Arenas are literally as dead as the worst times of end of s1, end of s2 ranked yes. The 30 min queues to pop with 2 n pcs to keep you company hits the nostalgia vibe just right. What effort, what rewards, they literally switched to the flair model so they don't have to do anything for ranked after what was it, s8 or something... 0 maintenance or support and it was still going for years. And anything that doesn't have the population to support popping 24/7 can be fixed by gating it behind limited time availability - weekends only, or certain hours daily only, etc.

Half a year now and can't fix the css (if the new UI mess is based on what I think it is) of a table

Ping is also considerably more shaky, and desync in PvP feels worse

AP definitely going to be significantly better with these changes. Probably biggest winner. Sniper to some degree as well. For operative healers, I don't think this change really makes sense, that choice remains way too bad to take instead of the flat 5% higher healing. At 3 minutes cooldown, it's useless. Especially considering it kills your energy permanently after that (has to reset Adrenaline Probe cooldown too probably).

This game barely has like 3-4 good players online at a time. They will farm the others.

Weird logic all around. Bad players/noobs/whatever should be losing. Good players should be stomping. That's how PvP works.

What are all these pointless medal changes that nobody asked for? The old system worked great for 10 years.

Excited for Baron Deathmark's helmet 😩

Hey, thanks for the update. There is just one piece of feedback that I think could be useful - class balance shouldn't be dealt with on a big scale once a year (at best). There should be balance fine tunings every patch. As long as class balance is being paid attention to, most of the PVP players will be happy (at least those who play ranked, and I have to give you credit - ranked definitely seems to be more alive than ever, despite the lower population these days, well done with the daily rewards!) I am not very active anymore, I don't tryhard, and just log to play some arenas to chill out when I get extremely tilted in a certain other MOBA game but the state of classes has barely changed from what I remember about a year ago - just that mercs are not so extremely overpowered anymore. Either way, balancing definitely could use more frequent (although smaller) tweaks. Bonus points (but I know this would take some significant developer time and attention unless you already have something like that and you just need to rework it to be publicly available) - an API for stats and "match history". It would be incredibly useful if match data for ranked gets stored and if we had an API where we could access it. I personally would love to develop some stat web app, and just play around with the data, to see what tools we could build for players. And ultimately, an API like that would be useful to monitor class performance and aid balancing.

Tldr kids don't bring operative healers into PvP.

This "On Fire" thing definitely doesn't even have a "top 3" ring to it. Additionally, all titles that come after the name seem pretty lame. The Eternal, Dread, etc titles were all pretty good, "On fire" is a surprising downgrade. The class name should be in there at the very least.

Option 3 is the best. It allows for some (even if somewhat small) gear progression, while still making it viable to PvP without a huge grind - similar to the last iteration of PvP gear. Tier 1 was really cheap and easy to get, most people instantly had Tier 1 gear when they hit max level. Tier 2 required some grinding, but it was fine, the difference was not substantial. Just another thing that a tryhard would grind to optimize.

Wow, I lived to see sorc heals gutted. I expect them to nerf the other healers too, however. Looking at these nerfs, they are just way too brutal to be sorc only, I'm pretty sure operative healing will be hit too. Potentially merc too, if they want to reduce healing all around.

Bring 2.4 back.

Bugfixes are a good thing, even if they indirectly nerf a class I like to play. Because they are an unintended advantage. The operative insta heal is hopefully fixed, too, so we are back to square one, and hopefully it will be just mercs and snipers until Bioware get the idea that they maybe shouldn't wait until the next expansion to remove some dcds from mercs.

The best peel that is almost never seen nowadays (well, even in previous seasons, it was basically only 2k+ players or in general good team ranked players doing that) - cleansing. A sorc/operative/merc, I don't care if DPS or heal spec, should basically use his cleanse on cooldown. Best usage would be to cleanse stun/mezz, but cleansing even a debuff is massively beneficial. There is no excuse to not do it. Take the time to learn what your class can cleanse (force, tech, whatever), it is going to help you become a much better player.

That awkward moment when you wait 2 months... and get title for the wrong class. Well, who would have thought, Eternal Sage it is!

If it looks like a bug, behaves like a bug, it is a damn bug. Otherwise, if it was intended, it would heal to full when you had one/two stacks of Kolto Probes too. Operative is very good in solo ranked. Just like skank heal dps sorcs back in the day.

The number of hackers is less than 0.01%. That would be the percentage of tech literate people, at best. And of them, a much, much, much smaller group hack. Essentially it has always been a certain few people (like JZ, and his "predecessors" ) & like a dozen of their fanboys. A widespread thing that could be considered "hacking" (but isn't) are the various types of botting that used to occur in the past (the pve spaceship quests, chests, slot machines, etc)

Operative heal is amazing fun. Also in regs you don't even have to care much, it's more than good there; I feel like it is superior to sorcs, simply because in regs you can shine with your better sustained healing. Also, most of the time you won't die unless you decide you are fine with dying. Ultimately, I feel like the best combination would be to have one of each (oper and sorc), of course, one to handle burst and "preventive" healing, the other one to just keep everyone at decent high hp. Kind of like in the old days. In arenas it is alright but it does definitely feel at a disadvantage compared to sorcs. Burst healing is next to impossible if you have some annoying person on top of yourself spamming interrupts. Even the bug doesn't help much, since you will more often than not keep HoTs up on everyone anyway. It takes a lot of effort to match the burst healing that sorcs can do, trying to keep a tunneled sin without guard alive yesterday probably shortened my estimated lifespan by a few years It is definitely quite a bit better than it was the last couple of seasons though, so it is something.

A good start would be fixing the bugged Countermeasures + Kolto Probe combo. Or making it healer only, if a 50%+ hp burst heal is intended. I do not think offhealing is too overpowered, aside from that. Maybe Lethality is healing well with the new utility, but nobody plays that spec, and it compensates by being squishy and useless for anything else in arenas. Either way, I believe off-healing is not as strong as skank sage healer times, or just 4.0 with the dps sorc healing in general. It's been worse, and we are kind of used to it at this point. Still, bug fix needed. EDIT: Also, what is this "healers don't reset fights" or whatever argument? Here, simple version for people who have difficulty reading: Person is tunneled. He is low. No more dcds, no more medpacks. A wild dps operative appears, pops countermeasures and kolto probe, bam low hp person is now 60%+ hp and can easily keep fighting or try to kite around for some time. His defensive cooldowns are back up, he goes balls deep again. Also, trust me, dps sorcs can also do very high hps. Just use bubbles and the HoT properly. If things go bad and you are not focused, move to a good position, pull the targeted player, then bubble+hot+2 casted heals on him and you essentially reset the fight. Why are people who have probably never played an arena in their whole life OR haven't played in any elo over 1200 even arguing about balance and relative strength of things? EDIT 2: In the thread - full of people who also do not understand how taunt works, holy sht.... Pro-tip: It doesn't work like in PvE.

"Teammates hold me down"

They were not. Especially combined with bubblestun. There is a reason why most 8v8 ranked teams had to do "gentleman's agreements" regarding allowed number of smash maras on each team. Balance in this game has always been wonky. I would say around 2.4 (I'm not sure if that was the patch when smash got gutted or the one before it) it was at a decent spot. Or, heck, even right before 5.0, after some nerfs to sorcs. Now is definitely not the most 'broken' time. "Stun-locking operatives" , a bit after release braindead spam tracer mercs, smash & bubblestun, dotspread madness in 3.0, sorc skank heals, dps tanks recenly, etc etc the list goes on. Mercs now are cancer indeed, but mostly because they require coordination and target swaps, which are not very straightforward to pull off with randoms.

Can we stop it with the requirements ******** already? We don't need gear requirements, we don't need valor requirements, we barely require a bloody level requirement only because you don't have all your abilities otherwise. People should just "git gud", and realize that you can't usually achieve 100% winrate because that's not how it should work. Climbing in ranked is about consistency, and statistically the enemy team is even more likely to get bads/trolls than your team is (because you are the one constant in your matches). I mean, if anything, you should be happy if you have higher than 50% winrate, because (if rating gains/losses worked properly...) that would mean that you are climbing. Actually, the fact that most decent arena players can get 80%+ winrates shows that it is easier to climb in this game than in most others...

The Russian hackers ruined ranked!