Come on man, this is the world famous Crazyambo of Black Vulkars. Shame on you. Nice job, Crazy. <3 Miho

Good riddance to your friends. The class is already over-saturated with FOTM wannabe Palpatine scrubs. The nerf didn't go far enough imo. They should have nerfed the class straight into the ground.

Agreed with OP in regards to deception and madness specs or whatever you fruity Jedi call your specs. It's a shame that a class named an assassin is really incapable of...assassinating unless given the perfect conditions. I'd love to see BW do something in regards to these specs, perhaps give deception some more burst and less proc dependancy, and then perhaps some type of dispell dot protection for Madness builds. I do, however, think Darkness is more than adequate in it's currect state. I'm starting to see a lot more folks jump aboard the nerf darkness bandwagon and for good measure, it's a really effective spec. No need to re-hash all the tools, survivability, and dps you get as darkness....it's enough to earn a spot in ranked imo. I am also worried it maybe nerfed, but I'd don't think it will get hit very hard, maybe just a little dps off the top.

Too easy. <3 Crazyambo....keeping black vulkars real.

Agreed. Sorry OP, you were right about a tank spec being OP'd but it's not the Jugg. Darkness Assassin's got them beat, all the way around. Strong AOE snare? check Heavy armor? Check Guarding and 2 taunts? Check Powerful self heals? Check? 12 second 50% dmg mitigation shield? Check Instant cast 2-3k shocks? Check 4s stun? Check 2s knockdown / stun? Check Force pull? Check 3k+Executes? Check Sprint? Check Force Cloak and Vanish to exit and avoid any fight? Check

Darkness Sin's **** Sorcs. I usually finish a 1v1 with 75% health.

The game engine can't handle the large amounts of players. Why is this a surprise to anyone at this stage?

The best anti-healer class doesn't use stealth. The best anti-healer class in the game is the marauder / sent. Period. The operative / scoundrel has decent burst from stealth. The assassin / shadow has better sustained. Both are fairly squishy. The assassin / shadow in this game is no where near like in other games. You aren't going to stunlock anyone. You don't have prep, shadowdance, garrote, shadowstep, crip poision, etc. BW knew the queque they'd face if they made the stealthies too powerful. They aren't ouright horrible, but they aren't all that effective. Theres a reason you never see nerf Assassin threads, they are a dime a dozen and fairly inneffective, unless tank specced.

There is no fix because the game engine simply can't handle it. 40v40 is never going to happen in this game. Get over it. World PvP is for bads who need a zerg behind them in order to win.

Who are you trying to kid? Your guild is terrible homie.

Take away gear and you take away a vital part of the rpg element. You mind as well take away the leveling process and the skill trees to. Lets just have everyone start with a level 50 character fully geared and leveled. Please. Go play CoD or BF3 or, in a few months, GW2, f you want a level playing field. This is an rpg ffs where the whole process from starting a level 1 noob to developing your character into something far more powerful is the whole point of the game.

That would be nice but the game engine simply isn't able to handle large scale pvp like that. It already struggles to keep up with 20+ players in Ilum.... I couldnt imagine how it would be with a large scale siege...probably something like WaR's first few months. Totally unplayable. Mind as well play a slide show presentation. SWTOR's game engine's a joke and should have been scrapped long ago but that's what happens when a game of this size is in development for 5+ years. There's a reason we have 8v8 cap WZ's that's about as large scale pvp as we're going to see. Those of us in beta know we are lucky to even have that, 8v8 was a slide show for quite some time.

That part is obvious. Xfire users are gamers. Yeah lets not pay any attention and disregard how gamers are spending their time. They saw the same declines in games like Warhammer and AoC which was a correct indicator. How's is this not relevant???

WoW are there really players out there this dense? The point has nothing to do with the current number of Xfire users. The point is how much it has declined from peak numbers from earlier this year. For you short-bussers out there: Looking at Xfire stats....In just two months this game went from having 11,800 players, with 85k hours played, to just under 5k players and 15k hours played.

Interesting. LA Times and others quoted 200 mil. At any rate, they put too much into the voice acting and not enough in the games engine imo. http://herocomplex.latimes.com/2012/01/20/star-wars-the-old-republic-the-story-behind-a-galactic-gamble/#/0

Yeah it's real hilarious isn't it. Pull your head out of the sand ffs. No one in this thread is basing their opinion on falling numbers on forums posts. If you bothered reading an ounce of any of it, you'd see it was based on personal accounts (guilds people are in falling apart, whole servers with clearly declining numbers, friends leaving, etc.) and also a valid sample taken from xfire user numbers. The writing is on the wall. 200 mil was spent on a phenomonal single player rpg and a mediocre, at best, mmo. For many players, there's simply not enough here to justifiy the ongoing subscription, and rightly so. I personally don't care who or what is the next best thing. Only that I know enough that this game is no longer worth the time and effort and $$$.

Yes WoW had it's fair share of issues in the beginning but they weren't game breakers. Most of the issues with WoW were a little more justified simply because of the amount of players it drew in during the beginning and were growth related, not inharent flaws of the games engine and UI. WoW's open world was and never has been instanced. ToR's is yet it still has issues.

WoW may not have had BG's at launch but at least it had a decent, responsive interface, a solid game engine, an open source UI, combat logs, etc. Like others mentioned, WoW's pvp didn't need gimmicks because the game was simply fun to play regardless of environment. I'm a 25+ year PC gaming veteran and it still baffles me that a 200 million dollar game couldn't get the simple fundamentals right. Such a shame. They could fix the gear issues, balance issues, roll out 3 more WZ's, merge servers, fix Ilum, etc. but in the end we're still stuck with a laggy, poorly designed, un-optimized 6 year old game engine and an awful community to boot.

Not sure why some are getting so bent out of shape over this. Why would anyone take it personal and why would any of us want the game to fail? I love Star Wars, I love mmo's, and I love PvP. Apparently these 3 don't all mix well with each other, at least in this point of time. BW got there chance....and failed....and the community has spoken with their wallets as it's always been.

Darn right I'll praise Tera for what I have seen it do right, so far. The combat system is excellent, imo. Fantastic fluid animations, sound effects, and combos make it more engaging then simply clicking buttons and abilities at random through a clunky interface like ToR's. The interface was smooth and responsive and I experienced no lag what-so-ever and this is in the games beta. I got to partake in a little open world pvp between guilds (probably 20v20) and there was no lag and the frames didn't drop. (not surprised as it's using the proven Unreal engine) Haven't experienced first hand what the game offers as far as end game, PvP, BG's, Arena, etc. but I do know they've gotten the simple fundamentals of combat right.

90 players in my guild at peak back in January. We are on a good, solid server. Averaged 25-30 players on any given night / moment. Experienced great PVE / PVP progression. Now we're lucky to have 8 on at any given time. This game is going downhill fast....if you are too blind, lazy, or stupid to see that, you have more problems than SWTOR's population loss. There are simply too many potential amazing games on the horizon. Tera and Gw2. Played Tera's CB2, while not perfect, was thoroughly impressed. Finally played an mmo with a fantastic interface and smoooth, responsive combat system,a dn fantastic graphics and animations post WoW. Imagine that.

The Swiftsure. /thread

Great article indeed. Hopefully developers and future developers take something from it. I remember reading an article a while back from some gaming industry tool that said, all mmo's post WoW have failed because the market simply can't sustain it. Total BS imo and a cop-out for poorly designed games.

The Swiftsure. Best pvp server in swtor.

lol troll is fail The intial attack from stealth would have only taken you down 50% health if you had 10k health and he had a lucky shadow strike crit and proc at the same time (unlikely) as it only has a 30% chance to proc. My well geared shadow usually only crits for 4k tops, and thats pretty rare and needs the proc to do so and it's extremely rare for it to proc first thing out of stealh. That's the only ability (shadow strike) that has a chance to do that much damage out of stealth and it's actually a poor opener choice, as is the 2s stun. If he opened with the stun and then the shadow strike he would be severly forced starved the rest of the fight. Sorry, but if you are losing to shadows, even a well played one, then you are doing something extremely wrong.