No just no. That's a newbie trap way of presenting them—they are easier to kill (so not rugged in any sense that matters) and while they can mount a huge range of weapons, only a handful of them are actually worth using. Fixing some of the underpowered weapons (RFL come to mind) would go some ways towards making strikes better, because at least they'd have the impressive range of weapon capabilities you talk about (but in a game where you can't just switch weapons on the fly, it's not so big an advantage). Median would suggest half the ships are better and the other half worse. A rough comparison to ground PvP right now would be to say the Operatives are the median there. Strike fighters aren't the median—as a class, they're at the bottom. As individual ships, all of them are below the median. T1 and T3 GS, T1 and T2 scout, T1 and T2 bomber—those are the ships above the median, the other six ships (including all three strikes) are below the median. Gunships will always draw complaints, even if they become completely unjustified. They share the "Surprise! You're dead!" factor with snipers in FPS games and those always draw complaints as well. Even in games that go out of their way to offer counterplay. As for T2 scouts, a lot of it stems from the fact they seem to be a total developper's pet. It's why they have more competitive, "meta", builds than any other ship: they've been (intentionally or otherwise) minmaxed to the hilt. Even the mighty T1 GS has components that could be swapped in which would clearly improve it, while that isn't clearly the case for the T2 scout. Scouts are generically better than strikes, but the T2 scout is basically what we'd design if we wanted the strongest possible scout.

Presumably, the same people who thought endless power creep, huge mobility for everyone and dotspread would all be good for the game. Also the same people who think that Mando/Merc is balanced. Or who took what, three balance patches of nerfs, to hit Serenity/Hatred significantly enough for people to no longer rate it the best spec for ranked.

If any class is running the ball from the middle to the goal line, your team is defending wrong. What causes problems in Huttball is when you have organised, planned play, that's very hard to defend against. For instance if a Jugg grabs the ball, Force Charges to your RDPS to get in range so his Sorc pulls him, then Intercedes to his 'Sin, while the 'Sin then Phase Walks, the Jugg passes and the 'Sin Force Speeds for the goal. When you have premades doing things like that, it can come down to grabbing the ball and scoring first.

I think there are two problems with that argument. Firstly, no matter how good the worst guy in the arena is, there always will be someone who's the worst in the arena. Secondly, people don't stop improving in PvP, and the harder the opposition you face, the more you can improve. There's a point where you won't really improve doing regs, but that doesn't translate to being able to hop into ranked and dominate. To answer the OP, well obviously the title which just calls harassment "one of the reasons" is true. But to call it the major reason is simply false, I don't think most people even queue up to experience it first-hand. The main reason people avoid ranked is the same reason ranked harassment exists: it's supposed to be SRS BSNSS PvP but there isn't much to attract and retain a super-serious hardcore community (and arguably, that wouldn't be appropriate in an MMO anyway).

Hey, do you know what's really dumb? If I'm solo, I can queue for GSF and regs (or yolos, for that matter) at the same time. I can sit in both queues as a solo and take whichever pop happens first. In fact I could also queue for Group Finder, if I were so inclined, and sit in three queues as once. If I'm in a group, if we queue for GSF and then regs, we leave the GSF queue. If we queue for GSF again, we leave the regs queue. Same story for Group Finder, for those who care. If we're solo, we can queue for all the things, except regs and ranked at the same time. But if we're in a group, even just a two-person group, we can only ever queue for one thing. Someone find a meaning to this.

You think queue synching in deathmatch arenas is bad? You think having voice matters when people just use it to call out focus targets? You'll cry your eyes out when you see people queue synching in objective matches, and using voice to coordinate across a Civil War, Huttball or Novare. And with 8v8, it will be much less likely for a few randoms to disrupt a queue sync in the less populous faction. There's also the slight problem that individuals will be less able to carry, making the solo rating even less meaningful. Deathmatch is the best game mode for solo ranked, because it's the simplest and requires the least coordination. Objectives would take all the flaws of solo ranked—wildly different skill levels, no coordination, queue synching for advantage, etc etc—and magnify them.

That is SO annoying. Most annoying though is when Force Speed takes 0.5-1 second to break a root. It's a 1.5 second ability, if more than half of the ability is stolen by lag, it's a huge deal.

And that's the crux of the problem. Any suggestion that does not reverse this will fail. Strikes, being less manoeuverable and less able to force the fight on their terms, must be superior in raw power and consistently win jousts. That's not even up for debate, unless you want to consider making strikes able to keep up and turn with the scouts. Right now, if you consider strike versus scout, there is no trade-off. Even if you consider strike versus GS or versus bomber, what you give up to go strike isn't balanced out by what you gain. Strikes aren't unplayable but they're just...not good.

That's the whole point—you're "gimping" yourself yet you'd still be as well or better geared than anyone else in the match with you. I don't think we can complain of that. Having to reroll an alt just for that, on the other hand, would royally suck.

Assuming this is for PvE (PvP uses Expertise crystals anyway) most disciplines will have a bit of crit, so get both crystals in crit and then swap one of your crit mods for power. You may be slightly further from the theoretical optimum that way, but in practice the difference will be much smaller than the RNG difference between parses.

In fairness, that's a non-issue. If others were queuing with mastered ships they'd have a similar matchmaker profile and we wouldn't have issues getting pops.

It's more like a D&D campaign where any reroll or any new player must start level 1, while existing characters are whatever level they are. The later in the campaign you join, the more unfair (and the less fun) it is. MMORPG actually do tend to have a similar problem, in that their ability to attract and retain players declines over time (they also alleviate this aspect of it by making it much easier to hit level cap than in pen and paper games, of course). You could argue that one of the reasons it's of particular concern in GSF is that the usual MMO limiting factors don't apply. There's no 12x XP event for GSF, and the level cap never lifts, nor do you get any advantage through legacy or a guild req bonus or...

That's not a bot, it's just someone running a macro. It's not a bot unless it can decipher input and actually make decisions. Any effective bot is going to run in its own version of the client, not try to decipher graphical input from the screen. It's actually going to be easier to decipher the info the server sends the client than to try and make sense from the pixels the game draws on the screen. Let's not forget that what you see on the screen isn't the game, it's a graphical representation of the game (and only approximately correct, as all the stuff like one-way LoS, phantom lock breaks, etc, should make clear). The actual game is 0s and 1s. I'm not sure why anyone would code a real bot for GSF, though. If there's a bot for the main game that just accepts queue pops and iddles in the match, you'd think it would have been spotted by now. Most AFK conquest farmers seem to clear their non-contributing flag as soon as you tell people to votekick them, which makes me think they're just that: people who take the pops, do something else, and give the game 30 seconds of attention when they hear the chat notification from their name being said. Possibly they actually play on another account on another machine (or the same one) side-by-side.

The more relevant comparison is that one use of Vindicate with Resplendence gives enough Force to cast 2-3 heals, whereas even in the best case Kolto Shots doesn't give you the up front heat needed to cast any heals whatsoever, and won't cover the net heat of any heals besides Emergency Scan and Kolto Shells (which are both very cheap, like Force Armour is for the Sage).

Sorc healers needed a buff because it's still possible to kill them if more than one person focuses them. Fix that ****, BW THEY ARE THE CHOSEN CLASS.

I need an adult.

Virulence does. Although it uses the smaller radius and is a TAoE, so really not in the league of Madness.

Master Strike/Ravage shouldn't even root, it should be channeled on the move instead. As it is you need to have Unremitting as a Jug or use the new CC immunity proc Fury maras get to have a chance of fully channeling your Ravage, because approximately half your casts will be broken by your opponent breaking the root and running away, and without CC immunity the other half will be broken by knockbacks or stuns.

All the game modes favour some abilities over others. Node control favours stealthers. Using stealth and sap to delay a cap or to cap the off node is practically its own game. Huttball favours mobility and control. Leaps, pulls, rolls, and super speed are even more valuable than usual when they can be done with the ball (or to the ball carrier). Snares, roots, stuns to a lesser degree. Arenas favour defences, escapes and raw damage. Huttball is arguably the game mode that favours the most classes, really. Mercs do come up short yet again, but no more than they do in the other modes and it's just a matter of time before BW turns off the PvP queue for that class anyway. Don't forget, Snipers can play goalkeeper in the endzone.

Your post is a quality post. The problem though is still that over half all damage is going to be unmitigatible if you look at damage as a whole. A big flaw in your methodology is that besides the OH and secondary hits (like Lacerate's) you also have DoTs while autocrits tend to be big attacks that make up a disproportionate share of incoming damage. Against some specific comps it's definitely optimal to stack specific forms of mitigation but for a single set for all PvP it's a lot less attractive.

This is true. However, in SWTOR PvP, there isn't very much mitigation, and what mitigation there is tends to be specific to a given opponent comp (e.g. defence against snipers, shield is less effective versus specs like Fury and Lightning that have rotational autocrits, etc).

I usually play right-handed, when I switch the mouse to my left hand I use the right side of the standard keyboard. I don't use the numpad for gaming.

Whether mainstat or power adds more expected damage is strictly a function of how much mainstat, power, crit and surge you already have, as well as class and spec bonii. There is no "cap" where one is automatically better than the other. If you change your other stats ever so slightly then all the calculations you've done will fly out of the window. Either download a spreadsheet (or make your own, but I've seen a couple floating around) to solve all the variables for your specific use case, just ballpark things, or copy someone else's gear. But don't expect people to quote you a number that does not exist.

One GCD for a net gain of 30 Force is pretty weak. You need to cast it twice to fuel one Dark Heal, if all you're doing is turreting and spamming DH. Or you can just do your DoTspread and bubble/resurgence your team, getting 150-200k healing as a DPS with no Force issues while still getting semi-decent damage.

Don't blame Dark Heal, it's a hard cast and even if the other team are bad and leave you alone, spamming it will make you run out of Force, something that normally just doesn't happen to Sorc DPS. Meanwhile Static Barrier is instant, cheap and stronger than two Dark Heals—and you can cast it on all your team before the fight starts, which in a 4DPS game is something like 60k pre-cast healing.