And why should anyone need two or three separate characters of the exact same class for role-playing, PvP, and PvE? I can understand separate characters for healing, damage, and tanking, but just to switch between RP/PvP/PvE? Really? I understand the reason they didn't offer cross-server queues is because they didn't know how to monetize it. But they definitely could monetize character copy.

That would be great, if this PvP hub server were open full time, not just for tournaments. And not just for ranked -- with so many people leaving, even unranked is dead on my server. And it would eliminate any pay-to-be-rich concerns if the transfer were one-way. But a server you could just copy level 55s to for PvP purposes would be awesome.

You're the lunatic. You end the lunacy. There are ways ways around that. E.g. Only copy character + bound items, no credits or unbound items. Or if you're really afraid of people moving stuff around between their alternates via legacy gear (not that I personally think it would be a big deal), only copy character with no items. Maybe a free set of level-appropriate greens just so they don't get one-shot by on-level mobs.

Yes, exactly. Everyone has to make compromises in their build. To be better at one thing you have to be worse at another. Weird builds actually do work, for certain things, which is one of the joys of PvP. Everyone tells you your spec/build is weird/bad, and then you go and do something they all say is impossible, and cackle, mwhahahahaha!

The thread opener stated in his short three-line opening post that he'd already removed the Elite War Hero relics in favor of a matrix cube and some other PvE relic, and right off the bat he gets three posts from two different people telling him he needs to get rid of his Elite War Hero relics. Wow... just... wow. The thread opener obviously has done more homework than certain people seem to give him credit for. To the thread opener, I think your power/crit ratio will depend on your spec/playstyle, but be warned critical will hit the softcap faster than it used to, after which you should probably go with power regardless. With some specs/playstyles, you may not need any critical. This post goes into great detail regarding new softcaps: http://www.swtor.com/community/showthread.php?t=615111 Of particular interest, KeyboardNinja's calculated diminishing return points for some of the stats that may be of interest to you: Crit (from rating) = 1012 Crit (from main stat) = 4088 Surge = 247

What does character copy have to do with game mechanics and balance? Are you in the right thread? Were you perhaps intending to reply to one of the nerf-such-and-such threads and ending up posting in this one instead?

If Bioware isn't going to offer cross-server queues, please offer character copy in addition to character transfer, even if it costs twice as much. I know the programming exists because it is used for copying characters to the public test server. I don't see how it would be overpowered to have the exact same character on two completely separate servers. It's not like you could play them both at once or anything. Sure, I could see how Bioware might want to charge more, to allow people to move a character copy to a new server while also retaining that character on their home server, but I'm sure many people would be willing to pay for that. I don't want to leave my friends on my home server behind, and I do really like the community here. It's a role-playing server, so there's role-playing of course, and the PvP community is nice too. Generally, win or lose, even lose badly, several people on the other side will give you a polite good game. There's a few jerks of course but they mostly stand alone. And I like that General chat isn't routinely littered with lewd comments. Not that I'm saying it is on other servers, as I haven't actually been there, but I haven't heard good things. On the other hand, a number of my friends have left, and I also want to follow them. Plus the PvP queues have been terrible on my home server since a bunch of the serious PvPers left. Regular warzones are now routinely starting with only 6 people even during peak hours, and even if you get a team together for ranked, the main characters of guilds formerly willing to field opposition are by and large gone. Server transfers seem to have divided the community. Maybe I'm wrong, but if you want good PvP *and* good role-playing/community and maybe a bit of ops, and to be with all your old friends, it doesn't seem like you can get it all on one server anymore. And I don't want to pick one or the other. I want it all! And yes, I realize I could just roll out a new character on the PvP server my friends went to and level all over again. And while I may eventually do that, it could take many months assuming I continue playing my main on my home server most of the time, and, quite frankly, people could always do that, and the whole point of server transfers was to spare people the repetition of having to level the exact same class with the exact same storyline yet again.

It's a rock-paper-scissors thing. A good concealment operative can tear a good sawbones scoundrel to shreds before the stun ever ends (if the scoundrel is not receiving guard or heals or other protection from teammates... if they are, obviously, it is not a 1v1). Yes, I could try my cc-break, but given that's a 2-minute cooldown, I generally just eat the death unless an objective is being imminently threatened. Especially since it's often pointless if your resolve bar isn't full yet. Also, some of the less common specs for other classes can do surprisingly well in specific situations, like taking out healers. Another thing to point out is, even if your class / spec / playstyle can't solo kill a good healing scoundrel / operative, they can't kill you either unless they stop healing for a moment. Every heal eats up a global cooldown. If they try to kill you, or even damage you a little, they're nerfing their healing. If they just run around healing themselves, you are in absolutely no danger of dying, at least not from them. And if they do try to do both damage and healing, heals per second goes down, making them easier to kill, plus their damage isn't that great, and even if they're heals aren't running them out of energy, their unspecced damage can. Not saying they can't kill you, especially if they outkite you, but it's not as if they can do tremendous healing and great damage *at the same time*. And not all damage is equal. Some people are putting out 9k hits while others barely tickle. And I'm sorry, but the game should not be balanced so that the latter can take out healers without serious coordination. That would be like saying a scoundrel healer who didn't even know he had instants should be able to heal a whole raid while just spamming his 3 activation/channeled heals while buried deep into enemy lines without using any cooldowns. Gear up, min/max, augment, use stims, experiment with different specs, learn how to use the right skills at the right time. Just because you can't solo a decent scoundrel doesn't mean other people can't.

Solo stand-ins in ranked would not be a bad idea, especially if someone disconnects in the middle of a match. I suppose there could be a box to check if they don't want solo backfills, in case the team is trying fancy tactics like not killing during the Voidstar transition phase and would rather be one short than have someone who might mess that up, but solo back-fills in ranked would not be a bad idea. For that matter, it wouldn't hurt to let a 7-person team use the queue to find a random for the last slot, if they don't mind the unpredictability and just want to get started already. Or even a 5 or 6 person team, for that matter. If soloers were allowed to fill in remaining slots (while still queuing for normal at the same time), ranked might be a lot less dead. And if a soloer just wants the queue to pop as fast as possible, especially in the morning when it can take hours even without dividing up the queue, could they queue for both solo and casual group at the same time? Why not simply a smart matchmaking system that attempts to queue premades versus other premades, with soloers filling the remaining slots, but will still create a pop even if there aren't enough people online to create any such balance? Are there really enough people who would rather the queue not pop at all than be in the same warzone as premades to justify a hard divide rather than a smart matchmaking system that does its best with whomever is online? And if there are enough such people, who are so adamant about not fighting with or against premades that they would rather the queue not pop at all, shouldn't any such "solo-only" queue receive less rewards (just as the current regular queue receives 1/3 less rewards than the ranked queue) than the mixed queue (or, for that matter, solos queued for both mixed and solo-only because they don't care)?

There you go again. If you are asking for premades not to be in your queue, then that means you are also asking for soloers to not fill the remainings slots in the less-than-8 premades. You can't eliminate premades from solo queues without also eliminating solos from premade queues. And if less-than-8 premades can't get 8 versus 8 warzones, then there is no point in their existence, so you are asking for the elimination of less-than-8 premades, deliberately crippling and preventing the people who would be in less-than-8 premades from reaching their full potential. Your problem is not premades. Your problem is your own unwillingness to play to your full potential, and failure to accept responsibility for that choice, causing you to demand that others be crippled, rather than either stepping up your game or accepting your responsibility for choosing not to. It is no different than if you demanded Bioware prevent people from kiting outside ranked warzones just because you can't be bothered to learn how to kite yourself. If other people choose to get together with friends and get on voice, that is none of your business.

The people who are asking for solo queuers to be completely separate from pre-mades are indeed asking for that. The people asking for the matching system to attempt to give one side a pre-made, if the other has one too, if possible without drastically increasing queue times, may not be asking for that, but the people asking for solos never to be mixed with premades, then unless seriously suggesting a 2v4 warzone (2-person pre-made versus 4-person premade) with no soloers filling the other six slots, are indeed asking for the elimination of pre-mades less than 8. And when you say "not being allowed to queue with pugs who want to play solo" (your exact words) you are indeed asking for no soloers to fill the other six slots. As are they people saying they don't want to play with pre-mades, even on their own team. And unless you seriously think a 2v4 actually makes sense, you may as well eliminate all pre-mades less than 8 at that point. Which means, that's exactly what you're trying to do. Either that, or you are seriously failing to explain what exactly you are trying to accomplish.

By erasing the middle ground between "full team of 8" and solo queuing, which includes currently includes everything from duos to 4-person groups, you cripple the would-be duos, 3-person groups, and 4-person groups by converting them to solos. Without voice and the coordination it brings, they are not reaching their full potential and being all they can be. And even if you do this, you still won't get what you want. No doubt, someone will go off, buy a big voice server, and offer everyone on their server/faction access too it, letting people form channels on the fly as they end up in different warzones. And you will still have these unbalanced matches when enough people on the opposing team are on said voice server, if you don't have the same advantage on your side. To really get what you want, you need to make sure everyone has equal access to voice. And that requires in-game voice. It would still be optional to actually use it, of course, but the option would be freely available to everyone without even having to form groups in advance and get on Skype (or whatever), and even if only half the PUG got on it, that would still be as many puggers on voice as there are on a 4-person premade.

There, you see? You aren't stuck with premades. You are free to take your business elsewhere. You have a choice. And if you really want a solo queue... it should be an actual solo queue. As in, 1v1s. Like Obi-wan versus Darth Vader. Then voice or lack thereof doesn't matter because the only other person there is your opponent. Then you won't have a team to worry about coordinating with. But so long as you are queueing for 8v8s and not 1v1s, it's really none of your business how other people coordinate or fail to coordinate.

And none of that makes you the sort of person to engage in any sort of real life violence or criminal activity. Not even remotely. The solution to any imbalance isn't to deliberately cripple anyone. Voice is an effective means of communication, and deliberately not using it even when it is simple to do so is not striving to do your best. It would be like if you learned to kite really well, but deliberately stood still to give they guy to who didn't learn to kite a better chance. Why bother with PvP if you aren't going to at least make the effort to be all you can be? The solution, if anything, is to make obtaining that advantage as simple and easy as possible, or, in other words, built-in voicechat. In games that have built-in voicechat, PUGs routinely wipe guild groups, even when the numbers are equal or the guild groups have greater numbers, because the whole PUG is on one voicechat together (the one built into the game), and the little guilds are on 4 separate voicechats not listening to each other. Naturally, you can't actually get people to use it if they don't want to, or even if they listen, I'm sure they'll want the option to mute individual people, and even if they listen, they might not actually talk, but even in premades, there might just be one person talking, 3 listening, and 4 more not even in the premade. All you can really do is offer people the opportunity, and let them take it or leave it. And as long as Bioware still hasn't implemented in-game voice, you can still work around that by forming your own premades and using one of any number of cheap or free internet voice options out there. (Mumble, Skype, C3, etc.)

Whatever his point of view is, it doesn't give him the right to accuse broad groups of people of being the sort to join gangs, beat up deaf people, and steal people's lunch money. Those accusations are entirely unacceptable, and even if he is only making them due to extreme mental distress as Helig insists, anyone getting that much mental distress from an online game that they have to take it out by accusing random people of being the criminal sort should just stop playing. Sometimes, you have to take the good with the bad, or take neither. If someone's girlfriend says she won't go out with him anymore unless they go to an Italian restaurant instead of a fast food restaurant, is she forcing him to go to an Italian restaurant? No. Yes, she's giving him an ultimatum, but he's not being forced into anything: go to an Italian restaurant together and not fast food, or break up. It's a choice. He can pick either. He can say "But I want to take you to fast restaurants and still be your boyfriend! Stop trying to force me to go to Italian restaurants!" all day, but that's not the choice he is given, and by making such a demand, he is the one attempting to guilt-trip her into a relationship she doesn't want. He can't have his cake and eat it too. You are free to not queue. You are free to queue solo and then exit every time a match isn't going the way you like. You are free to queue solo and then run around deathmatching or pulling silly pranks or camping the one node you do have for defender points after you give up on winning. You are free to make your own premade and get on a voice server so you can have a pre-made versus pre-made. But trying to tell other people how they should queue is none of your business.

Tactic good premades often use against me: * Stun * If I stun-break before I have full resolve, stun again (requires voice to coordinate). Note: Scoundrels/operatives have no cc-immunity aside from resolve. * If I stun-break and immediately disappear before they can re-stun, throw down an AOE or something. Or have their sniper shoot me. * If the initial stun was a short one, just keep chaining them together until the resolve bar is full (if I'm not dead by then, which is unlikely if the final bullet is followed) and then finish with a slow. * Have maybe 5 people whale on me all at once. I will probably be dead before my resolve bar is full unless their damage is just bad. If I'm not and manage to get emergency medpack and all my other cooldowns off just so soon as the stun ends, all they have to do is keep at it a little longer. No one can survive focus fire, nor should they be able to; focus fire is the natural antidote to anything that looks overpowered. It's amazing how fast those "impossible to kill" healers go down with 5 people beating on them all at once.

That may be his point of view, but he's wrong, and it doesn't give him the right to randomly slander large groups of people who did nothing to him that he didn't agree to in the first place, that he had within his capability to withdraw consent from at any time, and which never caused any bodily injury. If PvP is causing him such great mental distress, he doesn't have to participate. For people who want to win all the time, there is PvE. Preferably solo PvE at that. He may as well go to a paintball match and then complain about a whole bunch of people shooting paintballs at him all at once (in a way that is within the rules of the given arena). No one is assaulting him on the street. Winning a competitive sport or other game, within the rules, after your opponent has agreed to the game, is not the same as picking a fight with some poor person minding his own business crossing the street, or else there would be criminal assault charges left and right against football players from other football players. To truly enjoy PvP, you (generic you, not you personally) have to accept that it has it's ups and downs. There are times you will win gloriously, cap every single door in Voidstar personally, not to mention extend the bridge, disable the forcefield, and access the datacore as well, and there are times you will spend most of your time behind a 4-tick door because it takes the enemy team all of 10 seconds to kill you every time you come out. If some people can't take the good with the bad, well, they should probably find another hobby. There's no way to make everyone happy in PvP -- if I deliberately held back to be "nice" to an opponent, my own team would yell at me for not trying my hardest (if they knew), and it's not worth it to even try. With PvP, you can't always get what you want, but you can learn to want (or at least accept) what you get... and if you can't, then PvP isn't for you. Perhaps nobody likes feeling helpless, but you and only you can make yourself feel helpless. Someone who truly enjoys PvP, in such a situation where their team is the one getting obliterated, will just keep on doing their personal best even if the rest of the team has given up, or perhaps, if they are a creative spirit, try some practical joke, like throwing smuggle (shared stealth) over all the defenders sitting at the node gathering defender points, so when a member of the opposing team sees it apparently unguarded and comes over to try to cap it, everyone can ambush them from stealth. Or I've heard of people with pulls, while getting rez-camped, pulling members of the enemy team into the rez to cause insta-death. There are many ways someone who truly enjoys PvP can avoid feeling helpless even while losing. The only person who can truly make someone feel helpless is himself.

If you can always be that understanding when someone is accusing you of being the sort of person to join gangs / beat up deaf people / steal kids' lunch money / do other nasty violent stuff in real life, then you're a saint. Metaphorically speaking.

Not really. Concealment operatives seem to be one of the strongest specs versus sawbones scoundrels. Either that or I just need to spend some time in the scrapper tree to figure out how concealment/scrapper works.

I mean I do not take being kindly to being accused of being the sort of person who joins gangs in real life and steals people's lunch money, and of course, I will respond with extreme sarcasm to any person (not you obviously) who makes such accusations.

"You might need more than 2 people to kill a scoundrel, especially if the scoundrel is receiving cross-heals and/or a guard" is different from saying "scoundrels are impossible to kill". Get 6 people to all attack the same target at the same time, and unless the other team has perhaps 4 healers, it will go down. And if they do have 4 healers, they probably can't kill you very easily either. With regards to stealth, try damage over times (before they stealth) and AOEs (after they stealth). Healing-traited scoundrels get 0 incoming healing while stealthed, so they won't be able to heal through any damage over times without coming out of stealth. And you can use AOEs to kill/find them after they stealth. If that fails, you can also get a gunslinger/sniper to help. Gunslingers/snipers who have been in cover for awhile have superb stealth detection.

Which I never responded to directly, so far as I recall. Responses to different people, who are making different arguments, are not responses to your argument. Now who's making strawman arguments? I just said I'm fairly sure *everyone* would like cross-server queues. If there were cross-server queues, I'm sure many things could be done to improve the match-making system. But there aren't cross-server queues right now. The fact that I don't think they will exist any time in the forseeable future doesn't mean I wouldn't like them, but think that needs to be a priority over messing with the matchmaking system in ways that, without a cross-server queue, might easily result in 3+ hour queues for some people. For that matter, we already have 3+ hour queues frequently in the morning. Really, after waiting 3 or more hours for the queue to pop, I'm happy to face any team, no matter how much stronger they are, and I think most of the morning PvPers on my server feel the same. Getting some semblance of a balanced match should always be secondary to getting the queue to pop, period. You get half-credit for losing badly. A bit more for losing a close match. You get nothing if the queue never pops to begin with.

Well, I think *everyone* would like cross server queues. But until we get that going, some of us already frequently experience queue times of 45 minutes or longer, and do not want queue times increased any more. Also, saying that if one side gets a premade, the other side should too (in a world of cross-server queues where there are actually a broad selection of premades and soloers to choose from) is not the same as saying soloers should never be in the same match as premaders, as certain people in this thread (e.g. TonyDragonflame) are clearly supporting. I could agree with the former (only if there were cross-server queues and priority was given to queue times over perfect matches) but not the latter.

Well, think. Say the 'pubs have a 4-person premade and the imps have a 3-person premade. There are also 5 solo 'pubs and 9 solo imps in the queue. What would you have the queue do? Put the premades in a 4v3 (warzone shutdown...) and the soloers in a 5v8? Or just do what it does now and put the 4 person premade together with 4 of the solo 'pubs on one side and the 3-person premade together with 5 of the solo imps on the other side? Yes, it might be nice if the queue made some sort of effort to get a balanced match instead of straight up first in first out, but at the end, you still need at least enough of the first in first out to ensure people aren't waiting in the queue for hours just for being a damage instead of a healer or tank, as happens in PvE. However, a lot of people (not you personally) are saying premades should only be allowed in ranked, which requires a full 8-person team (you can't go in with a 7-person team even if you want to and don't mind the disadvantage -- the queue won't let you without exactly 8), and generally casting nasty aspersions about characters of people who queue with premades outside of ranked (including one insane person who implied that we are the sort of people who join gangs and steal kid's lunch money in real life). Those sorts of nasty aspersions are what we are replying to when we talk about certain people in this thread being terrible PvPers who are just crying about how unfair it is that they lost. Not you personally.

Hurrah!