this is correct and no matter how good or bad wildstar is, it is an objective fact that some of the core figure of what was the pvp community in this game left quite a while a go, and each day there are less. The main issue is actually not wildstar or anything, it is this game, which in all fairness is a good game, but i does not offer any serious perspective for competitive pvp anymore. And with each player that leaves it gets worse, and yes those people dont care whether it is star wars. star wars is a great franchise and they did a lot of stuff really good in this game, but that alone doesnt keep a pvp minded person forever, if there is no competitive scene and no chance to play the game modes he/she likes. WS maybe be cartonish (actually if pay attention closely, guess what this game is well), the bot and gear issue is annoying as hell, but there still is the perspective of good pvp and a competitive scene. If wildstar ultimiately fails, these people will no come back here, they mentally have given up on this game quite a while ago actually and just played it to pass the time.

tbf a sniper can just roll through it without taking damage, and operative are have a not too bad chance of doing the same.

Reminds me of that

with the weapon damage increase and you not fully pvp geared (or even worse i old pvp gear ... pre partisan), getting 100-0 in 3s is not completely impossible. Also depends there could have been more attackers which you maybe didnt pay attention to. The rest sounds more suspicious, but i actually just could be bugs, like the classic getting flashbanged through shroud or evasion not cleansing stuff. Awe sometimes has a weird delay, so that it doesnt apply quickly enough and people are out off range for that. Also there is the possibilty that somebody just broke it or it got cleansed (unlikely with the current skill level in game). Force stasis can be interrupted so that can be a reason. About the damage not taken thingy. well server lag and stuff, might be that it only applied later on or something. There could have been genuine cheating of course but in a lot cases it is things like that. Would be good if you had some proof like a video or something. Sentinel vs. Sniper is a tough one, since they are basically your hard counter and you already described how such encounters usually end up. 1v1 is tough, but what I did with a shadow friend a while ago was baiting, playing bait for the sniper, while the shadow opens once he opens and breaks cover, you can go in and finish him off. But i guess you are more interested in the more 1v1 situation. In the open, you have like no chance if he is halfway decent, you need LoS. If you are playing combat, camo is a root breaker, but dont use it as an intial gap closer, only after you have been knocked back. what you have to tried, is a best as possible to sneak up, let them knock back you and camo back and just hope you have enough burst to finish them before they can do something against you. With awe and and force stasis you can get them out of cover and consider buying grenades as well, if they are out of cover and have already used their knockback you can leap. Focus has a little bit of an easier go, since the second leap ignores cover and breaks roots so both leg shot and the knock back can be overcome. Especially against MM Snipers (but against the others as well to a degree) Pacify is really good, if you are in range use it when they cast aimed shot or when your HP is in execute range, so two of their hardest hitting abilities get their damage reduced massively. Transcendence can be useful as well to close the gap, it leg shot (15s) and the knockback (30s) are on CD. Also if you get full resolve break you should break mezzes and stuns against a sniper (although a good one wont fill yours up unless in very objective based situations). So basics are, try to LoS them as much as possible, get the knockback and leg shot out of the way, neutralize their hard hitter if possible, camo, pacify and transcendence are your friends and them out of cover.

on mate, do you remember BW main argument for removing 8v8 ranked? not enough people doing it. last summer more teams were rolling 8v8 than they are doing 4s now. I find that ironically funny. And heck WS is far from perfect, in fact i am even a bit annoyed by it, but swtor pvp just became unbearable, despite me actually likeing the game.

With smash being gone as the monster AoE you can safely stack up and spam AoE around you. If you spot stealther at the beginning, tell your team that they probably gonna open on you. If more then stealth dps is on you you need serious peel (well unless they are absolutel terrible), if you don't get them there isnt much you can do. Stacking up and AoE spam help against concealment operative since they dont wanna miss their opener. Assassins is a bit of diffferent story, but it makes it a lot harder for them. If your team pays attention there is no major advantage of having mulitple stealth dps, if they don't it is not entirely your fault if you get ganked.

And dont break low slash either Also if an assassin opens on you recklessness up in yolo or reg, pop CDs or it will be over soon.

Are they doing something like this guys http://www.twitch.tv/roudyzor/b/526451684 Ok that is how arenas are actually meant to be played, hard switches require CC, otherwise you can really kill anything.

plz, dont fool yourself, last summer your server tofn became the european pvp hub, with almost every serious pvp guild moving there. not even half a year later most of these guilds don't exist anymore and the players a nowhere to be found (no not even on other servers), and this has absolutely nothing to do with wildstar. It is alright, you still get your pops and if you enjoy the game it is fine, yet the fact is many veteran players have already left the game for good and wildstar in this context is not the reason but just something else to play. And all this isn't really about regular wzs, they will always pop, it pvers needing their brutalizer relics or just passing team before ops start and some regstar heros, premades and stuff. The quality, if you pay attention, of the regs has ridiculously dimished btw, to the point that would not advice anyone to enter wzs without friends because it can be outright painful. Ranked and competitive pvp is pretty much dead. The dominant guilds of 8v8 are almost all gone, the top players of team ranked season 1 mostly gone and looking at the team ranked leaders boards right now, i can assure you that most of the people you see at the top places there are playing something else (and are not just doing summer holidays). This is not the end of swtor, since yeah it is star wars, people will play it until something else star wars related comes out. But the core of what was good pvpers has left, because in a way they were bored of this game in the end. Imagine Roudy (from your server), queuing team ranked every day with his team and mostly facerolling everyone, it get boring after a while for both sides. And his team might have been the best arena team in the game, but i am sure there is more competition out there in the game world than tofn had to offer in the end. New name can pop up now, we have seen it on TRE after the big 8v8 teams left last summer, but with the samer amount of pvp focused people i have my doubts it will work.

if you are happy with the game... then alright, this thread was about everybody remotely good leaving which is different question. If the game was dying pvp wise, i would still happily play star wars. I think a lot others would. And heck both ranked 4s and 8v8 ranked take quite some skill. it just a different set of skill. And heck you know what they say at the military... ah team is only as strong as its weakest member and that applies to both.

And even Carebear TRE had ranked going again for a while after Nostrum Dolus and Reality Check left. but yeah totally agree Alco

Well the skilled set of rated 8v8 and 4s is quite different. You couldnt really be carried in 8v8 anyway, because the decent enemy side would imidiately spot you as the weakest link and focus fire you into oblivion, or you would be 1v1ed as a node guard or what ever. It was a different Meta that lot of people enjoyed more than 4s. That why a host of great players said good bye swtor last year, when the removal was announced, yet I am entriely sure you would have seen the same people in top ranked 4 teams of arenas would have been just added without removing 8v8. Hardly anybody was really against arena, it was the unnecessary removal of content (content, that kept people playing the game), that led to good bye. And you can fairly say, arenas werent capable of carrying competitive pvp in this game alone. They died out on most servers quicker than 8v8 ever did and even on the pvp hubs like ToFN, Pot5 or bastion there usually were only a handful of teams playing (number were rapidly declining over time as well). Just to make the point. For many people me included the removal of 8v8 ranked was the worst move of BW concerning this game in terms of PvP. You ignore all the bugs, glitches and balance issues, but they removed content that kept a lot of people playing this game.

The WS hype might be temporary, but (almost) everybody who was remotely serious about pvp in swtor is play it now, why? Because it has exactly those feature, pvper were asking about in swtor for ages (and all we got was the Musco No). Class Balance, heck class balance is always in issue in every MMO... I play a stalker... bottom of the footchain pretty much, like concealment operative (so i am used to it), but it is fun to play. Graphics always will be a matter of taste, i actually dont find it so bad. QQ on the forums.... well yeah healing is OP, this class is OP that class is OP... it will always be the same everywhere. In WS l2p is probably a major reason for that too, since everybody still has to l2p. And you know forum warrior lack inside in general, as is usually exposed in these forums (which is why they are fun ) Class balance is a difficult business especially when you balance around multiple amounts of content. To ranked arenas in SWTOR you can basically bring almost everything now (assuming good player), every class has at least one viable spec(in th e right hands). You cant balance around yolo and regs though. A shame team ranked is mostly dead Wildstar has more rated content 2s, 3s, 5, 10v10 and 40v40. That is harder why harder to balance and also there is about a felt trillion of spec for every class, so many options and a tweaks, that i would be surprised if the balance QQ is more of issue of people not having found there min maxed set up yet. bugs.... It is not surprising that even a well coded game has trouble at launch in terms of bugs. As was pointed out the dev realized it was a mistake just starting with 1 pvp realm for europe and in very short time the game had transfers to lower pop server (with X-Server it doesnt matter on which server you actually are, you can group up x-server as well). About other issues we will have to see, but so far it seems the devs are paying attention. As I used to main an operative and a scoundrel in this game, I can say that roll bug is about the most frustrating thing in this game and despite the community bringing up the issue time and time again, it still isnt fixed. Shroud/resilience. Smash, the ages they needed to fix AP in tank stance, now ED/FD.. tons of other gliches. Wildstar while surely not perfect seems far better coded, it loads much quicker and in general, you spend why less time on loading screens and even when you get the archetypical clusterf**** you normally dont get lag, while if you tried OwPVP in this game if you had more than 40 players involved there server is close to crashing. I stop here but i could go on. I dont know, i personally didnt leave because I was so amazed by wildstar anyway. I did leave because PvP in this game became unbearable because of the population. Reg without being in a premade became just painful in recent months (and i dont care about winning or losing, i just want good mildly competitive matches), team ranked was dead, and yolo ranked has no point for me ( i tried it a few times, but didn't like it). On the pve front i have everything except nightmare progression (dont like wipefests, that much). NoGate for me mentally meant goodbye, since no hope on the pvp in this game and i think most people remotely serious about pvp thought the same. You perfectly see how many better know posters on these forums have fallen silent in recent months... It shows what is gonna happen to this game now. Wildstar will not kill starwar but I dont think the pvper are comming back even if they end up not liking it. There is no hope for pvp in this game.

I actually the more I play WS the more i realize why not having X-Server is complete no go these days, even on pve side (which i WS is ridiculously hard, not question, but dungons and stuff). Having like 5 different forms of rated also makes the PvP side more interesting. I say it quite freely, if SWTOR had those features, i would still play it, since I love the game even despite all its flaws. From what i have seen from the european scene everybody is level in WS atm, but that doesnt mean they will all stay. It is not a game for everyone, so a bit of team ranked might return like after this month is over. And good luck Waka in getting ranked going again on the bastion, I dont think there is any active ranked going on any server (the europeans as well)

The removal of non ranked arena actually isnt such a bad idea, since without matchmaking arenas are completely pointless. While the yolo ranked matchmaking surely is far from perfect and can be cheated it is not even close to the joke reg arenas are. Who wants to play arenas can queue for ranked. I dont think the introduction of arenas wasnt a bad move as such (despite classes balance initially not being designed for this setting... now almost every class has one or 2 viable trees for team ranked), and yolo ranked being a rather nonsensical idea in general ( class balance for yolo is next to impossible, people will play what gives them the best chance to stand their own without being too team dependent, which currently is assassin and jugg), it was surely the removal of 8v8 ranked. No advertising or anything, but another game that recently launched after 5 pvp ranked modes, 10v10 wzs, 2v2, 3v3 and 5v5 arenas and 40v40 warplots (well and x-server). While x-server might actually be hard to implement for this game or not, having seperate ranked queue is not. Why remove content that is use (even if it is only a small supset of the community that use (used) it). 8v8 ranked was one major reason for a lot of players to keep playing this game despite actually being bored of everything else it has to offer. They asked for more content and bug fixes and most where actually happy that arenas would come, but the announcement of the removal of 8v8 made quite a massive portion of those leave the game for good. That is where final decline of the pvp population started. We are talking about key figure in pvp community that left the game. Arenas itself were not enough to keep those entertained that stayed. There are surely many reasons for that, but one i heard from experienced pvpers was that while 8v8 could keep you entertaine for the whole evening, it is hard get the same fun out of pure death matches. This is not to say arenas are boring per se. They are surely more competitive than 8v8 ever was, but they alone can not steam the burden of competitive pvp. And they dont write that great stories, like that one of the well known concealment operative singlehandedly beating the best ranked team in the world, be pulling of the worlds best ninja. 8v8 produced better storys and created something pvper could really talk about even 2 year after it happened. Sure arenas produce drama as well, but it is TDM it is hard to do something really exceptional and memorable in there. but all this is stuff from the distant past. Team ranked now is dead on most servers (which is kind of ironic: BW official reason for the 8v8 removal, was the lack of a playerbase and the difficultly of getting 8 players and each side to queue together, but even after it was pronounced dead still 8v8 happened very close the day 2.4 hit). So the pvp population in the game is no state of having any form of "competitive" pvp but yolo ranked. As it is now they could bring 8v8 and introduce x-server, it wouldnt change the fact that most people that are up for serious pvp and that put in the effort to organize teams and stuff have left the game already. Additionally No-Gate kill the last hope for ground pvp. Anywway i shouldnt complain I stopped playing a week ago. Have fun in star wars and yes nerfoperativesplz

Everything true, and i basically wanted just a another little note. In 8v8 ranked, you wanted to have at least 2 sentinels/marauders. One OP Smash to harass the backline (do people even know these days what a backline is... anyway that was the thing that made sorc healing ranked viable and sniper a bit OP), but you also wanted to have a carange marauder, for objective play. Predation was so god damn usefull, there are not even words to describe it. A carnage mara has ridiculous group utility without even doing any damage and still has save ED/FD about the best defensive CDs in game (Pacify/Obfrustcate is one of them, but i guess most people here dont even know what it does, so it can pretty much make snipers useless for 6s). A marauder that rotates his CDs well, is still very hard to kill, let is alone be for clever use of Camo.

I know it is completely unrelated, but i pre 2.5 and those that heard me on TS couldnt stop laughing. I mean i didnt even had my keybinds set up for that and only knew jugg smash before, so i was really only hitting random button, only to find out i am still not dead... ok another smash then. I ended up yelling" Bloody hell this is way too easy" the whole evening, (OK my exact words were "bloody hell this is even easier than operative healing") And yeah smash is even still good and easy, it is just not ridiculous anymore. I main the sentinel now for quite a while there are surely tons out there (or were) that are way better with it, but one thing I would never do is call it underpowered in both combat and focus. I usually blame myself first and try find out what mistakes i have made when it didn't work out as i wanted. A lot of time, i see my target picking was wrong, or didn't pay attention to the CDs my target has already used. I wont deny that the spec and class is more team dependent than others, but still even in unfavorable situation you can optimize your play style. Well if you are against 4 madness sorcs, there is nothing you can do. But it is same for the madness sorc if he is against 4 combat sents. And I dare say combat actually brings more to the table than its actual dps. Transcendence alone is pure gold in both objective based and arena pvp, not to mention inspiration at the right moment. The root alone can drive ball carriers in huttball mad (and roots dont fill resolve). Even if you might not always be able to burst down operative healers quickly you can harrass them so much that it is no fun for them (yes i have been on receiving end of this as well, those bloody roots). Not to mention that combat is almost a must have for team ranked if you wanna go hard switches. In yolo ranked you can still go smash and be less team dependent, if you feel combat doesnt work there. But sents/maras really arent the only class that has problems in arenas without support, ask sorc healers for example, or mando dps. (even scoundrel healing can be annoying without a tank) Combat can have an incredible burst when the stars align. Just from doing some PvE i can tell you from experience tanks usually have to retaunt after your opener and you better high camo as quickly as possible, because you regularly grab aggro. And sometimes it is possible to get that insane opening burst of even in normal wzs. I dont say it 4s kill, but it pretty much isnt much more. It is only fair that this can be countered.

well actually jugg can pull that off atm, at least to a degree.

I really don't know what is going on with people right now about mara sents. Yes the days of faceroll superduper ez Smash are gone, but the tree still does good damage and still can be played while being ********d without a performance loss. Carnage always was harder to play good then other tree is the game, and that is totally fine. If people would watch what you sometimes do on your stream i doubt anybody will see a terribly underpowered class. I am pretty sure there used to be quite a bunch of people pull this off. Well yeah anni will probably be the epic after 2.8. Heck Mara, isnt the easiest advanced class in the game, and it is fine like that.

hey hey, it is ironically funny the game is out for more than 2 and half years and we currently have 4 endgame pve operations ..... so much content very amaze. I mean we all correctly complain about PVP in this game, but for a PVEr that is a bit more than totally casual and roughly knows what his abilities do, this game is boring has hell.

tbf TRE has an unofficial forum, where most of the action takes place and heck "that" game has been hyped there to the max as well. All in all they have quite entertaining pit as well, so yeah, no moral superiority there. Actually people were not really unhappy when some people from TOFN came over, just to get ranked going a bit more (it died quickly again), but despite the seemingly bad reputation, it is not like you guys would not be welcome. Appart from that this initiative is a good idea, make the most of it while it lasts. Although I think a server merge might be probably the best solution, I don't really see it happening soon. About WS, well time will tell, somehow it is fun atm because it is good in all what star wars is lacking, but that might just be the aspect of novelty. I guess in months time we will find out whether it kills star wars pvp or not. For now most competitive pvper and some nubs like me are playing it.

how about picking egress/fade out like every sage sorc does now ?

i know, you are no up for real argument, but plz check in you average wz, which class usuall ends up with the most deaths in a wz... you would be surprised... just saying.

why the hell do you alway make so much sense....

Excuse my ignorance, and this isnt meant to be mean in any way... is there any pts data on the madness changes for PVE (not that it matter for this discussion we have 3 viable specs for pve atm, and only one most have). Not that dummy parse matter anything, i just would like to know how madness on sin is doing with the changes, because even me as basically a pve noob could easily beat the highest sin parse on op bosses with my scoundrel dps (both scrapper and df) at the time i still did pve (like 3-4 months ago and even pre concealment buff). Despite their better survivability what additionaly group utility do sin provide (i am really just interested), they cant really off tank since they are still too squishy for that, phase walk is mostly useless in pve, operatives can stealth rez as well, so ?what is it sin bring to the table that operatives cannot despite better survivability? about the tanking thing, you say sin are basically off tanks and that seems to be the received opinion, so basically both pt and jugg are better main tanks. Fair enogh operative still have a heals spec, that both can act as a main tank healer and an aoe healer, thereby being a must of for any serious raid group and sorc or merc being potentially better at the specific job, we can perform both if needed to a very good degree and being the easiest to play as well. (no reason to nerf medicine). Not saying that operative heals is like stike king of the hill in pvp. I dont exactly know what the raid leaders said to snave (despite being in the same guild, i am a bit lazy logging imp side these days and asking him in game), but i imagine that still you want to have mara as a bloodthirst and predation bot and probably if you roll with 2 melee vengeance is now referred, for surviability and cc immunty issues. Otherwise i think snipers and mercs pretty much form the dps these days. the problem is not that operative are not viable, the problem is probably still that other specs just offer the edge more for progression raiding. deception is a very good place pvp wise, but then again there arent that many player that can pull it off in group ranked anymore, and heck roudy can even make sorc healing work somehow. and absolutely no, i think the both dps specs definitely need help and i crying for it for ages, but when it comes to sustained dps both seems fine, major issure is surviability. and finally i ultimately dont disagree at that much, just some questions that popped up when reading this parts of this thread. Operative concerns are perfectly reasonably, i played both scoundrel and operative for quite some time now, and i do think snave did a good job (not just because he is kind a guild mate still, kind of a big deal and kind of less *** than he appears to, kind of the person that last year gave me hope in continuing playing the class as dps), i just wanna know. Anyway my voice doesnt matter or will not matter. I gave up operative dps for pvp quite a while ago, and even though trying it again in last 6 months i am now at the point i dont enjoy it anymore.On top like snave, i will probably soon will be playing another game. (and yes i am not exactly what would call good ). Operative where one of the most fun class to play in this game, and looking back i dont regret being stubborn and stupid liking them. It just lost interest i guess.