Really enjoyed the Vid Dakaru, thanks for posting it. Makes me feel like I should start pulling a video or two together, its nice to see some healthy Vigilance damage vids. I also play a fully specced Vigilance guardian and get similar results damage wise, it amazes me how many people say Vigilance isn't a viable DPS spec. Can't say I've ever had a 7k dispatch crit tho, but I don't often take Gather Strength in my spec. I would love to see your +Bonus Damage, Saber Damage, Crit & Surge and resilience. I've been tweaking stats alot recently and would like to see how similar your stats are to mine. It may also help others who don't use vigilance get some perspective of stats required for that kind of damage performance. I'm sure it will become a more popular spec after 1.2, the heavy dispatch crits will become more relevant at 30%.

I have no doubt this has been suggested before, but I don't see any current posts at a glance. I understand that Bioware are making efforts in 1.2 to make the different crystal colours more available to everyone. I highly approve of this. Its one of the most obvious customisation options a jedi can make and lets them stand out in battle. As the more unlikely crystals have already been thrown into the game (Black Cored, All white sabers) I fail to see any reason why we should not simply be able to pick our crystal colour. A special crystal could be rewarded after a lengthy quest, perhaps mixed with high-end crafting to keep them in the loop. The crystal upon first equip (or pickup if from a quest) would be bound to you and you would be offered 3 RGB colour sliders to pick the exact hue of your crystal. I cant think of a single colour combination that would be immersion breaking from RGB as we already have White & Black sabers. The customisation would just add a little more personality for the player to their lightsaber or blaster.

*Warning* This post contains Jedi Knight story spoilers to illustrate my point. This is a long one, sorry. I have put in a TL;DR One of the things that has fustrated me with SWTOR companions is the Affection system. Partly that it's tied in with their progress, personally I feel the companions story should progress based on the main story. Your affection with them would simply change the outcome, causing betrayal etc.. and more concequence for acting against the companion's ideals. Make them seem more like people damnit, the universe shouldnt revolve around me. Optional companion side missions which change situations if you dont do them before certain plot-critical points would add so much more character. It also seems counterproductive to me to tie it into their crafting/mission capability. I understand that motivation will alter someone's performance and can fully see the logic of why the system was put in place. My issue is that it essentially rewards you for acting against your characters personality, when interacting with a companion with conflicting interests. For example: After 'recruiting' Lord Scourge I found that (after getting stung for -400 affection) taking options completely out of character is more rewarding and directly beneficial. I didn't like taking the options but knew it saved credits and messing around with companion gifts, while giving me a direct improvement to my crafting/mission success. As the character was a late addition, the +/- affection swings are far greater and so the benefit of choosing an out of character option was quite large. Essentially the change I wanted to propose was to split up mission efficiency and affection. Upgrades to the ship and it's available equipment could be used to improve your crafting and mission efficiency. (Upgrading the workbench, providing equipment/improved terminals etc..). Wheras affection should be gained by gifts/missions as normal and have no bearing on missions. I know this change seems like it doesn't have a whole lot of point, but it opens the door for another change that I think alot of players would prefer. As far as I'm aware, scripted sequences for the death of companion characters has already been created and at one point in the beta they were implemented. People would kill off companion characters only to end up gimping themselves as they had lost a crew member on the ship. If a character companion were to be killed off/escaped/defected etc.., instead of loosing a crew member they could be assigned (by the republic or empire) a randomly generated crewmember to take their place. The crewmember would act as a standard companion but without any extra story and have the skills of the crewmember they replaced. Their crafting ability would be un-hindered as you kept your ship. It would allow for more diverse crew members and companions also (I am sick of seeing so many of the same companions running around the place). This would give Bioware more freedom with character betrayals and darkside concequences in future character story expansions. For Example: Perhaps I didn't complete a Lord Scourge side quests and so when I went to kill the Emperor he decided he had made the wrong decision and turned on me at the temple. We fight, multiple cutscenes and conversation choices later and I have a choice to kill him or let him go. Either way I loose the member as my affection was too far in the minus and I neglected him, but a replacement would fill his spot. I would have lost no character viability and been rewarded with a richer story experience with an actual concequence. Just to clarify, my main is full lightside and I rarely play darkside characters. I don't want to murder my entire crew, the depth of storytelling acheivable alongside companion mortality is what I'm after. I seems to me like some of the stories are simply shackled by the choices available to the writer and I would like so see them relaxed. Thanks if you read the whole post, I may have rambled a bit but my point is there. TL;DR?: Affection should be a story-plot device only, it shouldn't affect crafting/missions. Crafting & Mission success could be improved using ship upgrades. Companions should be killable - They could easily be replacable by randomly-generated crew with a basic set of scripted lines based on your alignment or by characters from your Legacy.

If I only had one change, it would be on resolve. I have no issues with how it works or triggers, but roots are currently unaffected by resolve. I would change roots so they would add a small ammount of resolve to the target (about 1/3 of an equivalent stun) and not work on a 100% resolve target, like all other CC. To a melee DPS a root almost as crippling as a stun, if noone is in your range of 4m then your practically useless. Sure you can pop a defence cooldown, but it's an instant shutdown. When chained correctly with stuns you can render a melee DPS, no matter how good the player, useless until death. When Ranked PvP hits and more organised groups start to appear I think this is going to become a bigger problem. I can understand why slows are not on resolve, but roots are a different story entirely. I imagine a few people are un-aware that roots do not affect resolve and work on a 100% resolve target at the moment. I'd not be surprised if thats why alot of people think resolve is not functioning correctly either. Personally I can't say I've had any issues with resolve and it's function on myself or any target in PvP. There are plenty of other things I'd change and tweak, but if I only had one thing I think that would be it. In general I'm very happy with the PvP in this game.

I've been playing Vigilance for some time, and although I'm not covered in full BM gear (Just weapon and offhand) I can confirm the kind of damage he is pulling off if you Min/Max stats correctly. He is also right about our job. If your playing a Vigilance and whaling on a tank then your not going to be effective, half our attacks are Physical damage and can be mitigated & avoided. 3k+ crits on all our main attacks is completely doable, I can crit up to 4.5k on my Dispatch on anything but a tank and thats in Champ gear with stacked +Power and 75% Crit Dmg Bonus from surge. Heavy, Medium & Light armor targets are no problem for our damage, only a specifically defence stanced target with extra mitigation is going to provide a siginificant drop. We are already extremely effective single target DPS, the changes in 1.2 are going to up our survivability and damage. I'm looking forward to seeing them hit live.

What depresses me is the 'floating' shoulderpad addons that ruin the PvE gear. Not that I'm that much of a fan of the boots/gloves but I can switch those out for something else. They added shoulderpads to the legacy jedi robes too...which look completely pointless and out of place. If they would just get rid of that pointless addon it would be a useable item, as it is...it just looks appauling. I have no words to express my dissapointment in the Knight PvP set, the colour choice, shoulderpad and helmet are just dreadful. Show that picture to ANYONE out of context and they would never guess it was related to Star Wars, it looks closer to a roman gladiator. We know they can make good armor, the Jedi Council look great, the Battlelord Armor is great and a few low level robes are ok (If your not a Twi'lek and get the hood cutoff, then it just looks daft)

Despite almost always being a light-side player, rarely sticking with a character thats taking the full-on darkside route, I really like the idea that companions can die. I wouldn't neccesarily take the droid route (Unless a droid was the NPC which died) The companion could be replaced by a random-name/race NPC, give them a few lines to flesh them out. if you go through a few they could simply show sheer terror towards being assigned to your crew. Would be more immersive for the more cutthroat players. God knows how many underlings Vader disposed of, the Empire/Republic consider you important enough it seems to make sure you have enough men to complete your missions. The replacement would be able to go on missions and whatnot, could be excecuted for poor performance/behaviour and replaced by another. Get through too many and perhaps a scalding from a superior if you haven't hit the end of the story. Would just add a little more flavor and immersion for those who are particularly ruthless. Decisions that lead to the acciddental death of characters, through negligence or sacrifice would also be appretiated in my opinion. Brings far more weight to the story and it's easy to work around if you replace the character for crafting/leveling purposes.

Considering they haven't implemented a combat log, I don't think they want people to have an easy method for measuring their Damage or DPS with any kind of consistency. Never the less it would be nice. Would be good to have a Training Room with a dueling arena on the stations.

Definitely agree with this. Far too many people calling left or right instead of East and West. Colours would make sence. Simple fix to help teams coordinate. Would also be nice to get rid of the Intro sequence & Bike ride. Along with the -Press Space to Continue-

I agree completely that the Medal system needs a revamp. I also think they should chain the Daily system off of it. So the PvP in this game rewards effort of the individual player over the success of the team in general. If implemented properly it would turn Medal Farmers into useful members of the team. I made a lengthy thread on it earlier - http://www.swtor.com/community/showthread.php?t=302978 Just seems like a sensible solution to prevent AFKers and stop Medal farmers being a detriment to the team.

Well the surge nerf yesterday should have taken the edge off the really big crits, only someone with high PvP gear + buffs vs someone without should get 6-7k crits now. I'd imagine an average of 4-5k which isnt that unusual for a DPS build character. Heavy armor is only useful verses normal damage hits, which are only a small percentage of the damage floating around the battlefield. Also a Focus build guardian (which I assume your referring to) has very unreliable DPS in general. The AoE as you mentioned requires a setup, and has a very small AoE range. It requires you to get in the middle of everyone to use. If the damage of the other abilities of a Focus guardian was high, then I'd agree with you but it's pretty much an 'All your eggs in one basket' build. It's not overpowered since the Stims/Adrenal stacking was nerfed. Now Surge has been knocked back as well. Personally I find it too much of a one-shot wonder to play as one. I switched to Vigilance spec.

I get what your saying Niddhog, (and I did read the entire post) but I dont think the situation is as hopeless as you put forward. I think a system of essentially 'rewarding everyone' by reducing the penalty of losing is completely counter productive. You will promote AFKers as there is no point in actually fighting, people will just give up because contributing doesn't matter. Also people are promoted even MORE than they are now to not contributing because it makes no difference to them personally. They will just keep throwing themselves into the masses and cleaving/casting away until the timer hits. If a medal system was well thought out for each specific warzone type then you would find people 'selfishly' completeing objectives, but in the process they are aiding the warzone. You can prevent everyone going for goal by giving medals for assistance, for stopping the enemy, for aiding the ball carrier, for a pass that leads to a goal scored, for healing/protecting the ball carrier, intercepting an enemy pass etc.. and you can only earn 1 medal per 'acheivement' so people wont be ball hogging like crazy. There needs to be enough alternative ways to earn a healthy number of medals. There are ways you can design the medals that will promote teamplay and objectives that in essence plays into the common attitude of 'what do I get out of it'. Eventually it will become second nature to pass for successful goals. But the most important thing in the end is the WINNER gets an extra lump of Valor to make it the favorable outcome. The fustration is more in the Daily than in the Valor gain I think. Make Dailys based around the new medals and the Daily fustration is solved by playing better for your team. Thought and testing would need to go into the medals system, but a redesign such as this could be greatly beneficial to the flow of every Warzone and every future warzone. As it is at the moment, people sometimes ignore the fact they are even IN a warzone. I have no doubt that some people don't even understand how to play warzones like Huttball properly either, having Medals that funnels them into objective play will quickly get them used to the idea of passing and assisting the team. I would actually be in high favor of a PvP taster for each Warzone that people could complete before being allowed to Queue for warzones (If it's their first character). Essentially it would give a brief description of the warzone, allow them to float around the map to get to grips of it and show them things like the Pass Ball ability which they need to have available. Even a 30-second primer for each warzone would aid things greatly. If a Farmer is going to Farm, then make that work in our favor. Systems can be built to do that, even if they aren't currently common. Farming isn't the problem, the systems that pander to them are.

This is a long post, sorry to those who don’t like that. I can’t really TL;DR it, but I’ve broken it up into sections as best as possible. So let's assume for a moment, for the purposes of this thread, that there is no class imbalance or gear differential. There are plenty of threads on people’s opinions on these matters. I’m hoping this will be more about improving our PvP system as a whole, adding/changing features that would make PvP more fluid and more enjoyable. All in all, I highly enjoy SWTOR PvP. There are many things that could be improved with the system we currently have, but I do feel things are changing for the better. Essentially all the following are my opinions on each aspect I feel could be altered to promote better gameplay. Medals- As these give a direct Valor reward to the player, they are essentially promoting a player to contribute to a Warzone in a specific way. Now in essence, that’s fantastic. Play well, get a cookie mentality works well and strengthens PUG groups. The problem is people are not getting rewarded for helping, but for mindlessly fighting. The medals are not focused enough around the objectives of each warzone. Slight tweaks would make medal ‘farmers’ (for lack of a better word) become far more effective to the team. Huttball seems to be the worst culprit of this, you get nothing for scoring, nothing for making that final pass before a goal and nothing for defending the ball carrier (aside from some protection/healing points if you have those abilities). I think the Medals need to be tailored for each Warzone type. The system can easily be reworked for rewarding team-work and objective play. Even if your team is losing, you should still be able to get something back for trying your best. That’s how you get better and it means everyone gets a more enjoyable PvP match. Gear aside, isn’t that the whole point? Enjoy the PvP. Dailys- An effort in frustration for some, 3 matches of face rolling for others. With the supposed fix for Dailys this may be less of an issue now. The point still stands that some people have huge difficulty getting their dailys done. If thats down to personal skill or perhaps a regular supply of people who aren’t playing to win, just to fight doesn’t really matter. The problem as I see it is someone can throw an entire evening at PvP and never get their Daily done and to me that seems like a problem. If the above Medal system was implemented, then it could be easily tied in with the Daily system. Instead of 3 wins? 20/30 Medals. People who play poorly, or simply ignore objectives would suddenly be motivated to assist the team. The medal system would have to be well balanced. It can’t all be about the objectives as dealing damage/healing is a huge part of war. But with more objective based rewards people will actively seek out the objective completion every warzone, not just the highest damage mark on the boards. Ilum- Ilum is already a whole lot better, people are actually fighting on my server (Bloodworthy) which makes a nice change. But there are still some problems as I see it. Defending a point gives you 2x the Valor, this is promoting turret hugging (The usable ones by the team bases) for both Valor and tactical advantage. This is exasperated further buy only those defending getting the extra Valor, so the attackers just cluster up outside the turret range. I like the idea of extra Valor, but it should apply to both sides (Attackers and Defenders, to promote fighting at the point) and should apply only to the three central map locations. They are supposed to be focal conflict points so let’s stop fighting at the bases. The double Valor is a HUGE incentive to fight at a point, I have no doubt, if properly communicated to the players, they would flock to the center points to battle it out. Warzone Leavers- Another huge issue which I think would be some-what alleviated by changing the Medal system. If your daily can still be completed by trying, despite losing, people may be more incentivized to stick around. I am also one of those with the opinion that a leaver should receive a short debuff to prevent them queuing, a 15-20min debuff would do the trick. This is probably one of the biggest issues with Warzones as they currently stand, a losing fight doesn’t have to be a dreadful one. Close fights, or unlikely come-backs are what make PvP so interesting. The current leaver issue is completely preventing this and turning the Warzones into more of a grind. I’m eagerly anticipating the next Warzone to be released , curious to see if it’s another map for one of the 3 game types, or a new game type entirely. I just hope that Bioware looks as some of the core items above to smooth out the current PvP situation. Interested to see what other ideas people have to give PvP in general a more enjoyable atmosphere.

I've been bouncing between variations of Focus and Vigilance builds alot since I hit 50 some time ago. This http://db.darthhater.com/skill_calc/jedi_knight/guardian/#::f14ef5ef13ef4e6fefe4fe7 (and slight variations of it) is pretty much my regular Vigilance setup and it produces excellent, unrelenting single-target DPS in PvP and PvE. I've definitely settled on Vigilance over Focus, I feel far more useful in a Warzone when I can target out healers and power them down instead of finding a cluster to get the biggest number possible with Focus. The only target I have trouble downing are Trooper/BH healers as the heavy armor reduction along with everything else makes them very resilient. A well played one could survive a very long time from my assault, but on the other hand he has to fully focus on me and is nolonger healing the rest of his group. Its also very powerful if you end up in a 1v1 fight, just keep in mind it is gear dependant. If you are poorly geared you may struggle initially.

I think any of the armor specifically for him you get as quest rewards also looks Sith now. Any other gear (Such as PvP gear which has a seperate appearance for Sith/Jedi) just shows as it would for a normal Republic character

The medals at the moment are far more counter-productive than a positive effect on Warzones in my opinion. People more interested in the most damage than planting a bomb. You can prevent fighting over a bomb if there are medals for other tasks involving the bomb placer. The bomb means nothing (in terms of personal gain) and you still get multiple people trying to do it, sadly you will never stop it. My aim is more to promote more diverse play by replacing the medals with objective based ones. That doesnt have to be placing the bomb, it could also be defending the guy placing it. Then next time someone else will go for the placing medal as the one who did the first time has got his one and wants the defence medal, etc... Also the medals get more actual meaning as you can tie the Daily rewards into it instead of just plain win/loss. If there are 2 medals, one for planting and one for defending the guys planting you will get people going for the objectives. If there are 2 medals, one for 100k damage and one for 100k healing....people will just fight. I have to admit, I'm not an avid search user so I didn't see your post. I saw a thread or two a bit similar but decided to pop my thoughts down more directly. Never the less, I'm glad you agree

Thanks for the support, I appretiate it The medals would be pretty resilient to abuse as not only are teams picked at random, making getting someone cooperative on the opposing team more difficult, but the medals can only be awarded once each, which is how things currently stand ingame. Scored once in Huttball? You can either help other people score for more medals, or go for a Hat-trick and get medals. Alternatively you'll get more medals for preventing the enemy ball-carrier from progressing. Either way, your being useful to the game as a whole and not just stat padding. I like the idea of a deathmatch mode aswell, but essentially isn't that what Open PvP is for? A less objective styled, kill or be-killed scenario. Admittedly its shot to hell at the moment, but the fixing of Open PvP gives those who want less objective PvP an outlet.

Good points, but I feel the medals could be better focused/tailored towards the individual Warzone itself. The thing is there are still too many people who just focus on damage & medals. If you make the medals actually more directly beneficial to the Warzone progress, you'll end up with more focused and dynamic games. As it is right now, a DPS who ignores the turrets in Alderaan completely and fights pointless battles can still end up with 8 medals and feel completely justified in their gameplay. When essentially their team was fighting 1 man down because his contribution was completely unfocused. Dailys could then focus on Medals and you don't end up with people complaining about an entire evening of play and no Daily. I definitely agree with the lack of leaving penalty, thats just a giant oversight. Its not about wanting to get more medals. If I am focusing on just medals I can get 8-10 most games, being a Guardian. Its about the medals being more focused on the objectives, then changing the Dailys to reward medals oriented towards Warzone progression. Not just arbitary stats like Damage. The system has the right idea already, I just think it could be better focused.

There are many issues with Twi'lek in the game it seems. Lekku bending awkwardly even in a basic combat stance. Or waving wildly upwards at a right-angle and crushing up when going down a lift/falling Unable to wear hoods ( which is particularly aggrivating as alot of the gear was designed to have a hood, as the hood isnt there the clothing just 'cuts off' and the neck of most pieces looks awkward. ) Poor skin colour choices is a personal peeve of mine. They have such a short selection and I have no doubt it's so they can 'add content' through the Legacy system. Headpieces disappearing Lekku dissapearing on alot of helmets/hats... It's a bit dissapointing as every other race is a coloured human essentially. The one with an unusual physical feature, which really isnt very complicated, gets the short end of the stick.

I think you may have gone slightly off-topic with that Vega. My point was more to improve the player's style of play more than a content issue. Objective PvP zones need to have incentive for people to actually do the objectives correctly, rather than just going for medals. Making medals the whole reason of PvP by pointing them to Objective based situations seems like an easy way to get the less group-centric players to focus on the WZ objective. Im almost certain this would make PUG groups improve exponentially and reward those who actually played well. New warzones will come in time, 3 is plenty for a game to start with and they have already announced a new one on the way.

I can't help but feel the Knight PVP gear could look so much better with some added robes. Bioware seem pretty content with adding sholderpads to things that dont need sholderpads. Both the PvE set gear and PvP for Knights are made 100x worse by their odd sholderpads. In my opinion, removing the backpack & shoulderpad, then adding some interesting robes to the PvP set would make it far better visually. The PvE gear needs to loose the awful shoulderpads, or atleast tone them down to somethign sensible. I have to add, the Guardian sets look far more appealing colour-scheme wise than the god-awful choices they made for Sentinels....Orange & White Columni gear...gold PvP gear...It all looks dreadful.

As far as I'm aware in one of the previous patches they changed his gear to give the Sith appearance as opposed to the Jedi version of the same armor. His armor is only wearable by himself, so you cant take it and use it. I dont think it was originally intended to appear as Jedi style armor.

Added a TL;DR to summarize the post

Medals seem to be a bit of an issue in PvP. The idea of rewarding effort is good but the implementation just doesn't promote teamwork or objective play in what are obviously objective based warzones. Causing people to selfishly go for as many medals as possible because win or loose, they can garantee a better personal reward this way. This in turn causes an issue with dailys, players unable to complete WZ dailys due to repeated team failures due to lack of structure or objective play. A third issue is AFKing, now I haven't seen much of this personally but I do see complaints. To be able to sign up to PvP, do nothing but run around (or twitch on the spot) and still get rewarded is simply counterproductive. I believe a change to the medal rewarding system (the criteria your currently given medals for), and altering the daily so it relies on medals would solve all 3 of these problems. In my opinion the current medal system promotes selfish gameplay. There should be scaling medals for Guarding, Healing and Damage but only 2 per catagory. The rest should be WZ specific rewards. For example: Huttball - Scoring a goal, scoring a hat-trick, passing the ball to someone who then scores, absorbing/healing X ammount of damage to a ball carrier, killing a ball carrier, intercepting a pass. Voidstar - Arming the bomb, medals for time spent defending a target, interrupting a bomb planter, perhaps even one X ammount of time CCing an opponent. Alderaan - Taking a turret, intercepting a capture, X number of kills while near a target etc.. Obviously the medals would need testing and some slightly deeper thought than what I'm pulling off the top of my head. If you had to earn 20/30 medals for your WZ daily, people would be more inclined to play objectively and not just fight for fighting sake. (I do understand why people do and enjoy this, but objective base WZs are just that...objective based. They need to be treated as such). Hopefully this would lead to far more objective gameplay and teams working together even if only for personal gain. It also means 3 losses in a row isnt a complete failure, you can still play with full intent of helping your team and get a number of medals to assist them. This system would only work however if the medals were healthily revamped. Healers/Tanks have to get a healthy reward for objective contributions (defending points etc..) without allowing someone to mindlessly fight without a care for the WZ around them. The side effect of making AFKer rewards/dailys impossible is also a nice bonus. If they are getting 10-20 valor for a medal-less game, then their progression is ground to a halt. Its not a big change really. I think a system like this would make WZs more enjoyable and rewarding for everyone who contributes. TL;DR? Medals should reward objective gameplay in WZs - They should also be the basis of the WZ daily so individuals are rewarded for playing well.

The only underwater city in Star Wars was home to the Gungans...surely that alone is all the reason we need to prevent the development of swimming in this game?