He's probably talking about when he has a skill advantage vs the players, on a map with tons of pillars. It's quite tricky fighting good ranged 1v1 in the open. In fact, I think the best ranged class to kill jugg may be a truly good merc.

Swtor needs to track damage, healing, protection and kills percentiles of players. That's the most likely predictor of whether the match will be balanced or unbalanced. Plus you should be restricted from stacking people in the 90%+ percentile within the same group. For swtor devs: Imagine two PvE groups are doing timed runs. One group has a bunch of nooby pug randoms. The other group has NiM hardcore raiders who have done the operation thousands of times. Who's going to be faster at it? That's why elite players shouldn't be in groups bigger than 4. Even 4 players of the best in the game kind of breaks things. Why not balance it more? Two tanks are already prevented from queueing together in arena. Those same two tanks could be complete noob players who are trash at PvP. If they got matched vs a veteran 4 man group, I guarentee those veterans would crush them completely. So why aren't the best players in the game prevented from stacking their team? You already know they're the best if you track their playstats in their accounts and look for anomalies. I see swtor willfully allowing veteran players to ruin PvP midbies by stacking perma 75s in a group and stack meta comps with the best players in the game while not allowing two noob tanks to queue together and limiting the number of healers. Why wouldn't you build on the restrictions to account for something far more unbalanced? Matchmaking certainly fails in accounting for this imbalance already, so you may as well just add those new restrictions.

In a wz? Who is going to wait 3 minutes for you to heal up after you camo out? Also camo does nothing to truly help you win vs a good player. I fought a duel with the supposed best 1v1 Mara on my server in 6.0 and he couldn't kill me. I didn't feel like hunting him down in his tatooine stronghold though. So it just ended in a stalemate.

If this is as cringe a comment as I think it is, I play Mara maybe once every 3 months now. There's other classes that are a legitimate threat when not playing in a premade. A solo Mara is pretty weak.

Generally I think it's perfectly possible for matchmaker to place truly skilled players against each other (solo or not), it just refuses to do so. Sometimes I *know* there's another premade in q if I make a counter premade. And yet we never get matched vs them. So why is that? Matchmaker being incompetent? The people who get matched onto the team are usually complete randoms who add no value to the match against a premade. In fact, I have no firm idea why the matchmaker even takes the amount of time it does to matchmake. I do notice lately if I play tank, sometimes it will insta pop for me spawning a new match against another decent tank. (But the other tank is queueing with a healer + premade while I'm solo). So it does attempt some role based Matchmaking still. Just seems like it's so mediocre of an attempt to matchmake compared to what used to happen once in a while years ago. Maybe we can write it off as solo players being less skilled but I feel like it's a catch 22. The real problem is that matchmaker might be attempting to place the highest rated ELO in a premade group against the highest rated ELO of a solo player (this happened even back in 2018 according to patch notes back then iirc). That would be very dumb, because you need the ELO's on each team to all be roughly equal. Not just in median skill, but within a bracket for each player. You can notice if a premade group faces off against another one (7vs7), then you queue solo and one noob queues solo, your team will win because you were the massively differentiating factor.

It's funny you mention this. Just last night I was innocently playing, then my team gets the top 7 players in queue (in fact all of us could have gotten gold or top 3 during a competitive ranked season back in the day, in fact some did) vs absolute noobs on the other team. We only had one new player on our team. So we crushed the opposition completely. I really dont know what's going on with it.

There was also a skill that reduced damage by 99% which Marauder had. Did any of that make Mara op? Nah. I never felt op while playing it, in fact, it was always difficult to 1v1 anybody on it even with the camo.

Tbf, the counterplay was pretty straight forward. You simply hit them with yellow damage, dot them up, or let other people hit them with white damage instead of you.

When I tell them that, they yell at me saying they're playing objectives. So they think (unfortunately) that they know how to play.

IMO obfuscate was ironically one of the higher skill ceiling abilities in the game, since it was a 90% single target white damage accuracy debuff. You could augment it for some extra burst from a vicious throw + yellow damage defensive utility, but knowing when to use it added a lot of fun "flow" to mara. Taking that away makes it into a bot-like clown fiesta that bores me with its 3-4 damage abilities and lack of thought. Plus you gotta remember, for lore reasons marauder should have some force abilities -- obfuscate was one of its only ones (it has maybe 2 at most on each spec now that obfuscate is gone).

I was playing with some of the weirdest "objective" players the other day. To start 4 went our side node (who knows why, because none of the enemy players went there), and 2 went to the enemy side node (???). So I went mid with one other guy and fought all 8 of the opposing players at mid. Ok great. Then we lost the game. (because our team had "objective" players) We only had 2 pvp players.

There's not enough pop to split the q. It's better to limit groups to 2-4.

Mara can do adequetely meh / ok-ish damage when not focused. Nothing special or super consistent though. The biggest and most massive nerf that occurred in 7.0 was the mara obfuscate removal. It'd be like removing snipers stun and leap immunities by removing cover.

I disagree. I myself have purposely started to lose on some of my characters since coming back, to lessen the times I'm put solo against a full ops group.

Yes there's an elo system. Years ago 8v8 unranked and ranked was entertaining but dps monkeys from solo ranked who get angst over a tank being able to guard swap are all you see now days. "Nerf healers they too stronk", "nerf tanks I'm bad, I can't manage to dps". Why? Because player skill in general is that much worse. Objectives can be fun to base the pvp around, but conversely if someone's so bad at playing the game the only thing they can do is objectives it is not fun. But it's also not fun to kill someone who thinks they're good because they play in a carebear ops group or full premade huddling together with other people in fear of being exposed. I already know they're a bad player. Playing objectives as you said spreads people out in a marathon. It makes them vulnerable, you can kill your prey more easily when they're caught out away from the herd. Although ops groups these days are extra careful to protect their stragglers unfortunately since 8v8 is unranked and they don't care about the objective. I understand people like to huddle together for protection, but I genuinely want to see more 1v1 or 1v2 action again. Those situations can be really entertaining, plus the group fights at mid. When people genuinely are encouraged to play objectives you see much more of that, plus real fights at mid. Some form of ranked would be nice in 8v8, since it'd force people to play better and create stragglers.

You're supposed to have a 50% win rate so matchmaker tries its absolute best to get you around there. The main thing it uses are wins. You also always get more medals for winning. If you're trying not to win all the time it puts you against very bad players who can't win. Effectively it sinks your ELO. Warzones have always had an internal elo, it's used to help people have higher win rates (get them to 50%).

SWTOR's matchmaker is ****, it's **** because it's based off wins internally for warzone ELO. So now you put a premade that doesn't give a **** about wins in a warzone together with a **** matchmaker based on wins, what do you get? **** matchmaking. Why don't ex solo arena players care about wins in warzones? Because they only cared about wins in arenas. Thanks for coming to my tedtalk.

Their simplistic MM based on wins giving elo works for arena, but not warzones. You'd need to make warzones ranked and arenas unranked to see people start to improve in play again.

Vote kick being removed only affected arenas. I never mangaed to successfully kick Naffeng Kreeoli from a WZ back when he played as deadofwinter.

Need a shot clock for huttball.

The games combat designers clearly say melee is inherently disadvantaged. So, if you put a melee vs a ranged then the melee is inherently disadvantaged. This is especially made clear by the simple fact that too many melee players will cause easy cleave (AoE), for ranged. In general the ranged advantage is fourfold right now 1) Ranged has the inherent single target dps advantage 2) Ranged has good defensives 3) Ranged can easily avoid cleave / AoE dps whereas melee cannot 4) Ranged has escapes + immunities + stuns / hinders + roots + slows In general, when all of this is combined it completely negates melee dps right now in practically every scenario aside from when you're attacked by a superior melee player. Also, if you're struggling to 1v1 a juggernaut on a merc maybe upload a video so we can give you tips. You shouldn't be losing that or be finding the a 3 second root that you have an in-built complete immunity and cleanse to, difficult to deal with.

Yeah, at this point I feel like they do. Although bioware used to understand that it's not fun when you're constantly rooted and slowed as melee: "We feel both Melee and Sustained damage types are inherently disadvantaged, and that is why Melee Sustained damage dealers (with their two inherent disadvantages) make up the top grouping. Melee damage is disadvantaged because it must stay close to its target (often within four meters) in order to maximize damage output, and Sustained damage is disadvantaged because it takes several seconds to ramp up to its full damage potential each time it acquires a new target (and in situations where rapid target switching is required, it will often never reach its full damage potential)." Hopefully they will fix how brokenly OP ranged specs are by removing the vast majority of those roots + slows and make it more fun for melee again.

The only thing that needs to be nerfed in this game right now are ranged specs. Melee specs don't need mobility buffs or anything done to them at all, ranged specs just need their mobility debuffs completely gutted down to one option.

Um what? Carnage is the burst spec. Fury is the quasi burst dps spec. Here, I even just went and looked for the old bioware post about it. https://forums.swtor.com/topic/842212-how-class-balance-happens/

The devs play ranged classes and PT. That's why you're struggling