PVP is broken, and bolster is the least of the problems. Once the bolster mess is sorted out the real issues will begin to become obvious. Class balance in 2.0 is probably the worst it has ever been, and that's saying a lot. TTK is a joke. Healing is ridiculously overpowered now. I don't see PVP lasting very long without some very swift changes, and we know how good Bioware is at swift changes.

Before 2.0 it was rare that I wasn't top damage. Played 9 level 55 warzones today. Won all 9 matches. Was only top damage in 1 of them. Assassins, Snipers and warriors have no problem hitting for 7-8k but I struggle to get a 6k railshot at times. Pretty disappointed to see this class absolutely gutted.

I'm on Shadowlands. Which premades are losing? Names? From what I've seen it's the same general people at the top.

There are people right now testing and figuring out the exact gear combinations to get the most out of bolster. How is that any different from stat optimizing and min/maxing? Gear still matters. The only true way to eliminate gear as a consideration is just have everyone enter the warzone with the same exact stats, no matter what (ie 2000 of your main stat, 2000 expertise, etc). Not that I'm advocating this, I'm just saying that your point falls apart when there are others in the warzone with significantly lower stats than you.

Dumb dumb dumb it down to the point that my cat can step on the keyboard and get top DPS. Anyone who doesn't like gear progression or stat optimizing is playing the wrong genre. Call of Duty is that way ---> The same "hardcore" PVPers are going to continue stomping your face, bolster or no. You think they beat you because of their gear? Ha. Gearing up never took that long anyway. If you couldn't do it, it probably means you didn't PVP much, and no matter how much Bioware holds your hand you'll never compete against those teams. Maybe that's the silver lining to all of this. All the players that backpedal, click, keyboard turn and cry about gear advantages will finally have to face the truth: they just aren't very good at this game.

THIS. They went in the complete opposite direction, and the gear gap is actually worse. The difference between full recruit and EWH was 4-5k HP. I've seen people in 2.0 warzones with 8-10k more HP than me. Their secret? Crappy gear, or no gear at all.

At this point they should just remove expertise completely. If they are going to give it in large volumes to everyone, regardless of gear, even naked people, then it's a worthless stat that should just be removed.

Frankly, gearing up for PVP was never that difficult or time consuming. I have never been full recruit on any character, because every character I leveled had a full bank of comms ready at 50. Within 3 or 4 days I am full WH. If you were not dedicated enough to gear up under the old system, it probably means you didn't PVP much, and no amount of bolster is going to help you against the so-called "hardcore" types that do nothing but PVP.

I have never accused anyone of cheating. I don't think it's rampant, nor do I think every loss I suffer is because of hacks or exploits. I'm pretty easy-going about PVP in general. That said... last night was the first time I started to feel something sketchy was going on. We had a Huttball match against a 4-man Republic premade that shall remain nameless. They scored 2 points very early on in the match, but overall the game was running smoothly. We finally get the ball and start pushing towards their endzone. Just as we got to the last fire the game started to massively lag. I'm not talking about a hiccup or two... 10-15 seconds or more of unplayable lag. Couldn't pass or line up for anything. As soon as they got the ball back it cleared up. Match ran smoothly until we again got near their endzone. Same horrible lag. Everyone on my team noticed it and were commenting on it. It happened a 3rd time later in the match, again right as we got to their endzone with the ball. They beat us with a final score of 2-2. It was a fun match, but I gotta think had it not been for those mysterious waves of lag that my entire team experienced, we would have scored at least 1 of those 3 attempts and won the game. That wasn't the end though. We went on to play another 2 or 3 really smooth matches until we landed in a Civil War against that same 4-man. We run into mid and wouldn't you know... lag city. Just as bad as the lag we experienced in the huttball. We went on to win that game, but my willingness to believe that it was a coincidence is strained to say the least.

This confused me until I saw what classes you play. I'll agree though... a Makeb themed warzone would have been nice.

The biggest trash talkers, or at least the most entertaining to me personally, are the pugs that land on the same team as a really good premade. They get absolutely carried by the premade, but point and laugh or boast in /say as if they are the reason they're winning. Usually run into them again a match or two later, without the premade, and they are suddenly less talkative.

Against a really bad team or a group of pugs, this can work. In Hypergates for example, you can send 1 guy to their node at the start of the first round. Not stealthed. Wide open, just running to their node. If the other team is terrible sometimes they will see him going for the node and 4-5 of them will peel off to stop that one guy. That can give your team time to take control of mid and start grabbing orbs. He will die and give the other team 3 points, but gaining mid, killing the couple of their team that didn't take the bait and running orbs can outweigh the sacrifice. Problem is you usually won't know if the team your against is good or not until it's too late.

Frequency of balance updates isn't the only issue. We went through 5 months of that ridiculous smash spec. Now they are finally releasing a balance update, and by all accounts smash is still ridiculous. In fact, it's going to be even worse now that other classes have been nerfed, bubblestun nerfed and critical nerfed across the board. Frankly, I believe every update since 1.2 has made PVP worse. Looking at what's in store for 2.0, maybe we should be grateful they don't update very often.

You forgot the part where bolster in 55 warzones makes PVE gear at least on par, and in some cases even better than PVP gear.

I would argue that every patch since 1.2 has made PVP worse. At the time the PTS shut down, nobody was even testing PVP anymore. There were a myriad of issues on the forums that were not being addressed by devs. I have very little faith that anything meaningful will change in the two weeks before release, and even if they do change something major there will be no testing on it.

Hypergates, final round. Our team is up ~750 to the other team's 400. Game is over. We've won. Everybody leaves the node to go mid, leaving myself alone to guard the pylon. I'm good at watching a node, but... we've won. Why even risk it? Nothing that happens in mid at that point will effect the outcome of the game. You don't get bonus comms for running up your score. All that does is give the other team a chance to comeback.

Marauder. /thread

They have 2X experience weekends planned until mid-April, so not until then at the earliest. Personally, I hope it stays in testing a long time. From what I've read on the PTS, it sounds like there are still issues that need to be addressed.

Rage, I'm not sure about, but I think there would be a lot less pre-mades. Yes, there are guilds out there that love challenge and competition. There are also groups out there that just want to pug-stomp. If they separated the queues into solo-only or team-only, the team-only queue would probably end up like the ranked queues are now. 1 or 2 guilds on each server dominating, while all the others dodge them or just don't queue at all.

I think everyone agrees DPS Mercs are somewhat lacking in PVP. Would smashers be totally okay with DPS Mercs having an ability that: 1) AOE on up to 5 targets 2) cast instantly 3) on a relatively short cooldown that can be reduced even further 4) free under the right circumstances 5) auto crits under the right circumstances 6) hits everyone for 6-7k Lets call it "The ROFLMissle." Is that cool with you guys? Lets also give Mercs similar defensive cooldowns. 99% damage reduction for several seconds. The ability to stealth out of combat. etc Still sounding good? How about an instant cast execute capable of hitting for 5-6k too? The first time you enter a WZ against 3-4 ROFLMissle mercs, you guys wouldn't be on the forums crying fowl? Just a l2p issue right? ...actually you probably wouldn't. You'd probably reroll Mercs, tell other people to stop crying, and post up pics of your ROFLMissle damage. Nevermind.

I think a smarter matching system would help in some cases. Many times I've seen an Empire vs Empire match where one side is two 4-man premades, and the other side consists of 8 random pugs. You're just being served up at that point. If there are two 4-mans in the queue, it seems like it would be simple to ensure one on each side, not both together. Another example would be when there are 3 healers solo queuing, and all 3 land on the same team. Other team gets no healers at all. I'm not saying you should queue as rolls similar to the group finder. That would slow down queues tremendously. They should just be smarter about distributing the players who are queued.

The only change I've noticed about PVP in the last couple of weeks is that when I queue up on the Empire side, 4 out of 5 matches are against other Empire teams. The imp side has always had larger numbers but I think the PTS has effected Republic population far more.

I tried asking this in other threads and got nowhere. I do nothing but PVP. Unless the weekly cap is extremely high, I'll hit this within the first day or two. Tuesday and Wednesday the queues will be hopping, because the weekly limits will have reset. It will slow by Thursday as more people hit the cap. By the weekend most of the serious PVPers will be capped and doing other things. Queues will be slow. This will also make gearing up a longer and more tedious task. Just an all-around bad idea.

The patch notes aren't extremely clear, or I missed something. Will these weekly limits apply to warzone comms as well?

This sounds very much like a "if it ain't broke" situation. No offense, but you guys have a history of tinkering with things nobody was complaining about, and making them sooooooo much worse. Every PVPer knows you need expertise. Nobody seems terribly dissatisfied with the way it works. In fact, the only real debate about expertise now is whether or not to max it or stop at 1200. You're opening up a can of worms here, and as PVP is all I really do in this game, it makes me VERY nervous. It seems your main goal here is to prop up players in PVE gear, or just poor gear in general, so that they can compete on the same level as players who have spent countless hundreds of hours perfecting their gear set. Reread that sentence. You don't see anything wrong there?