It's less about heals and more about sorc/sage. Had a voidstar this AM with 3 sorcs on our side, 2 broke 1 million damage and had 500k healing to boot. The other had 2.2m healing. I'm sure they were good players and all, but those numbers are just sick - especially for the damage dealers.

The prevalence of inward sloping walls is a bit of an issue. Not the look of the walls themselves, which are nicely distinctive, but most wall decorations look silly when placed on an inward slope. Even the Hanging Moss introduced with the Yavin stronghold looks odd on an inward slope (but fine on an outward slope - like the exterior of the building). I guess holo decorations don't look terrible, but they are a little out of place and there's a lot of sloping walls.

My sorc healer is rarely top DPS in warzones, and never gets any of the protection medals. Need damage and tanking boosts.

One possibility is also to run PVP warzones to reach the next level of gear. In warzones, your gear gets "bolstered" up to much more powerful levels. It doesn't completely level the playing field in terms of skills you have access to, but in terms of gear it will be equal to what the level 59s are wearing, so long as you have an item in every gear slot. In fact, players above 52 often will have worse gear than bolstered level 33 greens because bolster turns off if an item is over roughly level 52-53 in power. Crazy but true.

Silver lining though - if the price was $8 100 days ago, their demand must really be suffering. I'm getting $3 spam.

If it helps, the Republic is basically just as bad. Consider how oppressive even the best meaning of standard Earth governments is - now project that not only across the entire planet, but over thousands of planets with hundreds of races. There is no possible way such an entity could be both effective and non-repressive. And it's managed to hang around for 20 thousand years? Yeah, suuuuuure it's benevolent. Powerful figures get to do what they want - the more power the government has, the more power those who influence the government have. That's just reality. Who do you think the Hutt Cartel was doing business with all those millennia when there was no known Empire? Why did the Republic tolerate them?

I have some 32-35 year old friends (with corporate jobs even!) in RL who are decent people in the real world, but absolute jerks in MMOs. Nothing gets them happier than someone complaining about their actions. It's really sad and I often find myself embarrassed to be associated with them. It might be MOBA culture, since they love playing those games. .

It is possible to disable 12x XP if that's what you really want. There's a vendor on fleet with one item that disables the XP boost for the duration of it's buff.

Star Wars Galaxies was an earlier Star Wars MMO, launched in 2003. There was a hybrid class/skill system - originally intended to be classless, but forced into changes due to the producers demanding a rushed launch - in which players could choose 4 or 5 (out of 30-some) different professions, including the ability to drop professions at will in order to level up new ones. The game had a very rich non-combat experience - in fact, only about 10-12 of the 30+ professions were primarily combat oriented. Non-combat professions included things like Dancer, with performance skills that would buff the morale of customers, and remove the battle fatigue debuff; Politician, for the building and administration of player cities; Architect, for the construction of player buildings (which were placed directly in the world, not instanced like strongholds) and furniture; Tailor, for making clothing and light armors; Weaponsmith, for crafting weapons; Creature Handler, for capturing wild creatures and training them as pets (which could be kept or sold to other players). Each of these was developed to a level not seen in any other major MMO (except EVE Online, which hadn't been released yet). But the producers decided to force the developers to rush the game out the door before they finished building most of the combat content. The devs literally flew some beta testers in to apologize to their faces before announcing the early launch. As a result, the combat portions of the game were rather lacking in developer-created content. One key point is that, consistent with the MMO's timeline between Star Wars Episode 4 and 5, the entire list of known force users was: Luke Skywalker, Emperor Palpatine, Darth Vader. In other words, no player force-usage. However, the devs had in fact created a plan for players to unlock Force-senstive character spots in a system that they had intended to take years. A few months after launch, another MMO called World of Warcraft went live. The business people got antsy because Warcraft's buzz was eating into all of Sony's other games and they were worried that SWG, the one holdout, would soon suffer. To counter this, they forced the dev team to start giving hints about how to unlock the Force-senstive slots - which was by mastering 4 of the 30-some odd professions, but each player's list of needed professions was different (and mostly unknown to them). Predictably, this caused a huge portion of the player base to start grinding away at unlocking every profession in the game ... or to quit. It didn't help that EVE Online launched about this time. Basically, the combat achievement and kill oriented types largely abandoned the game over the course of the next year. However, the non-combat types were having the time of their lives. They were building player event cities, holding tournaments, running interplanetary mining operations, crafting unique items (every item had its own unique stats, they weren't all just copies of the same +42 End/+36 [insert main stat here] gear) and so on. So having reduced your player base to a particular crowd of people largely interested in sandbox, RP, crafting and player driven content, what's the obvious design decision to make? Why, to introduce (bad) FPS mechanics, make all gear equivalent, force players into pre-defined classes and basically destroy the non-combat part of the game, of course! Basically taking everything your remaining player base loved out and (badly) trying to break new ground in the diametric opposite direction. It'd be like WoW saying "There's too much focus on polish and casual game play here. Let's turn the game into the most hardcore of Korean grinder MMOs, delete all quest markers, make it full loot open PVP, and introduce a metric where if you don't grind at least 20 quests per day, you lose XP. And let's keep the quality control testing to a minimum for this one. A few game-breaking bugs won't hurt, and we certainly wouldn't want it to get out that we were making these changes before they went live." That's an NGE. I feel reasonably confident no other company will ever be that stupid again. But hey, no one saw Sony pulling that move in the first place, so who knows?

Speaking as a PUG healer, you pretty quickly prioritize heals on people who need them. Your low death count and self-healing ability suggests you probably needed healing a lot less than the average player. Adding in the geographic differences for Alderaan and it's not hard to see a situation where he just never felt you were both in range and in need ... and in truth, you clearly only were in need of him once. The best PvPers also are the hardest to heal as they keep LOSing you, skipping in and out of your range, throwing medpacks on themselves, etc.

It's mostly because launch SWG is the best AAA MMO there ever was ... for certain playstyles, including the RP, character customization and player-driven content groups. EVE online was better for crafters, but SWG was clearly ahead of the rest of the pack there as well - and EVE arguably was never AAA, certainly not before an influx of quitting SWG players. Each of these groups was gutted by the NGE and sent wandering in a post-WoW world where everyone was copying the same terrible (to these groups) formula. Given the IP and BioWare's story focus, SWTOR attracted much of that community.

Why are the people of (any government ever) so loyal to (said government)? Your average person gets no say when a government official decides to come down on them in any system. Beyond a few thousand people, voting no longer offers any practical voice in your representation. When extrapolated to a few thousand worlds as is the case in the Republic, all you get is galactic-level inefficiency, corruption and incompetence from "civil servants". In the Sith Empire, the bureaucrats can't afford inefficiency and incompetence - it may have fatal consequences. They're no pikers when it comes to corruption, but there's no reason to believe it's any better in the Republic ... just more secretive.

There's 21 servers where Republic outnumber Imperials.

I believe the concern is about parity. It's the reason the Super Bowl winner picks last in the NFL draft. If you make winning a gate for improvement, how does someone on the wrong side of the gate ever get through? In the current system, it just takes longer. That isn't a huge deal. We don't really know enough about the new system to speak intelligently. Maybe there won't be a gating issue -- or maybe there will.

Umm, they do exactly that. My healer does some of the worst damage in the game. The madness/lightning hybrid that drives people crazy has mediocre-to-poor healing. If you let them get away from you for 10 seconds, sure, they can heal up - but they have to remain still to do it, and why did you let that happen? There is a madness/corruption hybrid that's OK in both damage and heals, but doesn't excel in either. I've kind of wanted to try out a corruption/lightning hybrid and add the things that most annoy people about sorcs (blind-bubble, root on the AoE knockback) to my healing repetoire, but I'll wait for dual-spec for that.

That lead PvP dev interview linked on the first page said there's a whole different set of commendations, which strongly suggests a whole different set of gear. He even described Cent/Champion/Battlemaster as having been an interim step until they could introduce unranked vs ranked comms.

I'd imagine if the ops were the same difficulty as the 4-man hardmodes, they'd probably give out the same gear. Oh, and 4-man hardmodes do largely give out the same gear as normal operations, apart from the final boss.

I don't know why you'd want to lower crit - it's your best secondary. In general make sure your gear isn't upside down, with more end than willpower. They really like doing this on Force Mystic (healer) gear for some reason. Also, don't be afraid to check out Stalker gear - not the pieces with accuracy, but some of them are very high will + high crit with no other secondary, which is nice.

I think you overestimate the significance of this. In situations where a sorc is able to free cast without moving for 20+ seconds on end, I can see it reducing their heal output by 7-8%. In more typical situations, it might be 2-3%. In high mobility situations, it probably won't change anything at all.

Huttball rocks. It's about flexibility. If you insist on personally carrying the ball to the goal line, yeah - you're increasing your chance of losing. Getting knocked into the pit shouldn't cause a flexible team any trouble whatsoever - quite the opposite in many cases. If someone's on the ledge, going in the pit is a likely-to-score tactic as the opponents will follow you down and be stuck when you pass to/get extricated by/jump to the guy on the ledge or force leap to the enemy up there. If no one's on the ledge ... why aren't they?

Some people who "quit" didn't quit. They were disconnected.

I have no problem with a limit. It actually makes a lot of sense under the current system - though less so in the new medal system that's supposed to reward objectives with medals. However, setting the limit so low trivializes the concept of medals. Why have them at all if every player achieves full rewards every warzone?

Not directly. They tie in more accurately to effort - and the scales are relative based on your role. Tanks > DPS with taunts > DPS with heals > DPS > healers ... today anyhow. After the heal/kill change, I'd expect healers to pass up vanilla DPS. The easiest way to look at the effort involved is to consider the 75k damage or healing medals. I think we can all agree: a pure DPS or pure healer should be able to hit this number with only minimal effort, so long as they were in the warzone for over 5 minutes. So then look at the medals that they are likely to have picked up en route to 75k: 2.5k single (heal or damage) 10 kills (dps now, and healers after the change) Killing blow (automatic for dps, and not too hard for healers) OR 25 kills (will be nearly automatic for healers post change) 75k total (heal or damage) That's 4 medals right there. Maximum possible rewards - minimal effort. We haven't even mentioned all the new objective medals ... and we don't need to, as there's no point to objective medals if the rewards cap at 4.

We had 24-man Imperial ops versus 30-man Republics (full ops group + change) throwdowns last week on Ilum, Vrook Lamar server. The game did not meltdown.

I don't understand it. The limit is so low, and the rewards for a single medal are so high. Why not even it out more? I can see capping at 8 or even 6 - just cut the valor gain/medal in half. I'm a healer and usually have a low medal count as a result, but due to the healer kill change, I can now count on picking up the 10 and 25 kill medals in every warzone. Add in 2.5k single heal and 75k total heal, and I'm already at 4 automatics. Add in the killing blow, 5k single heal and 1k defender on ACW and that's 6-7 medals for trivial effort ... and that's without shooting for 75k damage or 300k healing, both of which I can do - sometimes even in the same match.