I was cautiously excited for a PvP rework / revamp when it first got announced. Surely after such a disappointing launch with 7.0, lessons would have been learned right? Nope. This PvP update has been a complete and utter failure in my opinion. Not only has it ostrocised and flat out removed the ranked community, but it has also beaten down the casual PvP community with an oppressively poorly tuned medals system. Further, nothing has been done about the abysmal state of class balancing within PvP or the horrific desyncing issues - which is made even more noticeable by just how stupidly punishing the medal system is. If you want to play a combat style with poor defensives, you don't get to experience the game due to massively overtuned burst damage in PvP. (playing as corruption sorcerer feels like I might as well just not play PvP, 8 seconds of invulnerability while I can't do anything once per 2-3minutes does nothing for me when it takes a few GCDs to die in more extreme circumstances) If you want to play a DoT class, you might never get the big crit damage medal - one of 2 that I've seen for damage players. Most medals from before 7.2 have been removed, yet we still need 8 to get full rewards. This makes no sense whatsoever. Lets look at a match I just played as a Corruption Sorcerer on Quesh Huttball. I healed non stop from start to finish, assisted in a few kills, interacted with the ball holder on both teams, I even picked up the huttball. I got 2 medals: Did I get a medal for picking up the ball? No. Did I get a medal for attacking or defending the ball carrier? No. Did I get a medal when my largest heal was a 55k crit? No. Did I get anything for hitting 5 million healing? No. And it goes on and on. Whereas previously you could easily get your 8 points - one for attacking, one for defending, one for a normal crit, two for doing enough damage or heals or protection, one or two more for kills etc... Now you get one for a much harder to achieve crit for many combat styles, one for damage, one for enough attacking points, one for enough defender....and yeah that's 4. We simply are not being rewarded for the time spent in warzones anymore. This game is a time commitment, and the devs are not respecting our time. This is made even more apparent by the fact that the devs for some reason beyond mortal comprehension think that the Decorated Combatant GS weekly should still require 45 medals to be earned, and think that 8 medals is how many we should need to get full rewards. If we are now getting between 2-5 medals on average compared to the 8-13 we used to be getting, reason would suggest that we should only need 4 medals for full rewards, and at maximum 25 medals for the weekly. These weeklies are supposed to take an hour each. It is near impossible for the average player to consistently get anywhere near 8 medals. That game I mentioned earlier? There was only one player who hit the 8 medal mark. ONE. Out of SIXTEEN. TLDR Combat style balancing is still awful in PvP. The medal system is inconsiderate towards 94% of the playerbase. Steps needed to fix this: Balance PvP separately to PvE or put more work into compressing the amount of burst damage in the game. Normalise damage between combat styles and normalise defensives. (It has taken an entire year for Fury to be brought down, yet marksmanship is still at rock bottom.) For medals; We need more medals back into the game, bring back kill medals for a start Reduce the stupidly high requirements on big heals, big damage and objective interaction (clicking an objective in one map grants points, but not in another??) If the above aren't done, fully halve the medal requirements necessary to achieve full rewards and complete the Galactic Season weekly. If not, I really don't give a damn about the fancy new PvP season track, it's simply not worth wasting my time on when the thing that actually needed a proper rework, the PvP matches themselves, have been left in such a poor and unfinished state. This wasn't a PvP rework or revamp, it merely attempted to direct attention away from poor balancing towards shiny new toys and systems. It can be fixed, but only if the devs listen.

Any chance we could get another dev post by Chris or someone else on the balance team about any changes that have been made based on feedback? It would also be great to get a post going back over how the team actually balances combat styles because no one I've talked to thinks that combat styles like virulence or lightning needed nerfing, while everyone talks about marksmanship as if it's a joke and it still hasn't received any meaningful changes. (Polarizing still only buffs innervate heals for a measly 3% during polarity shift and it haunts my dreams)

Beyond the initial culture shock, so far so good. Though it lacks some of the uniqueness attributed to older game ui design, it definitely seems smoother and less clunky while retaining a similar feel. A couple issues from a UX perspective are with navigation context. The top navigation bar (Game - News - Store - Forums - Support) which could do with offering better indication that you are hovering over a non active item. I.E hovering over Game should partially fill in the little circle underneath it and dim the text colour as well as the current cursor change. Same goes for the headers for each subforum. Hovering over the sub-sub-forum bits causes them to glow blue, whereas hovering the actual headers (New Player Help, General Discussion, Combat Styles etc) only shows a cursor change. Having additional context as to what is currently being hovered is more important specifically for these two (amongst others like hovering player names) because they are some of the key ways to navigate to larger blocks of content and will help the site achieve it's goal of modernisation. Just a couple small things that I haven't seen mentioned yet and I don't know if there are changes planned for these already in Phase 2!

I don't know if having the winning story become canon should be a thing, but having more community contests (screenshot, story etc) would be pretty neat. The devs have their own views and ideas about how things should pan out. Leaving some things intentionally vague allows everyone to have their own headcanon - especially for romance-centric fanfic. It would be cool if the devs took inspiration from new concepts introduced through fanfic (where they make sense), though that shouldn't be the focus imo. Personally I'd love to see some stories about player's own characters, whether it be following an in-game event or something that happens between the in-game stories.

There are a few solutions I can think of right now. Solution 1 Add a group finder variant of Esselles and Black Talon that doesn't have any conversations in it. Problem solved. Solution 2 Alternatively, set up an internal 4 player team / conscript some community groups to run through every flashpoint WITHOUT skipping any cutscenes. Could have one "noob" group, one intermediate and one higher level for e.g. Play out the flashpoints as they are supposed to be played without skipping any of the cutscenes and time how long it takes to complete. Oh, this flashpoint takes 50% longer because cutscenes? Add 50% extra rewards to it. The new player team is struggling on X boss and that makes it take longer? Nerf the damage or add a screen indicator that tells the player what to do. The issue with the above is that they don't address the primary issue with flashpoints. You get groups where high skill min max players are paired with (primarily) solo story content players who want to sit through everything and don't know the min max routes. Solution 3 Add a group finder toggle - story mode or rush mode. If you sign up for story, you sign up for sitting through cutscenes and maybe even doing bonus missions and killing every mob you see because you don't care about time. If you sign up for rush, you will be expected to skip everything and play more optimally. Perhaps the above suggested variant with no conversations could be available in this rush mode. This does split the pool of players queuing for flashpoints, but at least you will know whether you will be allowed to watch a cutscene or not when you join. If the queue times get too long, add that solo mode combat droid as a summon to fill in the gaps.

Basically getting the old tactical back is perfect and not having it mess around with slow effects is great. I do still really really want to see Madness's core issue be addressed however - the fact that the basic rotation requires you to refresh your dots before they've fully expired. Madness has a really wonky rotation where you need to cut off force lightning and refresh both dots early, something that has been an issue for years now. This could be fixed by having certain abilities refresh each dot separately or refresh with death field, or play around with their dutations and cooldowns of other abilities. On the subject of Sorcecers, I can't help but notice no changes to the Polarizing morph for Corruption yet... Nice to see this, don't know if it will be enough if the intent is to keep hatred's dps the same as when saber strike was being used exclusively. Something I just thought of is that it could maybe be interesting to see leeching strike refresh creeping terror (and auto proc it?). This would free up one gcd per rotation to be used on a damage ability which would help split the difference between the current and new rotation that reintroduces thrash.

Operative / Scoundrel General: Evasion/Dodge changes are nice, but it has the same issue as sniper/gunslinger where practically all their defensives and threat reductions are on the same ability and still have worse defensives than every other melee combat style Medicine / Sawbones: Kolto burst nerf was needed but as I said in my previous post, I think it should be tied into kolto waves to make it more interesting to play Nano Mark change might not be needed if the kolto burst changes go through, I'd rather see the other healers get buffed than the top healer be nerfed due to how difficult harder group content is right now. Reactive Substances healing for less than a tick of kolto waves makes it seem rather weak even if it can be stacked twice. Personally I'd really like a morph that lets you use kolto injection while moving (you give up kolto burst and don't gain healing so it wouldn't be OP imo), or maybe something that procs and refreshes kolto probe. Concealment / Scrapper: I'm just going to say that I don't think this combat style needed nerfing at all. It's fine as it is while also having some poor defensives outside of god roll. Acid Lash nerf should be reverted Crippling slice lifesteal seems like it will be mostly irrelevant if it's not 100% lifesteal Tactical Critical buff is nice Sniper / Gunslinger Marksmanship / Sharpshooter: I will still likely never use Target Acquired / Illegal mods, it just doesn't do enough compared for an ability on such a long cooldown. Personally I think it should be combined with Laze Target / Smuggler's Luck and replaced with a new ABC passive Lazer Focus change isn't going to be enough alone to bring Marksmanship up from it's low sustain position Maybe agitating energies needs a more significant damage buff to help sustain? I worry that buffing too many of its base abilities would just result in it having far too high burst Mercenary / Commando Bodyguard / Combat Medic: The Merc AoE morph needs buffing, I think healing scan should straight up heal two targets without needing the silly puddle. If it's too much, make the second target receive 50% of the healing Rest of the changes are nice, though I really do still want to see a morph that allows you to refresh Kolto Shell without needing to reapply it. It feels really bad reapplying it mid fight, so having a way to refresh it with idk, rapid scan or refresh one charge with each use of kolto shot, would be great No buffs to Arsenal or IO seems strange considering that they are still both underperforming a bit. I did really like the changes to both of them last patch but they need a little extra imo. Arsenal needs buffs that aren't just to crit damage. At the very least I'd give heatseeking missile an auto crit so that it always feels impactful to use - same as energy burst currently works for AP. Powertech / Vanguard Advanced Prototype: Very large amount of nerfs here, maybe too much we'll see The new tactical seems interesting rather than just being a "more damage" tactical Pyrotech / Plasmatech: Small nerfs seem fine, I still want a better way to spread incendiary missile (i.e. with flame sweep) Sorcerer / Sage Corruption / Seer: (I may be slightly biased here) Small buffs are great, though my main issues still haven't been addressed - those being a lack of force regen, AoE healing and POLARIZING IS STILL GARBAGE Corrupted Bastion change still doesn't feel good enough even at 15%. I'd buff the numbers even further and cause your next dark heal, rally or infusion to cost 0 force to make it your "sustained burst" option Dark resurgence should affect 8 players like it did on the pts before 7.0 released, that or rework it so that innervate chain heals between up to 4 targets because Sorc mass AoE aint great. Now for the thing I've complained about for literally a year at this point: POLARIZING IS STILL GARBAGE A measly 3% buff to an ability once every couple minutes will NEVER be considered over Dark Resurgence or Corrupted Bastion and I cannot believe it still has not been buffed or reworked. If you want it to stay as a morph that only works during polarity shift, increase the healing buff and cause innervate to be free and auto crit for the duration of polarity shift. What does this do? It means if you have tanked your force because of a burst window, you can pop polarity shift to not only guarantee you restack force surge, but also immediately start regenerating force and be able to emergency heal a single target. (I'm just really really annoyed it's been a year and it still hasn't been changed ) Madness / Balance: New tactical is awful because of the slow but it sounds like that is already being addressed. Slows do not affect such a large quantity of PvE enemies in high level content that it's not worth bothering with it. In PvP, there are already so many slows that it's just annoying. Bring back the old tactical that causes Demolish to hit every target affected by a deathmark. Simple as that. Disintegration buff is neat (so long as it's alongside what disintegration currently does) I'm assuming "Force Horrors" is just buffing the second part of Disintegration which is great More force lightning damage is more lightning ! Interesting that Tempest of Rho was causing more procs than it should have, guessing that's the reason for the above buffs so this patch seems like a bit of a sidegrade for Madness when really it could do with keeping the buffs AND that "incorrect" application of Tempest of Rho. Lightning / Telekinesis: I don't know why this combat style is being nerfed so much Looks like halted offensive might never be used again but we'll see. It was nice being able to use chain lightning more often for a while Assassin / Shadow Deception / Infiltration: Making awakened flame more viable for sustain is nice There is still a massive bug or issue with Deception for Voltaic Engine. If you use lacerate after building your voltage stacks with voltaic slash, your crit bonus gets removed until you use voltaic slash again. This means you cannot effectively use your AoE abilities mid fight. I still don't know if this is intended behaviour or not Severing slash is still NEVER going to be taken by me and here is why: Severing Slash cannot be taken by a DPS Assassin for one simple reason. Force Shroud for some ungodly reason is not a baseline ability. Assassins have 1 defensive ability without Force Shroud and it's on a 2 minute cooldown that doesn't affect tech or force attacks. (Sure you could count force cloak as one if you want too) How would I fix this? Simple! I would add Force Shroud baseline to all Assassins. Then, I would add Spike as the high level option for DPS Assassins to replace it (also buff it to be usable outside of stealth). Is this too much CC? Nope, because that PvP rework is coming and the devs will definitely be reworking resolve and "stun wars" right?! This opens up Assassins of every kind to take severing slash - though I'd also increase its base damage by at least 50% if not even doubling it as right now it only does about 50% more damage than lacerate while also being a CONE ATTACK on a 12 second cooldown. Finally, it means we get to use spike again! It's such a cool ability and I miss it. Hatred / Serenity: The nerf to Two Time Trouble is massive but I understand why it's being done. I'll be sad to see it go though. I'd increase the rate that it procs for non assassinate melee attacks from 50% to idk, 65-75% or something to compensate. This would encourage you to use thrash as intended while also retaining similar damage levels. Whoever thought to increase the amount of force restored by Fulguration from 3 to 5, thank you. This is an amazing example of a compensation buff in return for nerfing Two Time Trouble. Using thrash more will tank force regen, and this helps a little with that. Pervasive Death buff is great! Hungering Force buff is also neat As mentioned for deception, I will never take Severing Slash so long as it shares a row with Force Shroud. Replace Force Shroud with Spike or something else and buff Severing Slash, then we'll talk. Finally, Darkness / Kinetic Combat: Roots and slows are meaningless in PvP, though I see this has already been reverted. A different change would be for Severing Slash to generate twice as much threat and reduce the cooldown of mass mind control for each target hit. This would allow you to much more easily maintain threat levels on large groups of targets - even better than you already can while allowing the current damage reduction buff to be filtered into the rest of the combat style. Took a while but we got there. I'm really glad to see that we're finally getting some more consistent balancing and responses from the devs within the same thread!!! If there is one thing to take away from all that text; for the love of the force, buff Polarizing for Corruption Sorcerers.

I was actually just thinking that having kolto burst interact with kolto waves would be an interesting way of balancing out their AOE while also removing some of the spamminess of it. Sorcerers currently have a morph for chain lightning where the first tick of force storm procs a burst of damage. Kolto burst could similarly provide a buff on nearby allies that gets procced by the first tick of kolto waves for an extra bit of healing (or a flat buff to the whole channel). This effect could stack a couple of times and/or be on a rate limit to encourage using other abilities while you wait for kolto waves to come back up. Essentially, power would be shifted from kolto burst spam into buffing and using kolto waves more often as the strongest AoE option. My main concern is that operative AoE healing is seen as one of the only ways to clear hard group content, which means any nerf or adjustment to their healing will need to be met by buffs to Mercenary and Sorcerer and/or nerfs to some harder content's damage. I'd rather see Merc and Sorc receive larger buffs than see Operatives get gutted and I don't think they've received appropriate buffs just yet. I'll have to make another post going over my thoughts on all the other things / what I think would be good for the combat styles.

Mid summer is supposed to be June 24th, so basically any time between now and August 31st in Bioware time. That being said, 7.1 is already on a several month long delay and we haven't had any new content or a dev livestream talking about the large quantity of promised content we were supposed to be getting throughout the non-existent 10th year celebration, so who knows at this point. Can't wait for 7.2's PvP update early 2023 with the 11 year anniversary celebration!

The devs themselves made a post ages ago explaining how they balanced ranged, melee, burst and sustain combat styles. Burst and ranged should both be lower in general than sustain and melee - not every spec should be the same. However, some specs are vastly over or underperforming even using those dev defined metrics.

Straight up, it's never going to happen. The community wants it. The devs supposedly want it, but with what money? If it was ever going to happen it would have happened back in the first expansion. Considering that the most recent "expansion" had less voice acting, less cutscenes and less anything than a single class storyline on a single original 1-50 planet and took a year or so to make.... I'm willing to be proven wrong and want to be proven wrong, but I have lost practically all my remaining respect and faith in the dev team after 7.0.

I really want to see the old PvP gear like the Battlemaster sets come back in some form.

Sure there is absolutely value in having interesting legendary implants and tacticals, but when those tacticals result in a combat style severely underperforming compared to combat styles with 5% buffs.... We've had a tonne of tacticals since the very start of 6.0 that are completely and utterly beyond garbage. Useless in every single capacity, useless even in the niche scenarios they are built for. Have they been changed? Nope. Will they ever be used beyond troll/meme builds? Nope. We were promised more frequent balancing in 7.0 because combat styles allow the devs to more quickly adjust combat styles. So far we are still waiting on the first balance pass and it's already nowhere near good enough. Moreover, it's bringing back some useless tacticals that will never see use. The numbers don't have to be exactly the same for every combat style, but the end result needs to be a balanced spread of combat styles - which is not what we have right now.

Happy 10th anniversary. Maybe the year long celebration is scheduled for 2023.

The numbers are completely pointless, have no relevance on gameplay and their only purpose is to add an extra button click and scroll to see the actual important numbers such as alacrity, crit and accuracy values. It's simply poor UX.

Once again, players make better balancing decisions than the devs. Most of this makes sense therefore it will likely not be considered, thought I'd love to be proven wrong. Mercs were kind of silly in 6.0 with just how much they could do and were one of the only classes that really needed abilities to be removed. However, the devs went half way and for some stupid reason kept garbage abilities like sticky dart and stealth scan in the ability tree rather than developing actually useful ability morphs such as those created in this post. Arsenal relies far too heavily on random damage via crit chance and IO simply doesn't do enough damage with its DoTs considering it is a sustained damage DoT combat style. Higher base damage on tracer missiles sounds great, auto critting with heat seeker missiles should honestly just be a default thing like AP gets with energy burst. It's supposed to be a burst spec, let its abilities actually deal burst damage. I really like the idea of IO proccing its DoTs when combustible gas is refreshed similarly to cull - would be interesting to see a variant where unload procs the DoTs to keep it more consistent.

I was actually doing a story mode ops yesterday with a few newer players in the group who didn't know that you're supposed to group up, so I actually got to use my other abilities more Something definitely needs to change, but I'm hesitant to say "just nerf operative" because harder content is already far too difficult for most players even with operative healing. Further, I know for a blatant fact that if operatives get nerfed, the devs won't pay attention and readjust for many many months if they go too far. I'm pretty sure one of the sorc healing morphs that I have complained on the forums about for nearly a year at this point (early 7.0 PTS testing) is still unchanged and NEVER taken. As such I'd much prefer the other two specs receive more substantial buffs and a short time limit to the effectiveness of kolto burst spamming + incentive to use the operative's other abilities.

Part of the issue is that Sorc's AoE spread got nerfed from the original PTS to live for some reason, and the Mercenary's AoE equivalent is locked to an ability with a cooldown which drops a puddle that one other player has to actively walk into. Another problem is that the operative's level of healing is straight up necessary in some forms of content. The one balancing factor is that you do need to be in melee range and stand still for 1.5-2 seconds for most of the casts. One solution could be to add a rate limit to kolto injection's AoE heal. The other option is to buff the other 2 healer disciplines to reach similar levels of healing. The best solution imo is a combination of both solutions: Operative receives a rate limit to kolto burst of a few seconds / 2-3 gcds. This forces operative players to use their other AoE abilities and also gives more incentive to using kolto probes - which I honestly barely bother to maintain 100% of the time at the moment. For Sorcerer, a buff could come in the form of allowing resurgence to spread to 8 players again instead of 4 and maybe a buff to revivification. Rally could also be buffed to heal up to 4 targets rather than 2. This would be less than the operative's 8, but with the benefit of being able to be used at range instead of needing to be within 8 of all targets. For Mercenary, the healing puddle gimmick was interesting in theory, but in practice is just way too impractical. Having Healing Scan affect multiple targets (2-4?) with a morph is the obvious solution - and it even has it's own rate limit due to healing scan having a cooldown outside of it's burst window. Healing scan is a stronger heal than both kolto injection and dark infusion, and retains the Merc's identity as the best limited target burst healer. With these buffs, Operative would be the strongest melee range AoE healer (though adding a rate limit of a few seconds would still be good). Operatives would also be incentivised to use more of their healing arsenal when playing. Sorcerer would be a bit worse but with AoE usable at range and might not even need a rate limit. Mercenary would have the best burst AoE healing and since it already has a rate limit and frankly garbage ability morphs compared to both other healers, it has the most room for buffing imo.

This would actually be pretty great. You'd have the choice between living out your altaholic dreams or going all in on one or two of your favourite characters and not feel like you're missing out for doing one or the other. You shouldn't be punished for wanting to split your time in a different way to get your conquest points.

The change is a step in the right direction but not enough. It needs to feed back into the rotation How about something like this: Cooldown of death from above is reduced by 20 seconds. Targets hit by death from above are "marked for death" (get it? cus death from above?). Your next tracer missile is free and hits all marked targets around your primary target for 100% damage. This gives the tactical a great deal of AoE power in it's own right, which Arsenal is lacking. By making your next tracer missile free, it allows for a degree of resource management. You can then choose to either go further into AoE specialization by taking the existing ability morph for heatseeking missiles or set up those targets for your single target rotational abilities which do more damage vs targets with a tracer missile's mark.

The legendary implants absolutely are incredibly lazy, not just for assassin - but assassin has some of the worst and most lazy by far. You don't sound like a douche at all, you're simply voicing an opinion shared by the rest of the playerbase. The best in slot legendary implant for assassins is actually the Force Training Package which gives an amazingly interesting bonus of +3% melee and force damage!! Truly incredible. At least it's there I guess. (Oh what's that? The tank legendary implant is also just a flat +3% bonus to damage reduction???) The other implant you should be taking is the Dynamic Force Package for -15s cooldown to recklessness. This combined with the new passive effect for hatred which reduces recklessness's cooldown on dot crits + recklessness generating death field charges gives a slight dps increase. So yeah. Assassins need better legendary implants that actually do something interesting. Bonus points if each spec has a tailored implant for them rather than a set bonus that is twice as effective on one spec.

Honestly I've really enjoyed GS2. It's been much better than GS1 and is the main reason I've still been playing the game. I do agree that some of the weeklies take abnormally long times to complete compared to others and the time commitment is not reflected in the amount of points you get for it. However, I simply skipped some missions that I didn't care to do that week and was still able to complete the track with time to spare despite starting late and being f2p for all but one week. It would be nice if there were more solo orientated objectives, like guaranteeing that one max point mission per week is to complete 1 or 2 weeklies (either heroics or a daily area). On the point of x8 flashpoints, it's actually only 2 if you do the ones in the list and they usually include at least one that is doable solo with the combat droid such as Korriban Incursion or Blood Hunt.

If paying for an expansion got me something that lasts as long as a ff14 expansion sure. At least 2 flashpoints, 1-2 new operations, 2 planets, 10+ hours of story content, level increase, crafting increase etc. If paying for an expansion means a 1-2 hour major story update which has no conclusion, no ops, annoying new characters who immediately die, a broken flashpoint and a general downgrade to the game such as 7.0 - then no.

I made a big post about this last year when it was first mentioned in an interview in the run up to 7.0 so it's actually really old news at this point. Since then we've heard nothing about it. I for one can't wait to see a new combat style, but the dev team has made me cynical enough to not expect one for at least another year, if not two. We haven't seen a single piece of new content since 7.0 released and we're halfway through the "YEARLONG 10TH ANNIVERSARY CELEBRATION". Sure there is the daily area and an op with 4 bosses rather than the standard 5, but they should have been there at launch. It's looking like the PvP update isn't even going to come out this year... Only reason I'm subbed rn is to collect all my GS2 items, it's literally the only thing that's kept me playing. Personally I want to see a melee tech character who uses a vibrosword/techblade and wrist launcher.

You forgot to mention what server you are on