If you take a taxi over to each of the indicated ships and go to the bridge level, there is a designated "Training Area." It is in these places you can find the new Bolsterizer (they look extremely similar to the node points from the Civil War). As a special note, the training dummies there do not yet consider expertise when you attack them, so at the moment the Bolsterizer is just a way to view your stats as they would be inside a Warzone. We had enough people going into WZs just to try to view stats and optimize their PvP character that I wanted to get at least this first step out to the public. You won't be able to duel in the Training Areas at this time, though getting a place like this into the game is something I want to make happen.

I can confirm that at the start of Season One, we will be resetting Ratings!

You are in fact reading the patch notes correctly. We really felt like these cool down Legacy Unlocks were underwhelming as they were, and wanted to really pep up their bonuses (along with an extra kicker for subscribers). Have fun fleet passing!

A caveat, I'm at home with a sick infant so my numbers might be a little off, but I think the expertise value while under Bolster was set on underworld gear at 1332.

Hey Gang, I would just like to pop in here and offer some of our perspective on this topic. A lot of good points on both sides have been thrown around here, and extending our current vote kick penalty (or something similar to it) to players who opt to leave the Warzone is definitely something that we discuss. However, at this time we feel like the negative consequences of putting in such a system (such as hurting players who crash out of a Warzone) don't overcome the potential gain. With healthy Warzone queues, players will backfill into a game relatively quickly (side note: we are receptive to the complaints that you can get back filled into a really terrible position, that is something I want to try to address), and even if we prevented people from requeueing that doesn't necessarily stop them from leaving or going AFK at a point. All of that being said, I do think the Civil War Warzone specifically has some issues that really shines a bright light on reasons people would leave. Inherently, CW is the Warzone that has the hardest time for a team to come from behind and that leads to a higher percentage of players to give up once they feel like the game is lost (and that feeling can occur very early into a game). My team and I are working to try to come with some solutions to this CW issue specifically, to see if we can improve the general Warzone itself and fight some of this problem at the root cause instead of the effect.

The amount of expertise and stat you gain is based on the rating of the items you currently have versus the rating that we are bolstering a player towards. If you have items above that target (for example, from high end raid gear), you get much less (or in some cases no) benefit from the bolster. Consider it this way (and it isn't quite this simple of a , but it should help illustrate our goal): Bolster defines the floor of power we want players to be in PvP and if you are below that floor, we lift you up. We have the floor currently set right around non-augmented Elite War Hero level of power.

That doesn't look at all like the values I would expect, I would expect to see your Aim and End much closer to the 1900ish mark, and ~2k Expertise. Investigating what is going on, this *may* be a different symptom of our well known bolster bug, or it might be something else entirely.

Ya, the bolster will work for level 55s as well, if they are under geared. Could you post the stats on what you are seeing on PTS for your guy wearing legacy gear (or send the information to CommunitySupport@swtor.com, subject: ATTN Rob Hinkle, if you don't want to dirty up the thread). It certainly is the intention that your 55 wearing level 35 gear should get bolstered back up. To give everyone an idea (and BIG caveat here, this number is still in flux), but currently I would expect the new 55 bolster to be getting people into gear right around (statistically) non-augmented EWH.

Valid feedback, and something we continue to debate internally. When we talk about separating the playing population by hard lines, there are always 2 main concerns that often compete directly against each other: A)Can the players inside that bracket reasonably compete against each other, and B)Are there enough players in the bracket to keep wait times reasonably small. We have initially chosen 30 as our new break point because that is the level in which players start having complete combat rotations (often because they've gotten a really important ability from a skill tree) and our data of who actually queues into Warzones has shown that we've got a good pool on each side of that break. We continue to analyze who is playing, however, so certainly if we ever feel like a particular PvP bracket is being starved we should make changes to it. Unfortunately, that's what we believe would happen with a 50 - 54 bracket. It might be populated initially, but would quickly become empty as players hit 55 and for everyone following the initial surge of levelers there would significantly increased wait times to get into PvP. A number of players are concerned, reasonably I think, about the power differential between a fresh level 30 player and a current 50 player in augmented EWH gear being inside the same bracket. Our new bolster system should make those players reasonably competitive statistically, both with compensation for the lower items as well as some compensation for having fewer skill points/abilities (if you are lower level). Once we get this bolster bug fixed up, everyone should be able to see the kind of stats you are getting from the bolster and should give everyone a better basis for discussion.

Hey gang, let me see if I can bring some clarity to the situation. We do indeed have a new level of "Recruit" that we are bolstering towards, that is based on the new 55 gear. We believe that this bolster level will allow players to complete with any possible gear combination in the 30 - 54 bracket. Obviously we've had a few bumps in the road on PTS regarding current bolster, but we should be getting that fixed up soon , and everyone can get back to the business of PvP. Thanks for everyone's feedback, not just on this but on everything, it is really helping us make a better game.

Remember my original comment, the goal is for high end PvE gear to come into the power gap between the recruit bolster level and PvP gear. We still want actual PvP gear to be better than PvE gear, so you are always better off wearing the gear specifically made for the content you are consuming.

Truth. Bolster on live right exists in level 50 Warzones, it just doesn't do anything (since everyone is at the level it tries to bolster too). With the switch to the rating system, the bolster effect will still exist in Warzones of all levels, and now will do something if the player's gear isn't up to the task.

I don't know what the exact number is off the top of my head, but one of the aspects of the system is that newPvP gear, regardless of what "tier" it is, will hit cap expertise. That is, getting higher level PvP gear won't increase your expertise stat, just more of every other stat.

You've got the crux of the idea, but I think when you are able to see all the items it will be more clear. Fundamentally, PvP gear will have lower stats then PvE gear (expertise excluded), including endurance. So high end PvE gear characters will have bigger health pools, but take more damage. The result of this interaction should get us to point of balance between the gear sets we are shooting for.

It is ongoing, to prevent exactly the abuse you are worried about.

We've increased the effectiveness of Expertise over having no expertise at all, but if an attacker with full expertise is shooting at a defender will full expertise, their expertise effectively cancels each other out.

That's basically correct. There is a certain item rating level that once an individual item slot goes over that rating, it starts only getting expertise for its bolster (no more "PvE" stats). As the item rating continues to rise, you get less and less expertise until eventually bolster doesn't get anything from that item. The result should be that in the best PvE gear, you are somewhere between the "introduction bolster" level and the top end PvP gear in power. You would still be better off swapping to PvP gear if you have it, but you aren't terrible. Also worth pointing out that this system works on an individual item basis, so each slot itself is bolstered up independently of all of the other slots on a character, so slots can give more of a bolster bonus than others if you have a really powerful item in your chest slot, as an example, but a really behind the curve implant.

Thanks for the ideas! We are actually making some changes to the expertise system and how bolster interacts with the players in an upcoming Game Update (more info on this Update coming VERY soon), and this seems like a reasonable place to reveal some details about it, so buckle up and hold on! To give everyone a common base of knowledge, let me briefly discuss how bolster and expertise work on the live servers as of right now (Game Update 1.7). Expertise is pretty easy, it is a diminishing returns rating that increases the damage output against other players, gives damage reduction against other players, and increases healing on targets who are in PvP. As you get higher in value of expertise, you need more and more rating to achieve the same increase (hence, the diminishing returns). Expertise only comes on PvP items, but inside PvP expertise is designed to be better bang for your buck than normal "PvE" stats. The bolster system looks at a player's level and makes an assumption of the stats a player at that level would have and increases them to a target level defined by the designers. Bolster totally ignores what the player ACTUALLY has for stats, it doesn't matter if you are naked or fully geared out, it will give you the same bonuses either way. Notably, bolster will *not* give any expertise stat in Game Update 1.7. In a major upcoming Game Update, everything changes, woo! Expertise still touches the same 3 functions (damage out, damage in, and healing out), but is no longer is a diminished return value, you get the same increase in power for the same increase in expertise, regardless of going from 0 to 20 or 2000 to 2020. We've also cranked up just how much expertise enhances each of these functions, so having good expertise is more important than ever. Additionally, expertise is no longer a stat that will grow throughout a tier of items, all PvP gear will generate the same total of expertise (caveat: This statement only applies starting with the new gear in the new update. Previous PvP gear will not quite have the fully intended expertise totals). The bigger change is in how we bolster and add stats to players to even out the playing field. Instead of focusing on player level, now the bolster system will take a look at each individual item on your character and use that as the baseline assumption of power for that item slot. We then bolster each slot up to what we feel is the "entry level" of PvP power, at which we think everyone can be happy playing without getting simply out geared to death. Effectively, we bolster players to something like what our recruit gear set tries to do now in 1.7, but with much better accuracy and effect. Additionally, the bolster system will now grant players expertise when it feels it is necessary, bringing our entry-level power gap even closer to the end-game PvP power. All of this put together should make our Warzone matches much more about skill in this future game update, and less about people who simply aren't in the correct gear, while still giving our PvPers some better gear out there to strive for. Thanks for listening!