I will grant you that this is how SWTOR works, and actually how most games work. I'm not a fan that there is no counter to coordinated focus DPS. I feel like, in order to maintain a skill based contest, you should be able to counter this. I think the problem is that SWTOR is the worst of the bunch. Damage in this game is the highest out of any PvP MMO I've played, including vanilla WoW where trinketed POM/Pyro was king. Sure you'd get one-shot in those days, but at least it was only once every three minutes Anyway, it's fair to say there's a distinct difference between how it works and how I think it should work. I can accept this... I can't accept it coming from one player though (cont'd below). I think this is our main source of contention... that you think I'm lying/over-exaggerating the problem but I'm really not. I'm rational enough to admit if I'm wrong, and have no need to get my back up over and internet argument and would be happy to have this situation not happen because there was some easy fix. There isn't... we've got 40+ pages of thread discussing it and I'm still a little dismayed that we're hung up on the same point. It feels like we're failing to meet eye to eye on two points here: 1) Incoming damage on Sorc/Sage is very high... to the point where 1v1 a Sage isn't able to successfully heal themselves. For this I've given you a screenshot of the kinds of damage we take. It was 2/3's of my life delivered in two seconds. It happened, and there's nothing I can do in order to counter it. It's too much too quickly, and the tools I have at my disposal don't allow me to counter it, or recover from it. So yes, I am dying to a single marauder that quickly... I'm dying even more quickly to focused fire. I don't know how else to convey this point other than to ask you to play a BM Sorc in PuG WZ to get a feel for what I'm experiencing. The implications of that last statement tie into the next point... 2) This game should only be balanced around, and accessible to, all levels of play. This game, or any single AC/spec, shouldn't require you to dedicate your life to it in order to play and enjoy it. Not everybody can do this, not everybody wants to do this. I'm not saying the game shouldn't have balanced competitive play, just that this balance should include casual play as well. This is not something that is hard to achieve and several suggestions have been made already, it's just something that needs to be done. So if Sorc's are fine in your high-level ranked matches, they certainly are not in PuG WZ playing without a coordinated team. Balance is possible here... Keep in mind that we do pay the same $15 a month as you do, and we are entitled to a fair, balanced, and fun experience. You are also entitled to this. If it's not provided, a lot of folks will pack up and move on for greener pastures, which may well be fine as far as your concerned, and this is probably true, but only for the short term. This game is built upon the existence of a community and if that community enjoying themselves, portions of it will move on. Ultimately, it will fall apart. From all perspectives, this game has thus far seen exactly that. Upon release servers were full and PvP queues were popping frequently. Over time server populations have thinned and PvP queues stopped occurring because people weren't enjoying it (for any number of reasons). Server transfers have alleviated the impact of fewer players, but the evidence of the trend is there. People are leaving SWTOR. BW should probably start paying attention to why people are unhappy... and for a lot of people in this thread including myself, it's because they are getting killed very quickly in PvP through no direct fault of their own, and they aren't enjoying it.

Would that not further suggest that damage is too high? The point, though, was that DPS can do DPS on their own and kill things. Tanks can guard anyone and mitigate damage. Healers, or at least Sorc/Sage healers, cannot do anything without a tank guarding and a full team baby sitting them. Even then, there's still a few situations where, because of leap/pull, there's not a whole lot you can do to save them. If the other healers don't take this level of incoming damage, it means their team gets time to assist them. This isn't the case with Sorc... it's pretty easy for a PT to grapple them into the team, or for a few marauders to leap to someone and destroy them. These are things that even a top-level team would have a hard time reacting to, and dealing with.

Would that not suggest that perhaps guard is too strong? Also it's apparently more a problem with sorc/sage... the other healers appear to have more survivability than we do. Anyway, if you're terrible w/o guard and godmode with it, then things should probably get normalized so you're all right without guard and pretty good with it.

LoL are you kidding me? You spouted the same thing in the thread I have going and I proved you wrong with a screenshot of 10k damage in 2 seconds. You've just got to accept that incoming damage really is that high. That's cool if you don't get it on your class, but a lot of other people do. On topic: I don't think there's any imbalance between republic and imperial, the classes seem fairly well mirrored. Republic does get dominated on my server, but it's no different than the horde/alliance thing in WoW. Plus the gear disparity in this game is pretty big, so the first faction to have more well geared players is just going to naturally do better. It is a real possibility to have a single faction's PvP die due to lact of interest, but there's enough same faction WZ that at least PvP will continue. I think the only real solution BW could do here would be to lower the gear disparity... there was a thread a while ago showing the differences between recruit, BM, and WH. It was quite large. Lower that a bit and it'll make things more accessible to players who aren't as geared. The more skilled group will still win out. That's all I can really think of though... it is weird that imperial tends to be the dominant faction, and it was weird that horde was dominant in wow, but there's really not much difference between the two. At least as far as I know, anyway...

Maybe it's just the way you wrote it, but you come off as extremely negative here. Is a discussion where something is learned and opinions change a bad thing? Haha, maybe it's just a concept foreign to you Ok shameless dig there... but anyway, if I misread you I apologize. To the guy you quoted, yes apparently other healers are fine. I'm play a Sorc/Sage so I can only comment on what I'm experiencing. If you're not having these problems, great! Simply not true. DPS work just fine on their own. Tanks also do pretty good on their own... their guard protects DPS just as much as it does healers, and they are also capable of doing relevant damage. Frankly, you could remove healers from this game right now and I feel like nobody would actually notice.

The odds in making a weak class work for them. It's a figure of speech, the same as applied to a low-seed sports player "beating the odds" to win a championship. High ranked Sorc/Sage may exist, I'll take your word for it, but they are few and far between. It doesn't mean the class is balanced. I can't and don't reasonably expect equivalent performance, but I can and do expect reasonably close performance. A higher tier of gear should be better, certainly, but not so much that those in lower tiers have absolutely no chance. Especially because all three tiers are thrown together in the same queue for all warzones, both ranked and unranked. If there were separate tiers for each level of play, I would be more inclined to see your point here. Absolutely untrue. Tanks can guard anybody, and also bring good utility. They can do this without healers. Arguably, their DPS is lower... so without DPS it would make for a very long game. DPS is able to perform their job even without the other two classes. In fact, coordinated DPS will always win against coordinated healers, simply because the GCD limits a timely response. Try it... get 4 healers and 4 DPS. Have the 4 DPS unload all their attacks at once and see if the target lives. They won't. If a single Marauder can do 10k damage to me in 2 seconds (when I have BM gear) there's no way anybody can heal through 40k in 2 seconds. I'll let this slide becuase I think it's the first time you've said it, even though this has been addressed many times throughout the course of this thread. No, I'm not asking to survive focus fire from multiple opponents unaided. I'm asking to survive unaided against a single opponent unaided. Right now I can't even do that. Full BM taking 10k in 2 seconds. This isn't skill, there's a problem with the class. I thought it was a problem with damage values, but apparently other healers don't take these kinds of hits.

No response to any of the above, eh? One high rated Sorc on one high rated team at the upper levels of play doesn't make the class fine. I'm also not sure what you're basing these "highest ranked" statements on... to my knowledge we only have local server rankings and no world-wide rankings. There also haven't been any kind of e-sports tournaments for SWTOR as of yet, have there? (Honest question there, not sarcasm. I really don't know... so I'm asking.) A lot of your evidence for Sorc being fine is based on a very small set of data. A handful of people in the perfect scenario are on high ranked teams. This doesn't mean the class is fine, it means a few highly skilled players have managed to succeed in spite of the odds. This will always happen... if there's 51 aces in a deck of cards there's still a chance of drawing a non-ace. I can't help but wonder if that high ranked Sorc player would be more effective as another healer... though to be fair, Sorc does bring unique utility to the game. See my above post. Sorc should be accessible at all levels of play and shouldn't require a full set of WH gear along with a fully coordinated team to be mediocre. No other class has this requirement... and no other role has this requirement. Both DPS and Tanks stand on their own.

There was a thread floating about that detailed the differences in stats for each tier of gear. It was actually a pretty big difference. You'd be kidding yourself if you thought gear was irrelevant. That's part of the problem outlined in the OP. I was getting crushed in recruit and I was told that if I got BM, all would be well. I got BM but I'm still getting crushed by others in BM, and absolutely destroyed by people in WH. Refer to the screenshot posted somewhere in the 23-27 page range where a Marauder does 10k damage to me in a very short timespan (less than 2 seconds). It's been 40 pages of thread and you keep saying the same thing. You're fine if you get a team to baby sit you. This doesn't make you fine. Other healers stand on their own, DPS stand on their own. Having a team makes those classes better, but they play just fine on their own. This is more true of DPS than it is of merc/op healers. Sorc/Sage on the other hand, appears to be absolutely worthless without a team. That's a clear imbalance. Additionally, you keep throwing L2P and skill > ____ around like it's an instant solution. Not everybody has a team to play with and PuG WZ exist to be played. Like it or not, there's still a pretty large class imbalance. It comes right back to what I've been saying this whole time. If healers with guard are too stong, and healers without guard are too weak, make healers stronger and guard weaker. No class should be in such a binary situation. It's why you have people shelving Sorc/Sage characters left right and center. Apparently you find a few people who stuck it out and have a really good team to support them, but the average case is that the class is just not working. So congrats on finding an exception, but it does not define the rule.

Haha, very aptly put I can't imagine so, though... they've said they want to work on their PvP and make it balanced, I think they just need to start actively working on it. I know these things take time so all we can hope for is that they're paying attention I guess.

Nothing to add on the rest, it's pretty much been covered. Just a couple of points... * Still seeing a lot of people saying this is a L2P issue. Getting pulled/stunned and then burned before the stun isn't a L2P issue. There's nothing anybody can do about this, it's impossible. If the expectation is that a healer should never get caught, this is unreasonable. DPS is given tools specifically for the purpose of catching players who attempt to kite them. Being infinitely kited would be unbalanced, and this isn't even true in this game. Players will get caught... they need to be able to survive through this. This is 1v1. * There's still a lot of people complaining that if Sorc/Sage were buffed, they would be unkillable. Nobody (who's being reasonable) is asking for godmode Sorc/Sage. Please understand that, as it is now, we're getting exploded by a single DPS in seconds. There's a screenshot I posted a while back (maybe page 25ish) showing a Marauder who put 10k damage on me in about 2 seconds. That's 2/3's of my health pool and it happened before I could even react. All we're asking is to be buffed a little... just so we're on par with the other healers who apparently aren't experiencing this same level of frustration. An alternative would be to tone down DPS a little bit. Either way, we're not asking for god mode, we're asking for balance. That's the operative word here, balance. Please, lets try to keep that at the forefront of our focus. * Still lots of "you need a pocket tank". There has been a lot of discussion already on this topic so, to summarize, the complaint is that Sorc/Sage need a tank simply to be able to play. We're utterly crushed without one and we're still quite weak with one. In order to be viable, we need a fully coordinated team baby sitting us. Other healers maybe don't need this but Sorc/Sage does. DPS, on the other hand, does not. The bottom line is, no one class should be so completely reliant on someone else to be viable. Team play is meant to enhance the individual to form something greater than the sum of the parts, but each part should still be somewhat viable on its own. If the concern is that, if healer solo viability were increased, guards would make them unstoppable... then perhaps the key here lies in guard and that it should be toned down somewhat. I don't pretend to have the answer to this... our job is to provide feedback and right now that feedback is overwhelmingly that Sorc/Sage gets steamrolled by lesser geared, lesser skilled players.

I'm back... hopefully everybody had a good weekend. It seems we've got 10 more pages of discussion that I'm still catching up on. Some good stuff in there though, and it seems we're getting a lot more people coming in to post their experiences, which do mirror my own. Great to have some support First thing I want to reply to is this: You shouldn't be so quick to throw out the "didn't read the thread" thing... you're half right. I did start out saying all healers were getting crushed because I actually thought they were. However, somewhere around our initial discussion when you and I were first talking, I discovered that this wasn't the case. You yourself were saying you rarely take 5k hits and your incoming damage was fairly low. In fact, you didn't even believe me when I said I was taking as much damage as I was. I've revised my opinion... enough merc/smug healers are posting that things are fine that apparently it's just sorc/sage who are so startlingly weak and prone to massive amounts of incoming damage. I posted that, fairly clearly... I'm not going to go back and find it though, this is a lot of thread to go through. Suffice it to say, if you think your class is fine that's cool. I'm not here to argue that mercs have a bad gameplay experience when I don't play one. My experiences are with a Sage so that's all I feel qualified to discuss. SUMMARY FOR CLARITY: This thread is about Sorc/Sage. Thanks!

This, and additionally why should we have to have the top tier gear level just to stand a chance against people in BM? If a Sorc/Sage has to completely outgear someone only to still get beat, just last longer, that's a pretty good indication that the design is flawed.

Nowhere did I say I wanted Sorcs changed to be so powerful nobody can stop them. You keep taking my arguments to the extremes... this guy wants to not get destroyed in a few seconds, clearly he wants to be unstoppable. We can't have that, so no! It's absurd. All I'm asking for, and a lot of others too, is to just be able to play the game. There are changes that can be made that will give us a chance to contribute without making us OP. Besides, right now we have FotM classes, and people are playing them, and they're demolishing Sorc/Sage. So we should just leave that alone because it's ok to have a FotM that's killing us, but it's not ok for us to be FotM? Your reasoning is flawed. Finally, and for the last time because you apparently have trouble understanding it, and because I've repeated it so many times now that I'm feeling like you're just trolling, my performance shouldn't be so critically linked to others. Team games are fine, team cohesion is important. One class being so completely dependent on their team and so completely broken otherwise is not fine.

It was a few back. That marauder was unloading massive crits on people. Same as the guy in the game with the screens I took. And yea, I was having trouble taking them, I'm not sure what happened. It seems to work sporadically. Anyway, 10k damage floating on my screen from one guy. He didn't even do that in a stun, it just happened... I was at 2/3's life and then poof, dead. This isn't a l2p issue, there's nothing I can do about it. This particular fellow had it out for me all BG. I would keep him at range using all my cooldowns, then he'd leap in and do that. I didn't get a screenie so you'll have to just take my word for it, but he crit me for 6700 earlier. I'm not making this up... it's happening. Finally, in full BM sorcs aren't hitting 5k crits except under obscure circumstances, like relic procs or healing a shadow tank with their +heal ability popped. We get that ability that gives us two auto-crits, the maximum I've ever done is 4200. Maybe WH sages hit that hard, but as I've been saying all along we shouldn't need the maximum level of gear to stand a chance. It should give an edge, but not such a massive advantage.

You can accomplish this without grinding gear. There are other ways to tweak your character or to change things to suit your play style. Even if you got all your gear handed to you for free, you could still spend time tweaking your character with augments. I'd imagine you could go for damage/healing, defense, or a combination. Skills can also be tweaked to customize playstyle. As it is, you're not painstakingly tweaking anything. You're spending more time on a video game and ending up with an item advantage. There's a pretty big difference.