First

By the way Leaderboards don't update for "Warzones", they update for Ranked Arena.

Pretty much this.

My pyro has 38% chance to crit with railshot, 36% chance to crit with fire, 30% chance to crit with thermal det and explosive dart. They don't need to buff it by much.

You have no rating on all 6 of your toons in your signature.

Tanks and Guard.

Yes bring back old crit rating so th at way my Pyro PT has a 40+% chance to crit fire abilities, 40+% on Railshot, and 30+% on everything with 1454 tech bonus damage and 866 ranged bonus damage with max expertise + Main Stat and Power Relic. That will fix the game.. *rubs hands together*, yes it will fix SWTOR...

Yes, guard should work still in 8v8 Warzones. That is what the mechanic is designed around, which is why I knew Tanks in 4v4 would be horrible. In 8v8 RWZ's we had 2 healers, 1 Tank and 4 DPS fighting for a central node. That is a lot for a single Tank to guard swap too and even with Guard you'd be able to finish a target off because you have DOUBLE the amount of DPS focus firing a target than in 4v4 group queue. Now a tank only has to Guard a three targets instead of 6 and there isn't enough damage going out to counter the protection from Guard and Taunts, which is why "Guard" is so broken in Arena. First off, let me be the first to say 4v4 Arena has no place in Regular Warzone Queue. As much as I like it and getting a quick free 140 comms it doesn't belong in that queue. Players wanting to partake in Arena should have to queue ranked, and ranked ONLY to play Arenas. This way the guys who are vehemently against Arena can just focus on doing their Warzones and the guys who like doing Arena have more people (hopefully) to play with/against, and everyone is happier. A problem with Arenas being in the regular queue is that guys don't have to queue up for Solo or Group Queue to get their ranked Arena fix, they can just keep rolling their premades in Regs and get an Arena one out of every 2 or 3 matches. This will increase the amount of players in queue for Solo and Group Queue and then making Guard unusable in Arena and cutting the bracket sizes down to 3v3 much more feasible.

He is assuming that you know that max expertise is the only way to play Arena/WZ's. There is never a situation where you run less than max expertise when fully bolstered. Ever. His stat priority is for after max expertise.

His CGC is only critting for that much against targets that are below 30% life.

Now I'll make a post about the only you could save Arena: Render Guard unusable in Arena. (Yeah I get, you <1100 rated guys think I'm bad and I need to L2P), this would essentially force tanks to spec into DPS tree's because the only reason to go Tank Spec is for Guard. Every tank class has 2 DPS roles. Make bracket sizes 3v3. Nerf Operative HEALER DPS. Just Healer spec. No healer should be able to get a 7k burst off on a max expertise class in one global. Buff Sorcerer and Mercenary healing. Reduce burst damage across the board.. Especially, AOE Specs. Fix Assassin Hybrid so that way they can't dump 15-20k damage into someone in 3-4.5 seconds. EDIT: And add cross-server queues. I can't tell you that my suggestions would make things perfect, but I will tell you that the entire Arena/WZ community will be in a much better place than it currently is right now. Guard only exists because of AoE and High Burst.

You're in <WAR> and get rolled by everyone on POT5 in Warzones, and Arena.

I'll give you a rundown of the evolution of Arena on PoT5, I will not get into prior to 2.4 or PTS. The most powerful compositions in high level arena are/were: AoE Teams - (Act of AoEing multiple players and hard swapping to a low target to get kills) Tank Buster - (Act of killing the enemy tank rendering his guard and taunts useless) Double Operative Healer, AP PT Tank, Deception Sin - Probably the most lame of the three, but have nearly the same burst capability of the Instagibber with twice the survivability. Instagibber - (3 High DPS single target classes with a Dark Maul Specced Assassin as Tank, if you aren't playing on the edge of your seat they can do a hardswap and kill a player in <4 seconds, usually the duration of a single stun.) AoE Teams: AP Tank, Double Smash, Operative Healer (I Am Legend) AP Tank, 2x AP DPS, Operative Healer (Dongcleave) AP Tank, AP DPS, Smash Marauder, Operative Healer (Mugen, Bobbydigital, Vadea, Isaikk) AoE groups gained a lot of traction due to the nature of most classes not having 30% AoE damage reduction, players not wholly comfortable or familiar with the twitch play of Arena, positioning, LOS, etc. As players began to realize that 30% AoE Damage reduction in the AP Tree coupled with it's other defenses allowed them to actually tank in full DPS gear against other AoE teams and do fine during this era of Smash and Flamethrower. This led to the next stage of SWTOR Arena. The strategy was essentially to AoE the Tank, the DPS, and CC the healer so he had to catch up heals on 3 players. I know people want to say, "Arena sux cuz of smash/AP lol it's lame, that's what killed Arena", I will tell you that Smash only works against bad players, and bad teams. The best teams now run high CC or High Single target burst comps. Tank Buster Teams: AP Tank, Lethality Sniper, Madness Sorcerer, Operative healer. (Scolds Team/MVP) Dark Maul Assassin, Carnage Marauder, Madness Sorcerer, Operative Healer (Matchless/Glory's Team) Shieldtech PT, Pyro PT, Carnage Marauder, Operative Healer (iS hAcKiNg, Infinite Darkness) The meta of Tank Buster came out due to AP Tank's running rampant with 32-35k HP and doing the DPS of a regular player. People began to realize that the tank is the most effective kill target due to the nature of guard and the fact that all these tanks were running around in full DPS gear and since they were the tank they didn't have to worry about them being guard swapped too. One quick CC on healer and boom tank instagibbed. This breathed new life into Specs like Carnage Marauder, Pyro PT, Dark Maul Assassin who were played less than their Rage, AP, and Deception counterparts because of their high single target burst damage. Essentially the strategy here is to CC the Healer/DPS and kill the tank. Pretty straightforward until they're doing the same thing as you and it becomes a DPS race. Very intense matches. This caused another evolution, as teams saw that the race had become to kill each other's tank faster, the best teams began to run full Shieldtech PT's with max defensive gear. Teams still chased after each other's tanks because at the above teams level of play, their teams were seasoned and very good at Guard swapping, offhealing, CCing, popping defensives, etc during swaps. Then came one of the largest downfalls in POT5's Arena History: Double Healer, Deception Sin, AP Tank. (Arya, Count-Crotchula, Atense, and Darkyoda) This absolutely killed 4v4 queues on POT5. The way this composition works is the AP Tank is in full DPS gear + Fortitude Stim (35k HP), he has two operative healers rolling hots, and a deception sin. Most people aren't aware that Operative Healers can put out about 7k single target burst hits. The way this composition works is by healing through any other teams burst damage, forcing a trinket on the enemy tank, then CCing him and instagibbing an unguarded target (Usually the Healer) with chain stuns, 7k explosive probe crits, full deception burst, and AP PT damage. They time the CC and swap with deception stuns so the target they are on is unable to pop defensive CD's. Thanks to guard, flashbangs, 4 sets of 4 second stuns they make it impossible to kill anyone on their team unless they make some very obvious mistakes. My healer has been globaled by this team in about 4 seconds with min/max Obroan gear. My team worked hard and practiced hard, mastered every swap, defensive CD, etc. to play them into the Acid so we could come ahead with our far superior damage (Our end of round damage was always 2-3x higher than their best DPS), but we couldn't win because the Assassin would set phase walk down somewhere, pop all his defensive CD's with two healers topping him off to 100%, and simply teleport right before acid hits (Which negates the first tick of damage) and win by exploiting this mechanic. This worked on every team on POT5 and essentially killed motivation of everyone and anyone to queue. Only one team was lame enough to run it and two of the players no longer play. I'd like to note that the only team to be able to out cheese them was Double Tank, Double Operative Healer. Tanks would CC during Acid Phase and the Operative Healers would roll out in opposite directions. That composition only "slightly" worked on double healer, and failed against anyone else that was good. Instagibber / Tank Buster Teams return as the Top Tier compositions. Instagibber - Dark Maul Assassin, Carnage Marauder, Vengeance Juggernaut, Operative Healer Dark Maul relies on Recklessness procs to get massive 15-20k bursts off. The CD is over a minute, but it resets on Vanish. Again this is a team that will start on a target to force Guard on them, CC Tank and then put unhealable pressure on unguarded DPS via Vengeance Burst, Carnage Burst, Dark Maul Burst, and Operative Explosive Probe. Good play can beat this, and killing the Dark Maul Assassin works for Tank Buster teams. But they can kill a player in roughly 3 seconds. Usually two globals from every player on their team can drop someone. But the reason why Guard is broken is because all of those compositions and strategies above were only created to counter Guard: AoE - Damage everyone with AoE rendering guard ineffective. Tank Buster - Killing the tank because swapping to a DPS was a liability if they got guard, the best tanks. Double Healer comp - To counter Tank buster had 2 healers healing tank, used CC's on enemy Tank to kill enemy healer. Instagib - Kill a target so fast guard / heals are rendered ineffective to counter it, only perfect use of CC and defensive CD's can survive this team. I'm positive that only a very tiny handful of players will truly grasp what I'm talking about because they either know (From playing on POT5), or have dealt with it on their own server (Probably TOFN is the only other server with a scene like POT5's). Everyone else really has no idea, and I don't care how good you think you are in Regular Warzones, Dueling, with your zero or 1100 rating. If you stepped foot into POT5's Arena when all of the above teams are qing we would literally blow your mind with how hard we'd destroy you. When you've played against the best teams on US at their level, and play them nearly every night, know their players, strategies and compositions as intimately as I and others do, you see the trend. The sole reason why that Double Healer lameness was ever run was because Atense was tired of getting killed in 5-10 seconds and never ran more than 35k HP and full DPS gear. The only problem is that the only teams able to compete at the highest level, had the best tanks, from our server or others and anyone else who didn't, couldn't compete. Which meant that there was 6-8 good teams, and everyone else just got steamrolled and farmed so hard they quit qing for Arena. Now I fully expect some 1,000 rated scrub with less than 20 games played in Arena but breaks 600k damage in Warzones to come in here and tell me L2P, my server is terrible, and we all just need to learn to CC and Focus Fire.

Again another regstar commenting on Arena like he has a clue. Erza - 4 Solo Queue matches - 1191 rating, zero group queue rating. Sabersythe - Zero arena matches done. Though I did find a marauder named Erza, lets give him the benefit of the doubt. 26 wins... 1292 rating in Solo queue, 0 matches in group queue. Patharos - 0 matches in solo queue. 0 wins in group queue and a 1091 rating. Kadinne - No rating Aquilo - No rating. Please continue to talk to me about Arena balance. Your opinion means a lot. I play on POT5 and have never seen you in an Arena, and if I had, it was so fast and unmemorable that none of your toons ring a bell. *Rolls Eyes*

You don't need to tell me how to play, I already know, my team does great in Arena, but only 3 teams can queue on my teams level and actually have good matches. Every other team is a faceroll once or twice until they stop queuing forever. You wouldn't know this because you don't do arena and you have no idea what high level arena play is even like. All you're doing is repeating the standard crap you read on these forums from other players. "Use your CC and Focus fire", that is the most dumb generic statement I've ever heard and if you ever were unfortunate to get my team in rateds you'd feel like an idiot even saying that to me. You on the other hand, are terrible, and trying to show off your massive PvP knowledge by regurgitating 3 lines of PvP strategy that good players have been using while you were still trying to figure out how to keybind. (If you even do this, according to your ratings you might as well be a window licking, keyboard turning, clicking mouth breather.) I'm done wasting my time with you, it's like trying to have a serious discussion with someone who knows nothing about the topic and instead repeats the same phrases said by other people who know as much about the topic as they do. How can you expect anyone to take you seriously if you have yet to do any kind of competitive arena? You're a joke kid, sit down and let people who actually have done arena talk, oh wait, thats like 3 or 4 people in this entire thread. The rest of them are monger Regstars who comment on PvP because they beat up on kids in regs who can't break 100k damage. In fact you should have no opinion on the matter anyway, because you'll never do Arena outside of the mentally handicapped bracket.

If you don't buy a companion with Cartel coins, you will be using Mako until level 55.

My point is that Arena failed in SWTOR because of the Tank requirement. The only other example is WoW where Guard doesn't exist and is massively successful in comparison to this game. There are only about 20 competent PvP tanks on any given server, and only 5 of those 20 are actually really good. There are 100's of DPS, tons of healers, and all those tanks can play a DPS role. I'm not asking anyone to fix this game anymore, it's already dead. The same exact issue existed with 8v8 RWZ's, the amount of skilled tanks are dwarfed by the amount of skilled DPS and Healers. Also to magi_melcior. I decided to spend 30 seconds looking up all your toons on the leaderboards. Not a single one of them has rating. Not a single one, yet you comment like you've actually done arena. You're just another no name bad responding to forum posts like you're good. Then there is Saerali who agreed with you right below, this person has zero rating on their main. Then Aetios has 1100 rating in Solo queue (Which is window licking bracket) and 1200 in 4v4. You're a pro about whats OP in Arena. Then there is "Sarellia | Teslama | Sovalen | Téyla", 4 toons and only one has a rating... a 1100 rating in group queue and a 1242 rating in solo queue. You're opinion means so much. You are all terrible and have no idea what the real balance issues are in Arena because you either don't play arena, or you're extremely horrible at it. So continue commenting like you actually have a clue, keep saying that other players are bad, especially DPS who don't know how to target switch when you have an 1100 rating or zero rating. When I'm calling you bad, and that you don't actually understand the game, I mean it.

We're talking about Arena. To the other poster well I have played Healer Merc, Sorc and Operative. I have a PT Tank, which I also play Pyro and AP in as well. When I play my PT tank I play it as shieldtech unless they want me to be AP Hybrid. I also have a marauder and I have republic equivalents of each. I know more about healing, DPS, and Tanking than you do I assure you. (5 of my toons have augmented min/max Obroan Armor, and my PT has 3 sets of min/max Obroan for Shieldtech, AP, and Pyro with the other toons in min/max Conqueror) I even have an old Sorcerer healing video on youtube if you look up megatf battlemaster sorcerer healing. I do well in this game because I've played nearly every spec of every AC so I understand how every classes abilities work. Guard destroys the concept of arena and breaks balance as we've seen with AP Hybrid Tanks, Double Tank, Double Healer comps (Yes they exist), Double Operative Healer, DPS and AP Tank comp. I also exclusively PvP. So believe me when I tell you that everything you say is a load of crap and should be ignored.

Pretty much everything you say in this thread should be ignored. You have every tanking AC in SWTOR.

Healers were not excluded from WoW's 3v3 arena and I don't think they should be excluded from SWTOR. DPS races are no fun, hence why Solo Queue fails outside of primetime.

Only intelligent people understand that. Hence why Arena was doomed from the start. If there had been 3v3 and guard/tank specs were disabled in Arena then Arena would have skyrocketed. 3v3 would have been easier to balance around and there would have been at least 50-100 teams per server. Because of the high skill cap required for Tanking (In comparison to DPSing and healing) this limited the amount of teams on every server to about 10 strong teams, then about 20 teams who got facerolled so hard they quit qing arena. If there had been over 100+ teams from the start then the ELO system would have worked. With only 30 teams in queue at the start of 2.4 (Not at the same time), the ELO system was never able to take effect. Let's also point out the playstyle of Arena would have been much different, Sorcerers and Mercenaries would be significantly more viable than they are currently. Equally skilled teams can have full 3-5 minute matches every single round, Operatives are the only healer that have the longevity to handle those healing intensive matches that go 5 minutes. Sorcerers and Mercenaries would have been able to easily fill niches in team compositions to make them viable. Hell, you probably would have seen Operative DPS more successful in Arena. The only people who disagree play tanks, or are fortunate to have a very good Arena tank and enjoy steamrolling people who don't. I have a very good team, and very few can beat my team on a consistent basis. Tanks have 2 very viable DPS roles, Guarding/Tanking are PvE mechanics and do not belong in deathmatch arena. If I have to spell it out for anyone else more than that then you probably struggle with tying your own shoes in the morning. Disagree with my opinion all you want, but a real world example is the one that SWTOR is currently living in which is essentially a dead rated scene minus POT5 (Which is barely above water.) Another real world example is WoW. WoW is balanced around 3v3, and tank specs are highly discouraged in Arena by making them useless. The only times tanks have been viable in WoW Arena was due to bugs which was corrected at the development teams earliest capability. So taking those examples, one of tanks being a failure, and one of without tanks being a significant success we can deduce that you're a *********** idiot if you think tanks belong in Arena. I'm out

Come join everyone else who aren't SWTOR lemmings into different games with the possibility of a better future.

Only use your rockets with Explosive Fuel, if you time it right the cooldowns go with each other perfectly. It's also important to time this correctly with a burst rotation. Throw Thermal Detonator on the Target, Rocket Punch or Flameburst (Depending on if RP is on CD), then right before thermal det goes off and you do your Railshot pop explosive fuel and start spamming your Shoulder cannon button. If everything crits then we're talking like 25k burst really quickly.

In fact you broke AoE CC's thanks to your dots about a dozen times in the video. I watched the full thing because you have no idea how terrible your playstyle is to your team. You're the last person I'd ever want to do PvP with, that was just awful to watch. How has nobody else commented on this?

What you're actually doing is making every CC on your team utterly useless. So when that guy on your team is getting tunneled by two melee, when someone throws a flashbang, or an Intimidating Roar.. They get broken out half a second later thanks to all those dots you threw on everyone within range getting that player killed. AoE is fine, because good players can control when to use that AoE to prevent CC's from being broken. Putting 15 second dots on 5 people completely screws over your team. Trust me when I tell you that the way you're playing is effectively negated by one operative hot, and that you just gave everyone on the other team a permanent invisible white bar. You say that you aren't spamming aoe dots to get high numbers, but lets be serious, you really are.