The gear disparity between recruit/battle master and war hero is compounded by the fact the itemisation is terrible. recruit has good stats for most classes but not enough of them, bm has horrendous stats for most classes and finally war hero has good of everything, but because it requires bm to obtain is out of reach of many players. Made even worse by the fact there's no direct route to obtain war hero items, you have to do warzones for warzone commendations and convert them over at a 3 to 1 ratio. Unlike pve players who can get campaign/blackhole gear from multiple different routes. Even the most die hard of PVP players on the server I play on have at most 3-4 pieces of war hero gear because of how much grinding has to be done to get the items. And then theres the whole augment slot thing, war hero players can get crit crafted gear and put their war hero mods in it just fine, no penalties, but should a bm player try do the same, well they lose all set bonus's as set bonuses do not carry over from battle master mods. Another half arsed system bioware have implemented. How many of you have bought crit crafted bm items only to realise the set bonus doesn't carry over. I bet a fair few have.

Doesn't matter if its right or wrong, the game is on its last legs, this coupled with the total lack of communication from the developers means this game is just another notch on the failed mmo list, along with warhammer, age of canon and countless others.

The only F2P game that I know of which has been very successful is Guild Wars, because it really is free to play and the only reason to spend money is if you want a different look, but no matter what you cannot pay 2 win.

No matter what way you look at it swtor is a sinking ship.. 1.3 million players across 38 countries, thats barely 35,000 people per country, no wonder most servers feel empty. It's because they are! I've lost the will to play and the only reason I log in now is because there's nothing else worth playing, and the fact I handed over a rediculous amount of money for the collectors edition and 6 months subscription because I had faith in BW, that faith has long since vanished. One thing swtor has certainly taught me, ignore all hype. Roll on next tuesday for D3 and hopefully the next GW2 BWE at the end of this month.

Thats free 2 play done wrong and yes it would destroy the game even faster than it is now, but if bioware have any sense, and im sure they have some they would adopt the guild wars style F2P which is no where near a pay 2 win game and micro transactions are primarily a cosmetic thing only.

Wouldnt call swtor an MMO either if you wanna be that picky, hell I wouldnt even call it a CORPG either as you spend 99.9% of your game time playing solo anyway.

I would be very much surprised if Swtor doesn't go free to play in the near future, with the recent statistics and conference call recording from EA with regards the business as a whole it seems investors and share holders want to capitalise on the whole micro transactions thing which for a game like starwars would be ideal from a financial stand point. As for saying F2P doesnt work, well guild wars 1 managed to sell over 7 million copies and as that games entire business model was based on box sales and micro transactions I'd say it did pretty darn well. After all its considered the second most successful MMO to date, beaten only by World of Warcraft.

Going to assume you didnt play the recent GW2 beta, the openworld PVP in that blows everything away previously released, even warhammer. Infact I'd go as far as saying if you remember old school RVR like that of DAoC.. You would love GW2

Never mind, upon inspecting the footage in detail it was just a player leaving a warzone.. I will be back with more footage later on no doubt

Hey all, Im curious as to know what biowares stance is on cheating because every day I PVP and often see the same people who seem very suspicious of using cheats/hacks. These are things like being totally immune to CC (despite having no resolve), to lagging at really convienient times, to moving around so quickly the only valid explanation is using an exploit. Now I am aware of certain web sites which promote hacks/exploits for SWTOR so they definetly exist, but my question to bioware is, what are you doing about, because despite reporting these players they still continue to play. It's got so bad that I've resorted to using FRAPS all the time with loop buffer recording so that I can capture the video of these players exploiting/cheating/hacking. While these cheats exist, competitive PVP cannot.

The problem is that with the abundance of Knights/Warriors in PVP now (its not unusual to see half the team are guardians/sentinels) the Force Leap ability giving a root effect which can be chained makes them exceptionally powerful in PVP. There are many times when I and im sure others have been standing still for what seems like an eternity because multiple JK/SW's have leaped to you. Anything that impairs the ability to move and/or use abilities on your character should have diminishing returns, this includes snares/roots.

Nope, Can't be that we have 63500 objective points, they only had 41900.

Hey folks, Bit baffled by how a draw is determined exactly because following a game today we were up against a team heavy on healers, we were also the same so no one managed to cap the first gate in Void Star. The thing is when the game ended, no only did our side have more kills, fewer deaths, more medals and more damage/healing totals. We still lost. Infact our total kills were 255, the other team only managed 27 kills. As a result of this they won and we lost despite everything pointing towards us being the dominating team as you can see from the screenshot below. http://i.imgur.com/CCUbY.jpg

Were not immune to knockbacks in cover, only when we use Entrench are we protected against CC/Knockbacks. Entrench lasts 20 seconds and is on a 1 minute cooldown. Very easy to spot when its in use as well. As a hybrid operative (25/16/0) I've never had a 5k heal or 3k Hidden Strike despite being full BM with over 1.1k expertise. Yet routinely get hit for 5k+ by many other classes. Now im no genius at maths but if the damage coming in is greater than the healing going out then no matter what your gonna die. This is the problem currently with PVP, DPS has gone through the roof and healing as remained the same if not worse than pre 1.2. Hardest heat seeker on my so far is 5.7k and I purge debuffs like there going out of fashion!

So just did a warzone (alderaan) with my operative, having completed the entire game, we lost due to fighting a melee heavy team (they had nothing but knights and sentinels) the game ended and these were the results. Notice how one of my team mates defended the turret on snow the entire match, did no damage and less than 10k healing yet actually got rewarded more than everyone else who were actively fighting in order to win. Myself getting only 2 medals despite having done almost 30k damage and 230k healing while attacking the middle turret. This is seriously broken and has basically mean the entire 10-15 minute battle was a waste of my time as I got nothing at all despite active participation. http://i.imgur.com/Y32nv.jpg

As has been said before by the devs only newly purchased battlemaster and war hero gear has the set bonus on the armorings, the old pre-1.2 gear had it on the shell so WILL NOT transfer over.

10350 warzone commendations for a War Hero mainhand or offhand weapon. No matter how you look at it, thats a ****in lot of commendations to farm.

Hey all, Looking through many of the item sets available for damage classes we often see they have an abundance of accuracy on them, in some cases so much accuracy that you lose a huge portion of the stat budget on it. The problem is currently in the game its an almost pointless stat, most if not all DPS classes already have a 100% chance to hit with special attacks and because a vast majority of their damage comes from special attacks, accuracy is wasted. The way I see it as a stat and having played dozens of MMO's in the past 15 years the way to make this stat mean something is to offer an incentive to having it. My suggestion would be to make it a stat people want, instead of all "melle/ranged" attacks having a 90% chance to hit and all special attacks being 100% chance, bring them all inline. Reduce special attack hit chance to 90% as well. But in order to offer more of a reason to want Accuracy why not add additional funcionality to the stat, as an example for ever 1% chance to hit you gain, also give 0.5% armour penetration. So for those that wish to stack accuracy, snipers/gunslingers are a good example, lets say they have 300 accuracy and that provides them with a 10% bonus to hit giving them a 100% chance to hit a target with ranged and special attacks, but as a bonus it would also offer them 5% armour penetration, providing a damage boost to all attacks. This would give a reason to want accuracy and put less of a reliance of almost "having" to remod your gear because of a wasted stat budget. TLDR; Reduce chance to hit for all classes both melee/ranged and special attacks to 90%, give Accuracy and extra benefit, Armour Penetration. ie 10% Accuracy gives 100% chance to hit and 5% Armour Penetration.

Stacking accuracy means your neglecting other offensive stats, and accuracy only improves your chance of hitting targets which high defense (tanks for instance). It will have zero impact against classes who defensive cooldowns. I cannot think of any other class in the game who can have what is essentially there entire rotation negated several times. Yes if lady luck is on your side you may well get all shots to hit but verses a tank because of how the mitigation process works those shots are likely to do nothing more than tickle them.

Full centrurion wont help you much, yes your damage will improve but you will still get facerolled by any melee class/ranged class that targets you, unless you get very lucky with critical hits. And unlike pre-50 where your occasional snipe/ambush gets deflected at 50 when your up against champion/battlemaster geared people its a matter of life and death. On top of that nothing is more frustrating than working your backside off to do well in PVP when other classes (lets use merc for instance) can mash one button and still output more damage per attack than you can on a good day. My highest hitting attack so far is with adrenal/relic on an ambush against a sage who had been armour debuffed and it was 4.6k vs regularly getting hit for 3.5k+ by almost every other class. Lets not forget the "nurfed" operatives that are still capable of bringing down 16k hp in a matter of seconds. Don't bother trying to defend them I know, I have one an Operative, Assassin, Powertech, Sorcerer and Sniper all level 50 and all with extensive PVP experience. EDIT: 19:42PM I've literally just finished a voidstar game where I had a 1vs1 with a Sentinal, other than EP and IP all my other attacks (sniper, ambush, followthrough and series of shots) were deflected apart from 2 ticks from SoS, one was absorbed and the other crit for 1157. Bare in mind my Sniper is valor rank 56 with a mix of champion/centurion gear and has 508 expertise. No other class in the game can have there damage mitigated by such a huge amount.

I have 5 level 50 characters as shown below, and I can tell you without a shadow of a doubt of my 5 characters the only other class that is equally as squishy as my sniper is the operative, but the operative has a get out of jail card called stealth which the sniper lacks. Of the 5 the Operative is capable of incredible burst damage but once the initial damage is over it lacks sustainability. The Powertech (advanced prototype), Assassin (Darkness) and Sorcerer (Corruption) are all able to dish out very high sustained damage and/or healing and in many cases take a battering as well. The Assassin being the least likely to get face rolled by any class. Despite all of this though I enjoy the sniper more than the rest but they certainly have issues, more so than any other class I have played. http://i.imgur.com/ewpaR.jpg

removal of the sniper class as all others are better anyway.

The way i see it is cover is an integral part of the sniper its what basically defines us. So why not change cover from a necessity to our class and ability to do damage to a bonus to our class instead. Instead of a key abilities requiring us to use cover (snipe, EP etc) allow them to function outside of cover. This would solve our mobility issue in a heart beat. Ambush could remain an ability that requires cover as its capable of very high damage (even more so when i finish my suggestion). Change cover into a bonus mechanic, when using cover we gain the current bonuses like 20% ranged defense (change to 20% defense to all) and we gain X% armour penetration, 30%-50% for example, this would go along way to fixing the biggest convern of the class when it comes to PVP and also PVE. Fighting targets which high armour and/or mitigation. Against low armour classes our damage wouldnt increase that much maybe a 3-4% increase at most but it would go along way to bringing the sniper back in line with other dps classes.

Original source can be found at http://www.darthhater.com/articles/swtor-news/20063-star-wars-the-old-republic-update-1-2-starts-to

Either increased range or cover changes would be welcome, I'd also love to a see an "ammo stance" system for us. IE Armour Piercing ammo or Incendary Ammo, one could be effective agaist armoured targets but no use vs light armour and the other would be good vs light armour but no use against heavy. Both would be equal for medium armour targets. This would go along way to making attacking a heavy armour class actually worth doing rather than hitting them for 500 a pop and running out of energy before you even get them down to 75% hp.