Any sane person who has actually played PvP in this game knows that the healing/taunt/guard mechanics are broken. This is a petition to Bioware to fix them. I don't want this thread to turn into the typical L2P thread. Sign it, suggest improvements to the system or if you believe the mechanics are fine, please state why. Some background information. - Healers in this game are designed around healing PVE boss fights, etc, not PVP. -Taunt is a flat 30% damage debuff -Guard adds 5% damage reduction and 50% shared damage -In a 1v1 situation with "equal gear" a "Good" DPS will take down Sorc/Sage healers in about a minute due to their squishy nature. Operative/Smugglers are a bit harder to take down. Troopers/Mercs are down right ridiculous to kill in a 1v1 simply because they have a tonne more damage reduction, a bubble talent that gives them an additional 25% damage reduction and can make themselves immune to interrupt. Adding guard / taunt reduces incoming damage to 35% of normal and that is BEFORE you add natural damage reduction. This means that it will take 3 - 4 people to kill a guarded sorc/sage if taunted and 5 - 6 people to kill a Trooper/Merc. Adding to the problem is when you get multiple healers in any one game. Healers tend to clump up so that they can all AOE heal themselves. If their are 2-3 healers clumped together, the most efficient way to kill them is to have a class with "pull" lift a healer away from their group so that they can be taken down by 2 DPS quickly. This tactic fails when the amount of clumped healers is 4 or more. There is absolutely no way to budge them. On my server it seems more and more republic players are figuring out just how OP healers are. Initially when I first hit 50 there was one premade republic side that always had 2 healers. 1 month later, the amount of republic healers in any match has grown to 4 - 6. This many healers is game breaking. It's not fun at all. -Fix suggestions * IMO taunt should add a damage bonus versus healers. Great care would have to be taken to ensure 1v1's are not broken. That is, you can't just taunt a healer and receive the damage bonus yourself. I initially pondered the idea of adding a -30% healing debuff to Taunt but realized it would seriously break things. Adding the damage bonus is the most efficient fix and it would also be rather easy to implement. *Taunt would need to be fixed in that only 1 taunt can be active on any player at any point in time. Taunt should be shown as greyed out if you can't currently cast it due to it already being listed on a players bar. *Guard should add a 20% damage reduction bonus isntead of 5%. There should be no "shared" damage component. Instead apply a vulnerability to the guarding player so that that they take considerably more damage if attacked.

I have opened very close to 50 champ bags and I have received a grand total of 1 unassembled item piece.

Healers are fine when its just healers by themselves. This issue arrises when they are guarded and their attackers are taunted. The easiest fix I can think of to solve the healing issue is to give all taunt abilities a -30% to heal as well as the -30% to enemy damage which is already apart of the taunt function.

^^ Yep. And in that situation it is smarter to kill the tank before you kill the healer just so you don't have to have all your damage reduced by such a huge amount. Also you want AOE damage as the Tank will take considerably more damage from AOE than from single target attacks.

Provided this math is correct! Guard = 5% damage reduction and shared 50% damage. Taunt = 30% less damage. Let's assume that everyone has the same expertise to make things simple! Expertise adds to healing potency and a typical geared person has around 11% + 15% through stims for a total of 26% extra healing. Enemy DPS must be greater than total healing power in order to kill the target. With expertise their total healing power is 126% and thus you will need greater than 126% damage to kill the healer. Now here is the fun part.... Enemy that would normally deal 126% damage to a healer now hits for 88.2% with taunt. If a sorc has 20% armor which is typical of a lvl 50, they now have 25% with guard so the amount of damage they receive is now 66.15%. With guard, half of the damage is shared for a total damage of 33.075%. Amount of people required to kill the healer is 126/ 33.075 = 3.81 people. So you need minimum 4 people to take out 1 healer in this environment A typical team has 8 players per side and half are required to kill 1 healer! If the enemy team has 2 healers it takes every single player to kill the healers. If the enemy team has 3 healers it is GOOD GAME. You are not going to kill anyone!

I love the assumption that I suck because I make a logical observation grounded in math. Anyone who plays on Master Zhar PVP should know who I am. My nick is Sotera. Why don't you go check for yourself just how bad I suck before making silly statements. I'll say it again, MATH DOESN'T LIE. If you have any kind of insight you can work all this out for yourself just by looking into the math. From there you can see the effect it has on all the other mechanics. http://www.freeimagehosting.net/malbi Lvl 50 warzone. I have entry level 49 purple gear with a champion focus and champion implant.

Your missing the point! It's not just about the lack of access to gear which every newly 50 has to suffer through but also the effect it has on various other mechanics. Ie. Healing, CC, Melee vs Ranged, etc! It's a big deal! Seriously, if the ONLY reason it made it into the game was to prevent Raiders going into warzones and rolling PVP players then they should have simply made end game raid gear the same as end game PVP gear. Right now its battlemasters rolling newly 50's anyway so whats the point?

Agree totally with NYRFan. I have 2 lvl 50 sorcerers and a lvl 50 assassin. I can tell you right now that the sorcerer is absolutely screwed vs an assassin. They really have NO answer. Assassin sneaks up in stealth and opens with spikes for a guaranteed maul. First response for a sorcerer is to stun/overload. Assassin drops shroud just as the spike cc ends which makes him completely immune to ALL sorcerers attacks but thrash(who uses thrash as sorc anyway lol?) for 3 - 5 seconds. This is enough time to "almost" kill any sorcerer. He will try to run away and you simply slow/pull him and then force speed after him. If they spam lightning at you, you interrupt. When your immunity wears off you electrocute them and proceed to wail on them even more.

If sorcs/inq can't use speed when they have the ball then jugs/powertechs shouldn't have access to leap.

Grav spam/ tracer missile is annoying but it is balanced. It is easily interrupted. Also Sorcs have a shield which allows them to mittigate 1 - 2 attacks, Assassins have 3 - 5 second immunity, Jugs have 2 second immunity. I am not sure what agents/marauders get but I wouldnt be suprised if they can't mitigate the damage somehow also. If I were to change the merc/ tropper class at all it would be to make it start in medium armor and then add access to heavy armor high enough into its DPS tree so that it is out of reach of the healing tree.

Why can't hardcore raiders and hardcore PvPers have access to the same gear? All that needs to be done is to ensure that it takes approximately the same amount of time to acquire for raiding as it does for PVP and then there is no issue. I don't understand why the gear needs to be separate!

Yes!, God yes! new level 50's if they are smart will have lvl 49 purple gear and will have saved up 6 champion bags. This means they will score at best a couple of champion items and will end up with around 1.5 -2.5% expertise tops. Then it is a long grind to acquire better gear. Players who have been pvping much longer will have far better gear and more expertise. I am absolutely cool with players that put in the time being rewarded but not a TWOFOLD reward. Gear with better stats is enough. Adding better stats "AND" expertise is very silly.

The expertise system does more to break PVP then any other mechanic. In fact I would even go as far as to say that a lot of the "class" imbalances that people commonly point out are due to its implementation. here is why.. Player A has the exact same gear as player B with the exception that player A also has 10% expertise. Both player A and player B have 1000 hitpoints and each have a 100 hitpoint base attack. X% Expertise adds +X% damage + X% damage reduction and +X% healing Player A (110 damage every hit will kill player B in exactly 9 hits.) Player B will take 11.11 hits to kill player A This is roughly a 23.46% difference in spread. That is HUGE! Adding to the problem is the fact that newly level 50's are already at a significant disadvantage in terms of gear level. It is in effect a 1 - 2 punch and it is totally unnecessary. Off on a tangent but it is related--- We have all seen the "immortal" healers in pvp. The interesting thing is that they do not exist in lvl 10 - 49 games. These immortal healers only tend to show up in level 50 warzones. The expertise system contributes significantly to this problem with its 23.46% healing spread. No healer should be able to "out heal" a DPS class. It should be a 1 : 1 ratio. This includes taunts, etc! Now i have read many comments saying that "heaven forbid a healer should be good at healing" but quite frankly if you allow healers to "out heal" DPS classes they BREAK WARZONES! I personally have played against a team with 4 republic healers. Our entire team attacked them for a good 10 minutes and NOBODY ON THEIR SIDE DIED! When you have guard up and taunts, their damage is already reduced to 35% and that is BEFORE you add their natural damage reduction and then finally expertise. This means that in this kind of environment individual healers are doing between 5 and 10 times the healing damage as DPS classes and people wonder why they are seeing immortal healers everywhere. Personally I would really love to see the entire expertise system on gear scrapped. I don't mind it still being applied through "stims" or the red expertise buffs found throughout warzones, simply because they are temporary! Having permanent expertise is rubbish. To sum up- If bioware scraps the system it will -Go a long way in balancing lvl 50 warzones. -alleviate somewhat the ridiculous problem of immortal healers -Reduce client side lag because fights will be over much quicker -Reduce player frustration

The single best fix for PVP is to get rid of the expertise system entirely. It does more to break PVP then any other mechanic. What this mechanic does is skew warzones in favor of heavily expertise geared teams and "especially" in favor of healing classes. Expertise is pretty rare in the 1-49 bracket. My entire time pvping up to level 49 I experienced no immortal healers. Come level 50 and due to the expertise system it takes 3 people to take down 1 healer. Now what happens if a team has 2 healers? or 3 or heaven forbid 4! It doesn't take a genius to see how this will play out in a warzone. Removing the expertise system will also allow new level 50's to "atleast" compete in warzones vs pre-mades.