I like Huttball more than the other two, personally. Mainly because it's the only one that genuinely tries to be different to common MMO staples. It can get boring on those occasions when it's all that comes up but I have the good fortune to play on a fairly balanced server so it doesn't happen often these days. I'd actually like it if they designed 2-3 new Huttball maps to play on - same rules (don't kick the ball!) but different layout, hazards, routes to the endzones, etc. We at least know we're getting another faction vs faction WZ in 1.2, whatever form it might come in - should ease the feeling of overexposure to The Pit we get at the moment anyway

It's so weird, I re-watched the movie just last night and then I stumble across your post not 24 hours later!

Where did you find this quote? From the toilet store?! EDIT: Been burned by this before so, to be clear to Bioware moderators: this is not an attempt at "flaming" someone, I am playing along with the joke and paraphrasing the same movie as Nangasaur. Please don't infract me, thanks in advance.

I've both won and lost hundreds of times as both a Frogdog and a Rotworm, so

This is exactly the reason I disagree with all those people who come on these forums asking for a medal to be awarded for scoring a goal.

A Marauder in full Champion gear and all Datacrons has 15.9k health. I'd argue that a far bigger problem is people who think HP is the be-all and end-all of being geared up. I'd sooner take the OP in his Centurion gear with 14k than someone who bought PvE stuff from the AH just to get to some magical HP number that essentially means nothing. The more people make a big deal out of having high HP while ignoring (or simply not understanding) the concept of Effective Health, the more low damage, high death rate "noobs" we'll get in our groups.

Because when you then completely destroy him on damage done you can make sure he never forgets it. Next time you come across him, ask him to leave and say you've had enough of losing because of people with gear who still don't know what they're doing

Carnage has less damage generally because it's so heavily reliant on Gore and good players will CC you through its duration. It has some potential for burst with Massacre providing guaranteed Force Scream crits and it has a lot of utility with talents to add a root to Ravage and Vicious Throw. All three specs are decent in PvP but I personally prefer Annihilation for now. Only thing I'd say that Annihilate builds are quite gear-dependent, as your self-heals scale with your max HP and critting on your DoTs is obviously enhanced by adding more Surge. At lower gear levels I hear Rage is easiest to play in PvP but I've not personally tried it. Carnage is good single-target DPS in Flashpoints as you don't need to worry about getting CC'd through Gore or having your Ravage interrupted. Ultimately the best spec is going to be the one you enjoy most and best fits your playstyle. I'd recommend giving them all a try at some point and drawing your own conclusions. I personally, with my level of gear (full Champ) find Annihilation to be the best damage with decent survivability but YMMV. Good luck

It's not really about breaking even with the Trauma debuff though, as that in itself is just a band-aid fix and is always active in PvP combat, unavoidably. As a result, DPS and Heals are all balanced around the assumption that it's always there. Its existence by itself doesn't change the fact that gear inflation will lead to healing and Effective Health levels being significantly higher proportionally to the damage coming in. Unless the Trauma debuff were to increase in severity as you geared up but that'd be... weird. But yeah, if Trauma was taken out and eveyone had 30% more damage / EH then in real terms, it'd be exactly the same as now, so in terms of future scaleability it's kind of a non-issue. Expertise bonuses to healing beyond Battlemaster will still lead to healing being increasingly more powerful, with less ways to counter it. So there are two options: either take steps now to change the system so it can scale linearly with damage and mitigation or wait until it gets out of hand and then nerf like crazy (possibly by making Trauma a higher percentage, which will mainly harm those with lower gear levels). Even though I'm not a healer, I'd prefer they addressed this now and future-proofed the gearing system than unleash a carnival of nerfs and make everyone mad.

Spoilers: beta hasn't ended.

I thought it was funny. I don't think he's mocking you, he's just using silly, overly-formal language for comedy purposes. If anything he was trolling the guy who said he couldn't read your post

I guess the game figured everyone at that stage would be spawning from the point by the bridge. That sucks Thankfully not run into this bug myself. You'd think it would teleport you to the new GY in instances like that, like in OMG THE BIG MMO YOU KNOW THE ONE EVERYONE TALKS ABOUT BUT ISN'T ALLOWED TO MENTION THAT ONE where if they cap the point your GY is at, you get moved to another one you own and your timer is reset to offset any balancing issues.

Simple but not always possible. For example, when crossing the fire pit in Huttball, you can't always afford to ride out the first one in order to use your trinket. Likewise if someone is about to plant a bomb or cap a turret. Sometimes waiting the full duration just isn't the best solution. Sure, you should always pass through the fire, never defend a node alone, etc, etc. But if you're in a PUG or the rest of your premade are off doing something else or dead or something then you can't rely on this level of good play all the time. So while I don't disagree with you and believe you're right in the majority of cases, it's not always as easy as simply waiting it out. The most elegant solution I've read on these forums is that your resolve bar is simply a measure of "total CC'd time" whereby if you are stunned for 8 seconds then your next CC can only last for 2 seconds maximum or something. Would still decay over time when not under CC and would still grant a brief immunity once full, just would stop those times when you're at 90% Resolve, catch a Cryo Nade and end up stuck the whole time still.

Where does this notion of "you shouldn't be able to kill a healer 1v1" come from exactly? I can understand that if you're attacking Mr DPS Guy then Captain Healsalot should be able to keep DPS Guy up but when I'm directly attacking a healer with my full toolkit of three interrupts, DoTs and Mortal Strike, why shouldn't I be able to kill them? If you look at my class' abilities, I'm pretty much specifically designed for this purpose after all. And I can eventually whittle them down usually but it takes a while, especially if they have decent gear. Once you have three or four healers in a WZ though, it becomes difficult even for 8 DPS to make any sizeable dent. Ever get your 300k damage medal before your 10 kills medal? Yeah... Anyway, to my mind there are three main issues with healing in the game at present: The main one is that Expertise results in a net bonus to healing when all things are equal since damage and mitigation offset each other. Even if you think it's totally balanced now, it's not scaleable (or, rather, it scales too well). The second is that in other games healers have a finite amount of resources. Even if it takes forever without making a dent in their health, eventually they will run out of mana. In this game, compounded by the Expertise issue above, small or medium heals can be interwoven pretty much constantly without ever running out. There are also no resource-affecting debuffs which are the usual counter to healing classes - Mana Burn, for example. The final issue is that interrupts only lock out a single spell rather than the school of magic being cast. Perhaps the least important of the three because, over time, one can learn which to interrupt and which to leave. Now as I say, I'm not too concerned about healers right now because I can kill them eventually, even if it takes a while. However, the way Expertise works simply means that healing will vastly outstrip damage as Expertise increases. As I say, mitigation and damage offset one another if their Expertise values are equal, which makes each individual heal proportionally more powerful. Let's also consider that new gear will likely have additional Endurance. This means that, within a tier or two more of gear, healer Effective Health will get to the point where it will be a significant balance issue. Rather than hit all healers with a giant nerf bat, I'd prefer if Bioware were able to address those scaling issues sooner rather than later. I suspect they won't, however, and we'll end up with a lot of angry healers

Yeah it's kind of annoying. Perhaps not as high priority as some of the other things but it would be a great quality of life improvement, for sure. What I find weirdest of all is that when your group all enters a Warzone it comes up with the message "your group has been disbanded" yet you can all still communicate with one another in party chat during the Warzone

The spawn time is nearly instant - a friend and I have sat alone at Ilum late at night and observed it. At any one time there are two or three armaments in the area. Once you pick one up, the box stays for a few seconds and then despawns. At that point, one appears elsewhere. What this means is that if there are more than 2-3 people doing laps, it can be ages before you see one. It also means that if you stand on top of one of the spawn points and camp it, it'll spawn relatively regularly and you can almost guarantee you'll get it. So it's not about upping the spawn timer, so much as upping the number of maximum concurrent spawns. That may also require adding a few spawn points to the map, however, to stop them popping in one place too regularly (and thus making the camping of them even more profitable.) While the ideal situation is a complete overhaul of Ilum from the ground up, I think a good temporary fix would be to assign "Ilum points" to various activities. For example, pick up an Armament = 1 point, kill a player = 10 points, retake a cap = 2 points. Then add a timer where every two hours there will be 15 minutes of +500% valor (stacks with other valor bonuses) so everyone's there at once. Since it's hugely more "profitable" to kill people than flip bases or farm armaments, people will likely go for that option during the +500% time. It's not a perfect idea but I'm just trying to think of something they could implement relatively quickly without needing a lengthy redesign

It's entirely possible it'll be harder. Let's look at what we know: - In 1.2 there will be rated Warzones. - In 1.2 they will change the gearing system to no longer require bags and now be direct purchases from WZ/Merc and new RatedWZ commendations. - We've heard nothing to suggest there will be a new tier of gear. It's not a complete stretch to suggest that Champion gear will be from WZ/Merc tokens and Battlemaster will be from Rated only. Is this definitely going to be the case? Who knows. But it's certainly possible and, if so, it'll certainly be harder to gain BM gear than previously. Each content patch has made it harder on BMs to get their weekly/daily done, after all. 1.0 Get to 50, own level 10s, shoot walkers on Ilum. 1.1 Only able to own new 50s, have to kill people or collect junk on Ilum. 1.2 Only able to own 50 premades as part of your own premade? Do [something as yet undetermined] on Ilum. So yeah, wouldn't surprise me if it's harder for people to gear up in the future rather than easier.

There have been like 5 threads like this today. Was it really necessary to add another one? Especially given that the system is going away in 1.2 anyway.

Yes there is a lot of garbage on this forum, but amongst it there are good points worthy of pointing out or criticising. If you rampantly defend literally every single thing then you're frankly no better than the baseless whiners you are campaigning against. This thread is a great example - was the OP written in a slightly unconstructive, sulky way? Yeah sure, maybe a bit. That doesn't mean he's wrong or that the issue doesn't exist though. You make this big point about how you can never know someone else's latency and so on and so forth and yes, you're kind of right. Yet other games in the genre at least give the impression of being far better at handling this kind of thing. The "teleporting" happens in all online games to an extent, but find me an example in WoW where someone has suddenly disappeared carrying the flag only to appear by their base. Or show me in Rift how you perform a channeled spell and have the client show you going through the entire animation on your target's back, yet once it's done the enemy's health hasn't moved and they're 20 meters away. Partly I guess it's the server trying to make predictions on where the person will be next, in theory making the client more responsive. However, it regularly gets those predictions wrong - it seems to think someone has jumped off a ledge when they haven't. It seems to think they've lept one way when it's actually another. That isn't normal behaviour under lag - that's the server trying to feed your client the most likely scenario but getting it entirely wrong and then having to correct itself. You're obviously a smart guy and I get just as wound up about the trash on these forums as you do but just as not every "I don't get it" means "the developers are dumb", not every "this sucks and should work better" means "I don't get it".

The fire and poison are fairly consistent, it's just that as you get more HP, each tick is a lower percentage. Are you saying it should do a flat percentage of max health per tick? The fire is still enough that if you stand in it you're going to die without heals/cooldowns, even in full Battlemaster. As for the Champion bags, it's actually quicker for the average player now because you have no chance of getting duplicates. Sure it's slower for those who were particularly lucky before but now everyone's roughly the same and those poor guys who got 16 implants and no other items are no longer getting screwed. It helps everyone. Your comment about it "only gimping non-elitists" doesn't even make any sense to me. Why are elitists more likely to feel favoured by the new system where most people will not? FPS issues on Ilum we agree with, sure. It's the engine rather than Ilum specifically - it doesn't use your CPU cores optimally but I suspect it's because the server is trying to calculate all that data simultaneously in order to show it on your client accurately. Hopefully they can find a way to dynamically reinforce that node when it's needed, like EVE Online does but on a smaller scale (and, in theory, easier since it's one specific area rather than literally anywhere on the map). Do you really get 5s lag though? Ouch. I also play a Marauder so I know how frustrating it is to have your interrupts not fire on time etc, but I've never had 5 seconds lag, nor have I ever had my Force Leap go to someone other than I'm targetting (though trying to quickly tab-target someone is a complete nightmare sometimes). Sorry if that's your experience, must really suck - thankfully I've yet to come across it though and hopefully they'll fix it soon if it's affecting people like you describe.

Btw does anyone know if WAR is free to play yet? Would love to go back and check it out again but can't really justify adding a third monthly fee to my outgoings, y'know?

At its core, Warhammer was fantastic - different PvP scenarios in each levelling bracket, RvR islands, city sieges, public quests. They got some things wrong, sure, but I'd be happy if SW:TOR implemented some of its ideas, definitely. The innovation of Mythic, the polish of Blizzard, the storytelling of Bioware and the balance of Guild Wars - pretty much the perfect dev team in my eyes. Shame it'll never happen

I kinda agree with the OP about the single server thing - mine has a nice subcomminity going as well and it'd be a shame to lose that. However, I understand that it's not the same for everyone and it'd sometimes be nice to get a queue faster during off-peak times. My hope is that they either add a toggle switch to say whether you want to look outside of the server or not or, alternatively, that it'll automatically switch to cross-server mode after 15 mins or so but prefer same-server until that point if you ask it to.

So I group with a couple of guildies who hit 50 yesterday and who have not done a single Warzone yet and we lose to a PUG. But I thought premades were invincible? See also: guy's example earlier of the guy who repeatedly stood on the edge of the pit - if he's in my other four, he's hindering those four of us who can do well. If he refuses to move when asked and we lose as a result, that somehow means... what? I never claimed to be "elite" or that we were the best guild in the land or anything. All I said is that I enjoy playing with my friends and don't see why I should have to tell them I can't queue with them because then we'd be a premade and it'd be rated and by doing so I'd be letting my team mates down. That's ridiculous. Why make a multiplayer game that discourages people playing with their friends?

"I'm starting with the man in the mirror..."