You pretty much counter all arguments made against the level 50 bracket with this statement. If you do top 3 in damage and are overall fine in the level 50 bracket without battlemasters gear then that counters 100% of cases against the 50s bracket gear disparity. It makes it better, and that's true. The biggest unsaid issue is that it's because the game is still "new". When you are in the 10-49 bracket everybody is still "new". Most players don't have a level 50 toon yet. A few months from now or a year from now the 10-49 bracket will be HORRIBLE because it will be full of alts who know what they are doing AND are 39 levels above you. New pvp players won't make it to 50 because the 10-49 bracket will be more of a deterrent that they will end the pvp game sooner. It's ironic because months from now the argument is going to be the exact opposite in that players will cry that the 10-49 bracket is unfair and then it is pointless to do pvp till you get to level 50 where it's more fair. Another thing. The introduction of ranked warzones will fix a lot of these issues because those with full battlemasters gear won't be in the lower ranked warzones which the newer level 50s will be.

The RNG Bag system, while "not awesome" isn't any sort of reason for gear grind. You get tokens for centurion gear which is slightly worse than champion, but not by any long shot. You can even buy several battle masters gear with straight mercenary/warzones commendations given you're valor rank 60. There is one reason and one reason only that the bolster feature was put in to the PvP system and that was to curb queue times. The reason there is only a level 50's bracket and a level 10-49 bracket because there aren't enough people to put into smaller brackets. It wasn't to "equalize gear" per se. It really just a way to make things easier for the developers and have more of a player pool to queue with.

No BOLSTER doesn't work. It only makes it bareable. The equalling factor in the 10-49 bracket is skill level. The reason you are doing so well with your ALT is because it's your ALT, meaning you've already went through to level 50 before and know what you are doing. Players in the 10-49 bracket suck it's easy to top charts. If you as a level 10-20 went up against a level 49 with EQUAL SKILL, you'd get creamed. You probably wouldn't get any damage off. In the 40s I could easily kill players with out them being able to use any abilities. I could also easily 3-4 shot them. The current 50 bracket is only "TERRIBLE" because you just came from being 49 (meaning you had the biggest advantage known to man) and then went to 50 being at a disadvantage. It's a HUGE change of pace to go from winning without trying to losing while trying.

Except for the 10-49 bracket is the most imbalanced feature of the game or any game ever made. The abilities and skill points different between a level 10 and level 49 >>>>> gear difference between a new level 50 and a battlemaster level 50. Everything a level 50 battlemaster can do to a level 50 fresh meat can be done more times over by a level 49 to a level 10.

A lot of these posts are: I don't want Arenas because...[Enter Assumption Here] The biggest issue is that they are all assumptions, and aren't necessarily true nor how BW would implement Arena's if they so choose to do so. -There doesn't have to be gear grind or any special gear associated with Arena. -There can be separate ability sets for Arena so that it doesn't effect PvE or Warzones. It is very possible for BW to do a good job and create an Arena that does not effect the rest of the game in the slightest. An arena would make a lot of people happy, and if they can do it in a way that doesn't "break" the rest of the game, then they probably should. I don't think anybody (or at least very few) want an Arena for the sake of L33T gear, or balancing.

This thread, just like all other threads complaining about Expertise, is from someone who has absolutely no idea what they are talking about. Expertise isn't the issue, it's GEAR which is the issue. Expertise by itself is fine, the issue is that the person killing you has better GEAR (with multiple stats on it, not just expertise). If you remove Expertise, the end result will be the same. I don't want to go into the solution of issues that surround this as it's in another 20 threads that the OP didn't bother reading before making a copy, but again, Expertise by itself isn't the issue, it's GEAR.

I agree with this sentiment. Should be able to craft PvP gear. It would be my guess that this is implemented at some point as it just makes a lot of sense and doesn't hinder anything.

As a melee class I don't see any disadvantages at the moment. The pure fact that we have so many chances to prevent casting and as melee all of our abilities are instant is quite the equaling factor. I'd say there is definitely a discrepancy amongst NEWER players are if you aren't using your abilities and interrupts then yes Ranged has an advantage. Also as a Jedi Shadow our interrupt isn't on the GCD and can be used instantly.

There is a whole lot of fail going on in reading comprehension on this thread. Things I did NOT say: -Level 50 bracket is fair -Anything about either bracket being more or less fun -Anything about the rng of the champion bags My main point was that the level 10-49 bracket is less FAIR then the level 50 bracket, not less fun. Now there are misconceptions that people are having and I'll spell them out. First, if your level 10 ALT is rocking it in warzones, maybe because it's your ALT and not your first character. Thus you have a massive skill advanatage over other players. Additionally, 90% of players in 10-49 bracket suck and don't know what they are doing, thus the competition isn't very good. This doesn't make it any more fair, just means you've played more. Second, conversely to that...players who have valor rank 60 have put an ish ton of time into the game. Thus regardless of gear, they are going to be harder than the level 10-49 bracket. Especially now, as really only the people who have put time into the game are level 50 with battlemasters gear. Thus more time = relatively more skill. Doesn't mean they are good, just means they are better than they were in the 10-49 bracket. Third, The feeling of unfairness as a new level 50 is mostly compounded by the path to get there. Meaning, right before you hit 50, you are in the 40s, which is the very top of the 10-49 bracket. You will be owning up shop so hard as a level 49 in the 10-49 bracket as you have HUGE advantages over everyone else. Once you ding 50 though, all this advantages go away AND you are put at a disadvantage of gear. This huge change of perspective makes it seems much much worse than it is. Again, not to say it's fair, but the switch from amazing to newb compounds the unfairness feeling. Tl;DR Can't really summarize, if you didn't read it, dont' comment on it. Don't make this thread into somethin it's not.

Lol you fail. I just proved, very solidly that the bracket is unfair. What you are claiming on about is "Skill difference" The same "Skill difference" exists in the 50's bracket. Additionally, people in the 10-49 bracket haven't had as much TIME to learn their class etc then those who have made it all the way to 50 and valor rank 60. Thus there is an even bigger disparity when it comes to Player Skill Gaps. You have SO MUCH MORE of a chance to kill a 50 battlemaster geared player than you do a level 49 as a level 10 assuming equal skill. The reason you do so well in the 10-49 bracket is because MOST players in that bracket...wait for it...SUCK! The "MASSIVE GEAR DIFFERENCES" in the level 50's bracket is NOTHING compared to the MASSIVE SKILL AND ABILITY differences in the 10-49 bracket. To not see this is to be completely ignorant yourself.

Sorry you are wrong, would you like me to reward you for being wrong? You are giving wrong advice to someone asking for it, basically making them worse. So not only are you hurting yourself, your hurting someone else.

This needs it's own thread. There are a lot of people on the forum screaming how the 10-49 bracket is fairer than the 50 bracket and they wish they could stop leveling due to the "unfairness" of the level 50 bracket. I'm not claiming the level 50 bracket is fair, or the pvp system at level 50 in general is fair, but I want to clarify all the misconceptions going on. The most imbalanced, unfair system in SWTOR is none other than.... ...the 10-49 bracket for PvP. The level 50 bracket, where as "unfair" is tremendously better than the level 10-49 bracket. A level 10 vs. a level 49 is just stupid. A level 49 has all of their abilities sans level 50 abilities, and all of the skill points sans 1. A level 10 has 1 skill point, and a few abilities. No level 10 has their "key ability" that define's their class and makes them "uber" either. For example, a Level 10 Jedi Shadow...cannot even cloak. So many people cry "I want to stay in the 10-49 bracket cause it's fair". You sir are the biggest hypocrite in the world and should not be allowed to play said games. You truly just want to be able to pwn up on level 10s as a level 40 something with the insane advantage you have over others. Now if just the skill point and abilities differences weren't enough, guess what. The 10-49 bracket has huge gear disparities as well. Relics and gear: Level 10s can't get relics. Also the buff they give you doesn't "bolster" as well. Pretty much bolster only does your endurance and main dmg/healing stat. If you gear benefits from crit rating and such, bolster doesn't do anything about it to make it "fair. Starting at ~level 40, your gear starts to out do the bolster effect. Expertise: Guess what, expertise doesn't start at 50. At level 40 I was able to get about ~80 expertise by swapping out weapon expertise enhancements to put in my orange gear. It works out pretty well if you buy a weapon for your companion and swap out hte expertise, you can then put the expertise on your armor. A level 10 can't get expertise. So lets talk about fair. A level 10 can't do anything except level up to close the gap, all while getting creamed in PvP. So what's more fair. A level 50 w/ battlemasters vs a level 50 without battlemasters, or a level 10 with 2 abilities and 1 skill poitn vs a level 49 with all their abilities and all their skill points (Sans 1)? Which is easier to close the gap? Getting PvP Gear at level 50 or leveling up to level 49? tl;dr The level 50 PvP may be broken, but don't you dare say "10-49 bracket is more fair."

This is my fav so far on this thread. You can truly tell who's full of it and just doesn't want to have to "try" at PvP and cries when they lose. Can anybody here tell me what the most imbalanced system of PvP in SWTOR is right now? Beuller? It's the 10-49 bracket. Ding ding ding! You know how much of an advantage a level 49 player has over a level 10? HUGEMOUNGOUS!!!!! A level 49 has almost all of their abilities and skills, where as a level 10 has only a few skills. I'm a jedi shadow. And you are telling me that a level 49 who has Clairvoyant strike and all the bonuses to crit and shadow stance etc, is on an equal playing ground as a level 10 who can't cloak, can't do resilience, can't pop defensive cooldowns, can't interrupt, pretty much can't do anything except spam one button that costs too much force. All you guys complaining about level 50 pvp not being "fair" and then saying "I'm going to do the 10-49 bracket cause it's fair" are the biggest hypocrites I've met yet. You are completely full of it and should have their account deleted for such statements. It's quite amazing the audacity of some people. This is why the forums are horrible.

Did you invent MMORPGs, cause you sir speak a lot of truth on the topic. BW should hire you.

This is the worst. First off, all of your "CCs" have such a low cooldown that it's very low risk of "wasting it". They aren't mindless CCs. They aren't even CCs. CC stands for "Crowd Control". At no point in the discussion are u controlling a crowd using said abilities (less you take Powerr's scenario where you want to CC a healer while killing a target). You don't seem to realize you are still doing damage while preventing them from doing damage. I can't htink of a better scenario you want to be in where You are doing damage while they CAN'T do anything. Who cares if it builds resolve. There's no benefit to having resolve UNLESS you are at full resolve. If they ate all three stuns and are at a full resolve bar, guess what, you just killed them without taking any damage. Epic win. Now i'm not saying blindly use stuns and such all the time, but you should definitely be using them often as the Cooldowns are so low. Ideally there are better times to save stuns for, like if they are channeling a big ability or something, running away, have you rooted, etc. Basically, your advice and your reasoning are epic fail. This is a huge L2P for you.

Everything you say is fine except the last part. You are making an assumption that might or might not be true. It's like a wicked triangle. In order for Battlemaster gear's remaining stats to be balanced competitively with top tier raid you, you remain at a state of disparity equal to what exists now. Thus you remove Expertise and result in no net gain/loss in the game as far as the issue is concerned. You could argue in general gear is too strong for battlemasters, and that might be fair, but it's not expertise, it's the gear. My guess is if you removed expertise you'd need to buff the other stats to make it equal to PvE raid gear, thus having even more powerful PvP gear and same if not bigger disparity.

I mean that's fine. Mine point was they have responded, maybe not in the PvP threads themselves. To be claiming otherwise and faulting them for not doing so is wrong.

Additionally, you guys must really lazy if you can't click the dev tracker in the forum itself. http://www.swtor.com/community/devtracker.php

The sad thing is, they have, you just haven't bothered to read it. First go here to see latest comments: http://www.darthhater.com/articles/swtor-news/19903-devtracker-highlights-for-the-week-of-january-26 Then here about faction imbalances: http://www.darthhater.com/articles/swtor-news/19905-dual-shockers-interview-with-cory-butler Then there's another article there somewhere about future plans of PvP (which covers 85%-90% of what is being complained about)

I personally don't like repeating myself this will be the fourth post I make regarding expertise. Expertise has nothing to do with gear disparity, it was just an example to show that the underlying problem is gear, not expertise. Basically stating that if you remove expertise, you don't solve your issue. Expertise exists for a specific GOOD reason. Go read one of my last 4 posts about it. If you remove expertise you open up people grinding for Raid Gear to own up in PvP. That's it. For that reason you cannot remove expertise. EDIT: For that reason you cannot remove expertise WITHOUT removing gear from PvP all together or preventing "non-pvp" gear in PvP.

The reason I "Attack" you (even though I didn't say anything about you in this post) is 'cause you guys attack others. There is a reason the resilience went into WoW and it isn't because of what the other guy was saying about keeping people alive. That was a side effect of it. If you go into the history of WoW and look at the REAL REASON why Resilience went into it is because too many players were rocking the best Raid Gear and destroying everybody in PvP. Thus it became required to have the best Raid Gear (which isn't easy and requires a full guild) to compete "fairly" in PvP. Thus they added Expertise, which made it so PvP gear was better for PvP than PvE gear. Now I quote WoW because that's where Expertise ultimately came from and I am giving you the reason. It's a very legit reason, because if you took it out guess what would happen. People who have over "200 hours in a week" to both PvP grind and PvE grind would have a full set of Rakata gear and OWN UP SHOP IN PvP and we'd be begging for Expertise to come back in. Someone else made a decent point in this thread though it's all subjective. You could tone down Expertise so that it doesn't do so much, like only have increased survivability. The issue here is you have to balance it so that PvE gear doesn't become minutely better than PvP gear. So thus, expertise has to remain at least as beneficial as to make it better in PvP than PvE gear. All I was saying is that Expertise is not the issue, so stop saying it is. It's gear disparities in PvP in general. I personally don't think it's a big deal because after x amount of time I'll be the same gear as everyone else, but that's just me.

Did you fail out of reading comprehension while in college as well? You A) didn't read what I posted and B) are so short minded in thinking it's amazing you graduated. A) I didn't say it had to be gear based, I in fact said several times they could (and I would prefer) make it so it's a different system. HOWEVER IT'S NOT THAT WAY YET. What I said was you cannot remove gear without the introduction of a different system. B) Sucks to be those who will not get there? It's a compromise, if you go towards one side, you eff the other side. Whatever they do with their current system they lose player base. They either lose people because they hit "best gear end game" and don't have anything to progress to, or lose people because they don't want to grind for a bit. Some people play strictly so they can get better gear and stomp on less geared players. Thus you'd lose those players to. NO MATTER WHAT YOU DO YOU LOSE PLAYERS. Can't satisfy everybody. Until they make "ALL PEOPLE EQUAL" in PvP, there is going to be the "best gear out there" and a disparity between geared players and there's nothing that can be done about it except removing gear from PvP. As you are a psychology major you should know this, but studies show that people tend more to stay for the grind/progression then they do for the fun, EVEN IF THEY AREN'T NECESSARILY HAVING FUN DOING IT, purely for the sake of completion or achievement. Thus the argument can be made that they are keeping more people playing the game by having this disparity then those who are leaving due to it. C) I doubt they have new gear in a few months. It is just your opinion, just as mine is mine, and you can't really make facts or judgments based on it. And again, you can't please everybody. Some player base is going to suffer with EVERY DECISION That is made. Just the way the world works. By please YOU doesn't mean they've pleased everybody.

Lolololol. You are 100% wrong. Progression in pvp gear grind is by DIFFERENT TIERS of gear, or the existence of gear in general, it has absolutely nothing to do with pvp grind. If you remove expertise, you still have a progression of gear grind. Thus you are 100% wrong. You can tell it's there to separate pvp and pve because it only improves your abilities IN PVP ONLY. Just fail. Go to school.

Again to reiterate to all of you people claiming to do away with Expertise. "You can't remove Expertise because then you'll just get PvE gear. Additionally, if you remove Expertise, the OTHER STATS on the battlemasters gear will still destroy "new level 50s" Anybody suggesting removing Expertise specifically just needs to delete their forum account." You don't get it, because you are new at this and that's fine. As you are new at this and have NO IDEA what you are talking about, nobody at BW is going to take you seriously anyway so not like it matters. Expertise is just a separator for PvP and PvE. It's to make it so the "best gear for PvP" isn't PvE gear, and that PvP players can just PvP. Expertise is just another stat among MANY on Battlesmasters gear that is contributing to your destructing in the Warzone. If you took out Expertise, then the difference in EVERY OTHER STAT would still destroy and the result is the same. Take out Expertise, people go get the best Rakata gear, and STOP YOUR FACE IN PVP, and the same thing happens. It's not the expertise, it's the fact that GEAR exists in PvP. What you want to be saying is "REMOVE GEAR FROM PVP" not "REMOVE EXPERTISE". Everybody stating "REMOVE EXPERTISE" just sounds ridiculous and proves you don't have an understanding of the game and WON'T BE TAKEN SERIOUSLY.

See above response as you are wrong =).