My guess is Bioware's internal metrics tell them there are (or, with the reputation system, will be) way too many $$$ going into the economy than there are being removed and want to head this off. Problem is, repair bills aren't the way to do it. The group you hurt here is people with jobs and families who can't be subsidizing their weekend raiding by grinding mindless dailies during the week because they lack the time. In other words, paying subscribers who will cease paying if the choices you give them are a) play 10 more hours per week than you wanted to b) don't play the endgame Another casualty of this cost increase is the group finder. If they want to reduce inflation, a better way to do that is to return the repair costs and whack the dollar rewards given by pvp matches and dailies and whack those HARD. Reputation and daily comms are the new rewards.

Judging by this post (and the other one about government welfare) I don't think you know what "entitlement" is. People not wanting to put real money into a thing they don't enjoy does not constitute "entitlement."

You have some work cut out. But you're in luck. Bubblestunner is the single most-effective undergeared class you can take into a wz. First thing you should do is respec bubblestun. Something like this http://www.torhead.com/skill-calc#201rMrRMdMZfcbMzRr.2 Can put the last point into either innervate or polarity shift (now makes you uninterruptible during the cooldown). Or, if you don't want to DPS at all, maybe this http://www.torhead.com/skill-calc#201rMrRrdMzZfcbr0Mb.2 Your new role is to have bubble up on every ally possible at all times. Basically, when you're not bubbling, ccing, buying space for yourself or healing, you're using lightning strike to build up force regen (instead of having to use consumption) and try to proc chain lightnings (what I do, anyway). And you won't necessarily be healing that much because the whole enemy team's stunned for the whole damned warzone and won't be attacking your allies that much as they get beat on helplessly. War hero is bought with warzone comms (remember those?). There are no more merc comms in a practical sense or champ/bm bags. There are some dailies you'll need to pick up at the pvp terminal. While grinding out war hero (which doesn't take that long), you'll need to get something called "tier 6 aug kits." These can be crafted or bought on GTN. They add an augment slot to a piece of gear. You might not want to aug the default gear because the set bonus in war hero and up is tied to armoring (ie you can move the mods to any gear you want and keep the bonus). don't throw away the war hero shell, though. Once you have an aug kit, you want to get a purple resolve aug 22 (synthweavers make this) and put that in an augged piece of gear. Although...now that I think about it, bubblestunner doesn't really need extra bonus damage. An unconventional, but possibly effective approach might be to use END augs, though I've never tried it. Once that's done, you'll be about done with war hero gear. If you have enough comms for elite war hero, buy a mainhand or a focus. If not, time to optimize the war hero. Look for mods that are lettered (such and such 26A) or have an overabundance of crit (you shouldn't have more than 210ish total) and change them out for mods that have a lot of power. Same with enhancements. Trade out crit and alacrity for power and surge when necessary. Ultimately you will want to do the same thing for elite war hero (which will take an assload of time). You can trade warzone comms for ranked warzone comms to make the process faster. But the difference between augged WH and augged EWH isn't that much, especially for a bubble stunner, so don't sweat this last step.

His PT rotation is wrong, but the general idea isn't. The sorc beats the PT by not staying in range of those skills. Executed right, PT should get, at max, 3 10m globals and one will probably be a stun. Also, that's only 15k damage if everything crits. Likely for railshot. Unlikely for both bombs (will happen 1 in 6 times). Very unlikely for RS AND both bombs. Once outside 10m, if grapple's spent, the PT has literally nothing to fall back on (without PPA, railshot is on a long-ish cooldown for a money skill...same with the 30m dart...rapid shots does nothing...the dot, if it even procs, is wiped out by UP...DFA isn't gonna hit a sorc more than one tick...that 30m low-damage cannon that I don't even bind takes up a ****load of energy...unload tickles and is another long-ish cooldown damager).

Best part is all those dev diaries of guys who play snipers (I think all 3 pvp dudes who have been profiled play them). What's the conventional answer to "how do you kill a sniper?" Send a concealment op after them. My (cough) not based on anything (cough) prediction is snipers will get a passive extra 30 levels of stealth detection because, clearly we can't have snipers at a disadvantage vs one rare, difficult to use class like dps operative.

You guys are flaming him, but he's right (if for the wrong reasons). I've seen people ********** (edit coiclejoik) into cleaves and wipe. I've seen pvp hybrid tanks turn a mob in random directions and screw up dps who were trying for mauls and backstabs (not that ops and sins are good choices for DPS, but they do exist). There's a purpose to circling human players. There is none in hmops so take your adderall that day and chill out.

He's mocking the developers' notion of pvp balance, not your post. Implication being that one of them will see that several people with sorcs have noted (correctly) that this is a winnable duel for them and therefore, that's something the devs would think must be remedied immediately. I'd post a future state example of this phenomenon in action, but that would be inviting a ban.

If you're hybrid or madness, this is easy (assuming both bombs and a railshot don't go off before you notice him). You need stunbreak, force speed and one of electrocute, overload or whirlwind available (or bubble stun, if you're a hybrid). Force slow and, if you have it, creeping terror help. Key is to make it to 11 meters before taking too much damage and stay there or farther and bleed him with dots and burst him with instants. at 11m, he tickles. He's only got one gap closer, grapple, which is on a long-ish cooldown. Force speed is to get out of that, after you stunbreak his stun (you'll be whitebarred). Once you're back to 11, keep gaining ground, keep bleeding him, keep using instants (strafecast all of this)...if you ever get around 20m, you can use force lightning as well, long as you never drop back to 10m.

Deathfield only eats both charges if it hits 2 targets. Against a single target boss, you want to use recklessness on a deathfield and a force lightning. You never want to use recklessness on crushing darkness in PvE because it won't apply to fully half CD's damage (the dot does not benefit). Edit: in the case of multiple targets eating both deathfield charges, it depends whether or not that's what you want. In some cases (specifically Jarg and Sorno, who you're probably double dotting), that's exactly what you want to do as much damage as possible. Edit #2: you're right that it's "safer" to use force lightning then deathfield, but understand, if you're saving deathfields to line them up with something instead of using them immediately, you're likely going to lose DPS unless there's some strange boss mechanic, such as the drouks being too close together. Over a long enough fight, that'll add up.

Disregard

Software development on this scale isn't easy, particularly when a large chunk of staff was laid off, would be what the delay was.

1) Not sure. See answer to #5 2) Depends. If you ask me, PvP endgame has gotten less engaging with time. The end-game ops stuff has much more variety than it did. 3) Community is waaaaaaaaaaaaaaaay more stable now. The megaservers fixed basically every population-related problem the game had. Warzones pop fast. If you're one short for ops finding an qualified capable extra takes very little time and has a decent success rate. GTN has pretty much whatever you're looking for or a buyer for whatever you're trying to sell. 4) Not that I can tell. 5) Bioware left almost all bugs sit until about December. Since then, without saying anything, they seem to have been slowly, steadily stealth fixing a lot of little annoying things and not putting anything about it in the patch notes. Ability delay -might- be one of those. I used to just deal with it, but now that you bring it up, I think it's been a few weeks since I've been burned by it. 6) The only free to play focus I've seen, in a practical sense, is it looks like all future gear looks are gonna come through the cartel market. There is one new companion now, who requires a long series of new quests to attain. 7) I doubt companions will come through the cartel market, but all story expansions that are not ops seem to be paid dlc.

No-no or not, if someone's producing numbers in the 1850s to 1900s with a sorc, that's what they're doing.

I don't have a recent parse since I've been DPSing with a Vanguard for some time now, but, assuming you aren't a) using a dread guard relic of boundless ages (dread guard, not black hole...the stats are totally different) on cooldown, b) an exotech resolve stim, c) an adrenal on cooldown, d) there's no armor debuff on the target (sorcerors need another class to put such a debuff for them) d) nobody's is in an ops frame with you bloodthirsting your numbers aren't terribly light of what I'd expect them to be with a sorceror of any spec on an ops dummy with that gear distribution. I seem to remember topping out at roughly 1550 over 5 or so minutes in lightning spec at about your gear level (maybe a few more dread guard armorings) if I did not use any of those things to stat pad.

Whoah, when did I say all that? You're reading way too much into me understanding that crafters (I am not one) might be a little sore about someone buying their item, learning the schem and then undercutting them on the market. I didn't suggest actually -doing- anything about it, either on the part of the crafters or on the part of Bioware. I'm for whatever creates a robust market because working the economy is as viable a way to play the game as raiding/pvp/whatever.

This doesn't make much sense. You're saying that because you don't like the price depreciation caused by schem stealing (which is a fair point), you'll respond by....price gouging your friends at less total profit instead of making more total profit on sales to strangers. Seems like you, your friends and the GTN all lose your way. Cutting off your nose to spite your own face.

What?

I'm not a crafter and already have mostly optimized ewh, but think this is an excellent idea. Maybe give it schems for this stuff to armormechs and synths or something, instead of letting CTs and artificers make all the money.

Gear scaling with abilities is less of a problem and almost nobody takes the time to form two groups of 4 and try to get them in the same warzone. Warzones are more competitive in the lowbies due to those two factors. The drawback is, as you said, there are more people who don't know what the Hell they're doing, but they get distributed pretty evenly so competition isn't hurt by it.

In the grand scheme of things, in a development environment with finite resources, this issue should go right at the very bottom of the list of all potential issues Bioware could be working on. I mean, the Foundry's second boss has been bugged for a year, which isn't a huge issue, but it's a significantly larger issue than the idea that there's a guy named Darth Cockula, who I'll probably never encounter anyway, doing space missions once a week.

Powertech is easy to counter. If he's attacking a target other than you (which means thermal detonator is cooling down and rail shot is likely two globals from being able to proc again), attack him. Without heals, he dies every time, no matter what DPS you are. Or just engage him with an any spec sniper at any time, or any ranged class from >10m while grapple is off cooldown. Grapple has a long-ish cooldown, so it's frequently unavailable. If he's on you first from in close, your situational awareness is bad and you better hope you're an annimara or a class that can cleanse, stealth out and re-engage.

Short version: "Crafters shouldn't be able to function because I won't feel like a unique and pretty snowflake if they do." If the idea that someone can buy a particular mod from a crafter--one that's available in one piece of equipment for instance, instead of running the same damned op for 72 weeks to get all 9 they need is something that bothers you, it's time to do some internal re-evaluation. If you can't enjoy an MMO because someone else might have something you have, that's something you need to sort out for yourself. Not something the devs need to sort out for you. Myself, I'm glad I can trade those stabs and shorten the process instead of running the same damned op, praying to win a roll on the same damned belt over and over again for more than a year. I don't really craft either, but ffs, leave the crafters alone. They've got a good thing going right now (at least, CTs and artificers). Their ability to enjoy and influence an economy does not have a negative impact your ability to complete and enjoy raids. At all.

What platform boss. Savrak? Since when can you cleanse his dots? Did they nerf that too?

He's probably assuming you use the mouse, and just the mouse, to move, which would make you stationary while using any ability. I'm in the exact same boat you are (click heals, bind dps) and, if you're anything like me, you use the mouse to move sometimes and qweasd to move other times on your healer.

Click the heals (have a bar going parallel to the ops frame so I barely lose time), bind all non-heals on all characters. Just works better for me that way. I do bind the heals too, but only really use the bindings in pvp while being attacked, not in ops.