I just don’t understand how people still hate smashers so much.. then again I think I know why.. I rolled one lvld it and geared it out w/ the purpose of doing pure dps (I’d previously only healed and done hybrid dps – tank..) I rolled people in lowbie so badly it was ridiculous, however when I got to 50.. I really wasn’t satisfied. In reality It comes down to the aoe affect.. and smash just not being that good if you’re not pulling off multi person smashes. Against a single target the common smash are not all that great at all, and it tends to be that way against better players… So for lack of a better way of putting it, generally the build outperforms dps wise against bad players, and under performs against good ones… hence always going to appear ridiculously op to a portion of players.. I think the question is more, if their is a mechanic that a player does not understand, how big should the disadvantage be? Smash is definitely very much on the high side, in terms of punishing people who don't play against it correctly..

Assassin is not really a 600k class. Darkness can do it, its extremely rare though and requires at least a perfect game during a full length voidstar.. In ideal conditions madness can do it easy, that’s not really relevant tho, since in the average wz madness is not all that viable.

I feel like in the naïve “close gap and dps nearest target” mindset (which is how half the people in this game play 95% of the time), marauders wreck. Yes in a face tanking dps competition, they plain own people. They “cut down everything.” They are however the least versatile class in the game tho.. They lack significant cc. The only classes w/ worse mobility have maintainable 30m range dps.. No class has less 10m and 30m range attacks. They are the most clustering prone/aoe vulnerable class in the game. Essentially they can’t really be stacked because of their weaknesses… else you start getting situations where a single bubble stun hits 4 people and healer gets away and half your team gets neutralized for 10 gcd, b/c no ones w/ in 4m and all their gap closers are on cd.. I don’t think most experienced players think any more than 2 is all that optimal due to their shortcomings…. I think this last point is the strongest one on class balance.. If teams the the general pop think are optimal only roll 1-2… I just don’t see big changes coming. Hitting 1 exactly is not possible.. and you cant get to "0-1 on an optimal team class" w/ out making another class a 1-2… Hopefully someone gets my point..

Only armorings from belt and bracers are generic to my knowledge.. lvl 27 armorings from offhands were not the last time I tested it, although 26 from offhands are generic. The fastest way to gear up to bis is to start w/ shells that have the set bonus you want (either have to have old bm shells or use a pve set bonus if your class has a good one) then buy ewh belt/bracers for the armorings and mods.. For some classes its very very efficient.. Literally can get to bis for less than half the cost of going the standard route, and you get 80% of the bump 1/3 of the way in (e.g. you get full bis 27 armoring + 27 mod + bis 26 enhancement, at the point where you'd be 60% of the way done buying ewh the standard way once..)

I find it somewhat odd that the OP brings up he plays a sage.. Its somewhat discredits everything you say when your rolling probably the 1st or 2nd most fotm class right now which everyone complains about because it pretty much effs melee classes with downright disgusting amounts of cc, and then… your topic is about how op a melee class… Literally makes me want to cry..

I'd second that... Vanguards/pts can murder smashers.. Range dps in general is tough.. I feel like alot of classes shouldn't really be able to complain about smashers.. Vanguards/Snipers: Largely counter classes, And since they Can Dps from range, if they get caught clustered its pretty much their own fault. Bub sorc: Sure.. a couple smashers can kill them almost instantly.. they are the ultimate melee counter class tho when not dead.. Healers: Again, kinda there own fault if they get caught in it.. no reason you can't stay away from your teammates and heal from range Mara/Jug dps: Since they roll the spec.. cant really complain about it. Assassin: Has every tool in the world to react to the smash build up and prevent it from going off at inopportune times Really would say in general i only feel bad for people in the tanking roll. Trying to peel a smasher off you healer means youre inevitably going to be eating some 1.5x smashes due to your guard.

Tankasins also have auto crits. I don’t think of auto criters stacking power as gaining an advantage.. more as removing a disadvantage. They get no benefit from half their stats otherwise, unoptimized they are terrible. Would have to think bw already balances classes assuming everyone stacks power, given its the most optimal secondary stat to stack for all classes.

People just need to understand how op healing works.. Generally super efficient, slow, spread out... They can concentrate it if and only if: 1. They sacrifice efficiency 2. Targets are low health In order to counter it you need to.. 1. Not spread damage out over multiple targets 2. Kill focused targets quickly, especially towards the end Would say practically the first thing anyone rolling an op healer learns from lowbie is that op healing w/ out surgical probe is terrible..

After leveling a jug to 50 and gearing it almost to wh since the buff.. I’ve played a 100s of games in lowbie perpetually rolling people doing multiples of the next best dps.. and effortlessly got most of wh at 50… however I can’t say I’ve come to the conclusion that they are op at a high level of play.. However would say more than any other class they punish people who don’t repond and just play as usual when facing them.. People complain about “burst aoe”… however its also the longest to set up and easiest to avoid.. when your playing people who know what they are doing, its painful, they anticipate it and hitting 2+ people becomes the exception, not the rule… A huge portion of players do use non adaptive/non responsive straties in wz tho… and just spamming derpsmash can be so ironically dominant against non adaptive strategies that it’s a bit absurd.. when you want to just midlessly dps/heal/tank, its no fun to play against smashers, b/c they’ll always win. So essentially, am not sure it will be nerfed… If this game was brand new I think bw would.. because very basic strategies that are much more dominant than other basic strategies cause mass rage b/c everyone is at the basic point in terms of learning the game and they only have 1 toon.. however at this point I think it could stay. And last patch definitely seems to indicate it could. Jugs afterall got the biggest buff in 1.6.. being able to respec out of smashing when on maps its not as good is pretty huge..

There is still hope.. I think it takes them 7+ days to respond now.

Most effective tanks in pvp roll dps gear. Its just how it works. Would also say you need to be in voice com w/ a dedicated healer.. As a tank, if youre not working as a team w/ a healer, your just not going to be effective at all. Once you got that down start trying to guard swap to any target the opposing team is focusing when your healer has no one on them, and you'll increase your protection numbers and your healers healing numbers.. Would say some of the highest healing #'s i've seen are not due to healers.. they're due to tanks that not only free their healer up to free cast, but also guard switch/never are at full health and always have hots/are in their healers aoes.

Would say it has one definitive positive effect in normal wz. It allows you to sometimes turn what would otherwise be a very imbalanced team into a balanced one.. allowing you to remove one of the negative effects of having partially random teams in normal. It does benefit some classes though more than others which is not really fair… For assassins the option does almost 0, for jugs its huge… I did not think its possible but would say rage jugs got buffed again in this last patch… What would normally be Jug smasher players can now respect to tank on voidstar defense and huttbal and what would usually be jug tank players can respect to smash on voidstar offense. Can even see the situation happening in ranked where you determine you don’t have enough dps to take a node back and opt to respec one of your tanks to dps… on alderaan jugs will probably be able to do it at no cost on the speeder right down every time they swap offense/defense. The possibilities are endless.. am sure there are more ways to abuse respecs intragame yet to be discovered.. Really just want to know at this point from bw if its permanent or restrictions around respecing are going to be made.

Isn't it the other way around? Less healers -> Exertise has less advantage over main stats. Just saying...

I think the solution is just to make the non reusable ones cheaper to produce... I've used low level seisimic grenades on all my toons because they are still good and also cheap...... if their was a cheap + good cryo/rakata freezbombs that would fix the problem. I have recently given into switching all my serious pvp toons over to cybertech... There are just to many situations where an extra aoe mez, stun, or even slow(for some classes) will win or lose you a game...

Would agree that jugs can run into serious dps problems post smash which theoretically would compensate a little for having op smashes.. Would say 2 things negate the effect tho, the first is how front loaded jugs dps is, their average dps in the first few gcd is clearly the best/near the best, however even up until the 2nd smash, it is still very good. The 2nd is if the opposing team does not have enough heals and enough opponents are low health, jugs are able to add vicious throw to their rotation, which is enough to give them very very good single target dps between smashes..

Does anyone else feel that the dominance of maras in pvp is over? or is coming to an end? Maybe its just me? Dont get me wrong, the class is overall still a good class, one carnage marauder definitely still has its place on any team (which is more than alot of classes can say)... however..... I feel like rage and annihilation maras are completely dominated by rage jugs now.. Whenever I’m on my healer I find myself wishing incredibly often that a mara on my team was a jug. I don’t currently play either class at 50, from my impression they are roughly equal offensively (in reality depends on who you talk to, its *fairly* close tho), however defensively there is not really any comparison. Yeah mara’s have a some misc defensive utility from their cds that jugs don’t have… when it comes down to it though, healer + jug dps has serious staying power for guarding an objective, and healer + mara does not. And to top it off.. jugs are also the indisputable kings of hutball, the only wz that does not come down to objective guarding.. Anyone play both? What value can non carnage mara dps add that jugs can't also add/add more of?

It kinda depends on the situation right? Worse scenario i've been in is too many healers on voidstar offense topping everyone off, op asks them to actually do something, or at least just let him die so he can re-cloak and keep on trying to ninja, naturally offended, they dont stop healing him and lose on the tiebreaker...

I actually kinda like the state of cc in this game.. am not sure about stun bubbles though, sages using stun bubble on themselves to survive does not really worry me, its more in conjunction w/ others.. e.g. giving a smasher the stun bubble ability is not a good idea at all, so how is giving it to a sage who can cast it on anyone he wants and gives it to a smasher a good idea? its like the ultimate combo mobility of leaping, instant off gcd aoe chain stun, and huge aoe dps.. and the thing is most people only tap a small fraction of the potential effectiveness of it, and alot of people already are complaining... On another note although not op in the traditional sense, say.. 3 sages stun bubbling is enough to drive melee dps ineffingsane. And on another note, why not just give everyone the ability to stun bubble themselves, on a longer cd of course... except that would be insane.. how is the current situation not more insane tho..

Agree completely.. maybe not on removing grouping completely from normal.. but the basic idea that once you are 4 man premading in max gear, doing ranked should be easier and there should be more incentives for it... right now if i q for regular w/ say 2 max geared healers and 2 hybrid tanks.. forget winning and losing, it'll be maybe 20 games before we even go down an objective, and probably will go w/ out deaths in over half the games.. and if we get match'd w/ another good premade against a pug team they'll be lucky if everyone can even get a medal.. am not saying you shouldn't ever be able to do this.. am just saying that complete roflstomps should not be the vast majority of games anyone plays, and for alot of high and low end players they are..

So wanted to start a thread on this because have been starting to notice that the worst type of pvp games are getting more frequent. More frequent being a gross understatement… In regular wz would say that the vast majority of games are just plain unbalanced, probably 80%+. Would classify unbalanced on one of 3 levels, 1. the winner of the match is known from the start, right when you load in, 2. when you see who’s on the opposing team, or 3. when you see how fast/who takes the 1st objectives.. On some days I play regular, would say there is not a single game where I could impact the outcome the teams are so stacked. If you don’t believe this.. try keeping track yourself, try seeing how many games you are reasonably sure who will win 1 minute in and how often you are wrong, it should convince you… I blame most of the failure on the current system.. Random wz w/ random opposing team and at least 50% random people on your own team is a great idea for giving everyone a shot at winning, the problem is it only lasts as long as the wz loading screen if people can identify the quality of other players.. I think the problem lies w/ the fact that this game has aged, the variance in player skill has increased, and the tendency to premade is very high now. All of which mean that when you form teams by any random process youre more likely to get 2 that are farther apart in terms of overall skill level, and hence un balanced games. Also the fact that the game has aged means that on average players are more experienced and better able to identify all the indicators of whether they will win or lose early on. I just think its time for a different system.. Could see 2 things working. 1. Make all games ranked, and have matching based on rank. 2. Get a substantial # of the high/med-high end regular wz players into ranked wz where there is already suppose to be matching based on ranked, there is just not a large enough population to ever notice it. I like #2 more and I only see 1 way to do it.. make ranked wz q’s accept 4 OR 8. (note 4 or 8 b/c you cant do 4 through 8 w/ out also having to take 1, 2, and 3, or else you couldn’t form an 8 person team out of them) Why would this work? 1. The 8 person barrier to entry is huge… I would say it is the number one reason why there isn’t much of a consistant set of 2nd tier teams in rwz… Most people don’t have 8 good pvp’rs that form a balanced team on their friends list/guild list except at peak hours, and unless there are a lot of teams qing its impossible to hold a “just ok” rwz team together. Losing 3 times in a row, losing vs the same team twice, and losing really really badly, are all pretty much morale breakers (and justifiably so, there is no hope of winning), and the team disbands.. the effort to reward is just tiny if you’re not winning games. 2. Allowing ques of 4 is condusive to forming teams of 8… if you get paired w/ another good group of four, why not continue quing w/ them? Would actually guess that allowing people to que w/ 4, will eventually result in many more 8 man teams… 3. Quitters you don’t know hurting your ranking.. I think this issue could be minimized in short. 1. Standard penaly for quitting. 2. Purposefully quiting is already much less common in ranked. 3. if your match’d w/ people not that great and the ranking system works, you should be playing people not that great. Giving people less incentive to quit.. 4. Pre start/close to start if someone quits you could kick the whole team and back fill w/ another group of four (who maybe then could play the game w/ only 0 or + impact to their rank, that penalty imposed on the quitters has to go somewhere.. idk where it goes now..) 5. Ideally support for reconnects would need to be added. 4. Realistically speaking the whole not being in voice communication w/ the other 4 people could be overcome. Voice communication has improved.. anyone use raidcall? Its free and super easy to create, find, and move between channels. Its as easy as giving someone the name of an unpassworded channel you just created, and all 8 people can be in the same chat.. could see it being more difficult using the traditional ts, vent, or mumble tho… I don’t see why anyone would be opposed.. If you are low to med end regular, it means probably slightly longer ques, but a lot more wins. If youre at the high end of reqular wz participants but med to low end of ranked wz participants and somewhat like myself, you probably just want good competitive games to be easier to get started, and probably care only minimally about your rank relatively. If you’re at the high end of rwz, probably would be great to just have some more people in the que, and more easy competition that might stick around for more than a couple games. Would like to see a ranked and regular fixed w/ one stone so to speak.. I think something this simple will do it, and is probably closer to what was originally intended, than what was actually implemented. Certainly back in the day before rwz were launched, when they were being advertised, I thought they would be for pretty much all experienced players, and that getting to the top would be a feat, not that even q’ing regularly for them would be a feat in and of itself… Kinda regardless of what happens to ranked.. would say regular needs to be fixed.. I loved pvp when I started close to launch.. if I had to start now tho 10 months in, I’d definitely not be playing this game tho. I’d say ideally when f2p goes live and hopefully this game gets new players, rwz should be popular accessible enough that the average new player is not getting rolled by premades that have played daily since launch in regular wz.

Originally wrote a longer more constructive post.. then decided to change it when I saw some of the later comments... When you are having defense/staying on the field problems in rwz you are at the very very painful 2nd beginning of learning how to play this game.. The whole low ttk thing is utter nonsense imo.. Am not a super highlevel player.. but would say I’ve made the following observation: as the skill of both teams increases ttk on average goes up, alot. E.g. super high level teams facing eachother tend to have the problem of not being able to kill each other fast enough (ttk is absurdly high from disciplined healing/tanking defensive play) for anyone to ever take a contested objective.

Thought so... does anyone have a belt/bracers w/ 27s in them? Wasn't there something about them accidentally allowing it on the pts, then patching it, then not including the patch for it in the live version, then patching again?

Err really?? Could someone confirm this? To my knowledge lvl 27 armorings are no longer transferable from offhands only lvl 26 are transferrable... didn't they make the 27s slot specific shortly after launch? or can they only be transfered to certain other armor pieces? I know for a fact for example 27 will power armoring will not go into a chestpiece.

Yeah would say being well geared is acceptable and very very easy to achieve in lowbie, if you're rolling cybertech its so ridiculously cheap to stay in @ level augmented blues, which is enough to probably give you a 20% advantage over the average lowbie player.. its a little overkill to do more tho... players who have augmented purples + stim are a little ridiculous, it doesn't last long and its so expensive to do.. so i wouldnt complain about it. Also just having a lvl 40+ healer on your team is generally going to be a more deciding factor in lowbie than any twink... which is kinda ironic.. However combining healers and twinking is no joke... i tried it at lvl 46 at my operative, and I dont think i ever lost, or ever even got killed... it was hilariously op relative to anything i've ever seen in 50.. was kinda fun while it lasted..

The only thing i can add is never stun first when attacking out of stealth. Its incredibly rare you'll find someone who can register that your attacking, target you and flip to face you and attack in less than a gcd.