Too many healers, not enough firepower.

Something you quickly realize when you start using Focus Target in this manner is that the best healers have a knack for avoiding LoS and can rarely be attacked by everyone at once. That's why it's often better to kill a DPS first.

\What we're seeing now in PvP is similar to some of the struggles Blizzard has faced when trying to balance Warcraft 3 and StarCraft II. There are specs that the conventional wisdom frowns upon and yet there are always outliers proving the conventional wisdom wrong, and that usually indicates that things are fairly balanced when all classes are played optimally. The problem occurs when some of those specs are much more difficult (or easy) to play than others and that's exactly what's happening now. Mara/Sents and PT/Vanguards are low skill, high output classes so it's only natural that people flock to those classes. The key to getting this right is to design classes/specs in such a way that they require a high skill level to achieve maximum output. Optimizing skill rewards is the key to balance nirvana. Sadly, it's much easier said than done. One of the huge challenges is getting it just right for different segments of the population. It's possible to have things tuned almost perfectly at the highest levels while still having a game that's horribly unbalanced for lesser skilled players. It's a trade off and a difficult one at that.

Nothing at all, huh? So I guess when I get repeatedly rolled by the best players on my server they're just in the midst of a really lucky rock-paper-scissors streak?

Fishing for Killing Blows is also quite helpful with medals.

You would have no trouble with queues between 9pm - 12am Pacific (12am-3am Eastern). Four fleet instances is the norm. Reg warzones pop within minutes. For PvE, most groups are formed ad hoc via fleet spam.

They've been pretty clear that implementing this is not going to happen due to the limitations of the game engine. It's also pretty clear based on how many people participate in ranked PVP that it would be foolish for them to invest so much time and effort for what amounts to a very small slice of players. At the moment, there are only 5,000 players across all servers who've played enough games to get ranked. 5,000. That's it. It would be terrible for the game if BW dropped everything to make this happen... Face it, the way you want it to be isn't how it is. Get over it and move on.

You've made this Slinger very sad.

I think the biggest problems occur when there are multiple healers and no one establishes a kill order or calls out target switches. When people rage about a lack of focus fire on healers what they're usually mad about is the lack of focus fire on the healer they're targeting. In general, the less you leave open to interpretation the better off you'll be.

Click on All Advanced Classes, scroll down until you see someone listed who's on the server you want to check and then click on the server name to limit the rating results so it only shows players from that server. Once you've done that you can just bookmark the link and go directly to your server rankings in the future. Here are some examples from popular PvP servers + The Harbinger (my server): Prophecy of the Five The Bastion Tomb of the Freedom Nadd Jung Ma The Harbinger

Saboteur or hybrid is the way to go in my opinion. Sharpshooter is a liability in arenas because the turret model just doesn't hold up very well. A Saboteur who remains in cover next to a wall provides some protection from melee attackers who have to weigh the pros and cons of attacking into someone capable of doing a wall bang. Sabotage is also highly versatile and can be used to provide additional mobility or defense as needed. The 6% damage mitigation while in cover and the 5% heal from Sab Charge provides additional survivability as well. If you haven't experimented with the spec and are committed to arenas I strongly recommend you give a try.

You can view ratings by server if that helps. http://www.swtor.com/leaderboards/class/undefined/the-bastion http://www.swtor.com/leaderboards/class/sage-sorcerer/the-bastion

I disagree that BA is irrelevant. On demand burst is valuable in burn phases and the differences between the onDamage proc and the BA relic is very small and mostly comes down to personal preference.

For some classes the relic procs for 12s every 20s which pretty damn nice. I don't know if that's a bug or or the tooltip is bugged and it should say 20s instead of 40s. The Boundless Ages relic is irrelevant in PVP. Since we can't wear 2 onproc power relics any more we have to wear something with the SA relic. I figure it's either the mainstat or crit relic.

This thread inspired me to take a more active role in the warzones I did last night. I went in expecting the worst (like many have expressed in this thread) but the results were actually quite good. The wz that sticks out in my mind was a Ancient Hypergate which I know can be confusing until you figure out what the hell is going on. We had a small lead going into the second round from kills and orbs. I had swapped places with the healer to guard so he could do his thing in mid. With about a 1 minute left in the phase our pylon gets hit by 2 stealthers, I call for help immediately and am just trying to interrupt the cap and avoid dying while waiting for help to arrive. Only 1 person responds and shortly after that 2 more enemies are inbound to the pylon. We kill one attacker and put out another call letting everyone know there were now 3 at the pylon. No one responded, we both die, the other team captures the pylon and we lose the match. Normally I'd just quietly fume but this time I spoke up and reminded the team that when the pylon is under attack they should drop what they're doing and assist unless they're sure the pylon is safe because losing it before the reset gives the other team an overwhelming advantage going into the next phase and puts us in the position of having to cap a well guarded pylon whereas before we had built a comfortable lead by farming kills and orbs. I got a whisper immediately from a guy on our team who thanked me for explaining how it worked who said he was always confused and just stayed quiet to avoid asking dumb questions. Even if you take crap from 3 or 4 ppl for stating the obvious, if you get through to a single person it's worth it.

Hopefully the mainstat relic procs in warzones now. I had upgraded it to Obroan before realizing the damn thing didn't work in PvP....

There is no DR on your primary stat! For the record, BiS PVE gear is approaching 4k so your measly 3200 Aim is nothing. Also, I don't think you're reading the patch notes correctly. Those relics don't stack with other relics with other relics of the same type. i.e. two SA relics don't stack, an SA relic with a Crit relic do stack.

When guarding a node, I find it very helpful to type out the "INCOMING ___" message in chat before I'm actually in combat so that it's ready to go at the first sign of trouble. The second I get attacked or catch a glimpse of the stealther I'll just hit Enter so I can get busy defending/delaying the attack without spending precious seconds eating damage while I get the message out. I have found that this leads to much earlier calls which is critical when attacked by more than one stealther.

After hundreds of arena rounds with my Gunslinger I feel pretty strongly that full Marksman/Sharpshooter specs are a detriment to success. The turret model, which works so well in objective based PvP, just doesn't hold-up against good competition in arenas; the pace and tempo of combat greatly reduces the effectiveness of signature abilities like Aimed Shot/Ambush and the core rotation relies heavily on Ranged attacks that are frequently Dodged by tank/dps hybrids and Shadows/Sins. To be successful in the crucible of arena combat you need to tailor your spec and style of play around the demands of the environment. Personally, I prefer Saboteur/Engineering for its ability to control terrain and the flexibility it offers via Sabotage/EMP Discharge. Additional mobility or defense can be called upon as needed depending on the situation, and the ability to do AoE damage on the run, or end the round with a well placed wallbang makes it my go-to spec for arenas. I've also had pretty good success with 0/23/23 hybrid where Sab/EMP Discharge can again be used as an all-purpose tool depending on need. At the end of the day, if the other team concentrates all of their fire on you and your team doesn't come to your aid you should expect to die and lose the match because the other team is simply better. It's the smart move. Especially against Snipers and Gunslingers who, if left alone, can decimate an entire team from afar. Good players don't let healers chill out in the back doing their thing, and they treat Snipers exactly the same way because they've been torched by us in the past.

Maybe they don't hate you because you're good at PVP. Maybe they hate your Objectivist ideology that's devoid of empathy and understanding, or the obnoxious persecution complex that leads materially successful people to overestimate how much they do for society while ignoring what society has done for them on their road to success.

Combat logs or it didn't happen. If you post the logs there will most likely be a perfectly valid explanation for your quick death. Hitting someone for 20k is entirely possible with Scatter Bombs and a few lucky crits. Even without crits it's a 10-12k GCD if someone lands all of them on your head. All it takes is a couple of crits for you to be on life support and with an extremely lucky series of crits you can die with a single roll. That said, most of the time the 2nd GCD will be the death blow. If you're not careful you can go from full health to dead in 3s-4s. I'd be willing to bet that if you are dying that quick it's either a) low expertise or b) you're being focus fired. But like I said you can't know for sure and we can't know for sure unless you post your combat logs. The logs tell all.

I did that very thing with Mouse button 5 on my Naga (it binds nicely with Speed Shot). Knowing when to reset Ballistic Dampers and getting into the habit of doing it consistently is the single biggest improvement you can make to your survivability in warzones and every Sniper/Gunslinger that PvPs should do whatever is necessary to free up the 2 skill points necessary to spec the ability. Low hanging fruit that tasty is rare .

I've been combing through PVP logs from my Saboteur (aka Engineering) Gunslinger and it's apparent that the damage distribution is heavily tilted in favor of AoE abilities. With the 30% boost to crit damage that is inherent to the spec and the prevalence of AoE damage in warzones it seems likely that PvP BiS stats are significantly different than the PvE BiS stats. Lobbing grenades at a dummy doesn't tell us much! It stands to reason that Crit % would be much more important, and I'm wondering if it's possible to determine what the target should be for those of us with little interest in PvE? Also, as a PvP'er yourself, what is your opinion on Accuracy in warzones? Is 95%/105% enough? Or should we still shoot for 100%/110%?

This is definitely an issue and most likely a bug. To the best of my recollection, it started with the release of 2.4 and since there's a very similar mega-knockback mechanic in the Draxus fight that also ignores Entrench I suspect they're related. Entrench is supposed to grant immunity to this type of crap and yet that's clearly not the case. Assassins/Shadows are already our hard counter, this ability just makes it a ridiculous match-up and makes the TTK issues that plague PVP even worse.

Guild: Delusions of Grandeur Gunslingers: Mozza, Keiza Vanguard: Archarias Scoundrel: Zaknafian Sage: Dhatri