UPDATE, They're Back In! Warzones Alderaan Civil War The speeder bikes that transport players to the East and West turrets have been resinstated. 4/6 Patch Notes. Alderaan Civil War The speeder bikes that transported players to the East and West turrets have been removed. 3/30 Patch on test servers. What do you guys think of this? My thoughts: This makes middle a little more valuable. Classes that have enemy pulls (tank Assassins/Pyros) are buffed by this. The reasoning being that for each team, one side turret can't be "dropped down" to, you have to run in plain sight of middle, which will allow these classes to basically pull stragglers that recently died, taking them out of the fight once again or at least causing a good initation/dog-pile. (For example you recently died, they hold middle, you drop down middle to try to run to the side node, but you get pulled instead.) This is already a bit of an issue, but it'll be even more crucial now to do. It also eliminates a bit of strategy to the game. With the current changes of a 3 second cast time, and the 1.2 patch PRIOR to 3/30 said the time was equal to middle's flight, it didn't seem like a big issue to have the side speeders.

The expertise change makes sense. Now the Damage Reduction doesn't equal the + Damage Done, or the + Healing. Secondary stats on all gear got nerfed a good bit for the doubling in expertise. This was probably to keep damage in line. In other words, your +damage from stats went down, so they increased the +flat damage from expertise. If +healing stayed the way it was before the 3/30 patch, healers would have +20-24% healing in war hero gear. That almost completely negates trauma. It would be RIDICULOUSLY good. Now the other nerfs to healers I totally hate just like everyone else, just keep the whole expertise thing in perspective.

My real question is, Is "Solo Ranked" and "Group Ranked" the same que? IE, with the wording it sounds like groups of 4 man premades (so excluding premades or 5, 6, 7, or 8) can be matched against solo que people. Is that the idea? Also, one has to wonder how lopsided ranked will be in pre-season, face it theres less than a handful of good pvpers on each server, and they're most likely going to que together. So the elo system will be REALLY, REALLY, skewed. Aka, 4 man group of 2k+ rated + 4 randoms (probably all bads, so that the opposite team has a bunch of average people) so like... 4 man premade of 2k+, + 4 people <1000 elo. Against 8 people of varying elo between 1200-1800? All just extrapolation without concrete information, but this really, really, feels like the old pvp system where it was "how many non 50s do we have to carry on our team?" when you would premade.

Yes, for healer sorcs and snipers they're both 30 yards, for a DPS sorc they get 35. But thats a completely different argument; "Is 5 more yards on an interrupt the best 4 piece PvP bonus?"

There was an official post ~2-3 weeks ago that said that CS was wrong, and that officially during a tie its random.

Hybrid Jugg has: Immunity on leap, Three defensive cooldowns, guard, taunt, aoe taunt, aoe sleep, aoe slow (free casting), force push (which will refresh leap), they can get a second leap if they don't go for immunity on leap, and a free damaging/stun (force choke). The idea sorc is omg *** cc is an incorrect one. The only CC/utilty a sorc has that beats every other class is their ranged interrupt. Thats their best ability in the toolkit that has no equal.

For the first time today I saw a loading tip briefly that said something to the extent of "High level valor boxes can contain marks, consumables, commendations and a rare chance at reusable combat usables!" So I had never heard of this before, so I went looking on torhead, and the only thing I could find are these items: http://www.torhead.com/item/4R04oxD/absorb-reusable http://www.torhead.com/item/1KlEnen/block-reusable http://www.torhead.com/item/cf6yCUn/counterattack-reusable http://www.torhead.com/item/ewppm27/disengage-reusable http://www.torhead.com/item/aYyl3v1/mark-reusable http://www.torhead.com/item/hqHjlGj/poison-reusable Has anyone ever seen these, or heard of anything like this?

I can attest to this. Some planets are still nasty, even on a SSD: Hoth, Tatoonie (kind of), Corellia, Belsavis, Voss (kind of), Ilum (kind of, but that was when you load back into the PvP area with tons of people). The rest are perfectly acceptable and short.

Until someone else levels a smugg/agent past Chapter 2 and gets the buff for everyone on their mains.

I was thinking of going hybrid Corruption+Madness for utility in rateds but with the gutting of the big heal nerf, no thanks. I was really looking forward to 1.2 then saw some of the most horrible changes, its made me barely want to log on anymore. I also have a 50 Jugg and a 47 Operative (healer), and people crying about the utility of sorcs, go find a good jugg and you'll be appalled at how good their utility is. I'll probably still play but they killed the hybrid dps spec for sorcs and that reduced my incentive to play, my favorite playstyle getting gutted and no changes to the awful lightning tree for PvP either? Blegh. I'll probably pick up D3 to mess around in (i'm in the beta and its good fun) its defintely not a game that can hold your attention like an MMO, but it'll be a good way to get away from the frustration of 1.2 (as-is according to the patch notes). I love this game, too.

Operative healers are the single most difficult healer to kill, especially when going up against a team that favors ranged dps, (they can LoS and use instants to heal themselves) They're also insanely difficult to kill at sub 30% due to the instant free heal with TA on no cooldown. This is made up for the fact that they can't smooth out burst damage effectively at all. They're really good for sustained healing, and when teams aren't focusing targets. You couple an operative with a merc or an operative and a sorc and its devastating. An operative guarded as well is ridiculously powerful. The only way to really shut them down is coordinated burst at ~35% and stuns. The buffs they're getting will just make them even better.

"I am a battlemaster Marauder and I can't kill a good sorc healer to save my life" This pretty much shows you have no idea how to play competently. Sorry.

I labeled the numbers to respond to the stupidity of this post. 1.This doesn't exist. Its either a slightly reduced cooldown, or an instant cast. "No cooldown" doesn't exist. This is 100% false and is a good indication with how accurate or serious the rest of your post is. 2.Our #1 dot tics for 200-400 depending on crits. Our 31 point talent doesn't hit much harder, neither does our 15 second cooldown one. 3.We have the worst burst in the game. Come 1.2 we will have even less. We're a pressure damage class, burst is very small and non-existent next patch. 4.Without bubble we would have no way to mitigate damage. We don't get any damage reduction skills. 5.The one saving grace of the class. On a 30 second cooldown (20 if talented), which is nullified by roots or stuns, oh and it only lasts 2 seconds. If you're a warrior use your gap closer after we sprint away now we're stuck. 6.One snare, that lightning talents for halfway up the tree. It also breaks on damage after 2 seconds. 7.Stuns? Everyone uses these. 8.Range? Welcome to MMOs. some are melee, some are ranged. This isn't even an argument.

You're talking about the legacy boosts, those are in 1.3 not 1.2

The whole having each of the main classes' special buff added to your own if you finished chapter 2 of that class. I AM SO going to do all 4 types to chapter 2 now.

There was also the confirmation of the 12 (or was it 14?) additional objective-only based medals being added in 1.2. (From the QA at the end of February, I believe.)

Thanks for backing me up on this.

The title is MORE forced huttball. With this change its LESS. By a LARGE amount. Right now the only same-faction warzone is huttball. There will be 3 options, and then 4. So misleading title.

Misleading title is misleading. In 1.2 if you're on a side with a lot more people on that faction, you'll be able to fight your own faction in: The new warzone Huttball Voidstar and after 1.2 Alderaan will be added to it as well.

+1-10 Commendations for "staying and not leaving a warzone" in succession. Make it happen!

One fourth of all classes can do this with force speed/equivalent. (Sage/Shadow, Sorc/Assassin - all 4 get the speed buff) All classes can get the speed boost to do it. PLUS: Doing it takes good timing and skill. Also, every other class in the game that can leap forward, can leap to people on the other side if people are there in range.

This really sucks. I want to at least be able to RE them to get a reusable one.

Step 1.Go be a battlemaster. Step 2.Play some PvP, get your dailies done for a few days in a row Step 3.Never see battlemaster tokens. Step 4.Read the PTR patch notes. Step 5.Complain because the battlemaster system is even more ******* than the Champion system next patch.

Only bad players think marauders suck. They TEAR PEOPLE APART if played competently. They also have a great escape mechanic if they start to lose. Most people just don't understand what a "good" and "bad" player is.

Hi, tested out the patch today for awhile. My rig: 6770 HD, 1055t (overclock to 3.2, its a hexcore if you're not familiar with that number), 4gb ram, and windows + the game are installed on a 64 SSD, Crucial M4. I notice two significant things from this patch: Interrupts happen instantly now/force speed too. Previously there was on occasion an issue where you would hit your keybind for your instant cast ability over and over again and it wouldn't work, regardless if it was ready to activate. Now interrupts work properly, and PvP against healers/tracer missle spam is a LOT more fluid and intuitive. The second big thing, is a bit of an old technique that is now possible. In WoW, many casting bar addons had a slight gap where it "compensated" for your server latency. That is, where you would cast your ability and you could MOVE during the end of the cast bar and the spell would still go off. I had tried this 20 minutes after getting my first casted heal on my Sorc, and was sad that it wouldn't work. I'm a 50 with rank 54 valor PvP now a days, and I kept practicing the stop-casting + move to get a cast through technique, but it would never work. Today, it works. You can actually move at the last .1 (I had 20-50 ms latency) second cast time and have the spell still go off. These are not false-positives. This is not a troll. We'll see if these things are actually due to the patch or just because the servers were restarted and the population wasn't very high.