Stanky DPS I want to put this out here in the hopes that someone else finds it valuable. What is stanky DPS? It's slightly tanky DPS; a DPS spec with slightly tanky gear. What is it for? Kiting in arenas. How does it work? The idea is to introduce defense into a DPS build, while maintaining the outward appearance of a traditional DPS build, in particular whatever health value a full 248/236 min-maxed DPS would have. Of the defensive stats, defense isn't that bad. Sure, yellow damage completely bypasses it, but it's effective against white damage, and can even muck up white damage auto-crits. Note: The below build uses 228 armorings; I'm e-poor and not likely to ground out 236 armorings. Additionally, it uses one Warding Mod 52A, which was a lucky drop from a crate. Ideally, it would use 9x Warding Mod 52A, which would offer increased mastery, slightly increased health, and decreased defense rating. Mastery: 7259 Power: 2671 Crit: 792 Alacrity: 1866 Accuracy: 567 HP: 129525 Armors: 8x Resistive Armoring 52, 1x Versatile Hilt Mods: 8x Warding Mod 52, 1x Warding Mod 52A (ideally 9x Warding Mod 52A) Enhancements: 6x Quick Savant Enhancement 52, 1x Initiative Enhancement 52 Augments: 8x Advanced Fortitude Augment 45, 5x Advanced Alacrity Augment 45, 1x Advanced Accuracy Augment 45 Ear: GEMINI Mk-5 Adept Device Implants: 2x GEMINI Mk-5 Adept Package Relics: GEMINI Mk-5 Relic of the Fortunate Redoubt, GEMINI Mk-5 Relic of Imperiling Serenity Shield/Focus: Focus; a case can be made for a shield, as it is the stronger pick, but the focus better sells the deceptive nature of the build. Stim: Advanced Polybiotic Proficient Stim Discipline Path: Vengeance Utilities: Warmonger, Overwhelm, Strangulate, Unstoppable, Unshackling Rage, Consuming Rage, Thrown Gauntlet, Intimidating Presence When upgrading to 236 augments, the alacrity augments would be directly replaced. I would play around with using a Advanced Polybiotic Fortitude Stim in place of the Advanced Polybiotic Proficient Stim, and then start substituting accuracy augments for fortitude augments, with a goal of at least 110% accuracy. Personally, I might even stack up to 9x accuracy augments, but I can see a case that for any point past 110% accuracy you use crit rating augments instead. I might also swap out the Versatile Hilt 52 for a Resistive Hilt 52, all with the aim of hitting the target health value. The high defense chance combined with the relics basically serves as an additional DCD. The tank armorings buff Saber Ward. You can further buff Saber Reflect through utilities. The build hits the Tier 2 alacrity threshold, and aims to maximize the use of roots, CCs, and the use of Force Charge for anti-CC and mitigation procs.

I think they announced the changes to help distract from the APAC issue.

So, instead of giving 30% DR while stunned to guards/jugs, they're going to take it away from PTs and sins.

Well, it's going to give 15s of AOE DR instead of the spec's 6s of AOE DR. I don't consider it a silver lining that they're normalizing PTs and Sins to be just as garbage. Well, sins should still be alright, between their superior anti-yellow defenses and stealthing out to h2f. DPS PTs are boned, and now you won't even get the occasion to enjoy not being focused first due to having a PT on your team. Seems they want more tank specs in ranked. I'm assuming they're currently targeting some sort of matchmaking metric, rather than anything resembling actual gameplay or the gameplay experience. My take away is that players need to QQ in the exact opposite of what they want. If you don't like skanks, then you need to QQ eternally about the DPS spec alternatives to skank. Because for all the QQ generated about skanks, they just buffed them, while further depressing the DPS specs.

You aren't entitled to any refund. You only ever paid for access, and they're still offering access. They reserve the right to terminate access at any time, and they have no responsibility to ensure you have an adequate connection to their servers. Out of curiosity, how much of that ~22,000 was spent on RNG service upgrades (ie cartel packs)?

EA knows that. That's why they'll do it all again with another studio. You would need to swear off EA, and even then you're not going to completely avoid this kind of behavior.

But is it really? This decision has me thinking it wasn't even that prior to the move, let alone after the move given the loss of APAC, Hawaiian, Alaskan and (entitled) west coast players.

This was the reason given as to why the personal starships would never be suitable as strongholds. More specifically, their stated concern was in regards to how many of the available hooks are already used for the cutscenes, rather than any concern regarding how any decorations would impact the cutscenes. Which is to say, even if they overlooked the cutscene/decoration issue, they could only give you relatively few hooks. Probably too few to justify the development effort, as there would be too few to drive decoration sales.

The one night I saw him in ranked he didn't kite. Didn't get targeted first, either. Lucky guy. Took the time to talk **** to me, so I don't know how helpful he'll be. Admittedly, the build I was using was purely for kiting, and I didn't bother to kite at all, so I can see why it confused him.

Based on some of the performance I've seen the last few days, I'm inclined to agree. But, they are moving to "new" servers soon enough, so that may only be a temporary issue. It's one of the dirty secrets of social media. The level of influence exerted by corporations and governments is astounding. And 99% of it is done under the radar. Though a company such as EA very likely outsources the bulk of the work to a third party firm. There's an entire industry out there specializing in faux social media interactions.

Sounds like the old standard east coast connection to Harbinger.

That's why I would invariably move back to Harbinger every time I dabbled with an east coast server, and before that played on an unofficial APAC server. Not any longer. I know JC and SL don't compare, so I took a look at TEH and it at least beat Harbinger for fleet pop, at 10PM PST. We'll see what happens once they transfer to new servers in ~10 days. As others have pointed out on this forum, US east is the stronger spot when they eventually consolidate to a single server for all regions. Whoa, another blast from the past.

Can't blame them, seeing as developers hold equally **** opinions of players. Just look at this thread. As for the actually dangerous players in WoW (or any MMO, including this one), I imagine that on good days, they help swell the ranks of the devoted sycophants. On good days, I can see them posting threads such as this one. It's only on bad days that they actively try to get individual developers fired, or threaten employee's children, or what have you. Also, you missed an item that should be on your list. 5) Stop playing video games. The industry is toxic, and does little but line the pockets of its own executives. At the very least, encourage your own children to pursue other, healthier hobbies, especially with the direction microtransactions are heading.

I strongly disagree, but we're free to do so. What makes no sense is a healer who can survive a DPS. That literally breaks the trinity. Single healer should die to single DPS pretty quickly, without some sort of team support. Add in cross-heals and the current dynamic is laughable. Even a guard brings it into joke territory, though all I ever hear on these forums is to nerf guard. Guard is only as good as the heals supporting it; the problem is with healing, and always has been.

As far as I know, there's only two sources of trauma in the game; mara/sent (possibly spec dependent, idk) and guard/jugg (tank spec dependent). Of course, that just reinforces how easy healers have it in this game. Great utility, good to great DCDs, healing potential significantly higher than DPS potential, etc. I would prefer if they were balancing healers based on survival rather than output. I can live with high output healers in-game, provided they die promptly to one DPS when not supported. Alternatively, if the healing community would prefer its survival, then nerf the output to the point where one healer doesn't even cancel out one DPS, and require a combination of healing plus the target's own DCDs to cancel out one DPS.

Those changes are lulz worthy. Guess the dev team is simply too busy with the mergers to do more than mail it in on these utility changes.

Harb west coasters were more than happy to talk **** at others who may have been playing with worser pings. As an east coast player who stuck it out on harb, It's hilarious seeing their complaints on here. That said, I have sympathy for APAC players, and those who spent CC to needlessly transfer, as I did (only 540 CC).

This is the only action in all of this which has me scratching my head.

The state of rollerball in queshball is worse than ever. It wasn't this bad when queshball released. I've seen players use it in both huttball maps to scale vertical facings. The OP is also probably thinking of players who escape the spawn before the match starts, which happens in queshball and hypergate. An easy fix for that is to finish enclosing the spawn points on those maps. I'm not sure what you're referring to here. The nerf to leap in all maps was quite effective. There are still bits of what you consider the "end zone platform" that can be leapt to, but that was intentional. There are also some odd interactions between leap and other positional effects, including knockbacks and pulls, which can result in a leap into otherwise invalid space, but that's such a rare event as to be a non-issue. Sorcerer pull is far more egregious.

What potential are you guys talking about? What is there that they haven't already tried? For example, why would you expect EA to fund development of an entirely new engine for this game, when they can do the same with a different game and add box sales in the process? If the license runs another five years, expect 2-3 years of continued development at the current pace, followed by 2-3 years of effective maintenance mode, which may still include new "content" in the form of new Cartel packs.

That's not 50.4 million gamers; if it was, this game would be more successful than WoW. That's 50.4 million characters which did not progress their class story enough to get the ship (I wonder how boosted characters factor into this). It's probably more representative of massive amounts of unplayed alts. No, probably not.

It's still available from world bosses, which means pieces of it still pop up on the GTN. I just recently finished my third set of it.

I would certainly expect that if EA expects to maintain the license past 2023 (or whatever the date is). Given the time involved in developing an MMO, and the time required to recoup the investment, they can't possibly entertain the idea of starting a new MMO from scratch and expect it to release in time to recoup their investment in the event Disney does not renew the license agreement.

I've tried testing this theory in regards to GCD and alacrity, but without tracking APM I can only say it seems like it makes no real difference. I play rage for big hits anyway, and alacrity doesn't really fit into that. I just want that issue resolved where Furious Strike whiffs with no flytext displayed. Seems alot of players, including some (past) devs, never got over the butthurt of early smash.

It's 4 seconds, probably due to the channel. They changed it years back. It was originally 3 seconds, with a set bonus to increase it to 4. They increased it to 4 seconds base around the same time they introduced the new set bonuses. I still kick myself periodically for tossing some of those early set bonus armorings when I came back to play. Would be nice to stack it to 5s, or to get a 10% damage buff on leap.