to disrupt my range and they will be in Force Leap range or in melee range. And that 6s immortality bubble right at the end, that's the final kick in the nuts. But I guess the solution for that is to save Cryo for that or kill them with a burst while they still think they are in comfort range. I am thinking about rolling one and seeing how the class works to learn all its cds and tactics... edit: Looking at their dynamic (Annihilation marauders seem to be most depressing), I am thinking about following tips: - grapple before he can force charge (prevents him to generate rage), if I know he is going after me. - Degauss to remove Force Charge root, start running and snare him. If HTL, now is the good time to use it. - keep CC break for Force Choke to avoid wasting HTL. Eating Berserked dots + force choke = hell. - stay in 5-10m range. - Keep Cryo grenade in reserve for his imba immortality bubble. - watch out for Force Camouflage. - pray and hope someone listens. Ideally a healer on your team...

shield/assault hybrid build with Aric, but I expect shield would do it exactly same, as I didn't do any HIB proc rotation until the first one died. Done it on the first try with most of my HP intact. Screwed up considerably, but I managed to get one AoE stun off to interrupt both heals at once. They both casted one heal each before the first one died.

1. If it's possible to miss with a tech/force attack, then its good. I haven't seen a definite answer to that yet. 2. Works only in combat and it requires you to use High Energy Cell. That means its limited to Tactics specs, but its pretty good. 3. High Impact Bolt is the core damaging ability of Assault/Assault hybrid specs. You can spec it to ignore 90% of the armor, reset its cd and be free on the next use after using Stockstrike(45%) or Ion Pulse (spammable, 30%), to give you +1 ammo when hitting a burning target and refreshing Plasma Cell dot, if it's on the target, etc. 4. Incendiary Round on its own is pretty bad. You will usualy want to add at least HIB related talents from Assault tree, which will prevent you getting both Gut and Smoke Grenade.

I was just making fun from the fact that while Vanguard is intended to play in melee and under 10m range, we have only 2-3 true melee abilities and a many mid range and full range abilities. We get trashed by true melee classes like marauders, if we are stupid enough to stay in melee range. That's why I wouldn't call us a melee class. Shield spec is closest to the pure melee class, but even they can kite and engage from range, if the situation requires it. Our abilities are not about making it into melee. Our abilities are about controlling the range and to engage at the most appropriate range at the moment. Sometimes its melee (against casters), sometimes it's 5-10m range (against melee). Sometimes (not so often) at 30m.

It's not impossible, though. The biggest obstacle is that players gained a certain perception of what each archetype is supposed to do from previous flawed games, and any attempt to change that will be met with resistance.

There seems to be a bug where using a CC does not fill Resolve bar as it should, allowing one more CC effect to go through. But it's not happening very often, Resolve works reliably 98% of the time.

A college degree in game design is worth less than a toilet paper in the game industry.