i'll assume that the fact they ruined half the classes in max level pvp and haven't looked at it for months counts in your assessment of broken endgame.

lol, i love that old blog post from the laid off ea employee talking about him stabbing marc jacobs in the back that also predicted how swtor is gonna fail due to the focus on voice acting.

this is probably the most ridiculous part. the pvp is shot, there are two wildly divergent tiers of classes where some have multiple viable specs and others have 1 if they're lucky. this would be ok except for the fact that with the delay since the last balance patch and no word on future changes it's like they're not even trying to balance the game anymore. i do extremely well ranked as a sorc healer in half augged wh the rest augged bm and it sucks. it requires a half cc build so that i can survive for more than 5 seconds. this sucks for them cause they can't control their character. meanwhile i have no fun getting cced/rooted/pulled at about the same absurd rate. it's awful, i literally just run from 2-5 dps each match wildly casting cc stun bubbles, purge, cc and then innervate since i have no instacast nonturreted heals worth anything. i do very well and have great heals, but it sucks, and i'm honestly just sticking around because i got some fun people i play with into an mmo coming out soon with amazing pvp and it's an easier transition. talking to the other sorc healers on my server we almost all feel the same. and based on the trouble my team had finding a healer for ranked wzs/the response i get when i complain about it i'm not alone in this perception. probably the worst part is the fact producers said the skill cap was raised for sorc healers, which is true, but ignores the fact there is one viable healing build for sorc healers and it's a hybrid, ttk is absurdly low, and the class is horrible to play atm. god forbid you were trying to gear one now. i can't imagine what it's like as sorc heals in recruit. honestly i feel like our role is to feel worthless as we get murdered and make the game enjoyable for at least some of the people there.

This is true, but I'm talking about relative amounts. 70% of wow players are from Asia IIRC. This means that SWTOR is unlikely to even reach the total amount of players WoW has total in the NA/Eu playerbase without massively increasing the number of subs there beyond what WoW has accomplished, which is clearly never gonna happen. The point is that it's silly to invest the amount they did in this game assuming it could even approach WoW without focusing on the Asian market, where WoW gets the majority of its customers and where Star Wars doesn't appeal nearly as much. They have a lot of subs from NA but that's not a counter argument or even touching on what I address. The point is SWTOR will never reach "WoW numbers" without that market, seeing as about 70% (or some other huge amount) of those 10 million counted WoW players are from Asia. The (admittedly speculative) point is that this is completely impossible from demographics alone. SWTOR would need to make up that 70% of worldwide subscribers somewhere, and based on most mmo sub stats there's probably not a NA/Eu population to support it.

You may be right about ignoring the effect of pandas on SWTOR, but that hides the real reason this game will never hit WoWs reported numbers. Most WoW subscribers play on game cards in Asia, which inflate their numbers. If there is any doubt who WoW's main playerbase is MoP answers the question. I couldn't tell you if the Asian game time playing population makes more money for Blizzard than the sub customers in NA/Europe. But looking at their actions, it is clear that Blizzard is targeting players in Asia, which makes me think that NA is not their prime market, or at least not a market they are looking to expand in. That or they figured MoP would help them in Asia while not having the same negative reaction in NA/Europe that people are reporting, though I'm not sure how well that reaction represents the playerbase as a whole. BTW I played WoW once in BC, this is just an observation that is so consistently overlooked that I feel compelled to point it out. This is also why SWTOR or most other MMOs will never reach those numbers. The game is made for NA/European customers without much of a presence in Asia. It's actually shocking to see a business ignore that demographic in their calculations about profitability with the BRIC crap that's being shoved down everyones' throats. Now I'm assuming bioware looked at WoW's numbers and used this to gauge how much they could invest in development as a result. But I figure they must have done this considering how much they spent on the game. I think this game has a lot to fear from GW2, based on my experiences talking to people. It's a game with more traditional north america content that appeals to PvPers, and with the PvE content so easily cleared at endgame, there's not much else to do here (had HM denova on farm for months now).

This is a fairly ridiculous post. Pre-50 pvp has nothing to do with 50 pvp. These classes haven't filled out in their roots, high level talents, abilities, and don't have end game gear. The fact of the matter is that TTK is so ridiculous that people die almost immediately. As a sorc healer you get focused, and there's almost no kiting or way to survive the onslaught. Our heals are garbage, take forever to cast, and completely interruptable except for a stupid HOT we use to proc. In a PVP environment what we end up doing as a result is casting bubble and purge or CCing enemies, making us damage mitigators instead of a classical healer. In fact, you can top the charts in rated wzs almost entirely from bubble and purge. Most of our healing numbers comes from our damage mitigation abilities, not our heals themselves. The problem arises because the class was changed from under us in 1.2 without the tools and mechanics being updated to complete the transformation. We are damage mitigators and cc bots now. The trouble is that our damage mitigation is on 15s cooldown with good PVP gear and that's shared among all sorcs, it's easily overwhelmed with the insane burst in this game, and we are the squishiest class once that bubble is broken. Meanwhile we don't have the tools to escape from melee dps without building for cc, and even then it's usually the other healer keeping me up until I'm unstunned. For example, the only viable heal build in PVP is actually a hybrid that uses cc from the *lightning tree* to up our damage mitigation indirectly by stunning dps since we lack the direct utilities in the *healing tree* to perform that task. And this indirect route scales poorly when resolve fills and CC becomes completely ineffective at mitigating damage. I have the feeling the developers don't understand this shift in the class mechanics and this is compounding their ignorance about the current state of sorc healing in pvp. If you haven't noticed a problem, it's because you still don't understand the class. I do very well and that's a result of playing a sorc for months and coping with the changes along with a team composition that allows me to exploit my utility. The problem is that it's not fun, there's only room for one sorc per team to perform this role since we share a cooldown on bubble and CC builds resolve, and we have an incomplete toolset as damage mitigators.

it's only fair, i think i saw in the patch notes for 1.2 that the only people enjoying the game at all should be dps.

running tank + healer to survive isn't even viable against certain classes with how much damage they put out. against a top geared smash jugg you'll take around 3k damage guarded from the smash. now that's not much, but if the tank is also in the radius of smash (as is usually the case for a tank that's guarding you and peeling) he'll take 100% of the damage to him and 50% of the damage from you. 2x smash juggs coordinating means youll take 6k and that tank is dead or will be soon, as will anyone else helping him peel. and smash is on something like a 12s cooldown, so when you're back from respawn it'll happen again. the worst part is going tank hybrid lowers smash damage a negligible amount, so these tank dps hybrids are wrecking with aoe smashes of death (much like the other tank hybrids sacrifice a negligible amount of dps for greatly increased survivability). when people say you need tank + heal to survive in pvp and you need a better one if you're dying they have no idea what they're talking about. the current mechanics are completely overwhelmed by the burst damage and abilities some of these classes are capable of. we're essentially playing melee dps online. range management is mainly gap closers and roots for the mdps to kill you faster and the burst dps or heals of fragile classes are completely overwhelmed by melee dps with much better defensive capabilities. as a healer - and particularly a sorc - your goal is to run around completely neutralized except for cc, bubbles and a piddly hot while a group of dps try and murder you, making pvp enjoyable for at least some of the people there.

that's really sad, you're right. i figured it must be on the gcd for other classes cause this was a *top* ranked pvp team. instead i'm just getting smash jugged/leap/ravaged to death roflmao.

i wonder how much the gear broke the game. i play in unranked and im like a god in augmented bm + 3 wh, no one can touch me and my bubble eats an absurd number of hits. i play in ranked and i eat 6k smashes over and over and over, which does 150% damage on the tank guarding me as well. i just finished a match where the tank had 200k+ protection and i had 485k healing on novaire where we ate smashes like candy. it's not just our class mechanics being screwed, with the scaling to dmg with expertise and the top end gear min/maxed it's like a completely different game (that's not fun to play in any form as this squishy a class). these people think we're godly cause they don't have the gear/are legitimately bad. really against geared players of equal skill we are utterly destroyed. as someone who played elemental shaman in early bc before going resto out of frustration, i'm ashamed to say this is far worse. maras and jugs don't even attempt to interrupt me, wasting a gcd on an interrupt lowers damage so much that it's more efficient to hit me.

except that a lot of people here are extremely skilled sorcs, some with bis everything, and you just ignore them and act like you know more when you have 2 dps mains. and talking to geared/skilled sorcs in game, the advice is overwhelmingly to reroll op healer, then make fun of the metrics that resulted in that class balance for pvp. the most telling part is you think sorc healers want to be invulnerable going back to 1.2. good juggs and maras could utterly dismantle a sorc healer before 1.2. interrupts negate all our big heals and it could completely shut us down. now i can't even tell the good smash juggs and maras from the facerolling dps. again, i regularly top the rwzs i play in as hybrid spec with 3/14 wh and the rest augmented bm, and in addition to my healing numbers the cc is mitigating crazy dmg. the main problem is that these heal numbers are mainly marginal heals on dps that aren't being focused. the dps is still steamrolled one by one while i run like a madman attempting to slow this process with cc and bubble, then I die in 6 seconds. after which the team tends to follow. meanwhile op healers are able to stay alive and keep the team up to win the game. that's what matters, not dumb healing numbers that you think you can interpret having never mained a healer or understanding what's important to our class, which is keeping people alive at objectives. if the game was get 600k heals and you win that'd be different. but it's not, it's keeping people alive to capture objectives, not the team deathmatch you and the mindless dps facerollers think makes up ranked pvp (apologizes to skilled dps). beyond all this, it sucks. it sucks to play and isn't fun. it's essentially smear the healer while i get guarded/crosshealed. then if i drop, they move on, rolling up the entire group. this is how ranked pvp works. and that's why op healers are so great - they stay alive so long the dps roll up an entire group while the op healing is still kiting the opposing dps around. my bis everything pt friend has 50s of every class but mara. he said he pities sorcs because he utterly dismantles them so quickly. he is often unable to kill a good op healer. as someone with a 50 pt, i have to agree.

the saddest part about this is that most career healers are thinking the same thing (healing since anarchy online, includes WOW and warhammer). i tried leveling an op, i'm like level 25, i'm just going to go play something else. this is gonna kill raid content. i've healed to gear up so many new people in raid content that i'm sure the campaign drops will suffer. part of that is how bad the healers are in this game, which is why a lot of them don't fully understand the class mechanics at endgame and extrapolate from pug wzs to ranked or between healing classes. i can count on one finger the number of healers who cleanse the tank in hm denova on toth and zorn/minesweeper that i've teamed with - despite me telling them to do it and reminding them through the fight - and we've been 4/4 hm denova since immediately after they fixed the kephess bug (where the circle instakilled). we've been 3/4 since week 1 or 2 after release i believe. it's really hilarious how bad the pvp balance is, the damage in pvp is so much higher than in end game raids that with trauma and expertise scaling i can only laugh at how healing works.

the only class that can facetank 6 dps is a marauder for several seconds, but that's ok. however, more defensive cc or non-turreted/interruptable heals for sorc are huge gamebreaking mechanics cause we'll live for 9 seconds against one person.

what is with you people putting words in my mouth. the mechanics are broken. lower the heals and change the playstyle to something viable in ranked that's fun. i don't get you people, i argue something that's common knowledge among healers (ops > merc > sorc unless you have no sorc and that sorc is cc hybrid), that the sorc mechanics are broken against certain combinations of skills that several classes end up having, and you assume what i meant was i want those crazy heals + more + more + face tanking + god mode + surviving forever + an i win button. i say it sucks to play, and you assume i'm complaining about dying and i should live forever? what i really dont get though are the facetank comments. with the defensive cc we have classes that can literally become invulnerable for several seconds and facetank (mara). whereas when i say 2 people focus me and i drop instantly, that's suddenly unreasonable? like i want the half the utility running away as the dps charging into a group of people and that's facetanking when i do it, but legitmate skill when they do? i want battles for range to determine whether i die and not see two sabers execute me from two outplayed mdps classes. and i would really, really like if ranked wzs werent me running around playing smear the healer while i bubble bot to cc all of you. i imagine you'd want the same thing, as the constant cc every class gets is annoying for you as well, and i know my bubbles anger you (god knows it infuriates me).

i top rated wzs. l2read. i regularly outheal full wh chars. the fact is it sucks to play. that there's no room on a rated team for more than 1 sorc, as the others get farmed and murdered. this isn't even a question and i'm shocked anyone would argue it. every healer ive spoken to with both classes completely agrees. bubble requires one sorc. others are a liability. a merc or op keeps me alive. i run around ccing everyone as a bubblebot while they play smear the healer. it sucks. this has nothing to do with skill. it sucks bad and isn't rewarding. mobile vs interruptable heals with a vanish isnt a playstyle, its basic game mechanics. there's no changing this. there's no changing the fact that i can win a battle for range, escape, and then watch 2 light sabers fly at me and murder me in what should be the moment i outplayed them. so range battles shouldn't dictate if a healer wins? if i have better positioning i should still die everytime? also, i like the 20% dmg reduction argument you brought up, as if heals dont scale worse than dmg and classes dont have a 20% heal debuff.

you still have to heal the tank because that redirects damage. usually then one goes on the tank, who does no damage and gets destroyed, and you get 5 other seconds to live. no, i want fun mechanics that don't involve the tank and healer being completely farmed. you're acting surprised like there isn't a reason most people only bring one sorc - stun bubbles! stun bubble bot is a very fun spec. i want mobile heals that can't all be interrupted and a defensive ability to get away. aka op healing. so what you've described with cross healing is that i get healed by an op while a tank keeps me up and we run around playing smear the healer until enough people drop that i can freecast. you're right, this works very well, but not with another sorc healer, who will get smashed too quick. but those sound like excellent team dynamics. compelling and strategic pvp.

no, i want mechanics that make it not suck to play. read harder. it's essentially smear the healer and it sucks so hard. face tank isn't what i call cc stun bubbles + force shackles + jolt. it's the fact that when i do escape the range, even when they're rooted and outplayed, they can execute me from a distance. do you think i top wzs as hybrid facetanking? like it matters, talk to good sorc healers with op alts and they'll tell you what to roll. turreting interruptable heals that take forever to cast on a squishy class - sounds great. really.

playing smear the healer sucks, it's boring and stupid. it's not even the team aspect, it's you getting focused by 3/4 people while you run to distract them for 10 seconds. leap - ravage - ranged execute - done. i love seeing two sabers fly at me knowing that while i managed the range correctly and escaped, i'm still gonna die because mdps in this game can murder me at any distance. also, to all you ops saying you're unkillable, i hope they destroy your class so you really understand what's going on. i've talked to enough wh geared sorcs that have op alts - their advice was to stop the sorc on 3/14 wh (including mh and soon offhand) and just level the operative. gear up, rofl. we have light armor and all 3 of our big heals are interruptable and take 1.5-2.5 seconds or are channeled. many classes can do the same or more damage as our main heal in the same amount of time, or have enough interrupts and cc or healing debuffs to cover all of them. the only viable healing build for sorc is innervate + cc stun bubbles. burst is so stupidly high in this game that the damage mitigated by cc is much better than any class can heal. i bet 20 dollars they nerf that before mara. btw, i regularly top wzs for healing, including rated, with 3/14 wh and the rest augmented bm. it's stupid and not fun to play a game where the strategy is one healer keeps me up while i run around, cc, and pray to freecast while our dps sees if they can kill the enemy dps before they kill me.

i honestly think of pvp in star wars as smear the healz. why would anyone argue that healers should be constantly running away to survive for 9 seconds against one person instead of 6? how is this fun and not frustrating and stupid to play?

this ignores all the mechanics of each class, group pvp strategies, and playing a healer. it assumes A is attacking B and healer C is allowed to freecast on B, which is like a badge of a trash player in a trash group. when does a healer have no one on them? how often does a healer only have one person on them? how often should a skilled dps player go after the dps being healed and not the healer themselves? against a good player who targets me, if i'm moving as a sorc healer all i can cast is my terrible resurgence hot that is entirely used to proc and bubble, and bubble doesn't scale with stats. and all my other heals require me to sit there and take more damage than i can heal with the possibility of being interrupted. also, while the 1000 HPS number compared to 1000 DPS is almost completely made up on this basis alone, it's also true that the dps of one person chasing me is far higher than my heals, let alone two people. it ignores that when dps is on you, running is the best option, cause they do so much more damage and can shut you down with interrupts let alone cc. beyond even this trauma debuff makes healing crap in pvp and expertise scaling is far worse for healing. so if we assume that a trash dps player is attacking another dps player and not the guy healing him, and the healer is allowed to freecast, and that completely made up healing numbers match dps numbers, and ignore expertise scaling and the fact some classes get 20% healing reduction, heals scale better than dps. literally every single assumption there is completely wrong and/or the sign of trash dps.

my concealment operative friend (all wh bis) rerolled a mara and was amazed. he would sit there and post in gchat all the cc and abilities they have, and it was so long he had to break it into two messages. in full campaign gear he was critting 3.5k in warzones on the mara, compare this to sorc or operative dps. atm we have melee dps - in some case multiple classes - that: perform stealth/burst/stunning better than concealment operatives, the rogue class (mara) do more burst than glass cannon classes, with the exception of sniper do more overall dps than most other classes, including glass cannons have better defensive cds than most tanks, including abilities that make them literally invulnerable or up armor by an absurd degree can heal themselves while most healers are too stunlocked to heal them (lol?) have better cc, kiting, and range management than ranged dps have insanely powerful ranged execute abilities can debuff heals absolutely murder most ranged dps except for sniper. my merc dps friends are also pissed. apologizes to the melee operatives, who are gimped enough they're missing out on being part of an unstoppable melee dps zerg. all my friends and i with gimp ranged classes or the dps operative have rerolled pt, mara, and assassin and it's absurd how much better these classes are. it's not even arguable, it's people dying over and over while i run around like a maniac. and it's not one or two forgotten classes - about half of them are completely worthless compared to the alternatives available and this is obvious after a cursory glance at the mechanics. i've healed since anarchy online, played heals in wow and warhammer and i've never found a game where healing is this stupidly unenjoyable. if the game is really slaughter the healer while he runs to survive for 3 more seconds, that may seem like a "strategic" way to do pvp, but it sucks and is obnoxious and isn't even internally consistent with how powerful op healers are. i get the feeling they nerfed healing for ops being cleared too quickly and ruined sorcs in pvp. which is funny, considering the real problems with ops was the utility of the ring and the double proc on innervate. the double proc bug wasn't even addressed till 1.3 and ring is untouched, despite being near worthless in everything but voidstar and absurd ezmode in ops. i can mindlessly heal hm denova (lol cleanse being the secret) - all the change did is ruin pvp.

your numbers are garbage because really there are 4 people on us at once in a giant cc fest where we just eat tons of damage and you're looking entirely at damage and healing numbers while ignoring range/cc/push pull/interrupts on those numbers. you completely ignore secondary abilities. what about push pull away from the tank or into the dps? or into the fire? what about interrupt? or 20% heal reduction? where does that come in your calculations? if i have 3 non-instacast heals that do anything meaningful and there is 1 cc and 2 interrupts between 2 dps, where does that leave a sorc? our only instacast heal is garbage used to proc. where do heal per second calculations come in when you ignore secondary abilities that can completely shut us down and the fact we can't cast while moving? also garbage considering a 2.2 second heal does 3k healing and is begging for an interrupt. that's the point here. they can negate it when you consider they can't outheal the dps in any way, shape, or form without getting interrupted each time, or even if they let you get that heal off. god forbid there's 2 or 3 dps. and you're ignoring saber throw. so with two, it takes about 3 seconds (zealous - merciless - any ability that does 1k-2k+ dmg depending on rng). i hope that in ranked warzones the dps know this. no it doesn't. the sorc bubble with the right talent grants damage mitigation to every player though an aoe stun that can hit multiple enemies. each aoe stun can mitigate damage for a group of dps around them when activated that also helps other players nearby. it can be clicked to activate. since you can kill a sorc in 3 seconds with two dps, its mitigating tens of thousands of points of damage when triggered correctly near enemies if a guard is not present and around 10k if it is. it can be placed on each player every 20 seconds and also absorbs damage beyond just mitigating damage through cc. this doesn't include the benefit it has for objectives. it is by far a better heal build than 31 in consumption, and you have no idea what you're talking about. i can assure you the tanks i run with stay up while i run back from respawn. they also railshot for crazy amounts, which reduces damage taken by dropping dps like flies far quicker than tank gear. does it matter anyways when the healers always die before the tanks?

i agree. the sad part is most people didn't see the synergy between sorc and other heal classes because of it. you shouldn't fear 2 sorc healers - fear a sorc + merc (pre 1.2, now just laugh at the bored bubblebot). these people see high numbers in wzs and don't realize that's from spamming bubble, ring and purge. it didn't help us win or do anything significant cause when i was respawning i couldnt heal, we lost half our team, and the objective fell. it's like the trash player mentality of bigger numbers took over and is being used to justify everything. so my ring gets me huge numbers - it still didn't keep the tank up, it just healed marginally damaged dps characters who are gonna die for sure now that the tank and i are dead. the trash player mentality of bigger numbers = better player took over and i think that's influencing how they balance the game. if our burst and damage output for being the squishiest class wasn't terrible compared to every melee class but operative, i'd say reroll dps. how does the glass cannon have the lowest burst in the game besides possibly mercs? how does melee dps with invulnerability and leap have better kiting and defensive tools? i don't even understand how this makes sense to anyone.

my favorite is when i break cc with full resolve and i get rooted by a class that can do that in the middle of my forcespeed. or when i get pulled right back by another player. or how about when everything goes right, you get away, and then some ranged execute ability a melee class has for some reason kills you at 25%. lol, i bet they don't even realize that you say dark heal cause casting dark infusion is begging for death. 2.2 seconds with 10% alacrity for 3kish non-crit, roflmao. that's a little more than half a good mara hit. in pve i cast it for 4k in full campaign everything but belt/bracers (though i have one resolve 25), bis everything mods, 941 power, and it still sucks. that's our "big heal." half the damage of one hit from one dps over 2.2 seconds that begs to be interrupted. the worst part is that i could get shut down pre 1.2. if the people knew what they were doing i was done. some nerf was necessary - or at least the bug fix for the double proc - but we weren't unkillable unless the dps ignored everything but big numbers flying across the screen. i don't even get the argument. if my cc heal hybrid mitigates more damage than my heal build due to stun something is hilariously wrong with a game relying on the holy trinity, even with "unique" pvp roles.

which doesn't change the fact you asked a meaningless question with no real answer to set up a strawman like "oh he thinks he should survive against 1 million dps players hitting 3 to heal." if i had 2 ccs available and forcespeed, i should always beat 2 dps in the sense i can run back to my group. if i have none available, i should die. if they have interrupts available, that should change it. what kind of response do you even want? "3.419 dps?" that's the best part. like they don't even notice the absurd los or force speed or cc or crazy nonsense we have to do to even survive against 1. wonder how many ops are gonna have healers if this keeps up?